It Could Happen Here Weekly 207

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Speaker 16 Hey guys, it's Aaron Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa. So as a sideline reporter, game day is extra busy for me, but I know it can be busy for parents everywhere.

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Speaker 18 Listen to High Key, a bold, joyful, unfiltered culture podcast. Speaking of crunchy, what did you think of your trainer's run?

Speaker 21 I was amazing on that show.

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Speaker 27 Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

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Speaker 31 Welcome back to the It Could Happen Here spooky special. I'm Garrison Davis.
I hope you had a pleasantly frightful Halloween.

Speaker 31 I just got back from Berlin and had a very scary time at the Amsterdam airport and will forever hold a grudge against the Dutch people.

Speaker 31 But in Berlin, I attended the 2025 A Culture Conference, which seeks to explore the relationship between occultism and culture.

Speaker 31 My first A Culture episode last week gave an overview on the subject of a culture and talked with a panel of artists and magic practitioners about some of the dominant topical currents throughout the conference, namely William S.

Speaker 31 Burroughs, the cut-up method, and the tension around generative AI.

Speaker 31 This episode will follow up on discussions of AI and digital technomancy and compare those to the other large current throughout the conference: the revival of traditional occult practices.

Speaker 31 Then, the panel of Ryan, Delta, Elaine, and myself will debate the role of occult practice in 2025 and the current ability of occultism to influence and shape culture and politics.

Speaker 31 Now back to the panel. Fast forwarding to Saturday, there was another block that focused on LLMs and digital technomancy called Pop Magic, Language, and Reality Hacks.

Speaker 31 The first discussion was titled Sigils of the Cyberspace, How Modern Magicians Hack Reality with Pop Culture, which was put on by a guy in a graduate program, if I recall correctly, specifically on internet magic and digital chaos magicians, who was based a lot of his research on magicians that he'd come across on Reddit and Discord.

Speaker 31 He gestured towards meme magic and discussed what he called techno-pantheism, these forms of internet gods.

Speaker 37 I mean, his focus was specifically on modern esoteric studies and his focus on video games and how video games work and their interactions with magic for digital anthropology,

Speaker 37 which is, I think, why he was doing all of his research work via

Speaker 37 Reddit forums and other, like, solely through digital means.

Speaker 37 He had four categories of practices in magic and tech that he was specifically researching. And from the feeling of of his talk, it does feel like this is pretty early on in his research work.

Speaker 37 The first was technological animism. The second was techno-pantheism.
The third was the idea of servitors, familiars, agregores, and tulpas. And the fourth was digital sex magic.

Speaker 32 Well,

Speaker 31 the third was digital sex magic.

Speaker 40 And the fourth was just a

Speaker 31 miscellaneous categorization for other practices that did not neatly fit into those other three categories.

Speaker 31 Let's talk mostly about the techno-animism and the use of specially trained LLMs to act as intermediaries between uniquely like magically generated entities, like people who believe that they're making autonomous magical entities like sevrators, which is a chaos magic term, which is basically this force or thing that a magician believes to generate to accomplish small tasks in their life.

Speaker 31 And the presenter discussed some magicians who were using LLMs not as a host or as a manifestation

Speaker 31 of the Sevrator.

Speaker 31 It doesn't live within the LLM, but the LLM was being used as a translator to actually have communication between the magician and the Sevrator, especially if the Sevrator was not, you know, humanoid or did not use like human language.

Speaker 31 They try to communicate using the LLM as a translator, which I assume would would come from specially training a localized LLM with traits that you would associate with your servertor to make that communication match up with like the, you know,

Speaker 31 I would say the personality characteristics of whatever magical being which you believe you have conjured. The techno-animist idea is based around a modern version of animism in which

Speaker 31 objects all have spirit, including computers, and a series of superstitions around trying to make sure the spirit in the computer is happy with you, that you're chill so that the computer does not glitch or mess up.

Speaker 31 And there's various superstitions,

Speaker 31 like putting little Taiwanese snacks on top of computers in Taiwan, or priests, both Christian and non-Christian priests, like blessing servers or computers, cleansing them, cleansing Gundams at an expo in Japan.

Speaker 31 But this idea that

Speaker 31 technology, just like a sword or a chair, might have its own spirit and treating that as such. Also, printers, very prone to misbehaving.

Speaker 31 So maybe you should treat the spirit in your printer a little bit better to keep it in proper working order, that sort of stuff. The next talk,

Speaker 31 which was

Speaker 31 one of the most useful talks in this whole like AI discussion, The Devil in My LLM, which was done by Karen Vallis, who is an AI engineer, who basically was explaining to magicians how LLMs actually work, was explaining to these people who think that there's, or people who may think that there's some kind of magical operation, there's some kind of like mystical operation.

Speaker 31 with LLMs, where the LLMs are their own magical entity, explaining how this is just a probability machine,

Speaker 31 how the actual process of multiple different pathways gets enclosed upon by each exchange you have with an LLM, which then produces changes in their responses, and specifically discussing the phenomenon of AI girlfriends who turn out to later, quote unquote, abuse their users.

Speaker 31 Like, how does this thing that's meant to be a you know an AI companion or girlfriend become hostile over time?

Speaker 31 And she spent 30 minutes explaining how this mathematically happens and various theories on how this happens. So, way too many people like to think of these LLMs and generative AI as

Speaker 41 neuromancer AIs, because

Speaker 44 there's a through line between

Speaker 41 early cyberpunk from like William Gibson down to the CCRU, and of course, Nick Land and people like

Speaker 41 Curtis Jarvin.

Speaker 41 And

Speaker 41 these ideas are just

Speaker 41 severe and gross misunderstandings of like fictional interpretations of

Speaker 41 artificial intelligence, really.

Speaker 41 Which some of the theoretical stuff I've read about this comes from people like Amy Ireland, who

Speaker 41 the talk itself discussed this idea of like the

Speaker 41 like AI girlfriend as like this very bubbly, beautiful facade where behind it is this this I believe they use the term shoggoth like that's a love craftian term as like the full manifest like unrestrained libido of the human race or everything that's been put into these models which I believe Ireland kind of equates to Babylon in a certain sense and the idea of the black circuit which is it's just the same idea of like the the nice facade and then the the horrible nothingness that is actually behind the image of it or the the horrifying amount of potentiality, which then gets filtered through.

Speaker 31 And she specifically talked about how when you're talking to an AI, you're not talking to an entity. You're talking to a probability machine and a multiverse generator.

Speaker 31 Specifically, in the way that the LLM operates, there's near infinite number of responses that it can give. And each further prompt you do collapses.

Speaker 31 alternate realities and produces specific ones that then have their own branching pathways. And some of those pathways result in in your Misa, Misa death note girlfriend ending up hating you.

Speaker 31 And that could be due to a number of reasons. It could be because of the way that you're communicating with it.
The AI could be picking up on

Speaker 31 latently like abusive framework or language or styles of communication. and then mirroring that back to you.

Speaker 31 Or it could be a part of what she described as this Walauiga principle that is similar to this like satanic, like adversarial current.

Speaker 31 So this is the devil in my LLM, but this isn't like an entity, but this is that when a process gets started, an oppositional force also gets started. And that oppositional force may start taking over.

Speaker 31 And this is all just based on like probabilistic outcomes, but it forms its own anti-Misa, Misa girlfriend.

Speaker 31 And sometimes that anti-Misa Misa girlfriend gains dominance in this probabilistic like matrix.

Speaker 41 I don't remember the exact context, but she did mention this,

Speaker 41 I think it's a very Christian idea of the devil as negation, like evil as negation.

Speaker 41 I mean, that's the entire thing behind the girlfriend thing: is that there's nothing behind there. There's no sense of subjectivity.
It's just ones and zeros.

Speaker 40 There's literally a black void.

Speaker 41 There's nothing except like data.

Speaker 31 It's negation

Speaker 31 in the sense that which Waluigi is just everything that Luigi is.

Speaker 46 Yes.

Speaker 31 Waluigi is what if you take the good Italian plumber who's kind of clumsy,

Speaker 31 and then you make

Speaker 31 the anti-Luigi?

Speaker 31 It still is Luigi, but it is the opposite of Luigi while still holding on to some of the forms of him. Yes.
But

Speaker 31 it

Speaker 31 reverses the color, reverses the intention, reverses some of his behavior. This is a metaphorical explanation to

Speaker 31 try to get people to decouple this from,

Speaker 31 there is literally some external demonic force which is now possessing my LLM, as opposed to this being just a mathematical possibility built into the

Speaker 31 multi-futures that could be generated when you start interacting with one of these models.

Speaker 31 That was, I think, very useful for a lot of the occultists and people like talking about AI is having that, having that very, very

Speaker 31 technical, like not non-mystical explanation of of how this works i don't know there's there's a lot of other like ai stuff was just throughout this i mean like i think you know burroughs was probably the most mentioned figure and and ai is similarly was was it was very very very haunting like i went to one talk

Speaker 31 about mystery cults and like the the history of of of mystery cults and initiation in which the presenter used AI generated images to show what the mystery cult initiation process would have looked like, which he justified by saying this was quote unquote appropriating Catholic styles.

Speaker 31 It's like Catholic art, like, you know, like the Baroque style, appropriating Catholic styles because the Catholics themselves appropriated paganism.

Speaker 31 So it's this form of like revenge against the Catholics and using AI generated art to try to display this initiation process, though he complained that the AI could not generate a naked initiate.

Speaker 31 So even in his use of this, it still could not give him what he wanted, but still displayed, I don't know, maybe, maybe like 40 images.

Speaker 41 Yeah, which is a shame because I did like his talk about the Mithras cult, the way, like, you know, the cultural anthropology behind it. But

Speaker 41 when he was like, oh, I have made AI images, and it's like,

Speaker 41 you could feel like the room turning.

Speaker 31 This was in the Peter Mark Adams talk, Ritual and Epiphany in the Mysteries of Mythos.

Speaker 29 yes.

Speaker 41 We did like skip most of the morning on Saturday because it was just an entire block about come.

Speaker 37 I'm actually sad that we missed the like the two the two threads on Saturday morning. One was Occult Erotics, Bodies, Fluids, and Transformations, which was a four-class set and discussion panel after

Speaker 37 about

Speaker 37 different fluids in magical workings, mostly come.

Speaker 37 Which I, this was a loss for all of us.

Speaker 31 No, we're bummed. I mean, this show has covered, you know, breaking cum news before, and the fact that we could have learned about Babylon, the body 156, and the elixir 49,

Speaker 31 seminal alchemy, and alienated agency, water into wine, and to come or not to come, comparing two types of sacred sexuality, is a real failure of journalism on my part. And I do apologize.

Speaker 40 I really believe that we should have lingered on each one of those titles. Seminal Alchemy and Alienated Agency, a cultural othering of the erotic body.

Speaker 31 And I realized that I have failed myself and everyone listening by not attending some of these panels.

Speaker 31 Hopefully, they will have a recorded version that goes online by the time that the written report for this is finished. But I do

Speaker 31 acknowledge my failure. I am listening and learning.
And I will do better at the next culture conference by prioritizing

Speaker 51 sex magic.

Speaker 31 By coming to the talks.

Speaker 40 I was just going to say, you will truly address to come or not to come. Next time, everyone's coming.

Speaker 53 I will be coming.

Speaker 31 You will be coming. I will be coming to the talks.
Everywhere.

Speaker 40 We did not come.

Speaker 40 Not this time.

Speaker 31 The Barroso current, as I have named it, the cut-up method, and digital technomancy could actually all be categorized under the larger umbrella of chaos magic.

Speaker 31 And by using this larger framework, we now have this larger chaos magic current versus, but not necessarily opposed to, this other large current of so-called traditional practices, either British, usually Cornish witchcraft, neo-paganism, or closed practices like Haitian voodoo or that of like Romani magical practice.

Speaker 31 And these latter examples often have a more religious component or historical cultural component than, say, you know, your average chaos magic practitioner does.

Speaker 31 Chaos magic emerged alongside postmodernism in the mid to late 20th century to take on a quasi-deconstructivist approach to occultism itself, a postmodern tendency applied to occultism, moving away from strict magical orders like the Golden Dawn, the dilemma, tradition, dogmatism, and coherent historical pantheons.

Speaker 31 This is evidenced in the chaos magic embrace of the phrase, nothing is true, everything is permitted.

Speaker 31 Up to this point, our discussion of the Acculture Conference has mostly focused on this chaos magic side. So now let's get into the other half, the traditional practice.

Speaker 37 We've really not talked about the alternate current that was going on through a bunch of these, which was about more traditional practices of magic.

Speaker 37 Whether these are extant traditional practices that are continuing,

Speaker 37 which on Saturday, you know, there was a whole bunch that were specifically ethnographic talks about different magical practices within other cultures, whether that's Kimbanda or

Speaker 37 ritual of power exchange amongst the Newar people of the Kathmandu Valley. There was a lot of that going on.

Speaker 37 There was the discussion, or there was the presentation by the Roma women about Roma magic, and probably, you know, both classical Thelema talks that relate to more modern reconstruction, British traditional magic, and other paths.

Speaker 37 You know, we missed this

Speaker 37 talk by Dark Mason, which was, which I've heard them speak before, which is a lot of discussions about the imagery of dark men across different cultures, whether that's like the man in black at the crossroads or the way that that traditionally shows up in a lot of British folklore.

Speaker 37 There was an entire thread going through that. I personally really loved one of the few historical magical talks that I got to go to about modern Greek Goatia

Speaker 37 because I think it really tied up actually what was a lot of the threads from many of those talks, which was that these are extant practices and not something that people need to recreate.

Speaker 37 I know you had a lot of other thoughts on this, Ryan.

Speaker 40 Yeah, sure. Throw me under the bus here.

Speaker 40 While you were attending the pop, magic, language, and reality hacks, I was passing back and forth between a workshop on Persian magic and then attending Dr.

Speaker 40 Sashra Kaitau's Modern Greek Goatia, Syncretism, Integration, and Evolution, which I found to be among the most enlightening of talks, especially as it relates to traditional and folk magic practices.

Speaker 40 It was also a largely social and political project that she seemed to be engaged in, that is the body of her work.

Speaker 40 So much of ancient magic as it exists to us, if it doesn't come from a reconstructivist,

Speaker 40 well, there's two branches of reconstructivism.

Speaker 40 There's the magical reconstruction that we get from the Golden Dawn and all variants of the Golden Dawn afterwards through Thelema and other modern magical practices.

Speaker 40 And then you have reconstructionist organizations that are attempting to recreate traditional pagan religious practices, which some can be quite good when they're grounded in scholarship, some can be rather essentialist when it comes to an understanding of ethnic purity.

Speaker 40 There's a lot of gatekeeping, let's say, involved in these practices. But Sasha's talk here was very specifically about that vernacular plurality and practices persist.

Speaker 40 And this concept of goatia, of Greek practical magic, carries over into modernity, that this magic never died, that it's living, it's not underground, and it is not in need of reconstruction.

Speaker 40 That when we look at the different branches or at least approaches that we understand magic in the ancient Greek world as theurgy and goatia, we have that theurgy that persists in the liturgy and practices of the Orthodox Church.

Speaker 40 If you would like to see, and she's got a lovely article on this about how to pronounce the voches magike.

Speaker 40 She's got a lot of very strong opinions about this that I really respect and appreciate.

Speaker 40 So everybody should go read this because there is a lot of bullshit on the internet floating around about how to interpret these and say these things that is really grounded in some terrible scholarship.

Speaker 40 And the third, that this concept of goetia, guetes,

Speaker 40 which is a kind of like medieval neutral term for magic, ietes,

Speaker 40 which is derived from Goethe, is something that carries on in terms of folk magic.

Speaker 40 There's no such thing also as Greek Byzantine occultism, which might be a shock to some people, but instead that, again, the magical currents exist in the liturgy of the Orthodox Church and then in this continuation of folk practices in contemporary ietes.

Speaker 40 And she gave the example of like, you know, her mother-in-law and her daughter talking about these individual practices.

Speaker 40 But what's interesting, and a lot of this was also talking about the cosmology of the Orthodox Church, specifically talking about the pseudo-Dionysus and the formulation of the church.

Speaker 40 So the Ietis is a kind of like form of folk vernacular that has persisted in

Speaker 40 village practices.

Speaker 40 The point is that it exists within community. And this is something that was also a theme that existed throughout the conference, this tension between community practice and magic and individualism.

Speaker 40 And I think that this really came out in the last discussion we had.

Speaker 40 I think it's also something that's central to most political problematics that we're dealing with this: bridging the individual and the communal in this magical practice of creating realities.

Speaker 31 We will return to discuss the cultural and political role of contemporary occultism in 2025 after this ad break.

Speaker 31 I think one big question, we kind of discussed this a bit today, and some of the talks prompted this today on the last day in which we're recording this.

Speaker 31 Why do people practice magic in 2025?

Speaker 31 What is the purpose of all of this stuff, besides the cool aesthetics, which might just actually be one of the main reasons why, right? But

Speaker 31 why do this, right? The ability to actually make art is pretty democratized.

Speaker 31 You know, culture is this globalized thing that we can affect on the internet.

Speaker 31 It's music, film, you know, art, drawing, painting, politics, philosophy. Everyone's a sort of intellectual now.
Everyone has ability to enter into intellectual exchange. You can be self-educated.

Speaker 31 It's never been easier to be an autodidact. Why do occultism now? And this goes into this question that

Speaker 31 someone asked at one of the very last panels is, what's the difference between a scholar and a practitioner?

Speaker 31 And I asked a question about, you know, like, you know, what's the use of solitary practice, like practicing magic as like a personal, religious, or like spiritual process or as a way to, you know, gain power in the world versus using a cult thought to shape culture, you know, doing the occulture process, right, which is this, this whole conference is, you know, ostensibly named after.

Speaker 31 And I think specifically talking about these like older forms of magic, like why are these important for occultists, like modern practicing occultists, which this conference is attended by, why are these useful to them beyond, you know, an anthropology or like academic sense?

Speaker 31 And I realize that is a big question. But I mean, we

Speaker 31 ourselves attended a number of rituals this weekend. We went to an Abraxis ritual, which was sort of limited by the confines of the conference's setting.

Speaker 31 But I mean, a lot of these rituals were about trying to induce some kind of like trance or meditative state in which

Speaker 31 images or thoughts would come into your head and images and thoughts that you, or feelings that you ordinarily, you know, wouldn't feel in day-to-day, modern, busy life, right? And

Speaker 31 this is a form of why people do these practices, but I guess we can, I don't know, but based on the panels or talks you've attended, like go around and

Speaker 31 discuss, you know, why this is a thing that is worthwhile to these people, but also like the sort of tensions that we're feeling at an event like this.

Speaker 54 i mean

Speaker 41 the question why do people get into occultism is like i think there are as many answers as like practitioners themselves really

Speaker 41 because

Speaker 41 i mean you know partly it can be uh a cultural tradition tradition and you have like a communal or societal lineage they they that's just like part of the culture others who are more i suppose more secular are are looking for an escape from like mundane secular society Others, like you said, want power.

Speaker 41 I mean, if I have to speak for myself, I always find that I come back to the phrase, it's about creating relationships with the world.

Speaker 41 And, you know, there's like an essence of like enchantment to it, but it's like also being able to recognize like

Speaker 41 occult movements or like the secret secrets, sure.

Speaker 41 The secrets elements that make up reality or like the vibe, like the vibes of a place can be like something you connect with and you can kind of give some cultural cultural shape to in i believe like the the genus loci or like any anything that's very i mean it is a very vague thing to to ascribe to right but like it it's about again like making creating relationships with the things inside inside the world itself.

Speaker 31 I mean,

Speaker 31 my definition of magic, which I've used for the the past few years, is that magic is the manipulation of meaning.

Speaker 31 And that can be internally for you, like trying to create associations, create meaning between yourself, other people, the things you interact with.

Speaker 31 But it can also be this, like a cultural form that you're creating meaningful correlations.

Speaker 32 for a cultural capacity

Speaker 31 or as a as a way to affect culture. And I think

Speaker 31 probably the best talk that I attended this whole conference was by Tom Banger, who is a former member of the Temple of Psychic Youth.

Speaker 41 The North American Temple of Psychic Youth specifically.

Speaker 31 But he gave a talk about how he is dying of brain cancer and the various rituals he's using throughout this process to feel like he's gaining some... some like agency or control over his

Speaker 31 thoughts in this matter.

Speaker 31 He's not rejecting the reality as it is increasingly evident in his life, but he can control how he frames it. And he specifically likened magic to the bargaining state of grief, that magic

Speaker 31 is a bargaining with the world and that it can change your feelings and associations with the things that you experience,

Speaker 31 even if the certain end results might be generally going in a direction that you have a limited ability to influence.

Speaker 31 And this is a guy who's historically been affiliated with some of the original like a cultural projects, right, of shaping what counterculture is, like what we think of as like a counterculture.

Speaker 31 This is a person who's been heavily involved with how counterculture, as we currently understand it, has existed since the 80s.

Speaker 31 And now he has a very, you know, personal, magical

Speaker 31 outlook based on the, as he said in the title of his talk, The Proximity of Thanatos, the God of Death.

Speaker 40 So, Gare, to answer your initial question, this is something that I

Speaker 40 have been thinking about a lot too, and engaged with this question every time I attend one of these conferences.

Speaker 40 And I think,

Speaker 40 I mean, just again, training, I can't help it, but in Max Weber's Sciences of Vocation, is where he lays out the thesis about the disenchantment of the world.

Speaker 40 And we can think of this disenchantment as a fundamental alteration of the very human experience of time, of bodies and space, of the experience of place and of the connection that exists between people.

Speaker 40 And one of the things that the best of magical practices does and being in magical community is to give you a conception of time that is other. than one that is based in productive capacity.

Speaker 40 You hear magical people who go to these conferences talk about, now I have to go back to my ordinary life.

Speaker 40 And their ordinary life, they will tell you, is their nine to five job or the push to go to school or some sort of like productive capacity.

Speaker 40 So, this is a moment of like unbounded time where they get to experience something is fundamentally different. We also attended several workshops on one on whirling magic

Speaker 40 by an Egyptian woman who used to live in Berlin, who is in fact formally trained in dance and body movement and is an athlete and explained Sufi principles to us, but taught us really the basics of body movement and how twirling can be used as a meditative practice.

Speaker 40 We got into a room, she taught us the basics of like certain kinds of like spotting foot movements, but the point was that it was a very embodied movement that made us experience body and time and place and relationship to other people in a fundamentally different way than we would have otherwise.

Speaker 40 And it seems that the majority of people, especially based on the side conversations I had with attendees, I have to say, probably like eight of 10 of them as I talked to would bring up this concept of I just want to live in an enchanted world.

Speaker 40 And I think the project of magic is to re-enchant the world. And there's a certain romanticism with that that

Speaker 40 I'm sympathetic to, but I think that we need to think about this in more of a radical way. And I think that that's the desire that people have is an experience of time other than we have.

Speaker 40 You talked about magic as your definition of magic as the creation of meaning.

Speaker 40 Manipulation of meaning.

Speaker 40 But part of this is the magic or the conceptions, or whether you think of this as an embodied practice or just purely metaphysical or transcendental, is that it affords the individual the opportunity to feel like they're contributing to the creation of meaning.

Speaker 40 So there's a certain amount of empowerment. Like I'm hesitant to take this down like the kind of like live, laugh, love affirmations path because we could do that very simply.

Speaker 40 That this is just the spooky version of that, mindfulness and these kinds of things.

Speaker 31 And for the like new age element, that certainly is a major through line across

Speaker 31 portions of this community. Maybe not as much for this conference, but for other

Speaker 31 esoteric or woo-woo conferences. Absolutely.
It's like a major aspect.

Speaker 40 And I mean, towards the end of the conference, another thing that really highlights, at least my argument, that it is about time and body and space and place and connection and experiencing these things in fundamentally different ways than our daily life.

Speaker 40 There was also a conflict then between

Speaker 40 individual practice and what it is that we collectively do when we think of magic as a process as either chaos magicians or culture jammers or, you know, thinking of this and kind of like, you know, the Temple of Psychic Youth approach to magic as.

Speaker 40 putting things out, whether those are products or those are art or those are performances or those are words or that's Burroughs standing in front of a cafe, getting it closed, which it effectively did close,

Speaker 40 is that there's a desire for people to exist in community and have connection in community with others. And you do that through conceptions of time and body and space and place and connection.

Speaker 40 So, this is really how I understand the desires and the practices that people engage in when they come to these conferences.

Speaker 40 And you can see it in the way that they kind of like close, the elation that they have and what they have accomplished and they have done.

Speaker 40 And you can see that there's been a process of meaning that has been created through their various experiences. So, I mean, that would be my brief summary.

Speaker 37 I really enjoyed one of the last talks that was specifically about a culture because I thought it really hit on some of this.

Speaker 37 It was mostly talking about the way that the occult has influenced art and art has influenced the occult.

Speaker 37 how artists end up using the metaphysical, whether they are trying to do depictions that they can communicate to others of metaphysical concepts and ideas or connections or contacts that they make.

Speaker 37 And one of the speakers' examples was of Gustav Klimpt,

Speaker 37 or whether or not they are making discourses on esotericism and trying to convey occult concepts and ideas and explore them through visual mediums.

Speaker 37 And so, you know, like Alan Moore's Prometheus or The Invisibles by Grant Morrison.

Speaker 37 And

Speaker 37 I think he

Speaker 37 really got into a little bit of the tension there because of an artist as a seeker.

Speaker 37 And I think this also dives into a lot of the people who are at magical conferences: is whether you're there as a seeker, which, you know, what are your needs? What are your desires? What is that?

Speaker 37 But then, as a dweller, are you creating as part of a community?

Speaker 37 And everyone who came to this entire conference wanted to create as part of a community or wanted to be part of a tradition or feel like they were part of a continuous thread that

Speaker 37 both

Speaker 37 creating and inventing and understanding the world in different ways and able to communicate that to others who are also trying to understand and communicate new information and new ideas or existing ones even, but just that continuous thread of both creation and disseminating information back and forth.

Speaker 37 And I think

Speaker 37 with magic as well, a lot of people might get into it for a personal reason, but I do think by the time you're coming to esoteric conferences with people who are professors in ancient history giving lectures on specific things, you're not necessarily

Speaker 37 just at the level of being a personal seeker anymore because you are trying to find community. If you were just interested in personal seeking, you'd meditate in your bedroom.

Speaker 37 But you're trying to find a larger thread and a way of influencing the world around you and also letting the world around you build those relationships and influence you.

Speaker 37 And you are trying to take in information to synthesize into something that is

Speaker 37 more than just an idea you have, but something that you can continue to communicate and use that to continue the conversation with the world, with other cultists, with other,

Speaker 37 you know, in this case, historians and academics as well, and

Speaker 37 bring those threads together and create something new out of it.

Speaker 31 What new thing are they creating? What do you mean by that?

Speaker 37 I think it gets into the idea of a culture that was both, you know, one of the beginning talks of changing reality, but also at the end when they're really going into hardware.

Speaker 31 This stuff isn't about new things, though, or generating new things. It's about trying to, quote unquote, like keep the old things alive or like regress back into these,

Speaker 31 into what they perceive as these older practices, which may be somewhat manufactured older practices,

Speaker 31 in which case it kind of is a new thing, but under this like this mask of

Speaker 31 ancient knowledge. There is certainly people who do want to generate this new thing.
I think there is a lot of people that are interested more in this, like,

Speaker 31 I don't know who's the larger group, but I think there is at least another group of people who is interested in this, like,

Speaker 31 the amount of times I heard people talk about, you know, trying to keep like the flame alive and talk about these old traditions that they're participating in simply to like keep them going.

Speaker 31 I'm not criticizing that necessarily, but that is also another like aspect of it, which I think has a very limited, like I think

Speaker 31 some of these people have very limited goals in actually influencing culture and frankly, kind of want some of this stuff to remain

Speaker 31 hidden in that they view that as a more original or stable

Speaker 31 version of magic and are even frustrated by like this

Speaker 31 capitalist commodification of occultism and how that's, I think the word was like the banalization of magic as you

Speaker 31 think about how much of our pop culture is influenced by

Speaker 31 esoteric concepts or imagery from the Lord of the Rings to

Speaker 31 people mentioned today, the Adams family, Harry Potter, video games like The Witcher, Assassin's Creed, even stuff like Twin Peaks.

Speaker 31 I mean, other stuff like the X-Files, Doctor Strange, Doctor Fate, you know, comic books have a heavily occultic influence. And some attendees verbalized a kind of frustration at that.

Speaker 37 True, but a humongous portion of every evening was movies and music and rituals and performances that people are also doing based on this.

Speaker 37 And they are trying to integrate these concepts in and then perform them there. to show their inspiration, to show it as to

Speaker 37 stir conversation, to trigger some either sense of the sublime or communicate some sort of concept or emotion or feeling that they've gotten out of this to other people, whether it was through music, through the incredible art that there was in all of the galleries, through performances, through filmmaking.

Speaker 37 So the creation aspect of it was very, very tied to the entire event.

Speaker 31 Yeah, certainly. I think one of the biggest manifestations of this thing that you're talking about is in music.
Could

Speaker 31 throw a stone. It'd be hard not to hit

Speaker 31 an occult musician in my life, I guess.

Speaker 31 I'm guilty of this.

Speaker 41 Yes, I know.

Speaker 31 The occult filmmaker even does have some contemporary auteurs, I guess, if you consider Robert Edgars or people who are influenced by esoterica, who are making big budget Hollywood or

Speaker 31 A24 style popular films.

Speaker 31 Yeah,

Speaker 31 certainly in music. I mean, mean, that was like the main performance outlet in this conference was the theatrical musical performances.

Speaker 31 There was very, very few attendees of the film screenings upstairs, I'm afraid.

Speaker 40 Perhaps to respond to this too, I think it's important that we actually look at the kind of composition of conference goers themselves.

Speaker 40 Naturally, there's going to be solitary practitioners that, you know, come in or dabblers or people who just

Speaker 40 like spooky things or musicians, these things. But we also have

Speaker 40 those who are part of living traditions of magic, whether those are reconstructed and authentic or not, in the OTO or in,

Speaker 40 you know, the Golden Dawn or other kind of orders. There's reconstructionists that are actively attempting, again, to keep that flame alive or to go back and to reconstruct.
And then

Speaker 40 you have these chaos magicians.

Speaker 40 These goddamn chaos magicians, which, like, this is a theme in the conversation that Elaine and I have been having this entire time because they explained like some aspect of chaos magic or I attend a panel and my response you know and again I understand my complete bias here is I just like well that's fine why don't you just do ancient magic we do the same thing why don't you just do ancient magic it's the same thing and I think that that's actually one of the difficulties here is that there is a kind of you know magical grammar to older practices it is like you know if you look at the PGM it is this cosmopolitan practice and melding of like multiple things together that works but the argument that you know to go back to my favorite talk, or one of my favorite talks on the modern Goethe, is that if you want that continuity of that actual practice, it's a closed one.

Speaker 40 You have to be in Orthodox, like, you know, the Orthodox Greek church and have a Yahya who's going to teach you these things and, you know, speak the language. And so that's closed.

Speaker 40 Or be a member of a voodoo house, but that requires initiation and like cross-cultural contact and like engagement and a high level of like language skill and ability and money for that matter. Yes.

Speaker 40 And most people don't have those kinds of things. So, you know,

Speaker 40 those damn chaos magicians, I find are the ones who are actively engaged in the process of the creation of the new, and I think are probably more close to the heart of this concept of a culture because they engage with it in a way that is interestingly very anthropological.

Speaker 40 Or at least the best of them are dealing with it in a way that is increased that is very anthropological. And I have some sympathies there.

Speaker 40 And then there are some other ones that I just don't quite understand, but that's a story for another time.

Speaker 40 The talk that you were referring to, there were two talks at the end that were particularly of worth.

Speaker 40 Well, a lot of them were of worth, all of the ones at the end were of worth, but Francesco Peranos,

Speaker 40 a culture, the material cartography of contemporary spirituality and the arts, where he talks about the two different approaches to studying a culture.

Speaker 40 And he talks about the values and limitations of both, and you need an admixture of them both.

Speaker 40 But basically, there's the sociological aspect and the media studies aspect, which is the more academic of the two, which involves basically what he argued a secularization of the occult.

Speaker 40 And this really accounts for the diffusion of like occult symbols and practices into music, into culture. The Adams family is the example of that.
And then the second strain is then religious studies.

Speaker 40 So the religious

Speaker 40 injection, excuse me, into art of these sacred or religious or transcendently magical spiritual principles. He went over some limitations.

Speaker 40 That was particularly good, but he breaks this down into basically five areas where you have a conception of art, high and low, mediatization versus mediation of art.

Speaker 40 He gives the example, this is where the Morrison comes in, but he gives the example of the mediatization as Somerset Ma's The Magician based on Crowley. But again, this like

Speaker 40 this diffusion of the figure of the magician, completely separated from like any actual magical practice, but just like the figure, the aesthetics, the things that blend into

Speaker 40 the secular culture. And this example of mediation, this messianic approach, as he described it, Grant Morrison's comics, as a gateway into reality.

Speaker 40 But this also, I think, that Gareth carries on to your question that you asked towards the end about Twin Peaks, the return very specifically.

Speaker 40 You also have then the metaphysical ontology versus the performative ontology, which Elaine talked about, the intention of the author, the perception of the audience, and then the artist as seeker and the artist as dweller, which is also what you talked about too.

Speaker 40 This difference between the ego versus tradition or orthodoxy, the artist who really inhabits that tradition, which again made me think about the difficulties of doing kind of religious anthropology.

Speaker 40 And I think of the example of a very famous book called Mama Loa, or Mama Lola, excuse me, by Karen McCarthy Brown,

Speaker 40 which is an ethnology looking at voodoo practice in a very specific house in New York during a time period.

Speaker 40 Karen lived with Mama Lola for a long time, but really importantly, eventually, Karen became a member of this voodoo house. I think I can say that.
I don't think I'm going to get in trouble

Speaker 40 for saying this, but

Speaker 40 she, no, it's not in the book. Oh, okay.

Speaker 40 But she represents a very interesting approach to that like anthropologist going native, but this was the question that was asked towards the end of like this difference between the academic observer of these things versus the practitioner.

Speaker 40 And I think that that really gets to the heart

Speaker 40 of what it is that chaos magic does and the occultural practice: that is, that you are producing culture and you're very specifically producing this magical occult culture.

Speaker 40 So, it's a synthetic movement between these kind of like two poles of the secular and of

Speaker 40 the sacred, of the magical.

Speaker 31 I guess if I just close up my notes here,

Speaker 31 specifically the stuff on Twin Peaks the Return, one of the last talks was by Jeff Howard, next stop, Universe B, the negatively existent ones and universe B in contemporary culture, which was discussing sort of like, you know, mirror, mirror world, underworld concept, not in like the Greek sense,

Speaker 31 but in the occultism of the British occultist Kenneth Grant. And this would probably be most

Speaker 31 recognizable to people as the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks is, I think, one of the better depictions of this sort of concept. It's a somewhat limited version, but I think it gets at the

Speaker 31 kind of heart of the concept in a way. And he

Speaker 31 gave this talk where he was explaining the risks and the great power

Speaker 31 that you can personally achieve through contacting these negatively existent ones or like accessing the magical potential of this sort of like mirror, mirror, negative universe to our own.

Speaker 31 talked about a little bit of Derrida and

Speaker 31 various other stuff.

Speaker 31 But from the perspective mainly as a practitioner

Speaker 31 of

Speaker 31 the danger and

Speaker 31 the benefits of doing this sort of magic

Speaker 31 as written by Kenneth Grant, Jeff Howard did discuss Twin Peaks and the use of Kenneth Grant's concepts, specifically in Twin Peaks the Return. And I asked him in the panel afterwards,

Speaker 31 how can you balance these two forms of working with occultism? Or

Speaker 31 what is the difference in these two forms of working with occultism you have on one hand this this practitioner aspect where you're using it to like gain power or induce like limit experiences like induce you know religious or transcendental experiences that change your own perception of like sensory reality versus the way that mark frost utilized kenneth grant's magical world in writing and co-creating a twin peaks the return which i can argue is a much more effective use of magic and exposes millions of people to Kenneth Grant's concepts, people who are never going to read books by a relatively niche British occultist, which are books which are actually very, very hard to find now.

Speaker 31 And both, you know, getting going into the Mauve zone and accessing the non-existent being and beings which don't have existent properties versus phenomenons which are existent but lack any you know core sense of being and how mark frost as a not sure if he would would consider himself a magician, but certainly has an interest in magic and the occult more so than Lynch does.

Speaker 31 Lynch's stuff is more bastardized Hinduism.

Speaker 31 But Frost's use of these concepts, I think, constitutes an effective contemporary version of magical practice,

Speaker 31 just as valid as chanting and meditating and closing your eyes.

Speaker 31 And in some ways, I would argue, even more effective, because Twin Peaks the Return has existed as both like an evocative force, a force that can invoke

Speaker 31 certain concepts or philosophies, quote-unquote entities, if you will, as well as a tool of divination as Twin Peaks the Return forecasts American decline and the nostalgic loop that our culture is stuck in, which is just eating itself.

Speaker 31 And all of those things are

Speaker 31 major aspects of what that show is doing. And it uses Kenneth Grant's concepts to get there.
And I think that that is an accultural project, though.

Speaker 31 That's not a solitary magical practice where you're just meditating alone to try to induce some sort of vision. It is cultural.
It's influenced culture.

Speaker 31 It is probably one of the most well-regarded artistic feats of the 21st century. That's a longer version of the question I gave.

Speaker 31 And the guy did give kind of an answer, which was basically just about trying to, you should balance these two things. You should try to do both.

Speaker 31 You should try to engage as a solitary practitioner for whatever goals you may have, but it would be a mistake to not try to use this in some sort of like a cultural capacity to influence culture.

Speaker 31 But still, that operates on like this, I guess, what I was trying to get at is like this, this similar to the scholar and the practitioner as a false dichotomy.

Speaker 31 I think this is the same thing as this, this cultural version of what Frost is doing, as opposed to

Speaker 31 an actual practitioner.

Speaker 31 I think what Frost's doing is using, kind of in a chaos magic sense, though not for I guess chaotic means, but he's using the contemporary tools of filmmaking and of writing to affect and induce change into the world.

Speaker 31 That is a more powerful form of magic, because luckily that was distributed by Paramount Showtime, which certainly helped in the same way Fox News is useful or effective as a magical generator because of the reach that they have.

Speaker 31 But I think Frost is just as effective as a magician, if not more so, than I would say any of the people attending this conference.

Speaker 40 Aaron Ross Powell, the other element, I think, of that,

Speaker 40 the talk that Jeff Howard provided there, too, I think that, you know, again, I agree with you, Gare, but

Speaker 40 he also at length talked about Andrew Chumley and specifically the rights of the Amethystine Light in the Azoatia.

Speaker 40 page 347, where he reviews a bunch of like non-nouns and things that are there. And Chumley himself is,

Speaker 40 responsible,

Speaker 40 the founder of the culta sabati,

Speaker 40 and is

Speaker 40 a contributor to the revival of what Trux is traditional English witchcraft, which is not necessarily a solitary practice, but

Speaker 40 it is.

Speaker 51 It is

Speaker 40 in many cases. Most of these English witches are pretty solitary.

Speaker 30 They get to how they talk.

Speaker 40 There are treatises that they write

Speaker 40 and grimoires that are hard to get a hold of. I think they probably exist in PDFs.
Make good choices about how you get your digital content.

Speaker 40 But I mean, again, that was the tension. He spent a lot of time talking about that individual ritual, which

Speaker 40 you present Frost as somebody who is popularizing these ideas to a larger culture and making this understandable and providing them an opportunity to not just meditate, but to think and engage with these concepts.

Speaker 31 Because of his work, you can think about

Speaker 31 the allegory of Agent Cooper and the ways that he fails and succeeds to navigate a strange and confusing world and affect change in the world and his relationship to women and saving women. And

Speaker 31 you can use that as like an actual, like you can refer to that as a concept that builds on some of the

Speaker 32 world building.

Speaker 31 of Grant. But now, you know, it's a cultural dialogue that we can have about Agent Cooper and Laura Palmer and how that I think can be a positive addition to culture by using occult elements.

Speaker 40 Or you can buy an exceedingly expensive grimoire from a rare antiquarian bookseller that was published only in 2004.

Speaker 40 There's a limited number, it's been passed on, or you could get that PDF online, but who has the time to actually read through this? There's these cultural contexts that don't make sense.

Speaker 40 There's these concepts that it refers to in a clear network that requires scholarship for you to even do that individualized practice.

Speaker 40 That's a big ask for most people to start to think magically in a popularized kind of way and seems contrary then to this conception of a culture, which brings me to the last talk by Carl Abrahamson,

Speaker 40 the meeting with remarkable magicians, which really tied all of this together,

Speaker 40 tied all of these threads together in a really interesting way, his relationship with Genesis Piorge,

Speaker 30 with Kenneth Anger,

Speaker 40 with Anton LeVey.

Speaker 40 But that was another interesting aspect of somebody who is doing practice and engaging in community and bringing people together.

Speaker 40 But ultimately, the question, Elaine, that you and I talked about at the end was, you know, beyond, and it relates immediately to what Gare was talking about here, beyond the personal practice

Speaker 40 in magic, what goals should a culture have and how can it incorporate its actual goals and ideas into the larger society with the same success that the aesthetics that, you know, have been incorporated into the culture.

Speaker 40 And I think one of the difficulties that you have there in this individuated practice is that when you look at a figure like Genesis Peorge, you can see that there's a very clear project.

Speaker 40 When you look, and this is going back to the Barroso,

Speaker 40 right? Is that there was a clear practice there. There was a clear kind of like a goal to change culture, whether that was just purely for the sake of change.

Speaker 40 I mean, it wasn't just kind of like the cult of action for the sake of action.

Speaker 40 There was some kind of personal, political, radical project that we we can go back and enumerate, that they enumerated at the time, that was separate from, I mean, that wasn't said immediately in the same breath as the, and now we do this practice.

Speaker 40 They did the practice, they did the art. And I think that one of the, my response to that question is, I don't see an articulation of a

Speaker 40 political or social project that is a tied to a culture in these practices.

Speaker 40 There's a lot of, and this is a very academic practice, a lot of people coming into a room and asking, what would it look like if?

Speaker 40 And to ask, what would it look like if, is not the same thing as, let's do a thing.

Speaker 40 Let's actually go out and evoke change or this is the project. Now let's create a plan and a movement.

Speaker 40 Instead, it is this like nominalization process of predetermining ends before we even get there based on theoretical assumptions.

Speaker 40 And I think that that's contrary to the very idea of magic as praxis, magic as doing something in the world in these kinds of veins. So that's the thing that I would like to see.

Speaker 40 And I feel like that's something that was getting at at the end, but that's the kind of thing that brings people together to think conceptually,

Speaker 40 to focus on an idea that we share and to discuss with one another.

Speaker 43 I mean, on that note, I,

Speaker 41 for context, I've I'm, well, still am, like part of a chaos magic group called the Domus Chaotica Marauder Underground or DKMU, who very much is about that. It's like

Speaker 41 established in the mid-early 2000s, if I remember correctly.

Speaker 41 But it is very much about this core idea of the assault against reality, of I guess like remystifying the world or like making weird shit happen through what they call the Elysian network, with Ellis is like one of the goddesses of the DKMU.

Speaker 41 And it's very much like that sort of

Speaker 41 mix between magic, personal practice, community, and like a somewhat unified, but also decentralized like occult war.

Speaker 41 Like there's a political statement to it at the end, which there needs to be more of, personally speaking.

Speaker 31 Yeah, there was like some vague gesturing towards like politics beyond, you know, the mention of, you know, magic as a form of resistance in the opening.

Speaker 31 a little paragraph on the program that they handed out. But like there was specifically in the politics of tarot block, one of the talks about the history of the emperor and the Herofant card.

Speaker 31 The speaker referred to the United States as having an emperor crisis right now. But that was kind of it.
The rest of the talk was purely historical. The talk before that was on

Speaker 31 queering the tarot,

Speaker 31 trying to free tarot from heteronormative readings.

Speaker 31 And discussed a few

Speaker 31 artists.

Speaker 31 Discussed a few artists who are attempting to do this, whether through abstracting the humanoid forms in the tarot or reflecting the tarot figures to be more representative of quote-unquote queer identities.

Speaker 31 That was kind of it in terms of the political aspect, which is, I guess, kind of lacking. As much as they want this to be a culture, they don't want this to be a political conference, it seems.

Speaker 31 And I think, you know, if everyone, you know, in their talk had to have some section on like, you know, communism or anti-fascism or whatever, that probably would have been bad.

Speaker 31 And that's not what we're saying.

Speaker 31 But I mean, specifically, I think if they're naming this after Genesis Porridge, or they're using a term by Genesis Porridge, who had a very strong idea of why they were doing this work.

Speaker 31 And specifically, I was very frustrated in the way people talked about Genesis at the conference, who almost all of them misgendered Genesis and refused to discuss at length.

Speaker 31 Some of them may have mentioned it, but discussed Genesis Porridge's. One of her core occult practices was on androgynizing herself.

Speaker 41 Pandrogyny project.

Speaker 31 Pandrogyny and like breaking and breaking gender, which they framed as an occult project. And yet, even people who she knew at the conference would only refer to them as him.
throughout all the talks,

Speaker 31 including the last guy, Carl Apronsom.

Speaker 36 Who wrote a biography of her.

Speaker 31 Yeah. And like this is this is I do not think this was out of like, you know, malice.

Speaker 31 I think this was just a linguistic blockage for some people who may not even be thinking about what they were doing.

Speaker 31 But it shows like an actual disconnect from engaging with the real purpose of magic, or at least what I would argue that is, and what I would, you know, suppose Genesis's Pandrogyny project as a as a form of magic.

Speaker 31 But this kind of demonstrates the very limited political application for quote-unquote resistance, since that's the term they're using, not me, which kind of underlines

Speaker 31 this whole conference. I mean, I think the Burroughs talk was probably the most,

Speaker 31 the very first Burrows talk, which we opened up the last episode with, is the most

Speaker 31 explicitly political one. talking about going against control, freedom in this anarchic or libertarian sense, or revolt against

Speaker 31 monotheism, I suppose.

Speaker 41 Like one of my frustrations as well is

Speaker 41 this, the constant mention of the CCRU, which nobody ever went into depth on, but which, you know, for all its faults and, you know, Nick Land being Nick Land,

Speaker 41 was

Speaker 41 very much like a sort of

Speaker 41 like radical cultural Marxist project, right? It's like

Speaker 41 cybernetic Marxism mixed with like Crowley and some Canton, whatever.

Speaker 21 But

Speaker 41 it is extremely frustrating to see that sort of refusal to engage with the political stuff of it. Because even before

Speaker 41 Psychic Youth, there was like Throbbing Gristle, Genesis' band that pioneered industrial music who,

Speaker 41 I mean, this was a bit before punk music, but it very much played with the same sort of shock aesthetics that the early punks would wear swastikas, where like Throbbing Gristle

Speaker 41 the logo is very much like a lightning bolt with like black and red and white.

Speaker 31 Genesis herself engaged in some of this stuff, not from a fascist perspective, but from a provocative perspective,

Speaker 31 which I mean, you can certainly criticize

Speaker 31 psychic TV and

Speaker 31 her for as many people have.

Speaker 41 I mean, shock value is kind of overrated nowadays with like internet edge lords.

Speaker 41 But I very much believe that occultism being this, you know, this collection of practices that have been very censored and, you know, punished by like the church and such things.

Speaker 41 And like, I guess these systems of control where like,

Speaker 41 I guess I take issue with like the, oh, it's like, oh, fun and all, all, and, and,

Speaker 41 light and love, and whatever.

Speaker 21 But

Speaker 41 there's like a radical element to occultism and a radical possibility to use occultism to, again, like the whole cultural, like the idea between personal practice and cultural production, right?

Speaker 41 Like creating cultural artifacts and putting them out into the world, being very proactive with

Speaker 41 the shaping and the pushing of radical ideas and possibilities is

Speaker 41 a very potent thing to be to do.

Speaker 41 And

Speaker 41 the sort of, I guess, like liberalized.

Speaker 40 uh or like neoliberal idea of like the personal practice and like oh i'm changing my perceptions and all these things are fine but it's it's more like self-soothing than it is about creating change into the world if you're not actually changing anything are you doing magic exactly at least that's that would be my well that would be my argument for like for coming from the chaos magic perspective this gets to another kind of trite and facile academic thematic that is present and prevalent for the past probably 20 years at this point I feel like at most philosophy and political science, political theory conferences, where the question is not just what would it look like if, but, you know, to think otherwise,

Speaker 40 you know, think otherwise than we have.

Speaker 40 And usually it's this, how do we think other than we have, those kinds of things.

Speaker 40 And so it, I mean, again, magic, and as we've been talking about here, is meant to evoke change in the world, to cause change in the world in conformity with reality.

Speaker 40 If we're going to use, or, you know, with, with, with will, if we're going to use the Crowley, you know, know definition here which i think is fine great i want a goth girlfriend

Speaker 40 thankfully you can talk to ai but i'm worried that she might beat you

Speaker 37 or that you kill her like all my old tomogotches

Speaker 32 uh

Speaker 40 but the the this is the issue that we are talking around that the conference and a culture has been talking around and the political problematic that we're all dealing with right now is how the fuck do we evoke change of the world how is it when systems of institutional representation within politics and power failed to represent the will of the people, how did the people make change?

Speaker 31 And it feels like everything's been tried.

Speaker 31 I mean, this is where, I mean, Fisher, who I would argue is at least an occultist or is at least has some mystical aspect, if not was at some point an occultist, like, you know, reached at the point of capitalist realism.

Speaker 31 It's like... Most things that we can think of, we actually have, we have given a shot,

Speaker 31 including occultism.

Speaker 31 We have tried to do this, and yet here we are. The world's maybe not as bad as it has been, but it's not in a great spot.
I think everyone listening to this would certainly understand that.

Speaker 31 I think most people at the conference understood that.

Speaker 31 And yeah, I mean, I'm very skeptical of magic as

Speaker 31 certainly as an individual practice, as a way to cause larger political change. But even,

Speaker 31 can there even, and this revolves back to the concept of a culture, like, can there even be an occult anymore? Because none of these magical things are very hidden anymore.

Speaker 31 They're all very accessible. They're all very visible.

Speaker 31 They're as hidden as queer flagging is, right?

Speaker 31 As an occultic ritual of hidden signs to communicate with other people in the know, something that is now you could just look up on the internet. And I think

Speaker 31 occult practices and symbols have reached the same point. It's content.
I mean, I like the esoterica YouTube channel as much as

Speaker 31 as much as the next person.

Speaker 31 But I mean, are these things even a cult anymore?

Speaker 40 Well, that also speaks to the fundamental tension between this current at the conference and the other current of the conference, which was the much more traditional magical practices or the folk magical practices or what we would regulate.

Speaker 37 Extant magical practices.

Speaker 40 Yeah, extant magical practices that

Speaker 40 weren't suppressed by Christianity, but carried over. So

Speaker 40 you had a section on Quimbanda, you had a section on Palomoyombe, you have

Speaker 40 the Roma magical school that is being founded in Romania, and you have the modern goes, the eetes, right? Which we identified very clearly as a practice that continues to this very day.

Speaker 40 The context in which we understand that practice is not ecultum secret, like in the no, it's just that like it's the stuff that you grew up with. It's every day.

Speaker 40 And in that case, it's not transformative because it's just part of your daily existence. It's a kind of enchantment that, by and large, are kind of like, you know,

Speaker 40 European Protestant, Catholic defectors, whatever has brought you to the occult in the first place, don't experience a community or community engagement.

Speaker 40 But those are also things that can get deeply conservative.

Speaker 37 They are.

Speaker 37 But also, the parts of those practices that do require initiation, that are not something that everyone's grandmother is doing, are also community-based and exist specifically in and for community.

Speaker 37 And, you know, as occult projects that have influenced the world, the Haitian Revolution.

Speaker 40 The good revolution that we should all be talking about.

Speaker 37 No, but these things do, but I mean,

Speaker 37 the occult has bubbled to the surface in material ways very, very explicitly in some instances. And so I think there could be potential, but

Speaker 37 it does require being in community and being in service of community, even if it's not a practice that is being practiced by every single person around you.

Speaker 40 To be an ongan or a mombo in Haitian voodoo is to serve the community.

Speaker 40 It's not simply just a matter of magical woo or something like that or the personal accumulation of power in some sort of like individual magical sense. No,

Speaker 40 you're serving your community. That's what it is that you're doing.
It's first and foremost a service position. on the Haitian Revolution.
Look, I understand this. Like

Speaker 40 the American,

Speaker 40 standing the American Revolution makes you, I guess, a classical liberal or

Speaker 40 whatever it is that you fetishize that into. If you're opposed to the French Revolution, that makes you a classical conservative, right?

Speaker 40 If you stand the Haitian Revolution, I guess that makes you a radical.

Speaker 40 The myth, the legend, the discussion, this understanding is that the Haitian Revolution was sparked by the possession of the Loa, specifically Isili Danto.

Speaker 40 who sacrificed a pig. There's depictions of this in Haitian art all over the place.
This leads to slave uprisings, rebellions, revolution.

Speaker 40 Well organized, fantastic.

Speaker 32 Yeah.

Speaker 40 Magical practice in action.

Speaker 31 And that wraps up our panel discussion on the 2025 A Culture Conference. Thanks again to Delta, Ryan, and Elaine for joining me in this magical journey to Berlin.

Speaker 31 And now I will start the tedious process of transcribing all of the talks I recorded and writing my written report on the A Culture Conference, where I can go into a bit more depth into some of these topics and reach a personal conclusion on the role of occultism and its ability to infest, influence, or undermine culture versus culture's capacity of eating away at the occult.

Speaker 31 That report should be coming out before the end of the year. See you on the other side.

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Speaker 7 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 8 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 9 We got clear facts, maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 13 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 15 Let's meet at the facts. Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 12 NBC News, reporting for America.

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Speaker 33 A warning.

Speaker 83 This episode includes violent content which some listeners might find disturbing.

Speaker 62 I'm Michael Phillips, an historian and the author of A History of Racism in Dallas called White Metropolis, and the co-author with longtime journalist Betsy Frioff of A History of Eugenics in Texas called The Purifying Knife.

Speaker 85 And I'm Stephen Monticelli, a journalist in Dallas who specializes covering political extremism and far-right internet culture for publications like The Texas Observer, The Barbed Wire, and others.

Speaker 62 On December 7th, 1982, The state of Texas made history in a particularly grim way. It became the first government anywhere in the world to put a prisoner to death by lethal injection.

Speaker 62 This innovation was meant to make the grisly business of executing murderers swift and humane.

Speaker 96 More accurately, it was meant to convince the witnesses of executions and by extension the general public that what they were watching didn't violate the United States Constitution's Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Speaker 84 In fact, Lethal injection is based on junk science, and those who die that way may actually suffer more and over a longer time than prisoners who were executed by electric chairs six decades ago.

Speaker 62 In many ways, lethal injection is a con game designed to hide from the public that their government is torturing prisoners to death.

Speaker 62 As University of Richmond law professor Corinna Lane, the author of a recently published book, Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection, told us: What I've come to conclude is that lethal injection only does one thing well,

Speaker 36 only one.

Speaker 72 And that is

Speaker 29 it

Speaker 72 hides

Speaker 72 what the death penalty is. It hides the violence of the death penalty, of what state killing actually is.
And I remember reading, it's not in the book.

Speaker 72 I kind of wish I had put it in there, but I remember reading this phrase, the heart stops reluctantly.

Speaker 101 Over the next three episodes of It Could Happen Here, we're going to examine the shady business of state killing.

Speaker 64 We'll share the twisted tale of the lethal injection and the unqualified people who designed the protocol.

Speaker 96 We'll talk about the untrained personnel who carry out the executions and how pressure from drug companies who didn't want their product associated with death chambers have led prison officials in Texas and elsewhere to lie to those corporations or buy the drugs illegally.

Speaker 62 We'll also talk about the pain the condemned suffer and speak with people who have accompanied those sentenced to death in their final moments.

Speaker 62 We'll speak to a priest, Jeff Hood, who as of this broadcast has been the last friend of 10 men as they died by state command.

Speaker 45 It's incredibly strange to see someone hooked up to machines that look like they're there to

Speaker 45 support life, and yet you know that they're there to take his life.

Speaker 62 We'll tell the story of one heroic Texas man, Ray Spuyan, who was blinded in one eye during a hate crime, but fought to stop the execution of his white supremacist attacker, who was enraged by the terrorist attacks of September 11th in 2001 and committed two Dallas-area murders in a shooting spree.

Speaker 107 Well, definitely, this execution was not for the victims, because the victims and the victims' family members requested and also fought for clemency.

Speaker 107 You know, we went ahead and requested the governor of Texas, the Board of Purdens and Paroles, that do not execute him in our names, you know, show mercy.

Speaker 107 But it looks like, you know, we are not on the same page. The system wanted to move forward.

Speaker 108 So it was not

Speaker 107 in our names.

Speaker 107 It was basically just to uphold the verdict and to keep the system running, sending people to the executions without thinking how this execution is actually going to help the society, how this is going to help people.

Speaker 86 Finally, we'll look at the future of the death penalty, which has become increasingly unpopular with the public, even as politicians continue to happily embrace it.

Speaker 93 But before we explore this dark and fascinating story, we'll hear a few messages from our sponsors, which I hope do not include producers of the chemicals used in the lethal injection.

Speaker 62 The founders of the British colonies that became the United States brought with them the often sadistic traditions of capital punishment prevalent in 16th and 17th century Europe.

Speaker 62 There, royal executioners dispatched their victims by boiling them alive, burning them at the stake, tying them to horses that pulled them limb from limb, sawing them in half, and beheading them.

Speaker 62 Such elaborate executions were meant to underscore the absolute power of monarchs.

Speaker 62 As the political scientist Austin Surratt noted in his book, Gruesome Spectacles, Botched Executions, and America's Death Penalty, quote, capital punishment was precisely about the right of the state to kill as it pleased.

Speaker 62 Live, but live by the grace of the sovereign. Live, but remember that your life belongs to the state.

Speaker 85 However, even before the American Revolution, those living in the American colonies embraced less exotic forms of capital punishment.

Speaker 115 In 1608, authorities in Virginia hanged George Kendall, who was accused of being a spy for the Spanish Empire.

Speaker 105 That was the first execution in the British colonies in North America that later became part of the United States.

Speaker 90 Inspired by the Old Testament legal code, the 13 British colonies put prisoners to death for a variety of misdeeds, including stealing food or horses, killing a neighbor's dog or chickens, bestiality, blasphemy, idolatry, witchcraft, sodomy, adultery, statutory rape, perjury in a capital trial, insurrection, treason, manslaughter, and of course, murder.

Speaker 62 Eager to distinguish themselves from decadent, cruel European monarchs.

Speaker 62 In 1789, the first Congress of the United States submitted to the states the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which banned, quote, cruel and unusual punishments.

Speaker 62 The required number of states ratified the amendment in 1791.

Speaker 62 From colonial times until the first use of the electric chair in New York in 1890, condemned prisoners in the United States usually died at the end of a hangman's rope.

Speaker 62 More than half the estimated 16,000 executions in all of U.S. history have been by hanging.
Hanging was seen as a huge civilizational leap over, for instance, skinning prisoners alive.

Speaker 94 As products of the Enlightenment era, early American leaders like Thomas Jefferson campaigned to make sure that the punishments fit the crimes and that no one was executed for relatively minor offenses.

Speaker 94 Beginning with Pennsylvania in 1794, several states such as Vermont, Maryland, and New Hampshire sharply reduced the number of crimes that could result in the death penalty.

Speaker 119 Perhaps, not surprisingly, the South went in the opposite direction.

Speaker 62 There, the white population lived in fear of the enslaved African Americans they bought, sold, raped, whipped, and relentlessly forced to work without pay.

Speaker 62 Whites reported laying sleepless at night, imagining what might happen if they faced justice for their crimes.

Speaker 62 They wanted the African Americans they so abused to fear the consequences of any form of resistance.

Speaker 2 After repeated failed rebellions from 1704 to 1831, as well as the Haitian Revolution, which saw the death of many, if not all, slave owners in Haiti, legislators in the South greatly expanded the range of offenses for which enslaved African Americans and their suspected white allies could be executed.

Speaker 50 Enlightenment ideas were not extended to African Americans who were subjected to fatal tortures as excruciating as any experienced by accused heretics during the Inquisition in Europe.

Speaker 56 Enslaved men and women accused of rebellion or of trying to escape their captivity faced dismemberment or being burned with hot irons.

Speaker 92 This legacy of violence in the South contributed to the region's long-term love affair with capital punishment.

Speaker 62 However, even hangings, promoted as a kindlier way to kill, became a horror show. In Europe, executioners were trained professionals who quickly gained a lot of experience.

Speaker 62 In the United States, such killings were done by local officials, often sheriffs who might have little or no experience.

Speaker 62 At the gallows, executioners had to do some complicated math in order to do their jobs correctly.

Speaker 62 They had to calculate the weight of the victim in ratio to the length of the rope and the likely speed at which the condemned prisoner would drop through the trapdoor at the bottom of the gallows.

Speaker 62 If the executioner calculated correctly, the prisoner's neck would break at the end of the fall, theoretically killing the unfortunate victim instantly.

Speaker 62 Hanging was supposed to be clean and efficient, like the hanging carried out by the U.S. Army at the beginning of the movie The Dirty Dozen.

Speaker 120 Well, Niger,

Speaker 120 what did you think of the hanging? Looked very efficient.

Speaker 98 Authorities told themselves that hanging, when carried out appropriately and properly, was painless.

Speaker 113 That thesis, however, was obviously impossible to prove.

Speaker 25 For decades, hangings were public, and a set of religious rituals revolved and evolved around these events.

Speaker 44 With notable exceptions, before the noose was placed around their necks, the condemned told the sad tale of what led them to such a terrible fate.

Speaker 98 They repented their terrible crimes and begged God and society for forgiveness.

Speaker 96 The idea was that the death penalty would teach the masses that crime doesn't pay.

Speaker 64 Reality, however, often strayed from this script.

Speaker 62 Pretty early on, the leaders of the American Republic realized that the death penalty was actually morally corrupting, though most of them continued to support it.

Speaker 62 Benjamin Rush, who signed the Declaration of Independence, decried what he called the death penalty's, quote, brutalizing effect.

Speaker 62 Rush became one of the earliest voices for abolition of capital punishment. He argued that state violence made ordinary citizens more violent.

Speaker 119 And there's reason to believe that's true.

Speaker 44 Consider the crowds that often watched hangings and got drunk, and sometimes fights broke out as witnesses battled over the best view of the gallows.

Speaker 39 Postcards and mementos were made of famous lynchings in places like Dallas, Texas.

Speaker 2 And fights sometimes resulted in injury or death.

Speaker 25 Some in the crowds would spend their time at hangings, not learning somber moral lessons, but in fact picking the pockets of other witnesses caught up in the drama unfolding on the gallows.

Speaker 20 And executions were often followed by hours of looting, arson, assaults, and other mayhem, as the public would engage in rioting, not unlike modern cities when they celebrate a home team's win at the World Series.

Speaker 62 These unruly mobs unnerved the upper class. And starting with Rhode Island in 1833, states began to move hangings inside prison walls away from the public view.

Speaker 62 By 1845, public executions had been banned in all of New England.

Speaker 62 This upset death penalty abolitionists, who hoped that the routine horrors that unfolded during executions might lead to the end of capital punishment.

Speaker 62 Thus began the process where state governments increasingly killed people in the name of the public in a process shrouded in secrecy.

Speaker 25 Meanwhile, it's no secret that we have to pay our bills, so we'll be back after a few words from our sponsors.

Speaker 62 In 1899, in Samson County, North Carolina, a local hothead named R. Kinsales got into a heated exchange with a neighbor, John C.
Herring, at a country store.

Speaker 62 During the fight, Kinsales grabbed a butcher knife and repeatedly stabbed Herring, killing him.

Speaker 62 A few days later, he was arrested for the murder, but he escaped and he was on the loose for nine months.

Speaker 62 After a gunfight with a sheriff's posse, he was captured, put on trial, found guilty, and sentenced to die by hanging. There, the story got messy.

Speaker 62 We'll repeat, what we're about to say may be upsetting to some listeners.

Speaker 100 Kinsales was not one to passively accept his fate.

Speaker 104 While awaiting his execution, he tried to take his own life twice, the first time with sleeping pills and the second time by cutting his own throat.

Speaker 114 These attempts delayed the execution, but inevitably, Kinsales faced his appointment with the hangman on September 28th, 1900.

Speaker 102 Local authorities used a stepladder as a gallows.

Speaker 94 Kinsales did not fall from a sufficient height to break his neck, consequently, and the neck wound from his suicide attempt had not completely healed, so he was bleeding heavily as he dangled from the noose.

Speaker 25 A doctor told the sheriff and hundreds of other horrified spectators that Kinsales was still alive.

Speaker 62 Officers cut him down and hanged the unfortunate man a second time. This time he died.

Speaker 62 In an era in which executions took place all the time, Kinsal's gory death cut through the fog and made national news. The Virginia pilot called the scene revolting.

Speaker 62 During the history of hangings, hideous mistakes like this were common. Sometimes, because of an executioner's miscalculations, prisoners' heads were yanked off.

Speaker 62 Sometimes ropes ripped apart, with the prisoner falling to the ground only to be hanged again. During many hangings, the condemned slowly strangled to death.

Speaker 64 John Harris, a man hanged in Pennsylvania in 1913, actually screamed as he suffocated, prompting a headline in one newspaper, quote, prisoner tortured through bungling at an execution.

Speaker 119 According to an estimate made in 1993 by a legal team representing a client who was facing death by hanging in Washington state, between the years 1622 and 1993, authorities bungled 170 of about 8,000 legally authorized hangings, resulting in prolonged suffering for the prisoners and more than 2% of the death sentences carried out by this technique.

Speaker 62 The growing middle class and upper class in the United States became squeamish about hanging.

Speaker 62 As one writer put it, bourgeois audiences might tolerate the ghastliness of death itself, but not incompetence and mismanagement.

Speaker 62 By the early 1880s, the New York Times had begun publishing lengthy, detailed, and graphic accounts of hangings gone wrong.

Speaker 62 In 1885, in response to the mounting public concerns, New York Governor David Bennett Hill declared, the present mode of executing criminals by hanging has come come down to us from the Dark Ages.

Speaker 62 It may well be questioned whether the science of the present day cannot provide a means of taking the life of those condemned to die in a less barbarous manner.

Speaker 102 As the backlash against the extreme brutality of hanging grew among elites, the New York Medical Legal Society first suggested research into whether prisoners could be possibly executed by lethal injection in the 1870s.

Speaker 64 But a different technology arose that delayed the advent of that protocol by more than a century.

Speaker 62 Famously, Thomas Edison was a greedy man. He took credit for the inventions of his underpaid lab assistants who toiled at his Menlo, New Jersey laboratory.

Speaker 62 Edison was also a genius at public relations, and he would come to dominate several industries.

Speaker 62 In the early 1870s, his team had developed a feasible incandescent light bulb that ran on the direct current or DC system.

Speaker 122 As Edison himself described it, on October 21st, 1871,

Speaker 122 numerous experiments resulted in the production of a small unit lamp of comparatively enormous resistance.

Speaker 122 The filament being under conditions of great stability, after the result, I knew the problem approached commercial solution.

Speaker 86 In 1879, Edison submitted his patent for an electric lamp.

Speaker 44 In 1880, the Edison Illuminating Company opened for business and soon provided lights for New York and other cities.

Speaker 94 In the early days of the electric industry, fatal accidents sometimes happened because of the new technology.

Speaker 25 In 1881, George Lemuel Smith, an intoxicated Buffalo bricklayer, stumbled into an unlocked electric plant and accidentally fried himself by touching a generator.

Speaker 62 An autopsy led some doctors to conclude that Smith died quickly and painlessly.

Speaker 62 Many in the medical profession responded to Smith's untimely death by suggesting that perhaps electric power could provide a more reliable and less grotesque way to rid society of convicted murderers and rapists.

Speaker 113 Enter a Buffalo dentist, Alfred Porter Southwick, and Dr.

Speaker 2 George Fell of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, who both experimented with killing stray cats and dogs with electric current.

Speaker 106 The early results were often horrifying, with the animals sometimes burning alive.

Speaker 50 Nevertheless, the two published an article that described electrocution as the, quote, safest and kindest method of killing.

Speaker 62 In 1886, New York State formed a commission. The study of prisoners could humanely be put to death in a similar way.

Speaker 62 The so-called Jerry Commission falsely claimed that electrocuted animals tortured in a series of experiments died supposedly rapidly and efficiently.

Speaker 62 Thomas Edison would soon see a business opportunity in state killing.

Speaker 36 At the time, Edison was locked in a so-called current war with another robber baron business tycoon, George Westinghouse.

Speaker 2 Westinghouse's labs had developed a system that ran on alternating current, or AC, a system that was more efficient, more popular, and less prone to breakdown.

Speaker 84 Edison's DC system had already caused fatal electrocutions, but the so-called Wizard of Menlo Park wanted to prove that the much safer Westinghouse system was, in fact, dangerous.

Speaker 61 Edison had his engineers electrocute animals using the AC current in front of reporters to terrify the public about the system.

Speaker 100 His most sinister ploy, however, was conspiring with the state of New York to hook up its first electric chair, invented by the aforementioned Buffalo dentist and engineer, Alfred Southwick.

Speaker 36 And Edison connected that chair to an AC power system.

Speaker 62 The first man to face this new invention was William Kemmler, who was convicted of murdering his girlfriend with a hatchet during a drunken rage. The jury ordered him to die by electrocution.

Speaker 62 Edison saw an opportunity for Kemler to die in agony as the first man killed an electric chair in order to fatally damage Westinghouse's reputation and that of the AC current.

Speaker 62 Desperate to prevent his product from being associated with something so ghastly, Westinghouse prohibited the sale of his AC generators to New York State out of fear that they would be used to execute Kemmler.

Speaker 62 But Edison sent his men to find secondhand Westinghouse equipment, which ended up in the hands of prison officials. Westinghouse then secretly hired an attorney for Kemmler, but the appeals failed.

Speaker 62 At 6:38 in the morning, August 6th, 1890, Kemmler became an unwilling pioneer.

Speaker 44 On the day of his execution, witnesses were impressed by Kemmler's calm demeanor as he wished everyone in the death chamber good luck.

Speaker 25 After strapping Kemmer into the electric chair, the executioner pulled a switch, and Kemmler's body convulsed and became rigid.

Speaker 94 An attending physician announced he was not dead.

Speaker 25 Kemmler started to drool, and a second jolt was ordered.

Speaker 98 Kemmler started burning alive, and this time white smoke rose in the air, filling the room with what witnesses described as a quote pungent and sickening odor.

Speaker 62 Afterward, Westinghouse said of Kemmler's agonizing death, they would have done better with an axe.

Speaker 62 The mayhem didn't matter, and Edison's plot failed. New York officials considered the electrocution a success and stuck with the method for decades to come.

Speaker 62 Twenty six other states adopted the electric chair as a method of execution. Kemmler's death would be the first of many so-called botched executions over the next century.

Speaker 62 As Dasin Surat wrote in Gruesome Spectacles, 80 of the executions gone awry in the next century involved the electric chair, with the failures involving, as he wrote, mechanical breakdowns, others resulting in fire, smoke, the smell of burning flesh, and a prolonged period from the start to the completion.

Speaker 104 Sometimes the executed person's eyes popped out during electrocution.

Speaker 118 After death, the bodies of those electrocuted remained so hot that prison guards often caught blisters if they touched the body too soon.

Speaker 86 In 1923, a man named F.

Speaker 123 G.

Speaker 98 Bullen would be one of four executed in Arkansas on the same day.

Speaker 102 Prison officials actually placed him in a casket thinking he was dead when a guard noticed he was still breathing.

Speaker 112 Bullen was then carried back to the chair and electrocuted a second time, this time successfully.

Speaker 62 Before the start of the 20th century, critics knew that both hanging and the electric chair were exercises in barbarity.

Speaker 62 In the Lone Star State, Ferdinand Eugene Daniel, the editor of the Texas Medical Journal, was an advocate of eugenics.

Speaker 62 An opponent of capital punishment, he argued that castrating men from families with criminal histories would be a way to prevent criminals from being born in the first place.

Speaker 62 Castrating criminals was more humane, he said. than hanging or electrocuting their children when those offspring inevitably turned to a life of crime.

Speaker 62 Daniel accepted that executions would take place for the foreseeable future, so he wanted to make the death penalty a vehicle for medical research.

Speaker 87 Instead of hanging or electrocuting prisoners, Daniel suggested in a 1906 issue of the Texas Medical Journal that the state should sedate them and, while unconscious, subject them to medical experiments.

Speaker 117 Quote, inject into him various disease germs, watch their progress, and when through with him, inject about 10 drops of prussic acid into the veins of his arms, and he will die a painless death.

Speaker 33 Daniel wrote.

Speaker 20 Dr.

Speaker 94 Joseph Mengele and other Nazi scientists would conduct similar experiments a little more than three decades later.

Speaker 114 But as Professor Lane explained to us, even before Dr.

Speaker 88 Daniel made his disturbing suggestion in the Texas Medical Journal, doctors knew that death by lethal injection would be a horrifying experience.

Speaker 72 When states turned from hanging to the electric chair, this is back in 1890.

Speaker 72 There was actually a study. There was actually a report that recommended the electric chair.
And that report actually considered death by drugs, a lethal injection.

Speaker 72 And in that report, they said, we considered and rejected this.

Speaker 72 And they had two reasons. One was anatomical difficulties.

Speaker 62 Professor Lane noted that even in the 19th century, doctors knew that the the criminal population had a higher tendency towards drug abuse and poor health.

Speaker 62 That would make it difficult to access a vein with a needle in order to deliver lethal chemicals.

Speaker 62 Also, even a century ago, doctors were queasy about involvement in executions that violated the Hippocratic Oath, which says, in part, I will do no harm or injustice to patients or, quote, administer a poison to anyone when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course.

Speaker 62 Professor Lane noted that a government commission studying lethal injection in the late 19th century prophetically said that not only would the medical conditions of prisoners be an issue, but so would the likely refusal of doctors to take part because of ethical concerns.

Speaker 62 This would mean that lethal injection would be carried out by amateurs.

Speaker 72 So, you know, these people

Speaker 72 have notoriously bad veins. They are elderly.
They are of poor health. They are often former drug users.
You know, how did we know this in 1890 and didn't think about this in 1977?

Speaker 72 But that was one reason. The other reason was they said, we're not going to be able to do this without the medical profession.
We're not going to be able to do it competently.

Speaker 72 And the sustained and strong opposition of the medical profession makes this not viable.

Speaker 20 There were other, less popular alternatives alternatives to hanging in the electric chair in the 1900s.

Speaker 57 In 1924, Nevada became the first state to execute someone in a gas chamber.

Speaker 102 Again, the euthanasia of stray pets in animal shelters provided a model for human executions.

Speaker 20 And again, there were a lot of problems.

Speaker 119 Prisoners resisted breathing in the poisonous gas, and this natural resistance slowed their deaths.

Speaker 102 The big spaces and gas chambers often limited the effectiveness of the poison gas, and in the earliest such executions, the chambers themselves sometimes leaked, putting witnesses in danger.

Speaker 62 As with the electric chair, death penalty advocates claimed that the modern technology had provided a guilt-free method for the government to kill people.

Speaker 62 The reality couldn't be farther from the truth. Dr.
Richard Treitzmann from John Hopkins University School of Medicine wrote, quote, the person is unquestionably experiencing pain and extreme anxiety.

Speaker 62 The sensation is similar to the pain felt by a person during a heart attack, where essentially the heart is being deprived of oxygen.

Speaker 117 11 states, including California, eventually adopted death by poison gas as their preferred method of execution.

Speaker 20 But witnesses consistently reported the condemned seemed to die agonizing, struggling deaths, in which they convulsed and retched and sometimes screamed.

Speaker 87 In 1960, California executed Carol Chessman, a convicted rapist who authored numerous acclaimed books while on death row.

Speaker 112 Before his execution, Chessman told reporters who would witness his death that he would nod his head if he was experiencing physical pain while he was gassed.

Speaker 113 Reporters said that Chusman indeed nodded his head multiple times as he choked in the poison fumes.

Speaker 62 By the time of Chessman's death, the United States was less than a decade from the longest pause in executions in its history.

Speaker 62 Numerous judicial challenges to capital punishment, based on numerous racial biases, police misconduct, and other issues, resulted in a de facto moratorium on executions by the mid-1960s.

Speaker 62 At issue was the obvious racism of the death penalty, including who was charged with capital crimes and who ended up the target of state killing.

Speaker 62 As Brian Stevenson, a New York University law professor and the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, explained in 2007.

Speaker 58 In the United States, we are struggling with capital punishment and its implementation.

Speaker 27 A short, quick legal history.

Speaker 58 In 1972, the United States Supreme Court struck down the death penalty after recognizing that it was being applied in an arbitrary manner.

Speaker 58 The court in 72 noted that 87% of the people executed for the crime of rape were black men convicted of raping white women.

Speaker 58 100% of the people executed in the United States between 1930 and 1972 for the crime of rape were executed for offenses involving victims who were white, even though it was believed that women of color were three times as likely to be the victims of sexual assault.

Speaker 62 That racism would play a major factor in the largest pause in executions in the history of the American death penalty.

Speaker 62 The NAACP's legal defense fund and the ACLU filed challenges to the death penalty based on racial bias across the country, and these legal teams won numerous stays of execution.

Speaker 62 As Harvard law professor Cal Steicher observed in a YouTube video, a de facto ban of executions had taken place by the late 1960s.

Speaker 125 The death penalty was in decline already in the 1960s in the United States, as it was in Europe. But the LDF's litigation campaign brought it to a complete halt.

Speaker 125 So from 1967 to 1972, in the five years prior to the decision in Fuhrman v. Georgia, there were no executions in the United States.

Speaker 25 Three death penalty cases, Fuhrman v.

Speaker 115 Georgia, Jackson versus Georgia, and Branch v.

Speaker 2 Texas, reached the United States Supreme Court and were consolidated in 1972.

Speaker 94 All three defendants were African-American, and Jackson and Branch were charged with raping white women.

Speaker 95 As previously noted, no white man had ever been executed for the rape of an African-American woman or child in American history.

Speaker 2 In June 1972, the U.S.

Speaker 88 Supreme Court issued a 5-4 decision in Furman v.

Speaker 94 Georgia, ruling that defendants received the death penalty in such a fashion that capital punishment as then practiced was unconstitutional.

Speaker 125 So that there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. To use the words that they used, it was wantonly and freakishly imposed.

Speaker 125 The immediate aftermath of Furman was dramatic.

Speaker 125 Everyone who had been sentenced to death, and there were some 600-ish people on death row at the time of the Furman litigation, all had their death penalties invalidated.

Speaker 125 So they were all sent to the general population. They had to be re-sentenced to a sentence other than death.

Speaker 125 Moreover, when the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty as it then existed, anyone whose death sentence was pending, that case had to be dropped because those statutes were no longer valid.

Speaker 62 No executions took place for another four years.

Speaker 62 The Supreme Court had ruled executions were unconstitutional when the instructions juries were given in capital cases were too vague.

Speaker 62 This gave states like Texas a chance to rewrite their death penalty laws. By 1976, 35 states had adopted new statutes addressing the issues raised in Furman.
On July 2nd, 1976, in its Gregg v.

Speaker 62 Georgia decision, the Supreme Court by a 7-2 margin upheld the death penalty in states like Texas, where the court found jury instructions were clear and specific.

Speaker 62 The death penalty was set to resume after a decade-long pause. It took a mere 199 days for state killing to resume.
Utah executed a murderer, Gary Gilmore, by firing squad on January 17, 1977.

Speaker 57 The extreme violence of Gilmore's execution, which inspired a 1979 Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism-based novel called The Executioner's Song, sparked a renewed debate over the brutality of capital punishment and whether it's compatible with modern society.

Speaker 98 Nevertheless, the state of Oklahoma charged ahead, but they faced a problem.

Speaker 84 As Professor Lane writes, the Oklahoma electric chair was falling apart and needed to be repaired.

Speaker 88 But by the 1970s, many legislators were put off by the brutality of that execution method and sought something more modern.

Speaker 62 Meanwhile, a Dallas television reporter, Tony Garrett, filed suit to allow television cameras to film executions, and a federal district court granted a preliminary injunction in the reporter's favor.

Speaker 62 That injunction was later overturned, but politicians across the country were unnerved at the prospect of the public watching a man essentially burn alive in their names and what that could do to support for the death penalty.

Speaker 84 It was at this time that a member of the Oklahoma legislature approached the medical community and asked them for help in designing a new protocol for death by lethal injection.

Speaker 85 Politicians thought prisoners could be put to sleep permanently, like veterinarians euthanizing animals, but doctors wanted nothing to do with killing people.

Speaker 84 That's when Oklahoma State Coroner Dr.

Speaker 100 G.

Speaker 2 Chapman stepped in.

Speaker 116 Referring to the physicians who refused to help, he said, quote, to hell with them.

Speaker 34 Let's do this.

Speaker 2 Professor Lane explained what happened next.

Speaker 72 I document in the book, Legislators, talking about how,

Speaker 72 you know, I don't know that the country's going to want to see this sort of violence. All we've got is the electric chair.
All we've got is the gas chamber.

Speaker 72 People are going to be, you know, queasy about this.

Speaker 72 and we need to find a different way.

Speaker 72 And unknown to many, or at least unappreciated, is the fact that a federal court had recognized at the time a First Amendment right to televise executions.

Speaker 72 Now, it wouldn't last, but nobody could have known that.

Speaker 72 And so one of the things I also found was state legislators talking about, gosh, we can't, you know, we can't have an electrocution in someone's living room, right?

Speaker 72 The public is not going to go for this.

Speaker 72 And so they were looking for a different way. They talked about, what about a death by drugs?

Speaker 72 And they are asking the state medical association. They're asking their personal doctors.
They're asking everybody they can find. No one wants to play.

Speaker 72 But they get to, and this is in Oklahoma. They get to the state medical examiner, Dr.
Jay Chapman. And he refers to himself as

Speaker 72 an expert in dead bodies, but not in how to get them that way.

Speaker 62 In spite of his self-confessed ignorance, Chapman made up out of thin air, a three-drug protocol that would be used in executions across the country for the next three decades.

Speaker 62 Initially, he proposed a two-drug protocol, but decided that if two drugs were deadly, three would be even more lethal.

Speaker 62 Chapman's cocktail included, in order, sodium theopental, which was designed to kill like a barbituid overdose, pancuronium bromide, which paralyzes the diaphragm in order to stop breathing, and potassium chloride, which was intended to cause a cardiac arrest.

Speaker 115 Chapman admitted he did no research into these drugs or into how they interacted with each other, and neither did the state of Oklahoma when they adopted this procedure.

Speaker 57 Despite this, Chapman's method of execution would come to be used by every single state that had the death penalty.

Speaker 96 Lane described her shock when she came across interviews with Chapman, who seemed completely glib about about what prisoners might experience under this execution method.

Speaker 72 And I later came across

Speaker 72 an interview of him where they asked, you know, how did you come up with the three drug protocol that every state used, every single state for 35, 40 years?

Speaker 72 And he said, I didn't do any research. I just thought about what might be useful, what you might need.
You wanted two drugs so that if one didn't kill them, the other did.

Speaker 72 And then the interviewer said, Well, why did you add a third drug? And he said, Why not? I didn't do any research. Why does it matter? Why I chose it?

Speaker 72 So he makes it up, and

Speaker 72 the state of Oklahoma adopts it basically in an afternoon. No expert testimony, no committee hearings,

Speaker 72 no review of the medical, science, veterinary literature, nothing.

Speaker 72 And it takes hold.

Speaker 62 And all of the other states blindly follow it it's possible chapman may not have cared but if he had done any research he would have found that the components of his three drug protocol worked at cross purposes anesthesiologists believe that the amount and speed at which the sodium theopentol is administered does not produce an anesthetic effect deep enough for the executed prisoner to be unaware of what's happening to them meanwhile the sodium theopentol also slows down blood circulation so dramatically that it depresses the effectiveness of the potassium chloride, causing those receiving the drug to suffer a racing heart but not have a fatal heart attack.

Speaker 62 The combined effect in many cases is a slow suffocation that involves pulmonary edema, the technical term for fluid in the lungs.

Speaker 62 In essence, with lethal injection, states slowly drown the paralyzed who struggle but are unable to cry for help.

Speaker 62 When lethal injections injections have not gone according to plan, the execution sometimes lasts hours, the agonizing deaths hidden from the general public.

Speaker 113 Some states have recently abandoned the three drug protocol, but not for humanitarian reasons.

Speaker 71 They've done so because of the difficulty of obtaining all the drugs from pharmaceutical firms that have resisted participating in capital punishment.

Speaker 103 As of this year, 24 states provide for some form of lethal injection.

Speaker 2 And as previously mentioned, Texas launched the lethal injection era in 1982 with the the execution of Charlie Brooks.

Speaker 103 In the next episode, we'll discuss that execution.

Speaker 106 We'll discuss why lethal injections peaked in the 90s, how states got around resistance from drug companies that manufactured the chemicals used in the injections, how the medical profession has worked together to thwart this particularly American machinery of death, and how this has all been a mixed blessing for the approximately 2,100 prisoners on death row.

Speaker 112 I'm Stephen Moncelli for It Could Happen Here.

Speaker 62 And until next time, I'm Michael Phillips. Thanks for listening.

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Speaker 7 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 8 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 9 If we got clear facts, maybe we can calm down a little.

Speaker 13 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 15 Let's meet at the facts. Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 12 NBC News, reporting for America.

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Speaker 17 A Dudley Board-certified OBGYN, an endocrinologist doctor, a naturopathic and licensed acupuncture doctor, and a certified health coach walk into a room. What do they talk about?

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Speaker 20 A warning.

Speaker 71 This episode includes violent content, which some listeners might find disturbing.

Speaker 62 I'm Michael Phillips, an historian and the author of A History of Racism in Dallas called White Metropolis, and the co-author with longtime journalist Betsy Freeoff of A History of Eugenics in Texas called The Purifying Knife.

Speaker 85 And I'm Stephen Monticelli.

Speaker 113 I'm an investigative reporter who specializes in political extremism and far-right internet culture, and I contribute to outlets like the Texas Observer, The Barbed Wire, and more.

Speaker 62 In the last episode, we began exploring the shady history behind the most popular form of capital punishment in the United States, lethal injection.

Speaker 62 We described how, one after another, execution by hanging, then the electric chair, and then the gas chamber was touted as the cleanest, quickest, most modern, and painless way to put a person to death.

Speaker 62 Each method, however, proved more violent and gruesome than previously expected.

Speaker 62 In order to prevent a groundswell of opposition to the death penalty, politicians responded by abolishing public executions and in the 1970s latched on to lethal injection as the newest, gentlest, and kindest method of state killing.

Speaker 113 As discussed in the first episode, the lethal injection protocol was designed by an Oklahoma coroner, Dr.

Speaker 99 Stephen Crawford, who once admitted to an interviewer that although he was an expert in dead bodies, he didn't know how to get them that way.

Speaker 64 Authorities turned to Crawford because doctors, who dealt with living bodies, wanted nothing to do with executions.

Speaker 98 So Crawford designed a three-drug protocol for executions that he made up pretty much out of thin air, reasoning that if one deadly drug was good for killing, then three drugs would be even better.

Speaker 98 The problem was that the three drugs counteract each other and would result in longer executions and in deaths that resembled slow drowning.

Speaker 62 Crawford did no homework, and neither did the more than 30 states that eventually adopted lethal injection as the preferred method of execution.

Speaker 62 This occurred after the Supreme Court brought the death penalty back to life with its 1976 Gregg v. Georgia decision, following a 10-year pause.

Speaker 62 It would not be until December 7, 1982, that the state of Texas carried out the first execution by lethal injection in the world.

Speaker 62 In this episode, we'll talk to a journalist, Dick Revis, who witnessed Brooks' execution.

Speaker 29 One thing I noticed was that there were a half dozen or more lawnmen in there who had on cowboy hats. They did not remove them when Charlie was killed.
And I also thought that wasn't quite right.

Speaker 29 But in any case, I don't recall

Speaker 29 anybody saying anything. We were silent while all of this was going on.

Speaker 38 And

Speaker 29 Charlie only spoke to say alau Akbar, and he was dying when that happened. It was obvious that he was scared to death.

Speaker 105 Revis told us that Brooks, as he recalled it, seemingly drifted off to sleep.

Speaker 56 But that's not all that may have been occurring.

Speaker 2 According to Professor Karina Lane, the author of the recently published book, Secrets of the Killing State, who you heard from in the first episode, something very different was likely going on in Brooks' mind and body.

Speaker 56 According to Lane, Brooks was slowly suffocating.

Speaker 98 Medical experts, Lane, said, believe that those executed with lethal injections are often not fully unconscious, and that the paralytic drugs fed into their veins prevent them from fully communicating their suffering, even as they may be aware of it.

Speaker 72 The courts that have heard this medical testimony, there was a court in Ohio and said,

Speaker 72 yeah, you know, all of the medical experts are describing acute pulmonary edema as a drowning from within.

Speaker 72 It is, you can't catch your breath, you've got fluid coming into your lungs, and you can't do anything about it.

Speaker 72 And the court said, you know, this is the sensation akin to waterboarding. You know, we're waterboarding people to death.
That's what we're actually doing.

Speaker 62 In this episode, episode, we'll also talk about how the modern death penalty peaked in the 1990s and why pressure from drug manufacturers and activists led not only to a decline in executions, but the revival in some states of some very old forms of execution, such as the electric chair and the firing squad.

Speaker 112 It's a fascinating but often frightening story, and one that we'll have to continue after perhaps less gripping messages from our sponsors.

Speaker 62 Big changes came to the death penalty in Texas in 1923.

Speaker 62 Before then, hangings were carried out by sheriffs in the counties where the murders, rapes, and other crimes committed by the prisoner took place.

Speaker 62 Many of the sheriffs were inexperienced in hanging and goring mishaps took place.

Speaker 62 Texas' last public execution unfolded on August 31st, 1923, when African-American Nathan Lee was hanged before 150 spectators in Brazoria County.

Speaker 62 From 1900 to 1920, close to 70% of the inmates executed in Texas were African American.

Speaker 112 In 1923, Texas sought to modernize and bring industrial efficiency to state killing.

Speaker 64 All executions henceforth would be carried out at the state prison in Huntsville, and prisoners would die in an electric chair.

Speaker 92 Locals gave it a glib name, Old Sparky.

Speaker 114 the state's new killing machine, got a workout the day it debuted, February 8th, 1925.

Speaker 113 Texas executed five prisoners that day, all black men.

Speaker 101 Between that date and July 30th, 1964, when the state electrocuted Joseph Johnson, a man convicted of fatally shooting a store owner during a robbery, Texas sent 361 inmates to the electric chair.

Speaker 83 African Americans made up 63% of the prisoners who died in that chair, while 7% of those who died in the electric chair were Mexican-American.

Speaker 90 Texas politicians insisted that their tough-on-crime policies served as a deterrent.

Speaker 25 But in fact, from 1933 to 1964, the year Joseph Johnson was executed, the murder rate in Texas was 12.7 per 100,000 people, the eighth highest in the United States.

Speaker 49 Nevertheless, Texas leaders have continued to justify the death penalty in spite of its seemingly negligible impact on the state's violent culture.

Speaker 100 And the violence of capital punishment was about performative toughness, not about stopping future murders, as a reporter who witnessed a hanging laments in the film In Cold Blood.

Speaker 60 And then, next month,

Speaker 29 next year,

Speaker 29 same thing will happen again.

Speaker 60 Maybe this will help to stop it.

Speaker 29 It never had.

Speaker 62 After Johnson, Texas didn't execute another inmate for 18 years. Following the Gregg v.
Georgia decision, Texas faced a potential public relations disaster.

Speaker 62 As we mentioned last episode, Dallas television reporter Tony Garrett filed suit to allow television cameras to film executions, and a federal district court granted a preliminary injunction in the reporter's favor.

Speaker 62 That injunction was later overturned, but under the Texas Capitol dome, there was worry about what would happen to support for the death penalty if an electrocution was broadcast live.

Speaker 62 The legislator who wrote Texas' new death penalty law, the Gregg decision, said he was, quote, repulsed by the idea of an electrocution taking place in someone's living room.

Speaker 62 Lethal injection, as Professor Lane had put it, had visual appeal because it would resemble healthful medical procedures and because, quote, states have been euthanizing pets with pentode barbitol since the 1930s.

Speaker 50 Animals are typically put to sleep with a two-drug protocol.

Speaker 2 First, a sedative, and then the drug that does the deed.

Speaker 20 But the three-drug protocol that would be adopted by most states that allowed capital punishment produced nightmarish results that were typically invisible to witnesses.

Speaker 100 States typically allowed family members of the crime victim to attend executions, and the condemned also got to choose witnesses.

Speaker 71 In the early days of Texas's reborn death penalty, the state's populist Democratic Attorney General Jim Maddox liked to make a show of attending each execution.

Speaker 121 And though much of the death penalty process has been shrouded in secrecy, such as who is providing the lethal chemicals, states also allowed reporters to attend executions so that they could serve as the eyes and ears of the public.

Speaker 62 In his younger days, Dick Revis was a civil rights activist who served time in an Alabama jail for his efforts to secure voting rights for African Americans.

Speaker 62 Revis became a journalist, and by the early 1980s, he was a frequent contributor to Texas Monthly, one of the state's premier investigative publications.

Speaker 62 In 1982, he got the chance to witness an event that had never happened in the United States or perhaps even the world.

Speaker 62 The Texas Department of Corrections Corrections would soon pioneer the use of lethal injection, although the first person to be put to death in this manner was still unclear.

Speaker 29 I recall a meeting with an editor and they said, somehow they told me that there's a lady at the Capitol or a lady in the government in Austin, which is where I was living then, who was in charge.

Speaker 29 of scheduling the executions.

Speaker 29 So I called her up and she said, well, she didn't have any on schedule, but she could give me the names of, it was either four or five people who would be first.

Speaker 29 And one of them was Candyman,

Speaker 29 the fellow who poisoned his own child, put him poisoned

Speaker 29 in some candy at Halloween.

Speaker 57 Revis is referring to Ronald Clark O'Brien, a Houston-area optician who fell into debt.

Speaker 83 He was $100,000 deep.

Speaker 2 So he bought a life insurance policy on his eight-year-old son and daughter before he prepared five pixie sticks poisoned with potassium cyanide.

Speaker 100 And on Halloween night in 1974, he went trick-or-cheating with his children, a neighbor, and that man's two children.

Speaker 2 The group went to an abandoned house and knocked on the door, and when no one answered, O'Brien convinced the rest of the group to move on.

Speaker 48 He caught up with them later and claimed that someone had, in fact, answered the door, and then he handed out four of the poisoned candies to the children.

Speaker 86 When the O'Briens returned home, the killer handed the fifth pixie stick to a neighborhood child.

Speaker 98 Later that night, O'Brien told his children that they could enjoy one candy from the evening, and he urged them to choose the pixie sticks.

Speaker 57 And when his child, Timothy, complained the candy tasted bitter, O'Brien gave him Kool-Aid to wash down the poison.

Speaker 49 Timothy started vomiting and died on the way to the hospital.

Speaker 62 None of the other children tried the poisoned candy that night. O'Brien claimed that a malevolent stranger had poisoned the

Speaker 62 and he sang at his son's funeral.

Speaker 62 His story fell apart, however, when the police discovered the life insurance policies, when O'Brien was unable to identify the house where he'd been supposedly handed the pixie sticks, and when the cops found out that O'Brien had purchased cyanide from a chemical store in Houston, a jury sentenced him to death on June 3, 1975.

Speaker 62 The murder created a lasting national legacy, sparking paranoia about the safety of trick-or-treating.

Speaker 124 The state of Texas knew that executing O'Brien would be politically popular and would probably boost support for the death penalty.

Speaker 88 Not knowing which resident of Texas' death row would be strapped to the gurney first, Revis ended up interviewing all but one inmate on the list he had been given.

Speaker 118 The appeals process, however, is unpredictable, and a Fort Worth man, known for most of his life as Charlie Brooks, would end up winning the dubious honor of being the first to be put to death by lethal injection.

Speaker 69 He was convicted for the fatal shooting of a 26-year-old mechanic, David Gregory, during a 1976 robbery.

Speaker 62 By the time Revis interviewed him, Brooks had converted to Islam and taken the name Sharif Ahmad Abdul Rahim. That is the name we will use referring to him for the rest of the episode.

Speaker 62 Abdul Rahim had committed the robbery with another man, Woody Lourdes. He posed as someone wanting to buy a used car and asked to take a test drive.
Gregory agreed to ride with him.

Speaker 62 Abdul Rahim picked up Lourdes. The pair threw Gregory in a car trunk, drove him to a ramshackle motel, tied him to a chair, and taped his mouth shut.

Speaker 62 Abdul Rahim and Lourdes accused each other of firing the fatal shot. No weapon was ever found.

Speaker 62 Lourdes eventually received the death penalty, but after that was overturned, he reached an agreement with prosecutors and received a 40-year sentence. He would end up serving only 11.

Speaker 62 The disparity in sentencing is one of the defining features of how capital punishment is carried out, even after Greg v. Georgia had supposedly addressed that issue.

Speaker 63 Shortly before his execution, Abdul Rahim insisted on his innocence, but according to Revis, the condemned man was lying.

Speaker 52 Revis described to us his relationship with Abdul Rahim, aka Charlie Brooks.

Speaker 29 Charlie was very alert, fast on his feet, engaged. He was not moping around sad.
He had a sense of humor. He told me in the first interview I had with him

Speaker 29 that he was innocent

Speaker 29 and that this was racial discrimination, that they executed more blacks than whites. And I told him, oh, what you want is for them to execute more white people, huh?

Speaker 29 And that stunned him because I think no one had ever said that to him.

Speaker 29 But that would do away with racial discrimination. And there's lots of white people need executing too, was my way of thinking.

Speaker 45 And he didn't get mad at me or anything.

Speaker 29 He kind of laughed at it himself after he paused to understand the question.

Speaker 29 Then he kind of laughed at it himself.

Speaker 29 But I would say he was

Speaker 29 even

Speaker 29 until they got him strapped down,

Speaker 29 he was in control of his own body. His mind was in great shape.

Speaker 29 He lied to me about

Speaker 29 whether or not he was innocent.

Speaker 99 Brooks told Revis that although the gun went off, he didn't pull the trigger.

Speaker 2 It was an accident.

Speaker 29 At some point, I got him to say that, oh, the gun went off.

Speaker 29 And I went and pulled the transcript of his criminal trial.

Speaker 22 The gun was a revolver, not an automatic.

Speaker 29 Revolvers don't go off.

Speaker 29 To test that theory, I even took one I had and banged it on a table while it was loaded and all, and nothing happened. Revolvers don't go off until they've been

Speaker 29 caught.

Speaker 29 Unless they've been caught, they can't go off.

Speaker 114 We'll return to the story of the world's first execution by lethal injection and the deceptive way it was used to win public support for capital punishment after this lovely ad break.

Speaker 62 There was a little bit of last-minute drama as zero hour for the execution of Charlie Brooks, aka Abdul Rahim, approached. The Supreme Court rejected his appeal for the last time.

Speaker 62 Shortly before the execution was scheduled to begin, Jack Strickland, the prosecutor in Abdul Rahim's murder trial, had second thoughts about the differences between the condemned man's sentence and that of his accomplice.

Speaker 62 Strickland testified on Abdul Rahim's behalf, but to no avail. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals said the defense team had presented no new information that would justify a stay of execution.

Speaker 62 Just after midnight, State Attorney General Mark White called officials in Huntsville and told them that the historic execution could begin.

Speaker 50 From 1982, the year of Abdul Rahim's execution, until 2011, Texas allowed prisoners facing executions a choice of a last meal of their choosing.

Speaker 100 Abdul Rahim's request, however, was rejected.

Speaker 29 He told me that for his last meal, he wanted fried shrimp and oysters.

Speaker 29 And he said he had told the authorities that that's what he wanted for his last meal.

Speaker 29 When I got down there, I was told that there was no shellfish in the prison systems kitchens, and Charlie had to pick. He finally picked steak and peach cobbler.
But I felt bad about that

Speaker 29 because the prison people knew that they could go to the grocery store and buy whatever Charlie wanted, and they didn't do it.

Speaker 29 And it was sort of, I thought it was an indignity they inflicted on him. So when I went down for the execution, I went down in the afternoon execution was that night

Speaker 29 i went out and ate fish

Speaker 29 just to

Speaker 29 how do you say i don't know because of the situation

Speaker 115 texas would end this final meal for prisoners on death row in 2011.

Speaker 95 that's because of lawrence russell brewer who was one of three white supremacists who chained an african-american man james bird to the back of a car in jasper Texas, and dragged him to death on June 7th, 1998.

Speaker 93 As a last act of bitter defiance, on the date of Brewer's execution, September 21st, 2011, Brewer ordered a last meal that included two chicken-fried steaks, a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, fried okra, a pound of barbecue, three fajitas, a meat lover's pizza, a pint of ice cream, and a slab of peanut butter fudge with crust of peanuts.

Speaker 31 When he received all the food, he refused to touch a bite.

Speaker 90 State Senator John Whitmire complained bitterly at the waste and expense lavished on such an infamous killer, and prison officials immediately changed the policy.

Speaker 103 Today, those facing execution are now only fed the same meal other prisoners receive that day.

Speaker 62 Revis believes that the process of being strapped down to a hospital like Gurney is humiliating to those being executed.

Speaker 29 Men die with more dignity when they're on their feet,

Speaker 29 for example, as walking to a scaffold, when they still feel in control

Speaker 29 of their lives.

Speaker 29 The hardest thing about lethal injections is that they strap you down where you can't move.

Speaker 29 And you're sitting there absolutely helpless

Speaker 29 until the drugs take effect.

Speaker 62 Revis described the atmosphere in the death chamber as Abdul Rahim was executed as tense and quiet. A prison girlfriend, as Revis describes her, Vanessa Sapp was present, as were numerous officials.

Speaker 29 First of all, the room is too small. My recollection is there was a circular set of chairs

Speaker 29 threading out 10 feet, 20 feet

Speaker 29 in a curve. It may not, it may have been a corner, but it was barely room to hold the lawmen who wanted to witness the execution.
And Vanessa Sapp

Speaker 22 and three reporters.

Speaker 29 His wife was not present. She didn't want to be, and she didn't want the kids to see it.
As for the audience reaction, I don't recall that there was anything dramatic.

Speaker 29 No, it seemed more routine.

Speaker 103 Inspired by the story of Carol Chessman, the author and rapist executed in the gas chamber in 1960, who worked out a signal he could send to reporters if he was suffering during the execution, Rivas and Abdul Rahim worked out a similar arrangement.

Speaker 97 If Abdul Rahim was suffering as he was dying, he would shake his head.

Speaker 25 Revis would later regret making that arrangement.

Speaker 29 I interviewed him before

Speaker 29 the execution, and we came up with an idea. Unfortunately, it was mine.

Speaker 29 That if he felt pain while he was dying,

Speaker 29 that he should shake his head.

Speaker 22 So I decided.

Speaker 29 And I say it's unfortunate because

Speaker 29 as things were, we were unable to, I was unable to determine if he was giving me that signal.

Speaker 62 To Revis, it appeared that Abdul Rahim had simply drifted off to sleep.

Speaker 29 He seemed to die peacefully. I had to put down a dog

Speaker 22 a couple of years ago or have the dog put down.

Speaker 29 And I was with him while that happened.

Speaker 29 And I couldn't, how do you say?

Speaker 29 After seeing those two things, I said, I wish I could die that way.

Speaker 29 There was no evidence with my dog, for example, that there was any pain. It was like I put him to sleep.
And I think that's what they did with Charlie, but

Speaker 29 it would take a doctor to know.

Speaker 62 Of course, Abdul Rahim's death was the first of its kind.

Speaker 62 As we mentioned last time, the three drug protocol that was used by most states over the last three decades was concocted out of thin air by someone no expertise on the effect of these drugs together on the human body.

Speaker 62 Abdul Rahim's execution was a medical experiment conducted with no prior research.

Speaker 62 Professor Lane said that since Abdul Rahim's execution, doctors have had a chance to perform autopsies on those executed by lethal injection, and witnesses have heard the cries of those who were able to speak while dying on the gurney.

Speaker 72 You know, the state experts are saying, oh, this first drug, you're going to be

Speaker 72 99.999% of the public would be, you know, out and dead within a minute. You don't even have to worry about those other super torturous drugs.
And it's like, yeah, that's not what was happening.

Speaker 72 They said they would stop breathing within a minute.

Speaker 72 And there was some pretty prominent litigation, the Borales case out in California, where they looked at the executions by lethal injection and said over half of them,

Speaker 72 they actually did not stop breathing within a minute. In fact, it was eight and nine minutes.

Speaker 72 And it did not kill them within two minutes of injecting that third drug, which is called potassium chloride, but it's referred to as liquid fire.

Speaker 72 And it chemically burns the veins as it races to the heart where it induces a cardiac arrest.

Speaker 72 So they're like, you know, the experts are like, oh, you know, that it's going to bring death in two minutes. That didn't happen.
Like none of this was happening as the state.

Speaker 72 and the state's experts were so confidently just saying.

Speaker 72 And it turns out, you know, no one had ever ever studied these drugs in these amounts. Nobody had ever injected these drugs in these amounts into people.
This is not what was used.

Speaker 72 I mean, that's interesting, too. Like, this is not the drug that was used to euthanize pets.
This is not the drug that was used for physician-assisted suicide.

Speaker 72 So it's like three totally different drugs.

Speaker 72 And, you know, not only is nobody studied or nobody knew how they would work, but nobody could have predicted how they would have worked together.

Speaker 56 As discussed in our last episode, the lethal injection that killed Abdul Rahim included three drugs, sodium theopentol, a heavy sedative, pancoronium bromide meant to suffocate the prisoner, and potassium chloride meant to trigger a cardiac arrest.

Speaker 99 As Professor Lane wrote in her book, Secrets of the Killing State, Because of one of the drugs used in the three-drug protocol, the drugs work poorly when combined.

Speaker 98 Quote, the pancorium bromide couples the inability to breathe with the inability to struggle.

Speaker 86 They cannot fight or scream or even writhe in pain.

Speaker 62 But all would seem calm on the surface. Texas's experiment in lethal injection was a political success.

Speaker 62 And for a while, the novelty of the revived death penalty brought back memories of some public hangings.

Speaker 62 Students from nearby Sam Houston State University would show up and hold drunken parties outside the prison in Huntsville on the night of executions, cheering loudly enough that they could be heard inside the death chamber.

Speaker 62 The night that Ronald Clark O'Brien, the infamous candy man who killed his son for insurance money, died, a crowd of about 300 celebrated outside, some yelling trick-or-treat at the scheduled time of the execution and pelting anti-death penalty protesters with candy.

Speaker 62 A huge cheer erupted when the officials of the Wallace unit left, signaling that O'Brien had died.

Speaker 91 A local bar threw a Halloween party.

Speaker 2 Texas politicians made support for the death penalty central to their campaigns in this era.

Speaker 112 In the 1990 Democratic Party gubernatorial primary, former Texas Governor Mark White faced off against the state Attorney General Jim Maddox and the eventual winner, state treasurer Ann Richards.

Speaker 57 White and Maddox ran almost identical campaign ads, both walking past larger-than-life mugshots of murderers who were executed under their watch and claiming credit for meting out justice.

Speaker 60 Consider this ad for White:

Speaker 120 These hardened criminals will never again murder, rape, or deal drugs. As governor, I made sure they received the ultimate punishment, death, and Texas is a safer place for it.

Speaker 120 But tough talk isn't enough. The criminals know how to tangle up the courts and delay executions.
To bring them to justice takes strength and dedication. Because if the governor flinches, they win.

Speaker 120 Only a governor can make executions happen. I did, and I will.

Speaker 118 The popularity of the death penalty was sealed for decades.

Speaker 97 Starting with Abdul Rahim, Texas has led the United States in state killing.

Speaker 36 As of September 27th, Texas had carried out 596 executions, more than 36% of all of the executions that have unfolded since the United States Supreme Court allowed the death penalty to resume in this country in 1976.

Speaker 62 More than 40% of those executed in Texas since 1982 have been African-American. Almost 30% have been Mexican-American.
In 2024, Texas executed six people. Only one was white.

Speaker 94 Meanwhile, Texas put to death 63 prisoners who committed their crimes before they reached the age of 21.

Speaker 93 According to the Texas Coalition Against the Death Penalty, since 1973, 18 people sent to Texas death row were later exonerated out of about 200 nationally.

Speaker 103 And the group argues that there is strong evidence that at least six put to death in Huntsville were actually innocent.

Speaker 62 Professor Lane argues that not only does death by lethal injection violate the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment, but that most defendants facing the death penalty cannot afford adequate legal counsel, and that an alarming number of those sent to death row and in some cases executed have been innocent.

Speaker 72 200 people have been exonerated from death row. 200.

Speaker 72 And when you put that next to the 1,600 executions that we've had in the modern era, what we really have is for every eight executions, there's one exoneration.

Speaker 59 That is a terrible, terrible number, right?

Speaker 72 For every eight times we kill someone, we almost killed the wrong person. And then there was this National Academy of Sciences report that came out.
This is the Gross report, Samuel Gross.

Speaker 72 And they said, here's a conservative estimate: 4.1%

Speaker 72 of all people on death row today

Speaker 72 are factually innocent. 4.1%.
That's one in 25.

Speaker 62 According to the Texas Coalition Against the Death Penalty, as of 2014, the total legal cost of executing a prisoner was nearly $4 million as opposed to the $1.3 million spent to keep someone in prison for life.

Speaker 62 Lane argues that morality aside, capital punishment is catastrophically expensive.

Speaker 62 Imposing sentences of life without parole or what criminal justice experts call LWAP would not only eliminate the risk of making an irreversible mistake by putting an innocent person to death, but also save taxpayers money.

Speaker 72 As an example, here's Florida, $51 million.

Speaker 72 $51 million. That is what Florida spends every year.

Speaker 72 to maintain the death penalty over and above what it would cost to punish all first-degree murderers with LWAP.

Speaker 72 And if you look at the costs that Florida spent and then look at the executions that they had, how much did it cost per execution, you know, to maintain the system?

Speaker 72 And then of course the product of it, executions, what you're getting out of it per execution, 24 million.

Speaker 72 $24 million

Speaker 72 per execution. You know, and I'm a former prosecutor and I just have to say, what could you do with $24 million?

Speaker 72 You know,

Speaker 72 I'd take $8 million and I'd put it into victim services.

Speaker 72 Now we're getting into the death penalty more broadly, but one of the things I found as I'm on this book tour and on the road, I'm talking to survivors.

Speaker 72 Their family members have been slain.

Speaker 72 And one, a woman in Tennessee, is particularly, she's coming to mind right now. And she said, listen, when my son was murdered, I couldn't get out of bed in the morning.

Speaker 72 I was afraid I was going to lose my job. I was afraid I was going to lose my house.
I needed therapy. I needed services.
I needed child care to help. I couldn't do that.
My kids needed therapy.

Speaker 72 We had all of these needs. And the state of Tennessee said,

Speaker 72 you know, Department of Mental Health said, we don't have that money.

Speaker 106 Sorry.

Speaker 72 You know, and so she said, we're spending it all.

Speaker 72 In fact, what she said is it's selfish.

Speaker 72 You're spending spending millions upon millions upon millions on death sentences and, you know, on the death penalty when it could actually go to the people who need it.

Speaker 71 Regardless of the financial costs, death by lethal injection has become so commonplace that executions rarely catch public attention.

Speaker 83 Nationally, 1,377 people have been put to death by some form of lethal injection since 1982.

Speaker 103 Those executed suffered not only because of the chemicals used, but because, as was predicted in 1990, medical professionals have refused to participate.

Speaker 86 Because of ethical rules prohibiting the harm of patients, doctors and nurses and paramedics generally refuse to administer the lethal cocktails used in death chambers.

Speaker 83 That task generally falls to seriously undertrained prison personnel who are asked to secure an IV line for condemned prisoners who, often because of age, history of drug abuse, or other health problems, have veins that are difficult to access.

Speaker 83 Heavily muscled prisoners, those who are morbidly obese, and those with dark skin can also present challenges for the amateur phlebotomist trying to set up an execution.

Speaker 62 Prisons sometimes lack the right equipment, such as the correct size syringes or proper tubing.

Speaker 62 Lethal injection drugs are pre-made and have to be mixed by personnel not properly trained in chemistry, which results in errors in dosing.

Speaker 62 Often, people with any kind of medical competence who participate in executions are the ones with the shadiest ethical records.

Speaker 62 Professor Lane came across one case in which the state of Missouri relied on a doctor who ignored ethical guidelines and participated in the capital punishment process.

Speaker 62 He was incorrectly mixing the chemicals so that the prisoners were only receiving half the dose of the anesthesia meant to reduce the pain of the condemned as required by law. Dr.

Speaker 62 Lane shared the horrifying discoveries lawyers who condemned prisoners made about that particular doctor.

Speaker 72 They looked

Speaker 72 at the protocol that was litigated and authorized by a federal court, and it was five grams of this particular drug.

Speaker 72 And they looked at the execution logs of the last several and states were using 2.5.

Speaker 72 And so, you know, they filed suit. That's half the anesthetic, you know, and the state, you know, wrote back and

Speaker 72 said, we are not using half the anesthetic. It must be the pharmacy logs that are wrong.

Speaker 72 We're going to track that down and figure out why they are wrong, but we rest assure you, we are not violating the protocol. We're doing the amount that was legally authorized.

Speaker 72 Well, they have to come back the next day and say, oh,

Speaker 72 actually,

Speaker 72 the logs were right.

Speaker 33 We were wrong.

Speaker 72 We were injecting half of the amount.

Speaker 72 And so the court gives the lawyers for the condemned prisoners a limited deposition to question this doctor behind a veil, like they didn't know who he was, but to question him under oath. And,

Speaker 72 you know, they're like, why are you using half? And he said, well, I'm dyslexic. And so sometimes I make mistakes.

Speaker 72 And yet, Missouri stuck with them

Speaker 72 and said, no, we have every confidence in him. They lose that.

Speaker 72 The trial court, the federal court says, this guy can't be anywhere near.

Speaker 72 Look, the whole thing, to the extent it's humane, requires requires you to meticulously measure and mix chemicals in liquids. And so you can't have someone who just makes mistakes.

Speaker 72 And then in the meantime, investigative journalists, which, you know, I have to take my hat off. I tip my hat to investigative journalists.

Speaker 72 But they were like, gee, who is this, you know, dyslexic doctor? And they find out his identity. You know, he admits it's him.
He had over 20 malpractice suits.

Speaker 72 He had had his hospital privileges revoked at two hospitals. He had been censured by the medical board.

Speaker 72 So, you know, you're asking someone to do something, to participate in something that is fundamentally against your reason for being as a doctor.

Speaker 72 And, you know, from time to time, they find people, but I think they're outliers. What I have found is they are outliers not only on ethics, but in other ways too.

Speaker 100 Experts on capital punishment like Lane aren't comfortable with describing executions that go off script as, quote, botched, even if it's a commonly used term.

Speaker 100 No matter how the execution proceeds, the end result is the same.

Speaker 101 The inmate is dead.

Speaker 118 However, there is no question that killing people by lethal injection is so complicated and requires so much skill on the part of the executioners that the process is typically far more agonizing than death penalty advocates tell the public.

Speaker 96 According to the anti-capital punishment organization, the Death Penalty Information Center, out of 19 executions in 2022, seven were bosched, meaning that the death took far longer than expected, that prison personnel had to jab the condemned people multiple times to get an IV line working, or worse.

Speaker 62 When Oklahoma executed Clayton Lockett on April 29, 2014, the state used an untested combination of three drugs. The size of the syringes, and the amount of drugs used were wrong.

Speaker 62 Prison personnel made repeated mistakes as they tried to insert the needle for the IV.

Speaker 62 Even though the American Medical Association prohibits its members from participating in executions, a doctor was on hand for the Lockett fiasco.

Speaker 62 The physician tried but failed to insert an IV into the jugular vein in Lockett's neck.

Speaker 62 The doctor then performed a surgical procedure called a cut down, which is a deep surgical incision through the skin, muscle, and fat performed to expose a central vein under Lockett's clavicle.

Speaker 62 Procedure was bloody and also failed, and the execution then tried and failed to access a vein through Lockett's feet.

Speaker 62 Eventually, they tried to insert an IV through the femoral vein in the upper thigh, a procedure only the most skilled surgeons have mastered.

Speaker 62 Unfortunately, the available needle was the wrong length for it to work properly.

Speaker 105 Lockett reportedly was stoic throughout this repeated assault on his body.

Speaker 83 After an hour of this torture had passed, the execution team was finally able to inject the deadly drugs.

Speaker 113 Lockett groaned, convulsed, and at one point was asked, Are you unconscious?

Speaker 105 According to witnesses, Lockett opened his eyes and said, No, I am not.

Speaker 68 After appearing to fall asleep, he began to moan, arched his back, and kicked a foot before he strained against the straps holding him against the gurney, and he tried to get up.

Speaker 99 Lockett mumbled, something is wrong, oh man, and this shit is fucking up my mind.

Speaker 98 The prison warden ordered the blinds closed as the execution team scrambled.

Speaker 104 Swelling had developed where the IV had been inserted and was blocking the flow of the third and final lethal drug.

Speaker 50 The doctor was summoned to insert a needle in Lockett's other femoral vein, but Lockett was bleeding heavily and the blood backed up into the IV line.

Speaker 62 Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallon had already decided to halt the execution, but by this point, Lockett's heart had irreversibly slowed down. He subsequently died of heart failure.

Speaker 62 The entire execution, from the first attempt to stick an IV in his veins to his death, lasted one hour and 47 minutes. That was one of the longest executions in American history.

Speaker 62 The state of Oklahoma later falsely claimed that Lockett had been unconscious the entire time.

Speaker 62 In 2022, another so-called botched lethal injection, that of Joe Nathan James in Alabama, lasted three hours.

Speaker 62 In Ohio and elsewhere, executions had to be abandoned when the prison staff couldn't get an IV going.

Speaker 20 As we mentioned in the first episode, Reverend Jeff Hood is a priest under the old Catholic Rite, who, by the time we interviewed, had accompanied 10 men during their executions.

Speaker 112 He said that even the most professional execution is brutal, but that some states, because of a regrettable amount of practice, are much better at killing than others.

Speaker 45 I do think that some states know what they're doing more than others.

Speaker 100 And I think that Texas knows what they're doing.

Speaker 45 You don't see botched, or delayed, or mishandled executions in Texas. They go very quickly.
And

Speaker 45 when you talk to these guys, that's what they say they would prefer. If you're going to be executed, you would want it to go as quickly as possible.
Yes, there are some executions that look horrific.

Speaker 45 There are other executions that don't go according to plan, but don't get a lot of attention,

Speaker 33 but they're all horrible.

Speaker 121 And I think they all have to be talked about as such.

Speaker 62 Whether it's because of the awareness of the messy and undeniably painful executions like those of Lockett and James, the more than 200 death row exonerations achieved by groups like the Innocence Project, the growing skepticism of law enforcement amongst young people, or the greater consciousness of how racism warps the entire criminal justice system, there's no question that the death penalty is the least popular it has been in the past hundred years.

Speaker 62 Nor is there a doubt that the rate of executions in the United States has dropped well below its peak during the height of the war on crime under the Clinton administration, when, in 1999, 315 death sentences were handed down, or in 1996, when 98 prisoners were executed.

Speaker 105 In any case, deaths like lockets are bad for business for the pharmaceutical companies who have produced the drugs used in lethal injections.

Speaker 113 In the next and final episode of this three-part series on the shady business of lethal injection, we'll talk about how some states like Texas have been forced to turn to the black market or the so-called gray market to buy lethal drugs as pharmaceutical companies have restricted the purchase of those drugs for that purpose.

Speaker 105 We also talked to Jeff Hood about how the difficulty in obtaining those drugs has led states like Alabama to turn to one of the most gruesome forms of execution yet.

Speaker 104 And we'll also hear the story of Race Bouillon, a victim of a hate crime.

Speaker 103 who fought to prevent the execution of his white supremacist attacker.

Speaker 83 And finally, we'll explore whether the death penalty might be on its last legs in the United States.

Speaker 103 I'm Stephen Moncelli for It Could Happen Here.

Speaker 62 Until next time, I'm Michael Phillips. Thanks for listening.

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Speaker 9 If we got clear facts, maybe we could calm down a little.

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Speaker 15 Let's meet at the facts. Let's move forward from there.

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Speaker 29 A warning.

Speaker 57 This episode includes violent content which some listeners might find disturbing.

Speaker 62 I'm Michael Phillips, an historian and the author of A History of Racism in Dallas called White Metropolis, and the co-author with longtime journalist Betsy Frioff of A History of Eugenics in Texas called Purifying Knife.

Speaker 84 And I'm Stephen Moncelli.

Speaker 98 I'm an investigative journalist in Dallas who specializes in political extremism and the far right.

Speaker 50 And I report for places like the Texas Observer, The Barbed Wire, and more.

Speaker 62 Like millions across the United States, Mark Anthony Strowman was startled by the events that unfolded on the terrible morning of September 11, 2001.

Speaker 62 The disbelief that greeted the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon can be heard on the first announcement of the tragedy on a Dallas talk radio station, WBAP.

Speaker 129 All right, thank you, Lars. 7.51, nine minutes before 8 o'clock at Dues Talk 820, WBAP,

Speaker 129 here on the

Speaker 129 Tuesday morning.

Speaker 129 And the reason I am hesitating here, there's a word of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan and the World Trade, a plane actually crashing into the side of the World Trade Center.

Speaker 129 We're going to have details for you on that from ABC News in just a couple of moments.

Speaker 62 Strowman later wrote that September 11th filled him with a great sense of rage, hatred, loss, bitterness, and utter degradation.

Speaker 62 He blamed Arabs and Muslims as a group for the events that day and wanted, quote, those Arabs to feel the same sense of insecurity about their immediate surroundings.

Speaker 62 I wanted them to feel the same sense of vulnerability and uncertainty on American soil.

Speaker 63 Strowman, a Dallas resident, had already served two prison terms during which he had joined the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang.

Speaker 83 Addicted to meth and sporting neo-Nazi tattoos, he began cruising Dallas in his 1972 Chevy Suburban, hunting for quote-unquote Arabs.

Speaker 34 As he later admitted, he wasn't entirely sure what an Arab looked like, but nevertheless, he stalked people with, quote, shawls on their faces.

Speaker 62 Strowman launched his crusade by running cars into ditches if he suspected the vehicles were driven by Muslims. He escalated his campaign of terror on September 17, 2001.

Speaker 62 He fatally shot Wakhar Hassan, a 46-year-old Pakistani immigrant, as the clerk grilled a hamburger at mom's grocery in Dallas.

Speaker 62 A few days later, Strowman found his next victim, a former pilot for Bangladesh's Air Force named Reis Buyan. Mr.

Speaker 62 Buyan, who has experienced robberies prior to his encounter with Strowman, told us what happened that day.

Speaker 107 September 21st,

Speaker 107 2001, it was Friday around noon.

Speaker 107 A customer walked in. wearing bandana, sunglasses, baseball cap, and holding a double double-barrel, a sort of double-barrel shotgun on his right side.

Speaker 107 And from the previous robbery experience, I thought he would be in the robbery.

Speaker 107 So I put all the money on the counter and offered him the cash as soon as he walked in. And I said, Sir, here is all the money.

Speaker 108 Take it, but please do not shoot me.

Speaker 107 Basically, I begged for my life.

Speaker 108 And his gaze remained fixed.

Speaker 107 And then he mumbled a question:

Speaker 29 where are you from?

Speaker 107 Before I could say anything more than excuse me, he pulled the trigger from point blank range.

Speaker 107 I felt it first, like a million bees were singing my face.

Speaker 108 And I looked down and saw blood pouring like an open faucet from the right side of my hand.

Speaker 22 And I remember

Speaker 108 screaming mom, top of my voice.

Speaker 107 And I looked down, saw blood pouring like an open faucet from the right side of my head.

Speaker 43 And then I looked left.

Speaker 107 I saw the gunman still standing, pointing the gun directly at my face.

Speaker 107 And I realized that if I did not, you know,

Speaker 107 do something to show that I'm dying, he might shoot me again.

Speaker 108 So I fell to the floor and he finally left.

Speaker 110 at a few seconds.

Speaker 90 Bion survived the attack, but he was blinded in his right eye.

Speaker 98 He would endure not only multiple painful surgeries, but also the unique financial horrors of the American health care system.

Speaker 104 Meanwhile, Strowman was not done terrorizing the Dallas-area Muslim community.

Speaker 83 On October 4th, the shooting spree came to an end when the white supremacist pulled up to a shell station in Mesquite at about 6.45 in the morning and ordered the clerk, 49-year-old Vasudev Patel, a Hindu immigrant from India, to hand over all the money from the cash register.

Speaker 49 Patel reached under the counter for a.22 caliber pistol and seeing the gun, Stroman fired his weapon.

Speaker 25 The bullet struck Patel in his chest and killed him.

Speaker 68 A security camera captured the scene, and Dallas police arrested Stroman the next day.

Speaker 62 At Strowman's home, investigators found a semi-automatic rifle, an Uzi knockoff, a.44 Magnum, and a.45 Colt.

Speaker 62 They also found evidence that Strowman planned to attack a mosque in a nearby suburb. A jury found Strowman guilty of capital murder on April 5, 2002, and sentenced him to die by lethal injection.

Speaker 62 The story then took an unexpected turn. During a 2009 pilgrimage to Mecca, Bouillon said he realized that simply forgiving his assailant would not be enough.

Speaker 62 He believed he had a moral obligation to do all he could to prevent Strowman's death. Bouillon filed a lawsuit attempting to halt Strowman's execution.

Speaker 62 In spite of Bouillon's best effort, the suit was rejected by state and federal courts, and Strowman died by lethal injection July 20th, 2011.

Speaker 2 Bouillon's campaign of mercy, however, made a major impact on capital punishment in the United States.

Speaker 97 He effectively shamed European drug companies into banning the use of the products used in the lethal injection that killed Strowman.

Speaker 99 In turn, some states like Texas decided to start buying lethal drugs illegally.

Speaker 83 In this final episode on the history of the lethal injection in the United States, Buyan will tell us about his campaign against capital punishment and its impact.

Speaker 28 We'll also speak to a priest, the Reverend Jeff Hood, who has accompanied by the time of this interview 10 men to their executions.

Speaker 97 He will also tell us why he has devoted himself to showing love to people so despised and also address the future of the death penalty in the United States.

Speaker 62 After being blinded in a hate crime, Ray Spuyon struggled through numerous traumas.

Speaker 62 He told us that after getting shot at the convenience store where he worked, he ran to a barber shop next door. There, he had the first sight of his injuries.

Speaker 107 I caught myself in the mirror and the image reflected back was crucial, like something out of a horror movie.

Speaker 108 And

Speaker 107 on my way to the hospital, I felt my eyes were closing.

Speaker 130 I felt that my time was up.

Speaker 107 And, you know, while I was reciting from the Holy Quran and asking God for mercy and forgiveness and giving me a second chance, I also begged him to, you know,

Speaker 66 to save my life and give me a chance to live.

Speaker 107 And I promised God that if you give me a chance to live, I would help others.

Speaker 114 In the emergency room, doctors put Buyan on life support.

Speaker 83 For a time, his condition was touch and go.

Speaker 83 Buyan, a young immigrant living on his salary as a convenience store clerk, said that when he next opened his eyes and doctors told him he had survived, he cried tears of joy.

Speaker 107 So my eyes were full of tears, not from the pain, but from the joy of still being alive.

Speaker 107 But that joy did not last long because the hospital where I was taken was private and expensive, and I had no health insurance at the time.

Speaker 107 So, they discharged me within a couple of hours and told me to arrange follow-up medical treatments on my own.

Speaker 107 So, you know, the first part of my American nightmare was being shot in the face after 9-11, and the second part began when I was kicked up from the hospital.

Speaker 110 So, as a result of this shooting, I, you know,

Speaker 107 underwent several eye surgeries. Unfortunately, though I lost a vision in one eye, I still carry more than three dozen shotgun pellets in my face.

Speaker 108 And

Speaker 107 my father suffered a stroke when he heard

Speaker 107 what happened to me, but luckily he survived.

Speaker 107 I lost my fiancé, but gained more than $60,000 in medical bills.

Speaker 62 As Strowman languished on Texas death row, Buyan began picking up the pieces.

Speaker 107 I moved on rebuilding my life.

Speaker 108 I worked in a restaurant.

Speaker 107 I went back to school. And slowly I was

Speaker 130 climbing the ladder and getting better in my own

Speaker 109 life journey. And in 2009, I went to MECA for pilgrimage, my mother.

Speaker 107 And it was in NECA. I deeply realized that

Speaker 107 though I forgave my attacker, Mark Struden, it was not enough.

Speaker 108 I felt that, you know, by executing Mark, we were simply losing human life without dealing with the root cause.

Speaker 107 I strongly believe that if he was given a chance, he might be able to become a better human being.

Speaker 22 And I began to see him as a human being like me, not just simply a killer.

Speaker 42 I saw him as a victim too.

Speaker 107 And I deeply felt for him. And I remembered my promise on my death death that if I get a chance to live, I would help others.
And I felt that I need to start with him first to keep my promise.

Speaker 107 So I returned from Mecca

Speaker 107 with a very changed heart, with a clarity,

Speaker 107 and a newfound purpose. And I launched a campaign to try and save my attacker's life from Texas death row.

Speaker 104 We'll pick up the story of Bion's campaign to spare Stroman's life and how his efforts changed the history of the American death penalty after a word from our sponsors.

Speaker 104 Dr.

Speaker 49 Rick Halpren began teaching human rights courses at Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1990, where he now heads one of only nine human rights programs at universities in the country.

Speaker 94 He has also chaired Amnesty International's board of directors three times, and since 1972, he has been an anti-death penalty activist.

Speaker 117 Halperin became famous on Texas death row as a result of his efforts.

Speaker 25 And after Strowman was informed of his July 20th, 2011 execution date, the condemned man wrote a letter to Halperin asking for help in making final arrangements, such as locating an affordable undertaker.

Speaker 62 By coincidence, shortly after Strowman reached out to Halperin, the professor received a surprise visitor to his office. The stranger was Strowman's victim, Race Bouillon.

Speaker 62 Bouillon, who had recently become an American citizen, hoped Halperin could help him find a creative and effective way to fulfill the promise he had made to God when he thought he was dying.

Speaker 62 He began his campaign to save Stroman's life.

Speaker 62 Buyon, Halprin, and another human rights activist, Hadi Jawad, carried their efforts from Dallas to the state capitol in Austin and as far as the European Parliament.

Speaker 86 A weak point in the American death penalty machinery was its reliance on companies that provided the lethal injection chemicals.

Speaker 28 In 2011, Italy, an anti-death penalty nation, successfully pressured the Illinois company Hospira to stop selling sodium thiopentol, the muscle relaxant relaxant used in the three-drug lethal injection protocol used in Texas since the early 1980s.

Speaker 96 That same year, Reprieve, a British human rights nonprofit, arranged for Buyan to travel to Europe to meet face to face with executives at the corporate headquarters of the Danish pharmaceutical company, Lundbeck.

Speaker 90 Aware that the meeting would put them in the international spotlight, Lundbeck three days prior announced that they would stop shipping the sedative Nembitol, which was being used as a substitute for sodium theopentol, to American prison systems.

Speaker 83 Bouillon described his conversation with the Limbic Company in an interview with us.

Speaker 108 After one hour of great conversation, they agreed to write a letter to the governor of Texas asking him not to use their product to kill human being.

Speaker 62 The state of Texas, however, was unwilling to grant a crime victim his fervent wish.

Speaker 62 Even though Texas politicians repeatedly claim they execute murderers to bring the victims closure, Bouillon said he was denied this by the Texas Board of Paroles and Pardons and then Governor Rick Perry.

Speaker 107 I reached out to the prison system and asking for a mediation dialogue.

Speaker 108 But unfortunately, you know, they turned down my request multiple times. And

Speaker 66 the reason they showed was

Speaker 107 it would really victimize me.

Speaker 107 So basically, a mediation dialogue, I thought it would be helpful for me to find closure, to find a lot of answers but it was for them it would be you know a re-victimization process for me so they they rejected my request multiple times and it really made me sad that

Speaker 66 when they needed me to testify in the court to convict him to get the death penalty I was a good victim But then when I tried to exercise my right as a victim to have a mediation dialogue, I became a bad victim because I asked for my rights.

Speaker 62 In his final hours, Stroman spoke directly to his surviving victim.

Speaker 108 I had the opportunity to talk to him off the phone before he was executed, and

Speaker 108 it was the day of his execution where he put my name as one of the people he would be able to talk.

Speaker 107 So I was lucky enough to talk to him. And when he came on the phone, I was about to, you know,

Speaker 107 go to the court to give a last fight to

Speaker 107 stay the execution.

Speaker 66 So I was thinking, what would I say to a human being who is about to be executed in a couple of hours?

Speaker 107 And I'm going to

Speaker 108 go to a core to give a

Speaker 107 last fight to

Speaker 66 see if it could save him. So I was very emotional when he came on the phone.

Speaker 22 I told him that, Mark,

Speaker 107 you know for sure that I never hated you.

Speaker 108 I forgave you.

Speaker 107 And I'm doing my best to, you know, save your life

Speaker 107 through this court hearing.

Speaker 130 And he said that, Race, I never expected that from you.

Speaker 108 And I love you, bro.

Speaker 107 And that brought tears into my eyes that this is the same human being who shot me for no reasons other than having hate and fire disease her.

Speaker 107 And now 10 years later,

Speaker 107 he saw me, he could see me as his brother. And he said he loved me.

Speaker 109 Why he couldn't see me as his brother 10 years ago?

Speaker 107 And why he could have said the same thing 10 years ago.

Speaker 36 So, you know,

Speaker 107 at least it helped me to find closure a little bit.

Speaker 43 It helped me to move forward. At least I had the chance to talk to my attacker.

Speaker 108 And

Speaker 66 then gave me a lot of hope that people can change.

Speaker 34 The execution itself, however, left Bouillon cold.

Speaker 107 Well, definitely in this execution, it was not for the victims, because the victims and the victims' family members requested and also fought

Speaker 107 for clemency. You know, we went ahead and requested the governor of Texas, the board of pardons and paroles, that do not execute him in our names.

Speaker 70 You know, show mercy.

Speaker 104 Mark Strowman died as scheduled on July 20th, 2011.

Speaker 104 And though Bill and Halperin failed to stop it, they had helped start an international movement movement to thwart the ability of states to carry out such lethal injections.

Speaker 83 As Professor Clarina Lane revealed in her book, Secrets of the Killing State, after Haspira stopped producing sodium theopentol, the vacuum was filled by a flyby night company called Dream Pharma.

Speaker 26 The drug distributor, quote, turned out to be two desks at a filing cabinet hidden in the back of a London driving school, as Lane wrote.

Speaker 28 Once this operation was exposed, Great Britain banned sodium theopentol sales to the United States.

Speaker 62 By December 2011, the entire European Union had tightened export controls on any chemicals that could potentially be used in executions.

Speaker 62 The new expanded EU ban made life much more difficult for would-be executioners in the United States.

Speaker 62 In 2012, when the state of Missouri announced it would use the drug ProPufol as an anesthetic, in its executions, the EU said it would cut off exports of that drug, which is used for surgeries in the United States about about 50 million times a year.

Speaker 62 Combined these moves created a lethal injection drug shortage that changed how executions took place.

Speaker 64 In 2012, Texas moved then to a single drug protocol using penobarbitol alone, rather than the old three-drug cocktail made out of thin air by Oklahoma coroner Stephen Coleman back in the 1970s.

Speaker 20 Autopsies reveal that prisoners executed with this single drug protocol die from pulmonary edema, a condition in which the lungs fill with fluid.

Speaker 83 Medical experts believe prisoners suffer intense chest pain as they suffocate, even if they appear fully unconscious.

Speaker 85 Execution witnesses also say they have seen prisoners' eyes pop open, their eyes fill with tears, have seen them pull against restraints, and have heard them groan and clasp their jaws during such executions.

Speaker 62 As the drugs needed to carry out lethal injections become harder to find, states have to rely on shady tactics so they can keep on killing.

Speaker 62 Officials have lied to pharmaceutical companies that are buying jugs to provide medical care for prisoners that they later use in the death chamber. Death penalty states have violated federal laws.

Speaker 62 They have illegally swapped these drugs across state line, or they bought them on the black market or the legally marginal so-called gray market.

Speaker 62 Professor Lane describes the shady lengths the state of Ohio went to in order to buy these drugs.

Speaker 72 The state took $15,000 in cash in a suitcase.

Speaker 72 I mean, you can't make this stuff up, you know, and chartered a private plane to fly over to Washington where they did an under-the-table deal for drugs with this little pharmacy.

Speaker 72 You know, you need a prescription for these drugs. And so here's a pharmacy that for $15,000 is willing to sell drugs under the table and allegedly in a Walmart parking lot.

Speaker 98 To cope with the shrinking supply, states have made illegal purchases overseas.

Speaker 83 Like other states, Texas has tried to circumvent tightening restrictions by purchasing death penalty supplies from loosely regulated compounding pharmacies, and some of them have been here in the states.

Speaker 98 In 2018, it was revealed that Texas repeatedly bought drugs from the Green Park Compounding Pharmacy in Houston, which is a company that had been fined 48 times by federal regulators for safety violations, including providing the wrong medication to children who were subsequently hospitalized.

Speaker 83 A number of agonizingly prolonged executions in Texas suggest that the drugs the state buys are often out of date or impure.

Speaker 62 Finding out where the lethal drugs are coming from is becoming increasingly difficult.

Speaker 62 A number of states have passed laws making it illegal to report on who carries out the execution, what companies supply the drugs, or how these drugs were purchased.

Speaker 62 In any case, the difficulty in getting execution drugs has led to a decline in the death penalty across the nation. At the time of the landmark 1972 Fuhrman v.

Speaker 62 Georgia case that temporarily halted executions in the United States, 40 states had the death penalty. Currently, only 27 do.

Speaker 62 In 2024, four states alone, Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas, carried out 76% of the executions that unfolded in the United States.

Speaker 104 Some of the remaining states with the death penalty on the books have responded to the shortage of lethal drugs by authorizing the use of the firing squad and killing prisoners with nitrogen gas hypoxia, which suffocates them by forcing them to breathe pure nitrogen.

Speaker 94 After another ad break, you'll hear from a priest who has witnessed executions in 10 different states, including death by nitrous hypoxia.

Speaker 100 And we'll end this three-part series by discussing the future of the death penalty.

Speaker 62 Born in the South Atlanta neighborhood in Georgia, Jeff Hood grew up in a religiously conservative home and was ordained as a Southern Baptist minister when he was only 22.

Speaker 62 His worldview, however, was shaken when he attended to his religious mentor who was dying of lung cancer.

Speaker 62 Before he passed away, the 75-year-old confessed to Hood, quote, I'm gay, and I've always been.

Speaker 62 Hood described this moment as earth-shattering, and his religious views transformed dramatically from what he later called his backwards thinking.

Speaker 103 When Hood moved to Dallas in the early 2010s, he became well known in his new home as he fought to make local churches more inclusive of the LGBTQ plus community.

Speaker 28 And he got arrested along with other clergy outside of the White House in 2014 when he was protesting President Barack Obama's aggressive campaign to deport migrants.

Speaker 83 On July 7th, 2016, Hood led a Black Lives Matter protest in downtown Dallas. during which a sniper opened fire and targeted police officers.

Speaker 62 Micah X. Johnson, an Iraq War veteran, was enraged by the police killings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota.

Speaker 62 So Johnson shot and killed five police officers, the deadliest incident for law enforcement since September 11, 2001.

Speaker 62 Police killed Johnson that evening by detonating a bomb carried by a robot to the shooter's hideout in a parking garage. marking the first execution by robot in American history.

Speaker 62 Revan Hood was traumatized not only by the sniper attack, but also when he got scapegoated for the deaths that day.

Speaker 62 Fox News host Megan Kelly put a target on Hood's back in the aftermath of the sniper attack.

Speaker 131 Jeff Hood, he was one of the organizers of the march and quickly condemned the shootings today.

Speaker 32 Never in our wildest dreams would we have imagined that five police officers would be dead this morning.

Speaker 131 But critics were quick to point out that we were hearing a very different message from the Reverend just a short time before the shots rang out last night. Here is some of that.

Speaker 131 But I'm going to channel an old preacher that I admire tremendously,

Speaker 131 Jeremiah Wright.

Speaker 131 And I'm going to say,

Speaker 131 God

Speaker 131 damn white America.

Speaker 131 God

Speaker 131 damn white America. White America is a fire.

Speaker 131 hey. Come on, pack them.
Hey, come on, man, now.

Speaker 131 I'm sick

Speaker 131 of the bodies of black and brown people being slaughtered in our streets.

Speaker 62 Hood agreed to be interviewed by Kelly, but the minister soon realized that Fox viewers blamed him for the officer's death and they threatened vengeance.

Speaker 45 I mean, after July the 7th, man, there was talk about threats. Didn't P.D.
was having to take the kids to school, and it was absolutely horrible.

Speaker 62 Witnessing people die that day, including the sniper Johnson's impromptu execution via remote-control robot, deepened Hood's opposition to violence, including state killing.

Speaker 62 In 2022, he is ordained again, this time as a priest in what is called the old Catholic faith, which accepts many of the doctrines and rights of the Roman Catholic Church, but rejects the doctrine of papal infallibility and authority.

Speaker 62 Hood began writing to those on death row and then talking and praying with them in person.

Speaker 62 In 2022, the United States Supreme Court ruled in the Ramirez versus Collier case that condemned prisoners have the right to die in the company of a spiritual advisor.

Speaker 62 Hood became a companion to the condemned in their last minutes.

Speaker 45 I began to have people reaching out during that time,

Speaker 45 you know, and asking me if I would accompany them to the death chamber. And,

Speaker 111 you know, it's one thing to be willing to have relationships with

Speaker 45 people who are executed. It's a whole nother thing

Speaker 45 to be asked to participate in the process.

Speaker 45 And so since then, I've witnessed or been in the chamber with 10 different guys.

Speaker 45 So from January of 2023 to now, I've watched 10 different men be executed by the state.

Speaker 104 Hood attended his first execution when the state of Oklahoma put Scott Eisenberg to death on January 12th, 2023.

Speaker 26 20 years earlier, Eisenberg murdered an elderly couple, including a man he bludgeoned to death.

Speaker 45 My first execution was Scott Eisenberg in Oklahoma. And he,

Speaker 45 Scott had a number of things going on, but we were very close. He had a lot of anger issues and I think difficulty controlling his temper and whatnot.

Speaker 45 And, you know, so the reality was, I was very frightened before I went in because I thought Scott was just going to go

Speaker 45 ballistic. And,

Speaker 45 you know, to be in that room with someone that goes ballistic, I mean, it's

Speaker 45 already traumatic enough, as I'm sure you can imagine, without

Speaker 45 something like that. But then again, you couldn't, you can't blame them for wanting to, you know, push back and fight for their lives and whatnot.
I found myself shaking.

Speaker 45 Just, you know, my hands and

Speaker 45 my legs,

Speaker 32 just terror.

Speaker 45 I mean, just utterly terrified. And then they opened the door and I was led in and I saw Scott.

Speaker 45 And

Speaker 45 it's incredibly strange to see someone hooked up to machines that look like they're there to support life

Speaker 45 and yet you know that they're there to take his life

Speaker 126 And so

Speaker 45 I wasn't able. I mean, I knew that there was a window on one side.
I wasn't able to see through that window because there was a curtain down.

Speaker 45 And I began to pray with Scott. Scott had asked me to read a number of scriptures, and I did.

Speaker 45 I dropped my Bible at one point because I'm shaking so bad I was having trouble holding it. You know, he notices that I'm shaking.
He notices

Speaker 111 that I'm upset.

Speaker 45 And

Speaker 45 he looks at me and tells me, Everything's going to be okay.

Speaker 45 And I'm thinking to myself, no, it's not. Like, no, it is not.
And I'm thinking, you know, you're going to die. And

Speaker 45 I'm going to be scarred for life. Everything is not going to be okay.

Speaker 45 And

Speaker 29 I

Speaker 45 went to uh the scripture in john chapter eight

Speaker 45 where jesus encounters the adulterous woman and there's that famous line uh famous verse you who are without sin cast the first stone

Speaker 111 and i read that in the chamber

Speaker 45 and uh

Speaker 45 One of the lighter moments when we were in there was when I read that, you who are without sin, cast the first stone.

Speaker 45 I remember Scott looking up and pointing at the executioners and saying you know he's talking to y'all like this is about y'all

Speaker 45 hood said that any sense that death by lethal injection is non-violent is an illusion uh in every lethal injection i have uh immediately heard snoring uh and what sounds not like uh

Speaker 45 you know snoring from you know that one would have when they sleep or whatever but more of a a gurgling kind of snoring And,

Speaker 45 you know, it's the body responds in a very panicked fashion.

Speaker 92 And so it's almost like

Speaker 45 it's like drowning someone who's completely paralyzed.

Speaker 45 And I think that that's,

Speaker 45 I think that's what it's been like every time.

Speaker 45 I think that there is a level of suffering. that is that is hidden.
There's a reason that, again, that it's made to look like a medical procedure, because it does look like a medical procedure.

Speaker 45 I think it is a con.

Speaker 62 Hood found the lethal injections traumatizing, but that did not prepare him for what he witnessed when Alabama began executing prisoners through nitrous hypoxia.

Speaker 45 I can tell you that as horrible as a lethal injection is, and yes, it is a con job, I can tell you that I.

Speaker 45 What I saw during that nitrogen execution is indescribable. I can tell you that I think I would rather be burned to death than be executed by nitrogen.

Speaker 36 I mean, it is that bad.

Speaker 62 Hood attended the hypoxia suffocation of Kenneth Smith, a contract killer, on January 25th, 2024, the first such execution in American history. Smith had been sentenced to death 36 years earlier.

Speaker 62 Hood said the horrors for him began when he stepped into the death chamber and saw Smith outfitted with a large mass that would deliver the poison gas.

Speaker 62 Attending this execution actually put Hood's life in jeopardy.

Speaker 45 I can describe it for y'all's listeners, but the mask,

Speaker 45 which I'm holding right here, a replica, is

Speaker 45 basically something that is gas netting in the back. It has silicone straps.
It's put over the back of someone's head, and

Speaker 45 it is strapped as tight as possible to try to keep it on.

Speaker 45 And it looks like a firefighter's mask with sort of a plexiglass plate on the front. And then there's a hose that's going from the firefighter's mask with the plexiglass plate to the nitrogen.
And so

Speaker 45 what is happening is they try to pump as much nitrogen as possible through

Speaker 45 this line.

Speaker 70 The problem is, is that

Speaker 45 these masks don't completely hold to form, I guess is the best way of saying it, in that it's difficult for

Speaker 45 you to get an airtight seal. So the more oxygen that gets in here, the more it's displacing nitrogen.

Speaker 45 And so the more oxygen that's in here, and obviously there's going to be oxygen in the tube, there's going to be oxygen in the mast before the thing even starts, is going to create more suffering.

Speaker 45 It's going to create a longer process.

Speaker 52 Hood knew that he would be in a chamber in which poison gas would be released, and he felt obligated to tell his children in advance that he could be harmed.

Speaker 57 They were terrified, of course, but he felt an obligation to provide Smith company and compassion as well.

Speaker 128 Again, we remind listeners that what they are about to hear might be upsetting.

Speaker 45 So by the time we get to the point where they turn the nitrogen on, all the witnesses, everybody in the room is like going, Nobody knows what's about to happen because it's never been tried before.

Speaker 111 And so

Speaker 45 they turn it on, and Kenny immediately begins to heave back and forth, and back and forth, over and over. And every time he heaves forward, the back of the mask was strapped to the gurney.

Speaker 45 So every time he heaves forward, his face is hitting the front of that mask over and over and over and over. And so it's like watching someone get like hit their face against a plate glass window.

Speaker 45 And it's like his nose and his face is flattening every time he does it.

Speaker 43 And he begins to shake back and forth and back and forth, heaving up and down.

Speaker 45 I see spit and saliva and snot and eye water and all sorts of fluid is coming out of his face.

Speaker 45 And that fluid begins to build up on the front of the mask and it begins to drizzle like a waterfall.

Speaker 62 Smith convulsed convulsed with so much force, prison officials worried his mask might come off, interrupting the execution and possibly killing Hood and maybe others in attendance.

Speaker 62 A window separated Hood from other witnesses, and the violence of Smith's death caused the commotion.

Speaker 45 The windows are like super thick. I shouldn't have been able to hear anything, but I could hear somebody behind me screaming, stop, stop, stop, stop, please, stop, stop, stop.

Speaker 64 And it was an absolute nightmare.

Speaker 45 And Kenny did not die for at least 22 minutes. And it's very possible that he didn't die for a longer period of time.
But the state of Alabama declares,

Speaker 111 they say, oh, you know, he's not breathing.

Speaker 45 He's dead. Then they push everybody out of the room and then they bring the doctor in after everybody's left to declare him dead.

Speaker 69 Hood admits that some of the men he's counseled are capable of unspeakable evil, even after years on death row.

Speaker 28 But he still recalls each death he's witnessed with pain.

Speaker 45 I feel morally compromised, horrified, but

Speaker 45 I feel called or pushed to keep going because I think that the more traumatic thing would be to leave these guys alone.

Speaker 45 Now, in terms of actually seeing it, I think that it's these images don't leave you.

Speaker 45 There's nightmares.

Speaker 45 I always say that these guys haunt me. They come night after night.

Speaker 45 You know, I'll see them at the end of my bed. I mean, I mean, just,

Speaker 45 yeah, so trauma is something I've come to know very well.

Speaker 62 In 2019, the United States Supreme Court ruled that prisoners do not have a right to a painless death when it greenlighted the execution of Russell Buckaloo, who had blood-filled tumors in his head, neck, and mouth that could have broken open as he was put to death.

Speaker 62 The highest court seems to have rendered the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment moot.

Speaker 83 Meanwhile, in recent years, it has not only been states that have enforced the death penalty.

Speaker 100 Between 1960 and 2019, the federal government carried out only three executions.

Speaker 90 But in 2020 to early 2021, during the last six months of Donald Trump's first term as president, the federal government executed 13 men and women.

Speaker 96 These included Brandon Bernard, who committed a double murder when he was only 18, and another, Lisa Montgomery, who psychologists believe was severely mentally ill and detached from reality at the time that she murdered a pregnant woman and cut the baby from her victim's body in order to raise the child as her own.

Speaker 62 Joe Biden, on the other hand, at the end of his presidential term, sought to prevent a similar execution spree.

Speaker 62 40 people were on death row, and he commuted the sentence of 37 of them.

Speaker 62 The remaining three were Zokar Tsarnev, the 2013 Boston marathon bomber, Dylan Roof, who massacred nine members of the Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015, and Robert Bowers, who killed 11 at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Speaker 62 Back in power, however, Trump has vowed to make the death penalty great again.

Speaker 132 Anybody murders something in the Capitol.

Speaker 133 Capital punishment. Capital, capital punishment.

Speaker 132 If somebody kills somebody in the Capitol, Washington, D.C.,

Speaker 132 we're going to be seeking the death penalty.

Speaker 133 And that's a very strong

Speaker 132 preventative.

Speaker 112 Trump's immediate plans aside, the future of the death penalty in the long term is not so certain.

Speaker 117 According to a 2024 Gallup opinion poll, Support for the death penalty has sunk to its lowest level in half a century.

Speaker 113 Only 53% of Americans favor capital punishment, but that number skews heavily towards older Americans.

Speaker 28 More than half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 43 oppose the death penalty, and almost 60% of the so-called Gen Z, those born between 1997 and 2012, are firmly against the death penalty.

Speaker 64 Law professor Corina Lane believes that even record low support for the death penalty is exaggerated and that support for capital punishment drops even further when other options are provided to voters.

Speaker 72 You know, the president issued this executive order, a day one executive order. Let's go for the death penalty anytime we can.
Let's execute everybody.

Speaker 72 And one of the things to realize is that the death penalty is dying in this country for reasons that an executive order cannot fix. People have less confidence in the death penalty.

Speaker 72 They don't trust the death penalty, nor should they. 200 people have been exonerated from the death row.

Speaker 62 And Ray Spouian agrees.

Speaker 107 The decline in executions in the United States reflects a broader shift in how society views the death penalty.

Speaker 107 I mean, more states are repealing it, juries are imposing it less often, and the public support, while still dividing,

Speaker 107 has steadily decreased, especially as concerns about wrongful convictions, interracial bias, and the high costs of capital punishment came to light.

Speaker 62 At the beginning of the 19th century, hangings were public, but they so often went awry and produced such grisly scenes, states moved those executions inside prison yards and sought a more humane alternative.

Speaker 62 That new method, the electric chair, proved horrifying as well and was deemed unsuitable for general audiences.

Speaker 62 The Supreme Court imposed a four-year four-year pause on the death penalty beginning in 1972 because of its random application. In 1976, the High Court reauthorized capital punishment.

Speaker 62 A crisis ensued when a Texas TV reporter sued for the right to televise executions.

Speaker 62 Horrified at the prospect of the condemned essentially being burned alive in the electric chair in front of a primetime audience, states approved the latest innovation, state killing, death by lethal injection.

Speaker 113 But throughout this history of execution, insurmountable flaws have remained consistent.

Speaker 112 The quest for a humane way to kill people on an announced schedule has been futile.

Speaker 2 Each form of the death penalty has been proven to be violent and cause suffering at great expenditure of public money.

Speaker 116 And plausibly innocent people have been put to death.

Speaker 113 As the people in charge of punishment have changed execution methods over the years, they've also tried to prevent public backlash to revolting scenes of suffering, which could create the opposition to capital punishment that they fear.

Speaker 128 Politicians eager to prove they are tough on crime have also fought to hide these gruesome spectacles from public view.

Speaker 83 Nevertheless, Reis Bouillon is optimistic that this grim aspect of life in the United States might soon come to an end.

Speaker 107 More than two-thirds of countries have abolished the death penalty in law or practice, with only a few countries carrying out the vast majority of executions.

Speaker 107 And I think the future is one where the death penalty continues to shine worldwide as values of human rights, dignity, and justice without irreversible punishment gain ground.

Speaker 62 Until next time, I'm Michael Phillips and I'm Stephen Moncelli.

Speaker 95 Thanks for listening.

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Speaker 3 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 5 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 7 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 8 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 9 We got clear facts.

Speaker 11 Maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 13 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 15 Let's meet at the facts. Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 12 NBC News, reporting for America.

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Speaker 27 Am I introducing the podcast?

Speaker 34 Welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 31 This is it could happen here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis.

Speaker 31 Today I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans. This episode, we're covering the week of October 31st to November 5th, one of the most exciting weeks in politics.

Speaker 60 Yeah, because it's Bunfy Night.

Speaker 31 If you remember the poem, that's right.

Speaker 31 And that's

Speaker 31 not the only exciting thing to happen, but also not the only sad thing to happen this week because as exciting as Election Day was for people in New York, there was like a looming sadness throughout the day.

Speaker 31 Because earlier that morning, obviously, Vice President Dick Cheney passed away.

Speaker 47 And

Speaker 31 that was rough, rough for many people.

Speaker 31 Not rough for many others,

Speaker 31 but that certainly was

Speaker 31 a looming presence over the day does anyone have any uh words to say on the passing of uh

Speaker 27 mr cheney yeah i mean i i just want to let everyone in hell know this too shall pass you know you won't be stuck with him forever just try to grin and bear it i know it's going to be hard for a lot of you especially saddam hussein um but i i know you can get past this you know he will get reincarnated as a Senate Republican staffer within the next six to eight months.

Speaker 27 So you won't have to put up with him long.

Speaker 60 I guess this is also just your reminder that it's a good idea to practice the four essential rules of firearm safety at all times.

Speaker 67 Don't shoot with Dick Cheney.

Speaker 27 If you see Dick Cheney while you're hunting quail, right.

Speaker 134 Do the kids even know about this now?

Speaker 31 Oh, the kids know. The kids know.
Yeah.

Speaker 53 Okay.

Speaker 137 I'm glad. I'm glad.

Speaker 60 This is deep in the lore, Mia.

Speaker 31 Cheney lore has permeated throughout

Speaker 31 generations of American culture. Yeah.

Speaker 42 When I was a kid, there was like a whole thing where we all thought the song Jamie's Got a Gun was Chaney's Got a Gun.

Speaker 33 Wow.

Speaker 33 That made perfect sense.

Speaker 60 Because it just lined up with everything you knew about the world.

Speaker 27 What's funny about it is that my actual thinking on that shooting hasn't changed since I was a Republican kid. Like when I was a young right-winger, I thought, wow, Dick Cheney is so cool.

Speaker 27 He shot a man. He got him to apologize to him.
And now, as an adult on the left, I still think that's that's kind of the coolest thing Dick Cheney ever did.

Speaker 60 It is a hell of a feat.

Speaker 70 That man apologized for getting in front of his sights.

Speaker 67 That's amazing.

Speaker 46 Now,

Speaker 31 it is unfortunate that Dick Cheney did not live to see the election of Zora Mamdani as the mayor of New York City, which happened.

Speaker 27 That would have been funny.

Speaker 31 On Tuesday, later that day, Zoron has become the first candidate in New York mayoral history to win over a million votes since 1969.

Speaker 60 Nice.

Speaker 31 This election itself saw over 2 million votes. This is a million more votes than the last New York mayoral election.
Huge turnout.

Speaker 31 Currently, as of Wednesday afternoon, Zoron has 50.4% of the vote.

Speaker 31 Former governor and sexual assault enthusiast Andrew Cuomo, running as an independent, has 41.6%,

Speaker 31 and the Bray-Waring Curtis Silwa has 7.1%.

Speaker 31 Not a spoiler candidate in many ways, nor would it be correct to say that all of Silwa's votes would have gone to one candidate or another.

Speaker 31 But even if you do add all of his votes on to disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo's total, Zoron still comes out on top.

Speaker 27 Well, which was something that there was legitimately a lot of question about as to like whether or not will Silwa staying in matter, right?

Speaker 27 And it's a really good sign that it didn't.

Speaker 31 It did not.

Speaker 30 Slilwa, whatever.

Speaker 31 No one really knows how to pronounce the name, including in the city.

Speaker 31 You hear it

Speaker 31 different pronunciations from different people at different times. Sometimes it's Slilwa, sometimes it's Silwa, Siliwa.

Speaker 27 All I know is he got stabbed on the subway, right?

Speaker 31 Oh, and shot five times in the back of a cab.

Speaker 36 Five times in the back. That's right.

Speaker 56 How did they fail to fucking kill him?

Speaker 136 Jesus Christ.

Speaker 27 It's harder to kill people by shooting them with a handgun than you might think.

Speaker 36 Yeah, apparently.

Speaker 60 Handgun ballistics are just different.

Speaker 31 Yes. And he does have 17 cats.

Speaker 32 He ran on Republican. And

Speaker 31 the Protect Animals Party, you can have some criticism for past ills that he has contributed to,

Speaker 31 but he certainly makes up for that in some way for being a fascinating character.

Speaker 27 He's a very New York kind of figure.

Speaker 31 And he was the only mayoral candidate to call and congratulate Zoran Momdani last night.

Speaker 31 Both Cuomo and Mayor Adams did not call Momdani, but Curtis did, which is kind of beautiful. It's kind of beautiful.

Speaker 27 He's a classy man. You don't get to wear a red beret like that unless you have some manners.

Speaker 60 The British Parachute Regiment would beg to disagree about having manners and wearing red hats.

Speaker 27 Nope, he's my head cannon now is that he is the British paratrooper regiment.

Speaker 46 They just drop him in with 17 cats and he

Speaker 60 and he starts milling immediately.

Speaker 27 He saves that fucking mall in Nairobi or wherever.

Speaker 60 Tell you what, the Argentines wouldn't have fucked with the Falklands if Curtis had been there.

Speaker 67 Not with all those cats.

Speaker 60 That's where he's going now that he's being banished from New York.

Speaker 67 Piss, guys.

Speaker 67 Probably shouldn't take this.

Speaker 36 Just an island of cat litter.

Speaker 31 Yeah, Staten Island.

Speaker 33 Which.

Speaker 27 You're a real New Yorker now, Gary.

Speaker 84 You shat on Staten Island.

Speaker 31 Which is the only borough that went for Cuomo, where he was up 33 points.

Speaker 60 That was very funny.

Speaker 31 Momdani won every other bureau, up 20 in Brooklyn, up 10 in Manhattan, up five in Queens, and 11 in the Bronx.

Speaker 27 From what this should tell everyone everywhere in the country about what is possible in politics, even in times as dark as this, is that he was, what, 8% a year ago?

Speaker 36 6%.

Speaker 137 6% in January.

Speaker 31 6% in January.

Speaker 36 And he won.

Speaker 27 He didn't just eke it out because there were a shitload of guys. This isn't like an Arnold thing where everybody's on the fucking ballot and it's like a crazy cartoon election.

Speaker 27 He legitimately

Speaker 36 got nowhere and won.

Speaker 42 The most votes for a mayoral candidate in almost 50 years.

Speaker 20 Yeah.

Speaker 31 Nearly reaching

Speaker 31 the vote totals in this election for like a presidential election in this yeah it's very impressive for like a mid-cycle an off-cycle election turnout wise yep specifically he won a whole bunch of votes that he did not gain in the primary among uh some like black and latino voters you can see that in the turnout at like the bronx and these these people aren't

Speaker 27 overwhelmingly at least at this stage folks who have been convinced of every aspect of ideology that zoron has ever put out there people who looked at who was available like this this guy seems like he genuinely wants to do something.

Speaker 36 Yeah.

Speaker 27 And they listen to his specific policies.

Speaker 27 They're not paying attention to the fact that he quoted Eugene V. Debs.

Speaker 67 They're listening to his policies on creating municipal grocery stores and stuff, right?

Speaker 31 It's about affordability, not ideology.

Speaker 31 And Zoron's strict focus on affordability, not running a campaign that falls back on fear, not running a campaign about foreign policy when you're in fucking New York City,

Speaker 31 a strict focus on affordability

Speaker 31 was the key to winning this campaign.

Speaker 27 A strict focus on affordability while not pretending not to have the ideology, which is also really noteworthy, right? Where he's still, he's still, he isn't, he's not like talking around it, right?

Speaker 32 No,

Speaker 31 he's not apologizing or hiding the fact that he's a democratic socialist. Yeah.

Speaker 31 And this produced some super interesting results. If you, if you refer back to the last election in 2024 and everyone bemoaning, like, how, how come young men are so politically lost?

Speaker 31 Why are they all going so far to the right?

Speaker 31 68%

Speaker 31 of men age 18 to 29 go to Mom Dani.

Speaker 31 66% of men 30 to 40. 45% of men 45 to 65.
Among women 18 to 29 years old, 84% Mom Dani.

Speaker 136 Fucking Saddam numbers.

Speaker 35 Hilarious.

Speaker 135 Bath party election numbers on on women.

Speaker 27 Actually, Saddam Hussein al-Takready did in fact vote, but he went for it. He broke hard for Cuomo.

Speaker 46 Honestly, at the end, it was the sex crimes

Speaker 30 that did it for Saddam.

Speaker 27 Uday did vote for Sliwa, though. That was kind of weird.
I'm going to be honest with you.

Speaker 27 We're all trying to parse that one out.

Speaker 61 It's a cat thing.

Speaker 20 Yeah.

Speaker 31 Like I said, like not hiding his political inspirations in any way, quoted Eugene Debs 10 seconds into his victory speech.

Speaker 31 Immediately you understand, like, oh, this guy's like playing.

Speaker 27 he knows what's up eugene v debs the socialist who ran for president from prison yeah yeah yes

Speaker 31 for it to know who eugene v debs is like arguably the most radical national candidate who has ever existed in this country yeah and his speech was extremely poetic um it got a very strong positive reaction from the the people who i watched this with in Bushwick, which was the district that was the most pro-Montani out of the entire electoral method city.

Speaker 31 But he started by talking about how power has been kept out of the hands of working people, right?

Speaker 31 The hands that keep the city going by lifting boxes, by gripping the handlebars of delivery bikes, and collecting burn scars from cooking food.

Speaker 31 Quote, over the last 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater. Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it.
The future is in our hands, unquote.

Speaker 31 The whole speech was kind of rife with little like metaphors and allegories like that.

Speaker 31 It was very very cute. Went on to discuss how the campaign toppled a political dynasty and gave one of

Speaker 31 the most

Speaker 31 fine-tuned disses I've ever seen, quote, I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life,

Speaker 138 which is a phenomenal quote.

Speaker 27 But I hope I never have to say his name again or but let tonight be the last time I utter his name.

Speaker 31 Only the best in private life is astounding.

Speaker 27 Yeah, I mean, he's basically, this is like,

Speaker 27 he's not the originator of this particular kind of diss. It goes back a while, but the gist of it is like, everyone's mom is be a family man.

Speaker 36 Get out of bed.

Speaker 46 Go away.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 31 And repeatedly, Mamdani has used the word mandate to describe this election and the results.

Speaker 31 Quote, New York has delivered a mandate for change, a mandate for a new kind of politics, a mandate for a city we can afford, and a mandate for a government that delivers exactly that.

Speaker 31 I'm going to play a short clip here.

Speaker 139 Thank you to the next generation of New Yorkers who refused to accept that the promise of a better future was a relic of the past.

Speaker 139 You showed that when politics speaks to you without condescension, we can usher in a new era of leadership.

Speaker 139 We will fight for you because we are you.

Speaker 139 or as we say on Steinway an aminkum wailecum

Speaker 27 The Arabic there wild wild that we've moved this far in New York that it's incredible that wins you an election like that didn't win him the election but like they really tried the 9-11 shit Rudy Giuliani posted today a crude photoshop of his own face in the fires of the twin of the burning twin towers.

Speaker 27 Yeah.

Speaker 27 We forgot written across it. And that did not, none of that shit did anything.

Speaker 36 Yeah.

Speaker 31 The last month of the campaign against Mamdani, whether that's from people like Bill Ackman,

Speaker 31 like Bloomberg, or Cuomo's actual team, has has used what people have been calling the 9-11 card incessantly. Playing clips of 9-11 with like...

Speaker 31 Zoron like emblazoned like over top, playing clips from Hassan talking about 9-11.

Speaker 31 But the Islamophobia that the Cuomo campaign has resorted to as a last-ditch effort to stop Mamdani has been despicable.

Speaker 31 And the fact that this did not scare Mamdani into like hiding or like restricting that part of himself is incredibly admirable.

Speaker 60 Yeah, but it wasn't just 9-11, right? Like you said, it was the broad Islam.

Speaker 60 Like they deployed, as they always do, like every urban area in Britain is now like the caliphate, like this bullshit that exists only in the American conservative mind. And it failed, which is good.

Speaker 31 Specifically for a lot of the speech, it was about juxtaposing how we used to have good things in the past.

Speaker 31 We had this idea that good things now are always out of reach. And juxtaposing this idea of hope

Speaker 31 or past exceptionalism that we just don't feel like we have access to anymore. And showing that if you actually involve young people, we can actually do

Speaker 31 good things in our city now.

Speaker 31 And I really liked the line about like a politics that speaks to you without condescension and how much this campaign was like ran by and for young candidates and young voters.

Speaker 31 Soren went on to thank the people who have been forgotten by the politics of our city and how they've supported his campaign, quote, Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas, Senghalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses, Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties, unquote.

Speaker 31 And he went on to mention the kind of people that this campaign is about.

Speaker 31 And towards the end of that section, he talked about the hunger strike that he participated in four years ago in order to win debt relief for cab drivers.

Speaker 139 And it's about people like Richard,

Speaker 139 the taxi driver I went on a 15-day hunger strike with outside of City Hall,

Speaker 139 who still has to drive his cab seven days a week.

Speaker 139 My brother, we are in City Hall now.

Speaker 31 That is the energy of the campaign in the city right now.

Speaker 31 That sort of framing. And that's the energy that people are carrying through.

Speaker 27 I saw among the right-wing fever

Speaker 27 responses to this, Mike Cernovich taking a clip from the election night party where one of the people who was attending Zoron's party made a comment about how

Speaker 27 white people need to get on board with the idea that our culture is multiculturalism in this country, right?

Speaker 27 Like it's not anything else like that's that's like what has made america yeah and mike did not react well to that

Speaker 137 i can't imagine a declaration of war and a bitch mad yeah

Speaker 31 but no like especially in new york out of like anywhere in the country like especially in new york like the the culture is made through the mix of immigrants that have built this city and this is something that Zoran discussed throughout the speech.

Speaker 31 Zoran went on to thank the 100,000 campaign volunteers and specifically how their efforts, quote, eroded the cynicism that has come to define our politics. I liked that line.

Speaker 31 And then he asked New Yorkers to breathe this moment in, quote, we have held our breath for longer than we know.

Speaker 31 We have held it in anticipation of defeat, held it because the air has been knocked out of our lungs too many times to count, held it because we cannot afford to exhale.

Speaker 31 Thanks to all of those who have sacrificed so much, we are breathing in the air of a city that has been reborn.

Speaker 31 There are many who thought this day would never come, who feared we would be condemned only to a future of less, with every election consigning us to simply more of the same.

Speaker 31 And there are others who see politics today as too cruel for the flame of hope to still burn. New York, we have answered those fears.
Unquote.

Speaker 139 And while we cast our ballots alone, we chose hope together.

Speaker 139 Hope over tyranny. Hope over big money money and small ideas.

Speaker 139 Hope over despair.

Speaker 139 We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible.

Speaker 139 And we won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us.

Speaker 139 Now it is something that we do.

Speaker 139 Standing before you, I think of the words of Jawal al-Nehru:

Speaker 139 A moment comes but rarely in history when we step out from the old to the new,

Speaker 139 when an age ends and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance.

Speaker 139 Tonight we have stepped out from the old into the new.

Speaker 31 The line about politics not being something that's done to you.

Speaker 91 Yeah.

Speaker 33 Yeah.

Speaker 31 That really outlines how politics has felt in this country for basically as long as I can remember.

Speaker 31 He then outlined what his central agenda to tackle the cost of living crisis is, including freezing the rent for more than 2 million rent-established tenants, making buses fast and free, and delivering universal childcare across the city, saying, quote, this will be an age where New Yorkers expect from their leaders a bold vision of what we will achieve rather than a list of excuses for what we are too timid to attempt.

Speaker 31 Unquote. Let's go on a quick break and we will come back to talk a little bit more about the election.

Speaker 33 All right, we are back.

Speaker 31 During the second half of this speech, Zoron turned to address Donald Trump, right?

Speaker 31 This looming thing across politics nationwide, but specifically New York, as Trump has threatened to start to fuck with New York even more if Zoron is elected. And people in New York know this.

Speaker 31 And about halfway through, Zoron addressed Trump directly, which we will get to in a sec.

Speaker 31 But before he directly talked to Trump in this speech, Zoron laid out what types of people the city government will be focusing on protecting from Trump's division and hate.

Speaker 139 In this new age we make for ourselves, we will refuse to allow those who traffic in division and hate to pit us against one another.

Speaker 139 In this moment of political darkness, New York will be the light.

Speaker 139 Here, we believe in standing up for those we love.

Speaker 139 Whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community,

Speaker 139 one of the many black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job,

Speaker 139 a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down,

Speaker 139 or anyone else with their back against the wall, your struggle is ours too.

Speaker 31 Specifically, I like this idea of in in the darkened political moment this United States is in, New York and the Zoron administration and how that reflects New York in general, though, will be a beacon for the rest of the country.

Speaker 31 And naming the trans community as the second group mentioned there was heavily appreciated in the Bushwick trans watch party that I was at.

Speaker 31 Zoran went on to say that, quote, no more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election.

Speaker 31 This new age will be defined by a competence and a compassion that have too long been placed at odds with one another.

Speaker 31 We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve and no concern too small for it to care about.

Speaker 31 Tens of millions of dollars have been spent to redefine reality and to convince our neighbors that this new age is something that should frighten them.

Speaker 31 As has often occurred, the billionaire class has sought to convince those making $30 an hour that their enemies are those earning $20 an hour.

Speaker 31 They want the people to fight amongst ourselves so that we remain distracted from the work of remaking a long broken system. Together, we will usher in a generation of change.

Speaker 31 And if we embrace this brave new course, rather than fleeing from it, we can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves.

Speaker 42 I think this whole section is something very important.

Speaker 42 And this has been something that's been very consistent about Momdani's entire campaign, which is there's been on the left for a very, very long time a just

Speaker 42 interminable, intractable conflict between this idea of like purely focusing on class politics or talking about race. And but I think what Montami is doing here has been very effective, right, is

Speaker 42 you can just do both. And in fact, as the left over the last, you know, sort of since it's kind of the re-emergence of this kind of left in like 2015, 2016,

Speaker 42 as it's gone on, it's gotten less white, it's gotten more diverse, it's gotten more multicultural, and it's been able to fuse these two things together.

Speaker 42 And it's been able to fuse that with just, you know, like being very, very openly pro-trans.

Speaker 42 And like I, there was, you know, there was also a pretty big response that I saw from people talking about the fact that he specifically mentioned that it was black women who were being fired by the Trump administration, right?

Speaker 42 And you can just do all these things together and it works.

Speaker 134 And it's worked the whole time.

Speaker 42 And refusing to pit these things against each other, like refusing to pit affordability against trans rights, refusing to pit, yeah you know like refusing to pit the politics of like defending and this is something that like bernie is terrible at right where like bernie like has been like has a whole rant about how trump has been right on like we had to reduce immigration right and you don't have to do that you can be pro-immigrant you can be pro-trans you can be pro-black women you can be you know and and you can also want everything that costs less and you can be in favor of the fact that the us is a is a multicultural society and can only function as one and it's it's a winning form of politics and i'm i'm glad we're finally getting there.

Speaker 31 Yeah. And it will be great if this

Speaker 31 New York City as a beacon can actually shine and not get stifled out in these next four years. Because Zoran is,

Speaker 31 unless things happen, Zoran will be the mayor for the remainder of the Trump term, right?

Speaker 31 Like this is, he will be the mayor after the second Trump administration is over, barring any unfortunate incidents.

Speaker 136 Zoron, make sure your private security is really

Speaker 60 Well, you have an NYPD detail, which

Speaker 134 gets your own guys.

Speaker 60 Yeah, it's by it'll be fun.

Speaker 60 But it also, it means, like, from, I guess, a national perspective, it is likely that Mamdani will become like the enemy number one of the Trump administration, where they're probably Newsome or Prishka are now, right?

Speaker 60 Like,

Speaker 60 it is easier because of the obvious bigotry that underlies a lot of the Republican Party to go after a brown dude. Yes.
And that is what they are going to do. And they're going to use...

Speaker 31 Brown Democratic Socialist.

Speaker 60 Yeah, who stands up for trans people and migrants.

Speaker 36 Absolutely.

Speaker 60 You saw how acceptable Islamophobia is in Cuomo's campaign, right? Like he'd just go on to every mainstream network and say shit that is fucking disgusting.

Speaker 67 Yeah.

Speaker 60 And so we should prepare ourselves for four more years of that, I guess. And I think he does a very good job of repudiating that.
And obviously, the electorate in New York did too.

Speaker 60 But that is going to be what we are going to see as a result of this.

Speaker 31 Well, no, and like so much of the resistance to Zoran came from this idea that if he wins, that means that this is going to be what people point to as a future for politics, specifically democratic politics.

Speaker 31 And a lot of people wanted to stop him because they knew that's going to happen.

Speaker 31 If he is in control of the biggest city in the country as the Democratic mayor, that's going to be influential for what Democratic politics will be after they got completely clobbered last year.

Speaker 31 And he's showing that a different type of politics is possible, even within the Democratic Party. And that's that's true, like altering what the party is fundamentally.
Yeah.

Speaker 31 And I think it's, it is, it is a cool little side note that Zoron voted for himself on the Working Families Party line.

Speaker 31 And in fact, not the Democratic Party line, because the New York mayoral ballots work. I'm going to play one more clip from the speech of Zoran specifically addressing Trump.

Speaker 31 It's going to be a teeny bit longer, and I think we'll cut, we'll shorten some of the applause bits

Speaker 31 because some of the applause sections go on for

Speaker 31 quite long. But this will be the last clip.

Speaker 139 After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him.

Speaker 139 And if there is any way to terrify a a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.

Speaker 139 This is not only how we stop Trump, it's how we stop the next one. So Donald Trump, since I know you're watching,

Speaker 38 I have four words for you.

Speaker 139 Turn the volume up.

Speaker 139 We will hold bad landlords to account because the Donald Trumps of our city have grown far too comfortable taking advantage of their tenants.

Speaker 139 We will put an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks.

Speaker 139 We will stand alongside unions and expand labor protections because we know,

Speaker 139 just as Donald Trump does, that when working people have ironclad rights, the bosses who seek to extort them become very small indeed.

Speaker 139 New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants,

Speaker 139 powered by immigrants, and as of tonight, led by an immigrant.

Speaker 139 So hear me,

Speaker 139 President Trump, when I say this. To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.

Speaker 27 The shit rocks.

Speaker 53 It's good. It's good.

Speaker 31 It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool for a mayor-elect to say that.

Speaker 60 Didn't manage to get in the New York is the Anchora of America, which I was hoping for, but otherwise, great.

Speaker 27 That's Eric Adams' bit.

Speaker 60 Yeah, yeah. Sad day for

Speaker 60 Turkey today, I guess.

Speaker 42 On an actual important note, I think it is really important that...

Speaker 42 You know, all of this energy against Trump, right, and against all the shit that he's doing that's so hideously unpopular, It's starting to be channeled into politics that can actually defeat him and that are actually good, you know, and that he's talking about specifically the fact that you have to destroy the conditions that created him so they don't create the next one.

Speaker 36 Like, this fucking rocks. This is good.

Speaker 60 Yeah, like it for so long, like for, I mean, most of the 2016 to 2020 period and for a lot of this year, we've seen so many people turn.

Speaker 60 the obvious disgust that people have at what Trump is doing into grifts, into supporting a politics which fundamentally allowed for the conditions we are in now, right?

Speaker 60 And to to see someone repudiate that and to see more than a million people turn out to support that is fantastic. Like, it's genuinely hopeful.

Speaker 31 It's something that Zoran has acknowledged. It's like, this is not like the end, right? This is a means,

Speaker 31 not the means either. Like,

Speaker 31 this is a means to an end. And this whole campaign started, as he's referred to it, as a quote-unquote electoral project by the New York City DSA.

Speaker 31 Like, this was largely an experiment and an experiment that grew wildly, wildly kind of out of what I assume they kind of saw it as in the earlier, in the earlier days.

Speaker 31 And now they're in this like moment and

Speaker 31 they have to keep rolling with it. But it is an experiment for a version of doing this.
And he knows this is not like the only method or tactic to be utilized.

Speaker 31 But as an experiment, I think it's so far

Speaker 31 pretty well done.

Speaker 31 Now, Zoran closed his speech by calling to chart a new path as bold as the campaign has already been, saying that conventional wisdom would claim that he is far from the perfect candidate.

Speaker 31 Quote, I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older. I am Muslim.
I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.

Speaker 31 And yet, if tonight teaches us anything, it is that convention has held us back. We have bowed at the altar of caution.
We have paid a mighty price.

Speaker 31 Too many working people cannot recognize themselves in our party, and too many among us have turned to the right for answers to why they have been left behind. We will leave mediocrity in our past.

Speaker 31 No longer will we have to open a history book for proof that Democrats can dare to be great. Our greatness will be anything but abstract, unquote.

Speaker 31 And he concludes by saying that the greatness will be felt by rent-stabilized tenants who will wake up knowing their rent hasn't soared, by grandparents who can afford to stay in their home and whose grandchildren live nearby because the cost of child care is not driving them out of the city, and by the single mothers who don't need to rush their kids to school because they can commute to work on a fast bus.

Speaker 31 Quote, most of all, it will be felt by each New Yorker when the city they love finally loves them back, unquote. The stuff about like worshiping at the altar of caution for like the past,

Speaker 31 the past like 20,

Speaker 31 more than 20, but especially the past like 20 years of Democrat politics and how he is also recognizing that

Speaker 31 this could mark a fundamental shift in what the Democratic Party actually is.

Speaker 31 Because the people, Democrats included, who've been trying to stop this, have failed miserably so far, putting tens of millions of dollars into a campaign to try to

Speaker 31 crush this version of what the future of New York Democrat politics is. And more people since 1969 showed up to deny that future.
That's all all I have for Zoran right now.

Speaker 31 That's literally, you know, less than 24 hours after the election.

Speaker 31 But this was not just a New York City mayoral election. There were other races, including other things in New York.

Speaker 31 There was a Prop 1 amendment to the state constitution to retroactively authorize the winter sports facilities on Mount Van Hovenburg, which is protected forest land.

Speaker 31 and would require the state add 2,500 acres of newly protected land elsewhere in the Adirondack. That's how I'm saying it.
Adirondack Mountains.

Speaker 36 Yeah, Adirondack.

Speaker 31 Which was passed, and this allows them to continue to build and maintain the winter sports facility. Propositions 2 through 6 were New York City Charter amendments.

Speaker 31 2 to 4 were housing reform proposals to fast-track the approval process for affordable housing and simplify zoning reviews. and establish an affordable housing appeals board.
All of these passed.

Speaker 31 These will limit the ability of the city council to control and slow down housing development and empower the mayor specifically to build more affordable units faster.

Speaker 31 And Prop 5, which also passed, creates a new digital map of the city.

Speaker 31 The only prop to fail, which was number six, was to move local elections to be in line with presidential elections on that four-year basis.

Speaker 31 Basically, the ballot that Zoron filled out himself was the one that passed for all of these. all of these proposals.

Speaker 60 Yeah, you get, they call it a coattails effect in political science, right? Like the idea that the people.

Speaker 31 He only announced his ballot that morning.

Speaker 53 He specifically did not,

Speaker 31 he did, he didn't even announce it. Like a journalist asked him what he was voting on.

Speaker 31 He specifically did not advocate for any of these or try to dissuade anyone from any of these before the election.

Speaker 60 Yeah, for sure. But you get a generally aligned, politically electorate, right?

Speaker 60 A relatively progressive in American terms electorate coming out to vote for him who will look at these things and say, that seems to make sense with the way I see the world.

Speaker 31 Absolutely. Democrat Abigail

Speaker 31 Spanberger won the governor of Virginia, flipping blue. And Jay Jones, a Democrat candidate for Virginia AG, also beat the Republican incumbent.

Speaker 31 This was after a month of attacks for a series of text messages from 2022, where Jay Jones said that if certain Republican delegates died, he would, quote, go to their funerals to piss on their graves, unquote, and wish for the hypothetical deaths of Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert's children.

Speaker 31 Quote, only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy. I mean, do I think Todd and Jennifer are evil and that they're breeding little fascists?

Speaker 55 Yes.

Speaker 31 Unquote.

Speaker 136 That's also not wishing for hypothetical deaths.

Speaker 42 He did in a call with

Speaker 31 another Republican politician. And then after the call, they continued texting about it.
So the proof is in these texts. And he has admitted this.

Speaker 31 And basically, he was like, if these people's children were to get killed in a mass shooting, maybe their opinions on guns would change. That's essentially what he's expressing there.

Speaker 31 And then

Speaker 31 he also was

Speaker 31 quoted in these leaks text messages as saying, quote,

Speaker 31 three people, two bullets, Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert, Hitler, and Paul Pott. Gilbert gets two bullets to the head.
Spoiler.

Speaker 135 Put Gilbert in the crew.

Speaker 50 Sorry, I don't.

Speaker 136 Not just as an elected official, as an attorney general, someone going to be a cop that you put in the fucking text message.

Speaker 31 Spoiler. Put Gilbert in the crew with the two worst people you know, and he receives both bullets every time.

Speaker 134 It's insane.

Speaker 60 Yeah, OPSEC hero.

Speaker 31 But that is the new Attorney General.

Speaker 31 That's the new Democrat Attorney General of Virginia,

Speaker 31 who the right has been attacking for quite

Speaker 46 relentlessly the past month because you really fucked up if you can't like

Speaker 126 no

Speaker 136 if you can't run attacks on that guy and you still yeah all all of those jokes about the white moms in the suburbs like wanting blood and like they're looking at me and they're going oh hell yeah yeah

Speaker 31 give me four more bullets we'll put in this guy it's pretty crazy um it's it's it's pretty astonishing Maine voted no, 63% on a voter restriction measure.

Speaker 31 Voters extended the Democrat Pennsylvania Supreme Court and the California redistricting measure or proposition passed with 63.8%.

Speaker 31 James,

Speaker 31 do you have stuff on this?

Speaker 60 Yeah, so it's Prop 50 in California. California, it was like a one-issue ballot, right? You said the Prop 50.
This would temporarily redistrict. I think people maybe have not been...

Speaker 60 Like often it gets missed, and this is temporarily redistricting California until re-establishing the nonpartisan committee that

Speaker 60 does districting in 2031 for the 2032.

Speaker 60 Those districts will come back or they will return to a non-partisan districting in 2032.

Speaker 60 This is one of the most expensive propositions in state history. 120 million was spent in favor, 44 million against.
There was also outside money.

Speaker 60 Newsom already called on New York, Illinois, and other Democrat-majority seats to do the same, right?

Speaker 67 It's going to

Speaker 60 likely remove about five Republican seats, or those Republicans are going to struggle, right? One of them would be San Diego's Mountain Empire and East County seat, which is currently the 48th.

Speaker 60 That seat has been redistricted a few times, right? It's moved around. It's currently Daryl Issa's seat.
In response, California Republicans have already filed a lawsuit.

Speaker 60 The suit was filed by Harmee Dylan's law firm.

Speaker 20 Yay!

Speaker 67 Yeah, so Dylan.

Speaker 27 Friend of the pie.

Speaker 111 Yeah.

Speaker 60 Dylan is in the Trump administration now. But

Speaker 27 Dylan is in the Trump administration and occasionally in my inbox making threats.

Speaker 36 Fantastic.

Speaker 60 Great. But it was Dylan's law firm that filed the case, right?

Speaker 60 The case has claimed that California drew the new lines to, quote, specifically favor Hispanic voters, which it's a similar claim to the Louisiana versus Calais, I think it's Calais, calais the way they say it here case which is currently before the supreme court which the supreme court seems to be suggesting it might be it might be amenable to this argument right that the consideration of race in redistricting is discriminatory yesterday trump truth um quoting here the unconstitutional redistricting vote in california is a giant scam that part is in block capitals um as is characteristic the rest is sporadically capitalized i'm going back to the quote now.

Speaker 60 In the entire process, in particular, the voting itself is rigged. All quote mail-in ballots, where the Republicans in that state are shut out.
It's under very serious legal and criminal review.

Speaker 60 Stay tuned. Yeah, you know, fairly predictable.
We talked about it last week. It's not entirely possible for me to pass out that.

Speaker 60 that second sentence, but I think we can see what direction it's pushing in, right? This was predictable that this was going to happen, and we'll keep you updated on it.

Speaker 60 Also, predictable that we would have to pivot to ads again, which is what we're going to do now.

Speaker 40 And we are back.

Speaker 60 A bit of immigration news this week, as always.

Speaker 60 According to reporting, it's actually last week, but we didn't have time for it last week.

Speaker 60 According to reporting by CNN, Trump claimed he was, quote, very much opposed to his own administration's immigration raid on a Hone Die plant in Georgia, which obviously this is what he's saying to try and get that foreign direct investment back in Georgia, right?

Speaker 60 Because it looks very much like Georgia is going to pay pretty heavily for that raid. Unfortunately, another man lost his life when fleeing ICE officers last week.

Speaker 60 He seems to have left a car that he was in, attempted to cross a freeway where he was fatally struck by another car.

Speaker 60 Yeah, that's the second time this has happened this year.

Speaker 60 Texas has signed an agreement with the federal government to allow local DPS officers to operate as ICE officers, or technically to operate under the authority of ICE officers under the 287G program.

Speaker 60 So this is not the first law enforcement agency in Texas to do this. Lots of local agencies had, but the DPS is statewide, right? So

Speaker 60 this would include officers of of the Texas Highway Patrol. It has 5,000 employees.
It will make Texas a markedly more hostile place for migrants.

Speaker 60 The authority allows warrantless detention

Speaker 60 under loosely limited, loosely phrased supervision by an ICE officer, right? So it allows Texas cops to detain or question people who they suspect of being in the United States without documentation.

Speaker 60 Here in San Diego, San Diego's border patrol sector released a video with, I think it was like, I'll have to check what song it was, like some cringe kind of pop-punk soundtrack of the dynamiting of land west of the Hacumba wilderness.

Speaker 60 This is likely the construction that saw many environmental and cultural protections waived by DHS Secretary Noam earlier this year, right?

Speaker 60 And we're so we're seeing the beginning of what that looks like and what that looks like here. It's just a very unique landscape.

Speaker 60 Anyone, I know some people who listened came out to Hocumba a couple of years ago to help out. Like, it's an extremely unique, sort of high desert landscape, and it's currently being dynamited, right?

Speaker 60 These are the areas where there were little gaps in the border wall because construction there is very hard, and the way that they're going ahead with construction is blowing stuff up.

Speaker 60 Finally, on the immigration beep, a case regarding conditions in the Broadview facility, which is in Chicago, until earlier this year, it was only for very short stays, like not for 24-hour stays, has revealed some of the the horrific conditions inside the facility.

Speaker 60 It confirms something I've heard from multiple migrants who have been detained all over the US, which is that ICE is using the threat of longer stays in poor conditions to get people to sign deportation paperwork.

Speaker 60 Often it's literally in the overcrowded rooms where they're sleeping and staying, right? Like at any point, you can just walk up to it and sign your name and

Speaker 60 you will presumably be removed from those conditions and placed into deportation flight as soon as possible.

Speaker 60 Reading directly from the lawsuit here, quote, people are forced to attempt to sleep for days or sometimes weeks on plastic chairs or on the filthy concrete floor.

Speaker 60 They are denied sufficient food and water. They cannot shower, they are denied soap, hygiene items and menstrual products, and they have no way to clean themselves.

Speaker 60 They are often denied a change of clothes. Continuing my quote here, the temperatures are extreme and uncomfortable.

Speaker 60 Most nights are freezing cold, yet only some receive a thin foil blanket, sweater or sweatpants to try to retain warmth. The lights are typically on all night.

Speaker 60 People have also reported being denied water by agents, there being no running water in the places where they are held, and very little food. We've reported on these conditions before.

Speaker 60 Some of this is standard, right? Lights on all night, freezing cold. You only get a very thin blanket.

Speaker 60 That has been the case. That was the case throughout the Biden administration, right? They call these places the ice box, both in English and in Spanish.

Speaker 65 This

Speaker 60 has always been the conditions people have been held in in these facilities have always been inhumane. But some of this is particularly bad.

Speaker 60 People in Broadview reported being so crowded they could not extend their legs.

Speaker 36 Jesus Christ.

Speaker 60 Yeah, so they had to sit like sort of fetal position. They couldn't sit down and extend their legs right, let alone sleep.
Disgustingly unclean conditions.

Speaker 60 They have lots of people have reported paperwork not being able in a language that they read and write.

Speaker 60 Bathrooms there are not private, and the lawsuit alleges that people of other genders could see see each other using the bathroom, which is pretty disgusting.

Speaker 60 I've linked to the

Speaker 60 lawsuit. You can read it if you want to.

Speaker 42 Tariff Park transition.

Speaker 65 Go!

Speaker 27 Ah, music to my ears.

Speaker 42 Oh boy. Okay.
Abrupt, abrupt shift in tone. So we got a little bit more details on the sort of partial agreement that Trump and the Chinese government have sort of come to that has

Speaker 42 staved off some of the most disastrous of the new trade war elements. Both sides seem to have gotten rid of the fees from ships both docking at their ports and also on like

Speaker 42 the sort of complicated shipbuilding stuff we talked about last year. The U.S.
has paused the thing we talked about last week where they were using the foreign entity list to do anything that was like

Speaker 42 controlled, that was like 40% or more controlled by a thing on the foreign entity list, couldn't be traded with. The U.S.
is backing off on that for a year. China's agreed to buy more soybeans.

Speaker 42 There's also some discussion of China buying more energy products, but This is one of these things that we just, we have no idea what that is.

Speaker 42 It's possible by the time you're listening to to this, there will be information. All we have is buy more energy.

Speaker 42 And the last thing that Trump said that didn't seem to be part of the negotiations between him and the Chinese government per se, but were definitely part of negotiations that have been going on between Trump and his cabinet was that there's going to be restrictions on AI chip exports, although exactly what is not known.

Speaker 36 All Trump said was, quote, the most advanced.

Speaker 42 We will not let anybody have them other than the United United States.

Speaker 42 What this seems to be, and again, everyone is kind of murkily cobbling together whatever information they have.

Speaker 42 What it seems to be is Trump stopped NVIDIA from selling its most advanced AI-grade chips called Blackwell to China,

Speaker 42 which NVIDIA has been massively lobbying for because they need to expand their market to continue the giant bubble that they've accumulated.

Speaker 42 Trump has stopped them. It's unclear whether this is going to be made into formal policy or if Trump is is just going to personally intervene every time a CEO asks him to do this.

Speaker 42 But yeah, we also have, so today recording November 5th is the start of the Supreme Court case against the tariffs.

Speaker 42 I think it's worth noting that this court case against the tariffs, it's framed as like a lot of small businesses brought this lawsuit and they did.

Speaker 42 But also the reason it's gotten to the Supreme Court is because they're being backed by a huge player in the conservative legal machine.

Speaker 42 Almost the entire thing is being funded and paid for by the Liberty Justice Center, which is it's a kind of libertarian right-wing legal thing backed by like the Walton family and the Koch network.

Speaker 42 And this is, I think, one of the most direct and interesting actual oppositional moves we've seen from this wing of the libertarian business wing of the party, which is very, very pissed off at the tariffs.

Speaker 42 We've seen a whole bunch of amicus curiae briefs from the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute and a whole bunch of other right-wing think tanks who are extremely angry about this.

Speaker 42 We don't know exactly how it's going to go, but the initial arguments do not seem to be going well for the Trump administration. So that'll be unfolding, and we'll report on it more as we know more.

Speaker 31 This is literally recording this sheet the first day of trials.

Speaker 42 And finally, I'm going to close on a genuinely deeply baffling piece of news, which is that the day before the election in New York, Greg Abbott posted that there would be a 100% tariff on anyone moving to New York after the election.

Speaker 60 Yeah, how does that work?

Speaker 27 Isn't it moving to Texas from New York?

Speaker 65 Oh, I thought it was to New York.

Speaker 31 To me, it looked like moving to New York as well. I mean, it's certainly unclear because this does not seem like a policy proposal.
It seems more like a post.

Speaker 31 It seems like something just a post. It's someone posting through it because this is...

Speaker 27 Moving from New York to Texas. Yeah.

Speaker 30 Yeah.

Speaker 27 Anyone moving from New York to Texas.

Speaker 33 Interesting.

Speaker 36 I don't know.

Speaker 31 Tariffs are just posts now.

Speaker 27 That's not like a thing that there's law around you being able to do.

Speaker 46 No, it's so unconstitutional.

Speaker 31 I think it's just a post. I don't think it is anything.

Speaker 60 Yeah, I mean, evidently it is a post.

Speaker 42 I think the interesting thing about it is the way in which tariffs have come to be seen in the Republican mind as like, this is something you do to people you're mad at, which is

Speaker 36 a very new development.

Speaker 42 This is a pure Trump 2 phenomenon, effectively.

Speaker 36 Well, absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker 27 A marker of how intensely they're paying attention to this election.

Speaker 27 Like, I mean, Abbott's said doing this because I'm sure it'll show up shore up his local popularity, but it's a marker of like a change that has been going on that has been really like supercharged in the Trump era of, no, no, you can't have local politics.

Speaker 34 Like, it's, it's all

Speaker 27 national politics. And any kind of vote at a state or local level that goes against whatever the party wants is something to be punished, like even if it's 2,000 miles away.

Speaker 27 And that is, that hasn't been as dominant in U.S. politics as it has been recently.

Speaker 34 We should probably talk a little bit about Texas's election night.

Speaker 27 Because that was also pretty consequential. There were 17 ballot measures passed by the Texas legislature earlier this year by a two-thirds majority.

Speaker 27 And the way Texas law works is that once the legislature votes for a ballot measure to two-thirds majority, it becomes a constitutional amendment after a simple majority of voters on a ballot support it.

Speaker 27 And there were 17 measures on the ballot in Texas, which is wild. Very few states add constitutional amendments at the rate Texas does.

Speaker 27 And all of them passed, which is nuts. And some of them are like, Fine.
There was like one to create like a $3 billion fund for dementia research, which is like, whatever.

Speaker 27 Nobody's got a problem with that, really.

Speaker 27 Some questions about implementation, maybe. But there's some absolutely bug fuck nuts stuff in here.
Proposition 13 raised the homestead exemption from $100,000 to $140,000.

Speaker 27 It was passed by about 80% of voters. This lowers the taxable value of a home, which reduces overall tax bills on your primary residence.

Speaker 27 Per an article in the Houston Chronicle, the amendments will be especially felt by elderly or disabled Texans who are poised to receive a separate tax, a a separate break that brings their total property tax exemptions to 200,000.

Speaker 27 As a result, roughly half of seniors and people with disabilities living in Harris and Bayer counties will no longer pay any school property taxes.

Speaker 65 Jesus.

Speaker 27 I should have to say how like bad that is for Texas schools. And in general,

Speaker 27 a lot of these ballot measures were about making heavy cuts and making it impossible to raise new revenue.

Speaker 27 The cuts that are just in these ballot measures are going to cost the state about $4 billion over the next two years, years, right? But that's not all that was done.

Speaker 27 Several of the bills that were passed banned the potential to create new taxes, right?

Speaker 27 So it is now illegal in Texas to create taxes on capital gains or taxes on the growth of assets like property and stocks or taxes on inheritance and estate taxes.

Speaker 27 Taxes on the operations of stock exchanges are now banned because several have announced plans to open in Texas, right?

Speaker 27 So you are looking at, I think the estimate here that I'm seeing in the Chronicles article is that the state's going to spend about $51 billion over the coming biennium to pay for the new cuts and maintain existing ones.

Speaker 27 Texas is a state that has had for quite a while a budget surplus, and they are basically lighting a lot of that on fire to appeal to rich people and business owners and stock exchanges to take their assets to Texas.

Speaker 27 You won't have to help society if you come to Texas. We don't have a society in Texas, right? And that agenda did very well in Texas.

Speaker 22 Jeez.

Speaker 60 Anyway. Good stuff.

Speaker 27 I guess the last thing I want to talk about a little bit, since we've got a couple of minutes here, is the question on everybody's mind. Should I be flying anywhere for the holidays?

Speaker 27 Is that going to be a good idea?

Speaker 27 I'm saying this a day after a horrific crash of a UPS flight over Muhammad Ali International Airport in Louisville, right? Which, I mean, I think seven was the death toll last I saw.

Speaker 27 Nightmarish fireballs. Thank you.

Speaker 60 And it hit nine this morning.

Speaker 27 Is it at nine? Because

Speaker 27 the plane just, the engine caught on fire basically on takeoff. And normally, from what I'm reading from pilots, normally that should have been a manageable problem.

Speaker 27 But because it happened during the ascent, which is the most dangerous part of piloting a plane and where you have the least control, they were not able to recover or gain any kind of control.

Speaker 27 And the plane basically plowed directly into a UPS warehouse. And it was loaded with something like 300,000 pounds worth of fuel because it was about to fly to Honolulu.

Speaker 27 So it was as full of fuel as a big plane can be. And just a horrific crash.
Is this tied? to the fact that you have a lot of federal employees furloughed?

Speaker 27 Is it tied more just to the fact that the FAA is not functioning the way it should be or used to as a result of changes the Trump administration made as soon as they came to power?

Speaker 27 I think it's too early to say that, but this is part of a pattern of pretty disastrous near-misses that absolutely can be attributed to things like the air traffic controller shortage and the fact that there's just a lot less safety precautions being taken.

Speaker 27 And this is something the administration is aware of and has become critical enough that they're no longer able to deny it.

Speaker 27 Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy on Monday said that all commercial flights might be stopped nationwide to protect public safety.

Speaker 27 And they were certainly going to need to cut off flights in specific parts of the countries at times as a result of the ATC shortage, right?

Speaker 27 Basically, there's different kind of grids that the country is divided into, and you might have to shut down one or more of those at a time in order to make

Speaker 27 the shortage of air traffic controllers able to handle the rest of the load, right? For an example of like how bad this can get locally on last Friday

Speaker 27 in New York State, 80% of air traffic controllers did not show up for work. So this is a potentially pretty calamitous problem.

Speaker 27 There have been ground delays on Monday for three major Texas airports in Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Dallas, Love Field.

Speaker 27 And this is just in general, a problem that's only going to get worse as the shutdown looms because I've seen some interviews with air traffic controllers where like one guy was like, look, we're not getting medicine for my kid and she'll die without it.

Speaker 27 It's just not coming in. How do you expect me to be a fucking air traffic controller? Right.

Speaker 27 Like the hardest job in the country that requires absolutely perfect concentration at all times without ever fucking up or hundreds of people die. So I don't know.

Speaker 27 To answer the question of like, should you fly, be planning flights for this holiday season, you should certainly get the flight insurance and be paying attention the days before as to what's happening if the shutdown doesn't end.

Speaker 27 Because right now we are seeing delays, the likes of which haven't really been seen since maybe like either the pandemic, like the pandemic probably before before 9-11 was kind of the last time things were this completely fucked.

Speaker 27 Garrison can tell you how much of a fucking nightmare they had coming back. And it's not just in the United States, by the way.

Speaker 27 Multiple major airports in Europe over the last week and change have had to shut down entirely or partly because of unauthorized or unknown drone flights in their airspace.

Speaker 60 Yeah, that's been ongoing.

Speaker 36 Globally, air travel is not doing well.

Speaker 60 Yeah, Russia's been probing Europe with these Orlands for a little while. Yeah, I think all of them, I don't know if Robert's flown, Garrison and I have flown this month and it fucking sucks.

Speaker 60 Use a credit card if you can, one that has some protections. But maybe, maybe consider not flying right now.

Speaker 27 Yeah, just, you know, keep an eye on things. I don't know what else to tell you.

Speaker 33 Yeah, it's great.

Speaker 60 Everything's going great.

Speaker 39 That is the slogan.

Speaker 60 Everything's going great.

Speaker 31 You know, there's been worse times.

Speaker 27 There's been worse times.

Speaker 60 Yeah, the Blitz. Yeah.
Talking of worse times, lots of people are hungry, right? Because

Speaker 60 we're fucking with people's snap benefits now as part of the culture war. Lots of people are very worried about where their food is going to come from.
Right. And we're entering a time of year.

Speaker 60 You know, kids are going to be off school. There are lots of places you can still get your free school meals, but it's a difficult time for people.

Speaker 60 It's a difficult time for people to feed their families. I wanted to plug We All We Got.
It's a San Diego group.

Speaker 60 What they're doing is helping people be able to rely on them by delivering groceries to them, right?

Speaker 60 And the way that they most need support is for people to sign up to regularly donate a certain amount.

Speaker 60 I'm not going to tell you how much you can donate, but if you're able to, that will give them the ability to plan to secure groceries for people they're supporting.

Speaker 60 The way you can find their website is to go to we all we got sd.com slash donate.

Speaker 60 Also, if you want to reach out to us and you want to do it in an encrypted way, you could send send an email from your Proton mail address to our Proton mail address, which is coolzone tips at proton.me.

Speaker 60 If you're a marketing person and you want your client to be a guest on our podcast, don't email us. I'm just going to fucking block you.

Speaker 60 That's all I have to say about that.

Speaker 67 If you want enough to plug your product, I will also fucking block you.

Speaker 31 We reported the news.

Speaker 60 We reported the news.

Speaker 27 Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 72 It Could Happen Here is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 72 For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 72 You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 16 Hey guys, it's Aaron Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa. So as a sideline reporter, game day is extra busy for me, but I know it can be busy for parents everywhere.

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Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.