Derek: 00:28

Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. In this episode, it's time for us to dig into our true conspiracy. To this point in the season, I've made sure that I didn't use the word true lightly. I've only covered conspiracies, which I felt were well documented and which had a consensus opinion of historians who are knowledgeable about the topic. I've avoided covering conspiracies that would be considered highly disputed.

Derek: 00:52

I've taken this approach because my goal this season is to give you the clearest picture that I can of what propaganda and conspiracy looks like so that when we do get to cases, which are murkier, we've prepared for battle in the light. Maybe a better example would be training for elite sporting competition. Back in the day, right after college, I was trying to get into really good shape, and I was running a lot. I was running high single digit, low double digit mileage over the summer, but then I ended up moving to Mexico City to teach. I was excited because Mexico City is over a mile high in elevation, and I thought that training there would be harder and more beneficial.

Derek: 01:33

Well, needless to say, when I got to the city and started running, I definitely struggled to do even a mile. Now, of course, Mexico City was also very hilly, and running more than a mile would probably have given me lung cancer anyway, considering the thick smog that always hung in the air. But running was way, way harder there. And I started doing research on high elevation running, and you know what I found? I found that high elevation running actually isn't the best for training.

Derek: 02:01

That's because when you train at high elevations, you aren't able to work your body as hard as you can at lower elevations because your body has less resources to use at the heights. Your body and blood acclimate to the high elevations, and you might have more red blood cells or more efficient blood cells, however, that works. But the wall that you're gonna hit is still essentially the same wall. You've increased the fuel efficiency of your vehicle, but you've decreased the size of the gas tank, or you've increased the load that you have to carry. Meaning, you're not gonna get any farther in your training than you would have at a lower elevation.

Derek: 02:39

Now you'll be at a huge advantage if somebody decides to come up to you and play you at a high elevation, but you're not gonna have a significant advantage playing at lower elevations. So what's the secret then to the best training plan? The secret is to live high where your body and blood cells are going to adapt to, and function at a minimal oxygen level and while training low so that you can push your body to the max. The trick is to increase your fuel efficiency and the size of your gas tank. Now, obviously, you have to be rich or sponsored to do something like that, so it's really not feasible to physically train like this for most people, but it's the ideal.

Derek: 03:20

Now fortunately for us here in this podcast, this infeasibility is really just an analogy for something that is actually feasible for us. Because what I've been trying to do this season is to train low, to train where we can push our minds to the max in an oxygen rich environment. We're training where the air is thick with the fuel that we need, where we can breathe in the abundant oxygen. We've been training in clarity where we can assess obvious truths and falsehoods and find similarities, patterns, clues, and keys. Because you live in the paper thin atmosphere of the real world where truth is often fleeting and difficult to discern, you can take your amped up training from the depths of substance and bring that muscle mass and power that you've gained back up with you to the deoxygenated heights where you live.

Derek: 04:08

We all live in the oxygen thin heights, so we must train in the oxygen rich depths. Now keeping our training plan in mind, I want you to, to know that I initially struggled with making today's selection. As today's story became more and more the story that I wanted to select, I sort of felt like I wasn't training low. I felt like the truth of this story was murkier than it should be for training purposes and clarity. Yet as I studied the story more and more, the shackles of this seeming murkiness flew off, the scales from my eyes fell, and I realized that the seeming lack of clarity would actually end up helping me to uncover media propaganda better than some other story, which seemed much clearer.

Derek: 04:54

With our training plan in mind once again, let's start with some stretching and a brief jog. To warm up, I want to gently prep your muscles for the hard work that they're about to do. In this episode, we want to explore the story of Gary Webb. Gary Webb was a journalist in the 19 eighties 19 nineties who ended up breaking news on what has become an infamous story, a story that we don't need to unpack quite yet. What we do need to know right now, though, is that the story which Webb broke is usually a different story than the one that others represent on his behalf.

Derek: 05:30

See, conspiracy theorists love to take the seed of Webb's content and grow the story to extremes, implicating large scale government and media conspiracies, something that Webb never really concluded. The same time, establishment media takes the same approach, focusing on the conspiratorial voices as Webb's own voice. It ends up then that Webb is misrepresented by those on both sides who claim to seek truth, by the conspiracy theorists who think that they can see truth, which should be obvious to everyone else, and by the journalists who say that they can see the lies that everyone should be able to see. Conspiracy theorists and mainstream journalists are purveyors of the obvious. At least, they think they are.

Derek: 06:17

But as it is with most truths, we can often take the 2 competing groups on the fringes and average their so called obvious truths together and often come up with a much more truer truth. As just a quick analogy to perhaps give you a slightly clearer picture, or maybe it's a terrible analogy. I don't know, but we're going with it. Imagine the book or the movie, if you've seen the movie, entitled Holes. In that book, you have a bunch of juveniles sent to a labor camp whose job it is to dig holes for the warden.

Derek: 06:51

Now the warden is seeking to find some long lost treasure that she knows is hidden in the desert. Well, conspiracy theorists are a lot like the hole diggers. They dig and dig and dig, hole after hole after hole. And while in the book, each hole winds up being devoid of any treasure, you know, because they're looking for a needle in a haystack, conspiracy theorists think that they find the treasure in just about every hole that they dig. There's a conspiracy everywhere.

Derek: 07:18

They're so used to finding pyrite, fool's gold, that when they actually find a true gold nugget, neither they nor anyone who is tired of their ceaseless Boy Who Cried Wolf claims can see the true value in the treasure that they found. At the same time, you have the news media, which likes to come behind the hole diggers and fill in the conspiracy theorist's useless holes. While many times the news media fills in legitimately useless holes, there are plenty of times when, because the media is so used to filling in worthless holes, they, out of habit, fill in a hole that has real treasure at the bottom. So that's sort of our task with the story of Gary Webb today. There's a treasure at the bottom of one of these holes, and I think there's one at the bottom of the the Gary Webb hole.

Derek: 08:05

The conspiracy the theorists are too sensitized to understand this truth because every nugget, real or fake, peaks their excitement, and they think it's all real. Likewise, the news media is so mithridatized to the dissonance of inconvenient truths. They've become immune to the effects that truth, even and especially inconvenient ones, should have upon our souls. So with our warm up completed, let's go ahead and play the game. One day, Gary Webb received a phone call, which would change the course of his work and his life.

Derek: 08:41

He was led onto a path of discovery in relation to the drug epidemic experienced by the United States in the mid 19 eighties and on. If you want a full accounting of that, you can read Webb's book entitled Dark Alliance, And, I'll link some, some videos and things in the show notes as well. But I actually like the movie, about Dark Alliance, about Gary Webb called Kill the Messenger Because I thought the movie did a great job of both presenting the story accurately as well as highlighting the point that we're gonna make today, which is that conspiracy theorists and the news media both misrepresent Webb's actual views. Anyway, as Webb started to look into the drug epic epidemic, particularly the crack epidemic, which in a later interview, he also emphasizes as married to the urban arms and violence epidemic, Webb essentially began to piece some things together that others hadn't seen or reported up to that point. To see what Webb saw, we need a little bit of a history lesson.

Derek: 09:45

In 1979, the Sandinistas of Nicaragua overthrew the current government. Now when you compare the Sandinistas to the government that they overthrew, it seems pretty clear that the Sandinistas were a lot better. The government overthrown had embezzled money intended to go to humanitarian needs. It was oligarchical, but sort of. They repressed freedom of speech.

Derek: 10:06

They tortured and killed dissenters and everything else you can imagine that's true of a repressive regime. Of course, like most repressive regimes, especially repressive regimes in South America, the US supported the repressive government. In fact, we were such buddies with them that part of the US forces, which were supposed to be sent on the Bay of Pigs invasion, were actually to be sent from Nicaragua. Now we like repressive regimes that do our dirty work. But when Jimmy Carter stopped funding this regime openly, this weakness in US support, in part, allowed the Sandinistas to swoop in and overthrow the tyrants.

Derek: 10:47

It didn't take long for the Sandinistas to implement horrific policies, like increasing education and literacy, improving housing, ending torture and capital punishment, promoting women's equality, and other atrocities that go along with these types of things. Most horrifically, they may have been on the way to democracy for once. Joking aside, these sorts of initiatives obviously have a price to them, and that cost has to be procured from somewhere. Naturally, the Sandinistas sought to garner the funds for improvements largely from the oligarchy and the leadership of those who came before them. They sought land reform and other movements, which would strip the land and wealth from those who had used their power previously to embezzle funds, steal from the people, and make unfair deals with international companies that benefited the leaders at the expense of the nation and the people that they were supposed to represent.

Derek: 11:40

So while the US saw socialism here and that property rights were not being upheld, we have to ask at what point something becomes someone's property if it's illicitly or oppressively gained. That's an uncomfortable question for the US, which has gained pretty much all of its property illicitly in the not too distant past. Suffice it to say, the US didn't like the socialistic tendencies of this, sand Sandinistas. And, it wasn't long until the United States, under Ronald Reagan, started opposing the Sandinista government. Reagan began actions, which would later become known as the Iran Contra Affair, in which he sold weapons to Iran, which at the time was under an arms embargo, and then funneled money from the sale of, of that to Contra rebels or, I guess, freedom fighters from the Reagan perspective.

Derek: 12:31

Because they opposed the Sandinistas. What's interesting is that when this money started to be funneled to rebels in 1981, it wasn't too long afterwards within a year about that the Sandinistas also took more repressive measures to protect the government. They began limiting freedom of speech and habeas corpus, though their measures weren't nearly as barbaric as the previous government or as what the Contras were doing to civilians. This state of emergency called by the Sandinistas lasted from shortly after the US began supporting the Contras secretly to about a year after direct US support dried up in 1987. It's almost like US support of dictatorial regimes props them up and encourages violence, or US support of rebel forces causes human rights to be curtailed by governments, which otherwise are very progressive and human rights oriented.

Derek: 13:22

Go figure. Anyway, that history on Nicaragua is really important because it was only a few years after the Sandinistas took control of power that cocaine started to become popular in the US. 1981 to 1982 ish. This was the ground level of the cocaine epidemic as US consumers were being introduced to larger and larger quantities and a larger availability of this drug. By 1983 and 1984, cocaine had gotten into the hands of Rick Ross, known as Freeway Rick, who pushed cocaine in extremely large quantities, particularly to the black community that that he was in.

Derek: 14:04

Simultaneously, someone figured out how to cook a new concoction of cocaine known as crack, which was extremely addictive, much cheaper, and smokeable. This access, price, and the addictive nature of the substance meant that crack became very popular, particularly in the black community where Freeway Rick had already established a thriving market and sophisticated infrastructure. By 1989, through market forces and social connections, crack had spread beyond Rick Ross's California to black communities across the country. Now up to this point in history, there isn't much that I've said which wasn't known too much in, Webb's time. It was what Webb uncovered next that revolutionized our understanding of the crack epidemic.

Derek: 14:50

As Webb pursued the lead he received from a phone call, and as he began to put names, countries of origin, and connections to various cases and drug runners, Webb began to uncover something alarming. He discovered that a number of drug runners were on the governmental payroll and that a number of big drug runners had actually been overlooked by the government. Or worse, the government had knowingly looked the other way to allow them to do their thing. Now why would the government allow some of the biggest names in drug the drug cartel to continue running their business? Of seeming coincidence was the fact that many of the drug runners that seemed to get a pass had connections to the Contras in Nicaragua.

Derek: 15:31

To help you draw a pretty obvious, though not necessarily flawless conclusion, the US didn't want socialism to spread in South America. Nicaragua had overthrown their US backed oppressive regime in 1979 for a government that made humanitarian reforms and looked very socialist. Within 2 years, the US was secretly funding remnants of the old regime and the brutal right wing Contras in hopes that they'd overthrow the socialistic Sandinistas. When the Iran Contra affair, the secret selling of arms to embargoed Iran in order to send proceeds to the Contras. When that came to light, the Republican administration had to stop directly funding the Contras.

Derek: 16:09

With the US pulling the plug on funding for the Contras, a major source of revenue for the Contras that was left to them then became drug trafficking. Now the US couldn't directly fund the contras, but they could look the other way when they did business in the illicit drug market inside the US. At worst, the US was largely sacrificing black communities to the ravages of crack, a sacrifice that they were very willing to make as it fit the current narrative of black addiction and inferiority. Add to this, the convenience that increased drug issues in the black community fed into the nation's support for the war on drugs by fostering fear, justifying exorbitant funding of equipping the police forces, along with harsh sentencing laws that started coming out in the mid eighties and beyond, like the Anti Drug Abuse Act of 1986? Well, the whole scenario was a perfect storm of US intervention, nation building, militancy, racism, politics, self interest, and circumstantial luck.

Derek: 17:10

And that, if you read Dark Alliance or if you listen to the fantastic interview that Webb gave in the video linked in the show notes, that is Gary Webb's point in all this. Webb is the first to admit that there was no huge contrived conspiracy to sabotage the black community. The CIA didn't purposefully create crack and introduce drugs into black neighborhoods to destroy them. It was pure chance that Rick Ross was the entrepreneur that he was and got connected with the Nicaraguan drug dealers. The CIA didn't hatch this nefarious plan in order to prop up the war on drugs, though the administration's desire for self justification and the agency's self interest certainly bias them to seeing convenient truths and being blind to inconvenient ones.

Derek: 17:51

The government didn't seek to destroy the black community through drugs, but their racism and bias didn't allow them to see victims or really care all that empathetically to their plight. The destruction of the urban black community wasn't a crisis which called for sympathetic action, unlike the current opioid crisis in the white community. The government didn't seek to import drugs in order to fund the Contras, but looking the other way was easy to do, especially if one could justify that by making someone an informant or arguing that there were other fish to pursue. It was easy to let the big dealers go and to make their money for the contras when one could pass legislation to fry small fish. Capturing a 1,000 small fish, legislation to fry small fish.

Derek: 18:31

Capturing a 1,000 small fish might have felt like more progress than catching just 1 or 2 big fish anyway. As Gary Webb acknowledges, this isn't some huge contrived conspiracy. Rather, it's a perfect storm of circumstance, racism, politics, and human nature. In fact, that's what most true conspiracies end up being to a large extent. But we'll talk about that more at the end of the season when we draw some of those conclusions.

Derek: 18:58

The point is, and I've said it a couple times already, but it bears repeating. The point is that Webb does not at all claim that the CIA introduced drugs into urban neighborhoods in order to fund the contras or to sabotage the black community. Rather, the CIA, the government, they looked the other way a whole lot, which in turn helped the political cause of the administration funding the Contras while simultaneously decimating the urban black community through the growth of the crack epidemic and justifying the positions of government drug enforcement. Now that story is all well and good so far and pretty easy to understand. But the question that we're seeking to answer in this episode is how has the media been conspiratorial?

Derek: 19:44

And that brings us to the response to Gary Webb's reporting. While there was a lot of initial buzz around Webb's series of articles, it didn't take long for other media outlets to push back. Now pushback is good in places like the news media and science. It's how ideas get tested. A good story with good sources or a good experiment under controlled conditions ought to have the proper, property of replicability.

Derek: 20:09

If you can't follow the source and get the same answers or if you follow the sources and find the quality is really low, then the story probably smells. So how do we see the news media push back against Gary Webb after releasing his articles? They made a number of moves that weren't representative of quality journalism. 1st, they only or mostly sought out details to discredit or bring into question Webb's articles. Sure.

Derek: 20:36

K. The null hypothesis is vital in science and journalism. We seek to put conclusions to the test by assuming that they're false and trying to negate them. But in science or journalism, we might conclude that one part of of a, a conclusion is wrong while holding other parts to be true. Some aspects of a conclusion are more integral than others, and their falsity in no way disproves the whole conclusion.

Derek: 21:01

For instance, if there's a murder case going to trial, and I have video footage of the suspects, their fingerprints on the murder weapon, a strong motive to collect, on an insurance policy or something like that, lack of an alibi, and one of their hairs at the crime scene. I've got a pretty good case. But if information comes back that they're the the hair that we found actually isn't theirs, it's somebody else's, is my case blown? No. Not one bit.

Derek: 21:29

You'd expect there to be hairs from multiple people who pass through an area. It doesn't matter if it's not my killer's hair. It would have been helpful, but it doesn't matter that much. My evidence on the hair is erroneous, but the rest of the evidence is strong. On the other hand, if we find out that an alibi surfaces and we have video evidence of the suspect at a different place at the time of the murder with video evidence that is more clearly shows his or her face rather than just maybe a profile, then our case will likely be lost because the suspect almost certainly isn't the killer.

Derek: 22:03

Now this seems to me to be what happened in the Webb case. The news media, for whatever reason, pressure from the government's embarrassment that the bigger outlets didn't come up with the case first, whatever conglomeration of motivations existed, The news media focused on a few inconvenient hairs at the crime scene while failing to disprove the core of the case in the motive, alibi, fingerprint, and video footage. By focusing on a few hairs and talking only about those hairs, the media diverted attention away from the strength of Webb's case. 2nd, part of what the news media used to attack Webb was circular reasoning or biased sourcing. To disprove Webb, rather than do all of the legwork of working through dangerous and difficult sources to get to the heart of the drug trafficking, journalists went to unnamed government officials a lot.

Derek: 22:55

Of course, this is shoddy journalism at best, if not outright sabotage. It is in the government's best interest to paint themselves in a favorable light and to deny everything that Webb said. While they should have had their chance to defend themselves, at the same time, they are not, by themselves, reliable sources. Hearing only or largely from the government sources produces a severely lopsided case. Considering that Webb did a lot of legwork from a variety of sources and documents and that the congressional hearings ended up confirming some of his big points makes the media's reliance on government sources highly suspect.

Derek: 23:34

Here's a quote from Webb to sum up this particular issue. Quote, the government side of the story is coming through the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post. The CIA uses the giant corporate press rather than saying anything directly. If you work through friendly reporters on major newspapers, it comes off as The New York Times saying it and not a mouthpiece of the CIA, end quote. A third tactic that the media used with Webb's reporting was what Webb calls the proof versus evidence tactic.

Derek: 24:05

How much evidence is needed to make a case that one can, make a rational and reasonable judgment on? A sufficient amount. Right? No claim ought to require certain proof, like, 100% certainty, but, rather, it ought to require adequate evidence. In the case of Webb's journalism, the media kept asking for proof by which they meant some indisputable fact.

Derek: 24:30

A taped recording of government admissions of which the congressional hearings apparently don't count or something along those lines. Right? Whenever an aspect of Webb's case was validated, the standard was raised for Webb's case. The media was essentially making it impossible for Webb's case to be believed because with each addition of evidence, more was required of him. You can hear Webb discuss this, around minute 42 in the video that I link in the show notes.

Derek: 25:01

Finally, Gary Webb highlights what is perhaps the biggest aspect of the news media's propaganda in this situation. You can find this around minute 39 of the interview linked in the notes. Webb talks about how public hearings had been called in light of his journalism and that these public discussions confirm some of Webb's bigger points in the case. However, while the media fervently reported on the hairs that didn't stand up to scrutiny in Webb's library of documentation, jumping on every hair that surfaced, they, at the same time, failed to report on aspects of the case when Webb's information was validated as was the case with some key points in the congressional hearings. After Webb, who was a lifelong journalist, experienced the media propaganda machine come out full force against him, what did he have to say?

Derek: 25:49

Here's probably one of Webb's most famous quotes to sum it up. Quote, if we had met 5 years ago, you wouldn't have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me. And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been as I'd assumed because I was careful and diligent and good at my job. The truth was that in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress.

Derek: 26:18

End quote. Of course, a big question in all of this is why did the media engage in a clear propaganda campaign against Gary Webb? I don't know, and I don't think that Webb had an easy answer either. But I think the truth is probably much less conspiratorial than it seems. Because as I'm learning, that's how conspiracies often work.

Derek: 26:41

I'm learning that from getting familiar with a lot of conspiracies, but also from people like Gary Webb who advocate against complex conspiracies and Noam Chomsky who argues that conspiracies are usually more reactive, and, they aren't often as planned. They're just natural reactions to circumstances that snowball. Well, it's not the scope of this episode to claim that I have an answer for media motive here in in Webb's case. I do just wanna offer up one series of possibilities. And, again, this isn't meant to to say this is what happened.

Derek: 27:14

It just shows you there are lots of simple explanations, a lot of motives that could be at play here. And one or all of these motives might truly be what's, what created, Gary Webb conspiracy here. So Gary Webb was from a no name paper. He broke the story of the century, and journalists at the bigger papers were getting flack for not breaking that story despite their having better resources and better equipment, better connections. Furthermore, there may have been threats against those journalists if they sided with Webb as many of their government sources might have threatened to dry up if they, reported along the lines of Webb.

Derek: 27:55

And that wouldn't be unusual. Go check out the documentary linked in the show notes called War on Whistleblowers to hear journalists talk about some of the threats that they experienced in regard to reporting stories that made the government look bad. And when we get to the season on government, we'll, we'll do more than one true conspiracy, and, you'll get to see some more listen about, some more whistleblowers, and it'll kind of color things in for you and give you a a broader palette for understanding that this kind of thing is not abnormal. You could also read up on Michael Hastings or any other number of journalists who've even feared for their lives in reporting significant stories. And journalists whose job it is to report the news through quality sources have a vested interest in maintaining strong government sources even if those sources have a particular agenda because they can say, hey.

Derek: 28:46

Well, I talked to somebody, source from the CIA about this. That looks really good when you can do that. Gives you credibility. Forget that that CIA source has a particular agenda. Never mind.

Derek: 28:59

So on top of this, the nation was coming off of a decade of the crack epidemic and a significant rise in violence through the early nineties. They didn't know if that violence was gonna continue to rise and peak again or if it was on its way down for good. Nobody knew. There was a fear in the nation. And, in a rare feat of partnership, there was solidarity between the 2 major parties on the solution.

Derek: 29:23

A war on drugs and getting tough on crime. That, tough on crime, especially, was a bipartisan issue. Now fear may sell and keep the money coming in, but people want to believe that the fears that they have are able to be resolved by some savior. If the government couldn't be trusted about one of the biggest fears of a lifetime and if the policies implemented were unjust, not to mention the issue itself was brought about by the government actions, then that would be a catastrophic paradigm shift. You can't completely dishearten your readership, the middle and upper class.

Derek: 30:00

The middle and upper class, which, you know, we saw in, McNamara's morons episode in our series on race, they're the ones who have to be appeased. You can't make things hopeless for them. They have to think that the government's working. So to keep government sources happy, to keep the money coming in from readership, to avoid a paradigm shift, to assuage fears that the savior was, you know, really the villain, we can't have that. All these reasons and more, you know, the news media didn't want Gary Webb to be right.

Derek: 30:31

When you have a preconceived conclusion and or a desire for a particular outcome, it's easy to see what you wanna see and to be blind to what you don't want to see. It doesn't have to be any big huge conspiracy there. It's just human nature. The news media, for whatever reason or reasons, wanted to believe that Gary Webb was wrong. And they even created a a committee to to prove this.

Derek: 30:55

They wanted him to be wrong. And, again, you can see that in, an interview, in one of the the videos I linked below. So to what degree, there were conspiracies and and people conspiring, strategies to discredit Webb. I don't know the extent to that. But there was certainly a collective motivation by big papers and the government to have Web Story discredited.

Derek: 31:21

So they saw what they wanted to see, and they, through silence, helped the masses to see only that which they wanted the masses to see, the media's great power of selectivity. Unfortunately, Gary's, story does not end there. Today, anti government conspiracy theorists abound in part because only 8 years or so after he released the Dark Alliance series, Webb was killed by 2 gunshots to the head, which was ruled a suicide. Of course, it all sounds very suspect. You know?

Derek: 31:54

2 shots to the head. Like, how is that possible? But the evidence points to the fact that Webb's death was indeed a suicide. His family identified that Webb had had some really hard times leading up to his death, and they believe that he committed suicide. Suicides by more than one shot are much more common than people think.

Derek: 32:13

And Webb's journalistic conclusions had largely been suppressed or drowned out, So a government motive to kill him, you know, 8 years later after everything had died down, it doesn't make sense that they'd be silencing him at that point. Nevertheless, Webb's death provides a fitting capstone for those conspiracy theorists who, like the media, see the evidence that they want to see. Ironically, in being unable to draw the conclusions that are most supported by evidence, the conspiracy theorists feed the position advocated by journalists, which write Gary Webb off as an unprofessional loom, a conspiracy theorist. But that's the farthest thing from what Gary Webb was. He never claimed conspiracy theory, and he always advocated for a balanced look at the evidence.

Derek: 32:59

Something that neither the conspiracy theorists or the news media have been able to do when approaching this issue. Webb uncovered the way that systems and institutions lead to injustices through unfortunate series of events by reacting to circumstances based on self interest. It's natural. He shows us human nature leading to injustice and atrocity is, as Hannah Arendt famously put it, like the banality of evil. Evil, atrocity, and true conspiracies are birthed out of the many seemingly small compromises, which over the years snowball into intricate injustices woven into the fabric of an individual's heart, into the fabric of a community, and even into the fabric of a nation.

Derek: 33:43

They look complex because human nature is complex, and our desires are simple yet lead to actions that that create very complex outcomes. So over the course of a decade or 2, sure, it looks like a conspiracy that was contrived from the beginning, but, really, it was just the outpouring of wicked hearts and wicked structures. Of course, it's not impossible for intricate conspiracies to exist, but they are more rare. Reality is usually much simpler. Gary Webb's claims end up being much less interesting than either side wants to make them out to be.

Derek: 34:18

But I suppose that's what makes his story so interesting. If we believe Gary and peer into this banality of evil that he identifies, there's an opportunity for us to be made aware, to experience the discomfort of our history, the uncertainty of our future, and even the truth of our complicity with injustice in the present. Perhaps that's why so few have truly heard Gary Webb for what he's actually said. Some of us like the silence we can buy in the papers, discrediting Gary and easing our discomfort, while others like the silence that Gary gave us with 2 shots to the head, proving to us that we see what others can't. The bad people out there are against us.

Derek: 34:58

Just remember that the silence of propaganda is deafening, and Gary's voice has been silenced. Gary Webb has a lot to say, so please don't let him remain silent. Hear him speak. That's all for now. So peace, and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.

Derek: 35:39

This podcast is a part of the Kingdom outpost network. Please check out the links below to find other great podcasts and content related to nonviolence and Kingdom living.