The aggressive manager collapsed to the floor, looking up at me, in total shock. If you like true revenge stories, you found the best place for your vengeful needs. I create them with fleaky visuals, dipped in artificial love. We start with a bad manager, who ritualistically humiliates his employees. Until he unexpectedly gets his first, meaningful kiss. Knocking him off his pedestal. Followed by a story, about an employee who was brutally bullied for years, yet his boss didn't care. Well, he did care in the end, when his company went out of business because of it. Lastly, a private prison facility, fosters nepotism and promotions. So when those in power, favor their friends to be appointed to the highest positions. They pushed aside the knowledgeable employees, that should have been promoted.  Make sure to sneak a notice to the like button's office desk, and leave a post-it note saying, Emergency, need you ASAP. Then add an unrecognizable signature, and leave it be. Let's dive in. Naturally, viewer discretion is advised. These revenge acts, might be disturbing to bad managers. I work for a large global IT company. In my team, we are part of a larger extended team, and an even larger still divisional team. The manager of this division is called Raj. He's based in the States, and is what many would call the poster boy definition of a corporate suck-up. According to him, he is in constant video chats with the CEO, and has a lot of face-to-face interaction with him. He also appears on much of our division's promotional emails and photographic material, so he's a company-wide recognized person. As for me, I am a trench-working techie from Scotland. My direct manager is always happy with my performance, and I am somewhat known in our extended team, but not so much in the divisional team. Although I was aware of Raj and his reputation, I had never worked with him directly. Until this event, which was a wall before the outbreak. I got invited to a company-wide collaboration event in America, which we usually use for technical training and innovation discussion. We got there, and there were some initial social events and meet and greets. Raj was amongst the group, and his general demeanor seemed appropriate for the reputation which followed him. We went into the first day bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I was assigned to a group of 10 people to work on a problem with some coding. All was going well, until we came to do some group presentations. For our group, a young woman named Natalie was speaking for our results. It all seemed to go okay, but after the session was over, Raj asked to see Natalie out in the hall. From inside the room, we could hear Raj literally screaming at her. Many, many offensive slurs were used, and we could hear banging on the wall as well. Natalie returned to the room a sobbing mess, much to the shock of everyone. Raj returned as if nothing had happened. This pattern continued over the course of the week. Raj would single out people for these, one-on-one performance critiques. He would go into detail about how work was substandard, and how they needed to improve. All while taking group photos for corporate comms for the higher-ups, orchestrating shots to make us all look like one big happy family. I spoke to some of my own team back home about this in my downtime, and it does turn out that this has always been rumored behavior for him. Just no one ever knew someone who had experienced this before. I don't know what the job culture is like for this role in a place like America, but here we have dignity at work regulations. Performance criticism is fine, but not when you are engaging in ritualistic humiliation of your employees. I knew exactly what I was going to do. For the next few days, I made sure that I was delivering more presentations than anyone else, and really making an effort to attract attention. As hoped, he asked me for a chat and pulled me into the hall. He didn't wait for the door to close before starting his rant. Experiencing at first hand was interesting, he claimed I had no idea what I was talking about, even though it had likely been about 20 years since he did any technical work himself. He was vile, shouting and spitting in my face. I also learned what the banging noises were, he would punch doors and slam his hands on the wall near me, as if to try and intimidate me.  He looked angry that I was reacting this way, and by the end of it, I thought he was legitimately going to burst a blood vessel. When he was finished, I asked him if he was done? He told me to get out of his sight, and that's when I did it. I gave him a Glasgow kiss. For those unfamiliar, it is a headbutt. And it is not the first headbutt I've delivered in my life, having been brought up near Glasgow. He collapsed to the floor, holding his nose, looking up at me in total shock.  I went back in the room, while he did not. Inevitably I got the HR call. Raj was in the room as well, and I could see that he had two black eyes as a result of the encounter. I was asked to explain myself, and I told the truth, mostly. I explained about his abusive behavior, but focused specifically on the hand slamming, and how it had been intimidating me. It hadn't really, but I massively played up on this aspect of the encounter. I described the headbutt as a reaction, when he slammed the wall right next to my head with his hands. I wasn't sure what story he had told them, but I was sent away after this. I ultimately ended up with a disciplinary on my record, but no further consequences. Other team members were interviewed over the next few days, and once the pattern of abuse was established, Raj was terminated from the company. The most satisfying part of this was the day after, when everyone on the course went out for dinner. Natalie insisted that he stand next to her for the division group photograph, black eyes and all. I think that photograph contributed to his downfall, in some poetic way. I live in a relatively small city in North Carolina, and started working as a dishwasher at the young age of 14, soon working my way up through the restaurant over the following two years. The original owner of the restaurant, a 50 plus year old woman, had grown interest in selling the restaurant, after 10 years of great reviews. Honestly, it became the best place in town to go to. A younger male walked in one day through the kitchen door. I thought he was a new employee. But later that night, I found out he was the one interested in buying the restaurant, and the sale went smoothly. Fast forward a year, and the new owner, let's call him Herb, denied the only time I had ever asked for a raise. As the $7.50 an hour I started on, was not a living wage. He told me I didn't work hard enough, when I had gone as far as to wait on tables, cook, as well as do lots of the cleanup, maintenance, on top of my job of being their dishwasher. Thankfully for me, my manager, who had listened through the office door, pulled him out on it. She made sure I got a raise. She really did me right. A few more months down the line, Herb let several meat coolers break down and refused to fix them or get new ones. My nice manager didn't like to work for him, as she would always get blamed for things breaking down. Herb's the owner, it was his money, so he had to approve anything we did. So nothing happened. This went on until one night. On the night we celebrated her 10 year anniversary of working there, she ate the cake my sister and I made her. Then also proceeded to quit on the spot right after. The responsibility of management fell onto my sister, and she was forced to take the promotion without the raise or anything. She managed his restaurant for nine months, only to feel unheard for any issues she brought up with equipment or workers. She would always be told. No, we can't do that. And after she had had enough trying to convince him on repairs, we were left without a manager for a period of time, forcing him to drive three hours to come and manage the restaurant himself. This went on for a few weeks until a new guy was hired to be my help in the kitchen. At this time I became the head cook, so it was my responsibility to teach in the ups and downs of the kitchen. At the beginning this dude was kind and seemed really caring. But unfortunately, that was at first. He kissed booty so much that I was overlooked for the kitchen manager position. And he got the position. It didn't make any sense.  The guy loved to watch football within the kitchen, commanding to use my phone and speaker. He would cuss at the waitresses and that's not where it ended. He seriously tried to physically fight me on the daily. I could handle the unfortunate situation I was in during that time, but it went too far on another occasion. It all started when he started loud mouthing me, but one of the waitresses heard it and she was fed up with his behavior.  You can either apologize now or you can leave. He has been here a lot longer than you and you were trained by him and yet you think you can disrespect him. I won't stand for that. He immediately answered by raising his hand. But when he was about to swing, I got to him in time, decking him before he got to her. In return, he slammed me into the already broken coolers. Unfortunately, this incident didn't change much because he kept working there and we didn't resolve the issue we had with each other. But over the following months, the rest of the team had encounters with his dark side and got to realize he was a great adouche. Many of us had tried to tell her about his actions, but our complaints were met with a measly. It can't be that bad. He's such a nice guy. After not being heard or listened to for so long, I began planning my exit strategy. I had it all planned out for the last company meeting. I made sure to walk in wearing a suit, already having found a new place with my fiancee and a new job. Everyone knew I was overdressed and this raised questions. Yet the mean manager was nowhere in sight. I enjoyed the meeting and told some trusted coworkers I was planning to quit that night, but I asked them to keep quiet. Then the moment came. Irb asked me publicly to share my opinion on how to boost sales and how I think we can better the restaurant. I looked at Irb and answered sarcastically but in a serious tone. Oh me? Now you wanna hear what I have to say? I stand up to emphasize what I'm about to say. Why would I help a business, much less the owner of this business to better themselves when I have been blown off for months? Within this restaurant, I was bullied for months than when I mentioned it. I was brushed off. Have a great day Irb, let me update you that you don't have a cook anymore. Today is my moving day and I found a new place to live with a better job with an owner who will listen and show respect to their workers. Who won't force their workers to cook green slimy chicken past its expiration date? I quit. He proceeded to beg me to stay because he had finally fired the mean manager. He said, Is there any possible way I can get you to stay? I answered in his exact customer support accent. No, we can't do that. As I walked out, he followed and kept begging me to stay, saying I couldn't leave because he actually did what was asked of him and already solved the problem by firing the mean manager. I ended our conversation that day by simply telling him too little, wait too late and proceeded to walk out. This fallout was followed by other coworkers who were on my side that stood up and left also. This is not where it ends though. He had purposefully not given me my W2 forms for taxes and after a few days of harassing him for my tax papers, I finally got them. Then I received a letter from the IRS saying there was a problem with my tax forms, therefore I couldn't receive my tax refund. Calling up the IRS, I found he had not submitted any of the forms he was supposed to as our employer and when contacting him to rectify the situation. He proceeded to say, I don't recall employing any of you this year after you left with no reason or right. Little did he know, I record every conversation on my phone and I reported him to the IRS. Attached to the email, I sent in the voice recording in an MP3 format and I also sent in photocopies of my checkstubs and copies of my W2s along with informing my coworkers having issues with their taxes to do the same. Herb has since lost his business, his business license, his wife left him and took their kids after finding out about his fraud. Herb is now facing upwards to 60 years in prison. For multiple counts of tax fraud, it turns out we were not the only business he owned and refused to pay taxes or file the correct tax forms when needed. He had also withheld the safety precaution pay during COVID and used all of it to fix up the restaurant. He did us all really dirty and I get to sit back happily typing this with a smile, knowing he got what was coming to him. For all of you wondering whether I ever got my taxes and my money, yes I did. Thanks for listening to my live story guys. I need to ease my way into my story, then I'll tell you how and why it happened. Names will be omitted for anonymity reasons, of course, just to set up some background. I was working for a privately run correction facility, PCF for short and anonymity and had been doing so for nearly 10 years. Even though the facility is now long since closed down, the pay is nothing like what state or federal employees get paid and it was a constant show of being shorthanded. I worked my way up through the ranks from being a frontline officer in the units to visitation sergeant, to shift commander and finally security specialist. Bear with me as this does take a bit to explain why the upward steps came. When I was a floor officer, I worked with others assigned to the same unit to get a general code of conduct going. This unit ran really well and most found the unit to be the easiest unit in the facility to work with. This because all of us ran it nearly identical and were consistent and fair. Eventually, this caused my shift commander to move me to other areas as a test and eventually into visitation. Visitation ended up being one of the most demanding positions I worked at the facility, simply because prior officers had done so little and were so behind. Along with my partner, which regularly changed because of the stress of the position, we got the visitation department up to code and went from taking five visitors a weekend to over 80 visitors a weekend on the regular. After doing this for roughly three years, I moved up to sergeant of visitation, which was less stressful as it was more supervisory and handling complaints, as well as necessary policy revisions. After nearly two years, I moved into shift commander. Here I identified several issues with our overtime policy to include significant favoritism issues, as well as corrected several reporting flaws that we were constantly being dinged on by PPMU. This is the private prison monitoring unit of the Department of Corrections in my state. Because of this, PPMU personnel and I became very close, as I worked with them on further clarifying and correcting some of the things we weren't doing quite right. This led to creating several spreadsheets in Excel that more or less made tracking overtime, vacation, assignments, and various other little managerial things far easier to track. So anyone would barely have to do much other than add their employees and fill out assignments for each shift. This allowed us to get away from favoritism and more easily spread the copious amount of overtime fairly, so everyone was doing their fair share. Instead of just a handful constantly being taken advantage of, while also making it easier to explain monthly shortages. Higher ups loved it, PPMU loved it, and many of the overworked front line staff were delighted by it, cause it allowed them to finally get some rest after 16 hour shifts. But some hated it, because they couldn't skate by under the radar without doing their share of mandatory overtime. Part of the new hire agreement was signing that you understood there was mandatory overtime and refusal could lead to disciplinary up determination. During this time, we had some changes in administration and the creation of a couple positions that were required as part of our contract with the state. This was renegotiated yearly, this is important to know later on. This included at least one captain per shift, a captain of housing, had none prior, a security specialist, and changing several positions from officer to sergeant level. This is where the problem started. A number of the staff started filing complaints because while the state mandated these positions, the private company didn't like to cut into their profit margin and begrudgingly agreed. However, our administration saw this as a way to get their friends in cushy positions. Company policy says to promote from within, but our administration found ways to make it seem like most internal candidates didn't meet qualifications while hiring old buddies into newly created captain and administrative positions. I was eventually moved to security specialist and backup shift commander. My new role was creating facility specific amendments to administrative regulations to ensure we were following the purpose of administrative regulations. This entailed how our equipment was managed, key set permissions, restrictive housing unit, visitation, perimeter security, and making sure all guests, visitors, vendors, and volunteers entry policies were followed to include mandatory background checks. I also ended up taking over several other Excel spreadsheets that were required to show each department and the facility was accordingly staffed the required hours per our state contract agreement. It was quite the handful to say the least and by closely following the administrative regulations, I was quickly making more enemies as a lot of the issues started showing how incompetent the administration was, namely the major housing captain and one of the other captains that were buddies the major got hired on. As security specialist, I reported directly to the major deputy warden and warden as well as by extension the PPMU. We had regular meetings to discuss issues and how to remedy them. Then it was my job to author the adjustments so the major could review and sign them along with the warden before they went into effect. By this time, I was the sole manager of five major Excel spreadsheets in the facility used in various departments. I had to teach all of the methods to whom it may concern in those departments, including major and captains as it was to eventually become their responsibility to manage them. This included giving them encrypted passwords if those spreadsheets ever broke slash corrupted as Excel is known to do on occasions. However, this wasn't the case as I was constantly the go-to guy in order to get them fixed. After a couple of years of this in comes the private corp to renegotiate the contract and then suddenly my position responsibilities get reorganized into their respective captain or major responsibilities. At this time, a new captain position comes open and I put in for it, along with several others with similar experience to me. Also one that has absolutely bare minimum experience but is close friends with the major and another administration sitting on the hiring board. Needless to say, they get the position and I get bumped to their old position as housing lieutenant. I ask my major why I can't be moved back to shift commander, where I can at least still work on all the policies and sheets I've made up to this point to which my major says to me. You are not a captain and we needed a captain there. Not you. Just be happy you didn't get demoted and stop trying to be a captain. I smile and reply, okay, but if you move me to housing, I no longer have responsibility over all the work I currently do as that is all security related responsibilities and housing has different responsibilities, right? It is important to note that at this PCF, housing and security acted like two different entities from one another and security had final say over housing, but it was housing's responsibility to address housing issues before coming to security. This meant moving me to housing lieutenant instead of back to shift commander would mean I no longer had any right to correct them when they weren't following the policies I had written prior and certainly meant I had no responsibility over any of the spreadsheets they managed. Well, that is how it works here. The major replied, you just didn't get the captain position. I'm sure we chose the best person and there will be no issues. Just do what your new position is because you aren't a captain, you're a housing lieutenant and you will do only what is part of that position's assignments.  Okay, I say and leave the room without saying anything further. Start countdown, nuclear revenge. Now I had also submitted complaints of harassment and policy violations with updates as further incidents took place causing the complaint to stay perpetually open and this was added to the complaint with documentation. This was only another notch to a long going issue, one that various others I worked with had also joined in on as they had equally been railroaded, harassed, discriminated against, to include lost wages and saw the nepotism taking place. It is important to know that the policy on nepotism for this company included language stating that family and close friends could not have unfair advantages in promotion or job placement over qualified or current employees. Now it isn't immediate, this change, but after a couple months, I'm now working as a housing lieutenant and taking care of my new responsibilities. I've shared all responsibility of prior spreadsheets, policy adjustments and anything that doesn't have to do with my immediate department. It is about this time when things start to go noticeably wrong. Even though I took the time to train, assign management rights and give password control of all workbooks to the responsible department heads, most of which was the major, it doesn't take long for it all to go to shit. The new captain doesn't know a thing about Excel, let alone any of the reporting software a shift commander has to use, sometimes multiple times a day. He's very lacking in knowledge of R and quickly gets various offender and staff complaints. The major is in keeping track of the spreadsheets he is now supposed to manage, contract compliance tracking and facility entry tracking, because he is just as clueless when it comes to anything computer related. Visitation is slowly going down the drain, cause none of the other captains kept open communication with the sergeant slash officers to help deal with issues and staffing concerns. By this point, PPMU is very unhappy and demanding that these areas be brought up to compliance within 30 days. Or they will start to pursue fines against the company, cutting further into their monthly profit margin by nearly $1,000 per day, out of compliance for each issue, on top of other fines for failure to fill contractually obligated positions. Needless to say, these are fines that add up very fast for those who don't know. At this point, my housing captain calls me into his office with another of the admin to give me the assignment of fixing these troubled areas. After reviewing the assignment, I smile back and tell him, sorry, the major told me I wasn't a captain anymore and that I was to stop doing captain work now that I was a housing lieutenant. This is beyond my assigned post to fix, as it requires me to tell security what to do in order to fix it. We should work as a team. You don't want the team to suffer for this, do you? He says to me, then the other admin pipes in. Lieutenant, let me get this right. You're refusing to do this because you didn't get the captain position.  Well, that is how it works here, isn't it? Security manages security and housing takes care of housing, unless it jeopardizes the security of the facility, then it is security's problem, right? I then roll my shoulders into a shrug. I just simply lack the authority to do that job and the major assured me that you and the other captains all had it under control. I even showed it all to you before I was reassigned. Remember? By this point, I can see that the captain is getting visibly upset as they are now entirely responsible for all the work I used to do. The other admin at this point looks at me again and asks, So, are you refusing to do this assignment? It isn't that I'm refusing to do the assignment, it is just that with all my new responsibilities as housing lieutenant, I simply don't have the time to do them in the work of a captain, which the major made very clear. I'm not supposed to do the work of any longer as I am not a captain. I then stand with a smile. So no, I am not refusing the assignment, I am following the orders of a higher superior that told me to no longer do anything outside of my assigned duties as a housing lieutenant. Last I checked, the post orders I signed, stated I was only to do assignments that are of housing unit responsibility, which also assigned by the major in the warden. Now, if you don't mind, I really have other responsibilities I need to get back to. I then smile to both of them and walk out of the office, as I was currently in the middle of getting vacation request and working on offender housing assignments to ensure we were in compliance with SDG, security threat group, and racial balance requirements for the nearly 1,000 offenders in the facility. About 20 days later, I receive a phone call while on vacation at eight a.m. from the stand in warden. Our warden had been put on administrative leave pending investigation, along with said housing captain. Is this lieutenant? Ask the stand in warden, to which I groggily answer, yes it is, who is this? This is stand in warden and I'm sitting in the room with housing captain, who has brought something rather startling, to my attention. He is saying that you refused to do an assigned duty, that resulted in the inability to track various things in the facility, is that correct? At this point I set up in bed and answer, yes, that is correct, but that is because, I don't even get to finish as this stand in is clearly upset at my admission and interrupts me. You do realize, that this is insubordinate behavior that is gross in nature, don't you? Anger clearly in his voice, but a controlled anger.  Am I going to get to answer, or are you going to interrupt me again? It seems you have already made your mind up on the matter given the tone of your voice, sir. I responded. You're correct, I've decided that your negligence in performing duties as assigned is gross in nature, and believe this meets the required parameters for immediate termination, effective now. He pipes back, obviously not happy with what I said. You do realize I'll be adding this to my complaint of workplace harassment and retaliation if you do so without getting the full story, don't you? This means that I will be adding your name to the complaint, for failure to do your due diligence in getting the full story, on top of the warden you are currently replacing, the housing captain sitting with you, the major, and several others for violation of your own disciplinary policy. I'm shaking at this point, angry that this is happening and then I have to resort to this extent to get the point across. And yes, I do have access to all of the documents, including all current policies of the company, the current contract between the company and the state, and we'll pursue this if you continue with this. You do what you feel is necessary, and I am doing what I feel necessary. As of this date, you are hereby terminated. You will receive in the mail the disciplinary form and decision to include a formal answer to your complaint by the week's end. You see, if you're part of that complaint, you no longer can issue the formal answer according to policy. It will now have to come from corporate HR, who will have to agree with your decision and already has copies of the complaint as well. My voice now shaking from my own anger. Well, then you'll be hearing from them I suppose. The phone call ends, but not before I could hear the change in his tone of voice as well. I wasted little time in updating my complaint and notifying the corporate HR person I had been in contact with for about six months now. The glorious aftermath. A week later, a notice was sent to all employees that the facility would be closing their doors permanently in 90 days, and I continued to receive my full 40 hour a week pay until the day those doors closed without ever having to return to work. I was then later allowed to file for unemployment, as well as the technical reason for loss of employment was through no fault of my own. I later found out from the HR department that the facility was closed due to four major reasons. Reason number one, the company was no longer making any profit due to poor management decisions that lead to PPMU issuing upwards of $75,000 in fines per month on top of out of control over time, due to shift commanders not properly tracking their shift officers over time, vacation or days off. Reason number two, many of the administration and captains had received numerous complaints of company violations to include harassment and nepotism. Reason number three, PPMU investigated the qualifications of some of the recently hired slash promoted administration and captains, as they too were suspicious that they didn't meet proper qualifications for the position. This means they were entitled to back fine all the days those positions were filled, simply because they were unqualified candidates. Reason number four, the investigation found all complaints to be valid and would require termination of nearly all of the current administration. Consisting of two captains and one HR for failure to correct the issues, meaning it was easier to just cut their losses rather than try to fix it. Why was this nuclear revenge? Well, the state had to quickly move and relocated nearly 1,000 offenders, 250 people lost their jobs, of which 15 of them ended up fired due to policy violations, resulting from the investigation of nepotism and workplace harassment. A few had workplace discrimination and resulted in one person who was not receiving fair wage of others of similar position to receive back pay of upwards of $38,000. My start of complaints led to others filing complaints for similar reason in the nearly two years, leading up to this adding to documentation of the issue that resulted in the closure of the facility. Even knowing the impact this had, if I were to live through it again, I would still have done the same thing. You stay till the end, which means you're the one I make these episodes for. I wanna take this moment to thank you, I really appreciate you, because you bring me a great amount of joy. Subscribe for future uploads and show your vengeful devotion by tickling the like button without mercy. Do you have any experiences surrounding the topic of this episode? Share yours below, I'll join the conversation and I'll be seeing you in the next one.


How many moms are here? My mom is here too. And I mention it not just because I love my mom, but because my mom met our next guest last night and her word on that was awesome. Let me introduce you to the documentary filmmaker, activist, and artistic director of the Women's March on Washington, Paula Mendoza. Was at the Javits Center. The Javits Center was supposed to be the place where Hillary Clinton won and accepted her historic nomination to be the first female president of the United States. It was a horrible place to be, but I couldn't gather myself to leave. And I didn't leave until well past one in the morning. I didn't leave because leaving meant that I was going to have to accept our new reality. I was going to have to accept what we had done, that we were going to have Donald Trump as our next president of the United States of America. When my fear and my pain was overwhelmed and it overrode my denial, I decided that I had to go home. But as a filmmaker, I knew that I needed to focus on the details. As a writer, I knew that this moment in time was going to dictate some future artistic endeavor and I would have to excavate all of this pain. So I started focusing on the details. I remember walking across the hall hearing my heels click in a mostly empty space. I remember seeing people in corners whispering to one another and crying to one another. I remember seeing a balloon floating in the sky. It was a red balloon. And the worst part was seeing all of the people walking around with looks of nothingness in their face lost, almost like zombies. And then I walked past these two young women. They were sitting on the floor holding on to one another. And I couldn't just walk past them. So I turned around to sear their memory into my mind forever. And they looked so lost and so heartbroken and they were so young. Clearly this was their first election. And before I knew it, I was walking towards them. I had no idea what I was going to say to them but I knew that I had to say something.  I said, I don't know how and I don't know when but it is going to be okay.  Tears were running down their face and tears were running down my face and we didn't say anything to one another. We just nodded. And I found some small form of comfort in that moment. November 8th, 2016. The heart of this country skipped a beat. Some thought that it would never recover. Some thought it flatlined. But I'm an artist and my job is to dig into the human heart and I knew that we would recover. Since the election I've been asking myself this question. What is the heart of our nation? What is the heart of our neighbor? What is the heart of our soul? And as artists do I continue to ask more and more questions and I think I've come to one of the most important questions of all. And that is, and what makes a heart close? Today in this country we are suffering from a mass contraction of the heart. And I firmly believe that it is artists that can reopen the heart of America. It is our duty and our responsibility to do this. The day after the election I was terrified. I didn't want to get out of my bed. I sat in my bedroom crying. But I remembered the young women that I had told just the night before that it was going to be okay. And so I did the only thing that I could do. I got up and I got to work. And going to work meant reaching out to my community. Going to work meant calling the artists. Going to work meant going through my entire phone from A to Z and talking to every artist I knew. It didn't matter if you were my best friend, if you were a producer that I wanted to work with, a writer I wanted to hire, or a director that I admired. I called you and we talked for hours for two days. And we asked each other questions. What was the purpose of art now that Donald Trump was our president? Did art actually matter? What could art do when people were going to be deported to their deaths? And at the end of those two days, art came away with more faith and more belief and more passion in art and the artistic community than ever before. Because this is when art truly matters. Because when we are in our darkest and most painful moments, the beacon of hope. And what we have to figure out is how are we in service to this moment? I had the great honor and the great pleasure to be in service of the woman's march. I was the artistic director. I started off organizing partnerships, but my love and my passion and my faith for the artist led me to the artists. I've been working 15-hour days. I hadn't seen my son very much and I had been working seven days a week. So that night, in the third week of December, I had two visitors come to my office. Our offices for the woman's march happened to be the headquarters of Mr. Harry Belafonte. And the first visitor was my son. Yes, he deserves applause. The first visitor was my son, Matteo Ali. I read him some books. We played in Mr. B as we like to affectionately call him. On Mr. B's couch, we ran around. And to our surprise, Mr. Belafonte walked into his office and he sat down with us. And I couldn't believe that I was sitting with Mr. Belafonte and Matteo Ali on my lap. And Mr. B talked to us about what he did for the march on Washington. He told us his lessons learned. He told us about his mistakes. And he said something to me that I will never forget. He said, when the movement is strong, the music is strong. When the movement is strong, the music is strong. And our movement at the woman's march was strong. We had a vision. We had people coming. We had support. We were in the trenches of the movement. But we needed to focus on making our music strong. And so that's what we did. We created an artist's table where we had over 150 artists sign on board, well-known artists from the visual arts world to actors, to writers, to directors. And they served as our surrogates and they endorsed us and they were amazing. But it was the everyday artist. The hundreds, the thousands, the tens of thousands of artists that were creating artwork and videos and memes and graphics and going out to the streets. And what they did is they created art with the values and the vision of the woman's march. And it was those artists that brought the vision and the culture of the woman's march to mainstream America. We were radical and we were progressive so that the woman's march was able to be at the heart and the center of the culture of the United States. You see, Paul Robeson, the incredible phenomenal Paul Robeson said, artists are the gatekeepers of truth. We are civilization's radical voice. Artists, this is what we do. We create culture that we take a leadership role in this movement of resistance. We have the ability to tap into the human heart and show the American people what is truly there in contrast to what is currently playing out every day in this country. We artists create worlds from our imaginations and we make people see things that they thought were unimaginable artists, challenge people to love when the easy thing to do is to hate. And make no mistake. This moment that we are living in will dictate the future of this country for generations.  And the resistance is made up of moderates and radicals. It's made up of Hillary Bros and, I'm sorry, Bernie Bros and Hillary supporters. It is made up of first-time protesters and lifetime marchers. We, in the resistance, are using the things that worked in the past and we are also using the forward creative thinking of our present. The resistance is made up of the disability community as they go and they demand their right for healthcare and they get arrested for our right to healthcare as well. The resistance is made up of the 40,000 people that marched on Boston to stand against white supremacy. The resistance is made up of the young people that are risking deportation from the only country they have ever known because they are demanding that they be looked at as human beings with the right to stay in this country, regardless if they are documented or undocumented. And the resistance, and it is with all of those groups and with all of us that the resistance has been able to be more successful than we ever imagined possible. We have had more of this as well. But hear me out. The resistance has done all of its strongest to address the artists. The artists have been with us 100%. You have stood with us and you have created with us. But what I am asking us to do is create the way that we did for the women's march. The tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands of artists are creating every day with the values and the vision and the desires of the resistance and making the value of the resistance, the vision of the resistance become part of mainstream American culture. Imagine what we could do with that power. Artists, power to create. And when you create, create art that simply reflects the times that we are living in. I am asking you to create art that engages deeply in this world. I am asking for your art to be the hammer with which to shape the society that you want. And that hammer can be subtle and beautiful and revolutionary like moonlight. It can educate and illuminate like the documentary Dolores. It can shake the cultural foundations of this country like Carol Walker's work. It can do all of that. But you have to pick up your camera and point it to the communities that are the most vulnerable and tell their stories of love and dignity and respect. Pick up your pen and teach us something are the light in these dark, dark times. I am asking you to seek truth. To create. To make art that opens the heart of America. If you do this, you will be saving this country from itself.


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Well, hello everybody, thank you for coming. I want to start by thanking Professor Hoppe and Gulchan for having me. It's a very big honor for me to be here in front of so many people whose work I've admired for so long. What I hope to do is firstly discuss the military mentality and some of the thinking that makes it possible for so many people to sacrifice so much blood and money for an endeavor that I think almost all of us would consider clearly immoral, illegal, and contrary even to its stated goal, whether that be the goal of keeping us safe or the goal of supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Those words are from the oath of enlistment taken by all U.S. military personnel. I'm trying to avoid the word service members because I know Lou Rockwell would cringe at that term. Secondly, I want to tell some stories from my time as a nation builder and some of the economic consequences. Some of these are things that I started seeing in a new light after I began studying Austrian economics. What I don't want to spend very much time doing is reiterating the libertarian case against war. It's already made very well, very clearly. I learned it from others, including from several of you. But for the sake of completeness, I'd like to begin by reading or citing three arguments as part of the libertarian case against war. First, Hermann Göring's testimony as recorded in the Nuremberg Diaries. Naturally, he said, the common people don't want war that is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy. And it is always a simple matter to drag the people along. There is one difference I pointed out. I as the American psychologist who conducted the interviews and wrote the diaries. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives. And in the United States, only Congress can declare war. That's a good bit of comedy because since this was written in 1948, the United States has waged a war every decade. Not a single one declared. Hermann Göring replied, oh, that is all well and good. But the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. Second, I want to cite something that Murray Rothbard wrote in a book that's available over there, The Myth of National Security. He wrote, the state takes care to arrogate to itself the compulsory monopoly of various critical services needed by society, thus keeping the people independence upon the state for key services. And fostering among the public the myth that only the state can supply these goods and services. Later in the essay, he writes, the great Randolph Bourne realized that war is the health of the state. It is in war that the state really comes into its own swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and society.  And third and last, I want to cite Professor Hoppe's devastating criticism that a monopoly on security will always favor itself at the expense of its clients. By its nature, it unilaterally determines the price of security and the nature of security. True security can only be private voluntary security subject to market forces. It would inevitably put a much greater emphasis on arbitrage and conflict resolution rather than on the brute force of invading armies. You can imagine that with private security, which we are voluntarily paying for, we would not have additional services such as the indiscriminate firebombing of cities, the infecting of unsuspecting Guatemalans with syphilis, the setting up of brutally oppressive regimes, and the staging or provoking attacks against ourselves, not to mention today's additional services of being fondled by TSA agents and our handful of wars in the Muslim world. I think these are the most important things which can be said about war. I'm just providing a little bit of illustration. I commissioned as an infantry officer in 2000 and joined the 82nd Airborne Division. We went to Afghanistan in 2002. In 2003, we went to Iraq. There I had the additional duty of meeting weekly with the Council of Sheiks and helping them with their civil problem sanitation, irrigation, civil security. Here's a picture of me looking at an irrigation canal. I was about 20 kilometers south of Baghdad and the green zone. And I would always read about these multi-million dollar contracts going to military industries. I would always repress releases by all the technocrats and bureaucrats. But judging from just 20 kilometers away from this green zone, those people never even existed. And the book Imperial Life in the Emerald City sheds some light on their utter incompetence. I left the Army in 2004 and over the course of three years developed a profound visceral distrust of all things government. It was then I received a letter in the mail calling me back for one more trip to Afghanistan. And you can imagine how delighted I was to be retrained officially now in nation-building by the very same technocrats and bureaucrats who proved so useless in Iraq, whose job I was doing for them. I used to talk about this and I used to talk about how we would how Iraqis would line up around the block to work for $2 a day pulling reeds out of the irrigation canal. And I used to contrast this with how private industries, American industries would contract to do the same job and their security guards would earn $1,000 a day. And this is very interesting to me, but it lapses into a discussion of how to conduct a military occupation when the important question is if we should conduct a military occupation. A question I'm often asked is what soldiers think about our wars and I'm not able to quantify this in terms of percentage, but I think I know what the categories are. There are some constitutionalists and for them I have the most hope. While they recognize the state as a necessary monopoly on security, they see the tension between our unconstitutional wars and the task they are doing. In 2008, more veterans and military personnel contributed to Ron Paul's presidential campaign than to all his Republican challengers combined. There are also organizations like the Oath Keepers who try to instill in military personnel and law enforcement personnel a respect for the Constitution. The second category probably thinks of the Constitution, though they wouldn't say it in the way that most evening news anchors think about it, that it's generally a little bit quaint and unsuitable to the modern world. And they see there, some of them very genuinely see their job as good and noble and some of them are just seduced by it. I can say from personal experience that it feels great to hand out other people's money. When you're somewhere where the people are desperately poor and you get this flow of American tax dollars which you're controlling, it just feels great. You're giving desperately poor people something they want. Additionally, you get this huge status with which many of my, many people have never felt before who are engaged in this type of work. Suddenly, people hang on your every word. They come to you very politely, very respectfully. Although if you look closely at them, you might see that where their people should be are little dollar signs. Incidentally, I bought this Constitution at the Jefferson Monuments. I forgot it, unfortunately, but this is the same version. And I was shocked to see that on the inside cover, it begins with a general disclaimer. It says something to the effect of some people regard this document as important, others think it's no longer suitable to our modern world, nevertheless, here it is. It has historic significance or something like that. This was at the Jefferson Monument of all places. So I think a third category of military personnel are somewhat indifferent to politics. Either they happily sort of punt on the issue of politics or ideology because they regard the state as more good than evil and they're happy to let themselves be wielded as a weapon by the representatives of the state. Also in the indifferent category are, I think, and this I think is quite a few service members, they regard our wars as just another feature of the landscape whose creation or sustenance has nothing to do with their participation. It's just like another hill or a river and they make economic decisions to determine their participation. They take into account the level of danger, money, quality of life, personal development. That was a part of my motivation way back in 2000 and also the status they achieved. This has always been the motivation of soldiers. It's been evident from Thucydides onward. I want to comment about that last motivating factor, the status they achieved because this is very real. When I returned from Afghanistan in 2002 or from Iraq in 2004, I was showered with praise and thanks, I was offered free drinks and free dinners. At the time I was still a statist, however I felt extremely uncomfortable by all the thanks I was receiving because the hero's welcome was given to me without any knowledge of whether or not I was completely incompetent or not. I happened to have been a little proud of how I'd served as an officer and including proud of the restraint that I had shown and I was getting this praise just automatically. They were giving it without knowledge of whether I commanded an infantry platoon or a desk and it became very clear to me that the soldier, his role as a security provider is of secondary importance. Much more important is his symbol as a figure of national pride and national identity. He becomes a idol behind which all the nefarious political motives and all the hypocrisy can hide. The soldier becomes a rallying call in support of the official war effort. It's hard to imagine something similar happening with a private voluntary security agency. And I imagine such a mindset would be much, much worse if this was a war with a conscription where the propaganda must be even stronger. Now of course I view the automatic praise as downright dangerous because it opens the door for all manner of tyranny and more importantly it allows for the systematic aggression against innocent people based only on their proximity to our perceived enemies. I did benefit from personal development. I learned a lot in the military. Nevertheless for the most part I consider it a fool's errand from which I thankfully merged unscathed minus just a little bit of hearing. I've also been asked a few times including last year at the Property and Freedom Society Conference whether I consider insurgents nobler than soldiers because insurgents fight for ideology and soldiers fight for money. I perfectly understand the libertarian hostility to all things military but I disagree with this analysis and I'd like to illustrate that with a couple examples. I remember returning from our first combat mission in Afghanistan it was a two week mission in which we helicoptered to different spots trying and failing to make contact with insurgents. Incidentally back then that was before Iraq had begun so we had all the aviation assets of the military at our disposal. But anyway after we returned one of my fellow platoon leaders told me in a very emotional sort of way that on the helicopters he was having visions of Christians praying back in the United States for him to keep them safe. He was saying that he was thinking on the helicopter of all the difficult training we'd been to and he was expressing how proud he felt for the privilege of defending America. I might accuse him of being foolish perhaps even a little egotistical but I would not accuse him of being insincere if he had his ideology too. From the other side in Iraq in 2003 we would occasionally catch poverty stricken farmers setting up rockets to launch to our base. They were being paid to do so and seemed to have little incentive for effective attacks. In fact it was hard to tell many times if the attacks were even intended for us or not. So there are insurgents fighting for money too. Incidentally later in the war the attacks became more effective and we learned they were being incentivized by things such as whether or not a Medevac helicopter showed up after the attack and I'm sure there's a dark joke in there somewhere about the power of prices. There's also the factor from both sides that young men simply like to fight. They want to know whether or not they're cowards. This is evidenced by me when I was in the Hawkeye Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Club we would drive six hours to Milwaukee and pay a $50 entry fee to go into grappling tournaments just for the privilege of fighting under very restrained conditions. Now the Libertarian instantly sees the line between such a voluntary contest and an involuntary one but I think most young men do not which is why it's so easy to get a whole bunch of them to sacrifice themselves in foolish endeavors. Now I don't mean to be muddying the water on justice and morality by stressing the similarity between insurgents and soldiers so I do believe good people have sacrificed themselves on both sides of every military conflict in history but I think you need a perspective of property rights and you need a paradigm where the individual is the center of action and the individual is the center of decision making and only then do the aggressor and the aggress come into stark contrast. If you work as most people do from this idea that the states are the actors then many people in perfectly good faith can conclude that a war between states is necessary. I think there's a Libertarian case for the invasion of Iraq that you can begin but not finish, it falls apart. It probably begins by citing the systematic abuses of Saddam Hussein's regime and the sincere and desperate desire of many Iraqis to find an outside security agency to rid them of their dictator. In many places in 2003 we were greeted with cheers, grown men shook my hand and cried thanking me for getting rid of Saddam Hussein and in other places they shot at us. It was a very confusing time. Of course this case falls apart very quickly. It does not justify the size and scope of the invasion. It does not justify the deaths of between 100,000 and 1 million Iraqi civilians depending on which estimate you believe and the exodus of four million more. It does not justify nation building, torture and the coercive means of funding our wars. I don't think it takes evil people to do evil things. It only takes evil ideologies now. Please be mindful of the possibility that I'm simply rationalizing and justifying my six years in uniform but I've given that possibility a lot of thought and I think I'm telling it to you the way it is. Please come to your own conclusions though. As further evidence I would cite the 1971 Stanford prison experiment. Out of 75 volunteers they picked the 24 who appeared most mentally stable. They made some of them prisoners, they made others guards and they had to call off what had been planned as a two week experiment after only six days because of outright brutality and sadism from the guards. We need market prices and voluntary patronage to restrict the production of security. Unfortunately this constitution is not enough. Back when I was a constitutional libertarian which was a position I gave up very, very reluctantly. I would point out that if we followed the advice of the founding fathers to avoid keeping large peace time standing armies and if we followed the constitution and forced Congress to declare our wars we probably would not have had a war every decade for the past 60 years, I'll count them. Korea in the 50s, Vietnam in the 60s and 70s, various Latin American wars in the 80s, Gulf War I in the 90s and since the millennium Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and I haven't even counted smaller wars like Philippines or Somalia. Now the argument is technically true that following the constitution and the advice of the founding fathers may have prevented a war every decade though perhaps this argument rests on the assumption that a monopoly on the production of security is capable of following a document like the constitution. Nevertheless today I would point out to my former self that neither the absence of a large peace time army nor the requirement to declare a war kept America out of World War I, very likely prolonging the war and setting the stage for the rise of different flavors of socialism nor did it prevent America's participation in the Spanish American war when some historians consider the first big imperialistic war and the occupation of the Philippines that followed which I never even learned about in public school I discovered it myself. Here's a quote about the American occupation of the Philippines from a Republican congressman who visited in 1902. You never hear of any disturbances in Northern Luzon and the secret of its pacification is in my opinion the secret of the pacification of the archipelago. He's speaking approvingly of this strategy. They never rebel in Northern Luzon because there isn't anybody there to rebel. The country was marched over and cleaned out in a most resolute manner. The good Lord in heaven only knows the number of Filipinos that were put under the ground. Our soldiers took no prisoners, they kept no records, they simply swept the country and wherever and whenever they could get a hold of a Filipino they killed him. The women and children were spared and may now be noticed in disproportionate numbers on that part of the island. This was done with the blessing of a congressional declaration of war. In my opinion, the correct case against war and the only case against war must begin with the rejection of the state as a monopoly on the unsecurity. And I now want to illustrate the cultural Leviathan that stands in the way of this argument. I'd like you and in particular the Americans in the audience to imagine having a conversation with this man and imagine telling him, no thank you, I do not care for the service which you have presumed to have provided me with. Imagine telling him that you don't think the war made you more safe but rather less safe. Imagine pointing out to him that Americans today are eight times more likely to be killed by an agent of government security than by a terrorist. That's a very difficult conversation indeed. I think the myth of the state has replaced individual identity with national identity. It replaced local culture with national culture and individual pride with national pride. If the myth is ever torn down or if it tears itself down as it very well might, many people I know will be hollow empty shells of themselves scarcely able to answer the question, who are you? I'd like to shift now and just talk about nation building in Afghanistan. This is the biggest population center in Kunar province. It's at the confluence of the Kunar River and the Pesh River coming in left to right. There's a very interesting place in Kunar province called the Korangal Valley and I'm gonna resist with all my might to go on anthropological tangent but it is absolutely fascinating and related to Rudyard Kiplings, the man who would be king. But anyway, the Korangalis were timber barons. They used to chop down these gigantic trees and sell them in Pakistan paying the local warlord for transportation across his turf. In 2005, 2006, we shut down the timber smuggling because we wanted timber trade and that made the Korangalis very angry. Many Korangalis and many American soldiers died in the Korangal Valley, which was abandoned last month, I believe, or at least they didn't use the word abandoned pulled back from. I would occasionally point out to my colleagues that the difference between smuggling and trade is who gets to cut. The local warlord gets to cut, it's smuggling and if the national warlord with his national munglisha called the Afghan National Army gets a cut, then it's trade. But it was like pointing out the unrealities in a science fiction movie. Everyone is mildly irritated for a while and then returns to watching the movie. The most impressive man I met in Afghanistan was a young man named Mahmood. We were on a mission to inspect one of the many schools we're building there. I think we're building, the average was around $200,000. That goes to one of my many principles of military service, whatever the private sector can do, the United States Army can do more slower and for 10 times the cost. But anyway, Mahmood came up to me very cautiously and introduced himself and standing in a mud field surrounded by bare mountains. He started telling me about Windows XP and the types of processors he has on his seven computers and how he teaches classes in Windows XP PowerPoint and many other things. He is doing for profits what the mighty U.S. Army struggles to do for charity. Incidentally, I couldn't buy him the generator that he wanted because we can't help private entrepreneurs, we could only build things that are sort of collectively owned like hydroelectric plants for little villages, micro, really small hydroelectric plants for villages. But in practice, I think they were privately owned. They were just owned by the village elder. In any case, I want to contrast Mahmood's computer school with the jewel in the crown of our reconstruction efforts, which was this trade school. We would pay students for their attendance. They would learn one of five trades, plumbing, electric, carpentry, masonry, or something else. They got little hats, which looked very professional. And the parade of dignitaries that came to our provincial reconstruction team were always taken here. UN generals, diplomats, ambassadors, and undersecretary, I believe, of the State Department, who he might have been from defense. And on the surface, this looked great. And it's very easy for good people to feel good about this effort. You have to look a little more closely to realize that this was costing the American taxpayer $50,000 a month, hard to imagine. Although that figure almost surely went down, because I wrote about it, I wrote about this, and the Army is very sensitive to publicity. You could tell that there's no market pressure. Like, the Army betrays its political masters by how sensitive it is to any type of publicity. Later during my time there, I realized that there were three private trade schools doing for profit what we do as charity, which had gone out of business, because how could they possibly compete with the largest of the US taxpayer? And I also came to appreciate something which should have been completely obvious, which I was very slow to realize. Students went here for political reasons. Oh, how's this? Students went here for political reasons, and I couldn't believe how far I had gotten into this without realizing. We would go to a place like the Carangal Valley, where they didn't like us, and we would tell the elders, listen, I know you're very angry about this whole timber thing. Why don't you pick 10 people to go to the next class of the trade school? And then there was elders. I'm sure would go to people in their valley who they want to influence, and they would either trade favors or whatever else and send students here, which is why our school had a moderate dropout rate. I doubt the private schools that we put out of business had a similar dropout rate, because those students were sacrificing something to be there. This sort of central plan in which we were engaged in, which I was very slow to appreciate for what it was, because you are giving desperately poor people some resources. But this was central planning detached from any kind of reality. It very soon became apparent that we were flooding the area with eager construction workers. Thankfully, we dropped $90 million of dollars worth of construction projects on the province, so we could absorb all this labor. I almost fell out of my seat when I read, towards the end of Murray Rothbard's essay, World War I, as a fulfillment of progressivism, he describes governments lost for big numbers, because I went through a similar loss when I was engaged in nation building. The most absurd appetite for data came towards the end of my time in Iraq when soldiers, for a brief while, as part of their routine patrols, tried to photograph all the Iraqis, all of them. They would knock on the door, take a photo, go to the next house. The soldiers knew right away that this was absurd, and thankfully the leadership figured that out pretty quickly, too. But anyway, it's difficult to measure all the improvement that all this building of schools and clinics and bridges is doing. And the army's aware of that, and they discuss it often, but there's no solution. This is central planning. It's divorced from any kind of market pressure. One of the things that they loved was the roads right here. This is the road we built in our project, because for this they did have data. They counted all the shops in the bazaar before we built the road, and after we built it, it tripled. So there were many metrics of verifying the road as an improver of quality of life for the Afghans. And I was, again, astounded when I read Professor Hoppe's criticism that the overproduction of roads is a universal property of government for the purpose of moving their security forces, because this was readily discussed as the alternative purpose of building the roads. And there's a publicly available essay on this written by David Coole Cullen called Building Roads in Afghanistan, where he's very explicit as we were that the alternative purpose is to move security forces. So I was astounded to see the theoretical prediction match the reality I had known. All our efforts certainly warp the Afghan economy in bizarre ways, and this is very interesting to me. Though I'm not sure I would make the statement that it's a negative effect, because if you're building things for desperately poor people, it's still a benefit, even though it's probably not how they would allocate their resources if they had them. I think I'm running out of time. This is me playing guitar hero in my room in Afghanistan. I used to be the drummer, but our drums broke, and we couldn't get replacements. But I guess that's what they mean when they say war is held. I've written quite a bit about my military experiences, and you can read more on my website. I want to thank you all very much for your time.