Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 212

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Starting point is 00:02:08 Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hello, everyone. This is Dana Al-Kurd for It Could Happen Here. Today's episode will be focused on Arab-Israeli normalization, Arab-Israeli peace deals, and Arab-Israeli relations more generally. The reason that this is an important topic to discuss is because a few weeks ago, the Washington Post published this PowerPoint presentation. originating in the Trump administration, titled The Great Trust from a demolished Iranian proxy to a prosperous Abrahamic ally. And this presentation is about Gaza, the U.S. and Israeli

Starting point is 00:03:08 vision for what Gaza's quote-unquote reconstruction will look like. And the word great itself is an acronym that stands for Gaza reconstitution, economic acceleration, and transformation. Now, this presentation has so much in it that horrifies any normal human being. But essentially, it outlines this vision for how Gaza is going to be reconstructed. And throughout the entire document, it's very clear that whatever remains of Gaza's population will not have any political rights. There is some gesturing at some point about handing over some governance to, quote, vetted Palestinians, but there's also a repeated discussion within this presentation, within this

Starting point is 00:03:54 document, of how they want to incentivize a significant segment of Gaza's population to leave Gaza altogether and not return. And they want to financially incentivize them to do that. I think the entire presentation is worth looking at, I'll put it in the show notes, because it really outlines what they think Gaza is going to look like and what they plan for the Palestinians more generally. The reason why Arab-Israelian normalization is important to discuss, given this presentation, given what's happening in Gaza after ceasefire, is present very much in this document. It's very clear from the presentation that the U.S. and Israel envision a particular role for Arab governments in this reconstruction and in this new Middle East that they hope to achieve.

Starting point is 00:04:39 A Middle East where Gaza is this economic zone, connecting it to Saudi Arabia, connecting it to other parts of the Middle East, opening up investment opportunities, for different Middle Eastern governments and companies in the global north as well. And it really is just an astounding vision to behold. Referring to Gaza as a demolished Iranian proxy that they want to turn into an Abrahamic ally is also interesting here because we've seen this kind of language in the last couple of years, especially during the first Trump administration with the Abraham Accords. Now, the Abraham Accords, as this episode will outline in detail,

Starting point is 00:05:15 were agreements signed between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and eventually Morocco and a part of Sudan and these agreements were billed as this new era of peace between Arabs and Israel under this kind of religious language and religious framing of Abraham as the father of both Jews and Arabs, Jews and Muslims.

Starting point is 00:05:40 So to discuss this entire framework what it means, what it obfuscates, Today I'm joined by Ben Schumann Stoller and Matan Khammer, who have created a new podcast series called Bad Cousins. This is published by Kolo Media in partnership with the Diasperist, and they recently had an event in Berlin debuting their first episode, which, full disclosure, I'm on. But essentially, they tackle this question of, why are the Abraham Accords named after Abraham? What was that intended to denote? And why is Arab-Israeli normalization such a big piece of the puzzle? in understanding both the Israeli-Palestinian conflict right now, as well as the vision for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Starting point is 00:06:21 from the American and Israeli perspective. So please enjoy this interview with Ben and Matan. I wanted to give you guys a chance to introduce yourselves to the audience. So Matan, would you like to start? Sure. I'm an anthropologist. I work at Queen Mary University in London. My main research is on migration from Thailand to Israel for agricultural work. But this project is something of a side project

Starting point is 00:06:44 that's blossomed together with Ben who I've been good friends with for, I think, over a decade now. All right. Yeah, I remember that first book on the Thai migrants. But you have also published extensively on the Arab-Israeli normalization questions. So, yeah, we'll get into it. Ben? Yeah, I'm Ben Shuman Solar. I'm the founder and owner of Kolo Media here in Berlin, Germany. We're a audio publisher. We have audiobooks and shows and documentaries in English and German. And, yeah, I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having us. Awesome. All right. So the listeners, I'm sure, are going to be a little bit aware. But let's kind of just define terms at the top of this. When we say Arab is really normalization, well, what do we mean by that? So it's a long, long process. It's not new. One of the interesting things that I found out when researching the article that this podcast came out of is that more than 100 years ago, Haim Weitzman, who was head of the Zionist organization and King Faisal were in very, very close communication about, an agreement that it seems a lot like a progenitor of the Arabic courts today. We had a very sort of strong pro-Western orientation on both sides, pro-imperialist, if you like, use that language.

Starting point is 00:07:54 We had a disdain for the Palestinians as people who were not supposedly an important factor in the politics of the area, and we had a framing of Arabs and Jews as relatives, as kin, which is one that we trace back in the show to the sort of Abraham. concept that has really come to the fore with the naming of the Abraham Accords. Of course, there's a long, long history since then, with the bigger landmarks being Egyptian-Israeli normalization in the late 1970s, 79, I think, and of course, Jordanian Israeli normalization in 1994, which came very, very tightly knit with the Oslo Accords and the initiation of so-called peace talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis.

Starting point is 00:08:39 So the Palestinians were, of course, do play a central role here. whether as present or as present absentees, as the Israelis like to call them sometimes. Today, of course, we fast forward to the 2020s. The Abraham Accords were signed between Israel, Bahrain, the UAE, Morocco, and one of the warring factions in Sudan back in 2020. And of course, there's a kind of live project

Starting point is 00:09:05 led by the U.S. under Trump as well as Biden to extend normalization between Israel and not only Arab countries, but other so-called Islamic countries. Like Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan, yes. Which has had diplomatic relations since 1992, but we'll get into that. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:09:22 But there's other ones, of course, that are on the table. I think Indonesia has been spoken about. Pakistan is always some hovering in the background. The big fish is Saudi Arabia. And we can talk about that as well. Right. Yeah, and when we say normalization, usually people are referring to the formal normalization of diplomatic ties.

Starting point is 00:09:41 because a lot of these countries, a lot of the Arab countries, had a position, reiterated in the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, that they would not have normal ties with the state of Israel until a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And the Abraham Accords was a step away from that, a kind of breaking of that precedent. But if we think about kind of under-the-table normalization, of course, there are so many ways in which these Arab countries have had under-the-table normalization to varying degrees with the state of Israel. Ben, maybe you could tell us about what the Abraham Accords were. How were they billed and what did they include? You have to make sure the precision of my language is on point. But there's two agreements, right? There's two things that were actually signed.

Starting point is 00:10:25 So one is the framework, right? Which discusses like the Abraham Accords as this unit. The Declaration of Principles. The Declaration of Principles. And the other one's a peace treaty, right? A peace treaty between Israel and the UAE and other countries, right? So essentially, that's what it is. It's these two signings.

Starting point is 00:10:43 But I think when you talk about how it was presented, it's supposed to mean, it's supposed to be like a vehicle, a conduit for travel, for security, for economics, for deals, for cultural interchange, for a new way to be seen. It's like a massive PR exercise. Matan, jump in with the specifics. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we're kind of honing in on here is the sort of cultural or ideological aspects, if you want to be more stern about it.

Starting point is 00:11:17 And I think, you know, that's the real interest of the show is in how this sort of mythical framework that I refer to already, and specifically the figure of Abraham, is really, really central to this kind of ideological framing of their course. Like, Elham Fahor was written extensively about how toleration and tolerance have become sort of ideological tools. And Abraham is kind of a figurehead for that. He does listen to a few different ways that I think are interesting for listeners to sort of follow on. The first is as the progenitor or the kind of the figurehead of monotheism. So Jews, Christians, and Muslims all have a stake in Abraham. Of course, this concept of the Abrahamic religions that's very central here.

Starting point is 00:11:53 But another one, and we already mentioned this as well, is the sort of language of kinship, Jews and Arabs as being related to one another, as being specifically cousins. Or so is called Bad Cousins because we're kind of exploring the various modalities or the various kind of shades of meaning and mood that this idea of cousins can have. It can be very positive, of course. You know, a lot of people say, oh, Abraham, that's a wonderful figure of peace,

Starting point is 00:12:14 of hospitality, et cetera. But they're also really dark sides to it. Dark sides that we really get into are the sort of misogyny that's very, very central in the Abraham myth, the underpinnings of slavery versus freedom that are really, really present there. And maybe most prominent,

Starting point is 00:12:30 and most important to me, maybe as somebody who also studies migration to the area, is xenophobia. So something that you don't have written about the similarities between the UAE, for example, and Israel that aren't really considered, that aren't thought about much. One that's always stood out to me is the way that migrant workers are treated in both these countries. The Gulf states, including UAE, are huge, obviously users of non-citizen migrant labor. Israel is not as big. It's not as big a phenomenon in Israel there, but it's growing a lot, especially since October 7th when Palestinian workers have been shut out at the Israeli market.

Starting point is 00:13:01 And so I think Israel is like the Gulf states in a lot of these ways, and it's also getting more, getting to be more like them. And Abraham is kind of a prism or a figure through which we start to explore all these issues. So in my mind, when the Abraham Accords were, you know, whispered about and then we saw them happen, and, you know, I've been writing about Arab-Israeli normalization since before the Abraham Accords in smaller ways. But in my mind, when I kind of heard that terminology being used and that framing being used, to me, it felt deceptive. That they were using this term of like the Abraham Accords, denoting and harkening back to like the idea of the Abrahamic tradition and that were kin and all of these things for listeners who are bad at religion as I am, Abraham had two sons, presume, you know, apparently. and one of those sons is the ancestor of Jews and the other one is the ancestor of Arabs, if you believe that.

Starting point is 00:14:01 So anyway, I'm not going to have blaspheme on this podcast. No, I think a story is important. I mean, it is a deception. I totally agree with you on that. But it's important to unpack how the deception works. Right, right. It's so effective because the story is so well known to people in the region. No, absolutely, absolutely.

Starting point is 00:14:16 But to me, like, the deception lay in the framing of Arab and Israeli animosity through a religious perspective as if the conflict was a religious one. So to me it felt kind of very shallow, but then as you start to unpack, not only the impacts of the Abraham Accords immediately, so immediately repression increases in these countries that sign the agreement.

Starting point is 00:14:41 But then you start to unpack, what are these accords actually serving for the Arab countries that are signing? Why are they signing with Israel? Well, they're attempting to re-engineer society. A lot of that tolerance, language has to do with that. It's they don't want societies that are politically active. They want them to be interested in consumerism. They want them to be maybe slightly socially

Starting point is 00:15:04 liberal. Tolerate the Israelis, tolerate war crimes, and, you know, kumbaya, and never ever have the ability to question the political leadership or the political status quo in any of these countries or in the region as a whole. Yeah, I think it's all that, but I think it's also a global power move, right? The Gulf countries, including Qatar, which has a different politics, are all really trying to make a name for themselves to become really, really huge global players. They're basically all trying to transform this gigantic oil wealth that they have into soft power, into diplomatic power, into cultural power. This brings us into the comedy festival in Saudi Arabia as well, right? And I think part of the framework here is we're part of this

Starting point is 00:15:46 larger global story, which is about freedom, peace, and friendship through religion. Now, what's the deception here. The deception is this sort of, and I think Bena, this is one of his favorite point, so he can expand on this. There's a sort of like a switcheroo game in which something else is brought into view and the Palestinians are hidden, right? The crux of the conflict, the crux of what is basically brought Israel to go wild on the entire region, attacking seven different countries simultaneously, is the Palestinians. And it's always, it has been the Palestinians, it's always going to be the Palestinians. There is, and you've written about this as well, there is a segment of Arab society, especially Arab elites, especially in the

Starting point is 00:16:19 Gulf, who want nothing to do with the Palestinians and would be happy to get rid of them. But this isn't the case with the vast majority of Arabs. It's also not the case with the vast majority of the global South, I think, and even the vast majority of the global north, right? We've seen very, very clear majorities against Israel's genocide in Gaza, even in the United States, you know, in Israel's biggest ally abroad. So there's, in order to not have to talk about this, it's always good to be able to talk about something else. One of the many ways, and I'm not saying this is the only one, but one of the many ways in which the subject has changed is by talking about Abraham.

Starting point is 00:16:52 So we're doing, I mean, our show has a little bit of a, it's kind of a difficult to move to make because we're trying to talk about an excuse, but also unpack why that excuse is so powerful. You know, there's like a lot of violence in this piece framing. And if you look at, I think it's point 18 of the, the peace framework that Trump talks about that Trump presented on Gaza. I think it's

Starting point is 00:17:23 18. I have the quote here, but not a number. It's, you know, an interfaith dialogue process will be established based on the values of tolerance and peaceful coexistence to try and change mindsets. I mean, this is like to try and change mindsets in narratives of Palestinians and Israelis by emphasizing the benefits that can be derived from peace. I mean,

Starting point is 00:17:39 it's like mafia talk, right? It's like, you better do it. Exactly. You better, you're going to love this piece so much or else kind of thing. I cut up some audio from the episodes and from the interview with you, Donna, at the live event that we had here in Berlin a couple weeks ago. This topic is so, feels so urgent and relevant to so many people

Starting point is 00:17:56 that, like, more than 50 people came out in the rain in November in Berlin. And one of the things I played was exactly when you called it an obfuscation. Like, there's this paradox where all these things that were under the table are coming up and are now explicit, these secret deals with Gulf states, this normalization that, you know, you two had known about, you know, in your research, but people like me wouldn't know about if they're not following,

Starting point is 00:18:17 if they're not following this closely. And yet the Abram Accords brought this all up. Okay, now everyone knows, right? Now we know that, like, this is about Iran. This is about security. This is about, you know, these material issues, right? But at the same time, that it's playing on this kind of clarity and this openness, right? And this moderation, it's also creating a whole new obfuscation, a whole new myth.

Starting point is 00:18:41 And, you know, people love this quote. Like there was a lot of, like, nodding heads in the audience when I played what you said, down, which was like, as if, right, like, as if this is about religion, it's about land and it's about sovereignty. And that's clear. But these aren't called the land and sovereignty accords. I mean, like you said, like you said, it's very violent. I mean, I've been describing normalization under these terms, as well as the Abraham Accords in particular, as authoritarian conflict management, because it maintains structural violence. It's not attempting to solve the underlying, you know, motivations for that violence, which, as you said, is the Israeli-Palestinian

Starting point is 00:19:15 conflict, which is the land, which is the war crimes. And I think also I want to just emphasize for listeners that the tolerance framing in particular, there's like the flip side to it, which is you better like this piece or else. And we're calling it peace and it's Abrahamic. So like if you don't like it, what does that say about you? Yeah, exactly. Are you intolerant? Are you an anti-Semite? Are you, you know, like, it's just how could you be against peace? The piece is in the name, but it's a very particular type of peace. It's a liberal. I think authoritarian conflict management is a very good way of putting it, but also, it's also very helpful to help to explain why the Abraham myth is so useful in that regard. Can we just go over the story real quick for listeners

Starting point is 00:20:00 who aren't that familiar? Yes, please. So Abraham, who is known as in all the so-called Abrahamic religions, as the first one to explicitly reject idolatry, right? So there are other righteous men in the Bible before him, but he's the first one who becomes what is in Islam is known as the friend of God, right? So, Al-Qaeda. And he also, in addition to having this very, very intimate relationship with God, he also has a family, right? And in this family, he has a wife and a maid-servant. The wife is named Sarah, and the maid-servant is named Hagarar. Now, I'm going to do this quick. Don't worry. Sarah is barren. She can't have children. And she says to Abraham, I have an idea. why don't you have a child with the maid servant with agar and it'll be my child so already already

Starting point is 00:20:44 i think we can see authoritarianism we can see uh we can see authoritarian conflict management already as kind of the seed that's that's planted in the story agar has a child that child is named ishmael and uh and ishmael is beloved by his father it's the the old testament says so it's very very clear right uh but then sarah gets jealous she says well you know this uh this son is going to and his mother are going to basically be pushing me out of my status within the family. Yada, yada, yada. There's a lot of other stuff that goes on, very, very interesting and very fascinating and lots of it very well-known, like so-called sacrifice of Isaac.

Starting point is 00:21:17 She miraculously had such a child, right? That child's named Isaac. Everyone agrees within these scriptural traditions that Isaac is the father of the Jews and Ishmael is the father of the Arabs. This is central to both Jewish theology and Islamic theology and the Christians in so far as they're involved in the story they're also in on. Now, then the question becomes which one of them is the blessed son? Which one of the one is the one who is supposed to inherit the land, that is the holy land,

Starting point is 00:21:39 wherever that's defined, and that's a little bit vague as well. The Jews say it's Isaac, and the Muslims say it's Ishma. So we have a story, what my dissertation advisor, Andrew Shrya, called a community of disagreement. There are people who disagree on something, but they don't disagree on the frame, right? The frame in which all that entire story is inserted is one in which there's no disagreement. Everybody agrees that Abraham had two kids. Everybody agrees that the women are basically, you know, the women, this is, in the story is predicated on their sons and whether their son succeed is what makes the

Starting point is 00:22:08 women succeed or not. And then the question becomes, which one is the favorite son? Which one is the one that the father loves and the big father up above also loves, right? Now, this is in itself, I think, at least in the way that it's framed in the Abraham Accords, a form of, what do you call it, authoritarian crisis management, right? That's what it is. Now, that doesn't mean, and I think that this is also important, this is also one of the reasons that we made the podcast, that there's no other ways of reading the story. How else could we read the story? For example, we could point out, we could note that the person who has the most intimate contact with God

Starting point is 00:22:37 in this entire story is Hagar. She's the first and only person in the Bible to give God a name. She calls him El-Roi, the God who has seen me. She has at least two miracles done to her. In Islam, of course, her story and Ishmael's story becomes the story of Mecca. All the traditions of the Hajjah are based around the story of Hagar and Ishmael.

Starting point is 00:22:53 So she's a central, central figure, and she's a slave woman. She's an Egyptian. She's the one who's cast out into the desert. She's a migrant. Her name, Hagar or Hajjar in Arabic, means migraine or migration, right? There's all these powerful undercurrents in the story, as there are in every powerful myth,

Starting point is 00:23:07 that mean that it can be read differently. And some people are reading it differently. So I don't think the story itself is the problem. The problem is that the story is used in a very particular way, in a way which facilitates, again, what you called conflictual, sorry. Authoritarian conflict management. I mean, it's a mouthful. Maybe that helps us to get to what the podcast does.

Starting point is 00:23:29 Like, who do you speak to? I know I'm on one of the episodes, but who else do you speak to? And like, what trends were surprising to you? How did your kind of thinking shift over time? I mean, let me start at least, because one thing we talked a lot about at the live event, there was a panel and there was a discussion with the audience. And one thing that's become excessively clear, like we heard Mattan explain the story. I'm down from the Middle East, right? And also in this Berlin audience, like the relevance of the story as a Bible story, I know I've heard of the story, but it doesn't have that much impact for me, like on my life or on how I understand the world. It's a story. It's a Bible story.

Starting point is 00:24:06 And we felt this from the European audience, right? We heard people say something like, like, okay, this is the myth, but are these the myths that are worth exploring right now? You know, maybe with like looking at other myths of more like material issues. And I think what we're trying to do with the show is also explained, well, but these do affect people's lives in the Middle East. Like this is something, in fact, episode two, which comes out in a couple weeks, we have all these vox pop interviews from the old city of Jerusalem where we talk to people on the street and just ask, like, why do you think Jews and Arabs are cousins? And what does that mean? And what does that mean with the Abraham Accords? And immediately, everybody had different

Starting point is 00:24:41 Israelis and the Arabs that you talked to, Matan, had different understandings of the Abraham Accords. But if you said, why is it called the Abraham Accords? Every single one of them were like, oh, yeah, because we're cousins. Yeah. So start there, right? So episode one was about the kind of geopolitics, that's why you were on, Donna. Episode two, explaining this kind of What does that mean then that if everybody can agree that the Jews and the Arabs are cousins, but the Abraham Accords are seen with all of these, like we already started talking about, you know, all these obfuscating kind of nasty, hidden violent undertones, but also kind of like sick, you know, we can fly there or whatever, like all this tourism and and high-fiving and

Starting point is 00:25:20 entrepreneurship and, you know, the biggest sater of whatever UAE history or whatever that was. you know so like yeah so we start there and then and the idea is to really like then turn this whole thing around and look at the myths and look at the stories and try and understand from all these different sides we go into you know medieval Islamic stories and and texts and the idea of hospitality and the idea of of cousinage and what does cousins mean and i mean matan you can you can go further here but the idea of the show really starts from there right and that's how we're going to start at the geopolitics and end up hopefully in turning the whole Abraham idea thing in such a somersault that it lands right on its head or right on its butt or something.

Starting point is 00:26:05 And not only can we kind of dismantle it or understand it and take it apart, but then maybe like reclaim it in a different way and maybe even use it for some kind of positive progressive purposes, even radical ones that, I mean, Matan, in his activism and in his research, you know, you Matan, you say you've already seen. And kind of he has to make the case to me. That's kind of the framing of the podcast. I'm eternally making the case. That's okay. I think it's kind of a difficult case to make.

Starting point is 00:26:32 And the fact that people keep challenging me on it, I think, is very productive. One other thing that came up in Berlin, and I think it was really interesting, is that Ben sort of touched on this at the beginning of what he was saying just now. The way that framing this as the Abraham, of course, framing it as the Abraham story, tends to make it easier for people from Europe or from the United States to North America to see themselves as outside of this story. Right? So, Donna, you also alluded to.

Starting point is 00:26:55 to this. There's this idea that this is like an age-old conflict, you know, between these relatives who are always quarreling between themselves. And oh, it's so difficult to understand. These primitive people over there. Yeah, yeah. Cue like oriental music right in the background. And hence that we rational outsiders, we Westerners, we Christians, et cetera, all these sort of vaguely linked identities that so-called outsiders have, we are sort of neutral and rational outsiders who can play a mediating role and bring this whole ancient mess to an end, right? But the funny thing about this is that it's also a religious kind of, there's also a religious undertone here.

Starting point is 00:27:33 There is this idea. You know, a lot of scholars have written about how so-called secularism, so-called enlightenment in the West actually is a secularized form of Christianity in a lot of ways. And this is really actually very, very clear in this Abrahaming framing because there is this idea that Christianity is superior to these other two religions, right? This is the actual universal religion. this is the one that is able to encompass and sort of transcend the other ones.

Starting point is 00:27:56 And hence, I think maybe this was controversial a few years ago, but nowadays, I think it's quite clear that the U.S. sees itself as a Christian state, right? He even sees itself as a crusader state. I mean, they state it pretty clearly. With the Secretary of Defense having Deus Volt tattoos on his chest, right? So this is no longer, they're saying the quiet part out loud in this, in this context as well. And they think that they can come in, you know, and as these sort of outsiders solve things. But they're actually deeply implicated in the story themselves for much, much earlier than

Starting point is 00:28:23 the 19th century. We could, but go back to the Crusades if we want. Europe has always been involved in the Middle East, right? And the Middle East has been involved in Europe, of course. These are near foreigners, right? So there's no innocence here, right? There's nobody who's outside the story. And Abrahamic framework, one of the, I think, sort of pernicious ways in which it's acting in this, in this current conjunction, in this current day and age, is as this sort of framing that neutralizes the Western influence. It makes it seem objective and rational. And also, I think, allows the Gulf states to to claim that, right? There was like some interesting stuff in the factual book that I didn't quite

Starting point is 00:28:57 put together about the, you know, sort of elite Emirati perspectives as liberal and anti-democratic. But if you're pro-business in a certain way, then you can claim this kind of, you know, like Donna Matan, you two have written about moderation a lot. But this idea for me of like, if you can claim, you know, the business forward thinking, then you're also modern. Then you're also considered, you know, more above, like you have a different elevation and a different sort of legitimacy according to this worldview than somebody that would care about such things as the Jews and the Arabs. What an ancient, old-fashioned kind of passe, you know, the Palestinian issue, you know, ugh, kind of thing. But you know what's cool? Like artificial intelligence and like

Starting point is 00:29:45 shipping deals in the Indian Ocean. That's new, you know? And golf. Yeah, that's sick. Like, yeah, golf and like virtual reality watching people play golf like that would be awesome yeah and it's sort of in data centers invited Dubai chocolate I could go on it's I still think the sater like the biggest sater in memorandi history or whatever is my favorite anecdote but the way that it invited this space so like it's almost like a genius like maybe it was like Jared Kushner's great genius was to see this like you know ability to let other people claim the same Christian elevation, right? The same, like, I'm on

Starting point is 00:30:21 a bit shaky ground here now, so I'll stop. Yeah, I don't know if, I don't know if genius, I might dispute you on that. You know what I mean? In a way, it's kind of obvious, right? Like, they were always going to call these the Abraham Accords when they did them in a way, right? Derek Kushner, I don't know. He's the right guy. He's the right guy in the right place

Starting point is 00:30:37 at the right time, more than anything else. But do you understand what I mean, that like this invitation into this perspective that you were saying, which is kind of like Christian, you know, in our event in Berlin, someone said something like, even without the Jewish Muslim context, we have this problem. We have this problem in this region. And the Abraham Accords allows the conversation to happen on this level of, let's talk about chips, let's talk about fighter jets, you know, let's talk about drones.

Starting point is 00:31:03 Yeah. Drones, yeah. Reveillance, yeah. One other thing that I think is really important is it sort of normalizes this idea that there is a place for everybody and that people shouldn't be mixed. On the Israeli extreme right, the religious extreme right in Israel, there is this notion of the distancing of Ishmael for his correction, right? What's the idea here? Is that the Ishmaelites, that is the Arabs, that is the Muslims, that is the Palestinians,

Starting point is 00:31:24 they have their place in the world. It's just that that place isn't here. It's somewhere else, in a place called Arabia, right? And therefore, that's why we can be friends with Emirates, because the Emirates are Arabs in the right place, in Arabia. The Palestinians, however, they're a problem because they're Arabs who don't realize what the right place is. They can stay here if they accept total subjugation, basically, you know,

Starting point is 00:31:43 the Smotritch's plan is sort of a secularization. The size of plan. Yeah, his decisiveness plan or whatever that's called is a sort of secularization of things that Kahana was saying, the so-called Rabbi Mayer Kahana was saying in the 1980s, the sort of spiritual father of the Israeli extreme, right? They can stay here if they're willing to be our slaves, basically. If not, they can go to Arabia. And once they're in Arabia, they can be our best friends.

Starting point is 00:32:07 And this is really, I think, very, very closely connected to the animosity towards migrants, right? That brings me back to the figure of Hajar or Hajar, right? She is a migrant, and because she is a migrant, because she's not into, the right place. That's why she's denigrated. That's why she's exploited. That's why she's cast out into the desert. So it's not just about the Palestinians in that regard. We can see how this sort of myth also plays into the hyper-exploitation of migrants in the Gulf. We can see how it plays into the racist treatment that refugees from sub-Saharan Africa are receiving in North Africa, right? We literally saw people a couple years ago in Tunisia being cast out into

Starting point is 00:32:38 the desert the way the Agar and Ishma was. And of course, this is all closely related. Again, to Europe, to global imperial kind of processes to capitalism, you know, when Ben was talking about. Racial hierarchy. Racial hierarchy. Right. So one of the reasons that I think we need to keep our eye on this ideology is that in some ways it's different from what we're used to, right?

Starting point is 00:32:55 It's not, for example, white supremacy, right? We're used to think about white supremacy as this sort of globally dominant racial ideology. But this is something different. This is not about people being better because they're white. It's about people being better because they're in their right place. And that's actually, I think, something that's really coming up very, very strong on the global far right, on the far right globally.

Starting point is 00:33:12 This idea that, you know, oh, you'll see like in Europe, for example. It's not that we have anything against black people. or Arabs or Asians or anything else. They just need to stay in their own countries. So long as everybody stays in their own countries, that's fine. And you know, with climate change, with all these catastrophic ecological changes that are happening in the world, people are going to be moving.

Starting point is 00:33:30 And we already see people in masses moving from place to place, but that's going to be larger and larger movements in the coming decades. And, you know, the basic test of humanity is going to be this test of hospitality, whether people are allowed into new places that they have to go to in order to survive. And this sort of ideology, I think, is already sort of primed. it's primed to deny that and to say, no, you've got to just stay in your own space, right? So against that, Abraham, I would like to play Sagar.

Starting point is 00:33:53 I think she's the answer. So, I mean, that's fascinating. I've never really kind of thought about, I've never really thought too hard about this story because as a Muslim and Arab child, it upset me. But I do want to say, like, there is, as you mentioned, like, there is a general trending towards ethno-nationalism all over the world. But the Gulf states cannot manage ethno-nationalism. Saudi Arabia is kind of a little bit of a different story, but the ones that

Starting point is 00:34:34 signed, they are minorities in their countries. On top of that, to their own citizens, to Emirati citizens, to Bahraini citizens, they are illegitimate. They are only legitimate by virtue of providing economic opportunities. You know, those cracks have already been showing up. So the way in which these countries can build legitimacy for themselves, offset possible public pressure, offset any kind of accountability for their regional role. People forget that the United Arab Emirates is deeply implicated in the genocide in Sudan. The way that they connect with, what is, I think, inherently white supremacist and things like this is, but of course, they're not white, is what Yassin al-Hashala, Hassyrian theorist, calls the ideology of modernism.

Starting point is 00:35:17 He was writing about the promise and the discourse of the Assad regime when Bashar al-Assad came to power. But when I read it, I was like, this sounds a lot like the ideology of these Gulf states. And so he says it has three traits. It entirely neglects issues of values, such as freedom, equality, human dignity, mutual respect among people, in favor of morally amorphous categories such as secularism, enlightenment, and modernism itself. It neglects fundamental social issues related to poverty, unemployment, marginalization, life conditions, gender relations, et cetera. And the advocates of this modernism are politically conservative.

Starting point is 00:35:54 I mean, just to a T. Yeah, that's the Abraham Accords in an nutshell right there. Exactly. Yeah. And I, you know, I wrote about this in the context of the Abraham Accords in a paper I published in 2023, but Yassin Haashtala had like kind of nailed it back in 2011, that this was the trend. Yeah, I think Syrians saw a lot of things earlier than the rest of us.

Starting point is 00:36:13 Yeah, definitely. And so this is their vision for the world. And I think this is the vision of a lot of essentially the right in the world, even in America. Like they don't care about democracy. They want this. They want you to be prosperous and in your place. And yeah, everybody stays separate. Yeah, there's a sort of like callousness around all of it, which I think is actually a draw for some people.

Starting point is 00:36:38 Because, you know, cynicism is a big thing in the world. And people are, I think one of the reasons that people are attracted to Trump, for example, is because it's clear that he's a completely cynical actor, you know, who's only out for his own sake. And people are sort of, you know, for better or worse, sick of liberal hypocrisy. So they gravitate towards that. And it's funny, I mean, you would think that that wouldn't go hand in hand with religion or these mythical stories, but it actually does.

Starting point is 00:37:02 You know, speaking of prosperity, for example, there's, in evangelicalism, there's a very strong strand of what's called like the prosperity gospel. this idea, and this has, you know, very, very old roots in Calvinism as well, if you make it in the world, if you're rich, if you make, if you make a lot of money, that means that God loves you. That's like a proof, right? And so again, we shouldn't think about religion too narrowly. Religion is really infused in all these sorts of social ideologies among which are this, and I think this is very, very prominent in the Abraham's story, in the Abrahamic story, is that, well, you know, if they have oil, if they have riches,

Starting point is 00:37:32 if they're, if they've managed to sort of manipulate the global economy to their own advantage, then more power to them. Right? And that's attractive. That's that's something that you want to, that's a train that you want to get on. Maybe they'll give you a plane too, right? That was the Qataris. That wasn't UAE. So we shouldn't get them mixed up. But I think it's kind of the same story. Yeah. No, I completely agree. So, I mean, I started this discussion by talking about the plans for reconstruction in Gaza. And you've already mentioned that like the big whale for the Trump administration of Saudi Arabia. They want Saudi Arabia to normalize with Israel. What are

Starting point is 00:38:07 some things we should watch for in the near future? Where do you think this Arab-Israeli normalization is going to go? I'm always hesitant to make predictions. I think it's an extremely volatile moment. This ceasefire in Gaza, God knows if it's going to hold or if the Israelis are just going to go back in

Starting point is 00:38:23 and start genociting again. I think we're also seeing these really rapid movements throughout the region with, I mean, we've kept alluding to Qatar, but Qatar and Turkey are really playing a really much bigger role now than they were until recently. And that's with American blessing. So that's also going to change, I think, the sort of calculus that Saudi makes. But broadly speaking, I think one thing that we really need to keep an eye on is this IMEC corridor, this idea

Starting point is 00:38:47 of that basically the Biden administration was starting up, but Trump is really sort of put into hyperdrive, which is this idea of connecting India, the Gulf, Israel, and Europe through a sort of alternative to China's Belt and Road initiative. It revolves around oil and gas, but it also revolves who are data centers and AI. So sort of geopolitically and geo-economically, I think that's the big plan that the Americans have hatched for the region. And that basically means turning Gaza

Starting point is 00:39:14 into some sort of concentration camp slash SEZ, especially economic zone, right? There are really, really, really frightening plans to ethnically cleanse about half of the Gaza's population and to sort of turn the rest of them into, well, basically slaves, you know, basically unfree workers in these, in this so-called especially economic zone

Starting point is 00:39:35 that they're trying to set up. Now, whether any of this is going to actually happen, I think it's anybody's, it's anybody's guess at this point. But it's very clear, and I just saw Rafifzata speaking about this at the historical materialism conference in London. It's very clear that it's their plan, right? That's the plan. It's out there.

Starting point is 00:39:51 I don't know if it's even been leaked or it's just publicly released, that this is what the Americans, Israelis, Saudis, and Emirates are planning for the region. It's a really kind of nightmarish vision that they're not even, they're broadcasting out loud. They're not, they're not even pretending to disown it or anything. So, you know, we should take them at their word, and we should be very, very clear that this is

Starting point is 00:40:10 something totally unacceptable. And I mean, as you started out saying, and I think we've always agreed on this, the question for the region is the Palestinian question. If the Palestinians don't have sovereignty, if they don't have freedom, if they don't have equality, if they don't have the right of return, then things are not going to calm down in the region. It's just going to be more and more and more violence, more and more of this hell for everybody. And, you know, these have been hellish years for all of us. I'm not, of course, making any sort of comparison. I think it's clear that things that have been happening in Gaza are beyond any sort of description

Starting point is 00:40:47 in terms of how hard the genocide has been. But, you know, as an Israeli who's currently not living in Israel and would like to return at some point, I really hope that everybody in the region can come to this very, very clear conclusion, you know, whether you phrase it in religious terms or not. And I don't think there's a problem with framing it in religious terms. There are ways of framing it in religious terms, and we can talk a little bit about that more if you want. The fact that the indigenous people of Palestine,

Starting point is 00:41:10 the Palestinians need to have the rights to respect it and fulfilled. And that's the only way that we can bring peace, that we can bring these really beautiful biblical prophecies about the wolf and the sheep lying down and the cutting down of swords into the plowshares to make those reality. So some people might call that messianic, but I think there's also good forms of messianism. Do you have anything to add?

Starting point is 00:41:33 Top of that. My hope the past year, two years, has been that if the Abraham Accords elevated, you know, countries like the UAE to a certain volume, like gave them a certain audience that maybe they didn't have before internationally, that then what Israel has done could be criticized more obviously and that they would actually have some leverage. So my hope still is that as like normal partners, they can normal threaten and normal criticize and normal check the power of their, you know, quote whatever, partners, Israel. And so I'm keeping an eye on hopefully that that will start happening more. But what we do see is that like trade continues to go up and it doesn't seem to have an impact. And I find that very disappointing. And also at the same time, I see.

Starting point is 00:42:30 the polling, and Donnie, you know more about this than I do, but the polling shows increasing criticism of normalization with Israel. So, you know, the idealist to me thinks that like civil society will win out eventually, that this is just untenable. And that what October 7th showed was that and the wars since then, that without dealing with the central cause in the region, which is the Palestinian cause, like there will be no possible, safe, you know, entrepreneurial dreamland of a rich future that they're claiming is going to happen. So that's my hope. And I keep an eye out for that. I hope that they use China and Russia as good countermeasures and counter threats to the American agenda. And I keep my eye out for that.

Starting point is 00:43:19 Yeah, I think really that's the open question moving forward is like, will the political elites went out, will they be able to sidestep the Palestinian question, sidestep their own publics, who, as you mentioned, are extremely critical of normalization, extremely supportive of the Palestinian cause? I think the Americans think that they can. I keep mentioning this on this podcast, but I was on a panel with Stanley McChrystal, general and commander of the joint, what is it, the joint armed forces or whatever in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he was like, oh, you know, the Arabs really want to move past the Palestinians. Like, it's a thing of the past.

Starting point is 00:44:00 If October 7th hadn't happened, like, we would have just moved past the Palestinians. And I was like, what the hell are you talking about? You only say that because you think that you can continue to crush Arab Publix. Yeah. Like, you are predicating your entire strategy on authoritarianism. And it's not an Middle East problem. It's a civil society all over the world has to fight back against authoritarianism, or this is our reality. Yeah, this is.

Starting point is 00:44:25 I think this is the moment now, and this is one of the ways in which the rest of the world is becoming more likely the Arab world in some ways. As we mentioned, we have large majorities almost everywhere in the world. I think maybe every country in the world except for Israel. We have a majority of people who are now supporting Palestine more than support Israel, who are against the genocide, who say, you know, who answer the polls in a way that makes it clear that they're against what's going on. Right. And they're against their government supporting it. But most governments in the world, most governments in the world, including ones that aren't considered very pro-U.S., are basically letting this happen, right? That means that there's no effective democracy anywhere in the world, really,

Starting point is 00:44:58 except maybe in a few places where you can say, okay, I don't know, Spain, some countries. Ireland. Yeah. Yeah. Where even those countries, I don't think they're doing as much as their populations would like them to do, right? Right. So, again, this idea that the West is somehow essentially different from these other countries, it's also kind of a lot.

Starting point is 00:45:18 And it's also something, it's also bogus. And we need to call bullshit on that as well. Yeah. Many people have already made various arguments and there's various ways of making this argument that the Palestinian question, the question of Gaza, the question of the genocide is kind of the global question of our time. I don't think just because there's a ceasefire that that's going to go away in any way. Everything that caused the explosion in the first place is still there.

Starting point is 00:45:41 Right. And I think we're going to keep seeing mobilizations around this issue. I'm sure we are. The crucial question for me is how we connect this to other issues, how we connect us to the question of democracy. Yeah. Can we connect this to the question of rights for migrants? how we can access to the questions of climate change, right? And various people are already doing that.

Starting point is 00:45:57 So I'm not saying this is something that people aren't working on. But this is kind of the challenge for our time. And this podcast, this project is just one small part of that mosaic, which is looking into the ideology that framed the accords after Abraham. And again, thinking about how we can not just debunk that ideology and say, oh, it's not about this, it's about that, but also about how we can read those stories in a different way. To usurp it.

Starting point is 00:46:22 Yeah, exactly, to subvert it and to read those stories in a way that makes progressive sense. I'm really looking forward to listening to the other episodes, not just my own. Yeah, you sound a little more convinced now than you did it after we interviewed. I'm being really nice. No, I'm just joking. You're being hospitable, like Abraham. Exactly. It's in my blood.

Starting point is 00:46:43 When we played it live, someone came up to me afterwards and was like, you know, I agree with Donna, right? And I was like, no, I think we all agree. Like, that's kind of the point. I think we all agree on the basics here. The other part is just sitting in the cringe, as Matan says. Oh, nice. Yeah. Basting, basting in the cringe.

Starting point is 00:46:59 Yeah, basing in the cringe here and trying to find our way out of, like, a bad mushroom trip hallucination where you can do things like pretend that the Palestinians don't exist. Yeah. You know, we're trying to be the orange juice that's supposed to get you out of the, you know, of a bad mushroom or something. Out of the hangover or whatever. Yeah, the trip. Yeah. Sorry.

Starting point is 00:47:18 I don't do drugs. I don't understand. Anyway, thank you all so much. This has been a very interesting episode. And yeah, I'll link in the show notes for listeners, all of the things we mentioned. But yeah, more soon. Yeah, episode one is already out.

Starting point is 00:47:32 By the time your listeners hear this, I think episode two might already be out as well. Okay. And episode two, we kind of go into the back story. Episode one was with you, and we talked about the chords themselves. Episode two, we start digging into those warm holes of the Abraham's story. Interesting. And we talk to people in Jerusalem.

Starting point is 00:47:50 Jerusalem. Again, Ben mentioned this, both Palestinians and Israelis. We went out and asked them what they thought about the Abraham Accords and why they thought it was named after Abraham. Yeah, I'm really excited to listen to that. Thank you. All right. Thanks, guys. Thanks for having us, ma'am. Thank you. Take care. work, a last-minute science project, and someone's always, always shouting for you from another room. So yeah, I'll take any shortcuts that actually works. And that's why I'm all in

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Starting point is 00:49:51 And what is this? How is that not a story we all know? What's this? Where is that? Why is it wet? Boy, do we have a show for you? From Smartless Media, Campside Media, and Big Money Players, comes Crimeless. Join me, Josh Dean, investigative journalists.

Starting point is 00:50:09 And me, Roy Scoville, comedian, as we celebrate the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals. We'll look into some of the silliest ways folks have. have broken the laws. Honestly, it feels more like a high-level prank than a crime. Who catfishes a city? And meets some memorable anti-heroes. There are thousands of angry, horny monkeys. Clap if you think she's a witch.

Starting point is 00:50:33 And it freaks you out. He has X-ray vision. How could I not follow him? Honestly, I got to follow him. He can see right through me. Listen to Crimless on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. What up y'all? It's your boy, Kevin on stage. I want to tell you about my new podcast called Not My Best Month, where I talk to artists, athletes, entertainers, creators, friends, people I admire who had massive success about their massive failures. What did they mess up on? What is their heartbreak? And what did they learn from it? I got judged horribly. The judges were like, you're trash. I don't know how you got on the show. Boo. Somebody had tomatoes.

Starting point is 00:51:15 I'm kidding. But if they had tomatoes, they would have thrown the tomatoes. Let's be honest. We've all had those moments we'd rather forget. We bumped our head. We made a mistake. The deal fell through. We're embarrassed.

Starting point is 00:51:27 We failed. But this podcast is about that and how we made it through. So when they sat me down, they were kind of like, we got into the small talk. And they were just like, so what do you got? What? What ideas? And I was like, oh, no. What?

Starting point is 00:51:41 Check out Not My Best Moment with me, Kevin on stage, on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. Last week, two major news networks, CNN and CNBC, partnered with the so-called prediction market, Kalshi, an online political betting platform, to use Kalshi's real-time betting data in TV news segments' online news content, and, as Kalshi announced on X the Everything app, quote, to integrate prediction,

Starting point is 00:52:14 markets into CNN's global newsroom. With Kalshi threatening, quote, a new era of media is here. This is, it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. Regular CNN viewers may have noticed this integration has already been happening for some time. This past election cycle, news anchors used betting odds in place of an addition to polling data to weigh the likelihood of him candidate's winning elections. CNN's chief data analyst Harry Enten, a Nate Silver protege who used to work for 538, trailblazed the use of political gambling data in news stories earlier this year. Kalshi praised Enten by name in their announcement of the CNN partnership, quote,

Starting point is 00:53:03 Enten is an expert at translating what data and polling are saying on any given issue, and through this integration, he can tap into real-time prediction markets data to better inform and fact-check his reporting, unquote. Here's an example of this reporting in a CNN segment from October 2025. If you go back six months ago, you go back to April Cape Baldwin. What were we looking at?

Starting point is 00:53:28 Well, we were looking at the Democrats with a very clear shot of taking control of the U.S. House of Representatives according to the Kalshi prediction market odds. We saw them in an 83% chance, but those odds have gone plummeting down. Now we're talking about just a 63% chance while the GOP's chances, up like a rocket, up like gold, up from 17% to now a 37% chance.

Starting point is 00:53:50 So we'll look like a pretty clear, likely Democratic win in the House come next year, has become much closer to a toss-up at this point, although still slightly leaning Democratic. Harry Enton never clarifies how these quote-unquote odds are formed for what they really are. To a viewer who just tuned in, or maybe isn't paying that much attention, it would be very unclear that these numbers are actually from a gambling website. They're just big percentages displayed on screen the way you would see polling data or legitimate information used in a newsroom. This short section, using the Kalshi prediction market odds, was then followed by three

Starting point is 00:54:33 minutes of analysis using selective midterm voting data from 2017 and 2018 to support. the movement in these gambling odds. The gambling odds themselves were the load-bearing piece of information in this piece. Kalshi's main competitor, another so-called prediction market, called Polly Market, partnered with X-The Everything App and Yahoo Finance earlier this year to integrate their prediction data into online news content. Time magazine and Sports Illustrated have also both launched deals with the prediction market, platform Galactic.

Starting point is 00:55:13 So what exactly are these prediction markets and how do they function? On Polymarket and Kalshi, users can bet yes or no on the outcome of a question relating to world events, which is called a market. As more money is wagered on either side, the odds of the outcome change. Currently, top questions include various predictions for time person of the year, will the US strike Venezuela before the end of the year, the release of the Epstein files, and who will be the next president? Kalshi has Trump's chances at 6%. Here's Polymarket CEO Shane Copeland explaining on 60 minutes. You make money if you're right, you lose money if you're wrong.

Starting point is 00:55:55 And as a result, it creates this information that's really useful for people. These companies would like you to believe that the ratio of people betting yes or no on a certain outcome of world events, is somehow useful or reliable information for the general public to forecast the future. Whether that's through betting on the likelihood of an upcoming recession, the winner of a sports game, which days of the week Israel will bond Gaza, or what movie will win best picture. Almost $50 million is currently being wagered over a potential Russia-Ukraine ceasefire in 2025. Production markets currently have $3 billion in weekly trading volume. I do need to note, these companies argue that hedging outcomes of world events legally is not gambling,

Starting point is 00:56:48 because that would be illegal. Payments through unauthorized gambling sites are illegal under the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act in 2006, which suppressed the early prediction markets of the 2000s. But Kalshi is regulated as a platform for trading financial derivatives, rather than securities trading or straight-up legalized gambling. And this determines what entity they have to register with and what regulations they're subject to. Kalshi launched in 2021 with a federal license from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. And after a years-long battle, in October 2024, a federal appeals court ruled in favor of

Starting point is 00:57:30 Kalshi, allowing online prediction market betting on U.S. elections, rejecting claims by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that the practice was illegal gambling, and their concerns that prediction market betting could undermine election integrity. Former CFDC Chairman Rostombenham made a statement of May of 2024, reading, quote, contracts involving political events ultimately commoditize and degrade the integrity of the uniquely American experience. participating in the Democratic electoral process. Allowing these contracts would push the CFTC, a financial market regulator, into a position far beyond its congressional mandate and expertise, unquote.

Starting point is 00:58:14 A week before his dad took office in January 2025, Donald Trump Jr. became a strategic advisor at Kalshi. Polly Market launched in 2020 without registering with the Commodity Futures trading, Commission, and was fined $1.4 million by the CFDC in 2022 for operating as an unregulated exchange, and was henceforth prohibited from allowing bets from U.S.-based users, though the Polymarket CEO sees it a little different. It was a $1.4 million fine, and also... It was a settlement.

Starting point is 00:58:50 And you could not have customers in the United States. Yeah, we had to go in Geoblock Trading the U.S. and move certain operations offshore. and it wasn't, hey, you're banned from trading the U.S. It's like until you're licensed. I mean, it was breaking the law. I mean, people say breaking the law, it's like which law, you know. So if anything, it's incompatible. It's incompatible with the law.

Starting point is 00:59:09 Yeah, with the regulatory matrix that existed. The past two years, Polly Market has found to be facilitating illegal gambling and subsequently banned in the countries of Switzerland, France, the UK, Poland, Singapore, Belgium, Romania, and Australia. Most of these bans just require geoblocking users, which can be easily circumvented through the use of a VPN, and since the financial transactions on Polymarket are all done through cryptocurrency, it's not clear that Polymarket is taking any steps to enforce these bands beyond geoblocking. In the midst of facing regulatory hurdles and bans from across the globe, Polymarket still exploded in popularity last year. attracting investment from Peter Thiel's venture capital firm and hundreds of thousands of new users, primarily driven by betting on the U.S. presidential election,

Starting point is 01:00:07 speculation on whether Biden would drop out of the race, and who Trump would pick as vice president, all despite the platform technically being banned in the United States. After the first presidential debate in July 2024 around the attempted assassination of Trump and the RNC, Polly Market gained 60,000 new accounts. The year prior, Pollymarket averaged 2,300 new accounts per month. August 2024 saw 70,000 new accounts. September, 90,000. October, 300,000, the month after Trump's second inauguration, 400,000.

Starting point is 01:00:46 Currently, Paulymarket has over 60,000 daily active traders, and hundreds of thousands of monthly traders, since October 2004. To give another example of their recent growth, in April 2023, Polymarkets monthly volume was about $3 million. A year later, it was $39 million. In November 2024, it was $2.5 billion. Last month, it was $3.7 billion. In summer 2025, Cash Patel's FBI and the CFTC under Trump dropped investigations into whether Polly Market

Starting point is 01:01:39 was illegally allowing U.S. users to place bets using VPNs. Shortly thereafter, Donald Trump Jr.'s venture capital firm invested in the platform, and Trump Jr. himself joined Polly Market's advisor. misery board. Curiously, a few days after Trump Jr. joined Polymarket, the Commodity Futures Training Commission announced it was going to allow Polymarket to operate in the United States after acquiring another company that held a U.S. license. This past October, Trump's own Truth Social, announced it was partnering with crypto.com to launch TruthPredict, quote,

Starting point is 01:02:19 a revolutionary prediction market backed by President Trump for enhanced decision-making, unquote. When Barry Weiss's 60 Minutes did a puff piece on Polly Market with its CEO last week, Anderson Cooper inquired about the risk of insider trading. Polymarket's CEO, Shane Kaplan, seemed to think that a little bit of insider trading might be good, actually. But predictive markets do rely on someone having some inside information. Yeah, I think that people going and having an edge to the market is a good thing. Obviously, you need to curate them, and you need to be really clear and stringent on where the line is drawn and, like, sort of ethics, and we spend a lot of time on that. But it's sort of an inevitability that this will happen, and there's a lot of benefits from it, and, you know, people will adapt.

Starting point is 01:03:11 The CEO did not elaborate on what polymarket's practice of curating insider trading looks like and where their quote-unquote stringent line is drawn, because in reality it doesn't seem this line exists. They essentially encourage insider trading through these vague statements and lack of clear enforcement. From the point of view of these platforms, insider trading makes their prediction markets more accurate. So it's a net positive. And if it fucks over some users on the other side of a bet, that's just the cost of business. Last week, an alleged insider trader won over a million dollars for bets on Google's 2025 year-in-search rankings, listing 22 out of 23 in the correct order. This user has made a series of early bets related to Google the past year,

Starting point is 01:04:04 like the exact release date of Google's Gemini 3.0, which they won $150,000 on. But because this polymarket user isn't trading stock, there's no clear regulatory mechanism to stop this behavior. And polymarket can't reverse these trades because they run through the blockchain, not that they would even necessarily want to. Professional gambler, political data analyst, and polymarket advisor, Nate Silver was also asked about insider trading on the China Talk podcast two months ago. Are you worried about insider trading with all this political betting? I mean, there's an

Starting point is 01:04:47 aspect of like, look, these are all crypto, you know, you get on these markets with crypto and like, like there were markets like which way is Suzanne Collins going to vote? And, you know, the sort of the like, you know, like the tail outcomes for like a legislative assistant in her office are, you know, you can make 10 times your salary in like a minute, right? Yeah. What's your, what's your thinking on this? For sure. I mean, look, I think there are a couple of qualifications, though.

Starting point is 01:05:20 Like, first of all, I think people on the inside often aren't as well as informed as they think and or there are some downsides to having an inside view and not an outside view. you might drink the Kool-Aid, so to speak, right? You might be in a bubble. Yeah, look, I mean, we've seen. But I mean, there are ones where it's like you can literally, I mean, there's been lots of group chats people talking about like very, very sketchy trades and one-way bets that are being made in the stock market of like what's going to happen with a trade deal.

Starting point is 01:05:49 I mean, you can literally be the person who decides, right, and be betting on the side. If there are, if there are incentives to make money in a world of $8 billion. in people, many of whom are very competitive and all of whom, not all of them, most people who have access to the internet, right? People are going to find a way a way to do it, right? Let's pause here for a sec. What do you think Nick goes on

Starting point is 01:06:12 to list as a comparison to political insider trading as like an unfortunate but somewhat inevitable consequence of our evolving system of finance? Like in the crypto space, we've seen like an increasing number of like crypto kidnappings, right? well, I mean, that's one of the consequences of people are worth vast amounts of wealth that

Starting point is 01:06:34 isn't very secure. It's just going to happen until you up security or have better solutions or whatever else. And so, like, you know, I don't think there's necessarily anymore or less insider trading on like polymarket than there might be for sports betting sites. We've seen a lot of sports betting scandals or for regular equities. You know, I believe the literature says that like members of Congress achieve abnormal returns from their stock portfolios. I'd have to, I'm sure there's some debate about that. I'd have to, like, to double check that, right? It's fine, bros.

Starting point is 01:07:06 It's just like cryptocurrency kidnapping. It's fine, actually. So, Nate goes on to say that prediction market insider trading isn't that different from congressmen doing insider trading on the stock market or, like, rigged sports betting. But he really neglects to emphasize that. Those things are also bad and should be aggressively clamped down on. That shouldn't be allowed. And prediction markets intentionally skirt regulation.

Starting point is 01:07:37 They currently have far less legal protections for users against unfair practices. And with crypto, they can be pretty anonymized, enabling bad actors. And now, news companies are legitimizing, turning everyone's phone into a corrupt casino for world events. whether that's Israel, starving Palestine, or how many tweets Elon Musk is going to publish this week. The day before, Kalshi announced their partnership agreement with CNN and NCNVC, CBS aired a 60-Minute's puff piece on Polly Market anchored by Anderson Cooper. When we met with Copeland last month, more than $3.6 million had been wagered on whether or not Venezuela's president Nicholas Maduro would be out of power by the end of the year.

Starting point is 01:08:24 Polymarket users didn't think so. They gave it only a 23% chance. And if you buy no on that, and you're buying it at 78 cents, and at the end of the year, he's still in power. Yeah, you get a dollar per share. So you've made a profit of more than $0.22 per share. I can see why this would be, I mean, I don't want to use the term addictive, but it would be compelling.

Starting point is 01:08:48 I mean, maybe it is addictive, I don't know, but it's certainly compelling. This is how I see it. If you are into geopolitics, this. creates an incentive for you to dig in to what's going on in Venezuela and try and get an edge. Anderson Cooper, who both works for the newly Kalshi partnered CNN, as well as CBS's 60 Minutes, is so hesitant to call this clearly addictive practice, addictive, quote unquote, compelling. Here's how Polymarket CEO Shane Copeland explained the platform earlier in this piece. It's a site where you can basically bet on current events, some sort of question about the future,

Starting point is 01:09:29 like an election, and as a result, when a ton of people are betting, you get the betting odds, which basically tell you how likely each outcome is. And how accurate is it? It's the most accurate thing we have as mankind right now, until someone else creates some sort of super crystal ball. Anderson Cooper responds with narration that the CEO, quote, may be prone to hyperbole, but he's definitely on to something, unquote. In explaining how polymarket users attempt to seek truth and gain an edge, Copeland told the story of how in 2024, an anonymous French user made over $80 million

Starting point is 01:10:08 on polymarket by betting on Trump winning the presidential election. And to bolster his bets, he contracted UGov to conduct private polls in swing states. People thought he'd just like Trump, and he had actually commissioned a ton of private polls. He did something called neighbor polling, which is you asked people who they think their neighbors are likely to vote for. For scenarios for an election where there's a stigma to saying you're going to vote for somebody and people feel some sort of social awkwardness, and what he noticed was there was huge discrepancy in the neighbor polling versus the normal polling, and the neighbor polling favored Trump enormously.

Starting point is 01:10:42 He thought Trump was undervalued. If this guy was not able to make $80 million, but rather able to make $80,000, he would never gone through, the hassle. But when you get markets that are big enough, you create this incentive for people to go above and beyond to try and find truth. What the CEO is arguing here is that the sheer scale of money being wagered creates incentive to quote-unquote find truth. In media discussions of prediction markets, there's this specter of objectivity around the gambled odds, which obviously the CEO of Polly Market has a personal incentive to encourage But Anderson Cooper here doesn't challenge this notion of capital T truth, even though Donald Trump was way ahead in prediction market odds back during the 2020 election, which had his chances of winning that election far higher than what pure polling models showed.

Starting point is 01:11:39 Kalshi claims that prediction markets can help journalists quote-unquote fact check, but doesn't explain how fact can be determined. and from speculative gambling markets, where is the fact in gambling? Well, we will find out after these ads. To quote from Polymarket advisor, Nate Silver's blog, The Silver Bulletin, quote, it's basically good when people are more exposed to probabilities and they become more normalized. But, of course, I also analyze polls and build probabilistic models myself.

Starting point is 01:12:26 In that capacity, I strongly disagree with the notion that prediction markets can serve as a good substitute for polls. These sorts of claims are sometimes advanced by the prediction market companies themselves, including polymarket to be fair. One minor pet peeve is that, Both reporters and readers often confuse probabilities for poll results, unquote. As Nate goes on to explain, if Trump is up 55 to 45 over Kamala Harris on a prediction market, that's not saying that Trump is expected to win by 10 points. It means that 10% more users on the website favor Trump winning, which is pretty close to a toss-up.

Starting point is 01:13:11 This confusion is a huge problem, which is bolstered in both how prediction market companies market their platform, but also how journalists use gambling data in news stories. If you see a social media post, an advertisement, or a random news segment showing percentages tied to pictures of two politicians in a race, without context, those betting numbers could be interpreted in a number of ways and influence someone's perception of an election and maybe even their choice on who to vote for or even whether to vote at all. In an October speech, Zoran Mamdani referenced Kalshi billboards predicting a Cuomo victory in the Democratic primary. When I walked the length of Manhattan just a few days before the election, hundreds of New Yorkers marched alongside me.

Starting point is 01:14:02 And when we strode into Times Square under a billboard with betting odds that showed Cuomo's chances of winning at nearly 80%. We knew that the so-called experts were set to get it wrong yet again. Andrew Cuomo was supposed to be inevitable. When you see the calci odds that have our chances of victory in the 90s, know this. you are reading the same things that Andrew Cuomo read when he went to sleep each night in June, believing that his victory was promised. We cannot allow complacency to infiltrate this movement.

Starting point is 01:14:49 Kalshi excitedly shared the latter half of that clip, proclaiming, Breaking, Zoran Mamdani references his Kalshiads on stage. Kalshi is mainstream, unquote. despite this clip demonstrating how prediction markets often suffer from inaccurate bias. Last week, discount Steve Kornacki, former 538 analyst and now CNN's data expert Harry Enten, shared this segment about the Tennessee District 7 special election on X-The-Everything app, with the caption, odds are Dems will come within 10 points of a win, if not outright win.

Starting point is 01:15:30 I would say if you had to look at the congressional map, any district that Donald Trump won by 22 points, you would say, you know, you've got like nearly a 100% chance of winning if you're running for Congress there. But what are the prediction market saying right now? Yeah, what are we talking about in terms of the prediction market odds? Look, the Democrat has a 15% chance of winning in that race, okay, a 15% chance, which ain't nothing in a district that Donald Trump won by 22 points. But here I think is the key nugget on this side of the ledger. and that is a GOP win by under 10 points. There's a 68% chance of that. So there is a more than two-thirds chance

Starting point is 01:16:06 that the Republican candidate, yes, they win, but they win by a significantly lower margin than Donald Trump. We're talking about double digits smaller. We're talking about a huge, huge shift to the left. We're talking about when you add these two together, we're talking about a more than 80% chance that there is a clear double-digit shift to the left

Starting point is 01:16:27 and a 15% chance that Democrats, actually wins in a district that Donald Trump won by 22 points, that just shows you how bad the environment is for Republicans right now, that the Democrat has any sort of a chance in this day. He's just authoritatively rattling off complete speculation on a Democrat victory as big screens display percentages in huge text, with source Kalshi in tiny text at the bottom of the screen. Ordinary polling showed that this was a close race,

Starting point is 01:16:58 that leaned red by two to eight points, and the Republican did end up winning by nine points. To quote the broken clock Nate Silver, quote, without having polls to look at, the prediction markets would probably kind of suck at making election forecasts. Translating polls into probabilities is considerably more complicated

Starting point is 01:17:21 when there are many correlated races at once, such as in the battle for the electoral college or control of Congress. Prediction markets had a strong 2024 in this regard. They leaned toward Trump when our model had it at 50-50. I don't think this was because

Starting point is 01:17:39 of any special modeling insight per se, but because they incorporated some sort of prior intuition that Trump would overperform his polls again. So give the markets credit for that. These sorts of soft

Starting point is 01:17:54 quote-unquote intangible intuitions can be valuable. though you'd need a lot of data to determine whether they add or subtract value in the long run, unquote. As Nate himself acknowledges, someone like Andrew Cuomo had much higher betting odds throughout the entire New York mayoral race than a purely statistical model would show. A contention I have with Nate, one of many, is though I call prediction market numbers gambling odds, they are not actual probabilities. These odds aren't based on objective mathematical principles, like flipping a coin,

Starting point is 01:18:35 the three-door problem, or even something like blackjack. These odds are created whole cloth through guessing, sometimes educated or data-informed guessing, but still primarily through people's intuition, which is susceptible to group impulses. Many random world events lack a reliable basis of continuous, controlled data that's needed to form a probability, like that which is applied to legalized sports betting. This is quite evident in the betting odds around the last papal conclave, which had very little relevant data to use for informed predictions. There was no existing probability to support the election of an American Pope.

Starting point is 01:19:18 a first-time occurrence. With prediction markets, people can still do research to make an informed bet, but it's not really the case that ex-candidate is mathematically expected to win an election 80 out of 100 instances. A hive mind of users have formed that statistical division through the power of money. 80% of users are betting that a certain result is likely to occur. So the problem isn't just that, like Nate's... says people are confusing probabilities for polls, it's that they're confusing prediction market

Starting point is 01:19:55 betting odds for mathematical probabilities. It's this difference that allows betting on sports outcomes via Kalshian polymarket, even in states that ban typical sports betting. Because you're not actually betting on fixed odds. You're betting against other investors. And now news companies are not just manufacturing consent and normalizing political gambling, but are actively encouraging the use of these platforms and endorsing the predictive capacity of these gambling markets. Anderson Cooper calls it the quote-unquote wisdom of crowds. But we already have methods for learning group consensus like polling, which may have problems, but frankly, far fewer problems than gambling on world events. Beyond the moral qualms of betting money on human suffering,

Starting point is 01:20:50 prediction markets are susceptible to not just personal bias, but group bias based on the current ratio of odds. This in-group consensus can be influenced by short-lived trending topics. And these platforms cater to a hyper-online point of view. Prediction market users provide a very non-representational sample variety. Pulling from very specific type of guy who regularly uses these platforms. To quote from Kalshi's CNN partnership announcement, Kalti has become the definitive source for staying informed about the future and is used by reporters, politicians, pundits, Wall Street, and Main Street.

Starting point is 01:21:32 He had recently called the New York City mayoral election eight minutes after polls closed, hours before the media. It's because of this accuracy that Kalshi's data will serve as a powerful compliment to CNN's reporting. Journalists can more easily surface credible information to their audiences about the real-time probabilities of future cultural and political events.

Starting point is 01:21:53 Unquote. In practice, this reporting mixes, gambling data, and actually reputable or credible polls in a confusing way, like this recent CNN segment, which cites calci odds on whether Trump will send

Starting point is 01:22:09 tariff stimulus checks, as well as CBS, U-Gov polling data on if tariffs lower prices back to back in the same segment. Do they think that the tariffs, that these rebate checks are actually coming? And at this point, no, no. I mean, chance Trump tariffs, the tariff stimulus checks are sent to Americans by August of 2026. It's a 25% chance.

Starting point is 01:22:34 That's one in four. So that's not nothing. But the American people right now are craving, craving some relief. And at this point, it doesn't look like it is coming. Although I will note, John Berman, this 25%, it is greater than this 6% who say that tariffs decrease prices or that 5% back in March, which are just, you never see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5%. So look, 25% ain't nothing, but at this point, it's low. Yeah, it's interesting that prediction markets think that only 1 and 4 chance that will actually happen there.

Starting point is 01:23:07 Is this really what the future of political forecasting is going to be? Maybe, maybe not, but there are four horsemen of this political gambling apocalypse. Nate Silver, via his gamification of election predictions based on his time as a professional gambler, sports betting, especially since the Supreme Court struck down a federal law banning sports betting outside of Nevada in 2018, resulting in almost 40 states subsequently legalizing some form of sports betting, which has facilitated the accessibility of gambling to grow dramatically across the country the past 10 years, through the spread of online sports betting apps. The third horseman is Trump, or the Trump administration,

Starting point is 01:23:49 through their removal of regulatory hurdles facing prediction markets. And finally, that CNN guy, Harry Enton, a Nate Silver protégé who trailblazed the use of political gambling data in news stories the past year. These four horsemen, Nate Silver, sports betting, Trump, and Harry Enten have created the cultural and political conditions for political gambling to spread like wildfire, which, hey, is also something you can bet on.

Starting point is 01:24:19 During the LA fires, prediction market users could bet on how many acres would burn. So what is the end game of this? This gambling apocalypse that seems to be inching its way closer and closer. To answer that, here's a clip from Kalshi co-founder and CEO, Terik Mancer. The long-term vision is to financialize everything. create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion. We are living in a world where like we have an abundance of information but there's a lot of noise and like we don't really

Starting point is 01:24:50 understand what's real from what's not. And prediction markets are an antidote to that. They do very, very good job at distilling information and surfacing truth to people. And you're seeing this sort of massive shift where like people are using them whenever they think about questions about the future, you know, whenever they're debating about anything. And I think that trajectory is going to keep going. That's a new consumer habit that I don't think it's going to be undone. This is the demon child of crypto and sports betting, this financialization of everything to form a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion, creating new, addictive consumer habits. These companies want to apply the logic of smartphone sports betting to everything, where everyone gets to be their own little Nate Silver while carrying around their own digital casino in their pocket, getting addicted. to gambling on speculation of world suffering.

Starting point is 01:25:43 And CNN is complicit in this. CNN and others have decided to partner with platforms that enable the people who decide when to drop bombs around the world to win millions of dollars by betting money on the choices they themselves are making at the expense of the rest of the world.

Starting point is 01:26:01 And these companies think this is a good thing because the betting odds can serve as a potential heads up that something is likely to happen. Simple consumer protections for users, which currently are non-existent, are just not enough. Congress needs to be far more involved in regulating online betting, and in the case of political events, it should just be completely banned. It is detrimental to a healthy society. It incentivizes corruption, cruelty, and erodes public trust. Gambling doesn't need to go away entirely, but it should return to being time and location locked. Go to Las Vegas like a

Starting point is 01:26:40 fucking adult. Currently, there is no existing mechanism for individual states to regulate prediction markets. Only the federal government can. And Trump's federal government certainly seems like it's not going to, considering the president's son works for both of the main platforms, Kalshi and Polymarket. And while news companies are legitimizing this, these platforms are now working as their own news aggregators, specifically Polymarket social media account, which is acting as a news aggregation account, because that drives traffic back to their website where people can bet on the news stories that Polymarket is sharing, even if those news stories are speculative or completely made up. On December 5th, Polymarket posted,

Starting point is 01:27:31 quote, Justin suspected J6 pipe bombers legal counsel projected to argue he was included in Trump's pardon of those involved in January 6th, unquote. This claim subsequently spread all around the internet, parroted by people of a variety of political orientations. But if you read closely, the original post says, suspected J6 pipe bombers legal counsel projected

Starting point is 01:27:58 to argue he was included. in Trump's pardon. Polymarket is just spreading gambling information as if it is news content. Quote unquote, projected just means that polymarket users are betting on this. But these projected posts are mixed in with other posts, just aggregating the day's news.

Starting point is 01:28:20 So unless you are paying super close attention, which rarely people on the internet are, this becomes a Trojan horse of disinformation. When news companies use the term projected on election night, usually that indicates with pretty clear mathematical certainty that an event is going to happen. When Polly Market uses projected in news tweets, it only indicates that internet gamblers are swinging around money in an effort to create truth. With once legitimate news companies, not just complicit but active participants in this process. That is it for us today at It Could Have Been Here. See you on the other side.

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Starting point is 01:30:48 And what is this? How is that not a story we all know? What's this? Where is that? Why is it wet? Boy, do we have a show for you? From smartless media, campside media, and big money players comes crimeless. Join me, Josh Dean, investigative journalists. And me, Roy Scoville, comedian, as we celebrate the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals.

Starting point is 01:31:13 We'll look into some of the silliest ways folks have broken the laws. Honestly, it feels more like a high-level prank than a crime. Who catfishes a city? And meets some memorable anti-heroes. There are thousands of angry, horny monkeys. clap if you think she's a witch and it freaks you out he has x-ray vision how could i not follow him honestly i got to follow me he can see right through me listen to crimeless on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast what up y'all it's your boy kev on stage

Starting point is 01:31:49 i want to tell you about my new podcast called not my best month where i talk to artists athletes entertainers, creators, friends, people I admire who had massive success about their massive failures. What did they mess up on? What is their heartbreak? And what did they learn from it? I got judged horribly. The judges were like, you're trash. I don't know how you got on the show. Boo, somebody had tomatoes. I'm kidding. But if they had tomatoes, they would have thrown the tomatoes. Let's be honest. We've all had those moments we'd rather forget. We bumped our head. We made a mistake. The deal fell through. We're embarrassed. We failed, but this podcast is about that and how we made it through.

Starting point is 01:32:29 So when they sat me down, they were kind of like, we got into the small talk, and they were just like, so what do you got? What? What ideas? And I was like, oh, no. What? Check out Not My Best Moment with me, Kevin on stage on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. Hello and welcome to Ikadopinia. I'm Andra Siege, also known as Andrej.

Starting point is 01:32:54 and I'm joined once again by that's your cue Mia Wong girl who was really really the first time was like I am not going to miss my cue this time and then this time I was like oh I'm waiting for the queue and then it was like shit that's the cue and then it took my brain

Starting point is 01:33:17 several seconds to be like oh no it would be very funny if the editors just edited out the pause so everyone has no idea what I'm talking about. That would be hilarious, actually. But there was unaware. That was like a 10 second pause before Mia came in. No, really, truly, this is Mia on like three hours of sleep, brain.

Starting point is 01:33:42 And I was like, oh, yeah, right. The cue's going to come. Things going great for Bea Wong, the other person who's on this show. You know who I am statistically. if you're listening to the show, Woo! Of course. I mean,

Starting point is 01:33:58 speaking of seconds, by the way, in those 10 seconds that you were waiting for your queue that had already passed, hundreds of people were born. You know,

Starting point is 01:34:11 every second, somewhere someone is being born. Like other animals, humans have this tendency to multiply. But should they? That is the question of the day.

Starting point is 01:34:23 You see, last episode I was on, we spoke about the worries surrounding population. You know, whether we have too many people or too few people. But the question of making people or not making them has been the subject of a few ideological clashes. There's a whole movement of thinkers who argue that bringing new life into the world is a big mistake. These are the anti-natalists. And on the other side, you have those who say that having children is good and essential. That's the pro-natalist cap.

Starting point is 01:34:57 So in this episode, we'll be getting into that tug of war philosophically and weighing the issues with both. Because I'm not going to make it a secret. I'm not a fan of either of them. I don't know. How do you feel about? Yeah, this is the one good Stalin quote. They're both worse. So we have to pick among those two.

Starting point is 01:35:18 So let's start with the anti-natalists. What's the kind of gut reaction? or impression you get from those folks. I don't know. I think there's a combination of stuff that's largely harmless and sometimes is funny.

Starting point is 01:35:35 Like, you get protested people holding up signs that are like, I didn't ask to be born, or didn't consent to be born. It's like, sure. But then there's also people just doing mass shootings about it. So, it's great. It's a good time. It's a very normal time for politics. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:35:50 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when I think of them, I tend to think cringe and Reddit, but they actually have a philosophy outside of Reddit forums. So, according to the internet encyclopedia, philosophy, anti-natalism is the view that it is either always or usually morally impermissible to procreate. Now, most of us grew up with the idea that life is inherently valuable, right? But antinitalists disagree. They see life as a budan rather than a gift. very edgy very reddit but you know it's something that has been around since before the internet while not himself an anti-natalist the german philosopher arthur schopenhauer who lived in the

Starting point is 01:36:35 19th century is thought by some anti-natalists as a contributor to their philosophical foundations in his descriptions of life as constant striving frustration and pain in the 20th century the Romanian writer Emil Choran argued that non-existence is the ultimate form of peace. His philosophical pessimism regarded individual life and human history as a whole as a record of error, illusion, and futility. And most famously, South African philosopher David Benatar laid out one of the main anti-needalist arguments in his book, Better Never to Have Been, the Harm of Coming Into Existence. bang a title though. Now, you can find theoretical contributions to antinatalist thought in Buddhism's idea that life is suffering, or incident interpretations of it rather, or incident gnostic traditions

Starting point is 01:37:32 that saw the material world itself as a kind of cosmic mistake. Now, there are a lot of reasons that antinatalists put forward for their stance. There are philanthropic and misanthropic arguments for anti-natalism. You know, the philanthropic ones focus on harm to the individual. who is brought into existence, while the misanthropic arguments tend to focus on the harm that new people cause to the world. So there's the consent argument that Mia would have mentioned, you know, basically a child cannot consent to being born. So by creating them, you're forcing them into a life they didn't ask for, a life that will inevitably include suffering. Another argument is in that sort of negative utilitarianism camp. It's the idea that our moral priority should be

Starting point is 01:38:15 reducing suffering, not increasing happiness. In fact, they don't see the potential or actuality of pleasure as an offset to suffering at all. Under their view, even a single unit of suffering is unacceptable. And since every new life will include suffering, not creating life is the surest way to reduce it. David Benetor had the famous asymmetry argument, which is that the presence of pain is bad, the presence of pleasure is good, but the absence of pain is always good, even if no one appreciates that good, and the absence of pleasure isn't bad unless there's someone missing out. So put simply, according to the argument, by not having a child, you avoid guaranteed suffering without depriving any person of joy because that person doesn't exist. So that equation

Starting point is 01:39:09 is probably one of the main pillars, I'd say, of the anti-natalists as a movement. You know, you might be thinking to yourself, oh, but I'm glad to be alive. No, you're not. According to Benetter and the anti-natalists, you're deluded to think so. the internet encyclopedia philosophy calls it the deluded gladness argument.

Starting point is 01:39:43 Basically, your positive view of your own life is unreliable. Beretta argues that we have cognitive biases like optimism and selective memory and so on, which distort how viciously we assess our own suffering. So many good life reports, even if you think you have a good life or a decent life, you're deceiving yourself according to him. Do you think people are deceiving themselves when they say, that they enjoy their lives? You know,

Starting point is 01:40:10 this entire line of argument is just making me be like you need to do less philosophy and like go outside and live. Like, it's just like... Yeah, I mean, I get the whole thing about, you know, all mental bias towards optimism and that kind of thing,

Starting point is 01:40:27 but that doesn't invalidate the joy of people appreciating their life. Yeah, it's like this sounds like the exact. script you get in your head when you're really depressed? It's like, okay, like, have you considered getting your depression managed and getting help for it instead of like doing philosophy about it? I feel like E.O. would be an antennae list.

Starting point is 01:40:54 Oh, Eor, yeah. Like, nothing matters. Well, and it's also frustrating because it's like, the most compelling version of this argument is about, like, This world right now is absolutely dog shit, and I can't justify bringing someone into it. But that's, like, too grounded. And so all these people are like, no, no, no, no. Actually, here's like this philosophy that proves that life bad.

Starting point is 01:41:21 And it's like, ugh. I mean, there are antennaseless arguments that do get into that more grounded. Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah. You know, they have one argument about multiplying suffering, right? Because every child you bring into the world isn't just one person. son, you know, they have the potential to have children themselves and grandchildren and so on, multiplying the chances of pain, disease, loss, suffering down the generations.

Starting point is 01:41:46 This is like long-termism shit. It's just like, instead of like actually analyzing the world, we're going to build unbelievably complicated and completely meaningless, like abstract models of it and try to base our things off of that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's absolutely ridiculous. us. Now I understand, you know, our track record isn't the best, you know, their plagues and slavery and genocide, environmental destruction. And some of them say, well, that's the best thing. The best thing we could do is to voluntarily go extinct, you know, to step off the stage of the earth. And that connects with the general misanthropy and I think the misanthropic argument that humans are some kind of blight on the world. Yeah. And they are anti-Aitlists who take it a step further as well. And they're not just anti-aitlists for you.

Starting point is 01:42:35 humans. They are universal anti-useless. Oh, Jesus Christ. So they believe that not just human births are problematic, but existence itself, sentient beings across the board, human or animal, are better off never being brought into life at all. Really, truly, at this point, brother, this is a you problem. Like, you just don't like existing. Like, we can work on that, but, like, this is not a philosophical thing. Like, you're just depressed. Like, come on. Yeah. What are we doing here? Yeah, I mean, Antenationalism is making some very heavy claims, and they're obviously going to be counter arguments, because people are not going to roll over with the kind of assertions that it makes. The most intuitive answer I would give is that, yes, life involves suffering, but it also includes pleasure and joy and creativity and achievement.

Starting point is 01:43:24 And for most people, those positives outweigh the negatives. And if you're a radical, you recognize that some of the negatives of life, are not inevitable. The famines, the wars, the suffering, the poverty, it's not inevitable. It's a product of economic and political systems that we have the power to change. And yes, there will always be suffering. There may always be some diseases. There will always be death, right?

Starting point is 01:43:52 But that doesn't mean that existence is worse than non-existence. I'm glad to exist. Mia, I feel like you're probably glad to exist. I'm glad you exist. most of the time like this is a distinct improvement for positions I have been in but like yeah it's nice

Starting point is 01:44:10 yeah it's you know like even even in the middle of like hell world it's nice yeah and yeah the biases may skew our perspective but the fact of the overwhelmingly choose life itself is a reason

Starting point is 01:44:26 to not throw it out you know when people are given the choice do you want to live right now or die we're going to say they're going to live, you know. Yeah. And yes, we don't consent to being born, but there are other things that we don't consent to that we still benefit from. You know, infants don't consent to being vaccinated, but it's something that benefits them.

Starting point is 01:44:49 You know, we educate infants. We restrain them from danger. We don't ask their permission necessarily to do these things, but it's just for their well-being, for their benefit. And I don't think, while consent is an important fact, factor in the way that we engage with others, I don't think consent is the only factor for a framework of determining what is moral and immoral. You know, you can't use consent to determine whether it's moral or not to exist. I don't feel like those two pieces mesh together

Starting point is 01:45:20 very well. Yeah. Well, and also I think like there are so many other things that we didn't consent. Like, for example, you know, like, and this is another thing that's talking about it's Like, we never consented to die. On a less metaphysical level, I don't know, like, I didn't consent to, like, to live under this state. Yeah. Where, you know, they're, like, doing helicopter raids on apartment buildings and, like, dragging naked children screaming away from their parents in the middle of the night.

Starting point is 01:45:46 Like, you know, and that's a thing that you can actually actively do something about that you didn't consent to that is actively harming you and everyone else around you, versus like being born and making that the thing that you're doing is like okay like we didn't get to live in our capitalism we didn't we didn't get set to colonialism like we didn't get to any of the shit and that's something you can you know make not happen versus you being born which there is nothing you can do that change the fact that you were born and it's like oh well I'll focus on yeah you want you want it you want to focus on like reducing the amount of suffering the next generation will create in the world have we considered like climate change yeah yeah i i also think

Starting point is 01:46:30 that on a broader level right i think it's good to be questioned some of the intuitions that we may have you know even if they are our deepest moral intuitions i think it's good to maybe consider them or to be thoughtful about them but also as the incident encyclopedia philosophy argues, if a theory implies that the creation of all human life is a moral mistake, that conclusion itself might be reason to doubt the theory. This is something called the repugnant conclusion objection. You know what I mean? Because it's repugnant.

Starting point is 01:47:08 It's intuitively repugnant to most people to hear that existence is a mistake. Nobody should be alive. Yeah. I was like, well, no. Absolutely not. Get your shit worked out. Exactly. The train of logic here, not great.

Starting point is 01:47:24 Like you were saying, yeah, there are a lot of things in the world that suck right now that cause suffering. And there's a lot of present joy is alongside that present suffering. But there's also the value to be had in that potential joy. You know, the potential possibilities have value. If potential suffering has value, potential joys should also have value. the potential of creating a better world. Each new child bringing the potential for greater love, for incredible arts and crafts,

Starting point is 01:47:57 for scientific breakthroughs, for reshaping the world in a positive direction. You know, the potential for the unique goods that each individual life can bring, I believe, justifies the risk of suffering because a world without those future goods would be worse than a world with them. And yes, humanity can cause harm, but we are also capable of extraordinary good.

Starting point is 01:48:24 We can change. We can reduce suffering over time. New generations are going to be part of that solution. I will say, though, to anti-natalists credit, one of the points of the internet and cycle of media of philosophy points out is that the debate about anti-natalism is theoretical. You know, this is stuffy philosophers sitting around exchanging nodes. and writing books, right?

Starting point is 01:48:50 Most of its advocates are not actually putting forward policies that are restricting people's ability to create life. But the same cannot be said for the other side of the coin, the pro-natalists. So in broad terms, pro-natalism or just natalism, It's the belief that reproduction is a societal good, or even the society needs more children. Now, this movement is getting louder and louder these days. It's shaping policy debates in the U.S., in Europe, in Asia, and beyond,

Starting point is 01:49:30 because, as I mentioned, in the previous episode, fertility rates are falling almost everywhere. Countries like South Korea, Italy, Japan, and the U.S. are seeing fewer births than needed to sustain their current populations. So you're going to be seeing pro-natalism in various forms, showing up in politics, and even in tech circles, especially in those wear tech circles. Now, pronatalism is a broad umbrella. You know, you can have the mild position of supporting families with policies, and most people are not opposed to that. But you also have the strong pronatalist stance, which is actually urging or incentivizing or mandating birth for cultural, economic, or ideological reasons. A pro-natalism was motivated by a few different reasons.

Starting point is 01:50:17 You know, there's the economic anxiety of a shrinking population, meaning fewer workers, more retirees, and streamed pension systems. There's a nationalistic argument of worries about cultural continuity, which tend to teeter into the reactionary directions. And the pro-natalism today is very much political as a result. In the US, Republicans have been leaning into it, framing the low birth rates as a national crisis, and in Europe you have countries like Hungary under Victor Orban, which have made pronatalism a signature policy to varying effectiveness.

Starting point is 01:50:52 The religious motivations of pronatalism are also pretty interesting. You know, you have the being fruitful and multiply directive in the Bible, which some take as far as the quiverful movement, which is the whole thing about having children by like the dozen or more. then you have the tech elite circles pushing pronatalism because it connect with the ideas of human progress one of the pronatalists who most famously practices what he preaches mostly for worse is he on musk yep right he's he's a big nazi about it for one because of his whole worry about white fertility rates but he also thinks that low birth rates as a whole or a bigger threat than climate change so I mean, it seems like he's single-handedly trying to fix that with his seed is spreading.

Starting point is 01:51:44 Yeah. His assembly line of children with, you know, the accompanying product barcodes for names. And I just feel bad for them, honestly, to have that as a father. No, it sucks. Yeah, it's not great. It's not good. And so he and his billionaire buddies are of the belief that civilization will collapse if we don't make more babies. Silicon Valley Circles are funding pro-natalist think tanks and embryo-optimization projects.

Starting point is 01:52:14 A lot of policies are also coming out of the pro-natalist camp, unlike the anti-natalists. Historically, countries like the Soviet Union handed out medals like mother heroin for women with large families, and the Russia of today has revived similar awards recently, alongside, like I mentioned in the previous episode, banning anti-natalist propaganda. Now, some countries are offering tax incentives for births and even proposing baby bonuses of thousands of dollars paid for each birth. Thousands of dollars per birth is kind of a spit in the face because that's not even going to last the first couple months of a child being born. Let's be real. Children are extremely expensive.

Starting point is 01:52:55 Yeah, yeah. Pranities also tend to push things like expanded family benefits, child allowances, or housing subsidies for parents. These, I would say, are the more liberal-minded or progressive-minded pronatalists, as much as you can be a progressive and a pronate list, because they're actually considering the ways that they can make actually bearing children and raising children a bit easier for the people who have to do it. That sort of support also includes things like expanding IVF access, subsidizing fertility treatments, you know, improving embryo screening, that sort of thing.

Starting point is 01:53:32 Places like Scandinavia also have generous leave follow. which are often cited as a model of soft pronatalism because it makes it easier for people to balance work and child rare it. But he don't tend to hear these policies coming out of the much louder pronatalist conservative cap. What do you get from them and from their pronatalism tends to be restrictions on women, restrictions in abortion and bodily autonomy, policies that conflict with the goals of reproductive justice and gender equality, sometimes putting women's health at risk. And also conservatives push lots of narratives with their pronatalism. Large families, the sense of valorize, they frame childbearing as a civic duty, you know, the appeal to legacy

Starting point is 01:54:16 and culture and identity when you get into that white supremacist camp. And you also get the whole eugenics of it. You know, the tech elite pronatilist wing, they're pushing for things like gene editing, embryo selection, the sort of stuff that Musk is talking about with his racial replacement anxieties. In any case, the effectiveness of even the few positive policies has been pretty mixed. Countries have tried pumping billions into subsidies and often fertility rates have barely budged. Deep structural issues like the cost of living, cultural norms around gender, career paths, health concerns, all of these often outweigh the incentives of a couple of thousands and dollars or extended paternity leaves. You know, if people don't want to have babies,

Starting point is 01:55:07 they're not going to have babies. If they're not confident in their ability to have children raise an environment that they feel is best for them, they're not going to have children. You know, people more than ever have that choice. And unfortunately, a lot of the pro-natalist policies don't care about making child bearer and easier, you know, easing the path to make that choice. They just want to pressure people to have children. Yep. You know, it looks right back to misogyny,

Starting point is 01:55:36 a reaction against women's freedom, pushing them back into the kitchen, pushing them back into that subservient position in society. So after looking at both sides, right, you have the anti-natalists and the pro-natalists. Don't create life to avoid suffering, or you must create life to preserve society. I guess you could call me a centrist.

Starting point is 01:55:57 The anti-natalists repulse me, and the pro-natalists equally repulsed me. You know, I'm wary of anyone claiming that you must have children or you must not have children. I'm wary of a world where these kinds of choices are coerced by others. You know, as an anarchist, I'm a firm believer in autonomy, in personal freedom, and the ability to decide one's own life. That's what matters to me. You know, I don't intend to have children myself. I do like children a lot.

Starting point is 01:56:27 I was once a child myself, and I look forward to being an uncle, a godfather, and all that. But that's my choice. You know, let your choice be your choice and my choice be my choice. Make choices, free-de, resist the pressure from either camp, and keep the agency intact. That's all I have to say on it, honestly. Yeah, I mean, honestly, that covers the stuff I was going to say. Yeah. I mean, with that, we've beacon rapid.

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Starting point is 01:58:32 For more on gentlemen's cut bourbon, please visit gentlemen's cuthuburn. Please enjoy responsibly. Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers? And what is this? How is that not a story we all know? What's this? Where is that? Why is it wet?

Starting point is 01:58:51 Boy, do we have a show for you. From Smartless Media, Campside Media, and Big Money Players, comes Crimeless. Join me, Josh Dean, investigative journalists. And me, Roy Scoville, comedian, as we celebrate the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals. We'll look into some of the silliest ways folks have broken the laws. Honestly, it feels more like a high-level prank than a crime. Who catfish is a city? And meets some memorable anti-heroes.

Starting point is 01:59:20 There are thousands of angry, horny monkeys. Clap if you think she's a witch. And it freaks you out. He has X-ray vision. How could I not follow him? Honestly, I got to follow me. He can see right through me. Listen to Crimless on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Starting point is 01:59:42 What up, y'all? It's your boy, Kevin on stage. I want to tell you about my new podcast called Not My Best Month, where I talk to artists, athletes, entertainers, creators, friends, people I admire who had massive success about their massive failures. What did they mess up on? What is their heartbreak? And what did they learn from it? I got judged horribly. The judges were like, you're trash. I don't know how you got on the show. Boo, somebody had tomatoes. I'm kidding. But if they had tomatoes, they would have thrown the tomatoes. Let's be honest. We've all had those moments we'd rather forget. We bumped our head.

Starting point is 02:00:16 We made a mistake. The deal fell through. We're embarrassed. We failed. We failed. but this podcast is about that and how we made it through. So when they sat me down, they were kind of like, we got into the small talk, and they were just like, so what do you got? What? What ideas? And I was like, oh, no. What? Check out Not My Best Moment with me, Kevin on stage, on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast.

Starting point is 02:00:44 Hello, and welcome back to It Could Happen here. I am your occasional host, Molly Conger, And today I have exactly the kind of story you probably expect when you hear my voice on this feed. A white nationalist has gone and done something we all wish that he was not doing. If you listen to my show, weird little guys, you already know a little bit about this particular guy. On that show, I talk about white nationalists, neo-Nazis, right-wing extremists, aspiring terrorists, things of that nature. My domain is mostly guys you've never heard of because they failed to live up to their goal of

Starting point is 02:01:24 becoming the next Hitler or whatever. It's funnier than it sounds, I swear. But unfortunately for all of us, sometimes one of those guys reaches containment. The guy we're talking about today wants to be more than just one of the weird little guys trying to make a name for himself on the fringes of the white nationalist movement.

Starting point is 02:01:45 He wants to be a congressman. He's trying to make himself everybody's problem, and that makes him part of what is happening here. Back in August, Representative Nancy Mace announced that she wouldn't seek re-election in South Carolina's first congressional district, and she would instead focus on making a run for governor. And that announcement opened the floodgates. All but one of the ten Republicans vying for the nomination to replace her

Starting point is 02:02:18 filed their paperwork after the announcement. I don't pay a ton of attention to this sort of thing. It's not really my wheelhouse. But last month, a man named Tyler Dykes joined the race, filing paperwork as a congressional candidate in Mesa's district. Now, like I said, it's a crowded field. There are ten people in this primary. And it's Nancy Mesa's district, so being a little bit of a conspiracy theorist with an extremely right-wing policy platform doesn't really set you apart.

Starting point is 02:02:52 They all kind of blend together. Most years, I probably couldn't tell you a whole lot about every primary candidate in my own district, let alone one two states away. So on the surface, he's just another carbon copy America First zealot trying to fit this particular moment. mold. He's created an image for his campaign that's not unlike Nancy Mace's. And I guess that makes sense, right? These people voted for her. So maybe that's what works here. Tyler Dikes's campaign website is pretty similar to Nancy Maces. They both emphasize their personal connection to military service. Nancy Mace graduated from the Citadel Military College and Tyler Dikes features photos of himself and his Marine Corps dress blues. They both describe themselves as

Starting point is 02:03:44 entrepreneurs and business owners and they both hate immigrants so much that their lust for mass deportation isn't even confined only to the pages devoted to their position on the issue. It's in their candidate biographies. And they frame themselves as fighters. There's a lot of fight-based language, fighting for America, fighting for Christ. They both really position their devotion to God as something they have to fight for and fight against the Christ hating hordes on the left to keep. Like this is something someone's trying to take from them. Their platforms are pretty similar to America first, South Carolina first, law and order, tough on crime, deport millions of people. Nancy Mace is running for governor on eliminating the state income tax. And if he gets to

Starting point is 02:04:41 Congress, Tyler Dyke says he wants to slash taxes too. But of the five main policy ideas on his congressional campaign website, the one that's about taxes, the tax that he will cut as a congressman, he wrote that he will end property taxes. Now regardless of how you feel about property taxes, those are imposed by your state and local government. The federal government doesn't tax your property. So I guess he's got that Republican tax cut spirit, but he's a little confused. But overall, just another far-right

Starting point is 02:05:19 America-first candidate trying to elbow his way into this attention economy. It's distasteful, it's bigoted, it's prosophascist, xenophobic, poorly articulated, economically unsound. but it's not unique or interesting. These guys are a dime a dozen and they'll mostly be gone

Starting point is 02:05:38 by the time the primaries end. But there is one really weird thing about Tyler Dykes' campaign messaging. He keeps bringing up that he's not a Nazi. He wants you to know that. No one's asking him this. He's bringing it up preemptively.

Starting point is 02:05:59 The I am not a Nazi letters that he mailed to the homes of hundreds of voters in his district are starting to raise questions he thinks are already answered in those letters. And here's the thing, they still call me a Nazi to the state. They still brand me as all these evil, horrific things. But let me tell you this. What makes me a Nazi? I love Christ.

Starting point is 02:06:21 I love God. I love my country. I love my state, my family, and my community, and the entirety of the low country area. And that's why I live here, because I love it so much. So does that make me a Nazi? Does loving your family, does loving God, does loving your country, does that make you a Nazi? That makes you a Nazi so mean. Oh, wow.

Starting point is 02:06:47 He's just another tragic victim of cancel culture. He's being attacked by the woke mobs who hate good Christian men. And that's why they're calling him a Nazi. Right? Is there another reason that this keeps coming up, or is it just because he loves his family so much? So it's quite interesting, you know. My experience in January 6, for example, I've branded as a neo-Nazi domestic terrorist because of a wave. Oh, it's not just because he loves his family. It's because he's a peaceful patriotic supporter of Donald Trump, who visited the Capitol building and the communists who run the mainstream media. are unfairly showing a photograph of him where he was simply waving hello to a friend

Starting point is 02:07:33 and that's why they're calling him a Nazi because he loves America too much and he waved hello to a friend while on a sightseeing trip to the Capitol building. It probably won't surprise you to know that that is not the whole story. He's getting closer. It's definitely a little bit more

Starting point is 02:07:52 about what specifically he was doing with his right arm at the top of the east stairs of the Capitol building a little after 2 p.m. on January 6, 2021, it's more about that than it is about his love of his family. He's getting warmer. See, the reason he keeps bringing up that he doesn't want to be called a Nazi is because there are Nazi allegations. But these allegations aren't just lies from the evil left-wing media.

Starting point is 02:08:34 It's something he's been asked about by the FBI. And by the DOJ and the Marine Corps and police in multiple jurisdictions across several states. A lot of people are asking him about the Nazi thing. So it makes sense that he'd want to get out ahead of it and assure the voters that there's a good explanation. When he brings up that innocent wave that's being taken out of context to smear him as a Nazi,

Starting point is 02:09:03 he's talking about a photograph, a particular photograph and one of many that federal prosecutors included in their sentencing memorandum after Tyler Dykes accepted a plea agreement in federal court. He pleaded guilty to two counts of assaulting an officer during the breach of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In exchange for his cooperation, the government dropped the other eight counts on the indictment. So in that sentencing memorandum, there's a picture. It's a still frame that was taken from a video, but obviously you can't put a video on paper. So it's just a still frame. And it shows a mass of people making their way up the east steps of the Capitol building on the afternoon of January 6th.

Starting point is 02:09:49 Whoever's taking the video was standing at the bottom of the stairs. So you're just seeing the backs of the people in this crowd who are walking up the stairs, except for the figure in the center. In the center of the picture, at the top of the stairs, a very tall man in a black jacket and a gray mask has turned around, so he's facing the plaza below. And he's sort of squared up, facing down the stairs. And his right arm is completely extended.

Starting point is 02:10:18 at about a 45-degree angle. Elbow straight, wrist straight, fingers together. The government's caption reads, Still from video, showing Dykes performing what appears to be the Seekhyle's salute after he arrives on the landing in front of the East Rotunda doors. He maintains that he was waving to a friend. For what it's worth, I've seen a lot of these waves, and I know what it looks like to me.

Starting point is 02:10:48 And regardless of what it looks like to you in this photograph, I have a video of him doing the exact same wave at a Nazi rally. So it's not just a picture. He only served three of the 57 months he was sentenced to spend in prison before he was released in January of 2025 as a result of Trump's blanket pardons for the nearly 1600 January 6 defendants. But that's not the issue here. He's not ashamed of being a January 6 defendant. That's a badge of honor. That's not a problem. If he can spin this Nazi thing into a story that reinforces this narrative of brave January 6 patriots

Starting point is 02:11:32 who are being persecuted by communists and liberals and the woke mob, it stops being a problem for the people whose attention and votes and donations he wants. So his story is pretty simple. all the people calling him a Nazi are lying. They're taking a single photograph out of context. It's not a Nazi salute. It's a wave. And all of this, all of this Nazi talk,

Starting point is 02:11:59 it's all just about this one single incident, this one picture, this one wave. And the government, the government is preventing him from proving that to you. And then the honorable judge that I had denied me being able to get that evidence and being able to show up to people. And so a lot of these people, unfortunately, because of a lot of the news media and because of the efforts of the Biden administration, they see me as an enemy and as a terrorist.

Starting point is 02:12:23 That's Tyler Dykes in mid-October of this year, telling a local TV news crew in Hilton Head that the media is complicit in spreading these lies the government told about him in court. When he was interviewed last month by a conspiracy theorist and right-wing podcaster named Anne van der Steele, she was on his side. She was earnest, and she wanted to get to the bottom of this. He told her that the government's entire case was lie after lie, and there's proof that he never did any of those things on January 6th. And she's excited to hear this. And she wants to see these videos because she would love to see proof that the government is persecuting our brave January 6 patriots.

Starting point is 02:13:05 But there's one little problem. Well, you know, that's a very funny thing. the honorable judge in my case actually put out a gag order banning me from being able to have any of the discovery evidence for me to be able to defend myself from the false claims. That is in the dockets. Oh, it's in the dockets. It's in the dockets. It's in the dockets. Phenomenal. I can look at the dockets. We can look at that together. That's easy. And I do see here that there is a protective order filed in this case. Shortly after he was first arrested, the judge, entered an order prohibiting the public dissemination of certain discovery materials.

Starting point is 02:13:44 If you look at enough J6 cases, this kind of protective order was almost universal. The government didn't want to publicly release stuff like the names of confidential informants, security footage from inside certain secure government areas, personal information about witnesses, just a laundry list of kinds of evidence that was likely to be produced in these cases that would be sensitive. So they're not saying they can't turn it over to the defense in discovery. They're just saying this stays between us, right?

Starting point is 02:14:16 This doesn't get released to the public. This was normal and it was routine and it was agreed to by everyone involved. The defense counsel agreed to this. So, okay, off to a good start. I do see a protective order on the docket. But if you skip down a year, down to the bottom of the docket,

Starting point is 02:14:36 end of the case after the guilty plea, the government filed their exhibit list for the sentencing hearing. And in that document, the federal prosecutor wrote, the government does not object to any photo or video evidence being released to the public. So of the exhibits they plan to show in court at sentencing, they said, it's okay if everyone sees these. The media can have these. And so the judge in turn asked defense counsel how they felt about that. And the defense replied, defendant, Tyler Bradley Dykes, by and through his attorneys, does not object to the video and photo evidence identified in the government's notice, ECF number 44, being made publicly available.

Starting point is 02:15:21 Defendant does object to any public disclosure of his military records identified in Exhibit 19. And so the judge signed an order. The exhibits that the government identified for the sentencing hearing, which the file names are in that document. It includes the video of the wave, the video of him grabbing the policeman's shield, the things he's saying he can't get. Based on the file names,

Starting point is 02:15:48 those videos can absolutely be requested from the court. These aren't under seal, there's not a gag order. He can request these. And I think he should do that. There are a lot of videos on that exhibit list, and I'm sure people would like to decide for themselves, if he's describing them faithfully. The only exhibit on that list

Starting point is 02:16:19 that the defense objected to making publicly available, the only one that remains sealed and isn't available for public access, are his military records. Those military records are specifically the ones related to the other than honorable discharge he received from the Marines. See, those campaign flyers, the ones he was mailing to people's houses, they're all signed at the bottom Tyler Dykes, U.S. Marine Corps veteran, business owner,

Starting point is 02:16:50 pardoned J6 Patriot. On November 10th, the Marine Corps' birthday, he posted a photo of himself in his dress blues on the campaign's Instagram account. Being a Marine Corps veteran is as big a part of his campaign identity as talking about how he's not a Nazi. These are kind of the top two things. He's a Marine, and he really wants you to know that Nazi stuff isn't true. And he was a Marine, that's true. He definitely was in the Marine Corps.

Starting point is 02:17:21 But those military records that he doesn't want released would really undermine his narrative about being a practical. honorable veteran who definitely isn't a Nazi because they would show that he received an other than honorable discharge for participating in prohibited extremist activity on November 8th, 2020.

Starting point is 02:17:44 And that's in the file. I know that specifically is in that sealed file because in other documents that refer to it, that's all it says. I don't know what else is in that record. All I know for sure is that stated reason for his other than honorable discharge is something that happened on

Starting point is 02:18:05 November 8th, 2020. Now, luckily for us, I know that on November 8th, 2020, a security camera in Sumter County, South Carolina, recorded footage of two men. One of the men looked exactly like Tyler Dykes, even his father had to agree it kind of did, and the men were putting up flyers with swastikas on them outside local businesses. I don't know if his military discharge records include anything else. Was it really just the flyers, just the one time with a swastika flyers, and that was it? I don't know if the military was aware that he'd been attending things like a paramilitary training weekend at a compounded Michigan hosted by members of the neo-Nazi group the base. I don't know if there's a memo in there about the time in January of 2019 that an FBI agent

Starting point is 02:19:00 from the Joint Terrorism Task Force questioned him about his possible connections to domestic extremist groups. I don't know if the Marine Corps knew that he was one of just a handful of white nationalists who attended the Unite the Right 2, a flop of a Nazi rally held in Washington, D.C. in 2018, to commemorate the deadly rally that had happened a year earlier. And along that same line of thought, I don't know if the Marine Corps knew back then. The Tyler Dykes had attended the United the Right rally in Charlestville in 2017. I don't know if they saw the videos of him marching with a teaky torch or the videos of him punching wildly at counter-protesters that he'd helped trap in that sea of flames. And with the exception of the United the Right rally in 2017,

Starting point is 02:19:48 which was before he enlisted, all of the rest of that conduct occurred while Tyler Dykes was a Marine. He went to Nazi rallies, he joined Nazi groups, he put up Nazi flyers, he went to Nazi training camps to prepare for the race war

Starting point is 02:20:05 and he fought his way into the Capitol building on January 6th. So, okay, yeah, he was a United States Marine. He can post that picture in his uniform on his campaign website. I don't care. I'm not personally offended about him

Starting point is 02:20:21 being a stain on the honor of the U.S. military or whatever. But I think a lot of voters would feel like this isn't quite honest. By the time Tyler Dykes was arrested in 2023 and extradited back to Virginia to face charges for menacing those counter-protesters with a lit torch, he'd already been kicked out of the Marines. He had apparently hidden that fact from his parents.

Starting point is 02:20:46 And there was a lot they didn't know but their son. The day he was arrested in 2023, he'd been out with other members of a group called the Southern Sun's Active Club, a sort of white supremacist fight club for a friendless young men. They were trying to hang Nazi banners from a highway overpass, but Tyler Dykes was bitten by a dog and had to go to the hospital instead. He eventually pleaded guilty to that felony charge in Almeral County, Virginia, related to the torch march. And he spent a few months in a local jail. On the day he was supposed to go home, he was picked up by a federal marshal. The DOJ had waited until the last day of his sentence here to unseal the charges against him

Starting point is 02:21:30 for January 6th. And after that, he spent a year out on pretrial bond in that case, and then he eventually pleaded guilty to those charges in the summer of 2024, and he finally reported to federal prison in October of 2024, expecting to be there for almost five years. but he was released a few months later in January of this year after receiving a federal pardon. And now he wants to go back to the Capitol building, not as a rioter this time, but as a congressman. The campaign is barely a month old. He's using a right-wing crowdfunding site for campaign donations, so you can see that he hasn't cracked $200 yet. The only photo of his launch party is so tightly cropped

Starting point is 02:22:18 that you can only see the candidate himself standing in an empty field in a public park. I don't think there's a lot of grassroots excitement for Tyler Dykes in South Carolina's first district. But if he does keep making the rounds, and if he ever ends up in front of a real reporter, I hope they'll ask him, why doesn't he just produce those exhibits?

Starting point is 02:22:39 The videos he's claiming are being kept from him under seal, aren't. And if he's so against any exhibits, being held back from the court of public opinion, he could go ahead and release the one he actually has in his own possession, the only one that is sealed. He has his own discharge records. Show him to us.

Starting point is 02:23:02 I'm dying to know how many of those Nazi rallies the Marine Corps knew about before they finally kicked him out. If you're interested in hearing more about this particular weird little guy, there are two episodes available right now over on the Weird Little Guy's Feed. It's a cool zone media show you can listen to wherever you get your podcasts. If you're in the Charleston area, or more importantly, if your conservative boomer parents are, it can't hurt to let folks know that one of your local candidates isn't being entirely forthcoming about why people are calling him a Nazi.

Starting point is 02:23:36 And wherever your conservative parents live, maybe this is a useful example of the kind of thing you might find when you start gently scratching the surface. of these America First candidates. Being a parent is basically a juggling act. Dinner, hockey practice, homework, a last-minute science project, and someone's always, always shouting for you from another room. So yeah, I'll take any shortcuts that actually works. And that's why I'm all in on Hello, French.

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Starting point is 02:25:15 Total Wines or Bevmo. This message is intended for audiences 21 and older. Gentleman's Cup Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky. For more on Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, please visit Gentleman'scutburbon.com. Please enjoy responsibly. Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers? And what is this?

Starting point is 02:25:36 How is that not a story we all know? What's this? Where is that? Why is it wet? Boy, do we have a show for you? From Smartless Media, Campside Media, and Big Money Players comes Crimeless. Join me, Josh Dean, investigative journalists. And me, Roy Scoville, comedian, as we celebrate the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals. We'll look into some of the silliest ways folks have broken the laws.

Starting point is 02:26:03 Honestly, it feels more like a high-level prank than a crime. Who catfishes a city? And meets some memorable anti-heroes. There are thousands of angry, horny monkeys. Clap if you think she's a witch, and it freaks you out. He has X-ray vision. How could I not follow him? Honestly, I got to follow him.

Starting point is 02:26:21 He can see right through me. Listen to Crimless on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. What up, y'all? It's your boy, Kevin on stage. I want to tell you about my new podcast called Not My Best Month, where I talk to artists, athletes, entertainers, creators, friends, people I admire. who had massive success about their massive failures. What did they mess up on? What is their heartbreak?

Starting point is 02:26:50 And what did they learn from it? I got judged horribly. The judges were like, you're trash. I don't know how you got on the show. Boo, somebody had tomatoes. I'm kidding. But if they had tomatoes, they would have thrown the tomatoes. Let's be honest.

Starting point is 02:27:03 We've all had those moments we'd rather forget. We bumped our head. We made a mistake. The deal fell through. We're embarrassed. We failed. But this podcast is about that. and how we made it through.

Starting point is 02:27:15 So when they sat me down, they were kind of like, we got into the small talk, and they were just like, so what do you got? What ideas? And I was like, oh, no. What?

Starting point is 02:27:24 Check out not my best moment with me, Kevin on stage, on the Iheart radio app, Apple podcast, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, everybody, this is an emergency episode

Starting point is 02:27:39 of It Could Happen here. We're dropping everything else for the most important breaking news in the country. Andy Dick has overdosed in public in the city of Los Angeles. Thankfully, in preparation for this, we've had our entire team deployed to the areas around Andy Dick's home. James, do you have any updates on the situation?

Starting point is 02:27:59 No, I'm not sure who Andy Dick is. Is this like a public figure in America? I could have planned this out better. Andy Dick is America's sweetheart, and he's going through some troubled times. But it's okay. They narcanned him. public. No, it's Andy Dick's fault. This is entirely on Andy Dick. Yeah. Well, good on the person who had Narcan. Carrie Narcan. Yeah. No one should never feel sorry for Andy Dick. I feel bad for the

Starting point is 02:28:24 Narcan. This is it could have in here, executive disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and Andy Dick. I'm Garrison Davis. This episode I'm joined by Mia Wong. We've referred to someone the first time we only use the last name, Garrison. Yeah. I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout. Robert Evans and Sophie Lichtenman, we are covering the week of December 4th to December 10th. So one of the big stories of the last week or so is something that would seem would be unequivocally a bad thing in any other political climate, which is Netflix buying Warner Brothers and contributing to the shrinking ever further of like America's like the number of people who actually own all of the media that Americans consume. Yeah, monopolization is obviously bad. But in this case, I mean, it's bad on that end.

Starting point is 02:29:15 It's probably better that Netflix buy it than Paramount buy it. So I guess I'm like, well, okay, this could be worse. Predator versus Alien situation. This is a really weird situation, right? Because a lot of people are really dooming about, you know, Netflix requiring Warner Brothers and what that'll mean for, like, you know, art and the, you know, theatrical model of film distribution. And then not realizing that Paramount's counterbid based on. on Saudi money would place Warner Brothers in the control of one of the most Trump-aligned

Starting point is 02:29:47 media enterprises in the United States right now. Yeah. So let's roll back a second and look at what is actually going on here. And it's actually very important to note this is being recorded on Wednesday, December 10th. This whole situation is changing extremely quickly. There could be some another unhinged thing could have happened by the time you're listening to this.

Starting point is 02:30:08 but the basics here is that Paramount which was recently acquired by Skydance which is which direction did that acquisition go I mean technically speaking it was a merger but it was really but it was Skydance taking control of Paramount Skydance had been run by Larry Ellison's son David Ellison David yeah so and this is

Starting point is 02:30:29 this is this is the regime that sort of imposed Barry Weiss on CBS which has become increasingly right wing under her quote-unquote leadership. We're going to do a full episode about this, I think, on Monday. We're going to be tuning into the Charlie Kirk, Erica Kirk Town Hall on CBS this Saturday. Oh, God. They can't make me.

Starting point is 02:30:50 I will have recorded this episode before they did this. I'm going to be tuning in because it looks phenomenal. So it's worth pointing out. So Larry Ellison, who is the father of David Ellison, is one of the most terrifying of all of the right-wing billionaires. Yeah. He's kind of more quiet than someone like Andresen or Elon Musk about being a unhinged right-wing fanatic, but he's one of Trump's biggest supporters. He has the whole thing about how everyone's inevitably going to be under total constant surveillance that will make everyone behave well. We'll cover this more later.

Starting point is 02:31:21 But the Ellison's, the father-son, Ellison duo, and Paramounts backed by the Saudis, Abu Dhabi and Codder. They won Bugs Bunny desperately because he keeps, my sources are saying he keeps pranking Muhammad bin Salman. cross-dressing, yeah, and it's really... Yeah, the entire Saudi military is incapable of stopping Bugs Bunny. So this is their best bet for taking him down. Well, I think what's an interesting fact, in

Starting point is 02:31:47 these various bids for control of Warner Brothers, the Netflix deal does not include CNN. The Paramount deal does. Yeah. Before we get into that, we should say what Paramount is doing now, which is Paramount on Monday began to try to just

Starting point is 02:32:03 do a hostile takeover. by just straight up buying out the shares at what they're claiming is a higher share price. There's a whole lot of complicated stuff about share pricing here that you don't really care about. And there have been so many dishonest headlines, like one being like, Paramount, lost the bid by just 75 cents. I know, 75 cents to share. That's like hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah. And that's not even, it's, it's all, it's all ridiculous. Yeah. The Wall Street Journal has been getting a lot of the information about this. We've gotten to a point on Wednesday where investors are going to the Wall Street Journal and being like, there's going to be a bidding war.

Starting point is 02:32:34 there's going to be a bidding war but the Wall Street Journal points out and I think this is an interesting thing here that's important to say these hostile takeover attempts almost never work it's like 30% of the time and it's some 30%

Starting point is 02:32:45 that these things kind of work but the other card that the father's son Ellison duo have is claiming that Trump is more likely to back Paramount's buyout than the Netflix one because Trump can sort of stop this

Starting point is 02:33:01 through antitrust or quote unquote anti-trust stuff, per Axios. Jared Kushner's consultancy firm is part of Paramount's buyout plan. And per Wall Street Journal, David Ellison met with Trump administration officials in, quote, recent days and has offered to, you know, so this comes back to what Garrison was saying about CNN being part of this package. They have been offering to effectively do to CNN what they did to CBS, which is put it

Starting point is 02:33:29 under control of some right-wing fanatic and turn it into a pure propaganda outlet. this is you know obviously corruption of a sort of mind-blowing yeah yeah and a product of the fact that like our quote-un-un-court free press is literally just for sale amazingly this is not this doesn't seem to be working no i mean and trump has spoken positively about netflix the netflix CEO the past yeah but he's also spoken negatively he's spoken negatively about both of them yeah both the netflix yeah he's spoken negatively about ellison recently and there's a there's a quote from an article I found in the Wall Street Journal

Starting point is 02:34:06 Trump has so far avoided publicly backing a bidder. None of them are particularly great friends of mine, he said at a White House roundtable on Monday. A person close to Trump said the president will want Paramount and Netflix to compete for his approval of a deal, which does sound very Trump. Yeah, and apparently the specific thing he's mad

Starting point is 02:34:22 at Paramount about is for having Marjorie Taylor Green on CBS. Yeah, that's funny. Oh, he's so cool. It's really funny. There is no amount of sort of ass-kissing that can do to actually make Trump consistently be on your side. It's really hideous. This is all disgusting.

Starting point is 02:34:38 Unless you give him the FIFA World Peace Prize. Yes. Oh, yeah. He'll die for FIFA now. Yeah. Can I just say, fuck me? He's actually renaming American football to soccer. God.

Starting point is 02:34:52 I love the FIFA trophy because it looks disgusting. Have you seen the FIFA trophy? Yes, I have. 15 minutes on that fucking thing. Just all those hands grasping that ball. Oh, my God. Yeah, really genuinely, one of the most impressive act of sports sick of fantasy since 1933.

Starting point is 02:35:11 But, but yeah, it doesn't seem like Trump is as keen to back Paramount's bid as what some of the Paramount people thought he might be. Yeah. And the Netflix deal might just end up actually going through. Yeah. Yeah, and we'll see about this. This is all going to change probably by the time you're reading this. or listening to this, that's the one that you do.

Starting point is 02:35:33 But it's so cool that we live in an economy where your two options are Netflix destroys film forever and the Nazis gain control of CNN. It's great, great system. Yeah. No, no, no, no notes. And what would really be damaging if Paramount's able to buy Warner Brothers

Starting point is 02:35:51 is that then they would be in charge of Nathan Fielder's rehearsal, which does, which does target the fascistic paramount regime. Yeah. James, what's some small news stories we can go with here before our first break? Yeah, okay. I'm operating on a couple of computers here, so this is going to have to work around some constraints, fam. Good thing you're wearing your 511 uniform to help maintain the discipline necessary. Gersen, this is not 511, my friend. This is 5.1. Yeah. You cannot get this shit outside of

Starting point is 02:36:25 Syria and Iraq, and I fucking love it. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I, I, still have my knockoff Timberland shirt, which just says Thickson Gand, and looks, honestly, the label looks like an AI slop tried to push the Timberland logo. It's amazing. My favorite is the one that just says 16, 5 plus 11. I love fake 511 shit. If you have fake 511 shit, I have a collection of it. Send it to me. I will retire and make a museum one day.

Starting point is 02:36:50 I cannot get enough of it. I love that it started as a rock-climing brand in Yosemite, and now it is a lifestyle brand in Syria. It's perfect. I tell you I miss my Adotis track suit that I got in Turkey I got some I got some Merle boots as well I love that shit I got a fake gherba knife graber that one that one that will

Starting point is 02:37:11 that's from David Graber's not bullshit knife yeah it's one of my favorites it's going to start putting out women's hats very soon yeah okay let's talk about the news so this is a fun one Schrodinger's permit, we're going to call it. In Pensacola, somebody participating in food, not bombs, was arrested.

Starting point is 02:37:34 Following that, at a press conference, the city announced that the person was arrested for being in a park too late, right? I guess in Florida. Of course. Yeah, this is the most serious crime imaginable. And also giving food to poor people, which is probably like a felony in Florida. So the city then announced issue been resolved because there was a permit issued to food, not bombs for them to be in the park late and give people food. Food not bombs did not apply for the

Starting point is 02:38:02 permit, nor do they want the permit, right? That's not kind of, that's not how food not bombs works. Food not bombs is an action, not an entity, right? Like, it is a protest action. The city is now reviewing if the permit is releasable under public records laws, so someone can find out who attempted to white knight food not bombs. Yeah, some of the suggestions, There's a guy who runs some kind of, we will cooperate with the cops to get people off fentanyl charity, which uses some incredible AI imagery on its Instagram page. Yeah, that sounds good. Yeah, so I will keep you updated on this Florida story. Yeah, thanks for that, James.

Starting point is 02:38:42 In the Oregon versus Trump case regarding National Guard deployment, Judge Jay Bybee, not normally a guy associated with woke. A George W. Bush appointee has penned an extensive opinion, I think it was 64 pages, on the domestic. violence clause of the Constitution and how it ought to restrain the use of the guard. So it's like a different argument than we've seen previously, right, in discussions about the National Guard. Because, yeah, I've read the other judge opinion pieces, but not this one. Yeah, so Bybee's been in it for a while. And he's been someone who has previously not really been an opponent of what I might see

Starting point is 02:39:18 as overreach in terms of state power and violence. But yeah, using this, this is a different clause of the Constitution. So it's now moving along in that discussion. Yesterday, as we were recording this, so that would be on Tuesday at the 9th, the Democrats held a bicameral shadow, quote-unquote, shadow hearing on the detention of U.S. citizens by DHS. It doesn't really have the power to do much.

Starting point is 02:39:42 And I have not had time to listen to the entire recording because it was only streamed on Facebook. I love that we have an opposition in this country. God, I love the Democrats. Yeah, they're really, I like how together they've got it. Like, after a rough patch, they're really firing on all. Like a phoenix from the ashes of an absolute ass whooping in the election.

Starting point is 02:40:02 Yeah. Yeah, like an ass phoenix, exactly. Yeah, ass Phoenix. That's my band, actually. I can't believe that you plugged us on there. Thank you. Okay. Trump's ongoing barrage of hate about Somali people has been met with some incredible posting.

Starting point is 02:40:17 People who are not on X.com will have missed this, but, like, genuinely some of the funniest response to some of the most hateful shit. like Trump and Miller have both been on a and I guess Fox News Fox News went to Minneapolis and heard a call to prayer and had a meltdown about it but this is this campaign I guess

Starting point is 02:40:37 by Trump and Miller is very much ongoing we spoke about that last week with the TBS if people aren't familiar they can check that out last week yeah Eileen Higgins won the Miami mayoral election do I want to make a pit bull joke the dog

Starting point is 02:40:51 you're talking about Mr. Worldwide where we could do Maga is a major issue. I'm just trying to work on that acronym. Oh, God. Because I'm always thinking about Mr. Worldwide, James. He's never far from my thoughts. No, I often think about Pitbull and how he and Hillary Clinton often were exactly the same thing. That's right. They have a lot in common, actually. The primary thing is being there. Is this like a Miami thing? Yes. It's simple. Mr. Worldwide is in fact a Miami thing, Gary. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. Yes. But this is the first time a Democrat has won the mayoral office in Miami.

Starting point is 02:41:24 almost 30 years, which is... Yeah, this is wild. Significant. Yeah. This is astonishing. Yeah. And this was like a pretty decent win. This was a runoff election, but it's still a pretty substantial win.

Starting point is 02:41:34 Yeah. And I think there's a few important notes here. One is that even the Miami-Cuba demographics swung massively Georgia Democrats, which is sort of apocalyptic news for the Republicans. That's really, really bad if you're losing the Miami-Cuban population. If you have got Miami-Cubans to think critically about politics. politics. Things are dire. Yeah. And the other thing here, too, is that the Florida Democratic Party, like, I would

Starting point is 02:42:03 compare them to clowns, but like these motherfuckers make Bobo the clown look like fucking Napoleon. These are the most, some of the most incompetent people in the entire history of politics. And the Republicans are losing to them. That's astonishing. There were a couple of other results like this. Yeah, this week, Democrats flipped a Georgia state house seat. The seat moved blue by 22 points. Jeez. Yep.

Starting point is 02:42:30 They flipped Albuquerque City Council. There's all of these literal results, and this has been happening basically since we got the first special elections of the Trump administration, where the Republicans are losing like R plus 22 districts. They're getting destroyed in places that it shouldn't be possible for them

Starting point is 02:42:45 to lose. And this is another major confirmation of the Mia everyone hates them theory. Every day it gets more and more validated. Everyone fucking hates them. Yeah. Last small news story that I think is worth mentioning because it's, I think, pretty important, actually.

Starting point is 02:43:01 Conservative podcaster Benny Johnson is threatening to sue Milo Yonopoulos for alleging that he is gay. So we're going to be keeping up with this story pretty close. I know this has a lot of ramifications for listeners. Yeah. Great. Cool.

Starting point is 02:43:19 We should do ads. We're back and we're talking about the January 6th pipe bomb guy. Suspect. Yeah. Well, I mean, we know there's a person. We don't know that that was a guy. We know someone planted those pipe bombs. I'm going to talk about the suspect.

Starting point is 02:43:46 Yes. I want to start just for a little bit by. Again, talking about the degree to which I really hope this is apocalyptic for the blaze. What they did is a case study and what you should never do as a publication. It was unethical. It was idiotic and it was deeply dangerous. And if the Capitol Police officer does not sue them, I don't know what kind of advice she's getting other than maybe just sheer terror at the number of death threat she's already received.

Starting point is 02:44:16 But, like, ma'am, getting all of Glenn Beck's money. is the only thing that will keep you safe right now. Please do it. No, yeah. So you were out last week when we got the, some of the very first reporting on the pipe bomb arrest. I know. It's the only thing I regret about my vacation. Yeah. But very little information was out last week. And we have more information now regarding the alleged January 6th pipe bomber, or technically January 5th, pipe bomber, who is now charged with transporting an explosive device with intent to kill, injure, or damage property, and attempted malicious destruction by means of fire and explosive materials.

Starting point is 02:44:52 According to court records, the FBI identified the suspect through cell tower records, license plate readers, and purchases of potential bomb-making materials, including the pipes, the cap-ends, the wires, steel, and nine-volt batteries. It doesn't appear that they gained possession of new information, but by changing the agents looking at the information, they were able to piece this together to actually make an action on it leading to the arrest. It's a classic FBI story of they had all the information they needed to have caught this guy very long ago and did not.

Starting point is 02:45:30 Right. Or lacked the ability to put the pieces together in a way that makes them able to do an arrest. But as is always the case, this was not an issue if they didn't have enough access to information, there was too much encrypted, they need more power. No, they had everything they needed. They just didn't think right. Yeah. That's what it was.

Starting point is 02:45:46 They weren't thinking right, you know? Still very little has come out officially about the alleged bomber's potential motivation. Who may be innocent, let's be clear. Yeah, yeah. There's nothing alluding to his motivation in the charging documents besides just an interest, a year's long interest in bomb making starting in 2019 and continuing into like 2021. Now, NBC has reported, based on sources inside the law enforcement investigation team, But embassies reported that before the suspect acquired an attorney, he confessed to investigators and told the FBI that he believed in 2020 election conspiracy theories.

Starting point is 02:46:27 But some new information from the New York Post, which I have verified, may have actually cracked this story wide open. They have learned that the suspect is a brony, my little pony fan, draws a lot of actually relatively. good quality my little pony fan art and writes my little pony fan fiction. I could read some here. Garrison, what is the quality of their fan fiction? Yeah, let's just give us like 15 minutes. I'll read a paragraph.

Starting point is 02:46:57 Quote, Apple Bloom's eyes snapped open as she sat up in her bed, panting heavily and sweat dripping from her red mane. It was another bad dream about that village she had discovered back in the ever-free forest, sunny town. At first it seemed like a normal, peaceful little village

Starting point is 02:47:13 kind of like Ponyville. What was strange was that none of the inhabitants had cutie marks. In fact, they hadn't the slightest clue as to what a cutie mark was. So, yeah, could you send me that link? Could you send me that link to work with? Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I'll actually, I'll send this to the entire team chat. I'm demanding hazard pay at the next union negotiations.

Starting point is 02:47:34 Yeah. I need hazard pay. Actually, like, this is very standard, but relatively good quality, My Little Pony Brony activity, non-sexual entirely. Like, I've looked at a lot of this guy. art. It's fairly clear pros. Fairly high quality, My Little Pony fan art in a variety of styles from different

Starting point is 02:47:51 arrows at the show. Not like a sexually fetishistic depiction. Can't wait to see the headlines from this. Cool Zone host Defends Capital Bight Bombers pros. But no, like a high school classmate told Washington Post that

Starting point is 02:48:07 he was bullied for having a My Little Pony backpack in school. Yeah, that makes sense. He's had this interest for quite a while. Kind of tapered off a few years before the bombing. But for a while, this was, like, kind of one of his main hobbies. On a Tumblr profile,

Starting point is 02:48:23 he lists his interest as, quote, hardcore, music, video games, mainly horror, drawing, improving myself philosophically, and anime, unquote. His grandmother is described him as, quote, almost autistic like, because he doesn't understand

Starting point is 02:48:39 a lot of stuff, unquote. He's only ever worked for the family bail bond business. Yeah. Well, I mean, look, I'll say this, he wasn't bad. Like, he could have had a future in a private security or something like that. Like, not bad OPSEC, as it turned out. Yeah. But, I don't know.

Starting point is 02:48:57 A funny slash a dark thing is that in the right wing's just desperate effort to make everything about trans people, they have turned this brony thing into, like, you know, trans people also like, my little pony and like, broony. And, like, quotes from, like, psychologists in, in some of these articles. about how bronies, like, play with, like, gender boundaries by being fans of, like, a girl's, like, a property that's usually enjoyed by girls. So there's been, like, a slight attempt to try to kind of paint this in, like, a pseudo-translate. But that's not getting much traction, because, like, people know what bronies are.

Starting point is 02:49:36 And, like, come on. I think this whole strategy is, is on the out in some ways. Yeah. Am I incorrect here? Because I had just caught this, but I didn't actually, this is, like, while I was on vacation. I had heard that he expressed a belief that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Yeah, that's what it seems. Do we know if that's accurate? Okay, okay. So he does seem to be... That's being reported by the NBC, that he told investigators that he believed in, like, 2020

Starting point is 02:49:59 election conspiracy theories. Okay. The ones that were spread by Trump. So, I mean, it seems like from what we have, one of the more predictable ones. And like, it's not, if this is like a weird right-wing brony, this is not the first time a right-wing brony. has done something violent? He doesn't seem super political, in my opinion. Like, none of his only activity points towards, like, a deep interest in politics. Yeah. No, but if he said he thought the election was stolen, then that makes sense as being a

Starting point is 02:50:29 contributing factor. Yeah, a factor, perhaps, but not a huge, like, online presence that revolves around politics. Like, a lot of people who aren't super into politics maybe thought the election was, like, stolen or, like, rigged. I mean, as we try to point out periodically, the vast majority of people who will carry out a shooting or other act of mass public violence in the U.S. are going to have more in common with other people who do that than anyone

Starting point is 02:50:55 specifically just in political terms for the most part. Because most of them are, you know, their shooter stands, they're that sort of thing. Like this is their special interest, bombings or whatever. He just seemed to have, like, it's a lot of special interests, right? It used to be my little ponies. Then it became bomb making. That just seemed to be a special interest of his for like three or four years was just like the practice of bomb making. It's just just something he got like into. And I think that's more of a motivating force than like a specific partisan political motivation. And I think it's really funny like reflecting on a statement that, uh, that law enforcement leaked last week saying that he had like anarchist-like

Starting point is 02:51:34 leanings, which is very, very amusing now in light of, in light of all of us. For a long time, they have used anarchism to mean like a predilection for violence or chaos. It doesn't like He doesn't like the government. Blah, blah, blah, right? Yeah. Yeah, part of this is just the way people tend to use the term anarchism. When I was doing my research

Starting point is 02:51:52 for, like, the nuclear doomstay device episodes, there's a bunch of otherwise great pieces that are like, and then in the wake of a global nuclear war, society will collapse and all that will be left is anarchy. And it's like, guys, like, it's not anarchy that's going to be the problem. Like, you realize that the cause of a nuclear war

Starting point is 02:52:11 is, like, all of this, Yeah, it's, it is not at all, I'm not worried that's anarchy as opposed to nuclear war. I'm worried about, for example, yeah, the nuclear war part. Yeah, I'm worried about like democracy, fucking authoritarianism. I'm worried about all of those things. Anarchists would never have built a nuclear doomsday device. Yeah, it's why I used left libertarian sometimes in my academic writing because it was just the term. It's just not comprehensible, especially like someone coming, having been

Starting point is 02:52:44 race on U.S. media. And in the wake of a global nuclear war, you'll be lucky to get some anarchy because it probably means someone's found some food and it's cooking it for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Food, no, bombs. I like food off. They've rebranded, but they're still going. Food, comma, yeah, yeah, food post bombs, we're out of bombs.

Starting point is 02:53:00 The world is actually done with bombs. We did it. We replaced the bombs with food. One other update, I'll squeeze in here quick. It's short. Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that Texas can use its newly drawn congressional map in the upcoming 2026 midterms, likely adding five Republican seats. The lower court order, which found the new map was racially gerrymandered intentionally, has been stayed indefinitely as the Supreme Court prepares to consider whether to overturn the lower court's ruling entirely, a process which could take months go well into the midterm cycle. So the Supreme Court has authorized the use of that new map for this next election.

Starting point is 02:53:47 Talking of fan fiction and covers of things, here is a song that was originally the worst song by The Clash, and now it's about tariffs. I think the cover is of a similar quality as the alleged bomber's fan art, in my opinion. Dear God. There's a lot of good Twilight Sparkle stuff that he was drawing. I'm sorry. So, all right, China is technically once again buying American soybeans as part of the sort of giant trade deal that Xi Jinping and Trump negotiated. But, come up. It is not buying soybeans at the rate that the White House said it would in the fact sheet that was released by the White House about the negotiations.

Starting point is 02:54:47 This is a huge problem because farmers are still not being able to sell enough soybeans to not get completely fucked. And the White House is now putting out a bunch of statements saying, oh, no, we actually screwed up the fact sheet. They said that they would buy the soybeans not before the end of the year, before the, at the end of like the growing season. That's good. that's good yeah so and his other solution

Starting point is 02:55:13 to this has been a $12 billion farmer bailout which is funny because he did a $12 billion farm bailout in his first term when exactly the same thing

Starting point is 02:55:23 happened and it didn't really do anything well at least we're not bailing out let's say Argentina a funny example Garston what makes you choose that one oh god

Starting point is 02:55:30 yeah so the issue with this farmer's bailout is and this is something that farmers have been saying through all the trade press, any regular press they can get access to every local media outlet, every

Starting point is 02:55:44 single farmer who anyone has interviewed has gone, we don't want to bail out, we want to be able to sell our blasted soybeans, and they still can't, and this is, you know, becoming a real problem for this administration that even after their giant negotiations

Starting point is 02:56:00 to get China to buy soybeans, they still can't do it, and farmers are continuing to be very, very pissed off about this. Where are my beans? Yeah. They're sitting in the silos. They're still there. They can't sell them.

Starting point is 02:56:13 How am I going to keep up my soy consumption? And I'm going to be forced to become a no one of other vegan options era, some other kind of boy, I guess. Yeah. Well, we'll just have to get it from Brazil instead. Brazil mentioned, everyone, cheer. Hey, they're doing good these days. Oh, yeah. Hasn't there been some Bolsonaro news recently?

Starting point is 02:56:30 I feel like I've... There has been. Let's roll the ads and then we'll talk about it. Okay. This has been Terfalk. We're back, and you know who's not free to listen to podcasts, Jahir Bolsonaro. We can hope. After trying to cut off his ankle monitor, he has been taken into custody for attempting or at least probably trying to escape.

Starting point is 02:57:05 Trump had made comments about expecting to see him soon. Uh-huh. Yeah, I don't think, I think he's going to die in prison. He's not doing well. I will say one thing we got to do, you know, back when he got stabbed, I think everyone's opinion on it was like, oh, fuck, you've just, you know, you've made him a martyr, you got to look cool and seem like a badass. This has done nothing but empower him.

Starting point is 02:57:27 Yeah, no, it cares. No, actually, that stab did a lot of damage. Like, that ruined his life low key. Yeah. So thoughts and prayers to that guy, wherever he is, you know, we just didn't realize. the level of game that you had, my man. No, I mean, it's, it's tough. I mean, we used to have the two, like,

Starting point is 02:57:44 of the world's sickest men, Bolsonaro and Stephen Crowder, just fighting it out to see who would stay sicker for longer. What about Jordan Peterson? That seems like erasure. Yeah. He's taking the spot because he's still vanished from the Daily Wire because of his, like, visorialness.

Starting point is 02:57:59 His daughter says he's basically dead. Yeah, he's like Patient Zero for CWD in humans or something, right? The Daily Wire still is acting like, God. Peterson's, like, still a person. Yeah, it turns out cold turkey quitting binzos via a fucking coma in Russia is a bad call. Speaking of Crowder, I did watch the two-hour Stephen Crowder, Nick Fuentes, interview this week. Oh, God.

Starting point is 02:58:22 And it was really uncomfortable. Yeah, I'll bet. I can imagine. They were just, like, jerking each other off for two hours. Nick was trying to be nice and, like, not act like Stevens, this, like, totally irrelevant, like, boomer. And Stephen was trying to make Nick think he was cool, and it was so painful to watch the entire time. I love to watch that. It was bad.

Starting point is 02:58:46 There was really nothing else notable from that. I guess let's actually move to some notable stories to close this episode. So, I want to talk about the case of Faustino Pablo Pablo. A U.S. District Court in El Paso, Texas has granted Mr. Pablo a tentative restraining order directing the government to return him to the United States by the 12th of this month, which would be the day that you are hearing this episode. Mr. Pablo Pablo entered the USA in 2012 and was found removal by a judge. However, that judge granted his application for withholding of removal under the Convention

Starting point is 02:59:22 Against Torture because he would likely be tortured if he was returned to Guatemala, which is where he's from. In theory, he was removable, therefore, to a place where he would not likely be tortured. should, right? This is what we've seen the US government doing more and more in the last year, really. He spent more than a decade. He moved to California, attended his ice check-ins until he was detained at an ice check-in on the 5th of November. Mr. Pablo Pablo's lawyer filed a habeas petition and asked the court to enjoin ice from removing him from the Western District of Texas, which is where they took him on 17th of November, right? So he was detained on the 5th.

Starting point is 03:00:02 People who listened to my immigration series a couple of weeks ago will be familiar with this, right? People were detained in L.A., ferried all around California and then sent to Texas. This is what happened in his case. He wouldn't have been sent to the same place. People of my series were because that's for family detention. By the time the court ordered the government not to remove him, they had already sent him back to Guatemala. Just to cover there is one country in the world that he has withholding of removal to, because he will be tortured there most likely, and that is where they sent him.

Starting point is 03:00:32 The government conceded that they had made a mistake and said they, quote, tentatively scheduled a flight for the 4th of December. He did not take that flight. As far as we know, he is still in Guatemala. He's in hiding, and the court has ordered that the government facilitate his return by the 12th of this month. So we'll probably update you on that in next week's ED. I'm going to talk about an expansion of social media monitoring, which we've already seen for visa applicants, but now expending out to tourists as well. Customs and Border Protection and DHS have posted a 60-day notice for a proposal to revise the electronic system for travel authorization application, which is a waiver that some

Starting point is 03:01:13 foreign tourists can use to avoid getting a tourist visa. And the proposal is to add mandatory social media collection for all foreign tourists using the ESTA visa waiver. This proposal would require that applicants provide their social media information from the past five years, citing a January executive order, quote, protecting the United States from foreign terrorists and other national security and public safety threats, unquote. This would match the sort of social media monitoring. We've seen applied to some visa applicants and immigrants just now extending out to tourists using the ESTA application. And to comply with this January executive order, CBP is also planning to add, quote, several high-value

Starting point is 03:02:05 data fields to the EST application when feasible, unquote. This would include, quote, telephone numbers used in the last five years, email addresses used in the last 10 years, IP addresses and metadata from electronically submitted photos, family member names, parents, spouse, siblings, children, family telephone numbers used in the last five years, family member dates of birth, family member places of birth, family member residences, biometric, face, fingerprint, DNA, and iris, business telephone numbers used in the last five years, and business email addresses used in the last 10 years, unquote. Yeah, this is a wild amount of data. I mean, they can flash some of this really quickly against quote-unquote watch lists, right? Yeah. But some of this, A, like to

Starting point is 03:02:58 gather this data, to gather biometric data, that's not possible with, like, say, you're applying on your cell phone or your home computer, right? So this might require an appointment. Yeah, for some of the fingerprint stuff. Part of the proposal is also requiring a selfie be submitted with this application separate from whatever's on the ID that is being used. And so they could extract some, like, facial biometrics from that. Yeah. But they can also collect that stuff, like, at the airport of ports of entry. They have fingerprint scanners now at a lot of these, like, entry kiosks.

Starting point is 03:03:32 Yeah, yeah. The selfie isn't just a selfie. It's what's called a facial liveness scan, which is what we've spoken about before with CBP1, right, that, like, notoriously was very poor at capturing black faces. Generally, you sort of have to, like, move the phone around your face to check that It's not, like, it's not me holding up a life-sized copy of Garrison. It's actually Garrison. A 3D Garrison, yeah.

Starting point is 03:03:55 Yeah, yeah, exactly. The Garrison mannequin that we all got for Christmas last year. Can you excuse that one to me? Sorry. It's not legal in New York. Yeah, this will make it a lot harder for people to apply for Esther visas. It's going to create a massive, like, drag net of data for people applying for Esther visas. I'm guessing that.

Starting point is 03:04:19 kind of is the goal already, right? So like if you live in these countries, you don't always qualify for an esther. There are certain things you could have done, certain countries you could have been to certain, like if you have a criminal record, etc., where there you wouldn't be able to get an ester. So this is kind of already a something of like a pre-vetted group. And countries who, from which citizens can apply for esters, is that in itself. It's like a tier, right?

Starting point is 03:04:47 Not everyone in the world can apply for an ester. Esther. Yeah, it's already a semi-exclusive waiver with like a cost burden as well. Yes, yeah. Yeah, it creates a massive data mine, which I'm guessing might be what they're going for. Yeah, I mean, just the normalization of this sort of like social media scanning to identify, you know, undesirable political beliefs that Mark Rubio in the Department of State or DHS and deems is like a national security thing. threat. Yeah. Yeah. I also have kind of my fringe fears that this will be used to train LOM. Yeah, it's probably fair. But yeah, we'll see. Yeah. How is this not going to be catastrophic for any business that relies on tourism, any state that relies on tourism? Right. Like Florida. Yeah. I know that's not the top risk, but like it just seems, again, they're going out of their way to

Starting point is 03:05:49 fuck over every single demographic in the country, which I don't think it's going to work out for them in the long term. Yeah, it's a, this is a weird one for me because it's, yeah, the economic cost is so obvious. It's a, it's a catastrophe. And I, there's a part of me that's like, maybe this is a good thing just because it's part of like, right, we've always known and have been trying to say for years, every single aspect. Like, these people are bad for everybody. There's like 150 people in the country who benefit from the policies that like the most extreme parts of the right wants to push. And everyone else is going to be completely fucked over by it. And we might as well just take the mask off. And maybe that's some of

Starting point is 03:06:33 what we're seeing in the collapse of Trump's approval is people realizing like, oh my God, these guys really just want to destroy everything good about life. Like that, that is conservatism in a nutshell. We hate life and ourselves. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Yeah, that was the Democratic Party in that Simpsons episode, Gerson, but yes. We want what's worse for everybody. There, that's the other one. 50, 50, you got it. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:06:56 Yeah. Talking of worse for everybody, do we want to talk about the National Security Strategy document that the Trump administration released? Let's go for it. Yeah, we should do a dedicated episode about that, but we could talk briefly about it. We have 15 minutes. That's not you saw 15. Yeah, I've pulled a lot of quotations from it, and we're not going to be able to discuss

Starting point is 03:07:15 all of them here. I think we will have to discuss it. this probably next year when we do a whole episode on it. It is one of the more like, especially in terms of like foreign relations, one of them more like sort of this is our ideology, this is our outlook and these are our goals, documents that I've seen from this administration, right? They talk about how, I'll just quote from it here, American strategy since the end of the Cold War have fallen short.

Starting point is 03:07:41 They have been laundry lists of wishes or desired end states and have not clearly defined what we want, but instead stated vague platitudes, and have often misjudged what we should want. They talk about how they are going to retain soft power. Soft power, people aren't familiar, is a theory that Joseph Nye has an international relations. It's a power to compel or persuade rather than to force, right? The United States has been hemorrhaging soft power, like someone with their artery cut, like in the last 12 months.

Starting point is 03:08:11 Soft power is a fraction of what it was. year ago. I find it very odd to see them even mentioning that, to be honest, when, like, I mean, they have soft power if you're Victor Orban. Talking of Orban, there's this incredible stuff about Europe here, quote, we want to support our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe's civilizational self-confidence and Western identity. Jesus Christ. Another quote. That's good. This is wild. The larger issues facing Europe include the activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty,

Starting point is 03:08:48 migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech, and suppression of political opposition, cratering birth rates, and the loss of national identities and self-confidence. Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less. And then I'm skipping a bit here. We want Europe to remain European. This just sounds like your average white nationalist, like Twitter post.

Starting point is 03:09:13 Yeah, no. Like, yes, it comes from Twitter, right? This is just a Twitter reply. This is, like, very Twitter-brained, like, types of politics. Yeah, yeah. This guy has, like, a Greek statue avatar. Exactly. Oh, 100%.

Starting point is 03:09:26 I mean, I think it's really fun to think of Europe being like, I'm Europe. I have a lot of self-confidence issues. I can't really speak up for myself in big groups, like the European Union. Like, come on. What do you mean? Self-confidence grow up. Yeah, it's one. They're like, you know, they're saying that, like, white European people don't have enough, like, white European pride.

Starting point is 03:09:51 People don't respect my Western identity. Like, okay. Yeah. Notably, like, for instance, a country of France, a country which lacks self-confidence and pride in its identity. This has been an issue for a long time. It's very funny to have this in, like, a U.S. foreign policy or national security documents. Yeah. This is, like, these are the guiding principles of our, like, foreign policy going forward. And they're, like, jorking off about, like, Europe remaining European. Yeah. Yeah, and just, like, shit-talking an entire continent. No, America should think Europe is gay, and we should stay away from it. That's what our national security party should be, is Europe is gay.

Starting point is 03:10:29 We don't want to deal with whatever Europe is doing. We're America. Yeah, leave us alone. Yeah, that ended really well for us in the 30s. Yeah. Well, there's almost like an early 20th century vibe to this document. They talk about the Monroe Doctrine. Yeah, they do.

Starting point is 03:10:45 And they talk about the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which they define as, quote, we will deny non-hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities or to own or control strategically vital assets in our hemisphere. Which people aren't familiar with the Monroe Doctrine. It's the U.S. sort of has a right and obligation to exercise some control over the outcomes of the entire Western Hemisphere. Like, say, Venezuela. Yes, that would be one example. See, it's totally different from Iraq because this is on our hemisphere.

Starting point is 03:11:18 So it's good intervention, actually. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Manifest Destiny has given us the right to all of the Americas, and so we can intervene in outcomes there. There's a lot about the nation state in here, and like the idea that the, quote, unquote, nation state should prioritize its own interests. I wonder what they're talking about there, because, like, we have many nations that are excluded from states all around the world, right? Right, like the Kurds being one example, right? Like, are they, like, are they saying that nations and states should always align?

Starting point is 03:11:52 Whilst, like, their special envoy to Syria is saying that he said this week that decentralization has never succeeded in the Middle East, which is a wild statement to be saying in a place where, like, you can drive in a single day to the sites of three different genocides from northeast in Syria, right? You can see the places where the Armenian genocide happened, the Yazidi genocide, and the unfast. Like, you can do that drive in a day if you don't get hung up at the border. Yeah, I mean, honestly, for now, if we're counting some of what was done against the Alawites and the Wiceliswals, you know, I think that's a little unclear at the moment. But, yeah, possibly. Yeah, like, to say that centralization is the only way for the Middle East is a wild statement. So I don't know how some of this pans out.

Starting point is 03:12:35 There's also a lot here on border security as national security, right? Sure. I'm just going to read one. They use the word national. a lot. Nationalism was a subfield of my PhD, so obviously, like, I'm interested in the exact understanding of nation they have here because there are several. But throughout history, sovereign nations prohibited uncontrolled migration and granted citizenship only rarely to foreigners who also had to meet demanding criteria. The West's experience over the past decades vindicates

Starting point is 03:13:05 this enduring wisdom. In country throughout the world, mass migration has strained domestic resources, increase violence and other crime, weaken social cohesion, distorted labor markets, and undermine national security. The era of mass migration must end. Border security is the primary element of national

Starting point is 03:13:24 security. Great. This is the only terrain they have left because they've abandoned class interests and, like, exploitation, so the only thing they can actually focus this on and they focus the economy on is through nationalist immigration policies. This is like the last refuge for

Starting point is 03:13:39 the right, once they're still trying to appeal to some sort of populism, but don't actually want to address real class conditions. Yeah, and for a lot of the right, when they talk about nationalism, they are talking about ethno-nationalism. Right. The people, you know, the people are the nation. Yes. Yeah, yeah, the Volk, like, which is not always, like, blood and soil nationalism, it's one type of nationalism, it's not all types of nationalism, right? That's the cool thing about the United States. This is the one country, one of the only countries where this, that principle has been, like, opposed, in very degrees since the country's founding. Yeah, like, it's supposed to be that the example, maybe along with France, right,

Starting point is 03:14:17 of, like, subscriptive nationalism, where nationalism was not an ethnic quality, it was subscribing to a set of values and beliefs. A philosophical idea. Yeah. That does not seem to be the vibe I'm picking up. There's a lot more in this document. They spend a decent part of his shit-talking other documents, other previous national security strategies. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:14:38 These are always long-in-for-bbing. boast, but we're going to keep it brief, and then off they go. But yeah, I think it's, it's worth us maybe doing the whole episode on, because I think it's one of the more, like, coherent statements of belief. Not a lot of this stuff is new. We knew that's how they thought about immigration, right? You hear them talk about it on Fox, on Newsmax, like any Stephen Miller, like, public statement is going to talk about, talk about how, you know, immigration is changing, you know, the economic makeup of the country and like the core identity of the country is changing

Starting point is 03:15:12 which to defend Western identity, that sort of stuff. Yes. Seeing it all written in a document together, I think it's where this has value. Totally. And I think, yeah, seeing that all laid out, seeing the way these things play into their view of the world. And then as I say, following what's actually happening in the world

Starting point is 03:15:31 and like, you know, clearly that when they're talking, they're talking about the United States, when they're talking about nations, right? They're not talking about the Kurds. They're not talking about Yazidis, the Catalans, Southern nations that have states, right? It's just so funny because they lay out all these economic things, right? Straining domestic resources, violence and crime,

Starting point is 03:15:50 weak in social cohesion, and destroyed labor markets, right? They lay out all of these things, which have direct, like, economic causal drivers. And they're like, no, no, no, no. It's actually not about these economic factors. it's just about immigration. Like, it's so blatant. Yeah, no other ideology in history has scapegoated a certain group

Starting point is 03:16:11 for the economic disaster in a country. That's never happened before. Yeah. It's just one for one. If you go back to Moispo Stone's theory of structural anti-Semitism as the driver of the Holocaust, it's literally just this, right?

Starting point is 03:16:24 Except this is an even more blatant version of it. Yes. See, like, the Nazis even though did try to do some, like, populist economic policy as well. Yeah, yeah, sure, of course. Yeah, the strength through joy program. Yeah. The modern American right doesn't even try to do that. It's just the immigration. They're not even doing like a weird, like, like, right wing, like socialized.

Starting point is 03:16:47 There's a, no, I'll just, I'll push back. There's a little bit of like the talk with, oh, we're going to have a give every American and they're born, $1,000 that will be invested in that. Like, there's, they are like talking about it. They don't do it. They don't do it, but they talk about it. Yes. Sometimes. Yeah. He talked about a tariff. check, right? Trump was going to give every American... The stimulus checks, yeah. The first time they did during COVID, right? They threw some money around, but...

Starting point is 03:17:11 There was that, like, yeah, one or two stimulus checks we got at the end of COVID. Yeah. The end of the first, you know, batch of the pandemic cycle to be more accurate. Yeah. Yeah. Robert, was there one other thing you wanted to talk about? We've time. Yeah, this is basically related to the Warner Brothers

Starting point is 03:17:28 acquisition. For whatever reason, Reddit's algorithm will periodically give me little hints and bits of the war between Zach Snyder fans and the rest of the world. I know a lot about this. I know a lot about this. I'm not a big Zach Snyder fan, you know, but I don't care. Like, I didn't feel strongly anti or pro his DC movies. There are some crazy people out there who believe, and they are like reading the tea leaves.

Starting point is 03:17:56 They think the Saudis are going to, like, kill his enemies. They're going to restore the Snyder first, Robert. Yeah. You know, have you, this is, I've been following this just as like a personal interest for years. It's nuts. It's crazy. No, there are fascinating people. Like, they're a fascinating, unique people to study. Like, the number of people who literally believe that it, like, there should be people executed publicly for, for not letting Zach Snyder finish his movies that didn't make money is outstanding. No, because, well, because Netflix has partnered with Snyder for years, when, when, when, if Netflix takes over, uh, there are, uh, there are.

Starting point is 03:18:31 obviously going to restore the Snyderverse. James Gunn is going to be out. They're going to restore the Snyderverse. But if the Saudis and Paramount takes over, the Saudis want to do it too. So it's really for Snyder bros, things are looking up. So put your money in Snyder coin right now. Well, my favorite thing about that is that

Starting point is 03:18:48 like as soon as they announced the deal, they were like, and James Gunn is staying. Yeah, they talked a lot about him on the call. Because like his movies are a big part of what makes what are valuable right now, right? Like, he's good at making money for the people that he works for.

Starting point is 03:19:03 And the level of conspiracy theories, we're like, no, they have to, it's like, cueing on stuff. They have to hide that Zach Snyder's back because they can't let people know yet. Robert. But he's already even told he's out. They've been doing this for like eight years.

Starting point is 03:19:15 It's so funny. I had not realized how crazy they were. Yeah. I love it. It's really fun. Anyway, that, that's, I always enjoy encountering a new cult. I think Zach is kind of taking advantage to them to get his Instagram Follower account up.

Starting point is 03:19:32 It's very funny. He's like posting stuff that's like, their reading is like he's messaging that it's coming back. Even when guys like, Bit Affleck's like, it was the worst. I hated being that man. I would never do that again. I don't want to be. It's, I love it. I just love seeing deranged people be deranged about something that's actually harmless for once.

Starting point is 03:19:52 Yeah. We could get a Snyder-vers related shooting. That's not impossible. Snyder does encourage it a little bit. But Snyder is not, I think, the villain of this story. No, he's clearly friends with gun. Like, they're not. Oh, no, yeah.

Starting point is 03:20:08 And specifically, he has dropped his plans, which he had for years to do some Einranded adaptions, which I'm bummed about because I think Snyder's Iron Rund would be great. And instead, instead, he's writing this, like, this, like, lesbian movie with someone. With Tignitaro. Yes. And so unfortunately, we're trading Ayn Rand for like this, like, lesbian cinema slop, which I'm, I am, I'm, I'm, I'm really bummed about. Because I think, I think Zach Snyder's Ayn Rand would be a much more fascinating piece of art. No, no.

Starting point is 03:20:42 I want to see Ben Shapiro get $150 million to make Atlas shrug. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, that's what I want to see. They bought exclusive TV rights to one of the, one of the books. I forget, I forget if it was Fountainhead or Atlas shrugged, but since the Daily Wires, like, finances, have collapsed. I do not think they're going forward with that right now. Oh, but, but Gare, the Pendragon cycle is coming out, though. I'm excited, right? Are you excited? We got to watch that together, buddy. We got to find it.

Starting point is 03:21:08 We got to, we got to have the company pay for us to meet in the Airbnb in a third state and just, just watch that son of a bitch. If we want to this year to plan some kind of a cool zone convergence to watch, to watch the Pendragon cycle together, I would happily travel for that. I think we're ethically obligated to do that. Okay, final closing note, trans housing insecurity continuing to increase. If you have an extra room, put a trans person in it. If you have a couch, put a trans girl on your couch. This is going to be via message going forward.

Starting point is 03:21:40 Jesus Christ, people, put a trans girl on your couch. You can figure out how to live together. It will be fine. People are going homeless and dying. Please do this. Is there like data on, like, what's that? Is this just as a result of, like, the continuing, like, people being forced out of their jobs and economically? This is all, this is, this is me finally talking about something I've been tracking for a very, very long time, which is, I mean, I say very long time, but, you know, even over about the past four or five years has been massive transmigration into places like Portland, into places like Chicago, into places like New York.

Starting point is 03:22:17 They're getting housing in New York. There's a lot of, a lot of trans housing in New York. I think this, yeah, there's some, like, regional aspect. of this. Don't come to San Diego. Yeah, it makes sense that the cities that are safer are having like a big influx. Yeah, and there's a lot of people. Yeah, those are also cities that do not have great housing

Starting point is 03:22:34 supply. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, neoliberalism. And there's been a lot of issues with it and that's something that can be mitigated by just putting people on your couch. I mean, yeah, that's a short term maybe. I don't, honestly, the couch thing freaks me out as a long-term solution. Well, but I mean, that's the thing, though. It doesn't have to be

Starting point is 03:22:52 a long-term If people have connections to help other people get jobs, so they can actually like pay a low amount of rent for like a room that's way more solid than like this like forever couch surfing thing that sometimes people like refer to as like quote unquote trans housing. Yeah. Okay, but again, but the idea here is that there, and this is something that I have run into extensively,

Starting point is 03:23:16 is there are a bunch of people who basically just need to get out and need like a couple of months or a month to get back on their feet. and don't have the ability to do it and are going homeless because of that and it's killing people and it fucking sucks. And that is something that can be mitigated with sort of cultural shifts towards sharing space more and we're all going to have to do it more

Starting point is 03:23:36 because the economy is about to collapse even more. Great. Fun. Yay. Put a trans girl on your couch. If you would like to email us, you can do so by emailing coolzone tips at proton.many. Many of you already have. I'm sure there are more of you to come If you want it to be encrypted, you should send it from a proton mail address as well.

Starting point is 03:23:57 Okay, everybody. Well, happy holidays. I think we have one more ED episode before the end of the year. 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 podcast from Cool Zone Media, visit our website,

Starting point is 03:24:22 coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. I'm Stefan Curry, and this is Gentleman's Cut. I think what makes Gentleman's Cut different is me being a part of developing the profile of this beautiful finished product. With every sip, you get a little something different. Visit gentlemen's cut bourbon.com or your nearest total wines or Bevmo. This message is intended for audiences 21 and older.

Starting point is 03:24:59 Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky. For more on gentlemen's cut bourbon, please visit gentlemen's cuthuburn.com. Please enjoy responsibly. What up, y'all? It's your boy, Kevin on stage. I want to tell you about my new podcast called Not My Best Moment, where I talk to artists, athletes, entertainers, creators, friends, people I admire who had massive success about their massive failures.

Starting point is 03:25:22 What did they mess up on? What is their heartbreak? And what did they learn from you? I got judged horribly. The judges were like, you're trash. I don't know how you got on the show. Check out Not My Best Moment with me, Kept on stage, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast.

Starting point is 03:25:40 Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers? Who catfish is a city? Is it even safe to snort human remains? Is that the plot of footloose? I'm comedian Rory Scoville, and I'm here to tell you, Josh Dean and I have a new podcast that celebrates the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals.

Starting point is 03:26:00 It's called Crimeless, a true crime comedy podcast. Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Greatness doesn't just show up. It's built. One shot, one choice, one moment at a time. From NBA champion Stefan Curry comes Shot Ready, a powerful never-before seen look at the mindset that changed the game. I fell in love with the grind. You have to find joy in the work you do when no one else is around.

Starting point is 03:26:30 Success is not an accident. I'm passing the ball to you. Let's go. Steph Curry redefined basketball. Now he's rewriting what it means to succeed. Shot Ready isn't just a memoir. It's a playbook for anyone chasing their potential. Discover stories, strategies, and overwork.

Starting point is 03:26:45 100 never-before-seen photos. Order shot ready now at stephancurrie book.com. Don't miss Stefan Curry's New York Times bestseller, shot ready, available now. This is an I-Heart podcast, guaranteed human.

Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 212

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