Margaret Killjoy
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
There's people that... will never get my pronouns right, who I suspect would kill someone who tried to hurt me. And there's other people who would absolutely always get my pronouns right and be super respectful and would be like, oh, no, a bad thing is happening if they watch me get murdered in front of them. You know? Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
I love his talking blues.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
They've probably driven stuff off of the road before.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
One of the first people I ever rode trains with, I haven't ridden trains nearly as much as it's going to make it sound like when I do these episodes, but was this folk singer named Ryan Harvey. And so that's why I have a lot of these associations with riding trains in particular.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
But we used to sit around and sing Big Rock Candy Mountains, but change the words very slightly to be like modern anarchy. You didn't have to change much. And my favorite was, and the hens lay vegan eggs was my favorite line.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Just immediately like, no, he found this thing that sort of works.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Well, I guess it didn't really work. That's the other weird thing about it.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
He's got a nice jaw.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Yeah. He's better looking than Woody Guthrie if we go AB real quick. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
I can tie this back to Italy in the 1870s, Malatesta and all these other anarchists in Italy in Benevento province would go and their idea of how to do propaganda of the deed was to go and they'd march on these small towns and they would destroy the tax and ownership records. And they were like, and then everyone would come out and be like, you have freed us.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
The priest was like, came out of the church and was like, these people have been sent by God to free us. And then they all got arrested. But then they actually only spent like a year in jail because everyone was going so crazy in Italy at that point that they were like, you know, we better just let these people out. Yeah, we can't go too hard on these people.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Everyone really likes them for some reason. And so that's like... There is a specific point. And if you're going to be a criminal, if you go hard enough and make everyone like you, there's a certain safety in that.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
That you probably wouldn't find today. Just to be clear, anyone listening, that you probably wouldn't find today. You will not find today.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
That's good. It's so interesting to me because I... If you'd say folk music in different places, you mean something so completely different, right? American folk music is this like Woody Guthrie kind of vibe thing, whereas in almost any other country, you're looking at stuff that's a little bit more like
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
technically interesting like like musically yes i don't know i have a lot of thoughts about like folk and folk instrumentation and music and all that but i think what he's describing is great and specifically that thing that it's like this is the stuff that people make up you know it's not fancy yeah and it's also how poor people without really any other idea of how to have a voice
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Yeah, yeah, totally.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Yeah. I mean, that's the thing about like populist and popular stuff is it can really go either way. Yeah. But it's like, yeah, still on some fundamental level. Interesting.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Just to keep going with all the weird family connections, my great-grandfather was a Tin Pan Alley songwriter. And yeah, he just wrote music that he didn't own the copyright to. He wrote the B-sides for more popular musicians like
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Yeah, I mean, the internationalist newspaper stuff was pretty... Yeah. Sometimes they were better at knowing what was going on around the world than like a modern leftist is today. But he's holding the party line. They got told very specifically. I mean, this is the problem with the commenter in the Communist International. Yes.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Is that someone in the American Communist Party during this era is literally taking orders from Russia. Yeah. Yeah. And that's one of the parts that we don't want to talk about with the Red Scare, because the Red Scare was bad, right? Yeah. But when they're like, oh, these foreign agents acting under a foreign national... They were.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
It turns out not, yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
The Communist Party was absolutely right about racial politics in the United States during this era. Yes, 100%. And they were one of the only non-black organizations. It was actually heavily black, but one of the only not majority black organizations that was right about this.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
But actually, that's still like even when we talk about the way that people have arcs, right? One of the things I've read a lot, I've read a lot about the UK communists at this era where a lot of the communists left the Communist Party once they realized that they were just being mouthpieces for Stalin, you know?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Strange bedfellows. Good piece of propaganda.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Oh, that was like a the government was putting that on machines to raise morale. And he took one of those and was like, I'm putting this on my guitar.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
That makes so much sense. I never quite understood that. I always really liked, though, when people carve into their AKs wooden stock, this machine makes folk music.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
It's a good line. All right. It might kill me. It's killed millions of people before. So it fucking goes. I'll be in good company. Yeah. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
No. Is he going to heel turn again? He keeps dancing. It's...
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Well, it's actually in the US, they're called vacuum towns, Vacuumville. That was good.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
And, like, famous men sex-pesting is fans. Famous men sex-pesting is, like, or everyone in your orbit, you just assume they want to fuck you. Which I guess he's, like, doing to this... No, yeah, the degeneration thing, that just makes sense.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Right. But the fact that it was out of the blue to her means that he probably kept his fucking mouth shut about the fact that he had a crush on her.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Although in England, they had the, we put the D in bread campaign only a couple of years ago.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Yeah. Especially for someone who's at the kind of beginning, not the very beginning of recorded music, but like. Pretty close to it.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Yeah. I knew so little about him. I knew about some of his music and it's been super influential, but that's awesome.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
She's already a good podcast dog, which is a hard level for a dog to reach.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Well, if you want Christmas every week, I have a podcast called Cool People Did Cool Stuff, where I talk about cool people did cool stuff. And then either this week or next week, depending on when everything gets released, I also will be covering the history of the song Bella Ciao, because I got excited by this recording last week of part one, and I thought, I'm going to do a song too.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
So next Monday, you all can hear me talk about the history of Bella Chao.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Merry Christmas and or whatever you want to have happy, happy.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Yeah, I'd be a great Supreme Court judge.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
I mean, it was the Great Depression. It was the Great Depression. Yeah. We see a lot of this now where like people are like, oh, I'm failing under capitalism. I must personally be a failure. And you're like, no, times are really hard right now.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
You'd be great Supreme Court like 90% of the time, and then 10% of the time you'd be like, I think that everyone should have a personal nuke.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Yeah. Like migrant laborers come to the United States. They're not abandoning their family to try and. But they're usually not going out there to play guitar.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
I mean, he's doing folk punk before it's folk punk. He's doing folk punk, right.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
It's interesting because country western, I had never occurred to me that those were separate categories.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
If we had a time machine, we would feel justified in going back and killing absolute monarchs from the 19th century and earlier.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Well, that's going to bring us to this week's first assassin.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
I actually can't remember whether this guy stabbed or shot him. This is the only successful assassin we're going to talk about for a while. But he shaped a lot of Italy's politics for a long time. And that man's name was Gaetano Bresci. He was a weaver from Italy who emigrated to the U.S. in the 19th century to Patterson, New Jersey.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And it's kind of funny because there's all of these different hidden secret anarchist strongholds of the past. I don't normally think about New Jersey when I think about anarchism. But Patterson, New Jersey, very strong Italian anarchist scene. The next little bit, because it's been a little while since I've looked up Katana Bresci.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
I used to write about him a lot, so I'm kind of going into a little bit story mode when I talk about Katana Bresci. I'm going to have more direct sources for the rest of the people I'm going to talk about, just so everyone knows. Katana Bresci was hanging out in New Jersey with his Irish wife, Sophie, which is a good name.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And his two daughters. And she's going to be all right in this story.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Cool. Yeah. Cool, cool, cool. Don't bring the name down.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah, no, no, she's great. No negative notes on Sophie. In 1898, there were these food riots in Italy, and the government was like, well, a specific general was like, why don't we just murder the entire crowd that's rioting? And so they did that. And when people think food riots, they usually think like, oh, everyone lost their mind and was running around and burning things or whatever.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
These were organized strikes that were met with lethal force. At least 80 protesters and two soldiers were killed. Jesus. And so King Umberto I What did he do? And everyone at the time was like, oh, the king is the true, you know, a lot of like populism is based on the idea that the government's bad, but the king's good.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah. No, totally. Yeah. We see this again and again. And so I think everyone was kind of expecting Umberto to come in and be like, well, you probably shouldn't have done that. Oh, I did promise you more than one Umberto, and this is one of them. There's going to be another one probably on Wednesday. But what Umberto I did is awarded the guy who ordered the Massacre a Medal of Honor.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And Catano Bresci, he didn't like that. He was living in New Jersey with Sophie. He'd started an anarchist paper with some folks, and he'd put up a fuckton of money to start that paper. It was like 200 bucks at the time, which is like several thousand dollars now. He didn't want anyone else to get in trouble for what he decided to do, so he didn't tell anyone. He didn't tell Sophie.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
He just told her he had to go deal with some stuff like family stuff in Italy. He didn't tell his comrades. He went into the newspaper and said, hey, all that seed money I put in, I need it back now. And they were like, why? And he was like, not your business. Give me my money back. And so everyone kind of thought he was a sellout and he was just like getting his money to go fuck off, right?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Everyone thought he left the movement. But he got his money back and he bought two things. He bought a Smith & Wesson and he bought a one-way ticket to Paris.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And unlike a lot of would be assassins that we've talked about on this show, Bresci practiced with the revolver, which is always key.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
He made his way, probably to Rome. He made his way to Italy. He spent two days scouting out the area where he knew the king was going to be. And then on July 29th, 1900, he went out and he got some ice cream. I think he had lunch with a stranger and just hanging out. And he was like, you're going to remember me, guy.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And then he waited for Umberto to come through, waiting in the crowd that was all there to cheer on their glorious leader. And he shot Umberto to death. The crowd immediately grabbed him. Gaetano said, I did not kill Umberto. I have killed the king. I have killed a principal.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Back home in New Jersey, his anarchist friends were like, oh, I guess we judged him wrong. And they started a fund to look after his kids and support his family. His wife came to Italy and testified to his good character in court. His whole family was like arrested in an investigation into conspiracy, but eventually everyone was let go.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And Italy under a king was actually had a more fair criminal justice system than the United States does today. They didn't have the death penalty. Mussolini is going to bring that back later. So he gets life in prison. He was held in solitary confinement. He had one hour a day of exercises, like feet were like manacled to the floor. They didn't treat him great.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Less than a year later, he was found hanging in his cell. And modern historians are reasonably certain he was murdered at the time. Everyone's like, nah, he just killed himself. Interestingly enough, this assassination didn't bring in sweeping reactionary forces or anything. Usually people are like, oh, you killed the king and something worse is going to happen.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
This changed things, but the existing kind of leftist government stayed in power and things kind of chugged along okay. It didn't even lead to – they cracked down on the anarchist movement, but they didn't come through and destroy it. It did lead to more international cooperation between law enforcement groups.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
When I first started dreaming up this show years ago, it was kind of in a different context. And I wanted to talk about anarchist history. And I was like, you know, they literally invented international policing to stop us. Why are all of our books boring? Has been my, like, go-to tagline. Because they did. International policing exists because of trying to stop the anarchist movement. Because...
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Nothing gets people to work together. Like, when people go around and kill, like, poor people, everyone's like, oh, that sucks. Whatever. When people go around and kill kings, kings work together to make sure that that stops.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
When someone comes for them as a class, they band together. Yeah. One person who defended Gaetano Bresci doing a little king murder was a man by the name of Benito Mussolini. His fellow socialists were claiming Bresci was crazy for having killed the king, right? Mussolini said that tyrannicide was, quote, the occupational hazard of being a king. Which, I don't know.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
But what isn't a pre-existing, no, but what else we're obliged to do is play ads for you now. Yeah. Like these ones. And we're back. Now, this might shock you, Robert.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Well, I was reading a whole bunch on that website X about how actually the fascists are socialists and leftists.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
My X feed is certainly playing looping videos of something right now. And... So... Mussolini was kicked out of the Socialist Party because he supported interventionism. He supported Italy fighting in World War I. And along the way, he started developing his theories on fascism, which was basically, what if you took revolutionary socialism and then replaced it with revolutionary nationalism?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Instead of class solidarity, you had national solidarity. What if you made all of the poor people suck up to the rich people and then defend the nation as a concept? the leftist trappings, and some of the leftist strategies, but with right-wing goals. Because at the time, right-wing was just like the status quo, right? If you defend like the monarchy or whatever, you're right-wing.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
So there's nothing really revolutionary about it. But fascism was like, no, but we want the revolution and we want to like feel cool and edgy, but we also want to, we really like the taste of boots. And so we're going to become fascists and invent this new ideology. For a few years, a lot of politics in Italy was happening in the streets, fascists versus anti-fascists fighting it out.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And for a good several years, Mussolini tried to make common cause with the anarchists specifically to join him against the socialists and the communists. After all, this is the period where the Bolsheviks in Russia were murdering anarchists en masse. And so some folks, there's a chance that Mussolini was even going to go anarchist during this time.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
I actually don't buy it, but I read one person making this argument. He actually risked alienating his base with how much he appreciated the anarchists. Interesting. Because his base was like, no, those are the people we just go fight in the streets. But Mussolini kind of admires their commitment, right? And the anarchists don't want him.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Mussolini said, quote, we are always ready to admire men who are willing to die for a faith they believe in selflessly. And this is him contrasting the anarchists to the cowardly socialists. The anarchists, in so many words, told him to eat shit and die. They refused his overtures again and again, and soon enough, they're going to try really, really hard to just outright kill this man.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
The most famous Italian anarchist, then and now, is this guy named Errico Malatesta. He's popped into a bunch of our stories on this show, like when comrades got him to Argentina by smuggling him in a crate of sewing machines. And then he helped the baker's union there become the most radical union in that country and the model that all the other unions rushed to follow.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And how today in Argentina, there are still pastries named by the anarchist bakers, like little books and little bombs. I really like Malatesta. He's always in and out of jail. He's an older fellow now. I think he's in his 60s at this point that we're talking about. And while he's in prison in Italy, there's a huge campaign to free him.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And who supports that campaign but Benito Mussolini, even though his followers are fighting the anarchists in the streets during this time. Malatesta gets out, and he can't get any paper for his newspapers because of political pressure against him. And Mussolini offers him paper to print on. And Malatesta's like, no. What? No. So Mussolini keeps trying to be friends with him.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
But some anarchists and folks from every ideology did turn fascist, right? Because you can't have a new ideology without starting with people who used to have other ideologies. An awful lot of anarchists turned fascist. Orwell has a really good essay about this. George Orwell has a really good essay about this called Notes on Nationalism.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
It basically lays out the case that a lot of political extremists are into extremism, not the idea that the extremism is attached to. So you get people going from the radical left to the radical right reasonably often. And this, unfortunately, ties into the first time that I've found of someone trying to kill Mussolini.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Some anarchists got together in 1921, before Mussolini ever even took formal power. He does that in 1922. And they're like, all right, we got to kill this guy. They delegated one among their number, a man named Biagio Masi, to go kill Mussolini. Instead, Biagio went to Mussolini and told him the whole plan. Mussolini protected him.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And then the very next day, because Mussolini is just being, I don't know, cunning or whatever... Mussolini goes and gives a speech about how the government needs to really release Malatesta, right? Even though he has just learned that the anarchists are trying to kill him. He's a 4D chess kind of man, this Mussolini.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
There's also this thing where people are always like Mussolini is like the little brother of Hitler, you know, and he's kind of a joke because Italy's military might is not the same as Germany's, right? Mussolini pulled off something pretty incredible, like terrible, evil, but like he did become dictator of a major country. That is like a hard thing to do.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
I really like the pizza in Italy. Yeah. I like how every country, not every country, but most countries I've been to, the American version of their national food is hard to get vegan, but in the country that I'm in, it's actually reasonably easy. Like, it's really easy to just go into any train station in Italy and buy vegan pizza.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
So... Mussolini comes to power in October 1922, first as the prime minister. There's something that's like not not a coup. I mean, it's not a coup, but it's also not not a coup. Right. 30,000 of his black shirts, his personal army, marched on Rome in the March on Rome. The liberal government was like, hey, let's declare martial law to stop this.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
But then the king was like, no, let's just put that guy in charge instead. Mussolini immediately helped out the rich people. He was not a fucking leftist at this point. Immediately helped out all the rich people, centralized power, and just was a right-wing shitbag. By 1924, he was like, look, there's not a democracy anymore, okay? It's just fascism. And Italy became fascist.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And people didn't really like that. There are some occupational hazards to being a dictator. First and most famous at the time, but not the most famous now, was a socialist politician named Tito Zanaboni. And don't worry if you're like, hey, that sounds like Zamboni and you think that's clever. Don't worry. There's two Zanbonis later. OK. OK. But this one's Zanaboni.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
One time I was in Italy and my friend took me to like her very nice apartment in, um, no, I don't remember which city I was on tour for like a month. I went to a bunch of cities and she was like, looks out and I'm like, how do you afford this? Like amazing, fantastic place. And she goes to the window and points down to this like public square right outside.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And she's like, that's where the mafia assassinates, like executes people in public. No one wants to live here.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Most of the places that have been really nice, that, like, have been aesthetically really nice that I can afford to live in have had gunshots outside at night. Yeah, that's true.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
So... Before we talk about Tito, we're going to talk about another Italian socialist politician, Giacomo Mattiotti. Mattiotti. And his best friend, Bucca di Beppo. Giacomo Mattiotti was a socialist politician who tried repeatedly to expose Mussolini and fascism for what they were.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
After he published a book against the fascists and accused them of fraud, the fascists, who were certainly people of action, on June 10th, 1924, Giacomo was kidnapped by the fascist secret police, who stabbed him to death with a carpenter's file, I believe in the car. This was in a lot of ways the thing that paved the way for Mussolini to declare himself dictator.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
I'm going to oversimplify this dangerously. But after a lot of hand wringing and investigations and castigations of the fascists for this kind of thing, eventually Mussolini was like, look, I'm a fascist, though. I'm in charge and we're going to stab people to death with Carpenter's files and you're just going to deal with it. This had an enormous amount of knock-on effects.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
One of them was that this other socialist politician, Tito Zanaboni, he got real mad. He had been part of the search efforts to find his friend. Before that, he'd been part of signing a peace treaty between the socialists and the fascists. But after they killed his friend, oh yeah, the socialists signed a peace treaty with the fascists.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah. After I talk about all the anarchists who became fascists and stuff, it's worth pointing out the socialists signed a peace treaty with the fascists. Mm-hmm. After they killed his friend, he's like, all right, fuck this. We got to shoot this guy. And he and his friends conspired to kill Mussolini.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Tito is a war hero, so he got a precision rifle, and he set himself up to station himself in a window to shoot Mussolini from far away. But among his co-conspirators was an informant. So Tito, and actually a general in the Italian army, were both sent to prison. I think they got the maximum sentence, which was 30 years at the time. Great. The United Socialist Party was no more.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
In court, Tito used the same defense as most of Mussolini's would-be assassins used later, which is the defense of, yeah, but fuck Mussolini, though. Somebody should shoot him. Mm-hmm. Just, you know, not always the best way to get off in court, but like...
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah, we covered this one on the Armenian genocide episode.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
So Tito was released in 1943 when the fascist government fell, which is the other thing that comes up a lot is that revolutionaries, or in this case, I mean, it wasn't even a revolutionary. It was a politician who was like, yeah, but other politicians shouldn't murder people, you know? And people go to jail for a really long time. Right-wing governments often fall.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And if you can stay alive in jail long enough, you'll be free again. Mm-hmm. But... Someone else was directly inspired by the death of Giacomo Mattiotti. One of my favorite strange and misunderstood assassins in history. Violet Gibson. Have you heard of... I feel like there's one... I've heard the name. Yeah. If there's one assassin, people have probably heard of Violet Gibson.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
This is the most widely known attempt on his life in the modern era because it's the one that makes the coolest social media headline.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Is there like a... I'm...
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
There are. There's actually, there's songs about her.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
There's documentaries. And I really hope I'm thinking of the right person or else I sound dumb. She was like really short, right?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
As somebody who definitely can't reach things on the top shelf, I'm very excited to hear more about Violet.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Also, the only person who I'm going to talk about today who successfully shot the man
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
So Violet Gibson was a 49-year-old Irish woman from Dublin who lived in a convent in Rome and shot Mussolini in the face on April 7th, 1926. What's not to like? Oh, God. Ireland stays winning. Yeah, you know? I know. Yeah. Mostly, the part to not like about the story is that he turned his head at the last minute. Yeah, he didn't die. And she only grazed his nose.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
But there are good pictures of him with the bandage on his nose or whatever. There's no comparisons that can be made now to the modern world. No.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
About people turning their heads?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah, and getting grazed. Yep. The world would have been a very different place if he had not turned his head. Yep. Violet Gibson was a thin woman, about five foot one. Her father was the Lord Chancellor of Ireland. She grew up... She's Anglo-Irish, right? And she grew up like... Oh, wow.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And like Lawrence of Arabia, she's crazy as shit. But people use this to invalidate and claim that her action wasn't political or thought out. And that's what I want to argue against. But I can't argue against her being crazy as shit. And I'm going to tell you why. But... She grew up rich as hell.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
She was a debutante, debuted in Queen Victoria's court, which I only vaguely understand what is through mostly my friends who are from the South. Most tellings of the story come down to, I don't know, she did it because she was crazy.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
I am going to make the case that she did it because she was a politically committed Catholic socialist who wanted to do right by God and people by killing a man who went on to be responsible for millions of deaths, who was also crazy. She was always esoteric. She was raised Protestant, right? Her mother became a Christian scientist, and so she herself experimented with Christian science.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And then she got into theosophy for a while, but then she converted. She found another esoteric religion to get involved in, Catholicism, when she was 26, and she stayed a Catholic for the rest of her life. She was sick all of the time. Her body carried the scars of many surgeries, and she spent years working at various pacifist organizations.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
The craziest thing she did, which is left out of the leftist accounts of her story, but it's included in the right-wing accounts of her story that are, like, demonizing her. But they're verifiable. I believe this happened. So she used to walk around Dublin with a Bible in one hand and a knife in the other.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Oh, yeah, no, like, yeah, no, it...
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah, exactly. She talked all the time about the necessity of mortifying the flesh, which is normally about like killing the urge to sin. But she seemed to want to kill. That was part of her way of understanding that particular doctrine. Around 1920, she attacked a young woman with a knife, cutting the woman's face and hands. And so she spent two years in an asylum.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And I don't know enough about that attack to know like if there's any motivation beyond something about how she wanted to like replicate the sacrifice of so-and-so in the Bible or whatever.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
When she got out, she moved to a convent in Rome. I believe this was kind of a like, yeah, you're like super rich though. So you can go be in this convent. Her friends thought to themselves, she's probably going to kill somebody. Maybe the Pope. But they didn't try to stop her, which is really funny because they're probably all Irish Catholics. And they're just like, eh, whatever.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Then in 1924, when Giacomo was murdered, the guy murdered to death with a carpenter's file. Yeah. She was heartbroken because she was a Catholic socialist, right? And so she decided to like revenge that killing by shooting herself in the chest. The bullet bounced off her ribs and she survived.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And if you want to survive in the world that's coming, you need to buy literally everything that is advertised on this show. It is the only way to survive, I believe. It's not a guarantee. But here's ads. And we're back. Mussolini, at this point, God, I read a whole bunch of New York Times articles and other newspaper articles from this time, and they're all like, Mussolini's great.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
We all like Mussolini because he's stopping the Bolsheviks, you know? Mussolini was being courted by the Western world. The King of England awarded him the Order of the Bath, which is not an order to take a bath, unfortunately, but instead, a knighthood. And Violet Gibson decided that the way to glorify God was to assassinate Mussolini.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
So she showed up at one of his talks in 1926 with a revolver and a rock. The rock was to break his windshield if necessary, which later assassins would have been more successful if they had also brought a rock. The modern mind can't really understand her motive, I think, because her motive was primarily religious, but it was also political.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
She did it to, quote, glorify God, and an angel kept her arm steady. I told this story to a Catholic anarchist friend of mine whose response was basically like, oh, those Irish and their angels. Mussolini turned his head at the last minute. She grazed his nose. She tried to fire again, but the gun jammed. And I've read that what he yelled at the time that he was shot was fancy a woman.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
But that might have been later. He told the crowd, don't be afraid. This is a mere trifle. And then like later he went on this rant about how he's totally down to die violently as long as like a good glorious death. But if he's like killed by an old lady, he just can't handle it. Which is why I wish Violet had succeeded over everyone else. Alas. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
The crowd caught her and beat her, and she was whisked away by the cops and declared insane. People said that she was paranoid, and that was why she tried to kill him, because she was paranoid. I hate to break it to the people of back then, she was correct about this particular thing. She spent the rest of her life in various institutions.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
She wrote letter after letter pleading to be set free, but those letters were never sent. Because, you know, women are crazy, right? That's my, that's a sarcastic remark.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
People probably caught on to that. She told people that her mood controlled the weather. Okay, well, did it? If she'd killed Mussolini, she would have stopped like three million deaths. Maybe her moods, like I want to kill Mussolini, have a pretty major impact. Yeah, I mean, look, I can't prove that she's wrong. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
It reminds me of when I covered Joan of Arc on this show, where people are like, oh, feminist icon, except, you know, obviously she was just crazy with her visions from God. And it's just that people were conceiving of reality in different ways than we conceive of it now. And I think that people have a hard time wrapping their heads around that. She died in 1956 at the age of 79.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
She did outlive Mussolini. No family members came to her funeral. History has vindicated her and there's now a plaque for her on her childhood home in Dublin that describes her accurately as a committed anti-fascist. And it was articles about this from like right-wing Irish people is how I learned about how she would run around and stab people and things like that.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And I think it's, I think overall it was just like, oh, there's our crazy aunt. She's just crazy. She just wanted to kill a guy. You know, that's like my best guess, but I'm not, I'm not certain. People didn't like her at the time. And now there's been kind of this, this reclamation of her legacy. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
But Mussolini was particularly good at turning attempts on his life into popular support, which is like what you do if someone tries to kill you, right? You either say like, oh, no, I'm afraid and the enemy is scary and bad, which is not a good way to gain power. Or you can say like, ha, ha, ha, they can't get me, but they want to because they're evil, you know?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
almost every article about attempts on Mussolini's life from then or now is basically like, but this particular attempt is what Mussolini used to consolidate power. Everything was fine until this person tried to kill him. And then she just like swept in with fascism.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
You don't have to be a good person. And it's like. people talk about like hindsight is 2020, but it's not because you don't know what the other options were. You know, you can only see the one thing that happened.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And, um, Mussolini would have become dictator if no one had tried to kill him.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
You know? Yeah. And he used moments like this to consolidate power because anyone would.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah, he keeps busy. You know, he's got a lot of mistresses. Although New York Times just is going to run articles. I'll talk about him later. But New York Times is like, oh, he's just hanging out with his family. He's a family man.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And he like... knew more about philosophy and art and shit like that, you know, which was like a lot of the ways to be kind of like cool at the time. And like, I mean, he created a philosophy, one that is still around. Yep. It's a bad one. Yep.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
So there's another thing that's going to tie into this that is going on the Italian anarchist world and the Italian American world and just the news in general. And it's another thing that like looking back, it's hard to see why this is as big of a deal as it was. And this is the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti. Have you heard of this?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And it's probably the only time during anyone's high school education that the word anarchist gets mentioned. Besides like maybe you're going to get Shogosh killing McKinley, but probably not.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah, fair enough. I honestly, whenever I'm like, my high school teacher didn't teach me this, I'm like, I don't know. How would I have known?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Because that one is inescapable. And it was this incredibly important celebrity trial all over the world. And... Basically, some Italian-American anarchists or mafia, but almost certainly anarchists, were robbing a guy who carried the wages, basically the equivalent of an armored truck robbery. And someone shot and killed the paymaster and a guard.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Two Italian-American anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti, were put on trial. The entire leftist world, not just the anarchists, was convinced that they were innocent. And basically this whole thing was seen as like a travesty of justice.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
In 1921, they were found guilty and sentenced to death, but it took years for the state to kill them because the outcry was so much that they had to have all these appeals and investigations and things like that. This dragged on for years. Later historians have been like, well, Sacco probably did it. And Vanzetti, maybe?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Like, it's possible Vanzetti was there and therefore actually criminally liable but, like, didn't pull the trigger. It's also possible that they weren't there because a lot of the evidence that they did do it comes from a guy we're going to talk about later who's an anarchist bomb maker who turned into a fascist informant named Mario Buddha.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
No, it's true. And that is like something that, yeah, fun time to have decided to write this episode. But the important thing about the Sacco and Vanzetti case is that this trial was huge. The outcry was enormous. And one thing that happened in this is that the fascists tried hard to capitalize on it and did capitalize on it.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Because most of the outcry against the trial was that the trial was unfair as a result of the U.S. 's anti-Italian and anti-anarchist bigotry. A fuckton of the Italian-American crowd was either anarchist or fascist. And so both the fascists and the anarchists rallied for Sacco and Vanzetti.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Mussolini was cynically using the trial to stir up nationalism at home and continuing his odd overtures to the anarchists, even though he was in power by most of this point. And he's cracking down on the anarchists left and right. His soldiers are burning photos of that guy Malatesta. Anarchists are being rounded up and stuff.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yet Mussolini is telling his ambassadors to try and intervene on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti because Mussolini wanted to be seen as the man who protected Italians everywhere. And he has all these quotes that are like, I cannot agree with anything that these men stand for, but they're Italian by God and America shouldn't kill them or whatever. I'm now paraphrasing terribly.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Fair enough. And what does this have to do with Violet Gibson? Well, this is going to turn into one of the best zings against America that I've ever read about. On July 23rd, 1927, Mussolini wrote... It is certain that the execution of Sacco-Vanzetti would provide the pretext for a vast and continuous agitation throughout the world.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
The fascist government, which is strongly authoritarian and does not give quarter to the Bolsheviks, very often employs clemency in individual cases. The governor of Massachusetts should not lose the opportunity for a humanitarian act whose repercussions would be especially positive in Italy.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And fascist newspapers were now contrasting the American government as more totalitarian than the fascist Italian government. Because the Italian system, the fascist system, had let Violet Gibson return to her own country. And there is no death penalty in Italy at this point. That's nice. People could literally kill kings and get life in prison. Comparing this to the barbaric United States.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And this is the thing that I love about it. It is like, the dude's got a point. Yep. The U.S. President's industrial system is like a nightmare. It sure is. And was worse than the fascist government.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah. And yeah, Violet, she was not alone in her quest to see the Duke die. The next attempt was on September 11th, 1926. And this is why people remember September 11th. And this is probably the most organized attempt. Sophie clearly agrees with me.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
It was a coup that happened somewhere.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
That was such a smooth joke.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
You're the funniest person I know.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah, I lived in New York City on September 11, 2001. Saw the towers on fire. Or saw the smoking remains. But anyway... The socialist politician had failed. The Catholic wingnut had failed. Time to bring in the professionals. If there's one group that knows about killing kings and monarchs and stuff, it's the anarchists. Again, we all know they failed. But you know what? They tried real hard.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
The next attempt was by a man named Gino Lucetti, who I'll tell you about, along with his cousin Gino, because his name is Gino, but so is his cousin. That's the thing I'm saying. Well, I'll tell you about it on Wednesday.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Robert, just thank you so much for telling us that. I have no idea. I have no idea how we would have gone on.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Oh, okay. No, yeah, that makes sense. Yes. But Robert Evans, where can people find more about you or what do you do?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
I feel like at the end of a G.I. Joe episode where you tell kids to like not hide in refrigerators. Right. I feel like it's worth pointing out that I really am talking about history here and that nothing necessarily good happened from any of the attempts that I'm describing. I am not morally against the attempts that I am describing. I'm clearly not of this thing that happened in the 1920s.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
But I want to be like clear on that.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
No, it is worth thinking about that anarchists had given up on propaganda by the deed at this point. Propaganda by the deed was this anarchist idea that people were like, well, the masses don't really read theory, so let's just show them by killing all the kings and the people who are in charge of them.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And it overall was disastrous for the anarchist movement because it just led people to then defend the very systems that the anarchists were opposed to. And this happened time and time again. There are exceptions. During the run-up to the Russian Revolution, from like 1903 to 1917, anarchists and other groups were all doing these attentats, all doing these assassinations.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And it did lead to a revolutionary situation, which of course all kind of ended badly. and created the USSR. But usually these kind of things destroy a social movement. Sometimes, if enough people are interested in it, it builds a social movement. But usually it doesn't. And that is the, like... It's a crapshoot at best.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
It's a, like, let's redraw our hand of cards and probably get something worse.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
But still... If someone had successfully killed Mussolini, I bet the world would have been a better place.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And we're going to talk about like five more of them on Wednesday. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
um at the end here i just want to plug uh if you you haven't listened i just am plugging this on anything i can i just want to plug uh our colleague james stout series from reporting from the darien gap um yeah about one of the worst land migration uh places in the world and just you know the stories and people he talked to there and i just want to plug that because it's an amazing series and i'm very proud of james
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
I started listening to it. I haven't finished it yet. It is really good.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
It's really good. Yeah, so if you have time around the end of the year and you're like, hmm, I need something to binge, James did five episodes. On It Could Happen Here. On It Could Happen... Thank you. On It Could Happen Here.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
All right. See you all on Wednesday. Bye. Bye.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts 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.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. We're back, in case you noticed. We weren't here, but now we're here. The we, in this case, is me, Murder Killjoy, and my producer, Sophie. Hi, Sophie.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah, despite the huge trial that we talked about last time about anti-Italian prejudice in the United States.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Maybe... That's a dead Mussolini joke, which is unfortunately not going to happen in today's episode. Yeah. A lot of people are going to try. Give it the old college try. Our producer is Sophie. Hi, Sophie.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
It's me. I'm Sophie. Hi.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
I realized when I got my podcast you listened to the most in 2024 that four of them were Sophie podcasts.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
The loyalty is unmatched.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Unmatched. That's right. I'm a little bit surprised that not all five were. But I think the problem was that the Pathfinder podcast I listened to has really long episodes.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
You need one break.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
So I listened to like five.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah, you need one break from me.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
I would love that, guy who created Pathfinder. Y'all are great and your system rules and I play it anyway. So... But yeah, no, Cool Zone Media needs a live play podcast. That's all I'm saying. And if you, listener, agree, bug these people on the internet about it. And then, because I needed more podcasts to be on.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Well, it's the only thing that they're trying to put a tariff on that everyone's in favor of is that they're trying to make it harder for people to make podcasts.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
That's right. All podcast mics. Oh, my God. That actually is good. Most of the podcast mics are probably not made in the U.S. Whatever. I got mine. I have no idea. I have no idea where they make our microphones, Margaret. No. No, I do not. Yeah. Anyway, this is part two on a two part episode about people trying to kill Mussolini. Later, we'll probably talk about the people who succeeded.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
It took a whole war, but some people tried to cut to the chase and circumvent the need for the war. And we've already mentioned several of them, but we're going to talk a lot more of them today. First, we're going to talk about Rory, who's our audio engineer. Hi, Rory.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Hi, Rory. And that our theme music was written for us by Unwoman. And that Gino Lucetti was born working class in the year 1900 in Carrara, Tuscany. You ever heard of Carrara?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah. Well, Carrara is famous for two things. It is famous for its marble quarries. It produces some of the finest marble from which the most iconic buildings and statues in the world are made. There's a whole list of them, and I forgot to write them down. But like think of an old Italian statue from Rome, old Rome, and the marble might have come from Carrara. It has like blue veins.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
I spent way too long reading about this marble. Good-ass marble. Yeah. The other thing that Carrara is famous for is anarchism.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
When my anarchist friends took me through Italy, when we were near Carrara, they pointed out and they were like, hey, that place was an anarchist stronghold for a long, long time among the stonemasons who put that town on the map. Enough so that I was like double checking this today. I was like, Carrara, that sounds familiar, right?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And I was looking at a mainstream tour company's website, Carrara Marble Tour, and they offer an anarchic Carrara tour. Oh, wow.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Marble? One time, statute of limitations ago, I had to empty all the marbles out of my pocket before a mass arrest.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Well, we can make hay from that. One time Robert and I went and got hay, and it was the first time in a little while that my pickup truck got to be a pickup truck. Well, I guess it was a camper. Actually, we filled my camper full of hay is what happened.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah, but it's pretty, though. Yeah. Years and years ago, my dad told me this spooky story that he wrote called The 37 Marble Steps. And I was like a kid, so I was just assuming that these were steps with marbles embedded in them. But Gina Lucetti was from Carrara. In the early 1920s, there are factory occupations all over Italy.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
I don't know enough about these yet, but they've come up a bunch of times, and they'll probably be one of their own episodes at one of these points. And...
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
I know that in the end of these factory occupations, the socialist parties kind of gave up and gave power back to the bosses, which made an awful lot more anarchists from those socialists who, you know, had just seized the means of production and were like, but isn't this our goal? Isn't our goal that the workers control the means of production? Why would we give them back?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
I don't know enough about the ins and outs of that struggle, but a lot of people were mad. Gina Lucetti was at these occupations and somewhere along the way, he got into a gunfight with the black shirts. He got a guy in the ear who got him in the neck in return. And this second time we've had an anti-fascist get it in the neck and survive on the show. The other one was George Orwell.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
It seems self-evident, but an AI does not have our best interests at heart.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah, yeah. It detaches a limb if a head is a limb. The appendage, I don't know, whatever. Whatever a head is anatomically. I guess it's a head. So he couldn't find a doctor in Italy to get the bullet out. I do not know why. So Comrade smuggled him to France where he was finally treated. And he was like, you know what? I don't need to be in Italy right now.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And it took me a long time to get all the hay out.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
They are in the middle of a fascism and I am in the middle of just got shot in the neck by a fascist. Yeah. There was a large political refugee scene in France at the time. Anarchists, socialists, and communists had formed a popular front against fascism there, not only just in general in France, but specifically the Italian refugees had.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
They were like, all right, look, all that stuff going on in Russia, we're all mad at each other, but right now, Italy is being taken over by fascists. We got to do something about that. Right. And they all agreed what needed to be done was kill Mussolini.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And this action was intended to be anything but a propaganda of the deed action, which is, I think, actually a really important point for kind of what we ended on talking about last week. Right. As a Libcom.org article put it, quote, Propaganda of the deed attacks were supposed to inspire the working classes to rise, and in this they were entirely unsuccessful.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
But it was worth it, because then the goats got to eat hay.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
In this instance, however, the urge to kill Mussolini was the expression of a convergence of opinion among many popularly representative political groupings, and was commonly perceived as a necessity at that point in time. So it wasn't like, oh, we're going to...
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
spur on the revolution and radicalize people by showing them that you know our opponents are made of flesh and blood it was like no Mussolini is basically the enemy war leader that we're in a war against you know mm-hmm One word that has never been successfully applied to anarchists is cowardice.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
So, this week... Speaking of saying hay...
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And specifically... Other groups like putting us in the front.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Oh, we should say hey to Rory, who's our audio engineer. Hi, Rory.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah. I remember when I first became an anarchist, I was just going to protests and things 27 years ago. And my roommate in college was like, you anarchists, you're just the berserkers of the protest movement. People just throw you in the front to soak up all the damage. And I was like, no, no. He was a little bit right, at least in terms of how people perceive us and use us.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
So, of course, when they're like, who's going to go risk their life to go do this? An anarchist volunteered. And twice he returned to Italy to meet with comrades there to plan the assassination. And they met aboard a ship at sea, which is aesthetic as fuck, off the Tuscany coast. And this time, there were no informants among them. He had several co-conspirators worth mentioning.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Hi, Rory. And our theme music was written for us by Unwoman. And for no particular reason... Not at all. I actually genuinely picked this subject and started researching it before the activities that happened last week.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Stefano Vadieroni was an anarchist tinsmith from Rome who was the secretary of the library. The fucking librarian was in on this assassination. The secretary of Mussolini's library supplied all of the details, including Mussolini's routes by car. Vadieroni funded the thing by selling his family's land near Carrara.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Another anarchist, Leandro Soria, was a waiter who was planning to finance the group's escape from the country. But then they all decided basically they were like, well, we're actually just all going to get arrested and stand trial. There you go. We want to make a statement. Malatesta, the anarchist guy who's old at this point, was briefed on the plan and signed off on it.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
So this wasn't a like spur of the moment attack. This was a, you know, huge conspiracy across borders to try and kill this guy. Our man Gino went back to Italy and he went to Rome. He waited for Mussolini's car and then he threw a pineapple grenade at it. The grenade had been made by his cousin and he threw it into the windshield. Famously, grenades are on timers, not like pressure sensitive.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
They like don't explode on impact.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
You did. Like, I can vouch for you. You 100% did. I'm glad you... You did.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Fair enough. In this case, it didn't get through the windshield. This is the guy who should have brought a rock. Yeah. Violet Gibson was right. You need to get through the windshield. The grenade bounced a few meters away and exploded. Mussolini's bodyguards caught up with Gino and beat the shit out of him. That sounds about right, yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And when they arrested him, they found him with a second bomb, a handgun with six hollow points poisoned with muriatic acid, which I don't know anything about. And a dagger.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
That's what happened to me today is I was like, I wonder what this stuff is.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Hopefully you don't have to vouch for me in court about it.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah. And also, like, there's so much myth building, both positively and negative about all of these things, you know, so it could have been like, oh, he had a dagger and muriatic acid. It actually used the word dum-dum bullets instead of hollow points because that's what they called a round that expands at the time, you know.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
But I would, and I would be truthful. I have, like, documentation. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
So he's tortured, he gives a false name and location, and eventually they get the truth out of him. Lucetti was given 30 years in prison, the waiter got 20 years, and the tinsmith got 19 years and 9 months. 30 years is the maximum anyone's allowed to be given in Italy at the time. Which again, more... I mean, later they're going to start killing people, but... Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
For three years, Lucetti was in solitary and had only a sparrow that would visit at the window for company.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
It's true, because the thing we're going to talk about, Robert Evans, have you ever heard of people trying to assassinate people that they don't like?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah, he he lived off of, I think it's just literally soup and bread. And that's that sounds about right. He died after 17 years in prison in 1943. He died during a U.S. air raid. Some claim that he was killed by the shelling, but the man who identified the body said that he had been killed by the occupying Germans during the raid. The Italian communists tried to claim his legacy.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
They published that one of his fellow inmates claimed he had become a communist in his later years. But his brother and his fiancee, who kept visiting him until the end of his days, denied this adamantly. They're like, no, he was an anarchist. He died an anarchist. During the partisan reclamation of Italy, two different anarchist battalions named themselves after Gino Lucetti.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Each was about 60 fighters, I believe both men and women. I know one of the other anarchist battalions I'm going to talk about later was both men and women. And they helped rid Italy of fascism. So he won, in a way, after his death. And that is all most of us can hope for, I would say.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
As for the man who made the bomb, that's a different story about another Geno, because his cousin's name was also Geno. And I want to tell you about that story, but did you know what I want to tell you about more?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And we're back. We are. Gino Lucetti had a cousin, Gino Bibby. Very serious country, as you said. Yes, absolutely. Gino Bibby was from a more middle-class background. His father owned a sawmill. Gino Bibby, um... Did you know an anarchist invented the missile?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
If you Google, I'll talk about it a little bit more later when he actually does the inventing, when I get to it. But if you Google who invented the missile, you get the Nazis. But he's going to pull out missiles, guided missiles that go 20 kilometers in the Spanish Civil War. Shit. Missile in this case being a rocket, but guided. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And as a teen, this second Gino, Gino Bibby, went around on a bicycle and distributed anarchist leaflets until a fascist dragged him off his bike, beat him up, burned his motorcycle, and then burned his father's sawmill. Great. Because they were a little extra, the fascists. This did not make Gino less radical. It just made him more angry.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
He's going to have the last laugh against fascists in Italy. That is often how things go. Yeah. Yeah. He spent a while in lockup for fighting fascists in the early 1920s, then fled to Spain where he started learning how to fly in case he needed to assassinate Mussolini from the air.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Which is kind of like how I learned a while ago for a prison break episode that an awful lot of the prison breaks in the early aughts were.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah, exactly. Learn to fly. That's how you get people out of prison back in the day. Yeah. Come the Spanish Civil War, he worked behind enemy lines, blowing shit up and flying reconnaissance. And then he maybe designed the first missile. If you Google right now the first missile, you get Nazi Germany, World War II.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
But Gino designed missiles that went 20 kilometers, and the Daruti column fired them at Francoist forces. So it started off as a good idea, just a very Pandora's box. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. You know what else the anarchists... This is not a products and services switch. Do you know what else anarchists invented during the Spanish Civil War? No. You ever played foosball? Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
No, there's not a whole saying about direct action gets the goods. You all are listening to this in the future where the knock-on effects will have become more clear. But right now we know very, we only know one knock-on effect of last week's.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Is that ours? Did you ever know an anarchist named Alejandro, I forget his last name because it's not my script, invented foosball? Alejandro Foos?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Cool. Yeah, there was a, again, I'm completely off script here and going from memory, but there was a guy who was injured in the Spanish Civil War and he was like an inventor and he was like, but I want to keep playing soccer, but I can't because I got really badly injured. I'm going to invent table soccer. And other people had invented it But his invention is the one that people play today. Okay.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Fascinating. So Spanish Civil War, the anarchists gave us missiles and foosball.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Meanwhile, while Gino's inventing missiles and doing spec ops missions, the Stalinist murdered his sister. Listen to any of our episodes about the Spanish Civil War for more about how Stalinists betrayed their comrades and started arresting folks that they didn't like and torturing people and killing them.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
The Stalinists actually arrested Gino too, but the anarchists in the government, which is another odd thing that happened in the Spanish Civil War, were like, oh no, fuck no, and the Stalinists were forced to let him out. When the Spanish Republic fell, like everyone else, he fled into France and was held in a concentration camp, not a Nazi one, but a pre-VG France one.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Wherefrom he escaped, and then he moved back to Italy, and he joined the partisans there, and he freed his own fucking hometown from fascists as part of an anarchist partisan unit. I really like this guy. To quote author Nick Heath, he died at the age of 100 on the 8th of August, 1999. He was cremated with a red and black scarf tied around his neck.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
His ashes were interred in the anarchist corner of the graveyard in Carrara.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And, yeah, Geno Beebe, I got kind of teary when I was writing about the life of the anarchist spy pilot, bomb maker, engineer, partisan, and inventor. Spilot. Spilot, Margaret. Oh, Spilot, yes. The Spilot.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yes. An inventor of the guided missile system, which, again, not our best move. Later, I'm going to talk about a military invention or actually a terrorism invention of the anarchists that's even worse. Uh-oh. The Irish are mostly famous for it, but it was an Italian anarchist who later became a fascist. Anyway, back to our main story. People trying to kill Mussolini.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah, and waking up in the middle of surgery, which is basically everyone's nightmare.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Only a few months after Gino won through Gino II's grenade at Mussolini, another young hero stepped forward to give it his all. A really young hero. Kind of a, this is the most heartbreaking part of the story. A 15-year-old kid who had just quit the fascist youth and become an anarchist.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Literally, that is so, like so many people have that fear. It's ghoulish, yeah. It's so ghoulish, it's so gross.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
She needs to know about this name. I genuinely thought, I was very glad that you were my guest until I got to Zamboni and I was like, if I was going to have anyone else, it would be Jamie Loftus. Also more experience killing, nevermind. No, no. No, I'm not allowed to join the bit about trying to implicate. Okay, just checking.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
By a mysterious person with a bad fake Boston accent.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
For anyone who doesn't know what we're talking about, I'm proud of you.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Well done. Way to be less terminally online.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
You should listen to Jamie Loftus' podcasts. You should. Antio Zamboni was born into a working class political family in Bologna. His parents were anarchists who became fascists, or at least his father had. He was never baptized. His parents only had a civil union because they refused to let the state or the church have anything to do with their marriage before they became fascists.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
His father, Mamolo Zamboni, when he became a fascist, the New York Times called it, quote, disassociating from radical action. Because being an anarchist is radical. Being a fascist is normal, according to the New York Times in 1926. And now. Yeah. Mamolo called himself, quote, an anarchist and a fascist. So.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Well, the person that we're going to talk about attempting to assassinate in the past, who's already dead, is a little fascist you might have heard of named Mussolini.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Well, I think that that sounds like approximately half of the modern libertarian party that the other half of the libertarian party is very embarrassed about.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Antio had two brothers, one of whom was in a fascist militia, the other of whom was in the army. Antio was a young anarchist with way better politics than his dad. And he took a shot at Mussolini while the man drove past him in an open car. He missed. He pierced the fascist's collar. And the crowd killed him. Just stabbed this child to death.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
You know how a 15-year-old either looks like a kid or an adult? Yeah. Antio is a kid. This is a child. Yeah. I mean, every 15 year old is a child, but the crowd knew they were killing a child.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah. He could have passed for 12. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
I looked at the I don't normally do this to myself, but I looked at the corpse photo because the only other photos that anyone has of him is when he's like eight, you know. And his coward fascist father tried to distance himself from the actions of his son until after the war. But we'll get to that.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
The New York Times reported the father walked into the police station to see the body and said, quote, This is the father trying to save his own ass. It's not going to work. Then New York Times writes a little glowing article about Mussolini playing his violin with his wife and kids at home, taking solace after the attack.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Mussolini okay pass it's not gonna work sorry Mussolini originally this is going to be a two-parter where one part was the people who tried when Mussolini was coming up and then the second part was going to be people who succeeded when he was coming down but it's actually all going to be about people who tried when he was coming up because there were so many did you know that an awful lot of people tried to kill Mussolini
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Then they talk about how everyone is saying that if Mussolini stays alive, fascism will keep Italy normal and peaceful. But if he were killed... That seems like what fascism will do, yeah. Yeah. Violent fascists might take over if Mussolini is killed.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And on that exact same page of the New York Times from 1926, there's a different article about fascist black shirts raiding anti-fascist newspapers at gunpoint.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
But, you know, whatever. But like in a normal way, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Being a fascist did not protect Mamalo, the father. He and his sister-in-law were both sentenced to 30 years for being vaguely connected to Antioch. Basically, they're like, oh, the kid couldn't have come up with doing it. It must have been a plot by previously anarchy dad.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
But by 1932, the elder Zamboni received a pardon directly from Mussolini in exchange for becoming an informant for the fascists. Then, after the war, Mamalo went 180 again and started writing pamphlets speaking of the courage of his son and started publishing anarchist material again. Great. He died in 1952, and he's not the only anarchist in this story who went fascist and then anarchist again.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
I'm just so mad at him for turning his back on his kid and trying to throw his dead kid under the bus to save his own ass.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
He's kind of a little weird guy too. Like, yeah. After Antio's attempts on Mussolini, all other political parties were outlawed, but they already didn't have any power. And Mussolini was going to do that. Anyhow was my argument. This more or less ends open anarchist organizing in Italy, as I understand it. And Mussolini brings back the death penalty now for anyone trying to kill him or the king.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
That didn't stop people from trying to kill him. No one tries to kill a dictator thinking it's a safe thing to do.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah, I'm going to get away from this just fine. Yeah, yeah. Although later the people who do kill Mussolini do. Yeah, that's a different time. That's really not an assassination. No, no.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
The next attempt we're going to talk about was a man who, like Gaetano Bresci before him, abandoned the safety of the United States and kind of abandoned his family there to return to Italy to try and do what was right. His name was Michele Chiru. Okay. which to me looks like it's spelled Michelle, if anyone's curious. Yeah. But it's like the French, but it's not. It's Italian, so it's Michele.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Michele Shiro was born in 1899 on Sardinia, which is an Italian island.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
His father had already emigrated to the U.S., and Michele was raised by his mother. He was twice arrested in demonstrations as a kid. He was conscripted into World War I, and like a lot of anarchists at the time, he was hoping the war would turn into a war of liberation. Mm-hmm. It did not, famously. That's a bummer. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Michele became convinced of anarchism after the Communist Party, he felt, sold out the factory occupations and let the bosses back in. He eventually moves to Manhattan. He starts fighting Italian fascists in the streets. He worked as a mechanic, and then he became a banana wholesaler in the Bronx. He married an Irish-American woman named Minnie. He had two kids. I think he had a son and a daughter.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
But he was watching Italy fall to fascism, and he couldn't handle it. He was like, someone's got to do something. I'm someone. I'm going to do something. He went first to France and then likely coordinated with anarchists there, but he kept his mouth shut about it. So we never know. We'll never know who else was involved because they were never arrested.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
He went up to Belgium and he worked in an anarchist bomb making workshop. I don't know. There's like a like fly. You go to like the punk show and there's a flyer. It's like, hey, come to the anarchist bomb making workshop this Saturday.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
But he made himself two bombs and then he traveled to Rome in January 1931. Mm hmm. We've only got his confession under duress to work from. So we don't, you know, famously not always the most honest.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah. Yeah. But his original plan, he said, was that he was going to use the bombs in Paris against the Soviet embassy in revenge for the murder of anarchists in the USSR. But then he decided to kill Mussolini himself. I think that that was his backup plan. I think that he went to – I think he went back to Europe to try and kill Mussolini.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
But in Rome, he rented two hotel rooms, one for himself and one for his bombs because bombs need privacy too, you know? Mm-hmm.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
While he was there, he was either shacking up with or conspiring with a Hungarian dancer named Anna Lukowski. If I were writing the story, it would be both. Also, everyone writes sex work out of history, so I would put money that she was a sex worker, but that doesn't make her less or more likely to have been one of the conspirators.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And there is reason to believe that he is part of a broader conspiracy working, but he never rats them out. And the reason that we think this is that he spent money really freely while he was there. He was renting two hotel rooms, but he had no money on him when he was arrested. And there was like no money in any of the rooms or whatever, right?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
So he was probably working with a bunch of people who wanted Mussolini dead. A lot of people wanted Mussolini dead. Yeah, for some reason. His plan was really simple. One of his hotel rooms overlooked a common route for Mussolini's car. He was going to wait and drop a bomb on Mussolini. But he wanted to do it when there was no bystanders around. Of course.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And this is the thing that has come up a bunch of times on this show but has left out a lot of the sensationalist stuff about bomb assassinations as all of the bystanders who get killed. There have been so many times in history, and there's going to be two in this episode, where people don't do it because they can't find a way to do it without hurting people.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
He's there for like three weeks and he can't find a way to not hurt anyone else. He had all but given up and he was figuring he'd go back to Paris and attack the Soviets instead. When he was stopped on the street by cops on February 3rd, 1931, and I think he was just like stopped for being a sketchy guy because it's a fascist state, you know, and they take him to a holding cell for investigation.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
There were three cops in the room. He pulled a gun and shot all three cops. Wow. And then he shouted long live anarchy and put the gun in his own mouth and pulled the trigger. Well, okay.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah. Like, I think he like, he seriously injured one of the cops in himself. Jesus Christ. He was like rushed to emergency surgery and they, you know, wanted him fit to stand trial. Right. Stand trial for killing no one. That's actually part of the thing. I was reading newspapers at the time and they were like, look, shooting cops didn't carry the death penalty.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah. And so far by my count, I was counting right before I recorded, I was talking to one of my friends about it. So far by my count, we've got one socialist, one Catholic, one Republican, and five anarchists attempted to kill Mussolini. So... Benito Mussolini is famously one of the founders of fascism.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
So it actually was against their own laws to try and give him the death penalty. But he admitted that he was there to kill Mussolini. In fact, they were like, what are you doing? He was like, I'm here to kill Mussolini. He tried to write his wife, and his wife tried to write him while he was in jail, but their letters were confiscated. He wrote to his father to the same effect.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
In May 1931, he was tried by a fascist judge with no jury, and all the lawyers and witnesses had to be put before a special tribunal before they could come in. His defense was basically, I came here to blow up Mussolini. During the trial, he decried both fascism and communism. They told him he would be executed, shot in the back. He didn't say a word as the sentence came down.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
When he was asked if he had anything to add, he shrugged his shoulders. At 2.30 a.m. the next morning, they came into his cell and told him he would be killed at sunrise. He said he did not need a priest, and he was shot in the back by a firing squad of 24 fascists, folks from his home of Sardinia who had volunteered specifically to kill him.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah. His wife, Minnie, lived to 1987, dying at 83. Their son, Spartaco, died in 2005. I found an article I couldn't get access to behind an academic wall of Spartaco writing about his father, and I'm kind of sad I couldn't get it. Here's an assassin who didn't go through with his actions because he couldn't do it without hurting anyone else. Now, let's talk about the opposite. Sure.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
But before that, let's talk about the other opposite. Products and services.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
We are Bert. Now I'm going to talk about my least favorite anarchist in history.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
My least favorite anarchist I've never met. You don't stay in a political scene without making a few. Let's go with frenemies.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
So... There's a long list of things anarchists have invented, which could be used for good or evil. The carriage-mounted machine gun. Missiles, apparently. The getaway car. Foosball. Steampunk. Free bike programs. Signal the messaging app.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
One thing that you can say was probably invented by someone who called himself an anarchist at the time was the car bomb.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
The ideology that is genuinely and truly bad, that 95% of the people on this planet agree is bad. We just don't agree about what counts as fascism.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Okay. Yeah. No, I'm sure that doesn't have any effects on your psyche.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah. Before the Oklahoma City bombing, the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history was the Wall Street bombing of September 16th, 1920. Oh, I have heard of this. Yeah. Someone, it is not certain who, used a horse-drawn wagon as the first car bomb. And every time I say the first in any show, it's like, you know, I don't know, the first that I know about. Right.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
There's a whole book about the history of the car bomb called Buddha's Wagon because we're going to get to how it was probably Mario Buddha.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
In this carriage was 100 pounds of dynamite, 500 pounds of cast iron weights for shrapnel. And they rode the horse up, and then the driver got out and left, and it blew up on Wall Street. Not in one of the buildings. It killed 40 people and then injured hundreds of people. And almost everyone it killed were fucking kids that worked as messengers and clerks and shit.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And the guy who had recently just tried to kill Mussolini earlier in the story didn't do it because it wasn't a good bomb chance.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
It doesn't help that... I mean, because some people use fascism to just being anyone I don't like or any authoritarianism, right? And that's not an accurate way to talk about things. We shouldn't call our enemies fascists when they're not fascists.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah. And this wasn't some kids who died as collateral damage, but we killed some big shots. This was all collateral damage. No regular damage.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah. And I would argue that of every major political ideology of the last 200 years, anarchism probably has the least innocent blood on its hands.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
But the Wall Street bombing is a decent chunk of the innocent blood on our hands of the anarchist movement. That's a bad one. The most likely suspect is an Italian anarchist named Mario Buda. who was actually probably with Sacco when they robbed and killed those people in the Sacco and Vanzetti case.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Mario Buddha is like a mystery man in history, and there's a lot of takes on him, and he was kind of almost everywhere that violence was happening. Mm-hmm. Mario Buddha went on to, almost certainly, become a fascist informant in Italy. Cool. Yeah. And, almost certainly, foil another anarchist attempt on Mussolini's life.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Absolutely. After murdering a bunch of kids and shit in the name of anarchy, he made his way back to Italy, got caught up in the hubbub. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah. Jesus. By 1933, it seems likely that he was cooperating with police and informing on anarchists. And a lot of like people who are really into anarchist history are skeptical of this because for a while, the only information that anyone had about this was that a communist newspaper accused him of this at the time.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And a lot of people, even anarchists, listened and were like, oh, we don't trust this guy anymore. But other people were like, oh, that's the communists playing sectarian politics. And then later you can see historians have done the work of being like, here's where Mario Budo was dropped off the list of dangerous anarchists to keep an eye out for.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And like, here's, you know, he's basically like the fascists took him under their wing. And even if half of what they say about Mario Buddha is true, I don't like him at all. I don't like blowing up kids on Wall Street. I don't like cooperating with fascists. And I don't like foiling an attempt on Mussolini's life.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Therapy, yeah. Meanwhile, back to a regular anarchist, one I like, who doesn't become a fascist. Sure. There's a blacksmith named Umberto, I promise you another Umberto, Tomasini. Umberto got involved in politics when he was 13. He joined the 1909 general strike in response to the murder of the Spanish anarchist educator and veteran of the pod, Francisco Farrar.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
He went on to fight in World War I. He won a cross for valor. But according to his own take, what happened is he got to the war because he was conscripted and he just shot into the air and he was like trying not to kill anyone.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
go shoot that dot on the horizon. Whereas like, if someone's like running through a trench trying to kill me, I'm like, I'm going to shoot that man. Even if we have the same political ideology, if someone's trying to kill me, I just don't want to get shot. Yeah. But yeah, no, totally.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And he spent some time as a POW during the war, and then he returned home to return to work as a blacksmith, and he more formally committed to anarchism alongside his brothers who, like everyone else, they left the Socialist Party in 1921 after the Socialists sold out the movement. Again, I don't know as much about that, but that is what Umberto felt and his brothers felt.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Umberto's life could easily be his own episode. He helped get the bombs from one Geno to the other Geno in 1926, then spent six years in prison during the crackdown. Like, after Mussolini came to power, he sent a whole bunch of the anarchists to prison, right?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
During those six years, he met an anarchist in prison named Mario Buda. Then Umberto fled Italy on foot to Yugoslavia. Then he went to Paris, where he met his partner Anna and had his son Rene. In 1936, Spain was under attack, and so Umberto left the then-safety of Paris to go to the front lines, teaching anarchists about trench warfare.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And then he became an anarchist spec ops guy, and he went off to go mine Francoist ships. Oh, cool.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And he shouldn't have been friends with that guy. He was arrested by Stalinists and prevented from attacking the fascists while he was off to go mine these ships. He broke out of Stalinist prison and then he returned back to the prison he had just broken out of alongside anarchists from the government to negotiate everyone's release.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
I think this is the same situation as the last man, the missile inventor man. But this might have just happened a bunch of times.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Because I read about these in different sources. Then, in 1937, he goes back to France so he can plot how to kill Mussolini. One problem. One of his co-conspirators, a man who he has absolute trust for, is Mario Buddha, whom he had met in prison. Mario leaked the plan to the Italian police, who foiled it. After the war, Mario Buddha went back to the anarchist movement.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
You know, don't want to cancel him just for saving Mussolini's life and murdering children. I can't find much about this particular assassination attempt that he foiled. Mostly, I found a lot of ins and outs about the informant. But to follow Umberto, he, like so many other anarchists, wound up in a non-Nazi concentration camp in France.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Then he was turned over to the Italian police where he was imprisoned until the end of the war. Finally, he's freed. He returns to his wife and his son and his work as a blacksmith and to anarchist organizing. When the spirit of 68 swings through, he starts organizing again. He's like...
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
about 70 years old and he's like organizing with a bunch of 20 year old kids right because it's the it's 1968 right yeah that's who that's who there's gonna be to organize with yeah i think it's cool as shit he kept publishing shit that would send him back to jail i think he was sent back to jail like multiple times just for continuing to publish anarchist literature And then he died in 1980.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
He wrote an autobiography, but I don't believe it's been translated. And there's a documentary about him called An Anarchist's Life from 2013 that I haven't seen yet that I want to see. And he was real cool. But I don't know what he did to try and kill Mussolini. I just know he made the wrong friend.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
I mean, what's funny is that pre him becoming Mussolini, that is the story that a lot of people tell.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Like the woman Lita, who is probably his lover, who is an anarchist, who was like later, she was like, I misjudged his character. You know?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Hey. Whomst amongst us hasn't been friends with the inventor of fascism.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
We definitely talked about it, though.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
But it turns out Umberto is sort of the Mike of Italy. Well, Michele is probably the Mike of Italy, but...
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
God, actually the Occupy versus Fume thing actually makes a lot of really specific sense. That's the thing that's so hard to talk about is that in a certain way, fascism is the Red-Brown Alliance because it is taking ideas from leftism but applying them to right-wing ideology.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Well, two more people at least tried to kill Mussolini. One of them, don't know much about, isn't even on the list of people who tried to kill Mussolini Wikipedia. His name is Domenico Bavone, and he was a Republican. He's the Republican on our list. He tried to build bombs to kill Mussolini, but he didn't go to the bomb-making workshop the punk show Flyer told him about in Brussels.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
That's a shame. So he failed at making the bombs properly, and he blew up his own house on September 5th, 1931, killing his own mother.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Fascism is one of the most convoluted and complex political ideologies to ever come about, which is one of the reasons why you can kind of point to anything and call it fascism and be wrong, but also be like, you see where you're coming from about it, you know, because it's not actually a simple ideology.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
They're very indiscriminate. And under interrogation, he admitted he was trying to kill Mussolini and he was shot in the back by a firing squad. And then there is Angelo Pellegrino Sibard Aletto. Angelo was born in 1907 in Mel, Italy, and he was the fifth of 11 children, which means I do not need to tell you he was from a Catholic family, but he was. His family was poor as hell.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
The article I read specifically indicated they were poor as hell because they had 11 children. But, you know, whatever. You do you. People can make their own decisions about how many kids to have. They fled poverty to France, then Luxembourg, then Belgium. Angelo was a miner and a machine hand.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
He became an anarchist as a teenager, talking to other immigrant workers who were mostly political refugees. Soon enough, he was on lists of dangerous extremists and draft dodgers and shit. And he was inspired by Michele Oshiro, and he met almost the exact same fate. In 1932, he went to Rome to kill Mussolini.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
But like Michele before him, he couldn't find a moment when he could bomb Mussolini without hurting anyone else. He spent months trying. Should have just bought a gun. That man should have bought a gun.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
But, you know, he spent months trying and he was on the verge of giving up when, like Michele, he was arrested seemingly by happenstance on a train station. Just like some cops were like, hey, you're suspicious. We're going to search you, which is, you know, fascism. Also, the same thing happens in New York City subways. But, you know, whatever. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
When he was searched, he had a Swiss passport, a pistol. Oh, he had a fucking gun.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah. And two bombs. And he was tortured. And under torture, he said he was there to avenge Michele Shiro. He'd written a letter previously that year that said, quote, I have no choice. To be free, tyranny must be beaten.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
To build tomorrow a new order in which all can enjoy the fruits of their labor and freely express their thoughts, we must destroy today all the injustices which render this impossible. His trial was a show trial. It was two days long. Journalists decried him as surly and sinister and would like literally make stuff up about how he looked.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
They were like, he had a low forehead, you know, which he didn't. But even if he did, fuck you, you know. His lawyer asked him to write Mussolini for clemency. He refused. He shouted long live anarchy when he was shot in the back. After he was killed, the fascist government decided to hide forever his burial site. No one knows where his body is.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
The more as I was reading this, because Italian fascism in particular comes out of where the right and the left meet. And it is not a, well, we'll talk about this.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
A biographer for Mussolini said that he would have pardoned the anarchists if they had asked because he lauded their courage. I mean, considering a lot of his fucking people were former anarchists. Yep. I don't know. Maybe you would have, but fuck that. I mean, whatever. I wouldn't be mad if anyone was like, Oh, please don't kill me, Mr. Mussolini. Whatever, I wouldn't be like, you weakling.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
So, yeah, originally I was going to talk about the partisans who finally did him in, but I think we've covered a lot of trying to kill Mussolini. There are too many cool people I didn't want to skim past. You got a socialist, a Catholic, a Republican, at least five anarchists who tried to do him in. But it took a whole ass war. We got him in the end, though.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Gender neutral shooting range. That's what they say. That's right.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
I'm not going to get too deep into the weeds of defining fascism today, but I want to talk first about someone who 100% absolutely, I am certain, would have been fine with assassinating someone like Benito Mussolini about 15 years before Benito Mussolini came to power. That man who would have been totally fine with killing Benito Mussolini was Benito Mussolini.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And I can't believe that's the note we're ending on, but that's where we're at, everyone. Go kill Mussolini, but only Mussolini. We're talking about the past. Yes, only in the past. And if you want to know more about the knock-on effects of various types of violence, listen to this entire show's history because it is full of knock-on effects, many of which are negative.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts 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.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah. To open up a can of worms that the internet is not equipped to handle, Benito Mussolini, the founder of the world's deadliest far-right ideology, started on the left.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah, we're going to talk about that. There's going to be a lot of... Also started as a journalist. Hooray. Yeah. Yeah. He was a socialist for a long ass time. He was at least a second generation leftist. Mussolini was born in the year 1883, and he was the child of a blacksmith socialist and a Catholic school teacher.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
He got named after a series of socialists and leftists because of his father, and then he was baptized Catholic because of his mom. He's named Benito after Benito Juarez, the liberal president of Mexico. And his middle names, which I forgot to look up in Italian, are Andrea and Amalacare.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
And these are after two anarchists because his father was part of the Anarchist International, which was an anti-authoritarian socialist organization in the 1870s. I'm just going straight into the like, this is like when I have to talk about eugenics on this show.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
You know, whenever I have to talk about something that was like really common and easily understood in the 19th century that makes no sense in the 21st century. Italian nationalism is really intertwined with the left and it's really intertwined with anarchism.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Benito Mussolini never did really roll with the anarchists. He kind of wanted to at different points. When he was a socialist, he was firmly in the authoritarian socialist camp, but he studied a lot of anarchist theory. He remained friendly with anarchists. He was either dating or just friends with, I've read both, the anarchist orientalist poet named Lita Raffinelli.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
He translated two of the anarchist Peter Kropotkin's books from French into Italian. And, because, yeah, he was a journalist, he read newspapers and... kind of, if you were a political person in the 19th century, if you were like a political leader, your thing was that you were a journalist. Your thing is that you ran a newspaper.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Yeah. And it was – yeah, you wrote polemics and propaganda just literally meant propagating ideas. If you had an idea and you wanted to tell people about it, you would propagandize the idea. So – Mussolini, the thing that's going to come up throughout this week's story is that he's clearly into authoritarianism, right? But there's something he liked about the anarchists.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
He liked their courage, he liked their commitment, and he liked action. He wasn't the kind of guy who wanted people to wait around and talk about things. He wanted people to go out and do things. He also, for a long time, shared their opinion that killing autocrats was just fine.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
If you're on the East Coast or somewhere else and you're like, oh, I'm fine. I'm not on the West Coast. I have bad news for you. You're not fine. Slowly, more and more, the East Coast, including the Northeast, is being seen as a fire-prone area. And we're seeing an increase in fire out East as well.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
The people in California that you're talking to?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Interesting. With water, you turn it off by moving it perpendicular. I've never messed with a gas line. I've lived weird and off-grid instead.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Which you can just kind of imagine as like when it's in line, you can imagine like, oh, that's how the gas and water can flow through. And then when it's to the side, it's like, oh, now it's blocking it. That's how I remember.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
And it seems like that's probably a like city versus rural or like city to city kind of divide. You should listen to your local authorities around this kind of thing.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Yeah, you're probably going to turn it off your water. Yeah. But if you do need to, it's just a pipe going into your basement that you turn the valve on.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
We're now talking about city water again, right? Municipal water.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Let me let me go to the shelter. And you can get something called a water key or a silcock key. And I have a thing. I have not personally used it. I have a thing called an eight-way key. Sometimes they're called four-way keys. Depends on how many little wrenches are on them. And these are just cheap things that have basically all of the weird wrench-style things that you would never otherwise use.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
All the weird triangle things. They can get you into the... boxes on a subway car and they can turn on and off water. Like I carry one in case, you know, you're in the apocalypse and you need to turn on the water at a rest area. You know, that kind of thing. I first learned about these from squatters who would just move into houses and then turn the water on.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
And they're built in specialized ways to try and prevent squatters from doing exactly what I'm describing. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
They're also not very high quality. This isn't the kind of thing you're going to want to use over and over again. They're usually cast and they break. Yeah, it's like pot metal. Yeah, exactly.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Also, if my house is about to burn down and you go steal all my stuff, good.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
We're going to start a whole interior design thing when I teach James interior design.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Unless they inherited it from their parents and in which case they still also, yeah. Right. They have like one plate.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Yeah. Yeah. Can I actually just kind of like really quickly run through some, if you fire protecting your house, there's two things you're gonna do. One is the, oh, I'm gonna run away now version, and then there's the ahead of time version. The really quick, basic version of the ahead of time is that, and this is more applicable rurally, But you want to have a defensible space.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Everyone's going to give you a different number, but like 100 feet from your house. You don't want densely packed trees, especially conifers. The one tree is okay as long as it's a little bit further from the other. You're going to want to clear out yard debris.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Even though leaves on the ground is overall good, you kind of want to create this space where there's not a lot of leaf litter and things like that. Directly under your house so that the eaves don't catch, you want to make sure that you don't keep a lot of flammable stuff there.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
And if, like, if I was fleeing my house in a hurry, I would be pulling all the stuff away from under the eaves that I should have pulled away from under the eaves months ago. If I were to design my house better, there would be basically a three-foot, like, gravel line around the edge of my house, right, of landscaping. Yeah. But...
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
The other things that you're going to want to do is you're going to want to look for how embers can get in through the vents and stuff, like in your roof area or under wherever. And you're going to want to basically make sure, and it might already have that, but you want to make sure that there's tighter than chicken wire. I think you want quarter-inch mesh covering those things.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Yeah, that makes sense. If your porch is wooden, you have a porch, you don't want fire to get underneath it. And so you can keep your wooden porch, but you want to screen off underneath of it to keep flaming debris from going under there. And then if you have a wooden fence, consider... having the first 10 feet or so of the fence be brick or something like that, I can't afford this.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
But imagine you can. Then you would want the first chunk of it to be that way. If you have gates, you open them. The deal with fences and everything is that you don't want a wick that brings fire to your house. So if the forest around you is burning, you don't want it to catch your fence and have that go right up to under the eaves, catch the eaves on fire, and now you have a structure fire.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
So what you're going to do... as you open the gates if you're leaving. And then, for example, my plan, because I have a wooden fence that goes all the way up to my house, is that if I have more than like five minutes to flee a fire, if I have a half an hour to flee a fire, I am taking the chainsaw and I am cutting down about 10 feet of that wooden fence before I leave.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
And that should dramatically increase the chances that my house will survive a fire. Yeah, smart move. And... And then another thing with the pool thing, and it's a thing I've read about, but there's no version of my life where I'm ever going to have a pool. If you live in a fire-prone area, they actually make pumps that are designed to pump your pool water into a fire hose.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
And they have saved a lot of rural areas, and probably city areas too, by having that accessible to firefighters immediately. Your pool can become a resource for the people who are coming in to try and keep your house intact.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
That's the least relatable story I've ever heard about England.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
One and also being horse poor is you have a horse, but you don't have any money. And you're like, you're partly poor because you have the horse because horses are incredibly expensive to maintain.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
You also probably want to chip your dog also, or chip your pets.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
And also particularly rabies vaccination is like the thing that you need to make sure that you have with you. There's a lot of places you can't go with a pet like Canada unless you have.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Yeah. I think that choosing to be in charge of an animal's entire life is a pretty solemn vow. Yes, I would agree.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Yeah, but I guess there's probably... I mean, you see, for example, I know we're going to talk about livestock in a second, but people have had to let loose some of their horses because they can only personally escort so many horses or whatever, right? Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Yeah, I suppose there's some situation I am not imagining where it is literally a necessity, but I struggle to.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Which is literally why I actually think that your evacuation plans, I'm not trying to blame those people that we're talking about, but I believe that your evacuation plans need to include people with disabilities who are in your area, not just in your house, but elsewhere. Yeah, 100%.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
If you have someone who can only travel by a wheelchair, then you should be considering for your only vehicle a wheelchair-accessible vehicle. This is the kind of thing that I think that plans need to include people who are at different levels of ability.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Yeah. If you have like older folks who live alone in your neighborhood, you should know that, you know?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Which, since it's England, is actually the second floor to Americans. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
It was the ground floor. You had to hide on the first floor.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Especially because you try to Google what do American lifts do and they're like, what the fuck is a lift?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
I'm sure I'm the only person who does it. I'm sure it never comes up.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
And then this is actually a decent regular prepper practice regardless. This isn't a like, oh, I'm just about to have to run out for a fire. This is like every six months or every year or every time you get a new weird expensive thing that you put in your house, make this video so that it's easier to prove all of the stuff that you had that needs to be replaced. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
If you do that on a regular basis, there's a little bit of security of where do you put it? Do you really want... But it's honestly, for almost all people, probably totally fine to just have that on the cloud.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Although they do make P100 masks that are more like, they look more like COVID masks. They're just a little bit thicker.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Although I'm kind of a 3M girl, I got to admit. Oh, controversial. Okay. I know. So one of the things I did during 2020 was a lot of testing of protest gear. And if you want to see, I've written up a whole bunch of pieces about exactly everything about masks and body armor and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But...
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
In general, when you think about masks, there's sort of three levels that actually matter or are useful. There's the version that we kind of see as a COVID mask. There's a version where it's like you wear it around your face and you make sure you get a rated one. An N95 is better than nothing for smoke, but a P100 is better. And then there is a half mask respirator.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Half mask respirators are great. They are probably the sweet spot for this. They are less good for pandemics because they do not filter the exhale. They're better for your daily life because they don't filter the exhale. It's much easier to breathe with a half-mask respirator than a fabric mask.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
And you can switch out the cartridges, and unfortunately, almost all of them are various proprietary types of filters. And the bayonet mount is the 3M style. There's a NATO version. If something looks more like a gas mask, it's probably the NATO screw-on kind. So you can get a half-mask respirator Or you can get a full face respirator, which is more or less what looks like a gas mask.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
But those come in kind of civilian styles that are using the same 3M brand or Honeywell or whatever cartridges. Or you can get the more military style that'll have the NATO style screw in. The military style is kind of overkill in terms of it'll position you oddly socially.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
I think that a thing that is worth everyone having are these respirators, a half mask respirator, or depending on your life, like if you use them a lot or you're going to be protesting or, I don't know, there's a lot of different reasons. You might want a full face one. They make really cheap knockoff ones that you can get imported.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Although maybe if you're listening to this in the future, you can't get it imported, but yeah, They work fairly well. They're just not quite as good. I've tested a whole bunch of them against various impacts and things like that. I think that half masks are great. I keep a half mask in my truck literally for wildfire smoke.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Because when I'm traveling, if I'm driving out west, I've been around wildfire smoke while traveling before. Another thing, just really quickly, they make these for dogs as well. Oh, cool. They're more like COVID mask style and my dog hates it, you know, but you could train your dog into not hating it. I just haven't.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
I just keep it around to be like, well, if it really, if we had to sleep in the vehicle in a smoky area, my dog would hate it and he would put up with it, you know, and he would survive. Yeah, yeah. I like masks. Yes. They're great.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Oh, and then really quickly about physical stuff like deeds and all of that stuff. Yeah. I'm actually kind of curious because it's like, I see why it matters the most to have the physical originals. For most crises, a lot of people talk about how safety deposit boxes at banks are kind of the way to go for stuff like that you don't need on a regular basis.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
This wouldn't be a proof of documentation necessarily, but it might be your like birth certificate, maybe like deeds and titles and things at a safe deposit box because then If your house burns down, it's still fine. LA wildfire kind of disproves this a little bit, right? Because then you're like, well, what if your bank burns down? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
And then if it's not on your property, you can't grab it and go. So it's a little bit complicated. I think overall, I think that there's a real advantage to keeping stuff in a safety deposit box off-site. And then also I just want to shout out that fireproof safes aren't fireproof. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Right. They are designed for like your kitchen catches fire or your bed catches fire and your safe is under your bed.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Right. When there is a structure fire and a structure is destroyed, fireproof safes, like all other safes, are generally not protecting their contents. And that's not the fault of the fire safe. It's just they're not designed for that.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
And also just like scanning and having them on encrypted hard, like a encrypted USB stick. A little USB stick with all of your stuff is a really pretty good thing to have. It has some advantages too, right? Because sometimes you don't, want the originals of your documents. Like, for example, you probably want a list of all of your bank accounts. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
The bank account numbers, your pins, your credit card numbers, like all of that stuff that you really don't want someone else to have. But if you lost, you would be really sad. You probably want digital encrypted copies of that available to you.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Also your like master passwords and all that terrible, horrible stuff that's scary to put onto a USB stick.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Oh Lord. Uh, Change of socks and underwear, your basic toiletries, like the kind of like travel toiletries. Because your go-back is like more like, sorry, it's not going to be a long tangent. Your go-back is like more likely I have to spend the night in my car than like I'm starting a new life somewhere out in the plains.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
And so the small little things like bring deodorant, even if you don't have deodorant in your daily life, because you might be crammed into a place with lots of other people.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense. So basic toiletries and a little bit extra to share. I think whether or not you menstruate, you should have tampons, for example, in your go bag. And so I think that the basic toiletries, basic first aid slash survival stuff, and then like change of clothes and also like at least one or two morale items. I keep a Nintendo Switch in my go bag.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Skyrim is, I need a Skyrim box in order to fight anxiety sometimes.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
That actually, I had like almost no electricity at the beginning of COVID. And so the ability to play the Sega Genesis version of Shadowrun from like the 90s was crucial to me because I didn't have enough electricity to run a computer.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Having a little bit of food though, a little bit of shelf stable food. I really recommend bars you don't like as the food that you put in your go bag. Because if you put in bars that you do like, you're going to eat them when you're bored one day. Yeah. And you don't want to go to the store.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
I say this, literally all of the bars in all my bags have been eaten in the past week. But that's because there's been like a winter storm. So I haven't been out to the grocery store and I just have been like sugar craving. So I eat even the gross bars.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
So find the one that you don't like, put it in your bag. Just have a couple. It's not to keep you sustained. It's to keep you from being grouchy. Don't think of it as like, I need to put entire meals in my go bag. Think of it as like, I need enough sugar and whatever to keep my headspace right.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
When I lived out of a backpack, I kept a plastic jar of peanut butter at the bottom of my pack always because I knew no matter what, I had at least two days worth of calories in the bottom of my bag.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
I think that's a really good way to put it. It's the get out of town for the weekend bag. It's not the end of the world bag. I think that if you are more rural, you might want some basic camping stuff.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
But the average person probably doesn't. I mostly have this at the like, there's my go bag and then there's the stuff that's kind of always in my truck.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Yeah. And so, like, I am almost certainly not bugging out on foot from my house. And if I had to, then I would have to bring a... Not my go bag, I would have to bring a hiking bag, you know? Yeah. Most of the time, if you have access to a car and roads because you're escaping an emergency, you're getting to somewhere with enough civilization that you have...
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
But I do, I will say have some water. Don't go overboard. Like I think that having like a little bit of like chemical water filtration and a water bottle or a little water filter and a water bottle, you know, no reason not to. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Yeah, I use also like a single-wall steel canteen so that you can heat water in it. If you get the double-wall ones, then you can't heat them over a fire because they're vacuum-insulated or whatever. But then other people I know are like, well, they want the ability to have their insulated tea bottle. Yeah, sure.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
I will also say battery packs for phones is a big one. Again, you're less likely to need to hunt squirrels with axes and you're more likely to need to keep your phone charged and other people's phones charged.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Yeah. I also keep one of those, I don't know if it's the same one you're talking about, but it collapses up almost accordion style.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Okay, I have the camping style one and I keep it in there as a like emergency dog bowl.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Yeah. And another thing that I keep in my go bag is I keep the meds that my dog is on and I keep some of the meds that I take in there. And, you know, it's like my dog only gets the meds once a month. So I go to my bag and I pull out the meds and I give them to my dog from my bag because why not?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
And if you have, you know, other people, whether they're not fully grown yet or are that you also take care of, you know, you need to make sure you have a little bit of their stuff in In there, like you keep a dog toy in your go bag.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Oh, I forgot to mention that. Yeah, you need to trade. Rather than having a system of mutual aid, which we naturally do, instead, we should interject a complicated barter system, ideally on the gold standard.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Just bring a copy of Debt by David Graeber in here.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Having a paperback book, if you like that, it's not weight efficient, but you know what? Yeah, that's how you like to read. Morale matters.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Yeah. And, and, and, and on RIP to David Wengro is a lot.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
I always feel bad when I just talk about Graver stuff and they talk about Don of everything. And then I don't talk about the other David.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Yeah. Anyway, it's going to be okay, or it's not. But you know what? You weren't going to survive being alive anyway. And keep your car half full of gas. Like when you're on your way home, make sure that you fill up if it's less than halfway full.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
Hello, welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and the people trying to put them back together again. I am today's guest host, Margaret Kiljoy. Today is one of those episodes about people, well, trying to put it back together again, or I guess really an episode about people trying to stop them from making things fall apart.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
because today I'm going to talk a little bit about the fight against the Mountain Valley natural gas pipeline. Last Tuesday, February 25th, 2025, the last criminal trials from the campaign to stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline were held in Parisburg, Virginia.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
As you might have guessed, based on the fact that you've never heard of Parisburg, Virginia, it's a tiny town nestled in the Appalachian Mountains. It's also the county seat of Giles County, Virginia, and it, the town, is home to almost 3,000 people. It's in the southwest of the state, right up against West Virginia.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
Culture and geography, of course, both reject things like state lines, though governments are obsessed with them. For ten years, the people of central Appalachia, on both sides of the imaginary line, fought against this destructive pipeline. Their campaign tied nonviolent direct action with lawsuits and public pressure campaigns, and they very nearly won.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
It took backdoor dealings at the highest level of power to force the pipeline's construction, with West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin holding 2023's Inflation Reduction Act hostage until President Biden personally guaranteed that the pipeline would be constructed, overriding all of the courts, activists, and locals who'd blocked it along the way.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
Essentially, the ostensible Democrat Joe Manchin said, fine, I'll vote for your climate bill, but only if you fuck over the state that I represent. The pipeline, owned by Mountain Valley Pipeline LLC, was supposed to be built in a year. Thanks to the campaign against it, it took six and a half years to build. It was intended to cost the company $3 billion.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
It cost them more than twice that, which is not bad for a scrappy movement of mountain people, hippies, and punks. It's not bad for a bunch of grandmas and college kids. I'll be covering the full campaign in more detail soon on Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. This podcast is, instead, about the trials.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
Twelve defendants went before the court that day, eleven of them facing felonies and serious prison time. In the end, none of them were sentenced to time behind bars, I am happy to say. A friend of mine invited me down to cover the trials. Twelve defendants all in the same day, all in the same courtroom with the same judge. I said yes.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
West Virginia is a bigger state than its own map would indicate because there aren't freeways that run through it, so it takes a very long time to get anywhere. So I packed up my van and headed down on Monday night.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
That night, sleeping in my van, I had a stress dream about court, where I'd forgotten to take off my knife before going through the metal detectors and spent a very long time talking to various cops about who I was and why I was there before being stuck outside the courthouse in a large crowd of protesters surrounded by a large crowd of cops.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
In that dream, someone who wasn't on either side stood up to give a speech, but too near an open flame and his clothes caught fire. Us anarchists, again, I'm talking about my dream here. Us anarchists rushed to help him while the cops stared on with blank stares. We beat out the flames and held his burned body while the cops stared on with blank stares.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
We screamed for someone to call an ambulance while the cops stared on with blank stares. I like when my dreams lend themselves to obvious symbolism, in this moment where the apparatus of the state is content to let all of us burn, whether in the fires of fascism or the fires of climate change. But I woke up disturbed nonetheless, with the sun barely over the horizon.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
I ate a quick breakfast and I drove the rest of the way up to the actual courthouse and the actual trial. Fortunately, at the actual thing, no one caught fire. I parked on a nearby street and made my way to the courthouse. I didn't accidentally bring a pocket knife, which is easy for me to do since I usually have three on me because I am a totally normal human.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
I did, though, bring an audio recorder, which was equally forbidden in the courtroom. I went through the metal detector and surrendered my little bag with the Zoom recorder. Later, press came into the room and I tried to get my recorder back, but I was told, that's real media. Without a press badge, I don't look much like someone who works for iHeart.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
I settled into a seat and waited for the proceedings. Eco-defendants and eco-defenders both poured into the tiny, dingy courtroom. The ceiling had holes in it, the drywall was sagging. Appalachia is an extracted-from region, a place from which wealth is gathered, not a place where wealth goes.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
We were reminded repeatedly that the fire code limited occupancy of the room to 89 people, and it sure seemed like they brought in as many cops as they could to limit our numbers. Many more supporters waited outside.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
Most of what I did that day was wait in the courtroom, because most of the courtroom drama was happening behind closed doors, as the prosecutor, the judge, and the eight or so defense attorneys all argued and fought over the details of plea deals. Most of these characters, judge, prosecutor, and lawyers, were quite familiar to the people working with the movement.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
This was the last trial of many throughout the 10-year campaign, which has relied heavily on nonviolent direct action since 2018. The prosecutor in particular, a guy named Bobby Lilly, was a well-known figure. Usually, when people say things like, the prosecutor was a clown, they're speaking figuratively.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
But Bobby Lilly, the prosecutor, is a balloon artist in his free time, and his Facebook is full of photos of all of his balloon creations. The rumor is that he clowned his way through law school. All right, which look, if I wasn't predisposed to not like this man because he was arguing for the imprisonment of people trying to save all life on earth, I would kind of think that's cool.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
But it does mean that there was a clown prosecution. And some people who were there to support the defendants wore balloon animal hats to mock Bobby Lilly, though they were forced to leave those hats outside as no hats of any kind were allowed in the courtroom. Coming in that morning, we expected most of the defendants to take non-cooperating plea deals they'd already agreed to.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
Non-cooperating plea deals are deals in which the defendant refuses to cooperate with the state's investigation of other protesters. Basically, this means these are non-snitching deals. A few of the defendants, though, were ready to take their cases to trial. I've decided to largely not use people's names in this reporting.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
Those names are a matter of public record, of course, but we are entering unprecedented times, and I don't see any particular advantage in making their names more public than they already are. But do you know what I do want to make public? The sweet, sweet deals offered by our advertisers. I love making those public. Here they are. And we're back.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
The charges against the defendants seem politically motivated. This isn't to say the defendants might not have walked onto pipeline worksites and disrupted activity there. There was certainly a coordinated campaign to do just that. But the charges against them were artificially inflated.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
I was talking to a supporter during one of the many long interludes in the proceedings, who explained to me that nearly everyone on trial that day, and a large percentage of all defendants throughout the course of the campaign, were charged with felony misuse of a motor vehicle, aka joyriding. To be clear, no one has been accused of hijacking construction equipment and riding it around.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
It's just one of the many charges levied at protesters in order to get their bail denied or inflated to tie everyone up in legal proceedings for longer, and intimidate people into pleading guilty to lesser charges.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
These are similar to the kidnapping charges that a lot of protesters got as well, despite that, well, no one was kidnapped during the course of the campaign, except, of course, by the state. Another supporter explained to me inflated charges has been part of the Mountain Valley Pipeline's legal strategy all along.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
The same as protesters look to tie the pipeline company up in court and delay construction, MVP's strategy seems to have been to drag out court cases and keep as many individual forest defenders caught up in legal jeopardy as possible. Of course, they shouldn't actually have the means to change people's charges.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
But if the fight against MVP has taught us anything, it's that the state caves to business interests every time. Most defendants from the course of the campaign have taken pleas that include suspended sentences, so that they never do jail time as long as they promise to never try to save the world from fossil fuel infrastructure.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
It seems like MVP wants each person who catches charges to be out of the fight. But fortunately, Frontline's work is only a portion of the work involved in defending the Earth. When someone told me that this was MVP's strategy, to catch everyone up on charges, I wasn't really skeptical because it made sense, but I still had that confirmed for me in the courtroom.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
You see, a few lawyers or other legal representatives of MVP were present in the courtroom that day, standing at the back of the room, seemingly eavesdropping on the courtroom chatter. Word on the street was that part of their goal was to gather information for the ongoing civil litigation happening against environmentalists.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
But eavesdropping goes both ways, and one supporter I talked to overheard them talking to each other about how they wish they could drag these cases out even longer. Once court began, defendants went up one by one before the judge. Most entered pleas of not guilty with stipulation. This is, in essence, a way to accept a plea agreement without actually accepting guilt.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
So each person went up, pleaded not guilty with stipulation, and then was found guilty by the judge on their lesser charges. The process took three to six minutes per defendant. I tracked it.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
The defendants were there for arrests stemming from actions that happened between October 2023 and March 2024, from three different actions, all on nearby Peters Mountain, a mountain which sits on the horizon of Parisburg, Virginia, and which defies the border between Virginia and West Virginia.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
Most of the action from the campaign happened on either Peters Mountain or another mountain in another county, Poor Mountain. One action in October 2023, like I said, court has been dragged out for a very long time, was an action in which one person locked themselves to an excavator while others were there in support. The supporters of the action were facing felonies too.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
Some of them, a while back, were rearrested at their own arraignments, given additional charges, and put into jail for days. It's not hard to imagine why the defendants were nervous in the courtroom that day. Even though most of them had already sorted out their plea agreements ahead of time, the state is fickle, condescending, and unpredictable.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
One of the defendants that I talked to told me about their own case. The evidence supporting the charges against pretty much everyone was weak, but the evidence supporting the charges against this particular person were particularly weak. The state kept offering this person plea deals before anyone else. Will you be offering the same deal to my co-defendants? The defendant kept asking.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
The state kept saying no, so the defendant kept refusing the deal. That defendant came to court fully expecting to stand trial rather than take a better deal than what their co-defendants were getting. The big story of the day actually revolves around that particular point.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
At least one of the defendants who came prepared to stand trial last Tuesday wound up being offered much more generous plea agreements at the last minute because the state knew its case against them was flimsy. Those who accepted non-cooperating plea deals were hit with suspended sentences, community service, and restitution.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
The details differed from case to case, but in general, people were given a year in prison hanging over their heads if they're caught breaking the law in the next year, and have to spend between 50 and 100 hours doing manual labor for Giles County, Virginia.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
I've been told this can range from something benign like painting murals to something intentionally humiliating like cleaning the toilets at the police station. The single biggest issue of contention was restitution. The defendants are being ordered to pay for the overtime costs associated with arresting them.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
One defendant, who was, I believe, arrested at a Moms Against the Pipelines action, a woman who simply wants her children to grow up in a world with a habitable ecosystem, was in court last Tuesday to contest the restitution payments. This is, as I understand it, the only issue that was not fully resolved that day.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
The case the defense made was one that I found convincing, although of course I have a bias in that direction. Essentially, the defense's case was that people are not legally on the hook for the investigation of their own crime. that it would set a very dangerous precedent to have people have to pay for the cops' time to arrest them.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
The prosecutor's argument was, and I rudely paraphrase here, yeah, but fuck these people in particular, that because there was a campaign against the MVP, their crimes ought to be treated differently, and the same standard of the rule of law should not apply to them. Again, I'm paraphrasing, but that really was the takeaway that I seemed to get.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
The judge said he would need to consider the case law on the matter and would not rule on it that day. But you know what he would have ruled on if he was the judge of this podcast? He would have ruled that it is time for advertising. And we're back. The only case that actually went to trial, as I understand it, was for the only misdemeanor case of the day.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
A protester who was accused and convicted later at the end of the trial of spending a couple days living inside a length of pipe to prevent it from being buried in the earth.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
The full incompetence of the police was on display, from the state trooper who didn't know what the word diameter meant when asked to describe the pipeline in question, to the police who admitted that they didn't actually bother watching the entrance to the pipe, so they didn't actually see the protester when they emerged from the pipe.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
In court, the cops said the protester came up to them to turn themselves in and said, quote, well, you're lucky I'm honest. A large part of the defense's case was that the defendant had been denied the right to a speedy trial, which seems true to me. Misdemeanors in particular are supposed to move through the court system quickly, not drag on for a year.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
Because, again, it seems quite likely that MVP has been working from the start to drag on court cases as long as possible. All the while the trial went on, supporters outside had a table set up in the parking lot with homemade food, a staple of this movement as far as I can tell. The connections between the front lines and their supporters built a very strong movement indeed.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
After the trial, an older local man gave a heartfelt thank you to everyone who had put their bodies on the line to protect the mountains he loves, and I went around and talked to people, feeling a bit odd to be there as a stranger to the movement and as a journalist. Blocking pipeline construction through nonviolent direct action is simple in principle, but complicated in the details.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
The core of it is that you leverage your own safety in order to prevent construction crews from working. Since your own safety is what you're gambling with, it's, well, not safe. The idea is you put your own body on the line. In 1998, for example, an Earth First activist named David Chain died when a logger dropped a tree on him and killed him.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
And despite ample evidence that the logger in question had been aware of the protesters and had been threatening them, no charges were pressed against him. In 2003, an American anarchist peace worker named Rachel Corey was killed in the Gaza Strip when she stood in front of an Israeli bulldozer, trying to stop the bulldozer from demolishing a Palestinian home.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
even when you aren't murdered for doing it, the work itself is dangerous too. Shortly before I joined my first forest defense campaign in the Pacific Northwest, an activist named Whorehound had just fallen to her death from a tree sit, and her absence was a tangible presence in every meeting and every forest defense camp for years after.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
So I don't feel like I'm speaking hyperbolically when I say that in that courtroom were some of the bravest people I've ever met, who risked their lives to stop a clear and present threat against it. And again, I genuinely believe this is not hyperbolic to say, clear and present threat against all life on earth. Climate change could very easily destroy every ecosystem on the planet.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
This fight is bigger than Appalachia. These forest defenders at this last trial knew that they would likely face felonies were they arrested, and they knew that people have died doing this work before them.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
And I don't want to speak to everyone involves gender identity, but it seems likely that some of them were trans as well, and thus risking spending prison time in the wrong prisons, which is a particularly dangerous position to be in. I don't say this to try to scare people out of joining movements like this.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
I can name people who have died in nonviolent direct action campaigns, and occasionally people have served real jail time. But I've met thousands and thousands more who have saved wild places, who have built lifelong friendships, and who have proven to themselves that they are who they hoped they would be. I want to end this by reading two statements.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
One was written by one of the defendants and was posted onto the Appalachians Against Pipelines Facebook page on March 3rd. You can read the full statement over there if you'd like. Quote, We were able to see how different strategies against a stacked system play out.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
It is in the court's best interest for us to take a deal out of fear of trial, but today we showed that they are just as afraid of an uncertain outcome, and we can use that to our advantage when we work together. The people who went to trial or pushed it to the brink got objectively better outcomes than those who took deals ahead of time.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
And those who took deals often had to struggle with changing conditions at trial, but still felt obligated to comply. I and another defendant held out, in part out of principle for people who had not been offered deals, and in part to say, fuck you, Bobby Lilly, our prosecutor, who is a literal clown. My co-defendant and I went to bat for another who was not offered a deal.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
At first, my co-defendant was offered a deal, a rather nice one at that. But my friend said no. The clown blinked. My friend basically went to trial. Technically, they took a deal, but they basically started a trial. Prosecution made a motion to amend charges, but abruptly, the clown and his cop buddy left. They ran. They had no evidence.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
Another deal, which was even better, was offered and this time I got one too. For me, it was good and in agreement we took our deals. The one other person was offered an okay deal but opted to go to trial with eyes open at the court's incompetence and crushed it. Little Bobby Lily looked even more like a clown. Every deal that was offered only got better, especially on the day of the trial.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
You don't have to accept the first deal, or the second, or the third, or the fourth. And when they try to pit us against each other, it is because they know we are stronger together. Initially, we were charged with conspiracy. The real conspiracy is between prosecutors and the judges, between the cops and the corporations.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
It is the conspiracy between your landlord and your boss to keep you exhausted and hungry, unable to fight back. It is the dictatorship of the billionaires to keep us bound to their world where they make and break their own rules. This is bigger than a 42-inch wide, 303-mile long, ticking time bomb running through Appalachia.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
It is the fact that our lives are bought and sold by the large landowning class who were able to ram this project through under Joe Biden despite the harm it'll cause because it will make them money as the world burns. Then here's another statement from the person who sat inside the pipe. And the statement is from last year. Quote, winning looks so much bigger than just stopping this pipeline.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
It's a win through the community folks continue to build. It is a win because of the insane amount of skills that people have gathered and shared. It's a win because whether or not this pipeline ever has gas running through it, the legacy of resistance in Appalachia still lives. Extractive industry knows that they can't fuck with the communities here without going through hell.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
And we better not let them forget that. Many times in my life I have felt consumed by grief. Grief for all the places this pipeline has destroyed. For communities who continue to be ravaged by the state and industry. For the senseless violence committed against people and land every day. For friends and strangers forced into cages.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
But what keeps me moving is knowing that I feel such grief only because I have such deep hope and love for what could be and what we have the power to create. Find or facilitate radical community wherever you call home. Think about the things you are willing to sacrifice for people near and far. Dream of worlds that feel out of reach because I bet they aren't as far away as it may seem.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
That's the end of the quote. And so, yeah, though the criminal trials are over, the civil legal fight rages on. MVP is attempting to wield civil courts to silence its opposition. And if you want to help support that fight, which continues, you can donate to Appalachian Legal Defense Fund.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
which you can find probably by just searching for it, but you can also find it by going to bit.ly slash applegaldefense, all one word, no dashes. Anyway, that's it for the episode. I'll talk to you soon.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Yes, that is the only job. That is the only job.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
You gotta rub some mud on you. You gotta take some pieces of metal and move them around to where they're not supposed to go. That's when you're a real laborer. That's labor.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
See, that's how you know they're smart, is because they're using Greek letters.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
We can resurrect neoliberal globalism. We can restore free trade.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
It was bad then, and it's bad now. Well, now that we got those pesky tariffs out of the way, let's talk about the actual most important thing to happen this week in the news. New Jersey Senator Cory Booker has broken the record for the longest Senate speech ever. 25 hours and 5 minutes. Yeah, that's horrible. Beating Strom Thurmond's filibuster of the 1957 Civil Rights Bill by 46 minutes.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
It's astounding. It's astonishing. It's not even a filibuster. He's not filibustering anything.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
The fact that Chuck Schumer caved on the Republican budget from a few weeks ago and secretly got a number of Democratic senators to switch their votes to make it pass. And no one did this for, for that, which, which previously Democrats were talking about this budget bill. Like it's the worst thing to ever happen because it is a bad bill. Yeah. It's really bad.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
And then they just caved last minute, or specifically Schumer and the people he talked to caved. And Schumer definitely would not have been in support of Booker doing something like this for that bill. But now Schumer gets to applaud along as Booker delivers a 25-hour, maybe well-orated speech.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Although, because it took him 20 hours to break emotionally to the point where he could admit that to himself.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Yeah, but it took having your brain be shattered by this pretty impressive physical act that destroys your body, soul, and spirit. Anyway, I think that's all we have to say about that. Let's go on an ad break and come back to discuss more... sad, and actually also possibly good news. Or at least bad for Elon Musk, which is good for us. All right, we are back.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
I think let's pivot to James Stout for an update on... Venezuela? No, El Salvador. Well, no. El Salvador, yeah. El Salvador, the torture labor prison, James.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Yeah, yeah. The fact that so many members of the modern Republican Party have like memory holds 2019 and 2020 as being under the Biden administration is just insane.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
But like, even the way they talk about like the COVID response, the way they talk about 2020, they talk about it as if Joe Biden was the president.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Yesterday, me and James did an episode on ISIS targeting of students, scholars and professors that they believe are associated with pro-Palestine protests. So we did an update on that story that I did a piece on or a segment on last week on executive disorder. So for a follow-up on that, you can look to yesterday's episode.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
But we are going to close with, I guess, kind of a feel-good story because it makes Elon Musk... Sad. He has had a bit of a rough week for Mr. Musk's businesses and his political projects, I guess. Elon Musk's efforts to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court have failed as the Democratic-backed candidate swept the election, maintaining 4-3 liberal control of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
The head of the College Republicans of Wisconsin? Amazing. Must fetch $25 million on this race.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
He danced around on stage wearing a cheese head, and he gave out million-dollar novelty checks to quote-unquote voters who won a contest by signing his petition against activist judges, which has been the new rallying cry on the right, is that everything that's going wrong, everything that's stopping Trump is from these activist judges that we have to unseat.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
He also gave $100 each to every person who signed that petition. And on election day, Musk offered voters $50 if they posted a picture of a Wisconsin resident outside of a polling place. Yeah. How is that allowed? These are the same people who scream about like election interference, rigging elections, buying elections. It might not be. And like, this is insane stuff.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
You can go to jail for giving people a water bottle in line. At polling places in multiple states. And Musk is allowed to give people $50 for pictures posted outside of polling places. What the fuck is happening? But luckily, the negative polarization against Musk and Tesla that's been increasing the past few months has resulted...
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
in Judge Steven Crawford beating the mega hat Republican judge who last year went as Donald Trump for Halloween, beating beating this this guy by by 10 percent. This was a massive, a massive reversal of the 2024 presidential election results in Wisconsin. There was a record high turnout for this spring election, 40% higher than the last Wisconsin Supreme Court election, which was in 2023.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Which, by the way, that was also a high turnout election, too.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
This was just under the results of what you would expect out of a midterm election. Yeah, yeah. They shifted every single county in the state blue compared to the 2024 presidential election. And on average, by about 10 to 12 points. Massive, massive shifts. And this was before the tariffs, by the way. Like, this was before the tariffs were announced.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Luckily, the next day, there was a Tesla sales report, which was one of the worst in the history of their company. 50% fewer vehicles being delivered in the first three months compared to last year.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
With Tesla stock continuing to plunge the past week, although with reports that Musk might exit the inner circle of the Trump administration, those stocks are kind of flipping back and forth as he's expected to return to his companies.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
They were testing out if he was a stable, consistent, reliable political operator, or if what he did in 2024 was kind of like a one-off event, if he's like a one-trick pony there. And this complete devastating loss demonstrated that maybe this unstable drug addict No offense to drug addicts, but specifically for Elon Musk, who's railing ketamine all the time and trying to run the entire world.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Luckily, my friends who might indulge in ketamine don't try to run the entire world. You say that now, but you'll get older at some point. But it's... They'll have midlife crises too. But he was shown in like a very public way to be like an unstable political force. And yeah, that's going to turn some of the people in the Trump admin against him. Yep.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Anyway, I think that's all I have to say about this Wisconsin race. All right.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Hello. He's making the meme come true. He's making the millions, millions must die. We're really, really...
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Yeah. At many points, he tried to take credit himself for the fast response of the code vaccine, which, hey, as long as we get the vaccine, do whatever you want, buddy. And the amount that that's been, like, memory hold, and, like, they're trying to, like, just alter history. Yeah. Regarding the COVID vaccine is a little head-scratching.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
It gives me that slow-growing headache that I'm experiencing every day, nearly all the time. Just not due to COVID, because I've actually, to my knowledge, never gotten it. But it is a headache of political origin.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
I would love to talk more about them. We're still trying to get that HIMS and eventually that THEMS sponsorship. We're getting closer. We're getting closer. Getting closer.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
I'll give it to them. That's fine. We're going to cure autism by giving all these autistic kids puberty blockers and making them trans. Sure. Let's go for it. Let's give that a shot. I'm sure that won't create a whole new problem for them. That bone damage thing isn't real, but that's fine.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
To be fair, I also am probably... I'm unfamiliar with this exact puberty suppressant. Yeah, I don't think... But in general... Yeah, in general, the bone damage thing is bullshit. The bone density loss of puberty blockers is mostly negligible.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Very funny. You know... I do know a lot of autistic people that have gotten... How do I say this? They've seemed more comfortable once they've transitioned.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
This also shows how like the attack on puberty blockers for, you know, quote unquote trans minors is completely nonsense because these drugs have been used for cis children to cease early onset puberty. These are fully reversible. Yeah. These are used for cis children. It's used by these like hacks and weirdos to quote unquote cure autism. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
by these same people as in autism care for the vaccines.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Even though these are the same like drugs, these quote unquote like chemical castration drugs, as Matt Walsh would put it, are, you know, now trying to be banned for trans children. So, You know, hypocrisy always matters. It's always important to point out their hypocrisy because that's how we win. So here, this is one more step towards victory. Garrison, Garrison, listen.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
That rules. These liberal arts students are giving our kids transgender hormones. Many such cases.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Like, he's the only one. Yeah, this is the first instance I've, like, heard of, like, mass unethical use of puberty suppressing drugs.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Imagine how many skilled drone pilots they're going to lose. It's really going to backfire on them. Womp womp. We will see. Speaking of womp womp, here's some ads. All right, we're back. Let's hear more about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the second Kennedy to have a hole in his head. But this one's from a worm. Whoa!
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Someone should probably report that to Trump's anti-Semitism task force.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
You know, hall monitor, whatever. No one cares anymore.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
See, actually, I agree with this because this is the one thing where I think the lifestyle choice thing does matter because I just read Yaoi when I'm sad and it fixes me. And if everyone does that, I think we don't need any of these other mental health services.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Read more Yaoi. You can read a lot more. Because famously, the yaoi reading demographic, the most mentally stable and normal population. God.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
I sometimes do forget that there are trans women with different lived sexual backgrounds than me. Because coming out of twink culture, it's ingrained.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Yes, no, because in twink culture, getting on PrEP is ingrained pretty hard at this point.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Which is now leading to the paupers raids. Yeah. Red alert, everybody. Red alert. Yeah. It's getting pretty scary out there.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
I assume you saw the statement from Cantor Analysts on Monday, the Wall Street investment firm. This founder was a really big Trump donor, was on the inauguration committee, but two of their analysts put out a statement today calling to re-evaluate RFK Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, calling out his quote-unquote apparent anti-science and libertarian agenda.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
saying it will put people's lives in jeopardy to advance a discredited theory on vaccines. Look, I will say this.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Yeah, after Carl's grandson's resignation, tourist analysts also put out a statement advocating for vaccine use and specifically against RFK Jr. and his vaccine rhetoric. Biotech investors also spread similar anti-RFK Jr. rhetoric over the weekend following Mark's resignation.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Stand outside your local CDC office with a sign and protest the CDC. The hospitals are empty. It's fake. Oh, God.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
We lost the election. It's not happening. Truth and reasonableness lost the election. Sorry.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
This is It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by James Stout.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
This episode is going to be about ice actions against students, scholars, and professors around the country and this wave of deportations targeting people engaged in pro-Palestine speech, protest, as well as some individuals who have been roped up in this new wave of deportations who have not publicly engaged in Palestine activism. Let's start on the evening of Saturday, March 8th.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Mahmoud Khalil and his wife were returning home from dinner when plainclothes ICE agents followed the couple into their campus apartment building at Columbia University. A man wearing a Marvel graphic tee arrested Khalil for then unknown reasons and threatened to arrest Khalil's wife, who is eight months pregnant and an American citizen.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
When Khalil's wife brought his green card from their apartment, she says one of the ICE agents placed a phone call, informing someone Khalil was a permanent resident. To which the person on the phone replied, let's bring him in anyway.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
During the arrest, Khalil's lawyer, Amy Greer, spoke on the phone with one of the ICE agents who said that they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil's student visa. Greer reiterated to the agents that Khalil was in fact a permanent resident with a green card. But the ICE agent just responded by saying they were revoking the green card instead.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Khalil is a graduate student who has been studying at Columbia for over two years. Last year, Khalil emerged as a visible figure in the college encampment protests, becoming a public spokesperson and a lead negotiator on behalf of Columbia University Apartheid Divest. Though never being arrested, Khalil faced harassment from right-wing Zionist doxing campaigns calling for his deportation.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
And when ICE did come for Khalil, disappearing him to a detention facility in Louisiana and cutting him off from communication with his wife and lawyer, throughout all of this, he was not charged with any crime.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Instead, ICE and the State Department are using a rarely used Cold War era immigration statute that gives the Secretary of State the power to exclude or deport any non-citizen of the United States if there are, quote, reasonable grounds to believe that an individual's entry, proposed activities, presence, or activities in the United States would have, quote, potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
And right after this happened, we discussed how this case was probably going to be used as a testing ground for employing these tactics on a more widespread scale, creating legal precedent. And sure enough, Khalil's case was not an outlier.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
This was just the first public instance of the Trump administration's directed targeting of students they believe to be associated with protests against Israel and its actions in Gaza. And this wave of actions by ICE had actually already begun before Khalil's arrest.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
The day before Khalil was arrested, ICE agents knocked on the door of PhD student Rajani Srinivasan, who a few days prior was suddenly notified that her student visa had been revoked. When ICE agents knocked, she did not answer the door. The next day, ICE showed up again to her Columbia University apartment.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Sreenivasan was not home, but upon hearing of Khalil's arrest just a few hours later, she decided to quickly collect some belongings and flee to Canada. Five days later, when ICE returned to her residence, but this time with a warrant, Sreenivasan was already gone. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem praised this as quote-unquote self-deportation.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
I don't believe so, no. It was just the fastest flight from LaGuardia. Out of the country. Out of the closest she could be.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
She is currently figuring this whole situation out still, navigating her legal options both in Canada and the States.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
there is no need for extradition because none of the people that we're talking about today were accused of any crime. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
which I think is in part why she made the decision to get out when she could. DHS claimed in a statement that Srinivasan advocated violence and was, quote, involved in activities supporting Hamas, a terrorist organization, unquote.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Vices targeting her seemingly stems from being mass arrested while trying to return to her apartment from a picnic with friends on the same day as the Hamilton Hill occupation. She couldn't get home and was caught up in the crowd and was arrested among a hundred other people. She received two summons for obstructing traffic and failure to disperse, but her case was quickly dismissed.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Homeland Security claims that failing to declare these two summons is what caused her visa to be revoked. Okay. Interesting. That same week, ICE went after another green card holder at Columbia, a 21-year-old student named Yongsao Chung, a permanent resident who immigrated to the United States from South Korea with her family when she was seven.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
On March 9th, ICE agents visited her parents' home looking for Chung. And that day, she received an odd text message reading... This recent arrest was allegedly in reference to being detained, among others, at a sit-in protest at Bernard College on March 5th. Chung was charged and then released with misdemeanor obstruction.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
After receiving that sketchy text message, Chung got an email from Columbia Public Safety reading, quote, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York has asked us to inform you that Homeland Security investigation agents are seeking to make contact with you in connection with an administrative warrant for your arrest.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Consistent with the university's practice, we wanted to share this information and their request with you. If you are represented by counsel, it may make sense for your lawyer to speak directly with DHS, unquote. Chung's lawyer decided to call, quote unquote, to Audrey from the police, who revealed that she was actually an HSI agent and that the State Department was revoking Ms.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Chung's residency status. Now, rather than opting for self-deportation or turning herself into immigration authorities, Chung decided to go into hiding and fight the deportation in the courts while trying to evade ICE detention. When ICE failed to locate her, they enlisted the help of federal prosecutors.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
To quote from the New York Times, quote, on March 10th, Perry Carbone, a high-ranking lawyer in the federal prosecutor's office, told Ms. Ahmad, Ms. Chung's attorney, that the Secretary of State, Mr. Rubio, had revoked Ms. Chung's visa. Ms. Ahmad responded that Ms. Chung was not in the country on a visa and was a permanent resident.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
According to the lawsuit, Mr. Kobani responded that Mr. Rubio had, quote, revoked that as well, unquote.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
So this is the exact same language we saw with Khalil. And it displays a general uncaring towards who they are actually targeting and what their actual legal status is in the United States. They think they're going after people with student visas, but when it turns out they have green cards, that doesn't stop them. They still continue to do it anyway.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
On March 13th, ICE searched two residences on campus with warrants, citing a statute for harboring non-citizens, but Chung was nowhere to be found. Like Khalil, the Trump administration is arguing that her presence in the United States hinders the administration's foreign policy agenda. But her lawyers note that Chung was not by any means a quote-unquote movement leader.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
She was simply one of hundreds of students who joined in nationwide protests against Israel's actions in Gaza. Her lawyers write, quote, Miss Chung has not made public statements to the press or otherwise assumed a high-profile role in these protests. She was rather one of a large group of college students raising, expressing, and discussing shared concerns, unquote.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Chung had previously faced a university disciplinary process, which found she was not in violation of any university policy related to protests last year. Chung's lawyers filed a lawsuit to prevent her deportation, claiming that ICE's actions against Chung are illegal and unconstitutional.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
This lawsuit reads, quote, officials at the highest echelons of government are attempting to use immigration enforcement as a bludgeon to suppress speech that they dislike, including Ms. Chung's speech. ICE's shocking actions against Ms. Chung form a part of a larger pattern of attempted U.S. government repression of constitutionally protected protest activity and other forms of speech, unquote.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
On March 25th, a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order halting efforts from ICE to detain or relocate Chung. The judge said that the government produced, quote, nothing in the record to indicate Chung is a danger to the community or a, quote, unquote, foreign policy risk, or that she was in any communication with terrorist organizations.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
The judge said that there would be, quote, no trips to Louisiana here, unquote. This is in reference to the big ICE detention facility in Louisiana. We'll be right back after this ad break. Okay, we're back. Now, although Chung has at least temporarily halted ICE's efforts to detain or deport her, not all legal recourses have proven successful. This week, a U.S.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
district judge declined a request to block the deportation of Cornell student Mamadou Tal after the State Department revoked his visa. On March 31st, Tall released a statement, quote, Given what we have seen across the United States, I have lost faith that a favorable ruling from the courts would guarantee my personal safety and ability to express my beliefs.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
I have lost faith I could walk the streets without being abducted. Weighing these options, I took the decision to leave on my own terms.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
So Tal has elected for the quote-unquote self-deportation option, at least for now. I believe his case is going to continue, but he's not going to remain in the United States.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
I believe so, yeah. He's a British citizen. Now, interestingly, last September, Cornell University itself tried to revoke Tal's student visa for involvement in student protests, but he successfully appealed and was able to continue his African Studies PhD remotely.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Yeah, no, he entered this period of radio silence after he won his appeal last fall and then only started speaking publicly again once he began getting targeted by the Trump administration the past month and a half.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Now, the scale that Mark Rubio and ICE are seeking for in regards to deportations is seemingly going to be increasingly large. On March 27th, Secretary of State Mark Rubio claimed that he has revoked over 300 student visas so far, saying at a press conference, quote, we do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas, unquote.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Now, there are a few ways the government is currently trying to find these quote-unquote lunatics. ICE seems to be targeting non-citizens who have been arrested or detained at Palestine protests, even if their charges were subsequently dropped.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
This is the case for Chung and Srinivasan, as well as former student Lekha Kordia, a Palestinian who was arrested at Columbia campus protests in April of 2024. She is currently being held in an ICE detention facility in Texas.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Now, beyond arrest records, the government is utilizing the World Wide Web and social media to identify new and returning visa applicants and possibly current visa holders that, quote, support terrorist organizations, unquote. Social media screening of immigrants and visa holders has been slowly ramping up since 2014 and accelerated during Trump's first term.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
But a new directive from Secretary of State Mark Rubio, titled Enhanced Screening and Social Media Vetting for Visa Applicants, was sent out on March 25th and leaked by journalist Ken Klippenstein.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
The directive cites two executive orders from Trump, measures to combat anti-Semitism and, quote, protecting the United States from foreign terrorists and other national security and public safety threats, unquote.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
The State Department is now requiring consular officers to conduct a quote-unquote mandatory social media review with screenshotting for students and student exchange visitors with the intent of looking for evidence of quote, advocating for, sympathizing with, or persuading others to endorse or espouse terrorist activities or support a designated foreign terrorist organization, unquote.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Now, this applies to FM and J visas, so student exchange visas, academic visas, and vocational visas. The directive also instructs officers to search social media for, quote, conduct that bears a hostile attitude towards U.S. citizens or U.S. culture, including government, institutions, or founding principles, unquote. Which is kind of the most incredibly broad thing I've ever seen.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
There's already been an instance of U.S. Customs agents denying entry to someone who had a quote-unquote anti-Trump sentiments found on their phone. Now, though this new directive is focused on denying or revoking student visas, the Department of Homeland Security is seeking to expand its social media data collection to U.S. citizenship, green card, and asylum applicants.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Basically, anyone and everyone in the U.S. immigration system, no matter their current status or what previous vetting they might have already gone through.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
On March 5th, DHS issued a 60-day notice for public comment on a proposal for, quote, uniform vetting standards and national security screening, unquote, that includes the collection of social media information for all non-citizens applying for immigration benefits like citizenship or permanent residency. A statement from the U.S.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Citizenship and Immigration Service reads, quote, these efforts ensure that those seeking immigration benefits to live and work in the United States do not threaten public safety, undermine national security, or promote harmful anti-American ideologies, unquote.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Former immigration agents have suggested that they're probably going to use some AI system for this as they've already kind of used more primitive versions. But ramping up to this scale and with like this increased focus and like attention on quote unquote AI is going to affect the way that they do this vetting process. Absolutely. Yeah. Great.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
So though the government is trying to increase their social media screening, so far, they actually haven't had to do that much of their own research to identify targets for removal. On March 17th, a Georgetown scholar named Badar Khan Suri was arrested by Homeland Security outside his home in Virginia, where he lives with his wife, who's a U.S. citizen, and their three kids.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
According to Suri's lawyer, masked agents, quote, refused to tell him the basis for the arrest, handcuffed him, and forced him into an unmarked black SUV, unquote. Later, his wife was informed that her husband's visa was revoked based on the social media posts and that Suri was sent to ICE detention in Louisiana.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Of course, any single post in support of Palestine is going to be seen as, quote unquote, promoting anti-Semitism, according to Mark Rubio. Suri's lawyer wrote in a court filing, quote, Dr. Suri is an academic, not an activist. But he spoke out on social media about his views on the Israel-Gaza war.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Even more so, his wife is an outspoken critic of the Israeli government and the violence it has perpetuated against Palestinians, unquote.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Correct. And we'll get to that. Suri has no criminal record, and according to a colleague, he did not attend campus protests. However, Suri's lawyer writes that his family have been victims of a doxing campaign, with his wife stating that a website had, quote, claimed falsely that my husband and I have, quote, ties to Hamas, unquote.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
The Homeland Security Assistant Secretary referenced that claim in a public statement on Twitter. And this harassment stems in part from Suri's father-in-law being Ahmad Youssef, a former advisor to Hamas. A federal judge blocked Suri's deportation as immigration court proceedings continue, but he still remains in ICE detention. What kind of visa was he on? He's not a green card holder.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
He received his visa to continue doctoral research on peace building in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's some kind of like academic or exchange visa. I don't think we know the exact type that he has.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Well, I think specifically in this case, they're searching social media. They're not searching through their own databases. They don't care what kind of visa he has. They're looking at this doxing campaign that's been targeted at him and his family for over a year. and using that as the basis to deport him.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
His wife, whose father is Ahmad Yusuf, they can't deport her because she's a citizen, or at least they can't deport her right now. Who knows if they'll try to denaturalize in the future. Yeah. But this is the easiest person to target.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Yeah, and using social media to identify people who have never been arrested, never been charged with anything. Yeah. We're going to finish our discussion on these doxing campaigns and ICE action-starting students after this ad break. All right, we're back.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
So right now, the two main vectors for ICE detention, whether you have a green card or a visa, seems to be previous arrests or these mass doxing campaigns. Now, someone like Mahmoud Khalil was never arrested or charged with a crime, but instead has been the target of harassment from both a local campus doxing account run by Columbia professors and fellow students,
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
as well as larger right-wing Zionist organizations like Canary Mission. A few days before being arrested by ICE, Canary Mission posted a video naming Khalil as a quote-unquote siren emoji, suspected foreign national alert. So what is Canary Mission, if you're lucky enough to be unaware?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Since 2015, Canary Mission has been collecting and publishing personal information of people they accuse of promoting, quote, hatred of the United States, Israel, and Jews on North American college campuses and beyond, unquote.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Now, they have profiles for a few legitimate American neo-Nazis, but many profiles only cite criticism of the Israeli government and its actions in Gaza as proof of alleged anti-Semitism.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
And now there is increasing evidence that the government is using websites like Canary Mission to target students, professors, and scholars for ICE deportation, essentially outsourcing intel gathering from these pro-Israel non-government organizations. A few weeks ago, Canary Mission uploaded a profile for Rumeza Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
They included a picture, her resume, and linked to an op-ed she co-wrote last year for her student paper criticizing the university for its ties to Israel amidst the war in Gaza. For this, the Canary mission claimed Ozturk, quote, engaged in anti-Israel activism, unquote. Two weeks later, while walking alone to Iftar dinner for Ramadan, a plainclothes ICE agent approached Ozturk on the sidewalk.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
As he grabbed her arms and wrestled away her phone, five more agents surrounded her and pulled up their gator masks as neighbors began filming the arrest. Within 24 hours, she was moved to ICE detention in Louisiana.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
A statement from Homeland Security claimed that HSI, Homeland Security Investigation, had determined that Ozturk, quote, engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans, unquote.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
And Secretary of State Mark Rubio said, quote, we gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses, unquote.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Yeah, there's no evidence she was even attending campus protests, let alone tearing up the university. She co-wrote an op-ed, and you should not be deported for engaging in protests on a university campus at all, right? This is blatantly unconstitutional, extremely worrying.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
The fact that this person just got a profile in the Canary Mission website for writing an op-ed, and then this is used as justification for her deportation is still an even greater escalation.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Yes. On March 24th, Canary Mission published a new section of their website titled Uncovering Foreign Nationals. which lists the profiles of non-citizens who they believe qualify for deportation.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Another far-right pro-Israel doxing group called Batar, which even the ADL lists as an extremist group... Which is wild. Bataar says that they have given the Trump administration a deportation list of thousands of names, including citizens that they expect to be denaturalized. People like Mamadou Tal and Mahmoud Khalil have been targeted by both of these organizations.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Or even just like, quote unquote, celebrating the deaths of people, right?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
The past week, ICE actions against students have seemingly accelerated. Ali Reza Daroudi, a doctoral student from Iran studying at the University of Alabama, was arrested by ICE on March 25th in the middle of the night at his off-campus apartment. Daroudi's entry visa expired, but he was allowed to stay in the States as he still maintained his student status.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
It's unknown why exactly he was targeted. He has no ties to protests or any notable online footprint.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
No. Simply, his entry visa expired. So if he left the country, he then would have to get another visa to get back in. But he can stay as long as he still has his valid student status. So not only is ICE trying to revoke these visas, but they're trying to essentially say that by revoking these visas, they are also attempting to strip them of their student status, which is like a separate step.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
These things can get kind of very blurry, though.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Technically, the State Department does have that ability, but it's under the same like foreign policy risk designation.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
And they'll justify it by saying, well, his visa already expired. So we're just removing him because his visa expired, even though that's not really how this works.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
No, because the University of Alabama did not elect to rescind his student status. He was a student in good standing. Yeah. And thus legally allowed in the United States.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Just this last week, ICE detained a University of Minnesota grad student at their off-campus housing. The university released a statement saying that they had no prior knowledge of this incident and had not shared any information with federal authorities. This person's name is still not released. Last week, a student at the Southern Illinois University had their visa revoked.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
The school administration told their college paper that the university has no role in the visa revocation process. The Illinois governor's office is working with schools across the state to, quote, ensure they are being vigilant about what's happening on their respective campuses.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
The governor's team has asked universities to communicate with international students about the general resources available to them through the institution. In addition, we have suggested that they revoke TINA SICKENGER, WHICH IS...
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
a very cool name, the school's director of international student and scholar services, sent an email to the international student body of Southern Illinois University, advising them to carry photocopies of immigration documents with them at all times, as well as proof of enrollment and records of U.S. residences.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
The email recommended that students, quote, use caution on social media and exercise discretion when participating in political demonstrations or protests, unquote. warning that though protests should be protected speech, quote, such activities can sometimes be misinterpreted and may carry risks to your immigration status, unquote.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Unfortunately, I think this is the university trying to look out for these students. Yeah, that's the best you could expect from them, really. And they are providing like legal resources to these students, but they're essentially saying like you shouldn't post anything or do any protests because then ICE might come kidnap you. Yeah. Which is... just a fucked up situation to be in.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
And they don't have any other ability to stop this right now. I am curious what Pritzker is going to continue to do here, though.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
So that is the situation as it currently stands. I do have one final tidbit here just that highlights the absurdity of this whole situation.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
On March 24th, a lawsuit on behalf of Israeli Columbia students and relatives of Israeli October 7th victims was filed against Columbia Jewish Boys for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, and individual Columbia students, including Mahmoud Khalil.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
The lawsuit alleges that these Columbia groups and students are the domestic propaganda arm of Hamas and even claims that these groups had advanced notice that the October 7th attack was going to take place. Oh, come on. So... The plan was kept secret among Hamas's own political allies in the region. But they gave an Ivy League university in New York City a heads up.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Hamas didn't tell the Houthis. They didn't tell Iran. They didn't tell Hezbollah. Didn't tell Hezbollah. But they told student activist groups in New York City at the Columbia University campus.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Some of the quote-unquote evidence that they allege is that some of these activist accounts had renewed activity in October of 2023, before the attack happened. But this is just a simple coincidence. Obviously, these people did not have a heads-up that the October 7th attack was going to take place.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
The lawsuit also argues that protest activity is not First Amendment protected speech, but in fact, quote, substantial assistance in the form of propaganda and recruiting services and in coordination with a designated foreign terrorist organization. Again, alleging there is some kind of communication between Hamas and student activists in New York City.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
I will end us with just this kind of final note. Now, while there are little signs that this would happen at a scale this large and this focused under a Democratic president, a degree of consent for this type of targeting was manufactured the past year as it relates to Palestine protests, with some liberals and Democratic politicians associating activists as pro-Hamas terrorists.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
And this is the consequence of that public perception building and the consent being manufactured for that framing. And now that the even more evil side is in charge, they can take that justification and run with it way further than what a Joe Biden or a Kamala Harris would have done. So it is far worse, but it's not in a political bubble.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
This has been like a growing project for the past few years.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
They never defended the constitutionality of this speech. Nor would they have intervened to stop the deportation of someone like Tall if Cornell decided to revoke his status, right? Right, yeah. I don't think the Biden administration or a Kamala Harris administration would be directing these universities to take that action themselves.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Nor would they be, I think, revoking student visas at scale like this. No. But they would have let ICE do the stuff that ICE does if universities themselves elect to remove student visas or unenroll these students. And like a degree of the complacency here is placed on the actual university administrations, the university staff who have been vilifying these protesters for the past two years.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
It's also worth noting that since I've had to quote from so many government statements this episode, the Trump admin is continuing to correlate any expression of sympathy or solidarity with Palestine as explicit support for Hamas.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Basically, anything you say that's critical of the Israeli government, its actions in Gaza, are being interpreted by the Trump administration as anti-Semitism and support for the October 7th massacre. This is a false equivalency. What the government alleges should not be automatically taken as the truth.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
These tactics have been used for years to broadly smear pro-Palestine activists while also hurting anti-Zionist Jews. And I guess like finally, we are not necessarily endorsing every single thing that every single one of these students has said. Yeah. We do not necessarily agree with the framing of every single sentence that they have said. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Yeah, exactly. This is like completely separate to that.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Correct. No matter what they're saying, no matter if they have opinions on Hamas that differ from ours, no matter what they are saying at a campus protest, it should not result in ICE targeting them and hunting them down and forcing students who attend sit-in protests into hiding to defend their own rights and to keep their green cards. This is a completely absurd and blatantly...
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
fascist, to use the now overused word, frankly, but this is. This is what that is. If this was happening in China, if this was happening in Russia, in other countries, people would be very quick to call out... I mean, it does happen in Russia, right?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Well, I think that does it for us today at It Could Happen Here. We will continue to report on the targeting of students, scholars, and professors, and immigrants in general as the Trump administration ramps up its deportation efforts. If you would like to contact us about these topics, We have an encrypted email address at coolzontipsatproton.me.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
It is end-to-end encrypted, so if you use another encrypted email service or another ProtonMail account to send the email, only then is it encrypted.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling economic world, and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by Robert Evans, James Stout, and Mia Wong. It is Liberation Day in America, everyone. How do you feel? I feel liberated.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Well, I think we should just get right to the most pressing news, which is line go down. Line is on its way down.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
No, I'm not qualified to give financial advice, but I think everyone should pull out your 401k right now, go to the bank, withdraw all your money, all of it, empty your accounts right now.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
I mean, it's going to exist in like what? Like 40 years per the Star Trek timeline? Exactly. Get it on the ground floor.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
We should probably talk about why the stock market is doing poorly. So I think, Robert, you can handle this segue.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
It really was. The best financial purchase we've made is the Tariff Talk theme song. We're going to get so much mileage out of that thing. It's an unbelievable steal.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
Now we're in what I'm referring to as the Chinese century. I came up with this this week on my own. Oh, wow. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 163
Well, Mr. Wallace, it's hard to say that any one thing has made one do this or that. I think from the very beginning, I came from a large family. My mother died young. Eleven children made an impression on me as a child. I was a trained nurse, went among the people.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 163
I saw women who asked to have some means whereby they wouldn't have to have another pregnancy too early after the last child, the last abortion, which many of them had. So there's a number of things that are one after the other that really made you feel that you had to do something.