Hello and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an Angry Planet. Thanks for letting us kick up our heels this August, it was a rough one. We may not have been releasing, but we WERE recording.

The first episode upon our return is with terrorism and vice presidency expert Aaron Mannes. Mannes is lecturer at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and was one of the first people to use big data sets to study terrorist group behavior. These days he’s really into vice presidents. We sat down with him for a wide-ranging conversation that covered everything from Aaron Burr to the Bonus Army.

• Why are America and Israel all-in on assassination?
• International relations versus the domestic tensions
• Stats out of dead bodies
• Assassination: Obama Style
• The terrorist’s dilemma
• Matthew immediately figures out how wrong he is
• The case for Aaron Burr
• The Bonus Army
• Taking a shot at the vice president
• 
  

Analyzing Assassination Plots Against VPs

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Nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein stops by Angry Planet this week to tell us all about his new project Doomsday Machines. It’s a deep dive into the weird post-nuclear futures we’ve built in pop culture.

• How Warcraft orcs got ICBMs
• Matthew confuses Camus and Sartre
• Food poisoning as practice for the radical acceptance of death and suffering
• Is there any hope in The Road?
• Alex is hung up on the cannibals
• The video game aesthetics of the post-nuclear world
• Debunking gasoline futures
• Working for the authoritarian government to get the petroleum industry back on its feet
• The Civil Defense truncheon
• Deep thoughts on the Fallout franchise
• The American libertarian lone survivor

This American Life - Ends of the Earth

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Facing a friendly audience at an AI expo earlier this year, Palantir CEO Alex Karp let loose on a list of controversial topics. He talked about Israel, Gaza, and campus protests. “The peace activists are war activists,” Karp said. “We are the peace activists.”

Palantir, Karp’s company, is promising a bold new way to wage war using AI, one it’s testing out in Ukraine. Karp’s comments hit on an old promise. For generations, salesmen have tried to convince everyone they have a new way to conduct war that’s cleaner and better for everyone. That pitch is at the hard of dozens of new defense tech startups.

On today’s show we get into the weeds of the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley obsession with Michael Brenes. Brenes is a Yale historian who recently published a Quincy Institute brief about the rise of private finance and disruptors in the DoD contracting space. To hear Brenes tell it, companies have been trying to sell a peaceful way to make war for a hundred years.

It never quite turns out how they planned.

Private Finance and the Quest to Remake Modern Warfare

A.I. Won’t Transform War. It’ll Only Make Venture Capitalists Richer.

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Ronald Reagan carried a gun in his briefcase when he was president. According to Edmund Morris’ pseudo-historical memoir of Reagan, Dutch, Reagan got the gun in Iowa. “It is a fact … that RR did acquire a 1934 Walther PPK .380 pocket-sized police pistol early in his stay in Des Moines and kept it lovingly the rest of his life,” Morris wrote. “He even toted it in his briefcase as president.”

Reagan was obsessed with the idea that he was a target of assassination and had been since his days as the president of the Screen Actors Guild in the 1940s.

That’s just one of the bits of ephemera from this episode of Angry Planet where we’re joined by historian Rick Perlstein who is on the ground at the Republican National Convention. On Saturday, a gunman took a shot at former President Donald Trump. He missed, clipping his ear.

What can the lives of past assassins, both failed and successful tell us about Thomas Matthew Crooks? What is the duty of the historian at this moment? Is political violence on the rise in America or is this all business as usual?

Join us as we ask these questions and attempt to find some answers.

You Are Entering the Infernal Triangle

Gunman’s Phone Had Details About Both Trump and Biden, F.B.I. Officials Say

A Blind Spot and a Lost Trail: How the Gunman Got So Close to Trump

‘Stay Strapped or Get Clapped’

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On July 1, 2024 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that American presidents have immunity for “official acts” committed while in office. In the dissent opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor raised an interesting hypothetical.

“When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune.”

It’s the kind of hypothetical situation that people would roll their eyes at during a dinner party. Now it’s on everyone’s minds and in an official Supreme Court ruling. The president can order it, but that doesn’t mean the operators would carry it out. It also doesn’t mean state and local authorities would look the other way.

On this episode of Angry Planet, Army lieutenant colonel and judge advocate Dan Maurer comes on the program to take the SEAL Team 6 hypothetical seriously. Maurer is an expert military legal scholar who was willing to answer our questions, no matter how absurd they might be.

Want to know what happens if the President hires Pinkertons? Interested in a definition of an “official act” or want an explanation of what the long term consequences of this might be? Looking for a bit of hope that cuts through the hysteria. We can help with that. We also ask a very silly question about Delta Force.

Maurer also wrote about the topic in Lawfare.

Can the Military Disobey Orders in the SEAL Team 6 Hypothetical?

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Influence campaigns, both subtle and unsubtle, are as old as statecraft. Agencies like the CIA, KGB, and Israel’s Mossad have all attempted to force friends and rivals to change. It doesn’t work as often as you’d think. Subversion campaigns are often so secretive that their effectiveness is hard to quantify. But Lennart Maschmeyer decided to try.

Maschmeyer is on this episode of Angry Planet to tell us all about the limits of cyber war and subversion operations. It’s the subject of his new book Subversion: From Covert Operations to Cyber Conflict. Maschmeyer is a senior researcher at the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zurich and his book is a deep look at what works and what doesn’t when countries try to influence each other. It throws cold water on Russia’s much-hyped “Hybrid War” and the idea of cyber Pearl Harbor.

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We used to build things in America, things like fallout shelters. There’s a luxury hotel on the border between Virginia and West Virginia that’s been a favorite retreat of the D.C. elite for generations. After the fall of the atom bombs in World War II, Washington commissioned an addition to the hotel: a secret fallout shelter that would house Congress in the event of a nuclear war.

Matt Farwell of The Hunt for Tom Clancy is here to tell that story and others from the golden age of Atomic America. There was a time when Las Vegas casinos sold tickets to watch nuclear tests. It was an era when the concrete flowed like water and America built bunkers under a hotel and a military base in the heart of a mountain.

We might even talk about Nazis and aliens. It’s a wild one. Join us.

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Back in 2020, Daniel Perry was driving for Uber to make ends meet. He ran a red light and dove his car into a crowd at a Black Lives Matter protest. Garret Foster was there to protect the crowd and he’d brought an AK-47 along to do it. Foster, an Air Force veteran, approached Perry’s car. Perry, an Army sergeant, pulled out a pistol and killed Foster from the car and drove away.

After a trial and a deep dive into Perry’s online history, a jury of his peers found him guilty of murder. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott pardoned him.

Why? Perry had become a symbol that transcended justice.

Christopher Hooks is here to walk us through the particulars of the case. Hooks is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and The Atlantic. He’s been writing about the Perry case and its consequences for Texas Monthly. Hooks tells us exactly what happened in 2020, when Perry committed the murder, and walks us through the colorful cast of Texas politicians who may soon take the national stage.

Why Did Greg Abbott Pardon a Racist Murderer?

Ken Paxton Takes Manhattan

What Azerbaijan Wants From Texas Politicians

D.A. Seeks to Overturn Texas Governor’s Pardon of Man Who Killed Protester

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