Part Two: Blue Dawn: A Right Wing Fantasy of Leftist Revolution
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- Garrison. - Hi. - Are you going to give an atonal shriek or are you not going to be a team player today?

I don't know what tone I would even try to imitate for an atonal shriek. Come on, come on. You want to go to David Lynch in the afterlife and say that's the atonal shriek that I gave when I had a chance to perform Garrison to really sing my heart out on camera? I'm sure I'll have another opportunity again to do an atonal shriek. Yeah, well, literally anytime you're on the show. How have you been in the week or so since we first started reading Blue Dawn? Yeah.

Pretty good. I've not been doing as much other reading as I would like to, but that's the way it goes sometimes. It's too hot to read. It's too hot to read? Yeah. Wow. I mean, I guess I grew up in Texas, so everything inside was always 55 degrees, so...

I've never known that. Well, I'm going to try to break that spell for you, Garrison, because we're going to get back into reading the next two chapters of Blaine Pardo's Blue Dawn, which is, as far as I can tell, like a fantasy novel of what certain people on the right think Antifa is capable of. And as a result, it comes across in parts as like, oh, if only, if only. But it's interesting, too, because you get these like this kind of vision of like,

what they think was about to happen, which is fun because of like,

I mean, we just know what happened. Like the reality is this. Because it's 2024. Yeah. Yeah. This movie they were so terrified of like, no, I mean, like people were angry, but there was never any cohesive effort to take over the country or any real desire to among a large number of people. Most of the people who went out in the streets in 2020 were just angry because the cops suck. And then they went home, you know? Yeah, they were they were not planning to take over.

The United States Capitol building. They certainly didn't have together to like lay siege to two military bases while taking the Capitol and the White House. No, but let's get back into the fantasy. Robert Evans here. And I know everybody loves a great deal, but I also know most of us aren't willing to crawl through a bed of hot coals just to save a couple of bucks.

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Chapter 4

The greatest heroes are victims, which is like presented as a quote, but they don't say you said it. Yeah. I mean, that is very much like there's this not there was a famous Nazi quote, like the Jew cries out while he strikes you. Right. Like it's this thing the right has always done where anyone who is a victim is really secretly our oppressor because that's how they get you. But pointing out that you're doing things that hurt them.

That's also how a whole bunch of these conservative men also just like view all women. Yes. How the victim is secretly the oppressor. Yeah. I mean, it's the kind of thing you have to believe if you're primarily going to spend your life victimizing people. Right. If you decided the thing that I do is hurt people, then you really have to make it clear that the actual actually being a bad guy is being the person who gets hurt. Right. Like it's bully logic. Right. Yeah. My fist wouldn't hit anything if your face wasn't there. Right.

So we start back with the story of Raul Lopez, who is our young Mexican-American immigrant who's gotten a job with the youth corps. Now,

The Youth Corps Garrison is clearly modeled in part after the Civilian Conservation Corps, which is an organization that was started during the FDR administration to like deal with the consequence of all these people being out of work in the Depression. A lot of my family is alive because my grandpa, you know, got a job through the Triple C. The Timberline Lodge up here in Oregon, which is an incredibly beautiful building, was made as a result of

you know, these mass civilian employment efforts. Most of our national parks and stuff, a lot of them got started. What my grandpa was doing out in Oklahoma was largely like building trails and stuff for parks. It's one of the better things that we did. In this book, it is a sinister example of the evil government destroying the populace. And it's both, one of the things that's interesting about Blaine is he can't pick a lane. So he's aware enough to know that like,

He has the issue with the environmentalists that a lot of conservatives have, which is they think that everyone who's concerned about global warming just wants to put an end to modern civilization. And so he kind of accidentally, there's a moment here where it seems like someone who has more knowledge of the left might be parodying anarcho-primitivists.

Right. Where this youth corps, they're cleaning up these destroyed factories and whatnot that have all collapsed, but they're not allowed to use any technology or vehicles because it all emits. So they're like disassembling factories brick by brick, hand to hand. And it's one of those things, somebody who actually like knew anything about the left

Theoretically, you could do a parody of like the anarcho-primitivist scene or something here, but he doesn't know that those people exist. He just thinks this is like anyone who believes in the EPA like would be doing this. Sure. It's like your average Elizabeth Warren voter. Yeah. Which is, you know, not the case. No, no. It's very funny. Yeah.

Yeah, there's an interesting line here where we also get kind of how Blaine thinks people from Mexico might look at the United States.

The youth corps officer that gave the lecture had talked about how the companies had taken billions in profits and made the workers get by with paltry bonuses. Some of the factories he saw were massive and impressive, and it struck Raul as wrong that the businesses had taken advantage of their people in such a way. When he saw all of the neighborhoods on their tour drive, he found himself wondering just how bad off the employees were. We never had homes like this in Mexico. For oppressed people, they seem to have good places to live. Jesus Christ. Okay. Shh.

It's like, were they driving through the neighborhoods that people who worked in the factories lived in? Were they? Or were those? Saying that people in Mexico are like the most oppressed people is not a common American political talking point. No, no. Even liberals tend to have pretty shitty opinions on immigrants.

So again, there's this piece of it that verges on satire of fringe ideology. It's just interesting, I think, the way that they do this. So he's like, they're cleaning up and Raul's like, boy, in Mexico, we would use cars or something for this. And the friend he's made in youth corps is like, no, it's better we do it by hand. Running the heavy equipment, that only pollutes the air. Yes, it's faster, but look at all the material we're saving for reuse. There were so many clean air acts out of the district in the last few years that it was hard to keep track of them.

Everyone said they were worried about pollution. No one makes the Chinese or Russians comply, though. They are the biggest polluters. The chairman of the ruling council summed it up best. It's not important that they do. What's important is what we can do. And...

One of the things that's going on here is he's like, this is literally like four years after the revolution. And they've just started calling DC the district, which like it kind of works in like fucking hunger games. Cause it's supposed to be hundreds of years after like people call stuff different now, but it's like five years. That's like, that's like if we now called DC the district after, because of like Trump's election or something like it's just, that's not long enough for that kind of change to happen, man. I don't believe you.

It's also unclear how this government works because AOC still has a job and the FBI still basically exists. But there's like a chairman and a ruling council as opposed to a president. Just unclear to me how this government actually functions. Yeah.

So, this facility had been abandoned for decades. According to the troop leader, it had been used by homeless people as a shelter. That area had been the worst to demolish. The stench of stale urine and garbage mingled with body odor. Those days were gone. The homeless didn't exist, not according to the administration. They were economically displaced, in transition, and shelter-dependent people. But the word homeless was never used. It was simply a banned word. Though Roel had to admit he didn't understand the distinction so well. The ones that had been in the abandoned factory had looked homeless enough to him.

It was a banned word. You're not allowed to say homeless anymore because woke. If all of this was like more consistent, again, you could at least try to make a point about stuff like people obsessing over like should you use unhoused or homeless as opposed to like what would we actually do to like help people who are housing insecure like not live on the street, right? Like what action should we take? Sure, there's things you could say there, but he just gets bogged down in like

The George Orwell nightmare of there being a word you just can't say anymore. Yeah. And again, it makes the government inconsistent because they forced all of the suburban middle class white people out of their homes to

So are these the formerly suburban people or are these the same homeless who were homeless before and the government just didn't do anything for them? We're not going to explain that because that would actually be like competent world building, which we're not going to do in this book, right? Of course not. No. And again, you could – at least it would still be weird right-wing propaganda. But if it became clear that like all of these homeless people living in the ruins had like five years ago been middle managers at like Boeing, like that's –

maybe interesting, right? Like you could do something with that, but he's not going to do anything with that. Of course not. Yeah.

So, yeah. As he carefully loaded the wheelbarrow, making sure that it stayed balanced, he noticed the old graffiti on the wall. Freedom lost in fading orange print. Looking at it, he wondered as to its meaning. What freedoms had been lost? He felt free to do what he wanted as long as he followed the rules. What are you doing, Cadet Lopez? His troop leader, Avalon Winston, barked out to him. And that is, I think, our 1984 reference is this guy who was like the milquetoast liberal that...

that's like secretly sinister is named Winston. I was looking at the wall. That's subversive content. The troop leader replied, looking at the wall as if it were a piece of pornography. You shouldn't even read it. Also, should this guy not be negative about pornography, right? Like, wouldn't he be rad with pornography? Cause he's the evil degenerate leftist.

You shouldn't even read it. It doesn't say much, only two words. The troop leader walked over to him. You were probably just a kid at the time. You don't remember the right-wing radical standoffs with the NSF, the bombings and violent protests. The people who wrote that were clinging to long outdated ideals that went back to the founding of their country. They wasted the rights they had and corrupted the rights they believed were theirs. Look at guns. Gun crimes are down because we rounded them up. Those people fought against the safety that we offered. They said we were anarchists, but in reality, they were terrorists.

Sure. Yeah. You can't look at the wall anymore because woke. Yeah. And also just like, yeah, this graffiti freedom loss. That's bad graffiti.

That's like, that's not an incisive political commentary. I don't feel like- To be fair, there is a lot of bad political graffiti out there. There is, but what I don't believe is that Raul would see that and, I wonder what freedoms were lost. That really got me thinking. No, of course. Your eyes are just gonna go over that, right? No, that's not gonna induce any deep contemplation. But to make graffiti, to competently do graffiti that might really

reach someone, he would have to like have characters with an interior mind. And these people really don't.

Anyway, we go immediately from this while Raul is like cleaning up this destroyed factory to some some very out of place seeming Islamophobia standing in the sunlight just outside of the building where five young men. They had dark complexions and they seemed to be angry. Raul could see it in their faces and the way they stood. Arms crossed, their mouths drawn to tight frowns and air of defiance emanated from them.

What can I help you with? The troop leader called out to them. Your people, they didn't stop when the prayer siren went off. The tallest of the men said bitterly. They continue to work through their prayers now for several days. You must stop when you hear the siren. It is Fajr. It is sacred. His voice was thick with a Farsi accent. How does, first off, Raul is this, didn't really receive an education, like,

like undocumented immigrant. How does Raul know what a Farsi accent is? Yeah, but I learned that.

I still can't get over prayer siren. I'm sorry. It's just so funny. It's also like it shows that the author has never been to a Muslim country or even around Muslims because like I have been to numerous Muslim majority nations where there's a call to prayer and I have been visibly outdoors working during the call to prayer. I've been outdoors drinking water and eating during Ramadan. And you know who never gave me shit is a single person.

Because it's their religion and they know that's some fucking white American. He's not good. He's not obeying like keeping Ramadan. Like, I'm not going to give him shit for this. Like, yeah, I just love the idea of the prayer siren being this like horrible sign of how far we've we've come. Yes. But like church bells are essentially the same thing. Like, yes, we have our own version of the prayer siren. Well, and it's also there's this attitude. It's the same thing you get with like these people who are like, I think this happened in the.

Some one European country is trying to keep migrants out where they're like, we'll just put pig manure around the border. And it's like, do you think it's like kryptonite to Muslims? Like they're not even banned from touching pork products. That's not how it is. They're not supposed to like eat pork and.

But also they're specifically allowed to if they're starving. There's no rule that says they can't like step in cow or pig manure. Like that's not you don't know anything about these people. Like they don't go to hell if they get shot by a bullet covered in pork fat. That would be a weird thing for Muhammad to have put in the Koran.

No, I mean, but all of these things are more useful as phantasms than actual, you know, understandings of different people or cultures. And it's this thing, this belief that like, yeah, the culture prayer where it exists is this like authoritarian command. Whereas like, again, having been around it a lot, most of what you see is people who are Muslims in the street not stopping, like continuing to go about their day. I've seen it a lot because like,

Muslims are people who live in a modern country too and they don't follow every rule the strictest way that it can be followed because nobody does.

And my personal opinion is I actually really miss – it's like nice. It adds atmosphere to your day. Like I found it really soothing waking up to and going to sleep. I miss it actually when I'm not there. So I don't know. This guy is just a bigot and he doesn't know anything about Muslims. But let's continue with these – I can't believe the author of this book is a bigot. Of Blue Dawn!

Hi, I'm canceling my Audible subscription. I can't support this anymore. Yeah, this is what did it for you, huh? Yeah, I'm sorry.

Let's continue. It was a call to prayer, another man snapped. You are defying the will of Allah and insulting us while you continue to work while we pray. This is back to Raul's thoughts. Ah, they must be Muslim. That makes sense. He had been told when they arrived in Detroit that there was a large Muslim population in the area. Troop leader Winston tried to diffuse the situation. I'm sorry. We meant no offense. We don't practice your faith. Most of my troop are Catholics.

Some follow no religion at all. The lanky man stepped closer, only a few feet from Winston. You will stop your work at the times of our prayer. His tone was filled with a rage. Several members of the troop began to move forward, closing on their leader. Raoul was shocked, but he too found himself stepping towards them in response.

The man stabbed his slender finger right into Avalon's chest as he spoke. I do not care about your administration. You are violating our law. We are not going to tolerate it. What law, Julian and other of Raoul's friends called out. There's no law that says we have to stop. Raoul noticed at that moment that Julian was carrying a pick in his hand. Suddenly, it looked like a weapon to him. This is getting out of hand. It is Sharia law, one of the men spat back. No, it...

It's not. It is the law that we live by. If you are here, you need to adhere to it. That's religious law, Avalon said. That doesn't apply here. The man poked at his chest again, this time harder. It is our law. As he did so, he noticed that the troops stepped forward. Even Raoul stopped for a moment and grabbed a brick from an old factory floor. The weight of it gave him confidence.

You're making a big mistake, snapped the tall man. You're disrespecting our faith. We don't take them from anything, from anyone, especially a bunch of Mexicans brought into our city. It's bad enough that your youth corps takes jobs that our people need. We will not tolerate you ignoring our religion. And it's interesting. It's, again, if you knew anything at all about like,

There's a couple of ways this could go that would be more interesting because like we're led to believe this is a government where most of the law enforcement is done by Antifa mobs who just like beat up people in the street and light their cars on fire. And if you actually know a lot of anarchists, there's a lot of anarchists who are very anti-religious. So like one version of this, you could have this guy Winston be very hostile and he could be showed like what the doomed multicultural nature of this like society is.

But they he's he can't be consistent. So Winston can't be like an actual like angry anarchist who hates religion. He has to be like this milquetoast caricature of a liberal who can't stand up to the evil Muslims, even though the government is explicitly shown as being governed in large part by evil anarchists murdering people in the street. But like we just don't actually see them doing any evil anarchist stuff.

Like they're not able to even like argue with these Muslims about the call to prayer. It's just so inconsistent. Like you can't pick what kind of evil progressive fantasy world this is. I mean, I did kind of get a little nostalgic about the Sharia law thing because that was such a –

such an overwhelming talking point when I was younger, how they're going to invade the country and force everyone to live under Sharia law. It was just like so common. You don't hear that as much anymore. No. It used to be like ever present. And I'm going to talk about why. Part of why is that like...

Christians in this country have realized that a lot of the things they used to be scared about as Sharia law are actually things they want. Are things that they want. Right? Yeah. Like a lot of things that are actually shitty about like a lot of Muslim countries where religion is legislated into law are just things that Christians are trying to do here. And it is funny. He can't stop in trying to create these evil Muslim caricatures. He can't stop accidentally describing American Christians. I'm going to read another passage here.

Sir, what do we do when the sirens start the sound of their prayers? One of the youth volunteers asked. We will work quietly, Winston replied almost under his breath. I don't think we want trouble with these men. Raoul nodded in response. That much was true. They were tough looking and angry. Their religion fuels their anger and that is a dangerous combination. Sure is, Raoul. Um...

Yeah, so Raul, this really troubles him and he goes to a church, which despite the fact that this is like an evil atheist anarchist totalitarian state, there are still Catholic churches operating openly where the priest is allowed to openly critique the government without fear of violence apparently. And Raul goes to one of these churches and he talks to a priest.

Once it had been a splendid building, but time in the community had not been kind. Nasty, spray-painted words plastered the magnificent stonework. Avalon had limited their time for church, but never said why. Raoul had promised his mother he would go, and he enjoyed singing and praying. It reminded him of home. The congregation was small, huddled in the first five rows of the immense church.

There had been more Catholics here at one time. That was evident. Many were older people, though a few Latino families were there as well. Some pews were missing near the rear of the church, and Raul thought he saw burn marks on the stone floor where they had been. Had there been a fire here? Was it during the liberation protests? And again, it's very unclear how the actual rules are set up here. Is this like some sort of early Soviet Union thing where they have banned the churches? Because it certainly seems like they're able to do church still.

Anyway, whatever. I also wanted to point out that like this fantasy he has of like, oh, if the progressives get their way, churches will be burned. What a horror. Who would do this? I want to want to look into like what happened to mosques right after Trump took office. And I want to read a quote here from a Teen Vogue article from March 2017.

In the past seven weeks, four mosques across the country have caught fire, according to BuzzFeed News. Three of those fires have been ruled arson, the authorities stated. The Darussalam Mosque near Tampa, Florida, caught fire this past Friday, marking the fourth mosque to go up in flames in fewer than two months. Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said he's never seen anything like this, calling them part of a series of dramatic attacks against Muslims.

So, again, he's always describing here shit that actually happened just in reverse. And he's being like, yeah, but what if it what if it wasn't us doing this? Like they didn't do this when they had the chance. But what if it wasn't us doing this? You know, I just I I love victim culture. You know who is a victim, Garrison?

The products and services that support this podcast. Yeah. So pay reparations to them. Possibly Tucker Carlson's live tour. Yeah. Yeah. God willing. You know, our main sponsor, Tucker Carlson's live tour. I'm happy to take his money. He is a victim. He is a victim. He is a victim. Victim of cancel culture. Thanks, Tucker.

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We're back. I just got a text from Tucker Garrison. He just wanted to let us know that our support means the world to him. I'm glad that we're still close with Tucker, despite our many disagreements. I'm glad that we're still able to remain friends. Yeah, I would never think that he didn't – we didn't want him to come along this summer to the annual retreat that you and I do at our cabin up in the Catskill Mountains. No, I would love for him to join us in the isolated cabin in the woods. Absolutely. Yeah, that'll be a great time for everybody. Yeah.

So next, this Catholic priest explains how Muslims ruined tolerance to Raoul. Raoul told him about the confrontation with the Muslim men. The genial face of the older man nodded and slowly went from jovial to rigid. God teaches us to turn the other cheek, he said. But why were they imposing their religion on us? Father Ryan sighed as if this were a conversation he'd had many times over. There was a time not long ago when I would have told you that they couldn't.

The United States did not allow such things. They called it the separation of church and state. We also treated every religion equally. That changed four years ago. After the fall, things changed, not necessarily for the better. Detroit has always had a large Muslim community. Before the fall, we lived in relative harmony. With Numerica, however, some communities have begun to inflict their religious beliefs on others.

The government refuses to step in. Being Muslim means you are an oppressed religion, and the FedGov looks the other way when they overstep their bounds. The Catholic Church is seen as a privileged religion, which promotes racism and class distinctions.

I forgot about the whole like privilege system that they have. Oh my God. You get different privilege points. I also forgot about Numerica, which is still very good. It's really funny. And yeah, the FedGov, there's no four years is not enough for everyone to go from calling it the federal government or the government to the FedGov.

That's just not the way language works, my man. FedGov has a weird mouthfeel. I don't like FedGov. I don't like it all. And it's this, I love that it's a Catholic priest being like, America used to not privilege any religion. And then four years ago, it all changed. Yeah, then it changed.

Sure, buddy. And, you know, I talk a lot rebutting this right wing shit, Islamophobia shit about like good experiences I've had in Muslim parts of the world. You know, I've had bad experiences, too. I've encountered like plenty of regret. I've been shot at by ISIS guys. But like in Ukraine, I went to a Ukrainian mosque that had an Azeri imam. And like my photographer was a woman and she was not allowed on the compound. I had to go in alone to interview this guy because he would not let a woman onto his compound.

And that's fucked up. But it's also the kind of fucked up that like Christians think is good. It's like Mike Pence did that shit. And it's when I went to a Christian monastery in northern Greece and Meteora, they like hand out.

dresses there that all of the women have to put on around whatever they happen to be wearing just to make sure that they're decent before God. And it's like you get like that. And that's that's why they have to make up shit like these fantasy Muslims who want to murder people for working during the call to prayer, which doesn't really happen because the shit that actual Muslim extremists do that's bad is stuff that all of these Christian conservatives think is awesome.

Yeah, I mean, even when I grew up, like it was that was the entire culture that I was entrenched in. And like women had to make sure they didn't dress certain ways or else they would like incite lust in a man, which isn't a man's fault if he acts on it. It is the woman's fault. And that's just so normalized from like girls like five years old to corpse. That was the way that was the way things were. Yep. Yep. In part to just sort of like make a point of how full of shit this guy is.

One of the more recent stories of actual attempts by American Muslims to enforce like religious laws on other people in the United States is something that was widely supported by Christian conservatives. This happened outside of a, in a, in Washington DC, um, in a school district that had an LGBT inclusion policy that was protested by a chunk of the local Muslim community. Um,

According to Zainab Chowdhury, the Maryland director for the Council on Islamic American Relations, the school system believes it is being inclusive towards LGBTQ parents and students. But in doing that, it is not being inclusive toward another set of parents and students.

And this is like a real conflict. There's been a couple other cases of this where you've got like large Muslim communities that are hostile to LGBTQ rights. And guys like Blaine have no issue with this because they're fundamentally in favor of all of the actual problems that come from like Islamic fundamentalism because they have the same problems that come from Christian fundamentalism.

Anyway, yes, yeah, they they often will form a like a sort of informal united front on this sort of thing. Yeah. But again, a smarter person who was still conservative could actually like do something interesting where you have like, yeah, I've got these like Christian religious extremists who lost their war and they're like banding together with these hardliner Muslims in, you know, some of these cities in order to like.

Because these people are oppressed and they have more power under the new government to push through some of the regressive laws against groups that they hate or whatever. Like that's at least more interesting and more complex than what we get here. You know, I could still see that being pretty racist, but at least it would make for better storytelling. But again, Blaine doesn't doesn't go deep enough to do any of that. Yeah. So Raul continues to talk with Father Ryan, who.

Father Ryan Who ends by saying,

Christians would never inflict their beliefs on anybody. No, not a thing I've ever seen them do. And the scene ends with Father Ryan telling Raul there are times we have to fight for our beliefs. And so Raul very reasonably is like, are you saying I should fight those Muslims or like fight the government? And the priest is like, oh, no, no. I just meant like generally sometimes you got to fight for your beliefs, but not in an actionable way. It could get me in trouble.

And then we move on to the next subject chapter, which is set in Wheeling, West Virginia. You remember our Fed spook Kaylee, the the former CIA lady who's part of the it's not the FBI, but it's mostly made up of the old FBI and the CIA who anarchists are all.

with basically having cop jobs still. Yeah. Yeah. She has to drive to this. There's been a murder that she's going that's tied to this right wing terrorist group. So she's going to go look at these these anarchist, you know, gang cops who all got murdered together. And she gets really angry on the drive there that she has to drive a hybrid. Yeah.

I have to drive a Prius. Yeah, it's fuel efficient, goddammit! I've been cucked! A cop car is supposed to be fast and heavy duty, to hell with emissions and concerns that perps would get hurt in a chase. And that's so comprehensively... For one thing, electric and hybrid cars are much heavier than regular cars. They're extremely heavy. If you hit someone with them, they do a lot of damage because they're very heavy vehicles compared to, like, an ICE, you know, engine. And the other fact of this is that, like...

The concern with cop cars being too big isn't that they'll hurt perps in a chase. It's that cops kill people constantly chasing them, and the dead are almost never the perps. They're nearly always bystanders. In fact, I looked this up. More than 5,000 bystanders and passengers have been killed in police car chases since 1979. That's two 911s, Garrison.

What a fun fact that is. Yeah, two 911s. Bystanders and passengers in chased cars account for nearly half of all people killed in police pursuits. Most bystanders were killed in their own cars by a fleeing driver. Anyway, police shouldn't be allowed to chase people. It almost never goes well. Police shouldn't be allowed, but yeah. Police shouldn't be allowed. I'm just...

We did try to have that fight, Garrison. This book is about what would have happened if we'd won. And we still have the FBI for some reason. Yeah. Honestly, again, because he's not a good writer, he couldn't make this more interesting. You could, if you were a leftist, maybe do a fun satire of like,

Law enforcement after the fantasy anarchist revolution where all of these, as happens in real revolutions, like a lot of the czar's secret police wound up working for the Soviet police state, right? Like stuff like this happens in revolutions. You get a pretty interesting satire novel based around like an FBI agent who manages to keep his job in this transition to a quote unquote leftist state.

that recreates a lot of the same problems of the earlier states. Something interesting could be done with that if you actually cared to, right? Well, and it is funny because now a popular conservative platform is basically trying to abolish the FBI. Sure, hey, you know,

You know what? Let them fight. If it works, it works. Austin Tucker fighting the hard fight. Yeah. All right. So here's Kaylee. The place that this murder has taken place at is called the graveyard, which is, Garrison, do you know what discourse we're about to get into here?

Necrophilia discourse? No, no. Destroyed statues, Garrison. All right. The graveyard, all of the statues got removed after the 2020 revolution from everywhere in America. And they all got moved to a graveyard in West Virginia. That's where all of America's old statues go. That's pretty funny. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it was wet from the morning rain. To some, from a distance, it looked like a cemetery with unusually large markers. In reality, these were statues. After liberation, the ruling council felt that destroying the monuments to old America's past might spurn more resistance. Their solution was to put them in the graveyard.

Its formal name was the United States Tribute Gardens. There were statues of former presidents, soldiers, countless Confederate statues either torn down by mobs or removed after the United States had fallen and New Merica was born. I love this confirmation that New Merica is the legal official name of the country. Yeah. That would get bigger riots than anything that actually happened in 2020. Yeah.

Kaylee looked at them as she walked through and saw the damage that had been done to them, the faint outlines of old graffiti and sand blasted off. She could see BLM and Antifa tags and symbols sprayed in several spots where the cleaning had failed. Streaks of rust and tarnish stained some stones. She walked past the statue of Thomas Jefferson, ripped from its former memorial in the district. Someone had painted his face black, and despite scrubbing efforts, it clung to the bronze.

how the mighty have fallen. The old Jefferson Memorial had been converted to the Clinton Peace Monument a year ago after the former president's death. This is a utopia. Bill Clinton's dead in 2025 in the blue dawn future. Jefferson has fallen. The Clinton Peace Monument? That's so funny. That's so funny. What did he do for peace particularly? It's a great question. Yeah.

Like no one even, no one, no liberals, liberals don't credit him for being a great peace president. They just missed the 90s because things seemed a lot better. Yeah, because it was before 9-11. And after the Cold War, it was just the best time to be president. Like he just got really lucky with it. Okay, some really stupid world building follows.

Kaylee had been monitoring NSF reports, looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack for anything that pointed to Sons of Liberty movement. There were a few seemingly random assassinations, usually of social enforcement, but those could be attributed to some overly brave civilian that had somehow managed to keep his or her rifle and was out for revenge.

No, she knew that the SOL wanted to do something that could not be ignored, something that would provoke a response on the part of the administration. This mass killing, this fit their MO. NSF detectives were good, but they came from a pure policing background, usually. She was an operative.

and that was a different animal altogether. Operatives all had some sort of special forces background. They didn't think like police. They were more devious, a bit more cunning, always more ruthless. She had been a ranger in the army right after the liberation, one of the few women to ever pass the program, then transferred to military police. Kaylee understood how the police thought and went past

that. If she didn't get the answer she was looking for, well, she was an operative. NSF operatives like her could beat it out of someone if they had to. Officially, operatives didn't exist, but everyone knew they did. There's a lot that's fun. For one thing,

You've known a lot of army rangers, the idea that like we're uniquely brutal kind of breed, like not guys. No, barely, barely special forces. Yeah. I'm not trying to give the rangers particular shit, but come on here. Like it doesn't include torture training to be an army ranger.

It's also funny when you read about like the kind of shit special forces guys get busted for, which is almost 100% of the time selling lots of drugs and guns. Like it happens constantly. They get caught constantly. Just this fantasy fetishization of like what it means to be special forces is always very funny to me.

The thing that's funnier to me is the idea that she's an operative and that's a secret, almost mythical status in this government. People don't even know that they don't even officially exist, but everyone knows they exist. So her organization is both so secret that it verges on mythical, but also an open enough reality that she has a badge that

that identifies her as an operative. And immediately after this paragraph where they're like, officially it doesn't exist, she introduces herself to the police with a badge as an operative and is immediately recognized as legitimate law enforcement. It's just bad writing.

As she rounded a massive battered statue of Theodore Roosevelt, she came to where the crime scene technicians were gathered, tied to the statues they stood in front of, with the bodies of 15 individuals. Most had their throats cut, and she could see bruises many bore on their faces. They were tied up, arms extended with cheap old rope, something that would be hard to trace. The techs were getting up on ladders, carefully scanning the bodies and the statues for evidence.

She looked at them, strung up on the statues as if they were crucified. She spotted someone she assumed was the lead detective and walked briskly over to him. Her feet were already wet from the grass. He eyed her with total disregard until she flashed her badge. "'Spec ops,' he said, turning to face her with a little more respect. "'An honest-to-God operative. I thought you folks were myths. It's best that you continue to,' she said. "'It's how we prefer it.'"

So he doesn't like question it at all that he sees a badge for a thing that doesn't exist. He doesn't like be like, that's not a real law enforcement badge because that doesn't exist. Like there's no, nobody actually questions this. Like the cops have no problem. Not only have no problem with the fed, but a fed from an organization that doesn't officially exist. Anyway, whatever I, it's just bad writing is what it is. Garrison. Yes, it does. It does appear to be. Yeah. Okay. It's fine. The victims are dastardly Antifa oppressors. Um, so, uh,

We're going to get like some grisly descriptions of like young college students getting murdered that clearly gets the author of this hard. Yeah, totally. Yeah, like it's it is it is very clear here. And I'm not going to go wildly into detail on this, but I do feel the need to read this paragraph.

That was the problem with the social enforcers as she saw them. They were sloppy. Professionals understood the need for paper trails and good documentation. These former Antifa kids preferred to grab a club or a rock and just start chucking. Sooner or later, we're going to have to put an end to having two policing forces out there. There's more, the detective said grimly. When we ID'd the first victim, we sent someone over to his house. His family had been murdered as well. We're still tracking down the rest, but it looks like someone made this very personal. Killing children. I can't wait to get my hands on these bastards.

She said nothing, but did nod, mostly to appear polite. The tactic was far from new. During the liberation, Antifa and the other revolutionaries had done the same thing to police officers' families. It had shaken the law enforcement community to its core. Many officers put their loved ones in hiding, while others refused to go back on patrol. Now these tactics are being used against us. She knew no one would say it out loud, but the phrase that came to her mind was, "'Karma's a bitch.'"

And I think that's funny because do you know what actually happens in real life? What didn't happen is Antifa murdering the family members of police officers. Never happened. Didn't occur. We had an Antifa. They won the election, theoretically. If you're this guy and no police officers' families ever got targeted or murdered, you know what is happening right now? Present day Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputies targeting the families of people that they murdered.

And I'm going to read a quote here from TheHill.com. A report released this week claims that deputies with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department regularly targeted relatives of several individuals who were fatally shot by members of the agency. The 37-page report from the National Lawyers Guild Los Angeles, ACLU of Southern California, and other groups lists alleged harassment against relatives of two men, Paul Rea and Anthony Vargas.

Rhea, 18, died in 2019 after being shot multiple times by an East Los Angeles deputy. Vargas, 21, was fatally shot by two deputies in 2018. The report, which was also presented by groups like Black Lives Matter Los Angeles and the Check the Sheriff Coalition, said deputies tried to intimidate family members of Rhea and Vargas by slowly driving by or parking in front of their homes, slowly driving by memorial sites, and damaging items at memorial sites.

Deputies also allegedly taunted relatives with crude comments and gestures, followed them as they drove, parked outside their relatives' places of work, took pictures of them, and recorded them. The groups further alleged that the deputies harassed relatives who were minors, frequently pulled over family members and searched their vehicles, and detained members without probable cause.

The report detailed several incidents of alleged harassment, claiming in some cases it took place after individuals spoke publicly against the killing of their family member. In one incident in October 2019, the group's Areya sister, Jaylene, spoke out about her brother's killing, and later that month also attended a town hall that was hosted by Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva.

The report alleged that Jaylene was forcibly arrested by LASD deputies without probable cause shortly after attending the town hall. In the roughly two hours she was held by police, Jaylene was not told by deputies why she was arrested. There's been very similar stuff happening in Atlanta the past few weeks. And the past few months, I guess, there's been a lot of similar reports from people of APD and other agencies doing things.

Quite quite similar harassment and even allegedly escalating to forms of like violent intimidation. Yeah. And it's this this idea that like, oh, my, these Antifa guys that I've had to invent because the real ones never did anything like this. You know, come as a bitch. You started this and we're finishing. And the reality is that like, well, I think they're Batman or something like I can't let people know or else they'll go after my my family or like Spider-Man, like whatever, like.

Karma being a bitch would be police officers, families getting targeted by like the victims of police violence as families who like carried out a vengeance campaign, like something like that. Cause that's like what actually happens in the real world. But, you know, again, you could, you could still be a right wing shithead and have that be your plot point. And at least it would be slightly truer to the reality. You'd be acknowledging that like, no, the cycle of targeting families was started by the cops and

It does kind of make me think, too, of like Chris Dorner, right, who is the only guy I can think of who hated cops and attacked cops and attacked and killed members of police officers' families. And he was also a cop.

Because that's what cops do is they go after the family members of people they don't like. Right. With with disregard for like other casualties. Yes. Yeah. It's very much cop shit. You know. Anyway, you know what's not the police unless it is because it has been in the past is our sponsors. Hopefully these ads. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see.

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We're back. So I want to give you an idea of how masturbatory the descriptions of dead activists here are. Sure, why not? And also, let's talk about who he sees as being the members of these Antifa death squads.

Kaylee looked up for a long moment at one of the bodies, a young woman, her matted wet blonde hair obscuring her face, her black buttoned shirt was opened, and her faded UCLA t-shirt was visible against the wet soaked bloodstain where her throat had been cut. She was close to the same age as Ailee, but they were worlds apart. The message is that the Sons of Liberty are back.

Throat slashed. Throat slashed. I do love that. Like, yes, random UCLA grads are like the murder police in this, this hellhole progressive fantasy world. Um,

Very, I mean, nothing scarier than UCLA kids. You can tell why all these like campus protests really freaked out these people too. Yeah. Like it really, it really got to them because yeah, they think all these kids at universities are like this like secret militia ready to strike. Meanwhile, they have actual militias ready to strike. Yeah. They have militias that like tried to overthrow the government, uh,

And like actually did a huge amount and have repeatedly there was just another guy arrested for threatening to kill the family members of FBI agents after Hunter Biden's conviction, like a conservative who was angry because he somehow felt that the Hunter Biden conviction was evidence of.

hiding the truth about his family's crimes. He threatened to kill family members of FBI agents, and he's going to do a lot of prison time for that, presumably, because you're not supposed to do that. But again, the people threatening folks' families are always you guys, right? Anyway, I want to end with a little bit more world building from this book about what happened to the press.

Oh, good. Yeah, this is Kaylee talking to this cop at the murder scene. The press is already here. I've kept them back. Secure their gear, she replied. Kick them out. Remind them what happens if they don't cooperate. If they have a complaint, tell them to take it up with the Truth Reconciliation Committee. The media sided with the administration. They had little choice. They had incited the liberation with their manipulation of information during the last election. Any pretense that they were going to buck

the fed gov and ruin a run a story that was bad was quickly squelched their hands were as dirty as anyone's now if they wanted a story out it had to be cleared by the trc which was little more than a government censorship organization they know their place and those that didn't are long gone they incited the liberation with their manipulation of information

This is all based on the 2020 uprising, which was incited by a cop choking a man to death and a very like absolutely unedited, uneditorialized video by a citizen who happened to be on the scene. Like largely like completely undisputed. Yeah. Yeah. Even Trump's initial reaction was like, yeah, it's fucking horrible. Right. Because like everyone's was. It's just I anyway. Yeah.

I don't know. I guess that's all I got today from Blaine Pardo's Blue Dawn. We're probably done with this book at this point. I just needed to know a little bit more about what the future has in store when Antifa gets mortars. I would like to learn more about how Trump is going to be training this secret underground militia. I do. I do kind of want to hop to find the precedent in this. I haven't made it that far. Oh, totally. How would Donald Trump survive underground? Living is like...

I really want to see like, Snakeplunkin, like Donald Trump with like an eyepatch. Yeah. He has like a mullet. He's like, he's paragliding into New York City. He's going to retake Trump Tower.

Oh, man. Oh, God. That's funny. Yeah. Good stuff. It probably won't be that fun or cool, but we can imagine. It definitely won't be that fun or cool, but we can do something. Garrison, you got any pluggables to plug before we roll out here? Oh, just my regular chronicling the brainwad on It Could Happen Here. If you want to listen about...

Me learning way too much about Trump pornography. That episode came out earlier in the month of June or Trump rule 34. And there's probably all kinds of nonsense come out since then based on, you know, the election and the debates and all that, all that fun stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. So check that out. Check out Garrison showing his coworkers pornography. Um, unless you work, unless you work for I heart radio HR, in which case those episodes, it was completely said they tried, they tried, they tried to censor. Um, anyway, you know, we're done.

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is supported by BetterHelp, offering licensed therapists you can connect with via video, phone, or chat. Here's BetterHelp head of clinical operations, Hesu Jo, discussing who can benefit from therapy. I think a

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