Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 231

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Starting point is 00:02:28 but you can make your own decisions. Hey everyone, it's me, James. I just wanted to do a very quick introduction to this episode. We have split it into two parts because it went longer than we expected, so you'll hear the first part today, and you will hear the second part tomorrow. Welcome, everyone, to It Could Happen here.

Starting point is 00:02:49 My name is Mick, and I'm here with the lovely James Stoutes and the lovely Molly Conger. How are you guys doing? I'm great. I'm so excited. I love France. I love all things French.

Starting point is 00:03:01 I've had such great times in France. I particularly love French identitarianism, so I'm excited. You love French identitarians? No, I just love it when, like, like, France has... James Stout, huge fan of French Didentarism. I just love, like, the idea, like, of the Le Mung Nations, like France's chosen one. It's just like, I'm not particularly anti-French, but it is quite funny to me. James travels to France every year to go to, but do they still have generation identity?

Starting point is 00:03:30 Yeah, and every year they say, oh, well, your accent is not correct. You've not used Vue in the requisite time, therefore you are no longer welcome here. I went to France once with some Quebecwa friends. This is a funny, like, low-key identity story. I've already derailed this fucking fucking. Don't worry, don't worry. I went with two Quebecquire friends and we let go doing something official and I did it, conducted my thing in French.

Starting point is 00:03:58 It was fine. I speak French, so this wasn't an issue for me. And then they went up at this woman just when you don't speak French, sir, and then began addressing them in English because she was unwilling to accept the Cog or Quebecoire in France. That's so mean. Yeah. Well, I, for one, am excited to hear about, I don't know a lot about this guy. No, he's a weird little guy.

Starting point is 00:04:19 My favorite kind of guy. Yeah, exactly. Notably. Which is why I asked you. I'm also just recovering from like an English person here saying that they love. France. That must be like historically a first time that that happened. A good place to race bikes. It's a good place to, if you like to hang out in the mountains and race bikes, pretty much France, Spain, maybe Italy is where it's at. I visited once and I didn't, I don't know, people are always saying that you, they're so cruel to Americans. That wasn't my experience.

Starting point is 00:04:49 But most French people are really lovely. I wasn't there long enough. Yeah. It's. And, you know, I'll always treasure the week that I spent in Paris because it's the only reason I didn't get deported from Germany for visa violations. Okay, that is a story I actually want to hear after we're done recording. So, but yeah, we're talking about French identitarianism, French Nazis. But before you start, James, I wanted to ask you a very important question first. You have a podcasting honorary degree, a PhD. I've heard.

Starting point is 00:05:27 That's right. Yeah. Me and Joe Rogan both. Yeah, exactly. And I just must ask, how do you deal with the recurring trauma of having to hear your own voice on recording? I play it at 1.5 times speed, so it doesn't sound like me. I was very curious about that. I've also a fair share of having to hear my own voice and it just doesn't get any easier.

Starting point is 00:05:48 No. I thought I would struggle with it because I hate the sound of my own voice in casual context, but like listening to my own podcast, I guess because I talk like this on my podcast. and it sounds a little different, right? So it's like... Oh, you go into podcast mode, yeah. Yeah, I have sort of a Terry Gross thing cooking. Okay.

Starting point is 00:06:06 Okay, yeah, I'll try that. Okay. I'll do my Molly voice next time. Well, see, this is the kind of information that I need to cope with. Yeah, you have to form an alter ego. Yeah. Oh, like a... Enter your podcast self.

Starting point is 00:06:22 A podcast to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Exactly. Yeah. Podcasting is just the id of every man. every white guy in the world has a podcasting id. Freud would have loved this era. You don't have to psychoanalyze anyone anymore

Starting point is 00:06:37 because they just say shit. Just say it. They'll just say it. But they put it on true social. Like it's not fun anymore. He'd be bored. Well, that would be counteracted by like the higher quality cocaine

Starting point is 00:06:47 that we have right now compared to his era. It would also be prosecuted for feeding his children cocaine. So, you know, you win some, you lose some. You never know. Jeffrey Epstein got away with a lot of shit. Like maybe Freud could have joined the club. That's a horrifying mix of worlds.

Starting point is 00:07:05 Tell us about this French nonsense getting beat to death. Okay, okay. I'm starting with a bit of an introduction because this story actually happened in my hometown of Utrecht. Oh, no shit. Yeah. Somewhere midway through February, a message started to circulate in far-right circles in the Netherlands. It originated from a group called Defend Netherlands, who made a public call to visit the ACU on the night of Thursday 26th.

Starting point is 00:07:33 So remember Quinton, killed in a cowardly manner by Antifa in Lyon earlier that month. Small side notes, all these groups are so proud of the Netherlands but never use Dutch language. And it's my personal pet peeve. They're doing it in English? Yeah, they call them so like defend Netherlands. Oh, it's called Defend, it's not translated as Defend Netherlands. It's not translated. That's so interesting.

Starting point is 00:07:56 I find when European Nazi groups use primarily. English, it is because it is for an American audience. Yeah, they're trying to communicate something. Because Americans only speak English. Yeah. But anyway, that was the message that was circulated on Instagram and Telegram. The top of the image that was shared showed a Celtic cross, a symbol with a Christian and pagan origins, but politically often used by white supremacist and neo-fascist groups. At the bottom is an Italian slogan in orange letters, the national color. of the Netherlands reading

Starting point is 00:08:30 Partuti Camarati Caluti presente. The slogan originates from the Italian fascist movements and means for our fallen comrades present signaling that the fallen comrades are present in spirit. I can hear you all thinking

Starting point is 00:08:46 what the fuck has the death in France to do with the political community center in the Netherlands? Because that is what ACU is. It's a community center. There's concerts. There's a bar. Sometimes there's fundraisers. there's nothing obvious going on there. But lots of more left-leaning people visit there,

Starting point is 00:09:03 which is, I think, why it was the original target. So, but to understand how it came to be that the death of a French Nazi caused threats to a Dutch bar, we'll have to explore the circumstances of the death of Quentin Derank. Derank? You're asking the wrong crowd. James speaks French. Yeah, I guess it's Derr.

Starting point is 00:09:25 like what's D-E-E-R-A-N-K-E-E-E-E-O-E-R-E-O-E-R-O-E-R-K. Okay, I will butcher this pronunciation. It's okay if it's a Nazi. Yeah, exactly. It's okay if it's French. Molly, I mean, Molly's now going to get kicked out of Paris. Never again can you evade German visa law, Molly. Okay.

Starting point is 00:09:48 I'll help you circumvent Dutch visa law. Don't worry. But, Quentin, Derang, was a far-right activist. who died on February 14th after a violent altercation between the far right and the far left. I also want to make a broad disclaimer. Regardless of where anyone

Starting point is 00:10:05 listening to this stands politically, I'm still going to say this was tragic. Quentin was only 23, barely an adult. And as much as this worldview and politics were vile, cruel, and pretty much everything I'm personally opposed to,

Starting point is 00:10:21 it was still a son, a friend, and a family member that's not coming home. I mean, I think it's always a tragic thing for someone to get beaten to death in the street, or at least almost always. Almost always. You know, I'm not saying it's wrong to punch a Nazi in the face, but I think beating a young man to death is probably not necessary in this case. Definitely. And I don't want to make it come off like this.

Starting point is 00:10:45 It's a celebration of some sorts because it's not. It's a tragedy. And as much as the world would be a better place without his politics, I still. think it's within my own moral lines to say like, fuck, this shouldn't have happened. Yeah. And I think that's important to acknowledge up front because I think, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know exactly where the conversation is going. But from what I have seen in, you know, following a bunch of telegram chats from Nazis

Starting point is 00:11:13 all over the world, and I haven't engaged really with this story. I don't know a lot about it. But I see his name a lot. So his death has become something that isn't really about him. It's not about the tragic death of a young man. even to the people who are celebrating his life and using his death as a political tool. Right. It's like it's not about the tragedy of his death for the people who would have been his friends.

Starting point is 00:11:34 No. And I think we could add some asterix later on with friends. Because he wasn't white, was he? He was half. I think his mother was Peruvian. Exactly. Yeah. Anyway, sorry to derail us.

Starting point is 00:11:49 No, that's fine. His death is tragic. And I think that is. a much more generous read of the situation than many of his comrades. Yeah. What actually have. Yeah. And also, it's like, if I'm going to celebrate it, then I'm no better than they would be,

Starting point is 00:12:05 other than being on another different political aisle. Yeah. So, but those two things can exist at the same time. But to get back, who was Quinton? He was a student at Leon University. I've read contradictory reports on what it exactly was that he studied, but it was in the general area of mathematics and data science. Around his late teens, he converted to Catholicism.

Starting point is 00:12:30 And outside of his studies, he was passionate about philosophy and ethics, specifically St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine. Those close to him who have spoken with the media describe him as more of a bookworm than violent activist. Few quotes here to underline that. He was a normal young man who had reconnected with his roots, who loved his country, his people, civilization, his religion.

Starting point is 00:12:55 Quinton belongs to legend. He is already a hero and a martyr. Well, yeah. These are the things said by the people who loved him. This was a friend of his who spoke to the media. Yeah, I mean, you always hear this about, I mean, I don't know anything about Quentin specifically, but just because someone close to him said he was, he was a nice boy, he was never violent. You heard that about mass shooters.

Starting point is 00:13:16 Yeah. Yeah. So, great assault. Exactly. And apparently he was so devout in his Catholicism that he, managed to convince several family members to convert, which led to him becoming his own father's godfather. Oh, wow. If you're an adult convert, anyone can be your sponsor, any other baptized Catholic adult. Everybody can confirmed Catholic adult. Yeah, but it still feels weird to

Starting point is 00:13:38 me. It's like, who's going to give who presents in that dynamic or? Yeah, what's the Christmas dynamic now? Does he, do you get, do you get two? Oh, yeah, exactly. Otherwise, they've just shorted you, right? Like, someone else could have, any adult Catholic could have done that, and his dad would be cashing in now at Christmas. Exactly. And now it's just an equal trade, sort of. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:14:01 Because they have to give each other presents. Yeah. The image painted of Quinted in the early days of the coverage after his death, overwhelmingly attempted to paint him as, like, this devout person as a curious bystander who was either at the wrong place at the wrong time or ominously targeted by left-wing militants. This narrative seemed to dominate. until his Twitter accounts were found. So you already know where this is going.

Starting point is 00:14:27 Yeah, great. One of the first posts he made was about his support for the repeal of the Cleveland and Igwiso laws, which are French laws that prohibit Holocaust denial, among other things. Subsequent posts throughout the following years were frequently anti-Semitic, racist, Islamophobic, fascist and homophobic. There will be some quotes later on.

Starting point is 00:14:49 what stood out to me most is that he seemed to have like a very theoretical underpinning for his beliefs. This is also a recurring theme that he seemed much more ideologically constructed in his beliefs rather than your run-of-the-mill, you're proud boy who are just like straight thugs, essentially. Yeah. I mean, the French really do excel at sort of academic anti-Semitism. So he's really, I mean, he's getting back to his French identity, right? Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 00:15:19 And like most French academics, half of the things are completely impossible to understand. So another quote from Quentin here. A fascist is someone who supports fascism, someone who affirms the primacy of the state over the individual. He wants the state to be a regenerative force of a moral order and to unite the nation. He opposes liberalism and Marxism. If he hadn't had that last caveat, he could be describing like Stalin. list, right? Yeah, I think that's why it was added.

Starting point is 00:15:53 It just copy-paste it. And also, by the way, fuck those commies. Yeah. All right, Clinton. Yes. The anti-tanky brigade has arrived. So sometimes he would also correct others or less informed right-wing activists. And he said, fascists and anti-fascists literally have two opposing visions of society.

Starting point is 00:16:13 Political violence is not unique to fascists. It is intrinsic to politics when you have a bit of character. A bit of character. Oh, wow. Well, I mean, ironic, I suppose. Yeah, that's one. Or apt, rather. I guess it's not ironic.

Starting point is 00:16:27 Yeah. There is a broken clock moment in there, in that, like, political violence is not unique to fascists, but then. But they tend to use it more. I was, like, you know, I was racking my brain thinking about, you know, sort of street deaths of this nature that I'm familiar with in my work about, you know, white supremacist violence. they're usually the ones doing the killing. Sure, there's political violence. It's not unique to fascism, but they sure do love it. They have embraced it.

Starting point is 00:16:55 Yeah. When thinking about the state and how the state itself is like a violence machine. Oh, absolutely. Sort of supports the status quo. That's where I'm seeing the broken clock moments. And good did you notice, Bolly, that's a bit about you need to have a bit of character because that also comes back later on the Twitters. he also commented about voting for Fortress Europe,

Starting point is 00:17:19 a French-French political party led by Pierre Marie Bonneau that made its campaign revolve around the repeal of same-sex marriage, reproductive rights, and the creation of a nationality codes, and a new form of the country's population census with additional religious and ethnic-related criteria. So, like, already, you know exactly what type of conservative this guy was. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:17:43 There were also a lot of instances of very racist, terms against black and Muslim people involving hard are N-words including explicit calls for murder. He used the acronym TND, which stands for total N-word death. Oh, yeah. So I can kind of guess where he was hanging out online. Oh, yeah. Well, he's really in deep. Yeah, well, Twitter should have been enough of the red flag for that, to be honest. Yeah, it's true. It's probably you could get that whole worldview just from X.com, the everything website But if he's reposting like T&D type

Starting point is 00:18:18 content, like, this is not a guy who is just reading Thomas Aquinas. No, no, no. It's what I'm saying. But no, no one should read Thomas Aquinas, to be honest. Neither St. Augustine. I've read both some and did not stick.

Starting point is 00:18:34 What I do find very interesting was a particular tweet in which he compared African migration to German occupation, where he's express this preference for Doliho-Solephic blondes over blacks with large nostrils and disproportionate

Starting point is 00:18:50 lips. Oh, that's great. And that's a very nice scrabble word for those of you that play. It's a fascinating choice of words. It comes from 19th century anthropology. Back when anthropology was more problematic than it is now.

Starting point is 00:19:07 It's like scientific racism, pretty much. It comes from cephalometry. the measuring of skulls and crania. Yes, I love a good caliper guy. Ophrenology. No, this was like a branching of ophronology. Okay. I dove into this because it was like, what the fuck is he saying?

Starting point is 00:19:25 Yeah. But essentially it was used to make different races. And of course, the Aryan race was the best one. Dolis chocepalic refers specifically to the Aryan white race. What he essentially said is, I prefer to be occupied by white people. pool. So, great guy. And then this is also how we come back to like how well read he was in this garbage because those are not terms that you typically find when you're researching Nazis or like the Nazi discourse. It almost is like an academic level of. I mean, that's very French.

Starting point is 00:20:03 It's very French. Well, it reminded me of like, uh, creatives of yours, Molly, a Richard Spencer who I think once. I'm not sure if I can't. Oh, he does, he does love to to let you know that he's read philosophy. Yeah. Yeah. He's not a common gutter racist. He's read papers. Yeah. He's read anthropology. Okay. Well, we can bleep the following word out because I'm not too into like American discourse to know if I can say this. But I think he, at some point he referred to like people of African ancestry as octaroons. Oh yeah. That's a, it's a very obscure like old racial slur. Like, it's something like my great, great grandparents would have said. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's a fascinating. Yeah, they, they love to flag, so they have read a book. The N-word is for common

Starting point is 00:20:49 racists. I know old-fashioned racial slurs. They genuinely do see themselves above in the hierarchy of people who say that, though. Like, with... Well, James, he has half a PhD. Right, up there's a pH. He had to, he had to drop out of his PhD program to pursue a career in professional racism. I see. To be fair, many people in the PhD academia world could have done that. Pursuit a career in professional racism? Yeah, yes. Yeah, this is a thing I observed in the academy.

Starting point is 00:21:22 I believe that instantly. Yeah. You could argue, in fact, that in some disciplines, having a PhD is pursuing a career in professional racism. Now I'm very curious as to what those disciplines are. Like in anthropology more than 50 years ago. Oh, yes. Oh, definitely. It would be the obvious one.

Starting point is 00:21:42 Yeah, it's as an anthropologist. Very much, very much true. I can say it's less bad nowadays that it was 50 or years ago, but still there's. Yeah, definitely. There's still improvements to be made. And speaking of improvements, you are the products and services that support this podcast. Good save. And we're back.

Starting point is 00:22:19 So we left off with Quentin being on the Twitters and saying Twitter things there. And what you all gathered from this right now is that despite what his friends and family and fellow fascists said, he was definitely not as peaceful or as harmless as they tried to portray him in the wake of his death. He was also getting increasingly involved with far-right self-defense groups. among possible others active club france oh that's a nazi group oh yeah you don't say

Starting point is 00:22:53 my poor philosophy student with those people he had regular interactions with them also with odas leon who provided combat trainings in a local park their slogans are nothing new or interesting white people need to defend themselves against migration

Starting point is 00:23:13 and the left What was interesting was one of these training sessions was with toy knives, where they had to practice like dueling against each other. And to everyone's surprise, Quinton managed to defeat several people because he was very... He's kind of a scrawny little guy. Yeah, exactly. He studied the way of the blade. Exactly. The toy blade.

Starting point is 00:23:35 Yeah, specifically. I have not found a Ben Shapiro ninja photo of him, but it would have been appropriate at this point. I'm now quoting a little bit from media part. That's also the ones who unearthed a lot of his tweets. In the spring of 2025, Quinton launched a small group in Bourgeoisie, the Adalo-Brogé bourgeoisie bourgeois. Sorry to the French speakers. Sounded good to me.

Starting point is 00:24:01 Yeah. On May 10th in Paris, he was photographed, wearing a partially covered by a neck warmer and participated with a small group into a neo-Nazi march that was organized annually in homage to a member of the petanist group Levre Francois, who died

Starting point is 00:24:20 in 1994. Alo Brochet's Bourgeois also paid tribute to Jean-Marie Le Pen, one year after the death of the founder of the National Front. They now go by Rseblement National, RN, I suppose it's a rebranding

Starting point is 00:24:35 exercise. So at this point, I think amongst ourselves we can agree that he was not a particularly innocent philosopher or good-hearted saintly person. It feels much more like he was someone who acted on his beliefs. A neo-Nazi? Someone who was a member of several violent neo-Nazi organizations. Yeah, that tends to be like a very strict causation between hanging out with those groups

Starting point is 00:25:00 and being one. And I would be very curious to know sort of what order these things happened in. Was his conversion to Catholicism part of his descent into these neo-Nazi groups because the sort of traditionalist Catholicism he was involved in, because it looks like he was involved in academia Christiana, which is not, that's not normal. That's not church. That's a Nazi group. Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:25:26 Insofar as I can tell, I think his conversion happened earlier. So it was maybe a sincere conversion to Catholicism, but then he got involved in traditionalism maybe as part of his entry into far-right politics. I know these things are very intertwined. Given the, like, this Academia Christiana group was founded by one of the founders of generation identity. These things are overlapped completely. Yes. He wasn't just going to Catholic Church.

Starting point is 00:25:54 He was going to a very extreme right-wing, anti-Semitic, identitarian, traditionalist subgroup. Yeah. To the Westboro Baptist Church, pretty much. French Catholicism. Also French Catholicism. I don't know how many groups we were. we've insulted with that comparison. It's fine.

Starting point is 00:26:15 We'll have to have a tally. It's legal. Ah, okay. Then it's good. But with that bit of context about, like, Quentin's background behind him, we're going to go to the faithful day of February 12th when he was beaten. He was not fatally beaten. I have to say, but more on that a tiny bit later.

Starting point is 00:26:33 On the day of February 12, a French EU libertarian, a Palestinian woman named Rima Hassan was giving a speech at the Leon Institute of Political Studies. Hassan is a member of the French far-left party, La France-sumise, French unbought. A counter-protest was announced by the far-right feminist group Nemesis, for which some fascist groups

Starting point is 00:26:56 volunteer to do security at the protest. Yeah, James, I see the look on your face. Girls can do fascism too. Yeah, I'm sorry, I doubted you all. Get on the train, James. Yeah, okay. Women's rights and women's wrongs. This is the only women's wrongs I will ever support.

Starting point is 00:27:16 I am curious what neo-Nazi feminism looks like, because they're not just like a women's fascist group. They're a fascist feminist group. What do you think those words mean, babe? Yeah. I'm going to find out more about that on my own time. Yeah, yes, this is going to be Monday's evening. It's locked in now.

Starting point is 00:27:32 Yeah, I can give you some pointers. I'm familiar with women doing fascist organizing, but it's usually very confined to a traditional female role. So what are fascist feminists? There was like the Session Feminina of Francoist, if that's any indication, but maybe... So yeah, he was just being a gentleman providing security for these girl boss Nazis. Pretty much. There is a very girl boss photo I found.

Starting point is 00:28:00 I'll pull it up in a bit. But yeah, they are identitarian air quotes feminists who blame all sexual violence on people of color and Muslim. There it is. Okay. Great. Yeah, we knew this was coming. I bet their white boyfriends never, never mistreat them. No, they respect a woman.

Starting point is 00:28:18 No. Depending on her race. And her politics, of course. And the beauty of the white-haired and woman, James, please. Founder and frequent guests on various French right-wing platforms, Alice Cordier, was the one who founded this collective. They seemed to have like a few hundred people in the collective, but like a very small inner circle of like 12 people.

Starting point is 00:28:42 And Alice Cordier was already at the center of a controversy. On March 10th this year, journalist Ricardo Pereira posted a photo on Twitter of Alice mimicking an SS symbol with her hands. And in this photo, she's together with former Leon Popular member, who is allegedly now fighting with the Asov Battalion in Ukraine. Wow. It's all coming together. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 00:29:07 So this is Alice doing an S symbol with her hands. Oh, yeah, okay. She's got the Lansing ball going. Look at her. Okay. Yeah, wow. That looks very intentional. This doesn't seem like a gesture you would make by accident.

Starting point is 00:29:24 Alice Cordia based question. The title of this book. What does this sign mean? Yes, Christ. Exactly. And just because we were talking about the girl boss, Can you see it? Oh, wow, yeah.

Starting point is 00:29:39 Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Wow. What a vibe. Yeah, definite girl bosses. Mm-hmm. Yeah, pantsuit fascism. Oh, business casual fascism.

Starting point is 00:29:52 For the woman in the workplace. Yeah, it's the other pantsuit nation. Yeah. An all white pantsuit nation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Although two of those women don't actually look Anglo-Saxon.

Starting point is 00:30:06 It's so interesting. to me. That's something for the French to figure out. French identity and national identity is different. It's pantsuits. No more immigrants. Your grandparents were fine. Yeah. Ladder up. Exactly. Now it's time to punch down on other people who've had, we don't have the opportunities my parents had. Yeah. Not a phenomenon that's unique to France.

Starting point is 00:30:32 Oh, no, not at all. I mean. Settler, a colonial country of the United States. French and colonial. Elizabeth and James, really. No. They never would do that. Not the French. All those places were parts of France. They're not still doing that.

Starting point is 00:30:46 No. I think Alchiris would like to have a word with you, Molly. That was Alice from the nemesis collective. Yeah, that's a collection of my nemeses now. Yeah. Like, that is the name I used when I was 14 and I had to make up a character name when I was playing video games or something. It's not original. Yeah, it is extremely teenage.

Starting point is 00:31:10 Like Angel of Darkness, levels of cringe. Something like that. Yeah. But what I find most frightening about these people, though, is they seem to be incredibly media-sevy and cunning as a group. And to give you an example, in June of 2024, several members of this group infiltrated an anti-far-right protest in Paris. they had brought slogans highlighting legal convictions or trials from several high-profile far-left French politicians. This includes Jean-Luc Mellecheon, who was convicted of inciting rebellion or revolution in 2019. That's for the CV right there.

Starting point is 00:31:51 What a thing for the French to make illegal. That one cool thing we did? Well, no, we'll do it again. Never again. Yeah, yeah. The best thing about France, pulling the old ladder up behind. behind them again. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:32:05 Like, there's no return to tradition if that's the thing you're going to make illegal. And I thought these guys were traditionalists.

Starting point is 00:32:12 Exactly. Like, same with the Dutch. We can't do it anymore, but I think back in the 1700s, we literally clubbed some high

Starting point is 00:32:22 functionary to death and ate him. And his brother. We can't do it anymore. But we can't do it anymore. Because of woke. Because of woke. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:32:32 This is the, This is the one Dutch tradition I fullheartedly support. If you're upset with your elected official, now elected, air quotes, because I don't think they were elected, then some casual cannibalism might just do the trick. Well, if you guys bring back clubbing out of control elected officials, we could look the other way on some of your more questionable Christmas traditions. Oh, I don't know if we could.

Starting point is 00:32:57 That's not a Christmas tradition, but I know what you mean. I don't think I'm going to look the other way on that one. No, okay. It's a chimney sweep, guys. It's just a chimney sweep. It's fine. Yeah, that's what's called an Easter egg for listeners. You can Google that on your own time.

Starting point is 00:33:13 Don't Google it. Yeah, you're going to see some racist shit. Back to this guy getting beaten to death. Not to death. Just being beaten. But he did die. He did die. But apparently, when everyone had fled, he refused to go to the hospital,

Starting point is 00:33:28 despite several non-activist bystanders, like, emphasize like, hey, you should go to the hospital. And he did not. He walked for at least one and a half kilometers, like a little more than a mile for the Americans.

Starting point is 00:33:43 Thank you. And he then collapsed. And he was in a coma for two days in the hospital. And then on Valentine's Day, he died. Oh, that's a real bummer. So, yeah,

Starting point is 00:33:55 and that's also why I'm going to say, like, that he wasn't fatal. beaten because I don't know if... Well, so, I mean, at least in American law, he did die of injuries inflicted from that beating. So you would say the people who inflicted that beating on him did cause his death. Yeah, but... So, I mean, under American law, like, if you get shot today and you die from a disability

Starting point is 00:34:15 from that shooting 10 years from now, you were murdered. Yeah. I hated that I'm surprised by this. Because you would not be dead but for those injuries. If he had not been hit in the head, he would not have died. Indeed, you can in fact not be the person doing the shooting and still be charged for murder in the U.S. It's someone on... That's a different problem.

Starting point is 00:34:35 The felony murder problem is very serious here. But no, I mean, he would not have died had he not been beaten. So he was beaten to death. It was just that it was perhaps possible that he could have survived had he attempted to survive. I don't know if he would have survived if he had caught an ambulance straight after. That's the other thing. That's the other thing. is if he had that much

Starting point is 00:34:58 probably intracranial bleeding that he collapsed pretty soon afterwards, he may have died regardless. We'll never know, probably. Right. But I would say he was fatally beaten because he would not have died

Starting point is 00:35:09 if not for the beating. At least under American law, that would be the case. I don't know about it in France. It's probably worth noting that like the American phenomenon of not wanting to go in an ambulance to hospital

Starting point is 00:35:19 because you know that you will have life altering medical bills. Like this is, believe me, if someone who did not grow up in the United States and now lives here is a unique and quite disturbing character trait of people living in the United States. Because people are thinking, like, I personally have gotten an ambulance. Yeah, like, I personally have not gotten an ambulance when I should have done in the United States

Starting point is 00:35:41 because I knew that I wouldn't be able to pay the bills. Oh, if I'm conscious and able to walk on my own two feet, I'm not getting an ambulance. Yeah, this is just just so people understand that this is not a thing that people tend to do as much, at least not for that reason in Europe. He just won't be a pussy, I guess. I don't know. I can also imagine that maybe, like, after authorities were alerted, that maybe he would have been visited by police in the hospital due to the fight.

Starting point is 00:36:05 Right, because he was involved in a conflict. Yes. And I have some photos later on of, like, images taken by, I think, a journalist, where you just see the black, like, fascists with, like, iron bars in their hands and everything. Oh, shit. So I would say that the self-defense motive is very indefensible. You know what? Let's take an ad break.

Starting point is 00:36:27 You know who... Who won't beat you to death with a bar. Who won't beat to death with a bar, allegedly. I'm pretty sure none of their advertisers have ever beaten someone to death with a pipe. Oh, no, I can't guarantee that. I can't guarantee that at all. Maybe a mining company. Who can say?

Starting point is 00:36:43 They will not beat you the listener to death. Probably. I was about to plug the Washington Highway State Patrol, but I'm not sure if I can do it. They can get to me in the Netherlands. I'm safe. Yeah. That's. And we're back, unbeaten with iron bars. So when we left off, we were supposed to talk about more about nemesis.

Starting point is 00:37:15 So we'll continue there. Yeah, they were carrying slogans with like accusations and trials of like prominent left wing politicians. But they had them covered up with like regular slogans. So at some point they unveiled their actual slogans and they were repeatedly chanted to the crowd of anti far right protesters. you're not feminists. This action only took about two minutes, a combination of chance, being spat on,

Starting point is 00:37:43 and the general hostility that I imagine followed very quickly. I'm feeling general hostility. And I'm not even there. Now, but you've seen the girl boss photo now, so you know why, that's why you feel hostile. Maybe it's just the pantsuits.

Starting point is 00:38:00 Those two minutes were enough, though, because they had the content and the images that they were after. They also brought bodyguard to protect them, which, again, it's this savviness and this, this cunningness that I said earlier. Like, they know they're going to be provoked and possibly attacked, so they're already preemptively bringing bodyguards. Well, they're not going to be provoked. They were going there to do the provoking.

Starting point is 00:38:23 They went to someone else's rally to do a provocative stunt. Yeah. And so they, I mean, it makes sense. If I was going to, if I was going to cause problems on purpose, I would bring a bodyguard. Okay. Okay. I'll make sure to watch out for you if you ever. bring a bodyguard

Starting point is 00:38:36 and I see you. But yeah, those two minutes, they proved enough. They had the content and the images they were after, which were quickly

Starting point is 00:38:43 published by far-right magazines, social media accounts. Four members of the collective were later interviewed by C News and Cordier herself was hosted on Europe 1.

Starting point is 00:38:54 Both of these stations are owned by Vincent Boulor, who is sort of Rupert Murdoching portions of the French media ecosystem. Yeah. So, again, not surprising to anyone.

Starting point is 00:39:05 I suppose. And insofar as I can tell, this is also Nemesis preferred method of getting attention. They're a modus operandi. They pick high visibility locations or events where they provoke their opponents through their messaging and when confronted by people opposing their racism and their views, they'll play the victim card. Classic maneuver. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it's the best way to get positive attention while not actually having enough numbers to hold your own rally that anyone would notice. Exactly, but again, we're coming back to this. This feels much more savvy and thought out than... Oh, absolutely.

Starting point is 00:39:41 I mean, it's a clever strategy, but it's like the media keeps falling for it. Like, you don't have to interview the head of this little Nazi group just because they put on a nice outfit. It's the Richard Spencer problem all over again. Yeah. Just because they dress nice, doesn't mean... Just because he owns a little suit jacket. No. This is why I don't owe any suits.

Starting point is 00:39:59 Like, just to avoid being associated. In November 2019, they infiltrated a Paris march against sexual and gender-based violence, and then they branded signs referring to foreign rapists. I hate these women. Yeah. You'd have to have a woman on so that we could, so someone can say, these women are dumb bitches. It's legal for me to say.

Starting point is 00:40:22 Yes. In hindsight, I'm very glad that you're here to say those things of all. Because I won't talk about women's wrong. But you can. I mean, it's just, it's so cynical and so nasty to show up to an anti-rape march to displace the blame for sexual violence onto immigrants. To just like, ooh, gross, gross. Yeah, that's like 90% of right-wing politics at the moment. Right, but for the women themselves to be doing, because you see men do it all the time.

Starting point is 00:40:56 But these women know better because I guarantee you, at least half of those women have been second. actually assaulted. And it probably wasn't by an immigrant. Like, you know better. You know better. Alice Godier says she has she suffered from a sexual assault by immigrants, but there's no way to prove it because it was allegedly when she was 13 or 14. So it's just this after the fact justification that you can't prove or disprove either way. And even even if we're going to say, okay, you know what? We'll take that argument at face value. I won't. That is your prerogative. No, I just, you see, I don't know, it reminds me so much of this, this funny little, you know, Nazi con artist that was, um, she testified in the Oklahoma City trials. She had this, like, her origin story was like, oh, like I became a racist because I was listening to racist radio shows while I was recovering because I was attacked by a gang of black teenagers and I broke my legs.

Starting point is 00:41:52 She broke her legs because she got drunk at the park and she jumped off a giant crucifix set up for a passion play. Okay. Okay. So this whole like, oh, my origin story is like I was assaulted by a gang of like of people of color. Like, I don't believe you. Yeah. Anyway. Completely valid. But what I meant to say is like even if that were true, there's no argument to like generalize it to an entire population. No. Or just show up to the anti-rape march to cause a scene. Girl go home. Yeah. You'd think, yeah, if you've been subject to sexual assault, you would want to be a. in solidarity with other people, maybe make sexual assault stop happening, like, period. Not focus on a subset of human beings. But James, what you're forgetting there is that sexual violence is okay if it's done by white people.

Starting point is 00:42:40 Okay. According to nemesis. In a biblical way, you know, within the bounds of marriage. Yeah. In the holy bounds of matrimony. So, yeah. What this group essentially does is they tie feminism or their brand of it. Yeah, thank you for the air quotes.

Starting point is 00:42:56 Yeah. They tie it to their nationalism. they focus solely on sexual violence and even then only violence that is connected to, like, migrants. So it's no feminism at all. It's just, it's a lie. You won't, you won't be surprised that they're awfully silent about equal pay or abortion rights. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:43:14 Well, I imagine they're probably anti-abortion. How did you guess that? Well, it depends who's getting the abortion, I would assume. I will send them, like, an email to ask for a verificate. Yeah. To specify. They need more coverage. That's the way we should respond.

Starting point is 00:43:28 to this. Exactly. And I want to know which abortions are okay and which are not. So I can accurately make a, you know, a harrowing story of it. Anyway, this exploitation of women's issues by far-right groups to proliferate their bullshit worldview and pull people in is called Femot nationalism. It was coined by the British sociologist Sarah R. Ferris in 2017, which might be a broader topic worth exploring in the future. Yeah. I'm very interested. Me too. People have been complaining that I never talk about weird little girls. Well, now you can. Ellis Cordier.

Starting point is 00:44:05 Here you go. For now, it is enough to see what they're doing as some sort of fucked up, arranged the marriage of feminism and ethnic nationalism that views gender issues explicitly through the lens of ethnicity. Yeah. And as I said before, they're notably very quiet on bodily autonomy, workplace equality, equal opportunity, abortion, and maternity care. So, like, actual sort of safety and well-being and equality for women, the things that I think of as feminism.

Starting point is 00:44:36 Yeah, like, the maternity care was, like, the, that sprung out to be because, like... In my feminism, I don't die in childbirth. Because it's woke. They want to return to tradition and have 30% of childbirths result in one or other party dying. Ah, great, great stuff. It's beautiful. Yeah. I guess if you were trying to invent feminism, but the only text you had is the 14 words,

Starting point is 00:45:00 this is what you would get. You had a dictionary with the word feminism and the 14 words, and that was all he had to go on. David Lane, famous feminist. Yeah. I guarantee you that Alice Cordier has said the 14 words on probably multiple occasions. On Francie. It's a garbage group of people, and I hope they have the hiccups the rest of their life. Oh, that's hurtful.

Starting point is 00:45:22 I like that. Yeah. Yeah, that's a pretty good one. And with that, that is the end of part one. If you'd like to find out more about Quentin and various other French fascists, please join us again tomorrow. Experience Harry Styles live in London, England at Wembley Stadium. Harry Styles.

Starting point is 00:45:53 IHart Radio wants to send you and a mate across the pond with flights from Virgin Atlantic, hotel from TripCentral.C.A., tickets, and $1,000 cash. Download the free IHartRadio app. Listen to Iheart new music for 10 minutes. Enter to win. Every day is another chance to see Harry Styles. Very excited to see you with the show. Kiss all the time. Disco occasionally.

Starting point is 00:46:16 Available now. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide. Not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

Starting point is 00:46:38 There's that worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right?

Starting point is 00:46:53 That's the name. The Harvard Yard. But they're open to change. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged. One erection. Listen to you.

Starting point is 00:47:04 Humor Me with Robert Smygel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me! I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days I'd put on 10 pounds, I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My mother-in-law spent years sabotaging our relationship until karma made her pay for it. Wait a minute, Dakota. How bad did it get?

Starting point is 00:47:54 Well, it got bad enough that her son-in-law had to eventually arrest her himself. She moved in for two weeks, lasted for five. She left nail clippings in the bathtub, candy stuck to the same. the furniture, and then she pressed her ear against the bedroom door and burst in screaming. She did not burst in while they were. She did. They kicked her out and paid for her hotel, and they thought, it's finally over. Days later, she called her son-in-law at work, claiming that his partner had been in some kind of freak accident and had been rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. He called every hospital in the city, and his partner was making coffee the entire time.

Starting point is 00:48:25 She faked a medical emergency just to test whether or not he loved her son? Yeah, and she sat in the hospital parking lot, waiting for him to see. if he would show up. When that didn't work, she walked into the Sun and lost police station and filed a kidnapping report against him. She filed a kidnapping report against him in his own police station. And spoilers,

Starting point is 00:48:45 karma's going to show up in the best way possible. So if you want to hear how this story ends, search OK story time on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to podcasts. We're picking back up at the rally where Quentin was in the capacity of security for a nemesis. At some point, a confrontation developed between anti-fascists and brown shirts.

Starting point is 00:49:09 Clearly, the instigator depends on the political orientation of the media that reports on it. But we've all seen scuffles like this. It's just they don't usually devolve to a point where someone dies. Like, I can imagine, I don't know. I can imagine the outbreak of this scuffle because we've all seen it. Yeah. I'm not going to litigate on who started or who not. I'll never know, and it doesn't matter.

Starting point is 00:49:32 Because it doesn't matter. Yeah. But I found an independent while left fleeing. video website, Contrae Artique. They published several pieces on the events with claims that the fascist started to brawl. I find that one personally also more credible because they have multiple videos of photos of the far right being there with weapons, including iron bars, crutches, motorcycle helmets and at least one smoke grenade. I mean, they showed up to someone else's event, to disrupt it, to cause a problem. They got in the middle of it. They brought weapons.

Starting point is 00:50:03 It's hard to say who started the fight, but I can tell who wanted to. Exactly. Like, I've seen security at events and protests, but I've never, okay, unless they were cops, I've never seen them carrying weapons. Oh, I have. Well, that's more common in the United States. It's very common here. Oh, wow. Okay.

Starting point is 00:50:20 Oh, is that a pipe in his hand? Yes. It is. So he's wearing a balaclava and carrying a pipe. Yeah. It's not a great look. It's kind of classic. You're a Nazi fit.

Starting point is 00:50:32 Skinny jeans. The sneakers. Always the sneakers. Always the sneakers. One of those, little Adidas? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, of course. You've got to pick a brand that has been there since the beginning.

Starting point is 00:50:44 Maybe some Pumas in there, too. Oh, of course, there's also Pumas in there. Here's another picture. Like, you can also see the motorcycle helmet in here in disguise hands. Oh, yeah. Okay, yeah. Motorcycle helmet's great because it's, you put it on to protect your head, or you can hit somebody with it.

Starting point is 00:51:00 Because he's holding it in his hand. He is not wearing it. That is a weapon. Yeah. But you have the plausible deniability of I wrote my motorcycle here or this is for defense. That's what I also find. They often use things that you could really have with, like,

Starting point is 00:51:15 they also use belts or sticks and stuff that you could carry with you. Flagpoles. Flagpoles. Like stuff that you could carry with you without it being as immediately recognized as a weapon. Like if you were carrying knives. After you use it as a weapon, it doesn't look like premeditation because, well, I just had this. Yeah. The pipe.

Starting point is 00:51:34 I don't know why you would just have a whole pipe. He was on his way to do some plumbing. Mario and Luigi. Yeah, maybe he found it. I can imagine myself carrying a sledgehammer. Be like, no, officer, this is my... I was on my way to break big rocks into small rocks. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 00:51:49 I'm offensive. I don't think that would fly, to be honest. But those I wanted to share as well. So he did show up with a pipe. That wasn't him, I didn't think. He wasn't pipe guy. That was one of his friends. That was one of the far-eyed activists.

Starting point is 00:52:03 That was present there. Yeah. One media account said he was wearing a blue hoodie, Quentin, and I haven't seen that in the pictures that I could find. Well, it looks like the only confirmed photograph of him is that one that was provided by his family's lawyer to the media. So we don't know if any of those other photos even are him, right? No, there's also not that much footage of it, to be honest.

Starting point is 00:52:25 Right. I mean, I guess there's the footage of him, like, lying on the ground. But I mean, like, the only picture of his face is that one that was provided to the media by his family. And so far as I found, yes. Yeah. And then in one of the few of the articles, there's like one where he's like half Balaclav out up, but then that was at some Nazi rally in Lyon. So it still wasn't his first Nazi rally.

Starting point is 00:52:46 No, it was, it was not. Okay. In any case, I think you would have a hard time defending that it was purely self-defense on part of the security of that counter demonstration. Yeah. Again, no one is saying that he deserved to be beaten to death. We're just trying to figure out what happened here. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 00:53:03 Yeah. Contra Attique also published another article on February 20th about acts of violence from fascist militants in just Leon. There had been around 102 acts of violence as of 2010. Yeah. That's one of their spots from what I understand. There's lots of groups that formed in response to like the fascist threats that were there. And also a lot of the fascist violence is them just harassing brown people or like Muslim people. So it's hard to get a proper estimate, but I found this one very detailed.

Starting point is 00:53:39 They mentioned, like, from the top of their head, like 25 different instances. The article for that will be in the show notes so people can read it themselves. Okay. Now, I'll cite this from France info.fR. I witness accounts from residents who saw the fighting take place. Christine also witnessed the violence. I saw a fight over there with lots of young people. They were hitting each other, hitting each other, hitting each other.

Starting point is 00:54:06 And then I saw a young man fall, she recounts. Maxime also saw the attackers flee. They shouted dispersed when they saw, I think, that they might have hit him hard. They went off into all the streets. Everyone got out of their cars. Some guys on scooters stopped. They put him, I assume Quinton, in the recovery position. The resident explains.

Starting point is 00:54:26 Neighbors then came to aid the injured. Another neighbor, Willem, saw him get up after being beaten. I went outside. I saw someone with blood on his hands. He looked a bit dazed. He was just standing, but he refused to go to the hospital, even though they offered to. I was just saw the people talking to him who told him to go to the hospital.

Starting point is 00:54:46 In any case, what is certain is that he refused. So this was a much larger. It wasn't like 10 on one. It was like a group versus a group. It was a group. Yeah. It was a melee. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:54:58 Okay. I'm not sure which article exactly was, but said that the fighting went on for like five minutes. Which is a long, it doesn't sound like a long, but for a fight, that's like a long, that's a lot of minutes to be fighting. Yeah. Yeah. Fighting is normally pretty fast, especially fighting of this level of violence.

Starting point is 00:55:16 Especially if you're getting hit in the head with a pipe. Or a motorcycle helmet. Yeah. There's a little video of it. Like, I've seen a couple of very small videos of the actual confrontation. It's not like, it gives the impression, like, because of the big repercussions, this was like a huge set piece. But it's not.

Starting point is 00:55:32 It's like, what, three dozen people maybe? At most. Yeah. And it was just like in some street. Yeah, it looks like a street corner. Yeah, it wasn't a battle of thermopyla or something. Yeah. I'm sponsored by not being able to pronounce foreign words outside of English.

Starting point is 00:55:50 Well, you could just tell us that that's how it said in Dutch. And we would all have to believe you because we're not going to find out. I'm going to use that as a caveat the next time. Yeah. That's how we say it in the Netherlands. Stupid Americans. Yes. I'll be saved by the fact that like Denmark and the Netherlands.

Starting point is 00:56:08 Nobody speaks to Dutch. Or that they confuse Danish with Dutch, which is also very funny, but also. Yeah, I did see some kind of funny posts regarding Greenland with that. Okay, then we're entering a whole other discussion. Yeah. But anyway, after the fighting about half an hour and a half later, in the Fultourgéon district on the banks of the sand, Quinton was evacuated in serious condition by firefighters.

Starting point is 00:56:34 To get there, he had to walk more than a kilometer and a half, cross two bridges and traverse the Leone Peninsula. His route between the attack and his arrival at the hospital is unknown. So it sounds like he's just sort of staggered off disoriented. It's something like that. Because he was probably bleeding in his brain. Yeah, he has a TBI, right? I would imagine so.

Starting point is 00:56:55 I just find it incredibly sad, to be honest. It is sad. but also that like so like these bystanders are saying hey man like let's get you in an ambulance to get to the hospital where were his friends that he walked off alone yeah where were the guys he came with were the guys that were fighting on his side how did he manage to walk off alone so like these people want to make him a martyr but like they're the ones yeah well let him die yeah this is also why i'm like i'm not going to say he was fatally beaten because like who knows it sounds like a lot of people have some responsibility here yeah a lot of people fucking If you die, if you die after being hit in the head, the person who hit you in the head killed you. That's how it works. But like, why did his friends let him walk away alone? Yeah, knowing he was injured, right? No, even if he weren't injured, you never walk away from something like this alone because

Starting point is 00:57:42 someone could follow you and keep beating you. Yeah, if there are people who are trying to hurt you, the best time for them to do it is when you're on your own. Like you never leave an action alone. Yeah, the whole thing, like, I guess I should just say, like, I don't know, when you fucking hit people in the head, this is what. one of the consequences that is on the list of possible consequences. Like I fucking hate people who can hear people in the head come from a place in the world where like that kind of violence

Starting point is 00:58:09 is more common because guns are less accessible to people. And like, yeah, people are going to fucking die sometimes when you do that. Like it's serious. You don't have to intend to have killed them. Like you one good punch to the head in an otherwise very fair normal fight. Yeah, someone could die. Yeah, people have died from a single punch to the head that started a fight and ended their life at the same time. I think people sometimes, you know, you watch boxing or wrestling or whatever and then you see people fighting very hard and not dying, but like you find someone with your bare knuckles to their bare head and they could die even if it's only once you didn't mean to. Yeah, it's just one one small vein in one vein that gets nicked that can cause of a whole lot

Starting point is 00:58:48 of trouble in that. Yeah. And even if it's not deaf, then there's still like life altering consequences. Be careful with your brain, kids. Yeah. Which is why you need to wear the helmet on your head instead of in a hand. It's just using it as a bludgeon. Yeah. Yeah. I can only come back to like, I find it sad because it's a death that may have been preventable with like proper medical intervention.

Starting point is 00:59:11 Also with like friends that that should have backed him. Yeah, it's pretty sad that this guy felt like he was part of something. Because those guys left him to die alone on the street. So now that now they're trying to take his death and profit from it politically. And then yeah, he's only useful to them when he's fucking. dead. I mean, you know, he's a little horsed vessel. Yeah, that's a nature of fascism, but yeah. It's almost exactly like Charlie Kirk, where he was more useful as a martyr than when he was just a propagandist. But then he turned out not to even be good at that. I don't think we can

Starting point is 00:59:45 fault him for being a bad martyr. Of all the things, of all the things we can criticize Charlie Kirk for, that is not one of them. Yeah, that's not on him. Right, but I think in order to have a successful martyrdom, you have to have someone to blame? And there was just not enough publicity around the guy who actually killed Charlie Kirk. You know what I mean? Like, you know, horse vessel was killed by communists. So we're mad at communists. But like, there was an attempt to pin that on the trans community, right?

Starting point is 01:00:13 Like, it didn't stick the landing. And it didn't work. I should say that that guy is accused of killing Carly Turk as well. Exactly. I don't know. But the right is constantly trying to create a horse vessel and it just kind of never works. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's how the Spanish Civil War started as well, right?

Starting point is 01:00:29 Like, it was probably easier in an age with less information and, like, party propaganda. I mean, these days, we would all be talking about, like, was Horstessel a Piff? It kind of seems like maybe he was a PIN. A horse vessel would have had a Twitter account and we would have been a thing. And we would have said, what was he doing with all those girls? Or we would have found his racist tweets. Yeah. Oh, well, that wouldn't have been a barrier.

Starting point is 01:00:51 It seems like the head of his local Sturmup Tylone. Of course he had racist tweets, but being a pimp is not conducive to traditional Aryan values. Mick, please. Ah, okay, okay. There goes my career change. God, damn it. I'm now going into the last section, which is about what happened here in Eutrecht. They attempted to martyr him and the Fed Netherlands had said,

Starting point is 01:01:24 we're coming to the AQ to hold a vigil for him. The Fed Netherlands is, man, umbrella term is not the perfect word. There's lots of local defense chapters, but they have like where they organize. But they also have like a main telegram group. So these are people who explicitly came to Utrecht to hold this vigil. The reason why I think is because they think ACU as stands for Antifa Center, Utrecht. Oh, wow. Yes.

Starting point is 01:01:56 It used to be a former auto garage back in the 80s, I think. So it stands for auto center Utrecht. Oh my God. Yes. I'm at the auto shop. I'm at the Antifa Center. I'm at the combination. Autoshoffat.

Starting point is 01:02:12 I'm at the four seasons total landscape. Yeah. That's what it is. Yeah. But it was a pretty big deal. Yeah. Because for reasons that I still can't understand. Like the mayor didn't like instantly ban this very obvious intimidation at

Starting point is 01:02:30 attempt and threats. Hold a picture in your backyard or something. Like, there's absolutely no reason to travel to Utrecht to hold that vigil other than than being threatening and intimidating. But I think that's part of why they love trying to make these martyrs is because it, again, it's this like being the victim. Like, they killed one of us. How could this isn't a politicism political.

Starting point is 01:02:50 You can't ban our event, right? This isn't a Nazi rally. It's a vigil. Yeah. It's this victimhood thing. And it does make you harder to, to suppress. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:03:00 I still find it unbelievable. that the local authorities didn't do it. Oh, it's tacky. I was also there that evening because when I do activist stuff, I mostly do like first aid at events or protests. Very noble.

Starting point is 01:03:17 Somebody's got to do it. I'm not a confrontational person, so yeah, I'll give you a band-aid later. That's where I'm good. You're a non-combatant. Exactly. And I actually came from the office that day, so I was also looking very inconspicuous, which was good because I ended up standing between

Starting point is 01:03:35 my left, all the anti-fascists that on my right, all the black-left fascists. And it was like, and then two lines of like riot. I'm just the band-aid guy. Yeah. It was like in a narrow alley. So I left, I'm enclosed. On my right, I'm enclosed. And then this girl boss cop comes up to me like, do you want to get out of here?

Starting point is 01:03:55 I was like, yes. It seems like it could go wrong. And then she guided me through the fucking fascist. That must have been fair. I like to be a lot closer to an exit than that. Good on you. So it's even worse because I was with someone who was also doing first aid. And we tried to get back to the location.

Starting point is 01:04:15 And we accidentally went to an alley that at a dead end. And when we turned around, there were not cease walking there. It was like, oh, oh, fuck. No. Yeah. But I think they just thought that it was a way around and had just followed us because they thought it was a way through. They didn't actually, like, confront us or anything. That makes my tummy hurt, Mick.

Starting point is 01:04:36 I don't like that. It was one of the more scary moments. I'm going to admit that. Anyway, the Fent Netherlands mostly carried that picture I sent you of, like, the bad AI sketch of a photo of Quinton. Okay, I'm sorry, if I ever get murdered and you're holding a rally for my memory, use a real fucking picture of me. Yeah, this is so insulting.

Starting point is 01:04:58 Okay. They're using a fake picture. of a more handsome guy. Yeah, the other the flag that you said, yes. Like, I'm saying, like, use a good picture of me, you know, like a cute picture, but like,

Starting point is 01:05:11 they're using a fake picture of a more handsome guy because this guy was weird looking. Yeah, the person who is on the flag and the BBC article, that's just straight up, not him. It's not a guy who looks like him. It's not a rendering of him by AI. That is, like, old school German propaganda

Starting point is 01:05:28 of like an Aryan... Yeah. they're like an Aryan specimen where this was like a skinny little guy who's half Hispanic. Latino. Latino, yeah. Like, it's just disrespectful to his memory to whitewash him and make him more handsome. You were not a good enough martyr. We had to find a better looking guy to pretend was you so we can profit politically from your murder.

Starting point is 01:05:51 What picture of you do we need to use Molly in that event? Oh yeah, I should I should pre-select. Yeah, exactly. And then you can also select which, which, photo we're going to use and which we're going to put on the banners. But it's like they don't actually care about this man. Most of the people holding those banners don't know that's not him. Yeah, 100%.

Starting point is 01:06:09 It's a very empty performance. I'm performing outrage over the theoretical death of a guy whose politics were similar to mine. Yeah. But defend Netherlands, they also carried what we call the princess flag in the Netherlands. Princess flag? Yeah, the flag of the prince. Oh, princess. Yeah, and it's a variation on the flag that we have right now.

Starting point is 01:06:28 but it was co-opted by the Dutch National Socialist Party prior and during World War II. Oh dear. So it's now heavily associated with those groups. And that is the flag they choose to carry. I'm just skeptical of all flags. Like, unless I'm 100% sure what I'm looking at, I'm skeptical of a flag.

Starting point is 01:06:46 Because usually a guy with it, like, I don't know what you're doing. What does that mean? It is always telling when people are like, are this nationalist flag. The flag of our nation is not nationalist enough. Let me find an obscure one from the past. it has only been revived by fascists.

Starting point is 01:07:00 Yeah. Like anyone in South Africa carrying something other than the current officially South African flags? Yeah. Because there's a lot of variations and they're all back. Well, we're getting to those variations, Molly, because like the flag flag was not only used by collaborators, but they've also added. Because just alluding to like the collaborationists is not enough. They added a VOC logo from the Dutch East India company onto the flag. Wow.

Starting point is 01:07:26 Fuck me. ever was. That's honestly hit me that came from fucking nowhere. God. It's just like

Starting point is 01:07:35 these people fucking hated people who weren't white as well. Like, yeah. Sorry, that is incredible. We are evil.

Starting point is 01:07:42 Yeah. Fuck me. It's amazing. Yeah, I can't believe we've opened that can I won't because it's going to be

Starting point is 01:07:49 that's going to happen in Britain now, unfortunately. God. I've put it in the chat, like something like that. I mean, that's just,

Starting point is 01:07:56 It's like comedically. Fuck. It's a shit logo as well. It's a what? It looks like a ranch brand. It looks like somebody didn't want their cows to go missing. And they did that. It does.

Starting point is 01:08:10 I would stamp that on a horse for sure. It probably was. Probably also on people. I was going to say that's an unfortunate series of it. What the fuck though? Like, I can't believe they did that. Is that a thing on the Dutch. right, like make Dutch East India Company

Starting point is 01:08:29 Gray again. I'm nostalgic for the dusty my loyalty lies with the Dutch East India Company. It's such a niche. This is what you get from European ultra-nationalism. It's incredibly niche racism. I'm a monarchist for spice trading.

Starting point is 01:08:44 Yeah. Yeah. This is something they actually do. I've seen it at multiple far-ride rallies where they're just waving that shit. That rocks. Yeah. It's like the poorest.

Starting point is 01:08:56 walk whistle that any normal human being can also hear. Like, okay, you long back to the days of like killing hundreds of thousands of people for the spices that we don't use in our cuisine. Yeah. Wow. That is so niche. That's so good. I hope those guys get pressed into service on a ship.

Starting point is 01:09:18 Yeah. You know, they might be shipped to Iran soon. Who knows? Like, enjoy sailing around the world. You love it so much. Yeah, going to Bengal. by sale because you love fucking racism.

Starting point is 01:09:30 Getting scurvy to own the lives. You know they will get scurvy James because they won't be eating fruit. Yeah, because they're exclusively eating what the Americans call French fries because of the erasure of Dutch cultural brilliance. That's true. They are.

Starting point is 01:09:47 Or like fermented meat or something just exclusively. Yeah, because it return. But yeah, anyway, with the rally, In the end, nothing really happened. There were some chance going up and down. I think there were only two arrests for insulting police officers. I think one on either side.

Starting point is 01:10:06 That's illegal there? Yes. Oh, I can never go. You can also just avoid police. That's a thing. Wow. They won't immediately chase you with a gun here. But I've never had any experience with American cops, so there's no comparison for me.

Starting point is 01:10:23 Also, hope that never happens, because her story, of what happens. Yeah, American cops, not good. Yeah. That's one of the founding principles of this here podcast network. Well, we have, there is one cop in Utrecht who was allegedly a member of, like, an openly Dutch Nazi group, but I think he's since left it. That happens a lot here.

Starting point is 01:10:45 Yeah, that's not an uncommon occurrence. No, what's the Copsan clan go hand in hand? That's right. Yeah. We say it for a reason. Yeah. Well, we can have cops in company. bracket Dutch East India.

Starting point is 01:11:00 Those were not cops because it was a corporation, James. Yeah, that's the thing. That's an enforcers. You can't be a fascist for the Dutch East India company because it's something a little bit different. That's true. That's true. They were not a state.

Starting point is 01:11:11 It's a non-state entity. It's like an autonomous. It's an autonomous fascism of its own. It kind of cucked for a fascist to be nostalgic for a company. Yeah. Yeah. But as long as it's a nationalist company, then it's okay. This is great.

Starting point is 01:11:26 to revive some like, like, 18th century pirate shit. You know, when like, the British were, like, attacking the Dutch East India Company ships, I'm going to bring that back now because fuck these people. You have my personal permission to attack Dutch sailing ships. I have that authority. But to get back. Back to Quentin. Sorry.

Starting point is 01:11:58 No, there was one other thing that happened because the day after the rally, there was an unknown person who threw a smoke bomb inside the Aki. Oh, shit. A person was never caught. I'm going to make a wild guess and say he was probably involved with defend Netherlands or some other similar fascist groups. No one attack who was heard. It was mostly just an inconvenience. And that is pretty much the story of how the death of a French Nazi involved threats to a community center in the Netherlands. Wow, yeah.

Starting point is 01:12:27 I think you mentioned someone called him Francis Charlie Kirk. Yeah. But it's wild how this one has been so seized upon, right, by people. who, like, as we said, did not give a shit about this guy when he was alive. Now, I think, uh, R.N. Rseumlement. National rally would be the English or like national assembly. Yeah, I think national rally is how they do it in English.

Starting point is 01:12:52 Okay. Yeah. Those guys held like also like on a political level, it was like a national thing that happened where they were memorizing it and they were blaming a French unbought for whatever happens because one of the people who was a, arrested for the violence was an aid, I think, to someone from French unbout. That's not great. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:13:13 That's not great. I imagine their boss would have preferred that they had not done that. Probably. Probably. But it was a huge thing. I mean, like, from my end, like, I mean, obviously I don't read a lot of French news, but I subscribe to a lot of Nazi telegram channels, and I see his name a lot. Like, the active club sort of networks.

Starting point is 01:13:34 It's not always directly the active clubs. sort of these sort of ancillary telegram groups that spin up around them. But in that milieu, they're talking about him a lot. They're talking about, like, you know, training in his honor, punching communists in his honor. You know what I mean? Like, they're trying to make this a rallying point to inspire more violence. Yeah. I don't know if it'll work long term.

Starting point is 01:13:56 I've seen many such attempts that do not work long term. But it's been two months and they are still talking about, you know, hurting people in his name. I also have my doubts on whether that will work. Because they try a lot. They try a lot. Yeah, yeah. I put together a bunch of examples of attempted martyrs that just like nobody remembers. I can't think of anyone.

Starting point is 01:14:17 Exactly. Exactly. Beside the one we already talked about, whose wife is now running the foundation. And for the most part, it's, I mean, at least in America, most of the right-wing martyrs are people who died in prison or were killed by the police. We don't have a lot of sort of street deaths like this. Yeah, yeah. Although, like, I do feel like right-wing martyrs killed by the police. Like, if they, like, if the Weaver family were killed by the cops today,

Starting point is 01:14:42 the members of the Weber family who were killed by the FBI, Vicki Wee, yeah. Like, if that happened today, I think half of the right would be like, hell yeah, get them, cops. Like, like the bootlicker tendency. I mean, like they tried to make Levoie Finacom was killed during the Bundy standoff in 2016. Did you remember Levoie Finnecom? No. Yeah, no one. I mean, Ashley Babett.

Starting point is 01:15:04 Ashley Babett should have been their martyr. They moved on. Yeah, and they've been doing some Ashley Babett stuff. Like, I think they, it didn't work. Yeah, it still hasn't. They're trying to bury her, I believe with like military honors now

Starting point is 01:15:17 and get her Air Force pension or something. And she can sue Capitol Police now. It hasn't worked. In terms of popular culture, no one cares. Yeah, I mean, the closest thing we have are when white women are killed by black men or immigrants. that sometimes will that flash in the pan

Starting point is 01:15:35 lasts a little longer but even still like Kate Steinley Molly Tibbitts like Arena Zerutska like well they stuck the landing with um

Starting point is 01:15:43 Lake and Riley they had the Lake and Riley act right they managed to essentially create a system where immigrants are guilty until proven innocent

Starting point is 01:15:54 right now yeah they have not spoken about her sins but like the legal version of the legal tendency on the right the right legislative movement

Starting point is 01:16:04 kind of did with that but they are they're like constantly scrounging around for a martyr and trying to make one happen like in 2020 like right after George Floyd Ken and Hinnant that five year old boy that was killed by his neighbor oh yeah and they were like this is our George Floyd you never heard about it again yeah they tried a lot in this Trump tried a lot in the state of the union right

Starting point is 01:16:26 and then the one was it two weeks ago he posted that video of a woman being beaten to death yeah it's just it doesn't work. Like, so the sauce isn't there for them to create martyrs, but they love to try. Yeah. But in order to have a martyr that person needs to have had value in their eyes in the first place. And I think that's what missing.

Starting point is 01:16:47 Right, because they don't care. Yeah. Well, they posthumously tried to kind of stack it on old Quentin here. Yeah, but I think that this person needs to have a reason. They needed to have really died for an actual cause. died for an actual cause, but also someone who was, like, broadly known and looked up to. Well, not necessarily. I mean, you don't have to be somebody before your death to be an important martyr. I mean, Emmett Till was not a civil rights activist. He was a little boy.

Starting point is 01:17:15 Yeah. Fair. I think it's worked historically more on the left because it is people who are, it tends to be people who are victimized for just for being themselves. They're blameless. Yeah. People who are just existing in the world. Right. It's like if you got into a fight at a. Nazi rally. I'm not going to blame the victim, but it's not a, it's not a blameless death. No, like, more like Renee Goot, I think was her name.

Starting point is 01:17:40 Where she was just, you know, looking out for her neighbors. But then, yeah, it was murdered. You've been a good person in the first place. Yeah. Maybe that's where the right goes wrong. That's where it really goes wrong. That's the root cause, yes, yeah. The only ones I can think of that really stick are older. And maybe that is like you're saying, James, because it was like,

Starting point is 01:18:00 a lower information environment. But, like, they still do Martyr's Day for Robert Matthews, and that was 40 years ago. Yeah, like, it was easier, right? Like, for them to do it back then. And, like, Matthews got sort of enshrined into this martyrs pantheon. Yeah. At a very important time in the movement? I just don't know that his death would be that important if it happened today.

Starting point is 01:18:24 Yeah. I think a lot about the Vicky Weaver thing, because we had Bill Gore, who was a sheriff in San Diego, had been an FBI agent who was part of the operation at Ruby Ridge. It was very interesting in San Diego because initially, when Gore became sheriff, if you had all these people on the right, like specifically posting on the sheriff's department lost a lawsuit for deleting comments on its Facebook page regarding this. They can't delete comments, right? Like, they're a public agency.

Starting point is 01:18:51 Right. Then 2020 happened. And that same tendency, those same groups, not the individual who bought the suit, But like those folks were showing up with their Blue Lives Matter flags. But then like also struggling to like line that up with like, oh, we should bring guns. Oh, but that would be illegal in California. Oh, but we have a right into the Second Amendment. Well, who would be the person who enforced the law that you think contravenes the Second Amendment?

Starting point is 01:19:17 It's a copse, right? And you're also here to. They're so stuck. They're so stuck. Yeah. They just kind of backed themselves into a corner there where like they were in a way more ideologically consistent back in the day at least. like they're like loving the cops thing that they made part of their identity largely in the George Floyd moment right and the Eurochoil up riding has really fucked them when it comes to people

Starting point is 01:19:38 who get killed by the cops. Yeah. So hopefully this one fades away like all their other martyrs. Yeah. I mean I don't like know where his family are at either. Like if family may not have been bigots. Right. Like have they come out and tried to capitalize on this?

Starting point is 01:19:53 Like does he have a crying mother on the news talking about evil Antifa? They don't have a crying mother on the news? I do know they have a lawyer and I think there is some form of legal action being taken. And that makes sense because there were people arrested who were responsible for the death. It makes sense to be a legal process to move forward. Yeah. But I mean, like, there's not like a member of his family out there doing propaganda against like antifascists. Not that I'm aware of, but they were very quiet insofar as I could see.

Starting point is 01:20:22 Yeah. Like I've written this over the space of like two months. so I may have missed something somewhere. Sure. But they were pretty quiet on his activist activity. So I'm not sure how, I'm not sure if it's something they didn't know or if it was something that. Maybe they didn't know how bad it was. How bad it was.

Starting point is 01:20:42 It could also have been kept quiet in order to like. They're doing a lawsuit. Yeah. Right. They should say less if they're pursuing litigation. That makes perfect sense. So it seems like most of the propaganda around his death is being produced by the groups he was in, right? You said he was in an active club.

Starting point is 01:20:56 I'm mostly seeing this from active clubs. So it makes sense that they would be doing that. Yeah. It's just, if they're not, like if it happens that, like any someone in his family is, you said like a migrant to France themselves,

Starting point is 01:21:08 like it would really fucking suck to know, first of all, to find out that this kid and your family had these reprehensible views and then to see their face everywhere. Well, luckily it's not his face. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah,

Starting point is 01:21:20 it's someone else's face in his name. It's just fake resemblance. Yeah. So, yeah, before we close it out, though, I do want to plug something because I do know when the ACU, they shut down. They had a concert and the entire venue was closed the day of the vigil. So they did miss a lot of income. And I also personally know a few people who spent quite some money on just barricading the door, getting iron grates for the windows or steel grades. That's dark.

Starting point is 01:21:51 Yes. Yeah. So there is a donate link for the ACU. because it's also entirely a volunteer run. Like there's no paid employees. Everyone's just doing that in their spare time. Yeah. So if there are people who have some money to spare and they think that's a worthy cause,

Starting point is 01:22:07 then in the show notes you can find the donate link to support the local community center. Yeah. It would be nice if people did that. That's beautiful. Yeah. It was very hard warby to see. I think at the demonstration itself, I think that the Nazis were outnumbered like three to one, maybe more.

Starting point is 01:22:24 Usually are. Usually are, but it's still very heartwarming to see such a quick and rapid response of people just being like, hey, we don't want them here. Go back to your backyard, hold the vigil there. And it was a thing that happens. Yeah. But after we've spoken so much about weird Nazis, Molly, I've been told you do also something with weird little Nazis. Oh, I love a weird little guy. I don't talk about them every week on my show, weird little guys.

Starting point is 01:22:52 Okay. I can find it anywhere you get your podcasts. Great. And now I'm actually so curious about these weird little girls. I might have to check this out. Okay. It's new fascination unlocked. I'll share some of the links with you.

Starting point is 01:23:07 Then you can have a starting point. Although I think you're a much better researcher than I am. Although, unfortunately, it's all going to be in French. That's a nightmare. Just auto translates. That's true. Because I also don't speak French and also translate safety. You've just made a powerful enemy.

Starting point is 01:23:23 Oh. the francophone world They're so uptight about their silly little language I love to speak French French-speaking people please then Next time I read French articles James I'll send the link to you and ask you to translate them for me Yeah I'm really worried that I'm going to have to translate some heinous shit

Starting point is 01:23:44 Now here's like the French version of Mike Kung Could you please translate it for me I do have some Holocaust denial text I need to translate it Perfect. Just make sure I'm not in France when I receive them and be a prime. True. You might have visa problems as well. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:24:02 I'm not going. Okay. I'm no longer a EU citizen. So I now have to get visas for places. Too bad. And you have to not be declared persona and on grata. Yeah. Okay.

Starting point is 01:24:17 Then, yeah, I think we can wrap this up. Thank you guys for being here and making us a lovely. time talking about Nazis. Yes, thank you for introducing me to some terrible new concepts. I'm very excited. You're welcome. Experience Harry Styles live in London, England at Wembley Stadium. This is Harry Styles. IHart Radio wants to send you and a mate across the pond with flights from Virgin Atlantic, hotel from Tripcentral.ca, tickets, and $1,000 cash. Download the free IHartRadio app. Listen to I heart new music for 10 minutes. Enter to win.

Starting point is 01:25:07 Every day is another chance to see Harry Styles. Very excited to see you at the show. Kiss all the time. Disco occasionally available now. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide. Not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman,

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Starting point is 01:26:55 himself. She moved in for two weeks, lasted for five. She left nail clippings in the bathtub, candy stuck to the furniture, and then she pressed her ear against the bedroom door, and burst in screaming. She did not burst in while they were. She did. They kicked her out and paid for her hotel,

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Starting point is 01:27:56 Hello, everyone, and this is It Could Happen here. My name is Dan Al-Kurd. I'm a researcher and analyst of Arab and Palestinian politics. Today I'm joined by Justin Salhani, who is a non-resident. fellow at the Tehrid Institute for Middle East Policy and a writer and journalist based in Beirut. He has worked with Al Jazeera Digital and has contributed to a number of different outlets in the past and has been reporting on the region since 2011. Justin, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. So since you are, you know, based in Beirut and so intimately knowledgeable

Starting point is 01:28:28 of what's been going on, I thought we could start by just kind of laying out what conditions are like in Lebanon right now. So right now, as you know, we speak, we're in the midst of kind of a tenuous, fragile, incomplete, we can call it ceasefire. In Beirut proper, there still is occasionally, you know, a drone overhead, this kind of infamous drone that buzzes incessantly and keeps everyone constantly on their toes. But there's been almost two weeks or a little, maybe a little bit more now, without an attack on Beirut. Basically, we had that day, April 8, which is being called locally Black Wednesday.

Starting point is 01:29:06 where around the country, I think the numbers are now over 350 people were killed. And many of those were in Beirut in areas that came without warning. You know, there is this kind of dynamic now where the Israeli military will at times announce warnings for certain areas, though many attacks come with no warning. And they brought down buildings without warning in some cases as well in central Beirut. So the conditions right now are, you know, relatively, I guess we can call it quiet here. course, that's vastly different in the South where there was an intensification, particularly yesterday. There wasn't really any cessation of hostilities. We can talk about how the minutes

Starting point is 01:29:46 leading up to April 16 when the ceasefire went into effect, you know, throughout the country in Lebanon, the Israelis were attacking around the country, not Beirut, but in other parts of the country, particularly in the South. And in the city of Sur, they bombed, you know, I was down there the other day. And people were talking about what time the Israelis dropped their last bomb. And whether it was 12 on the dot or 1159 p.m. or 1157 p.m. And so these are the conditions that essentially journalists and media workers are forced to live with on a daily basis. I mean, it's wild. How conscientious they are. You know, they have to take every single minute to bomb their neighbors. So yeah, maybe tell us what the situation has been like for journalists in

Starting point is 01:30:35 particular. I imagine different parts of the country are struggling with maybe different challenges. Yeah, this exists on a sliding scale. Obviously, since 2023, the first week post October 7, there was a Lebanese journalist by the name of Isam Abdullah who was killed. He was a Reuters photographer. And that was a strike that wounded other journalists, including journalists from AFP and Al Jazeera. So, I mean, it's been over two and a half years now that there has been a danger. And that first strike that killed Isam changed the way that media assesses risk in this country. Since then, a number of other journalists have also been killed. So in that sense, there still is a fear that targeting, you know, much like in Gaza,

Starting point is 01:31:20 is a thing that happens. Of course, in Gaza, it was way worse. There was a way higher threat level. And I think part of that is because there were no foreign journalists in Gaza during that period. So it was killing of Palestinians. Until now, there has been at least one foreign journalist who was wounded. in that initial attack. Since then, most of the attacks have targeted Lebanese journalists, and particularly Lebanese journalists working with outlets who have some sort of, we can call it,

Starting point is 01:31:44 line that supports or is differential to Hezbollah. I mean, of course, this is not an excuse, right? They're still journalists. They're still working in the media, regardless of what their political affiliation is, these are people who are there to assess information. Recently, in this latest intensification, there have been more killings of journalists, of course, And these are typically journalists who are working on the front lines and in the South. You know, we can't know what's in the minds of the Israeli military, but based on my conversations with media professionals and media watchdogs in the recent years, I wrote a piece for Al Jazeera back in 2024, I believe it was, about the killing of journalists in Gaza.

Starting point is 01:32:23 And, you know, people at outlets like reporters without borders were telling me that at that point, we're talking, you know, a year and a half ago, it was already systematic. There was a systematic means of trying to control the narrative through the killing of journalists. And this is a big thing for these groups that are, you know, work really hard to share only things that they've backed up with data. They're not bombastic, spokespeople who have some sort of political lean, you can say. These are people who really have to, and organizations that really have to be careful with the language that they pick and choose. So I thought that was like a really interesting framing. So what they had told me at the time, and I think this is inevitably still true if you subscribe to this idea, is that the goal was to prevent the information from getting out from the front lines, to stop people from knowing what was happening.

Starting point is 01:33:14 And this has been clear as lately we've seen journalists targeted. And, you know, this isn't a case whereby journalists were killed, and I'm speaking specifically in Lebanon. This also happened in Gaza, but specifically in Lebanon, but specifically in Lebanon, in the last. few weeks, we've seen cases where there were double-tap strikes on journalists that had targeted journalists. And then the Israeli military came out, particularly with an incident that happened, I think just a little over a month ago now, they came out and photoshopped journalists from the TV station Al-Manar in Hezbollah fatigues and claimed that he was part of this elite fighting force, the Rwadwan forces. They offered no proof for this. The Israeli military, a spokesperson,

Starting point is 01:33:55 and I believe it was later admitted that this was a doctor or an AI-created photo that they released. But these are the conditions that journalists are working with. Unfortunately, Lebanon is not signatory to the ICC or the ICJ. And so these cases, though, there's been pressure by media watchdogs and other bodies to get Lebanon to sign up, to join the ICC and the ICJ so that they can put forward cases against Israel for specifically the targeting of journalists as well as many other actions the Israelis have taken in Lebanon, particularly South Lebanon, over the last two and a half years. These are essentially the conditions that Lebanese journalists are working under where their lives are at risk. I might point out one other incident where a journalist from

Starting point is 01:34:39 RT was reporting on a bridge in South Lebanon. It was one of the last bridges to not yet have been bombed that would connect South Lebanon to the rest of the country. He was reporting when it was caught on video that a strike had happened. I think there are legitimate criticisms. about, you know, this journalist's conduct in terms of placing himself. He wasn't wearing a helmet at the time. Those are legitimate criticisms for, you know, kind of here's how you can do a better sort of thing. That still does not excuse the fact that the attack happened while the journalist was there covering. And again, regardless of the outlets lean, regardless of what their agenda is, et cetera, et cetera.

Starting point is 01:35:16 These are still media professionals working. I believe that a warning had happened at that time. So, again, questions over maybe decisions that were made. still that does not excuse the Israeli military action. And I've heard people say, you know, that if you work through this logic, if we go back to the logic of what happened in Gaza, for example, with the first attack on a hospital. And I know, you know, this was in the first few weeks after October 7. You may remember at the time there was this whole kind of debate between analysts and pundits and talking heads and what have you. You know, Israel would never do that.

Starting point is 01:35:50 They would never attack a hospital. And then months later, here we are. and every hospital in Gaza, at one point, multiple hospitals in Gaza were completely unoperational attacks that happened around hospitals, at hospitals, claiming hospitals were militants were militants, or centers that were hosting militants and all these other sort of things. Forensic architecture has done fantastic work on the Gaza example of how the Israelis had structurally gone in and dismantled Gaza and health care, Palestinian health care, in Gaza. And I think it might be fair to say that there's a similar logic that is working here in Lebanon, is that, you know, because after the murder of Isam Abtala, essentially there was a period where journalists were not killed for at least, you know, a short period of time. Then two journalists from the outlet, Al-Mayadine were killed. And then since then we've had others from Mayadine, from Manar, et cetera, that have been killed by the Israelis.

Starting point is 01:36:40 So you see kind of a pattern that, okay, we can get away with killing these journalists that are ostensibly working with outlets who have some sort of affiliation or lean towards the Hezbollah narrative. That's also the case for Al-Habbar with the newspaper that Ahmad Khalil worked with. She was killed in a really horrific targeted strike just a few days ago where her and a colleague were in the South. An attack happened. They fled into a building. Then the Israelis attacked that building. She was stuck under the rubble.

Starting point is 01:37:11 And the Israelis prevented Red Cross medics and first responders from getting to her for a series of hours. I think it was around seven hours, the official reporting says. and she died. There's no way to frame this other than that Israel attacked her and then prevented her from receiving the treatment that she needed to be able to continue to live. And Amal was somebody who I didn't know personally, so I can't speak to her character in my sense. But from the reports, people reported her as a person that was incredibly generous with her time, was incredibly helpful, was very kind to animals. She was somebody who was in the south for years and years, was often in the south, was constantly in the south, was always on the front lines, felt it was her duty to report from the front lines as much as possible. You know, these are the people that the Israelis have targeted until now. Without maybe going too much into, you know, an attempt to draw some sort of pattern, I think that what seems clear is that those people are targets. But we have to ask, are the Israelis maybe trying to expand that a bit?

Starting point is 01:38:14 Because this is the first journalist they've killed from Al-Aqabbar, right? If they've killed Manar before, they've gone on to Mayadin, or they've killed Mayadine and gone on, you know, Manor and Mayadine in one way, gone on to Akbar. Are they widening the scope? Are they challenging more people? Are more people at risk? And so I think what this does is inevitably now journalists will think twice about going south. They'll think twice about going to the front lines. Security advisors will put more caution into allowing their journalists to go south. People will take less risks. Obviously people who will see themselves who work as targets, maybe with outlets that the Israelis are openly in opposition to might take different decisions, you know? So I think this is where we end up

Starting point is 01:38:55 at basically after such killings and such actions. Referring back to the killing of Amal Khalil, we're recording this April 27th as far as I'm aware no other journalist has been killed since. She was the last person who was killed, but we'll see what happens. But Amal was not only double-tapped. They had been threatening her over text message, right? Yeah. So this is a phenomenon that has Obviously, it's not just journalists, but it's others as well that have gotten threatening messages. There have been cases, reported cases of people receiving texting. We're going to attack you now. You can die by yourself or you can die with your family.

Starting point is 01:39:42 And I want to be clear until now that's not a journalist that this has happened to. Amma did receive threatening text messages. Other reporters have followed up and message the number that messaged her. It's really hard to deduct if this is an actual campaign, if this is somebody within state capacity, or if these are individuals that found her phone number and did that. However, there is a psychological effect that takes place here, right? There has been a phenomenon of different municipalities around Lebanon, receiving phone calls from Israeli officials or Israeli military officials,

Starting point is 01:40:13 warning them of hosting displaced people. You know, this has been reported in outlets, including in the New York Times and others. So essentially, a psychological effect has began to take hold. With that as well, there have been a number of calls that are essentially fake calls. So, you know, for example, a few weeks ago, a neighbor of mine or a neighboring building, just a couple streets over, reportedly received a warning, a threatening call, threatening them that there might be attack on their building. Now, that attack never manifested and never developed, at least not at that precise building, though there have been other attacks within a walking distance of my house in the last few weeks. That being said, you know, that has a psychological effect because many people will not take the risk.

Starting point is 01:40:51 They'll leave. Other times you'll find cases where people will get some sort of call or people in the building will get some sort of call. they'll write it off as fake and they won't leave their house. And so there have been people who have seen warnings coming one way or another. I'm not saying it's directly through a phone call, but through one way or another and thought, you know, whatever the case, we're not going to leave our homes and they end up dying and strikes. So there is absolutely a psychological effect. And we have no way of knowing if these fake calls are coming from the Israeli military or officials or individuals or just other people playing pranks. All those things can be true to varying levels.

Starting point is 01:41:24 a neighbor who lives above me got a call from ostensibly a Cuban number that was like an automated recording of sorts. And through her mind, she started thinking, you know, what are the different possibilities of these calls? What sort of chances do I want to take? Incidentally, a day or two later, I got a call from a Cuban number as well, and I just chose not to pick it up because at that point we had figured out it was very likely to be fake. But this has a psychological effect. And this is one of the many things that Lebanese people are dealing with when we talk about these sort of psychological warfare through the things like, you know, calls, warnings of your neighborhood or of your entire village at times, or maybe even of your building, sonic booms, distribution of leaflets,

Starting point is 01:42:05 all these things are happening simultaneously. When we talk about the things that Amma received, again, this is the targeting of media workers and journalists. And you will see kind of this international indifference. Luckily now, there's been kind of more voices, I think, picking up on the fact that journalists are a threat. And it is a case where it seems. like yesterday it was Palestinians and today it's Lebanese and tomorrow who could be next. And maybe this is starting to ruminate a bit with journalists and the international community. But, you know, these are the things that, you know, we've seen happen with Lebanese journalists, that they are directly attacked. There's been huge indifference. There is always kind of this,

Starting point is 01:42:45 you might call it not an indifference, but maybe kind of a hedging of sorts of like, yeah, of course we don't condone the attack of media workers. You know, but the affiliation with Hezbollah, right? Because this thing exists on a sliding scale of sorts. International humanitarian law is not a super cut and dry thing all the times. There are nuances and exceptions and whatever have you. Under international humanitarian laws, I understand it. I mean, media workers absolutely are off the table.

Starting point is 01:43:10 They're not somebody you can attack unless they're actually caring and taking part in battles. Even combatants who are not actively on the field of battle are not legitimate targets. However, Israel does not play by those rules. Israel will target people who are ostensibly in Hamas or Pazbalah or other such groups, even if they're at home with their families. Till now, nobody has held them accountable for this, right? This is why they've been able to attack Beirut at will, to attack the Beirut suburbs at well.

Starting point is 01:43:35 This is why they can bring down buildings in the capital or in the south and say that, you know, there were Hasbala figures in the building, even if they were not carrying weapons, even if they were not active combatants. And the burden of proof has not been on them, though it should be. So this is a sliding scale. So it starts with these kind of militants and they, get away with, you know, attacking maybe somebody who was a former militant who's no longer carrying weapon or somebody who's not an active combatant. And it goes all the way to media

Starting point is 01:44:00 workers who have this sort of, you know, what we might call kind of this not clear-cut affiliation or whatever. We should be clear that it doesn't matter what their affiliation is. As a media worker, as a journalist, they should be protected. But because of these affiliations, they're not. again, in Gaza, it started with such media workers. It ended up with more recently seeing, for example, a Palestinian journalist who worked with the Associated Press being killed on a live stream. So this is kind of the sliding scale that we're seeing happening now. Like you said, it's widening. It's a testing of the limits. Some outlets will get no outrage, but then they widen the scope of it. The entire landscape and dynamic that you're describing

Starting point is 01:44:41 can only be described as terrorizing. And we've seen this. In the past, of course, in Gaza, they drop leaflets to terrorize people. They send those text messages to Gazans. I mean, I don't encourage anybody to look for these, but there have been videos of people fleeing their cars because they're about to be droned after receiving a threat saying, leave or your family will get droned with you. Like, it's unbelievable. And of course, as you said, we're talking about journals now, but we've seen a targeting of, like, medical professionals, like we've seen quadruple taps at this point of medical professionals to prevent people from helping those under the rubble to prevent helping those who have now then been targeted

Starting point is 01:45:20 for being in an ambulance. I mean, it's a really outrageous state of affairs. Has there been an exodus of foreign journalists? What's the situation like for those who are in Lebanon? No, there's not been an exodus. You know, I think that many foreign journalists still feel that they're protected. It's an interesting dynamic, you know, because I think as you'll know very well, right, Like whenever there are active hostilities or things like this, we have this flock of journalists who come in, and then once it kind of calms down, they leave. And I always find that bizarre,

Starting point is 01:46:04 because I feel like so much of the work to be done happens when ceasefires go into effect, because that's when you can see the extent of damages. That's when you can actually investigate and see, you know, okay, now that the firing has stopped, you have better access to the places. You can spend more time in places. You can get deeper stories. I mean, unfortunately, the way that media works today, there's not the luxury of time.

Starting point is 01:46:25 Oftentimes, you know, media outlets are understaffed and underfunded. And so it's a difficult prospect. There's still actually quite a lot of foreign journalists here. Luckily, some of them even covered Amal Khali's funeral. They covered her memorial. They covered what happened to her because it was such an egregious example. At the same time, I think that there is this sort of dynamic. The Israelis are aware of that if they kill a foreign journalist, right?

Starting point is 01:46:47 Like, they have killed a Lebanese journalist who worked for a major international outlet. And that led to some troubles for them because Reuters and others collaborated to do an investigation. Human rights organizations are reporting on this, killing other Lebanese journalists that worked for less prominent outlets still led to certain condemnations, certain reports were written. But I think that, you know, it's kind of this effect, it's like an avalanche effect. It's that the more sort of attention goes towards these sort of incidents, the more of a more problem it becomes for Israel with their international partners or their international. national relations, right? And so I think there's an acute awareness about that from the Israeli side.

Starting point is 01:47:27 They know kind of how far they can get away with things to a certain extent. You know, I think a lot of journalists are aware of that as well. And so they feel that for until now, they can still go into these places. But like you said, it's a widening effect, right? It's trying to see how far you can expand and how much you can get away with. Now, let's say that, you know, for example, this RT journalist, if they had killed him, he's a British citizen, you know, does that suddenly change the calculus or the fact that he worked for RT, does that count against him? How many politicians, let's say, in Europe will come out and say, you know, this is wrong, the fact that it was an RT journalist. Hopefully they still would, but it creates this kind of, you know, indecision, if you will.

Starting point is 01:48:05 It seems to me from your answer that, like, they still expect a deterrent effect of their foreignness, essentially. Yeah, I think so. They still carry that. And I think they, they have an awareness of that, you know. I wouldn't want to speak on their behalf. And, and, and, and, there's always layers, right? There's the ones who parachute in who may be a good basis in the region. There are those who are based here and have been here a long time. There are those who speak the language and understand the culture. There are those who don't. And I mean, like, this is not to single out foreign journalists. There are local journalists who are amazing and there are local journalists who are horrible, obviously, right? But I think that there is kind of a thought process

Starting point is 01:48:43 that, yeah, carrying a foreign passport, working for a major organization still comes with some sort of protection. But I mean, at the same time, this also means that the Israelis killing the journalists that they have killed, it's not a mistake, right? I can think off the top of my head of at least two journalists who were killed in their homes. And so, you know, again, this is attacking civilian infrastructure, attacking buildings, and that comes with a different sort of criticisms. But if we're talking just about the operation of journalists while they're doing their jobs, you know, while they're driving in cars, while they're covering sometimes conflicts, sometimes, you know, maybe just moving from one place to the other, it becomes very clear that, you know, if you feel protected by the fact that

Starting point is 01:49:22 you have a foreign passport, that also means that the Israelis are aware of who they're attacking and when they're attacking AIDS. You know, we've seen things, for example, like recently, you know, compared to the killing of people, this might be a minor example, but we saw this thing that got a lot of international attention of an Israeli soldier destroying a statue of Jesus in a Catholic town in the south of Lebanon. And then more recently, there was the destruction of solar panels in another Christian town in South Lebanon. And the Israeli military will come out and say things like, you know, this does not represent the values of the Israeli military. So, okay, then there's the targeting and killing of journalists.

Starting point is 01:49:54 Does that represent the, you know? And then additionally, I think it's important to say that with the level of data, with the level of precision that the Israelis have, that they've killed at times, you know, I visited a scene in a Christian town just east of Beirut in a place called Aina Sadeh, where our mutual friend, Elia Ayub, grew up. And we saw the attack, the side of the attack. And I went to a building behind the building that a town, attack that had, you know, we had the view from up top. And you could see that two holes were in

Starting point is 01:50:24 the rooftop of the building that was struck. And it's because the shells went through or the rockets went through the top of the building through the roof, went down a floor below and then exploded and killed what ended up killing a local Christian official. And that was, according to the Israelis, not the target of who they wanted to kill. But the point being is that they have this technology that they can attack precisely certain areas. They can attack to the apartment. They can blow out the walls of one apartment and leave the one a floor below or two floors below intact. And they've done this. They did this at a hotel just five minutes away.

Starting point is 01:50:56 Some ostensible Iranian officials were staying in a hotel. They destroyed that room. It doesn't mean that at times there aren't other people nearby that are hurt. But if you're able to attack and you know the figures that you are going after and it is this precise, then what is the need to take down entire buildings? Or what is your excuse when you're going after media workers? Now, they say it in a sense of, you know, like, they did with this Menar correspondent that he was a member of the Redwan forces. But again,

Starting point is 01:51:22 they've provided no information to do that. These are people who have very public-facing social media accounts. These are people who are in the public eye, who are on TV, who are doing all these sort of things. So, you know, it really begs to ask many, many questions of the Israelis. Yeah, statues are off limits. But people are okay. Yeah. Yeah. Fair game. So there's a ceasefire now. What are people expecting for Beirut? And what does that ceasefire look like? As you said, the attacks are still going on in the south. But what are people expecting for these different parts of Lebanon?

Starting point is 01:51:58 Yeah, the south is still very active. And yesterday was a particularly brutal day with attacks across the area. There was forced evacuation orders for areas above the Littani River, which for anyone following, you know, there's been this whole kind of dynamic about disarming Hezbollah below the Littani River, which runs across South Lebanon. The Israelis have previously issued evacuation orders for above the litany as well, reaching up to another river called the Zahrani.

Starting point is 01:52:26 According to human rights, someone at Human Rights, what I spoke to, these evacuation demands to comply with international humanitarian law. They need to be precise, they need to be exact, and they need to be temporary. You know, you need to leave your home now because we're attacking a target, but, you know, they can't be open-ended the way that they've been with the Israelis, and they cannot be indiscriminate the way that they've been of demanding the entire of South Lebanon to move north or the entirety of the southern suburbs. So attacks on Beirut after Black Wednesday have come to a halt.

Starting point is 01:52:55 And this is also true for the southern suburbs, which, you know, have been an area whereby they've suffered many, many attacks. And so it's a bit of a strange spy at the same time. I think people have gone home to check on their houses. Some people have gone home to just stay in their houses for a variety of reasons, either because they might feel that it's safe for this moment or, you know, they're hedging their bets, but still a lot of people have not returned home. Many of them cannot. These are obviously people of the South, or you cannot if you've had your home destroyed in the South or in the

Starting point is 01:53:25 southern suburbs or parts of the eastern Bacaa Valley. You know, I've got a school by my house, which is hosting displaced people, and it's still filled with the displaced, either because they cannot go home or because, as many have told me, they don't trust that this ceasefire will hold, obviously in places like the South, it has not held, and it's still ongoing with attacks coming from both sides. In Beirut, you know, it's calm in a sense for this moment. Like I mentioned, there's still a drone overhead at times. There have been reports of warplanes flying over different parts of the country. So, you know, there's still this doubt if this ceasefire, this truce will hold. So we're kind of expecting or waiting any moment. But I should

Starting point is 01:54:04 say that this was also true of the 2024 ceasefire to an extent. Now, in 2024, immediately the next day, people went home. They drove home. They drove south. They went ahead with it, of course, the attacks from the Israelis did not stop in the South. In Beirut and the southern suburbs, predominantly there were a few attacks in the southern suburbs, but not regular attacks. You know, a kind of normalacy returned a bit. However, there was still kind of this attitude of waiting and seeing what would happen because very few people trust the Israelis to stop the attacks. Very few people trust that the Israelis want to stop the war at this point in time. They're stronger. They're the hegemon in the region. They control the skies.

Starting point is 01:54:40 to a large extent they control the seas. And now in southern Lebanon, they also, you know, to an extent, control parts of the land. And so I think that the attitude here is very much one of this truce is tenuous. We're living day by day. We're waiting to see if tomorrow, you know, we have to return to kind of a pre-April 16 reality where we're checking our shoulders. We're deciding which streets to go down. You know, those of us who are lucky enough to maybe have relatives or friends in other parts of the country that we feel, we can go to to be a bit safer or are, you know, waiting to do that again. Maybe initially there was something of an exhale kind of, okay, we know that we're going to be okay for, or we hope we'll be okay for at least a few days. But as the days go on and as there's been no conclusion to this issue, and of course, we know that these are connected to the Iran-U.S. discussions, which are in a whole other place themselves, I think everyone's just kind of waiting to see what develops. and there is the sort of baited breath.

Starting point is 01:55:41 And of course, the reality, I mean, even if the ceasefire holds for a bit, like the reality is that the situation on the ground has changed, whether it's how much land they've taken, there's like a new yellow line in Lebanon in the same way that they've constricted Gaza and also the damage that's been left behind, not just of the infrastructure, but of the herbicides that they're spraying and the environmental destruction. So there's just so much to think about.

Starting point is 01:56:06 Thank you so much for coming on and making time to talk about this, and please stay safe. Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you so much, Donna. Experience Harry Styles live in London, England at Wembley Stadium. This is Harry Styles. IHart Radio wants to send you and a mate across the pond with flights from Virgin Atlantic, hotel from TripCentral.ca, tickets, and $1,000 cash. Here we go to download the free IHart Radio app.

Starting point is 01:56:46 Listen to Iheart new music for 10 minutes. Enter to win. Every day is another chance to see Harry Styles. Very excited to see you with the show. Kiss all the time. Disco occasionally available now. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide. Not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends.

Starting point is 01:57:04 Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me.

Starting point is 01:57:21 Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open to change. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged, one erection.

Starting point is 01:57:43 Listen to you. Humor Me with Robert Smygel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me! I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days I'd put on 10 pounds, I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 01:58:26 My mother-in-law spent years sabotaging our relationship until karma made her pay for it. Wait a minute, Dakota. How bad did it get? Well, it got bad enough that her son-in-law had to eventually arrest her himself. She moved in for two weeks, lasted for five. She left nail clippings in the bathtub, candy stuck to the same. the furniture, and then she pressed her ear against the bedroom door and burst in screaming. She did not burst in while they were. She did. They kicked her out and paid for her hotel, and they thought, it's finally over. Days later, she called her son-in-law at work,

Starting point is 01:58:55 claiming that his partner had been in some kind of freak accident and had been rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. He called every hospital in the city, and his partner was making coffee the entire time. She faked a medical emergency just to test whether or not he loved her son? Yeah, and she sat in the hospital parking lot, waiting for him to if he would show up. When that didn't work, she walked into the son-in-law's police station and filed a kidnapping report against him. She filed a kidnapping report against him in his own police station. And spoilers, karma's going to show up in the best way possible. So if you want to hear how this story ends, search OK story time on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're

Starting point is 01:59:34 listening to podcasts. Welcome to a Kidapin Here, a podcast about things falling apart, and, although not today, putting them back together again. Today we are going to be talking about some of the ways in which the world is falling apart and the ways that they've been invisibleized. Now, there are obviously a wide and broad variety of ways in which the world is coming to pieces, but one of them is the impact of the continued dual blockade now of the Strait of Wemus. The sense you get reading the papers, if you were looking at the moment, at the economic reality of the situation

Starting point is 02:00:18 is that everything is broadly fine. The economic impacts have been less bad than expected. The economy is proving more resilient. Economies, particularly in East Asia, are hanging on better than predicted. China has been resilient. America has been resilient. Trump will eventually back down,

Starting point is 02:00:36 which will head off the worst-case scenario, long-range forecasting of material shortages. Now, the rest of you, I'm assuming, if you're listening to this podcast, you live in reality and not the distorted mirror world of the stock market. Stock market, as I think everyone has been able to see by this point, is increasingly unmoored, if it ever was moored to begin with, from the reality of how the global economy is actually functioning.

Starting point is 02:01:09 Trump has been able to play a game by which she makes the appearance of backing down in every time the stock market seems to be actually tanking, and the markets have simply come to believe as an axiom that if they simply bet that Trump will eventually back down, it will simply happen. No, it hasn't. The war is continuing apace, and it seems to have no signs of slowing down. But the markets are behaving as if they know that it's going to happen. And this has created a kind of paradox, where, on the one hand, There is us living in this world, and on the other hand, there are the markets living in a world where everything is going to be fine. And in the world that we live in, things are not good, but they are breaking, I think, more slowly than people tended to expect.

Starting point is 02:02:02 Now part of this, and we will go over this in this episode, is that the impacts of this have been worst felt, obviously in Iran itself, and then across South and East Asia. which are markets that are incredibly, and economies that are incredibly reliant on, not just oil, but things like naphtha and also fertilizers that pass through the Strait of Formuz. But if the markets are Wiley-E-Coyote, hovering in the air through the sheer power of not looking down, the rest of the economy is a kind of slow-moving train wreck.

Starting point is 02:02:41 It isn't collapsing all at once, but the more you poke through and the more you go past the first page of the newspaper and start looking at the later ones and the more that you look at the press in other countries, the more you begin to realize that things are going quite, quite badly. Now, in the West, the sign of this has been $5 a gallon gasoline in vast portions of the United States. we are quite frankly seeing the better side of it. There have been widespread shutdowns of transportation across South and East Asia. Buses simply aren't running both public and private.

Starting point is 02:03:24 There have been strikes and protests over high gas prices by people who normally drive buses. Even in the U.S., you can talk to people who try to do Uber deliveries, and it's becoming effectively impossible even to do that, simply because gas prices are so high, but they are simply nowhere near as bad here as they are in places like the Philippines. Now, the interconnected nature of the global economy means that there are things that are being broken right now that are going to break more things later down the line and are continuing to break things down and cross the supply chain, but the ripples are moving slowly.

Starting point is 02:04:03 transportation costs are something that we tend to think about in terms of moving people around, right? We try to think about it in terms of buses, in terms of cars. However, one of the very significant issues that we are running into across, particularly South East Asia, also Southeast Asia, to combining all sort of, I don't know, three of the regions, a bunch of the island nations in the Pacific are dealing with as two to various extent. Sri Lanka has been one of the worst hits to the extent that we're seeing a bunch of these countries are doing kind of like miniature government shutdowns. And obviously, there's a bunch of different versions of this Pakistan, for example, is going into more debt in an attempt to sort of keep the economy running.

Starting point is 02:04:50 But returning to transformation costs for a moment, it is important that we also understand that goods are transported and increases in the price of gasoline to the point where it's simply, you know, impossible to afford, also affects shipping, and in particular, affects things that are delivered on trucks. I'm going to read this quote about Vietnam and rice production in Vietnam. Quote, in today's abnormal times, rice buyers are hesitating. Shipping delays of 10 to 15 days have become common as carriers slow steam to conserve fuel. Osmati rice from India bound for the Middle East has been unable to get through this trade of Ramos. In the Philippines, wholesalers are not sure when

Starting point is 02:05:37 there might be enough diesel to move imports around the country. That means rice has been piling up across Asia, creating a short-term paradox. Wholesale prices declining as production costs rise. After a year of healthy harvests, traders are paying farmers less right now to hedge against future risk. So this is a really complicated fucking... mess, right? What the New York Times is saying here is that buyers aren't buying the massive amount of rice that has already been planted, right? But on the other hand, there's also now we're running into fertilizer shortages because of a bunch of elements for fertilizers that is used in a lot. I mean, this is also affecting the United States, too, but it's significantly worse

Starting point is 02:06:27 in places like the Philippines and places like Vietnam. Some of the important elements needed to create fertilizer past the trade of farm moves, they're not getting through. And this means that on the one hand, farmers are facing enormous rising production prices. But production is a process that takes place over and through time, right? And this is something that very importantly, most economic models are really, really bad at dealing with. Conventional macroeconomic models assume time and space don't exist to a large extent. Like this is like a real issue for a lot of large-scale economic models. Unfortunately, they exist here.

Starting point is 02:07:03 And so what we're dealing with, right, is that there has been production that's already happened because there's already have been harvests. But now farmers can't sell the stuff that they've harvested because the transportation costs are so high that the buyers don't want to buy it. But that means also, on the other hand, food is still getting more expensive on your end

Starting point is 02:07:24 because even though the people making the food can't get enough money for the food they are selling, because again, the buyers won't buy it because it's too expensive. You're now also paying, like people in the region are now paying increased rice prices because they have to pay the shipping cost. So even though, on the one hand, right, the actual price that consumers are paying is going up, right? And the cost to produce the rice is also going up. The actual price at which these people can sell the rice is going down.

Starting point is 02:07:56 And this is a fucking nightmare. It means that crops are getting planted. It means that crops are also just rotting in the fields because there's no way to sell and move them. This is causing really, really significant concerns that we are going to be, you know, like we are looking over the coming months at a kind of agricultural catastrophe,

Starting point is 02:08:16 where you're starting to see sort of projections of people going, oh God, like, hey, what if people simply stop exporting food? there's a great quote in this New York Times article from a guy who's a senior fellow in food security at Singapore's ISEAS where he says, quote, complex systems have a habit of creating wicked problems. The way that like capitalist markets interact with food shortages is a complete fucking nightmare. And this is something that we have seen that has caused famines all over the world is that once you're, get into the point where food genuinely becomes scarce, which is not quite the point where we're at, now, we're in the beginning of the process by which this could happen, right? The part of the process

Starting point is 02:09:07 we're in right now is these farmers who also, by the way, and this is also very important, these rice farmers are not operating on particularly high margins, right? They are not very wealthy. When I say low margins, right, they are not making all that much money. And so, you know, being unable to sell your rice, you're being forced to sell it at an extremely low price, and then having your production costs rise because your cost of fertilizer is skyrocketing is how these things effectively go under. If this stuff continues, this is how you get waves of people being forced off their land because they simply can't afford to do the farming anymore, right?

Starting point is 02:09:45 But then, you know, you also have sort of, in some sense, you have the reverse of this in other places where if you look at what's happening in India, we talked about this on an executive disorder a few weeks back, you know, like a bunch of the ceramics industry. It's just like shut down and like 400,000 people are out of work from this. And this is causing those people to, okay, like, what do you do when you can't get work in sort of urban industrial centers as you go back to a lot of the rural places where these people are from? But, you know, the thing about oil, right, is that oil price increase is something that hits people

Starting point is 02:10:18 across the board. It hits both rural and urban economies because they both are heavily. oil depends. This is something that New York Times mentions when you're talking about like rice problems in Vietnam, right? Part of the other thing that's been making rice like harder to farm is that their irrigation system is powered by like diesel engines, which is pump driven and diesel stuff. And so because of that, you know, there's sort of like broad scale shortages in Vietnam and you have to choose whether you're, you know, using using the limited amount of diesel that you have in cities or in rural areas.

Starting point is 02:10:57 And so these things are just kind of rapidly becoming a nightmare. Now, you know what isn't a nightmare? It's the products and services that support this podcast. And we are back. So I want to talk a bit about why the system is structured like this and why, you know, on the one hand, like we are starting to see things that are very incredibly alarming. in East and Southeast Asia on varying levels that,

Starting point is 02:11:39 and I guess I should be really clear about this, right? The actual economics impacts of this are really dispersed. It depends a lot on how wealthy of a country you are in and then also like how reliant on oil your economy is. So the Chinese economy, for example, is not been that badly affected because they have large oil supplies. the Taiwanese economy, you know, like there's kind of plastic bag shortages. And that's been

Starting point is 02:12:08 another element of all of this is like people panicking about are there going to be enough trash bags? Because for reasons that I will get into in a second, like, plastic is made of oil, right? Everything around you that is plastic is just oil. And it does turn out that you do need crude oil in order to produce plastics. And this has been causing lots of production issues across like a whole variety of sectors that use plastics. Now, the bottom hasn't just completely fallen out yet. And it's worth taking a little bit of time to examine why. And the reason why it hasn't immediately collapsed

Starting point is 02:12:47 is actually strangely the same reason why we're in this mess from the first place, which is that in a lot of ways, the way that our system of production works, the way that we produce things in the world, and the way that we move things around is made in the image of oil. So what do I mean by that? What I mean is that the system of production is very nodal, right?

Starting point is 02:13:11 It operates on a whole bunch of these nodes and you have a node where a part of a production is happening and then that node moves an item from one thing to another where it goes another stage of production process and inputs and outputs come in in these nodes. and the thing about these nodes, right, is that in theory, the way the system is supposed to be designed, right,

Starting point is 02:13:35 and the way that it's been sort of, they call it like, flexibilization to some extent, the way that's supposed to work is that like, okay, so like if you are a company that needs to get, like, I don't know, you're like a ramen company. You're taking an example that's been in the news, at least in these, like in East Asia, like there's been disruption to like ramen making companies, right?

Starting point is 02:13:54 And you need plastic. You have like one plastic supplier you normally going to, but there are a bunch of other ones, right? And so, you know, or maybe maybe a better way to explain this would be using the example of like the way that like fast fashion works and the way that like drop shipping works, right? Where there are like there are all of these different like small sort of factories around China or like these small like sort of garment production places

Starting point is 02:14:17 where you can like very, very quickly crank out the same like dress or whatever. And if you're doing the drop shipping, you can like source your drop ship stuff from one of like a hundred of these places, right? Now, this is what I mean, what I say, that it's nodal, is that it's designed in such a way that a blockage in one part of the system isn't supposed to be that bad because the system isn't designed in a way

Starting point is 02:14:44 where, you know, there's like one railway from one place to another and you have to move all of your goods along this one railway and you can only get it from like one buyer who produces a thing, you produce it and everything, you produce and everything. you're supposed to be able to get it from like a broad distributed network of people. And if one node of the network goes out, you're supposed to be able to pivot to another one.

Starting point is 02:15:07 And this is the way that the economics of oil works, right? There are a shit ton of different oil producers. And in theory, you're supposed to be able to pivot around between different oil wells in a way that's different from, for example, the way that coal worked. right with coal and a lot of this I'm sourcing from Timothy Mitchell's book carbon democracy which is very very good you know with coal right you're usually not moving it by ship which is this is like another thing that that we're going to get to in a second but with coal it's very easy the way that coal is mined and the way that you have to move it right it goes from one place to another to another to another in a line and if one part of that

Starting point is 02:15:52 process shuts down, there isn't like another coal thing you can get your coal from, right? You're just fucked. Like there's not like another mine that fees into your factory. This is sort of the way that coal production worked in sort of the 18 and early 1900s. Oil works in basically the opposite way, right? Where there's just like a shit ton of things. And because you're mostly moving it by water, and to some extent by pipeline, the way the production process works in the way that it's sort of easier to move. And just like the way that it flows means that it's harder to block off the entire supply of oil in the same way that it was actually kind of easy to just like completely stop up huge swath to the economy by just blocking off

Starting point is 02:16:33 their access to coal. And capital has like long realized the danger of choke points. This is called foreshadowing. This is a literary device, etc., etc. You know, the choke point used to to be coal mines and the railways on which coal was moved, right? And one of the things that Timothy Mitchell argues is that a lot of the militancy of the 19th and 20th century labor movement is a direct product of the ways in which these coal miners were both extremely militant and also very, very easily able to shut down production in a line by mobilizing a force that was greater than their numbers, right? a relatively small portion of, you know, like hyperbilligent coal miners can shut down, like, the rest of the economy because everyone else is relying on their being coal.

Starting point is 02:17:27 But oil has the opposite problem. We're like, the problem with coal is that there's not enough of it. So you have to constantly extract it. The problem with oil is that there's too much of it, right? If you shut down coal production, it's a nightmare for the companies that produce coal because they can't make any money because there's like a fixed number of mines

Starting point is 02:17:45 and it takes like large-scale capital investment to like get them out. And it's also true that like it's expensive to extract oil. But the thing about oil is again like there are just, there are too many refineries, right? This is sort of why OPEC was formed.

Starting point is 02:17:57 If you shut down production, if you restrict the amount of oil that comes onto the market, that's actually how you make money. Versus if you shut down coal production, suddenly nobody's making any money versus oil where it's like if you shut down oil production, usually it just means

Starting point is 02:18:11 that like the oil companies make more money because the price of oil goes up. And the specifics of why this is true, I would encourage people to go re-carbon democracy. I could spend another like two hours talking about the materiality of oil and why it specifically works like this differently. But, yeah, oil has the opposite problem of coal.

Starting point is 02:18:29 Like, there's too much of it. And so this goes to a point where Mitchell talks about how in the early 1900s, companies are deliberately setting off oil strikes, right, because it'll raise their production prices. Because shutting down their own production, and having an excuse to shut down their own production, like we'll let them just knock off oil refinery

Starting point is 02:18:48 so they can reduce the amount of oil in the market. The system of oil is designed to get around these blockades, right? This is a big part of the reason for the transition from coal to oil. Specifically, it was like the U.S. and the Marshall Plan was trying to defeat these extremely militants like French unions after World War II. And these unions were largely coal mining base, and they were like, oh, shit, we can do like a pivot to Saudi Arabia to move to oil. and this can be our solution to, like, crush these coal mining unions

Starting point is 02:19:13 because oil is extremely hard to unionize, it has, like, a highly divided workforce. You know, and so they tried to design the system that doesn't have choke points. But the problem is, there's one fucking big one, and that one big one is the Strait of Hormuz. And at this point, the sort of advantage of the system, right, which is that it's all these different nodes

Starting point is 02:19:36 that are, like, bound together in this, like, extremely convoluted weave, the strength of the system is also its weakness. It means that we're all getting dragged down together with the system when it stops working. Because we all rely on stuff from all over the world, the way that the system has bound us altogether means that we're all reliant on every other part of the economy and we're all reliant on oil.

Starting point is 02:20:01 And this is sort of the root of the catastrophe and also the reason why this crash is operating in slow motion in order to stop the international labor movement, right? The system was set up in a specific way where it works along nose and is supposed to be designed to deal with a crisis like this. So instead of collapsing immediately, it collapses in slow motion. But it is still collapsing because capital, and I guess like the presidents of the United States,

Starting point is 02:20:29 has taken the action that the system was designed to avoid, which is like, you know, like a large-scale blockade of production. And the consequences of this are both dire and expanding as we speak. Yeah, this has been, it could happen here. Things are only going to get worse before they get better. Harry Styles, live in London, England at Wembley Stadium. This is Harry Styles. IR Radio wants to send you and a mate across the pond,

Starting point is 02:21:13 with flights from Virgin Atlantic, hotel from tripcentral.ca, tickets, and $1,000 cash. Download the free IHartRadio app. Listen to IHart new music for 10 minutes. Enter to win. Every day is another chance to see Harry Styles. Very excited to see you with the show. Kiss all the time, disco occasionally available now.

Starting point is 02:21:34 Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriters. Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group?

Starting point is 02:21:56 The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yard. But they're open.

Starting point is 02:22:11 Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smygel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me, I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque.

Starting point is 02:22:40 Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days I'd put on 10 pounds, I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My mother-in-law spent years sabotaging our relationship until karma made her pay for it. Wait a minute, Dakota. How bad did it get? Well, it got bad enough that her son-in-law had to eventually arrest her himself. She moved in for two weeks, lasted for five.

Starting point is 02:23:17 She left nail clippings in the bathtub, candy stuck to her. the furniture, and then she pressed her ear against the bedroom door and burst in screaming. She did not burst in while they were. She did. They kicked her out and paid for her hotel, and they thought, it's finally over. Days later, she called her son-in-law at work, claiming that his partner had been in some kind of freak accident and had been rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. He called every hospital in the city, and his partner was making coffee the entire time. She faked a medical emergency just to test whether or not he loved her son? Yeah, and she sat in the hospital parking lot, waiting for him to see if he would show up.

Starting point is 02:23:50 When that didn't work, she walked into the son-in-loss police station and filed a kidnapping report against him. She filed a kidnapping report against him in his own police station. And spoilers, karma's going to show up in the best way possible. So if you want to hear how this story ends, search OK story time on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to podcasts. I enjoyed the new devil wears Prada movie. It was weirdly relevant.

Starting point is 02:24:20 I did not expect Merrill Street to deliver like a monologue about how AI is destroying independent internet writers or comedy writers or whatnot. Any kind of independent internet writer, but I guess that's what we got. So that's good. And thinly veiled Jeff Bezos villain. Finley veiled Jeff Bezos villain, yeah. Yeah. Well, this isn't our movie review podcast because we don't have one of those because I would be bad at it. This is electile disorder function.

Starting point is 02:24:50 It could happen here. Gerson, what are we doing? Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening. Did I ruin your intro? In the White House. No, it's fine. The crumbling world and what it means for you. I'm Harrison Davis.

Starting point is 02:25:01 Today, we're joined by Robert Evans, James Stout, Mia Wong, and maybe Sophie Lichten. This episode, we are covering the week of April 30th to May 6th. I want to roll things back to just before we recorded because Sophie brought up the California gubernatorial debate that happened Tuesday night. Gubernatorial Garrison. You got to make it sound silly. Which I tried watching as that kind of is my job, only to discover it was not streaming anywhere online

Starting point is 02:25:29 and only available the CNN channel on television, like actual TV channels, which prompted Sophie to ask the good question, who is this for? Why does this even exist then if only people watching cable can watch it? And then I realized the real reason this exists is to generate short video clips for social media and that's I guess how most people are actually engaging with this debate in contextless

Starting point is 02:25:56 50 second, that's generous, chunks of time. Yeah. In which Steyer came off the best, did not come off great, but came off okay. Okay. He came off fine. He had this weird tick where he would be, he would

Starting point is 02:26:12 ask a question and when he would respond, it would sound like he was deflecting the question even when he wasn't. But the sort of like defensiveness of his framing, sounded like he was deflecting a lot of questions that actually he was giving kind of good answers to.

Starting point is 02:26:29 Porter was I don't know. Sophie, can you speak about Porter? I don't. Porter, I hardly know her. I don't have a mic so I'll be really quick. That was pretty good. Porter kind of overcompensate snarky remarks

Starting point is 02:26:44 but she's only polling like 8 or 10% where Seltin and Steyer are both pulling close assert to 20. So also, Steve Hilton, ew. Yeah, short video content has not been kind to Katie Porter in the last couple of years. It was interesting. Earlier that morning, Katie Porter released an ad that ended with a joke about her abuse of her staff. It ended with like a reference to a line that she said that was in those articles. And like she had all these background extras laugh at the joke referencing the

Starting point is 02:27:17 abuse allegations against her to her staff. interesting choice. Crazy move. Who is that for? Who is that for? I mean, you know what it is actually? It's her trying to be like Trump. Like one of the lessons that Trump has taught the political class is that if people come at you for like being corrupt or fucked up or evil or irresponsible, you just kind of barrel right through that. You don't acknowledge it. You don't like acknowledge any validity in it. And like you you kind of make fun of it. You try to like. Make it a selling point for yourself. And I don't, I'm not saying she's doing a good job of it, but I think that's what is she's trying to do. I think that's the attention. She's like tough, no nonsense.

Starting point is 02:28:01 Yeah. You know. Yeah. The amount of money being spent on anti-styre attack ads is, judging by the amount of them that get beamed into my home every night now, pretty significant as a resident Californian. I didn't watch the debate because the choices we have make me very angry. and upset.

Starting point is 02:28:21 And I didn't want to think about that. That's politics. Yeah. James, do you want to start with a few of yours I see are at the top of the dock here? Yeah, well, let's begin with the biggest news of the week, which is that the White House Twitter account has shared the new crest for Nice. I got to see this. Oh, yeah, click on that.

Starting point is 02:28:44 Oh, good. Thank God. Share that screen, Gary. I'm sorry. You can't have a treat and not share it with everybody. I'm getting it. I'm getting it. I've got to get it.

Starting point is 02:28:56 There we go. Okay. So, yeah, that looks like shit. Yeah. That looks like lazily AI generated garbage. Yeah,

Starting point is 02:29:04 if you asked AI to generate a crest for a U.S. Law enforcement agency. It's the most basic that could possibly be. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Oh, well. National Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Starting point is 02:29:16 Nice. Always good when you throw National in front of any acronym. That's never turned out bad. As many people have shared with me, several television shows had already come up with the idea of rebranding ICE as nice. I don't think this is going to stop them. Moving on, the DOJ said that it is suing Denver for infringing the Second Amendment. This pertains to their assault weapon ban, which bans a lot of semi-automatic rifles, including AR-15s. interesting kind of precedent for DOJ behavior in that obviously lots of states have assault

Starting point is 02:29:52 weapons bans and previously we have not seen the DOJ intervene against those and there are a few cases about them on the way Supreme Court has shown any particular desire to urge to get to them. Yeah, this has been an interesting thing for a while is that even as the Republican, the right has had control of the Supreme Court for years now, They have shown a distinct unwillingness to visit the matter of, like, assault weapons and, like, magazine capacity bans. Yeah. As well as, because there's definitely been some folks, this is less popular, but some folks on the

Starting point is 02:30:30 pro-gun side who want them to look at, like, state-level restrictions on, like, you have to, like, waiting periods and stuff. And it's just kind of been this detente that's existed where, like, they have not pushed too far in a certain direction to, like, limit what blue states can do with their gun control. And if they are, that's an interesting shift. Yeah. It's interesting that this has gone after the, it's a civil rights. It's through the civil rights division, right?

Starting point is 02:30:59 I guess they're using the Heller precedent, right, which was the last time. And it was, Heller wasn't the last time. The previous one was Bruin. Yeah, yeah, so, yeah, yeah, Bruin. The Bruin decision, which was the last time that the Supreme Court really made a major change to national firearms rules, right? It's interesting they're going off to Denver and not, like, for instance, California. Well, Denver has a specific, they're specifically banned VAR-15, as opposed to California doesn't ban any specific guns.

Starting point is 02:31:28 They ban features on firearms. So I suspect that would be why is that Denver is going, Colorado's going after this specific firearm that, and the argument that's going to be made is that the AR-15 is the most commonly available like rifle. Yeah. Like it's absolutely the equivalent of a musket in its day is the argument that they will be making because I've, Clarence Thomas has made that argument before. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:31:54 So California never tried to ban AR-15s. They just made it a giant pain in the ass to own them. And that's a lot, I think, safer from this sort of attack, although I guess we'll see, you know. Denver's assault weapons ban is not the same as California's, but nor does it ban A.R. 15 by name. I'm just reading from the Denver Municipal Code Section 38130. The categories, or the way it defines, assault weapon is a semi-automatic center-fire rifle with a detachable magazine capacity at 21 rounds or higher. That's subsequent legislation after that, which further

Starting point is 02:32:34 limits magazine capacity in Colorado. All semi-automatic shotguns that can take more than six cartridges and or have a folding stock or a weapon which can be converted into one of those things. So that's actually a pretty, it's not the same as a California ban. It's interesting to see them picking this one. It's also pretty old. Denver started its assault weapons ban story. It's been through the courts quite a few times, but this begins in 1989. But yeah, it's an interesting sort of area that we'll keep tabs on.

Starting point is 02:33:09 Yeah, we'll keep tech because there's a couple big gun things. going in front of the Supreme Court this year, right? Like earlier in March, the court heard arguments on the United States versus Hamani, which was a case about the legality of basically if you're using a drug that is illegal, even if it's like a drug, even if it's marijuana and it's legal at the state level, if it's like federally illegal, you cannot possess own, do anything with guns, right? Yeah. And that's not really constitutional because the Second Amendment, like it or not, is like a civil right.

Starting point is 02:33:41 Yeah. And the idea that, like, you lose a civil right because you're, like, ingested a substance at some point is, like, a wildly dangerous and un-goyal, anyway, whatever. It's the kind of thing that just, again, courts have refused to sort of take seriously, even though everyone's known, there's very thin precedence. So the fact that the Supreme Court is finally hearing arguments on this is really interesting. This is a case of a guy who had both marijuana and cocaine on him when he got busted. And, yeah. So we'll also cover that case. But there's a lot of,

Starting point is 02:34:13 going to be a lot of interesting gun stuff happening this year. Not all of it bad, because honestly, if the Supreme Court were to rule that like, no, you can't say someone can't own a gun just because they smoked pot. I would say that's a net win.

Starting point is 02:34:27 But obviously there's a lot of, you know, violations of states' rights and whatnot that's going to be, I'm sure, a part of this too. It'll be a messy summer for that. But this is going to be some major stories this year. Yeah, yeah, I think we'll certainly see some movement here. Border War Construction crews destroyed an intaglio sacred to the autumn people. The 7-year-old Las Playa's Intaglio sacred site is irreparably damaged,

Starting point is 02:34:55 despite being very well recorded and having been identified to construction crews by cultural monitors. Ton Autumn chairman Verlon Jose said, quote, this was a devastating and entirely avoidable loss. there is nothing more important than our history, which is what makes us who we are as autumn. The site was also an irreparable piece of the United States history. One, none of us can ever get back. The nation's leaders have and will continue to meet with Senior Department of Homeland Security officials to obtain more information and to communicate the nation's absolute insistent so this cannot happen again.

Starting point is 02:35:32 And then, finally from me, the United States State Department has approved the sale of J-DAMS to Ukraine. which is a significant increase in their capacity, right? JDM, if you aren't familiar, stands for Joint Direct Attack Munition, I think. Big bomb. Like, it's a guided bomb. It can either be a bomb that comes guided or you can change a different munition

Starting point is 02:35:55 to make it become guided. These are packages, right? Like, these are kits that you take... So you have, like, a bomb of various sizes because they can range, and you, like, basically apply this kit to them and it makes it into a guided munition, right? So you can have whatever kind of explosive package you want

Starting point is 02:36:15 and you can convert it into a guided munition that you then drop or throw or whatever via whichever platform you happen to be using. Yeah, these are like aircraft fired, right? Yes. Yes. In these case, their extended range tail kit. It's not the bomb itself,

Starting point is 02:36:34 but the thing that allows the bomb to be delivered to a target. Right. Again, this is a package. You have a bomb that's a dumb explosive and this is the thing that you put onto it that allows it to be like a smart munition that is targeted. Like it's an air to surface munition. Generally they're like a thousand or two thousand pound warheads, I think for the most part. Yeah, I guess in this case it would depend on whatever the warhead is, right? But like there's 500 pound ones. Like there's a variety of sizes. Obviously, the Ukrainians have used many of their long-range assets to attack Russia, inside Russia. Previously, this has been something the United States had kind of drawn a line at

Starting point is 02:37:20 that seems to no longer be the case. This will obviously also be a massive contract right there. The principal contractor here is going to be Boeing, who are located in St. Louis, and the estimated total cost is about a third of a billion dollars. So, 373 million, to be exact. There's been like a big push in a couple of different states to increase munition production, and it has been very uneven in terms of how it's worked so far. They've encountered a lot of issues scaling up production to the level they need. I'm not convinced in our ability to actually, like, meet this at the time frame being proposed, but we'll see.

Starting point is 02:37:56 That's, that's, I've caught, I've been reporting on that a couple of times so far this year. Yeah. The munition shortage and our issues in scaling up production, I'll probably do something later this year, like a more detailed look at like what the pitfalls have been. But it's actually surprisingly hard just because they say we're putting this much money into, you know, creating these facilities or encouraging the production to scale up. It's not necessarily that easy to actually do that. Of course, the State Department says there will be no adverse impact on US defense readiness as a result of this proposed sale. I don't see why there would. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:38:30 That's what they're going to say. These are standoff munitions. The U.S. military is not short on them for our purposes. But like the shit that we're getting cleaned out on primarily is, is not, like this is not the main thing. I mean, we're definitely being stretched, but this is not the main thing. It's, it's, uh, sidewinders. It's like our cruise missiles and it's our, our interceptor missiles are like the big things that we're, we're straining on right now. Speaking of on May 1st, President Trump, quote unquote, joked. That's how most people are referring to this. Joked that we will be, quote, unquote, taking over. Cuba almost immediately.

Starting point is 02:39:07 Great. After finishing with Iran, sounds real. He has made previous comments to this effect the past few months. Yeah, his joke was that Abraham Lincoln would stop on the way back from Iran, right, and park off 100 yards off the coast of Cuba,

Starting point is 02:39:21 and they would immediately surrender. Just kind of knock that out. Yeah, I mean, we're going to get onto this, but this is not the only thing pointing towards Cuba right now. I have trouble knowing how this is going to go, Because obviously, like, Venezuela was the best case scenario for them. Like, Maduro was not personally popular. And he had a, like, the apparatus below him was more than happy to just kind of, like,

Starting point is 02:39:45 everyone move up a step and be nicer to the U.S. on paper. Like, whereas Iran, that's certainly not how anything has worked out because you had this whole state has been built for the last 60 years to endure casualties without, like, losing operational capacity or its ability to resist. Yeah. Cuba's not really quite like either government, and I don't know what's going to happen. You know, on one hand, it is a country that's exhausted by decades of sanctions and exhausted by, you know, what has become after Venezuela, since they're no longer sending fuel to Cuba, like, their fuel crisis is just devastating. I don't know. Maybe it is a case where the

Starting point is 02:40:25 government would capitulate fairly quickly, and then you just kind of have the, okay, what happens now? Question, like the humanitarian issue, which I'm sure would be very. I'm sure you'd get a lot of like grifters getting floated in there by the Trump administration. It would not be a positive situation. Or, you know, is this a thing where there would be even as exhausted as people are immediate and like vicious resistance to any attempt by the U.S. to assert its will politically over there? I have no idea.

Starting point is 02:40:57 And the other thing is that their military, it's more where, when Israelis is at than where We're around to say, right? They're outdated, sure, and defunded. It was the Cuban military that we were fighting in Venezuela to an extent. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. That said, like, it's also at the point at which those carrier groups are trying to do that in Cuba, they'll have been on almost twice as long as they're normally supposed to be out.

Starting point is 02:41:25 And who knows, like, what does done in Iran look like? What's that going to mean? Yeah, like, that war is not ending any time. sued. So, like, I mean, maybe he just tries to do it at the same time, but like, it's, yeah, I don't know, we're stuck in the mutual blockade right now, so. Impossible to know what he's going to do or what will happen as a result of it, other than I don't expect any of it's going to go very well. Nope, it's going to be a nightmare. In some sadder news, on Sunday, America's mayor, Rudy Giuliani was sent to the hospital

Starting point is 02:41:57 in critical condition. Giuliani is obviously a friend of the pod. We had her. on a few years ago to discuss sending weapons to Ukraine. We would love to have him back to discuss this recent sale. But unfortunately, Giuliani developed pneumonia after coming back from a trip to Paris and was put on a ventilator this weekend. It's always the young ones. Now, thankfully, he's been since we've taken off the ventilator. And spokesman Ted Goodman, who I do not like very much, announced that Giuliani's condition is stabilized and he is now breathing on his own. Last time we interacted with Goodman, it was specifically him pulling Giuliani away from us

Starting point is 02:42:34 after speaking with him for about 20 minutes. So I really don't care for Goodman personally. But I mean, if Giuliani ever wants to discuss weapons sales to Ukraine on the show again, I'm sure we would love to have him. Yeah. You know, Gare, I saved a little vial of the spittle that flew off of his mouth

Starting point is 02:42:54 when he and I were discussing weapon sales to Ukraine back at the RNC. And I keep it on me every day. And I'm holding it now, and I'm just thinking of you, Rudy. I'm just pulling for you, man. I'm pulling for you. We'll probably go on an ad break now. Okay, we are back.

Starting point is 02:43:27 Robert has just failed to execute a Simpsons-themed audio bit. I know. I wanted to play you Krusty the Clown saying, the Hanta virus. Because we're talking about the Hanta virus. Well, that's good enough. There. Your impression, I think, services. Does that work?

Starting point is 02:43:41 It's beautiful. I'm still sad. Eight people are suspected, at least eight people are suspected to be infected with a haunted virus strain. Five confirmed. Capable of human to human transmission. This is stemming from an outbreak on a cruise ship. We got to do something about the cruise ships.

Starting point is 02:44:00 Yeah. Yeah. Now, they're disease factories, first off. Like, everyone knows this happens in cruise ships, which is what we shouldn't have them. We don't know exactly how this went down. We know at least five. people are confirmed to have gotten the Hanta virus. Like they've done, and another three are suspected.

Starting point is 02:44:16 Confirmed testing. Three people are dead. Yes. And I think another couple are in serious conditions still. Yes. It's not known how they got it. It's possible that some of them were human-to-human transmission. Argentine officials believe that a Dutch couple contracted the virus while birdwatching at a landfill

Starting point is 02:44:35 where they may have been exposed to rat poop before boarding the cruise ship. What a series. Haunted virus has been a problem in Argentina for the past year. This has been a known problem. Oh, yep. Some human-to-human cases, there's multiple strains there. Now, so far, three people are suspected to have died from the virus, while three others have been evacuated to Europe from the cruise ship for treatment.

Starting point is 02:45:00 To be clear, it's not, because this is what I'd read. It's a strain that can be transmitted human-to-human. But they don't know how everyone who got it got it. They don't know that everyone who got it was human to human or that they didn't all just get exposed to the same droppings. But it's the Ande's the Andean strain that can transfer human to human. It's a problem, but probably it'll be fine, right, Garrison? Well, the World Health Organization's top epidemic expert Maria Van Kerkhov has cautioned, quote, This is not the next COVID, but it is a serious infectious disease.

Starting point is 02:45:38 Most people will never be exposed to this, unquote. and Reuters included a statement from the World Health Organization in their reporting. They say that the risk to the public remains low and that the variant detected among passengers can be spread between humans only through close, prolonged contact, unquote. Now, there is contact tracing currently in effect by officials in South Africa and Switzerland, specifically, who are tracking a few people that departed the ship. Many others are still on the ship, which is set to land either at Spain or some of the Canary Islands around Spain in a few days. That's what we know. That's what we know so far.

Starting point is 02:46:19 Sure. Yeah. This is changing like literally by the hour. So it's possible by the time you listen to this, there'll be a whole bunch of more information about what's happened. But that is the current situation as of Wednesday afternoon. Yeah. And I think we can also say definitively that if you want to avoid the haunt of virus, Like the number one step you can take is not getting on a plague ship.

Starting point is 02:46:41 Yeah. Or hanging out on a landfill. Landfill to cruise ship is a series. Yeah. We have the technology to avoid this. Speaking of rat poop on Wednesday, MS Now, my favorite outlet, reported that the FBI is investigating leaks to the Atlantic journalist who published that story about Cash Patel's

Starting point is 02:47:08 drinking habits and absences from his job, a story that the FBI is previously called false, but now is launching a criminal leak investigation into. These investigations typically focus on leaking class had information, which does not appear

Starting point is 02:47:25 to be a factor in this Atlantic article. Patel is also suing the Atlantic for defamation for like $250 million. And now through this investigation, the FBI may be able to seize the journalist's digital records. The FBI is denied, though, that this investigation exists.

Starting point is 02:47:45 And a few hours ago, the Atlantic journalist published a follow-up story, which we should mention, that Cash Mattel has been giving away customized whiskey flasks, like bottles, full of whiskey. It's great. It's Woodford Reserve is what it is. It's a Woodford Reserve bottle. Yeah, he's got his own bottle of Woodford Reserve. Yeah, he's getting what Costco has. Yeah, he's getting like a thoroughly mediocre, like, middling bourbon with his name on it,

Starting point is 02:48:14 which is definitely something an alcoholic doesn't have. Like, definitely a normal non-alcoholic thing to do is to have like a $30 bottle of bourbon with your name on it that you hand out to strangers at work. That's the thing alcoholics don't do. Yeah, it's not great. This is not a great revelation. This investigation, if real, very, very dangerous, right? It's really, really bad thing to happen, to have this clearly, like, personally motivated weaponization of the FBI against a journalist going through social media records, databases, digital records. Very worrying, but also Cash Patel funny.

Starting point is 02:48:58 Yeah, but yeah, it is, it, Cash Patel is this fascinating, like, well, this is, should, certainly, illegal, incredibly dangerous thing to have the FBI director doing. And like, what a ridiculous man. What's just a fundamentally ridiculous guy. I don't know what else to say. Meanwhile, in the broad world of things falling apart, Spirit Airlines has fallen. It is effectively no more. RAP.

Starting point is 02:49:28 Pouring one out, specifically a personalized bottle of Woodford Reserve is what I'm pulling out for Spirit Air. Airlines. So Spirit Airlines, I mean, has been in financial trouble for a bit, but it has now filed for bankruptcy. It has grounded all of its planes and fired everyone. So it is gone. And it is gone very, very suddenly. This is not something that was, you know, like there had been long-going negotiations, not long-going, but there have been negotiations with the Trump administration to try to arrange a bailout. But they just kind of woke up one morning and sent everyone a letter that said, you're fired. and canceled all the planes, which left a whole bunch of people stranded. Not ideal.

Starting point is 02:50:10 Yeah, and this is a real catastrophe for a lot of people, because there are a bunch of routes that Spirit was doing, that there just isn't really coverage of for anything else. And it's also one of the few of these sort of, these bunch of airlines are getting just hammered by the increase in fuel prices. For people who don't know aviation stuff, as much as airplane companies complain about like the cost of labor, as they like horrifically exploit flight attendants.

Starting point is 02:50:35 The actual most expensive part of flying is fuel. And as fuel prices have skyrocketed, specifically jet fuel prices have skyrocketed, that is taking an absolutely enormous hit out of the bottom line of these companies. And companies that were sort of just barely getting along and operated on low margins are getting hit really badly. And this is something that's not just a spirit airlines thing.

Starting point is 02:50:58 This is happening to airlines across the world. It's particularly intense in South and East Asia right now, where a huge number of their airlines are operating in this kind of like, they call it like emergency management where they've like significantly reduced the amount of flights that they're doing.

Starting point is 02:51:17 The cases like Korean Air, their routes from, you know, for example, like sold in New York are operating on 200% price increases. This has been going on for a while. Spirit is the first big American one to just go out completely. there are reports that Trump personally really wanted to save Spirit Airlines for kind of weird personal reasons.

Starting point is 02:51:46 Yeah, I can see that. Yeah. But, I mean, it's Spirit also, a part of like, why it has fallen apart is that it's been a victim of its own success. Like Spirit introduced to the airline industry, the idea of like, No, everyone should be paying for a bag and for a drink for every single thing. We should financialize every single aspect of the airline, of the flying process that we can. And as a result, like, they stopped being particularly cheap and they stopped working any different from any of the other airlines. So there was not really much of a reason to go with spirit as opposed to any of the slightly nicer airlines anymore.

Starting point is 02:52:29 You know, like this. I mean, I'm not surprised that they are. falling. Definitely like the fuel strike is what has been the death blow to them, but they've been in trouble for a little while. Yeah. And because like we've known that they've been in trouble, the Trump administration negotiations, apparently the stumbling block was that the U.S. plan was to give them like $500 million, but it would involve buying most of their stock. And the rest of the airline industry was like absolutely not. We're not doing a bailout for just one company instead of an industry-wide one.

Starting point is 02:53:06 And so they started putting pressure. And then Trump was apparently looking at using the Defense Production Act for this, but the Department of Defense finally found a Defense Production Act thing that Trump wants to do that they were like absolutely not. Like we are simply not doing national security. Like we finally found, I've been talking about this in terror episodes for a long time, where we've been looking for the limit of the president's ability to go, this is the national security concern.

Starting point is 02:53:30 And apparently the limit is by. East Spirit Airlines. That's funny because it is a time when the U.S. is flying a lot of stuff around the world. Like the airlift to Iran has been bonkers. Yeah. Would have been fun to see spirit. The one kind of final note I want to talk about is that there's been a lot of blaming of this from the administration. And, you know, there's even been some of this in places like Salon where there's been a lot of blame on the Biden administration's antitrust.

Starting point is 02:54:02 Unit, because in 2022, there had been an attempt by Spirit Airlines to, like, merge with JetBlue, which is like a slightly nicer airline. There's a lot of people going, oh, well, they wouldn't have gone out of business if they'd been allowed to you the merger. The Biden administration antitrust people were like, this is obviously a competition issue. And that's, yeah, maybe kind of true, but it's also like, it's not clear to me that like a Jet Blue Spirit airline wouldn't also be in really bad shape right now. Yeah, totally. Yeah. I think the thing about competition, right, is that sometimes you go out of business. And I know this is something that, like, business people absolutely despise and, like, promontical people absolutely despise. But, like, in theory, if you are a supporter of the free market, that means sometimes the firms go under. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:54:50 And they're all very mad about this. We especially airlines. Lots of airlines die out. That's why Madman, you know, like, look at all the dead airlines. madman. It's not an unheard of thing. It's a difficult business. Yeah. Yeah. And that's like, why you've gotten the degree of monopoly you already have in the airline industry is that these companies sort of bought up the carcasses and like, you know, did all of these very monopolistic mergers. So now you just have this thing where like, yeah, flying absolutely sucks because it's all

Starting point is 02:55:20 just these like, oh God, there's some economics term for it that I'm forgetting right now. But it's all of these sets of monopolies that have like divided up the country into their own basically personal fiefdoms. And yeah, that sucks. And it's why being on an airplane sucks shit. And opposing monopolies is not the reason that we're here. It's the main reason that we are here right now with Spirit Airlines dead is that the president of the United States unilaterally decided he was going to fight a war against Iran. Yeah. I guess technically bilaterally because B.B. decided to his release.

Starting point is 02:55:52 But like, you know, the president of the United, the U.S. is mad dictator decided to fight a war and that's why this airline is gone. Yeah. But that's like the main thing. That's why it's gone like now in this way. Yeah, somebody needs to Photoshop like Spirit Airlines in heaven with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Just like holding hands together. Two beautiful souls lost too early. He's getting on one final, final flight.

Starting point is 02:56:21 Yeah. See you later, space cowboy. In other wonderful news, we're pivoting from spirits to ghosts. and we are pivoting to a very interesting piece of reporting from CNN, who has obtained polling data. That suggests that the president's new ballroom, which has expended significant political capital from an assassination attempt to attempt to get built,

Starting point is 02:56:51 is polling in terms of, quote, Americans who support or believe in new White House ballroom, is polling at 28%, which is low, than the percentage of Americans who believe in ghosts and one percent lower than the percentage of Americans who believe in telepathy? Americans love believing in ghosts. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:57:10 We do. We do love believing in ghosts. Well, ghost thing at 39% I was expecting. Telepathy. Usually it's higher than that. It could also be support ghosts, right? Like, that could be throwing people off. The phrasing is unclear.

Starting point is 02:57:24 I want me to believe in the ballroom. Like, do they believe it exists? Like, this is an odd... I have a lot of questions of the methodology. And the White House denia. Part of the frustration here is, I think, because this presentation is coming from noted enemy of the podcast, Harry Eaton, CNN's discount version of Steve Kornacki,

Starting point is 02:57:46 who is a noted, noted Kalshi supporter. Yeah. I do not like this man. And I think he manipulates data for entertainment. Yeah. No, he is not good. it is also worth noting, though, that, like, the opposition to the ballroom is also, like, it's about 28%.

Starting point is 02:58:06 Like, everyone hates it. It's somehow, it's lower than his approval rating, which is astonishing. It's really funny. It's like getting lower through the 30s and threatening to go below 30% and somehow the ballroom rating is worse, which is just astonishing. Yeah, I do want to talk to the people who still like him, but they really hate that ballroom. The people that support the war on Iran, but draw the line at the ballroom is a really disturbing character to me.

Starting point is 02:58:38 It's like, well, no, it's the converted never Trump Republican. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I don't know if I agree with that entirely, but yeah. Speaking of that ballroom, the Senate GOP has released a 72 billion reconciliation package to fund ICE and Border Patrol after their. funding was removed from the long fought after DHS funding package, which finally passed last week. Yay.

Starting point is 02:59:07 The Judiciary Committee and the Homeland Security Committee each released proposed bills, and this package can pass the Senate with a simple majority rather than 60 votes. There's also a small provision here for the ballroom, which I'll get to. But let's start with talking about the other funding. These bills appropriate over 22.2.2.2.000. $1.5 billion for U.S. Customs and Border Protection until September 30th, 20209 for hiring, paying, training, equipping agents, and necessary support staff, plus other necessary expenses for mission support, operations, and maintenance. I'll draw attention to an extra $3.5 billion,

Starting point is 02:59:48 allotted for, quote, procurement and integration of new non-intrusive inspection equipment, unquote, which they specify as AI tools to combat drug smuggling at ports of entry. Yeah, they've been on that one for a while. I'm guessing it will be their continued facial recognition or pattern recognition stuff. That's listed also in addition to this AI drug detection inspection tool. Because they also have this $3.5 billion going towards, quote, upgrades and procurement of border surveillance technologies and the deployment of technology relating to the biometric entry and exit system, unquote.

Starting point is 03:00:34 $38 billion is appropriated for ICE for, quote, hiring, paying, training, and equipping personnel, including officers, agents, investigators, attorneys, and support staff to carry out immigration enforcement activities, unquote. This funding also covers transportation costs, information technology, facility and fleet maintenance, and expanding coordination with local and state officials. both the DHS and the DOJ each get a few extra billion for various uses in these bills. But at the end of the judiciary bill, it allocates $1 billion of taxpayer dollars for security enhancements to the new White House ballroom.

Starting point is 03:01:13 This money would go to Secret Service, quote, for the purposes of security adjustments and upgrades, including within the perimeter fence of the White House compound, including above ground and below ground security features. unquote. Trump has touted the ballroom as being entirely funded by private donors, originally costing $200 million but ballooning to $400 million this year, which means that these security funds are greater than the total previously estimated cost of construction. What $1 billion versus $400 million. Now, these security funds do have a stated limitation. Quote, none of the funds made available under

Starting point is 03:01:53 this section may be used for non-security elements of the East Wing modernization project, which is what they call the ballroom. But what qualifies as security or non-security elements is not clear. Like, is bulletproof glass or reinforced walls a security element? Does paying contractors to make adjustments or enhancements to the building count as security elements? We don't know because this is, this is a lot of money. And this, again, comes after the Trump administration's deployment of the attempted assassination at the White House dinner to further the development of the ballroom. And now this bill includes extra funding for it in the wake of that. And it's unclear how exactly that money would be used if passed.

Starting point is 03:02:43 Hey, Garrison, my dear friend, you were thinking way too small in terms of what, like, the president just tried to use, just trying to use the Defense Production Act to buy. an airline so he could run it, right? Like, they're going to be like, yeah, I had to, like, put this gold, this gold lace on, like, this column is actually bullet deflecting. It's going to be like that kind of shit.

Starting point is 03:03:04 Like, that's just like the way this entire administration has operated. A lot of the construction could have security elements. Yeah. Well, this is already something that's been discussed at length in the National Trust of Historical

Starting point is 03:03:19 Preservation lawsuit against the construction, right? And essentially, the Trump administration has argued that the project in and of itself is an indivisible thing. The project is a security project and you can't break out the security from the ball having. Yes. And the judge has so far not agreed to that, right? But the Trump administration has argued that like the below ground hospital room,

Starting point is 03:03:48 security infrastructure, bomb shelter, etc. and the above-ground party-having room are, like, all one big security project. It should be one secured zone. Yeah, and that, like, you cannot, because, because in this case, the discussion is about the injunction, right, which paused construction. Yeah. So they're saying, we can't do the security construction only. We have to do all the construction because it's a contiguous hole.

Starting point is 03:04:17 So, like, that seems like it's relevant to this. Yeah, we will keep. Keep checking in on these reconciliation bills as they move through Congress. But first, we will go on this ad break and then discuss Iran and some of the Tuesday elections. We are back, back in the Strait of Hormuz, a place where we spend a lot of time these last few weeks. So I guess let's just try and take this in kind of chronological order because it's probably the best way to explain it. Iran has launched cruise missiles and drones at United States ships in the Strait of Hormuz. For a while there, Iranian news sources were claiming that they had hit or turned around U.S. vessels.

Starting point is 03:05:15 This does not appear to be true. St.Com certainly denied it, although some news networks did run with this, apparently based on what the Iranian government-aligned media were claiming. It seems that two United States destroyers did transit the strait, and they did receive very, of types of incoming fire from small boats, from missiles and from drones. Following that, a Maersk vessel sailed through the strait. The Alliance Fairfax is the United States flagged vessel and it receives assistance from the US military. And then the motor tanker anthem of Crowley Maritime also sailed through. Trump has called this assistance quote, Project Freedom. True thing. For the good of Iran, the Middle East and the United States, we have told these countries,

Starting point is 03:06:01 that we will guide their ships safely out of these restricted waterways so that they can freely and ably get on with their business. Again, these are ships from areas of the world that are not in any way involved with that which is currently taking place in the Middle East. I have told my representatives to inform them that we will use best efforts to get their ships and crews safely out the straight. Exactly what this meant was unclear when the president first truiced it, but what I've seen reported now is that the United States provides them on safe routes and then provided in at least two cases security detachment to go on board the ships. Despite this, a UKMTO still has reports of attacks,

Starting point is 03:06:45 and on Tuesday night it reported that one vessel had been hit. And so it does not seem that there has been like a universal ability to allow vessels to move through the strait. The United States also claims to have sunk seven small Iranian vessels in the street. Let's hear from Marco Rubio, where he's explaining a little bit about why the U.S. is doing this. And we're going to do it as a favor to the world. Understand this. This is a favor to the world because it's their ships that are stranded. It's their fuel supplies that are stranded.

Starting point is 03:07:15 By the way, it's their humanitarian aid destined for different countries in the world that's stranded in the Persian Gulf right now. It's the fertilizer that they need for their food and crops that's stranded in the not our fertilizer, their fertilizer. So we want to be helpful. And that's why the president stepped forward because we're the only ones that can. Frankly, we're the only ones that can.

Starting point is 03:07:34 So the United States, they're wanting to be helpful, help the world with their humanitarian aid. On Tuesday, the president then truth, based on the request of Pakistan and other countries, a tremendous military success that we have had during the campaign against the country of Iran and, additionally, the fact that great progress has been made toward a complete and final agreement

Starting point is 03:07:55 with representatives of Iran, we have mutually agreed that while the blockade will remain in place and will remain in full force and effect, Project Freedom, the movement of ships with Strait of Formoos, will be paused for a short period of time to see whether or not the agreement can be finalized and signed. So that was the 24-hour duration of Project Freedom. Rest and peace. Then this morning, the President truth, quote, assuming Iran agrees to give what has been agreed to, which is perhaps a big assumption, the already. Ready, legendary epic fury will be at an end. If they don't agree, the bombing starts, and it will be,

Starting point is 03:08:31 sadly, at a much higher level and intensity than it was before, President Donald J. Trump. The parties, according to Axios, not an outlet known for its accurate reporting, appear to be closing in on a 14-point deal. The reporting suggests that Iran has committed to a moratorium of 15 to 20 years on uranium enrichment, the United States would then lift sanctions and release frozen Iranian funds, which is a massive concession, and both sides would lift restrictions on passage

Starting point is 03:09:05 through the straightforward moves. However, hours after this was reported, a United States aircraft shut the rudder out of an Iranian motor tanker called the Hasna. They say they warned the ship, which was headed towards Iranian ports. It was empty at the time. It was heading toward Iranian ports, right?

Starting point is 03:09:23 Then we saw reporting from Al Jazeera reporter Ali Hashem that instructions have been sent to boats crossing the street. These instructions include, quote, priority of payment in Iran's national currency, issuance of guarantees in Iranian banks. Three of a country caused damage to Iran in the recent war. It must first pay the damages but for obtaining a passage permit. Countries that have sanctioned Iran or blocked Iran's money

Starting point is 03:09:48 are not allowed passage. For the correct title, Persian Gulf must have written on all documents. Five, noncompliance with the above result in seizure and a fine of 20% of the cargo value. So it is chaos in the Strait of Hormuz, right? Like we have at once Trump saying the US will escort ship through and then pausing the escorting of ships through and then the Iranians shooting at a commercial ship and then the United States shooting at an Iranian ship. The Iranian is asking for money, this time not in cryptocurrency. and the United States saying that we are about to reach a peace agreement.

Starting point is 03:10:25 This, of course, provides a lot of certainty, which markets love, and I'm sure this will result in the gas price not being nearly $7 a gallon here pretty soon. I also want to briefly talk about suicide dolphins. In a press conference, Iranian suicide dolphins were raised. Here's the question being asked. Can you kind of clarify these reports of kamikaze dolphins that we've heard about? I haven't heard the kamikaze dolphin thing. It's like sharks with laser beams, right?

Starting point is 03:10:59 No, it's not. And then if you could play Hegsses response as well. And I can't confirm or deny whether we have kamikaze dolphins, but I can confirm they don't, ultimately. Well, it's good we're ultimate on that. Yeah, so Hexs has pretty definitive on it right, having kamikaze dolphins. It did seem kind of weird that people reporting on this weren't aware. The United States has had a marine mammal program for... Yeah.

Starting point is 03:11:24 Yeah, yeah. Like, you can see them in San Diego. Yep. Yeah. They are not, to my knowledge, like, used in a Kamakazi capacity. No. Mainly because it's just cheaper to do that with drones. The U.S. military did briefly experiment with bats, which turned out to be a terrible

Starting point is 03:11:37 idea because the bats would just fly back to you. The boomerang bat. This nearly wiped out a huge portion of U.S. Central Command and it... Yeah. Great stuff. Yeah. I mean, I'm pretty sure that Iran doesn't have suicide dolphins either, but people are asking that.

Starting point is 03:11:54 Again, it is just cheaper. Unaliving dolphins. Unaliving dolphins, yeah, sure. One-way dolphins, how we refer to them if they were munitions, but it just doesn't. Is it a suicide dolphin if you're pressing the button? So, like, are you just blowing up a dolphin? No, it's not.

Starting point is 03:12:09 It's a murdered dolphin. Yeah, it's really unfair to the dolphin. It's not a kamikaze dolphin. It hasn't made that commitment. It's just a dolphin. It's a harming. I can't believe that those reporters would mess up such a basic fact. Yeah, well, yeah, there are people on the suicide dolphin beat really need to get back to journalism 101.

Starting point is 03:12:29 Shot. All right, talking about the ocean, Marco Rubio has visited Southcom and posed for a photo with General Francis L. Donovan in front of what is very obviously a large map of Cuba. Hell yeah. I think what you meant to say is DJ Mark Rubio, but continue. Yeah. The map is titled Cuba reference map. That's not good. Yeah, like in terms of like subtle signaling.

Starting point is 03:12:56 That's not good. Rubio also claimed at a press conference that Operation Epic Fury was over. The Operation Epic Fury is concluded. We achieved the objectives of that operation. I'm not going to, you know, we're not cheering for an additional situation to occur. We would prefer the path of peace. what the president would prefer is a deal. He would prefer to sit down, work out a memorandum of understanding for future negotiations

Starting point is 03:13:20 that touches on all the key topics that have to be addressed, a full opening of the straits so the world can get back to normal, and he preferred that that be negotiated through the route that Steve and Jared have been working and that all of us have been supporting. That's the route he prefers. That is so far not the route that Iran has chosen. And so the result has been that the United States has to do something about the fact that we're the only nation on Earth that can do anything to open up a lane

Starting point is 03:13:40 within the Straits of Hormuz to get product and to rescue. you these people that are trapped in there. And that's what we're undergoing now. So let's see. The end of Operation Epic Fury and the beginning of the United States, doing something to open up a lane in the straight of all moods. Operation is unclear. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:14:01 The goals of which are unclear. But apparently the first one succeeded. So congrats to all the Epic Fury people listening. Operation, it's going great. things are really good and we're just minutes away from figuring out what we're doing next really thrilled for when we invade Cuba

Starting point is 03:14:21 and it's like eporation bacon awesome sauce. Yeah. Yeah, right, like epic bacon is he's easy. Oh boy. Before we close, there's a few shorter things that we should mention. Let's first by turning to, as Vivek

Starting point is 03:14:37 Ramoswamy has said, not the best state in the nation, Ohio. Which Not the best state in the nation Which for some reason Vefek Ramoswavi is the GOP candidate for governor As of Tuesday

Starting point is 03:14:51 He has deep connections to Ohio Where he's lived for how long Garrison? I'm sure just long enough to be on the ballot Like a few days Like a week or two Yeah It's a good state

Starting point is 03:15:03 I can't say it's the best state Incredible stuff High praise High accurate praise We will be following this because if Vivek loses to the Democrat, that would be an interesting indicator, not just of support for Trump and Maga, but also how annoying Vivek Ramoswamy is. But Robert, there's someone that you would like to briefly mention as well. Yes. So in addition to Vivek doing so well last night, another candidate who did pretty well is Brian Poindexter.

Starting point is 03:15:38 Brian is running for, well, was running and won the Democratic primary for the Ohio 7th District seat. And he will be running against the Republican incumbent in that district, a guy named Max Miller, who initially ran for and won his way into Congress in 2022. He was a former aide of President Trump and a bit of a sleaze back. if I'm going to be honest with you, if I'm going to talk about this guy. I mean, first off, he's, he's like definitely a nepo baby. His grandfather was Samuel H. Miller, who was the former co-chair emeritus of Forest City Realty Trust, which was acquired in this big real estate deal in 2018 for $6.8 billion. So he is like a kid who came from a family with a shitload of real estate money and wound up

Starting point is 03:16:33 working in the Trump White House and then got into Congress where he has a 14% lifetime voting score from the AFL-CIO when he was initially running for Congress and he was asked, because I found a fun interview with him where he was asked to give like his elevator pitch. And I just have to read, this was Max Miller's elevator pitch for why he should be in Congress. So with my background in the Marine Corps in the infantry and six years on the reserve side and the work and working for Senator Rubio and my. my time in the White House, I've been in these meetings with the president and other cabinet secretaries. And the reason why I'm running for office is because of what I saw, what I was there,

Starting point is 03:17:11 we send people to Washington, D.C. to represent our values. And for the most part, what we see is regular Americans as they don't. They're so out of touch with reality. And for the most part, these individuals only go there to benefit their own way of life. And they lose sight of everyone that they were sent there to protect. And I saw that throughout the four years that I was in Washington, D.C., in the White House. And it was extremely eye-opening. And that's why I'm running to be the Republican It's amazing. You are asked, okay, what's your elevator pitch? Why should you be in office? That's an amazingly incoherent bit of babble. Yeah. So he was asked like, what do you think you're the right guy? And he was like, well, I've been in North Korea. I've been in Iraq, bouncing between al-Assad and Erbil.

Starting point is 03:17:51 I was in Afghanistan negotiating with foreign delegations on behalf of the president. And I've been in the pressure cooker. And again, he was like a Trump aide. Like, he's like followed around and meetings were more important people were making decisions. Like that was this, he was like a coffee boy, yeah. And no, well. Again, walking around with the president, not making any decisions. He was like a diet Coke boy more than anything. Like those were bad negotiations.

Starting point is 03:18:18 Yes. Yes. The center of your firing gets him to pin down and like, what is the issue you most want to deal with? And he's like, top issue, hands down is inflation and the economy. And like, he talks about how like there's $67 billion worth of credit card debt. that Americans are, and that's his top issue. So what does he do once he's in power? First off, none of the bills that he co-sponsored in his first year in Congress had anything to do. All I made it

Starting point is 03:18:44 through is like the first year and a half, but none of those had anything to do with credit card bills, inflation, or the economy. And the main bill that he is like can attach his name to that he co-authored was the Full House Act to End Unfair Taxation of Gambling Losses. So, Not a great guy. So anyway, while I'm going through this interview, there's a moment here where the interviewer's like, hey, so your girlfriend recently made some allegations against you? How did we see that one coming? So here's what Taylor Poplars, that's the journalist here, says. Your ex-girlfriend, Stephanie Grisham, who also worked in the Trump White House with you, she has alleged some pretty serious things related to you, that you slapped her, pushed her through a dog toy at her,

Starting point is 03:19:32 cheated on her, and I know you've denied all that. You filed a lawsuit at one point. Do you still deny all that? His response was, to be clear, we're handling this in litigation, and her motion to dismiss was denied, so the case will be heard. So we've already won our first battle in that hurdle. And to be clear, she herself has never articulated the allegations. It was all hearsay by second and third-party sources.

Starting point is 03:19:52 Anyway, that's not the only scandal this guy has on his record. I just briefly looked into him, and I found not only those allegations from this former staffer that he had become violent in the White House and that the president was aware of that and was like

Starting point is 03:20:08 that's kind of fucked up like he and the prison on Melania where both saw him become violent and we're like oh God that's kind of fucked up

Starting point is 03:20:15 yeah but didn't actually do anything like it's really messed up like the allegations here at least really messed up yeah that's not the only person who has made allegations against him

Starting point is 03:20:24 he in his like messy divorce his ex-wife has alleged that he has gotten violent with her he has countered and said that she got violent with him, but then his representatives had to admit that their client fabricated testimony in court documents

Starting point is 03:20:40 in order to obtain a protection order against his ex-wife. So this dude is a real piece of shit. Yeah. Like Max Miller, bonafide trash person. And currently he's up by about five points in this election in Ohio 7 against Poindexter.

Starting point is 03:20:56 So it's very unclear how are things going to actually go? but I just looking at how sleazy this guy is and how soft his actual base of organic support seems to be. This is one where I kind of suspect maybe once you actually get a decent candidate. And Pointexter really seems to be like he's a guy who spent pretty much his entire year as like a union metal worker and is a reasonably good campaigner. He's been a five term councilman in Brook Park, Ohio. Like he's he's someone who like this isn't a dilettante in politics. but also has like a real light. I don't know.

Starting point is 03:21:32 I could see this being something that like maybe the Democrats are actually able to flip here. If Poindexter proves to be as good at campaigning in like an open election as he was in the primary, I'm kind of bullish about him. Anyway, it's something to watch.

Starting point is 03:21:47 Yeah. Last big story, as a part of the ongoing lawsuit, Louisiana, the FDA, on May 1st, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals granted a temporary ban on the remote prescription and mailed delivery of the abortion pill Mithopristone.

Starting point is 03:22:04 Last October, Louisiana brought this case against the FDA for a Biden-era regulation allowing telehealth prescription and mail order access to the drug, which Louisiana claimed was unsafe and facilitated illegal abortions in the state. A district court had previously agreed that Louisiana was likely to win its challenge, but it did not grant the state's requested stay on the regulation. In fact, the lower court put the entire case on hold because last year, RFK Jr. announced an FDA review of Mithopristone and its quote unquote reported adverse effects, with RFK Jr. specifically mentioning in his announcement that, quote,

Starting point is 03:22:48 the Biden administration removed Mitha Pristone's in-person dispensing rule without studying the safety risks, on quote. Despite the case being put on hold due to the FDA's review, Louisiana appealed the lower court's decision to decline a stay on mail order with the Pristone. And last week, the Fifth Circuit ruled in the state's favor, temporarily reinstating this in-person dispensing requirement while the case continues. But then on May 4th, the Supreme Court restored remote prescription and mail order access to Mythopristone by blocking the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling. But this stay by the Supreme Court is only in effect until

Starting point is 03:23:29 Monday, May 11th. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court will consider responses from both parties and then issue a subsequent ruling. The majority of abortions in the United States are now administered through abortion medication like Mythopristone, and according to a study published in 2025, one quarter of abortions are now done through telehealth services, double the rate from before the overturning of Dobbs. Other Republican states like Texas and Missouri are also engaged in other efforts to restrict access to Timothy Prostone nationwide. Yeah. We'll keep up on this

Starting point is 03:24:04 as the Supreme Court issues a more definitive ruling in the near future. The last thing I want to mention very, ever so briefly, big news in Marx land. Biggest update in Marxism in a while. Oh, boy. Oh, good. New Marxism just dropped? On Monday, the Secret Service shot

Starting point is 03:24:24 a 45-year-old man from Texas named Michael Mark Spelt the same way. Yeah, dear it. Who was allegedly concealed carrying a SIG P65. A P-365? Okay. P-365. Well, between the White House and Washington Monument,

Starting point is 03:24:44 Secret Service say they tried to approach the man after noticing the imprint of a gun. The man then fled and allegedly fired towards the agents who returned fire, wounding Mr. Marks. while in the ambulance, he allegedly said, quote, fuck the White House and kill me, kill me, kill me, unquote. Oh dear. A 15-year-old was also shot during this incident, and at first, Secret Service claimed that the armed man shot the kid,

Starting point is 03:25:10 but they later reneged that claim, though after Marx was charged, U.S. attorney Janine Piro repeated this claim, saying that he, quote, shot an innocent bystander who was simply, crossing the street with his family, unquote. After the shooting, Chris McDonnell, a congressional affairs official with Secret Service told Congress that there was no indication that the man was targeting anyone inside the executive

Starting point is 03:25:36 complex, writing, quote, President Trump was not in any danger. So we don't actually know what happened here. Like, was this just some weirdo conceal carrying, presumably illegally, right? Illegally, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, just because he's, does that? Or was he, did he have, was he trying to commit? Doesn't, it doesn't make much sense right now.

Starting point is 03:25:59 Yeah. No, it's unclear what his intention was at this point. But then after being shot by Secret Service, that's when he expressed, fuck the White House, kill me, kill me, kill me. But there's no indication he was targeting any elected official. Sure. But did allegedly shoot at Secret Service as they tried to approach and chase him. Interesting. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:26:22 Yeah. Anyway. Cool. I mean, it's bad, but you know. Yeah. That's it for us. Here, add it could happen here. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:26:34 We reported the news. Great. Put a trans scroll on your couch. If you want to send us an email, specifically pretending to tips about news, you can do so. Coolzone tips at proton.b. We reported the news.

Starting point is 03:26:50 Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Coolzone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

Starting point is 03:27:21 Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite, unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes.

Starting point is 03:27:42 Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year.

Starting point is 03:28:09 Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the I-Hard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the Look Back at a podcast. From 1979, that was a big moment for me. Eighty-four was big to me. Sam J. And I'm Alex English. Each episode, we pick a year, unpack what went down, and try to make sense of how we survived it with our friends, fellow comedians, and favorite authors. Like Mark Lamont Hill on the 80s. It was a wild year. I don't think there's a more important year for black people. Listen to look back at it on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 03:28:51 Hey, what's good, y'all? You're listening to Learn the Hard Way 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're 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 IHard radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

Starting point is 03:29:27 You know,

Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 231

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