Zombie Book Club

I Am Negan: The Dictator's Playbook | Zombie Book Club Ep 92

• Zombie Book Club • Season 3 • Episode 92

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In this episode of Zombie Book Club, we dive deep into the chilling parallels between Negan from The Walking Dead and real-world authoritarian regimes. By breaking down Negan’s methods into four distinct phases—consolidating power, eroding democratic institutions, establishing totalitarian control, and sustaining the regime—we expose the disturbing strategies dictators employ to seize and maintain power. 

From identity erasure through the "I am Negan" mantra to economic coercion and psychological manipulation, this analysis offers crucial insights into recognizing and resisting authoritarian tactics in our own world. Join the discussion to discover how fictional villains can teach us real-life lessons about vigilance, resistance, and the fight against tyranny. 


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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Zombie Book Club, the only book club where the book is step-by-step instructions to install your very own dictatorship. If you don't like the one you got now, just install a new one. Yeah, make your own. Make your own dictatorship.

Speaker 2:

D-B-I-D, no, b-y-d, b-y-o-d, b-y-o-d. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Bring your own D. I'm Dan, and when I'm not living in a modern day dictatorship, I'm writing a book about a world left with a huge power vacuum after a zombie outbreak, where wannabe dictators rush to the spotlight to claim their authority over the remnants of a shattered civilization.

Speaker 2:

Fun stop stealing my ideas. I'm leah, and when I'm not waking up from nightmares but moving back in with my mom in canada to escape a us dictatorship, I'm dancing to the song hostile government takeover, edm, remix by a gift from todd and vinnie marchi yeah, check it out, shout out, a gift from todd and vinnie. Yeah, really, you've been keeping me sane. If you need to pick, me up.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean that's when we get our spotify wrapped. It's gonna be a hostile government takeover.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that and like the luigi mangione songs what a year. Today is a casual dead, dan it is.

Speaker 1:

We're gonna be casual today.

Speaker 2:

That's why I'm drinking a red bull right now I'm drinking coffee because I have not slept much for many months now yeah, it's been. It's been a thing yeah, so we're giving our brains a break and all of you from the real life.

Speaker 1:

Hostile government takeover in the us by turning to a fictional dictator instead yeah, this is gonna be fun because we're gonna be talking about everyone's favorite dictator. Who's that? Negan? I love him. Yeah, he's so sweet, you know. Um, before we start, I just want to say a lot of people, so many people, an alarming lot of people, so many people, an alarming number of people have said that they stopped watching the Walking Dead when spoiler alert, if you haven't gotten this one yet, it's only been like 15 years when Negan bashes Glenn's head in with a baseball bat, and I understand that was very brutal, it was very upsetting, but I think you're really missing out on a really great story, because we're going to be talking about that and how Negan is playing by the book as to how to install a dictatorship. He is a dictator and everything he does is on purpose in order to maintain his power.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and build his empire.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and it's amazing how much crossover there is between what Negan does and what dictators do in real life. It's just on a smaller scale because there's fewer people.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, because they were killed by or are undead. Yeah, I guess that's true. Are there fewer people, or are there just more undead people?

Speaker 1:

There's fewer people, but also there's more undead people. But are they people? Different episode, that is a different episode.

Speaker 2:

But first we have some updates to share. You know the usual.

Speaker 1:

Oh, the usual.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, some fun stuff, before we get into a man who bashed everybody's favorite Walking Dead character, glenn's head in.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, but also we release episodes every Sunday, so subscrump it. That's what I wrote, that's what you wrote, yeah, and also, if you could give us a five star review, wherever you are, that helps us immensely and we love it. It's kind of like. It's kind of like when you scratch behind a dog's ears.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, my, my back, or my left, my left leg will just start like kind of mine's already going, scratching, going, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:

I'm already doing it. Life updates Leah, I'm going to work in a week in a week a week in a week, a week tomorrow. Yeah, I have a stay of execution of one week for going back to work. Um, one exciting thing, because I I talked to my boss and he said it's gonna be like the week of the 21st, which that'll be like one day from when this episode comes out if you're listening to this, on sunday, april 20th, smoke a joint for dan.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, eat edible burn went up.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, for me, because I can't anymore. I'm not allowed, uh, technically not allowed any well, that's neither here nor there, we won't talk about that. But I'm going back to work. I'm not supposed to be high at work. It's weird, I know, um, but uh, one exciting thing when the conversation with my boss, he shared with me that he bought a Rivian. We've talked about this before, yeah, and Leah told me to seize the means of production, which I believe she meant the Rivian.

Speaker 2:

Well, that would include the Rivian.

Speaker 1:

Yes, he was talking to me about a company that he reached out to to get a test truck like a, like a, like a full size class eight semiruck for our work, from a company called Revolt, and they make not an electric truck, they make a hybrid electric truck. Like all the power of the drivetrain is electric, but the diesel engine from the semi-truck powers a generator and I think it's really cool and I would love to see our fleet replaced by these things because I mean, I mean, two-thirds of the costs of operating a trucking company is diesel. It really is.

Speaker 2:

We go through so much it would also make me feel a little bit better about the scales of our relationship being a little less like a you cancel. At my job too, yeah, we're actually doing a little less harm yeah, yeah, um, leah helps the environment.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I destroy it.

Speaker 2:

We cancel each other out and you help other people just destroy it by driving their cars.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean this. I mean you can look it up, uh, if you want to. They only have like test trucks right now. They're not like a fully operational company, but they do offer kits for small diesel pickups to to do the conversion yourself, um, and it's really fascinating, and I mean it doesn't eliminate the the emissions. But you're going from I mean, one truck that I drove got two to three miles per gallon that I drove got two to three miles per gallon, which was that's bad, but that is also acceptable. And it'll go from that to more like 12 miles per gallon. That's better. And I imagine, with all the hills that we have in Vermont, a lot of regenerative braking opportunities will probably get better than that.

Speaker 2:

That's pretty awesome. I just actually think about the fact that my boss is kind of a visionary and had this idea. They were on a road trip recently and they had an idea where they were like why can't we generate wind power with vehicles?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, why don't you think we can Dan? It's kind of like running a flashlight off of a solar, a solar panel right, no, no.

Speaker 2:

Her conclusion and she's very well versed in this field is that, uh, they'll never do the research or it will be suppressed.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, because oil um but I was like that's actually good that's a good idea. You are creating wind, so there's gotta be some way to capture that yeah, um, I think the only thing that wouldn't work great is that by capturing that wind, you're creating drag, so your car has to produce more energy in order to counteract that drag. Yeah, drag coefficients are a really fascinating subject to get into. If you're like learning about race cars, I was gonna say drag coefficients sounds like I'm about to go have a nap.

Speaker 2:

They they have. Yeah, but when they do wind tunnel testings on on cars when they like try to make them.

Speaker 1:

I was going to say drag coefficient sounds like I'm about to go have a nap. Yeah, but when they do wind tunnel testings on cars, when they try to make them aerodynamic to go a top speed, there's a certain speed that they can't get over because you have to generate a certain amount of horsepower to overcome the resistance of the wind.

Speaker 2:

Well, maybe it's not on the car, maybe there's something that's capturing the wind of all the vehicles on interstates.

Speaker 2:

oh, well, possibly but that's not what we're talking about today, um other than I guess we are, because we just did, but I thought it was cool. It'd also be cool as a way to have power, uh, in the future when everything is shit. Because my um, my dissociation failed me this week and I had a really awful nightmare that involved living with my mom. Oh no, and at the age that I am, I really don't want to do that ever again. I yelled at her in my dream. I was very upset about being there.

Speaker 1:

So why did you have to move in with your mom?

Speaker 2:

Because we were escaping the United States.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, at this point in history I don't know when you're listening to this hopefully all of this blew over and we have a great president now, wouldn't? That be incredible um oh, please, let us know right now, uh, they are extra judiciously removing legal residents of the united states simply because they're not citizens, and then sending them to, uh third world gulags where we will never see them again, apparently.

Speaker 2:

Well, hopefully the louisiana court is not saying it's extra judicial. They're saying that we can use that uh for every what the foreign policy act is called. But basically, if you have, if you say anything, uh, that doesn't agree with the foreign policy of the united states, you can deported, even if you have legal permanent residency. And they are. They are transparently, in fact. They said in because we are transparent. We're sharing with you that we are looking into, as an administration, ways to deport citizens who also don't agree.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so that's where we're at today I am indeed a citizen. I'm also a citizen. Yeah, where are they going to deport me to? I'm also a citizen.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, where are they going to deport me to? That's what I find. I mean, I think that they're probably going to focus, of course, on people who have another country. Well, never mind, they'll just put you in El Salvador. What am I talking about?

Speaker 1:

They'll put me on a wellness farm. Yeah, the ones that RFK Jr was talking about. Yeah, you'd be a worker there. Yeah, to end my dependency on antidepressants. But yeah, I could see how that might creep into your dreams as a stress point.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I was reading about Mahmoud Khalil and the fact that the Louisiana judge ordered that he should be deported, and then there's, like so many other cases of really awful things happening right now. And then to see what's her name again, the the press secretary oh, caroline levitt yeah, to see her be like yeah, we're looking into this, we're gonna find a way legally. Um was probably enough. That was like two things in one day. Oh, and then there's a new executive order.

Speaker 1:

I prefer to refer to her as bleach demon bleach demon.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, then there's another executive order that makes it so that it's probably going to get um, what's the word? Not revoked, but overturned said that it's not possible, but basically it is directly attacking the work that I do around states, legislation and regulation of energy. So, um, that was all in one day, and thus I had this nightmare where I yelled at my mom in her house and I was like I want to go back. I think in my dream I said I would rather go back and die than be here, and I that's really, um, probably not true, but that's how I obviously in my dreams, how I was feeling about having to leave our home.

Speaker 1:

So, um, yeah, it wouldn't, it definitely wouldn't be easy, but um it, you know it's. It's crazy that we're living in a time where that is, there is a possibility that we might have to do that. Yeah, um, which, of course, you know, you plan, you plan for the worst and you hope for the best it's funny because I, like, I'm always struck every single time I have these fears or I had this nightmare.

Speaker 2:

I woke up and I was like, but I'm fine. And then I think about everybody who's actually been through things like that or worse, and I'm just like it's really hard to process that because it's awful enough with just the possibility and the fear alone, letting like, letting alone live through it. So that's why we're going to talk about negan. Yeah, let's talk about negan, not yet, though.

Speaker 1:

Not yet because we have groans from the horde do.

Speaker 2:

We haven't done um, a groan from the horde in a while, from our instagram, but I wanted to give a shout out to jacob. I feel like jacob is rapidly becoming a zombesty. Yeah, uh, they are. Uh, we sort of met each other via our podcasts Viva La Festiva podcast is Jacob's, and on our most recent Casual Dead, episode 90, where we talked about cooperation and how it outlasts collapse, they left us a really nice note and it was really inspiring to hear the great things that they're doing, so I wanted to read it Also. I wanted to say, jacob, like your comments really are the kinds of comments that keep us going. Yeah, and it's really nice when people make comments about the fact that they find these episodes meaningful, because I feel like they're necessary and I don't think we can just pretend that nothing weird's happening. Uh, yeah, but sometimes I'm like, oh, this must be such a downer for people. Maybe they're gonna stop listening to us.

Speaker 1:

So you know slight sidebar, when people pretend that none of this is happening, like, like, I see a lot of like commercials for like doing your taxes or like getting better insurance, and I'm just like, how can you be talking about this at a time like this? I don't want better insurance, I want the freedom of speech. Yeah, that'd be nice. And it's like, obviously the insurance company can't help me with that, but it still makes me mad. Yeah, well, this will make you happy. Okay, good.

Speaker 2:

Jacob shares. What a fun, inspiring, invigorating, beautiful episode. I live right next to my village's community center and I'm already thinking of where we can build our community garden. Oh yeah. So just like nice to hear the things that you folks are doing, I'm already thinking of what I would give someone for them to teach me how to change my own oil. Thank you guys.

Speaker 1:

I could show you yeah, come on over.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I don't know if you're thinking about going to Living Dead Weekend, Jacob, but we'll be there. Yeah, we'll change your oil. I'm sure you can give us some podcast tips, since you're a fellow podcaster.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I say this often and I don't do anything about it, but I also want to get more involved with the community in this way.

Speaker 2:

Oh, I have one more piece of news actually that we should share, which is that our local library had some people come in and do a quote-unquote First Amendment audit. Oh yeah, I remember about this and I'd never heard of this. I'm curious if anybody here has had this happen to them or has heard of it or has watched these videos. But do you want to explain what a First Amendment audit is, dan?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so I did some research on this because it sounded pretty upsetting, and I found some people who make their living doing this. It's not actually like a government agent that comes by. It's not an official capacity.

Speaker 1:

It's some asshole with a camera, is all it is who is very confrontational and what they do is they come in and they shove a camera in your face. If you're a government worker in a government space and they do all the things that they are legally allowed to do, like walk around where there's no signs that say not to walk there, signs that say not to walk there, they'll shuffle through your papers, they'll kick open your door like they're about to shoot you and then just put a camera in the door and film your reaction, and their whole thing is that they just want to angry, anger people into reacting so that they can, you know, have a five second clip of rage bait yeah they can put on social media yeah, because apparently you, if you're in a public place and you're a government worker like you, have to let them in.

Speaker 2:

You can't stop them from filming you and if you don't, like you said, have signs that say this is not a like, this is an employee-only area, they can go wherever they want.

Speaker 1:

You have to put up signs. You specifically have to say no employee-only area if you don't want them to go through your desk and just start rifling through your papers.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so that happened in our little town hall and our library and it sounded really, really awful because, as a worker apparently folks and maybe you're one of these people who's had this training I didn't know what this was until our librarian friend told us about it, that it had happened to her. But you have to capitulate to them because otherwise you're going to be on some awful video and become viral slash, you know, be told that you did something wrong. So they received training on how to address this. But definitely Google first amendment audits and make sure you're prepared too, because my first reaction was like I live seven minutes from the town hall. Next time this happens I will come and start filming them. And then she was like you can do that, but don't say anything, cause the minute you say something, it's going to become off the chain and and the people that you were looking at, that lived or lived relatively near us, do things like, uh, pepper spray people and all kinds of other things.

Speaker 1:

They've been arrested many times there's one guy and I don't have his name off off the the top of my head. He's got like 178 000 subscribers on youtube. We don't want to drive people to him anyways, right, yeah, and he's. But he's a local guy and he does go around and instigate other than views and ad revenue from YouTube is a civil lawsuit. Yeah, so like half of his videos are like tyrant cop or angry Karen. He'll like try to start fights with people, especially cops, and try to get arrested. Quote unquote wrongfully, because technically there's nothing illegal about what he's doing, but he's being a total asshole and he is disturbing the peace. So it would not be hard to understand why a police officer would want to arrest somebody like this who's going around and trying to pick fights with people.

Speaker 2:

But if you do arrest him, then he files a civil lawsuit and he's hoping to get big money payout or you refuse to show him the things that he's asking to see, that are legally within his right, because you're frustrated with this person who's basically attacking you, yeah, and you can't do anything. So it's pretty wild out there. I had no idea. Google it so that you're ready in case this ever happens to you. And, uh, like I, I think they probably come to small towns like ours thinking like maybe they don't know and they're more likely to do something they shouldn't, and also I think they're just prepared.

Speaker 2:

I'm very proud of uh, our local town leadership they're.

Speaker 1:

They're playing a numbers game, so they're just going to every place that they can, especially places that might not have experienced this before, and just trying to provoke people. Yeah, so honestly, I mean I hate this answer, but the the best thing to do is to just distance yourself from it, if you can, or just remain quiet.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we know this guy loves Elon for sure. Oh yeah, Definitely yeah.

Speaker 1:

If he could afford a Cybertruck, he would. He would absolutely be driving one.

Speaker 2:

In a much more fun note, we have a zombie comic pitch today. Yeah, we've been getting quite a few. A zombie comic pitch today? Oh, yeah, we've been getting quite a few. This is another great one from Scott Cirklund of CirqueWorks Art Labs, who's created a comic series called Young and the Dead no Zombies Allowed.

Speaker 1:

It kind of sounds almost like a soap opera. Name the Young and the Dead.

Speaker 2:

It does, it does have that vibe.

Speaker 1:

I would watch a soap opera in a zombie apocalypse. I mean, that's what the Walking Dead is, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Well, I never thought of it that way until Jack Callahan, author of Zombie Nerd and the Half-Term Harrowing, pointed it out.

Speaker 1:

Let's give it a listen, so let's hear his pitch.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, neither of us have heard this. It's totally a live reaction. Okay, you ready to listen? I'm ready. All right, this seven sounds good. We're going away from escape city, yeah, by kayla hicks and all of the scariness, and now we're going up the elevator to seven to see what horrors await us.

Speaker 1:

On the seventh floor.

Speaker 3:

Yes, let's listen greetings dan leah and the extended zombie book club family. This is scott circling, creator of young and the dead. No zombies allowedies Allowed. A 1980s-themed kids-versus-zombie adventure comic book series. Young and the Dead follows the adventures of 11-year-old Sam.

Speaker 3:

Young and his little brother Tad as they wake up one morning to find most of the adults in their quiet suburban neighborhood have fallen victim to a horrific virus that has transformed them into flesh-eating zombies. Together they team up with a ragtag group of neighborhood misfits, including Sam's wisecracking best friend, mitch a live-action role-play aficionado named Lloyd a tough-as-nails tomboy Oxana Ox for short Sam's secret crush, stephanie and her overprotective older brother Ricardo aka Rocky.

Speaker 3:

It's a race against time as these unlikely heroes fight to survive and unlock the clues to a cure that could potentially reverse the effects of the deadly zombie outbreak and save the world in the process.

Speaker 1:

Young and the Dead has everything I love about comics, adventure, humor, horror, mystery and, of course, zombies.

Speaker 3:

This comic is my love letter to the kid adventure films of the 1980s, movies like the Goonies, the Monster Squad, explores, et and, more recently, stranger Things.

Speaker 3:

Young and the Dead captures all the nostalgia of that era of storytelling, only with a lot more zombies. Just think Goonies meets Night of the Living Dead. Now, for the first time, you'll be able to get the complete story and trade paperback. If you love 80s nostalgia, kid adventures, if you love zombies, then this is the book for you. The comic is currently funding on Kickstarterstarter. Just go to younginthedeadcom to learn more that sounds like a trip scott.

Speaker 1:

That sounds incredible. Uh, I meani, it sounds so 80s. Like when's the last time you heard of a person named tad sam and tad yeah, and like the whole time, even though you you mentioned the Goonies, monster Squad, et, stranger Things the whole time. I was picturing it as the Sega Genesis game Zombies Ate my Neighbors.

Speaker 2:

Oh, I've never played.

Speaker 1:

Oh, it's wonderful you have like 3D glasses. Your character has little 3D glasses, spiked hair, runs around with a squirt gun filled with holy water that he shoots all of his zombie neighbors with. Oh, it's uh pretty great that does sound great.

Speaker 2:

I love anything that's 80s nostalgia. I cannot tell a lie. I hope that there's like some 80s musical references too, because the stranger things song and soundtrack just fills my soul with joy. Yeah, but this sounds super fun and it's really exciting. There's a whole trade paperback available to purchase right now yeah, I'm excited to check it out yeah, thank you so much for sharing with us, scott. We can't wait to read it leah, let's talk about negan our favorite bat swinging authoritarian, yeah, yeah yeah, um, so negan a dictator.

Speaker 1:

I don't know if anybody knows that, but he is absolutely a dictator and we checked out this thing that we. Where did we find this Social media? Somewhere it's called the Dictator's Playbook. Yeah, I probably.

Speaker 2:

I don't remember the original, where I found it. Yeah, you sent it to me.

Speaker 2:

I don't remember. You should check this out. And then I was like we should make an episode about this. Well, that's, that is not what happened. Every good idea on this podcast is mine, just for the record. I'm kidding, but this one was I. We talked on our last casual dead about negan. I think we just briefly referenced that negan as a dictator and like running an empire, since that was the topic of the show, and I was really listening to it for some potential clips, which I then forgot to do because I'm dissociating, playing Catan most of the time now. Um, but I was listening to it and I heard that again I was like, wait, we could do a whole episode on Negan. Uh, to like think about what is, how do dictators come to be? And eventually, maybe in a future episode, how do they? How do they fall? How do we make sure that we can trounce them? Yeah, put them in jail.

Speaker 1:

In the case of negan, he doesn't die yeah, um yeah, and we found this, we, we found this on the uh, the dictator's playbook. They don't talk about negan, but they talk about all the tools that a dictator uses to take and hold on to power.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and the the show notes, will have a website and some book sources that it pulls from yeah, I think it's the dictator playbookcom yep to know, know the just dictator playbookcom. Very easy to remember. But before we get started, for the people who have just never watched the walking dead, can you give me a quick rundown of who negan is?

Speaker 1:

oh, uh, negan shows up. He negan is referenced in season six of the walking dead and we don't meet him until the very last episode of season six. Season seven is when we start seeing what negan is all about is a monster. Negan uses brutality to force his will upon survivors of the zombie wasteland to join him, yeah, and basically do his bidding and give him power.

Speaker 2:

He's been very successful at rebuilding society. Is it a society you'd want to live in?

Speaker 1:

I don't think so, but it's fairly similar to many that have existed in history from the dead um. So they have walls the dead can't get in. They have, uh, a large military force, um of negan's enforcers who keep them safe.

Speaker 1:

They have food, they have access to medicine and, if they sleep, with him, yeah, in some cases well, we'll talk more about how that operates, but, um, there's a lot of reasons that people want to be a part of negan's society. Um, but the thing is that negan and his people can't necessarily provide all the things that those people need, unless they go to communities that already have those things and then force them to pay tribute to them yeah, an empire.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, he's slowly trying to call us slowly. He was rapidly trying to colonize his surrounding area as far as he could with any other um group that had kind of figured out how to live again. And for those who have just never, uh, watched the walking dead to the point where there was negan, I feel like we need to give a shout out to the actor whose name is jeffrey dean morgan. Yeah, jeffrey dean morgan, this character, like I understand the brutality of stopping when you see glenn get his face bashed in and the eyeball popping out. I remember that moment. It was really shocking.

Speaker 2:

And then I think I watched a couple of episodes into season seven. This is back when it first came out. It was coming out live and I had to stop because I was like this is so fucking dark, like I can't help, I can't handle it and I'm personally not a huge fan of gore. So it was just really a lot. But then Dan came back into my life and convinced me that it was worth it and I'm so glad that I pushed through that part, thankfully, through that part. Thankfully. I knew that part was coming so I could just like look away. Yeah, um, so I'm encouraging you. If you find this interesting, it might be. It might be time to return back to the walking dead and watch negan's character, because he's fascinating and he's so well acted. Yeah, like you, what's scary about him? Like many dictators, he's very charming.

Speaker 2:

We'll get into that in a minute as well.

Speaker 1:

He's a very charming and likable guy. They want you to feel the same way that the people who are under his rule feel. They want you to feel as hopeless as everyone else and they want you to feel like your only choices are to submit or die. And that's why it's so hard to watch that season, but it's so worth it to watch it because you're not only going to see all of these tools of author, author, author, terror, dictatorship you can keep that, probably. Uh, you're not gonna. You're not just gonna see all these tools of dictatorship and all the brutality and the senseless violence, but you're also going to see how people resist it. And that's not a spoiler. You know the show's about rick, so you're going. You're going to see that happen. It's not a spoiler. You know the show's about Rick, so you're going to see that happen. It's not the Negan show, yeah.

Speaker 2:

So what we're going to do in this chat of ours today with you is that we're going to go through the four phases of the dictator's playbook. The first is phase one consolidate power. The second is phase two erode democratic institutions. Phase three establish totalitarian control. And phase four sustain your regime. And we're going to actually walk through all of the ways that Negan actually does this, and I think it's a great example of how good television is always drawing from reality.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, there's a lot to draw from.

Speaker 2:

Yes, there are so many examples of dictators in our history as a species.

Speaker 1:

It's not a new thing. It's been going on for a very, very long time do you think there was ever a chimpanzee dictator? Oh sure you think they have so same as coco coco and he wanted to control the entire supply of bananas do not blasphemy coco, he just died, and he was a bonobo. Who was? Who was coco? Hold on, I'm unfamiliar with this chimpanzee that you refer to as coco you don't?

Speaker 2:

oh coco's a gorilla, so you were deriving from something. I was thinking of konzi leah. Konzi's a bonobo that is species konzi did die and also, I'm pretty sure, coco is also dead. Let me just confirm this.

Speaker 1:

Yes, they died in 2018. I'm familiar with coco, the sign language regardless.

Speaker 2:

Coco and kanji, not dictators, but I think I said this before. But I find it really fascinating that our closest relatives are the bonobos and the chimpanzees and that the chimpanzees can be violent and kind of assholes and bonobos solve things very peacefully and very egalitarianly. If that's erotically and erotically, yes, sex erotically yes, sex solves everything. I think that Polymorphous Lee is the episode where that came out, where we talked about Bonobos, I think so I don't recall, but I do remember something about that yeah, Shout out to the zombie re-erection.

Speaker 2:

Only Sex Can Save Us. By Polymorphous Lee.

Speaker 1:

So let's go back to phase one. Okay, consolidate power. This is the first phase that you need to do if you want to be a dictator, and the first way that Negan is going to do it is he's going to exploit a power vacuum, take control of leadership from a weak predecessor during chaos. So Negan only hints to this. We don't actually see this happen because they're just talking um back and forth. Negan and his right hand person, simon, are talking about the person who was running the sanctuary before them and they say that. They say that he was weak and needed to be taken out. So they identified that their leader was not capable of leading them through this crisis and they, I imagine, used a lot of the things in this list to do it back then. But we don't see that because that's not part of the show.

Speaker 2:

They do hint to it more and more. In Dead City, the first season of Dead City, we'll get to learn a little bit more, which also is one of the better spinoffs, I will say.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you know what I mean it's definitely better than daryl dixon.

Speaker 2:

Don't. Even daryl is a betrayal of the entire. It really is it's universe. It's upsetting, norman reedus, you betrayed us anyways, oh poor norman why poor norman, he's making money, poor rich norman.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so, uh. The second thing is uh, crises are actually opportunities. Um so, for a dictator? For a dictator, absolutely for a dictator, because the postal apocalyptic disorder of the walking dead made people desperate for leadership, and that's where Negan stepped in. He became the strong man that stepped in and said I'm going to lead you through this. All you have to do is give me all of your loyalty.

Speaker 2:

Yep, and there's a really great book that still stands true today. If you haven't read it, it's called the Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, a Canadian, which is a critique of neoliberalism. It was written in 2007. Which is a critique of neoliberalism. It was written in 2007. Basically, she shows this mechanism of shock therapy where, anytime there's any kind of crisis that's when global powers, united States and some others Are you okay? Through mechanisms like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, do these things called shock therapy, where they introduce new legislation when a country's constituents are just too overwhelmed to contest them because they're dealing with crisis, sounds familiar. Palestine is going through that right now, where it's like we're, you know, literally there is Trump's vision of taking over Palestine and making it into his own little paradise and essentially controlling it, so that's very similar.

Speaker 1:

He wants to open a casino that he'll bankrupt.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I have not read the Shock Doctrine, so I should probably check that out. It'll be good. It's depressing. Good research for what I'm doing. Next on the list Savior Complex. Literally, he calls his people the saviors. They live in the sanctuary. He presents himself as the only one who can enforce peace and order yeah, without him, it's chaos, it's zombies, it's definitely death.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you know, you trade your freedom and your sense of autonomy and your own mind for safety by the saviors yeah and uh.

Speaker 1:

Charismatic rule next in the list. I mean that's kind of negan's thing yeah, negan is incredibly charming yeah uh, you would like him until you knew anything about him he gives you a five mile smile as he's bashing your head in yeah, he looks horrifyingly happy about it yeah, um, also he, he's got this unique persona.

Speaker 1:

He's got the leather jacket, the slicked back hair, the big smile. He's handsome. He's handsome, he's got good jokes, he's strong. He has a baseball bat, who has a name, lucille, that he uses as a tool to implement this, this vision, this, uh vision of his persona and uh, the whole idea is to appear strong and iconic and irreplaceable. Like you can't replace negan, who's taken?

Speaker 2:

negan's place. Everyone is negan, which we'll get to in a second, but the other thing that he does is like inside of the sanctuary, which is like what an old factory, dan yeah, it's like a.

Speaker 1:

I think it's a steel mill. They have a foundry.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, they probably make steel parts and they have multiple locations, but the main location is this uh big building and he always addresses his people from this balcony. Yeah, so he has this like um bravado about him and everybody just stops and listens when negan speaks. You do not talk back to negan yeah, also.

Speaker 1:

They are forced to bend the knee, kneel before him and he does not accept any talk back yep at all um propaganda and messaging. Uh, he has a mantra wait, don't say it dan.

Speaker 2:

Who are you?

Speaker 1:

I am negan why I am negan am Negan. I don't know, I don't know the answer to why?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, probably nobody's allowed to even ask that question, why they have to say I am Negan that would really fuck somebody up.

Speaker 1:

if Negan was just like why? Then they'd just be like what yeah?

Speaker 2:

So he has this phrase that he makes everybody who is a part of his sanctuary and wants to be a savior Say I am Negan, who is a part of his sanctuary and wants to be a savior, say I am everyone.

Speaker 1:

If he says who are you, you have to say I am negan. That's right. It erases uh personal identity and spreads loyalty through identity control. Um, you'll see this like in cults, where, like you give people new names or you make them dress a certain way dare I say there might be some comparisons and correlations between cult leadership and a dictator.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, a little bit, yeah. Another tool that they're going to use is he's going to discredit his rivals. Episode of season six where or no? First episode of season seven where, after um killing two of his people, he degrades rick in front of alexandria. He does that through multiple episodes, making him carry around lucille um, giving him the power to kill negan and, knowing that he won't, just to degrade his authority also incredible, acting like rick looks destroyed, absolutely destroyed, because he is he is.

Speaker 2:

He is psychologically tortured in a way that is also, I will say, like one of the more painful episodes to watch.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, the initial torture that he does to make him submit to him and and the whole idea is that he wants to undermine that leadership and that's going to keep people from rebelling If they don't have a leader that they can believe in. You know, certain current events remind me of this. When a leader shows themselves to not be a very good leader, suddenly people lose faith that they can rebel against something.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, but also if that person that you did trust says to you we have to go along with this yeah they're not standing up. Why would you stand up?

Speaker 1:

yeah you're suddenly alone in this rebellion feels very familiar with.

Speaker 2:

I think a lot of us feel abandoned by the folks who are considered our um democratic leaders, chuck schumer, like if they don't stand up, how are we, the little people, supposed to stand up? And I think that that is psychologically like really makes a lot more people submit.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, he also uses fear to reduce leaders like Ezekiel from the king kingdom and Gregory from the hilltop into submissive roles.

Speaker 2:

Briefly, the kingdom and the hilltop are two other communities that are relatively near Alexandria, which is where I think if you've watched this, you know that he treats the hilltop.

Speaker 1:

The kingdom is much more like. He knows that Ezekiel is going to err on the side of caution. So, instead of risking having to go to war with these people, he knows that Ezekiel will do the things that he wants him to do. If he just gives him a good deal and promises that he will keep his end of the bargain yeah, whereas Gregory, the leader of Hilltop, is a sycophant him a good deal and promises that he will keep his end of the bargain yeah, whereas gregory, the leader of hilltop, is a sycophant yeah, and he just, he just dominates gregory and gregory just capitulates to his every, every whim because he's afraid that he'll be, uh, executed and have his head chopped off and he also wants to maintain his leadership.

Speaker 2:

so he gets to be the leader of hilltop because negan still sees him as a leader of Hilltop. Meanwhile, people really have lost faith in him because he's a shitty leader. Watch the show, see why. And you can see these real life opposition suppression examples happening right now in the United States, like with Mahmoud Khalil being detained and trying to be deported. You can look at Turkey, putin, obviously, and Russia, venezuela. You can look at Turkey, putin, obviously, and Russia, venezuela. There's lots of examples of places where anybody who has a different view is said to be the enemy. You might be heading towards a dictatorship slash in one.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, well, good thing that's not happening. No, that would never happen here. And finally, you want to divide and co-opt Division. Are there any examples of somebody trying to divide a people that you can think of in order to co-opt them?

Speaker 2:

I mean, some people are really attached to the colors red or blue, Like really attached.

Speaker 1:

The directions of both left and right.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, um, whether or not they like animals like a donkey or an elephant, yeah, which I really like elephants I like them both and I like the color red. I don't want to have to choose this way yeah, what if you like purple?

Speaker 1:

that's true, yeah somebody needs.

Speaker 2:

We need a third party. That's the purple. We can call the purple people eating party.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, although that doesn't sound very appealing, people eating, never mind group, um, some, some nails that were sticking up, that he needed to hammer down, some areas where he needed to divide rebellious parts of that group in order to undermine the group as a whole. And and two that are most obvious are daryl and eugene can I talk about daryl?

Speaker 2:

yeah I think the why he treats daryl in the way that you're about to describe and this is Daryl Dixon, the Daryl Dixon we know and love, not the new Disney Daryl, no. Disney Daryl, no. This is the Daryl we've come to love through many seasons of the Walking Dead. I think that's because he knew that Daryl was second in command and he knew that Daryl was not having any of it. He could see it and he had to try and also make sure that that person was not there to also organize a resistance.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think also he recognized right away that Daryl has a rebellious nature, daryl's kind of like a wild dog, and that's how Negan sees him, and he thinks you can either shoot this wild dog that's crazy and trying to bite you, or you can try to tame it and the way that he thinks that is best is to um, isolate in prison, starve, emotionally, manipulate him like the entire time that he's locked in a closet and starved and like being tortured with with music. What was that song? Uh, easy street it will absolutely be easy street.

Speaker 1:

We're using that for the thumbnail episode, yeah, and instagram and and the whole time that he's in that closet, he is feeling the guilt of being responsible for glenn's death. Because glenn dies because daryl stands up and tries to attack Negan and Negan doesn't kill Daryl, he kills Glenn instead Because he could have just killed Daryl and had that problem solved and it would have been a more just solution to what he was perceiving as a threat. But he also saw potential in daryl. If he could turn daryl and uh indoctrinate him, daryl could be one of his lieutenants absolutely one of his best, his, his, uh catchphrase is people are resources, which is true.

Speaker 2:

I would like to say that in our jobs, we're called human resources, which is kind of creepy. I never thought about that. Oh, I've always thought I'm like I'm a resource, okay, got it, but people are resources. And so it's one of his ethos, like, while he will willingly kill people, he I think one of the I don't want to say nicer parts of Negan, but like he doesn't want to kill people, actually he does it when he thinks he needs to.

Speaker 1:

So, like in the case of, like Abraham and Glenn, his, his idea behind that is I'll kill two people and that means I won't have to kill 25 people or 50 people who have been honestly highly antagonistic and aggressive against my people and attacked first.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, we should say if you've never watched the Walking Dead. Rick's rip is not entirely innocent in this circumstance. Yeah, but that's a whole other can of worms. I think the point here on division and co-option is that he figures out what a person is most likely to succumb to and uses it, like with Eugene, who we have a history of seeing as being very soft, yeah, and using people for the for his own survival. He just gives him everything he wants.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, he uses comfort and flattery. He knows that the same thing that he thinks will work on daryl isn't necessary for eugene. It probably would work, but he knows that if he just gives eugene a comfortable apartment with video games and kettle cooked potato potato chips, that eugene is. He you're not. You're not even gonna have to ask. He's gonna be like I am negan. I figured out this riddle.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, the riddle is I am negan and I will use all of my massive big brain to do things for you, negan. Yeah, let's move on to phase two. So we have, at this point, consolidated power. Negan's got it. Good job, negan, you're doing great at your dictatorship project a plus.

Speaker 1:

The next phase is to erode any kind of other institution that is democratic or involved, where people the people make decisions collectively yeah, he had a really um, a really big advantage in this department and he probably had to do more of this in the off-screen part in the beginning, where he took over the sanctuary that we don't know about. What we see is the result of what he's done off screen that we don't know about. So the first thing is you control all the decision making. So, while he does have a board of advisors that we learn about in season eight, um, there's there's no council, there's no voting. Negan's word is absolute.

Speaker 2:

Sounds like somebody we know yeah, the the council that he has is vying for his ear because they know that it gives them additional power within the context, but they don't have any actual power without negan giving them power and saying I agree with you, we should do this even with his advisors simon uh, not dan's brother. An evil simon a different.

Speaker 1:

Simon um eugene becomes part of that. He's got a few other lieutenants in there. Dwight is one of them. I can also see an interplay there where him asking them for their opinions is him gathering information to make a better decision. But also it's this game where he is playing with how valuable they think they are and playing them against each other so that they don't get comfortable and work together with them because they are the closest to him. They have the best chance of just putting them out.

Speaker 2:

It's actually a good point that he's dividing them.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

He makes it so they compete with each other for Negan's favor, which I wonder what it's like behind the scenes in our current federal administration. If it feels like that, it's probably it's probably exactly like yeah um so, at the end of the day, there's no council, there's no vote, there's no vote. Negan's word is law. You do what negan says or there are consequences. Yeah, like your life, or like somebody else's life, or getting an iron to the face.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, or something worse. Yeah, he creates a legal illusion. So he talks about the rules and they are framed as being totally necessary. Without rules, you have chaos. None of this works without rules. He tells us all of these things and, yes, it's good to have chaos. None of this works without rules. He tells us all of these things and yes, it's good to have rules. And I and that's one of the things that I do like about Negan's society is that he understood the importance of having rules and making sure that people follow those rules. Um, but the thing is, the rules really only serve his own interests. Yeah, so he has rules. Like everyone kneels before him, everyone answers I am Negan. No one touches his harem of wives. No one runs away you run away.

Speaker 2:

You die, yeah, or they're going to try to kill you.

Speaker 1:

He controls whether or not somebody can have uh intimacy with another person. So, like in the case of of dwight, he offers dwight the opportunity to have sex with a person because he did a good job but not his actual wife, who's now negan's wife, not, not, not her, but he does offer Not her, but he does offer a time together for them.

Speaker 1:

Just no touching, because that's against the rules. But that was also a loyalty test and Dwight turned it down. And also, whatever he says about the resources that he wants, he gets it. He gets everything he wants. He doesn't actually have to follow the rules. Everybody else does. He doesn't actually have to follow the rules. Everybody else does. He is the law.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and here's where capitalism comes in, because a lot of his way of looking at things is capitalistic. He makes sure that all of the people who are resources for him have something to scrape by. So he doesn't take every single thing, but he takes enough that it makes it really hard. It makes it really hard to survive. Yeah, sound familiar.

Speaker 1:

Just enough so that they feel safe from the outside world, but not enough that they feel like they don't have to contribute anymore because they have everything they need.

Speaker 2:

Well, I think that the folks inside the sanctuary might feel safe, but the colonies that he has, oh yeah, they don't feel safe, but they know that if they give it to him, they're at least safe from Negan.

Speaker 1:

I don't see the people in the colonies as being sanctuary citizens. They are the externalized workforce that is under Negan's rule.

Speaker 2:

That's a good point. Going back again to division and co-option, I think that that's a really clear intention, because you get to be. If you're a member of the sanctuary, you have privileges and you have access to things and you can. It's portrayed as a meritocracy where you can, like, earn your way up. Yeah, but it's not. Earning your way up is just doing whatever Negan says.

Speaker 1:

basically, and that goes into suppressing alternatives. So communities like Alexandria and the Kingdom are not allowed independent governance or military strength. I think that these are really good examples. These communities are actually colonies. Negan has colonized these communities and now they serve the saviors, but they don't necessarily benefit from the sanctuary other than the sanctuary. Just won't attack them if they play by the rules yeah, that's the benefit.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's people do it and that if they do what he says, then at least he'll take less of their resources and they can have a little more comfortable, have a little more food to rely on.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, um, eliminating key institutions. So we mentioned that. He overthrew the previous leader of the sanctuary, emerged as a strong man. There's also another really great example where, for reasons that we'll discuss in a bit, he needs a new doctor. Hilltop has one. And they're like come with us, You're our new doctor now you live at the sanctuary, you just got an upgrade. And meanwhile the people at the Hilltop are like what are we supposed to do? We have medical needs. So they removed that institution of health care. And they're like well, we don't want to leave you high and dry, so they left behind a pallet of ibuprofen.

Speaker 2:

That fixes everything, yeah, especially your liver. Take it every day multiple times, yeah.

Speaker 1:

I actually learned from personal experience that ibuprofen is fine for your liver. It's terrible for your digestive system, oh yeah.

Speaker 2:

Let's not. You should never take medical advice from us. Just saying that for legal purposes.

Speaker 1:

Right now, my medical advice is don't take ibuprofen three times a day every day for 20 years.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, don't do that. But if you're looking to be a dictator, you got to move on to phase three, which is establishing totalitarian control. Yeah, fun, yeah. So what are you going to do to make sure that you have full totalitarian control? You need to eliminate dissent with brutality.

Speaker 1:

We see a lot of that. That's the thing that people are upset about when they watch the Walking Dead. He killed Abraham and Glenn in front of all of their best friends, slash Maggie, who was especially upset.

Speaker 2:

Glenn's wife Glenn.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, there's a, the doctor that I mentioned before, glenn's wife working with one of his wives to facilitate a relationship outside of Negan's harem marriage. Um, and just suspicion of that was enough for him to take that doctor and throw him into a furnace and burn him alive in front of everybody while they were taking the knee. Um, this was after, uh, maiming the boyfriend of his harem wife after he confronted them and he admitted to it and he burned his face with an iron. So he's eliminating that descent with brutality.

Speaker 2:

And that creates a culture of fear, which is the next part of this, where you, first of all, you have to kneel and repeat I am Negan, because if you don't't, it could be you going into the fire, it could be you being branded with a hot iron on your face, like dwight, who resisted at one point yeah, dwight get.

Speaker 1:

Dwight has a bad scar on his face that he didn't have a season before and that's because he escaped with his wife and somebody else um and stole some insulin and they just wanted to escape. They wanted freedom and they ended up going back um for a variety of reasons survival.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, feeling like there's no other option. Um, didn't want to live on the run, I guess, but yeah, the culture, the culture of fear, that that's. That's something that we. That is the most obvious when we're watching the walking dead in these seasons is that he is cultivating fear among everyone.

Speaker 2:

He's ruling with fear and he controls the economy. Which the economy? Is this like fancy word for how you get what you need. That's what it is. Yeah, economy is just the systems in place that help people get what they need and distribute what is available, uh, fairly or unfairly yeah, um.

Speaker 1:

So he has a few ways to do this. First of all, he controls access to supplies like medicine, weapons and food weapons. He just takes them away, unless you're part of his, uh, military group, his paramilitary group. Um, because he wants everybody dependent on him for things like the tribute system. The tribute system is the things that he does with the communities slash colonies, yeah, where he takes a certain percentage of everything that they have. It doesn't matter if it's things that they grow in their field, if it's the ammunition that's in their vault, it doesn't matter if it's medicine or if it's beds or furniture. He's taking it and he is allowing you to keep half of it. That's the tribute system.

Speaker 2:

It's like If you're being good. If you're not good, you don't get. You get less Lucky you.

Speaker 1:

You get to keep half of everything you work so hard for Instead of 100% of it. But if you want 100% of it, then we are going to come and bash your gate down and let in a horde of zombies and then shoot you and burn your houses down. It's a great show, uh. Within, within the sanctuary, they have a point system, and points is like more like monetary money currency, so everybody works for points. They keep track of how many points everybody has. If you want to buy a sandwich sandwiches are like the main food item that everybody wants um, but if you want a sandwich, you got to buy it with points. If you want a tv vcr combo so you can watch sitcoms from the 90s, you got to buy that with points. If you want an ipod that's loaded with a bunch of music, you got to buy that with points, and they keep track of it.

Speaker 2:

It's just disturbing. The parallels of our real world, and even before things got to the point that they are right now like this is capitalism with a dictator. I think that communism is often the one that is perceived and shown historically as where authoritarians or dictators show up. But we are in a capitalist economy and we are on the verge of a dictatorship in this country right now. Um, and just show, it's not really. Those two things are separate.

Speaker 2:

You can have an economic system, and then you have the people who enforce it, the political control, uh, and so points really are just money. And then there's the illusion of meritocracy, like you earned it, which makes you a better person. Right, you have more respect if you have more points, if you're closer to negan, the more respect you get, the more you can abuse others too. Um, so let's move to phase four sustain the regime. So at the point in which we are meeting negan, this is basically what he's doing. And then he's doing stuff along all the other four phases to either bring in new colonies, uh, suppressed dissent, things like that. But now you know he's, he's built a very impressive empire.

Speaker 2:

We have to give him credit yeah, he was very successful yeah, uh, rick thought and his group thought that they were just like one. What they thought was the entire thing, the entire community and civilization, was an outpost of Negans, their regime.

Speaker 1:

They're going to maintain a monopoly on violence, so they're going to have their own armed loyal inner circle of lieutenants. They're also going to have their armed paramilitary groups that go out into the wild to find communities, to find resources to do bad things to people. But only these trusted people are going to be allowed to be armed and they are going to be quite violent and they are going to be tested there's.

Speaker 2:

They are not immune from the possibility of, like dwight, uh like others, of uh a downfall. If negan doesn't, for whatever reason, decides that they're not 100 trustworthy, yeah, so they have to keep earning his trust by being loyal.

Speaker 1:

Also, he's going to distract with external threats Also sounds familiar. So things like the walkers, the other communities, people who defect, people who defect Traitors from within, the constant threats that are trying to undermine his control, these are all going to be framed as being evil or subhuman, existential threats that not only want to take out Negan but destroy their way of life, all of their safety, take away all their stuff and possibly kill everybody inside because they just hate you so much.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, those people at the hilltop and Alexandria, they want your sandwich.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, they don't have sandwiches at the hilltop.

Speaker 2:

And that's because they it's their fault.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, really they hate us for our sandwiches, our freedom sandwiches.

Speaker 2:

So with external threats, we already see that. I think the obvious examples are with ice and deportation and detention of people who are considered to be quote unquote threats, even though many of them end up just being gardeners or regular people who don't agree with Trump. I want to just briefly share with you what that does. So Trump enacted the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and said we have an emergency. So he's manufactured a threat, essentially by doing all this weird shit with the tariffs. A lot of his executive orders are about this, like perceived threat of other countries of people who don't identify as male or female or are intersex Like I love that. That executive order just thinks those people don't exist, or female or are intersex. Like I, I love that. That executive order just thinks those people don't exist.

Speaker 2:

Um, and the emergency this emergency economic act allows him to do things that otherwise he would not be allowed to do a fun one. As an example, by using he used this act to order the removal of social media platforms like tiktok back in 2020, before the end of his first presidency. Oh, wow, that was because of the quote-unquote national emergency, uh, of having a china-based company running a popular platform. Yeah, he tried. Nope, that that's not an issue anymore. Like nobody, I haven't heard anything about tiktok yeah, well, this is the the one.

Speaker 1:

in 2020, though, he was unsuccessful, and then he successfully tried to remove it in January of 2025. And that lasted like 12 hours because he was like wait a second. I have a lot of supporters on TikTok who are spreading my misinformation for me. I want that back.

Speaker 2:

So he manufactures this crisis and then, through the benevolence of the dictator, he gave it back to us and, literally, the gay rights attacked Islam.

Speaker 1:

And also the first presidency of Trump, we saw a ban on any Muslim countries, just framing people who he didn't like as dangerous enemies, a convenient scapegoat.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, basically.

Speaker 1:

And that's a really common tool to influence the people into thinking that there is something out there trying to hurt them.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and it's one of the strategies, which is to use indoctrination, yeah, to convince people that the narrative that you're sharing is true and this is the enemy. Yeah, to convince people that the narrative that you're sharing is true and this is the enemy. Like, if you read, um, fortunately, because I live in vermont now and I'm not married to somebody anymore who had, horrifyingly, uh, white supremacist family members uh, I don't have to deal with it every day, but I do still have some folks on facebook that were like acquaintances that I see post once in a while their love of trump and they believe all of it. They believe that immigrants are the enemy, um, and that trump is doing wonderful things and it's all going to be better because of his tariffs.

Speaker 2:

they have been fully indoctrinated they believe that he won all of those golf tournaments so we can't talk about negan and his dictatorship and empire without talking about how he uses it to abuse women specifically. Um, I want to come on the record here and say this might be unpopular polygamy a one man having many wives is not, on its face, evil. Okay, it is a marriage structure that's exist, for existed for a very long time in many cultures. However, when it is through, uh, coercion and threat of violence, it's a problem. Yeah, when the, the women, don't have actual power or decision making involved, that's a problem. And, uh, this is the one area that, in the future, we see negan possibly have some regret about and shame yeah, and, and it starts.

Speaker 1:

I mean so, negan, he, his harem of wives are typically former spouses of people that work for him, either his lieutenants or people that are just working in the uh, in the compound, the, the sanctuary, and usually they need something like they need medicine, like insulin, or their family member needs medicine or their spouse has done something that Negan wants to punish them severely for. So they agree to marry Negan, and when they agree to marry Negan, that means that he now has ownership over them. They are his wives now.

Speaker 2:

And they all dress the same, in little black dresses the LBD.

Speaker 1:

Little cocktail dresses. They hang out in his loft and he has his pick of whoever he wants. And he doesn't see a problem with this because he doesn't have to play by the rules.

Speaker 2:

He has different rules he does say that he would never um that that sexual assault's not okay. But again I want to be clear that uh man trigger warning already.

Speaker 2:

Sorry too late this is absolutely sexual assault, because even folks who claim that they're there for their own free will, they're there because in one example, the woman needed medicine for her mom and negan could provide it if she just have sex with him and be his wife, yeah, and and by by the end of season eight, rick confronts him about this and I really appreciate this part of the story because in that moment, you know, he calls Negan out for sexual assault while they're while they're fighting to the death.

Speaker 1:

And Negan's like I never forced myself on anyone. And uh, and that's when Rick is like I've heard about your harem, are those women there by choice? And then, like you see this moment where he's thinking about it and he's he doesn't like the answer that comes from his mind.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, but he doesn't. He still has them until he can't yeah, well, the end is coming.

Speaker 1:

At that point, yeah, which is something that we'll talk about in a later episode do you think that he adjusts his propaganda or strategies in any way?

Speaker 1:

ah, I don't have any examples off the top of my head, but he's. I mean, if you don't adapt, you don't survive. Yeah, so you know, strategy is always an adapting thing. So like that's what he saw with Eugene. Eugene was a way to strategically adapt to a situation. Eugene had a lot of ideas about things like how to keep walkers from rotting on the fence, which he decided to pour molten metal over the walkers while being pushed against the fence so that they were welded to the fence and kept other walkers away. Very innovative, ingenious, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Also a disturbing visual.

Speaker 1:

Well done ANC. Yeah, negan says that is rad as hell. The reason that Eugene comes under fire from Neggan and gets abducted in the first place is because he manufactures bullets for rosita, who tries to assassinate him, and he saw the value of somebody smart enough in the wasteland to be able to manufacture a bullet. And you want to channel that resource and it comes in handy later because ammunition scarcity becomes a problem for the saviors in their war against Alexandria and their partners.

Speaker 2:

So, having heard all of this, I feel like if you haven't watched the Walking Dead, you may be feeling a lot of dread and a lot of like oh shit. This sounds very familiar, even if it's in a zombie wasteland equivalent, and this is why I think you should watch the show, because there are actually a lot of ways that people fight back and eventually this empire crumbles and eventually Negan falls. And the different strategies that people use, the resistance efforts that happen some that fail, some that require the sacrifice of life are not necessarily always easy to watch, but I think that they are a very useful allegory that we can learn from if we think about it that way. Or you could read some great books like how Democracies Die by Stephen Levitsky and Daniel Zablatt, or, dan's favorite, the Anatomy of Fascism, by Robert R Paxton. Or On Tyranny 20 Less lessons from the 20th century by Timothy Schneider.

Speaker 3:

That's your favorite. I said the wrong one, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Oh, there's also a great one called the dictator's handbook, why bad behavior is always almost always good politics. And apparently there's a PBS documentary which I kind of want to watch now, called the dictator's playbook, which is this I found.

Speaker 1:

I found that trying to find the link for the dictator's playbook that we're talking about in this episode.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it profiles figures like Saddam Hussein, kim Il-sung, can you say Kim Il-sung?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, he's one of the dictators of North Korea before Kim Jong-un and Kim Jong-il.

Speaker 2:

They're going to have to update this with other examples. There's plenty, yeah.

Speaker 1:

Also the Freedom House report. What, what's that? I don't know. It's on your list, but I just read it I haven't read it myself from freedomhouseorg. We'll have all the links down there in this in the description. If you want to read these. I'm pretty sure on tyranny you can read online, but also I'm I think it was free on audible. Um, if I'm not mistaken, free or very cheap because it's a it's kind of a short read. I was you, you, uh, you get through the audiobook in like an hour or two and apparently you can stream the print the dictator's playbook, uh, live from pbs.

Speaker 2:

So we'll add that to the show notes because it's free and I think let's watch it. Probably worth watching, yeah yeah, I want to watch it it's important to recognize what these things are, because I know back in like 2017, 2016, 2015, many people made it very clear that this is where we were heading. Yeah, and a lot of us, including myself, was like I don't know if we should be comparing it to hitler oh my god.

Speaker 1:

Even even jd vance was telling us that this was going to happen. Really, marco rubio was telling us that this was going to happen. And now they are trump's biggest supporters. Love it, because they're sycophants. They gain. They gain from contributing to the system. They're gregory's on the hill. Um, you've got some other books to read here that you have listed.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there are some other suggested books. When I was looking up examples of books around dictatorships, I have not read them, except for the last one Strongman Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum. The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt I have talked about Hannah Arendt before, an amazing academic, and this one I have read. Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward S Herman is a really, really great one. But again, we could just dive into the dissociative world of the Walking Dead. Feel like it's too depressing to look at real life examples, but you want to be thinking about ways you could resist. I think that there's an actual playbook of resistance in the walking dead too, which is what we're going to talk about in our next casual dead, unless something really heinous happens between now and then that we have to talk about instead. That's possibility yeah, um.

Speaker 1:

What I love about all these books, all this suggested reading which links in the description, um is that it helps me understand things like the Walking Dead more, and this helps my writing when I'm reading on tyranny. This is helping inform me how these systems work and improves my writing, because that's what I'm writing about, and improves my writing because that's what I'm writing about. So, if you're interested in the zombie apocalypse and this is a part of your story whether or not they run into a big force like Negan or just some random psychopath understanding how these things work might give you some ideas Exactly.

Speaker 2:

And it was an excuse for us to talk about the Walking Dead, which we haven't done very much.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's true, there's so much to talk about. Think we need time after watching season 11. We need a time so season. We talked about season 11 on episode 9 and since then it's it's either just us talking about how terrible daryl dixon is or just like raging about how bad season 11 was.

Speaker 2:

Didn't we do an episode on the ones who live? I feel like we did. I think we, yeah, we probably did. I can look this up. I do have a list. Hold on, it was good.

Speaker 1:

How about that? That's our, that's our one sentence it was good.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it wasn't the best, but it was good. Yeah, yeah, and we'll eventually probably do on dead city, maybe when the next season comes out. Yeah, you know what dead city? Pretty great, really enjoyed it. A couple of flaws, but overall pretty great yeah, a couple flaws, but it's no daryl dixon I want to know are you convinced to go back and watch the walking dead now, or are you just saying I can't do it, it's too much like reality?

Speaker 1:

let us know, because I I feel like if you aren't watching tool at least the end of season eight, like you're not actually getting the full walking dead experience. I agree, you can quit after season eight. Nine and ten are fine. Eleven's horrible, yep um eleven.

Speaker 2:

You can just skip, you can just do it I know you liked a few of the first episodes, but take it from people who have now watched the entire series multiple times yeah, um, but thanks everybody for uh tuning in to the zombie book club.

Speaker 1:

Do people tune into things anymore?

Speaker 2:

I mean, they're not turning a dial back and forth, that dial they're going to their podcast app and going oh, zombie book club has a new episode.

Speaker 1:

let me click on that and they turn that dial to go to the Zombie Book Club podcast. Yeah, exactly how it works. If you want to give us some support we talked about this at the very beginning you can leave a rating, preferably five stars Love, five stars Delicious. You can also leave us a review we love those. You can also send us a voicemail up to three minutes at 614-699-0006. You could even leave us a, a, uh, an elevator pitch, if you have a book that you want to pitch to us and talk about?

Speaker 2:

um, yeah, that's always a bright spot, especially now, like I love hearing about people's amazing ideas. And don't forget to go check out young and the dead.

Speaker 1:

No zombies allowed by scott, check out young and dead. It's not a soap opera, it's a comic book. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Goonies meets night of the living dead Sounds amazing, yeah.

Speaker 1:

You can also follow us on Instagram at zombie book club podcast. Hey, if you're on blue sky, look me up, Dan the zombie writer. You can also search for Zombie Book Club Podcast and my name will pop up.

Speaker 2:

Yep, and, last but not least, dan made a newsletter because all of this is going to fall one day.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, one day, it's all going to collapse and we're going to need you on a list so that we can tell you when there's a new episode.

Speaker 2:

I think the truth is that Dan wants to be a dictator, and this is his way of collecting followers is through the newsletter. So if you want to be a part of our sanctuary and say I am Dan, this is what you do, and on that note, I'd like to end with this note. On that note, I'd like to end with a note, A few notes. Tell me about this note.

Speaker 1:

We're in the middle of a hostile government takeover. I want to talk about it, but I'll be late for work. And if you say wait a minute, do we have to stop this?

Speaker 2:

We have one, but you didn't want that lady in autism. Bye everyone, Bye everybody. Bye, Bye.

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