Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 209

Starting point is 00:00:00 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,

Starting point is 00:00:22 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. AllZone 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.

Starting point is 00:00:53 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 Acidapp and Hear a podcast about things following. apart and how to put them back together again, I am your host, Mia Wong. So a week ago, we did some episodes about the election of Zoran Mamdani and a lot of the very funny reactions to it. And, you know, on executive disorder, we've talked about what this sort of means for politics. But now I want to do a slightly different kind of episode, which is looking at the challenges that Mondamne is going to face,

Starting point is 00:01:37 attempting to implement his agenda, attempting to stay mayor, just taking him very seriously at his word in his attempt to, you know, make the cost of living lower and make people's lives better. And there are unfortunately very significant challenges to this agenda. And those challenges are a mix of structural problems and, I don't know, the president of the United States, right? We're going to focus on a few of them today. And before we really start this, I think, I want to start this to some extent with the conclusion.

Starting point is 00:02:16 And the conclusion of this episode is not to say that these things are impossible, right? And to not say they can't be done. But it's to remind people that the way that actual politics works, electing one person does not immediately make everything better, right? You can't stop organizing because someone has been elected. And in fact, if you actually want to see the things that you organize to, you know, happen by electing this person, do you have to organize even harder once they are in power and mobilize even more to allow the things that you fought for to actually happen?

Starting point is 00:02:51 Because there are significant opposition to anything, you know, getting better for anyone in this country. and that opposition is powerful, well-funded, well-organized, and structural. And also, as we saw with the election of Aldani in the first place, it can be defeated. So we're going to start with the bond market. Now, many of you may be asking, what does the bond market have to do with make buses free? And to do that, we need to talk about funding mechanisms. So most plans in the U.S. for sort of social democratic policy for how you implement welfare state policies, how you implement policies that make people's lives better, tend to start from the federal governments and the national level, right? And there are very obvious reasons for this. Unlike the federal government, city governments don't issue their own currency, which means the modern monetary theory things that you would normally use to fund welfare programs with at a national level don't work. The federal government, again, has control of its own debt and money supply.

Starting point is 00:04:03 City governments don't. That means the city governments, if you want to find money to do something, you have to find that from somewhere. And as wonderful as it would be if you could simply do that by just, okay, we raise taxes and the taxes go to the policy that we want to implement, that's not how the system actually works. The way the system works if you want to pay for things at a city level is the bond market. David I. Backer has a very good piece about this in the baffler that I deeply recommend when people read. The main thing that's important here for our purposes is that for funding significant portions of anything that you want to do as mayor, you are legally required to go through the bond market. and this means that the city is forced to beg for money from Wall Street investment banks

Starting point is 00:04:58 and then also pay those same banks exorbitant fees and interest. And a significant amount of money has to go to, as Backer points out, a whole bunch of lawyers and finance people and consultants and all of these sort of mafia of finance schools who are standing in between the normal mechanism of, you have money and you pay for things. And that's assuming, again, that you even have the money in the first place, which you quite often don't because cities are very, very often cash-strapped.

Starting point is 00:05:32 As Backer points out, using these bond mechanisms to pay for programs is legally required. Now, Backer is mostly focused on the structural constraints created by servicing debt, which can consume increasing portions of a city's budget until, you know, there's nothing left. This is sort of what's happened to Detroit to a large extent. And also, the bank's direct control over the payment mechanism even when the city government brings in tax money, right? So even if you raise taxes and you bring in money, because you have to go through the bond market, it means that a bunch of that money is going to be funneled into servicing debt and paying interest on debt. But there's also a secondary problem here,

Starting point is 00:06:15 which is that in very extreme cases, and I'm not. saying we are immediately facing this, but I want to put this on the table as something that if you were attempting to run a social democratic program in a city, you do need to be significantly worried about. The bank's direct control of repayment mechanisms means that the banks, you know, the people who buy the bonds that you need to use to get to fund these things. So let's actually take a step back here and explain what a bond is, right? A bond is basically you selling a piece of paper that is debt. So you go into the market. and you sell, sell a bank of bond, and they give you a bunch of money right now, and at the

Starting point is 00:06:54 exploration of the bond, you pay that money back plus interest. This is how you have to fund things, because that is what's legally required, and also because cities need a way to get extremely large amounts of money. But this also means that cities that, you know, banks and investors can simply not buy your bonds if they don't like what you're trying to do. And at that point, very little can be done to oppose them. The most dramatic version of this problem came through the New York City bond crisis in 1975 where New York City

Starting point is 00:07:25 had to sell a bunch of bonds, it was significantly in debt, and there's a very famous scene in I think it's in hyper-normalization. You know, there's film of like these city government officials who are sitting in this room waiting for the banks, like people for the banks to show up to buy the bonds

Starting point is 00:07:41 and no one shows up. So suddenly they don't have any money. And then President Ford at time, tells the city to eat shit and die, and refuses to buy any of New York City's bonds, refuse to give them any money. And this leaves the city bankrupt, right? It gets to a point where they have fired the teachers. There's no one to collect garbage because they literally don't have money to pay anyone because no one will buy their bonds. And eventually this crisis is

Starting point is 00:08:08 sort of mitigated, but the problem is that, you know, the task force that was set up to mitigate this, right, to like, you know, get there to be people buying New York City bonds again. people were able to come in and New York City had a functional welfare state, right? It had a sort of mini social democratic welfare state. And in order to reopen the government and have schools and garbage collection again, in order to get that money, the city was required to dismantle it. And, you know, the financial situation of New York is obviously significantly better than it was then, right? And the odds of having this kind of just full on macro scale crisis is not as high as it was then. But because of the fact that this is the legally

Starting point is 00:08:53 mandated way that you have to do these payments and because unlike the federal government, there are constraints on spending that in some ways function like needing for an exchange currency, you know, you can't just issue this money. You have to get it from somewhere. And because that some words usually the banks, it means that you have to constantly negotiate with the banks and with capital in order to keep the city's lights on. And this is a constant threat that they have sort of, you know, hanging over the head of anyone who wants to be governor. And as Backer points out, you can't even just tax your way out of the problem because payment structures for government projects work out of the bond system so that money just goes to debt payments. And, you know,

Starting point is 00:09:40 one of the other things the backer points out. And obviously the situation in Chicago is different in the situation in New York, but the Chicago Teachers Union did elect a mayor who was, you know, their guy, right? The Chicago Teachers Union spent a significant amount of money and resources and effort getting their guy elected. And once he came into office, he basically ended up doing the same thing in their negotiations with the teachers union that the previous administrations had done. And the reason that happened, you know, and the reason that you started to see cuts to school services that were not supposed to happen but did anyways was because the bond market stepped in and said this is what's necessary in order to do this. And they have that kind of power.

Starting point is 00:10:21 Now, obviously, Chicago was in a worse financial situation than New York is. Mom Domney is significantly further left than Brandon Johnson is. But these are real constraints. And the Social Democratic solution to this has always been to get money from the federal government. But the federal government won't give money out to the things that is legally required to give money out to you right now, because obviously it is run by one Donald Trump, and obviously Trump in and of himself is a significant problem to doing this. Right. There's always a chance that Trump will see something like mean about Mondani on Fox News

Starting point is 00:11:00 and decide to send the National Guard to New York or something, and, you know, he will probably continue immigration raids. he can, you know, just fuck with people's ability to get Medicaid payments, which is a really significant issue. There will continue to be lots of creative and terrible things that the federal government can and will do to this administration that will have to be fought and can be defeated, but we'll have to be organized and fought against. But for our purposes right now, the big issue here is that you can't get money out of the federal government. So, okay, where are you getting money out of then?

Starting point is 00:11:41 And the answer is the state government. Now, do you know what else gets money out of state governments? Probably not these products and services? I don't know. Who knows? Who knows? We are back. So, okay, let's talk about the state government.

Starting point is 00:12:10 Now, again, this is even with the city the size of New York, there still is always significant negotiations in order to do, things in the city that require the age of the state-level government. And part of the problem here is that the New York State Democratic Party is significantly responsible for the Republicans' control of the House, particularly in the 2022 cycle. There's a whole long story here about how a bunch of the Democrats wanted to form this sort of moderate caucus thing where the sort of independent caucus that would caucus with the Republicans in order to give the Republicans the ability to stop any sort of liberal or left-wing thing.

Starting point is 00:12:47 from happening in the state governments and handed a whole bunch of seats over to the Republicans because of it. But just, you know, setting all of that aside, the place that you can get money from would be from the governor's office. Unfortunately, that's a significant problem. So here's Holtrell's response to Mamdami's plan to make buses free. Quote, I cannot set forth a plan right now that takes money out of a system that relies on fares of the buses and the subways. But can we find a path to make it more affordable for people who need help? Yes, of course we can. So Holtzio does not want to raise taxes. Any proposal that would involve raising taxes probably has to run through New York City's city council and thus

Starting point is 00:13:29 through her. I'm going to quote this from Spectrum News about Mondami's proposal to expand universal child care. Hocel said she's also looking at expanding a universal child care program statewide, but the total price tag is $15 billion. Child care I already committed to, she said. I'm committed to this as a mom governor, I get it, but also to do it statewide. It's about $15 billion, the entire amount of my reserves. Hultural says she prefers to phase an expansion first within certain age groups and geographically underserved communities. So, okay, what is happening here in a macro sense is that Hultral is trying to slow roll both of these things. She is outright opposed to making buses free. She wants to do weird means testing stuff to it that will make

Starting point is 00:14:13 it very difficult to do, an extremely annoying bureaucratic layer meant to deny people's services that you have to do instead of just having them be free. The child care thing she probably does want to do, but again, because she is not a democratic socialist, because she is a regular Democrat, she wants to do it slowly expanded through a whole bunch of phases and taking a whole bunch of time. And this is a pretty significant problem, because you know, at every step of this, not only are you going to have to be negotiating with the banking system, you're going to have to be negotiating with the statewide Democratic Party. And the statewide Democratic Party is fairly conservative.

Starting point is 00:14:57 Hocrell's not as conservative, and she can be sort of dragged kicking and screaming into good policies, like what happened with congestion pricing. And if something works and is really popular after you do it, she will sign on to it. but it's a significant hurdle that you have to deal with. I want to move from this into a kind of related problem that's a more structural constraint on Omdami's time in office, which is that he is now in charge of running a capitalist economy. When you take a position in a capitalist government,

Starting point is 00:15:32 it is now your job to make the economy run, and that means maintaining economic growth. But, okay, what does economic growth actually mean in a capitalist economy, it means that corporations make more money than they did the year before. And this is a structural problem for all of us, because we all have interests that are diametrically opposed to corporations making more money every year, because their profit comes directly from our exploitation, right? We have fundamentally opposed interests from the corporations and the capitalists and the billionaires, but in order for there to be capitalist economic growth,

Starting point is 00:16:06 those people have to keep making more money every year. And obviously, you can, you can make arguments about how redistribution enhances economic growth by creating a larger consumer base. And that's obviously true. We're in a extremely deformed economy right now where, as I keep saying on this show, 50% of all consumer spending is happening from 5% of the population, which is just a completely unsustainable way to run an economy. And is also absolutely miserable for every single other person who's in that bottom 95%? And, you know, there are things that you can do to some extent, right? But at some point, you are going to have to choose between workers and capital. And if you're the mayor of New York City, your job is to make capital more money.

Starting point is 00:16:58 And this is a structural constraint that every social democratic government has faced. And it's worth noting that we are not in a world that is surrounded by social democratic governments. And part of the reason why, again, is that they need the economy to keep growing and that they're reliance on finance institutions to make money. And the most grim versions of this tend to happen at a sort of national scale. But if you look at morally in Jamaica in the 70s where you have a democratic socialist who gets elected and is running Jamaica and then has to implement. austerity because the country runs out of money and the IMF comes in, right? These things can get really bleak. Now, they don't have to, right?

Starting point is 00:17:44 Like, sufficiently well-organized populations can force the hand of capital to do things that they don't want to do, significantly well-organized populations can, you know, start trying to fundamentally redistribute economic power. But it's difficult. And the difficulty is magnified by the third really massive constraint. And that constraint is the police. One of the other big structural problems that comes with running a state is that it relies on armed men to enforce the laws. And those men, especially in the United States, are at best.

Starting point is 00:18:18 One step removed from straight up neo-Nazis, a lot of them straight-up are neo-Nazis. The cops are the most consistently right-wing group in the entire country. They are a bunch of racist shitheads who exist to perpetuate right supremacy and protect capital, and they're also, again, a fundamental organizational unit of the state. Right. Without the violence of the police, laws are just suggestions. And if you're going to run a capitalist government, if you're going to run one in the U.S., you have to deal with the fact that your power depends on the loyalty of a bunch of Nazis.

Starting point is 00:18:54 And these people will riot. if you attempt to do oversight of them. They very famously did this in 1992. They had this whole giant riot, right? They had the thing that was supposed to be a protest rally where they all went on strike, and then the cops who were supposed to be policing the protest obviously didn't do anything

Starting point is 00:19:15 because, again, they're also cops. And in 1992, I did this for a really, really, really minor oversight, attempted oversight, right? And obviously, they actually didn't win that direct fight, but they were able to cause enough of a political shitstorm that they were able to force the last sort of like, vaguely

Starting point is 00:19:35 social democratic mayor out of power and install like Rudy Giuliani who is a weird face-melty dip shit, right? Who's an incredible tough on crime right-winger. And obviously, Mamdani has been trying to kind of trying to do his best

Starting point is 00:19:49 to negotiate with the police and not to overtly threaten them, but that kind of doesn't matter because they just hate him. Like, they think that a Muslim social is just inherently an illegitimate person. And they think that anyone who's even vaguely liberal is someone who is their enemy and who is their target. And we have seen them take actions

Starting point is 00:20:11 to just directly threaten mayors fairly recently. Right? In 2020, they kidnapped Bill de Blasio's daughter at a protest and then sort of like paraded her mugshot around and posted it everywhere and did this whole big show of how they were holding her. To say it was a thinly veiled threat is a dramatic understatement of how incredibly, incredibly blatant this threat was, right? They kidnapped the mayor's daughter, Doreen a protest movement, and that was Bill de Blasio, who was not some kind of like wild anti-polize radical, right? And especially now as sort of fascismism is on the march and with the backing of the U.S. federal government, right, the police form a very significant threat to Mondami's ability to do anything, both on a sort of political level.

Starting point is 00:21:07 They are going to be constantly, you know, putting out giant press releases about how Mamdami is like trying the city into a unlivable hellhole and how they can't do their jobs, etc., etc., and also just in terms. terms of just directly threatening him and trying to influence his policy, they're going to be a real problem. And his ability to prevent them from, for example, smashing in the skulls of pro-Palestine protesters, even if he wants to, was going to be very limited because the police have become a kind of semi-autonomous fascist force in this country. They have always been a ticking time bomb on status democracy, and that clock is closing in on zero. in this sort of moment of ascended fascism. Now, again, I want to close this by saying,

Starting point is 00:21:56 these are not all the challenges that he's going to face, but, comma, none of this also means that the things that he wants to do to make people's lives better are impossible. Every single one of these problems are problems that you can defeat by organizing, right? You can put enough pressure on capital to prevent them from doing a kind of like capital strike

Starting point is 00:22:16 or a bond strike, right, to force them to continue. to fund things, right? With enough public pressure, you can make a whole lot of things happen. You can make the police, you know, at the very least be acting on a kind of defensive front to where they're not, you know, rioting and trying to run city politics, but are kind of forced by mass popular mobilization and pressure to, at the very least, not be openly attacking the mayor. You can put massive political pressure on Kathy Holtz to, you know, do things that are good, which is how we got, how New York got congestion pricing in the first place, right?

Starting point is 00:22:56 Like, that was a result of a massive, like, organizational campaign that went extremely well, and Huchel's, like, tried to sabotage it because she thought it would be unpopular, and eventually it got implemented, and it's really popular now, and now she's really in favor of it. So these people can be pushed around, right? They are not invincible, their victory is not inevitable, they can be defeated, and they can be forced to accept that, oh, wait, hold on, the extremely sensible policies that we want that make our lives better are good. And that requires mobilization. But, you know, that's not impossible.

Starting point is 00:23:30 We know how to organize. We've been doing it for ages. And it was, you know, what had to happen to make all of this possible in the first place. And so instead of demobilizing now and going, oh, our jobs are done, no, no, no, no, no. Our jobs have just begun. But, you know, the better organized we are and the more we're able to push this and the more we're able to push this, and the more we're able to push all of these people, the better our lives will get. And this election to begin with is a reminder that another world is possible. And it could be better than this one. We just have to build it together. This is It Could Happen here. I'm Garrison Davis, joined by Robert Evans. Last week, I released an episode on the ascent of white nationalist live streamer Nick Fuentes and his Groyper fans

Starting point is 00:24:29 among particularly young Gen Z Republicans. The episode also tracked the conservative infighting at Heritage Foundation and Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire in the aftermath of Tucker Carlson's friendly sit-down interview with Nick Fuentes. In the episode, I mentioned that I had an extra segment covering the final section of the interview. Now, most coverage of this interview,

Starting point is 00:24:56 including my episode last week, focused on like the first two-thirds, which ranged from like Nick Fuentes' political background, early beef with Ben Shapiro, and his like Nazi-esque anti-Semitic theories of a quote-unquote organized world jury corrupting America, which he now lightly couches in anti-Israel framing to profit off of the genocide in Palestine. But the last third of the interview changes course to discuss the mechanisms of quote-unquote reality distortion. which are ruining young man, drugs, alcohol, the internet, and most importantly, pornography. After receiving a universal response demanding the release of the porn cut,

Starting point is 00:25:42 I have sat down with Robert here to finally, finally air what no other news platform is brave enough, brave enough to cover. Yeah, what new other news platform can legally cover because they have a duty to their employees to not make them research this stuff. Yeah, or like an actual healthy HR department. Yeah, we have not finished our classes on what we're not allowed to make people do. That said, to be fair,

Starting point is 00:26:09 Garrison couldn't be stopped from researching this. There was no way of stopping you from doing this. I have a sick drive. You would have quit and started working for someone else if we hadn't let you do this. No, if Sophie told me I wasn't allowed to cover this, I would have quit immediately. You'd be putting this out for...

Starting point is 00:26:28 Wired or somewhat. So now I am very pleased to present to you probably 30 minutes of Nick Fuentes explaining to a performatively confused Tucker Carlson, the concept of pornography. And I guess if we're going to view Fuentes and the Groyper's as like a serious legitimate threat that's able to sway

Starting point is 00:26:51 the national political discourse, I think it's also important to cover his weird sexual politics, just as explaining the weird sexual practices of like, you know, the proud boys is important for understanding their whole deal as like a neo-fascist street gang. The kind of closeted gay in-cell women issues of the groopers is actually really important, especially for Nick. And let's discuss that. But thankfully, we get to start off with the majority, majority of this section, which is on pornography.

Starting point is 00:27:25 Let's start one of the first clips. What is porn exactly? Like, describe how available is porn. What is it? Oh, my God. Oh, man.

Starting point is 00:27:42 Because he does ask that like a man who's legitimately never heard of pornography. He does. He later says, like, obviously he is familiar with the rough concept of porn. Uh-huh. But maybe not this sort of...

Starting point is 00:27:55 But maybe not this sort of internet porn obsession to which Nick refers. Let's skip ahead about a minute where Nick kind of closes on his explanation of internet porn specifically. So something that has almost never talked about is that this is a generation that's totally sexually dysfunctional, I think, because of pornography. And some people are able to cope with it. Some people don't have a problem, but I think a lot of people, and maybe even a small minority, have a serious problem with that.

Starting point is 00:28:28 And the problem... How does it make people sexually dysfunctional? I think that it's impossible for a real woman to compete with the availability and the novelty of pornography. So that is Nick's kind of ending argument at the tail end of his, like, definition of porn and how porn is affecting specifically American men. A little bit of his in-cell status is obviously seeping through there. More of it will become increasingly evident throughout this interview.

Starting point is 00:29:00 But this idea of sexual dysfunction, how porn is ruining men's ability to get into relationships, is ruining the ability to get into marriages, lasting marriages. And he frames this kind of slightly as the fault of men, but also really as the fault of women. women aren't able to compete with how much porn there is, the different categories of porn. How can one woman please a man when a man can go on to the internet and look up, you know, 50 different niche fetishes that not one woman could provide? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:29:35 And that's part of his argument at this point. Yeah. And that's always like, been the, okay, so you've just, you've never had a relationship. Which Nick is open about. At least Nick claims that, right? It's unclear how true a lot of Nick's claims are about his, like, in-cell, volselle, involuntary celibate-type deal. But no, Nick does claim that. And the sort of pushback Nick will receive later on in the interview on some of these aspects is actually way stronger than any of the world jury anti-Semitic stuff from earlier in the interview.

Starting point is 00:30:11 Yeah. Which Carlson was fake actually kind of like trying to shape Nick Quinn. has his rhetoric to make him like appeal to a bigger audience, but did not really push back on to the same extent he does on Nick's like relationship with women. But the sexual dysfunction

Starting point is 00:30:28 aspect I think is the is the ending argument for Nick here in terms of what actually makes porn bad. He extrapolates on this point in this, in this next section which I'll play now. Porn is

Starting point is 00:30:43 you could have a hundred different women in one sitting, doing anything that whatever niche or idiosyncratic thing a person might be into, it's there. And so I think that novelty combined with that availability, it makes it so that, you know, when you think about courting a woman, juice isn't worth to squeeze. And so there's like also a problem of like erectile dysfunction, people that can't enjoy regular sex because it does not compare to the intensity. the novelty and the availability of porn.

Starting point is 00:31:18 It's hyper-stimulation. And so I think that's sabotaging a lot of normal sexual relationships. It seems like it's making a lot of people gay, too. Yeah, and trans. You think that's true? 100%. What is that? Oh, my God.

Starting point is 00:31:35 What is that? I don't even know where to start there. I mean, like, it's what these people have always believed, right? That, like, that's the, that there's got to be an explanation. some kind of causal relation for why people like things that they're not allowed to admit to liking in public and it's got to be the fault of pornography right or libraries whatever every time Tucker interjects the beauty of his of his little like befuddled interjections what is that is that real is that true uh-huh it's it's fantastic but but yeah no i mean Nick kind of blames

Starting point is 00:32:15 the rise in homosexuality and transsexuality on this novelty of pornography and this sexual desensitization. Like once regular porn, it doesn't do it for people. They get pushed to more and more extreme categories. Of which trans porn is somehow particularly effective at like influencing and, you know, manipulating human behavior, right? This is like the sissy hypnotherapy that porn can like make somebody trans. Yeah. Very goofy stuff. Specifically for Nick, considering his curious catboy background and his alleged leak viewership of trans porn, which we might discuss later. I'm going to play another clip kind of on this note, a shorter one. I think that if you are somebody that uses pornography multiple times per day, which many people do.

Starting point is 00:33:07 Actually? Oh, absolutely. That's a lot of jerking off. That's a huge problem. Yeah. That's a lot of jerking off. Former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson club. That's a lot of jerking off. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:33:21 That's a lot of jerking off. I so badly, I just wanted to cut some of these clips out of like out of context and just put them in my other episode. Tucker only comes once a year and he can only come by wrapping his dick inside of two frozen Swanson's meals. He's got to kind of use like, you know how it's got like there's little divvets on the back end. he's got to use that to cushion his penis. It's the only way he can come. It's very, like, edible thing with his, you know, family business, this sort of, like, psychosexual drive.

Starting point is 00:33:50 Wow. The swan's in of it all? Sure, of course. That makes sense for... Yeah. That makes sense for Tucker. Mm-hmm. But, no, and Indic says that porn, like, operates kind of, like, drug tolerance levels,

Starting point is 00:34:04 which, like, over time, after repetitive use, in order to get high, the user must seek out stronger drugs or dangerously intense doses, of which he views trans porn as this like dangerous dose. Yeah, yeah, because I do love like the through line with these people that like both, this is like a sickening degeneracy and also is so appealing that people absolutely cannot help themselves to it. Like it affects them like heroin. It's so inherently attractive.

Starting point is 00:34:36 I mean, some of that might be their actual proclivities kind of. Yes, I think so. peeking out from under the surface there. Because all of these guys love watching Transport. All of these, like, anti-trans people, whether that's Alex Jones or, like, Nick Fuentes. Like, obviously, they have an interest

Starting point is 00:34:52 in that, and that's what kind of drives them with their obsession. Yeah. Which is, it's just weird. Like, I don't know anyone who talks about any pornography that way. Like, you know, everyone's got whatever it is they're into, like, something that they'll be particularly interested in. But no one describes

Starting point is 00:35:08 as, like, it's just this type of thing. No one can resist it, obviously. This sort of, like, powerful, obsessive nature in which these types of right-wing freaks like refer to it as, yeah. Like, actual perverts will say stuff like, no, no, no, I've been shoving things inside my pee-hole for the last 27 years, and now I can get up to something the width of a maglight, and I know that's crazy. Like, I know no one else does that.

Starting point is 00:35:30 That's just a me thing. Oh, poor Nick. Someone needs to explain sounding to Tucker Carlson is what I'm saying. Like, I, if I, if he interviews me, I'm going to walk him through sounding. I'm going to, I'm going to put together a PowerPoint with photos. He's obviously, he's obviously, uh, open, open to this line of discussion. Mm-hmm. Let's, are we allowed to have ads on this episode?

Starting point is 00:35:55 Yeah, probably not, but let's throw to him anyway. All right, we are, we are back. Nick Fuentes is going to continue, continue to describe pornography towards a slightly confused Tucker Carlson now. now Nick is able to really speak from a sense of authority. As someone who claims to have never had sex, he's able to really speak with authority on this topic, which I will play this next clip. And there's something too about what it does when you look at it.

Starting point is 00:36:36 Because people don't realize that it is a fundamentally different experience. People don't realize. Being involved in intercourse versus watching other people have intercourse. And I think that actually does something. to you. Tell me, what do you mean? Sorry, I'm just off there for a second. People don't realize this. Amazing observation from alleged virgin cell, Nick Fuentes.

Starting point is 00:37:02 He's trying to make this point about like body depersonalization or like disassociation when watching porn. It's like this like out of body experience because you start associating yourself with people on screen. That's eventually what he starts talking about. Right. And but he couches this in saying that like people don't realize that this is what this is, you know, different from actual sex, which is really funny because Nick is proudly proclaims that he's never had sex before. So he is in no possession to argue this point. No. Yeah, that's the other thing. How would you know that it's inherently better than sex? Like, because he's never had. I think he has to assume that because that's the only information he has. But I love his framing of this as like new novel information that no one else has access to. That no one realized. that watching porn is different from having sex. Yeah. Tucker's response is just phenomenal at the end of this.

Starting point is 00:37:54 Because Tucker's like trying to coax more and more shit out of him. It's really the only time where he's kind of being a sly interviewer is at this ending porn section. It's not the, it's not the Are You Offed section? It's not the Daily Wire stuff. It's not the anti-Semitism stuff. It's specifically the porn section.

Starting point is 00:38:14 But to explain this like out of body, theory that Nick that Nick has here. Unfortunately, Nick gets into trying to explain the Blanchardian theory of transsexuality towards, towards Tucker Carlson, of which I will only play a certain segment of, because we don't need to hear that whole thing. But there is a section of this next clip, which will get into that, as well as take you on kind of a beautiful journey, showcasing Tucker's objection to pornography. think that, you know, for example, I think Steve Saylor has written about this, that there's multiple kinds of transsexuals. And he says, a one kind of transsexual is somebody that likes

Starting point is 00:38:57 the idea of seeing themselves as a woman, it's auto gynafilia. Yes. And I think that, you know, one of the theories for that is you, you watch a man having sex with a woman that isn't you so much, you kind of achieve an identity with the woman in like a weird sick way. You almost identify with the woman. And so there's weird things that happen when you're, watching that and having such strong emotional and sexual experiences. Interesting, Nick. That's fascinating. I've always been, I've sensed for a long time having had a lot of young male employees

Starting point is 00:39:29 mentioned porn as a problem. I mean, the big porn companies give visibility to foreign intel services on the back end. So that means people know what you're looking at. There's likely video and audio of you watching. Okay. All right. There is so much. I love that Tucker's made objection to pornography. Isn't the stuff that Nick's talking about at all, but the idea that it poses a security risk because of foreign Intel

Starting point is 00:39:56 services? Yeah, that they're recording everyone masturbating. To blackmail every single person on the planet. And he couches this and saying that he's, quote, not a huge expert on the topic. Yeah. Which is really good. But to go back a little bit, the level of projection, Nick is doing here with this identifying as a woman in the in the porn thing is simply phenomenal. I mean, especially considering the whole, you know, cat boy scandal, which I covered on the show like years ago as when I was like a baby, as well as Nick's like alleged trans porn league, which I guess I'll explain here briefly. This was in 2022. Nick allegedly was operating a sock puppet Twitter account when he was banned on Twitter.

Starting point is 00:40:46 this account shared a clip scrolling through Nick Fuentes like analytics like video analytics like search analytics showing his popularity and when scrolling through these various tabs a little section of a tab that did not get into full view but you saw the bottom of it which looked a lot like a very specific trans femmeboy porn video on porn hub people found the video and after they found the video uh you know this this post with these analytics was like taken down and this account was believed to be operated by Nick Fentos. Now, Nick claims that he obviously was not behind this account, that this was some like Groyper fan who was trying to set him up for scandal by operating an account that appeared to be Nick's account on Twitter, but actually

Starting point is 00:41:31 wasn't. I, Robert, I will show you a little bit of this analytics video. We don't need to see the whole thing, but it's like this. Okay. So, various, various, various, tabs. Look at all these tabs. This varies... When does Jake Lloyd explore? What? Comparing his popularity towards other other like commentators.

Starting point is 00:41:56 Oh, I thought he was comparing his popularity to fucking Jake Lloyd from the phantom menace. From the phantom menace. You should be beating him, Nick. But like web traffic, analytics, Joe Kent, Google Trends. And then, let's see if I can find it. Right.

Starting point is 00:42:14 Oh, oh, right here at the time. top. Right here at the top, while scrolling through the tabs on the iPhone Safari, there's a little porn tab, right? So this turned into a little mini thing with people thinking that they secretly stumbled across the NIC's porn watching habits, of which it would be no surprise that he'd be watching trans femme boy porn, especially, again, considering that he operated a cat boy Discord channel on his server. But he has staunchly denied this, as you know, as a based Catholic cell, obviously. So both Tucker and Nick

Starting point is 00:42:51 believe that porn is a big factor affecting the decline of actual sex and marriage among Gen C. And it's not just a male problem. Nick argues that it has become, quote-unquote, so destigmatized for women to participate in porn as well, of which she's mostly referring to only fans.

Starting point is 00:43:12 Here's a clip of them discussing only fans. And it is completely casual. You know, because you could say that maybe 10 years ago, even at the heyday of internet porn, to be in porn, you got to be a porn star. Like, that's your life and that's your career and that's who you are and it's very shameful.

Starting point is 00:43:31 With OnlyFans, it's like having a TikTok. It's like, here's my link tree, here's my Instagram account, here's my Facebook account, here's my YouTube, and here's my OnlyFans. Why would any of this be? legal. I think that, well, there's like you indicated, maybe there's an intelligence benefit to that. Maybe there's a political benefit to that. I think that. Why wouldn't you arrest the people who run

Starting point is 00:44:00 something like that? They should be. If you had a Christian government. Or how about just a government who cares about its people? I mean, is Iran a bigger threat or is only fans? Iran's not turning my daughter to prostitution that I'm aware of. Right. Oh, my God. Is Iran a big of? Is Iran a bigger threat? I'm only fans. I don't know. bigger threat or is only fans. Yes, yes, that's the real geopolitical question. The wisest minds. No, what a, what a beautiful mind that is. Yeah, yeah. Like, even be able to think of the sentence, is Iran a bigger threat than only fans? Yeah. Like, I could never even get myself to a point where I conjure that thought in my own head. We have to ban fornography because it's the Iran of masturbation. It's frankly beautiful.

Starting point is 00:44:45 In order to get their minds so, so degraded to even have this thought, it's so alien. Man, like later Tucker pushes kind of on this point about the need to arrest people who run only fans, while Nick kind of quietly remarks that it's really the women or the quote unquote body assets who should be arrested. But Tucker is pretty firm on, no, it's really like the facilitators, people hosting the website who are enabling this. But, you know, Nick, Nick would be totally fine. women on the platform also get arrested.

Starting point is 00:45:18 Man. Again, the insistence that a primary objection or like a causal aspect of why is this allowed, it's for like intelligence gathering services is simply beautiful. Do you know what else is beautiful, Robert?

Starting point is 00:45:37 The sponsors of this podcast. They are for putting up with this. Yeah. All right, we're back. For this final segment, we will transcend the discussion of porn and just talk more about some of Nick's opinions on women. Oh, good. And other factors beyond porn for why marriage isn't happening. Why aren't people getting married as much any war? Of which both Tucker and Nick think porn is a factor.

Starting point is 00:46:18 But there's other factors contributing to this crisis, which, uh, Nick and Tucker will elucidate. Let's hear him out. So what are the other factors that prevent, I'm sorry I called you gay, by the way, but I'm always, I think I'm just too old or something. I'm like, why is anyone married? You tell me, why aren't people married?

Starting point is 00:46:39 Well, I mean, honestly, it's the women. All right. Oh, okay. We solved that problem. Yeah, that's it. I think that does it for us that it could happen here. They got to the bottom of that pretty quickly. Sorry I called you gay, by the way.

Starting point is 00:46:56 So, no, now it's time for the wise, in Celsage, Nick Fuentes, to bestow his wisdom pertaining to relationships and marriage. And in his eyes, the main problem seems to be that not just women, but specifically, that women are too liberal. Yeah. Really breaking new ground there. Yeah, sure. That's, that's it. That's the problem. Because then they don't like all of the Nick Fuentes fans.

Starting point is 00:47:20 The men are extremely conservative, increasingly. The women are extremely liberal. What are they liberal? On what issues? Like, what does that mean liberal? Oh, they're very feminist. Like, actually? Extremely feminist, yes.

Starting point is 00:47:34 I don't believe that, do they? I think they do. Really? Absolutely, yes. How could you believe that? Gender roles are a construct that none of this is inborn? Like, you'd have to be an idiot to think that. They like the idea of it.

Starting point is 00:47:48 Tucker's delivery. I want to study it more. I feel like they sketched some of this out before they did this, because I feel like they're both leading each other to get out statements that they want to say. No, yeah, like it's so crafted here. Like, their back and forth exchange is so, oh, it's so crafted. Every inflection they have, they're like giving each other these key points to then extrapolate on. Yeah, there's the stuff that's willful, like the claims that, well, young men are conservative,

Starting point is 00:48:17 which is based on like a shift towards Trump that's partly reversed over the last year or so. But that was not the vast majority of Gen Z people, right? Like it's young people are willing to like try out different things and swing back and forth. But like it's not it's not the way he's framing it, right? Because that's the most convenient narrative for the right that like all of the young men are pulling towards the right. And so the problem is that women are more progressive. Right.

Starting point is 00:48:47 Yeah. Therefore, it has to be liberal women. Yeah. Right. No, it's a very convenient excuse to explain actually a complex set of economic problems, which are preventing people from feeling comfortable enough to actually start a family and, you know, safe enough, economically speaking. Nick goes on to complain about, you know, women lying about wanting equality, wanting to work

Starting point is 00:49:09 when really all they want is a quote unquote, tough Chad. Quote, the whole political system is based around women, never being. accountable for any of their choices, unquote. This is namely abortion and no false divorce, which Nick spends a while talking about how that has been a significant contributing factor towards ruining this country, how women can enter marriages and then leave for whatever reason they want, taking half the money, taking half the stuff, etc., etc. There's another factor that Nick claims is contributing to this problem. They have a very high estimation of themselves. I think people call it hoflation.

Starting point is 00:49:49 Their... Their sense of their own looks and sexual value is very inflated. I just had to put the hoflation clip in there. The hoflation, yes. Tucker Carlson's saying hoflation is truly a moment for us all. Yeah. Again, I really want to just splice some of these sound bits into my other episode at random points. Now, again, Tucker actually pushes back in some of like the in-between sections here. And I'll play some of that pushback later, but, you know, way more than the rest of the interview.

Starting point is 00:50:20 So specifically here, Tucker is actually pushing back on Nick's kind of resigned blame directed towards women and the quote unquote legal incentive structures that he says are contributing to this. And Tucker responds by saying, even if some of these complaints are true, as believers in the natural patriarchy, isn't it men's role to take responsibility, lead by example, and to fix this behavior? in women through marriage. But I would say that, because I hear this all the time, people say, well, the men need to step up and be better and lead the women. Easier said than done. I agree with that. They're at war with the system, and not even just the system, but also society.

Starting point is 00:51:02 So this is the full, like, Joker Pilled and sell stuff, is that in order to have an actual relationship with women, men have to enter into combat against, quote, unquote, society. Right. like this this larger thing that's influencing women and is making them, you know, depraved and liberal. And Nick argues that even if you find

Starting point is 00:51:23 like a nice trad, Christian girl, they're going to be on TikTok, they're going to be on Instagram and they're going to be, quote, unquote, talking to other women and through osmosis, they're going to get influenced by this liberal culture

Starting point is 00:51:35 and say 10, 15, 20 years down the line, people will change. And they may not be so Christian and trad 20 years into your marriage because of society. Huh. Yeah. I mean, I guess that's the argument I expected from him.

Starting point is 00:51:51 He'll extrapolate some of his reasoning here. And I think that women as kind of the ultimate conformists, the ultimate enforcers of, like, social norms, I think eventually the pressure from society kind of gets to them. And a lot of them will go in a different direction. Depends what kind of husbands they have. I mean, if there's real leadership at home, I don't know a single, happily married woman who's liberal, not one. I know a lot of married women.

Starting point is 00:52:15 Here's some of the pushback that Tucker is doing now. But yeah, man, this idea of, you know, women as the ultimate conformists, is the enforcers of social norms, right? This is like kind of like Longhouse type stuff. And Tucker's rebuke of that is that in an actual, you know, marriage with a conservative man, a strong conservative man, all that behavior will get changed because people will fall into like their natural, biological, patriarchal roles.

Starting point is 00:52:41 but Nick still doesn't buy it. Like he is, he is, he is, he is an insult at heart. He is no way that that Tucker's kind of push back. It's gonna, it's gonna turn him on this. Like, Nick just hates women entirely. That's his whole motivation. Is that due to some sort of like, fascist homoerotic, like aspect maybe,

Starting point is 00:53:01 but it's, it's probably even more complicated than that. I mean, part of the fascist femme boy thing is people who actually aren't even gay, but just hate women so much that they end up being, being gay, because that's like the only mode of connection they can even, or like physical connection, they can even like muster themselves to, to like do, which I explained in that episode from, you know, a few years ago when I was a baby. But yeah, this is definitely some stuff at play here. And I mean, Nick will always just find new things to complain about in regards to this sort of stuff, like the quote unquote epidemic of simps. So like maybe the job is to, you know, make a girl happy

Starting point is 00:53:37 and like all this nonsense ends. Yeah, I don't know. I think that, That could be a bottomless pit, too, because one critique I have of the men is, and you're right about this, they enable this behavior. Well, that's for sure. It's epidemic of simps who, and especially with Christians, I've noticed this. Epidemic of sims. Yeah, that's something else. Marriage has this bottomless pit. Well, I also love the idea that Tucker's like, well, why aren't men just making women happy?

Starting point is 00:54:08 And, you know, the answer there for Tucker is that people like you are not capable of making other people happy. But Nick can't even consider that because the idea of women being happy is deeply offensive to him. Yeah. No, I mean, Nick says that sim culture, or more specifically, a backlash to sim culture, is why people like Andrew Tate have gotten so popular, despite being a quote-unquote Muslim polychemist. because Tate is, quote, putting women in their place, unquote, as opposed to Christian men who are tone policing each other and are worshipping women and worshiping their wives, which Tucker pushes back on a bit by saying that the New Testament commands men to love their wives and that wives respect their husbands.

Starting point is 00:54:52 We got only two more clips left, but I think they are very revealing. All right. As much else needs to be revealed here. I do think I just noticed this. that men who stay unmarried for too long become like kind of fragile. There's something about the give and take. There's something about living with, in fact, I think it's the key to life, someone you don't fully understand,

Starting point is 00:55:14 that broadens you, that keeps you always thinking that makes you wiser, more patient, more thoughtful, more self-aware, and more flexible. And those are all good qualities. And the absence of that, like in homosexuality or like men who are single too long, they get very rigid. Have you ever noticed this? Do you ever notice this? I like things the way I like them and they just get like, no.

Starting point is 00:55:42 Oh, yeah. Yeah, you certainly know what you mean by that. Yeah, you don't want that. Really? Because that's who you are, Nick. I would say that when you say you don't fully understand women, to me, I feel like women are very simple in terms of... Have you ever lived with one? No, I haven't lived with them.

Starting point is 00:55:58 But, I mean... All right, let's go. Oh, man. Women are really simple. Have you ever lived with one? No. It's really funny. Up until the assuming all gay people are the same bit,

Starting point is 00:56:11 Tucker's making a good point, which is that like part of what's healthy about relationships is like living with someone who's not like you, right? Yes. Like that makes us better people. No. And he's very clearly trying to like push Nick's buttons here. Yeah, because he knows.

Starting point is 00:56:28 He knows. Because Nick's getting called out. Because yeah, he's. this angry unmarried guy. He's this like a little little unhinged freak. Yeah. Oh. And yeah, he's like getting, he's absolutely getting called out here. And it's funny that this is the thing. Out of the entire interview that that Tucker really tries to harp on, it's this married thing. Like he really wants Nick to get married. That's the kind of the main thing he's really pushing for by the end of this interview. Yeah, bro, that's going to happen. Have you ever lived with one? Well, no. No, of course.

Starting point is 00:57:00 Of course not. It's wild. I mean, later Nick tries to argue that, you know, it's really the men who are complicated because men have a, quote, deep connection to math and space, unquote. Sure. Yeah, man. I love my deep connection to math and space. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:57:19 Robert's so good at math and space. Yeah. It's really my strong suits. Math and space. Anyone that knows you. I would say every man I know is good at math and space. versus, you know, women just operate on primal base instinct. Of course, yes.

Starting point is 00:57:36 Nick says, quote, men are masters of the universe. Women are the universe, which I think is a quote from someone else. Yeah, yeah, yeah. God, yeah, you're a real master of the universe, Nick. This will be the final clip where Tucker will offer a little bit more pushback towards Nick on some of his views about women in marriage. you've got a pretty clear look into Nick's interiority here as well. So but anyway, but whatever the point,

Starting point is 00:58:03 men and women talk past each other constantly. They don't always know what the other one is saying. And that frustration actually gives way to like great beauty over time, I would say. I don't know. I personally find women very frustrated when they are not expressing. And I just view that as like, I see the way I look at is like when you look at your favorite TV shows right sopranos breaking bad it's like the wife is the villain because it's like the main character if the wife could just get out of the way would be running the show and that's kind of how I feel like In Rand I agree with her about this she said that the wife's role is like hero worship the guy is the hero the guy is supposed to be the entrepreneur the conqueror whatever And the woman is really supposed to support the man's goals and be in his world.

Starting point is 00:58:59 And I've felt that way. Man, that's the last thing successful men need is more power worship, more hero worship, more. You're so great. When you get that at work, you don't want that at home. You become an unbearable asshole. Pray to destroy every successful man, which is hubris. Like you must take yourself for God. You need someone who's not interested in what you do at all, only interested in you.

Starting point is 00:59:22 And that's how you become balanced and wise. That's how you know your own limits. That's shockingly good advice from Tucker Carlson. Like that's... This is so beautiful. This is so beautiful as me. When Tucker Carlson is the voice of recent, it's really... It's bleak.

Starting point is 00:59:38 It's scary. Yeah. But no, so clearly, is Nick's, like, closeted, gay incal showing here? Well, like, while Tucker pains, pains to explain to Nick why people actually get into a relationship. And Nick just can't do it. He starts talking about the Sopranos and fucking Breaking Bad. That's like the only framework in which you can understand this, because he's never had a real relationship.

Starting point is 01:00:08 The wife is the villain. I agree with Ein Rand. Yeah, famously well-adjusted in the relationship department. Ein-Rant, the wife's role is hero worship. And Tucker's like, oh, my God, no, that's horrible. No, no, that's what ruins people. that destroys people. It's fascinating.

Starting point is 01:00:27 No, yeah, this is a truly fascinating exchange. And it's really telling that this is the thing that Tucker pushes back on, not the anti-Semitism. But he, like, kind of tepidly offered Nick advice on how to change his rhetoric to be more appealing, but did not push back on the substance of it because Tucker is actually just as anti-Semitic as Nick is.

Starting point is 01:00:45 Yeah. But no, this is the thing that he decided to do. And, yeah, like, my initial feeling after watching this whole two hour and 18 minutes stream is like this whole stream or this whole episode felt like Tucker was kind of trying to be some sort of mentor figured in Nick or saw that Nick might be the future in some way like whether that's the future of the party or future of like you know this sort of like commentating class or style and kind of wanted to offer a little bit of a guiding light towards someone who I

Starting point is 01:01:15 think Tucker does see as you know having some obvious issues and saying some nasty things but and wanting to kind of write that course in a way or provide Nick a bit of of a fresh start to restate some of his views on the biggest right-wing platform online, which is, which is Tucker's show right now. I guess that's kind of, that's kind of all I have on this women in porn section. I guess the last thing before we close, there is this question, right, with people in the GOP who are scared about Nick's influence, at least in the commentating classroom among like interns. Yeah. But specifically scared of it, one, because of the, you know, anti-Israel stuff, but also if that's going to hurt them electoral.

Starting point is 01:01:54 A lot of people couch this and saying, well, you know, these views aren't popular with the electorate. Republicans are never going to win elections if this griper thing takes over. And that leaves us, you know, people who are against, against, you know, the rise of fascism and authoritarianism in kind of a weird spot. Because I don't think we can really do anything to encourage, like, the groipification of the GOP in accelerationist fashion. But we can kind of let it happen. Yeah. We can choose. to just let it happen.

Starting point is 01:02:25 Or we can choose to kind of stop it in like the 2017 Antifa, you know, framework of like trying to prevent this stuff from spreading because it will always lead to bad things. And yeah, after doing all this research last week and really continuing to this week too,

Starting point is 01:02:41 I mean, Trump just gave a statement in support of Tucker and saying that he should get the word out about Nick Fuentes. I've continued to be looking at this stuff and can we even stop it though at this point, right? how much of the Antifa project even succeeded, considering where we are now politically, right?

Starting point is 01:02:59 But no, there certainly is this internal debate in terms of letting this stuff happen versus trying to actively oppose this, like, Groyper takeover of the GOP. Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's realistically anything that we can do to influence how popular Nick Fuentes is on the right. Like, if you just start screaming about how bad and dangerous he is,

Starting point is 01:03:22 that's going to convince a lot of people, oh, well, the left hates him. That must mean, you know, he's our guy. Yeah. Likewise, I don't know. I don't think it's our place. I think it's our place to make sure people know what Nick actually stands for, that if there's some sort of like whitewashing of his character

Starting point is 01:03:41 that they attempt to do in order to make this more electorally viable, that people are aware of, like, how an hinged this guy is. I don't think the kind of shit Nick is saying here, will do well when exposed to the body politic as a whole, because it's nuts. But that said, like, I don't think you can, you're going to scold your way out of this. No, no.

Starting point is 01:04:02 And I guess part of the education is making sure people have a more full understanding of Nick Fuentes' views on women and his, uh, and his little conversation on pornography. I think that actually is important because all of these guys are weird little insult freaks. Yes, and people don't like how weird they are when they're confronted with No. Right. Mostly what they're concerned about is whether or not there are jobs and shit is more or less

Starting point is 01:04:27 expensive. They don't want some weirdo telling them that living with women will make them weaker. No, even Tucker doesn't like that. Yeah. Well, I think that does it for us today at It Could Happen Here. Great. I hope this episode is something. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:04:46 I hope it's something too. Good night. Goodbye. Welcome to Anken Appethearer podcast telling you to rage against the dying of the light. I am your host, Bea Wong. And many episodes ago, significantly more tearfully, I talked about how, you know, watching the trans voices in media get fired and disappear. Felt like watching the stars disappear in the sky.

Starting point is 01:05:25 And today I am here to say, do you not go gently into that good night. Fuck him. Rage against the dying of the light. And with me to rage against the dying of the light and talk about some absolute bullshit is Alma Ovae who is a former staffer at Bon Appetit and we will be getting into why that's now technically former and the VP

Starting point is 01:05:45 of the News Guild of New York. Alma, welcome to the show. Hey, Mia, lovely to be here. I wish it was under better circumstances. I feel like everyone I talk to, I go, I wish you were just under better circumstances, but, you know. Yeah, circumstances across the board

Starting point is 01:05:59 are kind of trash right now. Yeah, they're really bad. The circumstances, they do be, they do be shit. So these specifically bad circumstances, circumstances are one, Condé Nast has just obliterated Teen Vogue, which had been one of the few actually very good progressive outlets, also one of the few outlets that would publish trans people regularly. And it's just gone now. And Alma and three of her colleagues were fired for very protected union activity being like, hey, what the fuck? In way kind of your terms of that. I can say

Starting point is 01:06:31 this because it's not my ass in the line. But yeah, do you want to talk a bit about what happened? Yeah, totally. I mean, to give the company its caveat, technically Teen Vogue still exists. It has just been moved under the broader organization of Vogue. They've now said that its coverage areas will include professional development as well as, well, there were a couple of other things that they highlighted, but certainly the things that they did not highlight include, say, you know, scathing coverage of the Trump administration or coverage of trans youth and trans health care bans for teenagers, coverage of like young celebrities of color and so on. But yeah, anyway, I guess to just go back to the start of the timeline, last Monday, we at the News Guild and, you know, at the Condé Nast Union, which is the union that represents basically every worker or every journalist and video maker at Conday Nast, except for those in the New Yorker, they are in like a separate bargaining unit that we see as like, you know,

Starting point is 01:07:29 linked sibling units, or linked sibling unions. We do most of our organizing together and our contracts are. nearly identical. But anyway, we were, yeah, I know, right? Union siblings. It's adorable. Yeah. We try to stay close. But anyway, we got word last Monday that about two-thirds of the staff of Teen Vogue were being laid off, including a friend of mine. And I think former guest on your show, actually, Lex McManumanneman. Yeah. Who was the politics editor at Teen Vogue, as well as a few of their culture editors, basically, like, if they were covering, I mean, being a little glib here, but like if they were covering, say, like, trans rights. It's trans youth, like progressive culture in nearly any way, shape, or form. Yep. They were either laid off or the remaining workers were folded into the larger organization of Vogue.

Starting point is 01:08:16 And I think they're still figuring out exactly where they fit into that organization and what, like, youth coverage looks like going forward. So that happened last Monday, which was obviously a massive loss. I sat in on a lot of the, like, the wine garden meetings going over the exit packages for those employees, a lot of like really sad and cheerful meetings that day. We should point out, this is being recorded on Monday. But 10th, last Monday is Monday, November 3rd. Not sure when this is going to come out, but yeah, just to make the timeline clear here.

Starting point is 01:08:42 Yes, absolutely. That's November 3rd. Yeah, that was Monday, November 3rd. Yeah, thank you for the correction. And then two days later at the company, we got a notification that there was another round of layoffs. This one hitting, I believe, folks on the video teams, and then people on the, like, copy and fact-checking section of the company as well. This was super disruptive. usually, you know, at a company like Conday Nast,

Starting point is 01:09:08 while the union doesn't have like explicit protections for this, and in fact, like, the company has the right to perform layoffs if they need to for business reasons. Usually when a round of layoffs goes through, there's like a period of peace that comes after that, you know? Like there will be, you know, a reduction in force. We'll figure out, okay, how are we going to keep doing our jobs now that we have fewer staffers?

Starting point is 01:09:28 And then if the company needs to, like, reduce the staff again, that will happen like a few months, maybe a year and a few. future. Two rounds of layoffs in the same week had people really, really scared and really stressed out. Because, I mean, for one, there's like just the sense of like, oh, God, a lot of my co-workers are gone. How am I going to be able to keep doing my job? We lost at my magazine, Bon Appetit, we lost our social media director, the person who was basically running our social accounts. We'd gotten notification from the company that editors were going to be doing their own posting from then on, which is just not how things, not how things I've ever worked before.

Starting point is 01:10:04 not really a thing that they're like, you know, my colleagues are brilliant, and many of them are brilliant, like, users of social media, but, like, not really a part of our jobs historically. So we're all pretty confused how we were supposed to, you know, actually keep running our magazine. Most of our magazines are already running on pretty reduced staffs in the first place. Yeah. Yeah. So, anyway, between that and the kind of obvious political connection that one could draw, or at least like that a lot of our members were afraid of, you know, Teen Vogue being this, like, pretty famously radical, or at the very least, like, pretty famously progressive publication,

Starting point is 01:10:36 doing some, like, really, really hard-hitting journalism. Yeah. There's a really clear line you can draw between, like, all of the Colbert and Jimmy Kibble, but also, like, the CBS stuff with Barry Weiss, like, this kind of broader right-wing shift in media. You can draw, I think, a direct line between all of that and, like, the shuttering or near-shuttering of Teen Vogue. So we did a thing that we basically always do when we're facing an issue like this, whether it's a big redact. and force or just some decision from the upper levels of the management that have all of the workers being like, wait, what the fuck did you just do? We had a rally in the cafeteria to go over

Starting point is 01:11:12 some of the questions that we all have for management. We created a list of questions that we wanted to ask, and I cannot stress how, like, routine this is for us as a union. We went from the cafeteria, which is on the 35th floor of the World Trade Center, down to the executive floor, which is directly below it on the 34th floor of the World Trade Center. And we walked over to the executive offices and said, we have some questions for Stan Duncan, who is the head of the people team at Conday Nass, basically one of the people in charge of either making these decisions of, you know, staffing and reduction, and then of enforcing those decisions as well. We went down to speak with Stan Duncan, ask him some of our questions. To other HR employees came out in medicine hallway. We said we'd like to

Starting point is 01:11:55 speak to Stan. We were happy to ask them our questions, but they said they wouldn't be particularly good at answering them or they might not have good answers for us. But Stan, they said there was in a meeting at the time. It just so happened that either Stan's meeting ended right then, or maybe he heard people talking in the hallway and decided to come check it out. Or maybe there wasn't a meeting. But for whatever reason, Stan happened to come out into the hallway at that time. And so we started trying to ask him our questions. Some of those questions included, like, was the closing of Teen Vogue inherently political, but also how are we going to be able to do our jobs going forward? How are we supposed to keep running these magazines if you're going to keep cutting our jobs?

Starting point is 01:12:32 And then also, how are we supposed to keep doing our jobs if we are constantly living in fear of losing them, you know? Stan does not answer any of these questions. Of course. Yeah, no, naturally. He tells us we're not allowed to congregate in the hallway. This is not true. Of course we... What?

Starting point is 01:12:50 Well, yeah, we, I mean, one, this is our workplace. we, I think, are allowed to have conversations in the hallway of our workplace. Two, I mean, if he was saying that we weren't allowed to, say, take part in union activities in the workplace, we have a right under Section 7 of the NLRA that says we can do that. We also have, like, contract provisions that say the company will not infringe upon our right to organize and demonstrate in the workplace. So that just wasn't true. And in fact, the union, before everything else happened, already filed a grievance about denying our Section 7 rights to organize in the workplace. Oh, God. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:13:23 Yep, yep. So anyway, Stan tries to get us to go back to our desks. He walks across the floor, tells us to follow him. We follow him and keep asking questions. He says that we have to go back and do our jobs. We say, we will happily do our jobs if you could just answer our questions. He tells us that we have to go back to our workplaces. We remind him, this is our workplace. And anyway, we end up asking him those questions. We follow him back and forth along the hallway. He goes back into his office, closes the door. We all go back to our desks for the rest of the day. I finished up my work and I go home, and then I get notification from the News Guild at 7 that the company has notified them that they are terminating me and three of my colleagues. Jesus Christ.

Starting point is 01:14:06 No severance, no ongoing insurance coverage. My insurance expires at the end of the month. Oh, my God. No notice, no investigation effective immediately. So as of last Wednesday, I am no longer an employee of Condé Nast. I had been working there for five years. I helped start the Kondaynast Union in the time since I joined there. I was one of the most tenured members of my magazine, actually.

Starting point is 01:14:29 People don't generally stick around there for a long time. But at 27 years old, I was a long hauler, Mia. And yeah, in the time since then, our union has filed a second grievance. There was the first one over telling us we couldn't congregate. There's now a second one over the retaliatory firings of me and my three colleagues. The company has since put five other people, I believe, on an unpaid leave in like an attempt to discipline more people who took part in the demonstration. It's kind of hard to see rhyme or reason in the people that they decided to discipline. So I was speaking quite a bit during the demonstration, as was one of the other people who was terminated.

Starting point is 01:15:12 One person asked one question that was Jake LaHood had wired. He asked a question towards the beginning, which was, what is your definition of congregate? when they told us we can't congregate in the hallway, which I think is a perfectly valid question. And then one person who was terminated actually, as far as I know, didn't speak at all during the demonstration. He was, however, the vice president of the New Yorker Union, the vice chair of the New Yorker Union.

Starting point is 01:15:36 And, you know, an organizer that the company was, like, very well aware of. And then as for the people who were placed on disciplinary leaves, I mean, I believe some of them actually spoke significantly more than some of the people who were terminated during the demonstration. Yeah. But we're certainly, like, historically at the very least, less visible and less vocal union organizers. So the trend that we're seeing is that the people who spoke up were either people who had been historically very active in the union or in Jake's case, somebody who is doing really, really impressive coverage of the Trump administration and, like, really, really hard hitting journalism against, like, Doge and, like, the general, like, efforts of the right right now to, you know, I mean, listeners of this podcast know everything that's going on there. Yep.

Starting point is 01:16:14 I'm going to say this, and I'm going to adopt the preferred language of these professionals, which is to say that, and this is the preferred language of management, is that some people are calling this both a return of resegregation and an obvious anti-union political purge, because it is a bunch of trans people and a bunch of non-white people who have been eliminated from Teen Vogue. You know, it's something that you were talking about earlier, about drawing the connection between this and CBS.

Starting point is 01:16:52 And like, yeah, what did Barry Weiss do when she got into CBS? Yeah, she fired like every non-white person who worked there, right? Because their overt political plan is resegregation. And, you know, in order to do resegregation, you fire all of the people who are non-white, you get rid of any trans people, and you get, I mean, admittedly, it's CBS. It's not like they had like a giant, like, you know, it wasn't like a haven of trans politics in the first place. I mean, they had some, like, you know, there's some people there who were like cool. But, like, it wasn't like, you know, it's not, it wasn't like Teen Vogue, which genuinely had.

Starting point is 01:17:24 way more trans coverage than like any other outlet. No, totally. And I cannot emphasize enough. Like, the extent to which this is the most normal union activity in the entire world and to which this is the most protected category in the entire world. And, you know, obviously a bunch of the bosses and a bunch of like the corporations that are doing this shit, like don't think the NLRA should exist and like is like a legally valid thing.

Starting point is 01:17:45 But it's still in force right now. And so, well, mostly. But like, like for this? Yeah. Still enforce. So there is just unbelievably hideously illegal retaliation. retaliatory firings that are illegal in like so many different ways it's baffling like it's like you need like a second law degree to find every single law that just broke totally i mean the thing that i

Starting point is 01:18:07 would point out too is like like you said this is an extremely common type of union action like across the entire labor movement everyone does this everyone marches on the boss we also specifically like as a union we've marched on the boss like tons of different times yeah we've marched on stand multiple times in the past. There was one demonstration where we all marched on Stan during contract bargaining, actually, last year, where we had significantly more people, and I will say being much more confrontational. I remember, like, a large crowd booing him in front of, like, the entire executive floor. And I would say, and I would say, like, two to three times as many people present watching in a much more, like,

Starting point is 01:18:47 loud and activated and energetic forum. We've had marches on other executives. We've had marches on editors-in-chief in the past. And I mean, one of the reasons that, like, when I got the news that I was being terminated, I, like, basically went into shock. This felt extremely tame compared to past union actions that we've done. Yeah. And also, no one has ever been disciplined for taking part in any action like this in the past,

Starting point is 01:19:09 like, let alone terminated. Like, as far as I know, no one's ever been called into a meeting and said, like, you shouldn't have done that and we're keeping an eye on you. So this is like a massive escalation on the company side in terms of retaliation. And I mean, that's also what we've heard kind of across the board at the News Guild. You know, I've been in close conversations with our president and with other like organizers at the Guild who have said, and this is, you know, our local union that organizes a bunch of different publications in New York City and kind of in the surrounding area. This is one of the most egregious examples of retaliation that just about anybody I've talked to has seen in our union's history. And there's like pretty, I think, valid concerns.

Starting point is 01:19:46 that like if a company like Conday Nast is able to get away with this, like other companies within our union are going to like follow suit and like take this as their cue, which is both scary but also has been energizing for a lot of people. We've seen like a lot of folks really excited to like show up and join our fight and get involved in any way that they can. Hell yeah. The other thing that I would point out based on what you were saying is so Condonest has a queer

Starting point is 01:20:10 publication, Them.us, which I think is one of the all-time URLs for a queer you possibly have. Very funny. So between them and Teen Vogue, you had a lot of the companies like trans staffers. They kind of function as like sister publications. They, like, sit next to each other. They work closely together. Outside of them, as far as I know, I was the only trans woman implied on editorial Akone Nest. And I am certainly the only trans woman in our union, including at them, actually. All of the trans woman employees there, to my understanding, are not part of the unit. They are in management positions, which, yay, representation,

Starting point is 01:20:49 but also means that, like, I was obviously in this, like, very lonely position, but also this very, like, visible and, like, clearly very vulnerable position, where it's, like, incredibly easy to single somebody like me out. I would also say during our contract fight, we had a lot of back and forth between, like, me and company management about their coverage under the health care plan, namely, they excluded facial feminization surgery, which meant that like if you were an employee of Condi Nast and you wanted facial feminization surgery,

Starting point is 01:21:18 you were either out of luck or had to find a way to raise about $50,000 based on a lot of estimates that I've seen. If you're really lucky and good and you're going to go to Thailand, you can maybe get it for 30K. Yeah, right. No, exactly. Which admittedly the Thailand stuff is cool. No, totally. It's like, it's like, all power to you.

Starting point is 01:21:36 That's, it's a lot of fucking money. Totally. So much shit. It sucks so badly. Even more if you want to recover in your own home and your own bed. Yeah, actually, and we weren't able to resolve that in the contract. I got FFS this year, and to do it, I had to go on like a New York State marketplace plan. Oh, no.

Starting point is 01:21:55 Jesus Christ. I had both plans active at the same time, but I had to get like secondary insurance that cost $700 a month in order to get FFS covered. Oh, my God. Yeah, and that still ended up being significantly cheaper. Yep, yep, yep, yep. I mean, and frankly, like, Condé Nast never covered it. Yeah. Who did cover it was, like, lots of my union colleagues who jumped in and, like, created a go fund me for me and, like, helped him raise, like, all of the money that I needed to get surgery.

Starting point is 01:22:21 And very, very thankful for that. But anyway, point being, like, the company does not exactly have the best track record when it comes to, and, like, I feel very qualified to say this as, like, the trans woman in the Condi Nast union. Yeah. The company does not exactly have the best track record in terms of, like, how they have treated us and me specifically. around trans issues. Yeah. So being like, again, kind of singled out in this way, and then being hit with like this significant,

Starting point is 01:22:46 a piece of retaliation, it just feels really telling. And also, I mean, really disappointing, frankly. Like, I've been at Condé for, or I keep using the present tense. I'd been at Condé for five years. And, you know, I liked my job. I was really good at my job.

Starting point is 01:23:01 I hope that they will reverse course and turn this around. But anyway, it's disappointing. It's disappointing that, like, that doesn't, really seem to mean anything when the rubber hits the road. Yeah, I think there's two ways you can look at it. One is it's like, oh, yeah, of course the one trans woman in this bargaining unit was like the VP of the union because like, yeah, trans femmes do be organizing. We do, we do do this.

Starting point is 01:23:24 Paint that the truth. But then the second thing, and you were talking about this, like, yeah, the magazines are already understaffed and they're just destroying them, you know, and this is something that I can say, which is like, it's something we saw from Jeff Bezos, right? When Jeff Bezos sort of like took control the Washington Post and then gradually sort of purged their staff and like you know has this whole thing now about how oh uh we're supposed to be pro free market and pro individual liberties which does not include trans rights you know if you look at what happened to the washington post subscriber account it's like nothing it's like the paper is dying

Starting point is 01:23:54 it's effectively just like it's not it's not like an actual functional like profit making thing anymore like it's just it's just the sort of propaganda vanity outlet of a billionaire and that's you know, that's probably what's going to happen to CBS is that it's going to just get sort of annihilized stripped down because these people don't want a functioning media. They don't give a shit if these things actually work because what they're

Starting point is 01:24:17 trying to do right now is accumulate raw, accumulate just raw power and attempt to do raw sort of narrative and media control in order to stay in power. And it's not working because everyone still hates them. Even though they bought all the newspapers, everyone is like these people suck. But

Starting point is 01:24:32 this is something we run into with union and stuff all the time, which is like, yeah, there are a lot of bosses who would rather their own company be non-functional. You know, their workers have any voice in it. And especially now in this political moment in which, oh, hey, look, the fascists are trying to seize control of the media. That becomes increasingly more and more an option of just, fuck it, we'll just, like, get handouts from like the tech fascists forever. And in exchange for that, we'll publish whatever propaganda garbage they want to spit out. Yeah, I mean, I, I, would also say, like, I'm not sure I get about across the entire company, although I believe it was one of

Starting point is 01:25:10 the better traffic stories that Condon asked all year. But one of the most, certainly one of the most trafficked teen vogue stories in this past year was like out of their politics section. It was the Vivian Wilson, Elon Musk's trans daughter cover story. Really, really, really good, an amazing piece of journalism and also a piece that went like super viral and I'm sure made a ton of money for the company. Yeah. And so one would think, you know, looking at like the trends of the past that if that was going to inform anything, like the company would actually say like more politics coverage, like more progressive coverage out of Teen Vogue. And like, I remember, I don't have the exact numbers on me because I'm a hack and a fraud,

Starting point is 01:25:47 but if it wasn't a hack and a fraud, I would have the exact numbers from the coverage of like the increase in both revenue generation and in like readership that Teen Vogue underwent once they started doing politics stuff onto the first Trump administration. And now you're getting rid of that for what are clearly. business reasons and are clearly very, very clearly not related to the fact that there is a bunch of a bunch of political pressure from a bunch of fascists to run the government now? Yeah. I mean, obviously we don't have like perfect insight into like what's going on behind closed doors at Conday Nast. But I can't say that we had a diversity committee meeting with our

Starting point is 01:26:23 joint union management diversity committee a week before all of this went down. And they told us that they were, you know, paraphrasing here, but management said that they are actively trying to avoid the attention and the ire of the Trump administration, which at the time definitely raised some eyebrows, and I think led to the big response last week of like, oh, by actively avoid the attention of the Trump administration, you meant just like get rid of the parts of the company that are like hostile towards it. And I mean, kind of too, like the good business of progressive coverage.

Starting point is 01:26:54 I've covered a lot of beats in my time of Bon Appetit, but there was a period where I was covering like the Starbucks workers United fight pretty closely. A lot of articles about that in my back pockets. But those generally did really well. Actually, one of the first times I faced, like, big right-wing backlash online was covering the, like, Dylan Mulvaney Bud Light protest. Oh, my God. Which I used as an opportunity to write about the, like, the Korslight boycotts of, like, the West Coast queer worker movement and, like, kind of the birth of the, like, gay labor movement. One of my best traffic of all-time stories.

Starting point is 01:27:24 I wrote about the, like, why the watermelon symbol became, like, such a big kind of, like, rallying cry in that, like, Palestine organizing over the past few years. again, massive traffic winner for the company. But every time, you know, we get into these meetings with management or every time we like hear about the direction that the company is shifting, or coverage is shifting, it always seems away from those kind of hot button issues that, like, there's clearly an appetite for stories about. And instead towards, well, whatever it's towards, you know. Yeah. And you know, and you can look at this. Like, there's been a whole bunch of, there was a story recently about Dr. Oz, like, pivoting his whole thing into doing like a right-wing, like media grift. And nobody's walking.

Starting point is 01:28:02 watching it. Like, the average episode of it could happen here absolutely annihilates, like, just like, like, orders of magnitude better than like, no, I think it was Dr. Phil. Yeah, it was Dr. Phil who did that. Look, they're like the same guy. Like, wow, that's, that's slightly unfair to Dr. Oz. Like, yeah, Dr. Phil did this, like, did the right wing pivot and like nobody's listening to the show. It's like, no one. This is like one of the most famous people in the United States getting annihilated by like Mia and the tready crew. Like, it could happen here. like oh wow you know and yeah like there there there is this like massive demand for this stuff as like people increasingly realized that oh yeah wait hold on we're getting every single person like in the

Starting point is 01:28:44 country is like almost individually getting screwed over by the trump administration he's like individually micro targeting every single part of his base and pissing them off like there was the whole farmer soy thing right um and like he's like i guess technically has negotiated soy bean sales now but like, you know, you can look at like, so he was fighting this whole war with his entire farming base, and then he immediately turned around from there and went to fight the cattle ranchers. It's like, there's so much appetite for any critique of this because it's so obviously just like malignant and narcissistically violent. And all of these companies that are like, you know, like, this has always been the problem with the free press is that like the U.S. does not have a free press. The U.S. is a capitalist press.

Starting point is 01:29:22 And so, you know, you can just buy them or apply enough political pressure and they will fall in line. that's like what they're doing here. So what you're saying is we need a left-wing Joe Rogan. I'm going to become the Joker. No, of course. I mean, I'll also say, like, I became an organizer in the News Guild for a lot of reasons, right? Like, Bon Appetit was my first job out of college, and I was really involved covering the dining workers organizing at my undergrad school.

Starting point is 01:29:54 So that was like definitely my introduction there. But at the same time, like, when I got into the workplace, I kind of realize that media unions are maybe one of the only things that will keep the media, at least as currently exists, alive until we can come up with some other model that is more sustainable. Because, I mean, I look at a company like Condi Nast, and you have this very well-compensated, very large cast of managers and middle managers. Yep.

Starting point is 01:30:23 And then you have this, like, massive body of people actually producing the magazines, actually making, like doing the work of the journalism and the culture reporting and the video making and so on and so on. And, you know, one of those groups is constantly subject to layoffs. One of those groups is constantly being made to, say, work overtime and maybe being told not to bill for as much overtime as they're being needed to work. And one of those groups is being extremely well compensated and has seemingly incredible job security. Yeah. Like all of the resources are being sucked out by a combination of like these venture capitalists dipships at the top and then all of these fucking middle management bureaucrats, like, who do nothing.

Starting point is 01:31:01 Right. And the thing that slows that down is, like, workers having a say in the media, you know, like the people who actually can produce the work, like, being able to say, and these are the circumstances under which the work is going to be produced. I mean, I think it's no surprise that, like, if you look at a publication, like, Hellgate or, like, Defector or, like, aftermath in 404 and all of these, like, worker co-ops that are popping up kind of across the media ecosystem, like, their worker owns, and they have this, very kind of flat like payment structure where everybody is making around the same amount like

Starting point is 01:31:30 everybody has a say in the way that the workplace functions and like these appear at least to me to be some of the most like stable media like organizations that are out there right now and all that tells me is that like workplace democracy i mean in like the truest sense of the word you know workplace democracy as it is earned by like worker organizations unions worker co-ops whatever they might be is the thing that's going to keep the media afloat like that that's going to keep the media afloat like That is the model that is like sustainable in the long run. So I think that's one of the reasons that having like a strong and active Condi Nast union, though management probably wouldn't agree, at least explicitly, is like one of the things

Starting point is 01:32:07 that can keep Condi Nast alive for as long as possible. Like, you know, again, they would probably loathe to admit this. But like an organization like the Condi Nast union can only exist as long as an organization like Condi Nast exists. Their fates are kind of tied to one another. Well, okay, this is, we're, we're, we're, we're, doing the incredibly esoteric via union three. There's two

Starting point is 01:32:28 versions of looking at this one. Okay, this is the version where, yeah, the Kondaynass Union is structurally dependent on the existence of Kondaynast and this means that the power of the union is based on its ability to bring people back to work. However, Kama, there is the second one. You could theoretically have, you could theoretically have

Starting point is 01:32:44 the Konday Nass Union without Konday Nast where we have we have seen it over, we've taken it over, we're running it now, we are just now the union and you know, and the The thing I will say about that, and this is always been the advantage of co-ops is that, like, you are immediately from the ground up, you're going to have a kind of efficiency advantage because there is not an entire middle layer. Like, obviously, like, there were, like, producers who do a bunch of work like my boss, Sophie. Like, if we didn't have Sophie, none of this would work, right?

Starting point is 01:33:15 Yeah. There's also a bunch of other people who have the same title who do nothing. And that's not even true. If they did nothing, it would be better. they interfere with everything constantly and get paid an extraordinary large amount of money to make everything work worse. And you don't have to have that entire like bureaucratic layer like the layer of middle management. And this has always been the massive just efficiency advantage that you have when workers running their own shit is that you don't have to have those people. And the coordination that needs to be done.

Starting point is 01:33:42 Okay, you have people doing the coordination. You don't have 15 layers of dipsets whose job it is to run around making your job harder. Hmm. This has been me talking about the organizational advantages of anarchy. It's great. I was so sorry. No, you're fine. I mean, what I will say is like, it's an interesting thing about Condé Nast.

Starting point is 01:34:04 And like a lot of, I think these media conglomerates is like, you know, other than like when I am a member of the Condé Nast union, like, I don't really interact with people who work elsewhere at Condi Nast. Like, I interact with people at my magazine. And like, the people at Bon Appetit and I like generally get along great. I had a really, really awesome relationship with my manager. I have a lot of admiration for him and what he does. I think he's like the same way that you talk about Sophie. I think he's like really great at his job. I like have a good relationship with our editor-in-chief.

Starting point is 01:34:30 I have a lot of respect for her as well. We have a really, really solid system going where we are like able to make this food magazine every month and able to keep this website online and able to make content that we're all like, you know, recipes and stories that we're all really, really proud of. And then at the same time, we were kind of subject to this like kind of bigger whatever media machine. that's kind of moving around ahead or above us. And also moving around like, again, but just like so little transparency. Like, yeah. Going back to the action on Wednesday the 5th, we have tried to have meetings with Stan,

Starting point is 01:35:00 like the executive that we talked to in the hallway, the executive that we marched on, we have tried to have meetings with him so many times in so many different ways. We have emailed him questions, not gotten responses. We have invited him to like town halls, not gotten responses. We invited him to meet with our diversity committee. and labor relations got mad at us for C-Cing him on the email. God. Historically, like, that kind of level of the company has been extremely averse to interacting

Starting point is 01:35:26 with its workers to, like, answering basic questions. Which is why, like, when you look at, you know, there's a video out there of the interaction, like, this is why we have to march on our bosses like this, because there's literally no other way to get a single answer out of them. Because they kind of, I mean, they exist on this other floor of the company altogether. like so I don't know it's it's very frustrating it's frustrating to like kind of exist in this like dual system of like well

Starting point is 01:35:51 we have a magazine that we are operating like very effectively on our own and yet there's this entire thing above it that is making these decisions about how it ought to function and like what it ought to be doing yeah and you don't know what it does because totally they're not there like they have absolutely no idea how your production actually functions I would be surprised if the man who fired me knew what my job was yeah no absolutely not all the old critiques of like the Soviet system

Starting point is 01:36:26 we're like oh there's just this out of touch bureaucrat 300 miles away making production decisions blah blah blah blah it's like oh yeah no that's actually just like how your job works is some suit in like another building is like oh your jobs are all replaceable oh you can you can do this with like 20% less staff oh I don't even know what you do but we're firing you

Starting point is 01:36:45 because we hate you specifically like it's just terrible way for the world to run yeah totally And I mean, we have like these models of like what successful workplaces can look like, you know, like places with militant unions that like actually work, like actually give workers a say and what their conditions should be and what their conditions are. Places that have like gotten rid of the boss altogether. And like, you know, again, those worker co-ops that I listed, like, there are these functional models of what the future of media can look like. And this is a thing that I say all the time is like the reason that I'm excited about being a member of the News Guild, the reason I got involved in organizing in the first place is like, I think there is a future of media.

Starting point is 01:37:21 Like I think there is a way that like, you know, people like. you and people like me, like people who write and tell stories and like are interested in like talking to people and getting their stories out there, I think there are sustainable ways that we could do that. And I think the people who know how to do like the sustainable future of this thing are the people who are making the product in the first place. Yeah. Like we are the ones with vision. Like we are the ones who know how to make something that can continue to exist sustainably, something that can like even under the capitalist like framework, like something that can make money, something that can be profitable. A lot of the great journalists I know are like actually very interested

Starting point is 01:37:53 in and very, very good at making work that, like, generates quite a bit of revenue. And I don't think that's a particularly bad thing. Like, they know how to do this in a way that is sustainable in a way that, like, keeps readers excited and engaged and, like, willing to, like, pitch in their own ways. The problem is that the people who seem to have that know-how, the people who make the thing and the people who know how to keep making the thing and the people who are making the decisions, like, aren't the same people. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:38:17 And the way that you fix that divide, like, is by demanding a seat at the table, is by demanding the people who are making those decisions actually do listen to you, and then demanding that they actually follow through on the obligation or the things that they say they're going to do. One of the really frustrating things about my termination is, like, they're saying that I was, like, too aggressive and was harassing the chief people officer. Again, there's a video I think is extremely exonerating. Also, oh, wow, the trans women's being too aggressive. Wow.

Starting point is 01:38:45 Wow, never seen that one before. One day they're going to develop a second joke. wow, anything now? No, I know. Actually, one thing, some, like, chud on the internet, who was, like,

Starting point is 01:38:58 trying to make fun of me said I was wearing a wig. I would like to state, for the record, I don't wear a wig. This is my hair. I grew it myself. It took a while.

Starting point is 01:39:07 Thank you. I agree. Although, one of my friends told me that I had to have turf fangs the other day, which I really... Actually, it was the day that I got fired,

Starting point is 01:39:16 come to think of it. It was before they knew, to be fair, but... No, I know. Sorry, what was I saying before that? The last time I got owned that hard was my mom called me a talking head, so, you know, it happens. Sometimes you get absolutely obliterated.

Starting point is 01:39:39 Hey, I love that band. But if the company, like, actually believed that I was, you know, being too aggressive or, like, committing, I think the words that they used are, like, gross misconduct. Like, I know. We have just caused protections in our contract that include, like, an explicit procedure that you're supposed to go through for gross misconduct. Like, if the company was following the contract, if they, like, felt the obligation to do so, what should have happened is they shouldn't have let me finish the rest of my workday.

Starting point is 01:40:07 Instead, I should have been escorted out of the building by security. I should have been placed on a leave. There should have been an investigation with, like, time for me and the union to comment. And then a decision should have came out. and the entire time that that should have been happening, I should have been paid. And like, if that sounds greedy, okay, the company agreed to it. Like, they didn't have to sign the contract, but they did. But this is another, like, concerning trend that we're seeing right now with, like, you know, the gutted NLR and, like, the kind of, you know, shirking of NLR, like, responsibilities from companies.

Starting point is 01:40:37 It's, like, companies are, like, straight up gaslighting workers about things that are in the contracts that they agreed to. They are, like, pointing to the contract and saying that it says things that it doesn't say. or that it doesn't say things that are like right there for you and clear English right before your eyes. Actually, another time that we tried to talk to Stan this year was, so we are based out of New York predominantly. We have remote workers across the country, although we were told just about everybody at the company to start coming into the New York offices four days a week. There's a section of our contract that says that under a declared state of emergency, workers can stay home. Well, this summer in New York, listeners may remember, we had a really massive, like, terrible heat wave, like temperatures. in the hundreds every day, like going into the subway stations in that week, I remember feeling

Starting point is 01:41:21 like I was baking. During the declared state of emergency, which again, the contract says workers do not have to come into the office. The company said, we don't care, you have to come into the office. Paraphrasing, those aren't their exact words, but they're not too far off. And again, we said, okay, but the contract says under a declared state of emergency, we don't have to come into the office. And they said, you have to come into the office, four days a week, no exceptions. And it is maddening. I mean... Yeah, that's life-threatening. Like... Oh, I mean, absolutely. And I will say, like, you know, I've been at the company five years. That makes me a bit of a long hauler. Like, we have people who have been at the company for like 15, 20 years. Like, there are people who are like near retirement age who are standing on a subway platform, again, it's New York City. People aren't really in air-conditioned cars driving to work. Like, there are people for whom, like, at all ages, standing on a subway platform in that kind of heat is like a really life-threatening and like really dangerous thing to demand people do. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:42:15 Which is like one of the things that we were thinking about when we like fought for that contract language. And like one of the things that we were thinking about when we were like nearly ready, like in fact that we were ready to go on strike and like disrupt the MetGala in May of 2024, like that is one of the things that we were thinking about when we drafted that. And one of the things we were really excited that the company agreed to give us when we won our contract. And so for them to immediately just say, oh, just kidding. Well, oh, well now if we file a grievance and might take like months to rectify. well, just kidding, those rights that we gave you, they don't exist anymore. Sorry. And again,

Starting point is 01:42:47 it is like clear, easy to understand language that they are somehow willing to just say, like the contract doesn't say what it says. It's interesting because, I mean, you know, there's like on the one hand, like companies have always like not followed contracts and it's always been like, okay, if you want your contract to do what it says it does, you have to force them to do it. But on the other hand, like, the thing that it reminds me of is like, like, one of the things happen with the Trump administration when I've been talking about them pissing off their base is there's been a bunch of unions that they've just, you know, bilaterally been, this has said this is national security, we don't recognize your contract anymore.

Starting point is 01:43:17 So for example, like the, the funny version of it is they did this to the prison guard union, which is hilarious. It's like, yeah, I don't know, you guys, you guys shat in your own bed. Now you have to lie in it. Like, I don't know what to tell you. But like, yeah, but like, you know, the national government has been doing this to a bunch of unions because they've just been going. Totally. Oh, yeah, no, we don't have to follow this contract anymore because it's national security. And that's the future that all of these people want and that they're like, you know, this is of what they're fighting for. This is part of that fight is that they want to fight where

Starting point is 01:43:46 union contracts don't exist and they can just do whatever they want to anyone. I mean, there's also like a clear line you can draw from say like the Reagan era and the like air traffic controller union strike break and then like the way that from like the federal government unions and like the way that the federal government treats its unions that like basically the rest of the American labor movement and rather the management side responses to the American labor movement generally flow. Yeah. Yeah. Is there anything else that you want to to make sure that people know? Well, I mean, in the coming days and weeks,

Starting point is 01:44:17 the union is planning a lot to fight back against the company. Hell yeah. That said, one of the things that we know most about media organizations generally is that they are very concerned about public pressure and they are very concerned about public image. This is like APR-obsessed industry for better and for worse. So we are hoping that, like, readers and, you know, fans and followers will keep the pressure up against Condé Nast.

Starting point is 01:44:42 to show like employers like them that like we will not stand for this. We have an Action Network petition up right now that we are going to keep collecting signatures for that we hope to deliver to management soon. Depending on when this comes out, I mean, we'll be collecting signatures regardless. And that is also one of the best ways signing on to that. We'll get you updates for other ways that you can support us from the outside. But otherwise, I mean, we've got a lot of fighting to do. We've got a lot of organizing to do.

Starting point is 01:45:08 I certainly don't think my days at Condi Naster over. I expect that, like, however long it takes for the lot of shakeout, like, I hope to be reinstated, as do the other, like, three terminated employees. I also am certain that, like, we will be able to win justice for ourselves and the other people who were, like, illegally retaliatorily disciplined following the action. And I also think that this is nowhere near the last action that Condi Nass Upper Management should expect. if anything, like, this is just showing us that if we want our contract to be enforced, if we want the rights that they said that they would give us, we are going to have to keep holding them to account,

Starting point is 01:45:46 and we are going to have to keep fighting for them. Trying to figure out whether or not I can get away with saying, you have sown the wind and now you'll reap the whirlwind. Oh, God. You have sown the Bon Appetit, and now you will get the, I can't finish that. I don't know where that goes. Yeah, you've sown the bun appetit, now you'll get teen votes too.

Starting point is 01:46:12 You have sown the bun and now you'll get the appetite. That doesn't mean anything. That's on anything. You know, look, it's a struggling time for the whole industry. Yeah, and if people want to find you, do you want to be found A and B, if people want to find you, where can they find your work? Yeah, totally. I plan to keep writing and doing journalism for,

Starting point is 01:46:37 however long I can allow to keep doing that. So I'm on basically every website at goodbye Alma, including the evil ones, sadly. I also, I co-edit a literary magazine with my friend Joyce. That's called Picnic Magazine. It's very cool. It's all work by

Starting point is 01:46:56 trans contributors. We are predominantly a print-first publication. You can find us at PicnicMag on Instagram. We're also on Blue Sky. I should have prepared our ad, but I'm sure I can send that to you afterwards. Yeah, we'll put it in the description. And, yeah, we are available in a few bookstores in big cities across the country. We also have a you can download our PDF and a pay-what-you-want kind of way.

Starting point is 01:47:20 We have a second issue coming soon, although it turns out making a magazine with just two trans women is really difficult. So, yeah, check that out. It's all-fiction, criticism, and poetry by trans contributors. And, yeah, follow me at Goodbye Alma Online. Yeah. Yeah. And if you want actual news that's fit to print, you're going to have to fight for it. Amen to that, sister.

Starting point is 01:47:44 Hello, everyone. My name is Donna El-Kurd. And this is It Could Happen here. I'm a professor and researcher of Arab and Palestinian politics. And a senior non-resident fellow at the Arab Center, Washington. Today we're joined by Shedin Sekari, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her book, Men of Capital, Scarborough. and economy in Mandate Palestine, explores economy, territory, the home, the body, and she's also

Starting point is 01:48:28 editor-in-chief of the Journal of Palestine Studies. Today, I wanted to invite Shadine on to discuss the importance of Palestinian knowledge production and Palestinian spaces for writing, researching, analyzing, et cetera. So yeah, Shadine, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for having me. So let's maybe start with a very basic question. What is? is the Journal of Palestine Studies. Could you give us kind of an overview? Sure. So the Journal of Palestine Studies is the flagship journal of Palestinian Studies in the English language. It was established in 1971. So that makes it 54 years old. First, it was part of the then-Berut-based and still Beirut-based Institute for Palestine Studies and Kuwait University, which sponsored, what was understood at the time as an international forum

Starting point is 01:49:25 to discuss all aspects of the Palestine question and the Arab Zionist conflict. And really, the people who established it were looking for shaping a space that could discuss these matters freely. And the story of the founders is a really interesting one because they were people like Hisham Sharabi, Walid Khalidi, Burhan Dushan,

Starting point is 01:49:50 Adzharov and Constantine Zrek, who actually was the person who coined the way that we name the Nekba in his book Manal Nekba that he wrote in 1948, in which he coined this term, the catastrophe, to think about 1948, which would, you know, be our ongoing condition. And I think the way to think about these people in the way that they began the journal is to think about them as really confronting a landscape of erasure, denial, and urgency, and occupying this kind of steady, incessant pain of the original inception of the Nekba. You know, if you think about it in 1971, it was not that long before a decade and a half. Yeah, right. And I think what's important about, you know, in the last couple of years, people have been kind of making demands about Palestinian studies as part of, you know, some of the student movements and the staff and faculty movements. And I think it's really important for people to know that this comes from a much longer tradition of the production of knowledge as a real insistence on existence.

Starting point is 01:51:13 Absolutely. Palestinians have been producing knowledge about their state of affairs, you know, just like today, academics in Gaza are producing knowledge, right? And I'm always, like, struck by how just ahead of its time, you know, the General of Palestine studies is like a lot of our understanding of the conflict that are now finally starting to seep into the mainstream were first discussed in these pages. Some of the research findings, about the history were first articulated in these pages. And so that kind of knowledge production is just, it is a form of resistance to erasure. Absolutely. And just, you know, some of those would be, for example, Planned Dalit, which was the, you know, the plan, which would lead to the destruction of 450 to 537 Palestinian villages. And this plan would come to be, recognized through the work of Benny Morris as an Israeli historian who had access to Israeli documents, but it's actually was Walid Khalidi, who had been evidencing and showing the empirical foundations of Planned Alid. And it was in the Journal of Palestine studies that he published those

Starting point is 01:52:35 findings. Right. In that case, I think that, again, for people who are really engaging the the movement for free Palestine and free Palestinians, we really have to be approaching the political economy of who gets to speak. Right. And whose knowledge production is uplifted as legitimate and worthy. And I think you see a lot of this kind of centering of Israeli voices. And I think we really have to, in this moment, it's urgent to center Palestinian knowledge production. Yeah, there's just so many ways that we witness this all the time, that it's not something worthy of discussion unless an Israeli voice says it. And there's an inherent suspicion about the Palestinian scholar, the Palestinian analyst, the Palestinian knowledge producer of some kind. Now, of course, the last two years have been a true upheaval, the genocide in Gaza, a tragedy that we, honestly, we haven't really absorbed.

Starting point is 01:53:42 and possibly can't. And we've seen in the last two years a concerted effort to erase Palestinians further from the American Academy, but from also like scholarship, generally speaking. But before I get into that, I wondered if you could kind of give your impression of what did doing Palestinian studies look like before October 7th? How, was it easy? Was it acceptable? I mean, I know the answers, but I'd like you to say them. So I think one of the things that's been interesting to observe, and I would date this as happening around COVID, when our colleagues in various disciplines started confronting the reality of their archives closing. So I'm a historian.

Starting point is 01:54:31 So I speak from that place. You know, people who study Europe, people who study the, United States kind of confronting that the reality that they might not access archives that they are accustomed to accessing. And in a similar way, facing the kind of targeting and surveillance, the bipartisan targeting and surveillance of academic knowledge production and trying to explain to people, this is what we've existed under all along. Now, I think there are similarities across communities of knowledge production. So I think people who work in black studies, who work in indigenous studies, who work in queer studies, gender and sexuality have also been under the duress of surveillance and targeting. I think for those of us who have been doing Palestinian studies, what does it mean? especially if you're a Palestinian doing it. But whoever you are, it means you have to show up 10 times more ready than anybody else.

Starting point is 01:55:39 It means you have to conduct yourself as if you are always being recorded. Right. It means that every single word that you say you should be able to stand up for in a court of law. And all of those kinds of restrictions, actually, you know, you give us lemons. we're going to make lemonade because those restrictions have imposed on us a kind of rigor that is the least that we can do. It also means, I mean, I think for a lot of us, yourself included, right? I was just, somebody was interviewing me yesterday about, oh, have you faced harassment or censorship? And I think, at least in my case, I'm constantly, you know, experienced.

Starting point is 01:56:38 these things and just kind of swallowing it. Right. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Just like getting along with the business of the every day. So there was this moment back in 2015, 2015, where for whatever reason, every couple of months, one of the bots of one of these surveillance websites would start highlighting me

Starting point is 01:57:01 and insulting me on Twitter, you know, liable calling me name, going after how I look, like really vulgar, misgendering me, that kind of thing. And I'd come out of my lecture, you know, and you know, I teach big classes. And I'd come out of a big, you know, 250 person lecture, which requires so much focus and energy and being present and, you know, that adrenaline rush. And I'd look at my phone and I'd have 50 notifications. and it would just be one insult after another. And that's just part of the job.

Starting point is 01:57:44 Yeah. And that's just how it's been, right? Like, you know, from the beginning at least of my graduate career, and I started grad school, you know, September 11 happened when I was in grad school and I was in New York when it happened. And, you know, we've been under surveillance. We've been named. We've been watched as part of what we do.

Starting point is 01:58:07 as you said. And in fact, I got my master's at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, and they wrote a book back in the 80s about the surveillance, and I think it's called They Dare to Speak. Oh, right, right, yeah. These early accounts of the concerted attempt to silence us. And so what I like to remind people is at this moment, you know, you said, oh, they're trying to erase Palestinian scholars. I mean, at least they're trying to erase the voices who are putting forward a critical take on Israeli settler colonialism and genocide. And I think what I like to remind people is that there is way more of us now than there's ever been before. Yeah, good point. Ten years ago, people like you and me wouldn't have jobs in the academy. It may be in a couple years we won't have jobs,

Starting point is 01:59:02 but I don't know. Like, I'm not, I don't want to sit on our laurels and think, oh, okay, we arrived. In any case, the whole concept of arrival and career arrival at this moment has completely changed for me. I don't know how it is for you, but the effect of the genocide has made it so that the bankruptcy of the institutions we work for, the rapid ways in which they are engaging with obedience and authoritarianism. Yeah. It's like what we've worked for our whole careers. It's like, I don't think this makes sense actually, do you know? Right. So I would say it's been like that all along.

Starting point is 01:59:45 People even saying to you things like, oh, what do you mean you study Palestine? You know, like, what is that? Yeah. So yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm in a different discipline, but certainly it was, I remember as a student, hungry for information. I mean, it was rare to find something about the Middle East to be taught, let alone Palestine. The level to which they delegitimized Arab and Palestinian sources or questions of importance to Palestinians and Arabs,

Starting point is 02:00:18 normatively speaking, politically speaking, also theoretically speaking. I mean, I can tell you so many stories. Like, every person who has ever wanted to study Palestine, especially as you said, if you are Palestinian, is discouraged from it and is told not to is told this doesn't fit

Starting point is 02:00:33 is told I'm in political science the theories don't account for Palestine it's just outside of space and time and theory and you can't account for it you can't discuss it and the harassment

Starting point is 02:00:46 the harassment campaigns all of us have been facing I mean it takes such a mental and emotional toll and yet we produce and yet we get tenure and yet we teach our classes and we're excellent

Starting point is 02:00:58 in our teaching and our students love us and want to learn. But, you know, as you said, like, it really has exposed the degree to which these universities, because they have been, well, one, like, we are in America, but also because they have been so divorced from their actual missions. Like, how meaningless the space this has now become. But that's, like, on the harassment and, like, kind of these kinds of obstacle side. I also think, like, people don't recognize, like, the resources that are needed. needed to teach and study and research Palestine that other people in the academy, other knowledge producers get very easily. And it's, there is so little for people who study Palestine. And of course,

Starting point is 02:01:44 that impacts what kind of academics are able to do this and, and how many people we're missing from this discussion, right? I agree with you. That has been the condition before October 7th. I think now after October 7th, that after they have attempted to use Palestine as kind of a cudgel to attack the higher, you know, higher education generally. Like now people are recognizing it maybe more, but that has always definitely been the case. Oh, also, I just wanted to remind listeners and bring it up. Like, I remember Barry Weiss, who is now the head of CBS. I mean, she made her claim to fame attacking Arab and Palestinian. professors in Columbia as an undergrad.

Starting point is 02:02:27 Yeah. And that's seen as totally valid. Yeah. No, I mean, I think, you know, Palestine is cultural and also, you know, I've been saying this for a while, Palestine is paradigm, right? You know, if you look at the Memdenouin, I think it reveals also kind of what Palestine also stands for, which is the way that both the Democratic and the Republican Party has, really no link to the popular realities on the ground. Right. And that in effect, you know, part of the Trump base was really responding to this disparity, right? This lack of investment in the political system.

Starting point is 02:03:14 And I think, you know, that for me was the, I don't have hope in electoral politics. And, you know, I don't want to be cynical or anything. But I think what the Mimdeni win shows us is that people are disgruntled. And they're sick of the kind of extractive billionaire class doing what they want to do at the expense of the rest of us. And I think the media is really complicit in all of this. Absolutely. Absolutely complicit in the genocide. It's been absolutely complicit since the, you know, war on Iraq.

Starting point is 02:03:53 since the second war on Iraq in rendering news as entertainment. You know? And it's like you could see the freak out that people had, the media had about Memdenny. Right.

Starting point is 02:04:10 Across the board. It wasn't just the Fox News. No, New York Times, everybody. Yeah. And all of the, you know, television media too. So it's just, I think it's part, I think there's also a link to higher education. in that way because I think there has been an investment in making people stupid. Right. Yes, that's what I was going to say. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's exactly what I was

Starting point is 02:04:34 going to say is the Palestinian issue and Palestine studies and research and knowledge production. The fact that there exists a few Palestinians in higher education has been used to attack higher education, but it's not really about Palestine. I mean, it is a little bit about Palestine. of course these people are anti-Palestinian, but it's about preventing social mobility. So you're saying like there's all this disgruntlement in the public space. Our students are disgruntled. They want to learn. They've been promised something with this college education.

Starting point is 02:05:06 And, you know, even the slight bit of social mobility that has existed as a result of higher education is too much for the Trump administration. Yeah. It's too much for this right wing. So Palestine is a class issue. Absolutely. No, it absolutely is, you know, as I. as are all of the kind of struggles we stand in solidarity with, you know, it's like, really, it is intersectional. And we didn't need Trump to teach us that. But that's the lesson that keeps being

Starting point is 02:05:36 delivered time and again. And one of the things that's really struck me, and this has been the case for the last 10 years, 11 years, long before Trump. And I think one of the challenges we face today is not to over-determine the Trump administration as the site of all of the catastrophes that we're in today. And one of the things I've noted for the last 14 years is, I don't have to teach students that history isn't about things always getting better. That's not a lesson they need to know. They understand that teleology and the fallacy of advancement is a lie. They understand that because they live it. as you say, you know, they're in debt, especially those of us who teach at public universities.

Starting point is 02:06:21 You know, most of our students are indebted. A lot of them have two or three jobs. They are housing insecure. They're food insecure. They don't have a clear vision of the future. And if they protest genocide, they're labeled anti-Semitic. Yeah. Their universities crack down on them. They're doxed. I mean, it's, it's so outrageous. Obviously, I don't need to tell you. Their identification with Palestine is also about their own experiences with green. Of course. So I think that's the, that really is the momentum, you know, that we're witnessing is, is that kind of identification. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's important for listeners to know some of the contours of what has

Starting point is 02:07:15 happened after October 7th. And like you said, it's not a Trump thing. It started under Biden about how Palestine has been used in the academy. I mean, as I said earlier, I have done an episode on this. I will link that. But also, you know, there is now evidence and data around how this issue has been weaponized. So the AAUP, the American Association of University Professors alongside the Middle East Studies Association, just put out a report on this exact question about how Title VI investigations. So investigations of alleged discrimination, specifically about anti-Semitism and nothing else. First of all, there's been a huge uptick in them and have been used to target these universities.

Starting point is 02:07:53 The vast majority of these cases has to do with faculty extramural speech. So like these faculty members having an opinion about genocide outside the classroom. I mean, honestly, I always remember, I think Edward Said said like being a Palestinian academy is like being an outlaw. That's like how it feels. That's how it feels. Yeah, it's fugitive labor for sure. Yeah. Definitely.

Starting point is 02:08:17 And I think one of the findings has been also, I don't know if it's 95%. of the cases have been shown to be fraudulent, yeah, to be totally fraudulent. So, yeah, it's a real policing of speech. It's a real kind of weaponization of the charge of anti-Semitism. And honestly, sort of one of the things I think that really happens to is that students don't get the tools to actually recognize and understand actually existing anti-Semitism. Right. As it is being rehearsed in like these show trials that we saw in Congress and these in the rhetoric of many of the, you know, people affiliated with the administration in the kinds of alliances that even the Israeli state, right, has made with various right-wing anti-Semitic states. So it's like, I think one of the

Starting point is 02:09:19 things that it's kind of like watching a train wreck. just hitting one train after another and just being like, what is this absurdity? You know, I myself was accused of being anti-Semitic for having a history of anti-Semitism. So what surprises me is the way that people are allowing and facilitating this to happen, you know, and the way that they're not able to recognize how high the stakes are, what it means to be Palestinian in this moment, you know, when you've been sitting watching for two years, your people being shredded and you're facing the reality of what the stakes are in this moment, which is the annihilation of Palestine and the annihilation of Palestinians,

Starting point is 02:10:10 your threshold for shock becomes very high. Yeah. And so, I mean, I'm sure it's the same for you. I don't know if like what it's like a constant trauma response, you know. Absolutely. Yeah. There, my emotional reactions are shut down and I'm in a state of being in the present. Okay, we got through today.

Starting point is 02:10:37 Hopefully we'll get through tomorrow. I don't. I kind of am prepared for the worst at all times. And, you know, it's a condition of vigilance that I think people, when they can to feed this kind of right-wing agenda of making people stupid and eroding even the possibility of higher education. It's the kind of condition that will be much more general, you know? Yeah. And all these ice raids at the same time, you know, it's, I just saw, I haven't been able to listen to it, but a scholar who powerfully is talking about the Mexico-Palestine border

Starting point is 02:11:18 and the links between ICE and the IDF and the ways to think about these two things together. Please share that with me. I haven't seen it. I mean, yeah, as you said, when we take away Palestine from the academy, when we use Palestine to attack the academy as imperfect as the academy is, it is this larger attempt to take away people's analytical tools and frameworks. to understanding their reality, to understanding how their reality intersects with these other things, because they don't want you to be able to solve it. They don't want you to be able to mobilize. And then, of course, there's this, as I said, this class dimension of wanting to keep people in their place. There are too many black and brown people in the academy now. We can't have that kind of social mobility.

Starting point is 02:12:09 I just want to emphasize for the listeners why it's so important for Palestine to be researched and studied and things like that is self-evident. I don't need to explain it. But why is it so important that Palestinians are the ones who do that? I mean, again, it feels self-evident, but I'll say it. Like, Palestinians have agency, and they are full human beings, and they know best what questions are relevant, and they have a unique perspective on the issue of Palestine as well as other issues. And so not only are you engaging in the ratio of Palestinians when you don't amplify that kind of knowledge production, but.

Starting point is 02:12:47 you are making scholarship poorer. You are limiting what you know about this issue. Yeah. So what do you think, you know, kind of broadly speaking, students, scholars, sympathizers, what do you think they should do in this moment? I want to just go back to the point about why is it important to have Palestinian voices? Because when we say that, we're not doing it in an identitarian way, right? Of course. Yeah. Anybody who wants to study Palestine should study Palestine. In doing so, you should be centering the lessons that Palestinians have offered us. First and foremost in this moment, the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip. And in my own practice at the Journal of Palestine Studies, what I've tried to do in each of the editor's notes, is really lift up all of the testimonies that we've received

Starting point is 02:13:42 from Palestinians in Gaza, written and social media and all of these, but also. lift up the international voices of Palestinians like yourself and the many, many, many people who are writing and giving us tools to understand and analyze. And the reason that's important is because the main problem that we face, I believe, is the way that certain people are more susceptible to being excluded from the category of the human. Once you exclude people from the category of the human. It's much easier to kill them and make them expendable. And I think our work really in centering Palestinian voices rejects that logic, right? Rejects the logic of are we human or not? Are we going to evidence our humanity or not? No, we can tell our stories. And I think that telling of the story

Starting point is 02:14:38 changes the angle of vision. If you're looking at what's happening in the Gaza Strip from the perspective of people who are living it, you will see different things than if you're looking at it from, you know, a drone or, you know, a geopolitical lens. So that's one thing. I think another thing that's really important is, you know, I mean, Mahmoud Darwish said this, actually in an interview in journal Palestine studies, he said, you know, the Palestinians are talked about because their facing Israeli Jews because the Jewish question is the question of Europe. Oh, that's right. Yeah. And I find that one of the things that continues to be an issue until now is that what scholars and thinkers and analysts are adjudicating is the question of Europe and the question of the

Starting point is 02:15:39 sustainability of European values and European notions and all of these things. And I'm not interested in that. I want to center the question of Palestine and what that, what kind of other tools that might offer us. So I think in a way linked to what the earlier conversation about a political economy of value of scholars, right? There's a kind of also here, a political economy of concepts. And I believe that we have to really provincialize Europe. We have to provincialize Europe as the means and the ends of all things. Yeah. It is not generalizable.

Starting point is 02:16:20 No. Just ask different questions and look at you from a different perspective. Yeah. In terms of what do I think students and scholars and all of us should do is, it's going to sound strange, but first and foremost, study, study, read, learn. Those are the critical tools that you gain that will allow you to defend yourself in our world that is intent on making you stupid. We all have to reject that. I think it's a moment where there's a temptation to slide into sensationalism or to slide into circulating, especially on social

Starting point is 02:17:02 media and that whole economy, right? So I think we have to be vigilant. I think we have to be rigorous and I think we have to study. And I think more than anything else, the lesson I keep coming back to is we have to take care of each other in the communities that we build. Yeah, that's exactly right. I think you begin arming yourself with the tools to understand this moment and think of ways to defend yourself in your community. And you can't do that without being grounded in this knowledge that came before you. So listeners, please crack open a journal of Palestine studies. And of course, I'll link to all of this in the show notes. Shadyin, I could talk to you for hours.

Starting point is 02:17:49 Thank you so much for your time. This has been really enriching. Thank you so much for having me and for all the work that you do. Thank you so much. Listeners, I'm going to also put in the show notes a fundraising campaign for the Journal of Palestine Studies. So if you can, you have the capacity. It's a surefire way to help resist these dynamics. All right.

Starting point is 02:18:12 Thanks so much. Take care. This is It Could Happen here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans. This episode we're covering the week of November 13th to November 19th. The biggest news I think of this whole week, J.D. Vance has been sentenced to two years in prison for threatening Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. This is, of course, James Donald Vance Jr.

Starting point is 02:19:01 A different JD Vance. A 67-year-old man from Grand Rapids, Michigan. A second J.D. Vance has hit the discourse. Who's also named Donald, which is phenomenal. It's amazing stuff. Who pleaded guilty to three criminal accounts based on the social media posts about killing the president, the vice president, Elon Musk, and Trump Jr. Jeez, yeah, not a good, don't a good call.

Starting point is 02:19:25 Garrison, I would quibble that that is the biggest story this week because this is the week, of course, that Nikki Minaj addressed the United Nations. This is a week where years happened. Yeah, Nikki Minaj, if readers are familiar with her, it will doubtless be because of her contributions to discourse on her cousin's friend's testicles. But this time she's back, and she is talking about the persecution. That's right, baby. Yeah, that's what we do here.

Starting point is 02:19:53 She's talking about the persecution of Christians in Nigeria, just for listeners who are not aware, Nikki Minaj is from Trinidad. Yeah. Not aware of any particular expertise or insight she has on a topic. But yeah, she did that this week. Yep. That's the United Nations. Do we know how she decided that this was a problem she needed to get involved with?

Starting point is 02:20:14 She reposted a truth that Donald Trump had made. Not a great. And I believe they reached out on the basis of that. There's some tremendous, like, statements calling her the greatest female recording artist in history. Oh, God. that. Yeah, yeah. Which sets us up nicely for a Nicki Minaj, Dolly Parton beef.

Starting point is 02:20:35 Yeah. I think I'd join on the side of Dolly Parton in that one. Yeah, it would be hard not to. Yeah. So, yeah, I guess she reposted a thing about a truth that led to them reaching out, and she volunteered her time to address the United Nations organization set up after World War II to try and prevent genocides. Yeah. Outstanding.

Starting point is 02:20:58 The truth is so beautiful. Yes. Speaking of the truth, the truth coming to light, we're talking about Jeffrey Epstein again, I guess. Yeah, the ongoing revelations based on Jay. This guy's post-death career has really been one for the books. Yeah, he really rivals Michael Jackson in more than one way. Yeah, or Tupac. I would say Tupac.

Starting point is 02:21:24 No, it was when fucking John McAfee died, there were all these people being like, oh, he's got, you know, because McAfee had lied and said, I've got like an insurance folder that will come out in the event of my death that'll, you know, reveal a bunch of top-level secrets. And John McAfee didn't know shit. He was a crazy old drug addict who killed his nephew and then fled to South America or Central America.

Starting point is 02:21:51 Anyway, whatever. One of the Americas. He fled to a day. He fled to a different America than the one that he came from. Anyway, but that's actually happening with Jeffrey Epstein. We actually now have a lot of dirt on a lot of people. Larry Summers just left the board of Open AI because he was revealed as a rampant misogynist and friend of a pedophile sex trafficker.

Starting point is 02:22:11 Not a good look. He's also announced that after finishing his current class at Harvard, he will be resigning from Harvard University. Oh, what a loss for Harvard. I don't know how they're going to recover. Well, it's the biggest loss since President. gay, yeah. Yeah. Look, Harvard, if you need someone to teach his class, I'll do it. I don't know what his class is. I don't actually know what Larry does. We know what his expertise is, but I feel

Starting point is 02:22:37 like I can do a better job. Yeah, bring me in. We do know a little bit about what Larry does and that is the problem. Yeah. Yeah, the sex crimes. Right after recording executive disorder last week, Not the most important, but certainly the oddest email was uncovered as a part of that big documents release. This is an exchange from 2018 between Mark Epstein and Jeffrey Epstein, two brothers. Let's start with Mark. How are you doing? A while back you mentioned that you were pre-diabetic. Has anything changed with that?

Starting point is 02:23:18 What is your boy Donald up to? now. Jeffrey replies, All good, Bannon with me. Mark replies, Ask him if Putin has the photos of Trump blowing Bubba. You know, I'm going to continue the exchange. Jeffrey replies, and I thought I had to risk. Mark replies, you and your boy, Donnie,

Starting point is 02:23:50 make a remake of the movie Get Hard sent via a tin can and a string. And Jeffrey replied, you mean Donnie T. And Mark replied, I'd rather be in Donny D's shoes. That's the exchange. Also, what Epstein said was Cirrus, which is a Yiddish word that means like problems. Like I got problems. I got shit. I'm all fucked up, which he was.

Starting point is 02:24:18 He was not wrong about that. Look. Yep. So, Bubba, many people have speculated that this could be a reference to former president Bill Clinton, whose nickname was Bubba and whose name is Bubba in some of these other emails or is referred to as Bubba in some of these other emails. Which is something that I've seen surprise a lot of people. If you grew up in the 90s, you were aware that his nickname was Bubba.

Starting point is 02:24:47 But he has not been called Bubba in a very long time when you, he like lost all that weight and went vegan and like it kind of he stopped seeming like as much of a bubba as he did when he was the president the saturday night live uh made fun of in that great mcdonald sketch but yeah anyway continue gear i mean and i don't know how what what else there is to say here uh you know photos have been recirculating of trump yeah yes baba gump shrimp will the real Bubba please stand up. Photos have been recirculating of Trump, I would say, groping

Starting point is 02:25:21 Bill Clinton's penis. Yeah. Yep. There's more there than you'd expect, right? Yes. Yeah. But Bubba has referred to a few people, including other people like in Epstein's circle,

Starting point is 02:25:37 like golfers and models. But Bubba was also the name of Galane Maxwell's horse. Oh. I'm just hearing this and that's not I'm sorry and here here's the thing I see the appeal to believing that this is the answer I simply don't believe Donald Trump ever had that kind of throat game I'm sorry I just don't I just don't accept that I've just this is by far the funniest possibility that he did like a joke photo shoot where he like pretended to blow a horse I could see him doing that

Starting point is 02:26:11 This is really understandable. This is like, this is really doable. Haven't we all been there? So that is. Yeah. And, you know, take this however you will. Like, Mark Epstein has denied that the Bubba referred to in the email is a reference to Bill Clinton, while also admitting in this same like interview to a news station and a statement that like, you know,

Starting point is 02:26:36 Jeffrey certainly did have dirt on the president and thought that he was the only one that could sink both. candidate's career in 2016, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Pretty good chance that's true, actually. Yeah. But he, for what it worth, is saying it's not a reference to Clinton. Who knows? There's a real sort of, you know, if you want to do the sort of pop Marxist lines, there's a real sort of historical unity of the ruling class moment when you read these

Starting point is 02:27:06 emails and the people in them, it's like, it's both. Clinton, it's Bill Clinton's, like, the people around Bill Clinton, it's Ken Starr. And it's, and, you know, you go back and you look at, like, you look at, like, the actual, like, impeachment of Bill Clinton, right? And you realize that every single one of these people are all friends with Jeffrey Epstein and are just kind of hanging out, like, on, like, on the pedophile island. And it's just, yeah, it's, it's something that, like, you couldn't, if, like, the most, the most, the most, the most. sort of on the nose, like, completely didactic. I'm pounding your head with a hammer. Like, Marxist thing from 1960, where they go, yeah, all of the presidents are hanging out

Starting point is 02:27:52 on pedophile island, like, conspiring behind your back and they're taking photos of them, like, grabbing each other's dicks. Like, you wouldn't believe. But it's like, no, no, no, no. This is just the historical unity of the ruling class is literally they're all friends with this pedophile. Well, it's just these are all wealthy power. people and the only people that they socialize with is each other.

Starting point is 02:28:15 You know, the New York Times came up with an out with an article this week that was like the Epstein emails or an insight into an old New York long departed or since departed. Yeah, that was an incredible headline. And yeah, I mean, it was. This was like the transition between all of these people writing each other letters and all of these people just bitching publicly on the internet openly and losing their minds. like the awkward interstiddle period was them all emailing each other from their iPads, right? So to that extent the New York Times article is right, not the main takeaway from the Jeffrey Epstein emails.

Starting point is 02:28:49 I would say probably not worth an article in the Times, but it's not wrong, technically. Yeah, it's a fascinating thing to choose to color. Yeah. That poor horse. Yeah, it's a little bit like a journalist showing up in Berlin in late 1945 and going through, like, papers in the ruins of the Reichstag and being like, wow, this really reveals a lost Berlin. I was like, I mean, yeah.

Starting point is 02:29:19 That's not really the point. Any other comments on Bubba? Did anyone ask guys his brother about the horse? I don't believe Mark has been asked about the horse. Mark is in a, not that I have a ton of sympathy for this guy, but just recognizing things objectively. He's in a tough position because his brother was an incredibly famous kind of file sex trafficker.

Starting point is 02:29:47 And he is desperately trying not to get disappeared by the regime. Or he also knows what will come after the regime. So he doesn't want to set himself up in a way where he gets in trouble from that either. Right. Like it's a legitimately complicated situation he finds himself in. that his brother just kind of left for him. And again, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the man, but I can recognize it. Because he also said at the same time he was like, this definitely was not him referring to Donald

Starting point is 02:30:17 Trump giving a blowjob to Bill Clinton. He did also say that he believed that the Republicans were removing the names of Republicans from the Epstein files before release, right? So he's, he has been like hedging his bets because, again, he's in a lot of danger. Yeah. Like, he's in trouble. This man, this man. This man is in trouble.

Starting point is 02:30:37 Yeah. Yeah, I would not be granting interviews as I was him. I would be... I wouldn't say shit. Yeah, literally under the ground. Yeah, I would, for one thing, not be in a country that extradite. I would never set foot in a country with extradition treaties to the Western world again. Yeah, the next strike in Venezuela will be Mark Epstein.

Starting point is 02:31:00 I would be living in Tehran right now. Like... Let's talk about Marjorie Trader Green. Sure. Why not? Yeah. So Marjorie Taylor Green is part of the resistance now. Hashtag, welcome to the resistance.

Starting point is 02:31:17 Yeah, exactly. It's very like Andor. Sure. It's like that point in Andor where the person who did nothing but help Emperor Palpatine suddenly at the last minute was like, you know what, this guy went a step too far for me. Or, actually, I hate Jews too much that now I'm going to become. I think that's the reality. I wasn't sure if there was an analog for anti-Semitism in the Star Wars universe that I wasn't aware.

Starting point is 02:31:43 You probably don't want to go there. I've asked the wrong people. We've got to stop this right now. They're not paying us enough. I've made a terrible mistake. Do you have three hours? James, in the early 2000s, George Lucas invented some names that are themselves hate crimes. Just be remembering the names as a hate crime.

Starting point is 02:32:01 James, do you want to read about the Troidarians? No. No. As far as I get into Star Wars, bigotry discourse is Jaja Binks, and after that I leave. Well, it's from the same movie, but no. So, yeah, Marjorie has been more combative against some of the Trump cultist mega-right on a few issues. One, she's extended her already evidenced anti-Semitism a la Jewish space lasers towards foreign policy in this, like, America first Nick Fuentesi way of being critical of it. Israel, you see seeds of this because like Marjorie Taylor Green like attended the Nick Fuentes

Starting point is 02:32:41 America First conferences like four years ago. Like this is this this side of it, not a surprising turn for her. Her finally flipping on Trump in terms of the pedophile stuff, maybe a little bit surprising because she was the original like Q and on candidate. Yeah. And Q&ON's built on this like trying to justify in some ways Trump's proximity to Epstein by building this grand narrative. And she made a statement recently that she's no longer all in on the Q stuff, right? Like she has she is, this is a pivot for her, but it's a pivot that's pretty consistent with, you know, her anti-sitismic. And it makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense with the Israel foreign policy stuff. It also makes sense in terms of Trump's made a lot more statements directly addressing this Epstein stuff, which kind of does

Starting point is 02:33:28 call into question some of like the Q narratives, which for someone like Marjorie might actually get her to kind of reflect on some of, some of like this Trump cultish status that she's had for a while. This has frustrated Trump. And, and, you know, Trump's also been frustrated with other members, like Lauren Bobbert and other, like, Congress people who were pledging to vote in support of the release of the Epstein files. And this pressure was building a lot last week during this, like, 20,000 document release and all this new news coverage. And as, as, as more and more Republicans began to deflect from Trump

Starting point is 02:34:06 over the release of the Epstein files, Trump himself flipped his rhetoric over this past weekend, still calling the debate over the files a Democrat hoax, but truiting that the files should be released because we, quote-unquote, have nothing to hide.

Starting point is 02:34:22 And he called on Republicans to vote in favor of the bill to release the Epstein files, which they did on Tuesday in a 427-1 vote with Representative Clay Higgins, a Republican from Louisiana, the only congressman to vote no. Hours later, Chuck Schumer unanimously passed the measure through the Senate.

Starting point is 02:34:44 Mike Johnson had previously expected the Senate to amend the bill to, quote, make sure we don't to permanent damage to the political system, unquote. And after its passage through the Senate, Johnson seemed quite worried that it went through the chambers in its current form. And I want to play this clip here because it's kind of shocking to hear him, hear him freak out. And before we say this, you owe it to yourself as a person to go actually look at this clip and watch his face. It is amazing. It's so good. I haven't seen this. I'm excited. It'll be in the sources below. Any reaction to Leader Thune, are you seeing the bill without adding amendments or changing it? I am, I'm deeply disappointed in

Starting point is 02:35:32 sound come I think I've told I've been at the state dinner I don't know I was just told that Chuck Schumer rushed it to the floor and put it out there preemptively it needed amendments I just spoke to president about that we'll see what happens so is he do you think he may veto it you say you spoke to the president I'm not saying that I don't know he supportive of it in its current form we both have concerns about me so we'll see if I was staying in with the crown friends we get involved are you frustrated in the majority leader are you upset with the majority leader

Starting point is 02:36:02 Cool. Nice. What a normal... What a normal interaction that is. Also worth noting, the very end of that video, he says, I was eating with the Crown Prince, because he is, again, walking out of a state dinner with one Muhammad bin Salman, the...

Starting point is 02:36:19 I don't even... List of war crimes here. The Sudanese child soldier exterminator, et cetera, et cetera. But no, it's safe to say that both Johnson and President Trump have concerns about the state of the bill and Johnson seemed a little bit

Starting point is 02:36:38 wishy-washy on if the president would even sign this or veto this. Now, it's not all bad for the president. I like to see Aldenny J. wiggle his way out of this jam. This bill that has passed does allow Attorney General Hambondi to withhold or redact portions of the files that could jeopardize active federal investigation.

Starting point is 02:37:02 and personally determine if information in the files should remain classified to protect national security. Last weekend, Trump ordered Bondi to launch investigations looking into connection between Epstein and prominent Democratic politicians and donors. Here's clip from a Wednesday, November 19th press conference. Attorney General, do you mean that you will provide all the files by 30 days? We will follow the law. The law passed both chambers last evening. It has not yet been signed, but we will continue to follow the law again while protecting victims, but also providing maximum transparency.

Starting point is 02:37:47 Madam Attorney General, the DOJ statement earlier this year saying that the files would not release mentioned the fact that the review of the documents and the evidence did not suggest that any additional. additional investigation of third parties was warranted. What changed since then that you launched this investigation? Information that has come for information. Information that new information, additional information, and again, we will continue to follow the law, to investigate any leads. If there are any victims, we encourage all victims to come forward. And we will continue to provide maximum transparency under the law.

Starting point is 02:38:31 Very normal. Very normal response. Uh-huh. Yeah, that doesn't sound sketchy. Sure. I have never at any point in the last eight years, 12 years, however long we've been in this Hellscape, been a piss tape believer. This, looking at these people's faces is the closest I've ever been to being like, no, maybe that shit's real and maybe it's in there.

Starting point is 02:38:53 Because there's clearly something in there that they are just, they're just going through it. Yeah, it's wild. Yeah, some of these guys seem a little bit concerned. Yeah, yeah, I wonder why. Surely there's no... I mean, imagine the workload ahead of them. They have to redact so much.

Starting point is 02:39:15 Yeah. They have to get so many of those markers. Imagine how tired their wrists are going to be. Yeah, it's like that feeling when you come back from a reporting trip and you're like, shit, now I have to do the job. Yeah, yeah. Yes, I'm familiar with that feeling. Do you know what we have to do right now?

Starting point is 02:39:33 Ads? It's pivot to ads, yes. Yeah, let's go ahead and do that. And we're back. Now I would like to take some time to discuss probably the second most important new story of the whole week. I'll do it. Sure. Which is totally not a Hail Mary distraction to get away from the Epstein stuff.

Starting point is 02:40:04 This is totally legitimate and totally newsworthy. On Monday, November 17th. A piece in the prestigious outlet, the New York Post opinion section, provided earth-shattering revelations. That's the word, about the attempted Trump assassination, claiming to have discovered evidence that Thomas Crooks, the shooter, had two possible accounts on deviant art. Which? Yeah, this really is the biggest story.

Starting point is 02:40:38 Which the Post, New York Post, describes as, quote, one of the biggest online hubs for furry art and the furry community. A furry is someone who has an interest in anthropomorphized animal characters, often as a sexual fetish, unquote. Every time. Later reporting in the New York Post claimed that one of these accounts had only shared a single post, quote, a repost of a towering, muscular female bodybuilder,

Starting point is 02:41:06 and a slight man in his underwear. unquote. And, quote, multiple searches for muscular women and female bodybuilders were found on Crook's supposed YouTube search history. He's a real pervert then. Excellent. Yes, beautiful. Oh, it's not. Oh, Robert. That's not even the worst part. The furry stuff, obviously problematic, considering our past few furry mass shooters is maybe a trend here. We should look into this. But possibly the most damning piece of information in the New York Post reporting is that Crook's,

Starting point is 02:41:38 quote, described himself with the pronouns, they, them, on the platform devian art, which is one of the biggest hubs for furry art and the furry community. This became the big thing among the right. Another trans shooter. The Trump, the Trump assassin was trans the whole time, and we didn't even know. The FBI covered up the trans connection here. It's all coming together. More red string on the board.

Starting point is 02:42:04 The trans shooter narrative is growing more. and more evident by the day, right? This is the way that this was framed across all of these, all these commentators. Who's the president right now? How is this supposed to work? At the time they investigated it by them would have been president, right? Or they began their investigation.

Starting point is 02:42:28 The New York Post did reach out to the current FBI for comment. They did not receive a response. Deep State. The New York Post's reporting, like in the, in these opinion pieces, and I think later an article, they did, did later include references to, quote, violently anti-Semitic comments and racist remarks about Hispanic immigrants. Hmm.

Starting point is 02:42:49 That seems relevant. Thomas Crooks also made, including YouTube comments from 2019. Quote, this is going to be blatantly racist, but I hope Trump has these people, the squad, murdered. Oh, great. I always believed being patriotic was lighting up a bunch of socialist Jews, like the ones that booed Trump and blasting their useless brains out

Starting point is 02:43:11 with an AR. I hope a quick, painful death to all the deplorable immigrants in anti-Trump Congresswoman. Unquote. Obviously, the right-wing commentators are not talking about this sort of stuff.

Starting point is 02:43:25 They're not talking about Crux's actual politics or political shifts during the pandemic, where he started getting kind of more Trump critical, but still from a conservative perspective. Instead, the story is now, to quote, libs of TikTok,

Starting point is 02:43:40 Charlie Kirk killer, furry fetish, Trump shooter, furry fetish, Idaho firefighter killer, furry fetish. What's going on? Right-wing podcaster and disgraced BuzzFeed journalist, Benny Johnson, quote, it has now been confirmed that attempted Trump assassin, Thomas Crooks, used they-them pronouns,

Starting point is 02:43:57 had a deep interest in furries, and was exploring gender identity, add it to the list. This list is then a list of both real and many not real, quote-unquote, trans mass shooters. Another account, D.C. Drano, who was part of the White House Photoop team during the initial fake release of the fake Epstein files. Not that the files were fake, but like this fake media presentation around releasing

Starting point is 02:44:26 the already released and actually even more redacted versions of already public files. D.C. Drano was one of these guys who was like paraded around as like a prop holding up these binders of files, he posted, quote, it is now confirmed the deep state tried to cover up that Thomas Crooks was a transgender extremist. He used they-them pronouns and then shot President Trump. We need a massive crackdown against

Starting point is 02:44:48 violent trans-extremism. This sort of stuff is losing steam. This sort of stuff is not spreading around the way that it has been previously. It's very clear that this is a blatant distraction away from unflattering stories about Trump in terms of

Starting point is 02:45:04 the economy, and specifically Epstein, And all of this, you know, you might be wondering why maybe no other outlets are picking this stuff up. And that could be due to the dubious nature of the New York Post's sourcing on these claims. But also the fact that DeviantArt automatically lists a user's pronouns as they, them, as the default setting if pronouns are not specified. This is the setting that everyone gets. You have to actively try to change it. There is no indication. Thomas Crooks specifically set pronouns to they them.

Starting point is 02:45:43 He is not a transgender extremist. He, like many Gen Z people, is aware of furry art online. This is very common. This is a very common thing. But the post had a few other things. They tried to wrap this story around to give it some credibility, including this post from the deviant art alleged to belong to Thomas Crooks,

Starting point is 02:46:06 which is a picture of someone shooting to someone else in the head, which the York Post calls another artwork appear to feature a shooting against a backdrop of the trans flag colors. This is not the trans flag

Starting point is 02:46:22 nor the trans flag colors. This is a blue and purple background. What? Purple is not in the trans flag colors. You can maybe argue this is Magenta, maybe. But this is not a trans flag.

Starting point is 02:46:37 This is not a LGBTQ pride flag. This isn't even the bisexual flag, which does use these same colors. This is just like a sky blue and a magenta purple backdrop, which they are trying to frame as further evidence of Thomas Crook's transgender ties. But what is kind of interesting is as a part of the social media accounts, alleged to be linked to crooks that have appeared in new reporting from both the New York Post. and Tucker Carlson's own news outlet, but as a part of this reporting

Starting point is 02:47:07 on Crook's possible online background, included a collection of search results or like search history from April of 2019 to May of 2020, which lines up with stuff that me and Robert have been talking about for a while in that this guy seemed to have the ideology or non-ideology of a school shooter.

Starting point is 02:47:29 This is the actual through line across this act of violence. These searches include, quote, crazy chemical reactions, deadliest mass shootings in the world, people attacking pride parades, cars running over protesters, getting away with racism, best places for a mass shooting, pulse nightclub, pulse nightclub police body camera, mass shooting El Paso, mass shooting, Trump Civil War, Trump Church shooting video, guns versus protesters, Orlando shooting reaction, why I'm missing handgun, firing an AR-15 as fast as possible, fertilizer bomb, how do you use a tourniquet?

Starting point is 02:48:04 how to make napalm, Maltov cocktail, how to make Maltov cocktail, mixing gasoline with styrofoam, mass shooting Canada, Oklahoma bombing, sniper in Dallas shooting, unquote.

Starting point is 02:48:15 Man, he was having real trouble hitting with his pistol, huh? Yeah, yeah. And his rifle, it turns out. Probably choking up too much on the trigger, I'd guess.

Starting point is 02:48:25 Yeah. Many such cases. Yeah. Yeah, but that's a pretty clear theme that you've established there, Garrison. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:48:34 Like, you see this in some way being like a, not necessarily an actual precursor, but in the same vein that some of these like TCC people later would, you know, start developing these past few years of this just obsession with doing violence. This obsession with mass killings, with bombings. And some of it takes the form of like, you know, what looks like political violence, like the Oklahoma City bombing. But a lot of it is is very nihilistic. That's all I have on the explosive reporting from the New York Post. Great, great. I don't know how to segue from that list of Google searches to tariff talk, but you know what I've been searching for is this music.

Starting point is 02:49:17 So this has been a very, very light week on tariff news. It is almost entirely composed of people arguing about whether you're going to get the tariff check, which, no, you're not. You're not going to get a check from the government. with tariff money. It's just not happening. So I thought I'd take a second to pull out and look at some of the macro stuff that's happening in the economy and look at why it feels like a recession even though there isn't one. And the answer is that you and me and everyone in this room and probably most of the people's Sistically listening to this podcast are effectively in a recession. And the reason I can say this is that there's pretty good numbers from the Harvard economist Jason Furman who points out that if you look at, so, okay, so recession is three consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, right? And this is not like a perfect economic indicator. But, you know, as Jason Furman points out, 92% of GDP growth in the first half of this year is,

Starting point is 02:50:45 In a category that's called information processing equipment and software. And so, okay, what is that? That is all data center. It's all data center construction. It is 92% of all of our GDP growth. Well, the good news is that, for example, Oracle didn't just make a big deal with Open AI to provide them with computing resources. And after making this $300 billion deal has dropped $315 billion in valuation.

Starting point is 02:51:14 Like, that didn't happen. obviously. Like these are, things are good in an AI world. There's not a bunch of people pulling their money out of Nvidia as fast as they can.

Starting point is 02:51:25 Oh yeah. We're getting to that. Yeah, one of them again, Peter Thiel pulling his money out right now. Getting all this shit out. Yeah,

Starting point is 02:51:33 get your shit out. Fucking Michael Burry is now shorting the AI industry. I will say this. The Michael Berry short thing is literally the only thing that I've ran into that actually makes me be like,

Starting point is 02:51:45 Michael Burry versus the AI industry is like really truly is the great duel of the stoppable force and the movable object. Yeah. Like that's we're not dealing with like world renting titans here. But, you know, but we are we are going to get a sequel to the big short that's going to really struggle to be entertaining. Because with the big short, what was fun was these guys realizing how fucked the this like system based on like really bad like tranches of debt. and how badly it was going to fuck the economy. And with AI, it's just going to be like literally everyone in the world, except for the people in media and politics being like,

Starting point is 02:52:24 this seems like a fucking grip. Yeah. This seems bad. And them all being like, no, no, no, bro, trust me. No, no, no. And then it all goes to shit. Yeah. I'm going to do a full episode about this at some point.

Starting point is 02:52:36 There's a really good interview on a Bloomberg podcast called Odd Flots with this guy and Paul Kodroski, who points out that, Well, A, he has a great line about calling this like the super bubble, basically, where it's every single kind of speculative bubble rolled into one because all these data centers are being financed with like the equivalent of mortgage-backed securities. Well, yeah, these are these are subprime loans for tech companies, right? Like that's what's financing all of this. Yeah. And then these buildings, right, it's also a real estate bubble because all of these data centers are taking a ridiculous amount of real estate. There's a tech bubble.

Starting point is 02:53:12 and the single thing that, and again, we're going to do a longer episode about this later, the single thing that's the most unhinged to me about this, and it's, you know, even excluding the fact that,

Starting point is 02:53:22 you know, all of these processors that they're using in these data centers burned out after about a year and a half because they're just running them constantly, is that if you look at like the housing collapse in 2008, right? And you look at what was underlying

Starting point is 02:53:36 all of those bad assets. There were houses there. Right? At the end of the day, all of these banks, can go in and they can take your house. And that's really bad, obviously. But what is the underlying assets for all of these trenches of all these trenches of debt? The underlying asset that you're supposed to be taking, you know, that's supposed to be the collateral is compute power.

Starting point is 02:53:59 Yeah. Now, no. It seems fine. This is not a real asset. It's fine, because people can live in a computer power and we all need to live in a computer power. So it's fine. Yeah. Look, the, the bad news is things are going to be really bad for a lot of people. Oh yeah, and they already are. Probably most people. And they're going to get worse. The good news is once we get past, you know, if this is the way the dot com bubble went, right, once we get past this crash that's brought on by, you know, a mix of greed and, you know, a mix of greed and, you know, insanity and ignorance and lies, then we can finally get to the internet

Starting point is 02:54:44 changing society in only positive ways, which is what happened after the dot-com bubble. You know, we got Facebook, we got Google, we got Twitter, we got Instagram, we got all of these great apps that have made our lives nothing but better, you know? So I'm looking forward. Grumbo, Getter, God, how could I forget Getter?

Starting point is 02:55:06 Geez. Wouldn't be furries, but they would. wasn't deviant art with the devian art exactly how would we know who was who was trying to get the president without deviant art and what their pronouns were and what their pronouns may have been well i do i do i do want to make a serious note about this because i've seen a lot of people who compare this to the dot com bubble and this is so much worse because the dot com bubble and you look at a telecom bubble afterwards right there were actual assets there right you know like the way people talk about this is like there was pets dot com but there was

Starting point is 02:55:38 real stuff, too. Real pay. Yeah. And, you know, when a telecom bubble goes under, right, there's still a whole bunch

Starting point is 02:55:44 of, like, fiber optic networks that they've set up. Yeah. That, you know, people with a bunch of money afterwards can come scrape up

Starting point is 02:55:50 and there's the material base of something here. These data centers, there's nothing. They're not practical if the, because this is what the reason, because our colleague, Ed Zetron,

Starting point is 02:56:01 had a big scoop last week that's getting a shitload of attention right now for good reason, which is that inference cost has been raising consistently for Open AI, which is increasing their, like it's fucking their margins and it's increasing their losses,

Starting point is 02:56:16 which is why they keep losing more money each quarter. And the idea behind why people thought Open AI could be a good business is that these inference costs, which is basically the cost that it takes to keep making the models better, right? That that was going to decline once they hit a certain level that like you're not going to need to,

Starting point is 02:56:37 it's super expensive to get the models to a point where they're good, but once they're good, then they get to be really cheap. And that's not really true, based on the data that we have. And they were lying about it, kind of. You know, they were not in a way that was legally actionable. They're not a publicly traded company. They were not required to release this to the public. It does seem like they were honest with their investors like Microsoft, right? They were lying to us, right, to regular people. In order to pretend this was a business that had a lot better of a shot of being successful in the way it needs to be. The problem with AI, as a money thing, is not that there's no profit in this.

Starting point is 02:57:13 It's not that there's no use for any of these tools. There are many uses, and there are many potential businesses. It's that none of them equal trillion dollars, which is the minimum that they need to be profitable. Right? And these data centers are all based on the bet that, no, no, actually, this is a multi-trillion dollar industry, and we need this much compute, right? And this is the greatest misallocation of capital in human history. There has never been anything like this. There has never been this much of the capital on earth poured into nothing. Because there's not even physical assets left, right?

Starting point is 02:57:48 The physical assets are burned out graphics cards. Because a lot of these data centers aren't built and they don't last. Yeah. Right? That's what we're going to do. Like, yes, they have a building. They have a building you can run power to. But the graphics cards don't last.

Starting point is 02:58:00 Yeah. And, you know, and at the end of this, right, you have you have a bunch of buildings that don't do anything attached to, like, extremely expensive diesel generators. And I am praying, the one thing that makes you be like, I hope this goes down quickly is that I am praying that this bubble goes down before they actually start trying to build nuclear, like, really, truly get off the ground, building a bunch of nuclear reactors. Because can you imagine these guys who created a computer that can't win at chess trying to build nuclear reactor? I think we should let them do it I agreed Fuck it Why not?

Starting point is 02:58:34 I long for stalker No I mean it's it's what This is like the The point that is meaningful here Is that after the dot com bubble You were able to have a massive boom That created a bunch of wealth

Starting point is 02:58:47 It created wealth doing things That were often super bad for society But it created a shitload of wealth Because real infrastructure Had been put in place That actually enabled the whole country To get connected It enabled the birth of like

Starting point is 02:59:00 the mobile computing revolution or whatnot, because a lot of groundwork had been laid, that was really meaningful, even though a number of the businesses involved in it didn't work out. And that's really not what we're seeing because it's hard to imagine, assuming there's not a multi-trillion dollar need for AI, assuming everyone isn't going to do everything for the rest of their lives through AI agents and do all of their thinking through chat GPT, unless that's the reality we're in, these are not good investments. And the only thing I can compare it to in terms of what you were saying me about this being the worst allocation of capital in history, because I've been reading a lot about like the nuclear arms race. And it was one of those things

Starting point is 02:59:39 where you go from, we've dropped tens of thousands of bombs over the course of five years to if we were to accidentally launch these 10 missiles, it would be more explosive power than has ever been detonated in the entire history of human war added together up to the present moment, right? Like that is the because of, and part of this was enabled by the actual like internet boom, right? The one that brought about Web 2.0 in the social media era, right? Like all of that wealth and all of the money that poured into these VCs who'd gotten on board companies like Facebook, that had to be created to allow something this irrational. Because 20 years ago, if the technology had been there, there wouldn't have been the money to enable this kind of insanity. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:00:22 Well, and I think that the last thing, I mean, I guess I've been. there's two more things that I want to say about this. One is that, you know, this is also part of the cyclical economic crises that we've been looking at since the 70s, which is that one of the ways you get these bubbles is that there are suddenly these unbelievably massive trillion dollar pool, like trillions of dollars of pools of capital

Starting point is 03:00:42 that you're trying to find something to invest in, right? You have to reproduce it. And this is one of the things that causes, for example, the third world debt crisis in the 70s is all of this capital flows into all of these, They will bet things. It eventually, this is, this is one of the things that powers first, the Japanese giant housing bubble that they did that caused the Asian market collapse in the 90s and then caused 2008 is that there's all of these pools of capital. They have to turn into more capital and they can't do it.

Starting point is 03:01:10 And when they can't do it, you get 2008, right? And they've been able to sort of hang on for about a decade, a decade and a half-ish roughly because there was so much money coming in. from this tech sector, but everyone outside of the tech sector, it sucks. It's bad. So this is part of the reason why everything feels unhinged right now, right? Like, okay, there's obviously kind of a problem with trying to track employment data just by seeing news of firings because companies just do firings because it makes their stocks go up because it makes investors think they're being more efficient, which is nonsense. But it's why it feels like this. It's why you feel broke and everyone is like talking about how the economy is growing. And it's like, well, yeah, this really small

Starting point is 03:01:54 of tech has accumulated an unfathomable amount of wealth, and they are getting very, very rich, and everyone else is fucked. You know, and when this bubble collapse, when these people take all of the money they got out of tech and have thrown it into the metaverse and AI, when that blows up, it is going to be cataclysmic and we're getting closer to it. Yeah. Yeah, the only one of them that will be left is Gabe Newell sitting on his insane yachts. Finally releasing Half-Life 3.

Starting point is 03:02:28 He could probably appoint himself to Kitter for life after that. Yeah, he'll be the only one with money left. What else will we do? All of the money is Gabe Newell's pockets. The only asset is steam. We've had it replace the military now. This is, basically, the plot of Yu-Gi-O. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:02:50 You think I'm joking. I've actually died. No, I never paid attention to the Yu-Gi-O. The plot of Yu-Gi-o is the card game becomes so profitable that the guy who runs the card game company fights a battle with all the entire built-ro industrial complex and defeats them because he's making more money than they are. Okay.

Starting point is 03:03:05 This is the plot of Yu-Gi-o. Yeah, I guess I think that sounds better than what we're doing. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We can't get as far without mentoring tulip mania. The perfect historical comparison, right? No one.

Starting point is 03:03:19 You can eat a tulip bulb if you really have to. I think they're poisonous. I don't think you can need a tulip bowl I don't know I shouldn't say that but they're more edible than a graphics card Mia is telling every listener to go out and find a tulip bowl

Starting point is 03:03:35 then eat it Putting this on my tombstone More as a whole than a graphics card And a graphics card Do a side by side Don't do this Don't do that If you have eaten a tulip

Starting point is 03:03:47 You can tag Mia on blue sky I write okay Send her a picture of your face post tulip if you've eaten one, but don't eat one on our account. Talking of other things, not to do.

Starting point is 03:04:03 Yeah, all right, fuck it. Here's an ad for tulips. All right, we're back. And I am going to talk about a number of things. I guess the first thing I should talk about

Starting point is 03:04:25 is the sanctions and FTO's designation for various leftist groups in Europe. Europe, there are four entities that the State Department has announced. They've already been sanctioned, and I believe they'll be added to the FTO list, either today or tomorrow as we're recording this. So it will be on the foreign terrorist organization list by the time you hear this on Friday. The four entities are called Antifa Ost, aka Hamabund, Hammagang,

Starting point is 03:04:57 the Informal Anarchus Federation. That's an Italian group. They use the initials FAAI, also the SAC, They use FRI. That is not the same as the F-A-I that you're familiar with from the Spanish Civil War, if that's your thing. And then two Greek groups called armed proletarian justice and revolutionary class self-defense. Notes on the names, guys. I guess I shouldn't, but I have notes on the names.

Starting point is 03:05:23 Yeah, yeah, probably. They're European leftist groups. It's going to be. Yeah, yeah, of course. It's going to be as many syllables as they can possibly have. Yeah. Yeah, it is an alphabet. soup. So a couple of notable things here. The US doesn't seem to have coordinated with the states

Starting point is 03:05:41 where these entities exist. For example, the German government, they prosecuted people who they've accused of being members of Antifa Ozt recently, I think it was in September, and they claimed that the threat of violence for them has, quote, decreased significantly, which is contradicting, right, the claim that these are violent groups. The State Department, when it talks about Antifa Oz, talks about a series of attacks in February of 2023. What's missing from the analysis of February 2023 is what was happening in February 23. It was an event in Hungary, which existed to honor Nazis. I don't mean Nazis like people who have a right-wing political ideology. I mean like members of the NSDAP in Germany who fought in World War II at the time when they were doing the Holocaust. The rally

Starting point is 03:06:31 included several groups which were already sanctioned by US allies, including Blood and Honor, Combat 18. Jesus. I'm not going to go into an in-depth history of either of those groups. They're neo-Nazi groups, right? The 18 is Adolf Hitler, 1-8. These are the people who are, as far as I'm aware, the victims of that February, 2023 violence, right?

Starting point is 03:06:56 Notably, though, Antifa Ost was sanctioned by a hundred, Hungary earlier this year, right? Hungary under Orban, fast moving towards an extremely right-wing. I didn't think what political scientists like to call it an illiberal democracy, right? This sucks to hear. I mean, with this news, I feel like we might need to pull out of Victor Orban presents Hungary for comedy, the upcoming Cool Zone headlined comedy festival. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:07:26 So many of our famous comedian friends have been planning to join us. Yeah. We are doing that show in Riyadh, though. Oh, that's so on? Yeah, that's still a lot. Yeah. Yeah. The other groups aren't explicitly anti-fascist, right?

Starting point is 03:07:44 Because this is getting framed to support of Trump's like anti-Antifa crackdown. Yeah. I was trying to find foreign terrorist organizations linked to Antifa. But these other three groups are not explicitly like Antifa in name or scope, it seems. No, exactly right. So most of them are anarchist groups, right? And just to delve very briefly in two lines into things I have literally written a book about, anti-fascism is a left unity position derived from the common term position that it adopted its Congress in 1935.

Starting point is 03:08:14 These groups do not call themselves anti-fascist, right? There is a distinction between anarchism and anti-fascism, which can be seen very acutely in the May 1937 events of the Spanish Civil War. but these groups have neither claimed anti-fascism, nor as far as I'm aware, have any of them killed anyone. I believe that the Antifa Ost people being prosecuted, one of them is being prosecuted for attempted murder. In other cases, they have been responsible for explosions or attempted bombings. Normally to be designated in FTO, they would have to be a threat to either U.S. people or the United States as an entity, right? there doesn't appear to be any evidence that these groups have any ties to anyone in the United States or present any immediate danger to the United States. I don't quite know where they got

Starting point is 03:09:04 these particular groups from. It's so weird. It's a completely baffling list of groups, like even looking at like Greek anarchist groups. I mean, my guess is that someone in the Trump administration has a friend in Orban's administration and ask them, hey, who are some Antifas we can go after that you guys, like, you know, you're up with... Yeah, the Greek anarchist groups specifically are some of the more interesting inclusions here. They're not the Greek anarchist groups you would expect them to be going after. It's very weird. Yeah, like, they're not groups I was familiar with.

Starting point is 03:09:39 Like, admittedly, you know, I don't speak Greek. I don't, I don't read Greek. I don't pay that much attention to that part of the world. But, like, there are other groups which are more notorious. Like, it's very... odd that they've come up with the Antifa Ostwan, I agree, Garrison. I think the lineage is more obvious there, that the other three, yeah, I'm not entirely clear on how they got to those. If any of, you know, contact us if you have ideas. The other terrorist designation that happened

Starting point is 03:10:07 this week, which is breaking, as we record on Wednesday, the 19th of November, is that Greg Abbott has declared care, this Centre for American Islamic Relations, and the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organizations. Jesus. Yeah. Jesus Christ. Texas doesn't appear to have an FTO list as far as I can tell. What this seems to be is a designation under SB 17, which parts past earlier this year, which

Starting point is 03:10:43 relates to property law. It would stop the Muslim Brotherhood or care as a national 501c3 renting or buying property in Texas. I'm not sure the Muslim Brotherhood intended to rent or buy property in Texas. Most of SB17 deals with like nationals and entities linked to like China, Russia and North Korea. It's trying to not have them buy large chunks of Texas. But it also does have this mechanism in it. So just as Muslim Brotherhood is a Sunni Islamist organization. It has participated in violence, but not for some time. It has its origins in Egypt. It does a lot of like social programming.

Starting point is 03:11:23 Care, most people will be familiar with, right? Care has already issued a response letter, and in their letter, they said, quote, your proclamation has no basis in law or fact. You do not have the authority to utilize to declare any Americans or American institutions terrorist groups, nor is there any basis to level this smear against our organization. It's probably worth noting that there was a DOJ investigation into epic. Not that epic, the one you're thinking of, probably, but this is the El Paso Islamic Center. that investigation was closed, right?

Starting point is 03:11:53 But this is not the first time that they have attempted to... It's just very clearly in Islamophobia out of Texas, right? Like, that is what this is. This is also just an ancient sort of Obama-era conspiracy where all of these people were all convinced that Obama was part of the Muslim Brotherhood and that there was this whole network of Muslim Brotherhood operatives that were like running the country.

Starting point is 03:12:15 And really sort of, if you squit hard enough, it was like, well, there's a bunch of people from the UAE who are kind of involved in some stuff, but this is like one of their, they're kind of fusing this old school, like old old school is homophobic stuff with their like kind of very specific current contemporary targets

Starting point is 03:12:37 by sort of running these two together. Yeah, me is right. I think Ted Cruz has tried to get the Muslim Brotherhood on the FTO list like several times. Yeah, there's this old like, from the golden age of right-wing conspiracies, right? Like the, the Bohemian Grove era, there's this idea that, yeah,

Starting point is 03:12:54 they're on like a, it's like a 50 or 100-year plan to bring the US under Sharia law. Right. It's, it's boomer stuff. Yes, combined with now trying to explicitly link them to Hamas, right? So, yeah, that is great. That's not great. I would disagree, James.

Starting point is 03:13:13 I think that's not great. I'll be brave enough to say it. Don't love it. No, it is a, uh, It's an assault on the First Amendment. Like the stuff... The inclusion of care is like, is absolutely outrageous. Yeah, care is a very respectability for like a civil rights organization.

Starting point is 03:13:29 Like a liberal civil rights organization. They're the least threatening organization in the world. Yeah. No, like, and they have advocated for an end to the genocide of people in Palestine, which is a perfectly reasonable and legal thing to advocate for. They have not expressed support for political violence. Yeah. Care is as protected by the First Amendment as things can be in this country.

Starting point is 03:13:53 This is bonkers. So, yeah, I guess care is already presumably preparing a court case. In other Texas news, a three-panel judge in Texas just struck down Texas's newly drawn congressional map in federal court, with Trump appointed judge Jeffrey Brown finding that, quote, substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map, unquote. The judge has required Texas use its previous 2021 map for the upcoming midterm elections. What's really, what's really funny here, is that before the elections in November, where the California redistricting measure was up for vote, Newsom specifically removed language

Starting point is 03:14:43 in that measure that framed the California. California redistricting as a triggering event, as in if the Texas one passes, then the California one can go into effect. You specifically removed this. Yeah, the trigger language wasn't there. Which means that California now does a wipe down five Republican seats? And Texas probably won't be able to do anything about it. There's still a challenge. The California GOP are also trying to challenge.

Starting point is 03:15:11 Yes, and this Texas case is set to be heard before the Supreme Court. there's a few other redistricting measures, I think, in Louisiana and in North Carolina. A few other states are trying to do this. But there is a possible future in which Texas is not allowed to racially gerrymander, and California is able to go forward with their redistricting because it may not have been specifically violating this racial gerrymandering aspect that Judge Jeffrey Brown found was affecting the Texas maps intentionally. The GOP claim is that California is quote favoring Hispanic voters.

Starting point is 03:15:52 That's going... It's going to be a harder landing to stick, right? Given that there are Latino people in every square mile of California. Like, it's going to be a rougher one for them. And specifically, the stuff that Judge Brown found is, like, in the way that these districts were redrawn, it was to totally exclude non-white voters in some of these districts. All right, one for the train fans in the audience. A section of railway that connects Warsaw to Lublin in southeast and Poland,

Starting point is 03:16:21 which then connects onto Ukraine, was destroyed by an explosion earlier this week. Overhead cables further down the track were also damaged. This comes as drone incursions into European airspace continue. Donald Tusk, the Polish Prime Minister, called the Axe Sabotage. And it seems extremely likely that he is correct about that. I guess we haven't explicitly covered this on ED very much, but there have been dozens of documented Russian operations in Europe since the expanded invasion of Ukraine that began in 2021.

Starting point is 03:16:57 What's concerning to me about this is that Europe is responding to some of these by accusing Russia of trying to, quote, destabilize policies by sending migrants there. It's likely true that Russia is messing with, migration flows. I mean, it is demonstrably true in some cases, right? Responding to this by hardening borders, deploying troops to borders is not the solution to that problem. Europe's iron border hills more people than any other border. And hardening that border is only going to kill more people.

Starting point is 03:17:33 Like, if you want to be the shining city on a hill, right, if you want to be, I think that title is maybe up for grabs, if you want to be the place that stands out as like a safe place for democracy, you don't do that by killing migrants. And so Europe's response to this is extremely disappointing, right? And I wanted to highlight that because I don't see that in the coverage. Yes, Russia escalating, it's meddling in Europe, is extremely concerning. But like, if we accept that Russia is a totalitarian state or going in that direction, then we should also, therefore, accept that people are going to want to leave that and many other

Starting point is 03:18:09 states where they cannot have autonomy, where they cannot live healthy and full lives, and we should welcome them. Talking of people leaving places where they cannot have autonomy and have full and happy lives, let's talk about immigration in the United States very quickly. Border Patrol named Gregory Bovino have moved their internal enforcement, Iov Sauron, to Charlotte, North Carolina. This seems in large part due to some racists on X.com, demanding that they do so. I shouldn't say in large part, I guess. in some part. There has been video already showing Bovino participating in detentions at a home depot car park. I've said two words there, which of course one of my colleagues

Starting point is 03:18:50 are smirky giggle at me. I stand by both of them. So yeah, it is in part, right, due to X.com, the everything website being a haven for racism. But I think it's also worth noting in 2018, Democrat sheriffs in five North Carolina counties ran on the plight. platform of not cooperating with ICE. All of these, I believe, were black sheriffs. And ICE pushed back hard, right, including with a billboard campaign. Last year, the North Carolina Republican state legislature overrode a veto to pass HB10, which required agencies to cooperate with ICE and honor their detainers. A detainer is basically when ICE is like, hey, you've arrested this person. We want you to hold them for a bit longer so we can come pick them up for ice reasons.

Starting point is 03:19:39 Since then, Meckleburg County Sheriff McFadden has claimed that ICE has failed to collect people on detainers 163 times. So this would be, they would normally have a 48-hour detainer, right? They'd hold them for 48 extra hours. Ice should come get them. When they are held on the detainer, it is still the state that is responsible for them. It is a state that is paying for the cost of incarcerating that person. It is the state that is still incarcerated that person, right? this has led, I guess, to Republicans claiming that McFadden is ignoring his obligation under

Starting point is 03:20:14 HB10. McFadden says he isn't. He is holding them for the duration of the retainer, but then releasing them when no one comes to get them, right? This has led to, like, CIS, right, the Centre for Immigration Studies, and SPLC has designated it as a hate group. CIS has listed Charlotte and Mecklenburg County on its map of, quote, unquote, sanctuary jurisdictions.

Starting point is 03:20:35 There's a link to the map if you want to look at it. cite the 2018 policy and don't even mention HB10, so it's unclear to me if they haven't updated this map or if they just believe that nothing has changed because they believe that HB10 is being ignored. I think that might be a lot of the reason why we're seeing this now. Then finally, I want to talk about something local to Southern California in Tomecula, north of San Diego. A 17-year-old boy was pulled over at gunpoint by a man who was known to locals as an ICE agent. The man does not appear to have been in his professional capacity at this time.

Starting point is 03:21:10 Neighbors were able to de-escalate the situation and get Gerardo Rodriguez, the man in question to stop pointing his gun at the teen. L.A. Taco got video of this. It is wild. The guy is just in the middle of the road with a handgun pointing at a truck that's driving down the street. Rodriguez accuses the young man, he's 17 years old and we're going to say his name, right? He's a child. of speeding in the neighborhood,

Starting point is 03:21:35 not generally something that warrants drawing a firearm. Rodriguez was detained by the Riverside County Sheriff's Office. I believe he's bonded out now, but this is an interesting development, right? Elsewhere, like in Santa Ana, an agent pulled a gun

Starting point is 03:21:51 on a community watch member, Fullerton Police on the scene did not detain the person. They also refused to assist, right? They just kind of were present. But this is one of the few cases I'm aware of an ICE agent. There was someone else arrested in LA, who I believe died. I believe that was a Border Patrol agent.

Starting point is 03:22:13 That person unfortunately passed away of an overdose. But this is one of the first instances I've seen of this, right? Like a kind of a state federal, a direct confrontation where this guy appears to have been pseudo-claiming that he was acting under his authority as an ICE agent. That's not entirely clear to me. The young man's parents rushed at a scene with the young man's passport, but by that point, neighbours had already been able to de-escalate.

Starting point is 03:22:41 So, yeah, I'm going to keep an eye on this because I think it's interesting. All right, this week we have a fundraiser from Borderlands Relief Collective. I know they're helping a lot of people who need a lot of help right now, some folks whose roofs are really struggling to keep up with the recent rainstorms that we've had in Southern California. They have an Amazon wish list. URL is too long for me to read out to you. So we will include it in the show notes. If you'd like to help, you can look on that and buy something for someone. Thank you. All right. Well, folks, this has been

Starting point is 03:23:16 the news. Goodbye. 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 CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find

Starting point is 03:23:46 sources where 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.

Starting point is 03:24:05 So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this 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 iHeart podcast guaranteed human

Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 209

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