Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 109

Episode Date: February 7, 2024

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Hi everyone, I'm Paul Nacko and I'm Skip Bronson. And what happens when two old friends take their decades of experience in the business and entertainment roles and sit down with our buddies? You get Our Way, a brand new show from iHeart Podcast where we chop it up with our pals about everything under the sun. This is Our Podcast and we're going to do it Our Way. Listen to Our Way on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. is called Mal Evans with Ron Roddy and he was coming back on the plane and he said, will you pass the salt and pepper? And I miss her. I said what? Sergeant Pepper. Listen to season two of McCartney A Life in Lyrics on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, this is Susie Esmond and Jeff Garland. I'm here. And we are the hosts of the history of Curb Your Enthusiasm Podcast. Now we're gonna be rewatching and talking about every single episode, and we're gonna break it down

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So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's got to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. you can make your own decisions. Alright, welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and also sometimes about how things have been falling apart for a while now. And today we're going to talk about how things were also bad in falling apart in the 2000s, which a profoundly cursed time period. And specifically, we're going to talk about, I think, a part of the anti-war movement that does not get much attention, which is the Port Militarization Resistance that happened sort of 2006-2007.

And with us today to talk about this is two people who were part of this movement. We have Julianne a new Houser, hello. Hello. And Brendan Muslaska's done. Yeah, both of whom were organizers and activists while this was going on. Yeah, thank you both for being here. Yeah, thanks for having us. So yeah, as I was saying a bit in the intro, I think this is a part of the anti-war movement

that is not very well known. I think a lot of people know about the initial stuff that happened in 2003, and people might know about some of the stuff that was happening against the war in Afghanistan right when it started. But I don't think most people know that it, like, you know, even after 2003, sort of doesn't work, that it continues and it continues sort of informs that are very interesting. And so I guess I want you to start out. I want to ask how we sort of got from the early part of the anti-war movement into this and how you got involved? I would say that there's this narrative about the movement against the word Iraq,

that there is the largest protests in human history, at least at that point, I don't know if it's still true, against the invasion and then it didn't work and everyone kind of went home and ended there. And to a certain extent, that's true. But like you said, the people that didn't go home went in interesting directions. And so at the time there were, direct action was not as acceptable as it is now.

The protest movement was largely dominated either by big liberal coalitions or PSL front groups that were basically indistinguishable in what they actually did, which was basically nothing. And in the best of cases and in the worst of cases counterinsurgency. and then the worst of cases, counterinsurgency. But then there were small groups of people that when we saw that it didn't work and we saw that these giant peaceful marches from one part of town to another or voting for John Kerry or whatever didn't work

that we started to look for other options. Yeah. I got involved. I'd say with the anti-war movement, that idea of how wars unjust was really taught to me from a very young age. I mean, my parents were, you know, children of the 60s, and they had family members fighting in Vietnam and, you know, friends dying in Vietnam, and were against the protests back then. So I grew up hearing these stories, and of course,

stories from family members, particularly one of my grandfathers, both of them who were veterans in World War II. One of them was a Marine in the Pacific theater and still into his 70s, 80s and 90s until his final days was just dealing with horrific PTSD and had always taught me from a young age never to get involved. So I, and I remember when the very clearly, I'm sure it's on everyone's minds now, when the invasion of Afghanistan started,

when the invasion of Iraq started. I was at that massive demonstration in Washington, DC that Juliana just mentioned. And I ended up, I'm from Utica, New York. I went to a rural high school just outside of Utica, you know, Rustbell, generally speaking, in Poverish, and also very conservative area of New York. And, you know, I had the recruiters bothering me, military recruiters in high school, recruiting my friends, and they were just everywhere in the hallways. So it was very present with

me when I was younger. I moved out to Olympia, Washington, 2006. And that's one new student activist group, Students for a Democratic Society was launched. That's how Julianne and I first met. We were both in separate chapters of that new organization in the Pacific Northwest. And the port protests started just a few months after I moved out there in Olympia in 2006. So wait, to clarify this for a second, because I've never quite been clear on this history. So there was a second SD, like Students for Democrat, decided it was like unrelated to the first one. Yeah, it was newborn briefly at the end of the Bush administration.

That explains a lot of things that... We're otherwise very baffling. We're not that old, yeah. We were definitely in the second, you know, the rebirth of it. So, you know, I think it took on some things in spirit, you know, the rebirth of it. So, you know, I think it took on some things in spirit, you know, but also was, I'd say different in many ways. And it was very active to me, at least it was very exciting to be a member of that the new SDS because there are over a dozen chapters in the Pacific Northwest and it was a great way to connect with young activists all over the U.S.

So, SDS is emerging in this time period. One of the other things I was interested about is something you were talking about in the early part of this, which has to do with the way that these giant, both the sort of answer coalition PSL-Frank group, and I guess the ISO was still around back then, Coalition's work versus how anything else worked. So was SDS sort of consciously set up in opposition to those groups? I don't think it was conscious, but there was just like, I mean, these days, I mean, there's a lot of controversy around PSO with anarchist versus tanky politics. None of that mattered at that time.

Like none of that mattered. The only thing that mattered was the answer, which is the PSL front group was completely fucking useless. Like they completely indistinguishable from any peace police, um, liberal democratic front group. There was literally no difference just in in terms of their aesthetics maybe. Like, is there a donkey or a hammer and sickle on something that's the only difference we saw?

So I don't think there was, there wasn't like a conscious like political opposition to it, it was just like, they're not doing anything. And so we had to look in another direction. Actually, you know, it's hard to keep track of the alphabet soup of authoritarian communist groups at times. But this was actually answer for those who don't recall, it was a front group for the workers world party, the W.W.P. Which, yeah, I mean, it's hard to keep track, right? Yeah, it's the same thing. Like,

I think so. Okay, so for people who are sort of unaware? Yeah, it's the same thing like I think so okay So for people who are sort of unaware of this there's a network of connected But sometimes feuding like weird Stalinist cults that kind of reem that kind of like they hold on through like the set the 80s and 90s and they Start sort of rebuilding again around the anti-war movements in that period that that's the ps lswp That's answer like andL, it's the WP that's answered, like, and I think most modern anti-war groups are also still these people, which is incredibly depressing, something I want to talk a bit about towards the end of this, but yeah, just for people who have not spent the last half decade in the trenches of extremely weird anti-war politics.

So yeah, so I think we should get into how the first action starts in Olympia. Yeah, so, and there were actually a couple actions that happened in the year preced proceeding that, you know, before I moved out to Olympia in 2006. It was not yet under the banner of PMR, Port Militization Resistance. That was a name that was officially coined in, you know, in May and June of 2006. in May and June of 2006. And so just to give you an idea, Olympia, it's a college town or at the Evergreen State College is there. It's also the capital of Washington state. So you have that going on.

It's also a military town. It's a little over 20 miles south of what we called Fort Lewis. It's now called JBLM, JBLOM or Joint Base, Lewis McCord, it's an Army and Air Force base, now it's one base. So you had all these different kind of elements in tandem in that town. And the public port, the Port of Olympia, is one of about 70 or so public ports in the state of Washington, some of which are, I mean, they're used for all kinds of things, you know, for commercial private industry,

but also the military and the US government. So, you know, I heard from someone, I don't even remember who, that the military was sending a ship to the port of Olympia in late May of 2006. This happened for 10 or so days, and it was just kind of a natural instinct for a whole bunch of us to go down to the port of Olympia. It was the war machine in our backyard, and the idea was to just block the vehicles.

It started out with just like less than 10 people, number of folks getting arrested, and that very rapidly culminated into larger protests every single day, an act of blockades. People, those of us like Juliana and myself and other folks using civil disobedience or what we prefer to call civil resistance to try and stop or at the very least slow down these striker vehicles. And to give folks an idea of what a striker

vehicle is, you can look it up online, but it's kind of halfway between, you know, a tank in a Humvee. It doesn't have the slats, you know, that a tank would have. It's, you know. And they were being used in both Iraq and Afghanistan for raids of residential areas. They were really on the front lines of the war in both those countries. And that's what we were trying to stop. I only got involved later because I wasn't living in Olympia at the time. I was in another SDS chapter, but my roommate was from Olympia and he had been involved in that first round of protests

in Olympia before moving up to Bellingham. And so like hearing his story has got me very excited because just like finally someone's doing something. Like someone's, they're not just like, everything else was just so liberal. Whether it was marching from one place to another or writing to your congress people or occupying their office, it was like asking someone else to do something, which you knew from the beginning they were never going to do something which you knew from the beginning they were never going to do. Yeah. And finally this was, finally someone was like actually getting into it.

I think for people who either don't know Washington or Because they're normal people don't know like the port areas of these cities very well because it's like Like unless you're a long Sherman like why would you go down to like the port of Tacoma? Yeah? Yeah but like, why would you go down to like the port of Tacoma? Yeah, nothing there. Yeah, no. But they kept moving it around because Ointia is also not very big. And so it's, there's really only two roads into the port,

which is very small. And so it was, it's very easy to block it. And so then I think the first time that I got involved was in 2007, when they had moved it because they kept moving it around to try and switch things up and wait, before they're moving the ship around? Is that? No, it's like, sorry. They had to make a military shipment. They would, it's like, like once the ship was in the port, they would just have to

go through with it. But then, you know, it's like every six months or so, they had to make another military shipment. And they would change the port usually each time to try and let, to basically to avoid us. It doesn't seem like this is like normal practice. The first time I had gone down was in Tacoma, which is a much, much, much more industrialized port than Olympia. It's, you know, it's like a big port more normal port I guess and That one was honestly pretty crazy Because you're just trapped in this giant industrial maze

Basically at the mercy of the riot cops the best success we had was definitely at the port of Olympia I think in the in Port of Olympia. In 2007, the Olympia was definitely the glory moment, which was when people were able to on and off actually hold the port and control its entrances and exits. Yeah, and I want to just emphasize that, like the one, the military changing their approach, right, to avoid us. So jumping from port to port with these different shipments, they actually went so far because we were so successful

as a movement in the Pacific Northwest to ship Stryker vehicles by rail out of the Pacific Northwest and even going so far as to ports in Texas. But one thing that we did is that we built up contacts with other activists with longshore workers all up and down the West Coast in California. There are other activists we're connected with in Texas, Hawaii, New Jersey, and New York. There is a desire in the anti-war movement. And, you know, in some extent, maybe it's like it was small, but with some folks

in the labor movement, especially in Oakland, where the ILWU, the, you know, Longshore Workers Union, it's a lot more militant than say, in a place like Olympia. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, people wanted to replicate this model because, as Julianne has said, we wore a success in 2007. We shut down the port of Olympia for a total of, it was essentially two days. They were not shipping anything in or out. We set up blockades.

We were willing to throw down with the police in the street. And one of the things that was cool about that blockade is that What in that there's two entrances like I said and one was completely blockaded and then the other one we had like a moving I Don't really know what it was But something with wheels that we can move in and out To open it up and so then we could allow like civilian cargo to move in and out But then like we feel it back in place to block military shipments. So were you able to actually stop them while in that one intercom?

Were you able to actually stop them from moving the stuff altogether or did you eventually get cleared up by the police and they moved it? We would eventually get cleared out by the police. It's like we were never able to... It's like we held it for two days. Those protests took place over a series of two weeks or more or less. We were only able to fully hold it for two days before eventually they would clear us out. But one of the things is that it does... they would clear us out. But one of the things is that it does, it did create problems for the army. Because when you work with a port, you know, it's like you've got like a certain timeframe that you've contracted with the port to do whatever it is, is you're going to do.

And it's not too happy if you take longer than you said you would or Yeah, and the other thing I want to add is you know, I think the other really important element with this whole movement going on is the Pacific Northwest was It is specifically Western Washington where the two of us were living. It was the center, in a sense, it was the heart of the anti-war movement in the country at that time. One, because of this militant direct action that we were building up in the streets and trying to throw a wrench and the gears of the war machine to at the very

least slow it down, which in some ways we did, but we were up against so much. But the other added element of course is the GI resistance and the soldiers who are resisting. Ival, also known as Iraq veterans against the war, was very active there. They set up a GI coffee house across, of war was very active there. They set up a GI coffee house across, you know, literally across the street, you know, the gates for one of the entrances for Fort Lewis. There are a whole bunch of soldiers that were going AWOL. We had friends who were active duty soldiers who had fought in, you know, Iraq and Afghanistan that were AWOL and they were hiding, refusing to go back into the strike reprugades that joined us in port militarization resistance. There are a whole long list of soldiers that were very publicly saying, I'm

refusing to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan for various reasons. And so we are very much connected with this movement too. And I think the higher ups in the military, they're hyper aware of that. They studied us very well, to the point of actually spying on us. So that's like a whole other element of the story too. One of the things that I've heard from talking to other people who were involved in this was that, like, wow, like, during these protests, like, the level of police militarization just, like, skyrocketed. And, like, I remember, I was like, I have to find out about this. It was, like, you know, if you go back and look at, like, old system of a down videos, you know, they'll have these things, yeah, you'll see these riot police. And And like, you look at them, and it's like, these people, they look so much less armored

than like the people that we have now. And one of the things that I thought was interesting about this was that like, this is, I think, one of the points where you start getting the modern riot police showing up, that are just like, you know, completely encased in like armor and yeah, I don't talk about just like the police response to this because I think that's that's another thing. I think there's there's a kind of a tendency to sort of project back what the police look like in 2021 just onto the whole history of police. And I think it's like it's it's it's gotten worse even in the last 20 years. It's gotten worse even in the last 20 years.

Yeah, I mean, so I live downtown in Olympia and probably just like a six-minute walk away from the Port of Olympia and also very conveniently just a few blocks away from the police station. So lucky us. So we actually saw, you know, we could see from the front of down on the road, down in the sidewalk from the front of our house, some of the military shipments going by. And we, we, we did see that absolutely. And at times it was, it was terrifying. I mean, I lived in an activist house we jokingly called HQ because that's just, you know, we're because of its proximity to the port, that's where a number of us were having meetings, you know, around these protests early on in 2006. And yeah, I mean, we like, they look like Robocop. And it's something I had, I, you know, I hadn't, like, I had been to, like, mass marches and demonstrations, like the RNC protests and DNC protests in Boston, New York, and like in Washington, DC. And so I would see these like riot cops, but they were, I mean, ubiquitous in these port protests. It was like a whole army of them that was sent out. I mean, when Julianna said that things got kind of crazy at the Port of Tacoma protests,

I mean, there was like a police riot, you know, like the cops went absolutely nuts. They're shooting people with tear gas and pepper balls and brutalizing people. I had never before witnessed anything like that. And it got to the point in, you know, in Olympia where we kind of knew early on that we were being traced by the police to the extent where, you know, one Olympia where we kind of knew early on that we were being traced by the police to the extent where, you know, one friend of ours was followed from our house to the bus station to take a bus to school by the police and then was stopped and essentially assaulted by them on the street. And we had another fellow activist and, you know, a roommate of mine who was going out to driving out with a few friends, a few fellow activists from Olympia to Aberdeen, about an hour's drive. So Aberdeen, there's a port of Grace Harbor there, pretty conservative small town.

It's where Kurt Cobain is from. Home of the famous Kurt Cobain-themed McDonald's. They served billions and billions served in that one McDonald's and Kurt Cobain's McDonald's. But yeah, I mean, they were following. They had orders, the Washington State Patrol to pull over a car full of known anarchists. There was alert gone out to all the police departments. They pulled them over, they made them walk the line. He was hadn't, you know, wasn't drinking, had no drugs, like nothing in his system, but they,

he was driving under like one mile per hour under the speed limit. They arrested him for DWI, you know, eventually fought the charges, sued them, and, you know, won a big settlement out of all that. But that's just one example of many of the lengths that the police would go to. It was pretty severe even. There's a house of a bunch of anarchists, younger anarchists called Pitch Pipe Info Shop in Tacoma. And that was also a big target. The police were swarming around them all the time.

They had cameras set up specifically just outside the Info Shop. There weren't surveillance cameras there before, but then there was like, oh, we'll just conveniently put them on this one specific street corner. Yeah, I think like, there was one of the things I was reading about this is you have that stuff. And then also, I think one of the scariest parts of this is that like army intelligence gets involved and yeah, do you want to talk about The man named quote unquote John Jacob who was in fact not that Yeah, so You know, I'm curious what what memories you have of our our good dear friend John Jacob, Juliana

I don't think I ever actually knew him in person, but he was the moderator of the listserv, wasn't he? Yes, he was one of the moderators of our listservs. Now that I look back on it, I'm like, the Portmultidialization Resistance, the serve was always just like this dramatic shit show. And it's like looking back on it, I was like, oh. It was moderated by a cop that did absolutely nothing

to establish order or, huh, I don't know if that was on purpose. Yeah, so I think there's definitely some things that happen, like looking back from our vantage point today, it's like, okay, things make a little more sense met this guy named John Jacob and he sent an email out to me. I was one of the contacts for the Olympia SDS group and it's like, hey, you know, there's kind of like a parent organization that's an old like elder activist are in to kind of mentor us called Movement for a Democratic Society. Very small, never really took off, but it's like I'm interested in getting involved. We met up in public and he seemed like an all right guy. I mean, he was, you know, 40-ish, early 40s. He'd told me, you know, Ben in the military for years and he actually still worked

at Fort Lewis. So he was always open about that, but it only went that far. He didn't ever tell us what he actually did there. And it wasn't abnormal for, you know, we had many folks that worked active duty, you know, on base and civilian, civilian roles or soldiers, as I mentioned that were in Port Militarization Resistance. So he gets involved and he gets really involved with Port Militarization Resistance. He goes to protests. He gets pretty close with this group of anarchists. I mentioned who lived in Tacoma.

And he seemed like a really solid guy to most of us. And things happen as we progress and, you know, as the military responded to our, you know, how effective we were in the anti-war movement and the GI resistance movement by changing their tactics. We noticed that, okay, when we first started the protests, we had the ability to catch the police by surprise by setting up a blockade here or having a surprise action there at this time or this port, etc. etc. And as time progressed, we found out that we were making these decisions for tactics in our strategy. We thought that we're in private and then for whatever reason, the police kind of knew about where we were going to be before we even showed up. And I remember that clearly happening in 2007,

the Port of Olympia. Yeah, in Tacoma, there was a lot of things like that. There was one time when there were some people who had a meeting in a closed room with all their, they had taken the batteries out of their cell phones. They had simply written on the whiteboard the time and place they were going to have their next meeting, which is going to be in a diner near the port. And so that way, if like, if for any reason the room was bugged, it wouldn't be caught up

because it was just written on a board. And then it was like a small meeting too. So it's like there wouldn't, and then when they got to that diner, there was like full of cops, and like clearly waiting for them. Like at that point, it's like it was very clear there was some level of infiltration involved. Yeah, and I think we from early on, like, you know, we knew our history. I mean, you know, one of our fellow activists in PMRs and a friend of ours, Peter Boomer, is a professor at the Evergreen State College.

He was in the original SDS back in the 60s. And, you know, he was essentially a political prisoner for a couple of years in both Massachusetts and California. I mean, the feds essentially tried to assassinate him back in the 70s when he was active in the anti-war movement in San Diego. Like, we knew, you know, former Black Panthers and we read our history. So we knew about the history of Cointel Pro, the counterintelligence program of the 60s and 70s and the war on the anti-war and civil rights and Black power, American Indian movements, etc.

So we knew, you know, just intuitively early on. But there is one thing that happened in particular, which prompted some of us to file for a public records request with the city of Olympia. And another activist walking down the street in Olympia, I'm a member of the Wild Leaves Industrial Workers of the World Union. And we had like one of those metal newspaper boxes boxes downtown and it was locked to a pole, you know, with a bike lock and there are some city workers there with a pickup truck and they're cutting the lock to this newspaper box and they threw it in their pickup truck.

And so our, you know, this friend of ours was there was like, what, what the hell, what are you doing? What's going on? And one of the workers just kind of shrugged and was like, I don't know, the police told us to do this. And they drove off. Like they stole our, essentially like our union property or whatever. So we had our lawyer friend, Larry Hildes, and the National Lawyers Guild call and kind of threaten the city.

And then a number of us got together, like, hey, let's do like a public records request with the city of Olympia, freedom of information law. And so we did and the request was just requesting any all information the city had, any exchanges, communications by email, et cetera, between the police and like other agencies about anarchists, the IWW, Students for a Democratic Society. And their initial search that the city clerk did yielded something like 30,000 responses.

So she was like, okay, I got to narrow this down. And I don't know, I was working on the request at the time. And for some reason, like, I don't know, we're poor protest or near military base, communications between the army, not thinking anything. And so the initial response is we actually got, maybe 130 or so different documents, just copies of emails, et cetera, that were little puzzle

pieces for this massive puzzle. It was just a few of them. There was an email talking about our guy in the Navy going to a PMR meeting to get some intel. There are all kinds of things like that. There are a few emails in particular and the email address was something like John J. Towery at, you know, army.us, whatever the email address was. So there's a crew of activists that got together, put their heads

together, did some research quietly for a few months and eventually found out by publicly accessible information like voter registration records and also finding out something about like a motorcycle club called like the, I don't know, like the Brown Butte Club or the Brown Butte Club or something. And like found out that this John Towery guy that was in this motorcycle club and had his, you know, was registered to vote outside of Tacoma in this town there. It was actually John Jacob. It was this guy that we thought was a fellow activists and anarchists and a friend.

You know, I thought he was a personal friend of mine. Turns out he was actually essentially an Army intelligence officer working for something called a Force Protection Unit at Joint Base Lewis-McQuart and also working with a whole list of different agencies and what turned out to be like a massive surveillance network that was national in scope. This guy was sent by the Army along with many others to infiltrate us to spy on us and to disrupt us was huge Yeah, and that's one of the things that have always always really interesting about this is like so like I learned about poor militarization resistance basically because I was like

poking around the history of like informants and I ran to this and I was like What because and that was what I thought one of the things that that was really interesting about this is that like And I was like, what? Because, and that was one of the things I thought was really interesting about this is that like, like I think this chapter, the anti-war movement is, even on the left, is like not very well known. But like the seriousness with which the army seems to have taken it is really remarkable. Yeah, I'm wondering what you do think about that. One thing we have to emphasize is that we were not a large group of people. Yeah.

have to emphasize is that we were not a large group of people. Yeah. Like the number of people who are actively involved in port militarization assistance at its peak was how many people do you think it was, Brandon? Well, it depends. I mean, I'd say they're probably like at its peak, maybe probably four to 50 people that would like consistently show up to things, you know, maybe a slightly smaller, very core group, but we would have demonstrations with like 400 people, you know.

Yeah, and like that would be like the max. Like there is, it's like there is like the peaceful, like kind of like support actions, you know, you'd get like a couple hundred people and then like for the stuff like where it's like the first night that the part of the entrance to the part of Olympia was occupied, it would be like 40 to 50 people. These were not very large groups of people. I feel like, and like I said, it's like one thing that we need to keep in mind was that the peace police were much stronger back then than they are now. Nowadays, like as we saw last year, it's like people in the US have learned to throw down, but that was not the case at the time.

And so this is a very, very small group of people. And I think we accomplished a lot with how small it was. If it had been larger, it would have accomplished way more. But even that small core of like 40 to 50 people with maybe expanding out to like a larger group of a couple hundred had them that scared That they went at that far the train disrupted Yeah, and this is one of the things I've been thinking about a lot recently of This is a very consistent thing, which is that the two things that are guaranteed

to have a hammer drop on you if you touch them is pipelines and ports. And that was something... We've talked a lot on here about pipeline protests. But I was interested in what you two think about, because this is like a very particular moment right now in what you're dealing with all these logistics chain failures. And I was wondering if you do think there's anything that we can learn from how your versions

of the sort of port demonstrations worked for potentially trying to leverage that in the future, especially with like contract negotiations for the port workers in Oakland coming up next year? Yeah, that's a great question. You know, there's this old saying in the IWW, direct action gets good, right? And I think it really boils down to that. It's building up mass movements and social movements from below that rely on direct action, that rely on civil resistance, civil disobedience. Yeah, and the pipeline protests that have been ongoing where indigenous people have been on the front lines of that for many, many years now,

I mean, the kind of repression and surveillance that we face really pales in comparison to the kinds of, you know, surveillance of repression that folks were facing at Standing Rock, for example. You know, I think, of course, one of the, well, one of the main differences is that it was primarily the military, you know, with us, right? That was surveilling us because this was very specifically,

you know, a war issue and a military issue. But yeah, I mean, I think, you know, like, I think there's a big question is like, what do we have to do that's new? And to me, I say, you know, for both that kind of militant action, but also for the labor movements, like, what's not, you know, we don't have to reinvent the wheel. There are things that have a tried and true track record of getting the goods. And that is these more disruptive kind of actions and movements.

And so one of them would be, I guess my suggestion would be to go back to the basics. And even I would say now, remember this is at a time when Facebook was around, right? But we weren't really using that for our organizing. We really relied on face-to-face meetings, phone calls, and building up trust with people, and building up our capacity to take actions and make change. I think I'm not saying throw out everything that at least some of the good that social

media has to offer, but like, I think going beyond that and going back to these older tactics, and then for the labor movement, like the big thing is, you know, and it's just like a bigger question for mainstream unions in particular. I mean, there, the whole idea of like union contracts

is that workers also lose a lot. Yeah, they get some things, but business owners and bosses have rights carved out in those contracts. And with the longshore workers, I mean, the difficult thing with that, of course, is like there would be some symbolic strikes that of course like longshore workers have done

and continue to do, you know, around like the war in Iraq historically, supporting Mumi Abou Jamal, Mayday, etc., in Oakland, but they have some things for that written into their contracts. And for all these other unions, it's like, well, we can't strike it all for the next two years or or next three years, whatever the life of the contract is. I think it's a bigger question and challenge for the labor movement to move beyond that and not be put in this straight jacket of contracts like that. Yeah. I think that the no strike clause part of contracts, I think it's an interesting thing because it, I don't know, there's not,

there are some unions that will actually do stuff around fighting it, but mostly people just sort of don't care. And I think you wind up in a situation where it seems like you kind of have to plan your tactics around when contract negotiations are happening because otherwise you can't actually get people to do anything more of in a one-day symbolic strike. Yeah. Or the challenge is we have this great American tradition that's not unique to the US. It's universal, really, and it's one that resonates with me, breaking the law. And we are civil disobedience. what we are doing in the streets and blocking the ports. We were breaking the law and we knew it.

And that's what the civil rights movement, the black freedom movement did in the 1960s. But like we have recent examples of workers breaking the law en masse. Like the West Virginia teacher strikes that happened a few years ago. Like teachers in every single county in that state went on strike, they broke the law

and they won something out of that. And I think that's what we really need to encourage people is this idea of breaking out of like the norm and breaking the laws, which, you know, the laws that are in place, which are not there to, you know, expand our freedom, they're there to contract it. Yeah, one of my friends had a joke about, what was the exact line? It was, it's only illegal if you get caught and it only matters if you lose, which I think is a good way of thinking about

both breaking the law and, yeah, and, yeah and you know yeah I think it's also like it's worth mentioning that like the other sides the law doesn't matter to them at all like they just tear it up and like light it on fire constantly so don't don't bind yourself if you can if you can not get caught and not like go to prison for the rest of your life, don't bind yourself by a bunch of like paper that the other side just doesn't care about. Yeah, and that's an excellent point because that's the big thing, you know, with the army and law enforcement in general, like surveillance of us,

they were in the police, just their actions or brazen actions on the street, like the riot police They were just breaking the law all the time. They absolutely have a deep visceral hatred of the Bill of Rights of civil rights and civil liberties And so there were a number of you know court cases that sprung out of you know, this movement There was a case called Panagakis v. Tauri. Another Giuliana Panagakis was another PMR member, co-plaintiff in that case. And was it a case against the army that we waged and brought up to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals

and eventually lost and could have brought it to the Supreme Court but didn't. But the other thing is like the violation of the Posse Comintatus Act. It was the whole other thing. We don't have to get like so tied up until like the legalistic thing, but like the point, your point is valid. Like they don't care about the laws that are already there.

They'll just intentionally break them, break their own laws that they have set up, and you know, they'll just get a slap on the wrist, because that's really all that happens to them. I think that's a good note to end on. Break the law, it's fake, it's also bad. Do you two have anything you want to plug? Other than that, I would encourage people to break the law. Do you ever have anything you want to plug? Other than that, other than, you know, encouraging people to break the law. Do you have a guess of that? Plug cage your local port.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think it's, you know, I guess just encourage people to do as, you know, it sounds like what we're doing by having us on the show. And like, there are some in our very recent history, movements and wins that we all as activists today can still learn from. And I think part of that, I don't wanna call us elders cause we're not that old,

but like one part of that is like making sure like our movements are still like multi-genergenerational and we learn from each other. And also, as Julianne and I did, I mentioned earlier, we learned from the movements of the past, the SDS, the Black Panthers, the Black Freedom Movement, etc. But there's a lot that these struggles, I think, have to offer us today. you know, these struggles I think have to offer us today. All right. Well, thank you. Thank you both for coming on and talking with us. Thank you for having us. Thank you.

Well, this has been it could happen here. Find us at happen here pod on Twitter, Instagram, and the rest of our stuff is at Coulson Media at the same somewhat accursed social media places. I don't know why I'm saying somewhat, they're just accursed. Yeah. See you next time, whenever that is. Good song. The Johnny Carson theme, right? Hey, who wrote that?

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So subscribe now and you could listen to the history of Kerber enthusiasm on iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you happen to get your podcasts. Hey everyone, it's James. I'm just recording an introduction for today's episode, which we recorded on Sunday night. I'm recording this on Monday night and you will hear this on Tuesday morning,

that's Tuesday the 28th of November. I just wanted to include another Ask for Donations right up front here because we are tired, broke, and sad. I spent last night sleeping out by the migrant camp in in Okumba, one of the camps. It was extremely cold. Like, and I had a good sleeping bag, right? It must have been much, much worse for people who had blankets. I had a young woman like completely breaking down and crying this morning, understandably, because it's terrible and people have been there for five,

six days now. We ran out of food, all our distribution sites today. We just desperately need more help and we need a much larger scale operation, but we can't find that. And so if you're able to help, please, please do. I know it's a difficult time of year. I'm not asking you to give money that I wouldn't give. I'm 1000 plus dollars deep in this. I'm not asking you to do things that I wouldn't do spending half my week out there. Like I'm, I'm not just preaching something that I am not part of.

This is something I'm very much part of. So I think it's very important to me and it would mean a lot to me. If people could help however they can, either materially or with their time. Thank you very much. And I hope you enjoy the episode. Hi, hello, it's me, James, the guy who does podcasts, who talks to you when you're driving to work. And today, on this podcast, it could happen here, which is about the world falling apart and people who are putting it back together. I am joined by two friends of mine. We are

in the desert in Hukumba at the Hukumba Hot Springs Hotel, which is open now. Thankfully, we've just spent most of today and the last two months doing mutual aid project out here. So if you guys would like to introduce yourselves in any way you think is relevant, that would be great to start off with. And then we can talk about what's been going on here. I am Haval. I use their pronouns. I live in San Diego, but now currently living in the Hacumba, helping out with the migrant

crisis at the border. Hi, I'm Aloe, like Aloe Vera. I use she, her pronouns, and I've been doing mutual aid for a couple years now and recently have come into the scene of helping with the refugee crisis at the border. Massive. Thank you. Okay, so I think to start off with, can one of you or both of you describe just what we've seen today?

I think it's very hard for people to get aggrieved of the scale of what's happening and how bad it is here. Yeah, so today we are in the wake of a holiday where CBP takes off, well most of them are taking off for the holiday and probably what is it, ISS action as well who picks up the migrants. So there's a huge backlog of people not getting picked up stuck in these open air detention sites. And this is some of the highest numbers that we've seen in a long time since like the beginning of this, what happened in September, right? Yeah. And it's insane, like the amount of people that we were running out of food, basically. We barely made a buy on peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

The world famous peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Yeah, that's why they're coming here. Because we feed them, they just want the sandwich. That's true. And it was wild. It was, it's, it's, like the desperation is getting worse because as it gets colder, you know, people are suffering more, they're shivering more, so it's using more energy.

They're more hungry when we show up. They're tailing our van as we pull up, which didn't always happen. And yeah, the desperation is real. We saw what like 360, I think, at one camp, Willows. And then at another camp, it was 150, 180, at another camp willows and then at another camp it was 150 180 at another camp totaling what? 700? Math is hard. Yeah. And it varies throughout the day, right? Like, so perhaps we should explain, maybe Aloe can do this. What is it? Opened Detention site, right?

OADS is the acronym we use. What does that look like? So an open-air detention center from what I've seen is literally just people left out in the desert with nothing. The shelter that they have has either been built themselves by the shrubs and the Manzanita bushes that they find around there, that they also burn, which creates awful smoke, as well as what we provide them in terms of tarps, blankets, tents. What I've seen in the Open Air Detention Centers is essentially when Border Patrol has the start of a quarter, they have the money to really get people out of there. You have a lot of people just processed very quickly. It doesn't pile up.

And then because of that, all the infrastructure that we put into these places and all of the infrastructure that these refugees build themselves, right, this is not provided by Border Patrol, gets basically ruined. And so you have soiled blankets that have become the tops of tents, because that's their only use at this point. You have not enough shelters, so people are sleeping just among the rocks and trees because it's the best they can. And I think one of the most notable points of these open air detention centers is, legally speaking, Border Patrol gets around this by not really calling them detention centers saying that they're not detained and that technically they're free. But the reality is there's nowhere for them to go without getting arrested or deported.

But because of this loophole, Border Patrol has no obligation to feed them. And so when they do feed them at the start of the quarter, when they have the budget at which they blow, it's oranges, it's crackers, it's not enough to live off of when you're stuck there for five days. I spoke to a Kurdish migrant today who had been there for five days and we've heard of people staying there for an entire week just stuck in these camps as they overflow with people because they're not cleared due to whether it be a holiday season or whatever it might be that puts us in this circumstance.

Yeah. And obviously, most people weren't been here. You can look on a map or Google Maps if you want to. But all of this is happening literally in the shadow of the border wall in some cases, or right next to the border wall, sometimes a little bit next, a little bit further away. And just to explain why there are these locations where they are, you guys want to explain how people are getting to the... Because, if you've got Google Maps, if you're not driving, you can put it up and you can look, right? We're like an hour and a bit east of San Diego. That's 70 miles east of San Diego, closer to El Centro than San Diego.

So can you explain how people are ending up here by the hundreds or thousands? Yeah, so talk to many migrants and they stay in a hotel in TJ, I have no idea which one, and wouldn't give the information if I did. But yeah, they stay in a hotel in TJ and they get separated by nationalities. So the coyotes take their passports from them and put them in stacks and separate them by

their nationalities. So you'll get Chinese nationalists together. You'll get people that are from Turkey together, mostly Kurdish, and then you'll get whatever their nationality is. And I'm sure the outliers get just lumped into whatever is the most like national... Yeah, the place is still a language group. Yeah, language group, exactly. And then they get, in the morning, I guess, at like 5 or 6 a.m.,

they drive all the way out from TJ to Hakumba and get dropped off at, there's three points where there's breaks in the walls. And these walls, obviously, they don't go over the mountains because Trump was trying to build distance rather than actual stopping people. And so these brakes on the walls are very easy to cross. It's literally just walking over. There was some remnants of the concertina wire or Bob wire like in the area, but it's all ripped and super easy to cross. And so the coyotes will drop them off near or bits away from that point and have them walk in

when that's where Border Patrol, after they cross, Border Patrol will intercept them, give them wristbands for the day they arrived. We actually just saw this last week, they must have ran out of wristbands because they were giving like Sunday wristbands when it was like a Wednesday. Yeah, I remember saying that.

Like what the fuck? And that makes our job more complicated too. Not only their job, I'm sure, because they're trying to process them in order, but our job, because we're trying to record how long have people been here. I remember I was talking to a Chinese nationalist and had to call a translator just to see,

like, because they had a Sunday wristband and I think it was Tuesday or something already. And I was like, wait, you've been here for two days and they were like, trying to explain what the language barrier was to translate. They were like, wait, you got you've been here for two days. And they were like, like trying to explain what the language barrier wants to translate. They're like, no, we got here three hours ago, we kept thinking they got here three days ago. They kept showing the number three on their hands. And so yeah, they give them these wristbands and then tell them to wait in these areas that are very close to where they're intercepted. And Border Patrol will tell them there's cameras all over the desert,

we're watching you, so don't leave. And if you leave, it'll mess up your migrant process or your asylum process. And so they, most of them stay. We've actually have seen a lot of people walking on the 80 here trying to get to town because they're desperate, they're cold, they're hungry, and they're probably just like, fuck this, you know?

But it's interesting too how like, border patrol in all media aspects denies the existence of these camps yet. They're denied explicitly to me, right? Like that they don't exist or they don't detain people. What they'll say is that people aren't detained here, that they're free to go. Which technically they are and they can't walk.

But I had a Kurdish friend that I met at one of the camps that we call Moon Camp, and 20 year old from Turkey. And he said that him and a bunch of friends that he was traveling with just walked to the subway up the street, got a subway sandwich, and then Border Patrol showed up after they had ordered their food and said,

you have to go back with us, but finish your food here. Because imagine them walking in, being taken back with somebody. So I would be like, oh, we can just leave and get out of here. So they finished their sandwiches and then he took them straight back. So that is detention.

If you can't leave, then you're in detention. That's the debt by definition, I feel like. Yeah. And I don't think people think they are free to leave. And I don't think people certainly, they're not told what situation they're in, right? I think so think they're free to leave. And I don't think people certainly they're not told what situation they're in, right? I think so maybe they would assume that,

but there's also not very many places for them to go. We are in the middle of nowhere. So from what I've talked to different people, on top of just like crossing the border, there's also an entire period where these people are traveling and all of them travel in different ways and some of them are traveling all the way from South America through Panama, through the jungle and you know people are dying on the

route over here and some of them are lucky enough to just fly in and you know, right. Yeah, they have to fly to Cancun. Fly into Cancun and then make their way over to TJ and make it through the border. And I have seen like for myself with my own eyes, you know, burns from motorcycle exhausts, from, you know, the different methods that they've used to get here.

And I've seen spider bites, I've seen, you know, injuries that are infected that have been infected for a long time because they've been that way since they were in the jungle. And it's inadequate. I had a woman that I was helping give medical care to whose ankles were swollen from a steroid that she was given that she should not have been given, and that she had a bad reaction to. And yeah, that's just been their reality,

traveling here and trying to get here. On top of that, I think that speaking of medical issues and speaking on what you were saying earlier about the threats of becoming undocumented, the threats of being forced to stay in these camps, there's even fear of having a medical emergency. So when EMS comes out, when we call 911 or Border Patrol calls 911, they're not working

in connection with Border Patrol. They're just going to a hospital as if it was someone, a house person on the street, going to the hospital. And so they end up there, and if they're not given the proper information to get a court date to finish their asylum process and to really be submitted properly into the country, they are at risk of becoming undocumented. And I think that fear has spread among people, and I've definitely noticed personally that there is fear to have 911 call, to be taken away in an ambulance because they fear, you know, becoming undocumented

or being at risk. Yeah, separated. Separated has been a big thing because if they end up having their process either take longer or just be stuck in the hospital or whatever, it may be they're away from their family. They have to go through a different process. They're not processed at the detention centers the same way or at the same time. So it's just, there's a lot of fear and I think that's led to a lot of unnecessary harm

and we do our best in terms of medical care, but we're limited. It's over the counter. We can't do much. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a street medicine, really. Yes. Exactly. Yeah. Like, and we have some doctors and nurses and other qualified medical people come and help, but they don't have the diagnostic tools that they need, right? Like, today we had somebody who had clearly some high issues and like, the best we can do is say, this person needs to go to hospital. But then in this case, they were able to take the person's partner. Sometimes they won't take the person's partner.

Sometimes the person could be separated from their children. And so they're obviously very afraid of that. And to compound that, I think like the release that they're not released in the way they had previously been released, they're just dumped onto the street at certain transit centers, right? And then again, it falls on to volunteers or nonprofits to help them get to where they're going to go. The scale of the mutual aid operation is really impressive. And it's something that I don't think is, like we don't talk about enough, or people don't really understand it. So maybe we just start like literally what we do every day in a day.

Again, Havala's here every day. Yes. Yeah, one thing I forgot to mention is I am here every single day now, full time, 10 plus hours a day, it's eight days a week. And so yeah, every day we wake up, I wake up around like 6 a.m. And we try to get to the first camp, which is down the street from where I'm staying around 7.30 or 8 o'clock in the morning. And the previous night we have loaded the van up

with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches because they have a good hold. You don't need to keep them really refrigerated much or yada yada. And so it's just PB and J's, water and fruit. And we give them each one at least, sometimes more if we have the capability. And then we, another person who is also here full time

will hit another camp on their way because it's on their way to meet up at a central location. We call the U-Center or the YC where all of our donations end up whether it's clothes, blankets, food items, non-perishables, perishables, we have a fridge and in that place once we get there we'll assess what we need to do is do we need to make more food, do we have enough to go feed the third camp which we call 177, which is all the way in Boulevard,

a little outside of Hacumba. And if we have enough, we'll just hit, we'll leave and hit that spot and then come back and start dinner. And in the meanwhile, we have a lot of volunteers that will show up and make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches because that is our easy go-to staple.

It's quick to give out. It's, you know, not a whole lot of prep time to make 500 sandwiches, which seems like a lot, but we've gone through probably tens of thousands of sandwiches by this point. So- We probably gave out a thousand PB&Js today. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.

Yeah, we ran out. Like today I gave out everything and there was even people where like the two we got everybody in the line Which was I think I think that was around 360 No, no, it's 360 we did account and so in the morning Yeah, and we ran out and we but we had to so like a lot of the times Especially the migrants that have been there multiple days. They'll jump in There's like always two people or three people that'll be like, I'm here to help, Kurdish people are amazing help

and are always willing to step up. But yeah, this morning at Willow, one of the camps, we had two guys that were kind of controlling the line and helping keep them back and wanna like send them to us one at a time. And at the very end of it, I had nothing for them. And I was like gonna hook them up with a couple of sandwiches and a little like,

anybody who helps, I'll hook them up with a couple extra sandwiches or food items or water or cigarettes even. And yeah, I had nothing for them except for kids sandwiches or kids sandwiches, the kid packs. So we make these little sandwich bags full of like different candies and granola bars

and things that kids would like to eat and give them a lot of nutrition and stuff. So I just gave them extra of that. And once other migrants saw me giving those things out that I had been holding and telling other people, no, these are for kids, then everybody swarmed. And it was just like, okay, well, I'm giving all the kids, whoever's there, whoever's arm is there,

they're getting a kid's pack and got rid of literally all of our food. And I think we put in like 12 plus cases of water, 40 packs and they were all gone except for maybe like 10 or 15 waters. It was one of the more dire mornings that we've had, especially at these camps. I know that 360 was the number that you guys got

in the morning, but I believe that by the time that we were working in the evening, at least when I was doing medical check, the number that I was getting told either around the camp or from Border Patrol was 500 at Willows. So, and this is, you know, these are numbers that even Border Patrol is like freaking out over. They are, you know, worried because they can't deal with this quantity of people and keep them processing

while there's still a consistent flow. It puts a lot of strain on us because like you were saying, we're running out of food. We don't have enough to feed 500 people every day even though we're just doing, you know, two meals, a breakfast and as best we can a dinner, and trying to make sure that that dinner is a hot meal because it is frigid out here. I slept in my van and I kept having to wake up to try and warm up and do something to keep myself from freezing and I, you know, I can only imagine what it's like for them with what minimal equipment they have. Some of them don't even have tents. So it has been

a lot. I know that today, running medical, I've seen a lot of people with colds. And I am suspicious that perhaps there is COVID running around, that perhaps there is, you know, something, there's definitely something, some kind of very severe illness going through the camps and being in this freezing cold is not helping anyone's immune system. And on top of that, I've seen broken fingers and some other stuff. And that's, that's been my today has been treating that and then helping out with dinner, which I will say, I tried a little bit of the lentils and rice and I can say we are feeding them well.

It is delicious, delicious food. Thank you Sam Schultz, an amazing cook and an amazing helper for us, making sure that we are able to do this. Like you were saying for a long time, this was put on one family of locals you know, are able to do this for like you were saying for a long time, you know, this was put on, you know, one family of locals to really, yeah, one family of Quakers to really take care of these people day in and day out. And it wasn't until you came here

and were able to actually like be here full time that there was even just an extra hand around and You know Right volunteers are here during the week, but the reality is is we are all still stuck at work We all still live in this hellscape. We're all still stuck grinding those gears and Making ends meet and so coming out here for a lot of us is, like for me, is a weekend task. It's what we can do. It's what we have the ability and the time and the gas money for.

And on top of that, a lot of us spend a lot of our own money. I know that I've spent at least a grand and a half on just supplies for these runs, on supplies for whatever I can. And, you know, sometimes we get, we're able to get reimbursed by our mutual aids and sometimes the money runs dry. And we just, you know, we need a lot of support out here that we don't have, that we don't get. And I feel like we really felt that today running out of food.

Yeah, it was bleak today. And the thing is, like, we can feed 500 people and do this gargantuan effort, and then we have to feed the same number tomorrow. And if we clear out our... We... On top of those of us who are able to go out, to do medicals, to do feeds, sometimes some of us go out and construct shelters or to check that there aren't people who are sick in the shelters who aren't getting care that they need, etc., etc. Like you said, people have to cook, right? People have to make PBJs.

People have to resupply our stuff and drive it up from San Diego, which is an hour and 15 minutes away. It's a gargantuan effort that it's exclusively taken on by volunteers and like a relatively small group of volunteers considering the scale of the task at hand. I wonder like if you would like talk about your volunteering experience a little bit because I think it's been great. Like it's a very diverse group of people. We've had so many. We have the Schultz family who are Quakers who are amazing who have been like spearheading this since the start. We have like obviously a lot of anarchist people and a lot of people from various migrant advocacy

and aid groups. This is where we had the Black Panthers the other day. That's probably a ton of people I'm missing. Yeah, in church groups, church groups. Yeah, church groups. I mean, the YC was kind of given to us and I think now we're renting it to my knowledge but that was given to us by the what's the church? The Methodist Church here in Hakamba and then there's a group of Mormons and they're just kind of unaffiliated from their church in a way like

they're not they were just a family that saw the need and some of the elders were helping load up this the beans that they made the other day, you know, from the house that the lady that makes it. And then another lady, Mormon lady makes us these rolls and will just like give us like hundreds and hundreds of bread rolls, which everybody loves, even the volunteers love to eat. Homemade rolls, yeah, super good. So that, yeah, like you said, mutual aid groups, anarchists, just individuals, random people will show up. They heard it.

We had a couple people show up that heard it on national NPR, KPBS, and then they were export of kindness. A lot of Lado will come out here and send volunteers and whatnot. But it's hard to really rely on volunteers. Like we have a sign up sheet and everything so we can kind of gauge what the day's gonna be like, but sometimes people don't show up. And sometimes, especially around the holiday times,

it gets really thin because everybody's got their own lives and things to do. And, but yeah, I mean, I started volunteering just on my weekends when I was working full time at my dead end job back at home in San Diego, and I would, you know, saw the need. I was down at Whiskey 8 in San DiCidro pretty much every day after work and on the weekends. And then when they started doing street releases at Iris Station in San Diego, I would just be there full time and on my weekends, just be there until IMDef and Haitian Bridge started showing up

and kind of took in detention resistance and they kind of took over that scene. And so I, the need was like, oh, how come my needs help? So I just would come after that, I just started coming out here every weekend from I would get off on a Thursday at like 2 p.m. Take care of my cats at home for a sec and then drive out, help out whatever I could

by the time I got here, spend the night somehow either. I never had to sleep in my car, but I would be ready to. And then I have some friends here that would put me up for the night and stay Thursday night to Friday, work all day Friday and all day Saturday until I had to go home because I worked at five AM on Sunday. And then all that week, I would just be at W8

going down after work. And so I haven't had a day off since this really started. I mean, I think I got the flu for a week, five days, where I had a fever four or five fucking days in a row, which is horrible, but it's not really a day off technically. But yeah, and then I, since I had been coming out here every weekend and dedicating my time to Hukumba and had so many ties with like the locals.

And I know the people who own the hotel out here that we are currently at and just, you know, showed face and showed a strong work ethic, I guess, to help feed these people and the passion of, and the amount of care that I gave and attention to these people and listening to them and the Schultz family who are the main on the ground people since day one,

we're like, yeah, this person needs to be out here. We one of all out here full time, and Alotrolato got a grant to basically fund that. And so once that money came through, I just took a sabbatical from my nine to five, and I was like, peace. I got more important things to do than give Jeff Bezos more money, you know?

So he needs more yachts, clearly. Yeah, clearly, yeah. And more space money, you know? So he needs more yachts clearly. Yeah, clearly. And more space trips, you know? Yeah, yeah. So yeah, so ever since then, I've just, you know, I'm lucky enough to have that and, you know, showed that, you know, dedication to where I can be out here. And honestly, like some people may think like,

oh, because I'm getting paid, I'm a boss or I'm a lead. And like, to me, it's like, no, we're all leading. And I'm still just doing the same work. I'm just now able to be here. Well, on payroll, 48 hours a week, but in reality, it's 10 hour days, eight days a week. Yeah, it's all the time. And like, yeah, I think it's really important that people know actually that we have a very diverse group group It's not like everybody is necessarily like committed to horizontal organizing as the be all and end all But that's how we operate and it works really well. I think yeah, especially Sam and the Quakers. They're very good at listening to That's the American Friends Society, right? Yeah, it works so well like when I was thinking the other day I was out here and it was the day before the holiday.

And first of all, we had this moment where this lady pulled up and she was like, hey, who's the charge? We were all like, everyone's in charge. And the lady was like, what? How does that? But then like another time we had a bit of a crisis where we ran out of bowls when we were trying to feed people.

And like one of us came up with- Putting the beans in the bag? Yeah, and it's blocked bag. Yeah. We made, we saw, we were like, we didn't have bowls, we had sandwiches. So we gave them a sandwich and then took the zip lock bag back and filled it with beans. And like, it wasn't the person who'd been here for the longest or done the most sessions, but it was a great idea. And it got us out of a difficult situation. And like, I think because we organize with respect for each other, we can listen to each other and incorporate those ideas. I know you had something to say. Oh, yeah, I just, I want to highlight the community that I've seen built here. I know that in terms of non-hierarchical organizing, I personally have seen, you know,

everyone step up and lead, even people who are there their first day, right? If there is a task to be done and they say they know how to do it and they have a good idea, they're leading it, they're spearheading it. There is, you know, there's no second guessing or egos that I've seen, at least not to such a degree that it's been harmful, and I think that that has given us a lot of power and has allowed sort of our creativity to get us through this. I think it's a testament to what non-hierarchical organizing means and how, you know, lack of hierarchy and lack of a dedicated leader doesn't mean

a lack of leadership. I think it falls on all of us to lead. It falls on all of us to bring what we know to the table, whether that be from the experience that we've had coming here and working here and knowing the details and the minutiae of what's going on specifically here in Hakamba with this project or what we bring to the table from our past experiences. And I think that that has really beautifully coalesced into a really efficient system as best as we can do, as best as we can manage. We've really made do and kept people alive in a huge way.

You know, we've really made do and kept people alive in a huge way. Yeah, and like, I think kept people alive is right. Like if I don't know how this would have gone down if we weren't here, because I don't know if they would have kept doing it, but certainly more people would have been very unwell or passed away. Like, I think we can all think of a different medical emergency where we've had to intervene to stop it getting much worse. Yeah, like just last week, I think did you come out the day after

something where it rained on all of us and there was like a heavy downpour. We weren't even ready. We thought it was, oh, it might be like a little drizzle or maybe light rain here and there scattered. But then we set up and we're cooking, getting ready for, to do lunch or after breakfast and getting ready to do our dinner and stuff. And it just started down pouring on us.

I remember I was driving and I called you. Oh yeah, you shut up that day and literally, like we, as we got to, we were like, oh, fuck, we got to like move now. So we just got all the ponchos that we had a bunch of ponchos, got them all in the car, drove to the first camp that we had fed that morning, and we just started handing out Ponchos as the rain's coming down. They're walking in as you know, the coyotes dropped them off and that's a long hike. Had the moon camp from where they end up to where the break in the wall is.

Maybe a mile probably. But what, 30 minute walk or so? And so they are arriving in the pouring rain. Their socks are getting wet. It is super cold, especially at moon because of the location. It's just ridiculously cold. And that's like case for hypothermia. And we're there to stop them from getting so wet.

We're giving them trash bags for their bags, ponchos for their being, their persons. I remember seeing this little girl. She must have been like five or six. And then we had cardboard because we didn't think it was gonna be so pouring before we loaded up the van. And we had cardboard to keep, you know,

the ground dry for them to like lay on in their tents or whatever. And people took the cardboard out of the van and we're like blocking the rain and shielding this little child from getting wet, you know? And it's super windy at moon too to that camp. It's the location that gets a lot of the wind from whatever that passes. Yeah, it comes up from Anza Barrego. Yeah. I think the other thing you said which we should probably touch on is like,

perhaps it's because of the way we organize, because we don't have like strict roles or jobs or low leadership things. But like, and you'd mentioned it before, but like nine times out of 10, we end up doing things with people, not for people. Like the other day, I know, like a Kurdish guy and I set up a ton of tents, a Colombian dude and I built this amazing shelter. And then it wasn't for him and his family. It was for anyone who needed it. I definitely have seen that sort of collaboration with the migrants and I feel like it doesn't feel like charity. It feels like mutual aid. And on top of that, when I'm hearing from them, you know, they, you know, they're helping us out.

But then on top of that, they're saying, I'm going to get processed and I'm coming back. I'm helping and I'm have you been in touch with anyone who has, who has come back yet? And I'm, have you been in touch with anyone who has come back yet? Well, yeah, actually, like early on in iris, when I was doing iris, there was like a few people that were staying a few days before they traveled onward and they just wanted to be around and help. There was also a I mean, he got sponsored by, or pretty much loosely sponsored by one of the organizers that was helping out at WA and he stuck around. He came out to Ocumbo a bunch of times. He killed it on everything he did, cooking, dishes, whatever, cleaning up, whatever. He just saw that need.

And yeah, I mean, I've been in contact with a couple of people that said they would come out and I don't pressure them. I don't, and A, I won't pressure them to come out because they came here for, you know, a better life and all that. But at the same time, it's just hard to get back to some people because I've given my number out to way too many Kurdish people to get back to everyone on WhatsApp. And that's, you know, I got signal, I got regular texts and then WhatsApp and that kind of gets buried. So yeah, there was some Afghan folks out here in September, few Afghan folks who had come out.

I think they had arrived either in May or perhaps earlier, but there were some Afghan folks who came out and were able to help us. Of course, like it's great because we don't all have all the languages we need and we don't have all the skills we need. And so the more people we can incorporate, even if temporarily while they're here, then the better we can help people, right? Right, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, but I think definitely the vibe is there that they want to come help. And yeah, like the other day I was feeding, we're doing a hot dinner and we set up and everything and then all

these Kurdish people because I've you know will wear this. Yeah, feel like a scarf. Yeah, with the scarf that you gave me. All the way from Kurdistan. All the way from Kamishlo. And so they recognize it and then I know the sayings, Bidji Karda Stan went, oh, you're from Turkey. Oh, you're Kurdish, because most of the people from Turkey are Kurdish.

Not all, but most. And so, we'll start talking and then they get all excited and then they would just want to help. And I think even regardless of if I said that or not or had the scarf on, they would still just want to help. And I remember one time I was surrounded, it was just me serving one of the things because we'll serve multiple things, water, like a soup and then a rice or a bread or whatever, and then maybe some hand wipes or something.

And so we just had, it was just me in the middle surrounded by Kurdish people. And I remember the dude next to me, we were just like, someone videotape. Yeah, we, we Kurdish people help really well. Tell the world, you know. We, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, someone is there to help. They're like, oh, can I grab the table? Can I do this? How can I plug this in? A lot of times I was just plugging in. I'm like, no, I got this. There's a certain way I like to plug this all in. That makes sense. And I'll do it.

Relativity high-risk activity. Yeah. Don't want any electrocution or... Yeah. Oh, like the other day I was chopping some stuff with an axe and a guy wanted to help. And I was like, look, if I hurt myself and I can get to hospital, if you hurt yourself, it's going to be a rough night. I mean, that could have been his ticket out.

Yeah, he could have been a hitter. He might have purposely hurt himself at that point. He had his whole family. Yeah. But yeah, we build shelters and like some people are really good at that and they get at tying knots and they get at seeing things in 3D and some people are not. So like often just get a team of people who can help and then you'll get a team of people who need shelter. So we'll just cruise around building shelters for people and it's fun. Like it can't, I'm sure it's not a very stimulating

environment out there, you know. So being engaged in a task, completing stuff and helping people, I'm sure is rewarding. Or like, yeah, even tonight we had a dude from Turkey who just like was holding his head. Tia, one of our local residents, she lives around here. She doesn't have a whole lot of medical experience other than being a mother or grandmother and working in as a pharmacy tech and knowing a little bit about it and learning and being super badass.

She came to me and she's like, look, this guy has a headache, he has a migraine and he has medication from TJ. So this is obviously like an ongoing situation. And my eyes were hurting just from all the smoke, from all the fires that they were starting in the area. And he's just sitting there holding his head, clearly just absolutely miserable.

So she took him in her car just to like give some heater and to warm him up and to try to make him feel better, get him away from the smoke. And she's like, yo, we got to get this guy. He's here traveling alone from Turkey. He doesn't have anybody. So we went and found some more. And I think he was Kurdish as well. We went and found another Turkish person or Kurdish person from Turkey. And I grabbed this, this person and I was like, Hey, I have somebody here who has a gnarly migraine and they just they

need they're here alone. They don't have shelter they need. And so this guy came over and talked to him and was like, look, I got we got a tent over here, come camp with us. Like that's the kind of shit that we have to deal with, you know what I mean? Just like the migrants will like getting a migrant to help another migrant, you know, it's just like it's community. That's what like mutual aid is about. I think that, um, and that, that specific situation, um, I had been talking to the, the, the group that took him in, I had been talking with them and chatting with them and I sat by the fire with them, just talking about, you know, what was your experience like and trying to get warm.

Cause God, it's cold out there, even for us volunteers and, you know, we're far away from the fires and it's really hard because you know this road is cleared and so there's you know there's no warmth out there by where they have to stand to get food but what I wanted to highlight was that because we are interacting with these people as equals because we are coming here and seeing them as people and we spend the time to talk with them and to build communion with them. We can build those connections which allow people like the gentleman with the migraine to be taken in and to have basically a temporary family while he's there and make sure that

he's taken care of. I think something that really highlights the strength of this type of organization and this type of work and this type of, you know, the way that our politics, the way that our ideals really shine in this kind of setting. Yeah. I think that's right. Like, I've been around a lot of humanitarian crises and, you know, refugee situations, and I think we're doing a really excellent job

especially given the minimal funding and sort of scale of access to resources that we have. We could do a lot more if we had a lot more money, but we don't. Yeah, we're cooking on like a fucking burner. It's probably older than us. Yeah, but we're cooking up to a propane thing that's made out of an old keg.

That's just like, if you turn it on wrong and let the gas bleed, you will blow yourself up. So it's just like, like Sam is, you know, responsible for everybody at the youth center where we do stuff. So he doesn't really like other people cooking. Does it? I mean, even though I know how to do it, he's like, doesn't even like me doing it because he's responsible for me. If anything were to happen. So it's like our capacity is super limited.

We don't have enough burners. We don't have enough containers. So we have a couple, one really nice like locking containers that hold hot food and keep the food hot, but not enough to serve upwards of 600 people at all three camps and not enough vans. Like it would be ideal like in my situation to send a van that has charging capabilities

to charge everybody's cell phone, to feed everybody, to give them water and all their needs, blankets, medical, to each camp all at once. Instead of us driving, cooking a mass amount of food at the youth center, and hoping we have enough to hit all three camps, because the numbers, we can try to call Border Patrol offices and get numbers, but the numbers are always a little

skewed or just off, you know, or sometimes lately they have just been straight up not giving us the fucking numbers, like being dicks, especially Campo, Border Patrol office, which, because we deal with two different, Campo takes care of the Boulevard open-air detention site, and then the Boulevard, Board of Patrol takes care of the Willows in the moon camp in Acumba, and straight up the Boulevard, Board of Patrol called Campo not to, it's like they treat their employees like not, they're just not to, and I've seen it, in fact, yeah. But yeah, like we have to interact with Border Patrol a lot

to get people the help that they need, right? But like, yeah, there are definitely some cases where like, there have been certain people who are much like, the agent I spoke to today for a Border Patrol agent, he was very accommodating. He took the person who was in medical distress and their partner, he drove them himself to where they could be EMS

and ensured that, presumably they got to hospital. Like I don't have a whole lot of knowledge for what happened afterwards. Like we don't have, we're not entitled to that private medical information. And not should we be. But like other times it could be much harder. So it's just luck of the draw, right? Like we, there's so much we don't control, I guess.

And like we don't know exactly like we can't control who goes when, who has the highest level of need. You know, constantly people will be coming up to me and be like, Hey, today I was warming up milk for babies in my camping stove, right? And it was three or four babies. And they were like, do you think they'll take us first? We have babies. And like, I think most of the people there would rather give up their space

and let that baby go out because no one wants to see a fucking baby shivering out there. Like, it's fucked. It's terrible. But we don't know. And we can't tell you and we can't help you. And so, like, a lot of that stuff's outside of our control, but the stuff that's within our control, I think, we've done a really good job of. I wonder, like, if people are listening, I think I just want to convey that we're all just weird, like a group of like, we're not like, Ragnar crew, extremely like Motley crew. And but we're really doing excellent work, I think, if I may blow our trumpet. But like, if people want to come and help, first of all, I would like, you probably can,

like people think that they can't, they don't have anything useful. Like I promise you, you do. Like if you can, if you can like lift a ladle or like a pallet of water bottles or drive a vehicle or make a sandwich. Multiple languages. Sometimes it's like, you know, we just want and just right or even just one language other than English. Because I mean, even some people speak perfectly English out there. And so just going out there and paying attention to them, even if you don't have the capacity to cook food or to serve food or whatever, if you can go talk to people and you're sociable

and you can make connections and listen to their needs. And there's Google translate. We have a list of translators, like a form with numbers. So if you have a language barrier, you can just call, start calling down the line of numbers of Mandarin or this language or that language. And you can get, I gotta hold to somebody one time for Mandarin to figure out how many days they had been there.

And it was like, call a couple of people first, no answer. And then finally someone picked up. And so it's, yeah, anybody, there's always, you could always find something. Honestly, one thing that I miss doing, which when I first started coming out here, we had a little bit more volunteers, especially I was coming out on the weekends.

Weekends, typically we have more volunteers because people have jobs in the weekdays, and weekdays we have less. But I was, when I first started coming out to Hucumba on the weekends, I started bringing my guitar and my bongos and my different instruments, tambourines. And I remember we gave out all the instruments to the migrants at night while we were giving them dinner

to their around the campfire so that they can play and enjoy themselves and lift their spirits. And so that would be rad to have somebody on spot all the time with a guitar and jamming with the migrants and lifting their spirits because so like that would be rad to have somebody on spot all the time with a guitar and like jamming with the migrants and lifting their spirits because it's they're miserable and one dude from Uzbekistan once told me, spoke really good English and in fact he told me about those like commercials and so he worked at like a center where they send people over here. Oh wow. Yeah, like he was on the call center or whatever for it or something like that. But I was like, well, like how was it like?

I hear he's like, honestly, we're just bored. Yeah. Like they're just waiting. And at that time, like the waits were like four or five days, you know, it changes. It varies. It goes from two to three to four or five and the distance.

And sometimes they get out the same day if they're lucky. But yeah, it was, it just, we're bored and we're just waiting and they're anxious and which also just tears at their spirit while they're, you know, their first day in America, you know. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Like welcome to America, sleep in the desert. It's like just above freezing.

Yeah. And here's no blankets, no structures, no anything, no food, no water. And for your lucky border patrol will bring crackers and water for not enough people. Yeah. And then yeah, a bunch of us waiters turn up with blankets and that's it. Yeah. And I know that even if it's, you know, I try and include other people, but even just like I go out there with my guitar sometimes and there's a lull and or we're waiting to

pack up or whatever and I'll be playing and I think that little moments like that mean everything for these folks and I know that I've, you know, I'll bring up that I have, you know, on a day that I don't have my guitar, I'll bring up that I play it and the migrants will be all excited wanting me to bring it out or wanting me to, you know, whatever the activity may be, just to stimulate, you know, their minds a little bit. I mean, this is, it's really bleak and being there for days for just stuck in the desert with nothing to do. Right. And I mean, sometimes, you know, I've seen a soccer ball out there that the kids play with and that's so heartwarming, things like that, that really, you know, we want these people to feel

like they can still be in community with each other. Like they're not, and I feel like things like that really help to repair that sense of desperation, Because right now with the level of desperation, we do see a lot of fighting for supplies, a lot of fighting for resources because it's it's hard. It's hard out there. People want to make sure that their kids have blankets, people are so cold they can't sleep. And I feel like things that bring them together, activities that really make them feel like a community out there and help us feel in community with them allows us to have a more cohesive relationship and allows things to go more smoothly. And I think it's, you

know, in some cases more important than the supplies themselves. Because it makes sure that they go to the right places. It helps us triage. It helps us, you know, it's its own tool for survival. And it distracts them from, it could distract them from their suffering, you know, if they can have an ounce of joy, you know, in this horrible condition, in these horrible conditions, it'll distract them enough to smile and to laugh and to not be miserable. Yeah, have a normal moment. Yeah, so I wonder if people want to help, what are the ways that they can help?

Um, ways they can help are if are coming out here directly, hands on the ground, money, donating money is another huge need because a lot of the supplies that we need cost money. We need a new kitchen. We need a dishwashing station because we're currently just dumping all of our dishwashing water into a lawn that has a small drain. Yeah.

And yeah, Alotolto is one organization that takes money that you can donate to border kindness is another one. Yeah. And a detention resistance is out here a lot. The most direct way to is would be donating directly to Sam Schultz himself. Yeah. himself. So yeah, and just you know, following those same organizations, they're a free shit collective, it's another one, they mostly focus on W8, but this is all related, right? Like I, we had this man from Turkey who came with his dog, Bam Bam, or Bam Bam, like he said Flintstones, but they say Bam Bam, I guess. And he was stuck in one of the camps. And so, we like took his dog

because he was not gonna be taken from the camp. He spent the night alone because they had enough room for him. There's like, they don't know how to process a fucking dog, I guess. So we took his dog for him and so he could get processed. And once he ended up out of detention at Central, which is where they released him, and so he could get processed. And once he ended up out of detention at Central, which is where they release them, we reunited his dog with him, very emotional on both sides of the separation and they were uniting. So, you know, there's all these organizations

you can, you know, volunteer down in Central at the, when they release, you can, you know, there's, and so yeah, but following all these accounts, sharing the stories, you know what I mean? On your social media, as be it Twitter, I'll never call it the other thing. Or, you know, Instagram, Facebook, whatever your media is, Discord, yada yada. Yeah, I think even sharing the stories is really powerful.

People could translate, they can reach out, they wanna do that. I looked up the URL. It's for border kindness. It's link tr.ee slash border kindness. And for al otro lado, it's al otro lado alo t r o l a d o dot org slash donate. And they pay me to be out here. So please donate to them. And border kindness Jackie and James are great. They're always out here, so please donate to them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, help them pay. And border kindness. Jackie and James are great.

They're always out here. It's, yeah, either one is wonderful. I also wanted to highlight the lovely mutual aid groups that do a lot of work. There's not as many of them directly putting their efforts out here, but I know that they have helped me work out here and make sure that I have the funds I need to do little store runs that are necessary on a moment's notice at times because we run out of something and we can't wait for a bulk order supply. These mutual aid groups, they put in the work to reimburse folks when we do things like that, when we have to go make runs because we can't bulk order, we can't do it the most efficient way because we have a need right

now. And that has saved us in a lot of different moments, especially I used to volunteer down at W-8 in San Ysidro, and that was the primary way that we got resources was through these mutual aid groups who fundraise. And I just wanted to highlight them and highlight the... So there's the Rosekeep Collective. I know that they do a lot of fundraising. I know that you were saying free shit, free shit collective. There's a few free store SD. Yeah, there's a few different ones who, you know, their funds

help keep us running, especially in the hardest of times right now. Yeah, because we were all broke. We're so broke. We have no money. Please give us money. I'm on the migrant diet because I'm broke all the time. So I'm just eating the food that we feed them when there's leftovers. Yeah. Yeah. We've been a lot of PB and J and beans. Help us. Help us feed ourselves. That was wonderful.

Thank you so much. Yeah. Everyone listening should donate. Thank you. Yeah. And come down here. Someone came from San Francisco in May. Come back. Like there are places you can stay out in the desert if you want to come and help. But even if you have language skills, like there are so many ways you can help.

Come down. I've always had a place to stay, even though I like, like of all I've always been ready to sleep in my van, but always had a spot to say, come down. It's, you know, it's worth it. It's- There's a vortex in the coma. They call it, the locals call it a vortex. You know, you come here and it's like every past lifetime has been here and you're destined to be here.

There's something special about this town and I've really fallen in love with it since coming. Yeah, yeah, I hope more people will come. It would mean a lot to me if like, we could do something cool and like further support something that's very important to me and I think very important for the world. Good song. The Johnny Carson theme, right? Hey, who wrote that? Skip, who do you think? It's your buddy. Hi everyone, I'm Paul Enko. And I'm Skip Bronson. And what happens when two old friends take their decades of experience in the business and entertainment roles and sit down with our buddies?

You get our way, a brand new show from My Heart Podcast where we chop it up with our pals about everything under the sun. Hear about Michael Buble's entrance into show business. And get business insight from Mark Burnett. Find out what scares my son-in-law Jason Bateman and discover the bragging rights that come with beating Michael Jordan at golf. Together we know just about everybody including sitting presidents. So join us as we ask the questions they've not been asked before. Tell it like it is and even sing a song or two. This is our podcast and we're going to do it our way listen to our way on the I heart radio

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to get back a moon rock. Another week, we'll unravel a 90s Hollywood mystery. It sounds like it should be the next season of True Detective or something. These Canadian cops trying to solve this 25-year-old mystery of who spiked the Chowder on the Titanic set. A very special episode is Stranger Than Fiction. It's normal people plop down in extraordinary circumstances.

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We're gonna watch every single episode. It's 122, including the pilot, and we're gonna break them down. And by the way, most of these episodes I have not seen for 20 years. Yeah, me too. We're gonna have guest stars and people that are very important to the show,

like Larry David. I did once try and stuff a woman who's about to get hit by a car, I screamed out, watch out! And she said, don't you tell me what to do! And Cheryl Hines. Mike, why can't you just lighten up and have a good time? And Richard Lewis.

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Yes, tidbits is a great word. Anyway, we're both a wealth of knowledge about this show, because we've been doing it for 23 years. So subscribe now and you could listen to the history of Kerber enthusiasm on iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you happen to get your podcasts. Oh, boy, howdy. Welcome back to It Could Happ could happen here a podcast about about those wacky Jinzy

kids and how all of the things that the mainstream media used to say about millennials I have now embraced to say about Jinzy who are destroying the world through their greed and evilness and good knees comparatively. Yeah, Mia, how are you doing? You're Gen Z, right? Yeah, so I'm on... Okay, I am on the exact borderline of... I am either the oldest zoomer or the youngest millennial. You're a daywalker, right? Like you're the you're the blade of Gen Z. Yeah. Yeah. OK, so you could go out in the sunlight, but you still need blood.

Yeah, I get it. I get it. Yeah. Who's the Chris Christa? I guess I'm the Chris Christa Overson if we're doing the original blade movie, which I watched over Thanksgiving break pretty good. I hadn't seen it in like 20 years, but solid movie. Solid movie. I feel like it's kind of downhill from the blood rave, but the blood rave is pretty sick. It's all, everything in culture was downhill from blood rave. But yeah, it's got some good bits to it still. You know what doesn't have good bits to it.

The institution of marriage? That, I mean, I don't disagree with that, but I was going to say the Washington Post editorial board. You know, yeah. So we are talking, this is an episode about some Gen Z panic shit that came out recently that I felt was worth digging into because of the pretty interesting ways in which it's wrong.

If you were celebrating being with your family, eating turkey, or just shooting a pair of it alone in the bathroom last week. On November 22nd, 2023, the Washington Post editorial board published an opinion column with the provocative title if attitudes don't shift a Political dating mismatch will threaten marriage. Hell. Yeah Finally destroy the institutions. Yeah. Yeah, we're doing this through a political dating mismatch now

I think I I think an article with roughly this premise drops every year, sometimes a couple of times a year, on a couple of different places. This time it came in through the Washington Post editorial board. And the basic premise of this specific article is that Gen Z and millennial men are growing more conservative.

Well, women are growing more progressive. This threatens marriage as an institution because all these close-minded Gen Z Librauds won't date Republicans, right? That is literally like the point of the article is Gen Z liberal women, they're less willing to date outside of their political beliefs and men are getting more conservative.

So it's really a danger for marriage. Now, I understand if your first impulse is to say something like, well, when has the Washington Post editorial board ever been right about a single goddamn thing? And that is a correct attitude to have. Sometimes sometimes they make the decision not to publish an article. Yeah, there are some days where they don't write anything. Yeah, you have to. that is a good decision.

If they made that decision every day, I would be fully supportive of the Washington Post editorial board. And if they'll hire me, I can make that decision for them every day. I'm very good at not doing anything. That said, even though it is correct to say the Washington Post editorial board

are basically always wrong, I've still run into overwhelming numbers of my peers who think this article is silly but still buy into the basic points in this piece. This is generally married to a widespread belief which is actually cited in the article that toxic male influencers like Andrew Tate have tilted huge numbers of young men to the right. So even though people will be like, well, it's stupid to expect people to date, you know, folks who believe horrible political things

that would hurt them, it's true that men are getting more, young men are getting more conservative, right? And this is, I think generally down to this belief that has, I don't like people examine often, they just sort of like, they get concerned about the popularity of guys like Tate, which don't like people examine often. They just sort of like, they get concerned about the popularity of guys like Tate,

which is valid, he's concerning. But assume that does mean that like, yeah, we're losing the young men, they've all been tilted towards these guys. And so without discounting the damage of dudes like Tate, I wanted to give a breakdown of how common the so-called rightward tilt of young men actually is. Because, spoilers, this is a pernicious bit of disinformation, and I think it kind of blackpills

a lot of people unnecessarily. Let's start with the obvious point here. Young men are not growing more conservative across the board than men of other generations. So, first off, I want to read you a quote from this post editorial. Since Mr. Trump's election in 2016, the percentage of young women ages 18 to 30 who identify as liberal has shot up from slightly over 20% to 32%. Young men have not followed suit. If anything, they have grown more conservative. Now, that claim is based... you want to guess, did they cite a bunch of different sources to prove like that it's a really widespread problem or do they have a single shady source? It's the Washington Post editorial board.

Those people could not find a second study if you nailed it to their face. They sure couldn't. They googled real quickly or I'm not even gonna give them credit for googling. One of their friends who works at a right wing think tank sent them a survey from that right wing think tank because that the entire statistical basis of that claim is a study by the American Enterprise Institute, which is a center right think tank that tends to produce center right surveys. And even then the study that they're actually citing doesn't show what the

post-editorial board claims. Again, their claim is, young men have not followed suit. If anything, they have grown more conservative, right? Young men. So they are talking across the board about Gen Z and millennial males, right? I'm going to quote from that study. Previous research identified a growing gap in ideological orientation between young men and women. The gender gap in liberal identity is notable among members of Generation Z, but it's relatively modest. 43% of Gen Z women identify as liberal compared to 35% of Gen Z men.

However, the gender divide among white, non-Hispanic Gen Z adults is considerable. Close to half, 46% of Gen Z women are liberal, a far greater share than white Gen Z men, among whom only 28% identify as liberal. Among Gen Z adults, white men are significantly more likely than white women to identify as politically conservative. 36% versus 26%. So you see what number one the study is doing there, is it saying 43% of Gen Z women,

all Gen Z women identify as liberal, whereas, and then it goes to 36% of white Gen Z men identify as conservative. Yeah, that's not the same thing. It's switching it on them, right? And while it does eventually acknowledge the differences, because it says that like across the board, all Gen Z men, 35% are conservative,

43% of Gen Z women are liberal. That's not a massive gap, right? The Washington Post editorial board just makes the claim that young men have grown more conservative, which is not supported by the study. And also the study is specifically talking about how Gen Z white men have gotten more conservative, right? Very different things being claimed here.

So the post just ignored what was actually in the survey to claim all young men, not just young white men, are more conservative, not just Gen Z white men are more conservative. Now, this is weird, but even if you take the study, which is misrepresented by the editorial board at its face value, that study does not gel with all of

the other data that we have. Now, when I went through this, it was hard to find good data on just Gen Z men that is not broken down in most of the studies that we get. But we do have some information on how Gen Z adult men voted as a group in the 2022 midterms. And that data is telling. Based on the 2022 midterms, 71% of young women, that's Gen Z, mostly Gen Z, 18 to 29. So I think Gen Z taps out at 26 right now. So presumably a percentage of the people in this are technically millennials, but they're like you.

They're day walkers. Yeah, that's like what like, oh my god, I can't do math life on air. I think it's like 27 to 40 something is the millennials. But I'm going to say it's close enough to this. It's like it's close. Yeah. It's only like three years of people. Yeah, exactly. And they're the three years that are right in the middle. But of that, of these voters in the 2022 midterms, 71% of young women voted for Democrats, 26% voted for Republicans, 53% of young men voted for Democrats, 42% voted for Republicans. And among LGBT, and again, this is not broken down male or female, 93% voted for Democrats. And overall among non-LGBT youth,

58% voted for Democrats, 38% voted for Republicans. So again, not massive discrepancies here. And one thing that may help to explain this that again is not really broken down in the Washington Post editorial, is that while Gen Z white men have are more conservative compared to like Gen Z millennial white men, Gen Z itself is a lot less white than prior generations, which means overall Gen Z men are not really

getting more conservative. About 55% of Gen Z is white compared to about 70% of boomers, right? So this is one major reason why, again, because again, if you actually factor in all of Gen Z, there's not this huge worry about like a marriage discrepancy as long as you assume that people, that interracial dating is not a problem for most people. The way it is for apparently the Washington Post editorial board.

Now there's a couple caveats here. One is that midterm voters are historically more engaged and educated than voters of other generations. However, that may not necessarily hold true with Gen Z or millennial voters today due to a variety of factors. One worthwhile point is that young people tend to be driven far more by what they encounter through social media, which is probably part of why

Genzian millennial voters consider abortion to be a more important thing to vote on than the economy by a margin that bears no resemblance to older generations. This is why we've actually seen in last four elections soaring youth voter turnout, particularly during the midterms, record levels of youth voting, which doesn't mean it's completely wrong that midterm voters may be a bit more engaged and educated,

but that's probably less of a factor for young voters than it is for older generations, right? Some of the conventional wisdom about who votes when is not as accurate when we're talking about younger people. This is not something that you can prove objectively, but there's significant sort of circumstantial evidence around this. Speaking of circumstances,

you know what circumstances get me to spend my money? Is it being served products and services? It's, well, it's when those products and services advertise on this podcast and only this podcast. So check that shit out, homies. One of those products and services advertised on this podcast and only this podcast. So check that shit out, homies. Ah, and we're back. So yeah, one of the overall points to make that I think goes against this kind of panic

a lot of people have that Gen Z is somehow being like, peeled away from progressive politics is that as a result of stuff, primarily abortion, Gen Z voters supported Democrats over Republicans in the midterm elections by an astonishing 27 points. This is again, a large part of this came down to abortion, which Gen Z voters prioritized by a higher amount than any other generation. One of the things that was noted in one of the studies

I found is like a potential line of hope for Republicans. Is that while this and this is part of where I think some of the the fear mongering in these these Washington Post articles comes from, although I don't think it says what they think it says, is that lower numbers of young people support specific parties, right? So only about 30% of Gen Zers align with Democrats compared to 24% of Republicans. And if you just look at that, that's way less of that seems like you're seeing like these numbers sort of kind of tighten up. But again, they still voted over Democrats over Republicans by 27 points. It's just that Gen Z is less loyal to political parties, which doesn't necessarily mean that progressivism is in danger. It just means that most young people hate the Democrats too.

And the other thing is like the thing that actually, and I think this is legitimately a part of it, is like, well, okay, so what's happening to all those people? And the answer is they're becoming socialists. And it's like, well, that doesn't help Republicans either. So... Yeah. And it's, I mean, part of it is that more young people identify with like kind of more politically radical chunks of progressivism. Part of it is that a lot more of them identify as independent and may not have, may not identify themselves super much

as a specific political chunk, but in general, like they vote progressive. They just don't have any faith in like the ossified political structures in our society, which is a rational thing to do as a young person, right? So I also want to address kind of the elephant in the room with this piece, which is that the Washington Post editorial board's obsession

with political divide among the young harming marriage specifically is also kind of gay panicky, right? Because one of the reasons why there seems to be this divide that they see as like this threatens marriage is that a higher percentage of Gen Z kids are less interested in straight marriage. And these Gen Z kids, male and female, are not getting more conservative,

but they're also presumably not going to do the kind of marriage that the Washington Post editorial board wants, right? I'm gonna quote from a time magazine right up here. In late 2020 and early 2021, Gen Z was the only US generation in which a majority believed there were more than two genders. As recently as the first half of 2020, this was a minority opinion even among Gen Zers, a remarkable amount of change over just six months. In contrast, there was only a small uptick in this belief among older generations.

That type of data is finally available. Starting in June 2021, the US Census Bureau offered four options on its household pulse survey question about gender, male, female, transgender, and none of these. The last, a rough gauge of those who identify as non-binary, gender fluid or another gender identity. That is a terrible way of phrasing that question. It's not a great way. It's better than nothing. It's better than nothing, but like my God.

With more than a million respondents, the survey is large enough to provide accurate estimates. The results are clear. Genzzi young adults are much more likely to report identifying as either trans or non-binary than other generations. Well, only one out of a thousand boomers report they are transgender, one tenth of one percent. Twenty-three out of a thousand Genz young adults, two point three percent identify as trans, twenty times more. By this estimate, there are now more trans young adults in the US than the number of people living in Boston, which is great because I have long felt that what

we need to do is arm trans people to take over the city of Boston. I believe this for years and I think we can finally make it happen. Okay, but here's the problem though. You still have to live in Boston afterward. Well, I guess we could take the city of Boston and live somewhere else and then sort of like extract cutled dues from it. Yeah, presumably, yeah.

You could basically become like collectively the landlords of Boston, and then use it to afford rent in a better place. This is viable. I believe I believe in our lifetimes that we can do this. And this will finally increase Gen Z's like home ownership numbers, right? If collectively, all of the transcend non binary people own Boston. Yeah, this is a workable plan. I think I'm gonna continue that quote fewer than 1% of boomers identify as non-binary compared to more than 3% of Jinzi young adults Combined with the more than 2% who are trans that means one out of 18 young adults identified as something other than male or female in

2021 or 2022 Which is not true 2021 or 2022, which is again, it's not true. Because half of, no, no, it's not. It's not because again, 2% are trans, which presumably based on this survey and how it's asked, presumably means identifies either male or female, whereas 3% are non-binary of some sort, may not identify as either male.

It doesn't say that. This is not well written, but the data's interesting. It suggests five to six percent of Gen Z are trans or non-binary, which is a wild departure from previous generations. Right? And also, that's a significant chunk of these Gen Z numbers that are not being included in this Washington Post. Because presumably, a decent chunk of these people will want to get married. They just don't identify in a way that the Washington Post editorial board respects, right? And again, one of the things that's interesting about this and counter to all this fear mongering about,

Andrew Tates destroyed all the men, is that male or female Genzian millennial voters overwhelmingly support LGBT rights, more than they support almost anything else. And this is consistent across the board and markedly higher than it is for other generations, right? Presumably this seems to include even like more independent or even more conservative Genzine millennial voters, right?

They're just across the board, less shitty on this. I guess presumably because a lot of their friends are trans or non-binary or just queer and that makes them less bigoted about this stuff. And again, doesn't really fit into this narrative, right? And this is again, part of why I'm not as doomer about, you know, there's this big fear, oh, you know, young people are deserting progressivism, which is going to doom us electorally. And I, I'm just not seeing that in the numbers.

Now, again, everything that's been going on with like the Biden administration's, you know, support of Israel, certainly may and probably will have have an impact politically, but it's not necessarily, it's very clearly not a result of young people getting killed by Andrew Tate, right? That's not why that's happening. There's there's a thing I wanted to talk about with the Andrew Tate stuff too because like everyone's treating this as like a completely new phenomena and it's like Most of the people who are talking about this should be old enough to remember Gamergate

Like yes, this stuff has all happened before and it it was like, yeah, like Gamer date did produce a bunch of fascists and also the millennials were still unbelievably further left than like the generations that came before them. Yeah. So like, yeah, it's like this is this is just a thing like every generation has a giant thing where there's like a bunch of right wing, like, yeah, where the rest of them get a big push. Yeah. Yeah, it's like this just happens periodically It's just like a part of it's a part of politics and it sucks It's bad, but it's also like not a thing to be do mered about no I do think another thing that is happening here is that the kind of people who become members of the Washington Post editorial board

Yeah, have this have this brain worm the sickness that infects members of the American media worse than almost anyone else, which is like they're always looking for contrary to popular wisdom. You think this, but the reality, you know, it's Malcolm Gladwell syndrome, right? Where you've got to come up with some like clever thing that shows that you're smart because you don't buy into the standard wisdom, which is always wrong. And so they have to believe that whatever is really happening is the opposite of what's obviously happening, right? Which is why this actually young men are getting more conservative. And I'm the only one who realized that I've got to warn everyone of the danger to marriage. Speaking of which, here's another quote from that Washington Post article.

In another era, political or ideological differences might have had less impact on marriage rates, but increasingly, the political is personal. A 2021 survey of college students found that 71% of Democrats would not date someone with opposing views. There is some logic to this. Marriage across religious or political lines, if either partner considers those things to

be central to their identity, can be associated with lower levels of life satisfaction, and politics is becoming more central to people's identity. This mismatch means that someone will need to compromise. As the researchers Lyman Stone and Brad Wilcox have noted, about one in five young singles will have little choice but to marry someone outside of their ideological tribe. The other option is that they declined to get married at all, not an ideal outcome considering the data showing that marriage is good for the health of societies

and individuals alike. And again, this is only the case that one in five number is ignoring queer people, right? And ignoring largely ignoring non-white people, right? Like it's just not accurate like yeah Maybe a lot more young white men are gonna be single and there's problems that will occur due to that right because for one thing That's the group that tends to like load up on guns and shoot up places Not saying it's not a problem

But it doesn't mean that our society is doomed because no one's getting married It means that there's some serious problems with young white men that we need to deal with. Yeah, well, and there's two other things that I think are interesting there. One is, okay, you can tell when these people like formed their political beliefs because they're complaining about the personals political, which is, this is 90s shit.

Like that is like old school ass, like this is like stuff people were like, I don't know, it's like political correctness. Where it's like, it's the previous version of the same panic that everyone's having now, but this is from the 90s. And so it's like all these people are just like absolute dinosaurs, who they've like dragged out to write this like weird fear mongering thing. And the second thing is, I think is interesting too, is like just the deep ingrained sort of very conservative assumption here, which is that marriage is good for society. Yeah. Which I don't think is anywhere near as straightforward a proposition as to why should it be made.

It's making it seem like, and you know, and like they have grand statistical arguments. I mean, the statistics that I've seen, like, you know, like they have ramps physical arguments I mean the cystics that I've seen like you know just just sort of like cystics that I've seen based on American society is that like women who aren't married are way happier than they are in marriages and you know like men do worse but like you know but like I mean this is one of these things was like we don't know like there has not been a version of America where we haven't or the institution of marriage wasn't like our thing. That hasn't existed for like two or three hundred years.

Right? Yeah. We don't know. The Washington Post doesn't know what an American society without, like where people don't get married looks like. Like they have no idea, but they're just sort of assuming that it's like the apocalypse because they're weird conservatives in the 90s. like the apocalypse because they're weird conservatives in the 90s. Yeah. And a lot of, I mean, and again, a massive part of what's we're seeing here is less it's objectively good. Like marriage is the result of all of these kind of positive mental health outcomes and more. Well, when people are like have relationships and loved ones and like a family system supporting them, they're less likely to commit suicide

They're more likely to have someone notice if they take ill. They're just like healthier in general but that doesn't That doesn't necessarily mean that it's marriage specifically and more like yeah, not being alone, right? Yeah, anyway, I I want to continue and just kind of go through I think we've trashed this article enough But I did find a lot of interesting stuff about Gen Z and young voters that I wanted to continue and just kind of go through. I think we've trashed this article enough, but I did find a lot of interesting stuff about Gen Z and young voters that I wanted to get into. But first, here's some more fucking ads.

You pigs, you filthy Mongrels, slap it up, suck it down. Anyway, we'll be back in a minute. And we're back. So one interesting thing I found, I tried to stick to just stuff from like 2021 or later for this, in part because of the andro-tate of it all, right? I wanted to like try to find stuff that was like, okay, since that guy came onto the scene, has there been some sudden shift?

Because people treat him like the Pied Piper of fucking fascism, which again, he's a problem, but I don't think that's broadly accurate. So one of the studies I found was a 2021 survey from MTV APNORC, right? And it was interesting because it showed something I had kind of bought into, was at least less supported by the evidence than I might have thought, which is like the level of demerism in young people politics. Gen Z actually shows that they are more optimistic than a lot of older people, both in the state of the world and their role in improving it.

Two thirds of Gen Z feels like their generation is motivated to make positive change in the country. Part of, I think, where we get some of the feelings of demerism is that only about 14% think that they can have an impact on what the government does. Yeah. I mean, that is an entirely reasonable assessment of, I mean, just like looking at polling data on Palestine

or like, you know, not a very rational take actually. Yeah, yeah, it's like we had an entire uprising. People fought the Secret Service at the gates of the White House and the product of it was the government was like, no, we should give more money to cops. It's like, okay, we're defunding the New York Public Library system to buy encrypted radio things for police units. It's like, yeah, this is objectively true that you have very little influence over the

government. Yes, it's the least. Perfectly reasonable thing to say. Yeah. But yeah, about, it is interesting too, another thing that I was kind of surprised by is about half of Gen Z people think their standard of living is better than their parents, but about half also think that the world

their generation is facing is worse than what most other people, most other generations have dealt with. So like they think that their problems are worse than like what boomers and Gen X and millennials were dealing with, but they think they're, about half of them think they're living better lives. This is pretty similar to how millennials feel.

Gen X feels very different. Gen X is the most pessimistic generation about the state of the world, which actually makes kind of sense if you realize that like a lot of Gen Z kids are the children of Gen X people, right? So like they think their standard of living is better than their parents because Gen X is miserable. Yeah. Which you know, interesting. Gen Z and millennials are more accepting than Gen X of depictions of same sex couples and media and hold more positive views of LGBT people, which again, Ginex is the worst generation. We all have to agree on that one.

It really sucked. Just terrible. It really, really didn't work out. The 90s and 2000s were just a disaster. Yeah, a calamity. Worst decades. So I wanted to kind of break down some stuff from this survey that was interesting,

just kind of on how the generations support various policies. So in terms of their support for prohibiting workplace discrimination on the basis of gender identity, 62% of Gen Z and 62% of millennials support that, only 53% of Gen X does, which is still actually not like a massive gap, right? When it comes to, this is interesting, when it comes to requiring Americans to mask in public places like stores and restaurants, 54% of millennials support that 53% of Gen X do, but

does, but 52% of Gen Z does, which is all potentially within kind of a margin of error. Yeah, that seems like noise. Like, yeah, that might just be noise. It's about equivalent, right? It's pretty close. Most of this is actually pretty for all of our shitting on Ginex. Most of this is actually pretty close for acquiring vaccinations. Millennials seem to support it higher than anyone else. Forty nine percent. Gen Z at forty three percent, which is significant.

Kind of Ginex is right in the middle at forty five. When it comes to supporting a nationwide ban on AR-15s and other similar semi-automatic rifles, Gen Z and Gen X are at 42% for Gen X, 44% for Gen Z, whereas millennials are at 47%. Now, a lot of this breakdown, because I dug into the actual numbers, is the difference between men and women and conservative men and liberal women, right? Who are liberal women are a lot more common and more likely to support these kinds of bans whereas conservative men aren't, but that drags the overall numbers down.

It's just interesting to me that there seems to be less support with Gen Z over that. They're closer to Gen X. Increasing security at the border. This is where there's a huge gap. 55% of Gen X for increasing border security. Millennials in Gen Z are at 38 and 37%. So that's really, like Gen X really seems to buy into the,

we need more border security, whereas deutes are like, no, fuck that shit. Yeah, Gen X or Gen Z and millennials both tied at 48% support for a universal basic income, only 36% of Geninex supports this. Again, another significant gap. One interesting thing is that Ginex and Millennials at 38 and 36% support reducing regulations on businesses.

Only 31% of Gen Z supports this. That's a significant difference. I find that kind of interesting. Yeah, I wonder how much of that also is just like, like, like you are. OK, you are in your resume. Are you over owning a business? Like first off, thank you.

I am. I am a zoomer. Under what circumstances? I think it may it may be. And I don't I don't know that this has been studied. It may be that because Gen-Z are so many of them wanna be influencers who do some other kind of job in like internet content creation,

that and a lot of them have done kind of work, made some amount of money in that field, that tends to be independent contractor work. And there's some pretty onerous tax regulations. You know, if you've ever been an independent contractor about how you've gotta pay taxes, it may have something to do with that. I don't know though, like I, this hasn't been broken down like granularly that I've seen, but I did find that kind of interesting. And then here's kind of depressing, but interesting, reducing funding for law enforcement

agencies. 34% of millennials support that 30% of Gen Z supports that, which is enough of a gap to suggest like might be somewhat less popular among Gen Z than millennials. Only 18% of Gen X feels the same, which is a huge gap. And that is kind of interesting to me. So yeah, that's all compelling. I think there's one, I think there's one like last kind of interesting thing about

this is that those numbers, the numbers on like police funding and a lot of the sort of like, if you just look at the graphs that were in the Washington Post article, a lot of that is it looks a lot like there's there's there's a giant spike between the uprising and then it sort of like tails off after it. And so that's the thing that I think is like, like, I don't, you know, and this is, I think, a thing I think is kind of important. It's like, this stuff is all malleable. And the moment something happens, everyone's beliefs change really quickly. And that's the thing, and like, that's the thing with these sort of like, you know, with the sort of doom,

bris and random changes. Like, yeah, like, with the sort of doomvirus in my eyes, you're like, yeah, but people's actual political beliefs and what they're willing to do for them can change very, very, very quickly in moments where they're sort of, you know, I mean, there's a bunch of people getting shot by cops in the street, right? Right. Like that changes people really, really quickly.

And so- And I do think that's why the gap is so high, both between overall Americans, which are at 28% for defunding police, and between Gen X and Gen Z millennials, is that a lot more Gen Z millennials people got like beaten by the cops in 2020. And this does show, well, again, it's an uphill battle. Most Americans, a super majority of Americans do not support that. Way more young Americans do. And it's probably because so many of us got our asses kicked.

Yeah. Well, and also, I want to, like, like, if you look at what's happened, like the numbers during the uprising, right? Like the number of people who supported the burning of the Third Precinct was like 50%. Yeah. So, like, these are things that change really quickly in the moment too. And now we're in the sort of long backlash and that's you know, that's that's driving like some of these numbers. But yeah, like don't don't don't be cynical things things

can and will get better. Yeah. Yes, they will. And they there's a pretty dramatic difference. Maybe it'll take a couple more of the general uprisings where people get there and just get kicked, which is not great to think about. But like, these are pretty stark differences in the generations. And I think that that's kind of worth noting and I don't know, celebrating maybe the wrong term, but I don't think it's pessimistic. Now, in terms of stuff that is pessimistic, I want to end on a note of like, where I kind of think some of the lazy, dumbass pundit brain on this is coming from, and maybe I'm wrong about this, but I have a little conspiracy theory that involves AI, because I did kind of at the end of digging up a bunch of these studies, reading through, I don't

know, like 15 articles or whatnot, and the actual entirety of three or four different big surveys. I decided just to hop onto one of the AI search engines that I use occasionally that is usually not helpful, just to see what it said. And I asked like, what is the most recent data on how young Gen Z men are voting, right? And it gave me mostly useless shit,

like the resources were bad. But one of the things it said, because it breaks down the different sources and like summarizes them for you. So it says here, the Atlantic is kind of one of the sources it recommends. The Atlantic reported that Gen Z and millennials are more likely to vote Republican.

This could indicate a shift in political leading among these demographics. Now, the article that it is linking there is an article called, Is Gen Z Coming for the GOP? Not All Young People Are Democrats by Ronald Brownstein. And it does not say that it does not say anything like that. It certainly does not say that. And I will tell you what it fucking says, right? Because it's wildly fucking different. An analysis of previously unpublished election data from catalyst a Democratic targeting firm by Michael Potorzer, a former political director for the AFL-CIO, shows that even the emergence of these new voters may not break the larger

political stalemate that has partitioned the country in the seemingly immovable blocks of red and blue states. Potorzer's analysis of the Catalyst data shared exclusively with the Atlantic, found that over the past four elections, Gen Z voters have broken heavily for Democrats in blue states and provided the party's solid margins in closely contested swing states. But in red states, with a few prominent exceptions, Podhorzer surprisingly found that even Gen Z voters are mostly supporting Republicans. Now, when you dig into the data, first off, that does not show that Gen Z people are voting more for Republicans. It's the opposite of that.

The vast majority of them are voting for Democrats. But in red states, the number, and it's not finding in red states that Gen Z are more likely to support Republicans than previous generations. They are more progressive than previous generations. They're just still majority supporting Republicans in deep red states. Now, again, if you read that quote, it's also saying there are some red states where Gen Z are voting overwhelmingly for Democrats. And in purple states, they are wildly progressive compared to previous generations. It is again the opposite of what that AI summary is. I'm wondering how many lazy pundits are doing this because they suck at shit and we're just like, oh, well, the Atlantic says they're more Republican. It's like, no, if you read the article, it does not say that. It's a pretty good article.

Yeah. Well, and this is actually, there's one thing I want to mention about that polling data too, which is that the 2022 election was really weird because the 2022 election was supposed to be, it was supposed to be a red wave election. And there actually was one, but it was, it only happened, it happened in deep red states. Yes. And it happened in New York. And that has to do with the New York media market, which has caused part of also why all these people's brains have been completely destroyed. But I don't actually, it's actually genuinely unclear to me that this is even predictive of how those same people in deep red states are gonna vote in like the next

like four to eight years. Because again, this was a midterm election with a Democratic president. That is when you're supposed to have the opposition like win a bunch of seats and stuff like that. And like it didn't go the way it was supposed to. And so I think it's actually even that part is more, is more like even the tiny note of it

where they're like more like Gen Z people voted for Republicans, like I, I don't know. I don't even know if that's gonna hold in the long run. But all of these pun, like yeah, the fact that they probably are just reading AIs. Yeah, I wonder, just like coming across that dog shit, like just completely wrong. Very funny, made me feel a little bit better

about the computers coming for us all. Made me feel a little bit worse about the intelligence of pundits. But yeah, it's, you know, and one of the things that is kind of, if you're concerned about 2024, that is a worthwhile concern, and that is a real problem, is that while young people are overwhelmingly progressive as voters, this is not evenly distributed across the country. And a lot of the gains in voters that progressives have seen are gonna be clustered in states

that were already overwhelmingly blue. And when it comes to a presidential election, those are wasted votes, right? And this is a problem that the Republicans dealt with a lot during the Obama years, right? Where there would be massively more Republican voters, but they would be clustered in these areas that Dems were never going to win.

And so it didn't help them electorally, right? That is kind of worth noting, it's potentially a thing. Although a lot of the gains when people are freaking out about like, oh, you know, Biden's numbers among non-white voters have gotten worse. That is probably true, almost certainly true to some extent, but a lot of those vote gains are clustered in areas that were so heavily

read, it may not have any impact on the electoral state. This is unclear. The one place for that matter actually does matters, Michigan. Yes. Because Michigan has this huge Muslim population who are unbelievably pissed at Biden for, you know, offering them the deal. We're going to murder your family. And also you have to vote for us, which is like, I'm not doing the Will Stansel thing

and saying there's nothing to worry about. There are places where it does matter. Yeah. But like, yeah, it's unclear. And a lot of what may be ha, well, a lot of what is certainly happening, although this doesn't mean that there won't be because I think there's a good chance there will be an electoral impact, but a lot of what is objectively happening, both on the left and the right is increasing numbers of voters who are in states that would never, never going to be in play electoral. Right? This is because

the electoral college is bullshit, you know? Yeah, it's like, like, I've lived in Illinois my entire life. It is not possible for me to cast a vote that matters. Yeah. Like, it just isn't. Yeah, it's just how the system works, right? It's like like it's a great, great, great job. Great job. Yeah. People wrote the Constitution. So anyway, I think that's about enough to get into. I hope this has been edifying and useful to people. Mia, you got anything else to say before we roll out here? Molotov 2024, just like Molotov 2020. Yeah, the Washington Post. Okay, I wanna close on the note that the Washington Post editorial board

managed to find the one socialist in the entire US who's anti-abortion and make her a writer for them so much. Yeah, this people really suck. But who are you speaking for? Why it important that we we have this voice? Yeah, like Fucking hell god. It's tiring Speaking of tiring. I'm tired. So now we're done. Goodbye Good song. The Johnny Carson theme, right?

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Robert Evans, this is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and about my slow descent into theistic narcissism. Here with me today, Garrison Davis and Mia Wong. How are you guys doing? Great. He wasn't like this like 15 minutes ago. There's been a rapid radicalization process. Yeah Speaking speaking of rapid radicalization. I downed a bottle of this alive ancient mushroom lick elixir and it is Overpowered me. It's brought on delusions of cancer. Not a sponsor too, free advertising here. But if they wanna pay us,

I will probably stop claiming to have slain the God of Abraham. This is this week in terrorism, a show title we've never used before and may never use again But we wanted to we're probably gonna have to use it again None of the terrorism we're talking about has occurred this week. It all occurred in previous weeks We were out last week. We wanted to talk about some of our recent terrorism Attacks to discuss kind of what we're seeing and radicalization of the people who are carrying out Usually shootings but not exclusively. We're actually gonna start with a hammer attack

Yeah, what we're seeing out there because very British style actually To most of these are not shootings I'm a liar It's the mushroom juice But yeah, we're gonna start by talking about the attack on Paul Pelosi, who's of course Nancy Pelosi's fuck buddy. Some people call him a husband. I think that's an archaic term. But yeah, he got assaulted in his house by this guy, Brian DePayep. This was like a year or so ago. And he just recently got convicted of a bunch of stuff He's going to be going to forever prison

But we're going to talk about that attack Essentially, I wanted to start with kind of a little bit of audio of the attack itself This is from police body camera and basically what happened is this guy Brian Broke into the Pelosi's backyard, which was not guarded. Nancy was away from the house. She had their security detail. Capitol police does not protect spouses and family members of Congress people. And he used a hammer in one of the two very large backs

he brought with him to bust into the house and then had a conversation with Paul Pelosi that he insists was very polite until the police showed up at which point he started bashing him in the skull with a hammer and We're gonna get into more of what happened, but I wanted to I want to start by playing that audio This is right at the point that the police opened the door Are you doing? What's going on there?

That's the guy. What? Off the hammer. What is going on? I'm not being answered. Oh, and so what is actually happening in the video is this guy, Brian, who is whole, like he's got a very large hammer in his hands and like there's a very mild Struggle going on for it Pelosi has one hand on the hammers

Which is a reasonable thing to want to do in this situation And the guy just looks kind of stunned and the police show up and they're like yeah I'm and drop the hammer and he says no and they to be fair to the police pretty reasonably take a step towards him And he pulls the hammer away from Paul and hits him in the head several to the police, pretty reasonably, take a step towards him. And he pulls the hammer away from Paul and hits him in the head several times that police tackle him off. Paul got hurt very badly.

He's a pretty ugly Italian. He's an old man. He got hit in the head with a hammer several times by a much younger man. Pretty ugly. One of the things that becomes clear if you watch the earlier footage of this guy in their backyard,

because they have a security camera. And if you watch this footage, is that like, this is not a guy who had a super clear plan about what he was going to do. This is a guy who was kind of flying by the seat of his pants. And when the police came in, kind of irrationally, like based on his existing plans decided to swing at him.

And when he was at court, like some of the things that Pape said were very interesting. He basically like, you know, he busted into their backyard. Paul Pelosi in his pajamas like confronts him when he hears it. And DePap asks, are you Paul Pelosi? Where's Nancy? Where's Nancy? And DePap, Pelosi's like, she's not home.

She's gonna be gone for several days. And DePap started threatening to tie Palosie up. He does this like 10 times. Eventually, Paul's able to get away briefly to go to the bathroom where he has his cell phone and he calls the police. And like while he's on the phone with the dispatcher, you can hear DePap like telling him to hang up,

you know, the police get there and he attacks him. Um, the first thing that happens in the wake of this, this is obviously big news. And the entirety of right wing media basically decided that this was Paul Pelosi's lover. And yeah, I was under the impression from reputable sources that this was this was Paul's gay lover is what I was told. That immediately comes out. Marjorie Taylor Greene spreads this. Tucker Carlson spreads this. Elon Musk spreads this.

Representative Carla Tenney spreads this. Again, because this is very clearly a right-wing attack motivated by right-wing media on an elected leader. Pretty brutal attack, not on an elected leader, sorry. On the husband of an elected leader, right? And I wanted to quote really quickly from an MSN write-up on this that talks about like why D'Pap says he did this. D'Pap explained that he broke into the Pelosi home in order to lure University of Michigan Anthropology and Women's Study professor Gail Rubin to their house. Rubin's research, according to her professional bio, focuses on LGBTQ studies,

gay and lesbian ethnography, sexual populations, and geography, sexology, and feminist theory. She is known for her 1984 essay, Thinking Sex, which is considered a founding text of queer theory. Paul was never a target, DePap said in court, explaining that he was only using the Pelosi's to get to my other targets, and that he felt really bad for Paul Pelosi. He explained that he spent six hours a day watching political commentary on YouTube before he was arrested, where he learned that everything was a lie coming from the press. He listed off common right-wing grievances, according to NBC News, to explain why he broke into the home.

He claims to have heard about Gail Rubin from anti-LGBTQ activist James Lindsay, who was the same person who claims to have popularized the groomer slur against LGBTQ people. DePap said that he regularly listened to Lindsay's podcast. The takeaway I got is that she wants to turn our schools into pedophile molestation factories, DePap said. So one of the things that's really interesting to me is that this guy's in the home

of one of the most powerful people in the entire country who is worth a hundred million dollars or more. So also extremely wealthy person. But she's not his target. His target is this woman's studies professor who James Lindsay has convinced him is trying to molest all of the kids in America. Right. This is again, this is entirely stochastic terrorism. This is the fault James Lindsay wanted stuff like this to happen. That's why he does what he does. This is on him. And it's a very clear example. This is, if you go into the student's backstory, he was not always like this. He used to be, I think, a pro nudity activist, but like,

was not a guy who was like, wildly conservative. And then the pandemic hits and he's spending all day playing video games alone, increasingly isolated. And he starts going down these YouTube and podcast, primarily listening to these right wing podcasters. Lindsay's one of them. He's also a huge Tim Poole listener who is this super right wing guy who believes that like we're already in a shooting civil war with the left. And yeah, these are all big groomer guys. These are all women's studies professors of the most dangerous people in the country. And this is a vulnerable dude who the pandemic isolated from what social networks he had had. And he just kind of completely loses his shit. It's a very clear

radicalization path. And it's a big bummer because this is a deeply mentally unwell man who was taken advantage of by a right wing media ecosystem that exists to churn exactly this kind of guy towards violence against their ideological opponents. It is certainly interesting. This is this attack was more deeply weird than what we all initially thought. Like, oh, like someone was trying to kill Pelosi, right? It is certainly interesting. This is this attack was more deeply weird than what we all initially thought. It's like, oh, like someone was trying to kill Pelosi, right? It is like- I'm not surprised someone would try to do that.

I'm not saying it's just, I'm not like saying that because fuck her. I'm saying that like, I'm not surprised. She's incredibly powerful. Of course people would have killed her. That's just the way it is. Yeah. We all saw what happened on January 6th.

Like, come on guys. Yes, this is normal politics. Yes. But like the idea that you're like holding holding Pelosi is a hostage to get like a gender theory women's studies professor is just so much more like like highlighting the type of American brain rot that is just totally taking over large swaths of the media of of the media ecosystem at this point. Yeah. I think one of my favorite details from this is that if you go into like his court case,

why he chose to attack the home of again Nancy Pelosi, super wealthy, powerful person with a security detail is because he believed this Gail Rubin, this professor lived in a fortress that he could not break into. This limit studies professor lives in an underground bunker. Yeah. It was easier to get to the speaker of the house's home than it is a woman studies professor's house. I think it's interesting too that it was, it's specifically James Lindsay,

I don't know, have we talked about him really on the show? I'm sure in passing. Well, he had a big Twitter fight with him earlier this year. I I've had several. Yeah. Yeah. My, you know, so he's an interesting kind. He's like kind of like a proto Chris Rufo, like a lot of ways. But he's interesting because he's one of these people who makes a very classic

mistake in in when you're trying to become a media person, which is that he tries to do theory bullshit. Yes. And it's on, it's, it's nonsense. Yeah. Like he, it's, it's, you know, but his things, he's trying to derive basically like, effectively what he's trying to do is derive a theoretical basis for the whole like Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy, which he was one of the big sort of cultural Marxism people.

Yeah, well, he is probably most known for propagating the critical race theory kind of debacle that happened a few years ago. That was mostly spearheaded by this guy, James Lindsay. Yeah, and he's trying to, like his project, his intellectual project is he's trying to trace this line from Hegel through Marx, through Gromsi, through Mao, through the Frankfurt school, through the 60s radicals. And it's interesting though, because what he's doing is he's part

of this really systemic attempt to completely, and we saw this, the result of this is this pulpolysis attack, it's to completely obscure the actual power relations of American society to the point where, yeah, the thing we've been talking about happens where, because this person thinks that this Marxist conspiracy from gender studies professors is actually the thing that controls the US, he is like kidnapping one of, like the husband of one of the most powerful people in the United States because he thinks that As a way to get to a gender studies professor. It's this it's this interesting. I think like I

Don't know it's okay. I think it's this interesting demonstration of of how of how right wing ideology is specifically designed to act to like Conceal the actual power relations society and then blame like queer people for it. And it's like, no, it's the same thing with. If I'm not mistaken, Lindsay comes out of academia too, right? He's like this professor at a in Washington. Yeah, but he's like a he's like a math professor or something. He's like, no, no, it's like a. And basically, that's professor. The gist of what what happens is he realizes you're never going to get rich being a math professor, but if you become a right-wing thought leader,

there's money in that. So he makes these series of bullshit claims about how he's being oppressed by fucking evil progressive fascism. And yeah, this is why also all of his grievances are so focused around academics is because he still has academia brainworms where everything that matters is like what this handful of

upper middle-class professors at fancy Ivy League schools argue about He also believes that queer people are engaging in a form of ancient hermetic magic Yeah, he's sure to us which is now that part of your garrison if I know you at all that part's true Like that's accurate. It's so funny that he got there, because like when I was arguing with him, he was trying to argue that Mao had read this Gromsi,

who's Italian Marxist theory. He demonstrably cannot have read because Gromsi's prison notebooks don't come out until like aren't translated in Chinese until after Mao dies. So it's like, it's physically impossible for him to have done this. But it's funny, because like he's gone from that to like the queer hermetic like. Yes.

Yes. Seriously to destroy the... Who do we want to talk about next? Because I have I have I have my Dayton shooter and I know we we have we we have a list of guys. Let's do let's let's do let's do Dayton shooter and then close out with To anti-Palestinian. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, I'm not I don't know shit about this. So date me up motherfuckers You so a few days before Thanksgiving. We'll home. We should we should turkey day before we do. Oh, yeah Speaking of Thanksgiving, you know what I'm thankful for the fact that we're supported by advertisers and We're back. OK, let's talk about this fucking Dayton shooting. A few days before Thanksgiving,

someone walked into a Walmart in Beaver Creek, Ohio with, I believe, it was a high point, 45 caliber carbine with a nine oh wow high point. OK, yeah. He shot four people before eventually dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Victims were transferred to the hospital. It looks like nobody actually died besides the shooter. So hey, that's a win. Great, great job, medical teams.

But upon looking into this guy's home, it's very, very kind of standard stuff ever since 2016. We have Nazi flags, we have Nazi books. He went to a Christian online school. He was 20 years old. He spent almost all of his time at home on the internet. He did not believe the Holocaust was real. He had been to the hospital before

for mental health evaluations. The FBI referred to his beliefs as a, quote, loosely organized movement of individuals and groups that espouse some combination of racist, idiosemitic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, misogynistic, and homophobic ideology, which is a very, very broad, broad way of saying, yeah, he was like a far right nut job. He was very, very typical kind of Nazi guy. He had two swastika flags. Now, because he died, it's it's worse. People are still putting together, like what exactly led to him to, like,

do this this specific act because they can't like talk to him. But yeah, it was a very, very typical sort of thing of this guy deciding to go into a Walmart and do a shooting This is something that other Nazi accelerationists have done before it's something that will probably keep happening Oh, yeah, I mean for sure. It's it's it's it's it's it's not like a big story It's it's just another thing that's happened But it is weird the sort of like normalization of it, of like, oh yeah, Nazi did a Walmart shooting again. Isn't actually a story anymore? It's just like, it's just another Tuesday.

No, and this is like, what the right wants, by the way, is that like when they do these mass shootings, it does not make the news. And whenever they can blame a shooting on a queer or a trans person, they try to keep it, make it be the only thing anyone talks about, right? Like this is part of the plan, you know? And it's a bummer that it's worked just because like it's impossible to stay at an equal level of anger every time this happens. It's so common, you know?

Like you just can't, you can't continue existing and have the same reaction to these that you had in 2019. Yeah, so I mean, like that, I don't have much else on this because it's just, it's this guy who played video games alone for most of his life, went to a Christian online homeschool, never really interacted with the public,

is almost solely existed within this within this like media ecosystem online, which pushed him towards buying a book on the history of the SS and buying multiple Nazi flags and not thinking the Holocaust is real. And this this is the inevitable result of this sort of thing. So I guess, do we want to segue to Vermont for our next next like something happened, I think less than a week later. It sure did. But first, Garrison, speaking of segues, did you realize that the guy who bought the segue company died in a segue crash in Scotland?

Yeah. Segue throw him off of a cliff. Yeah, he did. He sure did, Garrison. He sure did. You know, this is why I think there is a little bit of magic that is real, because every once in a while, the funniest thing happens. Oh, man. What a stupid product, Seguees. I remember when those first came out and people were like, this is the future of transportation. And then everyone who was not completely brain dead

was like, of course they're not. Look at how dumb those things look. Nobody's gonna wanna drive these. I mean, if I was a self-educated finance guy, I'm sure I would be able to estimate the life cycle of the segue. You're not gonna make it if you just walk like a peasant. You got to get a one wheel that explodes.

It's it's so funny to me, too, because it's like like a thing that I like. I genuinely think is a real kind of shift in in in our modes of transportation. Is that people really did start using electric bikes more? And that has a lot to do with the delivery and stuff. Yeah, but it's like, you know, we've actually the segue. Yeah, instead, like, no, it's like, amount. We've actually like the segue. Yeah, instead. No, it's like, yeah, we don't need you. Don't need to fuck with the the the form factor.

People are happy using bikes. They're just too slow and sometimes too too much effort is required. So you make that easier and then people don't drive as fucking much. Great idea. Speaking of a bad idea, let's talk about this other mass shooter in Vermont from last week. This actually happened on Thanksgiving Day. So this guy, I think it was on Thanksgiving Day. It may have been like a day or two later. Oh, it was Saturday night. So that would have been, yeah, that would have been like the day you were two after, two days after Thanksgiving. So

two days after Thanksgiving, you know, you've got these three 20 year old Palestinian men who are in town visiting family, you know, they're doing, I think they go over and do a Thanksgiving dinner with some friends. They're over in other people's. Yeah. Yeah. The the specific thing they were leaving was it was they went to an eight year olds birthday party. Yes. Um, party. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah, they're with one of them's uncle who lives in Burlington. And these kids are all students at different Northeast, I think all Northeast colleges. One's from Brown University, one's from Haverford. One is from Trinity College. Two of them are citizens and the other is, I think naturalized or at least a permanent resident and at some point after you know they're they're hanging out at this event family event they're like let's go on a walk you know it's a nice night let's let's have us a walk around and they're they're walking around their near an apartment building and this 48 year old man named Jason J Eaton steps off his porch, pulls out a gun and apparently without saying anything, fires at least four shots at these three young men.

Two of them are shot in their torso, a third is shot in the lower extremities. They are all alive still, they're all expected to live. I think one of them was more seriously injured than the others, but they're all like going to survive, thankfully. And then Eaton flees on foot. I think like the next day, the police catch up with them.

He used a 380 pistol, if that matters to you, which is a fairly small handgun, which probably explains why everybody's survived. And yeah, so that's the extent of like what physically happened on the day. Again, Eaton doesn't say anything before he starts shooting. There's no evidence that he knew these guys. They are apparently speaking in a mixture of Arabic and English as they walk by, which and also at least I think two of them were wearing like Palestinian color sort of shmogs or keffias. I don't think I don't know if that's like like not like the colors of the Palestinian flag, but like the color palette that is used in that specific.

It's the white and black scarves. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Eaton was a finance broker and adviser kind of part time. I don't know how much money he actually made from it. Yeah. He was like working on a farm part time. Yeah, was employed at Edward Jones a few years ago. He's kind of, yeah, he's this this libertarian finance bro. Yeah.

And so, yeah, people found his social pretty quickly. There's like an archived Twitter, which is really standard, standard libertarian stuff. He talks about like, um, he complains about the Fed an awful lot. Uh, he quotes Elon Musk a number of times. He seems to be a fan of him, but he's also a huge fan of Bernie Sanders and describes like the only good man in politics pretty much. Yeah.

I think it's kind of like, it's kind of like the Joe Rogan libertarian of like right right. Yes very much so you You like Bernie because he's like he like cares about like the people He's not like and he's not like falling for like the big finance corporation stuff blah blah blah blah blah Yeah, it's like it's this old sort of like the oh my god. Why I've gotten his name the libertarian guy from the 2000s and early 2010s the libertarian guy from the 2000s and early 2010s. Paul, the guy who wore the Riddler suits. No, I he was a congressman.

I think he was like, he was like, one of the fashions in Occupy was like these weird libertarians. And it's like this seems like there's like the ideological ascendance of those people who didn't turn into like neo confederate like, yeah, people. And it's in his old archived Twitter account, he describes himself like his profile describes him as radical citizen patrolling democracy, which he spells with a K and crappitalism for oath keepers. Well, oath creepers. I don't know entirely what all of that means. And then hashtag wild type with the little atomic symbol, which I guess means he likes science. He describes himself as a dad and a part-time farmer, a reformed stockbroker. And his archived account includes a link to his substack,

which is RDKL radical. He describes it as, yeah, wandering ramblings of a reformed broker on the ADHD, ASD spectrum. He's claiming at least to have ADHD and autism. It's he's deleted by the time we got to them, everyone got to the most of the posts on his sub stack. The only thing on there is a really extensive post where he's like talking about how restaurants can keep dishwashers employed. He seems to have worked as one and be angry that they're not always paid fair wage commensurate to back of the line or the front of the line staff, I guess,

which is like not unreasonable, but an odd thing for him to be so focused on. I think it's- He has a really interesting online footprint. Yes. At least in like everything like pre pandemic is like, he's like this regular libertarian finance guy. Like there's nothing too concerning.

He's like- Or hateful. Yeah. He's like retweeting like the libertarian party of Tennessee saying that they like Bernie Sanders. Yeah. He's like retweeting like the libertarian party of Tennessee, saying that they like Bernie Sanders. And like he's he he has like this podcast where he talks about penny stocks. And it's like, yeah, it's it's it's a lot of like. You see a lots of these types of guy around.

And most of them are just like guys in their forties, because that's what he is. He was just like a libertarian guy in his forties who lived in Vermont. So like, yeah. So like. Yeah. So, you know, as you kind of stated, Garrison, he's pretty normal up until he gets like COVID hits and that seems to be what pushes him over the limit. I want to I want to read a quote from Vice News here who's done a lengthy breakdown of his social media presence. One post from March 2022

titled Thought Crime is an anti-vax screed that labels COVID-19 as a government conspiracy. The scale and scope of this operation was next level, he wrote. He also shared other anti-vax sentiments on his LinkedIn and wrote last year that he'd started deleting or unpublishing certain posts because my ideas make some people not want to hire me. He also has an Instagram account, which is largely dedicated to sharing images from his farm. Only one post hints at any ideological or political outlook, which is a screenshot from the Urban Dictionary definition of America with a K. A word used to describe the worst sense of the United States, i.e. imperialism, corruption, and the global exportation of

American culture. His Instagram links to another blog, which has the same name as his sub-stack and contains a rambling podcast about the financial system. He's uploaded documentation of his various qualifications over the years. One document indicates that he was a Boy Scout leader between at least 2017 and 2021. Don't worry, everyone, the Boy Scouts are not letting this guy continue to be an adult leader. Yeah. It's the home page of his of his website just reads, Take Together No King. Yeah. And there's a lot of stuff that looks like it's been deleted.

A lot of like weird financial advice under the under the name of radical citizen spelled all. Yeah. Seized. But yeah, like I I I've I've I've I found his YouTube pretty quick. I found his LinkedIn pretty quick. I found his LinkedIn pretty quick. There's a lot of like, his YouTube starts with a lot of like vaccine hesitancy stuff.

And then on his LinkedIn, he moves into like full, full like weird, like COVID conspiracies, vaccine denial, vaccine conspiracy theories. And I will say, I've never seen a shooter post like this on LinkedIn before. Yeah, that's an interesting one. Yeah, it's a really unique thing. You'll find stuff like this on Reddit, you'll find stuff like this on Twitter. But having a shooter share this type of conspiratorial content on LinkedIn and then talk about how he has to

delete some because he's not getting hired because LinkedIn's a place to help you get hired like that's like it's it's a really weird platform This could just be his like libertarianness showing and like they they use they use LinkedIn because it's like for like business and finance But it is certainly weird like the way he was using it is is unlike most most like either like is unlike most, most like either like COVID, COVID conspiracy shooters, vaccine shooters, or whatever his motivation was for this, for targeting three Palestinian people. It's certainly certainly a unique facet of this incident. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. I mean, in some ways, this is a pretty standard case in that, like, not the specific things that this guy is starting point, but just the fact that this is a guy who's clearly open to some level of right-wing politics and thought influencers, and it seems

as if COVID-19 drove him off a wall, ideologically. Yeah. And I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if this winds up being a very, you know, if we wind up finding out that it's specific motivation for this Santee-Belsinian racism, because yeah. Well, yeah. We know it probably is, but. His mom describes him as a Christian who takes spirituality very seriously She said that he thought the whole state of the world was kind of like a big mess right now Like everything everything spiritually is kind of falling apart is what his mom said because he he he was he was at Thanksgiving

Dinner with his family like two nights before this happened. Yeah, they said he seemed to act be acting like Like his usual self, not saying that he was acting good, but like he was acting normal for him. But no, he certainly had some degree of religious affiliation. He talked about using his religious status as to get like vaccine exemptions for his kids. So there's stuff like that that does tie to his religious background,

which could certainly contribute to anti-Palestinian violence. Yeah. And I don't know, if I had to assume kind of how this went down without more evidence, my guess would be he was having a bad day, probably, you know, that kind of after the holiday depression, that's not uncommon. He's like listening to or reading some sort of, listening to some sort of weird conspiracy podcast, or he's just falling down another rabbit hole online. conspiracy podcast or he's just falling down another rabbit hole online. He's gets angrier and angrier and he hears some people talking in Arabic outside, looks out his window, sees a Palestinian Kefya and decides, I'm going to just start shooting.

Um, I don't actually know. Like I don't know what else it could be. He can't have these people were not like regular walkers in his neighborhood. So this can't have been like, he wasn't laying and wait for them. This seems like, we know it must have been like a he wasn't laying in wait for them. This seems like, we know it must have been like a spur of the moment thing, right? He waited for the ATF to come to his door.

He said, like, I've been expecting you, or I've been waiting for you or something. And he said, I don't want to say anything without a lawyer. So like he had like, you know, like the libertarian script of like, here's what you say if the police are coming to a rescue. It's like he didn't, he didn't like kill himself at the end of this act of violence. A lot of other shooters do. He was very, very like put together weirdly.

And he's he's law-eared up. I guess we'll learn more. But yeah, no, it's it's it's certainly interesting. I mean, I'm scrolling through the past two years of LinkedIn posts where he posted a lot on like LinkedIn's like social platform. And it's a big mix of LinkedIn posts where he posted a lot on LinkedIn's social platform. It's a big mix of financial conspiracy theories and COVID conspiracy theories and vaccine conspiracy theories. I can certainly see how the way libertarians in general the past three years, past five years, six years, maybe even since like the Tea Party, realistically, have just have been getting increasingly aligned with like other aspects of the far right where it contributes to like transphobia or contributes to racism, xenophobia, homophobia. Like that has

been that that Venn diagram is slowly becoming more of a circle And I can certainly see if this guy this guy obviously was listening to podcasts if he was making He was making a financial podcast at some point. Yeah, he like I can totally see if you're listening to libertarian podcasts You slowly getting all of these other kind of beliefs that have been seeping in to almost the entirety of the libertarian political project. If you see like a few years ago, he was retweeting posts from like the libertarian parties of these various states. And now many of those accounts are just run by Nazis. Like it is, it is like watching how the posting trends of like official libertarian party affiliated accounts have changed the past few years. Specifically the New Hampshire account.

Yeah, oh my God. Is quite something. Yeah, and it's not always what you'd think because the Louisiana Libertarian Party is like super chill, reasonable, anti-racist guy. Whereas yeah, the New Hampshire Libertarian Party dude is like just a straight up Nazi. Yeah.

Interesting. Interesting. Good stuff. Should we do our second ad break? Did we already do that? Did we already do it? Anyway, Danil, if we didn't do a second ad break, here's our second ad break. Ah, we're back after either our second ad break or that will be edited out because we already

did too. We forgot which. Dan that will be edited out because we already did too. We forgot which. Dan will figure it out and you the listener will never know if I fucked up. Dan'll keep it in if I fuck up. Yeah. And speaking of stuff that's fucked up. Yeah. Yeah. So the last thing I want to talk about is this is an older... This is from like October, right? Yeah, this is from October 14th. And I think it is specifically this is this is seven days after the sort of Hamas attack that started all of the sort of stuff that's been happening in Palestine. Yeah. So in Plainfield, which is this kind of.

Yeah, it's like a. It's a really far suburb of Chicago. Yeah, it's in these things where it's like it's in the kind of, I don't know, almost a borderline of is it a suburb? Like it is, it's a place that sucks ass. Yeah, and... No offense to anyone living there. Yeah, no, lucky there.

There are good people there, but it... Some of them, I assume, are good people. Yeah. So on on the 14th, a 71 year old man named Joseph Kuspa, who was the landlord of a Palestinian woman and her son. And, you know, OK, so this story, this story just sucks. They had actually so these this family and their landlord had been like pretty close friends, So this family and their landlord had been like pretty close friends. Like the family had considered him like a grandfather.

And this guy comes through the door and the six year old kid runs up to go hug him and he stabs the kid 26 times, it kills him, nearly kills his mom. He's screaming like the entire time about like, yeah, he's screaming, you Muslims have to die. You're killing our kids in Israel. You Palestinians deserve to live.

And this is a, I think this is a kind of, a kind of different kind of shoot of, well, not sure, a different kind of like killing than the ones we've been talking about because this is a very sort of like Wake of 2001 killing where you have this enormous enormous spike in Islamophobia very specifically here you have this incredible spike in In anti-Palestinian racism and you have this this period like especially in the week I mean and this is still happening to this day, but in like the week after in the week after this all started You could say fucking anything about Palestinians. You could say, you could, you could like, you could talk about fucking turning the Gaza Strip into glass, like you could talk about fucking dropping nukes, you could talk about killing every single Palestinian on earth.

And it was, and no one fucking said anything, right? Yeah. All these fucking people, all of these fucking, all these fucking journalists said nothing, all like the, the president's like, the president only starts talking about about Islamophobia after this fucking kid gets stabbed to death. And you know, and this guy is listening to right wing talk radio, which is why, you know, this is like, this is an older, like this is a specific kind of killing that like I think is very, very similar to the enormous number of Muslims who were killed, not so Sikh people too, because these people are just really racist. And Palestinian people who were just killed right after 9-11,

because there's just this wave of the US that gets into one of these sort of murder frenzies, like one of these sort of racist frenzies, and this kid gets to have the death. And yeah, this guy, you know, and I mean, in like, I think. I think the thing about this case, right? It's like this is, you know, this is a radicalization in terms of like going from going from literally like this kid is running up to hug him because like he had built like a treehouse for the family before this, right? Like, like in over the course of like seven days, this guy goes from that to like, we need to kill all Muslims, we need to like stab them to death, right?

Like, it's horrible. And this is, you know, like this kind of stuff just keeps happening. And, you know, like the media literally only covers this stuff like in terms of like oh it's costing a democrat support and it's like you guys just I don't know the the extent to which the media has been utterly and completely complicit in anti-palestinian racism has been appalling and you know it's killed people now yeah and there will there will be no reckoning with this because the US media does this shit all the time and no one cares. And yeah.

By a wide margin, the most disturbing thing about this is just, and I think what separates this from the 2001 stuff, because this version of this attack in 2001 would have just been some racist stranger who saw, you know, a Muslim person or just a person he assumed looked like they were Muslim and attacked, but did not have a relationship with them. This guy is super close to this kid, right? This is like an example of how fairly integrated this community was. And it's the, again, an example of kind of what we're seeing in most of these other attacks we've talked about, except for that Nazi, is these people who are a lot more normal, and then I'm going to guess when we find out more about the dude who stabbed that kid, a lot of his drift

happened after COVID. It's a product of this right-wing media ecosystem that again exists purely to do this sort of thing. But it's do this sort of thing. But it's also a product of COVID, right? It's a product of this lockdown that just fucking shattered so many people. It's the one other thing I will mention because it is relevant because the trial is starting

is another extremely targeted attack with the murder of Breonna Jai. Yeah. Yeah. The perpetrators were very familiar. targeted attack with the murder of Brianna Jai. Yeah, yeah. The perpetrators were very familiar. They were interested in killing her specifically because Brianna was trans. And that was-

I don't know if we talked about this on the show. I don't think we did. I don't think we did. I don't think it had happened. Yeah. No, but with the trial happening, we've gotten text exchanges between the two people who were involved in the killing.

And it's very telling the way they were talking about Brianna as this object. And very specifically, almost stalking and gaining familiar with her specifically to kill her out of like fascination. Oh wait, so for people who don't know what this is, Brianna was, I think she was 16. 16, 16 year old trans girl in the UK who was stabbed to death by two other kids. And yeah, so the trial is like happening right now and it's it's really fucking sucks

Yeah, she was she was killed earlier this year Yeah, and Yeah, I mean if you if you want to understand What trans folks think about trans people like those texts are as clean as an example that you're gonna get about how, like all of the fucking right wing media people and all of the sort of like, you know, like all of the most sort of,

like absolutely like committed transphobes think about trans people and how they talk about us, like in enclosed, like behind closed doors Where they think yeah, we'll never see it and this is just just just how they talk about us And this is what happens is people like people fucking where to trans people and Yeah Yep Well that yeah

All right. Well folks this has been It could happen here a podcast about terrorism. Goodbye. Do we, do we want to try to end this any literally any other way? Um, I'm not sure. You know, no, Garrison, we're not. That's the end of the podcast. Goodbye. Skip, who do you think? It's your buddy. Hi everyone, I'm Paul Anko. And I'm Skip Bronson. And what happens when two old friends take their decades of experience in the business and entertainment roles and sit down with our buddies? You get our way, a brand new show from My Heart Podcast where we chop it up with our pals about everything under the sun.

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And we're going to break them down. And by the way, most of these episodes I have not seen for 20 years. Yeah, me too. We're going to have guest stars and people that are very important to the show, like Larry David. I did once try and stop a woman who's about to get hit by a car. I screamed out, watch out! And she said, don't you tell me what to do!

And Cheryl Hines. Why can't you just lighten up and have a good time? And Richard Lewis. How am I going to tell him I'm going to leave now? Can you do it on the phone? Do you have to do it in person? Not yet. What's the financial aid cable? You have to go and age a human being. He's helped you. And then we're gonna have behind the scenes information.

Tidbits. Yes, tidbits is a great word. Anyway, we're both a wealth of knowledge about this show because we've been doing it for 23 years. So subscribe now and you could listen to the history of Kerber enthusiasm on iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you happen to get your podcasts. Welcome to Nick It Happen Here, a podcast with the it is Henry Kissinger. And the happening here is that he's dead as a doornail. I'm your host, Vee O'Wog, with Vee on this joyous day after Kissinger's dead is Garrison

Davis and James Stout. Welcome to the show. Woo! Hello. Very excited. Had a fun night in the group chat last night. Welcome to the show. Woo! Hello. Very excited. Had a fun night in the group chat last night. I did send over the horny Henry Kissinger copypasta without reading it to the group chat.

And I feel like that was a good call. Fully at the exit. Within 30 seconds of you sending that, I got the same message in another group chat It was spreading around pretty quick. I wanted to jump on it soon before before other people were gonna share it So so yeah, that is that is that is my duty. I mean, it's it's certainly upsetting He lives to 100 but we will celebrate his death nevertheless Yes It would have been nice if he died sooner. Yeah. Yeah. We don't know how he

died. He could have died horribly. We actually don't know. Oh really? Yeah. He died in his home in Connecticut surrounded by his family. Yeah. Hopefully he died shooting himself. According to the official statement. Yeah. Well, look, he lived a lot longer and died a lot more pleasantly than a lot of the people who he's liked. He ended, which is sad. It is sad, but it's also funny. He died knowing he's probably one of the most hated men in the world, which is also pretty funny.

Parties of the fucking street. So there was a giant pro-Palestine protest in Chicago last night and there's videos of them finding out live while they're in the streets. That kiss is just dying. This giant cheer goes up. People having a great time. Yeah, I was texting my friends who were down at the border. It was like, Henry Kissinger is dead. Spread the word. Like, among the people of the nation, so he destroyed. Pretty good. pretty good stuff. I mean, it's, we all had a fun time last night as I'm sure many of you listeners did,

but slowly some organizations started to trickle out very embarrassing statements. The first one I saw was from the ADL who had quite the statement. I'm gonna, I wanna find it actually on X, the new hot social media app because- It's on my timeline on X, I've shared it. Because the community note on it is just magnificent.

Oh yeah, that was great. Really, really gives you a good look at the mind of Kissinger, and it's a good look at the mind of Kissinger and it's fun to laugh at the people who are like propping him up as some like great Jewish statesmen. So yeah, Henry Kissinger was a towering intellect, diplomat, and practitioner who, not without controversy, helped shape American foreign policy with a lasting impact worldwide. A refugee from Nazi Germany and the first Jewish secretary of state,

he was unapologetic about his heritage and his embrace of the importance of American global power and democratic values. Which I like that they call them a practitioner, which is a funny thing to say. But there are a number of funny things in that post. Oh, absolutely. Probably the funniest is that during a meeting

of the Washington Special Actions Group, Kissinger said, quote, if it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be anti-Semitic. Any people who have been persecuted for 2000 years must be doing something wrong Yeah Here's another one that that one's funds another one the emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy

And if they put Jews and gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern not an American concern, maybe a humanitarian concern. Yeah, that was a real kiss in your moment. Amazing stuff. Like it's it's it has it has certainly been wild to watch any any shred of credibility that the ADL has had just absolutely go down the drain the past two months by their own volition, just ruining decades of like of research into antisemitic extremism by just tarnishing every single piece of research into antisemitic extremism by just tarnishing every single piece of research they've done by how they've been behaving

the past two months. Yeah, I mean, they had- Outrageous stuff. Because three or four years, they've really been on one. Like, Pitcavige had been leading the charge to the bottom there. They're like fully going back to their selling information to apartheid South Africa days.

Yes, yeah. So, yeah. But praising, praising, praising Henry Kissinger, someone who admitted that he would be anti-Semitic if he wasn't born Jewish. Yeah. It's just like, what the fuck are you doing? Anyway, that was, that was one of the first, one of the first organizations to come out in, in memoriam of Mr. Kissinger after his devastating passing last night.

Sorry, I made a post about this ADL post and I'm just scoping the replies because there are a lot of normal people on x.com these days. Someone that says a group which appears to exist to lobby for the ADL to lose its nonprofit status. And I'm just going to say that these are the people that ADL should be focusing their attention on. Because this is the old school antisemitism that is a giant fucking problem. And we all need to reject like there is some hateful shit on x.com.

And sadly it's in my replies. Yeah, there is there is plenty to go around and the fact that they feel the need to defend Mr. Henry Kissinger. This guy's running for governor of Missouri. So yeah, just as a podcast, I think we can safely say don't vote for Darryl McClanahan. Clan is in his name. This is our, this is the cap here. It's first anti endorsement for the 2024 election season.

Yeah, yeah. I'm just gonna say it. Don't vote for this guy. So true. Well, I'm glad we could all bond over that. As I bonded over the many, many funny memes in the meme chats that I'm in. That were just rocketing on all cylinders. Twitter has been preparing for this night for years.

We've been training for so long. People have stayed on throughout Elon's catastrophe just for this night and now are finally free. They could finally be released into the pasture. Yeah, go live on a farm. I'm surprised we didn't crash Twitter with our posting. Hopefully his last words were, I wonder what they'll post about me. Yeah, I'm sure he was thinking about posting

when he was going out, that makes sense. He would have been a poster. I'm hoping it was like, oh no, it burns, oh god. Yes, that's me. She's coming through. Anthony Bourdain with brass knuckles at the gates of hell. Just too blatant.

Yeah. Yeah, so, okay. All right, so what are we doing for the rest of this episode? So, okay, if you wanna do an episode that is the entire history of the stuff Kissinger did, Robert did a six part behind the bastard episode on it. You can spend like 12 hours of your life doing that. Learning about having the worst time.

Yeah. Yeah. The opposite of a self-help book is a self-harm book. Audio book that Robert has made for you. Yes, but with three funny people giving commentary. Yes, it's very funny. You should listen to it. Yeah, however, comma.

So we have been talking about how, I mean, people are like, people are partying in the streets in Cambodia. Like, there, Kissinger's death has been a source of celebration for almost everyone on Earth. But that is not what this episode is about. This episode is about the one country on earth that isn't celebrating. That country is China. And on the country, not only is China not celebrating the death of Henry Kissinger, China is quite possibly the most popular American in the history of China. To this day, like right now, if you went and polled

like the favorability rating of like every famous American you can think of, the person with the highest rating is almost certainly going to be Henry Kissinger. And you know, I mean, and this is not just a sort of like a popular thing, although again, he is enormously popular among ordinary Chinese people. This is a thing that goes from the state down.

Xi Jinping, he's actually weirdly one of the last world leaders to talk to Kissinger. So, Kissinger went to visit China in July. And him and Xi Jinping have this like great heartfelt reunion. They have a great time. Xi Jinping says, quote, the Chinese people never forget their old friends. And Sino-US relations will always be linked with the name of Henry Kissinger.

In the wake of Kissinger's death, the Chinese government said from Reuters, quote, Kissinger made historic contributions to the normalization of China-US relations, and Chinese people will forever remember him for his, quote, sincere devotion and important contributions, Wang added. The Chinese Premier and the foreign minister also sent messages of condolences to Kissinger's family and to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. So he is getting like, he is getting as good a reception in China as any American has ever gotten. And if you if you can understand how this came to be how like every other country in the region fucking hates Kissinger like everyone else despises him.

And if you can understand why China why he is like the most popular American in Chinese history you can understand the entire arc of the 20th century and how we ended up with the horror that we all live in today. But first, speaking of the horrors that we all live in today. Is this an end break? Are you saying? Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah.

Hopefully one of our first. You're saying, yeah. Yeah, hopefully the Henry Kissinger collectible coins that they minted 10 years ago now have been released to the market and this will be the first of many adverts for them. They're only going to grow in value. Insulate yourself against inflation with these Henry Kissinger coins. And we are back. So this story, the story of how Kissinger became the most popular man in China or most popular America in China begins in Shanghai 1927

It is the year 1927 for over a decade China has been locked Yeah, yeah, oh child Kissinger child Kissinger is presumably unaware of the developments in China. Oh, I'm... Oh, I don't think you can say that with certainty. He was keeping tabs. Absolutely at four years old. Yeah, yeah. Even back then, he was a quote foreign policy realist. A towering intellect of this stature doesn't start in his 20s.

He starts like in his toddler years. You have some absolutely. Amazing choice of words by the way, towering intellect. I'm just looking at the pictures of him in China where he's dwarfed. And it's just very funny to look at this guy just grabbing a towering intellect. He's gonna be like five foot nothing.

His intellect is towering not his not his person short king short king short king would have been a great tweet if the ADL accord him a short key I know I understand that yes you were saying yes so as as as as little tiny baby ass kiss-a-chers looking on China's Communist Party is locked in a tenuous alliance with the Chinese Nationalist Party, which is the Kuomintang Now yeah, they they saw so with the aid of the Soviets and when I say the aid of the Soviets I mean the Soviets basically rebuilt the Nationalist Party from the ground up

Yeah, the Nationalists have turned into a juggernaut. They have, they have swept aside like every warlord army they face, they are marching triumphant across the country. And ahead of their advance, a massive uprising led by the communists finally drives the warlords out of Shanghai. Chinese working class stands victorious. They, and they alone stand triumphant over the greatest city in China. It is the last time they will control this city for 40 years. The new leader of the nationalist party is Chiang Kai-Shak, a proto-fascist drug lord

who the Soviets for some inexplicable reason thought was going to work for them and was going to like build a socialist state in China. Deeply unclear why they thought this. I, I don't know. Don't have Stalin running your foreign policy. I don't have Stalin running shit like as a rule. Like, yeah, this is. Yeah. So he's, he's no kissing jerk.

Like, what can we say? Yeah. Also dead though, thankfully killed similar numbers to communists. True. True. And we're, we're, we're, we're one sentence away from that. So thankfully. Killed similar numbers to communists. True. True. We are one sentence away from that. So under the direction of Moscow, the communists in China convinced the Chinese working class

to open the gates of the city to allow the Nationalist Army inside. The Nationalist Army immediately began slaughtering the Chinese working class by the end of the white terror that this is going to unleash. The Nationalists will have killed one million people, most of them Chinese workers and peasants. That's a lot of people. Basically, the entire, basically the entire urban Chinese left dies in this slaughter. And with them dies, basically the entire internationalist wing of the Chinese Communist Party, because

the internationalist wing, the wing that had very close connections to Moscow, were all in Shanghai. And they were all the most important. They were all literally in Shanghai, but they were all part of the urban Communist Party. And they get just completely wiped out. And this is the part of the Shanghai uprising that for our purposes is important. Because it's the first moment where the rift between the Soviets and the Chinese Communist Party begins to form. Now in the wake of the Shanghai massacre, Stalin sends the CCP instructions that are just nonsense. Like, he's telling them to stay aligned with the Nationalist Party but to oppose Chiang Kai-shek.

And like, literally, there's descriptions of the meeting when like this, this telegram comes in, the CCP leaders are like sitting around this, I don't even think it's a radio, they're sitting around this radio and they get the, they like, they get the instructions and they're just like, these people are just burying their hands in their face because like, this is nothing, it is nonsense. And, you know, and this is sort of, this is the last, that's like the last gasp of the old communist party leadership, those people are just gone. And in their place rises Mao. Now Mao is not from the urban wing of the party. He is from like he's Mao was a peasant organizer, right? He's from the rural wing and his wing of the party tends to be more nationalist and less sort of like

subservient to Moscow than the urban wing of the party. And with Stalin basically getting the entire urban Communist Party and like every other urban leftist in the country killed, you know, the people that are left are Mao and the sort of peasant organizations who have a distrust of the Soviets that they're going to maintain for basically their entire lives. Now, obviously, relations between the CCP and Stalin improve as like World War Two happens, but there's a, basically the moment the war ends. There's a series of incidents that sort of strain relations. One is that, and this is less an incident, but Stalin seems to not have thought

that the CCP was going to win the war. Like he seems to have thought that the nationalists were going to beat them. And one of the things that he does is basically deindustrializes Japan's giant industrial belt in occupied men's area. This is a completely intact industrial belt. It is one of the largest like intact industrial belts in the world. And Stalin, like in classic Soviet fashion, takes the factories, takes them apart, puts them on trains and ships them across the U.S. Sorry to rebuild the Soviet economy. Yep.

One of the first of many such incidents. Yeah. And this is a catastrophe for the CCP because even after the CCP wins the war, because they've now, you know, so it was like Shanghai is in ruins, Beijing, like most of China is just in ruins because of, I mean, like what year are they on, if I effectively continue was fighting. And the after the war, China's industrial base in this is 1949, right? Their industrial base is smaller than Russia's in 1917, which is just nuts. It is very small. Yeah, and this is the conditions that the everything,

the entire like course of 20th century Chinese history are defined by these conditions, right? And these specific conditions are, is basically a production bottleneck, right? And I've talked about this on the show before. This is one of the most important things in 20th century Chinese political economy is that the CCP is trying to simultaneously expand its agricultural production to feed people and also expand its industrial capacity. It's mostly trying to expand its industrial capacity. The problem is

they can't expand their industrial capacity without expanding their agricultural capacity and they can't expand their agricultural capacity without expanding their industrial capacity without expanding their agricultural capacity and they can't expand their agricultural capacity without expanding their industrial capacity and their attempt to just blow through this by like mass use of human labor is the Great Leap Forward. It's complete catastrophe, right? This is just gonna fuck, like whatever like intentions like the Chinese Revolution had, this is just going to fuck them because the combination of this and their ideology is just going to doom the entire project. And you know, this and the other, the other thing about this period, the Soviets are really, really patronizing. Like they

talk about like constantly and like diplomatic things. And like they talk about the Soviet like the Chinese is like their younger brothers. And there's like this weird like thing going on. This isn't enough to substantively threaten their alliance, but the relationship between the USSR and China is never as, it's never quite as firm as people think it is. Now, the thing that really like kick starts the break between the USSR and China is Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin

So this gets like leaked Krushev makes a speech where he was like wow Stalin did some fucked up stuff the cult of personality was bad actually and This pisses off An enormous number of people's mouth wherever like problems Mount Hass was Stalin He takes a very hard line on this where he's like, no, I'm like, the Soviets are now revisionists. They have abandoned the path of Marxist-Leninism. I am now the only anti-revisionist in the world. And this whole thing results in these worsening relations between China and the Soviet Union, with the CCP basically calling the Soviets

like weak-neck bureaucratic social imperialists and the Soviets looking at like the Great Leap Forward and being like, what are these maniacs doing? And this tension escalates through the 60s as both sides start massing troops on the Chinese-Soviet border. Now, meanwhile, so, so, okay, the 60s goes on and control of the Soviet Union has fallen to Leonid Breshnev, who is an absolute maniac, deeply weird, deeply not very good guy. And he, in response to the Council of Communist Uprising in Prague in 1968, Breshnev rolls tanks in, kills everyone, and then declares the Breshnev doctrine, in which Breshnev claims the right to overthrow any socialist government who the Soviets decided

to try to become capitalist. Which, I mean, this is the Soviets right, like that. Well, what that actually means is that they don't align with the USSR. So Brezhnev means this to be about Eastern Europe, right? Mao looks at this and goes, oh shit, Brezhnev is going to try to overthrow me. And this, this does not go well. So, and you know, I know what he's looking at. He's looking at like the Soviet troops massing on the border and he's like, oh shit.

And this is where things get absolutely wild. In 1969, there are a giant series of border skirmishes between Soviet and Chinese troops. People are killing each other across this enormous, this is like continent-sized border. People are like, companies of Chinese and Soviet troops are like firing artillery at each other. Everyone is completely losing their minds. And this is actually like one of the reasons why, like if you're once in a while you get these things from the Himalayas and China's border with India where everyone's like hitting each other with sticks and the reason you're hitting each other with sticks is that like the Chinese were like, wait, hold on, it's actually a bad idea to have guys with guns on the border

of nuclear power. Yeah, yeah, they have some amazing brawls. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, they have some amazing, amazing brawls. Yeah, but you know, and the funny thing, like, that's the reasonable version of this. In 69, they're having the unreasonable version of this, where the Soviets are looking at the situation and they're going, oh shit, we can't win a war with China, because their calculation is that they will eventually be overwhelmed by a combination of human wave attacks and the fact that like an enormous portion of the China is

But the Chinese population has been trained in guerrilla warfare And their second problem is that the Chinese population is too dispersed for them to all be killed by by a Soviet nuclear weapons And the CCP makes the same assessment and is like okay If we fight this war like the human wave attacks are just going to eventually are going to crush them We're going to use force numbers that can't kill us all with nukes So the Soviets plan for this is they are like drawing up plans to line the border with China with nuclear land mines to stop the Chinese army from pushing through. It's nuts. Everyone is losing their minds.

Normal times. Yeah. Like I've seen rumors. This is the thing I don't have actually good sources on. I've seen rumors, this is the thing I don't have actually good sources on. I've seen a lot of rumors that both the Soviets and China reached out to the US, tried to get them to nuke the other side. Everybody is completely losing their minds. And, you know, so at this point, like, both sides kind of back down because both of them realized that, like, fighting this war is the stupidest thing that anything could possibly do because there's like, there was a little tiny shred of sanity left in both sides. That's like, do we like actually want to have a nuclear war? And they're like, no, okay. But this marks the permanent solidification of what's called

the Sino-Soviet split. And do you know what else is a Sino-Soviet split? It's the split between the part of the episode that's ads and the part of the episode that's episode. That is a very important split that does release to the worker councils of the Soviet state. And if the Soviets got their wish for world domination, we wouldn't be pivoting to an ad break instead. This would be purely worker sponsor. I don't know. Here's the ad. All right. I for one am very excited to get those coin

and jur limited edition NFT collectibles. I think it's a real solid investment. So I know it sounds a little far fetched, but hey, in 10 years you can sell it to some guy from the CCP and you might make a lot of money. So food for thought or the 80, that's right. That's right. You can sell it to pick cabbage.

He could buy that for like 10 grand. That's right. You can tell it to pick cabbage. He could buy that for like 10 grand Only to spend $1,000 and in 10 years you could be getting 10 grand from pit cabbage and that sounds like a great deal That's a that's a 10% discount as well with the discount code Garrison Davis Sorry Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. the Sino-Soviet split and Mao begins casting around for allies and into this breach steps

a man. A cursed through history. Who's towering falls echo through the halls of power. I am talking of course about Charles de Gaulle. The one who's a brother of France. Yeah, most French man ever to exist. Yeah. So, de Gaulle has been devising a strategy to pull China away from the USSR and towards the West. And this is the origin of what's called triangle diplomacy. Now, Kissinger steals this idea and goes and does it. But this was not Kissinger's idea. This was a plan that was already kind of in motion that he stole from De Gaulle.

Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, good artists copy great artists steal. If Kissinger was anything, it wasn't artist. Great artist. That is literally what the Tony Blair Foundation said. It's not a joke. We can't fucking make jokes because everything's too fucked. I'm quoting the Tony Blair Foundation.

That was it, There was some... There was some... Oh god, I can't remember his name. Someone in the 70s declared that satire... The day that Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize is the day satire died and he was right. And this is why satire doesn't work anymore. Yeah, Tony Blair is now pissing on its grave.

Ahhhh... Yeah, so... all right, but the, you know, okay, so this triangle diplomacy thing, Kissinger basically takes it over. And the key element of this plan is to use China as a bulwark against the Soviets, both in East and Southeast Asia and in places like Central Africa. But in order to do this, they have to actually establish contact with China, a thing they haven't had in like 30 years. Well, I guess 20, whatever, it's complicated.

I'm not gonna go through the entire diplomatic history of China, but, you know, and this is the origin of one of Kissinger's most famous crimes, which is Operation Searchlight, which is Pakistan's genocide in Bangladesh. They kill about 3 million people. If you want to really detail the count of this, go listen to the behind the bastards episodes.

The short version of this is that Pakistan has been a Chinese ally for a while for a lot of reasons, one of which is China's antagonism with India, which peaked in 1962 when China just straight up invaded at least be in border region, conquered it and then like handed Nehru his ass in the process of what became known as a Sino Indian war. And this is an incredible betrayal by the way, like Nehru, who was the prime minister of India, Nehru had turned down a permanent seat on the UN Security Council because he was being given the seat as a way to make sure China didn't get it. And he turned down that seat to get China under the Security Council, like out of, not

out of geopolitical, like this was basically a pure ideological, I'm doing this because it's the right thing to do thing. And Mao returns him by fucking invading India. So because of this, and because of, you know, India and Pakistan don't like each other, this is known. The Pakistani government is very close with China. Pakistani troops are trampled by the Chinese army. They are armed with Chinese weapons.

And with Kissinger's blessings, if he could use the Pakistani government as an intermediary to negotiate with China, the Pakistani government proceeds to kill 3 million Bangladeshis. It is, yeah, it is among the worst crimes of the 20th century. It's a crime that is broadly forgotten. China's complicity in it is forgotten.

The Americans complicity in it is barely remembered, basically only when people talk about Kissinger. But this was one of the worst things that happened in one of the worst centuries in human history. But for Kissinger, this is an enormous success. He gets everything that he fucking wants out of it. He doesn't give a shit about Bangladesh. This is a tradition that has echoed through the eons of the illiberalism ever since The US successfully opens diplomatic channels with China and soon Kissinger and Nixon are going to meet Mao in China

And I'm gonna read from Mao talking to Kissinger so you can understand who these people are The tree between our two countries at present is very pitiful, is gradually increasing. You know China is a poor country. We don't have very much. What we have in excess is women. Kiss and cheer. There are no quotas or terrors for those. Chairman Mao. So if you want, if so if you want them, we can give you a few of those, some tens of

thousands. Prime Minister Cho, of course, on a voluntary basis, Chairman Mao, let them go to your place. They will create disasters. That way you can lessen our burdens. Laughter, some time later, Mao, do you want our Chinese women? We can give you 10 million.

Laughter. Jesus. The Chairman is improving his offer. Mao, by doing this, we can let them flood your country with disaster and therefore impair your interest. In our country, we have too many women and they have a way of doing things. They give birth to children and our children are too many. I mean, this is like a deeply CCP moment. Yeah.

Like, this is one of these things where it's like, there are people in the United States to this day who call themselves Maoists and like, and think that this guy was like on the fucking left. And it's like, like, how do you fucking read that, like him just, him just doing this fucking banter with the butcher of Bangladesh and be like, no, no, no, this is the guy who figured out to keep the key to achieve and caught like socialism Right is the guy you free how to end the class system and end imperialism is this fucking guy palling it up with fucking Henry fucking Kissinger Like it's terrible like I just Yeah, it's not I mean not great the key to being a Maoist is not reading this stuff Yeah, it's not great. The key to being a Maoist is not reading this stuff. So true.

I've seen Maoists on Twitter trying to defend this through there. Like, well, it was only like a temporary thing because the Soviets were threatening the new China. And like, you know, and one of the things that they, one of the real problems they have is that, so in Angola, there's a civil war in Angola, there is a faction that are the good guys and then there's a faction that's being backed by apartheid South Africa and China is backing the apartheid South Africa fashion. Yeah.

So, you know, and this is the thing they have to justify and they can't and this actually and you know, one of this actually has impacts in the US because like American Maoists are confronted with this and are like, what the fuck? What is this shit? And there are some of them who just like ignore it and quadruple down. There are some of it who become disillusioned. You can even pick a different tanky like Cuba heavily supported the MPLA in Angola for instance. Yeah. At least. Yeah, like yeah at least it was like yeah moved to like Castro or something I don't know yeah like Trotsky's right there he's right there with an ice pick in his head so true should have should have happened to Kissinger we got it

fucking incredible alternate history Oh Trotsky lives in kishinder ties. Yeah, Trotsky lives to 100. The world is so much... Not it's... The world's not like a great place, but it is a much better place in that alternate history. Like can you imagine if Trotsky had held on long enough for social media to exist? I know. Oh my god. Oh, he would have been Trotsky.

Trotsky poster. Yeah, yeah. to exist. I know. Oh my god. He would have been Trotsky. Trotsky poster. Yeah. It's him and the one, the person I'm the most sad right now that never got on there was Gore Vidal. He would have been, he would have fucking killed it. He would have posted. Yeah. Yeah. There's a few people you just think would have been magnificent posters. There's a, Vidal has a famous Kissinger moment where he's, he's, he's watching, he runs into Kissinger in the Sistine Chapel looking at the part that's looking at the hell part of it. Vidal goes, Kissinger is apartment hunting.

Very funny. Very funny. Yeah, yeah, that is a soul of a poster. Poster braid. Poster braid. He has it. He has so many of these. There's another famous one where the thing goes there.

A proto-poster poster the absolutely dog shit I American author Norman Baylor punches him and he's like falls over cuz he's got punched while he's on the ground Vidal goes words fail Norman Baylor again Yeah, absolutely incredible guy real- posting. We love to see it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Tragic tragic. You never made it. Lots of tragedies unfolding. One of them is that, you know, this whole thing of like, like Kiss and Jared bantering with Mao like this, it works like the U.S. and China established diplomatic relations. And this is a, this is a seismic shift in sort of Chinese popular culture and media and consciousness, because from the

Korean war until like the 70s, right? The way people think about America and the way they're portrayed in Chinese media is like as the great imperialist enemy, right? Like the last time there was contact between the US and China, it is a bunch of Chinese troops doing bayonet charges, like wearing sandals in the fucking snow, doing bayonet charges through their own artillery barrages to kill American troops. Like that is like the amount of hatred like there is unbelievable. And you know, it's funny because like the US like really forgot that war, but like China did not, right? And suddenly, like America is China's friend. And the human face of this absolutely pockel shift in basically the entire ideological system of Chinese communism.

The face of this shift in just the image of what America is, which is like, it's not quite mapping on, but it's like America, it's kind of like how Baptists think about the devil, right? That is the role that America has in Chinese like popular sort of culture like up until this point And then suddenly it's completely pivoted on its head and the face of this shift is Kissinger and You know and this is this is ping pong erasure is what you're doing right now Yeah, this all happened due to table tennis and I won't hear any other way Oh god, I was I was I I specifically did it include that the table. Oh, God. I specifically didn't include that the table tennis diplomacy at this

because I was like, I hate this shit. Yeah. When the liberals really get on their shit, they talk about ping pong diplomacy. I think Joseph and I was a big ping pong diplomacy guy. Yeah. But it's like, you know, but I think, like ping pong diplomacy is an example of like,

how circumscribed the contact between the US and China is, right? Like again, like we're talking, like, think on diplomacy is an example of, like, how circumscribed the contact between the US and China is, right? Like, again, like, we're talking about, like, like, ping pong teams playing each other. This is like the big diplomatic and cultural exchange that's going on between China and the US. There's nothing. And this is something that you have to sort of understand if you want to understand this pivot is how isolated China was, right?

Like the US, through this entire period, is pretending that the nationalists in Taiwan are the legitimate government of all of China. They have blocked off, effectively all trade with China. They've blocked off basically all trade from the US. They've blocked off a huge amount of international trade. And this is something that really, really cripples the Chinese economy like you know you can't quite blame it for

Like the famines because like I mean for example like the CCP was exporting grain to the USSR while greatly for what's happening Right like but I mean it didn't fucking help that And one of the and the other big consequence of this is that it is almost impossible for Chinese people to go to China. Like you basically can't do it. And this is an enormous deal because there are tens of millions of Chinese people across the world who can't go back to China. These people can't see their families, they can't see their friends, they can't go to the graves of their ancestors, they can't go home. And this happened with my family. Like my grandpa didn't see his brothers and sisters for 40 years after the war. 40 years just did not see his family. And you know, and it's only when Kissinger,

and this is the way that it's seen in China, it's only when Kissinger reestablishes relations with which Kissinger goes out there and advocates, and the way they see it is he's advocating for China in the US, which is kind of true. But the way they see this is only when Kissinger reestablishes diplomatic relations, that's when it becomes possible for you to see your family again. And you know, like I cannot emphasize enough how big of a deal this is in China in the diaspora.

Like if you are in the diaspora, you can't get fucking messages in. You like, a lot of people don't know whether their family's still alive because the last time they saw them was the war. Or, and when I say the war, like that could be World War II, that could be the revolution, that could be people leaving before that.

And, you know, this is a huge deal in the diaspora too. To the point where like a lot of the people who had been like in the Asian American movements in 68, like people who had been like yellow peril, yellow power people who were like ally with Black Panthers. Like these people are trying to get jobs in the Nixon State Department because they want to be there to like help reopen

diplomatic relations with China. It is like, it is like, it is one of the sort of apocle moments of the second half of the 20th century is this, these diplomatic relations opening up again. And in the Chinese media, they don't really want Nixon to be the face of it because there's no one to be like- No one does. This is not great. But so they put Kissinger as like the human face of all of this.

And you know, and there's a lot of benefits to China from this. They're getting these massive technological transfers from the US. And this is one of the things that it's, I think it's a very underrated factor, but this is one of the factors that makes their technology, like, sorry, let me say that again, this is one of the factors that makes, it's one of the incredibly underrated factors that makes their industrialization program work. And there's a lot of places where people try similar industrialization programs to what China is going to pull off.

Like Venezuela, for example, tries this. And Venezuela's program completely fails because they don't have access to the technology that the US got from basically sucking up, or that China got from sucking up to the US. And Kissinger is directly responsible for a lot of these technology transfers. And for this, Kissinger is labeled as a friend of the Chinese people. This is literally the way that it's talked about in the Chinese media. And even sort of beyond just him being labeled like a friend of the Chinese people, like he is like, okay, so there's like one or two other Americans who you can sort of like publicly express admiration for

who are people who like effectively defected to China or just moved to China and like were there for the revolution. But those aren't like major figures, right? Like they're like communist journalists or stuff like that or like anthropologists. Like they're not, this is the first like actual public American figure that you were allowed and you are encouraged to be like, yeah, this guy fucking rules. And in a very short amount of time, Kissinger becomes enormously popular as the man who, you know, he's the guy who restored Chinese-American relations. He's the guy who allowed all these people to see their families and ended the session of terror for Jean.

I mean, he's actually ended them, but he's helping people work around them and the sanctions eventually sort of come down. But, you know, all of this comes with a price and this brings us to another Kissinger crime, which is Kissinger in the coup against Chile's democratically elected president Salvador Allende. So this coup is fully greenlit by the U.S. like Kissinger is involved with it. Pinochet is going to murder 40,000 Chileans who talked about this on the show a few times before. But what we haven't really talked about much is that after the coup, Chile is completely diplomatically isolated.

No one wants anything to do with them because this just met, like absolute maniac mass murderer has just deposed a sovereign government. Even the UK refuses to talk to them, right? When the Brits won't talk to you because you've done too many crimes? Yeah, yeah, you've really fucked it there. Like the guys who, uh, whose prime minister's son have made a living doing coups. Yeah. But there is one country other than the U.S. that will do, that will, that will like do, that will make deals with Pinochet. And country is China and China funnels millions of dollars like two some literally two Pinochet directly into the Chilean government and this is a time where

China is not rich but and this is millions of dollars like in in like 1970s money it's a lot of money and this and China is absolutely broke and they're fucking sending it to and they're sending it to fucking Pinochet and like and and like to get a sense of how weird This stuff is in China, right? Like a lot of people in China think that Pinochet is a socialist Because he's being portrayed positively in the Chinese media. So they assume that he's a socialist like this is the kind of shit That's like the absolute brain worms that are happening in China at this point because their their connection to the outside world is Really really tenuous and the Chinese media is suddenly gassing up all of these just like The horrific right-wing dictators Now as as Kissinger star ascends in, the CCP begins pulling its own Kissingers.

So this is a story we only learned about pretty recently, I think in like the last two years. Bane Shoping was the first Chinese Communist leader to visit the US. And so he's in Washington DC and he takes time out of his schedule to have a secret meeting with the CIA, where he goes to the CIA office to set up a listening post in China to spy on the USSR. And one of the products of this, you know, so that's the sort of low level stuff that China's getting involved with. The high level stuff is in 1979, China invades Vietnam. They killed tens of thousands of people. They devastate both the Chinese and Vietnamese economy. And this is one of the things that, you know, this is the decisive thing in the Cold War, right?

China has like Donna Kissinger, they've invaded fucking, they've invaded Vietnam. Yeah. And, you know, and one of the one of the sort of modern iterations of this has been, there's a long period of sort of China's alignment with the US. And one of the other things that happens is that China becomes increasingly tied to Israel. And this is one of the things that's like true of China to this day is like there are a bunch of surveillance cameras in the West Bank that the Israelis used to surveil Palestinians that are built in China. They're the same cameras that are being used in

Xinjiang. A lot of Chinese police, sometimes special forces units train with Israeli trainers. They do counter-terrorism exchanges. The's a lot of, they do quote unquote, counterterrorism exchanges. And the other big aspect of this is that a huge part of the Israeli tech industry, a huge part of, they're sort of like defense complex is fueled directly by both Chinese resources and by Chinese raw materials

and also by things like transistors that they're importing from China. And this is the product of the sort of long arc of Kissinger's work in China and Kissinger's work sort of peeling off Egypt from the Palestinian like Soviet camp. And this ultimately is the price of opening relations with the US. It's not a price that's paid by the Chinese ruling class. Instead, what happens is that every dissident in China, every fucking child in Cambodia,

every teenager in East Timor, and every veteran in Vietnam, Mao sells them the fuck out. Ding Xiaoping sells them out, Hu Chutiao sells them out, Xi Jinping sells them out. They take American money, they take American technology, they shake hands with Kissinger

and they let Bangladesh burn. And for this, Kissinger would remain a steadfast ally of the Chinese capitalist class's entire life. When the CCP butchered the last gas of the Chinese working class at Tiananmen, Kissinger stood by the CCP and basically is one of the few Americans straight up doing PR for them. He does it again when China's trying

to enter the World Trade Organization. This is the last thing he was doing before he fucking died, was going to China and allying himself for the Chinese ruling class. He meets Xi Jinping and is greeted as an old friend. This is how you get to the thing that's been happening today, which is like all of these, like the Chinese foreign ministry and a bunch of high-ranking Chinese government officials like releasing these statements about how Dr. Kissinger is a good friend of the Chinese people. And this ultimately is what Kissinger represents, the prospect of the alliance between the American

and Chinese capitalist class built on the blood of the working class of five continents. It is a world in which there is peace and prosperity for the bourgeoisie, where there is starvation and death for everyone else. This still, to this day, is the regime that rules the US. It is the regime that rules China, and they are being united for one final time in their love of one Henry Kissinger. And yeah, that's basically all I've got. I guess the last thing I can say is one of the things that I think I hope people will understand about this is that the way that the American left thinks about China, like the way that it, the way that its politics function are completely

illegible in China. Like there are no, like in the US, it is very common to have someone who is like pro-Palestine, who is like socialist, who is like pro-LGBTQ, like rights who like, you know, who considers themselves an anti-imperialist, who is also pro-CCP and also fucking hates Kissinger. And this is not a position that exists in China. There is nobody like this.

Nobody fucking, like no one at all believes this because it's just, it's not a coherent political position. It is an American projection of politics on the China. Cause again, meanwhile, like the actual thing that's happened in China is because of the way the media has covered Kissinger, the thing they covered is the normalization of US-China relations and not all of the fucking

genocide that he did. And so they have the same fucking whitewashed view of Kissinger that like right-wing Americans do and that the American ruling class does. And yeah. This truly has been the century of Kissinger from 23 to 23. But fuck that! The century of Kissinger is over. Now is the century of the Social Revolution.

We're fucking coming for his ass. We're going to tear apart everything you ever built. That motherfucker is going to watch from hell as we destroy everything he ever created his entire life. Yeah, we got time. Let's go. That's why we're we're taking a week off to go to Chile and begin the social revolution that Kiss listen to destroyed again as a podcast We we do now have to

Choose the new most evil person alive There's there's been quite a there's been quite a few in the running We have we have Cheney's up there. Obviously we have W Bush we have Cheney's up there obviously we have a W Bush. We have We have Netanyahu we have We have BB's making a strong case right now. Yeah, we have a maybe did him off maybe he wanted to take the seat take the throne Yeah, that's made a decently strong case Yeah, sure there is there is there is a decent list running. I think only time will tell

for who will truly have a lasting impact of similar evil. But yes, there is now a new, new open position for most evil person alive. So many people are throwing their hat into the ring. We will see how this contest plays out. Yeah. And you will hear it when that fucking person dies. You will hear it on this show too. And we will enjoy it. Yeah, let's be naked out here and go have a good time.

Enjoy. Enjoy for this. Enjoy by the time you're hearing this, the second ever sunrise in 100 years that does not have Henry Kissinger under it. Yeah, somewhere today, somewhere in the world, a baby has been born in a post Kissinger world and we can all. The most evil baby has been born and we have to kill it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Somewhere, thanks to the cycle of Samsara, Henry Kissinger is back. That's right. So if you're squeezing out a baby this month, just be careful is what I'm saying. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of CoolZone Media. For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hi, everyone. I'm Paul Neika. And I'm Skip Bronson. And what happens when two old friends take their decades of experience in the business and entertainment roles and sit down with our buddies?

You get Our Way, a brand new show from iHeart Podcast where we chop it up with our pals about everything under the sun. This is Our Podcast and we're going to do it Our Way. Listen to Our Way on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. One of the best shows of the year, according to Apple, Amazon and Time, is Back 4 and Other Round. We had a big bear of a man, he was called Mal Evans, he was ourie. And he was coming back on the plane and he said, will you pass the salt and pepper? And I miss herding.

I said, what? Sergeant Pepper. Listen to season 2 of McCartney, a life in lyrics, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. season of True Detective, these Canadian cops trying to solve this mystery of who spiked the Chowder on the Titanic set. Listen to very special episodes on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.