Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 189

Episode Date: July 5, 2025

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.  - How to Organize a Meeting (And Stay Sane), Pt. 1 - How to Organize a Meeting (And Stay Sane), Pt. 2 - The Fall of the House of Liver King - Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #23 You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone  Sources/Links: How to Organize a Meeting (And Stay Sane) https://libcom.org/article/how-hold-good-meeting-rustys-rules-order Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #23 https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/06/27/us/birthright-citizenship-supreme-court?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes  https://ktla.com/news/local-news/mother-and-young-kids-inside-during-explosive-huntington-park-raid-suspect-not-home/   https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/bob-vylan-visa-revoked-state-department-1235375566/ https://bsky.app/profile/mclem.org/post/3lstr4lfyns2w https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-secures-denaturalization-convicted-distributor-child-sexual-abuse  https://bsky.app/profile/immdef.bsky.social https://laopinion.com/2025/06/30/hija-de-inmigrante-secuestrada-por-encapuchados-no-encuentra-a-su-madre-enferma/ https://ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2025cv0306-71 https://x.com/RepOgles/status/1938301392416084150 https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/01/kirsten-gillibrand-zohran-mamdani-00436031 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hU8dU-K1qZ4  https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/immigration/article309792865.html https://www.wfmz.com/news/area/berks/tesla-sedan-hit-by-train-after-self-driving-error-in-berks-county-stops-train-traffic/article_aa1cbbf4-7918-4379-b557-da80f9596103.html  https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/heres-whats-in-the-big-bill-that-just-passed-the-senate https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/how-might-federal-medicaid-cuts-in-the-senate-passed-reconciliation-bill-affect-rural-areas/ https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/02/trump-trade-vietnam-deal.html https://newrepublic.com/post/197412/donald-trump-big-beautiful-budget-bill-devastating-poll https://www.cbpp.org/research/medicaid-and-chip/senate-reconciliation-amendment-would-cut-hundreds-of-billions-more-from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/whats-in-trump-big-beautiful-bill-senate-version/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York,

since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the IHeart Radio, app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. CallZone 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 going to be nothing

new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to It Could Happen here, a podcast that is, in many cases, about organizing. I am your host, Mia Wong, and with me is one of the most experienced organizers I know, Margaret Kiljoy. Oh, no. Hi. I'm a little out of practice, but I have done it a lot. You know, Margaret says this and also has been doing shit for like one bazillion years. And this is, and I will say this, the sign of you that you are running into a good organizer is when you talk to them about their organizing. and they immediately start downplaying it,

that's when you know that you haven't captured a good organizer. If they start immediately going, I'm the best fucking organizer in the world. Run like hell. This is an asshole who sucks. Someone who's like, I did this a billion years ago, I'm not good at it,

but I didn't matter, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Very good organizer. Thank you. Yeah. I remember once I went to a thing, wait, that was put on, and there was this,

they were kind of turfy people who were coming through, and we didn't totally know that right away. and their pitch about why they were such a good experienced organizers is one of them was like, and this person has been organizing for more than three years, and it was just like, more than three years. Okay, every person you are giving this talk to

has done this for at least three times as long as that. And don't get me wrong, if you're listening and you've been organizing for three years, you've learned a lot. I'm not trying to tell you that you're a bad organizer. You might be a better organizer and someone's been doing it longer. But don't use that as your selling point.

Anyway. That's very funny. Yeah. So, okay, this episode, we are asking you a very, very important question. Okay, you want to change something about the world. I don't know what that thing is. That is up for you to determine. The question that you need to be asking is,

are you organizing because you want to feel cool or are you organizing because you want whatever you're doing to fucking work? Yeah. And if you want you're organizing to work, literally no matter what it is, you actually need to listen to this episode and you need to have some rudimentally knowledge of the thing we're about to talk about

because if you do not, your organizing will fail. If you cannot do this, the thing we're going to talk about in this episode, if you cannot do this, everything else you know, all of your experience, all of your knowledge, all of your passion,

all of it is fucking useless because the actual work of organizing is incredibly unglamorous, it is unsexy, a lot of it is very time-consuming, a lot of it is not cool. It is you sitting there and talking to a bunch of people.

Yeah. And if you want your movement to succeed, you have to be able to do this kind of like groundwork, logistical work, because if you don't, it won't work. So what we are going to teach you the very, very, very, very basics of in this episode

is a social technology that has been developed over the course of literal centuries of movements, right? This is something that has been passed down and refined, like, through generations and generations of organizers. I mean, I could do a genius.

of this, a lot of the modern stuff sort of came through the Quakers, moved through the civil rights movements, moved through the anti-war movements, moved through, like, in Vietnam, moved through a whole bunch of other movements, like, to be passed down to you today. This is a complicated social technology. It does not sound complicated. If you do not know how to do this, it is impossible to try to replicate on the fly. And that is, we are going to explain to you the very basis of how to run a meeting. Yeah. I really like this way of phrasing it, that it's a It's a technology. Like, it's a way of applying ideas to get something to happen.

Even if a lot of it is instinctive, there is an art to it. But, like, yeah, no, there's stuff you can, like, learn and apply. And it's technology is a good way of framing it. Yeah, and it's one of these things where, you know, you can kind of, if you don't know how to do this and you have people, you can kind of sort of maybe approximate something that is a little bit functional. And the moment it runs into a stress. points, it will collapse completely. And this is a thing that, like, you know, I, I have talked to,

I have done a lot of these. I have talked to a lot of people who've done this. I have, like, I have been in rooms where people knew how to run meetings. I've been in rooms people, didn't know how to run meetings. I have talked to a bunch of people who have been in rooms, who don't know how to run meetings. And like, there are rooms of people with collectively hundreds of PhDs. And because nobody in the room knew how to fucking run a meeting, complete disaster, the organizing didn't work. Yeah. Right. You have to be able to do this. And it doesn't really matter, you know, we're not going to get that much into, like, what mechanism are using to make decisions because this is, this is like, even like a layer

below that. And so this is not that you can use it, you know, regardless of whether you're doing consensus and, like, you know, like, and I think that like if you're trying to make a decision as a group, right, and you're trying to get everyone to want to do the thing and do it, I think that some version of consensus is a good idea. But this can be for a sort of just like, a, you know, like a majority of world democratic process. Whatever process you are using to decide things, you need some kind of structure thing there. Otherwise, it's just not going to function. Like, none of it will. What's wild to me is that it's almost like the important thing is that there is a structure. There's so many different structures you can use. Like, when we

come at this, I don't actually know I'm the podcast idiot on this episode. Me is going to explain stuff to me. But like, there's a lot of different ways to do this. And the important way, the important thing is that you do one of them. Like there are ways that I think are better or worse. Right, but you do actually need to create a structure and move forward with that structure in order to get anything done, which is the whole secret of organizing. Like, that is what organizing is, is you actually have to say, not only do I want something to get done, but I'm going to figure out the steps by which to get that done. And it also applies to meetings, yeah. Yeah, and like that kind of undergirding thing of figuring out how you're going to do it, right? Like that's the part of organizing that, as you're saying, it's like nothing works without it because it is like half of what,

organizing is and otherwise you are just saying things into the wind. And admittedly, my job is to say things into the wind. So, it's hope you do it. So, like, you know, I have a little bit of respect to that, but also you need to have some way of getting other people to do things. Yeah, it's like a, when you sit around with your friends and they're like, oh, someone should do this. No one's actually named someone. Yeah. You know, I mean, somewhere there's a non-binary person named someone. But shout outs to someone. Yeah, yeah. If you're listening to someone, congratulations, you're a master level troll. But, like, my friend, don't ask.

Her name was don't ask. It's great. Anyway, whatever. But someone needs to get something done. And if you leave a thing being like, oh, someone should do this, you didn't organize. You have to say, this is what the following people are doing. Yep.

Also, shout out also to everyone who has been in meetings with me and are like, why is Mark? I'm insufferable in meetings. I try really hard. Anyway, whatever. Oh, God. Okay, okay. So this largely is going to be like how to run a meeting 101. We're going to start at like zero zero zero, which is you need a place to meet. And that place to meet has to be accessible to everyone who's trying to go to the meeting. This is a thing that people screw up a lot. It is not that hard to find a place that's accessible for everyone to go. You can do this. There are lots of places you can have meetings depending on how sensitive the meeting is, you know, how formal and informal it is. I've done. meetings and restaurants and meetings and bars, or them in libraries, people use churches sometimes,

like queer centers, union halls, parks. I want to shit talk bars really quickly. Yeah, I don't think bars is a great idea, but... I don't think it's accessible to people who are under 21, and I don't think it's accessible to people who have problems being around drinking. That said, they happen there, and I'm not trying to say you're bad for having had meetings there, but I just want to say that... Yeah, bars is one that, like, people go to a lot, and, like, yeah, there's definitely

issues with it. Right. But, I don't know. You can have them people's houses. Sometimes you can, like, go into, like, a mesa or whatever. You can go have a meeting there. You can get people to just, like, go out somewhere and do it. You know, I don't know.

Like, you are capable of thinking of lots of places where you could have meetings, but you actually do need to have a location. And this is actually, again, I've talked about this before, but it's like one of the organizing things that's actually really important is, like, knowing how to get a room for a meeting or get a room for something to happen. You have to be able to do this. This is like zero zero, like, okay, you know, okay, so you've now achieved this.

And congratulations, you clowns have now achieved a location. I am going to stick a provisional thing in here, which is, this is jumping the gun a little bit, but I need to put in here. Do not use Robert Rules of Order. One of the things you will be told, and if you have been in organizations before, a lot of them use a thing called Robert Rules of Orders, which is this old, like incredibly elaborate set up. parliamentary procedures. Do not use them. They suck. And this gets into before we can even talk about what a meeting is, right, and how you do it. You really, really do not want your meetings to get bogged down in everyone having to learn one million lines of parliamentary procedure. And this is a problem for any meeting technology that you use, because they all do involve a little bit of technical stuff

because you have to get people to be able to do things. Totally. But one thing we with Robert Tools of Order is that like it's like hundreds of pages right and in those hundreds of pages are the recipe for one asshole to derail your entire meeting by doing a whole bunch of unhinged parliamentary shit

I have seen this happen it sucks this is something that you can technically do in any meeting structure but the more opaque the rules of the meeting are the easier this shit is to do and the harder it is to be like please stop yeah there's you have to have a certain amount

of flexibility in the way that you do things because every system, it's the problem with law as a concept, right? Is every system can, you can find loopholes and anyone who's been in a lot of meetings has seen people learn how to abuse the process in order to get their position to win by making everyone else too tired to continue or to use up all of the space in the room or, you know, whatever. But I think that, yeah, this idea that the rules that are used, in your meeting, I think that a very good facilitator, which is something that I tend to believe in for meetings,

is capable of explaining the process in such a way that even when a lot of people come who are not familiar with the process, they will leave familiar with the process. Yeah, yeah. Like, to that sort of end, if you need a like, okay, we need a written procedure thing, the thing I would recommend is called Russi's Rules of Order,

which is an unbelievably pared down version of Robert Rules of Order that was specifically developed to be used in union circles, in activist circles. And it's like the total PDF of it is 25 pages. That makes it sound way longer than it actually is. Like several of those pages are like a glossary and like the cover. It's very easy to read. It's easy to understand.

If you have to use a like, this is a formalized procedure, do Rusty's, don't do Roberts. this is just a I need to do this before we say anything else because a bunch of people are going to push you to use this and it sucks so having gotten that out of the way

we can now get into okay things for meetings I was supposed to make a joke about at the top of all this I'm sorry everyone everyone has been waiting for me to make this joke I'm certain

but Mia which one of us is going to keep stack during this meeting so that we know who can talk the products and services who support this podcast are going to keep stack and we're going to go

to the right the fuck now we are back. And I really just want to say as timekeeper, I'm a little bit upset about how much time that those ads used during the meeting. And if we can... God fucking damn it. Okay. We will explain what a stack is and what the timekeeper is in a second. However, comma. So things you need to do at the very start of a meeting. You need to take like two minutes to do this. But you need to explain how the meeting fucking works and you need to assign everyone rolls. And you can't assume that everyone who is going to be in this meeting understands how the rules work. Like, you cannot, and this is something I've run into is like, you can't assume that everyone understands what your hand signals are, or even just basic, like, everyone has been in a thing before and understands what a stack is. Right? You can't assume that. Unless you know everyone in the room.

And more than that, like, unless you know everyone's level of experience in the room and you've been in meetings with them before, like, you can't assume the level of knowledge that everyone has. And I have watched these processes not work because people, just did that, and then a bunch of people in the room were like, what the fuck is going on? So you need to, at the start of the meeting, explain how the meeting is going to work, like, at least a little bit. This doesn't have to be super formal. This can be, like, fucking two minutes of like, we're going to have a stack, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And for anyone, just so you know what we're saying right now, we'll explain stack more. That is the order in which people talk.

It is a way of, like, keeping track of the line of who's going to talk when. Yeah. I'm realizing this explanation is jumping around a little bit, but you need to make sure that everyone understands how the meeting is supposed to work. and, you know, usually that's really quick. Sometimes someone will just not know something, and then, okay, you explain it to them, and that's, like, fine and chill. And, like, I don't know.

I remember being a little tiny baby anarchist and, like, not knowing anything and going to my first meeting. And, like, people were talking about restorative justice. And I was like, hi, what's restorative justice? I'm, like, a little tiny child. I don't know anything. And they explained it, and it was, like, chill and good.

And you can just do this, and it helps people feel included. And, yeah. Totally. Okay. So general meeting facilitation Things you need You need one

An agenda An agenda is what the fuck are you doing And generally speaking Secondarily you want to try to have time planned out Because one of the failure modes of a meeting As the meeting goes for fucking 30 hours And everyone's miserable So you generally want to have an agenda

That has what you're going to talk about And then kind of guidelines roughly For how long you think it'll take to talk about the thing We'll get more into that in a second sometimes people create the agenda beforehand sometimes you set the agenda at the beginning of the meeting but like you do want an agenda so people know what you're doing

Yeah it should be somewhere that everyone can see on a whiteboard or like Yeah yeah Zoom meeting notes or a doc that everyone has open Yeah yeah you want to make sure everyone has it Okay and this is the point where we need to talk about roles So part of the technology for this right And the stack is a big piece of technology

To keep track of who's talking but a big part of what the technology of this is is a bunch of roles that you assign people and that ideally everyone rotates through so you learn how to do all of them and so to prevent people from sort of concentrating power by like monopolizing one role so the first role we need to talk about

and this is I don't know if the big one's the right one but this is the one that I think people know kind of I don't know if intuitively understand is the right word but like this is the one that there are usually versions of any meeting and a lot of those versions are bad is a facilitator. Yeah. So, okay, my explanation of what a facilitator is, and Morgan, I'm going to ask you for yours, too, because

I don't know. So as a facilitator, your job is to, like, point to the agenda and go, okay, we're talking about this. Your job is to move people through discussions. Your job is to try to get people to a consensus on what you're doing. And your job is to stop people from giving speeches. And this is, I'm going to take a little digression here, which is, okay, we've been talking about ways meetings fail, right? Number one, no one can go to it. That's, that's way meeting

fails. Two, you don't have an agenda and everyone, it just goes off the rails and no one has any idea what you're supposed to be meeting about. Three, and this is a huge one, is that one of the biggest ways that meetings fail, and I have seen this in every single context I've ever worked in, is that someone, and it is usually a dude, it's almost always a dude. It can not be a dude, but it's usually a dude just keeps talking and keeps talking and keeps talking and will not shut the fuck up and nothing gets done because the entire beating is one hour of this guy just yabbering. And one of your most important jobs as the facilitator, and this is genuinely a huge part for social technology of the structure of meetings is to make sure that your meeting is not one

person talking. Yeah. This is why this exists. Yeah. And, you know, if you just want to get into the sort of dire part of this, right? If you do. If you do. Do not stop all of your meetings from being one annoying guy talking. Your projects will fail. You must do this. This is the one thing here that is like you absolutely positively must get this guy to stop talking. I think that the important thing to think about a facilitator is that most people come from a background of assumed authoritarian politics. Yeah.

Assumed politics where someone is in charge. Even our democracies are built around this idea that you will live. elect someone to tell you what to do. When we talk about meetings, we are talking about building bottom-up structures. Even when we later, I think we'll end up talking maybe a different episode or something about larger structures you can build up out of these sort of local assemblies or meetings.

Yeah. The idea is that everyone is empowered. And so because we're really used to this competitive decision-making around who is in charge, we struggle a little bit adapting to egalitarian meetings and also to consensus isn't. the only way to make decisions, but people struggle with consensus because they'll think of that at meaning a hundred percent vote, where everyone votes for the same thing. And that's a mistake.

Yeah. And so we think of the facilitator accidentally as the leader. And they are a leader in the sense of a whatever. You could use the word leader in a lot of ways, and some of them are positive and not authoritarian. And so in that context, they are leading people through the meeting, but they are absolutely not only not the decision maker, they are less the decision maker than everyone else. choosing to be a facilitator of a meeting is choosing to go in and say I'm not actually even going to push for my side unless you were in a like

tight-knit enough group where everyone knows each other and everyone kind of knows oh in this group Margaret's opinion is always going to be this and so-and-so's opinions always can be this if you know people really well you can kind of still be both a facilitator

and a participant but by and large when you are the facilitator your job is to help the decision form. It is to help take what people are saying and say, okay, this seems like what we're saying, is this the proposal? And not say, I think this is the proposal, but say, is this the proposal? And yeah, it is to keep people on track. And every meeting is going to have different. I really like a strong facilitator. I really like someone who's going to shut me up. I really like someone who's like, yeah, that's not what we're talking about right now. And it's hard because your feelings get hurt,

Like, especially, for example, someone says a joke, and then someone else says a joke. And then you're the third person and you say the joke too. And the facilitator's like, yeah, that's enough of that. We got to keep going. You're the third person who said the joke and you're like, why am I getting yelled at? And the other two people didn't. Yeah. And that's the wrong way to look at it.

We're not yelling at anyone. We're trying to keep things moving forward. And you're absolutely right also about the people grandstanding and, you know, a particular habit that men often have, especially cis men, is that they'll come in and be like, they'll listen to what someone else says and then repeat it louder and then be like, yeah, yeah, right? And as if it's their idea.

And they don't even realize they're doing it. It's kind of cute. But there's a lot of that you can learn about yourself by going into these meetings and learning about your own habits and what you've been inculturated to do. And it shouldn't be about shaming people around this as long as people are able to like kind of get called in

and listen to it. And one of the things that I think when you teach the meeting at the beginning of the meeting, at the beginning of the meeting, you also explain some of this social stuff. And you say, like, you know, we believe in a step up, step back thing. If you're someone who generally feels comfortable talking in large groups, we invite you to step back a little bit. And if you're not someone who generally feels comfortable expressing your opinion in groups, we invite you to step up. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Do you know what also needs to learn to step up is I actually think we don't

get enough advertising in our lives. I think that the people who are afraid to take up space are the people who pay a lot of money I'm using a block, I'm using a block. It's all right, babe, this ain't consensus. Here's ads. We are back. I think this is also, you know, as we've talked about, sort of, in a lot of ways, like, how important

the role to facilitator is, this is a role you need to rotate because that is a role, it's like, those are skills that everyone needs. Like, if everyone knows, Did you just do the hands? I did. I did. I did.

and you should be teaching everyone to be able to do all of the facilitation roles because, A, okay, there's lots of reasons for this, right? One, facilitation in particular can be kind of dangerous because there's a real risk of someone who is facilitating,

deciding that they are the leader and they're going to steer how everything goes and they're going to make their decisions. And by rotating that around, it becomes a lot easier to not have that happen. Yeah. And also doing a role makes you a more active participant in the meeting a lot.

a lot of times. It depends on the role, obviously, but like it's a way to get people, like, keep everyone engaged to a thing. That's a good point. Thank you. I stole this from my friend who is going to remain nameless, but if you're out there, I love you. Your friend's name is nameless. I understand. Yeah, my friend's name is the nameless child.

Somewhere there's someone who's name is the Olmalas kid, and anyway, whatever, anyway, okay, please continue. Yeah, but the other thing about it, right, is the more everyone knows about these skills, the more effective of a participant and the more effective you can be at making decisions in the meeting, like the more everyone understands how the process works and knows how to do it and knows how to... Because like being in a meeting and being

in community with other people and making decisions together is a skill. Yeah. And we don't have it. Yeah. There's this great David Graber, the anthropologist David Graber, who actually spent a lot of time, like, writing about these meetings in a way that doesn't usually happen as like as an anthropologist. Yeah. Yeah, as an anthropologist, right? because he was both an activist and an anthropologist. And he has this great line where he says, Americans are great at communism and terrible at democracy, which is that they're really, really good at, like,

doing things to each according to their need and from each according to their ability. Like, if you try to organize a barbecue, everyone can do the things to do the barbecue, but no one knows how to make decisions together because that's a skill. Yeah. And the more you're rotating through all the roles and the more you understand how everything works, and the more you understand, you know,

how to do the facilitation stuff of, like, getting everyone to figure out what the things, thing that they want is and how to express that and how to, like, how to work together. The more you understand that as like a person who's not facilitating, the more you can understand, like, how to actually do democracy. Yeah. And it rules. And there's also the fact that like, if you are indispensable to your group, you've actually failed your group. Yeah. Especially when you're talking about stuff like activism that has a certain risk. If you are the only medic in your affinity group, that is a problem. Because if you get arrested.

now there's no medic. If you're the only facilitator who is a very skilled facilitator, what happens when you're sick or in jail and you all have a very intense meeting that you have to do and you need a skilled facilitator? Not that everyone needs to be equal in all skills within a given group, but you need to learn to if you are very good at something, your job is to make someone else very good at it too. That's the thing both for meetings in the way it was explained to me and this is a more kind of I don't know what term you'd use for but it was tough to me as your job

is to organize yourself out of a job yeah totally okay so we're gonna move on to the second role which is the stack taker so okay the stack this when I first like started talking about this

as a social technology the thing I specifically meant was the stack and then eventually I was like no this actually the whole process is but the stack very very simple invention but if you don't have it, it's a disaster. The stack, as we said before,

is just literally a list of names of who's going to talk in what order. Someone raises their hand, they can add to the stack. Yep. That is very simple. It is also absolutely crucial to making sure a meeting runs at all. Most groups tend to use some variation of what's called a progressive stack, where, you know, this is part of we were talking about earlier of, like, step forward and step back.

But when you're compiling a stack, you want to have the people who speak last. in front. And this works sort of in two ways, right? One is it's okay, so if there's someone who's not like a cis white dude and who is trying to say something, you probably want them to say something because they are less likely to be the one who says something. Yeah. Like just because of the way that sort of whiteness is structured because of the way that masculinity is structured because of the way that these things work. So you want to give opportunities to speak to people who like don't usually get heard. And then also if someone just like hasn't been talking, in a meeting and they want to say something and that's also a part of the sort of facilitation and sometimes I know this is a thing that like a role that I've seen passed out between a bunch of different roles and I guess everyone kind of has a responsibility to do this but if there's someone in a meeting who has not been saying anything it's generally a good idea to be like hey are you okay and also like more importantly to some extent than that are you okay of like what do you think about this

yeah although I do think that there's a little bit of a like some people don't want to specifically be called on in that way. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's kind of a like learning to read the room skill. Yeah, definitely. About when you want to encourage people to step up versus other people are like, no, I don't have anything particular to say and I don't want to get, you know,

singled out. I think that in a smaller meetings, sometimes the facilitator can keep stack, larger meetings. That's a terrible plan. Yeah, if large meetings, you need two. You can't have them both be doing it. Yeah, because you need someone keeping track of who's raising their hands when and things like that.

Sometimes you're actually even writing the stack on a whiteboard. people can see. Yeah, yeah, you've like a piece of paper, yeah. I have been in meetings that sort of self-facilitate fairly effectively in smaller groups where a thing that people can do is if they have a thing they want to say, they hold up one finger, and they keep that finger up. And if someone else is something that they want to say, they put up two fingers. And then if someone else is something they want to say, they put up three fingers. And so you can have this method by which people track their own stack. But this is a small group thing. This is not a and this is a people who know each other

and know how to do the balancing that we're talking about about making sure everyone gets heard. Yeah, and I think part of this also that's important to remember is like, this is like 101. Oh yeah, sorry, as an advanced skill. Kind of, and I'm introducing some things

that are probably more advanced than 101. Like, like, like, the like, okay, figuring out why someone isn't comfortable talking on a like, this person wants to talk but doesn't feel comfortable to, and if you ask them, they will say something and this person doesn't feel comfortable talking

because they don't want to talk. That's kind of a more advanced thing. Fair enough. I guess we should talk about hand gestures here, which is that, okay, over the course of these meetings, over the course of, like, movements, one of the things that is built up is hand gestures because they can be a very effective way of, you know, someone expressing something without having to talk over someone else. This is, I don't know, this is the 101. I'm not going to teach hand gestures because everyone has different ones. And there are some that are pretty universal, but like the number of different gestures I've seen. for like direct response

and shit like it is the thing that like hand gestures can work and can be really efficient yes you're doing one of the headers you're doing one of the direct response I don't know what that one is we make a triangle with your hands

oh it's front of process fuck I forgot about point of process oh no there's all of this very very complicated stuff it's not that complicated but like point of process sucks like that she's actually complicated I'm actually derailing again

I'm so sorry this is an example if there was a facilitator in this call they would be making me shut up is what's happening. Yeah, I know, but this is actually like, this is the one time I've ever wished there was, like,

videos so you could see the hand gestures. Because, like, the thing about this, right, is once you are good at meetings, and, like, if you have people who do this and you talk about what the hand gestures are beforehand, that's also important. You can't, even if you're very good at meetings and you're still listening to this episode for some reason, I mean, I don't know, it's a good episode. But, like, you can't assume that everyone knows what your hand gestures are. Yeah.

And sometimes people have different hand gestures for different things. sometimes you have contextual hand gestures for like, like there are like, okay, like you're, if you are trying to meet in the dark, your hand gestures don't work, right? This is also stolen from another friend, right? Like sometimes you need to use snaps for that because so that you can hear, right?

Like, all of this is to say that like, the stuff with hand gestures, it can make your meetings a lot more effective. This is a thing you can do if everyone in the group understands how they work. I'm not going to be like teaching you sets of hand gestures. gestures here because I can't guarantee that any gesture I teach you will be the one that people use. Can I, though, like, speed run the concepts of some of them because I think they are useful to

understand. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it's hard to imagine when you imagine meetings. I think about this a lot because I write meetings into fiction, which is a very hard thing to do and make them entertaining, because they're also hard to be entertained by when you're in them, unless they're contentious. But there are certain things that you learn derail meetings, and there are ways in which by using hand gestures, you can avoid having more people speak. And the single most important and common one is a way of saying, I agree. And so that way people, when they really want to say something, but they're not on stack and they get really frustrated, they can do that hand gesture, which, you know, is very easy to make fun of, you know, when I was coming up, it was twinkle fingers

where you waggle your fingers. And then we were like punk, so we did metal fingers instead, which was literally the same thing but reverse. It's kind of like the look that. you do when you really like music and it's actually sort of like mimicking playing a guitar and so that's a very important concept and sometimes people use snaps although sometimes people prefer non-audio and other people prefer audio um yeah yeah and sometimes that's that's that's posture while i was talking about like like like that's that's dependent on who's in the room and what the room is and like so but i think that a i agree without needing to say anything is essential yeah yeah that's a good one other ones to just know of is that there are things like people will say like, please move this along. It's a way of saying, hey, facilitator, please shut this person up, usually. Or can we talk about something else?

There's ones that are direct response, which is saying, I would like to jump stack because this person has just insulted the honor of my family or whatever. And it's like, it's up to the facilitator to decide whether to do these. Another one is point of process, which is saying like, hey, I actually don't want to talk about the thing we're talking about. I want to talk about how the meeting is going. Meetings get real meta, and it's real frustrating. Anyway, so it's worth knowing that this is part of the technology.

It seems cringy from the outside, but like are other options. I mean, there are other technologies about decision making that people have developed, but like actually living democratic lives in which we all have a say in our decisions, sometimes means that we go to meetings. And we can actually kind of learn to, I'm talking shit on meetings, but that's, meetings are also a ways to get to know your friends and express yourself and get things done. Yeah. You know, as much as I've been talking about to being boring, like, I've had things that were technically organizing meetings that were like some of the most

transformational experiences in my life. Yeah, totally. Because me and a bunch of people who, you know, a bunch of people really close to me, like, came together and we figured out how to do something. And there is a beauty there that is, and this is part of the issue why it's hard to talk about these things, right? Because like, the technical process of it, and the technical description of what we're saying is at the same time being used to do something

that can only be described in sort of poetic terms like the actual experience of like you and a bunch of other people coming together to do something and figuring out how to do it and fucking doing it is a transcendent act of creation

and these are like you know yeah like it doesn't like the fucking hammers and shovels and like fucking slide rules that you use to construct something don't look very pretty. And then at the end of it, you've built something together, and it's beautiful.

Yeah, no, it's the other side of the coin of the first time you watch the police run away from you. Yeah. It is a way of coming together with other people to accomplish something and make something powerful is meetings. And it is also, it's interesting because we talk about how men will often take up too much space in meetings. So this is not a universal thing anytime we say this kind of thing. But it's actually often feminized labor because it's this inviative. visibleized labor that happens behind the scenes that is not as sexy, right? And is about just actually hearing people out. It is like conflict resolution speed run. Anyway, I accidentally

went off on the meta of meetings also, but no, it's good. Well, but and I think there is an important thing here though, because like we're talking about the politics of like meetings themselves, right? Of like the, you know, the actual political angle of what it means to have a democracy where what democracy means is you make decisions together. Yeah. And this is something, there's also a very important actual procedural meeting note here, which is that one of the things you will learn over the course of doing meetings is that a lot of times people wage battles over the content of political ideology in the form

of fighting over how a meeting works. Yeah, totally. And you can see this everywhere from like your fucking local organizing meeting and people yelling about who's on stack or whatever, all the way up to like, you know, when when like the Democrats are saying that like in Congress that like the part of the budget parliamentarian won't let them like raise the minimum wage

that's what they're doing. They're using an argument over procedure to like disguise the fact that what they're really arguing about is like it is an actual political argument. Yeah. And but this is also a thing where like the way you structure a meeting is political. Yeah.

It doesn't seem like it. Right? But you can have a meeting where you know it's like the fucking plenipotentiary meeting. meeting of like the executive committee of, I don't know, the People's Congress, the Chinese Communist Party, whatever. Those are not the right words. I'm on five hours of sleep.

But you can have a meeting where it's just like, yeah, the way the meeting works is one guy stands out there and he gives a speech and he tells everyone what to say and then everyone votes yes. Yeah. That's a way you can do a meeting, right? And that's political. And it fucking sucks. And we're trying to teach you how to do a meeting where, you know, we do democracy,

where everyone comes together and we like do a thing. Yeah. And we will get to more roles. next week. This was originally planned to be one episode. It is not one episode. It is now two episodes. But the upside is that we solved a bunch of the fundamental logistical problems about how to build a free society. So stay tuned for that. Stay tuned for more roles you want in your meetings. And yeah, Spinaicadapin here. Thank you, Mark, for coming on the show. Welcome to It Could Happen here, a podcast about organizing. I am your host, Mia Wong, and in a moment,

we will be continuing our episode about how to run a meeting, which is one of the fundamental tools of building democracy and free societies. Here we go. Okay, so other roles. So we talk about that that was a long digression about the concept of a stack taker, which is

at a very simple level, you write the names down, you call the names in order. Yep. Yeah. We're going to move on to some of the other ones. Those are like the two, I don't know if most important is the right word. Funnily enough, stack taker's not the one I thought that digression was going to happen on.

I thought that was going to be the last one we're going to get to. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is Vives Checker. Oh, shit, the Vives Checker. Oh, the vibes, okay. Okay, please continue. Okay, let's do Timekeeper. Timekeeper, extremely important person.

You want someone with like a watch or something. And the timekeeper's job is to give people reminders of like how much time things are taking. So, you know, a thing you can do is like, okay, so we know we have this much time allocated for something, right? So we have 20 minutes to talk about this. Okay, so like 10 minutes in you go, we have 10 minutes left, we have 5 minutes left, we have like 15 minutes left. This is really important. And at the end of it, the timekeeper's job is to go like, hey, this is our allotted time. Do we want to keep talking about this and use more time? Or do we want to move on? And that's a really important role. It's also kind of why you want to generally have like an

idea of how long you want to talk about something in the agenda. It's also worth noting that like this is all guidelines, right? Like, these are all, Mia's Guidelines of Order. Is that what you're calling this? Oh, God, no. We're taking one more digression. Oh, no. One more digression, which is that the anarchy symbol, the A with the circle around it is

from a predomin phrase that's, the circle is actually an O because the original thing was anarchy, the original saying is Anarchy is the mother of order. Yeah. And that's where that comes from. So I was going to make a like Mia's like procedure disorder, whatever joke, but it's like, no, no, no, this is actually like, Anarchy is order, baby. I believe in an organized society. I just believe in an organically organized society

that is to use the Zapatista phrase from the bottom and the left. Yep. Okay, so that's the timekeeper. The note taker. Sometimes you need to decide whether you want notes of your meeting. Yeah, it depends on how crime you are. Yeah, I hear this all the time

from people making jokes about the scene for the wire that I've never seen the wire. But everyone's making jokes as the scene for the wire where a guy goes, are you taking notes of the criminal conspiracy? see. So, okay, are you going to have a note taker? And then secondly, like, okay, the note taker takes notes of what's being talked about. I actually, this is also Mia going into a little bit more advanced stuff. I actually like the practice of kind of rotating this throughout the

meeting because the problem with being the note taker. So if you're the timekeeper, right, you can be involved in the conversation. Stack taker is also hard to. But the thing about the note taker and it is you know if you get good enough at this you can rotate all of these roles during the meeting so that everyone has a chance to participate so you don't just have a group people who perpetually can't be in a meeting and so note taker is a thing that you can pretty easily just like pass to someone else yeah you're like hey you're not the note taker so the person who is being the note taker can like say things yeah although okay so there's two weird funny things about this one sometimes people who tend not to want to talk about

in a meeting, but also maybe have an attention span where they would prefer to be doing something at all times, prefer to be note taker. Yeah. But famously, the International Workingmen's Association or whatever, the first international international was a organization of a lot of different stripes of leftists, and someone went to someone's friend's apartment, this anarchist went to this anarchist friend's apartment and was like, hey, I want to invite my friend to this meeting. And this guy answers at the door, and his name's Carl Marks.

and he's like, oh, well, so-and-so's not here. And he's like, all right, well, you can come to. So an anarchist invites Marx to the international. I don't have my notes in front of me. Don't at me. But then Marx goes, and he becomes the note-taker. And by means of that, takes a minority position within the group and makes it the majority position by controlling the way that a lot of the media and

expression and stuff around this was, because Marx was a good writer. And for better or worse, I have my opinion about whether it's for better or worse. And so there's a power within note taker that actually is a reason to rotate this task. Yeah. On the other hand, if you're like not worried about that, you can just have a person who's like, I just really want to be the one who takes notes. It really depends on everything's going to be contextual. I just wanted to tell that story about Marx.

No, no, no. Like, this is the story of how Marx became Marx by taking a note-taking job and then becoming the person who would write the declarations for the organization. Yeah. We should note, like, this is also kind of how Stalin took power was by being the person in the back of the room, we didn't say anything, and keeping track of what everyone was doing and saying, and being able to manipulate, like, the inner workings of these sort of parliamentary procedures that the Bolsheviks were using.

That's what the Robert, not of the rules of order, but of the behind the bastards was saying about, oh, the Cambodian man, the horrible man who killed everyone. Oh, Pol Pot. It was that he was the quiet guy at the back. Yep, yep, yep, yep, same kind of guy. can be extremely dangerous. The guy who says everything all the time can be dangerous, quiet person

also can be very dangerous. Just never trust anyone, that's the answer. Wait, no, hold on. Hopefully we're not producing Pulpot in these meetings. Okay, so the last official role that I want to talk about, and there's a lot,

there's like a million other roles that people use. I want to talk about the vibes checker. So this is the one that's kind of not obvious from like the name, but the vibes checker is someone who actually has a,

really, really important role, and your role is to figure out, like, is everyone in the group okay? Does this meeting feel okay? Yeah. And is just something we need to do about it. And some of this is like, okay, everyone is clearly really tired. Let's go get lunch. And that's like a pretty easy sort of vibes checker thing. But then also like, I don't know, this is partially a facilitation job.

Like, I don't know. If someone says something racist at a meeting and a bunch of people are uncomfortable, it's like, now you're suddenly glad you have the person whose job it is to be like, hey, what the fuck? like and that's also that's like obviously like that's a blatant enough thing that everyone can be like hold on hold on like don't like say a slur or whatever but like

you know the vibe checker's job is if there's a lot of people who are uncomfortable with something or if something they're kind of there if something is going wrong or if people are checked out or if like stuff's happening sometimes this is behind the scene thing sometimes this is like explicit like you make a you bring it to the group to be like hey this is a okay

we need to address this. Yeah. Kind of thing. I don't know. It's a hard role to sort of like explain. It's fuzzy. Yeah. I mean, but it's in the name.

How are the vibes? And vibe is a fuzzy word and, you know, it's the word that people are going to interpret in different ways. Yeah. And like I, as a very sort of materialist, godless atheist, I, it's like, okay, this is how people are feeling. Right. People also take this in sort of more new agey directions. people take it in like but like you know

the important thing about this is right you can feel in a meeting when it's really tense or when things are like just weird everything feels off everyone is like pissed off or tired

or like just grossed out or like you know and that's this person's job this is why I'm putting it in here because it's it's one of these roles that like ideally I guess this person doesn't do anything

for a whole meeting, but they're just, they're sort of watching it. I mean, like, it's, it can be good if they intervene, but, like, it's especially important if something is going wrong in ways the group isn't addressing. Totally. It is good to have someone who's ready to step up and say, this is what's going on. Can I make a pitch for another role? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't have a name for this role.

The very first activist meeting I went to when the world was young. During the ultra-globalization movement, I went into a meeting for New York City Indie Media. and I had no idea what was happening, but it was a public open meeting, and I was a young activist, anarchist, or whatever, and I went to this thing. And someone sat next to me, knew that I was new,

and sat next to me and explained what the fuck was happening. That's a good role. And I don't know if I would have become an activist if that person hadn't done that. Because I went in, and it was the middle of a contentious meeting about people talking about some stuff that was pretty important,

and I had no idea it was happening and someone explained it to me. I think it is very important to have someone know who is new and help them feel comfortable. You could call like an usher if I was going to have a word but that's like,

because I'm really into this idea that our movements don't need gatekeepers, we need ushers, we need people to help people find their seats and figure out how to plug in. Yes, onboarding. But then the other thing I want to say is that with roles,

the larger and more formal a meeting, the more likely you need these to be formalized roles. But I also think that these as generalized skills can be dispersed through. Like, I think that a lot of groups, especially if they're kind of comfortable with each other, you maybe have a rotating facilitator,

you maybe have a stack taker, and you maybe are like who's taking notes right now, but stuff like TimeKeeper and Vives Check might be a thing that everyone feels empowered to do. I think that understanding these as roles is different than saying, at the top of the meeting, this is the way it is done,

you must assign these things. It is always contextual based on the meeting. in. Yeah. The range inside of meeting structure of like how formal and informal it is changes a lot. And that, yeah, that like changes, you know, that changes the roles. That changes how all of this stuff works. Totally.

And that's one of the most important things about this is like being flexible. Because the point of a meeting is not everyone followed the exact parliamentary procedures. Yeah. The point of a meeting is we did the thing we came there to do. Or sometimes if we did it. we did a different thing, right? But it's like, we all did something together and that thing happened, but we figured out how to make that thing happen.

And that's the actual important part. The content of the meeting is what's important. Not this, all of the structure is to enable the content. It's not the other way around. Yeah, totally. Right. Totally. And like, yeah, I don't know.

Like, if you have a timekeeper and someone else ends up doing time stuff too, right? Like, that's a significantly better result than we just kept talking. So. Okay, can I make one more pitch about a thing that's important at a meeting? Yeah, yeah. Food. I think that it's not always going to be appropriate in every specific situation, and there's a lot of things around dietary restrictions and all of these things.

But making the meeting feel like a place that is worth going to and a thing that, like, I think food is basically like hosting and good hospitality and these sort of, again, invisibleized feminine labor things goes a really long way towards making everyone feel comfortable. It also helps people's attention spans and blood sugar. Like, whether every meeting's a potluck or whether everyone just brings snacks or whether it's at someone's house and they're like, fuck yeah, I'm hosting. I'm going to make a bunch of food and, you know, whatever it is. Yeah. I've been theorizing this for a while that like we need.

Because like obviously a lot of this technology has been worked out already. But also we have so much further to go in order to like be able to make decisions together in a free society. And like I think we need to just have an initiative of like how do we want to. meetings fucking rip. One of my ideas has always been like you have a meeting that's just like the standing barbecue meeting that happens like every

like it's like the endless meeting and it's like okay you have it at like this time and there's just like a barbecue and everyone does barbecue stuff and it's a standing thing where if you want to come and like and then okay just to keep talking about some of this stuff. Child care. Child care. I think when you mentioned at the beginning being like

making sure that the space is accessible to everyone and there's a lot of stuff that gets forgotten about in particular, I would say that single parents are often forgotten about. And I think that having, or parents in general or children in general, are often forgotten about. And I think that having a plan in place for accessibility of all kinds of different people often includes child care. I used to do this. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, that was like one of the things that I did for some meetings.

And like, yeah, there were like meetings that happened. They're like tense meetings that happened because like people stayed and played with everyone's kids. It was a good time. And yeah. There's also this idea where sometimes meetings, people can come in and out of. The society that I want to live in has neighborhood assemblies that then move up to larger structures and make decisions, right? And in those, there's also this thing where it's like, you don't always have to go to meetings. Yeah.

There's a thing about democracy that people don't quite always get, which is that sometimes the most beautiful thing we can do for each other is give our agency freely to other people to make decisions for us that we trust. Working groups are actually a big part of this where I'm like, I don't actually want to have a say in every single decision that affects me. I want to be able to have a say in every single decision that affects me. Anyway, I'm again going kind of meta on this, sorry. No, no, this is important, right? And also, like, doing the childcare was part of that

because, like, yeah, it meant, like, you know, I was kind of, I was, like, trusting my people in the group to, like, do the meeting without me while I was just sort of, like, taking care of, like, just taking care of kids. And that was a really beautiful thing. And it worked really well. It fucking ripped. Yeah.

And you can build multi-generational movements, which are the only movements that accomplish... That's not true. Sudden movements also accomplish things, but when I look at some of the real high watermarks from the bottom and the left organizing around the world, you're talking about people who are drawn from hundreds of years of radical legacies or at least a couple generations.

Yeah. Speaking of generations, I don't know, I don't have a good pivoting to this. But, okay, so we've been talking a lot of, about a lot of the technology that's been used from meetings. I want to talk about a couple of other kinds of meetings that you can have.

When I originally was writing this, I was like, oh, I could fit, this whole section on how to run a meeting, this will be like 20 minutes, and I can have 20 minutes about like, spokes councils and 20 minutes about general assemblies, and we're now like it out,

we're not like, this is episode out. And we have not even seen. started to talk. So, okay, that's going to be another, the general assembly episode is going to be another episode completely in and of itself, but I do want to talk about spokes councils, because this is a thing that I've been finding really, really useful that I think people just don't know about anymore, and because people have lost the knowledge of this, a really valuable organizational tactic has been lost. So, okay, the thing that a meeting is there to do is so a group of people can come together and make decisions, but how do you make decisions between groups?

Or, and this is also often more important, less than having, like, because, you know, a lot of spokes consuls aren't usually supposed to be like, we're all making, like, we're all sort of, like, this is like a binding decision handed down by, like, spokes counsel. Right. This is also a really useful coordinating tool. Yeah. And this is what it's, you know, what is, like, actually designed for is, how do you get groups to sort of talk to each other and work with each other in a way that also lets them continue

to be, like, their own groups and not, you know, a sort of, like, subservient to the larger coalition. Yeah. And, and, you know, the answer to this turns out as a technology that was developed, I actually don't know the history of the spokes council. I mean, it's been around for like a long time. I don't either. Like at least like 30, 40 years in the anarchist circles. But it hasn't really made it out of them. And so spokes council is a meeting of groups. And so it's a meeting of spokespeople, right? So your group sends like one or two people to a thing. You send like a couple of people. And all of the other groups send some,

people and you come talk about a thing. Yep. And this is really useful for a number of reasons. One, it's a way for different kinds of groups to interface with each other in ways that they usually don't. So this can be anything from like an affinity group to like

an NGO to like a union. Yeah. It can scale between different kinds of things. It can theoretically you can do this with like your like fucking spokescounsel could theoretically send a person to another spokes counsel. Totally.

Right. And this is, you know, we'll get more to this a second, right, but like, like,

like, this is a way for a bunch of different types of organizations to come together and do something. And it's a way

for them to coordinate with each other. It's a way for them to share information. It's a way for them to, and this is like, one of the sort of secrets of organizing

is that, like, actual organizing is built through personal relationships with people knowing each other. Yeah. And so this is a way for like people to, like,

and meet each other and get to do things. There's different kinds of these. The traditional one is like, a thing happening, right? Like, there is a, there is a giant protest. And, like, a bunch of people who are going to be a bunch of the different groups and organizations and affinity groups and whatever, we're going to be at this thing, come together. And they're like, okay, how,

what are we doing? How are we going to sort of do this? And how do we coordinate this with each other? Yeah. And, yeah, Margaret, I assume you've been in like a million of these. You know, I have been in a lot of spokes counsel meetings. I've been in a fewer of them. And I think that you're right, there's been a bit of a drop off. Yeah. It's funny. We were talking earlier when I was like, oh, I was like, oh, I haven't done this in a while. I actually do go to meetings every week. But I like, but I used to go to meetings specifically for direct action protests. And that is a thing that I used to have more direct experience with. And so I don't want to be like, oh, people stop doing it because I don't totally know.

I'm not totally plugged in. But I do think the ultra-globalization movement of like 1999 to 2003 or so is where a lot of modern protest tactics and stuff were developed, or rather it came to a head of the tactics. have been developed for decades by various different groups. Yeah. And actually a lot of the technologies around spokes councils and stuff, they come from a lot of different sources, including, I think, anarchist and the Spanish Civil War, but I'm not 100% certain about that.

But a lot of the ultra-globalization movement stuff comes from the Zapatis and Chiapas. I know you didn't ask for history lesson, and I'll speed run it. No, no, no, no, this is good, though. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The folks in Chiapas and the Zapatis have developed a lot of different ideas about how to have bottom-up democracy,

and they've been moving through different ones. They actually moved to a more decentralized model than they were doing about two years ago in 2023. But they went around the world and built organizations by saying, everyone send your people, we're getting together, the people's global alliance, like all of these like, you know, global south,

I'm putting air quotes here. We're getting together and we're building direct action movements together. And that is where the ultra-globalization movement comes from at least as much as anything else. And some of that is, that technology of saying send your representatives and do this thing. But it's interesting because in some ways it's actually just an upside down version of parliamentary democracy, right? Where theoretically we elect a politician and they go speak for us. They don't. That is the concept behind a democracy, right? And so theoretically, you can send a delegate and there's two ways of doing it. There's a decision-making larger body and there's a coordinating larger body. And there's a coordinating large. body. And if you want to maintain every group's autonomy, it is a coordinating body. You get together

and at the Spokes Council, you say, the 10 people I represent who will remain nameless are all willing to get arrested tomorrow and we're all willing to lock ourselves down. And someone else will say, we don't want to get arrested. The 14 people that I'm representing kind of want to break shit. And then other people will be like, the 15 people that I represent kind of wish you all wouldn't break shit. And you can get together and coordinate. And then the break ship people can be like, oh, okay, well, we'll make sure we break shit somewhere else than where you are and and all of this stuff. And whereas a decision-making body would get together and your spoke would have a mandate from your group. They would be empowered to make decisions for everyone,

knowing that the decision has to be within a certain framework. And then basically when they're done, you'd be like, okay, you did or didn't succeed at your mandate. We're going to send someone else next time or whatever. So there's two different ways of doing spokes counsel meetings. I think one of the reasons that they fell out of favor is that by and large open organizing of direct action has diminished in the movement because it may or may not be legal to show up somewhere and say, well, the 15 people I represent want to break shit or even the 15 people that I represent want to lock ourselves down into big puppets with lockboxes, right, and disrupt global trade. Because of the ramping up of repression, people have backed off of certain types of open

organizing. I have opinions about that, but that's kind of, I'm actually not trying to tell anyone what to do about it. But so I think that that's part of why the spokes council has a little bit diminished. And I actually think that we just need to adapt the spokes council to the modern context. And I'm sure people do still do them. So this is, this is where we're getting, this is what I'm calling the MIA technology, which is, there have been spokes councils recently that are not like, that are not this, that are using the idea of the spokes council, but are kind of a different thing. Okay.

Because there's another thing that you can do with this organizational form, right? Of everyone sends their delegates together or whatever. Like everyone sends their like spokespeople.

Yeah. And everyone meets each other. You can also do this for like not planning a direct action. Yeah, totally. You can do this as a way to get all of the different organizations

and like affinity groups and shit in a city talking to each other. Yeah. And this turns out to be extremely useful. Yeah. I've seen this a lot recently. and sort of trans-organizing

where like all the trans different groups of the city will be like, fuck it, we're showing up to a thing. Yeah. This is a different thing that we will be talking

hopefully to some people who run this soon. This was originally supposed to be part of this episode before I realized that it was impossible to fit this into this episode which is now two episodes.

But there was a really, really cool thing in Portland that was called the trans general assembly. Cool. Where people were just like, fuck it, we're running a general assembly

for like all of the trans people come, you can say things and everyone meets at the end. And that was awesome. but you can do this on a very, very, on a targeted level with like, okay, I know a bunch of different orgs. Like, for example, okay, we need to coordinate a response

to like the situation of trans people in the U.S. So you can go through all of your networks. You can be like, okay, I know this person who is in this org that does this thing, right? And you can bring all of those resources together and then you can turn that into a spokesperson council that's not quite the same thing exactly as the kind of like direct action spokes councils

that have been organized. Right. It is closer to a general assembly maybe, but maybe that's a pedantic difference or semantic difference. Yeah, it kind of is, but it's, well, so, okay, the way I've been conceiving of it is like, if you're specifically getting people together

who are there as organizations, it's a spokes, it's a spokes. Yeah, totally. If they're there as themselves, it's a general assembly. Oh, that makes sense. Even if they are sort of like representing a thing, but like, yeah, yeah, yeah, like the scopes

and who shows up to them are very different, I think. Oh, and there's also fish bowls. What's a fishbowls? Actually, I haven't heard this one before. A fishbowl is a spokes council where everyone can come and only the spoke can speak. So you can look in on the fish. Oh, that's what that's called. Interesting.

Okay. Yeah. Anyway, which is a way to do it. It maintains transparency. It's a way to have a still open meeting, but if only one person from the group is empowered to speak, then it's not a nightmare of trying to have 6,000 people in a room talk. The basic beating technology, all of these things can be used for a whole bunch of different things in a whole bunch of different ways that we haven't thought of yet. Yeah.

You could arrange trash pickup in a neighborhood. You can make the government obsolete. Yeah. With meetings and spokes councils and general assemblies and federations and all of these like levels of bottom up organizing. And there are places in the world where people have done this. Yeah. And, you know, if we want to close on sort of like this is the political angle of this, right? Like a free society is one that is structured like this.

Yeah. Where a bunch of, where things happen by people coming together to do them. Yeah. Right. And you can take the sort of like, I don't know, I guess you'd call it the workerist angle of like, I don't know, we need to run a waste treatment plant. Yeah. Right. So the way the race treatment plant is run is that the people who do waste treatment have their own like workers council or whatever.

Right. And they decide how they're going to do it and they go do it. Right. Almost every, I would say, every real revolution and revolutionary movement in history is doing a version of this. You can even look at the Soviet concept. The Soviet was the decision-making body. It was the assembly. And all power to the Soviets was the slogan that literally was inverted by the Bolsheviks, where the entire idea was a democratic but revolutionary movement. And this happens constantly, even when societies break down on some level naturally, and a ton, not all, a ton of indigenous societies, this is the default model. And so, you know, in Chiapas with the Zapatistas, what happened was is that you had this like Marxist-Leninist army and they were like, oh, we're going to do this way.

And the indigenous people who lived in Chiapas were like, that's not how we do things. Yeah. And they were like, this is how we do things. And then those Apatistas who are good people were like, you're right. That's how we do things. you know, and they like built up this model. And you have a similar thing happening with the area called Rojova in northeast Syria where like basically people are like actually the indigenous Kurdish model of doing things

is much more this egalitarian method and democratic method. And then, okay, and the other thing is you can do it in the workers model, but there's also people who have messed around with it and done things like, you know what, maybe the school isn't run by the teachers. Yeah. Maybe the school is run by the teachers, the parents and the students. Yeah, yeah. And maybe the food distribution center is a common.

of the workers of the feud distribution center and the people who make use of it. So maybe the trash pickup is both the workers and the people who need the services. But the specifics almost they do matter and we can, but we don't know. We don't know the actual formulation. But this is the core of bottom left organizing and it is a beautiful thing. And it is funny how it all comes down to meetings and making sure that there's food and child care and not one person taking a person taking a person. all the time, which is really hard when you podcast for a living. I will tell you that. Yeah. But this is like, you know, I have had to learn to shut the fuck up in meetings. Yeah, me too. And by doing it has made meetings better. It's great. You can learn to shut the fuck up. Someone else says the thing and you don't have to say it. Yeah. Yeah. But then also, I do want to put this out, right? The things that we're describing here, right? It's, okay, like, how do you do to be it work? You need food. You need childcare. You need structure that make sure one person isn't running the thing. Yeah. This is the entire political situation of the modern

United States, right? We are trying to get food, we are trying to get child care, we are trying to have a place to do our thing, and we're trying to have to not be ruled by like a fucking king? Yeah, totally. Again, this all seems like very, very basic, like shit, right? But if you don't have this, and this is a problem that the U.S. has constantly,

your protest movements, it's like, most Americans don't have a democratic tradition? Right. And so when shit happens and there's suddenly riots and there's suddenly, like, mass protest movements break out, right? people don't know how to make democratic decisions so they don't. Right. And that means that nobody's talking to each other.

That means that everyone is locked in these very small circles of extremely violent paranoia. Yeah. And that sucks. Yeah. And we can avoid that by knowing how to do democracy because that's fundamentally what running and beating is. This is what democracy looks like. Yeah. Yeah.

And I also want to say one more thing. This is a podcast that would probably could have. could have used a facilitator, especially on my end right now, because unmedicated Mia is a fucking trip. But, like, you know, when we talk about sort of our, how do you apply this to your sort of broad vision of society, right? And it's like, okay, anarchist, how do you run USAID? Right. Because, like, yeah, like the destruction of USAID is going to kill an unbelievable number of people because people aren't getting HIV vaccines, right? Right. Right. And the way you run that is the way that you run a meeting, right? The workers who produce, yeah, to act, who are the people who actually, who actually

figure out how to make an HIV vaccine. Distribute it, distribute information about it. Those people form fucking councils, and they form fucking meeting groups. And they work in collaboration with the people who need them. And that is how you build society, right? It's like, David Graber's thing was always like, the ultimate hidden truth of this world is that it is something we make and we could just as easily make differently. And when he says something we make, he was talking about it in a more abstract sense,

but like we do literally make it. Yeah. Like all of this stuff is the product of stuff that we did, right? Like we all physically built every aspect of this world, right? Everything, everything that you see and touch and hear right now are things that we designed and engineered and built. Yeah. And we don't lose that capacity when we cease to be ruled.

We can still do that. And as long as we have the ability to do democracy, right? And we have the ability to make decisions with each other. We can fucking do those things. And we can do them for each other and not for a king. Yeah, it's like people ask, how would you make and distribute insulin in an anarchist society or an anti-capable society or a bottom-up society?

And you're like, well, we know how to make and distribute insulin, and we just need to change some of the social technologies that are doing it. And I think we could probably do it better because it's currently not working great. You know, and my other like go-toe quote, I love the Graber quote, is the Derrude quote. Anarchist General and Spanish Civil War Probably didn't actually say this It was probably a journalist put these words in his mouth

But we're not actually certain And he says like the boot I'm paraphrasing the bourgeoisie can blast And ruin the world on their way out of history That's fine Yeah We the workers built All of these cities

We can build We know how to do that The part of that I always stuck with me It's like I think the exact quote that I got Was we are not in the least afraid of ruins Yeah You're the ones who built this world and we'll do it again.

Yeah. And yeah. So I don't know what these episodes are going to be called, but if they're called, the answer is meetings, comma, sorry. I think how about that.

Okay. I don't know. This is going to end up. The provisional title right now is the most important organizing skill you don't know. Because unfortunately, we do need people to click on this and they won't if it's a meeting thing.

So I'm sorry. I've clicked baited you into this. Right. Well, then that's the monster at the end of the book is that, meetings all the way down. Yeah. Yeah.

Margaret, thanks for talking with me about the actual fundamental building blocks and tools of democratic life. Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for talking about this stuff. Yeah. And this has been a good happen here. You can go out in your community and you can do these things. You can form spokes councils. You can form assemblies. You can go work with the people

around you to do things and you can use structures to do it. and you can change the world. The secret is to really begin. Hell yeah. Ah, welcome back to It Could Happen here, a podcast that is normally about the terrors. But today, today we're talking about, I mean, technically still the terrorists, but we're talking about a more fun part of the terrors.

We're talking about the Liver King. Thank God. Thank God. Dodgers and Kings, two things we famously appreciate on this podcast. With me today is James Stout and Miel Wong. What do you all know about the Liver King? I thought you were going to give us cool titles. Just if we could just go back and you could each give us some kind of nobility and a food stuff.

Yeah, sure. James, you are the tea leaf salad that made you really sick that one time, King. It's true. I think that tea leaf saddle ruled me, actually. Yeah. It made me in subject. And I, you know, you and I haven't eaten a lot of meals together. We need to do more of that.

Right, we need to do more of that. You're the, I have not eaten many meals with me yet, but hopefully will, Queen. Incredible, incredible, incredible. Now, the liver king is the king of liver, as you're all, I'm certain, well aware. And I did, we did the bastards. This was a live episode I did a couple of years ago with Dr. Kavejoda. And in case you're not aware, the liver king is a guy who like three, two or three years ago started to get really famous very suddenly and obtained millions of followers, I think up to like six at one point on Instagram, by getting super jacked.

He was this huge shredded guy. Or he's not actually very tall, but he was shredded. And he was always perpetually shirtless, usually wearing very little. And talking about his different primal rules, how mainly you need to eat nothing but liver and testicles. Often raw, and that's all you need to do in order to get huge. That, and then you can just lift hundreds and hundreds of pounds, and you'll get swollen and gigantic, totally nattie, because we're just, we're supposed to eat like primal cavemen who only ate testicles and livers. They left the rest. Now, accepting how none of this is accurate, it came out very soon after that because the liver king, prior to becoming the liver king, had been a series of petty grifters of lower nobility and had written an email to a guy.

who was like an expert on performance-enhancing drugs, asking like what kind of regimen he could take in order to get the size that he eventually became. Anyway, it came out that he's been spending like $13,000 a month on steroids. Like that's how he got huge. It's not the testicles. It's not the livers. It's not these absurd videos of him eating different organ meats

or making his kids eat different organ meats. It's not his weird workout tactics. It's the fact that he's taking $13,000 worth of gear a month, right? Now, one of the first people to call him out before this came out was Joe Rogan, who saw the, and, you know, I'll give Joe Rogan credit for one thing. He knows when someone's on steroids. Yeah. So, Joe Rogan had called him out initially being like, there's no way this guy's natural, right? Like, he's taking fucking steroids. It's very obvious. Now, to be fair, everyone knew that because it's very, like. I don't know shit about steroids, and I look at that guy. It's like, his belly button pushes out. It's like, Robert's not talking about an outy.

No, no, I'm talking about it. It's a golf ball size protrusion. The organs are trying to escape. This man is so clearly 80% steroids by volume. That is the highest volume of steroid to body mass that has ever existed. Yeah, it's nuts stuff. So he lost a shitload of his followers. And he's still got like $3 million on Instagram, but his videos, he's lucky to get a couple of thousand.

likes and shares these days on an Instagram video. And before that all came out, he was doing much more. He had to do a Mia Coppa. He claims he's all natty now. And he has, just over the last couple of years, just continually degraded. Right. Now, this guy's business, which he made millions doing, or one of his businesses, was selling different supplements.

He's very expensive supplements. And he's built kind of a little cult at his compound in Texas around, you know, listening to fucking dance music from the mid-aughts. A lot of like Mike Posner. remixes and weird shit while giving rants about being a caveman and like pulling, trapped your equipment and shit. He likes to always walk around with fucking a, with a plate carrier on, which he calls his exoskeleton in order to like, you know, build up muscle mess or whatever.

And anyway, he's continually degenerated to the point where those of us who call ourselves Liver King watchers have all kind of been saying for a while now, oh, he's not just on gear anymore. Like he's doing, he's, he's doing other drugs and they have had, they are really having a negative effect on his mental health. Yeah, he doesn't seem well. He does not seem well. So I'm going to put a video, play a video on. This is a video that started at all. He started a couple of weeks ago increasingly threatening Joe Rogan. And he doesn't live that far away from Austin. He started posting a series of videos trying to threaten Joe Rogan to a fight. And I'm going to, I'm going to post you the one. This is kind of like the key video that gets this series of events started. It's the video that

is the inciting incident video for everything that's happening now, right? So that's what I'm going to play for you guys. You see the Instagram? Okay. So in this video, listeners, you're going to hear him talk. In this video, he's got, again, like music playing in the background. He's wearing a badly taxidermied wolfhead that's like a cape over his regular head. It looks like a cute.

It's like a dup wolf. He's shirtless. He's wearing shorts. And as one user noted in the comments, his pants are vibrating as he talks. And he is carrying in each hand, he has a gold-plated AR-15 short-barreled rifle. With a fucking blast phobia. In my entire life, I have never seen a man look less intimidating while holding a gun wearing a wolf pelt. Two guns, Mia.

Two guns. That's a second gun? Two guns, yeah. Holy shit. It looks like a blunderbuss. Those are two gold-plated AR-15 SBR. With a gold eotech on toping, if he hadn't spent enough money. Yeah, yeah, and I think a gold one on the other.

So anyway, I'm going to, you listen to this, man. Joe Rogan, I'm calling you out. My name's Liberty. Man to man. I'm picking a fight with you. Yes. I have still training as you did, so you're a black belt. You should dismantle me.

But I'm picking a fight with you. You'll rule. Whatever you want you to, Wait, I'll wait. I'll wait one nighty this morning. I'll come to you. Whenever you're ready, whenever you're ready to go. I'm on a vibration plate by the way. That's why I'm shaking.

Hold on. And then he just starts dancing. I'm sorry. I'm on a vibration plate by the way. That's a healthy man. That's a guy who's doing well, right? all agree. He's pretty buzzing. I saw a video

one time where someone was reacting to a Drake video and his response was those are the least intimidating goons I've ever seen in my entire life. And that is the entire vibe of watching him trying to like bring someone to a fight. It's a stodging. It is special. It is special. And if you couldn't quite make out the audio

over whatever the fuck that music was, what he says in that is Joe Rogan, I'm calling you out. My name's Liver King. Man to Man, I'm picking fight with you. I have no training in jujitsu. You're a blackout. You should just dismantle me, but I'm picking a fight with you. Your rules. I'll come to you whenever you're ready. Holding the A.A.S. does give that a slightly different... A slightly more terroristic threat vibe, right? Why are you holding the AARs? Because he goes on to say in another post, you never come across something like this, willing to die, hoping that you'll

choke me out because that's a dream come true, which makes it sound like a sex thing, right? Yeah, yeah. That makes it sound like a sex thing. Yeah. He closed out Pride Month. So this video comes out, and then Liver King starts making a series of videos in Austin, right? He drives to Austin. He's making videos on the way. He makes videos when he gets there. And he keeps saying he wants to fight Joe Rogan. Now, he's just saying he wants to fight him, right? He's not saying, I'm going to kill you. He's not saying, like, I'm going to assault you. He's like, he's asking for a consensual fight. But he's also posing with weapons, and he has now traveled to Austin. And he's clearly unwell.

So Joe Rogan has a security team. He's got a bunch of like former operators and shit that he pays to watch over his security and whatnot. And sometimes go on his podcast, if I'm not mistaken. And they do their job, which is, oh, there's a guy threatening our boss holding guns and photos. And he's traveled to Austin. We should probably call the cops. We should probably do something about this. Right.

So they give a call to the police and they're like, hey, we consider this to be like numerous threats, right? He's traveled to Austin. Like, this seems like a guy who might actually act seriously on his threats. We're concerned about this. So the police wind up talking to Joe Rogan himself. And Rogan says, yeah, I was, you know, my security team told me about this. I consider these to be threats. Like, and I'm willing to file a police report, right?

He tells the police that Brian Johnson has a drug issue, which is, again, it's weird to be like, yeah, Joe Rogan so far, not wrong about any of this. And he's like, he's unstable and he probably needs help, which again, probably accurate, right? I don't think, I don't think there's much to argue with here. So the police decide these cross the line into terroristic threats and they file charges. The liver king is arrested. He's not in jail long. He's released within a day on $20,000 bond. There's a restraining order.

He's not allowed to have guns anymore for a while. He's got to stay 200 yards away from Rogan. So the liver king. does exactly what a guy like the, you'd expect a guy like the Lyrking to do, right, in the wake of something like this happening, which is he immediately gets out of jail and starts making more videos, right?

Oh, of course. Yeah. Yeah, from his hotel room in Austin. And again, these are just the videos of a really healthy guy who's doing well, whose brain is not, has not liquefied and isn't coming out of his ears, just a man who seems healthy.

Thank you for all the prayers, by the way. People pray for me. You should also pray for yourself, pray for your family. Lock that down, fifth bump pound, lock it down. You should do all that. I am going to the Capitol. I'm already in the Capitol, but we're going to like Capitol Capitol, the location. And I've been given the gift of a restraining order just recently.

And so if anybody knows if someone else whose first name rhymes with Blow, whose last name is Rogan, I'm not allowed to say it. for a copyright. I might sue you about a reason. You're not allowed to laugh. I'll see you. I'll put you in jail in that one, too. Okay.

So, first off, he starts this. He admits in another video, he posed a little earlier, that he hasn't slept in days. And he hasn't been eating. And he is slurring his words at the start of this. He is not well. I don't think he's sober, but it could just be sleep deprivation

and the fact that something else is awry. And he's like, going to the Capitol, He says he wants to go to the Capitol to like start a legal precedent. He says Liver King v. Joe Rogan is going to be like one of the great legal battles of our century in terms of setting precedents. What kind of precedent? It's going to be the new dread, Scott. I got to play you guys another video from right after his arrest in terms of like seeing how well this man is doing. This is the one where he talks about having not slept days.

It's going to zoom it on his eyes. And I need you to look at his pupils. Okay? Oh, no. This is, this seems like a man who's had a serious head injury to me. Because his, his, his, one of his pupils is a very different size from the others. Good morning, primates. Oh, wow.

From the vibration plate of the greatest whole state in the world. Austin, Texas. Texas is the state just to be clear. Bags under my eyes. I haven't slept a whole lot. And it's been an amazing gift. What do you see there, people with medical training? Yeah, the human eyes shouldn't do that.

That is like... Yeah, they're not supposed to look like that. That's one of the... It's a side of a serious... It's one of the bad science. What if his eyes is like 20 times bigger than the other people? It's bad. Like, if I cared about this, man, I would get him to a hospital immediately.

Yeah, immediately. To be clear, I don't. I gotta wonder, the liver, a filtering organ, right? It takes the bad stuff out. I feel like if that's all you eat, you're going to concentrate the bad stuff at some point. Yeah, you're going to get vitamin A poisoning, she almost certainly has by now. Did someone like slip him a bear liver or something, polar bear liver? Like what was going on here?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He went up the food chain until he ate that wolf's liver and then put it on his head. Yeah, it's very unclear to me. is he actually eating that much liver? Like there's videos where he does, but like on a daily basis, he's also taking gear. So maybe he has a normal diet in order to like, you know, outside of it. And this is just for show. There's been a lot of theorizing about that.

And we just don't know. But either way, I think it's safe to say, this is a sick man, right? This is not a well person. Yeah. His Instagram comments are not helping. If they're not, just give this man a gun immediately. Yeah. Keep trying to fight Joe Rogan, but I believe you can do it.

Right now, if someone is putting out a casting call for deranged man and, like, profit in the desert, he looks exactly like that. Absolutely. The incredible added before he went completely. He looks amazing. He looks incredible. Yeah. He's got like two foot of beard, his hair is unkempt. He looks like, if you know the mural of John Brown.

Yeah. John Brown is like, joked and really angry. Yes, yes, yes. That is what he looks like. Yes, he does. Different vibes. Speaking of different vibes, let's change off the vibes and play some ads. And we're back.

So friends, I got to play you this next video, which is after he gets out of jail, he goes to the Capitol. And this is him going through security at the Capitol, as best I can tell. And he is wearing like a fucking waiting length pants, like pants that cut off just below your knee. So like they're high water sweatpants. He's wearing like a sleeveless green hoodie. and he has the hood up over his head,

and then he's wearing a plate carrier. And he's trying to go to Capitol Security. It's just really funny. It's just two ladies in, like, security uniforms. They're letting him try to go through. And I think this proves that he's, if he was wearing ceramic plates, I don't think it would set off the metal detector.

but it does. So he's got to be wearing those cheap AR-500 metal plates. Oh, it's a detector. Wow. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's possible, this doesn't look like just a weight vest that looks like just a normal plate carrier, although it's a...

Yeah, it's a 5-11 tactic. Yeah, yeah, it looks like, yeah. So I think he's just got AR-500 plates in there. Of course. I mean, they're probably just weight plates. They may not even be AR-500. Yeah, they may not even be ballistic. He can be cast iron.

He tells them it's his exoskeleton, so he has to keep it on. I don't think he gets in wearing this. Oh, man, I can't. It's my skeleton. There's nothing to... Oh, man. I love the liver kick. I was really not expecting him to turn into a lobster,

but apparently that's just where we're at now. That's where we're at, yeah? You're right, given his readiness. So, there's one more video from his time in Austin before we'll get back to the liver king compound and see the liver queen a little bit. Oh, no. That person is going through, like,

the mental health equivalent of the Q course right now, watching their one source of income. Yeah, I don't know. I have to hope if you're the liver queen, you have pretty good, like, insurance for the liver king. Yeah, you hope so. I don't know how long they've been liver monarchs together, whether she was with him before he went completely fucking bongas or...

I don't know how much time there was before that happened, to be honest. Was it an arranged marriage, like previous monarchies? Yeah, sure, yeah. Yeah, she's actually from the lung family. but they had to marry her off to forge an alliance. I'm going to have to demand that we watch is LK's back vulnerable if he only stands to strike? I need to see that.

There's a lot of Liver King fighting videos, and none of them are all that impressive. So one way he fights like a horse-sized duck or a hundred duck-sized horses. There's a video where he goes hunting with his kid, and he's talking about how it's like a primal experience. experience, but all that happens is he pays a guy to take him into the woods, like, 40 feet away from a deer, and then they just shoot the deer. That's bad. Where his Native American guy is like, okay, you can shoot it now.

It's really funny. It's pretty good. Okay. What? He's just cram walking like a gorilla down like the hall of his hotel. What is happening? It's beautiful stuff. It's good stuff.

What's happening now? He's doing fake martial arts moves. And it comes out of the door, straight gorilla crab walk. Yeah, he's just doing his gorilla crab walk that he does his like fist bump. He has like a little chant that he makes people say. We just won't have what we do. Lock it down. And he appears for you wearing an ankle monitor.

Yeah, he is wearing an ankle monitor. Yes, that's my favorite part of the video. I have to wear an ankle monitor now. Someone's commented, is that an ancestral ankle monitor? I can't emphasize enough. That is not a normal crab walk. I don't know how to describe what that is. It genuinely defies description.

It is the weird, one of the weirdest forms of motion I've ever seen the human can undertake. Imagine if the gorilla was drunk. We're going to go back to ads real quick. And then when we come back, we're going to finally see the liver queen and him back in his compound talking to his fellow friends about how things are really good, how he wanted to get arrested for threatening Joe Rogan, how it's a blessing to have a restraining order against him and to not be able to be in possession of his guns anymore. And we're back. And I'm going to play that video for you guys once again. So he is standing in the yard of the Liver King compound.

His wife is drinking a glass of wine next to him. And a point of this kind of reluctantly takes his hand. They are listening to a, like, I think it's a, I think you'd call it a trance remix of Mike Posner's, I took a pill in Ibiza. So I don't know why. It's just blasting over the yard as he talks, as he rants about his arrest.

There's zero. Grace. There's zero. I really understand. I really, I did it. Really? And I'm not asking for it. I don't need it.

But it's hard. It's, uh, the hardest part's over. The hardest part's fucking over. That's great. That's really good. The hardest part's over, getting arrested. Yeah, yeah. His wife really doesn't want to take his hand.

He has a kaffia draped around his shoulders. A tactical kaffia, no. His, he's wearing a tactical kaffia. He loves his tactical Kaffia. Okay. It's good stuff. Yeah, he's just doing really, really healthy. Yeah.

He seems to have, like, added mag pouches for this one, which suggests that he removed them for his trip to the capital. He did that remove the mag pouches to go to the capital. So he really thought it through and thought, I bet I could wear it if I take the mag pouches off. Yeah. He looks like a puffer fish. It's incredible.

It does look like a puffer fish. It looks like a puffer fish. he's taking so many steroids that he is literally inflated and they are trying to get out. Yeah. So in this last video that we're going to play, he's sitting on a throne. He's got a throne. He talks about how

he thinks the throne is silly now and how he wouldn't have liked past Liver King and how people talk about how he's lost it and he thinks that's a compliment because I think he's making a point about ego death here, but it's not very coherent. So here's the Liver King talking about how it's good to lose your mind.

Just walking through the foyer and I saw these old thrones and I just kind of laughed. I was like, oh, God, you know, kind of a little bit embarrassed. And I thought, oh, you know what? I don't think I made a video today. I said I was going to, so I better deliver on it. But it was Sunday, family day, God's Day, capital G day. And we did that thing, man.

That was good. And so I'm walking by this one, this throne, old throne, And I thought Buffalo is real. That's, that's legit. That's going to stay. But I thought, oh, my God. You know, the predecessor me, I would have hated me too. I read some comments today or yesterday.

And I saw he's losing it a lot. And this is, says it on my desk. Lose yourself. The thing is, like, when you actually lose yourself, though, and you lose the ego, you can't really tell people, you know, because then it's like, hey, yeah, I actually shed my ego. And now I'm better, you know. That's the ego talking.

So if other people are seeing it, whoa, thank you, thank you. Or I can also go back to the egomaniac. So here's the thing, folks. The new DSM that's coming out, I think they're going to increase the age at which you could be diagnosed as a schizophrenic for male. up to like 40 or something like that, and boy, howdy. Oh, no. Real truly, like, real Ross Putin vibes from this one. He's got like a hood on.

He really is obsessed because his hair, he's got less and less of it every day. That'll happen with testosterone. Would you take nothing but pure test? Yeah, yeah. Would you pour testosterone on your cereal in the morning? Yeah. So anyway, that's my update for everyone on the Liver King. he's doing well. I'll be shocked if he's alive at a year.

What a fantastic man. He's got kids, but he also makes the meat raw testicles, so I don't know if they're going to be worse off. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's probably one of those rare stations-in-movement. Yeah, something should have, something should be done here. Yeah, this doesn't seem like a healthy guy. I'd know if you should eat just organ meat.

No, apparently, like, eating a diet that is entirely consists of raw organs, random pharmaceuticals and gear makes you talk exactly the same as like a 19 year old art student. Yeah. Yeah. Like enough ketamine to like tracholize a horse. These are apparently equivalent states of being this is what I've learned from this. Yeah. I think ketamine is one possible explanation

because some of his behavior is definitely like ketamine coated. Yeah. But I also think there's a good chance. that this is just like he's been abusing drugs for such a long period of time that his he's just suffering permanent brain damage now at this point right like he's he's not able to like he's not very cogent anymore and i don't know i feel like the people who are still around him are largely taking advantage of him for money like he was good at making money at one point they're still

cash flooding in yeah and that's that's kind of what's happening here but on the other hand like this is this guy made his own hell he made his own he's getting exactly what he wants. Yeah, he lied to people about their health, which is a pretty fucked up thing to do. Like, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the liver king. No, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the liver king. Anyway, any questions about the liver king before we roll out?

I mean, so many, Robert, more than you can ever imagine. But, okay, on a scale of like 0.01 to 1 Goddafi, how were his golden A-Rs? I mean, they're golden ARs. Like, they're fine. Like, they are, like, they're definitely, like, dictator-grade ARs. I'll give them that. Like, if you, if you saw that in, like, some fucking, uh, uh, junta leader, you know,

carrying it around and screaming about executing his enemies, you'd be like, yeah, that fits. That said, I do think if you are going to be carrying a gold-plated weapon, an AR is just inherently less impressive than an AK-47. Like, a golden AK-47 says, something about you. And a golden AR just says that you have like $15,000 to light on fire for no good reason. Whereas a gold plate at AK-47 says, you've probably mixed cocaine and gunpowder. You know? Yeah. Yeah. That's some advice for the liver king for free. Yeah. You have to be, sending positive messages out into the world with your apparel. Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah, it's just why I'm wearing the derpyest wolf. You guys have to see. Find the fucking wolf. Like, the indignity of it being killed is not its final indignity as it turns out. Yeah. No, that's, that's as bad as it can go for a wolf. Yeah, pretty much. You go from the top of the food chain to this guy's balding, uh, the cranium. Yeah, I don't know. Have a fucking vegetable, everyone. That's what I have for you. Yeah, have vegetables. Eat more vegetables. Oh, we haven't talked about how he squats. He doesn't squat with the bar. He squats with the Frank.

We've got to mention this. Yeah. No, we forgot to mention that. That is very funny. Yeah. God. Go on this.

It's a terrible fucking time to be alive. Go on his Instagram. It's funny. Yeah, it's really funny. Have some fun. Enjoy the Lever King's Instagram. While he's still alive for another like four to six months.

I'm not taking any pleasure in this. I don't want him to die. I'm just looking at a man and being like, well, that's not going to last much longer. Yeah. This is like watching a car. without breaks.

Yeah. Traffling downhill at speed. Yeah. All right, everyone. Have a good night. Triple pound. Yeah, yeah, boy. This is It Could Happen here.

Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I am joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and later a special report by Robert Evans. This episode, we are covering the week of June 25th to July 2nd. It is the end of Pride Month. It was Canada Day. Fourth of July is coming up. I will say,

no one in our team wished me a happy Canada Day, not that I noticed. That's correct. I hate the Trump administration because I can't do my death to Canada jokes anymore. It sucks. It's terrible. Canada, welcome to the resistance. I'm going to start with a brief news roundup, because there's been so many news stories this past week that we cannot do big sections on all of them. We already have three main stories, but there's some mini stories that I didn't want to get forgotten. I'm going to start by talking about the Supreme Court, which has now limited the ability of lower court judges to use nationwide injunctions. So now, Trump's order to end a birthright citizenship can be enforced, if even temporarily, for those who are not affiliated with the actual

court cases on the constitutionality of ending birthright citizenship. What this means on a broader scale, is that Trump's very obviously illegal executive orders can now be enforced in a lot of states because the injunctions that judges are putting on only apply to the people in those specific cases. So enforcement of the orders can start before the final order on if it's legal or not gets issued.

So this is really bad because it will cause some intense, if temporary, like short-term headaches for many people whose now citizenship is in a big question mark. But this also affects many other cases regarding judge's ability to actually issue injunctions that affect things across the whole country.

Yeah, there is some sort of weird hack shit you can do where like there's been some stuff that judges have been trying to do and be like, everyone in the country is a plaintiff or whatever the fuck. Yeah, and I don't know how long that's going to hold up. And like, the fuck thing about this is, again, It's just like, what this means is Trump administration can kind of do whatever the fuck they want,

and it's just legal until the Supreme Court looks at it and that's completely unhinged. Yeah, like, egregiously illegal orders can now be enforced for a period of months to years. Yeah. As the court cases eventually will turn their way up to the Supreme Court. Yeah, and this is a particularly egregious one too because like birthright citizenship is so obviously, it's just literally in the Constitution. It's literally the Constitution just says if you're born here, you're a citizen. Yeah, well, it says the section of the amendment that is under question is subject to the authority thereof,

which is what is being litigated here. There is a section there that, that I guess, is perceived by some people to be debatable. It doesn't seem very debatable to me, right? No, it's completely insane. Yeah. It's like unhinged shit. Like, it's like, it's like stuff you wouldn't have seen even from like unhinged conservative legal cranks 15 years ago. You absolutely would have seen this particular case, unfortunately.

Well, I guess I'd say the absolute most unhinged maybe, but you wouldn't have seen it even like, I don't know, the normal like person on Fox News kind of unhinged thing arguing this even like 15 years ago and now. This was like on the blogs I have the, you know, the GeoCities era web design. Yeah, yeah. Trying to restrict and quantify citizenship is going to be probably the main theme of this episode as we will get to in the future. And if even temporarily trying to strip the citizenship, but already thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who live in this country is incredibly worrying, considering the massive amount of increased funding

that ICE is about to receive. Speaking of ICE, second little mini story, an explosive ice raid in Huntington Park, California. Portack and ICE agents used explosives to breach and raid the home of U.S. citizens. A drone was sent into the home after explosives shattered the windows, sending glass shards flying into the home

occupied by a mother and two young children. The target of the raid was not in the home. Now, Border Patrol was looking for a man that got into a car accident during a previous ice raid who was questioned at the scene and was allowed to leave. But now, the DHS alleges the man was obstructing the actions of ice when he rammed his car into a vehicle carrying CBP agents. Though witnesses at the scene say that the feds break-checked, leading to a rear ending.

The man turned himself in on Friday after the raid, So what actually happened here is that ICE caused a car accident and in response they blew up the home of U.S. citizens. Yeah, well they dynamically breached, yeah, at home with a little child in, right? Like you see in the video... Two young kids, I think like a six-year-old and a two-year-old. Yeah, you see them presumably the mother of the two-year-old with the child in her arms leaving.

They sent a fucking drone in there. They're acting like the house full of like active combatants. You have like dozens of people in military fatigues, raiding this home. Yeah, except they didn't do it in such a fashion as you would if you were actually worried, right? Like, there wasn't a flashbang, right? That they breached, stood around for a while, sent a drone in.

They didn't dynamically breach in a dynamic way, right? Like they would, if they were expecting a real threat. No, they just wanted to blow up this person's fucking house because they were pissed off that they caused a car accident. Yes. These are the tiniest fucking baby secret police I have ever seen in my entire goddamn life. Fucking Christ. It reminds me of that one, like, picture of, like, a police raid in the 90s that conservatives used to use in terms of, like, the government's taking over of this, of this, of this, like, you know, retro 90s SWAT cop, like, pointing a gun at, like, a family. It's, like, hiding in, like, a closet.

The alien Gonzalez raid, do you mean? Yeah. And how much this was used is, like, fear of, like, federal overreach, like, used by conservatives. And now this is, like, their entire platform is raiding the home of U.S. citizens. Yeah, it's probably worth noting. I believe Huntington Park, their mayor has directed their police to enforce the California law, which requires law enforcement officers to identify themselves, right? It's been very common. See ICE agents refuse to identify themselves and wear masks, right? And I believe this was passed by their council and then their mayor, whose name is Arturo Flores, released a statement, calling the ICE abductions, masked abductions, and directing his police to intervene if what we're going. We're going, what we're going. We're going. We're going, if what, was happening was unlawful or unauthorized. And I can't help but think that that is why we saw this happen here, right? I think it may not be so much of car crash as a chance to do something in this city, which has been one of the very few that has taken meaningful action to prevent this.

Absolutely. Because people don't like ICE. There's new ICE approval ratings that came out by Quinnipiac on June 24th, 2025. Net approval of ICE negative 17 percent, Democrats, negative 80, independence, negative 32. This is the centrist position. Independence, negative 32%. Oh, yeah, you've got like Bush admin staff as saying abolish ICE. It's a win for Mia. Oh, yeah. GOP is up 60, but that's it. This is like the centrist position now. And also, 60% is nearly just half the GOP. Like, people don't like ice. The majority of people in this country don't like ice. Negative 17%. Yeah. Candidates need to run on abolishing ice. This is like one of the most important issues facing the country right now. And they are wildly unpopular.

including for independence. This is the abolishing ice should be the centrist position. Yeah, but this is sort of the problem, right? Which is that the Democrats did this like, well, some of them,

at some of them, at the Democratic wave ran on that in 2018. And then the Democrats were just like, each shit, we're never going to do that again. And like, AOC never fucking mentioned it again. Like, they all came into power and we're like, okay, we got to deal a stupid border crackdown shit.

It's like, they need to. They fucking need to do this. Yeah. But people should bring it back. I think the data here is in support. Yeah. And like ICE is younger than I am. Ice is younger than all of us. Like, ICE is a fucking fake agency. Yeah. I mean, DHS is younger than most of us. Yeah. Like the ICE has an agency should be like disappear and we should like try to be forgiven for it

over the course of hundreds of years. Like yeah. Yeah. People want to learn more about the history of DHS. I did a series about Title 42 where I talk about it a whole lot. Speaking of agencies that shouldn't exist, the BBC cut the feed of the Glassbury Music during kneecap's performance to block pro-Palestinian messaging. But they failed to stop Bob Villan from leading a death to the IDF chant. Wait, Bob Dylan? Bob Villain. Bob Villain. Oh, Bob Villain.

Okay, okay. That sounds like, what? Hold on. Based on Dylan. They are a punk rap group, and they were leading death to the IDF chants, broadcast live on the stage. both of these music groups, Neckap and Bob Villain,

are now an investigation by the British police from their political comments at this music festival and the US State Department has revoked Bob Villan's work visa ahead of an upcoming US tour as punishment for criticizing

the military of a foreign country. The party of free speech strikes once again. Yeah, I do want to say that like, as a consumer of Glastonbury Music Festival content, right? I guess I... As a British person.

Yeah, and the target like... age demographic, I guess. What this has overshadowed is the massive amount of support for the Palestinian cause that you saw, like, go watch a glass to me video and you will not, not see Palestinian flagged in the crowd. Most of them, you will hear the artists acknowledging that there is a genocide in Palestine, right? I don't know if anyone at the BBC is familiar with Bob Villain, like, I'm sure they've played their music, but whoever made the choice to stream them and not stream kneecap, clearly had not done a, like a fucking, like a Wikipedia, media level research because you know what you're getting into with these guys.

Both the people in the band are called Bobby Villain, right? That's a stage name that they use in order to have a little bit of privacy. But there's an interview with him a while ago where he's like, yeah, I just like pissing people off because it's the only thing that brings me joy in this miserable fucking country. Incredible. Yeah, they've been very outspoken about a large number of things. The British police have been going completely unhinged with this too.

the parliaments currently, I don't know what there's all, I think they may have voted to do it already. They've been trying to vote to, like, make it illegal for, like, Palestinian action to exist after they did a, after they did a pretty big action at a British. Yeah, after Palestine action did a pretty big, like, action at a, like, fucking British arms manufacturer that sells to Israel.

So, they're going so unhinged on all of this shit. And they've been going after Neckap for years. There's, like, multiple investigations into kneecap now. You should check out Neacap's new movie. It's pretty good. For our first main story, I guess I'll throw to James to discuss denaturalization. Yeah.

Oh, come on. Yeah, less exciting than Glastardy Music Festival. So denaturalization, if you're not familiar, rate the removal of U.S. citizenship from people who became U.S. citizens at some point in their life. The DOJ has issued instructions to its civil division employees to pursue denaturalization proceedings against naturalized U.S. citizens, quote, in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence. It goes on to list some categories.

These include some of the things you might expect, including being in nexus to terrorism and organized crime, people who engaged in war crimes, people who committed violent crimes, or failed to disclose felonies on their application for nationalization. But they also include fraud, both against private individuals and against Medicaid, Medicare, and the Paycheck Protection Plan,

maybe program, the PPP, he, COVID-era government bailout, right? The last one, however, is the most concerning, quote, any cases referred to the civil division that the division considers sufficiently important to pursue? Any cases that are found to be sufficient, sufficiently important? Just, if people aren't familiar, right, civil and criminal law are distinct, right?

Civil law has a lower burden of proof, and crucially, the accused person is not entitled to legal representation. In addition, this could have trickle-down effects, right? Children of naturalized citizens are also citizens. So their citizenship derives from their parent's citizenship. So it's possible that children who are not even accused of doing anything wrong could be denatural, not naturalized, desitizenized, and left stateless, right?

Many of these children will not be dual nationals. This is the other big problem with, like, ending birthright citizenship. Yes, it will lead people. So, like, this is something that I do feel like, much like I feel like in the UK, people should have pushed back against the government prosecuting people for saying shit that was fucking hateful and disgusting about migrants when there was a stabbing attack last year. I still feel people should have pushed back because it's not a good situation when the government gets to decide what you can and can't think. Likewise, in this instance, nations in the global north have been leaving people who fought for the, or people who are accused of fighting for the Islamic State or joining the Islamic State stateless for a long time. And I think that was a bad precedent. And they were able to, as we'll get into, they will always use an odious person as the first example, right, to set the precedent and then go from there.

Yep. So in the odious person example in this case is someone called Elliot Duke. They have been denaturalized. Duke was a UK citizen, served in the United States military. While serving in Germany, they received and distributed child sex abuse material. According to the DOJ, they were later contacted by the FBI about this and prosecuted. The DOJ stated that their case was identified as part of Operation Prison Lookout, which aims to identify sex offenders who have naturalized.

I haven't seen any reporting on Prison Lookout. it's in the press release, but I think maybe people don't read to the bottom, but it appears that the DOJ, this case has been going on for months, the Duke case, right? And so the DOJ, as early as February this year, was looking through prosecution records to find, find naturalized citizens who have been convicted of sex crimes. Duke was not able to get an attorney to represent them. They also, it appears, renounce a UK citizenship, and it's not very clear what happens now, right? Like in another stateless person cases, where does this person go? Denaturalization has been used before, right?

The time when the United States did the most denaturalization was during the second red scare, second red scare, aka McCarthyism, right? And oh boy, are they trying to bring it back? Yep, yep, yep, yep. 20,000 cases a year in the McCarthy era. For reference, best stats I could find suggest about 25 million naturalized citizens in the United States. both Obama. Obama had something called Operation Janus. They identified people who were eligible for

denaturalization. Trump won also had higher rates of denaturalization, but nothing on this McCarthy-era scale, right? People will be familiar with denaturization also. Before that, it happened to Emma Goldman, for example. Yeah. One other story from this week that's kind of related is it was announced that tool to check the citizenship status of all Americans. this is the first time we've had a centralized tool like this, or we've attempted to. The U.S. for a while has resisted, creating a dossier of like official citizens because this is like a kind of problematic thing to have.

There's a lot of issues with this concept. Actually verifying that this list is accurate is very tricky. You have to add people who have been naturalized, how they've been naturalized. There's other people who acquire citizenship through other means than the standard like naturalization process, including like through your parents. There's the Child Citizenship Act of 2000,

where if one of your parents is a U.S. citizen and you are not a U.S. citizen, but you live with your U.S. citizen parent while being a legal permanent resident that then gives you automatic citizenship, but you don't need to apply for the naturalization process. So this is like a really weird thing to prove. You have to like apply for a certificate

or apply for a passport as proof of citizenship. How would those cases be added to this list? This is an incredibly problematic thing to have, and it's going to be used mainly just to hunt people down and try to deport them. Yeah. Massive information security risk. It's really problematic and tied in with these other denaturalization programs. It's a really worrying sign of where things are going to be going. Yeah.

Talking of worrying signs, this is a worrying sign that we have to pivot to advertisements. All right, we are back. James, you do have one piece of good news in the immigration front. Well, I do, Garrison, but I got to hit you some bad news first, buddy. That's the way this show works. That's how we do it here at Cool Zone Media. It could happen here special. Immigrant Defenders Law Center, a legal nonprofit, says one of their clients, Julie Calderon,

was abducted by armed men in Los Angeles and taken to San Isidro. People are not familiar to San Isidro is the border that you might call San Diego border, right? The town that actually has the physical nexus of Tijuana is San Yidro. The city of San Diego also has some land down there. She was told at San Yedro that she was to sign voluntary deportation papers. She very reasonably refused, asked to see a lawyer and a judge, and at this point she was taken and returned to the armed men and is now being detained in a warehouse with no beds, blankets or food.

She was able to make a call to her family from a blocked number. She described the people as bounty hunters. And at this point, she said she has not seen any uniformed offices in her detention. She's being detained in an area where men and women are mixed, which is not usual in Border Patrol detention. According to IMDEF, she has not been able to shower and the only water source is a sink. The Mexican consulate has been informed and thinks that she might now be in the Otai Mesa Detention Center. that because she's not showing up on the ICE detainee locator, they don't know that for sure,

and they are therefore still a little bit unclear on where this lady has gone. I have seen reports of bounty hunters. Many of you have sent them to me. I have seen none that I find to be credible before this. MDEF are an established group. They are not people who I've found to be prone to making things up or exaggerating.

I trust them as a source. and this is deeply, deeply worrying. I don't know why it's not getting more coverage other than most people on the migration and border beat perhaps don't speak Spanish or have actually just turned up on this beat a few weeks ago and have no notion of who the actors and these groups are and they tend to go off government press releases.

This is like shit that we haven't seen in the United States since I don't know the Fugitive Slave Act. Yeah. Like, it's appalling. Yeah, this is like the most just actual straight-up 1930s Nazi shit that we've seen from them. Like, it's hideous. Yeah, it's happening here in San Diego. But it's also, of course, like, as Californians, we are entering this time with the most cowardly and, like, pathetic governor that we've had in a long time.

Like, Arnold Schwarzenegger was a Republican, but I bet he'd have handled this better than Newsom, who is. is just a slime ball. Yeah. Like the fact that Newsom isn't like, like if this was happening in fucking Illinois, Pristier would have SWAT teams. Like these, these people would be like dead right now.

But like, this is, this is completely fucking unhinged. Yeah. This is, what the fuck? Yeah. James,

I was promised to good news after the break. You're right, Garrison. And I do have some, uh, lucky you. Finally, a judge has ordered that Trump's sweeping asylum ban exceeds his authority as president and granted broad class protection.

So we're going to see, like, literally this happened maybe 30 minutes before we started recording. I'm going to read over the court documents. I've linked them in the notes here and see what this means. But it suggests that Trump's authority under the Immigration Naturalization Act doesn't allow him to just say we're not doing asylum anymore. And therefore, it could mean that it is possible for people to once again apply for asylum in the United States, I don't know how that will look. The Biden administration had great success gating asylum through CBP1, right, and making it practically impossible for many people, people who have darker skin, people who don't

have fancy-ass cell phone, people who don't have access to Wi-Fi, et cetera, et cetera, to apply for asylum. That was the Biden administration, the people who were supposed to think of good, they were terrible for migrants. But they got that through, right? So what we'll see from the Trump administration, I don't imagine we will see a return to like regular title A asylum processing. As we saw like, you know, last time we saw it, I guess was in the Obama area. So, yeah, I don't know what we'll see.

All right. Now I'm going to throw to Robert Evans for a special report on the Diddy trial. Hey, everybody. Robert here. I guess I'm our resident P.D.D.E.E. Expert because I did the bastards episodes on him. just felt like it was appropriate to give you all a brief update. So on the day that we record this, which is Wednesday, the 2nd of July, Sean Deddy Combs was found guilty on two of the five charges in his trial. He was being charged with racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking,

and he was not found guilty of racketeering conspiracy or of both sex trafficking counts, each of which carried 15-year mandatory minimums, but he was found guilty on two counts of transportation to engage in. prostitution. These were four, one for a woman who was sued an end up to Jane and one for his former partner, Cassie Ventura. So, you know, this is not what people who understand the case had hoped entirely, right? Like, this is not ideal. It's not nothing, but it's not ideal. Now, if you're looking at like, why did this happen, right? Why didn't he get convicted on these higher charges? He was absolutely guilty of. And it's because the prosecutor's fucked up, right?

there were a number of different felony charges they could have gone after him for that were less difficult to prove than racketeering and sex trafficking and did he had good lawyers, right? And there's a lot of weirdness about like, well, they didn't go after him for the guns and drugs that he had both at his properties or for a number of the other things that they could have done after him. You know, this is because prosecutors have to make choices as to like what to charge someone with. And they tried for some of the harder stuff that was always going to be a little more difficult to prove. Now, the two charges he's been convicted on, he could do up to 20 years. each has up to a maximum 10-year sentence, so he could get sentenced to do 10 years for each. Prosecutors have said that they're looking for a four to five-year prison sentence, which I think is much too light. 20 years would be, I would say, like, okay, that's a serious punishment. Anything over it, you know, 10 years are over. I would say that's still at least, you know,

we can say it's not all the things you should have been convicted on, but that's not, you can't, you know, no one's going to spit it 10 years in prison, especially at his age. He's in his mid-50s right now. But four or five years, you know, I wouldn't quite say that's a slap on the wrist, but it's not nearly what is deserved here, right? Now, you do with federal sentences like this tend to serve a lot more of this. This is not a hope, and he'll be out in a year kind of situation. One of the things that's kind of worth noting here is that he and his team

did ask for bail while he waited for, because next week he's going to, they're going to, like, set up when he's going to get sentenced, right? So that doesn't mean he'll be sentenced next week, but they'll be scheduling his sentencing next week, right? The legal system moves pretty slow. and his team asked for bail. There's evidence that he had people like setting up, getting extra security up around his, you know, primary home, and they were kind of expecting him to be able to go home today. That's not going to happen.

The judge has denied his bail. This is after one of his accusers basically said, hey, I think this guy is really dangerous. He has a history of going after his accusers. I don't feel safe with him out, you know, before sentencing. And that's maybe a good sign that maybe the judge will go further than the prosecutor. although I don't know if that's likely. Again, I'll be like, okay, well, at least this is serious.

If it gets 10 years or something like that, if it is four or five, I'm going to be pretty frustrated. But, you know, that's the case. This is, we are talking about a billionaire going to court here. So any serious prison sentence is more than you usually would expect. And this is a guy who's been used to living with kind of impunity for a while. And if he spends years in prison, either way, it's not totally impunity. But, yeah, not ideal.

That's the situation as it stands right now with P Diddy. We'll see again next week they're going to schedule his sentencing. So yeah, we'll see how things shake out. Now we'll pass over to Mia to discuss our second main story this episode. The formerly named One Big Beautiful Bill. Oh, God. So actually reading through this, I refuse to call this anything other than the genocide budget because this budget, what it is designed to do is a genocide?

And that's not an exaggeration. Well, there's multiple types of killing including in this bill, not just genocide. The Medicare cuts, I think, aren't technically genocide, but they could lead to mass death. So we should be inclusive. We should be inclusive of all the types of deaths, I think.

We'll get into the Medicaid shit later. We need to start with the mass deportation. We want to do an ethnic cleansing. We want to just simply wipe out entire peoples who live in the U.S. And, like, fucking deport them from this country. Right. And by we, you mean the bill, not you, Mia Wong, or us, Cool Zone Media.

Yeah, no, by, yeah, by we, I mean the Republican Party who fucking wrote this bill. Okay, just checking. So, okay, what is actually in this? There's a very good write-up of this from the American Immigration Council, and a lot of the stuff is from there. Okay, so across Homeland Security and Government Affairs, the judiciary and the military, the version of the budget that just passed the Senate allocates $170 billion. to their fucking unhinged deportation shit. This would be the third largest military budget in the world.

It is 30% larger than the military budget of Russia, which is currently fighting an active full-scale ground war. Right. This is a genocide budget. They are trying to get $170 billion for all of their border enforcement shit because they want to do a genocide. They are trying to remove entire people from the United States, and to do that, they need this kind of money.

Yeah. So let's let's break down a little bit of where this money's fucking going we're going to do a longer thing. I'm going to do a longer episode about this thing probably Tuesday, about everything that's in this budget, but this needs to be understood. They're running $45 billion specifically for immigration detention. And as the American Immigration Council points out,

that is, at minimum, $5.5 billion more dollars per year than the entire budget of the entire federal prison system. Yeah. what the shit that's again at minimum it's like 14 and a half billion at minimum for detention

just just for immigration attention again significantly like over 50% larger than the budget for the fucking entire federal prison system they want to put into this they're also giving out $3.5 billion to state and local government spent on working with ICE the American Immigration Council estimates

this could be 125,000 holding beds for people, which is, and I quote, only just a bit below the current population of the entire federal prison system? They waste they want to create a whole new prison system just for immigrants. Yes. And again, and again,

and I cannot emphasize this enough. The United States has one of the largest prison systems on earth. And they want to be the largest. China, my question. I think it's technically smaller from the Chinese. Oh, actually, let me actually pull the numbers up. Yeah.

I think it's technically smaller. Per capita, yeah. It's like, it's like, there's like no contest. Yeah, well, the statistics are weird because there's countries that have like a really, really small number of people. Sure. Like, in terms of like large countries. For major countries.

For major companies, not even close. Yeah. Not even close. Now, obviously that's also counting like state prisons, but like still, the federal prison system is still like unfathomably massive. Yeah. And they basically want to double the size if it's specifically just to fucking do this. Just to do these deportations.

There's $30 billion in this for direct deportations. and just like to hire 10,000 more ice agents. Which Trump's also been calling for in executive orders. Yeah. There is $48 billion for building the wall in like physical border enforcement infrastructure. There's an additional $5 billion for checkpoints and like border patrol like facilities and outposts and shit.

There's also about $15 billion for states to do deportation shit. There's so much unhinged anti-immigrant shit in this bill that like again, we don't have time to get into it here. This is going to be a full episode on fucking Tuesday. This is why you have people like Stephen Miller trying to rally the whole party in support of this bill, which massively raises the deficit, something that Elon's been

complaining about quite famously. Yeah, a $5 trillion hole in the budget. It doesn't matter. Now there's all these Republican congressmen who constantly complain about the federal debt who are totally fine, increasing the federal debt massively, people compromising their fiscal conservatism, in support of a bill that furthers the United States as a white supremacist penal colony. And at the senators and congressmen vote against it, then that will be used against them in future

elections. Being flanked from further on the right with attack ads claiming that the senators failed to round up the illegals in not voting for the big, beautiful budget bill. Yeah, and I want to point this out, right? Like, they're not going to stop at immigrants. I need to make this incredibly clear. Once you have this infrastructure, you have to use it. Yeah. Okay, look, Like the people on like the furthest left of the U.S. have talked about for a long time, but this is a country that is built on genocide, right? This is an apparatus that is designed to turn the U.S.

specifically into a machine to, to, and again, I need to point out. The definition of genocide includes like, like, removing people from a place. Yeah. Right. Like, that is a genocide. If you, if you force a bunch of people to, if you fucking round them up, put them into camps, and then fucking send them somewhere else, that's a genocide. That is what they are trying to do.

Like, Laura Lumer has been talking today about, like, the number she was citing was 65 million people, which is just every Latino person in the entire U.S. Yeah, that's Latino people. That's what she's talking about. Specifically talking about how she wants to feed them to alligators, which we'll talk about later. Yes, the context of the number was feeding them to alligators, yeah. Yeah, right. So, like, Trump has been joking for a long time about how if Stephen Miller got his way, there would be like 115 million people in this country and they would all look like Stephen Miller. Like, that's where they're going.

And that's not like, oh, this is the infrastructure for them to be able to do this. And so, like, killing this fucking bill is unbelievably important. We're going to get into more of the fucking unhinged shit in here. But, like, they only passed it by one vote in the House last time. And because of the way that that reconciliation works, right? If anything changes in the House version of the bill, it has to go back to the Senate, where they also only barely passed it by, like, buying off Susan Collins. It was a 50-50 split in the Senate.

Yeah, with like a Mikowski voting for it, for example. Yeah, so like, you know, on the one hand, being able to pass this bill is precarious. On the other hand, if they do it, that limits the window for which we have to, like, make ice non-functional a lot. Because as they ramp up this capacity, and it's going to take them a while to ramp up this capacity, right, even if this passes. But, like, they haven't had the capacity to do the genocide they've been trying to do, right? This will give it to them. With this amount of resources, yeah, with the third-lordest military budget in the world, they can do this kind of shit. And we have to stop them before they get there.

Yeah, like this is one of those core everyone you can in Congress situations. Like, I'm not always a big call your rep person. Yeah. We're going to get to at the end of this, like how we've actually met up, we've gotten provisions killed from this bill already. We're going to get to that later. We also need to talk about the Medicaid shit because Garrison, you were saying, oh, I don't think this can be considered a genocide, but it's so killing. I actually disagree with that because, okay, let's explain what's going on with Medicaid.

They want to do a trillion dollars of cuts. I think it's like just slightly under a trillion, or maybe it's actually a trillion dollars of cuts over the next 10 years to Medicaid. They want to put an 80-hour-a-month work requirement for Medicaid and food stamps. Now, if you are disabled, right, this is just like a fuck-you-die proposal because there are a lot of people who fucking can't work 80 hours. month. And this is just like literally eat shit and die. Right. They're also expanding this shit, the work requirements to, well, they want these work requirements to apply to people who have children ages 13 and older. So if you are trying to like raise a child, fuck you eat shit and die. And again, also like this is both Medicaid and SNAP. So this is a targeted, the estimates by

the CBO, this is per PBS, the correctional budget office estimates that it will, that by 2034, 18.8 million people will be uninsured from this. It will get 3 million people off of food stamps. A lot of those people are just going to be disabled, and unbelievable numbers of people of those people are going to fucking die. And that's the point of this, right? Also, it's going to be just hideous for trans people who use Medicaid and SNAP at enormous rates

because disabled and trans people are like the two poorest populations in the U.S. It's fucking hideous. These systems are already so hard to get in and stay on. Like both snap and Medicaid requires substantial revisions and reforms to make them easier to access

to strengthen the infrastructure capacity of these things to get more people on them. They need more funding. This is basically trying to take an already kind of dying system and just take it out of back and shoot it in the head. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, and they intentionally just wanted to be like harder and more frustrating and shitty to use. Like they literally rolled back, like part of this bill is rolling back a bunch of reforms that Biden made to make it like slight,

easier to get on. Yeah. And this is just going like, yeah, fuck you. This is going to be an absolutely fucking catastrophe. Um, not just because of the people that it immediately affects, although it is, again, going to kill unbelievable numbers of people. The other thing with this is that this is going to fucking annihilate rural hospitals because rural hospitals get a huge amount of their money from Medicaid. And, you know, there's a very good Kaiser Family Foundation report where they talk about how like, yeah, one in four people in rural areas get their health insurance from Medicaid. And it's estimated a $155 billion decrease in money to hospitals in rural regions over the course of a decade. Those hospitals are already closing. Those hospitals are

fucking gone. If this fucking passes as is, and there is a provision in there that's like, oh, we're going to spend $50 billion on like to give money to rural hospitals, that's not enough. That's like, that's a third of the amount that they're getting cut by. Right. Like, and even if those hospitals are open, how the fuck are people going to pay for the treatments because they're now kicked off Medicaid. But this is going to fucking just absolutely eviscerate, like the tiny remains of our rural healthcare system, which is a complete fucking shambolic mess.

This is just going to fucking liquidate it. It is going to cause mass suffering and death on a scale that, like, we are going to look back at the height of the opioid crisis and, like, in fucking nostalgia, because we're going to have the opioid crisis and this at the same time. So it's real, real fucking bad. I'm going to mention a couple of other things and it's like there's two points to this bill, right?

One of the two points of it is to do, is to, again, just like, ethnically cleanse every non-white person from the U.S. The second point of this bill is to give corporations $4.5 trillion in tax cuts. It's mostly for rich people. That shit sucks. That's like the buy-in for like the business people

is you get these tax cuts. They also want to end the tax credit for electric cars because their response to climate change is, fuck you die. Now, again, as I mentioned, this only passed in the House by one vote last time and that was actually a less extreme version of the... Well, okay, there were some more running shit in it

that we'll talk about in the other episodes in the House version of it. But this only passed in the House by one vote and it only passed by one vote because three Democrats died in office. Great system. It's great. So things going great.

However, it is possible to like... It is possible to beat these people. It is possible to get shit cut from this fucking bill to end on a positive note on this. We talked a bit last week, maybe... Last week, two weeks ago. One recent executive disorder. Yeah, yeah.

We were talking about I think it's on two different ones now. About how we beat the fucking ban on using Medicaid for trans health care. And by we, I mean, a combination of trans journalists like Maddie Castigan, Bira Levine, David Forbes, are like resident trans policy analyst Corinne Green. I did some work on it, not like a huge amount, but like, I don't know, I did a little bit. A lot of like local queer orgs did a bunch of really good work on this. And quite frankly, like, the other people who killed this is every single one of you who, like, fucking called and emailed and harass your senator. Like, Ron Wyden, there was, like, there was, there was queer orgs, like, lobbying him directly.

And then also his office got fucking flooded by shit from, like, you. Yeah. Who went and, like, screamed at them until they stopped doing this. And because of that, we got this thing killed from the fucking bill. And the Republicans are so mad about it that, like, they could theoretically re-ad it to the House one. And there was a chance where they get so mad that they get so mad that they. They re-ad this to the House bill, and then that causes the House bill to fail in the Senate, because if they re-ad this into the House bill, then reconciliation fails and they have to go back to the Senate again.

So, you know, it is possible to fucking beat these people. And it's also important to understand that this was not done by, like, the giant national, like, gay ink, like huge nonprofit, like human rights commission bullshit, council stuff. They did a little bit of stuff on the fucking trailing in. This was accomplished almost entirely by a combination of non-war. and working class trans journalists and organizers and just like a bunch of random fucking people who are like, each shit fuck you get this out

and you know on a thing that would have killed unbelievable numbers of trans people we fought the Republican Party and we beat them. So this can be done and this bill is not guaranteed to fucking pass. The bill can still be, it can still be killed. Yeah. Yeah. Like it is devastating enough to like rural health care

that even Republican senators are talking about not wanting to cut Medicaid. So... It's a very unpopular bill and when you tell just regular Republicans about the details of the bill,

they don't like it. They're being, like, the Republican media machine is being so selective in how they're talking about the bill. Because if you discuss the way that it just rips

the heart out of Medicaid, yeah, yeah. That's not what most older Republicans want because they actually also rely on Medicaid. Yeah. So it's a,

It is a pretty unpopular bill, and the more people learn about the bill, the more they dislike it. And you can see stats on this. Yeah. And the unhinged thing about this, right, is that even with limited information most Republicans have about this, it still has like a 20 to 30% approval rating. It's so unpopular. Even in the low information environment we're currently in, it is like a 20 or 30% approval rating. I think if everyone actually understood what was in the bill, I think it's approval rating would fucking drop even further. Yeah.

Nobody wants this except for like the overt genocide people. So most people, if they're not personally harmed, will know someone who's being personally harmed. Yeah. Do you know what is popular, James? Uh, I can guess. The products and services that support this podcast. Beautiful. Ooh.

You know what else is extremely popular? It is my hit theme song about tariffs. Let's fucking go. Mia, what do we have for tariff talk this week? So this is an important week for tariffs. Next week will be the. really, really critical one. So next week...

Allegedly. Allegedly. We'll see. I'm skeptical. So next week, all of the tariffs on every other country in the world from the Liberation Day tariff tariffs are supposed to, like, come off. We're going to see what happens. I've become, it could happen here's biggest tariff denier. I'm the tariff denier conspiracy theorist. Well, so here's the...

Okay, so the Trump administration is claiming that they cut a deal with Vietnam. Again, as of time of recording on Wednesday, I haven't actually seen anything from, like, Vietnam confirming this. It's just like a Trump tweet. It's totally real. Who fucking knows. So the deal that he's saying is that Vietnam is going to levy, or the US is going to levy a 20% tariff on all goods from Vietnam

and a 40% tariff on goods that are produced elsewhere and move through Vietnam. Now, I know we're all used to looking at, like, 130% tariffs, but I cannot emphasize enough that a 20% tariffs on goods from Vietnam is also just fucking ruinous. Most tariff coverage on Vietnam focuses on the fact that, like, companies like Nintendo, for example, deliberately move production to Vietnam to avoid tariffs on China.

Now, coverage is like this because all of these people fucking learned about Vietnam producing things like a week ago. They missed a decade of capital flight along, I mean, it's a decade and a half, really, so 2011.

A bunch of Chinese capital has been flowing into Vietnam, like down the Macon Delta. So these tariffs are not just affecting the ability of China to evade the tariffs on it by, like, moving products to other countries, which has been a lot of, what's been keeping the inflation from just fucking exploding,

has been the ability of producers to route goods through places like Vietnam. This is also hitting one of the world's largest manufacturing hubs, right, in a developing manufacturing hub that has very good infrastructure, etc., etc., etc., etc., that capital from China had been moving to. This is still, even this 20% tariff on Vietnam is, like, catastrophic. Yeah. So we'll see what happens next week if the rest of the turf tariffs kick in.

I don't know what's going to happen. Who fucking knows? I've been leaning towards I think they will, but yeah even this stuff is really fucking bad and we're gonna start seeing the impacts of it

but yeah this has been tariff talk there's enough skepticism in the market about the tariffs in general that so far

not not all but most corporations have been eating the tariffs in the short term not all like famously like Walmart like has been

raising some prices but a bunch of corporations have been eating the costs because they're they do not think these will be largely effective, like, long term. And, I mean, this will slowly change, especially as more of these start, like, being taken into effect on, like, a rolling basis, we'll probably see corporations adjust to this, and we'll see the market adjust to this.

But I think that's part of why maybe people haven't been seeing the massive price hikes that were expected back, you know, like two months ago. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think also, again, the important thing here is what this is going to do to logistics firms, which has, have very, very low margins. And right now, they've been surviving by just running shit through other places. But, like, again, if this is, if 20% is the rate on Vietnam,

plus there's now a massive incentive not to run goods through Vietnam, that's really bad because that, like, kneecaps, the evasion tools people have been using. Yeah. So we'll see what happens. Yeah, wait for me and more to come into play.

Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about Alligator Alka. Tras. So, fucking God. Florida's new immigration detention center has opened

this Wednesday. It's built on a remote airport with aircraft hangers outfitted with cages and bunk beds to incarcerate between 3,000

people. The facility is surrounded by a moat of alligators and python snakes. They're calling it alligator

alcatraz. It was designed to be the most efficient deportation machine in the country. National Guard members will act as immigration

judges on site to speed up deportation proceedings. I'm going to play a short clip here. I apologize for hearing DeSantis. I mean, this is going to be, illegals will come in, there'll be process, there'll be places for them to be housed, you'll have an ability for food,

you'll have an ability for them to consult legal rights if they have that, because there is a process that's involved with this. So the Florida Attorney General has called this a, quote, one-stop shop for immigration enforcement. Come in, get your process, and fly out, unquote. Jesus.

So immigrants will be flown here. They will have some degree of due process here, not really real due process, but enough to fast-track their deportation, stay basically at this facility like less than a week and get deported from it. It has a working airport. They want to start running thousands of people

through his facility basically every week. Trump toured the facility on Tuesday, and he said, quote, Biden wanted me in here, okay? He wanted me. Didn't work out that way, but he wanted me in here, that son of a bitch, unquote,

which is an insane thing to say, but it gives you an actual look into why the current Trump administration, like why Trump term 2.0 is kind of different from one point no, because it's purely built on this, like, this animosity. It's built on this idea that Trump thinks that the entire, like, entire world conspired against him to lock him up and somehow he beat them. And now he's getting his revenge

on the entire world, right? This is what's, that's how he's governing. It's because Biden wanted to send him to the alligator Alcatraz, but he was able to beat him. And now he's going to get revenge on everyone who's tried to stop him. And that's how he's running the country, because that's the thing he's obsessed with. He can't stop talking about Biden. He brings up Biden fucking every day because it's not about what Biden actually did. It's this,

it's this like symbol of like everyone who has tried to like tried to beat me. Everyone who has tried to like lock me up. Now I get to take my revenge out on them. They wanted to disappear me to this alligator concentration camp

which, no, they didn't because this thing fucking didn't exist a week ago. Like this facility was built in the last eight days. Yeah. It's going to cost $450 million annually to operate. I remember.

remember when I went to the Charlie Kirk event in Atlanta, they're talking about how much money we're spending to give immigrants free cell phones and to give them housing. Meanwhile, you have not only this bill that massively increases the deficit in ways we've never seen before, plus on the local level, you have $400 million a year for these deportation facilities. And this facility specifically built on the Florida Everglades. It's not hurricane proof. Of course. After one day of operating, they've already had flooding issues. This is an incredibly dangerous facility. It could lead to a natural disaster

could kill thousands of people here. And currently the state of Florida is selling alligator Alcatraz merchandise on their website. It's always a grift as well. So you can get deportation merchandise. You can get concentration camp merchandise. This is the soul of the Republican Party.

For our last main story tonight, let's talk about how Trump and the Democrats are trying to stop the zomentum because ranked choice voting has now been completed. Zoran has defeated Cuomo 56 to 44, 12 points, which were tallied in just the third round

of ranked choice voting. The other tallies will come out, like, eventually, but this is, like, the last, like, legitimate tally because of, like, the elimination rules. Zoran got 150,000 more votes than Eric Adams won with in 2021. Like, phenomenal sweep. That's on finished. It's wild.

Like, we've never seen anything like this. Call me summer, baby! Let's go! So, Republican Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, asking to investigate Mamdani for denaturalization on the grounds that he obtained citizenship through misrepresentation or concealing material support for terrorism. I'm going to read this disgusting quote from Ogles because I think people should hear it. Quote, Zoron Little Mohamed Mandani is.

is an anti-Semitic socialist communist who will destroy the great city of New York. He needs to be deported, which is why I'm calling for him to be the subject to denaturalization proceedings. This is a guy who would be petrified if he ever had to walk around New York because seeing brown people is very scary when you know, this kind of person. Zoron's been facing this huge wave of egregious, like, Islamophobic attacks, including from the Gillesbrun. From a Gilbert.

...of his own party. Yep. On a radio show, Democrat, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, false claimed that Mamdani had made references in support of quote-unquote global jihad. Outrageous stuff. On Monday, she apologized for these comments in a private call to Mamdani and expressed that she believes that Zoran is sincere when he says he wants to protect all New Yorkers and combat anti-Semitism.

But fucking, fucking gross stuff. Yeah. It was so hideous. It's like 2003 level. It's, yeah, it's really bad. Well, no, it's considerably worse than that. Like, Bush gave that Islam is the fabric of America speech in 2001. Yeah.

Like, we now have Democrats just knee-jerking to fuck them all their terrorists. In their own party. And, like, many top New York Democrats have still refused to endorse the now, like, Democratic nominee. Yeah. Including Governor Kathy Hocchel, House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffreys and Senator Chuck Schumer. Jeffreys posted in support of him today, I believe. Some of them have expressed, like, support of him, specifically supporting. against Islamophobic attacks, but have explicitly refused to endorse him as the nominee.

Yeah. Which is like, it's vote blue no matter who until you have like a Muslim democratic socialist. And it's like, we have to discuss. Like, you know, there's some, we have some skeptical things about his candidacy and his ability to keep New Yorkers safe. And you're like, oh boy. Yeah. Yeah, you voted for the three people who died.

You endorsed the three people who died in office, I guess, like since the last election in the house. Now, the attacks have continued on Monday. Fox News reporter Peter Ducey asked White House Secretary Caroline Levitt about deporting Zoran. Let's play the clip. Peter. Thank you, Caroline. Does President Trump want Zoran Mondani deported? I haven't heard him say that.

I haven't heard him call for that. But certainly he does not want this individual to be elected. I was just speaking to him about it. and his radical policies that will completely crush New York City, which is obviously a city that the president holds near and dear to his heart. There's this Congressman Annie Ogles. He wants the Attorney General Bondi to explore denaturalization proceedings because he thinks Mamdani could have misrepresented or concealed material support for terrorism

based on rap lyrics he wrote in 2017. Does President Trump think this is a worthwhile use of the Attorney General's time? Well, I'll let the president speak to that. I have not seen those claims, but surely if they are true, it's something that should be investigated. It's ridiculous to suggest that you could wrap your material support for terrorism. They have to prove that you materially supported a group which is listed as an FTO. Yeah. Then on Tuesday, a day later, Trump himself attacked Zoran, threatening to arrest him if he interferes with ICE.

Your beloved New York City may well be led by a communist. soon, Zohan Mandami, who in his nomination speech said he will defy ice and will not allow ICE to arrest criminal aliens in New York City. Your message to communist Zorhan Mandami. Well, then we'll have to arrest him. Look, we don't need a communist in this country, but if we have one, I'm going to be watching over and very carefully on behalf of the nation. Later, Trump suggested that Zoran, quote, unquote, may be here illegally and that the Trump administration would be looking into that while in the same in the same clip praising the now independent nominee and current mayor eric adams independent running mayor adams who's a very good

person i helped him out a little bit he had a problem and he was unfairly uh hurt over this question he uh he made a statement to the effect that this is terrible new york city can't have all these immigrants came come in and like he was indicted the following day just openly admitting to corrupt He had a little problem, and I helped him out. Yeah. Just a little problem with accepting massive payments from Turkey to fucking corrupt his whole city. And I want to say here, too, like, I was watching just like Trump openly targeting Tom Donnie. Like, all of the Democrats who are attacking him are just on the side of Trump here. And this has been a significant problem in the entire administration is that one of Trump's, like, core bases of support is like sitting Democratic fucking legend.

legures. It's like fucking Chuck Schumer. Yeah. Like all of these people. Yeah. They're working with Trump rhetorically on all of this. And sometimes literally with like Schumer voting for the original like budget resolution shit. Like they're just, they're just actively collaborating. On Tuesday, Zoran released a statement regarding Trump's comments saying, quote, the president of the United States just threatened to have me arrested, stripped of my citizenship and put in a detention camp and deported. Not because I have broken any law,

but because I will refuse to let ICE terrorize our city. His statements don't just represent an attack on our democracy, but an attempt to send a message to every New Yorker who refuses to hide in the shadows. If you speak up, they will come for you. We will not accept this intimidation. That Trump included praise for Eric Adams and his authoritarian threats is unsurprising, but highlights the urgency of bringing an end to this mayor's time in City Hall at the very moment when mega Republicans are attempting to destroy the social safety net, take millions of New Yorkers off health care, and enrich their billionaire donors at the expense of working families. it is a scandal that Eric Adams echoes this president's division, distraction, and hate. Voters will resoundingly reject it in November, unquote. And former mayor Bill de Blasio came out in support of Zoran, saying, quote,

Donald Trump will have to go through a lot of us first if he wants to arrest Zoran Mamdani. We New Yorkers will put a human shield around him if we need to. No one gets to intimidate us. Bill de Blasio, if you get arrested doing the human shield, we will forgive you for one of your many cries. What? Yeah. What a crime off for arrest? Good for Bill. But no,

everyone needs to do this. Like, everyone needs to get behind him right now. If he's going to be the target of this, like, denaturalization push. Yeah, no, fuck this. Yeah. If he becomes, like, the symbol of everything that Trump hates, like, Democrats need to fall in line fucking right now.

And you can't be attacking this guy for, like, innate Islamophobia. Yeah. It's, it's outrageous. Yeah. He also has made one of the funniest music videos I have ever. seen. There's some good stuff. His video about how much he loves his grandmother with Mada Joffrey and it is outstanding.

Now, we do have some good news to close this episode on, including the return of the Stinky Musk segment. In Pennsylvania, Tesla turned into train tracks and drove into an oncoming train. It's okay. People were able to exit the car before the crash, but great stuff. Great stuff in the

self-driving car department. Oh, God. And Trump trothed on Monday, quote, Elon might get more subsidy than any human being in history by far. And without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa. No more rocket launches, satellites or electric car production, and our country would save a fortune. Perhaps we should have Doge take a good hard look at this. Big money to be saved.

And then on July 1st, on his way to Alligator Alcatraz, Trump was questioned again about Elon and said, quote, we'll have to take a look, we might have to put Doge on Elon. You know what that doge is? That monster that might have to go back and eat Elon. Wouldn't that be terrible? He gets a lot of subsidies. Elon respond to this on X the Everything app. Quote, so tempting to escalate this.

So, so tempting, but I will refrain for now. I will say, Musk has also been talking about forming a new party if this budget bill passes. God, I hope so. It would be the funniest thing. Oh, it would be so good. what other good news do we have to end on here? I think the other good news was the asylum ban

getting stopped in the courts. Oh, we already did that good news. Yeah, we already did that. Oh, that's it then. Yeah. Mm-hmm. All right, well, people like ED being an hour long. I've been told this. The longer, the better. It's one thing they say about ED. It goes without saying, James. 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. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him?

I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHart podcast, guaranteed human.