I really didn’t want to do this episode. I had actually considered doing something to this effect under a pen name somewhere else, because the last thing I want to do is minimize the experience of prison in such a fashion as to make my audience more inclined to find themselves there.
I had considered producing something like what I am about to do when I heard that a January 6th defendant had committed suicide. Not long before I heard the news of this, I had fresh in my mind a pretty good time I had enjoyed behind the walls. I thought of these two things side by side in my mind, and it really upset me because I also understand the idea most people have about prison that it is akin to death, and in many cases, worse. I happened to know with certainty that this was not true, and I considered it a terrible tragedy that this man had ended his life over a falsehood.
It is to society’s benefit that people generally think about things in this way, however. I have remarked in the past that, the worst part about going to jail is realizing that it is an option. Most people think, “I can’t break the law, I’ll go to jail”. When you have done some time, the calculation is different. “I can do this, but I might go to jail, maybe even prison, so now I must decide the likelihood of that outcome, the amount of time I stand to do, and whether or not that risk is worth the reward of the act in question”. Such calculations complicate one’s life in undesirable ways, and increase immeasurably the likelihood of such an outcome. It is far better that one eliminate the possibility of prison from their menu of options in life, and avoid even the appearance of criminality.
But, of course, this becomes more difficult as our society descends into chaos. We are, with increasing and frightening rapidity, approaching the Democrat Party’s ideal state of affairs in which a criminal is no more likely to find himself in prison than anybody else. The true, egalitarian Utopia. In such a place, the idea of staying out of prison is not merely a calculation of doing the right thing, but of telling the appropriate lies, and kissing the right asses. Even this. brings no certainty. It requires an eternal diminishment of one’s integrity, and promotes cowardice as an unalloyed virtue. In such an environment, one’s satisfaction with life might best be served by considering prison a foregone conclusion, and thinking of time spent outside as a matter of very fortunate chance.
A compromise might be to think of prison as being a very costly affair. Consider what you are capable of earning in a year, triple that, multiply it by the number of years you are doing, subtract the result from the economic value of your life’s output, and then reduce by 75% or so what you are going to earn when released, and in monetary terms you might approach a reasonable assessment of the expense.
It is a more difficult matter to calculate the costs to your family. I do not often consider myself fortunate to be single and childless at my age, but this is certainly advantageous when facing prison.
For a man who does have a family, the idea of leaving them for a number of years is surely an altogether more devastating affair. Will your wife leave you for another man? Perhaps you should divorce her, and tell her to move on for her own benefit? Would that be the charitable thing for you to do, or would it be, in an odd sense, selfish? What impact will your incarceration have on the lives of your children? Will they remember you? Will they hate you? Will they end up in prison when they grow up? Will it even take that long?
You can hardly blame a man for considering suicide under those circumstances. Death may seem preferable to the contemplation alone. Going to prison might be the least of his problems. It’s not so much the prospect of doing the time making you want to end your life, but the desire to take a bullet to the intrusive thoughts, to kill the ideas in the ultimate kamikaze attack, as attempted Edward Norton, in Fight Club.
Of course, that stands no chance of improving the matter under contemplation. If it is bad for a child to know his father went to prison, it is surely worse to know that he killed himself, but that is hardly your problem. You are dead now, and provided you’re certain that there is no afterlife, your last thought will soon be comprised of a lead alloy.
From here derives the idea of suicide as being selfish. The concept of a mercy killing derives from the idea that it is not the dead who suffer. If you believe in hell, you might conclude otherwise, but even in religious circles this concept has largely fallen out of fashion, and those circles are, in any case, becoming smaller by the day. Much to our detriment, I’d say, whatever the facts.
What prompted me to this point was the news that a friend of mine killed himself not so long ago, and I’m really, really, really bothered by it.
I know rationally that it’s not my fault, but I’m also kind of an egomaniac who thinks everything ought to be under his control and that whatever isn’t is a consequence of some sort of personal failure. That’s a dumb idea, and I know that, but as we discussed on the prior episode, our minds are not nearly so rational as we like to tell ourselves most of the time.
Ted von Nukem was born Ted Landrum. He changed his name to von Nukem in 2012 inspired in some part by the character of the Duke Nukem videogame franchise.
It wasn’t so long after this that I met Ted for the first time, in 2014. He had long been a listener of my show, from the “Some Garbage Podcast” days, and I hesitate to say he followed me into the Alt Right only because he seemed to be ahead of me in this in some respects. When we met I still considered myself a libertarian but had been well along the antifeminism track,and Ted approached me with an idea that had me thinking he might be a spy.
Ted shared the view I then held that government was fundamentally an illegitimate institution, and that force was a legitimate, and perhaps inevitable means of ceasing its predatory schemes. But we both had come to grips with the power dynamics of the United States in that we would not be able to build ancapistan on the continent of North America. Ted contacted me asking if we could meet up and he would buy me dinner, and when he came here he suggested we could seize power by force in some third world country with nicer weather. While the idea seemed plausible, I got the idea that if I agreed with him, I’d soon find myself somewhere far less sunny.
But Ted and I stayed in touch, and frequently texted one another. He came to Charlottesville in August of 2017, and when I saw video of him fighting right next to me at UVA, my lingering suspicions of him were substantially diminished. When he testified at my preliminary hearing, it would be fair to say he seemed overly eager to help me. My suspicions of him by now were mostly erased. Though, not entirely.
While things were at peak chaos, Ted sent me a text message claiming to be trapped in the same parking garage where justice was dispensed on Deandre Harris for his attacks on our people. I was at that point in no position to help, but I had asked around if anybody else was. A short time later, Ted sent me a text message saying he had fought his way out, and that “The garage was bloody business.” I would subsequently see the fight with Mr. Harris become a national news story.
These messages were sent in unencrypted plain text. While I was in jail in Charlottesville, I was served with a lawsuit, and a demand to preserve records. When I got out and was ordered to hand over all my event related communications to the plaintiffs in discovery, I was very conflicted. I did not want to risk getting this guy in trouble, but I could have wound up in more than a little trouble myself if I didn’t give up that text message. The Plaintiffs might not have had it yet, but the FBI certainly had to have discovered it in the course of their investigation. If I tried to lie, they would know I had, and they would have me dead to rights on perjury. At this stage of the proceedings, we still expected self defense claims to be taken seriously in trials.
So, I warned Ted that I had no choice to give up the messages, and told him to take precautions. He was understanding of this, and we remained friends.
I thought it was conspicuous that Ted was never even subpoenaed, much less sued or prosecuted. But since I didn’t want that to happen, I kept the mindset that I was happy for Ted’s good luck.
To make a long story short, Ted’s luck seems to have run out.
According to a federal indictment, which I stress we should not accept as fact, Ted was caught smuggling fentanyl into the United States across the Mexican border in 2021. He made bail, and was set to stand trial earlier this year. When he failed to show up for that trial, the Judge issued a bench warrant. The case was dismissed when Ted was found dead of a self inflicted gunshot wound, and police found several suicide notes with reportedly inconsistent handwriting.
I’ll conclude this part of my narrative by saying that I personally liked Ted, even when he raised my suspicions. I met his wife and she is a beautiful woman who gave him beautiful children and my heart goes out to them. This will have to make due for my eulogy of Ted.
Aside from the questionable entertainment value, a listener in the Telegram chat pointed out that in Robert Cialdini’s book Influence, which we recently discussed, it was shown that news reports of suicides actually increased suicide rates. I have enough guilt in my life, Ted is at least the second Radical Agenda listener I know of to have committed suicide, and if you’ll pardon some gallows humor, dead men don’t donate. So, don’t kill yourself, please.
The episode I said I didn’t want to do, but am about to, is an episode about prison. Fortunately, I have more experience than most of you regarding this subject, which is to say I am glad that most of you have never been there and never will. Not that I consider myself fortunate to have gone, which is subject to more vigorous debate. But I am by no means an expert on the subject, and my experience in prison was different from that of most. If you’ve been keeping up with me, you know that I was housed in something called the Communications Management Unit, which is far from the normal prison experience. There was almost no contraband in the way of drugs where I was housed, not even tobacco, and it was impossible to get your hands on a cell phone. In the rest of the federal prison system, these items are ubiquitous, and they have profound impacts on social dynamics. Most of the people in the CMU were political prisoners, and thus disinclined to uncontrolled violence, comparative to other parts of the system. So if you go to prison, your experience will surely be different from mine.
I have seen a great many jails though, and prisoners do talk to one another about their tours of the system, and I do learn fast. So I can speak with reasonable confidence about the matters I’ll be addressing here today.
But as I have alluded to in the preceding 2,000 words, I have come to you with a specific purpose in mind for discussing this, which is to convey that prison is not worth killing yourself over. I can say with the utmost confidence that if a man were to kill himself to avoid prison, and then, in his afterlife, to be shown the outcome of his life had he not, he would be filled with the most profound regret at his poor choice. But dead men are not given this option, to the best of our knowledge, and this prompts us to say something about suicide more generally.
During Radical Agenda Stage Three I did an episode titled “Lacking Tomorrow” and the opening monologue was included in one of the “Best Of” compilations released subsequently. It’s not currently in my interests to be distributing this, and one of these days I’ll explain why. In the meantime, talk amongst yourselves, and you’ll find it if you try hard enough.
Fundamentally the idea was this: If a person concludes that the future will contain more suffering than satisfaction, and that only death will end his suffering, there’s a coherent line of thinking that results in the taking of one’s own life. From what one derives satisfaction, determines the trajectory of this thought process.
So if you derive satisfaction from wealth, comfort, and sensual pleasures, then you are going to have an exceedingly difficult time in prison. But arguably, this does not lead to the happiest life in comparative freedom, either, as evidenced by every story you have ever heard about some wealthy idiot killing himself or becoming addicted to drugs. When such a man finds himself facing prison, it is most likely the outcome of his orientation toward the world leaving him profoundly dissatisfied with how he has utilized his freedom, and taking some risky maneuver as a consequence. In such a case, prison is just one more symptom of a pathology which has very little to do with his material environment.
To find satisfaction in life, one must have a purpose, or better yet, he must have purposes. Plural. If you have a single minded focus on a narrow objective, then prison is near certain to derail your plans. If that is all you’ve got, then fast forwarding to the end begins to seem reasonable.
One must also have an identity, but not entirely dissimilar to his purposes, his identity must be subject to constant development and discovery. If your identity is as a law abiding successful person, and you have the new component of a prisoner identification number imposed upon this self image, one’s image of oneself must not be so rigid that it cannot bend without breaking.
For me, the way I get through the day, whatever my circumstance, is in my constant search for purposes, and in my constant evaluation and discovery of myself. I have long term goals, but when the likelihood of accomplishing them seems diminished I am not deterred from life. This is because I have integrated into my worldview a purpose of seeking new goals as I go forward. I reassess every so often, what I am capable of doing, and I attempt to do these things. As new information becomes available, I reassess again, and repeat the process in perpetuity. Consequently, I have known little of the concept of boredom for many years.
When I encounter setbacks, when I suffer, when I fail, these are mere data points to consider in my constant reassessments. Fear, pain, and dissatisfaction, are little more than information to me, and I dare say that your satisfaction with life will improve dramatically if you can adopt this mindset.
This outlook was refined substantially during my incarceration. I read a good deal about religion, I read about Buddhism and more specifically, the concept of mindfulness. I read about stoicism. And the common theme throughout much of this literature is that there is opportunity in suffering. I hesitate to invoke the facially false cliche that “anything that doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” but the theme is familiar and somewhat approximates my point. If you get shot up and survive but are paralyzed from the neck down, it would be difficult to say this made a man stronger. Not impossible, but it is hardly axiomatic that this would make him more powerful in any sense.
I like a line Viktor Bout used in an English language interview he had with Maria Butina. He said he read something along these lines, that put it quite poetically. A challenge can either be your tormentor, or your mentor. It is entirely up to you. You have very limited control over your environment and the people around you. We would like to improve upon that and that is one of our purposes, but you have substantially more control over how you react to stimuli, and it is by no means beyond your capacity to intelligently direct your thoughts and emotions.
Among the many problems with our politics today, perhaps chief among them, is that the people involved in politics have not learned this. People become politically active not because they have any coherent vision for how to organize society, but because they are profoundly miserable internally. These people are incapable of addressing these deep psychological and emotional issues, and so they focus their energies outward and attempt to reorganize the rest of the world. To them this tremendous and ultimately impossible task appears to be quite a trivial matter, compared to the pain which attends to spending 15 minutes alone in one’s own head.
The trannies are just the most extreme example of this. They cannot change their sex. They know they cannot. For that matter, they know they should not. But they demand that everybody else tell the same lie as them, and will resort to any means to compel universal dishonesty in pursuit of this aim. And then, of course, it should almost go without saying, they kill themselves anyway.
What I mean to get at here is this. Prison or not. Make peace with the world. I don’t mean that you should seek a life free from conflict. far from it. I mean you should learn to be at peace, internally, no matter what. Things will upset you, sure. You will get angry, of course. I am not the Zen master and I am not proposing that you become passive. What I mean is that you should strive to accept things as they actually are, and to accurately include in this assessment your capacity to change them.
If there are bullets whizzing past your head and you have a gun, you should try to shoot the people who are trying to kill you, and you will be far better qualified to accomplish this goal, if you are in possession of what is sometimes referred to as coolness under fire. If the fear of death in this circumstance preoccupies your thoughts, you will likely hide behind something and wait to die. Getting up to shoot back will be too much to handle. If you are whipped into a murderous frenzy and can only think of damaging those who have tried to harm you, then you are likely to make an error and reach the same outcome.
These stand in contrast to what I am encouraging here. If you calmly say to yourself in this gun fight scenario, “How many people are shooting at me? How many shots have they fired? How many bullets do I have? What can I use to my advantage in this environment? How fast am I capable of running for how long?” you’ll be in a far better position to survive that conflict, and it is no different in prison, or for that matter, in politics, or in business.
Love, well, that is always more complex, and far less aided by rational analysis.
If you can manage what I’ve described here, the rest is just data. Information is useful, but it almost doesn’t matter what happens so far as your satisfaction with life is concerned. If you end up spending the rest of your life in the worst prison, and you have to fight for your chastity day in and day out, your purpose will be to do this and suicide will not enter into the equation. So far as I am concerned for my purposes today, that would be the ideal state of affairs, and it would not be necessary for me to say much about prison specifically.
But, I have hardly given the master class on mindfulness today. I will find it far less effortful to tell you about prison, and I do have a podcast to produce. So, as I’m fond of saying, Alright on with it.
Let us begin, as these things always do, well prior to the alleged conduct which is to result in your incarceration. Since you are not likely on your way to prison, we can, in your case, begin right now.
Suppose you have concluded that as a consequence of your lawful political activity, that you are at an increased risk of being forced to defend yourself in a hostile area with unsympathetic juries and unforgiving statutes regarding self defense. This is just an example, what I am going to say could apply equally to an actual criminal. For whatever reason, you have concluded that you are at an increased risk of finding yourself on the wrong side of the authorities.
This is useful information. You can use it to organize your life more efficiently, and to decrease the likelihood of panic and consequent error should such an event come to fruition. It should also go without saying that you can use this information to avoid the circumstance you fear might lead you to such an outcome, but such will be beyond the scope of our discussion today.
Do you know a good lawyer? Now might be the time to do the research. These things can become exceedingly difficult if you are denied bail. Do you know how you will pay this lawyer? How much you will need to pay?
Who is really going to be there for you, and for how long? Perhaps more importantly, when you find out the hard way that your assessment is faulty, as almost all incarcerated people do, how will you readjust to this discovery?
In the event you find out the authorities are seeking to arrest you before you are captured, how much trouble would you have to be looking at, before you considered it preferable to abscond?
Don’t underestimate this calculation. Most people who run, are caught, and it tends to make matters worse. Many are killed. If you are going to be charged with a misdemeanor, and you run, you’re an idiot. A fugitive almost always has to commit more crimes along the way, and each of those increase the risk of capture, and the penalties one will face upon that outcome. If you do your time, the matter is likely to conclude someday, but if you run, it will be a lifelong committment unless you are ultimately forced to face the music.
Do you have a passport? Cash? An unused prepaid cell phone? Cryptocurrency? A friend you can count on? If you ask yourself these questions for the first time after you find out about the warrant, just turn yourself in, because you will not last as a fugitive. You would need to know these answers well in advance, and begin making life or death decisions immediately.
If you have facial hair, it’s a lot easier to shave it than it is to grow a beard. A white man might do well to find a tanning bed if time avails, but if you’ve never done this before you might end up red and conspicuous.
Can you run fast, or have you been smoking cigarettes your whole life? If you punch somebody as hard as you can, are they likely to fall down in one shot? Is your car reliable? Does it have a bunch of political bumper stickers? Are your windows tinted in such a fashion that you run the risk of being pulled over for an equipment violation? Do you have a real spare tire or one of those donut things in the trunk?
All things to think about, but we’re not doing a show on the fugitive lifestyle. I don’t run fast. That’s how I learned to fight.
More important things to consider are your freedom related expenses, and how easily you can avoid paying them if you’re incarcerated. Do you have a family to worry about? Do you have investments? If you are the breadwinner, how long after you are taken into custody will your wife be looking for jobs and babysitters? Does she have marketable skills that will facilitate such a search?
Maybe you should make a plan to sell your house or your car or your stocks or other assets in advance, so that you don’t have to figure this out from behind the walls.
Maybe you shouldn’t, but at least now you’ve got an idea of some of the decisions you are going to have to make once you are met with this challenge.
It’s helpful to know a little bit about the law. Particularly, the rules of evidence. These vary to some extent from place to place, but the federal rules are instructive enough to talk to a broad audience about.
You should most importantly learn about the legal concept of hearsay. You might think the authorities know something, but that does not mean they can introduce it as evidence. A facebook post is not evidence. With few exceptions, if a person will not or cannot say it under oath in court, a statement made outside of court is not admissible as evidence. Even video that proves or disproves the central facts of the case can be excluded from evidence because it is legally considered hearsay, and you might be shocked at how ridiculous some of these decisions end up looking to reasonable people. This is one of the prime examples of why it is typically considered ill advised to speak to law enforcement. If you corroborate otherwise inadmissible evidence, it can become admissible.
This does not mean you should not speak to law enforcement. To give a less controversial example from my own life, some of you have seen a video where I pulled a gun out on a guy and the cops came up while I had it pointed at him. I told them exactly what happened, I had the video on my cell phone, and I told them “hey here’s the video” and they reviewed it, concluded I was righteous, and sent me on my way with my revolver in its holster.
Lying to law enforcement, or anybody else, about a situation that might land you in legal trouble, is a risky gamble. One of the strongest forms of evidence is what’s known as a false exculpatory statement. You might think it prudent to say “I didn’t do it” but even that can land you in hot water. Take for example, Alex Baldwin saying he didn’t pull the trigger on a single action revolver that happened to kill somebody while he was holding it. He might not have been charged save for that absurd lie. Lying is very suspicious, and in many cases, can be a crime all by itself.
What you say before arrest can definitely influence charging decisions, such as when I told those cops why I drew down on that guy. If I said “fuck you copper I want my lawyer” I’d have probably gone to jail that night. But it is unlikely that I would have faced a trial, much less been convicted. I was in a position to make that decision because I understood New Hampshire’s self defense laws. The cops knew who I was, they knew I wasn’t the type to be running around shooting at innocent people, and I knew I had it all on video. New Hampshire has no duty to retreat, but before I pulled my gun I tried to run away. If I had shot that guy, I’d still probably not have been arrested, because I exercised more restraint than the law required. But I could have had a far different outcome in another state, and spending a night in jail might be a foregone conclusion. There’s no benefit in talking there.
When in doubt, shut your mouth. If you have something to say, usually there’s not much downside to telling your attorney before you tell anyone else.
In every correctional facility in the United States, there is law library access for inmates. If you are ever arrested, you will want to know what exact statutes you have been accused of violating, and what the potential penalties of that crime are. In the federal system, there are sentencing guidelines, and you definitely want to figure those out as soon as possible. It can be overwhelming to hear that you are facting, as I was, 37 years in prison. It then comes as a huge relief to find out that this is a statutory maximum, and your sentencing guidelines come out to less than five.
You will want to know what peculiarities attend to interpretations of words, laws, and facts, surrounding it. Your lawyer will help you to get started on this, but you should pester him with questions, especially if you are using a public defender. You should not assume your lawyer knows everything, because he most certainly does not. You find out these peculiarities for yourself, so as to inform your questions of the attorney, by reading what is known as case law. Case law consists of decisions made by courts, which guide the actions of courts in the future, so as to maintain consistency in the system. That is what it means to have a “common law court system”. When you hear Supreme Court decisions cited, perhaps most notably, Roe v Wade, or Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health, these are citations of precedent which have a similar, and arguably more permanent effect, as statutes passed through a legislature and signed by an executive.
Reading case law can be very tedious and time consuming. To use a familiar example, there’s a lot of caselaw surrounding the subject of threats. In my case, it was not at all clear that what I was accused of constituted what is legally known as a “true threat”. The central questions are what I intended it to be received as, and how it was in fact received. Context is key. That’s important to know when you are fedposting, because “I didn’t actually say I was gonna kill the guy” is not a defense in court. The question is, did you intend to intimidate the person in question, and your use of innuendo and jargon does not a defense make.
The appeal of my criminal case currently pends before the first circuit court of appeals. A central feature of my appeal is that hearsay was used to undermine my contextual defense. I defended my conduct by saying in the context of my relationship with the alleged victim, the statement I was charged with making was not a “true threat” legally, and that to undermine this defense, the prosecution invoked out of court statements by someone who was not called to testify.
If the court rules against me, which let’s face it, is the baseline expectation, it will not be because my argument is meritless. What the prosecution did was inarguably against the rules of evidence. It is, what is known as “plain error”, though I hate that term because error implies lack of intent, and they knew exactly what they were doing.
But the point I’m trying to make here is not so much to bitch about injustice or to teach you about the law. It is to demonstrate that it ain’t over when you get charged with a crime. It ain’t even over when you get convicted. The legal process is full of intricacies and uncertainty, and process, process, process. There’s guys who spend ten years in prison, some of them guilty as hell, they empty their assets into the pockets of lawyers, and then get their sentences reduced or their convictions expunged on a Hail Mary pro se filing typed up by some weirdo they met on the yard.
People get intimidated by the system, appropriately. Guilty or not, they fear that they are powerless against it, and not without justification. But whatever your challenges in Court, they are less certain to destroy you than a bullet through your temple.
If you have a family, and you are put on trial, they will suffer. No doubt. If you are sent to prison, and they have to get by without their breadwinner, you will be tormented day in and day out by the guilt of failing to meet your obligations. But you will fail to meet those obligations all the more, and all the more certainly, if you are dead. When I hear about some family man blowing his brains out to spare his family some harm, I get really upset. With all due respect to the dead, I mean to protect the living with what I say today, so sorry for the F, but what kind of fucking asshole thought process, leads a man to conclude his family will suffer less upon discovery of his lifeless corpse, than to endure some number of years, without the benefit of his presence?
If you ever get the idea in your head, that you’re gonna whack yourself for somebody else’s benefit, let these words be the last thing you think before you pull that trigger. That’s a bunch of fucking bullshit, and you goddamn know it. I don’t blame you for feeling overwhelmed. But whatever obligations you incurred prior to your arrest, did not get erased by that arrest, and they will not be erased by your death. That is not how familial obligations work. You owe, and ain’t no such thing as bankruptcy in this field of endeavor. Pull it the fuck together, and do whatever you can of what you must.
The future is uncertain, it is ALWAYS uncertain. You can bring a certain conclusion to your life on this earth, but if you think your heartbeat and brain activity are all there is to your existence, well, no wonder you’re fuckin suicidal. Your impact on the world continues in those children, and in all the people whose lives you have impacted, and thus continues your obligations, whether you strive to meet them, or not.
But let’s face it, these people didn’t indict you because they thought it would be a fun exercise. There’s a reasonable likelihood that you’re going down. You are unlikely to succeed on appeal, and even if you do, it’s gonna take awhile. I’ve done all my time and my appeal is still pending. You’re going to have to figure out how to get on inside the walls.
Let’s begin with an important distinction. Jail is not prison. These things get confused in the common parlance because they have a lot in common and most people have no reason to discern between the two, but there are differences that take on quite profound meaning once you have to do some time. Most people who know the difference between prison and jail assume that prison is worse, but everybody who has been to prison can tell you it is exactly the opposite.
Jail is where you go before you are convicted. It is usually run by the county or the city. Jails are designed to house pretrial detainees, and people who are sentenced to less than one year of confinement. Many are notoriously filthy, violent, crowded, and teeming with transient mentally ill people and drug addicts in withdrawal. They typically have a bare minimum of health care, mental health assistance, or rehabilitative programs, by design, because most of the people in them will soon be leaving, whether it is through the front door or on a bus to a prison.
Prisons are exclusively for convicted felons who have been sentenced to more than one year of confinement. They are typically run by State governments or the Federal Government. Depending on the prison, there are varying degrees of programming, recreation, and services available, designed, ostensibly, to prepare prisoners for release back into the community. They are typically much larger than jails, and are subjected to higher standards since people are expected to endure long stays inside them. For the same reason, the prisoners themselves tend to behave differently.
These environments are very different, and different incentives attend to them.
For one example, while I was being held in Strafford County, I got in two physical altercations. Both times, me and the guy I mixed it up with were punished with two weeks in disciplinary segregation. Disciplinary segregation is typically a 23 hour lockdown with minimal distractions and no access to commissary, which, if you don’t know, commissary is like the store where you can buy things from in correctional facilities.
To say the least of it, this does not provide much of a deterrence to violence. Depending on the circumstances, somebody can be charged with a crime if they commit one in jail, but this is not frequently the outcome, and that expectation is how people inform their decision making. If you’re a violent criminal who will assault people on the street knowing it could get you years in prison, two weeks in disciplinary segregation is not enough to keep you from assaulting people in jail. In his eyes, going to jail is actually an incentive to be more violent, because the penalties are comparatively reduced quite dramatically, and you can hardly be surprised that dumb animals behave like dumb animals when met with such incentives.
Prison, by comparison, provides substantially greater disincentives to petty violence. Serious violence such as rape, stabbings, and murder, are more common in prisons than in jails. But there is no sort of permissive attitude about this among the staff or among the prisoners. Violence in prison is a big deal, and so when it happens it is often more serious than in jail, but n my limited experience it is more avoidable in prison than in jail. While in jail, mentally ill people will just attack you because they are fucking crazy and don’t have any reason not to. In prison you can spend months in disciplinary segregation while the violence is “investigated”. So, people have a greater disincentive to just randomly attack other prisoners, and if you are not disrespecting people, gambling, borrowing, trafficking in contraband, or making yourself aware of things which you can be accused of informing on, then you are substantially less likely to find yourself on the receiving end of an assault.
But, if you are a reckless shit talker, or engage in other conflict prone behavior, you are a lot more likely to get stabbed in prison. When violence happens in prison, the goal is to get the victim off the unit permanently so as to not have to deal with them. Getting punched in the face sucks, but it will only lead to prolonged conflict if you aren’t hospitalized. So, in prison, respect is exceedingly important.
Rape is not nearly so frequent in prison as you might think from watching TV. It’s more common in prison than in jail, for sure, largely to the fact that people in jail are likely to leave before homosexual behavior appeals to otherwise heterosexual men. Two guys were in disciplinary segregation when I left Marion, and they had been accused of raping a guy, but I was in no position to judge the veracity of that allegation. The idea that guys are walking around with raging hard ons raping people for urgency of desire is largely fake. There are enough homosexuals in prison, and increasingly, trannies, who are all too happy to service their fellow prisoners free or cheap without the need for coercion. Numbers are hard to come by, for obvious and not so obvious reasons, but I’ve heard estimates that about 1 in 10 male prisoners engage in some kind of consensual sexual behavior with another male prisoner at some point during their incarceration. I think this is probably accurate. I never witnessed it, thank god, but I heard credible rumors while I was locked up in Marion, and I am willing to bet it is more common in less restrictive and less monitored places, especially where drugs are pervasive.
Of course, there are differences of opinion as to what constitutes consent or coercion. If some effeminate homosexual is performing sexual favors in exchange for money collected by people who provide him with protection, is that consensual? This is a subject of debate for other formats, and not likely to be a subject of urgent concern for anyone listening to this show.
Especially in the federal system, but I expect in most state prisons as well, there is a more rigorous classification process than in jail. A jail simply takes the murderers and the drunk drivers and the crazy people screaming at cars, and puts them all in the same box and hopes they don’t kill eachother before the Judge can sort them out. Prisons are more conscientious, and there are more than 9 levels to this particular version of hell. The vast majority of federal prisoners are sent to camps, or low security facilities. To reach a medium security facility you typically have to have committed a violent crime, and people who end up in penitentiaries or maximum security prisons typically are either murderers, rapists, have some extenuating circumstance, or have gotten in trouble in other areas of the prison system.
This provides a strong disincentive to bad behavior, especially violence. Especially at the camps, there are drugs and cellphones galore. Escape is possible and deterred primarily by the threat of incurring new charges. I have even heard stories of female prostitutes sneaking onto the grounds, to service the better off clientele at exorbitant rates. I am not saying it would be wise to join in any of this behavior, but it gives you an idea of the level of freedom one still enjoys while locked up there. If somebody creates a victim, he is likely to lose access to such amenities.
You take your smartphone for granted today, but it really cannot be stressed enough what a luxury it is to have one is in prison. After you’ve spent a year or so in pretrial detention in county, the capacities a cell phone provides will seem amazing to you, and time will zip by like the breeze as you chat and play and work.
I mentioned commissary, and this is more important than most people can imagine. People get the idea in their head that the world just stops spinning while you’re incarcerated and that is so not the case. Any jail or prison will provide you with everything you need to survive at taxpayer expense, but the comforts you can purchase from the commissary are meaningful. You typically eat dinner around 4:30pm, and for me, this results in hunger before bedtime. Prisons typically provide a warmer set of clothes, but jails can also be cold at night, and buying sweatpants and sweatshirt is important. In my experience, jail commissary is anywhere from two to four times more expensive than in prison, and the quality of the products is not nearly as good. For example, ramen soups costed $0.95 in Strafford County, and $0.25 at Marion. The menu items were also about twice as numerous, and when things are cheaper, one can afford to be more discriminating in their tastes.
Eat your vegetables, and drink your milk. The diet provided to you by the facility is not random crap. It is designed by qualified professionals to give you nutrients your body needs. If you don’t like something on your tray, I’m not saying you’ve got to eat all of it every time, but you can find yourself with some kind of deficiency if you don’t eat the food they give you. Get whatever sun you can too, because your body needs that more than you probably realize. I did a lot of time when going outside wasn’t an option, and I didn’t realize what was happening but it was causing me to be hungry all the time, and I only understood it when I started going outside everyday and the hunger stopped and I was like holy shit my body was trying to find something it was missing.
This is how I got fat in jail, eating cheap garbage at night during a COVID lockdown. I gained almost 40lbs. I dropped 15 in prison, and I am happy to report I’ve dropped more than another 25 since I’ve been out. Goodbye fat pants! More on that later…
I’ll tell you a little bit more about what day to day life is like, but I wanted to get some of these basics out of the way, and especially to differentiate between jail and prison. Experienced criminals try to conclude their cases as quickly as possible to get the hell out of jail and into the prison system because they reasonably expect their lives to improve there.
And it can improve, almost in perpetuity. The more time you’re in, the more people learn to navigate the system, and one another, and the potential for conflict tends to be reduced. The guards get to know you, and if you’re not an asshole, you can develop friendly relationships with them without being accused of snitching by other prisoners. A friendly cop can make a world of difference while you’re incarcerated, and that’s one of the reasons I promote a positive attitude toward law enforcement on this show. Power is your friend, and all the more so if you are dependent on them to open your gate and to feed you.
So, if you’re ever in jail and thinking to yourself “I can’t stay here for X number of years” don’t worry, you won’t have to. If you think you’re going to end up someplace worse after jail, you won’t. You’re not going to get raped, you’re not going to get beaten up everyday, and I have my doubts you’re going to be among the one in ten who starts banging other dudes out of boredom. In the unlikely event that you are, that behavior will in all likelihood cease once you have access to women, unless you’ve been some kinda closet case the whole time.
So, at this point in the narrative, you might be asking yourself “Well, then what the hell am I going to do?”
Not much. Whatever you want, really. In a way, there’s a lot more freedom in jail and prison than there is outside. You ain’t got to do shit but be there, for the most part.
Some places say you have to work, but chances are you’ll want a job because of the benefits of having one, which can be substantial even in places that don’t pay prisoners. In Strafford I used to get $55 a week for cleaning up my housing unit at night, but the money was nothing compared to the benefit I had of getting the TV and microwave to myself after everybody else was locked in for the evening. In the federal prison in Marion, I couldn’t get a job because I was in the CMU. That meant I had to find other ways to occupy my time, I had no special privileges, and I was dependent on people outside for commissary. If you don’t want to work, they can’t really make you, but refusing a job can result in minor disciplinary action and being housed less favorably by classification.
The people who work there don’t want to know what you are doing, for the most part. In a lot of places, the prisoner to staff ratio is easily 100 to 1, and they couldn’t keep track of what everybody was doing even if they wanted to work hard, which in nearly all cases, they do not. These are some of the most notoriously lazy people on the planet, and unless you make them work, they are not inclined to bother you.
By default, you’re going to have a cellmate almost anywhere you go. Sometimes more than one. Some housing units, commonly referred to as dorms, are just one giant cell with a hundred people on bunk beds. Depending on your social attitudes, this can be a mixed bag.
Personally, I will do almost anything to avoid having a cellmate. If I can’t be with a woman I love, or men I respect, then my next best option is to be in absolute solitude, in which I am perfectly happy, provided I have mental stimulation in terms of interesting books, talk radio, and access to news. The great thing about being happy with solitude in jail and prison is, you can always find it, in the worst case scenario, by getting in trouble. After my second fight in county, I never got stuck with another cellmate the whole time I was in that jail. Not that I was fighting with my cellmates, in fact, the first fight happened because my cellmate was a fuckin pussy and I was standing up for him when somebody tried to bully him. But I told classification I was conflict prone and I’d be substantially less likely to get in trouble if I had a single cell, and I had a single cell until they shipped me out. But I wasn’t alone, I had a single cell in what is known as a pod, which is to say many cells which open up into a common area known as a day room.
If you require contact with other human beings, there are different advantages that attend to this. Typically, you’re going to have this contact whether you want it or not, so it helps to want it. Your life will not be improved, however, if your neighbors detect that you think you’re better than them. From what I know about this audience, that’s more than likely to be the case, so you’ll want to be conscious of the signals you are sending. This can be cognitively demanding if you are accustomed to an honest life, but as we’ve alluded to in prior episodes, it might be worth the effort to think more about how you appear to others, for political reasons, prison aside.
If you know how to play cards, poker and spades in particular, you’ll have no trouble making acquaintances. I discourage gambling, but the problems associated this are more typically associated with debt than the wagers themselves, so keep that in mind. Spades, as you may know, is typically a friendly game. People bet on everything in prison so I’m sure there are people who bet on a game of spades, but from what I’ve observed it’s mostly an excuse to slap the table and talk shit.
Voluntary racial segregation is the norm, obviously. There’s not a lot of Jews in prison suppress it, so whites tend to become race conscious while there even if they weren’t on the outside. Depending on where you’re housed, many classification officers have a loose tendency not to mix whites and blacks as cellmates, but that’s not by any means universal, and in any case once you come out of your cells you are going to be in the same room as eachother, so, get used to that. But, typically whites sit with whites, blacks with blacks, Spanish with Spanish, Islam with Islam, and so forth.
This does not mean that prison creates white racial unity, by an stretch of the imagination. It just means that they become conscious of the racial element of their social order, and this does not imply that they do a good job of assessing or navigating it. Most white guys in jail, and many still in prison, are scared of blacks, and not without cause. If you get in a fight with a black guy, if blacks jump you, don’t expect the other white guys to jump in, and if you’re smart, you won’t do it for them either absent other cause. The idea that your skin is your uniform in a race war is an edgy meme, and has no place in the prison social order.
Who is white, that’s an interesting subject.
There’s a lot of ostensibly white guys in the Gangster Disciples, but they are not, for our purposes, white. They are gang members who are loyal to their gang, and the Gangster Disciples were formerly known as the Black Gangster Disciples Nation. The was BGDN founded by Larry Hoover and David Barksdale in 1969, and subsequently split into what are now known as the Gangster Disciples and the Black Disciples. This is a black power gang that paints six sided stars all over the place, and I can only assume White guys join it for protection, but I dare say one is better off solo, even if there is a beating involved.
My experiences with these guys wasn’t bad, for what it’s worth. The white and non-white ones actually treated me with considerable respect in Strafford County. They knew who I was and what I was about and I guess they kinda bought the media narrative that White Supremacy is gangster shit and they perceived me as having status in it so, we never had to test one another’s boundaries. Your mileage may vary.
A lot of Whites convert to Islam in prison, and this too, I assume is a matter of protection. I also suppose that the upside of Islam is, they tell you pretty much exactly what to do so, if you don’t know how to act, they’ll provide you with a fairly rigid standard of conduct which, if you abide by it, will secure your place in the group. But of course, Muslims sit with Muslims, and are thus, for our purposes, not White, whatever the organization of their DNA.
Interestingly, my experience with Muslims in prison is quite positive. This stems in part from recruitment efforts, no doubt, but more to the point they are not typically involved in senseless behavior, even the black ones, on whom this rigid standard of conduct has a remarkably civilizing effect. They are interested in politics and have no use for liberals, and so you can watch the news or listen to talk radio with them and remark about the marvelous things that fall from Jewish and adjacent mouths in the process, without any fear of misunderstanding one another.
The Spanish speakers are, as Joe Biden put it, more diverse than the African American community. At one place I was housed, there were enough of them that the Puerto Ricans were a separate group from the Mexicans, but in smaller numbers they constitute a single group. The Puerto Ricans, in such an instance, tend to view themselves as of a higher caste, and will consequently adhere closer to Whites than blacks in some matters. This can prove a useful conduit of influence if you need to negotiate across racial lines. Come to think of it, the Muslims are pretty good at this too.
Pride in your race will not often be inspired by the White guys you meet in jail. Prison, a bit more so, but by no means is this universal. A fentanyl junky who was shitting his pants in withdrawals two weeks ago is not an impressive specimen. If he was stealing from his mother to fund his habit before he got arrested, you can reasonably assume he wasn’t just skipping her to extend greater loyalty to his broader racial family.
That reminds me of another advantage of prison over jail. Aside from the fact that the prisoners are typically further from the depths of their drug addictions, the worst people in the world to be around are not murderers. They are petty thieves. This is not a moral judgement, it is a question of who you would rather spend your days with, when you have to pick from a menu of criminals. Bank robbers, killers, high level drug dealers, terrorists, you might not want to introduce some of these people to your wife, but they are infinitely better company than some junky who just can’t stop breaking windows to steal change from ashtrays. Any day of the week, I’d rather watch Tucker Carlson with a black Muslim, than watch some fucking white junky change the channel 500 times because he can’t concentrate on anything so intellectually stimulating as music video.
One thing people get scared about when going from jail to prison, is that you are around more serious criminals. That concern is not without a degree of merit, but as far as your day to day interactions are concerned, especially when it comes to white guys, these people are actually better to be around, in my, albeit limited, experience.
This is all the more the case in federal prison, and my view of this is doubtlessly informed by the fact that it is all the much better still, in the CMU. The FBI is not above snatching dope fiends off the street in flimsy drug dealing conspiracies, but the goal is typically to flip them, and you’ll not be shocked to learn it usually works. Other than that, the FBI isn’t typically involved in your day to day law enforcement stuff. So the people in federal prison are often a higher caliber of criminal than in state prisons, and certainly higher than the average lowlife in county jail.
You might have heard that Derek Chauvin, and the guys who were convicted of killing Ahmad Arbery, both tried to do their time in federal prison instead of state prison. This is partly why. Federal prison, depending on where you’re comparing it to, can often have longer sentences, but your quality of life tends to be better, and while there’s some evidence that the facilities themselves are better, the bigger issue is the caliber of people you’re around.
Ultimately, you should do what you can to minimize the necessity for caring who is around you. Always be exceedingly polite, especially to people you don’t like. Make a reasonable effort not be overheard discussing political topics you expect to piss people off. Don’t join a gang. Don’t get tattoos, especially on your face. Don’t do drugs. Don’t drink alcohol. Don’t get into avoidable arguments. Don’t Insult people. Don’t gamble. Don’t borrow. Don’t lend.
You will almost certainly borrow and lend anyway. It’s very common, and it almost always works out. If you borrow and you pay on time, ultimately, there’s not going to be a problem. But shit happens. The commissary is out of something you’re supposed to repay, your people don’t make a deposit when they’re supposed to, whatever the case may be, and you can hardly blame people for assuming the worst about men they meet in prison. If you lend, then somebody doesn’t pay you, well, what are you going to do about it? Are you going to let this guy dick you around and look like a punk? Or are you going to fight some retard over potato chips? You have no good options.
You’re going to make some friends whether you want to or not. Chances are, there will be at least a couple of decent people there, and if you’ve got three guys who have a few bucks coming in, then nobody is going to have to go a week without a deodorant, and nobody is going to get hungry at night. In Marion, I knew that Viktor Bout, Matt Hale, and Bill White were solid people, and they knew that I was solid. If any of us needed anything, we would ask one another, and we would have it without any discussion of repayment. Next time commissary came, you got your stuff back, or you got told that the commissary was out and he offered you anything you wanted to make up for it, and you typically tell him, “whenever they get it in stock is fine, thanks”. Not a big deal.
In Strafford, the commissary was expensive, not a lot of guys had jobs, and your neighbor wasn’t necessarily going to be there next week, so lending typically involved interest. Guys who had money would run basically their own store, and they would either give you one item and expect two in return, or two items and end expect three. Pretty steep. But on top of the fact that guys get released from county jail more frequently than a federal prison, Strafford was a place where you could just tell the cops “Hey I owe and I can’t pay” and they’ll move you to another unit. So, the guys who lent were doing so at greater risk.
Here’s a scenario. You borrow from a guy, he gets in trouble and they take him to the hole. Somebody else says “Hey, you gotta pay me what you owe him”. This actually happened to me.
Do you pay him? There’s no right answer here. It’s a coin toss. Maybe you pay him, you see the other guy and you say “Yeah, I paid your boy” and he says “What boy? You owe me. Pay.” Or, maybe he says “Good lookin out” and everything is fine. Maybe you say “I didn’t borrow from you, I’m not paying you”. Forget the debt, you just insulted this guy by calling him a liar.
When in doubt, pay. That way, you can’t be accused of being dishonorable. If you gotta pay twice, pay twice. Now one of them is dishonorable. If you have to choose between being seen as dishonorable and just about any other option, choose the other option, even weakness.
Clean your cell when you move in, and no less than once a week after, and I mean wipe the whole thing down with a wet rag and preferably some kind of cleaning chemical. As a general matter, always clean up after yourself, if you have a cold drink that leaves condensation on a table, wipe it up.
Don’t skip showers. Don’t fart in the presence of others if you can avoid it. If you have a cellmate and you have to fart in his presence, sit on the toilet with your pants on and flush while you fart. It sounds dumb, but prison toilets are usually very powerful. They have to be on account of retards throwing things in them that don’t belong there. Even if it doesn’t work to eliminate the smell, it is a show of courtesy, which is more important than the practical effect.
When you shit, you flush while you shit, repeatedly. Cellmate or no cellmate. These are called courtesy flushes. Pinch flush repeat. Sometimes this will make the toilet seat cold and you will not appreciate this. Do it anyway.
Blacks will be loud. It is impolite to be loud in jail or prison. They will do it anyway. You will not.
The general idea of what I have outlined here is that you don’t want your presence to be a discomfort to others. Noise, smells, and mess, make other people’s lives more difficult, and the last thing anybody in prison wants is for their life to be more difficult. That makes time move more slowly, and everybody in prison wants to fast forward. If you piss off your friends, you won’t have any. if you piss other people off, your friends will not appreciate the burden this places on them, and you won’t have any.
So let’s talk about friends for a minute.
When I got to Strafford, I was amazed at how white it was. I had once been in a mostly white unit inside a mostly black jail back in New York, and it is interesting what this does to social dynamics. While jail does not automatically create white racial unity, it does determine your social circle when white are the minority. This is not so much the case when whites are the majority. I won’t spend a lot of time on this, because it is so unusual it hardly warrants mention.
But in this environment, friendship is much like friendship anywhere else. People find their own level, they find common interests, and our fellow whites are not particularly interested in the fact that you are also white. When they are the minority, they care about this much more, and for good reason. But if there’s one or two black guys on your unit, they’re not gonna sit alone, and you’re probably not gonna tell them to.
When whites are the ethnic minority, as per usual, upon arrival, White guys will introduce themselves to you. Smile, make a firm handshake, and thank them. What I told you earlier about borrowing, forget about it. If they offer you things to get settled in, accept them. But, make the repayment terms clear. If you’re just getting to jail after arrest, and you had money on you when you were arrested, that money is in your account already. If somebody offers you something, say “Thank you so much man, I really appreciate it. When does commissary come? I have money on my books. I’ll replace it as soon as I can place an order”. Telling him that you will “replace it” is a not so subtle way of saying “I am not paying interest.” The dynamics are similar if you are going from jail to prison, or if you’re transferred from one place to another, simply adjust for the accounting.
If somebody lends you something at interest, he is not trying to be your friend, at least not through this gesture. Giving you something and expecting a return on his investment is a sales pitch, and you should only do this upon proper consideration, not as a means of getting to know somebody.
It is entirely possible he will say “Don’t worry about it, I got you” or something to that affect. If he does, tell him you will take care of the next White guy who comes on the unit.
Whatever the outcome of this interaction, you should do this for the next white guy who comes on the unit. Try to have an extra soap, an extra deodorant, an extra set of shower shoes, and some extra coffee around. When a white guy comes on the unit, you introduce yourself, ask if he needs anything, and no matter what he says, make sure he gets a set of shower shoes if they arent’ provided by the facility.
You might not know about shower shoes, it occurs to me. In your shower, you just get naked and wash yourself off. In jail and prison, you generally share a shower with others. Depending on the environment, there is a varying likelihood that people are masturbating in those showers. If you want to step in another man’s semen, then get in the shower without shower shoes and get your feet pregnant, but most people don’t want pregnant feet. So if you are the guy who gives the new guy his shower shoes, you’re off to a good start with the new guy.
A more common problem than pregnant feet is foot fungus. If you’ve never had this problem, lucky you. If you have had this problem, you know how much it sucks. One of the first things you’ll want to buy from commissary is whatever antigfungal product is on the menu. All correctional facilities sell them. Don’t wait until you need it, buy it right away. You should also get “triple antibiotic ointment”. All correctional facilities sell this. It is basically a generic Neosporin, and it hastens the healing of cuts and prevents infections. Don’t wait until you need it, buy it right away.
Wherever you go, analyze the social dynamics of the unit. Sometimes there is an identifiable shot caller. People might tell you who he is directly. In the absence of a designated shot caller, hierarchies nonetheless emerge. The biggest guy on the unit has influence, obviously, and he’s usually not White. But intelligence plays a big role too. So does money. Do not express disapproval of the social order if you are not influential enough to change it, and upon arrival you are certainly lacking this influence.
Some facilities designate an inmate as a “Pod Rep” or something to this effect, essentially somebody who acts as a liaison between inmates and staff. Be friendly toward him.
If there are gangs, which is common, you might have a situation where a gang claims to run the unit. They might say who can use what phone when. This might piss you off, but take my word for it, this is not worth fighting over unless they say you can’t use the phone at all. It’s possible, even likely, they are preventing a worse situation from emerging.
I’ll give you an example. When I left Strafford, but before I got to Marion, they dropped me in a Corrections Corporation of America facility, a private prison, in Tallahatchie, Mississippi. This place was notorious, people all throughout the federal prison system tell stories about Tallahatchie. We pulled up on the bus and this tall black dude with dreads to his thighs takes one look at the staff and says “There’s way too many black people working here” and I wholeheartedly agreed in total silence. The place wasn’t just run by black people, but black women, specifically, and no matter how reliably they vote Democrat, black men are not feminists. They do not respect women as authorities, especially black women, and the black women, at this facility, were disinclined to assert themselves, so the place was absolute fucking chaos. Guys were smoking synthetic cannabinoids out in the open, which, if you don’t know, is one of the most dangerous drugs around. People got beat up, people got stabbed, there were these like kiosks that were supposed to be for commissary and they destroyed the kiosks and started making weapons out of them, it was the most dangerous thing I had ever been anywhere near.
The phones were absolute goddamn chaos . We had a hundred guys trying to share four phones, and nobody could agree if there was one line for all the phones, or a separate line for each phone, and arguments were threatening to turn into fights all the time. The Gangster Disciples and the Puerto Ricans got together without consulting the Whites, and they said “This is the Spanish phone, this is the gang phone, and those two phones are for everybody else. That meant whites had to share the two ‘everybody else” phones with non-affiliated blacks, but Bloods, Crips, and Gangster Disciples, had one phone and they handled access in their own hierarchy. The Spanish guys had cell phones, and they never touched their phone. There would be a line an hour long for the neutral phones, but if you tried to pick up that Spanish phone, you would get surrounded by gang members who would insist that you hang up and wait your turn on the neutral phone, and they would absolutely send you to medical if you challenged their authority.
Believe it or not, this was a better arrangement than we had prior. They maintained order in a place where the staff could not and would not. They ran the unit, by force, and they actually did a reasonably good job of it. In that environment, you can go to a gang leader and tell him your problems and ask him to solve them. If he wants to maintain his dominion, he has an incentive to comply. Your polite request legitimates his authority, it is a show of respect, and he will more than likely make a reasonable effort to incentivize this.
The TVs there were chaos too, obviously. I had one request. I want to watch Tucker Carlson. And, you guessed it, I watched Tucker Carlson, with the help of black gang members. And it is worth noting, that they knew exactly who I was and had a CNN viewer’s comprehension of what my politics were.
All of which is to say, don’t buck the social order. Learn it, and navigate it, and your social situation, and notably, your safety, will be much improved.
The black gang members are not your friends though, obviously. Friendly, preferably, but your friends are White, and you’re going to have an easier time making those White friends, if your White friends don’t think being friends with you is going to get them in a fight with the blacks. You follow?
Guys with Swastika tattoos might be your friends, or they might not be your friends. Do not assume that somebody covered in Nazi ink knows the things you know. In prison, swastikas are gang signs, not indicia of nuanced views about World War II.
At the same place in Tallahatchie, I met a guy named Drew. Drew did something straight out of American History X when we got to the place. I had sat next to him on the plane and I didn’t know anything about him, but when he went up on the second tier, took off his shirt, and displayed his giant swastika while leaning on the rail, I figured I had my first friend.
Drew turned out to be a pretty good guy, for prison. We got along well, but he had never read Mein Kampf, which a reasonable person might assume was something you did before you got such a tattoo.
I had been checking out the talk radio options at the facility, and after I had a reasonably good idea of what was on, I sat down next to Drew and asked him if he was into talk radio. He told me that’s all he listens to, and you’re not gonna believe this, he tells me “I really like that Ben Shapiro guy”.
Now, we had just gotten there, this guy didn’t know who I was yet, and I don’t have Nazi tats advertising my politics. So I figured this was a good opportunity to let him know that I favored his symbols. I said “I like a lot of what he says too, but hardly an episode goes by where he doesn’t remind me that he’s Jewish and that drives me nuts”.
He says to me “He’s don’t sound like a Jew to me” and I just sorta let it go. He went on to tell me that he’s been in and out of prison most of his life, and he picked up the Nazi ink as part of a skinhead gang in California. He literally didn’t even understand the conflict between Jews and Nazis. I had to explain the Jewish question to this guy covered in Nazi ink. On race, he told me “I just don’t like blacks. I fuck with them Puerto Ricans though.”
I tell this story, one because it’s funny, but more to illustrate that Nazi means something different in prison than it does on Telegram. It’s a gang affiliation, and whatever you are, you’re not a fuckin gang member. Assuming you’re gonna get out someday, you shouldn’t become one, either. Some people cover themselves in Nazi symbols not because they think Hitler was right, but because they are as convinced as any Jew that he was the most evil man who ever lived, and they too, want to be evil.
Prison will force you to interact with evil people. You will more than likely come to enjoy their company, to some extent. But you are not evil, and you should not become convinced that you are on account of your compulsory surroundings.
I actually ended up getting along much better with a common horse thief, and I mean that, almost literally. Dude was doing 3 years for interstate transportation of stolen livestock. The way I met him was kind of an interesting story too.
When we first got to Tallahatchie, I had my own cell, which as I’ve mentioned, is a big deal to me. I was told by staff members “this is your cell” and I went to that cell. At the county jail I had come from, you would get in trouble if you refused a cellmate, which is important to understand the next part of the story.
One day, a whole bunch of new guys come onto the unit. Some black dude shows up at my door with his sleeping pad and says “you mind if I move in?” and I didn’t think I had much of a choice, so I said “sure guy, let me get my stuff off your bunk.”
Then I looked outside, and I saw people negotiating their cellmate situations, and it occurred to me that this dude wasn’t assigned to my cell, he chose me. So I stopped him and I was like “Hey, ah, I don’t have a personal problem with you, but before you get settled in, I should probably tell you that I’m a White Nationalist.”
He asks “What’s that mean?”
I tell him “I don’t think that White people benefit from the presence of other racial groups, and that we should have our own country. It’s nothing personal against you, it’s a political thing”
He says “Oh, okay, no problem” and keeps getting settled in.
While this is going on, I notice that there’s a bunch of white guys down in the day room who don’t have cells to go to, and they’re talking amongst themselves about what to do. I went downstairs and I said “one of you need a cell?” and my soon to be horse thief friend says yeah.
So I go back upstairs, and I tell my would be negro neighbor “Hey, look, I’m sorry to interrupt you while you’re trying to get settled in here, but I gotta ask you to find another cell. There’s white guys down there who need a bunk and I gotta take care of them.”
He says to me “I think you’re being racist”
I says to him “Dude I just told you I’m a White Nationalist and I’m kicking you out in favor of a White man. Of course I’m being racist, that’s the whole point”.
When you get to a new facility, I mentioned shower shoes earlier, some give you the shower shoes as your primary footwear upon arrival. Some kind of plastic crocks or sandals, but you may or may not have regular shoes in your property. This guy was wearing his crocks as I say this to him.
Generally speaking, you don’t want to wear such things as your primary footwear, because they are not good for fighting. If you are wearing them, and you decide you are going to fight, then when you go to put your shoes on, it is a show of aggression. If you want to have a fair fight with a man in crocks, you say “Put your fuckin shoes on” as a challenge.
This guy puts his shoes on, and refuses to leave the cell. I tell him, “buddy, you’re gonna leave this cell, and if you want to fight me first, that’s your call.”
He sees his buddy walk by my door, and he calls the guy’s name. Dude comes in the cell, and he tells him “This guy’s racist, says I can’t move into his cell”
His buddy tells him “Then what the fuck you doin here? Let’s get you another cell”.
Problem solved. I went and got my horse thief friend, told him the story, and we had a good laugh about it.
I had a lot more in common with this guy than I did with Drew. This guy led a normal life, he had a wife and kids and a successful business, and I never tried to get the details out of him, but he figured he could make a bunch of extra money if he bent the rules a little and, like most non criminals, he got caught. He was an honest guy, who made a bad choice, and got nailed for it. He wasn’t covered in tattoos. He wasn’t particularly race conscious before coming to prison. He was a Christian who thought Israel had some special place in God’s plan, and in all my tours of the American criminal justice system, I had never had a more pleasant cellmate.
Fortunately, I didn’t have a cellmate in Marion. When the bus pulled up, I saw “USP Marion” on the sign, and I got scared. USP stands for United States Penitentiary, and a Penitentiary is the second highest security classification right under ADX which means Administrative-Maximum U.S. Penitentiary. In holding cells, you hear horror stories about Penitentiaries, but as it turns out, Marion operates more like an FCC, or Federal Corrections Complex, with different security classifications spread across what is known as “the Compound”.
The Communications Management Unit, or CMU, is a very high security unit. It has to be, in order to control communications. A unit that you can get drugs into, is a unit that you can get messages out of, and that was not acceptable to the people who run it, which is an outfit known as the Counter Terrorist Unit, or CTU. The CTU is not organizationally part of the Bureau of Prisons, or BOP. They are an intelligence agency, and accordingly their mission has nothing to do with law or justice. They are a political secret police, and my understanding, which I have not endeavored to verify, is that there are line items on their respective budgets in which the CTU is actually renting space from the BOP to run the CMU, to give you an idea of how this works.
But, the purpose of the security classification is the communications component. Not violence. If you are a communications risk and prone to uncontrolled violence, you go to ADX, and people not infrequently are transferred between the CMU and the ADX, depending on the circumstances.
There are two CMUs. In at USP Marion, in Illinois and one at USP Terre Haute, in Indiana. If you get in a fight at Marion and they have to give you a separatee, one of you is going to go to Terre Haute, most likely. If you have separatees in both places, the only place they can send you, is ADX.
In any case, after I got out of quarantine and they put me on the unit, I am greeted warmly by several people, including a man with a dark tan who asks me my ethnic background. I tell him I’m Irish and Italian, and he says “I’m a Jew”. I tell him, “good to know” and keep it moving.
I meet Matt Hale for the first time, and although we have no idea who one another are yet, we understand without saying anything that the other is race conscious, and shake hands.
I find out the toilet in my cell is broke, and the cops move me upstairs. Upon which, a fat guy with white skin named Steve comes and introduces himself, and asks me if I need anything. I assume he is white and ask for coffee and antiperspirant. He says he will introduce me to Mohammed, aka Frenchie, who will lend me whatever I want at 20% interest. I accept the offer, thank them both profusely, and go back downstairs to talk to Matt.
Matt subsequently informs me that Steve is Jewish, and the interest bearing trip to Mohammed begins to make more sense.
At my first meal with this group, Matt invites me to sit at his table, and I accept. At some point in the course of our conversation I make mention of “my website” and a guy by the name of Jarrett Smith asks me what my website is. I tell him ChristopherCantwell.com (now ChristopherCantwell.net), and the whole table simultaneously says “Holy Shit!” letting me know they were familiar with my name, but did not recognize me.
I didn’t have to try very hard to make friends, thankfully. It was part of the package.
I’m not going to say a whole lot else about my social interactions in Marion. I have my reasons.
I will tell you that I had five situations at Marion that almost turned into fights while I was there, and all of them were with blacks, and over the TV. None of them resulted in anybody putting hands on anybody, and for this reason, I think they are instructive.
Black people love TV. They will watch Ridiculousness all day long, and never tire of it. If you don’t know, I’m not just saying that what they watch is ridiculous, though that too. I mean they watch as show called Ridiculousness, which is basically a blooper videos show that has seemingly become the singular purpose of what was once called Music Television, or MTV. I, too, like TV, and as you may have gathered, I like the Fox News Channel. Black people, for the most part, have little use for the Fox News Channel, and this was a source of constant friction during my incarceration.
Matt Hale hardly watched television. He had it worked out that he just wanted to watch Tucker Carlson, and that was considered Matt’s TV time. It didn’t matter if there was a football or basketball game on, or if some idiot started watching a movie at 6:30. At 7pm (8pm Eastern), Matt would put the Fox News Channel on and watch Tucker. I too, like Tucker, but I was not about to let it be the case that White men got one hour of TV time a day just because they like the same show. I like to watch the news whenever I am not doing something more worthwhile. And so, I tend to insist on respectable negotiations over the TV.
Sometimes, black people think they can just insist, and that White men will simply go along with it. Usually, they are right. With me, they were wrong.
I too, insist. I don’t insist on anything in particular, as long as I’ve got Tucker, I’m fairly easy to negotiate with, but the news is always happening, and when left to my own devices, I leave the Fox News Channel on mute while I do other things at home. I unmute it when something catches the corner of my eye. When one shares a TV, this is obviously untenable, so I just try to make things equitable.
The first altercation arises when one black guy who I knew had only a few months left to do, wrote up his own TV schedule and posted it up on the wall, deciding that he would determine who got the TV when without any negotiation. His time slot, of course, was from 7pm to lockdown, which is when everybody wants the TV. That is why they call it, Prime Time.
I flatly insisted that he lacked the authority to do this, and demanded a negotiation. He said “Nah, that’s my time. You watch whatever during your time.” and I firmly but politely said “No. That’s not going to work. You need to negotiate this with me.”
He tried to intimidate me by puffing out his chest and saying “What? You think you can punk me out?”
I said, “No, you’re trying to punk me out, and it’s not working. We need to negotiate this”
The guy goes and puts his shoes on, and I says to him calmly, and within arm’s reach, “Hey man, we both know you’re too short for that shit, and neither one of us are gonna be able to watch TV in the hole. You have no choice but to negotiate this”.
And so, we negotiated a situation in which we watched Special Report, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham. White hour, black hour, white hour, black hour, white hour, and after we locked in overnight he could put it on whatever he wanted.
Another time, another black guy, decided that my news time was less important than his football game. He said “Nah uh, football, is we always watch football”.
I told him, I don’t watch football, I always watch the news. There’s football on every tv in this prison, you’ve been watching football on this TV all day, so go watch this hour of football somewhere else. He tells me to come in his cell, which is an invitation to fight in prison. You say “come in the cell” as a means to get away from the cameras.
I told him “I ain’t getting charged with no hate crime, you come into my cell” and I went to my cell. He did not follow, and tried to change the channel. I changed the channel back, and I said if you want to fight over it, I got you in cell fourteen. If not, fuck off.. And off he fucked.
I basically ran he TV after that.
When I got shipped to Virginia for the trial, I basically lost my spot. When I came back, two blacks came into my cell uninvited in an attempt to intimidate me, having seen me on television while I was gone. One of them says something to the effect of “I know you don’t like black people, we from the penns, we know about you guys, but we don’t want you preaching that white supremacist shit around here, and we don’t want this other white guy from upstairs coming down to watch Tucker Carlson with you and Matt.”
I tell them, “Look, what you see on TV, ain’t what’s going on. You been in prison long enough to know that. I’m a White Nationalist. That means, I think race interacts with our politics in ways I don’t appreciate, and I think we would be better off if ethnic groups governed themselves. If you want to talk about politics, I’m happy to do so, but you don’t know anything about me. I got no problem with you, and both of you already know that I treat everybody here with respect, and that ain’t about to change. As for the other guy coming down to watch Tucker, I’ll talk to Matt about that. It’s not my call.”
And they had to agree that I treated everybody with respect. I had pleasant interactions with both of them before I went to Virginia. One of them needed batteries once and I offered to lend him some and he paid me back promptly. The other one, we used to joke around sometimes and we were cool. They had been prompted to make a show of fucking with me by some other black dude, and when the intimidation routine didn’t work, they eased their posture. One of them actually said to me “If anybody fucks with you, let me know.”
And it wasn’t long before I did exactly this.
While I was gone, another black guy basically claimed ownership of the TV for our section. He let Matt watch Tucker, and he would actually watch it with us a lot of the time, but he wanted to watch horseshit all day long and basically camped in front of the TV to maintain his control over it.
After two days of this, I said “Hey, this ain’t gonna work man, we gotta negotiate this TV situation”. He insisted that he didn’t want to, and I said, “What you’re doing isn’t an option, you gotta negotiate.”
He puts his shoes on, says “You wanna fight about it?” and one of the black dudes who had previously entered my cell comes over with unclear intentions.
I told him calmly “I’d rather avoid fighting, but this isn’t going to work, so we’re going to have to negotiate.”
Matt Hale and another white guy come over and stand, quietly at first, nearby.
Now, this situation is threatening to turn into more than a TV dispute. If I provoke this guy, It’s gonna be three white guys against at least two black guys, and this conflict is going to take on a racial character that threatens to get all of us thrown in the hole and possibly lock the whole fucking prison down.
I’m not going to tell you how it ends in that moment, but suffice it to say, nobody gets hurt or sent to the hole. I knew however, that the situation wasn’t over, and if it isn’t solved, it’s going to turn into something bad.
So, I go to the other guy who had entered my cell before. And I tell him what happened. I tell him “Look, this is a dispute over the TV, and I don’t want to turn it into a fuckin race war, so help me de-escalate this situation. ”
He comes downstairs, me him and the other black guy go in a cell. A few minutes later, all three of us walk out unharmed, and I get back to watching the news.
Pardon me for being vague, but trust that I have my reasons.
There’s one more, but it’s kinda repetitious of the first two and I’m not telling you these stories to act like a tough guy.
What you may have already taken away from this, but I will say anyway in case you didn’t, is that I was neither picking nor running away from fights. I made reasonable requests, refused to be intimidated, and insisted on being treated with respect.
And as a result, I was treated with respect. More notably, I made what effort I could to prevent things from escalating without forfeiting my dignity.
The first two situations I described, I knew I wasn’t in danger. Those guys just thought that I would back down, and when I did not back down, they did. I sized them up, I made my decision, I came out ahead.
When those guys came in my cell, they could have fucking kicked my ass, and unless I ended up in medical, the cops would never have been the wiser. One of those guys was later accused of rape, and caught with a knife, as I mentioned earlier about the guys who were in the hole when I left. So, I was genuinely in serious danger, and I knew it in the moment.
What I mentioned earlier about Stoicism, coolness under fire, mindfulness, and mastering your emotional responses and your thoughts, it helps in a lot of situations. My mind is like “Okay, you’re in danger. These are the range of harms that can come. Calculate your best chance of avoiding them, and act accordingly. You don’t want to show fear, so don’t be afraid. You don’t want to fight, so don’t provoke them. You don’t want to have this happen again, so don’t reward the behavior.”
A lot of guys, and I’ve made this mistake myself in the past, try to look unafraid by inviting escalation. Trying to make themselves look dangerous, or crazy, like a blowfish to ward off predators. But I’ll tell you what, people like these goons who came in my cell, they see right through that shit. If they think you’re supposed to be scared, but you’re calm and assertive and polite, what it tells them is that you feel in control of the situation, and they’re typically unprepared for that.
So not only did I escape with my life and chastity, but I managed to get one of them to help me de-escalate another subsequent conflict. That is more power than you can wield by being bigger than somebody, in a lot of ways.
I accomplished this, first and foremost, frankly, by concluding a long fucking time ago that it wasn’t such a big deal if I died. I don’t want to die, and sure, they could have killed me, sure I could have gotten beaten up, but that wasn’t really the end of the world in my book. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might be raped honestly, and that probably helped. But I started this thing off telling you that I decided on producing this episode after hearing about suicides of people who killed themselves to avoid prison.
Well, dude, like, what’s the worst thing that happens to you in prison? Somebody kills you? Why save them the trouble? Why do the guy a favor?
If you’re really to the point, where you want to die, god bless you man, you’re free. I thought I had come along way achieving indifference to death, and here you eagerly waiting your turn. You can no longer be intimidated. That makes you the toughest guy in the prison, pal. Relax.
Stoicism was pretty big on this. Seneca said “A man cannot live well if he knows not how to die well.”
The Stoics contemplated death at great length. It was the subject of considerable writing. They famously said “Memento mori” translating to “remember that you will die”. As far as they were concerned, death was just one more fact of life, and it was not death that made people miserable, but the fear of death. If you can shed your fear of death, life is much improved.
Death is inevitable. It will come for you at a time of its choosing, and the only control you have over it is your capacity to bring it on sooner. The two men we opened our discussion with, made that choice, and with all due respect to the dead, I think they chose very poorly. If you are ready to eat that bullet, your life is just getting started. You’re more like an abortion than a suicide, in this respect.
In studying stoicism, you come across this concept articulated by Epictetus as “the open door”. The idea being, there’s really not a whole lot of point in cursing the gods, because if you don’t like your life you can end it whenever you want. Poetically, he says “if you remain, don’t complain” from his “Discourses” I will share two quotes;
“Remember that the door is open. Don’t be more cowardly than children, but just as they say, when the game is no longer fun for them, ‘I won’t play any more,’ you too, when things seem that way to you, say, ‘I won’t play any more,’ and leave, but if you remain, don’t complain.” (Discourses I.24.20)
“Has someone made smoke in the house? If it is moderate, I’ll stay. If too much, I exit. For you must always remember and hold fast to this, that the door is open.” (Discourses I.25.18)
If it’s not clear from those quotes that he is talking about suicide, take my word for it, the broader context does. The door is open, you can leave whenever you want. So, no sense in getting all worked up about things. More importantly, if you’re not getting all worked up about things, then you probably don’t have any reason to kill yourself, and thus comfort with death is comfort with life. You follow? This is profound wisdom, and it is old, old old. You shouldn’t have to stumble upon this shit in prison, we should teach it in kindergarten.
But let’s just say, that yeah, for whatever reason, you still do want to die. Well, what’s the hurry? You gonna be late for something, besides your own funeral? Somebody expecting you? I’m reasonably confident your life isn’t so pointless that there’s nothing you can accomplish between now and ten years from now. If you’re ready to die, okay, that’s a fine piece of data. File it away in your hierarchy of values, and as soon as you run outta shit to do, blow your fuckin brains out.
I like the way Epictetus puts it here when he says;
“I must die, must I? If at once, then I am dying: if soon, I dine now, as it is time for dinner, and afterwards when the time comes I will die.”
Do I have to die now? Eh, maybe after dinner. We’ll see. Whatever works.
From some of the things I say, it might not seem this way, but I got a lot of sympathy for guys who off themselves, I do. I’m also really glad I never gave into despair in my darkest moments, of which you may know, there have been many. You think I wanted to go to prison? You think I wanted to turn myself in to Charlottesville in 2017? What do you think went through my mind, as I’m in a hotel room with a bunch of firearms looking at 60 years?
I been locked up in 7 states. I was 13 the first time I got put in handcuffs, and not for nothing so noble as my recent adventures. I’ll turn 43 this year, so you could say that I been at this for 30 years, though I’ve spent just over one tenth of that time held against my will. If you think it gets easier as you do this repeatedly, it doesn’t. I didn’t want to do this episode, because I don’t want to come off like I’m bragging about how good I am at doing time. It’s not a fucking skillset, and certainly not one you want to brag about.
Obey the law, and stay away from things that you can reasonably foresee carry a risk that you might get in trouble anyway. Jail is awful. Prison is awful. Supervised release is awful. Court is awful. Losing your right to legally carry a firearm is worse than all of them, and perhaps most importantly, being branded a criminal will not aid you in your pursuit of political power, which at this point, should be second only to the wellbeing of your family in importance.
But if shit goes sideways, and you get jammed up anyway. Do your fucking time. Chances are, you’re going to get out someday. Probably sooner than you think.
But before we go, let us address what is sometimes considered a fate worse than death. Life in prison, without the possibility of release.
It’s not the craziest thing to consider, after all. I know a kid from Ohio who is suffering through this as we speak. He got in a car accident when some maniacs attacked him, and a dozen registered voters in Charlottesville sentenced him to life plus 419 years after a mockery of a show trial in that Democrat cesspool.
James Fields was simultaneously charged with a hate crime murder by the Federal Government. They threatened him with death by lethal injection. They said you plead guilty to this, or you get the needle, kid.
James still could have appealed his conviction in Charlottesville. The truth is out there, everybody knows it. One might reasonably have hope that James could someday be released. Maybe the federal trial would have failed to convince those jurors of the lie, the way they had in the city of Charlottesville’s kangaroo court. With the inconsistent verdicts, maybe the appeals court would have taken his appeal more seriously. Even if he was convicted in the federal trial, the fact that the prosecution seeks a death penalty, doesn’t mean they’ll get it.
“Plead guilty, or we’ll kill you”
If you know anything about James Fields, he doesn’t look or sound like the kinda guy who takes prison lightly. He was attacked by some black guy in the Charlottesville jail, and to the best of my knowledge he didn’t even hit the guy back. He was a scared kid, trying to get home to his mother, a bunch of fucking animals attacked him, he was wrongly convicted of murder, and sentenced never to leave prison.
Arguably, the Feds would have done him a favor with the painless death. No getting cold as you run out of blood. No bullet crashing through your skull on the way to your brain. No long fall, no sudden stop. Just a medical professional, telling you it’s time to rest.
But he pleaded guilty to a crime he knew he didn’t commit, to save his life. And I’d go so far as to say that this scared kid made a wiser decision than Ted von Nukem.
If James Fields can handle life in prison, so can you., and I’d go so far as to say, that you would likely manage to find meaning while you were there. You would meet good men like Matt Hale, and Bill White, and Viktor Bout. You would talk about politics, tell jokes, cook food, and eat together. You would probably do some pushups, read a few books. Try to better yourself, and if somebody tried to intimidate you, well, I imagine you’d find that pretty amusing.
I did, and I still had shit to lose.
If you’re never gonna get out, what’s stopping you from putting a knife in one of those guys? Nothin. I’ll tell ya, I’m pretty unlikely to be the last high profile nationalist to do a stint, and it’s entirely foreseeable that one of them might need a favor done. You think you can’t be of service to your race and nation behind bars? Behind the walls they call it “puttin in work”, White man.
So, as I said about the subject of suicide in Stage Three, when it’s time for you to die, somebody else, will gladly handle that for you, and until that times arrives, tomorrow’s another day, fellas.
I’m not bragging to say that I’m getting better at this again. In prior episodes you heard me saying I forgot how to talk, and this was something that was really bothering me. At one point I thought it might be because I had some teeth pulled while I was in prison and I thought I’d have to get implants to fix my verbal fluidity, but I am happy to report that I was able to make this entire recording in two hours and 11 minutes. It took a little while to edit it, but not as long as some earlier recordings. I’ve still got it! I just had to blow the dust off, it turns out.
Owing in part to this, I’m gonna start live streaming soon. The equipment and studio are all configured and tested and working great.
I’ve almost got the new website ready. Just a couple of more bugs to work out with some friends I’ve got testing things. I built in a feature that paying members can use the website to call into the show live, and the system will associate their membership account with the phone call. Some of you threw a tantrum when I said I was going to use Discord for this, but that is no longer necessary. I heard you, and I found another solution. It wasn’t cheap or easy, but I found it.
I also talked to the guys at Entropy, and they say they can run Superchats for me, so we’ll have that. I’ve got several platforms I plan to stream to including DLive, Odysee, JoshWhoTV, and Rumble, to name just a few. I’ll basically stream anywhere that has an RTMP feed and won’t kick me off. I’m open to suggestions on Telegram or at ChristopherCantwell.net/contact
Listening to audience feedback, mostly on Telegram but I read your emails too, I’m glad to hear that these long form, single theme recordings are being well received by many of you, even those who were skeptical of the announcement. But it’s obvious to me that this is not a sustainable business model on its own, yet. These take a very long time to produce, comparative to the old model, and I think it might be too important to put behind a paywall. So, my thinking currently, and I’ll appreciate your feedback on this, is that I’ll do public live streams two or three times a week, and limit on air audience participation to paying customers, whether that’s through membership and call ins or through superchats. I’ll work on these long form things in my spare time and release them every couple of weeks probably, but with the live streams I will at least have a constant production presence and a revenue model to finance this decidedly more labor intensive project.
I’ll seek opportunities to put out members only content, but as I’ve said elsewhere, I always had trouble with this because the business end of this is really something I’m doing to finance what is ultimately a political project. If I hide what I’m saying from the public, it largely defeats that purpose. These long form things, I think are worth paying for, as an example, but I think you’ll agree that they should be made public. So I’m thinking of ways to add value to the membership subscription in terms of functions or other perks. The site has like a group video chat built into it for example, maybe I could do a private members video chat once a week? I’m again open to suggestions.
I’m also considering doing my own version of Miss Cleo’s Psychic hotline, if any of you remember those commercials. A more common reference might be the business model of a phone sex operator. But I won’t be reading tarot cards or talking dirty. As I was looking for ways to restrict access to the call in lines, I came across some service providers who will basically run a pay per minute or pay per call operation. I don’t know how popular this would be, but I need to make money and I like to talk so, if anybody wants to chat on the phone and is willing to pay for it I’m willing to take your money, I guess is the moral of the story.
Once I am confident in the functions of the new website, the last of the Radical Agenda merch is going up for sale on the new website. All the stuff is entered into the e-commerce function already, I have shipping labels and packing materials, it’s all ready to go. So stay tuned and I’ll make the announcement soon if you want to buy those. There’s not a whole lot of this stuff, I should add, and I don’t have current plans to make anymore. If I do make more, it will be of a different design, so it is, at the very least, limited edition. You’ll be able to get that piece of history very soon, and I hope you’ll pick up a membership at checkout.
In the meantime, you should just throw money at me to show your appreciation for the content, I’m thinking. You may have gathered from what I’ve just said that I need to make money and that’s absolutely the case. Putting all this together has taken longer and costed more than I expected, and I am almost out of the money I raised when I got out of prison. So, FYPM, as I’m fond of saying.
There’s two GiveSendGo campaigns up. It would be really nice of you would make a monthly pledge at https://GiveSendGo.com/spm. There, you’ll see that I am trying to raise $5,000/month to finance the SurrealPolitiks Media production. There’s also about 1400 words written there, total coincidence, describing what I have pictured for that operation. It might be worth a read.
The other one is the thing I set up when I got out of prison at https://GiveSendGo.com/Cantwell. I had set a fundraising goal of $10,000 to get an apartment and a car, the goal on the site is $10,000 and you’ll see that it’s at about $6,000 at the time of this writing. I’ve gotten money from other sources but, I’m still adjusting to inflation and I haven’t been able to buy a car and as I said, I’m nearly tapepd out so, if you want me to keep doing this, pay.
You can mail me stuff,
Christopher Cantwell
497 Hooksett Road
Unit 312
Manchester, NH 03104
Cryptocurrency, I love it, and I’ll read out my public keys on air, get a pen. I’m kidding. Just got to https://ChristopherCantwell.net/donate and you’ll find those.
If you can’t pay, don’t kill yourself over it. I promise I won’t. Try to stay out of prison, and I’ll do the same.
Thank you very much for tuning into the Radical Agenda. Have yourselves a wonderful evening, and goodnight.
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The Radical Agenda was a live, uncensored, and mostly unscripted entertainment program. It began in 2014, after being rebranded from its predecessor, which was called “Some Garbage Podcast”. The Radical Agenda aired live three days a week at the time it went off the air in January of 2020, which was when its host and producer, Christopher Cantwell (yours truly), was dragged out of his apartment by the FBI.