CZM Rewind: Harlon Carter: the Man Who Militarized the Cops and the NRA

Summary

Behind the Bastards: CZM Rewind - Harlan Carter: the Man Who Militarized the Cops and the NRA

Episode Overview: In this episode of Behind the Bastards, host Robert Evans delves into the life and legacy of Harlan Carter, a pivotal figure responsible for the militarization of the U.S. Border Patrol and the transformation of the National Rifle Association (NRA) into a powerful gun advocacy organization. The discussion uncovers Carter's influence on gun culture, his strategic maneuvers within the NRA, and the enduring impact of his actions on contemporary American society.

---

1. Introduction to Harlan Carter and His Legacy

Robert Evans begins by introducing Harlan Carter as a central figure in the history of American gun culture. He describes Carter as the man who not only militarized the Border Patrol but also played a crucial role in shaping the NRA's trajectory.

Robert Evans (04:49): "He’s the guy who started militarizing the police, and he's the guy who made the NRA."

2. Early Life and Formative Years

Carter was born on August 10, 1913, in Granbury, Texas. Growing up in a semi-rural environment, he developed a strong affinity for firearms through hunting and target shooting. At age 14, his family moved to Laredo, a border town, where his father became one of the first Border Patrol agents.

Robert Evans (35:19): "He develops an intense affinity for firearms from an early age."

In 1931, at the age of 16, Carter was involved in a fatal confrontation where he shot a Hispanic teenager, Raymond Casiano, after falsely accusing him of car theft. This incident resulted in Carter's conviction for murder, though his sentence was later overturned on appeal.

Robert Evans (45:28): "Carter is arrested, he is tried and he is convicted of murder. He's sentenced to three years in prison, but he only serves two years."

3. Transition to the NRA and Early Influence

After his release, Carter enrolled at the University of Texas, changed his name slightly to distance himself from his criminal past, and followed in his father's footsteps by rejoining the Border Patrol in 1936. By 1950, he was running the entire Border Patrol.

In 1930, Carter joined the NRA, which at the time was a non-political organization focused on hunting and target shooting. His presence marked the beginning of a shift within the organization towards a more militant and politically active stance.

Robert Evans (60:14): "He starts filling the NRA with his buddies from the Border Patrol who are wanting a cushy job in the private sector."

4. Operation Cloudburst and Operation Wetback

Carter spearheaded Operation Cloudburst and later Operation Wetback, aimed at purging undocumented Mexican immigrants from the United States. These operations involved extensive raids, building of physical barriers, and collaboration with the military to enforce immigration laws aggressively.

Robert Evans (63:50): "Operation Cloudburst is the first modern attempt to build a wall, specifically designed to use violence to keep the borderlands white."

Carter's tactics were explicitly racially motivated, aiming to maintain white supremacy by disarming Mexican Americans and controlling their presence within the U.S. border regions.

Robert Evans (64:37): "He believed that guns were a tool to enforce white supremacy, and he wanted to ensure that white people maintained the right to do this."

5. Internal Conflict Within the NRA: Old Guard vs. Carter's Faction

By the mid-1970s, Carter's radical approach clashed with the NRA's old guard, who preferred the organization to remain a sportsmen’s association. Carter, along with Neil Knox, pushed for the NRA to adopt a more aggressive defense of the Second Amendment, focusing on individual gun ownership rights.

Robert Evans (146:26): "Carter and Knox have built a very effective, both fundraising and propaganda wing. They are building a moral panic over this."

The resulting power struggle led to the "Weekend Massacre" in 1976 when members loyal to Carter were purged from the NRA, allowing Carter and his allies to gain greater control over the organization's direction.

Robert Evans (157:25): "Carter plans to take over the NRA by mobilizing its membership to vote for bylaw changes that favor his militant vision."

6. Rise of Wayne LaPierre and the Modern NRA

After Carter's resignation in protest, Wayne LaPierre emerged as a dominant figure within the NRA. By the 1980s, LaPierre was leading the NRA's lobbying efforts, transforming it into one of the most influential gun advocacy groups in the United States.

Robert Evans (172:38): "Carter’s strategies laid the groundwork for LaPierre to turn the NRA into a massive lobbying powerhouse."

Under LaPierre's leadership, the NRA focused on expanding its lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA), and pushing for aggressive gun rights policies, aligning closely with Harlan Carter's original vision.

7. Impact on Gun Control Legislation and Policy

Carter and his allies were instrumental in blocking gun control measures, such as the 1970s National Firearms Act (NFA), and later influencing federal legislation like the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. Their efforts ensured that gun manufacturers could operate with minimal regulation and that individuals could maintain widespread ownership of firearms.

Robert Evans (210:12): "The NRA blocked legislation aiming to give the CDC oversight of defective weapons, ensuring gun manufacturers remained largely unregulated."

The NRA's shift towards political activism under Carter and LaPierre led to a nationwide pushback against any form of gun control, cementing the organization's role in American politics.

8. Conclusion: Legacy of Harlan Carter

Harlan Carter's legacy is evident in the current state of American gun culture and the NRA's formidable influence on gun legislation. His strategic use of fundraising, lobbying, and propaganda transformed the NRA from a sportsmen’s association into a politically charged organization dedicated to preserving Second Amendment rights at all costs.

Robert Evans (193:46): "Carter's actions laid the blueprint for the NRA's dominance in gun politics, making it a cornerstone of right-wing advocacy."

Carter's relentless pursuit of armed enforcement of racial hierarchies and his manipulation of gun culture continue to shape debates around gun control, police militarization, and individual rights in the United States today.

---

Notable Quotes:

• Robert Evans (04:49): "He’s the guy who started militarizing the police, and he's the guy who made the NRA."

• Robert Evans (35:19): "He develops an intense affinity for firearms from an early age."

• Robert Evans (45:28): "Carter is arrested, he is tried and he is convicted of murder. He's sentenced to three years in prison, but he only serves two years."

• Robert Evans (60:14): "He starts filling the NRA with his buddies from the Border Patrol who are wanting a cushy job in the private sector."

• Robert Evans (64:37): "He believed that guns were a tool to enforce white supremacy, and he wanted to ensure that white people maintained the right to do this."

• Robert Evans (157:25): "Carter plans to take over the NRA by mobilizing its membership to vote for bylaw changes that favor his militant vision."

• Robert Evans (210:12): "The NRA blocked legislation aiming to give the CDC oversight of defective weapons, ensuring gun manufacturers remained largely unregulated."

• Robert Evans (193:46): "Carter's actions laid the blueprint for the NRA's dominance in gun politics, making it a cornerstone of right-wing advocacy."

---

Final Thoughts: This episode offers a chilling exploration of how one individual's extremist views and strategic actions can reshape national institutions and influence societal norms. Harlan Carter's role in the militarization of the Border Patrol and transformation of the NRA underscores the profound and lasting impact of his legacy on American gun culture and politics.

Transcript

[Matt Lieb]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Robert Evans]

OpenAI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be an aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley.

[Matt Lieb]

And I'm going to tell you why on my show, Better Offline, the rudest.

[Robert Evans]

Show in the tech industry where we're breaking down why OpenAI, along with other AI companies, are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to Better offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts. Over the years of making my true crime podcast Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community.

[Matt Lieb]

I was calling about the murder of my husband.

[Robert Evans]

The murder is still out there. Each week I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should Hear about, call 678-744-6145 list. Listen to Helen Gone Murderline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Marsha P. Johnson is the trans icon of the queer movement, and it's time to listen to her.

[Matt Lieb]

I want to be one of the.

[Robert Evans]

World'S biggest drag queens. Today you can buy T shirts with her face on them, but her death in 1992 was never solved. I'm dying, dying, dying. Hear how Marsha's life and legacy reshaped our world. Just get your heart ready. Listen to afterlives on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did it occur to you that he charmed you in any way? Yes, it did, but he was a charming man.

[Matt Lieb]

It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.

[Robert Evans]

I often ask myself now, did I know the true Yan at all? Listen to Hot Agent of chaos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Callzone Media. Hey, everyone, Robert here, and we're on reruns this week, so we're deciding to rerun two episodes with you cutting multiple parts into a single episode, reducing some ads and getting some ears on some topics that have unfortunately only become more relevant as time has gone. And this week we're talking about one of the founders of Border Patrol as an organization and institution and One of the men who was behind the start of the NRA and its growth into what it has become today. Like with the dhs, these episodes have only gotten more relevant as time has gone on. And it's very important that we get them in front of as many people as we can. So please listen and I don't know, enjoy seems like the wrong word, but enjoy. Matt Lieb. How are you doing today?

[Matt Lieb]

I'm good, man. I just got married.

[Robert Evans]

You did just get married. I got married.

[Matt Lieb]

Former guest, Francesca Fiorentini, you know.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. One of our favorite guests with our least favorite. Oh, shit.

[Matt Lieb]

Oh, how dare you.

[Robert Evans]

Joking. I'm just being an asshole. We love you.

[Matt Lieb]

I love you.

[Robert Evans]

That's why I've brought you on. To read you a 12,000 word script about.

[Matt Lieb]

Oh, a script.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, a script. That's right, Matt, because. Because I do love you and we have such a good time talking and I wanted to celebrate that you. You have embarked on this new chapter of your life.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Very sad.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, I actually. This is the perfect palate cleanser to a weekend of joy.

[Robert Evans]

That's right. That's right.

[Matt Lieb]

Coming on this podcast and just being just torn to shreds emotionally because there's.

[Robert Evans]

Going to be no joy here. Matt.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

How do you feel? How do you feel? First off, I guess, have you ever heard of a motherfucker named Harlan Carter?

[Matt Lieb]

Harlan Carter? I don't think so.

[Robert Evans]

Okay, okay.

[Matt Lieb]

Is that Jimmy Carter's brother?

[Robert Evans]

Oh, boy. Not at all. That would be Billy Carter. And Billy Carter will be on our episode behind the Heroes for his invention of Billy.

[Matt Lieb]

I thought you were gonna ruin, you know, that guy because he seemed pretty dope.

[Robert Evans]

Can you imagine back when, like, the biggest scandal a president had was that like, his brother made bad beer?

[Matt Lieb]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

My God, what a time. What an administration.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, it was just like, hey, his brother's too cool.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Dudes.

[Matt Lieb]

Dudes were not supposed to rock this much. That was, you know, that was the biggest.

[Robert Evans]

We got to get this guy out of the White House and put in a dude who's going to do part of a genocide anyway. Matt, how do you feel about the proliferation of firearms in American society?

[Matt Lieb]

I'm pro. I think, you know, the more guns, the better. Obviously nothing. You know, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. I think we all know that. And I think it's.

[Robert Evans]

Or 19 good guys with guns stacked outside of a classroom for 78.

[Matt Lieb]

Exactly. Dude. Just kind of sitting around waiting to be waiting to Be good, guys. I can't wait to be a hero. I'll just give it another 45 minutes.

[Robert Evans]

You got to clock in first mess. So it's interesting, it's fun that we got to the military, the incompetent militarization of police, because this is a thing. One of the things that's frustrating. Obviously, you and I may have some slightly different attitudes towards firearms, but I'm frustrated with American gun culture, which I think is primarily toxic, and also the culture of police militarization, which is 100% toxic. And the guy we're gonna talk about today, Harlan Carter, is the dude who started both of those things. He's the guy who started militarizing the police, and he's the guy who made the nra. This dude. Sophie's got a picture of him. He looks like. He looks like who you would cast if you were putting Kingpin, that comic book villain. He looks like Kingpin. He literally looks exactly like Kingpin. He looks so.

[Matt Lieb]

Oh, my God.

[Robert Evans]

And spoiler.

[Matt Lieb]

Sorry for body shaming the NRA guy.

[Robert Evans]

I would prefer any gangster to. It's not even body shaming. He just looks like his neck is the width of his ears.

[Matt Lieb]

No, he's like a literal dickhead. It is the most dickhead ish head I've ever seen.

[Robert Evans]

He is a chode someone poured into a suit. I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure that this what Joe Rogan was like, I want this. And then that's where he basically style off of. Someone has been cutting Joe Rogan's HGH with lemon juice just to try to keep him from getting too huge. But if Joe got the amount of HGH that he intended to shoot into his testicles, this is how he would look.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, he would look like this guy.

[Robert Evans]

His neck would be even thicker.

[Matt Lieb]

He's exactly the way you are picturing him in your mind, listeners.

[Robert Evans]

He does kind of look like. Cause Alex Jones has that thick neck, but he's, like, not that. He's a little smaller. And Joe Rogan's got that. That big muscle, muscle guy head. If, like, Joe Rogan and Alex Jones, if you, like, in vitro fertilized, like, cut their sperm in half and, like, merged them together with the egg from, like, a dead California Condor. You would get Harlan Carter. What's better is this painting of him where he literally looks like Dr. Evil.

[Matt Lieb]

He does.

[Robert Evans]

He does look like Dr. Evil.

[Matt Lieb]

Who painted him?

[Robert Evans]

I don't know a lot of people. He's a very important person that we would not get Drinks with fair. So we're gonna have to start by discussing the history of gun control in the United States. And because this is the United States that also started with white supremacy, I can only.

[Matt Lieb]

Yes. Like, just from. This is just a guess, but I bet you gun control laws that have been enacted were mostly racist.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. This is one of those things when you get these arguments online where, like, people will be like, gun culture is white supremacist. And it's like, yeah, an awful lot of it is. And then folks who are pro gun will be like, well, gun control, white supremacist. And you're both right. Because it's the United States of America.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

It's like, if you try. It's like people talking about, like, oh, well, the Democratic Party used to be like, was a white supremacist party for a very long time. And it's like, yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

Yes, yes.

[Robert Evans]

Both major US parties are primarily rooted in white supremacy, 100%.

[Matt Lieb]

And it's always. It's always super weird that, you know, whenever someone is just like, nuh. And it's like, what. Why are you. You don't need to be so attached to being a Democrat that you're just going to refuse to believe that it's.

[Robert Evans]

This doesn't make an argument one way or the other about gun control because, like, you could say, like, zoning laws have a lot of their rooting in white supremacy. It doesn't mean zoning shouldn't exist.

[Matt Lieb]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Because fundamentally, yeah, factories maybe shouldn't be in the same place as apartment complexes, but that also. That, like. Yeah, anyway, whatever. We're gonna do our rockets.

[Matt Lieb]

Hell, yeah. We're doing gun control. We're doing CRT on this podcast. This is gonna be a little.

[Robert Evans]

A little bit. Yeah, we're getting into a lot of stuff, but we're gonna be talking a shitload about the Border Patrol. But first, let's talk a little bit about the history of gun control in the United States. Obviously, 16, 19, thereabouts, is when the first African enslaved people are brought to the United States. Well, it wasn't the United States then, but you know what I'm saying, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The colonies against their will. And not that long after, in 1680, which is pretty quick considering how slow things went back then. The Virginia assembly passed one of, if not the earliest gun control laws in the colonies. Now, this law did not restrict the ability of white people to be armed. It might even be more accurate to say it wasn't gun control, but weapons control. But this law passed in 1680, made it a crime for any African American to carry a weapon or weapon like object. Now that last term there is interesting, Matt, because you could, I mean like as a man, right. Anytime you're out in the world, you think about all the different things you could use as weapons. Everything is, it's just a thing that happens.

[Matt Lieb]

I enter every room going, what could I use for self defense?

[Robert Evans]

And.

[Matt Lieb]

Or if I just felt like harming someone.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. If I had to defend myself against the 84 year old man next to me in the post office, how hard could I hit him with one of these empty cardboard boxes?

[Matt Lieb]

Seriously, in the genes of every dude is just Mark Wahlberg going, I would have stopped 9, 11 if I had been on that plane. And you know, that's all of us.

[Robert Evans]

It would have been so funny. It would have been really funny if he'd like, if he'd stopped it, but then he'd had to try to land the plane and had accidentally crashed it into the White House, like, oh, God. Anyway, so as you might guess, the vagueness around the term weapon like object meant that this law, it didn't just like ban black people from carrying guns. It meant that they could be punished brutally for holding any object if it could be used to hit somebody. This started what wound up being like a more than a century long tradition of elderly black people being banned from having canes.

[Matt Lieb]

Oh my God.

[Robert Evans]

Because you can hit someone with the cane. Right. As Gandalf showed us, you know.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. Oh yeah.

[Robert Evans]

They weren't being fooled by that. In Virginia in 1680. Yes, we will pardon old man for his walking stick.

[Matt Lieb]

I'll know a wizard staff when I see one. You think I don't know, you gonna.

[Robert Evans]

Cast a spell now? This being 60 years after the forced importation of African slaves to the continent. The 1680 law was aimed at slaves, obviously, but it applied equally. There were some freed black people in the colony at this period and it applied to them as well. The law was amended in 1723 to specify that Africans, African Americans were not allowed to use firearms for any purpose, be it hunting or self defense. And again, 1723, it's kind of important to be able to use a gun, you know, just if you're living in the Virginia frontier.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of other people with guns and it seems just like to.

[Robert Evans]

Have one, you need food and stuff, you know, and there's bears, like, yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. How do you catch your food?

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Matt Lieb]

If you are not allowed to Use.

[Robert Evans]

A gun you can trap. But I think the purpose here, no one's thinking about, like, they're not. They're doing whatever they can to make these people's lives harder because, like, they're terrified of the existence of free black people.

[Matt Lieb]

Yes, of course.

[Robert Evans]

And under this law, a freed black person who defended himself from a white person using a firearm was committing a crime, technically, with any weapon. Like, is any. Like, any tool they were to use to defend themselves would be illegal. So gun control in the early colonies, most of the time, these kind of laws in Virginia were sort of the exceptions of the rule, because as a rule, like, there were. The laws were less kind of specifically banning certain things and more just kind of generally trying to make it possible for black people enslaved or free to challenge white supremacy in any way.

[Matt Lieb]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

So it wasn't just guns. And in fact, that. Because guns were, like, not as good back then, those were less of a focus than some other objects that might surprise you. Possession of dogs by black people was heavily regulated in this period.

[Matt Lieb]

Just having. They couldn't have dogs.

[Robert Evans]

Well, it was not impossible, but it was very hard. If you were a black person who wanted to own a dog in Maryland in the early 1700s, for example, you were forced to get a license from the justice of the peace who was going to be a white man. So it was not easy to get a license from a justice of the peace for this. And if you managed to get one, you were still restricted to owning no more than one dog at a time. Mississippi banned the ownership of dogs for black people under any circumstances and even allowed slave patrols to kill dogs found in the house of a black person. So the police tradition of shooting people's dogs is very old indeed.

[Matt Lieb]

Of course, I should have. I should have known. Of course, dog control also, you know, ties directly to white supremacy.

[Robert Evans]

Well, and it's one of those that you have to. Again, weapons. Firearms are a lot less deadly back then. So, like, a gun, you get one shot, and it's not easy to reload. I think there are revolvers, but, yeah, a dog, you don't need to reload. Right. A Doberman will keep fucking going until, you know. Yeah. So that's what, you know, white folks were particularly scared of. And again, it's also worth noting, obviously, the prohibition against black people carrying guns or other weapons makes sense if you're afraid of a slave or, you know, just an uprising. Right. Because a group of people with guns can do an uprising. You can't really effectively organize a bunch of dudes and their dogs to do an uprising together. It's hard to do that.

[Matt Lieb]

I'd like to see it though.

[Robert Evans]

It would be cool.

[Matt Lieb]

That would be the greatest.

[Robert Evans]

Clearly, what they're doing here, they don't want black people to be able to defend themselves from like mob violence. Right. Like individual and families. They don't want them to have any kind of defense if like somebody wants to do a murder, you know, Jesus Christ.

[Matt Lieb]

Like inventing, inventing laws that are completely useless. The idea that somehow this is like, oh, well, we can't, we can't kill that guy. He lives in a kennel filled with ravenous dogs surrounding him like he's fucking Ramsay Bolton. Just like ready with hungry dogs to.

[Robert Evans]

Bite your dick off if I'm. Yeah. So in the late 1700s. Spoilers. The American Revolution broke out.

[Matt Lieb]

Hell yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And by 1787, we have us a constitution. You know, we fight them English, we beat them, and then we're like, oh boy, this first government we tried as a giant shit show. We should probably like give another shot at this. And they do a constitution. And eventually this constitution comes to include a bill of rights and the now infamous second amendment. We're gonna be talking a lot about the changing ways this has been interpreted through time. And despite what people tend to say on either side of the modern issue, there are a couple of different ways to interpret how the so called founding fathers intended it to funct. And again, as a general rule, they weren't all in agreement about pretty much anything. But one thing is perfectly clear, they did not see the right to bear arms as extending to black people. Now, black people were not categorically forbidden from owning weapons in the new United States. But in those states where it was legal for them to own arms, they were always required to register those weapons with the government. This was not the case for white people. While there was some hope during the revolution among black Americans that independence would bring about an improvement in their circumstances, and that was not unreasonable. Again, the British Empire allowed slavery too. So at this stage in time, it's not like it's perfectly reasonable to hope that like, well, maybe things will get better when they don't have a king anymore. Right?

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Obviously that doesn't happen. And when that doesn't happen, there's some uprisings in the new United States. In 1811, Louisiana uprising of enslaved persons failed. And in response to this, New Orleans made it a crime for black people to carry weapons. And, and this was again, primarily even more than guns, banned them from stuff like Canes.

[Matt Lieb]

Crutches, wheelchairs.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, any. Yeah, definitely. You don't want them with an assault wheelchair. Yeah. So, as we've discussed in our behind the Police series, many Southern police departments started as slave patrols made up of armed white dudes searching for escaped slaves and using weapons to keep a boot on the neck of even free Black people. In 1825, Florida gave slave patrols the right to enter any black person's home and take away firearms, ammunition, or any other weapons found. And obviously, these kind, as, as is the case with no knock raids today, these often were basically just pretexts to kill people in their homes by saying you felt threatened. Yeah. Now, in the early 1860s, obviously, we have us a civil war over slavery. And broadly speaking, this goes pretty well. If you think slavery's bad. U.S. civil War, broadly speaking, goes all right.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Now, one of the most kind of revolutionary aspects of the Civil War is that for the first time in US History, a shitload of are legally carrying guns in an organized way. 179,000 black people serve in the Union army, which is roughly 10% of its total. And you suddenly have tens of thousands of black men with guns marching across the US south, which really freaks out people in the South.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, that's gotta be the scariest thing. They looked at that, and they're like, see, this is what I'm talking about. This is the scary shit I did not want to happen.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, this is why we're losing, started this war that we're losing. So post Civil War, black people are not immediately entitled to the same rights as white people. So starting in 1865, which is the year the war ends, states like former states that had lost, basically start enacting black codes. And these are kind of, okay, these people aren't slaves anymore, but we want to treat them that way. So let's just write new. Let's just take the old laws that we had that restricted slaves from doing things in order to keep them under control. And we'll replace the word slave with servant or, you know, something similar so that we can try to hold them under the same laws. In Mississippi, black people were still banned from possession weapons or ammunition. And if white people turned them in for this crime, they would be given their firearms as a reward. And again, this is after they've been freed, so they, like, should have the right to bear arms and whatnot.

[Matt Lieb]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

I want to quote now from a 2021 honors thesis by Alexandra Lanzetta from the University of Colorado, quote, other Southern states to enact Their own set of black codes were Alabama and Louisiana. Both states prohibited African Americans, not including veterans, from owning guns without a license or special permit. Not surprisingly, these permits and licenses were controlled by white men, making it virtually impossible for a black man or woman to legally obtain a gun. This resulted in many blacks illegally purchasing guns, making the potential penalties of exposure even greater. Punishment for having an unlicensed firearm was a fine and confiscation of the weapons. Old slave patrols re emerged to enforce the black codes and to terrorize African Americans. This, along with a combination of great incentives to catch blacks with weapons and a hatred over their newfound freedom created a white frenzy, making it extremely difficult to hide a gun as an African American.

[Matt Lieb]

White frenzy is the worst frenzy.

[Robert Evans]

It's. It's the most common frenzy, too, in this country.

[Matt Lieb]

It's their most traditional American frenzy, but it is not. Is not a fun one.

[Robert Evans]

We do love us a frenzy.

[Matt Lieb]

We love a frenzy.

[Robert Evans]

We love a good frenzy, we love a bad frenzy. So 1865, right? Bunch of black codes come into effect to basically try and keep black people in similar positions to how they'd been during slavery, even though the war was over. So in 1866, the US Congress passes the Civil Rights act, which. This is like, there's a big old fight over this. And this is the law that basically says, hey, you actually have to. These people have the same rights that white people have under the Bill of Rights. Right. Like, that's what that does, you know? And, you know, things do get a lot better for a while, you know?

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. Reconstructed at this point was like, look, do you ever just, like, read up on reconstruction and go like, holy shit, for a hot second there?

[Robert Evans]

We seem to be on a good track for a while.

[Matt Lieb]

We were on a good track. Like, it seemed like shit was gonna, like, work out.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, things get a lot better for a while. And then there's a violent reaction from the reactionari, and they do an insurgency which is kind of centered around the kkk. We have talked about this in other episodes. It ends with a series of demeaning, bigoted laws aimed at maintaining white supremacy in the former Confederacy. These are, you know, Jim Crow laws, right? And these come into place alongside a wave of lynchings which kill at least, like, 5,000 black Americans. Obviously, there's no way of knowing the actual total good chance it was significantly more, but at least 5,000. So in response, black people do what you would expect. They form militias. You know, they start carrying guns. For what? I don't think I need to explain the Logic here, right? And they organize to stop lynchings. This culminates in Louisiana in 1876 where a bunch of Klansmen who are also government officials, these are like elected leaders in Louisiana who are also in the kkk are charged with, with conspiring to disarm a meeting of black Americans. Basically like one of these groups of black folks had gotten together with guns to like figure out how to protect their community. And these state officials like try to take their weapons away.

[Matt Lieb]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

A bunch of court shit happens. It goes to the Supreme Court who rules in favor of the Ku Klux Klan saying that the state had the legal right to disarm this meeting to protect the common good.

[Matt Lieb]

God.

[Robert Evans]

And you know, in this period of time there's also one of the things that's happening during the lynching period is sometimes lynchings get stopped because the person who has attempted to be lynched has a gun and they shoot the people trying to lynch them. And when that happens, a number of laws are passed in different towns and states to ban the carrying of concealed firearms. And in fact those are some of the first specific laws against the carrying of concealed handguns. Now this is an area where like the kind of the anti gun control people tend to focus entirely on this stuff. It's very much worth noting all gun control in the United States in this period is not based in white supremacy in part because a lot of it is put in areas where like most of the population is white. And there was, it's worth noting, significantly more gun control in portions of the so called Wild west than there are in a lot of those same states today. In places like the Dakotas and whatnot. It was common for the open carrying of firearms to be restricted. In many towns if a visitor came into town, they would be expected to, to leave their guns with the local police before entering they'd get like a, a little card or something you weren't supposed to like, like there were, it's, it's, it's. And there's, you know, a lot to be said about like why this is being done, but in general it's being done because they see that it's, it's perfectly reasonable to say that like, well, there should be restrictions on what you can do in town with a firearm. Right?

[Matt Lieb]

Right, yeah, yeah. Walking around with a gun seems, I don't know, threatening.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, they certainly don't want you doing it openly. And then like there's a bunch of, there's laws about carrying concealed and those kind of vary from place to place. But it's worth noting that the infamous gunfight at the O.K. corral actually occurred because a guy, like, it was over gun control. Right? Like a guy was openly carrying his guns in the city. And, you know, there was, as far as I'm aware, like, everyone involved in that, I'm pretty sure was, like, a white dude. So I don't think there's anything particularly racist in the gunfight. You could talk about it, be it involving, like, police overreach, which people will make the case that this was a case of a fucking early cop going bug fuck on some people, don't tread on me.

[Matt Lieb]

And just people see, this whole time, I didn't know that that was a real Gunfight at the O.K. corral.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, no, no, no. It's a pretty cool story as perfectly accurately described in the documentary Tombstone. It's a great doc starring Val Kilmer. Yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

See, Yeah, I thought the reason. Reason was, you know, like, a card game got lost or something, or someone had, like, extra aces up their sleeve, but it turns out gun control.

[Robert Evans]

No, that would be the. That would be the documentary. Shit. Was it Maverick? What's the documentary about? The card guy who gets like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's. Oh, I need to rewatch that. That was a good fucking. That's a good movie.

[Matt Lieb]

My other guess was going to be a giant metal spider who tries to.

[Robert Evans]

Take over my third favorite documentary. And this is what brought about the. The famous US Law against the carrying of gigantic metal spiders.

[Matt Lieb]

Right, right, right, right.

[Robert Evans]

Which I consider to be the civil rights era of the day. Of course, I think access to giant metal spiders should be democratized. I mean, that's just a legitimate.

[Matt Lieb]

Well, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a giant metal spider is a good guy with a giant meter.

[Robert Evans]

I would argue that you can't be a bad guy with a giant metal spider.

[Matt Lieb]

Agreed.

[Robert Evans]

Cause, look, no matter what it's doing, if I get to see a giant metal spider tromping around town, my day's improved. Like, I don't care what that spider's going to do.

[Matt Lieb]

Everyone feels safe and happy.

[Robert Evans]

Everybody feels better with a giant metal spider.

[Matt Lieb]

So this podcast is brought to you by giant metalspider.com promo code. Giant metal spider.

[Robert Evans]

Get yours today. You're actually right on time. Because it is that. It is about that time.

[Matt Lieb]

Wow.

[Robert Evans]

Well, look, everybody's talking a lot about AR15s. You know what's more powerful than an AR15? A metal spider spider the size of the Chrysler Building.

[Matt Lieb]

That is scary.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. How could a beautiful young first grade teacher be stabbed 20 times, including in the bat, allegedly die of suicide? Yes, that was the medical examiner's official ruling. After a closed door meeting, he first named it a homicide. Why? What happened to Ellen Greenberg?

[Matt Lieb]

A huge American miscarriage of justice.

[Robert Evans]

For an in depth look at the.

[Matt Lieb]

Facts, see what happened to Ellen on Amazon.

[Robert Evans]

All proceeds to the national center for Missing and Exploited Children. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves.

[Matt Lieb]

This medal is for the men who went down that day.

[Robert Evans]

It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm J.R. martinez. I'm a U.S. army veteran myself and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and I Heart podcast Podcast from Robert Blake, the first black sailor to be awarded the medal to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I wanna be one of the world's biggest drag queens. You've heard the name Marsha P. Johnson. Trans icon, revolutionary saint.

[Matt Lieb]

They call me a legend in my own time.

[Robert Evans]

But who was she really? Trans. She's strutting up there, waving to the policemen in the cars. Pay it no mind.

[Matt Lieb]

I'm a woman.

[Robert Evans]

A real woman. Marsha also survived homelessness, sex work and police violence. And in 1992, her body was found in the Hudson River. Her death remains unsolved.

[Matt Lieb]

Marsha was pulled out of the water.

[Robert Evans]

Right over the edge here. Afterlives is a podcast about how trans lives we've lost have reshaped our world. Marsha will tell us who she was in her own words.

[Matt Lieb]

You're gonna be gagging.

[Robert Evans]

Just get your heart ready for heart failure. At a time when trans rights are under attack, her story is more urgent than ever. Listen to afterlives on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Jan Marsalek was a model of German corporate success. It seemed so damn simple for him. Also, it turned out a fraudster.

[Matt Lieb]

Where does the money come from? That was something That I always was questioning myself.

[Robert Evans]

But what if I told you that was the least interesting thing about him?

[Matt Lieb]

His secret office was less than 500.

[Robert Evans]

Meters down the road. I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all? Certain things in my life since then have gone terribly wrong. Wrong. I don't know if they followed me to my home.

[Matt Lieb]

It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story because this ties.

[Robert Evans]

Together the Cold War with the new one. Listen to Hot Agent of chaos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. We're back. So you have, you know again, the Wild West. How common gunfights and stuff were, especially in like cities and towns is exaggerated. But also there was a lot of, like, there were a lot of robberies, there were a lot of crimes like, and it's, it's the same as it is today. Like the gunfights that have kind of come down to history were like the ones that the media went nuts on in the day, like the gunfight at the okay Corral, right? But broadly speaking, by the end of the 1800s, most places in the United States had banned the concealed carrying of handguns. Although open carrying remained legal in a lot of places. We'll talk about when that ended. In 1893, the government of Texas said that, quote, the mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder. To check it is the duty of every self respecting, law abiding man. And again, again, he was probably saying that primarily because he didn't want black people to have concealed guns. This is the governor of Texas in 1893, so do keep that in mind. But US gun control in this period was at least deeply preoccupied with the specter of armed black people. And even where laws were perfectly reasonable, they were often used specifically to enforce white supremacy, even if that hadn't been the initial intent of the law. Lanzetto writes, quote, another example of discrimination is found in legal proceedings during the Jim Crow era involved an 11 year old black boy with a toy gun in St. Louis in 1900. It was illegal to fire a gun within city limits and the boy was charged for violating this law. However, when his case was being reviewed by a judge to determine his guilt, it was discovered that the gun was fake. Knowing this new information, the judge should have dropped all charges, given that it is not possible to fire a fake gun. But this was not the case. Instead, the boy was found guilty and the Judge fined him $10, almost $310 today. Which is interesting. Again, another thing that goes back very far. Is black kids being penalized for having toy gun. Exactly. Quite, quite far back. Yeah. Yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

I mean, it's literally just these are like, rulings. It's like, well, you scared me. Yeah, that's. That's the entire thing that has been the, I believe, the explanation for the deaths of countless, countless black people.

[Robert Evans]

Well, and it's also just like this.

[Matt Lieb]

I was scared.

[Robert Evans]

Perhaps we don't, like. Perhaps we're fundamentally frightened by the concept, even if it's a toy of, like, black people having guns, because that's how we maintain our power over them. Right, right. Which is again, even in these areas where concealed carrying or open carrying is illegal, it's generally not illegal for white people to do if they're being vigilantes. Right. This is a key aspect of this period. And this brings us back to the glorious state of Texas. Like much of the south after the Civil Rights act, legislators had to at least pretend that their laws meant to disarm black people were not motivated by racism. Brendan Rivas from Texas Christian University writes, quote, the post 1860, 1865 laws, however, used race neutral language to accomplish a racially motivated goal. Most of these laws attempted to disarm black Texans, but some from the 1870s stopped to curb the racial violence of the Ku Klux Klan by disarming everyone. For instance, a part of the Texas slave code prohibited slaves from carrying a gun without written permission from a master or overseer. And a law passed in 1866 prohibited laborers from carrying firearms onto a plantation without the owner's consent. And race neutral language at the 18th 1866 law achieved the same result as the slave code without specifically declaring that African Americans should be disarmed. Their arming was conditional, subject to the authorization of an interested white party. Similarly, the state's first comprehensive weapons control law did not use racially charged language, but left enforcement in the hands of local officials who could apply it selectively against uppity blacks or white vigilantes, depending on which political party controlled those local offices. And you can guess which of those happens more often. Often. And this is the state of affairs legally in the state of Texas when Harlan Bronson Carter is born on August 10, 1913, in Granbury, Texas. Now, at the time, Granbury's primary claim to fame was that it was the home of Davy Crockett for a little while. And every town in Texas was Davy Crockett's home for a little while. Not super premium impressive.

[Matt Lieb]

And yeah, every town is just. He stayed at a motel here for two weeks. Yeah, and he fucking all our hookers.

[Robert Evans]

He's. He's like, a celebrated hunter and frontier guy. And Harlan certainly, like, I heard God knows how many fucking stories about Davy fucking Crockett when I was a kid in my mandatory Texas history class. I am going to guess in, like, 1920, young, young Harland Carter is growing up and learning even more of these stories.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And obviously, he's also enmeshed in the local gun culture of the time. Pretty much everywhere is semi rural. So he's, you know, he does a lot of hunting. He does a lot of target shooting. He becomes an excellent shot from an early age, and he develops an intense affinity for firearms, shall we say. So when he's young, the family moves to Laredo. And Laredo is a border town. Right. And they moved to Laredo because his father is a Border Patrol agent and, in fact, is one of the very first Border Patrol agents. So the year that they moved to Laredo is 1927. Harlan's 14. And it's the same year that a Border Patrol inspector named Clifford Perkins makes a trip to the town and expresses in an official document his shock to find that, quote, laredo was strictly a Mexican town. Probably 90% of the people were either Mexican or of Mexican descent. He adds with horror, the only Anglo on the police force was the chief himself. And this is an interesting. Like, Laredo at this point, because it's so heavily Mexican, is not a town controlled by white people, and the police are not a white force. Right. You'll note that quote I read earlier states that, like, kind of the laws against gun control were usually mainly, like, put into force against, like, armed black people, but depending on politics, could be used to try to stop white vigilantes. Well, this is one of those towns where maybe that's more likely because the police force is not white. So the Border Patrol, however, is not happy with the idea of a town where Mexican folks are running things. Right. That does not thrill them.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, next, you know, they'll start inviting other Mexicans to live here, and they won't stop the border. I mean, I love the idea of these, like, people going to a town right on the border of Mexico in Texas, which used to be Mexico, and being like, what the hell are all these Mexicans doing?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. These communities that had been there for decades before a state of Texas was a thing that anyone had thought of being like, these people are gonna change the nature of Texas.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. This is not the Texas I know that we invented about 20 years ago.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. That we invented when I was 15.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, exactly.

[Robert Evans]

So this inspector guy, Perkins, again, is exactly as racist as you might expect. And he decides that Laredo's immigration cops are not going to be able to enforce U.S. immigration restrictions, which are, again, geared towards enforcing white supremacy, if the. The state of affairs in Laredo remains the way that it is. So he carries out what he describes as a, quote, full scale house cleaning. Now, in the wonderful book Migra, Kelly, Hernandez writes, quote, he charged local officials, the chief patrol inspector, and border patrol officers in the Laredo station with immigrant smuggling and forced just under half of Laredo's 28 Border Patrol inspectors and the chief patrol inspector to quit or be fired. Perkins then transferred select border pat, who had all been Texas Rangers, into the Laredo sector because all were experienced, well disciplined fighters who knew the country well. Detailing former Texas Rangers to Laredo was a strategy used to divorce the border patrol station from the local Mexican American political elite. Tension quickly mounted between the X rangers in the Laredo community, particularly the Laredo police department, while the border patrol enjoyed close relations with the local police in most borderland communities. In 1927, several officers of the Laredo border patrol patrol got in their model T automobiles and spent about half an hour circling and shooting up the police station.

[Matt Lieb]

Holy fuck.

[Robert Evans]

So he cleans house, brings in a bunch of Texas Rangers, which is like, the most racist police force in the United States in this period, and has them shoot up the police station.

[Matt Lieb]

Fucking A. I mean, like, on the one hand, acab.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's like, on the one hand.

[Matt Lieb]

But on the other hand, I don't think it's a. I think it's just these particular cabs, you know what I mean? They're going after specifically an armed group of Mexican Americans.

[Robert Evans]

It's also probably worth noting, but that in this period, if you being a fucking. Being a Mexican American police officer in Laredo in 1927 is a bit different from being a police officer pretty much anywhere in the United States at this point, which is part of, like, why the border patrol is purging them. Cause he's like, you guys, they're not stopping immigration. They're not, like, violently cracking down on people who aren't white. They're not enforcing white supremacy. So we have to get rid of them with guns. And they get rid of. They do get rid of the Laredo police force with guns.

[Matt Lieb]

The only time in American history that police have been able to be fired.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. Yeah. This is the one time it happened. This is what it took. The one time so it's safe to say that Laredo was a pretty wild place when Harlan Carter was an adolescent. His father, Horace, was among the first cohort of Border patrol agents hired in 1927, and he was transferred to Laredo in 1927 as part of this process. It's entirely possible that Horace Carter was one of the guys shooting that police station. And in this period of time, Harlan's father would have seen his job as explicitly to use violence to assert white supremacy in a place where most people were not white. White. Quote from Migra. Although most local stations developed their own strategies, policies, and procedures, the Laredo station was exempt until the men and the infamously brutal racial violence of the Texas Rangers slashed away at the bonds between the Laredo Border Patrol and local Mexican American leadership. The cleanup transformed the Laredo Border Patrol into a refuge for white violence within Mexican dominated Laredo. So they've turned the Border Patrol prior to this, and they're all like, local guys. Right. So they don't really care about, like, Mexican America, like, Mexicans coming into America because, like, that's how they got there. Right. That's like, their family, everybody, like. And again, they also probably don't see the border as this solid thing because their relatives have lived here for forever. It used to not be, like, a thing to cross.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

But this is the period where the border is really is becoming a thing in a way it hadn't been before. And part of how they do that is they clean house, bring in a bunch of white people, and have them shoot anybody who disagrees. Right. Like, that's how the border becomes real in Laredo.

[Matt Lieb]

The American way. And it's how borders are enforced everywhere.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

That's why borders are bad, folks.

[Robert Evans]

Yep. Yep. Although today, I mean, there's a long conversation to be had about the fact that the Border Patrol today is extremely diverse. Like, one of the things people on the left particularly have gotten wrong about ivaldi is like, the assertion that, like, well, they probably didn't go in because those kids were Hispanic. And it's like, have you seen pictures of the Uvalde police? A lot of them are Mexican American. It's. And the border patrol guy, like, it's. It's a whole thing. Like, if you go down to border communities, you'll see.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, it's not simple. Is always as, like, superficial and simple as it. As it seems.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So in 1930, Harlan, aged 16, joins the National Rifle Association. And again, again, the NRA is rightfully. Again, I'm more pro gun than most People on the left tend to be. But the NRA is like, undoubtedly, we'll be spending hours talking about this. Incredibly toxic. It's not at this point. Right, right. It's not. There's nothing wrong with the NRA at this stage, really. And in fact, the NRA has its roots on the correct side of the Civil War. There's these two Union generals who are like, cause, again, Civil War. One of the things early on, the south is doing pretty well. And part of why they're doing pretty well is that, like, all the boys who wind up fighting in the Confederacy's military, they're country boys, right? They've grown up shooting and hunting and using guns to enforce white supremacy. They're good with firearms, whereas most of the Northern boys who get drafted are like city kids. And many of them had never had any chance to use firearms. So they're like, they suck with them, right? And these two Union generals are like, boy, our soldiers. Soldiers are really bad at shooting, and it takes a long time to train them up. Maybe if we should get ready for the next war by having an organization where boys who grew up in urban areas can, like, go in and learn how to shoot, you know, like, that seems like a good thing to encourage. So that's in the NRA, up until the early 20th century, is like a sportsman's association. You're doing it for target shooting, you're doing it for hunting. Now, it is worth noting that, like, from the beginning, and this was not seen as problematic at all at the time, there's a military aspect to it as well. It's not like a military organization, but part of the purpose of the NRA is to prepare people to be part of the military if necessary. And this is also. The military is a really different thing in this period. You know, we have a big standing army during the Civil War, but we hadn't before, and we don't quickly afterwards, right? Like, this is again, when World War I happens, they have to, like, make an army. When World War II happens, they have to, like, make an army. Army in a way that, like, it had not hugely existed prior to this. So there's this understanding that, like, if there's an emergency, we're going to need to activate all of these civilians, and they need to be ready to, like, fight and whatnot.

[Matt Lieb]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

So, yeah, the U.S. defense Department would regularly hand over old weapons and other equipment to the nra, which would sell them to members quite cheaply. This used to be able to get, like, World War II guns like Garands for really cheap from the NRA. It was a bunch of stuff they did like that. So in February 1931, the Carter family's car is stolen from in front of their house. Right. Now, they have no idea who does this.

[Matt Lieb]

This is the origin story of so many racists. But go on.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, boy. Matt. So again, as far as I know, it was never figured out who had done this. But a couple of weeks after their car is stolen, on March 3, 1931, while Horace Carter is out at work, Harlan's mother sees three Hispanic boys, quote, unquote, loitering out in front of the house. Now she says, loitering? We have no idea. They may have just been like, walking around or what? Like, even if they're loitering, it doesn't justify this. But like, racist white lady sees people who are not white vaguely close to her house, and she decides that, like, these boys must have been who stole my car.

[Matt Lieb]

Yes, yes. The earliest recorded incident of Karen. Yeah, yeah. So Karen Carter calls the cops.

[Robert Evans]

Karen Carter. Well, you can't really call. It's 1931. Some people do have phones. I don't know if they do. It's not easy to call. It's not as easy to call the cops.

[Matt Lieb]

They send a page in or whatever those guys did there.

[Robert Evans]

No. Her son winds up taking this into his own hands.

[Matt Lieb]

Ah, yes, that's right.

[Robert Evans]

I'm gonna quote from a write up in timeline here. The elder Carter was at work and likely wouldn't be home for hours. So the son picked up his shotgun and walked out the door. It didn't take him long to find the boys, who were between the ages of 15 and 12, at a swimming hole nearby. He demanded they come home with him. When they asked why he wouldn't say, 15 year old Raymon Casiano responded, hell no, we won't go to your house and you can't make us. Carter and Cassiano started swearing at each other. Cassiano pulled out a knife and asked if he wanted to fight. Carter lifted his shotgun to Ramon's chest. According to testimony from that time. Ramon told him not to do it and pushed the shotgun aside. Then he took a step back and laughed. Annoyed by Ramon's lack of fear. Carter asked if he thought he wasn't going to shoot. Then he did. Cassiano lay dying on the ground with a 2 inch shotgun wound in his chest.

[Matt Lieb]

Jesus.

[Robert Evans]

So that sounds familiar, right? There's shades of Rittenhouse, there's shades of Zimmerman. You know, like this is again, not. And obviously I'm sure, like, if we had been around at the time and paying attention to the news, we'd say, oh, there's shades of like this thing that happened in like 1920 and this thing that happened. Right.

[Matt Lieb]

Like we just happen to know the most recent incidents.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. You know, this is a very familiar incident. Right. And you can imagine if this happened today, it would be a massive culture wars. Well, he had a knife. What was supposed. He was just defending his family, you know, yada, yada, yada. So it's worth noting talking about why Harlan felt comfortable leaving the home carrying a shotgun, which there are some, like, obviously it's not entirely legal to carry shotguns because people go out and hunt and stuff. But this is, you're not supposed to like walk out to try and solve the robbery of your car with a 12 gauge shotgun. That's not explicitly legal. But there's a long history of vigilante violence by white people. And so whether or not this actually is legal is gonna come down heavily on the local courts. Right. And so the fact, because this is happening in Laredo, if this had happened in like Dallas, you know, the city of hate, perhaps it would never have been even an issue. But because it's happening in Laredo, this is gonna be a problem for Harlan.

[Matt Lieb]

Did you call Dallas the City of Hate?

[Robert Evans]

That's literally its nickname.

[Matt Lieb]

What?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's the nickname of Dallas, Texas. Is the city we killed jfk.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, I mean, good point. Holy shit. The City of brotherly Hate. That's Wow.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, not anymore, but like, that is the nickname of Dallas, Texas. Yeah. So because this happens in Laredo, the law is not as on his side as you might expect if it had happened in some other parts of Texas. Harlan Carter is arrested, he is tried and he is convicted of murder. He's sentenced to three years in prison. Again, you can say like, he should have been sentenced to more. I, I, I'm mixed because he was a child. Right. Like this is bad. But also like, like, I think you have to if you believe children are not culpable in the way that adult. But anyway, this is academic because he only serves two years. His family appeals the judgment and they complain about a number of things. They say the judge is related to the prosecutor that self defense had not been adequately explained to the jury that one of the witnesses was like a criminal himself and wasn't trustworthy. A bunch of racist shit.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, yeah. They were like, well, the judge failed to consider that the victim was no angel.

[Robert Evans]

That like, that's based. Yeah, Although they focus more on, like, the. The kid who watched him's friend get his brother or whatever get murdered was no angel. Yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

He was also no angel. So eventually, legally allowed to kill no angels.

[Robert Evans]

That's right.

[Matt Lieb]

That's in the Bible.

[Robert Evans]

That's right. That's why anytime I see a bunch of floating eyes, I just start shooting.

[Matt Lieb]

Mm.

[Robert Evans]

That was a biblical angel joke.

[Matt Lieb]

Sure was.

[Robert Evans]

So eventually, a judge with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals agrees that, like, the case was bad, and he overturns Harlan Carter's conviction on these grounds. And because, quote, several of the material witnesses for the state have been discredited, having been convicted of infamous crimes. It does not seem accurate that they were convicted of infamous crimes. But, you know, it's also worth noting that, like, Harlan's dad helped run law enforcement in Laredo, it's impossible that some of the people who had witnessed the shooting were, like, targeted by the police to provide plausible deniability for his kid, if not likely. So Heartland gets let out of prison. His conviction is overturned, and he proceeds with life. Now, as a young adult, as a free man, he enrolls in the University of Texas, but he changes his name. So his original name had been Harlan H A R, L, A, N. And he swaps out the A for an O. And he does this basically under the understanding that, like, well, this will make it a hard. If people go looking for Harlan Carter's criminal record, they won't find anything.

[Matt Lieb]

Wait, so he changed it to horror. Lan.

[Robert Evans]

Or Harlan. Harlan H A R, L O N, as opposed to H A R L a N. Right.

[Matt Lieb]

Okay. Okay, got it.

[Robert Evans]

And again, it's a marker of, like, how different the time is that, like, this works perfectly for him for decades. Like, people are. Well, they swapped an A with an O. Nothing we can do.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, yeah. It's like. Well, the search engine doesn't do other letters, so. Fuck it, I guess.

[Robert Evans]

You were so easy to get away with crimes back in the 30s. My God, was it easy? Speaking of getting away with crimes, do not. If you walked fast. Like, if you could walk pretty fast, you could get away with a crime. Crime.

[Matt Lieb]

Oh, man. Those are the days.

[Robert Evans]

Those were the days. Let's bring them back. Robert, do you know who else gets away with crimes? The corporation. When they hired those mercenaries to gun down union organizers in Latin America, that was a lob. And you took it. I'm very proud of you. Yeah, yeah. Drink? Ah, we're back. And I'm just gonna have a nice, refreshing sip of.

[Matt Lieb]

Oh, it's the classic Drink, you know.

[Robert Evans]

That'S like locking a bunch of nuns and organizers in a church and lighting it on fire. Mm. God, that's good stuff.

[Matt Lieb]

Yummy.

[Robert Evans]

Love it. So, again, it's one of those things. If this had kind of been the end of Harlan Carter's story, I'd say like, well, that was a fucked up thing that happened, but I guess I don't believe a 16 year old should be locked in prison for their whole life, so. But that's not the end of the story.

[Matt Lieb]

It sucks that there are cases where I'm like, it would be sick if he had.

[Robert Evans]

It's like with Kyle Rittenhouse, I don't think the right thing was to throw him in a hole for forever. Certainly the right thing is not to turn him into a celebrity and give him millions of dollars. That's maybe even worse. But I think fundamentally you have to believe that, well, if a child does something, even if it's heinous, you have to be extra focused on the possibility of rehabilitation, because otherwise you don't actually believe that children are less responsible than adults.

[Matt Lieb]

And anytime you, like, try to set up, anytime you try to be more punitive, it always affects brown people and people of color way more.

[Robert Evans]

And obviously, yeah, like, Raymond Cassiana suffers even more for, you know, whatever, however questionable you want to think his call to pull a knife might have been. Although I think it's, again, you could argue, justified because the other kid had a fucking gun. Anyway, whatever, shotgun, it's like, it's. It's. One of the problems with guns in America is how often angry teenage boys get a hold of them. And this is again, quite an old story.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, Tale as old as time.

[Robert Evans]

But regardless of like, what you think, think of should be done when kids commit murder, Harlan definitely committed murder. That's not self defense. And anyone who says otherwise is probably racist. But it's worth noting that even modern sources, and this is something. This is where things get really incompetent. Even modern sources that are like, very pro gun control, very anti. Harlan Carter, who will attack Harlan for his later work with the nra, tend to tell the story of what happened with him and Raymond Cassiano in ways that sometimes subtly reinforce Harlan's claims of self defense. This is a very strange thing I've noticed in a couple of sources. I've read a lot of articles about this guy, and his actions can be framed in fascinating ways. I wanna highlight particularly a passage from the book Gunfight by Adam Winkler and Gunfight. There's actually like five books Titled Gunfight. I think one of them seemed to be slightly grifty. It's like a former gun industry lobbyist who like, like does an anti gun book because I think maybe that's where the money was. I don't know. I'm not gonna go into date. Cause I haven't read it. I haven't read it. But like, there's a bunch of books with this title. The good one, the one that you would actually be worth reading is Winkler's Gunfight. He's a UCLA professor and Gunfight is a critical history of the battle over the second Amendment in US politics that has a lot of really useful context, including some of what I went over about like the early racism and gun control. It's, it's a good. And again, very much anti nra. But here's how Winkler describes what happened between Harlan Carter and Raymond Casiano, which I find very peculiar. Quote, carter loved guns from childhood. He was an excellent shot and would go on to win two national shooting titles and set 44 national shooting records during his lifetimes. His most infamous shot, however, came at the age of 17 when in defense of his mother, he unloaded a shotgun into the chest of a knife wielding Mexican teenager.

[Matt Lieb]

Nope, not what happened.

[Robert Evans]

That's a weird way to describe that.

[Matt Lieb]

That's not what happened at all.

[Robert Evans]

That's not what happened at all. That's such a weird way for. And again, Winkler is like, he's a professor of law at ucla. Like he's all over the New York Times writing about this kind of stuff. It's like really weird that he describes it that way.

[Matt Lieb]

Maybe it was just like, oh man, I've done all this other research. I'm just not gonna, I'm just gonna go with the autobiography that he this.

[Robert Evans]

It's like calling Ramon Cassiano a knife wielding Mexican teenager is such like an unsettling way to choose to phrase it.

[Matt Lieb]

Very strange. It was just like people forget that Cassiano was guilty and he had a knife.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Matt Lieb]

Guilty of bringing a knife to a gunfight.

[Robert Evans]

It is. Yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Again, the book is not at all right wing or reactionary. There's a lot of good stuff in there. The fact that he describes Cassiano's murder in this way, though, makes me question, question some stuff that like maybe I missed in vetting this thing because it's, it's a really weird passage.

[Matt Lieb]

It's so strange.

[Robert Evans]

Now let's compare that to this write up by a right wing dude, Dave Coppel, from an article he wrote explicitly defending Harlan Carter's. Legacy. Now, in this article, he's critiquing a fundraising letter from a gun control organization that accurately noted, quote, 50 years ago, Carter shot and killed a 15 year old boy and was convicted of murder. Arguing against this, Copel writes, the letter admitted the fact that Carter was defending his mother's ranch against a gang of intruders led by the boy, and that the boy was menacing Carter with a knife. Again, this is also not true. He was not defending his mother's ranch. They were swimming.

[Matt Lieb]

They were swimming and having a good time and being accused of doing a crime that they. I mean, did they do the crime even?

[Robert Evans]

I don't think there's ever been any evidence that they did.

[Matt Lieb]

She just said they even stole a car.

[Robert Evans]

Again, this is a little murky, but it kind of seems like what happened is their car was stuck. A couple of weeks later, she sees some Mexican kids walk past their house towards a swimming hole and six her son on them. Right. That kind of seems like what happened.

[Matt Lieb]

That seems. That tracks.

[Robert Evans]

And it's. It's weird because Winkler and Coppel could not be more apart ideologically, but their description of this murder is very similar in a way. Like, I just, It's. I don't want to harp too much on this, but it's like, really weird to me that that happened.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. Yeah. Do you have any inkling as to why that may be, or is there just a.

[Robert Evans]

Most people don't dwell too much on. It took me a while actually to find good, specific details about what happened that day. And I think most people take the attitude that just like. Well, he said he was defending his mom. And that's the. I don't know. I think in part, Winkler's covering a lot of ground. Right. Because his book is a whole. It's not focused on Carter. It's a whole history of how the Second Amendment has been interpreted and ruled on and whatnot over a couple of centuries. So he does have a lot of ground to cover. It's just very. And I guess that one of the things he did was just kind of brush over what happened there.

[Matt Lieb]

It's familiar to me that he did. It's a conscious bias, like the way.

[Robert Evans]

I would do it. Right. Cause it's perfectly reasonable if you're covering a broad history to not go into detail. But I would have just said something like. Like he confronted another teenager over something his mother said or he just confronted another teenager and shot him under suspicious, even. That would be better. Right?

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. And also, this is. You do a podcast this guy's a UCLA professor.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Again, I don't want to shit on him too much because it's like, there's a lot of good stuff in the book. It's just that part I don't get it. I don't get why you. You would write about it, though. Anyway, so Harlan Carter commits murder, does two years in prison, goes to college, and then he decides to follow in his father's footsteps and join the Border Patrol. He becomes an agent in 1936, three years after leaving prison. Carter's rise was rapid, if not meteoric. So he joins in 36, having been in prison two years earlier. In 1950, he's running the entire Border Patrol.

[Matt Lieb]

Wow.

[Robert Evans]

Now, again, Border Patrol's a lot smaller back then. It's a lot newer. It's easier to become head of the Border Patrol.

[Matt Lieb]

And also, his murder was definitely something on his resume. You know what I mean?

[Robert Evans]

Like, I. I probably, unlike the Secret, I don't think he put it on his paper resume, but I'm sure because he's known in Laredo is like, I'm sure the guys giving him his first gigs all know about it and think it's rad. Right?

[Matt Lieb]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. But he also. He does keep it a secret publicly. Right. Like, he doesn't brag about it in public. Again, when he's hanging out with his buddies. I'm certain it comes up fucking constantly, but it's not like a part of his public Persona as a. You know, once you're the head of the Border Patrol, that is like a political position, you know?

[Matt Lieb]

Right, right, right. Yeah. It's not like today in which that would be something he would be celebrated for and talk about on, you know.

[Robert Evans]

The right wing podcast. The shotgun that he used to kill Raymond Casiano of an auction off for tens of thousands of dollars, and he would have used it to buy an F350 with the daily Wire.

[Matt Lieb]

Would give him his own column. It would be a whole thing.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he'd be making documentaries with Matt Walsh.

[Matt Lieb]

Times were a lot more chill back then, which is.

[Robert Evans]

It is when we're talking about the story of this guy who does, like, a racist murder as a teenage boy and like, wow, he really was less proud of it than he would be today.

[Matt Lieb]

Right, Exactly. Yeah. That's where we're at. Where we're like, oh, wow. He didn't make that, like, his whole brand.

[Robert Evans]

Weird, Wild. So the Border Patrol had shifted at this point from being geared mainly towards policing the border to being a force for policing Mexican Americans inside the United States on the pretext of them being potentially undocumented migrants. As a result, their work strayed further and further from the border and increasingly into American cities, factories, farms and anyone, anywhere expected of harboring illegals. Some Border Patrol agents had difficulty with this, right? This was not a lot of the folks who had signed up earlier. This was not like the thing that they had signed up for specifically. Harlan though, is hugely supportive of this change and in fact he wanted to expand the Border Patrol's purview even further and use it to eliminate Mexicans from the country entirely. This was justified in his mind by the fact that a large number of undocumented minutes migrants were living and working or this was justified publicly. Right? So Harlan, there's like a racial motivation, but you can't use that like as we talked about earlier, right? Like you have to hide when your laws are racially motivated. So the justification is that a large number of undocumented migrants are living and working on ranches and other businesses in the borderlands, often under nightmarish slave like conditions. Now this is a real problem that's happening, right? Like the ABS as it is today, right?

[Matt Lieb]

Yes, yes, completely.

[Robert Evans]

And yeah, there's this like suggestion of a new thing called the Bracero program that will provide kind of like a legal way for these people to like work. But they'll have, you know, there will be more control over the conditions that they can work in, which obviously the people who would be hiring them don't like.

[Matt Lieb]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

It's a whole thing just fucked.

[Matt Lieb]

Fucked every which way.

[Robert Evans]

From the perspective of Harlan Carter, though, this is primarily a humanitarian pretext for carrying out like a purging of Mexican Americans and from like the borderlands. And I'm going to quote from Migra again. Carter had convened a meeting to request the assistance of the US military and the National Guard to purge the nation of undocumented Mexican nationals and seal the U.S. mexico border. The Border Patrol's proposal was titled Operation Cloudburst and consisted of three basic steps. First, an anti infiltration operation on or near the border would seal the border with the assistance of 2,180 military troops. In addition to stationing troops along the borderline, the Border Patrol planned to build fences along the areas of heaviest illegal traffic. Two metal picket barbed wire fences 8ft high and 8ft apart with rolls of concertina wire in between and one roll of concertina wire on top of the fence nearest Mexico, built several miles along the border would form the fence. But previous experience had taught the border patrol that fenced areas still needed additional security. Therefore, the concertina fence would be reinforced by officers and jeeps who will be directed to the scene of any attempted fence or canal crossing by observers in radio equipped towers. So this is the first modern. This is the wall. Right?

[Matt Lieb]

This is the start of it.

[Robert Evans]

This is the beginning of that. Not that there hadn't been like fences and stuff in different areas before then. This is the first time someone's like, we need to build a wall and has like a concerted vision of that and specifically a vision of using of the wall as a system of violence in order to keep the borderlands white. Right, yeah, that's what he's doing here. And he invents that shit, you know.

[Matt Lieb]

Wow. Wow. He's like the Thomas Edison of making racist borders.

[Robert Evans]

That's right, yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

Wow.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. He's the Elon Musk of border racism.

[Matt Lieb]

Sure.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. So to continue that quote.

[Matt Lieb]

Race. Sorry, I just want, I wanted to do. I wanted to do a pun. Yeah, sorry.

[Robert Evans]

Good, good, good work.

[Matt Lieb]

Thank you.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So I'm going to continue that quote. Second, a containment operation would maintain roadblocks on all major roads leading from the southwest to the interior of the United States. These roadblocks would be used to inspect traffic, including railroad traffic, for the purpose of detecting illegal entrance and to maintain safety patrols around the checkpoints. The roadblocks were planned for strategic locations that would prevent aliens from fleeing to the interior of the nation when the mopping up operations, the third phase began. The mopping up operations would be conducted in northern areas such as San Francisco, where the task forces would raid designated locations such as migrant camps or places of business. So San Francisco. I don't know if you've ever been. Matt.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Not super close to the border.

[Matt Lieb]

Oh, yeah, right.

[Robert Evans]

Well, I guess close to like a sea border.

[Matt Lieb]

Right, which is what we're building towards, but yeah, exactly. I mean, those are the other aliens that they also want to put a fence around. You know, watch out for all those turtles and fucking, you know, don't worry.

[Robert Evans]

We'Ll get rid of those in a couple of decades.

[Matt Lieb]

Right, exactly. Just put a few more of those soda, you know, fucking soda rings in the water. But yeah, no, not close to the border. I lived in San Francisco and I'll tell you, it was a trek to get to pretty far north.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, exactly. So the primary downside to his plan. Right. This is a pretty good idea if you're a white supremacist. Right. Solid plan. The only problem with it is that it is wildly unconstitutional. So there's this thing, right, this law that kind of gets in the way of this. So right at this point in time, nowadays the border patrol, like, you see those guys fucking walking around and they look like soldiers, right? They've got their plate carriers and their AR15s and all their fucking cool tactical gear. At this point, the border patrol is like slightly better armed than a modern boy scout troop. You know, like, they're not, they're not. They're not packing that much heat compared to what they're going to be packing.

[Matt Lieb]

And they have a lot of merit badges.

[Robert Evans]

They have a lot of merit badges in racism, but there's not a ton of them. Right? So they're not. They can't do this without the US military. And in fact, the military is going to wind up being a significant portion of the effort if they try to do this. But here's the problem. There's this stupid fucking bullshit ass 1878 law called posse comitatus. Right, right. And that means you can't use the military to enforce domestic laws without congress's approval.

[Matt Lieb]

Oh, damn.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I know, I know. We all hate posse comitatus. Yeah, dude, I for one think the military should enforce all of the laws.

[Matt Lieb]

Yes, dude.

[Robert Evans]

Particularly jaywalking.

[Matt Lieb]

Exactly. They're the best at it. You don't want. You don't want a bunch of, you know, boy scout border patrols getting a fucking merit badge for walking a Mexican old lady across the border.

[Robert Evans]

You should have drones come, making sure, watching for people to cross the street illegally. And we should have MLRs, rocket systems to just bombard the area if they cross the street, not at a crosswalk.

[Matt Lieb]

Exactly. Dude. We want more robocops and we want them absolutely federal.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, reinstate the draft and use it to stop jaywalking and littering. Yeah, of course, absolutely.

[Matt Lieb]

Someone like cuts you off, someone's speeding Agent orange immediately.

[Robert Evans]

Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. So this fucking law, Posse comitatus really grinds Harlan's gears. So obviously I should also note here that the fact that the military is not supposed to be used to enforce the law doesn't mean it isn't right. If you've casually googled the Watts riots, the government has a way of finding out being able to use soldiers to do cop shit when it needs to. But in this case, the government wasn't willing to push things that far. And the general whose like job it is to like. Basically the general who's liaising with Carter, this guy named Swing who really wants to do this, like he's a racist, too, but he's like, hey, we can't make this work legally right now, but we could do it if the President issued a proclamation. Like, it's not impossible to do, but, like, it's. You'd have to get Eisenhower on board. So Harlan Carter gets in touch with Eisenhower's people, and he tries desperately to get approval, but Eisenhower isn't quite willing to deploy troops. Now, he. Again, not to give Ike any credit, he agrees with Harlan's basic goals.

[Matt Lieb]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

He just. This, like, using the army in this way is a little too far for him.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

But again, he's not against this. So In May of 1954, Eisenhower appoints General Joseph Swing to be commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Right. Ins. We don't have INS anymore now. Now we've got ice, whatever, but these guys are in. So he's basically. Now he's Carter's boss, essentially. This, like, general and Swing had a long history of commanding troops in battle from Mexico to Korea. Obviously, you could see the fact that now a general is in charge of INS as, like, the start of the militarization of the Border Patrol. And Swing is a bastard in his own right. But this is really happening in part because of, like, what Carter is pushing to turn the Border Patrol into. Right. This is not just the start of the militarization of the Border Patrol. The Border Patrol is going to become the first large police agency to militarize. Right. This happens decades before. You know, we talked about the Watts Riots, which happened like, a decade or so from now, and then the LA riots, which were a big. Decades later, which were a big pusher. This happens way before all of that. This is 1954. So this is, like, in a lot of ways, the beginning of police militarization. Happens because Harlan Carter and General Joseph Swinner want to cleanse the borderlands of. Of. Of Mexican Americans.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Quote, as promised. One month after joining ins, Swing announced that he would lead the US Border Patrol in an intensive, innovative and paramilitary law enforcement campaign designed to end the problem of illegal Mexican immigration along the US Mexico border. No one questioned how in four short weeks he had prepared the officers of the Border Patrol for such a massive campaign.

[Matt Lieb]

I mean, at this point, too, what was even the. The. Like. What were the migration numbers like? Was it even that? I mean, certainly it's not as much as it was now, but I'm thinking about, like, what 1950s, 1950s Mexico was what they had, you know.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. The Civil War's not that long ended.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. The PRI is in power. It's. Isn't it fairly stable at this point? I feel like. Yeah, so it's like. It's like what they were doing, this pretense of, like, oh, we got to stop the illegals. I mean, we're not even talking about, like, you know, we're not talking about modern Latin American immigration that we have today, which is used as a pretext for all sorts of racist laws against Latin Americans here legally. We're talking about.

[Robert Evans]

There's a lot, like, yeah, labor stuff that's taught. And again, they have to, like, do moral panic and stuff about.

[Matt Lieb]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

The treatment of migrants. But, like, this is all very messy because, like, some of the biggest people opposing the government doing this crackdown are these different ranchers and other employers who.

[Matt Lieb]

Are, like, doing it to exploit people's labor.

[Robert Evans]

It's not. There's a lot that's going on overall in this issue, but when it comes to Harlan Carter, it's pretty simple. Right? He's a racist, you know.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. He's trying to do a racial purge under the pretext of, like, oh, man, you know, you know, they're not paying fair wages. Like, he gives a.

[Robert Evans]

And it's. You know, he's. He's also, like, starting the process of. Of justifying. Figuring out ways to justify this that are, like, palatable to large chunks of Americans. And, yeah, that's. That's what's happening in this period of time. You know what else is happening right now?

[Matt Lieb]

What?

[Robert Evans]

I'm gonna ask you for your pluggables.

[Matt Lieb]

Oh, hell, yeah. So my pluggables are. I just finished the entire series the Sopranos. Pot Yourself a Gun is a podcast that I do with Vince Mancini, and we just did our very last episode. We watched all of it. We watched all the Sopranos, and you can listen to the series finale wherever you get your podcast. So check that out. And also follow me on Instagram, because, you know, I feel like that's where all the, like, cool kids hang out. So, like, yeah, you know, hit me up. Hit me up there. And also be. Be excited because me and Vince, our next show, we're going to be talking about the wire. That's right. 20 years after the Wires come out, finally, two white men will break down the Wire, because finally, finally, someone's got to do it.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, that is the right group to break down the Wire, season two.

[Matt Lieb]

Oh, for sure, for sure.

[Robert Evans]

Very excited. You got to make sure at least one of you is a poll.

[Matt Lieb]

Oh, yeah, we're going to get some we got some polls who are going to come on. We got a bunch of Greek Baltimore friends who are going to come on. It's going to be great. But yeah, look, look, look for that.

[Robert Evans]

What do you call them?

[Matt Lieb]

It probably when you pod through the garden, you know, which, you know, kind of continues our tradition of having a really bad title for ATV rewatch podcast. Yeah. So check it out whenever that comes out. But for now, listen upon yourself a gun. You can go back, listen to the whole thing.

[Robert Evans]

I wanted to know who your favorite character on the Wire was.

[Matt Lieb]

I mean, I relate the most to Bubbles because I used to love hero heroin, but other than that, probably Clay Davis. Clay Davis is cool. He's a. He's a state senator. Yeah. Who says. Yeah, who says shit a lot?

[Robert Evans]

She. She.

[Matt Lieb]

You know, for a show that is like lift lifted up as one of the greatest TV shows of all time, there sure certainly are a lot of catchphrases. It's a weirdly catchphrase heavy show for something that is incredibly serious.

[Robert Evans]

I'm so excited.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. What the did I do? You got, you know, you got. Proposition Joe is like I got a proposition for. It's like this is a serious show, but they love catchphrases. Anyways, I'm excited.

[Robert Evans]

That sounds awesome.

[Matt Lieb]

Me too.

[Robert Evans]

Boom. Podcast. How could a beautiful young first grade teacher be staged stabbed 20 times, including in the bat allegedly die of suicide? Yes, that was a medical examiner's official.

[Matt Lieb]

Ruling after a closed door meeting.

[Robert Evans]

He first named it a homicide. Why? What happened to Ellen Greenberg?

[Matt Lieb]

A huge American miscarriage of justice.

[Robert Evans]

For an in depth look at the.

[Matt Lieb]

Facts 6 what happened to Ellen on Amazon.

[Robert Evans]

All proceeds to the national center for Missing and Exploited Children. Jan Marsalek was a model of German corporate success. It seemed so damn simple for him. Also it turned out a fraudster.

[Matt Lieb]

Where does the money come from? That was something that I always was questioning myself.

[Robert Evans]

But what if I told you that was the least interesting thing about him?

[Matt Lieb]

His secret office was less than 500.

[Robert Evans]

Meters down the road. I often ask myself now, did I know the true Rian at all? Certain things in my life since then have gone terribly wrong. I don't know if they followed me to my home.

[Matt Lieb]

It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story because this ties.

[Robert Evans]

Together the copy Cold War with the new one. Listen to Hot agent of chaos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves.

[Matt Lieb]

This medal is for the men who went down that day.

[Robert Evans]

It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm J.R. martinez. I'm a U.S. army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and I Heart podcast from Robert Blake, the first black sailor to be awarded the medal to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor, going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I want to be one of the world's biggest drag queens. You've heard the name Marsha P. Johnson, trans icon, revolutionary saint.

[Matt Lieb]

They call me a legend in my own time.

[Robert Evans]

But who was she really? She's strutting up there, waving to the policemen in the cars. Pay it no mind. I'm a woman, a real woman. Marsha also survived homelessness, sex work, and police violence. And in 1992, her body was found in the Hudson River. Her death remains unsolved.

[Matt Lieb]

Marsha was pulled out of the water.

[Robert Evans]

Right over the edge.

[Matt Lieb]

Here.

[Robert Evans]

Afterlives is a podcast about. About how trans lives we've lost have reshaped our world. Marsha will tell us who she was in her own words.

[Matt Lieb]

You're gonna be gagging.

[Robert Evans]

Just get your heart ready for heart failure. At a time when trans rights are under attack, her story is more urgent than ever. Listen to afterlives on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Wire, the podcast that created the hit TV show the Wire.

[Matt Lieb]

We were first.

[Robert Evans]

Our idea was stolen by that hack, David Simon.

[Matt Lieb]

We went to HBO in 1998, and you said, have you ever considered making a show about wires?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And we said, you know who understands Baltimore? Me and Matt Lieb.

[Matt Lieb]

That's right. Exactly.

[Robert Evans]

That's right, baby.

[Matt Lieb]

We understand Baltimore more than anyone understands Baltimore.

[Robert Evans]

I stopped there once for gasoline on a road trip, so. So I get it.

[Matt Lieb]

I played for the Baltimore Orioles.

[Robert Evans]

That's. A lot of people are talking about that right now. Yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. And, you know, I feel like. I mean, it was in Los Angeles.

[Robert Evans]

That's right.

[Matt Lieb]

And I was in fifth grade. But I was an oriole, so.

[Robert Evans]

And we famously. Season two was based on the fact that I once bought a sandwich from a Polish man.

[Matt Lieb]

That's right. That's right. He said, what if this was a whole show?

[Robert Evans]

What if this was a whole season about longshoremen?

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, yeah, Just like longshoremen, like stevedores and, like, you know, that's a word.

[Robert Evans]

That doesn't get used enough. I love the word stevedore.

[Matt Lieb]

It is weird.

[Robert Evans]

What an incredible job title.

[Matt Lieb]

It's the coolest job title. I don't know. Like, what about moving like crazy?

[Robert Evans]

It makes no sense to me based on what the job is, why they're calling it.

[Matt Lieb]

I imagine there was just, like, the first guy to ever do that was named Steve.

[Robert Evans]

Steve. And he was just so good at it that they were like, everybody buddies.

[Matt Lieb]

We're all Steve out here now.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. With the stevedores. You're like, look at how good he is at moving crates.

[Matt Lieb]

You're moving shipping crates like Steve did. Oh, man, I want that job.

[Robert Evans]

Well, this was a meandering way of introducing the podcast behind the Bastards. Matt Lieb, guest, also host of a podcast.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, yeah. Pot Yourself a Gun, which is a Sopranos podcast. And then soon to be a Wire podcast coming out shortly. So. Which is why for that, we were.

[Robert Evans]

Talking about the Wire.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, it's a good show.

[Robert Evans]

Also soon to be the host of a baby.

[Matt Lieb]

I know, I'm having a baby, dude.

[Robert Evans]

We'll subsequently launch a podcast called the Goo Goo. Gah.

[Matt Lieb]

Dude, I can't wait to do a Barney rewatch podcast.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

With my little baby. Just, like, analyzing, like, you know, the role of American imperialism in the happy purple dinosaur.

[Robert Evans]

Well, you know, there was that whole season of Barney that took place in a contra camp in Nicaragua.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, that was great.

[Robert Evans]

Bold choice. You have to give it to them.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Barney was, like, teaching, you know, classes over at the School for the Americas.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. A lot of people don't realize that he worked hand in glove with Oliver north to sell those missiles to Iran.

[Matt Lieb]

Exactly.

[Robert Evans]

Because the only person the Shah trusted, or the Shah the ayatollah trusted was Bonnie Lagaina.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Soul crack.

[Robert Evans]

He did sell a lot of crack. But that was. That was completely unrelated. We should probably talk about when we last left off. We were about to. We were talking about Operation Cloudburst, this attempt by Harlan Carter and the Border Patrol, and this guy, General Swing, to cleanse the border area. We should probably give a little bit more background about what's happening in the border in this period. So this is kind of, again, I think Harlan's primary motivation is racial, but there's other stuff happening, happening. So in the early 1940s, the US government had created this thing called the Bracero program, which is like a guest worker visa program that would let Mexican farm workers enter the country legally, temporarily, to work for American farmers. This gets started during World War II because, like, we don't have any. We don't have any dudes left in the country. We send them all over there, you know, like, we need some more dudes.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. Shortage of dudes at this point. Point.

[Robert Evans]

But it also, it. One of the reasons why it's popular even with people who, like, are pretty racist, is that it. It by providing kind of a legal, regulated way for them to work here, it also provides a legally regulated way to get them out of here. They can't become residents. Right. The Bracero program does not. These people are supposed to leave. But in fact, part of the deal is that like 10% of the migrants wages are taken out of their paychecks and deposited to an account that are given to them when they come back to Mexico. Right. So that's part of why this is popular, is that it allows them to do the work that the country can't function without, but it also ensures that they don't stay. Right. That's why this is such a big deal for a lot of folks. So it's actually very popular. And one of the things about it is it doesn't limit the number of workers, because why would you. Right. Because they're not. You're. Anyway, millions and millions of Mexican workers use the Bracero program over the years. And. And from the perspective of the US Government, it works pretty well for a while, and it certainly keeps workers in farms. But. And so by like the early 1950s, there's like 2 million of these workers or there's like 5 million people have worked in through the Bracero program. But also, like unauthorized migrants continue to cross into the border. And by the early 1950s, there's like 2 million of these people. People. And part of one of the things like that happens in this period is that there's suddenly like a big surge of folks coming in unauthorized in the early 1950s. And this is part of what, like, inspires Operation Cloudburst is that like, Border patrol has never had to deal with like, these kind of numbers of people crossing post war, and they're not really capable of handling it. So by the early 1950s, the number of, like, voluntary departures had raised in 1946, like, 101,000 undocumented migrants voluntarily leave the United States in 1952, more than 700,000 do. And you can, like, these numbers are just kind of useful in seeing, like, how many folks are coming in.

[Matt Lieb]

Sure.

[Robert Evans]

So this. A lot of people are not wild about this because, again, you know, know, racism. Racism and such. Yeah. So Joseph Swing, part of his motivation here is that, like, he wants to get the employers of unlawful migrant workers to cooperate so that they can, like, increase the number of folks who are working there under the Bracero program and shrink the unauthorized workers. And so his justification for, like, participating in some of the stuff that. That Harlan Carter is building. Building is that he wants to cut down the supply of unauthorized workers in order to get more of these employers on board with the Bracero program. So, again, a lot of. There are a lot of, like, kind of wonky aspects to what's happening with migration here that you can, as always, justify is, like, not based in racism. It's based on, like, well, there's a lot of these undocumented people coming over, and it's, like, create a problem for the border Patrol, and the conditions they're working under are, like, really bad. And we want to reform this program so that, you know, everyone is documented and legal, and, like, we're not. We're not trying to stop them from coming over. But also, one of the things you're trying to do by expanding this program is making sure that they don't stay right.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And I guess, again, you can look at what's happening with the Bracero program in a couple of different ways. But if you really want to know what's going on with the immigration sweeps that Carter and Swimming eventually enact, the main thing you need to know is what they call it. And this is Harlan Carter's name for this is Operation Wetback. That is the official name of this immigration purge that they're going to do.

[Matt Lieb]

And again, did they invent the term or was it.

[Robert Evans]

No, no, it had existed for a while.

[Matt Lieb]

Okay, so they did just explicitly name it after a slur.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, yes.

[Matt Lieb]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's exactly it. And obviously, like. Like, again, for folks who maybe are not aware of this, I know we have a lot of, like, European listeners, Canadian listeners who may not have heard this. Like, wetback is a racial slur for Mexican immigrants to the United States. It takes its name from when people would cross illegally. They would do so through the Rio Grande often. And, like, so you. You Know you get wet when you do that. Right? And so like that's the, that's the origin of the slur, Right.

[Matt Lieb]

The backs part. I don't, I don't know what they specified it.

[Robert Evans]

I don't know why they specified. But this happens. There's like a history of this. Like an old anti Italian racial slur is wap, which means without papers. I don't think it was entirely just for Italians, but like, you know, this is like the late 1800s, I think.

[Matt Lieb]

Right? Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So, yeah. And Carter again. So swing. Swing is the kind of guy who can sit down and explain to you, like, well, this is where the Bracero program was broken down. And like, these are the problems that we're having and these are the different violations that we're seeing. And like, we need to get these, you know, employers on board with this program to reform the system. And the only way to do that is to cut down on the like. So he can get very wonky with it in a way that doesn't sound racist. Whereas Harlan Carter's like, yeah, Operation Wetback, let's get him out of here. And Carter is not great at, like, he says, he just kind of says the loud part. Loud, right. In interviews with the press, he describes it as the biggest drive against illegal aliens in history. He tells the Los Angeles Times that he intends to deploy, quote, an army of Border patrol officers, complete with jeeps, trucks and seven aircraft, in order to declare, quote, all out war to hurl Mexican wetbacks into Mexico.

[Matt Lieb]

Jesus Christ.

[Robert Evans]

So he's not a subtle man.

[Matt Lieb]

He added yee haw after every sentence.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, you have to imagine he's shooting his six guns into the air as he gives these speeches to the press.

[Matt Lieb]

It was in the middle of burning.

[Robert Evans]

A cross as he lit a cross on fire on someone's lawn. Harlan Carter gave a statement to the LA Times. So what followed was close to, again, Operation Wetback is kind of. He tried. It's a lot of what he had tried to do with Operation Cloudburst only just toned down a little bit so that they could get the federal government on board. Obviously this follows like a massive hiring campaign of Border Patrol men and they take thousands of Border Patrol agents and they separate them into mobile task groups and they set up mobile immigration systems to block roads. So basically doing like this, they've already put this, like, started putting these fences up, but they do like kind of a. You could call it a kind of like racist defense, like defense of white supremacy in depth, where they're setting up Blockades deeper into the country. And they're also carrying out raids on factories and restaurants and just through whatever mean they can, arresting and containing huge numbers of Mexican minutes migrants. And I'm going to quote from Migra again. To hold the detainees, the officers turned public spaces into temporary detention facilities. For example, in Los Angeles, the Border Patrol transformed Elysian Park, a popular public park, into a temporary holding station where apprehended Mexican nationals were processed for deportation. In countless fields and along many country roads, Border Patrol officers set up mobile immigration stations to process unsanctioned Mexican immigrants for official deportation. They used trucks and on loan from the armed services to transport the apprehended immigrants from California to Nogales, Arizona for deportation to Mexico. To showcase the large numbers of migrants being processed for forced removal into Mexico, officers were directed to raise Mexicano communities, leisure spots and migrant camps, ranches, farms and parks. They also paid close attention to urban industries known to employ undocumented Mexican immigrants. Between June 17 and June 26, 1954, 2008, 827 of the 4,403 migrants apprehended by the task force assigned to Los Angeles had worked in industry. After Border Patrol raids during the summer of 1954, three Los Angeles brickyards were left without sufficient numbers of workers and temporarily closed down their operations. Similarly, Border Patrol officers paid close attention to the hotel and restaurant business, which routinely hired undocumented Mexican immigrants as busboys, kitchen help, waiters, et cetera. Officers reported apprehending such workers at well known establishment establishments such as the Biltmore Hotel, Beverly Hills Hotel, Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, Los Angeles Athletic Club, and the Brown Derby. At times, Border Patrol raids created moments of chaos at popular restaurants when migrants attempted to escape by running through the servant area. Everywhere they went, the officers were chased and photographed by journalists who had come to witness what General Swing had promised would be a spectacular show of US Immigration law enforcement. Swing pledged that the Border Patrol would deport or Otherwise purge the 1 million undocumented Mexican national estimated to be living in the United States at the time.

[Matt Lieb]

Oh, well, that sounds like a lot of fun. Just. Yeah, just going buck wild with journalists in the back. Like, this is great footage.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And it's interesting because a huge number of these guys are immediately let back into the country. Like a lot of times what they're doing is they're pushing them across the border and then making them recross under like the bracero program. So again, they can be. Because they need the labor. Right. They don't want the Brickyard shut down. They don't want these places to go out of business. They just don't want these people to be able to actually build a life in the United States. Right. They want to guarantee that they go back. So that's like a huge chunk of what's. Of what's happening here. Like, it's. It's basically taking. It's taking the natural movement of people across an area where like, their ancestors and relatives had been moving freely for centuries. And it's stopping that. Stopping, like the ability of populations to move and build lives and turning them entirely into economic units. Right.

[Matt Lieb]

Yes.

[Robert Evans]

You're not a member of the community. You're labor.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're an entirely different class of citizen, which is non citizen, which means you have no rights. Yeah, you have no rights. You're not entitled to any of the human, human rights that we give to our citizens. Super, super normal and definitely a natural state of things.

[Robert Evans]

Certainly not definitely the way things are supposed to go.

[Matt Lieb]

Exactly. Not an invention of humans at all.

[Robert Evans]

No. So at the same time as they're doing this, and obviously the media is a big part of, like, why this is such a hit, because, you know, INS says, hey, we're gonna raid the Biltmore. Like, yeah, you're gonna show up there. And like, that's like, who doesn't want to see that as like a journalist? So, like, part of like what? Part of like, what increases sort of the. Because the people hadn't really. The Border Patrol had not been, probably most Americans only been kind of vaguely aware of its existence up until this point. This is part of what turns them into like an institution within the United States is like all of the press around Operation Wetback.

[Matt Lieb]

Right. It's like the, you know, they took a cue from the FBI. They're like, we need, we need to be flashy. We need to. We need to look cool as shit. Doing a bunch of horrid to people.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I mean, like. And you're talking about, like, what the FBI does against anarchists and socialists in like the late, you know, the, the early 1900s. Yeah. This is, this is like the Border Patrol's equivalent of that. Yeah, right.

[Matt Lieb]

And creating like, you know, an entire propaganda arm that made like, you know, the G Man cool.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Matt Lieb]

You know.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, yes. And at the same time they're doing this, Carter and Swing are like, meeting with these influential ranchers and farmers and industrialists, the people using the undocumented migrant labor, and they're getting them in line between like a revamp of the Bracero program that is, again, like, supposed to fix some of the issues the program had. I'm not going to get terribly into the weeds on that kind of stuff. There's plenty of places to read about that if you'd like. There's a pretty good article. Yeah, we'll have some sources in here. But the book Migra goes into a tremendous amount of detail about it. So in the end, it was a wild success. More than one million people are deported. Potentially as many as one and a half million people are deported. Beyond that, the precedent was established that the U.S. border Patrol could and should conduct operations from deep within the United States. Border Patrol is legally able to carry out immigration checkpoints within 100 miles of the border. Right.

[Matt Lieb]

Of any border.

[Robert Evans]

That's the. Exactly. Of any border. Right. Which includes the coasts and Canada. So basically, all of the places where most Americans live are covered by the. About two thirds of the U.S. population are in this area, which is why the Border Patrol has the widest ranging purview of any law enforcement agency. Pretty much, yeah. I guess. Yeah. The FBI technically has more, but their mission is more limited anyway. It's what, whatever. Like, this is like the Border Patrol. This is what turns them into what they are, this monster, this juggernaut they are today, as opposed to, like, some dudes literally on the border, you know, like, yeah, say what you like again. And not that, like, they weren't getting up to problematic shit earlier in their history, but their ability to do harm was limited by geography. It's not after Operation Wetback, and we can thank Harlan Carter for that. And it's, it's, it's worth kind of noting here. I'm not going to get too much to Trump, but he, Donald Trump, consciously looks back to Harlan Carter's period of time running the Border Patrol as an inspiration.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Clearly. During a 2015 presidential Republican presidential debate, Donald Trump said, quote, let me just tell you that Dwight Eisenhower, good president, great president, people liked him. I liked him. I like Ike. Right. The expression. I like Ike, moved 1.5 million illegal immigrants out of the country. Move them just beyond the border. They came up, back, moved them again beyond the border. They came back, didn't like it, moved them way south. They never came back. Dwight Eisenhower, you don't get nicer, you don't get friendlier. They moved one and a half million people out. We have no choice. We have no choice. So, first off, obviously, it's probably not gonna surprise people. That's, again, as we've said, completely Wrong for. Among other things, nearly all of them come back.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Always under, like, the Bracera program. Like, that's part of the point. Like, they're not. But yeah, it's. It's so Carter. And again, there's the kind of folks who, like, again, swing, I'm sure, has his racism, Ike. There's racism in his motivations, but it's also. There's a lot of economic. And just like, they're the kind of people who believe all of this stuff should be done based on a set of laws. So they're, like, kind of fundamentally. They're probably more offended by the fact that people are undocumented than they are necessarily about the racial element. That's a chunk of these people.

[Matt Lieb]

Absolutely. Lack of documents alone is just like.

[Robert Evans]

Jesus Christ, Carter's doing it for white supremacy. And that's the thing, you'll notice, the thing Trump takes out of Operation Wetback isn't the way they established this kind of, like, system in order to, like, document and, like, make these workers legal in order to provide labor. A labor for, like. That's not the thing he takes out of this. The thing he takes out of this is they got one and a half million Mexicans to leave. Right?

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Like, that's the thing that has come down in history from Carter's period is.

[Matt Lieb]

The cutting to the heart of really what's going on here behind all of the, you know, I don't know, respectability, politics or whatever of it.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, that's what has lived on that. And of course, the militarization of the Border Patrol and the fact that it gets to work every. We get all of that from Harlan Carter. And here's the thing. Harlan's just getting started.

[Matt Lieb]

Oh, God.

[Robert Evans]

This ain't even. This ain't even his whole thing. Right? This, like. This isn't even his main game.

[Matt Lieb]

I know we haven't even gotten to the beginning where it's just like, we're gonna talk about some NRAs and some gunshit.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, we're not even into that shit yet. Like, this is just his first gig. Right.

[Matt Lieb]

God damn.

[Robert Evans]

This is his, like, the equivalent of the time, like, the rest of us spent, like, working at a Wendy's or something. Wasn't that Harland Carter? Right.

[Matt Lieb]

This is Hitler at painting school.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, this is. Yeah, this is Hitler at fucking, like, hanging out in Austrian operations opera houses.

[Matt Lieb]

Exactly.

[Robert Evans]

Arguing with homeless people about the Jews, which was like, a whole chunk of his life. But anyway, because he was homeless, too. It's whatever they were living In a men's shelter. Anyway, Hitler. So I should note before we move on to the nra, that while Harlan Carter was massively expanding the reach and power of the Border Patrol, he was also robbing it blind for his own benefit. See, Harlan loves shooting, right? Like he's not one of these nra like Wayne lapierre, the current head of the nra. I don't think Wayne particularly cares much about, like, a lot of these guys. Like, it's a political thing as opposed to them. Like Harlan Carter is, you have to say. Loves to shoot guns.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

But here's the thing about shooting guns. Bullets cost money. So three years after Harlan Carter retires from government service in 1957, the Justice Department opens an investigation into what are termed, quote, various allegations against him, including the claim that he had struck, stolen 40 to 50,000 rounds of ammunition from the Border Patrol, quote, with the sole intent of converting this property to his own use after he retired.

[Matt Lieb]

Wow.

[Robert Evans]

So he steals like a pallet of bullets to go shoot. Privately.

[Matt Lieb]

I would love it if we found out that he's the one who stole his mom's car.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he went joyriding and crashing.

[Matt Lieb]

It was him. And he just, oh, fuck, I gotta find some Mexicans.

[Robert Evans]

Some more 15 year old gets murdered.

[Matt Lieb]

So.

[Robert Evans]

So, yeah, it's not that funny. But like, that's not impossible, right?

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. Yes.

[Robert Evans]

So I'm going to quote from the New York Times here about this theft of tens of thousands of bullets that Harlan Carter perpetrated. Quote. Asked in an interview in Denver about the allegations, Mr. Carter said that he had testified before a federal grand jury in San Diego for some hours. And they covered a lot of things, none of which I'm ashamed of and none of which I had any difficulty asking. He added that he did not, quote, know anything about the disappearance or misappropriation of government agencies ammo. The missing ammunition, worth several thousand dollars, was never traced, according to an agent who worked on the investigation. And no charges were fired filed.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, very funny. Slip.

[Robert Evans]

Now, obviously Carter didn't need to steal those bullets because he's about to get a new job that is never going to let this him run out of ammunition.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So as we stated earlier, there's a little bit of debate about when he joined the nra, whether it was before or after he killed Raymond Casier. Probably he was like 16 when he joins. And in 1951, the year after he becomes head of the Border Patrol, he joins the NRA's national board. And again at this point in Time. There's obviously, there's people who are right wing in the nra. There's people who want it to be more of a conservative institution. It's not really a political organization at this point. Right.

[Matt Lieb]

It's almost, at this point, just from what I remember, it's almost an apolitical, just kind of gun lobbying group that kind of.

[Robert Evans]

They're not lobbying. They do not lobby in this period of time.

[Matt Lieb]

They don't have the Sierra Club at this point.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, they're just kind of like, yeah, they're there to provide training courses for people. They're there so that one of the things they do is when the government demilitarizes weapons, right? They're like, okay, we're not using, like, the M1 Garand is no longer the gun that the army uses. So we have a couple of million of these things. We will sell them at a discount to the nra who can sell them very cheap to their members. And, like, it's the part of, of this. So there's like, stuff that they're doing, but they're not. They're not getting in. And there are. They have some involvement politically. We'll talk about that in a little bit. But they are not, like, lobbying on behalf of the Republican Party or something. Right. Like, that's not really a thing that the NRA is doing yet. Harlan Carter wants that to be a thing that they're doing, but they're not. In 1951, when he joins the board, they're still not very political. But now that he's on the board, he starts to see the organization with friends and comrades from the Border Patrol. Right. Because he can help get people high. He can put in a good word. So he starts all of his buddies from the Border Patrol who are, like, wanting a cushy job in the private sector after working for the guy, like, he starts filling the NRA with them. So he finally leaves government service in the early 1960s. He stops running the Border Patrol in 57, but he does some other shit. Not really that important for our purposes. But he retires from working for the government in the early 60s, and he gets pretty much immediately elected president of the NRA from 1965 to 1967. But that doesn't mean he's actually running the NRA. Like, right. It's just like a job within the organization. You've still got this board of directors. So he's an influential figure in the nra, but he's not actually, like, directing it at this point.

[Matt Lieb]

Right. He's collecting a check and he's probably getting like, you know, a bunch of free bullets, which is even more free.

[Robert Evans]

Well, he also wants it. He wants the NRA to get more political. And again, we're gonna chat a little bit about why in a second. But one of the things that happens is like the folks at the NRA who kind of don't necessarily want that know they have to do something with Harlan Carter. Right. Like you can't like ignore him, so they stick him. They create a lobbying arm for the first time of the nra, the Institute for Legislative Action, and they put him in charge of it. And he again, this is the first time the NRA had had a lobbying arm in, in the early 1960s. It was like not. They, they barely funded it. So there's this, you know, there's kind of this growing fight and, and Harlan is one of these guys saying that like, hey, the NRA needs to get more political. We need to be lobbying, we need to be focused on Second Amendment advocacy that was not had not like the NRA's planks, like their, their like stated purpose as an organization did not include like protecting or defending the second amendment at all. Like that was not even on their radar.

[Matt Lieb]

Wow.

[Robert Evans]

He thinks it needs to be. And the old guard who run the NRA don't see it that way. They see themselves as essentially in partnership with the government to ensure the development of a heavy, of a healthy shooting sports culture in the United States. Right. And part of what that means is that when gun control laws get passed, they work with the government to formulate those laws. So again, they're certainly like they're not anti gun. Right. But they're not anything we would recognize as like in like a modern political context.

[Matt Lieb]

They just want to. So it sounds like they just want to make sure that gun control doesn't affect hunting and, or like regulation of people owning actual rifles or.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. And it's again, everything is different, right? Like nothing. The AR15 exists in this period, but it's not what it's going to be come, right, like because it's, it's harder to make. They're much less common. Like today an AR. Like one of the things that has made the AR15 what it is is that it's a perfectly modular platform. So it's basically like gun Lego. So there's like a million. You can customize it infinitely. You can make the basic gun itself for a couple of hundred bucks if you have some stuff. It's not like that at this point. Right.

[Matt Lieb]

It's now. It's the. It's like the Honda Civic of guns.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So they just haven't. Like. Part of why it's not political in the way it will become is that there's not really a need to. You know, like, no one's. There's not. Like, there's not. The culture that. That the NRA helps to create doesn't exist because they're not doing that. So. Yeah, their primary focus is, like, hunting and target shooting. Right, right. And again, Carter has his own interpretation of the Second Amendment. And in the 1970s, he's going to go to war with the NRA's old guard in order to change it. But before we get into that, we should probably have some ads.

[Matt Lieb]

I love ads.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, I do, too. Including this ad for guns. The concept of. Yeah, guns, sure. How about the life card? The life card. It's a gun that's built into a little credit card. Can it shoot? Well, no. Is it accurate? Of course not. Is it a stupid thing to carry in your pocket? Yes, 100%.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. Enjoy.

[Robert Evans]

It's a real thing. Look. Look it up. Very easily. Gun of the meme. Guns. Easily the memeiest.

[Matt Lieb]

Wow.

[Robert Evans]

That's a whole thing we have these days. There's no meme guns in the 1960s. We haven't invented memes, you know. Well, we had one, but it. Yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

Which was the meme from the 1960s.

[Robert Evans]

Well, it's earlier than that. You know, the. This is getting way off topic, but you've heard of. Kilroy was here. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's memes. But, yeah, I was thinking.

[Matt Lieb]

I was like, was the Zapruder film. Was that a meme? But I guess that came out in the 70s.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, no, it comes out a little late. Oh, that's like the 60s or mid-60s. Right.

[Matt Lieb]

But when. What did the. Did people see the Zapruder film? I thought that was, like, they. I don't know.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, I will tell you, my entire life, I have specifically picked houses with a floor plan where. Where the bathroom is kind of like back and to the left of the living room so that when people ask where the bathroom is, I can say, oh, just take a Kennedy, go back into the left. It's a JFK getting murdered joke. Anyway, here's ads. Oh, we're back. Everybody's having a good time. Great job. You know, Robert Kennedy was killed with the.22, which is the same caliber as the life card. The gun that's built into a credit card.

[Matt Lieb]

I love that there's a credit card gun.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, honestly, if Sirhat and Sirhan had had one of those, RFK would probably be alive.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, it'd be fine.

[Robert Evans]

Is a really stupid gun anyway. The Second Amendment. Well, actually, weirdly enough, that's getting close to an argument Harlan Carter will later make. But I don't want to. I don't want to get ahead of things. So the Second Amendment is, I think it's fair to say the most politicized part of the Bill of Rights today. Right. That's probably not. Maybe the First Amendment gives it a run for its money, but even then, it's usually people differing over interpretations of the First Amendment, as opposed to the argument over the second is really, should it exist? Or does it exist in the way that it's, like, currently being interpreted? Right. Because an awful lot of Americans think it shouldn't be the law of the land at all, which is difficult to square with actually doing something legislatively because it does exist. But it's. But anyway, in 2008, the Supreme Court ruled in D.C. versus Heller that the Second Amendment establishes an individual right to bear arms. Now, obviously, a lot of liberals see this as terrible jurisprudence and claim that an individual right to bear arms was basically invented by the nra. Conservatives will say the opposite, that, you know, this was clearly what the founders had intended. And the reality of it is that while an individualist interpretation of the Second Amendment amendment at a federal level is only like 20 years old, different courts have ruled very differently on the Second Amendment for quite a long time. And also the Supreme Court is stupid. So, yes, like, I don't personally give a good goddamn about what the Founders intended.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, that seems like the weirdest standard to uphold to this day, where we're like, well, the Founders intended. And it's like, the founders. First of all, none of them had teeth.

[Robert Evans]

None of them had. And it's one of those. This is. It's comprehensively wrong. Because again, liberals will often be like, well, the founders would never have wanted people to have AR15. And it's like, did you know some of those guys?

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. No, A lot of those dudes would.

[Robert Evans]

Have been like, this will kill so many more like, indigenous people. Of course we should have these.

[Matt Lieb]

They all wore powder powdered wigs because they all had, like, herpes on their heads. And they, you know, they were all syphilitic. So, yeah, they were insane. Being like, the Founders wouldn't like that. It's like, no, no, no, don't defend the Founders.

[Robert Evans]

Well, and they would have. They would have liked it for a variety of different reasons. Thomas Paine would have liked it because it would allow you to shoot government agents. Much better. Right. Like Thomas Jefferson would have liked it because he was scared of how many slaves he had, you know?

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Like different. Different people would have liked it for different reasons.

[Matt Lieb]

They all would have loved to have that gun.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. So obviously, again, as regards my personal standing towards gun control, I don't care about what the founders thought about anything, including free speech. Because they didn't actually believe in free speech.

[Matt Lieb]

Yes, yes.

[Robert Evans]

Because a lot of the moments. Well, Thomas Paine did. Again. He's our one good one.

[Matt Lieb]

He was. Yeah. Although kind of in a reactionary. During the French Revolution, they locked his ass up.

[Robert Evans]

They did lock his ass up during the French Revolution. They locked a lot of people up.

[Matt Lieb]

They really just kind of went overboard, as is the left.

[Robert Evans]

So I think it's probably valuable to discuss how interpretations of the right to bear arms have varied over time in the United States, because again, if you're ever saying it's always meant this thing or that thing, that's not. You're not gonna be correct because a bunch of different courts have found a bunch of different things. So the Bill of Rights was the brainchild of James Madison, and in portraits, he's the founding father with just massive bags under his eyes. Like, you look up a drawing of this dude, he looks fucking exhausted in every.

[Matt Lieb]

And he was.

[Robert Evans]

Every sketch of it.

[Matt Lieb]

He probably was literally dying at all times. Times in his famed career.

[Robert Evans]

He was dying all the time. If only every American political leader had followed in his footsteps of dying.

[Matt Lieb]

I know, I know. You know, he's. Yeah, he was supposed to write way more of the Federalist Papers, but he was so sickly, he couldn't.

[Robert Evans]

We are getting to that. So obviously he's a. He's, you know, on that side of the Federalist, Anti Federalist divide. But he drafts the Bill of Rights because the anti Federalist are worried. And they have a very good point that, like, okay, well, we're establishing this supposedly democratic government, but if we don't place limits on the powers of the federal government, they could get the power to do anything one day. Which is a very reasonable thing to be concerned about. Right. Broadly speaking, one of the better ideas the founders had was having a Bill of Rights.

[Matt Lieb]

Yes.

[Robert Evans]

So most of them are terrified of the idea of a permanent standing army, which is also a good thing to be frightened of. And if we had stuck with that idea, maybe things would be a Little bit better. One of the things is that like these guys are all ancient Roman history nerds. Right. And they are well aware that like the history of the Roman Republic includes so many times where just like a guy gets an army and takes over. Right. Or tries to take over and there's a big fucking fight over it. So they don't like the idea of like a big centralized standing army because it's very dangerous.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So the second amendment was initially drafted to guarantee people's right to form a militia. Original text. And this is not what's in the Bill of Rights now, but this is the original text. Madison writes is quote, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. A well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country. Colon. But no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person. Now this is interesting because if that had been in the Bill of Rights today. Right. This would have done a couple of things. Among other things, things it would probably have made a draft impossible. Right. Because that second clause is like you cannot force someone to render military service, which like you would think would make a draft impossible. That said, it also might have made it impossible to do things that a lot of liberals support like banning weapons like the AR15. Because when you have well armed in there, it does kind of seem to more specifically endorse heavier firepower than the current text of the second amendment does. Yeah, that interpretation could at least be argued. Now this is all academic because the wording winds up being changed to the present text which puts well regulated up front and fun times also makes it legal to draft people. Obviously people have argued for years and will be arguing for years what the second amendment should mean about gun control and how it should function. I'm not an originalist. Yeah, I think the Constitution is too old for anyone to care about, but obviously it does matter because it is the law of the land. And how it's written and how it's interpreted has a huge impact on what is legally possible within the present situation. And so I think the context of how the second Amendment like was seen at the time is helpful to have, even though again, I'm not an originalist. Please don't take this as me arguing because the founding fathers felt this way. This is how people should, should act.

[Matt Lieb]

But yeah, I don't think we've said we can stress enough. We do not care what the founding fathers thought about literally anything.

[Robert Evans]

My, my, my stance broadly in Support of civilian arms ownership has nothing to do with the Constitution. Yes, because it's a stupid document written a long time. Well, again, given the time, not a stupid document. Right. Better than. Anyway, whatever. I don't need to have this conversation. I am going to quote from the New Yorker here because I think it gives some helpful context. None of this, this being the Second Amendment, had anything to do with hunting. People who owned and used long arms to hunt, continued to own and use them. The Second Amendment was not commonly understood as having any relevance to the shooting of animals. As Gary Willis once wrote, one does not bear arms against a rabbit. Meanwhile, militias continued to muster. The Continental army was disbanded at the end of the Revolutionary War, but the national defense was increasingly assumed by the US Army. By the middle of the 19th century, the US had a standing army, after all. And this is one of the things I think is interesting because again, the kind of, especially on Twitter, common takes on one side or the other of this is that like, well, you don't need these guns for hunting, which is obviously the intent of the Second Amendment, which. No, it's absolutely not. But at the same time, the idea of the Second Amendment as referring to an individual's ability to stockpile an arsenal is not really accurate because it was within the context of a militia. However. However, if you're bringing that up, it's one of the things that they meant by like, one of the things that the founding fathers wanted with this militia was for it to be the primary method of defending the country as opposed to a massive standing army. So again, if you are, for one reason or the other, if you're arguing that we should do things the way the founding fathers argued, probably the most accurate thing would be to limit civilian arms ownership outside of the context of a militia and also ensure that the militia is the only army armed force in the country, including police, so that like a massive civilian militia is the only armed force. There's no federal power to deploy a massive military and there's not really federal policing in any meaningful way. Because that's how things were in the 1800s. Right?

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

If you're. Or 17, if you're arguing that, that's probably closer to an originalist interpretation than anything being argued right now.

[Matt Lieb]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Which is not to say that that makes much sense in the current day at all. Although I would argue you there's a number of. You could look at like what Switzerland does. Right. Which is often brought up by Second Amendment advocates.

[Matt Lieb]

What do they do?

[Robert Evans]

I don't even know what Switzerland has like. Basically if you want to own a weapon in Switzerland, the government will give you one. But like there's training and you're part of a militia to get it. It is a military assault rifle. Right. And a lot of Switzerlands are. The percentage of Switzerland who own guns is not significant compared to the United States, but it's one of the highest in the world. Right, but it does come as you don't. It's not. Well, you can buy some arms in Switzerland. It's not like you're not like just stockpiling guns for your own personal thing. You are being armed by the state as part of the state's defense apparatus.

[Matt Lieb]

Right, right, right, right, right.

[Robert Evans]

But also not in a way like the Swiss. Like the civilians who own guns in Switzerland are not like deployed for. Obviously it's Switzerland. Right. They don't do that famously. But anyway, I mean, this is again, when I talk about Rojava and what I think about in terms of the value of the state not having a monopoly on the use of force, these are some of the things that I think about, broadly speaking, stuff has been different about the Second Amendment and kind of as a result the second amendment as, as heavily politicized as it is now was kind of like nobody, it was like the Third Amendment, right? Nobody talks about that anymore. Nobody fucking talked about the Second Amendment on a national level for like a century or so. Right, yeah, we talked about like gun control earlier, but it was basically all state level. Right? Different states, different cities would have like different rules based on shit that was happening there. The federal government left them alone. Like there was not really any kind of federal interest in regulating the Second Amendment until the early 1930s. And that is when we came get our first major piece of national gun control legislation. Now the NFA or National Firearms act was a response to the era of the gangster right. In particular, you get this weapon starting in like, I don't know exactly when it was invented, I could have looked it up. But like it becomes popular in the 30s. The Tommy gun, right, which is the Thompson submachine gun. And it is broadly speaking kind of like at least in terms of the way it's interpreted by the media and the way it's used in crime. Kind of like the AR15 of its day, because it is the Tommy Thompson. It's a, an automatic.45 caliber weapon. It's a submachine gun. Right. So it's not like a full sized rifle. This will be one of the most popular squad weapons that the United States Uses in World War II. Right. A very effective weapon for what it does, which is shoot a lot of big, heavy, slow bullets very quickly at people at close range. So super good if you're for example, a gangster who wants to murder a bunch of people in a, in a, in an enclosed room. Right. If you're like lining a bunch of other gangsters up against the wall, you get. Kill a shitload of people with atomic.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. You know, yeah. Very fun for, you know, pulling off some sort of St. Valentine's Day massacre.

[Robert Evans]

Incredible bank robbing weapon. Great for all sorts of stuff.

[Matt Lieb]

Going to the local gobaghel and shooting up the Gabagool.

[Robert Evans]

Exactly. You could gobble a hell of a lot of ghoul with this.

[Matt Lieb]

Lots of ghouls.

[Robert Evans]

It's, it's nowadays honestly not that impressive of a weapon. But at the time, Right. Like prior to this, most Americans like their experience with this like single shot rifles and lever action guns and like revolvers and shit. Right. Even semi automatic handguns are pretty new and fancy in the 30s. The Thompson is just so much deadlier than anything else that scary as fuck. And the crimes that get committed with it, again as with the AR15 on like a national scale, very little gun crime involves a Thompson submachine gun. And again the AR15, not the most common gun used in crime by any. Like, it's not super common compared to a lot of other kinds of firearm. But the crimes that it's used in are so spectacular and kind of like horrifying that they shock the nation. And law enforcement gets nuts about this because one of the things that gangsters do with Tommy guns is shoot lots of police officers with them. So there's a whole kind of America's first panic over a gun. Right. Is what happens with the Tommy gun in the 30s. And it's not just the Tommy gun. They're also freaking out about software off shotguns, which is actually pretty dumb. They're only scared about them because you can like hide them. Hide them. But they're, they're not even like. Anyway, it's dumb for sawed off shotguns to be regulated more than regular shotguns. They're actually less deadly.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, they look cool as fuck.

[Robert Evans]

They look and they, you see them a lot in the hands of gangsters. Right. So it's. Again, there's this part of this is that like, yeah, the Thompson is a lot deadlier than guns that had been available before. But part of it's also just like there's this media sort of panic around, around the Thompson. And by the way, I should note, at this period of time, if you want a Thompson, you write to Sears and they mail one to your house. Like this is not there are not like you don't have to go to a gun store. You don't have to do it. They're like background checks. They just will send it to you. It's like if you order like a book on Amazon, it was that easy to get a Thompson submachine gun.

[Matt Lieb]

Damn.

[Robert Evans]

So the NFA puts an end to that. It heavily restricts the owner ownership of machine guns, sawed off shotguns and silencers. Now the NRA is again not a political organization at this point. It does initially oppose the nfa and this is kind of the first time it gets political. The organization writes a dissent in their magazine, American Rifleman. And this is a pretty like tamely phrased dissent. And it prompts congressional leaders to sit down with the NRA and work to limit their bill. The main thing that it does is that like it stops the ban from being torn total. So rich people can still get machine guns and silencers.

[Matt Lieb]

Oh, thank God.

[Robert Evans]

And silencers. Right. Well, and we could, I, I could rant about silencers, which are not what people tend to think. They're not silent, they're not silent. All of these things are still legal if you have the money, right. In the case of like a silencer or a, what's called a short barreled shotgun, it takes like a $200 tax stamp in a couple of months. It's technically like a similar legal process to get a machine gun. But machine guns cost. The cheapest machine guns today are like $10,000. So it's, that's why you don't see them like used in crimes. Yeah, I guess.

[Matt Lieb]

I don't know what a machine gun is. What? An AR15.

[Robert Evans]

An AR15 is a semi automatic gun. The legal definition of a machine gun is a weapon that will fire more than one bullet per trigger pull. Right. This is all very wonky because like we had bump stocks a while ago which function more or less as a machine gun, but legally weren't technically a machine gun gun. There's a couple of weird kinds of triggers you can as with anything with guns. Because when you, you like, when you make a law to ban a thing, you have to specify what that thing is in mechanical terms.

[Matt Lieb]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

And so you find a way to. People do this with drugs too, where it's like, okay, they banned mdma, let's make a drug that affects the same parts of the Brain, but doesn't like, isn't explicitly banned.

[Matt Lieb]

Right, right. Different compound.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And the same thing happens now. There are sought off shotguns that aren't legally shot shotguns because of very. Anyway, whatever. Yeah, this is getting off of the point a bit. But the NRA works with, works with Congress. Right. They don't do like a big political brouhaha. They're like, hey, we wanna make sure that rich people can still own these weapons. Let's, let's sit down and work some things out. And Congress is happy to work with them. Now some people in Congress are. The Attorney general claims that they emasculate the bill, but broadly speaking, the NFL seriously limits the types of weapons that civilians are allowed to have. And this is the first time anyone had done that at the federal level. And the NRA is pretty happy with the resulting bill. And they endorse the 1934 NFA. Now, there was still no real like massive national discussion of the Second Amendment as an individual right in this period. Not that it was like particularly discussed much at all. This is just not super constitutionally controversial in the period of time.

[Matt Lieb]

It's not yet part of the culture war.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it has. Yeah, that hasn't really evolved yet. The context, the discussion of the, the Second Amendment as an individual right to bear arms doesn't really start to take off until the early 1960s. And this is when the very first law review articles arguing an individualist interpretation are published. Now this period coincides with the civil rights movement and the second big push for gun control in federal history. History this time rather than. Well, racism and crime have a role to play, as we'll discuss. But one of the first things that sets it off is the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Famously, John F. Kennedy is assassinated by Bernard Sanders using a Mannlicher Carcano rifle that he'd ordered from a classified ad in the American Rifleman magazine, which is the NRA's magazine. So the gun that kills JFK is ordered from the back of a magazine, right?

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And this is. It's not. Again, he's not killed with like anything you would consider an assault weapon. It's like an old bolt action rifle. But the fact that he was able to get it from like a magazine ad becomes like. And like, you know, again, background checks are not really a thing yet. And that's that. That makes a lot of people very angry. And I'm going to quote now from an article by Alina Savadra Buckley, quote, for years prior to Kennedy's assassination, America had Been watching television and learning how to shoot. In the 1919s, when Hollywood studios were churning out Westerns, popular Science estimated that half a million Americans had started quick draw shooting for fun. And by the end of the decade, 3000 Western style guns were selling per week, according to Frank Smythe in his book the NRA the Unauthorized History. At the same time, accidental gun wounds and deaths were on the rise, and three out of four Americans supported stricter gun control measures. As a result, the NRA braced itself for new legislation in the early 1960s, sprinkling the first references to the Second Second Amendment in American riflemen eight months after Kennedy died. The magazine had even added a new statement to its masthead. The strength of the NRA and therefore the ability to accomplish its objects and purposes depends entirely upon the support of loyal Americans who believe in the right to keep and bear arms. And a lot of this push is coming at the direction of Harlan Carter, who writes stuff for American Riflemen and who is a big believer that the. The NRA needs to be a Second Amendment advocacy organization.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And that's, again, that's different from what they had always been, pro gun, because obviously it's the nra. Right. But when you look at what they're doing in 34, that they're not advocating for the Second Amendment, they're advocating for what they see as sportsmen. Right. And obviously there's problems with that. It's based heavily on, like, the desire of rich people to be heavily armed. But they're arguing for sportsmen as opposed to. Carter wants to turn it into an advocacy organization for this thing, this idea of the Second Amendment. And when you do something like that, number one, if you kind of are an essentialist and you claim that this is like, there's this kind of inherent, timeless, essential interpretation of this rule, and that's your guiding light. There's not any ability to compromise there. Right. Like, you have to be kind of a fundamentalist about it.

[Matt Lieb]

Right. It doesn't matter if a president was just merked in front of everyone in Dallas.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, yes.

[Matt Lieb]

You have to be like, sorry, right. The law's the law. And this is, you know, this is my interpretation of it.

[Robert Evans]

And, and, and Carter understands. He, again, he's a very smart guy. What he'd done with the Border patrol shows he understands how the media works. He understands how to advocate for white supremacy without advocating for white supremacy. Right, right. And so he knows that it's not just enough to like, say that you support gun ownership. And I'm going to Continue with a quote from Buckley here. In order for there to be good guys with guns, there had to be an opposing force. For the NRA and many lawmakers, that opposing force was usually black. Now this gets into the aspect of the gun control push. Again, there's an aspect that's just based in these assassinations that's not at all based in racism. And then there's an aspect that's based on the Watts riots. So in 1965, the LAPD beats a black man named Marquette Frank Fry with a baton during a traffic stop, and protests erupt. It becomes an insurrection and spreads throughout the country. The military is eventually called in to augment an overwhelmed lapd. This is part of what jumpstarts the war on crime, a period of largely racist gun or crime bills that culminate with the whole super predator panic that Biden is famous for. And the nra, huge supporters of crime bills, anti gun control support crime bills. Right. So you see what. What they're doing here is you have some folks, because people are, during the Washington riots, using guns to fight the lapd. And so there are like. And this. This is kind of. There's. There's pushes. This is what starts. Some of the momentum for gun control in California comes from this.

[Matt Lieb]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

But more than that, what the NRA looks at is they see these armed black people carrying out an uprising, and they're like, well, we can take away. Focus on. On guns and on legislating guns by focusing on legislating to criminalize black people. Right, right. And that's what Harlan Carter realizes. Like, well, this is some. This is the business the NRA needs to be in. And also, like, this is the business of, like, arming the police. Arguing that, like. Cause that's where, you know, that's where the good guy with a gun argument starts. Right. The idea that, like, you need to. The police need to have more and more weapons to deal with today's, like, dangerous, heavily armed criminals. Right.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. And. And also the, you know, guns don't kill people. This racial group that I do not like kills people.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. Which is an argument you still see made today. There's just a fucking Republican congressional candidate who was arguing that, like, America doesn't have a gun violence problem. Black people have a gun or something like that. Right. Like, this is an old argument. And Hardland Carter is the one who first figures out how to make it. Right. So two years after the Watts riots, the members of the Black Panther Party start assembling an openly carrying fire firearms, which is lawful at the time, they would assemble with guns and they would audit police during traffic stops to ensure that cops did not abuse members of the public. One could argue this is in some ways closer to an originalist interpretation of the Second Amendment 100% than anything today. Now, their activism scares the fuck out of white people. And again, white people who are not pro gun. Right, right. And we're gonna chat about all of that. And we're gonna chat about my favorite president. Matt, I know your favorite president. Ronald Reagan, Star of Bedtime for Bonzo.

[Matt Lieb]

Love him. The Monkey movie, those McCarthy hearings.

[Robert Evans]

We owe Ronald Reagan a lot, including the beginning of the career of my favorite musician, John Hinckley Jr. Oh, he's so good, dude.

[Matt Lieb]

I just like. You gotta get his mixed up tapes.

[Robert Evans]

I like his early stuff better. But he's still really cranking, cranking out some solid things, you know?

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, his early stuff is.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, his early stuff. Unbelievable.

[Matt Lieb]

Unbelievable. Just right. Number one with a bullet.

[Robert Evans]

Here's. Here's. Here's our ads. Oh, we're back. And, you know, I just wanted to give a special statement from our sponsors that they completely support the career of John Hinckley Jr. Yep. And I don't know, Sophie, how do we. You're shaking your head. Probably shouldn't. Probably not good. No, it's just. It's just a boring bit. It's a boring bit. You think it's boring that John Hinckley Jr. Is making a comeback tour now?

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, he's. He's touring and he's nailing it. It's. He's got a guitar and it says, this machine almost kills fascists.

[Robert Evans]

Pretty close to killing a fascist. This machine shot the sight of an armored limousine and it bounced and managed to penetrate a fascist chest cavity.

[Matt Lieb]

This machine loves Jodie Foster and almost killed him.

[Robert Evans]

Fascist. Yeah, this machine was very creepy. She did say she was impressed.

[Matt Lieb]

She should be.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, it is impressive, right?

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. Good for him, man.

[Robert Evans]

I don't know. Mixed bag, whatever. Probably enough John Hinckley Jr. Jokes. Mixed bag. Look, he did shoot Ronald Reagan.

[Matt Lieb]

He did. Unarguably.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. All right, Evans. So two years. What? Sorry.

[Matt Lieb]

Go ahead.

[Robert Evans]

So you get the Black Panthers start assembling with guns in public. And this scares the shit out of both, kind of the progressive liberal crowd in California and conservatives in California. And so all of California gets on board the idea of banning the open carry of firearms. Yeah. And the NRA happily endorses the measure. The Black Panthers assemble with their guns in the Capitol on one of the last days it would remain legal to do so. It's described in local news as an invasion, even though, again, it was people legally protesting in a way that was not, again, whatever, fighting for the exact.

[Matt Lieb]

Rights that the same, you know, like white wackadoos do now.

[Robert Evans]

But again, Harlan Carter totally on board with criminalizing this as is. Again, Ronald Reagan is the governor at the time.

[Matt Lieb]

Governor of California.

[Robert Evans]

Reagan's totally against.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So, yeah, some of these guys get arrested during their protest in Sacramento as they are handcuffed. Bobby Seale read from their executive mandate which protested, quote, the racist California legislature which is, is now considering legislation aimed at keeping black people disarmed and powerless. The measure passed and it laid the groundwork for the extensive gun control that the state of California now enjoys to this day. Those laws primarily impact poor black people. Rich white folks can acquire concealed weapon permits very easily. You just have to be able to have a second home in a place like San Bernardino and you can get the license to carry a concealed gun in the state of California. They can also purchase. So California, one of the things that they have is a handgun roster, right? So the only handguns you can buy in the state of California are specifically ones that have been approved from the state. However, you can bring handguns into the state if you move there, as long as they don't have an illegal, you know, as long as you don't bring magazines with higher than a 10 round capacity, you can bring those into the state and then you can have them or you can sell them to people through an FF NFL. And if you're a police officer, you can buy any kind of gun you want and you can sell it to whoever you want. So there is a massive industry in California of police officers selling handguns to people that are illegal in the state of California to buy unless a police officer sells them to you for twice the normal price anyway. Whole bunch of sketchy shit happens.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, it's a nice side hustle for the cops, you know, I mean, cause hey, there was a gig economy back then too. A lot of us, us are uber drivers slash gun salesmen now. So I get it.

[Robert Evans]

And it's one of those things. There's a number of things about including like waiting periods and stuff in California that there's a strong argument to be made in favor of. But this is where a lot of it starts. And it never entirely gets divorced from, from this thing of like, again, you can look at the same thing in the 1934 NFA of like, well, no, we want to, we don't want rich people to be affected. Right, right.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, yeah. Anyway, you know, they banned. What is that, the Saturday night specials like any, like.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, we're getting to that. That's where the handgun. That's where the handgun roster starts, though. Yes, with the Saturday Night special. Yeah, but we'll get to that. Don't worry. So Harlan Carter's support of an individual right to bear arms was not out of principled belief that all Americans deserve to defend themselves, or out of a desire to even check governmental power again. He militarized the border protection troll. Instead, he believed that guns were a tool to enforce white supremacy, and he wanted to ensure that white people maintained the right to do this. And backing California's open carry ban, he was engaging in an intelligent strategy. You draw attention away from guns and you focus on who is carrying them. This is the origin of the quote, guns don't kill people, people don't kill people argument. But when Harlan made it, the people were explicitly coded as black. And I'm going to quote from Epic magazine now, the same year American Riflemen published an editorial titled who Guards America's Homes? It depicted protests like Watts as mob violence. Who then supports the police? Who then guards the doors of American homes from senseless savagery and pillaging. It read, with home front safeguards spotty and uncertain, the armed citizen represents a potential community stabilizer. Right.

[Matt Lieb]

Nothing is more stable stabilizing for a community than a bunch of armed white people. People.

[Robert Evans]

Well, and he's. He's very much making the Rittenhouse argument here. Right. The armed citizen supports the police. The Black Panthers are making what I might argue is more of an originalist interpretation, which is the armed citizen protects the community from government overreach. That's the Black Panthers. He's saying the armed citizen aids the police in enforcing white supremacy. Right, right. That's the argument being made by the NRA here.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. Yeah. It's funny because, like, you know, obviously, you know, you do have your, you know, right wing insurrectionist militias and shit like that, but for the most part, what is being supported is like arming the suburbs.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

You know, and anyone who supports the police should be armed, and anyone who in any way is against it shouldn't be. And that is, you know.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it is a problem. Yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

It's cause some issues.

[Robert Evans]

It's a problem. Problem that deserves a more complex series of solutions than tend to get suggested on, on and in debates over this. But that's a separate topic. So after RFK and Martin Luther King Jr are murdered in 1968, Senator Thomas Dodd reintroduces the Gun Control act to Congress. This had been put up through it for it a couple of times. He puts it through again in 1968 after those assassinations. And the Gun Control act is intended to ban the interstate sale of guns, ban their sale to children, to convicted felons, and because of some bigotry, mental defectives. Right, right. So again, like, all of these laws, there's like, okay, you don't want people to just be able to like, ship guns through a mail order catalog across the country. I can get on board with that. Right. Probably shouldn't be selling them to children or, you know, although I have issues with like, who becomes a felon. Right. Like, it's got a violent history. Sure, that makes sense. You don't want somebody who, who's like a convicted rapist buying guns and then like, and mental defectives. Well, how the hell do you define that? Now, now, now I've got some concerns, but this, this law, again, there's a lot that's very reasonable in here, and the NRA rallies against it in huge numbers. Harlan Carter and his partner in the. And they are not in. They don't have an issue with the mental defectives part. Right. That's not the thing that's a problem to them. Yeah. This is the first law that causes the NRA to get, like, hugely political. And Harlan Carter, again, there's this war still within the NRA that hasn't been resolved between the old guard and the new guard. Carter, because he has a lot of influence in American Rifleman magazine. He enlists, like, the people that he's been seeding the NRA with these new guard folks to start, like, coming up with a series of blistering editorials in American Rifleman magazine that are urging people to write letters to, to Congress to like, this is the first real concerted lobbying campaign by the end of the.

[Matt Lieb]

And I'm trying to figure out which part of it it is. Is it the children part? Is it the fact that they're like, no children is, I mean, neutral, racially neutral. So they're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, we can't do that.

[Robert Evans]

Or what is it a big part of it? This is an attempting to establish, like, if you're buying a gun, you have to do it through. There has to be like, this, this legal process. Like, it can't just be a dude has a gun and I get it. Right. And that's, that's the big. That's the center of the problem. Right, is the idea that the federal government is now going to be involved in, like, in all legal gun purchases, which is obviously not what the Gun Control act does. There's these things called face to face sales in a lot of states where if you're not a gun dealer, you can sell a gun to anybody without there being any kind of a background check. That is still the law in a lot of the country. But most gun purchases you have to do, you have to fill out what's called a form 4473, which is. And you have to have like a federal background check. Right. And the government gets involved. Right. That's, that's the thing that they're scared about. And again, you can't divorce this from like the John Birch Society, from all of these panics about communism, about, like, you know, the government getting increasingly centralized. And I guess you might argue that that's also closer to an originalist interpretation of the Second Amendment. But anyway, so the nra, you know, Harlan Carter urges, like, helps to organize this massive campaign of resistance against the Gun Control Act. And it's not popular with many of the folks running the NRA at the time. And again, the way they'd done things before Congress would suggest a bill. The NRA would usually have some issues with it, but they would, like, make those issues clear. Then they'd sit down and like, hash something out, as they did in 1934. So the vice president of the NRA, a guy named Franklin Orth, figures that's what we're going to do. Right. He doesn't want the organization to take like a really public political system stance because that's kind of permanently alienated from like one party. Right. And he doesn't. That's not his goal with the nra. He doesn't want it to be like a Republican or a Democratic thing.

[Matt Lieb]

Short sighted.

[Robert Evans]

Idiot. Yeah. So for what would be the last time? Because again, Orth and his people are still in charge of the nra broadly. The NRA sits down with Franklin Dodd and they reach a compromise on the bill and they, you know, they, they alter it and whatnot to be a little bit whatever Orth describes it as a law the sportsman of America can live with. The fact that anything had been passed at all enrages the base that Carter has put together. And they respond with a flood of hate mail so voluminous it nearly makes Orth resign. It becomes increasingly clear that the old guard did not speak for the increasingly radicalized masses of the nra. And these, again, these people are, they're frightened of black mobs, of the Watts riots. Right. They also have been stoked by Carter and his lackeys with like, fears of communist infiltration and invasion. This is all kind of coming together as part of it. And obviously a lot of the right in this time sees the Watts riots as like, it must have been the Soviet union right here, 100%.

[Matt Lieb]

There's like a synonymous, like, you know, any kind of black uprising synonymous with communism at this point.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So kind of what you're seeing here is the radical chunk of the NRA doesn't want, like, wants to oppose any like, this law under all conditions. Right. There's no way in which they'll be okay with this. And they, they lose the fight to the old guard who works with the government to pass this law. But the new guard, I guess new guard isn't really a term, but like the Harlan Carter's faction becomes. Starts to become more dominant as a result of this because it pisses off so many people and becomes, because it's so much easier to electrify people with like, threats of the communist government is coming to like, take your guns to stop. You have to be able to protect your family against these dangerous black. That's easier to rile people up for than we should work with the government to come to sensible accommodations.

[Matt Lieb]

Right. Let's compromise.

[Robert Evans]

That's not a selling point. Right. So because of what Carter builds here over this fight, membership in the NRA soars to open over a million people for the first time in the association's history. So this is part of what scares the old guard and makes them silo Harlan Carter off to the ILA, which is the NRA's first registered lobby. And when they make this lobbying group for him to run, they don't like, fund it. So he's going to have to raise his own money to do anything. And their hope is that like, this guy is dangerous, but we can't kick him out. So if we give him this lobbying organization but don't give him any money, he's gonna have to spend all of his time raising funds and he's not gonna be able to, like, cause any trouble.

[Matt Lieb]

Sure.

[Robert Evans]

This proves to be a bad strategy because Harlan Carter invents the concept of right wing fundraising.

[Matt Lieb]

Damn it.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Matt Lieb]

The first podcaster.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. He's the first guy to figure out how everything is going to work for right wing fundraising in the future. And he does it because he figures out, he start uses computer. Right. Like that's the thing he figures out is going to be critical and I'm going to quote from Alina Buckley again. Their computer could print 1100 lines per minute, letting Carter's team produce thousands of letters addressed to members over a 24 hour period. It was the latest iteration of a powerful tool, direct mail. The medium had reached prominence by the early 1970s, when it was first pioneered by Richard Vagari, who as a campaign worker had copied down the names and addresses of people who had donated to Barry Goldwater's unsuccessful, successful presidential bid. With that list of Republicans and their addresses as good as the gold bricks deposited at Fort Knox, he once wrote, Vigory had developed a way for conservatives to reach the people most likely to become coveted single issue voters. With the right messaging, Carter hoped to use the tool to drum up support for ILA's legislative work. Vigory himself collaborated with Carter to build their database. ILA did all of this under the noses and the shoes of the NRA executives, gaining ground for a hardened line against gun control control. I'm building an organization capable of public persuasion, not only in Washington, but in the states, Carter said at the time. We don't know the best way to reach all the people yet, but of course we shall.

[Matt Lieb]

So God damn it. He built a mailing list, and he's.

[Robert Evans]

One of the very first people to do this and is arguably the most successful of anyone in this period to do it.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And yeah, that's where we're going to leave things for today. But first, Matt, you got a mailing list? You want to. You want to.

[Matt Lieb]

Oh, I got a mailing list. It's called Instagram. You can find me there at Matt Leap Jokes. Please follow me. And also, hey, if you like the Sopranos, listen to Pod Yourself a Gun. It is a rewatch podcast where me and Vince Mancini talk about every episode. We just wrapped it up and it is the greatest and only Sopranos podcast in the world. World. And I would love for y' all to check it out and tell your friends.

[Robert Evans]

Well, that's. That's wonderful. I would like to use this time to get everyone to get involved in my fundamentalist right wing mailing list. Naca. The. The National Antiquatering Association. We're Third Amendment fundamentalists, Matt. Not only do I think that soldiers shouldn't be quartered in houses. Yeah, I don't think they should be quartered anywhere. I think soldiers should be kept awake constantly with heavy doses of amphetamines for the duration of the time that they're serving no quartering of soldiers anywhere. Not even on military bases. Keep them in the sea or in the sky. On drugs at all times. That's the NACA line.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. I love it, dude.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Find us online, give us your email, send US Money and actblue.com Antyquateries no quarterback entering nowhere. Good times, good times. How could a beautiful young first grade teacher be stabbed 20 times, including in the bat, allegedly die of suicide? Yes, that was the medical examiner's official ruling. After a closed door meeting, he first named it a homicide. Why? What happened to Ellen Greenberg?

[Matt Lieb]

A huge American miscarriage of justice.

[Robert Evans]

For an in depth look at the.

[Matt Lieb]

Facts, see what happened to Ellen on Amazon.

[Robert Evans]

All proceeds to the national center for.

[Matt Lieb]

Missing and Exploited Children.

[Robert Evans]

I want to be one of the world's biggest drag queens.

[Matt Lieb]

You've heard the name.

[Robert Evans]

Marsha P. Johnson. Trans icon, revolutionary saint.

[Matt Lieb]

They call me a legend in my own time.

[Robert Evans]

But who was she really? She's strutting up there, waving to the policemen in the cars. Pay it no mind. I'm a woman. A real woman. Marsha also survived homelessness, sex work and police violence. And in 1992, her body was found.

[Matt Lieb]

In the Hudson River.

[Robert Evans]

Her death remains unsolved.

[Matt Lieb]

Marsha was pulled out of the water.

[Robert Evans]

Right over the edge.

[Matt Lieb]

Here.

[Robert Evans]

Afterlives is a podcast about how trans lives we've lost have reshaped our world. Marsha will tell us who she was in her own words.

[Matt Lieb]

You're gonna be gagged.

[Robert Evans]

Just get your heart ready.

[Matt Lieb]

The heart's fit.

[Robert Evans]

At a time when trans rights are under attack, her story is more urgent than ever. Listen to afterlives on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Jan Marsalek was a model of German corporate success. It seemed so damn simple for him.

[Matt Lieb]

Also, it turned out a fraudster. Where does the money come from? That was something that I always was questioning.

[Robert Evans]

But what if I told you that was the least interesting thing about him?

[Matt Lieb]

His secret office was less than 500.

[Robert Evans]

Meters down the road. I often ask myself now, did I know the true Ryan at all? Certain things in my life since then have gone terribly wrong. I don't know if they followed me to my home.

[Matt Lieb]

It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story, because this ties.

[Robert Evans]

Together the Cold War with the new one. Listen to Hot agent of chaos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves.

[Matt Lieb]

This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it.

[Robert Evans]

I'm J.R. martinez. I'm a U.S. army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart podcast. From Robert Blake, the first black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor, going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. What's Epstein? My bar virus. Why was that your intro? Why is that your intro, Sophie? As with all of our podcasts, this show is sponsored by the Epstein Barr virus. It is not, but okay. Have you had mono? No. Well, maybe try. Maybe try mono. Hell, yeah, it's good. It might cause multiple sclerosis later in life. There's all sorts of things that mono does.

[Matt Lieb]

Hard to tell.

[Robert Evans]

Hard to tell.

[Matt Lieb]

You will know if you had it if you ever take the Epstein Barr exam. That's right, a test. You get the rest of the joke.

[Robert Evans]

You can do it for free on this podcast if you sign up for a week of food. We love the Epstein Barr virus. You just like to make our poor editor bleep things. I do. I do.

[Matt Lieb]

It's fun.

[Robert Evans]

I'm so sorry for him, Chris. Well, once upon a time, when we still went to the office, somebody dinged my car. Maybe. I'm not 100% sure, but I've decided it was our editor. It was not Chris. It was not Chris. You don't know that. Sophie. You don't know that he didn't cover.

[Matt Lieb]

You can't prove it.

[Robert Evans]

You don't know that he didn't do it. Oh, wait.

[Matt Lieb]

Unless you did it. Do you want to know more about that?

[Robert Evans]

I've seen his dogs. His dogs are honest. He would never do that. Well, it was the. It was the. You know, Chris. You know who it was, and I don't know who it was. It does wrench us back on the topic, which is Harlan Carter and the birth of the national. Well, not the birth of. But the rebirth of the. Like, this is. It's. It's like a racist. You know how Gandalf is like Gandalf the Gray, and then he. He gets reborn as Gandalf the White. After fighting a boss, the NRA gets rebirthed as a white supremacist organization after fighting the Balrog of the Black Panthers, assembling legally with guns to check police power. Yeah, I may have lost the threat a little.

[Matt Lieb]

No, I gotcha.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

Shall not pass gun control legislation.

[Robert Evans]

All right, we figured it out. We got it. We got it back. See, people, this is how the sausage.

[Matt Lieb]

Gets made so disgustingly.

[Robert Evans]

Now we're talking about the nra, and particularly we have this over the Gun Control Act. This. This first big clash between Harlan Carter's people and the Old Guard. And the Old Guard wins, right? Because they're still, broadly speaking, in control. But it become that, like, they kind of sack. Like, in the course of winning, it becomes clear that an awful lot of, perhaps most NRA members are actually not on board with the direction. Direction they want. Are really excited about this more fundamentalist attitude towards the Second Amendment. And while Harlan Carter was busy building the bones of a fundraising and lobbying machine that would dominate conservative and really, in a lot of ways, American politics for the next half century, the Old Guard were wistfully looking back to the organization's past as a sporting association and figured maybe we could go back to that. Right, right. And so they are the conservatives. Harlan Carter is the radical right. Politics kind of leaves a bad taste in these people's mouths, because, again, they're all aristocrats, right? They're all like. They're kind of like Joe Biden. They want to have all of their friends, right? Like, on both sides of things. They don't want things to get too political because that gets nasty and it reduces the number of people who can give you money.

[Matt Lieb]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

So in 1973, the old guard had purchased land in Colorado, and they wanted to turn it initially into a shooting range. Pretty normal thing for the NRA to do. But in 1976, they decided to go with a grander plan. The National Rifle Association Outdoor Center. This was going to be a massive compound dedicated to classes on, like, woodcrafting and wilderness, you know, stuff and conservation research. There's supposed to be, like, scientific research done there and also other sporting skills. And, of course, there would be a shooting range there, and people would be able to hunt on the land. But, like, guns were not the primary purpose. Right. It was like a whole outdoor recreation center for the nra. And this was in line with. They wanted to expand the organization because that's. Obviously, it's more money and whatnot. But they didn't want to, like, hone in on guns entirely. They wanted to be like, well, we could be like. We could be like the. The American go to organization for, like, outdoor, you know, sporting and stuff. Um, so in order to help them kind of make this shift. Right, because this is at this point. But that is different from the NRA's initial vision, as is Harlan Carter's vision. Right. So they're both trying to move it in different directions. Right. It's become clear that, like, this thing the NRA had been. Isn't going to continue. And the old guard has a vision, and the new guard has another one. And so the old guard hires a PR firm, the Orem Group, to help them drum up funding to make this facility a reality, because they need tens of millions of dollars to build this thing. It's a pretty impressive vision. And they hope that they see Carter's built this, like, massive fundraising arm. He's getting all these people organized on behalf of his Second Amendment absolutism. And they want this PR firm to help them, like, take back, like, power from. From Harlan Carter and, like, people on their side.

[Matt Lieb]

Now here's be like, yeah, you know, Second Amendment absolutism is fun, but what if we built a rec center?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, what if we had a rec center for rich people? You can see. See what? This is kind of like how you've got, like, those. Those, like, old political ghouls in the Democratic Party and, like, the parts of the Republican Party that turned into Lincoln project who opposed Trump with, like, very slick political ads that did nothing, whereas Trump just got people angry. And that works a lot better than, like. Anyway, this is a version of that same fight. Right. And part of how you could tell the Orem Group was not going to succeed in their goals is that their founding, like, the guy they're named after, their founder is this wealthy New York philanthropist whose most prominent clients before the NRA were Planned Parenthood in the naacp. So, boy, this. These. This guy maybe doesn't get the base of the nra, and he's gonna have trouble speaking to them, right?

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, that's gonna be a problem. I see.

[Robert Evans]

Might be a problem.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. I mean, it's one thing if it's just like a. We have two different branches of conservatism or whatever, but no, these guys are going to be politically and morally opposed with each other. It's gonna.

[Robert Evans]

It's not gonna.

[Matt Lieb]

It's not Gonna work out well.

[Robert Evans]

It's not gonna work out well for them. It may have. It may be such a bad idea that literally anyone could have called it. But the NRA bigwigs, they bring this guy on the team, and his goal in his organization's goal is to chart, like, a safe new course for the NRA in which they kind of keep out of politics. And this is in part because, like, they want to build this new facility. You're not gonna get $30 million in 1970s money like, by. By hewing to a hard political line. Right, Right. So they succeed in roping in a bunch of big donors from all across, you know, major American business interests. They get Bill Spencer, who's, like the second guy at Citibank. They get Ezra Taft Benson, who's the highest apostle of the Mormon Church. They get a bunch of oil and gas industry bigwigs, all of whom agree to, like, start putting money into this project. So in order to, like, celebrate that they've found enough rich old dudes to fund this thing, the NRA sets up a big party on their land in Colorado for all of these, these rich guys, and they basically host, like, a multimillionaire summer camp. People are, like, camping in their private jets on the land. Like, they park their private jets there and, like, sleep on them, and then they hunt and fish in the daytime.

[Matt Lieb]

I love it. Super relatable.

[Robert Evans]

Exactly. Right. You see, again, this just makes it really easy for Carter to be like, well, these guys don't have your interest at heart, because they don't. Right. Yeah. It's not defending Carter to say that, like, these guys don't give a shit about the average person who might want to join the nra. Because most people who join the NRA are not millionaires with private jets.

[Matt Lieb]

Right. Exactly. They're missing the entire cultural aspect of it at this point.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And so this is not going to work out well for them. Right. So there's some backlash. And Alina Buckley describes kind of the old guard's vision of the association's futuristic quote, one in which shooting accompanied frontier abundance, funded by corporations that had long bankrolled conservative causes. One in which guns were a reflection of American might. Cowboy like, to be sure, but still with a military like formality rather than a vigilante ethos that saw federal power as a threat. So again, the nra, this is the attitude. The NRA works with the federal government in order to ensure this sporting culture and in order to ensure a degree of military readiness, which is basically back to their Old principles. As opposed to. Opposed to. The NRA is an association that enables individual Americans to be vigilantes. Right, right. Like, which is more what Carter's pushing.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The fun. The fun type of.

[Robert Evans]

Carter. Carter, the guy who was a vigilante, you know.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So while the old guard are hobnobbing with the great and good, Harlan Carter is making a strategic alliance with a gun industry journalist, a guy named Neil Knox. Now, Knox had been educated at a Christian college in Abilene, Texas. And the fact that he comes from Abilene is a red flag.

[Matt Lieb]

Oh, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Just in general. Don't go to Abilene. No. It's almost as bad as Brady. So, anyway, sorry.

[Matt Lieb]

I wish I knew anything about.

[Robert Evans]

This is. This is just Texas lore. You have to. Yeah. You're doing Dallas as I do. You have to on every other city in Texas.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So that people don't notice how terrible Dallas is.

[Matt Lieb]

Right, right.

[Robert Evans]

So I. I like to throw a lot of Flack Houston way in order to ignore that their food is better. It's whatever. So he goes to Abilene College, and every social find on Neil Knox will note that he marries his wife because she was the only girl on campus who kept a rifle in her dorm room. Well, hey, you know what? That's love. Right? Like, he finds his. He finds his person. Good for him.

[Matt Lieb]

He was interested in safe sex. Am I right, fellas? We're having fun.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, it is. This is, like, getting into, like, how different some things are in the country. But, like, at the elementary school where I went to, it was not uncommon for, like, people, particularly, like, teachers, to have, like, guns in their cars in the parking lot. And at the high school, like, kids would regularly have their guns in their cars in the parking lot during, like, hunting season and stuff. Well, it's like they're hunting rifles, right? Cause they're like, this is in, like, Idabel, Oklahoma. Like, it's not uncommon during the season. Like, you go straight from there to, like, whatever blind you've got. Got.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So again, this is, like, different. Different time. But also, Neil Knox is a very modern kind of gun guy who is going to help make the NRA into, like, the gun culture war organization that it becomes.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, yeah. He's like, sounds like the kind of origin story of, like, the first guy horny for guns. That's going to be normal. Like, he's going to normalize being horny.

[Robert Evans]

He's going to normalize being gun horny, but also with conspiracy baked into It. Right. That's one of the keys. Right. It's not just, like, an appreciation for guns. It's an appreciation for guns within this, like, conspiratorial milieu. That Neil Knox is like, he's a guy on this.

[Matt Lieb]

Yes. It's a. It's. Yeah, he's. He's read the Turner Diaries and shit.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I mean, he. He would have been the kind of guy to help write them. Not that he was, because that's a different set of guys. Although they are kind of connected by the Goldwater campaign. But that's another story. As the Dallas Morning News writes, Knox was. Yeah, I'm just going to quote, quote them walking through this guy's background. In the mid-1960s, Knox worked as a reporter and editor with newspapers in Vernon and Wichita Falls before getting a job as founding editor of Gun Week, a newspaper covering firearms issues of the day. From his base in Arizona, the bearded gun evangelist spent the next 40 years railing against gun control and pitting himself against NRA leaders he saw as too compromising. In the 1960s and 70s, the gun industry and the NRA were inclined towards pragmatism, said Jeff Knox, who's his kid from his home in Buckeye, Arizona, and willing to make concessions. The elder Knox believed strongly that the Second Amendment was absolute, and he especially didn't like the idea of registering guns, which to him raised the specter of a dictator confiscating all arms and subduing the citizenry. Jeff Knox said at one point in the mid-1990s, Neil Knox even suggested the assassinations of Kennedy and King might have been staged to build support for gun control. So Knox is the start of specifically the strain of the American right and American gun control culture that kind of culminates in Alex Jones, right?

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. Right.

[Robert Evans]

And he's not super big about pushing that, but he is, like, the first kind of prominent voice to start talking about, like, these. These.

[Matt Lieb]

These were made specifically for gun control.

[Robert Evans]

That's one of the big things that Neil Knox introduces into American culture, at least helps to introduce. I'm not gonna claim that he was entirely on his own there, but he's like. He's like the vanguard of that kind of guy who winds up doing the Sandy Hook conspiracy shit later on. And it's. It's worth noting, though, that while when Knox partners with Harlan Carter Again, this is 76, 77. So he has not yet started pushing conspiracies outright, but you can see kind of where he goes is where he. He and Carter helped to lead a Lot of the gun culture. And, yeah, so these guys, the old guard, see Carter and Knox and see them as, like, like, kind of unhinged. But even more than that, they're not primarily objecting necessarily to their goals as much as the fact that they're so extreme that it's going to take away funding. Right. It's going to reduce the NRA's ability to attract a lot of, like, people to give them money for their right.

[Matt Lieb]

It was a Republican establishment during, like, Trump's run. They were just like, listen, we agree all Mexicans are rapists, but you're not going to get the nomination by saying it. And it's like, want to bet?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, that's. That's kind of like they're arguing like, these people are too extreme. The NRA will, like, die out if their kind takes over. And Hartlan Cutter's like, oh, motherfucker, you want to see how to make the NRA make a lot of money? I will show you some things. He's about to.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So one Friday In November of 1976, the head of the NRA purged 80 staff members loyal to Carter. Right. They fire everybody with, like, very little warning because, again, Carter spent years getting his Border Patrol guys to in there. So they try to get rid of all these people. And what becomes known later is the weekend massacre. And Harlan, it's the only massacre. Harlan resigns from his position in protest, and Alina Buckley continues, quote, and gun Week, Hand loader and rifle. All publications Knox had once edited. Writers began reporting rumors about a shakeup at headquarters. The Orem Group's report on the outdoor center had been leaked, and gun group leaders around the country bristled at its language. And this is from the Orem Group's report. In the public mind, the NRA's current image is based almost totally on its supposed opposition to any form of gun control. This public image constitutes a weakness for fundraising. A new piece of. Again, very bad at being at their job. By the way, a new piece of information had gotten out, too, via a brochure sent in the mail to some members. The executive committee was considering moving the headquarters to Colorado Springs, not far from Raton, where the NRA could focus more squarely on its sports shooting ties. Regional gun groups began receiving concerned notes from their members. The Shooters Committee of Political Education, scope, based in New York, wrote a letter to rich protesting the NRA's recent board appointees and to let him know that they would advise their membership to write in Neil Knox, among several Others as board candidate at the annual meeting in Cincinnati. In the American Rifleman, an unsigned editorial appeared. There have been charges that the National Rifle Rifle association is being subverted, it read, in abandoning its fight against gun control. So this, and you see here, they've built. In their partnership, Knox and Carter have built a very effective, both fundraising and propaganda wing. That is, they're, they're building a moral panic over this. Right. In a very modern way. In a way. And it's modern because this is like the fucking, this is part of like the blueprint of like everything the right will do in the future. So for the next couple of weeks, Knox and Carter call every other NRA lifetime member they can. In brief, like you, when you have an organization like the NRA every year you have to have a meeting and you have to do like voting at that meeting and stuff. And like there's people who are the actual like board and stuff, but also the lifetime members get to vote. And so the board is in control. Unless you can get like enough of those members to vote on measures that would like replace the leadership. Right. And they had never worked. No one had ever really tried to do this before. The fact that the members get to vote had kind of been like stock options voting where it's like, yeah, I mean the random citizens who control 20% of the company's stock get a vote, but like our CEO controls 45% and his best friend controls 20. So it doesn't matter what they say. Right, right. That was the thinking. But obviously the NRA isn't like a publicly traded company. You just each, each of these people has a vote. And if you can whip them all into shape, you could actually rest control of the organization away from the old guard, which is what Knox and Carter start planning to do now. There's a lot of politicking that goes on here. You can read about it in, in detail in Alina Buckley's article. One thing I think that's worth noting is that the whole event has something of an early Trumpy vibe. The folks Carter lines up to back their plan to take over the NRA saw the old guard as out of touch aristocrats, which they want were. They framed themselves as like Paul Revere types. Right. They're founding fathers. Right. They're, they're fighting a revolution against an unjust like aristocracy. Yeah, one person who was present, they're.

[Matt Lieb]

All doing the cosplay now. It's all begins with the don't tread on me flags and the three pointed, you know, hats and yes.

[Robert Evans]

And one person who was present later recalled some members were angry enough to bring rope, tar and feathers to Cincinnati. Yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

What is their obsession with. It's like, oh, the Tea Party. A torn feathering. It's just like. They just have an obsession with this, like patriotic forms of like, you know, like old style LARPing. It's just, just the same. Oh, God.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, this gets into a broader issue that actually is. Is present in different forms everywhere, which is that, like, everyone has their types of violence that are like good and traditional and. Okay. And their types of violence that are so black people breaking a bunch of windows during a riot or like, you know, flipping a cop car and lighting it on fire. That is not okay. That's horrifying. That's.

[Matt Lieb]

That's evil violence. You know, end of civilization.

[Robert Evans]

Tarring and feathering a guy, trying to, Trying to like, raise taxes, like literally melting a man's skin off in order to stop him from like getting the taxes that will pay for a road. That's traditional, right?

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, that's. Yeah, it's allowed. You know, it's. I mean, burning their skin off and then the feathers is just so. They look like a chicken. Just the most horrifying joke that you can possibly think of. Yeah, there was like that John Adams HBO series with Paul Giamatti.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

They had like a tarring and feathering in it. And it was like, the first time I was like, oh, yeah, that's incredibly violent.

[Robert Evans]

Really, really violent actually to tar and feather a person.

[Matt Lieb]

I thought it was just like, hey, we're gonna make you look like a funny chicken. Like a pie in the face. I put it on the same level as a pie in the face, but it's. No, it's not. It's pretty bad.

[Robert Evans]

No. And it's like, I mean, everyone. There's a degree to which this is very common across the political spectrum. Because on one you get like whenever people suggest, suggests like, well, the cops should confiscate this or the cops should like do that. It's like, well, okay, what happens when police confiscate things? Like, what does that look like violence wise? You know?

[Matt Lieb]

Yes. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And it's because, like, I don't know, everyone's got. It's. It's a, It's a. It's. I mean, it's a common political tactic, right. To frame the violence you want to do or you want to have the government do as not violent violence because it's being done by the government. It's like, you know, when people do a panic about like drug dealers sneaking fentanyl into things, and their solution to that is have the DEA raid more people, it's like, well, the DEA kill people too, you know?

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, yeah, completely.

[Robert Evans]

I don't know. This is just what people do. Anyway, so Knox takes point. On the actual day of the convention, he's the one who's actually whipping votes at the NRA convention to propose a series of bylaw changes, changes using the support base Carter had built. He gets them to vote in a defense of the Second Amendment to the NRA's mission for the first time. Right? So he's like, this is the first time they actually add. Because the inter, like they have a mission statement or whatever as an organization, the first thing they do is they add like second Amendment, you know, like we are advocating for like the, you know, this interpretation of the second Amendment to that. The next thing they do is they block the sale of the N NRA headquarters in D.C. and they block the development of the outdoor center. So they put it into this plan. And then Carter or Knox brings up a guy named Bob Kukla, who's one of Carter's people, who's still in the nra. When Carter resigns in protest, Kukla takes over the lobbying arm. And he's apparently, I guess the old guard had thought he was trustworthy, but he secretly records one of their managing committee meetings. And they play this in front of the crowd. And in the tape you can hear the current head of the NRA and the other members of the old guard criticizing Kukla for, quote, going to war every time someone mentions gun control.

[Matt Lieb]

So he pulled a Project Veritas on.

[Robert Evans]

He does. He Veritas again. These guys are really building the playbook that's going to be used everywhere, well outside of guns. So following this, Knox and his voters strip the board and managing committee of power. And basically, again, this is there. You can go into a lot more detail about how they do this all legislatively, but way by the the end of things, the old guard are no longer in charge of the nra and Harlan Carter is the new executive vice President.

[Matt Lieb]

Damn.

[Robert Evans]

At 3:30. Yeah, yeah, they do it. They do it fucking street style. And at 3:30am Carter takes to the stage to give his first speech to his newly conquered nra. You're America's greatest people, my friends. Don't ever forget that. You are. You have afforded the NRA this wonderful, historically important reaction of yours to, to the way the association has been going to the way you want it to Be to the way it ought to be. And if I have anything to do with it, you are going to win because you are the nra.

[Matt Lieb]

Fuck. So you did it.

[Robert Evans]

He did it. Very Trumpy speech.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, yeah. Did his Trump speech and he took over the nra. And I imagine now people are gonna start falling in line.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, well, the NRA is gonna make a lot of people fall in line and we're gonna talk about what they do. But first, first, you know who loves to carry out coups?

[Matt Lieb]

Who?

[Robert Evans]

Our sponsors. Who backed a series of coups in Indonesia in order to gain access to the island that you can go to hunt kids on.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, that's what they're known for.

[Robert Evans]

And hey, if you're not. If you're not into guns, understands you can use bows, you can use an atlatl, you know?

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. Ninja stars.

[Robert Evans]

Ninja stars for sure. Sure. Look, there's. They can't stop you. Yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

A bow staff. Literally any weapon the Ninja Turtles use.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. The government of Indonesia has no control over this island. So it's all on. How could a beautiful young first grade teacher be stabbed 20 times, including in the back, allegedly die of suicide? Yes, that was the medical examiner's official ruling.

[Matt Lieb]

After a closed door meeting.

[Robert Evans]

He first named it a homicide. Why? What happened to Ellen Greenberg?

[Matt Lieb]

A huge American miscarriage of justice.

[Robert Evans]

For an in depth look at the.

[Matt Lieb]

Facts, see what happened to Ellen on Amazon. All proceeds to the national center for.

[Robert Evans]

Millions and Exploited Children. Jan Marsalek was a model of German corporate success. It seemed so damn simple for him. Also, it turned out, a fraudster.

[Matt Lieb]

Where does the money come from? That was something that I always was questioning myself.

[Robert Evans]

But what if I told you that was the least interesting thing about him?

[Matt Lieb]

His secret office was less than 500.

[Robert Evans]

Meters down the road. I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all? Certain things in my life since then have gone terribly wrong. I don't know if they followed me to my home.

[Matt Lieb]

It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story. Because this ties together the Cold War.

[Robert Evans]

With the new one. Listen to Hot agent of chaos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I wanna be one of the world's biggest drag queens. You've heard the name. Marsha P. Johnson. Trans icon, revolutionary saint.

[Matt Lieb]

They call me a legend in my own time.

[Robert Evans]

But who was she really? She's strutting up there, waving to the policemen in the cars. Pay it no mind. I'm a woman. A real woman. Marsha also survived homelessness, sex work, and police violence. And in 1992, her body was found in the Hudson River. Her death remains unsolved.

[Matt Lieb]

Marsha was pulled out of the water right over the edge here.

[Robert Evans]

Afterlives is a podcast about how trans lives we've lost have reshaped our world. Marsha will tell us who she was in her own words.

[Matt Lieb]

You're gonna be gagging.

[Robert Evans]

Just get your heart ready for heart failure. At a time when trans rights are under attack, her story is more urgent than ever. Listen to afterlives on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves.

[Matt Lieb]

This medal is for the men who went down that day.

[Robert Evans]

It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm J.R. martinez. I'm a U.S. army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and I Heart podcast from Robert Blake, the first black sailor to be awarded the medal to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. So immediately after carrying out his coup, Harlan Carter sets to work remaking the NRA in his own image. One of his first hires is a guy you may have heard of, Matt Wayne lapierre. Ah, yes, yes.

[Matt Lieb]

Good old Wayne.

[Robert Evans]

There we go. W. Big Wayne.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. Big La. Pierre P. Pepe Le Pew.

[Robert Evans]

Pew. Pew.

[Matt Lieb]

Pew.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

It's not French, but, you know, I.

[Robert Evans]

Mean, probably somewhere along the line.

[Matt Lieb]

Somewhere along the lines. Point is, Pepe Le Pew.

[Robert Evans]

Pew. Pew.

[Matt Lieb]

Pew. Is a very good point.

[Robert Evans]

That was a good joke. You should be proud. So by 1986, LaPierre is running the NRA's entire lobbying arm. Right. So he kind of takes the job that Carter had had, basically. Basically. But by the. By the 80s, he has turned it into. Because again, it was. I mean, and Carter started this process, but it becomes the most. The best funded and most effective lobbying organization in D.C. right? In the entire country again.

[Matt Lieb]

Insane.

[Robert Evans]

Carter draws kind of the blueprints. Lapierre carries them out, though. Well, there's no other story someday that.

[Matt Lieb]

You know, exists that, you know, has a lobbying arm that changed into just like a. You know what I mean? It was like this was a sportsman lobby that wasn't even a lobby, and now it is the most powerful lobbying group. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And again, there's, like, critiques about. Well, they were primarily interested in, like, preserving rich people's right to ownership, but they were, broadly speaking, saw that. Like, okay, when a law affecting guns is proposed, we'll sit down and we'll let them know this is how we think this will affect our members. And these are some changes we'd like. Again, it's like, broadly speaking, like, what you would kind of want to see in a democracy that's supposed to function the way ours does, as opposed to, like, we are going to become so key to right wing fundraising that if somebody proposes any kind of law meant at curbing gun crime, we will destroy them forever. Right. Which is.

[Matt Lieb]

By means necessary.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, by any means necessary. And to an extent that, like, it doesn't matter how, like, reasonable the, the restriction might be, like, even outside of stuff like an assault weapons ban, like, if you're going to propose, like, universal background checks, which most gun owners support.

[Matt Lieb]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

We're. We're gonna come for your ass, you know?

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Unless you're the Black Panthers, but whatever. Like, so another 1977 hire brought onto the NRA at the same time as Wayne lapierre is a guy named Robert Dowlett. Now, Dowlett becomes the NRA's general counsel, and it's his job to begin wrangling together legal scholars to push hard the idea of an individualist interpretation of the Second Amendment. So between 1960 and 1970, there's only three law review articles endorsing an individualist interpretation. Right. There are some, like, state level rulings, you could argue, kind of endorse one earlier, but there's never been, like, a national, like a Supreme Court ruling on the matter one way or the other. And it hadn't really. People had not even talked about it in that way until the 60s. So three law review articles written between 1960 and 1960 endorsing that interpretation. Between 1970 and 1989, the period in which Dowlett is the NRA's general counsel, there are 27 law review articles, three of which are authored by Dowlett himself. Yeah, and his work would start to bear fruit. Again, there's some, like, lower level rulings but it makes the individualist interpretation of the Second Amendment makes its way to the Supreme Court for the first time in 2001. Some people will say, like, point to D.C. as Heller. That's not the first time it happens in 2000. And the case in question has its origins in a 1997 criminal case in which a Texas woman divorced her husband and filed for a protective order against him because he had threatened to murder the man she cheated on him with. The next year, while he's got this protective order, which he's not supposed to have guns because he has the protective order against him. Right. During a meeting with his wife and daughter over some financial issue, he pulls a gun during an argument and points at. At them. So he gets indict. Again, if you're a rational gun owner, you would think, like, well, this is exactly the kind of person who shouldn't have access to a fucking gun.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

He gets indicted for possession of a firearm while subject to a court order, and he files for dismissal, arguing that this had unfairly infringed on his Second Amendment right. And the ruling, what it actually rules, is kind of complicated. The ruling is not entirely in favor of this guy Emerson. It's Emerson versus the United States. But in the ruling ruling, the Supreme Court rules that the SEC describes the Second Amendment as an individual. Right? Right. So this is the first time that happens at a federal level. And then this ruling in 2000 is reinforced by 2008, D.C. versus Heller, which is like the big ruling that is really more explicitly on can you ban, like, categories of weapons and whatever it's based on, like, a DC, I think, handgun ban. And then in 2010, the Second Amendment is finally incorporated in McDonald v. Chicago. But this is all orchestrated by Robert Dowlet. Right. Starting in the 70s. And one thing you have to say about the man is he earned his salary. Right. That's a significant change in US Jurisprudence that he kind of painstakingly is the architect of pushing. It's probably worth noting here that he was a murderer. So I'm gonna quote from the Boston Review here. Robert J. Dowlett was convicted of murdering Anna Marie Yocum, the mother of his then girlfriend, in 1963. Doulett also robbed and shot the owner of a pawn shop. Like Carter Doulett was 17 years old when he pulled the trigger. He confessed to the shootings and served six years in prison before his conviction was overturned on a technicality. The crimes were not made public until 2014.

[Matt Lieb]

God damn. No wonder it's like, this is Is.

[Robert Evans]

It's also he. And same origin story over and over. He and Carter and Kyle Rittenhouse, all 17, when they fucking kill people in, like, these. I guess I would. Maybe you wouldn't call what dowlet does vigilante violence. He's really just murdering people.

[Matt Lieb]

No, that just sounds like straight up murder.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he just murders a woman and then shoots a pawn shop owner in a robbery. So I guess you would say he's not a vigilante, he's just straight up an armed criminal.

[Matt Lieb]

That is fucking insane. And this is the guy who's made it easy, easier for everyone in the world.

[Robert Evans]

In the United states, he's the NRA's general counsel.

[Matt Lieb]

So at one point, I assume you went to law school.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because again, he gets off like. Like, Like Carter does. Right? He gets off and then he goes to college and then, I mean, you.

[Matt Lieb]

Know, good for them, I guess. Nice. You know, we live in the land of opportunity like that. I believe firmly that people should be able to get a second chance after making a mistake. Especially. Especially when they're, you know, not legal adults.

[Robert Evans]

I believe in certain second chances for certain kinds of mistakes. I think perhaps if you murder your girlfriend's mom and then shoot a pawn shop owner during a robbery, an avenue that we ought to close to you is representing the National Rifle association as well.

[Matt Lieb]

That's right.

[Robert Evans]

Like, maybe that's not okay.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, I mean, you know, it's like, listen, that guy explicitly does gun crime. Crimes.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

For fun.

[Robert Evans]

This perhaps should not be his job.

[Matt Lieb]

I want to know what happened with the. With the. The relationship.

[Robert Evans]

Did. I don't actually know.

[Matt Lieb]

Did they suffer after the murder of the mother?

[Robert Evans]

It must have been hard. Well, she was his girlfriend, so I don't think they wind up staying together.

[Matt Lieb]

Oh, damn.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's like, you know, with Harlan Carter. I think a 17 year old who, in a crime of racism, commits a murder, there should be some way for, like, that person to be rehabilitated. But perhaps they should never be allowed to be a border patrol officer.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, I mean, you know, there's like, little things, like not giving them, I don't know, authority over other people or requiring them to use lethal force as a part of the job.

[Robert Evans]

And maybe the guy who murders his girlfriend's mom shouldn't help to be an architect of federal gun policy. Perhaps.

[Matt Lieb]

I mean, it just.

[Robert Evans]

It's perhaps not that guy.

[Matt Lieb]

It sounds rational.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

But you know what? I don't know if that's. Yeah, I think it'll work. Out. Fine.

[Robert Evans]

I'm not even arguing against an individualist interpretation of the second Amendment because again, I don't really believe that the Constitution is something that we should treat as a religious document. But not this guy. Not this guy making that case. If you're going to make that case, maybe Ross Dowlet shouldn't be the man doing.

[Matt Lieb]

Doing it seems, seems like not.

[Robert Evans]

No. So that's cool. And the Boston Review article I found does a good job of pointing out that the NRA's embrace of this specific legal interpretation does not occur in a vacuum. While doubtless are lawyers are making their case. Right. So while they're and again this is a very, it's a pain. It's 40 years, it's painstaking process of Bill. Well not it's I guess 20ish, 23 something like that. But while they're making their case, the NRA is carrying out mass mailing campaigns, some of the most extensive in political history and they're publishing magazines that reach millions of people. They're paying for ads and all of these different gun press magazines. They're having paid spokesmen show up and talk radio stations. Right. And part of like what they're doing, they're obviously they're arguing for this interpretation of the second Amendment, but they're also pushing a cultural change. What some scholars have turned the termed the tactical turn in US gun culture. Again, even to the extent that like, I mean one thing that liberals get wrong is like it is not new for civilians to own on a widespread scale military grade weapons. Among other things, one of the most popular guns in civilian hands that the NRA before its political turn sold to people was the M1 Garand, which was the U.S. service rifle of World War II. Right, right. But what is really new is that it's is this kind of paramilitary turn for gun owners because people were not buying M1 garbage Garens primarily to like play act as soldiers. They were buying them because the Garand is a perfectly good hunting rifle. Right. It's a 3006 which is a very effective hunting round and those were cheap. Right. So it was a good weapon to buy. So people are not dressing up as soldiers with their in one Garands primarily. Right. That kind of stuff. The tactical turn in US gun culture occurs because it occurs alongside the militarization of the police and these kind of Hollywood valorization of the militarization of police. Police.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So there's a lot that's going on here. Right. And including like broadly speaking the kind of like you could you also should tie in what Holly Hollywood's partnership with the Defense Department. Right. And the increasing degree to which like military tactical culture becomes like, popularized. But the NRA recognizes like this is. There's a lot of promise in this. Number one, you can get more people involved. You can. You can sell more shit to people, which means you can have more companies funding the NRA who are not selling that shit, just guns, but all this tactical gear. I'm going to read a quote again from that Boston Review article, and it's quite long, but it really ties all of this together. Quote. Though the story of this tactical development in US gun culture is complex, I focus in this essay on a few particularly crucial components. The first is that border enforcement has been increasingly militarized since the 1970s and diffused deeper into the interior of the country. This has blurred the boundary between domestic and foreign conflict, brought the use of exceptional police powers into nearly every U.S. town and and turned militarized border security into a ubiquitous mechanization of radicalization. This has also corresponded with the militarization of local police forces, which was certainly worsened by the War on terror, but which historian Elizabeth Hinton has identified as having deeper roots in the Johnson administration's war on crime, which of course the NRA backs. Like the nationalization of border security, it turned this nation's city streets into sites of militarized racial enforcement. Second, individuals once arming themselves for self defense, often out of racial fears or oppressed, a perceived threat to their masculinity, are now frequently claiming to do so in defense of the Constitution and freedom itself. The NRA has played an outsized role in this vigilante reframing by promulgating the myth that gun ownership has always been about an individual constitutional right and oriented towards a nativist version of self defense. This vigilantism operates in conjunction with extralegal violence of law enforcement officers and is fueled by an individualist notion of sovereignty. Sovereignty more dangerous than any military grade weaponry. It rejects the freedom of others as equal to one's own and views any attempt to support such equality as tyranny. More importantly, this sovereignty is assumed to grant the individual the power to take life in defense, not of law, but of particular social and racial orders. There are now 25 federal agencies with special tactical units. In May Of June of 2020 alone, 16 deployed their tactical teams to Black Lives Matter protests, including the Border Patrol, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Bureau of prisons, the US Marshals, the US Coast Guard, and every one of the FBI's 56 field offices. And at the local law enforcement level, special weapons and tactics SWAT units are now a staple of daily policing. Their very ordinariness is a testament to how dramatically local policing has changed since 1969, when a SWAT unit was first used to raid the Black Panther headquarters in Los Angeles, pioneering what was at the time an almost unprecedented domestic use of military force. In Carter's victory speech, he declared, beginning in this place, in this hour, this period in NRA history is finished. The post1977 NRA was decidedly partisan, took an absolute position against gun regulation, and redoubled its efforts to cultivate a social identity and authoritarian political ideology among its members.

[Matt Lieb]

God damn. Damn.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Pretty bleak when you lay it all out like that.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. Yeah. All of that in a row and concisely done.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

Fucked up. Yeah. Jesus.

[Robert Evans]

Again, some in our listenership will agree and some will disagree. I'm a believer fundamentally that I don't like the idea of the state having a monopoly on violence. And I certainly don't like the idea of the police being able to own things that I cannot own.

[Matt Lieb]

Sure.

[Robert Evans]

And there's an argument to be made, if you again, care about being an originalist, that that is close to the original interpretation of the Second Amendment. Right.

[Matt Lieb]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

What part of what by. And they're claiming to be originalist. They're claiming to be that the. That the initial original interpretation was individualist. But what they're doing that for is not any idea of. Of community, self defense or a fear that the federal government will accumulate too much power, although it's often framed that way. Fundamentally it is about allowing regular white citizens to emulate the military and the police and to act as vigilantes in their stead. Right. That is where the NRA turns, and that is the tactical turn. Right. It's not that there's nothing evil about owning body armor, which people can do for defense, perfectly reasonable, defensive purposes. There's nothing like. But. But what, what they're. What they're doing is pushing this idea of like, not just the military, not just that, like society ought to be militarized, which you get in every kind of argument that, like, what we need to do is harden the schools, we need to add more cops. But it's this idea that the individual white person should militarize themselves in order to. In order to protect this kind of racial hierarchy. Right.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. Uphold white supremacy.

[Robert Evans]

And this is the thing, this is what I wish folks who are supportive of more gun control would more often do is tie in all of this to what has happened to the police because they cannot be extricated. Right.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And I think Uvalde made that perfectly clear that like, these are two sides of the problem. Problem. And the NRA is a huge part of how we get there both how we get these cops that look indistinguishable from like Marines in downtown Fallujah. Not that I think the Marines necessarily should have been in downtown Fallujah, but you have these guys. There's this thing called the weapons effect. Right. Which is a psychological phenomenon that's noted that the presence of weapons in an area, area visible weapons, can increase the willingness of people to use violence. Right. There's like something about that that heightens it and that's happening here. And part of why that happens is just the fact that America has so many goddamn guns. Right, Right. But another part of that is the fact that everywhere you go, you see fucking cops in a way that like, you don't see cops dressed as armed as heavily as our cops in fucking war zones a lot of the time. Right. Like, it's, it's. Anyway, Whatever.

[Matt Lieb]

No, that's.

[Robert Evans]

That's what Ireland Carter builds, you know.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, no, I hear exactly what you're saying and I, I agree to an extent with, with what you mean. I feel like in general, my problem with liberals is that they tend to kind of like put guns in the same category. Like they moralize guns the way they moralize. Like the right will moralize drugs.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Matt Lieb]

And kind of this idea that like, you know, if we were to just make all the guns illegal, then, you know, this would solve the problem and whatnot. And that's not to say that it. There isn't. It wouldn't be helped if you had some serious regulation. But this like, moralization of it, like, misses the entire point of why. Exactly the why the people who want guns and have those guns have them. You know, it's like, yeah, and the people you're speaking to are not. It's people speaking to the choir. Liberals often just speak to themselves and go like, isn't it crazy that, you know, all these people have so many guns? And it's like, yeah, well, while you're talking amongst yourselves, all these guys. Guys have created an entire family filled with guns.

[Robert Evans]

It's like looking at these right wing, like, militias that people are rightly, like concerned to see militias marching around US streets like threatening people, but also failing to see the thing that is like, well, every one of those guys has friends who are cops and like, A significant percentage of them are cops, which is why a whole bunch of cops were present at January 6th. And that's a huge chunk of it. And like, you can't, you can't divorce your desire to reduce the number of guns in American culture from the need to reduce the militarization of the police because they are both inextricably tied to the problem.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Which is the constant gun violence in this country has, has, has two points that need to be really like, hit on. It's not, it's not just civilian gun ownership. It's also the way in which the state uses and legitimates armed force, going back to even the earliest days where it's like, yeah, in Texas, your right to carry guns was heavily restricted, but if you were a white vigilante who carried guns to do racist violence, you would often get off. Right. Even though you'd broken the law. Right, right. Like Harlan Carter, you know. Anyway, under Harlan Carter, the NRA's membership triples from 1 million to more than 3 million. It would reach 5 million members under Wayne LaPierre. Obviously, the NRA, we're not going to get into this a lot, but it's like well past its prime at this point for a variety of, of reasons of primarily rampant corruption. There's a pretty good podcast about like, what the fuck happened there.

[Matt Lieb]

But yeah, it's called Pod Yourself a Gun. A Sopranos podcast. I'm sorry.

[Robert Evans]

So the NRA tops out at about 5 million members, but as of 2017, about 14 million Americans claimed some sort of affinity for the organization. And I forget who did the poll, but whatever. And one of the things that's interesting here is that like, that's like a lot of people to get around anything. But that's also not a lot of people as a voting bloc compared to the entirety of the United States. Right, yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And so looking at that, you have to kind of marvel at the success of the RA in making their ideas a cornerstone of right wing politics.

[Matt Lieb]

100%. I was just thinking to myself, that seems like a low number.

[Robert Evans]

It's right, because again, if you look at actually polling of Republicans on gun control issues, they are a lot less hardliners on gun than you would guess by how the party acts. And it's because the party's ability to fund elections for decades was heavily based on who could get the NRA's approval. Right.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. Gotta get that A plus rating.

[Robert Evans]

Exactly. In 2016, they spent more than $30 million on Donald Trump's campaign. And this again, people often miss this. Like my parents were hardcore right wingers, right. So was my whole family. I had like two relatives who owned guns, like my grandpa and one of my uncles. Right?

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And I did go shooting as a kid, but my parents didn't have any. My aunt, my and, and uncle didn't have any. There were not guns in the house of my family in Texas, you know, because like it's actually not as integral to conservatism as a, as a. At least. I mean this is again changed because the culture wars have accelerated. So like this is that there's less conservatives like the ones I grew up with when they were today. But the nra, it wasn't that everyone on the right was in lockstep. It's that the elected leaders were scared to cross them because that's where the fucking money came from. Of course, that's why they were able to wield power so effectively. One of the most peculiar but also influential aspects of Harlan's time and power was his repeated and intense defense of cheap, shitty handguns. And this gets us to the Saturday Night Special.

[Matt Lieb]

Here we go.

[Robert Evans]

So Saturday Night Special in brief, like there's a type of handgun that was very cheap in the 70s up through in the 80s and stuff called the Saturday. It was nicknamed the Saturday Night Special. Special. It's like a five or a six shot usually.38 caliber handgun. Yeah, these are still. Guns like this are still used in violent crime way more often than like the guns that are politicized. Like cheap handguns in general are the primary gun that are used in violent gun crime.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Although what, what is a cheap shitty handgun is different now because actually six shot revolvers are kind of pricey these days as opposed to like high pointers, something. But. Yeah. So this is a cheap shitty handgun. And these are particularly low quality handguns. They were not like well made as a general rule.

[Matt Lieb]

Right. They didn't always work.

[Robert Evans]

They did not always. We are. Yeah, that's that. We're building to that. Okay.

[Matt Lieb]

Jumping the gun.

[Robert Evans]

So you have this massive crime rate raise that starts in the 70s and really like peaks in the early 90s. And again a lot of Joe Biden, Biden's career is based off of this like violent crime panic that starts in this period. And one of the first like legislative like tsunamis that forms around the crime surge is around this fear of the Saturday Night Special. And one of the reasons why people are so scared of the Saturday Night Special is that it is a gun that black people can afford. Right? Right. It is A cheap handgun. And so it is affordable for those people, folks. Harlan Carter opposed new legislation to ban the Saturday Night Special, although he didn't do it on the grounds that poor people deserved firearms, but fascinatingly, on the grounds that they were shitty and broke easily. And this is one of the most incredible arguments I've ever heard from the. From NRA on the record.org's speaking in opposition to. Opposition to legislation that aimed to ban Saturday Night Specials and other inexpensively produced, produced handguns. Carter stated in a 1972 speech before the NRA's executive committee, I can produce actual cases that the cheap handgun that snaps in a police officer's face instead of firing has saved many, many lives. And the question arises, what are we trying to do upgrade the quality of handguns in the hands of our criminals? God, that's an amazing logical argument.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, I mean, it's like he has a point, a really fucked up evil point. And it's also, also he's getting straight to, I mean, the crux of it here, which is like he, he's lucky to be in a situation in which he can claim like, oh, actually, I don't want to ban this because this makes me feel safer to know that they have, you know, the, the poor, their, their quality of handguns is, is, it's way worse.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot that's messy on this whole, this whole thing, but it is very fun. And it's going to wind up getting a lot of people killed. Not in necessarily, not just from violence. A lot of people are going to die because of Carter's defense of terrible handguns and where it leads. But before we get into that, you know who else loves shitty handguns that break in their owner's hands and they. Handgun. I'm sorry, Sophie absolutely loves it. Motto is we want you to be armed and we want you to never know if that gun's gonna fire or not.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Completely inexplicable. We want a weapon that you cannot trust under any circumstances. That's guaranteed. Remove drop safeties from handguns. Let them free.

[Matt Lieb]

You know, I enjoy this because I am watching Sophie just shaking her head every time you do this bit.

[Robert Evans]

She's. She hates.

[Matt Lieb]

Please stop.

[Robert Evans]

She hates it. Makes you so angry. Do you know why I hate it? Why is that, Sophie? Because there's like 50 Reddit threads of people being like, wait, what is this? I've never read about this before. Who has a child hunting island, is he? And I just, it just feels like betrayal to Our listeners. I love with most of my heart, I like fucking with him. I know. I feel the same way towards them that I do with my kids. Cat. When I like, I like pick it up and I like, toss it in the air and it hates it, but it can't, it can't. It has to let me like squeeze it and wrap it in a blanket.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, it's called rent. It's called paying rent.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's right.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, you gotta be adorable for me. Sometimes your fear makes me smile. I feel the same way about our piggies. You know, everyone. It's like you feed the slop to the piggies and you let them oink. But, but it's. You're the farmer, Remember that.

[Robert Evans]

That's right. You're the farmer. Well, I'm the farmer.

[Matt Lieb]

You are, yes, exactly. Robbery.

[Robert Evans]

Remember, don't do that to the goats. I don't think it'll work out. Work out well for you. Oh, it's really fun to. With the goats. If you pick them up, like, they don't know what to do with their little legs and they just like kick in the air and then you can hug them. It's very cute.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, I love it.

[Robert Evans]

They go, except for my boy goat. He's the ram. He loves it. He. He fucking. As soon as he sees you, he'll run up because he wants to get cuddled.

[Matt Lieb]

Damn. Dude's right.

[Robert Evans]

His sister hates it, but whatever. Anyway, of course she does.

[Matt Lieb]

Of course she does.

[Robert Evans]

We're back. So, before we get onto the consequences of Harlan Carter's embrace of terrible unsafe firearms, let's talk about his defense of the virtues of arming small children with derringers. Now, Matt, if you're not a gun guy, the derringer is a tiny, ultra concealable one or two shot pistol. They were originally made for riverboat gamblers as documented in the documentary Maverick.

[Matt Lieb]

I'm pretty sure I know exactly what's going right.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, they're like little, little bitty like. Yeah, yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

Little hot girl guns is the way I think of them.

[Robert Evans]

Here's something he said to Congress. There was a little boy and it was real cold. And he had his hands in his overcoat. He had one of these little old arrows. And four bushy guys ambled up in an arrogant manner. He stopped them and three of them were very nice and decent. And one of them said, what would you do if I told you I had a pistol and I was going to kill you? And he says, I would kill you, you son of a bunch. These little Guns have a very noble and important purpose and we should make our position clear.

[Matt Lieb]

God. That is the first recorded incident of like someone being like my 5 year old just said, daddy, why does Trump do the bad thing? And I couldn't explain is like a totally fake story that did not.

[Robert Evans]

There's absolutely no way this happened. But also none of it makes sense. Like what does it mean by their bushy. What does that mean? He has to be being racist here.

[Matt Lieb]

Oh yeah, for sure. But I don't know how which race Go on. Like were they Hasidic Jews?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. What does this mean? What does bushy mean?

[Matt Lieb]

I don't know. It could be Italians.

[Robert Evans]

It would be funny if like the real story is that that the Jeb and George Bush who were younger at this point, like it was, it was all of the Bush brothers like trying to mug children.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. You know, Bushy like the former head of the CIA.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I think he was current. Probably would have been current when this was I guess like the late 70s. Yeah. So obviously that's probably a lie, but it's very. Again, Harlan Carter is, he is the kind of guy who is not just like I think children should be able to engage in shooting sports but like I think children should be routinely carrying handguns on their person.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. Because what she guys shows up.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, exactly. That is out of its damn mind.

[Matt Lieb]

Just. Oh man. A bushy man could strike at any point.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. You never know when a bushy dude's going to come in. You got to be. You have to always have a different in your 5 year old's pocket.

[Matt Lieb]

It's the 70s. Maybe he's talking about like a Tom, like a, like a lot of chest hair type guy, you know, like a disco stew shows up.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. A bunch of disco guys come out and start threatening children. So anyway, back to the point. Under Harlan and his successors, the NRA acted repeatedly to defend the rights of gun manufacturers to build dangerously shoddy firearms. Like this is we talk a lot about, rightly so the things they do, like legislatively to defend the gun industry. But this is often left out because one of the things is its primary victim is gun owners. Right. I'm going to quote here from a write up in Bloomberg. In 1972, Congress created the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Four years earlier, Lyndon B. Johnson had signed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets act which regulated several aspects of firearms sales. And advocates of gun control hope to give this agency oversight of defective weapons. Representative John Dingell. Sorry. A Democrat from Michigan and a hunter with an A plus rating from the ascendant. NRA blocked them in 1975. He did it again when a colleague introduced a bill making a second run at giving the CPSC firearms authority. We put in there an express prohibition against their. Getting them getting their nose into the business of regulating firearms and ammunition. Dink said in debate In Congress, that second bill was crushed 339 to 80 and the issue has never been seriously considered again. And it's one of those like, this is again, a perfectly. Even if you're like a gun fundamentalist, you should want there to be oversight of guns that don't work or explode and like ammunition that doesn't work. Like, Right, right. That seems to make. That shouldn't be a political issue.

[Matt Lieb]

It seems like you'd be into that.

[Robert Evans]

That. Yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

And the only explanation for you not being into it is like, oh, good, they can't get the good guns. I mean, like, like poor, poor people, black people getting the defective guns seems to be the only excuse here.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, well, I mean, their specific excuse is that like, this will. This will enable potentially the government to like, regulate what kind of ammo is illegal and ban types of like, what, Whatever.

[Matt Lieb]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Which they do anyway. Like, there's that shit happens. Like, whatever. It's dumb. It's dumb that this happens this way. It is worth noting that, yeah, it's like a blue dog Democrat who is the one who like, blocks this shit. So the end result is that when gun manufacturers produce firearms that, for example, fire for no reason and kill their owners, it is impossible for the government to order them to recall those weapons. Not even the batfe, which supposedly regulates firearms. Firearms can force a gun maker to take broken guns off the market. And I'm going to quote again from that Bloomberg article, and this is actually how the article opens. Thomas Bud Brown makes his way out the back door and stops a few steps to the right, raising a trembling arm, pointing at something. It's where he found his boy slumped against the cold back wall of the house around 7:15am on the last day of 2016, bleeding out. Brown is telling the story now about how he was sitting in his chair in the living room when he heard the shot. His son Jared, 28, had just picked up Bud's Taurus PT145 Millennium Pro pistol and headed out to do some shooting near their house in Griffin, Georgia, with his best friend, Tyler Haney. Bud figured Jared had fired at something for the fun of it, like he did sometimes. I was thinking, I'd better go out there and tell him, be careful or something. Bud, 54, says, his voice trailing off. But what he'd heard was the pistol going off without anyone pulling the trigger, sending a.45 caliber slug through Jared's femoral artery. Oh, my leg. My leg. Jared yelled loud enough for his father to hear. Haney, 26, rushed to the house in a panic, pleading for help. When Bud got out there, the pistol was still in its holster, tucked into Jared's waistband. So.

[Matt Lieb]

And he can't sue. He can't do nothing.

[Robert Evans]

Absolutely nothing. Bud is one of. We have no idea how many Americans died due to defective Taurus guns. The company did eventually issue a recall on something like a million weapons that were potentially defective. But they didn't have to run ads anywhere to inform people of the recall. They were not required to reach out to their customers, to reach out to gun stores, to take any action at all, to warn people that they'd sold guns that could fire for no reason. An unknown number of those weapons are still in people's gun safes, closets, and holsters today.

[Matt Lieb]

That's fucking crazy. Just like I don't even know the justification. It's just. Guns don't kill people. Yeah, it's this faith kills people.

[Robert Evans]

The. The nra, they are. There's this, like, social, like, culture war component of how they do what they're doing, but they fundamentally represent the gun industry. In any industry, that can stop there from being a way to sue them if their products don't work. Like, we'll do it if they can, you know?

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, yeah. It's just. It's just. It's.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

It's so insane to get to a point where it's so clearly a manufacturer lobby mixed in with a culture war issue that just creates death everywhere.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's. And it's. I mean, again, for. Among other things, don't buy Taurus guns for any practical purpose.

[Matt Lieb]

Absolutely.

[Robert Evans]

In the 1990s, more than 40 US cities filed lawsuits against gun manufacturers, spurred on by a surge in violent crime. This was the super Predator era. Now, I can't speak as to the legal merits of the individual cases of these cities against these gun manufacturers, but the response the NRA chose was interesting. They used their lobbying arm to launch a campaign that got Senator Larry Craig of Idaho and Representative Cliff Stearns of Florida to propose a piece of legislation that would end all pending litigation against gun companies and prevent any future litigation. It took a while to actually get the law, which is the PLCAA rule, written. And by the time it was introduced, George W. Bush was on his second term. In October 2005, he signed the PLCAA into law, which blocked lawsuits from seeking damages on gun industry companies for unlawful use of a firearm. Right. So if the company could be sued for, like, breaking the law in some way, but they cannot be sued for what people do with their weapons. And I have some conflicting feelings on some of these laws lawsuits, but one of the things that people will point out is that the advertising of a lot of these companies, like, leads to the like. And this is a big thing, like the Sandy Hook lawsuit. Right. One of the big issues, one of the big, like, points used to justify, like, the suing against the Bushmaster who made the gun that was used in Sandy Hook was this, this ad campaign they just done where it was like, consider your man card reissued. And they would, like, send you a man card with an AR15. And it's. It's again. And there's. Again, this is like, a complicated thing to get into entirely, but there's a debate to be had. Into my mind, the area in which it's kind of most relevant to have this debate is on to what extent does the way the gun industry tries to sell weapons to people complicit in when those weapons are used for violence. So, for example, when Daniel Defense launches an ad where you have, like, a Bible verse and a small child holding an AR15, to what extent does that help to lead. To, to what extent does that help make gun culture in the United States more violent? Right. And this is not really what the lawsuits are like. The Uvalde families aren't suing Daniel Defense, or they're attempting to right now. This is all happening at the moment on those lines. But to my mind, that's kind of the most. That's the thing that, like, I think there's a point on.

[Matt Lieb]

Sure. I mean, it's like. I mean, the way cigarettes were marketed changed, you know, were regulated like, crazy. Crazy. And has actually had an effect on.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Matt Lieb]

The amount of smokers.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And so anyway, again, I have some complicated thoughts on, like, suing companies for the unlawful use of their products. But there's like, anyway, the PLCAA kind of ended that for a long time. This is starting to be challenged. But for. For 15 or 17 years or whatever made any kind of, like, debate meaningless. Right. Because it was just prohibited. And it was prohibited. Again, the. This is. The NRA spent a lot of money on George W. Bush's campaigns.

[Matt Lieb]

You know, I am wondering if the, like, initially, the Hitachi Magic Wand actually was a Back massager. And if you could sue, Sue a company because it gave your wife an orgasm.

[Robert Evans]

Well, like, again, there, I think people do need to consider when we talk about, like, to what extent should a gun manufacturer be liable for something about a mass shooting. There are some unsettling implications to some of that. It's not a super cut. It's not as cut and dry as certain other things are. Yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

And I'm not saying it's a slippery slope necessarily, but I am saying that I thought it was a back massager.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

And now it's better at making my wife calm than I am. And that always has been. Yeah. And. Well, I mean, it seems kind of unfair to me to have not known that.

[Robert Evans]

What's really. I mean, people are bringing up. People on Twitter have brought up the fact that, like, you're limited to six dildos, I think, in the state of Texas.

[Matt Lieb]

Is that right?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's like, literal laws on how many. I mean, I don't think they've ever been in. What has been enforced, though, is that, like, anyone you know who works at a sex shop in Texas has to be like, has. Is like, prepared. This is a little bit less the case now, but when I had friends in the early 2000 2000s, like, you get training on, like, what to do if you get rated because you're not allowed to sell sex toys. They had. They were always called cake toppers. Right. Like, the dildos and shit were like cake toppers or personal massagers or whatever.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

But you couldn't, like, you couldn't say, like, these are for fucking, in the same way that, like, you could sell a bong, but you had to call it a water pipe for tobacco. Like, if you use the word bong in a Texas head. Again, head shops were always kind of inconsistent about how much they were paranoid about this. But like, you. You could get asked to leave for calling something a bong in a. In a.

[Matt Lieb]

Right. But I mean, what do you. What do you call that? You know, that, you know, that silicon, but that has both the pussy and the vagina.

[Robert Evans]

That's a sex ass. That's a sex ass.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So.

[Matt Lieb]

But you. I mean, I'm just saying how do you market that? So get around.

[Robert Evans]

I don't. I don't think they really had sex ass. Although I know people bought. What do you call them? The. The fleshlights. So there must have been some, like. I'm guessing they probably. They must have been advertised as like a novelty. Right? As like a. This is for joking around at a bachelorette party. You put it on a. Like, I don't. They're. They're like, it's dumb. All Texas's whole legal system is stupid as.

[Matt Lieb]

That's insane. That's a lot of fun, though. I mean, you know, but people get around it. Like, I didn't have access to a big silicon, you know, butt vagina. And so. So I fucked a big mouth Billy Bass.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Who didn't fuck a big mouth Billy Bass.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

That's just a universal experience of people in the early 2000s.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. I'm sorry. I just, like, eventually, I just was like, we're going to start talking about cum.

[Robert Evans]

We're going to start talking about cum. Look, you know, the same year that George W. Bush signs the PLCAA into law, that's the year that many millions of young American boys encountered a Billy Largemouth Bass for the first time.

[Matt Lieb]

That's. That's right. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And thanks to the NRA's lobbying, the Billy Bass company couldn't be sued for taking the virginity of all those boys.

[Matt Lieb]

Take me to your virginity. All right, I'm done.

[Robert Evans]

All right. The last thing I want to talk about here, and this is maybe the most unsettling thing the NRA has done, is that they have made it impossible not just to, like. Not only do they fight, like, any regulation that might potentially impact positively America's gun violence problem or America's gun death problem, they've made it impossible to research how gun violence works and like the extent to which different policies affect it. In 1993, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article that show showing that gun ownership was a risk factor for homicide in the home. Now, this is a study you'll see, cited a great deal, and it's often used to argue that hot firearms in the home make people less safe. This study was widely reported on at the time and it scared the shit out of the nra. So the NRA campaigned to eliminate the organization that had funded the study, the CDC's National center for Energy Injury Prevention. Congress included language in the 1996 Omnibus Appropriations Bill to insist that, quote, none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control. Now, you may note they weren't doing that with that study. It was a study that you could use to argue gun control, supported gun control, but it was just a study on, like, the homicide risk and how that changes when you have a gun in the home. Right, right. Like the CDC Was not like lobbying specifically. They were carrying out a study. But the NRA basically argued. Yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

How people get hurt in the home.

[Robert Evans]

Home. And the NRA argued that was inherently like, that's political and should be illegal.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And then they make that happen, right? Yeah. Like Congress goes through with this shit. This is later referred to as the Dickey Amendment because of some dude named Dickey. Now, under extensive lobbying pressure, Congress also removed $2.6 million from the CDC's budget as that was the amount they had invested in firearm injury research the year before. So they cut all of the money out of the CDC's budget budget that had been used to research firearm industry. And again, whenever you think about gun control, there are 400 million of these things in the fucking country. There should be research into how they affect people. Right.

[Matt Lieb]

It just seems prudent.

[Robert Evans]

It seems prudent.

[Matt Lieb]

Just seems prudent.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. If, if fucking. If auto companies were blocking research into how car accidents work. Right. Like you would say that's nuts, you know, because it would be.

[Matt Lieb]

And it's not even, it's like, like.

[Robert Evans]

It'S not even that power company tried to do that.

[Matt Lieb]

But yeah, right. It's. I don't fault them for trying. It's the same way with, you know.

[Robert Evans]

That'S what they're going to do.

[Matt Lieb]

That's what they're going to do. They're going to try to do that and you know, it's a fucked up capitalist system we're in. If you have the money, you can try. The crazy thing is the success rate of the NRA in these, in these things that are completely like, like common sense.

[Robert Evans]

There's, there's a wide variety of arguments about how should you interpret this, this, the, you know, the findings to studies like this, to what extent should they inform policy, all that kind of stuff. But at the end of the day, I think if you're saying you shouldn't be studying this kind of stuff at all, you're the bad guy here.

[Matt Lieb]

You're definitely bad.

[Robert Evans]

Definitely bad guy here.

[Matt Lieb]

At the very least, coming in bad faith. But yeah, you are 100% doing bad guy stuff. Stuff.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

And should be stopped.

[Robert Evans]

And federal funding for research into gun violence and gun related injuries dried up after that. Since 1996, the CDC's funding for firearm injury prevention has fallen 96%. And similar attempts to fund research have met with further attacks on the ability to study any of these stuff, most recently in 2012. And yeah, so anyway, that's broadly speaking the story. Our buddy Neil Knox I should give you a little bit of context on how our heroes turn turned out.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. How they doing?

[Robert Evans]

Neil Knox wound up being way too radical for even Harlan Carter's NRA. He was forced out of the organization in 1982 after being overshadowed by the rise of Wayne LaPierre. I think LaPierre kind of helps maneuver him out. He dies of colon cancer in 2005. He outlived Carter by a fair amount. Harlan died, not surprisingly, of lung cancer in 1991. So the tobacco industry did us all a solid on this one.

[Matt Lieb]

Yay. Okay. Occasionally it works out.

[Robert Evans]

One of his final acts in this world was to hand over control of the NRA to Wayne lapierre.

[Matt Lieb]

Oh, shit.

[Robert Evans]

That's the, that's the Harlan Carter in the nra, everybody.

[Matt Lieb]

God damn.

[Robert Evans]

There's a pretty good song about him called Raymond Casiano by the Drive By Truckers, which is good.

[Matt Lieb]

That guy fucking. He sucks. It sucks that he's. Sucks that he's dead too. I feel like the, one of the big reasons why I'm just like, I don't, you know, I'm not for like, hey, let's make guns a illegal or whatnot is because, like, I feel like guns might end up being very useful in stopping all these ridiculous, you know, fucking NRA lobbies. You know what I'm saying?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And this is, I have, I have tried. I think I've done a very good job of like not inserting a bunch of my own specific opinions on gun control because at the end of the day, there is a history of here and it deserves to be like, talked to about.

[Matt Lieb]

Sure.

[Robert Evans]

Without a tremendous amount of editorializing. But yeah, I feel similarly like my attitudes on what gun control should be around are impacted by like, number one, I don't think only rich people should have guns. I don't, don't like the idea of 1000% excise tax on AR15 so that only wealthy people can afford them.

[Matt Lieb]

Right. And I don't like the idea that like, at this point, at least culturally, the only people who are interested in having guns are people who are interested in upholding white supremacy. And that is deliberately designed that way.

[Robert Evans]

And I mean, one of the things that has happened in the last couple of years, this has really accelerated since 2020, is the demographics of people buying firearms have changed wildly, particularly first time gun buyers. And it's gotten a lot more left leaning and a lot less white. And you know, there's a variety of. Personally, okay. Because people do ask about this because I talk about guns Sometimes in terms of what I think are the number one, the laws that you could most easily pass without the Supreme Court guaranteed shutting them down. And I think a federal assault weapons ban the Supreme Court will rule against. Right. Like it will go to the Supreme Court and they will rule against it in their current construction. Outside of like talking about should we stack the Supreme Court whatever, like Biden's not doing that. So stuff that I think would not number one would not necessarily like obviously, obviously anything is a crapshoot with the Supreme Court. So literally anything could get turned down by the. Because they're about to rule on a concealed handgun carry bill anyway. But I think it's perfectly reasonable and is also there is legal precedent for raising the age at which someone has to be in order to buy a semi automatic firearm. Certainly 18 year olds are not full adults and our current gun legislation recognizes as that by banning them from buying handguns, although that's also not entirely accurate because you can still buy handguns through like face to face sales or have them given to you by a parent or whatever. There's always every, there's always like ways around this kind of stuff. But it is, it's been established Since I think 1986 that the federal government regulates, does not want people under 21 buying handguns. So it's the kind of thing where if you were to pass a law extending that to semiautomatic rifles, you'd have a stronger argument in front of the Supreme Court. If it came to the Supreme Court in order to like defend that piece of gun control legislation. And both of our most recent mass shootings, as of this recording, there may have been another one by the time this drop. We're 18 year olds who bought a gun and immediately carry it. So I do think just on a moral level there's a case to be made that yeah, this might fucking save some lives. And I think the best thing you could do, you would probably not have to call it a red flag law because that term has been politicized, but a law that would allow you to take guns and stop people from buying guns if they have a history of domestic violence and violence towards women and making violent threats of mass shootings. Which seems like a no brainer. Yeah, again like everything has been politicized to a stupid degree. But the buffalo shooter was on. Had been doing like threatening shootings and threatening women and like had was on law enforcement's radar. Should have been. It should be possible to do something there. Right.

[Matt Lieb]

You'd figure and yeah, I feel like that there's so many like common sense, like laws that you're, that don't exist that you're surprised every time you find out they don't exist.

[Robert Evans]

I think one of the things where gun control advocates make a mistake is focusing on universal background checks. Not because I don't think it's a good idea to have background checks for buying a gun, but because nearly all of the guns bought and even used in massacres were by people who passed a background check, including the Buffalo Navarro quality shooters. They both like universal background checks. They, they pass those. So like that, that's not as much of the solution as, I think something like an effective kind of. Again, I think you would need a better term than red flag law because, but also maybe, I don't know, the right's gonna culture or whatever you try to do, right?

[Matt Lieb]

But everything's poison pilled no matter what. You can name it any fucking euphemistic. Nice sound.

[Robert Evans]

Call it the if you hit your wife and kids, you shouldn't have a good gun bill. But of course one of the issues with that is that you're going to disarm like 40% of the police, right? Like I, I can talk about like what I think would be a good idea at the end of the day. Like, I don't know, like what I, what actually is going to pass. That's a totally different fucking conversation.

[Matt Lieb]

And yeah, no, I don't, I don't know what the answer is. I know that one thing that I don't think the answer is is is this like mutually assured destruction thing where we're all armed at all times times and that's the society we live in. I also know the answer isn't every like liberal and leftist being like, oh well, I'm, you know, I'm going to trust that the government and the police will keep me safe from the bad men. And so I'm like, it's, it's hard to know. It's hard to know what to do.

[Robert Evans]

I mean this is a very difficult issue because again, people, a lot of people say no, it's simple, just like ban the guns. But it's like, well how are you going to do that? There is legal precedent, there is a supreme Court and also there's a police force that's not going to disarm certain people. Like this is not as simple as you're making it out to be, right? You can say it is the guns. And yeah, of course access to guns is like why a lot of this is happening. But also, like, that doesn't. That's not the end of like the complexity of the issue because there are 400 million of these fucking things in the country right now, right now. And a whole culture built up around being ready to immediately use them against right now, gay and trans people are particularly in the fucking crosshairs. And again, this is like. So, I don't know, I think fundamentally, like, I argue a lot about gun control with people. I think the folks who want to see more of it are coming from a fundamentally natural and noble position, which is looking at repeating massacres and going like, we got to be able to do something about.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, there's gotta be something.

[Robert Evans]

There's gotta be something we can do about this shit.

[Matt Lieb]

No, I completely understand it. I mean, and yeah, and I feel, I feel the same way. It's like, there's certainly got to be a fucking solution to this that is a systemic solution, a government.

[Robert Evans]

This is like an, an acceptable state of affairs.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

But like, so many of the problems we have, like, how to fix it and like, how to fix it without having a shooting war over it. And like, who does the fixing. And like, I think, like, one of the things that is frustrating to me is that, like, it is, it is just a big fundraising issue in a lot of ways and in ways that I think are kind of like unhelpful and actually solving the problem. And I, again, nobody knows what to do with this because it's, it's so much like no one has ever had anything like this happen. Right. People bring up the Dunblane massacre, the Port Arthur massacre. They bring out like, you know, when Australia confiscated all those guns and like, that was 200,000 guns. Like, there are 20 million AR15s in the United States. There has never been a society this heavily armed or a society that has turned the random mass killing of civilians into a meme. Yeah, both of those things have happened here and they've happened alongside, like, the militarization of an increasingly unaccountable violence, violent police force that wants dictatorial control of American cities. And all of this stuff is pretty, pretty unique historically. So, yeah, I don't know how we fix it.

[Matt Lieb]

It feels so American and unique that it feels like, yeah, if I knew the answer to it, I would say it, but I really do not.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, and again, it's like one of those, I don't vote, I'm not a gun issue voter, I barely a voter. Right. Like, I do vote, but I don't believe in it. I don't Believe it's going to do any. I vote as, I vote as like a. Well, what if I'm wrong? If I'm wrong and it's best to vote and vote and the people who say you got to vote. If I'm wrong and they're right, then at least I, I, I put in the vote and I tried that thing. I don't think it's going to work. I don't think they're going to solve any of these problems. Problems. I think other things are going to be happening in the future that are not what we recognize as part of American politics but are going to become the way things get decided in this country. And I think they're going to be uglier and weirder than our parents were used to. But I do like voting is like a. Well, okay, but maybe I'm wrong about that. It's the same reason I have a 401K.

[Matt Lieb]

Right, right, right, right, right, right.

[Robert Evans]

Maybe there will be an economy in 30 years and I'll get to retire.

[Matt Lieb]

You know, it's the same reason I own half of a Bitcoin.

[Robert Evans]

Maybe I'm wrong.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, you know, I get it. Yeah, you got, just in case. What if I miss half? Yeah, I just Half a one. It's all I could afford. But the point is, is Yeah, I, I, I just want to say I vote and I also am cynical and I have the exact same, I have the exact same pessimism that you do.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

But you know, the re, the only optimism that I have is there's gonna be some, someone smart who does something good. I don't want to miss the bus. I don't want to miss, you know.

[Robert Evans]

I, I mean my, and I tend to think we should all, maybe if, if people are more committed to like getting out there and taking personal responsibility, not as a militia, but in a responsibility for believing. I think sometimes. Cause we just had a mass shooting in Portland that was stopped by an armed member of the community. A shooting at a protest for a police violence victim that was stopped by an armed member of the community. But I think community defense is everyone should have an ifac. Right. Downsides to owning a gun. No. Downside to having a tourniquet and some gauze on you and some chest seals and knowing how to use them. Zero downside. Could be useful in a car accident. You could have a fucking piece of rebar fall off of a building construction and impale somebody and maybe you'd get to save their life with an IFAC million times. That could Be useful. Have an ifac. Right. Organize in your community to provide houseless people with, you know, defense against sweeps. To provide people who are low income with eviction defense to stock food pantries. Like all of that stuff is. You can wear cool uniforms if you want. While you do, you can get a plate carrier. You can put patches on it. It. You know.

[Matt Lieb]

Can I wear tactical sunglasses?

[Robert Evans]

Fuck yeah. Why the hell not? Yeah, be the, Be the, be the tactical sunglass guy. Yeah, whatever. Make it, make it cool. Just help your, Help your community. Black Panthers look cool as shit when they were like serving food to kids, you know. Yeah. They had, they had swag, you know.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. They wore berets and they made berets look badass, you know.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Look cool as hell and protect your community. And. Yeah, yeah.

[Matt Lieb]

Doesn't mean you need to own a gun, but maybe a little more community involvement might be helpful and also a.

[Robert Evans]

Variety of things that you can do.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah, yeah. Abolishing the police.

[Robert Evans]

That is a good idea. Anyway, Matt, got any pluggables?

[Matt Lieb]

Oh, man, I've had a great time. And if you love the bastard and getting behind them, you'll love the podcast Pot Yourself a Gun, A Sopranos rewatch podcast that me and my friend Vince Mancini do. We just finished the entire series so you can re. Listen and rewatch the whole thing and it's great. You'll love it. And yeah, you look forward to us doing our the Wire podcast very soon. It's going to be great. And you know, speaking about cops being bastards, it's a whole show about it. So, yeah, you'll. You'll love it. And I promise you that, you know, well, we're not gonna, you know, be. It's two white guys talking about the Wire. We're not gonna. It's, you know, so just don't worry. It's a good. It'll be good. You'll. I promise. I don't know how to say that.

[Robert Evans]

I'm excited to listen to it.

[Matt Lieb]

We don't, you know, we're leftists. Anyways, I'm excited. Follow me at Matt Leap jokes on Instagram.

[Robert Evans]

Follow Matt Lieb home. You have a Twitter tracking?

[Matt Lieb]

I do. It's. It's. It's at mattlieb. And you can follow me there too. That's fine.

[Robert Evans]

But no jokes.

[Matt Lieb]

No jokes on that one.

[Robert Evans]

Got it, got it, got it.

[Matt Lieb]

Deathly serious, that one. You know, I just post whatever today. In fact, I posted something from a doomsday day dried food ad that I saw.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, good.

[Matt Lieb]

I love those and it was really weird. It was like a Mac versus PC commercial. But they made the doomsday. The like, you know, dried food guy, you know, he was talking about his product and then the other guy who was selling the. The fake patriot food was very much an anti Semitic meme.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, great. Oh, God.

[Matt Lieb]

Oh, yeah, yeah, they made him very clearly a Jew. And he sweet. It opened. Hello, fellow patriots. And I was like, holy fuck. They went for it. And yeah, so I posted a little bit of that.

[Robert Evans]

And you love to see it.

[Matt Lieb]

You love to see just straight up anti Semitism on the. On. This was an Instagram ad, by the way. But hey, it was on.

[Robert Evans]

It usually is.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah. Anyways, follow me on all the things.

[Robert Evans]

And Learn to can. Look, it's cheaper than food buckets.

[Matt Lieb]

Yes, Learn to can. And it works way better.

[Robert Evans]

It does work very well.

[Matt Lieb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Woohoo. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the ICE Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube.com behindthebastards. OpenAI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be an aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'm gonna tell you why on.

[Matt Lieb]

My show, Better Offline, the rude destination.

[Robert Evans]

Welcome to the show in the tech industry where we're breaking down why OpenAI, along with other AI companies, are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and.

[Matt Lieb]

Powerful are ruining the computer.

[Robert Evans]

Listen to Better offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts. Did it occur to you that he charmed you in any way?

[Matt Lieb]

Yes, it's.

[Robert Evans]

But he was a charming man.

[Matt Lieb]

It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story. Because this ties together the cold war with the new one.

[Robert Evans]

I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all? Listen to hot agent of chaos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell n Gon, I've learned no town is too small for my murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community.

[Matt Lieb]

I was calling about the murder of my husband.

[Robert Evans]

The murderer is still out there. Each week I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should Hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Helen Gone Murderline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Marsha P. Johnson is the trans icon of the queer movement, and it's time to listen to her.

[Matt Lieb]

I want to be one of the.

[Robert Evans]

World'S biggest drag queens. Today you can buy T shirts with her face on them, but her death in 1992 was never solved. I'm dying, dying, dying. Hear how Marsha's life and legacy reshaped our world. Just get your heart ready. Listen to afterlives on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an I Heart podcast.