Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 246

Starting point is 00:00:00 This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pastos survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all?

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Starting point is 00:01:30 Listen to Pro Society on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook. Each week, we talk to someone in show business and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our

Starting point is 00:01:53 show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, Adam Scott, Danny McBride, Ben Stiller, and a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are. without us. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also Media. Hey, everybody.

Starting point is 00:02:10 Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hello, dear listener, you're listening to It Could Happen here. My name's Carlos. I'm a journalist from Puerto Rico.

Starting point is 00:02:41 I'm here with James. Hey, how you doing? Hi, nice to have you on for this, James. Yeah. Let me ask, have you heard about a little thing called imperialism? I have. During my education in the United Kingdom, it was an issue that they raised once or twice. So you would say you're quite knowledgeable about it.

Starting point is 00:03:04 imperialism then. Sure. I think I have a little grasp of it, both from learning about it and teaching about it. There's a whole lot of imperialism, you know. I don't think I've covered all of it. So I'm excited to learn about some extra parts of it. Same, same. And actually, I would say so I'm from Puerto Rico.

Starting point is 00:03:22 And as a subject of American imperialism, I'm very happy to share this episode today, which is kind of a history of American overseas experience. expansion, focus particularly on its colonies. There are several American colonies. Puerto Rico is the most populous one and the most known, but there are several others. So I want to start this episode by laying out some definitions and frameworks in case people aren't familiar with them. When people think of the United States, they typically only think about the contiguous United States. also known as the Lower 48. This is how most people imagine the U.S. today,

Starting point is 00:04:09 and maybe they include Alaska and Hawaii. This is what historian Benedict Anderson calls the logo map in his seminal book, Imagine Communities. Essentially, the way that it works is that if every country had merch, then this is the logo that would be on it. This is literal in some cases. For example, I saw a lot of America 250 shirts that only had the map with the lower 48 on it.

Starting point is 00:04:32 The logo map, whether people mean it or not, is often a political statement. Whatever people imagine the logo map to be is what they consider the dominion of their government. For example, if you see an IDF or Russian soldier with a patch that includes Gaza and the West Bank in Israel or Ukraine as part of Russia, then you very likely know that person's thoughts on the territorial borders of their respective countries. However, what is included in the logo map is often just as important as what isn't included. In the case of the United States, which has continuously lied to itself about being an empire, the lower 48 logo map hides the country's former territories, Alaska and Hawaii, if they're not included, its current territories, like Puerto Rico and Guam, as well as a smattering of military bases that it owns across the world.

Starting point is 00:05:24 This omission in its self-conception is an act of American acceptance. giving visual credence to the fact that the country is one homogeneous polity, not a settler colonial state or a global superpower with overseas possessions, that it continues to colonize to this day. Yeah, I think America 250 with the lower 48 on it, it's a really fascinating image, right? Like, there is no historical argument. The countries on that map were not the United States 250 years ago, the places on that map. Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:05:56 When people think in their mind of their imagined community that is America, that is what they think of. Even though I think very few of the T-shirt wearers with the 250 map would be like, yes, and Hawaii and Alaska are colonies. And we should let them be, let alone discussing Puerto Rico, Guam. And then you have all the Kofa countries, right, like the RMI. Yeah, absolutely. Like, I guess if you wanted to put them on a T-shirt, you'd need a really fucking big T-shirt. to keep it to scale, right? Like, it is a vast global empire.

Starting point is 00:06:31 Yeah. And yeah, you have bases in Africa, bases in Greenland, bases all over the world. Absolutely. So at a time when Trump has made several overtures towards expanding the physical territory of the United States by either making Canada, Greenland, or Venezuela, or a bunch of other places, ostensibly, the 51state. I think it's important that people know that the U.S. is not only a military and economic empire, but a literal one, with control over a series of territories and their people that spans the Pacific and the Caribbean, as well as the aforementioned military braces.

Starting point is 00:07:11 So to start, I should say that that kind of ideological game about the U.S. logo map is almost wholeheartedly ripped from the beginning of Daniel Imowars, How to Hide an Empire. Also, James, in the case of the shirt with all of the territories and colonies, there is a map in there that I will show you later that we could put on a t-shirt. Oh, sweet. Okay, exciting. So how to hide an empire alongside Colonial Crucible, edited by Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano were monumental sources for these two podcast episodes that we're about to do. Anyway, James, I know that you've heard this term before, but I want to start. out by defining the term, quote-unquote, insular area before I get to the meat of this episode. When a place is an insular area of the U.S., it means that they are a U.S. associated jurisdiction,

Starting point is 00:08:03 but aren't states or the District of Columbia. This encompasses several different legal meanings in terms of sovereignty. Free of the U.S.'s insular areas, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated states of Micronesia, and Palau are independent nations that have compacts of free association with the U.S. This means that they have their own sovereignty, but certain things such as defense are in hands of the United States. I won't be talking about them too much,

Starting point is 00:08:30 but if you want to learn more about them, you should go listen to James' series on the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Thank you. I was in the RMI when they were renegotiating with the Biden admin. They are a proud independent country, of course, right? And they have sovereignty and a lot of issues, but also, like, the U.S. didn't come at that equal to equal.

Starting point is 00:08:49 you know like the US a country which nuked the Marshall Islands which it never had any quarrel with it's still not paying people in those places what it said it would pay them for the damage it did by new kingdom when they were downwind and like even now when they negotiate like they cannot force the United States to treat them with like really what one would assume would be basic dignity yeah absolutely and this is you know I think something that extends not only to the countries under the Compact of Free Association, but all of its colonies that when they are at the bargaining table, it is very clearly an incredibly unequal bargaining table with this like global superpower and its colonies and they're trying to reach, the colonies are trying to reach

Starting point is 00:09:36 sometimes more independence or more federal funding or something or another. Yeah. So the other 14 insular areas are what the U.S. calls quote unquote territories. And I should say that 14 doesn't even tell the whole story, but I'm going to hold on to that fact for a second. These 14 are divided into 13 unincorporated territories and one incorporated territory. There's a complicated explanation for that that I'm going to explain in the next episode, but all you have to know for now is that people often talk about these territories as being part of the United States. And while that is true on a conceptual level, right, when you imagine the United States,

Starting point is 00:10:17 Well, maybe not when people going to the America 250 rallies, imagine the United States. But when you map out the U.S.'s global borders, you include Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, as part of the United States. However, in a strictly legal sense, all of the unincorporated territories belong to but aren't part of the United States. So of these 14 territories, nine are uninhabited, and five have people on them. The nine uninhabited territories are Baker Island, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, Johnston Atoll, Kingman Reef, Midway Atoll, Palmyra Atoll, which is the Seoul Incorporated Territory, Wake Island, and Navasa Island. There are also two other territories, Serranilla Bank and Bajo Nuevo Bank, that are claimed by the U.S., but administered by Columbia. Meanwhile, Haiti has also historically laid claim to Navasa and still does. This is similar for Wake Island, which is claimed by the Marshall Islands, but is administered by the U.S.

Starting point is 00:11:23 In the modern day, these remain mostly uninhabited, save for military or scientific missions. All of these little pieces of land are often grouped together as the U.S. minor outlying islands. Yeah. In the calculus of the U.S., they're like so meaning. list that they're usually not even talked about by their names right. Right. It's like a footnote of like existence. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:11:50 Exactly. Even though they have been, as I hope to show, very important to the conception of the United States as an empire. Meanwhile, the five inhabited territories are Puerto Rico, where I'm from and currently located, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa. So this is going to be split into two episodes. The first is kind of giving a crash course on the inhabited islands

Starting point is 00:12:15 and how the U.S.'s claims to the minor outlying islands created the skeletal framework on which the U.S. would expand its overseas empire. And then the second episode is mostly going to be about how the U.S. acquired those five uninhabited islands and how they kind of shaped the metropole in ways that people rarely conceive of. However, before getting into that, I want to make a quick note about language. Up until now, I've been using the word, quote-unquote, territory to describe these places just to talk about them in the same way that a U.S. history teacher might talk about them

Starting point is 00:12:52 or how the president of the United States might talk about them. But going forward, I'll be referring to them by the word, quote-unquote, colony, because that's what it's called when a foreign policy controls a place and its people. Yeah. The U.S., like the book title hints out, has done a very good job of hundreds. its empire. But like I think part of that is because it's convinced people not to call it by its name and because it hasn't called it by its name and then no one else does, then somehow it fits into this magical third space between independence and empire rather than just saying, oh yeah,

Starting point is 00:13:25 this is an empire, but they rebranded it. Yeah, absolutely. It's like of the, of the however many empires that have existed throughout history, the only thing exceptional about the US is that it doesn't conceive of itself as an empire. So I'm going to assume that a lot of people don't know much about the U.S. colonies. So here's a crash course. Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands are in the Caribbean, while Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa are in the Pacific. Between them, the five U.S. colonies have about four million people.

Starting point is 00:14:09 Except for American Samoa, everyone born there is born an American citizen. People born in American Samoa are non-citizen U.S. nationals. If they want to become U.S. citizens, they have to go for the naturalization process. People in the colonies can't vote in federal elections, and we don't have voting representation in Congress. Instead, we have a non-voting representative whose job is kind of just to squawk at other Congresspeople to convince them to do things. Politically, all the colonies, save for Puerto Rico, have the U.S.'s two-party system. I should say that American Samoa's elections are nonpartisan, which means that while candidates do affiliate with the Republican or Democratic parties, they run the ballot as independent. In Puerto Rico, political parties are divided based on whether they want Puerto Rico to become a state, independence, or remain in the colonial status quo.

Starting point is 00:15:03 That has been that way for going on about 70 years now. Although some candidates in Puerto Rico do affiliate with U.S. political parties, they run representing the archipelago's political parties. A bunch of the sources I used, like the AP or the conversation, among others, are linked in the show notes if you want more details. Puerto Rico is probably the one that people most know about, right? And I'm also going to be focusing a lot on it throughout these two episodes, because I'm from here. We're the most populated and largest in terms of landmass by several magnitudes. The archipelago really only comes into the American consciousness in times of crisis. For example, right now it's in the news because we're facing a pretty bad water crisis

Starting point is 00:15:47 with some people having gone more than 100 days with no or intermittent water service. This is common across all the colonies, only getting media coverage in times of crisis, and even then it's unlikely that they'll receive the same media attention as any state. Puerto Rico is often the one that's in the news just because it's the biggest, right? But when was the last time you heard a, let's say, like a CNN report about Guam or American somehow, right? In my experience, right, only talking about Puerto Rico, it's kind of a news desert in relation to other states, which I know, right, media has been affected everywhere, but the colonies specifically, because of their kind of colonial status and how it has affected

Starting point is 00:16:28 them, there's media blackouts from the metropole to them, and in them, they are sometimes a little bit of news deserts. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I would wager to say that the first time Puerto Rico entered American consciousness in recent memory was in 2017 when hurricanes Irma and Maria destroyed the archipelago and its long ailing electrical system, causing thousands of deaths and the largest and longest blackout in U.S. history.

Starting point is 00:16:56 Shortly after that, a morning consult poll found that only about 54% of Americans knew that people here were also American citizens. Jesus. And that's like after kind of once-in-a-lifetime, natural disaster. Yeah. Right.

Starting point is 00:17:11 That's been in the headlines. And Trump is there, like handing out toilet paper. True. Absolutely right. He was doing the kind of Freepoint meme photo that has become famous now. Yeah. Yeah. Handing out is a wrong word.

Starting point is 00:17:25 Right. Sort of flicking toilet paper at people. Absolutely. And, you know, he also, like, and this is kind of a preview of what I'm going to talk about next episode or at the end of next episode. But he did remark that he wanted to trade. Rico for Greenland. It's Denmark.

Starting point is 00:17:42 So like it would be the Danes who would administer Puerto Rico or who's he trading it with? Yeah, no, he's trading it with Denmark, right? He would trade Puerto Rico for Greenland. So Denmark would take over Puerto Rico and the U.S. will take over. Why not? Over Greenland. You know, we're just kind of there to be bartered with. Right, yeah, this is not a place where people live.

Starting point is 00:18:04 Exactly. I'm sure the Danes really embrace the, the, Like, I mean, yeah, fine, I guess. That is what Empire used to do back in the day, right? We'd just swap land around. Absolutely. I mean, the U.S. bought the Virgin Islands from Denmark for a cool $25 million, right? So there's precedent for it.

Starting point is 00:18:25 Yeah, true. Yeah, and not so long ago, Alaska. True. So, like I mentioned, only appearing in U.S. media or receiving national attention is very common for the colonies. this is particularly the case of Puerto Rico, which has been suffering one crisis after another for the last two decades. Our siblings and the other colonies receive even less media attention. If you're listening, and this is the first time you're hearing about these colonies, to be honest, this is what empire does to those it considers lesser than.

Starting point is 00:18:59 Make them invisible in public life until it is sociopolitically expedient to use them for one purpose or another. Yeah. Like trading us for Greenland. And while I was writing, I really struggled to find a concise way of explaining the importance of the colonies to the formation of the United States as we know it today. Today, we often talk about the imperial boomerang produced by several overseas U.S. invasions in the Middle East coming back to hauntus. We've seen the militarization of police throughout the country, the rise of what any Latin American country would call, quote-unquote, manodura politics. at home, and much more. Yet in the conception of the American consequences of imperialism, the literal colonies of the United States are often left by the wayside. But the current and

Starting point is 00:19:53 former colonies have shaped the country in untold ways, of which I'm going to be talking about a few today. To quote from Colonial Crucible, quote, the United States held most of its larger colonies for just a few decades and governed only a few million people. Yet empire left an indelible imprint on the United States. Colonialism was a crucible that plunged Washington's raw bureaucracy into the white heat of nationalist revolution and great power rivalry, forging new heretofore unimagined state capacities. Indeed, the ramifications of this early American empire were far wider than anyone has yet imagined. A marked expansion in the role of the federal government for more

Starting point is 00:20:37 activist domestic administration and the formation of an agile transnational imperial state for more effective global governance. I think a lot about how like American self-conception has kind of changed. I guess I think a lot specifically about Cuba, right? and how, like, there is not an American politician who would not like to be compared to Theodore Roosevelt. Absolutely. Could be on any party, right?

Starting point is 00:21:09 Most of them would also like to be compared to FDR, which is a whole other interesting thing when you look at internment, but that's a separate topic. A part of that is that he and his, like, rough riders, right? These volunteers went to Cuba and then they charged up San Juan Hill. and like at the time in America there was this feeling that like empires are going to fall and we're going to help them

Starting point is 00:21:31 and we went from that and some of that was like yellow press stuff right like sort of whipping up this popular sentiment of like we are the Americans and we destroy empires to the platterment and to effectively the United States de facto ruling Cuba informal colonialism

Starting point is 00:21:50 and like what that says about how the United States conceived of its role in the world. Even like you can go back even further, right, and see Hamilton talking about a revolution in Haiti and the shit that didn't make it into the musical where he is just wildly racist and believes the people, the black people of Haiti to be incapable of self-government

Starting point is 00:22:13 and suggest that they might want to appoint a king to like, I don't know, keep them under some kind of control, I guess. I failed to follow the logic there, but I don't particularly care to try. But, like, it says a lot about this country, right? Which does it, saying, like, all men are created equal. Well, fuck, not in Haiti, though. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:22:33 Not in Haiti, not in the Caribbean, not in land America. Not anywhere, but the United States and maybe Europe. Yeah, like, from sea to shining sea is, in fact, like, those people are created equal unless they're indigenous to the place that we want, in which case we don't even fucking respect our treaties with them, let alone them. I mean, Britain did this too, but, like, just. a jarring disjuncture between rhetoric and actions. And like at the same time that that rhetoric could still be used to justify colonial actions, right? Like when Hearst and the yellow press

Starting point is 00:23:05 are whipping up this idea of like Spanish empire in Cuba and how unjust it is and how terrible it is and that we shouldn't be allowing this in our hemisphere. Let's stop and pause and think about our hemisphere in anti-colonial terms. But like genuinely I'm sure that working people in America believe that, right? And some of the people who look volunteered to fight their genuine, we're like, hell yeah, we're going to liberate another country in the Americas, like, fuck them all, burn it down. We're going to bring

Starting point is 00:23:32 the US freedom and liberty to these people by crushing them. Yeah, like, we're the best country in the world, and like, we're going to share that with you all because you're our neighbors to, like, actually, like, we get to intervene how we want, when we want, whenever we want in your politics, because we like

Starting point is 00:23:50 the stuff that you've got. Yeah, because seeing the colonizer from the colonized position, right? A lot of the U.S.'s approach to the rest of the world is either right at the tip of a barrel or from a position of imperial and colonial arrogance. Like, we figured it out before you did, let me teach you how to do it. And if you don't follow everything I'm going to say, I'm going to force you to do it, right? And that's what defined this period of colonial expansion by the U.S. between, like, the early 1800s, arguably to now, honestly, right?

Starting point is 00:24:27 Yeah. Like, that attitude is indistinguishable from the attitude that compelled Britain, to create an empire all over the world, right? I love to show my students a white man's burden cartoon, right? I'm sure you've seen the one where he's like, Uncle Sam is, like, carrying the peoples of, like, Puerto Rico, Guam and Cuba, I think, up in a little basket up towards, like, civilization. Yeah, the shining mountain, the shining city on a hill.

Starting point is 00:24:52 carrying us to salvation. Yeah, and just like wildly racist caricatures. But I will show that, you know, I've shown that to undergraduates for getting on for 15 years. And it's always wild to see their responses to be like, I understand sometimes because I'm British, so like I'm coming in there with a history of our own imperial crimes. But it's interesting to see them conceive of the United States that way

Starting point is 00:25:18 or try to wrap their heads around that when they're like, no, that's not America. We didn't do that, man. the totally different thing. It's fascinating that they could come through 18 years at a high school system and not be asked to reflect on that or even be aware of it, you know? And actually, speaking of colonial cartoons, I pulled it up right now, but I'm really partial to, have you seen this cartoon from Puck that I believe was made in 1900

Starting point is 00:25:45 where it's Uncle Sam teaching its newly acquired colonies, Hawaii, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Q. I can send the link in the chat right now. Yeah, yeah. I think about it a lot because I, growing up in Puerto Rico and being educated by the school system, I don't know about the American school system very much or specifically how it's taught, but there was a critical lens to the way that we were taught about the U.S.'s kind of capture and colonization of Puerto Rico. And that was mostly because I had a really great history teacher in my last senior year of high school. But this cartoon has really stayed in my memory for a very long time because it's like, it's how I view like the U.S.'s approach to so many foreign nations, right? You have so many like facets of this, right? You have the black population, which obviously the U.S. is historically oppressed and enslaved for centuries. You have the indigenous population also historically oppressed and killed for centuries by the U.S. government represented in the corner. And then you have these.

Starting point is 00:26:48 new states which are like depicted as white people in colonial dress being good students and then you have Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the Philippines up front depicted as not in like the clothes the rest of the people are wearing as if they need special attention to be taught the kind of education of freedom and liberty by Uncle Sam, right? I don't know. I think about this like anytime I'm like conceptualizing colonialism, this is this is it for mate. They peaked here. Yeah. That is wild.

Starting point is 00:27:22 It's interesting that Alaska is amongst the like, I know what to call them. Like the older kids. They're trying to portray like a civilization savagery binary here, right? Like, that's what's happening. Alaska is up there with a civilized stage.

Starting point is 00:27:39 And then there's someone, I know, what's happening with this person outside the door is just like the Chinese Exclusion Act? I believe so. Yeah. I think that's what they're trying to portray. Yeah. It's an excellent cartoon.

Starting point is 00:27:53 Yeah, but it's a whole lot happening here. Listeners, I know that this is an audio median, but go Google. School begins and puck, and then you'll see it. It's really, I don't know if they were made this like purposefully racist or if they were just really good at depicting the U.S. is racism, but they, they popped off with this one. Yeah. We should teach this in every school everywhere.

Starting point is 00:28:15 Yeah, it's pretty, like, gets right to the point. Yeah, exactly. So I want to be clear that the way that the U.S. was shaped by its colonies is not a uniquely American phenomenon. Paraphrasing from colonial crucible, every empire is shaped by the Promethean experience of the colonizer and the colonized, both empowering and eviscerating, yet mutually transformative and traumatic. The chain of continuity that now spans almost 200 years of seafaring colonization has profoundly shaped the American Empire, unleashing the catalytic forces

Starting point is 00:28:54 that have shaped the formation of the American state up to this day, the lasting imprint of which is evident during Washington's recent misadventures in the Middle East. And when they wrote that, it was 2009. So they were talking about the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. But 20 years later, it applies almost equally to the current war with Iran. With that out of the way, to start with how the U.S. expanded,

Starting point is 00:29:20 past the American continent and became a seafaring empire, we need to go back 200 years to the mid-1800s and talk about bird shit. Manifest Destiny had taken the United States on a genocidal campaign that displaced indigenous people and killed them from sea to shining sea. Meanwhile, the Monroe Doctrine, while still nascent and not completely enforceable by the American state, created the ideological and legal framework for the country to overflow from its recently established national borders. In the midst of all of this, industrial agriculture was becoming the norm across the world and in the United States, which meant that there was a severe need for

Starting point is 00:30:12 fertilizer to grow crops quickly. People were experimenting with different things, but the one fertilizer that everyone wanted was guano, also known as white gold, guano. Guano, and so known as white gold, guano is the accumulated poop of birds, bats, and seals. It contains several nutrients that are very good for quick agricultural growth. However, the thing about guano is that it mostly grows on far-off islands or caves. So the big problem with guano is that at the time, most of it was contained in islands off the coast of the newly independent state of Peru. And I'm talking about status in the nation state. The country, essentially, a country of Peru.

Starting point is 00:30:55 Yeah. And that was a problem for the United States because they needed guano bad, but they didn't want to rely on a foreign country for it. And I should say that a lot of this comes from How to Hide an Empire and an article titled, Guano and the Rise of American Empire by Mauricio Betancourt, published in Sage Journal. So, with a desperate need for guano, what is a fledgling empire to do but set sail and lay claim to the islands that contained large departments? of guano. U.S. businessmen originally wanted the U.S. to take Peru's Lobo Islands for themselves so they could extract the guano, but Peru protested and the U.S. backed off. However, the American taste for guano was clear. And in 1856, the U.S. passed the Guano Islands Act, which allowed

Starting point is 00:31:43 any U.S. citizen to lay claim to uninhabited islands that had guano on them in the name of the United States. American entrepreneurs set sale for poop cover. islands. And while the law specifically mentioned that they had to be not claimed by other countries, that didn't really stop people from claiming islands that were also claimed by other nations like Britain, Honduras, and Colombia. It's kind of like that meme from Arfer that says, a sign can't stop me because I can't read. Yeah. This is like the wildest period, maybe not, but like it's just this bonkers period of U.S. history where you can personally expand the imperial possessions of the United States,

Starting point is 00:32:26 like on your own free will and volition. Right. So it's like, you know, I mean, that's like part of the American conception, right? You reached a place that was empty of people. You settled there, and now you have brought the U.S. to it, right? That's the story that America tells itself, at least. Right. Like, that's manifest destiny, like writ large across the whole global map.

Starting point is 00:32:48 Absolutely. So per how to hide an empire. by the time that last claim was filed in 1902, the U.S. had added 94 islands to its dominion. All of these were uninhabited, so they weren't quite colonies until U.S. industry moved to them, establishing guano mining outfits that used black laborers essentially induced to work there under false pretenses and horrible conditions. In more ways than one, the U.S. had essentially exported southern-style plantations beyond its continental borders to the edges of its empire. Nowhere was this more clear than a tiny island off the coast of Haiti called Davasa

Starting point is 00:33:27 that the U.S. still owns to this day. Workers there mostly consisted of black laborers from Baltimore. Fed up with horrible conditions, the workers eventually revolted, and five white overseers died during the ensuing riot. For this, dozens of workers were charged with crimes ranging from rioting to murder. Three were given death sentences. And when their case eventually reached the Supreme Court, their defense rested on a hail-marry play. Since Haiti also claimed Navassa, the U.S. did not have jurisdiction to prosecute them.

Starting point is 00:34:00 And this was, to be clear, an extreme long shot. And the decision from this would define the U.S.'s legal approach to its colonies for, essentially until now. The Supreme Court cited with the prosecution, laying it out explicitly that the U.S. owned Navasa and other territories, and that American citizens there were working on American soil, even if it was a sort of corporate fiefdom. President Harrison eventually commuted the deaf sentences to life sentences per write-up in the History News Network, but raised the issue that the U.S. needed to better extend its government to these territories, ostensibly to protected citizens and its interest, no matter how far away their people or its land was.

Starting point is 00:34:47 At time of recording, the 94 Guano Islands have diminished to less than 10 through various treaties and sessions. Nevertheless, the U.S. minor outlying islands still represent important footholds of U.S. military power and American sovereignty across the world, particularly in the Pacific. So I started with these often forgotten islands because they have left a lasting legacy upon the American Empire. As highlighted by How to Hide an Empire, the first legacy is least. Per the Guano Islands Act, these poop-covered rocks shall, quote, at the discretion of the president, be considered as appertaining to the United States. Appertaining is a strange word, right? It's mostly used as a legal term, but to simplify, it means that these islands belong to the United States. This word would come to define U.S. overseas possessions as legally belonging to, but not part of the United States, right?

Starting point is 00:35:45 it's this appertains to me. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's part of me, but I own it. Right. But it's mine, yeah. It's like owned by the US, but not in the US. Yeah. Yeah. In a strictly legal sense.

Starting point is 00:36:01 Legal sense. Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah. It's just like the thing that's, it's hard to explain about the US colonies to some people where they don't get how it can be owned but not in, but also part of. Yeah. Meanwhile, the second legacy is that the quest for guano codified U.S. overseas expansion as being a quest of resource extraction. This kick-started U.S. imperialism past continental borders and showed how the U.S. government would encourage its industries to occupy and integrate themselves overseas in order to protect interest at home.

Starting point is 00:36:34 These companies went off to farm to mine guano and then to send it back home. We've seen this play out lots of times throughout American history, like during the so-called banana wars throughout Latin America, as well as the continued quest for oil that's played out throughout the 20th and 21st century. And the third legacy is that these Guano Islands, once rich in natural resources, are now part of one of the U.S.'s biggest exports, military bases. Through the bases, the U.S. has established there, alongside the ones in the inhabited colonies, the U.S. has been able to project power outside of its continental borders because these tiny islands served or continued to serve as strategic military footholds in their respective regions. This was particularly evident during World War II

Starting point is 00:37:23 where there was a wave of military expansion by the United States throughout the world, but it remains true to this day. During World War II, they called some of those islands in the Pacific, like, unsinkable aircraft carriers was the way they would refer to it. Like, still actually, in many of those islands, there was a serious problem with unexploded ordinance,

Starting point is 00:37:43 which I think gets to the difference between, like, being a place where the US could put its military and being a place inside the US, right? The US would not have left that many bombs and mines inside Ohio. Like, again, there are some areas with the UXO, including in San Diego, but like to no way at this extent, right? Yeah, absolutely right. And actually, to skip ahead a little bit,

Starting point is 00:38:05 Puerto Rico during World War II is called the Gibraltar of the Caribbean, because of how the U.S. operated kind of its force projection in the region. And actually, now that you mention the mines, there is an island municipality off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico called Piacos that the U.S. uses like a bombing range for many years. And there's still quite a few mines scattered throughout the island, I believe. Oh, wow. I should have included this. But there's about two thirds of the island municipality are still, you still can't walk on them because of, the unexploited ordinance, right?

Starting point is 00:38:41 Yeah, it's like Quigelin. When you see, like, a missile has been tested, normally it's from Vanderberg Space Force Base right up in Central California. That's where it's going. Like, Quash is where Quashlin Atoll is a toll in the Marshall Islands where the United States has a large base. And, like, that is where that missile is headed. Like, still, we still do this, right?

Starting point is 00:39:01 We still test those. And we, of course, tested nuclear weapons inside the United States as well. But very quickly when we realized that those things were devourable. devastating and the land never recovers. We started to do that on land which the United States controls but does not consider to be of the same value. Let's land in the contiguous lower 48. Absolutely. Now, Vieques and its sister island municipality, Culebra, were used as bombing ranges for years. Bejikas has a very high cancer rate compared to the rest of Puerto Rico. When I say decades, the Navy, quote unquote, left Vieques in 2003, right? That is the

Starting point is 00:39:39 still within living memory for a lot of people, right? You know, the same people that protested the Navy's involvement there are still alive in kicking today in several different activist causes, right? And they only left because they accidentally killed a security guard that kind of incited the protest that were already going on, but that kind of kicked it into high gear. Actually, I don't know if Americans know this, but like RFK for a very long time was kind of but a local Puerto Rican folk hero because he'd participated in the anti-Navy protests here.

Starting point is 00:40:12 Then he became what he is today, although I guess he might have always been that. Yeah, I did not know that. He has been on a journey throughout his life, I think it's fair to say. But yeah, there were people who, like, doubted the state parentheses good who have turned into people who doubt the state parentheses bad.

Starting point is 00:40:33 He is one of those people. I was just thinking, too, about like this same time period is like the same time period is the Canaanera strike. You familiar with the Canaaner Strike? Not at all. It's where miners in Mexico

Starting point is 00:40:45 go on strike, right? They're in Sonora. And the owner of the mine whose name I think was green. It's in Porfirio defto, right? So Porfirio Diaz is the president of Mexico. And it's like very pro-American investment. And this is just before the outbreak

Starting point is 00:41:05 of the Mexican Revolution. and it's a time when like the Americans are just like ruthlessly. Investing in Mexico is far too kind, but they're exploiting Mexican resources right now, taking those for American profit. There was a, I think it's called the Cannesare Consolidated Copper Company. The workers there go on strike.

Starting point is 00:41:28 And this guy, I think he's called Mr. Green or Colonel Green maybe, basically starts radioing to America being like, the workers are on strike, they're going to kill me, they're going to kill everyone. And they're not being particularly violent, right? A fire starts hitting a strike, but it is not the workers, it is the guards who are armed. As often as the case. Yeah. And the fucking Arizona Rangers enter from Arizona.

Starting point is 00:41:54 And I believe they're deputized on entering Mexico to intervene in this strike, right? Like the U.S. is like, Mexico is an independent country, but that's a, our mind guys. Like, we'll be coming in here, like, along with, man, the guy's name Emilio something, he was like a Russian emigre who became like a enforcer for Portphidio Diaz in Mexico. But it just reminds me of the same thing. Like, the United States literally sending its cops into, like, invading a country. To protect its, its U.S. business interests, right? Right. Like, don't fuck with our mind. In some ways, right, this was preceded or preempted by the U.S. claims on the Guano Islands, which, of course, were uninhabited.

Starting point is 00:42:41 So it made it easy for the U.S. to take control and establish them as mining colonies through its various industry companies. However, in modern times, resource mining has defined the U.S.'s imperialist ambitions. While it's much harder to establish dominion over places that people live in permanently, that hasn't stopped the country from exerting its influence through gunboat and dollar diplomacy in places like Iraq and Venezuela, where it controls a significant part of their oil revenues. So this is the end of the first episode, but I'm going to talk a lot more about this phenomenon in the next episode, where we dive into how the U.S. occupies and takes over the inhabited

Starting point is 00:43:22 colonies through war and purchase. Any closing thoughts, James? Statehood is not independent. I'm sure we're going to touch on this. But I thought that was great. I enjoyed that very much. Thank you. for being a guest.

Starting point is 00:43:37 Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pastos survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers?

Starting point is 00:44:02 Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.orgia for details and to check availability. Bell, Connection,

Starting point is 00:44:14 is everything. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me.

Starting point is 00:44:48 I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. There's stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your for-you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.

Starting point is 00:45:21 This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots

Starting point is 00:45:36 between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. Someone says. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters,

Starting point is 00:45:57 then that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to pro society on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. See you between the pages. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport.

Starting point is 00:46:17 And Sean Clements. We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook on the Big Money Players Network. Our show is extremely accessible to first-time listeners. Each week, we talk to someone in show business, aka the biz, and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time, and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman. Not that great.

Starting point is 00:46:39 Actually, can you help me shape this? How about we flip it on his head, right? How about we flip the script? What is the surprise woman who actually you think is the straight man is actually the one who's acting weird? Adam Scott, this entire time you've been expecting Adam Sandler to come to visit the show. I would never expect. I have, I would never set expectations for something like that to happen. If the universe allows for something like that to happen, I'm.

Starting point is 00:47:13 I am open to it. I'm always going to accept. You know, Danny McBride, fine. Yeah, it's all this fragile masculinity. Exuding. I could smell it walking down the hallway, to be honest with you. I was like, is that weed? Nope, it's fragile masculinity.

Starting point is 00:47:30 Ben Stiller, no. Because a lot of times, out of context, people don't get it or even know what a circle is. You know what I mean? They're like, oh, what's a state. Everyone's so dumb. And fake. Right, fake.

Starting point is 00:47:43 And also not interested or just like, oh, I've got my life. I don't care about your life. And a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Oh, and by the way, Will Ferrell told us personally he loves the show and he wants to be a guest on every episode, but he's just so busy. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to It Could Happen here. My name's Kim Kelly.

Starting point is 00:48:13 And I'll be your host for this morning or evening or afternoon. I don't know your schedule. A little about me. I'm a freelance journalist based in Philly, a third-generation union member, an author of the books, Fight Like Hell, The Untold History of American Labor,

Starting point is 00:48:29 and its young reader's edition, Fight to Win, Heroes of American Labor. Labor history is obviously a passion of mine, but it's also my job to keep up with current worker struggles here in the U.S. and abroad. Our pal Sophie, Robert, James, everybody else, have kindly given me the opportunity, here to share some recent labor stories you might have missed and add in a little historical

Starting point is 00:48:52 context here and there to explain why exactly they're so important. All that being said, let's talk about silica. There are a lot of things out there that can kill you at work, but silica, specifically, respirable crystalline silica, really goes above and beyond the call of duty. What is silica, you might ask? Well, it's a chemical compound made up of silicon and oxygen that is extremely common. Its government name is silicon dioxide. It's actually the second most abundant element on earth after oxygen. Doesn't sound so bad, right? Well, it all comes down to how you encounter it. If you eat it in the form of dietary silica, that's fine. You can find it in leafy greens, oats, brown rice, is actually pretty good for you.

Starting point is 00:49:41 But, and this is a big butt, if you breathe in silica dust, you're pretty much fine. See, silica dust is extremely harmful, toxic, dangerous, no good. If it gets into your lungs, it causes swelling and inflammation, which then turns into hard scar tissue, which makes it really hard to breathe and leads to even bigger problems, like lung cancer, tuberculosis, silicosis, C-O-P-D, kidney disease, and one of the scariest occupational diseases in American history, coal workers' pneumoconiosis, which you might know better as Black Lung. Cilica is 10 times more toxic than coal dust and has been fueling a quiet epidemic in

Starting point is 00:50:25 the Appalachian coal fields for years now. A new report from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health reveals that black lung rates are higher than they've been in 50 years. A disease that most people assume has been eradicated has come roaring back. And now one in three miners, with 25 or more years experience in the mines, has this brutal, fatal, incurable disease. There's no longer an old man's disease either. Let's do the math real quick.

Starting point is 00:50:55 So if a worker goes underground when they're 18, 19, you know, right at a high school, get their first big job, go down the mines. 25 years later, they've barely hit their 40s. These are not old dudes. This is not the end of the line. Like the stereotype of the elderly coal miner with the oxygen tank,

Starting point is 00:51:16 These are people in their late 20s, their 30s, their 40s. It's horrifying. These workers have so much more life to live, but their futures are being stolen from them by silica. And more specifically, the mine operators who refuse to follow the proper safety protocols and engineering controls needed to protect them and the Trump administration's refusal to do dilly squat to make them.

Starting point is 00:51:42 Actually, this administration is actively making the problem worse. You see, after decades of work from coal miners and their allies, the Department of Labor, under Biden, was poised to enact a new silica rule that would have the amount of deadly dust that miners would be exposed to. Finally, it took decades to get to this point. And this rule was supposed to go into effect in April 2025. But guess who was president then? For all Trump's squawking about beautiful clean coal and American workers and blah, blah, blah, he and the scrubs who work for him are actively killing coal miners. to protect their coal barren buddies bottom line. And silica isn't just wreaking havoc in Appalachia

Starting point is 00:52:22 on his coal mines. It's a huge problem in the construction industry too, specifically among stone masons and countertop fabricators. See, silica isn't just floating around like Lucy Goosey. It's not like you're not going to breathe it in walking down the street. You got to dig it out of rocks like granite, marble, quartz. Coal miners dig it out of the earth. For stone masons and countertop fabricators, they release the dust when they're cutting and finishing slabs of stone.

Starting point is 00:52:49 Artificial stone, aka manufacture quartz, isn't especially popular material for, you know, that kitchen makeover. It is chock full of silica. That's right. You're a shiny new kitchen counter. It might have killed someone already. Sorry. California is currently grappling with a silicosis epidemic that is sickened over 500 workers.

Starting point is 00:53:11 50 of them needed lung transplants. and as of today, 32 of them have died. These are not old men either. Their median age is 46, and almost every case in California has occurred among Mexican and Central American immigrant workers, many of whom have died within a few years of their diagnosis. It is a fucking nightmare,

Starting point is 00:53:34 and like Black Lung in Appalachia, it is completely preventable when workers' health and safety is taken into account and existing regulations are followed. When they aren't, people die. Regulations are there for a reason. Like, it's not just for funsies. Like, it matters.

Starting point is 00:53:52 Man, it makes me so mad. But with all that in mind, let's wrap up this silica-sponsored portion of our program with a little sweet treat from Starbucks. The coffee giant has gone all in on blended and frozen drinks. You see them on Instagram and TikTok. They're very pretty. They look very radioactive in like a fun way.

Starting point is 00:54:10 And they've recently started using a new blending powder that contains, wait for it, silicon dioxide, our old friend. Now, this silica is food grade FDA approved and it's safe to ingest. Cavi, caveat, caveat. The trouble is that the workers who are required to use this blending powder in the drinks they're making for you are being exposed to it as they mix up these little treats. That's not good. Members of the Starbucks Workers United Union have raised the alarm over this

Starting point is 00:54:42 and collected testimonies from hundreds of Starbucks workers who started to suffer adverse health effects as soon as the new blending powders showed up in their stores. As one worker explained on the union's Instagram, you inhale those powders every time you scoop them. Workers report experiencing rashes, headaches, coughing fits, nausea, throat irritation, swelling, they had trouble breathing,

Starting point is 00:55:06 and as one of them said, this powder is literally unavoidable. Now, given what we've learned about, that's silica today, you might be feeling a little nervous for those Starbucks workers. Some of those symptoms might sound a little familiar. That doesn't sound good. We don't like silica in things. We don't want silica in anybody's lungs. And you'd think that after said workers alerted their company to this issue,

Starting point is 00:55:29 Starbucks management would have swiftly removed this potentially dangerous substance from their stores and stopped requiring their employees to handle it. But as of now, anyway, you'd be wrong. So far, their response has been to blog about it. Here's the entirety of the response, Starbucks posted on their official website. And I quote, The product used in our coffee houses is a blending powder, which contains a small amount of food-grade silica,

Starting point is 00:55:57 an FDA-approved ingredient commonly used in food products that helps ingredients mix consistently and supports a consistent beverage experience. It does not contain crystalline silica and is safe for use in food. We are committed to providing accurate information about our ingredients. To learn more about our commitment to high-quality food and drinks, visit this link." End quote. So, okay, that's not the problem, though. We know it's food safe.

Starting point is 00:56:25 We know it's fine once you get it in your guts. It's the lungs we're worried about. We know it's food safe. The issue is that it's not worker safe. In a message the company sent out to its stores, it avoided the potential health issue entirely and instead simply told the workers to pour slower when handling it, putting the burden on them to protect their health instead of, you know, actually doing something about it. Classic case. You hate to see it. And for now, Starbucks Workers United are continuing to push

Starting point is 00:56:56 the company to address the actual issue here. And I bet they'd appreciate your support. So keep an eye out on their social media accounts to follow this story. Let them know I sent you. And now a word from our sponsors. And now for some good news. Deborah Kapesha, a medical surgical nurse at Maine Medical Center in Portland, is back home after a terrifying encounter with ICE. According to her union, the Maine State Nurses Association slash National Nurses Organizing Committee, an affiliate of National Nurses United,

Starting point is 00:57:40 Kapisha was detained on July 30th while traveling through Boston Logan International Airport. The union and her fellow nurses at Maine Med immediately organized a rally that's saw hundreds of nurses and allies mobilize, and successfully blocked her transfer to a facility in Louisiana. Quote, we knew we had to take action, first to stop her from being transferred out of New England while in custody, but also to demand her release. We're incredibly proud that nurses and the community

Starting point is 00:58:07 came together in Portland to advocate for her, and now we need to figure out how to stop ICE. That's a quote from Kelly Brennan, a registered nurse at Maine Med and a nurse leader with the union. Got that in a press release. So Capesia was born in Zambia, and she's legally authorized to live and work in the United States. She's waiting for her asylum case to be processed. There's no reason for ICE to snatch her up, bother her any of that.

Starting point is 00:58:33 Her fellow nurses have written more than 100 letters of support, while the union continues to coordinate with her attorneys, and her co-workers that made med are demanding their employer sponsor her permanent residency. She has a bond hearing on August 10th, and I know we're all crossing fingers for her. You know, I don't know if this is common knowledge, but nurses unions, especially National Nurses United, go ridiculously hard for their members and their communities. Like, they are so tough. Like, NNU has been on ICE's neck, calling it a illegitimate, violent, paramilitary organization that must be abolished. They've been publicly mourning the ICE murder of Lorenzo, Salgado, Arajo, and condemning the persecution of anti-ice activists in Minnesota and Texas.

Starting point is 00:59:18 The union has been extremely outspoken on other human rights issues, too, that many other big unions have ignored or barely acknowledged because they're politically sensitive. Not really if you have a heart and a brain. They've been calling out Israel for destroying medical warehouses and hospitals in Gaza, killing thousands of health care workers and Palestinian patients, and they just demanded an end to the U.S. blockade of Cuba. This is just the last couple of months of press releases.

Starting point is 00:59:45 Like, they've been out here. And NU is also the biggest nurses, Union in the country with more than 225,000 members. They have a lot of power, and they're not afraid to use it for good. Today, they're trying to free a member from ISIS clutches. Tomorrow, they may be striking for saving staffing levels, or organizing a new union in Louisiana, or holding your grandma's hand as she takes her last breath. Nurses really are the best of us, and I'm really glad they're on our side.

Starting point is 01:00:13 So everyone say good luck to Deborah. Finally, I want to end today's episode with some very big news. As I'm sure you all know, it's now Black August, the month we dedicate each year to honoring the memory of fallen Black freedom fighters and political prisoners. It's a tradition that began in 1979 after the assassination of George Jackson, a Black Panther and Black Liberation activist. With that memory in mind, jailhouse lawyers speak, a collective of formerly and currently incarcerated workers around the country, have just a job. gone public with their plans for a big nationwide prison strike in 2027, and they're calling for allies and comrades to support and spread the word. On August 2, they announced that prisoners will hold a national prisoners' human rights strike from May 1st, International Workers' Day,

Starting point is 01:01:03 through June 19th, June 10th, 2027, uniting the fight to end legalized slavery with the struggle to restore voting rights to the prison class. They shared three core demands, which obviously I'll read to you now. They also maintain 10 national demands on their website. They have a bigger program going on, but this specific campaign is focusing on these three things. One. And legalized slavery.

Starting point is 01:01:30 Repeal the exception clause of the 13th Amendment. Two, restore voting rights. Repeal exception clauses, including Section 2 of the 14th Amendment, that strip voting rights from confined citizens, pre-trial detainees, and former fellow. Three, free all the political prisoners in U.S. prisons. So they've got a lot of work ahead of them. It all sounds very reasonable to me, but unfortunately I'm not in charge.

Starting point is 01:01:57 You know, this isn't the first time that JLS and their affiliated prisoner-led organizations have raised these demands, nor is it the first time they've put their bodies on the line for them. There was a long, long history of resistance behind the walls of the American prison industrial complex. I devoted a whole chapter to it in my book. And groups like JLS, the Free Alabama Movement, and the incarcerated workers organizing committee have done an incredible amount of work over the years, keeping the spirit of hope and rebellion alive and organizing these huge nationwide actions under nearly impossible circumstances. Just because you haven't heard about them doesn't mean they're not happening. There is so much organizing happening inside prison in the U.S. It's just, you know, difficult to report on unless you have contacts and you care enough to do a little bit of digging, which I guess not that many mainstream reporters do, but fuck them.

Starting point is 01:02:49 Now, the largest prison strike in modern U.S. history is said to have been the 2010 Georgia prison strike, where in prisoners in seven facilities across the state went on strike for six days. Between 2011 and 2013, thousands of prisoners in California went on hunger strikes to protest the dire conditions in which they're held. Since then, we've seen large-scale, coordinated prison labor strikes in 2017,

Starting point is 01:03:14 2018, and perhaps most notably, 2016, which commemorated the 45th anniversary of the Attica Prison Uprising, which itself bears a historical precedent to ancient Rome, when in about 135 B.C., just after the first survival war, a thousand slaves lit a bloody revolt in Attica, a region of what is now Greece. There really is nothing new under the sun, at least when it comes to the carcoral system and human

Starting point is 01:03:42 enslavement. And the 27 prison strike makes that connection explicit with its slogan. From May Day to Juneteenth, we refuse to slave. Now, a prison strike may look a little different from what you're thinking. Strikers have to get very creative, since they can't exactly walk out of their workplace. There won't be any picket lines or cool matching t-shirts, and I'd be very pleasantly surprised if any elected officials or political hopefuls showed up to support these strikes. I mean, it sure would be nice, given that one of the major goals of this action is to have these incarcerated workers' voting rights restored. People in prison are a part of our society and always have been, ripping away their rights as well as their freedoms is a crime against their humanity, and this strike is

Starting point is 01:04:28 another desperate cry for help from people who have been left behind and forgotten. A lot can happen in nine months, and a lot needs to happen to pull off an action of this magnitude. Prison strikes aren't easy. There's so many dangers and risks for the people that participate, so much repression, so many repercussions. It's truly an incredibly difficult and brave thing to take part in a strike behind the walls. And they need support from people outside, too. JLS is calling on support. quarters of the strike to get involved and support their resistance inside by sharing the strike statement widely, centering prisoner voices, and pressuring Congress and all those other fancy, powerful people to heed their demands, or at the absolute least, show that they're

Starting point is 01:05:14 listening. As JLS stated, the National Prisoner's Human Rights Strike is more than a strike. There is a commitment to building lasting institutions, expanding legal knowledge, strengthening political education and organizing inside and outside the walls until legalized slavery and the broader system of exploitation are abolished. So if you got some time, you got some skills, and a desire to burn down the American plantation, give a little whistle. JLS is waiting for you, and they need all the help they can get. This has been a special labor episode of It Can Happen Here. I'm still Kim Kelly, and it's been lovely talking with you. Until next time, be good, do no harm, and take no shit.

Starting point is 01:06:08 Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pasto survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.za for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything.

Starting point is 01:06:37 When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the survivor files. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.

Starting point is 01:07:22 But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. There's stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story.

Starting point is 01:08:05 I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community. of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro Society on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport.

Starting point is 01:08:39 And Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook on the Big Money Players Network. Our show is extremely accessible to first-time listeners. Each week, we talk to someone in show business, aka The Biz, and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, not that great. Actually, can you help me shape this?

Starting point is 01:09:05 How about we flip it on his head, right? How about we flip this script? What is the surprise woman? Actually, you think is the straight man is actually the one who's acting weird. Adam Scott. This entire time, you've been expecting Adam Sandler to come to the, visit the show. I would never expect.

Starting point is 01:09:27 I would never set expectations for something like that to happen. If the universe allows for something like that to happen, I'm open to it. I'm always going to accept. You know, Danny McBride, fine. Yeah, it's all this fragile masculinity. Exuding. I could smell it walking on the hallway,

Starting point is 01:09:45 to be honest with you. I was like, is that weed? Nope, it's fragile masculinity. Ben Stiller, no. Because a lot of times out of context, people don't get it or even know what a circle is. You know what I mean? They're like, oh, what's a state? Everyone's so dumb except for you.

Starting point is 01:10:02 And fake. Right, fake and also not interested or just like, oh, I've got my life. I don't care about your life. And a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Oh, and by the way, Will Ferrell told us personally he loves the show and he wants to be a guest on every episode, but he's just so busy. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcast. or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen here.

Starting point is 01:10:31 I'm Garrison Davis. Today we have a very special episode because we are talking once again to Bridget Todd, who we've had on a few times. But Bridget has a new book, Love at First Prompt, A.I. And the Future of Intimacy. And we will be discussing how AI companies

Starting point is 01:10:50 are trying to sell you love and how that might have a few problems beyond the sort of base conceit that I think, you know, everyone can pick up on, there might even be more problems underneath the hood. So thank you, Bridget, for coming on. Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be back here. How did you first decide this is something that you want to, like, dedicate months of your life to researching?

Starting point is 01:11:16 Yeah, that's a great place to start. I think, like, a lot of folks listening, I would hear these stories about individuals who would say things like, I am in love with Chad GPT or I am having some sort of intimate sexual relationship with an AI companion. And I can admit that my reaction to a lot of those headlines were something is wrong with this person, this person is pathetic, or maybe this person is super lonely, super sad. They're putting themselves at great risk for harm. And, you know, I once had this therapist who told me that judgment and curiosity could not coexist. And so I realized I was really treating these stories with such kind of knee-jerk, negative reaction and judgment. And then I heard

Starting point is 01:12:00 Mark Zuckerberg on a podcast talking about how he thought in 10 years time, well, everybody, including everybody listening, was going to have AI friends, AI companions. He said that most people don't feel like they have enough friends to have a nourishing social life and that in the future, it won't be a big deal if all of us have AI companion. So what he didn't say is that it would be AI that he owns, operates, and profits from. But I got to thinking, you know, if Mark Zuckerberg and other tech leaders are designing futures involving technology where they believe this will be commonplace, whether the average person wants it to be or not, we should really be looking to the people who are already there to tell us what brought them to experiencing intimacy with AI and what the

Starting point is 01:12:45 risks and ramifications might be. It's time to stop treating these people like pathetic freak shows and sort of listening to what they're actually saying because it could behoove all. all of us to know where we could be headed. No, the freak show aspect, I think, is, as a real inhibitor towards actually understanding this problem. Because, I mean, a lot of the first sort of, like, reports around this sort of thing, you know, like AI girlfriends, right? It has this sort of freakshadow element.

Starting point is 01:13:07 You know, even the way that we maybe talk about this on the show when we're, like, reporting at CES, you know, we walk through all these, you know, ridiculous AI gadgets, you know? We saw, like, you know, like an AI sex doll, essentially, you know, that has like a a very like low quality chat bot component that can't really, you know, understand what you're saying very often. But I think it is a mistake to just assume that this tech will always stay in its kind of janky form. This stuff is rapidly advancing. It is, it is going to get better. And just kind of denying that, I think, sort of pushes the problem, you know, down the road. Yeah. And like, no, this is, this is a real problem now. And this requires like regulation and intense, intense like intervention right now.

Starting point is 01:13:51 And just to kind of assuming that as it's all like all these like little niche things, only, you know, crazy people are going to fall for this. The tech is bad. I think that that is, I think, overlooking what is it legitimately like a, you know, a society-wide problem. Yes, I am so glad you said that because one of the researchers that I interviewed for the audiobook, Love at First Prompt, is Dr. Kate Devlin. She was really one of the first people to sort of take seriously the intersection of AI and robots and intimacy. And when she first started doing this, the place that she started looking was exactly the kind of thing that you saw at CES, right? These physical life-size sex bots that were also enabled with a kind of, at the time, low-grade AI chatbot quality. If you were around a few years ago, you probably saw so much breathless reporting that was like, oh, men are going to be buying these sex dolls and they're going to not need wives and girlfriends, all that.

Starting point is 01:14:46 Now, that ended up sort of not being the case. People do buy those sex dolls, but they're really expensive. They're not really that practical. So they're really kind of a super niche thing. What did take off was the AI intimacy part of that. That's what Dr. Devlin really saw. She said the physical bot part of this is probably not going to take off in mainstream ways. The AI companion, AI intimacy chat bot feature of these physical dolls, that's what we're

Starting point is 01:15:13 going to see kind of become more mainstream. And, you know, again, a lot of people listening probably think this sounds really. niche, but I think Pew said that one in ten Americans already use AI for some form of intimacy. That's about as many Americans are left-handed. When you look at younger folks, folks under 30, that number jumps to one in five, who are already using AI for some sort of emotional support. So this idea that it's this niche thing, only weirdos are doing it, really isn't aligned with what we're actually seeing.

Starting point is 01:15:44 This is, I think, part of the problem with, like, you know, living in your own little internet silo, right? Because like you and your blue sky friends might think that no one uses AI, knowing that, you know, serious, no one that I know would use AI, right? There's this sort of like ideological, like resistance to AI. And I think that is a very isolating look at the world. Because while that might be true for you and your friends online or maybe your social circle, there is millions of people who go through the world every day who use these things. And they just think of it as like an extension of the internet, right? Because that's what it is. a lot of people. That is what it is. They don't have these sorts of like moral frameworks around

Starting point is 01:16:22 whether or not you should use Claude, whether or not you should use chat GPT that I think you see among a certain strain of like, you know, like liberal, like leftist online. And the other thing that kind of, what that silo produces is that it makes it so that I think it's hard to understand that for people using these tools every day, the same way you might use a search engine, right? The same way you might use, you know, a real friend, like bounce ideas off of how much, much that sort of regular use can develop a sort of intimate component, the line between AI girlfriend and tool you talk to online might not be as like clear as what some people might first assume. I know this is something that you discussed in that book. That's, that's one of the

Starting point is 01:17:03 things I think to be, it's one of the most interesting is like how fuzzy this kind of barrier actually is. Oh, yes. So even before I was deeply interested and sort of consumed on this topic, One of the most fascinating things that I witnessed and sort of saw with my own eyes was when ChatGBTBT changed models, you know, they had that 4-0 model. So do you remember that was the model that like people were really developing these intimate connections with because it was so sycophantic. It was so kind of human like, quote unquote, when you asked it a question that wouldn't just say, here's the answer. It would be like, here, you're so perceptive or even asking such a smart question. Yeah. And so what really deeply fascinated me was that when Open AI switched that model to make it less thick, authentic, less sort of glazing, less complimentary, people who did not report that they were having any kind of intimate connection with AI who would not have said I have an AI girlfriend or AI companion who were just using it exactly as you described like a search engine.

Starting point is 01:18:01 Those same people got online and expressed something like grief. No, absolutely. Yeah. I remember reading someone on a Reddit form saying, it feels as if my friendly cheerleader in my pocket got replaced overnight with a terse overworked secretary. And so I think you're exactly right that our brains are designed to project human qualities and human intimacy onto things that we know are logically not human. And it really, the way that these things are designed really easily blurs that line for folks. I mean, it's trying to be as human as possible for its own, for its own reason so that people use it.

Starting point is 01:18:39 more so that it's not, you know, a cold emotionalist AI that is maybe a little bit hostile to the user. Obviously, they don't want that. So, so yeah, they wanted to be approachable, but I think the specific thing you're talking about, the switching from, from one GPT model to the other, from this, like, overly, like, you know, praising kind of, like, almost, almost annoyingly so model towards something that is a little bit more cold. I mean, produce these reactions online of people that are like basically acting like a friend died. And like that was essentially what it was. Imagine if you were talking to, you know, a real person online for like two years.

Starting point is 01:19:17 And then suddenly they stopped or suddenly they had a complete personality change. And it's like like there was no way to talk to that other person again. That is basically the equivalent of like what happened to a lot of people. Yeah. I think it's easy to make fun of that or to other people who report this. But I don't think that it's really right to discount the way that online connections really do make people feel and really feel like they are validating and filling a need that people have. You know, it's easy to say, oh, it's just an online friend or an online community or an AI bot. I've talked to people who said, oh, this video game that I was obsessed with, it's gone.

Starting point is 01:20:00 And I, you know, this has filled my life for two years. Yeah. That's real. Do you want to get into some of the sort of problems beneath the surface of this? Beyond the sort of, you know, maybe socially alienating aspects, the issues of people having to turn towards these things to kind of have some connection. But actually now kind of discuss the motivations of the companies behind these products and why they are designing them this way and the sort of risks inherent towards having these sorts of tools

Starting point is 01:20:41 be run by and owned by companies with like for profit. I mean, you really said it. I think that we are spending far too much time looking at individual users and sort of moralizing about what brings individual people to this kind of connection with AI. It kind of goes back to what you were saying about, you know, I'm not a big AI person myself, but I think that it goes back to this idea of conversations about the ethics around AI use being hyper-focused on individuals, whether or not individuals are good or bad or pathetic or this or that, if they use AI, when really I think the conversation has to be about the companies and what the companies and the people who run them are doing, how they are designing this AI, because I can tell you,

Starting point is 01:21:27 AI chatbots like chat GPT are intentionally designed to keep you talking and to keep you engaged because they want you to be more and more locked into their AI. You know, I went through a personal crisis myself where I was caring for my dying father and was really thrust into a medical situation that was way above my pay grade as a podcaster. And I will admit that in moments of extreme vulnerability, turn to AI to try to get questions answered about navigating insurance companies, navigating Medicare, Medicaid, all of that. Sure. And the way that Chachipit did not just give me the answer or try to give me something that looked like an answer, it was, this seems really hard. Are you asking because you're dealing with this yourself? Yeah. And so it's the way that

Starting point is 01:22:14 AI is designed to ask increasingly intimate, sensitive questions of the people who use it with intention. I think that it's not any wonder that individuals might find themselves becoming ensnared in that because that's exactly how they were designed by these for-profit companies. Yeah. I mean, if you're asking it like logistical problems, you help me navigate the process to file an insurance. claim, you know, using it as this sort of like, you know, advanced like internet assistant. But then in doing so, it kind of latches on to, you know, vulnerabilities that they can infer from the, from the types of questions you're asking and trying to like, you know, coax out more information. That, I mean, that, that, that's like an incredibly insidious process. You know, you want, you want it to help with, like, a very,

Starting point is 01:23:01 you know, direct task. And then in its sly way of, of, of maybe doing that, it's trying to, like, introduced this sort of like personal therapeutic element. And like what happens to that data? Like what is it what is it using that sort of record of your own like personal experiences for? I am sad to report. The answer is we don't really know recently. I mean, that's really just what it is. The FTC recently asked some of the major AI chatbot companies to give clarity about how these companies are monetizing engagement and how they are using the sort of intimate personal, sensitive information that is obtained through these conversations. So we really don't know a ton.

Starting point is 01:23:41 But to your point, you know, it's not just Chad GPT knows when I'm lonely. Chad GPT knows when I'm sad or scared. It's Chad GPT, this computer knows exactly what works on me when I am lonely or vulnerable or scared. Sure. And so that to me opens up an entire new level of potential for surveillance and control. And so people have asked me a lot of times, you know, is it so bad if people are getting fulfillment or emotional support from AI? The question is really not if it's bad or good or pathetic or not or whatever.

Starting point is 01:24:16 It's what are the companies doing? Are the companies behaving ethically? And are they really honoring the deep, sensitive nature of the information they are intentionally harvesting from people often at their lowest or most vulnerable moments? I'm going to reckon to say probably not. I think that the interests of these companies are probably slightly different from your personal interest as a person. Or, you know, obviously, like the sort of interest of like, you know, a therapist or a friend. Immediate guesses is first an evolution of advertising, like how the search engine optimization has transformed from companies trying to optimize for Google Search to now trying to optimize for LLMs like ChatGPT. and to have your products be recommended to users by chat gpti by creating posts online,

Starting point is 01:25:04 specifically intending for those posts to be read by chat gpti and then regurgitated back to the user. And for the past few months, OpenAI has been experimenting with ways to make direct purchases through chat GPT. And of course, companies pay OpenAI just to put full ads at the bottom of your chat GPT logs, oftentimes based on your query. The other thing is more so kind of like the Walmart-like Uber model. They introduce a service that is very cheap to start, possibly free,

Starting point is 01:25:39 and then people get hooked on the service and then they jack out the price, which is kind of what OpenEI's main model has been thus far. And I can see that becoming a real problem. If you have thousands, millions of people who use this tool, both as like a tool online, This is an extension of types of things that the internet has been operating on for years,

Starting point is 01:26:02 but using them in this much more personally manipulative way because of this sort of emotional, intimate component of like you're talking to something that now just doesn't send information back to you, but talks back to you like a person does. And if that is one of the primary ways you interact with the internet, you can easily get hooked on that. And then once they're hooked on that, chat GPT can start boosting that price. Exactly. And I think these products are only going to get better and better at convincing us that you're talking to a person, not AI. And I think the more that happens, the easier it becomes to sort of forget that you are actually disclosing intimate information to a private company. depending on what AI you're using, a company that has incredibly cozy ties to the Trump administration.

Starting point is 01:26:47 So when people ask me, like, is it bad to be in a relationship, quote unquote, with AI? I said, do you want to be in a relationship with Sam Altman? Do you want to be in a relationship with Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or Donald Trump? That's really who you are in a relationship with. And don't let the AI, their human-like flattering, you know, back and forth make you forget that reality. Do you have any sorts of idea of what we should do about the problem, I guess? Has governments started to regulate the way that these AIs communicate with people? Is there efforts to kind of adopt our privacy policies to this new emerging threat, I guess?

Starting point is 01:27:29 Yeah, that's a really good question. So I would say the most clear-cut legislation we see in China, folks might have heard that China's government just recently cracked down on AI companions. and the ways that AI companions can be designed to connect with people, they've really cracked down on that. Interestingly, in the United States, we're not really having that conversation in the same way. It might not surprise you to find out that the main legislative interest in the United States

Starting point is 01:27:56 is really kind of focused on minors. And this kind of idea that minors are using AI companions for things like inappropriate erotic role play. And what's so interesting about that, there's two pieces of legislation moving through right now, neither of which have been, you know, turned into law, but they really are quite concerned about minors and sort of sexualizing minors. And when you actually look at the research about how minors use AI, things like sex and romance are actually way down on the list. Much higher on the list is emotional support

Starting point is 01:28:32 and advice. And so again, we are always going to this sort of most extreme iteration of the way that AI intimacy is actually showing up for people, whether they're adults or minors, and going right to legislating romance and sex, when in actuality, the much more common use case is things like emotionality and vice. Yeah, that is a really troubling instinct. There's a bunch of the internet regulation going on right now is all focused on this sort of hysteria in some ways. You know, there is real problems with the way that the internet exploits children, obviously. But though, the way that we are going about it, resulting in many proposals to end up giving more of your

Starting point is 01:29:15 information over to these companies or the government, doesn't feel like it's going to solve many of the sort of base problems here, and completely overlooks the main way that people use these tools. I mean, if I had a nickel for every time I've seen a story about, this is also an extreme case, but not like a sexual one, but like a kid, you know, discussing their like mental health leading to a suicide attempt with an AI system or discussing something as extreme as like, you know, like a public act of violence, like a shooting. And the AI essentially helping coax them into being able to do that, right? There's a bunch of problems that require like legitimate regulation, but the sort of like puritanical, you know, sex crazy nature of our government, you know,

Starting point is 01:29:58 specifically the Republicans, but but also just like American culture in general is just going to be so ill-equipped to actually handle this sort of like a subtlety, a nuance of a lot of these problems. Yeah, you really put that well. And it's a little bit complicated because, as you said, there are real problems. There are real legislative and regulatory needs that we should be having real conversations about. And I think it is so easy to get whipped up into a hysteria. It is so easy to say, we just need some kind of legislation. I need to feel like there is some sort of progress being made on this complex, scary, sensitive issue. And so I will get on board for legislation that is actually not really that good or legislation that doesn't even doesn't even really

Starting point is 01:30:44 meaningfully address the actual problem. Right. And so I think that we're in this really thorny place where even people that I think are reasonable, like leftists, whatever, can quite easily get on board with legislation that really in the end might change the internet in ways that we might not actually want because we were so whipped up into this like moral panic about legislating technology and the internet.

Starting point is 01:31:20 The lack of focus on the specific companies, you know, just talking about these things is like abstract technologies instead of actually talking about no, these are like specific companies who are doing specific things and that the government can regulate in a specific way.

Starting point is 01:31:33 Will that be the Trump government? Probably not. But I don't think slash hope that Trump won't be in power forever. fee. And we may as well use these next two years to try to build more public support for actual, you know, sensible regulation at the federal level. When I was at D.C., going to that, you know, liberal convention, which I've talked about on the show last week, I did go to a panel with Representative Don Beyer, who is getting either a master's or a PhD in computer science

Starting point is 01:32:04 right now, specifically to help him do AI regulation. And he said he's not optimistic about AI being regulated in a serious way while Trump is in power because of how much these companies have tried to cozy up to Trump and Trump's trying to shut down state's attempts to regulate certain things. But he does have hope that in our next Congress or in the next presidential administration, there will be the opportunity to regulate these companies on a federal level. And in the meantime, states can push for their own regulation. States can try to put certain safety measures in place. but I think right now it would definitely behoove us to take this technology as a real legitimate threat, not something that's just going to go away in the next few years, not something that, you know,

Starting point is 01:32:47 the bubble's going to pop any day now, any day now it's going to pop. As nice as that is to, you know, tell yourself that is kicking the can down the road in like a real sense. And this thing is having very real impacts. I mean, people are focused obviously on like the data center question. But I think that that relates to the same base problem. Is that do we have an opposition to these things in the sense? sort of abstract technological sense, or do we have an opposition to these tools being developed by and for for-profit companies who want to make money off of us? For me, that is the main problem.

Starting point is 01:33:20 If you want to be like a Luddite, that was also the Luddites main problem. They weren't opposed to technology in this abstract sense, but the specific way that it was transforming production to benefit capitalists instead of workers. And if we want to think about the internet in the same way, what's happening is that they're deploying these technologies to benefit the people that own these tech companies rather than regular people. And if we can think about regulating on that basis, not just in complete opposition to these things, I think that might actually have a lot more positive outcomes because these things are going to get developed. These things are going to get built. I don't think we're going to be able to totally shut down AI as an industry in the next few years. I just don't see that being possible.

Starting point is 01:34:00 Think about in the 90s, do you think they could have shut down the internet as an emerging technology? this is where all capital is going. The most hope that I have is looking at something like the Stop Data Center movement as an opportunity to educate people about how these companies are profiting off of us and maybe we can team up together across party lines, across whatever, to actually have a sort of a popular front against these tech companies so that the internet and that these advanced tools can actually exist in a way that is democratically decided and actually to the benefit of people

Starting point is 01:34:35 and not like three dudes who are overdosing on ketamine every week in San Francisco. I completely agree with you. I think while we are all sort of like having this conversation, specific tech companies are increasingly making forays into the most intimate inner parts of our lives. OpenAI just announced their first ever consumer hardware product and you could probably guess what that product is going to be.

Starting point is 01:35:03 It's going to be a hockey puck. sized smart speaker that you put in your home that reacts to you like what they said call a human-like AI companion, an intimate AI companion, and it will have the ability to mechanically, they say, follow you around from room for room in your house. And so while we're all kind of having this conversation, you can bet your ass, these tech companies are increasingly trying to not just be the most powerful AI companies, but the most emotionally supportive, the most emotionally invasive. You know, we've all talked so much about the more kind of logistical elements of our digital selves, you know, our intellectual property, our browsing data, who gets to make money from that. But I firmly do believe the next iteration of the digital rights movement will be about our inner emotional lives and who gets to commodify that, who gets to profit from that.

Starting point is 01:35:54 And so, you know, as grim as that sounds, I completely agree with you that I'm also incredibly optimistic about the moment that we're in when it comes to your average. person's sentiment around things like big tech, data centers, AI, commodifying every resource, whether that's our intimate emotional data or our environmental resources. I am incredibly optimistic that we are sort of on the right page collectively pushing back and saying, I don't know, these tech companies say that this is all going to be really great for us. Is it actually? Yeah, based on, let me look at the window briefly. No, no, I don't think so. Let me look at my magic ape ball. Sources say no.

Starting point is 01:36:37 Sines point to gnaw. Is there any other kind of final points about your new audiobook that you would like to tease to the listeners before we sign off? Yeah, it is really accessible. And the conversation is dark and hard and vulnerable, but also fun and funny and engaging. I talk to people who actually say that they had experience. intimacy with AI. And so if you ever wanted to go beyond the sort of clickbait headlines of some of these stories that you might have skimmed on social media, you hear directly from folks about what brought them into connection with AI, which I find fascinating. I try to neg Chad Shef ET into having

Starting point is 01:37:17 sex with me in the audiobook. If you want to find out if that worked or not, check it out. And then ultimately, again, I would say reporting the book made me very optimistic. One of the reasons why I'm so optimistic in this moment is that I just think when you actually look at the research and listen to what people are talking about when they talk about intimacy with AI, it just becomes incredibly clear that AI can never replace humans. AI cannot replace human labor. AI cannot replace what people are looking for when they look for nourishing connections and relationships. And so I kind of ended the audiobook feeling incredibly optimistic about the power of human connection and the power of human labor and the desire that we all have to connect with each other

Starting point is 01:38:00 that we know will never be replaced by AI. I've seen that Spielberg movie. I think it's possible. I think it's possible. I think we could all have a kind of creepy seven-year-old AI bot soon. Oh my gosh. I will say I am kind of low-key obsessed with movies like that, like AI or Ex Machina or Blade Runner. I think that we're all so, it sounds like a niche thing. But when you look at pop culture, been interested in people who have intimate connections with technology and AI for a really long time, myself included. No, I think that is a big part of how these companies are able to kind of pass this stuff off to people. It creates a sort of public buy-in because of like the pop culture idea of these things. Both the good and the bad, I think both the sort of apocalyptic

Starting point is 01:38:45 versions of it make the company seem more legitimate and that makes investors excited because like, oh, this could actually be a real thing, even if it causes bad things, you know? It's this sort of like a, you know, don't invent the torment nexus book being like, oh, this is, this is a great idea. But, I mean, also in like the Blade Honor sense, you know, these sorts of more like humanistic looks about like, what does it really mean to be human, you know? What actually is the line between artificial intelligence and humanity? I think that that's sort of, you know, very like armchair philosophizing as that's in those

Starting point is 01:39:17 sorts of films. It does make it easier for people to start to talk to these things like they could maybe be a person. in the more extreme cases, there was that, like, Google developer a few years ago who, like, who quit or got fire and was like, I've discovered that Google's AI is a real person. And I think it can really, like, encourage people to, like, want to almost create this sort of conscious humanity within these tools, even if those, you know, tools aren't even there yet. But there's, like, there's, like, a desire to kind of, if I talk to it enough, maybe it will become

Starting point is 01:39:49 human, which, again, again, this kind of serves back to where we started. There's these sorts of like, you know, very, very kind of based problems with the way that people use the internet to kind of solve this sort of, you know, social alienation and social disintegration that we have in our society and culture. The my main issue is that the way that companies glom on to that as an opportunity to make a lot of money. Yeah, I think that's exactly what we're seeing. You know, we have a loneliness issue that people have described as a epidemic right here in this country. we live under such oppressive structures that the idea of doing the labor that it takes to maintain friendships, when you're working a million hours to be able to afford your rent that's gone up $100 in the last month, seems impossible.

Starting point is 01:40:34 And so all of these are very real needs. And tech companies are not only making those needs worse, but then selling us back a solution in the form of technology that they own, operate, and profit from. It's a real cyclical problem, but I don't think we'll solve it until we have those systemic institutional conversations about how we can meaningfully fix that what's so broken that is leading people to find this kind of nourishment in technology in the first place. Easy peasy. Yeah, simple.

Starting point is 01:41:03 Where can people both hear more about this in the audiobook and then also find you elsewhere on the internet? Well, you can check out the audiobook at love at firstprompt.com. You can get it wherever your audiobooks are sold. I particularly like Libro FM because they give me. money to local bookstores and libraries. But you can also follow me on Instagram at Bridget Marie in D.C. and check out my podcast. There are no girls on the internet. Thank you, Bridget, for introducing a new horror to everybody. One of our favorite things to do on this show. Thanks so much for having me.

Starting point is 01:41:48 Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pesto survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half or come home at all. And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.za for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything.

Starting point is 01:42:17 When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who lived through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.

Starting point is 01:43:05 There's stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's Part Book Club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet,

Starting point is 01:43:40 and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, and that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives,

Starting point is 01:44:02 smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro Society on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements.

Starting point is 01:44:20 We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook on the Big Money Players Network. Our show is extremely accessible to first-time listeners. Each week we talk to someone in show business, aka The Biz, and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, not that great. Actually, can you help me shape this?

Starting point is 01:44:45 How about we flip it on his head, right? How about we flip the script? What is the surprise woman? Actually, you think is the straight man is actually the one who's acting weird. Adam Scott This entire time You've been expecting Adam Sandler to come to visit the show

Starting point is 01:45:05 I would never Let go of that I have I would never set expectations For something like that to happen If the universe allows for something like that to happen I'm open to it I'm always going to accept You know Danny McBride

Starting point is 01:45:19 Fine Yeah it's all this fragile masculinity Exuding I could smell it walking down the hallway To be honest with you I was like, is that weed? Nope. It's fragile masculinity. Mm-hmm.

Starting point is 01:45:32 Ben Stiller, no. Because a lot of times, out of context, people don't get it or even know what a circle is. You know what I mean? They're like, oh, what's just a state. Everyone's so dumb. And fake. Right, fake and also not interested. Or just like, oh, I've got my life.

Starting point is 01:45:48 I don't care about your life. And a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Oh, and by the way, Will Farrell told us personally, He loves the show and he wants to be a guest on every episode, but he's just so busy. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Have a podcast about workers and the things that they do to fight to survive and live in a better world. I am your host, Mia Wong. Some of the worst treated and most depressed workers in the United States are incarcerated workers, a group of workers who are very seldom talked about,

Starting point is 01:46:26 much less actually like formally organized by the conventional labor movement. And here with me today to talk about the incarcerated workers organizing committee. Is Colin from IWAC, Giselle Garcia, who is IWAC's California Outreach Coordinator and Audra Dawson, who is a formerly incarcerated person and his MA support. To all three of you, welcome to the show. Thank you so very much. Thank you. I'll talk to the meeting.

Starting point is 01:46:57 Yeah, I'm excited to talk to all of you, and I guess I want to start. Can you explain a little bit about what the incarcerated workers organizing committee is for people who are unfamiliar with it? I'll kick us off and everyone can supplement. So I would definitely say that the incarcerated workers organizing committee or IWalk, it's a committee of the incarcerated workers of the world labor union, and it was formed in recognition that there's probably not a more exploitative kind of labor setting than the prison system and not just, you know, U.S.-centric, but also across the globe. And so our effort is to build a bridge with our incarcerated neighbors, build that

Starting point is 01:47:47 connection and true solidarity rooted in connection, and then help support those inside with resources so that they can not only come to an understanding of the profound intentionality behind labor exploitation inside of carceral settings, but also give them support them with tools that they ask for when it comes to organizing those conditions. And it's led by those inside, really, because no one can inform process in this area other than those who are to actually want to talk more about, like, what's happening right now and then come back to sort of more historical components, or do you want to try to do the history now? Well, I think I can give like a tad bit on a system since I was an incarcerated in me.

Starting point is 01:48:42 Yeah. Not long ago inside of CDCR, Chautila, California. CDRC is the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which runs California's prison system. And I do understand the significance of working for pennies. Yeah. When that same job outside is paying $34. I worked for HFM. I made $35.40 an hour.

Starting point is 01:49:10 That job out here pays in the streets $35.40 an hour. Jesus. The cost of living was low. The price of what it costs to live inside when a customer. situation was high. Two-paste, $2.00. After you do the two-paced, your lotion, your fuel at the small size, dollar store size prices, you don't have anything left to live with. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. And it takes a lot to live inside of CDCR because they provide you housing because you're incarcerated. Yeah. But outside of housing and the food that they try to put together to make right for us,

Starting point is 01:49:51 oh my God, there's really not much more they can do for you. A lot of the things they want you to do for yourself out of your penny job, your job that pays sense. Yeah. Yeah. So it was really hard. I did almost 16 years. It was a struggle.

Starting point is 01:50:08 It was ugly and it was a struggle. If not for IWalk, they gave us resources to help us with books and paper. They taught us how to exercise our legs. labor laws and how to fight for ourselves and to know what you are allowed and what you can't have and don't let nobody beat you. Don't let them cheat you. This is your right to have this. You know? I think just before our incarcerated, I left, they had raised the percentage rate on some of the jobs, the more harder labor. They gave it a few more pennies. But it's crazy how multi-billion dollar corporation.

Starting point is 01:50:49 Don't take care of the inmates who keep it working. We do the laundry, we do the cooking, we do the housing, we do the clerk work, make glasses, teeth, everything is done by inmates. I work for carpentry, so I built

Starting point is 01:51:05 some of the buildings, but yet I only worked for pennies. And if you think about it, that penny labor is even lower than slave labor in Mexico or some of the more countries that don't provide anything. Yeah. So obviously, as you're describing, these are unbelievably horrific conditions and wages. And God, I keep thinking about, you know, like $2 for toothpaste,

Starting point is 01:51:33 if you're making 20 cents an hour, it's like 10 hours of work for like one of the small rings of toothpaste, which is just nightmare. What does organizing look like under those conditions. I think most of us lived in flight or fight mode. Yeah. You had to do what you had to do to survive. The mental health level in CDCR is like 99% over super high because people are stealing toilet paper and pads, things they give us, but you need more because there's not enough and I don't make enough money to get some, you know, toothpaste. You're doing extra. So it has made the CDCR system a little volatile because people are still in a robbing and mugging like in the free world, but you're taken from penny pinching people that don't have anything. So it's made

Starting point is 01:52:27 our environment a little bit more violent if you've asked me. Yeah. I want to reflect on what Audra said. Prison is tremendously expensive. You know, within our circles, I guess. It's famously more expensive to send someone to prison than to send them to Harvard. However, people are in these, like, really desperate material circumstances for stuff like toothpaste, deodorant, even toothbrushes, and things like that. And within people that know about CDCR, the California prison system, on the men's side, they do a thing where they track and monitor the calories that people get because the guys all, you know, like to work out a lot.

Starting point is 01:53:12 like they just don't want people bulking up that much. And so they physically restrict the amount of protein and calorie intake to, oh, Jesus, sort of facilitate their ideal security situation. So they're just starving everyone, like intentionally. Yes, yes, precisely. Yeah, keeping people alive, you know, and in purgatory and not able to like be how they want to be. And so like that situation of artificial scarcity is,

Starting point is 01:53:42 it's reflected on, you know, the outside of prison too and, you know, just hustle culture, you know, housing scarcity, artificial housing scarcity, all kinds of other artificial scarcity. And I think in prison, it's like a, it's like a form of social conditioning where people are being conditioned into this scarcity mindset in like a really extreme way and being forced into this kind of hustle mindset. And so like all of the things that the prison administration kind of like trots out to justify their new security, quote-unquote, measures, which is just often stuff like banning physical mail, you know, restrictions on visits, restrictions on books, restrictions on showers,

Starting point is 01:54:26 restrictions on anything, you know, remotely humane about prison. Like, these things are all justified as security. And the things that they talk about when they talk about security is like, you know, drugs, you know, prison commerce, things like this. And like, prison commerce exists because of this situation of incredible scarcity that the prison itself is, like, maintaining to begin with. And the point of I walk in part, like part of our sort of mission and, like, strategy is to get people together, get people like, you know, talking about solidarity, connecting people who have a kind of like-minded kind of outlook on things so that we can start to form a foundation. for solidarity that is not based around the prison economy as it exists, but rather based on like inside, outside solidarity on like a, you know, a humanistic, socialistic level.

Starting point is 01:55:25 Right. In that sense, like there are stark similarities, but also very stark differences with, you know, other groups that do the same thing, right? like essentially a lot of groups that arise sort of spontaneously that do that kind of stuff tend to have a capitalistic nature to them and those are the groups that become what the state refers to as gangs oftentimes and there are different ones and they do different things and they have unique cultures like the term gang kind of flattens them all into one but yeah they're all very different and have different sort of survival adaptation mechanisms.

Starting point is 01:56:03 They're like large cliques. I think that word would like kind of be better from a CDR sense. CDCR is like one of the most largest human trafficking industries in the business. They collect people. They work people for nothing. And the revenue all goes back to them. Because no matter what we spend, we spend it with CDCR. So not only are you collecting 50, $60,000.

Starting point is 01:56:33 a year per person. And the institution is over packed. So it carries up to 2,500 people at a time. These people are working for either dollars or cents. And every dollar they have is invested back as CDCR. So it is 100% financial gain for CDCR, no matter how to look at it. Because they supply everything. They sell everything.

Starting point is 01:56:57 Everything goes right back to CDCR at the cost of human lives. for medical, poor food, the things that they give you is for you to barely make it, and what it does is it keeps you in the same kind of criminal mindset. So you're a better criminal when you leave because you have to do what you

Starting point is 01:57:15 have to do to survive in there. And at $40,000 per person a year, I feel like nobody should be hungry. Nobody should need shoes. Nobody should need T-shirts. Tu-paces should be full-size. Shampoo should be full-size. They invests

Starting point is 01:57:31 a thousand, millions of dollars in mental health. And yet the suicide rate is high there because abuse rate is high there. Whether it's being abused by staff or by inmate, abuse is 24 hours around the clock in CDCR. And only a very

Starting point is 01:57:47 few survive. And they don't survive on scratch. They survive because they have a super will to survive. So for me, that's where I was at. I had a superwill to survive. So I hid in the cracks. I tried to do my bare minimum.

Starting point is 01:58:03 I stayed in groups and stuff. I fed my mind. I nursed my body the best I could. I took care of my health the best I could. I just stayed focused. But I will always have me. Always. I've been a member for almost eight years now, eight nine years.

Starting point is 01:58:20 I was a member incarcerated and now. I would be able to talk to college and work through some of the worst moments. He would refer me to other entities of the organization for support. They would give me referrals to how to give me books to take my mind out of places, refer me to places that would give us papers and pen. People would help us with laws and stuff we didn't understand, and as copies. You know, it was just really a platform for making you a stronger individual in an awful situation. And for that, I will always be grateful. And even now that I'm no longer incarcerated in CCCDCR, I get to see the fruit of the labor of every,

Starting point is 01:59:00 this organization has given to the people that are behind bars. And I'm so grateful. Yeah. Jail conditions in California, and I think a lot of places are like even worse than prison conditions. And I mean, I remember when I was visiting someone in the Sacramento County jail, and she was excited after multiple years in the county jail to go to federal prison. She was like over the moon that she was going to federal prison and getting out of the Sacramento County Jail. So, Audra, I was wondering if you could describe the conditions in the Fresno County Jail and how we

Starting point is 01:59:35 fix them, or at least how they kind of Mickey Mouse did for the entire time that you were there just so that this wouldn't happen again. So I was incarcerated. I went back for recitence, you know, my life sentence. And that Fresno County Jail is horrible. It's infested. People are dying daily. If you have nobody, you have nothing.

Starting point is 01:59:56 It was really sad. I asked Collins and I walked to get involved. So when shop time came, they had put in to get some funding to help. People didn't have hygiene. It was very stinky and nasty. So they donated through me. And I bought the girls their hygines, shampoo, conditioners, to pays, bought bags of snacks.

Starting point is 02:00:23 I made them all little care packs. And I got to see. a small amount of women in my pod spring to life, all because the organization cared. All because somebody reached into the heart and did a little something different. It made such a different. Like they really all wanted to be involved.

Starting point is 02:00:46 Like, how do I get involved with this? But I left shortly after this all happened, so we didn't really get to click it in because using the phone and stuff in there is not like being in prison. people are dying to get out of county jail. I mean, people are actually dying in their cells. One lady was left to fester in her infestations of cysts of stuff she had all over her body.

Starting point is 02:01:10 Jesus. We had another lady in there that actually went out non-responsive because they said nothing was wrong with her. And yet she had an internal disease. She had been living with all her life and they would not help her. Oh, God. And because I don't know a lot, I'm not going to name anything or anyone. Yeah. I just know I was a part of the situations.

Starting point is 02:01:30 We were denied meals sometimes. You were too late. You didn't come. People were denied meds. You should have been there. People who couldn't even walk. And they had no medical assistance. People who were kicking, as we know, to kick alcohol or heroin or crystal can be deadly.

Starting point is 02:01:49 All they would do is bring them a Gatorade one cup in the middle of the night. But these people were throwing up their guts. Yeah. throwing up blood. It was crazy. It was really sad in there. But like I said, the one moment of joy was when IWC came in. IWC came in and they literally contributed to making it a better environment for us.

Starting point is 02:02:15 And we did something with that gel that in activist vernacular, organizing vernacular, you could call it a phone zap or like a distributed action. Yeah. So do you remember what our demand were with the jail? I think we had like four or five. And they did most of them. I know one was with medical. It's been so long.

Starting point is 02:02:37 I don't quite remember everything. But I know the girls were able to call outwalk and file complaints or tell people about what was happening with them. And they would, you know, give them resources and help them out the best they could. Women started filing grievances because they were actually being able to receive. information that would help them. Yeah, I just found what we won, by the way. We won a violent guard transferred from that unit. Undoubtedly, they were just transferred to another unit and then moved back later. Increased access to showers in clean water, provided mental health care, put in repair work orders for showers and the television, and provided grievance forms.

Starting point is 02:03:18 All that from just like, what I have to assume was like the Fresno County jails like first serious encounter with like public anger and scrutiny and probably years. Not that people aren't angry at them over this stuff, but like the way they just like absolutely hopped to is, you know, in my experience, indicative of people just used to getting away with it and receiving very little pushback. I just wanted to say that I think it also highlights the importance of mutual aid within our movement work. You know, oftentimes in especially labor movement spaces, you hear a lot of, you know, focus on quote unquote, organizing without recognition of kind of like the human element and like the human connection aspect to it and how, you know, in different kind of spaces being able to break bread or if we can provide basic needs and supply. like, you know, for hygiene or, you know, I remember doing COVID, being able to provide folks who were incarcerated with soap, right?

Starting point is 02:04:32 It was huge. And it's those gestures. Some people challenge that and say, well, that's not really organizing, right? Yes, it is. Absolutely. It's recognizing our humanity, our basic needs, and showing up to try to support each other. it's not just quote unquote fighting right in that kind of advocacy but advocacy is also about mutual aid

Starting point is 02:04:59 and so trying to live that and making sure we're meshing that with our movement work is essential yeah i wanted to emphasize that like it's not like we sent some incredible amount of money to the to adra when she was in treasno county jail it was like maybe a hundred bucks or like not even and yet it was able to do a lot of stuff audra you do remember how much it was um i think it was 75 or 100. It was wanted him. Yeah. So, I mean, that's, that's like one small example of how, like, when you're doing prison solidarity, you're able to do so much. Like, you're able to have a tremendous impact for folks in a way that you are not able to do in any kind of organizing, at least for people in the present moment. And that is something that really attracted me to it as just kind of a spectrum-headed person.

Starting point is 02:05:51 I was like, oh, this is like a very good labor cost to benefit ratio of like you can put in the same amount of work and reap like much greater benefit for a greater number of people. And that I think remains true today. It's something that folks should consider when considering whether prison solidarity is something that they'd like to take part in. Thank you, Collins. The one thing I did remember more than anything out of Collins and their overall. coming into our county, the one thing I did see that you very get to see in an incarcerated situations was in our pod a glimmer of hope. They planted a seed when they made it possible for us to fund help for people. And the next time around, people were donating a little bit.

Starting point is 02:06:45 People who had more were donating to make sure those people kept things. I've seen unity in its greatest form with culture difference, stigma difference, race difference, gangs didn't exist at that time. I watched this come together. We started having prayer circles. The pod became more positive. And that all started with a heartfelt $75 to $100. It brought people together.

Starting point is 02:07:15 And that never left. That never left. And I think it's the same thing in an incarceration situation. you're in prison. When we build our little inside organizations and we help each other, we give hope to each other. I am so grateful to be a member of such a profound organization that believes in neighbor laws to help us be treated fairly. Abolishments of institutions because know that they need to reap a little bit of what they sow. And a hand and a heart that says we care from across the mouse and this organization reaches different parts of the U.S.

Starting point is 02:07:56 So it's not from one place. It's a whole unit and I'm grateful to be a part of it. Right. And in fact, IWOC exists in the United States. We have interest from some wobble in Canada. And there is also established IWAC presidents in the UK, including Northern Ireland. Uh-huh. What does it actually look like to be doing sort of jailhouse law and to be helping people understand what their rights are and trying to fight for better conditions through the internal legal system?

Starting point is 02:08:41 I work for the law library in CDCR at Chachilla, SCWF. SCWF is the Central California Women's Facility, a California women's prison. And I am what they call a jailhouse lawyer because I helped a few people go home. not that I was brilliant. I just comprehend very well and I articulate very well. So by me working there, I got to learn first-hand law books

Starting point is 02:09:08 and penal codes and processes and it was a wonderful thing. But it can also be a sad thing because before you know you make a lot of mistakes and those mistakes hurt people. Yeah. Because people can't afford lawyers.

Starting point is 02:09:27 I mean, I went in there with 36 to life, lost all my levels of my appeal and never thought I would ever see the light of day, I knew I would die in prison. And a lot of jailhouse lawyers helped me. And just it didn't happen because financially I was not able to do a lot. If you hadn't, Gavin Newsom, we sentenced me under exemplary programming. Obviously, I did a good program. I've done over 150 years or so of their groups and I facilitate. So I work my way out. But you guys, you guys. documentation in there that's probably 20 or 30 years old, it doesn't even apply with the laws that are today. People are using old documentation. The courts are rejecting them because they have

Starting point is 02:10:09 the wrong paperwork. A lot of things had been happening until some of us started 602ing, like, we need the right paperwork. We started fighting for that and we started getting it. And people are now being able to see a glimmer of hope. It's all about, for me, it's about the fight. how bad do you want it? You know, I know what I would do to throw my life away? What would I do to have my life back? You know, after I've worked it out, the same energy you put into it,

Starting point is 02:10:39 it's the same energy you got to put it into it to get out of it, if not a little bit more. Did you talk a little bit more about how you went about actually getting the correct copies of the legal code because that seems like just an absolute nightmare? No, it is a nightmare. When I first started, I had two and, Two life sentences. I just beat my second life sentences. I was a three striker first, and at that time they didn't have a lot of paper. And there was a lot of rigamarroar going on because of the law was so inadequately we put together just to please the people or the U.S., but not to be fair all the way around. A lot of people were getting life sentences for slices of pizza and hot dogs. You know, and I was one of those people. Don't get me wrong. So at that time,

Starting point is 02:11:26 there wasn't a lot, a lot of legal paperwork. The paperwork was so outdated. They were given us. And people started, we started filing the pills. Hey, we have a right to the right paperwork. How am I going to get home? Yeah. If I don't have, I'm a fight if I don't have the right forms to fight with.

Starting point is 02:11:43 Or we would, organizations would print us paperwork out that we wrote out to and they would send us the right one in. And we would make copies in our own self at 10 cents a copy and put. changed the copy that they used to copy, the copy one, and the original would be, and it was a lot of scheming and scamming, but it was worth it because we were starting to go home. The paperwork was being updated, you know? They had a lawsuit because they did have the right paperwork. They really started updating then, because we had some legal mongroes, you know, lawyers go to present too. So if I'm understanding this, right, are you saying that they had the right paperwork,

Starting point is 02:12:25 they were just giving you the old one? No, they had the wrong paperwork. So we were sending out for the right paperwork, throwing away to old paperwork, and sliding the right paperwork in. The clerks that worked at the lawberry, we would do anything to make sure we can go home, you know? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:12:41 I mean, but like I said, we had people who used to be lawyers. I mean, if we had to wait a little bit longer, we could have had a president. I don't know. People are going to prison these days. You know what I said. Yeah. So, you know, but it was just that,

Starting point is 02:12:55 You had to have a will to be a success, and it took organizations like, I walk. When I was there, I needed certain paperwork, and college would look it up in reference for and send it to me. You know, legal paperwork that would help us. Whether we were fighting for our jobs not paying us right, or we can't get a hold to this paperwork for us to be free. Yeah. He would send it, and I would spread it like fire. You know, one sheet, I'm a clerk. I make a hundred copies.

Starting point is 02:13:25 and I don't get caught. You know? It is what it is. And just trying to save lives. Yeah. That was important. But I'm on this thing talking. I really want to hear Gigi's aspect

Starting point is 02:13:40 because she is like so superheroes. She's a great human being. And she fights for incarcerated inmates and she fights by labor rights and she fights for her organization and she fights for, everything and I would really like to hear her. I haven't heard her much. I don't like to hear her side. Oh, thank you, Audra. You are incredible and I just, I just want to listen to you.

Starting point is 02:14:06 Thank you. And you are, you know, the one that we are taking notes from. So thank you for everything that you do and everything that you did while incarcerated and everything that you're doing now. Just so just so you know that we are all inspired by you always. Thank you. I, you know, you know, as someone who has been in the legal field for many years, you really, the more year around legal professionals, specifically lawyers, you learn how little they actually do. I think a lot of the times our perception of civil rights and just movement work. We think of lawyers. We think of big organizations, right, that have been, you know, those big gains in the courts.

Starting point is 02:14:55 But the reality is that the real work happens on the ground, grassroots. And so in the case of our prisoner movement, it happens behind those bars, behind those concrete walls. And when it comes to the most vulnerable, as you kind of go down, right, in terms of how impacted folks are, there are less and less lawyers that are willing to do their work and definitely less that are even able to. They just don't bother, you know? And so what you really see when it comes to jailhouse lawyers is that they said we can't depend on these privileged class of people to fight for us, let alone free us. Yeah. So they've taken it into their own hands.

Starting point is 02:15:56 And that's why it's such an honor for organizations like IWalk and our members to be able to support in that hands-on participatory defense model, where it truly is about, it's understanding that our liberation will not come from external hands. it will come in, you know, internally will come from us who are impacted. And so supporting each other is what is going to make the difference. And I sound so simple, but sometimes it looks like sending in a book, an article, pulling up, supporting evidence that someone can use, right? Doing some research and sending it in. And California has the Racial Justice Act, which is opening a pathway for a lot of folks to reopen their cases

Starting point is 02:16:50 and have some resentencing done. And a lot of folks are, you know, being free now because of that legislation. And so, you know, how can we support in that way? But also, I always go back to building the relationship with the folks inside because sometimes it looks like writing a letter of support for folks. I mean, you can tell when someone writes a letter

Starting point is 02:17:16 that didn't have a relationship with the person who needs a letter, right? But the opposite is also true. You can really tell when someone actually has a relationship with that person. It comes to life, what you're writing, and you feel that connection, right? So truly building those relationships, those friendships, I tell you some of our comrades inside, I bicker with, and we fight and we make up, you know, and we're there for the ups and downs and we'll give each other advice. And it's true friendships that we've built behind those walls.

Starting point is 02:17:50 And that alone is also a form of radical love and a radical part of this movement to form those bonds with those who the system tried to bury alive. And circling back to, you know, jailhouse lawyers and how our incarcerated neighbors have taken control and a lead of their own defense. how important it is for us to be plugged in on the outside to different advances or regressions when it comes to the legal system. Because oftentimes we need to recognize that to be able to ignore policy, to be able to ignore what's happening in the streets is a tremendous privilege. It's not impacting you. When you are impacted, you cannot ignore what's happening around you because it's happening to you. Right? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:18:45 And so for us, if we feel like we're not impacted, even though we are, because it's all interconnected struggle, right? But if we feel like maybe we don't need to pay attention to struggles or advancements that could be used by people inside, then we're really privileged. And we were failing our neighbors inside. So I just hope that we can recognize that and understand that it is an obligation of to move through life in a way that is thoughtful of those who could use our support and who we could empower because they don't have the same access to that information or the resources.

Starting point is 02:19:31 And so in many ways, that's what IWOC does. And there's just something so powerful about getting out a piece of paper and pen and writing a hand-writing letter, stuffing an envelope with the literature. with zine or sending a book inside and putting that stamp on the envelope. It feels like a material manifestation of your solidarity. Oh, no, that was awesome. If it's okay, I'd like to dig into some details on the sort of state of the civil rights liberalism, as we know it here in California, because I think like we glossed over certain things

Starting point is 02:20:13 that I'd like to clarify are not acts of benevolence on the part of the state and are in fact acts of just kind of like self-glazing on their part and like things that they do to sort of pat themselves on the back and then move on. So, I mean, first of all,

Starting point is 02:20:29 Audra mentioned that Gavin Newsom had something to do with her release. I just wanted to circle back to that and point out that he's also completely screwed over some of our members, like gone completely out of his way to use his like what is basically like a veto power over parole that should not exist. And it's just like set up to yeah, create like I mean like this is how Gavin Newsom

Starting point is 02:20:54 does everything in California. Like if I'm going to either take an action or not take an action as governor, is there any possibility that my action or inaction could make me look bad later on the national stage to people that are not my current constituents when I'm running for president? and he always does what he thinks is going to create the least risk and make him look good to a national audience rather than to his current constituents.

Starting point is 02:21:19 And that is pretty clearly what happened with another one of our members recently. So yeah, fuck Evan Newsom, actually. Why does he even have the power to overwrite parole? Why does that even exist? That's absurd. I don't know. Yeah, you'd have to talk to some sort of, like,

Starting point is 02:21:35 California constitutional historian to learn that. Yeah. The other thing I want to talk about was this racial justice act thing. So this is something that on its surface, it sounds really radical. So first, what they did was like in 2020 when, as we all know, nothing in particular was happening. They passed this law called the Racial Justice Act that was like, hey, if you're convicted, but it was like due to racial animus or like the length of the sentence perhaps, if not the conviction itself was due to like a racial bias, you can try to prove that. or not prove it, but like do what's called a prima facer showing,

Starting point is 02:22:13 which is like the lowest level of, you know, demonstrating something in court. And then we'll just like let you go based on that alone, right? So that's, wow, pretty radical, right? Okay, so a couple things. First of all, that was only from the future onward. So that was not retroactive. Later, there was outcry about that. And so they came back and were like, oh, okay, yeah,

Starting point is 02:22:31 all the people in prison now can do it too. So the thing is this is also the kind of thing that can, like, overwhelm the courts, right? So like the way that this is being done in practice is like you get one shot at this ever. Yeah. As I understand it. And just like appeals, you get different amounts of appeals, I think based on the conviction. But like basically if you fuck it up, like you're done because the courts are limited in their capacity. You need to be able to move on to hear other people saying.

Starting point is 02:23:00 And of course, people file it and it's not good. It's not done well. And like the infrastructure to violate your rights is like better funded all the time. Meanwhile, the institutions to like defend your rights are typically not publicly funded at all outside of like the courts proper. And, you know, maybe there are certain government agencies in some states. But then like private civil rights attorneys are who have the option to be kind of the real civil rights defenders. And they get funded based on like court fees that are like set by the. the government, right? And so the government, like, creates these systems where, you know,

Starting point is 02:23:39 the legislature essentially has the power to decide how much money a civil rights lawyer is going to be able to get practicing civil rights law by, like, suing the cops and stuff. In California and probably elsewhere, it's already, like, been settled that, like, if you do a civil rights case for something happening on the street and then you do the same civil rights, case for like the same thing happening to people in prison, you're going to make less money when it occurred in prison, basically. Jesus Christ. And, you know, maybe some legal person has a finer, you know, detailed analysis of that than what I just said. But that's essentially my understanding. And I did

Starting point is 02:24:20 work for for some attorneys who practice this kind of law at one point. So that is, pretty egregious. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, I think that like there's, there's a lot of stuff in the kind of abolitionist sphere that is really kind of like nails on a chalkboard to me and I think a lot of other people who tend to take a more like radical yet like radical in the long run yet day-to-day pragmatic approach. I mean, one of those things is like the the nonprofit route basically or like the 501c3 route where you, you know, staff up hire a bunch of people. If you started out, you know, being in the same class as the people who are in prison, you like quickly propel yourself out of that class by doing this if you're successful.

Starting point is 02:25:07 And then like things deteriorate from there as far as relationships go with people who are impacted. And then the other thing is like there's this strain of abolitionists who are like, well, we're the truest abolitionists because we just believe in like infinite second chances basically. And so like we sometimes get questions of like, how are you different from other abolitionist groups? So I would say, yeah, like, A, we're not afraid to, like, pick people out. But it's like, you behave badly. I walk like you're talking. Like, you're out.

Starting point is 02:25:37 Like, that's not the same as throwing someone in prison. Although people will make that equivalence. I love this, but I do have to go. I appreciate you guys allowing me a chance to speak. Thank you so much for doing this. I appreciate calling your support. I appreciate your support for allowing us on your podcast. I just want to say one thing.

Starting point is 02:26:00 When I was incarcerated, I would write, and Collins helped me start me a little website because I would write my emotions. I don't know if I can leak that website. Can I say what that website is in case you guys want to look at it? It's your website. Okay.

Starting point is 02:26:16 Thank you. It's Audra's A-U-D-R-A-S, Real Thoughts, R-E-A-L-L-Thots with the S-D-W-P-W-P-W-P-R-P-R-P-R-P-R-P-R-P. And it talks about my trauma, my prison life and everything. It has pictures and everything. And it would not be possible if it was not for Collins. It was my way of forming a support group from inside out.

Starting point is 02:26:40 But I have to go because I do have somewhere else to be. It's been great having you here, Audra. Yeah, it's been amazing having you here. I really appreciate it. Yeah. I love you, Audra. G.G. Collins. Thank you guys so much.

Starting point is 02:26:53 I'll talk to you later. If you're comfortable with it, Audra, only if you're comfortable with it before you go, do you want to tell Mia and the audience what your third strike was, allegedly? Yes. I was sentenced in 1994 for sales of a $20 piece of cocaine, and I was given 25 to life plus a five-year enhancement. This one, I was sentenced to 36 to life for second-degree raw. A lady say I robbed her why she was with her child, and then she recanted that story in court. I still was sentenced to 36 to life because she couldn't find her $40 that she lost.

Starting point is 02:27:39 There's a lot behind it. Actually, me and my partner at the time were co-defendants. He was let off because he had been in trouble in California, which was a good thing because he really was innocent. But I had to spend almost 16 years of my life in prison. for a crime I did not commit. It has its pros and its cons. I'm a better human being today, not because of CDCR,

Starting point is 02:28:03 but because of me and the support system that I had while incarcerated in CDC. And it just made me a stronger person. They said if it doesn't break you, it'll only make you stronger. So for anybody out there in the incarcerated world, don't give up, because if this doesn't break you,

Starting point is 02:28:19 it will only make you stronger, and you will get out because I did. And it's not always by the means that we think it will be, but when it's time, it happens. I've lived in the system long as I've lived a lifespan as a human being. I've spent more time incarcerated for little stupid things. No murders, no mayhams, no beat-ups, no DUIs, no nothing. Nothing like that. Things that no one should ever see prison walls behind, but I did.

Starting point is 02:28:49 And like I said, I was made the stronger because I, Organizations like you who support me, there were others, but you guys were the most impact in my life. You came in my life like a whirlwind, and you straightened everything. It helped me straighten my thoughts out in my life. You helped me in many ways because you didn't come in, get overwhelmed, and take off. You stayed the long call. Your organization is not an organization that quits. It's we're going to get some more to help us fight type of thing going on.

Starting point is 02:29:19 And there's not a lot of organizations like that. They get overwhelmed. It's too much going on. We ain't got enough of manpower. You guys only had people and you were making movements. I don't understand correctly. I think you guys wrote a letter for a friend and supported her through board. Now she's out in the free world.

Starting point is 02:29:36 You know what I'm saying? So you guys change lives because you don't give up on life. And for that, I hope you guys be around 100,000 years from now. But I'll always be a member. You guys have a great thing. Hopefully prisons aren't around for 100,000 years. But we love you, Audra. Hell yeah.

Starting point is 02:30:06 I just want to add, when I clarified about the Racial Justice Act, I don't want to, you know, applaud it as a victory of the system. Like, they're not really victories when the system still exists, right? But I just want to say that it is still our duty to know when we can find those little kind of avenues for some momentary reprieve for some people. And that can look like some creative ways. During COVID, we actually created. hundreds of pockets for incarcerated folks so that they can actually file some tax documents and

Starting point is 02:30:40 get their stimulus checks. Oh. Which is major, right? So a ton of people were able to get their stimulus checks while incarcerated. Do you know how far that went? So it's just like those kinds of creative ways. You know, we often think, you know, we drive past a coffee shop and we think, oh, yeah, I love that coffee shop.

Starting point is 02:31:02 we just hope that if we can make these connections with incarcerated neighbors, then we can, you know, as we're going through the world on the outside, we also make those connections. Like, oh, you know what? Stimulus checks. Oh, you know what? How do we get our incarcerated comrades to get those two, right? Making those connections with the people that you build bonds with.

Starting point is 02:31:26 It's really important. Yeah. Yeah. Can I go on a rant that covers most of the notes? that I have that I haven't covered yet. Yeah, go for it. Okay, thank you. Prison organizing is tremendously popular with people in prison.

Starting point is 02:31:40 And a lot of people on the quote-unquote left or just with humanitarian sentiments on the outside are really great at, you know, encouraging us and being like, what you're doing is awesome and kind of giving us that like moral support, which does help. And also, you know, subscribing to our newsletter and sometimes doing phone zaps and stuff like that. but generally it is tremendously difficult moving people from passive to active support in this kind of organizing. Typically, I think there is that kind of out of sight, out of mind factor going on for a lot of people.

Starting point is 02:32:15 And I think there are organizing avenues out of that that I think we are, you know, always exploring new, new ways to kind of try and make those connections in an experiential kind of way rather than just like, have you thought about how'd these. things are connected, but actually making it like real for people, you know. But we have just found that like the most stalwart, steadfast people in this struggle for the most part are people, you know, directly impacted by it, are people who've been to jail and prison or who have like close family members who are often currently there or were recently there. And so, you know, we'd love to hear from you. If that's you in particular, we'd love to hear from you. Love to hear from you. Love to

Starting point is 02:33:00 plug you in. We are speaking, you know, from California, but again, the organization exists across the United States and, and aspirationally, Canada as well, and the UK. And there are also other prisoner solidarity organizations with a similar orientation. So it's not like we're doing something totally unique and unheard of here. There's something called G.G. slash V.O. in Germany, which is also like a union for prisoners. And I want to say there's pretty similar stuff in Spain to associated with the anarchist movement there. In the United States, I think people are probably pretty familiar with, like, political prisoner support or, like, support committees for groups like the Minnesota 15 or the prairie land defendants and situations like that. And that's really

Starting point is 02:33:48 valuable and really important. And no movement that, like, doesn't look after its people when they're in prison, like, is a serious movement that will go anywhere at the end of the day. So that work really, really matters. And I think that when people hear us as IWAC repeat one of our mottoes that like all prisoners are political, they don't quite necessarily get the analysis there. I mean, for one thing, like, you know, I'm going to give the spiel from the ground up, I guess for a second, like crime as an artificial category, like what a conviction says on paper is not like reflective necessarily of what really happened. And there has yet to be, I think, some really damning, like, study about this just because there just hasn't been a study.

Starting point is 02:34:30 But it is widely understood that, like, essentially all women in prison have suffered some kind of abuse in their lives. And almost all of the women in prison for murder, murdered an abuser of either themselves or their kids or both. And in my book, that ain't a crime. Yeah. But Gigi, maybe if she's, if she wants to, can talk about how narrows. the self-defense rule actually is. And this is something that is like a popular myth that like the self-defense rule is actually really wide. And like if you know someone's coming to kill you,

Starting point is 02:35:08 you can kill them first and it's not murder. Absolutely not true. I actually had a manager at a job. He was doing a training on something completely unrelated, I assure you. And he was just sort of going off and he was like, and he was this fucking macho prick, right? Obviously, based on what I'm about to

Starting point is 02:35:25 say, but like, he was like, oh, yeah, like, if anyone attacks you in the middle of nowhere, you should just, like, kill them if you have the chance. And then there's only one story being told. And I was like, yeah, so that would be murder. And he was like, well, not if they attacked you first. And I'm like, yeah, it is, actually. You know, like, if there's just a body and you're like, yeah, you attacked me. Like, you should not assume that you will just get away with that. Like, that is not how things work at all. Yeah. Uh, G, do you want to elaborate on the self-defense rule and what, what it is versus what people think it is?

Starting point is 02:35:57 Yeah, so it's really important for us to understand that our legal doctrines in the United States are created, to have loopholes for those in power, and to be very convoluted and impossible to benefit from for those who are our work. So when it comes to the self-defense doctrine, we actually have seen that it is disproportionate disproportionately unavailable to victims of domestic and intimate partner violence. We have seen it disproportionately unavailable to black and brown men, to trans and non-gender conforming neighbors. And a big part of that reason is because a complete self-defense claim has six really

Starting point is 02:36:52 important elements. You know, you cannot be like the first aggressor. There's distinctions between the use of deadly versus non-debtly force, a reasonable belief that the level of force that you use was necessary to protect yourself, but also this concept of proportionality, right? We've seen that absolutely impact, and I'm using DV cases, because of this kind of, concept of imminence, right? So if someone was being abused for a long time by their partner or their spouse and, you know, our psychology as humans, our psyche sometimes, you know, sometimes we snap, right? If you didn't snap in the moment as a reaction to, you know, being harmed in that moment, right? Your brain didn't make the proper calculation.

Starting point is 02:37:56 That defense is not available to you, right? There's so many, unfortunately, bars to actually being able to claim self-defense in a successful way. And it's very intentional. Unfortunately, it was intentionally designed that way to avoid the most vulnerable from using it. For example, there's this. kind of concept of perception of threat, right, along with proportionality, right? So if someone is taller or maybe physically larger than their abuser, then there's this concept that, well,

Starting point is 02:38:38 is your abuser actually a threat to you? Right? And so there's just so many ways in which the law has not actually caught up with our new knowledge. when it comes to the psychological effects of living with intimate partner violence, the impact that it has on our reaction times, right, on the cycles, on the challenges for many survivors to be able to even compile long-term proof of abuse, etc. We can go on endlessly. And so, unfortunately, I think it's just a reflection of our legal system.

Starting point is 02:39:21 Again, just created to bar those most vulnerable for many protection. And it's really just there so that those who have the resources and those who have the control of social norms, right? Those like young white men who have been perceived by juries as kind and innocent, right? Yeah, Kyle Rittenhouse. Exactly, right? that's who our laws were designed to protect, not our individuals. And so that should just tie into our understanding of incarceration in this country and how it's truly not a reflection of what really happened.

Starting point is 02:40:07 Most of the time, it's void of context, and it's just outright ingest. Yeah, and there are a couple of resources, I think, for people to check out if you're more interested in this. I mean, one question is like, how many people are in prison right now who are straight up innocent? And the straightforward answer is, we have no idea. And, you know, as a rule, we just tend to take prisoners word on stuff. I mean, what everyone else does is just take the cop's word on stuff, frankly, including the news oftentimes. Yeah. A big part of what we do is we are available to give comment to journalists when possible around certain jail and prison disturbances.

Starting point is 02:40:50 or, you know, actions that people in prisoner jail have taken to defend themselves against, you know, quote-unquote, the law, the people, you know, torturing them essentially. Yeah. Because oftentimes, you know, local news in particular will just be straight up stenographers for whatever the police press release is. I mean, they'll often also just refer to things as riots that are not. Like, if people sit down and, like, refuse to leave the lunch area or, like, the, you know, like, the central sitting. area, they will refer to that as like a riot, even if no one is like throwing punches. And just to sort of circle with labor. If you refuse to work, you get punished for it. It's not necessarily optional, right? It is absolutely a flavoring, not just because of the

Starting point is 02:41:39 conditions and because of the, you know, poor payment, basically lack of payment, right? but because you are forced to work or you get punished. And sometimes it goes on your record that could actually impact you for any kind of parole opportunities, etc. So it is punitive. It is exploitative. And it is nothing more than slavery. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:42:06 To also touch base on, yeah, like the fact is it's slavery. I think that's like we and other organizers have done a pretty good job, I feel like, of like getting that fact into the mainstream and being like, yeah, like this is slavery, like period, end of sentence. It is legally and materialist slavery. And now we're entering this process in which states like Colorado, for example, are passing laws that's like, yeah, so we're just like abolishing this slavery thing. And it's like, it's like the apparatus to deprive people of their rights has not itself been

Starting point is 02:42:37 disempowered in any way. And so they're just like waving a bond over this system of slavery being like, it's not now. like okay you know what I mean so like when we demand you know abolish the 13th it's like that's like kind of a long term like strategic like legal demand but just because a state like I feel like this is being recuperated into the kind of like self-congratulatory you know like faux civil rights like liberalism at this point because like states are like abolishing their version of the 13th and then being like cool our work here is done oh but you didn't do anything actually Right. And Colorado, in fact, still forces people to work in their prisons. And it is illegal, technically. But, like, it ain't quite as illegal as, you know, it ain't the same type of illegal when the state is doing it, right? The state is not, in fact, gone by its own laws in practice. Yeah. And, I mean, also juxtapose, like, everything that Gigi just said about self-defense with, like, the excuses that cops are allowed to give when they shoot people out of out at random. Yeah. Right? It's like, oh,

Starting point is 02:43:44 well, the standard for a human being, you know, killing another human being is it has to be like in mutual combat. Like you have to be using proportionate force. Dada, da, da, da, da. Whereas like a cop can just be like, well, I kind of thought that he was holding something or whatever. So yeah. And as far as organizing goes, I mean, people, I just want to say, people take lots of actions. So a lot of the form that our organizing takes is like we establish ourselves as a presence. we have our incarcerated members.

Starting point is 02:44:16 They give us information about what either they or other groups of people are doing. Other people on the outside know about us. They give us information about what's going on in places. And we are kind of known as like the prison labor organization that like does stuff around those. And there really isn't as far as I'm aware, a kind of organization that like does that direct support specifically around labor issues anywhere else in the United States, again, outside of the local level perhaps.

Starting point is 02:44:42 So yeah, what we do is we pressure the. prisons and jails to give in to the prisoner's demands. And they're not necessarily going to be like, oh, well, now that we've heard from the public, we will do all the demands. But like, you heard the list of stuff that we read off about the Fresno jail. Like, that was a surprising list of stuff, and they weren't actually striking or anything. And so oftentimes, because of the power imbalance, it does sort of just make more sense for us to just pressure the prison directly, regardless of whether there's a strike or not. But people do go on strike in prison and do. And, work slowdowns in prison and all that kind of stuff. And it helps to have an outside, like,

Starting point is 02:45:21 buffer and, like, support team and, like, a relational network of support, just like it does with other workers, right? Like, building that kind of network of mutual aid and respect and support is what makes more action possible. And so that's what we kind of seek to do. And prison solidarity is something that is also not one directional. You know, you probably got a, sense of this, you know, in the snippets with Audra, but we learn a lot from our inside members. We learn life-changing lessons from our inside members a lot, and they learn from us too, but we always tell new members, like, especially, you know, if they don't have a lot of experience with prison or whatever, it's like, do not approach this or from like a paternalistic standpoint.

Starting point is 02:46:05 Like, yes, they have a lot to learn, but so do we. And relationships and lessons go both ways. And also, like, prison admins are just incredibly vulnerable to public. scrutiny. Like, we heard how bad things are there. And it's like, they don't want people knowing this. Like, they have just skated by on like the kind of general Reagan 80s vibe of like, oh, yeah, this is actually part of the punishment, like, this entire time. And like, that is still their mindset. It's like, yeah, this person isn't supposed to be fun. What do you mean? We need to give people toothpaste. Like, that is still like their attitude to the T. And we need to intervene in that because that's really terrible actually. Yeah. And, you know,

Starting point is 02:46:44 know, this is an authoritarian country, like, straight up for the less wealthy half of the population. And this is, like, a huge part of that. And we can't just, like, not challenge the prison system and then do, like, radical organizing of any other kind and be like, yeah, we can just ignore this prison thing. It surely will not come to eat us at any point, right? There's also this kind of myth of, like, labor as rehabilitation, which is just like a, you know, kind of Calvinist sort of, you know, humbug. but it's like, you know, we've already established that a lot of people in prison didn't do anything wrong. Yeah. But like for those who did, like, you know within whatever moral framework you're using, like,

Starting point is 02:47:22 if you're someone who like goes around causing harm, how is like performing labor going to make you not that person? It's not. They're just producing surplus value, right? Yeah. So that's total bullshit. And it's also, you know, it's just kind of like this old fashioned 1800s logic of like poor houses and shit. You know, like make them work. It'll make everything better.

Starting point is 02:47:43 somehow. And as for being sued, like, we know that the prisons hate being sued. The people who really sue them the best oftentimes are jailhouse lawyers. And we know that they hate that because, like, they will straight up try to have those people killed. Jesus. Not only will they try to have those people killed. They will try to have any kind of prison staff or guard that, like, grows a conscience. And it's like, yeah, this thing that we did is kind of fucked up. Like, I can't say with certainty, but like those people have died under suspicious circumstances. Just to contextualize it, like the prison admins, your public scrutiny, like, so much. And whenever we do something like this that is, like,

Starting point is 02:48:18 sustained and, like, strategic and involving a lot of participation, which it's, unfortunately, not always. And we need to work on that. And that is part of building a, like, staunch support base, right, is doing these distributed actions in a way that is, like, really sustained. So, you know, we communicate with specific people and apply pressure to the institution directly without going through any kind of like proper channels necessarily, which tend to just do nothing. But doing this, we have stopped jailhouse lawyers from being killed.

Starting point is 02:48:54 We have gotten firefighters at the Central California Women's Facility, their time credits, which the prison was like dragging their feet on giving them to the extent that like it was actually going to affect when they got out. Like they were having like six months of time that they like weren't applying. like eight months from like their current get out time you know what I mean Jesus and so we fixed that we have gotten multiple people like real medical care as opposed to like fake medical care

Starting point is 02:49:22 there was actually a kitchen strike that we didn't we didn't directly support just because it like happened too quickly like I just I think I gave some like advice but that was about it and like they just like stop paying them like in California you're supposed to make like eight cents an hour or whatever and they just were like we're just not going to pay you or your eight cents anymore But eight cents an hour's too expensive for you as a prison. Fuck it off. God. Jesus Christ,

Starting point is 02:49:45 I hate these people. Yeah. I mean, this is just the nature of exploitation. Like they're always just trying to like, oh, we've gotten away with a million things. Let's get away with a million and one things. Yep. You know, like it's it's the nature of oppression and exploitation, right?

Starting point is 02:50:00 But yeah. So they struck and they went back their eight cents an hour. And there was a slowdown that you can read about in PRISM reports, which is like a movement news outlet where people did a slowdown. People that were producing like the boxers for other prisoners, I believe, did a work slowdown about two years ago, 18 months ago or so. And this was just to get access to the commissary. So like they were making good money by like prison standards. But like the commissary closed while they were still working. And so they couldn't spend their money. Oh, but Jesus Christ. Yeah. And so they did a slowdown to like fix that.

Starting point is 02:50:37 this was part of California Prison Industries Authority, which like is the manufacturer of oftentimes first resort for like all kinds of like furniture and other supplies for the state of California, including the UC system. And this is often the case with other states as well. And we also just are disseminating helpful info all the time like with that legal info. It's like if you show up with like a bunch of like radical literature and like some legal info It's like a punk show. People are like, why do you have legal info? That's boring as well.

Starting point is 02:51:09 But like in prison, it's like, yeah, you're going to find some people interested in the radical info and like that stuff. People are interested in it too. But like the legal info is what people really want because it is more practical. It's like, you know, we, of course we distribute information about the IWW and about solidarity unionism and, you know, feminism and all kinds of other stuff. You know, the Black Panthers, you know, the whole nine. But like what people really do want because it's the most practical is like, how do I

Starting point is 02:51:34 sue the prison. How do I legally hack my way out of this beast? And like, it works. And a lot of our best and brightest outside members who were once inside members, they didn't just wait for their sentence to expire. They like had to

Starting point is 02:51:51 file grievances and like take every opportunity to like be the prison's worst off to the point that the prison was just like, just I'm going to fuck out already. Like, enough of this person. Yeah. So yeah, that's most of what I got. How can people support y'all and get involved more? So definitely folks should visit us at incarcerated workers.org, and we will provide those links.

Starting point is 02:52:14 And definitely sign up for our newsletter where we give some updates on what's happening inside in a safe way to protect our members inside and their organizing work, but also hear about, you know, work happening across the country and across the world as well. I would also, I guess, just add that we really want labor unionists and health care workers and lawyers and law students and researchers to plug into our website because there are spaces just, oh, and reporters and journalists, I should say, as well, to plug into our website because there are spaces for just them. That doesn't mean that we don't want other people signing up to, but those professions, I think, in particular, you know, and educators also have a lot of impact. and like a lot of relationships direct and indirect to the system that we want to kind of zero in on and do something with. And the website elaborates on that. If you're addicted to Instagram, you can follow us there at incarcerated workers

Starting point is 02:53:16 and also at CA underscore IWalk or California. But if you're not, then good for you. And instead, you should sign up to our email newsletter. Yeah, I will leave it at that. In short, let's burn it down. Amazing. Now, before we go, I want to mention something extremely important that we'll be covering in more detail in a later episode, which is the planned 2017 National Prisoners Human Rights Strike Plan to Run from May Day to Juneteenth in 2027. We're going to talk more about this in a later episode and get more of the history of the 2016 and 2018 prison strikes.

Starting point is 02:53:58 I walk and jailhouse lawyer speak, who we're going to be reading a statement from in a second, we're involved in, but for now I'm going to close this episode by quoting the statement released by jailhouse lawyer speak. Why We Strike A political storm is sweeping through many prisons across the nation, as the prison class plainly see the hidden mechanisms of a system designed to dehumanize the imprisoned population. For too long, many of us were kept in the dark. about the machinery behind our confinement, how law enforcement, district attorneys, politicians, and judges

Starting point is 02:54:34 win elections on platforms of mass imprisonment, and how private interests and rural economies profit off our bed counts. Our captive bodies are weaponized through prison-based gerrymandering, where our numbers are used to swell the political power and draw federal funding into rural districts, all while stripping us of any voter representation. Through these exceptional clauses, the prison class is relegated to conditional citizenship,

Starting point is 02:55:01 a status where constitutional rights are granted at the pleasure of the state. When officials can openly discuss transferring in prison citizens to foreign prisons without constitutional barrier, it is because these exception clauses have already stripped the prison class of the full protections of citizenship behind the razors. This legal disenfranchisement is paired with the reality of living in unventilated boiling cells, during climate extremes. Enduring endless so-called staffing shortage, lockdowns ordered by prison crats,

Starting point is 02:55:35 washing militarized round-ups in ice attention centers, and seeing poor people funneled into plea deals simply because they cannot afford cash bail or paid legal defense. The trap extends beyond the walls. Thousands on thousands of people in prison who meet the basic parole requirements are repeatedly denied parole by arbitrary boards, citing, quote,

Starting point is 02:55:55 the nature of the original crime, end quote, a static reason that never changes solely to maintain prison bed quotas. Even upon release, the carceral state traps formerly in prison people under supervision debt, electronic surveillance, income monitors, and restrictive probation and parole systems that serve as a revolving door back to a cell. The core demands. While the full 10 national demands remain active, strike organizers across committed states are focusing on three-core demands. One, and legalize slavery. Repeal the exception clause of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This is the clause that allows slavery as punishment in prisons. Two, restore voting rights,

Starting point is 02:56:39 repeal exception clauses such as Section 2 of the 14th Amendment that stripped voting rights from confined citizens, pretrial detainees, and former felons. Three, free all the political prisoners in U.S. prisons. Thank you all both for doing this work and for fighting this fight and for being on this show. And I hope we all go out into the world and fight for workers everywhere, wherever they may be. And I'm start. Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies?

Starting point is 02:57:23 Will the pastos survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months.

Starting point is 02:57:52 I survived and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the Survivor File. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who lived through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. but these aren't stories about what's taken from them.

Starting point is 02:58:35 There's stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsesives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.

Starting point is 02:59:12 I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place.

Starting point is 02:59:39 Listen to Pro Society on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook on the Big Money Players Network. Our show is extremely accessible to first-time listeners. Each week, we talk to someone in show business, aka the big. is and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us.

Starting point is 03:00:03 Everyone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, not that great. Actually, can you help me shape this? How about we flip it on his head, right? How about we flip this script? What is the surprise woman? Actually, you think is the straight man is actually the one who's acting weird. Adam Scott.

Starting point is 03:00:27 This entire time, You've been expecting Adam Sandler to come to visit the show. I would never expect. I have. I would never set expectations for something like that to happen. If the universe allows for something like that to happen, I'm open to it. I'm always going to accept. You know, Danny McBride, fine.

Starting point is 03:00:49 Yeah, it's all this fragile masculinity exuding. I could smell it walking down the hallway, to be honest with you. I was like, is that weed? Nope. It's fragile masculinity. Mm-hmm. Ben Stiller, no. Because a lot of times out of context, people don't get it or even know what a circle is.

Starting point is 03:01:07 You know what I mean? They're like, oh, what's a state. Everyone's so dumb. And fake. Right, fake and also not interested or just like, oh, I've got my life. I don't care about your life. And a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Oh, and by the way, Will Ferrell told us personally he loves the show and he wants to be a guest on every episode,

Starting point is 03:01:28 but he's just so busy. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans.

Starting point is 03:01:53 Hoodley do. This episode, we're covering the week of August 12th through August 19th. So I guess I'll start with, I've seen reports. ICE is using... vehicles, I guess, as staging points for cameras. And I have seen videos of what appear to be license plate flippers on ice vehicles. If you're not familiar, right? Like, there has been lots and lots of reports of ICE agents, like manually changing license plates.

Starting point is 03:02:16 This just appears to be a device that goes, whoop, rotates 180 degrees, so you've got two license plates available. A lot of the pictures, we saw a man being, I'm not sure if he was arrested or just like harassed for saying, like, why don't you have a license plate on your vehicle, why don't you have a license plate on your vehicle? And it very much appears that vehicle had a license plate flipper on the front. Secondly, CBP is pausing all construction in Big Bend. This is according to Rodney Scott, who's the CBP commissioner, who says he is personally on his way there to conduct a, quote, personal evaluation. It's entirely unclear like what that means

Starting point is 03:02:52 and what are the criteria for this evaluation, right? Like, there are dozens of laws, treaties and regulations that cover the kind of thing that they are doing in the place that they are doing it, and they have waived all of them. So this is what we get now, right? We get Rodney Scott going on a plane and just like giving it the like the imperial thumbs up or thumbs down, like some kind of Roman emperor, I guess. Like this is a thing that wouldn't fly in like a hereditary monarchy like the UK, right, where we now have one person making this choice that everyone will have to live with forever, that they're destroying a place, which is beautiful. And one of the places that has not been and ruined by capitalism and the state, one of the few large areas of public land in Texas.

Starting point is 03:03:36 So I will keep you updated on what Rodney Scott decides to do. I will probably do an episode on my other show, Natural Courses, about Big Bend soon. And then finally, I guess as we're talking about border wall stuff from me, people are conducting a tree sit in a cottonwood tree in Arizona. The cottonwood tree, it's a very old, cottonwood tree, sometimes called grandmother tree. these people are trying to protect it from being destroyed due to border war construction. They've been sitting in that tree for several weeks now. I will eventually go visit them.

Starting point is 03:04:06 I was going to go visit them, but I went to Spokane when those fires struck instead. They have been joined by someone on the Mexican side. So now there are two tree siters making this the first international tree sit that I am ever aware of. That rules. Yeah, no, it's great. Hell yeah, hell yeah. Well, like, trees don't know borders, right? Yeah.

Starting point is 03:04:25 As I highlighted in my other podcast, Natural Cause, is the US left really fucked up when NAFTA came in by not saying if you're going to try and pay people less in Mexico, then we will try and organize people in Mexico. And together, we will demand dignified wages and conditions. I'm glad that people are not taking that approach anymore because they didn't get us anywhere. I'll keep covering the situation there as well. So speaking of, I guess, the long-range effects of NAFTA, KOSPI, which is the Korean stock index, hit it circuit breaker, which is the breaker that hits if you lose too much percentage of the stock market's value again on Wednesday. I genuinely have lost count of the number of times that it has been triggered over the past few months. This has become a regular recurrence in one of the largest and most important stock markets in the world. This time it was fueled by a collapse of tech stocks and the Brent Fruit Index hitting $90 a barrel. We will be getting into some more of the impacts of that later. I don't know. My guess is that it's going to rebound as everyone buys the dip tomorrow,

Starting point is 03:05:29 but any one of these could be the one where it doesn't rebound, and we will let you know whether the global economic collapses on. Yay. Yeah, what happens if there's not a rebound? What is that going to look like? Everyone's fucked? No, I mean, like, in terms of, like, what is you're expecting cascade of events if that goes down? Oh, the entire global economy goes under because the Korean stock market right now is basically a kind of tragedy as far as version of the American market where most of the almost all of the value is congealed into these three.

Starting point is 03:06:02 Yeah, AI. Yeah, three companies that, yeah, basically make AI chips, right? And then the rest of the value down the chain is people doing weird gambling stuff on different AI components. if the market just actually crashes, that is those three companies. And, you know, we're talking like Samsung here, right? These are vital components in the entire AI. I mean, not just the AISphere, obviously, these, Samsung, right? Like, we're talking about, you know, things that are vital components.

Starting point is 03:06:29 The big tech companies. Yeah, yeah. And, like, all of the manufacturing of, like, tech all over the world. If that stuff goes down, that takes the American markets with it. That takes all global markets that are reliance on. these AI surges go with it. And that's kind of just the beginning of the popping of the tech bubble. Yep, yep, yep.

Starting point is 03:06:47 I just wanted to get to that. Because it's like it is, it is this mirror of exactly what's gone in in the United States. I guess the big difference is that so far, the obvious signs of trouble in South Korea have not set off alarm bells in, at least in American investors to the extent that you might expect. But I'm sure. There's been some, like it tends to be the other way around where Cosby tends to kind of be following the American markets, but there have definitely been days where, like,

Starting point is 03:07:16 because of the time difference in Korea, all of the American investors wake up to watch like 10% going down, like 10% of the value of the Korean stock market disappearing in one night, and that, like, lowers American stocks, and then Trump says something about the war ending, and it goes back up again. So there has been some notice of it, but our grand collective delusion to maintain the functioning of capitalism continues. Great. Good, good, good. On Tuesday, there was a J.P. debate for the South Carolina U.S. Senate special runoff election. So it's a special election and a runoff. And in this debate, sister of the fallen, Lindsay Graham,

Starting point is 03:07:57 Darlene Graham, could not answer a pretty rudimentary foreign policy question because it is not her area of expertise. Let's take a listen. Senator, our Taiwan and the South China Sea, national security issues for the United States? If so, why? I'm sorry, could you repeat the question? Are Taiwan and the South China Sea national security issues for the United States? And if so, why or how? I'm just going to be honest here. I'm not on national security. I'm not that informed on national security. But I do support the military. My brother was in the Air Force for 33 years. So I will do everything I can to support the military. Great stuff.

Starting point is 03:08:48 You know what? Honesty. That's what we need in politicians. I love hereditary seats. This is an amazing feature of what is supposed to be a representative democracy. It's so good. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:09:02 I don't know shit about fuck, but I love the army. That's incredible. No, she later goes on to literally say it's on her quote-unquote area of expertise. It just talks about how, regardless, she will always support the U.S. military. It's astounding. Lindsay Graham rolling over in his grave. So that is Darlene Graham, sister of Lindsay Graham, who is facing Republican Ralph Norman in this runoff election, the winner of which will then face the Democrat, Dr. Annie Andrews, for this general election in November to replace Lindsay's seat.

Starting point is 03:09:40 pretty cool. God, I hope she wins the primary. I want to see more of this. Yeah, yeah. This will be highly amusing, if nothing else. Oh, man. I want to briefly mention some new information regarding the federal investigations

Starting point is 03:09:58 into anti-ice protests in the Twin Cities based on some newly released court documents. This was first reported in the New York Times and I have read through the, like, page motion filed by the defense that unveiled these documents and a number of the 30-some exhibits. And I'll report on this in full probably next week with its own episode. But I do want to discuss with the group here a little bit. So four days after CPB killed Alex Prettie, DHS open investigation

Starting point is 03:10:29 into labor unions and left-wing activist groups that they thought were involved in funding the anti-ice protests and, quote, providing material support. to violent opportunists, unquote. This HSI investigation amounted to a massive spying operation called Operation Puppet Master and later Operation Whipple Shield.

Starting point is 03:10:55 God, I hate these people. Whipple is the name of the federal building that was at the heart of a lot of the protests in the Twin Cities. And these operations ended up probing three years of financial records from organizations like

Starting point is 03:11:13 Sunrise Movement, the Communication Workers of America, and the Healthcare Union, S-E-I-U as a part of a quote-unquote financial investigation into quote-unquote domestic terrorist financing. I think it's really important

Starting point is 03:11:27 to point out here is that this three-year time span of documents extends far beyond the time span of Operation Metro Surge and the protests, right? This is not a probe

Starting point is 03:11:39 into financing specific protest groups responding to ICE. This is just a general dragnet into labor unions, into left-wing non-profits, environmental groups, a racial justice activist group in the area. Like this is a huge probe. They're looking into Venmo transactions. They're requesting bank records. This is a massive probe of like the interior of like some very major national

Starting point is 03:12:07 unions. Yeah. It's interesting when when you look at who they're looking into, right? Because it's a really, really wide swath across the political spectrum of the left. Like, SEIU, like, obviously there are, like, locals of SEIU that, like, do good work. But, like, nationally, SEIU is not, like, a radical organization, right? Like, of the major unions,

Starting point is 03:12:28 this is, like, an extremely, extremely milk-toast union. Right. Yeah, I guess context with SCIU particularly would be that they arrested David Huerta in Los Angeles in June. of last year, right? He's union leader. Yeah, yeah. And I know because Alex Prattie was a healthcare worker,

Starting point is 03:12:46 SIEU is a healthcare union. Like, I went to like a solidarity protest to put together by a bunch of different unions in New York City following the death of Alex Prattie. Yeah. It's interesting that the federal government picked up on that sort of union solidarity and then started investigating it.

Starting point is 03:13:04 Yeah. And I think that is really telling. Yeah. Part of what I'm getting at here is like they're just going after everyone who's even like tangentially involved in these protests, right? Yeah. The way the state sees this is they're incapable of organizing like spontaneous and like horizontal solidarity or seeing that, right? They understand. Yeah, SEU folks showed up in New York where Garrison is.

Starting point is 03:13:27 And I think they're not called the AFT in Minneapolis. Maybe they're called the Federation of Educators or something like that. MFE looks like. Yeah, like another union, right, for educators evidently. and 50-51, and some more explicitly socialist and leftist groups, showed up against eyes, showed up in solidarity after Alex Prattie was killed. And the way the state sees this is, therefore, they are nationally and vertically integrated, and someone is pulling the strings and paying the funds.

Starting point is 03:13:52 Not like they are fucking mad. Yeah, it's like, the way that they see it is like, yeah, like, SCIU National has like handed down like the riot orders. Just like, no, no, SCIU like. But she's right. Like, that is how they understand it. It's like time traveling militants for the 1970s, kidnapped SCIU's leadership and held him at gunpoint and said, we will let you go if you order mass riots. They still wouldn't do it.

Starting point is 03:14:15 Like, that's not what this is. But the feds have a hammer and they're trying to hammer down every single thing that even vaguely looks like a nail. Yeah. So they can do sort of the broadest and widest ranging oppression that they can deal with. Yeah. And we have like an example of how HSI is envisioning this sort of conspiracy. like what we're talking about, because as a part of the new exhibits that were released to the public, we have this slide that was sent to grand jurors for the indictment, which we'll soon talk about,

Starting point is 03:14:47 that targeted 15, 15 protesters. The grand jury was shown this slide that is labeled the conspiracy that has about 15 different organizations, all with arrows pointing towards direct action, Minnesota Dam, which is the protest group that the government alleges the 15 people indicted were involved with in some way. I want to read through some of these organizations that are part of this conspiracy diagram. There's the Monarcha Rapid Response Line. There's Ray Rainbolt Memorial Gun Club, Red Pine Revolutionary Collective, SDIU 26, showing it for racial justice, Socialist Alternative. Veterans for Peace, Whipple Watch, Workers Solidarity Circle, AFLCIO, Black Cat Workers Collective.

Starting point is 03:15:39 It's all of it. The Democratic Socialists of America. The Greece Pit, which is a local bike shop. Hell yeah. Left jab. Minneapolis Federation of Educators Local 59. Minnesota Association of Professional Employees, Minnesota Ice Watch, and Minnesota 50501. pretty incredible. Pretty incredible collection. And they're all supposed to be like sending like a council member. That's what the diagram has is that

Starting point is 03:16:10 there's a council member from these organizations. That like is part of direct action Minnesota that is like orchestrating all these protests. It's incredible. I love to see like Creminology

Starting point is 03:16:26 overcoming like a DIY bike shop that opens for a few hours a few afternoons a week. Like, it's... The Politburo of Minnesota is populated by, like, by co-ops. It's the shadow council,

Starting point is 03:16:39 James, the shadow... Okay, they're running everything. It's incredible. This is what happens when socialist alternative and DSA can overcome their differences. And support council communism, descend of member to direct action,

Starting point is 03:16:55 Minnesota high council. Black and red United States. Yeah. It's incredible. stuff. Now, of course, none of these organizations themselves have actually faced charges stemming from this investigation. But this investigation did result in 15 people being indicted on, quote, conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer for allegedly planning to block a roadway, among a few other charges against specific individuals for participating in Ice Rapid Response.

Starting point is 03:17:26 So although DSA, the Greece pit and SCIU are not themselves as organizations, you know, charged, this sort of huge, like very broad investigation into nonprofit organizations, into electoral organizations, into labor unions, this did result in charges against specific people. Many of whom are not part of these, you know, 15 council member organizations. The defense lawyer Kevin Riyak wrote in a motion, quote, Homeland Security Investigations Investigation extended far beyond any potential threat to law enforcement safety. It concluded with no evidence but obvious political animus that numerous twin cities unions and nonprofit organizations were involved in a widespread conspiracy to violate 18 U.S.

Starting point is 03:18:18 1-1, assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers or employees. and it surveilled and surptutiously gathered financial records generated by these organizations despite the lack of any connection between those organizations and criminal conduct. Yeah, it's co-intel pro shit. It never ended. They're just doing it again. I've always been doing it. Yes, and part of what these new docs reveal is much more details, on like the covert surveillance of organizer meetings at libraries and churches, and the way in the extent that Homeland Security infiltrated signal chats and how undercovers try to entice people into discussing or committing crimes.

Starting point is 03:19:02 And I want to discuss that in more detail and in its own episode, because I think that requires a very careful focus on how that actually went about, because I think that can very easily be turned into, you know, panicking or maybe overstating certain things regarding, you know, were ICE the ones actually directing all the protests against ICE? And like, no, obviously not. So I think that that requires a distinct focus. Specifically in these court documents, there's a there's a reference to an undercover discussing with someone at like a sunrise movement meeting about getting more involved in direct actions and maybe building quote unquote devices for direct actions. So it's that kind of stuff. And I want to discuss that more in detail. But this

Starting point is 03:19:49 new batch of court documents in this case has revealed a lot about how this investigation went, how it started off very, very broad against a lot of organizations. And like what, you know, National Security Presidential Memorandum Number 7 wrote about, you know, looking to the finances of a lot of different nonprofit groups. But then from there, realizing that maybe they are not going to be able to prosecute all these unions for terrorist financing. Yeah. Instead, they find 15 people who are engaged in First Amendment activity that they think they could maybe, you know, turn into an Antifa boogeyman and get that past a grand jury because you certainly could not get the rest of this shit past a grand jury. Yeah. Talking of like pushing the boundaries of

Starting point is 03:20:32 the constitution with regards to policing is a good tie-in to this next piece that I have, which is to talk about the national defense areas. So the DOJ has issued a new opinion this week, suggesting that military forces in the national defense areas that span much of the border can now detain people, not just in such. the NDA, but also those near the NDA who leave it before they have time to arrest them. If you're not familiar with the NDA, these are areas along the border wall that have been transferred to the military and are being managed as extensions of military bases. For example, NDA number three, the California NDA begins, I think at the western edge of Otai

Starting point is 03:21:11 Mountain Wilderness, stretches all the way to the Arizona border in Imperial County. that is an extension of NAF El Centro, so it's Naval Air Facility El Centro, so that's patrol by Marines. The New Mexico one is an extension of Fort Huachuca, and that's patrolled by the army. There is one in Texas, which is an extension of Fort Bliss.

Starting point is 03:21:34 Fort Bliss spans those two states, but that NDA goes into Texas more. The bases themselves are being extended, therefore the logic goes from the Justice Department that they are not violating the Posse Comitatis Act because there are recognised exemptions, they say, for military installations. So they're saying because the base is being extended to generally, but not always, it is the Roosevelt Reservation, right, which is a 60-foot area to the north of the physical border. But some of these NDAs span areas larger than that, they are claiming that that area is therefore exempt from PCA if the military is prosecuting or, in this case, arresting or detaining people for trespassing on a military installation, right?

Starting point is 03:22:28 They think that the military can also enforce federal law on its installations. So by definition, anyone eweeing, ewee entry without inspection, right? so that's someone entering between ports of entry. Anybody doing that in an NDA, which is a large amount of the southern border right now, would be trespassing on a military installation, right? You can also see in this opinion, they're like hinting at adding more NDAs soon.

Starting point is 03:22:53 This is the same legal reasoning that they are using claim it is illegal to photograph things inside an NDA. I think this one is incredibly suspect, right? So statutory law does ban photography of, quote, certain vital military or naval installations or equipment. But I think you'd have a very hard time arguing in court that like a pile of razor wire and some rocks is vital military equipment. But that's what they're going with, right?

Starting point is 03:23:21 This is important because what we are seeing here is the Trump administration pushing at the boundaries of constitutionally what it can do. And as I've said hundreds of times on this show of the last four years, this always starts at the border and it never stays at the border, right? Everything we see with mass surveillance now has been a reality in border communities for some time. Everything we see with the increased presence of ICE, of CBP, this has been something that border communities have dealt with, right? This is this particularly violent form of law enforcement that is particularly unaccountable. If we see this at the border and they get away with it at the border, then I'm sure it will continue in other places.

Starting point is 03:24:01 It doesn't take like a brain genius to look at, for instance, what happened in Portland six years ago, right? and see how like we could edge towards the PCA POSICOMOATARTA Act waivers in other parts of the United States as well. So I think this is worth keeping an eye on and like I would like it to get more attention in reporting. Let's go on an ad break and then we'll discuss in honor of Lindsay Graham the US military. Who we support but we don't know where they go. All right. There's a lot of military news this week. That ship does not look like it's doing too well. Let's start with the sad boat. The sad boat. Anyone here old enough to have watched the love boat on Nick at night? No, none of you. Okay. All right. Well, you didn't have that where I grew up

Starting point is 03:24:59 Robert. Okay. That's hurtful. This is all very hurtful. Anyway, the sad boat is the USS Abraham Lincoln. How sad is it? Yeah. Yeah. Why is Abe sad? Well, yeah. Mia, you want to start? Yeah, so the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. It's actually funny because we have now reached a point where when you say the sad boat I actually couldn't tell which of the boats you were referring to Because it was the Jerry Ford before it was the Abraham Lincoln and the Gerald Ford had longer to be sad Well there was also a destroyer

Starting point is 03:25:33 This point in the South China Sea where the power was out for three days Oh yeah So they didn't have running water Which one was it where they were blocking up all the toilets Like jamming there was toilet paper That's the Jerry Ford and I think the Lincoln All of our newest supercarriers have serious issues with the bathroom plumbing. So the primary means of First Amendment expression that is available to say this.

Starting point is 03:25:57 That's why they practice the two-man poop over the side technique, which is an actual thing they have to do whenever the bathrooms don't work. Which it's so funny reading about these ships and being like, this is shit from like my like slum lord fucking apartments in Chicago. Except for the DODs, your slum lord. Yeah, like, they're happening aboard like the most, like, the most advanced and expensive military in human history. Oh, God. Where do we even want to start with the USS Abraham Lincoln? I mean, I guess, I guess we could start with the fact that they have been hanging nets over the side of the aircraft carrier because sailors keep trying to jump off to kill themselves. a thing that I last saw with like Foxcon factories in Shenzhen.

Starting point is 03:26:48 Yeah, that's the last time I heard that as well. Yeah. But at least in Shenzhen, to my knowledge, nobody is shitting into the nets, which appears to be from what Robert has said. You know, the shitting would be incidental. We have covered on this show before. I think it was, was it Temu, I think,

Starting point is 03:27:07 was the one where their Chinese branch had like timers over the toilets to show how long. been in there for. Now you say that. I would not, would not rule that out in Shenzhen as well. Good, good, good.

Starting point is 03:27:18 Yeah, but this ship has not been getting resupplied. It has been out for significantly longer than the original plan duration. The sailors are just kind of trapped on board. Sailors who have, you know, attempted to commit suicide because they've been stuck on this fucking ship are getting like their careers destroyed because of this.

Starting point is 03:27:40 Oh, wow. It's just a nightmare. And this is running into one of the, what I guess is turning into one of the themes of this week's episode, which is that there are a whole bunch of elements of the U.S. Navy and also of the world economy, where them functioning correctly are based on the U.S. not fighting a forever war in Iran

Starting point is 03:27:59 and are based on the assumption that eventually this is going to end. Yeah. And it's just not. And so the ship is also just physically breaking down. Well, yeah, they're running low on all of the, like, necessities. And part of that is because of the success of Iran's attacks on bases, like U.S. bases overseas and U.S. bases in like foreign countries. There was an article that came out just within the last couple of days on August 14th in the New York Times by John Ismay that

Starting point is 03:28:30 traced a lot of the supply issues that the Abraham Lincoln's been having for its entire deployment to like right after the first day of the war when Iran launched a massive attack on a U.S. Navy base in Bahrain. which destroyed a massive logistics hub that the Navy has relied on basically the entirety of the global war on terror up to the present moment. And that's what's forced them to switch over to using Diego Garcia as a supply hub. If you remember Kier Starrmer over in the UK initially was like, no, you guys can't use Diego Garcia as like the supply hub for your legal war. And then immediately changed his mind when he got threatened a little bit. Yeah. Brave as who are in.

Starting point is 03:29:07 Good stuff. Good stuff. Yeah, I think like, I mean, it's so obvious, right, that Iran, a country which like the U.S. has been saber rattling out for decades would very obviously have a plan of what to do in the event that the United States struck it and they executed their plan. Yeah. Trump for his part has repeatedly stated that the length of the deployment of the Lincoln and the Ford before it are not big deals. When he was asked earlier this week if carrier deployments were too long, he responded, no, no, no, no, not. nearly long enough. See, he's really going to get into it with Lindy Graham's sister over this one.

Starting point is 03:29:44 No, he's, it's also, she's just been very personally meddling with and fucking with a bunch of Navy stuff. He sure has been. There's a whole kind of side drama to this story where Trump has ordered the Navy to go back to using steam catapults to, like, launch aircraft off of the deck of the ship,

Starting point is 03:29:58 which is like a significantly worse thing than the electromagnetic systems that the Navy has been using. But Trump, like, heard that, that some pilot liked them a long time ago, and so he's been trying to force the entire Navy to do this since the first administration. And he's finally succeeded,

Starting point is 03:30:15 which means you're going to have to refit like 40% of these ships, and they're probably going to have to design new ships because the ships are not designed around having these things, and they're just going to be worse because the emperor has decided that he likes steam catapults. Oh, yeah, no, no, no. There's a piece in the Guardian just about a week ago. Trump orders Pentagon to redesign U.S. aircraft carriers

Starting point is 03:30:37 to use steam catapults to lodge jets? Yep, yep, yep. Yeah, because he thought the digital systems were too complicated. I had missed this in the long list of like bullshit. Oh, it's amazing military stuff he said recently. Yeah, he signed a national security memorandum directing Pete Hegseth and the acting Navy secretary to make this change. That's great.

Starting point is 03:30:57 That's good. It's this astonishing combination of like, he's made the cardinal mistake that all of these people make, which is that American military and economic supremacy is, premised on having the world's most expensive army and not using it. Yeah. And now he's used it. And then also he's doing all of this weird emperor fucking with it stuff at the same time. There's amazing quotes from this.

Starting point is 03:31:23 Apparently it started back in 2017 what he told Time Magazine about a conversation that he'd had with an unnamed Navy officer. So I said, what's this? Sir, this is our digital catapult system. Trump went on. It sounded bad to me. Digital. They have digital.

Starting point is 03:31:36 What is digital? And it's very complicated. You have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out. And I said, and now they want to buy more aircraft carriers. I said, what system are you going to be? Sir, we're staying with digital. I said, no, you're not. You're going to goddamn steam.

Starting point is 03:31:49 The digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it's no good. He's also trying to get him to move the fucking control tower of the aircraft carriers into the middle of the ship. According to the Washington Post. This is beautiful stuff. I hope he gets his way. I hope he gets his way. It'll protect the rest of the world from us.

Starting point is 03:32:10 Yeah, the rest of the world would do better of all these ships who are not deployed right now. This is, yeah, outstanding. Great stuff. Great, amazing shit. Oh, God. Very normal.

Starting point is 03:32:20 This is how a successful military is organized. Yeah. I should point out that, like, the latest statistics on people wounded in action now suggest that there are about 700 U.S. service people who have been wounded in a six-month operation. allegedly the Washington

Starting point is 03:32:37 is coming in to replace the Lincoln unclear what will happen to the destroyers and also unclear when this is actually going to happen The destroyers have to come back

Starting point is 03:32:46 so they can put a mast on them Yeah because that looks more epic and a big fucking cannon like a black powder cannon on the front Yeah the last I heard from Trump he said that a replacement

Starting point is 03:32:56 for the Lincoln is quote moving right now or very shortly and it's being replaced with another very similar ship So that's what we've got so far. It is worth noting just in terms of a general update on the situation in Iran that the ceasefire that no one has really been holding to has come to an end or is in the process of coming to an end and does not look like it's going to be renewed for all of the good that that did everybody over the last 60 days or so. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:33:27 The Trump administration has gone back and forth up until earlier this week. he had been claiming that he was in, that the U.S. was in active talks with Iran. But he said earlier this Tuesday that the U.S. is not in any talks with Iran and has no plans to start new ones. This is around the same time that he started saying that the Strait of Hormuz is open and that the U.S. is going to take it and make it a new U.S. territory. This has just been something he released as a series of truth posts or truths, including one showing a map that circled the Strait of Hormuz with the words, new U.S. territory,

Starting point is 03:33:59 straight of Hormuz above and below it. So, again, hard to say what's going to happen here, other than that oil prices are continuing to rise. The same day that he announced that there were no talks going on and that the ceasefire was not going to be extended, US forces fired on a Panama flagged ship, and around the same time, Iran struck a ship as well, killing at least one sailor.

Starting point is 03:34:27 Since the war began, 17 sailors have been killed. killed in 65 attacks. Most of those have been the result of Iranian strikes, but three of those deaths have been caused by a U.S. Navy ship that struck a merchant ship in June. So sailors are getting killed all around. The USS Abraham Lincoln's probably getting rotated out. The ceasefires over, and I guess we're trying to take the straight, although it's, I mean, there's no way to know what any of this actually means or what Trump's going to do.

Starting point is 03:34:53 He could announce that they've got a new ceasefire tomorrow. Like, it would be silly to take any of this as, final word on anything. Yeah, let me pick up on that where Robert left off there. It does appear that in response to Trump continuing to just post insane stuff, Iran has been having talks with Oman, probably talking about like joint tolling the straight, right, which is something we've spoken about a lot on this podcast. Trump did interview with Trey Yinks.

Starting point is 03:35:18 If you're not familiar with Trey Yinks, his job is to kind of be a credulous nodding head to broadcast shit that Donald Trump says. He's chief foreign correspondent at Fox. Now, I asked the president about these parlixt. parallel talks that are taking place between Iran and Oman about control of the Strait of Hormuz. And the president told Fox News, if Oman gets in the way, will bomb the S out of them. That is Donald Trump threatening to bomb the shit out of Oman. A fantastic U-turn in the United States policy.

Starting point is 03:35:50 This is a wild thing for him to be saying, right? This is a country that obviously the U.S. has had previously good relations with. This is like a CIA outpost. like brand new country to do to do Middle East War with. Yeah, exactly, right. We're running out of countries. We're having to turn on our own. Trump has also claimed in the same interviews

Starting point is 03:36:08 to Tray-Yinks that he has a back channel to the IRGC. Interestingly, President Trump confirmed to Fox News that there is a back channel with the IRGC. These are the hardline officials inside of Iran and that the United States and officials in Washington are speaking directly

Starting point is 03:36:24 with IRC officials in Iran. So yeah, there he's talking about the United States negotiate directly with IIGC, I would assume that they have had back channels in the IIGC, right? That is something one would assume. This is very normal when you have two states of this size, which are frequently kind of squaring off against each other. And generally, it is something that can be used to de-escalate conflict. Obviously, that ain't happening right now. It was later reported that these, and you don't have to be a brain genius to work out that these probably came through to Kurdistan, region of Iraq, right?

Starting point is 03:36:56 southern Kurdistan. In related news, Iran then attempted a drone strike on Barzani. What? Yes. Wait, what? President of the Kurdistan region of Iraq. Yeah, they sent two drones to Barzani's residents, I believe. What the fuck? Yeah. Sorry, I missed this. Why was this not a front page? What the hell? Yes, they sent two drones to the office of the Kurdistan region Prime Minister Mosul Barzani and the residents of the head of the Kurdistan region's security agency.

Starting point is 03:37:25 The drones obviously did not cause any casualties. I think they were intercepted. This was reported by Axios, right? This link between southern Kurdistan and the IRGC back channel was reported by Axios on the 16th. And then on the 17th, Iran attempted to drone strike. Marseur Bazani, the prime minister of the Kurdistan region of Iraq. Yeah, they attempted to drone strike his office and the residents of the Kurdistan region security agency, both in the Abil province of Kurdistan region of Kurdistan. Kurdistan. And like this again is a, like I've reported extensively, I think, that Iran is bombing southern Kurdistan and has been for some time. But this is a hell of an escalation. Yeah, I've tried to assat. Like, Barzani is like the political figure in, in, in, in this part of Kurdistan. Like, yeah. And like the Brazzani family has been, has been a political faction powerful enough that like a lot of politics revolves around whether you're not, you're like in their client networks for a long, long time. This is, this is kind of like trying to, like, I mean, He literally is like the Prime Minister of Iraqi Kurdistan. Like this is like attempting to assassinate the Prime Minister. Yeah, yeah. It's a staggering escalation. Like, Baziani Zetid, I tweeted, exed that it was dangerous escalation and direct threat

Starting point is 03:38:38 to the security instability of the Kurdistan region. He's not wrong. Yeah. When you combine this with the US having a scheduled withdrawal from Iraq, right? Like, this is bad. And like, it is very clear that Iraq is continuing and even escalating its policy of punishing the Kurds for the United States aggression, right? There's this perception that the Kurds and US are like always aligned.

Starting point is 03:39:00 As Robert said, Iran has continued to strike dastles and straightforward moves. What's interesting about this recent strike and the number of strikes that came in the days before it is that normally there has been a pattern by which the bombing relaxes. Iran strikes a vessel. The US bombs Iran, things peter out, lower intensity. Iran strikes a vessel, the US hits Iran, right? Like, yeah, yeah. The US has not hit Iran yet in response to these most recent ones.

Starting point is 03:39:32 And I think part of the reason that might be is something we've talked about before that the United States is not capable now of doing what it did in February. Like, it has significantly diminished its stockpiles. Yeah, by an estimate of around 70% plus, depending on the munition in terms of like long-range cruise missiles and our interceptors. Yeah, so just to de-joggan that for people, that's like attack and defense, right? It's your ability to hit Iran and also your ability to stop Iranian things. It's all the stuff that lets us hit Iran without endangering the lives of U.S. airmen,

Starting point is 03:40:10 and it's what allows us to defend our bases and all of the allied bases and increasingly fuel infrastructure in the region, right? And it's low enough that in part why they don't want to continue burning more, even though they have, like, a third or more left, is that they have to keep a stockpile in case shit goes down with China or, you know, expands with Russia, right? Like, these are our primary weapons. With Iran, they're completely unnecessary. Yeah, or a Mon. Yeah, or our new war with the Mon. Yeah. If we were to theoretically get into any kind of anything approaching a near-peer conflict, we're not on a good spot right now. We are only weapons other than nukes.

Starting point is 03:40:51 Yeah. So I know we're going to come back to the U.S. like a defense procurement situation. But I do want to just point out that the president, I don't know if this is related to the fact that gas prices are still bonkers six months into this, but he has posted an AI image of a trimmer version of himself ripping the Keystone pipeline out of the ground

Starting point is 03:41:11 with a banner reading buried by Biden in the background. Not clear if he understands how pipelines work. What? Yeah, your guess is as good as mine on that one. What? Like, it's, it's, I mean, here, let me just drop the link, I guess. Sometimes I'll just scroll his true social page. It's wild up in there.

Starting point is 03:41:33 That is not a task for the faint of heart. No, like, this is one of the things I do for work, you know, that traumatizes me. I've put it in the chat, the Zoom chat. We don't want our oil in the ground, in those pipes. We want it straight from the straight of Hormuz in barrels. Well, yeah. All right. Like, what is he thinking?

Starting point is 03:41:50 What does he think? The Keystone Pipeline, I should have also has a plaque affixed to it that says Keystone Pipeline, completely free, energy jobs, America first. No, and there. The buried by Biden is on a gravestone. The pipeline also has some handles. Trump's kind of in sort of a stable, wide stance there, pulling it out the ground. It's got roots on it.

Starting point is 03:42:14 I don't know what the fuck is going on here, but there are also some soldiers in the background, like underneath an American flag. So, yeah, this is the guy who just decided we were at war with Iran and now was killed a shit ton of people over it. Yeah, I guess now the response to the war with Iran and gas prices being up is more pipelines at home, which is sick. Like, I should add, I guess, that there is a continuing ecological disaster in the Strait of Hormuz

Starting point is 03:42:38 because people keep shooting boats, which are full of fuel. Yeah. And Iran is having to clean up these oil spills. Well, there's also a further ecological disaster in that you have an enormous fleet of vessels that are just sitting around waiting and accumulating a huge number of different kind of mollusks that you don't want to spread around the world

Starting point is 03:42:57 that are definitely going to. And it's also getting stuff is getting sucked into like their water tanks and their, what do you call it, their ballast tanks and shit that's going to get squirted out somewhere else. Like there's a lot of potential problems. Yeah, there are some procedures for like dumping ballast and stuff. But this is all the problem is right,

Starting point is 03:43:14 everything is delayed. every shipping company is losing money, hand over fist, and they're going to want to get moving pretty fast if the straightforward moves ever opens again, and yeah, we will see more environmental damages. Like every war is an ecological disaster, but this one that isn't getting as much reporting on. But it's great that we're bringing that home

Starting point is 03:43:35 with the Keystone pipelines, so we'll get a little piece of that too. So I wanted to give an update on a story because I talked about two weeks ago, something like that, about the general dynamic, Armix artillery shell factory in Mesquite, Texas that was meant to by now be producing somewhere between 20 and ideally 30,000 shells a month of specifically the kind that were being used most rapidly in Ukraine before Ukraine pivoted to using drones for a lot of style. I mean, they're still burning through 155s. But like that was, I mean, they incurred a shell debt of something like 3.6 million shells in the United States as a result of that. And so it's a massive issue to get these shells being produced because in any kind of modern war, we're going to. going to be burning through a shitload of them. We have a hundred something years worth of heavy artillery in warfare to know that you never have enough shells. So this is a problem the U.S. has been trying to get its handle on for a while. And as I noted, this factory that was supposed

Starting point is 03:44:28 to be producing like a third of the total of all the shells in the United States has not produced any so far. And a few days after I discussed that on E.D., Jesse Coburn at ProPublica published a beautiful investigation into that General Dynamics factory in Mesquite that opens with just a great lead. A robot was on fire again. And it's talking about the fact that all of this factory is like filled with, because it was supposed to be meant to be heavily automated, which is why it was supposed to be able to keep up with such a high level of production. And it was automated using these robots that had like giant metal arms, clamps for hands. And because of the way they were designed, it wound up soaked in oil constantly. And that oil would combust because they were moving steel

Starting point is 03:45:11 blocks that had been heated to about 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit into and out of a machine that also would periodically belch flame at them. And the robots were not roofed against this much flame. Per the ProPublica article, one blaze that summer melted a robot's cables, putting it out of commission for a week.

Starting point is 03:45:28 Now, the series of fires in the factory came just a few weeks before Trump administration, defense officials, and executives for General Dynamics, the company that made the factory, toured and threw a gala opening event there to celebrate that it was supposed to be up and running by now.

Starting point is 03:45:43 Exploding robots were not the only method of uncontrollable failure that workers had documented at the factory by that point. For one thing, the robotic arms had a tendency to flail uncontrollably and destroy equipment. They also would periodically drop heavy loads at random. The most sensitive and expensive equipment in the entire factory was a machine that was meant to stretch metal in order to make artillery shells. It cracked them nearly constantly. The factory was filled with smoke at all times and was usually over 100 degrees inside.

Starting point is 03:46:10 every description of the state-of-the-art arms factory sounds worse than the ones that were operating in World War I. This is probably my favorite part of that article. Then there were the giant press machines, which required regular pounding with a sledgehammer to function properly. It still spot the shaping of nearly every shell. We didn't really have any standardized practice, said Quantel White, a former employee. It was just a bunch of guys taking turns going at the machine with a sledgehammer every night. This is Warhammer 40K shit. Warhammer 40K works a lot.

Starting point is 03:46:40 lot better than this. There would be a priest. He'd be reading from a Bible. There'd be ungence and oil. My God. Well, there's lots of oil. I love this. Now, by last summer, which is when reports first started coming out about the difficulties the factory was having, by that point, General Dynamics had missed eight deadlines to get this thing up and running. Their factory still has yet to produce a single usable shell, despite $533 million in Pentagon funds going towards refurbishing old machines and ordering new ones from Turkey. Even so, the Penteenths The Zagon continues to sign contracts with General Dynamics. And two months ago, the company announced a new solution to all of their ill-fortune factories

Starting point is 03:47:18 mini-issues. Can you guys guess what the magic bullet that finally is going to fix everything that this factory that doesn't work is supposed to be? AI. Yeah, it's AI. It's fucking AI. Of course it is. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:47:29 Quote, a news release from General Dynamics and the new company, deterrence, was filled with techno business jargon. AI-enabled capabilities and intelligence and connectivity would be added at Mesquite and other General Dynamics factories. the companies wrote. AI transforms production facilities into strategic assets, deterrence the CEO said on the release.

Starting point is 03:47:46 We're building autonomous manufacturing systems that learned, adapt, and scale in real time. By the way, what that CEO said, I'll guarantee it was written by Chad GPT. The whole AI transformed, that's, yeah, very clearly. Yeah. These pronouncements have baffled former mesquite workers.

Starting point is 03:48:00 What are they talking about? There's nothing to learn or adapt or scale one said, it's all broken. It's been my problem. This is, God, it must have been fun writing this. It's really fun because no one actually works at the factory and no U.S. military officials who are allowed to speak their minds openly have had anything positive to say about General Dynamics and how they've proceeded with

Starting point is 03:48:19 this project. The article quotes a former official in an army office supervising the factory is saying, it's an absolute disaster. The army should have gone after recovering money from general dynamics. Yeah, no, I mean, they should have. Yeah, but that gets the central contradiction of the American War machine, which is that the point of it is to give money to defense contractors. You're not actually supposed to have to use the stuff. I should say here, General Dynamics is one of the companies most responsible for inventing that state of affairs. We're going to talk about these folks because they keep coming up when you look into, like, defense-related golduggery and fuckery and, like, U.S. history. I feel like now is probably is a good time to talk a little bit about their history.

Starting point is 03:48:59 I'm going to give a brief overview of these guys because we're in an illegal war that's currently shuffling a fortune to defense contractors, and we should probably talk about one of the most corrupt members of that family. The General Dynamics Corporation was founded at the tail end of the 19th century by Isaac Leopold Rice, a businessman and a musicologist who was born in Bavaria and raised in Milwaukee. He made his fortune doing a mix of railroad law and publishing sheet music and eventually got into the electric battery and vehicle business. This ended with him involved in submarines because early Navy subs ran on electric power when submerged. In 1890, he purchased the Holland Torpedo Boat Company and named it the Electric Boat Company. The electric boat company remained a submarine manufacturer after his death in 1914, providing

Starting point is 03:49:43 subs for not just the U.S. government, but the Peruvian government, and gradually spinning up to produce other kinds of boats, including PT boats for the U.S. and Canadian militaries. After World War II, it purchased Conver, which made anti-aircraft missiles, jet fighters, and the Atlas rockets used in the first U.S. crude orbital flight. This new company, a mix of the electric boat company and Convair, became General Dynamics. In more recent decades, General Dynamics became the manufacturers of the feared Tomahawk cruise missile, arguably the most iconic ballistic missile in the entire U.S. arsenal. It also kept making subs, including the famous Los Angeles class. And as time went on, the company got really, really good at corruptly fucking U.S. taxpayers out of their money.

Starting point is 03:50:24 Investigative reporting first started shining a light on constant cost overruns and blown budgets in a series of G.D. defense contracts, per a 1985 time article by Charles Alexander, a federal grand jury first started investigating the company's cost overruns on submarines in 1979, but dropped the probe in 1981 for lack of enough evidence of fraud. Now the Justice Department has reopened the case in light of new information from P. Takas Veliatis, who in 1977 became head of electric boat, the company's subbuilding division in Groton, Connecticut. His word is hardly unimpeachable. In 1983, he fled to his native Greece to avoid being tried on charges of perjuring himself before a grand jury and taking $1.3 million in kickbacks from a subcontractor. Veliatis has produced tapes and company documents that he claims reveal a pattern

Starting point is 03:51:04 of waste, corruption, and cover-up at General Dynamics. In a tape of one talk he had with Lewis, the chairman, for example, the chairman suggests that Valiades reassured James Ashton, a discontented electric boat executive, that he is still in the running for a promotion in order to keep him from popping off about shoddy work at the yard. So we have all of these tapes from this equally shady dude Valiatus, because nobody who's in a high position in the defense contracting industry is not constantly committing crimes. And the tapes that he provided showed several things that are very familiar to the Mesquite

Starting point is 03:51:32 factory case. For one thing, Viliatus provided a 1977 tape of the company's executive vice president Gordon McDonald, telling him that the company had issued an impossible delivery time table for the first Trident submarine because the CEO of General Dynamics wanted to, quote, keep our stock price from

Starting point is 03:51:48 sliding. In other words, every time that the stock price slide, you can announce oh, we're about to release the Trident and you get a quick boost in the stock price. Yeah, yeah. As a result of this kind of fuckery, the sub was not produced until two years after this date. Now, that's pretty bad. But the incident that actually sparked the first known criminal investigation of a defense contractor came

Starting point is 03:52:07 in 1983 when General Dynamics tried to charge the Air Force $9,600 for a four-inch long wrench. And this revealed a bunch of, if you've ever heard stories of like $6,000 wrenches and yada, yada, yano, $4,000 plungers, it's general dynamics that people are talking about. That was a real series of, like, news articles and eventually congressional investigations into the fact that they were charging absurd amounts of money for bullshit. Now, part of the reason for this was that, like, Navy and Air Force procurement was completely fucked in this point, and they just did not keep a backlog of, like, the material they needed to repair their shit on hand.

Starting point is 03:52:43 But a lot of it was just massive, rampant corruption with companies like General Dynamics in particular. Now, charges like this inspired further investigations into how GD functioned, and this eventually led to a congressional inquiry. It came out that in 1982, General of Dynamics had asked the Pentagon to pay almost $19 million in overhead costs for their company HQ. These were not what you'd call unavoidable expenses. Quote, $491,840 for Lewis's, that's the chairman's personal flights on corporate jets, often

Starting point is 03:53:12 to and from his farm in Albany. $538,78,781 for contributions and memberships, including country club fees for top executives. And $155 for the kindling of a dog named Fursten, while its owner, a General Dynamics executive, attended a company conference at a South Carolina resort. At last week's hearing, Congressman Dingell quizzed Lewis about a $571 charge for a king-sized Sertapur-Perfect Sleeper mattress and a box spring set, which was delivered to the Clayton Inn in suburban St. Louis. It was for Mr. Valiatus, said Lewis, who explained that the executive said he needed the bed for times he came to St. Louis for meetings. Added Gordon McDonald, a general dynamics executive vice president, Mr. Valiatus being a very large man,

Starting point is 03:53:51 complained so much to the secretary of the company that he got tired of hearing it and bought the bed. The Liatis denied that the bed was for him. So just very funny stories consistently. When you look into like 80s defense contractor procurement issues, specifically around general dynamics. Now, I know what you're wondering. How did they get away with such corruption? Well, that $19 million the U.S. government spent on complete bullshit fees was matched with $1.24 million in a general dynamics account meant purely to entertain Pentagon officials.

Starting point is 03:54:22 In 1977, they gave $1,125. diamond earring set to the wife of Admiral Hyman Rickover, head of the nuclear propulsion program. Now, to be fair to Hyman, the real reason they were trying to butter him up is that he had repeatedly complained about the company, but this is the kind of shit that they have been doing forever. Like the fact that they have now spent half a billion dollars of taxpayer money on a factory that does not work is nothing new to General Dynamics. And I'm sure they've now promised to put another $200 million into the factory and that it'll be producing 20,000 shells a month at least within a year.

Starting point is 03:54:56 I'm sure at some point they'll get it working if they keep shoveling a bunch of money into it, but make no mistake, it will not be general dynamics money. It will be money one way or the other that U.S. taxpayers have given them that winds up eventually maybe making this factory produce a single shell. Anyway, general dynamics. Let's go on one more head break and then talk about bonds in Florida, I guess. Yeah. Wild. Speaking of unbelievably corrupt bullshit. shit that is directly tied to the American war efforts in Iran.

Starting point is 03:55:40 Okay, so bonds are not normally an extremely exciting topic. So let's start off with the glaring part, which is that early this week, the yields on U.S. Treasury bonds, specifically 30-year T-notes hit highs not seen since 2007 several weeks before the collapse of the American stock markets. It is also noted by several analysts that the other three. times that we've seen peaks like this were like 1939 right before that. And I think there was another one of these. I forgot the other economic collapse, but there was a giant one of these right before it. Like the 1920, no, 1930 one? Is that like Black Fright? Yeah, there's one more. I think

Starting point is 03:56:27 it might have been like the dot-com bubble or something. I forget which other. But experts suggest that bond markets only do this when they are in extreme distress. So what does this actually mean? Bonds are a thing that in this case you can get from the government and you pay the government money and the government promises you to pay back more money later and the yield is like how much more money they're giving you back, right? High yields on bonds means, you know, an increase of the cost of borrowing. And high yields on U.S. government bonds is a sign of growing distrust in a long run economic feature of the U.S. Usually these bonds pay like absolute shit, but the reason they pay like shit is that it's the

Starting point is 03:57:10 U.S. government you're guaranteed to get your money back. So they're supposed to be an extremely safe asset, right? And when these rates are up, it's because everyone is, you know, looking at something happening in the market and something happening structurally in the U.S. economy and panicking. Now, one of those things is they're looking at the U.S. debt and panicking and, you know, whether or not that's like a great way to evaluate how panicky they have to be. be is an open question. This has been one of the lines that's been coming out is that they're looking at, you know, the U.S. date increasing faster than expected. The main thing, however, that has been

Starting point is 03:57:43 setting off this particular wave of like mass selling of bonds is the collapse of that 60-day peace deal that Robert was talking about earlier, which, you know, I don't think anyone who was actually following the conflict really thought that was going to go anywhere. But the thing that was important about it strategically from the American side was that this was the thing that investors and financial analysts were hanging their hat on. And, you know, these people had convinced themselves that this process was actually going to result in the end of the war, and that quickly ending the war was going to, you know, restore economic growth, et cetera, et cetera, and save off inflation. And this was sort of the week, as, as I mentioned

Starting point is 03:58:23 earlier, the Brent Crude Index hit $90 a barrel and the peace talks formally completely collapsed, that there was a growing realization that this war is not going to end. The economic conditions caused by the war not ending are going to continue, which means inflation is going to increase and it's going to have sort of far-reaching and long-lasting economic impacts. Now, this is a global squeeze that's been hitting most developed countries. Japan has also been very badly hit by these sort of shocks in bond yields. Now, what's interesting reading analysis of it is that you're actually starting to see a lot of firms. J.P. Morgan is a good example of this. What J.P. Morgan for, like, basically since the war has started, J.P. Morgan's analysis has been

Starting point is 03:59:09 the war is going to end, and when the war ends, things will go back to normal, so we're just going to keep projecting things are going to be fine. They are finally pointing out the things that we've been saying, which is that, yeah, no, the war is not ending and it's wreaking havoc on global supply chains. Now, the other thing that's been causing this run-up, there's two sides of this back-to-back that seem very conflicting, which is on the one hand, there is growing fear over the fact that the AI bubble looks like it's going to collapse, right? And we've seen this with sort of like the Koseby shock I was talking about earlier,

Starting point is 03:59:42 where, you know, the stock market, like 10, 5% of the stock market's value keeps disappearing overnight and then reappearing the next day. But then, and this is sort of fascinating, one of the other things that's been happening is that there has been an unbelievable proliferation of bonds issued by AI companies. Because these AI companies are having to go to the finance markets to fund all of their weird data center bullshit. And this has gotten a bunch of investors to pull their money out of very safe U.S. bonds and put them into hideously unsafe AI bonds. a thing which I don't even this obviously

Starting point is 04:00:25 is going to go catastrophically wrong I don't have a sophisticated analysis for why like taking the money out of the U.S. government

Starting point is 04:00:33 and putting it into this AI company is going to create a transcendent god is a terrible idea and what we've kind of seen in the past couple of days

Starting point is 04:00:43 as these bond yields have risen as from a combination of these factors is it looks like the beginning of the moment where Wiley Coyote looks down and realizes that he's off the cliff. Now, on Wednesday, the Treasury began a massive buyback of Treasury bonds.

Starting point is 04:01:00 I'm going to quote from CNBC here. Under the accelerated buyback, Treasury, led by Secretary Scott Besant, will target the 10 to 20-year and 20-to-30-year portion of the market, which has seen a buyer's strike since late June. The government will at least double the maximum size of its buyback operations, from $2 billion to, quote, at least $4 billion, according to an announcement from the department. Now, in terms of the actual size of this buyback,

Starting point is 04:01:29 which is like not a great sign when the government is buying back its own debt in an attempt to stabilize the market, but that's not, you know, in terms of the size of like the U.S. market, that's really a drop in the bucket, but it does seem to have temporarily sort of stabilized the markets on the belief that if things continue to go wrong, the government will step in. However, the actual underlying economic metrics remain bad for everything in the economy that isn't AI.

Starting point is 04:02:01 And this is one of the things that traditionally heralds a full-on economic collapse. Now, it's also worth noting that, you know, Cospy, for example, keeps hitting its circuit breaker. That's something that also traditionally has been like the prelude to collapse, and it hasn't yet. So, you know, we're in it, we're in a deeply weird and semi-imprecedented time in the markets and in sort of the behavior of these investors and financial actors. But it's not good. It's my conclusion on the state of the U.S. bond market and the global economy at large. Let's close with elections. And I want to start with a quick correction for one or two of my last election.

Starting point is 04:02:46 segments. I keep calling Governor Tim Walls, Mike Walls, and I don't know why this keeps happening. I picture his face in my mind, and it just like autocorrects to Mike. I've caught this a few times and fixed it before the episode goes out, but this past time, I did not. Now, slightly more importantly, I also accidentally referred to Mike Rogers in Michigan as the incumbent, and that is not true. This Senate race is open and Rogers is a former congressman. These are, you know, smaller details and stories that are focused more on how DSA and left-wing candidates are running their campaigns, but these types of details are still important to get right, and I regret the error. Let's turn to Florida, where I'm sad to say, the resistance has been defeated. Now, Garrison, are you talking about

Starting point is 04:03:35 Florida the state or Flo Rida, the musical sensation? No. You missed a good chance to pivot with talking of regret and then... I thought about doing that, but I'm like, no, I would rather not because... I'm just saying. I still think there's hope for Florida. That's a bold take. But American hero Alexander Vindman will not be that hope. You'll be issuing another correction for that bad boy, let me tell you.

Starting point is 04:04:00 I'm talking in the grads. Okay, I'm talking about in the cosmic sense, not in the short term. Yeah, okay. I agree with you. I have hope for the Floridians. The resistance has been defeated. American hero Alexander Vindman, the whistleblower who testified in Trump's first impeachment hearings, has lost the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in an upset to Angie Nixon, a state representative from Jacksonville and a Democratic socialist. Nixon won by 150,000 votes. Oh, wow. 56.1 percent to Vindman's 43.9. And this is a big upset because Nixon was out fundraising. 16 to 1.

Starting point is 04:04:42 She had just under a million dollars while Venman raked in over 16 million. And I think like a resist lib hero losing a primary to a socialist in Florida is astounding.

Starting point is 04:04:57 Yeah. Now Nixon, Nixon's a union organizer who's running on Medicare for all, taxing billionaires for your child care, universal jobs program, and opposition to Israel. She was endorsed by Alon Omar, Rashida Talib, Benina Turner, Corey Bush, and Ms. Rachel, who's listed in the National Leaders section of Anthony Nixon's website.

Starting point is 04:05:17 Good for her. Our only truly good national leader. No complaints with her. Ms. Rachel has shown more spine than most of Congress in the last few years. Nixon was also endorsed by Working Families Party, Local Unions, JVP, Jewish Voice for Peace, and Track A-Pack. She joined DSA this past June, but did not pursue an endorsement, so is a relative newcomer to DSA as an organization. I do want to play this clip from her back in November 2023, a month into Israel's attacks on Gaza. We are at 10,000 dead Palestinians. How many will be enough? So.

Starting point is 04:06:01 One of the lawmakers, Republican Michelle Salzman, just shouted out to all of them in the hearing. I'll continue the clip. Jesus. One of my colleagues just said all of them. Wow. One of my colleagues said all of them. One of my colleagues also stated that this is going to dry up their fundraising

Starting point is 04:06:24 if we vote on this resolution. I also want that, like, that's what we've become in this state. That's what we've become in this state where we don't care. about innocent babies that don't even get the opportunity to blow out their first birthday candle? So this was a ceasefire resolution just a month into the war. Do you have the sense of like turnout versus like electoral stuff? Like I'm wondering, is this a like people who turn out for primaries tend to be like a more politically engaged and people who turn out for generals?

Starting point is 04:07:01 Or is this a like display? Because she clearly has like just looking at that speech, she has a genuine commitment towards. he's talking about. And I think people appreciate that more than, like you said, a resist lib hero. Definitely. And I mean, certainly I think generals can attract a bigger, a bigger portion of the electorate. But there's a few things going on that created this pretty, pretty big difference in votes, like over 150,000. Yeah, it's big. And like in my mind, this relates to two of the elections last week in Minnesota and Wisconsin. The My Pillow primary. where Trump endorsed Michael Lindell

Starting point is 04:07:39 lost the Republican gubernatorial primary to the state speaker of the House and like this is kind of like the idea that a national political celebrity can just like waltz into your state and gobble up a nomination. Yeah. Both Lindel and Alexander Vindman

Starting point is 04:07:54 come from like the Trump world, albeit on opposite sides, but it's still part of like, you know, the Trumpian political circuit. Yeah. And voters rejected both of them in favor of proven state lawmakers, you know,

Starting point is 04:08:07 one, you know, a more like regular state level Republican, and Angie Nixon, who's like a community organizer with like deep connections to a lot of, a lot of different communities in the state. And specifically, the working class black community. Now, the other interesting thing that this race kind of continues the conversation on relates to Francesco Hong's loss last week. As I discussed last week, Hong did not pay for any TV ads. And Nixon only spent 60,000 on ads was zero spent on broadcast or cable. Meanwhile, Vindman spent 2.2 million on ads. That's 36 times as much as Nixon.

Starting point is 04:08:46 Yeah. And Nixon still won. Dumping money off the cliff. That's because she actually ran a real campaign, like on the ground. And Vindman did not. He ran an incredibly lazy campaign. He really thought he could just like coast to the nomination based on his resist lib credentials.

Starting point is 04:09:04 And, you know, while that maybe helped in Palm Beach, it did not help him in the rest of the state where just he got absolutely trounced by Nixon. Like if you look at like the county map, it's like, whoa. Yeah. So come November, Nixon will face the incumbent senator Ashley Moody, the former state AG who Ronda Santas appointed to fill Marco Rubio's Senate seat after he was tapped for Secretary of State.

Starting point is 04:09:32 And like, Rubio has had a strong hole in that seat for decades. So the hope for Florida Democrats is that Ashley Moody won't command as much loyalty at the ballot box as Rubio does or as Rubio did. And maybe maybe like a critical 1% of the Republican vote thinks that she's another Nixon. Yes. Hopefully. You never know. But like this could very likely be a much harder uphill battle than even, you know, like the Texas Senate race with Tolerigo. in this recent election, there were around 300,000 fewer votes in the Democratic primary than the GOP primary.

Starting point is 04:10:12 Like, this is going to be a very difficult race to win. Yeah. I don't want to, you know, understate how impressive this primary win, like, really is. And, like, I don't think anyone will false Nixon or her politics if she loses in the general. I mean, someone will. Someone will write a shitty, like, is just the end of the left op-ed, right? They always do. It doesn't matter.

Starting point is 04:10:32 They will try. I'd be like a lot of centrist did not expect Vinman to win if he wins the primary. So like... It's a Senate seat in Florida. It's like harder with that. I'm reflecting on the fact that like people have taken Hong's result and then like, oh, the progressive left is dead. And then they're still treating Calerico like he's like the presumptive victor.

Starting point is 04:10:57 And then on El Sayette, but like, yeah, I mean, I think one thing we probably should take from Hong's election is that television ads cannot be disposed of so quickly yet. At the general... Yeah. I mean, period. I think that's one of the things that definitely hurt her campaign is that they made a big choice not to do TV ads. Yeah.

Starting point is 04:11:18 I wouldn't want to write everything down to that, but yeah. That was certainly a factor in Wisconsin. Nixon's ground game in Florida was able to overcome the massive deficit in spending and just not really many funds for TV ads. And I think, yeah, because this is a Florida Senate seat that Vindman was not expected to win in the general, and he was the presumptive nominee, but because this race will be so hard to win,

Starting point is 04:11:43 it'll be harder to, like, blame her or her politics specifically for losing. I think this race can also be a big opportunity to push the overton window in Florida. And come November, it will be really interesting to see what the results of this election are because if this is a super close race, even if she still loses, hopefully she will not lose.

Starting point is 04:12:00 But if this race even gets to be where it's like more, competitive than what it's been for the past like 10, 15 years, I think that could be an interesting look at how much Trump is hurting Republicans in elections, like exactly how upset parts of his base are at the current state of things and to what degree that affects turnout. But also, on the other hand, if Nixon and her politics are able to form a new coalition and attract voters that might not usually vote for Democrats, might not usually vote for socialists or might not vote at all. Because even just in this primary, her core voter base was

Starting point is 04:12:40 very different than what's currently considered to be DSA's most reliable voters. Nixon did best in districts that were majority non-college educated, and that's usually the reverse for a lot of DSA-type candidates in other states. So she was getting out a slightly different voter base than what El-Said was getting out, than what DSA candidates in New York have been getting out, especially in the primaries. So I think she is someone to watch and could alter what's seen as politically possible in Florida.

Starting point is 04:13:13 Yeah, I want to say briefly also that there is a chance that, you know, with how badly the Republicans are doing on generic ballots, I mean, like, the good projections right now have them down seven points on just like a generic Democrat versus Republican ballot. Like, there is a small chance that we get a 2000 Nate style blowout and she wins, which it's not impossible in a way that it usually is.

Starting point is 04:13:36 It would be historic, right? It would, yeah, no, it's possible. It's just extremely unlikely, but like, like, I don't think it's unlikely, but it would be, like, historic. It's more likely than any of the times people who have said the Democrats are going to take Texas is what I'll say about this? Like, it's, like, actually technically possible. So, while this is a big win for the left statewide, DSA candidates did not fare as well in the recently redistricted U.S. House races in Florida. Let's briefly talk about my boy Oliver Larkin. Larkin was running for House District 25.

Starting point is 04:14:09 That's Miami-Dod, Palm Beach, and Broward County. Not exactly the friendliest waters for an anti-Israel socialist. Larkin got 16,284 votes, while the incumbent House rep Jared Moskowitz won with 28,294 votes. Larkin is DSA endorsed, and he ran a solid campaign with an impressive ground game over 500 volunteers, 40,000 doors knocked, 750,000 calls. He campaigned with Angie Nixon. Also, this past month, Larkin has gone, and this is a technical term, a beast mode in TV news interviews. Here's Larkin getting some pushback from a Fox News anchor on abolishing and prosecuting ICE. What is the number

Starting point is 04:14:58 that is fine with you? Is there a benchmark? Is it fine? How many children can be raped and it's fine if you're in relation to the immigration community? If we're going to talk about children being raped, then we need to hold this pedophile president, Donald Trump, accountable, and all those that have been implicated by the Epstein files that the Department of Justice is still not leaking. And they've sent APEC after Thomas Massey for having the temerity to hold accountable to pedophiles that are in control of our government. or we appreciate your time very much. So beyond like attention grabbing moments like that,

Starting point is 04:15:37 he's also very clearly articulated the details of his platform and defended it and DSA against bad faith attacks. He's talked about the need for a new path to citizenship and just how cost prohibitive it is for immigrants to maintain a documented status. Trump has made things even harder on purpose to manufacture a political crisis. on Fox, he argued very eloquently against providing Israel with so-called defensive weapons,

Starting point is 04:16:01 which he rejected as a categorical term. And he's gone toe-to-toe with Sean, aka Scott Hannity, on tax reform. Earlier this week on Local 10, this week in Florida, host Glennna Milberg abruptly cut off her interview with Larkin

Starting point is 04:16:17 after he said that Israel has committed a genocide, which she claimed was quote-unquote factually incorrect. Jesus. Now, also, late last week, Lower Lumer and Democrat State Representative Michael Gottlieb tried to shut down a get-out-the-vote rally for Larkin, Angie Nixon, and another DSA candidate, Elijah Manley, called Chomp the oligarchy with a, I want to say alligator or crocodile on front. Don't, don't at me.

Starting point is 04:16:46 It's got to be an alligator, right? Thank you. Whatever the ones are in Florida. Yeah, it's an alligator. I don't think we have any indigenous crocodiles. Democrat stage rep Michael Gottlieb said the rally was quote-unquote anti-Jew and told his constituents to not support the venue hosting the event. Laura Lumer led an online harassment campaign targeting, quote, jihadist congresswoman

Starting point is 04:17:09 Rashida Taleb, who was slated to speak at the rally. Lumer said that Taleb was, quote, bringing her band of Jew haters to South Florida and said that Oliver Larkin, quote-unquote, hates Jewish people and that he's trying to primary Jared Masowitz because he is Jewish. Now, the venue originally contracted for the rally canceled. They pulled out when the organizers wouldn't remove Rashida Talib as a speaker. The rally was rescheduled for August 14th, and the organizers secured a second venue, which also canceled the night before the Champ the oligarchy rally was supposed to take place. Next morning, the organizers found a third location, which was kept secret, until our

Starting point is 04:17:53 before the rally, which was then also streamed live. And the owner of that third venue, which did ultimately host the event, said that within hours, his phone was bombarded with like 600 messages from people protesting the rally. That kind of shows like the speed and scale of the harassment campaign led by Lumer and this state Democrat. So unfortunately, Larkin did not, did not win. I'm interested to see what he does next. I think it would be a mistake if he just completely disappears. I think he's a good communicator, whether, you know, something like DSA National wants to tap into that, or if he wants to work on some other campaigns, like Angie Nixon's campaign, which I think he's indicated he'll do, but after the general, we'd be very

Starting point is 04:18:35 interested to see what he does in the future. And to close, like, at this point in like big cities, you know, in blue states, DSA or left socialist candidates can only really, like, run to win. Like, that's what you have to do now. There's no more of this, like, participation trophies. it's you have to win. But it's also really important for DSA to expand their electoral efforts into red states and districts that are not solid blue. And in that vein,

Starting point is 04:19:02 I think what DSA is done in Florida, this primary, reminds me of what NYC DSA was doing in New York like a decade ago. Experimenting, building, organizing campaigns, running candidates, even if there is a huge uphill battle. Campaign volunteers get to, you know, get experience, and you find your base of support that can be built on in future races.

Starting point is 04:19:22 And in that sense, I think what they were able to pull off, including in some very hostile districts, was impressive now. We'll continue in some form with Angie Nixon running for Senate these next few months. Finally, finally, before we close, I should mention James Fishback, enemy of the pod, the Groyper candidate for governor, came in third place in the GOP gubernatorial primary. He was expected to come in second. So that is interesting. but Jay Collins instead got second place with almost half a million votes. Oh, he got waxed.

Starting point is 04:20:00 Byron Donald's, the expected winner, won with 800 and 10,000 votes. Fishback got just less than 200,000, which is way too many votes. He should not be getting that number of votes. That is not great. His campaign was very tailored to a type of,

Starting point is 04:20:21 voter and also like places online and locations in the state that the other candidates were not tailoring for. So I, I don't want to like overstate the sort of impact of Fishbeck's campaign because there was really no one else kind of going after that block. Like especially late, Fishback was pivoting very hard into like anti-data center stuff very late into the race to try to, you know, attract more voters. Oh, really? So like he was, he was doing stuff that other Republicans just were not doing and, you know, using that sneko, Nicolns. Fuentes Asmigold endorsement, which got him more than 150,000 votes, which is not great. Yeah.

Starting point is 04:21:00 It is just over 10% of the Republican vote. I think Garrison and I made an episode about fish, but God knows how long ago. Yeah. I don't know. He might just try to get some sort of like right-wing, far-right pundant job in the future. We'll see. Yeah. I want to also convey

Starting point is 04:21:20 Sophie's message of fuck Byron Donald's this guy also sucks but yeah yeah it's a Republican primary they're all going to be like you're in a race

Starting point is 04:21:33 with the worst second worst and third worst person you've ever seen so yeah but yeah that is that is Florida yeah that is our bi-annual Florida check in if you

Starting point is 04:21:47 are in Florida or elsewhere, you can email us using the email address, Coolzone Tips at Proton.me. Hey, do you want it to be encrypted? You have to send it for another Proton address. Yeah, have fun with that. Don't, it's still doing it with the fucking marketing emails, by the way. Like, every time I think I've blocked all, you bastards. Unbelievable. Put a trans girl on your couch. We reported the news. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com,

Starting point is 04:22:33 or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources where it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. I survived nine months in captivity, and I've spent my life experience. Exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.

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Starting point is 04:23:56 and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, Adam Scott, Danny McBride, Ben Stillard, and a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us.

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Starting point is 04:24:32 To Bill Burr. I don't think I've ever met somebody so exactly out of their mind as I am. And now we even have more great guests coming up, including the great John Tuturo. It's called Happiness. Delivering Happiness. And many, many more. Open your free High Heart Radio app. Search Delivering Happiness with Nick Tutro.

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Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 246

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