Angry Planet

Sign up at angryplanetpod.com to get instant access to the full episode.A direct link to the episode on Substack.Back in 2020, Daniel Perry was driving for Uber to make ends meet. He ran a red light and dove his car into a crowd at a Black Lives Matter protest. Garret Foster was there to protect the crowd and he’d brought an AK-47 along to do it. Foster, an Air Force veteran, approached Perry’s car. Perry, an Army sergeant, pulled out a pistol and killed Foster from the car and drove away.After a trial and a deep dive into Perry’s online history, a jury of his peers found him guilty of murder. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott pardoned him. Why? Perry had become a symbol that transcended justice.Christopher Hooks is here to walk us through the particulars of the case. Hooks is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and The Atlantic. He’s been writing about the Perry case and its consequences for Texas Monthly. Hooks tells us exactly what happened in 2020, when Perry committed the murder, and walks us through the colorful cast of Texas politicians who may soon take the national stage.Why Did Greg Abbott Pardon a Racist Murderer?Ken Paxton Takes ManhattanWhat Azerbaijan Wants From Texas PoliticiansD.A. Seeks to Overturn Texas Governor’s Pardon of Man Who Killed Protester

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com/No one is really sure how many nuclear weapons are out there. Every number you see is a best guess. Russia and the U.S. have the most, sitting at around 5,000 each. France has just under 200, China has about 500 (and is probably building more), and North Korea has around 50. The world’s nuclear powers love to keep the details of these weapons secret, but not too secret. It’s a complex game of signaling and secrets, one that can be difficult to parse from the outside.Matt Korda of the Federation of American Scientists is here today to walk us through the world’s nuclear powers and the wannabes. Over at the FAS, Korda spends his days looking at high resolution satellite photos of Chinese deserts, pouring over footage of Russian military drills, and reading every line of Pentagon budgets. All that information is mixed together to produce the Nuclear Notebook: a constantly updated inventory of world ending weapons. The Nuclear NotebookNuclear Threats Are Looming, And Nobody Knows How Many Nukes Are Out There

Sign up at angryplanetpod.com to get instant access to the full episode.A direct link to the episode on Substack.American politics was bizarre in 2016. Alt-right figures dominated many news cycles and shared pictures of cartoon frogs online. A lot of those personalities, like Baked Alaska and Richard Spencer, flamed out and vanished from the scene. But there’s always money to be made and political power to be gained by playing to people’s base fears and a new brand of online far right weirdo has risen to take their places.On this episode of Angry Planet we check in on the so-called “New Right” with investigative journalist Jason Wilson. Wilson has chronicled far-right movements for years and recently exposed some of their thought leaders in The Guardian. If you want to learn why some people care about the “longhouse” or the importance of online anonymity when spreading weird ideas online, then this is the episode for you. Revealed: US university lecturer behind far-right Twitter account and publishing houseRevealed: the extremist Maga lobbying group driving far-right Republican policiesAt least 66 members of far-right group in rural Oregon standing for officeRevealed: how a US far-right group is influencing anti-gay policies in Africa

International criminal organizations are more concerned about message security than the average citizen. The end-to-end encryption of WhatsApp or Signal is great, but drug traffickers are looking for a little extra. Enter services like Anom, EncroChat, Sky, and Phantom Secure— discrete messaging services that charged big bucks and promised criminals a chat experience free from the prying eyes of law enforcement. But the cops always find a way. And one of those services was actually purpose built by the FBI to act as a spying tool on the world’s criminals.In Dark Wire, investigative journalist Joseph Cox tells the story of how the FBI built and maintained a phone service just for criminals. He’s on Angry Plant today to tell us all about it.Buy DARK WIRE here.You could have heard an early, and commercial free, version of this episode. Sign up for the Angry Planet newsletter to get started.

A lot goes into keeping a navy afloat. There’s ship husbanding, maintenance, and buckets of haze gray. The U.S. used to be good at this, but it hasn’t been on an active war-footing for a long time and the manufacturing base that created its massive navy has seen better days. So what happens if there’s a war and America doesn’t have enough welders, let alone drydocks, to build out its fleets?Gil Barndollar is a senior analyst at Defense Priorities and the co-author of a recent piece in Foreign Policy about America’s inability to build new ships. Barndollar sounds the alarm on a number of different issues facing the U.S. military: the recruitment crisis, manufacturing issues, and sailors pushed to the limits of their physical abilities.We might even talk about arming container ships with missile batteries to augment existing forces.The U.S. Navy Can’t Build ShipsConverting Merchant Ships to Missile Ships for the Win

Sign up at angryplanetpod.com to get instant access to the full episode.A direct link to the episode on Substack.The big picture in Europe doesn’t look good. Russia is moving to encircle key cities in Ukraine and is shaking its nuclear saber at the West. Ukraine’s nearest neighbors are, understandably, concerned about Moscow’s aggression and militarizing at an alarming rate. This summer, NATO will conduct Operation Steadfast Defender, a military exercise the Pentagon said is the largest since the Cold War. To Moscow, an enormous military exercise on its border could seem a tad aggressive.Add to this Russia’s recent nuclear rhetoric and missile exercise and the geopolitical situation is looking a bit tense. On this episode of Angry Planet, Aram Shabanian stops by to talk us through the troubling signs he’s seeing about a brewing conflict between Russia and NATO. Shabanian is the Open-Source Information Gathering Manager at the New Lines Institute. We also get into what happens when you mix Coke and Pepsi, how Reagan navigated a similar situation, and when it’s OK for everyone to stop worrying about the bomb. (Never.)

Americans love shrimp. They love it so much they don’t think too hard about where it comes from—or the virtual slaves who are farming them. Joshua Farinella doesn’t have that luxury.A few years ago, Farinella took a job working for a shrimp production company in India. The money they were paying would set his family up for a long time to come, but what he saw when he landed in the country made him realize the cash wasn’t worth it. He chose to blow the whistle.On this episode of Angry Planet, Farinella sits down with us to talk about what he saw in the shrimp factory. It all starts one fateful night when he receives a WhatsApp message telling him that one of the plant’s workers was caught in the place’s water treatment facility. “She was searching for a way out of there,” the message said. “Her contractor is not allowing her to go home.”After Farinella decided to blow the whistle, he began to document what he saw at the plant. Video, audio, and documents he secured can be viewed at The Outlaw Ocean Project. Read The Whistleblower at The Outlaw Ocean ProjectRead through the documents.

Sign up at angryplanetpod.com to get instant access to the full episode.A direct link to the episode on Substack.In Russia there’s a revolving door between prisons and the frontlines. What began as a Wanger program is now official: the Kremlin will pardon nearly any crime if the convict agrees to serve on the front lines in Ukraine. After a six month stint at war, murderers and rapists are free to return to the scene of the crime. Some come home to kill again.On this episode of Angry Planet, New York Times journalist Milana Mazaeva is here to talk about what happens to Russian communities when criminals return to them after going to war. The first half of the conversation covers the articles and details harrowing stories of Russian murderers who became soldiers who became murderers again. The latter half of the episode is about how hard it is to report from Russia right now, the incredible games of telephone Mazaeva plays to get the stories she does, and what’s lost when you can’t visit the place you’re reporting on.Pardoned for Serving in Ukraine, They Return to Russia to Kill Again

Luke Paxton and Han Lee know a good cause when they see one. When Russia invades Ukraine in 2022, the American vets know what they need to do. Their time in Afghanistan has given them the skills to help fight a war and the moral clarity needed to know when a cause is just.But are they going to fight in Ukraine for the right reason? Do Ukrainians want them there? And does either matter when bombs are dropping all over the country?On this episode of Angry Planet, author Matt Gallagher returns to the podcast to talk about his novel Daybreak. It’s the story of Paxton and Lee as they travel to Ukraine to fight. It’s a work of fiction that strikes at deeper emotional truths about the conflict. It’s also pieced together from Gallagher’s own experiences in Ukraine, some of which wouldn’t fit neatly into a work of journalistic non-fiction.What fiction can do that non-fiction can’t.Exploring Lviv’s mystical toy barter alley.The contractually required Joan Didion quote.Why Ukrainians are suspicious of Americans who say “I want to help.”The structure of a Daybreak movie.Recorded 4/23/24Go here to buy Daybreak.Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.