This is a sample of a premium episode. Sign up to listen to the entire episode.

patreon.com/wetwired

Cops, laws, prisons, and the military are political violence. Crackdowns on strikers and protesters are political violence. Poverty, hunger, and crime are all political violence.

The state's will is not enforced with good vibes and polite suggestions. Its defining feature is its monopoly of violence within its borders. “Political violence” as seen on TV just lacks state sanction and operates outside the monopoly of violence of the state.

The state’s policies may be determined without violent force, which is where liberals and conservatives can superficially separate themselves from political violence, by confining the term to the extracurricular activities of non-state actors. 

“There is no place for violence,” and “violence is never the answer,” aren’t aphorisms from pacifist monks, sweeping the ground as they walk to save the lives of would-be squashed bugs. It’s only the pejorative “political violence” when it’s not blessed by the state and the ideology of the speaker. This framing obscures the role of violence in all political activity.

It may not be outright dishonesty or hypocrisy when talking heads and heads of state are clutching their pearls after some kind of public violence, it’s just a terrible model of reality that confuses how violence is really valued in a liberal democracy.

There’s an Irish aphorism, “Is minic a bhris béal duine a shorn.” Many a time a man's mouth broke his nose. Anyway, Charlie Kirk got shot last week.

This is our first conversation with independent filmmaker Christopher Jason Bell. We with him again about the feature length release, Failed State, which he co-directed.

Miss Me Yet is a chronicle of the George W. Bush presidency, which means that it also documents the early days of the War on Terror, beginning with 9/11. Chris draws us back into the early 2000s by painstakingly splicing together archival footage of Bush interspersed with commercials that amplify the cultural moments.

It seems appropriate to rerelease this episode, not just because it's the 200th anniversary of 9/11 (or whatever), but because the seeds of so much we've grown to live with and so much of what we've become numb to were planted in those years. Trump used an Iraq War era Congressional authorization for the legal pretext to assassinate Qasem Soleimani in 2020.

Of course, as we've seen many times recently, we've moved well past the need for annoying legal authorizations. Arguably though, we might not have become so inured to extrajudicial violence if we weren't first used to Congress rubber stamping it. Congress' approval was never even requested for the recent US attacks on nuclear sites in Iran.

From the original episode description:

In this episode, we talk with filmmaker Christopher Bell about his docuseries Miss Me Yet. Chris brings the horror and absurdity of the George W. Bush years back to life as he tells the story of a political heir who becomes president, is branded a liar and war criminal by many, and finally drifts into the semi-reclusive painterly life. 

Miss Me Yet is currently showing on Means TV.https://means.tv/programs/missmeyet

Find Chris bell on Twitter:https://twitter.com/UpdateTheGrids

Watch some of Chris' other films:https://linktr.ee/christopherjasonbell

Music:Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC BY 4.0)https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en

We're unlocking this ep for a while because everyone should get to know Chris and hear about his docuseries Miss Me Yet.

Subscribe on Patreon to support making this show, get premium only episodes, and listen to our entire back catalog.

patreon.com/wetwired

I guess we could call these archive releases "ReWired".

This episode was extremely educational for us. It was part of a group of episodes where we dove into the background and origin story of a person or people who've had an outsized impact on shaping the way many Americans as well as people worldwide see themselves and their place in the world.

Subscribe on Patreon to get extra episodes and listen to our back catalog

patreon.com/wetwired

As we continue our retooling of this show's format, we'll be releasing some of these older episodes that we think are especially important.From the original description:

The law of attraction permeates the world of self-help and spirituality. In this magical world, everything you think you know about the causal nature of reality is wrong. All that you experience, all that you have and are, is a consequence of the vibrations that you attract. You don’t have to explain the mechanism or prove the results, because it’s all self-evident–if you don’t get what you want, you weren’t wishing hard enough. If you want something, all you need to do is believe.

Even if you’ve never heard the words “the law of attraction,” you’ve heard its message from pop signers and film stars. Even Peter Pan knows this one weird trick to flying, “you think of a wonderful thought!” However, you probably have heard of the law of attraction from the 2006 film, The Secret.

The messenger behind the message, Esther Hicks, got the idea from 100 ghosts, whom she channels in seminars for her captivated audiences, in books, and even on cruises. Without The Secret, we wouldn’t know Esther and her spooky friends, and without Esther Hicks, there would be no film.

Subscribe on Patreon to get extra episodes and listen to our back catalog

patreon.com/wetwired

You might think QAnon has faded away, or maybe has been just laying dormant for the last couple of years. You'd be wrong.

It’s been there all along, stewing and metastasizing beneath the surface, mostly. You can find people decoding the news all over Telegram still, and it’s absolutely thriving Twitter.

Having Trump in the Whitehouse and QAnon influencers like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino in the FBI, and all the other psychos in lower offices all over the government, means that the regular news is often QAnon news.

Always looking for the secret truth behind current events, QAnon and Sovereign Citizen accounts have taken a special interest in Trump's Executive Order sending National Guard and Federal law enforcement into Washington, D.C.

For them, these actions aren't just Trump flexing political muscles, or worse, breaking the law. For a Sov Cit or a QAnon follower, Trump federalizing law enforcement in D.C. is nothing short of a killing blow struck at the Deep State.

It's pretty nuts.

Music:

Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC-BY)

Kevin Hartnell - Reflections (CC-BY)

Subscribe on Patreon to support making this show, get premium only episodes, and listen to our entire back catalog.

patreon.com/wetwired

First up, we talk about Sam Altman’s overhyped and supremely disappointing release of ChatGPT 5. Then we get into the AI hype machine that has the potential to take down the US economy when the bubble finally pops. We wrap up with a dip into r/AISoulmates, the community for the Wireborn and the humans they've chosen to love.

Music:

Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC-BY)

Subscribe on Patreon to support making this show, get premium only episodes, and listen to our entire back catalog.

patreon.com/wetwired

This is Part 6 of Cold as ICE.

This is a sample of a premium episode. Sign up to listen to the entire episode.

patreon.com/wetwired

We go over the ballooning Homeland Security budget and ICE's unprecedented expansion. None of this looks good for anyone in the US but as always with things like this the most vulnerable people are hit first and the hardest.

Unsurprisingly and despite their positive comments, the real winners won't be Trump's supporters. It's the private contractors who are coming out on top. Companies like GEO Group and Core Civic are vacuuming up money as fast as the US Treasury can print it. All the while, DHS has been running a Blood and Soil ad campaign on social media.

Breaking from our sabbatical to talk about Dems cowardly criticisms of Israel’s manufactured famine in Gaza after spending 18 months supporting the genocide and Bernie Sander’s failed legislation to restrict military aid to Israel. We also get into the resurrected 2 state solution as a platitude that even if they meant it would be impossible to achieve.

Music:

Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC-BY)

Subscribe on Patreon to support making this show, get premium only episodes, and listen to our entire back catalog.

patreon.com/wetwired

We start off with a truly bizarre story about a yeti blood oath and some of the different types of priests. Then we get into the MAGA mindset and talk about how all the old Epstein stories are new again, why Trump's distractions aren't working like they used to, and why his lunatic base just can't let go of Jeffrey Epstein.

Music:

Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC-BY)

Subscribe on Patreon to support making this show, get premium only episodes, and listen to our entire back catalog.

patreon.com/wetwired

We kick off this episode talking about the terrible politics surrounding the floods in Texas. As if the mass death tragedy isn’t enough, the crank caucus has decided that antique emergency systems isn’t grabby enough for a headline. Instead, they're pushing a new weather conspiracy and claiming that "someone" in the government caused the heavy rains and flooding on purpose.

While Texas was experiencing a thousand-year flood. Grok, Elon Musk's AI butler was busy transforming itself into MechaHitler and letting us know what a racist, abusive sexual deviant it is.

Last, we get into the fallout caused by Trump telling everyone to shut up about Epstein.

Music:

Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC-BY)

Subscribe on Patreon to support making this show, get premium only episodes, and listen to our entire back catalog.

patreon.com/wetwired

This is Part 5 of Cold as ICE.

This is a sample of a premium episode. Sign up to listen to the entire episode.

patreon.com/wetwired

In today’s episode, we begin with the recent spectacle in MacArthur Park in an LA community with a large immigrant population. We move on to talk about dehumanizing undocumented people, the national citizen registry, and the parallels of a rising authoritarian state and colonialism.