Sean Williams
speaker
3,152 appearances
9 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 8 Sep
Sean Williams’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
Appearances
The wall's not coming down, man.
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The wall's very big.
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Anyway, at this point, you would be forgiven for thinking, why is this flat white drinking journalist going on about a land deal involving the Trump family?
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Is he just trying to ride the coattails of controversy to get a few more clicks?
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Is he actually going to talk about organized crime at all?
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And you would have a point.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Yeah, you would.
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So let's park the now and dive back into the history of Albanian gangs.
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That's the bit you like, isn't it?
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Particularly how Vlora became arguably the biggest hotbed of gang crime in the country, and how Arta Shehu came out of that world to become the benefactor of some $120 million in MAGA money.
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So let's take it back to the 1443 Battle of Nish.
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Then Bulgaria.
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No, no, I'm only joking.
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Let's start off in nineteen twelve, because uncoincidentally, it is in Vlora in that year that Albanian national hero Ismail Chemeli declares independence from the Ottoman Empire.
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Only around ten thousand people actually live in Flora at this point, which in Albania, an overwhelmingly rural country, is still big enough to put it in the top three.
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But Albania from nineteen fifteen then goes through a series of shaky, shall we say, iterations from Principality to Republic to Kingdom to Italian fascist occupation, German Nazi occupation, short lived democratic rule, and in nineteen forty six the People's Socialist Republic of Albania, a Soviet satellite ruled by revolutionary nutcase in Verhoja.
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A quote from my own New Yorker piece on Albania from 2015.
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Because I wrote it and I wrote this show too, and I want to.
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Quote After Hodger's partisans routed Italy's fascists and then the occupying Nazis at the tail end of the Second World War, Hodger began installing a government that turned Albania into something like a Balkan North Korea.
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Showing 241–260 of 3,152 · page 13 of 158
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