The Plebeian Power Hour
Season 1
by Kim and Tiffer
In today's discussion we go back to a bit of obscure history with the story of the Jonestown Massacre. In 1978 918 people were killed in a strange tale of murder suicide. A religious / communist group from the US calling themselves the People's Temple go to live in a commune that they built from scratch in Guyana. We discuss the life of Jim Jones, the charismatic leader whose followers built Jonestown, as well as the events that led a US congressman to fly down to Guyana to investigate Jonestown, ultimately leading to the murder of the congressman, and the revolutionary suicide of over 900 Peoples Temple members. The story is even more bizarre than we were able to cover, and is almost too strange to believe even barring the outlandish CIA MK Ultra conspiracy theory.
We talk about the fires in Maui that have left thousands without homes, and thousands dead or missing. But we really start getting into the crazy conspiracies that have popped up regarding the fires. There have been more, and crazier, conspiracies around these fires than there have been around top US officials suggesting we have alien space craft (I guess people tire of the same old conspiracies and are happy to have a change of topic in the conspiracy arena). There are underlying questions about society and trust that pop up when conspiracies hit this level of popularity and craziness, and we're sure that things are about to get stranger (deep fakes, AI, and who knows what else).
This episode we went off on some strange tangents around politics. The idea for the podcast came from a simple question that we never really answered, and don't know how to answer. How did we get to where we are now politcally? Or more specifically how did we end up with the two least popular presidential candidates in 2016, followed by 2020, with a pretty good indicator that 2024 is setting itself up to be the most surreal election in the history of the US. We clearly don't have any answers, but we do have some fun discussing politics in general.
On July 26th, 2023, the House Oversight Committee held a hearing titled "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications in National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency" and it sounded so fun we thought we'd spend some time talking about it. UAPs are the new UFOs, and they're making a comeback. The bombshell congressional hearing dropped some serious accusations about a government coverup of its alien encounters, and us plebes are here to get to the actual truth. This was a tailor made, open ended, choose your own conspiracy adventure, and we had a lot of fun talking about it.
We're following up on our last two episodes discussing the US China relationship, and get to modern times. We give our hot takes on the current relationship between the US and China for whatever those are worth. Are we headed to war? I can tell you for sure that we don't have any clue, but we had a good time discussing it.
We're picking up where we left off, around the end of WW2, and we discuss the Communist Party taking over and the policies they enacted while in power. We talk a little about the conflicts, Korea, Vietnam, as well as the conflicts surrounding Taiwan.
We'd already talked a little about US China relations in a previous episode, but in this episode we focus more on Chinese History, starting around the opium wars in the early 1800s, and going until just after WW2.
After seeing on the news that there were Russian tanks barreling towards Moscow we got really excited and decided that would be the topic of our next podcast. Whatever was happening with that fizzled out, or more specifically didn't live up to our expectations, but we had fun with the topic anyway. Please note that any comments about bombing countries to smithereens (sic) are in jest, and in addition we make some conspiratorial accusations with nothing to back them up. But we hope you enjoy
We go on another meandering trip around another topic that's probably a little too big to fit into our podcast. We get into the labor wars of the late 1800s, talking a little about the formation of labor unions, the labor conflicts that led to 100s of deaths, and end with a little tie in to the mafia. Somehow we even cover an assassination plot against Lincoln (not the successful one).
We're back with another overlong episode where we do our best to give you the plebeian take on the civil war. We discuss the causes, (spoiler, it's slavery), some of the major battles, and ramble on about topics like the morality of secession. We had a good time learning, or relearning, a lot of this and we hope you have a good time too. We come in under two hours, which is definitely not enough time to get in depth about anything, but we do our best to cover