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

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

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

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

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

You Are Entering the Infernal Triangle

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

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

‘Stay Strapped or Get Clapped’

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

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

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

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

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

Maurer also wrote about the topic in Lawfare.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why? Perry had become a symbol that transcended justice.

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

Why Did Greg Abbott Pardon a Racist Murderer?

Ken Paxton Takes Manhattan

What Azerbaijan Wants From Texas Politicians

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

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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 Notebook

Nuclear Threats Are Looming, And Nobody Knows How Many Nukes Are Out There

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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 house

Revealed: the extremist Maga lobbying group driving far-right Republican policies

At least 66 members of far-right group in rural Oregon standing for office

Revealed: how a US far-right group is influencing anti-gay policies in Africa

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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.

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