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Mike Freedman
Welcome to 1984 Today, your one stop shop for all things dystopian. I'm your host, Mike Freedman. Our guest today is Ken Silva. Ken is a freelance investigative journalist who focuses on the issues around the collection and use of data. His work has been published by Headline USA, Global Data Review, The Libertarian Institute and Reason, among others. You can find him on the platform formerly known as Twitter, where his handle is jd_cashless. Ken, thank you so much for joining us.
Ken Silva
Yeah, thank you very much for having me.
Mike Freedman
And we wanted to have a chat together for a couple of reasons. If I'm not mistaken, one of which is your broader work around data and privacy and and its implications for, for the normal citizen. And the other is some work you are quite in the thick of right now to do with what are called the Fed Files. Is that correct?
Ken Silva
Yes. And I'm glad you're having me on to talk about this topic, because we just freshly published a couple of very interesting stories that touches on Charlottesville and some other events that have been in international news.
Mike Freedman
Maybe for people who are joining us and might not be familiar with your work in general or specifically to do with the Fed Files, maybe we can quickly bring people up to speed on where you're coming from, what your wheelhouse is, and specifically what the Fed Files are.
Ken Silva
Okay, sure. So I've been a reporter for about ten, 12 years and I've been a libertarian longer than that. So I got interested in politics around 2008 when I was 18. The Ron Paul movement, that really, you know, got me into, you know, a variety of topics related to libertarianism, the Federal Reserve, all these so-called deep state topics.
That was when I was in college, kind of fell into a job reporting around 2010, 2011. Did a variety of things. I went overseas, worked in the Caribbean for a little bit, and then I came back about two years ago and worked for The Epoch Times, which is one of the, I think, six biggest newspapers in America at this point.
It's kind of a conservative newspaper. I don't agree with all its politics, but that's when I started writing about these topics, such as January 6th, the so-called insurrection, and this weird plot in Michigan to supposedly kidnap the governor, which we come to find out was heavily driven by FBI informants. And you begin to notice a pattern here where any big right wing terrorism case you see, there's just many, many FBI informants involved.
And you begin to question whether the FBI is trying to solve these cases and prevent terrorism or if they're actually trying to provoke terrorism for whatever reason, whether it is so they could make high profile cases or for more nefarious reasons. We can get into that. But so I really got into this topic pretty much the last two years I've been writing heavily about the intersection of the FBI and the far right movement, and I recently came across a trove of court filings that one Nazi inmate has been filing from prison over the last ten years.
They've been sitting here practically unnoticed. But there's thousands of records that he's filed that paint a picture in the mid 2000s of, you know, the FBI basically creating phony white supremacist groups and trying to, you know, provoke violence, I guess. So the agents can make, you know, so-called terrorism arrests. And these Fed Files describe this activity going all the way up to the 2017 Charlottesville rally. I think people will recall that because there was a big torch march with all these Nazis, and it ended in violence when counter-protesters came the next day.
Mike Freedman
That was the “Jews will not replace us”, Trump saying “fine people on both sides” one? It's hard to keep track of all the crazy in America these days.
Ken Silva
Most people remember that event from Trump's reaction, he refused to allegedly condemn the Nazis. I think his remarks might have been taken out of context. But in any event, and this is what we can get into, that the Fed Files expose that many of those so-called Nazis in Charlottesville actually have deep connections to the FBI.
Mike Freedman
Besides the fact that it's a fascinating line of inquiry and a very important investigation, another reason why it's of particular interest to us on this podcast is in the book 1984, one of the, not even really a character, but one of the layers of the book is the existence of a figure known as Emmanuel Goldstein, who is this supposedly revolutionary figure.
And it's never quite made clear because you can't really believe anything that's asserted in the book. It's never quite made clear whether he's real or not, whether he works for Big Brother or was a real revolutionary. But this blurring of the line between the the government in power and the people who are supposedly resisting the government in power, the implication that the the existence of an opposition group actually can help cement the power of a government rather than undermine it is particularly relevant for us here.
And that's why I'd love for us to get stuck into the Fed Files and what you found there. Because besides the fact that it's a nutso story, I couldn't even begin to sum up myself because my brain can't hold all those details. It really does, in my opinion, speak to this question of what we can believe in, what we see going on around us when we hear such and such a group are up to no good, or there's a domestic terrorist here, or there's a so-called far right extremist here.
There's obviously people who hold all kinds of crazy beliefs, I'm sure. But the way that it filters through the media and through the the mouthpieces of the state seems to be telling quite a neat story. And you're here to tell us that that story isn't quite as neat as we may have been led to believe.
Ken Silva
Yeah. And these kind of tactics go all the way back to the Cold War. There was something you might know called Operation Gladio, where the CIA had these Nazi stay-behind groups after World War Two, where they stored secret caches of weapons, you know, they formed these secret militias of, you know, ex-World War Two Nazis, just in case, the ostensible reason was if Russia invaded Europe.
But it turned out that throughout the seventies and eighties that these Nazi militias in Europe, in Europe were doing terrorism attacks. All these bombings and things like that. And they were trying to blame it on the communists to gin up support for the centrist liberal government to keep it Western so they wouldn't flip communist. So I believe that's kind of my thesis, that many of these tactics from the Cold War have since been imported to America because these programmes just don't go away. They're still, you know, special forces operators and all these CIA people, they need something to do. So why not terrorize the domestic populace?
Mike Freedman
Well, that's, I mean, that's the old Harry Anslinger story, right, from Prohibition. We ended up with, we ended up with effectively an FBI because the the semi-militant group that was created to enforce prohibition needed jobs for the boys once everyone decided to get drunk. So we ended up with a body investigating all sorts of stuff with all kinds of powers and function creep means that it's much bigger now than it was. Just like DHS had a very narrow remit back post-9/11, and it's now a sprawling government bureaucracy. So. All right, hit me. Fed Files 101. For the untrained listener, what's been going on in the FBI's treatment of neo-Nazi groups?
Ken Silva
Okay, so where to begin with the Fed Files? I guess I'll begin with the source of the Fed Files. I did allude to it previously. He is a convicted felon and a Nazi that's currently in prison. And your listeners might be like, Well, why is this reporter using a convicted felon Nazi as a source? This sounds highly dubious. I mean, he'll say anything to get the attention of a reporter. You know, he's a Nazi in prison.
Mike Freedman
A classic. What in cinema is called an unreliable narrator, right?
Ken Silva
There you go. Yeah, well, in this case, this Nazi has been filing authenticated FBI memos and other court transcripts, you know, affidavits, things like that, to actually support his claim. And he's made a lot of wild claims that I haven't been able to confirm. We can touch on those at the end. I mean, he does have a crazy story, but one of the things that he's proven beyond the shadow of a doubt is that an FBI informant founded one of America's oldest and largest Nazi groups.
It's a group called the National Socialist Movement that was founded in 1976. One of the direct disciples of a guy named George Lincoln Rockwell, who's like the godfather of the American Nazi movement, founded this group. The founder's name was Robert Brannen. And it comes to turn out this Nazi inmate, through the Freedom of Information Act, obtained an FBI memo from the Seventies where agents are worried that this Robert Brannen character, that his cover had been blown. And the memo doesn't name him directly, but it says, you know, the leader of the National Socialist Movement, he responded to these allegations that he's an FBI informant. They published an article, you know, responding and clapping back. And this Nazi inmate, he finds the article in the Nazi publication and and he has the FBI memo. So he puts two and two together.
And clearly, Robert Brannen was an FBI informant for 10 to 20 years. And so we know that the NSM, which continues, it's still a group today, was founded by the FBI, you know, essentially the FBI, because the FBI informants under the law, they're agents of the state. And this group also participated in Charlottesville and was allegedly led by another FBI informant during that rally.
Now, this other FBI informant, his name is Jeff Schoop, and he's an interesting guy. He led the organization from the Nineties up until 2017, this deadly Charlottesville rally, his group. And he gets sued and he immediately repents and disavows his Nazism after the group gets like a $1,000,000 civil judgment against him. The group, it still exists, but it's effectively in shambles right now.
So basically he led the group during Charlottesville, destroys the group and then repents. And now he's openly working with the FBI and a DEA-funded nonprofit group, which really makes you wonder, was this guy actually a Nazi when he was in the movement, or did he have government connections? And the Nazi inmate, the source of the Fed Files, has accused him of being a Fed.
They worked together in the mid 2000s and he said, you know, we'd organize similar rallies in places like Toledo, Ohio or Orlando, Florida. And evidently counter-protesters, it wasn't called Antifa at the time, I think it was Anti-Racist Action was the group. They'd show up, fight with the Nazis or a riot would break out and arrests would be made and there would be headlines. It would be a big disaster. And the Nazi inmate suspected that the leader at the time was a Fed. And then, yeah, this is all a run-up to Charlottesville where, you know, the most volatile situation ended up happening. So that's the main finding that I've been able to confirm from the Fed Files.
Mike Freedman
I think I'm going to leave that long pause in because there's a lot of questions I have, but it's a very difficult thing to jump on immediately because I'm receiving what you said and things are still landing. Maybe where I'd start is that the leading light of a present day far right organization had a kind of Damascene conversion right after suddenly being made financially liable for his insanity.
That's maybe the first thing that I find very fun about this affair. It's interesting what consequences interest people and what consequences don't. But more than that, there's an almost poetic circular nature to that, that an FBI informant is the founding member or founding director of the NSM, and it's another FBI informant who sees it through its final chapter, so to speak.
Is there any insight into whether the wrapping-up in a way was intentional, that just as there may have been federal input into the foundation of the group, that there may have been federal input into the winding down?
Ken Silva
Well, I think it's reasonable to draw the conclusion that if this group was founded by an FBI informant, it wouldn't be passed off to a true believer. I think it was probably infiltrated by the FBI the whole time. Do I have information that Charlottesville was kind of the bookend on this group and that they imploded on purpose? No, not really.
The significance of this group participating in Charlottesville, if viewed in isolation, is maybe you could downplay there were maybe 20 NSM members there, including the leader, Jeff Schoop. The so-called FBI informant did punch somebody, so they did perpetrate violence. They helped plan the event. But, you know, there were hundreds and hundreds of people there. So maybe the skeptic could say, well, what's the significance?
Well, what I found in reading through the civil litigation transcripts is that this FBI-founded NSM Group was part of a larger alliance that these Nazis called the Nationalist Front. But sure enough, according to my third file source, had other FBI front groups in it. And my source, the Nazi inmate, also accused the Confederate Hammerskins. How's that for a group name?
Mike Freedman
That's a band name, not an extremist group, right? The Confederate Hammerskins.
Ken Silva
There's a skit. The Skinhead, the heavy metal movement of the early Nineties and the Nazi movement heavily intersect in London as well as I'm sure you might know.
Mike Freedman
Skrewdriver with a K was a kind of right wing punk band at some point, like you could have far right punk and have it still be punk. It's a very strange idea.
Ken Silva
The Confederate Hammerskins is an FBI front group. According to the Fed Files, the League of the South is another group that was infiltrated by the FBI.
Mike Freedman
They sound much nicer than the Hammerskins. They sound like they'd knit you a quilt.
Ken Silva
Yeah. Yeah, they're the kind of people who care about Confederate statues and things like that. They do Civil War reenactments. They're not as heavily like hardcore Nazi.
Mike Freedman
They're more Nazi cosplay.
Ken Silva
Yeah, there you go. They're more cosplay of, like, Confederate soldiers, I guess. But then so the final group in this Nationalist Front alliance is called Vanguard America. And this group had already been formed after my source was in prison. So I don't have anything on that from the Fed Files. But what I can tell you is that Vanguard America is the group that marched with the guy who eventually drove his car into the crowd of protesters and killed the counter-protester Heather Heyer.
He comes from this group, so you've got this Nationalist Front with three alleged or confirmed FBI front groups, and the fourth one, its membership included the homicidal driver. They're all linked. They were all part of the same alliance. And now furthermore, sorry to keep going, but Vanguard America, after Charlottesville, it also gets sued. It's destroyed by one of its top officials.
I guess one of the leaders rebrands it as now you might see these guys up all the time on Twitter, the Patriot Front. Are you familiar with the Patriot Front?
Mike Freedman
I haven't had the joyous experience of encountering their surely sterling work, no.
Ken Silva
Okay. So, yeah, if you're in America and you're on Twitter a lot like I am, you have run across the Patriot Front. They show up to LGBT events and things like that, and they're actually kind of known for looking like Feds. Like whenever there's videos of them, everybody on Twitter is like, that looks like an FBI group. They all have blue polos, khakis, they march with face masks, like they're a very weird and bizarre group that just pops up and it seems to be like looking almost to discredit the right wing.
Mike Freedman
This is what happens when you have a fascist section at Abercrombie, right?
Ken Silva
Yeah. But that group directly comes from this alliance of Nazi Fed groups that participated in Charlottesville. And that's what I think is like the larger significance of the Fed Files in relationship to this Charlottesville event.
Mike Freedman
This brings us to a broader topic in a way, which is the ethics and reality of what we would call entrapment or informant-based law enforcement. Right. I don't, I'm not a lawyer, but something that seems to crop up quite a lot in particular in the United States is you track any horrible event or any event that would have been horrible if it hadn't been foiled. Quite often when you track it back, there's some kind of member of law enforcement. Quite often the FBI who had some kind of meeting, who might have made a suggestion, who might have helped out with equipment or something like that going all the way back to the nineties and beyond. This is a thing. This is a known structural aspect of a lot of extreme events in the United States.
What has the federal response been, if at all, to the material you've been putting out about this particular situation and more broadly about the ethics of that? If someone from the federal government approaches a private citizen and effectively either convinces them or deliberately elevates them to a position where they are able to do something, that is, let's just call it anti-social or illegal to keep it simple. Is that the same kind of a crime as if someone does that on their own, on purpose? Do you see what I mean? I, I find it oddly unethical to have a government interfering in the genesis of criminal behavior rather than dealing with the aftermath.
Ken Silva
Right. And it's just starting to become a national conversation now because groups closely connected to the Republican Party and Donald Trump are finding themselves in these situations of like January 6th and the so-called plot to kidnap Michigan's governor. These were high profile national cases. The Michigan plot was October 2020. It directly affected the outcome of the election.
So this kind of entrapment activity has happened for decades. They did it to Muslims after 9/11 and nobody said anything. But now that it's actually affecting national politics, people are talking about January 6th in the context of, well, what did the FBI do to help provoke this? It may be cynical, just to get political points, but at least people are starting to talk about these issues now.
I mean, the last time we had this conversation was in the seventies during the Church Committee hearings in Congress after Watergate. That's when they discovered COINTELPRO, which is an FBI program, basically exactly what I described in the Fed Files on the right wing, except COINTELPRO targeted mostly left wing groups like the Black Panthers, anti-Vietnam protesters. It was specifically designed to infiltrate and disrupt these groups.
Mike Freedman
Environmental movement as well.
Ken Silva
That's right. The environmental movement as well. And there were limited reforms enacted in the seventies and they almost passed something called like the Undercover FBI Regulation Act, which would have given Congress direct oversight of FBI undercover operations actions. But that I think that was in like '82. And Ronald Reagan's attorney general convinced Congress to not pass that legislation.
Then Reagan launches Iran-Contra, which is a very spooky operation with FBI, CIA informants. Pretty much every reform of the Church Committee in the seventies was undone by Reagan. And we've had these kind of operations all throughout the eighties and nineties. And then after 9/11, of course, it really gets ramped up. And now we're just beginning to talk about it in the wake of January 6th. And because, you know, it's affecting one of the two largest parties in America.
Mike Freedman
Something that's very powerful to me about the the story and the dealing with the aftermath of January 6th is, regardless of whether you are of the opinion that it was an insurrection, that it was a genuine, motivated, organized, premeditated attempt to overthrow the government or some aspect of it, or whether you think it was effectively a riot, a protest that got out of hand, people got carried away and behaved the way crowds often do in those situations: What I find is the queasy part is that we don't know that. That's what I find strange. And that's again, touching on something that we deal with in this podcast is the finding out what's real. I mean, you're a journalist, this is literally your focus, I presume, is trying to find the underpinning evidence and facts that tell the story in a factual and realistic way rather than from an opinion or a viewpoint. So we have telephones in every pocket. Everyone these days is a cameraman or a surveillance recording engineer of some description, CCTV body cams on police. We have so many information and data and audio visual gathering devices available and we can't seem to agree on the factual basis of what took place on that one day. That to me is the really weird part, the fact that it happened. Obviously it's unsafe, but the main thing is with everything at our disposal, why can't we just see what really happened? Or can we, and people don't talk about it? What's your view?
Ken Silva
Yeah, it is pretty scary that, you know, depending what your political views are, your view of reality is, is totally different. My view of January 6th, I mean, I, I don't really research that as much as these other Nazi events like the Oklahoma City bombing and Charlottesville, the stuff we've been talking about. I do think there were some undercover provocateurs in the January 6th crowd, but there were over 1000 people there. And everybody has agency. They have volition. They get to choose whether or not they're going to go into the Capitol. I'm more concerned about stuff like the Whitmer plot, where it's, you know, people in the heartland of America hanging out on a Friday night. They're in a militia. They just shot some guns. They're having a couple of beers. They're talking politics. And they might say some dumb things about capturing a governor, but they have no actual intent to do that. But then there's some undercover FBI guy with a microphone and they entrap these people and, you know, throw them in some of the most, you know, the terrible prisons in the world, all, you know, trampling on the First Amendment and the Second Amendment while doing so.
So I'm more focused on those plots than January 6th. But I know there is, there's something the FBI is trying to cover up in January 6th. They still haven't identified the so-called pipe bomber. There was a guy who allegedly placed these pipe bombs by the DNC and the RNC. And I think the rationale was that these things would go off, all the law enforcement would be diverted to the pipe bombs, and then the crowd would stormed the Capitol. The pipe bombs never went off. And there's an FBI whistleblower that has alleged that they were inert material, which would suggest that it was an undercover operation, because usually when the FBI is trying to entrap or entice a rube into bombing something, they'll give them inert material and make an arrest at the last minute.
So the pipe bomb is one of the biggest questions I have that hasn't been solved. You know, who even was this guy? Additionally, another FBI whistleblower who was working in the Boston field office has come out and said that the D.C. FBI field office really wanted to control this case from day one and they won't even share information with the other FBI field offices about undercover agents or informants in the crowd. They refused to share it. I don't know what headquarters rationale would be, but this comes straight from an FBI agent in Boston who's saying, like, we can't even get information out of our D.C. headquarters. So there is definitely, there are a lot of questions surrounding January 6th. I haven't gotten to the bottom of everything or even hardly anything, maybe we never will, but it is a bizarre event that people should not take on its face value.
Mike Freedman
In your answer, you used a phrase that in itself, I think, shows how far we've come since the Church Committee. You said “usually when the FBI try to entrap some group” - how did we get to this point in a country that, while it definitely has its issues, also has some of the clearest guidelines for the standard a government needs to be held to? How did we reach a point where a federal agency has a usual way they go about convincing a citizen to do something violent or stupid or dangerous so that they can then arrest them for doing something stupid or violent or dangerous.
Ken Silva
Well, our civil liberties were severely eroded under 9/11, and a lot of Americans didn't care because all the people largely affected in the mid-2000s were Muslims and now the same counterterrorism apparatus is being turned on dissident right-wingers so, you know, that's a big thing is the erosion under 9/11.
Mike Freedman
You mean the Patriot Act, right?
Ken Silva
The Patriot Act and just the FBI ramping up now, there's a book called I think it's either The Terror Factory or Manufacturing Terrorism by Trevor Aaronson in 2011, which found that like out of like a thousand FBI terrorism cases in the mid 2000s involving Muslims, I think 800 of them, so like 80% of them involved an FBI informant, 60% involved allegations of entrapment. And so I just think these tactics were, really there was a playbook. The FBI dusted it off after 9/11. And we've been dealing with it ever since.
Mike Freedman
In terms of the Nazi groups that you've been looking at, the story doesn't obviously begin in Charlottesville and the NSM you described was formed in the seventies, but if I'm not mistaken, there is an intervening period in the eighties and nineties, there's quite a rabbit hole there that's worth looping people in on, am I correct?
Ken Silva
Yes. And thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about this, because I think everything we've been talking about really began in the early eighties as it pertains specifically to the FBI's kind of low intensity warfare against dissident right wingers. Like, obviously, the FBI has been, you know, butting heads with Black Panthers, left wing groups, the Muslim terror groups are not terrorist groups, but, you know, Muslim civilians that we've been talking about.
Mike Freedman
People who don't want bacon on their cheeseburger, basically.
Ken Silva
Yet they got specific with the right wing. This all begins in the early eighties when Ronald Reagan's Federal Reserve chairman, I think Volcker, he jacks up interest rates to control the inflation, kind of like what the Federal Reserve is doing right now.
Mike Freedman
You ever get déja vu?
Ken Silva
Yeah. Yeah, it's, so it could be scary if this is kicking off the same set of events, because the rising interest rates call caused a farming crisis where all these farmers in the Midwest, all of a sudden they couldn't afford credit to keep their farm operations running. They couldn't afford, you know, more fertilizer, heavy, you know, machinery, things like that.
All those things. Prices were skyrocketing while the prices of their crops, because it's such a competitive market, was basically stagnant. So at one point it was like a farm a day was closing in America for years. And a lot of these guys were also like Vietnam veterans, you know, people that at one point loved their country, but now they're feeling like they're really being abandoned.
And you know what they thought in the fifties and sixties and seventies, you know, they're coming to realize the American dream is a farce. And many of these guys at that point become, you know, they get into national socialism or, you know, far right, I guess you want to call it constitutionalism where you believe, you know, we got to go back to 1790, that kind of form of government.
They're forming militias there. It's getting really, really big and serious in the eighties. And there was one particular guy, a World War Two veteran named Gordon Kahl, who was a really popular guy in the movement. And he was a tax protester who refused to file with the IRS. He called the IRS like, I kind of like this, I'm not religious, but he call it the, like, the tithe collectors for the Synagogue of Satan.
So he was a colorful character. And because he was going on the radio stations and TV stations at the time, you know, spreading the message, the IRS targeted him for not filing, even though he was a poor farmer who didn't owe any money. Actually, he did not owe a single penny. They went after him for not filing, throw him in prison. He has a couple of heart attacks in prison. Thinks the government's tried to kill him, gets out, still doesn't file. They go after him again. And this time the U.S. Marshals set up a roadblock in North Dakota, really heavy handed tactics for like what amounts to a paperwork issue. Gordon Kahl's driving down the road and encounters this roadblock.
This is a hardcore World War Two, you know, most very decorated veteran with his kids. They all have their hunting rifles. A standoff ensues. A bunch of the marshals get killed. Gordon Kahl goes on the run. He's on the lam for a couple of months, and now he's like a cult hero. Like, everybody loves this guy. The FBI finally catches him in Arkansas and in a Waco style event, they surround his house and shoot like 10,000 bullets in it.
By the way, Governor Clinton was the governor of Arkansas at the time. That's a random little factoid.
Mike Freedman
And then he was President when Ruby Ridge happened as well, right?
Ken Silva
Yes. Yes, that's exactly right. So they shoot up this guy's house. They burn him alive. It looks like, I've got a photo of him, his charred corpse, they look like they defiled his body almost. They cut off his hands. I guess it was a really bizarre and mysterious case that would be kind of a whole, whole other show in itself.
Mike Freedman
So a guy who thought that there was some kind of mystical element to the government's persecution of him seems to have died in a ritual killing.
Ken Silva
Like, well, when you put it like that, it sounds as if it's...
Mike Freedman
No, I'm just saying it's interesting how this stuff happens, that is what I heard you describe to me. That's, it's weird.
Ken Silva
That is the description. And I stand by it. And in any event, this really inflames the right wing movement. And in response to Gordon Kahl's killing, this militia goes full-on legitimately domestic terrorism. They form a group called The Order. And this group in 1983 and '84 would go around robbing banks to fund a right wing revolution. They ended up as legitimate, bad terrorists. They assassinated a Jewish radio host who was speaking out against them.
Mike Freedman
They're the people that killed Alan Berg.
Ken Silva
Yes. Okay. You know about this case. Yes. So these guys are really bad terrorists. And this is when the FBI starts to focus on it, the FBI takes down The Order, you know, pretty good, pretty good police work. But then for some reason, they want to go full ham and take out everybody. And so they charge pretty much all the leaders of the militia movement in the eighties with insurrection, the same charge facing a lot of the January Sixers.
But this time in the eighties, the militia people beat the DOJ. They were found not guilty of insurrection. And after they were found not guilty, they go outside the courtroom and raise the Confederate flag, like they were really rubbing it in the government's face. And now it was here that the government really, I think, they got upset, they wanted revenge or they really wanted to get a win back.
So they launch another undercover operation called, I kid you not, it's called Patriot Conspiracy. They call it PatCon for short. They love their acronyms.
Mike Freedman
And I'm sorry, I don't mean to laugh, but Patriot Conspiracy, first of all, sounds like the show about this, not the actual thing. But also it's quite a, it's quite a power name. But PatCon? Pat Con sounds like the guy that's dating your grandma. And it doesn't quite have the same oomph. I don't know why they'd sacrifice such a, such a beefy name, but anyway, sorry. Go on.
Ken Silva
It's become an infamous acronym now. Well, if only more people knew about it, because this is a very, very dark operation and it entailed undercover FBI agents, not even informants, like actual trained FBI agents posing as Nazis. They formed a front group called the Aryan Veterans Front or something like that, where they were like former U.S. military veterans.
Now they were Nazi bank robbers. And they networked with a lot of far right groups in the early nineties and PatCon was running during Ruby Ridge, during Waco and during Oklahoma City, when all these right wing terrorism events or bizarre standoffs with law enforcement were taking place.
Mike Freedman
And the first World Trade Center bombing.
Ken Silva
Yeah. Which also, that had an informant involved, too, which is another bizarre story. But this PatCon ran during Oklahoma City and the far right movement of the nineties. And we didn't know about PatCon until like the 2000s when it came out, I think during Terry Nichols's trial, who was one of the accomplices in the Oklahoma City bombing. Somebody gets wind of this program. A Utah lawyer named Jesse Trentadue starts filing Freedom of Information requests about PatCon and his filings caught the notice of a former informant who was part of that operation called John Matthews. It's like 2010. He's retired by now, but he's seen that the FBI is releasing memos where he's named as an informant and he's like, What the heck? I was loyal to the FBI and now they're naming me, they're endangering me.
Mike Freedman
They're unredacting me.
Ken Silva
Yeah, they unredacted him. Yep. And he comes out to Jesse Trentadue the lawyer and says, Well, you know, I'm going to blow the whistle on this operation now and tell everything. And he told everything to Newsweek, but the story was heavily censored and...
Mike Freedman
But censored internally? Sorry to interrupt, but just, censored internally meaning by Newsweek themselves, or they were asked to?
Ken Silva
Yeah, internally by Newsweek. We don't know exactly what happened. I think one of the editors ended up working for the left wing Daily Beast. So there could have been just some, it might not have been nefarious FBI stuff. It might have just been petty politics. And in any event, the story doesn't run. And his allegations, by the way, are shocking.
He says that the FBI was monitoring Timothy McVeigh before the bombing, which suggests that the bombing was a botched sting operation. It could be like the biggest scandal in FBI history. And after the story is censored, he agrees to testify in Jesse Trentadue's FOIA lawsuit because Jesse is continuing to sue the FBI for records related to his brother's death.
His brother at one point was a bank robber in the eighties. It's, it's very loosely connected. But he's trying to get vengeance for his brother. So he's going after the FBI for, you know, as hard as he can for these records. And he's going to have the FBI informant testify on his behalf about this PatCon operation. And the night before the informant was set to testify, he backs out and tells Jesse “the FBI threatened me. They said I'm going to end up another homeless Vietnam veteran if I testify in your trial and talk about PatCon, I got to disappear.”
And now Jesse goes to the judge and accuses the FBI of tampering with his witness and surprisingly, the judge agreed with Jesse and launches a federal court investigation. He appoints something called a special master, which in America is like a judge designated to preside over a certain topic.
And so a special master has been investigating these witness tampering allegations against the informant for the last eight years. The case is still sealed. The proceedings are still ongoing. I know there's gag orders on all parties, so I don't know exactly what's going on. But eventually there's going to be a court opinion that talks about whether the FBI threatened this whistleblower from talking about the biggest, one of the biggest FBI scandals in history.
So this thing is still developing and we're going to hopefully blow the lid off of it. One of these days, in the near future.
Mike Freedman
And the Oklahoma City story, if I'm not mistaken, the principal actors were, of course, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. But am I right in remembering that there was always this kind of cloud or fog, suggesting there was a third man, so to speak, and that this might be related to that?
Ken Silva
Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly the implications of PatCon. So we know there was Timothy McVeigh and there's a guy named Terry Nichols who helped McVeigh build the bomb. But Terry Nichols is confirmed to have been in Kansas on April 19th, 1995, the morning where Timothy McVeigh and this mysterious John Doe 2 drive a Ryder truck to the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.
And they set it off at 9 a.m., kill 168 people, including, I think, 19 children, a couple of pregnant ladies, like they blew up a daycare. It's one of the most disgusting things you'll ever read about that terrorists would do because it wasn't an organic terrorist act, I do not believe. There were 28, 27 witnesses who saw McVeigh with this mysterious John Doe 2 character on the morning of the attack.
And the FBI refused to call any of them as witnesses in McVeigh's trial. They convicted McVeigh by putting in, like, phone call evidence. And they basically had people testify about their babies dying, like really just trying to emotionally gin up the jury. And McVeigh essentially admitted to doing it. So that case was pretty much a slam dunk to convict McVeigh.
But meanwhile, the FBI has this manhunt for John Doe 2 for a couple of months and then all of a sudden they just announce like, oh, all these witnesses, they were mistaken. John Doe 2 doesn't exist. Like, do not worry about this. And there is surveillance footage there that's missing. All the witnesses, a lot of them are still alive, they're still swearing on their life that they saw McVeigh with another person. There's an FBI, one of the lead investigators, a guy named Danny Coulson. He started the hostage rescue team, a highly credible person. He came out in the early 2000s saying like if it were one or two witnesses that saw McVeigh or John Doe 2, maybe you could dismiss it. But 27 witnesses, are you kidding me? Like this guy was definitely out there. He was never caught. And furthermore, sorry to rant about this. This also ties into PatCon. Right around the time of the bombing, there was this group called the Aryan Republican Army...
Mike Freedman
Every time I hear a title like this, all I can think of is like three dudes with a six pack of PBR in the back of a pickup truck. Like, it's such a grandiose name, the Aryan Republican Army.
Ken Silva
Yeah, one of the leaders was named Commander Pedro.
Mike Freedman
Amazing.
Ken Silva
Commander Pedro. Yeah, that's beautiful. So as far as Nazi terrorists go, these guys are kind of like comical. They went around in the early nineties. They committed like a stunning, like 25 successful big bank robberies, no casualties or anything. They bust in wearing like presidents' masks. They would let you say, like, thank you very much and they would laugh about it.
Now, there's a book about this called In Bad Company by an Indiana University criminologist. So this isn't like fringe right wing conspiracy stuff. This was a real group written about at the time by The Washington Post.
Mike Freedman
And this is, this sounds like the plot of Point Break, right? Except they were right wing maniacs instead of surfers.
Ken Silva
I'm not familiar with that movie, but I'll take your word for it.
Mike Freedman
I'm old enough that I remember when it came out, but yeah, it's basically about a gang of bank robbers who dress up as presidents and rob banks.
Ken Silva
Say, I love bank robbery movies. I'll have to check that out. So these, these bank robbers, these Aryan Nazi bank robbers, their hideout was a place called Elohim City, which was like this right wing identity, Christian identity property in Oklahoma, which is also where McVeigh was seen on numerous occasions. So there's a direct link between these Aryan bank robbers and McVeigh.
And the feeling is that there's a lot of other evidence that the bank robberies were used to help finance McVeigh's travels. He was living out of hotel rooms for a year with no job, no help to finance the construction of the bomb. There were probably two Ryder trucks and some diversionary tactics to fool the FBI to actually carry out the attack.
And so there's a, there's a direct link between these bank robbers and McVeigh, like it was 100%, with no doubt in my mind that this was a larger conspiracy, that the FBI, if we want to give them the benefit of the doubt and said they didn't want this to happen, it was, it was definitely a failed sting operation because they had informants in the Aryan Republican Army, too, by the way.
Mike Freedman
Is there a right wing extremist group in the United States that doesn't have an FBI informant in it?
Ken Silva
At this point, I don't believe so. The Order, I think, was the last genuine right wing terrorist group. And I think the reason for that is because in the eighties, these groups were able to network off the Internet. I think any group that's on the Internet is automatically compromised because, as you know, we talk about data privacy, you know, the government can see everything you're doing. There's little, there's no way to network as a terrorist without having Big Brother seeing you. That's what I think.
Mike Freedman
That makes a lot of sense. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but there's this much derided, often unsavory, but occasionally hilarious chat room called 4chan that put out what they called the Rules of the Internet. I think that's the first place it appeared. And one of the Rules of the Internet, obviously, this is a little outdated now, but one of the Rules of the Internet was 'there are no girls on the Internet.' The idea being that if you're in a chat room, whoever you think you're talking to online, it's just another dude. And listening to you tell this incredible history, it just makes me think like that's maybe one of the rules of extremism, right? That there are no extremists in the Aryan Army. They're just all feds.
Ken Silva
Yeah. It's become a meme. Yeah. If anybody, any time anybody in the right wing movement says something slightly suspicious on the Internet, like suggesting any kind of illegal act, everybody responds saying, this guy, this guy glows. It's what the kids say. They call them glowies. I think that's like an X-Files reference or something like that. So yes, and it's become comical.
I think there's a joke, you know, if you're in the Ku Klux Klan, how can you spot the FBI informants? Oh, well, they're the ones that pay the dues on time.
Mike Freedman
I mean, that's a whole, I'm laughing, but that is a whole other queasy question of, the government is effectively funding extremism in order to crack down on extremism.
Ken Silva
That's what it is. And yet another connection to this part time operation is the fact that I mentioned that the government went after these militias and accused them of insurrection in the eighties. And the militias beat the case, but they pretty much depleted their resources after fighting the DOJ. And there's one particular group called the Aryan Nation, which was like the main Nazi group of the eighties.
They were almost defunct, like by 1991, it, you know, they had a property in Idaho that was in shambles. They didn't have any money. Membership was hemorrhaging. Hell, a sudden calm kicks off and the membership starts going back up. And there's a great book by, her name's Wendy Painting. It's called Aberration in the Heartland of the Real. It was a Ph.D. thesis. It's actually a biography on Timothy McVeigh. It's the book that set me off in this whole rabbit hole. But she talks to a former head of security of the Aryan Nation who said, yeah, we know the FBI was basically getting people to go to our annual Aryan Nation World Congress, like they were directly subsidizing these people to get the group, you know, back up and running.
So, yeah, I think you're exactly right when you say the government is subsidizing this, that's a good way to put it.
Mike Freedman
Which is, of course, on its face, both absurd and concerning. Like we can joke about it and it is funny in a particular way. But at the same time, we're talking about the same organization that claims a moral mandate for taxation and also argues that taxation funds their spending. We're not going to get into an economics conversation, so don't worry, we're not going to go down that rabbit hole. But suffice it to say that we can talk about roads or defense or health care, such as it is in the United States - I don't know any one really who would tick the right wing extremism box on the tax form to opt in. So where is the, where is the overarching logic for this? I mean, this is in a way, I suppose not to diminish what you've said, because it comes from a lot of research and from access to primary materials, but what you're describing is what would usually be called a conspiracy theory, in a certain way. That doesn't mean the certain ways in which a conspiracy exposed requires theorizing about it until one has all the information, that doesn't mean it's not real. So I'm not saying it in a demeaning way, but because that's how it lands or could land for a lot of people.
The question that usually comes up when someone retells this kind of story, this kind of idea of why things are happening is, well, why would they do that? So to play Devil's Avocado, as they say, why would the FBI spend money that they're always complaining they don't have enough of in order to build up organizations that their budgets are intended to fight against if those organizations are already floundering and on their way out? Why would Congress and the federal government, the executive branch, in some cases, even the judicial branch, rubber stamp, sign off on, oversee and wave through a logic of law enforcement and approach to dealing with extremism that is effectively to encourage it until it is obvious enough that you can actually catch them? Why is that an idea that we can believe in or defend?
Ken Silva
Well, there's certainly cynical reasons. You know, the self-licking ice cream cone, you know, there are...
Mike Freedman
I'm not familiar with that. Please, please carry on. I'd like to know more about the self-licking ice cream cone.
Ken Silva
Agencies creating their own rationale for existence. If you're going to have an FBI domestic terrorism unit, you know you've got to have domestic terrorism cases to keep it busy. Otherwise, they're going to get it, have it shut down. So that's a real kind of cynical way to put it. Even more cynical would be these guys want to terrorize their own population, keep people discombobulated, distract it, keep the current people in power.
I think, you know, Bill, Bill Clinton said after the Oklahoma City bombing he actually became popular because the right wing became anybody right of, like, Rush Limbaugh was demonized and he actually, Clinton said after he won reelection in '96, he's on the presidential plane, and the reporters hear him saying, like, the Oklahoma City bombing secured my reelection.
Now, these are cynical things and I don't think your readers or, your listeners should believe it for sure. So I'll defend the FBI, and there is a legitimate rationale. For starters, I pointed out that The Order in the eighties that assassinated the Jewish radio host, that was legitimate terrorism and the FBI did feel the need to counter that for good reason. I mean, obviously, now in the early 2000s, though, it turned out that...this is another wild story.
Mike Freedman
I love it. Hit me. Keep it coming.
Ken Silva
So a lot of these Nazis are still hanging out, the ones that are still in the movement in the early nineties, even after OKC bombing, after a lot of people became more patriotic after 9/11. Like a lot of the right wingers actually like the government again. But the few remaining Nazis, they started networking with the North Korean government.
The North Korean government made like a 21 year old Nazi who probably only had like an IQ of 90, but they kind of made him like a poster child. And he started appearing in North Korea propaganda publications saying like, Oh, look at this young, handsome American. He hates his own government and he thinks North Korea is number one because a lot of the Nazis, like, they like right wing strongman. So there is kind of a common theme between Nazism and the North Korean Juche, whatever form of government. So the Nazis and the North Koreans started networking, and I think the FBI saw this and said, you know, we have to co-opt the Nazis so foreign governments don't. So that's, I think, the best realpolitik, a real legitimate reason for the FBI to do this is saying we've got these fringe crazy Nazis in America, these fringe leftists that are going to collude with Russia, collude with China, collude with Iran, collude with the Palestinians. I know that some of the Nazis support Palestine to attack Israel. I guess if we don't co-opt the Nazis, then foreign governments are going to co-opt them. So I think that's the best reason that I've ever come across for why the FBI feels the need to do this.
Mike Freedman
Almost like a crowding out strategy that if all of the interference is coming from the U.S. government, then that lowers the chances that any interference will be coming from foreign governments.
Ken Silva
And they'll be able to do counterintelligence to spot well, hey, why? What's this? What's this guy with the Russian accent doing hanging out in South Carolina or whatever? You know.
Mike Freedman
[Russian accent] I am here to support the revolution against the Zionist occupation government. I completely believe in this...
By the way, the North Korean thing, because you're such an incredible encyclopedia of this stuff. Do you happen to remember the name of the unintentional poster child, by any chance, just in case people want to look this guy up and maybe see some of the pieces that he starred in?
Ken Silva
Okay. The article is on NK News which is in English, an English news site that covers North Korea. And I'm pulling the article up right now. It's called White Power and Apocalyptic Cults, the pro-North Korean Americans Revealed. And so:
“In September 2003, John Paul Cup, the 22 year old son of a fundamentalist Christian preacher received a message from the government of North Korea. The message said, 'Upon the authorization of the Central Committee, Pyongyang extends militant greetings to you who extend warm support and solidarity to the Songun policy of our respected Marshall, Kim Jong Il, treasur sword of our nation.”
So, you know, the lead of the story is about the message that this 22 year old, you know, Nazi chud in Indiana gets from North Korea.
What kicks it off? So I just named the title of the article and we'll check that out on NK News dot org. It's an old article, but it's a trove of information that I used as the basis for a lot of my understanding of this case.
Mike Freedman
That's amazing. John Paul Cupp was extended militant greetings from the government of North Korea.
Ken Silva
You can't make up this stuff. I'm telling you.
Mike Freedman
That's the famous line, right? That the difference between fact and fiction is that fiction has to make sense.
Ken Silva
Yes. Yes.
Mike Freedman
I think in a way, that's one of the problems, is when someone such as yourself goes on this journey of digging deeply into a particular thing, finds out a lot of stuff, ties it together, realizes what's actually going on, understands, as you clearly do, that it is quite a yarn and something that a lot of people would either not even be able to follow because it's complex, or even if they did, would kind of write it off because it doesn't conform to the Occam's Razor idea of bad guys and good guys in a simplistic sense. But I feel like that's something that just, it's how these things form, right? You can't really understand what's going on without going into the granular detail. And once you do, it's like splitting the atom. All this crazy, strange, what's the word? Jung's word. Synchronicity. Right? All these weird coincidences fall, fall out, and you end up with a story, because it's fact, you end up with a story that doesn't quite make sense the way that a neat three act story for a hero's journey would. And when you've been trying to write about this, to encompass this in clear journalistic prose, how do you, how do you get all of this stuff that's in your head into a way that someone will commission or publish and that someone will will read? How do you line up all this information to share with others?
Ken Silva
Well, that's, I guess I try to pride myself on being able to do that. I mean, one of the things about being a lifelong reporter is I started out working for newspapers and they literally tell you to write like you're writing on the fourth grade level. And so in my Fed Files reporting, which is on HeadlineUSA.com, that's what I try to do, is break this stuff in the most simplistic terms that I can. It's still complex storytelling and you have to have an attention span to follow along this kind of weaving narratives. And yeah, I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about this. I hope I didn't boggled the listeners' minds or make them bored with all these random dates and names and acronyms because it definitely is complex. But if you really, once you start to understand it, it's better than any Netflix show or HBO or anything. It's like, it's really interesting.
I read and write about it all day and it's really dark stuff. And I don't know if, if my journalism is ever going to make a difference as far as reform. But I do mean looking at this dark underbelly of the American security state, if nothing else. And, you know, it's fun, as weird as that might sound.
Mike Freedman
I completely hear you. I think maybe we could say that we share the idea that people are fascinating and extreme people are extremely fascinating.
Ken Silva
Yeah. Yeah. That's a really good way to put it.
Mike Freedman
And I completely share that with you. Since you raised the dark underbelly of the American security state, as you put it, this neatly brings us to the broader scope of your work, which is to do with data privacy, technology, surveillance and so on. I know it's a whole other kettle of fish. We could be here for another couple of hours and I don't know how much time you have, so I won't ask you necessarily to give us the same level of deep dive, but I'd be very interested to know, based on your work, specializing in that field, where you see, because you specialize in North America, where do you see the data privacy situation, the rise of technology, of surveillance and so on? I know there was a mooted concept of a national privacy law, for example, for the United States. I don't know where that is right now. So if you wanted to just give us a kind of State of the Union, so to speak, on this privacy factor, because I think it also relates to a lot of what we've talked about, that presumably much of the potentially nefarious influence and interference of law enforcement in the lives of regular people could be prevented or safeguarded against by stronger regulations on the the wall that separates a private citizen from the prying eyes of government.
Ken Silva
Yeah, would it suffice to say that we're all doomed? Can I just leave it at that?
Mike Freedman
Only if you tell me a knock knock joke afterwards.
Ken Silva
Oh, yeah, well, I don't have any knock knock jokes. I guess I'll have to go into it a little bit. We're a little bit different to Europe over here, where the tech industry and the military industrial complex is the exact same thing, which is why we don't have any national data privacy or anything like that. A couple of years ago, there was a congressional created commission called like the Something Commission on Artificial Intelligence, where a group of tech tycoons, I think Eric Schmidt, one of the original Google executives, was chairman of this committee.
And basically they released a report saying, oh, China's so terrible, they spy on all their citizens. They collect all their data to fuel these artificial intelligence technologies. And by the way, we need to do exactly what China's doing in order to compete with China to become the, you know, the global power of the 22nd century. And so we're dealing with some very powerful forces that say we have to mine all the data of American citizens in order to fuel all these AI bots so we could fight China. So, you know, there's obviously, there's a lot of details to unpack there. But in a nutshell, this is a national security issue. So the US government doesn't really care about our privacy.
I'm hoping that maybe Europe can help. I think, I'm not an expert on the legal issue, but I think there's like in some Schrems case or something where they're saying that Europe isn't like, the tech companies can't play the same in Europe as they do in the US. You can't send the data back and forth unless you follow the GDPR, which is Europe's privacy law.
I don't know how the GDPR is in any event, but yeah, hopefully maybe global pressures will help America, but at the end of the day, they feel like they need to fight China. So they got to get all our voices and our all our various, you know, data to fuel their machines of war.
Mike Freedman
Yeah, there's an old Tom Lehrer gag where he says the whole world is beginning to feel like a Christian scientist with appendicitis. And there's an element of that. There's now this newly coined phrase, I think it's the Censorship-Industrial Complex, which has been coined by Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, the work that they've done on the so-called Twitter files.
There's a lot of “files” floating around this year for some reason, I think. I definitely share your concerns and unfortunately probably also your bleak outlook. But how would I put it? Yes, it's ironic and strange and probably wrong for the government to use the logic of the Cold War arms race when it comes to the protection of personal data, the idea of the the arms gap, right, that oh, well, we can't afford to have a surveillance gap. We need to know everything that's going on about everyone, too. But why? Because you're not fighting people in the United States. It's a very strange logic, but more deeply, this control of information, the potential for the control of information opens especially with the developments in A.I. technology. Recently, it opens the door to levels of deception and propaganda that we haven't even really experienced yet. The concept of deepfakes. The idea that if your voice is in a database somewhere, they can just have you make a phone call to someone and it's not even you. They just write the script and it's your voice. With that in mind, there's all kinds of evidentiary implications for that.
Can we still have trials where you allow voice recordings in, if a voice recording can now be faked with pretty much perfect verisimilitude, even video footage in a way? We've got a a government ecosystem, a technology ecosystem and a legal ecosystem, and the technology is moving so much faster than the other two that maybe government is intentionally lagging, as you say, because they don't want to regulate it too hard because they're benefiting through the backdoor from a lot of the stuff that's being built and implemented. Where or how, if at all, can the legal infrastructure, the legal system respond to this in a way that can actually put checks on this?
Ken Silva
I guess the one idea I'd have, and this could have a bunch of unintended consequences that would also be bad, but if you had a privacy law where you give the private right of action to the consumers, where we don't have a regulatory agency cracking down on Cambridge Analytica, all these data mining scandals, you let the consumers themselves sue the tech companies.
And, you know, one thing America has is a pretty big private bar association. And a lot of lawyers who would love to get their pound of flesh out of the tech companies. So I don't see that being enacted. I don't think the tech companies would ever allow the government to pass a privacy legislation with that private right of action. But that would probably be the best seller. It would just be sic the lawyers on them and bog them down in lawsuits. And again, that could totally destroy all tech innovation. And maybe we don't even want that, but that's at least one idea. I'm more here just to document the dystopia. I don't have any solutions. I apologize.
Mike Freedman
No, no, no apology needed. I'm in the same boat. You are just on the other side of the ocean. Yeah, well, so when it comes to documenting dystopia, then how do you wash it off at the end of the day? Because obviously you can't carry this stuff into the restaurant or the movie or the bar afterwards. You have to wash it off somehow. How do you wash it off?
Ken Silva
Well, luckily, it's actually pretty, pretty fun, like I said. And if that makes me a weirdo, maybe, maybe it is. But I do enjoy this. And yes, I've got my hobbies and stuff to blow off steam. But, you know, it's not, it's not the worst thing in the world. I've come to develop light friendships with some victims who are in prison right now as we speak in tiny little seven by seven cells.
A lot of the guys that they accused of trying to kidnap the governor in Michigan, these people were entrapped by FBI informants. Now, their lives are ruined and they're sitting in cells designed for terrorists, like they're next to the Unabomber and all of these, you know, pretty hardcore criminals. And so, whenever I feel stressed about my own situation or reporting, I just think about the actual victims of the security state.
Mike Freedman
Mm hmm. That's a very good point. And so it's a very nice, compassionate note to end on. And I also think it's worth bearing in mind that actually there is a kind of implementable response to what we've spoken about today, that it's up to us as citizens to respond in a levelheaded and circumspect manner when we're presented with these strident media reports of extreme actions and dangers and threats, internal and external and terror, it's always our fear response that is manipulated or that is the cause of us signing off on extreme measures that then effectively, as you say, the guns are pointed outwards until a certain point and then they just rotate the turret and the guns are pointed inwards.
So there is something we can do. It doesn't cure everything, but it makes sense to remember things like we've talked about today. When we see on the news that such and such a group was arrested or accused of this, somehow maybe we can try and maintain a certain amount of perspective that the the ubiquity of the message and the power of the people using the mouthpiece doesn't increase the truth of what they're saying.
Ken Silva
Yeah, that's well said. And I would hope people would remember that, especially after COVID, especially when we saw the panic that arose out of that and how government exploited that. I mean, I'm old enough to remember what happened in 2020, and I really hope that all the people that were awoken by that terrible event, you know, stay woke, as the kids say.
Mike Freedman
Ken, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to to speak with me. It's been really great learning from you. Your knowledge is amazing and I can't wait to read what you come out with next and see where the story goes. I hope maybe in the future we can speak again and catch up as we document dystopia together. We can be on the rollercoaster, hearing the screams of the people at the front as it goes over the ridge, and we can be at the back talking about it before we all end up going into the dip together. So yeah, I thank you so much.
Ken Silva
Yeah, thank you. I really enjoyed this. Any time.
Mike Freedman
Well, that's it for this episode of 1984 Today! I've been and hopefully will continue to be Mike Freedman. As always, I'm grateful to our guest, Ken Silver, for giving us his time and of course, to you for listening. If you've enjoyed this episode, please check the show notes for ways to support us. All blessings are gratefully received. Wherever you are and whatever you're up to, keep the fire burning. We'll be back with more fuel next time.
Goodbye.
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