Hello, I'm Michael Watson, joined by Sarah Lee, and this is the Influence Watch podcast.

Just before Christmas, the Federal Justice Department secured indictments against four alleged radical-left domestic terrorists,

alleged to be affiliated with the Turtle Island Liberation Front.

Our colleague Robert Stilson is deeply familiar with the notion of Turtle Island,

a name for the North American continent derived from Native American mythology that radical

leftists increasingly used to show they deny the legitimacy of the American and Canadian

governments. He joins us today to discuss the radical left's increasing rejection of America's

existence and how the mainstream center left

appeases the radicals with land acknowledgments. Robert, welcome back. Thanks, Mark.

So what is, what is Turtle Island? And why is the radical left so big on it? Yeah, I mean,

that's a context-specific question, right? I mean, it's most properly,

it's a name for, in certain American Indian cultures, it's a name that refers to the land

beneath them, right? Whatever they viewed that as Turtle Island, it's generally taken to

geographically refer to North America. But what the article was really about was how, you know,

a certain activist segment of both academia and the nonprofit sector has taken to using the phrase

Turtle Island in the course of their attacks upon or delegitimization of the United States of America and Israel, typically, too.

And so that's what I focused on.

So this can all get very esoteric and very like, why should I care?

You've got these crazy people in academia.

Okay, these guys tried to do crimes, but they were

not very smart and got arrested very quickly. How can this affect people's real lives?

Yeah, that's a good question. You know, because there's always the, you've got the people on the ground that do it, like the Turtle Island Liberation Front folks that go that, you know, because there's always the, you've got the people on the ground that do it, like

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