'2024 Was A Different Time' & Other Lies The Right-Wing Press Tells Us

0:00Yeah, I'm not surprised to hear that the Marxist Leninist who dropped acid and kidnapped people did a bunch of other strange and relatively incoherent shit. Yeah, so cautionary tale folks. Don't be a Marxist Leninist. This is not what we are talking about when we say that we need to be revolutionaries. Oh wow, that was a sick burn on any tankies who may be listening, but probably no one at this point. No, I mean, I don't know. We're all a little bit masochistic sometimes, so I wouldn't be surprised if they were out there. You know, I love a man in uniform. I think that's the primary appeal for me as the uniforms if I was ever going to go tanky. But I don't need to be a tanky to wear uniform. I can just dress up in my silly, calming mommy outfit anytime I like and fight to rid the world of non-consensual domination. Ow, ow. Consensual is okay. Yeah, I picked up on that.

1:08Hello, welcome to Party Girls. Oh no, is someone sick? Dude, I'm sorry. Welcome to Party Girls. I'm your sickly host, Sam Beard. And I'm your other host, Victorian orphan, Jamie Peck. And I have successfully, I feel like you, Jamie, because I'm the one who gets to complain about being sick today. So, huh. How do you like that? You think I'm not sick too? I'm always a little sick, but I'm okay. I think you're sicker than me today. I think you win the contest. I went to a wedding this past weekend that was outdoors and was camping-based. And, uh, you know, I just want to wish, uh, a happy, a happily ever after to the happy couple that got married somewhere in the Midwest. You know who you are. Good job. If you got married in the Midwest this past weekend, Sam says,

2:08it's mausletop. Good job. If you got married somewhere in the Midwest this weekend, I was nearby in the woods camping and attending. That sounds awful. Yeah. It was cool though to step out of my tent with a suit on. That was a new one for me. That sounds so weird. It was cool. All right. Well, I'm glad you enjoyed it. Thank you. Uh, it is October. Everybody, happy October. Happy Spoo Key Season. It's also October 7th, specifically. So happy October 7th. I suppose happy October 7th, all who celebrate and happy October generally. I hope we can make this the Spoo Key as October ever. Me too. I saw Chelsea Wolf last night. That was pretty spooky. Oh, wow. That's cool. It was beautiful. It was beautiful. You know who that is? Yeah, sure. She, yeah, Chelsea Wolf. She is that, um, American singer, songwriter, and musician. And, you know,

3:13her band blends elements of Gothic rock, doom, metal, and folk. Growing up in Northern California with a country musician father, Wolf began recording songs during her childhood. Yes, of course I know. Are you reading that off Wikipedia? No. She's just in case you didn't know. She's from Sacramento, California. And she was born on November 14th, 1983. Yeah, well, she is a beautiful, witchy, psychedelic, sad, dark angel who plays amazing, kind of doom, folk, music. I highly recommend you check her out if you're looking for something gripping this time of year. I'm very excited. We're getting some beautiful fall weather. Music's getting really awesome. Mm-hmm. The trees are starting to change just a little bit. I'm looking out my window at the,

4:14the tree tops and some of them are turning in nice, uh, a burnt umber, if you will. Nice. Yeah, I really want to go upstairs and see the leaves, but I have so much shit going on this month. I don't think I have anyone to go with. Mm-hmm. Like my friends who I usually go with are all busy. So, I guess I just have to find a boyfriend really fast. Well, uh, your work boyfriend will be visiting you in just a few days in the good city of New York. Uh, I, I am going to be hopping on a flight this Friday and going to pay visit to my dear friend, Jamie Peck, where I will, I believe for the first time ever sleep over at your house in Brooklyn. I think, I think so. Yeah. I'm very excited. I'm excited too. Um, I'm excited for a lot of things. This is like one of the less exciting things that I'm excited about, but I do need someone to help

5:14moving the couch out for the wall because my cat, free to call another mouse the other day. It's like the day before yesterday now. Mm-hmm. And the same thing happened again, where she catches the mouse. I see her with the mouse that her mouth. It's like bleeding and it's like still alive. And I'm like, eh, what do I do? I know I should take it from her, but I like don't want to touch it with my hands. And then before I can even think she lets the mouse go and it runs away and hides somewhere. And now I'm like, do I have a dead mouse in my apartment? And it ran out of the couch this time. She couldn't get it again. So, so there's a dead mouse that's blood out under your couch and you need a big strong Midwestern man to come help you with that couch. Yeah, I will hurt myself if I try to do it by myself. But I really, I really need to look under there. I will move the couch, but you're going to have to move the mouse. That's fine. I'll put gloves on. I'll use a dust pan or something.

6:19That's a good idea. You can bury it in the part of Central Park where Curtis Lewa buries all his cats and the mice that they kill. That would be cute. Yeah. What else are we doing this weekend? Well, I believe we're doing some events for the book. Yeah, let's just talk about the one on Sunday. Okay, great. We are definitely doing an event at Woodbine, the new Woodbine, which is in Manhattan, Chinatown on Sunday, October 11th. Wow, that's five days from now. We've got it totally planned out already. Don't even worry about that. We know exactly what we're doing. We are hosting a little talk for the book that the December 4th legal committee is about to release. It's called Depos. Luigi Mancione, the right to health and the unfinished American revolution. And we will be screening a really cool hype film made by the filmmaker Stanya Khan at the

7:23beginning, sort of cataloging the reactions in the immediate aftermath of December 4th, 2024, the tyrannosite of Brian Thompson. And we're going to have a little book talk after that with some special guests, including a doctor. A doctor. What's up doctor? A real life doctor. And us. And I think one or two more people. So, you know, if you are listening to this episode on Saturday or whenever it comes out and you happen to live in the New York City metropolitan area and you want to see what shoes I'll be wearing, then come out and hang out with us. Yeah, and we'll probably hang out after, especially if you tell us you like our podcast. We'll hang out with you as long as you want. What hang out with you until you want to leave? Yeah, especially if you buy two or more copies of the book, which will help pay

8:24for my plane ticket that I've purchased to fly all the way over there. Oh yeah. Yeah, that'd be great. It's a good book. You should buy it and read it. That's good. That's good. And then we can all talk about it with each other in our discord. We are donating 100% of author royalties of every book sold to the Luigi Mangione official defense fund for all three cases until he is free as well as grassroots health care initiatives. So those will be donated in a 50, 50, even split between those two things. That's right. We are in this for the right reasons. All right. Well, let's move on. Hope to see you on Sunday. And what else you got for us, Jamie? I did tell Jamie today. I was like, I'm sick. I'm lazy. We had more layoffs at my work today. And I'm sad because another co-workers gone. And I just don't want to do anything. Jamie and she's like, okay, follow me.

9:27I mean, I'm also feeling kind of low energy, but I did put some things on a document. So I'm the leader today. I'm piloting fearless leader piloting ship. This podcast ship. Oh, another funny speaking of podcasts. I had a funny moment of deja vu last night at the Chelsea Wolf show because it was at this place called Town Hall, which is in the theater district in Midtown, in Manhattan. It's like near fucking Times Square. So it's not a place I normally go. But I was like, I feel like I've been here before. What have I been here before? Oh, I've been here once before. I was there for the Chapo Trap House live show that I went to a few years ago. Oh, wow. Isn't that funny? And that was the only night that I've ever hung out with. Stavros, the guy who's now extremely famous and probably would not return my DMs, although I should, I've considered hitting

10:29him up because he was nice. He was funny. He was fun to hang out with that night. Cool. But yeah, that was a funny deja vu. I was like, oh, yeah, I was here for my podcast friends, my, my much more successful colleagues live show a few years ago. But, uh, but for them, and good for Chelsea, having a song in Game of Thrones really helped her career thrive, I think. It's such a crap shoot as to whether like the artists that I liked in 2013 are either like bigger than ever now, or have been completely forgotten at time. But she's, she's bigger than ever. So good for her. And I want everything that she was wearing. She looked amazing. But anyway, what's some other spooky, spooky news? I mean, the news, nothing could be spookier than the actual news. That's true. Fucking Donald Trump wants to run to New California or some shit. Yeah, what's up with that,

11:34dude? I have people and I got people in California. I'm sure some of our listeners are from California. Shit, we probably even have a Patreon subscriber from California. Probably at least one. Well, I could barely bring myself to read this article because it seemed really stupid. And, I think as usual, he's just kind of babbling incoherently. So that's fine. That's always a good thing for the president to do concerning nuclear war. But why did he come for, like, he came for specific cities too. He was like San Diego or Los Angeles. Like, yeah, he said they can take out a city. He said of Iran. Let them take, let it, let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego. That's, this is a very small price to pay for what? For defeating Iran's nuclear

12:35capabilities and evil. Okay. So I read about this a little bit and these journalists have kind of slotted it into the way he usually talks about the war, the cost of the Iran war where he's usually talking about gas prices. And he says that it's a small price to pay. Like, he says, here's another quote from a speech where he talks about it. He said, and again, remember, with the word, it's just artificial. It's a little bit high. It's a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping your country safe. So yeah, he's, he usually is talking about gas prices as a, as a price that Americans have to pay for defeating Iran or whatever. We plus like dead a lot of dead people. But you know, I went to fill up my gas and it cost me $76 to fill up my gas. That has never in my entire

13:42life happened before. And I was just like, and I have like a Honda CRV. I don't have like a giant lifted pickup truck. You know, I was going to ask like, do you have a much larger car than me? I have a regular fucking car. And yeah, okay, I definitely was like running on fumes by the time I filled it up. But it's like, yeah, that's untenable. Yeah, I mean, if Americans are going to riot over anything, it'll probably be something like that. Fucking hope so. Because that's like really hitting people where it hurts. Because, because we live in a car country, unless you live like exactly where I live, you probably fucking drive to work. And that's not a cost that you can do without. We've privatized everything and we've externalized all of these costs of all these, I don't even want to say social costs like costs of doing business. Like it costs money to have a job. And we've, we've put that onto the individual.

14:49So it really, it really is a problem. I saw it tweet the other day that was like America's a high wage country, but it also it then takes those wages back by privatizing and you're realizing these, these things that should be social, socialized. I don't even know if that's true. I don't even, I guess we're a high wage country compared to some other countries, but there are quite a few, quite a lot of people living below the poverty line and the minimum wage has not changed in a very long time. So I don't know. But yeah, that's, that's always fun when I pop in on the president. See, see him getting increasingly incoherent and pugnacious. What he, what else did he say? He said he bounced around from talking about Kamala Harris and the election. What year is it? Is she riding again? Why is he talking about her? To wanting total victory in Iran, to talk

15:54about gas prices being high, but without actually saying gas prices. When he made the comment about Iran, New King Los Angeles at San Diego, he used very unfortunate sentence construction that did sound a lot like he would let them to run that is nuke the two blue state cities. And then he returned to the gas prices, but again, in an extremely confusing way. But it's good and very soon, and it'll end one way or the other. And your gas and your gasoline and all of the things Trump said before jumping off on a tangent about Venezuela. Jesus Christ, we're cooked. Yeah. Well, in other news, let's see Bill Harris died. Do you know who that is? The name's familiar. He kidnapped somebody. Yeah. So he is famous primarily for kidnapping a 19-year-old Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, who was the media of big media baron.

16:56Right. And the basis for the title character in Citizen Kane in 1974. Oh, little did he know at the time that that would be all that he was ever going to be known for. He was part of the Simbuty's Liberation Army, which was, I mean, they considered themselves to be a revolution, a serious revolutionary group in the 70s. They were pretty clown shoes. But he said, he said, here's a quote from him. I'm taking this from the New York Times of Bituary. He said, Patricia Hearst was a symbolic target. He said, later adding, her family was in control of a media empire that we viewed as an arm of propaganda for the United States government. What that part is rational. That's just pie true. That part is just true. But I mean, this story is interesting because Patty Hearst got Stockholm syndrome where you start identifying with your kidnappers. She joined the Simuny's Liberation Army for a while. She changed

18:01her name to Tanya after an Argentine revolutionary and she ruptured a bunch of banks. And then, yeah. And then later she got arrested. She testified that they coerced her, they raped her, and they threatened her and made her do all these bad things. And she still got sentenced to prison. But she only served about 22 months before Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence in 1979 and Bill Clinton would later give her a full pardon. Because, you know, Bill Clinton's going to do that, shit. So then she just kind of went back to being a normal rich lady after that. Like, she was an actress. She acted in John Waters movies. She actually did a bunch of John Waters movies, actually. And she did a bunch of fancy dog shows with her purebred dogs. What a kind of dogs. I think one was a shitsu and one was a bulldog, I'm gonna say. So, you know, I diversity of dogs.

19:01And Bill Harris is completely doomed to only ever be known for that. But he did do some other things, I suppose. The obituated doesn't really go into it that much other than to say that the SLA were clowns who did not have the respect of other radicals and kind of represent like the worst excesses of the 60s sort of curdling into the 70s and becoming a parody of themselves. I mean, this group was only active from 1973 to 1975. But they did declare themselves to be a vanguard movement. Of course they did. They six members died in a May 1974 shootout with police in Los Angeles. And then the three surviving members, the three surviving fugitives, I should say, recruited new members. But nearly all of them were apprehended in 1975 and prosecuted. They killed at least two people, they kidnapped people, they robbed banks. And in 1973,

20:07the previously unknown, this, okay, so this is the assassination that put them on the map. They assassinated Marcus Foster, who was a black superintendant of Oakland public schools. And they also wounded his deputy superintendant, his deputy superintendant Robert Blackburn. And this voter alienated the SLA from the local radical community. As one would imagine they would. Yeah, for sure. They, I mean, they also got like super high on acid and their own supply of Marcus Leninist thought. They just, they did, they were kind of, I don't want to say silly because that trivializes like the people they killed and kidnapped it tortured. But, uh, yeah, I think Betty Hearst might be the most interesting character in this story because she did such a, she did two extreme 180s. And I don't know if we're ever going to really know what was

21:09actually going on there. Yeah, I'm not surprised to hear that the Marcus Leninist who dropped acid and kidnapped people, uh, did a bunch of other strange and relatively incoherent shit. Yeah, so cautionary tale folks. This is, don't be a Marcus Leninist. This is not what we are talking about when we say that we need to be revolutionaries. Um, yeah, oh, wow, that was a sick burn on any tankies who may be listening, but probably no one at this point. No, I mean, I don't know. We're all a little bit masochistic sometimes. So I wouldn't be surprised if they were out there. You know, I love a man in uniform. I think that's the primary appeal for me as the uniforms if I was ever going to go tanky. But I don't need to be a tanky to wear uniform. I can just dress up in my silly, calming mommy outfit anytime I like. And, uh, yeah, fight to rid the world

22:17of non-consensual domination. Bout-bout. Consensual is okay. Yeah, I picked up on that. Um, I mean, she's a dominatrix. Of course, of course it is. Um, what else, what else we got? Oh, yeah. Uh, so we've talked about it a little bit before on this podcast that the Trump administration's NPSM7 memo is a very bad thing. Uh, Tari, it's like trying to lay the legal groundwork to target basically all left-wing opponents of the Trump administration. So all opponents of the Trump administration, because I don't think it really has any right-wing opponents at this point. Um, trying to target them and say that they are part of a terrorist group called Antifa. So, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, yeah. So,

23:24now what's happening is people are fighting back by creating an NPSM7 defendants union. And they made a little website already and they have a little blurb about who they are and what they're about. So I think I'm just going to read it. Great. Uh, NPSM7 is an expansive directive targeting any and all left-wing opponents of the Trump administration, aggregating all of the political left under a single banner, Antifa. The NPSM7 defendants union aims to turn this aggregation into a collective strength from the Prairie Land defendants to Ohio voting rights organizers from the pitched street battles against ICE to the Cuba solidarity convoys. We are uniting everyone caught in the dragnet of NPSM7. The defendants union has four goals. Number one, make NSPM7 a household term. That's great because when I talk about it to anyone but you, people are like, what the fuck is that?

24:28I mean, I should say anyone, but you know, my political friends, my comrades, uh, believe it or not, I do have some normal friends still. I believe it. Number two, popularize a united framework for fighting legal repression. Seems like a good idea. Sure. Three, recenter the political discussion of the left onto ourselves in our own words. Yeah, they shouldn't get to say who we are and what we're about. It is annoying that the only place we see, uh, communist anarchists, anti-fascists really mentioned in the news is like a lot of the time when it's coming out of the mouths of these right wing shitheads just trying to stir up paranoid fantasies like people need to know that we are real people that exist in the world and they need to know where we're actually about, which is, you know, peace and love and all that,

25:28obviously. Good point. And then you to know how sexy we are, of course. And then number four, treat repression as an organizing terrain. We're always saying. You know, I think oftentimes we think of repression as this thing that has nothing that that causes the, as a thing that the only way we can respond to it is by suffering. But repression is a force and forces can be channeled towards different ends if you use a bunch of hands to grab it and push it in a direction and pour it over to something new. So yes, repression is bad. Yes, repression will always have bad components to it. But as we all know, anyone who's ever paid attention during a social movement, sometimes poorly timed repression on the part of the state creates a pretty fertile

26:30soil for a bunch of public outrage to be generated. Right. Sometimes the wrong type of repression at the wrong time filmed by the wrong camera can cause an entire nation to rise up against the oppressors. So there are other outcomes to repression besides just suffering and weakness if we move in a cunning collective fashion and try to bring that about. Very well said. I also think we should take advantage of any opportunity to kind of bring people together and compose ourselves into a movement because there are so many forces trying to divide us. So maybe the state has done us a favor on some level at least by uniting us against them. I'm trying to think of some other examples where this has happened. I'm thinking

27:34about the very broad coalition of people who came together in Minneapolis to oppose ISIS in Beijing. Everyone from Tim Walls liberals to people like us. I don't know there's pros and cons to that kind of coalition but look we got to fight fascism. So that is the most important thing on my mind right now. So I think we'll probably try to reach out to whoever this defendants union is and try to see if we can interview some of their founding members to see what else they have to say about it. You know, NSPM 7 has been something that we've talked about like many times on the show, what national security presidential memorandum number seven, which is sort of a strange, it's sort of a unique, it's a national directive that comes from the executive branch in Donald Trump's office.

28:37Basically instructing all law enforcement and intelligence agencies around the country to make left-wing protesters, anti-capitalists, protesters and activists and anti-fascist protesters and activists, as well as communists and artists and Tifa, other things like that. Make that their number one priority in fighting, you know, the allegedly the global war on terror or whatever they're using this time to smuggle it in. So obviously we've talked about the prairie land case a few different times here and for folks who don't know that was just, you know, January, July 4th of last year there was a noise demonstration that happened in Texas and after that there was a massive amount of political repression that happened as a result of resulting in some of the most austere and relatively arbitrary sentences that we've seen handed down where people will be spending 10, 20, 30, 40, 100 years in prison if they end up going through. And that was, you know, we have

29:44reason to believe that NSPM 7 was a motivating force behind some of that and some pressure that was pushed down from the federal government onto the local courthouses that we're overseeing some of these. We've seen it in many other instances since then as well. So it's like, I think we're going to continue to see it more and more in the fact that there is a banner of activists who are trying to make a united framework for fighting legal repression under the banner of NSPM 7 defendants unions. I think is kind of precisely what is needed right now. Yeah, absolutely. Well, hopefully we'll have more on that soon. Oh my god, are you drinking a blood orange spindrift? Is this your favorite drink? Yeah. Turn me on to the good shit. Well, I've got some waiting in the fridge for you here too. Yes, I should be drinking hot tea because I feel like shit, but I didn't have time to boil water. So we'll do that after. I'm sorry. You're doing amazing, sweetie. Thanks, mom.

30:49Well, this is a fun one. Let's do this. There's a, I mean, there's been a lot of articles and a lot of media in general trying to kind of put the whole Luigi Mancione thing back in the box. You know, they're like, uh, yeah, this was an isolated thing. All his supporters are crazy. They're just, they're crazy and evil and they're horny, which is also bad for some reason. And they, uh, this doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things. He's just another killer. Like, uh, you know, he's basically son of Sam, you know, don't think about the politics. Don't think about the moral content. And they're getting really lazy. And I think this lazily written piece of propaganda is going to be fun to talk about to read a mock. Oh, right. Let's check

31:53this shit out. Yeah. So it's in the spectator, which is a right-leaning British publication. Love that. I mean, where do British people even get off, like, intervening in this debate? They have the National Health Service. They could sit. Their healthy ass is down and listen. That's what I think. I want you to see that it's illustrated with a picture of Luigi in full Joker makeup with flames behind him. Hell yeah. Exactly what he did. I mean, that's honestly based, but Luigi is not the Joker. The Joker is, well, I mean, he gets kind of bad by the end of the buffet. You've seen it, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He does kill some people who don't deserve it. Totally different. So yes, this person writes, Americans love their killers. I'm already like shut up. I don't want to shove you in a locker. Alex, Bronzini, vendor.

32:56We should look up those names. I bet they're like a sion of some really evil arms sales company or some shit. Americans love their killers. Still, Luigi Mancione, who shot United Health Care CEO, Brandon Thompson dead in November 2024, may be the most beloved of them all. It took a special sort of fetishist to see something in maniacs like Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed for no reason other than their sadistic compulsions. Mancione, though, nearly every American has been ground down by our country's health care system. It's as first an American, and that's the only way that that would make sense. Anyway, police had prepared for a mob last Friday as Mancione appeared in a Manhattan courthouse to plead guilty to federal stalking charges. But by mid-morning, the officers outnumbered everyone they'd been sent to contain. The cult of Luigi had not come. Still, the press had enforced. Those of us outside were, by my count, about 98% press and 2% Luigi's admirers. The photographers finding nothing to shoot shot one

34:02another. A BBC reporter also at a loss attempted to interview me. Now, side note, they announced this hearing two days beforehand. So there probably weren't going to be as many people as usual. But also, there was never like a huge mob at the courthouse. There were more people than could get in at all of the hearings, including this one, by the way, because I talked to a real, a real rios who was there, friend of the show, and she said it really wasn't that dramatic a drop off from what it had been the whole time. And that the courtroom was full. Like there were still people who didn't get in. And maybe people stopped showing up because they realized they weren't going to get there early enough to actually get a seat inside. I don't know, but I did a little research and I talked to a real. And so did they. So they continue. So who some 19 months after Thompson's murder still keeps the

35:04faith. Well, there was Fion 42, a coordinator in a home care agency. She'd moved to the United States from China. She told me and had discovered that insurance is, you know, just like a scam. Companies like United Healthcare, she told me charge people for their human right. And Thompson, as CEO, had murdered thousands of people using his laptop. Show me the lie. That is my editorial thing, but show me the freaking lie. I asked Fion why she'd come to the courthouse. She hoped Manchione would see that she didn't forget what you did for the patients. She'd canceled a medical appointment to be there. I guess we're supposed to think that she's stupid or whatever. That she doesn't really care about her patients. Yeah, she doesn't care about her health. She's just throwing a tantrum. Oh, here's another one by the courthouse steps sat Christopher Adal 39, a homeless man with a

36:04pentagram tattooed on one hand and an A for anarchy on the other. He admired Manchione. He told me as a man, quote, willing to sacrifice his own life to benefit others. Unquote. See, all the quotes they're getting, they're like setting this guy up to like look real crazy. And then no one says anything crazy at all. They just sound pretty sensible. Oh, but then it says today he wore a maga hat. Crazy. I mean, that is kind of, it was kind of nuts. But he'd first become politically involved on the other side of the spectrum with Bernie Sanders first presidential campaign in 2016. That quote, whole thing was completely railroaded and quote by the Democratic National Committee. He said, the powers to be quote, did not allow what the people wanted. Well, that's true. I mean, yeah, we've been emotionally manipulated and mentally manipulated in all sorts of ways. He told me, I don't know, is murder justified? America, he said quote, is supposed to be the land of the free.

37:07So how are we supposed to break free? Sounds like a pretty good interview. I mean, this, this is interesting because it kind of shows the progression from wanting to change things by working within the system to believing in more, shall we say, extreme solutions after you see that that doesn't work. Then there was Dodge Landsman, a YouTuber, a YouTuber, the worst class of person in the world. He wore a matching belt tie and derbies. I don't know what that is. All bright blue and had come to determine whether support for Manjoni had waned. It had, he concluded. There used to be tons of people dressed up in inflatable outfits. People dressed up in Luigi costumes. But today, that same support is not here. Support looks different at different times.

38:09The fact that there's still not a bunch of people standing out there and fucking Luigi costumes. To me, it doesn't feel like evidence of Luigi support for Luigi going down. But also at the same time, I don't think it's ridiculous to say that the support terrain also has indeed changed over time. When this first happened, it was this completely earth-shattering thing. A lot of shit has happened in the world since then. Donald Trump became the president since then. Then everything that's happened since then has happened since then. It looks different than it used to. It's not at all surprising to me. Although I do think you and me, one of our primary jobs is to continue raising money for the Luigi Manjoni Defense Fund. We do try to, obviously, we're trying to continue what we can to continue to continue to generate and stoke further support for Luigi

39:11because we see his freedom as being integrally tied up with this world that we're trying to create. He has become a symbol for the human dignity and freedom from capitalist oppression in this country and for revolution in this country. For that, we want him free, despite the fact, or in addition to the fact that we just want everybody free. That's right. We've got a free arm. Also, like you said, Trump is the president now. There's insane repression being brought down on anyone that this administration doesn't like. I mean, the right-wing press has been terrible to Luigi's supporters. The New York Post has doxed people, harassed people. You want to talk about Obril and the Manjoniistas. They harassed their families. They harassed their jobs. In one case, they harassed their families job. It's not that surprising that people might be a little bit scared to be

40:17photographed, like, visibly supporting Luigi because his most visible supporters have been treated that way. What do you continue? Of the murder itself, Lansman said that it's never okay to take a father away from his children. But Thompson had also been an evil figure. One responsible for the death of at least hundreds of thousands of people. Manjoni, quote, was avenging lives and trying to save them. Moments later, suited men emerged from the courthouse, carrying a lectern. Shortly afterwards, Manjoni's guilty plea was announced. But we knew that, didn't we? Manjoni's defenders rarely dispute that he'd gone down Bryant Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, on that Midtown Manhattan sidewalk. Only one person visibly reacted, a shirtless tattooed man. Crazy. He threw his hands in the air, grasping at the sun. He moaned an agony. Ha, ha, then he approached the press pen, mouthed a few profanities, and stumbled off. Crazy.

41:21Yeah, it was crazy riding. Incredible Hulk. Yeah. But now we're going to find some more clean and articulate members of the Louis G fandom as well. Still, for some members of the crowd, Manjoni's plea stung. One young woman, Manor, felt betrayed by her idol's decision to plead guilty. I think he should have fought a little more, like have a little more trust in the justice system. Fair enough? Others believed that there had been chicanery in the outcome. Jury nullification was definitely a possibility. Errol Roman, a 26-year-old law student told me, I mean a law student, they know. I know what's up with the law. The justice system, she said, had treated him unfairly. Prosecutors with hold exculpatory evidence and had been leaking a lot of stuff to the press before they even told his defense counsel. He should have gone to trial anyway. It's worth rolling the dice, she said, especially when public opinion is as positive. Some 30% of Americans profess to understand Manjoni's motives.

42:28Consistent majorities, however, neither approve of the killing nor view him favorably. Only a substantial minority of millions of people admit to sympathizing with Louis G. As she left the courthouse, I caught a real rios, a pro-Manjoni influencer at an ex-organizer with hot girls for Zoran, who had been inside for the proceedings. Rios is one of the three manjoni stars, the name of their shared Instagram account, who caused a stir in May when, wearing city-issued press passes, they condoned Thompson's killing on the steps of another courthouse. The mayor's office promised afterwards that it would review its press credentialing process. Still, Rios told me that she'd heard nothing more from the Mamdani administration. Her credentials still stand. They're still trying to make this an issue for Zoran, which is very funny. He's got more important to stay with, like anti-Semitism. Ha, ha, maybe we'll talk about that in a bit. I don't know. I don't think this is a concession or an admission of guilt, Rios told me.

43:32Manjoni's lawyers, she thought, had simply advised their client to plead guilty so that they could advocate for the double jeopardy clause in the state case. The Fifth Amendment's double jeopardy clause bars a person, bars trying a person twice for the same offense. Manjoni currently stands accused of murder by the state of New York. She defended, hmm? Ah, you know, love a braille. I do think this qualifies as an admission of guilt, but you know. Yeah, probably. She defended the killing itself, though. An actor idle had, she said, not truly conceded to committing. Everyone has a family, she told me, but it doesn't mean that you should get into an industry where you're putting profit before people. And quote, when you are getting into those sorts of lines of work, you should consider that some people may be very unhappy about that. Yeah, that's not really defending the killing. That's sort of not, that's just saying some things that are true. It's contextualized, right?

44:32Right. Oh my god, what do you expect is going to happen. Such was the scene. The still faithful celebrating a man for a crime they believe he may not have committed. I think most of them believe he committed it at this point. Yeah. Or else wishing he'd kept up the fight in court, it seemed that day that the cults of Luigi had run its course. It was probably always going to end like this. Yes, Manjioni's admirers shared his loathing of the insurance industry, which Americans hated before Thomson's killing and hate still, but Manjioni was a creature of a political moment. Here's where it gets real galaxy brain, okay? December 2024, after all, was the season of the five shift. Donald Trump had become the first Republican to win the popular votes since 2004, and for the first time since he descended the escalator in 2015, had the approval of a majority of Americans. Corporate America, so ostentatious in its commitments to the cause of racial justice four years earlier, was now reconciling itself

45:36with the right. For much of the political left, Manjioni had, if nothing else, identified a solution to that condition. You could just kill the bastards. But as the New York Times is as reclined declared last December, 30 on everything, quote, the Trump five shift is dead. Trump's approval rating has tumbled to the mid 30s. This November, the Democratic Party appears likely to win the House, if not the Senate. Rios, for her part, told me that the Manjioni's to movement had been set in motion by the sense that protesting and voting isn't working. But Democratic Socialists have romped through Democratic primaries and are angling to seize the party itself. Elections don't seem so ineffective after all. Yeah, I'm sure this person loves it, that DSA people are winning. Right, and also like ineffective towards what ends. Like, my goal is not to get a bunch of DSA reformists selected into office.

46:37No, but like also they seem to be missing the direct causal relationship between whatever social democratic concessions we might be able to ring out of the ruling class and the immediate threat of revolutionary violence. You know, like why why is this happening? Maybe they're a little scared. For many on the left, killing the bastards no longer seems necessary. The returns in any case are poor. Roman told me she'd bought a United Health Care plan after Manjioni put two bullets in Toxin. It's still shitty, she said, so it didn't really accomplish what he wanted it to. I mean, Rome wasn't built in a day, honey. But I agree that that can't be the end of it. She also doesn't know what he wanted it to accomplish. Nobody does because Luigi hasn't said anything.

47:38Yeah, that's also true. There's a lot of unanswered questions. So final paragraph, what's next for the Manjioni's movement? Quote, I want us to continue to have these conversations to question why oligarchs are stealing away our futures. Rios told me and quote, this wave of DSA has kind of started forming. I asked whether she would back AOC for president. We'll have to see. She told me, I think she's fantastic. The end. The end. This article doesn't really say a whole lot. I mean, to call at the end of the Luigi cult and then come back to that at the end while not providing any evidence for this sort of thing and being like, we showed up to one hearing and we talked to some people. And actually, they're all stupid, but and crazy and crazy. But you know, as reclince said this one thing and also just like, I don't really like Luigi or his supporters. So the whole thing's over.

48:41You know, go back. Look, the DSA is winning. You know, someone who likes hates United Healthcare still participates in the system. Ha, gotcha. It's like a bunch of just like stupid shit over and over and over again. And then they're like, huh, fucking publish that shit dog. Shit's fire. Send it to the press. Track is hot. Drop it. Drop it. Although it's funny if you scroll down the top article on the recommended for this is AOC, the radical for normies. I mean, I don't necessarily disagree with that. No, me neither. I mean, would I rather have AOC than maybe I don't know anybody who's been president since the FDR? Yeah, probably. Yeah, would I rather have AOC than JD Vance? Yeah, certainly. I don't think that's a hard choice. But that doesn't meet like, okay, a handful of DSA candidates won elections. They still have very little meaningful power. And people dislike Trump more than they used to, which also on its own

49:51holds no political power whatsoever. He's still the president. So for that reason, people don't care anymore about all of these issues that we that they had in 2024, but have magically gone away now. Like, oh, you think people aren't still angry about the health insurance system that has probably killed thousands of people since 2024? Like, oh, no, it was a different time. It was a whole 20 months ago. Like, fuck off. Like, things have, if anything, things have gotten worse materially since then for the average American. True. So like, I don't know. I mean, they're all, they're trying to say that this is this like unique 2024 hysteria. There's just a single wave in his past now and everything can go back to normal. But I mean, come on. I don't insult. Don't insult our intelligence. Come on, man. I had something smarter I was going to say about this. I'm writing an article for current affairs actually about the Luigi phenomenon. And

50:56this is how I found out about the spectator article because believe it or not, I have not a regular reader of the spectator. I guess I choose to believe that. I don't read a lot of right-wing British publications as a matter of course. Perhaps I should because it contains gems like this. But, you know, Nathan Robinson at current affairs sent it to me and he was like, what, what if you write something that sort of contests the meaning of this act that occurred on December 4th, 2024, because there's certainly contesting it. So I'm almost done. I hate to jinx it because it hasn't been published yet. It's going in the print edition that's coming out in November. Great. So that's exciting. And I draw a little bit from depose. I draw a little bit from my own sense of humor. I'm pretty proud of some of the lines I dropped in it. But basically my point is that what happened on December 4th is it's not an isolated phenomenon. I mean, this

52:00touches some of the most fundamental questions of American life and government and questions of like what are our rights? What are we entitled to and what makes a government legitimate? So I hope that you all check it out when it comes out. So I think we just about did a podcast and we both feel kind of lousy right now. Yeah, your boy I think is starting to get an ear infection. And I really, really, really hope that's not the case. And I really hope I didn't throw out all my antibiotics the other day in my great medicine cabinet purge that I do once a year. Sorry, probably every five years. And but I think I'm going to proactively take some antibiotics because I think I'm about to get some crazy fucking ear infections. So I need to get going. But I love you so much Jamie. Oh my god. I don't have any ear infections. I can come see you in a couple days.

53:01Oh my god. Likewise. Okay. Well, I guess we already plugged the book event and we'll put a link to it in the show notes as well for anyone who wants to come hang out with us. I R L. Us because I'd manifesting that Sam will be there. Speak on it. And yeah, this is kind of out of the left field. But I have been trying to break into the pro professional dominatrix business because I have a lot of simps who seem like they really want me to do that for them. But I'm a responsible person. No, no, I'm a responsible person. And I want to feel like I know what I'm doing before I do thanks to them. So if anyone has any tips for me, if anyone listening is a pro dom, I feel like we have sex workers in our audience. Probably. Yeah. There aren't not that many

54:02communist podcasts made by sex workers. Uh, yeah. So pro doms. Yep. You heard Jamie. You can either hit her up or you can hit me up. Literally. Yeah. If I could get like, I don't know. I like, I did a session with my friend who's a dom in L.A. And it sort of like she was treating it like training for me. Cool. And it was a lot of fun. And I learned a lot of things about how to be a good dom in atrix. So if anyone else, perhaps in New York or surrounding regions wants to keep the party going, that would be really lovely because I feel like I could be good at this. But I don't want to fuck it up by, you know, doing it hastily or irresponsibly. Or maybe, maybe you have other tips for me. Maybe you're like, this isn't a thing that people really do, Jamie. You need to buy this box of DVDs and start going to fetish parties. And that's how you do it. I don't

55:06know. But I figure, I figure it's worth a shot. And this might have a higher chance of success than me telling our audience that I'm looking for a boyfriend. This, well, hit your girl up. And until next week, party on.