Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 153

Episode Date: October 26, 2024

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. Sources can be found in the descriptions of each individual episode. An Alex Jones Update feat. Knowledge Fight Infiltrating Local Nazi Groups How Trump Rigged an FBI Investigation for Brett Kavanaugh Economists Win Worst Nobel Prize Yet, Asked to Please Stop Charlie Kirk vs College Students You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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. Oh, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here, things falling apart. And today the thing that is falling apart is Infowars. Now, this is not a new situation. Infowars has been falling apart for like half a decade now, but we are we are reaching certainly a point in that process. And to talk about that point, I am bringing on really the only two people

you can bring on if you want an expert opinion on Alex Jones, Dan and Jordan of Knowledge Fight. Dan, Jordan, welcome to the program. Hello, thank you for having us. Hello. You can bring us on to tell you things that every other expert in the world will say are wrong. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's nice to know that we are once again at that point where shit is

looking that bad for Alex. Yep. That it's relevant for us to, uh, yeah, get to start doing your media tours. Yeah. I mean, I mean, hey, we'll, we're, I'm enjoying this because I know we're going to see you next year to have the same conversation. And I was flashing back to earlier times we've talked, we've probably been like, hey, things are looking bad for Alex. Oh, yeah. My fingers are crossed that he gets a bad batch of supplements and goes on, like not a sad murdering spree, but like a cannibal spree.

Like he eats three or four people. And then the news, like you guys, you guys are on fucking CNN talking about, well actually Alex has been discussing eating people for quite some time. This is really, this is really a long story for him. Really anyone should have seen this coming. The writing was on the wall.

This is some of the least surprising cannibalism in media history. It turns out this supplement, it didn't make him a cannibal. It just brought out that cannibal that was already there Yeah, that's what the iodine does. Mm-hmm first before we get into it, you know elephant in the room by which I mean Dan You look like you're ready to lead the Union Army in a series of civil war battles. Dude, that's a compliment to your facial hair. So by elephant, you mean the tusks. Yes. Well, thank you very much.

I'm learning to accept compliments, but yeah, I've got a ridiculous handlebar situation that I did as a joke. I got this as a joke to go undercover to a Tucker Carlson event. That's an incredible decision. And then the positive feedback's been too much for me to handle. It's good.

Well, I mean, this is really changing things for me, because prior to seeing this, Jordan would have been my go to if I needed someone to help me burn Atlanta. But now I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Could be either of you. There's a lot of civil war jokes, a lot of hitting home runs in the 70s. Sure, sure. Jokes.

It's okay. I have a whole subreddit full of people that just Photoshop my face on the pictures of Rasputin, so it's what happens. Speaking of Rasputin, he was psychic, and so was Alex, according to Alex. Yep. Yeah, where do you guys wanna start here?

Because obviously the big news right now is all of Infowars is up for auction, including apparently Alex's Twitter, it sounds like will probably be part of the deal, although I guess that's a little unclear right now. He's trying to fight that inclusion of the Twitter handle in his bankruptcy estate, but I think almost anybody could make a pretty solid argument

that it's company property. Yeah. Yeah. He uses it to broadcast his show. He takes calls on it for his show from Twitter spaces. So like, yeah, he's probably gonna lose that fight and it's probably gonna be part of the auction. Yeah. But I mean, at the same time, him not having it makes it valueless.

So it's worthless Yeah, so if I were gonna auction it it would be worth zero dollars But if I were going to give it to Alex it would be worth to him Millions upon millions of dollars and that's the issue here Yeah, it does kind of seem and I'm I listen to Alex primarily through you But it does seem like from what I'm hearing your show He's kind of more concerned about the Twitter account than the multi-million dollar studio space.

Yeah. Big time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which actually is kind of funny because I think it belies a lack of confidence. Yeah. Because I think if he loses real Alex Jones on Twitter, he could have realer Alex Jones. Yep. It doesn't seem like that would be a problem

for him actually. Yeah. Do you think you can't gather this audience back together? I think that's the problem. He's worried he can't get it back, yeah. Yeah. Well, and specifically him, like Elon would tell people to follow him.

There'd be a bunch of people with huge accounts saying, this is the new Alex Jones. Like I really don't think it would be much more than a speed bump actually, unfortunately. You think that, but these aren't your friends. No. You can't trust Elon fucking Musk to help you out. What?

Yeah, I do think that there's an abandonment fear possibly. Yeah. Or some sort of lack of confidence that like, if this speed bump does hit, I won't be able to rebuild. Oh no, and it makes sense. Yeah. I think it's delusional. I think he's totally fine. Start a hundred new Twitter accounts. You can get a million followers on all of them. Agreed. Yeah. But I mean, he's delusional about just about everything. So it makes sense that in this case he would be delusional in the wrong direction. That's true. Yeah. So, yeah, how does this seem to be going?

My big concern when I'm when I'm thinking about it is like, well, there's probably someone rich out there, some like rich asshole, you know, think tank funding oil billionaire that would consider it chump change to buy all this shit up and just give it back to Alex. But my understanding is that that's not actually like a thing you could do in these kinds of situations, although I'm not an expert on it. Oh, I think you can.

Yeah, the trustee has the ability to even say, like if there was like a bid that was from whomever you wanna say, like out of nowhere, George Soros, if you like. Fucking William Regnery the Fifth or whichever Regnery we were on now. Yeah. Yeah $10 billion more money than God could imagine but the trustee wanted it to stay in right-wing billionaire hands. He could give it to somebody who bid $6 million for it or five. I don't think

that that's actually accurate fully. And I also don't think that the trustee is beholden to Alex accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately,

accurately, accurately, accurately, accurately, Actually, Actually, Actually, Actually,

Actually, Actually, Actually, Actually, Actually, Actually, Actually, Actually, or higher bids, it would be very difficult to rationalize not taking them if they are from people who have the actual money, aren't I guess involved with terrorism or something. Unless there's a concrete reason not to accept it.

I would be surprised if they didn't accept Soros if you made a bid. I mean, I would be too, but also currently we are on surprise number 7,500. That's true. If not more. So that would be the least surprising thing if it was That's true. If not more. Yeah. So that would be the least surprising thing

if it was a surprising thing. Yeah, I guess so. I think we're all agreed Alex isn't going to just shut up and ride into the sunset. He's physically incapable of doing that. Like he would literally explode like a soda with Mentos dropped into it if that were to happen. Yeah.

But also there's a massive judgment on him, right? So my understanding is that like any money beyond whatever a court decides would be necessary for him to maintain existence. Although I understand there's also like ways you can fuck around with that too. Like, what do you guys know about like, what kind of limitations the court has placed on Alex

for the future after all of his shit gets sold out from underneath him Well, I don't know about like specific details, but because his Judgment was deemed to be like malicious and intentional. Yeah, the amount that he owes personally is not dischargeable by bankruptcy Yeah, so he's in chapter 7 bankruptcy now personally and so he's liquidating all the assets. So he has to sell off the company, which is how we get to the auction in the first place. And so he will sell off these assets to go towards the payment of these people. But that's not going to erase the debts and set things even.

So in theory, he could be hounded for the rest of his life. He could have wages garnished, have some oversight of his finances, in theory. To the amount that that's exercised, I'm not sure how much it will be, but that's gonna be hanging over him for the rest of his life. Or I mean, if I was him,

and based on how things are going for him so far and the direction things are taking, then once this is handled, then he's going to move all of his money to alexjonesstore.com. And then once they catch him there, he's going to move all of his money to alexjonesstore.com too. And then once they catch him there, he's going to move his stuff to alexjones.com three until eventually everybody gets so fucking tired that they're like, fine, either we're no longer going to come after you or we'll settle for fucking nothing. Yeah. Cause him and him and his lawyers explained that even as part of their legal strategy

early on, which is that you exhaust people with delays and, and to the point where someone's just willing to settle because you're such a pain in the ass. And that's just kind of his mode of operation. Yeah, and every time people have been like, well, clearly you can't continue to be a pain in the ass this way anymore. It won't be allowed.

It has instead been allowed. So you can do it. It's fun. I don't wanna get like in the way of people's, you know, celebrating the downfall of Alex Jones, but it does kind of seem like nothing realistically is going to stop him from being rich and being able to talk to an audience of people

who are dangerously devoted to his shit. Like none of this is actually going to, I'm sure it's unpleasant and stressful, right? But it's not gonna stop him. That's just not possible. This is why you get other experts. Because I do wanna get in the way of people enjoying the quote unquote info or sound fall.

I'm just talking about like when I'm watching people celebrate on Twitter, like you can't correct everybody. It's like whenever there's like disinfo about Alex Jones that people listen to your show know, like there was a period of time where I would correct people about that or really literally anything else. And I've increasingly gotten to the point where like,

everyone's wrong about almost everything they say on the internet. And there's really no point in correcting anybody about it anymore. Like, what am I going to do? How is this going to help? Yeah, I see people like posting videos of Alex crying and like changing the context of what it is for some post. And it's like, ah, you guys are just,

I don't, it's not worth the energy to correct here. Yeah. To your point though, Jordan does want to stop people from celebrating and ruining everyone's fun. I'm in the middle. Okay. I would like people to be a little bit. Half the time do it.

I'd like people to be a little bit more realistic about their expectations. People being like celebrating prematurely, like you're just gonna have to deal with the hangover of this. That is, there's a pretty decent chance somebody aligned with Alex is gonna buy the company and then all of it is gonna get just given back to him.

And it's equally likely that someone like a Soros or whatever does end up buying it. Infowars is destroyed and Alex's revenue streams remain intact because his dad runs his supplement company now that's outside of the bankruptcy. Because his dad runs his supplement company now that's outside of the bankruptcy He shifted all of his merch over to this Alex Jones store calm that's run by somebody else So like all all the meaningful ways that he can make money are now protected and he can just start Alex Jones fuck around our or whatever and have these people be sponsors and you know It'll feel fun that info wars is gone or someone else bought it or whatever. But like, you know, like you're saying, Robert,

it doesn't really address the issue and nothing is really gained. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's kind of been a massive waste of everybody's time, but a lot of lawyers are gonna make a lot of money. So that's good. It does seem, if I'm going out of my way to kind of look at what are the most positive results

of this, like if, I mean, it does look like he's probably going to lose control of all of the shit that they have to film Infowars, right? Yeah. That won't stop them from filming and doing videos, but maybe they'll look like crap and maybe that will have an impact on like the degree of credence people give them, you know, like maybe the fact that Infowars has a nice studio isn't zero percent of like

why their shit gets taken seriously by people. I don't think it's most of why, but it's not nothing either. Otherwise, like they wouldn't be doing it. Like I do think that that is, although I don't know, maybe that was a in a different era is when that mattered. I think it's also psychologically important for him. Yeah, that might be the most of it. He wants to think he's doing a real show. And without the trappings of a fake CNN studio, it's harder to pretend that you're not just reading Twitter headlines and then getting mad about them. But I do, I do feel like this idea that it's a waste of time and everything has been a

waste of time. I just want to give a little bit of voice to the fact that it may feel like a waste of time and nothing has been achieved. But you know, if you listen to the perspective of some of the plaintiffs and some of the families, the ability to face him in court and reclaim some of the power that he had over memories and the power and the pain, you know, that isn't something that is quantifiable in terms of the money or, you know, all of his feet dragging, but it is something that matters. And I don't want to pretend

that that hasn't been achieved. Oh, great. As much as it's not the catharsis of him getting arrested or losing all of his money or whatever that you might want. Yeah, no, I mean, I just, I think we all needed to understand clearly from the beginning what this was, and that would have altered kind of the way

that this is perceived. Like if we had all known from the beginning what this was, and that would have altered kind of the way that this is perceived. Like, if we had all known from the jump, like if all the lawyers and everybody and all the media had gotten together and been like, listen, this is going to be a moral victory and it's going to be good to have this like in public to have this airing for all of us to see and for the families to have, I think we would have been fine with that. The problem was all the rest of the stuff was a waste of everybody's time. Yeah. Does that make sense?

Yeah, no, that makes sense to me. Yeah, I think if we had just had, this could all have been banged out in a day, really. Yeah. Like we get everybody in court, everybody gets to say their piece, and then we're done and Alex gets to remain rich. It's basically the same thing. everybody in court, everybody gets to say their piece, and then we're done, and Alex gets to remain rich.

It's basically the same thing. All right, well, we're gonna keep talking on this, and I'm gonna ask you guys for an update on how Alex is handling the election too. But first, let's all handle some ads. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that.

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I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that.

I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. We are using that in the porn sense. My Alex Jones deep fake pornography website is off the ground for $70 a month. You too can have a subscription. Dr. Jones big naturals.

Alex Jones shrunk naturals. Yeah, Dr. Jones big naturals. Take too many supplements, you're gonna have some real shrunk naturals. Yeah. Honestly, most of what I do is just take clips from the graduate and put him in as the male lead. I don't know why, I don't know why. You gotta give the people what they want.

Anyway, we made $40 million last month. Shit. Damn. You're in the wrong business. We should have stopped with this whole no ads thing. So I wanna talk a little bit about how Alex has been handling the election, because one of the things that's always interesting to me is how his sense about whether or not everyone's doomed

to be murdered by the New World Order and have their corpse disposed of by a robot is not related at all to like how conservatism is doing, how his party has picked candidates are doing. It's a pure, his own personal vibes because right now is not a terrible time if you're a fascist in the United States. There's a real good chance they're gonna have a runaway win

here in the next couple of weeks. But Alex is at least based on the most recent episode of Knowledge Fund I've listened to, more or less on the everything is fucked and we're all doomed, the New World Order is going to eat you all thing. I think it's just because he's got the auction team coming by his office.

Well, spoiler alert, in the next episode, he's had a euphoria moment because he's realized that they're gonna win. They've already won. They've already won. You're way too far behind. Now tomorrow, of course, they will be losing and we're all gonna die. He's a rapid cycling kind of guy.

But the day after that, we're gonna win. Yeah. But I mean, I think that, you know, we've even talked about this before, this dynamic of like your enemy has to be super strong and then super defeatable and super weak. Like all of that must exist simultaneously or else. Yeah. You know, his game doesn't really work as well. Yeah. So that, that energy

is going to keep going until the election. And also it makes sense. I mean, I can't imagine the idea of a bunch of professional people coming into my home or place of business and just like cataloging things, just taking each individual pictures, the amount of stress and nervous energy that that would provide. Like I would be like, Hey, I didn't know. I don't know if I needed to clean that. I don't know if I needed to clean it. She would be getting real. Yeah. I just like cleaning up my dad's place after he died was like this whole thing of all of these are items that have meaning to our family and I would be okay burning But yeah, I just like cleaning up my dad's place after he died was like this whole thing of

all of these are items that have meaning to our family and I would be okay burning them all in a fire, in a pit right now. Like I'm just, I'm done, I'm done. So I can't imagine like the sense of fucking I would have in Alex, especially if I had Alex Jones money. Like he really, it's just more evidence that there's a deep sickness involved in all this with him.

Like he can't stop himself. Like go fish or something, bro. Like go on a nice fishing trip. What are you doing sitting in your office watching your life get picked apart? What a miserable place. Give everybody the day off. It's crazy.

Fishing's not gonna stop the devil. And that is really, you know. Fishing is actually how the devil gets out. It's every water as a portal to the fifth dimension of hell, which is actually the lower fifth. There's a higher fifth dimension where good demons, I mean, angels come out of, but then the lower fifth dimension comes up through the pond and that's where catfish come from. This is not an Alex theory, but it plausibly could be. Yeah, I feel like that wasn't far off. No. So how are we doing with Alex in terms of like,

one thing I've noticed, and maybe I have a, you can tell me if you agree with my kind of interpretation here is that he seems to be at a little bit of a lower ebb in terms of getting invited on and talking with like much more popular creators. I haven't seen like last year. I felt like I saw him on a lot of stuff and this year.

I don't know if it's just that he's not, you know, as sexy as he was to them last year, but I'm just not seeing him out as much as I kind of expected to in an election. And I'm wondering if that's your interpretation too, or if I'm just kind of you think I'm off. I think it's 50-50. Cause I think that there is something to that. Like he was on, he's been on more fun stuff before in the past. And it's been a little bit limited this year,

but he was just on Tucker's live show in Pennsylvania, which is about as big as anything he's done, probably. At least it feels pretty big. Yeah, it wasn't the two drunk sports guys. No, flagrant two. Flagrant two. That might've been a few years ago too. Yeah, my memory is terrible.

Yeah, he hasn't been back on Rogan. Yeah. You know, there's some big gaps in terms of like where he feels like he should be appearing, but you know, if you look at the luminaries that were on that Tucker Carlson tour, like him being included in that list of people is pretty, you know, that's, that's rarefied air.

I mean, unfortunately, I guess it is in a way. You got RFK junior. Yeah. You got the vague. They're consequential people, which is the most disappointing part is that these are the dregs of humanity. And yet they are very consequential people that we should be paying attention.

It's absolutely infuriating that, yeah, I have to care about, especially fucking Vivek, because I ran into him at the fucking RNC, and he was being surrounded by a cloud of guys who all looked like Nick Fuentes. Like, the only reason I didn't assume one of them was Nick Fuentes is that any one of them could have been Nick Fuentes.

And I had to fight this urge, do you ever see those like old man comics where like a guy will be fighting a hundred shrews and like beating one of them to death with the others? I had to fight off the urge to pick up one Fuentes by the legs and just start swinging him. Just start swinging. You are my weapon.

So like, where do you, where do you see Alex a year from now? Right? Like, do you have any kind of expectation for where he's going to be? Cause like at some point his dad has to die, which I understand is a pretty important part right now of how he's able to keep money flowing to his operation in the face of the judgment, right?

His dad and his brother-in-law both run the Dr. Jones naturals. So even if old David Jones kicks the bucket, his brother is still gonna be there. So I think Alex is fine, but I think he almost killed his dad with COVID. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I am surprised Dr. Jones lived through

that given Alex's. Yeah, it's like a gorilla sitting on his chest. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it is a little bit of a testament to how insane and how the best torture for Alex is just being cursed with being Alex is like, if I was in this scenario where I plausibly have a reason to never touch or talk about money again, and yet still make

the almost exact same amount of it. That would be perfect. That's just taking a job away from me. Right now. It's my dad's problem to look at the sales numbers. Dr. Jones go anywhere. Yeah. Not a good ad man. That's the thing. Do a good read. Alex is the face guy. Dr. Jones handles the business. That means that Alex doesn't have to do both. It makes perfect sense. But to your, to your question though, like I really do feel like right now we're in the most chaotic possible moment, right? Because you have these two things that could go any direction that are happening around the same time. Like you have the election and then you also have the auction, right. And if Trump wins or loses,

there's a lot of different possibilities of how his path might go. And if someone who he's aligned with ends up buying the company or not, that's another like, the world will be very different in terms of the choices that he has in front of him. But I think it'll be bad. I think it'll be unhappy that I think no matter what But I think it'll be bad. I think it'll be unhappy.

That I think no matter what, I think it'll be pretty miserable. Yeah, yeah. And that's just cause of him. He's just a real miserable piece of shit. Yeah, I spent a lot of time thinking about his B cast and how they might do. Cause again, I don't see a world in which Alex

gives up what he's doing, but I do see a world in which he can no longer pay Owen Schreuer. That's the true goal. And that could be a real win. This is Owen Schreuer's paycheck is gone. Owen's not making what? A heartbreaking amount of money, I'm sure. More further into the six figures

than Owen Schreuer ought to be. Further than Will ever be. I wonder what the deal with him would be, though, like he went to jail for Alex. God, he sure did. He sure did. He did time. Like, what could he tell if he was off the payroll or, you know, like, or how much do you pay to keep him on the payroll because he's the kind of guy who went to jail for you? I mean, if you look at a, I mean, David

Knight's not going to jail for you, but if that's, if that's a comparable exit for a personal popularity, I don't think Owen's got much of a shot. Yeah. I think he can be tossed into the ocean. But I think chase chase geyser is more of a B player than, than, oh, and we just have a personal, we just, Chase Geyser is a new character who's popped up in the later seasons of the show. And he's really brought a new, he's brought a lot of late season juice to it

that I think we needed. Yeah. He's better than Owen though, that's for sure. See, I was gonna say, it's like when Frasier brought on all those British people. But speaking of British people, our sponsors might be British. We don't check.

And we're back. Okay guys, so I guess kind of closing stuff out, what do you think this year have been the big pieces of Alex misinformation that you've seen people spreading online, like what's kind of been your biggest, I'm guessing this is gonna be a Jordan heavy question, but like- Stuff about Alex or stuff?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, stuff about Alex that's like specifically what kind of stuff have you heard like people in media saying about Alex this year that has pissed you off the most? I mean, the funny part of this question is that I've actually left the internet about as much as possible because of the rage that I feel at this very situation. A wise move, yeah.

So I honestly, I think the big thing for me personally is just the, if we are going to talk about Alex's auction then to me what we're talking about is how much money the families are gonna receive That's that's to me in my head of yeah if we're gonna talk money then what we should talk about is the end point how much do the families get and Even if this auction just goes gangbusters the families get. And even if this auction just goes gangbusters, the families are going to get so, so little of whatever happens because they're the last in line before you pay. Like Norm Pattis is going to make more money at the end of all of this process than any of

the family members. That's just probably true, probably true. I would say if not guaranteed true at this point, unless, of course, Mark Cuban or somebody, a billionaire shows up and showers them with money. But for the most part, it's it's like the end goals should be the family. Yeah, they should be first. But that's the wrong thing. They're the last.

So it's very annoying. It's very frustrating. Yeah, that is especially given that, like, that's the whole reason that is especially given that like that's the whole reason for the suit Like that's the whole reason for the season But I mean obviously the system is not conducted to benefit families who are suffering this that's not who makes the rules That's not who operates the system the system Yeah, okay. We don't need to rant about that. It is a bummer. Dan, what about you? I mean, maybe it's recency bias and stuff, but like, I do think that the conversation around the auction

is missing a little bit of the point. Whether it be in terms of, you know, what the sale is, like you were bringing up, Jordan, or like people thinking that there is a solution to the problem that Alex represents. Like this isn't going to be like a ding dong, the witch is dead type moment. You're gonna, you're gonna have, you know, his new thing funded by the companies that he's been building up to avoid the bankruptcy,

or you're gonna have somebody who's with him, but that buys it. Infowars is going to be the same problem on November 14th or whatever. Yeah. As it was the day before. And I think that, I think that people are getting themselves maybe a little bit up for a disappointment. Yeah. And I think that we've seen that a couple of times, like with the, um, Alex had the night where he claimed that security guards were trying to shut him down. You know, people got excited about like, this is it? And I think maybe I'm jaded too because of years of doing this. But yeah, it's almost never it.

I mean, I wanna say this, and I want people to recognize that this is true. In regards to this scenario, you are never going to come. You're never going to come. It's never going to happen. You're going to be perpetually close, and then you're not gonna make it, and then you're gonna come back. That's how it is.

If you're into edging, Alex is the guy to follow. Yeah, it's perfect. No, I think that that's actually really good advice. Like if you just as a layman are hearing people talk about Alex Jones on social media or like seeing some sort of like opinion column or whatever and some, you know, left-winger liberal rag and you want to know like how credible is this? I guess the first question to ask is are they predicting a massive change to Alex and what

he actually does? Because if so, probably nothing has gotten, unless it's like an article that he's been diagnosed with a disease, nothing's probably going to change, right? Like at some point he's going to die, I'm not being mean. I don't even know. I wouldn't believe that article. I wouldn't believe a word in that article. They're lying!

Well, you faked that illness with Dr. Marbles to get out of the deposition thing. So like, you know, fuck even that. Yeah. I think I look at it slightly differently. And that is that I do predict that there will be a massive change. We just don't know what it will be. Sure.

Like there will be something. He's got to do something. Because his content is really stagnant and a bit uninteresting in the Trump sense. Mm hmm. Yeah. And I do. I think that there is a change that will be needed if he wants to maintain whatever he's doing. But I mean, anybody who has an idea of what it is, is wrong. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I imagine that predicting anything in the next 60 days is going to be a ridiculous proposition. If you had predicted a new hurricane fucking two weeks ago,

people would have thought you were crazy. Yeah. Well, I think that's all I had to ask guys. Anything you wanted to plug, we'll bring up before we close out. No, just, we exist, we have a show. Check out Knowledge Fight, it's my favorite podcast. It's the only reasonable way to keep up with Alex Jones.

And a whole network of other con men and grifters who kind of latch onto him like that fish that lives on the underside of a shark. A remora. Except for Alex, Alex is also a remora, a remora, right? So it's just like a, it's like a, just a series of smaller and smaller ones, each sucking each other off.

Yeah, that sounds about right. And Alex is latched onto the side of a cruise ship toilet. Yeah. He sees the Remora on the cruise ship toilet. You've now turned this into a human centipede situation. I have, I have, I don't know why. Again, again, it's all, this is all viral marketing for Dr. Jones's Big Naturals.

Now we've figured out an appropriate punishment for defamation of character, human centipede. Yeah, I've been saying that for years. Years. I feel like, and I do have to point this out, that is both cruel and very unusual. It is perhaps the most unusual thing you could imagine really.

I hate to say, but it would take like some of these people three months to have several thousand people convinced that human centipeding is like a mental health hack. Like it's like getting rid of seed oils, you know? That's how you accelerate muscle development. Right. Yeah, yeah. Ancient cavemen were always eating each other's shit.

You know what? You've also made a very good point. If this whole thing, if you wanna stop Alex, Alex is a symptom. Alex is a symptom of the larger problem. You need to regulate supplements. Yes, yes. FDA approved supplements will get rid of most of these guys.

Every podcast episode we can. we are pushing the line. In my dream, if I accomplish one thing in my life, it would be getting this to become widely agreed upon by liberals in the left, regulate supplements, allow direct sales of cars to consumers, and ban MLMs and prosecute people criminally for trying to operate them. Do that and you fix a lot of other problems.

I would do something about precious metals businesses too. I would throw that into the mix. Whoa, whoa, whoa, hey now, hey now. Mike Lindell's giving us some gold money, sir. Right now, you just wait right there till he runs out, Dan. Pillow sales are illegal also, I should throw that on the pile.

Pillows are illegal. Makes your neck weak. Yep. All right, everybody, listen to Knowledge Fight. Thank you, Dan and Jordan, as always. We'll be back tomorrow with some other episode of this podcast that we do every day. Welcome, I'm and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories

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Listen to Black Lit on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Mike and Ian. We're the hosts of How to Do Everything from NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. Each week, we take your questions and find someone much smarter than us to answer them. Questions like, how do you survive the Bermuda Triangle?

How do you find a date inside the Bermuda Triangle? We can't help you, but we will find someone who can. Listen to the How to Do Everything podcast on iHeartRadio. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships,

and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome to Icadapin here. I'm Garrison. This is a little special episode today. I'm joined by Alex from Corvallis Antifa and Hank, who's using a pseudonym for personal safety, from

the Left Coast Right Watch team. Hello to you both, and thank you so much for joining me. Hey, what's happening? Thank you so much for having us. Thanks for having us, good to be here. So today we're gonna be talking about this group called White Lives Matter. I guess originally, White Lives Matter was like a slogan

and like a very, very loose group from like 2015, or at least it kind of started in 2015, as a reaction to the growing Black Lives Matter movement. I know I definitely saw this phrase propagated via like memes, flyers, billboards, and other forms of propaganda as a way to like seed white nationalist rhetoric to the then like growing and burgeoning alt-right. Yeah, so there was a formation that was kind of like an NSM splinter formation that happened in reaction to the initial Black Lives Matter protests in 2015.

The White Lives Matter that we're talking about today is a different formation entirely that utilizes sort of the same slogan. They are a group that started in like 2021 and have been organizing primarily on Telegram and have grown really rapidly across the country in the years since. Yeah. It's like we can see the early use of this phrase spread by, you mentioned the National Socialist Movement, along with a few other kind of collections of neo-Nazis, the Aryan Resistance Society and the Aryan Nationalist Alliance. But then things kind of like died down. It was just a, it was like a slogan you could see

at rallies, but it wasn't, it wasn't anything like too prominent, honestly. But then we had this big second wave in 2021 with Telegram channels promoting a White Lives Matter march or a series of marches to be held across the country on like April 11th. This batch of rallies were mostly a failure in part due to the efforts of anti-fascists who worked to sabotage the planning of these rallies ahead of time. Of the rallies that did eventually take place, really only a handful of white supremacists showed up and most were outnumbered by anti-fascist counter-demonstrators. So then after this initial event with this big batch of channels on Telegram, which is this encrypted messaging platform based out of Russia, it's not very good. Don't use it unless you're trying to infiltrate a Nazi group.

But after these failed rallies, White Lives Matter kind of turned into yet another one of these networks for white supremacists and neo-Nazis that advocate quote unquote pro-white activism. Typically, this includes putting up white nationalists stickers around neighborhoods, hanging large banners with fascist rhetoric or Nazi imagery, flyering and just spreading propaganda online with the occasional in-person rally. I think you can see kind of the peak of the White Lives Matter slogan, at least, was when it was propagated to the degree that Kanye West wore it on a t-shirt during his little

Nazi era back in 2022. And I think now you see White Lives Matter as like a network. It overlaps and crosses over a lot with like similar groups like the GDL, that's the Goaim Defense League, as well as the National Socialist Club and Patriot Front to some degree. I guess one thing that I wanted to talk about is that, and this is mentioned in the Corvallis and Tifa article on the Oregon chapter of White Lives Matter, is like this idea of hiding your power level, which we used to talk about a little bit more. I think in some ways a whole bunch of Nazis kind of blew their cover back around 2020.

But now you see kind of more attempts to try to seed a white nationalist rhetoric into other kind of right wing spaces to push them farther along that radicalization pathway. And I would like to have a discussion at least a little bit about how White Lives Matter specifically tries to hide their power level, like kind of disguise the level of like overt fascism that they're really proposing by employing this like quote-unquote like pro-white rhetoric. Yeah, so White Lives Matter as a national organization is extremely like conscious of what they would describe as like their optics.

They are very intent on like radicalizing who they perceive to be everyday white people into sort of fascist politics. And in their national level manuals and the materials that they provide to the leaders of statewide organizations. They specifically talk about stuff like not displaying Nazi flags or using neo-Nazi rhetoric, despite that being what they believe. But their goal is to use more innocuous styles of sloganeering,

like the phrase white lives matter and protect white babies, stuff like that, as ways to kind of open the door to get people to become interested in a more overtly national socialist politics that they can radicalize people to who join their group. And you see a lot of groups like active clubs, Patriot Front, other sort of white nationalist formations using the national WLM org as sort of a way to recruit to their own organizations with this sort of more innocuous, subtle style of propaganda. Yeah, and like one other thing that's pointed out in the in the Krovalis and Tifa article is like, they don't just do adjit prop,. They're not just a group that is composed of only doing stickering.

There's been multiple instances when their online propaganda as well as their in-person stickering escalates to real violence. Last year, a 28-year-old from New Jersey attacked an anti-racism concert at a church. He yelled, white lives matter, at attendees, threw smoke bombs at the church, and then tried to bear spray the crowd. I think inadvertently, bear spraying himself, which he then recorded the video talking about and posted online. Later, in AR15 and High Capacity magazines were found in his home alongside White Lives Matter propaganda. And later that year, a 20-year-old male associated with White Lives Matter firebombed a church in Ohio, and the church was picked as a target because it planned to host two drag events.

After being arrested, police found six firearms and dozens of loaded magazines alongside Nazi paraphernalia. This guy also wrote a manifesto defending his actions, specifically stating that he was happy about it because people online were proud of him. And, like, you can even go back to the White Lives Matter rallies back in 2021, especially the one in Huntington Beach, which saw a degree of physical violence. It's important not to just write these groups off as being like, oh, they only do banner drops, oh, they only do stickers.

Not only is propaganda a really important part of growing the number of them out there, but they also do real world violence. It's also important to talk about the ways that WLM is organizationally connected to more scary elements of the neo-Nazi right. Recently Left Coast Right Watch published proof that Matthew Allison, who was one of the leaders of the terror group, who was recently arrested, was responsible for some of the national WLM propaganda that they published, which is quite

concerning. So even these groups that are more movementarian in nature and are trying to appeal to more, quote unquote, normie white people are directly in bed with people who are like associated with mass shooters and terrorists. Yep. Specifically, try to groom people into becoming mass shooters. Yes. I mean, and that's why I think specifically with both these guys who did physical violence, you can see violence as like an escalatory thing for the person who's doing it, right?

You start off with throwing a Molotov cocktail, and then later you might do a mass shooting. It's like a testing ground. You can see the same thing with, you know, bear macing and anti-racism concert. The fact that both these guys, specifically the one in Ohio, had like a lot, a lot of guns. And like we're in America, there's a lot of guns around. But having that many guns and loaded magazines in Ohio as a 20-year-old with all of that Nazi paraphernalia, that is what a Nazi mass shooter's bedroom looks like. And these are not isolated incidents. I guess let's take a bit of a break and we will come back to talk about specifically the organ chapter

of White Lives Matter and what they've been getting up to the past few months. ["White Lives Matter Theme"] All right, so after Corvallis Antifa leaked chat logs from the organ White Lives Matter group back in 2021, the chapter went dormant, and then it restarted earlier this year. I guess Alex, can you walk us through kind of the rebirth of White Lives Matter Oregon? Yeah, so the way that WLM works as a national organization is there's like a series of groups

that all kind of are extants, like there are groups, and then people would like apply to be with the National Order to be like a leader of a state group. So back when WOM initially began as a thing in 2021, our group was running the Oregon chapter and exposed several people who tried to join that group. And then after that, like interest in that organization became... It stopped existing for several years. Yeah. Then earlier this year, we noticed that somebody had taken over the chapter and had started engaging in some stickering and some propaganda.

So we were like, well, you know, we may as well join this group and see what's up. So we infiltrated the organization, gathered information about the membership and published that information online in order to warn the communities that these guys inhabit about their activities. The group, you know, was doing stuff that was not like extremely intense, like they were doing stickers, they did two banner drops, or three banner drops successfully rather. But in their chat, we also found that they were talking a lot about military training and escalating.

And even though this group seemed very low key and was not doing anything super, like the stuff they're talking about is concerning and they're getting organized and they're getting to know each other. So we put a kibosh on that. So it looks like according to your research, the new leader is this guy named Cruz Dean Walters. Yeah, yeah. So Cruz is a Marine that kind of wash out who lives in McMinnville, Oregon, until very recently was living a double life.

He was living with his mom and his fiancee, neither of whom knew about his racist beliefs and now knew. He was a highly incompetent leader who, you know, really had a tremendous number of security flaws in his organization, you organization, as is evidenced by the fact that we were able to infiltrate and destroy it in a matter of just a few months. But it is worth noting that the group grew from just a handful of people to doing banner drops with six or seven folks in just a couple, you know, a couple of short months. So like, even though these groups can kind of be benign, if there winds

up being somebody who is like, particularly passionate behind the channel, like, they can transform into something less benign very, very quickly. And that's something we want to impart to other anti-fascists across the country is there are all these channels and they might be seeming kind of like benign now, but they can turn to something very malignant very quickly. I wanted to ask specifically about Cruz's radicalization. It's written in your piece that he was radicalized in part by the GDL, the Going Defense League, and participated in the city council death squads as reported by our own Molly Conger. And then just seemingly like just getting bored of just calling into

City Council meetings to yell slurs. He then like cooed the organization. So I'm curious if he ever wrote about or talked about his background with the GDL and his like apparent boredom at their particular style of white supremacist activism? Yeah. So he, I think, was just kind of sitting on the internet as a fucking dorky, lonely, sad little man and got into the GDL. For those who have the fortune of not knowing, the GDL is sort of this network of really grotesque, highly cringy, racist Twitch streamers. Or, not on Twitch anymore, but there's streamers nonetheless. They've been banned from Twitch, but...

Yeah. But yeah, so they have this program called the City Council Death Squad, where they will call into your local city council meeting and just like yell slurs at the bleaker municipal employees that have to sit and watch. They did one in Corvallis and like watching the footage was just like watching like these like grown men acting like children, like, you know, hollering at like random like city counselor 23 or whatever. It's really pathetic.

So, and I think Cruz kind of saw that and many do. The GDL is just a tremendously fucking pathetic organization. And he was like, kind of decided that he wanted to get more involved and he chose to get involved with WLM as opposed to another neo-Nazi formation because WLM is like a really, really easy entry point and has a very like, you know, kind of base politic.

It's not like, you know, Patriot Front or an active club where there are, you know, membership requirements and you have to engage in certain amounts of organizing activity or whatever. It's just very easy for, you know, your lazy Nazi to engage with. Yeah, absolutely. It definitely feels like the lazy person's option who doesn't want to go through the work of being vetted by like actual like larger organizations. Yeah, and he took over the chapter from an even lazier Nazi named Christian Coates, who

lives in Portland, Oregon, who is like this old school bonehead from the 2000s who like has some hate crime charges from, I think, attempting to and failing to assault some black teens in 2007. So Christian had, in the interceding years between us destroying the initial iteration of WLM, taken it over and basically done zilch with it. He posted one photo on the channel ever. But then he got taken over by this dude Cruz, who grew the organization from like just a few people to, you know,

being a reasonable street presence in a short number of months, obviously, at the expense of including an anti-fascist infiltrator and, you know, also just a true coterie of scumbags and idiots in the group. Yeah, one of the other guys that you've identified is, I don't know how to say his last name, but Casey, I want to say Nutsim. Oh yeah, Casey Knudsen. Who after being kicked out of both the Proud Boys and Patriot Front, made his own group in 2022, the Rose City Nationalists, which is kind of the laughing stock of all white supremacist groups in the PNW. And the group has largely fallen apart after being

just extensively investigated and exposed by local anti-fascists, almost to a comical extent. Yeah, ourselves, Rose City Antifa, and the Stumptown Research Collective have been kind of going through and just, you know, ripping apart Arsien. And Arsien is, at this point, more or less just Casey and this fella named Jaren Huber, who is an absolute, like, freak. He's got a bunch of tattoos all over his face. He was arrested for kicking a puppy nearly to death and beating up his grandfather. Just real scumbags. Jesus Christ.

Yeah, they all have domestic violence charges and are just real nightmare folks. The funniest thing about Rose City Nationalists is they got in this conflict with the Proud Boys. I believe it was in Oregon City where they got just absolutely washed by some drunken Proud Boys on the street. Not because of like ideological issues, but just because they like have, you know, interpersonal issues between Casey and the Portland chapter of the Proud Boys. It was, you know, they are truly just a laughing stock and are just like, you know, I hate to use the term but kind of like wall accounts of this.

No, I mean, and one thing that you do like document is just how many of these guys are like domestic abusers. And like, this is not uncommon for like these types of fellows, but also Cruz, like both admitted to stealing a gun and also abusing his wife and threatening other family with firearms. And this is like a trend across so many of the people exposed in these articles, is the extent to which they're all in view of like, like, spousal abuse, child abuse.

It's just, it's one of the very consistent factors. Yeah, misogyny is, you know, one of the very, very core parts of neo-Nazism and white nationalism. And, yeah, there's a really, really horrible section of text in our article where Cruz discusses physically hitting his fiance and then threatening his brother with a firearm. And yeah, it's really, really common that these people have domestic abuse charges. Multiple people in WLM Oregon have histories of domestic abuse, including Jaron Huber and Casey Knudsen, who are the two other members. And yeah, it's just, any time you look at a Nazi group, there's a dude who beats his wife in it. Like, kind of bar none, as long as we've been doing this work, we've been seeing it.

I'd like to talk now about the second in command of White Lives Matter Oregon, this small business owner in Coos Bay named Michael Witt-Gatenbein, who usually just goes by Witt. Now Witt has been a part of the White Lives Matter Oregon banner drops and was also responsible for a lot of the stickering that gets done as he leaves stickers across the truck stop bathrooms up and down the coast. Now Witt's kind of a fascinating fellow to me. He has shockingly bad opsec, kind of one of the worst examples I've ever seen. His very easily recognized custom flatbed truck can be seen at banner drops in August,

and it even appears in their own like propaganda videos for another banner drop in September. He like talked about his just like utter disregard for OpSec in one of the audio archives that you have hosted on Left Goes Right Watch. What else can you tell us about kind of Witt's background here? Yeah, so Witt is a Nazi and I believe his mother is actually, you know, he said at one point his mother was like, quote, awakened to the truth about the Jews or something like that. So he seems to come from, at the very least, an anti-Semitic family, but he himself is certainly a Nazi. And I think he has believed he can operate with impunity in Kuzbe. So I think it's less that he has that opsec and more believes he seems to think of himself as living in a world where it's okay to

be a Nazi. Sure. We can talk a little bit more about that. But yeah, he runs a company called Wit Industries, which he's claimed does business from Mexico to Russia. He works in the marine and maritime industry within the Port of Kuzbe and Kuz County. We know that he's gotten about a quarter million dollars in public contracts, primarily from the Port of Coos Bay, but also the Port of Umpqua, the City of North Bend, Coos County, South Coast Education Service District. That's just what we've found so far. It can be pretty difficult to find, you know, even though this is public money, it can still

be sort of a pretty difficult process to get public records and things like that. But we know that the port of Coos Bay alone has awarded him $219,000 in contracts for work ranging from hydraulics repairs and replacements on vessels and the bridge. He's also painted the state dredge and the trailer, things like that. You mentioned him using his work vehicle. So he has stated, and this is from information we have from the Port Vales Antifa infiltration, he stated that part of his goal is to build a white supremacist hub in Coos Bay. He wants to get guys elected to mayor and city council and things like that. I mean, he actually was using White Lives Matter to recruit guys to come and work for him. He was recruiting a guy named Landon Calhoun,

who is also an alleged pedophile. And we go into that in the Left Coast Right Watch article. But if he got this alleged pedophile, Landon, to come and work for him, they met in White Lives Matter. And he said, hey, come work for an all white organization where we can come and build the movement together. And as far as we know, it does appear that Landon has moved there. He's planning to move there in this fall. And we believe he's currently there.

Yeah, I'd like to kind of go by some of these points one by one, because he's he's certainly like a worrying figure. The fact that he's using his income, which is largely derived, of government contracts to specifically fund white supremacist activity in the PNW and use his own company resources to grow the number of far-right extremists in Coos Bay. Specifically, his plans of having them eventually occupy positions of local government. It's a degree of long- term planning that isn't always present in some of these types of guys. You know, plans are one thing. But when you actually have a business that you are like hiring people

to move to this town to like actually build this plan up, like it shows a degree of a chutzpah, I guess, on his part that he's actually like doing this. I mean, it kind of reminds me of the the Rise Above movement's tree trimming business. But that was's actually doing this. It kind of reminds me of the Rise Above movement's tree trimming business, but that was just to pay bills. They had no plans to slowly actually just take over a small town. There's a lot of these businesses that are run by Nazis that primarily hire other Nazis. But the degree to which that Michael Witt is able to operate without much oversight and just get all of this money from local government is certainly worrying.

I know he's stated that one of his employees prints out all of his White Lives Matter stickers and has gotten help from employees to do one banner drop outside of Roseburg and has a history of hiring far-right people, conspiracy theorists, and monetarily supporting them to help them continue their own far-right activism. Yeah, and you mentioned his employees that were printing the stickers for him. That was before he hired Landon. So yeah, he already has guys that are doing this. And the port, I think it's important to point out that the port of Coos Bay, its public body, the commissioners are elected by the governor and they're confirmed by the Oregon Senate, you know, or yeah, the Oregon Senate, I believe it is. So

this is a state body that is giving state funding to this Nazi. And I think that's really important to me. It's also like just to give people a little bit of the geography. Coos Bay is a small town, but actually, geographically, it takes quite a while to drive from North End to Coos Bay. And Witt lives right over by the Charleston Marina. And we know he's pretty in bed with the Marina folks there. There was a big Oregon Department of Transportation grant at a state level that the port had written that Witt would have been one of the like people making money. He was like written officially into this grant for, it was a $3.5 million grant that Witt was written into, right? So they're like his friends, you know, like they're

like, they're writing him into these grants. Witt's office is over there on Oceanview Boulevard, which is right next to the Confederated Tribes of Kuzla, Umkwa, and Sayusla Indians Tribal Housing Office and right next to one of their casinos. And just to give folks the terrain of where he's living and kind of operating to, yeah. Hello, Garrison from the future, just cutting in to say something that Hank said, but it got a little bit garbled in the voice modulation. So I just want to state it a little bit more clearly here. There's some other events that can help contextualize what Witt is doing in Coos Bay. Because currently in Coos County, there's this sort of intense far-right power grab that is slowly happening.

Some people might know of this radio host named Rob Taylor. He's said to be one of the guys who coordinated the breaching of the Oregon Capitol in late December, which was basically a test run for January 6th. And he's hosted people with the far right group Patriot Prayer. He has an old Gap account, which was essentially like Nazi Twitter before Twitter just became Nazi Twitter under Elon Musk. So this guy is like very comfortable and associates with extremely far right people as well as engaged in a level of activism in Oregon, at least. So this guy is like very comfortable and associates with extremely far-right people, as well as engaged in a level of activism in Oregon at least. So that's Rob Taylor, the radio guy. There's this other person named Rod Taylor, who's a Coos County commissioner,

who actually was a January 6th insurrectionist. He was arrested at the Capitol on J6. Now Michael Witt-Gatenbein has also previously employed this guy named Matt Wilbanks who's a buddy of Rob Taylor. He runs this blog called The Daily Resistor and also one of the Coos County neighborhood watch groups in the Empire District of Coos Bay which is mostly just focused on like doxxing and harassing homeless people. And these guys are also part of various mega groups like Citizens Restoring Liberty. And Witt himself is a part of this network.

He has attended Citizens Restoring Liberty events. He's also an admin on a telegram channel called the Oregon Patriot Alliance, which is like this mega patriots organizing channel on telegram. Nominally, these mega typespes typically say that they are, you know, not for Nazis, they are against Nazis, they are against pedophiles,

and yet they are associating with Witt here, who employs a pedophile and is a Nazi. But one other thing that Hank said that I wanna reiterate is that Kuss Bay is also a contested space. Although there is this intense far-right power grab happening, there's also a contested space. Although there is this intense far-right power grab happening, there's also a whole bunch of other much more positive activism. Hank pointed to the tribal communities fighting for

indigenous sovereignty as well as environmentalist groups calling BS on the ports greenwashing of all their projects. So it's not just that like everyone's Nazis now in Coos Bay. Yes, Witt is a Nazi and people should be concerned about that, but it is a contested space home to a diverse group of people who are also fighting for good things. We're now going to have an ad break and then return to talk more about White Lives Matter Oregon. Okay we are back. And Alex, you said you wanted to add something on this point about Kuzbe being a contested

space. Yeah, I think one thing that is important to just like throw on to what Hank is saying about Coos Bay as a contested space is like it's not entirely unheard of for neo-nazis to kind of try to do these projects of like moving a bunch of people to certain usually rural areas to You know try to take them over, you know, most notably like leaf, North Dakota where Craig Cobb tried to take over. But what I think has been shown really repeatedly is that these projects have failed because the communities that live there, even if they're rural communities, even if they're small towns, don't have it and are willing to fight back. And that's what we're really hoping to see from folks on the Oregon South Coast, being willing to push back against this sort of

thing like was done in Leith and forcing these people out of the institutions they're trying to inhabit. Yeah, and especially with someone like Michael here, because he's hiring people who advocate going much farther than White Lives Matter to actually engage in paramilitary training, hiring someone who is like, not just accused of being a pedophile, but has admitted to Michael that his family hates him because of an allegation that he's touched someone and that Michael himself witnessed this guy, Calhoun being quote unquote hands on with an eight year old girl while they were meeting

together in Cuspe. There's like that side of it. And then you have him like posting on Telegram about like wanting the day of the rope to come faster, kind of like an old like Nazi slogan about like racial lynchings and like furthering racial conflict, as well as like sharing instructions from the meme Waffen Telegram channel about how to make Maltav cocktails. I believe we've talked about meme Waffen on the show before. So he's like doing all of this type of stuff. It's like so much more obviously objectionable.

We're also trying to like make like space for himself within like the mega community, right? Being the admin of this Oregon Patriots Alliance telegram channel, which is like also an attempt just to like further the radicalization of these like mega centric members by like inundating them with more explicit kind of fascistic propaganda, but on like a slower level.

And then there are multi-million and multi-billion dollar government projects to improve the port that Witt is expected to receive funds from. And I feel like this is something that's pretty objectionable and it should be easy to stop, but it requires like attention and it requires a degree of public pressure to make sure that the government, both state and federal, are not giving funds to an explicit neo-Nazi who hires alleged pedophiles to fund right-wing activism across the Pacific Northwest. Yeah, totally. And I think it's important to point out too, Kuzbe is in this process. They have the intermodal port of Kuz Bay, which is like a $2.3 billion project where they want to become like, you know, they want to be as big of a port as Oakland,

California or whatever. And, you know, one of the things, I mean, my understanding from talking to folks in Coos Bay is that it's just greenwashed capitalism that will be destructive to the environment. It won't actually bring the community the kind of like, people are like, what about bike lanes? There's like community infrastructure people want in Coos Bay and dredging the port is not that, you know, and I think there's also like a couple examples of that is it will destroy eelgrass, which is a really important marine habitat and also source of storage carbon. It'll destroy indigenous cultural resources or impact those spaces. And you know, WIT, we haven't seen the exact financials yet for what this project will be, but it's a $2.3 billion project that involves

dredging, you know, which is sort of deepening and widening the port and the channels. And we know that WIT has gotten money, for example, to work on the state dredge and do work on it. So I think it's very possible that Witt would be, until the port takes a stand and says, hey, we're not funding this Nazi who uses his work truck to do Nazi stuff. I think people should be really concerned

about this port money going back to help build a Nazi community that he's trying to build there. Yeah. And like to your previous point, like the fact that he's able to be so flagrant about his rights from his sister beliefs, the way that he doesn't feel like he needs to care about OPSEC because he has a job that's like irreplaceable, like he provides a service to this community that he feels like no one else can do.

Therefore he is secure in that. Like you can't allow them that level of comfortability. And that's something that has to be like opposed to do to both like public pressure and research that like you have done as well as the crucial work from Corvallis and Tifa. Yeah. You know, I think just to add to like, like groups like the Oregon, Oregon's Bay Area, which is like a popular Facebook group, has been doing a really great job like raising, just talking about wit and what's going on. I think largely we really

haven't seen much response from the Port of Coos Bay or the governor who's confirming these commissioners. Like largely the sort of institutions of power are not yet responding. And so I think that's something that both local folks in Coos Bay could be pressuring and also at a statewide level, right? Like this is state funding and the port of Coos Bay development has federal funding too. But I think those are places where there could really be a lot more pressure being applied. And I think a lot more people should be talking about all of this as well as we mentioned earlier you know what Witt claims to have a reputation and work and contracts all up and down the entire west coast so certainly if there are listeners in here in oakland or alaska or washington or wherever you might be who know the name Witt Gaten Vine or Witt Industries and you want to send in a tip to Corvallis Antifa or whatever, left-to-right watch, we

would be really happy to hear what you know about this guy because we know he's working in other communities which we would love details or any tips folks may have. Yeah, would either of you like to kind of add anything else before we close out and point people towards both your work and where to send information to? Yeah, I guess the thing that else before we close out and point people towards both your work and where to send information to? Yeah, I guess the thing that I would just close out with is WLM is not just an Oregon problem, it's a national problem. I know this podcast reaches folks all across the country. If you are somebody who is Antifa curious or is interested in making a difference in

your community? It's a group with really terrible security culture and it might be worth taking a gander at that and then you know God, it feels so silly to do a podcast plug, but please check out our work at cvantifa.noblogs.org We're also on Twitter at cvagainstfash and Instagram at also on Twitter at CV against bash and Instagram at CV Antifa. And you know, we have lots of articles exposing neo Nazis in Oregon and across the country. And you might just find somebody in your community who sucks. Hank? Yeah, I'll just add, you know, if you want to see the the of course, the Left Coast Right

Watch article gives a really deep dive on wit and also information for public use has posted like the financials. So if you really want to like get into the numbers it's worth looking there. And yeah just to reiterate I mean I think Kuzbe and so many other places are really contested spaces and I think these Nazis want us to believe that they're in charge and that they're powerful and they have this idea that they can operate with impunity and it's really not true. Like we've seen small and rural towns take down Nazis all over this country and I think that will continue and I think that yeah like what tactics and ways people might do that

in from place to place can look different but I just you know encourage folks to dig into your local Nazis and get together and figure out how to mess them up. It's a good way to have fun with your friends and we can do it. We need to be doing it. I mean, there just shouldn't be state money going to help a Nazi build a white supremacist utopia. I mean, that's the history of this country, right?

Like, that's the history of colonization. That's the history of Oregon specifically. So, yeah, it's a time to do something else. Yeah, and Antifa isn't just for you big city folk, you know? Those of us that live in rural communities can and should be involved in these struggles, and it is something that, like, is not just something that

happens in Portland. People in rural Oregon are doing anti-fascism and will continue to do it and will continue to win. Thank you both so much. I will leave links to your orgs and your articles in the description below. Thank you for listening and yeah if you are Antifa curious, give it a shot. It is indeed done Welcome I'm Danny Threll. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by I Heart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

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now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. What's Brett, my cavernous? I'm Robert, and this is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here. With me today is Sophie Lichterman and Mia Wong. We're gonna be talking about a guy who is near and dear to my heart because the second to the last conversation I ever had with my mom was about Brett Kavanaugh. Mia, what are we gonna learn today?

Oh boy. Oh my God. Have you done the What's Brett-ing my cavena before? Like I'd I know I'm certain I haven't why would I have? I don't know it felt oddly familiar. So if he has somebody let me know. Thank you. Yeah tell us the good and the bad. Yeah we already know the ugly. Yeah. I'm body shaming Brett Kavanaugh. Yeah, that's right, motherfucker. That's right, motherfucker. Hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe He has a sweet gig for life. Yeah, he's set.

He's set, bro. Yeah. Yeah. He sucks so bad that even like, you know, Midwest dads hate him. So at least there's that. Yeah, he's really rancid. And so I think the place to start with this actually is not with Kavanaugh, but with Trump, because what we're talking about today is a thing that we kind of knew was true, but didn't know the extent of until now Which is that the supposed FBI investigation into everything that Brett Kavanaugh did was?

Like fake and deliberately fucked by Trump Specifically like this is wrong specifically told them to just like not do the investigation and so they didn't do the investigation and nothing happened This is the sort of how we got confirmed. And I think the interesting thing about this partially is because I hate Brett Kavanaugh. He sucks. He's the worst guy. A real dick. Yeah, but I think the other thing about him is like, I feel like everyone has forgotten what it was like to live under Trump. I agree. Because there was just so much shit happening all the time like every single every single day It was like a new one of these things and I want to go back to what like one week of Trump was like because every single fucking week was like this and it was the most miserable thing

So who is Brett Kavanaugh? He's one of the nine assholes who get to decide whether we all have rights For people who've sort of forgotten his background. So he's like an old old Like 90s era kind of like protege of the 90s republican ghouls He's like one of the people who helps ken star do the like monica luinsky trial Like he's a he's involved in a whole bunch of sort of like Republican rat fucking operations he's also and I think this one's actually important to remember is a co-op to the election Cavanaugh was part of the legal team that helped Bush do the original stop the steal in 2000 just like straight up

stole the election in Florida love that these guys keep getting jobs as opposed to I don't know getting the punishment for treason. And he's only 59 years old. Yeah. He's so young for that job. We have like 40 more years of him. If you ever wanted like a clear reason why we shouldn't do things, like the death penalty for treason, it's because when people commit treason, nothing happens to them. And when people, I don't know, agitate for Puerto Rican independence, they get executed. Like that's what happens with those laws.

Just bad. Avoid laws existing. Yeah, and especially avoid all of your laws being dictated by a bunch of fucking serial predators. And this gets us to, so Kavanaugh's appointment was very, very close. The Republicans at the time, they controlled the Senate, but they had a 52 to 48 margin. And a lot of those kind of marginal senators were like, not- There was, there was a more realistic chance of it

not happening then typically yeah but they still fucked it in the end oh yeah 100% course but you know the reason the reason why it was close is as I think most people probably remember Kavanaugh is a serial sexual predator he has sexually assaulted so many fucking people people saw him do it there were times when he was the only fucking person there who did there were times we did in crowds He definitely 100% did it and if he wants to fucking sue me about it like I'll see you in court Motherfucker and and while we're here Clarence Thomas also a predator. Oh, yeah, we're gonna get to that Let's be clear here like if we're doing an Olympics of predators Clarence Thomas is up in the number one spot Brett Kavanaugh is down in place three, you know Thomas is is is a much much more I don't know

expansive predator Yeah, there were some belief at the time in this is sort of like every single article about this I talked about how this is peak me too But it is sort of important that like this way it was a real possibility that he was going to go down in flames Yeah, it has happened before it can happen again and it was a Real issue for him. It was a real issue for him in large part because christine blasey ford Who's a psychology professor just like testified under oath in one of the most like fucking harrowing?

Things i've ever seen on on the floor of the most like fucking harrowing things I've ever seen on on the floor of the Senate. Horrific. Yeah, the thing that stuck with me was it like he was laughing while he did it. It's just like this guy is a fucking monster. I mean, one of the things that you do have to take into account is that like the media infrastructure that whirled up to defend Brett Kavanaugh to ensure that this didn't take him down existed in part because

About a third of right-wing media like about a third of that whole infrastructure system exists because of the Clarence Thomas hearings Yeah, like that and Nixon's resignation being forced are kind of the two two inciting incidents of modern conservative media Those were the things that made them really commit to the idea that like we have to build a completely separate ecosystem of facts. Because if we let reality in at all, like our guys who are all sex predators and criminals will never be able to win or stay in office.

Yeah. Yeah, and also, I mean, it's worth noting too that like Roger Ailes, who is like one of the people responsible for building all this infrastructure was also himself just a surreal predator on a like frankly incomprehensible scale yes, and so all these people were also just defending themselves because they also are all Fucking their own sometimes miniature Cavanaugh's sometimes worse Cavanaugh's Uh-huh and it into this sort of breach, right? This is a real PR crisis for the Republicans. This is going even worse for them than the last time that they fucking did this, which

was as we've alluded to when they got Clarence Thomas on and when Joe Biden personally helped railroad Anita Hill to make sure that she would get fucked when she tried to testify against Clarice Thomas So that's great incredible stuff There was a point in our nation's history where that was actually like a political problem for Joe Biden We're fucking no longer there anymore and into this breach steps What's supposed to be an FBI investigation? Yeah? Ostensibly yeah, so so I'm gonna read from a recently released report There's gonna be I'm gonna quote from this report a lot because this is this is the sort of new information that we have

Where can people see the report? It will be in the description if you just like search Sheldon Whitehouse report you should be able to find it. There'll be a link in the notes. Yeah, we'll link it Yeah, it's like it's like 30 pages It's actually not their base more like 20 pages because like a bunch of the murder citations So it's a pretty easy read. I'm gonna read some of it And also I do want to point out the fact that the Senate Senate Judiciary Committee member who wrote this thing is named Sheldon Whitehouse Incredible name

That is a great name Where does that come from that can't be a name. That can't be a name that existed before the White House, right? Like, it has to have at some point been named after the White House, right? Why else would you have that name? Well, it could just be that this family historically lived at a White House for 700 years. You'd have to be in a White House for a long ass time to get that last name. So, here's from the report, quote, after hearing the testimony by Ford and Cavendall, the Judiciary Committee agreed to request the FBI to conduct a supplemental background investigation, quote,

limited to current credible allegations against Cavendall before the full Senate voted on his confirmation. And so there's an important detail here that wasn't clear to anyone at the time because fucking no one knows how the minutiae of FBI investigations work. But this was not actually a full FBI investigation. This is this is something called a like supplemental background investigation. And we'll get into what exactly that is in a second, but it's not like a real FBI investigation and This investigation does What it was supposed to do which was you know clear?

Cavanaugh's name and off Republican senators to be able to vote for him without immediately getting destroyed politically What it didn't do was like actually conduct an investigation, right? Trump very famously at this time. time says that the investigation had quote free reign and it unbelievably did not. Bullfucking shit. Yeah, he just lied about this. Like, yep. Yeah, the administration directly ran the investigation, killed it, and then used its political power and the FBI itself to, you know, illegitimately railroad a serial predator, run it to Supreme Court to take away everyone's rights to get an abortion. And then after that, they stonewalled the investigation for six years.

So this is how that sort of process worked. I'm going to quote from that report again. Third, although the Trump administration and the FBI assured the Senate that the FBI's investigation was being conducted, quote, by the book, they failed to disclose that there was actually no, quote no quote unquote book at all. The FBI produced no written records for supplemental background investigation saying it was merely acting as the quote agent

for the White House in such matters. But which White House? Was it Sheldon White House? Sorry. No, unfortunately White House bad, the one with the president. Oh, the bad White House, yeah. By the way, I was trying to the one with the president. Oh the bad White House. Yeah, by the way I was I was trying to debunk his last name

He comes from the longest line of nepotism of that held I was like I was like Oh, they must have gotten named that back when like the fact that they had a house at all was no Yeah, these people have paint it literally kept going. I was like, okay, one level, okay, two levels, okay, three levels, okay, four levels, okay, when does it end? And then I got bored. And the funny part about this again is that like, this is the good guy in this story.

Oh, I know. Is this like, nepo baby, like, infinite like, corruption guy. Junior senator of Rhode Island, yeah, okay. Yeah, and I wanna kind of focus in on this statement in and of itself because this is just like an absolutely hideous a view of just like the hideous power of the unitary executive just do whatever the fuck it wants. Like, what do you mean that the FBI produced no written protocols for how they're supposed to do supplemental background investigations? What do you mean that they were quote acting as an agent for the White House?

What? That's bat shit. Why do your security services literally directly answer to one guy who could just tell them what to do whatever the fuck he wants? That's insane. That is a, that is a fucking, that is a deranged political system. And yet this is, you know, this is, this is the system that's supposed to be doing this stuff, which is also very funny because White House is like, not really trying to get into a feud with the FBI. So there's a lot of kind of like a sculpatory stuff with the FBI. But like also everything the FBI does in this is such a fiasco that it's very clearly like also very much their fault. I'm going to read another quote from this.

This is from a bit later in the report. Fourth, the FBI's tip line was not used to facilitate the FBI's supplemental background investigation into the allegations against Kavanaugh. On instructions from the White House, the FBI did not investigate thousands of tips that came through the FBI's tip line. Instead, all tips related to Kavanaugh were forwarded to the FBI's tip line. Instead, all tips related to Cavanaugh were forwarded to the White House without investigation. If anything, the White House may have used the tip line to steer FBI investigators away

from derogatory or damaging information. Which is, again, absolutely nuts. Insane. And like, yes, so this is this is the kind of thing that like should be serious crime, right? Like yeah that you go you get locked up for forever. Like this is a forever crime Yeah, it seems much more serious than I don't know robbing a bank to try and fund the Puerto Rican independence movement Yeah, it's not clear to me whether this would have been a giant scandal for a normal administration Just because the American presidency has so much power But it should have been like this was just like a thing that would happen every week

under Trump was like he would just do shit like this mm-hmm you know also what you should do shit like I don't know that was not my best pivot no no but but dude do shit like yeah like like these products and services that support the podcast We are back. We've gotten to the point where again the FBI's tip line is not actually being used in the investigation. They're sending it all to the White House. The report found that so the FBI like and they talked about this public at the time.

They talked to 10 people who they said had like direct knowledge of the situation, but again, they only talked to 10 people and There is a whole bunch of people who had very relevant evidence about a lot of important stuff in this like so one of the one Of the claims that's going on here is that Cavanaugh was just wasted all the time And this is like every single person you talk to who knew Cavavanaugh in college and isn't like directly employed by the Republican Party was like, oh yeah, this guy was wasted all the time. Right. And this became a big part of the trial. And there were a whole bunch of people who tried to go to the FBI to be like, hey, he did this. And they just like would not talk to them. People who tried to come forward, like they wouldn't talk to people who sent them information to the tip line they just like didn't talk to them at all I'm gonna

I'm gonna read from the thing again according to a quote executive summary of the FBI supplemental background investigation issued by the Judiciary Committee majority the majority of that time was Republican majority so that's why it's fucked these people were, all witnesses with potential first-hand knowledge of the allegations. The FBI did not, however, interview Ford or Kavanaugh, the witnesses potentially with the most first-hand knowledge, nor did it speak to other potentially corroborating witnesses who had not witnessed the events first-hand. Nevertheless, the Judiciary Committee's Republicans Executive Summary concluded that the, quote,

supplemental background investigation confirms there is no Cooperation of an allegations made by dr. Ford and mr. Miras So they didn't talk to either Cavanaugh or Ford the two people who the thing was about well I mean, you know, why would you need to do that, right? I What the fuck This is so insane! Another part of this is that the FBI's initial background check didn't turn up any of this and so the supplemental thing is being done in place of the normal background check because the normal background check was also done like shit

so they never figured out any of this incredibly obvious stuff about him. And meanwhile, the supplemental one, they just kept being like, oh, well, we don't actually like need to talk to the people who this is about for incredibly nebulous reasons. And the other part of this is going on is that like, while this process is happening, the Democrats on the judiciary committee are trying to figure out how this process works. And Trump just like refuses to talk to any of them. And the FBI refuses to fucking send any of them. People are fighting out like, we know that there's no specific process for this like supplemental investigation thing because like their staffers found it out from a YouTube

video. Jesus. Like they did not find this out from the FBI. It was like this guy's senators staffers were like watching YouTube videos to figure out how this investigation was supposed to work. So and it turns out we had known at the time that the FBI was doing some kind of shady stuff, but what we know now is that so Ford and her lawyers repeatedly tried to talk to the FBI and they were just never able to do so right.

The FBI completely stonewalled them. And it turns out that they stonewalled them because Trump specifically ordered the FBI not to talk to her or Kavanaugh. What? What? Which is absolutely insane. Yeah. I love the law. It turns out, and this is the part of this is the most insane, right? Everyone thought that the FBI was just doing a normal FBI investigation, right? And part of what's going on here is that the media is just these like absolute credulous idiots, right? Because every single day the media is reporting that like Trump is allowing an open investigation because like somehow again This is this is like two years into him being in office, right?

None of these people have figured out that every single thing he says is a lie They're all like, oh, yeah Trump keeps saying that these people can talk to whoever they want and they can investigate whoever they want and this gets to the point Where the FBI is calling the White House every day because They'll be reading the news reports that say we can talk to anyone and they'll be like hey you told us we can't talk To these people and they'll be like no no you actually you still can't talk to these people And it turns out that what's happening is just like quote-unquote supplemental investigation. It's not an FBI investigation They can only do things that are like quote-unquote directed by the president

so they can only talk to the people who the president tells them to talk to. And they can't look at evidence that the president doesn't tell them to look at. And so what ends up happening is that like, you know, there's initially like four people that they're supposed to be talking to, right? And, you know, they keep getting these like press things that are like, oh, hey, this is an open investigation. You can like do whatever you want. And eventually they put in like six more people.

So like they talked to 10 total people. But because this is an investigation that is not being run by the FBI, really, it's being it's being directly ran by Trump himself, which he's lying about. Because of that, they fucking never talked to anyone. And then also, again, as we talked about, about right that that tip line they set up a bunch of people who tried to talk to the FBI who the FBI wouldn't talk to Were like told okay go submit stuff to this tip line and the FBI later admits that the tip line was like never real Sure have a nice fake tip line. Yeah, they never use any of the investigation. They they sent it all the Trump

Yeah, and the reason they did it was that they were sick of people calling their regular tip line so they set up a specific tip line so they could just have all the stuff they would never listen to and instead just send to the White House so they could do I guess like oppo research bullshit on it so this is just straight up a sham there's no actual investigation going on The media people at the time should have been able to figure out that obviously this thing was bullshit, right? But nobody looked into it except for this one guy on the Senate history committee. And so this report comes back and goes like, yeah, we did no research. We talked to like 10 people and we didn't like ask them anything and we didn't use any of the research that we had and we have cleared this guy. As this

is happening, right, the the Judiciary Committee Democrats are like trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. And this begins a a six-year process of a Senator White House just fighting a war with the actual White House and the FBI and the DO day to try to figure out what the fuck just happened and The interesting part of this also is that so obviously the Trump administration was never gonna talk to them, right? It is of itself incredibly disturbing that like the Senate Judiciary Committee who in theory is one of the organizations That's supposed to be doing oversight of the FBI would send requests to the FBI for information. The FBI would just tell them to fuck off Yeah I would send requests to the FBI for information the FBI would just help him to fuck off. Yeah But the interesting part is they kept doing this under Biden. So Biden's FBI was also doing this

Which fucking liberals like have concluded politically at least that they have to be as like vociferously pro law enforcement As they can and all cops ever do is say we are just waiting for the chance to kill you like It's great cool good stuff. I'm gonna realign from this. It's so insane When the senators followed up they faced the challenge of aligning FBI DOJ and White House equities So they sent like request for for the emails between Trump and the FBI right to figure out whether Trump was doing the thing He was doing which was like directly running the emails between Trump and the FBI, right? To figure out whether Trump was doing the thing he was doing, which was like directly running the investigation himself.

The FBI claimed it cannot answer without authorization from the DOJ and the White House. The DOJ directed the senators' inquiries to the White House and the FBI, and the White House referred the senators back to the agencies. So they're doing this like they're doing the like the circular run-around thing you get from your insurance company, where they tell you to talk to three people and every single one of them tells you to talk to the other one but but again this is the Biden DOJ the Biden FBI and the Biden administration all doing this the FBI finally provides documents about like their contact with Trump for the investigation they finally provide the documents in November of 2023. This investigation started in late 2018. It took half

a decade, almost half of which was under the Biden administration. And also, Senator Whitehouse literally threatening to torpedo a nomination for the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel. Like he had to threaten the Department of Justice in order to get them to send the documents that proved that Trump colluded to stop the Kavanaugh investigation, which even just from like a political standpoint from the Democrats, right? Why the fuck would you not want that in the open? I mean, I guess I guess unless you're Joe Biden, you don't want ever remembering like all the shit you need to need a hill. But like, this is literally free political ammunition of your opponent

like abusing the political process and it still took a Democratic senator just directly threatening the DOJ of a Democratic administration to get this out. I just like it also took so many years like yeah Kavanaugh has has been able to take away and fuck up our rights since what, 2018, 2019? Yeah. And the damage he's done is permanent. Yeah. He will be around in office, possibly very likely for most of the rest of our lives.

Yeah. Like I said earlier, he's only 59 years old. Yeah, he could have another 30 years there at least. Yeah, and if this stuff had been known, she absolutely would not have gotten nominated, right? There were two unbelievably close votes to get him appointed, right? There was a first vote where the Republican straight-up bypassed the filibuster and still almost lost. And it turns out that, okay, the actual final vote ended up being 50 to 48 with two abstentions.

And one of the abstentions was because this guy was going to his daughter's wedding or something. But the other abstention was Lisa Murawski, who's the senator from Alaska, who's like the most sort of liberal Republican senators. And she does like a coward president vote so it can happen. And if she had voted no, and if Joe Manchin hadn't fucking cross party lines to get to get him in office which I think also people just forget about Joe Manchin that he he is also like individually specifically the guy who got fucking Kavanaugh appointed this would have failed

and the only reason that it didn't fail and that this guy was able to fucking destroy Roe v Wade it didn't fail and that this guy was able to fucking destroy Roe v. Wade is that Trump just straight-up ran a fake FBI investigation and lied to everyone about it and Fucking railroaded the nomination through that that's fucking Cavanaugh And I think I think the clothes on here again is like every single week of Trump is just like this Yeah, right like every single day has some bullshit like this. It just like fucks everyone for the rest of their lives. And it's deeply grim that he could take power again and we could get back to like the stuff he was doing at the end of his administration,

where he was just like having protesters killed with federal marshals. Yeah, that's the scary thing about it, right? Is there's not any kind of like functional resistance to this, right? The left has no power, has no serious organizing capacity in the United States and can't get on the same page about anything that matters. Whereas liberals, when they have four years of control of the federal government, cannot adequately prosecute and attempt to overthrow the government

and murder them. So I don't know. Make sure you got clean water, folks. Check on that garden. I don't know what to tell you. It's just so bleak because like I said earlier, everything is so permanent. Yeah. You know what I mean?

It just lasts so fucking long. Yeah. It lasts so permanent. Yeah. You know what I mean? It just lasts so fucking long. Yeah. It lasts so long. And like, we don't even know the damage that Kavanaugh is going to do to our society because of Trump. And it's also just terrifying that, you know, Trump was able to manipulate the system in this way, and that so many people were silenced and now our rights are gone. Yeah. Or our rights are going to be taken away. We have no idea what

else is gonna be taken. Yep. We have no idea what else is gonna get fucked up. We have it we have ideas. We have ideas. Again, the problem is that the root of the problem is that liberals work tirelessly in this country to stop the left from gaining any power and the left works tirelessly to stop itself from having any kind of influence by having no capacity to organize or compromise with people who do not agree with whatever their little brand of leftism is, right? Whereas conservatives are willing to work together with other conservatives they hate for 40 straight years in order to get us to the position that we're in.

That's what happened is they had message discipline, they had organizing discipline, and they successfully pushed their madness into the mainstream in such a way that now the Democratic Party in a lot of ways is expending a huge amount of its efforts on moving in the direction of that madness, especially as regards immigration. Look at where we've moved on immigration from 2016 to 2024. That is the result of disciplined power building as opposed to what liberals and the left do, which is fight with each other and fight amongst each other and engage in a mix of like craven power politics and worshipping various con artists.

And the right worships con artists too, they just actually get power out of the deal. Yeah. And just like the other terrifying thing about this story is that it's not fucking everywhere. It's not everywhere. Ten years ago, this would be the scandal of all scandals. And it's barely a barely a headline. No, because no one's gonna do anything about it. It's like it's like Elon Musk paying people a million dollars a day to vote in Pennsylvania. Like, yeah, that should be illegal. Like, you can at least

make a strong case based on existing laws. But that is election interference. The kind of which that can land you in prison. Everyone knows nothing's going to happen to him. Yeah, nothing's going to happen to him if Kamala wins. Right. If the dims have a blowout and wind up with both houses of Congress, nothing is going to happen to Elon Musk. It's yeah. Again, just like we have no idea how how long this is going to go on and how much worse it could get and

Yeah, I have some ideas, but I podcasted about those back in 2019 selfie I was quite literally there. Yeah, but yeah, so Thanks Mia. That was a bummer. Thank you, Mia. No, this was good. This is solid and a bummer. Again, when I started this by saying my last, second to the last conversation I had in person with my mom was about Kavanaugh. It was her almost screaming at me because of how unfair what the Democrats did to Brett Kavanaugh was because of the good man that they, and she felt the same way about Clarence Thomas right that like these guys were the victims of media Assassination attempts she felt the same way about Bill Cosby by the way anyway, whatever. I don't need to yell about my mom

I've yelled about enough this episode. Well tomorrow's episode will be more fun. I promise We're gonna we're gonna yell about how why the econ develop prizes fake and read some of the dumbest things you've ever seen in your life Hell yeah, there we go. There we go back to the good stuff back to the good stuff Yeah, Mia's been deeply excited to do this episode. Look look out for that one and I don't know touch grass and pet a dog if it wants you to yeah Yeah, bye! Dear Ydreho, won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by I Heart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters......to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturne, Tales from the Shadows, as part of my Kultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. John Stewart is back in the host chair at The Daily Show, which means he's also back in our ears on The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. The Daily Show podcast has everything you need to stay on top of today's news and pop culture.

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I'm Jack Pease Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works, while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeart

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Listen to the How to Do Everything podcast on iHeartRadio. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex positivepositive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson-Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture

in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. No bell prize. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about Nobel prizes, I guess. I'm your host,o Vogue with me with me is James

Hi, I'm here excited to hear about the dynamite guy prizes Yeah So as people I think are aware the the man who invented dynamite Established a bunch of prizes to be like the pinnacle of human achievement right every year It's decided on a bunch of judges and you know in this year in the Nobel Prize in physics right? Nobel Prize in physics went to two guys who did a whole bunch of the sort of fundamental basic work on what became machine learning algorithms and as as annoying as modern AI is like machine learning algorithms has fundamentally

changed the way that science works it changed astronomy I've used it I use new astronomy like there's all this you know it has fundamentally changed the way that humanity functions yeah it's an there's all this you know it has fundamentally changed the way that humanity functions Yeah, it's an important discovery Yeah, and you know the Nobel Prize in medicine went to a group of people who discovered micro RNA which is like a different type of RNA that Fundamentally changed the way that we understand how like gene regulation works That we understand how like gene regulation works This is like a fundamental path breaking thing in biology

They got that they got the fucking medicine to what price for the no one price in economics went to three guys who discovered that institutions affect prosperity huge groundbreaking shit groundbreaking shit it's like economists don't discover shit they just say shit

and then other economists are like yeah cool this is ok when i was originally planning this episode this is going to be an episode about the fake Nobel Prize which is the economics Nobel Prize which we talked about in the show before but it's worth saying again this is not a real Nobel Prize like this is not one of the prizes that was established

by Alfred Nobel This was a thing established by the the Swedish Central Bank as a way to push neoliberal economics classical economics and Every year they're always very stupid is the thing right and and my plan for this episode I started seeing stuff about this noble prize, and I was looking at this And I was like this is the this is the one of the dumbest ones They've had since they gave out one in the 2000 thousands for realizing that people could simply not make a trade like

I was like, okay, I'm gonna go read all of these papers, right? We're to come back We're gonna have a detailed analysis of it and I'm reading these papers and it's like it's nothing These three economists are there from what's called institutional economics These are supposed to be the smart ones, right? These are these are the economists that like the neoclassical economists have to bring in Like the normal neoclassical economists have to bring in because their models don't work right and the thing and the thing that makes them like quote unquote smart is that they understand the institutions exist and they know how to use really really basic game theory models and

Exists and they know how to use really really basic game theory models And this makes them like the cutting edge the absolute elite cutting edge of virtual economics They're on the front lines. What have these people discovered? What do you see will win this prize for right? Okay, the thing that they won this prize for like the initial thing There's a couple of stuff that we'll get to you in a second But like the big thing that they they figured out out is do a series of thunderously stupid regression analyses. They discovered something, I don't even know how to frame the magnitude of this discovery, but it took them a shit ton of math and like a bunch of like tabulations of mortality data to discover that in some places European colonial powers form settler colonies and in some places they established colonial rule that wasn't based on settler colonies and that these were different This is what they won the Nobel Prize for they did a bunch of regression analyses and we're like holy shit

In some places the Europeans did settler colonies and in some places didn't, and it had to do with like disease and a level of Redistance from the indigenous population. They won a Nobel Prize in Economics for this! Are you fucking kidding me? Also a paper that you could write for my history 110 class at a community college Okay, so some of the discourse about this, right? The Marxist economist, Sharama czar pointed out that like these fundamental observations were made by another guy we've talked about on this show, the renegade Marxist economist, Paul Buran.

And that's a good point. But also what I was thinking about how to do this episode, right? This isn't a thing like with like Donald Harris, like we talked about Kamala Harris's dad's book, right? And that's a book where there's like ideas in it, right? You can go through it and you can watch him developing ideas. You can't do that with this because these people are not developing ideas. They have discovered the most obvious things. They have read a single book about history,

and they have attempted to use a bunch of regression analyses to prove things that, like, you can just read a Wikipedia article and discover about the course of colonization. Yeah, and then you can go back and do a bunch of regression analyses to prove something that everyone already knew. Yeah, and the place that I got to about this was, I have this joke about Maoism, where all the things that people get from Maoism are things that you should have learned in elementary school

Like one of the most common things you get from Maoist is like you have to read no investigation No right to speak and like my friend, okay If you needed Mao Zedong to tell you that you needed to research something Before you talked about it What the fuck happened in here like? What's wrong with your life? What were wrong with your education like what what has gone wrong with the way you think about the world that you needed? Bows a dung you can tell you this

This is this is what most noble prizes in economics are and this is the most that it has ever been Yeah, so so basically their argument is that like this is also an argument that Paul Baran makes Is that like okay depending on whether you're dealing with a settler colony or a a sort of like India style Like administrative colony, I guess I don't like a technical term for it I guess like an extractive colony where you're more about extracting labor and more raw materials and settling Yeah, like that changes the kinds of institutions that are set up and like okay You can if you want to credit Paul Baran for the discovery that Like settler colonies and like extractive colonies have different

Legal institutions and they function differently and that has had long-range economic impacts like stretching into the future But like this is something again that you could you could just you can find in a history book and immediately Understand and these people have tried to do this They're trying to like track the difference in why we're like some colonies more prosperous leaders and other colonies, right? They're trying to track this process through a whole bunch of incredibly sketchy regression analyses and weird assumptions about what income is. They're trying to track, like, why was it that, like, China and Turkey were, like, rich in the 1500s, but they ceased to be rich after that?

Oh, sick! They're doing a fucking Jared Diamond. Yeah, they're doing a West and the rest. Yeah, yeah, it's one of a Jared Diamond bullshit, except, doing a West and the rest yeah, yeah, it's wonderful. I am bullshit except you know with China Standard of living in Europe if you actually go back to the historical record and aren't doing their like stupid weird Like using population density as an index for stuff with a they're bringing Malthus into it If you don't do that and you look at like the actual like historical record like the average quality of life in China like is not eclipsed by Europe until like the mid 1800s. Yeah, like You know, so like this is all this is all like very even then like life expects in the mid-1800s

Didn't take decades to go up after the Industrial Revolution, right? Yeah, this is this is sort of drawing to what they're trying to do here, is that a lot of this is directly as a product of colonialism, right? And they sort of acknowledged that colonialism existed and that it was extractive, but their job is to take the basic insights of history and depoliticize it, right? We are going to get to later. One of the things they win this prize for is depoliticizing revolution,

turning revolution into like a Nash equilibrium game theory thing oh god which is unbelievable it's incredible yeah these are the kind of people who I have to deal with on a daily basis on listservs like these are the economists emailing the entire listserv with a unique insight into something that we all knew 30 years like the all faculty email list is plagued by this kind of individual Yeah, and like like this is a thing where so they're absolutely convinced that like like the 100% convinced that the thing that leads to economic prosperity is like the safeguarding of

individual property rights and like I Will give them a little tiny bit of credit where they're like, well, yeah So direct colonial institutions were extractive and they're bad because they infringe on property rights Yeah, that's mildly better than most of these people. Yeah These are these are these are again. These are the most advanced bushwalk economists, right? They're not they're not like pro-rhodesia and neoclassical guys, right? They do have a line where they say we're not going to say whether colonialism is good or bad And I think that's been misinterpreted a little bit because like in their work

They're pretty clear that it's bad. It is trying not to make like a moral judgment because God forbid Yeah, well they said they're saying it's extractive and they think that like extractions back is inefficient Yeah, but basically they think that like okay, so like if you set up like regimes that like safeguard private property this will like make People like richer, but I want to read a quote from one of the papers that wrote quote In comparatively poor and less dense populated regions where Europeans could easily settle it was in the colonizers interest to introduce Inclusive economic institutions that helped to boost prosperity for the majority in the long run Now! Now!

Fuck me! They didn't go on to say how like, yeah, but Britain built the railways in India Like this is one of these things right? What's happening here, you know, this is something that economists love to do Economists love to go into other fields and have to Colonize them right? Yes, like what they're doing here is there they've gone into like this field of history Yeah, and they're attempting to sort of colonize them, right? many such cases, yeah, and you know, they're looking at this stuff, right and

You know things like this where it's like no like the economic institutions that were set up in like settler colonies were not designed to like the economic institutions that were set up in like settler colonies were not designed to Introduce inclusive economic institutions to like help us boost the prosperity for the majority in the long run like that was the result of social struggle Yeah, but they for some reason basically think that social struggle started in like the 1880s Yeah, the Nobel like committee They're like econ fake econ Nobel committee like releases like a giant statement like there's like press summaries They have like a slightly more detail and they have like the econ II one and I want to read this From so the part of part of what they're doing right? You're talking about like the work that was inspired by this by the other but the understanding that like the different institutions change economic outcomes

quote better G and Iver 2005 examined the legacy of British land institutions in India that gave cultivators in certain regions to proprietary rights, including their productivity was higher in these regions post independence. Jenny Oli and Rainier and Michaelopoulos and Papa Ianu studied the impact of differences in political centralization along ethnic groups during pre-colonial times. Nunn documented the long-run negative impacts of the slave trade. Dell 2010, by the way, Nunn paper in 2008.

So we'll go back to that in a second. Dell 2010 investigated the long-run effects of the so-called Mita system, an operation between 1573 and 1812 in Bolivia and Peru, where men were forced to work in mines. Within the boundaries of Mita, household consumption was 25% lower in 2021 than just outside the boundaries. So, what they have discovered here, again, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, they discovered that slavery had long-run negative economic impacts on the places where there was slavery. Jesus Christ. Like...

Thanks for trying, guys. This is the shit that they gave these people a Nobel Prize for inspiring This is insane you're right economists do just love to tourist in someone else's discipline and like Fucking have the most basic insight possible. All of these are things that would be like an interesting undergraduate paper, right? Like, like, yeah. Insane that these people are getting Nobel Prizes for this. It's not insane, it's economics, but same difference, I guess. Alright, so speaking of economics, we need to go to ads.

Yeah, because there'll be a long-term detrimental consequence for us if we don't. But when we come back, there's some more unreal bullshit. We are back. Okay, so speaking of undergrad bullshit, one of the big things in their initial paper, they did the whole, oh my god, they discovered that there's a difference between settler colonies and extractor colonies. One of the big things in that paper was they spent a whole bunch of time looking into was it was the economic difference in These countries because of the climate Which now for those of you who are students of history, right?

The thing you will remember is that this this was like the most advanced race science theory of the early 1800s Yes, and these people are like the economists are finally getting around to busting this in like 2004. Have they ever looked at skull measurements? Because I feel like we're heading down that path. Like to econo-phrenology. It's so bad. Incredible. That was actually a whole thing where they had like racial

categorizations and like biological characteristics of like the races and they would use them to like determine allocated efficiency of which slaves you should use to do what? Oh cool. Cool cool cool cool cool. It was great. And by great I mean like holy fucking shit. It's so bad. Yeah. Oh was great. Am I great? I mean like holy fucking shit. It's so bad They just missed that time there those people could kick the shit out of a Nobel Prize in like 2025 they came back with that stuff Yeah, I get like you know I mean one of the things we were talking about right It's like they see you were mentioning is like if you do like these like such obvious insights I remember so I went to the University of Chicago, right?

And that means that I fucking know all of these fucking ghouls Like I bet all the people who are going to become these econ dipshits Yeah, you're a ground zero for that shit. One of the things that's funny Is that like this is like a particular thing of the University of Chicago You come people say they all think they can do math and they can't write they suck at it But one of the thing I was fun was like so much my friends are math majors and math majors can like actually do math Like they could do the kind of math. That's like There's no there aren't like numbers involved like it's like they're doing like field theory or some shit or like they're doing a kind

Of math that when someone tries to explain it to you They have to start like making diagrams of like the faces of cubes and then like explaining how there's like 32 dimensional edges or whatever and There's always this joke from the math professors Would they be mad because like they look at the economy will price and they'd be like this person made like an incredibly minor Optimization to a trading algorithm that's like incredibly obvious to anyone who even sort of knows math and they gave them a little price for this And this is that but for history Yeah, so the other thing that that they discovered right? God I I I'm trying to find the least depressing way to put this

They they discovered that there are revolutions and There are revolutions and They discovered that like there are different Interest groups at a revolution who have different interests and like like legitimately one of the things that they won this prize for is a paper where they they discovered that Giving people like the franchise I giving people the ability to vote and setting up the welfare state was something that was done by elites Stop revolutions Yeah Setting up the welfare state was something that was done by elites to stop revolutions Yeah Again, yeah

They have all these mathematical models that look very impressive until you realize they're just they're like incredibly stupid game theory bullshit to like Determine whether or not a country will do a revolution and their model for it basically is and you know They've discovered some some genuinely impressive insights for like a 16 year old who wants to go into political science. Right. Like, they discovered that, for example, elites have economic interests, and that those economic interests are different from masses. But because they're economists, the only way they can conceptualize this is in terms of tax rates. So, they make the argument, and this is not a joke, I am being serious about this, I read this fucking footnote.

They make the argument that the overthrow of Salvador Allende was about elite tax rates. Oh, that one is fucking like... Jesus wept. And it's so funny too, this is like one of of the biggest most obvious problems with their models, right? And this is this is this is from all the way back to like their whole thing about like how the institutions that were set Up by colonialists being different affected like the long-term trajectory of these countries They treat these entire process because like this one of the things that they've discovered is that there are revolutions and counter revolutions Because they read a Wikipedia article about like right-wing coups in Latin America and they discovered that elites can do anti-democratic coups because They don't want their taxes to be too high. That's the only reason they do it

Yeah But but their discovery of this right that that right wingers do anti-democratic coups to like preserve their wealth and political power, right? Yeah, but never at any point in their process does it seem to have occurred to them that elites are not purely single national figures and that there are in fact multinational elites and in fact there's something called the Central Intelligence Agency that does in fact hope these people do good. And this is like the fundamental core of this right?

These models talk about sort of like elite extraction right? But it's all framed through fundamental core of this right like these models talk about sort of like a lead extraction, right? But it's all framed through the language of sort of like you'd like taxes or like rents basically like They're making like land rent or like they're fighting over a surplus, right? Okay But what they're trying to do is De-politicize how this actually works because then you're trying to present is that all extraction happens through the state, right? Yeah, like the state is the tool that elites use and now if you think about this for about five seconds Well, like well, no, obviously like there's the exploitation in like the workplace. That's actually in the army military dictatorship That's actually like the primary place where extraction happens

Will you shoot all the union organizers and then you'd fucking force all the peasants to work in the fields and shoot them if they Don't right? But what they're doing is attempting to sort of depoliticize The deep lysis entire process. This is why I talk about like they are the most advanced bushwalk economists and Being the most advanced bushwalk economists. They have finally figured out that the whole they call it modernization theory That's not really what modernization, but they're economists. They're fucking stupid. They don't know anything. You can't judge them for not actually knowing what modernization theory is. But they finally discovered that the old line about how economic development inevitably brought democracy was wrong. Again, huge insight here. Yeah, but this

this brings them into the world of democratic transitions now After we come back from these ad breaks. I am going to read you the most thunderously stupid line I've ever read in a paper in my entire life, and that is fucking saying something given how many e-com papers I've read yeah, you've been in the trenches Okay Okay. Oh God. Let me read this slide. This is a quote from the econ noble prizes site. In their 2006 book, the two of the three economists made an ambitious attempt to provide quote the first systematic formal analysis of the creation and consolidation of democracy. The first... The first...

This is very funny. This is fucking insane. This is like an entire field of international relations and political science. This is shit. No, no, just like there were a lot of people who were like, oh, this is very funny. This is fucking insane. This is like an entire field of international relations of political scientists and shit No, no, there are literally multiple disciplines where this is an entire field of study Yeah, right like I I have rated they're like obviously this is an entire branch of political science This is an entire branch of international relations. This is an entire branch of sociology There's like there's like an anthropological school kind of that's about this interdisciplinary fucking Institute

So they just for this reason like this is shit that I studied from people who wrote books about it in the 1950s like this is like like you and the findings They are lit. They literally quote people who are writing about this The funny thing is they are lit. They literally quote people who are writing about this People have been studying this for fucking as long as there has been democracy people have been studying this shit Yeah, yeah, the econ thing that I always use like oh nobody ever did formal analysis for like have you ever fucking read? Yeah, have you read a poly side paper? I understand I too Dropped my public policy major the moment I realized that public policy was just fucking econ with the lines on the graph relabelled But like, have you ever fucking read one of these papers?

Like, you actually have a chance of understanding them because they are, you know, okay, I can't bet you mean to political science They are about 150 times more advanced than the econ papers on this subject But that's still not like a very high level of advancement Right, but like still they're like they have formal models of this they they've done all the stupid math bullshit the sociologists have done all the fucking number crunching like Okay, okay Here's another quote from this the authors start the paper by showing that democratic transitions are precipitated by falls in GDP per capita They discovered this in 2019! I was having Twitter arguments, like arguments again with like 16 year

olds on Twitter in like 2016 about what the relationship between revolutions and declining and raising living standards were like this was Twitter discourse, right? This is seven years after the Arab Spring. 2019! Insane! They discovered this. Yeah, do they do formal analyses of the Arab Spring, famously the first and only democratic transition that's ever happened?

No, that's like two reasons for them. All their stuff is what they call the quote the second wave of democratic transitions, which is not second wave at all They're just those idiots. So they're talking about the the pro-democracy movements in the 80s in Latin America and East Asia Great. Yeah, which they also just thunderously wrong about like all of the time Yeah, it's gonna say I can't wait to hear what they have to say about those I'm I'm literally not even gonna talk about it because it's nothing. It's just like air.

I'm just looking up a very insightful paper that Alika Deva wrote, who I've interviewed several times for different things. It's called Stick Stones and Molotov's Cocktails. Oh, that rules. And it is a fantastic analysis of democratic transitions. It's about like the strategic use of violence against property and the correlation it has between successful democratic transition movements.

Good paper, read that. Yeah, there's a lot of great like analysis. We'll put that in like the notes here. There's a lot of great analysis of this. But what they're trying to do is they're trying to build this model where they're like looking at like basically bargaining between like the masses and elites to decide whether to do a revolution or a counter revolution and they're trying to build this model where they're like looking at like, basically bargaining between like the masses and elites to decide whether to do a revolution or a counter revolution and they're trying to build like a game theory model based on like, fuck off the elites and

like give or hand in concessions and when they don't grant concessions and whether people believe they're going to grant concessions. The other thing that's also very stupid about this right is that like, the thing that they're interested in is why or why not people like believe that neoliberal economic reforms are going to work and a lot of democratic transitions are also about like resistance to that shit yeah like the revolution in Sudan for example like he is a pro-democracy movement but like it is also in large part a reaction to IMF and post structural reforms these people all think are good

and will like cause long-term prosperity and like a lot of the democratic Just they're talking about like like for example again Pinochet, right? like that was like, you know, I know like obviously that the pro-democracy reformers I did more neoliberalism but like a part of the big part of the reason like that stuff worked was because Pinochet ran the economy into the gradually Yeah, right, which is what he was there to do but yeah, but like I want to close it on two things one I want to read this line Mm-hmm, right from from talking about like the advances in their papers

This is again from the equitable prize thing Yeah quote in the earlier models the probability that the masses are successful when they stage a revolution is always won But this is a strong assumption that does not reflect real-world events very well they published a paper about how people make a decision to do a revolution this this was peer reviewed in an economics journal it's one of the papers that is cited in the fucking Nobel Prize they gave them they assumed that revolutions always succeed yeah, no bell prize And the second paper was the one they realized holy shit. That's not true Malter isn't it this is the kind of assumption that these absolute fucking morons make all of the time all of the fuck This is why they had to bring in the institutional columnist in the first place to bring this shit in right because like their basic

Models of how humans work were like every single human like sys that and calculates a fucking utility curve Yeah, figure out whether they're going to brush their hair in the morning was obviously not true That's what I had to bring in game theory in the first place, right? they make stupid assumptions like this literally all the time and Again, this is one of the ones they're making in one of the papers that was cited in here as a reason They want to know what price in economics. Yeah, I want to read this Molotov Cocktail's paper out to everyone. Here's a fun little sentence. An event history analysis finds that riots are positively associated with political liberalization

in 103 non-democracies from 1990 to 2004. Attacks by civilians on police stations during the January 25th Egyptian Revolution illustrate one way in which unarmed collective violence can bring about a democratic breakthrough. Incredible. Thank you. We love to see it. Great stuff. We love this. That's a pretty normal thing from like, I guess you would call it like the center left of like democratic tradition studies stuff, right? Yeah, it's a sociology paper. Yeah, that's like a pretty normal, it's like a good life, a good paper. This is from one of the books written by people who won the economics Nobel Prize Quote chapter 6 explains why several European countries have managed to build broadly participatory societies with capable But still shackled states our answer focuses on the factors that led much of Europe towards the corridor

During the early Middle Ages as Germanic tribes Especially the Franks came to invade lands dominated by the Western Roman Empire after its collapse We argue with a marriage of bottom-up participatory institutions and norms of Germanic tribes and the centralizing bureaucratic and legal traditions of the Roman Empire Forged a unique balance of power between state and society enabling the rise of the shackle of the vines oh god fuck me sorry this is so depressing i spent ten years getting a phd in history

and they've just given these people a nobel prize for like jordan peterson shit they have discovered like this is the thing these people have discovered the concept of history and they've read like four wikipedia articles and they've read like four wikipedia articles They have discovered Like this is like these people have discovered the concept of history Yeah, and they've read like four Wikipedia articles, and they've used those Wikipedia articles or start doing regression analysis Yeah, and this is this is what they want a Nobel Prize Yeah, this is yeah

fake Nobel Prize like again like you know in physics what you have to do to win a Nobel Prize is you have to make a prediction about the fundamental nature of the universe that can only be tested by building a fucking machine that can measure a vibration of gravitational waves which is a it has to be able to measure a ripple in the fabric of space-time that is smaller than the diameter of The fucking nucleus of an atom that is what you have to do to win the Nobel Prize in physics What you have to do to win the Nobel Prize in economics is

Realize that institutions affect prosperity affect prosperity? Jesus... I just cannot... So... This has been the Vibes Econ will prize episode I... I don't know

I hope this made your day slightly better because holy shit this is the fakest prize in the entire world. Shout out to the Economists, like I guess I'm eagerly awaiting you discovering some other shit from my 101 class. So feel free to sign up at any time if you want to get a Nobel

fucking prize in economics, I guess. All right. Well, this has been a kidnapping here. I will return. Yeah, next time they give the economics a prize for tying their shoes or something. Welcome, I'm Danny Drell. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by I Heart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shape-shifters

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturne, Tales from the Shadows, as part of My Kultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

John Stewart is back in the host chair at The Daily Show, which means he's also back in our ears on The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. The Daily Show podcast has everything you need to stay on top of today's news and pop culture. You get hilarious satirical takes on entertainment, politics, sports, and more from John and the team of correspondents and contributors. The podcast also has content you can't get anywhere else, like extended interviews and a roundup of the weekly headlines. Listen to The Daily Show, Ears Edition on the iHeart

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Don't Tell Me. Each week, we take your questions and find someone much smarter than us to answer them. Questions like, how do you survive the Bermuda Triangle? How do you find a date inside the Bermuda Triangle? We can't help you, but we will find someone who can. Listen to the How to Do Everything podcast on iHeartRadio. Curious about queer sexuality,

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and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. This is It Could Happen Here. Today I'm your host, Garrison Davis. And there sure has been a lot happening this past year. I am kind of feeling emotionally exhausted and just numb in general. It's a different feeling from the political desensitization that my job usually provides me. I'm frankly still recovering from attending the DNC, even more so than the RNC.

At the RNC I knew I was going to be walking through the pits of hell and despite the immense evil on display, the sideshow conspiracy theory freak nature of the event made it almost absurdly amusing. But the DNC kind of broke me. Between the infighting among Palestine protesters and the insistence from the official organizers, TM, to oppose any course of action that would actually disrupt the event or apply pressure to attendees, and instead just use the Palestine protests to promote their little socialist newspapers and political orgs. Meanwhile, inside the actual event, I was surrounded by some of the richest, most powerful

people I had ever been around, and just watching them maintain their Kamala is Brat party atmosphere at all costs and purposely blind themselves to the atrocities happening around the world, especially Gaza, was a deeply unsettling experience. These are supposed to be the, if not the good guys, at least the better guys or the less openly fascist guys. And like among the American right-wing's unprecedented focus and organized attack on trans rights, this was the first DNC since 2012 to not feature a trans speaker, and trans people were never directly mentioned during

the convention's primetime speaking slots. And now with the election ramping up and the southeast still recovering from two devastating hurricanes, Israel escalating tensions with Iran, and with the backing of the United States continuing strikes in Lebanon and Palestine, I am just feeling more lost and discombobulated than I have been in years. So to cheer myself up, I decided to go to a Charlie Kirk and Vivek Ramaswamy rally at Georgia State University. Now to some that may sound just completely batshit, or perhaps some form of bizarre self-harm, but look, I've been covering far-right rallies and writing about these weird conservative influencers

for years now. It's almost second nature to me. Going to these events can feel paradoxically relaxing. Even though it may trigger some stress, my body just kind of subconsciously knows what to do in environments like this. The RNC was so easy, it's like an autopilot just takes over. And so I thought going to this Turning Point USA event might help reset my brain by giving myself a simple task that I know I can excel at.

But before we get into all that, first, for those more fortunate than I, here's some background on Charlie Kirk, also known as the far right podcaster with the smallest face. As a teenager, back in 2012, Charles J. Kirk co-founded an organization for campus conservatives called Turning Point USA. And then in 2019, he founded a sister organization

called Turning Point Action, which focuses on elections and conservative political advocacy. Though initially more aligned with the so-called Alt-Light rather than the Alt-Right, Kirk has slowly moved farther and farther to the right during the past 10 years. And by 2020, he embraced

election fraud, COVID-19, and vaccine conspiracy theories. Also during 2020, he started his own podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show, which is now somehow ranked as the number 7 podcast for news in Apple podcasts. So that's not good. At this point, Charlie has kind of taken the place of, if not surpassed, the role that was previously occupied by Steven Crowder before his fall from grace stemming from his breakup with Ben Shapiro and the allegations of abusing his ex-wife. Through the Turning Point Action Organization, Kirk is more tied in with the actual mechanisms of the Republican Party than even the Daily Wire is. Just this past Wednesday, Turning Point Action hosted a rally for Trump in Duluth, Georgia,

just outside of Atlanta. Trump spoke at this event, and Tucker Carlson made a very fascist speech advocating to refuse the results of the election if Trump loses, and likening Trump to a quote unquote daddy figure needing to punish the country for being a quote unquote bad girl the past four years. It's a huge indictment against Americans' deeply Freudian politics. Now, the event that I attended on October 21st was a part of Charlie Kirk's Your Being Brainwashed tour, where Kirk and friends travel from swing state to swing state to debate college students on camera about why Trump is the better candidate.

Charlie's focus on debating unprepared college students shows how he has kind of picked up the baton from Steven Crowder and his old Change My Mind videos. But this year specifically, Charlie's version of this college debate content creation strategy is more in line with this overall strategy to inflate Kirk's political influence leading up to the election so that he can get more directly involved in the GOP's Get Out the Vote campaign in key swing states. As a part of this strategy, Kirk has been on a bit of a media blitz the past few months to promote himself. Some listeners may have seen the viral video featuring Charlie Kirk debating 25 quote unquote

woke college students for over 90 minutes. This video from the YouTube channel Jubilee has over 20 million views. And like, just as an aside, Jubilee is just so deeply evil. This company claims to advocate for like empathy and human connection, while turning life and death political issues into fucking game show segments for YouTube ad revenue, often pitting media-trained conservative activists against just random clueless liberals. I hate this company, they are so bad, but I digress. Now I actually attended a Turning Point USA event on the GSU campus last year. It was a smaller event that was ostensibly about defending the Cop City training facility

in Atlanta. Though halfway through the event, it just stopped being about Cop City and it just turned into an ad for Turning Point USA and this other political organization started by Candace Owens called BLEGZIT, which stands for the quote, black exit from the victimhood mentality unquote. This was one of the most racist events I've ever been to. The main speaker in his best metrosexual attire blamed black people for creating situations that result in police murders, said that the real problem is that black kids are never taught accountability, and that in the MLK days, people only ever advocated for more police training. He also claimed that rap music is causing a spike in violent crime, and ranted against Jay-Z and Beyonce, and closed by saying that we need to support more conservative rappers

and singers. It was really bad. But on the plus side, I went undercover to this event, and when talking with the Turning Point USA officials, I convinced them that I was actually a student at a different, nearby university, and I reserved the right to start a fake TPUSA chapter in that school, so hopefully that will never happen since I'm the one who's supposed to be doing it. For the brainwashed tour event this past Monday, I dressed like an unfashionable campus conservative and donned my Reagan Movie Baseball cap acquired at the RNC welcome party, and arrived at campus an

hour early to scope out the terrain. They didn't announce the exact location for the event ahead of time, so for about half an hour I just walked around to GSU with the fucking Ronald Reagan hat looking for like a TPUSA booth. Now luckily I spotted some people with red mega hats that I tailed to the nearby Hurt Park, where it was immediately evident that this would be a much bigger event than the Cop City one I attended a year prior. In the middle of the park was a big table with microphones set up for questions and

debate, and on either side there were booths with turning point stickers, buttons, flyers, a pocket constitution and sign up sheets to get involved in their political advocacy programs. I took home a big button that read, Republicans are hotter. And I got another, what I would call a brat style button, but brown instead of green, that reads, hi, period, stop being a socialist, period, thanks, period. Not good, not good. But I watched the crowd grow from like 20 people

to I would say around 200, you know, it got kind of fluid, but yeah, around 200, you know, it got kind of fluid, but yeah, around 200, 250 maybe. A small majority were students, or at least young, and appeared to be equally made up of liberals and conservatives, with the rest of the crowd mostly made up of conservatives from all ages who came to campus just to see Charlie Kirk. As the event was about to begin, TPUSA staff moved all of the older quote-unquote non-college students out of frame of the cameras to make the video seem more focused on liberal college students.

And after waiting in the surprisingly warm October sun for over an hour, Charles J. Kirk finally arrived 30 minutes late from the official start time, tossing three mega hats wildly into the crowd, one of which I am now in possession of. For this leg of the tour, Kirk has been accompanied by the 2024 Republican presidential candidate with the tallest hair, Vivek Ramaswamy, who by the way has also won the Cool Zone Media Award for presidential candidate with the most Nick Fuentes-Gruyper energy. So there you go.

I can't believe I've seen Vivek Ramaswamy like four different times this year. That doesn't feel good. But you know what does feel good? That's right. These products and services that support this podcast. Okay, we are back. It's time to finally talk about this fucking rally. So I'm not gonna go over the whole event play by play because there was over two hours of quote unquote debating that I have neither the time nor the desire to recap. But I will mention some of the overarching topics and common lines of questioning. Even as the first student took the mic, I knew that this was going to be a rough day. The first person to quote-unquote debate,

Charlie and Vivek, stated that their quote, primary opposition to Trump is that he's anti-American and anti-patriotic, unquote. They said that they believed that Trump fundamentally undermines American values and specifically invoked Trump's rhetoric online about suspending the Constitution and the January 6th incident. Look, I don't think this is a very compelling line of attack, especially in a debate setting. I just don't believe that patriotism is like an inherently good thing. And I think grifters and con men are pretty darn American. But Vivek and Kirk responded by talking about

how social media censorship in 2020 was a much greater act of anti-Americanism. Although later on in the day, they defended Elon Musk and his running of Twitter, since he's a private citizen and should be allowed to do whatever he wants with his own platform. This is of course ironic amidst reporting from the New York Times that Musk and the Trump team colluded to suppress information damaging to Trump on the platform.

Basically exactly what the right was accusing the old Twitter of doing in the last election, but none of that really matters. There's no such thing as hypocrisy. You can never hold anyone account to this sort of thing on the right. Charlie Kirk then just went on to deny that Trump called to suspend the Constitution. Here's a clip. He never has. You're misquoting him, but let's just look at what he did, not just rhetoric. Nice little quick pivot there from Charles. But yes, technically Trump didn't say suspend,

he actually said terminate, which is like worse. In 2022, Trump posted on Truth Social calling for the quote unquote termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution." I don't know how Kirk thinks that saying terminate is better than suspend. Of course he doesn't. He's just playing this game. It doesn't matter. Kirk went on to lie about the nature of January 6th and whether Trump literally personally committed the legal act of insurrection, eventually saying that even if Trump did, it would be thrown out under the new presidential immunity

ruling by the Supreme Court, and stating that though Trump didn't actually do a coup, the Democrats did actually do a coup to get Kamala Harris on the ticket. Okay, sure, buddy. Now, part of Kirk's just flagrant January 6 revisionist history was claiming that Ashley Babbitt was suddenly killed with no warning as she was retreating from the Capitol. And just none of that is true. That just isn't what happened. The only person to die on January 6th is a Trump supporter killed by one of Nancy Pelosi's bodyguards. Okay, even that part isn't true. Two other Trump supporters died of heart attacks and another died holding a don't tread on me flag after being trampled by fellow rioters.

Now a student countered Kirk's claim of Babbitt's innocence by confirming that he believes in Stand Your Ground laws, that if you're breaking into property you can be shot. Hold on, but Ashley Babbitt was unarmed. Isn't the whole kind of shtick of the American left like don't shoot unarmed people? If I break into your house and I was unarmed but I broke into your house, was George Floyd was that a rightful death? Okay, first of all incredible incredible deflection, but oh yes, as if these two situations are in any way comparable.

A black man being pinned down and choked to death for over nine minutes, and a woman leading a mob intent on killing US politicians right up to the last line of defense protecting said politicians as they try to evacuate the capital. Kirk tried to make this same gross George Floyd comparison like an hour later again to booze from the audience. Later in the day, a second student hit the Charlie Kirk debate chair debating on whether Trump is anti-American and mentioned Trump's recent comments talking about a quote-unquote enemy within, some enemy inside the United States that poses a far bigger threat than foreign enemies.

The VEC claimed that Trump was referring to people who shot at Trump, and Kirk claimed that it was a reference to drug cartels. So Donald Trump is talking about the enemy within. He's talking about the cartels that are here that are poisoning our streets with drugs that are bringing illegal guns into the country. That is the enemy within. Yet we say Russia is the enemy. Russia has never attacked the United States of America.

Curious Russia comment there, certainly. But like for this enemy within thing, we know that's just not true. Trump has specifically named multiple Democrats as the enemy within. It's not about cartels. it's not about people shooting him. There's just non-stop lying coming from Kirk and Vivek, and none of the students are equipped or researched enough to call him out on it. Another common topic of debate was war, and the insistence that Trump didn't start any new wars, unlike Biden and Harris, who have

personally started wars, I guess, with Kirk crediting Biden for starting the Russia-Ukraine war by financing the Ukrainian defensive, as well as roping in Harris by saying that she was quote, in charge of the Russia-Ukraine war before it happened, unquote, Which really doesn't make much sense as a sentence. Vivek later added that Kamala Harris was personally in charge of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which again just isn't true. Vivek is parroting a failed attempt by Republican lawmakers from last September to invent some way to blame Harris for the Afghanistan

withdrawal now that she is the presidential nominee. Harris is only mentioned three times in the 3,288 pages of interview transcripts from the Foreign Affairs Committee's investigation of the withdrawal. But by far, Charlie and Vivek's main focus on the topic of war is just defending Russia. Trump did not really end any wars in his first term. In fact, he increased US troop levels in 2017 and raised the number of civilian deaths in Afghanistan from drone strikes by 330% according to Brown University. Still, Vivek tried to frame Trump as the much more principled anti-war candidate.

There were multiple arms deal packages to Saudi Arabia for the war in Yemen, and the US increased its involvement in the Syrian Civil War under Trump. But to Vivek's earlier point, I really don't see a way Trump would end the war in Ukraine that isn't just giving more territory over to Russia. But to Charlie Kirk, that might not be such a bad thing, since he seems to be kind of fond of Russia. You know who is the enemy? China is the enemy. And Russia. Well, Russia's not the enemy exactly. How many of your friends have died because of Russians? Here's another soundbite from Vivek.

Joe Biden and Kamal Harris, along with some Republican help, I'm going to admit, is sending more money to escalate that war that otherwise would have resolved itself if we had just negotiated peace back in 2022. Resolve itself sounds a lot like Vivek just means that Russia would have just seized territory. And like later on, Vivek argued that Ukraine just shouldn't be getting any NATO protection at all. So the US actually made a commitment back in 1990 to say that NATO would expand not one inch past East Germany. Hmm. I wonder what may have been different geopolitically in 1990 in relation to Russia, Vivek. I wonder if anything has happened since 1990 that might affect certain Slavic territories,

Vivek. I wonder. Oh my god. Now the topic discussed probably the most during this event was immigration. Even the liberal college students seemed to believe that an influx of immigration was the biggest problem currently facing the United States. Kirk claimed that Kamala Harris let 10 million new quote unquote illegal immigrants into the country and like no, the total population of undocumented immigrants in this country has fluctuated between 10 to 12 million over

the course of the past 20 years. Though like JD Vance, Kirk considers most immigrants illegal regardless of their actual status. Kirk claimed that the quote unquote 9 million immigrants seeking asylum that have come into this country under Biden are all illegal because they are quote, cartel sponsored fraudulent asylum claims unquote. Kirk said that these false asylum seekers pay cartels $10,000 to be smuggled into the United States. They're all illegal because they're,

it's actually we know it to be trueuggled into the United States. They're all illegal because they're we know it's actually know it to be true It's not the question. They're fraudulent. They're defrauding the American immigration system is what they're doing when pressed for proof on this Kirk just stumbled and Vivek took over and later just plugged his new movie about illegal immigration Yes, I mean, so for example, what is the asylum claim if you're coming from? Yes, I mean, so for example, what is the asylum claim if you're coming from? From North Korea. Yeah, actually Wow Wow very very convincing stuff happening Vivek argued that most immigrants lie about seeking asylum in order to enter the country and Since that's illegal that makes them more likely to commit other crimes once in the United States.

So right now our immigration system literally selects for the people who are most willing to lie to the US government to get in. And that's why it's no surprise that the people whose first act of entering the country breaks the law often continue to break the law while they're already here. I don't think that's racist or xenophobic, I think it's a fact based on who we're actually selecting to come into the country. In actuality, immigrants, and especially undocumented or quote-unquote illegal immigrants, are far less likely to commit crimes than U.S. citizens. Most research puts it between 40 to 60 percent less likely, at least according to Stanford,

the Texas Department of Public Safety, and the Cato Institute, all famously liberal organizations. One thing that Kirk kept trying to do is pander his nationalism towards the racially diverse audience of Atlanta students. The people in this audience, which is a very diverse audience, specifically Black Americans, should be incensed that they're being replaced by foreigners. Black Americans are now being put aside so that a bunch of foreigners can come undercut wages and fill your city. The black community which you obviously both care a lot

about is actually not being prioritized instead people from the third world are coming in and black America is getting put last which seems to be a common theme over the last 60 years when Democrats are in control. Well, okay. Thank you guys so much. Thank you. The worst part is that this seems to work. The audience seemed to resonate with this grossly fascistic framing, seemingly unable to recognize what Kirk was doing. And at this point, I was just like fucking losing it. Vivek said that if you don't know English, you shouldn't be allowed in the United States. And like no one cared, no one pushed back on that. A pro-Kamala person repeated false migrant crime wave rhetoric in her question about

the Venezuelan refugee crisis. That student said that 300,000 Venezuelan refugees came to the United States in 2023. And Kirk then claimed that 3 million more would arrive if Kamala is elected, along with 20 million more immigrants. Kirk promised that if Trump's elected, any immigrant, whether legal, undocumented, or a refugee, just any immigrant who commits a crime like a DUI will be immediately deported. And unfortunately, when pressed to defend or even just openly express their own personal views on whatever the topic of debate was, multiple students just like completely backed

down, saying that they would rather quote unquote-unquote, stay out of the political realm. Or in another instance, what are you doing? You're trying to debate about access to abortion or if all immigrants should be rounded up and deported, but you don't want to get, quote-unquote, too political? What are you talking about? I'm sorry you couldn't get a fast dunk on Charlie Kirk, but come on. But perhaps the most disheartening moment was when Charlie Kirk was challenged on his opposition to the Civil Rights Act.

Someone asked why Charlie thinks that the Civil Rights Act was a mistake. Kirk started by saying that even if some of the original intent was good, it's now being used for bad things, like allowing men in women's locker rooms to the complete shock of the questionnaire. Kirk and Vivek then went on to explain why we should repeal the Civil Rights Act. The fanfare that the Civil Rights Act is met with, it's almost like the new Constitution.

We talk about the Civil Rights Act more than the Constitution, it is cited more than the Constitution. We almost had a new American founding in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Act. So let me share a couple of hard facts with you, which is that it turns out that you're much more likely to end up in prison, you're much more likely to end up in poverty, you're much more likely not to graduate from high school if you grow up in a single-parent household versus a dual-parent household. Today you're talking about upwards of sixty percent of black kids born into

single-parent households rather than dual-parent. What number do you think that was in the 1950s before the Great Society? Probably like 40. It was even less, 20 percent. 20 percent back then. So then we look at what the results have been of this entire agenda, put the Civil Rights Act, put the LBJ Great Society. Black Americans are worse off today, even economically in terms of mobility, than they were back then, in the name of laws that were passed to supposedly advance black interests. Oh, God. Do you know what that can actually be attributed to? It's the massive increase

in policing and the carceral justice system that was specifically intensified as a conservative reaction to black people gaining more civil rights in society. The Civil Rights Act has nine different titles in it, and you have this Leviathan that was created and something that most black Americans don't support is men and female sports. Would you agree? What did you say that again? Men playing in female sports. I have not.

Yeah, I know. No, no, for sure, right? Believe it or not, the Civil Rights Act is now being used to keep men playing in women's sports. So the Civil rights act was used to help black America originally, totally get that. But now the way it was written is that any claim of identification. So someone says I'm a woman, therefore I can compete in your volleyball team. They come in with a civil rights claim. And so what we're saying is, you know, it should be specified to racial, not gender, all that other stuff. And there were all these other provisions as well. How sad is it that this kid was convinced that the fucking Civil Rights Act is bad through transphobia?

It's so fucking predatory what Kirk is doing here. This was so fucking gross to watch in person. As the day went on, things just started to get more and more kooky. A whole batch of like libertarian, Austrian-trained economists went back and forth with Charles and Vivek on tariffs, free markets, and the validity of the economic philosophy of Friedrich Hayek. This fucking dude with a little mustache who ostensibly got up to debate Kirk on abortion said that, quote, I think my generation has started to abuse the option of abortion, unquote.

Why the fuck are you up there debating him then? Jesus Christ. And then, what I would call generously a himbo in a white dudes for Harris shirt said that Kamala's greatest accomplishment is being an idol after debating Kirk about FEMA money being spent on illegal immigrants. Meanwhile, Kirk just continued to spew COVID-19 conspiracy theories to very little pushback. They were wrong about everything. They were wrong about six feet to solar spread. They were wrong about the vaccine safe and effective. They were wrong about whether the earth revolves around the sun.

What are you talking about? Oh my god. One student just got so fed up with Kirk's endless rambling about topics unrelated to their question and decided to walk away, which then of course, Kirk claimed as a rhetorical victory. Hunter Biden laptop misinformation, where did the virus come from? Biolabs in Ukraine. I was losing it, and frankly just shocked at how little pushback Charles and Vivek were receiving for what I saw as very clear lies and manipulative debate tactics. The majority of people clearly did not think too hard about the question they were going to ask, or let alone research the topic of debate beforehand. I saw people in line to ask a question using chat GPT to generate

questions to ask using a prompt about how to debate Charlie Kirk at a Turning Point USA event. Like what the fuck is going on? Now, I fundamentally refuse to participate in quote unquote debates like this for reasons that I will soon get into. So I just started taking notes of all the things Charlie was lying about. And I was right at the very front of the crowd,

so whenever TPUSA publishes the video Charlie Kirk destroying silly liberal college students, you should be able to see me pretty clearly in the background in my fucking Ronald Reagan hat just furiously scribbling down notes. Though I would recommend watching with an ad blocker not to give Kirk extra money. The whole event was a pretty pathetic affair. By my count, there were only 8 liberal leaning challengers who questioned Kirk, compared to 13 conservative leaning questionnaires who entered a friendly discussion with Kirk. Out of all the liberal debaters, two backed down because they didn't

want to get too political, and three others appeared to be at least somewhat swayed by Kirk and Vivek. Now, like, I can't entirely blame these students, right? Like, this setting is not a real debate. Kirk holds all of the power. he does this for a living, and he fucking brought a friend with him to help. It's two of them versus what? It's Kirk and Vivek. There's a reason he prefers debating college students rather than working professionals. Most students are not prepared to effectively counter Kirk's claims and don't have enough general knowledge on current events to call him out on every one of his many lies. And even if they do catch him on something, Kirk will try to project authority to sway

the uneducated audience into believing that he is correct. Just because teens are chronically online doesn't mean that they have better media literacy, critical thinking, or know how to determine the validity of information. A 2024 survey by News Literacy America found that only 50% of teens could identify that an article labeled as branded content on a news site was in fact an advertisement. Barely over half of teens could accurately identify an op-ed with the word commentary in the headline as an opinion piece. 44% claimed that a company's own press release was more credible than an independent news report on the same subject, and 34% of teens incorrectly labeled a random picture of damaged

traffic lights as quote-unquote strong evidence supporting a viral false claim that hot July temperatures had melted traffic lights. These teens surveyed said that local TV news and TikTok were the most trustworthy sources of information. And 35% of teens said that professional journalists are more biased than social media content creators. Meanwhile, 45% said that journalists are just as biased as these TikTok influencers.

Let's do a test right now. Try to see if you can determine that these following clips are in fact advertisements. ["Sweet Home Alone"] ["Sweet Home Alone"] Okay, we are back. Now, this was technically my first time seeing this format of conservative YouTube debate in person. The videos that get published online later get heavily edited down, and while I was going

at it in my notepad, I started to recognize the repeating patterns that Kirk and Vivek employed to gain dominance in almost every single debate matchup. So now I'm going to talk about some of these common tactics used by Kirk. When Kirk or Vivek wants to end a particular line of questioning or move on to the next person, they'll just restate their own opinions as fact and then end that debate, leaving the impression that they won. They can just stop whenever they feel like they have made the final point that gives them victory. Here's Vivek. The number one human attribute that our legal immigration system selects for isn't who's

smart, isn't who's going to work hard, isn't who loves the country. It's are you willing to lie to the US government or not? If you are, you get in. If not, you don't. That's the way it works. Thank you so much. Thank you. And here's another example from Kirk. Black Americans are treated far worse than illegals in this country. And we have violated our social contract to our own citizens. And I just want you to think about that. Okay. Is that if you break into America, you get a flight to the country, the city of your choosing, you get taxpayer funded luxury hotels, you get a taxpayer funded phone, taxpayer funded food stamps, whereas many Americans are struggling to even make ends meet. So

thank you so much for coming. What a convenient way to say a bunch of bullshit without having to back any of it up. Now of course, welfare programs like food stamps and even assistance to get access to smartphones since they basically are now a requirement of everyday life, those programs do exist, right? Those are important programs. But those free flights to any city, that's actually a reference to New York City's reticketing program which offers one-way bus or plane tickets out of the city.

This program was actually started because the governor of Texas sent 40,000 immigrants to New York against their will. And those quote unquote luxury hotels are actually a small part of an emergency housing program that utilizes some converted hotels, as well as airport motels, and even office buildings as temporary shelter for immigrants.

But I'm sure Kirk would rather these people just be homeless living on the street. I'm sure he wouldn't find ways to complain about that too. A very common Kirk tactic to avoid answering a question is just to simply flip it around and ask the students a different question that might eventually be related to the student's original question, but not necessarily. Let me ask you just one more question. Can men give birth?

Can men give birth? Yeah. If they're transgender? Cue the audience's shocked response. These people probably don't even know if this refers to a transgender woman or a transgender man. Whatever. For another example, here's how Vivek responded to a question about voter fraud allegations. Do you think Donald Trump committed a coup against the US government? This was part of Kirk's response to a question about US aid to Israel.

What is your strong opinion about the civil war happening in the Central African Republic? For another example, a student asked Kirk, what should be done about hate crimes against Venezuelan immigrants in cities like Chicago? Chicago. You would think that we should do about that. I have a question. So what part of Chicago are you from? So these are all just classic red herrings.

Here's another. Do you admit that the Hamas tried to commit genocide on October 7th? Also, simply not what a genocide is. Now sometimes the students can catch what Kirk is doing with red herrings and deflections, but even when drilled down on the original line of questioning, Kirk will try hard to pivot away whenever the momentum is not going in his favor. on technical things that we could talk about forever. Let me just ask a question. I asked you, what is Kamala Harris's greatest accomplishment? Can you tell me what that would be?

Perhaps the most common tactic Charlie Kirk employs to maintain control over the interaction is instead of just stating his opinion, Kirk will throw a question back to his opponent with the intent of getting them to say something that's in support of Kirk's own argument. Alternatively, Kirk will ask a question that the student probably doesn't know, like some

specific stat, but something that Kirk already has a prepared answer for, so that he can throw off his opponent, make them question their own ability to debate, and make himself seem smarter. Here's a short compilation. If there was a policy that made markets more free but hurt your country, would you support it? Do you believe that FDR was right in partnering with Joseph Stalin to defeat Hitler? Yeah, so I guess two questions with tariffs.

How do you avoid a tariff? Let's ask another moral question then. Is it ever okay to do something evil after an evil act? Under abortion, How do you avoid a tariff? Let's ask another moral question then is it ever okay to do Something evil after under abortion. Do you carve out a new morality? Is there like a different kind of morality that we apply only to abortion at what point does it get human rights? Let me ask you just a question Do you know which nation is the biggest supplier of the US military today? You can probably guess it is your phone paid for by US taxpayers

Let me ask you did you have a vacation this summer in a luxury hotel paid for by taxpayers? Ten people are murdered in Chicago. Out of those ten, how many of those cases will be solved on average, do you think? Okay, so you said he wanted to suspend the Constitution. Did he do that when he was president? His argumentative style looks pretty goofy when it's all broken down into its respective parts. Now, to circle back to my stance of just never engaging with these bad faith debate spectacles,

lastly, I'll show you what happens when you quote unquote do well against someone like Charlie Kirk. I think the only time Kirk was really thrown off was during one of the very last matchups, with a student asking about Kirk's support of military aid to Israel, despite his alleged anti-war stance and his call for the US to pause all foreign aid until the southern border is secured. Like usual, Kirk first tried to deflect

by using red herrings and turn questions back on the student. Let me ask you just a first principle question. Do you think the Jewish people have a moral right to their ancestral? Absolutely not. Religions do not have any sort of right to ancestral ground. Kirk then failed to accuse the student of anti-Semitism. Kirk then tried to trick the student into saying that Hamas is more morally good than Israel.

But the student saw what Kirk was trying to do with his bizarre moralistic framing. The student, quite wisely, did not answer Kirk's precariously worded yes or no question, and instead reframed the question in their own words and only then stated their opinion that both Hamas and the IDF's actions can be constituted as evil. Still, Kirk wouldn't relent. His nonsensical framing was once again rejected. But then Kirk accused the student of being propagandized and then asked if they had personally

been to Israel to assess the situation, and this is when everything fell apart. Well, let me tell you this, that you know that there's Arabs serving in the Knesset, you know that people in the West- Yes, I know that there's Arabs in Israel, which is exactly why your point of Jews saying, I don't like Jews because I don't like Israel makes absolutely zero sense. I'm just going to go back to this, because I think it's so interesting, though, which is that I believe that the Jewish people do have a right to their ancestral home.

Well, first of all, that you believe that they should be leveling buildings because that's their ancestral home. I'm not defending every decision they made. But that's exactly what they're doing. You're interrupting. I'm gonna ask the next question because you're not arguing a good thing. Not much to debate because I believe that Israel should exist in its current form. You do not. Thank you very much. You do not. Thank you very much. Okay, the moral confusion on the Israel topic is it's hard to clear up in a day like this. Again, like these aren't real debates. If the conversation goes any way other than how Kirk wants it to go, he has complete control of the environment and can move on to a more desirable opponent. Because beyond convincing any gullible people that might happen to be in the crowd, the real reason Kirk does events like this is to make content. It's YouTube bait. These debate

videos rack up thousands and sometimes millions of views on YouTube and TikTok. And every single person that participates, as if these are real debates is directly helping Charlie Kirk make money and grow his brand. This TPUSA brainwash tour will continue into November, and I'm sure Charlie Kirk will keep doing events like this in the years to come regardless of who wins the election. So what's the options to counter something like this? I'm of three minds. My default response to stuff like this is usually just to ignore.

Don't give these attention hounds what they're looking for. Don't try to debate. Don't try to own a Charlie Kirk with facts and logic. There's no real benefit from engaging with him and his ilk on their own terms. But there will always be at least a few college students who think they can get one up on Charlie Kirk. So since these events are going to continue to happen, even if my friends and I withhold

our participation, the second option is just to simply confuse. This is what I call the Skibbidi-Biden strategy, one which I deployed against the MyPillow guy, Mike Lindell, in front of the Israeli consulate as he tried to suck up as much attention as possible during the DNC. Mike, Skibbidi-Biden! What's up? Skibbidi-Biden! Skibbidi-Biden what? during the DNC. This was probably my favorite moment of the DNC. This strategy of complete

confusion doesn't just deny the subject what they want, if you're the MyPillow guy, attention from reporters, or in the case of Charlie Kirk, an unfair debate against a non-media trained college freshman. But the skimity Biden strategy also eats up their time, prohibiting others from being able to engage on the terms decided upon by Turning Point USA. The more time you spend spewing your near-unintelligible gibberish about how Warhammer connects to US foreign policy, or explaining your made-up conspiracy theory about how the Haq Tua girl is a CIA asset, all of that is less time for some 19-year-olds to challenge Kirk on his abortion views.

And annoying Charlie Kirk is just a fun bonus. Now that I think about it, this is essentially the Patton Oswalt filibuster tactic. Now obviously Kirk has control of the mic and probably won't let you ramble on about gibberish for too long, so this strategy becomes more successful if you can get a whole team lined up in front of the microphone. Now finally, the last option is disruption through force, preferably in a way that limits the possibility of creating an on-camera spectacle that can be utilized by TPUSA. This has typically not been a common tactic used to counter turning point events on campus,

but it may be time to reconsider. Forceful disruptions were often utilized when figures like Milo Yiannopoulos toured college campuses back in 2016-2018, and more recently against campus events featuring Daily Wire employees like Michael Knowles and Matt Walsh. Historically, this strategy has not been applied to Charlie Kirk as he's been viewed as less radical than some of these other figures. But I just don't think that's true anymore. Kirk is spreading and normalizing hardcore xenophobic and nationalist rhetoric across

college campuses with little to no resistance, not to mention his complete embrace of conspiracy theories and use of transphobia to undermine civil rights. There's many ways to disrupt events like this through forceful means. Sound disruption, visual disruption, physical disruption. Planning an alternate event to take place at the same time and place. Big banners with Charles' tiny face carefully placed in view of the debate cameras. Creative opportunities abound, but it requires people to be actively monitoring when and where these events take place, and actually plan a counter-demo ahead of time, and that just doesn't seem to be happening at the moment.

And so I thought going to this event would help reboot my brain, cheer myself up, and amuse me with Charlie's childish display of debate kid politics. But it just left me more sad, watching hapless kids fall prey to Kirk's transparent scheme, just feeling like I had no way to stop the train wreck. But it doesn't have to be this way with a few friends and a little preparation There is an alternative and hey it could happen here Well, that's my recap on this fucking Charlie Kirk rally. Oh And heads up next week. There's gonna be no spooky week episodes for the first time in four years

Sorry, the world has just gotten too spooky this year. Between the election and hurricanes and the genocide in Gaza and everything else happening, the world's just too spooky. I'm really just not feeling Halloween-pilled as I usually am. Hopefully things will get better soon. But in lieu of Spooky Week, we actually have a special series from James on the Darien Gap, so you have that to look forward to next week. Goodbye, everyone. See you on the other side.

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 now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. I'm Julian Edelman.

I'm Rob Gronkowski. And we are super excited to tell you about our new show Dudes on Dudes. We're spilling all the behind-the-scenes stories, crazy details, and honestly, just having a blast talking football. Every week we're discussing our favorite players of all times, from legends to our buddies to current stars. We're finally answering the age old question. What kind of dudes are these dudes?

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