Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 144

Episode Date: August 24, 2024

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Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Senora Sex Ed is not your mommy's sex talk. This show is La Platica like you've never heard it before. We're breaking the stigma and silence around sex and sexuality in Latinx communities. This podcast is an intergenerational conversation between Latinas from Gen X to Gen Z. We're your hosts, Viosa and Mala. You might recognize us from our first show, Locatora Radio. Listen to Senora Sex Ed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ever wonder what it takes to be a professional athlete or how the best in the sport are taking those skills to elevate women

sports to a whole new level? I'm Tiffany Oshinsky, host of League One Volleyball's podcast, Serving Pancakes. Get ready for some unfiltered analysis and authentic conversations about the sport itself and what it takes to stand on the podium. I'll be joined by top athletes and figureheads in sports as we dive deep into match play, mindset, and memories from years past. And you can guarantee that pancakes will be on the menu. Listen to Serving Pancakes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Callzone Media. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here. and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

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 going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to Icadabra here. I'm your host, B.O. Wong. With me is James Stout. Hi, man. Hello. This is a podcast about things falling apart, putting it back together again. For the rest of this week, we are going to be going to our live correspondence from the Democratic National Convention. We're going to be getting a bunch of episodes from the floor. You're going to be hearing all about all of the sort of

excitement. But for sort of day one of our DNC convention, I thought we'd do something a little bit different. And that is, I want to take a look back at the convention that I think most people have been thinking is the most similar to this one, which is the 1968 Democratic National Convention, which is also a convention that featured large anti-war protests and the vice president of an extremely unpopular president who is waging an unpopular war has seized control of the nomination. I mean, the parallels, I mean, there's occupations at Columbia. I mean, right down to the one that I think I've seen, I haven't seen anyone else talk about is that one of the big uprisings in 1968 is in Pakistan, and particularly in the

part of Pakistan that is now Bangladesh. We are about a week, maybe two weeks removed from a enormous uprising of Bangladesh that just knocked out their political leadership. So you know, there are lots of sort of 1968 vibes in the air. It's not un-similar, but it's also not the same as I'm sure we're about to find out. Yeah, yeah, I think in some sense, and we'll get to this more as the episode progresses, but in some sense, 68, parts of it are sort of an inversion of what's happening now, and parts of it are an interesting case study in having the same pieces, but having them

fit into totally different configurations. Because of that, the results are going to be, I think, very, very staggeringly different. I think maybe the primary difference is that really the 1968 Democratic Convention does not start in the US at all. It starts in Vietnam on Vietnamese New Year's and it really starts with the Tet Offensive. So for people who have forgotten this from their history classes, like maybe some of you are around for this, I don't know. Statistically, probably not, but I don't know, maybe there's a few old timers here. So the Tet Offensive is this massive attack by the Viet Cong, or North Vietnamese forces on New Year's of, well, technically it's like January 6th because the calendar dates are

off, but it's this massive attack on American positions. It's an attempt really to sort of seize control of South Vietnam. It doesn't really work militarily because, and this is an interesting kind of display of bad judgment, the North Vietnamese leadership bizarrely makes almost exactly the same mistake that the Americans are going to make from the invasion of Iraq, which is that they are under the assumption that their attack would trigger a series of urban revolts that would drive out the corrupt South Vietnamese puppet governments and run the Americans out of the country. That doesn't happen.

There's no uprisings. The Viet Cong take a bunch of grounds, but unbelievable numbers of Drakadrae are just wiped out by the subsequent American counterattack. But it didn't matter at all because what the Tet Offensive really did was instantly reveal to everyone in the US that LBJ and every previous American administration had been lying to them about the Vietnam War. In the wake of these attacks, it is instantly clear that the US is not winning the war. They are not making steady progress against the communists.

They are at best locked in a grinding stalemate against an enemy with the capacity to launch attacks that could, again, temporarily run the US out of cities. Right? Yeah. And this craters LBJ's popularity. His popularity is in the 30s. Oh, damn. Yeah.

When you come, but that's... Yeah. It's really, really bad. I think it's like 36%. He is staggeringly unpopular. And, you know, the tight offensive also, in some sense validates, particularly the sort of radical wing of the anti-war movement. I think people remember the anti-war movement today as this purely this sort of like hyper militant Students for a Democratic Society, just the draft card burning stuff. And there was that, but those people for the early, especially the early 60s leading up to this point, and even even during 68 are a minority. Right. Most of the anti war people

are sort of older, like anti nuclear activists, people who come up in the 40s, people who've been through the Red Scare and are these sort of hyper vigilant liberals. And these people thought that they could work with LBJ to end the war, right? LBJ comes in, not like quite explicitly promising to end the war, but he comes in as the candidate who's not, you know, who's not literally threatening the bomb Saigon and then he turns around and bomb Saigon. And so this moment, the Tet Offensive, is this moment where the radical wing of the anti-war movement is vindicated, right?

LBJ has been lying to them the whole time. All of the sort of negotiations that people have been doing have been a complete failure. And in the sort of wake of this, there's a real sort of drive by a couple of different anti-war factions to stage a protest at the Democratic National Convention for what, you know, to protest what everyone assumes is going to be the coronation of LBJ. There are two different kind of umbrellas of groups, I guess you could call it, who wind up at 68. And this is something that we aren't going to have now because neither of these two kinds of things really exist anymore. The first of these groups are the

politically serious hardliners. They are organized into this unbelievably large coalition of hundreds of groups called National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. Nobody says that because it's so long. Everyone then and now just calls it MOB or sometimes mobilization, but everyone in the writing just calls them MOB. And mob is one of the groups that's been getting more radical by 68. But again, the students for a democratic society who are kind of the 60s parallel to the DSA, if you're going to sort of do these direct one-to-one lines, right, are a minority. And also, SDS basically leaves mob to focus on other kinds of organizing. And so SDS is going to be around, they're going to be involved in this protest, but

MOBE is kind of not being ran by them. And MOBE is also a very complicated endeavor because again, these are big tent groups, right? These are very, very, very big tent groups. These range from honestly sort of right big tech groups. You know, these range from, honestly, sort of right liberal professional groups who opposed the war to, like, one of the major leaders of MOBE in this period is a senior member of the SWP, the Socialist Workers Party, who are like old school Trotskyite group, right? Yeah. And it's very, very hard to get coalitions like this to work, partially because of sectarian infighting over

Some of its over tactics because a lot of there's a lot of people in Bob who do not want Militant confrontation they don't want there to be big conversations with the police and then also You know, these people just don't have the same ends, right? Yeah, the best ofMP people are trying to have a socialist revolution. I there's other people in this group who are trying to not have their tax dollars paid for a war. Yeah, and not get their kids drafted into a war. Yeah, yeah. But MOBE is the big anti war hub, right? With the exception of the group we're gonna talk about next. Almost all anti war activity in the country is running through Vogue, just to some extent or another, because it's

a coalition of like all of these groups. We don't really have anything like this anymore. Yeah. There are kind of the tattered remains of this stuff, but they don't have the kind of pull, the kind of especially I don't have the kind of organizational capacity that this stuff had. Yeah, that's not really like that there are a wide variety of people opposed to genocide in Palestine, but but they're not united under and even this there isn't like a popular front or a big tent. Yeah, that really brings them together.

Even in 2020, so if you didn't really have like a big tent or could we like we had it like BLM, capital BLM, that Vivo 1C3, but like that wasn't really like an org that was that effective on the ground. And that's a key component that's very, very different about the 68 convention than the one that's gonna happen. You know, as this comes out, it will be day one of that convention.

The terrain of groups who are opposed to it are staggeringly different. This kind of stuff, we just don't have it anymore. Now, part of what MOBE is struggling to do, and this is something that some of the things they're dealing with, the things that we don't deal with now, some of them are things that we deal with all the time now. One of the big ones is they're trying to develop what eventually is going to be called the diversity of tactics. So they're trying to have protests that you can have 300,000 people and most of those people could be sitting around having a picnic. And then there's also a bunch of people who are like fighting the police in the front.

Right? We are, I think, sort of largely familiar with this kind of from 2020. Right? Yeah. And the police take ass everyone. Yeah. Well, so this comes to another very important part about this, which is Yeah, and the police take ass everyone. Yeah, well, so this just comes to another very important part about this, which is that Moeb, even in the planning stages,

even the radicals are not trying to fight the cops, right? Nobody wants to do it because everyone is terrified about Chicago's reaction to the Holy Week uprising. We talked about the Holy Week uprising in another episode very briefly. It's a massive series of riots and uprisings that follow the assassination of Martin Luther King. There was a particularly bad one in Chicago where Mayor Daley is so pissed off that he

goes on TV and gives a speech where he tells his cops to shoot and maim people they could accuse of looting. Good stuff. And, you know, this goes over so badly that the next day He's giving statements to the media saying he never said this but you know, everyone saw him say it on live TV Yeah, but people people are terrified because this is a period where the cops really will shoot into crowds Mm-hmm. So, you know everyone in the planning phases of this, you know I think most people broadly know how this turns out, which is there's a bunch of street fighting, the police attack

people. But none of the planners wanted that. They were very, very deliberately trying to make sure there weren't confrontations with the police. Because as it turns out, these people are staggeringly unprepared for a confrontation with the cops. I'm going to read a quote from the very good book, Chicago 68, which is a politically, it's a bit questionable, but it has an excruciatingly in-depth account of

These I mean we're talking hour to hour rundown Of the convention itself, you know very well documented accounts of all of the meetings that produced this. So I'm going to read a quote. This is about Moe, about their preparation for Chicago DNC protests. Quote, some even wanted to warn prospective protesters that they should bring protective clothing like helmets, bulky sweaters and bent down after tear gas. But it was decided that this might overly alarm would-be protesters. Great. Now, again, this is MOBE. They are supposed to be the serious organizers here, right?

The other group that we're going to talk about, the Yippies, like compared to the Yippies, these guys look like shock troopers. And this is how unprepared they are. Yeah, wow. Like looking at this from our perspective, these people are dangerous amateurs. They have no idea what they're doing. They don't understand how to deal with police at all. One of the other things that happens is this is one of the

first, an early deployment of sort of CS tear gas, right? And they have a guy who'd been drafted into Vietnam, was like had been, had become a special forces guy who had, you know, like after we got out, had become a leftist. And she's telling you about this gas and he's saying, yeah, we need to talk to the, so the other thing that's going on here is you can tell how early this is into the cycle because they don't have

dedicated street medics. They have basically a nurses association, a doctor's association that they've gotten to go give you a medical care, which is not bad, right? But no, I mean, that's great, but people need to be aware of what they're getting into. And then the medical folks need to be aware of how they can mitigate that. And the most people overrule this guy and say, no, we're not going to tell the medical people

about the sort of solution thing he's talking about to neutralize this gas, right? These people are just staggeringly unprepared for for an actual police confrontation. And something you have to keep in mind about about 1968 America, right, is that we have a very different sort of outlook on the police and how you deal with the police than than than these people. Right. We come from basically the decade of the street fight since since occupied 2011 and really intensifying in Ferguson in 2014. There has been a straight decade between conversations in the police. If you were out in the most intense part of 2020 and statistically, you if you're listening to this show, you probably at least were out there a little bit.

You have seen shit that these kids like I call them kids. Right. These people are in the 20s, 30s. But you have seen shit that these kids, like I call them kids, right? These people are in their 20s and 30s, but you have seen shit that these people cannot even imagine, right? If you're looking back from our perspective, right? You know, with the experience with the police that we have, you can look back at these people and you can instantly tell

that they're gonna get clobbered. One of the things they're trying to do is they're trying to copy some of the techniques from the Japanese student movement, which is an infamously very, probably the best street fighters in the world. And they're trying to copy their techniques and they can't do it and they're trying to do the snake line thing to break police lines. They're all falling over and so it's very, it's very clear from our perspective that this is going to be a

fiasco. But these people think that they understand how to manage the police. Yeah. I mean, the state's capacity for violence has increased exponentially since then. You could kind of stand up to the cops just by staying in the streets, to a degree. I think it's probably this is the beginning of the state sort of moving towards arming itself to deny people access to public space in that fashion, which we saw. If you grew up at the time I did in Genoa, in Prague, in these G8 summits, Cancun, all the different ones, right, at Octorada, like, I think that was the beginning maybe of like modern crowd control policing. But yeah, these, this is a different world to the one we're in now.

Yeah. And they don't, you know, and there's no sense. This is the beginning of the modern world, right? But they haven't seen it yet Yeah, there's only one way to really experience that stuff. Yeah, you have to go through it So we're gonna take an ad break and when we come back we are going to get to the yippies the other group That's protesting at this convention. All right I'm gonna get you. Hooray. ["Sweet Home Alone"] And we are back from the advertisements that the Yippies would have loved hijacking. So the Yippies are another group that we don't have anything really like this today

because this is the year 2024, everyone kind of smokes. I mean, not everyone, but people just kind of smoke weed, right? All the time. Yeah, it's pretty normal. But in 68, this is really not that. Where MOBE are very, very explicit political people, right? Capital P politics, you know, the communists, socialists, some like sort of left liberals, progressives, etc, etc. there, and they're very clearly doing politics conventionally. The Yippies are a counterculture group. It's this mix of people who are political radicals who get caught up in sort of this counterculture stuff. And then a lot of them are just kind of counterculture people who mostly just sort of want sex, drugs and rock and roll,

but see this as the way to sort of resist the sort of death machine that they see themselves as living in. Yeah, I think this is a time when people start talking about the Marcusean Great Refusal a lot in 1968, right? And then kind of people go in big different directions with that. Yeah. Although these people are, we'll get into this more in a second. These people are not very theoretically sophisticated, right? They're not reading old Herbert. They are stoned out of their minds at literally all times.

Yippee is a term that didn't exist before the 68th convention. It was developed specifically as part of a plan to do a sort of protest thing as this rallying cry of Yippee against the sort of death machine of the Democratic National Convention, which everyone thought was going to nominate LBJ to do more firebombing of Vietnam. And so their plan is, and this is something that you can still see kind of reflections of in some-ish modern movements, although we don't do this much anymore, but their plan was to have this sort of festival of life to counterpose against the DNC's festival of death. They were going to have a bunch of singers and people were just going to have public sex. And their thesis of how they're trying to do this is to hijack the sort of

mass media machine, which they see as the kind of defining element of modern society, right? It's the element of sort of totalitarian social control. And their plan is to hijack it for further own purposes. This is superficially similar to something you see from the French 68ers, who have, sort of by the time this is happening, have done a revolution that doesn't quite work. We'll cover on this show at some point. And the French 68ers, both the students and the workers, who very, very nearly take control of France, are heavily influenced by a theorist named Guy de Borde and his sort of ubiquitous book, The Society is Spectacle. And superficially, these are

very similar things. But de Borde's analysis is a technologically, ideologically sophisticated analysis of social relations. And again, the Yippies are contrary to that stoned out of their minds at literally all times. Yeah. They're doing like team.com. Yeah. So I'm going to read back to back a line, an average line from guide to board society is spectacle.

And then I'm going to give you a quote from an Abbie Hoffman, who's one of the people who invents the term yippie. I'm going to give a quote from one of his speeches at the 68th Convention. So here is an average guy-de-bored Society of Spectacle line. Quote, the spectacle is the existing order's uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence. The fetishistic, purely objective appearance of spectacular relations conceal the fact that their relations among men and classes, second nature with its fatal law, seems to dominate our environment. But the spectacle is not the necessary product of

technical development seen as a natural development. The society of the spectacle is on the contrary, the form which chooses its own technical content. So this is what the people, this is what the 68ers in France are reading. Here is Yippee founder, Abbie Hoffman. This is in a speech why he would call it a rap or something. But this is in a rambling that he gives to a crowd at the 68 convention. Meet the press, face the nation, the issues and answers. All those bullshit shows, you know, you get a Democrat and a Republican arguing back and forward this and that. This and yeah, yeah, yeah.

But at the end of the show, nobody changes their fucking mind, you see. But they're trying to push Brillo, you see. That's good. You want to use Brillo, see, in about every 10 minutes. Odd will come three minutes of Brillo Brillo is a revolution Brillo is sex Brillo is fun Brillo is At the end of the show people ain't fucking switching from Democrat or Republican or commies, you know The right wingers ready of that shit. They're buying Brillo I mean, can you imagine if they had the Beatles gain zing zing zing all that jump and shout?

You know it all of a sudden they put it ad where this guy comes on very straight. You ought to buy Brillo because it's the rationally correct decision. Part of the American process is the right way to do things. You know, fuck, they'll buy the Beatles. They won't buy Brillo. So this is a semi-incomprehensible rat. Right. This is this just goes on in in the middle of this kind of semi-incoherent intentionally semi-incoherent nonsense is Is this point about how the thing that changes people's minds is advertising?

Right and not not the sort of business of politics as usual It's this sort of performance spectacle that is the real thing that like shit actually changes how people think These are performance artists, right? That is the real thing that like actually changes how people think. These are performance artists, right? Alan Ginsberg, sort of famous beat poet, was one of the people who's going to be speaking there. He's writing sort of he's writing poetry about it. These people are doing theater performances.

If you've seen like the giant puppets that used to be at big protests, that was kind of a descendant of this stuff. Oh, yeah. And these performance artists are sitting out to hijack the biggest stage in the world and turn it against the war. And that stage is the 1968 Democratic Convention. Unfortunately, however, if there's one group in the US who is even less prepared for a street fight than Mob is, it is the Yippies. At least the more radical members of MOBE have pretensions of street fighting. The Yippies are not street fighters at all.

And this is something that's distinct from most of the 68 uprisings. Most of the 68 uprisings everywhere are characterized by people who are very, very good at this, right? And these protesters fight very well. I mean, the most famous ones we've talked about a little bit already are the Japanese student movements who have this sort of iconic white construction hats, these giant wooden poles they use to literally fight riot police at rage. But you know, students, workers, and just like random people off the street everywhere

from Italy to France to Pakistan are able to fight the police on fairly even footing. They equipped themselves valiantly. The yippies, on the other hand, every single time they come into contact with the police they get absolutely bald um and you know the pre-dnc yippie protests are extremely peaceful right they're not even disruptive they have permits and the police just batter them and this is kind of the plan right the police attacks are generating media coverage and the yippies are trying to hijack this media coverage to spread their message. And this kind of works to some extent. Part of the problem though, is that one of the biggest newspapers in Chicago is Chicago

Tribune who are a kind of reactionary that I mean, I guess we still have them, but this is the kind of magazine that would have been right there with the economist saying that all of the Irish dying was good. Right? That's the kind, like, when the British killed them in the famine. This is the kind of reactionary that the Chicago Tribune is. And so some of their protests hijacking stuff doesn't really work in Chicago because you'll have these protests where just the Tribune shows up. And if the Tribune shows up, the coverage of the cops just absolutely beating the crap

out of a bunch of people who were just walking on sidewalks is going to be something like a police defeat, unruly demonstrators or something. Before we go any further and by any further, we're going to talk about how these groups relate to each other and oh boy, we need to go to the thing the Yiffies would have been hijacking, which is these products and services. We're continuing in their noble tradition by using their money to do this episode. And we are back. So something that I think is very interesting about these two groups that is the final thing that you kind of have to understand about why these protests go the way they do. I've talked a bit about how sort of the more radical parts of Moeb and

the Yippies who are very radical are, are kind of being isolated from the more moderate elements, right? And this is part of Mayor Daley's deliberate strategy. Daley is the all-powerful mayor of Chicago. He's one of the builders of America's greatest ever political machine, which is the Chicago machine. By this point, he has almost single-handedly won elections for the Democratic Party by handing them Illinois on a platter. He is one of the people who turns Illinois from a swing state into a state that

votes for Democrats by enormous margins every single year. And he does this through this incredibly powerful patronage network and corruption network. And Daley's deliberate strategy is trying to sort of separate, he's trying to knock the moderates out of the protests by threatening that he's going to just like obliterate these people, right? And also by continuously denying them permits so that sort of more moderate people won't show up. Yeah.

And so the plan is basically to isolate them. And part of the other reason why this works is that this whole plan is opposed by a group you wouldn't really expect to be opposing it, which is the communists. CPUSA wants nothing to do with this. Even the SWP, Socialist Workers Party, who are the Trotskyites, who have very important roles in MOBE, they're part of a faction that doesn't want to do the DNC convention going in. And this is something you see all over 1968.

Because weirdly, the communist parties in 68 are a very conservative force. This is something that we've talked about on the show before in places like Chile, where you have fairly moderate Christian Democratic workers going into the streets. And meanwhile, the Chilean Communist party is going, no, no, hold on, we must slow the pace of reforms. Yeah, yeah, this isn't it. And you know, that's even more mild example than what happens in France, where the French Communist party blows its one shot of ever taking power by straight up working with the government

to stamp out the May 68 uprisings there. These old left parties are very conservative, both because, you know, on an international level because some of them are in the sort of common turn orbit, right? So they're taking orders directly from Moscow, and Moscow doesn't want any disruption. And in the US, a lot of the older activists don't want a confrontation because they're all still petrified of the Red Scare. And so they're terrified of anything

that could like even sort of alienate a single person. And this means that to some extent, all mobe and the yippies really have over each other. But the problem is the mobe and the yippies hate each other. That's a tennis artist time. Yeah, it's amazing. And again, this is something that all of the mob people agree about, which they agree about

nothing. The only thing they agree about is they don't even agree about fully demanding an end to the Vietnam War. Right? Like, in a media end. They don't agree on anything except they hate the yippies. Because they see the yippies as these deeply unserious bourgeois degenerates who are just having sex

and doing drugs and are just literally the same culture that they're trying to resist. The Yippies see Moab as sort of self-righteous assholes who are locked in this death spiral of comically serious politics that are also just a reflection of the thing they're opposing, so, you know, both of these people take the same things about each other.

But meanwhile, both of these groups and really everyone else in the US is going to have to ride the wildest wave of vibe shifts in the entirety of American history. So all right, we kind of famously had our vibe shift when Biden dropped out and everyone was like, whoa, hold on, better things are possible? Question mark? Yeah, question mark. There's also a vibe shift in 68 when LBJ drops out, March 31st, but there are key differences here though, right? Biden has already won the nomination, right, by the time that he is forced out.

And when he is forced out, there is great rejoicing, everyone's really happy about it, Even the old Biden stout words immediately fall in line behind Kamala Harris, right? Yeah, right the Biden's wins account changes its name 68 is much much messier than that LBJ doesn't drop out until he almost loses a he almost is he is the New Hampshire primary to anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy not to be confusedwar candidate Eugene McCarthy, not to be confused with the other McCarthy. I was really baffled the first time I just saw people talking about McCarthy. I was like, what?

Wait, hold on. Yeah, yeah. This is anti-war stalwart Senator Eugene McCarthy. And McCarthy almost beating LBJ in a very conservative state really sort of lights this fire under LBJ in a very conservative state really sort of lights this fire under LBJ and LBJ realizes that he could win the nomination, but if he does that, he's going to lose the general election. So he books it and drops out. When LBJ drops out, there's a competitive primary. The other reason the primary is competitive is that RFK takes this as a shining moment and goes I am going to enter the race as the anti-war

candidate. Now we now have our tragedy as farce RFK. Yeah, yeah, Jesus, yeah. Just to be clear, people aren't familiar, not the same dude. No, no. Different Bobby Kennedy. Yeah, this is RFK. RFK really is seen as a guy.

And both him and McCarthy are seen by young people who have been disillusioned by LBJ as someone who can sort of like take this anti-war platform national. Right. And there is a massive vibe shift for a moment. There is hope. And this is a real problem for the anti-war factions, because this kind of thing is exactly how the US got into this mess in the first place. LBJ ran this same con in 64. Yeah, exactly.

And they got elected and immediately made the war worse. So you know, I think there's this tendency to look back on the anti-war protesters as these sort of like spoiler people who ruined the Democratic nomination or whatever. But you know, they were right to a large extent to be incredibly suspicious of anti-war Democratic candidates. Yeah. But you know, this also throws all of the planning for the protest, the chaos, because the center point of the protest for both Moe and the Yippies was to show an alternative to the sort of stagnant war upon death machine politics of LBJ. But then suddenly, like if there's

a if there's an anti-war candidate who's a nominee, it becomes so much harder to make this case. And these people are really unbelievably depressed. The vibes everywhere else in the country are great. Everyone believes in hope again. It's hope and change. They have the Obama. And then RFK gets assassinated. Everything goes to shit. Almost immediately. I

mean, the vibes are so bad that famously one of the one of the mobe guys, I think he's on camera, just weeping. Because I mean, he and he and Bobby Kennedy had kind of had sort of known each other through through the sort of anti war networks. And he's not a Kennedy supporter. But when Kennedy gets killed, it's basically imagine our vibe shift immediately flipped out his head and went even more rancid than it had been. The feeling that you all had in the week

after the failed Trump assassination, right? Yeah. And you can see this is interesting, right? Like all of the elements of 1968 are here in 2024, right? You have your unpopular president leaving, you have a vibe shift. You have a Kennedy. You have an assassination attempt,

but the pieces fit together differently because what happens is, you know, the vibe shift collapses with the RFK assassination. And suddenly, you know, anti-war is back on the table.

But on the other hand, McCarthy still in the race, right? Eugene McCarthy, who is the other on the other hand, McCarthy still in the race, right? Eugene McCarthy, who is the other anti war candidate is still in the race. However, comma, it is becoming increasingly clear that what is going to happen at the convention is that Eugene McCarthy is going to get rat fucked and they are going to put Hubert Humphrey, who's LBJ's vice president, back in the saddle under the same policies. And this too is a sort of inversion of 2024. The party elites ousting Biden and installing Kamala Harris is broadly unbelievably popular

with the base. Yeah. Hubert Humphrey doesn't run in primaries. He just wins by wrangling all the delegates to vote for him in these, this incredible series and sort of smoke-filled backroom deals and peeling off people who've been Kennedy delegates. And it becomes clear that he's going to win,

but it's terrifying because what has happened is that the Democratic elite against the will of a lot of Democratic voters has just straight up stolen this election, right? They have stolen it. They have rat-fucked Eugene McCarthy. Yeah. This is kind of like the right has unsuccessfully tried to play this narrative again, right?

Yeah. And again, the thing about Harris is that she is seen as something different than Biden. This partially has to do with the differences in Biden's weakness versus LPJ's, right? A huge part of Biden's weakness that everyone thinks he's completely senile. Yeah, because he is objectively senile. Yeah, yeah, because he can't fucking string together a sentence. Yeah. Goes off on. Right. Not that Trump can.

No, not the Trump can either. Right. But it was but Biden's was sort of more visible. Right. Yeah. Because of sort of the way the media works, because of Trump's ability to sort of run away. There's a lot of factors to this, right? Yeah. No one on earth thinks that LBJ is senile, not even his worst enemies think that that man is senile. Right?

His problem is his policies. And the problem with that is that his policies are being transferred directly to his successor, who is his vice president. Whereas Kamala Harris does not have the fundamental weakness of Joe Biden, which is that she successfully, and she is the first major American political figure who's been able to do this in eight years, she can string together three consecutive sentences. Yeah, which, yeah, it appears like a manner from heaven to the sort of politics appreciator

classes, right, when they have to explain to all of us why we're pure, right? And juvenile of wanting a politics outside of politicians while their politicians are like struggling to do a whole paragraph without talking about their corn pop or Scranton, Pennsylvania or something. Yeah. And so, so this is, you know, even as we're heading into the convention, things are, things are going to be very different than they're going to play out now. But there's one thing that is exactly the same.

If that is Chicago Police Department, there is no changes. The only change is they are slightly less willing to say the N-word in public. Like a little bit. Yeah. And in return for that, they got approximately 10 million dollars of fucking weapons. Yeah. Yeah. So really up to you. These people are exactly the same as today.

They are overpaid, entitled asshole screaming for violence. They're screaming that they're going to take their vengeance against what they see as a leftist conspiracy to protect criminals and hand the country to communists. They are precisely the swine who beat us in the streets in 2020. These people in 68 are precisely the men today who ran a black site at home in Square to disappear and torture suspects in the false confessions and who boldly set out a few years ago to kill a 16-year-old with 16 shots on a cover-up. This is the exact same Chicago Police Department that it was in 68. And in fact, all of the key elements

of the modern police department, this is the period. Richard M. Daly is one of the people who gets the cops unionized. And again, we're gonna see Daly is really, truly a terrible person. Daly wants the teamsters to organize the cops. That doesn't work at all. His bid completely fails.

They're organized by the Fraternal Order of Police who are just effectively a giant cartel for police murderers now, and they were at the time. They're a bunch of unbelievable reactionaries. A bunch of their leaderships will do things like quote Hitler. They just can't fucking stop themselves. No. Yeah. So I want to read, I'm going to read sort of a modern police statements. Quote, the better we do our job of enforcing the law the more we are attacked the state of our so-called objective press is sad To behold suddenly too many so-called objective news writers attempt to excuse the actions of minorities. Oh, wait, that's not that's not the modern police

That's the 68 police saying a thing that is literally identical to every modern Today, yeah change at all I think that is literally identical to every modern statement today. Yeah, not changed at all. Because no one made them. No, this is sort of the trap that the anti war people are walking into, right? They are walking into a bunch of ultra radicalized, unbelievably pissed off cops who are salivating at the attempt to sort of beat up long haired hippies.

And I saw there's one thing we should also make clear that's that's very different between this anti war movement and the modern one, which is that mobe and the hippies are terrifyingly white. They might be whiter than the cops at this. It's genuinely possible that's true. The hippies love for reasons that are incomprehensible to me other than racism. Absolutely love dressing up in like indigenous costumes. Oh God. Yeah, it's awful. Yeah. And part of what's going on is that the sort of black radical groups

don't really want to be involved in this. Yeah, one can see why. You know, they're anti-war, but they're like, this is not our problem. You can sort this out. Yeah. And this is also another thing, a very, very key difference between that anti-war sort of coalition and today's because today's anti-war coalition, if you go to any of the campus occupations, right, you go to an anti-war protest, it's basically a combination of two groups, right?

It's queer white people and just non-white people in general, some of whom are queer and some of whom aren't. And that's the core of sort of protest organization in the US, right? Those are the core of the people who show up. Yeah. And then 17 people with fucking clipboards trying to get them to sign up for their various... Well, those are the leeches that show up to sort of prey on the new base. Yeah, yeah. They are the lamprey on the on the on the shark of protest. Yeah, yeah. But this plays out very differently politically because of who has been mobilized

into sort of anti-war things now versus who is showing up to this convention. And this is going to be true of the people who show up to the convention this time, right? Yeah. They are very much not the same kind of sort of middle class student people who were showing up to like this, although not all those people, but like there was a lot of people who were

workers, right? But like they're distressingly white and that is that is simply not true of the modern group. It's one of the reasons why the pieces don't quite fit. All right, we need to go do some more ads and then we're going to sort of wrap up what actually happened at the convention and how it sort of shook up politically. We are back. So the other thing that guarantees really that this is going to descend into sort of chaos is that, I mean, even days before days before the events right neither the moat people nor the yippies really know

what they're planning to do the planning has been terrible part of it is because they get they can't get permits from the city and it's really hard to plan when you can't know what you're supposed to be doing there's also internal disagreements in the groups over what to do. There's also a truly staggering federal infiltration. And not just the normal feds, right? We're talking like military intelligence. Oh, wow. Like the Army's intelligence office is spying on protesters.

They have guys inside of McCarthy's campaign. That should not be legal. Like, it doesn't matter if it's legal. It doesn't, right? But it's nuts. And, you know, I mean, there's an estimate that's from 68 Chicago, that book that one in six protesters were informants. Oh, fuck me.

It's like Atomwaffen ratio they've got going on. Yeah. And part of this is the numbers of protestors aren't very good because people are terrified the CBD is going to start killing everyone. So the actual numbers even at its peak is maybe 10,000, which is pretty small considering that the Pentagon mobilization that MOBE had done in 67 was like 100,000 people.

Wow. Right. They've been able to put together really massive protests, but this one is not that large. So the Yippies kind of do their concert thing. But the moment night hits and they're trying to be in this park, the police attack, the police are incredibly brutal. By about three days in, the National Guard gets deployed. And this is something about 68 that's also different from today.

If the National Guard is deployed today, it's not the same thing as a National Guard deployment 60, because the National Guard deployment in 68 very well could mean that the army is going to kill you all right. This is a period in which the National Guard, their riot control mechanism is a line of guys with bayonets. Yeah, he's back to say they use bayonets. That's less lethal. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's less

lethal because when they're actually going lethal and they've done this in the past three or four years against a bunch of the sort of black uprisings have been happening is they just shoot people. Yeah. Right. They straight up kill them. This happened in Chicago.

That was more the cops than the National Guard because during Holy Week, they were sort of told to stand down. So it's not to like literally destroy the entire country in a giant war. But, you know, them showing off also really pisses off the organizers and everything that happens to the cops start beating the organizers.

And this, it turns out is a bad idea because it turns out if you beat people, they get really angry at you. And so suddenly you have all of these moab guys who literally their plan going into the convention was we don't want to have a fight Because we're gonna lose who are suddenly like well fuck it. They're attacking us anyways. We're just gonna fight them Yeah, and and this is where everything sort of the police completely go off the rails, right? This is where you see, you know all of the sort of famous footage of beatings outside the convention Also, and I will post something Robert pointed out. Is it like anyone who was in Portland in 2020 has been through stuff that's way worse than anything anyone saw here? Like you statistically probably have seen something that was much worse than what

happened to these people, which is not to say it wasn't bad, right? I mean, these are people getting horribly beaten by guys with billy clubs, but yeah, it just happens all the time. Now we are so far past this being a thing that nobody's ever seen before, whatever, right? Yeah, we had a moment where it could have stopped and a lot of people fucking tried. Yeah. And as a country, we are going down the path of the cops beating people and getting away with it.

Like that is where we're at politically. Yeah, and in this period in 68, the cops are able to go even more feral than they are now, which is slightly more fail, which is to say that they storm McCarthy's campaign office and they have his campaign staffers beaten. Oh damn. Yeah, that is that is advanced. Yeah, I've never heard of another modern political thing where police straight up stormed a campaign office of a presidential campaign and had his staffers beaten. Right. And this this has a massive impact inside of the convention itself, because what's happening in the convention is not what we got with Kamala where like the old is gone and here's the new or

whatever. And you know, you can you can look for some kind of break there. It is Humphrey has been put in Humphrey is LBJ2. LBJ's Vietnam policy is inscribed by vote into the platform of the Democratic Party for what they're going to run in 68. And meanwhile, outside, right, as a sort of rat fuck is happening and as the party leadership is installing Hubert Humphrey, the sort of liberal anti-war wing

of the party is recoiling in horror. A McCarthy delegate, who's a senator, famously liberal anti-war wing of the party is recoiling in horror. A McCarthy delegate, who's a senator, famously is about to go on stage and endorse endorse Hubert Humphrey because Humphrey's won the nomination. They have to come together if unity. But he's washing out the window as the police are just like throwing kids around and beating the shit out of them. And he instead gives this speech where he says that if McCarthy was president, the cops wouldn't be using Gestapo tactics. And Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley gets so angry that he starts screaming from the crowd. And I quote, and I apologize

for saying this, but you need to understand who the party elite is in this period. He says, quote, fuck you, you Jew son son of a bitch you lousy motherfucker go home This is the mayor of Chicago on the floor live on TV at the Democratic National Convention Geez you are watching in 68 you can see in real time on TV the entire Democratic Party completely fall apart Yeah, fuck the yeah, the mask has come off there, hasn't it? Yeah, everything. Everything's falling apart.

You can see you can see the divisions. A lot of liberal anti-war candidates refuse to back like Humphrey and his people. They eventually come back together sort of as the general election approaches, but the damage is done. And that's not something that we're really

at risk of. No, they seem to be pretty much lockstep right now, like both with police violence and with what is happening in Palestine. Like, there's not much like real within the party, the Democrat Party, like much dissent that I can see. Yeah, you know, and I think the other thing about the 68 election, people are trying to compare it to the 2024 election is that the Democrats only lost by about 1% of the vote or sub 1% of the vote, even though it was a blowout, they only lost about 1% of the

vote in 68. And a big part of what happened also was that George Wallace, the insane segregationist guy, was also running and drew a whole bunch of electoral votes. Yeah, which we don't really have. But you know, the Democrats almost successfully rallied to beat Nixon. Nixon, you know, and this is something that there's this narrative that Nixon wins by sort of unbelievable margins and that he represented the sort of silent majority. And that's only sort of true.

But on the other hand, the ground in the US since then has changed, right? The uprisings in the 1960s, and this is from the Holy Week uprisings to the process of the DNC, all of these protests are hideously unpopular. Everything MLK does, everyone hates it, right? Literally until MLK dies, right? And there's actually a very funny example of this. Bayard Daley had absolutely hated MLK when he was alive. Right. He he gives speeches calling him saying he's stirring up trouble and like absolutely despising him. In the moment he dies, he gives a speech saying everyone should follow MLK's example

and remain peaceful and not lose the state literally days after. Right. Yeah. But that's the thing. All of these all of these things are unbelievably unpopular. And, you know, the gap between their giant uprising, which was Holy Week But that's the thing, all of these things are unbelievably unpopular. And you know, the gap between their giant uprising, which was holy week, and the election was a few months. Whereas, you know, in 2024, right, the 2024 uprising was marked by over 50% approval for burning a police station down.

Right. It was actually extremely popular. And even even four years later, you know, with the sort of memory of the tear gas fading, everything about American politics is operating in reverse. Increasingly, it is not the left that seen as out of touch radicals attempting to force their agenda on a compliant population. It's the right. The silent majority today is not composed of evangelical fanatics whose children monitor their porn consumption. It is composed of people who think that shit is weird.

And that's the thing that I want to close on, which is that, you know, in 2024, in a lot of ways, is 68 standing on its head because everything that comes after the election is seen as the backlash to the sort of excesses of 68. Right. But we are we are already living in the backlash. The last the backlash to the sort of excess of 68. But we are already living in the backlash. The last four years, the last eight years, Trumpism is the backlash to Ferguson. And then all of the sort of dissent and stuff, the anti-trans stuff, all of the weird groomer panic, the anti-critical race theory stuff, all of the racism, all of that stuff. That's all the backlash to 2020. And it sucks. Everyone hates it.

It's awful. And so we're, we are in a period where the backlash that sort of swept in the Republicans to power for a generation that that's going to sort of come out of the Nixon era, that's eventually going to lead to Reagan. It's entirely possible that we are about to see basically the opposite of that, where this kind of backlash politics, this kind of sort of Trumpian fascism, this very well could be, 2024 could be the shore on which that wave breaks.

We can hope. I'm hope, I don't know. I am mildly hopeful. I also, you know, and this is another thing that's important, is this convention is not gonna look anything like 628. Even if there is intense suppression of the protests, it's not going to play the same way politically as the 68 convention did.

Yeah. History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes, right? And I think there will be similarities here. But it is impossible for the way that the state interacts with protest to be the same. And for people to be as shocked by it as they were in 68, right? Like a good number of Democrats, like, you know, if you go on social media, okay, it's not a representative sample, you've seen plenty of people barking for

cops to crack the heads of kids or people of any age, like protesting against a fucking genocide. Like people don't care anymore I guess if you're clapping for bombing babies You're also gonna clap for smashing students in the face of the club like I kind of go together I guess yeah, and I mean that's I don't know I think the sort of long-range things about anti-war movements is that the actual anti-war movement almost never stops the war Right in the short run immediately it almost never stops the war, right? In the short run immediately, it almost never works. But what happened with Vietnam was in the long run, the protest in 68 did stop

the war, right? But they stopped the war not by moving sort of traditional American politics, they stopped the war by being one of the catalysts that radicalized enough of the US Army that almost by the time the war ends, something like half of it is either on strike or openly in revolt. Yeah. And that eventually is the thing that crushes it. And I think that's also a thing for this is that like, yeah, Kamala Harris, probably not going to end the genocide. Yeah.

But comma, there's good reason for this, right? We're very used to looking for immediate direct impact of our actions. And a lot of times the impact of our actions are in things in the distant future in ways that we can't see right now Yeah, and maybe that gives you hope maybe that doesn't but that's sort of the way that these anti-war things work and I don't know hopefully we'll get a fucking better result this time and We can stop the rest of Palestine from being completely Exterminated but yeah, that would be nice. That's the not hopeful part of this can stop the rest of Palestine from being completely exterminated. But yeah, that would be nice.

That's the not hopeful part of this. Yeah, I think it's not hopeful, but it's instructive, right? Like if you're out there now and you're expecting some big change, if you're attending in Chicago and you're expecting some big change, you probably won't see it. It doesn't mean that what you're doing isn't important. It doesn't mean you shouldn't keep doing it. Yeah. Yeah. So this has been a kid Athen here. The rest of the week will

be an account of what actually does happen at this convention. So stay tuned. Enjoy that and go stop genocides from happening. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask.

I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs, from the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsmen plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy.

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I'm Robert Evans. I'm here in town with Sophie Lichterman who will not be on mic for this episode but will be later this week and Garrison Davis with whom I've been out all day in the streets. We are currently recording just a few blocks away from the DNC protest, the coalition to march down on the corner on the DNC out in the street. So on the DNC. Down on the corner, out in the street. So we apologize for whatever sounds are getting picked up, but today's been very hectic. There's been protests all day that me and Robert

have been at, and that's mostly what we're gonna be talking about today. So this is day one of the DNC. We actually have not yet been inside the venue, although we will be later for the speeches. Today has basically all been protests. So at the start of the day, I went to the kind of temporary headquarters

out of like a rental space, and I think North Chicago, don't quote me on the exact chunk of town, I'm bad at directions. But the organizations called Behind Enemy Lines, and it's a local, they call themselves a militant activist group that has been kind of controversial because they have made a couple of statements about something, what was the rhyme? 1968 was...

The slogan they've been using is make it great like 68. Make it great because 1968 was a famously bloody DNC as a result of the conflict over McGovern versus Hubert Humphrey. And this is not so far very much like 68 because everyone's known who the candidates are going to be going into this thing. And the protest today, at least by the time we left, no serious violence. You know, I didn't want to talk a little bit about that group because they made some interesting statements. And this is not their march today.

The march today that we were at is specifically billed as the family friendly one. Whereas Behind Enemy Lines has made a couple of statements about like, you know, collect bruises from the Chicago police. It's the new fall fashion, that sort of deal. So they're really playing up the whole there's going to be a big conflict thing. If that happens, it'll be tomorrow because that's when their event is planned. Today was the event that everyone thought was going to be the largest march, probably will be.

It's called the March on the DNC 2024. It's put together by a coalition of a lot of local different orgs in Chicago, as well as some ones from around the country. So heading into this, when organizers were asked, they said they were expecting 30 to 40,000. I saw a video by, I think, a CNN guy where he was like, 50,000 people could show up.

That's not the numbers we've seen. I would say 2,000 to 3,000, maybe 5,000 at the most, maybe 5,000 kind of on the outside end. One of the organizers on the mic said that they had 15,000 there. I don't think that was 15,000 people. I will say there's more protesters than cops, but it is closer to parity in terms of numbers than you normally get. The Chicago police have been lining every block for several blocks around the protest.

Lines and lines of police vans, some of them filled with riot teams, some of them clearly for potential arrestees. Every time the protests moved, they started in Union Park and moved towards, what was the number of the? Park number 578. 578, sounds like a fucking half-life two. Which is the park that Chicago and the DNC

is wanting most of the protests to take place at. Protesters, at least these big coalitions, have preferred to use Union Park as it's bigger but in this very moment we just walked over from Park 578 where people are currently lined up in front of the fence. I would say it was a very controlled event it's possible something's happened since we've left or will happen later especially people try to occupy the park but from what happened while we were there there was a group of a protest safety team who were all wearing high vis vests that the entire line of march, the march itself was hemmed

in on two sides by lines of bike cops using their bikes to make a mobile wall. Inside the line of bike cops was a line of protest safety people in high vis vests who, when folks tried to confront the fence there's a fence that is essentially the same fence we had in Portland lining the outside of the DNC some groups of people tried to confront that tried to get off of the route of March and move somewhere other than back to the park that the safety team wanted and the safety team basically walled off the protest from doing anything but going back into the park. Essentially

doing like kind of what the police were doing directly next to the police, which caused some conflict and some soreness among people, but as of the time we left like nothing else had really happened. Hello, Future Gare here cutting in from the middle of the DNC where I was just suffering through the Hillary Clinton speech, and I'm here to tell you that more in fact did happen, and things actually did get a little bit more spicy, but you will hear about that a little bit later on in the episode. Anyway, back to us sitting on a random Chicago street corner. Yeah, among the 5,000 people, there's a lot of like smaller groups, you know, you will have hundreds of people from this organization,

this organization, and it's a lot of regular people who are both against the genocide in Palestine Yeah, I do not believe that either political party is going to put an effort to actually achieve that Yeah, and they you know put most of the blame For sending bombs to Israel on Biden and now Kamala and I would say that's the vast majority I did run into some people wearing like DNC Kamala. And I would say that's the vast majority. I did run into some people wearing like D&C Kamala shirts that my understanding was they were kind of here to get the vibe and yeah it was definitely a lot of hostility towards the D&C so my guess would be not a positive reaction there. A couple of different communist organizations here. Including five I've never heard of before. Yes, almost none of them, but RevCom was there

which is a fun one that's essentially a cult. PSL, a few others. PSL's there also kind of on the cult-y side of things. I guess highlights, we did meet a lot of nice people out there, a lot of fans of the show. I was happy to see that they were not with the Popovakian crew. Everyone was very nice. I hope we weren't too curt. We're just kind of exhausted and have been talking to folks all day. I was able to geolocate enemy of the podcast. Jack Pasobic, yes, yes. He was in the quote-unquote camo. He was just wearing a green shirt and a keffiyeh around his face trying to interview people

I ran up to him and yelled his name out repeatedly until he acknowledged that he was in fact Jack Bassovic Then I asked him about an event from 2017 where he showed up at a protest Undercover as an antifa with a sign that said rape Melania Buzzfeed immediately published text messages of him essentially talking to a friend about like, yeah, I think this would be a great idea. We need to get somebody in there with this fucked up sign. So I asked him about it. He didn't want to answer, but he eventually left. I think the only people who were willing to talk to him were communists who wanted to

quote long passages of political writing at him. So I don't think it was a great content day for Jack, but we'll see. Maybe this will be what causes him to blow up. We're going to do some ads, then we're going to come back and talk about some of our highlights, what we expect from the week ahead, and the great city of Chicago. And we're back. Garrison, are you aware, because we're in Chicago, that the south side of this very city is, according to many, the baddest part of town? Are you quoting a song or something?

I'm just telling you, if you go to the south side of Chicago, you need to beware of a man called Leroy Brown. Jesus, I knew it. Bad, bad Leroy, he's the baddest man in the whole damn town, Garrison. I knew it. Badder than old King Kong, he's meaner than a junkyard dog. I'm not looking for my fucking notes All right, okay Great as Robert was checking out this office for this other group planning a protest at the Israeli consulate tomorrow I got to the Union Park protest early

Was able to walk around got a whole bunch of flyers for communist magazines that I've yet I've never heard of and you don't need to seek them out either. They will walk up to you and put one in your hands. I got a whole book by Caleb Maupin, who is a LaRoucheite communist, which is like, it's like the foil Charizard communist. Like, you're really, yeah, it's beautiful stuff. And then we had like three hours of speeches

before people eventually left and marched to the DNC fence by Park 578. And although most of this is about Palestine, there also is some intersectionality with a few other things. There's a lot of- LGBTQ stuff, a lot of trans stuff. A lot of LGBTQ stuff. BLM stuff, obviously. A lot of abortion rights stuff.

Yes, a lot of abortion rights stuff. That is one thing that has become a recurring talking point that I think I'll mention something a little bit closer to the end. Yeah, because there's one of the groups of counter protesters who has kind of shown up for these people purporting to be like dims against abortion basically. One of their chants was essentially being anti-abortionist, being pro-trans, because trans people might get aborted, which was a fascinating argument. An amazing chant.

Abortion is ableist, abortion is transphobic, abortion is racist, you know, all the things. And what I'll say, so, you know, obviously you and I have both expressed, neither of us really like it when at a protest you have a group of people basically being security who wall off other people from doing stuff. What I will say the protest safety team was effective at was every time someone like the progressives against abortion or whoever would show up there were there was a one literal fascist lady who I was definitely unwell with like a cardboard sign covered in racial slurs they would just get a team to kind of wall them off

with their bodies and it kept them from becoming like media were not focused around the the folks coming in to disrupt stuff like they were at the march yesterday we were at a march on Sunday afternoon where as soon as those anti-abortion folks showed up, every camera turned towards them because there's this thought that like, oh, maybe this is where there will be a conflict. No, I think walling off groups like that makes sense. It's a very effective way to do it. I do get very hesitant and a little bit on my toes whenever they start walling off people in the crowd

who are actual participants, who are just doing something that people in high Vez vests don't like. Yes. And when you start restricting their freedom of movement, when you start walling them off and pushing them towards the police away from everyone else. It really looked like they were trying

to push a chunk of the crowd. It can get pretty fucked up. Including a person with a YPG flag that, you know, I don't know, I'm just inherently sympathetic towards. But yeah, trying to push them towards the police riot line. I did not like seeing that. And there was some talk about this leading up to the DNC. There was some leaked memo, I think, from some PSL people and a few other orgs about plans to,

if there was any, quote unquote, disruptors or whatever, to circle them off, keep them away from the march, make sure they cannot rejoin the march and push them towards the police line. And that is never great. That's never great to see. No, especially when all of your chants are like, fuck the DNC, Kamala's evil,

but like, we need to do what the police are not doing here. Like, we have to be the cops. Yeah, and you're preventing people from actually marching to the DNC. And for most of this march on Monday, it was the cops who were leading the march. Yes, literally at the head of the march. Cops were in front of everybody.

They both had all of the streets walled off. At the head it was about six to eight cops at any given time and then a couple of dozen people with cameras, media, and then it was the actual protest. But essentially the whole march is being led by police. Yes. And that's also one thing. Led and surrounded. Whenever you're chanting like whose streets, our streets, and also one thing is whenever you're chanting,

like whose streets, our streets, and all these other things, you're like, this is basically a cop led protest at this point. You're outnumbered by the cops at most points. I was walking by a Chicago PD sergeant who was on his comms and he was telling everyone on the walkie talkie system or whatever, there is quote, nothing nefarious going on, there's nothing to worry about,

everything's good. And yeah, from their perspective, that is quote, nothing nefarious going on, there's nothing to worry about, everything's good. And yeah, from their perspective, that was what most of today was like. At least until a few hours ago, when people in the actual protest organizing committee were sectioning off people that they didn't like. From what I have seen so far, you know, there's not much that would go viral,

that would be big news from this protest, certainly not much that you would say it was embarrassing to anyone. But there's also not much that would go viral that would be big news from this protest certainly not much that you would say it was embarrassing To anyone now, but there's also not much that's gonna like draw any attention If you if you're considering that the goal of activism like this I don't I don't see this as like being a needle moving March And even if you have a march with five dozen people, which is good when it's after three hours of speeches about communism That's not actually doing anything to put pressure on like the Biden administration or the Democrats to actually do something about Palestine.

There were several minutes today about getting the US out of Korea and like, if that's gonna be your issue, that's gonna be your issue. But like, if you're kind of making it about everything. It's about nothing. Yeah, it's about nothing. It was not a lot of punch to today. A ceasefire in Palestine is a very popular issue.

And important. But the more time that you're talking about and trying to recruit people for like the revolution TM and fill up your sign up sheet and have speeches about, you know, Marxism, Leninism, the immortal science, that's not going to actually help anyone in Palestine at this point. I'm not sure how effective these protests are going to be. That's always hard to say. But if you are actually trying to apply pressure

onto the Democrats, onto the party in charge of the executive branch, I think focusing on that would probably be slightly more beneficial. Hello, this is Gare cutting in again from corridor underneath the Democratic National Convention, the United Center in Chicago. Sleepy Joe Biden's about to hit the stage. but before he does, I need to give you a special

update. So, right after we recorded this little street conversation between me and Robert, a whole bunch of more things happened. So there was already some kind of inter-conflict within the march on the way to Park 578. People had different ideas on where they wanted the march to be directed to, whether that's just stopping at the park, trying to break through and go further into the actual DNC perimeter.

And eventually, we had a small group of people kind of up by the fence line that were able to breach a small section of the fence. And people started going into one of the many layered barricades at the DNC. Now, as this was happening, some of the protest marshals and organizers and stuff tried to rally the rest of the many layered barricades at the DNC. Now as this was happening, some of the protest marshals and organizers and stuff tried to rally the rest of the crowd to march back to Union Park, away from this breach

at the DNC, and others started pouring in. There was maybe about 50 to 75 people who actually broke through this line, and maybe half of them were protestors, the other half were press and media. A whole bunch of the guys going through those barricades are people looking to take photos and it was a lot of press but police did pressure people out I think they arrested maybe like three people in this whole mess

but police pushed the remaining people out of the park and closed it for safety concerns and then those people who got pushed out and then people who were kind of already were on the move met back at Union Park where the day's protests began. And almost immediately they started setting up encampments, setting up tents, doing like logistics stuff. Now police saw this happen and did not like this very much and they quickly moved in and gave a disperse order. I believe two people were arrested during this kind of second kerfuffle. Police were saying like people can stay in the park as long as you're not setting up tents, as long as you're not doing like larger logistics, you know, using the sound system, all these kinds of things. And at a certain point, I think police pushed

most people either onto the edges, onto the periphery or just out of the area. But a whole bunch of like SWAT, a whole bunch of Chicago PD just surrounded this whole area and kept a pretty tight lid on things. So I know people were planning to want to do a larger encampment tonight and Chicago PD would not let that happen. And for whatever reason, there either wasn't enough people or there wasn't enough logistics or dedication to really fight off the Chicago PD's incursion in Union Park. So now the day is wrapping up, Joe Bynes about to head on stage and that is the situation for the protests the first day of the DNC.

Back to Robert Evans sitting on a random street corner. So you know the highlight to me of today, again we met a lot of very nice fans and they all seem to be doing smart things, which I like seeing. There was an old man who had a big Palestinian flag and underneath it was a Bosnian flag. So we went up to him because I was just kind of curious. I had a feeling it had something to do with the genocide, but like I wanted to talk. And he was a survivor of Srebrenica, which was a massacre during the Yugoslav breakup. That was, I mean, just one of the worst acts of genocide

of the 20th century. We talked a bit because I'd been to Srebrenica and interviewed some survivors and stuff, and he was very moved to be here, expressed a lot of solidarity with Gaza, essentially said, like, I lived through a genocide too, so I'm going to show up and support these people, which was very moving.

It was probably the most moving part, definitely the most moving part of the day for me Among all these big like socialist communist newspaper organizations people handing out There's a lot of just people who actually really care about what's going on And this feels like to them the only thing that they can do. Yes. Especially if you're from this area,

if you're from the Midwest, you're like, what can actually we do to stop what's going on? Here they are, all of the leaders of the Democratic Party are here, you know. And that is the majority of the thousands that are gathered. Yeah. You know, I have to say, again,

not to just be shitting on people, but it's probably a tactical mistake to, prior to the event, in the days heading up to this, some of the organizers said they were expecting 30 to 40,000 people in town for protests. And you know, the crowd we got today was a solid crowd, 5,000 people or so, you know, marching, 3 to 5,000, not bad. But when you've gotten people prepped for that, then the story is going to be that like, well, less people than expected showed up, and that can be used by folks to make the case that like, well, this isn't really that popular an issue for the Democrats, why should they care as

much about it? As they would if you had gotten 50,000 people in the street. Anyway. So that was the second protest at the DNC. Technically, the first protest was yesterday, the day before the DNC actually started. And yes, both me and Robert were there. I showed up as early as usual and Robert showed up late as usual. That's right. That's right. Late and hungover.

Don't you forget hungover. Of course. I got drunk as hell on that plane. It started off with maybe like 500 people, slowly accumulated to about like a thousand. This protest was called Bodies Outside Unjust Laws. It was about Palestinian liberation as a part of reproductive justice and trying to tie these issues together. So trying to like rope in like reproductive rights feminists who are here for the DNC

into looking at Gaza as a part of the reproductive rights issue with like the deaths of you know mothers, the restriction of health care in Gaza, deaths of babies, children, separating children from families after bobbing, or evacuations, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. So initially they were all gathered in front of the Chicago Trump Tower, which unfortunately is a pretty good-looking building, at least in my opinion. There was also a few like big anti-Trump signs as there were today. There was a woman with a sign that just read Trump and JD Vance are weird. But she also had Gaza stuff. She also had Gaza pants.

And there were also some people who I think, you can tell here for the DNC, but who showed up and yelled in support, but also had a Kamala shirt, or there was one lady with fuck Trump written on her arm, and who clearly just kind of showed up in between her day to go cheer a couple of times and move on. Just like today, you know, there was there was PSL people.

Party for Socialism and Liberation, if you're curious. There was this one other socialist group who was really repping Jill Stein, saying she's... A lot of Jill Stein signs. You know, saying she's the only candidate that is against the genocide, which technically isn't true. The Libertarian Party candidate also. She's been pro several genocides this century. And she has been pro previous ones. Including the one Assad did in Syria.

And similar today, you know, there were some people who showed up to be like corkers, right? People on bikes to help section off the march from like roads or cars, which proved to be ultimately useless because police were doing all of the corking. Lots of cops. Immediately when I was walking downtown to this protest yesterday, just the sheer number of Chicago PD was just stifling. This is very different from the RNC. Almost, I would say 95% of the law enforcement we've seen have been Chicago and Illinois cops. Yes, actual local police as opposed to the RNC

where there's a majority like out of state police. Yes. Yesterday did not have tons of medics, today did. That's not unsurprising. Everyone was expecting today to be the biggest day. And it probably will turn out to be yes But like I said, yeah, I mean even yesterday at the very first one. They still they still had a thousand people They were really really tying as much as they could into the reproductive rights issue

Yeah, we saw we saw pussy hats. We saw you know, all of all that kind of stuff Yeah and one of the funniest things from yesterday and We saw some of it today too, is that with all these different communist newspapers, they were like competing. They were competing to be the ones that have like the true path to the revolution, like handing out flyers, handing out pamphlets, being like, no, this is... We were the ones that have it figured out.

And you have like seven of these groups going after the same person. Yes. I felt very good when Jack wound up stumbling into one of those guys, because I was like, okay, he is going to bore the hell out of Jack Bassobic, but he's clearly, he's also like, has enough talking points that they're just kind of gonna be running talking points at each other,

which is good, I always get worried when someone like Jack shows up, that they're gonna find either some like, nice normal person who's just not ready to be on camera or you know somebody who's especially protests like this you'll often have like an old guy who's an anti-circumcision activist just shows up to every protest and he's like kind of harmless kook and they get made fun of a lot so I'm always happy to see when an asshole shows up and gets confronted by someone who is just ready to sit there and talk for hours you know

similar to today there was a small collection, quote unquote, like progressive anti-abortion activists that showed up. They kept mostly to the side. The crowd largely ignored them. But one thing I did like is that there was people in the crowd carrying around signs about like abortion pill instructions,

like how to use one, where to get one. And that was very nice to see. And similar to today as well, there was a few DNC volunteers walking through the crowd, either because they actually do agree with these issues or just because they're curious. Who knows? I mean, obviously they're still probably more pro-Harris than most people in the crowd, but they still might nominally care about these issues. But yesterday, they got booed while walking through the crowd.

The crowd was not happy to have them, specifically the people from behind enemy lines, were giving out most of the boos. Referring to the protest tomorrow at the Israeli consulate at 7 p.m., that's Tuesday, they said that they're going to be the group that quote unquote brings the ruckus. Yeah. And that is the vibe that they have. I think that is going to be maybe one of the more like conflictual protests that we're going to see this week, tomorrow.

That's Tuesday. So yeah, we will be there on Tuesday to see what goes down there. I'm about to walk into the DNC to hear old Sleepy Joe. We're taking bets to see if he has a stroke on stage. One thing that people have been able to use a lot, that is a very real and valid issue is that just last week, the government, including the Biden-Harris administration as well as

Congress, proved a $20 billion arms deal to Israel. We know how they're using these weapons. As many meetings that Kamala's going to take about an arms embargo, at least currently, we are still sending over. We're doing the opposite. Which is what most people gathered here are concerned about. You know, it's great to see people talking about abortion, LGBTQ stuff, you know, all the other reasons

that the US is doing things that are bad. But you know, when it comes to talking to the Democrats at the DNC, right, the Democrats are pro-abortion, they are nominally pro these things. Pressuring on the Palestinian stuff is gonna be probably the biggest thing as expected in these next few days. So we'll see how that goes. nominally pro these things. Pressuring on the Palestinian stuff is going to be probably the biggest thing as expected in these next few days. So we'll see how that goes. We'll be back tomorrow and the rest of the week from the

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Get the facts. Go to realdealonfentanyl.com. This message is brought to you by the Ad Council. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about how to pronounce the vice president and maybe future president's name, which is Kamala. See? I got it, Sophie. Yeah, but you looked at me for reassurance. No, I looked at you to be like, look at me, I'm doing it.

I'm riding a bike with no training wheels. Garrison, how's Grindr going? It's okay, I mean, it's certainly better than the RNC. But it's still slow picking, because I mean. Define better. Have you run into, he lives in the south side of Chicago guy named okay all right this is this is six foot four Garrison so this is day two ladies call him tree top of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago Illinois I'm Garrison Davis we

are here with Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans that's right and I guess let's pick up right where we left off yesterday because we're recording this Tuesday morning. Yesterday we had a full day of protests. There's still some protests today that we'll get to later, but we were also able to spend a decent bit of time in the actual DNC last night. And I think me and Sophie will have certainly much to say about that. But I'm gonna throw it to Robert Evans because Robert Evans went back to protests after our dinner. And how was that? It was, you know, by the time I got back, the police had mostly knocked everything apart. There was a brief attempt to occupy the park after we left. So right after we left, there

was a scuffle over the fence and some people managed to breach it Largely due to the fact that the kind of fences that they use that they put up outside of events like this are all the same It's the same style offense They had up in Portland And if you remember the fighting over the fence in Portland part of why there was days of fighting is because it was a pretty short Section of fence they were able to have it reinforced very heavily here it was a pretty short section of fence. They were able to have it reinforced very heavily. Here, it was kind of more of a visual barrier than an actual physical barrier

because there's probably miles of cumulative fencing and they don't have it all reinforced enough. So when a crowd got close enough, it was surprisingly easy for them to push their way in. Three people, I think, got arrested at the fence breach. I've heard some folks say it was partly because press crowding in made it impossible for people to get away from the cops. Just given the way the rest of the day worked and what I've seen, I think that's pretty

credible. It was one of those things where on the ground, if you were just kind of looking at tweets, I think it would look like it had been a larger part of what happened that day than it was because it really was a larger part of what happened that day than it was, because it really was a few minutes. And then things calmed down relatively quickly. But it did have an impact on the actual DNC itself. If you're looking at the protests outside over Gaza as part of their goal being to disrupt

the DNC, they succeeded in doing that. Because once there was a breach in the perimeter, the Secret Service has, and I don't know what these are, but they certainly do have a checklist of these are the things we do if there is a breach. And one of the things that we know they did after that breach is they shut down all of the other multiple entrances for media and delegates and attendees into the event and Funneled everyone through one entrance which caused a cluster fuck a massive bottleneck I was gonna say they should they sure did Sure did mean so if we spent quite a while trying to get into the DNC after this because yes all of the entrances on

The north east and west side of the convention all got shut down Everyone was funneled into one entrance on the south side the line to get in was just Just crazy. It was so so large I would have to say again if you're looking at the goal of these movements as like causing embarrassment and disruption to the DNC because fucking up entrance to the DNC fuck stuff up for all of the Fucking up entrance to the DNC fuck stuff up for all of the influencers and media people trying to get in I saw more Anger over how fucked up getting in last night was than anything that had happened Yeah, like in terms of like performative social media anger than anything that had actually happened in the streets

So I would have to call that a pretty good win for the protest I overheard numerous DNC goers wearing their best merch complaining that it was the protesters fault. Yeah. That the lines were so long. Well, I mean, people were also complaining about just like the level of like the DNC's like organization. It's terrible. Which is always the case. And how it was laid out because it was a mix. It was because of this, you know, triggered by actions via protesters, but also because of how the DNC was handling everything. It was a compounding nightmare for many people.

And I mean, in terms of other disruptions, we heard from a woman who's staying at our same hotel that she left at 4 p.m. to get to the DNC. She left on one of the DNC shuttles. And it took her four hours to get in. Now part of what happened was that if she left on the DNC shuttle at around four, she probably got to the area around 445. Just because you know they're slow, it's traffic. No no no no no no. And what happened next is that around 450 is when the fence got breached. And then everyone getting off the shuttles could not. What happened?

They did this mini security lockdown. Everyone was just told they have to stay in the shuttle. She had to stay sitting in the shuttle for an extra 45 minutes. She could not exit because they were not letting people get off the shuttles as the fence was breached. So it's stuff like that that creates these compounding fractures. And this is probably, if something similar were to happen tonight, and the protests

as far as I know are not planned to be in the same kind of locations as they were, so I don't think that's likely, I don't think it would have a severe response because a big part of what was going on Monday is that both the president and vice president were in the same building. So everything that normally exists in terms of security at an event like this was taken up to the... The suitcase that

ends the world was in the venue, right? So everything was on and just escalated to the nth degree, which is why never take the fucking buses. It's longer than one of my rules. Yeah. My take is she left at 4 PM. She. She didn't get into about 8 p.m. Not worth it. Yeah, I would rather die that's a rather die sounds like a Episode of black mirror. Uh-huh Terrible, so I got back to the protest a little later My understanding sounds like between seven and nine arrests over the course of the day There were it had been like three at the fence breach. There were three or four more

when people tried to briefly set up an encampment that really did not last very long. Now Chicago PD was very quick to take that down. And it was the, I had been kind of wondering, and I still think we might see some mace tonight, but it didn't, despite like the kind of Chicago 68 tear gas stories that people keep talking about, that did not seem likely at all during the day. No. Yeah.

And I've heard from multiple people on the ground that it seems like Chicago PD is very aware of the optics. Yes. And you know, despite being like the police, they are trying to not immediately bring out the truncheons on everyone's heads Now they do have the truncheons on they've all got trying They've got they have the they have the worn-ass old wooden ones They do have them but they are they're trying to be as hands-off physically as they can Of course like relying on the amount of like internal peace policing from these like you know big or mass groups But the other thing that they have going for them is when they do have to get go hands-on

There are so many of them that they do not need to use crowd control what crowd control weapons are things police use when they are Outnumbered that's partly why Portland police are so nuts with it is because there's almost no police in Portland Like it is literally the least policed city per capita in the country pretty much. Whereas you know Chicago, I think the protesters outnumbered the police yesterday, but not by a lot. Like it was not an overwhelming amount. There is a few differences between you know this and the RNC obviously and one of the main ones is that most of the cops we have seen have been local. They have been Chicago PD, there's been some

Illinois State troopers, of course there's like Secret Service, Homeland Security Investigations, FBI, but mostly it is just Chicago PD even around the perimeter. CPD and Illinois State. Illinois State, yeah. Based on how, because I had been I had been reading updates for the last couple of weeks on how security plans were proceeding for the DNC, I think that part of what we've seen, a large part was influenced by the guy that police murdered in Milwaukee, because it was a couple of days after the RNC that I started seeing the first articles about how there would not be out-of-state police doing patrolling around the city of Chicago. So it does seem like thankfully somebody over here

recognized that like, oh, if we have a bunch of fucking Ohio cops wandering around downtown Chicago, like they're going to murder somebody. Like they're going to freak out because these hayseed hicks have heard nothing in their entire lives as much as how dangerous Chicago is. They're just gonna start blasting. And I guess I'm just glad that hopefully nobody gets murdered by the cops this week.

Well, do you know what we can get murdered by? Yes, Garrison. Wow. Yes. Yes indeed. The services that support this podcast. That's right. If you enjoy them too much, you know, too much of a good thing is bad.

Mm-hmm. That's what I've heard. Yeah, I mean, that's really why I'm not sure if you should- No one will overdose on products. Meet with bad, bad Leroy Brown because he's got a custom continental. He's got an El Dorado too. Here's the ads. Sophie, I'm a trendsetter.

Nobody was talking about Bad Bad Leroy Brown except for the one guy who very famously talked about bad bad Leroy Brown. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here. So after getting through that that clusterfuck of a security entrance me and Sophie did eventually make it inside the DNC which we will talk about in a sec But as me and Robert were were parading around the protests on Monday Sophie Lichterman was infiltrating Dempalooza. Which is the wrong way, it should be Demapalooza. It should be Demapalooza, but it's not. It's Dempalooza.

Sophie, what is- This is the angriest I've been since CorgiCon. Let me just give you some visuals here. First of all, you're absolutely correct. The name is embarrassing. And that's generally how I felt about Dempalooza. What is Dempalooza? Dempalooza is like a...

First off, only the Gen X people are going to remember Lollapalooza. No, Chappellrone just performed at Lollapalooza. That doesn't sound right. Do you know, do you, I don't, I don't... Some kind of horse? Great. Keep going, keep going, Sophie. Jesus Christ.

Anyways, it was like half trade show, half panels by people talking about things that they think that the DNC crowd will care about. Leaning in too hard on the memes, like there was a booth. Was it the Coconut Vibes booth? It was the- I almost thought that was a Bored Apes thing at first. God, I wish. They just, I was like, why are we acknowledging it? It's fine. It's fine. There was, there was like cool coconut vibes here booth and right behind it was a seated area with like probably like a

hundred chairs and there were two people giving speeches on something and there were two people in the crowd. Many such cases. Many such cases and you know there was a lot of cardboard cutouts with VP Harris's face on it it's but there was like a VP Harris as Wonder Woman Section and then there was a section with shirts that they're all having fun Just so that people have an under understanding of like the level of embarrassing there was a One booth while I was waiting in the very unorganized line to get into the panels area of Dempalooza

That had shirts for sale for $28 Featuring one that said beware of the uptidy whities What does that mean? Uptie white people I'm guessing. I believe I believe so but also Sure why $28 banned dictionaries at your own pearl. Oh God, okay. Make stupid embarrassing again. You get the picture. We get it, all right.

You get the picture. Sylvie, what panels did you attend at Dempalooza? The first panel I went to was a panel that was like how to talk to your relatives about project 2025. A great Thanksgiving dinner talk. Yeah, yeah. And it was very unorganized,

and so I was 30 minutes late getting into it because not a single volunteer had been trained on how to get people into panels and they had a circle around the building several times until I found a very nice security guard who actually worked for the building that was like, you go that way, Thank you, sir. And I walk into this panel, there are seats for maybe 300 people. There is one man at the front of the stage and about 15 people listening. And I sat there for about five minutes and got up because it was basically, the sum of it was, if you're your relatives that you disagree with are trying to tell you something, don't yell at

them. Listen to them first. Which is not terrible advice. Look, if your relatives that you disagree with are trying to tell you something don't yell at them listen to them first Which is not terrible look if your relatives want to start talking politics at the dinner table this year This is gonna be terrible handgun drop it on the table and then just sit down put your legs up Stare at them just like the point say that the exact I learned everything about negotiations from the Portland Police Union say a word. I learned everything about negotiations from the Portland Police Union. This is interesting though, Sophie, because every night at the DNC, they're going to be reading from Project 2025 on the main stage. Yesterday, they were reading about all of the plans within that document to basically make Trump a de facto dictator. Tonight, they're going to be reading on sections about how Project 2025 will affect the economy and your

pocketbook. So they have this plan to every night actually talk about and read from the actual document. You know, framing this as like this is basically like Trump's plan for once he gets into office or this is like Republicans plan for Trump once he gets into office. And you know, just this type of like scare-mongering fear rhetoric around what Trump would do was semi successful in 2020. And I think they're trying to you know use this Similarly now I also think it's smart because There's two big threats here. One of them is does the election, you know go badly for Trump Which is an open question and then the other is if it does

He's not going to concede do the Republicans have shit together to actually steal the election, to do another Brooks Brothers riot, to refuse certification, to try and kick up enough uncertainty that they can take it to the Supreme Court for a steal? And the only way, ultimately, if it's a narrow enough election that the Republicans go for that, the only real way to fight back is to get an overwhelming number of people out and angry in the streets, like enough that it frightens, you know, the Supreme Court and everyone else who would be required to actually put in, like, sweat equity to carry off that steel.

And one of the ways you do that is by making the stakes really clear. So I think this is a good idea and responsible that they're focusing on Project 2025 as much as they are. And probably what's necessary to, I'm hoping that the dims don't fold if that happens. I guess we'll fucking see, you know? It's not 2000. So, what was the second panel you went to at Dempalooza? So, I walked around and looked into a bunch

of different rooms to see if panels had a big crowd or not and it was definitely or not and then I went to the Voices for Justice Democrats for Palestinian Human Rights panel that was Packed it sounded like the most popular panel of the day packed no seats available standing room. And just the energy was very respectful. Everyone in there was earnestly excited that this was happening,

but also it was mentioned many times that this was a step, but obviously not the step that they wanted. And it was filled with media, but also just people that were there for Dempalooza wanting to hear what people had to say. It was a very diverse group of people. And the panel featured, you know, several activists, former members of the House of Representatives. Someone from the Uncommitted Committee, I think it's called? Yes, I believe they were part of organizing this panel. Although this panel was a

official campaign approved panel which was brought up many times by each person who spoke as a thing that it was a first of its kind approved campaign panel in regards to the people of Palestine. And it's part of the dance the DNC has been trying to do where they, it is such a popular issue, like giving a shit about the genocide, wanting a ceasefire, that they can't not signal to it, but also there's absolutely no willingness at the top to actually hold Israel accountable. So they hold this event, they approve it, and it becomes the most popular one at the top to actually hold Israel accountable. So they like, they hold this event, they approve it, and it becomes the most popular one at the DNC.

Biden makes a very mild line in support of, basically saying, there was a line during a speech last night that like, the protestors outside of a point, right, which is not taking meaningful action, but it is like, it gets one of the largest reactions from the crowd that night. I mean, you guys were in the room, but at least from it gets one of the largest reactions from the crowd that night I mean you guys were in the room, but at least from where I was watching at the bar it sounded like a pretty sizable response and

that's I guess the The juggling act that they're still trying to do is like can we continue not actually committing on anything while keeping some of these people? Happy and the uncommitted people are basically like this, the protest group that's holding their votes, you know, hostage almost, to say like, if you want us to vote for you, Harris, you have to signal something, whether that be like an arms embargo,

a real effort towards getting a ceasefire done, trying to lobby for change by using their vote as a bargaining chip. Yeah, and a couple interesting things to note before I play an audio clip for the listeners here. It took almost the entire panel for them to mention Joe Biden by name. I think that only happened once. It was mostly just referring to the party itself. At one point, a panel member thanked VP Harris and she's trying. We need to hold her accountable but give her a chance. Which

was the general energy from the entire group was like she is not Joe Biden, we're hoping for better, she's made an inch of a step, we need more, but we want to give her a chance to do to do that. And I mean, it's a really different vibe from a lot of the protests, where you have people who are kind of more committed political radicals, as opposed to the uncommitted folks. The overwhelming vibe is, we would really like to get on board this, but you need to do something.

Right. The clip that I'm about to play for the listeners here comes from a doctor, Dr. Tanya Haj Hasan, who is a pediatric intensive care doctor who works with the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders. And she has spent the last decade as a medical trainer and helping people and organizations in Gaza and the West Bank. And she spoke for 10 minutes and I thought it was pretty moving.

It was a large room and I was able to get very clear audio which kind of says a lot about the crowd. And she kind of just spoke about her experience. And yeah, I guess I'll just play that clip for everyone now. When the Uncommitted Movement asked me to be here, I texted every doctor and surgeon that I knew who had been to Gaza in the last 10 months and asked them if they wanted to join me here in Chicago and the overwhelming response actually every single person said yes let me see if I can switch out of my shift and many of them are actually here in Chicago right now because we cannot unsee what we witnessed and cause every single one of us many of us have worked in many wars before and we have never seen anything so egregious so atrocious and that is why many of us swapped out shifts and flown a very long way to speak to politicians when we're not politicians ourselves.

As doctors, we're trained to protect and preserve life. This Israeli military campaign that's targeting life and everything needed to sustain it has rendered that impossible. And that is why so many of us have taken to other means of trying to protect life. For the past ten months, we have witnessed civilian massacre after civilian massacre, school massacres, internally displaced people with children. The flower massacre. Massacres of people trying to collect water. Massacres of people collecting aid at aid sites.

Massacre after civilian massacre. Entire families exterminated in one single bomb. Humanitarians, healthcare workers killed killed and journalists killed in record numbers, pediatric amputations, amputations in children that are heartbreaking records, over 17,000 children who have lost one or both parents since October in Gaza. We have treated so many children who have lost their entire family that it is a term has been coined to describe these children. You've probably heard it, Unde Chal Don't Survive the Family, WCNSF. This is a term that has been coined since October to describe this very frequent phenomenon that I personally witnessed more times than I can count while I was there. For children, I have held the hand of children who are taking their last gasps

because their entire family was killed in the same attack and couldn't be there holding their hand and comforting them and could not marry them thereafter. For the children who I treated who were discharged, they were and survived. They face a Russian let of a hundred ways that they will likely and potentially die when they leave the hospital due to the circumstances incompatible with life that have been architecture by this military assault. Direct bombing, starvation, dehydration, disease, alarming reports of the first cases of polio in Gaza right now. Polio is a potentially deadly disease that causes paralysis, including paralysis of the muscles needed to breathe. That has been eradicated for decades in that region. There's been a polio vaccination campaign

that essentially has eradicated the disease from the majority of the world, and now we're seeing cases emerging in a area of the world that cannot, that has a healthcare system that has been completely and entirely annihilated. I mentioned these wounded children with no surviving family. I'm gonna give you two quick stories

just so that you can humanize what I mean when I say this, because I know it's really hard to hear these numbers and think about individuals and what this means to them. I received a young boy to the emergency department during one of the mass casualties who had half of his face and neck blown off. Luckily, the organs that are vited for breathing and blood supplied to the brain were preserved.

They were visible, but preserved. And he was talking to us. He couldn't see himself, so we didn't know what he looked like at that point in time. He kept asking for his sister. His sister was in the bed talking to us. He couldn't see himself, so he didn't know what he looked like at that point in time. He kept asking for his sister. His sister was in the bed next to him. The majority of her body was burned beyond recognition. He didn't recognize that the girl in the bed next to him was his sister.

His entire family, parents and the rest of the siblings, were killed in the same attack. That boy survived. And the next day, I went to see him, a very young plastic surgeon, one of the few remaining plastic surgeons in Gaza, because both the others have either been killed or have fled, understandably, had removed part of his chest and created a graft

to cover those violent organs in the neck. He was lying in his bed and mumbling, it was so difficult to talk, and he kept saying, I got really close to him, and he said, I wish I had died too. And I said, what? And he said, I think my entire family has gone to heaven. Everybody, it's not my entire family,

he said, his exact words were something effective. Everybody I love is now in heaven. I don't wanna be here anymore. That is one of so many stories. Well, uh. Yep. That's, yeah. There's some ads.

Some ads, yeah. ["Sophie and I Are Back"] All right, we are back. We're gonna close this episode by talking about me and Sophie's experiences in the actual DNC once we finally got past that ridiculous security gate. So we got in and the biggest thing that we realized first was just how disorganized this was at least compared to the RNC. Now this is due to a number of factors, the protests being one. There's simply just more people at the DNC. Like way, way more people.

Yeah, I definitely feel like one of the right wing things to do right now is to be like, there was nobody there. Absolutely not. It was packed. It was packed. Way more crowded than Monday at the RNC. It was much harder to find a place to sit inside the arena. Honestly, hard to find a place to comfortably stand

inside the arena. No, yeah. So unbelievably packed. Garrison and I got inside of the actual seating area, trying to find a place to sit briefly as VP Harris came to greet the crowd, and it was roaring. It was what I would describe as electric.

Electric. People really like to see her. She played it very casual to kind of open up the convention. She didn't even have a podium. She was just doing basically a standup set walking around with a mic. She came out to be like, hey, girl. Yeah, exactly. And she was opening things up very informally.

People seemed to really like that and then you know A lot of a lot of the main speakers started started to kind of roll out now Me and Sophie were able to somehow get special tickets to go on the actual like a delegate floor area So that's something we never were able to do during the RNC Which was this was a massive error on our part. This is why I just sat at the bar a which was, this was a massive error on our part. This is why I just sat at the bar. Because it is a nightmare down there. So much pushing, shoving, no place to go. You really get to taste democracy there.

As soon as we stepped on the floor, AOC walked on stage, everything went crazy. It was a nightmare. She called for a ceasefire at Gaza, which apparently, I did not see any of the speeches before her, but apparently that was the first time that was done that night. And the crowd loved it. She gave a great speech.

She gave a great speech. Talking about working people. I think it's also important because of just how well she was received and like the kind of the spot that she had at the convention. Like she is, she used to be kind of be to be an outsider to the Democrat party, right? And at this point, she is fully within the fold of the Democrat machine, and for better or worse, probably a mix of both in some regards.

There's a lot of talk that in eight or 12 years she's gonna be running, and yeah. Yeah, she is preparing for a long political career. And people seem to like her. And the person that spoke immediately after AOC, while me and Sophie were still being shuffled around the show floor. I don't think shuffled is the way to even describe it.

You guys have seen the Jordan Peele movie. Sorry, what's the one with the sky monster? Nope. Nope, yeah. It's like being inside. It's being caught inside the nose. It's like being caught inside. Like you're being churned with a bunch of other people. Yeah, my hair was. Tra, yeah. It's like being inside. It's being caught inside the no. It's like being caught inside, like you're being churned with a bunch of other people.

Yeah, my hair was caught in like a CNN camera. Uh huh. Like, you could not breathe. It was like a mosh pit, but not fun. No, we were caught inside the jean jacket. And we were, we were. We were being sloshed around. There's three aisles, and we were in the center aisle.

Jesus Christ. Directly, like parallel to where the person who would be speaking comes up to talk. And then Hillary Clinton took the stage and unfortunately the crowd loved it. They went feral for Hillary Clinton. Baffling. Just baffling. I looked back at Garrison and we both love each other like death It's like when you're in a foreign country and they eat some sort they like lutefisk or something some sort of like weird rotten Fish dish that they just love over there or okay

Or when they eat like American garbage fast food and also love it you're like, oh no, this is terrible I don't know what I was expecting, but I just didn't think the DNC still loved Hillary the way they do, but they went feral. She was like very popular, I mean, she won the primaries. She's got a base of support, she just is, the people who hate her hate her a lot, which skews things. Sure. She gave a very big, mad speech.

Loss of arm-waving, go off. A lot of people disagree about that, Garrison. People got angry at me for saying she seems angry. She was a little big bad. I would say she gave a standard Hillary Clinton speech. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a pretty standard. Yeah, she's just not very likable or charismatic. But she did, I do have a great picture of when Scarlet and I Survived the floor we were up in a press area and of Hillary Clinton with both her hands in the air and the crowd Eating it up again a choice. Yeah navigating this this whole place was an area We're never gonna go in the on the delegate floor again. Just a nightmare Thank you being shuffled around corridors. It's it's terrible. There was a few other, you know, a few other speakers

Uh this year I think did didn't know case Beach You know a lot of stuff about abortion a lot of videos on the big Jumbo Tron About about cop prosecutor Kamala taking down the felon. Yeah Trump as expected They had they had a whole- Do we want to play a clip of that, by the way? Do you have the Law and Order clip, Sophie? Garrison, do I have the Law and Order clip? Of course I have the Law and Order clip!

We can play like 20 seconds of the Law and Order clip. Yes, there was several different videos played throughout the night, but I would say the most memorable one was the law and order themed clip featuring big bad Kamala as the prosecutor and criminal Donald Trump as the villain of the story The New York sex pest criminal of the week the criminal justice system the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups The police who investigate crime, and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders.

This is the story of Donald Trump. His entire life, Trump has believed he's above the law. That no one would ever dare hold him accountable. For the first time in history, we have a convicted felon running for president. And to take on this case, we need a president who has spent her life prosecuting perpetrators like Donald Trump. God damn it. It was the choice and it was night one.

Yeah, we'll see. We'll see how that plays. So Jill Biden introduced, well, first introduced her daughter and then they introduced Joe Biden. I think one interesting thing is that throughout the night I started seeing more green Jill signs Which I thought was really confusing like who snuck in Jill Stein green party signs into this and then I realized no Jill Biden their signs for Jill Biden Which I don't know if they chose green signs to be intentionally like trying like reclaim green for Jill Biden instead of Jill Stein I don't know. I found it to be odd.

She led the crowd in like, we love Joe chants. And immediately, as soon as everyone started chanting, like we love Joe, thank you Joe, it started to feel like we're kind of just sending him out to pasture. And that was the main vibe of the Joe Biden speech. He was very emotional. We're putting on his favorite Spotify.

Yeah, he was very emotional, came out crying after his daughter introduced him. And I would say there was like a good 10 minute standing ovation for him. Maybe five, but it was long. I was being generous, it's his last big thing. I don't care. Yeah, it's a really nice farm.

There's a great view of the mountains from it. Beautiful upstate. Tall grass, run through in the summer, all day long he's gonna be just running. We had a direct view of the mountains from it beautiful all grassed run through in the summer all day long He's gonna be just running. We had a direct view of the teleprompter. He did a great job reading that teleprompter He went off script, you know a handful of times but his actual performance was pretty good Yeah, they have to Zadar off especially for coming out around like 11 p.m. Yeah, he did he did pretty good It was a straw

It was a strong performance for Joe one of the first things he mentioned was Charlottesville as he talked about before in his campaign for being with the reason why that he ran in 2020 you know talking about how you know lots of the rhetoric was identical from Nazis and anti-semitic vile from 1930s he had he had a line describing kind of the alt-right movement as as old ghosts in new garments I thought that was well written by whatever speechwriter at the White House was putting that one together. Yeah. You know, talking about how Trump's being aligned

with this new version of the KKK. They just forgot to wear their hoods. Talking about, you know, very fine people on both sides. Hate has no safe harbor in America. All that kind of stuff. And you know, this rhetoric was a lot more common back in like, you know, 2019, you know, right after Charlottesville and during like the height of like the alt-right movement. We don't hear this as much anymore.

But I think it is important to remember that this was not that long ago. He then kind of talked about mostly the past. He wasn't talking about kind of the future. He was talking about what the Biden administration has been able to do the past four years and in trying to tie in, you know, Kamala to all of the good things that have happened. You know, talking about four years of progress, you know, making waves with COVID, with the economy, lots of new jobs, inflation is down, at least now. He gave his greatest, his greatest hits. Shrinking the racial wealth gap, you know, health insurance, stocks are good. We finally beat big pharma, I'm sure, whatever.

A lot of stuff about tying him to the unions, you know, the people have called him the most the most pro-union president in history and he's like I'm proud to I'm proud to take on that moniker Chanting Union Joe Union Joe said he was a you know first president to walk the thick of line So, you know, they were definitely focusing a lot of that union messaging. It is interesting considering that one union leader spoke at the RNC Yeah back when the nomination for the Democrats speeches. Yes. Yes. Yes Very brief talk about carbon emissions and pollution, but similarly very little climate change stuff almost Yeah, it's which is which has been common throughout this whole campaign this this this this whole election It's been very little mention of climate change stuff

You you really get a feeling of what a gift it has been for the Democratic Party that the Republicans have given them all this fascism stuff to talk about rather than actually needing to make any kind of serious statements about what they're going to do vis-a-vis climate change. Part of the other kind of achievements that he was, you know, lauding was saying that they finally beat the NRA passing this gun safety bill and next they're gonna ban assault weapons and pass universal background checks. Which gun safety bill? Okay, it was one of the ones that didn't really do anything. Yeah, correct. Okay, yes.

Correct. There was a brief section about the border saying that there's now fewer border crossings than when Trump left office saying that, you know, Trump tried to kill our border security bill and he said the main thing that makes us different from the Republicans is that we won't demonize immigrants. We are going to- The main thing that makes us different from the Republicans is that we won't demonize immigrants. We are going to... They're going to still do really, really bad border violence and really, really bad border security policies. Absolutely shut down people from asylum from being able to flee bad situations. But they're not going to be spending the whole convention every single day talking non-stop about how immigrants are coming to rape your family.

And like, yeah, that is true. You don't talk about them the same way, but some of your actual policies are not all that different from what most Republicans in office want. You know, they're not calling for massive deportations at the same rate, but still, that border security bill was very similar to ones that Trump was proposing. And the only reason that Trump killed it was so that Biden wouldn't be able to take credit, which Biden did also say during the speech. Order fear mongering. I mean, it's just been a titanic victory for the right.

And talk about abortion, talk about how if Harris is president, she'll be able to sign in something that puts into law the right to abortion, saying that, quote, MAGA found out the power of women in 2022, saying that they're going to find out again in 2024, which he's not wrong about. Yeah, sure. That is repealing Roe v. Wade did. I'm excited. Did swing election results in 2022, saying that they're going to find out again in 2024, which he's not wrong about, deadly. That is repealing Roe v. Wade did. Did swing election results in 2022. January 2025, abortion's mandatory.

Finally. And, yeah, he's, you know, talking about, quote, we got to put a prosecutor in the Oval Office instead of a convicted felon, saying that Harris is going to be 47. And whenever he made a comment like that, talking about how Harris is going to be 47. Whenever he made a comment like that, talking about how Harris is going to be the next president, the whole crowd started breaking down chants saying, thank you, Joe, thank you, Joe. Which is just really funny,

because they are just thanking him for stepping down for the race. Everybody wanted a chance to remember what 2008 was like, and they got it, and they could not be more grateful. And just interesting to note that it took him quite a while to really start talking about Kamala, but whenever the large chance of thank you Joe would start he'd be like no no no thank you Kamala. One of the last things that Joe talked about was you briefly mentioning Ukraine and then talking about Gaza and this is kind of one of the last things in his speech before he started his closing remarks.

You know, he talked about the need to get the hostages to safety and to quote unquote end the war in Gaza, saying that they're working around the clock to surge humanitarian aid into Gaza and to get a lasting ceasefire. He then gave a small off-the-cuff mention to the DNC protests. And this part wasn't on the teleprompter He said quote those protesters out in the street to have a point a lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides And he made similar comments to this last March saying that protesters who were disrupting a rally of his Had he quote-unquote have a point so he has used this line before but this was kind of the only Acknowledgement of the protests that I saw today at from any of the DNC speeches

It is interesting that this that this was not scripted This was just something that he said because as mentioned before we had a view of the teleprompter And at the same time that this happened someone on the far side of the crowd unfurled a banner I think Robert has some more info on that. Yeah There were a couple of delegates who managed to sneak in a banner Do you know if they were delegates? Well at least one of them was okay a banner that said stop arming Israel They unfurled it and got a very strong and I get a reaction from the people around them some of whom were Hitting them or at least shoving them. I think it kind of, you could look at the video and use either term. They were definitely

like moving, like pushing signs up. They were definitely aggressively making contact with them with these like big wooden signs that people had. These thank you Joe signs. Yeah. And then set up a chant of thank you Joe to kind of like drown them out as the people filming in the venue cut the lights basically, or downed the lights in that area so that it would be less visible. Eventually they got the banner away from them. But it was one of those, it shows you kind of the hollowness

of there's enough of a need that even Biden had to make a positive reference to the protesters. They see it as enough of a potential threat to being able to get the votes they need, that they have to signpost to it. But a banner, and this is not a radical banner, stop arming Israel is not a radical stance to have. No, it's not calling an end to the state of Israel.

It wasn't an Intifada revolution banner, right? It was a literally just stop sending guns to the genocide team. Can we stop sending $20 billion of bombs to Israel that's being used to bomb families? People were angry enough that I don't want to overstate the level of physical violence, but I don't want to understate it. They were physically aggressive over this and had this small group of people surrounded. And seeing that is a reminder that I am not in line with the people on the left who repeatedly call the Dems fascist because fascism means something.

No, it's a real political thing. But the Democrats have plenty of authoritarians and that's what that is, is that is authoritarian thinking and it can and will, if not checked, lead to a lot uglier shit than what we saw last night. So I did not like seeing that. It is a reminder that even as nice as the vibe shift has been, and I'm not gonna try to take enjoyment from that away from people, we are still in a real pickle as a country, are acceptance of authoritarian aims and tactics. And especially, you know, sending $20 billion in bombs.

And sending $20 billion in bombs. Just send the... Take all the Israel weapons and send them to the Ukrainians. That's my stance. I'm sure Rudy Giuliani will love that. So, yeah, I mean, you said that the crowd had a big reaction to some of the Palestine stuff, and at least from inside the convention, certainly calls for ceasefire did, that was big. When Biden made his little comment acknowledging the protests, the whole room kind of went silent. Like everyone was kind of surprised, like it was like

a chill went over the air, like no one knew how to take it. There wasn't like massive cheers, there wasn't booze either, but like it was weird because like arguably Biden gave a more positive comment referring to the protests than most of the regular delegates and attendees. Most of the attendees who were standing around in the waiting line were much more negative and dismissive. And I think Biden's comment kind of took the wind out of the air, at least inside the convention arena. But that was basically the end of it. He gave closing remarks, Kamala went onto stage, they hugged, they did their little thing and then me and Sophie went out of the convention as fast as we could. And we found this little corridor exit because we didn't want to mess with the escalators

or the elevators because that's always a nightmare. So we found this nice little staircase and I turned to the left walking down the stairs and I saw two very large men in riot gear with two assault weapons and I said I guess we're not going that way and I turned around and walked the other direction. Honestly funniest moment of the day. We were like like ten feet away from these guys. Ten feet away! Some of the most heavily armed men I've ever seen. I think we stumbled across,

because I looked at the signs later, I think we stumbled across the security gate for the presidential motorcade. Yeah. So that's where we almost accidentally went. Yeah, no, those are guys who have spent every year of the last 20 years of their lives just planning to kill as many people

No, they second someone takes them off the leash. They wouldn't shoot a twink on site. They do not care They don't give a fuck who they shoot the instant They have a chance so me and Sophie left as soon as we could and went back to the hotel and immediately went to sleep And that was the first night at the DNC. You had drinks with me, Garrison. I did not We shared a special moment. I'm trying to create a compelling narrative for the podcast. Well, I thought it was compelling narrative that we had a nice drink I said hi to you and then I went okay. Bye. Yeah, I wasn't interested in you because you left Yeah, sorry. You abandoned me. I abandoned you. Uh-huh. I'm so sorry But that anyway, that was the first night at the DNC. That was the first round of speeches I believe tonight we're gonna split up

So he's gonna go and go over there and me and Robert are gonna be back in the streets. Yeah I will report if anything of interest happens. It is the I believe Bill Clinton Obama night. It's once again the year is 2024 is the Bill Clinton Jesus Christ. It's once again, the year is 2024. It's the Bill Clinton Obama night. It would be pretty funny if Bill Clinton got played on the stage by bad Leroy Brown. All right. This is the It Could Happen Here.

This is It Could Happen Here recording from Chicago, Illinois. We'll see you at the Linn Walk. All right. Jesus fuck. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask.

I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs, from the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsmen plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. And you can laugh. Honestly, I think you have to. Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat.

It's a survival strategy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the Weird Little Guys Trying to Destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, I'm Lauren Lapkus, voice of Teresa and host of Haunting. In this series, we'll be bringing you different totally true ghost stories each week straight from the person who experienced it first hand.

I'm excited to share that you can now get access to all new episodes of Haunting, 100% ad free, and one week early with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So don't wait, head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today. Substance Use Disorder and addiction is so isolating. And so as a black woman in recovery, hope must be loud. It grows louder when you ask for help and you're vulnerable.

It is the thread that lets you know that no matter what happens, you will be okay. When we learn the power of hope, recovery is possible. Find out how at StartWithHope.com. Brought to you by the National Council for Mental Well-being, Shatterproof, and the Ad Council. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Little John didn't mention anything about sweat dripping off his balls. He sure did not.

And that's the greatest act of, you know, amongst all of the genocide denial, it takes a lot of cowardice to really stand up in this crowd, but Little John refusing to talk about sweat dripping down his balls in the middle of the DNC was a horrible mistake. I'm sorry, I didn't know he was gonna start that way. I knew I was gonna start that way.

Garrison is physically in pain. Garrison, do you know the song we're talking about? No. What? Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined with my bosses, Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.

Very old. Very old. Very old, remember when Lil Jon was slightly, he was never really that transgressive. Lil Jon's always been pretty family friendly, I guess. Somebody replied to the video I posted of Lil Jon saying maybe the best Lil. Uh-huh.

And you know. Ah! I have a soft spot in my heart for Lil Wayne. Not that he was good, but because he's really funny. Like, Mrs. Officer, that's a fun song. That's a fun story about Lil Wayne pretending he had sex with a police officer. The Democratic National Convention

continues inside Chicago, Illinois. Lil Wayne not yet present, but maybe tonight. People say Swift might show up soon She will she she had a couple shows and she could potentially get here by tomorrow. Okay, that's great That's great. I was actually talking about Jonathan Swift author of a modest proposal, but yeah, but in my heart I really don't think she's coming. No, why would she why would what does she gain from that? Yeah I don't think she's coming. No, why would she? Why would she? What does she gain from that?

Yeah. So Tuesday, we spent the day split up mostly with me and Robert going to a protest and Sophie entering the United Center to watch the Lib Utopia unveil, complete with an appearance from Lil John, I believe is what he's referred to as. Yes, that is correct.

Okay, thank you. I'm just checking my sources here. As someone currently wearing a mesh shirt, from Lil Jon, I believe is what he's referred to as. Yes, that is correct. Okay, thank you. Yes. Just checking my sources here. As someone currently wearing a mesh shirt, he is in your line of descendants. Like this is one of your sainted ancestors. I don't know how I feel about that.

And we will get to the Lil Jon antics, specifically with the state of Georgia, which made quite a show. Later on in the episode, we will be talking about that. But first, we will be talking about what me and Robert spent a good, I don't know, four hours yesterday doing. I was out for closer to eight, because I went out earlier to look at some stuff I went to.

There was a pro-Israel Free the Hostages event that I went to and looked around briefly. Not a whole lot to say about it other than some art that I don't fully know how to think about yet. They had a massive, one of the young women that was abducted by Hamas that very famously had like blood on her gray sweatpants. They had just like a massive two-story tall pair of gray sweatpants covered in blood, but it wasn't really clear until you like got up close what it was trying to be. So it was just kind of like, it was odd visuals for the event, I'll say that,

but mostly pretty tame. There was maybe 30 or 40 people there. And that was about two, three blocks down from the planned site of the protest that you and I went to, which was the Ascensure Tower, which is apparently, it's like a mall on the inside and a metro station, and also several floors, many floors of office space. So I'm guessing that the Israeli Consulate is a couple of small offices in this big building. Yeah, so there was a purchase plan for later this evening. As me and Sophie were going to get lunch, I saw like-

Sophie and I. I saw a whole- They both just looked at me deciding who I was gonna givefie and I. I saw a whole bunch... They both just looked at me deciding who I was going to give a dirty look to. I know. It was very... You were the United Kingdom and me correcting Garrison's grammar was the

German army marching into Belgium. I saw a whole bunch of police vans driving through downtown Chicago on the way to the Israeli Consulate and we showed up a few hours later for the protest planned that evening. Like usual, we tried to arrive early. And there was a few kind of characters bumping around the area that a lot of media was just fascinated by.

Yeah. The start of it was there was the same, there had been a Nazi lady out at the protest the day before as well. She has like bright purplish hair carried, and on the first day, just a cardboard sign covered in racial slurs, loved shouting the N-word. Today she had a friend, they unveiled a sign, people confronted them.

It was like a white genocide, white replacement, great replacement type sign with a URL to a telegram channel, I believe. Yeah, you don't really need to be on that channel. And she had a friend? Yeah, I think she had a friend today. She had someone else with her, yeah. That is shocking news.

Yeah, I mean, they usually have at least one, right? Maybe. And then, I mean, kind of, at one point, sort of while we were all waiting around, because it was initially just a shitload of press, some looky-loos from the local area, and a bunch of cops. A bunch of private security too. A lot of private security, mostly for the media.

There's a fun game of spot the concealed handgun, because none of these guys are very good at concealing their fucking handguns. But at one point, I'm standing and talking to another media, and I see this massive circle of cameras fill up around, and so I'm wondering, okay, maybe something's happened. I get over there, and I didn't even think to stop myself from using my outside voice.

I just shouted as soon as I got close, oh fuck, it's the MyPillow guy. Which is the least news anything could possibly be. But for some reason, there was maybe 40 cameras and reporters just huddled around this this guy trying to get whatever picture or whatever Letting him talk just yeah a couple of protesters kept engaging him about Gaza Which I just don't think that there's anything to be gained from engaging the my pillow guy with the exception of Garrison the way You chose to engage the my pillow guy

I think there's really only one way to handle this. Well, there's maybe two ways. You can just completely ignore him, which is probably the best tactic. That's what I did. Because there's no reason to engage with this. There's no reason to give him what he wants. The other option is just to completely baffle him. Just be really confusing. So I went up and I didn't even ask a question.

I just said- You said Mike first, which I left so funny I just want the listeners to know that after a 14 hour day yesterday I get I get back to the hotel and garrison and robert have had Several drinks and garrison is like did you see my video? Did you see my video? And and what and what was that video? We'll we'll play the audio here Mike skibbidy b, skibbidybiden. Skibbidybiden.

Skibbidybiden. Skibbidybiden. So no, I was able to get Mike. We're pretty close. That's how you guys talk now. To say skibbidybiden. That's the only way to handle these guys. You're not even like annoying them. It's just like, just like, just really, like,

you're not even like annoying them, you're just kind of baffling. Because all he wants is attention to say his little piece, and trying to attract whatever media attention, and you just gotta kind of fuck with them. And it's kind of a good sign that he did that, because this is not, if you think about where he was in like 2017, 2018, him showing up alone, no visible security escort, to just kind of stand around before a protest and bullshit, is like,

that's a man whose life has fallen apart. Like he has nothing left. No, everything he was saying, I'm able to hear him say at 4 a.m. on Fox News. Yeah. And that was pretty much the little pre-show circus. And people started to trickle into the area slowly. People in cafes, protesters, medics started to slowly,

slowly enter this little block radius. And then very, very suddenly, from the opposite side of where everyone else was stationed at, we saw a group of maybe 50 march in all at the same time. Yeah. And this was kind of the start of the main protest. And I would say at that point there were maybe 50 protesters scattered around within the clumps of media,

most of whom ran over and joined that group. So it was probably around a hundred or so, maybe as many as 150. And it probably grew to about like 200 over the course of the next few hours, although they started to kind of bleed numbers as 150. narration to kind of fill in the gaps. So to clarify, the audio you're about to hear was recorded over the course of like two and a half hours. We've cut this down for efficiency and clarity. So some of the sections you're about to hear, you know, may have happened a minute or two apart, but they're just being mushed together to kind of help the action move along a little bit faster, not including, you know, the sections of the protest where there's ten minutes of nothing

happening. Here's a first-hand look at what happened during the protest at the Israeli consulate. All right, it's just past seven. The Behind Enemy Lines Israeli Consulate protest basically just started. A whole bunch of people in some form of block showed up in front of the building, started marching up the street very quickly. A three or four or five layered line of Chicago PD came to block Clinton Street so the march could not advance. They're now retreating back towards the building and they might try to march the other direction. I'm going to be on the move here trying to take notes as this progresses. A center tower is kind of a tricky spot for this sort of protest, although it does

house the Israeli consulate. From the outside, there's no obvious indicators that this building is linked to the Israeli government. And it's about two miles away from the DNC, so there's going to be very little impact on DNC attendees all the way over here in the West Loop area of Chicago. Chicago PD is set up across the other street as well, blocking both ways in, essentially kettling this entire protest. There's a loudspeaker.

People are talking in front of the building. The purple-haired wig lady from before has moved her Nazi banner closer to this core of protesters right in front of the entrance of the building housing the Israeli consulate. Alright, some of the protesters just announced that they have a couple of speakers that are going to talk in front of the Israeli consulate building as people are now sandwiched in between two streets right in front of the entrance. Speeches discussed the genocide in Gaza and the US arms deals sending weapons and bombs

to Israel as part of continuing US imperialism. As the speeches carried on, more and more police began to arrive. All right, it is 7 20 p.m. About nine or so white vans just showed up with tons of Chicago PD and riot gear, helmets, gas masks, you know, thicker sleeves, not just the blue button-ups that the regular cops wear. All right, we're going to run into a line of police. People have banners, bring the war home, shut down the DNC for Gaza, Palestine flags, as they are marching towards a massive line of riot cops. There's too much media in the way.

And a clash has started. Pushing up against lines. Police pulling apart the signs and banners. Sounds familiar, I bet to anyone who was at 2020. The first clash lasted about a minute as protesters tried to march forwards into the street, and police pushed them back. I was off to the side, but the sheer amount of cameras and media in the middle of this scuffle prevented either side from gaining or losing much ground. All right, there was kind of a little bit of a back and forth.

The protest line got pushed back slightly, but still in the middle of Clinton Street. Protesters telling the press to get out of the way, as many press are in between. As press moved slowly out of the way, police were able to successfully push the protest back. Chicago PD is redirecting some of their push towards the south now. Looks like some of the protesters are trying to move onto the sidewalk to get out of this massive massive sandwich of police and there's maybe three or four cops trying to move onto the sidewalk to get out of this massive sandwich of police. And there's maybe three or four cops trying to prevent them from moving on the sidewalk

here. We'll see if they get past. Police have tackled some people. Police are going in for a lot of arrests. It's very combative. Police with batons out attacking people, hitting them on the ground, tackling them. Police preventing all forwards movement on the sidewalk as well, not just the street. People are trying to get out

and police are really trying to trap them. Go, go, go, go, move back! Move back, move back, move back! Move back! Move back! Move back! Move back! Move back! Move back! Move back! Move back!

Move back! Move back! Move back! Move back! Move back! Move back! Move back! Move back!

Move back! Move back! Move back! Move back! Move back! Move back! Move back! Move back! Move back! Move back! Move back! Police are telling people to move back into nothing. They have us trapped by this building. Eventually, police realized that they cannot push all 50 people into a flat wall and eased off,

directing people back in front of the consulate. Police are pushing us into a very tiny corner. A small line of police is separating two crowds, mostly on the sidewalk. Alright, they're pushing us back towards the building. Action now paused for a few minutes, as both sides figured out their next move. Protesters chanted for the release of detained comrades. Let them go! Let them go! Let them go! Let them go! All right, some of the crowd is trying to regroup

as police continue to push people off of the sidewalk and back into the street, I guess. The crowd has kind of been split now into four sections. Police keeping them separate, not letting them reconvene. The section in front of the building. There's a section on the corner. There's a section behind the police line. And there's a section close to where people tried to march

that's now been cut off from the rest of the crowd. So we have these kind of four groups. A smaller group is reforming in the street in front of the building. This is kind of the section that got trapped by the building as the rest of the march tried to move forward. And some of the people from the side have linked up with them as well. But still mostly kind of four sections separated up by police. People chanting to get back in the street.

We have little squads or AGs linking up with their mates again, linking arms, holding hands, kind of regrouping right now. Chicago PD is kind of doing the same. They're reforming their line, going back more into the middle of the street. If they did get any detainments or arrests, probably sorting those out right now as they decide what to do next. During this lull period, I was able to hear a decent amount of police comms chatter coming from their walkie talkies, as the police decided on their next move. Alright, I just heard on police comms that they're gonna be asking for media to leave.

Interesting. They are calling for transport bans, so... Yeah, yeah. If they're gonna start doing arrests, they might try to get media to leave first, then really move in. Yeah. That's what I guess.

Contact Air Force One, sir. It sounds like to me on the comms, they're calling out specific people to do targeted arrests. On the comms, they're calling out specific outfits, what people are wearing, what people are holding to move in and do targeted arrests on On the comms they're calling out specific outfits, what people are wearing, what people are holding to move in and do targeted arrests on the crowd. Some of the descriptions are very general, like black hoodie, red hat, that kind of stuff. I really did not want to get a face full of mace, so as soon as I saw police carrying

mace cans, I, perhaps a bit prematurely, decided to don my full face gas mask. Which I then took off like 10 minutes later as it became clear that we weren't in immediate danger of a macing. Well, I don't think I'm gonna see Barack Obama today. There's been enough of a pause that the anticipation keeps growing, because everyone knows what's about to happen. We're just waiting for it to happen. Alright, the Palestine protesters that are in front of the building are now moving towards

the Israeli counter protesters on the other side. As things started to heat back up, some folks in the crowd opted to exit the area via a small evac route on the northwest corner of the street. Considering the talk of targeted arrests on the police scanner, police may have been eyeing up certain people in the crowd who then got the hint about what's about to go down next. Do you see that group of people? That's a dozen people in block that just bounced? Yeah.

No, I think they could spot that they were about to get targeted for arrests. Yep. I think so. Because they were being followed up by some of the sergeants. Because I honestly can't name any law breaking other than quote unquote shoving with a cow. Sure, but I mean, you know, they can get you on something. The protest did not stay still for too long and a little less than an hour since the last big confrontation, the crowd once again attempted to march.

Alright, it is nearly 820. The crowd that remained in front of the Israeli consulate building is now moving up again towards Clinton Street to re-engage the confrontation that happened nearly an hour ago. Look, there's less cameras in between the two factions, but not no cameras. The crowd of protesters is still approaching. And they're turning. They are turning. They turned down Clinton Street. This is the movement they tried to make before, but police prevented them from doing so.

And now they're so far able to exit. The section of the protest that was still facing down the riot line split up into two smaller groups and then made this same movement down the sidewalk away from the police. The people that were traveling down the sidewalk in Clinton have now reformed on Morrow Street and they are now marching. The police are now caught behind the protesters in the march.

But sure enough, police quickly arrived to contain the mobile protest. All right, bike cops have beat most of the crowd to the intersection, but they're still slowly arriving. The intersection up here is a T shape so only two directions to go. Police are gonna try to get them to take a right it looks like. Yep. All right more police catching up. As I'm sure you can hear bike cops coming in from both sides. Well, this is quite the pickle. Unfortunately, because of the T-shape of this intersection, this is now a little bit of a tighter pinch. They can still get out via one path on the sidewalk, but

they might prefer a confrontation with some of these police. We'll see. The march paused at this T-shaped intersection for a few minutes as they decided their next move. Alright, the crowd is standing in front of this very thin line of bike cops. The police line's not very thick because they had to move, move kind of impromptu to adjust to the movements of the crowd. Small groups of the protest keep peeling off. They're slowly bleeding numbers.

People chanting, let us through, as the police yell to move back. Police have the remaining crowd in a pretty tight squeeze at the moment. Smaller groups keep peeling off, but now the remaining march is moving forward as the bike cops slowly back up. Looks like most of the crowd has been moving onto the sidewalk to move down the street. They don't really have many more moves to make. There's just a saturation of police in this area

that the cops can adapt to any movement this shrinking crowd makes. Police are piling into the sidewalk. Police are making arrests. Police are doing targeted arrests. They're grabbing people on the sidewalk. Numbers of arrests are being made. There's at least five from where I'm standing.

Police ordering media out of the way. Protesters are now moving back on the sidewalk, backtracking away from the police. The remaining crowd attempted to move away from the police who were making arrests on the sidewalk, but the only way left to move was back where they just came from. People are linking up with their AGs, arm in arm, trying to move through this very, very tricky environment right now. There's so much everywhere we go. I see a new a new battalion of cops People really just have nowhere to go there's just police everywhere we're just at this point moving in circles

But not like the regulars March circles just on the sidewalk went back and forth backtracking looping around They're trying to find somewhere just to get out of this area. Mostly out of options on where to go, the protest entered a small patio terrace on the corner of the street. Protesters are now getting into the terrace of this building at 525 West Monroe. That's probably not going to end great. At this point, police have the remaining much smaller crowd, maybe 50, squeezed in in this little building terrace corner. They are not letting any protesters leave.

A shoving match has started. Police are moving in, and they're tackling, pushing people on the ground. It's almost 9pm. Police have one arrest now. They just dragged someone out by their hair from the crowd that is currently just completely kettled. For the first time tonight, they're providing no evacuation routes for protesters. They are trapped on this street corner, completely surrounded, not letting anyone leave.

Eventually, a small hole opened up, letting a few protesters leave this kettled patio. Robert was able to exit with this group, but many people were not able to make it through. And this little patio was where a number of arrests were able to take place, as others slowly dispersed throughout the West Loop neighborhood of Chicago. According to NBC, the police superintendent Larry Sneeling, which is kind of a great name for a cop, praised his officers for quote-unquote, showing restraint when no one else did, saying that they, quote, did an excellent job responding to violence and vandalism. He made a similar comment on Wednesday, saying that the protest, quote, showed up with the intention of committing acts of violence and vandalism, unquote.

Now, there was no vandalism that was actually committed during this protest. That did not happen. I'm not sure how the superintendent was able to infer the intention of this protest exactly, as no vandalism took place. And the only violence that happened was when police started pushing people who were trying to march forwards in the street. Wow, Garrison. That was a gripping story that we're going to talk about after these services. Services? Products.

Okay, products and services. Yeah, well maybe maybe we can't know it's impossible to say We're back So I don't know. I guess we should probably just kind of give some final thoughts on how we felt about this protest I guess we should probably just kind of give some final thoughts on how we felt about this protest. My overwhelming impression, and I really am not saying this to try to be mean, is that the crowd came with a lot of rhetoric about, this is the protest that matters, we are going to shut down the DNC, we are going to throw our bodies upon the machinery of empire. And then after the first

couple of hand-to-hand clashes with the police, which were mostly just kind of shoving, people just wanted to get home. They wanted to leave. And most of the night was us following people, attempting to get home and disperse and not being allowed to by the police. Every time they would do a big push in where they're all shouting move in unison, they're telling you to go back, they're telling you to do this or you'll get arrested and there's always, you're always surrounded on every side by cops

and sometimes by gaggles of media, but like it was impossible to comply. Like I can't say that I saw any law breaking really, aside from assuming the cops called an unlawful assembly, which I did not hear. I don't know how you would have heard in most of the protests, but assuming they did, I guess that's the law breaking.

But yeah, there was no like property damage. There was no, there was no no real fighting activity. You know, people tried to march and police prevented them with their bodies. And you know, there's a confrontation that ensues like at that point where the two groups meet. But besides that, it was people trying to march and the cops prevented them from doing so and it was a lot

I got stuck at one point with a group of 20 or so people a handful of protesters couple of media and Then maybe a dozen or more like I think they were locals I guess it's possible they were tourists but people who had just seen the march going down the street and Thought that they might follow along and watch for a little. And then the cops moved in so fast, we all got walled off in the courtyard of a hotel that didn't actually have street access, but it wasn't clear that it didn't. And the police repeatedly said they were going to arrest all of us.

I had like a discussion with one about my credentials because he was like, those are press credential. Eventually they got a cop who could read, but another journalist got arrested. And I think there were at least four arrested. You mean at least four journalists were arrested? At least four journalists were arrested, yeah. Because after I got out,

they let most of the people in our kettle out, but they pulled one guy with a helmet that said press on it out of the kettle. I think his name was Josh Pacheco. I believe it was Josh that I was filming. Josh was definitely arrested and he is going to be raising money because his camera was broken.

They tossed his camera's lens first onto the ground and did significant damage. If you wanna find Josh's info online at JP underscore OTG, you can find his information. I'm sure he'll be doing a fundraiser at some point. And obviously there were many more protesters arrested. The actual final number is kind of up in the air. Policers are saying that 22 people at least were arrested and NLG is

saying it's closer to around 70. NLG being the National Lawyers Guild, they show up at protests to protect people's rights primarily in the event of arrest. Yeah. So there's kind of some confusion here on how many people were actually arrested. I'll try to get confirmations and I'll add that in later tonight. I'll also look for a bail fund to donate as well, because it is always unfortunate when journalists are arrested, but it's equally as unfortunate when people who are protesting, especially for a cause like this, get arrested as well.

This is, I think, something that it's worth stating. Especially since, again, I can't say anything anyone did to precipitate arrest. It's not even like they were closing down streets because the police had closed down every street they were on before they showed up. I think the police very clearly were under orders to keep things peaceful as long as possible largely because they didn't want the DNC and the city government didn't want the embarrassment of anything really ugly. So there were no weapons used, there was no mace used.

I didn't even really see the sticks used much. No, they were mostly used to push. There's very little in terms of overhand hitting. But they didn't need any of that stuff because there was no point at which they had less than a two to one numerical advantage, usually more like three or four. And the people that were organizing this protest in the days prior were announcing part of their intention was to specifically get beat up by police.

And beat up badly and have this generate news coverage, have this spotlight their organization as well. Yeah, invoking Chicago 1968. And police largely denied them that option. And many of the participants also opted to not continue an hours long physical confrontation with police and instead opted to try to move around them, try to evade them, instead of trying to push through police lines.

There was a few points where the police lines that were blocking the street was very thin after people started to move around this kind of area around the consulate building. And then, you know, other times the police lines were very thick. But consistently people opted to not continue a long physical engagement with police. Yeah. It was a discretion is the better part of valor kind of night. And I think that's the point at which the police decided we are going to arrest people. There was a degree to which it felt like they were just kind of like trying out tactics. A lot of what they were doing was splitting up the crowd, then doing targeted arrests

and kind of separating, calving off chunks of it. I don't know, the whole thing I kind of couldn't stop myself from being drawn back to the whole time is like, what is the actual utility of this, really? Because it didn't get attention, not much. There's some news coverage and stuff, but it's not a Chicago 68 moment. I don't think this is going to move any needle for anybody. And obviously that's the goal, right, is to have some kind of an impact. I mean, everyone was saying, like the stated goal at all of these protests is shut down the DNC. And the only time that

kind of happened was at the less radical protest, policed protest yesterday, right? Largely kind of by accident. I don't know. Like that, I'm not trying to be like down on anyone. It just is one of those, when you're seeing the sheer weight of police and the the numbers of protesters being generated is a hundred or two hundred, it just feels like you're asking people to get fucked up and damage their lives in a situation in which that's unlikely to actually lead to any of the things they want to see. Hey this is Gare cutting in again. The exact number of arrests is still a little bit unclear, but we have a clearer idea than

what we did a few hours ago. The official number, as of Wednesday evening, is that 56 people were arrested. I'm going to quote from the AP, quote, 30 of the people detained by police were issued citations for disorderly conduct, according to Chicago police. One person was arrested on a felony charge of resisting police, while nine were charged with misdemeanors including disorderly conduct, resisting officers, battery, assault, and criminal damage to property, police said, unquote.

For the record, neither myself nor Robert witnessed any criminal damage to property. I guess to kind of conclude, a protest that's going to actually like move the needle or change anything has to overwhelm like the capacity of the state system to deal with it. It has to be something that the state is not prepared. We saw this in 2020, right? Like just over, I'm just talking about Portland, just like overall, the George Floyd uprising was beyond what the state was prepared to handle

for at least a sizable chunk, especially of the early days. It like overwhelmed the capacity of the resources the state had to respond adequately. The state, at least everything I've seen so far at the DNC has been perfectly prepared for everything that people brought to bear. And that's really the summary I've seen so far at the DNC has been perfectly prepared for everything that people brought to bear. That's really the summary I've got. We're going to go on a quick break and then be back to hear from Sophie about the Obama

Festival inside the Democratic National Convention. All right. We are back. And as this protest was happening in this area around like, I think it's called the West Loop, Sophie was inside the DNC. And there was also people similar to the first day of the DNC who snuck in like banners into the DNC and unfurled them like pro-Palestine, disarming Israel banners. I believe the banner from last night just read, Free Palestine. And Sophie, what was it like in there exactly? Was it easier to get into than the day previous?

Well, it was more, it was, it was, it was, is what I'll say. It wasn't as organized as the RNC, but it was better than the day prior That's good. Win is a win at this point. But yeah, the energy was electric as I heard multiple people say Throughout the night in the unassigned press area that I was in it It felt like at least from watching online, it gave really big like 2008 energy. Yeah, yeah. And obviously, you know, Michelle Obama, Barack Obama are both speaking. So that kind of carries with it a little bit.

But even just like the general vibe just felt very 2008 and like that style of like 2008 optimism. Yeah, yeah, I would agree with that. I've been asked a lot like what the energy is compared to the RNC and like the RNC was more like a WWE event and this was more like a You know B level pop star concert sure where everyone was very excited to be there Where I only knew a couple of the songs sure That was that that was the general vibe, but the the main speech section of the event

started off with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. And I watched his speech. It was not very good. He came out and was what some would describe as dancing on stage. He was questionable. His speech was very like robotic. Yeah.

He was not good. Well, he's the head of the dimIMM crypto caucus. So like, he is part robot. People were not super into him. He was whatever. But then Bernie Sanders came up and I was actually surprised that the crowd was as into him as they were. But not super into him. No, no, no. Oh, don't get me wrong. Nothing like the Obamas later in the night. Nothing even like AOC, it seems.

No, they definitely loved AOC a lot, a lot more than Bernie. I enjoyed his speech. Yeah, he gave like one of the more like economically sound speeches talking about actual issues facing working people. Correct. I would say, you know, a lot of the other journalists around me were talking during that time. There was not they were not really paying attention to him, which was interesting to note. It was the same speech that he's been giving

since 2016, essentially. I feel like Bernie Sanders- Unfortunately, the economic situation in the States has not changed all that much. I feel like Bernie Sanders has been giving the same speech his entire career. Sure, yeah, and the same stuff he was calling for back then with the 1% and the billionaire class and healthcare

and all these things that are still real issues. And in some ways, I feel like they were more talked about back in like, you know, 2017. And the fact that they aren't as talked about now is maybe, you know, to some degree, like a failing. But no, he gave the speech that he was expected to make. And yeah, he called for an end to the his words, terrific war in Gaza and called for a ceasefire. One of the few this entire week that we've heard actually say that, AOC said it yesterday. Well, and AOC's specific line was crediting Harris for working around the clock to make a ceasefire deal.

Yeah. It was specifically like the phrasing that AOC used. Yeah. I don't buy that super well. No. Well, I'm not afraid to admit is that because I was at the protest, I had the intention of just watching all the speeches in my hotel afterwards, and I got up to my room, I turned on CNN, they were replaying the whole night,

and after Bernie's speech, I completely fell asleep. Uh-huh. And then I woke up at 8 a.m., CNN was still on my television. That is so cursed. Oh man. And I turned it off and I went back to sleep. Gareth, you had some nightmares on spooling in your brain. That is so cursed. Oh man. And I turned it off and I went back to sleep. Gareth, you had some nightmares on spooling in your brain.

That did permanent damage. I don't know what was being subjected to my sleeping body. You're never recovering from this. After Bertie, you know, I'd say the only other person until we get to the second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, and then the Obamas later that night, was the governor of Illinois, Pritzker. Pritzker.

He just was very, very well received, obviously by the crowd. Yeah, he's one of the Democrat favorite men. One of their favorite boys. He was early on a favorite for the VP slot. Yeah. He's very good at attacking Trump in his speeches. He said, Trump is only rich in one thing,

stupidity, and the crowd went feral. Yeah, he was definitely like the most, like a mean out of many of the speech-givers. I would say though like- Last night was the roasting night. Last night was the roasting night. Okay, okay. For sure.

Obama made a dick joke. Obama made a dick joke. We'll get to that. But yeah, also just like visually, they have like those light up things that you have at concerts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do before I get into taking this back into time to 2008

Talk a little bit about the roll call sure sure and this is where they formally like ceremonially nominate Harris and walls to be the president and vice presidential nominees, correct and Let's just say it was a little bit different Then the the the RNC at the RNC you have speaker Johnson Just telling the delegates that we need to keep order and there's a Proper way to do things and then you had people from each state come up and make speeches like this Since 1670 where the revolutionary war was won Where in 2016 Donald Trump won his first primary victory ever, ushering in the Trump

era of American history. The great state of South Carolina proud to cast all 50 of its votes for President, Donald J. Trump. And on the flip side at the DNC, and I had several friends that were watching on TV say it was translating very well on TV It was it was a little bit more chaotic in person and certain states didn't match the same energy But each state had had a song there was a whole playlist thing and that is now going around and the energy was of a I would say Teen Choice Awards Kamala is brat. would say, Teen Choice Awards. Kamala is brat. It was a Teen Choice Awards vibe with Garrison, the state of very cool, Sophie.

I will say the state of Oregon did not. Well, no, that's because Oregon's allergic to fun. Oregon and Wisconsin, boy howdy, did they not bring the good vibes. Well, that's because all you can do in Wisconsin is drink and all in Oregon you can do is smoke weed. So there you go. After the roll call, they cut to VP Harris and Governor Tim Walz streaming live from Milwaukee. The Pfizer forum where we all suffered through last month. Yes, that was where the RNC was held last month to be like, look at us, Donald. We're able to fill both venues

at the same time. We are so hip and cool And of course the crowd lost their minds ate it up. They love her Honestly pretty good burn on it's it's not bad. It was spicy. I like it's not a bad move This is this was you're getting kind of a glimpse ever since like the Republicans are weird stuff. They've been Realizing that's actually really useful to be kind of mean in politics. For so long, this party's been linked to, when they go low, we go high. We're gonna make a compromise.

We're gonna reach across the aisle. Yeah, I mean, last night it was not, they go low, we go high. It was definitely, they go low, we also go low. And that was interesting to observe because the crowd loved it. It plays very well. It plays very well.

Before the Obamas, we got a speech from the second gentleman, which is very fun to say, Cabell Harris's husband, Doug Emhoff. Doug Emhoff. Doug, I like the, let's try that again. You can't not yawn and say his name. That's the right way to refer to Dugya Moth. They intro'd him with a video from his son and it was very TV movie of the week, heartwarming.

And then he came out on stage and introduced his dad and they were talking, la la la. And the crowd was the loudest it had been that night. And I was like, wow. They love families. But I was like, wow, the crowd is so loud. And then like 10 minutes later, Michelle Obama came out and I was like, the crowd was very quiet for Doug Emhoff in comparison. She is by far the most popular Democrat in the world.

There is an Obama derangement syndrome. It ignites something in millennials. And makes them really love the Obama makes them really love the Obamas. They just lose their minds. Lose their minds. Doug's speech primarily focused on painting a picture of his wife as a family woman and talking about how great she is with their kids.

He has two kids from his first marriage and they call her Mamala. But she's not a real mom, you know. Robert. Robert. Look, I've been listening to a lot of Matt. This is a real scandal. They're not her born children, you know. You can't adopt kids.

You gotta stop listening to Matt Walsh podcasts when you're doing your work at Robert. You gotta stop. I do love that the right has entirely chosen the line of attack on Kamala to be that like she's a fake mom She's a fake mom. She raised Kamala No, cuz we're quoting Matt Walsh. Oh, okay That how he says that's absolutely by the way, Matt Walsh was like in a disguise

They're all in disguise walking around the DNC doing something that doesn't matter. Yes, Matt Walsh showed up in his, like, what is a woman, liberal disguise with the little ponytails. Cowardly, we didn't show up in disguise at the RNC. I showed up, I showed up kind of, well, my disguise just being a regular black suit, which I also wear regularly all the time. I'm pretty sure Walsh was trying to get some extra clips

for his new, like, How Racism Isn't Real documentary that they're playing ads for in theaters in front of, like, queer and trans movies, like, specifically to, like, How Racism Isn't Real documentary that they're playing ads for in theaters in front of like queer and trans movies, like specifically to like fuck with people. So I'm pretty sure they're here collecting some kind of footage for that because he had a little lav mic attached to his lapel. So he's doing some kind of hijinks.

But yeah, it's interesting to me how much of the attacks on Kamala right now are focused on Her family not being a real family. It strikes me is kind of a sign of desperation because I'm not saying it get any traction It's the same as like the Tim Wall stuff where it's like nothing's sticking that they're trying right now And I think they've just gotten so far into their own fever swamps that they have completely forgotten how to connect with a hit Which is is an interesting place for the Republicans to be because that's all they have. Yeah. Doug read the teleprompter.

It's fun being able to see the teleprompter because you can see where they have bolded words or underlined words or capitalized words. Any bold or capitalized word, he really went for it. I personally thought that was funny to observe. But the crowd liked him and I was like, wow, they really like Doug Emhoff, wow. And then I was like, no, that's not who they actually like because then Michelle Obama came out

and the crowd standing ovations. I can't even tell you. It was louder than like, I've seen Beyonce at concerts. Same exact amount of loudness. But yeah, it was just very 2008, very 2012. Her speech was incredible. What did she actually talk about? Nothing, but it was incredible is what I'm saying. She just basically talked about how important it is to do things. Without saying anything, she was able to resonate with every single person in the crowd. Every single person in the crowd was just enamored. Well, it's been so many bad months in a row of news and just getting constantly beat down in every news cycle and war and genocide overseas.

And a lot of people, as soon as Biden stepped down, it was like a rubber band breaking. And everyone just went from what this was supposed to not happen as a convention. There were serious efforts by the DNC when Biden was still the candidate, that to like, we don't even need to do a real convention. Because like, what is the benefit of to do a real convention. I know.

Because like, what is the benefit of sticking him in front of people for longer? And they broke a pinata full of party energy. And that's, that's what this has all been inside. And honestly, not a lot of energy outside in the streets, you know, energy from the people who were there, but like, I think there would have been much larger crowds if Biden had stayed. I 100% agree with you. You know, Michelle Obama brought back, you know, one of the key things from 2008, hope. She said, hope is making a comeback and the crowd lost it.

Yeah, I think that's really part of what made last night have so much of that 2008 energy beyond, you know, like all of like the pop songs, beyond like the that 2008 energy beyond you know like all of like all like the pop songs beyond like the Obamas it's like this this messaging of like there's actually there's actually like a good future to look towards like hope you know that's as long as we defeat Donald Trump sure hope is available was the main theme of the night and then she introduced President Obama he came out hammed it up, told his little jokes. He was so excited.

You could tell he was so excited to be able to tell his material to that large of a crowd. He was very excited to be up there. We got, yes, we can chance. Then later, yes, she can chance. At one point, the crowd started chanting, thank you, Joe, as they do when Joe Biden was referenced. And he directly said that the torch has been passed. There we go. And that is generally the summary of the night. Libtopia, as I'm calling the DNC, was very excited. Yeah that sounds thrilling. It's really making me optimistic about the

future. Yeah I mean I am more optimistic of the future. Yeah, I mean, I am more optimistic of the future than I was, but also what I do foresee from this is that we are heading into a future, assuming the Dems win, especially if they win by a sizable margin where they get meaner to everyone. The thing they learned from Trump is you should call people names and be sure, and that'll get turned on the left

because the left will- Yes, as it already has. Yes, as it already has. Yeah, as it already has, but also the left is going to continue not having much of an impact on the broader situation until people have any sort of ability to actually get folks out and have a clear plan for something to do that the system cannot easily, easily contain and withstand. Little marches and demonstrations, not only is the police prepared for them, but the Democratic Party, I think, is increasingly prepared for how you isolate and deflect attention from that sort of thing. A lot of what we've seen on the floor at the DNC with the, yeah, we'll have Bernie come up

and he'll talk about a ceasefire. We'll have AOC have her ceasefire. Like Joe will say that the protesters have a point. You should listen to them. Now you're not going to, he's not gonna draw any other attention. If he were to like come down and attack or the protesters for whatever bad piece of messaging or something

happened outside, that actually does draw some attention. You know, like the DIMMs have not just been smart in what they've signaled, but in how they've made sure that that really hasn't become part of the story of the DNC. And heading into this, that was a huge fear a lot of people had and a huge expectation a lot of people had. It was part of the planning that a lot of the protests that came in with, that we are going to disrupt and damage this kind of coronation process in order to make it very clear that the Democratic Party has not made any meaningful movement on Gaza. And I think what we've seen here

is the start of a replicable strategy that unless there's an alteration in how people are organizing is going to allow the Dems to continue to sideline radical voices pushing for things that matter. Yeah, and I think one trend that we're going to see continuing, especially if someone like Kamala wins, I'm starting to see a growing kind of reclamation of a liberal patriotism. Yes We're USA signs last night and USA chance And I think this will be something I'll probably talk a little bit more tomorrow or the next day I'm after like Kamala's like big speech and If they do win, I think this I think there actually is a decent bit of like 2008 energy in like yes People are excited. There's the quote-unquote vibe shift But things didn't go great after Obama was elected famously like everything just kind of yeah

Like the hope was mostly unfounded like a lot of war crimes There's a lot of work and it's not that much good stuff. Yeah, the the ACA Mattered there are some things that got better after it But the whole fight to get there was so dispiriting. And I think that kind of broke Obama, the actual like interested in pushing radical change. And then the Republicans absolutely swept midterms to such a catastrophic extent.

And I foresee Kamala getting stuck in the same thing that Obama did in terms of like, it is actually very hard to make any substantive progress that helps people. I don't know that she's going to have to deal with a Republican party that is capable of doing what the Republicans did during like the Tea Party. That's just, that's a very different Republican party

than the one that exists now. The one that exists now has been lobotomized by Trump. And will he, he's going going if he's alive, he's going to run in 2028. Yeah. But this this kind of this growing reclamation of like patriotism, we've already seen it with how like, you know, the NFL has gone woke all these things that have kind of been more affiliated with like, you know, conservatism or like, you know, like traditional Americana is slowly getting swept up more with like the liberal majority and you know those types of things that have kind of been gate-kept from liberals for

a while especially especially that kind of style of patriotism and this isn't this isn't necessarily a good thing that's not what I'm saying I'm just saying that this is gonna be a trend that I think is gonna be increasing and it will also lead to I think a bit more open hostility from liberals towards people that are more progressive towards people more on the left, especially protesters, especially protesters who are not just doing protests that are big parades and marches. And we've already seen that here with a decent bit of conflict between, you know, more radical attendees and the big coalitions with their safety teams.

We've seen a lot of fighting over, you know, who is more justified, what's more valid, what should you be allowed to do at a protest like this? And those debates are going to continue. I think we're going to see more pressure on that front, even from liberals as well. And that's kind of the big trends that I'm seeing right now as we're about halfway through the DNC. Yeah. Well, I'm going to finally go to the DNC tonight, so that'll be fun. I'll show you around. Yeah, you can show me around. We're gonna meet daddy walls I'll take my my anti PTSD meds

Overdose on those meds. You can take me to the hospital. It's gonna be a nice night Sophie The good news is there's two more days of this All right, that's news. I've heard in a while. I'm turning off this recording. I'm gonna go leap out of the window Yeah, all right. Bye. Bye. ["Sweet Homework"] Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters.

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Go to realdealonfentanyl.com. This message is brought to you by the Ad Council. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast being recorded in Garrison's hotel room, which is 30% the shopping bags that they got from the Nazi clothing store. You can't say that. You cannot say that. Well, look, they used to be the Nazi clothing store.

Now they just make suits, right, buddy? Why are you trying to cancel our goal work? It's a nice blazer. That white blazer you had on last night looks good. It is a good blazer. It's a good look. She's a good blazer. Anyway, we're back.

We're still in Chicago. We are all just exhausted. I feel like death is coming. I am missing the unhurried, relaxed pace of war zone journalism. Full nights of sleep, long rides and humvees. Even the RNC felt a little bit more manageable. Yeah. I'll tell you what it is. They were so unbelievably scheduled at the RNC where like you knew nobody was going to be speaking past 10 PM.

It was done. By 10 PM, we were safely back in our very, very bad hotel. And the actual physical setup of the event was more, for one thing, it's smaller. There's more people here. So that makes- Definitely more people. But it was also kind of, I think, better laid out for walking and stuff.

I agree. Everything is very spread out here. The entrances here to it especially take a lot longer to get into. Now, I think that some of that's not even on the DNC. It's just the fact that the DNC has the president and vice president at it. And so it's going to have more security.

But yeah, it is just fucking exhausting. And I guess probably the main reason why Garrison and I are so tired is every day has been many thousands of steps of walking around Chicago with different protests. So we'll be talking about all of that, but we wanted to get into the episode by kind of doing some horse race stuff, like actually talking about what are we seeing in polling, what are we seeing in like viewership numbers. So Sophie wanted to start with one of our favorite topics,

the popularity of the various vice presidential candidates. Yeah, and like, you know, national polls find that like, still that both vice presidential nominees are pretty much fighting to make themselves known to the US voters. But as of this week, at least, and this is before Walls' speech last night, so they haven't come back with a poll just yet on that. As of this week,

Walls is viewed more favorably than Vance with 27% of US adults saying Vance is favorable, while 44% find him unfavorable, compared to 36% who think Walls is favorable and 25% who find him unfavorable. And interesting to note, more Democrats are supportive of Walls, 62%, than Republicans of Vance, 57%. Which is wild, but also very consistent with what we saw at the RNC. We're like at the Heritage Foundation event, which Vance is supposed to be their man, no one would say a nice thing at him.

Like at the Heritage Foundation event, I could not hear a good word about JD Vance the night of his speech. Whereas the sheer number of dims that I've seen with Coach Wall's signs last night, including people like walking up to and interacting with folks at the uncommitted demonstration in front of the convention center,

was like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. Like I haven't seen any JD Vance merch. People genuinely like Tim Walls versus I don't think I heard a single person at the RNC give any inclination that they deeply liked JD Vance. Particularly when he was speaking, people were very much asleep. Very bored. It's reinforced that so far outside of Biden stepping down, picking walls is the best decision I've seen the Dems make this year.

He got a great reaction from the crowd last night. Yeah. So I wanted to talk a little bit about kind of what we're seeing in polling, at least according to Nate Silver's analysis, there's a tiny tick down between Tuesday and Wednesday and Kamala's chances vis-a-vis Trump, just based on some polls that had come out. All of that's kind of, it's, you can't really tell if there's going to be a convention bump until after the convention, so one way or the other, I wouldn't read too much into that. What is kind of worth reading into is the comparative popularity of the DNC televised speeches with the RNC. And so far from Monday through Wednesday, the DNC is ahead. And on Tuesday in particular, they were well ahead with Barack Obama and Michelle both speaking.

Okay. That got something like five million more viewers than the comparative night at the RNC, which is really significant. And all of these is obviously beating 2020. It's kind of unclear. The biggest night for the RNC was Thursday. So we'll see if Kamala can crack the 28 or 29 million viewers that Trump got, the height of his event.

But so far, a sizable, like maybe 15 to 20% edge for the Dems in terms of viewership. And obviously you have to keep in mind that like a half of the people listening to any convention are not necessarily supporters of that canon, that they're just people who want to be informed. But it furthers the narrative that there is a lot of energy behind the Dems right now. That kind of like vibe thing that people have been talking about. And speaking of vibes.

Speaking of vibes. Boy howdy. We wanted to end this segment before we get into the pro-Palestine protests and the uncommitted sit-in that's still going on at the convention center by talking just one more time about JD Vance, who while all of this is going on, yesterday, as Tim Walls was preparing his speech at the DNC, JD Vance visited a donut shop. And we're just going to play you audio of him talking to employees at the donut shop, trying to trying to get a photo opportunity or a good video clip. The zoom has come to town.

Thank you for letting us come in here. Yes sir. I guess I have to ask her. Oh sorry babe? I'm gonna be on film. Okay yeah. She doesn't want to be on film guys so just cut her out of anything. Appreciate that man.

I'm JD Dance. I'm running for Vice President. Go see it. Okay. Hello, what's your name? I'm Maynard Smith. I'm a beginner at your lab. Okay. What is it. Okay. How long have you been here? I've been here since I began as a lab.

Okay. A dish year. Okay, good. How much do you serve? Almost two years. Okay, good. I'll say everything. Yeah, I'll be a lot of glazed here, some sprinkle stuff, some of these cinnamon rolls,

just whatever makes sense. How long have you been around? About four years. About four years? Okay. How long have you been here? A four years. About four years? Okay. How long have you been here? A little over six months.

Quite literally, nobody has ever been worse at interacting with human beings. What is wrong with it? Okay. Good. Good. Good. Good. That was, by the way, in Georgia. Oh, Georgia. Great. Great. I'm JD Vance. I'm running for Vice President. Okay. If I wanted to win Georgia and I was Trump, JD Vance is the last man I would send to the state of Georgia. I'm JD Vance. Oh God. But I'm JD Vance. Okay. Okay. All right.

It was like that SNL Pete Davidson skit where he just goes, okay. Uh huh. And he just orders a random assortment of donuts. That's how everyone should react to JD Vance. Okay, like. If he loses, that's going to be the rest of his life, is him showing up places going, I'm JD Vance, and people going, all right. Please stay away from my children.

Anyways. Are you about to tell me that you can't be within a hundred meters of a school? Yeah, seriously. That's how that beard looks. Anyway. Ads. Here's some ads.

We're back. And yeah, so the protests have continued. Garrison and I nearly got arrested during a kettle. That wound up being about 60. It looked like people who were both cited and arrested. Most of those people cited and released on the scene. A couple, about two dozen or so actually arrested, including four members of the press. Pretty nasty scene.

Yesterday was very different. There was a protest march that moved up to the gates of the convention and then marched back. There were a couple of moments where like police would grab people that happened at the train station and detain them, but ultimately did not, not significant numbers of arrests, at least from what I saw and from talking to people, it did sound like they were

mostly kind of detaining and releasing. We had not intended to do more protests last night, just because the first two nights were supposed to be the largest and I had not even been to the DNC until last afternoon, actually past the gate. So we all went in together. We watched a couple of speeches. Thank God I got to catch the Bill Clinton speech.

Wouldn't have wanted to miss that barn burner. we watched a couple of speeches. Thank God I got to catch the Bill Clinton speech. Oh my God. Wouldn't have wanted to miss that barn burner. Epstein affiliate, Bill Clinton. He sounded almost closer to death than Joe Biden. Which was just shocking. Biden sounds a lot better now. He also spoke very early on in the night and his speech was so long.

It wasn't great. And it was bad, it was bad. I don't know why. It's a bad speech. Don't speak for that long if your speech is bad. But also just like don't invite him in the first place, DNC. Why was he there? It speaks to the, because,

probably because of the sheer amount of clout that the Clintons have within the Democratic party still to this day. Because if you don't have Bill there. Sure, but don't invite him. Well, they also, they wanted Hillary. And Hillary did get a big reaction. And I'm sure Hillary

dislikes Bill Clinton as much as anyone sure but for a variety of complicated and stupid reasons you can't both have Hillary Clinton and Exclude bill and repeatedly attack Trump for his Epstein connections It just doesn't work very well Which is why they shouldn't have had any Clintons there and hit on Trump for being a pedophile, but yes I don't know. He spoke for so long. I can't not apologize. It's set. It set me over the edge. It was fine It was not like it was just kind of boring Thankfully more important things happened if not inside the DNC just just outside Yes, the actual United Center like stadium still inside the security perimeter

So while we were watching Mindy Kaling talk about how she should be the ambassador to Italy, which I know was a bit, but I was just not in the mood. No. We start, I start getting like updates from there's a journalist on the ground, Prim Thacker, who was outside with some representatives of the uncommitted movement. So the uncommitted movement started as Democrats were voting uncommitted in the primaries in order to make a point about, you know, the fact that there is significant solidarity among the democratic voters with Gaza and that if Democrats do not do something more than a thoughts and prayers, they

won't get those votes. And particularly Chicago, massive Palestinian population, it could be something that, you know, matters in some of the swing states. So the uncommitted movement has kind of coalesced over the last couple of months into a group of delegates who are, again, we're not talking about like the folks marching outside. These are not people who are generally like committed radicals. They're certainly not communists. I heard a number of folks who engaged with people

from the DNC who were, and again, these are members of the uncommitted movement wearing Palestinian scarves, who specifically would say, I think Israel has a right to defend itself. Would you describe these folks as moderate Democrats? No. It's a mix of moderate and radical Democrats, but Democrats, right?

Progressive. Progressive Democrats, yeah. And the point I'm making about like, I heard a couple of them say, no, I think Israel has a right to defend itself is not that I think that's a particularly valid thing to mention, but that it shows you the level of rhetoric, which they were taking pains to be speaking within the bounds of extremely acceptable Democratic Party rhetoric, right? We are loyal Democrats. We were very excited.

I listened to a couple of representatives of the movement give speeches. One of them was delegate June Rose, which in my initial thread, I think I went with he, him, but I believe their pronouns are they, them. And Rose basically mentioned, this is a quote from them, when President Biden was the nominee, I felt hopeless. And this is both because Biden was providing Israel with bombs and because he could not

win. This is a quote from them when Harris was chosen. I heard empathy in her voice for Palestinian suffering. But then June says they remembered what Democrats give Republicans shit for saying, you know, thoughts and prayers after mass shootings. And I thought that was a valid point to make, right? A month ago, the fact that DIMS had really changed their messaging on Gaza sounded like it could be the start of something promising,

but it hasn't led to any kind of like strong commitment for actually anything actionable, right? Just saying, I support a ceasefire isn't enough when people are getting killed. It's not like an actual commitment to, for example, stop sending Israel arms. Now, to be totally fair, I don't want to be flattening this too much. There have been some significant concessions from the DNC to Palestinian solidarity movement, right? Not just a number of mentions and embraces of ceasefires from multiple speakers that got massive lines of applause. But Sophie, you went to the panel that the DNC put on

with doctors who had just been working in Gaza. And that particularly was not nothing. It was a first of its kind panel, yeah. And that, I would say more than people's advocating a ceasefire in their speeches, that's not nothing, right? Like that's an actual No, and Rob Wright June also posted that over 280 Harris delegates have signed their letter demanding a permanent ceasefire in arms embargo and says not another bomb, which was one of the signs that

they had last night. So that over 280 Harris delegates, that is not insignificant. No, that's a, and those people, you know, come here representing, you know, a significantly larger number of voters. So what had happened outside of the United Center is uncommitted, led by the co-founder of the organization, Abbas Alaway, were essentially engaging in a sit-in. Although Abbas was very open about like, I don't want this to be a sit-in. Although Abbas was very open about like, I don't want this to be a sit-in, I want to go home, I'm very tired, my feet hurt, I am just waiting for a call.

We presented the DNC some time ago, the conversations really started about a month ago. They were initially trying to get a doctor, a five minute speaking slot at the DNC to talk about medical care for children in Gaza that has evolved over time into they have a list of Palestinian American Democrats who they were willing to let the DNC pick from and let them vet a speech. Including some who have endorsed Harris already. From what I was listening to all

of this was very much in the context of and endorsing Harris, right? I've seen a lot of people be like yeah but what if they come up and, you know, attack the Democratic Party and call, you know, them genocide supporters or whatnot, and I don't get that feeling from this group of people. Now, I understand if you're like, well, that's what they should do, but these folks are not coming at this and certainly not framing themselves as we are radical leftists. They are framing themselves as we are normal Democrats who want to see the Democratic Party acknowledge the humanity of Palestinians

and also start taking real steps to reduce and mitigate the violence that Israel is able to do over there. And that's what these people were standing for. And at least in terms of the actual DNC convention at the United Center, the fact that they do not want to do this and would rather just continue like this big party vibe instead.

We want to be partying with you is really part of the vibe that they were getting off. Sure, but the DNC doesn't even want that to put at risk this whole vibe shift party that they have going on. And that is a massive issue. And similarly, we had videos coming out last night of DNC attendees leaving the area, plugging their ears as people read out names

of dead Palestinian children. It just creates this overwhelming atmosphere that these people don't want to be inconvenienced by the genocide. And the genocide for them, it just is a political inconvenience that's prohibiting them from stopping Trump and prohibiting them from just making this big like Kamala Party. And it is it is very much an own goal because one thing I will say if I'm

trying again if I'm trying to be fair is when I saw people leaving the event I saw people who got angry I saw people who tried to ignore it and I also saw a decent number of people come up and engage politely and with interest in the people who were doing a sit-in. And in fact, before the event let out, there were maybe a hundred people, including press around the uncommitted sit-in. And it was a couple hundred when I left.

And a lot of those were people who had come out. And so it is not, it is not fair to say, but when you have people reading out the names of folks killed in a genocide Leaving an event and you get any photos of Democrats leaving plugging their ears. That's that's the image That's gonna stick with people right? Yep, and that was obvious going into this. It's a sign number one I think of how scared people are of a pack but also of Kind of the lack of trust that the DNC leadership has in any one

Palestinian being able to balance being a Democrat with wanting to end a genocide. And you know, again, I think that probably a lot of folks who were outside of the event at the more radical protests would be frustrated by some of the language that I heard uncommitted representatives use. But I think that sit-in is having more of an impact than any of the demonstrations outside, right? Because it's right in the middle of the DNC. It's impossible to ignore.

And you cannot write these people off as protesters who are out there breaking the law. You know, there's a guy with a Hezbollah flag. Why are they walking around with a Hezbollah flag? These are people whose messaging is as moderate as it could possibly be. They just want the reality of a genocide to be acknowledged, which is not a big ask in my opinion. Yeah, and did you go to any other protests

that night, Robert? Yes, I sure did. Garrison and I had several drinks at the hotel, which we've been doing because, you know, when you get a chance to sit with your friend both wearing your nice suit and act world weary at a political convention, it's really nice. I wish we could still smoke indoors, Garrison.

We'd be four packs of palm all into this by now. Once we get back to Vegas. Once we get back to Vegas. Once we get back to Vegas, CES, right around the corner, buddy. I'm so sorry. So like at 1 a.m. in the morning, we go to bed just fucking exhausted and there had been sort of word that was supposed to be

some kind of radical demonstration and it was unclear exactly what was going to happen. And then right as I got up to my hotel room, I saw from one of the reporters I cover on the ground here, Talia Jane at Talia OTG, that a noise demonstration had opened up outside of the, they'd figured out what hotel Kamala Harris is at and had started doing a noise demonstration, just making as much noise outside of the hotel as possible. And it was like a block away from us. So down the street, I went maybe a hundred people or so, including one individual with a flute playing

as badly as they possibly could while standing as close to the police riot line as they possibly could. Great ambiance. A hero, a hero. And yeah, it was interesting because when I got there, I expected, because the police were telling people to move. They were in front of the president's hotel.

It was one in the morning and they were being very loud in front of people who have money. So I kind of expected, okay, wagons are gonna come in and people are going to get the absolute shit beat out of them, but nothing happened. The cops didn't even keep a tight cordon. There was clearly no, as we saw last night, there was no walling in the protest.

There was no sign that they considered this something that needed to be met with a significant degree of force. I kind of think some of it may be that they were tired too because they looked exhausted. So I wonder how much of it is that. I think it also, they got surprised as opposed to yesterday Where they came in knowing okay, this is supposed to be a radical militant demo So we're gonna have a overwhelming force response

I think they just had some teams show up and kind of catches catch can handle the event But you know they played around outside of Harris's place for 30 or 40 minutes and then marched on and dispersed and it was fine No arrests that I saw whatsoever. Pretty calm night. And I believe the actual hotel she was staying in was actually like a one or two blocks over. They, it was fortified. It's a fortress, right? Yeah, you're not going to get that close. It's the Secret Service headquarters, essentially, right? The vice president is sleeping in the building. There's not going to be protesters directly

outside on the sidewalk. They're going to have some kind of radius. People got as close as they could to what they believed the hotel was. But you know, it's not like they're going to be throwing eggs on the window of the vice president. No, and I didn't even see any implication that people wanted to do that. I have not at any of these demonstrations seen any sort of cohesive committed property destruction or even like I hint that people are thinking of property these are and in part because I think

most of the people have seen have been younger they seem to be newer to this kind of protest it seems like a younger movement is the core of things here and I don't think if they ever do I'd certainly they have not yet psyched themselves up to that kind of direct action. Yeah. All right. We will go on an ad break and come back to hear about a few of the other speeches that took place last night at the DNC, including Governor Tim Walz. To the window! We're not doing that.

We could. So we're back. I did want to note before we get into this that a Texas delegate who was in the south side of Chicago got robbed last night. Oh, yes. Which is not surprising because the south side of Chicago is the baddest part of town. And as I was warned before coming here, if you get down there, you better beware of a man named Leroy Brown. All right. Anyways, Garrison.

He stands about six foot four, Sophie. This week has lasted a month. All right. I've aged. All the downtown ladies call him Tree Top Lover. But before- All the minjas call him Sir. Robert.

If you were curious about his pronouns. I'm just trying to make sure that we refer to people properly. So the theme for Wednesday night inside the DNC was a fight for our democracy and with like a big emphasis on like trying to maintain The freedoms that we now have there was a lot of we're not going back chance that kind of stuff A lot of speeches focused on redefining freedom. Yes This is kind of part of like this like liberal Reclaiming of like patriotism and freedom that I've that I've kind of been talking about these past few weeks. It's probably the smartest thing they could be doing.

Yes. So this was kind of the main push, not only how Democrats will continue to secure these freedoms, but if Trump is elected, these freedoms will be gone. And people the judge gave an okay speech, you know, talking about how his current life being married with kids was like, you know, impossible 25 years ago. And if Project 2025 gets enacted, it will be no longer possible anymore. So a lot of stuff kind of like that. Oprah Winfrey showed up and gave a very long speech. I did have a moment of very jarring disconnect where as I listened to the boss, who was openly

weeping talking about his grandmother having to flee her home in Lebanon as it was bombed and then I look up as this man is crying on the ground talking about his grandmother fleeing bombs And there's Oprah Winfrey's giant head speaking on the jumbotron above me Yeah, similar to the RNC when the crowd started chanting USA, USA during Oprah's speech. I got one of those alerts on my smartwatch that my heart rate was a little too high, which again, very funny. That's all that it takes to trigger my poor little heart. It's chants of USA.

I got some magnesium supplements, Sophie. What's at stake though? And then even though there was all this freedom, democracy stuff, there was also some of the most conservative speakers of the night were also here. There was a few police officers, there was a sheriff talking about the border and how Trump killed the most secure border bill. Even though they're denying any Palestinian to speak on the main stage, they are inviting

like former Trump coworkers. A sheriff from Bayhard, Texas. Police officers. A border patrol guy. So all of these guys are speaking, which people are similarly pointing to as, you know, showcasing what exactly the DNC, I think, actually cares about right now.

But I think I just wanna go straight over to Mr. Walls, Coach Walls, right before he came out, volunteers at the convention center were handing out these big Coach Walls, Coach Walls, right before he came out, volunteers at the convention center were handing out these big Coach Walls signs. There must have been thousands of them. Just handing them out to everyone on the floor, almost everyone in the stands. Just the whole stadium was full of people

holding these big Coach Walls signs. He comes out onto stage and people seem to really like him. He gave a short but sweet speech, I guess. He was one of the most efficient speakers of the night. He talked a lot about schools and how schools are kind of one of the big battlegrounds for freedom right now because he used to be a teacher for geography as well as football. He had this line that instead of banning books, we've been banishing hunger in his schools, how he signed that free lunch bill.

Meanwhile, all these Republicans are just trying to ban science books, ban social studies, and he's giving kids free food. So it's a lot of stuff about protecting schools, a lot of stuff about empowering teachers. That got great reactions from the crowd. So I'm sure there's plenty of teachers here at the DNC. Sure. Speaking of crowd reactions, Joe Biden was very briefly mentioned in the Thank You Joe chance that normally go on

for a very long time. They've been getting shorter. Getting shorter and shorter. They've been getting shorter and shorter. It was quite literally, thank you Joe once, and then thank you, and then he kept talking and the chance ended. Yeah. So.

So long, Joe. The parties slowly weaning themselves off of hair Joe in. So, Joanne. So, Walsh's approach in his speech was similarly on this, like, freedom and democracy theme. One of the reoccurring talking points he used was back in either Minnesota or Nebraska, because he's lived in both places, their golden rule is to mind your own damn business. And that's kind of his stated is to mind your own damn business. And that's kind of his stated approach to a lot of these things. It's like Republicans are trying to get up into your business.

The Republicans talk about freedom, but what they really mean is freedom for the government to get involved in your own business. Yes. Saying that the Democrats are going to not do such a thing. We're going to keep the government out of your doctor's office. We're going to provide reproductive freedom. That's kind of the messaging that he kept using consistently throughout the night about being a good neighbor. Calling stuff like Project 2025 an agenda that no one has really asked for,

but Republican oligarchs are trying to force upon the nation just to get more involved in everyone's lives. And this is something that me and Robert were talking about kind of back in the hotels. Everyone really likes like libertarian messaging. Yes. Like this style of messaging always plays very well. People just don't like actual libertarians and they don't like, you know, lots of like libertarian like, you know, urban policy, right? But this style of messaging typically plays really well as something that Republicans

have been using increasingly like since like the Tea Party and stuff. And because the Republican Party has gotten much more authoritarian over the years, I think it's interesting to see the Democrats starting to realize that they can actually weaponize this style of framing themselves to a very good reaction. You know, this is where we get these big we're not going back chants. He in one of his many sports metaphors, he said, when somebody draws up a playbook, they're going to use it, referred to project 2025 and the crowd loved that. A lot of sports references that I did not really get,

but that's okay. Because you guys don't like the only real sport in this country. I was translating all the sports references to you. Robert, you don't know sports. I know football. Great. Anyways. He also talked about things that Kamala has helped fight for, including fighting big pharma, securing rights for workers, health care and housing. Those are just a few of the actual kind of still not super big policy things, but hinting towards policy things that Democrats have gotten closer to over these last few days,

as they did release their actual like DNC party platform and Finally the kind of last thing I want to mention is that with like Buddha judge and a few a few other Like LGBTQ speakers, you know walls walls talked about how he sponsored the the gay straight alliance in the 90s And that under his and Kamala's watch the government's gonna stay out of your bedroom Similarly, you know going back to this like freedom messaging But there has been these few mentions of like, you know keeping the government out of the bedroom and like doctors appointments as well Docs appointments and not and not regressing on LGBTQ rights There's been very little actually talked about positively about helping secure the LGBTQ rights that are

actually talked about positively about helping secure the LGBTQ rights that are Currently like actually a jeopardy like specifically like trans health care like there's not been a trans speaker at the DNC I've heard almost no mention of trans issues on any of the speeches or any of the or any of the panels and This is I guess just slightly. I don't know I I guess I was expecting something Honestly on this because this is such a big topic for Republicans, because there was consistently, every night, mentions of trans people at the RNC, I was expecting at least some degree for the DNC to push back on that and be like, no, we actually are going to make sure we have healthcare for trans people and make sure that trans people are not unfairly discriminated against.

And they have just sidestepped this whole issue. And that has been, that's not great. That is another thing, as well as Palestine, to push them on. Because this is like literally one of the core parts of the Republican Party right now is attacking the ability for trans people to not only get health care, but just to exist in public life. And it's specifically something Walls has a really good record on. Yes. Some of these people has a really good record on. Yes. Some of these people do have a good record on. Like a conversion ban and stuff.

So it's not something that they have shied away from in their own electoral history. But at least at the DNC, they're not putting it on like the national stage. Yeah. Maybe they think it won't play well. Maybe they think it's a little bit too weird for some of the people that they're trying to kind of court their votes for. I'm not sure. I wonder if the calculation's a little different. The only direct references I've heard to trans people

have been as part of- LGBTQ. I wonder if there's a degree of strategy where they're thinking like, the smart way to play this is to reconnect trans people with LGBTQ as opposed to deal with it as if there's some sort of separate thing going on. I wonder if that's a calculation that they're making. I don't know. But you're right, it is very conspicuous in its absence.

We just had this massive flare up at the Olympics with this like increasing like trans panic stuff. And yeah, it's just something I've observed the past few days. We'll see if there's anything tonight. I'm going to try to talk to people who've been at the LGBTQ caucuses these past few days Yeah I want to end by just as we're recording this it's come out mother Jones has published at the text of the speech that the Uncommitted movement wanted to give at the DNC This was from rep Rua Roman was supposed to be the one giving this and this was like Specifically turned down by the Democratic Party and I want to read a couple of paragraphs from it Just to give you an idea, again, make it very clear the actual kind of rhetoric

and how modest it is that these people are using. In this pain, I've also witnessed something profound, a beautiful, multi-faith, multi-racial, and multi-generational coalition rising from despair within our Democratic Party. For 320 days, we've stood together, demanding to enforce our laws on friend and foe alike to reach a ceasefire, in the killing of Palestinians, free all the Israeli and Palestinian hostages, and to begin the difficult work of building a path to collective peace

and safety. That's why we are here, members of this Democratic party committed to equal rights and dignity for all. What we do here echoes around the world. They'll say this is how it's always been, that nothing can change. But remember Fannie Lou Hamer, shunned for her courage, yet she paved the way for an integrated democratic party. Her legacy lives on, and it's her example we follow. But we can't do it alone. This historic moment is full of promise, but only if we stand together. Our party's greatest strength has always been our ability to unite.

Some say that is a weakness, but it's time we flex that strength. Let's commit to each other, to electing Vice President Harris and defeating Donald Trump, who uses my identity as a Palestinian as a slur. Let's fight for the politics long overdue, from restoring access to abortions, to ensuring a living wage, to demanding an end to reckless war and a ceasefire in Gaza. To those who doubt us, to the cynics and naysayers, I say yes we can. Yes we can be a Democratic Party that prioritizes funding our schools and hospitals, not for endless wars, that fights for an America that belongs to all of us, black, brown and white, Jews and Palestinians, all of us, like

my grandfather taught me, together." Jesus Christ. Yeah. It's the least objectionable thing I can imagine. Yeah. So anyway, that's what the DNC didn't want people to hear. It's pretty despicable. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty frustrating. Yeah. So anyway, that's what the DNC didn't want people to hear. It's pretty despicable. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty frustrating. Yeah. Well, this is how we're going to be closing this week of coverage. We will start next week's episodes by talking about the final day of the DNC, including Kamala Harris's

speech. And I also have some kind of disjointed thoughts. I'll try to put together more about some of like the discourse revolving around some of these protests, how they've been handled, a few like tactics things. But yeah, this has been this week at It Could Happen Here, recording from Chicago, Illinois. I'm exhausted. Will you guys listen to the speeches? I'm going to try to find Jake Tapper at the Politico Bar and Grill and, you know, read him the lyrics of Bad Bad Leroy Brown. Let us know how that goes.

Baddest man in the whole damn town. Normally I would be against abandoning you at a big public event, but see ya. It's fine. If it turns into a fist fight, I feel confident. We all do. I feel very confident I can win against Jack Tapper. If you're getting close to Jack Tapper, it's going to turn into a fist fight. We all know this.

All right. Bye bye. Horrible. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedmedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen here, updated monthly, at coolzonedmedia.com slash

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