Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 239

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Starting point is 00:02:43 if you're listening with the advertisements, which you probably are, about six minutes in, there is a mistake. I'm sure it's just like a misspeaking, but a unionist, of course, in the Irish context is someone who wants the union of what is today, Northern Ireland, with the United Kingdom to continue. It is not someone who wants the Union of Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland in an independent Irish Republic void of any British rule. I wanted to flag that.

Starting point is 00:03:12 We could maybe draw a difference between loyernists and unionists, but the important thing here is that the unionist in the Irish context is not a Republican. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the show. It's me, James today, and I'm very lucky to be joined by Eliyub, who's a UK-based researcher and journalist with an academic background of memory studies

Starting point is 00:03:33 and a particular focus at the moment on the far right. Also the host of the Fire in East Times podcast, which is an excellent podcast. I've been a guest on that one before. Yeah. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. the more visible acts of bigotry that we saw in Belfast, a couple of weeks back, and the response throughout the UK.

Starting point is 00:04:09 And I guess also the discourse around it online, which a lot of online discourse is generated by Americans in America. It ends up being divorced from context because of that. So I guess to begin with, right, like, I know I'm personally intimately familiar with the English far right, but let's maybe distinguish a little bit between the far right in northern, Island and the far right in England. And I'm saying England consciously here, not the UK. I'm wondering if I should pause here to define terms for people. Do you think most people

Starting point is 00:04:41 have an operating analysis? I guess we can at least say the whole four nations and one nation kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. So I'll just break it down. Like, Britishness is a national identity. If we talk about the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, we're talking about England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. There are four nations within that, right? If you want to know what a nation is, you can read Ben Anderson. But I like Linda Colley's analysis of Britishness, which suggested it is Englishness exported.

Starting point is 00:05:13 Like the Britishness is essentially an English colonial project that co-ops elites in Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland and bides people within those countries against each other. So given that, and I've already recommended two academic books, which we're five minutes in. Perhaps you could explain this distinction between like Northern Ireland and England as as it pertains to the far right. So there are similarities in the sense that a lot of this is transnational these days anyway.

Starting point is 00:05:42 A lot of it is online based. There are also a lot of reports of England-based far right agitators like, you know, most notoriously Tommy Robinson and whatnot. Yeah. Kind of almost visiting Northern Ireland and leaving overnight. They're just kind of like dipping their toes in a sense. So there are similarities there and the dominance of England cannot be

Starting point is 00:06:01 overlooked because it's still kind of like the the powerhouse or the capital of the UK is and just has this oversized influence right but also pretty important differences Northern Ireland I don't know how much we're going to get into the entire history of it but has had a different trajectory in terms of the fog right than than England

Starting point is 00:06:23 there is the added sectarian element there is the added whether you're pro-Ireland as in Republic of Ireland or whether you're pro-United Kingdom in UK and Ireland terms. This means a loyalist is someone who wants to remain in the UK and a unionist is someone who wants to, what, for Ireland to be reunified, basically. It can be confusing because a union and United Kingdom and whatever. Yeah. So there is that sectarian element.

Starting point is 00:06:48 Historically, the UK has one of the UK, as in British government, one of the ways it has faced what it sees as this national, not as threat by nationality. I mean, like Irish nationalist threat, which of course has grounds as well in Northern Ireland, particularly but not exclusively among Catholic communities. It has essentially armed and de facto armed these paramilitary groups that are today kind of a de facto mafia. Like for me, as the Lebanese, the pretty similarities with how sectarian elites operate in Lebanon. They have carved out parts of the, what is essentially the state there in parts of in parts of in different areas.

Starting point is 00:07:25 They even, to some extent, even provide services, you know, stuff like that. Again, not that dissimilar. I would say I would argue from how one might picture like a mafia. And so a lot of the violence that we're seeing today enacted against people of color is the same sort of rationale that was enacted against just like Catholic working classes not that long ago. And in many ways, that same kind of supremacist ideology has just been kind of transferred from one community against another one to another one,

Starting point is 00:07:56 but it doesn't mean that it's completely gone from the sort of like anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiments either. No, it's definitely not. Those things you don't see in England, you know, I mean, it's just not as prominent. There are like different dynamics here. I guess like, especially if you're watching from the outside, right, it can be easy to miss that because like, yes, in England,

Starting point is 00:08:14 every year in November, we symbolically burn a Catholic in effigy, right? I say we, the English as a tradition, but the anti-Catholic sentiment is not as present as it is in North-Sides. It's a completely different fish. You talked about like what I get into history and I do because I think that that's really important, right? Especially if we understand Britain as the beginning of the English colonial project and especially Ireland. I guess if we understand just to stick with conceptual clarity, the British Isles and especially the beginning of that colonial project in Ireland and to an extent in Scotland, then I think it helps with an understanding. analysis of this. And I think something you'd mentioned, which I really like the idea of is

Starting point is 00:08:56 when we talk about sectarianism as like a fixed point, we ignore how we got to sectarianization, right? And I think you're obviously very familiar with the British and the Lebanese context. Something you talk about with my grandmother, actually, who spent a good amount of time in Lebanon that overlaps with these things. But perhaps you could explain that to people, because I think it's very easy to come, especially the history of Ireland, Kwa, Island. with an S as a like a preset sectarian kind of situation. That's not really the case. Like a process occurred to get us to where we are.

Starting point is 00:09:31 Oh, yeah. I mean, kind of a simple way of explaining it, at least is how I do when I speak to like relatives, you know, is that no one is born, like, sure, they could be born into a Catholic or a Protestant family, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they therefore feel a certain way towards a member of that other community. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:09:49 That is a process. And so sectarianization is something that is crucially active. It is ongoing. Like it never stops. It cannot stop because it can otherwise like, again, using that simple example of like you have a baby that's born into a Catholic family and a baby that's born into a protest family, if you don't put them in a certain context that includes this thing that you call sectarianism,

Starting point is 00:10:14 they won't necessarily develop like hostile feelings towards the other baby. You see what I mean when they grow up? Yeah, yeah. Kind of like a simplified way of putting it. But sectarianization, whether in Lebanon, whether in Northern Ireland, whether in Bosnia, whether and then it gets complicated and you have added nuances whenever you add the different contexts, of course. Yeah. But is something that is active. As in like there are ruling elites that have a certain specific interest in maintaining the status quo in a certain way or in some cases worsening the status quo and so on.

Starting point is 00:10:44 It is directly intersected with things like capitalism, like the other types of supremacy. You cannot have in a sectarian society if you have like a very strong, let's say, welfare state where everyone is given the basics, where everyone has access to everything and you don't have these inequalities. And there are lots of case studies and studies, I mean, of the worst inequality gets, the more likely you are to get, like these secretarian tensions. So it doesn't come out of nowhere. People aren't just born like that. It's not just something that people are born with. They are raised in a certain society. They are sectarianized to view members of a different community in a certain way.

Starting point is 00:11:27 And also, most importantly, resources are allocated before one is born, often based on where you live. So there's a regionalism to it as well. But also, like in the case of Northern Ireland and in case of Lebanon, for that matter, based on sex and so on. Yeah. Your understanding of Lebanon perhaps gives you an interesting perspective to analyze this, right? because there's somewhat more formalized, to an extent it's not formalized in Ireland very much is,

Starting point is 00:11:55 like division of resources, allocation of state power even, that is sectarian. So, like, do you think that helps you analyze Northern Ireland? It does, because it's one of the things I always bring up because it takes everyone by surprise when I talk about sectarianism in Lebanon, which is that the average person isn't necessarily sectarian, and the sense that the average person doesn't necessarily think in sectarian terms. certainly not like their primary identity. In fact, it's a poll I keep on mentioning, I can send it to you if you want, but whenever you've had these pan-air poles across the region of,

Starting point is 00:12:28 the question would be something along the lines of like, do you primarily see yourself as being, let's say, Muslim, Christian, Druze, etc. Or as your nation, as your national identity. And the Lebanese and the Palestinians are often the ones that say, they're more likely to say, like first Lebanese or Palestinian and then Christian, Muslim, et cetera. Yeah. And with Palestinians can maybe more well-known,

Starting point is 00:12:48 story, like there's a cause. And so that cause has become the primary identity before even one is a Muslim, one is a Christian or so on. Yeah. In Lebanon, it takes people by surprise because Lebanon those who know anything about it is like, well, that's the sectarian place. That's where you have the president has to be Christian, the

Starting point is 00:13:04 marionite, the prime minister has to be Sunni Muslim and the Speaker of Parliament has to be a Shia Muslim, which is true. But it doesn't necessarily mean that they like the individual who's the president wakes up today and says, I'm going to act on behalf of Maronites. Yeah. It doesn't work. It's much messier than that. And most importantly, my personal beliefs in Lebanon, like I was raised in a Christian Maronite family, but if I was an atheist or whatever, it just does not matter as far as the state is concerned, because my legal status as a citizen is one that is a Maronite.

Starting point is 00:13:37 Yeah. And so it affects how I vote. It affects how I do certain things, whether certain services I have access to in certain, that and then it's like a region specific. And in Northern Ireland, that's kind of the thing that you see. Like, of course, there is a process by which certain communities are already separated in the sense of like you grew up in a majority Catholic area or you grew up in a Protestant majority area. Yeah. And in some cases, you may, depending on where you live, for example, parts of Belfast, you may not know a Protestant and or a Catholic. I mean, either up until a certain age, right, before you, you know, you're 16, you go to college or whatever it might be. Yeah. And those, of course, reinforce certain tendency. But most importantly, you might be a, you know, you grow up in a Protestant family, maybe middle class and whatnot.

Starting point is 00:14:18 but you don't share the politics of your neighborhoods, it doesn't necessarily then translate into that affecting the politics of the whole because there's something that's already in build there that's difficult because it's entrenched now. Yeah. And so it's both something that's entrenched, something that's difficult to change, and also something that can't stop at the same time. It has to be both.

Starting point is 00:14:38 Yeah, I think it's a very good analysis. Like, I guess like another example people cite for like, I guess the way these things can so rapidly, become entrenched. And like they can disappear, but it can become less important. Like if we look at the example of Rwanda, which is obviously a long way away from both those places. But being who to Tutsi or Twa, frustrates me a lot. The analysis of the Rwandan genocide overlooks the Tuar people. That's another topic, right? But they suffered some of the worst ravages of the genocide. That was such a fixed identity that became this alien identity, right? And even if individuals

Starting point is 00:15:14 were not buying into that increasingly opposed identities. Those identities were what would affect the outcomes of their lives, very clearly in 1994, right? And that is now less the case because, in part, the key to maintaining state power became decreasing those tensions or exporting those tensions in the case of Rwanda to the Congo, right? And we can talk about how we got there because it wasn't a great process. It isn't a great process, but it's a good analysis point for people. I guess. We've spoken about how these identities are so enshrined and how they're codified now. Because it's not the case, like you said, that everyone believes in this shit. And what we've

Starting point is 00:16:05 seen since what happened in Belfast is that the vast majority of people in the UK reject this shit, right? The vast majority of people. That's the other thing I do want to harp on. When people say, oh, this is Northern Irish groups in Belfast or whatever, it's a relatively small portion, even a relatively small portion of Protestants, even a relatively small portion of people who have strong loyalist feelings. Not all of those people are bigots. It is a relatively small group,

Starting point is 00:16:36 as you say, that is now somewhat linked to transnational hate networks. But the bulk of people think that that shit is absolutely repugnant, right? So should we talk a little bit about the backlash? Because I know you attended a massive protest, and also like half a dozen, a dozen fascists showed up to be like escorted out of town again.

Starting point is 00:16:56 Yeah, so the backlash to the Belfast ones. What happened in Belfast, America can give some context. Yeah, yeah. So there was an attack by this Sudanese person against this white person. And the reason I'm framing it in those terms is because that's how it was portrayed in the media in the sense that the attacker's ethnicity and national origins and whatnot has been front and center of that coverage. And that's not, it's not like a small detail in the story. It's why it's been linked to the Southampton murder that happened in December and the case,

Starting point is 00:17:27 like the person, the attacker was sentenced a few weeks ago, not long before the Belfast program happened. The reason these two are linked is media framing. One was in Southampton, was the one in Belfast. There's no connection between those two other than the attacker had a specific skin color and the victim had a specific skin color. That's basically it. Attacks have happened in between December and January. June that don't fit that framing, don't fake that description, and have been kind of left out of the discourse of that framing.

Starting point is 00:17:56 Yeah. And so it's contributed to this perception that is now, again, I wouldn't say it's the majority of the population, but it's like it's this higher percentage of the population that now at least think that there's some problem with immigration and criminality. And that is something that doesn't, is not borne out by the facts whatsoever, but it's still a dominant perception. It is, you tune in to BBC Question Time on a weekly basis, it's almost certainly going to be front and center of the conversation.

Starting point is 00:18:25 And I put conversation maybe in quotation here. It's more like rage abating and whatever. Yeah. So what happened in Belfast is, as I said, this Sudanese person attacked this white person. Initially, the media was reporting that a Somali person attacked a white person. So again, it tells you how these frames is inherently racial. They immediately went what they thought was the most likely demographic. Yeah. In response to that attack, despite the fact that the family of the victim explicitly asked people not to politicize this and that they rejected the politics of hate. Yeah. The same after the Southampton one for that matter. It made no difference to these far-rights, fascists and agitators and so on. And they basically went on a program throughout parts

Starting point is 00:19:07 of Belfast and some, I think 20 plus people were rendered homeless, including like kids and so on. Anyone who's a person in color in Belfast, including a bunch of people who have written about it since reported feeling unsafe that day and, you know, and arguably probably to this day as well, it hasn't been that long. Yeah. Some people didn't go to work. Some people went back home early. Some people asked their white colleagues to either, you know,

Starting point is 00:19:28 take their kids to school or, you know, walk with them home, you know, stuff like that. Yeah. All of that because they felt unsafe and the reason why they felt unsafe, that was very obvious that those people who were engaging in these programs were looking for people of color. The response to that is you had this kind of a pretty big reaction. from a good chunk of the population in a bunch of different city

Starting point is 00:19:51 including where I live, which is in Brighton and the south of England. Belfast itself also had a pretty huge mobilization. We saw one in, I believe, Sheffield, and I believe one in Liverpool as well, in Glasgow as well, where usually it would be a fairly small number of fascists and far-right activists, agitators

Starting point is 00:20:09 in Brighton, I think it was like 200 of them versus some 4,000 or 5,000 of on the other side. Yeah. I'm fairly certain. I can't say this 100% certain, but I'm fairly certain there were more police officers than there were like even for all right people there. Yep. And Belfast as well, there was a huge reaction. There was even like a pretty huge fundraiser by this collective of women, people of color in that are based in Belfast called the Anaka Women's Collective. That as of now, they were aiming to raise a thousand pounds and they've raised 253,000 pounds as of today. Oh, wow. Nice. to help those who were displaced

Starting point is 00:20:45 and those who lost their homes and so on. Yeah. And it was even condemned that like at the national level like Belfast the dominant party is actually not like it's Shane Fain which is not a loyalist party. So the people who did this act are very

Starting point is 00:20:59 much in the minority in terms of everyone like popular sentiment in Northern Ireland but even specifically in Belfast. This didn't stop the ongoing kind of tensions between maybe we can get into that on the fall right in the UK and the borderline included, especially the UK more broadly, between reform, which as of now is the dominant

Starting point is 00:21:17 party on the far right and this new party that came out of reform called Restore UK. Yeah. They are fighting with one another now. Elon Musk has backed the Rupert Law, the Restore UK guy. Yeah. You see things that Farage is too woke. You know, a lot of different things are happening. It's a fucking insane.

Starting point is 00:21:35 It is quite insane, yeah. Yeah. Nigel Farage, people aren't familiar. Like, long-time bloviating shit-haired fixture of the UK far-right. many funny clips of Nigel Farage being made to look like a tool. Let's talk about this, this tension, right? Because we do have this, like, and this has been a constant on the UK far right for a long time.

Starting point is 00:21:54 I remember the BNP, which was getting on for 20 years ago. But essentially, you will have a electoral party that stakes out a position on the right, and then a movement slash party that seeks electoral legitimacy will outflank them to the right, and they will stick that position and have electoral success. And then someone will outflank them to the right. That is the process through which British politics has moved to the right for my entire life. But let's talk about restore and reform and maybe explain the two categories for people that are not familiar.

Starting point is 00:22:32 Reform is led by Nigel Farage, who's maybe the better known one. He's the one that was like a close Trump associate for a while, and he was even friends with Elon Musk until they had like a falling out. He used to head this party called UKIP, the UK Independence Party, which was very pivotal in the Brexit vote. Nigel Farage is definitely an interesting figure for all the wrong reasons in British politics because he started off being pretty small, like a small fish, not a lot of support in the polls, not a lot of people knew him. But one thing he did have was like a disproportionate media appearance. He would be featured constantly on various shows, BBC Question. time as the one I just mentioned.

Starting point is 00:23:13 Even when he was not, like now he's a member of parliament, but he, for the longest time, he was a member of the European parliament. He wasn't a member of parliament in the UK. Yeah. And his entire thing was UK independence, as in what they call independence, as in leaving the EU, because the UK obviously was already independent. Yeah. And the way they framed this is anti-immigration and racism, essentially.

Starting point is 00:23:35 At one point, even, they weren't even focusing on, like, as they currently are, on, like, you know, people from Africa or people from Afghanistan or whatever. Their hatred was focused on Romanians and Poles and other members from Eastern Europe or Central Europe. Yeah. I'm saying this because when Henry Novak was killed and Henry Novak was Polish, British. Yeah. They all pretended to suddenly include Polish people in the white category, but that's a very

Starting point is 00:24:00 much a recent convenient thing because just a few years ago, they were absolutely not doing that. Yeah. Out of Reform UK, a lot of Reform MPs and Count. and counselors are ex-tories, so ex-conservatives. So reform has been taking a lot of the conservative votes and even conservative personalities, including most of their high-ranking members. Out of that came out, this new,

Starting point is 00:24:23 relative new party called Restore, which some people would say is further to the right than reform. The way I would describe it is that they're both vying for the far-right position in the UK, and reform is trying to position itself as the more professional, the more kind of like, you know,

Starting point is 00:24:40 would the new Tories kind of thing and the Tories fail, but we will be better than them. Yeah. Whereas Restore is just like directly. Like we were just depored millions of brown people and black people back

Starting point is 00:24:49 to where they came from and whatever. Like very just straight. The closest thing to the BNP really, historically speaking. Yeah. They don't have a huge percentage from last I check was like 3%.

Starting point is 00:25:01 Restore UK. But, and this is where it gets back to the media problem in this country, again, the BBC started one of their coverages of the Belfast programs with a coat by Rupert Lowe. Fuck. Who is like, again, maybe in terms of parties, the sixth or the seventh or the eighth or the eighth in the UK currently. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:25:21 But they have this disproportionate media presence because their position keeps on being framed as like the default position as if everyone has some concerns about, and put some concerns in quotations. Yeah. About foreigners or immigrants. or what have you, you know. Yeah, and they like anchor the debate on the right there. Like the BBC or anyone else is running at like,

Starting point is 00:25:44 let's have a debate about the humanity of people who weren't born in the United Kingdom or people who aren't white in the United Kingdom. They anchor that debate on their terms. They get to define the terms. Exactly. Yeah, I think Nick Griffin like would be a place where I could like see this particular tendency starting, right?

Starting point is 00:26:04 Like the sort of new, I guess Nick Griffin comes out the National Front, so it's really a continuous, just for people who aren't familiar, like hate groups from the 80s to hate groups in the 2000s as Nick Griffin to hear. I think you're right, they are the new analogue for that. There's a reason the BNP sounds a British National Party, but British Nauty Party isn't a fucking accident there, if you look at how these guys like to dress up. But, like, that's how we get here. I guess it is a real problem in the British media, right?

Starting point is 00:26:34 I know Americans are very familiar with the Charlie Kirk stick and the debate me stick, but like Britain has been doing that perhaps for even longer. I remember Nick Griffin attending the Oxford Union in 2007, 2008, and I remember big protests at that time. Like, Britain has been doing this for a while. And like most people, when it's, this hate is so evident if it wasn't Belfast and it as it has been in many other places, right, reject it. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:27:04 It's not the mainstream British dance. No. Hate is somewhat different in the UK. That's the other thing that we should mention, I guess. Like you say, it's not entirely racialized in the Polish people are othered from British and earth, othered from whiteness unless it is useful for them. Yes. So, like, I guess what did you see when you participate in this Brighton March? Because what we don't have in the UK as much, right?

Starting point is 00:27:29 Like, Labour is pretty shit at this. Like, we haven't had the similar thing on the last. left. So let's say like explain how people are going about rejecting this, which is largely an extra parliamentary process. It is. It is largely an extra parliamentary process. Gryton historically has had a different trajectory than other parts of the UK. Yeah, Britain's quite unique. It was the only Green MP, for example, was from Greighton. Now it's a change with the Green MP kind of taking a lot of the votes from the left because of Labor's rightward shift in the past a few years. I mean, Labor has always been arguably

Starting point is 00:28:03 a writing project anyway. But in the past few years, especially on the Star Mary, has been the past couple of years. Today is when he officially resigns. It's also like a momentous day. Brighton has had this kind of long history of anti-fascism. A lot of it has been cultural and it came out of its music

Starting point is 00:28:19 scene and all of that. And it has meant, like, as someone who's like, I am a migrant, I am also a person of color and I live in the UK. It was pretty nice to see a mostly, because Brighton is mostly white. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:28:32 Like a mostly white city really come out in force against these people who, a lot of them, I should say, were not even from Brighton, because that's not unusual these days. They were busting quite literally in some places. Yeah. But they want to come to where they feel like the migrants are or the liberals are. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And people, like, there were different groups that marched.

Starting point is 00:28:54 The Green Party was among them, but largely it was just like a bunch of unions, a one of like student groups, local anti-fascist collectives, even some religious groups, like multi-faith alliance stuff and all of these things, which Brighton is pretty good at, I would say, overall. Yeah. And there were these different marches that ended up kind of joining as is, you know, typical in these types of marches. They had like the Palestine one, the feminist one, the, you know, the LGBTQ one and so on.

Starting point is 00:29:21 They were kind of joined in the next to the station, the Brighton station, where the fascists were meeting up essentially. as I said, there were more cops than, I'm fairly certain of this, there were more cops than than like fascists that were there. In Belfast, it was different because it was the most direct reaction to what happened just a few days prior. And this was largely organic in the sense that the Brighton one was, like we were planning for this for some time

Starting point is 00:29:48 because the fascists had announced it long before even the Belfast program. It just happened to occur after the Belfast program, but it was already announced before. Yeah. All that really happened was that they made the announcement when people were really organizing and then a bunch of fascists did a program in Belfast and that motivated even more people in Brighton

Starting point is 00:30:05 to come out in Brighton, if that makes sense. Yeah. And we saw similar dynamics in Glasgow and similar dynamics and I believe, as I said, Sheffield and Liverpool and other places like in smaller numbers. Yeah. It's important to say that like with the exception of when they did the whole unite the kingdom rally like last year, which was the biggest of its kind.

Starting point is 00:30:21 And it was the biggest of its kind for like different reasons. There was even like a very meditized attack like a few days prior. There was, of course, a Charlie Kirk murder just like a few days prior. So it's kind of like it was a perfect storm that brought them all out at the same time. Yeah. That's very, very uncommon. The average protest that they managed to pull is in the lower hundreds, usually at most, it's like in the lower thousands. Yeah. Whereas like, you know, on a every other month or whatnot, you have a massive pro-Palestine protest in London that has like 200, 300, 400,000 people.

Starting point is 00:30:54 Yeah. And that's putting aside pride and it's putting aside all of those other things that that happen. Yeah. So they never managed to have enough people on the streets, at least not yet. The danger in some sense is that the response to those far-right marches and in some cases the programs shows how right-word what you might think of like centrist politics has gotten in the UK. Like the default is very right-wing. Yeah. Like the Overton window has moved way to the right in the UK.

Starting point is 00:31:24 Exactly. Even though it doesn't necessarily make sense, in the sense, in the sense that when you poll people, you have a difference between when you ask them what are like what are the top five problems, whatever, of like what the UK is going through.

Starting point is 00:31:48 And then immigration is usually in the top five. But then like what are the top five things or top ten things that you are personally struggling with? And immigration is usually never, you know, never in those top ten. Yeah. And so there is a disconnect there.

Starting point is 00:31:59 That's why I emphasize so much on the media framing and the centrality of the types of framing that we're seeing has been seen for some time. in the run-up to the Brexit vote since Brexit, which is going to be 10 years now. Fuck, yeah. Yeah, literally, I think in a few days it's going to be 10 years since Brexit. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:32:16 The tabloidization, I don't know how you call it off, the media in the UK where basically everything is tabloid. Has not helped to put it mildly. I started one of my, the article I wrote recently which is, I just randomly took a newspaper on the bus, the mirror, which is not even particularly right-wing

Starting point is 00:32:36 compared to the Daily Main. for example or whatever. Yeah. But there was a short story, a very small short story, and it was about like a drunken asylum seeker vandalizes memorial or something like that. And the headline was, asylum seeker vandalizes memorial, whatever it is. And then the first sentence was a drunk, all capital letters. And the story was just a drunk guy who damaged some property.

Starting point is 00:33:00 Yeah. His legal status and origins was literally irrelevant to the story. Right. It's a guy who's drunk who did something. Yeah. which is not that not common in the UK, unfortunately. Yeah, that's one of our national pastimes. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:33:12 I joke, like, if anything, it just shows that the guy was as well integrated into British culture. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, he's become British. But the editor of that paper, and that specific, they decided that adding asylum seeker made this a more sexy story for readers and so on. And that's a very common thing. Oh, yeah. As soon as you add asylum seeker or migrant or refugee or whatever to these headlines, it can drive engagement up on social media.

Starting point is 00:33:37 can attract eyeballs more because it's rage-baiting and it's become such a big problem. Yeah, it is like a largely a media problem. And I think like that's a really important place to talk about. There's this idea again that like this came from Elon Musk, right? And that like undoubtedly Elon Musk has amplified the very far right in the UK. Oh, sure. Undoubtedly, the fact that so many journalists spend so much time on his website changes their perspective of where the debate is at, especially when, like, you know, not to be too much of dick about it, but like a lot of journalists don't go outside and talk to normal people very much. My folks are both in agriculture, right?

Starting point is 00:34:18 Like, when I'm home, I'm talking to people who work in that world too. And, like, it's just not a – sometimes people say I saw X on the TV, I saw Y on the TV. But, like, you're just not running into many people who are seeking asylum causing problems, nor is it a major issue in their life. and when there are migrants in their lives, they're people who they cherish, right? They're members of their community. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:34:40 That doesn't get reflected in the media debate. But, like, this is a longer issue than Elon Musk buying Twitter in the UK. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's a big fucking problem. And it's one, I think, we can't fix. Like, trying to diversify people's media diet

Starting point is 00:34:56 is a challenge. Like, as you say, in the UK, like, just the way we consume media is different, right? Like, you think about, like, when my dad's driving and he's listening to Radio 2 or, the time, right? Like, though they will have, they will have these debates there. Like, it's different media consumption, media diet than people in the US. And I wonder, like, even if there were just, like, if there were good outlets that you prefer to read, like, especially for people who are

Starting point is 00:35:19 not from the UK, to understand the debate in just more rational and anchored in reality terms, like, it doesn't even have to be, like, a left source, like, if they're not distorting most people's lived experience, that's relatively unusual in the UK. It is, yeah. There's a fascinating program on the BBC that, weirdly enough, given that I do media studies, I actually did not know about it until relatively recently, but it's called News Watch. I sent you a clip a few days ago.

Starting point is 00:35:47 And it is what it is. It's kind of this program within the BBC, but clearly editorial independent of the BBC that does critical media coverage. And they pointed out that after the Belfast program, they got a lot of comments from people who were concerned by how the BBC was covering the Belfast Hyatt slash program, whatever. Yeah. And including the fact that

Starting point is 00:36:11 again, initially people thought they were saying this a Somali person when it wasn't even the case. Yeah. But immediately racialized in these terms and so on. And one of the people that came on said that like, you know, there was an attack in Bolton the day, which is outside Manchester, just the day after the Belfast program against an imam's

Starting point is 00:36:27 house. Like a guy just firebombed his house, his kids were inside. Luckily they were unharmed, but they could have easily died. Yeah. Then made the news but it's not and even there was even an attack in peace haven which is not far from where i live in october 2025 against a mosque there there were two worshippers inside that could have also the died luckily they were okay and again it's not that it doesn't make the news it gets reported on but like it that's it doesn't then get debated at nauseam it doesn't get it doesn't become this huge

Starting point is 00:36:54 sensational thing that like politicians are asked to to opine about or whatever it's just a thing happened, that's sad, let's move on. Whereas if it's a one, all you need is a single story of a non-white person attacking a white person and it's like in a particularly good times in terms of like, I don't know, whatever is happening on Twitter or whatever,

Starting point is 00:37:17 but again, not just that it's only that. But it's become this huge amplifier. Then you're more likely to see what we've been seeing really. That's why I insist on the media framing. It's not the only thing. I mean, you cannot talk about even if the media was bad, but if like everyone was comfortable and didn't struggle with these income inequalities and precarity and whatnot,

Starting point is 00:37:35 then the media wouldn't be as big of a, its salience wouldn't be as relevant, but it's those two things at the same time that there's kind of this perfect storm right now. Yeah, like people, like it's hard times for people. Exactly. And like it's the hard times you're bringing ground for hate. Yes. And I think like, yeah, that's something we all have to work against, especially in the British context, but also like that's coming here.

Starting point is 00:37:57 It's hard times here too. Yeah. The hatred is always going to find. fertile terrain in those difficult times. Even that framing, right, like I was thinking about this the other day, like talking to a colleague in the UK, like all the time the quote unquote migrant crisis is used as a framing in European politics. And that's something the US right learned from and they created a crisis here, right? It's not a fucking crisis. There is plenty of space in the UK for more people. And like these people are like members of our communities and a benefit to all

Starting point is 00:38:30 of us, the UK should be talking about the bigotry crisis, the racism crisis. We have a pogrom in Belfast. We have someone attacking an imam's house. We have constant, constant macro and microaggressions for people, including on our state-funded media. And that is the framing I'd like to see. It's not a framing you're going to see from the people who are perpetuating it because it's a profitable strategy to whip up hate like this. Yeah, I mentioned this if, like I have had a post from Duska a few days ago of like this country also has an aging population crisis. It has a job crisis, a lot of those jobs because it's structured. The economy is structured in a way that certain jobs are very difficult for locals to do like nursing, nursing homes and stuff like that.

Starting point is 00:39:17 Largely because pay is so bad. Yeah. And you have at the same time, the media kind of and lots of politicians focusing on this very made-up migration, like migrant crisis, as you said. whereas this country is actually struggling with an aging population. In addition to that, the increase in migration since 2004 has been increased in migrants, I mean, I'm one of them, has not actually brought more crime to the UK. The data is pretty clear on that. The crimes has actually been steadily declining in the past couple of decades in this country,

Starting point is 00:39:48 including in London the most diversity in the UK by far. There's just no, there's no core. And I know I'm saying this, obviously for the listeners of this, I'm kind of like preaching to the choir. here. It's just bears repeating that like this is generally entirely made up. Like there is absolutely no correlation between these two, between like just an increase of people from a certain skin color or whatever and then the prevalence of crime and so. There's just no correlation between those two. And when we talk about one of the big things that the far right here as in the US and

Starting point is 00:40:19 as in a good chunk of the world, it's all about, you know, save our women and girls essentially is how they frame it. Like constantly. Pretty huge percentage of the far right people have for example, two years ago, you also had riots in Belfast, something like a ridiculously high amount of those who were arrested and later released were since re-arrested due to domestic abuse allegations and sexual harassment and stuff like that, you know? Yeah, many such cases. They're not framed as like a civilizational crisis for women and girls

Starting point is 00:40:50 because they are the default. They are the white guys. They don't get spoken of in the same way as the rest of the population in this country. So in that sense, maybe it's a more familiar problem for American listeners. In that sense, you have these similarities there. Yeah, yeah. I think that's a good analogy to draw. I wonder then, as we wrap up, like, you wrote an excellent article on this, which we will link in the show notes.

Starting point is 00:41:12 Do you have anything else you want to share with people or resources you'd suggest? Like, it's a little less easy to feel so isolated in the UK, right? But just like a smaller polity, like you can normally find people. but just people who are, if people are wanting to support, if people are looking to find like-minded folks. Yeah, in the UK, I would say, I mean, I guess this is a bit everywhere the same thing,

Starting point is 00:41:37 but it's going to be dependent on like where you live. Yeah. Like, you know, I have other people listening, if they happen to be in Gritone A, feel free to reach out to me. I like meeting people. But like you have these different collectives that are like usually very locally based.

Starting point is 00:41:50 I mentioned the Anaka Collective, the women's collective in Belfast, for example, if folks want to support them, they can still do so. Maybe I could put it this way. I moved here 10 years ago and then I left to do my PhD in Switzerland. And then me and my partner and kid, we moved back here a couple of years ago. There are lots of reasons not to be here.

Starting point is 00:42:09 There are lots of good reasons not to want to be here and want to be elsewhere. Yeah. But there are also pretty good reasons to be here for me personally, which is that there are lots of different networks, communities that are, have been kind of built for decades now in some cases, that one. can join, one can help. Again, it's going to be very much, like, depending on where you live, London is not going to be the same as Manchester, as Belfast, as Glasgow, and so on and so forth. But, like,

Starting point is 00:42:36 that's one of the good things about it. The other thing you mentioned in terms of reading, and I write for this website, the one that you're going to Lange Shadow Mac without the W in the end. And at the end of every article, they have recommendations usually of, like, what people can do. And usually it has to do with either, like, you read further, but it could also be, like,

Starting point is 00:42:52 support this collective or, like, you know, follow this person or whatever. Like, just very, very small things. Like, yeah. By no means, are we, are we claiming to fix everything through that? But, like, there's just small things that people can actually, yeah, feel more connected, maybe if they actually live here and they don't feel connected to different communities or if they're abroad and they want to support this could also be

Starting point is 00:43:10 like an easy way to do so. Yeah, I think that's a great piece of advice. Like, it's very local, which is good. Like, the response to austerity has been people taking care of their community. And then, like, that is how we get through this. Yeah. Same as though, yeah, the poverty, the government is deciding that everyone has to live in. Like, it's the same shit.

Starting point is 00:43:25 it's the same response. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly, exactly. Well, thank you very much for your time today. That was really good. I think it's insightful. I have it helped people. Where can people find you if they'd like to follow you and your work in Brighton, obviously?

Starting point is 00:43:37 Yeah, if you're in Brighton, reach out. I do post on blue sky from time to time. It's just a you, but you'll find me there. And other than that, I have the podcast, the Friday's Times. It's been inactive for the past month, but I'm going to start again soon. And I have a news letter called Hontologies that I try and keep active as well, in which I talk about some of the podcast. some of the stuff we talked about here.

Starting point is 00:43:57 But sometimes more Lebanon stuff and Palestine stuff where I'm from. But also a lot of Western, like UK and U.S. stuff and so on. Yeah, yeah. And I think it's great to have those conversations connected. Like it struggles not as distinct as people think. Yeah, yeah, thanks. Well, thank you so much. That was great.

Starting point is 00:44:11 Thank you. Thank you, having you. Media and women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women.

Starting point is 00:44:37 Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast and IHeart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl, Sam J. And we're the host of everyone watches women's sports, a new podcast from Together and IHeart Women's Sports.

Starting point is 00:45:03 Because let's be real. Women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days. The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments to take over your entire timeline. And the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week. Every week we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports. We'll give you our takes, our debates, and probably a few disagreements. We'll talk to athletes, celebrate big moments and get into what's happening on and off the field, sport, track, and beyond. Because we're not just interested in what happened.

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Starting point is 00:45:58 I'm always searching for inspiration, for support, and useful tools to help maximize joy. So this podcast lets us uncover all of that together. We're going to have these meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people. Like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she never saw coming. I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer. And that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartner depression.

Starting point is 00:46:28 I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety. Olympic champ Sean Johnson revealed why she had no choice. but to be a gymnast. There was something about gymnastics that was intoxicating to me. It's given me a belief that we all have one of those treasures inside of us.

Starting point is 00:46:44 We just have to find it. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My first guest is Paris Houghton, Shakira, Luke and Yerrin, Samira and Gracie. I'm so excited. On the bouncy bed.

Starting point is 00:47:04 You have surprises? Many surprises. Welcome to Sweet 305 where the group chat comes to life. What a . It's like a way to say like, oh my, my friend, hello, hello, my brother. Look, I never have I've ever had to be

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Starting point is 00:47:34 No, there's a person that you can you're like you say, I'd like to collaborate with this person. This is Sweet 305. Listen to Sweet 305 with Lelepons as part of my Cultura podcast network on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 00:47:56 Welcome to Iqadap and hear a podcast coming to you from what they are calling the fakesest economy of all time. I am your host, Mia Wong. And with me to discuss really, truly, a stock market that is like a microcosm of all of the unhinged things they're going on in the economy is a friend of the show, Vicky Osterwhile, who has done many, many, many, many things.

Starting point is 00:48:22 Writers and organizer, recent author, current author? I'm just an author now, I think. I have two books. Yeah, two books makes you an author. That's right. Hi, how's it going? How's it going on, man? How are you doing this beautiful June day? Awful, absolutely terrible.

Starting point is 00:48:37 The whole world is on fire, both men. metaphorically and literally. You tried to learn about the economy again, didn't you? This is what happens. You should never look. Don't turn over that rock. Don't turn over that rock thing. Huge mistake.

Starting point is 00:48:50 Yeah. I am learning about financial instruments that are so deranged. They make the stuff that 2008 financial collapses based on look normal and stable. Yeah. We're doing great here. Having promised a story about the economy is fake. I want to do first when I am calling a bonus horror. Oh.

Starting point is 00:49:09 I love a bonus. This bonus horror. Now, I think you are one of the people who is most uniquely qualified to address this bonus horror. As someone who has recently written a book called The Extended Universe, How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World, that is about the evils of intellectual property. Anne Housel has written about riots and also has written about the transgender. I want to hear your thoughts on, oh boy, oh boy, a DMCA takedown notice filed by the Stonewall, LLC against a t-shirt shop that was being run by the Canadian trans-comics writer Sophie LaBelle for shirts that said Stonewall was a riot.

Starting point is 00:49:53 So, Vicki, what do you think about the phenomenon of trademarking a riot? Happy Pride, first of all, I think. I think it's really important that we celebrate June this year in all the right ways. Yeah, I mean, you know, trademarking a riot, that seems good. Like, you trade on a historical event, copyrighting a historical era, you know, patenting human genome. These are all good things. Frankly, I think it's outrageous that anything should be the common property of a community,

Starting point is 00:50:26 history, and humanity. So I just think it's great when people draw fences around the word stonewall, for example, which, you know, sure, it functions, you know, as a stand-in for an entire historical era, for a crucial moment and indeed for a riot. But what about the people who own the Stonewall in? Did you ever think about them and their interests? I don't think you did. It's like one of those things where it's like, well, you couldn't have had Stonewall without the police.

Starting point is 00:50:56 And it's like, I'm, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the Pontchus Polly that is the good guy in the Jesus story theory, right? Yeah. You know, like, well, if it weren't for the Roman centurians, you know, who would have, who would have sacrificed Jesus? Yeah, no, it's bad. I mean, I would love to have a hot take, but I feel like, or even a lukewarm one. But that one's really just, that's just a happy, happy pride. Love a business gay, you know, I just love a business gay.

Starting point is 00:51:23 The feeling I saw seeing that, the only feeling I've had like that recently was discovering that the NCAA was like selling the biometrics data of their athletes to sports gambling companies so the sports gambling companies could set lines. Seems right. Which is like, can I emphasize this enough? This is a thing that like scouts for professional teams have a hard time getting access to, like the actual like heights and weights and stuff of like it's, I don't know. This is, this is maybe the worst, maybe the worst economy that they've, that we've had.

Starting point is 00:51:55 If you're talking about like sort of some sort of high-tech surveillance apparatus that's largely used to prop up a casino, I mean, you might be talking about the NCAA, but you might also be talking about the stock market. Yeah. And oh boy. Today, today we are going on what I am colloquially referring to as the KOSPie roller coaster. Yay. Let's go. Oh, boy. So KCOPB for people who don't know is like the main Korean stock index in the way that like, I mean, we kind of have.

Starting point is 00:52:25 multiple. I don't know. NASDAQ or the SMP 500. Yeah, it's like that basically. It's an index. It's the main major index of major Korean stocks. Yeah. And people, long-time listeners of the show may remember that we have talked a bit about what's called the Magnificent Seven, which are the seven American tech stocks that make up an absolutely unhinged, like percentage of these like stock listings, right? So the reason I want to talk about Cospy, the South Korean one, is because in a lot of ways, it's like the entire economy and a microcosm. Because, you know, whereas the U.S. has like seven tech stocks that are like a huge percentage

Starting point is 00:53:04 of the market. Kostby over half of the fucking index is two companies. Yeah. Samsung and S.K. Hayeks, which are... That's that good. That's that good economy. Yeah. And yeah, that's how you know your economy is good and normal when it's two fucking companies,

Starting point is 00:53:21 both of which is like valuations have been spiking massively specifically because of chip production and specifically because of chip production for, I guess I have to say the words AI instead of just doing a long and elaborate bit where I simply just call it matrix multiplication over and over again.

Starting point is 00:53:37 Yeah, graphics cards. They're doing it because graphics cards are so valuable. That's what this is all about. Yeah. This is now like half of the main index of like one of the most advanced industrial economies in human history. right is fucking making graphics cards for chatbots south three is what the 13th the 12th or 13th largest in the entire world

Starting point is 00:54:00 yeah yeah yeah it's good and it's good you know there was a while back executive disorder where i was like spending a decent amount of time tracking cospy going up and down because it has lost 10% of its value multiple times this year that's unhinged that does not happen right like outside of like the Great Recession, right? It's like that kind of shit. That's a really rare thing to happen. This used to happen in the 19th century all the time. What we're looking at in Korea and indeed in the U.S. is like stock markets that like what used to be before the Great Depression, before Black Friday, and the invention of the SEC to make sure that this wouldn't happen every day. And I think like one of the things that, I mean, maybe you're going to get to this.

Starting point is 00:54:45 I don't want to jump on top of your thing. But I think the thing that is really wild about what's going on with the Cosby is also, I think again, it connected to sort of the gambling thing, is that in the last month, two months, I don't remember exactly when this happened, Korean stocks got added to, like, Robin Hood, right? It got added to, like, US retail trading. Now, like, retail trading, like,

Starting point is 00:55:07 used to technically be possible before these, like, apps and before Reddit, you know, our Wall Street bets or whatever. But it was hard. You had to have an agent. You had to, like, do a thing. And then day trading in the 90s made it a little easier for, like, middle class people to do.

Starting point is 00:55:20 but now, like, you can do it instantly anywhere. And, you know, if you remember, I mean, I know you remember Mia, but if the folks at home remember, like the game stock stuff, like that way called during the NFT era, you know, the meme stock, the meme, it was called meme stocks. And how like sort of, you know, this one Reddit subreddit could like make a stock, you know, quadruple its price overnight or go 10 times overnight, right? The thing is, what's happening is that the Korean retail market has also exploded. So not only are you getting U.S. investors, right, like day traders, just like going on really weird tips and like pouring millions and millions of U.S. dollars, right? Because like, you know, if it used to be hard to trade on the U.S. Stock Exchange, trading in a foreign stock was basically impossible. Yeah. You just couldn't do it. Again, you technically could. But you had to have a lot of money and a lot of connections. Yeah, you got to actually be someone who worked in finance. Yes. Like, you know, like you had to be effectively a professional. Exactly. Or.

Starting point is 00:56:19 it's like, you know, to like return to the gambling analogy, which is increasingly less and less of an analogy, it's like the equivalence of like, it was technically possible to be one of those guys who like played online poker. Right. Right. It was equivalent to that where it's like, okay, you can dedicate

Starting point is 00:56:35 your entire life to this one incredibly niche thing. Exactly. But so the opening up and the deregulation of this trade has this is sort of maybe can be a little hard to grasp, but like, so the Korean economy is massive, but compared to the U.S. economy, it's nothing, right? So when all of the money

Starting point is 00:56:55 from, when a ton of retail money from the U.S., in coordinated fashion, you know, coordinate online on Reddit or whatever in Discord servers can flood into the Korean markets, it can make a huge change. Imagine an even smaller, imagine a smaller market, right? Like, imagine something that's not worth very much and you get, you add that exchange rate in there and you're not getting hit on exchange rate fees. You can really swing the market. Foreigners could swing the market really easily, right, by speculating, which again, used to be a thing that finance operatives did, but it was really risky and it was like a really dodgy thing to do. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:57:26 But these retail investors don't really care because it's gambling. It's just a gambling app, right? They're gambling on stocks. Yep. But now it has become a huge thing in Korea as well. There was just a documentary, I think it was released like yesterday on like Bloomberg about how intense retail buying. So everyone in Korea has like sort of stock mania, right?

Starting point is 00:57:46 Like in the documentary, there's like, you know, like a woman at a grocery checkout. Like she's working and she's like checking her stock prices and she's like scanning stuff, you know? And like it's not about lower class people shouldn't have access. It's about this means that all the money is being funneled. The reason Korea is important, as most of you probably know, is because it's where all the chips are made. It is where processors have to be made. It's the only place on earth where they can really, they're in Taiwan, where they can be made. and because of the huge AI boom, right,

Starting point is 00:58:18 the huge amount of money circulating between three different companies, right? Back and forth forever. That every piece, AI supply chain, right? So like the, you know, each mineral that goes into it, the people who make a particular, like, plastic clip that's really hard to make that, like, fits into the data center. Like all of these companies get identified by, you know, deranged gamblers, you know?

Starting point is 00:58:42 And they say, like, this company, And in the Korean stock market, so in the U.S. stock market, there's like tickers, you know, like three letters. And the Korean stock market is just like a number, right? So in the KOSP. So they're like, guys, 4201 is this company. I'm telling you, it makes, you know, it makes the sort of fiber cables that go in a data center, right? And if that takes off on finance Twitter or in, you know, Wall Street bets or whatever, they can just swing these companies. And of course, so you've got these U.S. and European investors throwing all their money in.

Starting point is 00:59:12 So then Korean people are like, we got to get it. on this because it's all booming. And all of these are just really random companies that make really obscure. They're basically what would have been penny stocks back of the day. Right. And they're getting traded at wild volumes. And it's good. It's good because it's real money that really reflects the value of the Korean economy. And it's not just a bunch of people losing their shirts in a series of complex scams. Yeah. There's obviously this sort of like ground swamania of this sort of like, it's just a gambling boom, right? But on the institutional level, they are also doing things that are, I was saying this to

Starting point is 00:59:53 Vicki before I started this. So like, these might be the most deranged financial instruments I have ever seen. And like, I have spent a significant amount of my life studying the 2008 financial collapse and these make those instruments look normal. Yeah, you described one to me and I literally was stunned in silence because I didn't. believe that the thing you had just described was real. It's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my entire life. When we come back from these ads.

Starting point is 01:00:31 Okay, we are back. I have been promising you the worst financial idea I have ever seen. Right. So, like, what we've been talking about thus far has been, you know, like, our, the entire economy now is someone who thinks they got, they got a tip on the horses and is putting their life savings in on, like, fucking, I don't know, what, what's a horse name, like, secretary I don't know. Sweet Mondays. Yeah, sweet Mondays.

Starting point is 01:00:56 That would. Yeah, I don't know. She's great in the rain. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, but like, here's the thing, right? That is comparatively not that risky. In the sense that when you put the money on the horses, right, there's kind of a limit to how much you can lose. Yeah, totally. You're putting the money in. You can only lose that much money. Now, if the stuff of the regular people doing are, again, like, putting it all on red or just like, fucking, I got a tip on the horses.

Starting point is 01:01:30 What the institutional people are doing, I could only describe this shit as, like, and some of this is also designed to be bought by retail investors, which is just unbelievably insane. Like, I can only describe this as the equivalent of, it's the market equivalent of Russian roulette. Okay, so on June 22nd, Postby did a thing that it does semi-normally, which is, again, lose 10% and 30%. trigger the circuit breakers. They trigger the circuit breakers, like, again, like today, we were recording this on June 26th, a thing that, again, is not supposed to happen in normal markets. Like, no, that's

Starting point is 01:02:02 panic shit. But on Monday, it triggered because Korea's, like, national, like, financial watchdog. Like, the guy you ran it was like, okay, maybe, maybe it was a mistake for regulators to have approved this

Starting point is 01:02:18 thing called leverage ETFs on a single stock. Okay, so to understand how bonkers this is, like that, that's all gibberish, right? And for once, this isn't even a case where the financial people are packaging something simple with a gibberish name. This is ridiculous. So, ETFs are exchanged traded funds. And it's supposed to be a mechanism where like, okay, there's just one thing you can buy, but that one like security, this is like the physical thing you're buying, has like a bunch of stocks in it, right? So you could say like, I want to buy all the peanut farmers in America, right?

Starting point is 01:02:55 Okay, there's five public-in-listed peanut companies. They make an ETF. It's the peanut ETF. You buy it, no problem. And then you just buy that and you ride the whole, all five of them together instead of just one. Yeah. The place you might have heard of this is there were a bunch of like supposedly like green ETFs that were supposed to be like this.

Starting point is 01:03:11 These are the things you can invest in to save the environment. And obviously a lot of that was scams, but also it's one of those things that was bad while it was happening. And you miss it when it's gone because it was replaced. by what I can only describe as what if we did an ETF on destroying the economy? But again, so the purpose of these things, right, is that they're supposed to allow you

Starting point is 01:03:33 to have one instrument to hold positions on multiple companies. Right. It's a basket of companies. Yes. Now, it lasts about seven years, right? This is a relatively recent phenomenon. I'm sure people maybe had done something like this before that, but this is a relatively recent phenomenon. somebody had the absolutely horrible idea of what if you had an ETF that was just one stock well but me that doesn't make any sense they're all the

Starting point is 01:04:01 same thing yeah right and I look at this I was like what the fuck are you talking about that like what what what the fuck is it what the fuck is a single stock ETF like that's that's like that's literally it's nonsensical right you just buy the stock yeah right you buy the stock or you buy a future um like on the stock right if you're betting the socks and go up and down, you buy like futures, right? This, the only way, I don't know, I think Vicki kind of came up with the best way to describe this that I've heard, which is like, it's like getting a parlay on a stock. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:04:30 So, one of the very formative moments of Mia childhood, right, was reading this book by Cory Doctor, a friend of the show called For the Win, which is about a bunch of gold miners in a video game unionizing. There's like a plot, right? But that in between the plot, there will just be a chapter that is Corey Doctor O explaining to you how the 2008 financial collapse happens. And one of the things that he knows that has stuck with me my entire life, and I think is genuinely a really important lesson, is that if someone comes up to you, and the thing that they say is, hey, you can buy this thing, right? you know, or you can place a bet, you can buy a financial instrument. And the way that it works is if multiple things happen, you know, like several things that are different happen, right? So,

Starting point is 01:05:21 for example, it's like if LeBron scores 32 and Wembe has three blocks. And I beat the point spread by five, right? Yeah, right. Then you get paid out $100 million, whatever, right? And that's sort of extreme example. That's a parlay. That's a sports parlay. Yeah, that's a sports parlay. Every single time someone is doing that is a scam. 100% it is a scam. If you put your money into this, you are lighting it the fuck on fire. Now, this is

Starting point is 01:05:48 effectively what's going on with these leveraged ETFs, right? They're taking like a shit ton of positions at the same time. It's the thing that allows you to like have a bunch of different positions at one time on the same stock. This is an asset so

Starting point is 01:06:03 dangerous that like, if you look up any definition of these things, literally all of the sites will tell you do not hold this thing for longer than one day. Yeah. Because if you hold this asset for longer than one day, you will lose all of your money. Like investopedia, for example, like it just explains this, right? Where they're like, hey, this fucking asset, you can be betting on a stock to go up, right? Because of the way it happened, you can lose money.

Starting point is 01:06:30 Yep. On the stock, you are betting to go up going up. Because it's this like fucking unhinged set of parley. It's not all these conditionals on it. So it has to go up within a certain time window or it has to bounce, right? It has to go down, then up or something like that, right? It's a bunch of weird conditions.

Starting point is 01:06:45 Yeah. And you can lose more money on this than you put in. How does that mean? Which is insane because you have to pay out all of the options that you take in. Right, of course. So you can lose more money than you put in. Oh, my God. They found a form of gambling that is actually worse

Starting point is 01:07:02 than putting all of your life savings on rent. Because at least if you put all your life savings on, on red, you can only lose all of your life savings. You can lose your family's life savings on this shit. Like, they can, like... Famously, it's always good to go into debt to your bookie. This is famously good to get credit from your sports gambler. That's a famous narrative thing that's good to do.

Starting point is 01:07:24 Yeah. And again, to get a sense of how unhinged this market is right now, the regulators saying we probably shouldn't have approved people making these for a bunch of the biggest Korean tech stocks, caused the market to tank by 10%. Yeah. Just saying, like, exactly. There's a lot of different angles on this that we could, we could go into. Sorry, so is it okay if I switched to like some US stuff? For example for example. Amazing. So folks were pretty, it became pretty clear that Trump was playing the price of oil, right? Mondays, he'd be like, we're retaliating against Iran. Fridays, you'd be like pieces here, right? There's just like a really open trade that he was just making.

Starting point is 01:08:02 and it worked because it worked. It was a classic, like, well, the investors do it, so it works. The price goes up and down. You can play it. That was how war policy has been dictated for most of 2026, which is great and awesome and really good. So the thing about the AI stuff is that financial people insist that AI is relatively safe because there's actual capital spending, right? Money is being spent, they say, on data centers.

Starting point is 01:08:29 And, you know, Ed Zittron, who I know is part of the network, is in a lot of reporting on the money's not actually being spent. No. It doesn't actually... No. It's bullshit. So, yes, exactly. So it's all bullshit.

Starting point is 01:08:40 These are these bullshit companies at AI. But, like, one of the things that we're starting to see happen and that Trump really innovated, but that everyone's favorite Nazi, the trillionaire, Elon Musk, although he's not a trillionaire anymore unless he moved out of his space expositions, I think. He managed to do a pump and dump with his own company? Elon Musk did a crypto rugpole. at the scale of the world economy, okay? Which, like, you know, in a way, like, you know,

Starting point is 01:09:09 I'm not going to hand it to it. You don't have to hand it to him, but it's truly one of the craziest scams that, like, in plain sight that's ever happened. And part of the way this worked, I want to talk about this because it's not just about him being a creepy scammer. It's about the way that this is all being supported by the finance industry, which is what you're talking about with these instruments.

Starting point is 01:09:25 Yeah. So you've got these, like, really nasty instruments that they're developing to rinse Korean grocers, their, you know, of their money, whatever. But you've also got like what, what happened with the SpaceX IPO is that when something gets listed on the NASDAQ, the S&P, when it gets added to these indexes, everyone holding an index fund has to buy those stocks. Yep. So it means that, like, really safe stuff, like, you know, a 401k. And you're just like, I just put the 401k in the S&P 500, right? It's just the stock market. I'm buying the whole stock market. Yep. Lying those

Starting point is 01:10:00 up, no problem. So when the SpaceX IPO happened, it listed at 160, so on it that, 160? Was it 169? I don't remember the exact number. I think that it was it, did have a mean price? I don't even remember. Whatever. When it listed, that was 10 days ago, 15 days ago that the IPO happened?

Starting point is 01:10:18 Yeah, something like that. When that went public, all of the institutional funds had to buy a proportional amount of SpaceX, right? So they had to buy it because that's just how it works. And that's reasonable. That is actually like regulated. It's a reasonable thing. So what happened was the price, retailers drove it way up, right?

Starting point is 01:10:37 Elon still has, you know, using Twitter, managed to get a bunch of retail investors. This is going to go straight to the moon, whatever, whatever. So for five days, it goes up to like 190, 200. I think it crosses 200 at one point, right? And now it is down to 150. So it is 10% down from where it was 10 days ago. Why is it 10% down? Because SpaceX is a valueless company compared to what they're valuating at.

Starting point is 01:10:59 Yeah. SpaceX is 15 government companies. tracks in a trench coat. Yeah. Like, it's just not, it's not a company that, like, has any path to profitability. It also doesn't have a path to Mars. But what that means is that institutional investors created, and regulators created a situation where Elon and his buddies pump and dumped, as you said, they got the price

Starting point is 01:11:19 way up. They moved down to their position. And now those funds lost their 10% invest stake in SpaceX. And there's no reason to anticipate that stock going back up. Yep. It's just, like, there's just no reason for it. It's overvalued as it is, right? So this is how, like, people who aren't doing retail investing, people who are not, you know,

Starting point is 01:11:38 people who are like, I don't trust the stock market. Yeah. So this is the California pension fund. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So, yeah. And, like, obviously, like, Trump did that with the Trump coin.

Starting point is 01:11:47 Like, we're like, basically, like, what the lesson learned from the crypto and the NFT explosion. And by the way, Bitcoin is down almost 100% on the year. It's been under 60,000 for months. Bitcoin is collapsing as a safe. the safe haven asset. If you were heavily invested in Bitcoin, you're ruined right now, if you held for a year. Anyway, what they learned from cryptos and NFTs is, oh, we can just do that in the stock market too, right?

Starting point is 01:12:13 Yeah. We can just do it. We can just play the entire stock market like this, you know, and we can blame it on, you know, I started by talking about the retail investors, and that's real. That is driving the volatility. And that's, if you're a professional or you're in an industry force, you can just skim the cash off. Now, the reason that they need to skim the cash as fast as possible right now is because two years ago, I think I came on here to talk about the commercial. Did we talk about commercial real estate, like the commercial real estate bubble on the show? I don't remember. I don't remember if we actually talked about on the show or just, just, you know, we just texted about it, whatever, cackled about it privately. So basically, the private banking sector, or sorry, the shadow banking, which is now called private capital, private financing.

Starting point is 01:12:53 like that sector was facing a collapse two years ago in 2023 as all of their office buildings came to do basically. There was this massive expansion commercial real estate and the pandemic combined with the cooling economy, like they was in trouble. All of that money has now gone into the AI boom. So they staved off this collapse that was supposed to happen in 2023, 2024. There was even a word for it, which was like the maturity wall, right? Like all these things were going to hit this maturity wall. Like everyone was ready for it. So now those companies are starting to go down, right?

Starting point is 01:13:26 The private equity, and the thing about private equity is that it's what if a bank had no regulation. Yeah, yeah. Private equity has burned all of their money into the AI boom, but it's not just them. If we look at the huge layoffs and video game companies are going on right now, right? Yep. Like all tech investors are taking all of their money out of everything and putting it in AI. Yeah. They're going all in on AI.

Starting point is 01:13:49 That's why they're so insistent on doing it. movies can't get made. Like I talked to, you know, for my book that I wrote, I've talked to a bunch of movie producers, I have relationships with them. They just can't get funding.

Starting point is 01:13:59 These are people with huge movies, right? Big, small producers. There's nothing is getting greenlit. There is just no capital for anything except AI. The entire economy has put all of its resources. Yep. Into LLMs. Yep.

Starting point is 01:14:16 Nothing else is getting made. The data centers aren't being built. And then they develop. elaborate ways to ruin Korea by gambling on it. Yeah. Incredible economy. It's astounding. It's like the entire, it's like every rich person on earth has collectively taken all

Starting point is 01:14:34 of humanity's chips and put it on tulip bulbs. Yeah. You know, I compare this in the 19th century because this is before the SEC, what used to happen, joint stock companies used to, guys just used to go around a town, right? You know, before, you know, during the era of the telegram. This is the railroads were the most famous example of this. For the 1860s and the 1870s, post-Civil War, there were like five or six railroad stock crashes. People would just sell you, listen, we're going to make this rail line.

Starting point is 01:15:03 It's going to be awesome, okay? Rails are the future. It's so high-tech. You know, get it on the ground floor. And then there would be massive economic collapses. And, you know, that wild insecurity was driven by a lot of what we would call now retail investment, right? A lot of what the 20th century did. What the SEC did was try to make sure that didn't happen.

Starting point is 01:15:25 Because when everyone puts all of their money into a sort of speculative asset, like say, AI data centers because shrimp Jesus, when everyone was like, wait a second, these aren't very valuable. The money just is gone. Part of the reason why everything feels so weird is that, like, in order for the entire economic system to function, there's two giant collective delusions that everyone has to maintain at the same time or everything collapses. One is that the AI boom is inevitable and it's going to make money. And the second one, and this is also directly tied to South Korea,

Starting point is 01:16:08 is that the war on Iran is going to end and it's going to end soon. Yep. Because if both of these things are not true and... They're not true. They're not true. Like, there's no fucking... No, they're both complete lies, but everything falls apart immediately. And South Korea, you know, the other reason why South Korea was having these, like,

Starting point is 01:16:26 just 10% of the market gets annihilated in a few minutes is that this, this would happen every time it became clear that, no, the war isn't ending. Like, every time Trump's fake peace deal fell, like, latest fake peace deal fell apart, the market would collapse. But the problem is, in order for all these people to keep making money, everyone has to continue to collectively believe that, no, it's going to end. Yeah. And so you're just in this perpetual cycle, right?

Starting point is 01:16:52 Where, like, South Korea is one of the countries in the world that is the most exposed to the effects of this war that's not, like, actively being bombed. Like this is like like in terms of massive industrial economies, right? Like obviously like East Asia. Yeah. Like the rest of like East and South Asia, particularly is getting fucked by all of this. As we talked about elsewhere on this show. But South Korea is the core industrial center.

Starting point is 01:17:14 Yeah. That's the most fucked by this specifically because they because they rely so much on natural gas and just regular like regular fossil fuels that come to the Strait of Hermuz, which is not open, has never been opened, will not be reopened. Yeah, I heard there was a great deal. I heard that actually it's going to be open. Don't worry. It's going to be fine. Listen, Netanyahu's a reasonable man.

Starting point is 01:17:36 You know, Trump is a reason. These are reasonable people. It's going to go fine. It's all going to reopen soon. Yeah, Ben Gavir only holds a minor post in the Israeli government. Hold on. I am Googling this live. God damn it.

Starting point is 01:17:51 God damn it. Oh, wow. Checks notes. He is the Minister of National Security. Oh, no. Oh, no. So of course, you know, we talk about the economy and obviously the horror in Lebanon and Palestine is the real, like, you know, is the most horrible. And Iran is the most horrible thing going on right now.

Starting point is 01:18:10 But these cascading effects are also horrible. Yeah. If we've learned one thing in the last 10 years, it's that it can always get worse for everyone. Oh, yeah. So we have this moment where like everyone is gambling on South Korean ship manufacturers. and sub-manufacturers on the basis that they will be totally necessary to the production

Starting point is 01:18:33 of chips that are being sold to companies that can't use them, that are a depreciating asset that get become valueless, these extremely expensive chips lose all their value within five years. They are going to install those chips into buildings that don't exist yet

Starting point is 01:18:48 and they're going to put billions of dollars worth of these chips. Again, the chips have been made. The chips do exist largely. Although, there's still a lot of speculation. The chips exist. They're sitting in a warehouse. At some point, someone is going to put them into a warehouse that itself is being speculated

Starting point is 01:19:06 on by the same companies who are buying future compute on it as a different financial instrument. And they're going to build it. And then when they do build it, there's going to be so much demand for AI because people love to use it. And it's really made the economy so efficient. It is like truly... And also, And also one final point about this, right?

Starting point is 01:19:28 Yeah. And also that the people who use it and who become power users of it aren't going to request more tokens than actually make the money. Because more people using it is actually bad for them. Because if those people use tokens, they're selling the tokens below cost. Right. Yeah, it's good. So basically, this is a really strong thing for the economy. And it's obviously it's obscene and it's funny and it's truly terrifying.

Starting point is 01:19:57 But I think the thing that I think I really want to underline to me, I know, you know, you would say the same is that this is our money. Yeah. This is money that we produced by working our whole lives. We have worked so hard for so long and we produced so much surplus value. And we, you know, that's the nature of the situation. And that money is being lit on fire, sometimes quite literally, right? Like in coal fire plants and gas plants, it is destroyed. the planet, it is doing so in the name of keeping this bubble alive long enough for all of the big

Starting point is 01:20:34 people who are being rinsed, who got rinsed by investing in office buildings to get out with their cash and leave with the bag so that as we face the total political and economic collapse, as well as ecological disaster, there are people with enough money that they stole. This is one, it's like one last job at the level of like global delusion. Yeah. And it's all built on this myth-making about AI, but it's also built on all of these structures. And it's also built on like the collapse of the global economic system through war and stuff.

Starting point is 01:21:09 In short, it's good. But this is our money. This is our money. We made this money. They're lighting it on fire so that they can get a bad investment they made 10 years ago back. All the bad investments they've made since 2009. They're trying to cash out on that as fast as possible. now. And as long as they can keep pumping the stock market, they can keep taking that money out

Starting point is 01:21:33 and they have a chance to make it. And some of them will be ruined. But this isn't going to be like the 30s. I don't think we're going to see a lot of them jumping out skyscrapers tragically. Because I think honestly, most of them are going to get out. And we're going to be the ones holding the bag. And we're the ones who produce that money that they're lighting on fire. And this is what they want to do with us and with the world and the world that we live in. and I'm so glad that we have no way to stop them. I think that's good, personally. Yeah, you know, the optimistic view on this,

Starting point is 01:22:02 and again, I've been saying this already, trust approval rating is 30% and the bomb hasn't even gone off yet. Right. Like, the economy hasn't blown up. Well, and, lokey, the demand's destruction for natural gas and oil is so intense that the economy, the global energy market,

Starting point is 01:22:18 is greening faster. It's greening finally, for the first time since we started doing this, is greening at a pace fast enough to potentially stop some of the worst effects of climate change.

Starting point is 01:22:30 So, so. Unfortunately, the problem is at the same time we're also, all of our new economic growth is entirely in like fucking gas turbines. They're never going to run.

Starting point is 01:22:41 It's like, it's, you know, it's fine. Those are never going to run. Well, no, they've definitely poisoned a shit ton of people.

Starting point is 01:22:47 Oh, absolutely. Oh, yes, absolutely. No, no doubt. No doubt. No doubt.

Starting point is 01:22:52 Yeah. But, but, but, think that like, you know, like, to some extent, like, part of the strategy here, right, if, if, if you look at sort of, like, what venture capital is doing this, their plan is like, okay, yeah, we can, we can navigate the complete destruction of the global economy and the subsequent political, like, calamities and the subsequent political fallout and the collapse of, like,

Starting point is 01:23:11 nation states by, you know, creating our own sort of fascist corporate autocracies. Totally. But they don't have to be right about that. Like, they just don't. They're not, right. Have you seen how bad these guys are? Elon Musk can't even make a friend. You think this guy can run a corporate state, city state?

Starting point is 01:23:30 Like, come on, when that money stops having its value, they're not ready for the world if they're reaping. I said there's nothing we can do about that. There's nothing that we can do about it with the levers of power that exist right now formally, but there's actually a lot we can do about it. And they're going to learn a lot of reasons why previous capitalists built the SEC, built the welfare state, why they did things. and that's going to be one of the last things they learn, inshallah.

Starting point is 01:23:55 Yeah. Last time they did something like this that was frankly less stupid because I cannot believe I'm saying this. At least there were houses. I can't believe I'm saying this, right? But like the last time they did this, they set off a wave of world revolutions they barely survived and like revived the international left

Starting point is 01:24:19 in a way that had been basically more. for extremely long periods of time outside of very small regions. And now this, you know, this sort of like, the sort of sleeping giant that they unleashed has been awake for like a decade and a half. And they're like, what if we did this shit again? Yeah. But worse.

Starting point is 01:24:42 I mean, I don't see what could go wrong for them. I think I'm going to say it again. Happy pride. Let's make this one the last birthday America ever has. 250 is more than enough, don't you think? They had their time, our time is coming soon. It could happen here. Canadian women are looking for more.

Starting point is 01:25:11 More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHeart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Starting point is 01:25:41 What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up y'all? It's your girl, Sam J. And we're the host of everyone watches women's sports, a new podcast from Together and I Heart Women's Sports. Because let's be real. Women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days. The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments to take over your entire timeline. in the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week. Every week we're breaking down the biggest stories

Starting point is 01:26:07 across women's sports. We'll give you our tapes, our debates, and probably a few disagreements. We'll talk to athletes, celebrate big moments and get into what's happening on and off the field, court, track, and beyond. Because we're not just interested in what happened. We're interested in why everyone's talking about it.

Starting point is 01:26:22 Because everyone watches women's sports. So if you're already a fan, you're just getting into the game, there's a seat. for you right here. Listen to everyone watches women's sports on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, I'm Hoda Kotby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby. Okay, if you know me, you know this. I'm always searching for inspiration, for support, and useful tools to help maximize joy. So this podcast lets us uncover all of that together.

Starting point is 01:26:57 We're going to have these meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people. Like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she never saw coming. I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer and that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartner depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety. Olympic champ Sean Johnson revealed why she had no choice but to be a gymnast. There was something about gymnastics that was intoxicating to me. It's given me a belief that we all have one of those treasures inside of us. We just have to find it.

Starting point is 01:27:33 Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My first guest is Harris Houghton, Shakira, Luke and Yerrin, Samira, and Gracie. I'm so excited. On the bouncy bed. You have surprises? Many surprises. Welcome to Sweet 305, where the group chat comes to life.

Starting point is 01:27:58 What a fuck. It's like a way to say, like, hello, amiga, hello, my best. Oh, my friend. What are? Look, never I've ever I've ever. I've never. Except with my my children,

Starting point is 01:28:09 my children, I know Oof, Oof, that's incredible, yeah, the telenovela. You're the only person

Starting point is 01:28:19 I know that loves a yellow starburst. It'slamated. And there's someone like you say, I'd like to collaborate with this person.

Starting point is 01:28:27 This is Sweet 305. Listen to Sweet 305 with Lele Pons as part of my Cultura Podcast Network on the IHart Radio Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Imagine over 100,000 strikers shutting down the city of London for an entire month.

Starting point is 01:28:51 The makings of not only a general strike, but also a social revolution. Such was the case in 1889 when the dock workers in the port of London made their voices heard and shook the city to its core. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen here. I'm Andrew Sage, Andrew is on YouTube, and I'm joined once again by... James. I have to be back with you, Andrew. Likewise, likewise. And have you heard of the Great London Dock Strike of 1899?

Starting point is 01:29:22 Have. I went to school in a time when, like, they still taught a little bit of labour history. Ah, ah. Okay, so I guess you will be able to have a bit of an exchange about it then. Yeah, but I'm interested to know more. Yeah, I first learned about it through Eric Romanticester. He wrote briefly about it in one of his pamphlets, one of his many pamphlets. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:29:44 But I found further information and cross-verification through a bunch of different articles that I link in the show notes and reference throughout. Now, before we get to the strike itself, we have to look to the conditions that brought it about. The port of London, like ports around the world in that time, had terrible working conditions and terrible Pee alongside it. But despite being the fulcrum of London economy, the so-called unskilled workforce that made it run was left destitute. It parts due to the inconsistent nature of the work itself.

Starting point is 01:30:21 According to Libcom's article, a lot of trade was seasonal. You had sugar coming in from the Caribbean, timber from the north, and tea and spices from the east. This was in a time when, you know, the sun never set on the British Empire. Yeah. And back then, trade was also a lot more vulnerable to weather conditions. So the flow of commerce wasn't the most predictable. And since ports were not very recognized either, it took a lot of labor to load and unload ships. But there wasn't a consistent demand for that labor week to week.

Starting point is 01:30:56 You know, some weeks you would have hundreds of ships to load and unload. And other weeks, you would have mere dozens. So dark companies could get away with having a casual call on and contact. track system. Basically, they'd have a large pool of men hanging around waiting for labour. Most of them would only get taken on for a day or just a few hours. And whether you even got work that day or not was based on luck and fever, you could spend all day outside the dock waiting to get called on and end up being sent home with no pay. So it created a very desperate, competitive environment as men were basically have to push and shove each other to get a chance at being picked for work.

Starting point is 01:31:36 for the day. These are conditions where the workers are clearly poised against each other, as is often the case under capitalism. But around that time, about a year before the strike was talking about, according to an article by Beverly Cook for London Museum, the so-called unskilled and impoverished young women working at a match factory in the Boat Court of London went on strike and won better working conditions and pay, which may have even inspired dock workers' boldness. However, what really kicked off the Great Strike was a dispute over the bonuses workers would normally get for working faster and more efficiently. One of the big dock companies, the Eastern West India Dock Company, decided to cut their bonus.

Starting point is 01:32:24 And led by a man named Ben Tillett, on the 14th of August 1889, the dock workers began walking out and convincing their fellow workers to do the same. This era of labor history is always super fascinating to me. Like, there's so much at stake, right, for labor in this time period. People's lives were genuinely miserable, right? Like, working class existence in this time period. Like, you can read, I think Engels was writing about slightly earlier than this, but like Engels has sort of the conditions for working class people in Manchester.

Starting point is 01:32:58 But also, like, your bosses and the cops can just kill your own strike. you know, like those, the stakes are so high, like not that this cops can't and don't kill people now, I guess. But the desire to unionize was so natural, right? Like it wasn't coming from people like knowing of generations, like we do now, right? Like when we form our unions now, even if we, you know, we unionize, let's say Starbucks is a place that's unionizing not, we can think of the generations of union workers who have come before us and the struggles and the gains that they've had. but these folks, I mean, they had to an extent

Starting point is 01:33:33 the people's charter in these other things, right? Like, I know we've spoken about Luddites before and the idea of understanding Luddism as collective bargaining through riot, but like still, these people who really like built the modern labor movement in the 19th century, they paved the way with their blood for all of us to an extent, right?

Starting point is 01:33:53 And I think that's always like really impressive to me that people were prepared to like step into that fight. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we take it for granted that we have legacy to draw upon today, but, you know, somebody had to be the first. Some group of workers had to be the first, you know, come together and stand up in those industrial conditions, in those urban conditions. I'm sure there's a history of workers standing up prior to the Industrial Revolution. You know, you would have collective bargaining and even back in antiquity,

Starting point is 01:34:25 but the miserableness of the conditions really push them to take a stand. And even though the work itself was made so competitive, they still recognize their common cause. I'm sure that before that strike, they might have had some petty rivalries, some petty grudges amongst each other. Like, all that guy keeps taking my job. It's like three days straight. Now I haven't gotten any work because he keeps on shoving me aside. But they put all that aside for the strike. Their union was unofficial at the time.

Starting point is 01:35:00 but that union would go on to form a strike committee to put forward their demands, which were an increase in wages, an overtime wage, work time minimums, an end to the contract system and a limit on the call-ons, which would be fixed to specific times of day, and the recognition of their union. Their strike would soon be joined by the amalgamated Steve-a-dor's union, which were basically a higher status kind of dock worker, and even more critical to the function of the docs.

Starting point is 01:35:30 their support lended legitimacy to the strike. The stevedores would issue a request to other workers in London, particularly connected to shipwork, to stand in solidarity to duck workers and their demands, and to donate contributions to support the strikers, which is of course critical to any long-term strike action. So across workshops and factories, other workers join in the course, rope makers, carmen, and lighter men among them. By the 27th of August, an estimated 130,000 men were on strike.

Starting point is 01:36:04 To quote one newspaper article from the time, dockmen, lighter men, bargemen, cement workers, carmen, ironworkers, and even factory girls are coming out. If it goes on a few days longer, all London will be on holiday. The great machine by which five millions of people are fed and clothed will come to a dead stop. And what is to be the end of it all?

Starting point is 01:36:25 The proverbial small spark has kindled a great fire which threatens to envelop the whole metropolis. End quote. And according to Beverly Cook, after two weeks of the dockers striking, 10,000 tailors in East London also went on strike. Now, these were mostly Jewish immigrants working in the clothing industry's sweatshop conditions, scattered across around 500 cramped workshops of mostly 10 workers or less apiece, across Whitechapel. The tailors demanded fixed 12-hour work and days, a mandatory one-hour break outside of the workshop,

Starting point is 01:37:03 increased wages, and a ban on forcing workers to take home their work. They mostly spread the word of their strike through informational boosters. They weren't necessarily too connected to the dock worker strike at first. They had their own demands, and it seems to have been a coincidence of fate that they both rose up around the same time. Perhaps one encouraged by the other. Now, during the strike, as Malatesta put it, quote, they strove to feed a population,

Starting point is 01:37:43 women and children included, of upwards of half a million people, to raise subscriptions and collections across the city, to keep up with fast correspondence by letter and telegram, to organize meetings, demonstrations, and talks, to keep an eye out, put pen to people, and stay alert less the bosses successfully trick English

Starting point is 01:38:01 or foreign poor into black-legging, to monitor all the dock's entrances to see if there were people going to work and how many. All of this stunningly well done by unsolicited volunteers. There was one noteworthy incident. A shipload of ice arrived and a rumor was right that this ice was meant for the hospitals. The strikers raced in such numbers to help unload it without a care for whether they would be paid for the job or not. The sick, and especially the patients in the hospitals, were not to suffer on account of the strike. and quote.

Starting point is 01:38:33 I hadn't heard that before. That's quite touching. This is especially part of the discourse in the UK at the moment, right? Like when medical workers go on strike, like this always gets trotted out by the right-wing press that like, oh, well, they've just chosen to make their patients suffer or whatever when in fact, like the procedures and planning that medical workers go through before they go on strike to ensure that people don't die because they went on strike are many. and complex, right? But like, it's interesting to see that even back then people were, like, as they were working out the best ways to take collective action, they were trying to also not harm other working people. Yeah. I mean, also, the extent of the strike and the extent of the suffering is really determined by the extent to which the bosses are holding out, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So if you want to blame anybody, you have to blame the bosses, not the workers. Yeah, absolutely. It's,

Starting point is 01:39:32 within the power of employers to not have their employees have to go on strike in order to be treated with dignity and respect, however they consistently choose not do. Yeah, exactly. And I think what the workers demonstrate and strikes like that and strikes in this time period as well is just their capacity to analyze a situation, to organize themselves, to respond effectively to problems that arise, you know, maladious. as described mass meetings and pickets, daily processions to rally support, they even worked on persuading scabs to join them. Or according to some news reports, they were intimidating those scabs.

Starting point is 01:40:16 Yeah. But there was another quote from that liberal article I wanted to read. He said, Sir, during this week, I have witnessed the most open intimidation practiced by the men on strike, Howling crowds going from dock to dock and warehouse to warehouse, stopping businesses and threatening vengeance and all who do not comply with their demands. Until now, there are thousands who are out who had no desire to strike, but were compelled to do so. Those who dare to work for their wages are being brutally maltreated and threatened with worse if they dare attempt to work in defiance the strikers' wishes. I saw several men severely injured today on Tower Hill, the blood being made to fly in all directions by gangs of strikers.

Starting point is 01:40:59 One of the authorities for not to protect peaceable citizens in earning an honest living signed a lover of freedom. This was sent into the Times on the 24th of August 1889. And to me, it kind of sounds like a doc boss writing in. Yeah, right. Trying to sound like, oh, an innocent bystander. Yeah. Violence is not a thing that is absent in the labor movement.

Starting point is 01:41:23 But again, to your point earlier, often the discourse does not talk about the violence, which is done by forcing people to live in poverty and labor in humane conditions. Exactly, exactly. That's where the real violence lies. To be fair, there were a couple instances of charges of assault and intimidation, but the strikes were mostly peaceful. Yeah. You know, they were exercised a lot of courage and discipline and restraint.

Starting point is 01:41:49 Yeah. They really showed that these working class people, were not impossible to organize or absurdly dangerous, they had a capacity for order and collective organization that could just as easily prefigure a free society as it merely is directed towards negotiation with the powers that be. Another aspect of their resistance that I took note of was the fact that a rent strike also took place.

Starting point is 01:42:19 You know, you often hear nowadays, when you try and talk to people about, you know, organizing a strike, organizing a general strike, whatever, or just like a strike in their industry, from people I've spoken to you often hear that, oh, well, I have bills to pay, I have rent to make, I have, you know, this and that to do. And these violent and poor conditions,

Starting point is 01:42:40 at risk of their lives, the families of strikers just chose not to pay rent for the duration of the strike. That's right, yeah. All of them collectively. Yeah, a rent strike. And they also would have been gathering donations and such in all of this time as the strike is going on to sustain, you know, their keep in other ways, their other basic needs. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:43:04 But unfortunately, the donations do not look like there would be enough to stave off starvation. You know, despite food tickets being distributed to cover food needs after the direct food distribution couldn't keep up. There still wasn't enough to cover for the swelling mass of strike. and their families. And yet the strikers still held on and rationed what they had, even as the bosses waited and waited for them to give up. You know, the bosses were literally counting on the starvation of the workers to break the strike so they wouldn't have to give in to the demands.

Starting point is 01:43:39 Yeah. And it really got to a point in the beginning of September where it looked like the strike might not be able to go on. And then a miracle of international solidarity came through. the Brisbane Warf Laborers Union in Australia sent money from citizens of all classes across Australia to support the strikers. The strikers got a first installment of 150 pounds,

Starting point is 01:44:04 which I found out is worth 17,000 pounds today. And the dark workers received over 30,000 pounds in total, or over 3.4 million pounds today. To sustain their strike long term and security. their victory. Obviously, with a win-for like that, they'll be able to sustain the efforts. And even though the tailor's strike was mostly separate from what the dock strikers were doing, the dock strikers made sure that the tailors got funds to support themselves, amounting to about 100 pounds or 11,000 pounds today. Nice.

Starting point is 01:44:42 I mean, can you imagine that kind of solidarity today where that swell of resources can be poured to support fellow workers in their efforts. Yeah, fellow workers who you had so much less communication with than we do today, right? Like, it's not like they can, there's not like they logged on to Twitter and we're like, oh yeah, well, these people are on strike and let's talk to them and okay, we should support them. Like, yeah, at a time when people had less communication, they still managed to have more solidarity.

Starting point is 01:45:15 And we see, like, people have raised millions of dollars, for instance, to feed people in Palestine, right? Like, Solidarity still exists. For sure. But specifically in the labor movement, it is hard to come by often. And even when you do see solidarity in the labor movement, it tends to be restricted to the borders of the nation.

Starting point is 01:45:36 You might see the occasional solidarity strike within the country. But how often do you see strikes crossing those borders? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Like if if dock workers in London were to strike today, oh, you know, what are the chances that dock workers in Australia or dock workers in the US would support them? Yeah, like even living as I do like at an international border, like issues of international solidarity will come up in union discussions. Like there might be times where we might take a collection or something for unions to the south of what is the border now and between US and Mexico, right? but the idea that you could raise that much money

Starting point is 01:46:19 and that like your solidarity could be so profound that like that is a thing that let these people get through. Yeah. I think that's very hard to imagine that happening now, which is a shame. It's just so fascinating to me how like, we have this period of the Industrial Revolution, right? Where labor becomes even more exploitative, right?

Starting point is 01:46:40 More surplus value accrues to the people who own the means of production to like be, crudely Marxist about it, I guess. And the working class, which is the people creating the value, but not receiving the benefits from it, has to decide how to respond to that. And around the world, they're like, fuck this. Like, we're not having that. And like, the whole genesis of labor organizing, international solidarity, like it existed before, as you said. Of course it did. But like, the sort of formal structures that we have today arrives pretty quickly alongside

Starting point is 01:47:19 that increased level of labor exploitation. There's a moment from then until maybe the 19-teens, I mean, maybe till the Great Depression, where it really seems like that the class between capital and labor is like a really an equal and fierce fight, you know? Now, like, it almost seems like,

Starting point is 01:47:36 by comparison with sort of labor organizing tends to ask more nicely and be a bit less, like, bit less radical and a bit less international compared to how it was back then. Yeah. I guess not all of it. There is still very radical labor organ, I think, of course, I didn't want to overlook

Starting point is 01:47:51 that, but it's just, this is a particularly remarkable time. Yeah, it's not as prominent. Yeah. Or perhaps it's less, just less apparent, less recognizable, less amplified. If it does exist, it could stand to be amplified more.

Starting point is 01:48:07 Right. This was a time when bosses were really worried. Like, as influenced by the lover of freedom writing into the newspaper, they were very concerned with this, right? Like, they weren't sure how long, I guess they could pull this shit off, like how long they can make it last where they could exploit people this much. Exactly. And you kind of see them back in their time today, right?

Starting point is 01:48:30 Because these battles were fought, but the war wasn't won. You know, the class war is yet to be won. Right. Or I suppose if you want to be particularly cynical about it, you could say that it has been won, and the Catholicsists are the wind inside. But you'll notice that where we have won concessions, where workers have won concessions in the past, the capitalists merely buy their time and wait for an opportunity to roll back those concessions. Yeah, without a doubt. And so we could continue to exist in this kind of cycle of fighting and stopping short. of total victory by accepting concessions just for the fight after restart again years down the line

Starting point is 01:49:17 or we could, you know, reach the finish line as it were. Yeah, the kinder gentler capitalism that we were supposed to build through collective action hasn't really delivered. And all it's done has resulted in capitalism moving to places where it can more readily exploit labor. I was having this discussion with a colleague, right? like an older colleague, they had been an industrial union person, like their whole lives, and they were saying that, like, in this era of, like, neoliberal globalization,

Starting point is 01:49:45 the greatest failure of United States unions was to fail to internationalize. Like, when borders dropped to capital, but not people, right, in the late 20th century, and money and jobs started moving from the United States to, in a lot of cases to Mexico, right? And unions could have responded by saying, we will go to Mexico, and we will organize our siblings in the working class in Mexico. Not the Mexican people can't organize themselves and don't have a very long and proud tradition over work-plus organizing, they do.

Starting point is 01:50:13 But like those unions that had the resources from years of struggle in the US by and large didn't go to South and Central America and say, we're here with you. Like, we are not going to allow them to exploit you in the way that they once exploited us. And they didn't do that, right? They kind of doubled down on protectionism.

Starting point is 01:50:31 You see it now with unions under Trump a lot as well. You know, talking about tariffs and things as if they were protect jobs. They're sort of choosing the nation state over the working class when they do that. And that's bitten them in the ass before, but they still continue to keep doing it. Yeah. The nation state, one of the greatest sciops of all time. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:51:06 So just getting back to 1889 for a moment. Yeah, yeah. The workers, after receiving that, that windfall, managed to hold. hold on for just a bit longer and entered negotiations with their bosses through a committee initiated by the Lord Mayor of London, whose city was obviously quite paralyzed over the past month. The strikers also received the support of the Irish Catholic Archbishop Cardinal Manning, who shared that Irish Catholic background with a lot of the workers, a lot of the dark workers. and what I found, I guess, interesting reading that was that according to the Catholic Encyclopedia's

Starting point is 01:51:49 entry on Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, his involvement in the dark workers' negotiations kind of foreshadowed an encyclical that was issued by the Pope at the time two years later, which directly addressed the conditions of the workers, and set out a church policy that supported the right of labor to form unions while, of course, rejecting socialism and affirming private property rights. So one step forward, two steps back. Yeah. And I found that interesting that that encyclical was issued around the time that, you know, as many would have heard, the Pope of today has issued a new encyclical on the subject of AI, in part in relation to labor. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:52:35 So by the end of the committee negotiations, the dark workers had all their demands met, and the strike was agreed to be over on the 16th September 1889. The tailors also secured their victory. And after the strike, the dark workers formed an official new general laborers union, and the strike inspired thousands of unskilled workers to also organize themselves. According to Libcom, union membership overall grew from 750,000 in 189. to 1.5 million in 1892 to over 2 million in 18909. And this growth would be a 12 numbers for the existing unions as well as the establishment

Starting point is 01:53:19 of new unions. Now if we look at the strike through Malatester's eyes, I think he provides a very useful analysis. In about a strike written in 1889, likely right after the strike itself when Malatester was in London, While he recognized that dark workers had won the battle, he like I is questioning why they didn't go ahead and win the war. You know, he questioned why a movement powerful enough to bring one of the world's largest ports to a standstill didn't go any further. The docks have been running because workers, by the thousands, collectively made them run.

Starting point is 01:53:54 And when those workers withdrew their labor, an entire section of the economy crowned a halt. So from Aletesta, the first lesson of a strike and their value for revolution was that they reveal where the power actually comes from. Everyday life under capitalism and the state tends to hide that fact. You know, they make it seem like societies organised by governments, investors, managers, owners. But a strike makes it very clear that the people who do the work are the people who make society function. People who may have felt isolated would begin acting together, holding meetings, organising relief, feeding hundreds of thousands, managing communications, in the process, gaining practical experience.

Starting point is 01:54:34 and self-organization, demonstrating the potential to organize the city itself by themselves, for themselves. In other words, they're developing new powers, which would shape their new drives and establish a new consciousness. So strikes are schools of struggle, but as Maltaxasda points out, they're limited. They review workers' power, but they don't use that power to transform society. The dock strike won higher wages and better conditions, but the basic structure of society was untouched. The dock bosses were still bosses and the workers were still workers, and the state was still the state protecting property and maintaining the existing order. And this was Malta's critique of the labor movement. They got stuck on winning concessions instead of shaking up the system.

Starting point is 01:55:19 And we see through history that employers regroup in economic conditions change and the previous gains would come under pressure. So one battle being won does not mean the class war has been won. Literally a few decades later, another. The strike took place in the port of London by dock workers. In 1926, as recounted in Callum Kant and Matthew Lee's article on the making of London's General Strike, the Yakman, dock workers, transport workers and other laborers joined coal miners in nationwide strike after mine owners sought wage cuts and longer hours. In that strike, dock workers once again effectively shut down key parts of the city's economy.

Starting point is 01:56:01 But during this strike, state repression was especially severe. The government deployed police, volunteers and emergency powers to keep services running and break picket lines. Violent clashes occurred around the docks where workers tried to prevent strike breakers and the movement of goods. Also, the leadership of the trade unions Congress to UC was quite conservative in response to this worker action. While rank and file workers demonstrated strong solidarity and willingness to continue the struggle, union leaders ultimately called off the strike after nine days without securing major guarantees for the strikers. It was a major betrayal of the movement and demonstrated the weakness

Starting point is 01:56:42 of traditional unionism structurally and ideologically. You see the signs of unions basically being part of the system in the end, as we see today. And you see the potential of workers as always to act autonomously. So strikes like these leave me with questions. You know, can a strike develop beyond a negotiation over wages and conditions into a broader challenge to who controls society? Can the solidarity bill during the strike survive after the immediate dispute ends? Can workers begin to see themselves not just as employees with demands, but as people capable of managing social life themselves. Can we assailed the legal order and the property protection that stand in the way of our survival? And in all of these questions, what I'm getting at is, how do you turn a general

Starting point is 01:57:32 strike into a social revolution? There's still gaps to be bridged between labor struggles and the grander ambitions of such a revolution. And labor conditions have certainly changed for many. You know, I don't want to put forward the position that we just need to recreate the rugged industrial unionism of the past. Yeah. But we still have power in our refusal to work. That hasn't changed. And if we leverage that alongside organization within and outside of the workplace to support

Starting point is 01:58:01 our struggles, to build and fight, to propose and oppose, and push for the vision of a world beyond workers and bosses, and merely pushing demands to bosses, maybe we can accomplish the social revolution that Maltaxas sought more than a century. who bigger strikes, stronger unions are not the answer. There may be steps toward workers using solidarity, confidence, and organizational capacity to take direct control of all aspects of social life. As always, all power to all the people. Peace.

Starting point is 01:58:46 Listen. And you're there for heart-wrenching knockouts. The world's biggest stage. and breathtaking triumph. It's a lot of 2026 FIFA World Cup. The knockout stage. Every match, every moment.

Starting point is 01:59:03 Listen on TSN Radio. Join the globe. On the road to the July 19th final. 2026 FIFA World Cup. Stream it all live on TSN Radio. Available on IHeart Radio. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers.

Starting point is 01:59:20 Hey, what's up y'all? It's your girl, Sam J. And we're the host of everyone watches women's sports, a new podcast from Together and I Heart Women's Sports. Because let's be real. Women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days. The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments to take over your entire timeline.

Starting point is 01:59:37 And the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week. Every week we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports. We'll give you our takes, our debates, and probably a few disagreements. We'll talk to athletes, celebrate big moments and get into what's happening on and off the field, court, track, and beyond. Because we're not just interested in what happened.

Starting point is 01:59:57 We're interested in why everyone's talking about it. Because everyone watches women's sports. So if you're already a fan, you're just getting into the game. There's a seat for you right here. Listen to everyone watches women's sports. On the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast.

Starting point is 02:00:16 Hey, I'm Hoda Kotby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby. Okay, if you know me, you know this. I'm always searching for inspiration, for support. useful tools to help maximize joy. So this podcast lets us uncover all of that together. We're going to have these meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people, like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she never saw coming. I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartum depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety. Olympic champs

Starting point is 02:00:55 Sean Johnson revealed why she had no choice but to be a gymnast. There was something about gymnastics that was intoxicating to me. It's given me a belief that we all have one of those treasures inside of us. We just have to find it. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My first guest is Paris Houghton, Shakira, Luke and Yerrin, Samira and Gracie. I'm so excited. On a bouncy bed.

Starting point is 02:01:29 You have surprises? Many surprises. Welcome to Sweet 305 where the group chat comes to life. What a . It's like a form of saying like, Oh, my, my friend, oh, my brother. What a . Look, I've never I've ever had to have

Starting point is 02:01:43 been with my kids, my kids, see my amante. Oof, Oof, that's, incredible, yeah, the telenovela. You're the only person I know that loves a Yellow Starburst. It's a woman.

Starting point is 02:01:58 There's not anyone that you Like you say, I'd like to collaborate with this person. This is Sweet 305. Listen to Sweet 305 with Lele Pons as part of my Culturea Podcast Network on the IHeartRadio app,

Starting point is 02:02:14 Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is It Could Happen here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, The Crumbling World, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by James Stout and Robert Evans.

Starting point is 02:02:33 Whoa. This is the Supreme Court edition. That's right. This episode, we're covering Supreme Court rulings from June 24th to July 1st and a few other news items that happened in that duration. And let's start with some of those smaller, miscellaneous news items before getting to the long series of Supreme Court rulings, which this episode will focus on. Yeah. So starting with court stuff, I guess. It appears the Department of Defense is planning to involuntarily activate reserve lawyers.

Starting point is 02:03:03 to serve as immigration judges, according to an article in Bloomberg law, for some context of voluntary activation, you can still opt for that. It's to do with the nature of their contracts as reservists, like how that time adds up to their military retirement and stuff. But in this case, it seems that it is also planning on activating people who have not indicated that they are interested in doing this. Secondly, a horrific pair of shallow earthquakes rated at 7.2 and 7.5 on the Richter Strail struck Venezuela last week, destroying whole high-rise buildings. La Guayera and Caracas were particularly hard hit. I actually saw a video of the street where I used to live with people who were very clearly dead lying in the road, which sucks.

Starting point is 02:03:45 Days later, people are still trapped under the rubble. The death toll is already in the thousands, with over 5,000 missing. It will be very hard for us to get an accurate death toll out of the Venezuelan government. Among the missing are more than 100 recently deported Venezuelans who were sent by the USA back to Venezuela. they were staying in a hotel and that hotel collapsed. This week, the Iraqi military also raided politicians inside the green zone, seized a bunch of cash, incited an ongoing anti-corruption effort. And the Department of Justice Anti-Trust Division,

Starting point is 02:04:19 together with 17 state attorney generals, has filed a civil suit against a number of egg producers for their alleged unlawful manipulation of egg prices. This was really interesting. I read through some of the court docs here. and this is definitely worth a closer look at some point. This is something I'd like to cover in the future, actually. People are like, you know, the cost of eggs has become a meme or whatever.

Starting point is 02:04:44 But like this is just straight up like oligopoly behavior. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They are colluding to increase the price of something. And like this became a political issue. This was one of Trump's main campaign items. Yeah, yeah. They knew that as they contained. to collude to do this, right? I think it does bear discussing within the context of the way

Starting point is 02:05:08 that we obtain our food in this country and the people who have control over the things that a lot of people feel like they need to get through every day, right? Like, I think this isn't the sort of silly throwaway thing that some people think it is. Definitely. According to an ethics disclosure released last Tuesday, President Trump has made more than $1.4 billion from his crypto businesses last year, making over 600 million from Trump-branded meme coins and 500 million in income from his crypto platform World Liberty Financial, which also partnered with the UFC Freedom 250 event to pay the fighters in crypto on the World Liberty Financial platform. The peanut farm comes to mind considering...

Starting point is 02:05:59 Yeah. One point four billion dollars in Trump-branded meme coins. It's kind of hard to write these corruption stories. I was looking into one recently about some federal contracting and like something that would have destroyed a presidency 10 years ago is like a 12-hour news story now. Not even sometimes. This is something that like J.D. Vance was just like talking about just like openly like last week.

Starting point is 02:06:25 Vance joked about this. It was that quote, I think Nixon's historical legacy is a joke. a bit of a renaissance, and deservedly so. I joked that if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. There you go, yeah. The idea that it took down a presidency is crazy, unquote. Yeah, yeah, I mean, what a, uh, just laying it, laying it all out there. What a thing to say on the record. Yeah, Jesus. The Colorado Supreme Court has blocked three redistricting ballot measures that would help Democrats pick up house seats in the state, also in Colorado, the DSA has continued its winning streak with 29-year-old Democratic Socialist

Starting point is 02:07:06 Milot Keros, who won the primary in the first congressional district, beating the 30-year-long incumbent by 10 points. This incumbent has been serving as the House rep longer than this Democratic Socialist challenger has been alive. The first district in Colorado as well, like, they will go Democrat. Oh, yeah. Barring, like, centrist Dems running a spoiler, which is always a thing they could do. This person will go to Congress. Joining the now growing kind of informal Democratic Socialist Caucus there. Yeah. Mayor Zoranamdani has announced more details about the $15 million allocated to help trans youth access gender affirming care. The city is launching a text slash call line to help connect people with care and services and a direct care access fund for providers of youth gender affirming care to quote,

Starting point is 02:07:59 help ensure New Yorkers can continue to access medically necessary care, unquote. That's from the mayor's office. Currently, New York City clinics like Callan Lord, Planned Parenthood, and the H&H City Municipal Hospital System all provide care to trans youth. But the fight continues to restore youth care services at NYU Langoon and Mount Sinai. Also speaking of Mom Doni, the mayor's newly appointed Rent Guidelines Board approved a first ever two-year rent-freeze for rent-stabilized units in the city.

Starting point is 02:08:33 Let's now get to the Supreme Court, starting with two shorter summaries and not shorter because they're less important, just because we have a lot to cover, and we'll probably cover these stories more in depth in the future. In a six to three ruling, the conservative Supreme Court justices struck down a law limiting how much money political parties can spend on campaigns in coordination with candidates, citing the First Amendment. This order overruled the court's 5-4 decision back in 2001, which upheld campaign finance limits. Essentially, this will allow political parties to spend vastly more money while utilizing candidates' low advertising rates that are not awarded to super PACs.

Starting point is 02:09:15 This will also make it harder to do campaign finance reform or super PAC reform based on this interpretation of the First Amendment, meaning that court reform might be what is necessary. to change something like this in the future. In another 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court upheld state bans on trans girls participating in girls' school sports. Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion, finding that the Constitution and Title IX allows for school sports

Starting point is 02:09:45 to be separated by sex, and that the quote-unquote sex in Title IX, quote, cannot possibly be interpreted to refer to anything other than biological sex, unquote, because that was the quote-unquote, ordinary meaning of the word when Title IX passed in the 70s. And quote unquote biological sex is related to sex assigned at birth in this ruling. Do they actually say that?

Starting point is 02:10:09 They do tie biological sex to sex assigned at birth, yeah. So they're not proposing like a chromatonality definition? Not in my reading of the ruling that I see chromosomes. Because they also cited the IOC definition, right? Which is a distinct thing from sex aside at birth. the IOC definition considers chromosonality and then also androgen sensitivity. So like

Starting point is 02:10:30 we're, I guess, approaching a situation where someone could be eligible for the Olympics but not eligible for high school sports. I haven't read the entirety of this decision. I need to, but I've read three other ones yesterday. In the second paragraph, it states that biological sex

Starting point is 02:10:46 is quote sex assigned at birth. Okay. So yeah, we're approaching like a disparate situation with IOC understandings of sex, which is not, I guess, a particularly new thing. Like we had, Maria Jose Martinez-Patigno was disqualified from, she would have been an Olympic athlete in the 80s

Starting point is 02:11:06 based on like a misunderstanding of how chromosonality works, I guess. You'd have to have the person who would split that difference, right, for like a national organising body to then decide how they would deal with that person competing. Nonetheless, it's fucking sucks for lots of young people. Yeah, and in,

Starting point is 02:11:22 and biological sex even as a category itself constructed. This has actually no concrete basis in biology. Yeah. Justice Sotomurkegon and Jackson agreed that the state bans don't violate Title IX, though on a narrower basis than the conservative majority, but the three liberal judges dissented under the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. Now, importantly, the ruling itself does not mandate a ban, right? that the court's not saying that schools must ban trans athletes,

Starting point is 02:11:54 but rather that Title IX claims cannot be used to oppose bans on trans athletes from participating in school sports. This is a narrow, limited ruling. It's kind of like the least bad out of all of the potential bad outcomes. The court declined to rule on whether states that have trans-inclusive rules for school sports are themselves in violation of Title IX and declined to rule on the degree to which trans people in general have protections under the equal protection clause. Clarence Thomas's concurrence, very, very ugly, just like flatly, like transphobic, way more so than Tavanaugh's majority

Starting point is 02:12:32 opinion. I could read it, but it's just ugly, like, it's just ugly stuff. Yeah, he's just a bigot. And it doesn't add anything to like the legal opinion. He just like took the chance to show he was a bigot. Yeah. Like I said, we will definitely cover this in more detail in the near future. But that requires some like careful. focus in reporting. Yeah. So I want to start, I guess, with temporary protected status, TPS, right? So the case in front of the Supreme Court concerned the Trump administration's attempt to remove the TPS of Syrian and Haitian nationals. I think we need to begin by addressing a lot of the misinformation and misunderstanding here. TPS is a renewable non-permanent status with no pathway to permanency. It can last between six and

Starting point is 02:13:16 18 months, and it's renewed currently by the DHS secretary, right, that power passed to them when DHS began overseeing immigration. It was created in 1990, and at its core, it's supposed to be a way of protecting people who are in the United States when disaster befalls their country of citizenship. If you are in the U.S. when they declare a TPS, you can apply, get granted a work permit. The longest that will last is 18 months. And two months before it running. without DHS has to determine if they will reauthorize it or not. So some folks, for instance, from El Salvador have been in the U.S. for decades on TPS, that they have no permanency, they have no sense of stability.

Starting point is 02:13:57 It is very hard for them to, like, make progress in many areas that would be easy for citizens or even permanent residents or visa holders, right, because of that lack of the ability to plan to become citizens. So they wanted to pass to permanency. Like, there are a couple of ways to do that, but they, might have to risk leaving and coming back on another status, which many of them are not willing to do. I wrote about the Venezuelan TPS in my first Dary in Gat series. So people want to hear an immigration lawyer, it's an immigration lawyer from one of the cases we're going to talk about next, explaining that than they can.

Starting point is 02:14:33 The TPS, as ruled by Sanchez versus Mayorkas, is not the same as lawful admission to the country, right? people have frequently been claiming I've seen that the Haitian TPS pertain to the 2010 earthquake. This is not correct. This was in the courts in the first Trump administration would be the simplest way of saying it. The current TBS pertains to 2021 killing of juvenile moise and the subsequent violence thereafter, right?

Starting point is 02:15:00 So it came about under the Biden administration. If people want more context at the time I was writing op-eds for NBC and I will include one that I wrote on the show notes. at the time of the announcement in 2021, they were exceptionally clear that they did not want more Asian people coming to the US. Like, genuinely, some of the most repugnant language I've seen from the executive branch outside of this administration.

Starting point is 02:15:23 In one instance, my York has said, those who attempt to travel to United States after this announcement will not be eligible for TBS and may be repatriated. There were some more explicit and in my mind, uglier statements. Again, I've cataloged those in previous writing so you can read it. this case pertained to whether an administration could terminate a TPS without going through interagency review, something court records show that didn't do in case of the Haitian TPS. The court heard that argument and effectively said that the courts could not challenge the failure of DHS to do that. They didn't say that Nome followed the law or followed the procedures that she should have followed

Starting point is 02:16:02 to cancel this DPS. they said that whether she did or did not do that cannot be challenged in court. One of the other challenges here was that the Haiti decision was motivated by race. The court addressed this, and I'm just going to quote from the opinion here, political discourse by prominent public figures is increasingly cowed in terms that would have scandalized the public just a short time ago. And the statement cited by the Mayotte respondents, especially those concerning Haiti and Haitian immigrants to this country,

Starting point is 02:16:30 exemplify this development. but whatever one may think of the cited statements, they are insufficient to show that the termination of Haiti's TPS designation was based on the race of the Haitian people. Ironically, both Doe and Mayotte respondents identify a strong race-neutral explanation of these official statements. The present administration's general stance on immigration and its obvious antipathy towards past administration's TPS policies. So what they're saying there is, like this wasn't based on race. They hate all immigrants, right? Or they hate everyone on TPS. I do want to point out that it was not so very low.

Starting point is 02:17:02 long ago that the president spoke about Haitian people eating dogs and cats. Here is Mark Wayne Mullin answering a question about this. The temporary protective status is over. They have to go home. Now, they don't have to go to the country that they came from. If they're not feeling safe, they can go someplace else, but they cannot stay here. Your TPS, temporary protective status is over. So we will help assist you in leaving, if you would like. We'll buy you an airline ticket. We'll give you $2,600 to re-establish yourself. someplace else if you don't want to go back to the country he came from, but you have to leave. And we're going to assist you in doing so. And if you choose not to, then we'll pick you up and

Starting point is 02:17:41 force you to leave. That was yesterday. Here's him answering a question about TPS today. So today's Wednesday for those listening later. Are you going to be going after Haitians living in the country? Syrians living in the country. What's the path for? Well, I hate when it's phrased going after individuals, the fact is TPS for certain individuals under the court ruling, they no longer have status. TPS was temporary. It was never meant to be a permanent status. You had an opportunity why you were here to possibly try to change your status. Now that the court ruling has went out, you no longer have that option. You have to go back to a country that either take you or back to the country you came from.

Starting point is 02:18:21 And if you deport yourself, which we will give you $2,600 plus a plane ticket to go home, you had the opportunity at that point to fill out it legally for a visa or another way to come back in this country. But you have to come in through our immigration systems and follow their laws, not illegally. But if we have to arrest you and deport you, that option of coming back in this country is off the table. So we would encourage everybody that fell on any TPS that is no longer temporary protected status for you. Your time has expired. So previously this self-deportation had barred people from coming back. I need to check exactly what program he's talking about there.

Starting point is 02:19:01 Maybe it's something that I haven't come across, right? But what he's suggesting there is that people could leave to a third country. They would have to find a third country that would accept them. That is less and less likely to happen in its global climate. This is very bad, especially the people, like we know in Syria there has been intercommunal violence ever since. the end of the Civil War, right? And then the installation of the Syrian transitional government. It is still not a safe place.

Starting point is 02:19:32 Haiti remains a place where people, especially people who are going back with a bunch of cash from the United States are likely to be targeted. This is really bad. TPS is an important program. It did not give people permanency. It could have been much better, but not having it is much worse.

Starting point is 02:19:51 Talking of things that are much worse. I want to move on to Mullen versus Alotrolado. People will be familiar with AOL if they'd listened to my previous work. I've interviewed a lot of people from AOL over the years. This case pertains to asylum. And United States are law regarding asylum. The law says anyone who is in or arrives in the USA may apply for asylum. Of course, CBP can inspect people seeking admission to the USA.

Starting point is 02:20:17 In practice, what this means is that asylum seaters have metered this process. of physically preventing people entering the USA so that they cannot then arrive in the USA and apply for asylum is called metering, right? There have been various types of metering over the years. The Ninth Circuit had previously held that when someone encounters US border officials, they may apply for asylum. In practice, the difference here is between entering a port of entry versus having to have passed through a port of entry or around a port of entry. Port of entry is the thing with the, like I'm thinking of the San Antonio 1, but like the big revolving doors, right, where the CBP people stand,

Starting point is 02:21:03 where the blue CBP, blue shirt CBP stand. CBP has previously said that they did this for capacity reasons, but those capacity claims have been contradicted by reports to their own office of the inspector general. Effectively, the Supreme Court has blessed, the practice of metering asylum applications by saying that people have to have arrived in the USA versus arriving at the border. And this is being portrayed as a very, very straightforward decision. Let me read from the opinion here. An alien standing in Mexico does not arrive in the

Starting point is 02:21:35 United States by attempting and failing to set foot in the country. An alien, quote, arrives in the United States only when he crosses the border. The INA and A, it's the Immigration Naturalization Act. Thus neither entitles an alien standing in Mexico to apply for asylum nor requires an immigration officer to inspect him. They later said, metering does not permanently buy any alien from arriving and applying for asylum, despite the fact that many migrants have died and will die

Starting point is 02:21:59 or suffer tremendous harm due to the practice. They go on to say, last, respondent's argument that the government might someday prevent all potential arriving asylum applicants from reaching the point where they could find an application addresses a hypothetical future policy, not the rescinded metering policy at issue, which merely delayed entry to improve conditions

Starting point is 02:22:21 at certain points of entry. Let's listen now to this clip of Stephen Miller. So America's doors are closed fully to asylum signals. That's not a hypothetical future policy that Stephen Miller is saying it, right? Yeah, that's absurd. That's very clearly what was going to happen. You're being deliberately naive.

Starting point is 02:22:41 It's obscene to say that that's a hypothetical. It's not. You're just like flatly laying out the mechanism in which all asylum seekers can be denied the chance to even ask for asylum by just magically saying, no, you're actually not talking to us when you're talking to us at the border. Yeah. And like I want to address this like standing in Mexico claim, right? Because they're standing at the port of entry. So this building, quote unquote, in Mexico is paid for by the United States. It contains armed United States personnel. Are we therefore invading Mexico? have we therefore seized Mexican territory? Like, just because you have not definitionally crossed the border, it is misleading to say that you're standing in Mexico, right? The port of entry is clearly a liminal space.

Starting point is 02:23:28 It is not like you're in fucking Chiapas shouting on a megaphone, hey, can I have asylum? Like, this framing is oversimplifying, to put it mildly. What this means is that we have created a de facto incentive to enter the United States between ports of entry. people who do so will have arrived in the United States. This is what happened under the Biden administration, right, with CBP1, where they effectively use CBP1 as a metering tool. The metering tool because they and the Trump administration have both defended Title 42 was completely insufficient

Starting point is 02:24:02 to keep up with the backlog of asylum applications. And so people entered between ports of entry, right? Thousands of them, I reported on this a very great deal at the time. There have been many other forms of metering, the Obama administration did metering, that's when this case began, CBP1, the migrant protection protocols, many others, right? In every single incidents where there has been metering, we have seen that people enter between ports entry, we have seen escalations in border deaths. With war construction continuing, many of the places where people previously entered are now closed. We will see more people entering. along more risky routes and that will lead to more deaths.

Starting point is 02:24:46 There is no doubt in my mind that this decision will kill people. Also, the people who do remain in Mexico will in many cases not be safe there. The amount of migrants I know personally, like people who I talk to once a week, once a month, who came through the Darien Gap when I was there, who we traveled together. And then they attempted to apply for CBP1 and were robbed and were sexually assaulted. kidnapped, killed while they were in Mexico, is more than I can count on off the top of my head. This will have disastrous human rights consequences.

Starting point is 02:25:35 All right, we're back. And we are back to talk about birthright citizenship, Trump versus Barbara. In this decision, the court held that, quote, children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are, quote, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and our citizens at birth under the 14 Amendment citizenship clause. The court was a bit split on how they got here, with a 6-3 majority holding that Trump's attempt to remove citizenship by executive order was illegal, and a 5-4 majority agreeing that it was unconstitutional. Actually, I spoke about this just before we get onto this, with Robert and Sophie in November of 2024 talking about things that Trump administration might do.

Starting point is 02:26:15 Here we are. Here is the relevant part of the 14th Amendment of people who aren't familiar, quote, all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the government. a jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. The majority opinion, somewhat based in Giussoli. I think that's how I said. I haven't done... Juosoli. Jusoilia.

Starting point is 02:26:35 I did Latin. I mean, the good news is that Latin is nobody really knows how it was said. Yeah, sure. The bad news is that people still have strongly held opinions. Well, there's a ecclesiastical Latin and whatnot. But if you take classical Latin, there's not a pronunciation test in school. But JuSoli is fine. When I did my GCSE exam.

Starting point is 02:26:54 I didn't do a Latin oral like I did for French. The idea here is anyone born, here is a citizen, unless they are not subject to jurisdiction of the USA. That qualifier has generally applied to diplomats and their children. That is the main group. Because someone is here in an undocumented fashion, they are still subject to jurisdiction of the USA, as can be fairly obviously understood from like a plain text understanding of that phrase, I think.

Starting point is 02:27:17 Let's hear Mike Johnson. I guess Mike Johnson was in oppressor when this decision came down and someone got to tell him. Oh, dear. What do they rule? Here we go. As children born in the United States, parents unlawfully or temporarily present, are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and our citizens at birth under the 14th Amendment's citizenship clause. What's your reaction to that?

Starting point is 02:27:40 Well, I need to read the opinion, okay? But obviously that's, I mean, you could say that's a textualist, originalist view. However, I do think. think that this has been grossly abused in recent years. He's so pissed. He's so pissed. His little growl. Yeah, he's so mad.

Starting point is 02:28:03 And the joy in that reporter's voice, as he realizes, he's getting, number one, I get to be the person to read the opinion out to fucking Mike Johnson. And number two, I get to ask Mike Johnson for a response. Which is beautiful. I'm so happy for them. Yeah. And as he said, right, like, a. plain text understanding of this is all you really need. A textualist understanding, for sure.

Starting point is 02:28:27 Very clear. Yeah. So there was discussion of the Wong Kim Art case, which ruled that, quoting here, a child born in the United States of parents of Chinese descent, who at the time of his birth are subjects of the Emperor of China, but have a permanent domicile and residents in the United States, and are there carrying on business and are not employed in any diplomatic or official capacity under the Emperor of China, becomes at the time of his birth a citizen of the United States with virtue of the first clause at a 14th Amendment of the Constitution. It's the first clause of the 14th Amendment that I read earlier, right? It is important to understand the context of this case.

Starting point is 02:29:02 This One Kim-Arck case happened in the context of an assault on birthright citizenship and especially on Asian migrants, right? This is the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act, for example. The decision in the one case was that the 14th Amendment was declaratory of the common law understanding of citizenship. Decision holds that, quote, aliens who travel to the United States for, quote, business or pleasure receive no, quote, exemption from the jurisdiction of the country. The case has some very narrow exceptions for, quote, children of foreign sovereigns or their ministers, or born on foreign public ships, or of enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of

Starting point is 02:29:41 our territory and children members of Indian tribes. It's not until 1924 that we get the Indian Citizenship Act, I thought they might have gone harder on that than they did, but they did not. Much of the dissent focused on that use of the word domicile and whether that was in the USA, but as the majority argued, citing precedent and English common law, which is the basis for the law we have now in the United States, right? Quote, there is scant evidence for this dramatically revisionist few. Sources from 1766 to 1868 defined, quote, allegiance by birth, just as a British did, as the tie or duty owed by one who is born within the dominions and under the British,

Starting point is 02:30:17 of a particular sovereign. And quote, sources after the ratification of the 14th Amendment do not put in doubt the understanding of the citizenship clause at the time of and after its ratification. Certainly the US has not used this domicile test for other things, right? Like it doesn't, it doesn't use a domicile test, for instance, when it taxes its citizens extraterritorially. It is not the basis, by the way, for children of citizens becoming a citizen that is based on a law passed by Congress that does not base in this constitutional amendment, right? It is worth note that the way Trump's executive order, which was what was struck down here, was written, it would have included people who are domiciled here based on any understanding of the term domicile

Starting point is 02:30:57 that I think is genuine. His was written not even in this sort of more focused way, focusing on what they perceive to be a weakness in that one decision. So who was a floater from the 6-3 to 5-4? The floater was Kavanaugh. He opined that, quote, Congress could, consistent with the 14th Amendment, amend the law, or otherwise, I'm saying the law here, he gives a citation for the law, right? Otherwise, enact new legislation establishing exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born

Starting point is 02:31:25 to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country. But Congress has not yet done so. The law in question is the Nationality Act of 1940. It says, quote, the following shall be nationals and citizens of the United States at birth. A person born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, and then another clause further down, a person of unknown parentage found of the United States were under the United States were under the age of five years until shown prior to his attaining the age of 21 years not to have been born in the United States. He argues that Congress clearly did not want to

Starting point is 02:31:59 make more exceptions than existed in the one Kim-Arck case and that they would have done if they did. But he says it is possible to re-examine the Constitution in modern context and look at the jurisdiction part again and have additional exemptions that would pass constitutional muster if Congress chose to change the law. It seems like what he's doing here is like by disagreeing with the sort of constitutional interpretation, he is like giving the Trump administration a sort of framework to pursue this in the future

Starting point is 02:32:28 if they want to. He's signposting it, yeah. Yeah, and like whether or not that will succeed is another question. Yeah. He's kind of showing them a sort of path. Yes, he is. Yeah, he's saying if you want to do this,

Starting point is 02:32:38 you could do it like this, in my opinion. Yeah. They are currently having some issues with getting all their representatives in the house on the same page on shit. and mid-terms are coming up. A lot of the opposition to this was focus on the speeches that pertain to the authors of the 14th Amendment

Starting point is 02:32:53 and the process surpassing the Fourth Amendment. It's quite remarkable how, like, what a fundamental lack of understanding about how the Constitution works, this shows, right? When the Constitution is amended, we do not incorporate all of the vibes of the guy who wrote the text. We incorporate the words. It is those words that are ratified by the states,

Starting point is 02:33:13 not the person who wrote them. We do not endorse that this person's opinions are now constitutional. The United States has a codified constitution. It is the words that are codified in that document that matter. That's the end of James explaining constitutions. Gorsuch, however, to your point,

Starting point is 02:33:29 Garrison, about like Kavanaugh pointing in a direction, Gorsuch seems to be of the other opinion here. He says that undocumented people living in the United States are incontrovertibly citizens or the children born to undocumented people. living in the United States. Quote, what matters isn't whether a child's parents or citizens, what matters whether they and by law their child at birth have made this place their home and are thus domiciled within the United States. Thus, he's saying that non-resident's children

Starting point is 02:33:58 could in his mind be excluded, but that anyone who is residing in the United States cannot be excluded. So he's kind of halfway in between on that, but it seems like his take would not align with Kavanaugh's kind of signposted way there. I mean, yeah, it's on one hand, not great. Well, it's, you know, good, but not great that in some interpretations, this is like a 5-4 ruling, even though the Constitution is, you know, in a plain text reading very clear. This is also a very weird ruling, because it's 5-4, but also in some ways,

Starting point is 02:34:31 6-3, and also with Gorsuch, it's kind of like 7-1-1. 7.5. Yeah. Yeah. Like, yeah. Oh, Neil. I think once they get to a point where they're writing a dissent or a concurrence and they know where they're at, I think that's how it works, right?

Starting point is 02:34:48 They write the dissent after they've decided, I'm pretty sure. Then Gorsuch can fucking go on a sick one. He can go have his fun. Yeah, exactly. Like, he can nerd out on this shit. Well, that's why he's my favorite Supreme Court justice. Not in terms of, I don't agree with him the most. I don't think he's the best person.

Starting point is 02:35:06 I don't think he's right the most often. but he's always the most entertaining. Like, he's always the most interesting guy to see, like, how did you arrive there, Neil? How is this your stance on things? It's every time. It's fun as hell. Yeah, he is like a box of chocolates.

Starting point is 02:35:22 You never know what you're going to get with Neil Gorsuch. But yeah, that is where we're at, I guess, with three major cases pertaining to citizenship and immigration. Yeah. A mixed bag, I guess. This ruling is certainly a blow to the Trump. administration. Another blow to the term of administration is the ruling on mail-in-voting, where the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of counting valid mail-in votes that arrive after

Starting point is 02:35:52 election day. Glad we got a 5-4 in favor of counting people's votes. On the election day. Glad that that's at least still a 5-4. This case focused on a Mississippi law that allows mail-on-ballot to be counted as long as they are postmarked on or before Election Day and arrive within five days after Election Day. A district court previously ruled in favor of the law, but the Fifth Circuit reversed the ruling, finding that votes must be received by Election Day. But for the Supreme Court, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority opinion, finding that, quote, the Election Day statutes require the electorate's choice to be made on Election Day. That occurs so long as Election Day is the

Starting point is 02:36:35 deadline for individuals to vote, as it is in Mississippi, but the Election Day statutes do not set a deadline for ballot receipt. So they do not prevent Mississippi from counting ballots postmarked before Election Day yet received afterward, unquote. Alito Thomas and Gorsuch dissented with Kavanaugh joining their dissent in part. Much of this case rested on what quote unquote election day means in federal law. The Republican Party, who was is the plaintiffs in this case, among a few other, like the Mississippi Republicans, the Republican Party nationally, and also in part the Libertarian Party, but mostly the Republican Party tried to argue that because federal statutes use the term quote-unquote election to mean that ballots are

Starting point is 02:37:22 both cast and received, and by setting a day for an election, then that also sets a deadline for votes to be received. But as already stated, the majority found that, quote, nothing in the federal election day statutes requires ballots to be received by election day, unquote. Amy Coney-Barritt notes that, quote, although the election day statutes refer to a particular day for the election, plaintiffs do not contend that everything must occur on that day. For instance, they do not object to early voting or dispute that officials may count votes and certify a winner after. election day, unquote. Now, in this case, the Republicans aren't even directly challenging absentee voting as a general practice, but their argument to restrict the counting of some

Starting point is 02:38:12 absentee ballots, quote-unquote, relies heavily on historical practice, precedent, and policy from the mid-1800s because that's around when the first two federal election statutes were enacted. Basically, during the Civil War, states that authorized absentee voting did impose strict election day deadlines for ballot receipt. The opinion notes, quote, but plaintiffs admit they cannot precisely tie this historical practice to the text of the election day statutes, unquote. So to quote, Barrett, the Republicans theory here is, quote, because we are governed by 19th century election day laws, we are also governed by 19th century voting practices. Carried to its logical conclusion, this theory would call into question the way modern elections work, unquote. She goes on to

Starting point is 02:39:10 know how this would jeopardize everything from voter qualification to early voting to how we count votes, despite the Republicans focus on this like 19th century election day practices, because that's around when the first two election statutes were enacted on a federal level. The Republicans also ignore that right after the third federal statute was passed in 1914, Malin voting rose in popularity because of the First World War. And some states started counting absentee ballots that were received after election day. So their argument both doesn't actually refer to real federal statutes, but also is not consistent. Ultimately, Barrett writes that the quote unquote defining element,

Starting point is 02:39:57 of a quote-unquote election is the electorate's act of choosing a candidate, and that an election day just sets the deadline for making that choice. Quote, the electorate's choice is made when voting is complete, not when ballots are received, unquote. Per federal statute, the deadline to vote is election day, but the deadline for when ballots must be received is up to state law. Like what this case focuses on is the Mississippi state law on when ballots can be received.

Starting point is 02:40:26 That's a state issue. Finally, the Republican plaintiffs tried to argue that requiring ballots be received on election day or by election day helps protect election integrity and increases voter confidence in election results. However, Barrett notes, quote, policy arguments are properly directed to legislatures, not courts. The question today is not whether requiring ballots to be received by election day is a good or bad idea. The question is whether the idea has made its way into the U.S. Code, unquote. So regardless of whether Republicans think this is a good idea or not, as Barrett says, that would be a question for the legislature and not one that can be decided on in federal court, because it has no basis in federal law.

Starting point is 02:41:11 So the birthright citizenship and the mail-in-voting ruling are the two that hamper the executive's power or go against the agenda of the Trump administration. But there was a few other rulings that also relate to executive. power, which Mia Wong will cover in this special segment. So let's talk the executive branch, federal agencies, and presidential power. Now, in addition to the other rulings that we're talking about here, we also got an absolutely wild pairing of rulings in Trump v. Slaughter and Trump versus Cook, which were both written by Chief Justice John Roberts, and which establish together the rather astounding legal principle

Starting point is 02:41:57 that the president has complete power over the jobs of the heads of independent executive branch agencies, except the ones that Chief Justice John Roberts likes personally. Now, I understand that that is a provocative statement, and I'm going

Starting point is 02:42:13 to ask you to withhold judgment until we get to the end of the second ruling, because, oh boy, it's a doozy and I am fairly confident you will agree with this opinion by the end. So let's talk Trump versus Slaughter. So Trump v. Slaughter. So Trump v. Slaughter is a case in which the Supreme Court slaughtered a 91-year-old president

Starting point is 02:42:33 that was set in a case called Humphrey's executor v. United States in order to allow President Trump to fire the heads of a broad swath of independent agencies irrespective of Congress's specific instructions regarding how those heads could be fired. So Trump versus Slaughter began after Trump fired Federal Trade Commissioner, is the FTC, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter without cause. I'm going to quote from NPR here, as they point out, quote, since its creation of the Federal Trade Commission FTC in 1914,

Starting point is 02:43:09 Congress has held that commissioners can only be fired for, quote, inefficiency, negligence of duty, or malfeasance in office, end quote. Slaughter was presented with no such reason for her removal, only told her, quote, continued service on the FTC's, was inconsistent with the Trump administration's priorities. Now, there is an obvious legal precedent here, precedent that I described earlier,

Starting point is 02:43:34 because FDR tried to do literally this exact same thing in the 1930s. He tried to fire an FTC commissioner for political reasons. And the 1930s Supreme Court ruled in Humphrey's executor versus the United States that in again this exact same scenario, the president trying to fire an FTC commissioner for political reasons that this was in fact illegal because the FTC is an independent agency whose functions are, you know, outside of the executive, and thus the president does not have the power to simply remove their heads at will. Now, this 1930s decision, right, is a decision from the notoriously right-wing Hughes court facing a central left president.

Starting point is 02:44:14 So in the 1930s, it was important that the state be able to operate independently of FDR to prevent FDR from giving too many concessions to workers. Now, in 2026, the also fanatically right-wing Roberts Court saw a fascist in power and decided, no, actually, the FTC is an agency that does executive functions and thus is under the control of the presidents because of the unitary executive theory, which is, you know, a theory that the president should have complete control over everything in the executive branch, even agencies that were explicitly designed by Congress to be independent, and that this theory is good now because a right-wing president is using it, this ruling allows Trump to wield

Starting point is 02:44:54 unprecedented power over the American state. Many of these bodies, you know, specifically we should talk about the FTC here, right? The FTC has a cap of the number of members of the commission that can be from one party. Trump can now simply ignore this congressional mandate

Starting point is 02:45:11 by just firing all the Democrats and leaving only Republicans. As NPR reported, here's Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent. Quote, the court gives the president, president to power unknown even to the English crown against which the founders revolted, elevating him above his once co-equal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the law be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.

Starting point is 02:45:38 Now, notably, the court also ruled that this unitary executive doctrine, right, this doctrine of the president has the right to fire the heads of independent executive agencies and independent federal agencies, that this power does not apply to the Federal Reserve, and thus Trump cannot fire Federal Reserve Board Member Lisa Cook, because of some extremely nebulous logic about the Federal Reserve being the successor to the First and Second National Bank of the U.S., which establishes, and I quote, Are nation's tradition of central banking protected from political interference?

Starting point is 02:46:12 Now, in what way, quote, Are nation's tradition of central banking protected from political interference? interference differs even conceivably from our long-standing tradition of protecting the FTC from political interference other than that, you know, John Roberts likes banks and the first and second national bank are older than the FTC. And by the way, never mind here that Roberts himself admits that Andrew Jackson literally vetoed the second national bank out of existence, which reads making his arguments about the history of protecting central banking from political interference, read like a bad joke. I genuinely cannot understand

Starting point is 02:46:48 how the FTC is the rest of a different as the defendant federal agency and the Federal Reserve. It's also worth noting that the first and second National Bank we're not modern central banks. They don't do the modern central bank stuff.

Starting point is 02:47:07 Oh God. Here is from a source that would know what the Federal Reserve does because it's the Federal Reserve. It's part of a thing that they wrote in their 100 anniversary history project. Quote, and again, I kind of emphasize this enough, this is the Federal Reserve itself

Starting point is 02:47:24 from their 100-year anniversary history project. Quote, unlike modern banks, the Bank of America did not set monetary policy as we know it today. It did not regulate or act as a lender of last resort for other financial institutions and it did not hold their reserves. What the fuck are we doing here?

Starting point is 02:47:42 It is also incredibly jarring. To read Roberts Go from talking about how the president has total authority that chooses subordinates in Trump versus slaughter, to him going, well, we can't let Trump have at-will employment of like the heads of the people who work for him technically of the Federal Reserve. It's absolute legal gibberish that only makes sense when you take into account what is actually going on here. Trump versus Cook was a 5-4 decision with Roberts and Kavanaugh joining the liberals in going, Jesus fucking Christ Almighty,

Starting point is 02:48:18 we cannot give control of the single most important financial institution on earth directly to Donald Trump. Now, Mia, why are you saying this as if it's fact and not speculation? And to be clear, this is technically speculation. But I'm going to read this from Kavanaugh's concurrence that serves as an explanation of why he joins Roberts and the liberals

Starting point is 02:48:37 in agreeing at the president of, not have the power to remove a Federal Reserve Board Member without cause when he, and this is notable also, did also agree with Roberts when Roberts, in the other case, said that he can remove an FTC board member without cause. Now, here's Kavanaugh, quote, I agree with the court, moreover, that we should not leave open the question whether the Federal Reserve can remain an independent agency in the wake of slaughter. After slaughter, there was a clear choice. Either the Federal Reserve may remain independent, with the governor's removable for cause, not at will, or it may not. Leaving that question open would create significant uncertainty about whether the court might

Starting point is 02:49:20 soon eliminate the Federal Reserve's independence and thereby exposed the Federal Reserve to political influence and jeopardize the efficiency of U.S. monetary policy. Even temporary uncertainty about the status of the Federal Reserve could spark political unheaval, including confusion about whether the president could immediately remove multiple governors at once, as well as turmoil in the U.S. and world economies. I would not go down that road. I would not risk destabilizing the U.S. economy just so that we can further mull over an issue that in various permutations we have been thinking about for many years. As the course opinion explains the government degrees, the Federal Reserve occupies a unique role in the U.S. government

Starting point is 02:50:01 and maintains critical responsibility for the stability and success of the U.S. and world economies. So there you have it, folks. As long as the president does not fuck with the money, this court holds that the president can wield executive power to fire the heads of independent federal regulatory agencies. We will be right back to cover a few more rulings after this ad break. And we're back. So it's time for, I guess, the less, certainly the least. upsetting portion of the Supreme Court rulings this go around, which is two different

Starting point is 02:50:46 rulings that involve gun rights. And particularly, at least in one case, I think a very common sense ruling, one is a lot more controversial, although I do think broadly speaking, it's still a better ruling than not. So on June 25th, the Supreme Court struck down a Hawaii law that required people carrying firearms legally to get permission before bringing their gun into any private property open to the public. This law had passed in 2023 in the wake of the Supreme Court's 22-63 Bruin decision. Now, if you don't remember, Bruin ruled that firearm regulations must be consistent with the historic tradition of gun regulation in order to have any kind of constitutional standing. Because Bruin sliced the heart out of a lot of prior gun control legislation around

Starting point is 02:51:33 the country, particularly state-level legislation, and particularly like bans on concealed carry, right? One of the big things Bruin did is that it was basically impossible to get a concealed carry license in a number of states prior to Bruin. And after Bruin, states could no longer kind of arbitrarily make it basically impossible to get a concealed carry license, which is why you saw a bunch of states, including Hawaii, rush to pass a bunch of new laws. And these are generally referred to as vampire rules, because if you remember your lore, vampires aren't allowed to, like, enter your domicile unless you give them permission. So basically you're treating like legally carried concealed firearms as a vampire.

Starting point is 02:52:13 That's kind of like why it got the term. As Hawaii's legislature said when they passed this 2023 law, the legislature enacted this default rule in light of ample evidence that property owners in Hawaii do not want people to carry guns onto their property without express consent. Now, in their coverage, USA Today noted that the legislature argued their law was rooted in older Hawaiian legal precedent. Quote, in 1883, for example, Hawaii's campaign. prohibited anyone from having a knife, sword caner,

Starting point is 02:52:40 other dangerous weapon, Hawaii's attorney general told the court. Unfortunately, the liars defending this Hawaiian law to the Supreme Court also cited less pleasant precedent, bringing up the black codes and other laws meant to stop black citizens from carrying guns to argue that the U.S. has an established tradition of restrictive firearm laws. Neil Gorsuch in particular took exception to this.

Starting point is 02:53:00 This law, and similar laws passed in California, New York, Maryland, and New Jersey, have all presumably been declared unconstitutional? as a result of this ruling? They were already stayed here in California, so I'm guessing they just won't. Yes. They stayed it pending this, I think, so it just will die now. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 02:53:18 Gun rights advocates like the Firearms Policy Coalition cheered the result. The court explained that these laws did not merely regulate where licensed people could carry. Instead, they severely burdened the ordinary exercise of the right to bear arms by forcing peaceful people to seek permission before entering the stores, restaurants, gas stations, pharmacies, and other businesses they visit every day. That burdened the court held is incompatible. with the Second Amendment's protection of the right to carry firearms for self-defense as Americans go about their daily lives. So, yeah, you could feel about that one however you want.

Starting point is 02:53:46 I think that's kind of like broadly, reasonable, honestly, in my opinion. Arguably, a much bigger deal was the Supreme Court ruling last Thursday to change the way the federal government regulates casual drug use and firearms ownership. For a very long time, it's been illegal to buy and own guns while doing illegal narcotics, even marijuana with a medical prescription. This came out of the Gun Control Act of 1968, which itself was passed after Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy Jr. were assassinated.

Starting point is 02:54:16 It banned any person who was, quote, an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance from owning a gun. So when you buy a firearm the normal way up until right about now, you would fill out a form called a 4473. And on it, you have to state that you're not a marijuana user or the user of any other illegal drugs. and that you acknowledge, even if marijuana is legal in your state and you have a prescription,

Starting point is 02:54:40 you're still not allowed to buy our own a gun if you use it, right? That, like, you have to acknowledge on the form, I know that my state's laws don't matter here. And it's always been, you know, even outside of this, very unclear just how far this prescription goes, right? Like, if you're a gun owner who doesn't do drugs regularly, but one night someone offers you a hit from a joint while you're already drunk or like a bump and you take it, have you then broken the law? If you go to buy a gun the next month or the next year, is that still illegal? And this has always been a gray area more often than not, because the whole law restricting gun owners from using drugs has always been unconstitutional bullshit. And the ATF preferred not to talk about it in too much detail.

Starting point is 02:55:22 Now that era seems to be coming to an end. In a rare unanimous ruling, the court cited with a Texas man, Ali Hamani, who had his home raided by the feds in August of 2022 due to Iran paranoia. I think a lot of people know this is how this case. got started, but they like, just because his name is Ali Hamani, thought he and his Muslim, thought he and his family were like involved with the Iranian government or spies of some sort. And so they searched his home for the New York Times. When agents searched the home, Mr. Hamani told them that he had a handgun locked in a safe inside the house. He also

Starting point is 02:55:54 told them that he used marijuana about every other day, pointing them to about 60 grams of marijuana in the house. In addition, agents also found cocaine in his parents' closet. Quite a house. Six months later, Mr. Hamani was charged with one count of possession of a firearm by an unlawful user of a controlled substance based on his marijuana use. Now, all of this made for a decidedly weird Supreme Court case, Hamani's lawyers pointed out that there had never been any evidence that his family was connected to Iran or terrorism, but that the prosecution brought up the word terrorism repeatedly when talking about Hamani and his family. Oh, yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, I'm shocking to hear that.

Starting point is 02:56:29 When Hamani appealed and the case wound up at the Supreme Court, the Trump administration actually had its lawyers defend the law because law enforcement relies heavily on this to be able to attack on extra charges to people they dislike. Hunter Biden. Yeah, Hunter Biden. Meanwhile, the ACLU and the NRA wound up submitting briefs on the other side of the issue. The ruling was narrow. The court declared that the government's use of the law was overbroad and that recreational

Starting point is 02:56:53 drug users should not be assumed to be addicts who pose a danger to the public. So the law wasn't declared unconstitutional, but its application was. and the precedent that this sets would seem to necessitate changes to 4473 and to the way law enforcement works. I do want to quote before we end here the last bit of the ruling from Neil Gorsuch. Quote, because he possessed a gun despite this prohibition, the government insists it may imprison him for up to 15 years to disarm him for life. According to the government, none of this turns on how much marijuana Mr. Hermani uses or what effect it has on him. It makes no difference either if he keeps a firearm only in his home for self-defense, never misuses a gun while intoxicated, never poses a danger to himself or others as a result of his marijuana use.

Starting point is 02:57:36 The only thing the government must show, it says, is that an individual like Mr. Hamani regularly uses any amount of a controlled substance. To square that expansive theory with the Second Amendment, the government invites us to draw an analogy between its present regulation and historical laws addressing habitual drunkards. Those laws, the government contends, demonstrated tradition of firearm regulation consistent with its effort to disarm any regular user of any controlled substance without any further showing. But the government's analogy fails under every measure it asks us to consider. The historical laws on which it relies targeted different kinds of people did so for different

Starting point is 02:58:08 reasons and operated in different ways. And faced with all these shortcomings in the government's submission, we cannot say it has carried its conceited burden of showing its prosecution of Mr. Hamani complies with the Second Amendment. Yeah. Pretty good ruling. Yeah. Like you say, like this is one of those things that exists in large part to allow cops to fuck with people. Yeah, and prosecutors to put people in prison for longer when they've been convicted or charged with something else, right? Or to put a massive potential sentence on them so they plead guilty. It doesn't make you safer. And I have always argued, you know, whatever you think about it, the Second Amendment is a civil right.

Starting point is 02:58:45 And if the government could take away your access to a civil right and imprison you, if you ever put the wrong thing in your body, then you just don't have civil rights. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the same is true, I think, of this vampire rule to an extent. the government can speak on your behalf and say that's not okay about guns, can they do it about other things too? Right. Exactly. Like I know there was a First Amendment challenge briefly in California. I guess that didn't succeed or that's not what they went with in the Supreme Court. They went with the Second Amendment Challenge, but I thought that was interesting.

Starting point is 02:59:13 Yeah. Let's close with one more case, one more Supreme Court ruling that could have some really, really big impacts on digital privacy and surveillance going forward. In a 6-3 ruling, Supreme Court found that police gaining access to location data through what's called a geo-fence, does constitute a quote-unquote search under the Fourth Amendment. A geo-offence is when investigators ask a tech company for location data on all cell phones or cell phone users in a certain geographical range, usually during a certain time frame. The goal is to identify what phones and by extension,

Starting point is 02:59:53 who, was present when of crime was committed. To quote Justice Kagan, writing for the majority, quote, an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information, even though for only a limited time and from a third-party tech company, unquote. The fact that this qualifies as a search is important because that means that it's subject to certain restrictions as laid out in the Constitution. This case in particular, the one that Supreme Court was ruling on, revolves around

Starting point is 03:00:33 a bank robbery in 2019, where the suspect was seen on his phone before the robbery. Police asked Google to hand over location data for all cell phones or other devices in a 150-meter radius around the bank within an hour of the robbery. This location data would show users' coordinates every two minutes. 19 anonymous users were first identified. Police then narrowed that down to the nine users, whose movements in and out of the geofense were tracked within a longer two-hour period. It was before police then requested personally identifying information on three users, which they then used to arrest the suspect.

Starting point is 03:01:10 The suspect asked that the evidence obtained be thrown out on a Fourth Amendment violation, arguing that the warrant authorizing the location data search was invalid. He eventually pled guilty to the whole bank robbery thing, but the Fourth Amendment claim made its way through the district court, appeals courts, and up to the Supreme Court. The district court did agree that the search violated the Fourth Amendment, but it didn't block the location data from being permitted as evidence because they found the officers acted in, quote-unquote, good faith. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals initially ruled to one that the geoffence did not qualify as a search, so a warrant wasn't even needed.

Starting point is 03:01:47 One judge dissented from this arguing that the warrant issued was, quote, so lacking in particularity and probable cause that it was invalid. And this could be importantly. later. But the full Fourth Circuit panel reheard the case again and came out evenly divided, 7-7, half-ruling that the geo-offense warrant violated the Fourth Amendment, but most justices still found that the exclusionary rule's good faith exemption applied in this case, which leads us to the Supreme Court. Monday's ruling only covers the Fourth Amendment aspect of the case, not the good faith exemption. And the Fourth Amendment, Amendment question itself is split into two issues. Did the police conduct a search under the

Starting point is 03:02:32 Fourth Amendment by acquiring location data from Google? And second, did the multi-step geofence warrant that was issued in that case? Did that make the search reasonable? The Supreme Court found that it was a search, quote, because an individual has a legitimate expectation of privacy in his cell phone location data, unquote. But the court did not answer that second question, whether this was reasonable whether this search was reasonable because of the warrant. Justice Kagan wrote, quote, we leave it to the Court of Appeals. The further question whether, given the warrant issued,

Starting point is 03:03:08 the search here was reasonable, meaning that each of its steps was properly described with particularity and found to be supported by probable cause, unquote. For reference, the Fourth Amendment protects against the quote-unquote unreasonable search and seizures of persons, houses, papers, and effects. and requires that warrants may only be issued upon probable cause and must particularly describe, quote, the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized, unquote. So to issue a search warrant, a judge must determine there's a quote-unquote fair probability,

Starting point is 03:03:44 this is according to the Supreme Court, that evidence of the crime would be found and that the search is of an appropriate scope, to quote the opinion, quote, that it is carefully tailored to its justifications and will not take on the character of the wide-ranging exploratory searches the framers intended to prohibit. That wide-ranging aspect is the exact issue with geoffence warrants. They cast a dragnet on everyone in a certain area at a certain time. So while in the bank robbery case, a judge did issue a geoffence warrant. It was an uncommon multi-step warrant that was

Starting point is 03:04:25 co-developed with Google that gave officers a large degree of discretion on how to narrow down suspects from a wide pool while obtaining additional and increasingly personal information throughout the execution of that warrant. This new ruling by the Supreme Court is largely based on this 2018 case, Carpenter v. United States, which found that accessing cell phone location history based on cell site towers qualifies as a fourth and amendment search, quote unquote, given individuals reasonable expectations of privacy. Kagan wrote that this case is very similar to the Carpenter case, except that the location data as collected by Google is actually far more detailed and more fine-tuned than what you can get

Starting point is 03:05:13 from cell phone location records. But the government tried to argue that geo-fencing does not count as a search because of the short time window the location data is pulled from. The court struck this down, ruling that the Fourth Amendment doesn't kick in only once an intrusion, quote unquote, goes too far and applies regardless of the quote unquote quality or quantity of the information the government obtains. The other argument the government put up was that because the suspect, quote unquote, voluntarily gave this location data to to Google, he, quote, lost the legitimate expectation of privacy, unquote. You see stuff like this argued very, very often, right? This is something that comes up a lot, is that we're giving

Starting point is 03:06:01 these tech companies all of this data anyway, so how can we reasonably expect it to be private? This is the third party doctrine, which was originally for bank records and cell phone numbers. But the third party doctrine was not applied to Carpenter v. United States. So Justice Kagan wrote that for the very same reasons, it should not be applied here to location history collected by tech companies. And I'm going to read a kind of long quote to close this out because I think what Keegan writes here could have some really big impacts on how we understand digital privacy going forward. Quote, cell phone location information is not truly, quote, shared as one normally understands the term. Because cell phones and the services they provide

Starting point is 03:06:47 are such pervasive and insistent part of daily life, indispensable to participation in modern society, that a person can hardly help but generate a trail of location data. In no meaningful sense does that mean a person voluntarily exposes to any third party, a comprehensive dossier of his movements. The government's app by app feature by feature method of granting of Fourth Amendment protections, misapprehends the very nature of modern cell phone use. Pretty much everything a person does on a smartphone requires some kind of opt-in. The point of carrying smartphones is to use what is on them, as Carpenter said, to use the apps and services they provide. That is what has become a pervasive and insistent, even quote-unquote

Starting point is 03:07:34 indispensable part of daily life. And so that is what Carpenter insulated from the third-party doctrine. Kagan adds, police officers invade a cell phone user's reasonable expectation of privacy when they access location history, unquote. And this paragraph by Kagan also frequently quotes from the Carpenter ruling, combining her own analysis with the analysis in that case. Just to be clear. So, the actual question of both reasonableness and if there's a good faith exemption for this specific warrant in the bank robbery case will be determined by the appeals. court going forward. That is something that we will absolutely keep an eye on, and I'll be talking to someone from the EFF about this case next week for a regular it could happen here

Starting point is 03:08:21 episode as well. I believe that is all for us, for our special Supreme Court edition of executive disorder. That's right. You can email Coolzone Tips at Proton.me if you have any story tips for us. We reported the news. Go away now. We're done. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

Starting point is 03:08:59 For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, poolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. What's up, fam, it's sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl, Sam J. And we're the hosts of Everyone Watches Women's Sports, a new podcast from together. We're breaking down the biggest headlines, the viral moments,

Starting point is 03:09:30 and the stories everyone's talking about across women's sports. From game-changing performances to culture-shifting conversations, we'll give you our takes, our debates, and a few laughs along the way. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to Everyone Watches Women's Sports. It's on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Joy is essential and it's also elusive. But now, there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence.

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Starting point is 03:10:44 and listen to the stuff you should know doing science playlist on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Can superstars even exist the way they used to? 2016 was sort of that last era of monoculture where we still consume things in community. Everybody wanted to be Beyonce at that point.

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