Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 230

Starting point is 00:00:00 This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, what's good, y'all? You're listening to Learn the Hardway with your favorite therapist and host Kear Games. This space is about black men's experiences, having honest conversations that it's really not safe to have anywhere, but you're having them with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing. How many men carry a suit or armor. It signals to the world that you not to be played with. And just because you have the capability that does not mean that you need to, listen to learn.

Starting point is 00:00:30 the hard way on the AHA radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd was accused of fathering twins. But the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax. You doctored this particular test twice in so much, correct? I doctored the test ones. It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.

Starting point is 00:00:57 My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 2%. That's the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available.

Starting point is 00:01:21 I'm Michael Easter. And on my podcast, 2%. I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world. yourself through some hardships, and you will come out on the other side a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person. Listen to 2%. That's TWO.% on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed. I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends.

Starting point is 00:02:08 Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Media. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads packaged. 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. Hey, everybody, this is It Could Happen here, and I am Robert Evans, and initially this was supposed to be a slightly different episode. I have been pondering over the fact recently that I feel

Starting point is 00:02:58 weirdly optimistic, particularly in the last couple of weeks, especially compared to a lot of the people that I know and spend time around. And I think it's because I've been interpreting some of the pieces of news differently than they have, and because I've been coming across some different pieces of information than they have. And I wanted to kind of walk people through why I've been feeling so optimistic. And so I wrote something and I recorded it around Thursday of last week. And then over the weekend, a gunman attack the White House correspondence dinner. And actually, this hasn't really changed any of my overall feelings. We'll talk about that this week, probably on ED, but I did make some alterations to the episode as a result of that,

Starting point is 00:03:42 although I do think it reinforces my primary point, which is that the political era that we now find ourselves in is one dominated by extremophiles. Extremophiles are organisms with unique cellular and molecular mechanisms that allow them to survive and thrive in extreme habitats. I'm talking about places like volcanic vents at the very bottom of the ocean, or the Dead Sea. If you've ever wondered why it's called the Dead Sea, it's because for a very long time, people thought it was too salty to host any life. Modern research has disabused us of this notion. The Dead Sea hosts life. It's just weird life, because the Dead Sea is a weird place. The term extremophile was coined in 1974 by R.D. McElroy

Starting point is 00:04:25 to describe microorganisms scientists were increasingly finding in places that should have been devoid of life. The word is a hybrid term that literally means love of extremes. And while it is usually used in a scientific context to describe small organisms and very odd locations, some experts have, over the years, pointed out that the label might well apply to humans too. In the journal article, All About Extremophiles, Johns Hopkins University's James A. Coker wrote that, quote, Despite common perception, most of Earth is what is often referred to as an extreme environment. Yet to the organisms that call these places home, it is simply, that, home. They have adapted to thrive in these environments, and in the process have evolved many

Starting point is 00:05:07 unique adaptations at the molecular and atomic level. In our human-centric view of the planet Earth, we tend to think of ourselves as being in the Goldilocks zone, not too hot or too cold, protected from radiation, and filled with all the things necessary for life to exist. To some extent, this is true. However, this view keeps us from acknowledging several basic facts, including that the earth is mostly a cold place. Over 90% of its oceans are at or below 5 degrees Celsius, and it has an average temperature of around 15 degrees Celsius. And several conditions we humans consider normal, i.e. 20% oxygen in the air, actually make us extremophiles from the point of view of other species. End quote. Now, I have a bad tendency to want to apply literal knowledge like this,

Starting point is 00:05:50 metaphorically to my understanding of politics. It's a bit of a sickness, but it also makes more sense sometimes than you'd expect. There's a tendency among many millennials, and even Gen Z and Alpha kids, too young to have known the 90s, to look back on that decade as a sort of cultural Goldilocksone, as if the brief period post-Cold War and pre-9-11 was some sort of cultural peak for our species, and everything since has been a slow-downhill slide. People have different reasons for this. Some of them blame 9-11. Some people argue that we were in that sweet spot where the internet existed and could tap you into cool and interesting things, but social media hadn't come along yet and ruined it all.

Starting point is 00:06:29 You know, different people come up with different justifications for this. But this view keeps people from acknowledging some very basic facts about the 1990s, which is that they were full of genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, just to name two, and repeated U.S. military adventures and misadventures in other parts of the globe, some of which ended disastrously, as in Mogadishu. Our president, for much of the 90s, was a sex pest, and members of the far right staged a series of bloody terrorist attacks. attacks, including the Oklahoma City bombing and Olympic Park bombing. And while all this was

Starting point is 00:07:01 happening, a new and more openly extremist Republican Party captured Congress while hapless outmaneuvered Democrats gawked in awe. The reality is that the 90s were a time of extremity, of extreme weirdness and darkness, just like every other period of human existence. And the extremity of the era helped birth a new conservative movement, one radical enough to wrench power from the liberals and bring us ultimately into the slavering jaws of the Bush era. Today, those same neo-conservatives seem tame next to their modern descendants, the MAGA movement, but in their own time they were the craziest bastards out there, and this hits at a fundamental reality in American politics. If survival in extreme times requires extreme adaptations, then it's no wonder

Starting point is 00:07:45 that for much of our lives, the extremists are the ones who have primarily thrived electorally. Democrats like to forget this. But Bill Clinton, Fenton felt like a pretty big swing to folks exiting the era of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, just as Barack Obama was seen as the most extreme choice imaginable by roughly half of this country. In fact, he was such an extreme choice that the conservative movement had to birth the Tea Party and eventually the MAGA movement in order to unseat the Democratic Party and repeal the changes from the Obama years in power. I like thinking about this stuff because I find it interesting that one common theme from evolutionary biology to modern politics, is this. In extreme environments, extreme adaptations are necessary to survive. We homo sapiens

Starting point is 00:08:30 have been in the business of extreme adaptations for as long as we've existed. That's all central heating and air, vaccines, antibiotics, and the AR-15 are adaptations to extreme environments and situations, many of them, extreme environments and situations that we created for ourselves. The problem is, our adaptations have a nasty tendency to drive even more extreme circumstances, which in turn foster further adaptations and so on and so forth until we invent the internet and satellite-guided thermonuclear bombs. Extreme adaptations are not always good. But once you've found yourself thrown into an extreme environment, you can't just wish the weather was different. You've got to adapt. That's the bad news about our current political situation. The good news is that the pendulum has

Starting point is 00:09:14 started to swing back our way. The extremism of the Trump era is provoking its own equal but opposite reaction, and you can see the first stirrings of that and the popularity of Zoran Mamdani, or the fact that a former pillow of neo-conservatism like Bill Crystal is currently advocating for the abolition of ICE. We are in the process of deciding the next extreme that will dominate American politics, which means we have the opportunity to adapt with policies and changes that are every bit as good as the ones the Trump administration has forced through our bad. To do that, we're going to have to be brave, and we're going to have to start getting our shit together now because this window of opportunity won't last long.

Starting point is 00:09:53 The way I see it, the GOP entered office this time around intent on waging the political equivalent of a shock and awe campaign. They burnt up any goodwill or benefit of the doubt they might have had in an orgy of careless and brutal cuts to basic government functions, carried out by the least sympathetic group of Groopers imaginable, one of whom was nicknamed Big Balls. A flurry of state and local legislative pushes and criminal investigations aimed at herding left-wing activists and queer, particularly trans people, have done tremendous damage, as have relentless ice raids on mostly non-white Americans. It's been bad, and yet we're still here.

Starting point is 00:10:30 I won't pretend we're in a good situation today, not, at least in terms of what we'd like, good to mean in the everyday sense of the word. Many of us haven't survived the first 16 months or so of the second Trump presidency. Fewer of us are going to make it to the end. But this regime came to power with the knowledge that their success or failure, hinged on speed and violence of action. They had a limited window to make resistance impossible, and they missed it. You can see some evidence of this in our war of choice against Iran.

Starting point is 00:10:59 President Trump wanted a quick, brutal triumph that would look good on the evening news, so he told his military to bear down on Iran with all the speed and violence of action they could muster. That plan failed, and the reasons why are weirdly similar to how the Republican Party has overplayed their hand in our ongoing culture war. Back in Trump's first term, the DOD established the algorithmic warfare cross-functional team, nicknamed Project Maven. The goal of the project, as per Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan, was to automate the analysis of drone footage and other data humans previously would have gone over by hand in order to speed up the rate at which

Starting point is 00:11:34 targets were identified and struck in wartime. Project Maven, from the jump, was a product of the worst kind of military thinking. How can we automate as much of our planning of warfare as possible. This is the kind of project you pursue when your finest military minds still believe that victory is as simple as killing or destroying a preset number of bad guys, causing them to give up. The goal was to create a system that could co-late and synthesize huge quantities of data in order to allow 1,000 targeting decisions per hour. Kevin Baker, writing for the Guardian, notes that this means, quote, 3.6 seconds per decision, or from the individual targeteer's perspective, one decision every 72 seconds.

Starting point is 00:12:16 Now, we're going to talk about where this kind of thinking has led us in our conflict with Iran. But first, here's some ads. We're back. Now, if you listen to the advocates at this kind of military buildup, the people who are really bullish on AI for military purposes, talk in their podcasts and on their blogs, the reasoning behind why you need to be able to make a thousand targeting decisions per hour is pretty obvious. They're obsessed with the idea. that a future war between the U.S. and a peer or near-peer adversary, most prominently China,

Starting point is 00:12:59 right? That's what they're planning on. Now, the Chinese military is also heavily invested in AI. There was a major New York Times article earlier this month in April of 26 titled Mutually Automated Destruction, the escalating Global AI Arms Race. I'm going to quote from that now. China and Russia are experimenting with letting AI make battlefield decisions on its own, two U.S. officials said. China is developing systems for dozens of autonomous drones to coordinate attacks, without human thought, while Russia is building lancet drones that can circle the sky and autonomously picked targets, they said. Even as the specifics of the technologies remain veiled, the intentions are clear. In 2017, Mr. Putin declared that whoever leads in AI will become

Starting point is 00:13:37 the ruler of the world. Mr. Z said in 2024 that the technology would be the main battleground of geopolitical competition. In January, defense secretary Pete Hegeseth directed all branches of the U.S. military to adopt AI, saying they needed to accelerate like hell. Now, my interpretation of what I've read from most of these guys is that they see future conflict as a massive but almost instantaneous chess game, right? Whoever has the AI that can most quickly and effectively sort through their intelligence, come up with target packages, and then strike those targets first, wins, right? If we can make a thousand decisions and a thousand strikes in an hour and they can only make 800,

Starting point is 00:14:15 then we'll destroy more of them and we'll win the war, right? It'll all be decided right at the start. And this may well be how a shooting war between China and the U.S. would proceed. But given that very few people in either country want that war to happen because it would kill us all, I think we might do best focusing on the war our country is currently fighting, where this logic has resulted in a catastrophic failure for at least the second time in my life. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq after more than a year of buildup and years of intelligence gathering. Our military planners put together a list of 50 high-value targets.

Starting point is 00:14:48 The idea was, if we could use our incredible super-advanced spying equipment and our precision-guided weapons to wipe out the most important figures of resistance in Iraq, we could hobble any response to the invasion. All 50 targets were struck. None of the people targeted were killed. Now, that doesn't mean no one was killed. It just means we missed all the people we thought we were going to hit. To quote from Kevin Baker's great article again, the targeting cycle had been fast enough to hit 50 buildings and too fast to discover it was hitting the wrong ones. Fast forward to earlier this year. The Trump administration orders the launch of Operation Epic Fury and unleashed a nightmare arsenal of hyper-advanced weaponry on the people and leaders of Iran, alongside the Israeli Air Force.

Starting point is 00:15:30 In the first two weeks, U.S. forces hit 6,000 targets picked with the help of Project Maven. One of them was the Menab Girls Elementary School, which was destroyed by a missile, killing 156 and wounding 95. Now, Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, hyper-advanced AI, and a multi-billion-dollar network of satellites backed up by decades of intelligence gathering by the CIA and the Mossad, wasn't enough to strop us from striking a school that we knew contained none of our targets. We had data that the people we thought were there

Starting point is 00:16:01 at one point were no longer there, and it was a school now. But some of the data may even relied on was old and outdated, and these machines aren't capable of real judgment in the way we think of it, and because people trusted them so much, no one thought to check before ordering the strikes. is a human error. This is not an AI error, but it illustrates a massive flaw in the fantasy that winning a war could be as easy as building a smarter machine. Now, to be accurate, and it is important to note, a lot of those 6,000 targets were what we thought, and they were accurately struck and killed in the opening salvo of the war. President Trump and his mouthpiece has celebrated their successful assassination of Iran's supreme leader, alongside many other

Starting point is 00:16:41 prominent military and governmental officials. This seemed at first to be way more successful than the opening strikes against Iraq, they didn't get any of those 50 guys. We got a bunch of our initial targets in this first wave of strikes. Maybe we just didn't have the right technology when we invaded Iraq. Maybe now we're doing it right. You know, finally, we'll be able to win a war this way. However, that quickly proved untrue. All of those strikes put together were not enough to break Iran's will or its capacity to fight and fight back effectively. Now Donald Trump finds himself trapped in an expensive quagmire, one that is already bleeding him advanced munitions and equipment while it crashes the global economy. The most recent APNORC poll puts Trump's overall approval

Starting point is 00:17:22 at 33%, which is down 5% since just back in March. Only 32% of Americans approve of his leadership on Iran, because most of this country can still see a man shooting himself in the dick for what it is. Pete Hegeseth is our most lethality-obsessed Secretary of Defense and history, and in him we see the result of a long sickness, first incubated during the Vietnam War, when embarrassed generals needed to spin their failure to make progress as a kind of victory. So they turned to bragging about how many fighters they'd killed, inevitably defining many civilian dead as enemy combatants and bragging about the tonnage of trucking that they'd destroyed,

Starting point is 00:18:00 based on wildly incomplete and inaccurate intelligence. Ever since this calamitous era, informed students of military theory have seen doing body counts as the death knell of a military entity's ability to make intelligent decisions that move their forces closer to victory. But because the entire conservative project in this country is built on the thoughtless worship of military prowess and power, we've seen this kind of thinking trickle down to the sorry cadre of influencers who call themselves right-wing intellectuals today. I'm talking about dudes like Matt Walsh and Chris Rufo, who've built their reputations on picking targets to drum up mobs against and uses the basis of attack ads. These people have proven legitimately good at stirring up hate and forcing laws all over the country

Starting point is 00:18:41 restricting things like drag shows or the use of chosen pronouns on government documents. All these people are, by definition, huge assholes, and so are their followers. And thus, when those people get radicalized to take action in their communities, they make those communities worse. This pisses off their neighbors, which has resulted in significant backlash across the country. As an example, Moms for Liberty was formed. in Florida on January 1, 2021, by Republican activists and former school board members who were outraged about pandemic safety protocols and schools. They became a vehicle for the parental rights movement,

Starting point is 00:19:17 a nebulous and deeply toxic force in American political life that sees the parent as a kind of absolute sovereign over the life and mind of their child. Any influence that might lead that child to become a different kind of person than the parent envisions must be pruned away. The group used the then-fresh moral panic over critical race theory as a lever from which to force themselves into American life. In June of 2021, they started filing what would become a long series of criminal complaints against books available in specific school libraries across the nation. School started removing books, and Moms for Liberty-inspired candidates began winning school board elections around the country. It looked for a little while, like a popular wave of

Starting point is 00:19:54 hysterical fear might yank America into a Fahrenheit 451-style future slightly ahead of schedule. But just a couple of years later, a funny thing happened. Moms for Liberty backed candidates started losing major elections. First, a series of school board races in 2003 in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Iowa. But even as the Biden administration creamed towards a disastrous new election in 2024, one in which the far right seemed to have all the momentum, regular people kept rising up and organizing to protect their schools. One of the first was Karen's Foboda, a mother of seven in Duchess County, New York. In 2023, she told NPR reporter Jim Zeroli, I looked into the local Facebook page of Moms for Liberty

Starting point is 00:20:35 and just browsed through some of the social media of some of these individuals, and what I saw was very upsetting. As a mom of kids who are members of that community, it was very concerning to think that these people would be trying to get onto the school board, because what does that mean for my kids? So she started a group of her own, defensive democracy, which organized like-minded parents

Starting point is 00:20:53 in her community to warn each other about Moms for Liberty. It defeated an entire slate of Moms for Liberty-backed candidates in 2023, all with the infrastructure of a Facebook page and weekly Zoom calls. And the really remarkable thing is that even while the 2024 election took over the national discourse and the Democratic Party completely shat the bed, people kept connecting and organizing in school districts across the country to fight for their children's educations. In November of 2025, the Houston suburb of Cyprus, Texas, saw Democratic candidates sweep three school board seats and take the majority, ending two years of Republican dominance. This trend was

Starting point is 00:21:29 repeated elsewhere that same month per a political article by Liz Crampton and Madison Fernandez. Quote, in Pennsylvania, Democrats flipped at least two dozen school board seats per an ongoing tally from Progressive Recruitment Group Pipeline Fund. The under-the-radar trend was enabled by voters' increasing weariness with the culture wars that helped the MAGA movement engineer school board takeovers and generate hyper-local interest in politics as the COVID-19 pandemic raged. In addition to Texas, Republicans lost seats in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, and the National Battleground of Pennsylvania, the result of well-funded campaigns orchestrated by local leaders.

Starting point is 00:22:02 Now, one of my favorite details from that piece is a quote from one of the new school board members, Leslie Gilmart, who stated, folks just wanted their school boards to be boring again. They wanted normalcy. Once the board was taken over by a super-partisan extremist majority, folks across the political spectrum were dismayed. Now, I continue to be an advocate of the thought

Starting point is 00:22:21 that Tim Walls might have made a more effective vice-presidential candidate if he'd kept calling the Republicans out for being freaks, because they are. Their obsession with the lives and behavior of their fellow citizens and their naked, slavering need to control their neighbors is upsetting and unnatural. The way I see it, we're in a time of incredible opportunity right now. The devil has played his hand and wound up slipping on a puddle of his own flop sweat along the way. The momentum is with anyone but these fucks, at least right now,

Starting point is 00:22:48 which is why a bunch of tertiary Trump supporters like Tucker Carlson have been cutting bait. Donald did the thing fascists often do. He kept reaching until he reached for something that exceeded his grasp. Now, I don't know what's going to happen next in our absolutely unnecessary struggle with Iran. I think there's a non-zero chance Trump tries to extricate our forces, save for some token, so Israel won't say we abandon them, and tries to take out the Cuban government next. It's also possible he'll escalate the violence against Iran in some massive apocalyptic, hideous way.

Starting point is 00:23:18 In either case, the human cost will be nightmarish, but either action would just be the flailing of a busted gambler, putting everything he has on a fantasy that Americans want to see foreign enemies broken while they can't afford to fill their car at home. Every poll of the American people seems to suggest that most of us has a pretty low appetite for unnecessary wars.

Starting point is 00:23:37 Outside of Florida, it's hard to find regular people who are scared of the Cuban government. The idea that they represent any kind of threat to folks in Michigan or Kansas is absurd on its face. The further Trump reaches the angrier people get fascist governments rely on the complicity of the masses even more than their enthusiastic support and many Americans have proven themselves unwilling to be complicit

Starting point is 00:23:59 in most of what the Heritage Foundation and their friends want for this country. And that's a nice note to roll ads on. We're back. If you want a direct example of how weak the cultural conservatives are right now, think back to the stunt President Trump pulled with DoorDash earlier in April. He ordered several bags and had them delivered by a Dasher who was there to get photographed praising the president, no tax on tips policy.

Starting point is 00:24:32 While they were standing outside the Oval Office, Trump asked the Dasher if they thought trans women should be allowed to compete in women's sports. And the Dasher in question was 58-year-old Sharon Simmons, who was a, I mean, it's been widely reported, is a Republican activist. She'd previously spoken out in favor of the no-tax-on-tips policy at the House Ways and Means Committee field hearing.

Starting point is 00:24:51 And even when she was under the gun next to the president, Simmons wasn't willing to agree with him on the weird anti-trans stuff. She replied, I don't really have an opinion on that. And I'm not here to call her a hero for that. She's not, but it shows a crack in the rhetorical wall these people have built for themselves. A Republican can't just support low taxes now. They have to endorse a whole raft of psychotic vengeance politics and anti-scientific views that are deeply alienating to anyone who has a chance of being called normal. Any discussion of life after Trump nowadays has to include an acknowledgement of the big lurking question of our age.

Starting point is 00:25:25 What if he won't give up power? And that's a bigger question than the just Trump, a large number. number of government officials of elected leaders, military officers, and law enforcement officers have implicated themselves in the crimes and what we might call the ought to be crimes of this administration. It's not unreasonable to ask, what if they won't leave power without a fight? And I don't have a comprehensive answer for you that I feel comfortable putting in the last couple of pages of a podcast script. But I will point out that just in the last month, as I write this, Victor Orban and his entire political movement faced sweeping defeat at the polls. Orban had been previously

Starting point is 00:25:59 referred to as a quasi-dictatorial figure. He was the leader of the Hungarian government, and he had led a massive right-wing crackdown that attacked schools, that attacked the LGBT movement, and that became a major funder for much of our own right-wing movement. It's come out that the Orban government was sending money helping to fund CPAC. They were sending money to specific right-wing influencers like Rod Dreher. And despite the fact that Orban was the guy that people like Tucker Carlson a couple years ago was saying, this is the future of American politics. Orbanism is what we want. Despite that fact, when they lost an election, he and his cronies back down without a fight. Now, ultimately, they did this because they still think they're bulletproof, right? We've got

Starting point is 00:26:38 enough people in the government that we can stop Peter Maggi are the new guy from doing any damage to us, right? And thus temporarily leaving power is an acceptable sacrifice because that lets us avoid a civil war. And the rest of the EU won't look timely on that. I'm sure that's a lot of their thinking. And obviously, the U.S. is in a very different position geopolitically. But the rapidity with which some former Trump stalwarts like Marjorie Taylor Green and Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson have abandoned MAGA suggests one thing. They think it's more personally profitable for them to not be seen standing next to the president or the MAGA movement right now.

Starting point is 00:27:14 And here's more good news. Remember how basically every social network is now owned by an openly evil right-wing billionaire? Well, Americans have responded to this by discarding social media and ever-growing numbers. This has been about one of the most consequential shifts. of the last few years. And just this week, University of Amsterdam professor Peter Tornberg published a study on shifts in U.S. social media use from 2020 to 2024.

Starting point is 00:27:37 Quote, online platform reached a client, driven by growth in the share of Americans, especially the youngest and oldest cohorts who report using no social media. Visiting and posting activity on Twitter slash X and Facebook have fallen by nearly 50% since 2020,

Starting point is 00:27:52 with the decline on Twitter X driven primarily by reduced participation among Democratic users. Now, this is broadly speaking a good thing for the mental health of Americans overall and for the future of our body politic. But the Americans who remain in social media aren't all doing so hot. Over the same time

Starting point is 00:28:08 period, traffic on Twitter and Facebook grew markedly more right-wing as both sites shrank. In his paper Torneberg warrants, as casual users disengaged while polarized partisans remain vocal, online discourse becomes narrower and more ideologically extreme. Or, in other

Starting point is 00:28:24 words, as the algorithms that govern what gets seen on these shrinking social media sites, reward more extreme content, less extreme users leave, and the ones who succeed and become more widely shared are the most extreme. It's, you know, another extremophile kind of situation. Part of why the people near Trump all believe they're winning is they live in these same internet fever swamps and they've gotten used to the internet mattering a lot more than it does right now. I don't mean to suggest that what happens online isn't important, but that importance has been softened by the sheer deluge of AI slop, spam, and weird right-wing propaganda that we've

Starting point is 00:28:59 been forcibly drowned in for years. Less people are using these things than they used to, which means their reach has declined because people find them off-putting and gross. The data shows that folks particularly over 65 and under 24 are increasingly fed up with not just social media, but the whole state of affairs we've been locked in politically. In the recent Virginia governor's race, Democrat Abigail Spanberger won by a comfortable margin. Republicans, devoted a huge amount of their budget against her to anti-trans attack ads, writing high off their inaccurate belief that anti-trans propaganda had won Trump the re-election in 2024.

Starting point is 00:29:34 But only 4% of voters in that election listed transgender policies as a top issue. Now, that alone might just point to the overwhelming impulse towards centristism shared by much of the American middle class. People don't like to stand out, particularly as a political radical. But a year after Spanberger's election, a majority of Virginia voters approved a radical redistricting measure. This was entirely framed as a response to the Republican Party fighting for the right to redistrict several states in their favor. The usual chorus of voices piped up to say, oh, I don't know, guys, we shouldn't do the same thing they keep doing in order

Starting point is 00:30:07 to defend ourselves. That doesn't seem fair. And this time, thank goodness, most people ignored them. The controversial measure outperformed Kamala Harris by eight points. And yes, a federal judge did immediately rule the measure unconstitutional, but you know how these things go. We're off to a series of court battles now, and however those end up, two useful things have been accomplished. The liberal majority of a state has banded together to fight the Republicans on their own terms, and a clear message has been sent to those same people that Republicans benefit from a different set of laws than Democrats. Now, any anarchist or leftist as political organizer you've ever known would have told you the right wing always benefits from an interpretation

Starting point is 00:30:47 of the law that she shucks seems to deny their opponents the right to do the same things in self-defense. It's bad that things work this way, but good for rank-and-file liberals to be reminded of that reality. If it weren't, the current gatekeepers of our news media wouldn't be rallying so hard against this measure. The same day I wrote all of this, the Washington Post published an opinion column by Theodore Johnson titled, Why Virginia Went Back on Its Word. It opens with a particularly idiotic paragraph. Partizanship did its best impression of democracy in Virginia on Tuesday, voters approved a referendum permitting the state's congressional districts

Starting point is 00:31:21 to be redrawn to help Democrats win four additional seats. It's retaliation to recent redistricting by Texas to hand Republicans five more seats at the behest of President Donald Trump. It's a red versus blue tit for tat over who can gerrymander more efficiently, a necessary evil, the parties say, to protect democracy.

Starting point is 00:31:38 It's actually not necessarily. I mean, not that it's a necessary evil the parties say, it's that one party was already doing this for years, the Republicans, and you didn't speak up. The Washington Post, you know, this guy didn't write the same column when this shit's been happening other states. He only does it when Democrats do it in Virginia, right? And I also might point out to Theo that a majority of voters approving a measure is democracy. You know,

Starting point is 00:32:02 if your only concern is the overall health of democracy, redistricting that favors Democrats merely corrects a structural imbalance in our political system that favors loosely populated rural areas with an unfair proportion of political power and marginalizes the greater number of citizens who live in urban areas and tend to vote Democrat. Anyway, there are other good reasons to see hope for a fierce swing in American politics, not merely back to the middle, but far to the left, simply as a matter of practical necessity. The Republicans have spent their time in power gutting the Parks Department, the Post Office, the VA, the FAA, and every other useful part of our state structure,

Starting point is 00:32:35 and this is a big part of what's radicalized people because they very quickly come to notice that things are missing and shit is not working right. For decades, the government has been the enemy to millions of people. of Americans who went out in the world and relied on government services every day of their lives. And yes, that's irritating and unfair. And no, we don't have time to fix that right now. What we can do is use the fact that the Republicans broke all these systems to point out to people, actually, you don't hate it when the government does stuff. You just hate the way Republicans won the government. And the fact that the Democrats have usually been too scared to push for

Starting point is 00:33:11 policies as extreme as they need to, right? This is an opportunity to convince a lot of of people, oh shit, paying taxes to support a vibrant civil society with extensive and functional infrastructure is a lot better than letting big balls delete half of civil service, right? Like, that's, I think, the opportunity we have right now. And pushing that basic line on as many Americans as possible in the next two years is, I think one of the most important things we can do at the moment. Along with that, we need to keep building support for enforcement of consequences against

Starting point is 00:33:40 the cadre of billionaires and their lackeys who have been robbing our shared heritage blind this whole while. If I had my way about it, I'd point out to people that there are an awful lot of billionaires who we knew colluded to take over the federal government and put something like Elon Musk's doge in place. You can just see that in some of the texts between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. These people are enemies of the state with an awful lot of money that we could confiscate to do things like replace the books, Moms for Liberty tore out of public libraries. Now we also need to seek consequences for the criminals who have weaponized the organs of the state to fight their war against transgender Americans.

Starting point is 00:34:16 This is an issue you can, in fact, get centrist voters to support. The average swing voter may not be particularly woke on gender theory, but they don't like seeing the government bully people who are just trying to get by. The widespread suffering created by the MAGA movement also creates potential for widespread solidarity between its victims. If the midterms go badly for the GOP and the 2028 elections go even worse, the USA's new elected officials and surviving citizens will find themselves in the same situation as the man who just unseated Victor Orban and his supporters.

Starting point is 00:34:48 We all learned how temporary a victory can be after 2024. I've seen more than a few comments online by liberals who decided Orban's defeat was a good time to attack a straw man caricature of a leftist, and these posts were generally laughing at this idea that a lot of people on the left express that electoralism can't defeat fascism. Now, I do share a frustration with the blanket rejection of electoral politics that some people on the left champion. But every online and real-life lefty that I know was thrilled to see Orban get the boot. However, they all did share a fear, and this is one fear that I've seen in common with every

Starting point is 00:35:22 analyst and expert on Hungarian politics that I've read, which is winning the election isn't going to be enough for Magyar. Orban is an extremist, someone who took power because things were extremely shitty in Hungary, and voters got angry enough to vote for a guy who promised to burn things down. They did come to regret that, but things are still extremely bad in Hungary. Joe Biden was a moderate who tried to govern in an environment of raging extremes. His promise was that he would bring things back to the normal of the Obama era. He failed to do that because it's impossible, and his failure opened up the way for Trump 2.0. If we don't want to repeat that cycle, the failures and ultimate collapse of the Maga movement have to be met with new strategies,

Starting point is 00:36:04 new tactics and new politics as we seek to fill the void that they're going to leave behind. I wrote and recorded the first draft of this piece, as I said earlier, just a few days before a gunman stormed into the correspondence dinner. His manifesto has made it clear that he wanted to harm the president and members of his cabinet. Within hours, his social media accounts were archived and his life was put under a microscope, as always happens with gunmen these days. All of this revealed a liberal man, one who had previously expressed very comprehensive, centrist opinions, including a dislike of firearms. I've seen this used by people to justify a conspiratorial narrative that immediately followed the attack. This guy is a perfect patsy. Obviously,

Starting point is 00:36:45 they cooked this up in a lab as an excuse to crack down on Democrats. I don't believe that, and here is not a place for an argument as to why. Again, we'll talk about that I'm sure later this week. What is interesting to me is that before any of this happened, I'd been planning to revise the ending of this episode by commenting on an article that came out in April of 2025. It's published by Axios, and the title was, Democrats told to get shot for the anti-Trump resistance. Here's a quote from that article. At town halls in their districts and in one-on-one meetings with constituents and activists,

Starting point is 00:37:16 Democratic members of Congress are facing a growing thrum of demands to break the rules, fight dirty, and not be afraid to get hurt. One of the lawmakers that they talked to for that article related a conversation that he'd had in a meeting with a constituent. Quote, I actually said in a meeting, when they light a fire, my thought is, grab an extinguisher, and someone at the table said, You tried gasoline.

Starting point is 00:37:36 So many regular liberals are embracing extreme rhetoric and measures today because they know on some level that that's the only way you survive in an extreme environment. We see this in the thousands of Normies in Minneapolis who have been willing and eager to confront armed federal agents in bathrobes and risk their own life and limb to protect their neighbors from ice. And we've also seen a very dark reflection of that and the actions of that gunman last weekend. Now, the fact that an educated and informed 31-year-old man decided to buy a firearm that he hated and attack the president represents many failures. One of them is a failure of the Democratic Party and the liberal project to provide him with anything that felt like a useful outlet for his rage and hopelessness. When people start talking and acting like this guy was acting, you can either throw your hands up and back away or you can try like hell to present them with a counteroffer. In this case, I mean a set of policies, activist campaigns, and organizations. organized actions to make this country a less horrific place.

Starting point is 00:38:36 The victory and wild popularity of Zoramamdani is proof that you can, in fact, do this even in 26. The widespread support for formerly extreme positions, like abolishing ice, taxing billionaires, radically redistricting states, halting the construction of data centers, and expanding and packing the Supreme Court are more than enough evidence to show that people will get in line to back a candidate and a party who promises radical change. Moreover, everything I've seen lately suggests that people are starving for a movement like this, hungry for their own candidate who feels like Mom Dani, hungry more than anything to feel hopeful again.

Starting point is 00:39:13 When Oregon Senator Ron Wyden posted CU at Nuremberg 2.0 after Christy Noem got fired, I watched a coalition of left-wing radicals and centrist dims who never came together over anything else express wild glee at the very thought. We can do this. We have the tools and we have the opportunity. It's going to take a big old step into the unknown. But that's our only option, besides waiting until we get another chance to look through the social media archives of a gunman. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast,

Starting point is 00:40:05 we interview Canada's most inspiring women, entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Do you remember when Diana Ross double-tap Little Kim's boobs at the VMAs? Or when Kanye said that George Bush didn't like black people. I know what you're thinking. What the hell does George Bush got to do a little Kim?

Starting point is 00:40:33 Well, you can find out on the Look Back at it podcast. I'm Sam Jett. And I'm Alex English. episode, we pick it here, unpack what went down, and try to make sense of how we survived it. Including a recent episode with Mark Lamont Hill, waxing all about crack in the 80s. To be clear, 84's big to me, not just because of crack. I'm down to talk about crack on day, but just so y'all know. I mean, at this point, Mark, this is the second episode where we've discussed crack,

Starting point is 00:40:59 so I'm starting to see that there's a through line. We also have AIDS on the table right now, so. Thank you for finishing that sentence. Yes. I don't think there's a more important year for black people. Really? Yeah. For me, it's one of the most important years for black people in American history.

Starting point is 00:41:16 Listen to look back at it on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to my new podcast, Learn the Hard Way with me, your host, and your favorite therapist, Kear Games. And in recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month, I'm bringing over a decade of my own experience in the mental health field and conversations with so many incredible guests. I'm talking, Tripp Fontaine, Ryan, Ryan, Sometimes when we're in the pursuit of the thing, we get so wrapped up in the chase that we don't realize that we are in possession of the thing. And we're still chasing it. And we don't know when we've done enough. Because people scoreboard watch.

Starting point is 00:41:52 Life becomes about wins and losses. Steve Burns, Dustin Ross, because you find it important to be a good person while you hear on earth. Are you a good person because you're afraid? Because that's two different intentions, bro. Absolutely. And that's two different levels of trust. I want you to just really be a good person. Join me, Kear Gaines,

Starting point is 00:42:11 as we have real conversations about healing, growth, fatherhood, pressure, and purpose on my new podcast, Learn the Hardway. Open your free iHeartRadio app. Search Learn the Hardway and listen now. In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckerd found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.

Starting point is 00:42:31 The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story. This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth. You doctored this particular test twice in so-ins, correct? I doctored the test once. It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case. I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.

Starting point is 00:42:52 Sunlight's the greatest disinfected. They would uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Greg, a lesbian, Michael Marantini. My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trap. Laura, Scottsdale Police.

Starting point is 00:43:08 As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges. This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona. Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So by the time you hear this, the situation may be followed in any number of directions. I'm speaking in the immediate way. wake of the United States and Israel's brutal invasion of Iran. Thus far, over a thousand have been killed, including over 100 schoolchildren and the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Starting point is 00:43:58 In response to this American Israeli aggression, Iran has retaliated by targeting both American bases and civilian and energy infrastructure in the neighboring countries that have facilitated American presence in the region. With the strategically and economically critical, straight to Hormuz in jeopardy, with France, the UK and Germany, aka the usual suspects, indicating potential involvement, and with the potential Russian and Chinese involvement also being floated in some circles, it seems to me that without any formal announcement, the war on the world has escalated potentially to a point of no return. Hello and welcome to Ikrappin here. I'm Andrew Sage, Andrewism, on YouTube, and I'm joined again

Starting point is 00:44:41 by... It's James. Hi, Andrew. How are you doing? As well as I can be. Yeah, that's about the best we can hope for these days, isn't it? Yeah. And in a time like this, I want to take a look back at history, particularly how old past

Starting point is 00:44:56 U.S. interventions have left devastation in their week. Today, I want to look at the fate of Libya, a country still dealing with his similar intentions following the end of the post-intervention civil war. So I suppose we should. should begin in mid-February in 2011. The Arab Spring was sweeping the Middle East and North Africa. Among the countries caught up in the fervor against the prevailing states was Libya. A North African state ruled for the previous 42 years by the Colonel Muammar al-Gadhafi's government.

Starting point is 00:45:29 Masses had taken to the streets across the country, starting in Benghazi. The government had some successes in putting down the revolt, killing hundreds of rebels and demonstrators alike, and some failures. as the masses managed to hold position. The people had many motivations, span an Islamist, to democratic, to militant, to tribal,

Starting point is 00:45:50 to just disaffected, against a government intent on its continued survival. Revolutions, uprisings, protests, revolts, they tend to be messy affairs.

Starting point is 00:46:01 I'm sure James, you're well away of that. Yeah, yeah. I think it's really easy of, like, outside observers, or when we're looking back at history,

Starting point is 00:46:10 to be like, this revolution was an Islamist revolution. This was a Marxist-Leninist revolution. This one was an anarchist revolution. But every revolution that I have been at, they have witnessed happening, it's in everything revolution when it starts. And it later becomes a something revolution.

Starting point is 00:46:31 But especially in the Arab Spring, right? Like in that time, it was just like, we've had enough of being under the boot of these regimes. and it was extraordinarily heterodox. And that was quite beautiful in the early days. Exactly, exactly. The heterodox nature of revolutions is really what I want to drill here because I think it's very easy people to caricaturize and sweep up broad brush and this

Starting point is 00:46:59 determine, oh, this is, in the case of Iran, people are saying, oh, it's only monarchists. It's monarchists and Zionists going out in the streets when they were protesting. when the situation on the ground is always more complex than that. Yeah, maybe I'll just take a second to address the, like, annoying campus tendency. I understand that every time the United States rains down death on some part of the world, it's terrible, right? It's sad, as you've just said, Andrew. In Iran, we've seen a girl's school bombed not once but twice, it seems, right? Like, what they call a double attack attack.

Starting point is 00:47:35 That doesn't mean that your response. has to be to support the other people who are killing those same civilians in that same place. It is possible for two things to be bad. And like in Iran, yeah, there is a monarchist opposition. It sucks. I spoke just this morning to a Kurdish group, which is opposing the regime in Iran. And they had nothing but bad things to say about the monarchists, right? They said, this is the P.A.K.

Starting point is 00:48:05 The Kurdistan Freedom Party, I'm quoting here. They do not have a foothold in society to actually achieve anything. The lies and delusions of a group of people sitting in nightclubs cannot make any real impact. You're free to use that one next time someone tells you all the opposition in Iran is monarchist. It's nonsense. Exactly. I mean, just on its face, it's obviously nonsense. There's this notion that these people are high of minds.

Starting point is 00:48:31 It's really a racist notion that you see pop and up again and again. Yeah, very orientalist. Yeah, anytime people step outside and they have some. something that they're upset about, they just get labeled with this one broad, sweeping, ideological moniker whether they're prescribed to it or not. Yeah. And even within the ideological monocas, there's always a lot of nuance in how people understand those ideologies, you know, no two Islamists are necessarily alike, no two monarchists even

Starting point is 00:49:02 are necessarily alike. And those are both ideologies that I absolutely abhor, you know? Right. Yeah. I don't understand. how you can be a leftist and spend your life, like, as such, and then also think that in other parts of the world, people don't want the same things. Like, I believe it is inherently human. Yeah. To want dignity and respect and the same for others and to want our communities to govern themselves. And I don't believe that it's any less human if you live in North Africa or the Middle East or South Africa or an island in the Caribbean or an island in the Pacific. Like, I believe it comes from our human nature.

Starting point is 00:49:40 And so it strikes me as therefore obvious that there cannot be a country where people's human nature is fundamentally distinct and they're all just like knee-jerk monarchists. I wouldn't see the world the way I see it if I was able to believe that. Yeah, yeah. These movements, they're always composed

Starting point is 00:49:57 by the choices and actions of sometimes millions of people, each with their own motivations. And it's easy, particularly in retrospect, to pick particular leaders or organizations as representative of them all, that doesn't make it so. One of the things that defined the Arab Spring, as you mentioned, was it's a leaderless nature. You had neoliberal, you had monarchists, you had socialists, you had most of all, I would say,

Starting point is 00:50:23 people without any ideological commitments at all. The majority of the human population is not ideologically committed one way or the other. Most people are just trying to live their lives and meet their basic needs. And they're submerged in a society that lends, them towards a particular inclination, but that's not set in stone. Most people in the Arab Spring likely sought just the end of whatever it was that they were suffering under before. And of course, in these kind of incidents, geopolitical actors will choose to back particular factions, lend them credence and prominence according to their geopolitical interests. But don't give them undue credit.

Starting point is 00:51:02 During the Cold War, for example, the US would have backed rebellions that they believe benefit them and vice versa, the USSR backed rebellions that they thought would benefit them. And even today, the U.S. is claiming to care about freedom, but has continued to work with the Saudis, who infamously invaded Bahrain to crush the Arab Spring that occurred there. Yeah. And at the time, France's love for democracy didn't exactly match their offer to aid Algeria and Tunisia in putting down their own Arab springs. Now, as I've been saying quite often, pointing out hypocrisy, It's kind of a baby's first geopolitical analysis, right? None of these governments have any consistent values beyond their own interests.

Starting point is 00:51:45 But I think it's important to make this kind of heterodoxy in movements clear to contextualize what happened next. There's another notion that U.S. intervention is entering these countries during these conflicts to uphold humanitarian aims, to liberate to women, no, to, to, liberate minorities in that region. The United States, like all the government, is opportunistic, right? It is taking advantage of often genuine struggles by people to serve its own situational goals without a care for what happens to those people, either openly intervening or covertly intervening. Most obvious recent example is with the Kurds in Syria.

Starting point is 00:52:40 At the time, they were convenient to the United States' interests until they weren't, and they were abandoned. and this is especially the case when resources like oil come into the picture, and Libya is extremely oil rich. So tragically, the West saw this uprising in Libya as an opportunity. Following a timeline in Scylproped Britannica, on the 19th of March 2011, Libya was attacked by the combined forces of the United States, the UK, and France. These countries now condemned Gaddafi as an oppressor of the civilians they were swooping in to save, though for years before, the UK and France were selling him weapons. They, alongside their Qatari and Saudi allies, took advantage

Starting point is 00:53:25 of the protests to assert their military might. This move was authorized by the UN Resolution 1973, and NATO would soon take command of the operation. While claiming to protect civilians under a responsibility to protect doctrine, they bombed them. An allegedly humanitarian intervention led to the deaths of tens of thousands of a national population of just over 6 million. Key infrastructure was devastated by the NATO-O-Bulman campaign and by the struggles between the government and the now armed rebels of the National Transitional Council, or NTC. A quick note, by the way, the NTC appointed themselves as the leaders of the movement, and despite the struggle being kick-started by mostly working and middle-class militants,

Starting point is 00:54:09 often of an Islamic orientation. The NTC was composed mainly of regime defectors, businessmen, and exiles who had a broadly pro-Western, conservative, and free market stance. Some of the elements in Gaddafi's government and military had defected to the rebels and equipped those previously unarmed protesters with firepower. And so up to now we only have estimates regarding the civilian death duel, infrastructural devastation and arbitrary detentions,

Starting point is 00:54:37 disappearances and kidnappings carried out by both pro-Gaddafi and anti-Gaddafi forces. Not to mention the deliberate targeting of black Libyans and sub-Saharan African migrants by rebel forces that took place during and after the 2011 war, with the claim that they were Gaddafi's hired mercenaries. Many of those Africans attempts to escape were met with callous disregard by Europe. Yeah, callous disregard is, I mean, there are no words strong in there. enough to express the way I feel about the way the European Union has treated migrants and liviated is absolutely disgusting and continues to be.

Starting point is 00:55:17 It's despicable. Yeah. Have you read Sally Hayden's book about this? No, I haven't. It's called My Fourth Time We Drowned. Very good book. Difficult read, I would say. It very much is some of the type of reporting that I try and do myself on migration and that it

Starting point is 00:55:32 talks about people, not numbers. And it centers migrants as individuals. with stories. It's a great book, but probably not one to read right before bed. I could imagine. It sounds heavy. Yeah, definitely heavy going. So, following

Starting point is 00:55:49 a steelmate between the pro and Gaddafi camps in late spring of 2011, the rebels assisted by NATO forces took Tripoli and toppled Gaddafi's government, and the NTC was recognized internationally, almost immediately as the legitimate government

Starting point is 00:56:05 of Libya. As Matt will notes in Jack Ben, quote, On the day Tripoli fell, the New York Times headline, The Scramble for Access to Libya's Oil Wealth Begins was telling. Libya's vast oil reserves, long prized by the West for being the largest in Africa and incredibly close to Europe, were now open to business for foreign investors. As is the case with all imperial interventions, the attempts to get profits flowing for multinational corporations comes long before any

Starting point is 00:56:34 ideas of reconstruction, such as essential infrastructure projects or insurance services, end quote. And really up to now, that infrastructure has not been established, and even access to Libya's oil is not yet secured, even though they allegedly managed to loot some of that oil in 2012. Now, Gaddafi himself fled after the fall of Tripoli, but he was found. NATO bombed his convoy and he was captured alive, then executed by NTC forces in October 2011, after which the war was declared over and the NTC declared Libya and Islamic democracy in their constitutional declaration. The NTC estimated 30,000 dead and a UN report from 2012 estimated that more than 900,000

Starting point is 00:57:18 people had to leave the country since February of 2011. Many were not Libya nationals, but more than 660,000 Libyans also fled, and an estimated 200,000 people had been internally displaced. Continuing with our timeline, in 2012, the NTC handed power over to the General National Congress, or GNC. And despite a formal end to the war, Gaddafi loyalists, local militias, and tribes shaved against each other and the GNC. The militias wouldn't disarm, the Gaddafi loyalists continued to fight. And the GNC failed to put forward a new constitution. So in 2014, they were ousted by the newly elected House of Representatives.

Starting point is 00:57:59 and in 2014, a second civil war would begin in Libya, with the nation split meaning between the House representatives or H-O-R with its Libya National Army or LNA based in Tobruk to the east, and their rival made up of mostly Islamists from the former GNC with their Libya-Dorn militia based in Tripoli to the west. They didn't win the election, they didn't consider it legitimate because of its low turnout, and they didn't appreciate the amount of former Gaddafi supporters in the new government.

Starting point is 00:58:29 So they rose up to fight, claiming to be the National Salvation Government or NSG. So you have the HOR and you have the NSG. Beyond these two factions, you also had an Al-Qaeda affiliated militia and the Islamic State, both engaged in insurgent struggle around the country, sometimes holding entire cities. Eventually, the two governments came together to sign the LPA, the Libyan political agreement that formed the interim presidential council and government of national accord. or GNA in late 2015. With that attempt at cohesion didn't really work out,

Starting point is 00:59:05 as the UN backed GNA, now based in Tripoli, couldn't consolidate power. By the end of 2016, factions affiliated with the NSG still resisted the GNA, and the HOR, still based in Tobruk, refused to endorse the GNA's appointment. So they went from having two competing governments to kind of having three, though the main opposing forces were now the GNA and the HOR. The GNA was backed by Turkey, Qatar and the EU, especially Italy, and the UN, while the HOR was backed by Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and to some extent France, who technically recognized the GNA, but also provided support the HOR for their struggle against the Islamists. The U.S. was also supposed to be back in the GNA, but Trump jumped out to praise the HOR at one point, so the U.S. is positioned. position was exposed as a lot more ambiguous in practice.

Starting point is 01:00:04 Yeah. So the GNA and the HOR would keep on struggling against each other for control over the central bank and oil companies and territory over the years. By the end of one particularly significant offensive in 2019, which saw the country's largest oil field brought under HOR control, the situation was such that the HOR's leverage came from their control over the oil fields, and the GNA's leverage was that it was internationally recognized and could legally sell the oil. GNA leader Fayez Al-Saraj and H-R leader Shalif Aftar seemed to be developing cooperative

Starting point is 01:00:48 relations and in March of 2019, they were supposed to have a national unity conference, but then the H-O-R tried to take Tripoli. Whoopsy. So they kind of had to postpone that conference. The resulting fighting led to the H-O-R-taking Sirti, a major city between Libya's east and west halves. With Turkish support, the GNA successfully repelled the H-O-R from NETRPIL, and the situation was stabilized with a battle line just east of Sirti in 2020. Yeah. Not just Turkish support. Turkey deployed the Syrian National Army, aka the TFSA, the Turkish Free Syrian Army. They are

Starting point is 01:01:30 widely believed to be rebadged Islamist from previous iterations of various Islamist groups in Syria. that Turkey has formed into kind of its own proxy force. I mean, I'm sure if you go to their Wikipedia page, there are like 17 million different war crimes listed. Like, they are well known for their affinity for war crimes, yeah. I could imagine. The fact that Turkey, Turkey's back in them tells me everything I need to know, I think. Yeah, right.

Starting point is 01:02:00 Yeah. And they're considered, like, a deniable proxy, right? Like, they can be like, Turkey can be like, oh, well, that wasn't us. That was these Syrians. guys who we happen to arm and equip and run air support for. Yeah. What is their situation now,

Starting point is 01:02:15 now the Turkey is kind of back in the new government in Syria? They have largely been folded into the STG's armed forces. So like Abu Hamza is, I think, a general or a brigadier. I can't quite remember his rank, but it's a guy who has been widely condemned is now a military officer within the STG's Ministry of Defense. Huh. Okay. So a more accurate description then would be that Turkey sent their war criminal proxies to support the GNA in repelling the HOR from there Tripoli. Yeah. And the situation stabilized with a

Starting point is 01:02:54 battle line just east of 30 in 2020. And after other attempts to reach an agreement failed, they agreed to share oil revenue, establish a pluminant ceasefire and get both Turkish forces and Russian mercenaries out of the country. So the second civil war was officially over in October 2020. According to reporting by Al Jazeera, the UN initiated a new attempt at a unifying government in 2021, which was approved originally by both rival parliaments, leading to the establishment of the interim government of national unity, or GNU, in March 2021, thus replacing the previously UN-backed GNA. So we went from GNA to GnU. But then the GNU would be opposed by the H-OR, which withdrew from the

Starting point is 01:03:42 GNU in September of 2021 and established the government of national stability, or GNS, in March 22. So the GNA was replaced by the GNU, and the GNU was now opposed by the GNS. And thus the country remains split in two up to today, between the UN back to GNU, and the HOR slash Libyan National Army backed GNS. And in all of this chaos, people on the ground have been suffering. They've been suffering human rights abuses, disappearances, up to recently the GNU imposed a morality police, and there have been numerous reports about open slave markets in Libya, where migrant black Africans are auctioned to the highest bidder.

Starting point is 01:04:28 Yeah. This is a result of human trafficking and debt bondage, so not exactly the same as chattel slavery. but the experience and racial undertones are all too familiar. The suffering in Libya has also spread beyond its borders. Following Gaddafi's fall, the weapons of his military stockpiles ended up in the hands of militants across the Sahel region of Africa and even in Syria. You remember in my episode on the situation in Nigeria, some of those weapons ended up in the hands of Boko Haram and other Islamic militant groups

Starting point is 01:05:03 in the region, Pulani Herdsmen and so on. Tragically, because Libya just can't seem to catch a break at all. September 2023 also saw catastrophic floods devastating the country. The Hurricane Strong Storm Daniel caused two dams to burst in the coastal city of Durnar, which is within Jainas territory in eastern Libya. The flooding killed at least 4,000 people,

Starting point is 01:05:30 though potentially even more, left thousands missing. and displaced more than 40,000 others. The nation still roared by civil war and still unrecovered from the devastation of the NATO-abombing campaign surely could have mustered a more adequate response to the tragedy, if not for those conditions. In fact, it is theorized

Starting point is 01:05:50 that the tragedy could have been avoided altogether because, according to reports by the Middle East Eye, a Turkish company was supposed to rehabilitate the failed dams, but their works were reportedly interrupted by the 2011 uprising and subsequent civil war. Yeah. It's always the cost of war that we don't count, right? Like, if you look at the 2023 earthquake that killed people in Syria and Turkey, right?

Starting point is 01:06:15 Like, undoubtedly, that would have done a lot less damage. If it hadn't been for the fact that war had been raging in those places for so long, so like everything else got put on hold, right? All the normal infrastructure repair and such that you would expect had to stop because of that war. that made things like the earthquake worse. Yeah. I don't think the people who rose up against Gaddafi and fought and died back in February of 2011

Starting point is 01:06:41 had sought this outcome. Unfortunately, in a world dictated by the whims of imperialist powers, this was the end of their actions. I don't want people to get it twisted, though, because in the time since, As people have observed the devastation brought by these civil wars, there has been an effort to most whitewash Gaddafi and to limit our vision of possibilities to a binary of either perpetual Gaddafi rule on one end

Starting point is 01:07:17 or perpetual civil war on the other end. Those are not the only possibilities. So we've discussed the legacy of NATO intervention, which deserves condemnation in this episode. And it should be an indication. that who the Western invasions and wars not going to liberate anyone. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:07:36 But aside from that accurate analysis of Libya since the fall of Gaddafi, I want to bring in some conversation on demand himself in the next episode. Until then, all power to all the people. This has been Akkadapen here. I've been Andrew Siege. Peace.

Starting point is 01:07:55 Indian women are looking for more. More into themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are at them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers,

Starting point is 01:08:24 all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHeart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Do you remember when Diana Ross double-tap little Kim's boobs at the VMAs? Or when Kanye said that, George Bush didn't like black people. I know what you're thinking. What the hell does George Bush got to do a little camp?

Starting point is 01:08:46 Well, you can find out on the Look Back at it podcast. I'm Sam J. And I'm Alex English. Each episode, we pick it here, unpack what went down, and try to make sense of how we survived it. Including a recent episode with Mark Lamont Hill waxing all about crack in the 80s. To be clear, 84 is big to me, not just because of crack. I'm down to talk about crack all day, but just so y'all know. I mean, at this point, this is the second episode where we've discussed, correct.

Starting point is 01:09:13 So I'm starting to see that there's a through line. We also have AIDS on the table right now. Thank you for finishing that sentence. Yes. I don't think there's a more important year for black people. Really? Yeah. For me, it's one of the most important years for black people in American history.

Starting point is 01:09:29 Listen to look back at it on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to my new podcast, Learn the Hardway with me, your host, and your favorite things. Careers, Kear Games. And in recognition of mental health awareness month, I'm bringing over a decade of my own experience in the mental health field and conversations with so many incredible guests. I'm talking, Tripp Fontaine, Ryan Clark.

Starting point is 01:09:52 Sometimes when we're in the pursuit of the thing, we get so wrapped up in the chase that we don't realize that we are in possession of the thing. And we're still chasing it, and we don't know when we've done enough. Because people scoreboard watch. Life becomes about wins and losses. Steve Burns,

Starting point is 01:10:10 Dustin Ross, because you find it important to be a good person while you hear on earth, or are you a good person because you're afraid? Because that's two different intentions, bro. Absolutely. And that's two different levels of trust. I want you to just really be a good person. Join me, Kear Gaines, as we have real conversations about healing, growth, fatherhood, pressure, and purpose on my new podcast, Learn the Hardway.

Starting point is 01:10:31 Open your free, Our Heart Radio app. Search Learn the Hardway and listen now. In 2023, former Bachelor star Clayton Eckers, found himself at the center of a paternity scandal. The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story. This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth. You doctored this particular test twice in silence, correct? I doctored the test ones.

Starting point is 01:10:58 It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case. I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for. Sunlight's the greatest disinfected. They would uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Gregalespian and Michael Maranini. My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young.

Starting point is 01:11:18 This is Love Trap. Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Amaricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges. This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona. Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the IHeartRour. radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to I Kidapin here.

Starting point is 01:11:50 I'm Andrew Siege, Andrewism, on YouTube and joined again by... It's James again. Yes. I've noticed a phenomenon. I'm not sure if you've noticed it too. Mm-hmm. Where anti-imperialist solidarity somehow goes a step beyond opposing imperialist aggression itself and crosses into lionizing or whitewashing.

Starting point is 01:12:14 the targets of that aggression, or rather the sensible leaders of the target to that aggression. Yeah, I have noticed this too. It's one of the things that makes me most angry in the world. What's been referred to as the anti-imperialism of idiots. Yes. Not so relevant now, but I used to like to apply the Assad test to anybody who claimed to be interested in the politics of liberation. If you think Bashar al-Assad is a based anti-imperialist people, socialist hero, then your politics are shit. I have nothing good to say about that. Like,

Starting point is 01:12:50 you're an idiot. Yeah. Yeah. It should be a fringe phenomenon, right? But I haven't seen it get an increase in traction. Yeah, even in like relatively, you know, like I won't start a war with various US leftist publications. But I went to pitch some people this last week thinking like there is speculation that the United States will once again. again, ally itself with Kurdish groups, so I'm sure it had then planned to once again abandon when that became politically more expedient. But I happened to have some insight into these various Kurdish groups, having spent some time there and having contacts there. And so I went to the websites of these various, you know, big publications which are left

Starting point is 01:13:33 or left-leaning or even sort of liberal. And I saw these borderline campus takes on what's happening in Iran. And it's just so, so frustrating to me, legal. It makes me so angry that people continue to view the world through this binary Marvel movie lens, which sees it as impossible that two things could be bad at the same time. Yeah, it's infuriating to me. Yeah. And if I was more inclined to conspiracy, I might say that this binary is intentionally constructed. You know, it's by design that the most vocal anti-impearl.

Starting point is 01:14:14 periodist voices also just so happen to align themselves with state power. Yeah. And campism. But I'm not, I'm not inclined to conspiracy. Yeah, yeah. One could make a pretty reasonable argument for that, right? One could make that argument. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:14:32 I won't, but one could. I might. I think one of the best examples of this is the sort of odd obsession that some people have with, you know, Muammar al-Gaddafi. Now, last episode, we spoke about the long-term consequences of Western intervention in Libya, beginning with the 2011 uprising during the Arab Spring against the 42-year rule of Muammar Gaddafi. What began as a broad, largely leaderless protest movement was quickly shaped by foreign intervention. In March of 2011, the U.S., the UK and France launched a military campaign through NATO under a UN mandate to protect civilians. The war toppled Gaddafi

Starting point is 01:15:14 but killed tens of thousands and devastated infrastructure. In the aftermath, Libya fractured into rival governments, militias, and foreign-backed factions, triggering yet another civil war in 2014. And despite a ceasefire in 2020, the country remains divided between competing administrations, while ordinary Libyans face instability, human rights abuses, and economic hardship. I think it's fair to say that the NATO intervention was a net negative for the country. But in the same breath, I cannot agree with those who seem to believe that Gaddafi's rule could have continued either, that he was some force for good in the country.

Starting point is 01:15:53 And in this episode, I really want to get into the why, to identify and dissect the actions of the man Gaddafi. According to his biography in Encyclopedia Britannica, Murma al-Qaddafi was born in 1942, near Sirete, Libya. 69 years later, he would be captured and killed in Sirtay, Libya. After spending his early years in a tent, he graduated from the University of Libya in 1963 and then graduated from a military academy in 1965. In 1969, at the age of 27, Gaddafi pulled off a bloodless coup to seize power from King

Starting point is 01:16:33 Iteris I of Libya. For the next four decades plus, he will be the de facto ruling. of Libya. Garafi was both a passionate Arab nationalist and a Muslim. In power, he tried to push both of his ideologies. He expelled Western military forces, expelled remaining Italian settlers and Jewish communities in Libya, nationalized the country's oil industry, banned alcohol and gambling, tried to unify with his Arab neighbors, occasionally by attempting coups in their countries, and stood against normalization with Israel. a very mixed bag so far.

Starting point is 01:17:12 Yeah. Until 1977, Gaddafi ruled the Libyan Arab Republic. But the culmination of his cultural revolution period from 1973 to 1977 would sideline his political and religious opponents, who would begin in to see him as unstable, hubristic and authoritarian. That period would instead cement Gaddafi as the sole ruler of what he would rename the socialist people's Libyan Arab Jamahiria. As recounted in Libya, the history of Gaddafi's pariah state by John Oaks,

Starting point is 01:17:47 Jamahiria was a term he coined in his green book, likely inspired by Mao's Little Red Book, published during the Libyan Cultural Revolution period. Jamahiria was his idea of a state of the masses, governed by people's congresses and popular assemblies. And if it's one thing that makes a political movement, it's empowering, it's slapping the people's and popular label on everything, regardless of any additional context.

Starting point is 01:18:14 Yeah. So they had these democratic local assemblies called Basic People's Congresses that met three times a year. And those Congresses appointed executive people's committees, which did most of the day-to-day stuff. And above it all was the General People's Congress. This period was simultaneously an effort to encourage popular participation through these Congresses while suppressing dissent through his control over the secret services. It was clear that Gaddafi was still in charge even after he stepped down from his former position as Secretary General in 1979 and simply and humbly dubbed himself the brotherly leader

Starting point is 01:18:54 and guide of the revolution. Yeah, some of his like hubristic stuff, like his rhetoric, his outfits, his reference to himself. It's like you couldn't parody some of it. It is where like the parodies of dictators in this part of the world come from. It is Gaddafi's kind of effect, I guess. Yeah, he was a character. Yes, that he was, yeah. He was definitely a character.

Starting point is 01:19:22 Yeah. So, I mean, anarchist critiques of democracy are easy to find. And although Gaddafi's Libya was never solely directly democratic, even in his project, you could see some of the flaws, some of the issues that Anicus have identified in this approach to popular power. As the congresses and the people's congresses were poorly attended and easily manipulated, issues were often raised and were rarely resolved. And of course, compounding those flaws was the fact that these people's congresses had no actual power over the things that mattered in Libya. Yeah. The oil industry, the armed forces, the security, the armed forces, the security,

Starting point is 01:20:03 security services and foreign policy, where Gaddafi and his compatriots still ruled. Gaddafi decided where the oil money went, and he directed some of it to a great man-made ripper project that would extract from the ancient and non-renewable aquifer under the Libyan Desert to supply the coast with a more stable water supply. Frustraisingly for him, I could assume, Gaddafi did not get what he wanted out of the revolutionary people's congresses. So he created revolutionary committees to mobilize the people and safeguard their rule through commandos that answered to Gaddafi directly. These revolutionary committees could arrest counter-revolutionaries, establish revolutionary courts,

Starting point is 01:20:46 and eliminate enemies of the revolution at home and abroad. The people he called stray dogs. All of this for the people, of course, and for the revolution. So on people, his system had some degree of, uh, of people power and people voice, but in practice, he exercised near total control and suppression of opposition, both within the country and outside the country. The same went for workplaces, of course. He spoke about worker partnership and power in the Green Book, but it was a state-controlled and state-distributed economy in Libya, run by oil money with very few worker-run enterprises.

Starting point is 01:21:39 There was also no real freedom of organization or strike in Libya as independent unions were banned and Gaddafi explicitly rejected class struggle despite claiming to be a socialist. So in the return of Muammar Gaddafi by Tunisian academic Hatham Gussemi, he highlights the cult of personality that was forged over the years of Gaddafi's rule that has resurfaced up to the sea. His proponents often point to the good that he did for the country. establishing basic social services, free health care and education, housing and land distribution, accessible loan programs, women's rights, and so on. And with that welfare state came naturally some base of popular support for a people who had

Starting point is 01:22:25 little to nothing before. Other fans of Gaddafi point to what I like to call hype moments and aura. So there was a time when he was in the UN General Assembly and he had what was supposed to be a short time to speak and he just went on and on and on and on and on and on and he tore up the UN charter hype moments and aura right and yeah that's like something that a lot of people point to he was also at one point in time the chairman of the African Union and he wanted to keep that position permanently and he was proposing a whole United States of Africa like he had a whole period of Africa and solidarity which we'll get to yeah

Starting point is 01:23:09 Okay, good. Yeah, his pan-Africanist arc is fascinating. Yeah. So none of this, however, erases his dark, dark side. For one, for all the women's rights that he put forward in Libya, he was not that great to women. The Green Book presents Gaddafi as someone who cared about women's dignity and rights. But even in that book, you see a very complementarist take on women's place in society.

Starting point is 01:23:38 it's like yeah they're equal to men but also their role is in the household they're supposed to be mothers above everything else he was like they need to be mothers but they shouldn't be treated as property or objects yeah I think he based a lot of this in like his

Starting point is 01:23:54 interpretation of hadith or the Quran his idea that like there was some kind of divine guidance on gender roles right I've actually seen this in recent days like you can go and find Hamanai's tweets right, like Ayatollaham and I, not his son.

Starting point is 01:24:11 And like, you can see his stuff where he's like, you should not misstreet your wife. You can literally find those in his timeline on Twitter, right? He was a big poster. And people have somehow attempted to like construe this as like he was a leader of enlightened feminist regime in Iran, which I don't know. It's benevolent patriarchy all over again. Yeah, like you have to be really on a special fucking truth trajectory to convince

Starting point is 01:24:38 yourself that that is the case. Like it takes remarkable capacity for self-delusion. Rather than listening to women in Iran, women from Iran, many of whom I have spoken to, to look at the evidence of the killing, for example, with Gina Amini, right? To be like, I know, but I found this tweet from 2013, so we're good here. This is fine. It's just remarkable people's tendency to do that. Yeah, it's remarkable.

Starting point is 01:25:08 And stupid. Yeah, Yeah, stupid is a good word. Yeah, and going back to Gaddafi, aside from that sort of benevolent patriarchy take on women's equality, investigative reporting by Anna Kajin also gathered testimony since his fall that alleged his procurement, cohesion, and sexual abuse of women inside his compound,

Starting point is 01:25:34 aided by a network of officials. Unfortunately, men are far too afraid to come forward, even all these years after his death, due to the persistence of pro-Gadhafi sentiment in the country up to today. So not the best for men. What about for Africa, right? His whole Pan-Africanist arc. He styled himself as a pan-African who would support the struggles of people like Mandela and would fund infrastructure projects around the continent. But he had a history of attempting

Starting point is 01:26:11 to overthrow governments in Africa and support oppressive ones, including Idi Amin of Uganda and Charles Taylor of Liberia. So his pan-Africanism was never concerned with the freedom or well-being of African people. It was, I think, very much

Starting point is 01:26:29 according to his own self-aggrandizement. Yeah, like he, didn't he proposed like an African-Union which was more akin to like a United States, like a federal Africa. Yes, the United States of Africa. That was his proposal. Fantastic, yeah.

Starting point is 01:26:45 Yeah. Great. And as he's proposing this Pan-African vision, within Libya itself, he was pushing for an Arab Libya. The Amazik and other non-Arab Africans in Libya were mistreated. You know, his vision of an Arab Libya led to the suppression of, of the Tuaregs, the Taboos, and the Amaziv. He had policies, as reported in the BBC,

Starting point is 01:27:14 in New Internationalist, Al Jazeera and Oswe. He had policies that included the banning of minority languages, the banning of minority names, the discouraging of cultural expression, and sometimes denying citizenship to groups outside the Arab identity. So naturally, many of these minorities took part in the 2011 movement, and after Gaddafi's fall, there was a revival of language, cultural institutions, and publications,

Starting point is 01:27:37 However, the NTC and those it followed have continued to ignore the minority plight. Minority groups are still struggling for constitutional recognition, representation, and equal rights in a country that is, of course, still divided. And some minorities have chosen to boycott the national political process entirely in favor of pursuing local self-governance. Also, minorities were not the only people being persecuted in Gaddafi's Libya. On the political front, despite calling himself a socialist, Gaddafi was really all over the place ideologically. Now internationally, he may have backed the Palestinian struggle, the Irish struggle, the African-American struggle, but he was consistent in suppressing actual leftists in Libya. Marxist.com identified some of these repressive efforts in their article on Gaddafi. Quote, Gaddafi was very clear in expressing his anti-communism.

Starting point is 01:28:33 In 1971, he sent a plane full of Sudanese communists back to Sudan where they were executed by Nimeri. In 1973, the regime published an official document to commemorate the fourth anniversary of Gaddafi's rise to power under the title Holy War Against Communism, end quote. Quite eccentric. Later on, however, he would get more chummy with USSR, but Gaddafi was no Marxist nationalist. And communists and leftists and workers would not legal. capable of organizing independently in Libya. Aside from them, you also had the murder and torture of civilians and journalists, the assassinations of rivals in Libya and around the world.

Starting point is 01:29:15 It was not the free speech utopia that Gaddafi tried to paint it as. Instead of emboldening the left discernments, he emboldened his tribal groups and set the foundation for the Libya that we see today. His consistent throughline is that he likes strong men and sees himself among them and wants to associate himself with them. At some point in the early 2000s, he was supporting Jorg Haider, a neo-fascist in Austria and telling Europeans they needed to get past their obsession with the Second World War. He had no consistent politics. Well, I mean, that tracks with his expulsion of Jewish communities in Libya. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:29:59 He didn't only expel Jewish settlements. he expelled Jewish communities that had arrived prior to Italian colonization that had existed in Libya for centuries. Yeah, that maybe, I guess, anti-Semitism can often be the link that brings terrible people together. He had a lot of other notorious incidents of suppression, but one of the most significant was the Abu Salin massacre. In short, as recounted by John Oaks, Abu Salern was the site of a prisoner's protest on

Starting point is 01:30:30 the 28th of June 1996. The prisoners escaped their cells and were protesting their mistreatment as guards shot at them from the roof. Two top security officials came and took command, ordering the shooting to stop and promising to address the prisoners' complaints if they returned to their cells and gave up the guards they had hostage. And the following day, shots fired from 11 a.m. to 1.35 p.m. A mass slaughter of approximately 1,200 of the 16 to 1700 prisoners in Abu Salinas. The families who suffered that blow were among the first on the streets of Benghazi, 2011. But those families were not originally told that their loved ones had been killed.

Starting point is 01:31:15 Some of them continued to visit the prison for weeks, months, years after, bringing gifts for the relatives who were already long dead. In the twists and turns of Gaddafi's ideological development or lack their following the fall of the USSR, Gaddafi would also pursue economic liberalization. He started opening up to the West, ever so slightly. There was slow progress and a brief hiccup. But by 2003, free market advocate Shukri Ganim was appointed prime minister. Before long, 360 state enterprises were privatized. By 2007, Libya was laying off as many as a third of the government workforce,

Starting point is 01:31:59 400,000 public sector workers. And according to a New York Times article from 2011, the IMF had actually praised Libya's economic reforms. So why 2011 conditions were so unbearable for so many workers, especially young people, there's no wonder that some of them fought with nothing to lose. The last aspects of Gaddafi's rule that I want to touch on was his complex relationship with Western powers.

Starting point is 01:32:36 Louis in his rule in the 70s and 80s, he did style himself an anti-imperish revolutionary, and that is the image that a lot of people uphold of him to this day. Libya funded and armed revolutionary and militant movements worldwide from the African National Congress, or the ANC, to the Palestine Liberation Organization or PLO, to the Irish Republican Army or IRA. He aligned himself with the so-called radical camp in the Middle East, including Bathurst Syria and Iran, and Western governments accused Libya of supporting international terrorism. Libya was considered a rogue state.

Starting point is 01:33:14 But as noted by Syrian anarchist Mazen Kamalmas in an interview with Jose Antonio Guitares, quote, even when Gaddafi was declaring himself an anti-imperialist long ago, it was just a lip service while he engaged as an authoritarian in trivial terrorist acts that never meant to support libertarian objectives of the victims of imperialism. End quote. Still, Reagan called back. him a mad dog, and the US bombed Libya in 1986 after attacks in a West Berlin nightclub were

Starting point is 01:33:44 attributed to Libyan agents. Those bombings narrowly missed Gaddafi himself, but they killed his adopted baby daughter. Libya was also blamed for the 1988 bombing of Pan and Flight 103 over Lockerbie, which led to sanctions by the United Nations and the US, which isolated Libya economically and diplomatically. In the 90s, however, with the fall of the USSR, Libya began slowly shifting toward cooperation. They handed over the suspects in the Lockerbie bombing, and sanctions began to loosen as they attempted to normalize relations. Western intelligence soon started cooperating with Libyan intelligence against Islamist militant groups, including the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which is a thorn in Gaddafi side. The early 2000s had Libya renounce its

Starting point is 01:34:33 weapons of mass destruction program following the invasion of Iraq. The U.S. and the U.N. subsequently lifted sanctions and diplomatic relations were restored fully with Western countries. Gaddafi hosted Tony Blair of the UK, Nicholas Sarkozy of France, and met with Obama as well. And many of these meetings with Western leaders produced multi-billion dollar energy and business deals. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:34:57 BP, Royal Dot Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Total Energies, they were all getting pieces of Libya's wealth. As Libya began adopting more neoliberal economic reforms like currency devaluation, trade liberalization, and more openness to foreign investment, Libya was also able to cooperate closely with Western intelligence during war and terror, including assisting the CIA and MI6 in rendition and torture, as uncovered by Human Rights Watch. So by the mid-2000s, Libya had mostly reintegrated into the Western-led global system. And the West for their their part simply ignored Gaddafi's continuous human rights abuses, the counterterrorism cooperation, the oil and gas contracts, and don't forget the brutal African migrant control,

Starting point is 01:35:44 were all too valuable for America and Europe. I remember this period quite a while. It was when I was in my undergraduate university and Gaddafi was invited to speak. The Oxford Union, I did my undergraduate there, and myself and a number of had friends. So you met Gaddafi? No, he spoke via video conference. Okay. Which they paused while they removed us for protesting Gaddafi's. It just seemed like this decades of abuse of his own people have been completely forgotten, right?

Starting point is 01:36:16 Because he was now prepared to do abuse of other people that was beneficial to the United Kingdom, the United States. And we felt like that was apparent and wrong. So we went to make our feelings known and the Oxford Union is a very silly institution, right? We deprive itself on free speech, and really it just does kind of class reproduction for the most part. Right.

Starting point is 01:36:39 And, of course, there was not freedom of speech for people who were going to be rude to someone who was in charge of a state, even if they were being rude on behalf of the thousands of people. He's had murdered and tortured. And, yeah, that was my little personal run-in with Gaddafi when I was, what, like, 18. But, yeah, I can't remember if we were, like, not allowed in

Starting point is 01:36:59 or we were booted out because I am like two decades and half a dozen traumatic brain injuries since my teenage years. But yeah, I do remember just being like people are treating this like as some kind of fucking novelty. And this person has real blood on his hands. Real people have suffered tremendously and died because of actions he's taken. Like it's not funny or cute. Wow.

Starting point is 01:37:23 What year was that? It would have been in the early 2000s, the Bush era, because that's when I was in my undergraduate second Bush term. So it would have been bought in 2006, I'm somewhere there. Yeah, thankfully I never had any run-ins with Gaddafi. Yeah. Even at that time, I can remember just being somewhat appalled by the Marxist-Leninist tendency to excuse crimes against humanity

Starting point is 01:37:50 as long as they were done by people who said the right things, who had the right vibes, who condemned the right people and the liberal tendency to excuse crimes against humanity so long as they were done in service of capitalism and the state. Yeah, yeah, shockingly similar tendencies in some ways. Yeah, right, like this fundamentally not rooted in the idea that people have a right to dignity.

Starting point is 01:38:17 Both of them hold people as less valuable than other things, right? Be it capital or, I mean, the Marxist-ledm this tendency, honestly, like, it's not even the revolution that they believe it's more valuable than people. It's the revolutionary rhetoric. Yeah. Like, like, with Assad, right? Like, you can murder your own people with chemical weapons so long as you pretend to give a single shit about Palestinians, even though you've spent decades using your weapons to kill your own people and never once use them to actually help the people of Palestine, to actually protect people.

Starting point is 01:38:54 Exactly. Exactly. So at this point now, you know, Gaddafi's trying to be old chummy with the West, after he spent some time being chummy with Africa and spent some time being chummy with USSR and with rebel groups around the world. But that was just the thing, right? He had this track record of flip-flop-in, you know? And even though relations had normalized, these Western powers could not trust him. They still saw him as that mad dog. They still saw him as unpredictable and unreliable. In fact, even while he was

Starting point is 01:39:29 cutting deals with these multi-billion dollar corporations for the oil contracts and so on, when he wasn't getting what he wanted, he would threaten to nationalize to get what he wanted. And so, to West being opportunistic,

Starting point is 01:39:44 were just waiting for an opportunity. They were done with playing his game. And that opportunity came when the people organically rose up against Gaddafi in 2011. Not long after NATO intervened, and the years since Libyans have suffered and died with no end in sight. It shouldn't be uncontroversial to say this. Gaddafi was not a true anti-imperialist.

Starting point is 01:40:11 I don't think it's possible for a statesman or a government to be truly anti-imperialist. Government is foundationally exploitative internally, and when turned externally, that drive exploitation is, we understand as imperialism. All the markers of imperialism worthy of condemnation, be it economic exploitation, cultural dominance, military violence, etc., is carried out under the label of governance when done within its own borders, when done against, for example, the non-Arab minorities in Libya. I think what's missing from now popular anti-imperialist narratives is that connection, that analysis. And a gap in the analysis is what's creating this false consciousness

Starting point is 01:40:56 that leads people to come to the conclusion that anti-imperialism means that XYZ government is anti-imperialist and good, and ABC government is imperialist and bad. That's not how the world works. States are never going to be liberatory. They're not able to produce a liberatory framework. At their best, they function as a welfare state. at their worst, you get mass suppression and cults of personality.

Starting point is 01:41:23 Sometimes you get a combination of both, as with Libya and Gaddafi. And that's my message for today. Please stop line eyes and leaders. Stay woke. Yeah. And all power to all the people. I've been Andrew Sage. This is a good happen here.

Starting point is 01:41:43 Peace. Indian women are looking for more. More to them. their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women.

Starting point is 01:42:09 Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHeart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Do you remember when Diana Ross double-tapped Little Kim's boobs at the VMAs? Or when Kanye said that George Bush didn't like black people. I know what you're thinking. What the hell does George Bush got to do with Little Kim? Well, you can find out on the Look Back at it podcast.

Starting point is 01:42:38 I'm Sam Jett. And I'm Alex English. Each episode, we pick a here, unpack what went down, and try to make sense of how we survived it. Including a recent episode with Mark Lamont Hill, waxing all about crack in the 80s. To be clear, 84's big two. mean, not just because of crack. I'm down to talk about crack on day, but just so y'all know. I mean, at this point, Mark, this is the second episode where we've discussed crack,

Starting point is 01:43:01 so I'm starting to see that there's a through line. We also have AIDS on the table right now. Thank you for finishing that sentence. Yes. I don't think there's a more important year for black people. Really? Yeah. For me, it's one of the most important years for black people in American history.

Starting point is 01:43:18 Listen to look back at it on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you You get your podcasts. Welcome to my new podcast, learn the hard way with me, your host, and your favorite therapist, Kear Games. And in recognition of mental health awareness month,

Starting point is 01:43:32 I'm bringing over a decade of my own experience in the mental health field and conversations with so many incredible guests. I'm talking, Tripp Fontaine, Ryan Clark. Sometimes when we're in the pursuit of the thing,

Starting point is 01:43:43 we get so wrapped up in the chase that we don't realize that we are in possession of the thing. And we're still chasing it. And we don't know when we've done enough, Because people scoreboard watch. Life becomes about wins and losses. Steve Burns, Dustin Ross,

Starting point is 01:43:59 because you find it important to be a good person while you hear on earth, or are you a good person because you're afraid? Because that's two different intentions, bro. Absolutely. And that's two different levels of trust. I want you to just really be a good person. Join me, Kear Gaines,

Starting point is 01:44:13 as we have real conversations about healing, growth, fatherhood, pressure, and purpose on my new podcast, learn the hard way. Open your free, our heart radio app, Search learning a hard way and listen now. In 2023, former Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.

Starting point is 01:44:33 The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story. This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth. You doctored this particular test twice in someone's, correct? I doctored the test once. It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case. I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for. Sunlight's the greatest disinfected. They would uncover a disturbing pattern.

Starting point is 01:44:59 Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Gregalespian and Michael Maranini. My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trap. Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.

Starting point is 01:45:15 Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges. This isn't over until Justice is served in Arizona. Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 01:45:37 On Sunday, April 12th, I went to the basement nightclub in Queens. Like usual, someone scanned my ticket at the big gate off Flushing Avenue. I had to wait in a winding line outside the door, went through security,

Starting point is 01:45:51 and finally reached the DJ and bar. But instead of the regular collection of twinks, dolls, and bisexuals, The room was full of city workers, politicians, journalists, and DSA members, a decent number of which probably were bisexual, I suppose. Technically, we were directly above the basement nightclub in the knockdown center event venue gathered this Sunday afternoon to attend Mayor Zoran Mamdani's 100-day address.

Starting point is 01:46:21 I'm Garrison Davis. This is It Could Happen Here, a show about things falling apart, sometimes putting stuff back together. This one is one of those rare episodes focused on the latter. Earlier this April marked Mayor Mamdani's first 100 days in office. This episode, I'll discuss what Zoran has done these first 100 days, some of the challenges he's faced, if he's been able to deliver on the promises of his campaign, and how he's adapted to the power and constraints

Starting point is 01:46:50 of running the biggest city in the country. And finally, what all this could mean for the three? future of working class and left-wing politics in the United States. Let's first return to the 100-day address above the basement nightclub. Upon entering the venue, you found yourself in a museum of the administration's first 100 days. This little installation displayed the mayor's snow shovel from the historic blizzard during Zoran's first few weeks in office, a tenant organizing suggestion board from the rental rip-off hearings, and a child-sized mayoral podium used to announce a new.

Starting point is 01:47:26 new free child care program for two-year-olds. Museum plaques detailed victories for labor and tenants' rights, as well as infrastructure accomplishments like scaffolding reform, and a pothole blitz that filled over 20,000 potholes in just three days. Before the mayor's speech, a Bronx parent, two tenant organizers, and a city worker from the Department of Transportation, spoke to the crowd about how life is different under the new administration. Momdani's speech was effectively a state.

Starting point is 01:47:56 of the union for New York City. The mayor outlined the campaign promises the administration has fulfilled so far in their short time in office, and connected his style of governing to the sewer socialists of Milwaukee from the first half the 20th century who focused on strengthening public services. Because for too long, city hall had not just failed to meet expectations. It had lowered them. After years of broken promises, no one in this city could be blamed for doubting that government held either the ability or the ambition to upend the status quo. It, as I said, on that freezing January afternoon to more than 8.5 million New Yorkers, we will make no apology for what we believe.

Starting point is 01:48:40 I was elected as a Democratic socialist, and I will govern as a Democratic socialist. This speech was really the first time since the inauguration that the mayor has talked at length about what it means to govern as a Democratic socialist. and the example that New York City can set for the rest of the country. The address was mostly attended by city workers, who the mayor invited to enter into a ticket lottery. For most of the speech, I was pinned between a group of uniformed Department of Sanitation employees

Starting point is 01:49:17 and workers from the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. The event in general was focused on uplifting civil servants and celebrating public service, whether that be bus drivers, school teachers, or the sanitation workers that kept this city running during the worst snowstorm in years. It feels like for the past few decades, the only public sector job that gets regularly celebrated as noble by those in government or in the media, and promoted by pop culture, is being a police officer.

Starting point is 01:49:51 Being a cop is the only public sector job that gets uplifted with propaganda. Zoron's little videos promoting 311 city call center workers is, to quote front of the pod, Ben Lorber, rolling back decades of neoliberal propaganda, reasserting the dignity of public sector work and workers. A common turn of phrase uttered by Mayor Mamdani is, if you can't solve the smallest task in someone's life, why would they ever trust you to solve the biggest one?

Starting point is 01:50:20 So let's go over some things, big and small, that Mamdani has been able to do in his first 100 days. One of Mamdani's core campaign promises was to freeze the rent. On February 18th, Mayor Mamdani appointed six new members to the nine-member Rent Guidelines Board, which each year is tasked with determining the rent-increased percentages for the more than one million rent-stabilized apartments in the city. Under Eric Adams, the board approved a 3% rent increase for one-year leases and a 4-5%. 0.5% increase for two-year leases. In just a few weeks, the new board will hold a preliminary vote

Starting point is 01:50:59 to freeze or raise rents before their final vote in June. Public testimony on rent adjustments is currently underway. Housing in general is one of the top issues affecting affordability in the city, and the mayor's approach has not been limited to filling vacancies on the rent guidelines board. After Zoran's inauguration speech on January 1st, he went to a neglected apartment building just east of Prospect Park to sign an executive order revitalizing the mayor's office to protect tenants and appointed a tenant organizer to lead the office. This apartment building was owned by a literally bankrupt landlord called the Pinnacle Group, who was responsible for more than 5,000 housing violations and 14,000 complaints.

Starting point is 01:51:46 The revamped office to protect tenants and the mayor intervened in the bankruptcy proceedings and successfully secured $30 million in repairs and upgrades for tenants, as well as protection from future displacement. Through this office, the administration has continued to crack down on bad landlords who violate New York City law and mystery tenants. Just a few weeks after the inauguration, Mom Doni announced a $2.1 million settlement from A&E real estate properties for tenant harassment and hazardous conditions across 14 buildings in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens.

Starting point is 01:52:19 As a part of the settlement, A&E was also required to correct more than 4,000 building condition violations. In February, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development released a public list of the 250 buildings with the most severe housing code violations to citywide and put them under heightened oversight via the alternative enforcement program. With the city stepping in to make repairs, then billing the landlords if they failed to address violations. Since January 1st, we have won more than $34 million in settlements, judgments, and repairs for tenants. Delivered improvements to 6,070 apartments so far and issued 195,8299 violations. New York City will no longer tolerate exploitation as a business model. In March, Mayor Mamdani announced a quote-unquote landmark victory.

Starting point is 01:53:20 against famously bad landlord Seth Miller of Aegis Realty. You can say the landlord was egregious at Realty. The city brought a case against Miller for dangerously derelict conditions at 919 Prospect Avenue in the South Bronx, and for the first time ever, courts imposed the maximum penalties under the city's nuisance abatement law, a $1,000 fine per day until housing violations are addressed, and $2.174 million in retroactive penalties.

Starting point is 01:53:55 During the first 100 days, the city held five rental rip-off hearings, one in each borough, providing New Yorkers a platform to discuss various problems with their landlord from poor conditions to repair delays or junk fees. This was a dedicated public forum for tenants to speak directly to city officials and collectively shape housing policy going forward. A month into office, the mayor announced a $38 million investment to install modern heating and cooling in 712 of New York City's public housing units at the Beach 41st Street houses in Queens. And technically, this is after the first 100 days, but I think it's worth mentioning that just a few days ago, Zoran announced a $2.5 billion investment in public housing to deliver new energy efficient lighting and faucets to 45,000 homes, heat pumps in 20,000 and 10,000 new induction stoves,

Starting point is 01:54:51 all affecting the NYCHA public housing in New York City. On Zoran's very first day in office, he also signed two executive orders to accelerate housing construction by building on city-owned properties to increase the supply of affordable housing and cutting red tape to make it faster and more affordable to build. The development approval process for building affordable housing has been reduced by more than two years by the administration's implementation of the new voter-approved expedited land use review procedure,

Starting point is 01:55:20 combined with a new program called the Neighborhood Builders Fast Track, which will pre-select qualified developers to shorten the pre-development timeline by eight months for certain projects on city-owned land. Another of Zoron's core campaign promises was universal child care. On his eighth day in office, Mayoram Dani announced a partnership with Governor Kathy Hokel to provide free child care for thousands of two-year-olds in New York City with a $1.2 billion increase in state funding. Since then, the mayor has expanded the free 3K program for 3-year-olds to more than half of all school districts in the city and announced 2K fall enrollment for school districts 1823, 10, 6, and 27, which serve lower-income neighborhoods.

Starting point is 01:56:07 2K applications open for the first time on June 2nd, with the program. operating on a full day schedule from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. all year around. As a part of the 3K expansion, seven new early child care education centers are opening in Western Queens, Staten Island, South Brooklyn, and the South Bronx. And on March 30th, the mayor announced the city's first pilot program for free on-site child care for city workers based at the David Dinkins Municipal Building, with applications opening on April 30th. The city also created a new accessible child care provider map with interactive features to filter by location, age group, and cost. The mayor says that all these steps will lead to free child care for every three-year-old and two-year-old in the city by the end of his first term.

Starting point is 01:56:56 Another key promise was fast and free buses. The administration is making headway on the fast park by building more bus lanes, redesigning streets, as well as adding protected bike lanes on McGinnis Boulevard, 31st Street in Astoria, Ashland's Place, across Flatbush, East Flatbush, Midwood, and Brooklyn and Kingston Avenue in central Brooklyn. Umdani restarted the stalled Madison Ave bus lane redesign to make buses faster and more reliable for 92,000 daily riders. The city announced a new bus lane for the Bronx Cross Town Bus Service to Yankee Stadium and

Starting point is 01:57:33 restarted the Fordham Road Bus Lane project. to improve the bus corridor in the Bronx, servicing an average of 130,000 daily riders across four routes. Just this week, construction began in Brooklyn for the redesign of Flatbush Avenue, with the goal of improving bus speeds by over 40% for 132,000 daily riders. And before the World Cup this summer,

Starting point is 01:57:56 Zoran has promised to complete new bike lanes and pedestrian upgrades in Lower Manhattan. As for the free part, that will be a bit harder. Mamdani maintains that his administration is working with the state government in Albany and the MTA to eventually make New York City buses free and proposed a five-week free bus pilot program during the World Cup, though it's unclear if that will happen. It's not all sunshine and rainbows in New York City.

Starting point is 01:58:35 Upon taking office, Mayor Mamdani discovered the city was facing an unexpected financial crisis in the form of a hidden $12 billion deficit left by former Mayor Eric Adams, stemming from years of fiscal mismanagement and the under budgeting of essential services like rental and cash assistance, shelters, health insurance, and special ed. As mayor, Eric Adams covered up this massive budget deficit

Starting point is 01:58:59 by leaving the gaps grossly understated, gaps that were made worse by divestment in New York City by the state under former governor Andrew Cuomo. The mayor is actually required by law, to have a balanced budget. So rather than sweeping this under the rug by continuing to cook the city's books like his predecessor, Zoron chose transparency about the financial crisis he's inherited and signed an executive order to designate chief savings officers in every city agency to streamline processes and eliminate waste. Some of these savings so far include canceling $20,000 of Slack

Starting point is 01:59:36 subscriptions to saving hundreds of thousands of dollars by foregoing of vacant office space. Through his relationship with Governor Kathy Hokel, the mayor secured $1.5 billion in state aid in February. That, combined with higher than expected Wall Street revenues and savings measures, shrunk the deficit to $5.4 billion. Zoron's preliminary budget released last February sparked criticism for failing short of promises to increase funding to parks and libraries. While campaigning, Zoron advocated for city library. is to receive 0.5% of the city budget, but the preliminary budget only allocated 0.39%,

Starting point is 02:00:18 which is actually a $29 million cut from the Last Adams budget, down to $456 million. Meanwhile, the park budget remained effectively flat at about 0.5% rather than boosting it to 1% of the total budget, as Momdani previously hoped. Though in March, Mayor Mamdani announced new capital investment of $50 million to reconstruct 10 parks in underserved neighborhoods. This February budget is preliminary and subject to change

Starting point is 02:00:49 as Zoron's negotiations with the city council and the state continue. In February, Mamdani reversed a previous policy against the forced removal of homeless encampments after 20 people died in the street during a horrific blizzard and sudden cold snap in late January, despite the efforts of outreach workers visiting known homeless people people every two hours to offer warm shelter and check if they needed help. 1,400 people were placed into shelters and warming centers during that first freeze,

Starting point is 02:01:20 with 85 people involuntarily moved or hospitalized. The new encampment suite policy will be led by the Department of Homeless Services, rather than the NYPD, as they were under Eric Adams, which Momdani said put homeless New Yorkers in danger and was ineffective in moving people into shelter or housing. Under the new plan, after posting a removal notice, outreach workers will visit encampments every day for a week with the goal of connecting people to shelter

Starting point is 02:01:48 and establishing a pipeline to stable housing, while opening new shelters across the city, including New York City's first ever pet-inclusive transitional housing facility for families. Much of the criticism levied at Zoran revolves around his choice to retain NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tish, something he announced before the election. Zoran did cancel an Eric Adams plan to add 5,000 more NYPD officers,

Starting point is 02:02:14 but as promised, their budget remained effectively the same, despite the financial deficit. But Tish specifically has been seen as a rare moderating force in the administration, an outlier that may be preventing police reforms that Zoran campaigned on, like disbanding the SRG, the Strategic Response Group, tasked with responding to both protests and terrorism, as well as getting rid of the NYPD gang database. Critics have noted that Zoron seems to be moving towards, quote-unquote, reforms of the gang

Starting point is 02:02:46 database, rather than his previous call to get rid of it, saying in early April, quote, I've made my critiques of the database clear, and the NYPD has also implemented a number of reforms as per the recommendation that came through, and the implementation of those reforms, and the results of that are part of the active discussion that we are having, unquote. The gang database in New York has shrunk by 40% in the last two years. As for the SRG, Mayor Mamdani still maintains that he remains, quote, steadfast in my commitment to disband the SRG to do so in a manner that upholds both First Amendment rights of New Yorkers

Starting point is 02:03:25 and keeps New Yorkers safe, and that is the subject of an active conversation that we are having, unquote. Commissioner Tisch has been particularly resistant to the idea of, of disbanding the SRG. Though earlier this month, Mayor Mamdani's chief of staff, Elvisgaard Church, said on the news that the administration remains committed to fulfilling the campaign promise of disbanding the SRG and that a delegation of City Hall and NYPD officials traveled to Columbus, Ohio, to learn about their protest policing model focused on, quote, communication and, quote, de-escalation

Starting point is 02:03:59 over mass arrests and aggressive force. The commitment is to disband the SRG. and I think that the Columbus visit showcases that we are committed to a really disciplined approach here. We want it to work, and we want to do it in collaboration with the NYPD. So the mayor is in regular conversation with his police commissioner, and our teams also meet regularly, so that we can design something that is best suited to that commitment being fulfilled and not compromising any of the safety and the protection that New Yorkers deserve.

Starting point is 02:04:32 In an April interview, Mayor Mamdani did express to the New York Times, that when unable to reach an agreement with Tish, he does have the power to overrule her on police policy if needed, quote, ultimately, I hold the final decision no matter which department or agency were speaking about, unquote. Mbdani has not exercised his power with the NYPD as of yet. In March, Zoran took the first step in establishing the Department of Community Safety by opening the Office of Community Safety, led by Deputy Mayor Juanita Francoise. who directed de Blasio's action plan for neighborhood safety

Starting point is 02:05:09 and advised Campaign Zero, which opposes the gang database. The new office of community safety will develop strategies and coordinate efforts to combat gun violence, mental health crisis response, hate crimes, and substance abuse issues. At the announcement, Francois said, quote, the evidence is clear, addressing what ails our communities, whether that be crumbling physical infrastructure, social disconnection, or a lack of access to economic opportunity,

Starting point is 02:05:35 is how we best ensure that our communities are safe, unquote. It's too early to judge the impact of the office, but such an office or city department has the potential to challenge the police's monopoly on public safety. The other common critique of Mamdani is based on his endorsement of liberal governor Kathy Hochel and his decision to focus on governing rather than dedicating resources and political capital

Starting point is 02:06:02 towards further uphill primary challenges. Zoran has said, quote, the success of our movement will be defined by the success of our government. Through his working partnership with Governor Hokel, the mayor has been able to extract wins from the state, particularly for universal child care and the $1.5 billion in state aid. In the realm of discourse, some leftists, anarchists, or ultras, have jumped on any fault or policy shift as a sign that Zoran has wholly moved to the right or betray. the movement. Such opinions are rewarded by the social media economy, which tends to encourage whatever is seen as the most radical, extreme, or divisive opinion. This tendency has been present even among some of Zoron's earliest online supporters. Behind this tendency is a willingness and frankly hunger to turn on Zoron, not necessarily for anything he has or has not done, but because

Starting point is 02:07:00 of the position he now occupies. Zoron used to be an outside. Challenging the Democratic establishment embodied by Andrew Cuomo. But now he's one of the most popular Democrats in the country. DNC social media accounts are posting Zoron memes and hype videos. This could be viewed as a massive accomplishment. Evidence that the Democratic Party can be forced to bend toward left-wing populism because of the working-class voters and mass organizing that put Zoron in the position he's currently in. But others view Zoron's acceptance and select promotion within the party as a sign he's been corrupted, co-opted, recuperated, or made palatable.

Starting point is 02:07:44 Both of these things can be partially true. The Democratic elite certainly have their own motives for dipping their toes into the Mamdani hot tub. Just as Zoran and the New York City DSA have their own aspirations for influencing the direction of the party towards social democracy and democratic socially. In general, there's a lot of confusion or disagreement on what it means to be a democratic socialist in a position of power. As an executive, Zoran is in a unique position that not many other DSA members have ever had. Being in such a position of power informs and shapes the way someone interacts with the systems of party and state in a way that those outside of power cannot fully understand. It filters ideology into material actions. This idea frightens many,

Starting point is 02:08:37 but differences in political horizons also affect the way people interact and move with these systems. The question is not what should Zoran do if there were no constraints on his power, because then obviously he should just implement utopian communism, but his power obviously does have constraints. If the goal for the left is to build a working-class, movement, to that end, as a function of Zoron's constraints, it may actually be more effective for him to operate down to certain state pathways that allow him to facilitate the building of a working class movement and avoid other more extreme pathways that because of the current constraints on executive power would either be ineffective at best or self-destructive at worst.

Starting point is 02:09:23 As the mayor, Zoron's job is to run the biggest city in the country. and as a democratic socialist, that means using government to make life better for the working class. His task is to govern in a way that alleviates economic conditions to make it easier to organize and build a working class movement. But building that movement is not his job. It's yours. It's the job of the people. And such a movement is the only way of holding elected leaders like Zoron accountable. Zoron is not a revolutionary, nor is he in the world. organizer. He's the mayor of New York City, and as mayor, he has to serve more than 8 million New Yorkers, not just the 14,000 members of New York City DSA. The mayor may join the picket line

Starting point is 02:10:11 with striking nurses and fight for working class New Yorkers in City Hall, or even open an office of mass engagement, like Zoran has done, but it is up to those outside City Hall to move in tandem by working to rebuild a labor movement. Assuming that Zoron or some random public official can just do whatever is the most extreme radical thing, mistakenly sees the state as having more power than it actually does. People often see the state as an ahistorical abstracted seat of power. But no, the state is just the mediator between capital and labor.

Starting point is 02:10:47 The power of the state to support labor is exercised by doing things that are in the interest of labor and society as a whole, rather than just capital. But this ability is directly linked to the extent that labor is organized. So if labor is largely unorganized, then Zoron is more restrained in what he can do. What he can do then is use his position to help build working class power, which will then enable him further, so on and so on. The state has no power against capital outside of the power that labor does. gives it. Our situation is one where capital is very strong, which means when the state serves

Starting point is 02:11:28 capital, it's quite strong. But in its function of serving labor, it's rather weak, because the left is failed to reckon with the fact that right now labor is actually quite weak, which means that state actors, even those on the pro-labor left, are very constrained. So the main thing they can do to strengthen labor is providing better conditions for which labor power may be built. And importantly, organizers must utilize those conditions to build the labor movement. Zoran's other task is to demonstrate that left-wing working-class politics can actually govern, not just critique. Whether or not he succeeds at governing and delivering for working-class New Yorkers determines the perceived viability of democratic socialist politics nationally

Starting point is 02:12:17 going forward. As Mamdani has said, the worth of an ideology can only be judged by its delivery. Mamdani is not the first Democratic socialist to be put in such a position. In his 100-day address, Mayor Mamdani spoke about the so-called sewer socialists of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who 100 years ago, quote, built the greatest public park system in the nation and weathered the Great Depression better than almost any other American city. Milwaukee purged corruption, built the first municipally sponsored public housing development in the nation and transformed the city's sewage disposal system, unquote. Mayor Mamdani is trying to revive this legacy of municipal socialism by acting on his mantra, there is no problem too big, no task too small. On day six of office,

Starting point is 02:13:16 Mamdani fixed the infamous Williamsburg Bridge bump that has long-plagued cyclists, and in response to the historic winter damage affecting city streets, the administration, the administration launched a five-borough pothole blitz, filling 100,000 potholes in less than 100 days. This is pothole politics. Our 2026 answer to sewer socialism. Where government is not too busy, not too self-important, not too mired in paperwork, to fix the problems of this city, no matter their size. This quote-unquote, pothole politics has extended to scaffolding reforms, reducing the time that sheds clutter our sidewalks. In January, the mayor announced a new program to expand modular public restrooms. And starting this summer,

Starting point is 02:14:05 the roof of the historic David Dinkins Municipal Building will be open to the public for free viewing and tours. Fighting for workers from within City Hall isn't just an abstract ideal. In the first 100 days, the administration secured $9.3 million in restitution. No longer will city government be afraid of its own shadow. If anyone should be afraid, it is those who take advantage of working people. On January 15th, the city filed a lawsuit against a predatory delivery app called Motoclick for violating worker laws like minimal pay rate. At the end of January, Zoron announced more than $5 million in worker restitution and penalties

Starting point is 02:14:47 due to minimum pay rate violations from three major restaurant delivery apps, Uber eats, Fanton, and Hungry Panda. This money will be paid to almost 50,000 workers, and as a part of the settlement, Uber also agreed to reinstate 10,000 wrongfully deactivated delivery workers. In March, the administration won almost $2 million for over 800 fast food workers at Taco Bell and retail workers for violations of worker protection laws against unpredictable scheduling.

Starting point is 02:15:18 The mayor signed executive orders strengthening consumer protections by targeting hidden junk fees and impossible to cancel subscriptions and expanded the protected time-off law to 4.3 million previously unprotected workers and issued compliance warnings to nearly 60,000 employers. Speaking of sewer socialism, at the end of March, Mayor Mamdani announced a $108 million investment to upgrade and replace more than 6,700 water catch basins to combat flooding. This quote-unquote pothole politics

Starting point is 02:15:51 leased the groundwork of public trust needed for larger systematic transformations. If government can't do the small things, how could you ever trust it to do the big ones? How can we promise to transform our city if we can't pave your street? At the end of the 100-day address, Mayor Mamdani made a series of announcements.

Starting point is 02:16:12 The administration is restarting trash containerization and will make buses faster for $1 million, New Yorkers by speeding up buses by up to 20% along 45 priority corridors and constructing new rapid bus routes for 100,000 New Yorkers who live more than half a mile away from a subway or rail stop. But the big announcement was an update to another of Zoran's core campaign promises. The first of five city-owned grocery stores will open next year, with one store being opened in each borough by the end of Mamdani's first term. The location of the Manhattan Municipal Grocery Store has already been selected.

Starting point is 02:16:52 Le Marquette in East Harlem, a public market opened by the New Deal-era-Mayer-Mayer-Liguardia. The city will build a 9,000 square foot store at the site to offer cheaper groceries than the capitalist competitors. I know there are many who use socialist as a dirty word, something to be ashamed of. They can try all they want, but we will not be ashamed of using government to fight for, for the many, not simply the few. We will not be ashamed of adding more heat pumps to Nica buildings in the Rockaways or building more supportive housing in Harlem or standing steadfast alongside our trans neighbors.

Starting point is 02:17:43 We will not be ashamed of investing in youth mental health clinics or working to close Rikers or fighting for immigrants targeted by ICE. To any New Yorker, whether you're under attack from the federal government's cruelty or suffocating under the affordability crisis, we will stand beside you. Because government is a series of choices, and socialism is the choice to fight for every New Yorker, to extend democracy from the ballot box to the rest of our lives. Three days after Mamdani's 100-day address, on Tax Day, April 15, the mayor announced that he and Governor Hokel had agreed to a new tax-the-rich proposal. New York State will have its first ever heat-a-ta-ta-tax.

Starting point is 02:18:41 A wealth tax on second homes in New York City valued above $5 million, owned by out-of-state elites. This tax on the ultra-wealthy is projected to generate $500 million in annual revenue. And if owners want to avoid the tax by moving into the residents, that's fine too, because then they'll have to pay New York resident taxes, so you get taxed either way. Part of pushing back against the libertarian ethos in America by showing that government can

Starting point is 02:19:13 actually make your life better is actually showing people what local government is doing. Since taking office, Zoran has employed the same widely successful messaging style that helped get him elected to make PSAs and inform New Yorkers about what the administration has been able to accomplish. This is something Democrats have largely failed to do by either just not doing this sort of outreach while governing, making any outreach inaccessible or hard to understand, or having your outreach come off as cringe or out of touch. Regardless of how much effort is put into outreach, the people have to also see the improvements being talked about in their own lives or in their

Starting point is 02:19:54 own neighborhoods. A dense population and having a cohesive city culture like New York helps with that. Millions of cyclists cross the Williamsburg Bridge every year. So when the mayor fixes the bump during his first week in office, that's an easy reference point for people. The success of the administration's comm strategy has been by using Zoron's popularity to promote the public sector and public sector workers while actually showing people how social services help city residents. As the mayor says, New York belongs to all who live in it. While in office, Zoron has largely declined to explicitly talk about how his administration may impact the future of democratic socialism across the country.

Starting point is 02:20:41 Instead, keeping his vision laser-focused on improving the lives of working New Yorkers and making the city more affordable. To quote the mayor, we cannot burden ourselves with the question of what this means beyond this city. But before the mayor went on stage at the 100-day address, they played a clip of the progressive New Deal mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, saying, that the greatness of New York City is in the services to its people, where public problems are really the problems of all the people. Quote,

Starting point is 02:21:12 and if we succeed here, surely it can be done elsewhere. When former socialist mayor, Bernie Sanders, made a surprise appearance during Zoran's speech, the senator spoke about how what's happening in New York is influencing those outside the city. And I want to tell all of you and the mayor that what you guys are doing here in New York City

Starting point is 02:21:37 is important not only to the people here. What you are doing, what the mayor is doing, is providing hope and inspiration not only to people all across our country, but honestly, all across the world. As a part of Mamdani's first 100 days press circuit, he was asked on CBS News about, the future of the Democratic Party and if his socialist politics are really viable.

Starting point is 02:22:09 You know, what I find is that New Yorkers ask me less about how I describe my politics and more about whether my politics includes them. And I think what we can see is that a democratic socialist politics is one that should be judged on its delivery, like any ideology. And what we're showing in this city is we can pursue the big things like universal child care and do the pothole politics at the same time that we're showing and not just filling in the potholes, changing the catch basins, but also repaving over a thousand miles of roadway. But Mr. Mayor, presidential and statewide elections are often decided in battleground regions that do not look like New York City. Yeah. I'll be honest with you. Before I was the mayor, I was an assembly member of Astoria in Long Island City.

Starting point is 02:22:48 At that time, I was told that you could only be a democratic socialist in Northwest Queens. Then I became the mayor. Now, the next question is the state. Then it'll be the next question will be the country. I think that this is a politics that can flourish anywhere because, frankly, there is only one majority in this country. that's the working class. And it's time we have a politics that puts them at the heart of what it is that we're pursuing and not as part of the appendix. Mamdani still has over 1,300 days left in his first term. And there will be more challenges along the way, challenges with the NYPD, the MTA, state government, federal government, the billionaires, and the bloodsucking monsters among the Democratic Party elite.

Starting point is 02:23:27 Attempts to hold politicians, like Zoron, truly accountable to their politics, will require more than Twitter Maoists and your small DSA caucus. Navigating all these problems will require not just principal leadership with a commitment to working class politics, but also growing the mass organizing apparatus that helped get Zorn elected and continuing to build power in city hall, state government, and in the workplace. That does it today for it could happen here.

Starting point is 02:23:58 See you on the other side. Canadian women are looking for more. more out of themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey.

Starting point is 02:24:31 So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Do you remember when Diana Ross double-tapped Little Kim's boobs at the VMAs? Or when Kanye said that George Bush didn't like black people. I know what you're thinking. What the hell does George Bush got to do with Little Kim? Well, you can find out on the Look Back at it podcast. I'm Sam J.

Starting point is 02:24:55 And I'm Alex English. Each episode, we pick a here, unpack what went down, and try to make sense of how we survived it. Including a recent episode with Mark Lamont Hill, waxing all about crack in the 80s. To be clear, 84's big two. me, not just because of crack. I'm down to talk about crack on day, but just so y'all know. I mean, at this point, Mark, this is the second episode where we've discussed crack.

Starting point is 02:25:18 So I'm starting to see that there's a through line. We also have AIDS on the table right now. Thank you for finishing that sentence. Yes. I don't think there's a more important year for black people. Really? Yeah. For me, it's one of the most important years for black people in American history.

Starting point is 02:25:34 Listen to look back at it on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you You get your podcasts. Welcome to my new podcast, Learn the Hard Way with me, your host, and your favorite therapist, Kear Games. And in recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month, I'm bringing over a decade of my own experience

Starting point is 02:25:50 in the mental health field and conversations with so many incredible guests. I'm talking, Tripp Fontaine, Ryan Clark. Sometimes when we're in the pursuit of the thing, we get so wrapped up in the chase that we don't realize that we are in possession of the thing. And we're still chasing it. And we don't know when we've done enough.

Starting point is 02:26:09 because people scoreboard watch. Life becomes about wins and losses. Steve Burns, Dustin Ross, because you find it important to be a good person while you hear on earth? Are you a good person because you're afraid? Because that's two different intentions, bro. Absolutely.

Starting point is 02:26:23 And that's two different levels of trust. I want you to just really be a good person. Join me, Kear Gaines, as we have real conversations about healing, growth, fatherhood, pressure, and purpose on my new podcast, learn the hard way. Open your free, our heart radio app, Search Learn the hard way and listen now.

Starting point is 02:26:43 In 2023, former Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd found himself at the center of a paternity scandal. The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story. This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth. You doctored this particular test twice in so much, correct? I doctored the test ones. It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case. I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for. Sunlight's the greatest disinfected.

Starting point is 02:27:13 They would uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Greg Alespian and Michael Marantini. My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trap. Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.

Starting point is 02:27:31 Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges. This isn't over until Justice. is served in Arizona. Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder. Our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by James Stout and Robert Evans.

Starting point is 02:28:06 This episode we're covering the week of April 22nd, April 30th. Anything interesting happened this week? Very little, not much news. Oh, not much. I mean, Garrison, you've joined the ranks of the vaccine injured, right? Yeah, yeah. Also joining us of four live vaccines inside Garrison's body. Yes, thank you.

Starting point is 02:28:27 Thank you for having me and my four live vaccines, which have obliterated my body and mind this week as I scrambled to finish the Mamdani piece. But news happens whether or not I feel bad. So let's get to it. In fact, I think to happen a lot when we feel. That does seem to that they sometimes conspies that way. Now, we will talk about the thing, obviously.

Starting point is 02:28:50 We'll talk about the thing. But first, some smaller news items to start. Congress has voted to end the 76 day DHS shutdown without funding for ICE or Border Patrol. The bill now goes to Trump today. And if he signs it, the shutdown will be over. The House voted to reauthorize FISA Section 702, the war, list of surveillance authority. 42 House Democrats voted to reauthorize 22 Republicans voted against the bills expected to be stalled in the Senate, at least this version of the bill, as it included an

Starting point is 02:29:25 amendment about digital currency, which the Senate will fight over. The ATF released a new list of proposed reforms and regulations, repealing the Biden pistol brace rule, as well as requiring quote-unquote biological sex be used on ATF forms. The State Department is releasing a limited edition passport for the United States 250th anniversary, featuring a portrait of President Trump superimposed on the Declaration of Independence and an American flag with his golden signature below. Google Trump golden signature for more. Look, I'm just going to say if we have any foreign border control agents listening, you have to detain anybody who see with that passport. It is now possible for Nikki Minaj and only Nikki Minaj, and only Nikki Minaj,

Starting point is 02:30:13 to assemble the most unique collection of United States government documents in history if she become the citizen. Because she is apparently the only recipient of the gold card thus far. The golden visa? Yeah. Yeah. She could really get a unique, you know, Pokemon combination here. I guess it would be, she'd have to advance pretty quickly from.

Starting point is 02:30:33 She would. I'm not clear how one goes from gold card citizenship. And the only way we'll find out is by closely following Nikki Minaj. The DOJ indicted former FBI doctor James Comey for the second time, this time, for posting an Instagram image with the numbers 86-47. Once again, Trump's FCC is going after Disney's ABC licenses by directing Disney to file an early renewal order. After Jimmy Kimmel made a joke a few days before the White House correspondent's dinner about First Lady Melania Trump having the, quote, glow of an expectant widow. It pains me to say critical support to Jimmy Kimmel. President Trump, David Ellison, Todd Blanche, Stephen Miller, Barry Weiss,

Starting point is 02:31:16 Paramount's chief legal officer, and several CBS journalists met in a closed-door dinner in Washington, D.C. last week as the Paramount buyout of Warner Brothers and CNN progresses. Nightmare blunt rotation. Main governor, Janet Mills, vetoed the state's 18-month Data Center moratorium, the first of its kind in the country. Days later, Mills' draw. dropped out of the Senate race, paving the way for populist candidate Graham Platner to receive the Democratic nomination and go up against Susan Collins in the midterms.

Starting point is 02:31:47 Most of Dem seemed to already be behind him, a sort of post from the At-Democrats account, Patriot Graham. Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how the Democratic Party kind of falls in line behind this guy, given the fairly unique degree of controversy over the Nazi tattoo and a couple of other things that have come up. But this has been in general the gap between kind of how random progressives and Democrats online talk about Platner and how people in Maine feel about him has been massive from the jump. And I think a lot of it has to do just with the fact that this guy went about campaigning in a very dedicated way. He visited basically every county that like he could. And it goes to show that the consensus that builds online around candidates

Starting point is 02:32:31 will never matter as much as like what they're out there actually doing in the world. And it's, It's useful to get a reminder of that whether or not you think this is a tremendous disaster, just the degree to which all of the talk about this guy online had no impact on his ability to actually like win. Now, this is a unique case. There aren't a whole lot of seats that are like the seat that he's going to be taken, right? In terms of like both the weakness of your primary rival and the weakness of the other party, if you should happen to win the primary. Like this is not every congressional district.

Starting point is 02:33:06 but it's still kind of an interesting case study. Maine is also like it's not California, you know, like a Californian, so discourse happens online because we're a vast state and, you know, these big cities and such. And Maine is different. Like he has good ground game and that matters more there, it seems. And this signifies like a rejection of democratic establishment politicians. Like a hunger for change. And the fact that someone with all the controversies that come with Platner was able to beat

Starting point is 02:33:32 the democratic establishment, I think, shows how hungry. How hungry people are to upseat these bloodsucking monsters. Yeah, we'll keep reporting on that. I'm kind of interested in this race. Yes, no, absolutely. Susan Collins plays a unique role in the Senate right now. Finally, for me, on Saturday, a car bomb exploded at a police station in Dunmary, northern Ireland, outside Belfast, a group calling itself the quote-unquote new IRA claimed

Starting point is 02:34:02 responsibility, and a 66-year-old man has been arrested. Yeah. New IRA, 66-year-old man. Well, the new IRA is a, it grows out of the real IRA, right? Was it the new IRA who killed that journalist a few years back in Belfast? You know what? I don't know. The new IRA, yep, admitted responsibility. Yeah, yeah. That's the new IRA as well. Lara McKee is the name of the journalist who was killed. Okay.

Starting point is 02:34:31 I think just out of negligence and incompetence during an action these people were a part of. Yeah, this is like just before COVID times. Yeah. Vaguely remember. So two large vessels, including a tanker, have been seized by pirates off Somalia. Another attempted hijacking by pirates was prevented. I'm just going to quote the UKMTO here. Quote, the master of a cargo vessel was approached by two small fishing vessels with armed

Starting point is 02:34:58 person support. One vessel approached within 600 meters. Warning shots were fired and the suspicious craft returned fire. The suspicious boat moved away and made clear at the vessel. All crew are safe and accounted for. Vessels are advised to transit with caution and report any suspicious activities to UKMTO. Authorities are investigating. I saw another incident where a ship had fired a flare,

Starting point is 02:35:21 people who were allegedly attempting to board it, right, but it seems like there has been an uptick in instance, especially as ships generally are having a hard time right now. The United States has also been boarding a number of vessels to inspect them, as part of its blockade on Iran and Iranian goods. Secondly, JNIM, that's Jemat Nostrad al-Islam, while Muslimin, and the Asward Liberation Front in Mali launched a shock. Offensive this week that saw them sweep into Mali's capital,

Starting point is 02:35:52 assassinate the defense minister and force the military hunter and its allied Russian forces to abandon whole cities. They also abandoned a number of bases, right? The J&IM have captured like massive amounts of Russian Africa core material. This is a pretty ground-shaking offensive. This is a big change for Mali.

Starting point is 02:36:13 The Hunter in Myanmar, I think I'm going to still keep calling them that. They've rebranded themselves as a civilian government. They're not. No. Min Anhalang gets retired as a general and just become president.

Starting point is 02:36:24 It changed clothes and done the same shit. The Hunter reclaimed Falam this week, which is in Chin State. It's capital of Chin State. Fighting has been happening there for months. I've been talking. to people pretty regularly who are taking part in the battle there.

Starting point is 02:36:39 They're obviously, you know, they lost friends in the battle. They are not happy about this, but I think it's fair to say that spirits among the resistance generally remain pretty high. And they hope that they'll return to Falam soon enough. Doug Bergam has announced a United States geographic, is it geographical or geological survey? USGS, geological survey. Yeah. I know that because of the film evolution, starring David Docoven.

Starting point is 02:37:06 No familiar. This is an important piece of news for the listeners. There was a brief period of time in between X-Files and Californication where we thought that David Docovney might have a career as a comedic actor. And no, he did not. That he might have a career. Hey, I love Ducovenny. He's had a great career, just not as a comedic actor.

Starting point is 02:37:29 Okay, so Doug Bergam has announced that the United States Geological Survey found enough lithium. to replace three centuries of imports in Appalachia. Enough left the end to do that, or make one American small town normal for a weekend. I want to read from this, because it's kind of interesting. Quote, the Southern Appalachians hold an estimated 1.43 million metric tons of lithium oxide, concentrated in the Carolinas, and the Northern Appalachians hold an estimated 900,000 metric tons,

Starting point is 02:38:02 concentrated in Maine and New Hampshire. according to estimates in a new USGS scientific paper. That is like, I guess, big Appalachia, like going up into Maine there. Leaving that aside, lithium mining is incredibly disruptive to the environment. Generally, there's two ways you can do it. You can extract it from brine like they do in Chile, and I think other places, they're trying to do that in California. Otherwise, it's open pit mining.

Starting point is 02:38:29 The water use, energy use, ecological damage will be huge of potential for disasters is not zero and the people of Appalachia should be more than familiar with how this tends to go. Right. This is a long history of mining and mining disasters. Moving on, Donald Trump has reposted a tweet about changing the name of ICE to nice. Nice agents. They should do this. I want them to do this.

Starting point is 02:38:57 It would be absolutely disastrous for audio journalism. It'd be like, look, we understand, you know, it's 1943, people have a lot of issues with the Gestapo. We're going to call them the funstapo now. Yeah, the nice stapo. Yeah, the great stobo. SS now stands for super sweet, actually. The White House account and the DHS account have posted nice images or hype videos since this as well. Yeah, we have to consider.

Starting point is 02:39:29 There's like a 40% chance this happens at least. Yeah, no, this must. might happen. This could very much happen. Like, we're laughing, but this could be the future. Yeah. What does the end stand for? National. National. It's just, it's what they call a back pronoun. I know Garrison, with these guys, the end could have stood for a couple of things. A few things. Yeah, sure. Trump, truth, great idea. Do it. That is how policy is made these days. This is how government policy works now via the truth. Yeah. This has made something clear to me that I was kind of dancing around for all, which is that I am in support in general of any policy

Starting point is 02:40:07 that just pulls the wool off of people's eyes. Like, this is one of those things where it's now should be clearer to even the really stupid people where we are as a country when we do something like this happens. And so I'm supportive of it. Like, we can't have any artifice. The more you dress things up, the more people get deranged. So at least this, everyone knows what's happening. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:40:27 It's really clear. I'm also in favor of, like, they have a budget. It is vast, but it is fixed. And if they want to spend it all rewrapping their vehicles to say nice, yeah, fine. Also, it's going to make them feel lame. Are they going to do that by buying N stickers? Or do they have to get the whole new sticker, do you think? Right?

Starting point is 02:40:43 Are they just slap the end on there? I don't know if we want to open the door to them having stickers with N on. But yeah, who knows, Garrison? They had previously spent quite a lot of money wrapping vehicles, so it's not beyond them to get. Maybe they'll get a whole rebrand. Maybe it'll be nice and a picture. of someone like holding cake or they got to find some way to spend the seven bajillion dollars yeah they have so either that or you know when we get someone better in we

Starting point is 02:41:11 could keep the name but just create like a brand partnership with the city of nice in i was going to say that yeah it's like and turn them into advertising instead of yeah pulling people away from their families they can tell people about all of the new deals on airfare to france that are available right now we don't even need to abolish nice we can just Yeah, we could just reform it to a tourism agency for one city in France. There is a type of biscuit in Britain, which I suspect maybe comes from Nice, but it's generally referred to as a nice biscuit because it has nice stamped on the biscuit. Sure.

Starting point is 02:41:43 So perhaps we could instead of guns, give them biscuits and they can hand those out. Think of how much better it'll be. Some guy shows up for his like, you know, immigration court meeting and he finishes that. And on his way out, there's a delegation of guys from Nice just being like, You want to go on vacation? What of France's top five or six cities? I assume. The Nisois, cops.

Starting point is 02:42:06 Yeah, they give you one of their special salads they make there with that. Yeah, it could be great. Hit us up. This could be it. This could work. Yeah, if you're the mayor of Nice, we can introduce you. Yeah. Finally, the United States has indicted the governor of Sinaloa on drug trafficking charges,

Starting point is 02:42:23 which is a pretty significant thing. Well, that's not as funny. Yeah, no. No. Well, they're not going to be rebranding it. Clearly, are they? Speaking of not being funny, let's actually talk about the bad news this week. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:42:40 On Wednesday, the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana voting map as a, quote, unconstitutional racial gerrymander, unquote, that effectively created a black voting district. The ruling was split 6'3 on ideological lines. Alito wrote the majority. opinion, saying that the district violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution. The new ruling substantially undermines the 1965 Voting Rights Act, reinterpreting Section 2 provisions against racial discrimination to require evidence of intentional racial discrimination, not just discrimination as the effect. So in the future, proving discriminatory motives may be needed in order to

Starting point is 02:43:28 win legal challenges against gerrymandering by citing the Voting Rights Act. This ruling specifically depowers black voters while enabling Republican gerrymandering to continue. Republicans in the South will now be able to redraw House district maps that lean Democrat that have a high number of black voters. NPR estimates at least 15 House districts are now at risk of elimination. In the dissent, Justice Alana Kagan wrote, that court's decision will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity, unquote. Yeah, this is bad. This is possibly the worst escalation of the continued undermining of the Voting Rights Act.

Starting point is 02:44:12 Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, this is, arguably the most important thing going on this week, even with the shooting that we haven't talked about, like the gutting of this act that people died for. Like, the Voting Rights Act has a body count attached to it. Yeah, the court has to be packed the next, like if there's ever another democratic or left-of-center administration and they don't pack the court, there's simply no chance of improving or fixing any of the problems this country has. Like, it's a necessary prerequisite. It's no coming back from

Starting point is 02:44:42 this. DC and Puerto Rico also need to become states and have their own congressional representation. Sure. Any future opposition administration has to go completely gloves off. Like, yeah, and we have to imprison a bunch of the people currently. running things. Yeah, like there's a lot of stuff that has to happen. But one of those is the Supreme Court needs to get packed because by God, these people are not going to approve of anything that isn't insane. It's unclear if this ruling will have immediate impacts on the upcoming midterms, but by 2028, it will certainly have impacts. Yeah. Yeah, they had filed for an emergency decision on redistricting, or I guess not redistricting, like pre-districted, I don't know what you would call that,

Starting point is 02:45:24 but to get this in effect before the midterms, basically. Yeah. The Supreme Court also sent this to a lower court to work out more details. It's going to obviously be ongoing litigation about it, just as there will be about Florida's redistricting measure that they are trying to finalize before the midterms as well. Yeah. And indeed, California, I think there have been some arguments made,

Starting point is 02:45:47 like now that this decision has been made by the Supreme Court, right, like either states will have to consider this and they're redistricting. Should we take a break? we shall and then we can talk about the dinner yeah okay we are back let's talk about the dinner let's talk about the shooting that happened at the dinner the thing that everyone else has been talking about for the past five six days so yeah on april 25th during the white house correspondence dinner everyone's favorite event it's a shame we weren't there it is unfortunate that we were not there to point our vertical video at our face as the news happens in front of us oh i would have

Starting point is 02:46:34 been filming just your face, Garrison, and just like really tight in, like, to the point where it's difficult for you to get up and move. I keep wedging. No, Garrison, face the camera. Come on. The people need to see this. I'd be assuming the war fight of Posture. You're going to get up like egg stuff and storm around.

Starting point is 02:46:54 I would also be shielding myself behind Stephen Miller's wife. Hey, that could have been either way. He could have been protecting the wife. I know it could have been either way. It's funny, yeah, yeah. It's funny. At least Miller wasn't getting cucked, unlike the FBI director.

Starting point is 02:47:12 Yeah. That is funny that he abandoned his wife. Girlfriend, girlfriend. Girlfriend, sorry. I guess we should just go. Let's recap the events for people who live under a rock. So shortly before 8.30 p.m., the alleged shooter approached the Secret Service security screening checkpoint

Starting point is 02:47:32 located on the terrorist level of the hotel. This was the level above the ballroom level where the actual dinner was taking place. James, we should probably just read from the court document. Yeah, I think I'm just going to read this straight from the government's DFJ statement in the court, right? Before the dependent approached the checkpoint, he discarded a long black coat that concealed a 12-gauge pump action shock.

Starting point is 02:47:59 The defendant then sprinted through one of the magnetometers at the checkpoint and ran in the direction of the stairs leading to the ballroom where the president and members of his family and cabinet were located. As the defendant did so, he held a shotgun in both hands in a raised position parallel to the ground. A United States Secret Service officer observed the defendant to fire the shotgun in the direction of the stairs leading down to the ballroom. The Secret Service officer and others at the checkpoint heard the gunshot. The Secret Service officer drew his service weapon and fired five times the defendant. The defendant fell to the ground and was restrained by law enforcement and was placed under arrest.

Starting point is 02:48:36 The defendant suffered a minor injury to his knee, but was not shot. We can in a second talk about whether he shot the secret service officer. Yeah, because there's an interesting Washington Post review that's out too now. Yeah, and a couple of court documents just filed today. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about the just circumstances is this, right? This person had purchased according to court documents. He purchased two weapons from separate firearm steelers in California buying the shotgun on or about August 17th, 2025, and the pistol on or about October 6th, 2023.

Starting point is 02:49:13 He had the pistol for a while. The shotgun was more of a recent purchase. Yeah, yeah. The pistol is a fascinating choice. Amazing choice. 38 super. Yeah, I have never seen a 38 super hang gun outside of them. They're very common in Mexico because they have a certain cachet and cultural value.

Starting point is 02:49:36 Every 38 super handgun that I have personally held was embossed in gold and silver. Yeah, yeah. And usually a Mexican flag, but not exclusively. Yeah, or like some sort of heraldry that denotes that is associated sometimes with organized crime. Like, I'm not, when I say associated with organized crime, a few weeks ago, right, I talked about a material support for terrorism case, which centered on a firearms dealer who were selling grips for 38 super pistols with images that are associated with cartels. Like, when you buy a 38 super, someone at the ATF gets an email, I bet.

Starting point is 02:50:13 Like, these things are very rare and they have a certain consumer base. Now, obviously, there are normal 38 super pistols that exist. They're just like today most people buy it because it's a weird moon round too. There's not a normal, like, there's nothing wrong with it, but it's not a round that's commonly carried. It's expensive. It's primarily something that has like cashé for drug dealers. But I guess also, my interpretation, and I guess we're, I know, maybe this is getting too much

Starting point is 02:50:42 into my side of things, but I do have a theory as to why he would have picked this gun and the shotgun that he picked. But we can talk about that later if you want. We'll get that in a sec, yeah. He also had a, I believe, two knives and four daggers. Yeah. Six bladed weapons. Really want to see pictures of those.

Starting point is 02:51:00 bladed weapons. They are in the court documents, buddy. Let me just find those for you. We have an enhanced image of some of them too. Yeah, so we should talk about this. The government submitted a quote unquote enhanced image in the court case. Mr. Allen took a picture of himself at about 803 p.m. So about half an hour before he rushed past a magnetometer there. In the picture, we can see he is wearing black suit pants. He is wearing a black shirt. He has a red tie, which inexplicably is tucked into his pants. He has a shoulder holster and a large K-by-knife in a downwards draw configuration.

Starting point is 02:51:44 He is carrying a pair of pliers and a pair of wire cutters in a holster on his left side. On his right side, he is carrying a small leather bag, which allegedly contains. more shotgun rounds, and the 1911 is in a cruster or shoulder holster, right? None of this screams highly trained. The quote-unquote enhanced image was basically a zoomed-in copy of this photo that if I were to guess, the word enhanced means that they use some kind of sharpening or AI image sharpening tool. Yes. Yes.

Starting point is 02:52:21 None of which are real, in terms of like none of which are actually enhancing. or sharpening. The details that you are seeing should not be allowed to be, like, viewed in court, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The AI is guessing. There's not extra data in the photo that the AI is uncovering. Like, the AI is basically attempting to clean up an image, which is fine if you have, like, a blurry photo of you and, like, your wife when you got your first apartment together, that you went cleaned up. Yeah. But that's not, it's not valid in court or should not be. Yeah. I'm sure we'll see the defense challenges and I'll be interested to know. like what AI they used and, you know, did they ask for various iterations of the enhancement

Starting point is 02:53:01 or did they, you know, like, this will be interesting. I don't think it materially inserted anything. We can see the same Samsung phone. I can see the handle of the knife in both images. I can see the handle of the hang gun. This is more of like a principle thing. Yeah. Then like, did this specifically affect the photo in this case in any way that would lead to the evidence being more useful? Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. This is a bad, slippery slope. So talking of his phone, he kept it with him as he traveled across the country on a train, taking notes about the landscape as he went. Amtrak. Yeah, yeah. He took Amtrak and he was enchanted by the deserts and he liked Chicago. He thought the woods on the east coast were great.

Starting point is 02:53:44 He kept like a journal where he wrote about the trip. Yeah, in the notes app of his phone. Yeah. And then the day of his attempted shooting, he used open sources to track the president's movements. Should we move on to did he fire his gun? Yeah, that's a big, because that is a big question right now. Yeah. That's one half of the question.

Starting point is 02:54:02 The other half is, did he shoot a Secret Service agent, which... Right. Did he shoot anybody? Mm-hmm. The DOJ is saying he fired a gun. The DOJ claims that. But is not really affirmatively saying that he shot an agent. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:54:19 No, they've said a couple of different things. They've said that an agent was struck by gunfire. they've said that it was not friendly fire, but they have not said that he was struck by the assailant shotgun, by the gunman's actual weapon. And that's partly because there's not hard evidence yet that the gunman actually fired his shotgun. Let me read to you what they filed in court today.

Starting point is 02:54:44 Yeah. The evidence gathered and analyzed to date establishes that your client fired his Mosberg 12-gauge pump-action shotgun at least one time as he ran past some magnetometers on the terrorist level of the Washington Hilton on April 25, 2026. When the weapon was recovered, it had one spent cartridge case in the chamber, which has been identified as having been fired in the Mossburg shotgun. The government's preliminary ballistics video analysis

Starting point is 02:55:06 showed that your client fired his shotgun in the direction of Secret Service Officer VG, which Officer VG observed. Additionally, at least one fragment was recovered from the crime scene that was physically consistent with a single buckshot pellet. That fragment was recovered from a location at the scene consistent with your client, firing his shotgun in the direction of Officer VG. The government is aware of no physical evidence, digital video evidence or witness statements that are inconsistent with the theory that your client fired a shotgun in the direction of Officer VG

Starting point is 02:55:36 or the officer VG was indeed shot once in the chest while wearing a ballistic vest. They go on them further to say the government also recovered five spent nine millimeter Luger cartridge cases, each of which was determined to have been fired from Officer VG's service weapon. government also identified five separate bullet holes in the walls opposite from Officer VG, consistent with the direction. So Officer VG fired his service weapon. That's like the most, yeah, that's the most detail that we've seen from them of their case, right? His defense had previously suggested that because of some of the public statements Attorney General Blanche

Starting point is 02:56:14 had made, the government may have exculpatory evidence, either that he didn't fire his gun or that he didn't shoot the secret service agent in question. Which administration officials have gone on the news to say that the secret service agent did not shoot himself, which is not saying that another secret service agent did not shoot him, though. Yeah. Yeah. And it doesn't seem like he shot into like a plasterboard wall, it seems, right?

Starting point is 02:56:43 So he didn't maybe get splash back, which is... You know, the only holes we've seen look like they came from pistols, and that's something the Washington Post actually did like look into. Okay. Because there's at least one, there's a couple, I think, of live stream videos that showed like holes from a bullet in the wall. But the post talked to Rick Vasquez, a firearms consultant and former chief of the firearms technology branch at the ATF, or what was then the ATF, who said that the holes were consistent with handgun rounds. Now, that's not like a firearms technology. There's a lot of woo there, but it's also pretty easy to look. I mean, sometimes it can be kind of messy because, like, the balls and like a double-a-buck shot shell are kind of similar in size to 9mm, right? Somewhere in a 30-caliber range, right?

Starting point is 02:57:28 But they don't tend to hit with the same kinds of patterns, right? Like, it does, there does tend to be a significant difference, especially that kind of range. The night of the shooting, or within a few hours of it, Trump posted security camera footage. And the post got a hold of a higher resolution copy of that footage. and they went through like a frame-by-frame analysis of it. Because as you noted, James, they claim that Cole discharged his shotgun while he was passing through the magnometers, the magnetometers, right? They didn't say it happened to elsewhere. They said it like as he was going through that checkpoint that you can watch him sprint through like he's fucking Naruto running his way into the correspondence dinner.

Starting point is 02:58:07 And in their frame-by-frame analysis, the post only found evidence of four muzzle flashes, all of them from the agent who was allegedly struck by something's weapon. right? So first, I mean, and you can hear in other footage, you can clearly hear more shots than that. Like, I don't doubt that there were, that he discharged five shots, but the video only shows four. And crucially, it does not show Cole's shotgun firing. And the video follows him until he goes off-screen. So maybe whoever wrote that out should have written after passing through the magnetometers, but they seem to pretty clearly be saying it was while he was in that little security area. and there's not evidence in the footage of him firing. We don't see anything that looks like firing.

Starting point is 02:58:51 Like, nobody reacts as if he has fired. Like, there's just no evidence that he shot. And, you know, they're hinging a lot on the fact that there's a spent cartridge in the chamber of his 12 gauge. But number one, that's actually not an uncommon way to store that kind of 12-gauge shotgun with a spent shell in the breach because it makes it easy. If something were to happen, it makes it easier to basically get a fresh round. round in without needing to have a chambered round at all times, which a lot of people, most people don't like to do. Yeah. And they're not drop safe either. Like, it's a bad idea to do that. You don't want to do that with a shotgun. You know, is it possible that he was storing it that way?

Starting point is 02:59:30 Is it possible that he loaded one, an empty round in there intentionally? Because he didn't actually, he was hoping to do a suicide by cop and he didn't intend to actually shoot anybody. Is it possible he just fucked up. It's also perfectly possible he fired later, but it's really weird that they wrote it out that way, if that's what they're alleging, because we see him when he's at the security checkpoint at the magnometer, and he doesn't fire in the footage that we have. Yeah, there's been a lot of press statements that are sort of talking around exactly, not making the explicit statement, he fired his shotgun and he shot the officer in the chest. Right. Right. And certainly, like, I don't, I'm not sure about the distance we're talking about.

Starting point is 03:00:17 Like, and then thus the spread that would happen with, uh... It would be minimal spread, even with a sod off in a, in a narrow corridor like that. Yeah. I mean, you go by an inch per yard, right? Like, that's the amount that it generally spreads. And so if you hit this person once, assuming this person has a chest at 20 inches wide, that doesn't line up, right? Yeah. Might be different with Bugsaw. I mean, obviously, if they had evidence that the secret service agent was shot by Mr. Allen, we'd have seen it.

Starting point is 03:00:46 They would be running with that. That's the fact that they do not have evidence that the agent was shot by Alan is shown in the way that they're like talking about this. Like he was shot. Yeah. And the guy discharged a shotgun. Separate statements. Exactly. Two separate statements.

Starting point is 03:01:03 They're still affirming that the agent did not shoot himself, which does not mean that he was not shot by another agent. Yeah. And there's a, in that Washington Post article, they talked to acting attorney general Todd Blanche and asked him to explain, like, why are you guys never willing to say like where the round that hit the officer came from, right? They asked him the question that we've been asking. And Blanche answered, we want to get that right. We're still looking at that. There you go. Right. And that is a big change. As the post notes, a day earlier, he told ABC that officials believe the gunman had shot the officer. So he has pulled back. Which leaves. me to think maybe this guy didn't shoot at all, or maybe he fired later, maybe even totally by accident, maybe when he was falling down, he like discharged. But if so, also, you would think there'd be a photo somewhere of where he discharged the shotgun. It's surprisingly easy for bullets to get lost, right? And by that, I mean, just get so destroyed and whatnot by impact that there's not really much of anything to find. That happens all the time. It's really rare, and I would argue impossible, to discharge a 12-gauge shotgun with any kind of.

Starting point is 03:02:10 of shot shell in a fucking hotel like this and not have there be some sign of what you hit. Yeah. They make holes in things. That's what they're for. They make multiple holes. Yeah. Unless it's a slug, but then they make a really big hole. And Cole had specifically written that he was not intending to use slugs. In his manifesto, suicide, no, whatever you want to call it, he specifically stated that he was using a 12-gauge loaded with buckshot because he wanted to reduce the chances of overpenetration and of injuring or killing someone he did not intend to hit. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:02:41 Let's talk a little bit about his background and maybe a few other things from that manifesto. I know, Robert, you've done some digging into that. I did the normal thing that at least one of us does, generally all of us do in some form, ever after every kind of mass shooting or like publicly notable terror attack or whatever and just found myself looking through a stranger social media.

Starting point is 03:03:03 Yeah. There's been a couple of good articles out about him now. most of like the first things that we knew about this guy. Like the very first fact is when his name came out, there were two different guys who kind of lived in the tolerance area who were immediately like there were responses under Cole Thomas Allen, or Cole Allen. And one of them was like some fucking white dude who worked at,

Starting point is 03:03:25 I think it was a consulting firm or something. I don't know. It wasn't very, but he just looked like he might have been 30. And the other was Cole Thomas Allen. And it was him winning a Teacher of the Year award at the, He worked at a company that was basically doing like college test prep tutoring, right? Yeah.

Starting point is 03:03:40 So he was a teacher. Some people got really angry at the description of him as a teacher because they're being like, he's trying to like bad mouth public school teachers. He's not a public school teacher. But there are other kinds of teachers. He was the teacher of the month at the tutoring academy that he worked at. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:03:55 Yeah. I had found by the time I got there, which is like 20 minutes after the name started spreading, the Facebook page of the school that he worked or of the tutoring academy, whatever that he worked at, which I'm not going to name, but it was hundreds of posts already being like, good to see this is who's teaching your kids, you know, like you hired a terrorist, all this kind of like. Yeah. Yeah, it's bleak.

Starting point is 03:04:19 It's the normal thing that happens, you know, with anything related to this. In this case, right after that, Trump posted a picture of the detained and stripped mostly naked gunman that was obviously the Cole Allen who had won the teacher of the month, like immediately visible. Like, you could, it was a positive ID was very quick. Yeah, from that point on. So at that point, a couple other things started coming out because, you know, I had, I had looked through from that Facebook page.

Starting point is 03:04:46 I had found a couple other posts about Cole Thomas Allen or different places where he had accounts, which made a couple other details of his background, obvious. He was a mechanical engineering student in Caltech, kind of during the first Trump administration. Yep. You know, that was honestly like most of what was like immediate. obviously obvious. Is that like he'd been an engineering student at Caltech. He'd worked as a teacher and he'd been a part of, in his LinkedIn, you can see that he'd been a part of Caltech's Christian fellowship and the Nerf Club, right? Yeah. Now, Ken Klippenstein talked to one of his co-f fellow peers

Starting point is 03:05:22 during this period of time who knew that while he was at Nerf Club, Cal had like kind of led, there was like a conflict within the club over people modifying and otherwise altering their Nerf guns to make them more resemble real weapons as Nerf. as Nerf has also come out with more guns that look like real guns over the years. And he was really against this. He was very against the idea of like Nerf guns that were modified to look like real guns or just like people playing with things that look like real guns. Now, fast forward to the actual day of the shooting.

Starting point is 03:05:54 His blue sky account got found fairly quickly alongside the LinkedIn. Obviously, that got deleted in very short order. But it was archived, thankfully, by a very nice person. who realized that it was probably be useful to have actual documentation about what this guy was doing online rather than rely on a bunch of different articles making claims. So I went through all of that, you know, as soon as it came out. He had about 500 followers who was following about 114 people. He did not post often on his own, but when he did in like the two different occasions I could find of him posting on his own in this incomplete archive of his blue sky, one of them was him posting in like sympathy

Starting point is 03:06:34 in solidarity with Ukraine, which is something that was very consistent. He reposted a ton of different fundraisers from different Ukrainian military units. That was in his user bio as well, support for Ukraine. Yeah, he was massively supportive of Ukraine. Yeah. And very angry at the Trump administration's failure to, like, follow through with U.S. obligations in that regard. And the only other post of his that was like him writing something that I saw was him basically critiquing an article about using AI in the classroom and like people who were advocating with the use of AI in the classroom.

Starting point is 03:07:07 He's very much against that. He was a reposter though. He was a reposter. And we'll talk about like some of the things he reposted. His bio read, Hi, I'm a random Californian guy with posts about American politics, support for Ukraine,

Starting point is 03:07:19 and observations of small creatures. And then he includes a quote, I choose my own battlefields, not through my blood, but with my heart. I stand on the battlefield to protect what I want. So that is, I like, type that quote in, and that is a quote from an anime

Starting point is 03:07:32 the same anime that his profile picture was also from this like specific anime which is kagura i don't know how that's pronounced i think the character that he had is pfp of was kugura it's this like red-haired lady with these weird like ball things on either side of her hair like i don't fully know how to describe this lady's hairstyle it's kind of like vaguely princess lea-esque and that appears to be who he's his pfp photo is Okay. The series is called Gintama. I don't know much about this. I've heard people online being like, oh, he was a fan of like this anime.

Starting point is 03:08:11 That means something or other. But like I don't actually understand enough about the anime to much of an analysis of that. I think it's just people being like because of the character he likes, it makes sense that he's a guy who would do something very extreme. I don't know enough about the anime to say how relevant that is. But the quote kind of does sound relevant to what he actually did. I stand on the battlefield to protect what I want. And you can read stuff like that in his manifesto. Yeah, and you can read stuff like that in his manifesto, which we'll talk about.

Starting point is 03:08:40 His actual reposts are very normal lib. Yeah, he's a liberal. Hugely supportive of Ukraine. Nothing about Palestine in there. Nothing about Israel in there. A photo has since come out that appears to be legitimate of him wearing like an IDF shirt some time ago. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:08:55 He doesn't say anything. Again, in the limited, we don't also have, we don't have his whole blue sky in here. And the limited archive we have, I don't see anything of him, like, him talking at all about Israel. So I don't have enough to say that, like, he was strongly supportive. But he certainly, there's a real discrepancy between how he talks about Ukraine and him mentioning anything at all about what's happening in Gaza, right? Yeah. What is believed to be his Twitter account has also been scraped and not as well archived, but there's screenshots of reposts on Twitter reposting Brianna Wu with some criticism. of pro-Palestine protesters

Starting point is 03:09:33 or things that are critical of Palestine and in a nominal way supportive of Israel. Yeah, and it's kind of hard to tell was he just more quiet about this online because he wanted to avoid, you know, getting dogpiled, or is this just something that as the genocide got worse and worse,

Starting point is 03:09:50 he became less willing to talk about? I don't know, but it's kind of, it's just noteworthy how much, like, how absent that kind of discussion is next to how often he talks about Ukraine. Next to the Ukraine stuff, yeah. Yeah, he also posted a bunch of very normal posts. There was one from a user, you know, if you guys remember like a week or so ago, the New York Times published an interview with

Starting point is 03:10:10 Hassan Piker, the streamer. And the article was titled, The Rich Don't Play by the Rules, so why should I? Why petty theft might be the new political protest. It's where Hassan tried to introduce the term micro-looting to the discourse, which I don't support at all. But it was like a pro-shoplifting kind of, like, argue, kind of a casual and jokey pro-shoplifting argument, I don't want to people have blown this out of proportion. But it's interesting that he came down against Hassan's side on that. He was basically reposting someone who was like, hey, I've been a lot of, I've spent a lot of time in countries where graft and grifting are like normal. And it's really bad for that to happen.

Starting point is 03:10:45 You don't want that to happen to your country. So he's certainly not like on the far left, like direct action is good. I love committing crimes anarchist side of things. He is not at all that kind of guy. Yeah. He's a liberal. He is a liberal. He is a Will Stancelite.

Starting point is 03:11:01 He is like... A lot of Will Stancel reposts. A lot of Will Stancel posts. Yeah. He reposted me a couple of times. He posted me like talking about like the Pope, right? Like, because making fun of Trump for calling the Pope soft on crime. Like not any of my like spicy takes, right?

Starting point is 03:11:18 Yeah, just like viral posts on Blue Sky. He didn't do a lot of spicy takes. He reposted a lot of like normal viral stuff you'd expect. He was really angry about COVID-19. He hates Elon Musk. posted a lot of like, you know, Elon Musk wants poor African children to die, like kind of content talking about that after some of the more recent articles about how many people died as a result of like the American like aid cuts that Musk was a major part in. He was very angry about

Starting point is 03:11:45 that. He reposted Bill Crystal saying abolish ice. Okay. And there's a couple of different posts that he shared about or from people who were criticizing the White House Correspondents dinner. And particularly like when Jake Tapper. fucking made a post about like, here's the napkins that we've got that have like, you know, freedom of the press, you know, the First Amendment stuff on it, that like it was supposed to be like, this is our protest against the president, right? Like, we've got these monogram napkins.

Starting point is 03:12:15 And he made fun of that, like a lot of people did. He was generally critical of anyone who would be at the correspondence dinner, which was reflected in his manifesto, where he said that, like, the journalists and other people at the event who are not and the administration aren't my targets. And, you know, he said he didn't want to hit them. But also, he was, quote, I would still go through most everyone here to get to the targets if it were absolutely necessary on the basis that most people chose to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor and are thus complicit. But I really hope it doesn't come to that, right?

Starting point is 03:12:47 Yeah. Another interesting bit from this manifesto is, quote, administration officials, not including Mr. Patel, they are targets, prioritized from highest ranking to lowest. Yeah. Interesting, parenthetical. I wonder if that's just because some people were joking

Starting point is 03:13:04 after that article came out about how Cash Patel they had to like break down his door because he was too drunk to reach. People were joking like maybe it's best of Cash stays in office

Starting point is 03:13:13 because he's so, I wonder if that was the joke he was making. Unclear what he meant by that. But he doesn't give us any reason to believe. Possibly. And he doesn't share any jokes like that,

Starting point is 03:13:22 right? So that is kind of legitimately baffling. No, most of the manifesto is like, apologizing to people he knows for how this will be like disruptive and then talking about his own rules of engagement

Starting point is 03:13:34 which he says quote probably in a terrible format but I'm not military so too bad unquote yeah and it's it's interesting because he also shared at least one post on blue sky that was like kind of pro gun control that was like talking about how it's bad to have a gun basically like it increases the danger that you're in

Starting point is 03:13:53 which it did for this guy but uh it is interesting in terms of the firearms he chose, because this is clearly a guy who supports more gun control, he seems to find it distasteful, certainly, to, like, celebrate guns, right? And celebrate, like, military-style weapons. I kind of wonder if he picked the firearms he picked

Starting point is 03:14:11 because they did not look like... The pistol didn't look like a Glock or, like, the standard police guns that he sees people owning, and a shotgun doesn't look like an AR-15. Like, AR-15. Yeah, I kind of wonder, although he says it was to minimize penetration,

Starting point is 03:14:25 so maybe that's more likely. other thing I want to mention is because the shotgun was purchased in August, and he does make a few references in the manifesto to, like, thinking of having done something like this for quite a while, but this was his first opportunity that he saw that seemed semi-possible. Yeah. And I also had the thought that, well, when he bought the shotgun, because he specifically states that he wants to use a shotgun to minimize, like, casualties, then the date at which he bought the shotgun might be the date at which he decided he was going to do this, right? might be the point at which he started taking actions. Yeah. It would make sense that maybe that would be around when he had started planning to do this. And, you know, there's so much different shit happened around August of 2025. It's kind of impossible to say this is definitely it.

Starting point is 03:15:12 I did notice that August 25th, 2025 is when Trump issued his additional measures to address the crime emergency in the District of Columbia executive order. Yeah, the military occupation of D.C. Yeah. Okay. And this is when Trump is really, and a bunch of, there's a bunch of different news stories around Trump trying to deploy the National Guard in U.S. cities. And I kind of wonder if that's when he, but that's purely theoretical. There was a lot of other bad stuff happening. You know? So who's to say? He also seems to be angry about our war against Iran, like the fact like the war of choice that Trump launched against Iran. He didn't get a post a lot about it. But there are some references in the manifesto that kind of make me feel like that may have also been. like a major thing that helped push him to make this decision. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:16:00 Because he specifically stated that I'm at a citizen of the United States of America, what my representatives do reflects me, and I am no longer one to permit a pedophile rapist and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes, right? Like, there's some reasons to believe that that probably played into it as well. Interestingly, he does sign the manifesto with his blue sky username. He sure does. Cold force.

Starting point is 03:16:22 Yeah, he thought that was cool. Yeah. Perhaps that was a name he used, I don't know, in his nerthing activities or like it was maybe that meant something to him. Another thing that's probably worth talking about, because Trump has made the claim several times that this guy was anti-Christian, that hatred of Christianity is what drove him. Yeah. As I said before in Caltech, he was a member of the Christian group.

Starting point is 03:16:42 I'll talk about that in a second. But in his manifesto, he specifically justifies what he's doing as a Christian. There is a segment in there where he's going through like some objections he knows people in his life will have and kind of rebutting them. An objection one is as a Christian you should turn the other cheek. Rebuttal turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I'm not the person raped in a detention camp. I'm not the fisherman executed without trial.

Starting point is 03:17:04 I'm not a school kid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration. Right. So he specifically is justifying this as a Christian. On Christian grounds. On Christian grounds. He thanks his church, which seems to have been a major part of his life. So there's a quote from Ken Clippenstein's article about. his time at Caltech. He was pretty prominent at the Caltech Christian Fellowship, pretty Christian

Starting point is 03:17:28 and Mello. If I didn't see his face eating carpet, I would have never believed it. And then I found a Christianity Today piece that just came up a few hours ago. And a line from that is Allen's father, Thomas Allen was listed as an elder at Grace United Reform Church and Torrance and an evangelical congregation that describes itself as preaching a gospel that is Christ-centered, covenantal and confessional. The church's leadership page and social media pages have been pulled down. And yeah, It's fucked up. They had to have like security guards, armed guards, like escort worshippers inside and out this weekend just because of like all of the press around this. Elizabeth Terlinden, who also knew him at the time, told the New York Times, he was definitely

Starting point is 03:18:07 a strong believer in evangelical Christianity at the time that I knew him. She was in the Caltech Christian fellowship with him. So this guy appears to have been like a very strong evangelical Christian, like a liberal Christian. We don't exactly know was he always, was his Christianity always is like progressive and like liberal tinted or was he kind of, you know, more conservative at a different point in his life. Yeah. We do know that within the last couple of years, he got involved in left-wing activism in Los Angeles. His sister told law enforcement that after he got more involved in left-wing activism, particularly a group who called themselves the White Awakes, which was referencing an anti-slavery protest in the 1860s. Oh, yeah. Okay. Right? Like these were some of the

Starting point is 03:18:48 people who like back Lincoln. So he joined some group in Alicays called the White Awakes for some period of time. He starts talking more radically, starts showing up to more protests. And I think he's helping with a couple of different kinds of things, with a couple of different groups. But that's when his sister says he starts making like a lot more radical statements and maybe sometimes aggressive statements. And that lines up with when he buys a gun and he starts training after 2023. So this may have just been a thing where he he didn't have a full plan at that point, but he accepted the possibility that he might need to do violence in order to support, you know, his ideals. We don't really know, but that's all we've got in terms of a journey.

Starting point is 03:19:26 Yeah. In October of 2024, he did make one donation to the Kamala Harris presidential campaign via Act Blue. $25. Yeah. But not a lot of, not a long history of donations to the party, not a long history of like volunteering for the Democratic Party specifically. Seems to have been a pretty loyal voter. Yeah. But this is a guy who, I think really during like the, it would be during the Biden years gets more involved in like left-wing protests and organizing, he becomes angrier. And then after 2024, he gets really, really angry at Trump. And eventually, probably sometime late last year, decides to take action and for whatever reason picks the correspondence dinner to do it. It's probably also worth noting that he sends this manifesto thing out right before he carries out

Starting point is 03:20:12 the attack. Like, he's staying in the hotel for a couple of days before all this happens. Yeah. He booked two nights. We actually get him to reflect a little on the security that he's experienced while he's been there. And that's a really interesting part of this. He says, I expected security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, armed agents every 10 feet, metal detectors out the wazoo. What I got, who knows, maybe they're pranking me is nothing. No damn security, not in transport, not in the hotel, not in the event.

Starting point is 03:20:38 Like the one thing that I immediately noticed walking to the hotel is the sense of arrogance. I walk in with multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the possibility that I could be a threat. Crazy stuff. Most of the security seem to be isolated around the actual ballroom and the levels immediately above and below. And again, he doesn't get anywhere close to the president or any other, like, important person, right? So you could argue the security did its job. He was just in the same hotel. But yeah, crazy stuff. I don't know. I don't have anything else. Let's go on ad break and then return to briefly discuss some of the conspiracy theories that have spawned after. this alleged shooting.

Starting point is 03:21:19 Love it. Okay, we are back. Immediately after the event took place, tons of conspiracy theories. Started cropping up, obviously piggybacking off of the Butler, Pennsylvania ones. This was not helped by the confusion

Starting point is 03:21:44 in early reports, because once you get every journalist in D.C. in one room and then an event happens, that means every journalist has a kind of different version of the event that gets immediately blasted out. online and on the news. So there was not a clear sequence of events in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. There was reports that maybe it was just dishes being dropped. Eventually, it was clear that no, there was an actual shooting. And Wolf Blitzer did lose a shoe in the course of the events.

Starting point is 03:22:14 He sure did. Poor Wolf. Now, also not helping things. Trump was basically live truiting this investigation on the night of the shooting. Uh-huh. And it was not clear to many people that the shooting did not happen on the ballroom level. Yeah. And that the shooter did not get close to the targets. Well, also, the people in the main room were still very scared because, like, they had no real context on what was happening. And everyone around them just started freaking out. Yeah. Because there's the military running around, Secret Service running around. They heard gunshots. Yeah, it is a frightening thing. You're seeing J.D. Vance get pulled off stage, Trump's ducking down. What I do feel is kind of interesting about this is you've got this whole DC class of,

Starting point is 03:22:56 like press and other important people who are not in power themselves but are close to it. And they do a lot of the things that they do because they like being close to power. And there's this illusion that comes with that, I think, for a lot of these people of importance, that gets ripped away when the Secret Service pulls all of the people who are important out of the room and you're just left wondering if you're in danger? Like, that's what it'll be like if there's a nuclear war. All of these people will suddenly have the few folks who have a detail get ripped out of the room. and then you'll just hear the sirens start

Starting point is 03:23:28 and have nothing, no idea what's happening and realize that your whole life in pursuit of being close to power has brought you no security. Crazy stuff, wild times. Anyway, Garrison. One of the core pieces of quote-unquote evidence that was used to assert that the shooting was some kind of false flag or sciop

Starting point is 03:23:44 was a comment made by press secretary Carolyn Levitt shortly before the dinner. This speech tonight will be classic Donald J. Trump. It'll be funny. It'll be entertaining. There will be some shots fired tonight in the road. Great stuff. Poor choice of words there on behalf of the press secretary.

Starting point is 03:24:05 Excellent choice of words. Also, though, like, it's not a Dan Brown novel. When people are actually plotting conspiracy, they don't go around leaving the little Easter eggs for you to find. Of course. Yeah. Why else would the deep state orchestrate a top level secret, secret sciop? and not decide to leave little clues beforehand.

Starting point is 03:24:28 Yeah. They have to leave little clues, Garrison. You listen to Alex Jones, that's part of the deal they make with the demons, is that they have to leave little clues for the evil that they're doing while they're doing it. They call that the Riddler's Law. Uh-huh, that's right.

Starting point is 03:24:44 Now, another thing that got amplified in the conspiratorial milieu was a Twitter account with a Pepe profile picture wearing the same outfit as President Trump, the night of the dinner, who tweeted the alleged shooter's name about two and a half years ago. This post is the account's only visible post. The banner image of the account is a bunch of streaks of color,

Starting point is 03:25:10 but if you overlay the image of Trump holding his fist up in the air at Butler, the color streaks and the darkened areas line up with the Trump Butler photo. What? Now, the alleged shooter also had an undergraduate research. fellowship at NASA for the summer of 2014, and the name of this Twitter account matches the name of someone at Lockheed Martin, who published a NASA paper at the same time that the shooter was at NASA. And the shooter worked for the jet propulsion lab, the same labs that those scientists who have gone missing also have been working out of.

Starting point is 03:25:45 Garrison, you want to get out of the pegboard? When I saw this, I started feeling a little bit scared because I thought I was getting too close. Too close to the truth. I don't know. I was afraid. Too close to needing help. But that's not all because the Pepe, the Pepe Twitter account was also connected to a time travel study because the color streak banner photo was traced to a website on how to build a time machine and this photo was used on the web page for the time machine study. So what's, what's really going on here?

Starting point is 03:26:20 First of all, this quote-unquote time machine website is actually a Europe-based project for, quote, 3D digitalization of cultural heritage scanning, like, artifacts and uploading them online as like 3D models. Yeah. That's their quote-unquote time machine is preserving cultural heritage. Yeah, it's an archive.

Starting point is 03:26:40 And actually this color streak image has actually been floating around the internet for a long time. I've found versions of it since at least 2018. There are hundreds of people named Cole. Allen in the U.S. on data broker sites, right? Now, the first archive of this Pepe Twitter account, whose profile picture only matches Trump's because it's a tuxedo, one of the most common outfits for men at events like this. Yes, it is the same outfit that Trump was wearing at the dinner. It's also the same outfit Trump has worn at every dinner because it's what you wear at dinners if you're

Starting point is 03:27:13 the president. Tuxedo. But the first archive of this post is from after the shooting. So we don't know what this account looked like prior to the shooting. Now, this account could have tweeted tons of random names and then deleted all the other posts to pull a stunt like this. Or people at Twitter, like, you know, X the everything app, the people who work there, could have backdated the account and the post to boost engagement on the platform. Now, those aren't any more likely than just a simple coincidence, but there are other explanations other than gesturing vaguely towards a pre-planned sciop. Spreading images of this Twitter account

Starting point is 03:27:53 isn't necessarily putting forward a specific conspiracy theory. It just gets used as a data point among other unconnected data points to sow public mistrust and undermine reality, inferring meaning from odd coincidences, right? This is seeing patterns that aren't there, and literally in the case of seeing the Butler photo in a splash of colors.

Starting point is 03:28:14 And again, like, why would, quote unquote, they drop hints beforehand, right? Is this predictive programming? But predictive programming isn't really necessary to get the public to accept an event like an attempted assassination. In fact, that would only sow suspicion. Dropping these little hints, just so suspicion for an event like this, it doesn't actually make it more acceptable, right? The whole idea of predictive programming is sowing seeds to get the public to accept

Starting point is 03:28:42 an otherwise unacceptable thing. And that's not necessary for a presidential assassination. Yeah. Now, there was some other things that propped up in this conspiratorial shenanigans in the wake of the shooting. A Fox News reporter was calling in to report her experience at the dinner and suddenly cut out when she started talking about something that Carolyn Levitt's husband said to her. He kind of leaned over and said, you know, I watched you on TV. You do a great job.

Starting point is 03:29:12 You need to be very safe. And he was very serious when he said that to me. And he kind of looked around the room and he said, you know, there are some... Sounds like we lost Aisha's phone there. Well, well, well. What? So her audio actually cuts out at different points during this televised call. The anchor said that she was having cell service issues.

Starting point is 03:29:42 And later on X, this reporter, posted that she was about to say that Carolyn Levitt's husband was, quote, telling me to be careful with my own safety because the world is crazy unquote. But it does make for a funny moment a funny moment of television. That's a good moment.

Starting point is 03:29:58 That's an incredible time for your call to cut out. Like, just awesome stuff. There's other viral posts spreading video of the military storming past the red carpet or people in military fatigue storming past the red carpet

Starting point is 03:30:14 after the shooting with one person writing, quote, law enforcement doesn't act like this neither does the military this is a staged event with a shitty script and pre-positioned cameras unquote the cameras are there because they're there to film the red car fence

Starting point is 03:30:29 they're pre-positioned because this is an organization where all the press gathers because this is a press event that's why there's pre-positioned cameras yeah it's how you do you know the White House correspondence dinner yeah also you're going to see some types of cops

Starting point is 03:30:45 that you have never previously seen when someone tries to assassinate the president. There are a whole lot of people whose job it is to stop that happening. Lots of them aren't necessarily uniformed officers who you see every day in the Secret Service. Other people also thought it was odd that Trump has skipped every correspondent dinner across his two terms, except for this one.

Starting point is 03:31:07 And then all of a sudden there's a shooter in the lobby. How did the shooter know that Trump would go to this one? Because the shooter planned, planned this since early April. How would the shooter know this? Well, it's actually quite simple because Trump announced he was attending this dinner in early March.

Starting point is 03:31:24 And according to court documents, Cole Allen started searching for information about this dinner in early April, a month later, before then booking two nights at the Washington Hilton. Trump already announced that he was going to be attending the dinner.

Starting point is 03:31:38 The oddest aspect of the conspiracy post-this event is that Trump needed to stage this, not for any national security reasons or to seize more power, but to construct the White House ballroom, which has been the main thing that people on the right have been talking about after the shooting. The people on the right have not been using this shooting to like go after liberal terrorists, but have been talking nonstop about how this security breach demonstrates the need to construct Trump's massive ballroom. And that's the main thing they're talking about.

Starting point is 03:32:13 It's so funny. The idea that they would stage, that the deep, say it's going to stage a false flag just to push for the ballroom. Yeah. Is, to me, frankly, very funny. Yeah, we don't get an enabling act in our new fascists. We just get a fucking ballroom. Yeah, yeah, right.

Starting point is 03:32:30 Like, okay. I mean, I guess I prefer this. Yeah. The Reichs take fire to construct a nice a nice dance floor. Yeah. Yeah. Just, yeah. I mean, a lot of this was like centered on the safety

Starting point is 03:32:46 insecurity exemption, which was provided in the injunction against the building of the new ballroom, right? The issue here is that the Trump administration already filed on the 3rd of April, a claim that the entire building was a contiguous whole. They couldn't do the security part without doing the fancy dance floor part, right? And like, yes. Trump has also truceed about this previous to this event. This wouldn't have really added anything. They did try and get the National Trust for Historical Preservation to withdraw their court case which they didn't

Starting point is 03:33:20 like get subsequently to this the events of the White House correspondence sooner. So yeah, that's most of what I have on the conspiracy stuff. There's certainly more but there's more. Yeah, we're going to leave it. There's always going to be more, right? That's the way how it is.

Starting point is 03:33:35 We don't have good data on like the widespread belief of this theory. There was a poll that circulated that said like 47 percent of Democrats thought the attempted assassination was staged. But this poll, which is from the Manhattan Institute, so take that with a grain of fascism, this poll is actually polling the butler shooting, not this recent one. And people did not acknowledge that when they were spreading this poll around. So we don't know how many people actually believe that this shooting was was staged.

Starting point is 03:34:09 but you can certainly see a lot of people asserting as such on the internet. Shall we move on to a couple of other topics that we need to cover? Yes, this will be a super, super-sized episode, but it is what it is. Yeah, let's go. Talking of people talking about things on the internet, I think some people got this one, got a little carried away. A's 3-0 decision of a panel of second circuit. court judges has rejected ISIS mandatory detention of people seeking to deport, with a few

Starting point is 03:34:45 exceptions. The opinion was written by Judge Bianco, who is a Trump appointee, and it stated that, quote, Petitioner entered the United States unlawfully in 2004 or 2005 and has resided here ever since. He is therefore deemed to be an applicant for admission by Section 1-225A, but he is not, quote, seeking admission because he is not requesting lawful entry into the United States after inspection and authorization. The government's attempt to muddy these textually clear waters defies the statute's context, structure, history, and purpose. Contradicts the Supreme Court's dictator in Jennings and longstanding executive branch practice, and its interpretation of the statute raises serious constitutional questions that should be avoided, even if a statutory

Starting point is 03:35:27 language, were ambiguous. The statute in question here is the illegal immigration reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, and specifically the fact that it has a mandatory detainer for people, quote, unquote, seeking admission to the USA. Now, this ruling puts the Second Circuit in agreement with over 370 judges across the nation, but notably at odds with the Fifth and Eighth Circuit, right? Judge Bianco, in a really incredibly New York analogy here for seeking admission wrote, if someone sneaks into Yankee Stadium at the start of the game with no ticket for admission and no intention of ever paying and he is later found by security in a seat in the seventh inning, no one would consider that to be seeking admission to the game.

Starting point is 03:36:19 So hopefully that's that, they explain to people, the argument that the government is making here is that someone who has been in the country for a long period of time is still seeking admission, right? The Trump administration placed itself odds with other administration administrations right. This has been law since 1996. As Bianca wrote, quote, for five presidential administrations over nearly three decades, it did consistently release detainees on bond, whom the government now argues are covered by Section 1225B2A, even in President Trump's first term and the first few months of his second, the agency adhered to the decades-old understanding and the relative scopes of Sections 1-225 or 1-2-6. Under these circumstances,

Starting point is 03:37:00 the fact that no president has ever found such power and understanding, statute is strong evidence that it does not exist. That pretty much explains itself. What I have not been able to work out is whether this pertains to people who are detained, as in who are arrested in the Second Circuit, or people who are held in the Second Circuit, or both. My guess would be both because it is the law in the Second Circuit, right? So it applies in the Second Circuit. Certainly most detention facilities are not in the Second Circuit. A lot of them are in the Fifth, which has come down the opposite way on this. This is why the Supreme Court exists, right? Big disagreement between these several circuit courts here.

Starting point is 03:37:38 Moving on, let's talk about the border wall. Before leaving office, Secretary no messiah in several waivers for border wall construction. This was not in a week before she left office, but this year. One of them waived 28 laws in the Big Bend area of Texas. The waiver included 175 miles of the riverfront of the Rio Grande. including parts of the state park, National Park, and federally protected river. Some of these areas are very popular for outdoor recreation.

Starting point is 03:38:11 These waivers are now being challenged in court by the Center for Biological Diversity. They're out of Tucson. You'll see them in a lot of border legal cases. The Friends of Ruehosa Church and a Telangua River Guide named Billy Miller. It's an interesting coalition, right, that we don't often see.

Starting point is 03:38:27 Like a church group has the sort of approach to this, that it would destroy. historical and cultural heritage to build the wall there. Obviously, the river guy, Billy Miller, Mr. Miller has the claim that it would be disruptive to a business and to people's enjoyment of nature on the river. Currently, what they are doing is focusing on Chisper Road. It's near like Valentine, Texas, northwest of Martha, where the carrying garret road improvements that they did not notify county officials about, which is obviously cause of disruption.

Starting point is 03:39:00 I've actually ridden my bike out there a fair bit. Did some work making a film out there a few years ago. It's a really beautiful part of the country. I'm sure a lot of people will be familiar with Marfa, which is nearby. Oh, it's a great city. Yeah, Marfa's great. I love that area, Texas. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:39:15 I watched it all burned down one beautiful, beautiful afternoon when those horrible fires started. Yeah, it was wild. Yeah, I bet. Geez. Luckily, Martha has recovered. Great place to visit. You can go and see the Prada. store, which people now think is AI generated, which is great.

Starting point is 03:39:35 Our reality is cool. You can go see the Judd Foundations or the Chinati Foundation, the Donald Judd Museum, a lot of good stuff out in Marfa. Pretty good cheese sandwich, a restaurant. Pretty fancy glamping set up there as well. So I checked out the CBP Smart Wall Interactive Map, which sometimes they don't always have to give notice when they're changing their plans. So sometimes you find out via the Smart Wall Interactive map.

Starting point is 03:40:03 And right now it shows vehicle barriers and patrol road planned inside the National Park, right? So this will cause damage far, far beyond the riverfront. Evidently, to build barriers at the riverfront, they have to build roads to get to the riverfront, which will also spread this damage over an area that, like, especially in Texas, Texas is not a state which is abundant with public land. No. It is not like those states further away. west in that regard. And I know this is an area which is very special to a great deal of people.

Starting point is 03:40:34 I'm really interested in rain more about this. So like especially people in the outdoor industry or folks in that region, I'd love to hear from you. You can do cool zone tips at proton. dot me if you want to talk about that. Do you want to do the... We reported the news. All of it. Yeah. Again, cool zone tips at proton.me for story tips for your marketing emails, You can just go ahead and flush those. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

Starting point is 03:41:13 It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, poolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources where it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

Starting point is 03:41:31 Hey, what's good, y'all? You're listening to Learn the Hardway with your favorite therapist and host, Kear Games. This space is about black men's experiences, having honest conversations that it's really not safe to have anywhere, but you're having them with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing. How many men carry a suit or armor?

Starting point is 03:41:50 It signals to the world that you not to be played with. And just because you have the capability that does not mean that you need to. Listen to learn the hard way on the AHA radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd was accused of fathering twins. But the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax. You doctored this particular test twice in so-ins, correct?

Starting point is 03:42:14 I doctored the test ones. It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Gregalespian. Michael Ranchini. My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young. This is love trapped.

Starting point is 03:42:29 Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 2%. That's the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter. And on my podcast, 2%. I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world.

Starting point is 03:42:57 Put yourself through some hardships. and you will come out on the other side a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person. Listen to 2%. That's TWO% on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed. I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves.

Starting point is 03:43:31 We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe, on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.

Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 230

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.