We're teaming up with Bradley Plaisier and Robert Skvarla to talk about the show that 30 years ago introduced the normies to alien abductions, secret government programs, and global conspiracies.

Somehow, the X-Files was exactly the right show for its time. It harnessed the untapped cynicism and suspicion of the 1990s and assured us that there really might be answers out there if you know where to look and who not to trust.

This is an unlocked premium episode. Get extra episodes every month, and get access to all of our past subscriber only episodes for $5 a month.

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More from Bradley:

https://x.com/bpleasies

https://bwp.threadless.com

More from Robert:

https://x.com/RobertSkvarla

The Endangered Alphabets Projecthttps://www.endangeredalphabets.net/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/1529408245

We're also excited to announce that our long promised merch is here!!

We know it's tough sometimes to express your leftist feelings in public. Your ratty Che Guevara and CCCP t-shirts seem better left at home. Now you can fly your crypto-leftist flag and still be completely under the radar with our personal love letter to Juan José Arévalo, philosopher and socialist president of Guatemala, and the airline he nationalized.

wetwired.printful.me/

This is an unlocked premium episode. Get extra episodes every month, and get access to all of our past subscriber only episodes for $5 a month.

patreon.com/wetwired

Music:

Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC BY 4.0)

We’re joined by Daniella Mestyanek Young, the author of Uncultured. She was born a third generation member of an influential family, within The Family International, better known as the Children of God cult. She escaped at fifteen, put herself through school, and graduated from college as valedictorian.

Daniella joined the Army, became Captain, and she received the Presidential Volunteer Service Award. She was an Intelligence Officer in one of the Army’s first Female Engagement Teams. In two tours and six years, she saw patterns in the military that were just like her experiences in the Children of God.

Here are Daniella's 10 characteristics of a cult that we talk about:

1. Has a charismatic leader (and a skinny white woman)

2. A sacred assumption

3. The transcendental mission

4. Self-sacrifice of members

5. Limits access to the outside world

6. Distinguishable vernacular

7. Us versus them mentality

8. Exploits members' labor

9. High exit costs

10. Ends justify the means mentality

Find Daniella online:

https://twitter.com/daniellamyoung

https://www.instagram.com/daniellamyoung_

https://www.tiktok.com/@daniellamestyanekyoung

By Daniella's book UnCULTured

https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781250280114

We're also excited to announce that our long promised merch is here!!

We know it's tough sometimes to express your leftist feelings in public. Your ratty Che Guevara and CCCP t-shirts seem better left at home. Now you can fly your crypto-leftist flag and still be completely under the radar with our personal love letter to Juan José Arévalo, philosopher and socialist president of Guatemala, and the airline he nationalized.

wetwired.printful.me/

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 have some Jordan Peterson news. His daughter says he’s under spiritual attack after being exposed to a moldy attic.

We also cover some of the comments Kamala Harris have been making during the book tour for her 2024 election memoir 107 Days. Reassuringly, pro-Palestine protesters have been showing up at just about every one of her tour stops.

We're also excited to announce that our long promised merch is here!!

We know it's tough sometimes to express your leftist feelings in public. Your ratty Che Guevara and CCCP t-shirts seem better left at home. Now you can fly your crypto-leftist flag and still be completely under the radar with our personal love letter to Juan José Arévalo, philosopher and socialist president of Guatemala, and the airline he nationalized.

wetwired.printful.me/

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

patreon.com/wetwired

Music:Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC-BY)

We’re here on the eve of the end of America as we’ve come to know it, and the two of us thought, “what could be a more fitting way to honor everything we love about this country than to do one of the most American things possible?”

That would be watching a movie and then arguing about it. 

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The movie we picked to divert our attention from the machine like roll of militarism and xenophobia across the US is Paul Verhoevan’s Starship Troopers. 

That means we’re talking: propaganda, fascism, more propaganda, some xenophobia, a lot of militarism, and then even more propaganda. So, essentially, we carefully chose a movie that bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to anything happening out there in the real world.

This episode was born out of a conversation Jules and I had last week about a clip from Starship Troopers someone posted on Twitter. It was the scene of the cow in the lab getting gored to death by a giant bug.

In that clip, a couple of guys in lab coats walk a cow into a room with one of the arachnids and then hurry out before the bug gets to them. Immediately, that seemed to me like an encapsulation of the entire movie’s message. My takeaway from that scene and the move overall that fascism is stupidly overconfident, everyone is expendable, and safety is for pussies.

Independent filmmaker Jacob Gregor joins us to talk about his bleak and unsettling new film End of History. We talk with Jacob about his discomforting vision of a nameless young man who drives cross country to Alaska listening to nothing but podcasts and AM radio.

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This is the sort of man who has been living close by all along, right under your nose. You've seen him online countless times and probably didn't even notice. You didn't see him because his isn't an influencer, he's not in charge of anything, and he's never posted anything that went viral. He's a reply guy.

We chat with Jacob about his character's flat arc, making this movie, and the online-too-much guys who just want everything in the world to be like it was when they were 8 years old.

Find Jacob online:

https://x.com/JacobGorb

https://www.instagram.com/jacobgorb/

We're also excited to announce that our long promised merch is here!!

We know it's tough sometimes to express your leftist feelings in public. Your ratty Che Guevara and CCCP t-shirts seem better left at home. Now you can fly your crypto-leftist flag and still be completely under the radar with our personal love letter to Juan José Arévalo, philosopher and socialist president of Guatemala, and the airline he nationalized.

https://wetwired.printful.me/

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

patreon.com/wetwired

Music:

Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC-BY)

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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