Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 188

Starting point is 00:00:00 This is an iHeart Podcast. I'm Robert Evans and on my show Behind the Bastards this week, we have one of our worst subjects ever, David Byrd, founder of the Children of God cult, who we'll be talking about with special guest Ed Helms. He's not just like a weird religious cult leader. He was like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology in with this kind of like evangelical Christianity, Pentecostal preaching in the mid-century is a very weird guy. But yeah, I'll just get into it. Like nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't say. But that's the beauty of cults.

Starting point is 00:00:35 Listen to Behind the Bastards on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Open AI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be, an aberration, a symbol podcasts. with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to better offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts. Over the years of making my true crime podcast Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Catherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband.

Starting point is 00:01:26 The murderer is still out there. Each week I investigate a new case. If there's a case we should hear about call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murderline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I always had to be so good. No one could ignore me. Carve my path with data and drive.

Starting point is 00:01:48 But some people only see who I am on paper. The Paper Ceiling. The limitations from degree screens to stereotypes that are holding back over 70 million stars. Workers skilled through alternative routes rather than a bachelor's degree. It's time for skills to speak for themselves. Find resources for breaking through barriers at tearthepapersceiling.org, brought to you by Opportunity at Work and the Ad Council.

Starting point is 00:02:11 Call Zone Media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads Package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want if you've been listening to the episodes every day this week There's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions Sometimes there is a topic that is too big for just one podcaster.

Starting point is 00:02:46 Sometimes a simple medical podcaster, a simple wartime journalist, can't handle a topic on their own. They need to combine forces. A special team up has to happen. And that my friends is what's happening today on the special crossover edition of the House of Pod. And it could happen here in HOP ICHH Hoppitch Special. Myself, Dr. Kaveh Hoda. Hope I'm saying that correctly. And James Stout are going to be talking to you, along with two very special guests,

Starting point is 00:03:22 about what's happening out there in the protests, what risks the protesters are facing, what health concerns we have for them, how they can best prepare and more. James, hey buddy! Hey, it's nice to be podcasting with you again. We really enjoy our team-ups here, our special Marvel team-ups that we do. It's a fun one. You're my favorite collaborator, Carvey. Hey, I'm gonna to take that as total sincerity, even though I'm not entirely sure. So, I thank you for that. Yeah. Because I think that sounded sincere enough.

Starting point is 00:03:52 I like these. I like it. It's fun. Me too. I do too. Let's introduce our guests. We have some very special guests. I will actually ask you guys to introduce yourselves. Let's start with you, Miriam. Can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what your background in this field is? Sure. Hi, I'm Miriam. I use she or they pronouns. My background in the field of podcasting is that I'm with the collective Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, which puts out the podcast Live Like the World is Dying, as well as the podcast, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness and The Spectacle.

Starting point is 00:04:26 And my experience in the field of what I think we're here to talk about today is that I've been a street medic for over a decade, which means I've treated a lot of injuries on people who've been messed up by interactions with police. I mean, we're going to talk about this more, but my first question is, is it pretty much

Starting point is 00:04:45 90% or more violence from the police that you encounter? Do you ever encounter anything else like violence amongst protesters themselves or something else that happens along the way? Or is it solely what you're experiencing is treating violence from the side of the police? So that's a, that's a good question. It is mostly violence from the side of the police? So that's a good question. It is mostly violence from police. Sometimes it is violence from non-state affiliated or at least not on duty fascists. So you're proud boys, other people like that, or just generally sort of hostile right wing

Starting point is 00:05:23 actors. Sometimes it is also sort of underlying medical stuff more so like somebody has been out at the march all day and they didn't bring their medication with them and so they're having a seizure. And then there's also environmental stuff, your heat stroke, your hypothermia, your I was running to catch up with the march

Starting point is 00:05:42 and I stepped off the curb weird, ow, stuff like that. But in terms of violence, yeah, it's mostly coming from the cops. I've certainly never seen a friendly fire incident of violence amongst protesters. I'm sure it could happen, but I have not seen it. I've seen people that I'm in the streets with or wherever with attacked by people who wish them harm who are people from the state or, you know, like I said, not currently on duty as cops, but, you know, basically cops. I know I'm digressing too far and I need to introduce our other guest, but I have another follow-up question I need to ask because I'm so curious.

Starting point is 00:06:22 Have you ever had to take care of say, someone on the other side who's been injured? So as anybody who works in any kind of emergency, you know, medical response will tell you anybody who's an EMT or even anybody who's like a life guard. The first thing you do before you approach a patient is establish scene safety. So if a Nazi has been hurt, it is not safe for me to approach that patient because there's a Nazi over there. I see. Okay. I think I'm picking up what you're putting down on that one. So it has not happened. Yeah. Anybody who is acting as a street medic is acting under what are called good Samaritan laws, you know, which protect you from any kind of bad outcome.

Starting point is 00:07:07 If you start taking care of somebody, you know, start helping somebody out in the streets based on whatever training you have, you know, same thing like if somebody collapses at a bus stop and you start doing CPR based on the Red Cross class you took, that's good Samaritan stuff. Same way. It does not obligate you to intervene, especially in approaching somebody who is actively seeking to do you harm. So I would not consider that within my, within my lane.

Starting point is 00:07:35 Understood. Well, let's introduce our second guest. We have Dr. Richard Farrow, who is a doctor in the Los Angeles area and is a family practice physician. May I call you Richard? Richard Farrow Yeah, you may. Kyle Soria Okay, very good. Richard, welcome to the show. Richard Farrow Thank you very much, Kaveh. It's a pleasure to be on. You know, you kind of mentioned it already. I'm Kelly Medicine. I've also had experience in street medicine in the LA

Starting point is 00:08:00 area. Also, you know, this is obviously something that's really important to me right now, given everything that's been going on in the city. And also important for me, just given the fact that I'm a Latino, I'm a proud Costa Rican Cuban, and just that's part of the huge reason why I'm in medicine. So I'm really happy to have an opportunity to talk about, you know, the ICE protests and the stuff that's been going on to protect our community. That's great to hear. Can you tell us a little bit about what you've been involved with recently down in Los Angeles? So I, as far as what I've been involved in, in Los Angeles, you know, I've been coordinating with some of my colleagues who I knew from residency and just other colleagues just who

Starting point is 00:08:40 are all involved in social justice, as well as the CIR, the Physicians Union, you know, who are engaged in trying to like provide medical support to the protests in the area. So I've had experience working on some of the protests that have occurred both in LA and OC. Yeah, that's really good to hear. I think people will have been spending a lot of time like watching footage of the protest, right? In the last, I don't know, what we weekend now, fuck knows.

Starting point is 00:09:10 It seems like a long time. I haven't been sleeping very much. Give or take eight to 12 years. Time has meant nothing. Yeah. March of 2020. Yeah. Yes, exactly.

Starting point is 00:09:20 Yeah. It is March 16th of 2020. And here we are. I, uh, people would have seen a lot of people get hurt. Right. And I, like, as a journalist, like, I was in LA last week, you kind of tend to get towards the more violent end of things because that is our job. Most people who go to protests don't get hurt.

Starting point is 00:09:40 Right. And I don't want people to like hear anything we're saying today and think, oh God, I'm going to get fucked up because most people don't get fucked up. And like, my son says that you don't fight fascists because you think you're going to win or you think you might not get hurt. You fight fascists because they are fascists. And sometimes people do get hurt. So let's talk about the ways that people get hurt. Either of you is welcome to answer this, but like, what are some of the common mechanisms of injury that you see when you are out there street medicking when the cops are out there hurting

Starting point is 00:10:16 people? I would say that like in terms of the things that we would typically see, I just want to start off by saying like, absolutely, we're not out there just because we know that we would typically see. I just want to start off by saying like absolutely we're not out there just because we know that we're going to be successful in any type of advocacy. If that was the case then we wouldn't have that many people you know on that front. You know a lot of people know that it's you might be losing ground but you're not there because you're trying to when you're doing it because you know that you want to be on the right side of history. You want to do the thing that you believe to be morally right. As far as like the type of injuries that you would typically see, I think in order to answer

Starting point is 00:10:52 this question, I would kind of break it off into two sections. Like you have mainly protests that have not devolved into violent confrontations with law enforcement. And you have protests where things like, you know, for instance, riot control agents have been deployed in like the non-dangerous side of things. You might have the kind of stuff that you would encounter in any sort of major events. You know, you're going to deal with dehydration. You're going to deal with people who are in overcrowded areas that might accidentally fall, hit, trip over one another In those kind of circumstances, you know when we enter into the space where you know

Starting point is 00:11:31 Riot control agents are being involved the quote-unquote less lethal non-lethal which I'm gonna kind of go into later is a bit of a non a misnomer In those circumstances we look at like chemical exposure to things like tear gas. You know, there's a lot of different ways that that manifests that type of exposure. And we can kind of get into that a little bit as well. And then also we have, you know, projectile weapons like rubber bullets, you know, flash bangs, those type of things that you might encounter, you know, like sort of blunt trauma to people's bodies. Anything you'd like to add, Miriam?

Starting point is 00:12:08 I mean, first of all, you're doing great out there. Good for you for being out there. It's a hell of a time. There's regional variation, I think, to some of the stuff that we see. So I am based in New York City. Not all of the work I've done has been in New York City, but most of it has. And in New York City, we don't have tear gas.

Starting point is 00:12:30 They just don't do it here because the police found out after deploying tear gas extensively during the RNC that the thing about tear gas is it gets sucked into vents. And when it gets sucked into vents, it gets on all kinds of people in the subway and in buildings. And that causes lawsuits. And the NYPD does not enjoy that. So they use pepper spray instead, because pepper spray is more directed. It doesn't linger in the air the same way you hit the people that you are trying to hit, you know, and anybody else who's walking by. And also your buddies who are standing next to you because you fired into the wind Which is always a good time in these such cases. Yeah

Starting point is 00:13:11 So many there's a there's a whole series of what we are calling locally Peppa pigs Which are? It's what you think it is So yeah, we see a lot of pepper sprite. We also, because one of the primary weapons of the NYPD are just sheer overwhelming numbers, we see a lot of just direct hands-on violence, just cops hitting people, punching people, throwing people to the ground. We see a lot of very rough takedowns. Now if you're acting as a street medic in that situation, you don't get to treat those people because if they are taken down by a cop, they are then swarmed by many other cops

Starting point is 00:13:55 and they get taken away, then that's something that we might see when we meet that person later at jail support. But the other weapon that we used to see quite a bit but haven't in more recent years is the L-Rat, which is a sound cannon. They do still use it, but they use it to like make announcements and annoy people. They use it to like make obnoxiously loud announcements, but not to blast out people's eardrums, which was sort of its weaponized form. We haven't seen that recently though. Police will, you know, they all carry tasers.

Starting point is 00:14:31 You don't tend to see a lot of that at protests, but it's certainly something that we're constantly aware that they have the ability to do. But yeah, it is here. It's mostly pepper spray, night sticks, fists, knees, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah. I would assume that a lot of what they do, like for example, tear gas was, to my understanding,

Starting point is 00:14:55 first developed in World War I, really to cause confusion amongst the enemy. And what I assume a lot of these things that they're using, the sound sound cannons is to create panic and confusion and Hopefully get people to run and and move in Mass unorganized ways and I wonder if you're seeing crush injuries if you're seeing injuries related to just the people Moving and being scattered around and running in different directions. Is that something that you have seen in this process, either of you? Yeah, well, just real quick, like to the first thing you said, the

Starting point is 00:15:31 absolute, like the purpose of every police weapon is to cause fear. One of the reasons that I think they so often use things like tear gas and pepper spray when they could simply choose to not is like one, because they have it because their budgets are outrageous and they have, you know, all the weapons they could ever dream of and why not, you know, well, we have it. But I think that the other reason they use it is because it does freak people out. It scares people. And so, you know, a lot of people have had like a big dude shove them before, you know, that's like not a super unfamiliar situation that's like not a super unfamiliar situation. It's not a great situation. People don't like it, but they kind of,

Starting point is 00:16:11 they're familiar with it. They're, they, they're familiar with the concept getting sprayed by a mysterious chemical that makes you feel a thing you've never really felt before. That's a lot scarier and you don't know what's in it. You don't know what's on your body. You don't know why it hurts the way it hurts. Like you just know like, oh yeah, I mean, I guess, I guess this is what tear gas feels like. I guess this is what pepper spray feels like. Yeah. It's frightening. And yeah, people absolutely get hurt running away. It makes it difficult to see, like squeezing your eyes shut is like a very immediate reaction. So people run, they lose whoever they were at the action with, they get separated from their group, they get disoriented, they may

Starting point is 00:16:52 be having trouble breathing, they may be panicking because they're having trouble breathing, then they're having trouble breathing because they're panicking, you know? So yeah, you do absolutely see all of that. Yeah. I mean, I really want to second what, what Miriam has been saying here, you know, as far as like the most common agent that you see in tear gas in the United States. At this time, it's believed to be Agent CS. And this is something like you mentioned, it was developed right around the time of World War Two, they started like becoming into effect in like the in the in like the late 50s. A point of thought for this is it was actually made legal for use in warfare in the 90s by the Geneva

Starting point is 00:17:28 Convention. So you don't see the US or other armies like using this on soldiers, but we're using it in protests. Well, you don't necessarily see the US military following the Geneva Convention. Okay, well we can, that's a fair point. Of the wars of law, the tear gas is one that is, wars of law, laws of war. People do be using tear gas sometimes, but yeah, they shouldn't be. Yeah, and you're right, it was first in the Geneva Conventions in 1925, but then in 1997 specifically, it was prohibited. The thought behind that is they did it because they didn't

Starting point is 00:18:06 want someone to get one gas and not know exactly what it was and then use the really nasty stuff like Syrian gas, etc. And the reason our police are able to do it on our protesters is because they're pretty confident that our protesters don't have or wouldn't use Syrian gas. So they feel free to use it at our... But speaking of sound cannons and disturbing noises being shot into your ear holes, commercials, we'll be right back. All right, we're back. We should talk about noxious gases. There has been this persistent rumor, I don't just mean in the last like 10 days, there has been a persistent rumor

Starting point is 00:18:54 every time that people have been tear gassed, that this time the cops are using super tear gas, special tear gas, cancer tear gas. To be clear, like the effects of tear gas, special tear gas, cancer tear gas. To be clear, the effects of tear gas on people, especially to my understanding, people who menstruate are fucking long-term and nasty. So let's just address what are the reagents in tear gas and what are some of the outcomes we can expect short-term and long-term, and then do we suspect that the cops are using super tear gas this time? Well, I guess in terms of like the agent, like we kind of mentioned it a little bit ago, Agent CS, the more complicated long name, O-chlorobenzalabine, melanonitrile. Yeah, rolls off the tongue.

Starting point is 00:19:36 This is actually, it's absolutely the kind of thing you talk about in dinner conversations, but the compound itself, it's actually not in a gas form. It's actually a solid. It's a crystalline substance that's released, it's aerosolized after any type of like explosion from, you know, a grenade or canister. And it's, as far as, you know, the types of things that you will experience, it takes effect in the first 20, 60 seconds of contact with the body. It's a nucleophilic substance, so that means it will adhere to tears,

Starting point is 00:20:10 it'll adhere to moisture on your skin, like sweat, any type of saliva or mucus. And the first things you'll typically notice are the tearing, the redness, burning, blurred vision in your eyes specifically. On your skin, you could develop burns or rash. A contact dermatitis is also then associated with a development of this on your skin. Burning, irritation in your mouth. You can also develop runny nose. The more kind of more serious long-term effects that can

Starting point is 00:20:37 be more systemic. You can actually develop shortness of breath, wheezing or chest tightness. You can also develop nausea or vomiting if you ingest much of it while you're in The protest and you kind of already brought it up as well. Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of systemic research Yeah, that has been done on the impacts of Agents like CS that are in tear gas on on people But we have a couple of things that have come up about pregnancy outcomes. We do see increased rates of uterine cramping, menstrual bleeding, breast tenderness, and delayed menstrual cramping as well in pregnancy. We also don't know how well it crosses into breast milk. So, you know,

Starting point is 00:21:19 it's a kind of challenging question. And the CDC's official stance on it is this idea that like they don't believe that it crosses. But again, we don don't have that research so we can't know for sure. Great, cool. Good thing to be fogging large city blocks with. Yeah, well we don't know everything it does so probably some of it is fine. You know James when you're mentioning how it keeps coming up and there's these concerns of there being like a cause in cancer, we have no proof of that right now, but I mean, we really don't know. So it is a little concerning long-term, especially journalists like yourself who are exposed to it a lot.

Starting point is 00:21:56 So that is something I would love to see, but I mean, how are you going to study it? Who's going to fund that? I mean, I don't know, RFK Jr. might, who knows? It might be like, we're not funding real research anymore, like vaccines, so. If we get on the right podcast, we could probably make that happen. So before we move off of the gas,

Starting point is 00:22:17 let's just talk about treatment of it and what you will do out there in the field, someone comes to you, and let's try to address some of the most common misconceptions about what you should be treating or how you should be treating them. Yeah, I'm so ready to go. So since forever, there have been like rumors that there are these, I think because of sort of the way that it is mysterious, like the cops have these like, you know, containers of this awful poisonous magical potion that

Starting point is 00:22:52 they spray on you and then we have to find the antidote. So things that I have heard as being good for tear gas and pepper spray include raw onion, lemon juice, apple cider vinegar, Coca Cola, avocado. Delicious so far. It sounds like a nice salad. Great actually. And then the classic milk as well as maylocks. My personal favorite is when somebody like jumps in to correct somebody on milk and is as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, as well as, What you actually do is flush out the eyes with water. I mean, that's it.

Starting point is 00:23:46 That's the only thing. It's water. The number of things that should go into a human eye are basically water and any medicine that is designed for the human eye and saline solution, I guess. And definitely you could do an eye flush with saline. It's just that if you have saline in your bag, it weighs just as much as water and you can't drink it when you get tired.

Starting point is 00:24:10 Well, you can. Well, you can, but it's not recommended. Shouldn't. And you can't refill it from a tap. You can drink anything, James. Yeah, if you're not a calorie. Yeah. But if you have a bottle of water,

Starting point is 00:24:24 you can do a bunch of eye flushes. And then when it starts to run low, you can refill it from a tap because that has water in it too. It's very readily available water in most places. And all of the other things that are out there that people will tell you, you should use, you should not use. I have never seen any good evidence that any of them are better than water at getting pepper spray or tear

Starting point is 00:24:50 gas out of your eye. All of them are kind of predicated on this idea that there's like a chemical reaction you are trying to affect. And then that is sort of further based on the idea that the reason this stuff hurts is because it is acidic. Because I think people think like, what's a chemical that burns? Acid. Right, right. on the idea that the reason this stuff hurts is because it is acidic, because I think people think like, what's a chemical that burns? Acid. Right, right. These are not acidic. That is not how they work. They are chemical irritants and you don't want an acid based reaction in your eye anyway. You want to be doing chemistry experiments in your eye. Yeah, you actually usually wear goggles when you do chemistry experiments.

Starting point is 00:25:25 I'm not like a chemist, but... Miriam, water sure is great, but what about all that fluoride you're getting into your eyeballs? Okay, have you thought about that? That'll prevent eye cavities. Richard, anything else to add to that? No, I think you hit the nail on the head. I think that when I look at what

Starting point is 00:25:46 physicians typically recommend in terms of response to tear gas, I always think back on the Dr. Glockham-Fleckin thread that became very popular on Shorter. I'd be very interested to hear what your thoughts are on that Miriam. I think like one of the things that tended to come from that particular thread, because he does have experience as an ophthalmologist, he mentioned washing your eyes with baby shampoo and rinsing copiously. I think the challenge with that is obviously what Miriam had mentioned. One, water, saline are the better options for irrigating your eyes, especially after exposure.

Starting point is 00:26:23 For one, the fact that it's, you know, you never know what else, like it's better to avoid any other type of irritants that you could, you know, be exposing to your eye. Also the fact, like we already mentioned, the fact that the agents in tear gas, they're nucleophilic, meaning they're attracted to water. So by using water itself, you are effectively going to help to irrigate it. And, you know, we typically recommend anywhere upwards of 20 minutes for that type of exposure. And then as far as I'm not sure if you've mentioned milk already, Mariam. Milk haunts me. Yeah, we can't mention it enough.

Starting point is 00:26:58 Eyeball cheese. We cannot mention eyeball cheese enough. What about 2% is the percentage? 2% So let's think about what the context of where we are in a protest. It's very typically outdoors for many hours, usually in summertime. Hot, usually milk is a bad choice. So who likes the idea of putting this, you know, this culture on people's eyes?

Starting point is 00:27:26 Like, I think... Far too many people, is the answer. Just yogurt. Actually, yogurt. You may as well go and get Greek yogurt and pour it on their eyes. So you know, he really gets back to the idea of like constant irrigation, clean water is perfectly fine. If you have water at the protest,

Starting point is 00:27:46 usually the best thing to do is have the types of water bottles that have like a flip-off cap, so that way you can easily, you know, pour it over their face and then recap it for later use on someone else or yourself. I think the other thing too that's really important to discuss And the other thing too that's really important to discuss is, you know, because it's this solid aerosolized substance, it can sometimes adhere to your clothing. So you know, there's a couple of different approaches. You know, Physicians for Human Rights has a PDF that I strongly encourage anybody who's listening to review if you find yourself in the position of either being a protester at a protest or being a medic at a protest

Starting point is 00:28:26 They recommend if you've been exposed to tear gas to hang your clothing afterwards In a heavily ventilated place for up to 48 hours if you're not able to do that Placing your clothing in a plastic bag Including your shoes outside and not mixing it with any of your other non-exposed clothing is the ideal response afterwards. Yeah. Yeah. I'll add when Dr. Glockenflecken was on our show talking about this back then, George

Starting point is 00:28:55 Floyd, we discussed it. And the other thing that he recommended, and he is actually not just a very, very funny internet person, he's also a very good ophthalmologist. And he also recommended initially when it happens, as soon as you can, blink rapidly. That really helps initiate the tear response. You're still gonna need water, but it's gonna help get that jump started for you.

Starting point is 00:29:18 And it's gonna require a lot of water, about one to two liters is generally what people will say. So it's hard to have that much with you on hand when you're out there protesting. But if you're able to, I feel like water is one of the more important things you can bring with you. Yeah. So to the thing about the baby shampoo, first of all,

Starting point is 00:29:37 yeah, I think the recommendation with that is to wash the skin around the eyes with the baby shampoo, not directly in the eyes, but that that's like a less harsh way of removing the chemicals from the skin there because you would definitely wash skin with soap and water. But I could see maybe using like a gentler soap directly around the eyes, that makes sense.

Starting point is 00:29:58 As far as like my technique with doing an eye flush, in the streets, a continual 20-minute irrigation just is not feasible. Now sometimes at big actions, you know, medics will set up clinic spaces, tents, stuff like that. And occasionally, very occasionally, you can do the like true gold standard of eye irrigation, which is 20 minutes of continual saline irrigation where you like have a bag of saline like in a hospital and you plug it into a nasal cannula and you tape that to the bridge of the nose and just let the person lie down. That works, but like it's just not feasible in most street situations.

Starting point is 00:30:37 So what I do is I will basically I'll put on gloves. I will get consent because, you know, anytime you're treating somebody who's been brutalized by the police, you are like, you are treating an assault victim and you should prioritize their consent as much as you can. So I, you know, do a quick like, hey, what's up, my name's Miriam, I'm a medic,

Starting point is 00:31:00 can I help you? I guide them out of the area of immediate danger if they can't see. And then I flush first one eye twice, and then I have them blink a whole bunch, and then the other eye twice, and I have them blink a whole bunch. And then they're usually able to open their eyes and navigate safely on their own. Sometimes they need another round with that, especially if I missed't, you know, if I missed being, you know, if it's dark and there things are moving around and I missed the eye or something. But usually that gets enough out that they are going to be able to navigate the situation. And because they are tearing a lot, that's part of the flush too, right? The body is doing that on its own and flushing too much with water,

Starting point is 00:31:43 I think in that initial moment you're just washing away tears at that point. So doing like a first round of like forceful flush you know you're really like using a forceful stream to push the chemicals out and then okay their eyes are open they're still in pain and like that's just gonna last for a while. Your eyes are going to continue to hurt and like that sucks. You've been harmed. Somebody did a harmful thing to you and you are going to continue to have pain for a little while. But if you can see that your immediate danger is reduced and you can get out of there and you can, you know, in a calmer moment maybe do another couple eye flushes, maybe, you know, use soap and water on the face, clean up a little bit and like,

Starting point is 00:32:28 be a little bit happier with how you feel. But my priority in the immediate moments after somebody's been sprayed is to like help them so that they can get out of there if they need to, because they probably do. Yeah. Yeah. Well, speaking of things that will make you tear up, I'm sorry. I'm terrible Stay tuned. We'll be right back beautiful

Starting point is 00:32:59 All right, we are back and I guess Let's talk about rubber bullets of various impact nuisances and then let's talk about how people, actions people can take to keep themselves a little bit safer, right? Understanding that like you are not the one who gets to choose if violence arrives at your protest. The cops are and we're recording this on Sunday, a date in June, and people had their big no Kings March yesterday. They were largely like extremely nonviolent and they still got attacked by the cops in LA.

Starting point is 00:33:31 So let's talk about impact munitions, right? One thing we didn't mention actually was pepper balls. I've had the, uh, yeah, right. I've had the ill fortune of receiving some pepper balls in the balls. Oh yeah. Very uncomfortable cops will try and shoot you in the groin. I had a colleague who encountered this just a few days ago. I'm sorry. They fucking sucks. Like there's no yeah, it happens with such frequency that you'd have to be really trying to believe that it was an accident. So let's talk about things that can hit you, right?

Starting point is 00:34:05 If we start with pepper balls and then move on up to like what people call rubber bullets, which I think baton rounds is like a more technical description of what they are or marker rounds, right? Big foam or rubber things that hit you. Sometimes they leave a little puff of chalk on you. In theory, like that identifies you for the cops to arrest you, I guess, in practice. It's just another thing that they can use to smash into you. But let's talk about some of the things that the cops can shoot from their little guns.

Starting point is 00:34:35 Bean bag rounds is another one, right? That comes out of a shotgun. And it's what it sounds like, right? It's a bean bag traveling very fast. Somebody here in San Diego lost their eye to one of those in 2020. But let's talk about some of these impact munitions and what the potential risks are for people there. Yeah, I think that, I mean, just the one point I want to bring up in terms of these,

Starting point is 00:35:00 they're often called in the media non-lethal and or or quote-unquote less lethal. Yeah. And I think that what's really important to recognize and you kind of already had to do with James, people have been killed with rubber bullets, plastic bullets. We actually have Amnesty International did a report in 2023 that you know showed that over the course of about five years, dozens of people have died as a result of the use of rubber bullets. We show that between 1972 to 1989, just in Ireland,

Starting point is 00:35:37 16 people were killed in Palestine. Between 87 and 93, 20 people died just from the use of rubber bullets. And, you know, that's reports. We don't know how many in truth actually were impacted by that. Yeah. I would also add that the British Medical Journal back in 2017 looked at about 2000, a little bit over 2000 people who had been affected by these projectiles and 3% actually people who had been affected by these projectiles and 3% actually did cause immediate mortality. And then 15% was long-term chronic injury or illness or some sort of being maimed from the event. So yeah, you're exactly right. It's pretty significant, especially with the number

Starting point is 00:36:19 of these that are shot. You know, they don't have to keep record about how many of these they they shoot. So actually, one other question I have for you, Richard, that you could help answer to one in LA, did you see them shooting these things? And you kind of allude to that you felt that they were actually directing them towards you. Did you feel that being there as a medical professional that you were being targeted? I myself was fortunate and not hit by a rubber bullet from witnessing my colleagues who were actually there present at this protest. They themselves were hit with rubber bullets below

Starting point is 00:36:57 the naval. He had previous experience from an earlier protest that week where he had actually been struck in the thing. He told me that I remember is like, I'm never going to one of these things. I'm prepared again because he did have that situation where he was kind of hit closer to the groin. So we ended up wearing. I remember he was wearing a kind of a fanny pack for this particular protest that we were at. And you could very clearly see the dust marks, like the chalk marks of the bullets struck on this on his on his fanny pack. Yeah, you know, it's it's it's definitely something that that we noticed.

Starting point is 00:37:28 Many of the other medics at this event commented that they had been previously struck or targeted once the police began firing rubber bullets. As far as we fortunately, we didn't see anybody who was struck closer to the face. But there were reports after the No King's protest yesterday that several people had been struck in the eye or on the forehead. There was one picture I think earlier from earlier this week that one of the reporters in downtown LA had been struck with a non-lethal foam round directly in his forehead. And it was this, you could see this very clear, enormous wealth, the size of like a grapefruit

Starting point is 00:38:10 and bleeding. And it was very clearly like aiming above at the face in these cases. Yeah, there was a huge number during the Chilean protests in 2019, 2020. Eye injuries were huge. There were hundreds. There's a club somewhere of journalists who've lost eyes to rubber bullets. I think they call themselves the Cyclops Club or something. They're writers. They, you know. But yeah,

Starting point is 00:38:41 these things are incredibly dangerous and eye injuries especially are really common. They are less lethal only in that it is less likely to kill you than being shot with live ammunition. But like most things are less likely to kill you than live ammunition. Grizzly bear is less likely to kill you. My friend Rebecca Watson says, you know, Samurai Blade is less lethal than, you know, AK-47, but it's still not something you want them to have to use against you. Be ideal if you weren't being attacked doing what is a constitutionally protected right

Starting point is 00:39:15 in the US. Yeah. Hey everyone, I just wanted to record a little pick up here to explain a little bit more, I guess, about 40 millimeter and 37 millimeter less lethal projectiles. They are sometimes called baton rounds. I saw baton round written on the safari land, 37 millimeter one, but they are not the same as the baton rounds you will have seen British military using in Northern Ireland.

Starting point is 00:39:40 Most of the modern ones that I am aware of are not designed to be skipped off the ground, albeit there certainly are or at least were rubber bullets that were designed to be skipped off the ground at one point. The use of a bullet made of rubber that's fired out of a conventional rifle is very rare in the United States. There are things called simmunitionsitions which are munitions that fire out of a conventional rifle using a different bolt and they are generally used for simulated force on force training. You can think about it like going paintballing but with regular guns albeit

Starting point is 00:40:15 with a bolt that makes it so you can't load live ammunition into that gun while it's set up for sim munitions. Those were used extensively. I believe in Columbia identified some ammunition casings. I've not seen those used by police anywhere in the United States. What the LAPD uses is a 14 millimeter exact impact round. It has a plastic body and a sponge nose. And that is designed to be point of aim, point of impact, right? So shot at someone like you would shoot a gun at somebody. There are other less lethals in use, even in LA I saw a 37mm Safari land round, I saw

Starting point is 00:40:52 FN 303s which is like 17mm, I saw pepper balls, various different versions of less lethal munitions but most of the ones that I'm aware of in 2025 are designed for point of aim, point of impact. They're also extremely dangerous. And as we've said here, they can kill you. Just wanted to clarify that. So like, yeah, these things are dangerous, right? They have caused serious injury or death. Let's assume for a minute that like the folks listening have not attended many actions before, right? That they are at the younger or like they just haven't been in that world in that part of their life and they've seen what's happening recently and they're pissed off and they want to attend, but they're afraid, right? And they want to know what they can do, what they can bring,

Starting point is 00:41:37 how they can prepare themselves in the understanding that like it isn't 100% safe because the cops can decide to attack you whenever they want. What can people bring? How can people repair to be as safe as they can be? Bring water. I mean, not just the eye flushes, but like bring snacks and water. Like you're going to be out there for a while. You need to keep yourself going. You need to keep your friends going. Bring friends, like be there with somebody who is going to watch your back. Somebody who with somebody who is going to watch your back, somebody who knows a number for like your emergency contact, if you get grabbed, stuff like that,

Starting point is 00:42:10 especially if you're new to this, like try not to run alone. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Even if it's like just hooking up with people when you get there, you know? Yeah, I've been at a protest that was starting to look scary

Starting point is 00:42:22 and a woman turned to me and said, I'm here alone, are you here alone? And I said, yeah. And she said, now we're here together. Okay, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is beautiful. It's a good place to make friends.

Starting point is 00:42:35 It's a very like honest feeling to have. I mean, you're seeing for the problem, for many people, it's probably the first time you're seeing someone aiming a projectile at you and aiming a firearm at you and firing. So yeah, you know, there's a good reason to feel worried. That's like the fact that we have to worry about in this country period is, you know, it's very chilling. I think that, you know, Miriam mentioned it, bringing friends is really important. Something else that like we've

Starting point is 00:43:00 talked about in circles in LA, I think, is like really understanding going in, what is the amount of risk that you are willing to take entering into these spaces I think is extraordinarily important. I think some of my colleagues who were at the UCLA protests earlier during the Palestine movement, they kind of asked the question, like they kind of framed it in like green light, yellow light, red light. Like in terms of green meaning like I'm okay with, whatever risks might be involved like as far as like what my understanding of what this protest could entail, yellow being like I'm not prepared to go so far

Starting point is 00:43:37 as to be arrested, but I'm willing to be present, record if necessary, serve as a witness for my other colleagues who are gonna be in this space. Red meaning, you know, I'm not necessarily prepared at this point to go that far. I want to support, but I also don't want to get arrested. And I think it's important to like, you know, recognize that, not necessarily shame other people

Starting point is 00:43:59 in terms of like where they're at in this. Yeah, yeah, 100%. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Cause everybody comes at this from different places. I think it's really important like when they're at in this. Yeah, yeah, 100%. Yeah, absolutely. Because everybody comes at this from different places. I think it's really important like when you're in these spaces to like, you know, kind of understand the risk of the other people who are alongside you. Because if you're a medic and you're trying to treat other people and then you have all of a sudden you're by yourself because the other people are like, well, I, you know, this is

Starting point is 00:44:20 what I signed up for. I'm out. Yeah. That is also scary. Even if you're, you know, you're very willing to be there. So, I think just having those conversations and planning more than anything, planning, planning, planning is extraordinarily important. I think that's a very well said, great points.

Starting point is 00:44:36 And everyone has a different level of risk. And just to be totally clear for our listeners, there was over 2000 different protests yesterday, and there was the minimal amount of violence and they were all peaceful for me, the protesters were the vast, vast, vast majority, peaceful and things went fine. And some like the one I attended was actually kid friendly. So there was it was a safe place. But particularly in certain places, there's always a small chance, if not large, and depending on the police presence there, that things could go the wrong way.

Starting point is 00:45:11 And it is something to keep in mind. So I particularly like your point regarding everyone has a different level of risk and that's okay, you're still contributing. I mean, I'm not a place myself where I'm planning on getting arrested. That's just not something I want to do. But I would like to protest that I would like to support in along those lines. What are ways that other people who have medical backgrounds could potentially contribute or support you in terms of the ways that like medics can, know respond in these situations. I think for me I have you know a box of medical equipment that I go to bring on site.

Starting point is 00:45:50 Like I'm obviously like Miriam said I'm bringing water because that's gonna be foremost like my most useful tool to help anybody who's gonna be affected by things like like tear gas. You know as far as other things like having extra masks I think is really really important you, because it's a huge way of reducing respiratory exposure to the aerosols that are going to be in the air. And then eye protection, eye protection, eye protection. Now, the thing about, we've seen different types of protection for your eyes that are effective. We've seen goggles being used, like the ones you would see in a lab. They're not

Starting point is 00:46:25 actually effective unless you close the sides, the vents with tape, because otherwise the aerosols actually can still get inside the mask and irritate your eyes. So if you are going to be like bringing that type of eye protection, it's important to think about that. There's like some higher end, you know, more effective tools that provide both eye protection and helping to filter particles. Just using a basic goggle mask with the vents covered in an N95 for just about anybody, I think, is a useful tool. So having those types of supplies for people who need them is helpful. For sure. And as far as like a really low risk thing that people with medical training can do is

Starting point is 00:47:07 show up to jail support because that's like, that is a huge way you can help not just people who are arrested, but anybody coming out of jail is by doing jail support. And what that entails is hanging out where people get released. People will usually bring food, drinks, clothes, shoelaces. People often get out without shoelaces, belts, and like a couple of extra layers of clothes if people get let out and it's cold. And check out people's injuries.

Starting point is 00:47:40 Often people will be taken to the hospital during processing if they have something that the police can't ignore. But people often get released with injuries. And it can be really good to have somebody there who can evaluate them. Honestly, it's often just giving them like a judgment call on, do you think this needs somebody else to take a look at it, you know, in a professional environment, or can I put some ice on it and go home type thing. And almost everybody getting out of jail has handcuff injuries if they were arrested in a mass arrest because in mass arrest situations, cops tend to use the

Starting point is 00:48:15 plastic zip ties, which can get incredibly tight, even more so than metal handcuffs, which have a little bit, a little length of chain. They strain the shoulders, especially larger people, especially if somebody has a bag on their back. Cops will often cuff them in such a way that the bag pushes on their hands and makes the cuffs increasingly tight. And having a medical professional or a street medic or even somebody who's like just there to like take a look and be like, yeah, man, I see that that's really fucked up that they did that to you. I'm so sorry, can be useful. Having somebody there to like take a look and be like, yeah, man, I see that that's really fucked up that they did that to you. I'm so sorry. Can be useful having somebody there to witness and acknowledge and to document if somebody is planning on doing something with that.

Starting point is 00:48:53 You know, then that's, that's important too. So if you cannot be arrested, find out what's happening with jail support and go support them because that's chill. that's calm. Now, I mean, there are no guarantees in this world, but, um, but it is far more likely to be chill and calm. Yeah. And, and you can hang out and eat snacks. Oh, and this is the one situation where medically speaking, bring cigarettes. People want cigarettes when they get out of jail and they need, they deserve a fucking cigarette. Is it good for them? No. I know. I just am sorry. I hate cigarettes so much. Listen, I'm not going to say you

Starting point is 00:49:30 can't, but I will never give someone a cigarette. It goes against... I'll bring him a coat. Listen, there's certain things I just can't... All right. Listen, there's certain lines I will draw as a doctor. One, I have to help everybody even if I don't like them. Two, I can't give them cigarettes even if I like them. So I just can't, those are two things I can't bring myself to do. The cigarette one really drives me crazy, but I get it.

Starting point is 00:49:51 That's fair. In that case, maybe bring some cards for whatever your local public transit is, or failing that. You know, have some cash on hand to send people home in a taxi or have somebody standing by with a car to help people get home. Stuff like that. That's really important for jail support. Perhaps even more important than a cigarette. I would add that another thing you can do if you're medically, like a medical professional, especially, is help other people learn really basic skills.

Starting point is 00:50:22 You don't even have to be at a protest, right? It could be a week later. There are medical professionals who do street medic training. You can teach people stop the bleed in a day and potentially save someone's life. And so if it's something that you are skilled enough to teach and you need to be honest about whether you're skilled enough to teach that or not, if you've watched a few YouTube videos and you're not, that's something you could use to really help other people who are going to be there at a time

Starting point is 00:50:49 when you're not comfortable or safe being there. I guess for the end of the show to wrap up, if people are just attending to be fucking mad, and there are a lot of people who are fucking mad right now, what should they bring? And if people want to access training, right? Like what are some some resources that you would suggest? What are some types of training in terms of like first aid

Starting point is 00:51:13 that people can access that people should access if they're thinking of attending these things and they're worried? I mean, I think in terms of the type of first aid that you need to be really conscious of, especially in any type of event where you're gonna be with a lot of people and you're going in as a medic, and this isn't just for protests, I think it's for any type of event.

Starting point is 00:51:34 We do live in a world where, unfortunately, there is a lot of mass shootings. Even if they're firing rubber bullets, we don't know who else may also attend, who may also be going with the intention of being violent. So I mean, you mentioned it yourself, stop the bleed, having basic understanding of how to, what types of on the field first aid should be done for individuals who have got received

Starting point is 00:51:59 a gunshot wound, I think is really important. If they've been struck by a car. We've already seen earlier this this weekend that there were shootings in I believe in a couple of different cities. I it's I'm missing which one unfortunately happened, but I do know of at least one report of a Tesla being driven into a crowd of protesters this weekend. So it was, yeah. If I get killed by a Tesla, I'm going to be so fucking mad. Yeah, the fucking indignity.

Starting point is 00:52:33 That is actually the thing that concerns me the most at most protests is some actor coming in from outside to do something like that. That part really does concern me, especially because so many of these are, like I had mentioned, kind of family friendly, and they should be. I think families, for the most part, should be able to come to these things. So that is something that I am always constantly on the lookout for. Yeah, cars fucking scare me. Like, I've experienced car bombs in my career,

Starting point is 00:53:02 but also just like cars driving into crowds can cause untold damage and Americans do be loving large cars. And the cops won't stop them. Like at least in LA, my experience with the cars were kind of in and out the whole time and that did not make me feel secure. We had one individual who was stood in front of a van that was carrying ICE agents and that person essentially got run over. In that situation, you know, they were not at all stopping for that.

Starting point is 00:53:32 Yeah, big cars, it's a big risk. Like, I guess with that in mind, one thing I think about sometimes when I'm with these things is like, you don't want to be going into this, like, like traumatizing yourself by doing this, but the degree of situational awareness to include what are my points of cover and what are my ways out is good to have. Yeah. Yeah, it helps. It helps me feel safer anyway. Yeah. And that's another huge reason to always run with a buddy. Right.

Starting point is 00:54:03 That's another huge reason to always run with a buddy, right? Because if you're running with a buddy, especially, I mean, I think, I personally think that if you are doing medical stuff, you should always have a buddy just because if you're going to be stopped and like somebody's got to watch your back and like it's, and you know, you might need a second opinion. You can call in that buddy for a consult, you know? The medic collective that I run with on really big action days will put together like little bingo cards that we'll distribute to all the medic buddy pairs as a situational awareness game.

Starting point is 00:54:32 So, like, if we're all rolling out to a big, big action, we'll put like, there'll be squares for like a cop who clearly is not awake or your, or, you know, person who forgot sunscreen, or you know, just things to look out for. And I think honestly, like making a little bit of a game like that, if you're going to be out all day can be kind of fun. And it also makes you keep looking. It makes you not just look down at your feet as you march another mile. You know?

Starting point is 00:55:07 Yeah. Yeah. Please, as another great reminder, please prepare for the weather. Prepare for the elements. Bring water, bring sunscreen, bring hats, all that stuff. Sunscreen can trap the chemical irritants next to your skin. I like to wear a sun hoodie. Like you can get hoodies with SPF

Starting point is 00:55:27 I'm a pale-ass person right? It's some of you can see me for listeners. It is indeed true I was gonna say is that sun hoodie why you in no way have a watch tan Okay, friends friends can see my absolutely brutal tan right now Absurdly white when I was a bike racer, I used to have the logos of my sponsors burned into my back and that was cool. And, and normal. Um, unsettlingly literal. Yeah, right.

Starting point is 00:55:53 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was a political moment for me actually. Um, yeah, I like to wear a sun hoodie because sunscreen, it can trap irritants against your skin, but if it's a creamy kind, right? I think after a point it absorbs and it doesn't, but I've definitely experienced that kind of paste on your skin kind of situation.

Starting point is 00:56:12 Interesting. Some of the gnarliest injuries I've seen have been heat related at protests. Yeah. If you're organizing a protest, don't send it straight up a fucking hill. Just don't. Go easy on people. You know, the people will be bringing a lot of stuff and they have signs and stuff. Like it might not wear the comfy shoes.

Starting point is 00:56:33 Like you go easy on them with the, with the hill climbing and then, because you're doing it in the middle of the day often as well. Like, you know, don't hurt people. Richard, I knew you were going to mention something else. The thing I was trying to, to, to mention, this mention, this is less so for EMS non-physician individuals. Actually, before the podcast, I had a chance to talk with one of the regional vice presidents for CIR, the Physicians Union, that I was formerly a part of when I was in my residency. Kayla, she has a lot of experience being involved in protest in street medicine. And the thing that she likes to mention is like physicians have a tendency to want to

Starting point is 00:57:09 do a lot in a moment. And so Miriam mentioned situational awareness. I think situational awareness is extremely important. Being able to know when you have the time to do a certain intervention versus when it's time to like get this person out of here and to a safer place I think is like very, very important. Yeah. So less does more in these situations is what I would say is pretty important.

Starting point is 00:57:35 Yeah. Yeah. One thing I do like as a journalist, primarily not a visual one, I often work with photographers right as a two person team. I have been a photographer at ProG projects in the past and your world is very small in that viewfinder and it's kind of the same if you're helping someone, right, who's injured, that becomes your whole shit. I will have my physically have my hand on my photographer a lot of the time

Starting point is 00:57:56 on their back, right? And if they need to start moving backwards, I am going to start moving them backwards. Obviously you don't want to leave someone who's hurt, but like, if you're the buddy, it's good to be that close to the person who's providing care so that you can have a way out if you need to have a way out. This was so incredibly useful and helpful and insightful. We appreciate both of you coming on. Yeah. Let's close up here. What I would like to do coming on. Let's close up here. What I would like to do is not only plug something for yourselves, but what I'd like to hear in our listeners actually enjoy is to hear something that's bringing you some joy in these times, some piece of media, art, film, book, podcast, anything you name it, a good restaurant that you really love. you want to give a shout out to whatever it is something

Starting point is 00:58:47 That's bringing you a little bit of joy. So let's do those two things Miriam let's start with you. What can we plug and what's something that's bringing you some joy? So thank you for for having me on this was delightful. So I will plug strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, which is the collective that I'm a part of. You can find us at Tangled Wilderness on Blue Sky and Instagram and nowhere else. And we have a website, which is Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. We have a Patreon, all that stuff. But the main thing I want to tell you about those guys over there is that James and I

Starting point is 00:59:23 did a podcast recently for the show, Live Like the World is Dying on protest health and safety. And we go really in detail on specifics of gear, specifics of first aid techniques. And I think people should maybe check it out if they're, if they're going to be out there. We'll put it in the show notes. Yeah, because we're professional podcasters like that. You can cruise on over to It Could Happen Here if you'd like to find the show notes.

Starting point is 00:59:50 Right. Wait, wait, Miriam, so what's the thing that's bringing you joy? Oh, I have- Do you remember that? Joy? I'm familiar with the concept. I have been rewatching the She-Ra

Starting point is 01:00:02 and the Princesses of Power cartoon. Wow, nice. Love it. What about Jim? She is outrageous. You know, they didn't remake that as an overtly queer Netflix series, so I have had less exposure to it. But, you know, cartoon sword lesbians can't argue with it.

Starting point is 01:00:24 Yeah, that sounds pretty awesome. All right, Richard, what about you? As far as something to plug, I have a huge pleasure of being able to work on Blue Sky, helping to put together the MedSky feeds. So if you're on Blue Sky, be sure to subscribe to our labeler so that way you can get your medical specialty on your accounts and You can get your posts on one of our 40 different feeds and then also As a Latino, I can't leave the podcast without mentioning also. We are working on Latin Sky and it's a it's it's a it's the amount of

Starting point is 01:01:03 Latinidad and joy that I've been seeing on that feed over the last few days, despite the pain. It's been very inspiring. So I think that's like the plug that I want to put out there. And as far as the thing that brings me joy right now, I like, I was torn. I hear that like a bunch of people have already plugged Andor, so I'm not gonna plug Andor. You can, you can. You know, I'm gonna give some love to Ryan Coogler's Sinners, which is easily one of the best movies I have seen in at least the last five years. It is an extraordinary movie. Everything about that movie is like art. I just hope that Ryan Coogler can just make original movies for the rest of his life,

Starting point is 01:01:50 and that he doesn't have to be stuck doing franchise stuff. Because when he's just given a canvas, he makes beautiful, beautiful art. Yeah, right on, right on. Pura vida. Pura vida. That's for the, Pura vida. So James, what about you?

Starting point is 01:02:08 What can you plug for you? What can I plug? I don't know, there was a hot dog guy who went on the freeway in Los Angeles when everyone else went on the freeway, so that person's a fucking hero. I would let you know if you're in the, I'm vegan, so you know, maybe the bun, but for the rest of you, get after it. You know, you can you can listen to my podcast, you maybe already are, it could happen here. If you haven't listened, it would mean a lot to me if you had listened to the podcast I made in the Dalyan Gap last year, when I traveled with migrants who were on their way to the United

Starting point is 01:02:44 States. Those people and their stories are really important to me. So if you would listen to one thing I ever made, it would be that you can find it by searching Darien where dreams die. And then it could happen here podcast and it will come up unless you're using a really shit search engine and Google has been even more fucked by AI. And then in terms of stuff that gives me joy, recently I have been listening to the music of the anti-apartheid movement again. I kind of when I was a very young person, my sort of first exposure to activism was through people who had resisted apartheid in South Africa,

Starting point is 01:03:21 and they were very inspiring to me and they still are very inspiring to me. I listened to that music with them, right? Like apartheid in South Africa, and they were very inspiring to me and they still are very inspiring to me. I listened to that music with them, right? Like apartheid to be clear ended when I was like eight years old, but like, it was cool because it seemed like at that point, the good guys were winning. Yeah. Right. And so here we fucking are. Anyway, I listened to that because it reminds me that they always lose in the end. Yeah. So yeah, enjoy like the specials and Eddie Grant and even the incredibly eclectic Sun City album. Great choices, great choices. And for if you happen to be listening on the House of Pod, you've heard James come and talk about the Darien Gap. That was a really amazing story and it resonated with a lot of listeners and you

Starting point is 01:04:07 should listen to the full multi-part series that he put out on that. It's so much better, so please do that. For me, if you happen to be listening on It Could Happen here, listen to The House of Pod. You'll like it. You'll hear James and lots of people you already know and love and meet some new people and you'll hear us make fun of people you already know and love and meet some new people and You'll hear us make fun of medical grifters in the wellness community and that sort of thing as well members of the cabinet As for the thing that's bringing me joy I recently had a chance to expose my kids on a long drive to the work of Jeff Buckley, who is, for you younger listeners out there, you may not know who he was, because he unfortunately

Starting point is 01:04:54 passed away when he was only 30, but he was really a once in a generation talent. He was a voice, his songwriting transcended different genres. There was rock, there was jazz, there was folk. He could span a vocal range that just really is amazing. And he only had one studio album, Grace, but it is amazing. And I highly recommend that or really any of his live albums, Mystery White Boy, they're all fantastic. His cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah is the best version of it in my opinion.

Starting point is 01:05:27 I will fight you, I will fight you if you say Rufus Wainwright better. I will physically fight you. So it's just raw and beautiful and I hope you guys check it out if you haven't already. Last thing I'll plug, June 28th, if you happen to be in the Bay Area, my band will be playing at the Hotel Utah in San Francisco.

Starting point is 01:05:47 It is one of my favorite places to watch or play music, and it's just super fun. Come up and say hi, and we'll chat, and we'll maybe share a drink if we have time. Okay, thank you all so much. Thanks, James, this was fun, huh? Yeah, that was fun, it was beautiful. I had a nice time.

Starting point is 01:06:03 Yeah, let's do it again. Okay, byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee I'm Robert Evans and on my podcast Behind the Bastards we talk about the worst people in all of history. We've discussed a lot of horrible monsters in our time, but this week we have one of the very worst we'll ever talk about. David Berg, founder of a cult called the Children of God. We'll talk about all of his horrible crimes with special guest Ed Helms. He's not just like a weird religious cult leader. He was like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology

Starting point is 01:06:47 in with this kind of like evangelical Christianity, Pentecostal preaching in the mid-century. He's a very weird guy. But yeah, I'll just get into it. Like nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't say. Right. But that's the beauty of cults.

Starting point is 01:07:00 Listen to Behind the Bastards on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Catherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders.

Starting point is 01:07:22 I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. I have never found her, and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator

Starting point is 01:07:37 to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into,

Starting point is 01:07:54 call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Number five, listen to Hell and Gone Murderline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, but there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer

Starting point is 01:08:20 will always be no. Across the country, cops call this Taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission.

Starting point is 01:08:43 This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes one, two, and three on May 21st and episodes four, five, and six on June 4th. Ad free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple podcasts. The summer of 1993 was one of the best of my life. I'm journalist Jeff Perlman, and this is Rick Jervis. We were interns at the Nashville Tennessean,

Starting point is 01:09:25 but the most unforgettable part? Our roommate, Reggie Payne, from Oakley, sports editor and aspiring rapper. And his stage name? Sexy Sweat. In 2020, I had a simple idea. Let's find Reggie. We searched everywhere, but Reggie was gone.

Starting point is 01:09:43 In February 2020, Reggie was gone. In February 2020, Reggie was having a diabetic episode. His mom called 911. Police cuffed him face down. He slipped into a coma and died. I'm like thanking you, but then I see my son's not moving. No headlines, no outrage, just silence. So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own. No headlines, no outrage, just silence. So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own.

Starting point is 01:10:09 Listen to Finding Sexy Sweat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm here once again with... It's James again. Great to talk to you again, James. Yeah, likewise. Glad to be here.

Starting point is 01:10:31 You know, I spend a lot of time thinking about the world and how it works and all that jazz and I assume you do as well? I do, yeah, yeah. Increasingly worrying about the world and how it works. Yeah, this place, this home is quite the puzzle. And much like a puzzle, it has been carved up and divided in so many different ways, sliced, labeled, ranked and measured from all kinds of different angles. And that's really what I'm interested in talking about today.

Starting point is 01:11:00 The different ways that we try to explain the differences we see on the global stage. So going from the concept of civilized and primitive, to the East and West binary, to the imagined communities called nations, the clash of quote-unquote civilizations, to the concept of first, second, and third worlds, to the development spectrum, to the global north and global south, and finally to the core and the periphery. So we have a lot of ground to cover in this episode. Yeah, I really like this stuff. As a historian, we're always kind of forced into certain divisions, right? Even when you apply to your funding, right?

Starting point is 01:11:39 You're normally in a geographical area, or you're trying to shoehorn something that's just interesting into one of these boxes that gets funding. And I think like often that impacts how we see the world. So we have to write with that goal. Absolutely. Absolutely. I find the way that we approach the telling of history so fascinating and in another life, maybe I would have been

Starting point is 01:12:05 a historian. I know if I can recommend it. Yeah. Yeah. It's, I enjoy the doing of history. It's the doing of academia that I don't enjoy so much. So I suppose as a historian, I'm going to ask you a discomforting question. Great.

Starting point is 01:12:20 Would you consider yourself civilized or primitive? Oh, that's a fun one. I don't know. Like I, I don't like that binary because I think it's a value statement. Right. And then I think like, um, James C. Scott talks about this actually, this is a really interest this I've had this. James C. Scott, right.

Starting point is 01:12:40 Talks about the idea of people who exist outside of the state being labeled as primitive by the state, um, it's in the idea of people who exist outside of the state being labeled as primitive by the state. It's in the art of not being governed. And that's the sort of the narrative there. The inherent message is that the state is the final and superior form of human organizing and people who have chosen to exist outside it. Not because they chose to, but because they haven't made it there yet. And of course, Scott problematizes that, suggests that maybe it's a choice, not a failure to accede to that civilization. And it's a concept that like young Burmese fighters have echoed back to me. I don't think they're aware of James C. Scott, if I'm being honest, but they will say to

Starting point is 01:13:22 me like when, because when they left the cities to live with the ethnic revolutionary organizations there, they had always been told that the reason those people lived outside of the Burmese state was because they were primitive and violent. But then they came to live and fight alongside them and they were like, no, these are our, these are our family. They're brothers and sisters and siblings. And like, they want the same thing as us. Like they're not primitive. They and like they want the same thing as us, like, they're not primitive. They just don't want the state. So I guess in that sense, I would want to be labeled as primitive too. I think the primitive people are doing cool shit, and then the civilized people are not. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's one of, I think, one of the more enduring global binaries, one of the oldest, you know, you'd hear that kind of juxtaposition or civilized

Starting point is 01:14:07 and primitive or civilized and barbarian. You know, in ancient Rome, you see that distinction between the civilized Roman citizens and the barbarian other. And in that instance, and in a lot of instances, it's used as this ideological tool to assert superiority. Definitely. Yeah. Like I think we have to be really careful as historians about that. These assumptions that we make. Historians will often make a lot of like assumptions about revolutions too. And I would wager that I've attended more revolutions and many of my academic

Starting point is 01:14:40 colleagues, and I think many of those are grounded in the truths that people accept as truths without ever testing them. And like, I think this sort of civilized barbarian one, it's kind of the same like that. Yeah. It's a classic one. I mean, do you know where the word barbarian even comes from? Isn't it their language thing?

Starting point is 01:14:56 Like, because they didn't speak, is it Latin? They were just going like, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar. Is that right? Yeah. It's because of what, you know, Rome did this all the time where they just borrowed wholesale from what the Greeks were doing. Yeah. So in Greek, barbaros meant anyone who did not speak Greek. Okay. As the Romans just kind of took that and expanded it to talk about anybody who wasn't on their whole wave of urban planning and, you know, codified legal systems, the philosophy, the education, the art, all

Starting point is 01:15:26 of that stuff. Yeah, yeah. The barbarians didn't have those refinements. Right, yeah. But of course the relationship between the two is not so simple, right? Because later on in Roman history, as you'd know, barbarians, quote unquote, were incorporated slowly into the state and became very useful armies and a reserve full of labor and all these different things for what

Starting point is 01:15:50 Rome was trying to do with the ex-patriot. Yeah. And luckily contemporary American right has been very normal about that and uh isn't using that for like it's sort of eugenic eugenic agenda right now. Yeah. Very very much eugenics vibes these days. Yeah. Where my father lives is right on the border between England and Scotland. And you can visit Hadrian's wall. I rode my bike all along it a couple of years ago. Oh, wow.

Starting point is 01:16:16 It's cool. Yeah. It's like a fun edge of empire kind of thought experiment. Like, you know, you'll be on this line of the barbarians or the uncivilized people. Today, it's like an unremarkable, like, it's literally, it keeps some people sheep in their fields at points along the way. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like, there's some stones kind of piled on top of each other. And it's kind of an unremarkable novelty. But it's funny to think that at one point, there was this binary world, right?

Starting point is 01:16:46 And they felt that the outside was so dangerous to them that they had to provide a physical barrier, something we're still doing. Indeed. And as we're speaking of walls, by the way, this reminds me of another major empire, where this sort of dichotomy was occurring. You know, it wasn't just taking place in the Mediterranean world. You had, in of course, ancient China, this whole identity constructed around these moral and cultural and political ideals.

Starting point is 01:17:15 Of course, you had the whole Confucianism, Taoism, and legalist thought all shaping what it meant to be, you know, conducting yourself properly and in a civilized manner. Yeah. And so those who did not ascribe to those ideals would have been people who were labeled barbarians. Yeah. Often the people on the other side of the Great Wall. Yeah. We are, the United States is literally doing the exact same thing, right? Like it's,

Starting point is 01:17:42 we're building a giant wall and labeling othering the people on the other side of it. Yeah, you definitely see the genealogy there. Yeah. But I think there's a closer genealogy we could draw upon for that particular reference though, which is how later European empires would appropriate the Roman civilized barbarian binary to justify their assimilation, extermination and colonialism. Definitely.

Starting point is 01:18:07 One of the things I like to do, even with the United States and its informal empire, right, like I love to show my students cartoons, like political cartoons. Like there's one of the white man's burden, which like distil, you know, sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, but it distills that whole binary so well in a way that seems like repugnant to most of my students today, I guess, I don't know, maybe, maybe folks are moving back that way. But like the imagery and the distinction between the way, or even like Lewis and Clark, when they're addressing the indigenous people they meet and calling them children, right? Like this binary distinction is so, it's so apparent. And like, I know it seems so outlandish, I think, to most folks today. But then we do similar things, I guess, in, you know, in a slightly more subtle way sometimes. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 01:19:08 I mean, when you look at what was taking place with the Enlightenment and that whole development of this particular order, it's steeped in these particular values, where the European culture was the ideal standard and everything that did not measure up to that standard was barbaric or primitive. It's just that has never really gone away, you know, and it continues to be used to justify the domination of Western powers. Yeah. It's like the way that they've instilled these European norms and practices across the world

Starting point is 01:19:43 when it comes to things like relation to the land, when it comes to things like the divisions between people, between genders, all these things, all these attitudes that are now so widespread originated from in part this elevation of one above the other. And speaking of, I mentioned the word Western there and that's really another way that we've sort of maintained this binary in a different coat of paint, although it's not quite the same. So there's this sort of lingering framework of the notion of the East and the West, right?

Starting point is 01:20:25 In the ancient times, it was China versus Rome. These days, it's probably China versus America. China really is that old. Yeah, yeah. And okay, this is probably a very, very Gen Z reference for me to make. But I don't know if you've seen these edits circulated on social media of the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, going like buzz up Beijing and there's like a whole bunch of like skyscrapers and like like hardcore like electronic music edited to show like all these advancements

Starting point is 01:21:03 and people in the comments always saying things like Be China do nothing win I have not seen those. Yeah. Yeah, that's definitely dating me a little bit In terms of my social media diets but yeah, just seeing the Dynamic between China or between the East and the West, the Orient and the Occident, to use an older term, it's just another way that we've created this sort of boundary between people that are either on one side or the other, there's

Starting point is 01:21:37 a necessary tension between the two. This concept of the Orient and Orientalism is something that Edward Said identified famously as something that was constructed by the West as an exotic, irrational, decadent and dangerous place. And so that whole dualistic narrative was then put into the Imperial project to legitimize their domination and to position the East as a passive subject without a voice of their own and in constant need of Western intervention and guidance. So the West becomes a sort of stage for modernity and science and region and progress, this

Starting point is 01:22:16 whole idea of the protagonist of history and the Orient, the East, they're the primitive, I guess, side of that binary. Although unlike the civilized primitive binary or civilized barbarian binary of old, I think while there could have been racial components to it in the past, this one is more explicitly racial and geographic in its division. Because, I mean, in ancient Rome, anybody could essentially become a Roman citizen. You know, it wasn't necessarily racially, you know, pure Aryan sense that a lot of new Nazis and stuff today like to look back at that period as you had a quite a diversity

Starting point is 01:22:58 of phenotypes in the Roman Empire. Yeah. But, you know, when you come to this Orient and Occident dichotomy, it's very much racialized. A lot of times when people talk about the Western world, it really tends to be, I guess, a more politically correct way of saying the white world. Yes. At least in my observation. Yeah, yeah, definitely. That's often the subtext.

Starting point is 01:23:22 Because I mean, that's something I've always struggled with pinning down, right? Because why isn't Brazil considered part of the West? You know, why isn't Mexico considered part of the West? Right. What are we West of? Like, like what it what it's not even it's not the Western hemisphere. Like as you say, Yeah, I mean, Western is more straightforward.

Starting point is 01:23:40 But is it because there are too many colored people in Mexico and in Brazil? It seems to be right. Like it's not even countries strongly either from Western Europe or strongly impacted by settler colonialism from Western Europe, because the entirety of Latin America is impacted. Then they should be included, but they're not. That they're not. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:24:01 Yeah. And it, yeah, it's, I've always struggled with that one other than get neoliberal capitalist white countries. It's, it's, it's what people don't want to say. And Japan, some, sometimes. Yeah, yeah. Japan. Strangely enough. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:24:16 Yeah. They're like an honorary member of the club. Yeah. Or like sometimes also not Spain. This is a particular like bugbear, I guess, of Spanish historians. Really? I don't think I've seen that one. Yeah, for years, like literally you would be excluded from European history. Like, uh, like Africa starts with the Pyrenees is a sort of phrase that needs to be used.

Starting point is 01:24:36 That's hilarious. Yeah. Like I guess it compounded because Spain was so isolated under Franco, right? But like, yeah, they, they called it the black legend. Like Spain does not belong to Europe and, uh, like, yeah, they're, they're called it the black legend. Like Spain does not belong to Europe and, uh, and it's not, again, it's racialized, right? It's because Spain had this exchange with the Muslim world, right? And like that culture deeply impacted Spanish culture. And even after Reconquista, like it's like, you know, the French historians were just like,

Starting point is 01:25:06 no, you guys are tainted. Like you don't get to come back. It's kind of a similar situation with the territories of the former Ottoman Empire as well. Technically part of Europe and yet, you know, maligned in some way. Yeah, yeah, a little less than still. It's like, ah, you'll have too much, too much Turkish, too much Muslim influence. You all got a, Yeah, you need like a thousand years to decompress before we let you back in.

Starting point is 01:25:33 Yeah. I mean, honestly, if the Pope wasn't based in Italy, I'm sure Italy would have a similar dynamic. I mean, Italy is a recent construction, right? In terms of as a country. Yeah. I mean, Italy is a recent construction, right, in terms of as a country. But when you look at the two Sicilies, for example, that was under North African rule for a significant period of its history. But let me not get too far off track.

Starting point is 01:26:07 One more tangent and that is I'm far from being a dengist by any means or a Maoist or anything of that nature. But there is something to be said for the way that the East or the Orient has been sidelined, marginalized, treated as lesser than for so long. And now they're at a point where their geopolitical sway has to be respected. Yeah. I'm not rooting for them by any means. I'm not one of those people who's like, yeah, multipolar world. I would rather we have no poles, you know, as an anarchist.

Starting point is 01:26:47 Yeah, yeah, I do know what you mean. But it's like, it's a bit of a schadenfreude, I guess. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is, you know, ironic in a, but yeah, not necessarily in a good way. Like I just seen Xi Jinping meeting with Min Aung Hlaing, the dictator of Myanmar today. And I'm like, not excited for that pole of the world. Not at all. Not at all. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:27:12 I feel the same way about the way that the Sahel Federation has kind of kicked out France. I'm like, yeah, stick it to France, but also military who knows? Yeah. Yeah. Like the rebranded Wagner court now, like, uh, yeah. And the, the, the collaboration, close collaboration with Russia, but they know a lot of this thing is really, a lot of these relationships, these geopolitical leaders relationships are so opportunistic.

Starting point is 01:27:41 It's all opportunism. Yeah. And the data don't really, they're not really necessarily guided by principles yeah like the difference i guess between like for instance i've you know i've been thinking a lot about anarchists at war right and people go and fight in other people's to defend other people right like they'd be um the people who went to rajava to fight people who went to miyama to fight like uh there's a difference between doing something out of a sense of solidarity and doing something out of root opportunism. And like that always shows itself in the end.

Starting point is 01:28:10 Yeah, I mean, the Wagner Group's involvement in Africa is the most blatant capitalist driven opportunism. Yeah, like these people are not there for the anti-colonial. They're like standing with the oppressed peoples of the world. Yeah, yeah, like watching the Battle of Algiers and setting off to immediately liberate the people of Africa. Literal mercenaries, right? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:28:34 But getting back onto the main topic, talking about all these ways we divvy up the world. Out of the linguistic and cultural and geographical differences that we observe around us came this concept of nations, right? Nation as an idea also came out of the European imagination. It's commonly defined and it's used worldwide today, but it's commonly defined as a large community of people who share common identity, often through language, culture, history, and sometimes ethnicity, and who usually inhabit a specific geographic territory with its own political organization. They can be nations without states, as simply a cultural community forces people who feel

Starting point is 01:29:17 a collective belonging and share destiny, but nations are as we know mostly tied up with states today, hence nation being used as a synonym for country. Yeah, this is one of my bug bears, I guess, as an academic. Like, I tried to develop this concept of Catalan nationalism that like at the time was inherently anti-fascist, I think, or was trying to be like, but it ain't now. Like, there's a very, very little Catalan right now. And yeah, I do still find it hard when, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, that that Catalan nationalism has shifted, it really, I think, gets to the whole weakness of the nation idea. So Benedict Anderson famously called nations imagined communities, because the community

Starting point is 01:30:17 exists as a collective fantasy. You know, they imagine a deep comradeship with people who they've never met. And this fantasy has boundaries, not just about who is included, but also famously who is excluded. And this fantasy is not necessarily something that is automatic or natural as we tend to see it today. But it's really the rise of things like print capitalism, with the mass production of books and newspapers. And that's what really shaped the standardization and formalization of these imagined communities through the creation of like common cultural referents and a shared sense of history.

Starting point is 01:30:57 Yeah. And then of course you had the nation idea of further being developed by liberal revolutions and through the shared experience of colonial rule, you know, where subject populations would mobilize nationalism to claim self-determination. Yeah, definitely. Like it, uh, I'm sure I'm not the only, I'm trying to remember, I've borrowed this from someone, but the idea of like identity entrepreneurs is one I like, like it's when religion loses his claim on universal truth, specifically in Europe,

Starting point is 01:31:27 that's like a market for identity that is open. And the creation of nations is like, to my mind, like a boshwa project, right? Like it's an entrepreneurial endeavor that they seek to create something to benefit from it. And like it yet to a degree that's turned against them. It's still an entrepreneurial endeavor, right? Like still you could be creating a nation which wants to kick France out of Morocco, right? That that nation may not have space for everyone who inhabits that territory of Morocco.

Starting point is 01:31:59 Like it's still for some people construct. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think the elite intellectual current of a lot of nationalist movements can go understated. You know, oftentimes what stirs up the masses toward that specific direction, because I mean, the masses will revolt against their conditions, but what sort of directs it in that national independence direction and this concept of nation tends to but what sort of directs it in that national independence direction and this concept of nation is tends to be that sort of elite intellectual current. I often look at the history of Trinidad and Tobago as a reference point, seeing as that's

Starting point is 01:32:33 where I come from. The whole process of nation building is always ongoing and we are in a position where there's an effort, there's a very strong effort to both push for a nation building, but also recognize our divergent pasts. Because we have this sort of almost equal in population, Indo-Tranadian and Afro-Tranadian populations and then a mixed population as well. And then you have some Chinese and Syrian and Lebanese and Venezuelan and Filipino and all these different

Starting point is 01:33:05 groups come into Trinidad and because of that colonial past the tensions is between those groups and things are still play out to this day. But while those tensions are played out there's also an effort to create, to construct a unity through an allegiance to the nation of Trinidad and Tobago to create a sense of national identity. And as a very young country, it's still quite difficult to do. I could imagine, especially in the early United States, it might have been a similar situation where you have all these different European populations and different populations from around the world who are in the US.

Starting point is 01:33:43 And there hasn't quite yet been a fully built up American identity yet. And so a lot of those tensions are still kind of playing out. And so it takes a couple of generations for there to be a sense of American identity that rises out of that. Yeah, definitely. Turned out being one a younger colony and two only recently becoming independent in 1962. It hasn't had enough time yet to, I suppose, develop that patriotism that America is so known for. And so you still see our people continue to have allegiances to the ancestry, to the heritage, even before they have any sort of sense of connection to the country concept of Trinidad.

Starting point is 01:34:25 Yeah, the American one is interesting because the people who did the American Revolution would often call themselves English, right? And it's this kind of post-Hawk nationalism that is applied, right? They did begin constructing a nation, but after they gained after they, uh, gained the apparatus of a state, right? Like in the, sometimes they'll talk about their freedoms in terms of English freedoms, which they themselves are not granted, right? Like they don't have the same freedoms as English people in England.

Starting point is 01:34:54 When they are a British colony, this concept of freedom, they will elucidate like, and like so much of it is based on like English common law, right? They, they didn't necessarily see themselves as distinct that comes later. And like the US one is interesting because they have to develop this kind of civic nationalism. Much, I guess France does that too, of course, but like France, probably the OG there, but like, um, this idea that like you subscribe to these ideals, therefore you are an American, uh American because they're like this nation constructed by people from all over Europe for the most part. The phrasing is universal, but the implementation is not, right? It's also a country where people own other people.

Starting point is 01:35:36 Yeah, yeah. I think, I mean, like I was saying earlier, it does help in our struggle for autonomy and independence from colonialunyol rule to have this construct as a nation, right? But it also obscures a lot of the real material divisions in society, you know, between the working class and the elites. And so you have this national identity that is constructed by intellectual and, you know, economic elites. And it's overlaid onto a population that doesn't really have a say in that construction. And so these nationalist projects will try to downplay or suppress differences in conflicts.

Starting point is 01:36:16 And that is part of why nationalism so often lends itself to fascism. Because fascism is an outgrowth of this idea of nation, where they promote this vision of national unity and stifle class conflicts and create a collusion of classes that pushes aside the people who don't fit within their concept of the nation. Yeah. I often think like when I'm talking to my undergrads about nation, like the most succinct way I can say is like the salient we through both space and time.

Starting point is 01:36:51 Right? Like it's the people you identify with. It's the us. And fascism weaponizes us against the rest of humanity or against us mostly like against a scapegoat group who become them, right? And then like the nation is for us, the state is for us. It's not for them. Thus, they must be exterminated.

Starting point is 01:37:12 Exactly. Is obvious outgrowth of nationalism. Hence xenophobia, hence anti-Semitism, anti-blackness, anti-indigeneity, all these prejudices. I mean, and that's the thing about nationalism. It's not necessarily consistent because you'll say, oh, people from this land, you know, we should be united, except for those people who are also from this land. They don't get to come, you know, they are perpetual outsiders. They don't share the true culture. They aren't

Starting point is 01:37:39 part of our destiny. So even if they're legally citizens or legally long term residents, or they haven't residents there for a long time, their entire lives, their generations, whatever the case may be, they don't count. They're outside forever. Yeah, yeah, they can never ascend to like a sort of higher status of being one of us. British people like to mobilize this one a lot, right? Like, you can be British. But you can never be English. Yeah. I forget who coined that, coined the phrase cricket nationalism, but it's

Starting point is 01:38:12 just particularly kind of ridiculous. Like, Oh, if, you know, if, if there's a test match between Britain and Pakistan and Britain and train a dad to make a, who do you support? Like, is that like, are you really going to make that the core of your national identity? Like the sine qua non of being British is like which flag you take to the cricket match. Like it is particularly ridiculous. Oh yeah. And as if it doesn't reflect exclusion, right?

Starting point is 01:38:38 People aren't taking their flags to the cricket match because like that's the core of the entity. They just say, yeah, well kind of of I get treated differently because of my ethnic boundary, like makeup, right? Methodic presentation. So I guess you guys don't like me. So like, it'll be funny when we kick your ass cricket, like it's, it's the cause of arrow points in the wrong direction.

Starting point is 01:39:00 I guess I can imagine. I will not be bringing any flags to any cricket match because I don't attend cricket matches. I'm not too big of a fan of cricket. I can't be doing it. I stick to my football and I say football in the international sense. Good. Yeah. Yeah. I can't stand around long enough to play cricket to be honest. As we're talking about national liberation, these struggles often took place in the context of the Cold War, right? Which is where we get this other sense of this other framework for divvying up the world. Now growing up, I was always told that, you know, Trinidad and Tobago is a third world country.

Starting point is 01:39:37 I had a social studies textbook and I taught first world, second world, third world, but I didn't teach first world, second world, Third World in the context of the Cold War, because I grew up in a post-Cold War world. And these terms came from the Cold War, but persisted after the Cold War. So what happened? I was taught we are Third World because we are still developing. We're not at that intermediate stage of development where we could say we're Second World. And we're not at that First World level of development like America. Right? And that's a smaller side for me, but

Starting point is 01:40:12 I've always found it mildly irritating when I see people use this famous social media catchphrase, or America is a third world country in a Gucci belt. I haven't seen that one bit yet. That's annoying. I'm sure you've seen similar sentiments this idea all America's third world, America's third world. Yeah, I have like, it's just annoying to me. Yeah, fuck off.

Starting point is 01:40:35 Yeah, it's annoying to me too. But one, it completely divorces the concept of third world from its actual origins. And two, it also I think reflects a kind of a blindness to what's happening in the rest of the world, in the countries that are actually considered third world and the differences between them. You know, for everything that we can express frustrations about in the US, anybody in the third world, I think, and I've when I visited the US, I've seen it with my own eyes, you know, there's still things there that Americans might take for granted.

Starting point is 01:41:07 Oh yeah. That are just not 100% that would never be taken for granted in another context. I want to see of course a division in America's version of the first world versus, you know, some of the European social democracies version of the first world. So I get that frustration, you know, the lack of free healthcare and that kind of thing, investment in infrastructure and all that. But let me just get into the background behind the two, right? As we step into the Cold War, you have this concept of the three world model that came after World War II.

Starting point is 01:41:50 The pre-war status quo was over and you had new conflicts on the horizon. And so the term First World originally described the capitalist bloc, led by the United States and Western Europe, where capitalist markets, liberal democracy, and economic progress were celebrated. And then you had the Second World Bloc, which referred to the Communist Bloc, led by the Soviet Union, where what I would consider state capitalism and centrally planned economies shaped their societies. So in the First World, you had countries like the US, Australia, Africa today might be shocking. Iran was even considered part of the first world block during the Cold War. That might be shocking now because when we think of some of these countries like, oh,

Starting point is 01:42:35 those are third world countries, those are underdeveloped countries, they're not at the developed level of the West yet. But in the context in which this three world model originated, these all these different countries aligned themselves explicitly with the Soviet Union. But then the third world and where the third world concept came in was with all the countries that stood against picking a side. A lot of these were former colonies and nations that chose not to side completely with either. And so this whole concept, this whole idea of the non-aligned movement, it really kicked

Starting point is 01:43:31 off thanks to the joining of the Indian Prime Minister, the Ghanaian President, the Indonesian President and the President of the United Arab Republic alongside Yugoslavia. And so all these countries who all had very different economic arrangements, Yugoslavia famously was kind of doing its own thing compared to a lot of the other countries associated with socialism. India and Ghana, they were also kind of doing their own thing, kind of a mix. Trinidad and Tobago was also considered part of the non-aligned movement. And so these classifications at the time, these were geopolitical.

Starting point is 01:44:10 And they were all political ideologies, not necessarily economic development. So technically speaking, the terms shouldn't even be relevant to us today. I mean, the Cold War of the 20th century is over. But over time, the narrative began to twist. So because you didn't pick a side, you didn't pick the red team or the blue team. You didn't pick the first world or second world. This narrative developed where all you didn't pick a side. You're politically independent.

Starting point is 01:44:38 So you're poor. You're chaotic. You're a failed state. All these different things. And of course, there were incidents in part influenced of course by state actors in the US and state actors in the Soviet line block who would have contributed to this outcome. But over time you get this sense of the third world is failure. All these states were trying different paths of development, different approaches to governance from either of the two camps, mixed hybrid approaches.

Starting point is 01:45:08 But in the end, that just got them stuck with the label of underdevelopment and at having them being seen as lesser. Now today, people don't use third world as much as they use developing, at least in the more above board discourse. But that division also has its own implications, right? The developed countries versus the developing countries. It's kind of a softer sort of version of the same thing. Yeah, it's kind of gentler. Yeah, same shit. What those terms do, implicitly, it's like, you know, you're a fish in water, so you can't

Starting point is 01:45:46 recognize water. It's hard to recognize these things, these ideological impulses when we're submerged in them. If you take a step back, you realize, oh, these terms developed and developing, they have very heavy implications. And the implication is that there's a single linear path to progress, modeled after Western capitalism that all societies are progressing towards. Through industrialization, through consumerism, through the almighty GDP growth. And so development, your underdevelopment becomes a tool of intervention. It becomes a way to mask imperial interests with the sort of veneer of, oh we're just

Starting point is 01:46:24 kind of helping you out. You know, it's like we move from you're a savage, you're a primitive, to you're just not developed yet. But don't worry, we'll help you out. And that's how you get the whole sort of IMF and World Bank introductions of models of debts and policy conditions and metrics and all these different things to sort of shape these countries into client states. States that can be used to further Western development. The Cold War is technically over now, as I said.

Starting point is 01:46:58 So I suppose we've reached the end of history. As the famous saying goes, but not exactly. In the early 1990s, Samuel Huntington came up with a thesis to explain the conflicts that were defined in the post-Cold War world, and as we entered into the 21st century. And so he argued that the future of global conflict would not be defined by competing ideologies or economic systems, but by cultural fault lines. In his 1993 article in Foreign Affairs, which later expanded into his 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, Huntington predicted that the primary

Starting point is 01:47:34 source of conflict in the new era would be between distinct civilizations. His model would have pointed to clashes between the West and other groups, Islamic nations, the Confucian East, and of course set up this sense that the West is this pinnacle of rationality and modernity and all these others are in competition with the fantastic and amazing West. And I always like to call out some of the strange ways that he has divided the world, right? So Sub-Saharan Africa is all grouped up into the African camp. All of North Africa, the Middle East, into West Asia. All of that is considered part of the Islamic civilization.

Starting point is 01:48:14 Forget all the differences between any of them, by the way. Indonesia is also part of the Islamic bloc. You have the Sienic or the Confucian bloc that includes China, both Korea's, Taiwan and Vietnam. Except for the parts of China that are under the Buddhist camp, such as Tibet. So Tibet is kind of carved up on its own as its own camp. Mongolia is also under the Buddhist camp. Thailand and all these others in Southeast Asia are considered part of the Buddhist camp, Thailand and all these others in Southeast Asia considered part of the Buddhist camp. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:48:47 And then you have the Latin American block, which is everybody part of Latin America. And even people who are not technically Latin American, are kind of swept in there. And I'm going to be about the base of the map that I saw on the Wikipedia article on the subject. Yeah, I found that map now. Fantastic stuff. It's some very bizarre divisions and ways to cut up this world. They have the Western world

Starting point is 01:49:10 versus the Orthodox world which includes Kazakhstan and Greece and Ukraine and Russia all under that civilizational banner. Yeah. The Philippines is somehow part Islamic, part Western and part Sinic. It's a very unusual blend. Yeah. And then he's just got like Japan, it's just hanging out there by itself. Oh yeah. I forgot to mention Japan is kind of its own thing. Yeah, it just literally says Japanese. I forgot about that. And then he goes on to freak out about like, the like Latin world as he sees it, like, it fucking dividing the United States, right? Like in his his five, is it called like, who we are, or where we are or something his book about migration in the United States. It was after clash of civilizations, he wrote this book

Starting point is 01:50:02 about like how the like, I think I don't quite remember how he terms it like to see his Latino Hispanic or something else. But like that, that population increasing in the United States will like divide the United States into two fundamentally opposed civilizations. Yeah, yeah, he has some interesting compulsions. Yeah. And unfortunately, his thesis found its voice following the events of 9-11. Politicians, media, these people were taking his ideas to kind of justify the war on terror that would unfold. It would also create sort of cultural divides that settle into place at home. It will not create but shape those cultural divides as you create the sense of, oh, if we're experiencing a clash of civilizations right now, then this flood, quote unquote,

Starting point is 01:50:55 of people from another civilization is a threat. It's an invasion. It's something that needs to be targeted and fought against. And so in a sense, his clash of civilizations is kind of a repackaging of a lot of the binaries and divisions we've spoken about before. You have elements of nationalism, you have elements of civilized versus barbarian. You have elements of East and West, the Cold War dichotomies. All of that kind of comes together in this neat package. Finally we enter the

Starting point is 01:51:27 21st century and there are two very popular ways that we now categorize the world. People tend to use the phrases global north and global south as a softer or more politically correct alternative to develop developing or first and third world. It's considered less loaded, more neutral sounding, and has recently popularised via UN frameworks and the Brandt Line, which was done in 1980, which drew a literal line across the globe separating the wealthier north from the poorer south. To be clear though, despite the geographical language, it's not literally about hemispheres. Australia is considered part of the global north,heres. Australia is considered part of the Global North.

Starting point is 01:52:06 And Mongolia is considered part of the Global South. But generally speaking, the Global South refers to the post-colonial regions, and the Global North refers to the wealthy industrialized countries of the world. To me, again, it's not really a flawless framework. It has all the same binaries and smoothing over of complexities of internal class divides between, for example, rich elites in the global south and poor communities in the north. It gives the impression that entire countries share unified class experience, I think. I think it also has the potential to obscure inequality between South-South relations. So yes, two countries

Starting point is 01:52:46 may both be a part of the global South, but there could be a massive power differential between them that sets them up for interventions and equal treaties and also different sorts of meddling. For example, Saudi Arabia, at least in one map that I saw, is considered part of the global south. But as we know, Saudi Arabia is famous for its meddling across Africa and the Middle East. It's interventions, it's financing of different conflicts across the region. Now I get why the term is used.

Starting point is 01:53:22 It creates a sense of shared struggle, especially in anti-imperialist and climate justice spaces. But I think it has weaknesses, you know, in how we construct solidarity on that basis. Yeah, very much so. Yeah, and the other and final system that I wanted to mention that has gained popularity these days is world systems theory, which is actually older than Clash of Civilizations. It came out of Emanuel Wallerstein's work during the Cold War. And he kind of stood out and said that he was

Starting point is 01:53:50 rejecting the three world system and the simplistic country by country development models. Instead, he created this world systems theory that saw capitalism as a single global system, not a patchwork of individual national economies. So the focus is on labour roles, on commodity flows and on power concentration. And I think in an even more globalised world it makes the most sense. So to Wallerstein they have three different zones of the global economy. You have the core which has strong states, financial capital, tech-heavy industries, control over global institutions and exploit the labour and resources of the periphery while exporting high-value

Starting point is 01:54:32 goods and debt structures. The periphery of the countries tend to have weaker institutions, extractive or agrarian economies, reliance on export and raw materials, debt dependency and structural adjustment policies and are often the dumping grounds for pollution, waste and arms from the global north. The semi-periphery are then considered under his model the countries that mediate between the core and the periphery. These are industrialised economies with mixed labour and capital exports.

Starting point is 01:55:02 They sometimes exploit others while being exploited themselves. These include countries like Brazil, India, Mexico, Turkey and South Africa. And they tend to serve as the buffers that stabilise the system while chasing core status. I think this model is very dynamic. It could be more dynamic, but it does have the capacity to highlight the systemic interdependence of this global system that one region's wealth is contingent on another's dispossesor. It makes it very useful for understanding that poverty is not something that just happens. Italy is very clearly structured and developed by the wealth of the North.

Starting point is 01:55:43 And I think also with the corporate free model, you see the sense of a one-way flow, where value and labour goes from the periphery to the core. But there is another direction that flow goes, right? Because the migrants from the periphery, they go to the core, they fill precarious roles in core economies, like care work and agriculture and logistics. And so they almost become an imported periphery within the core and their absence from the periphery also deprives the periphery hence the phenomenon of brain drain where people are siphoned away as labor and the educated population tends to leave their countries

Starting point is 01:56:21 of origin. But I'm saying it's not just a one-way flow because you also have that sense of diaspora and diasporic networks that kind of reverse the flow. Remittances for some countries can be a significant chunk of their national income. I think the Philippines is a classic example of this. Some of the Caribbean countries, either historically or presentlyly were very dependent on remittances from their diasporic population, sending money back home. Lebanon is another example, Salvador is another example. They become a key part of the national GDP, that sort of relationship

Starting point is 01:56:57 of migration. But I think what I want to do with this core periphery model, or this core periphery semi-periphery model, is expand it. And one of the ways that I found very useful to do so comes from fellow podcaster, shoutout to Elijah J. Ayub. I read an article of his that was on the anarchist libraries called The Periphery Has No Time for Bineries. He made this very crucial point and I quote,

Starting point is 01:57:25 We are as peripheral to the global south regimes crushing us as they are perceived to be by the western think tanks and foreign ministers who view their imagined space as the centre of the world. China and Russia and Iran are peripheral to the west, and any and all activists in China and Russia and Iran are peripheral to their governments. So I kind of like this sense of not just looking on the country level, but looking at particular populations, populations within countries, the relationships between them, bringing in that class dynamic between

Starting point is 01:57:55 populations more prominently. Yeah. Like if you look at the, like the example I'm familiar with, where like, like the, um, we can, we could look at Kurdistan or Myanmar, right? There are ethnic groups within that country that are subject to colonialism by the core groups within that country, right? Like Assad's Arab belt stuff or the Burma majority using classic colonial divide and rule tactics right now against Rohingya in Myanmar.

Starting point is 01:58:23 And like I think it doesn't make sense to see that whole country is peripheral, right? Like that binary doesn't function when like the salient colonial violence happening, especially in Myanmar, it's happening within Myanmar. But it doesn't make any less salient and like the experience of colonialism is still violent. And if we only use this like state level binary, and we will totally miss that. Exactly, exactly. And I think it's important to be clear. Obviously, I've rejected a lot of these frameworks in covering them.

Starting point is 01:59:00 You won't see me using the civilized primitive binary anytime soon. But some of these concepts can be useful. They do shape the way that we view the world, how we see ourselves. The imperfect of course, because they're trying to map onto reality and reality is a shifting beast. But I think it's good to have some sense of, or some language to understand the inequality and poodynamics present in the world.

Starting point is 01:59:27 So we can reclaim these frameworks or we can reject them. We could use them for solidarity or for division. But the question I want to leave us with to wrap up this episode is, how do we build a world where these divisions are no longer descriptive or relevant? And that's all I have for today. All power to all the people. Peace. I'm Robert Evans and on my podcast Behind the Bastards we talk about the worst people in all of history.

Starting point is 02:00:09 We've discussed a lot of horrible monsters in our time, but this week we have one of the very worst we'll ever talk about. David Berg, founder of a cult called the Children of God. We'll talk about all of his horrible crimes with special guest Ed Helms. He's not just like a weird religious cult leader. He was like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology in with this kind of like evangelical Christianity Pentecostal preaching in the mid century.

Starting point is 02:00:34 He's a very weird guy. But yeah, I'll just get into it. Like nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't say. Right. But that's the beauty of cults. Listen to Behind the Bastards on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 02:00:48 Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Catherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband. It's a cold case.

Starting point is 02:01:06 I have never found her, and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still to even try. She was still somebody's mother.

Starting point is 02:01:25 She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

Starting point is 02:01:47 you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this Taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley

Starting point is 02:02:16 comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm journalist Jeff Perlman and this

Starting point is 02:03:03 is Rick Jervis. We were interns at the Nashville Tennessean, but the most unforgettable part, our roommate, Reggie Payne, from Oakley, sports editor and aspiring rapper. And his stage name, Sexy Sweat. In 2020, I had a simple idea. Let's find Reggie. We searched everywhere, but Reggie was gone. In February 2020, Reggie was having a diabetic episode.

Starting point is 02:03:32 His mom called 911. Police cuffed him face down. He slipped into a coma and died. I'm like thanking you. But then I see my son's not moving. No headlines, no outrage, just silence. So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own. Listen to Finding Sexy Sweat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 02:03:59 Hey, and welcome to Krapen here. I'm Andrew Siege and I'm back with James. It's me again. Welcome back. Yeah, good to be here. Great to have you once again offer you to have me. I'm not sure the dynamic is here. Yeah, I mean, it's nice to be together.

Starting point is 02:04:20 It's an egalitarian dynamic. You know, we both having each other in a sense. Yeah, we're sharing this podcast. Yeah. I think there are a lot of concepts that it's good to grasp to get a sense of how this world works. Kind of continuing from the previous episode where we spoke about all the different ways that we can divide up the world and understand in the world. And so in today's sort of pursuit of that endeavor, I wanted to get into a particular concept that is so benign,

Starting point is 02:04:52 yet so pervasive in the system. And it's the idea of externalization. You get what I mean by that? Yeah, like making people or things other. Yes, but specifically I think I want to address how capitalism persists by pushing harm onto the other, onto the someone or something else. Shifting the costs of particular actions, either environmentally, socially or economically. I think the easiest example I could point to is how a company may choose to save on

Starting point is 02:05:23 disposal costs by dumping their waste into a river, which can thus poison the water supply, the ecosystem and the health of all those human and non-human lives who rely upon or live near that river. Do you have another example you could probably point to? Yeah, I mean there are lots of them. One of them that I think of a lot is like how in the US, right, like products that we can't recycle or that we can't landfill, we will literally ship to somewhere else to be dumped. Like our consumption creates so much excess and so much waste and we can't be confronted with that waste so we ship it to places where people consume less. Yeah. It's, uh, I mean, when you see, I don't know if you've seen any of the footage

Starting point is 02:06:03 of some of these places, their whole coasts of fast fashion waste, for example, in Africa or just e-waste leaching into the soil. It's really quite tragic. Yeah. I remember someone Annette once was telling me that like one of the things that children did where they had come from was they would pick through e-waste, specifically charging cables to get the copper out. This would result in them having like these terrible injuries to their fingers because

Starting point is 02:06:37 they were like prying the cables apart and over time they would get little pieces of little shards of metal embedded in their fingertips. Yeah, that's terrible. Yeah, it's pretty pretty grim condemnation of our way of consuming. Yeah, it's messed up. It's messed up. And I think when you see that sort of stuff, it's hard to unsee it. When you see that impact onto the world, it's hard to unsee it. But that's part of how this concept thrives, this externalization thrives. It's by obscuring itself.

Starting point is 02:07:07 Yeah. So that's what we kind of want to do with this episode, get a full breath of its history, its present and its apparent future so that we can not, not see all the different ways that this occurs. Now this passing on of costs may have always been an option on the table, but we can see that a lot of traditional economies did not go that route. Because traditional economies were often human economies, as David Graeber used the term in Debt to the First 5000 Years, these were economies focused on human relationships.

Starting point is 02:07:41 They were embedded in kinship, in land, in customs, in obligation and reciprocity. So what you owed was rarely financial, it was to your neighbour, your elder, your clan, the land itself. And so you could not really avoid the costs of your actions on others because that was at the centre of it all. Others. But the transition to capitalism was a shift in what the economy was. It enforced the idea that everything is or should be up for sale. The economist Karl Polanyi called it the Great Transformation, when land, labour and money were turned into fictitious commodities, treated as if they were products for sale.

Starting point is 02:08:25 Plany saw the modern state and the capitalist market economy as a package deal. Graybough also made this very clear in debt as well. For this new kind of economy to take hold, people had to change how they thought about work and trade and relating with each other and seeing the world. Those conditions had to be created by the state. So you could look at how a lot of traditional economies and commons had to be disrupted to force this shift. In England, you had people pushed off of common land that they had used for centuries and

Starting point is 02:08:55 had no choice but to sell their labour to survive and go into the factories. We have to remember that they never started in the factories, it actually started in the colonies. This dispossession of people and from place started through that colonization process, or really amplified through that colonization process. Extracting the wealth of people, or of labor, of land, of resources from one place to concentrate it in another, to displace people and land and costs. And so colonialism was capitalism,'s sort of training ground for externalization. You plunder a little bit over here, you profit a little bit over there. And this is really where we get to the core of capitalist externalization with the shifting

Starting point is 02:09:36 of the costs. On a small scale that looks like the river pollution example, but on a global scale it looks like what Wall Street was getting into with World Systems Theory. How the wealth and stability of the core nations depends on the exploitation of the periphery. So slavery and genocide and ecological ruin, all of these are costs that create the wealth that the core enjoys but is made invisible to that core. Because when you're part of an ongoing relationship with community, with land, with ecology, with people, the actions have consequences that matter. They reverberate, you can feel them, and that demands a level of responsibility on your

Starting point is 02:10:15 part. But when you take the things that have been woven into a relationship and turn them into plain old transactions. Those transactions can then offload the costs, offload the consequences, make them someone else's problem. So yeah, clothing is very affordable now, but it's affordable because somebody, somewhere, was underpaid and overworked. Your smartphone, it's convenient, it's useful, it's accessible, but its parts are

Starting point is 02:10:45 minded to dangerous conditions. You know, your food is delicious, nutritious, not exactly affordable these days, but it's picked by hands that cannot afford that same meal. So the harms of these systems, the harms of these actions, of this level of consumption doesn't cease to exist. It's just externalized. So it can be rendered invisible to one point of view. Yeah. And it's not something that can be set up without a fight.

Starting point is 02:11:15 You know, people would resist. Inclusions were met with resistance, colonizations met with resistance. And even today, workers strike. You know, people do fight back. It's not just this sweeping inevitable process, but because of the collaboration between state and capital, that collusion of status and capitalist interests, the whole system has managed to persist thus far. It's a very formidable foe we're dealing with.

Starting point is 02:11:41 So we can set it back here and there, but we have not defeated it yet. Yeah. And I say yet because, you know, as we get into there are ways to loosen its grip. I think what's fascinating about capitalist externalisation today is just how much it has scaled and gotten more sophisticated. In terms of the work that makes the world run, the most essential label is often the most invisible and undervalued and precarious label. You know, where we're talking about the work that's necessary to clothe ourselves, the work that's necessary to feed ourselves, the work that's necessary to build infrastructure,

Starting point is 02:12:30 such as in the Gulf states where you have literal modern slavery taking place to build up those countries. Whether you're talking about gig work, transportation, delivery, that sort of thing, or reproductive work, stuff like what is called housewife for your domestic labor. So you can think of other examples as well. Yeah, I like the one you gave about your cell phone, right? Like those rare earth materials, like, it's not some slick safe mining operation that brings out the ground.

Starting point is 02:13:01 It's human hands in dangerous conditions that kill people. Exactly. Poisons people. It's not even necessarily a quick death. It's often a slow, Yeah. lifelong death. And it poisons that part of the world for generations. We could stop right now. And it would take generations for the damage to stop. Exactly. That's the thing about destruction, right destruction right destruction can be very quick as the rebuilding that can take a long time yeah and if you look at how quickly Gaza has been flattened versus how long it's going to take to recover from that it's like night and day

Starting point is 02:13:38 yeah yeah yeah like it uh i mean i'm very familiar with that particular example right like how quickly you can destroy something with a bomb from an airplane and how hard people had to work to build it. In October of 23, I was in Kurdistan and like, I know how hard people work to build up Rejava, right? To try and build a little island of democracy without the state in a place where the state has been weaponized against tons of different ethnic groups who are not Arab.

Starting point is 02:14:08 And even against Arab people who didn't agree with the state's particular Hawaiian on a thing. And one night, you know, like the power stations was gone. They bombed while I was there, like an oxygen bottling plant for people who need supplemental oxygen, either temporarily or permanently and like, it's gone now. And now to build that back up in a world where you are largely alienated from the system of states and capital, right? You're trying to build stuff back up as much as you can from networks

Starting point is 02:14:40 of solidarity and ingenuity. And that takes years. And yeah, but it's not visible. And that's not even getting into the emotional and mental toll of something like that. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that can be a setback as well. Yeah. Like we're not even talking about resources.

Starting point is 02:15:00 We're talking about, yeah, that loss. Yeah. That pain. Yeah, yeah, that loss. Yeah. That, that, that pain. Yeah. Yeah. The pain. Uh, it made even worse when the skilled people, skilled workers who were responsible for upkeeping such as something like that, also wiped out by that same bomb. It makes it all the more difficult to recover. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:15:19 Or drawn away, right? By conditions becoming unlivable. So you have this like brain drain where people who have skills that are considered to be commercially valuable have an opportunity to leave. And people who, who don't have those have the opportunity to stay or don't have the opportunity to leave, I guess, like, or even like, you know, the U S made a bit, a different version of externalization, I guess, but like the U S made a big thing of how it defeated the Islamic state in, you know, 2019, I guess, I can't remember when the last Athene Alba goose was, um, I think 2019,

Starting point is 02:15:54 but like we externalized it off, Loretta, the cost of that struggle. Yeah. The dying part, like the U S pilots did a whole lot of killing, but the dying part, that the, yeah, we, we externalize that right to Kurdish and Arab and Assyrian. To fodder. Yeah. To people who would, whose lives didn't matter. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:16:16 I'd like, I remember time standing in a cemetery there, just looking at lines and lines of graves and I just left the house of someone who's 13 year old son was killed in a cemetery there, just looking at lines and lines of graves. And I just left the house of someone who's 13 year old son was killed in a drone strike and just thinking like each of these is a mother burying her child. That like, we essentially asked for the most part, right? Like to do that. We said, Hey, well you guys do the dying part because we don't want to, like it kind of sucks, sucks for the United States and Britain and Iraq and Afghanistan.

Starting point is 02:16:47 So we'd like someone else to die now. And then, you know, here we are a few years later, right? And like the night before Turkey has been bombing the place where I'm looking at these graves and, uh, the U S ain't doing shit to help, right? Like, or like, even though these people had like made this massive sacrifice, the US wasn't like, yeah, we were your friends. It's not a friendship relationship. You know, like it's, it's like, you say, okay, an interaction and like, like a,

Starting point is 02:17:17 yeah, purchase more than a solidarity based thing. Yeah. And once again, we really see that core externalize and its costs onto the periphery and we see that both in the sense of on the global stage between countries or between populations, cause and peripheries, but even internally within countries, as we mentioned in the previous episode talking about that divide between the core and the periphery where you have what a lot of people have called the economy's biggest trick you know your socialized failures

Starting point is 02:17:53 and privatized profits. So in 2008 with the financial crash people were evicted while the banks got bailed out. In the early stages of COVID, corporations got relief, gig workers were exposed. Yeah. You know, in the process of austerity resulting from neoliberalism, social services get cut in order to balance the books, but there's never any consideration of all the strike cuts in profits. Yeah. You know, that's the one thing the strike cuts in profits. Yeah. And that's the one thing that can never go down.

Starting point is 02:18:27 Yeah, exactly. Or even like within, you know, we all, all food come from the soil at some point, right? But like, I can't tell you how many people I know that my family are in agriculture, right? Who have died or lost limbs on farms. The same is true if you're in the mining industry, right? Like that's not something that's visible. You know, you don't like go to the supermarket

Starting point is 02:18:52 and buy your bread, right? And you don't think that someone got their arm in the combine harvester when they were doing the field that went to the flower that made your loaf of bread that costs $1.90. Now that person doesn't have an arm. It's invisible eyes. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:19:06 I mean, it's the same thing when you see like these natural disasters taking place, right? Floods or burnings, right? When, when California is on fire or when Pakistan is completely flooded out, those are the consequences of the actions of corporations, of the actions of this entire global economic system. And meanwhile, corporations are getting carbon credits to continue doing what they were always doing. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:19:32 You know, and so the actual consequences of what they're doing, they're paying for carbon credits, but the actual consequences of what they're doing are being paid for by the communities that are displaced by the consequences of this climate change. Yeah. Yeah. And we never talk about when we talk about migration, right? Like that's a great, the climate change is a great example that we don't talk about how the bulk of people coming to the United States are coming from the

Starting point is 02:19:55 places most heavily impacted by climate change. Yep. Or like I was in the Marshall Islands a few years ago. And, uh, there will be no more Marshall Islands within our lifetime because of the consequences of massive corporations have made, but like they don't have any agency. It made me really like, it was hard because they're doing stuff like they use a, um, to get it to get around the atolls, right? They use little like two-struck outboards and they're trying to build

Starting point is 02:20:23 solar canoes instead and solar boats so that it's, it's a cleaner energy, right? And like less than a percent of a percent of the world's carbon emissions come from the Marshall Islands. And they're like trying their hardest to do their part to reduce their emissions. But like they can't make the impact that needs to be made to stop the sea levels rising. And arguably like when the world had a chance to do so, like you see them speaking at the United Nations and then the UN being like, line has to go up. Yep.

Starting point is 02:20:55 That means your island has to sink. And that's why, you know, reform is not and can never be enough because this is how the system is designed. It's designed to push risk downward and outward onto the working class, onto the global South and onto the next generation. Because that's another dimension of externalization, right? Time, even our future gets externalized in a sense. You know, all of our resources are limited or finite resources

Starting point is 02:21:22 that can be used up now at an increasing velocity. Right? Yeah. The national debt of some countries is being sunk in further and further into now. Right? The emissions, the center of all those emissions now, fossil fuels, you know, all that stuff. Because we don't have to deal with the consequences. The future will have to deal with the consequences. The future will have to deal with the consequences. As the system

Starting point is 02:21:45 dig in its own grave. Because even though the system needs stability, it will sacrifice future stability for present profits. It will sacrifice nature, which is the basis of the economy. It will sacrifice nature to the economy, in service of the economy. They'll treat nature as disposable and infinite and something external to the way that we run things as if it's not going to catch up to us. And so as collapse will accelerate, as the consequences become more apparent on the sacrifice zones of the periphery, the powers of beyonds interested in fixing it. You know, they're going to fortify themselves against it through border patrols, through climate wars, through militarized disaster response.

Starting point is 02:22:32 That's going to double down. Yeah, make it harder and harder to see the consequences of excessive consumption of capitalism like until the levy breaks, I guess, literally or metaphorically. Yep, literally or metaphorically. And I want people to keep in mind who are listening, you know, this corn periphery is not just the periphery out there, it's also the periphery within. They were talking about in terms of consequences, the internal dumping grounds, whether it be

Starting point is 02:23:14 indigenous reservations or the neighborhoods of black and brown people or the prisons that often serve as the holding tanks for discontent and for poverty and for all the nasty consequences that society doesn't want to deal with because of the way society has been structured. Yeah. Or just like under the bridge near your house, you know, like, like we treat our homes like, San Diego has this particular legislative initiative, which I find like, obviously it's fucked, but also like it's very, so it's so obvious.

Starting point is 02:23:50 Like they, they passed a thing called a camping ban where they're going to make it illegal to be unhoused on the sidewalk. But you're like, it's a ban, it's a ban against camping on the sidewalk. Right. And all it does is it doesn't provide housing for people and thus it doesn't solve the issue, it moves people. Our city is very hilly and we have lots of canyons in which they can't build. So it moves people into these canyons.

Starting point is 02:24:17 And it just makes the same people invisible, right? Like that's the goal. That the goal is not to provide any form of solution. It's just to move these people away so they don't have to be poor in public. And so, so the people who, who use homes as a vehicle for wealth creation, not as a place for humans to live, don't have to see the consequences of their actions. Exactly. It's all about what they want.

Starting point is 02:24:45 Right. I mean, yeah, yeah. Yeah. You know, in a sense, depending on how you look at it, any one of us can be a core and any one of us can be a periphery, you know, to our rulers, we are all. The periphery that they can push their consequences onto. Um, in another sense, you know, I am part of the periphery and you are part of the core, James. Yep.

Starting point is 02:25:10 And in another sense, you know, I might be considered part of the core in my own country in some ways because of my class position, because of my educational background, because of some of the ways that I can be insulated. Whereas, you know, other ways, you know, you might be the periphery in the United States to the core, to the elites, to the ruling class. And so this isn't to diminish the very real differences between the global core and the global periphery. It wants to make it clear to those of you in the global core that you should be in

Starting point is 02:25:43 solidarity with that global periphery because their consequences are ultimately your own. You know, ultimately we are all the ones who are going to be holding the costs, cleaning the mess, surviving the fallout. And I understand how tough it is because when you live with a system that is based on externalization of harm, you can end up lashing out on others as well. You know, that logic, that systemic logic becomes internalized, becomes part of how you navigate even your relationships. But we don't have to accept that way of doing things. The periphery, regardless of which periphery you're referring to, does hold the potential for change.

Starting point is 02:26:23 of which periphery you're referring to does hold the potential for change. And so, you know, in the beginning, when we were speaking of externalization of economic and economic dimension, specifically, it's important to understand capitalism relies on these flows, these very smooth flows of labor, energy and resources and data from periphery to core. However, you define those terms. And so when we interrupt those flows, even briefly, we can shake those foundations. And that sort of approach, that effort to interrupt is really part of what social revolution is about. It's how we make the changes that we want to see. Yeah. You know, I speak of social revolution as not some flashy one-time event

Starting point is 02:27:08 or moment in history, but as an ongoing process as something that has taken place right now at different levels in different ways all over the world. And so we can speak of the things we do to oppose the current system, like the strikes and blockades that have taken place around the world, the indigenous land defence struggles that have taken place around the world, the wrench strikes and mutual aid that have taken place around the world. And then beyond that sort of opposition, talking about the things we do to propose an alternative, to construct the kind of world and the kind of life that we need. So you don't have to rely on these systems anymore that exploit us to make these systems

Starting point is 02:27:51 obsolete, to build cooperatives, to build worker control, collectives and disaster response outside of the state, to sort of crack the system and to create in those cracks, the space where different system and new life can grow. Yeah. To not become one big machine or one centralized struggle or movement, but to multiply and interconnect and adapt to the niche circumstances we're all dealing with, like mycelium, you know, like the mushrooms Yeah, yeah that analogy like it's sort of You're like opening a crack thing paraphrases

Starting point is 02:28:34 Zapatista text right like and they have this either just phrase I like from so commandante Marcos that translates us like we don't have to change the world because we're building another one right now. And you know, you don't have to, we don't have to conquer. Like there's this obsession on the left with like revolution is like you said, like an act that occurs at a point in time. Capital R revolution. Yes. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:28:59 As opposed to like building the world where the things that we don't wish to see become irrelevant through our actions every day. Like you use the example of people being unhoused, which I mentioned before, right? Like the way we build a world where those people aren't externalized is by not externalizing those people. Like, you know, it's not hard to do. You probably talk to human beings every day anyway, like, uh, just continue to do that. You know, take your neighbor a sandwich and like that's the revolution that you can build slowly. And maybe it's not as exciting as like, you know, the, the one where you, uh, I've, I've attended the revolutions where people fight against the state, but you still have to do the hard work.

Starting point is 02:29:46 You still have to do the day to day building of a different way of relating to one another, even in those revolutions where things change quickly and violently. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, even before we get to that point, to be able to change, to be able to relate to each other, it starts with mindset. It starts with shifting our realm of possibilities, you know. Not necessarily killing the memes of capitalism, and I mean memes in the sense that Richard Dawkins, original use the term, as these cultural ideas that persist, that spread, that adapt. It's difficult to kill those memes, but you can replace them with better memes. And so replacing and popularizing those memes, those ideas,

Starting point is 02:30:30 challenging the idea that, you know, rest is laziness, challenging the idea that, you know, the end goal is profit, that there's no other system besides capitalism, that something better isn't on the horizon. Shifting that sense of reality, I think, is a very important part of the struggle. And with every act, because I think ideas have to be accompanied by acts, with every act, I think it helps to break the spell, to cut off, to put an end to that externalization. Because even though capitalism will continue to try to push its harm outward and downward away and away from view, we can continue to challenge it inwardly to push our struggle

Starting point is 02:31:15 upward and to center our struggle in the center of our view. So that we can see it, so that we can feel it, and so that feel it, and so we can act against it. And that's all I have for this episode. All power to all the people. Peace. I'm Robert Evans and on my podcast Behind the Bastards we talk about the worst people in all of history. We've discussed a lot of horrible monsters in our time, but this week we have one of the very worst we'll ever talk about. David Berg, founder of a cult called the Children of God. We'll talk about all of his horrible crimes with special guest Ed Helms.

Starting point is 02:32:05 He's not just like a weird religious cult leader. He was like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology in with this kind of like evangelical Christianity, Pentecostal preaching in the mid century. He's a very weird guy. But yeah, I'll just get into it. Like nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't say. But that's the beauty of cults. Listen to Behind the Bastards on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing.

Starting point is 02:32:36 No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband. It's a cold case. I've never found her, and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there.

Starting point is 02:32:53 Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions

Starting point is 02:33:12 that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this Taser the revolution.

Starting point is 02:33:50 But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad.

Starting point is 02:34:19 Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes one, two, and three on May 21st, and episodes four, five, and six on June 4th. Ad free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. The summer of 1993 was one of the best of my life. I'm journalist Jeff Perlman, and this is Rick Jervis.

Starting point is 02:34:46 We were interns at the Nashville Tennessean, but the most unforgettable part? Our roommate, Reggie Payne, from Oakley, sports editor and aspiring rapper. And his stage name? Sexy Sweat. In 2020, I had a simple idea. Let's find Reggie.

Starting point is 02:35:03 We searched everywhere, but Reggie was gone. In February, 2020, Reggie was having a diabetic episode. His mom called 911. Police cuffed him face down. He slipped into a coma and died. I'm like thanking you, but then I see my son's not moving. No headlines, no outrage, just silence.

Starting point is 02:35:28 So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own. Listen to Finding Sexy Sweat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Mia Wong. I am reporting from the beautiful and sunny People's Republic of New York City. And we are Zo-back. It is Clover.

Starting point is 02:35:59 Dime Square is on suicide watch. Zo-mentum is sweeping the nation. Zoran Mamdani has won the Democratic primary for the mayor of New York City, beating veteran sexual harasser Andrew Cuomo. It was quite a night in New York last night. We are recording this Wednesday morning. The final ranked vote will be done in about a week.

Starting point is 02:36:27 But Cuomo has conceded the race to Zoran who has declared a pretty decisive victory. It's been very funny. Seeing the dashing weeping of the Cuomo camp has been very funny. New York has officially been upgraded from a tier two to a tier 1.5 Chinese city. Given another decade, it will have entered Chinese civilization. Vibes are good. The vibes are good.

Starting point is 02:36:50 Well, the only difference is that now we will have an actually communist government in a city instead of the fake state capitalist governments of the Chinese megacities. Objectively more communist than a tier5 Chetys in the government. An American bogey lie. It was a pretty exciting night in New York last night. I and many people were not expecting a clear result so soon. I think Cuomo conceded around 1030 as the vote was still coming in, but it was pretty clear that Zoran did a very, very impressive sweep, really solid turnout across the boroughs.

Starting point is 02:37:35 Just to get a sense of where we were at, I got to announce to a pretty large room full of trans people at the Metropolitan Bar that Cuomo conceded to Zoran and Zoran has won. And I had not felt better in months. It was really invigorating. This was like the first like ray of hope in a political sense that I've that has been like so deeply felt. Nothing ever happens camp is finally finally taking his. So Jover for nothing ever happens.

Starting point is 02:38:08 The sheer the sheer like joy and excitement being in like a room of like a hundred a hundred queer people as as as Cuomo gets defeated and Zoran securing the primary. It was it was just invigorating. unsecuring the primary, it was just invigorating. In many ways, this feels a lot bigger than even like AOC's win a few years ago. And it feels so much more real than like the Sanders campaign really ever did, because New York is such a condensed, concentrated area. Now it has not quite like an inevitability, but a pretty strong certainty of what's going to happen come November in the general election.

Starting point is 02:38:48 Yeah. And I think the thing that's maybe in some ways the biggest deal about this is that New York was like the capital of the giant sort of right wing backlash inside the Democratic Party to 2020. Yeah. Right. This is the city that elected Eric Adams in 2021. Right? Like it just straight up a cop.

Starting point is 02:39:06 It was ruled for like four years by just like this unhinged corrupt alliance of like fucking real estate developers and like unhinged right-wing billionaires and the cops who ran this really, really effective sort of politics of like the demonization of unhoused people and like anti-immigrant politics and the shift right in this in the New York Democratic Party like single-handedly shifted the entire country to the right. You could literally

Starting point is 02:39:35 see where the New York media market was in the 2022 elections. You could see on the map who was getting the news because it was so right-wing and that's just broken that whole thing like this place was just like which was like the capital of the kind of revolution broke and that whole tide like you can it's it you know in the same way that like Hunter S. Thompson talked about how you could see like you could see them with a tie to the 60s broke standing in Vegas like sitting here right now you can see the place where the tide of that right-wing surge in New York broke

Starting point is 02:40:06 It was last night. We saw their high point. Yeah, they couldn't elect the fucking sexual predator That was as far as they could go a Cuomo to like like I know some people are slightly annoyed about like the outsized influence of the New York mayoral election affecting everybody Who's like online and cares about politics in the United States and even abroad. But this is like not only is New York like the biggest city in the country, this is like more so a representative battle for the future of the party and like what the future of democratic politics, not just the democratic party, but literally like democracies and like what the future of politics in this country is going to be

Starting point is 02:40:49 is kind of emblematic over how this race went. Are we going to go back to like the same old establishment, Dem Party stuff, Clinton's, Cuomo's, Obama, Biden, Harris, or are we actually going to legitimately chart a new course forward to counter this fascist element taking power across the country? And against nearly all odds and like $30 million, the underdogs actually won and pulled it off really strongly. And this really is like the battle for the future of the party. Early turnout was massive for this primary in the final three days of early voting. We saw like the youngest demographic of voters come out in high, high numbers.

Starting point is 02:41:32 One quarter of early voters were first time Democratic primary participants and young voters between the ages of 25 and 34 made up the largest share of early turnout. And this was all up against like the entire forces of the Democratic Party establishment coming together in the past few months specifically to stop Mondani from taking the primary election. There was $25 million of Super PAC funding behind Andrew Cuomo, which is the largest in New York City mayoral history. This PAC was backed by Michael Bloomberg, DoorDash, Bill Ackman, a Trump funder. And this pack allowed Cuomo backers

Starting point is 02:42:09 to spend three times as much money than what Cuomo's actual campaign legally can. In comparison, Mamdani's pack had just $1.2 million plus 500,000 in anti-Cuomo spending from the Working Families Party. In an attempt to seal the deal, the Quomo team got the coveted Bill Clinton endorsement, really forming the Touchers Alliance with Quomo and Clinton. Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton, there's one more sex pest for you to endorse.

Starting point is 02:42:42 It's time for you to endorse Donald Trump. One world job. That really was emblematic of the type of Democratic Party that Mamdani was up against, right? And the one that working people of New York and people around the country were hoping might finally get defeated after it's won one over on Sanders for the past like eight years. And last night it finally happened. Yeah, and I also want to see like this is not just when we're talking about the sort of political

Starting point is 02:43:15 apparatus of the Democratic Party being deployed in support of Cuomo, it wasn't just like the DoorDash guys like bringing out their checkbook it was like the actual internal political machines of a whole bunch of very very important and influential local and sort of mid-level political officials through their entire political machines behind Cuomo and then got fucking rolled in ways that are just absolutely hysterical entire political machines basically just got annihilated trying to stop this. It reminds me in a lot of ways of

Starting point is 02:43:50 the way that a bunch of the old machines broke in Chicago with Brandon Johnson where you had Mike Madigan making one last appearance, the most powerful figure in Illinois politics for 30 years and just gets crushed in that election.

Starting point is 02:44:09 So this was this was both a money effort and a we're using our political machines on the ground to try to do this. And they fucking lost. And it rules. They were photoshopping images of Zoran to make him look more brown and Muslim. They were. Yeah, they were making his beard longer. They were making his skin and his hair darker. Like they were pulling out all the stops. And it didn't work.

Starting point is 02:44:28 It was like Clinton 2008, like Barack Hussein Obama, like birther conspiracy shit. That's the last time I remember this party being this racist, very specifically in these lines. And it failed! And it didn't work. It failed. We'll talk about some of the actual results and Zoran's campaign itself after this break. Alright, we are back. It's a beautiful sunny day in New York. It's actually way too hot. There's a massive heat wave going

Starting point is 02:45:06 through the entire East Coast. New York has been like a hundred degrees the past few days. Thank God it was a hundred degrees on the day of the election. It kept all those Cuomo supporters home. We're calling him Mandate of Heaven Mondani. Good stuff. So let's talk about the actual results so far. So as of as of this morning, Wednesday morning, we got 93% of the vote in on the first rank. Mondani has 43.5% versus Cuomo's 36.4. And Zoran ally Brad Lander with 11.3, followed by a whole bunch of others. Now, really, as soon as like numbers started coming in, like like after the early though, which we expected would would lean in favor of Zoran.

Starting point is 02:45:49 But after more and more results started coming in, Manhattan started looking more and more orange. And that's the that's color the Times is using for Zoran. And this was the first like sign for me that Zora might be having a pretty good night because people were expecting that, you know, pretty big chunks of Manhattan and certainly like Staten Island, the Bronx, would be would be going towards Cuomo decisively or at least if this was going to be Cuomo's night, that's what we would be seeing. And that's not what happened. The northern tip of Staten Island leaning towards towards Mamdani. And really, most of Manhattan,

Starting point is 02:46:26 except for the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side, went to Zoran. And that is, like, super, super, I guess, like, surprising, but like, positive surprise, like, surprisingly. This is, like, this is great. Like, a really, really strong night. Yeah, one of the most interesting trends of this was that Mamdani just absolutely annihilated like every Asian district up

Starting point is 02:46:48 up 15 up 15 and not huge okay so you would kind of expect this in South Asian districts he he went in to a bunch of what are generally pretty conservative like like Chinese districts and like Queens and shit and just fucking rolled them Yeah like in like South Brooklyn like a very very powerful sort of like right wing Chinese political machine like went to war against them just Annihilated right the Asian vote in general had kind of been trending right in the last half a decade based on sort of like anti-immigrant shit anti-homeless shit and all of that just like Instantly pivoted.

Starting point is 02:47:25 Everything south of Astoria and Queens just full, full Zoran. Yeah, and like just rolled these districts. And I think this is a thing where, I think we're gonna talk more about the ICE stuff later, but I genuinely think part of what we're starting to see here is like, I mean, Brad Lander who... MVP Brad Lander, honestly, like... Yeah, a critical part of this. Kudos to him, like absolutely, like of this. Kudos to him. Like, absolutely. Like, we certainly have different opinions on some key issues,

Starting point is 02:47:47 but he really pulled out the stops to make sure that Cuomo does not get in. Yeah. And help Mamdani defend against some pretty, pretty horrific Islamophobic attacks. Yeah. And like, and that alliance, I think, was actually was really, really important because it meant that the kind of like left flank of the liberals and the progressives and sort of social Democrats weren't fighting each other which has been what's happening in like fucking every other city yeah is that these two factions go to war and then like just the fucking sex predators win the election because of it and sure you get a very very important strategic

Starting point is 02:48:18 alliance that allows a bunch of people to vote for Mamdani who wouldn't have and this this sort of alliance that they forged here was just like stunningly successful basically like outperformed expectations basically everywhere I think this is also a kind of decisive anti-ice thing because both Mamdani and Lander have been actually straight up on the front lines of like anti-ice stuff. Lander famously got arrested for trying to get in the way of just hideously illegal disappearance of one of his constituents and got fucking arrested for it, and I think that stuff, we're seeing the political impacts of

Starting point is 02:48:59 everyone being like, holy shit, they're trying to deport like every normal person in this country. Yeah. like, holy shit, they're trying to deport like every non white person in this country. Yeah. Mom, Donnie up six points with the Hispanic, up five with white, plus 15 Asian. Cuomo is is up 18 percent with the black vote. And Cuomo like underperformed there, too. He did underperform. Yeah. One thing that's interesting is the medium income levels.

Starting point is 02:49:22 Mom, Donnie did better with middle class and high income vote, middle class up 10, high income up 13, whereas Cuomo did better up 13 with lower income, which I mean, this is like some classic. We see this a lot in like national elections where like people vote against their own interests. This is weird. This is like what the Republican Party gets so much of their support from. Some of this is also like education bracket difference. Yeah, and I think some of it also is like a lot of the voters who would have voted

Starting point is 02:49:55 Lander and would not have supported Mamdani like were given permission to back him. And that boosted his vote share a lot. Yes. But like in terms of like why lower income is swinging towards Cuomo. Yeah. Specifically people making under 50k a year, so swinging more towards Cuomo, even though Zoran is running a campaign specifically for those people that is also largely up in the Bronx. I will also say like the other thing that's very weird about the way these are tabulated

Starting point is 02:50:21 is because it's it's tabulated by area not by the actual people. Yes, correct. Which means you can get these things where like, you see this Trump sometimes we're like, it looks like he's doing really well in like a district with like a really with like really low median income. But what's happening is like every single rich person in that district voted and then no one else did. Yeah. So the numbers are a bit weird when you're looking at these sort of like precinct counts. Yeah. Votes, but yeah, it's been a, I don't know, it's a constant trend in America. Although, again, this is another thing that was actually very, very different from Chicago,

Starting point is 02:50:54 where in Chicago it was like basically pure income line for Brandon Johnson, the sort of like vaguely left person. There is like, New York is a very like middle class city in a lot of ways. Like there's a lot of people in the middle class bracket. A lot of people in the lower class bracket as well. But in terms of like medium income levels, there's like a huge, huge number of like middle class voters specifically. Like the vote map for the middle income is so much bigger. I think it is worth highlighting what made Zorn's campaign special, right?

Starting point is 02:51:32 Like people are probably pretty familiar with like the slick videos, which yeah, he was really good at making videos. He is a great communicator. Probably his like biggest like biggest strength is his ability to be like personable and is of just a pretty good public speakers, great at communication. His mom's a relatively well-known filmmaker. Not super surprising that he put he put a lot of work into making sure his like online TV ads were like top notch. One of the more unique things that he did is a huge focus on multilingual outreach,

Starting point is 02:52:04 which like obviously New York is a city focus on multi-language outreach, which, like obviously, New York is a city of dozens and dozens and dozens of languages. And the Cuomo campaign did not focus on that, but this was a huge, huge focus of Zoran's campaign. Like, when you signed up for phone banking, you got to go through a massive drop-down menu of languages to phone bank in. And Zoran himself was like speaking multiple languages on the campaign trail. He had a huge, huge volunteer ground game. There was canvassing, door knocks, phone banking. My apartment had people stop in multiple times in the past week alone.

Starting point is 02:52:40 The biggest focus of his campaign itself was a focus on affordability. I want to play a ad that started running on TV and online about two weeks ago. This is one of his like less personal ads, right? Like as opposed to his ads where he's like walking around New York, talking to people, like addressing straight to camera, that kind of stuff, which is kind of in the staple of his campaign. So like this ad is not that it is more like a classic political ad, but I think it still hits really hard. And this this one like kind of brainwormed itself into my head because of how like concise it is. And it hits so many things that even because of like the last general election, right, like the twenty twenty four presidential, it reflects the things that a lot of voters are concerned about, which is affordability. Even if that means they will vote against their interests and vote in support of these

Starting point is 02:53:27 like crazy tariffs. But I'm going to play this 30 second ad here. There is a myth about this city. It's the lie that life has to be hard in New York. I believe we can guarantee cheaper groceries. We can raise the minimum wage. We can freeze the rent for more than 2 million tenants and build hundreds of thousands of affordable homes. It's city government's job to deliver that. We are done settling for less. Are you ready for a city we can afford?

Starting point is 02:53:58 Are you ready to win this race? So that was the main app that's been going across TV the past two weeks. This is this is his final final push. And it addresses this conception of New York that's definitely been in my mind ever since I was a kid. I always thought this is a city you can only live in if you're very rich, if you're well off. And like upon visiting here for the first time, I just realized how much that isn't true.

Starting point is 02:54:24 How much this is like actually a working class city, how many people keep this massive, like concrete machine running who do not live in like a Manhattan penthouse, obviously. And yes, it can be challenging, but we've like almost abandoned this place as like a zone of combat, as like a place to actually like build like an build an affordable stable life. And to see a candidate just directly address this is so invigorating. He ran on freezing the rent, free buses, a pilot program for city run grocery stores, free to low cost childcare, raising minimum wage. And he didn't cave or waiver on controversial issues or apologize or redact for past statements. He got really good at deflecting when people were asking about like previous statements out about how you know the NYPD is terrible. He did really good about moving towards talking about how NYPD should not be handling people in

Starting point is 02:55:18 like mental health crises, how there should be other public safety workers who can help people in distress who are not the NYPD. And just a very, very slick job handling some massive amounts of anti-woke attacks referencing the 2020 era of politics. Let's go on a break and then talk about his acceptance speech and the reaction from the National Democrats and Republican parties. Ahhhhhh! Okay, we are so back. So the past few months, Democrats have been asking this question, like, how do we reach young voters? How do we reach the young white to male vote?

Starting point is 02:56:11 We need like a Joe Rogan of the left, all these types of crazy things. And you had this guy, Zoran, who started to get massively popular with young people, including young men. And you saw this entire party mobilized to stop him, to suppress any movement that Zoran was able to make. And David Hogg, who is currently also being rat-fucked by the Democratic National Committee, has been campaigning with Zoran the past few weeks.

Starting point is 02:56:40 And he said a few days ago, quote, the same establishment that is spending millions to destroy Zoran will say in a few months that we need to spend millions on polling and testing to win back young people. Open your goddamn eyes. It's free. And yeah, he's right. This is the solution. The solution is staring them in the face and they were wanting to stop it. Yep. Young people are begging you to co-opt them and they won't do it because they don't want...

Starting point is 02:57:04 They would rather have Nazis and 1% higher taxes. They want to to co-opt them and they won't do it because they don't want they would rather have Nazis and 1% higher taxes. They want to be co-opted like actually fight for something like actually have something to like strive for. And like that's something that the Democrats have been so resistant to the past eight years, like even even Joe Biden's campaign wasn't like fighting for anything. It was to like return to normal. Even Joe Biden's campaign wasn't like fighting for anything. It was to like return to normal. Kamala Harris's campaign wasn't really fighting for anything either. It was just to stop Donald Trump. And this is like, this campaign wasn't just about beating Cuomo.

Starting point is 02:57:31 It was also about like envisioning an actually positive future of the city. And I was legitimately surprised that Cuomo conceded so early on in his speech. He said, quote, tonight was not our night. Tonight is his night. He deserved it. He won. so early on in his speech he said quote, tonight was not our night. Tonight is his night. He deserved it. He won. And from the moves that Koum was making,

Starting point is 02:57:50 it seems like he's probably not gonna run as an independent in the general, like he maybe has been planning to if it was closer. It does not seem to be going that direction. It seems like he's kind of realized that his career is finished. Yeah, he got rolled. Go back to the suburbs, motherfucker. seems like he's kind of realized that his career is finished. Yeah, he got rolled.

Starting point is 02:58:08 Go back to the suburbs, motherfucker. Chuck Schumer called Zoran Wednesday morning and posted quote, I've known Zoran Mamdani since we worked together to provide debt relief for thousands of beleaguered taxi drivers and fought to stop a fracked gas plant in Astoria. He ran an impressive campaign that connected with New Yorkers about affordability, fairness, and opportunity.

Starting point is 02:58:28 I spoke with him this morning and I'm looking forward to getting together soon. Hakeem Jeffries said, congratulations to Zahran Mamdani on a decisive primary victory. Assemblyman Mamdani ran a strong campaign that relentlessly focused on the economy and bringing down the high cost of living in New York City. We spoke this morning and planned to meet in central Brooklyn shortly.

Starting point is 02:58:47 The top dogs are bowing down. These Chuck Schubert treats are just straight up, please don't primary me because AOC is going to beat them by 30. He is going to get primary. Like he's done. He's going to get obliterated. But I was expecting slightly more resistance. And it seems like parts of the Democrats have realized that this actually is the future

Starting point is 02:59:07 of the party now and there's no use fighting anymore. This is the way to go. Yes, it goes against what all the consultants are saying, right? To be like, you know, the Democrats went too woke. We went too far to the left. We have to return to the center, even though that's what we've been doing for the Democratic Party for eight years. This election shows how much of that is like a complete bullshit lie that no, it's not about going too far left.

Starting point is 02:59:27 It's about actually wanting to fight for something real. And I'm kind of surprised that the these these two top dogs are giving in to the zoementum. I think also, and this is the thing like some of my friends brought up is that like, Momdomni like isn't really like AOC? No, no, no. And this is something like very very important for like New York politics which like he's not like, like obviously politically he is but like he's not a complete outsider to New York politics. All these people know him, they know him from like legislative shit, right? And he has like relationships with them in a way that will be very very different if he was like relationships with them in a way

Starting point is 03:00:05 that will be very very different if he was like I don't know just like some like a complete outsider who'd been like a protest leader or whatever. He has he has proven himself. He has like tense relations but like yeah but like he like these people know him and that's something that can matter a lot in terms of like how these reactions play out and in terms of like how desperate they are to stop him. The Attorney General of New York was making like Obama 2008 references being like this. This was the energy in New York last night and I wasn't around for for the 2008 presidential

Starting point is 03:00:37 election. I mean, I was alive. I just don't remember because I was also in Canada. But it did feel pretty exuberant last night walking around Brooklyn. And like this absolutely still is like a rejection of the Democratic Party establishment. That's what these results show. And we have to like claim a firm victory now, like hard line with such a strong fist that like any potential fuckery in the future, whether it's from like other Dems or from the Republicans, like from Trump, right? Like they're obviously willing to arrest the New York City controller.

Starting point is 03:01:11 So like any potential fuckery needs to look so much worse. People have to close ranks around Zoran like immediately and like strengthen him. He needs to be like the face. Like if they're going to take this guy down, he needs to be like the face of everything for like the next while we're sort of seeing like slightly smaller sharks like Trailing around the wake of the shark like you were talking about The Democratic attorney general Letitia James who gave a really really compelling speech like actually think she's like a better

Starting point is 03:01:39 Speaker than any of the people involved in this race and she is like she is 100% primary in the governor Like not a hundred percent, but like probably primary in the governor next year Like this is you know, like people people are sort of people have been flocking around this for a while And I think I don't know it This is this is some real doesn't take a weather man to see which way the winds are blowing shit like they are Yeah, they are they are they are living in fear. are they are bending the knee they are etc etc oh very funny and now the Republican Party is going to be on the attack the batons being passed from

Starting point is 03:02:16 establishment Dems to the Republicans to try to take down Zoran or at least paint Zoran as this new like radical face of the Democratic Party Like like racism levels are gonna they're gonna reach never before seen heights It's gonna be like post 9-eleven all over again Yeah, the National Republican Congressional Committee is already calling Zoran the new face of the Democratic Party, which Yeah, he should be that's like like fucking bring it if you want just like a breath of fresh air I would recommend watching some financial news from from Wednesday morning. Oh, it's so good hot commie summer, baby Executions in Central Park are about to begin the workers Republic has established the Commonwealth of Labor rules

Starting point is 03:03:04 We're waiting for chairman Mamdani to make the final call. Lists are being made. Only you can form the Soviets! Seize your workplaces! The time is now! I do want to play a brief click from CNBC. Have you seen what Batman is up against in in Gotham and what the guy running for mayor is up against?

Starting point is 03:03:30 That's what it reminds me of. They're taking Wall Streeters and making them walk out onto the ice in the East River as it and hope and then they fall through. I mean, there is a class warfare that's going. So what's happened here? I think it's Eat the rich type... There's a division within the democ... WHAAAA!

Starting point is 03:03:50 That's right! There is a division! Long live the revelation, baby! Eat the rich, there is a division of the Democratic Party! Walk them out onto the ice! We're sending them onto the ice! Zoran, head in hand with Bane and Killian Murphy are going to be sending them onto the

Starting point is 03:04:10 Hudson. The spirit of Occupy lives! Oh my god. Bill Ackman, Cuomo and Trumpbacker said, quote, I was a bit depressed when I woke up this morning, but now I'm optimistic I have a great idea on New York City and I will share it as soon as I can We are looking into legal issues. Good luck. Good luck bill. Have fun out there Do person again who cares Oh No, bring it it. I will say like this this coverage like

Starting point is 03:04:46 People don't understand how unhinged this coverage is going to be like in Chicago When when when Brandon Johnson won the election Brandon Johnson is like significantly to the right yeah of mom Donnie, right? When Brandon Johnson won the election the Chicago press went so insane that all of them pretended to be pro-immigrant Oh, yeah, like do you understand how unhinged? went so insane that all of them pretended to be pro-immigrants. Oh yeah. Like, do you understand how unhinged the press has to get here? Because like, one of Johnson's things, he was like fucking over immigrants here, and he was like, the shelters are being put in where substandard and people are getting sick. And like, we had the best coverage of immigration issues under Biden in the country.

Starting point is 03:05:21 Because specifically that was the thing they were using to attack him. I'm super curious what the Times is going to do, because they've also pulled out all the stops the past few weeks to try to stop Zoran. It's going to be unhinged. The wind's blowing in his direction now, though. I don't know what they're going to do. I don't know. I think that specific class of people is just going to hate him until the end. Like, I think, I think like David Brooks is going to be writing columns about how there are like pogroms going on, like on the streets, like Brett Stevens is going to be like, I don't know, they're going to call it like super Lebanon. Like it's going to be like levels of unhinged no one's ever seen before.

Starting point is 03:05:59 Now, speaking of the times, Obama's chief strategist was quoted in a New York Times article Wednesday morning, quote, there is no doubt that Trump and Republicans will try and seize on him as a kind of exemplar of what the Democratic Party stands for. The thing is, he seems both principled and agile, and deft enough to confront those sorts of confrontational plays. I do want to read off from a Fox News screenshot this morning showcasing Zoran's horrific, terrifying communist platform, which includes housing, freezing rent, building affordable housing, creating city-owned grocery stores, fare-free buses, raising the minimum

Starting point is 03:06:41 wage to $30 by 2030 and LGBTQIA plus protections expanding and protecting gender affirming care citywide making NYC and LGBTQ AI plus sanctuary city and Trump proofing NYC to end ICE cooperation. Hell yeah. Thank you. Thank you Fox News for that for that great list of reasons It's so great. To like Zoran Mumdadi. I think I think I think it's actually genuinely really important Is he's like the only Democratic candidate in fucking ages who actively campaigns on like putting more funding in the trans health care like 65 million dollars of funding

Starting point is 03:07:16 Yep, fucking be being pro trans wins being anti trans gets your ass kicked back to the suburbs like fucking Cuomo eat shit Eat shit all of you democratic strategists fuck off and die eat shit you will be the ones in the fucking graves that you're digging for us like fuck off we have dug your electoral graves this is why when i was at this like trans open mic at metropolitan last night like the whole room just like lit up in cheers because yeah like we've been we've been dealing with the past like six months this idea open mic at Metropolitan last night, like the whole room just like lit up in cheers because yeah, like we've been we've been dealing with the past like six months this idea that like trans rights is like the thing that's killing democratic politics and fucking no,

Starting point is 03:07:54 it isn't. Yeah. And Quomo ran as a fucking transphobe because he is and it didn't work. This is the joint feminist transgender victory over the forces of the turf sex predator. Fuck them. To wrap up my stuff here, I do wanna play one minute from Zoran's acceptance speech, which I think speaks for itself.

Starting point is 03:08:16 And it's where the mayor will use their power to reject Donald Trump's fascism, to stop mass ICE agents from deporting our neighbors, and to govern our city as a model for the Democratic Party. A party where we fight for working people with no apology. A life of dignity should not be reserved for a fortunate few. It should be one that city government guarantees for each and every New Yorker. If this campaign has demonstrated anything to the world, it is that our dreams can become reality.

Starting point is 03:09:17 I sure hope this is the model for the Democratic Party going forward. Mia, you wanted to close on a sad note. Yeah, I was really depressed this entire night because I remember feeling a lot like this in like 2023 in Chicago. Yeah, because this happened in Chicago. Yeah, well, not this, but a version of this. Yeah, like obviously, Brandon Johnson was like significantly to the right of like everything that's been happening in New York.

Starting point is 03:09:49 Like not not he was like a right winger, but he was like, you know, like the local DSA had conflict with them from other stuff. But like, you know, I remember feeling like this. And then one year later, like SWAT teams like deployed by the mayor that he

Starting point is 03:10:01 claimed he didn't send were beating up art students outside, like literally in the middle of downtown for trying to have a Palestine encampment. And you know, like my bitter cynical personally got rat fucked by the mayor's office. Yeah, like cynicism on this is like, it's gonna be weird. There's gonna be a lot of shit that sucks. This this guy is like advocated defunding the police and is attacked like the NYPD for years. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:10:26 And now he's essentially going to be in charge of it. And he's not going to be able to abolish the NYPD. Like that's not going to happen. No. So there's going to be a degree of like, you know, mortal like crisis. Like he's going to have to work against some of the things that he stated he believes in. Yeah. And on a structural level, there's a really significant problem here, which is that like,

Starting point is 03:10:45 the moment you become the leader of a capitalist city, right, it becomes your job to keep the economy running. And the problem is that like, keeping a capitalist economy running means you have to be your job is now maintaining growth for this economy, right? And maintaining growth through the economy means figuring out how to have corporations continue to make more and more money. And that's not compatible with being a socialist. And everyone who has ever tried to like deal with this crisis, you either like you have two paths.

Starting point is 03:11:19 It's like one, you become a capitalist, right? And we see this fucking all over the place, right? It's like, you know, it's, it's, it's Barcelona and Camus coming into power, which is like this sort of like left-wing council kind of like book tonight thing. And then they immediately start like evicting migrants, right? Or two, or two, you actually do the thing. You do the thing.

Starting point is 03:11:39 You do, you do the actual socialism. And we fucking, we like, you know, this is, this is the beginning of the end of fascism in a way where we see a fundamental change in the structure of our economic system. And that can be the outcome of this, but we have to build it, not him. Like, and I think the most he's going to be able to do is provide a bit of a safer zone for us to operate in in New York. Yeah, yeah. He's going to be introducing more like social democratic like. Like he's going to make the city financially easier to live in. Yeah, things will suck less, which is good. He is going to, to the extent of his power, fight against Trump's efforts to deport your neighbors.

Starting point is 03:12:17 And like that is so much better than both what Cuomo would do and Eric Adams, who is actively collaborating with the Trump administration. So this man's not going to actually be the Lisa Alguim. He's not actually going to be the guy that ushers in the red revolution, which is not even something I necessarily want. But I think what he can do is make this an actually better place to live right now. Yeah. And specifically make it a better place to live as the national politics in this country are controlled by a fascist and a cabinet full of Fascists yeah, and he can make the largest city in the country the rock upon which the tide of fascism breaks and that matters

Starting point is 03:12:54 That does well that does it for us today Greatest city in the world tier 1.5 Chinese City, let's go! I'm Robert Evans and on my podcast Behind the Bastards we talk about the worst people in all of history. We've discussed a lot of horrible monsters in our time, but this week we have one of the very worst we'll ever talk about. David Berg, founder of a cult called the Children of God. We'll talk about all of his horrible crimes with special guest Ed Helms. He's not just like a weird religious cult leader. He was like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology in with this kind of like evangelical Christianity, Pentecostal preaching in the mid century.

Starting point is 03:13:50 He's a very weird guy. But yeah, I'll just get into it. Like nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't say. Right. But that's the beauty of cults. Listen to Behind the Bastards on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 03:14:04 Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Catherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. I've never found her and it haunts me to this day.

Starting point is 03:14:25 The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother.

Starting point is 03:14:41 She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line

Starting point is 03:14:59 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this Taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them.

Starting point is 03:15:30 From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes one, two, and three on May 21st, and episodes four, five, and three on May 21st and episodes four, five,

Starting point is 03:16:05 and six on June 4th. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple podcasts. The summer of 1993 was one of the best of my life. I'm journalist Jeff Perlman, and this is Rick Jervis. We were interns at the Nashville Tennessean. But the most unforgettable part? Our roommate, Reggie Payne, from Oakley, sports editor and aspiring rapper. And his stage name? Sexy Sweat. In 2020, I had a simple idea. Let's find Reggie.

Starting point is 03:16:37 We searched everywhere, but Reggie was gone. In February 2020, Reggie was having a diabetic episode. His mom called 911. Police cuffed him face down. He slipped into a coma and died. I'm like thanking you. But then I see my son's not moving. No headlines, no outrage, just silence.

Starting point is 03:17:01 So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own. Listen to Finding Sexy Sweat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, who's got ED? That's not how we start these episodes Wow, that's how we're starting this one garrison. It's already begun Welcome to executive Disorder our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House the crumbling world and what it means for you That's right motherfuckers. That's Robert Evans. I'm g Garrison Davis. I'm also joined by Mia Wong and James Stout. This week, we are covering the week of June 18 to June 25. That's right.

Starting point is 03:17:53 A good week where nothing but good things happened. Assuming you are someone who manufactures 30 pound gravity utilizing bunker busting bombs. 30 pound? That's quite a small one. 30,000, 30,000. Yeah, that's it. 30,000, sorry. Anyway, we're talking about Iran.

Starting point is 03:18:11 We're gonna start with Iran. We're gonna start with Iran's nuclear program. And I think we should start, we need to start by giving the Cool Zone Media Cool Kids Guide for how to enrich uranium. Oh no, I don't wanna get arrested Robert. Now Mia, it's not illegal to tell people how to enrich uranium. Oh no, I don't want to get arrested Robert. Now Mia, it's not illegal to tell people how to enrich uranium.

Starting point is 03:18:29 Google will do it and I assume they're correct. Robert, it is legal for white people to do this? I don't know if it's legal for me to do this? It's okay, it's okay, it's okay. Look, if I've learned one thing, it's that it's okay for white people to talk about any kind of bomb on the internet. So we'll be fine. I'll be fine. That's what matters.

Starting point is 03:18:51 Robert, do I have kidnapping insurance? Do we have an extraction team for me when I go to ice prison? No, we don't. We have an extraction team, but it's not the cool kind. Anyway, so let's talk about how to make nukes. Because one thing you'll constantly hear whenever the US or Israel talks about Iran's nuclear program is that they're just three to eight months away, right? Or weeks away. Weeks away. This is what you'll hear sometimes. Just technically, if three months is a number of weeks away,

Starting point is 03:19:18 whatever. And they've been saying this for longer than I've been alive. Yeah, for longer than Robert and I have been. Here's the thing. It's technically correct. Not in a way that is correct in the way they are trying to push it, but in a way that is literally correct, which is that Iran paused their nuclear program in 2003. The current Ayatollah has not given the command to start it up again. There is no evidence that it is currently operative.

Starting point is 03:19:42 Back in March, US military intelligence, the DIA, concluded that there was no indication Iran had decided or attempted to restart their nuclear program. That said, it has been true since 2003 that they are potentially about three months or so away from having a nuke because of the way that making nukes work. So in order to make the standard kind of nuclear weapon that we're talking about here, you need a bunch of enriched uranium, right? And there's two kinds of uranium.

Starting point is 03:20:12 There's 235 and there's 238. And naturally they always show up together. And there's always a lot more 238 than 235. And 238 is fucking bullshit if you're trying to make yourself a bomb, right? You want the 235. And I'm not gonna go into a ton of detail about like how you do this But because of just the nature of how uranium 235 and 238 work there, they're chemically identical So you can't use chemical reactions to separate them, right?

Starting point is 03:20:41 So you can't use any of the easy ways that you would like separate one from the other in order to concentrate the kind of uranium that they want. The only way to actually do that is by using a centrifuge, which is it in short uses the magic of spinning, uh, in order to separate out the uranium that, that you want from their uranium. That's not very useful to you. And Iran has a substantial quantity of like 60% enriched uranium, which is basically one step away from 90%, which is like what you need to actually build the bomb that they

Starting point is 03:21:15 need. And they've had a shitload of this uranium sitting around for a while, right? Because it keeps well. And theoretically, if they were to start their program up again, it would be theoretically possible to enrich it in fairly short order to the concentration that you need, right? And at that point, once you have a sufficient quantity, and you'll hear slightly different numbers,

Starting point is 03:21:40 but generally agreed that they have a sufficient quantity of uranium that is fairly enriched, that if they were to finish the process, they could make somewhere between like eight to 10 warheads with it, right? Like something somewhere in that vicinity. And they could have a functional warhead within a matter of weeks after enriching because enriching the uranium is the hard part. Once you've done that, it's very easy to make a nuclear weapon, right? Sufficiently skilled people could do it with like fairly minimal technology. Once you've done that, it's very easy to make a nuclear weapon.

Starting point is 03:22:05 Sufficiently skilled people could do it with fairly minimal technology, getting the enriched uranium is the hard part. It's technically true that Iran is that close to having a weapon. They have been since 2003. But the more important part of the story is that they have not been working on a weapon. There's no evidence, even if the DIA concluded in March, that they were not actively working on a weapon and there's no evidence even for the DIA concluded in March that they were not actively working on a nuclear weapon. So what's actually been going on here is that while the Ayatollah has not reauthorized the program in quite some time, pressure has been, it's been generally agreed by people watching

Starting point is 03:22:39 Iranian politics that pressure has been building on him in order to reauthorize the program. There's a good CBS News article on this that notes that the US intelligence community assessment stated that there was an erosion of a decades long taboo on discussing nuclear weapons in public brought on by all of the pressure against Iran by Israel. In other words, the more Israel and the United States threaten and actually do bomb Iran, the more public support there is and the more acceptable it becomes to talk about restarting the program. Because continuing to bomb and attack them makes the case very strongly that, well, we probably need one of these fucking things.

Starting point is 03:23:17 Because otherwise, they're simply not going to stop. And that's been the lesson of the 21st century, which is if you are a country that has beef with the United States or any other nuclear power, the safest thing to do is get a nuke and then get more nukes as quickly as possible. So that's the situation that we're in. Iran has not moved any closer to having a nuclear weapon over the last 20-some years, but because they've got this uranium, you can always technically say, well, they could be months away, right?

Starting point is 03:23:46 So this all leads us up to last week's strikes on Iran. These were using a wing of B-2 bombers. There was quite a few aircraft involved. Prior to the bombing attack, there was a lot of discussions like the United States preparing for much more extensive action in Iran because we flew all of these different refueling planes all around the world and we're setting up very clearly this massive set of infrastructure to refuel and keep a bunch of planes in the air. The reality is that all of these refueling planes and whatnot were part of this bombing

Starting point is 03:24:20 mission and the bombing mission did not just include the seven bombers that actually struck Iran, but another wing of B-2 bombers that flew in the opposite direction as part of a faint, as well as fighter jets and recon planes that were necessary to help set up and protect the whole apparatus that we were setting up to get these seven B-2s to the target area, right? Now, the actual mission was about 37 hours, which is not the longest mission B-2s to the target area, right? Now, the actual mission was about 37 hours,

Starting point is 03:24:45 which is not the longest mission B-2 crews have flown. That was 44 hours and it was over Afghanistan in 2001. And keep a pin in that, because we will be talking about how successful that mission was, because there's some similarities between it and what was done in Iran. Now, the B-2s that we flew over Iran were armed with these big 30,000 pound bunker busting bombs.

Starting point is 03:25:06 And we'll talk about these as well in a while, but I found that there's a very interesting article on CNN Politics by Michael Williams that interviews one of the guys who was part of the longest B2 mission, that mission over Afghanistan, who talked about what you have to do in order to carry out a mission like this. And I want to bring it up because in the middle of this very shameful episode for the United States, it reminds me of what makes me proud of this country. And what makes me proud of this country is our tendency to dose bomber pilots with massive quantities of amphetamines so that they can be absolutely spun off their asses when bombing a foreign country.

Starting point is 03:25:41 And that's exactly how you get bomber teams over to a country like Iran for 37 hours of flight time is everybody is prescribed amphetamines and they are high as shit. They are pissing in Ziploc bags full of kitty litter. They've got a chemical toilet in the back. They're just spun off of their asses pissing into cat litter. And that's, that's how strikes like this are managed, which I think is beautiful. Yeah. Except for the whole, you know, Trump starting a little war aspect of it. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:26:08 Sure, sure. The massive civilian casualties are always a tragedy. Yeah, the death of innocent people. But you know, it also, it was from fighter pilots that we get a swinger culture, and it's from fighter pilots and swinger culture that we get popularized amphetamines in the United States. And without that, you know, I don't know.

Starting point is 03:26:26 We actually probably wouldn't miss out on much that was very good. But the 70s would have been different. I don't think the value was lost. Might have been better. Yeah, might have been better. I don't know. I feel like Jefferson airplane wouldn't have been as good.

Starting point is 03:26:38 But maybe they'd be cool with something else. Jefferson train. Yeah, maybe they'd have been called something else. So the primary munition that these B-2s were supposed to be dropping over Iran and the whole reason why the United States was needed, because Israel had carried out a bunch of strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

Starting point is 03:26:53 But basically Iran being intelligent knew that like, well, they're gonna bomb these facilities, like as long as they exist. And it's very difficult to get like these centrifuges made. Right? Like that's the hardest part of getting a nuclear weapon is getting the equipment long as they exist. And it's very difficult to get like these centrifuges made, right? Like that's the hardest part of getting a nuclear weapon is getting the equipment that will allow you to enrich uranium. And so it's very precious and you can't, you don't just have, you can't just

Starting point is 03:27:14 remake it super easily. So Iran buried this shit, right? Um, they had a number of different sites, which were hit by both the U S and R and Israel, the most deeply buried of which was a place called, at a place called Fordo. And the actual facilities were buried underneath like the US and Israel, the most deeply buried of which was at a place called Fordo. And the actual facilities were buried underneath like the ridge of a mountain beneath 90 meters or about 300 feet of rock, right?

Starting point is 03:27:33 And we have this tendency in the West in part because of generations of like military industry propaganda and in part because the Air Force really wants you to believe this, that bombs are a lot more powerful than they are. Now, bombs are great at blowing up buildings that are just hanging around on the surface of the Earth.

Starting point is 03:27:52 And they're great at killing people. They're great at killing civilians, people who are not, you know, armored or defended against them. They're awesome at that. You know what bombs suck at? It's going more than a couple of feet below the Earth. They're terrible at it. Even really big bombs, even the scariest bombs we've ever made, absolute dog shit

Starting point is 03:28:10 at getting through, especially like stone and rock. And so Israel was like, we don't have the capacity. We don't have the technology to actually like crack a facility like Fordo. The only thing that can is these bombs that can only be carried by the B2, which are these 30,000 pound bunker busters, right? And the question that comes up then is like, okay, well, this fordo is 90 meters, it was

Starting point is 03:28:33 beneath 90 meters of rock. How deep can these GBU 57s, these massive ordinance penetrator bombs, which had not been used in combat before, how deep can these fuckers go, right? That seems like a simple question. You will usually see most of the graphics on the news will show that it penetrates 60 meters, right, or 200 feet, and then it detonates, right? Which, you know, could do damage to a facility

Starting point is 03:28:55 that's buried deeper, right? If you're detonating it like 60 meters down and it goes down 90 meters, that explosion could do enough extra damage that it could damage a facility that's just like another 30 meters below, right? Theoretically. However, that doesn't tell the full story.

Starting point is 03:29:10 And I'm very indebted in this part to an NPR article by Joff Brumfeld, who did actually like the math, right? So we figured out a long time ago when we started bombing things, there's like a mathematical equation to how far a bomb that's a given weight and dropped from a given height and has a given explosive payload can penetrate through different kind of substrates, right? You can just kind of plug that equation in. And yeah, I want to quote from Jeff's article right now because it does a very good job

Starting point is 03:29:41 of like looking at kind of why this was sort of a dog shit plan from the start. I went back to take a look at the math from those early studies and I found it was actually straightforward. The so-called penetration equations have existed since the 1960s and depend on a limited number of factors, including the shape of the nose cone, the weight and diameter of the weapon, the speed at which it hits the ground, and crucially the type of earth it gets dropped on. It depends enormously on the kind of rock, says Raymond Jean Laws, the professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the original authors of the 2005 National Academic Study on Earth Penetrators.

Starting point is 03:30:12 When I ran the calculations, using a key equation from that study, I found that the GBU-57 could go up to 80 meters underground if it was dropped in silty clay. In medium-strength rock, things looked far different. The GBU-57 could only go around 7.9 meters beneath the earth. So that's not nearly the 60 meters that you're seeing claimed on most, and it's nowhere close to 90, right?

Starting point is 03:30:35 And there's a good amount of data. We already have, Trump obviously claimed as soon as we did this bombing run, because we dropped a fairly heavy cluster of these bombs, 12 on Fordow. And Trump's claim was that like, yeah, it was completely destroyed. His press secretary said, when you drop 12, 30,000 pound bombs with perfect precision on a target, there's only one result, complete destruction.

Starting point is 03:30:57 And that's not true even if you just like look at the past of us using these weapons. I mentioned earlier that 2001 mission to Afghanistan, that was us trying to blow up that purported cave fortress that Bin Laden had. You may have seen the diagram. In Tora Bora. And we didn't. It didn't work because it's really hard for all of our technological might. It's very hard to blow up something buried under rock. Like it doesn't matter how many of these giant bombs you have, we're shit at it, right? Now there's still some debate. The DIA assessment says that basically we did damage,

Starting point is 03:31:33 but it was at most maybe enough to knock them back by eight months and probably less than that, right? It's kind of debatable. And we don't have perfect data on this, right? I don't know that Iran has perfect data on this because one thing we can confirm is that the bombing sealed the entrances. So it's possible they can't get into Fordo quite yet, right?

Starting point is 03:31:50 Like there's going to be some work needed to do to be able to get these facilities, if they were to do that, which again, they were not. Based on US military intelligence, we're not doing prior to the bombing. But based on satellite imagery, it does not look like, there's not really good evidence that we did any kind of significant damage There's some reports that some centrifuges were damaged, but those reports state that other centrifuges were intact

Starting point is 03:32:12 So it's one of those things where like There's not any strong evidence and in fact the DIA's report suggests that like the damage done was fairly minimal given the extreme Cost of this operation and the brags that the administration has been making that like they totally destroyed these facilities. We simply did not totally destroy these facilities. Now it's a little too early to say so precisely like how bad is this, right? But again, that's kind of the early data is that like the DIA assessment says we set them back maybe a few months at most.

Starting point is 03:32:47 One of the fun things about this is that Iran moved their uranium prior to the bombing. Right? Like you can't really move these giant centrifuges or these big underground facilities, but you can take the uranium and you can just drive it places. And we don't know exactly where they hit it. The head of the IAEA, which is the International Atomic Energy Commission, has already come out and said, like, I have no idea where Iran's uranium is.

Starting point is 03:33:10 And it's the job, the IAEA's job is to account for every fucking gram of uranium held by every country in the world, right? They are supposed to know at all times where it is. And he's like, I have no fucking idea. Like, we don't know where it is. And we don't know how much damage is done, but we don't know where this is. There is at't know how much damage was done, but we don't know where this is.

Starting point is 03:33:25 There's at least one report stating that Iran's plan was basically load this up into the trunks of a bunch of cars and park them in public parking lots because they probably, they're not gonna bomb a public parking lot outside of like a store, which is really funny actually. To be fair, the US might do that.

Starting point is 03:33:42 Acerail will certainly bomb a fucking parking lot. They hit a prison. But which parking, there's so many. Yeah, yeah. it's rare will certainly bomb a fucking parking lot though. They they hit a pretty which parking There's so many yeah, yeah, and they'll play a show game right like they will send hundreds of trucks and vans from every location Yeah, right. They'll send way more It's it's just the funniest thing in terms of it also points out how doomed efforts like this are where you just like well with Our technology and our fancy stealth bombers not we clearly we should be able to figure this out and it's like nah, we're just gonna park We need a hundred cars will bring in 600 cars and we'll park them randomly all around the country. Fuck you What are you gonna do bomb every parking lot?

Starting point is 03:34:18 It's very funny quote from parking lot bombed, what are you gonna do on me? Yeah anyway, that's what's going on with us bombing Iran. And so again, very expensive. Yeah. Probably did not do much. Trump the Dove strikes again. The peacemaker. They calling him the peacemaker.

Starting point is 03:34:37 Yeah, we'll talk about the peace bullshit after this. We should throw the ads first. Thank you Northrop Grumman, for sponsoring this segment. We're back. So like the Fordo nuclear enrichment facility, Trump is between a rock and a hard place with this whole carrying out illegal strikes on a sovereign nation thingamajig. In that he came to power in large part by promising, I'm not gonna do a World War III. I'm not gonna, all these Democrats are crazy warmongers, but not old Donny T.

Starting point is 03:35:21 You can trust me to be a peacemaker. And then he fucking bombs Iran Which is kind of a major escalation, right? So and we're not gonna there's been people arguing with this have happened under kamala yadda. I don't I don't I don't give a shit I don't give a shit. It's happening now. Fuck it. Fuck off like I I it's not it's not worth talking about We'll talk about what's happening, which is that this is a major escalation But trump has had to he's kind of been hedging between like yeah Look at how fucking cool our weapons are we fucked them up so bad and also and now it's time for peace We have to stop the violence. Why don't you guys come to the table?

Starting point is 03:35:55 Let's all be friends and getting pretty pissed at the Israeli government Yes, because he announced a ceasefire and Iran was like after striking back and hitting US bases In a number of countries was like, okay We're done. Like we did the thing we had we did the face-saving thing. We have to launch missiles after you bomb us We can't not do that. Yeah, but we did it We got our strike off and we're not gonna continue if you guys don't continue, right? And Trump was like I did it I made peace look at look at how good I. And then Israel immediately starts carrying out more strikes. And Trump is... Are we gonna play the audio of him cursing on TV?

Starting point is 03:36:30 Cause it's very good. We should play the audio. Here's Trump being confronted about this, like within hours of the Israeli strikes. You know what? We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing.

Starting point is 03:36:44 Do you understand that? So that's a pissed off man. And he's pissed off. Again, I do think people are generally wrong when they're like, oh, Trump's much better on Israel because he can confront Netanyahu. That hasn't really proved to be the case yet. But unlike Biden, Trump clearly doesn't care about like, he's willing to be pissed at Netanyahu. And he was really pissed in this.

Starting point is 03:37:06 Yeah, like openly, like yeah, absolutely. Openly, very, because again, he's hanging a lot on like, nobody would dare go back to war when I said they were at peace, right? Like that's, this is like an ego thing for him more than anything. He certainly doesn't give a shit about the human cost of any of this.

Starting point is 03:37:21 No, certainly not. But yeah, and so that's where we are right now. Are we done? Will there continue to be more strikes and retaliation strikes? Something's got to happen. It's not done, right? None of it's done. But you know, also Iran's not stupid, right?

Starting point is 03:37:37 This is a country that has been in these circumstances and in variations of this conflict for a long time and they are neither foolish nor suicidal. So they're not going to be completely reckless here. I think you're seeing, and what you've seen is pretty calculated responses where they are aware of how much they think they can push when and where. So I think we're likely to... I don't know that I think the escalation ladder is in like a runaway state

Starting point is 03:38:06 I don't see that evidence right now, but this is not the end of this right? Yeah, so something we got news of today in the last this is Wednesday We got this in the last like hour. So is that Trump like? Said on TV the thing that you're not actually supposed to say which is that the US and Iran coordinated to have the Iran shoot these bases oh my god like okay like they literally went on TV and said quote you saw that working vessels were shot at us the other day and Iran was very nice they said we're gonna shoot them at one at one okay I said it's fine everybody evacuated about the basis like obviously the US has always done this but like we've never had the president go on TV And just say yeah, we let Iran shoot empty military bases. Yeah, we worked it out with them. Yep. Yep. Yep

Starting point is 03:38:58 This highlights something that's so interesting when I when I say this I I don't mean to ignore the fact that real people are dying particularly in Iran. Yeah, it's horrifying. But there is a massive degree of this at the nation state level that is kayfabe, right? And that proves it. Like Iran is like, okay look. Kayfabe with the cost of like thousands of lives.

Starting point is 03:39:19 People will die. Yeah, it's dick measuring. The fact that Iran is willing to talk with the US about like, okay, what can we strike that's not going to escalate things for you? And like, yeah, we'll pull, you know, whatever. And also that's to a degree that was going on with the strikes on Iran, right? Where they got enough of a warning that they were able to move their fissile material, right?

Starting point is 03:39:36 Like this is there, which is not to say that like things are like copacetic and friendly, but everybody's got everybody but Israel has like a vested interest in things not escalating too much. Even the Trump administration, right, has a vested interest in like, there's a line we don't want to cross because we just don't see any like benefit in it. Right. And that is, that is a part of what's going on here. Yeah. Anyway, that's probably enough talk about Iran and nukes and stuff.

Starting point is 03:40:03 But anyway, remember folks, you too could be a nuclear power if you can just figure out how to make a functional centrifuge and get a shitload of uranium. You know, it's not that hard. It just comes out of the ground. You have to depending on where that ground is. Depending on where that ground is. Should we talk about immigration? Sure.

Starting point is 03:40:21 All right. I love immigration. Sadly, Robert, Congress does not agree with you. They rarely do, James. They rarely do. Yeah, that is one of the things I say about Robert Evans. I want to start actually with a little disclaimer, rant. Almost every day for the past six months, someone has sent me a tip saying that ICE are raiding a hospital. This has happened almost every month for the past 10 years. I have

Starting point is 03:40:52 received this tip thousands of times. To my knowledge it has never been true. Nonetheless this rumor persists and especially among people who might be newer to migrant advocacy or newer to observing immigration enforcement. What is happening in a hundred percent of these cases that I have looked into is that customs and border protection or ICE or some other immigration detention agency is taking somebody who is in their custody to the hospital and then that person is getting treatment and then they are released again to that immigration agency. Normally those immigration agents can't enter non-public areas of the hospital, i.e. treatment rooms, but they can enter public areas, i.e. lobbies. This rumour,

Starting point is 03:41:37 which continues to spread, which I've seen people including journalists sharing on social media, kills people, right? I'm aware of one incident in which someone was having a medical emergency and didn't want to go to hospital. A medical emergency which could very well have killed them within hours. And didn't want to go to hospital because they had heard that ICE was at the hospitals. I understand that people are coming to this with varying levels of experience. It's cool. It's great that people are coming to this with varying levels of experience. It's cool. It's great that people are showing up for migrants, but people need to exercise caution

Starting point is 03:42:09 around this because it is not harmless to spread that rumor unless you are absolutely certain that it is true. It hurts people and I keep seeing it. I think it's important to say something about it, including to other journalists. Okay. With that said, let's start with some good news about immigration. ICE agents in San Diego scattered from the San Diego court when the newly appointed San Diego Bishop Michael Pham, who is himself a refugee, he was an unaccompanied minor from Vietnam, entered the court to accompany people to their immigration hearings. Bishop farm

Starting point is 03:42:45 was joined by Imam Taha Hassani, I hope I'm saying that correctly, of the Islamic Center of San Diego and our lady of Guadalupe Church, Pastor Scott Santarosa. They say they're going to keep doing this, quote, as needed. So like, this is actually one of the very few things, at least in courthouses, that seems to have worked, right? We've covered this in previous weeks, that what is happening is that the government is dismissing the case against people and then immediately detaining them and forcing them to fight for their asylum while detained, right? This has been happening all across the country. San Diego is the only place I'm aware of where religious leaders right from across the religious

Starting point is 03:43:27 community are accompanying migrants to their detention hearings. So we saw Brad Lander doing this in New York, a politician, but this is the only instance I'm aware of where clerics are doing it. And it seems to have worked. It seems to have, in this instance or in these instances, prevented ICE from detaining people. And like, I'm not a religious person myself, but I will say that I respect this. I think this is, this is cool. I've reported before, I spoke a lot about Jesuits in the Darien Gap and how

Starting point is 03:43:56 impressed and in awe of their work with migrants I am, and I think this is another example of like people organizing with groups who they might not normally organize with, but that having really beneficial results, right? Huge win for the woke Marxist pope as well. It's always good to see. Yep. Hell yeah. Huge win for Marxism this week.

Starting point is 03:44:17 Yeah, generally a big week for Marxism. In other news, a district court has ordered another man, Jordan Alexander Melgar Salmeron, returned from El Salvador. He's Salvadorian, but he was removed 30 minutes after a court order barred his removal, and thus he was removed in violation of that court order, and the district court has ordered him returned. I'm not aware if he's been returned yet on Wednesday. We shall see, I guess, because the Supreme Court has allowed the Trump

Starting point is 03:44:50 administration this week to continue removing migrants to countries which are not specifically noted on their removal orders, right? We spoke about this before in the case of the attempt of the DOJ to remove people to South Sudan. We've spoken about it in terms of moving people to El Salvador who are not themselves Salvadorian, right? This isn't really deportation. I think rendition is a more accurate way to describe it.

Starting point is 03:45:14 And it will certainly result in people facing hardship and more likely than not people facing torture and probably being killed. It is a disaster. It was a very short and unsigned order and the justice... it wasn't a final decision, right, but they paused the Massachusetts District Court ruling which had in turn paused the process. So the process is now ongoing again. It's worth noting that the Massachusetts District Court ruling didn't stop them doing it.

Starting point is 03:45:45 It allowed them a meaningful attempt at expressing their reasonable fear of torture. Three justices dissented Sotomayor, Keegan and Jackson. Sotomayor wrote the dissent. I'm just going to quote from it here briefly. Apparently quote, the court finds the idea that thousands will suffer violence in far-flung locales more palatable than the remote possibility that a district court exceeded its remedial powers when it ordered the government to provide notice and process to which the plaintiffs are constitutionally and statutorily entitled. As she pointed out, the government was seeking relief from this order in the Supreme Court, but had also been openly flouting it, right?

Starting point is 03:46:27 This flouting of lower court orders lines up with Erez Rouveni, a DOJ lawyer who was fired for, I guess, not following the DOJ line in the Abrego Garcia case. He filed a whistleblower complaint in Congress this week that the NYT has seen. You can read the whole article in the show notes, but in there you can hear Emile Beauvais, he was Trump's personal lawyer in 2023. Trump has now nominated him to be a judge, but he tells DOJ lawyers that they need to be open to responding, fuck you, to court orders. The allegations in the whistleblower complaint are pretty concerning, right, in terms of

Starting point is 03:47:10 the ability of the courts to stop the DOJ doing anything. I would urge you to read it. It's going to be linked in the show notes. We don't really have time to summarize all of it here, but I think the fuck you comment summarizes it pretty well. Yeah. And speaking of things that you should buy, here's ads. We're back. And since we've just done ads, let's let James give an ad for something that's not a product or a service, but is better.

Starting point is 03:47:47 Yeah. Either of those things. If you have any money left after investing in all the wonderful gold that our advertisers want to sell you, one of the people who we have interviewed on this show extensively, who came into the United States through Hukumba, and who provided us with a really in-depth account of his immigration detention has let me know that he is struggling to find a lawyer and pay for a lawyer. So far, he's been taking care of all of his legal paperwork himself, which is very admirable. But obviously, like many migrants, he understands that his chance of success will be much, much better with a lawyer, something he himself is struggling to pay for right now whilst also supporting a family. If you would like to help the link for that is www.gofundme.com

Starting point is 03:48:34 slash F slash standing with our family. It will also be the first link in the sources for this episode. So if you're listening on your podcast app, you can scroll down to the show notes, find it there, click it and help out if you'd like to. Well, I think it's time for Gare's Good News Roundup. And let's start with some actually like fantastic news. Mahmood Khalil has been released after 104 days in ice custody.

Starting point is 03:49:05 He missed the birth of his first child. Was it his first time meeting his child, or did he get to meet his child? I think he'd gotten one visit where he got to meet his kid, if I'm remembering correctly. Kind of about two thirds of the way through his detainment. Yeah. But now he is back in New York as his case will continue. This is a good step in the fight against disappearing people for political differences.

Starting point is 03:49:33 This is possibly one of the most important national pieces of news that's still a developing story right now. I've seen some responses that are like, yeah after a hundred and four days of being illegally detained, you know a guy finally got released This is still a bad thing and like that's true This is a bleak story But like it's actually kind of like foolish to not acknowledge this is a significant win, right? Like it's important. They did not want to release him. They wanted to keep him locked up forever. They did not want to release him. Yes. This is good. This is a good thing. And it's proof that it is worth fighting because you can win.

Starting point is 03:50:11 Yeah. Like every day he's not in jail and that he's with his family is a better day. Yes. It's a win. It's a victory. Yes. Also, some good news in New York. It is so quover. Zoran Mamdani won the Democratic primary for the mayor of New York City Tuesday night. This is quite exciting. I got to announce to a massive room full of trans people that Cuomo conceded to Zoran and I have not felt better in months. It was like one of of the one of the one of the brightest rays of hope that we've had and a rejection of like the old Democratic Party establishment. Yes.

Starting point is 03:50:52 Zoran had to beat like 30 million dollars of super PAC funding against him. He mobilized the youth vote in ways we've never seen before in New York. A quarter of early voters were first-timed at Democratic primary participants. Zoran ran a very, very solid campaign with slick videos online and on TV, multi-language outreach, 50,000 on-street volunteers, canvassing, door knocks, phone baking, and a distinct focus on affordability, including freezing rent, free buses, a pilot program for city-run grocery stores, free to low-cost childcare, raising minimum wage, and resisting Trump's efforts to use ICE

Starting point is 03:51:31 to deport New Yorkers. Myself and Mia did a full episode yesterday, if you wanna have a more in-depth look at the New York mayoral primary. Yeah, we should also note here that per a CBS New York interview with former governor Cuomo, he has stated that he is considering running against Mamdani as an independent, so we'll see how that goes. We might get to see Cuomo

Starting point is 03:51:56 lose twice in a year, which would be pretty funny. Yeah, I mean honestly I would be surprised if he actually decides to run in the general. A lot of like like Ackman is is going behind Adams, it seems. They're certainly going to be targeting from, like, Republicans and maybe even some of them, like, establishments. Oh, yeah. Sure. Definitely some. To, like, remove Zoran as, like, a viable candidate. They're going to pull out some crazy, like, Red Scare communist shit from the 50s. Absolutely.

Starting point is 03:52:24 They might try to remove his legal status as a citizen. Like they're going to pull out the stops. But this is like after the 2024 election, this is like the first first like clear look at what a new Democratic Party could look like. And right now it is the face of Zoran. Yeah. That's all I have. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:52:44 And you know, it's nice to see a win. Again, it's like the Mahmoud Khalil thing, right? It's nice. Absolutely. Like, this is, good things can happen. Now, does this mean, is this a part of a fucking progressive wave that's sweeping the country? Does this prove that, you know, being pro-Palestine and pro-trans is the best electoral strategy in 100% of districts? No. Like, this is New York. Like, this is one election. But it's like good news. And I think there's a very solid possibility that we will see this as, like, part of a growing trend that when candidates are actually left-wing and unabashedly so,

Starting point is 03:53:25 when they don't try to tack to the middle, when they don't try to embrace a hodgepodge of contradictory policies in order to please some sort of like farcical median, theoretical median voter, that they do better. I do think that maybe that's what we'll see, but obviously one election in New York City is not a, one election in New York City is not one primary in New York City isn't enough to prove that like this is going to be the same kind of

Starting point is 03:53:50 thing we see nationwide. I mean, but it did show how to mobilize like a huge number of young people and like a lot of a lot of young men, which the Democratic Party has been like whining about for the past few months. Terrible about. Yeah. And that's a big deal. Like how how how do we reach out to the young men in this country? And like Zoran showed you how to do this.

Starting point is 03:54:10 He's actually fighting for like real things that make your life better. You can get people excited about your candidacy if you're standing for something and getting people excited. It's even more important than just being like, well, this theoretically pulls the best. Because if you do take all the positions that poll well, but nobody gives a shit and you don't have any kind of excitement or the ability to build like a grassroots ground game, then you'll do worse. Like if you have that behind you, if you have all that enthusiasm, you can make

Starting point is 03:54:38 less popular positions more popular. That's how politics works. Right? Look at Trump, you know, Like, the whole, everyone's always wondering, like, how does he get away with all these things that were forbidden for so long? Is because he had a lot of enthusiasm behind them and that wave allowed him to push a bunch of boundaries and like that's how it works. It can work the other way too, if you try, if you're not just gutless, if you're not a fucking Schumer.

Starting point is 03:55:04 too if you try if you're not just gutless if you're not a fucking Schumer So in less good news and by less good news, I mean really Really horrible news. Yeah terrible news. Yeah, so last week we got the results of the United States versus scrimmety I think most trans people have been expecting that this was going to be really bad But it was it was I, technically not as bad as it theoretically could have been, but this ruling was a six three ruling that upholds Tennessee's, yeah, ban on gender affirming care for minors. That ban is, I mean, just like hideously illegal. It's like very obviously sex discrimination. The Supreme Court gave genuinely like I had a friend described as like we're just in pure Calvin Ball land.

Starting point is 03:55:58 Like it's if you read the decision, it's fucking nonsense. It's gibberish. That also makes it hard to figure out what it's going to do because the legal reasoning is just so unbelievably nonsense. Because the legal reasoning is just so unbelievably nonsense. Like it leaves it leaves in place the 2020 ruling on sex discrimination in the workplace for trans people intact. But it invents this new justification that you can discriminate against trans people if you're discriminating against gender dysphoria as a diagnosis specifically, not necessarily them being trans, but the but the ability to treat gender dysphoria as a diagnosis specifically not necessarily them being trans but the ability to treat gender dysphoria. Yeah, it's really really fucking weird.

Starting point is 03:56:31 I'm probably gonna do a full episode looking at like bringing in actual legal people to talk about what the legal impacts are going to be. This is really bad. This means that like 25 states' bans on gender affirming care go into effect. Yeah. One of the worst parts of this, right, is that, you know, and this is this is one of the biggest issues with like targeting a trans kids in general, is that just the structure of the family and of childhood makes it really hard to help these kids because they're significantly more isolated than trans adults. Right. It's harder for trans kids to find community. It's

Starting point is 03:57:04 harder for the community to find them. Yep. And because of the structures in place here, like they are denied the autonomy to keep living. And if their parents decide to just be like, fuck you, we're just doing, we're going to do conversion therapy on you by refusing to let you transition. They can do that. And it's extremely hard to resist it.

Starting point is 03:57:23 Yeah. The root of so much authoritarianism, I would argue, like the absolute core of the fascist movement, is the idea that parents own their children. Yeah. And that like that is the most that is the single most important property right that exists is your ownership of kids. I was going to say it's bedtime if we really get to the core of it, isn't it, Robert? Yeah, it's no Robert's going full like no future queer theory like I I agree with you. No, he's right No, this is I I don't think this is even debatable as someone who was raised in it

Starting point is 03:57:56 It's this and it's it's not a simple problem, right? Because like kids are not adults and shouldn't have full autonomy about choices, because they don't understand the world fully. There's a degree to which kids need to be guided. You should stop a child if they're going to walk into the street and get hit by a bus. Yeah, like grab a fire. Or if they only want to eat candy for dinner, right?

Starting point is 03:58:21 There are limits, but the idea that like... And so parents own their kids, they're like that, that is just pure poison. And it's killing us all. And like more broadly, like guys who hate their kids are the fucking forefront of fascism right now. Like, yeah, Elon Musk bought Twitter because he hates his daughter. Yes. More than if any other thing. Like it's, yeah, it's a repugnant ideology. It's disgusting. Yes. More than if any other thing. Like it's a repugnant ideology. It's disgusting. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, we'll do some sort of more detailed look at this that like that at some point, but I think we've, you know, covered the news. Yeah. I mean, I think the last thing I want to say about that is like, if you're trans,

Starting point is 03:59:00 I know this was a bigger thing in the immediate wake of last week, but keep living. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, stay alive Maybe get a passport because you can do that right now There's a lot of benefit even if you're not going to travel if you don't have the money to travel There's a lot of benefit and having that ID. Yeah. Yeah, we're all gonna see the sunrise together We are and it's gonna be beautiful But do you know who won't is a man from Norway who will probably never be seeing the United States ever again. Oh my god. Oh my god. Okay. Garrison. So to finish this

Starting point is 03:59:35 episode we're gonna talk about the one deportation we're kind of allowed to laugh at. Not because the guy is bad. The guy seems perfectly fine. But the circumstances around the deportation are so bizarre. It's wild shit. And it affects Norway. So it's, you know, it's like whatever. Garrison. Anti-Norwegian action over here. No offense to Norway. I'm just saying it's not like this guy's getting deported to a place where he's in danger. I love you Norwegians. Even if Garrison doesn't. This is not a guy who's going to suffer. He's not going to South Sudan. Severe life threatening or whatever. He's not going to South Sudan. Severe life threatening or whatever.

Starting point is 04:00:06 He's fine. Yeah. A Norwegian man was coming to the United States for vacation. And at the border checkpoint at I think Newark, he was questioned and handed over his phone. On the phone, Porter agents found a photoshopped picture of baby JD Vance. Oh, sorry, of bald baby JD Vance. Yeah, yeah. And for this reason, he was denied entry into the United States and deported back to Europe.

Starting point is 04:00:37 This is the dumbest country on earth. Anyway, said photo has now been shown in the Irish parliament because we live in a, it's beautiful. The world's beautiful. They're deporting Norwegians for JD Vance memes now. This is the level that we are at. Like the party of free speech deporting people who have JD Vance memes on their phone. Like on the one hand, I think you can make the argument that fascism has always been this stupid like Google

Starting point is 04:01:10 Mussolini's headquarters and look at that building is this dumb but like good lord like I just oh my god Personal vanity there's such fucking tiny babies about it Like that's like that's like the really defining characteristic of this area of fascism is that if you make fun of them, the tiniest bit, it is the worst consequences of ever suffered in their entire lives, and they fucking lose their mind that everyone doesn't fucking love them. the complete might of the state to step on anyone who dares defy their authority, even when that defiance is manifested through having a picture of baby JD Vance with a bald head. Like that is too far. I don't know what else to say about bald baby JD Vance. You know, get a tattoo, get a full facial tattoo or like a bin aflux size back piece Denaturalized for your JD Vance back tattoo can't punish you not for a tattoo No, it is it is it is funny how much Vance and the border patrol do not understand the Barbra Streisand effect

Starting point is 04:02:20 This picture is now everywhere. It shows how hurt JD Vance is by these photoshopped, even though he's tried to laugh along in the past. Yeah. I'd love to know, like, how... Is there a directive that has come down, like, no Vance memes? Yeah, who made the call? Did some, like, Office of Field Operations guy... Did they send it up to Stephen Miller?

Starting point is 04:02:40 With like, hey, Stephen, is this okay? It seems like, no, no, no, it's not. Did someone at the border take offense on behalf of vance like that could be very likely I think that is what happened like that all of the data suggests That's what happened Roberts talked about this like working towards the furor stuff before but like it right We're seeing a version of that here right like oh, yeah I mean like all of the current border agents are like Trump cultists essentially like they are they're the most evil people you will you Will ever meet I mean of the of all the federal agencies right it's CBP that has had the lowest

Starting point is 04:03:09 vaccination rate they're playing one American news in their break rooms like uh yeah they are more ideologically simpatico with what's happening than I would imagine most other feds are yeah certainly like ICE are pretty much in lockstep with the Trump administration. Yeah. If you want to help Amos, I guess, don't send a JD Vines baby meme, but you can send your money again to gofundme.com slash F slash standing with our family. They'll be in the show notes too. F slash standing with our family. They'll be in the show notes too.

Starting point is 04:03:45 And if you would like to contact us, you can do so using ProtonMail, which is only encrypted end to end if you are sending from an encrypted email address like a ProtonMail address. And the way you can do that is by typing the email address coolzone-tips at proton.me into the to field and sending an email to us that way. We do read them all. We don't respond to them all, but all of them get read. We reported the news. We reported the news. 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.

Starting point is 04:04:35 For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedmedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio 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 Robert Evans, and on my show Behind the Bastards this week, we have one of our worst subjects ever, David Byrd, founder of the Children of God cult, who we'll be talking about with special guest Ed Helms. He's not just like a weird religious cult leader.

Starting point is 04:05:09 He was like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology in with this kind of like evangelical Christianity, Pentecostal preaching in the mid-century. He's a very weird guy. But yeah, I'll just get into it here. Like nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't say it. Right.

Starting point is 04:05:24 But that's the beauty of cults. Listen to Behind the Bastards on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Open AI is a financial abomination. A thing that should not be an aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'm going to tell you why on my show, better offline, the rudest show in the tech industry, where we're breaking down why open AI along with other AI companies are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job. I'm Catherine Townsend. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder.

Starting point is 04:06:08 I'm Catherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week I investigate a new case. If there's a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murderline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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