Fourth Reich Archaeology

Here it is folks! Side B of the first episode in our brand new series, “Down by Law.” In this one, we continue our dig into immigration and the modern legal regime for asylum. We start off by taking a good hard look at the history of asylum law in the United States.  Even though you’d never guess it by the federal government’s utter lack of regard for human rights in the administration of the immigration system, the USA is a party to the 1967 protocol to the treaty on the rights of refugees. That means it is “the supreme law of the land” - with which even the federal government must comply as with the Constitution itself - to afford broad rights to asylum-seekers in danger of death or serious harm in their home countries.  After completing a historical survey, we then turn to some current events and examine how the Trump administration has weaponized the asylum regime in the United States to push immigrants out of the country. As a reminder, we recorded this before the DC National Guard shooting put asylum into the headlines, but the issue is more salient than ever. As Trump essentially seeks to end asylum as we know it, we trace the bipartisan roots of the whittling-away of immigrant rights, especially under the Obama administration. Put on your lawyer hats, it’s once again time to get down by law.

We are coming in hot this week with a very special episode and a very special guest.  We are calling it Fourth Reich Political Theology, and we are absolutely honored to have Marcus from the Return of the Repressed podcast joining Don to do some serious digging.  In this one, Don and Marcus examine how “The Market” and people’s fealty to its bizarre logic has come into actual existence, almost alchemically, or religiously.  To put it bluntly, The Market today fills the role of God in our society. It is beyond human control, beyond reproach, and exercises an omniscient, omnipotent power over human affairs. To capitalists, The Market’s pure rationality also bestows it with benevolence. Don and Marcus explore the historical and theoretical bases for the development of this phenomenon, by examining the transition from feudalism to capitalism and the adaptation of religion to the economic mode of production and vice versa. We think that this one will be the start of an epic run of episodes with Marcus. The first hour is available for free, and the full nearly-three-hour-long episode is available today on P@treon: https://www.patreon.com/c/FourthReichArchaeology And be sure to check out Marcus’s stuff over on P@treon too! You can find the Return of the Repressed at: https://www.patreon.com/TheReturnOfTheRepressed

We are excited to announce that we are launching a brand new series called “Down by Law.” In it, we are going to talk about how laws and legal systems that create and enforce them are put in place to serve the ruling class, while producing a spectacle of “justice” to distract and pacify the masses. We believe that, despite the law’s ultimate impotence to bring about the type of revolutionary change needed to ensure collective survival for humanity, it is important to understand how the law functions in society. This series is our attempt at political/legal education, jumping between various areas of law that purport to regulate behavior in “civilized nations.”It is certainly true that the legal system - from statutory legislation to the vast regulatory state to the judiciary - does impose restrictions on actors at all levels of the socioeconomic pyramid. We are not implying that the wealthy and powerful are entirely unfettered by the law. That would be an overstatement and would not reflect reality.But the law, too, operates as spectacle. And to a larger degree than most lawyers, government bureaucrats, and policy wonks would like to admit, the real function of the law is spectacular. It serves to inflate the illusion of justice. In reality, the legal system plays referee between factions of the ruling class, while ensuring that overall control of the systems of power remain in the hands of that same class. We start our legal dig site with a dig into immigration and the modern legal regime for asylum. Even though you’d never guess it by the federal government’s utter lack of regard for human rights in the administration of the immigration system, the USA is a party to the 1967 protocol to the treaty on the rights of refugees. That means it is “the supreme law of the land” - with which even the federal government must comply as with the Constitution itself - to afford broad rights to asylum-seekers in danger of death or serious harm in their home countries.We recorded this before the DC National Guard shooting put asylum into the headlines, but the issue is more salient than ever. As Trump essentially seeks to end asylum as we know it, we trace the bipartisan roots of the whittling-away of immigrant rights, spiking especially under the Obama administration. Put on your lawyer hats, it’s time to get down by law.If you want to hear the full episode, head over to Patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology and sign up today!

This week, we are getting back to the real roots of our project, which was initially conceived from Dick and Don's long phone conversations about current events. And that's largely what this episode is: we're out of the studio and back on the phone, real low-fi style.But the substance of the conversation, we hope, will not disappoint. We cover the reasons why we're not releasing a full on polished episode like we usually do, and dive right into the hellscape that surrounds us this holiday season, focusing on the latest deep event: the shooting of two national guardsmen in Washington, D.C., by a CIA-trained Afghan national. It's Programmed to Kill all over again.We hope you enjoy, that you stay sane this Thanksgiving and beyond, and that maybe - just maybe - you can use some of what we're putting down to break your friends and loved ones out of the haze of propaganda that has us all sleepwalking into yet another hot war on the flimsiest of pretenses to steal and exploit another country's national resources. We're thankful for you, and we wish you all the best.

We are back with another installment of “She Harvey Oswald,” our ongoing miniseries about the two women who pointed a gun at President Gerald Ford in the fateful month of September 1975.  This week we continue our exploration into the life and times of the first of these two, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme.  This episode is “Side B” to part 2 of this miniseries, which covers Squeaky’s origins and which was only available to our P@treon community until today. Recall that in Side A, we started at the beginning, with Squeaky’s upbringing in the contradictory world of Westchester Los Angeles where the barbecues and manicured lawns were financed by the barbecuing of human flesh by the warplanes and munitions fabricated by southern California's booming aerospace industry.  It was against this backdrop that Squeaky developed a rebellious streak while in the custody of an overbearing and mentally unstable father.  As Squeaky entered her teenage years, the tensions at home escalated and she ultimately moved out of the house entirely. In Side B, we pick things up with Squeaky just as she is first approached by Mr. Helter Skelter himself, Charles Manson.  Manson clocked Squeaky on a bench at the beach, crying and distraught over her blowout fight with her dad.  From here, Squeaky would go on to join Manson and his growing “family” of girls, on a trip up to the Bay Area and the redwoods of Mendocino in the summer of love, 1967. Throughout their trippy times in the North, Charlie and the girls frequented the infamous Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, which the likes of Dr. Jolly West had turned into a recruitment center for test subjects; a laboratory for human experimentation on unwitting, disposable hippies.Squeaky’s coming of age under the wing of Charlie Manson gives us yet another sharpened lens through which to view the consolidation of the fourth reich, the integration of the spectacle, and the preemptive destruction of the burgeoning movement for radical social change that characterized the 1960s and 70s.Let’s get digging.