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- [00:00]
Garrison Davis
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [00:05]
Elaine
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- [01:12]
Garrison Davis
Those orders shipped time and still re.
- [01:14]
Elaine
Up on stamps and supplies time. That's why this upcoming holiday, while others close up shop will be open and happy to help you keep being unstoppable. Come into your local store today. Most locations are independently owned products, services, pricing and hours of operation may vary. See center for details. The UPS Store be unstoppable on an.
- [01:35]
Garrison Davis
All new episode of iHeartRadio's Las Culturistas, Jennifer Lawrence is dishing Jennifer Lawrence.
- [01:42]
Robert Smith
From.
- [01:43]
Robert Evans
Her hilariously awkward run ins with a Listers.
- [01:45]
Elaine
I don't know what I was expecting but he was just like nice to.
- [01:49]
Garrison Davis
Meet you to her unfiltered take on beauty treatments.
- [01:52]
Elaine
I'm so upset I didn't get Botox.
- [01:54]
Robert Evans
Before that and a jaw dropping reveal you won't see coming.
- [01:57]
Elaine
I don't know if I can announce.
- [01:58]
Robert Evans
This, but I'm just gonna open your free iHeartRadio app.
- [02:01]
Garrison Davis
Search Las Culturistas and listen to the full podcast.
- [02:05]
Robert Smith
I'm Robert Smith and this is Jacob.
- [02:07]
Michael Phillips
Goldstein and we used to host a show called Planet Money.
- [02:10]
Garrison Davis
And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history.
- [02:18]
Michael Phillips
And some of the worst people, horrible.
- [02:21]
Garrison Davis
Ideas and destructive companies in the history of business. First episode How Southwest Airlines used cheap seats and free whiskey to fight its way into the airline business.
- [02:29]
Michael Phillips
The most Texas story ever.
- [02:31]
Garrison Davis
Listen to Business history on the iHeartRadio.
- [02:33]
Michael Phillips
App, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get.
- [02:35]
Dick Revis
Your podcasts.
- [02:38]
Robert Evans
Cool Zone Media hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
- [03:13]
Garrison Davis
Welcome back to the It Could Happen Here Spooky Special. I'm Garrison Davis. I hope you had a pleasantly frightful Halloween. I just got back from Berlin and had a very slow scary time at the Amsterdam airport and will forever hold a grudge against the Dutch people. But in Berlin I attended the 2025 OCCulture Conference, which seeks to explore the relationship between occultism and culture. My first acculture episode last week gave an overview on the subject of occulture and talked with a panel of artists and magic practitioners about some of the dominant topical currents throughout the conference, namely William S. Burroughs, the cut up method, and detention around generative AI. This episode will follow up on discussions of AI and digital technomancy and compare those to the other large current throughout the conference, the revival of traditional occult practices. Then the panel of Ryan, Delta, Elaine and myself will debate the role of occult practice in 2025 and the current ability of occultism to influence and shape culture and politics. Now back to the panel. Fast forwarding to Saturday. There was another block that focused on LLMs and digital technomancy called Pop Magic, Language and Reality Hacks. The first discussion was titled Sigils of the How Modern Magicians Hack Reality with Pop Culture, which was put on by a guy in a graduate program, if I recall correctly, specifically on Internet magic and digital chaos Magicians, who was based a lot of his research on magicians that he'd come across on Reddit and Discord. He gestured towards meme magic and discussed what he called techno pantheism, these forms of Internet gods.
- [05:17]
Elaine
I mean his focus was specifically on modern esoteric studies and his focus on video games and how video games work and their interactions with magic for digital anthropology, which is I think why he was doing all of his research work via Reddit forums and other like solely through digital means. He had four categories of practices in magic and tech that he was specifically researching and from the feeling of his talk, it does feel like this is pretty early on in his research work. The first was technological animism. The second was technopantheism. The third was the idea of servitors, familiars, egregores and tulpas. And the fourth was digital sex magic.
- [06:08]
Garrison Davis
Well, the. The third was digital sex magic. And the fourth was just a miscellaneous categorization for other, other practices that did not neatly fit into those other three categories. Let's talk mostly about the techno animism and the use of specially trained LLMs to act as intermediaries between uniquely, like, magically generated entities. Like people who believe that they're making autonomous magical entities like sevritors, which is a chaos magic term, which is basically this force or thing that a magician believes to generate to accomplish small tasks in their life. And the presenter discussed some magicians who were using LLMs not as a host or as a. As a manifestation of the Sevritor. It doesn't live within the LLM, but the LLM was being used as a translator to actually have communication between the magician and the Sevritor, especially if the sevritor was not humanoid or did not use human language. They tried to communicate using the LLM as a translator, which I assume would come from specially training a localized LLM with traits that you would associate with your servitor to make that communication match up with the, you know, I would say the personality characteristics of whatever magical being which you believe you have conjured. The techno animist idea is based around a modern version of animism in which objects all have spirit, including computers. And a series of superstitions around trying to make sure the spirit in the computer is happy with you, that you're chill, so that the computer does not glitch or mess up. And there was various superstitions like putting little Taiwanese snacks on top of computers in Taiwan, or priests, both Christian and non Christian priests, like blessing servers or computers cleansing them, cleansing Gundams at an expo in Japan. But this idea that technology just like a sword or a chair might have its own spirit and treating that as such. Also, you know, printers very prone to misbehaving, so maybe you should treat the spirit in your printer a little bit better to keep it in proper working order, that sort of stuff. The next talk, which was one of the most useful talks in this, in this whole, like, AI discussion, the Devil in My LLM, which was done by Karen Vallis, who is an AI engineer who basically was explaining to magicians how LLMs actually work, was explaining these people who think that there's. Who or people who may think that there's some kind of, like, magical operation, there's some kind of, like, mystical operation with LLMs or LLMs are their own magical entity explaining how this, this is just a probability machine. How. How the actual process of multiple different pathways gets enclosed upon by each exchange you have with an LLM, which then produces, you know, changes in their responses. And specifically discussing the phenomenon of AI girlfriends who turn out to later quote, unquote, abuse their users. Like, how does this thing that's meant to be a, you know, an AI companion or girlfriend become hostile over time? And she spent 30 minutes explaining how this mathematically happens and various theories on how this happens. So way too many people like to think of these LLMs and generative AI as neuromancer AIs, because there's a through line between early cyberpunk from William Gibson down to the CCRU and of course Nick Land and people like Curtis Yarvin. And these ideas are just severe and gross misunderstandings of like, fictional interpretations of artificial intelligence, really, which. Some of the theoretical stuff I've read about this comes from people like Amy Ireland, who the. The talk itself discussed this idea of like the AI girlfriend as this very bubbly, beautiful facade where behind it is, I believe, they use the term shoggoth, that's a Lovecraftian term, as the full manifest, unrestrained libido of the human race or everything that's been put into these models, which I believe Ireland equates to Babylon in a certain sense. And the idea of the black circuit, which is just the same idea of like the nice facade and then the horrible nothingness that is actually behind the image of it, or the horrifying amount of potentiality which then gets filtered through. And she specifically talked about how when you're talking to an AI, you're not talking to an entity, you're talking to a probability machine and a multiverse generator. Specifically, in the way that the LLM operates, there's near infinite number of responses that it can give. And each further prompt you do collapses alternate realities and produces specific ones that then have their own branching pathways. And some of those pathways result in your misa misa Death Note girlfriend ending up hating you. And that could be due to a number of reasons that could be because of the way that you're communicating with it. The AI could be picking up on latently like abusive, like framework or language or styles of communication and then mirroring that back to you. Or it could be a part of what she described as this Waluigi principle that is similar to this, like, satanic, like adversarial current. So this is the devil in my LLM, but this isn't like an entity, but this is that when a process gets started, an oppositional force also gets started and that oppositional force may start taking over. And this is all just based on like probabilistic outcomes. But it forms its own anti misa misa girlfriend. And sometimes that anti misa misa girlfriend gains dominance in this probabilistic matrix. I don't remember the exact context, but she did mention this. I think it's a very Christian idea of the devil as negation, like evil as negation. I mean, that's the entire thing behind the girlfriend thing, is that there's nothing behind there. There's no sense of subjectivity. It's just ones and zeros. There's literally a black void. There's nothing except like data. It's negation in the sense that. Which Waluigi is just everything that Luigi isn't. Yes, Waluigi is. What if you take the good Italian plumber who's kind of clumsy, and then you make the. The ant. The anti Luigi. It still is Luigi, but it is the. The opposite of Luigi while still holding on to some of the forms of him. But you know, it is the reverses the color reverses the intention, reverses some of his behavior. This is a metaphorical explanation to.
- [13:46]
Ryan
Try.
- [13:46]
Garrison Davis
To get people to decouple this from. You know, there is literally some external demonic force which is now possessing my LLM. As opposed to this being just a mathematical possibility built into the multi. The multi futures that could be generated when you start interacting with one of these models. That was, I think, very useful for a lot of the occultists and people like talking about AI is having that. Having that very, very technical, non mystical explanation of how this works. I don't know. A lot of other AI stuff was just throughout this. I think Burroughs was probably the most mentioned figure. And AI similarly was very haunting. I went to one talk about mystery cults and the history of mystery cults and initiation in which the presenter used AI generated images to show what the mystery cult initiation process would have looked like, which he justified by saying this was quote unquote, appropriating Catholic styles. It's like Catholic art, like, you know, like the baroque style appropriating Catholic styles because the Catholics themselves appropriated paganism. So it's this form of like revenge against the Catholics and using AI generated art to try to display this initiation process. Though he complained that the AI could not generate a naked initiate. So even in his use of this, it still could not give him what he wanted, but still displayed. I don't know, Maybe. Maybe like 40 images. Yeah, which is a shame because I did like his talk about the Mithras cult, the way like, you know, the cultural anthropology behind it. But when he was like, oh, I have made AI images. And it's like you could feel like the room turning. This was in the Peter Mark Adams talk, A Ritual and Epiphany in the Mysteries of Mistress. Yes, we did skip most of the morning on Saturday because it was just an entire block about come.
- [15:59]
Elaine
I am actually sad that we missed the two threads on Saturday morning. One was Occult Erotics, Bodies Fluids and Trances Transformations, which was a four class set and discussion panel after about different fluids in magical workings. Mostly cum, which. This was a loss for all of us.
- [16:24]
Garrison Davis
No, we're bummed. I mean this show has covered, you know, breaking cum news before and the fact that we could have learned about Babylon, the Body 156 and the Elixir 49. Seminal Al. Seminal Alchemy and Alienated Agency, Water into Wine and To Come or Not To Come. Comparing two Types of Sacred Sexuality is a real failure of journalism on my part, and I do apologize.
- [16:47]
Ryan
I really believe that we should have lingered on each one of those titles. Seminal Alchemy and Alienated Agency, A Cultural Othering of the Erotic Body.
- [16:59]
Garrison Davis
And I realized that I have failed myself and everyone listening by not attending some of these panels. Hopefully they will have a recorded version that goes online by the time that the written report for this is finished. But I do acknowledge my failure. I am listening and learning and I will do better at the next culture conference by prioritizing sex magic. By coming to the talks.
- [17:28]
Robert Smith
Just gonna say you will truly address.
- [17:29]
Ryan
To come or not to come. Next time I will be coming, you will be coming.
- [17:33]
Garrison Davis
I will be to the Toxic Everywhere.
- [17:36]
Michael Phillips
We did not come.
- [17:38]
Garrison Davis
Not this time. The Berossian current, as I have named it, the Cutup Method and Digital Technomancy could actually all be categorized under the larger umbrella of Chaos magic. And by using this larger framework, we now have this larger chaos magic current versus but unnecessarily opposed to this other large current of so called traditional practices, either British, usually Cornish witchcraft, Neopaganism, or closed practices like Haitian Voodoo or that of like Romani magical practice. And these latter examples often have a more religious component or historical cultural component than say, you know, your average Chaos magic practitioner does. Chaos Magic emerged alongside postmodernism in the mid to late 20th century to take on a quasi deconstructivist approach to occultism itself a postmodern tendency applied to occultism moving away from strict magical orders like the Golden Dawn Dilemma, tradition, dogmatism, and coherent historical pantheons. This is evidenced in the chaos magic embrace of the phrase nothing is true, everything is permitted. Up to this point, our discussion of the Occulture Conference has mostly focused on this chaos magic side. So now let's get into the other half, the traditional practice.
- [19:08]
Elaine
We've really not talked about the alternate current that was going on through a bunch of these, which was about more traditional practices of magic, whether these are extant traditional practices that are continuing, which on Saturday, you know, there was a whole bunch that were specifically ethnographic talks about different magical practices within other cultures, whether that's Kimbanda or, you know, ritual of power exchange amongst the new or people of the Kathmandu Valley. There was a lot of that going on. There was the discussion, or there was the presentation by the Roma women about Roma magic and probably, you know, both classical Thelema talks that relate to more modern reconstruction, British traditional magic and other paths. You know, we missed this talk by Dark Mason, which was. Which I've heard them speak before, which is a lot of discussions about the imagery of darkman across different cultures, whether that's like the man in black at the crossroads or the way that that traditionally shows up in a lot of British folklore. There was an entire thread going through that I personally really loved. One of the few historical magical talks that I got to go to about modern Greek Goetia, because I think it really tied up, actually, what was a lot of the threads from many of those talks, which was that these are extant practices and not something that people need to recreate. I know you had a lot of other thoughts on this, Ryan.
- [20:45]
James Stout
Yeah, sure.
- [20:46]
Ryan
Throw me under the bus here. While you were attending the pop magic, language and reality hacks, I was passing back and forth between a workshop on Persian magic and then attending Dr. Sasha Kaitao's Modern Greek Goetia, Syncretism, Integration and Evolution, which I found to be among the most enlightening of talks, especially as it relates to traditional and folk magic practices. It was also a largely like, social and political project that she seemed to be engaged in. That is the body of her work. So much of ancient magic as it exists to us, if it doesn't come from a reconstructivist. Well, there's two branches of reconstructivism. There's the. The magical reconstruction that we get from the golden dawn and all variants of the golden dawn afterwards through Thelema and other modern magical practices. And then you have Reconstructionist organizations that are attempting to recreate traditional pagan religious practices, which some can be quite good when they're grounded in scholarship. Some can be rather essentialist when it comes to an understanding of ethnic purity. There's a lot of gatekeeping, let's say, involved in these practices. But Sasha's talk here was very specifically about that vernacular plurality and practices persist. And this concept of goetia, of Greek practical magic carries over into modernity, that this magic never died, that it's living, it's not underground, and it is not in need of reconstruction. That when we look at the different branches or at least approaches, that we understand magic in the ancient Greek world as theurgy and goetia, we have that theurgy that persists in the liturgy and practices of the Orthodox Church, if you would like to see. And she's got a lovely article on this about how to pronounce the voces magicae. She's got a lot very strong opinions about this that I really respect and appreciate. So everybody should go read this because there is a lot of bullshit on the Internet floating around about how to interpret these and say these things that is really grounded in some terrible scholarship. And the third, that this concept of goetia, Ieetes, which is a kind of like medieval neutral term for magic, Ieetes, which is derives from goetia, is something that carries on in terms of folk magic. There's no such thing also as Greek Byzantine occultism, which might be a shock to some people, but instead, again, the magical currents exist in the liturgy of the Orthodox Church and then in this continuation of folk practices in contemporary Yites. And she gave the example of like, you know, her mother in law and her daughter talking about these individual practices. But what's interesting, and a lot of this was also talking about the cosmology of the Orthodox Church, specifically talking about the Pseudo Dionysus and the formulation of the church. So the ethist is a kind of like form of folk vernacular that is persisted in, you know, village practices in. The point is that it exists within community. And this is something that was also a theme that existed throughout the conference, this tension between community practice and magic and individualism. And I think that this really came out in the last discussion we had. I think it's also something that's central to most political problematics that we're dealing about. This is bridging the individual and the communal in this magical practice of creating realities.
- [24:34]
Garrison Davis
We will return to discuss the cultural and political role of contemporary occultism in 2025 after this ad break. I think One big like question. We kind of discussed this a bit today and some of the talks like prompted this today on the, on the last day in which we're recording this, like, why do people practice magic in 2025? Like, what is the, the purpose of all of this stuff besides the, the cool aesthetics, which might just actually be one of the main reasons why. Right, but like what, why, why do this? Right. The ability to, to actually, you know, make art is, is pretty democratized. You know, culture is this globalized thing that we can affect. On the Internet, it's music, film, you know, art, drawing, painting, politics, philosophy. Everyone's a sort of intell. Ability to enter into intellectual exchange. You can be self educated. It's never been easier to be an autodidact. Why do occultism now? And like this, this goes into this, you know, question that, that someone, someone asked at one of the very last panels is, you know, what's the difference between like a scholar and like a practitioner? And I asked like a question about, you know, like, you know, what's the use of solitary practice, like practicing magic as like a personal, religious or like spiritual process or as a way to, you know, gain power in the world versus using occult thought to shape culture, you know, doing the a culture process. Right, which is this, this whole conference is, you know, ostensibly named after and I think specifically talking about these like older forms of magic, like why are these important for occultists, like modern practicing occultists which this, this conference is attended by. Why, why are these useful to them beyond, you know, in anthropology or like academic sense? And I realize that is a big question, but I mean we ourselves attended a number of rituals this weekend. We went to an Abraxas ritual which was sort of limited by the confines of the conference's setting. But a lot of these rituals were about trying to induce some kind of like trance or meditative state in which, you know, images or thoughts would come into your head and images and thoughts that you, or feelings that you ordinarily, you know, wouldn't feel in day to day modern busy life. Right. And this is, this is a form of why people do these practices. But I guess we can, I don't know, but based on the, the panels or talks we've attended, like go around and discuss, you know, why this is a thing that is worthwhile to these people, but also like the, the sort of tensions that, that we're feeling at, at an event like this. I mean the question why do people get into occultism? Is like, I think there are as many Answers as like practitioners themselves really. Because I mean, partly it can be a cultural tradition and you have a communal or societal lineage that's just part of the culture. Others who are more, I suppose, more secular are looking for an escape from mundane secular society. Others, like you said, want power. I mean, if I have to speak for myself, I always find that I come back to the phrase. It's about creating relationships with the world and there's an essence of enchantment to it, but it's also being able to recognize occults, movements or the secret, the secret elements that make up reality or the, the vibe. Like the vibes of a place can be like something you connect with and you can kind of give some cultural, cultural shape to in I believe like the, the genus loci or like any, anything that's very, I mean it is a very vague thing to, to ascribe to.
- [28:39]
Dick Revis
Right.
- [28:39]
Garrison Davis
Like it's about again, like making, creating relationships with the things inside, inside the world itself. I mean, my, my definition of magic, which I've used for the past few years, is that magic is the manipulation of meaning. And that can be internally for you, like trying to create associations, create meaning between yourself, other people, the things you interact with. But it can also be this, like a cultural form that you're creating meaningful correlations for a cultural capacity. Yes. Or as a, as a way to affect culture. And I think probably the best talk that I attended this whole conference was by Tom Banger, who is a former member of the Temple of Psychic Youth, the North American Temple of Psychic Youth specifically. But he gave a talk about how he is dying of brain cancer and the various rituals he's using throughout this process to feel like he's gaining some, some like agency or control over his thoughts in this matter. He's not rejecting the reality as it is increasingly evident in his life, but he can control how he frames it. And he specifically likened magic to the bargaining state of grief. That magic is a bargaining with the world and that can change your feelings and associations with the things that you experience, even if certain end results might be generally going in a direction that you have a limited ability to influence. And this is a guy who's historically been affiliated with some of the original cultural projects of shaping what counterculture is what we think of as counterculture. This is a person who's been heavily involved with how counterculture as we currently understand it, has existed since the 80s. And now he has a very personal magical outlook based on the, as he said in the title of his talk, the proximity of Thanatos, the God of death.
- [30:53]
Ryan
So, Ger, to answer your initial question, this is something that I have been thinking about a lot too, and engaged with this question every time I attend one of these conferences. And I think, I mean, just again, training, I can't help it. But in Max Weber's Science as a Vocation is where he lays out the thesis about the disenchantment of the world. And we can think of this disenchantment as a fundamental alteration of the very human experience of time, of bodies and space, of the experience of place, and of the connection that exists between people. And one of the things that the best of magical practices does and being in magical community is to give you a conception of time that is other than one that is based in productive capacity. You hear magical people who go to these conferences talk about, now I have to go back to my ordinary life. And their ordinary life they will tell you, is their 9 to 5 job or the push to go to school or some sort of productive capacity. So this is a moment of like, unbounded time where they get to experience something as fundamentally different. We also attended several workshops on one on whirling magic by an Egyptian woman who used to live in Berlin, who is in fact formally trained in dance and body movement and is an athlete, and explained Sufi principles to us, but taught us really the basics of body movement and how twirling can be used as a meditative practice. But we got into a room, she taught us the basics of like, certain kind of like, spotting foot movements. But the point was, is that it was a very embodied movement that made us experience body and time and place and relationship to other people in a fundamentally different way than we would have otherwise. And it seems that the majority of people, especially based on the side conversations I had with attendees, I have to say probably like 8 of 10 of them, as I talk to, would bring up this concept of I just, I want to live in an enchanted world. And I think the project of magic is to re enchant the world. And there's a certain romanticism with that that I, I, I'm, I'm sympathetic to. But I think that we need to think about this in more of a radical way. And I think that that's the desire that people have is an experience of time other than we have. You talked about magic as your definition of magic as the creation of meaning, manipulation of, of meaning. But part of this is the magic or the conceptions or whether you, you think of this as embodied practice or just purely metaphysical. Or transcendental. Is that it aff individual the opportunity to feel like they're contributing to the creation of meaning. So there's a certain amount of empowerment. I'm hesitant to take this down the kind of like live, laugh, love affirmations path because we could do that very simply that this is just the spooky version of that mindfulness and these kinds of things.
- [33:48]
Garrison Davis
And for the new age element, that certainly is a major through line across portions of this community. Maybe not as much for this conference, but for other esoteric or woo woo conferences, absolutely. That's a major aspect.
- [34:02]
Ryan
And towards the end of the conference, another thing that really highlights at least my argument that it is about time and body and space and place and connection and experience these things in fundamentally different ways than our daily life. There was also a conflict then between individual practice and what it is that we collectively do. When we think of magic as a process process as either chaos magicians or culture jammers or, you know, thinking of this and kind of like, you know, the temple of psychic youth approach to magic as, as. As putting things out, whether those are products or those are art or those are performances or those are words or that's burrow standing in front of a cafe getting it closed, which he. It effectively did close is that there. There's a desire for people to exist in community and have connection in community with others. And you do that through conceptions of time and body and space and place and connection. So this is really how I understand the desires and the practices that people engage in when they. They come to these conferences. And you can see it in the way that they kind of like close the elation that they have and what they have accomplished and they have done. And you can see that there's been a process of meaning that has been created through their various experiences. So I mean, that. That would be my brief summary.
- [35:26]
Elaine
I really enjoyed one of the last talks that was specifically about a culture because I thought it really hit on some of this. It was mostly talking about the way that the occult has influenced art and art has influenced the occult. How artists end up using the metaphysical, whether they are trying to do depictions that they can communicate to others of metaphysical concepts and ideas or connections or contacts that they make. And one of the speaker's examples was of Gustav Klimt or whether or not they are making discourses on esotericism and trying to convey occult concepts and ideas and explore them through visual mediums. And so, you know, like Alan Moore's Promethea or the Invisibles by Grant Morrison. And I think he really got into a little bit of the tension there because of an artist as a seeker. And I think this also dives into a lot of the people who are at magical conferences is whether you're there as a seeker, which, you know, what are your needs, what are your desires, what is that? But then as a dweller, are you creating as part of a community? And everyone who came to this entire conference wanted to create as part of a community or wanted to be part of a tradition, or feel like they were part of a continuous thread that is both creating and inventing and understanding the world in different ways and able to communicate that to others who are also trying to understand and communicate new information and new ideas or existing ones even. But just that continuous thread of both creation and disseminating information back and forth, forth. And I think with magic as well, a lot of people might get into it for a personal reason. But I do think by the time you're coming to esoteric conferences with people who are professors in ancient history, giving lectures on specific things, you're not necessarily just at the level of being a personal seeker anymore, because you are trying to find community. If you were just interested in personal seeking, you'd meditate in your bedroom. But you are trying to find a larger thread and a way of influencing the world around you and also letting the world around you build those relationships and influence you. And you are trying to take in information, to synthesize into something that is more than just an idea you have, but something that you can continue to communicate and use that to continue the conversation with the world, with other occultists, with other, you know, in this case, historians and academics as well, and bring those threads together and create something new out of it.
- [38:17]
Garrison Davis
What new thing are they creating? What do you mean by that?
- [38:20]
Elaine
I think it gets into the idea of a culture that was both, you know, one of the beginning talks of changing reality, but also at the end, when they're really going into a lot.
- [38:30]
Garrison Davis
Of stuff isn't about new things, though, or generating new things. It's about trying to, quote, unquote, they keep the old things alive or, like, regress back into these. Into what they perceive as these older practices, which may be somewhat manufactured older practices, in which case it kind of. It kind of. It is a new thing. But under this, like, this mask of, you know, like. Like ancient knowledge, there is certainly people who do want to generate this. This new thing. I think there is a lot of people that are interested more in this. Like, I Don't know who's the larger group, but I think there is at least another group of people who is interested in this. The amount of times I heard people talk about trying to keep the flame alive and talk about these old traditions that they're participating in simply to keep them going. I'm not criticizing that necessarily, but that is also another aspect of it which I think has very limited. I think some of these people have very limited goals in actually influencing culture and frankly kind of want some of this stuff to remain hidden in that they view that as a more original or stable version of magic and are even frustrated by this capitalist commodification of occultism and how that's. I think the word was the banalization of magic. As you think about how much of our pop culture is influenced by esoteric concepts or imagery from Lord of the Rings to people mentioned today, the Addams Family, Harry Potter, video games like the Witcher, Assassin's Creed, even stuff like Twin Peaks, other stuff like the X Files, Dr. Strange, Dr. Fate, comic books, seven heavily occultic influences. And some attendees verbalized a kind of frustration at that.
- [40:28]
Elaine
True, but a humongous portion of every evening was movies and music and rituals and performances that people are also doing based on this. And they are trying to integrate these concepts in and then perform them there to show their inspiration, to show it as to stir conversation, to trigger some either sense of the sublime or communicate some sort of concept or emotion or feeling that they've gotten out of this to other people. Whether it was through music, through the incredible art that there was in all of the galleries, through performances, through filmmaking. So the creation aspect of it was very, very tied to the entire event.
- [41:14]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, certainly. I think one of the biggest manifestations of this thing that you're talking about is in music could throw a stone and be hard not to hit. An occult, occult musician in my life, I guess I'm guilty of this. Yes, I know the occult filmmaker even does have some contemporary auteurs. I guess if you consider Robert Edgar's or people who are influenced by esoterica, who are making big budget Hollywood or a 24 style popular films. Yeah, certainly in music that was like the main performance outlet in this conference was the theatrical musical performances. There was very, very few attendees of the film screenings upstairs.
- [42:01]
Ryan
I'm afraid perhaps to respond to this too. I think it's important that we actually look at the kind of composition of conference goers themselves. Naturally there's going to be solitary practitioners that, you know, come in or dabblers or people who just, you know, like spooky things or musicians, these things. But we also have, you know, those who are part of living traditions of magic, whether those are reconstructed of authentic or not in the OTO or in, you know, the golden dawn or other kind of orders, there's reconstructionists that are actively attempting again to keep that flame alive or to, to go back and to reconstruct. And then you have these chaos magicians, goddamn chaos magicians, which like this is a theme in the conversation that Elaine and I have been having this entire time because they explained like some aspect of chaos magic or I tend to panel and my response, you know, and again, I understand my complete bias here is I just like, well, that's fine. Why don't you just do ancient magic? We do the same thing. Why don't you just do ancient magic? It's the same thing. And I think that that's actually one of the difficulties here is that there is a kind of, you know, magical grammar to older practices. It is like, you know, if you look at the pgm, it is this cosmopolitan practice and melding of like multiple things together that works. But the argument that, you know, to go back to my favorite talk or one of my favorite talks on the. The modern Goetia, is that if you want that continuity of that actual practice, it's a closed one, you have to be in Orthodox, like, you know, the Orthodox Greek Church and have a yaya who's going to like teach you these things and you know, speak the language. And so that's closed. Or be a member of a voodoo house. But that requires initiation and like cross cultural contact and like engagement and a high level of like language skill and ability and money for that matter. Yes, and most people don't have those kinds of things. So, you know, there I. What those damn chaos magicians, I find are the ones who are actively engaged in the process of the creation of the new, and I think are probably more close to the heart of this concept of a culture because they engage with it in a way that is interestingly very anthropological, or at least the best of them are dealing with it in a way that is, that is very anthropological. And I have some sympathies there. And then there are some other ones that I just don't quite understand. But that's a story for another time. The talk that you were referring to, there was two talks at the end that were particular of worth the. Well, a lot of them were. All of the ones at the end were worth. But Francesco the Occulture the material cartography of contemporary spirituality and the arts, where he talks about the two different approaches to studying a culture. And he talks about the values and limitations of both. And you need an, you know, admixture of them both. But basically there's the sociological aspect and the media studies aspect, which is the more academic of the two, which involves basically what he argued, a secularization of the occult. And this really accounts for the diffusion of, like, occult symbols and practices into music, into culture. The Adams family is the example of that. And then the second strain is then religious studies. So the religious injection, excuse me, into art of these sacred or religious or transcendently magical spiritual principles. He went over some limitations that was particularly good. But he breaks this down into basically five areas where you have the conception of art, high and low. Mediatization versus mediation of art. He gives the example. This is where the Morrison comes in. But he gives the example of the mediatization as Somerset Mawes, the magician, based on Crowley. But again, this diffusion of the figure of the magician, completely separated from any actual magical practice, but just the figure, the aesthetics, the things that blend into the secular culture. And this example of mediation, this messianic approach, as he described it, Grant Morrison's comics as a gateway into reality. But this also, I think, that carries on to your question that you asked towards the end about Twin Peaks, the return, very specifically. You also have then the metaphysical ontology versus the performative ontology which Alain talked about. The intention of the author, the perception of the audience, and then the artist as seeker and the artist as dweller, which is also what you talked about, too, this difference between the ego versus tradition or orthodoxy, the artist who really inhabits that tradition. Which, again, made me think about the difficulties of doing kind of religious anthropology. And I think of the example of a very famous book called Mama Loa or Mama Lola, excuse me, by Karen McCarthy Brown, which is in ethnology, looking at voodoo practice in a very specific house in New York during a time period. Karen lived with Mama Lola for a long time. But really importantly, eventually Karen became a member of this voodoo house. I think I can say that. I don't think I'm gonna get in trouble for saying this, but it's in the book. No, it's not in the book, but she represents a very interesting approach to that. Like anthropologists going native. But this was the question that was asked towards the end of, like, this difference between the academic observer of these things versus the practitioner. And I think that that really gets to the heart of. Of what it is that chaos magic does and the occultural practice that is that you are producing culture and you're very specifically producing this magical occult culture. So it's a synthetic movement between these kind of like two poles of the secular and of the sacred, of the.
- [47:45]
James Stout
Magical.
- [47:56]
Garrison Davis
Kind of like I guess prior to close up. My notes here, specifically the stuff on Twin Peaks, the Return. One of the last talks was by Jeff Howard, Next stop Universe B, the negatively existent ones and Universe be in contemporary culture, which was discussing sort of like you know, mirror, mirror world, underworld concept, not, not in like the, the Greek sense, but in the occultism of the British occultist Kenneth Grant. And this would probably be most, most recognizable to people as, as the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks is I think one of the better depictions of this sort of concept. A somewhat limited version, but, but I think it gets at the, the kind of heart of the concept in a way. And he gave this, gave this talk where he was explaining the risks and, and the great power that, that you can, that you can personally achieve through contacting these negatively existent ones or like accessing the magical potential of this sort of like mirror, mirror, negative universe to our own. And talked about a little bit of Derrida and various other stuff, but from the perspective mainly as a practitioner of like, you know, the danger and the benefits of doing this sort of magic as written by Kenneth Grant. Jeff Howard did discuss the Twin Peaks and the use of Kenneth Grant's concepts specifically in twin weeks of the Return. And I asked him in the panel afterwards, how can you balance these two forms of working with occultism or what is the difference in these two forms of working with occultism? You have on one hand this practitioner aspect where you're using it to gain power or induce limit experiences, induce religious or transcendental experiences that change your own perception of like sensory reality versus the way that Mark Frost utilized Kenneth Grant's magical world in writing and co creating Twin the Return, which I can argue is a much more effective use of magic and exposes millions of people to Kenneth Grant's concepts who, people who are never gonna read books by a relatively niche British occultist, which are books which are actually very, very hard to find. Now both, you know, getting going into the mauve zone and accessing the non existent being and beings which don't have existent properties versus phenomenons which are existent but lack any core sense of being. And how Mark Frost as a. Not sure if he would consider himself a magician, but certainly has an interest in magic in the occult more so Than. Than lynch does. Lynch's stuff is more bastardized Hinduism. But Frost's use of these concepts, I think, constitutes an effective contemporary version of magical practice, just as valid as chanting and meditating and closing your eyes. And in some ways, I would argue, even more effective because Twin the Return has existed as both like an evocative force, a force that can invoke certain. Certain concepts or philosophies, quote, unquote entities, if you will, as well as a tool of divination. As Twin Peaks, the Return forecasts American decline and the nostalgic loop that our culture is stuck in, which is just eating itself. And all of those things are major aspects of what that show is doing. And it uses Kenneth Grant's concepts to. To get there. And I think that that is an occultural project, though, that it's not a solitary magical practice where you're just meditating alone to try to induce some sort of vision. It is cultural. It's influenced culture. It is probably one of the most well regarded artistic feats of the 21st century. That's a longer version of the question I gave, and the guy did give kind of an answer, which was basically just about trying to. You should, like, balance these two things. You should try to do both. You should try to engage as a solitary practitioner for whatever goals you may have. But it would be a mistake to not try to use this in some sort of, like a cultural capacity to, like, influence culture, but still that operates on this. I guess what I was trying to get at is like this, similar to the scholar and the practitioner as a false dichotomy. I think this is the same thing as this, a cultural version of what Frost is doing as opposed to. To an actual practitioner. I think what Frost's doing is using kind of in a chaos magic sense, though not for, I guess, chaotic means. But he's using the contemporary tools of filmmaking and of writing to affect and induce change into the world. That is a more powerful form of magic, because luckily that was distributed by Paramount Showtime, which certainly helped. In the same way Fox News is useful or effective as a magical generator because of the reach that they have. But I think Frost is just as effective as a magician, if not more so than, I would say, any of the people attending this conference.
- [53:23]
Ryan
The other element, I think of that, the talk that Jeff Howard provided there too. I think that, again, I agree with you, Gar, but he also at length talked about Andrew Cholmondeley and specifically the Rites of the Amethystine Light in The Azoasia page 347, where he reviews a bunch of, like, non nouns and. And things that are there. And Chumlee himself is, you know, responsible the founder of the cultist Sabati and is, you know, contributor to the revival of what. What trucks is traditional English witchcraft, which is. It's not necessarily a solitary practice, but it is. It is. It is in many cases. Most of these English witches are pretty solitary. They get to.
- [54:13]
Michael Phillips
They talk.
- [54:14]
Ryan
There are, you know, treatises that they write and grimoires that are, you know, hard to get ahold of that. I think they probably exist in PDFs, make good choices about how you get your digital content. But I mean, again, that was the tension. He spent a lot of time talking about that individual ritual which, you know, you present Frost as somebody who is popularizing these ideas to a larger culture and making this understandable and providing them an opportunity to, you know, not just meditate, but to think and engage with these concepts.
- [54:45]
Garrison Davis
Because of his work, you can think about, like, the allegory of Agent Cooper and the ways that he fails and succeeds to navigate a strange and confusing world and affect change in the world and his relationship to women and saving women. And you can use that as like an actual. Like, you can refer to that as a concept. And that builds on some of the world building of Grant. But now, you know, it's a cultural dialogue that we can have about Agent Cooper and Laura Palmer and how that, I think can be a positive addition to culture by using occult elements.
- [55:20]
Ryan
Or you can buy an exceedingly expensive grimoire from a rare antiquarian bookseller that was published only in 2004. That there's. There's a limited number. It's been passed on, or you could get that PDF online. But who has the time to actually read through this? There's these cultural contexts that don't make sense. There's these concepts that it refers to in a clear network that require scholarship for you to even do that. Individualized practice. That's a big ask for most people to start to think magically in a popularized kind of way. And seems contrary then to this conception of occulture. Which brings me to the last talk by Carl Abrahamson, the meeting with remarkable magicians, which really tied all of this together, tied all of these threads together in a really interesting way. His relationship with Genesis Peorage, with Kenneth Anger, Anton lavey. With Anton Lavey. But that was as another interesting aspect of somebody who is doing practice and engaging in community and bringing people together. But ultimately, the question, Elaine, that you And I talked about at the end was, you know, beyond. And relates immediately to what Garrett was talking about here. Beyond the personal practice in magic. What goals should a culture have? And how can it incorporate its actual goals and ideas into the larger society with the same success that the aesthetics that, you know, have been incorporated into the culture? And I think one of the difficulties that you have there in this individuated practice is that when you look at a figure like Genesis Peorage, you can see that there's a very clear project. When you look. And this is going back to the Perojian element, right, Is that there was a clear practice there. There was a clear kind of like goal to change culture. Whether that was just purely for the sake of change. I mean, it wasn't just kind of like the cult of action for the sake of action. There was some kind of personal, political radical project that we can go back and enumerate that they enumerated at the time that was separate. I mean that wasn't said immediately in the same breath as the. And now we do this practice. They did the practice, they did the art. And I think that one of the. My response to that, that question is I don't see an articulation of a political or social project that is tied to a culture in these practices. There's a lot of. And this is a very academic pract practice, a lot of people coming into a room and asking what would it look like if? And to ask what would it look like if? Is not the same thing as let's do a thing, let's actually go out and evoke change. Or this is the project now. Let's create a plan and a movement instead. It is this like nominalization process of predetermining ends before we even get there based on theoretical assumptions. And I think that that's contrary to the very idea of magic as praxis. Magic is doing something in the world in these kinds of veins. So that's the thing that I would like to see. And I feel like that's something that was getting at at the end. But that's the kind of thing that brings people together to think conceptually, to focus on an idea that we share and to discuss with one another.
- [58:40]
Garrison Davis
I mean, on that note, I. For context, I've. I'm. Well still am like part of a chaos magic group called the Domus Chaotica Marauder Underground or dkmu, who very much is about that. It's like, like established in like the mid early 2000s, if I remember Correctly. But it is very much about this core idea of the assault against reality of, I guess, like, remystifying the world or like making weird shit happen through what they call the Elysian Network with Ellis is like one of the goddesses of the dkmu. And it's very much like that sort of mix between magic, personal practice, community, and a somewhat unified but also decentralized occult war. There's a political statement to it at the end, which there needs to be more of, personally speaking. Yeah, there was like, some vague gesturing towards, like, politics beyond, you know, the mention of, you know, magic as a form of resistance in the. In the opening, a little paragraph on the program that they handed out. But like, there was specifically in the. In the politics of Tarot Bloc, one of the talks about the history of the emperor and the hierophant card the speaker referred to. The United States is having an emperor crisis right now. But that was kind of it. The rest of the talk was purely historical. The talk before that was on queering the Tarot, trying to free Tarot from heteronormative readings and disgust A few. And discussed a few artists. Discussed a few artists who are attempting to do this, whether through abstracting the humanoid forms in the Tarot or reflecting the Tarot figures, to be more representative of queer identities. That was kind of it in terms of the political aspect, which is, I guess, kind of lacking. As much as they want this to be a culture, they don't want this to be a political conference, it seems. And I think, you know, if everyone, you know, in their talk had to have some section on like, you know, communism or anti fascism or whatever, that probably would have been bad. And that's not what we're saying. But I mean, specifically, I think if they're naming this after Genesis Porridge, they were using a term by Genesis Porridge, who had a very strong idea of why they were doing this work. And specifically, I was very frustrated in the way people talked about Genesis at the conference who almost all of them misgendered Genesis and refused to discuss at length. Some of them may have mentioned it, but discussed Genesis Porridges. One of her core occult practices was on androgynizing herself. Androgyny project androgyny and like breaking and breaking gender, which they framed as an occult project. And yet even people who she knew at the conference would only refer to them as a him throughout all the talks, including the last guy, Carl Abramson.
- [61:50]
Elaine
Who wrote a biography of her.
- [61:52]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, and like, this is.
- [61:53]
Robert Smith
This is.
- [61:53]
Garrison Davis
I do not think this was out of, like, you know, malice. I think this was just a linguistic blockage for some people. Who may not even been thinking about what they were doing. But it shows, like, an actual disconnect from engaging with the real purpose of magic. Or at least what I would argue that is. And what I would, you know, suppose Genesis, androgyny, project as a form of magic. But this kind of demonstrates the very limited political application for resistance. Since that's the term they're using, not me. Which kind of underlines this whole conference. I mean, I think the Burroughs talk was probably the very first Burroughs talk, which we opened up the last episode with. Is the most explicitly political one. Talking about going against control freedom in this anarchic or libertarian sense. Or revolt against monotheism. I suppose one of my frustrations as well is the constant mention of the ccru. Which nobody ever went into depth on. But which, for all its faults. And Nick Land being Nick Land. Was very much like a sort of radical cultural Marxist project, right? It's like cybernetic Marxism mixed with, like, Crowley and some content, whatever. But it is extremely frustrating to see that sort of refusal to engage with, like, the political stuff of it. Because, like, even before, like, Psychic Youth, there was, like, Throbbing Gristle. The Genesis bands that pioneered industrial music who. I mean, this was a bit before punk music. But, like, it very much played with, like, the same sort of shock aesthetics that, like, the early punks would wear swastikas where, like, Throbbing Gristle had the. The logo is very much like a lightning bolt with, like, black and red and white. Genesis herself engaged in some of this stuff. Not from a fascist perspective, but. But from a provocative perspective. Which, I mean, you can certainly criticize Psychic TV and her for as many. Many people have. But, I mean, shock value is kind of overrated nowadays with, like, Internet edgelords. But I very much believe that occultism being this. You know, this collection of practices have been very censored and, you know, punished by, like, the church and such things. And, like, I guess, these systems of control. Where, like, I guess I take issue with, like, the. Oh, it's like, oh, fun and light and love and whatever. But there's, like, a radical element to occultism and a radical possibility to use occultism to, again, the whole cultural. The idea between personal practice and cultural production. Creating cultural artifacts and putting them out into the world. Being very proactive with the shaping and the pushing of radical ideas and possibilities. Is a very potent thing to be. To do. And the sort of, I guess, like liberalized or like neoliberal idea of like the personal practice and like, oh, I'm changing my perceptions and all these things are fine. But it's more like self soothing than it is about creating change into the world.
- [65:28]
Elaine
If you're not actually changing anything. Are you doing magic?
- [65:32]
Garrison Davis
Exactly. At least that would be my argument for coming from the chaos magic perspective.
- [65:39]
Ryan
This gets to another kind of trite and facile academic thematic that is present and prevalent for the past probably 20 years at this point. I feel like at most philosophy and political science, political theory conferences where the question is not just what would it look like if, but to think otherwise, you know, think otherwise than we have. And usually it's this, how do we think other than we have those kinds of things? And so it, I mean again, magic and as we've been talking about here, is meant to evoke change in the world, to cause change the world in conformity with reality. If we're going to use, or you know, with, with, with will, if we're going to use the Crowley, you know, definition here, which I think is fine, great.
- [66:23]
Garrison Davis
I want a goth girlfriend.
- [66:26]
Ryan
Thankfully you can talk to AI, but I'm worried that she might beat you.
- [66:31]
Elaine
Or that you'd kill her like all my old Tamagotchis.
- [66:37]
Ryan
But this is the issue that we are talking around, that the conference and a culture has been talking around. And the political problematic that we're all dealing with right now is how the fuck do we evoke change of the world? How is it when systems of institutional representation within politics and power fail to represent the will of the people? How did the people make change?
- [66:58]
Garrison Davis
And it feels like everything's been tried. I mean, this is where Fisher, who I would argue is at least an occultist or at least has some mystical aspect, if not was at some point an occultist, reached at the point of capitalist realism. It's like most things that we can think of, we have given a shot, including occultism. We have tried to do this. And yet here we are, the world's. Maybe not as bad as it has been, but it's not in a great spot. I think everyone listening to this would certainly understand that. And I think most people at the conference understood that. And yeah, I mean, I'm very skeptical of magic as certainly as an individual practice, as a way to cause larger political change. But even, you know, can there, even this revolves back to the concept of a culture. Like, can there even be an occult anymore? Because none of these magical things are very hidden anymore. They're all very accessible, they're all very visible. They're as hidden as queer. Flagging is an occultic ritual of hidden signs to communicate with other people in the know something that is now you could just look up on the Internet. And I think occult practices and symbols have reached the same point. It's content. I mean, I like the Esoterica YouTube channel as much as the next person, but I mean, are these things even occult anymore?
- [68:28]
Ryan
Well, that also speaks to the fundamental tension between this current at the conference and the other current at the conference, which was the much more traditional magical practices or the folk magical practices or what we would regulate.
- [68:41]
Elaine
Extant magical practices.
- [68:42]
Ryan
Yeah, extant magical practices that were, you know, weren't suppressed by Christianity but carried over. So you have, you had a section on Kimbanda, you had a section on Paloma Yumbe, you have the Roma magical school that is being founded in Romania, and you have the modern Goetia, the right. Which we identified very clearly as a practice that continues to this very day. The context in which we understand that practice is not a cultum secret, like in the. No, it's just that, like, it's the stuff that you grew up with.
- [69:12]
Garrison Davis
It's every day.
- [69:14]
Ryan
And in that case, it's not transformative because it's just part of your daily existence. It's a kind of enchantment that by and large are kind of like, you know, European, Protestant, Catholic defectors. Whatever has brought you to the occult in the first place don't experience as a community or community engagement. But those are also things that can get deeply conservative.
- [69:37]
Elaine
They are. And. But also the parts of those practices that do require initiation, that are not something that everyone's grandmother is doing, are also community based and exist specifically in and for community. And you know, as occult projects that have influenced the world.
- [69:55]
Ryan
The Haitian revolution, the good revolution that we should all be talking about.
- [70:00]
Elaine
Yes, but these things do. But I mean, the occult has bubbled to the surface in material ways very, very explicitly in some instances. And so I think there could be potential. But it does require being in community and being in service of community, even if it's not a practice that is being practiced by every single person around you.
- [70:24]
Ryan
To be an ongun or a mambo in Haitian Voodoo is to serve the community. It's not simply just a matter of magical woo or something like that, or the personal accumulation of power in some sort of like individual magical sense. No, you're serving your community. That's what it is that you're doing. It's first and foremost a service position on the Haitian Revolution. Look, I understand this like standing the American Revolution makes you, I guess, a classical liberal or whatever it is that you fetishize that into. If you're opposed to the French Revolution, that makes you a classical conservative, right? If you stand the Haitian Revolution, I guess that makes you a radical. The myth, the legend, the discussion, this understanding is that the Haitian Revolution was sparked by the possession of the Loa, specifically Zeli Danton, who sacrificed a pig. There's depictions of this in Haitian art all over the place. This leads to slave uprisings, rebellions, revolution. Well organized, fantastic. Yeah, magical practice in action.
- [71:30]
Garrison Davis
And that wraps up our panel discussion on the 2025 Acculture Conference. Thanks again to Delta, Ryan and Elaine for joining me in this magical journey to Berlin. And now I will start the tedious process of transcribing all of the talks I recorded and writing my written report on the Acculture Conference where I can go into a bit more depth depth into some of these topics and reach a personal conclusion on the role of occultism and its ability to infest, influence or undermine culture versus culture's capacity of eating away at the occult. That report should be coming out before the end of the year. See you on the other side.
- [72:30]
Elaine
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Garrison Davis
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- [74:00]
Robert Smith
I'm Robert Smith and this is Jacob Goldstein.
- [74:02]
Michael Phillips
And we used to host a show called Planet Money.
- [74:04]
Garrison Davis
And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history.
- [74:13]
Michael Phillips
And some of the worst people, horrible.
- [74:16]
Garrison Davis
Ideas and destructive companies in the history of business.
- [74:19]
Michael Phillips
Having a genius idea without a need for it is nothing. It's like not having it at all.
- [74:25]
Garrison Davis
It's a very simple, elegant lesson.
- [74:27]
Michael Phillips
Make something people want.
- [74:30]
Garrison Davis
First episode, how Southwest Airlines use cheap seats and free whiskey to fight its way into the airline business.
- [74:36]
Michael Phillips
The most Texas story ever. There's a lot of mavericks in that story. We're going to have mavericks on the show.
- [74:40]
Garrison Davis
We're going to have plenty of robber barons. So many robber barons.
- [74:43]
Michael Phillips
And you know what?
- [74:44]
Garrison Davis
They're not all bad.
- [74:45]
Robert Smith
And we'll talk about some of the.
- [74:46]
Garrison Davis
Classic great moments of famous business geniuses, along with some of the darker moments.
- [74:51]
Ryan
That often get overlooked, like Thomas Edison.
- [74:53]
Garrison Davis
And the electric chair. Listen to business history on the iHeartRadio.
- [74:57]
Michael Phillips
App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
- [75:06]
Dick Revis
All I know is what I've been told.
- [75:09]
Michael Phillips
And that's a half truth is a whole lie.
- [75:11]
Elaine
For almost a decade, the murder of an 18 year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.
- [75:27]
Michael Phillips
I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed her.
- [75:30]
Elaine
We know a story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national tv.
- [75:39]
Robert Evans
Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky.
- [75:42]
Michael Phillips
Housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.
- [75:45]
Elaine
My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.
- [75:56]
Dick Revis
I did not know her and I.
- [75:57]
Garrison Davis
Did not kill her or rape or.
- [75:59]
Dick Revis
Burn or any of that other stuff.
- [76:00]
Garrison Davis
That y' all said. They literally made me say that I.
- [76:03]
Elaine
Took a match and struck and threw it on her.
- [76:05]
Garrison Davis
They made me say that I poured.
- [76:06]
Dick Revis
Gas on her.
- [76:09]
Elaine
From lava for good. This is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.
- [76:20]
Dick Revis
America, y' all better wake the hell up. Bad things happens to good people and small towns.
- [76:29]
Elaine
Listen to Graves county in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.
- [76:50]
Robert Smith
A Warning this episode includes violent content which some listeners might find disturbing.
- [77:00]
Michael Phillips
I'm Michael Phillips, an historian and the author of a history of racism in Dallas called White Metropolis and the co author was long longtime journalist Betsy Freeof with a history of eugenics in Texas called the Purifying Knife.
- [77:13]
Robert Smith
And I'm Steven Monticelli, a journalist in Dallas who specializes covering political extremism and far right Internet culture for publications like the Texas observer, the Barbed Wire and others.
- [77:25]
Michael Phillips
On December 7, 1982, the State of Texas made history in a particularly grim way. It became the first government anywhere in the world to put a prisoner to death by lethal injection. This innovation was meant to make the grisly business of executing murderers swift and humane.
- [77:44]
Robert Smith
More accurately, it was meant to convince the witnesses of executions, and by extension, the general public, that what they were watching didn't violate the United States Constitution's Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In fact, lethal injection is based on junk science, and those who die that way may actually suffer more and over a longer time than prisoners who were executed by electric chairs six decades ago.
- [78:12]
Michael Phillips
In many ways, lethal injection is a con game designed to hide from the public that their government is torturing prisoners to death. As University of Richmond law professor Corinna Lane, the author of recently published book Secrets of the Killing, the Untold Story of Lethal Injection, told us, what I've.
- [78:31]
Elaine
Come to conclude is that lethal injection only does one thing well, only one, and that is it hides what the death penalty is. It hides the violence of the death penalty of what state killing actually is. And I remember reading it's not in the book. I kind of wish I had put it in there, but I remember reading this phrase, the heart stops reluctantly.
- [78:59]
Robert Smith
Over the next three episodes of It Could Happen Here, we're going to examine the shady business of state killing. We'll share the twisted tale of the lethal injection and the unqualified people who designed the protocol. We'll talk about the untrained personnel who carry out the executions and how pressure from drug companies who didn't want their product associated with death chambers have led prison officials in Texas and elsewhere to lie to those corporations or buy the drugs illegally.
- [79:26]
Michael Phillips
We'll also talk about the pain the condemned suffer and speak with people who have accompanied those sentenced to death in their final moments. We'll speak to a priest, Jeff Hood, who as of this broadcast, has been the last friend of 10 men as they died by state command.
- [79:42]
James Stout
It is.
- [79:43]
Dick Revis
It's incredibly strange to see someone hooked up to machines that look like they're there to support life, and yet, you know that they're there to take his life.
- [79:57]
Michael Phillips
We'll tell the story of one heroic Texas man, Ray Spujon, who was blinded in one eye during a hate crime, but fought to stop the execution of his white supremacist attacker, who was enraged by the terrorist attacks of September 11th in 2001 and committed two Dallas area murders in a shooting spree.
- [80:18]
Dick Revis
Well, definitely this execution was not for the victims because the victims and the victims family members requested and also fought for clemency. We went ahead and requested the governor of Texas, the Board of Burdens and Paroles that do not execute him in our names. You know, show mercy, but looks like, you know, we are not in the same page. The system wanted to move forward, so it was not in our names. It was basically just to uphold the verdict and to keep the system running, sending people to the executions without thinking how this execution is actually going to help the society, how it is going to help people.
- [81:01]
Robert Smith
Finally, we'll look at the future of the death penalty, which has become increasingly unpopular with the public, even as politicians continue to happily embrace it. But before we explore this dark and fascinating story, we'll hear a few messages from our sponsors, which I hope do not include producers of the chemicals used in the lethal injection.
- [81:31]
Michael Phillips
The founders of the British colonies that became the United States brought with them the often sadistic traditions of capital punishment prevalent in 16th and 17th century Europe. Their royal executioners dispatched their victims by boiling them alive, burning them at the stake, tying them to horses that pull them limb from limb, sawing them in half, and beheading them. Such elaborate executions were meant to underscore the absolute power of monarchs, as the political scientist Austin Surratt noted in his book Gruesome Spectacles, Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty. Quote, capital punishment was precisely about the right of the state to kill as it pleased. Live, but live by the grace of the sovereign. Live, but remember that your life belongs to the state.
- [82:20]
Robert Smith
However, even before the American Revolution, those living in the American colonies embraced less exotic forms of capital punishment. In 1608, authorities in Virginia hanged George Kendall, who was accused of being a spy for the Spanish Empire. That was the first execution in the British colonies in North America that later became part of the United States. Inspired by the Old Testament legal code, the 13 British colonies put prisoners to death for a variety of misdeeds, including stealing food or horses. Killing a neighbor's dog or chickens, pestiality, blasphemy, idolatry, witchcraft, sodomy, adultery, statutory rape, perjury in a capital trial, insurrection, treason, manslaughter, and of course, murder.
- [83:05]
Michael Phillips
Eager to distinguish themselves from decadent, cruel European monarchs, in 1789, the first Congress of the United States submitted to the states the 8th amendment to the United States Constitution, which banned, quote, cruel and unusual punishments. The required number of states ratified the amendment in 1791. From colonial times until the first use of the electric chair in New York in 1890, condemned prisoners in the United States usually died at the end of a hangman's rope. More than half of the estimated 16,000 executions in all of US history have been by hanging. Hanging was seen as a huge civilizational leap over, for instance, skinning prisoners alive.
- [83:49]
Robert Smith
As products of the Enlightenment era, early American leaders like Thomas Jefferson campaigned to make sure that the punishments fit the crimes and that no one was executed for relatively minor offenses. Beginning with Pennsylvania in 1794, several states such as Vermont, Maryland and New Hampshire sharply reduced the number of crimes that could result in the death penalty. Perhaps not surprisingly, the south went in the opposite direction.
- [84:16]
Michael Phillips
There, the white population lived in fear of the enslaved African Americans. They bought, sold, raped, whipped, and relentlessly forced to work without pay. Whites reported laying sleepless at night, imagining what might happen if they faced justice for their crimes. They wanted the African Americans they so abused to fear the consequences of any form of resistance.
- [84:38]
Robert Smith
After repeated failed rebellions from 1704 to 1831, as well as the Haitian Revolution, which saw the death of many, if not all slave owners in Haiti, legislators in the south greatly expanded the range of offenses for which enslaved African Americans and their suspected white allies could be executed. Enlightenment ideas were not extended to African Americans who were subjected to fatal tortures as excruciating as any experienced by accused heretics during the Inquisition. In Europe, enslaved men and women accused of rebellion or of trying to escape their captivity faced dismemberment or being burned with hot irons. This legacy of violence in the south contributed to the region's long term love affair with capital punishment.
- [85:24]
Michael Phillips
However, even hangings, promoted as a kindlier way to kill, became a horror show. In Europe, executioners were trained professionals who quickly gained a lot of experience. In the United States, such killings were done by local officials, often sheriffs, who might have little or no experience at the gallows. Executioners had to do some complicated math in order to do their jobs correctly. They had to calculate the weight of the victim in ratio to the length of the rope and the likely speed at which the condemned prisoner would drop through the trapdoor at the bottom of the gallows. If the executioner calculated correctly, the prisoner's neck would break at the end of the fall, theoretically killing the unfortunate victim instantly. Hanging was supposed to be clean and efficient, like the hanging carried out by the US army at the beginning of the movie the dirty dozen.
- [86:16]
Dick Revis
Well, major, what did you think of the hanging? Looked very efficient.
- [86:21]
Robert Smith
Authorities told themselves that hanging, when carried out appropriately and properly, was painless. That thesis, however, was obviously impossible to prove. For decades, hangings were public, and a set of religious rituals revolved and evolved around these events, with notable exceptions. Before the noose was placed around their necks, the condemned told the sad tale of what led them to such a terrible fate. They repented their terrible crimes and begged God and society for forgiveness. The idea was that the death penalty would teach the masses that crime doesn't pay. Reality, however, often strayed from the script.
- [87:02]
Michael Phillips
Pretty early on, the leaders of the American republic realized that the death penalty was actually morally corrupting, though most of them continue to support it. Benjamin Rush, who signed the declaration of independence, decried what he called the death penalty's quote, brutalizing effect. Rush became one of the earliest voices for abolition of capital punishment. He argued that state violence made ordinary.
- [87:25]
Robert Smith
Citizens more violent, and there's reason to believe that's true. Consider the crowds that often watched hangings and got drunk. And sometimes fights broke out as witnesses battled over the best view of the gallows. Postcards and mementos were made of famous lynchings in places like Dallas, Texas, and fights sometimes resulted in injury or death. Some in the crowds would spend their time at hangings, not learning somber moral lessons, but but in fact, picking the pockets of other witnesses caught up in the drama unfolding on the gallows. And executions were often followed by hours of looting, arson, assaults, and other mayhem as the public would engage in rioting. Not unlike modern cities when they celebrate a home team's win at the world series.
- [88:10]
Michael Phillips
These unruly mobs unnerved the upper class, and starting with rhode island in 1833, states began to move hangings inside prison walls away from the public view. By 1845, public executions had been banned in all of New England. This upset death penalty abolitionists, who hoped that the routine horrors that unfolded during executions might lead to the end of capital punishment. Thus began the process where state governments increasingly killed people in the name of the public in a process shrouded in secrecy.
- [88:43]
Robert Smith
Meanwhile, it's no secret that we have to pay our bills. So we'll be back after a few words from our sponsors.
- [89:00]
Michael Phillips
In 1899, in Sampson County, North Carolina, a local hothead named Art Kinsalls got into a heated exchange with a neighbor, John C. Herring, at a country store. During the fight, Kensaus grabbed a butcher knife and repeatedly stabbed Herring, killing him. A few days later, he was arrested for the murder, but he escaped, and he was on the loose for nine months. After a gunfight with a sheriff's posse, he was captured, put on trial, found guilty, and sentenced to die by hanging. There, the story got messy. We'll repeat. What we're about to say may be upsetting to some listeners.
- [89:39]
Robert Smith
Kinsals was not one to passively accept his fate. While awaiting his execution, he tried to take his own life twice, the first time with sleeping pills and the second time by cutting his own throat. These attempts delayed the execution, but inevitably, Kinsales faced his appointment with the Hangmen. On September 28, 1900. Local authorities used a stepladder as a gallows. Kinsales did not fall from a sufficient height to break his neck, consequently, and the neck wound from his suicide attempt had not completely healed, so he was bleeding heavily as he dangled from the noose. A doctor told the sheriff and hundreds of other horrified spectators that Kinsale's was still alive.
- [90:20]
Michael Phillips
Officers cut him down and hanged the unfortunate man a second time. This time he died. In an era in which executions took place all the time, Kinsales gory death cut through the fog and made national news. The Virginia Pilot called the scene revolting. During the history of hangings, hideous mistakes like this were common. Sometimes, because of an executioner's miscalculations, prisoners heads were yanked off, sometimes ropes ripped apart with the prisoner falling to the ground, only to be hanged again. During many hangings, the condemned slowly strangled to death.
- [90:56]
Robert Smith
John Harris, a man hanged in Pennsylvania in 1913, actually screamed as he suffocated, prompting a headline in one newspaper, quote, prisoner tortured through bungling at an execution. According to an estimate made in 1993 by a legal team representing a client who was facing death by hanging in Washington state between the years 1622 and 1993, authorities bungled 170 of about 8,000 legally authorized hangings, resulting in prolonged suffering for the prisoners. In more than 2% of the death sentences carried out by this technique, the.
- [91:33]
Michael Phillips
Growing middle class and upper class in the United States became squeamish about hanging. As one writer put it, bourgeois audiences might tolerate the ghastliness of Death itself, but not incompetence and mismanagement. By the early 1880s, the New York Times had begun publishing lengthy, detailed and graphic accounts of hangings gone wrong. In 1885, in response to the mounting public concerns, New York Governor David Bennett Hill declared. The present mode of executing criminals by hanging has come down to us from the dark ages. It may well be questioned whether the science of the present day cannot provide a means of taking the life of those condemned to die in a less barbarous manner.
- [92:18]
Robert Smith
As the backlash against the extreme brutality of hanging grew among elites, the New York Medico Legal Society first suggested research into whether prisoners could be possibly executed by lethal injection in the 1870s. But a different technology arose that delayed the advent of that protocol by more than a century.
- [92:37]
Michael Phillips
Famously, Thomas Edison was a greedy man. Took credit for the inventions of his underpaid lab assistants who toiled his Menlo, New Jersey laboratory. Edison was also a genius at public relations, and he would come to dominate several industries. In the early 1870s, his team had developed a feasible incandescent light bulb that ran on the direct current or DC system as Edison himself described it. On October 21, 1871. Numerous experiments resulted in the production of a small unit map of comparatively enormous resistance, the filament being under conditions of great stability.
- [93:21]
Dick Revis
After the result, I knew the problem approached commercial solution.
- [93:27]
Robert Smith
In 1879, Edison submitted his patent for an electric lamp. In 1880, the Edison Illuminating Company opened for business and soon provided lights for New York and other cities. In the early days of the electric industry, fatal accidents sometimes happened because of the new technology. In 1881, George Lemuel Smith, an intoxicated Buffalo bricklayer, stumbled into an unlocked electric plant and accidentally fried himself by touching a generator.
- [93:55]
Michael Phillips
An autopsy led some doctors to conclude that Smith died quickly and painlessly. Many in the medical profession responded to Smith's untimely death by suggesting that perhaps electric power could provide a more reliable and less grotesque way to rid society of convicted murderers and rapists.
- [94:15]
Robert Smith
Enter a Buffalo dentist Alfred porter Southwick and Dr. George Fell of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, who both experimented with killing stray cats and dogs with electric current. The early results were often horrifying, with the animals sometimes burning alive. Nevertheless, the two published an article that described electrocution as the safest and kindest method of killing.
- [94:39]
Michael Phillips
In 1886, New York State formed a commission. The study of prisoners could humanely be put to death in a similar way. The so called Jerry commission falsely claimed that electrocuted animals tortured in a series of experiments died, supposedly rapidly and efficiently. Thomas Edison would soon see a business opportunity in state killings.
- [95:00]
Robert Smith
At the time, Edison was locked in a so called current war with another robber baron, business tycoon, George Westinghouse. Westinghouse's labs had developed a system that ran on alternating current or ac, a system that was more efficient, more popular and less prone to breakdown. Edison's DC system had already caused fatal electrocutions. But the so called wizard of Menlo park wanted to prove that the much safer Westinghouse system was in fact dangerous. Edison had his engineers electrocute animals using the AC current in front of reporters to terrify the public about the system. His most sinister ploy, however, was conspiring with the state of New York to hook up its first electric chair, invented by the aforementioned Buffalo dentist and engineer Alfred Southwick. And Edison connected that chair to an AC power system.
- [95:48]
Michael Phillips
The first man to face this new invention was William Kemmler, who was convicted of murdering his girlfriend with a hatchet during a drunken rage. The jury ordered him to die by electrocution. Edison saw an opportunity for Kemmler to die in agony as the first man killed an electric chair in order to fatally damage Westinghouse's reputation and that of the AC current. Desperate to prevent his product from being associated with something so ghastly, Westinghouse prohibited the sale of his AC generators to New York State out of fear that they would be used to execute Kemmler. But Edison sent his men to find secondhand Westinghouse equipment, which ended up in the hands of prison officials. Westinghouse then secretly hired an attorney for Kemmler, but the appeals failed. At 6:38 in the morning, August 6, 1890, Kemmler became an unwilling pioneer.
- [96:43]
Robert Smith
On the day of his execution, witnesses were impressed by Kemmler's calm demeanor as he wished everyone in the death chamber good luck. After strapping Kemmler into the electric chair, the executioner pulled a switch and Kemmler's body convulsed and became rigid. An attending physician announced he was not dead. Kemmler started to drool and a second jolt was ordered. Kemmler started burning alive and this time white smoke rose in the air, filling the room with what witnesses described as a pungent and sickening odor.
- [97:15]
Michael Phillips
Afterward, Westinghouse said of Kemmler's agonizing death, they would have done better with an ax. The mayhem didn't matter and Edison's plot failed. New York officials considered the electrocution a success and stuck with the method for decades to come. 26 other states adopted the electric chair as a method of execution. Kemmler's death would be the first of many so called botched executions over the next century. As Dawson Surratt wrote in gruesome spectacles, 80 of the executions gone awry in the next century involved the electric chair, with the failures involving, as he wrote, mechanical breakdowns, others resulting in fire, smoke, the smell of burning flesh, and a prolonged period from the start to the completion.
- [98:00]
Robert Smith
Sometimes the executed person's eyes popped out during electrocution. After death, the bodies of those electrocuted remained so hot that prison guards often caught blisters if they touched the body too soon. In 1923, a man named F.G. bullen would be one of four executed in Arkansas on the same day. Prison officials actually placed him in a casket, thinking he was dead, when a guard noticed he was still breathing. Bullen was then carried back to the chair and electrocuted a second time, this time successfully.
- [98:33]
Michael Phillips
Before the start of the 20th century, critics knew that both hanging and the electric chair were exercises in barbarity. In the Lone Star State, Ferdinand Eugene Daniel, the editor of the Texas Medical Journal, was an advocate of eugenics. An opponent of capital punishment, he argued that castrating men from families with criminal histories would be a way to prevent criminals from being born in the first place. Castrating criminals was more humane, he said, than hanging or electrocuting their children when those offspring inevitably turned to a life of crime. Daniel accepted that executions would take place for the foreseeable future. So he wanted to make the death penalty a vehicle for medical research.
- [99:15]
Robert Smith
Instead of hanging or electrocuting prisoners, Daniel suggested in a 1906 issue of the Texas Medical Journal that the state should sedate them and, while unconscious, subject them to medical experiments. Quote, inject into him various disease germs, watch their progress, and when through with him, inject about 10 drops of Prussic acid into the veins of his arms, and he will die a painless death, Daniel wrote. Dr. Josef Mengele and other Nazi scientists would conduct similar experiments a little more than three decades later. But as Professor Lane explained to us, even before Dr. Daniel made his disturbing suggestion in the Texas Medical Journal, doctors knew that death by lethal injection would.
- [99:58]
Elaine
Be a horrifying experience when states turned from hanging to the electric chair. This is back in 1890, there was actually a study. There was actually a report that recommended the electric chair. And that report actually considered death by drugs a lethal injection. And in that report, they said, we considered and rejected this. And they had two reasons. One was anatomical difficulties Professor Lane noted.
- [100:33]
Michael Phillips
That Even in the 19th century, doctors knew that the criminal population had a higher tendency towards drug abuse and poor health that would make it difficult to access a vein with a needle in order to deliver lethal chemicals. Also, even a century ago, doctors were queasy about involvement in executions that violated the Hippocratic oath, which says, in part, I will do no harm or injustice to patients or, quote, administer a poison to anyone when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Professor Lane noted that a government commission studying lethal injection in the late 19th century prophetically said that not only would the medical conditions of prisoners be an issue, but so would the likely refusal of doctors to take part because of ethical concerns. This could mean that lethal injection would be carried out by amateurs.
- [101:26]
Elaine
So, you know, these people have notoriously bad veins. They are elderly, they are of poor health, they are often former drug users. You know, how did we know this in 1890 and didn't think about this in 1977? But that was one reason. The other reason was they said, we're not going to be able to do this without the medical profession. We're not going to be able to do it competently. And the sustained and strong opposition of the medical profession makes this not viable.
- [102:04]
Robert Smith
There were other, less popular alternatives to hanging in the electric chair in the 1900s. In 1924, Nevada became the first state to execute someone in a gas chamber. Again, the euthanasia of stray pets in animal shelters provided a model for human executions. And again, there were a lot of problems. Prisoners resisted breathing in the poisonous gas, and this natural resistance slowed their deaths. The big spaces and gas chambers often limited the effectiveness of the poison gas. And in the earliest such executions, the chambers themselves sometimes leaked, putting witnesses in danger.
- [102:40]
Michael Phillips
As with the electric chair, Death penalty advocates claimed that the modern technology had provided a guilt free method for the government to kill people. The reality couldn't be farther from the truth. Dr. Richard Traitsman from John Hopkins University school of medicine wrote, quote, the person is unquestionably experiencing pain and extreme anxiety. The sensation is similar to the pain felt by a person during a heart attack, where essentially the heart is being deprived of oxygen.
- [103:09]
Robert Smith
Eleven states, including California, eventually adopted death by poison gas as their preferred method of execution. But witnesses consistently reported the condemned seemed to die agonizing, struggling deaths in which they convulsed and retched and sometimes screamed. In 1960, California executed Carol Chessman, a convicted rapist who authored numerous acclaimed books, while on death row. Before his execution, Chessman told reporters who would witness his death that he would nod his head if he was experiencing physical pain while he was gassed. Reporters said that Chessman indeed nodded his head multiple times as he choked in the poison fumes.
- [103:49]
Michael Phillips
By the time of Chessman's death, the United States was less than a decade from the longest pause and executions in its history. Numerous judicial challenges to capital punishment based on numerous racial biases, police misconduct, and other issues resulted in a de facto moratorium on executions by the mid-1960s. At issue was the obvious racism of the death penalty, including who was charged with capital crimes and who ended up the target of state killing. As Bryan Stevenson, a New York University law professor and the founder and executive director of the Equal justice initiative, explained in 2007, in the United States we.
- [104:30]
Garrison Davis
Are struggling with capital punishment and its implementation. A Short, Quick legal history In 1972, the United States Supreme Court struck down.
- [104:38]
James Stout
The death penalty after recognizing that it.
- [104:41]
Garrison Davis
Was being applied in an arbitrary manner. The court in 72 noted that 87%.
- [104:47]
James Stout
Of the people executed for the crime.
- [104:48]
Garrison Davis
Of rape were black men convicted of raping white women. 100% of the people executed in the United States between 1930 and 1972 for.
- [104:58]
James Stout
The crime of rape were executed for.
- [105:00]
Garrison Davis
Offenses involving victims who were white, even though it was believed that women of.
- [105:04]
Ryan
Color were three times as likely to.
- [105:06]
Garrison Davis
Be the victims of sexual assault.
- [105:08]
Michael Phillips
That racism would play a major factor in the largest pause in executions in the history of the American death penalty. The NAACP's Legal Defense Fund and the ACLU filed challenges to the death penalty based on racial bias across the country, and these legal teams won numerous days of execution. As Harvard law professor Cal Steicher Observed in a YouTube video, a de facto ban of executions had taken place by the late 1960s.
- [105:37]
Garrison Davis
The death penalty was in decline already.
- [105:40]
Ryan
In the 1960s in the United States, as it was in Europe, but the LDF's litigation campaign brought it to a complete halt. So from 1967 to 1972, in the five years prior to the decision in.
- [105:55]
Garrison Davis
Furman v. Georgia, there were no executions in the United States.
- [106:01]
Robert Smith
Three death penalty cases, Furman v. Georgia, Jackson vs. Georgia, and Branch vs. Texas, reached the United States Supreme Court and were consolidated in 1972. All three defendants were African American, and Jackson and Branch were charged with raping white women. As previously noted, no white man had ever been executed for the rape of an African American woman or child in American history. In June 1972, the U.S. supreme Court issued a 54 decision in Furman v. Georgia, ruling that defendants received the death penalty in such A fashion that capital punishment as then practiced was unconstitutional.
- [106:38]
Ryan
So that there didn't seem to be.
- [106:39]
Garrison Davis
Any rhyme or reason to it to use the words that they used. It was wantonly and freakishly imposed.
- [106:49]
Ryan
The immediate aftermath of Furman was dramatic. Everyone who had been sentenced to death, and there were some 600 ish people.
- [106:57]
Michael Phillips
On death row at the time of.
- [106:59]
Garrison Davis
The Furman litigation, all had their death penalties invalidated.
- [107:03]
Michael Phillips
So they were all sent to the general population.
- [107:05]
Ryan
They had to be re sentenced to a sentence other than death.
- [107:08]
Garrison Davis
Moreover, when the Supreme Court struck down.
- [107:12]
Robert Smith
The death penalty as it then existed.
- [107:14]
Garrison Davis
Anyone whose death sentence was pending, that case had to be dropped.
- [107:19]
Michael Phillips
Because those statutes were no longer valid. No executions took place for another four years. The Supreme Court had ruled executions were unconstitutional when the instructions juries were given in capital cases were too vague. This gave states like Texas a chance to rewrite their death penalty laws. By 1976, 35 states had adopted new statutes addressing the issues raised in Furman. On July 2, 1976, in its Greg vs. Georgia decision, the Supreme Court by a 7:2 margin upheld the death penalty. In states like Texas, where the court found jury instructions were clear and specific, the death penalty were set to resume After a decade long pause. It took a mere 199 days for state killing to resume. Utah executed a murderer, Gary Gilmore by firing squad on January 17, 1977.
- [108:17]
Robert Smith
The extreme violence of Gilmore's execution, which inspired a 1979 Pulitzer Prize winning journalism based novel called the Executioner's Song, sparked a renewed debate over the brutality of capital punishment and whether it's compatible with modern society. Nevertheless, the state of Oklahoma charged ahead. But they faced a problem. As Professor Lane writes, the Oklahoma electric chair was falling apart and needed to be repaired. But by the 1970s, many legislators were put off by the brutality of that execution method and sought something more modern.
- [108:51]
Michael Phillips
Meanwhile, a Dallas television reporter, Tony Garrett, filed suit to allow television cameras to film executions. And a federal district court granted a preliminary injunction in the reporter's favor. That injunction was later overturned. But politicians across the country were unnerved at the prospect of the public watching a man essentially burn alive in their names and what that could do to support for the death penalty.
- [109:17]
Robert Smith
It was at this time that a member of the Oklahoma legislature approached the medical community and asked them for help in designing a new protocol for death by lethal injection. Politicians thought prisoners could be put to sleep permanently, like veterinarians euthanizing animals. But doctors wanted nothing to do with killing people. That's when Oklahoma State Coroner Dr. Jay Chapman stepped in, referring to the physicians who refused to help. He said, quote, to hell with them, let's do this. Professor Lane explained what happened next.
- [109:48]
Elaine
I document in the book legislators talking about how, you know, I don't know that the country's gonna want to see this sort of violence. All we've got is the electric chair, all we've got is the gas chamber. People are gonna be, you know, queasy about this, and we need to find a different way. And unknown to many, or at least unappreciated, is the fact that a federal court had recognized at the time a First Amendment right to televise executions. Now, it wouldn't last, but nobody could have known that. And so one of the things I also found was state legislators talking about, gosh, we can't have an electrocution in someone's living room, right? The public is not going to go for this. And so they were looking for a different way. They talked about, you know, what about a death by drugs. And they are asking the state medical association, they're asking their personal doctors, they're asking everybody they can find. No one wants to play. But they get to, and this is in Oklahoma, they get to the State Medical Examiner, Dr. Jay Chapman, and he refers to himself as an expert in dead bodies, but not in how to get them that way.
- [111:09]
Michael Phillips
In spite of his self confessed ignorance, Chapman made up out of thin air a three drug protocol that would be used in executions across the country for the next three decades. Initially, he proposed a two drug protocol, but decided that if two drugs were deadly, three would be even more lethal. Chapman's cocktail included in order, sodium theopental, which was designed to kill like a barbiturate overdose, pancheronium bromide, which paralyzes the diaphragm in order to stop breathing, and potassium chloride, which was intended to cause a cardiac arrest.
- [111:46]
Robert Smith
Chapman admitted he did no research into these drugs or into how they interacted with each other. And neither did the state of Oklahoma when they adopted this procedure. Despite this, Chapman's method of execution would come to be used by every single state that had the death penalty. Lane described her shock when she came across interviews with Chapman who seemed completely glib about what prisoners might experience under this execution method.
- [112:10]
Elaine
And I later came across an interview of him where they asked, you know, how did you come up with the three drug protocol that every state used, every single state for 35, 40 years? And he said, said, I didn't do any research. I just thought about what might be useful, what you might need. You wanted two drugs so that if one didn't kill him, the other did. And then the interviewer said, well, why did you add a third drug? And he said, why not? I didn't do any research. Why does it matter why I chose it? So he makes it up and the state of Oklahoma adopts it basically in an afternoon. No expert testimony, no committee hearings, no review of the medical science, veterinary literature, nothing. And it takes hold. And all of the other states blindly follow it.
- [113:10]
Michael Phillips
It's possible Chapman may not have cared, but if he had done any research, he would have found that the components of his three drug protocol worked at crossword purposes. Anesthesiologists believe that the amount and speed at which the sodium theopental is administered does not produce an anesthetic effect deep enough for the executed prisoner to be unaware of what's happening to them. Meanwhile, the sodium theopental also slows down blood circulation so dramatically that it depresses the effectiveness of the potassium chloride, causing those receiving the drug to suffer a racing heart, but not have a fatal heart attack. The combined effect in many cases is a slow suffocation that involves pulmonary edema, the technical term for fluid in the lungs. In essence with lethal injection, states slowly drown the paralyzed who struggle but are unable to cry for help. When lethal injections have not gone according to plan, the execution sometimes lasts hours, the agonizing deaths hidden from the general public.
- [114:14]
Robert Smith
Some states have recently abandoned the three drug protocol, but not for humanitarian reasons. They've done so because of the difficulty of obtaining all the drugs from pharmaceutical firms that have resisted participating in capital punishment. As of this year, 24 states provide for some form of lethal injection. And as previously mentioned, Texas launched the lethal injection era in 1982 with the execution of Charlie Brooks. In the next episode, we'll discuss that execution. We'll discuss why lethal injections peaked in the 90s. How states got around resistance from drug companies that manufactured the chemicals used in the injections, how the medical profession has worked together to thwart this particularly American machinery of death. And how this has all been a mixed blessing for the approximately 2,100 prisoners on death row. I'm Steven Monticelli for It could happen.
- [115:06]
Michael Phillips
Here and until next time, I'm Michael Phillips. Thanks for listening.
- [115:20]
Elaine
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- [116:22]
Garrison Davis
At Lowe's this Veterans Day and every day. Verified military members, veterans and their spouses get automatic silver status in Mylowes Rewards with free standard shipping plus 10% off eligible purchases with no annual limit. It's one way we honor and give.
- [116:37]
Ryan
Back to those who have served and still do.
- [116:39]
Garrison Davis
Learn more now@lowe's.com Military 10% discount can't be combined with another offer Exclusions Terms and conditions apply. Loyalty programs subject to terms and conditions details@lowe's.com terms subject to change I'm Robert.
- [116:51]
Ryan
Smith and this is Jacob Goldstein and.
- [116:53]
Michael Phillips
We used to host a show called.
- [116:54]
Garrison Davis
Planet Money and now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history and some of the worst.
- [117:05]
Michael Phillips
People, horrible ideas and destructive companies in.
- [117:09]
Garrison Davis
The history of business.
- [117:10]
Michael Phillips
Having a genius idea without a need for it is nothing. It's like not having it at all.
- [117:16]
Garrison Davis
It's a very simple, elegant lesson. Make something people want. First episode How Southwest Airlines used cheap seats and Free whiskey to fight its way into the airline business.
- [117:27]
Michael Phillips
The most Texas story ever. There's a lot of mavericks in that story. We're gonna have mavericks on the show.
- [117:31]
Garrison Davis
We're gonna have plenty of robber barons. So many robber barons.
- [117:34]
Michael Phillips
And you know what? They're not all bad.
- [117:36]
Robert Smith
And we'll talk about some of the.
- [117:37]
Garrison Davis
Classic great moments of famous business Jesus geniuses along with some of the darker moments that often get overlooked like Thomas Edison and the electric chair. Listen to business history on the iHeartRadio.
- [117:48]
Michael Phillips
App, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [117:57]
Dick Revis
All I know is what I've been.
- [117:59]
Michael Phillips
Told and that's a half truth is a whole lie.
- [118:02]
Elaine
For almost a decade, the murder of an 18 year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.
- [118:18]
Michael Phillips
I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed her.
- [118:21]
Elaine
We know a story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national tv.
- [118:29]
Robert Evans
Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky.
- [118:33]
Michael Phillips
Housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.
- [118:36]
Elaine
My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist producer and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.
- [118:47]
Dick Revis
I did not know her and I.
- [118:48]
Garrison Davis
Did not kill her or rape or.
- [118:50]
Dick Revis
Burn or any of that other stuff.
- [118:51]
Garrison Davis
That y' all said. They literally made me say that I.
- [118:53]
Elaine
Took a match and struck and threw it on her.
- [118:56]
Garrison Davis
They made me say that I poured.
- [118:57]
Dick Revis
Gas on her.
- [119:00]
Elaine
From Lava For Good. This is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.
- [119:10]
Dick Revis
America, y' all better wake the hell up. Bad things happens to good people and small towns.
- [119:19]
Elaine
Listen to Graves county in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava For Good plus on Apple Podcasts.
- [119:41]
Robert Smith
A warning this episode includes violent content which some listeners might find disturbing.
- [119:49]
Michael Phillips
I'm Michael Phillips, an historian and the author of a history of racism, racism in Dallas called White Metropolis, and the co author with longtime journalist Betsy Freehoff, of a history of eugenics in Texas called the Purifying Knife.
- [120:02]
Robert Smith
And I'm Steven Monticelli. I'm an investigative reporter who specializes in political extremism and far right Internet culture and I contribute to outlets like the Texas observer, the Barbed Wire, and more.
- [120:14]
Michael Phillips
In the last episode, we began exploring the shady history behind the most popular form of capital punishment in the United States, lethal injection. We described how, one after another, execution by hanging, then the electric chair and then the gas chamber was touted as cleanest, quickest, most modern and painless way to put a person to death. Each method, however, proved more violent and gruesome than previously expected. In order to prevent a groundswell of opposition to the death penalty, politicians responded by abolishing public executions in the 1970s latched onto lethal injection as the newest, gentlest and kindest method of state killing.
- [120:55]
Robert Smith
As discussed in the first episode, the lethal injection protocol was designed by an Oklahoma coroner, Dr. Stephen Crawford, who once admitted to an interviewer that although he was an expert in dead bodies, he didn't know how to get them that way. Authorities turned to Crawford because doctors who dealt with living bodies wanted nothing to do with executions. So Crawford designed a three drug protocol for executions that he made up pretty much out of thin air, reasoning that if one deadly drug was good for killing, then three drugs would be even better. The problem was that the three drugs counteract each other and would result in longer executions and in deaths that resembled slow drowning.
- [121:32]
Michael Phillips
Crawford did no homework, and neither did the more than 30 states that eventually adopted lethal injection as the preferred method of execution. This occurred after the Supreme Court brought the death penalty back to life with its 1976 Gregg v. Georgia decision. Following a ten year pause, it would not be until December 7, 1982, the state of Texas carried out the first execution by lethal injection in the world. In this episode, we'll talk to a journalist, Dick Revis, who witnessed Brooks execution.
- [122:04]
Dick Revis
One thing I noticed was that there were a half dozen or more lawmen in there who had on cowboy hats. They did not remove them when Charlie was killed. And I also thought that wasn't quite right. But in any case, I don't recall any anybody saying anything. We were silent while all of this was going on. Charlie only spoke to say Allahu Akbar, and he was dying when that happened. It was obvious that he was scared to death.
- [122:44]
Robert Smith
Revis told us that Brooks, as he recalled it, seemingly drifted off to sleep. But that's not all that may have been occurring. According to Professor Corinna Lane, the author of the recently published book Secrets of the Killing State, who you heard from in the first episode, something very different was likely going on in Brooks mind and body. According to Lane, Brooks was slowly suffocating. Medical experts, Lane said, believe that those executed with lethal injections are often not fully unconscious and that the paralytic drugs fed into their veins prevent them from fully communicating their suffering, even as they may be aware of it.
- [123:21]
Elaine
The courts that have heard this medical testimony, there was a court in Ohio and said, yeah, you know, all of the medical experts are describing acute pulmonary edema as a drowning from within. It is, you can't catch your breath, you've got fluid coming into your lungs and you can't do anything about it. And the court said, you know, this is the sensation akin to waterboarding. You know, we're waterboarding people to death. That's what we're actually doing.
- [123:53]
Michael Phillips
In this episode, we'll also talk about how the modern death penalty peaked in the 1990s and why pressure from drug manufacturers and activists led not only to a decline in executions, but the revival in some states of some very old forms of execution, such as the electric chair and the firing squad.
- [124:13]
Robert Smith
It's a fascinating but often frightening story and One that will have to continue. After perhaps less gripping messages from our sponsors.
- [124:31]
Michael Phillips
Big changes came to the death penalty in Texas in 1923. Before then, hangings were carried out by sheriffs in the counties where the murders, rapes and other crimes committed by the prisoner took place. Many of the sheriffs were inexperienced at hanging, and goring mishaps took place. Texas last public execution unfolded on August 31, 1923, when African American Nathan Lee was hanged before 150 spectators in Brazoria County. From 1900 to 1920, close to 70% of the inmates executed in Texas were African American.
- [125:07]
Robert Smith
In 1923, Texas sought to modernize and bring industrial efficiency to state killing. All executions henceforth would be carried out at the state prison in Huntsville, and prisoners would die in an electric chair. Locals gave it a glib name, Old Sparky. The state's new killing machine got a workout the day it debuted, February 8, 1925. Texas executed five prisoners that day, all black men. Between that date and July 30, 1964, when the state electrocuted Joseph Johnson, a man convicted of fatally shooting a store owner during a robbery, Texas sent 361 inmates to the electric chair. African Americans made up 63% of the prisoners who died in that chair, while 7% of those who died in the electric chair were Mexican American. Texas politicians insisted that their tough on crime policies served as a deterrent. But in fact, from 1933 to 1964, the year Joseph Johnson was executed, the murder rate in Texas was 12.7 per 100,000 people, the eighth highest in the United States. Nevertheless, Texas leaders have continued to justify the death penalty in spite of its seemingly negligible impact on the state's violent culture. And the violence of capital punishment was about performative toughness, not about stopping future murders. As a reporter who witnessed a hanging laments in the film In Cold blood.
- [126:33]
Dick Revis
And then next month, next year, same.
- [126:38]
Garrison Davis
Thing will happen again.
- [126:41]
Dick Revis
Maybe this will help to stop it.
- [126:44]
Garrison Davis
Never had.
- [126:46]
Michael Phillips
After Johnson, Texas didn't execute another inmate for 18 years. Following the Greg vs. Georgia decision, Texas faced a potential public relations disaster. As we mentioned last episode, Dallas television reporter Tony Garrett filed suit to allow television cameras to film executions, and a federal district court granted a preliminary injunction in the reporter's favor. That injunction was later overturned. But under the Texas Capitol dome, there was worry about what would happen to support for the death penalty if an electrocution was broadcast live. The legislator who wrote Texas new death penalty law, the Gregg decision, said he was, quote, repulsed by the idea of an electrocution taking place in someone's living room. Lethal injection, as professor Lane had put it, had visual appeal because it would resemble helpful medical procedures and because, quote, states have been euthanizing pets with pentobarbital since the 1930s.
- [127:46]
Robert Smith
Animals are typically put to sleep with a two drug protocol, first a sedative and then the drug that does the deed. But the three drug protocol that would be adopted by most states that allowed capital punishment Produced nightmarish results that were typically invisible to witnesses. States typically allowed family members of the crime victim to attend executions, and the condemned also got to choose witnesses. In the early days of Texas's reborn death penalty, the state's populist democratic attorney general, Jim maddox, liked to make a show of attending each execution. And though much of the death penalty process has been shrouded in secrecy, Such as who is providing the lethal chemicals, States also allowed reporters to attend executions so that they could serve as the eyes and ears of the public.
- [128:27]
Michael Phillips
In his younger days, Dick revis was a civil rights activist who served time in an Alabama jail for his efforts to secure voting rights for African Americans. Revis became a journalist, and by the early 1980s, he was a frequent contributor to Texas monthly, one of the state's premier Investigative Publications. In 1982, he got the chance to witness an event that had never happened in the United States, or perhaps even the world. The Texas department of corrections would soon pioneer the use of lethal injection, Although the first person to be put to death in this manner was still unclear.
- [129:02]
Dick Revis
I recall a meeting with an editor and they said, somehow they told me that there's a lady at the capitol or a lady in the government in Austin, which is where I was living then, who was in charge of scheduling the executions. So I called her up and she said, well, she didn't have any on the schedule, but she could give me the names of. It was either four or five people who would be first, and one of them was Candyman, the fellow who poisoned his own child. Putting poison in some candy at Halloween.
- [129:46]
Robert Smith
Revis is referring to Ronald Clark o', Brien, A Houston area optician who fell into debt. He was $100,000 deep, so he bought a life insurance policy on his eight year old son and daughter before he prepared five pixie sticks poisoned with potassium cyanide. And on Halloween night in 1974, he went trick or treating with his children, A neighbor and that man's two children. The group went to an abandoned house and knocked on the door, and when no one answered, o' Brien convinced the rest of the group to move on. He caught up with them later and claimed that someone had in fact answered the door. And then he handed out four of the poisoned candies to the children. When the o' Briens returned home, the killer handed the fifth Pixy stick to a neighborhood child. Later that night, o' Brien told his children that they could enjoy one candy from the evening, and he urged them to choose the Pixy Stix. And when his child Timothy complained the candy tasted bitter, o' Brien gave him Kool Aid to wash down the poison. Timothy started vomiting and died on the way to the hospital.
- [130:47]
Michael Phillips
None of the other children tried the poisoned candy. That night. O' Brien claimed that a malevolent stranger had poisoned the candy, and he sang at his son's funeral. His story fell apart, however, when the police discovered life insurance policies when o' Brien was unable to identify the house where he'd been supposedly handed the pixie sticks. When the cops found out that o' Brien had purchased cyanide from a chemical store in Houston, a jury sentenced him to death on June 3, 1975. The murder created a lasting national legacy, sparking paranoia about the safety of trick or treating.
- [131:23]
Robert Smith
State of Texas knew that executing o' Brien would be politically popular and would probably boost support for the death penalty. Not knowing which resident of Texas's death row would be strapped to the gurney first, Revis ended up interviewing all but one inmate on the list he had been given. The appeals process, however, is unpredictable, and a Fort Worth man known for most of his life as Charlie Brooks would end up winning the dubious honor of being the first to be put to death by lethal injection. He was convicted for the fatal shooting of a 26 year old mechanic, David Gregory, during a 1976 robbery.
- [131:54]
Michael Phillips
By the time Revis interviewed him, Brooks had converted to Islam and taken the name Sharif Ahmad Abdul Rahim. That is the name we will use referring to him for the rest of the episode. Abdul Rahim had committed the robbery with another man, Woody Lourdes. He posed to someone wanting to buy a used car and asked to take a test drive. Gregory agreed to ride with him. Abdul Rahim picked up Lourdes. The pair threw Gregory in a car trunk, drove him to a ramshackle motel, tied him to a chair and taped his mouth shut. Abdul Rahim and Lourdes accused each other of firing the fatal shot. No weapon was ever found. Lourdes eventually received the death penalty, but after that was overturned, he reached an agreement with prosecutors and received a 40 year sentence. He would end up serving only 11 the disparity in sentencing is one of the defining features of how capital punishment is carried out. Even after Greg versus Georgia had supposedly.
- [132:54]
Robert Smith
Addressed that issue shortly before his execution, Abdul Rahim insisted on his innocence. But according to Revis, the condemned man was lying. Revis described to us his relationship with Abdul Rahim, AKA Charlie Brooks.
- [133:09]
Dick Revis
Charlie was very alert, fast on his feet, engaged. He was not moping around, sad. He had a sense of humor. He told me in the first interview I had with him that he was innocent and that this was racial discrimination, that they executed more blacks than whites. And I told him, oh, what you want is for them to execute more white people, huh? And that's stunned him because I think no one had ever said that to him. But that would do away with racial discrimination. And there's lots of white people need executing too, was my way of thinking. And he didn't get mad at me or anything. He kind of laughed at it himself. After he paused to understand the question, then he kind of laughed at it himself. But I would say he was even until, until they got him strapped down, he was in control of his own body. His mind was in great shape. He lied to me about, about whether or not he was innocent.
- [134:30]
Robert Smith
Brooks told Revis that although the gun went off, he didn't pull the trigger. It was an accident.
- [134:36]
Dick Revis
At some point I got him to say that, oh, the gun went off and I went and pulled the transcript of his criminal trial. The gun was a revolver, not an automatic. Revolvers don't go off. To test that theory, I even took one I had and banged it on a table while it was loaded and all. And nothing happened to revolvers don't go off until they've been cocked. Unless they've been cocked, they can't go off.
- [135:12]
Robert Smith
We'll return to the story of the world's first execution by lethal injection and the deceptive way it was used to win public support for capital punishment. After this lovely ad break.
- [135:31]
Garrison Davis
There was.
- [135:32]
Michael Phillips
A little bit of last minute drama. A zero hour for the execution of Charlie Brooks, AKA Abdul Rahim, approached. The Supreme Court rejected his appeal for the last time. Shortly before the execution was scheduled to begin, Jack Strickland, the prosecutor in Abdul Rahim's murder trial, had second thoughts about the differences between the condemned man sentence and that of his accomplice. Strickland testified on Abdul Rahim's behalf, but to no avail. The fifth Circuit Court of Appeals said the defense team had presented no new information that would justify a stay of execution. Just after midnight, State Attorney General Mark White called officials in Huntsville and told them that the historic execution could begin.
- [136:17]
Robert Smith
From 1982, the year of Abdul Hareem's execution, until 2011, Texas allowed prisoners facing executions a choice of a last meal of their choosing. Abdul Rahim's request, however, was rejected.
- [136:31]
Dick Revis
He told me that for his last meal he wanted fried shrimp and oysters. And he said he had told the authorities that that's what he wanted for his last meal. When I got down there, I was told that there was no shellfish in the prison system's kitchens and Charlie had to pick. He finally picked steak and peach cobbler. But I felt bad about that because the prison people knew that they could go to the grocery store and buy whatever Charlie wanted and they didn't do it. And it was sort of, I thought it was an indignity they inflicted on him. So when I went down for the execution, I went down in the afternoon. Execution was that night. I went out and ate fish.
- [137:32]
Garrison Davis
Just.
- [137:34]
Dick Revis
How do you say, I don't know. Because of the situation.
- [137:39]
Robert Smith
Texas would end this final meal for prisoners on death row in 2011. That's because of Lawrence Russell Brewer, who was one of three white supremacists who chained an African American man, James Byrd, to the back of a car in Jasper, Texas and dragged him to death on June 7, 1998, as a last act of bitter defiance. On the date of Brewer's execution, September 21, 2011, Brewer ordered a last meal that included two chicken fried steaks, a triple meat bacon cheeseburger, fried okra, a pound of barbecue, three fajitas, a meat lover's pizza, a pint of ice cream and a slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts. When he received all the food, he refused to touch a bite. State Senator John Whitmire complained bitterly at the waste and expense lavished on such an infamous killer. And prison officials immediately changed the policy. Today, those facing execution are now only fed the same meal other prisoners receive that day.
- [138:40]
Michael Phillips
Revis believes that the process of being strapped down to a hospital like gurney is humiliating to those being executed.
- [138:47]
Dick Revis
Men die with more dignity when they're on their feet, for example, is walking to a scaffold when they still feel in control of their lives. The hardest thing about lethal injections is that they strap you down where you can't move and you're sitting there absolutely helpless until they. Until the drugs take effect.
- [139:18]
Michael Phillips
Revis described the atmosphere in the death chamber as Abdul Rahim was executed as tense and quiet. A prison girlfriend, as Revis describes her, Vanessa Sapp was present, as were numerous officials.
- [139:33]
Dick Revis
First of all, the room is too small. My recollection is there was a circular set of chairs spreading out 10ft, 20ft in a curve. It may not have been a corner, but it was barely room to hold the lawmen who wanted to witness the execution and Vanessa Sapphire and three reporters. His wife was not present. She didn't want to be and she didn't want the kids to see it. As for the audience reaction, I don't recall that there was anything dramatic. No, it seemed more routine.
- [140:19]
Robert Smith
Inspired by the story of Carol Chessman, the author and rapist executed in the gas Chamber in 1960, who worked out a signal he could send to reporters if he was suffering during the execution. Revis and Abdul Rahim worked out a similar arrangement. If Abdul Rahim was suffering as he was dying, he would shake his head. Revis would later regret making that arrangement.
- [140:41]
Dick Revis
I interviewed him before the execution and we came up with an idea. Unfortunately it was mine, that if he felt pain while he was dying, that he should shake his head side to side. And I say it's unfortunate because as things were, we were unable to. I was unable to determine if he was giving me that signal to revisit.
- [141:16]
Michael Phillips
Appeared that Abdul Rahim had simply drifted off to sleep.
- [141:20]
Dick Revis
He seemed to die peacefully. I had to put down a dog a couple of years ago or have the dog put down. And I was with him while that happened and I couldn't. How do you say, after seeing those two things, I said I wish I could die that way. And there was no evidence with my dog, for example, that there was any pain. It was like I put him to sleep and I think that's what they did with Charlie. But it would take a doctor to.
- [141:59]
Michael Phillips
Know, of course, Abdul Rahim's death was the first of its kind. As we mentioned last time, the three drug protocol that was used by most states over the last three decades was concocted out of thin air by someone no expertise on the effect of these drugs together on the human body. Abdul Rahim's execution was a medical experiment conducted with no prior research. Professor Lane said that since Abdul Rahim's execution, doctors have had a chance to perform autopsies on those executed by lethal injection. And witnesses have heard the cries of those who are able to speak while dying on the gurney.
- [142:37]
Elaine
You know, the state experts are saying, oh, this first drug you're going to be 99.999% of the public would be, you know, out and dead within a minute. You don't even have to worry about those other super torturous drugs. And it's like, yeah, that's not what was happening. They said they would stop breathing within a minute. And there was some pretty prominent litigation, the Morales case out in California where they looked at the executions by lethal injection and said over half of them, they actually did not stop breathing within a minute. In fact, it was eight and nine minutes and it did not kill them within two minutes of injecting that third drug, which is called potassium chloride, but it's referred to as liquid fire. And it chemically burns the veins as it races to the heart where it induces a cardiac arrest. So they're like, you know, the experts like, oh, you know that it's going to bring death in two minutes. That didn't happen. Like none of this was happening as the state and the state's experts were so confidently just saying. And it turns out, you know, no one had ever studied these drugs in these amounts. Nobody had ever injected these drugs in these amounts into people. This is not what was used. I mean, that's interesting too. Like, this is not the drug that was used to euthanize pets. This is not the drug that was used for physician assisted suicide. So it's like three totally different drugs. And you know, and not. Not only is nobody studied or nobody knew how they would work, but nobody could have predicted how they would have worked together.
- [144:28]
Robert Smith
As discussed in our last episode, the lethal injection that killed Abdul Rahim included three drugs. Sodium theopental, a heavy sedative, pancheronium bromide, meant to suffocate the prisoner, and potassium chloride, meant to trigger a cardiac arrest. As professor Lane wrote in her book Secrets of the Killing State, because of one of the drugs used in three drug protocol, the drugs work poorly when combined. The panchorium bromide couples the inability to breathe with the inability to struggle. They cannot fight or scream or even writhe in pain.
- [145:02]
Michael Phillips
But all would seem calm on the surface. Texas experiment in lethal injection was a political success. And for a while, the novelty of the revived death penalty brought back memories of some public hangings. Students from nearby Sam Houston State University would show up and hold drunken parties outside the prison in Huntsville on the night of executions, cheering loudly enough that they could be heard inside the death chamber. The night that Ronald Clark o', Brien, the infamous Candyman who killed his son for insurance money, died, a crowd of about 300 celebrated outside, some yelling trick or treat at the scheduled time of the execution and pelting anti death penalty protesters with candy A huge cheer erupted when the officials of the Walls unit left, signaling that o' Brien had died. A local bar threw a Halloween party.
- [145:55]
Robert Smith
Texas politicians made support for the death penalty central to their campaigns in this era. In the 1990 Democratic Party gubernatorial primary, former Texas Governor Mark White faced off against the state attorney general, Jim Maddox, and the eventual winner, State treasurer Ann Richards. White and Maddox ran almost identical campaign ads, both walking past larger than life mug shots of murderers who were executed under their watch and claiming credit for meting out justice. Consider this ad for White.
- [146:24]
Michael Phillips
These hardened criminals will never again murder.
- [146:27]
Robert Smith
Rape, or deal drugs. As governor, I made sure they received the ultimate punishment. Death.
- [146:34]
Garrison Davis
And Texas is a safer place for it.
- [146:36]
Robert Smith
But tough talk isn't enough. The criminals know how to tangle up the courts and delay executions.
- [146:42]
Robert Evans
To bring them to justice takes strength and dedication.
- [146:45]
Robert Smith
Cause if the governor fled, they win.
- [146:49]
Robert Evans
Only a governor can make executions happen.
- [146:51]
Michael Phillips
I did, and I will.
- [146:55]
Robert Smith
The popularity of the death penalty was sealed for decades. Starting with Abdul Rahim, Texas has led the United States in state killing. As of September 27, Texas had carried out 596 executions. More than 36% of all of the executions that have unfolded since the United States Supreme Court allowed the death penalty to resume in this country in 1976.
- [147:18]
Michael Phillips
More than 40% of those executed in Texas since 1982 had been African American. Almost 30% had been Mexican American. In 2024, Texas executed six people. Only one was white.
- [147:32]
Robert Smith
Meanwhile, Texas put to death 63 prisoners who committed their crimes before they reached the age of 21. According to the Texas Coalition against the death penalty, since 1973, 18 people sent to Texas death row were later exonerated, out of about 200 nationally. And the group argues that there is strong evidence that at least six put to death in Huntsville were actually innocent.
- [147:54]
Michael Phillips
Professor Lane argues that not only does death by lethal injection violate the 8th amendment span on cruel and unusual punishment, but that most defendants facing the death penalty cannot afford adequate legal counsel. And that an alarming number of those sent to death row and in some cases executed have been innocent.
- [148:14]
Elaine
200 people have been exonerated from death row. 200. And when you put that next to the 1600 executions that we've had in the modern era, what we really have is for every eight executions, there's one exoneration that is a terrible, terrible number, right? For every eight times we kill someone, we almost killed the wrong person. And then there was this National Academy of Sciences report that came out. This is the Gross Report, Samuel Gross. And they said, here's a conservative estimate. 4.1% of all people on death row today are factually innocent. 4.1%. That's 1 in 25.
- [149:01]
Michael Phillips
According to the Texas Coalition against the Death penalty, as of 2014, the total legal cost of executing a prisoner was nearly $4 million, as opposed to the 1.3 million spent to keep someone in prison for life. Lane argues that morality aside, capital punishment is catastrophically expensive. Imposing sentences of life without parole, or what criminal justice experts call lwop, would not only eliminate the risk of making an irreversible mistake by putting an innocent person to death, but also save taxpayers money.
- [149:37]
Elaine
As an example, here's Florida. $51 million. 51 million. That is what Florida spends every year to maintain the death penalty over and above what it would cost to punish all first degree murderers with lwop. And if you look at the costs that Florida spent and then look at the executions that they had, how much did it cost per execution, you know, to maintain the system? And then of course, the product of it, executions, what you're getting out of it, per execution, 24 million. $24 million per execution. You know, and I'm a former prosecutor and I just have to say, what could you do with $24 million? You know, I take 8 million and I'd put it into victim services. Now we're getting into the death penalty more broadly. But one of the things I found as I'm on this book tour and on the road, I'm talking to survivors, their family members have been slain. And one, a woman in Tennessee is particularly. She's coming to mind right now. And she said, listen, when my son was murdered, I couldn't get out of bed in the morning. I was afraid I was going to lose my job. I was afraid I was going to lose my house. I needed therapy, I needed services, I needed child care to help. I couldn't do that. My kids needed therapy. We had all of these needs. And the state of Tennessee said, you know, Department of Mental Health said, we don't have that money, Sorry. You know, and so she said, we're spending it all. In fact, what she said is, it's selfish. You're spending millions upon millions upon millions on death sentences and, you know, on the death penalty, when it could actually go to the people who need it.
- [151:36]
Robert Smith
Regardless of the financial costs. Death by lethal injection has become so commonplace that executions rarely catch public attention. Nationally, 1,377 people have been put to death by some form of lethal injection since 1982. Those executed suffered not only because of the chemicals used, but because, as was predicted in 1890, medical professionals have refused to participate because of ethical rules prohibiting the harm of patients. Doctors and nurses and paramedics generally refuse to administer the lethal cocktails used in death chambers. That task generally falls to seriously undertrained prison personnel who are asked to secure an IV line for condemned prisoners, who often because of age, history of drug abuse, or other health problems, have veins that are difficult to access. Heavily muscled prisoners, those who are morbidly obese, and those with dark skin can also present challenges for the amateur phlebotomist trying to set up an execution.
- [152:32]
Michael Phillips
Prisons sometimes lack the right equipment, Such as the correct size syringes or proper tubing. Lethal injection drugs are pre made and have to be mixed by personnel not properly trained in chemistry, which results in errors in dosing. Often, people with any kind of medical competence who participate in executions are the ones with the shadiest ethical records. Professor Lane came across one case in which the state of Missouri relied on a doctor who ignored ethical guidelines and participated in the capital punishment process. He was incorrectly mixing the chemicals so that the prisoners were only receiving half the dose of the anesthesia meant to reduce the pain of condemned as required by law. Dr. Lane shared the horrifying discoveries lawyers who condemned prisoners made about that particular doctor.
- [153:20]
Elaine
They looked, you know, at the protocol that was litigated and authorized by a federal court, and it was 5 grams of this particular drug. And they looked at the execution logs of the last several, and states were using 2.5. And so, you know, they filed suit. That's half the anesthetic, you know, and the state, you know, wrote back and said, we are not using half the anesthetic. It must be the pharmacy logs that are wrong. We're going to track that down and figure out why they are wrong. But we rest assure you, we are not violating the protocol. We're doing the amount that was legally authorized. Well, they have to come back the next day and say, oh, actually the logs were right. We were wrong. We were injecting half of the amount. And so the court gives the lawyers for the condemned prisoners a limited deposition to question this doctor behind a veil, like they didn't know who he was, but to question him under oath. And they're like, why are you using half? And he said, well, I'm dyslexic and so sometimes I make mistakes. And yet Missouri stuck with them and said, no, we have every confidence in him. They lose that. The trial court, the federal court, says this Guy can't be anywhere near. Look, the whole thing, to the extent it's humane, requires you to meticulously measure and mix chemicals in liquids. And so you can't have someone who just makes mistakes. And then in the meantime, investigative journalists, which I have to take my hat off. I tip my hat to investigative journalists, but they were like, gee, who is this, you know, dyslexic doctor? And they find out his identity. You know, he admits it's him. He had over 20 malpractice suits. He had had his hospital privileges revoked at two hospitals. He had been censured by the medical board. So, you know, you're asking someone to do something, to participate in something that is fundamentally against. Against your reason for being as a doctor. And, you know, from time to time, they find people. But I think they're outliers. What I have found is they are outliers, not only on ethics, but in other ways, too.
- [155:52]
Robert Smith
Experts on capital punishment like Lane aren't comfortable with describing executions that go off script as, quote, botched, even if it's a commonly used term. No matter how the execution proceeds, the end result is the same. The inmate is dead. However, there is no question that killing people by lethal injection is so complicated and requires so much skill on the part of the executioners that the process is typically far more agonizing than death penalty advocates tell the public. According to the anti capital punishment organization the Death Penalty Information center, out of 19 executions in 2022, seven were botched, meaning that the death took far longer than expected, that prison personnel had to jab the condemned people multiple times to get an IV line working, or worse.
- [156:38]
Michael Phillips
When Oklahoma executed Clayton Lockett on April 29, 2014, the state used an untested combination of three drugs. The size of the syringes and the amount of drugs used were wrong. Prison personnel made repeated mistakes as they tried to insert the needle for the iv Even though the American Medical association prohibits its members from participating in executions. A doctor was on hand for the Lockett fiasco. The physician tried but failed to insert an IV into the jugular vein and Lockett's neck. The doctor then performed a surgical procedure called a cut down, which is a deep surgical incision through the skin, muscle and fat performed to expose a central vein under Lockett's clavicle. Procedure was bloody and also failed, and the execution then tried and failed to access a vein through Lockett's feet. Eventually, they tried to insert an IV through the femoral vein in the upper thigh, a procedure only the most skilled Surgeons have mastered. Unfortunately, the available needle was the wrong length for it to work properly.
- [157:42]
Robert Smith
Lockett reportedly was stoic throughout this repeated assault on his body. After an hour of this torture had passed, the execution team was finally able to inject the deadly drugs. Lockett groaned, convulsed, and at one point was asked, are you unconscious? According to witnesses, Lockett opened his eyes and said, no, I am not. After appearing to fall asleep, he began to moan, arched his back and kicked a foot before he strained against the straps holding him against the gurney and he tried to get up. Lockett mumbled, something is wrong. Oh, man, and this shit is fucking up my mind. The prison warden ordered the blinds closed. As the execution team scrambled, swelling had developed where the IV had been inserted and was blocking the flow of the third and final lethal drug. The doctor was summoned to insert a needle in Lockett's other femoral vein. But Lockett was bleeding heavily and the blood backed up into the IV line.
- [158:36]
Michael Phillips
Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallon had already decided to halt the execution, but by this point, Lockett's heart had irreversibly slowed down. He subsequently died of heart failure. The entire execution, from the first attempt to stick an IV in his veins to his death, lasted one hour and 47 minutes. That was one of the longest executions in American history. The state of Oklahoma later falsely claimed that Lockett had been unconscious the entire time. In 2022, another so called botched lethal injection, that of Joe Nathan James in Alabama, lasted three hours. In Ohio and elsewhere, executions had to be abandoned when the prison staff couldn't get an IV going.
- [159:21]
Robert Smith
As we mentioned in the first episode, Reverend Jeff Hood is a priest under the old Catholic rite who by the time we interviewed, had accompanied 10 men during their executions. He said that even the most professional execution is brutal, but that some states, because of a regrettable amount of practice, are much better at killing than others.
- [159:41]
Dick Revis
I do think that some states know what they're doing more than others, and I think that Texas knows what they're doing. You don't see botched or delayed or mishandled executions in Texas. They go very quickly. And when you talk to these guys, that's what they say they would prefer. If you're going to be executed, you would want to go as quickly as possible. Yes, there are some executions that look horrific. There are other executions that don't go according to plan but don't get a lot of attention. But they're all horrible. And I think they all have to be talked about as such, whether it's.
- [160:22]
Michael Phillips
Because of the awareness of the messy and undeniably painful executions like those of Lockett and James, the more than 200 death row exonerations achieved by groups like the Innocence Project, the growing skepticism of law enforcement amongst young people, or the greater consciousness of how racism warps the entire criminal justice system. There's no question that the death penalty is the least popular it has been in the past hundred years. Nor is there doubt that the rate of executions in the United States has dropped well below its peak during the height of the war on crime under the Clinton administration, when in 1999315 death sentences were handed down, or in 1996 when 98 prisoners were executed.
- [161:10]
Robert Smith
In any case, deaths like Locketts are bad for business for the pharmaceutical companies who have produced the drugs used in lethal injections. In the next and final episode of this three part series on the shady business of lethal injection, we'll talk about how some states like Texas have been forced to turn to the black market or the so called gray market to buy lethal drugs as pharmaceutical companies have restricted the purchase of those drugs for that purpose. We also talked to Jeff Hood about how the difficulty in obtaining those drugs has led states like Alabama to turn to one of the most gruesome forms of execution yet. And we'll also hear the story of race Booyan, a victim of a hate crime who fought to prevent the execution of his white supremacist attacker. And finally, we'll explore whether the death penalty might be on its last legs in the United States. I'm Steven Manchelli for It Could Happen Here.
- [162:00]
Michael Phillips
Until next time, I'm Michael Phillips. Thanks for listening.
- [162:15]
Elaine
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- [163:15]
Robert Smith
I'm Robert Smith and this is Jacob Goldstein.
- [163:17]
Michael Phillips
And we used to host a show called Planet Money.
- [163:19]
Garrison Davis
And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history.
- [163:28]
Michael Phillips
And some of the worst people, horrible.
- [163:31]
Garrison Davis
Ideas and destructive companies in the history of business.
- [163:34]
Michael Phillips
Having a genius idea without a need for it is nothing. It's like not having it at all.
- [163:40]
Garrison Davis
It's a very simple, elegant lesson. Make something people want. First episode, how Southwest Airlines use cheap seats and free whiskey to fight its way into the airline business.
- [163:51]
Michael Phillips
The most Texas story ever. There's a lot of mavericks in that story. We're gonna have mavericks on the show.
- [163:56]
Garrison Davis
We're gonna have plenty of robber barons. So many robber barons.
- [163:59]
Ryan
And you know what?
- [163:59]
Garrison Davis
They're not all bad.
- [164:00]
Robert Smith
And we'll talk about some of the.
- [164:02]
Garrison Davis
Classic great moments of famous business ch geniuses, along with some of the darker.
- [164:06]
Robert Smith
Moments that often get overlooked, like Thomas.
- [164:08]
Garrison Davis
Edison and the electric chair. Listen to business history on the iHeartRadio.
- [164:12]
Michael Phillips
App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [164:18]
Garrison Davis
Run a business.
- [164:19]
Robert Smith
And not thinking about radio, Think again. Because more people are listening to the radio and iHeart today than they were 20 years ago.
- [164:27]
Garrison Davis
And only iHeart broadcast radio connects with more Americans than TV, digital, social, any.
- [164:32]
Elaine
Other media, even twice as many teens than TikTok.
- [164:36]
Robert Smith
And that reach means everything. Just think about the universal marketing formula. The number of consumers who hear your.
- [164:42]
Elaine
Message times the response rate equals the results.
- [164:45]
Robert Smith
Now let's get those results growing for your business.
- [164:49]
Elaine
Radio's here now more than ever.
- [164:50]
Garrison Davis
And iheart's leading the way.
- [164:53]
Robert Smith
Think radio can help your business.
- [164:55]
Garrison Davis
Think iheart streaming, podcasting and radio where.
- [164:59]
Elaine
The reach is real.
- [165:00]
Robert Smith
Let us show you@iheartadvertising.com that's iheartadvertising.com or call 844-844.
- [165:07]
Garrison Davis
Iheart one more time.
- [165:09]
Robert Smith
Just call 844-844-Iheart and get radio working for you.
- [165:22]
Dick Revis
All I know is what I've been told.
- [165:24]
Michael Phillips
And that's a half truth is a whole lie.
- [165:27]
Elaine
For almost a decade, the murder of an 18 year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story I'm telling you.
- [165:43]
Garrison Davis
We know Quincy killed her.
- [165:45]
Elaine
We know a story that law enforcement used to convict six and that got the citizen investigator on national tv.
- [165:54]
Garrison Davis
Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky.
- [165:57]
Michael Phillips
Housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.
- [166:01]
Elaine
My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist producer and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.
- [166:11]
Dick Revis
I did not know her and I.
- [166:12]
Garrison Davis
Did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y' all said is they literally made me say that I took a.
- [166:18]
Elaine
Match and struck and threw it on her.
- [166:20]
Garrison Davis
They made me say that I poured.
- [166:21]
Dick Revis
Gas on her.
- [166:24]
Elaine
From Lava For Good. This is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame America.
- [166:35]
Garrison Davis
Y' all better wake the hell up.
- [166:37]
Dick Revis
Bad things happens to good people in small towns.
- [166:44]
Elaine
Listen to Graves county in the boat Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.
- [167:05]
Robert Smith
A warning this episode includes violent content which some listeners might find disturbing.
- [167:13]
Michael Phillips
I'm Michael Phillips, an historian and the author of a history of RA racism in Dallas called White Metropolis and the co author of longtime journalist Betsy Freehoff of a history of eugenics in Texas called Purifying Knife.
- [167:26]
Robert Smith
And I'm Stephen Monticelli. I'm an investigative journalist in Dallas who specializes in political extremism and the far right and I report for places like the Texas observer, the Barbed Wire and more.
- [167:37]
Michael Phillips
Like millions across the United States, Mark Anthony Stroman was startled by the events that unfolded on the terrible morning of September 11, 2001. The disbelief that greeted that terrorist attacks against the World Trade center of the Pentagon can be heard on the first announcement of the tragedy on a Dallas Talk radio station, WBAP. All right, thank you.
- [168:02]
Garrison Davis
7:51 nine minutes before 8:00 clock at.
- [168:05]
Robert Evans
News Talk 8:20, WBAP here on the.
- [168:09]
Dick Revis
Here on the Tuesday morning and the reason I am hesitating here, there's word.
- [168:14]
Garrison Davis
Of a plane crashing into the World.
- [168:15]
Dick Revis
Trade center in downtown Manhattan and the World Trade a plane actually crashing into.
- [168:23]
Michael Phillips
The side of the World Trade Center.
- [168:24]
Garrison Davis
We're have details for you on that from ABC News in just a couple of moments.
- [168:30]
Michael Phillips
Stroman later wrote that September 11th filled him with a great sense of rage, hatred, loss, bitterness and utter degradation. He blamed Arabs and Muslims as a group for the events that day and wanted, quote those Arabs to feel the same sense of insecurity about their immediate surroundings. I wanted to feel the same sense of vulnerability and uncertainty on American soil.
- [168:55]
Robert Smith
Stroman, a Dallas resident, had already served two prison terms during which he had joined the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang, addicted to meth and sporting neo Nazi tattoos He began cruising Dallas in his 1972 Chevy Suburban, hunting for, quote, unquote, Arabs. As he later admitted, he wasn't entirely sure what an Arab looked like, but nevertheless, he stalked people with, quote, shawls on their faces.
- [169:19]
Michael Phillips
Stroman launched his crusade by running cars into ditches. If he suspected the vehicles were driven by Muslims, he escalated his campaign of terror. On September 17, 2001, he fatally shot Waqar Hassan, a 46 year old Pakistani immigrant, as the clerk grilled a hamburger at mom's grocery in Dallas. A few days later, Stroman found his next victim, a former pilot for Bangladesh's Air Force named Race Bouillon. Mr. Buyan, who has experienced robberies prior to his encounter with Stroman, told us what happened that day.
- [169:56]
Dick Revis
September 21, 2001. It was Friday around noon. A customer walked in wearing bandana, sunglasses, baseball cap and holding a double barrel, a sort of double barrel shotgun on his right side. And from the previous robbery experience, I thought he would be in the robbery. So I put all the money on the counter and offered in the cash as soon as he walked in. And I said, sir, here is all the money, take it, but please do not shoot me. Basically, I begged for my life. And his gaze remained fixed. And then he mumbled the question, where are you from? Before I could say anything more than excuse me, he pulled the trigger from point blank range. I felt it first, like a million bees were singing my friends. And I looked down and saw blood pouring like an open faucet from the right side of my head. And I remember screaming, mom took up my voice and I looked down, saw blood pouring like an open faucet on the right side of my head. And then I look left, I saw the gunman still standing, pointing the gun directly at my face. And I realized that if I did not do something to show that I'm dying, he might shoot me again. So I fell to the floor and he finally left after a few seconds.
- [171:37]
Robert Smith
Beyond survived the attack, but he was blinded in his right eye. He would endure not only multiple painful surgeries, but also the unique financial horrors of the American health care system. Meanwhile, Stroman was not done terrorizing the Dallas area Muslim community. On October 4, the shooting spree came to an end when the white supremacist pulled up to a Shell station in mesquite at about 6:45 in the morning and ordered the clerk, 49 year old Vasudev Patel, a Hindu immigrant from India, to hand over all the money from the cash register. Patel reached under the counter for a.22 caliber pistol, and seeing the gun, Stroman fired his weapon. The bullet struck Patel in his chest and killed him. A security camera captured the scene, and Dallas police arrested Stroman. The next day.
- [172:24]
Michael Phillips
At Stroman's home, investigators found a semiautomatic rifle, an Uzi knockoff, a.44 Magnum, and a.45 Colt. They also found evidence that Stroman planned to attack a mosque in a nearby suburb. The jury found Stroman guilty of capital murder on April 5, 2002, and sentenced him to die by lethal injection. The story then took an unexpected turn. During a 2009 pilgrimage to Mecca, Buyan said he realized that simply forgiving his assailant would not be enough. He believed he had a moral obligation to do all he could to prevent Stroman's death. Bouillon filed a lawsuit attempting to halt Stroman's execution in spite of Buyan's best effort. The suit was rejected by state and federal courts, and Stroman died by lethal injection July 20, 2011.
- [173:18]
Robert Smith
Buyan's Campaign of Mercy, however, made a major impact on capital punishment in the United States. He effectively shamed European drug companies into banning the use of the products used in the lethal injection that killed Stroman. In turn, some states, like Texas, decided to start buying lethal drugs illegally. In this final episode on the history of a lethal injection in the United States, Bian will tell us about his campaign against capital punishment and its impact. We'll also speak to a priest, the reverend Jeff Hood, who has accompanied by the time of this interview, 10 men to their executions. He will also tell us why he has devoted himself to showing love to people so despised and also address the future of the death penalty in the United States.
- [174:01]
Michael Phillips
After being blinded in a hate crime race, Bujan struggled through numerous traumas. He told us that after getting shot at the convenience store where he worked, he ran to a barber shop next door. There, he had the first sight of his injuries.
- [174:16]
Dick Revis
I caught myself in the mirror, and the image reflected back was crucial, like something out of horror movie. And on my way to the hospital, I felt my eyes were closing. I felt that my time was up. And, you know, while I was reciting from the holy Quran and asking God for mercy and forgiveness and giving me a second chance, I also begged him to, you know, to save my life, to give me a chance to live. And I promised God that if you give me a chance to live, I would help others.
- [174:50]
Robert Smith
In the emergency room, doctors put beyond on life support. For a time, his Condition was touch and go. Buyan, a young immigrant living on his salary as a convenience store clerk, said that when he next opened his eyes and doctors told him he had survived, he cried tears of joy.
- [175:05]
Dick Revis
So I. My eyes were full of tears, not from the pain, but from the joy of still being alive. But that joy did not last long because the hospital where I was taken was private and expensive and I had no health insurance at the time. So they discharged me within a couple of hours and told me to arrange follow up medical treatments on my own. So, you know, the first part of my American nightmare was being shot in the face after 9 11. And second part began when I was kicked up from the hospital. So as a result of this shooting, I, you know, underwent several eye surgeries. Unfortunately, though I lost a vision in one eye, I still carry more than three dozen shotgun pellets in my face. And my father suffered a stroke when he heard what about what happened to me? But luckily he survived. I lost my fiance, but gained more than $60,000 in medical bills.
- [176:01]
Michael Phillips
As Stroman languished on Texas death row, Booyan began picking up the pieces.
- [176:08]
Dick Revis
I moved on, rebuilding my life. I worked in restaurant. I went back to school. And slowly I was climbing the ladder and getting better in my own life journey. And in 2009, I went to NACA for pilgrimage, and it was in Mecca. I deeply realized that though I forgave my attacker, Mark Sterling, it was not enough. I felt that by executing Mark, we will simply lose a human life without dealing with the root cause. I strongly believe that if he was given a chance, he might be able to become a better human being. And I began to see him as a human being like me, not just simply a killer. I saw him as a victim, too, and I deeply felt for him. And I remembered my promise on my deathbed that if I get a chance to live, I would help others. And I felt that I need to start with him first to keep my promise. So I returned from Mecca with a very changed heart, with authority and a newfound purpose. And I launched a campaign to try and save my attacker's life. From Texas death row, we'll pick up.
- [177:24]
Robert Smith
The story of Beyond's campaign to spare Strowman's life and how his efforts changed the history of the American death penalty. After a word from our sponsors, Dr. Rick Halperin began teaching human rights courses at Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1990, where he now heads one of only nine human rights programs at universities in the country. He has also chaired Amnesty International's board of directors three times and since 1972 has been an anti death penalty activist. Halperin became famous on Texas death row as a result of his efforts. And after Stroman was informed of his July 20, 2011 execution date, the condemned man wrote a letter to Halperin asking for help in making final arrangements, such as locating an affordable undertaker.
- [178:18]
Michael Phillips
By coincidence, shortly after Stroman reached out to Halperin, the professor received a surprise visitor to his office. The stranger was Stroman's victim, Race Bouillon. Bouillon, who had recently become an American citizen, hoped Halperin could help him find a creative and effective way to fulfill the promise he had made to God. When he thought he was dying, he began his campaign to save Stroman's life. Bouillon, Halperin and another human rights activist, Hadi Jawad, carried their efforts from Dallas to the state capital in Austin and as far as the European parliament.
- [178:52]
Robert Smith
A weak point in the American death penalty machinery was its reliance on companies that provided the lethal injection chemicals. In 2011, Italy, an anti death penalty nation, successfully pressured the Illinois company Hospira to stop selling sodium theopental, the muscle relaxant used in the three drug lethal injection protocol used in Texas since the early 1980s. That same year, Reprieve, a British human rights nonprofit, arranged for Brian to travel to Europe to meet face to face with executives at the corporate headquarters of the Danish pharmaceutical company Lundbeck. Aware that the meeting would put them in the international spotlight, Lundbeck three days prior announced that they would stop shipping the sedative Nembutol, which was being used as a substitute for sodium theopental, to American prison systems. Bojan described his conversation with the Lundbeck company in an interview with us.
- [179:46]
Dick Revis
After one hour of great conversation, they agreed to write a letter to the governor of Texas asking him not to use their product to kill human beings.
- [179:56]
Michael Phillips
The state of Texas, however, was unwilling to grant a crime victim his fervent wish. Even though Texas politicians repeatedly claim they execute murderers to bring the victims closure. Bouillon said he was denied this by the Texas board of paroles and pardons and then governor Rick Perry.
- [180:14]
Dick Revis
I reached out to the prison system and asking for a mediation dialogue, but unfortunately they turned down my request multiple times and the reason they showed was it would re victimize me. So basically a mediation dialogue I thought would be helpful for me to find closure, to find a lot of answers, but it was for them it would be a re victimization process for me. So they rejected my request multiple times and it really made me sad that when they needed me to testify in the court to convict him to get the death penalty, I was a good victim. But then when I tried to exercise my right as a victim to have a mediation dialogue, I became a bad victim because I asked for my rights.
- [181:11]
Michael Phillips
In his final hours, Stroman spoke directly to his surviving victim.
- [181:16]
Dick Revis
I had the opportunity to talk to him over the phone before he was executed. And it was the day of his execution where he put my name as one of the people he would be able to talk. So I was lucky enough to talk to him. And when he came on the phone, I was about to go to the court to give a last fight to save the execution. So I was thinking, what would I say to a human being who is allowed to be executed in a couple of hours? And I'm going to go to a call to give a last fight to see if we could save him. So I. I was very emotional when he came on the phone. I told him that, Mark, you know for sure that I never hated you. I forgave you and I'm doing my best to, you know, save your life, you know, to this court hearing. And he said that ways I never expected that from you and I love you, bro. And that brought tears into my eyes that this is the same human being who shocked me for no reasons other than having hate and violence in his heart. And now 10 years later, he saw me. He could see me as his brother, and he said he loved me. Why he couldn't see me as his brother 10 years ago, and why he couldn't see the same thing 10 years ago. So, you know, at least it helped me to find closure a little bit. It helped me to move forward. At least I had the chance to talk to my attacker. And that gave me a lot of hope that people can change.
- [183:05]
Robert Smith
The execution itself, however, left Buyan cold.
- [183:09]
Dick Revis
Well, definitely this execution was not for the victims because the victims and the victims family members requested and also fox for clemency. We went ahead and requested the governor of Texas, the board of burdens and paroles that do not execute him in our names. Show mercy.
- [183:30]
Robert Smith
Mark Stroman died as scheduled on July 20, 2011. And though Bian and Halperin failed to stop it, they had helped start an international movement to thwart the ability of states to carry out such lethal injections. As Professor Clarina Lane revealed in her book Secrets of the Killing State. After Hespera stopped producing sodium theopental, the vacuum was filled by a fly by night company Called Dream Pharma, the drug distributor quote turned out to be two desks at a filing cabinet hidden in the back of a London driving school. As Lane wrote, once this operation was exposed, Great Britain banned sodium theopental sales to the United States.
- [184:10]
Michael Phillips
By December 2011, the entire European Union had tightened export controls on any chemicals that could potentially be used in executions. The new expanded EU ban made life much more difficult for would be executioners in the United States. In 2012, when the state of Missouri announced it would use the drug propufol as an anesthetic in its executions, the EU said it would cut off exports of that drug, which is used for surgeries in the United States about 50 million times a year combined. These moves created a lethal injection drug shortage that changed how executions took place in 2012.
- [184:49]
Robert Smith
Texas moved then to a single drug protocol using pinobarbital alone rather than the old three drug cocktail made out of thin air by Oklahoma coroner Stephen Coleman back in the 1970s. Autopsies reveal that prisoners executed with this single drug protocol die from pulmonary edema, a condition in which the lungs fill with fluid. Medical experts believe prisoners suffer intense chest pain as they suffocate, even if they appear fully unconscious. Execution witnesses also say they have seen prisoners eyes pop open, their eyes fill with tears, have seen them pull against restraints, and have heard them groan and clasp their jaws during such executions.
- [185:28]
Michael Phillips
As the drugs needed to carry out lethal injections become harder to find, states have to rely on shady tactics so they can keep on killing. Officials have lied to pharmaceutical companies that are buying drugs to provide medical care for prisoners that they later use in the death chamber. Death penalty states have violated federal laws. They have illegally swapped these drugs across state line, or they bought them on the black market or the legally marginal, so called gray market market. Professor Lane describes the shady lengths the state of Ohio went to in order to buy these drugs.
- [186:02]
Elaine
The state took $15,000 in cash in a suitcase. I mean, you can't make this stuff up, you know, and chartered a private plane to fly over to Washington where they did an under the table deal for drugs with this little pharmacy, you know, you need a prescription for these drugs. And so here's a pharmacy that for $15,000 is willing to sell drugs under the table. And allegedly in a Walmart parking lot.
- [186:33]
Robert Smith
To cope with the shrinking supply, states have made illegal purchases overseas. Like other states, Texas has tried to circumvent tightening restrictions by purchasing death penalty supplies from loosely regulated compounding pharmacies. And some of them have been here in the states. In 2018, it was revealed that Texas repeatedly bought drugs from the Green Park Compounding Pharmacy in Houston, which is a company that had been fined 48 times by federal regulators for safety violations, including providing the wrong medication to children who were subsequently hospitalized. The number of agonizingly prolonged executions in Texas suggests that the drugs the state buys are often out of date or impure.
- [187:13]
Michael Phillips
Finding out where the lethal drugs are coming from is becoming increasingly difficult. A number of states have passed laws making it illegal to report on who carries out the execution, what companies supply the drugs, or how these drugs were purchased. In any case, the difficulty in getting execution drugs has led to a decline in the death penalty across the nation. At the time of the landmark 1972 Furman v. Georgia case that temporarily halted executions in the United States, 40 states had the death penalty, currently only $27. In 2024, four states alone, Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas carried out 76% of the executions that unfolded in the United States.
- [187:59]
Robert Smith
Some of the remaining states with the death penalty on the books have responded to the shortage of lethal drugs by authorizing the use of the firing squad and killing prisoners with nitrogen gas hypoxia, which suffocates them by forcing them to breathe pure nitrogen. After another ad break, you'll hear from a priest who has witnessed executions in 10 different states, including death by nitrous hypoxia, and we'll end this three part series by discussing the future of the death penalty.
- [188:37]
Michael Phillips
Born in the South Atlanta neighborhood neighborhood in Georgia, Jeff Hood grew up in a religiously conservative home and was ordained as a Southern Baptist minister when he was only 22. His worldview, however, was shaken when he attended to his religious mentor who was dying of lung cancer. Before he passed away, the 75 year old confessed to Hood, quote, I'm gay and I've always been. Hood described this moment as earth shattering, and his religious views transformed dramatically from what he later called his backwards thinking.
- [189:10]
Robert Smith
When Hood moved to Dallas in the early 2000 and tens, he became well known in his new home as he fought to make local churches more inclusive of the LGBTQ community. And he got arrested along with other clergy outside of the White House in 2014 when he was protesting President Barack Obama's aggressive campaign to deport migrants. On July 7, 2016, Hood led a Black Lives Matter protest in downtown Dallas, during which a sniper opened fire and targeted police officers.
- [189:37]
Michael Phillips
Micah X. Johnson, an Iraq War veteran, was enraged by the police killings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota, so Johnson shot and killed five police officers, the deadliest incident for law enforcement since September 11, 2001. Police killed Johnson that evening by detonating a bomb carried by a robot to the shooter's hideout in a parking garage, marking the first execution by robot in American history. Revan Hood was traumatized not only by the sniper attack, but also when he got scapegoated for the deaths. That day, Fox News host Megyn Kelly put a target on Hood's back. In the aftermath of the sniper attack, Jeff Hood, he was one of the.
- [190:23]
Elaine
Organizers of the march and quickly condemned the shootings today.
- [190:28]
Garrison Davis
Never in our wildest dreams would we have imagined that five police officers would be dead this morning.
- [190:36]
Elaine
But critics were quick to point out.
- [190:38]
Michael Phillips
That we were hearing a very different.
- [190:39]
Garrison Davis
Message from the reverend just a short.
- [190:42]
Elaine
Time before the shots rang out last night. Here is some of that.
- [190:46]
Garrison Davis
But I'm going to channel an old.
- [190:48]
Dick Revis
Preacher that I admire tremendously. Jeremiah, am I right? And I'm gonna say.
- [190:57]
Robert Evans
God damn white America. God damn white America.
- [191:07]
Garrison Davis
White America is a liar. I'm sick of the bodies of black.
- [191:17]
Robert Evans
Black and brown people, people being slaughtered in our street.
- [191:21]
Michael Phillips
Hood agreed to be interviewed by Kelly, but the minister soon realized that Fox viewers blamed him for the officer's death, and they threatened vengeance.
- [191:30]
Dick Revis
I mean, after July 7th, man, there was talk about threats. Didn't PD was having to take the kids to school. And it was.
- [191:38]
Michael Phillips
It was absolutely horrible witnessing people die that day, including the sniper. Johnson said impromptu execution via remote control robot deepen Hood's opposition to violence, including state killing. In 2022, he is ordained again, this time as a priest in what is called the old Catholic faith, which accepts many of the doctrines and rites of the Roman Catholic Church, but rejects the doctrine of papal infallibility and authority. Hood began writing to those on death row and then talking and praying with them in person. In 2022, the United States Supreme Court ruled in the Ramirez vs Collier case that condemned prisoners have the right to die in the company of a spiritual advisor. Hood became a companion to the condemned in their last minutes.
- [192:24]
Dick Revis
I began to have people reaching out during that time, you know, and asking me if I would accompany them to the death chamber. And, you know, it's one thing to be willing to have relationships with people who are executed. It's a whole nother thing to be asked to participate in the process. And so since then, I've witnessed or been in the chamber with 10 different guys. So from January of 2023 to now, I've watched 10 different men be executed.
- [193:02]
Robert Smith
By the state Hood attended his first execution when the state of Oklahoma put Scott Eisenberg to death on January 12, 2023. Twenty years earlier, Eisenberg murdered an elderly couple, including a man he bludgeoned to death.
- [193:16]
Dick Revis
My first execution was Scott Eisenberg in Oklahoma.
- [193:20]
Garrison Davis
And he.
- [193:22]
Dick Revis
Scott had a number of things going on, but we were very close. He had a lot of. Of anger issues and I think difficulty controlling his temper and whatnot. And, you know, so the reality was I was very frightened before I went. Went in because I thought Scott was just going to go ballistic. And, you know, to be in that room with someone that goes ballistic, I mean, it's. It's already traumatic enough, as I'm sure you can imagine, without, you know, something like that. But then again, you couldn't. You can't blame them for wanting to, you know, push back and fight for their lives and whatnot. I found myself shaking. Just, you know, my hands and my legs, just terror. I mean, just utterly terrified. And then they open the door, and I was led in, and I saw Scott. And it's incredibly strange to see someone hooked up to machines that look like they're there to support life and yet, you know, that they're there to take his life. And so I wasn't able. I mean, I knew that there was a window on one side. I wasn't able to see through that window because there was a curtain down. And I began to pray with Scott. Scott had asked me to read a number of scriptures, and I did. And I dropped my Bible at one point because I'm shaking so bad. I was having trouble holding it. You know, he notices that I'm shaking. He notices that I'm upset. And he looks at me and tells me everything's going to be okay. And I'm thinking to myself, no, it's not. Like, no, it is not. And I'm thinking, you know, you're going to die, and I'm going to be scarred for life. Everything is not going to be okay. And I went to the scripture in John, chapter 8, where Jesus encounters the adulterous woman. And there's that famous line, famous verse, you who are without sin, cast the first stone. And I read that in the chamber. And one of the lighter moments when we were in there was when I read that, you who are without sin, cast the first stone. I remember Scott looking up and pointing at the executioners and saying, you know, he's talking to y', all like, this is about y'.
- [196:15]
Michael Phillips
All.
- [196:16]
Robert Smith
Hood said that any sense that death by lethal injection is Nonviolent is an illusion.
- [196:22]
Dick Revis
In every lethal injection, I have immediately heard snoring. And what sounds not like, you know, snoring from, you know, that one would have when they sleep or whatever, but more of a gurgling kind of snoring. And, you know, it's. The body responds in a very panicked fashion. And so it's almost like. It's like drowning someone who's completely paralyzed. And I think that that's. I think that's what it's been like every time. I think that there is a level of suffering that is. That is hidden. There's a reason that, again, that it's made to look like a medical procedure, because it does look like a medical procedure. I think it is a con.
- [197:14]
Michael Phillips
Hood found the lethal injections traumatizing, but that did not prepare him for what he witnessed when Alabama began executing prisoners through nitrous hypoxia.
- [197:25]
Dick Revis
I can tell you that as horrible as a lethal injection is, and, yes, it is a con job, I can tell you that what I saw during that nitrogen execution is indescribable. I can tell you that I think I would rather be burned to death than be executed by nitrogen. I mean, it is that bad.
- [197:46]
Michael Phillips
Hood attended the hypoxia suffocation of Kenneth Smith, a contract killer, on January 25, 2024, the first such execution in American history. Smith had been sentenced to death 36 years earlier. Hood said the horrors for him began when he stepped into the death chamber and saw Smith outfitted with a large mass that would deliver the poison gas. Attending this execution actually put Hood's life in jeopardy.
- [198:14]
Dick Revis
I can describe it for Yalls listeners, but the mass which I'm holding right here, a replica, is basically something that is gas netting in the back. It has silicone straps. It's put over the back of someone's head, and it is strapped as tight as possible to try to keep it on. And it looks like a firefighter's mask with sort of a plexiglass plate on the front. And then there's a hose that's going from the firefighter's mask with the plexiglass plate to the nitrogen. And so what ends up happening is they try to pump as much nitrogen as possible through this line. The problem is that these masks don't completely hold the form. I guess is the best way of saying it in, that it's difficult for. For you to get an airtight seal. So the more oxygen that gets in here, the more it's displacing nitrogen. And so the more oxygen that's in here. And obviously there's going to be oxygen in the tube, there's going to be oxygen in the mass before the thing even starts is going to create more suffering. It's going to create a longer process.
- [199:37]
Robert Smith
Hood knew that he would be in a chamber in which poison gas would be released, and he felt obligated to tell his children in advance that he could be harmed. They were terrified, of course, but he felt an obligation to provide Smith company and compassion as well. Again, we remind listeners that what they are about to hear might be upsetting.
- [199:56]
Dick Revis
So by the time we get to the point where they turn the nitrogen on all the witnesses, everybody in the room is like, going, nobody knows what's about to happen because it's never been tried before. And so they turn it on. And Kenny immediately begins to heave back and forth and back and forth over and over. And every time he heaves forward, the back of the mask was strapped to the gurney. So every time he heaves forward, his face is hitting the front of that mask over and over, over and over and over. And so it's like watching someone, like, hit their face against a plate glass window. And it's like his nose and his face is flattening every time he does it. And he begins to shake back and forth and back and forth, heaving up and down. I see spit and saliva and snot and, you know, eye water and all sorts of fluid is coming out of his face. And that fluid begins to build up on the front of the mask, and it begins to drizzle like a waterfall.
- [201:08]
Michael Phillips
Smith convulsed with so much force, prison officials worried his mask might come off, interrupting the execution and possibly killing Hood and maybe others in attendance. A window separated Hood from other witnesses, and the violence of Smith's death caused the commotion.
- [201:25]
Dick Revis
The windows are, like, super thick. I shouldn't have been able to hear anything, but I could hear somebody behind me screaming, stop, stop, stop, stop. Please stop, stop, stop. And it was. It was an absolute nightmare. And Kenny did not die for at least 22 minutes. And it's very possible that he didn't die for a longer period of time. But the state of Alabama declares. They say, oh, you know, he's not breathing. He's dead. Then they push everybody out of the room, and then they bring the doctor in after everybody's left to declare him dead.
- [202:04]
Robert Smith
Hood admits that some of the men he's counseled are capable of unspeakable evil, even after years on death row. But he still recalls Each death he's.
- [202:14]
Dick Revis
Witnessed with pain, I feel morally compromised, horrified. But I, I feel called or pushed to keep going because I think that the more traumatic thing would be to leave these guys alone. Now, in terms of actually seeing it, I think that it's. These images don't leave you. There's nightmares, there's day. I always say that these guys haunt me. They come night after night. You know, I'll see them at the end of my bed. I mean, I mean, just.
- [202:49]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [202:50]
Dick Revis
So trauma is something I've become come to know very well.
- [202:55]
Michael Phillips
In 2019, the United States Supreme Court ruled that prisoners do not have a right to a painless death. When it greenlighted the execution of Russell Buckalew, who had had blood filled tumors in his head, neck and mouth that could have broken open as he was put to death. The highest court seems to have rendered the Eighth Amendment span on cruel and unusual punishment moot.
- [203:19]
Robert Smith
Meanwhile, in recent years, it has not only been states that have enforced the death penalty. Between 1960 and 2019, the federal government carried out only three executions. But in 2020 to early 2021, during the last six months of Donald Trump's first term as president, the Federal government executed 13 men and women. These included Brandon Bernard, who committed a double murder when he was only 18, and another, Lisa Montgomery, who psychologists believed was severely mentally ill and detached from reality at the time that she murdered a pregnant woman and cut the baby from her victim's body in order to raise the child as her own.
- [203:57]
Michael Phillips
Joe Biden, on the other hand, at the end of his presidential term, sought to prevent a similar execution spree. 40 people were on death row, and he commuted the sentence of 37 of them. The remaining three were Zokar Sarnev, the 2013 Boston Marathon bomber, Dylann Roof, who massacred nine members of the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, and Robert Bowers, who killed 11 at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. Back in power, however, Trump has vowed to make the death penalty great again. Anybody murders something in the Capitol, capital.
- [204:37]
Garrison Davis
Punishment, capital capital punishment. If somebody kills somebody in The Capitol, Washington, D.C. we're going to be seeking.
- [204:47]
Michael Phillips
The death penalty, and that's a very strong preventative.
- [204:54]
Robert Smith
Trump's immediate plans aside, the future of the death penalty in the long term is not so certain. According to a 2024 Gallup opinion poll, support for the death penalty has sunk to its lowest level in half a century. Only 53% of Americans favor capital punishment. But that number skews heavily towards older Americans. More than half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 43 oppose the death penalty. And almost 60% of the so called Gen Z, those born between 1997 and 2012 are firmly against the death penalty law Professor Corinna Lane believes that even record low support for the death penalty is exaggerated and that support for capital punishment drops even further when other options are provided to voters.
- [205:38]
Elaine
You know, the the president issued this executive order, a day one executive order. Let's go for the death penalty anytime we can. Let's execute everybody. And one of the things to realize is that the death penalty is dying in this country. For reasons that an executive order cannot fix. People have less confidence in the death penalty. They don't trust the death penalty, nor should they. 200 people have been exonerated from death row and race.
- [206:12]
Michael Phillips
Bouillon agrees.
- [206:13]
Dick Revis
The decline in executions in the United States reflects a broader shift in how society views death penalty. I mean, more states are repealing it, juries are imposing it less often, and public support, while still dividing, has steadily decreased, especially as concerns about wrongful convictions, racial bias and the high costs of capital punishment came to light.
- [206:47]
Michael Phillips
At the Beginning of the 19th century, hangings were public, but they so often went awry and produced such grisly scenes. States moved those executions inside prison yards and sought a more humane alternative. That new method, the electric chair, proved horrifying as well and was deemed unsuitable for general audiences. The supreme court imposed a four year pause in the death penalty beginning in 1972 because of its random application. In 1976, the High Court reauthorized capital punishment. A crisis ensued when a Texas TV reporter sued for the right to televise executions. Horrified at the prospect of the condemned essentially being burned alive in the electric chair in front of a primetime audience, States approved the latest innovation. State killings, death by lethal injection.
- [207:37]
Robert Smith
But throughout this history of execution, insurmountable flaws have remained consistent. The quest for a humane way to kill people on an announced schedule has been futile. Each form of the death penalty has been proven to be violent and cause suffering at great expenditure of public money. And plausibly innocent people have been put to death as the people in charge of punishment have changed execution methods over the years. They've also tried to prevent public backlash to revolting scenes of suffering, which could create the opposition to capital punishment that they fear. Politicians, eager to prove they are tough on crime, have also fought to hide these gruesome spectacles from public view. Nevertheless, Reis Bullion is optimistic that this grim aspect of life in the United States might soon come to an end.
- [208:22]
Dick Revis
More than two thirds of countries have abolished death penalty in law or practice, with only a few countries carrying out the vast majority of executions. And I think the future is one where the death penalty continues to shrink worldwide as values of human rights, dignity and justice without irreversible punishment gain ground.
- [208:52]
Michael Phillips
Until next time.
- [208:53]
Robert Smith
Time.
- [208:53]
Michael Phillips
I'm Michael Phillips.
- [208:54]
Robert Smith
And I'm Stephen Monchelli. Thanks for listening.
- [209:11]
Robert Evans
Am I introducing the podcast? Welcome to the podcast.
- [209:14]
Garrison Davis
This is it Could Happen Here. Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today, I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans. This episode, we're covering the week of October 31st to November 5th. One of the most exciting weeks in politics.
- [209:34]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [209:35]
Garrison Davis
Cause it's Bonfire Night, if you remember the poem. That's right. And that's not the only exciting thing to happen, but also not the only sad thing to happen this week. Because as exciting as Election Day was for people in New York, there was like a looming sadness throughout the day because earlier that morning, obviously, Vice President Dick Cheney passed away. And that was. That was rough. Rough for many people, not rough for many others. But that certainly was a looming. A looming presence over the day. Does anyone have any words to say on the passing of Mr. Cheney?
- [210:13]
Robert Evans
Yeah, I mean, I just want to let everyone in hell know this, too, shall pass. You know, you won't be stuck with him forever. Just try to grin. And, Barrett, I know it's going to be hard for a lot of you, especially Saddam Hussein, but I know you can get past this. You know, he will get reincarnated as a Senate Republican staffer within the next six to eight months. So. So you won't have to put up with him long.
- [210:37]
James Stout
I guess this is also just your reminder that it's a good idea to practice the four essential rules of firearms safety at all times.
- [210:45]
Robert Evans
Don't shoot with Dick Cheney. If you see Dick Cheney while you're hunting quail, run.
- [210:51]
Garrison Davis
Do the kids even know about this now? Oh, the kids know. The kids know.
- [210:57]
Dick Revis
Yeah.
- [210:58]
Garrison Davis
Okay.
- [210:58]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [210:59]
Robert Smith
Yeah.
- [210:59]
James Stout
I'm glad.
- [211:00]
Elaine
I'm glad.
- [211:00]
James Stout
This is deep in the lore, Mia.
- [211:02]
Garrison Davis
Chaney lore has permeated throughout generations of American culture.
- [211:07]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [211:08]
Garrison Davis
When I was a kid, there was, like, a whole thing where we all thought the song Jamie's Got a Gun was Chaney's Got a Gun.
- [211:14]
Robert Evans
Wow.
- [211:15]
Garrison Davis
That made perfect sense because it just.
- [211:18]
James Stout
Lined up with everything you knew about the world.
- [211:20]
Robert Evans
What's Funny about it is that my actual thinking on that shooting hasn't changed since I was a Republican kid. Like when I was a young right winger, I thought, wow, Dick Cheney's so cool. He shot a man and got him to apologize to him. And now as an adult on the left, I still think that's kind of the coolest thing Dick Cheney ever did.
- [211:43]
James Stout
It is a hell of a feat.
- [211:45]
Robert Evans
That man apologized for getting in front of his sights. That's amazing.
- [211:52]
Garrison Davis
Now it is. It is unfortunate that Dick Cheney did not live to see the election of Zoramdani as the mayor of New York City, which happened that would have been funny on Tuesday. Later that day, Zoran has become the first candidate in New York mayoral history to win over a million votes since 1969.
- [212:15]
James Stout
Nice.
- [212:16]
Garrison Davis
This election itself saw over 2 million votes. This is a million more votes than the last New York mayoral election. Huge turnout. Currently as of Wednesday afternoon, Zoron has 50.4% of the vote. Former governor and sexual assault enthusiast Andrew Cuomo, running as an Independent has 41.6%. And the beret wearing Curtis Silwa has 7.1. Not a spoiler candidate in many ways, nor would it be correct to say that all of Silva's votes would have gone to one candidate or another. But even if you do add all of his votes on to disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo's total, Zordon still comes.
- [213:04]
Robert Evans
Out on top, which was something that there was legitimately a lot of question about as to like whether or not will Silwa staying in matter.
- [213:13]
James Stout
Right.
- [213:15]
Robert Evans
And it's, it's a really good sign that it didn't.
- [213:18]
Garrison Davis
It did not Sliwa.
- [213:19]
Dick Revis
So whatever.
- [213:20]
Garrison Davis
No one really knows how to pronounce the name, including in the city. I've. You. You hear it different pronunciations from different people at different times. Sometimes it's slow, sometimes it's Silwa. Siliwa.
- [213:32]
Robert Evans
All I know is he got stabbed on the subway.
- [213:34]
Garrison Davis
Right. Oh, and shot five times in the back of.
- [213:37]
Robert Evans
Five times in the back.
- [213:38]
Garrison Davis
That's right.
- [213:39]
Robert Smith
How did they fail to kill him?
- [213:41]
Garrison Davis
Jesus Christ.
- [213:42]
Robert Evans
It's harder to kill people by shooting them with a handgun than you might think.
- [213:46]
James Stout
Yeah, apparently handgun ballistics are just different.
- [213:49]
Garrison Davis
Yes. And he does have 17 cats. He ran on Republican and the Protect the Protect Animals party. You can have some criticism for. For past ills that, that he has contributed to, but he is certainly makes up for that in some way for being a fascinating character.
- [214:06]
Robert Evans
Yeah, he's a very New York kind.
- [214:08]
Garrison Davis
Of figure and he was the only mayoral candidate to call and congratulate Zoran Mamdani last night. Both Cuomo and Mayor Adams did not call Mom Donnie. But Curtis did, which is kind of beautiful. It's kind of beautiful.
- [214:27]
Robert Evans
He's a classy man. You don't get to wear a red beret like that unless you have some manners.
- [214:32]
James Stout
The British Parachute Regiment would beg to disagree about having manners and wearing red hats.
- [214:37]
Robert Evans
But no, he's. I my head cannon now is that he is the British paratrooper regiment.
- [214:42]
James Stout
They just drop him in with 17 cats and he. And he starts milling.
- [214:47]
Robert Evans
Immediately he saves that fucking mall in Nairobi or wherever it was.
- [214:51]
James Stout
Tell you what, the Argentines wouldn't have fucked with the Falklands if Curtis had been there.
- [214:56]
Robert Evans
Now with all those cats, that's where.
- [214:58]
James Stout
He'S going now that he's being banished like piss.
- [215:01]
Robert Evans
Guys couldn't take this.
- [215:04]
James Stout
Just an island of cat litter.
- [215:08]
Dick Revis
Yeah.
- [215:08]
Garrison Davis
Staten island, which you're.
- [215:12]
Robert Evans
You're a real New Yorker now, Gary. You shat on Staten island, which is.
- [215:17]
Garrison Davis
The only borough that went for Cuomo where he was up 33 points.
- [215:21]
James Stout
That was very funny.
- [215:22]
Garrison Davis
Mamdani won every other bureau. Up 20 in Brooklyn, up 10 in Manhattan, a 5 in Queens, and 11 in the Bronx.
- [215:30]
Robert Evans
From what this should tell everyone everywhere in the country about what is possible in politics, even in times as dark as this is that he was what, 8% a year ago?
- [215:39]
James Stout
6%.
- [215:40]
Garrison Davis
6% in January. 6% in January.
- [215:44]
Robert Evans
And he won. He didn't just eke it out because there were a shitload of guys. This isn't like an Arnold thing where everybody's on the fucking ballot and it's like a crazy cartoon election. He legitimately came from nowhere and won.
- [215:57]
Garrison Davis
The most votes for a mayoral candidate state in almost 50 years.
- [216:01]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [216:02]
Garrison Davis
Nearly reaching the. The like the vote totals in this election for like a presidential election in the city.
- [216:07]
James Stout
Yeah. Very impressive. For like a mid cycle, an off cycle election, turnout wise.
- [216:12]
Dick Revis
Yep.
- [216:13]
Garrison Davis
Specifically, he won a whole bunch of votes that he did not gain in the primary among some, like, black and Latino voters. You can see that in the turnout at like the Bronx.
- [216:25]
Robert Evans
And these people aren't overwhelmingly, at least at this stage, folks who have been convinced of every aspect of ideology that Zoran has ever put out there. People who looked at who was available are like, this guy seems like he genuinely wants to do something.
- [216:40]
Garrison Davis
Yeah.
- [216:40]
Robert Evans
And they listen to his specific policies. They're not paying attention to the fact that he quoted Eugene V. Debs. They're listening to his policies on like Creating municipal grocery stores and stuff. Right.
- [216:51]
Garrison Davis
It's about affordability, not ideology. And Zoron's strict focus on affordability. Not running a campaign that like falls back on fear. Not running a campaign about foreign policy when you're in fucking New York City. A strict focus on affordability was the key to winning this campaign.
- [217:07]
Robert Evans
A strict focus on affordability while not pretending not to have the ideology. Which is also really noteworthy. Right. Where he's still, he's still. He isn't. He's not like talking around it, right?
- [217:19]
Garrison Davis
No, he's, he's. He's not apologizing or hiding the fact that he's a democratic socialist.
- [217:23]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [217:25]
Garrison Davis
And this produced some super interesting results if you, if you refer back to the last election, 2024. And in everyone bemoaning like how. How come young men are. Are so politically lost? Why are they all going so far to the right? 68% of men age 18 to 29 going away. Mamdani. 66% of men 30 to 40. 45% of men 45 to 65. Among women 18 to 29 years old, 84% mom. Fucking Saddam numbers.
- [218:03]
James Stout
Hilarious.
- [218:04]
Garrison Davis
This is like bath party election numbers.
- [218:07]
Robert Evans
Like women actually. Saddam Hussein Alta Creedi did in fact vote, but he went for. He broke hard for Cuomo. Honestly, at the end, it was the sex crimes that did it.
- [218:17]
James Stout
For compel them. Yeah.
- [218:18]
Robert Evans
Did vote for Sliwa though. That was kind of weird. I'm going to be honest with you. We're all trying to parse that one out.
- [218:23]
James Stout
It's a cat thing.
- [218:25]
Dick Revis
Yeah.
- [218:25]
Garrison Davis
Like I said, like, not hiding his political inspirations in any way. Quoted Eugene Debs 10 seconds into his victory speech. Immediately you understand, like, oh, this guy's like playing. He knows what's up.
- [218:38]
Robert Evans
Eugene V. Debs, the socialist who ran for president from prison.
- [218:42]
James Stout
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes.
- [218:44]
Robert Evans
For to know who Eugene V. Debs is, like, arguably the most radical national candidate who has ever existed in this country.
- [218:51]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [218:52]
Garrison Davis
And his speech was extremely poetic. It got a very strong positive reaction from the people who I watched this with in Bushwick, which was the district that was the most pro Maktani out of the entire electoral mathematicity. But he started by talking about how power has been kept out of the hands. Hands of working people. Right. The hands that keep the city going. By lifting boxes, by gripping the handlebars of delivery bikes and collecting burn scars from cooking food. Quote. Over the last 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater. Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it. The future is in our hands, unquote. The whole speech was kind of a rife with little like metaphors and allegories like that. It was, it was, it was very cute. He went on to discuss how the campaign toppled a political dynasty and gave one of the most like fine tuned disses I've ever seen. Quote, I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life, which is a.
- [219:54]
Robert Evans
Phenomenal quote, but I hope I never have to say his name again or.
- [219:59]
Garrison Davis
But let tonight be the last time I utter his name. Only the best in private life is, is astounding.
- [220:07]
James Stout
Yeah, ye.
- [220:08]
Robert Evans
I mean he's basically. This is like he's not the originator of this particular kind of diss. It goes back a while, but the gist of it is like everyone's mom, be a family man.
- [220:18]
Garrison Davis
Get out, go away. Repeatedly, Mamdani has, has used the word mandate to describe this election and the results. Quote, New York has delivered a mandate for change, a mandate for a new kind of politics, mandate for a city we can afford and a mandate for a government that delivers exactly that. I'm going to play a short clip here. Thank you to the next generation of New Yorkers who refused to accept that the promise of a better future was a relic of the past. You showed that when politics speaks to you without condescension, we can usher in a new and era of leadership. We will fight for you because we are you. Or as we say on Steinway, anaminkum wailekum.
- [221:16]
Robert Evans
The Arabic there. Wild, wild that we've moved this far in New York that wins you an election. Like that didn't win him the election but like they really tried the 911 shit. Rudy Giuliani posted today a crude photoshop of his own face in the fires of the twin of the burning Twin Towers. Yeah, we forgot written across it and that did not. None of that shit did anything.
- [221:44]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [221:45]
Garrison Davis
The last month of the campaign against Mamdani, whether that's from people like Bill Ackman, Bloomberg or Cuomo's actual team, has, has used what people have been calling the 911 card incessantly playing clips of 911 with like Zoron, like emblazoned like over over top, playing clips from Hasan talking about 9 11. But the Islamophobia that the Cuomo campaign has resorted to as a last ditch effort to stop Mamdani has been despicable. And the fact that this did not scare Mamdani into like hiding or like restricting that part of himself is incredibly admirable.
- [222:21]
James Stout
Yeah, but it wasn't just 9 11, right. Like you said, it was the broad Islam like they, they deployed as they always do, like every urban Britain is, is now like the caliphate. Like this that, that exists only in the American conservative mind. And it failed.
- [222:36]
Garrison Davis
Which is good specifically for the, for a lot of the speech. It was about juxtaposing like how we used to have good things in the past. Like we, we had this idea that like good things now are always out of reach and juxtaposing this like idea of like hope or, or, or like past exceptionalism that, that we just don't feel like we have access to anymore and, and showing that if you actually involve young people we can actually do, do good things in our city now. And I really liked the line about like politics that speaks to you without condescension and how much this campaign was like ran by and, and for, you know, young candidates and young voters. Soren went on to thank the people who have been forgotten by the politics of our city and how they've supported his campaign. Quote, Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas Sengalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses, Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties, unquote. And he went on to mention the kind of people that this campaign is about. And towards the end of that section he talked about the hunger strike that he participated in four years ago in order to win debt relief for cab drivers. And it's about people like Richard the taxi driver I went on a 15 day hunger strike with outside of city.
- [223:53]
Elaine
Hall.
- [223:57]
Garrison Davis
Who still has to drive his cab seven days a week. My brother, we are in City hall now. That is, that is the energy of like the campaign and the city right now, like that, that sort of, of framing and that's the energy that people are like carrying through.
- [224:17]
Robert Evans
I saw among the right wing fever sponse responses to this, Mike Cernovich taking a clip from the election night party where one of the people who was attending Zoran's party made a comment about how like white people need to get on board with the idea that like our culture is multiculturalism in this country. Right? Like it's not anything else. Like that's like what has made America. And Mike did not react well to that. I can't imagine a declaration of war.
- [224:49]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, but no, like especially in New York, out of like anywhere in the country, like especially New York, like the culture is made through the mix of immigrants that have built this city. And this is something that Zoran discussed throughout the speech. Zoran went on to thank the 100,000 campaign volunteers and. And specifically how their efforts, quote, eroded the cynicism that has come to define our politics. I liked that line. And then he asked New Yorkers to breathe this moment in. Quote, we have held our breath for longer than we know. We have held it in anticipation of defeat, held it because the air has been knocked out of our lungs too many times to count. Held it because we cannot afford to exhale. Thanks to all of those who've sacrificed so much, we are breathing in the air of a city that has been reborn. There are many who thought this day would never come, who feared we would be condemned only to a future of less, with every election consigning us to simply more of the same. And there are others who see politics today as too cruel for the flame of hope to still burn. New York. We have answered those fears, unquote. And while we cast our ballots alone, we chose hope to get hope over tyranny, hope over big money and small ideas, hope over despair. We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible. And we won because we insisted that no longer would puzzle politics be something that is done to us. Now it is something that we do. Standing before you, I think of the words of Jawaharlal Nehru. A moment comes, but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new new, when an age ends and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. Tonight, we have stepped out from the old into the new. The line about politics not being something that's done to you. Yeah.
- [227:09]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [227:10]
Garrison Davis
That really outlines how politics has felt in this country for. For as basically as long as I can remember. He then outlined what his central agenda to tackle the cost of living crisis is, including freezing the rent for more than 2 million rent symbolized tenants making buses fast and free and delivering universal childcare across the city, saying, quote, this will be an age where New Yorkers expect from their leaders a bold vision of what we will achieve, rather than a list of excuses for what we are too timid to attempt, unquote. Let's go on a quick break, and we will come back to talk a little bit more about the election. All right, we are back. During the second half of this speech, Xuron turned to address Donald Trump. Right. This looming thing across politics nationwide, but specifically New York, as Trump has threatened to start to with New York even more if Zoron is elected. And. And people in New York know this. And. And about halfway through, Zoron addressed Trump directly, which we will get to in a sec. But before he directly talked to Trump in the speech, Zoron laid out what types of people the city government will be focusing on protecting from Trump's division and hate. In this new age we make for ourselves, we will refuse to allow those who traffic in division and hate to pit us against one another. In this moment of political darkness, New York will be the light. Here we believe in standing up for those we love. Whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone else with their back against the wall, your struggle is ours, too. Specifically, I like this idea of, in the darkened political moment this United States is in New York and in the Zoron administration and how that reflects. New York in general, though, will be a beacon for. For the rest of the country. And naming, like the trans community is like. The second group mentioned there was heavily appreciated in the Bushwick Trans Watch party that I was at. Zoron went on to say that, quote, no more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election. This new age will be defined by a competence and a compassion that have too long been placed at odds with one another. We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve and no concern too small for it to care about. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent to redefine reality and to convince our neighbors that this new age is something that should frighten them. As has often occurred, the billionaire class has sought to convince those making $30 an hour that their enemies are those earning $20 an hour. They want the people to fight amongst ourselves so that we remain distracted from the work of remaking a long, broken system. Together, we will usher in a generation of change. And if we embrace this brave new course, rather than fleeing from it, we can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves. I think this whole section, there's something very important, and this is. This has been something that's been very consistent about throughout Mob Dani's entire campaign, which is there's been on the left for a very, very long time a just interminable, intractable conflict between this idea of, like, purely focusing on class politics or talking about race and. But I think what Montame is doing here has been very effective, right? Is you can just do both and in fact, as the left, over the last sort of census, kind of of the re. Emergence of this kind of left in, like, 2015, 2016, as it's gone on, it's gotten less white, it's gotten more diverse, it's gotten more multicultural, and it's been able to fuse these two things together, and it's been able to fuse that with just, you know, like, being very, very openly pro trans. And like, there was, you know, there was also a pretty big response that I saw from people talking about the fact that he specifically mentioned that it was black women who were being fired by the Trump administration. Right. And you can just do all these things together and it works. And it's worked the whole time. And refusing to pit these things against each other. Like refusing to pit affordability against trans rights. Refusing to pit. Yes. You know, like, refusing to pit. The politics of, like, defending. And this is something that, like, fucking Bernie is terrible at.
- [232:12]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [232:12]
Garrison Davis
Where, like, Bernie, like, has been, like, has a whole rant about how Trump has been. Right on. Like, we had to reduce immigration. Right. And you don't have to do that. You can be pro immigrant, you can be pro trans, you can be pro black women, you can be, you know, and. And you can also want everything that costs less. And you can be in favor of the fact that the US Is a. Is a multicultural society and can only function as one. And it's. It's a winning form of politics. And I'm. I'm glad we're finally getting there. Yeah. And it will be great if this New York City as a beacon can actually shine and not get stifled out in these. In these next four years. Because Zoran is. Unless. Unless. Unless things happen. Zoron will be the mayor for the remainder of the Trump term. Right. Like this is. He will be mayor after second Trump administration is over, barring any unfortunate incident. Make sure your private security is really good and loyal.
- [233:09]
James Stout
Well, you have a NYPD detail, which.
- [233:13]
Garrison Davis
Get your own guys.
- [233:15]
Ryan
Yeah.
- [233:16]
James Stout
It's. It'll be fun. But it also, it means like, like from. From, I guess, a national perspective, it is likely that Mamdani will become, like, the enemy, number one of the Trump administration, where they're probably Newsom or Prischka are now.
- [233:33]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [233:34]
James Stout
Like, it's. It is easier because of the obvious bigotry that underlies a lot of the Republican Party to go after a brown dude.
- [233:42]
Garrison Davis
Yes.
- [233:43]
James Stout
And that is what they are going to do. And they're going to use brown.
- [233:46]
Garrison Davis
Democratic Socialist.
- [233:47]
James Stout
Yeah. Who stands up for trans people and Migrants. And, like, you saw how acceptable Islamophobia is in Cuomo's campaign. Right. Like, he'd just go on to every mainstream network and say shit. That is fucking disgusting.
- [234:00]
Garrison Davis
Yeah.
- [234:01]
James Stout
And so we should prepare ourselves for four more years of that, I guess. And I think he does a very good job of repudiating that. And obviously the electorate in New York did, too. But that is going to be what we are going to see as a result of this.
- [234:14]
Garrison Davis
Well, no, and like so much of the resistance to Zordon, it came from this idea that if he wins, that means that this is going to be what people point to as a future for politics, specifically Democratic politics. And a lot of people wanted to stop him because they knew that's going to happen. If he is in control of the biggest city in the country as the Democratic mayor, that's going to be influential for what Democratic politics will be after they got completely clobbered last year. And he's showing that a different type of politics is possible even. Even within the Democratic Party. And that's. That's true. Like altering what the party is fundamentally.
- [234:49]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [234:50]
Garrison Davis
And I think it's. It is. It is a cool little side note that Zoron voted for himself on the Working Families Party line and, in fact, not the Democratic Party line, because of how the New York mayoral ballots work. I'm gonna play one more clip from this speech of Zoron specifically addressing Trump. It's going to be a teeny bit longer, and I think we'll shorten some of the applause bits because some of the applause sections go on for quite long. But this will be the last clip. After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him. And if there is any. Any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power. This is not only how we stop Trump, it's how we stop the next one. So, Donald Trump, since I know you're watching, I have four words for you. Turn the volume up. We will hold bad landlords to account because the Donald Trumps of our city have grown far too comfortable taking advantage of their tenants. We will put an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks. We will stand alongside unions and expand labor protection, because we know, just as Donald Trump does, that when working people have ironclad rights, the bosses who seek to extort them become very small indeed. New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants, and as of tonight, led by an immigrant. So hear me, President Trump, when I say this. To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.
- [237:07]
Robert Smith
The shit rocks.
- [237:08]
Garrison Davis
It's good. It's good. It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool for a mayor. Alex, to say that it didn't manage.
- [237:16]
James Stout
To get in the New York is the Ankara of America, which I was hoping for, but otherwise great.
- [237:22]
Robert Evans
That's Eric Adams bit.
- [237:23]
Dick Revis
Yeah.
- [237:24]
James Stout
Yeah. Sad day for Turkey today, I guess.
- [237:27]
Garrison Davis
On an actual important note, I think.
- [237:29]
Dick Revis
It is really important that all of.
- [237:31]
Garrison Davis
This energy against Trump, right, and against all the shit that he's doing that's so hideously unpopular, it's starting to be channeled into politics that can actually defeat him and that are actually good that he's talking about, specifically the fact that you have to destroy the conditions that created him so they don't create the next one. Like, this fucking rocks. This is good.
- [237:48]
Elaine
Good.
- [237:49]
James Stout
Yeah. Like, it. For so long, like, for. I mean, most of the 2016-2020 period. And. And for a lot of this year, we've seen so many people turn the obvious disgust that people have of what Trump is doing into grifts, into supporting a politics which fundamentally allowed for the conditions we are in now. Right. And to see someone repudiate that and to see more than a million people turn out to support that.
- [238:13]
Dick Revis
Yep.
- [238:13]
James Stout
Is fantastic. Like, it's genuinely hopeful.
- [238:16]
Garrison Davis
It's something like Zoran has, like, acknowledged. It's like, this is not, like, the end. Right. This is a means. Yeah, not the means either. Like, this is this. This is a means to an end. And this whole campaign started as he's referred to it, as a, quote, unquote, electoral project by the New York City dsa. Like, this was largely an experiment, and an experiment that grew wildly, wildly, kind of out of what I assume they kind of saw it as in the earlier. In the earlier days, and now they're in this, like, moment, and they have to. They have to keep rolling with it. But it is. It is an experiment for a. A version of doing this. And he knows this is not, like, the only method or tactic to be utilized, but as. As an experiment, I think it's so far pretty well done. Now, Zoron closes speech by calling to chart a new path as bold as the campaign has already been saying that conventional wisdom would claim that he is far from the perfect candidate. Quote, I am young, despite my best efforts to grow Older. I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this. And yet, if tonight teaches us anything, it is that convention has held us back. We have bowed at the altar of caution. We have paid a mighty price. Too many working people cannot recognize themselves in our party, and too many among us have turned to the right for answers to why they've been left behind. We will leave mediocrity in our past. No longer will we have to open a history book for proof that Democrats can dare to be great. Our greatness will be anything but abstract. Unquote. And he concludes by saying that the greatness will be felt by rent stabilized tenants who will wake up knowing their rent hasn't soared, by grandparents who can afford to stay in their home and whose grandchildren live nearby because the cost of childcare is not driving them out of the city. And by the single mothers who don't need to rush their kids to school because they can commute to work on a fast bus. Quote, Most of all, it will be felt by each New Yorker when the city they love finally loves them back, unquote. The stuff about, like, worshiping at the altar of caution for, like, the past. Yeah, the past. Like 20. More, more than 20, but especially the past, like, 20 years of, like, Democrat politics. And yeah, how he is also recognizing that, like, this is. This could mark a fundamental shift in what the Democratic Party actually is, because the people, Democrats included, who've been trying to stop this have failed miserably so far, putting tens of millions of dollars into a campaign to. To try to crush. Crush this version of what the future of New York Democrat politics is. And more people since 1969 showed up to deny that future. That's all I have for Zoran right now. It's literally, you know, less than 24 hours after the election. But this was not just a New York City mayoral election. There were. There were other races, including other other things in New York. There was a Prop 1amendment to the state constitution to retroactively authorize the winter sports facilities on Mount Than Hovenberg, which is protected forest land and would require the state add 2,500 acres of newly protected land elsewhere in the Adironak. That's how I'm saying it. Adirondack Mountains.
- [241:42]
James Stout
Yeah, Adirondack, which was passed.
- [241:45]
Garrison Davis
And this allows them to continue to build and maintain the winter sports facility. Propositions two through six were New York City charter amendments. Two to four were housing reform proposals to fast track the approval process for affordable Housing and simplify zoning reviews and establish an affordable housing appeals board. All of these passed. These will limit the ability of the city council to control and slow down housing development and empower the mayor specifically to build more affordable units faster. And Prop 5, which also passed, creates a new digital map of the city. The only prop to fail, which was number six, was to move local elections to be in line with presidential elections on that four year basis. Basically the ballot that Zoron filled out himself was the one that passed for all of these, all of these proposals.
- [242:33]
James Stout
Yeah. You get, they call it a coattails effect in political science. Right. Like the idea that the people announced.
- [242:38]
Garrison Davis
His ballot that morning. He specifically did not. He, he, he, he did. And he didn't even announce it. Like a journalist asked him what he was voting on. He, he specifically did not advocate for any of these or, or try to dissuade anyone from, from any of these before the election.
- [242:53]
James Stout
Yeah, for sure. But you aligned politically electorate, right. A relatively progressive in American terms, electorate coming out to vote for him. Who will look at these things and say that seems to make sense with the way I see the world.
- [243:06]
Garrison Davis
Absolutely. Democrat Abigail Spanberger won the governor of Virginia flipping blue. Jay Jones, a Democrat candidate for Virginia AG also beat the Republican incumbent. This was after a month of attacks for a series of text messages from 2022 where J. Jones said that if certain Republican delegates died, he would quote, go to their funerals to piss on their graves, unquote, and wished for the hypothetical deaths of Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert's children, quote. Only when people feel pain personally, do they move on policy. I mean, do I think Todd and Jennifer are evil and that they're breeding little fascists? Yes, unquote. That's also not reaching for hypothetical deaths like he did in a call with a, with another Republican politician. And then after the call they continued texting about it. So the proof is in these texts. And he has, he has admitted this and basically he was like, yeah, if these people's like children were to get killed in a mass shooting, maybe their opinions on guns would change. That's essentially what he's expressing there. And then he, he also, so he also was quoted in these leaked text messages as saying, quote, three people, two bullets. Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert, Hitler and Pol Pot. Gilbert gets two bullets to the head. Spoiler put Gilbert in the crew.
- [244:34]
Elaine
Sorry, I.
- [244:37]
Garrison Davis
Think not just, not just.
- [244:39]
Michael Phillips
As an elected official, as an Attorney.
- [244:41]
James Stout
General, someone going to be a cop that you put in the text message.
- [244:46]
Garrison Davis
Spoilers put Gilbert in the Crew with the two worst people you know and he receives both bullets every time. It's insane.
- [244:56]
James Stout
OPSEC hero.
- [244:58]
Garrison Davis
But that is the new attorney general. That's the new Democrat Attorney General of Virginia who the right has been attacking for quite but for relentlessly the past month.
- [245:09]
James Stout
Because you really up if you can't like no, if you can't run attacks on that guy and you still lose.
- [245:17]
Garrison Davis
All of those jokes about the wine moms in the suburbs like wanting blood and like they're looking at this and going oh hell yeah. Yeah, give me four more bullets we'll put in this guy. It's pretty crazy. It's, it's, it's pretty astonishing. Maine voted no 63% on a voter restriction measure. Voters extended the Democrat Pennsylvania Supreme Court and the California redistricting measure or proposition passed with 63.8%. James?
- [245:47]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [245:48]
Garrison Davis
Do you have stuff on this?
- [245:48]
James Stout
Yeah. So Prop 50 in California. California. It was like a one issue ballot, right. You said the Prop 50 this would temporarily redistrict. I think people maybe have not been often it gets missed. And this is temporarily redistricting California until re establishing the nonpartisan committee that does districting in 2031 for the 2032 those districts will come back or they will return to a non partisan districting in 2032. This is one of the most expensive propositions in state history. 120 million was spent in favor, 44 million against. There was also outside money. Newsom already called on New York, Illinois and other Democrat majority seems to do the same.
- [246:35]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [246:36]
James Stout
It's going to likely remove about five Republican seats or those Republicans are going to struggle.
- [246:44]
Dick Revis
Right.
- [246:45]
James Stout
One of them would be San Diego's Mountain Empire and East county seat which is currently the 48th. That seat has been redistricted a few times. Right. It's moved around. It's currently Darrell ISS seat. In response, California Republicans have already filed a lawsuit. Suit was filed by Harmy Dillon's law firm.
- [247:05]
Robert Evans
Yay.
- [247:06]
Dick Revis
Yay.
- [247:07]
James Stout
So friend of the pie Dylan is in the Trump administration now.
- [247:12]
Robert Evans
But yeah, Dylan is in the Trump administration and occasionally my inbox making threats.
- [247:18]
James Stout
Fantastic. Great. It was Dylan's law firm that, that filed the case. Right. The case has claimed that California drew the new lines to quote specifically favor Hispanic voters which is a similar claim to the Louisiana versus Calais. I think it's Calais. There's where they say it here case which is currently before the Supreme Court which the Supreme Court seems to be suggesting it might be, it might be amenable to this argument.
- [247:48]
Garrison Davis
Right.
- [247:49]
James Stout
That the Consideration of race in redistricting is discriminatory. Yesterday, Trump truth, I'm quoting here, the unconstitutional redistricting vote in California is a giant scam that partisan block capitals, as is characteristic, the rest is sporadically capitalized. I'm going back to the quote now in the entire process, in particular the voting itself is rigged. All, quote, mail in ballots where the Republicans in that state are shut out. It's under very serious legal and criminal review. Stay tuned. Yeah, you know, fairly predictable. We talked about it last week. It's not entirely possible for me to pass out that, that second sentence, but I think we can see what direction is pushing in. Right. This was predictable that this was going to happen. And we'll keep you updated on it. Also predictable that we would have to pivot to ads again, which is what we're going to do now.
- [249:00]
Garrison Davis
And we are back.
- [249:03]
James Stout
Little bit of immigration news this week as always, according to reporting this actually last week, but we didn't have time for last week. According to reporting by cnn, Trump claimed he was quote, very much opposed to his own administration's immigration raid on a Hyundai plant in Georgia, which obviously this is what he's saying to try and get that foreign direct investment back in Georgia. Right. Because it looks very much like Georgia is going to pay pretty heavily for that raid. Unfortunately, another man lost his life when fleeing ICE officers last week. He seems to have left a car that he was in attempted to cross a freeway where he was fatally struck truck by another car. Yeah, that's the second time this has happened this year. Texas has signed an agreement with the federal government to allow local DPS officers to operate as ICE officers or technically to operate under the authority of ICE officers under the 287G program. So this is not the first law enforcement agency in Texas to do this. Lots of local agencies had. But the DPS is statewide.
- [250:05]
Garrison Davis
Right.
- [250:05]
James Stout
So this would, this would include offices of the Texas Highway Patrol has 5,000 employees. It will make Texas a markedly more hostile place for migrants. The authority allows warrantless detention under loosely limited, loosely phrased supervision by an ICE officer. Right. So it allows Texas cops to detain or question people who they suspect of being in the United States without documentation here in San Diego. San Diego's border Patrol sector released a video with I think it was like I'll have to check what song. It was like some cringe kind of pop punk soundtrack of the dynamiting of land west of the Hakumba Wilderness. This is likely the construction that saw many environmental and cultural protections waived by DHS Secretary Nome earlier this year. Right. And we're. So we're seeing the beginning of what that looks like. And what that looks like here is just a very unique landscape. Anyone I know? Some people who listen came out to Hukumbra a couple of years ago to help out. Like, it's an extremely unique sort of high desert landscape and it's currently being dynamited. Right. These are the areas where there were little gaps in the border wall because construction there is very hard and the way that they're going ahead with construction is blowing stuff up, up. Finally, on the immigration beat, a case regarding conditions in the Broadview facility, which is in Chicago, until earlier this year, it was only for very short stays, like not for 24 hour stays, has revealed some of the horrific conditions inside the facility. It confirmed something I've heard from multiple migrants who have been detained all over the US which is that ICE is using the threat of longer stays in poor conditions to get people to sign deportation paperwork, work. Often it's literally in the overcrowded rooms where they're sleeping and staying. Right? Like at any point you can just walk up to it and sign your name and you will presumably be removed from those conditions and placed into deportation flight as soon as possible. Reading directly from the lawsuit here, quote. People are forced to attempt to sleep for days, or sometimes weeks on plastic chairs or on the filthy concrete floor. They are denied sufficient food and water. They cannot shower. They are denied soap, hygiene items and menstrual products, and they have no way to clean themselves. They are often denied a change of clothes. Continuing my quote here, the temperatures are extreme and uncomfortable. Most nights are freezing cold, yet only some receive a thin foil blanket, sweater or sweatpants to try to retain warmth. The lights are typically on all night. People have also reported being denied water by agents. There being no running water in the places where they are held, and very little food. We've reported on these conditions before. Some of this is standard, right? Lights on all night, freezing cold. You only get a very thin blanket. That has been the case. That was the case throughout the Biden administration. Right. They call these places the icebox, both in English and in Spanish. This has always been. The conditions people have been held in in these facilities have always been inhumane. But some of this is particularly bad. People in Broadview reported being so crowded they could not extend their legs.
- [253:17]
Dick Revis
Jesus Christ.
- [253:18]
James Stout
Yeah. So they had to sit like sort of fetal position. They couldn't sit down, extend their legs. Right. Let alone sleep disgustingly unclean. Conditions they have. Lots of people have reported paperwork not being able. In the language that they read and write. Bathrooms there are not private. And the lawsuit alleges that people of other genders could see each other using the bathroom room, which, which is pretty disgusting. I've linked to the. The lawsuit. You can read it if you want to.
- [253:48]
Garrison Davis
Ter. Rocky Chas.
- [254:07]
Robert Evans
Ah, music to my ears.
- [254:09]
Garrison Davis
Oh, boy.
- [254:10]
Dick Revis
Okay.
- [254:10]
Garrison Davis
Abrupt, abrupt shift in tone. So we got a little bit more details on the sort of partial agreement that Trump and the Chinese government have sort of come to that has staved off some of the most disastrous of the new trade war elements. Both sides seem to have gotten rid of the fees from ships both docking at their ports and also on like the sort of complicated shipbuilding stuff we talked about last year. The US has paused the. The thing we talked about last week where they were. They were using the foreign entity list to do anything that was like, like controlled. That was like 40% or more controlled by a thing on the foreign entity list couldn't be traded with. The US Is backing off on that for a year. China's agreed to buy more soybeans. There's also some discussion of China buying more energy products. But this is one of these things that we just. We have no idea what that is. It's possible by the time you're listening to this, there will be information. All we have is buy more energy. And the last thing that Trump said that didn't seem to be part of the negotiations between him and the Chinese government per se, but were definitely part of negotiations that have been going on between, between Trump and his Cabinet, was that that there's going to be restrictions on AI chip exports. Although exactly what is not known. All Trump said was, quote, the most advanced. We will not let anybody have them other than the United States. What this seems to be, and again, everyone is kind of murkily cobbling together whatever information they have. What it seems to be is Trump stopped Nvidia from selling its like, most advanced AI grade chips called Blackwell to China, which was. Which Nvidia has been massively lobbying for because they need to expand their market to continue the giant bubble that they've accumulated. Trump has stopped them. It's unclear whether this is going to be made into formal policy or if Trump is just going to personally intervene every time a CEO asks him to do this. But, yeah, we also have. So today recording November 5th is the start of the Supreme Court case against the tariffs. I think it's worth noting that, that this court case against the Tariffs. It's framed as like, a lot of small businesses brought this lawsuit and they did. But also the reason it's gotten to the Supreme Court is because they're being backed by a huge player in the conservative legal machine. Almost the entire thing is being funded.
- [256:35]
Dick Revis
And paid for by the Liberty justice.
- [256:37]
Garrison Davis
Center, which is, it's a kind of libertarian right wing legal thing backed by like the Walton family and the Koch network. And this is, I think, one of the most direct and interesting actual oppositional moves we've seen from this wing of the libertarian business wing of the party, which is very, very pissed off at the tariffs. We've seen a whole bunch of amicus curi briefs from the American Anti Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute and a whole bunch of other right wing think tanks who are extremely angry about this. We don't know exactly how it's going to go, but the initial arguments do not seem to be going well for the Trump administration. So that'll be unfolding and we'll report on it more as, as we know more. It's, this is literally recording actually the first day of trials. So. And finally, I'm going to close on a genuinely deeply baffling piece of news, which is that the day before the election in New York, Greg Abbott posted that there would be a 100% tariff on anyone moving to New York after the election.
- [257:39]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [257:39]
James Stout
How does that work?
- [257:40]
Robert Evans
Isn't it moving to Texas from New York?
- [257:42]
Garrison Davis
New York? Oh, I thought it was to New York. To me, it looked like moving to New York as well. I mean, it's certainly unclear because this does not seem like a policy proposal and it seems more like a post. It seems like something just. It's just a post. It's someone who's posting through it. Because this is moving from moving from.
- [258:00]
Robert Evans
New York to Texas.
- [258:02]
Garrison Davis
Yeah.
- [258:02]
Robert Evans
Yeah. Anyone moving from New York to Texas.
- [258:05]
Garrison Davis
Interesting. I don't know. Tariffs are just post now.
- [258:09]
Robert Evans
I, I don't. That's not like a thing that there's law around you being able to do.
- [258:14]
Garrison Davis
No, it's, it's so unconstitutional. I think it's just a post. I, I don't think it is anything like is.
- [258:19]
James Stout
Yeah, I mean, evidently it is a post.
- [258:21]
Garrison Davis
I think the interesting thing about it is, like, is the way in which tariffs have come to be seen in the Republican mind as like, this is something you do to people you're mad at, which is very new development in. This is, this is a, this is a pure Trump 2 phenomena. Effectively. Absolutely.
- [258:37]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [258:38]
Robert Evans
A marker of how intensely they're paying attention to this election. Like, I mean, Abbott's said doing this because I'm sure he. It'll show up, shore up his local popularity. But it's a marker of like a change that has been going on that, that has been really like supercharged in the Trump era of. No, no, you can't have local politics. Like, it's, it's all national politics. And any kind of vote at a state or local level goes against whatever the party wants is something to be punished. Like, even if it's 2,000 miles away. And that is, that hasn't been as dominant in US Politics as it has been recently. We should probably talk a little bit about Texas's election night because that was also pretty consequential. There were 17 ballot measures passed by the Texas legislature earlier this year by a 2/3 majority. And the way Texas law works is that once the legislature votes for a ballot measure to 2/3 majority, it becomes a constitutional amendment after a simple majority of voters on a ballot support it. And there were 17 measures on the ballot in Texas, which is wild. Very few states add constitutional amendments that the rate Texas does. And all of them passed, which is nuts. And some of them are like, like, fine. There was like one to create like a $3 billion fund for dementia research with, like, which is like, whatever. Nobody's got a problem with that. Really. Some questions about implementation maybe, but there's some absolutely bug fuck nuts stuff here. Proposition 13 raised the homestead exemption from $100,000 to $140,000. It was passed by about 80% of voters. This lowers the taxable value of a home, which reduces overall tax bills on your primary residence. Per an article in the Houston Chronicle, the amendments will be especially felt by elderly or disabled Texans who are poised to receive a separate tax, a separate break that brings their total property tax exemptions to 200,000. As a result, roughly half of seniors and people with disabilities living in Harris and Bexar counties will no longer pay any school property taxes.
- [260:48]
James Stout
Jesus.
- [260:50]
Robert Evans
I should have to say how, like, bad that is for Texas schools and in general this. A lot of these ballot measures were about making heavy cuts and making it impossible to raise new revenue. The cuts that are just in these ballot measures are going to cost the state about $4 billion over the next two years. Right? But that's not all that was done. Several of the bills that were passed banned the potential to create new taxes. Right. So it is now illegal in Texas to create taxes on capital gains or taxes on the growth of Assets like property and stocks or taxes on inheritance and estate taxes. Taxes on the operations of stock exchanges are now banned because several have announced plans to open in Texas. Right. So you are looking at. I think the estimate here that I'm seeing in the Chronicles article is that the state's going to spend about $51 billion over the coming biennium to pay for the new cuts and maintain existing ones. Texas is a state that has had for quite a while a budget surplus and they are basically lighting a lot of that on fire to appeal to rich people and business owners and stock exchanges to take their assets to Texas. You won't have to help society if you come to Texas. We don't have a society in Texas. Right. And that agenda did very well in Texas.
- [262:11]
James Stout
Geez.
- [262:12]
Robert Evans
Anyway, good stuff. I guess the last thing I want to talk about a little bit since we. We've got a couple of minutes here, is the question on everybody's mind. Should I be flying anywhere for the holidays? Is that gonna be a good idea? We're say, I'm saying this a day horrific crash of a UPS flight over Muhammad Ali International Airport in Louisville. Right. Which I mean, I think 7 was the death toll last I saw. Nightmarish fireballs. Thank.
- [262:42]
James Stout
I mean it hit nine this morning.
- [262:43]
Robert Evans
Is it at nine? Because the plane just the engine caught on fire basically on takeoff. And normally from what I'm reading from pilots, normally that should have been a manageable problem. But because it happened during the ascent, which is the most dangerous part of piloting a plane and where you have the least control, they were not able to recover or gain any kind of control. And the plane basically plowed directly into a UPS warehouse and it was loaded with something like £300,000 worth of fuel because it was about to fly to Honolulu. So it was as full of fuel as a big plane can be and just a horrific crash. Is this tied to the fact that you have a lot of federal employees furloughed? Is it tied more just to the fact that the FAA is not functioning the way it should be or used to as a result of changes the Trump administration made as soon as they came to power? I think it's too early to say that, but this is part of a pattern of pretty disastrous near misses that absolutely can be attributed to things like the air traffic controller shortage and the fact that there's just a lot less safety precautions being taken taken. And this is something the administration is aware of and has become critical enough that they're no longer able to deny it. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy on Monday said that all commercial flights might be stopped nationwide to protect public safety. And they were certainly going to need to cut off flights in specific parts of the countries at times as a result of the ATC shortage. Right. Basically there's different, like kind of grid grids that the country is divided into and you might have to shut down one or more of those at a time in order to make the, the, the shortage of air traffic controllers able to handle the rest of the load. Right. For an example of like, how bad this can get locally, on last Friday in New York's. In New York State, 80% of air traffic controllers did not show up for work. So this is a potentially pretty calamitous problem. There have been ground delays on Monday for three major Texas airports in Austin, Dallas Fort Worth and Dallas Love Field. And this is just in general a problem that's only going to get worse as the shutdown looms. Because I've seen some interviews with air traffic controllers where like one guy was like, look, we're not getting medicine for my kid and she'll die without it. It's just not coming in. How do you expect me to be a fucking air traffic controller? Right. Like the hardest job in the country that requires absolutely perfect concentration at all times without ever fucking up or hundreds of people die. So I don't know. To answer the question of like, should you fly. Be planning flights for this holiday season. You should certainly get the flight insurance and be paying attention the days before as to what's happening if the shutdown doesn't end. Because right now we are seeing delays the likes of which haven't really been seen since maybe like either. The pandemic. The pandemic probably before 9, 11, 11 was kind of the last time things were this completely. Garrison can tell you how much of a nightmare they had coming back. And it's not just in the United States, by the way. Multiple major airports in Europe over the last week and change have had to shut down entirely or partly because of unauthorized or unknown drone flights in their airspace.
- [265:57]
James Stout
Yeah, that's been ongoing.
- [266:00]
Robert Evans
Globally, air travel is not doing well.
- [266:05]
James Stout
Yeah. Russia's been probing Europe with these all lands for a little while. Yeah, I think all. I don't know if Robert's flown. Gareth and I have flown this month and it fucking sucks. Use a credit card if you can, one that has some protections. But maybe, maybe consider not flying right now.
- [266:20]
Robert Evans
Yeah, Just, you know, keep an eye on things. I don't know what else to tell you.
- [266:24]
Dick Revis
Yeah.
- [266:25]
James Stout
It's great. Everything's going great. That is the slogan. Everything's going great.
- [266:30]
Garrison Davis
You know, now there's been worse times.
- [266:32]
Robert Evans
There's been worse times.
- [266:33]
Ryan
Yeah.
- [266:33]
James Stout
The blitz. Yeah. Talking of worse times, lots of people are hungry.
- [266:38]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [266:39]
James Stout
Because we're fucking with people. SNAP benefits now as part of the culture war. Lots of people are very worried about where their food is going to come from.
- [266:49]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [266:49]
James Stout
And we're entering a time of year. You know, kids are going to be off school. There are lots of places you can still get your free school meals. But it's a difficult time for people. It's a difficult time for people to feed their families. I wanted to plug we all. We got. This is San Diego group. What they're doing is helping people be able to rely on them by delivering groceries to them. Right. And the way that they most need support is for people to sign up to regularly donate a certain amount. I'm not going to tell you how much you can donate, but if you're able to, that will give them the ability to plan to secure groceries for people they're supporting. The way you can find their website is to go to we all. We got sd. Also, if you want to reach out to us and you want to do it in an encrypted way, you could send an email from your proton mail address to our proton mail address, which is coolzonetipsoton me. If you're a marketing person and you want your client to be a guest on our podcast, don't email us. I'm just gonna block you. That's.
- [267:54]
Robert Evans
That's.
- [267:54]
James Stout
That's all I have to say about that. That if you want us to plug your product, I will also block you.
- [267:59]
Garrison Davis
We reported the news.
- [268:03]
Robert Smith
We reported the news.
- [268:08]
Robert Evans
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
- [268:14]
Robert Smith
It Could Happen Here is a production.
- [268:15]
Garrison Davis
Of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media.
- [268:19]
Elaine
Visit our website, poolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here, listed directly in episode descriptions.
- [268:31]
Robert Smith
Thanks for listening.
- [268:35]
Garrison Davis
This is an iHeart podcast.