Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 248

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?

Starting point is 00:00:17 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. I survived nine months in captivity, 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. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.

Starting point is 00:00:54 These are 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. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement agency. It does not have body cameras. It's real. Black farmers have been under attack.

Starting point is 00:01:18 This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything. It's raw. And I'm sitting here going, they are playing y'all for fools. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the IHart radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Bobby Bones. Join me and former NFL quarterback Matt Castle every Wednesday on our podcast.

Starting point is 00:01:45 Lots to say with me Bobby Bones and Matt Castle. You're in training camp and the rookie quarterback has one good throwing session in front of the media. Suddenly, everybody online says he should start over you week one. How do you handle this? You just go back out to practice the next day and wait for him to mess up. Listen to lots to say with Bobby Bones and Matt Castle on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also Media. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

Starting point is 00:02:16 So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hello, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen here. My name is Dan Al-Kurd, and I'm a researcher and analyst of Arab and Palestinian politics. Today, I want to talk about the recent announcement that Hamas agreed to a second phase of the Gaza ceasefire. So the Board of Peace and mediator countries announced July 30th, last Thursday I'm recording on August 4th, that Hamas had agreed to a sort of roadmower. map in which they would relinquish some of their weapons. So this whole scenario has hinged on Hamas disarming, even though in other conflicts when there have been two parties, disarmament comes at later stages. But in this scenario, the Board of Peace and the Director General

Starting point is 00:03:17 Nikolai Mladenov has basically hinged the entire process on Hamas disarming first. And so in the recent announcement, which President Donald Trump basically celebrated on his social media, calling it a historic agreement for the complete disarmament of Hamas, Hamas basically said that they had been in conversation with not only the mediators in their proposals, but with other Palestinian factions and had agreed to relinquish their weapons in a particular way. So they said it was contingent and conditional on a permanent end to Israeli. attacks and a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, as well as recovery and reconstruction. And importantly, they basically said that no weapons would be handed over to Israel or to any non-Palestinian party. So what Hamas is saying is we're going to give up our weapons, eventually if Israel also adheres to the guidelines of the ceasefire, and we will relinquish

Starting point is 00:04:17 our weapons to the National Committee, which is a governance structure made up of Palestinian technocrats. So since the National Committee is supposed to govern Gaza eventually, or at least that's the intention of this committee, even though they haven't actually been allowed to do that, the idea here is Hamas is saying, you want to claim that disarmament is the reason that the ceasefire and recovery and reconstruction can't proceed. Okay, so we'll disarm, but we'll only disarm to other Palestinians. And like I said, it's contingent on Israel, also agreeing, withdrawing from Gaza, ceasing the continued attacks. Israeli officials have basically said that they have severe worries about it and they're not

Starting point is 00:05:04 interested. The national security minister, Ithamar bin Gavir, basically said that it's not acceptable to Israel. So, you know, it's very much up in the air, but Hamas basically threw the ball in Israel's court with this announcement. It's also important to point out that throughout these past couple of months since the ceasefire was announced, over a thousand Palestinians have been killed in the week that this announcement was made, Israel killed at least six in Gaza and wounded many others. And so all of that

Starting point is 00:05:35 is going on. And that's not even mentioning what's happening in the West Bank, where things have really escalated in terms of both Israeli army and Israeli settler violence, which often, of course, goes hand in hand. This announcement might really amount to nothing here, especially if Israel doesn't comply, but I think it poses a bigger question around the Board of Peace and its design and its objectives. So that's basically what this episode is going to be about, answering the question of whether the board's design, who sits on it, who pays for seat, who answers to who, actually makes a fair outcome for Palestinians structurally impossible, regardless of this announcement or any other announcements or decisions that Palestinians may make. So just as a reminder to listeners,

Starting point is 00:06:20 the Board of Peace was announced as part of President Trump's 20-point Gaza plan back in September 2025, 20 points to get Gaza back on track. I shouldn't make jokes here, but that's what it was called, and it was launched in January 26. Its stated purpose is to promote stability, restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace in conflict-affected areas. So not only in Gaza, At the start, the Board of Peace was announced around what was happening in Gaza, but eventually it grew into a bigger idea. And Gaza was framed as a template. So this Board of Peace is supposed to be a model for managing future conflicts globally. But as I've argued in the past, this really is not about conflict resolution.

Starting point is 00:07:09 It's about conflict management and a very particular type of conflict management where you subdue conflict through repressive means. rather than reconciliation or recovery or reparations or anything kind of long-term. So I think it's important to maybe discuss at this point how the Board of Peace is structured. It's basically a three-tier hierarchy with Gaza at the bottom. At the top, there's the founding executive board. This is chaired by President Trump. In fact, in the founding documents of the Board of Peace, he is named explicitly. It's not that the president of the United States will continue to chair the Board of

Starting point is 00:07:47 piece. No, it's specifically Donald Trump. So apparently he's going to be president for life here. That's the top decision-making body. And then underneath that is the Gaza Executive Board. It includes a lot of different interesting characters. I'll talk about them in a second. The Gaza Executive Board oversees implementation of what happens in Gaza. Farther, farther, farther, further underneath that is the National Community for the Administration of Gaza, who are 15 unelected Palestinian technocrats approved by Palestinian factions but they are not of any particular party,

Starting point is 00:08:20 they are civil servants and they're supposed to actually administer Gaza day to day. Now, the National Committee reports to the Director General of the Gaza Executive Board who is Nikolay Mladenov, not to any Palestinian constituency or to the Palestinian Authority, for example, or any Palestinian body.

Starting point is 00:08:38 Now, the six-page charter of the Board of Peace never actually mentions Gaza or human rights. And I don't think this is an oversight. You know, the board is designed as a template for managing future conflicts. It's not designed to uphold human rights. And I think even though, of course, these are problematic positions to take,

Starting point is 00:08:57 I think the European reaction serves as a sort of legitimacy check here. When the Board of Peace and its mechanisms were supposed to be applied to Gaza, the EU attended the board's first meeting as an observer, for example, and a number of countries kind of floated the idea of joining. But then when the Board of Peace was expanded as an idea to become a template for future conflicts, for example, Ukraine, then, you know, the European Union and other European actors basically cited serious doubts about compatibility with the UN Charter.

Starting point is 00:09:33 And then France and the UK voiced reservations when Putin, for example, was invited to be on the board. So yeah, who is on the top tier board here? It's got people like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who holds a seat on the Board of Peace, despite being a party to a conflict that's literally ongoing and is the reason why the Board of Peace supposedly came into existence. And despite having an ICC arrest warrant for war crimes. So clearly, you know, one party to the conflict in this scenario, in the Gaza case,

Starting point is 00:10:06 is elevated while the other is administered. Then there are a bunch of business figures. So CEOs, venture capitalists, they sit alongside heads of state. So reconstruction is really framed as a business opportunity, as much as it's framed as an issue of governance. There's not a single Palestinian, nor does the PA actually hold a seat anywhere in this hierarchy. Even though the Palestinian Authority did actually want to join the Board of Peace and it sought full membership on it, all they got was basically a consolation prize, which was this coordination committee between the Palestinian. authority in the board, with the Palestinian Authority Prime Minister,

Starting point is 00:10:42 Mohammed Mustafa, basically representing the Palestinian Authority one-on-one to Milanof, which, you know, has been described as a type of compromise because the PA doesn't actually have a seat by itself. There was much made about a $1 billion price tag for a permanent seat on the board. So people like Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin and Lukashenko basically were invited to participate in this way. And it's kind of obviously a sham turning participation and, you know, quote unquote, peace governance into a commodity for heads of state.

Starting point is 00:11:19 Now, Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, who is inexplicably also involved in this, at Davos in January, basically presented a master plan that projected $10 billion for Gaza's GDP by 2035. And he talked about new towers and industrial parks, and all of this, of course, drawn up without consulting Palestinians living in Gaza. And Trump himself has described Gaza as a, quote, beautiful piece of property over and over. So to me, this is a shorthand for how the plan frames the conflict or wants to, wants to convince people that this conflict is fundamentally about underdevelopment.

Starting point is 00:11:55 Palestinians have grievances because they're poor rather than the occupation, rather than the genocide. So, you know, poses a question, what does it mean for this peace architecture when the same people who overrefer, oversee reconstruction also profit from it. Now, who is on the Gaza Executive Board, that second tier? You can find the full roster online. It is important to note that they actually haven't met ever as a board. You know, some of these people have their names and their pictures on the website, and this Gaza Executive Board has really not functioned

Starting point is 00:12:35 except as kind of a legitimacy stamp on the Board of Pieces activities. But it really is very indicative of what the Board of Peace is supposed to be and how they want to deal with Gaza here. when you look at who has been invited, even if they've never met. So it's got Gulf diplomats, Turkish diplomats. It has an Egyptian intelligence chief. It has a bunch of Trump administration people, Kushner, Susan Wiles, Steve Whitkoff. And then finance and business interests, like I said, are very heavily represented here. So you have the CEO of Apollo, Mark Rowan, you have venture capitalist Michael Eisenberg, and a number of other businessmen, many of them with ties to Israel.

Starting point is 00:13:16 there's only really two, let's say, peace process veterans on this board. There's the Director General, Ladenev, who I've discussed in a previous episode, who's very problematic. I'll talk about him in just a second. And then Tony Blair, Tony Blair also extremely problematic. He has a history of basically delivering the Good Friday Agreement in the Northern Ireland conflict, but it doesn't seem to be applying any of the lessons of those previous conflicts to the Middle East in any way. But the point here is that security, finance and U.S. political operatives clearly outweigh conflict resolution expertise on this

Starting point is 00:13:52 executive board. So who's actually running this? Like I said, they've never actually met. Maybe some of them have been promised a bigger role in the future. I'm thinking particularly the business people here. But let's linger on Niklai, I don't know how to pronounce his name, Ladinov, who is the Director General here. I've talked about him before in a previous episode, but he's the former Bulgarian foreign minister under a government that was toppled by anti-corruption protests. Since 2022, he was the head of an Emirati diplomatic academy

Starting point is 00:14:23 which championed the Abraham Accords, the so-called peace agreements between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain and a few others. And this is a framework that was disastrous. It's seen especially by Palestinians as essentially cementing their exclusion from statehood. So this is the guy who's supposed to run the Gaza executive board

Starting point is 00:14:42 and who has turned the peace process on its head by basically, again, like I said at the beginning of the episode, conditioning the entire process on disarmament first. We have the rest of the Gaza Executive Board, and then we have the Center for Civilian Military Control. So this is a center. It's based in the South of Israel. It's supposed to oversee the ceasefire. But every ceasefire enforcement decision basically has no... sway on Israel itself. Like there's no mechanism to actually hold Israel accountable. It has no

Starting point is 00:15:17 independent authority. It coordinates with the White House. And in particular, the liaison to the White House is this man, Aria Lightstone, who was a senior advisor to a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, who was extremely right wing. And there's been recent reporting, which I'll link in the show notes, about how intensely hostile he is to Palestinians. So this is the guy who's supposed to oversee the ceasefire and report to the White House. So what are the consequences on the ground? As I said, more than a thousand Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the ceasefire was announced. Over half of Gaza is now behind this quote-unquote yellow line, which is Israeli-controlled territory.

Starting point is 00:15:54 Humanitarian and agricultural access is restricted or prohibited in that area. So Gaza is more and more squeezed. The aid that was supposed to reach 600 trucks a day has never reached that promised 600 trucks. And much of what enters is basically private sector goods that's sold for profit. with the Israelis also getting like a coordination fee on each truck. Now, Hamas dissolved its emergency committee in July 26 before they announced that they had accepted the mediator's proposals about disarmament. They dissolved this emergency committee and said they were handing authority over to the national committee.

Starting point is 00:16:30 But the board basically was uninterested in this move. They said that they were guided by actions, not promises. And it really points to the fact that these kind of procedural concessions that Hamas is attempting to make don't really fix the structural design flaws. I think it's also important to point out here that even though on paper, Hamas has given up its civilian government, on the ground, like, that doesn't actually change much. It's still involved in security and policing and bureaucracy. And what they dissolved is this like civilian cabinet body that had run Gaza since October 2023. And it's a very like specific administrative organ and it's not all of Hamas's governing capacity.

Starting point is 00:17:09 So it was kind of, again, a way of like throwing the ball in Israel's court and claiming that we are dissolving the committee, we are making these concessions, but they're being very, you know, strategic about this. And in the same announcement, when they dissolved the emergency committee, they basically said that their technical and professional staff would remain in their posts. And it hasn't, you know, relinquished control over the civil service and security bureaucracy. So a few months ago, much was made about Hamas's strategy and whether there were going to be shift. in that strategy because there was an internal election in Hamas that basically cemented the divide between a kind of more hardline camp and a more pragmatist camp. And the more hardline camp won. So between Khaled Mishal, who was supposedly, you know, more pragmatist and arguing for political accommodation, and Khalil Al-Haya, who demanded kind of more confrontation, the second guy won.

Starting point is 00:18:07 And so there was a lot of speculation back in February that that meant if the hardliners won that this is going to impact disarmament. And that means Hamas will never disarm and would never actually acquiesce to what was being demanded of them. But in the last couple of weeks, months, you can see that Hamas' strategy is much more, let's say, nuanced and attempting to kind of buy time with the United States and with the international community while still saying, okay, we're going to make concessions. This is not to imply that the victory of the kind of more hardline camp

Starting point is 00:18:49 isn't going to impact how best strategy in the future. They are much more Gaza-rooted and a more pro-Iran faction. Obviously, these are internal shifts between them, but we'll see how that plays out in the near future. But again, I think we go back to the idea of how the Board of Peace is designed and whether the flaws in its design and the dangerous precedent it sets for not only, quote unquote, you know, conflict resolution in Gaza, but conflict resolution in every other arena of conflict here, where in this scenario, there isn't neutral mediation, there isn't buy-in from all parties. One side is completely missing from the board. One side is administered. It really poses a question. of whether any kind of political movement, any concessions, anything that can be mediated and agreed upon, actually impacts how the board is going to function. How much Hada, who was speaking at a Carnegie Endowment Roundtable back in April, he is a

Starting point is 00:19:51 Gaza and journalist, I think, put it really well when he said that, quote, Gaza is no longer just a unique, extraordinary case of human savagery. It is a canary in a coal mine. What starts there does not end there. And I think I want to end on that note of framing Gaza as a canary in the coal mine, because the Board of Peace is this model that combines billionaires, profiteering, and kind of the worst actors in the world in terms of dictators and those who are invested in a more authoritarian world, that is going to be the model that's going to be exported to other weak states or contested territories.

Starting point is 00:20:29 That's all for me today. hoped that this was at least eye-opening and thanks for listening. 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,

Starting point is 00:20:55 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 00:21:15 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 00:21:59 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 file. with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinheiro, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes

Starting point is 00:22:32 without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people, and they were like, you smiled at us. Not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is, and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself.

Starting point is 00:23:02 So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to be a moment. book your first trip. I hope you listen to Solita 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 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 00:23:41 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,

Starting point is 00:24:05 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. The drums of war are beaten. Everywhere you look, people are picking sight. Governments are demanding unity. Critics are being denounced as naive, irresponsible,

Starting point is 00:24:30 even treacherous, and a movement built on international solidarity has been split in the chaos. The years 1914, at the beginning of the First World War, though you'll be excused if you thought I was describing today. Hello and welcome to Ikadapin here. I'm Andrew Sage, also Andrewism on YouTube, joined again by... Neil Wong.

Starting point is 00:24:56 To discuss the infamous split among the anarchists over World War I of all things. So just to be clear, the common anarchist dance prior to the war was fairly straightforward. It was a stance of internationalist worker solidarity against imperialist wars, a solidarity that transcended borders and nationalities, recognizing that ordinary people had more in common with one another than with the ruling classes of their own countries. Such wars were never fought in the interests of workers, but in the interests of states, empires, dynasties, and capsulists.

Starting point is 00:25:31 If war came, the task of revolutionaries was not to rally behind their own government, but to oppose the conflict and preserve international working class solidarity. However, the Great War would strain the internationalist cause, forcing splits and theoretical developments owing to the ensuing debates personified in the disagreement between Erichaelicester and Peter Kropotkin, as well as many others, who clashed intellectually over the nature of war, history, national struggle, and revolutionary change. The First World War emerged from decades of imperial rivalry, colonial competition, military expansion, and competing alliance systems among Europe's great powers.

Starting point is 00:26:16 The assassination of Archduke France-Fernand in Sarajevo on the 28th of June 1914 served as the immediate catalyst, but it merely ignited tensions that have been building for years. Within weeks, a regional dispute between Austria-Hungary and Serbia escalated into a continental and eventually global conflict. On one side stood the central powers, led by Germany and Austria-Hungary, later joined by the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria, and opposing them with the Allied powers, initially consistent of France, Russia and Britain,

Starting point is 00:26:50 with countries such as Italy, Romania, Japan, and eventually the United States entering the war on the Allied side as the conflict expanded. Attitudes toward the First World War across Europe were deeply divided and often changed dramatically in the opening weeks of the conflict. A powerful wave of patriotic enthusiasm swept through many cities, with countless people volunteering for military service under the belief that the war would be short, necessary, or even glorious. Governments, newspapers, churches, and much of the political establishment

Starting point is 00:27:23 promoted national unity and portrayed the conflict as a defensive struggle against foreign aggression. For socialists, trade unionists, religious parties, pacifists and most relevantly anarchists, the stance was deeply skeptical or openly oppositional to the war, as it appeared to be a catastrophic clash between rival empires in which ordinary people would bear the costs while elites pursued their geopolitical ambitions. However, one of the attitudes had flared up as a result of the war, even amongst some anarchists and socialists, was anti-German sentiment, manifest in Kropotkin's open letter in the anarchist newspaper freedom. This open letter

Starting point is 00:28:05 had sparked the ensuing debate between Cropotkin and Malatester. As documented by historian Matthew S. Adam in anarchism in the First World War, Capotkin wrote, quote, I consider that the duty of everyone who cherishes the idea of human progress is to crush the invasion of the Germans into

Starting point is 00:28:22 Western Europe. Since 1871, Germany has become a standing menace to European progress. All were living under the menace of sudden invasion. More than that, Germany was the chief support and protection of reaction." For many anarchists, and even Leon Trotsky, this seemed a clear break from Kopatkin's anarchism, which would be in opposition to alignment with nation-state-based struggles.

Starting point is 00:28:48 However, as noted by historian George Woodcock in Peter Kropotkin from Prince to Rebel, quote, anti-German sentiment was probably an influence on Kropotkin long before this point, as it was occurring in Russian revolutionary movements due to the German rule by the Romanov dynasty, and perhaps also because his fellow Russian anarchist, Mikhail Bikunin, had an infamous rivalry with the German Karl Marx, end quote. Though of course, you know, this is speculation. Kropotkin and Malatesta were both in Britain when their exchange of letters took place. Malatester wrote in his article, Anarchists have forgotten their principles that the only war worth fighting was one of liberation, and there was no siding with national acclaminations.

Starting point is 00:29:33 He said, quote, I have no greater confidence in the bloody Tsar, nor in the English diplomatists who oppress India, who betrayed Persia, who crushed the Boer Republics, nor in the French bourgeoisie who massacred the natives of Morocco, nor in those of Belgium, who have allowed the Congo atrocities and profited by them. The victory of Germany would certainly mean the triumph of militarism, but the triumph of the Allies would mean Russell English domination in Europe and in Asia. end quote. Now, Kropotkin had previously argued that modern wars were fundamentally driven by capitalist competition for markets, resources, and opportunities to exploit less industrialized nations. He pointed to the

Starting point is 00:30:16 imperial conquests and colonial conflicts of his time as evidence that financiers and economic interests rather than ordinary people were the true beneficiaries of war. And while he saw capitalism as the primary engine of modern militarism, he also condemned the state as the political institution that organized and carried out these conflicts. So it was odd for Kropotkin to seemingly come out the contrary of his previous positions and take one state's side over another when he had seen through such sides before. But of course, people and their motivations are more complex. Carpotkin had sympathy for France and hostility toward Germany. He saw France as the heir to the revolutionary tradition of 1789 and the Paris Commune,

Starting point is 00:31:09 and he saw Germany as the embodiment of militarism and authoritarianism. He believed the war was a poor moment for social revolution and feared that a German victory would usher in decades of political reaction, wiping out the hard-worn freedoms that had been achieved in countries like Britain, and France. His support for the Allies was rooted in his broader view of history, that social progress was never guaranteed and could always be reversed, that periods of freedom and cooperation could collapse into authoritarianism. He also believed that national liberation struggles were a space ripe for anarchist social insertion and radicalization, and at in times of war,

Starting point is 00:31:52 an anti-militarist general strike within the targeted nation, would simply gift the country to its invaders, and that anti-militarists advocating such action were thus siding with the invaders and making social revolution more difficult to carry out in the future. This is, for me, a somewhat compelling argument. I feel this way about current struggle, you know, while the worker has no friend in the states of the world, and I don't think it should be framed as a matter of campism, the way we see running rampant today. it is undeniable that there are some victories and defeats

Starting point is 00:32:30 that will be more or less preferable to the viability of the struggle long term. I am rooting against an Israeli victory anywhere. And while I reserve my right to criticize the politics, ideologies, and other actions of the groups carrying out that resistance, it remains true that the defeat of their oppressors can open up the space for further struggles. If it was that anarchists were arguing and acting solely for, anti-militarism in the targeted countries, then I would be fully with Krapotkin, you know,

Starting point is 00:33:02 I would get where he's coming from, we would indeed have a problem. But I think he mischaracterized the anarchist position, or perhaps to not give them enough credit. As for the anarchist's primary responsibility for anti-militarist ends is in agitating within the invader countries themselves to disrupt the militarism within the threatening nations to the bitter end. Anything less would be an incomplete and flaccid anti-militarist struggle. Kropotkin addresses this in the manifesto of the 16, which will get to shortly, and yet, with the context of hindsight, I share Malatester's criticism of the pitfalls of lesser evilism, as he kind of predicted World War II.

Starting point is 00:33:45 Adam wrote of Malatester's position, quote, "'German victory would certainly mean the triumph of militarism, "'but the triumph of the Allies would result in much the same. Both guaranteed the victory of the state principle. With statism delivered in both cases and the tensions that caused the war remaining unresolved, Malatester perspicaciously warned that with both sides exhausted, some kind of peace will be patched up, leaving all questions open, thus preparing for a new war more murderous than the present. End quote.

Starting point is 00:34:17 In 1915, Malatester, along with Emma Goldman, Alexander Bulkman and 32 other signatories, co-signed a manifesto titled The Anarchist International and the War, otherwise known as the International Anarchist Manifesto on the War, Manifesto the 35 and Anti-War Manifesto. In this text, the anarchists call out the ridiculous notion that any side of this clash of civilizations had claimed to righteousness, freedom, or civilization. Quote, in the current conflict, the governments in Berlin and Vienna have justified themselves by producing documents

Starting point is 00:35:03 every bit as authentic as those produced by the governments in Paris, London and Petrograd. It is for whoever on each side who will produce the most unchallengeable, most telling documentation to prove their bona fides and portray themselves as the unblemished defender of the right and of freedom, the champion of civilization. Civilization? Who stands for that at the moment? Is it the German state with its redoubtable militarism, so powerful that it has stifled every vestige of rebellion? or the Russian state, whose only methods of persuasion are the Naut, the Gibbet, and Siberia,

Starting point is 00:35:39 or the French state, with Espiri B, its bloody conquests in Tonkin, Madagascar, Morocco, and forcible conscription of black troops, the France whose prisons have housed for years past, comrades whose only crime was to have written and spoken out against the war? Or England, as she exploits, divides, starves, and oppresses the peoples of her huge colonial empire? No, none of the belligerents has any right to lay claim to civilisation, just as none of them is entitled to claim legitimate self-defence. The truth is that the root of wars, of the war currently bloody in the plains of Europe, just like all the ones that went before it, is located exclusively in the existence of the state, which is the political form of privilege. The state is born of military might. It has grown through recourse to military might, and logically, it is upon military might. that it must rely if it is to retain its own impotence.

Starting point is 00:36:36 Whatever the form it may assume, the state is merely oppression organized for the benefit of a privileged minority. The present conflict offers a striking illustration of this. All forms of the state are embroiled into present war. Absolutism is represented by Russia. Absolutism mitigated by parliamentarism and by Germany. A state ruling over very different peoples by Austria. Constitutional democracy by England. and the Democratic Republican system by France. End quote. Maltaester rejected the idea that anarchist should support one state over another

Starting point is 00:37:12 because it was supposedly the lesser evil. Doing so, he argued, placed the struggles of some workers above those of others and abandoned international working class solidarity. While he accepted that anti-colonial wars and social revolutions could be justified, he maintained that anarchists should oppose wars between rivals, capitalist and imperialist states, refusing to become complicit in their violence and exploitation. Later in the brief manifesto, quote, No matter where they may find themselves, the anarchist's role in the current tragedy is to

Starting point is 00:37:47 carry on proclaiming that there is but one war of liberation, the one waged in every country by the oppressed against the oppressor, by the exploited against the exploiter. Our task is to summon the slaves to revolt against their masters. Anarchist propaganda and anarchist action should set about doggedly undermining and breaking up the various states, cultivating the spirit of rebellion and acting as midwife to the discontent in the peoples and in the armies. End quote. Going on to describe how anarchists might convince the soldiers, the factory workers, the peasants, the outcasts, the women, and, quote, capitalize upon every stirring of rebellion, every discontent, and want to ferment interruption,

Starting point is 00:38:30 to organize the revolution to which we look for the ending of all of society's inequities, end quote. Powerful words. Yeah. And indeed in line with what anarchists had long proclaimed. But Kropotkin, and Kropotkin was not alone, mind you, he took a different position on the war. He and 14 allies published in 1916, the manifesto of the 16, as a reply. It was not 16 of them who signed that manifesto. it was 15. It just got called the manifesto of the 16 because the home address of one of the

Starting point is 00:39:06 contributors was mistaken for another contributor. Incredible stuff. Yeah. And so that's what I was known today. But it's like he was living in some town in Algeria, I believe, and they thought the name of the town was a person's name. Oh my God. Publishing mistakes are Taylor's all this time. In the manifesto of the 16, Kropotkin and the other signatories reaffirmed their opposition to militarism and wars of conquest, but argued that peace could not simply be declared while

Starting point is 00:39:39 Germany continued its invasion and expansion. They contended that German workers have failed to resist their own government's imperial ambitions, leaving no meaningful internal opposition to militarism. Although they maintained their commitment to internationalism and the eventual abolition of borders, they concluded that the defeat of German militarism was a necessary precondition for a just and last in peace, believing it would ultimately benefit both the German people and the cause of human liberation. So I get where Kropotkin is coming from too, as I see parallels to the situation today vis-à-vis American imperialism and the flawed actors that resisted. even though I generally share Malatester's sentiment, and Malatester was ultimately correct in his

Starting point is 00:40:28 assessment that maintaining a consistent stance is necessary for the clarity of the movement, and also that this war's outcome would be nothing but a precursor to further war and would not advance the class struggle and in fact worsen its conditions. All that being said, I think there's room for a more sympathetic appraisal of Cropotkin's position. As for responses and just the overall outcome of this rift? For one, the Bolshevik party had something to say. Lenin condemned the supporters of World War I as anarcho-chovenists. Stalin and Trotsky dismissed Kropotkin's pro-war stance as evidence of anarchism's failure, despite the fact that the majority of the anarchist movement remained opposed to the Great War. Amalatesta, responding to the manifesto of the 16 with his article

Starting point is 00:41:18 pro-government anarchists, accused its signatories of abandoning anarchist principles by siding with states in wartime. He also pointed out that in the name of defeating German militarism, they had instead strengthened in militarism, authoritarianism, and nationalism across Europe, including in the countries they were siding with the governments of. Alexander Bukman, echoing this criticism, argued that Kapotkin had wrongly treated nations as if they were their governments, when in reality the war was being driven by ruling elites, not ordinary people. Malatesta maintained the position that anarchist should capitalize on the imperialist war for class war by encouraging workers to resist their own governments and revive genuine international solidarity.

Starting point is 00:42:06 Although wartime repression made revolutionary activity extremely difficult, he believed the crisis created new opportunities of insurrection rather than justification for supporting any state. The anarchist movement emerged from the other side of the Great War fragmented. Some of its adherents forever stained by their inconsistency of principle. The war forced anarchists to reconsider strategy and revolutionary tactics, and, alongside the economic devastation and political instability to unleash, helped create conditions of fueled revolutionary upheavals across Europe, most notably the Russian Revolution and the wave of labor unrest that followed.

Starting point is 00:42:58 the war. Though the revolution was initially carried out by a diversity of forces, the Bolsheviks claimed it, and with the seeming success of the Marxist model in Russia, it appeared anarchism would be on the downturn. Though disillusionment with that model would follow, and as many anarchists have highlighted, the metrics of success between the respective movements were in many ways different. It wasn't all bad news coming out of the war. The collapse of old regimes inspired experiments in workers' self-governance, such as the German Revolution of 1918 and the Bavarian Council Republic, where anarchist like Gustav Landauer and Eric Musam sought to build a federation of workers' councils rather than a new state. Similar anti-authoritarian current appeared in the Cronstadt rebellion of 1921,

Starting point is 00:43:46 where rebels called for free Soviets independent of Bolshevik control. Despite the growing dominance of state socialism, anarchist ideas continue to shape revolutionary struggles in the aftermath of the Great War. Though the war marked a shift in the movement that some would argue anarchism has never fully recovered from, anarchism has persisted, continues to reach people worldwide, and has the potential still to intercede in the diversity of struggles and places today. What is needed is a clarity and consistency of principles and analyses across context that can encourage initiative and responsibility and solidarity and revolutionary achievement.

Starting point is 00:44:28 It's easy, I think, to reduce this story to Kropotkin standing alone, betraying anarchism. While ultimately I end up aligning more with Malatester's position than Kropotkin's, I do think that Karparkin deserves a bit more credit than he has sometimes been afforded in retrospect. While his prejudices played a role, he did seem to genuinely believe that German militarism posed a unique threat to freedom that British, French, and Russian powers did not, whether he was right is another question. But I think he was still coming from an anarchist police, coloured as he may have been by his anti-German prejudices.

Starting point is 00:45:11 I think the whole incident revealed the liveliness of the anarchist movement, as one that was constantly questioning and adapting and conflicting and refining its ideas. Something that I hope that we would be willing to carry on today. But what were your thoughts on this bit of early 20th century drama alert? Yeah, I mean, I think in a lot of ways, this is the anarchist version of a debate that played out throughout the entire socialist movement and effectively ended up destroying it. in the sense that, you know, the logic that Kropotkin is operating from, to some extent, makes sense. But it's also the logic that was taken by every single individual side in the conflict where, like, the German Social Democratic Party, you know, ends up supporting the war because they think that if they don't, they're going to be sort of like annihilated by the reactionary forces of the Tsar. And, but then, like, the French think they're going to be destroyed by the reactionary forces of the Germans and so on and so forth.

Starting point is 00:46:15 forth. And so everyone ends up operating from this logic of like, it's going to be really bad for us if like the other side of this wins this war. And it ends up squandering this moment of possibility. And instead everyone just gets sort of fed into the meat grinder. And I think the struggle playing out this way was effectively the worst possible thing that could have happened. Because it meant that like some of the only people who were resisting it were people who shouldn't be running a dog kennel, much less, you know, like controlling the fate of the socialist movement. And also it meant that the war was allowed to continue. And so I think from a theoretical perspective, it's like it makes sense why people took the positions that they did and also like supporting this war was so catastrophically wrong that basically every subsequent horror of the 20th century can be laid upon it. But I don't know.

Starting point is 00:47:18 The other thing I'll say about is like, it's not clear to me if Caprapp and acting differently would have, like, changed anything. Yeah. But the sort of general failure of the socialist movement to actually grapple with this moment was this sort of apocalyptic moment

Starting point is 00:47:34 in the history of class struggle that we have never recovered from. Yeah, I definitely don't think that the blame for World War II and all subsequent wars in the 20th century, which can in some way be connected to that World War I. I don't think we should lay the blame

Starting point is 00:47:51 on the feet of Krapotkin or on the anarchist movement or the socialist movement. Yeah. All we can really do is speculate the what if, you know? Yeah. And what if there was a unified front, a unified stand across all these countries, a commitment, a solid commitment to,

Starting point is 00:48:09 we will not cooperate with our respective states. How might the course of the war turned out differently? How might history have played out differently? I guess we'll never know. Yeah. But we are in a position to shape the course of history here and now. Yeah. As the title of the podcast goes, you know, it could happen here.

Starting point is 00:48:32 It kind of is happening here by here, I mean, on this planet across the world, we're dealing with wars. we're dealing with interstate conflicts, diplomatic, economic, and military. And despite how interconnected we are through the internet, it certainly doesn't feel like we've come any closer to the kind of international solidarity that the great war demanded, let alone the many wars being raged across the world today. Yeah, but even, you know, the bleakness of the past and the bleakness of the past and the bleakness of present does not mean that the future need necessarily be as.

Starting point is 00:49:14 As I've said before, the definitional quality of modernity is that today is not like yesterday. And so we don't actually have to live through yet another round of imperialist butchery where different parts of the working class slaughter each other. We don't have to live in a world that's defined by endless status and capitalist war. We can build something else. But that's something that is the responsibility of not the state, because the state will never choose to abandon its privilege and abandon its wars. And it's not up to, you know, Capital,

Starting point is 00:49:51 because Capital will also continue fighting its wars. The only people who can do it is us. As usual, all power to all the people. Peace. 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?

Starting point is 00:50:18 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. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.

Starting point is 00:50:52 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 so... 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 00:51:28 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. On the new podcast Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility.

Starting point is 00:52:07 Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people, and they were like, you smiled at us. Not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita 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 00:53:05 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, then that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations,

Starting point is 00:53:27 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 book. podcasts. See you between the pages. Robert Evans here and this is It Could Happen here, a podcast about our crumbling world and the people making it crumble. And a good chunk of those people happened to be race scientists, which is why today I'm going to be talking about the gang of race scientists who went after

Starting point is 00:53:57 Jason Ardey, the former Cambridge professor who recently died by suicide just earlier this year in August of 2026. And I came across a very good article about what happened to Jason and the people kind of responsible to that by Stephanie Lammy. Stephanie is a researcher, a feminist, and an expert in influence operations. She's the former Secretary General of Internet Without Borders and the co-founder of D-A-N-A-I-D-E-S dot org, which develops and deploys technology for civil society organizations operating in conflict and crisis environments. She's a PhD candidate in political sociology, and she wrote this really, really good article that was published initially on the Club de Media part, which is a French journalism blog effectively, and she published also a really

Starting point is 00:54:44 good translation of it. And I enjoyed it very much. I thought it was really valuable. So I reached out to Stephanie and asked if we could pay to host the audio version of her investigation. And she agreed. So I'm going to be reading it. She wanted me to do that, but I want to make it clear. None of this is my work. And I don't say that to defray any sort of responsibility or whatever. Like this is much better work that I could have done on the same subject, and I'm really proud to be able to host Stephanie's article. Before I get into our article, I do want to note that she is the author of two books,

Starting point is 00:55:15 Ogorah Toxica Uncivil Society in the Internet Age, which is about how anti-democratic actors use influence operations and digital platforms to mobilize and undermine democratic societies. And La Terur masculinist in 2024, an investigation into masculinist radical milieu, their ideologies, networks, and the use of violence as a political strategy.

Starting point is 00:55:34 Both are published by editions due detour. I think, unfortunately, unless you speak French, then it's very fortunate, but they are in French. Obviously, I'm going to be reading Stephanie's article in English, and here it goes. The Hunt for Jason Ardei. Race science is a pseudoscience that feeds far-right propaganda. Long relegated to the margins, it is gaining traction in universities and seeks to establish its proponents as arbiters of knowledge. The hunt that led to Jason Arde's death reveals how this machinery of epistemic domination operates and who helps normalize. it. From day one, everything pointed to the fact that Jason Ardeh, the black neurodivergent

Starting point is 00:56:11 Cambridge professor who died in August of 2026, was being subjected to racist and ablest harassment, exactly the kind of targeting he himself had described. Ardey had been marked as quarry long before the fatal media pile on. An open and immensely well-funded race science international network enabled its hunters to unleash the pack, to give the pursuit scale, reach, and political unity. But to break out of the margins of race science, the chase had to become something, else, its extremist ideology needed to be laundered into a story about scientific and journalistic integrity. The media had ample evidence to challenge the frame imposed on them by the eugenicists. Instead, they adopted it, running with the hounds, and in doing so, legitimized both the

Starting point is 00:56:51 aims and the epistemic authority of race scientists. Marking the quarry. The hunt for Professor Jason Arde began quietly, three years earlier, couched in the civilized nodes of a scholarly society, a professor who was merely asking questions. In May of 2023, Dave Harris, a retired white academic and professor emeritus at Plymouth Marjean University, began examining Ardei's publications. Ardey's appointment as professor of sociology and education at Cambridge had made national news. At 37, he was the youngest black professor in the university's history. From the moment he arrived at Cambridge, Arde was targeted by Freedom of Information Requests. In the United States, Christian nationalist organizations opposed to teaching and researching drawing on critical race theory,

Starting point is 00:57:35 CRT, which examines, among other things, how racism is reproduced through law and institutions, were already explicitly encouraging their supporters to use public records procedures to target academics and then identify or manufacture misconduct. Such smear campaigns are now part of the academic far-rights repertoire, aimed particularly at researchers who examine power relations, but also at those whose very presence, whose perceived identity, appears to embody the gains of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. The largely covert campaign against Black scholars also surfaced in 2023, when the work of Claudine Gay, Harvard's first black president,

Starting point is 00:58:11 came under heightened scrutiny against a backdrop of misogymoire. Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and former visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, both Christian nationalist organizations, is one of the principal architects of the American campaigns against CRT and DEI. He helped turn the plagiarism allegation, against gay into a broader political offensive against minority representation in American institutions. What connects Rufo to what would later come for Ardei is not only the method, but also the network.

Starting point is 00:58:41 Rufo has repeatedly promoted race science-focused online magazine Aporia and appeared on its podcast in 2003. Research by the anti-fascist organization Hope Not Hate identifies Aporia as the public-facing arm of the Human Diversity Foundation, or HDF, a Wyoming registered company created as the successor to the Pioneer Fund, the American Eugenics Organization established in 1937. Byline Times reports that Rufo and H.D.F. also shared a funder. Tech entrepreneur Andrew Conru invested $1.3 million in HDF, while his foundation gave $25,000 to Rufo's documentary foundation in 2021. Aporia repeatedly provided a platform for Nathan Koffness, the race science research who would later propel the allegations against Arday to a mass audience.

Starting point is 00:59:26 HDF co-founder Emile Kerkigard had met Peter Thiel in 2019. According to Kirkagard's own account, Teal subsequently asked him to recommend other researchers. Kirkagard named Koffness and Noah Carl, a poorie's editor. Both have been run out of Cambridge for their mediocre work and overt racism. This network also overlaps directly with Britain's Free Speech Union, FSU, founded by Spectator magazine associate Toby Young, who has himself advocated what he called progressive eugenics.

Starting point is 00:59:56 Aporia's Noah Carl is the co-director of Skeptics, LTD, the publishing company controlled by Young, while Aporia contributor, Eric Kaufman, sits on the FSU's Advisory Council. The funding of race science by Christian nationalist and extractive industry billionaires, including surveillance capitalism, serves a political function. As historian of neoliberalism,

Starting point is 01:00:17 Quinn Slobodian shows in Hayek's bastards, racialist theories and the obsession with IQ make it possible to naturalize inequality. Social hierarchies are no longer presented as the product of power relations, but as the expression of supposedly objective biological differences that are hereditary. In largely secular societies, race science therefore provides Christian nationalists with a substitute for the authority religion no longer commands. It also provides intelligence-obsessed techno-masculinists

Starting point is 01:00:45 with a scientific veneer for the hierarchies they seek to uphold or even reinforce. The day Claudine Gay resigned, as Harvard president, Rufo announced an initial $10,000 fund for plagiarism hunting at elite universities, explicitly tying the bounty hunt to his campaign to defeat what he called racialist ideology. Plagiarism hunting reconfigures legitimacy, promoters of the junk science, that is, race science repositioned themselves as arbiters of scientific integrity, from which position they can disqualify those who expose the cultural foundations of systems of power. By June 2024, black academics were describing the climate and their

Starting point is 01:01:22 universities as open season. The pursuit. So, against this backdrop of racist attacks on scholars at elite universities, on the 4th of May 23, Ardae received his first email from Dave Harris. Harris challenged his public work. When Ardae did not reply, Harris wrote again. On the 11th of May, Ardei eventually responded, accusing Harris of spending hours combing through his work looking for mistakes.

Starting point is 01:01:48 He told him not to contact him again. Anything further from you will be considered. bullying and harassment, citing a past incident of bullying in which Harris had been involved. Harris replied anyway. Ardei had explicitly asked him to stop, but Harris, willfully oblivious of his own oppressive behavior, treated the pursuit of academic standards as an entitlement to continue. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, this very posture was growing. The self-appointed investigator of black academics could recast himself as a guardian of merit, simply a man of learning, asking questions. With no reply to his last email, Harris took his claims elsewhere.

Starting point is 01:02:22 and enlisted another retired academic, Martin Hammersley, Professor Emeritus of Education and Social Research at the Open University, who has a history of wild claims about feminist standpoint theory. His grievance is what he regards as the influence of activist research on the social sciences and the diversity of viewpoints.

Starting point is 01:02:40 On the 19th of May, 23, Hammersley wrote to Hillary Crimin, head of Cambridge's Faculty of Education, in Rees Morgan, the university's head of research policy, governance and integrity, setting out allegations concerning Arctic, 's 2018 paper in social sciences. Kriman then met with Ardei and the faculty's director of research.

Starting point is 01:02:58 Ardee agreed that the article could be temporarily removed from the journal's platform while the issues raised were examined. On the 21st of June, 2023, Krimand told Hammersley that Ardee retained the faculty's full support. Morgan separately informed him that because the work predated Arde's employment at Cambridge, the university did not consider an investigation to fall within its remit. Hammersley escalated the pursuit, rejecting the resolution and demanding a systematic investigation of Arde's other publications.

Starting point is 01:03:25 Kriman did not respond. The chase then spread beyond Cambridge. Harrison Hammersley contacted academic journals in Liverpool John Moore's University, which had awarded Ardae his PhD. Harrison Hammersley also harried Ardei outside university channels. As early as 2023, he contacted Jack Grove,

Starting point is 01:03:42 a journalist at Times Higher Education, drawing his attention to the correction to Ardae's 2018 paper. Times Higher Education, T.H.E. did not investigate the allegations in earnest until June 2025 when another professor contacted the publication about Arde's work. Harris then supplied material to Grove, whose scrutiny extended far beyond Ardei's publications to his CV, sporting achievements, charitable activities, and personal biography.

Starting point is 01:04:07 By September, Grove had compiled a 63-page dossier and approached Ardee for comment not only on his work, but on his private life. By all accounts, Ardee experienced this as a continuation of the harassment he had already identified, the man he had asked to stop pursuing him had now enlisted journalists for the hunt. It's important at this stage to understand what the hunt had failed to achieve. After years of relentless scrutiny, only two of Jason Arde's 33 peer-reviewed papers had been challenged. The article in social sciences was amended on December of 2023, with additional references and clarification of its relationship to earlier work. The paper and educational

Starting point is 01:04:44 philosophy and theory was corrected in May of 2024. Neither was retracted. By the time T.H.E. began his investigation in 2025, both matters had been closed. When the allegations eventually reached Ardey's PhD, Liverpool John Moore's University found citation defects but cleared him from plagiarism, including that they resulted from honest and reasonable error compounded by inadequate supervision related to his learning disabilities. It's also important to center the story here. From Arde's standpoint, and from LJMU's own standards,

Starting point is 01:05:15 there was no intent to commit academic fraud. Arde, for his part, consistently described. what was happening to him as racist and ablest harassment, not legitimate academic debate. In April of 2006, in his British Sociological Association keynote, wanted Dead or Alive, the Playbook, he described how black academics were being targeted through an identifiable repertoire already deployed against prominent scholars in the United States. He explicitly warned that the very instruments designed to protect academic integrity were being weaponized against them. By then, Arde had already made public the very tangible effects of the campaign.

Starting point is 01:05:49 racist abuse, threats, and intimidation. In a July 2025 letter to Jackie Smith, then Minister for Skills at the UK Department of Education, he reported a physical assault, death and rape threats against himself and his family, and racist objects and threats sent both through Cambridge and to his family home. In his memoir, he likewise described

Starting point is 01:06:09 targeted campaigns driven by racial animus. In fact, the entire media coverage of the plagiarism affair cast Dave Harris in the familiar role of the reasonable, concerned academic A variation on the concerned parent or concerned citizen routinely mobilized to lend the appearance of spontaneous, reasonable concern to far-right campaigns against sex education, trans rights, racial equality, and public health measures, while Ardei became the eccentric young black professor resisting legitimate scrutiny. His attempts to protect himself were recoded as aggression through the classic mechanism of Darvo, deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender, first identified by psychologist Jennifer Freed. The reversal drew on the myth of the perfect victim. Inaccuracy in Arde's autobiographical narrative as well as unprovable facts were used to discredit his testimony.

Starting point is 01:06:58 If he was not beyond reproach, perhaps he was not a victim at all, and perhaps his place at Cambridge was itself suspect, and maybe he even deserved to be harassed. In a historically white and male elite institution, credibility, merit, and belonging became entangled. The racist trope of the threatening black man did the rest. Arde could be cast simultaneously as aggressor and fraud, while those pursuing him became the hapless victims of an interloper with something to hide. But for the reversal to take hold, it had to be made public. Darvo works by manipulating how third parties perceive victim and offender. On the 5th of August, as Ardee resigned from Cambridge and lost the institutional protections

Starting point is 01:07:35 that came with his position, the Committee for Academic Freedom, CAF, an anti-D-EI organization, revealed that Ardei had reported Dave Harris to the police and that the case had been closed without further action. CAF's Frederick Attenborough, who had previously headed research at the Free Speech Union, FSU, framed Arde's report to the police as a threat to academic freedom. Also on the 5th of August, Times Higher Education helped publicize the same reversal.

Starting point is 01:08:01 Jack Grove published his account under the headline, I was reported to police over the Arde case. I was just doing my job. Arde's complaint to the police and his instruction of Carter Rook, the London firm specializing in media and defamation, were framed as attempts to a police. obstruct legitimate journalism, while Arde's attempts to protect himself from harassment became threats to press freedom. On the 10th of August, the FSU fused the supposed attacks on academic

Starting point is 01:08:24 and press freedom into a single conspiratorial narrative, casting Ardei as a powerful censor determined to intimidate his critics. Quote, in a desperate bid to avoid scrutiny, Professor Ardei tried to use the police to silence a journalist and an academic. This threat frame survived Arde's death on the 14th of August. That same day, T. He published an opinion piece by Ian Pace, an advisory board member of academics for academic freedom, AFAF, who campaigns on institutional neutrality and academic free speech, alongside Cambridge Professor and Reform UK head of policy James Orr. As Byline Times is documented, Orr himself is a keynote in the same network. Peter Thiel made a secret five-figure donation to Cambridge through or around

Starting point is 01:09:08 the time of his appointment, while Orr later helped bring the race science publication Aporia into organized national conservative politics. Pace argued that the Ardei affair demonstrated, quote, the danger of treating criticism as injury. Three days after Ardei's death, T. He news editor Tom Williams maintained that the journalistic inquiry into the person of Ardebae Grove was justified. And we'll continue, but first, here's some ads.

Starting point is 01:09:44 And we're back. The Code of Gentlemanly Conduct. The Chase had remained largely confined to allegations and rumors circulated by Harris and others through academic and journalistic channels. The public frenzy began in earnest on the far-right French on the 21st of July, 2026, when Nathan Koffness, the race scientist, published allegations based on a dossier he said he had recently received from an unidentified source inside Cambridge. That claim is unverifiable.

Starting point is 01:10:11 Three days later, the telegraph, to which Free Speech Union founder and general secretary Toby Young regularly contributes, published an article with the title, Cambridge Diversity Poster Boy and Plagiarism Row. The Times and the Daily Mail followed that same day with similar articles. By the 1st of August, The Guardian published its investigation under the sensational headline, plagiarism, playbooks, and a pig's head, the new claim surrounding Cambridge professor Jason Ardei. The story had become a national media affair, still oriented by the race science network's framing. Four days after the Guardian piece, Cambridge announced a new investigation into Arde's

Starting point is 01:10:44 qualifications and career, citing new information. Arde resigned later that day, saying that the relentless accusation, speculation, and public commentary had taken a profound toll on him and those he loved. The scrutiny had to be of Ardei, not the pack. The Guardian article subjected Ardey's accounts of racist harassment to my new scrutiny, going so far as to check some of them with police and witnesses and finding discrepancies, but the three-year pursuit initiated by Harris, the Corey, the Chase, and the context, was entirely absent from the story.

Starting point is 01:11:15 Harris briefly appears in the article as a concerned academic. But Dave Harris' own history should have complicated his portrayal as a neutral source. For example, it's publicly available information that, in May of 1998, Times Higher Education reported that Harris had been dismissed from what is now Plymouth Marion following a complaint, alleging, harassment and bullying. Harris maintained that the dispute had begun after he and a colleague raised concerns about academic standards, and his union supported his appeal. He was reinstated the following month, although the rehearing upheld a finding of misconduct

Starting point is 01:11:47 and issued him with a formal warning. This history should have at least alerted the Guardian to a possible recurring pattern of behavior. Although Ardei had pitched specifically to him, maybe sending the arts and culture editor to cover the story was not the appropriate choice to cover a far-right propaganda campaign. In a video published after Arde's death, Harris lied, saying he had been cleared.

Starting point is 01:12:08 Furthermore, Times' higher education accounts repeatedly conflated civility with integrity. Harris' correspondence was described as, notably, even excessively polite, as though civility of tone guaranteed disinterestedness of purpose. Times Higher Education's Jack Grove recalled his first email in his August 5th account as softly phrased. By then, Arda had already asked Harris to stop contacting him and reported him to the police. When Times' higher education had resumed its investigation in 2025, Tom Williams similarly described the anonymous professor who contacted him as almost apologetic

Starting point is 01:12:41 about raising his concerns. Politeness became a proxy for trustworthiness, while the repetition and escalation of approaching THE, the very conduct Ardei had identified as harassment, disappeared from view. Two things can be true at once. A harasser can also be perfectly gentlemanly. As race and performance scholars, Kyla Wazana Tompkins and Tavia Nyango have argued,

Starting point is 01:13:02 civility operates as a covert political aesthetic and a rhetorical mode which guards the boundaries of access to politicity. It helps determine whose speech and conduct are recognized in the first place as legitimate political participation, Harris's softly phrased manner helped make him legible as reasonable, measured, rational, and therefore credible, irrespective of the cumulative effect of his conduct. The veneer of politeness, combined with other markers of legitimacy, a white man, a professor emeritus, a selfless defender of academic standards, positioned Harris as an arbiter of scientific integrity

Starting point is 01:13:36 rather than an object of scrutiny himself. Retraction Watch, a specialist publication dedicated to research integrity and misconduct, glaringly failed to scrutinize Harris' own track record. In its lengthy investigation published on the 27th of July, it detailed Harris' pursuit and quoted Ardei explicitly asking him to stop, yet did not frame that conduct as harassment, nor did it mention that Harris had himself previously been dismissed following allegations of harassment and bullying in a dispute he said arose from concerns about academic standards. Instead, Harris was given space to complain that bloody awful work could get through when standards were relaxed for special issues devoted to activist issues, like racial and equest.

Starting point is 01:14:16 quality. Harris' own record received no comparable scrutiny, nor was his sustained campaign against critical race theory treated as activism. The very man denouncing other people's work as bloody awful had himself faced questions about the quality of his research. In April of 2025, internal Plymouth Marjan correspondence described publications produced in the Marjan name as poor quality and often controversial, a criticism Harris himself understood to refer to his methodological assessments of critical race theory. His resulting critique of CRT was self-published in March 2024, rather than published by an academic press. The pamphlet attracted just five reviews, including a generic endorsement for Martin Hammersley. Concerns about the poor standard

Starting point is 01:14:59 of Harris' research had already been public knowledge since January of 2006 when the Telegraph reported Plymouth Marjohn's decision to suspend his emeritus status. In that article, the Telegraph explained the University's assessment of the publications produced in the Marjon name, were poor quality and often controversial. Although the Telegraph framed Harris as the injured party, an academic stripped of title after critiquing critical race theory, the information was now in the public domain, readily available to any journalist assessing his credibility

Starting point is 01:15:27 when the Ardei allegations resurfaced in July. Between the 24th of July and Ardei's death on the 14th of August, the Telegraph published 43 articles about Jason Arde. It even ran a box-headed, how the telegraph's reporting led to Jason Arde's resignation. After his death, the newspaper quietly altered the headline. Jason Ardei is living proof that you reap what you're so, removing the word living. Meanwhile, the January article about Harris briefly disappeared from the telegraph's website,

Starting point is 01:15:56 the very article containing information that should have disqualified Harris from being treated as an unimpeachably credible source. What felled Arde was not the action of isolated actors but that of a single, well-connected, and well-financed pack with a not-so-secret plan. In 2023, Nathan Kauffness laid out. a roadmap to power on his substack. How to take back academia. He was not alone in articulating such a strategy,

Starting point is 01:16:19 and the prescriptions tend to look very similar. Quote, there are two ways to reduce the power of the wokesters on campus, remove them by showing that they don't satisfy minimal criteria for contract renewal or academic promotion, or dilute their influence by bringing in some of the non-woke scholars who have been pushed out of academia for political reasons. The two-pronged approach, eliminate the black scholars,

Starting point is 01:16:39 platform the mediocre white males, is apparent with the support system they enjoy. When Dave Harris had his emeritus status suspended in January of 26, he became a cause-celeb in Britain's anti-woke ecosystem, with the Committee for Academic Freedom, CAF, rallying to his defense. CAF's Frederick Attenborough, during his time at the Free Speech Union, had also defended Nathan Kauffness. When Emanuel College, Cambridge, terminated Kauffness's affiliation on the 5th of April 2024, following his writings on race, heredity, and intelligence, BFSU assisted him in the proceedings, with Attenborough personally promoting his case.

Starting point is 01:17:12 Koffens later stated that FSU chief legal counsel, Bryn Harris, assisted his appeal. The FSU subsequently backed his legal challenge and urged supporters to contribute to his legal fund. The FSU itself says it has supported Koffinus throughout and helped him bring legal action against Emanuel College. In March of 26, Attenborough, now at CAF, intervened on Koffness's behalf again, urging Ghent Ghent University to resist demands that his appointment be rescinded. Kauffness had been recruited to Ghent by Boe DeVry, whose own work on intelligence and dysgenic fertility draws extensively on hereditarian researchers. In 2024, DeVry also attended the London Conference on Intelligence, alongside Human Diversity

Starting point is 01:17:52 Foundation co-founder Emil Kerkigard. DeVry had already sought university funding to bring Kauffness to Ghent for a lecture in February of 2024, just days after Kauffness published A Guide for Hereditarian Revolution, before later hiring him as a postdoctoral researcher on his liberalism's fertility problem project. So when, on the 21st of July, Nathan Kauffinus published DEI fraud and cover-up at Cambridge on his substack, the architecture of uncivil society actors to immediately scale the harassment initiated by Harris, as well as give cover to the attackers, was already in place. So was the framing.

Starting point is 01:18:29 Koffness heavily promoted his blog entry on X, where the post exceeded one million views. It was amplified by figures such as Richard Hanania, the American race and IQ writer from the same reactionary intellectual milieu as Curtis Jarvin. A foundational figure of the anti-democratic dark enlightenment, Yarvin coined the concept of the cathedral to describe what in secular societies he presented as a new church. A decentralized system made up in particular of universities and mainstream media, responsible for producing and disseminating progressive orthodoxy and policing the boundaries between truth and heresy. The concept made refutation almost impossible. If academic institutions rejected race science, that rejection itself could be presented as proof of their membership in the cathedral, discrediting academic knowledge production on race,

Starting point is 01:19:14 while recasting hereditarian race science as censored truth fitted directly into this logic. By the time the first national newspaper articles appeared three days later in the telegraph, the Times and the Daily Mail, Koffness and those amplifying his narrative had already transformed Arde into a symbol of the supposed corruption of university. by DEI, a DEI star whose alleged failings were presented as proof that Cambridge had sacrificed academic standards to racial hiring and then sought to conceal the consequences. Brought to bay on the 31st of July, Ardei submitted to an interview with the Times to defend himself against the allegations, but by then the media pack was closing in and the kill seemed inevitable. According to

Starting point is 01:19:53 Newscord's verified corpus, 52 articles about Arde had appeared by the time of his resignation statement was published on the 5th of August. Arde's resignation did not. stop the hunt because the actions of the victim have no bearing on the level of harassment they receive. It stops when the harassers stop, whether because they move on to another target or because institutions and bystanders intervene. If the prey is isolated, the hunt can intensify. Another 222 articles appeared between his resignation and the moment he was found dead on the 14th of August, 214 through the 13th, and eight more that day before his death became known. In all, News Cord records 274 articles across 26 outlets,

Starting point is 01:20:32 in the 22 days between the first national coverage on the 24th of July and his death. Of those articles, my own Stephanie's, mapping, identifies at least 23 produced by outlets or authors with links to the FSU, 19 of them after RDA resigned. 21 appeared in The Spectator alone, where FSU founder, Toby Young as associate editor and columnist. Another was written in the telegraph by FSU linked Alison Pearson, and another in the Times by FSU chair, Nigel Bigger. And we'll continue, but... First, we've got one last ad break.

Starting point is 01:21:15 And we're back. The trophy. Rather than a media pile on, this was predatory propaganda. Fighting propaganda is not simply a matter of determining whether each individual claim is true or false. It is first and foremost to struggle over who has the power to define reality. That is what framing does. It places certain perspectives at the center, relegates others to the margins, and determines what becomes visible, sayable, and relevant.

Starting point is 01:21:40 That authority, that power, is precisely. what is at stake. Race science, a belief system fundamentally untethered from reality, needs to be received as science. Its proponents crave legitimacy because their very existence depends on it. Without recognition from journalists, universities, and the public, they remain what they are, marginal and extremist. With it, they acquire the authority to police the boundaries of knowledge, to decide what counts as evidence, what constitutes merit, whose scholarship warrants investigation, and whose testimony can be dismissed as mere grievance. And Arde was an extraordinarily useful object around which to manufacture that authority.

Starting point is 01:22:16 A young black professor at Cambridge with a remarkable life story working on racism, sanism, and inequality. Make him doubtful enough and he can be made to carry the weight of a much larger proposition. Perhaps inclusion policies put him there. Perhaps standards were lowered. Perhaps research on racism itself is suspect. Perhaps the people telling us racism structures the academy are precisely the people who do not belong in it. You do not have to prove the whole proposition. You only have to keep the doubt moving. As defense researcher Olivier Schmidt, now research director at the Institute for Military Operations at the Royal Danish Defense College has shown, methodological doubt can be turned into systematic doubt. I'm just asking

Starting point is 01:22:55 questions, then becomes a posture through which suspicion can be kept moving, alive and definitely, even in the absence of sufficient evidence, while claiming the credibility of critical thinking. Arde did not have to be proved a fraud. He only had to be made permanently suspecting. and with him, everyone who looked like him. But the hunt could continue only as long as the pact kept running and the hounds baying. Arday's mass harassment on social media was participatory. For some, the serialization of revelations discrediting him became collective fun, harassedainment. Adam Serwer, the American journalist at the Atlantic,

Starting point is 01:23:31 whose work examines race in American politics, capture this political pleasure in collective humiliation in one phrase. The cruelty is the point. For others, the reward. award was informational ascendancy and a misguided impression that their contribution would protect science somehow. Kate Starboard, a University of Washington professor who studies collective sense making, has shown that online crowds do not merely consume a narrative. They participate in investigating, producing, and circulating the material that sustains it. The invitation to go and look for yourself,

Starting point is 01:24:00 to check another supposedly outlandish claim to uncover another discrepancy, was particularly enticing to those who define themselves as rationalists or skeptics. Participation could be experienced as independent inquiry, affording a sense of intellectual superiority over those who brought the issue back to the reality of harassment and thereby established ascendancy over them. Participation in the harassment

Starting point is 01:24:22 offered epistemic domination. That reward helps explain why, even after Arde's death, so many of those who engaged with the ready stream of revelations remain invested in fact-checking him to this day, unable to let him go, even the reasonable minds. Kate Starboard has also argued

Starting point is 01:24:39 that the answer to information information disorder lies, quote, not in better facts, but better frames. Arde was hounded to death. But the frame that made the hunt possible survives, a frame centered on the feelings of cisgender white men who believe themselves be being greatly replaced from the institutions that produce knowledge, while pushing Arde's own perspective out of view. On the 20th of August, six days after the kill, Ghent University suspended coughness as a precautionary measure pending a disciplinary investigation and to conduct that, in part, predated his post about Arde. The disciplinary letter describes months of complaints, reports and concerns about

Starting point is 01:25:14 his conduct and public statements, and their impact on staff and students. It accuses him, among other things, of using his position and Gint affiliation to pursue and promote his race realism and hereditary and revolution, despite having been hired to work on the future of liberalism. The university regarded this as a breach of his professional obligations, a misuse of his institutional reputation and a conflict with its code of ethics, which prohibits, among other things, the dissemination of ideas of racial superiority and incitement to racial segregation. This time, fraud really was at the heart of the case. Koffness immediately recast his suspension of censorship, an attack on his freedom of speech, the experiences of his racialized colleagues disappeared from the story.

Starting point is 01:25:55 His claim amplified by the very architecture of actors implicated in the hunt, but now with an American dimension. Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal handed him its opinion pages to consolidate the frame. How I became the scapegoat in the Jason Ardei affair. My university suspended me, the article declared. All I did was tell the truth. The U.S. Ambassador to Belgium, Bill White, then reproduced the free speech frame, pressuring Ghent to reinstate Koffness and warning that all options were on the table as the United States reviewed its relationship with the university. Its rector, Petra de Sutter, a trans woman and former Green Party deputy prime minister at Belgium,

Starting point is 01:26:32 then became the new target onto which the frame could be transferred. Within days, an open letter opposing the punishment of a whistleblower and the person of Kauffness attracted more than 800 academics. Among them, actors embedded in a billionaire-funded Christian nationalist and transphobic networks across Europe.

Starting point is 01:26:48 In France and Belgium, for example, signatories Florence Beauregard-Blackner and Xavier Lawrence Salvador led back to Christian nationalist billionaire Pierre Edward Stern, who funds Salvador's Observatoire due to colonialism.

Starting point is 01:27:02 While his Pericles project funds Justicia, created with the Institute Thomas Moore in Belgium, the latter collaborates with be regard Blackner and is linked to a French transphobic organization that fuels campaigns against trans-right. Pierre Edward Stern's Observatory has since expanded its remit. The organization

Starting point is 01:27:20 intervenes in academic controversies in the name of academic freedom, opposition to censorship and scientific integrity, a function comparable to that of the Free Speech Union in the United Kingdom. And like the FSU, it has relays across several media spaces. Its actors circulate in particular through the neo-secularist cluster around Le Point, Marianne, Frank Tirur, and Charlie Hebdo, but also through far-right media organs such as Le Figaro, Casuer, Beliorzacchelves, and Atlantico. Added to this is Christian nationalist

Starting point is 01:27:50 Vincent Belor's media apparatus, C-News, Europe 1, JDD, and others. But Beauregard Blackner and Salvador are not the only French signatories. Martine Benoit, Jean Fischot, Andreas Baccholvi, and Charles Ramond have, like Beauregard Blackner and Salvador, signed initiatives organized by vigilance universities, a collective founded in 2016, to combat

Starting point is 01:28:12 what it describes as racialism, communitarianism, and attacks on universalism and higher education. The neo-secularist milieu thus performs both a function of monitoring and that of ideological laundering, the dominant group's identity, anxieties, and the objectives advanced by Christophascist networks are stripped of their religious matrix and translated into the language of universalism, secularism, science, and academic freedom. Nathan Koffness has since been permitted to return to his mediocre work, albeit remotely impending investigations. But he is only a cog and a well-oiled machine, the one who looks the part.

Starting point is 01:28:46 Behind him, billionaire money flows through think tanks, media, and strategic litigation and concerned academics, allowing the same politics of white cis-male supremacy to circulate under the cover of neutrality, a very long way from the besieged dissidents they claim to be. The hood is not what makes the racist. Sometimes it simply makes the racist easier to recognize, and race science is a lab coat with an equally white hood.

Starting point is 01:29:09 The onslaught against Jason Ardei was not inevitable. It became possible because, at every stage of the pursuit, people in institutions, the police, universities, the media, the commentariat, chose to ignore his warnings, legitimize the frame and amplify the reality imposed by the proponents of race science. Collectively, we did not simply follow the hunt. We handed them the trophy, the power to define what is real. To overturn that frame, to take back the power,

Starting point is 01:29:34 we first have to lift the hood, collectively name what is wearing it. That starts with bringing the voices of those producing knowledge from the front lines back to the center and listening when they sound the alarm. Jason Ardeh was afforded no such attention. The stakes are huge. As Jafari Sinclair Allen, professor of black studies at Columbia University, writes in the nation, this is a transatlantic movement to end the independent production of knowledge about race and power, and to decide on both shores who is permitted to produce it at all. The question now is whether we can recognize the hunt for power

Starting point is 01:30:05 when it disguises itself as free speech, academic freedom, or scientific concern, and refuse our assigned role in the killing of our democracies. And that's it. Again, this was written by Stephanie Lammy. You can find more of her work on the Club de Media part, and we'll have that linked in the show notes. Thank you again, Stephanie.

Starting point is 01:30:23 We'll be back tomorrow. 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 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.

Starting point is 01:30:55 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. 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.

Starting point is 01:31:32 I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there. 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.

Starting point is 01:32:04 On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people and they were like, you smiled at us. Not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of

Starting point is 01:32:50 yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita 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

Starting point is 01:33:30 this story. I'm obsessed. 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, smart pop culture conversations,

Starting point is 01:33:51 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. Did you have a favorite? ancient civilization

Starting point is 01:34:11 which you were learning about growing up. Oh, man. So many. I guess I enjoyed like Celtic things because that's like part of the world I'm from. Wasn't even about Celtic.

Starting point is 01:34:23 I think she was Celtic, like a Celtic warrior, queen, Bodisha. Bodicea is how people used to say Budica, I think, is more accurate. That speed.

Starting point is 01:34:34 Like she was someone who had resisted the Roman invisions, right? Yeah, that's right. where my dad lives is like where the Romans built their border wall called Hadrian's wall and it's just kind of cool to be like

Starting point is 01:34:49 you know the Romans bought their colonialism to all of Europe and they got here and I can't fucking do it it might have been it might have been they got to that part of the world and they were like it's raining so fucking much I want to go back to Italy but yeah it was just

Starting point is 01:35:02 it was always interesting to me to think of like you know the amount of our modern world that's still impacted by Roman colonization and then these people who were able to resist it. Yeah, I remember as a child, I was a really big fan of Egypt, of course, I guess, classic. Of course. Greece, you can't go wrong. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:35:22 Babylon, big fan. I like the bards. Yeah. You know, very cool. Yeah. As someone who, you know, I grew up, like, with a voracious appetite for those living long ago, how people live in the past. historical books, how people dressed, what they eat, how they live day to day. And a lot of those ancient civilizations were presented to me as humanity's great achievements, you know, the magnificent

Starting point is 01:35:54 architecture, the advances in agriculture, the remarkable works of art, and so on. But as I got older, and I started reading more history from below, rather than history, through the lens of King, and empires. I learned more about life before civilization and outside of empire, and I really became less interested in civilization as something to be held up as the pinnacle of what he went to keep bull off, although I am still very much interested in it as an idea, and how we think about and talk about it as an idea. And so this is a crapeanee. I'm Andrew Sage or Andrewism on YouTube, joined again by... James.

Starting point is 01:36:45 People have already heard be sounding off, but yeah, it's nice to be here again. Yes, in case you didn't recognize the voice. Yeah. And I want to talk about the meaning of civilization. If I were to ask you if you were civilized, how would you respond? I think I aspire not to be, but like I have been raised in a society. which very much proposed this binary between like the civilized and the uncivilized, right? I guess savage is a word you could use if you were looking at how that society portrayed it, right?

Starting point is 01:37:20 And like, even though I think British education and stuff wouldn't use that word anymore, it says a lot about like the state and its desire to shape narratives in its favor. So I think I would aspire to decimilize myself, I guess. I'm not like anti-siv in the like big scheme of things. better. I think in the way that it's often used to describe indigenous peoples or people who are not under control of the state. I don't like that very much. Yeah, it's interesting to me because if you ask most people, they would probably just be like, yes, they would say yes, without hesitation. Sure.

Starting point is 01:37:55 You know, obviously we're not most people. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, as you mentioned, like the alternative being, you know, the savage, that is something that has kind of fallen out of. fashion. You know, that exact binary of civilized and savage is not in vogue. It's not treated as something that you say. And yet we maintain one half of the binary as something to uphold. So we still say, you know, we are civilized and it's a civilization, but you wouldn't as much see descriptions of the alternative of the barbarian, the uncivilized, the savage, the primitive. I think you can ask people like what is a civilization, what do you mean by being civilized? And it's a bit shaky.

Starting point is 01:38:45 You know, it's one of those concepts that is so familiar, it's so used to being referenced, that not many people stop to interrogate it. You know, we throw the word around all the time and it can mean cities or technology or modernity or law or culture or the state or simply not being barbaric. Historically, it's also been a way of dividing humanity. The Greeks, I believe, were the ones who referred to basically anyone

Starting point is 01:39:14 who didn't speak Greek as a barbarian. Yeah. You know, China infamously treated everything outside of China as the barbarian. Yeah, isn't it like literally an onomatopoeia? Like, people are saying like,

Starting point is 01:39:30 bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar. I think I've heard that story as well, yeah. I'm not sure how True it is. Yeah, I'm not super familiar with, like, the little exourcing on that one, I guess. Yeah, but, you know, the distinction of the civilized in barbarian is something that has been weaponized across history to justify conquest and colonization and hierarchical taxonomies of the human race. White man's burden, quote, unquote, was to bring civilization to the less advanced people. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:40:05 Civilization being, of course, the most advanced stage of human social and cultural development, which to me is itself a humorous because I think that presumption that we made it, you know, we reach where we go and, you know, what we figured out here, this is it. Yeah. You know, I think that is a very damaging way of thinking. Definitely. And it's something that I think is embedded into a very popular perception of what civilization is. You know, usually historically, civilization has also been tied to cities, writing, large populations, agriculture, social stratification of some kind, specialized labor, monumental architecture, and of course, the state.

Starting point is 01:40:52 Yeah. Buried in many of these associations is the assumption that hierarchy is advanced, that this way of structuring human society is the destination we will always headed to. You know, we have this term in anthropology, stateless. The presumption being that lacking a state is itself, you know, something that perhaps needs to be rectified. I'm not saying that every anthropologist takes its perspective, but, you know, the words that we use carries certain connotations. And I think that for some people, particularly people, raise in a civilization context, it's like, oh, yeah, they haven't reached where we have reached yet. they haven't gotten there yet, they haven't evolved to a point where they've developed a state yet, but that is the trajectory that they are on or are supposed to be on.

Starting point is 01:41:41 Yeah. The more bureaucracy and rule and classes and institutions your society has, the more advanced it is presumed to be. And then, of course, you have people like Samuel Huntington, who used civilization in this very broad sense as cultural identity. Yeah. I have a pretty negative impression of Samuel Huntington as a human being and as theorist. As do I. I mean, I think we all do. To give you the listener an indication, he treats Islam as a civilization. Hinduism as a civilization. Orthodoxy as a civilization.

Starting point is 01:42:18 And then everything south of the Sahara in Africa is just one civilization, Tim. Yeah. I love that like Islam is a civilization and also like south of the Sahara is a civilization as if never the two shall meet right like famously there are no Muslims in Africa yeah the maps that I've seen he does have like Islam in in Africa as well with the if you ever look at the map the map is awful the map is just awful yeah the map like gives me fucking yeah like it admittedly has been a long time since I have engaged I'm looking yeah Muslim and Africa I guess, yeah, he includes a horn of Africa in Muslim.

Starting point is 01:43:03 Fucking unbelievable. Yeah, Confucian. Japan just exists as like a, like, every other culture is like massively homogenized. And then Japanese is completely unique in this little bubble. Yeah, yeah. This is such like, I'm sorry, like that's so weeb coded to me. Yeah. It's incredibly white dude who hasn't fucking really engaged.

Starting point is 01:43:29 was the world coded, you know? Yeah, yeah. It's like, oh, yeah, the entire continent of Africa, sure, fine, whatever. That's Africa. Japan, though, like, Japan is distinct from Korea, from China, from the Philippines, from all of Asia. Japan's its own thing. Yeah, from these places it's had exchange with for centuries.

Starting point is 01:43:49 Yeah, and then, like, the entirety of North America, Greenland, Western Europe, and Australasia is just Western. the indigenous people's there don't exist, right? Like, the differences in those cultures. Yeah, well, Western is code for white, so... Yeah. It's not surprising. Yeah, that's definitely what he's doing there.

Starting point is 01:44:10 His famous argument was that future conflicts would be predicated on clashes between the civilizations, hence clashes civilizations being the title of his book. Yeah. I don't find it very convincing. I don't think you do either. Yeah, no. I'm not buying it, to be honest. Yeah, it treats these big cultural blobs as if they're unified entities and discrete entities

Starting point is 01:44:36 when, you know, history has been a long story of exchange, borrowing, overlap, divergence, migration, and transformation. Yeah. Finally, for another perspective, I want to share on the subject of civilization, we have David Wengrew, who many of you may know as the co-author of the... the dawn of everything. And for him, he argued that if we're going to keep using the word civilization, we should think of it as a product of interaction between societies. So through trade and conflict and migration and imitation collaboration,

Starting point is 01:45:25 civilization is like an emergent phenomenon of that interconnectedness. I think that is a somewhat idiosyncratic, but still compelling and somewhat familiar approach to the idea. Typically people do think of civilizations as discrete entities, though. At least in the layman's perspective, but the field of anthropology and historical research I know is rife with comparative studies and, you know, investigations of those very exchanges between societies.

Starting point is 01:46:01 So as he is speaking from an anthropological perspective, I see why he would want to put forward that reframing. And the thing about definitions of words and connotations and stuff, it's none of it is really objectively correct. The orders point into different things, and the way that we use language is always going to be subject to debate. I think the fact that we can't even agree on what civilization exactly is should probably make us a bit more cautious in how we make sweeping claims about it.

Starting point is 01:46:32 And really, I feel I've heard about many of the words that we throw around so casually. But one consistency I've seen across most definitions of civilization is this packaging with, of course, the city, but also with ideas of advancement and development, which of course begs the question advanced according to whom? You know, measured by what standard? How do you actually quantify how much more advanced one society is compared to another? You know if the benchmark is skyscrapers and bureaucracies and standing armies or industrial output, then yeah, sure, modern states score very highly in terms of advancement. But then we can ask, you know, why should those be the specific metrics we use? Why not measure the advancement of a society according to how much leisure its members enjoy?

Starting point is 01:47:21 Or by how equal they are, or by how sustainable they engage with the ecosystem that they're embedded in, why how much freedom regular people have over their own lives. You know, we can pick different measuring sticks and get different winners and losers in this competition of advancement.

Starting point is 01:47:39 But the measure and stick we're working with when we speak of civilization clearly isn't very helpful for many of us. All societies are not working with the same measure and stick despite the efforts to impose this capitalist, neoliberal

Starting point is 01:47:53 measuring stick on everybody. You know, we have countless experiments in examples of different ways of organizing life across history. Some lasting for centuries, others millennia, some expanded into empires, others staying small, some prioritizing equality, others prioritizing hierarchy, accumulation versus mobility.

Starting point is 01:48:13 You know, we can't assume that all of humanity is trying to reach the same predetermined destination. So the whole language of more and less civilized doesn't really cut it for me. But the language of civilization does work for the people that it's Zeus, the people who see their society as the highest stage of human development,

Starting point is 01:48:34 which must be imposed on others by evangelism and conquest and so on to bring development. And the same attitude, which is extended to people by European colonial powers, to invade these lands for wealth and territory, to conquer them, to treat them as a lesser

Starting point is 01:48:55 on the ladder of human development, that very same attitude extends beyond people to nature itself as something wild and unproductive and waiting to be mastered by civilization. But one thing is really stuck with me in reading, for instance, James Scott, which talks about this and against the grain, is just how fragile and not inevitable this civilization development was. These early states,

Starting point is 01:49:27 very often collapsed, very often fragmented. And for many people, in those contexts, the collapse, quote and quote, was an escape to freedom. You know, it was something that gave them an opportunity to disperse and to create smaller communities and to have greater autonomy and fewer obligations to rulers. And so with all that history in mind, I find the concert of civilization, you know, something to think about, but certainly not something to idealize. Yeah. Something that just came to my mind is a speech that Derruti gave to the cops on the eve of the Catalan Revolution, right?

Starting point is 01:50:11 So 19th of July. So the cops have been sent, right? They know that the military is going to rise up against them, right? They know that in the coming days that they will either have to fight their own military or accept the end of this liberal democracy in Spain, right? This republic in Spain. The Catalan government has still sent the police to seize weapons from the anarchists, right? Who are the most capable people of fighting this coup?

Starting point is 01:50:39 They would rather state than no state, I guess, right? Like, the state's always going to have more solidarity with the state than its constituents. And he says to the COBS, sometimes when we're given an order, we have to disobey it. and even if the order comes from a very big and important person to translate, obviously, and paraphrase to, we civilize ourselves with disobedience. It's a really interesting phrase, right? Like, to him, I guess, the concept of civilization is dignity and autonomy.

Starting point is 01:51:10 The person who is given up their autonomy to the state is not civilized because they have given up that autonomy and allowed the state to be the one that makes sense. their decisions for them, right? Like, it's an alternative use. It's like an inversion, basically. Exactly, yeah, yeah. Like, he's taken that term and said, like,

Starting point is 01:51:31 it's fundamentally uncivilized of you to allow the state to be the one that makes the choices for you. It's just a really interesting, yeah, inversion of the terminology. Yeah, yeah. I think it's curious because when I look at, for instance, there's this book, Civilized Death by Christopher, Ryan, and he uses this concept of human domestication. Okay.

Starting point is 01:51:58 And he argues that, you know, just as humans selectively bred and conditioned animals to fit into environments, they're redesigned for all on purposes. Civilization shaped us to fit the needs of these large hierarchical systems. Okay. You know, we sort of routines and obedience and punctuality for activity, dependence on these institutions. And so it's kind of interesting to me that, you know, by Dioriti's Freeman, the domestication of civilization is precisely what makes us uncivilized. Yeah, like the forced pacidism, I don't know how to say it, like it is what makes us uncivilized. It makes us undignified. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:52:41 And I guess that that is another use or connotation associated with civilization that he's utilized in there, which is civilization as civilization as being upright or dignified. dignified as a person to be civilized is to be, you know, a certain standard or caliber of person. Yeah, exactly that, yeah. And so he's kind of pointing to civilization as corrupting that caliber by making us slavishly dependent on the institutions over which we have very little control over. Yeah, it's like, it's interesting, like inversion. I'm not sure how useful it is.

Starting point is 01:53:20 I'm not sure if it's a term that anyone needs to recapture, but it's interesting, you know. First thing, even if I find that an invasion is not necessarily practical in terms of day-to-day communication, I think playing with concepts, you know, tinkering with concepts, inverting them, I think it's still useful in better grasping them. Yes. In better formulating a sense of what they are and what they are not. Yeah, definitely. the meaning of a word is something we co-create over time, right?

Starting point is 01:53:52 It's not like a fixed thing. I know obviously we have these dictionaries and they have the meanings of words, but language is just a way of communicating concepts. And so we co-create that meaning as we redefine those concepts. Exactly. So much of modern civilized life clearly isn't good for us. I say that after stretching my back with great futility as I spent most of my day sitting. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:54:36 Working at a desk. You know, a lot of people are working jobs they find meaningless, simply because they need the income to survive. You know, they are spending most of the waking hours indoors, on exposed to fresh air. Yeah. If they even have fresh air outdoors, is because many of us live in urban environments

Starting point is 01:54:56 where the standards of air quality are not the best. I could also speak of the rates of stress and loneliness and anxiety and depression and burnout that have continued to rise even as our material wealth as societies, not necessarily as individuals, but as societies and our technological capabilities have both increased. I don't think you have to be a primitivist

Starting point is 01:55:21 and advocate for some return to prehistory to recognize the negatives, the race here. And while I think many technological developments associated with civilization have genuinely improved people's lives, you know, antibiotics, dentistry, planes, the internet, especially for disabled people

Starting point is 01:55:41 in those medical conditions. They would otherwise be untreatable. Yeah. You know, these are very beneficial innovations. Yeah. I just don't think that civilization, as we have structured it and conceived of it, has a monopoly on innovation.

Starting point is 01:55:56 In his book, Wild Thoughts, Claude Lévi-Strauss had made the point that many of humanity's greatest technological breakthroughs in agriculture, weaving, pottery, animal domestication, they were developed long before we conventionally think of as civilization. Human beings have always been creative, we've always experimented, we've always invented and we always will.

Starting point is 01:56:22 Everything that we can or should go back, because, I mean, there are billions of us now, mostly in cities that are far from ecologically sustainable. But I think if we keep the history of our diverse social forms in mind, then as we go forward, we can try to preserve what generally enriches human life while leaving behind the institutions and assumptions that no longer do. By the way, do you by chance have a blueprint for the future of our species? No, I don't think I do other than working it out together. Yeah, we need to.

Starting point is 01:57:02 Hoping someone might, I guess we have to figure that out together, exactly. Yeah, maybe that is a blueprint. Exactly. I'm really not interested in seeing that there's like one correct society that everybody has to adopt. Yeah. I think we can learn something from the incredible diversity of human societies that have existed, and we can use that not for mimicry but for inspiration, you know, to realize that we too can pursue these uncharted territories and develop something new, or to take old concepts

Starting point is 01:57:37 and stretch them into new forms. Yeah, definitely. The author Daniel Quinn in his book, Ishmael, had made a point that tribes can be defined not by hunting and gathering or ethnicity, but as a social organization that allows people to make a living together. And so by this definition, you know, people still today create tribal forms of organization all the time, whether it be mutual aid networks, affinity groups, intentional communities, wherever people freely organize themselves around shared needs and shared purposes. One thing Quinn emphasizes is that these kinds of societies can be very flexible.

Starting point is 01:58:16 You know, when these arrangements are no longer working for us, we can change them, we can walk away from them. We're not tied to them in the way that we are basically bound by an enormous bureaucracy that we're supposedly in social contract with today. And so really, for me, that's what I want to focus on, a world where people have greater control over their lives, more decentralized, more cooperation, a world where organizations are things that people can free

Starting point is 01:58:44 join at reshape and split and leave and they no longer saving their needs. I really care about GDP metrics and, you know, megacity concentrations. I just want to know, you know, how we get from here to there together. And to me, that is something that requires, as I said many times before, on this podcast and on my YouTube channel. It requires opposition to systems of domination, through confrontation and non-cooperation, through things like strikes and boycotts

Starting point is 01:59:23 and other forms of resistance. And it also requires on the other end of that equation that we prefigure the world we want to live in by promoting certain ideas and philosophies, but more so by building the actual relationships and institutions, we want to live in and be a part of. And I think that these are two processes that will reinforce each other.

Starting point is 01:59:46 People will see and experience different ways of organizing their lives, and that informs their ideology. They become more confident that these alternatives are possible, and it drives them to push them in new directions. So I see all that to say that the idea of civilization had its place and has had its time,

Starting point is 02:00:09 but I think that we can let go of that bold idea, you know, that we don't have to assume but there is no other alternative. And I think that requires not just a rejection, but an active replacement. To make the cracks of the old order apparent and to make the idea, the omni idea of,

Starting point is 02:00:39 liberalism, capitalism, and civilization, unconvincent by the presentation of this other alternative. I know some people might call that next thing a better civilization, but I would prefer to be, you know, didn't bind ourselves to that old terminology. At least that's how I try to approach it. And what about you? Yeah, I don't think we should be beholden to these things that can hold us back, right?

Starting point is 02:01:08 And as you say, we should be more focused in, like, building the world that we want to live in. And not so much of building the world we've been told we should want to live in. Language can turn into a way of seeing the world. And I think we need to be careful of letting language determine how we see the world in a way that inherently limits our ability to create a better one. And I think this is a concept that we need to be very careful of when it comes to that. And just like the inherent bigot tree. that came with a lot of civilization narratives, right?

Starting point is 02:01:41 Sometimes I do like the idea. Scott talks about this a little bit, right? But in fact, it is people in states who were domesticated and they were domesticated by grain crops. Grain crops brought those people in, forced them to live in a certain place, force them to live in a certain way, so they could tend and care for grain crops, right?

Starting point is 02:01:59 Yeah. Like, I think maybe it's flipping that around might help people understand a little bit. Yeah, I think there's a, I forget the name of the book. It said botany of desire. Yeah, I haven't read that. I've been recommended that book before. Yeah, I've read that couple years ago.

Starting point is 02:02:17 And I think it was on that very subject. The idea that the plans that we've raised have in some ways domesticated us. Right. Just as we have domesticated them, it's been a reciprocal process. Yeah, I like that idea. That, I think, was like a theme or an element of that book, if I remember correctly. Okay, nice, yeah. or maybe it's a theme that I read into it.

Starting point is 02:02:41 Right. Either way, I think it's a use, sometimes a useful way of seeing the world. And yeah, I guess that's one of my takeaways as well. Play around with concepts. Think of with them, flip them upside down. And I think that is also how we innovate, how we create new things, new meaning. You know, there is this, I think it's a proverb, or it might be in Ecclesiastes, but it's like, there's nothing new under the sun. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:03:08 So it's like creativity is just the ways that we repurpose, what already exists. We build upon everything that came before. And we have to be willing to play around with it if we want to get to that point of innovator. Yeah. That's pretty much what I have for today. All power to all the people. Peace. Behind every night spent making the kids lunches, there's a lot of suspense.

Starting point is 02:03:46 Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pesto 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.orgia for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything.

Starting point is 02:04:11 When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. 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 so... someone at the end of my bed and I just started screaming.

Starting point is 02:04:52 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. On the new podcast Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinheiro, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first.

Starting point is 02:05:33 I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people. And they were like, you smiled at us. Not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most. most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita

Starting point is 02:06:05 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. Yeah, I'm obsessed. So I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments,

Starting point is 02:06:45 nothing is off the table. It's like if you, You can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, and 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. 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. This episode, we are covering

Starting point is 02:07:28 the week of August 26th to September 2nd. Today I'm joined by James Stout, Robert Evans, and special correspondent, Prop from our show Hood Politics. Welcome. Hey, long-time listener, first-time caller, you know. Glad to be here. First time on ED. You've been on it could happen here a few times. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Your favorite cousin, you know. James, do want to start with your little short news items. This is a barrage of bad news. Prop of you're not familiar with this. Last week, I guess,

Starting point is 02:08:00 barrage was an unfortunate choice of words. Right when we were releasing this, a flood in Nepal caused catastrophic damage. Yeah. Like, if you're on the internet, you've seen the videos, right? Yeah. 1,000 people have been reported dead so far,

Starting point is 02:08:16 with nearly 4,000 missing. The current hypothesis is that a glacial collapse so large and fast that it caused a seismic event, caused a detached portion of the glacier to melt due to friction as it fell. So there was like a seismic event. Yeah. And there was some question of the timeline, right? Did the seismic event precipitate the collapse or did the collapse?

Starting point is 02:08:37 Yeah. From what I've seen, the current I bought this is that so much of the glacier fell that it created the seismic event. Yeah, yeah. That's what I remember hearing. Me too. Yeah. And the most logical. Yeah, yeah, it does seem

Starting point is 02:08:51 Like it wasn't a tectonic Situation here No, it was purely as a result of the glacier degrading Yeah, I've seen a glass of a carve before It's an incredible thing But this is on a scale that like is almost infathomable There are early warning systems for flooding on that river But the flooding moves so fast

Starting point is 02:09:12 That it swamped and destroyed those facilities Before they could trigger it. Yeah Like we're talking seconds here Yeah Secondly, I'm going to talk about the SDF, the Syrian Democratic forces, which was officially dissolved on August 25th, had its forces absorbed into the new Syrian army. Maslum Ebdi. The SDF being, of course, the armed forces of Rojava, the self-administration, the AANES, you know, in northeast Syria.

Starting point is 02:09:42 James and I both reported from there. Yeah, and I know it's been really an important place, an important thing for both of us. We will break this down in more detail in another episode. But I wanted to say really briefly, Maslu Mabdi made the announcement, and he said that approximately 10,000 SDF fighters have been integrated into a new Syrian army. The integration that matters is the women's protection forces, the YPGA.

Starting point is 02:10:09 And some of the ethnic minority militias. Sure, yeah, yeah. The non-Kurdish ethnic minorities. Yeah, the Armenians and the Assyrians and the like. As it seems right now, the offer is for the YPJ to integrate as individuals into the Ministry of the Interior, so doing stuff like Taurus and Police, Border Police. And it does not seem that the new Syrian government is interested in having women in its armed forces, right? Despite these particular women being some of the most capable fighters in the world who have been trained by the US and by other militaries

Starting point is 02:10:46 and have been fighting for more than a decade in some cases. Right now, what they want is to remain as a distinct entity with their own structures and not to be broken up as a group of like disparate individuals. In related news, I guess there have been protested in Camiselo this week after the government failed to follow through on its promise in the constitution to have Kurdish be a language of instruction. Instead, lessons are optional and three hours a week. This would be a disaster for people.

Starting point is 02:11:15 There are generations who have grown up in Roshaba where Kurdish was the language they spoke at home Kurdish was the language they spoke at school of course Kamaji Kurdish has different alphabet to Arabic there are older generations who were educated in Arabic right and they're very aware of this difference but the right to education in your mother tongue when we look at like autonomous movements across the world

Starting point is 02:11:38 I write about this from a PhD dissertation actually like this is one of the things that is considered sufficient autonomy for these sub-state national groups and taking it away, it's a very serious thing. No, especially since, I mean, a lot of these people, like in Turkey it's been criminalized and there have been degrees of this in Syria under different regimes, but in Turkey it's been criminalized for a long time to speak the Kurdish language. Yeah, and school textbooks have explicitly in Turkey, like, I mean, they've written Kurds

Starting point is 02:12:08 out of history, right? Let's move to Myanmar, where a Burmese-Hunter resupply convoy to Barmo has been targeted by numerous FPV drones and attacks on its way at the Arrawaddy River to resupply the town. The KIA-Kachina Independence Army is attacking government forces there. It seems like this morning, two boats seem to have surrendered, and there are videos of what looked like hundreds

Starting point is 02:12:31 of what are probably conscript soldiers being captured by the KIA and associated PDFs. They're relying incredibly heavily on conscripts right now. Someone sent me some documents from a Hunter officer who they captured, showing that something like a single-digit percentage of the troops under his command had been in the military before the conscription began. So they're like taking people with very little training and sent into the front line very quickly, which relates to my next point, which is that Malaysia is planning to forcibly return

Starting point is 02:13:02 Myanmar nationals on Myanmar Navy ships at the end of this month. We can pretty safely assume that these will be Rohingya or other Muslim peoples from Myanmar, right? Malaysia has been one of the places where people have tended to go, especially with conditions being what they are in Cox's bizarre. This would lead to those people most likely immediately being conscripted if they were sent back. That's all I've got. Gara, I know you have some stuff too. Yes, I do have some stuff because it was a big news week for White House extended universe related news. Okay. On August 28th, Trump signed an executive order to create the country's first U.S. Space Academy. order starts by saying, quote, space is a critical domain for American national security, economic growth, scientific discovery, and technological innovation. More details on this will come out in the next 120 days. I'm really excited to see how they're going to work in the Confederate flag into that, because you know they're going to. It's that mid-military academies love that shit.

Starting point is 02:14:04 Trump starts the evil Star Trek. Amid trade disputes with Canada on August 27th, President Trump signed an executive order to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America. And as of recording, both Google and Apple Maps have complied with Trump's order. This move has not received universal praise even among Trump's followers on the right. Matt Walsh came out against this, saying, quote, this will be an unpopular opinion on the right. But I think this is kind of dumb, even as a troll. Lake Ontario was given that name on maps by European explorers long before the Canadian province of Ontario was named.

Starting point is 02:14:48 There are several cities in America called Ontario, at least one of them, predating the Canadian province by like 100 years. Because the word originates with native tribes in North America. Yeah. It is not a Canadian invention. Canadians never uniquely owned the lake or the name, so in effect, all you're doing here is actually giving them credit for a thing that wasn't theirs to begin with. Yeah, it's funny.

Starting point is 02:15:09 Canadians are upset, I guess, or whatever, but Lake Ontario name itself is American history dating back many centuries. Not sure how you own Canada by deleting your own history, unquote. So that's Matt Walsh's long, long take on this if you are interested. Man, of all the things, I would think he'd break with the administration on. Right. Yeah, okay. All right, Matt. All right. Well, because European explorers are I know, I know. It's just, it's just all so stupid. Yeah. And also, okay, it's stupid. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. But America's the name of the continent. It shouldn't bother me as much as it does. But like, Canada's a part of America. Like, you understand the Americas. Yeah. Even if it is a troll. It's not even, I shouldn't care that your troll sucks. It's deeply frustrating. It's, it's, it's deeply frustrating. Yes. It's so stupid.

Starting point is 02:16:12 That's the, it's, and even calling the Gulf of Mexico, calling the Gulf of America. You know, Mexico's a part of America. It's still, it's not a, it's just not a, it doesn't matter.

Starting point is 02:16:23 It doesn't matter. It's one of the most annoying things that he's, that he has done and continues to do as president. Yeah. And the fact that Apple and Google Maps is like,

Starting point is 02:16:31 the key towing to this is just, is completely embarrassing. A pundant on Fox News is the Five. Also, did not like this, but because he was concerned that the new acronym that would be given to kids to memorize the Great Lakes, right? Because the acronym used to be

Starting point is 02:16:46 homes, right? To go over all of the Great Lakes. That's the first letter of each said lake. Yeah. Yeah. Her on Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior. Work well for you. This Fox News Prondent is concerned

Starting point is 02:17:02 that now the acronym will be too close to Hamas. Because you have to trade the oath. Yep, yep, yep, yep. All right. If we could get a merry-go Vespucci in there, if Lake Erie, we'd be there. Right. I think we could make it to Homo.

Starting point is 02:17:20 We could probably get to Homo. We could get to Homo. If we're close to Hamos, we've got to be close to Homo. The next liberal president has to replace the name of Lake Erie with another O word and have homos. Lake Obama. There we go. Lake Obama. Like Obama.

Starting point is 02:17:38 Yeah. That's good. Trump has also since renaming, quote-unquote, renaming the lake. He has also suggested changing the name of either the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean to the American Ocean. The American Ocean, absolutely. Has also talked repeatedly about changing the name of the Strait of Hormuz to the Strait of America. So we'll see how that works out for him. How's that going for him?

Starting point is 02:18:01 We'll check in later. How's that going? Yeah. I'm about to go to your backyard and change the name of it. This is just for clout, right? Like, this is just a fucking, like, he's found out that he gets a lot of attention and owns the libs and creates, like, a news cycle whenever he does this bullshit. That's the reason this is happening, right? Yeah, that's why I don't want to speak any more about it, but it's worth a little mention there.

Starting point is 02:18:27 Oh, for sure. Homes to Hamas is undeniably funny. Homes for Hamas is an amazing, like, like, a fictional NGO that would come out of like a Matt Walsh tweet. That is true. And then maybe the new Daily Wire Plus film. The next film, yeah. It's Habitat for humanity, but it's Habitat for Hamas instead. Speaking of something that could come out of a Daily Wire exclusive film, a former staffer for Mike Collins, a Republican congressman from Georgia who's currently running for Senate against John Ossoff, has been linked to a Nazi account on X the Everything app. This ex-staffer is a 24-year-old who interned for

Starting point is 02:19:08 in 2024, and then the next year worked as a contractor at a pro-Collins pack. On X, this staffer described himself as a quote-unquote twink fascist. Okay. Yeah. And in one post from July of this year, he used the word twink to type out the shape of a swastika. Okay. All right. I have it in the dock here.

Starting point is 02:19:34 If you guys would see. Yeah, I saw it. What is happening? How does he think that's going to end for him? I don't think he cares. Oh, yeah. I think there's a chunk of people for whom all it matters is the lulls, right? So it would seem.

Starting point is 02:19:49 Yeah. Wow. He also posted thirst traps of himself, captioned racist. That's not desperate. And also shared a grok-generated photo of himself in a clan robe. Fascinating. I never thought I'd see the day of, like, bored Nazis. With too much time on their hands online.

Starting point is 02:20:07 Yeah. Yeah, I was like, y'all was just bored now. I mean, that's where these Nazis started. Okay, yeah. It began in boredom, and I guess to some extent, you know, it should end there. Yeah. Tushay. Yeah, it's downstream of being on the internet too much.

Starting point is 02:20:24 Yeah. On Monday, Secretary of Transportation and Sean Duffy announced an emergency shutdown of 110 commercial driver's license schools, which according to the White House accounted for, quote, more than 5,000 of the drivers who have failed English proficiency tests, unquote. So this will make it harder for people to work as commercial drivers. Yeah, we've got too many of those as it is, so that's good. Yeah, things are going great. A federal appeals court ruled three to one, and that's Trump appointees on that court,

Starting point is 02:21:00 that states can regulate prediction market platforms like Kaushi as gambling. This case originated from regulators in Nevada with support from their Republican governor. Obviously, the state of Nevada has an interest in keeping these platforms regulated as gambling or kicking the platforms out of their state entirely because it's Nevada. It's Las Vegas. The judges in this case wrote, quote, The substance of the sports event contracts offered on Kalshys Exchange is sports gambling, regardless of whether Kalshi calls them swaps. swaps. Kalshi's attempts to distinguish its sports event contracts from sports books betting are unpersuasive, unquote. The judges also highlighted how in court Kalshi argued that its platform

Starting point is 02:21:49 wasn't actually sports betting, but Kalshi had previously used that term to market its platform to users. I didn't go too deep into this, but yesterday that the first person to get a lifetime band from Kalshi? Did you see this? No. No. Is it Trump's teleprompter guy? No. It's even funnier. It's George Santos. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 02:22:15 He's back. Yeah. No way. Pour one out for Santos. For insider trading. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did he bat on himself getting booted out of Congress? I can only imagine him being like oh, me, right? Oh, fuck

Starting point is 02:22:32 me, right? Fuck me. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. This case here will most likely escalate to the Supreme Court. Another case which might end up going to the Supreme Court relates to this next short story. A district court

Starting point is 02:22:48 judge in California ruled that Rubio's use of the NIA to deport non-citizens based on their political speech violates the first and fifth amendments. Stephen Miller reacted to this ruling by writing, quote, a district court judge says America must admit

Starting point is 02:23:04 and keep foreigners who hate America and hate Americans. Court-ordered civilizational suicide. It will not stand unquote. Yeah. Very much in line with Stephen Miller's stance on restricting free speech

Starting point is 02:23:20 in order to save our civilization. Second to last here, I'm going to talk about a story in The Guardian, which everyone should just read the full story. It'll be at the top of our show notes. so you can check it out. Usually, keep the small things show notes at the top.

Starting point is 02:23:35 And this one will be at the top of the top because you should just read the story. Last Saturday, the Guardian reported that the Trump admin has been using a, quote, obscure legal maneuver to try to obtain private information on journalists, nonprofits, and unions, on quote. All without judicial oversight.

Starting point is 02:23:52 How the Guardian learned about this is that feds tried to get a search warrant for digital information from a Minneapolis journalist named Georgia Fort and Don Lemon. The judge denied this request, citing a lack of probable cause. And the government then withdrew its request. But weeks later, DHS requested the information from Google anyway. They went straight to Google.

Starting point is 02:24:14 And per the guardian, they used a, quote, administrative summons citing an arcane provision of federal law, 19 U.S.C.1509, dealing with customs imports, unquote. All that was needed to send the summons was a sign-off from a DHS official, there was no judge involved. Google denied the requests for information on Fort, but DHS did secretly obtain her phone records from T-Mobile with no opportunity for her to challenge the summons. For more information, people should read this full article on The Guardian.

Starting point is 02:24:51 It has other instances of DHS using this little piece of customs law. Basically, DHS is arguing that because this involves people interfering with ICE agents, it is subject to this like customs, like duties and taxes import law, which is in cases where this has been actually argued in court, has not succeeded, but they have been able to successfully get information on a number of people and have also requested information on outlets like Democracy Now, independent journalists, and nonprofits. And this follows, you know, a few weeks ago, we reported DHS obtaining information, financial information on unions in Minneapolis as well.

Starting point is 02:25:31 This is all kind of part of this same time zone in terms of the response to Operation Metro Surge. Lastly, for small things, and this will be a future episode, probably next week. Far-right provocateur Milo Yianopoulos was deported last week. Yeah, he sure was. Yeah, buddy. After promoting ICE and deportations

Starting point is 02:25:54 pretty gloriously for years and years. Yeah. Talking about wanting to masturbate while ICE tore people away from their... families. Like he specifically and directly stated like that, yeah, yeah, I don't know. I got no sympathy for the man. Certainly not. Like fuck eyes, but yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is Milo suffering the consequences of the world that he helped bring into

Starting point is 02:26:17 existence and has cheered on for years and years and years. This, you know, this should not be a thing that we have in our country. This process should not be something that exists, but it's one that Milo wants to exist and he still wants it to exist and his interview with Pierce Morgan And after his deportation, he said that the problem is not deportations, but that they're just deporting the wrong people. Yeah. After saying no one deserves this kind of treatment, he then went on to say, like, but obviously some people do.

Starting point is 02:26:42 Yes. But even that, like, this man's treatment, he still got the, like, white glove treatment. He's fine. He's fine. Yeah. Did you miss a meal, bro? Like, was they handing you stuff? Yeah, maggots in it?

Starting point is 02:26:55 No. He spent less than a day in detention. Yeah. And now he is free to go back in Britain with all of the money and resources that he has. He is not suffering the way thousands and thousands of other people have suffered. Yeah. Yeah. Now, DHS claims that he overstayed a visa.

Starting point is 02:27:13 Meanwhile, Milo himself claims that his green card was quote unquote canceled without him knowing. And that summons to immigration court were sent to an address that he no longer lives at. He never learned about the summons. That's what he's claiming. we will go over all of these in much more detail next week. Unless anyone has anything to add on that. Nope.

Starting point is 02:27:35 I think we can... Yeah, whatever. Yeah, whatever. It's funny. I think last time me and prop talked to at length, it was about Kanye West, who Milo was working for at the time. He was working for him.

Starting point is 02:27:48 Yep. And his is actually working for Kanye again. Yes. He started working with him again earlier this year. Oh, good. I think that's what he was in. Louisiana for it looked like. Quite possibly.

Starting point is 02:28:00 Yeah. Okay, obviously there's exceptions to everything, right? But within sort of like black American culture, it's, we're done talking about you,

Starting point is 02:28:13 we're done dragging, we won't even check for you. I'm like, Kanye dropped an album. And like, wait, what? Like, I don't know anyone

Starting point is 02:28:23 who heard this record. Just like dropped it. into a void. I was just like, this is how you know how thoroughly you burnt your brand. Like, honestly, as a person who bleeds hip-hop

Starting point is 02:28:38 is arguably a generational talent when it comes to production, soundscaping, like creating music, but is so completely insufferable and just so, we're just so done with you. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:28:55 that like and your boy Milo going as he should be yeah yeah that's that's what happens when you hire the man who perfected the art of the fall off

Starting point is 02:29:08 yeah to work for your company to help you in your fall off sir and you can argue he's like he sold out five days at crypto

Starting point is 02:29:20 okay but that's not five days in every city in America which is what he was doing. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah, I'll talk a little bit more about what Miles has been up to

Starting point is 02:29:34 and other issues regarding his ongoing separation from his husband and questions about his legal status next week in a special episode. But for now, let's go to a quick ad break and then return for some more news. Okay, so 27 years ago, one of the greatest rappers of all time was murdered in front of everybody. This is Tupac. And the killer just now got sentenced. One would wonder, first of all, why this is so important to put it on executive order.

Starting point is 02:30:16 And I have a theory as to why. But also, why did it take 27 years to solve this? And everybody involved except for one dude has been dead. So what is we talking about? So to understand this importance to this, I think we have to understand really just how singular Tupac was as a a person. And I think anybody born post his birth, it's like you weren't a part of the monoculture that we had all existed in in the sense that at some point in our lives, we used to all sit down

Starting point is 02:30:46 at 8 o'clock Thursday night to watch the same television show, like across the world. You know, like that just doesn't exist. So to be a star in that era means the planet is watching you. And I think Pock was such an enigma. We're talking about a guy. life who's like, his life would be a bad script. Like, if this was, somebody was writing like what he actually lived in a script, you'd be like, come on, guys. Yeah, like his last words is he was bleeding out and the police asked him who did it were something along lines of fuck you pig, right?

Starting point is 02:31:19 Like, it was something like that. Yeah, fuck you pig. Like, you're talking about a guy whose godfather was Geronimo Pratt, the legendary Black Panther. His mama and auntie of Fannie and Asada Shakur defended themselves in federal court while she was pregnant with him. The man was clearly Jada Pinkett's first love, which means that Will Smith is the consolation prize to Tupac. Like that's what I'm trying to say. Like, the man dated Madonna. He dated Quincy Jones's daughter. Like, there was just genre-defining

Starting point is 02:31:54 films. The guy lived four lives. Like, he literally lived four lives inside of the five years that he was a public figure. rapper, gangster, sex symbol, revolutionary, all before he was 26. So, backstory before we get this court case. So in 1996, honestly, the biggest star in the world, him and Notorious BIG, two biggest rappers, that rap has ever seen. Pach and his friends, part of Defro Records, Shug Knight, who was the leader of Defro, went to Vegas to a Mike Tyson fight. at the Mike Tyson fight, they see a man named Orlando. Now, Orlando was a crib, important to the story,

Starting point is 02:32:38 Shook being a notorious Compton Pai Roo Blood in charge of death row records at this fight for Mike Tyson, which only lasted 15 seconds, which was why they were so bored because the fight was done immediately. So while they were out trying to party, still kind of bored because the fight they came to see didn't happen, they run into this guy named Orlando.

Starting point is 02:32:59 Now Orlando's important because, again, he's a Crip, and a few months earlier, he snatched a chain, a death row records like gold chain, from another person at the Lakewood Mall, no less, which is very funny because Lakewood is a suburb of Long Beach. It's not even like a city. It's just, it's literally just a mall. So these murderous crips steal this chain from this guy, they see him. and they're like, hey, that's the dude that's not the homie's chain. So him and Shug go stomp the guy out. It's all, you could see it all. It's all on, you know, surveillance footage, camera footage. They see him stomp them out.

Starting point is 02:33:40 They're still on a high. They're about to go party. They want to go do their thing. The problem is the guy that they stomped out, his uncle is his man named Keefei D. Keep Kee-Dee's name in mind because Keefeedee D. Because Kee-Feedee D had a friend named Zip, I know. But Zip worked for P. Diddy, as in Sean Puffy Combs, as in the worst human we've ever met.

Starting point is 02:34:00 You know what I'm saying? So he works for him. Puffy is the leader of bad boy records who's got Biggie. They're in this amazing, like, struggle for power to be the king of hip hop. It was pretty well known, worst kept secret. Puffy wanted Shug and Pock dead, right? So Zip works for Diddy. Kee Dee gets a gun from Zip and says,

Starting point is 02:34:24 you're going to let that man, you know, stomp you out like that in front of the homies, we got to go get your get back. They get in the car, find out where he's going to be at the club, he's not there. They were going to give up. And then some girls on the side of the road at the gas station realized that that's Tupac in the car because, again, he's the biggest star on the planet at the time. They're screaming, oh my God, oh my God, it's Pock. They go, oh, dude, it's him. He's there. Flip a U-turn, roll the window down, shoot through the car, kill Tupac. Right. Now, all kinds of conspiracy theories as to how this happened because the case went unsolved, of course it was solved.

Starting point is 02:34:59 He's the biggest artist on the planet. They absolutely knew who killed this guy. It's just you didn't have enough to convict him, right? Because it's still all hearsay, it's still all this, the word of a bunch of cribs who all tell war stories all the time. You can't prove it, right? Anyway, they're waiting for a chance to actually solve this. Six months later, Biggie gets killed, right?

Starting point is 02:35:21 So now you got two of the biggest stars in the world in hip-hop murdered. Biggie's mom sues in. NYPD for not solving the case, right? Which means that, damn, we better solve this shit. Well, we kind of know who did it, but we can't prove it yet. 2008, KFEDD gets picked up on a drug charge, right? It's a federal case because he's doing a whole lot of drugs, right? So now the man's been to get put up under the jail.

Starting point is 02:35:46 The cops say to him, hey, listen, we know you got all them drugs, but can you tell us about what happened in 96? He was like, what you're talking about? They was like, we don't play dumb. You know that we know it was you. Right. And let me tell y'all something about this code that the gangsters have. You throw enough time at somebody, they're going to start singing, boy.

Starting point is 02:36:03 And Keefey sang, right? He told him the whole story, exactly what happened, all the names. Let me tell you, look, this is where we were sitting in the car. This is the homie. This is the one who actually shot. I got the gun from this person. And the gun I got from Diddy's homie told the whole thing in exchange for immunity. They was like, all right, we got you.

Starting point is 02:36:25 Good. Shut your mouth. everything's fine. They would go to trial except they can't go to trial because again, it's the word of just Keefy by himself

Starting point is 02:36:35 because everybody else that was in the car is dead. And are you going to press charges against Puffy, against Ditty? It's absolutely you can't do it. Anyway, it had been fine right after the sunset

Starting point is 02:36:45 we wouldn't have known until this fool got on YouTube. And then, guys, and listen, it can happen here podcast team. My friends, my friends, he wrote a book. He wrote a book confessing all of this, right?

Starting point is 02:37:08 He wrote a book. Perfect. He got on every podcast he could get on telling this story. Two years ago, Las Vegas PD say, hey, homie, we got to charge you for murder. He was like, what are you talking about? I got a deal. They was like, first of all, your deal was with. the feds, not with the Las Vegas,

Starting point is 02:37:29 PD, number one, and number two, the deal was for your testimony to us. You just told the planet what you did. You got on the internet and you told the planet. Sir, you confessed to a murder.

Starting point is 02:37:45 So he like, okay, well, I guess what we got to do? The trial started last month. The man's defense was, I need you to look me in my eyes. The man's defense was I was making that up for clout. I was lying the whole time.

Starting point is 02:38:00 We're seeing a lot of that in court these days. Yeah, I made it up. There's not real. I made it up. They was like, sir, we're going to put you up under the jail. So he just got convicted for murder. He was not the one that pulled the trigger. The one that pulled the trigger is dead.

Starting point is 02:38:18 But he was the one that attained the gun to make sure this happened. He had the last one left. Okay. 63 years old, about to go to jail for the rest of his life. Now, the reason why I bring this up for executive disorder is I really think this is the destiny of the Epstein case. They going to wait until everybody did except for one dude and then put him in jail. That's my theory. Thomas Massey was unwarning Congress again today reading off a bunch of the Epstein co-conspirators.

Starting point is 02:38:51 I'm not sure if you saw that bit. Yes, I did. Oh, yeah. And so what I'm trying to say is the case was solved within a week. Yeah. Like everyone knows who's guilty. Now, I'm not a gangster, okay. I'm from here, but I do not at all report to be a member of an active gang.

Starting point is 02:39:16 I don't think there's a single gang member in Los Angeles who did not know who killed Tupac. Yeah. I'm like everyone knew who did it. but you don't talk to the cops it's day job to figure it out. All right, that's your job. I'm not my job. That's your job.

Starting point is 02:39:33 That's day job to figure it out. But either way, now, officially, case closed. Tupac was murdered by Kee Fee Dee's friend who shot through the thing and now he's going to jail for a murder that happened 27 years ago. But yeah, you know,

Starting point is 02:39:50 keep fun in the police, right? Yeah. They're good at their job. They'll solve murders. I mean, not. like they can't solve like a kidnapping of an incredibly famous person's mom. Right. But, you know, eventually they solve the really obvious crimes if they're forced to.

Starting point is 02:40:06 Yeah. Yeah. I think that's why we should be funding millions of dollars to big podcast so we can continue to have people confess to murders on podcasts. Honestly. That's what we replace the police with. It's just podcast where people confess to crimes. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:40:20 It's just promise them $500 in a Vlad TV interview. and they will tell you every crime they did. That's a new take on true crime. Someone just comes on and talks about their crimes. Yeah. I think being forced to talk on the Joe Rogan experience would qualify as cruel and unusual punishment. So I don't know about that.

Starting point is 02:40:43 Constitutionally prohibited. Yeah, I don't know. It's one of the amendments. Like, okay, guys, just give me the time. Yeah. Yeah. So, moral of the story, guys, yeah, like, hey, listen, if you were about to get away with murder, just like shut the fuck up. Like, I can't stress this enough, listeners.

Starting point is 02:41:04 He was going to get away with it. If you're going to write a book, at least title it something like, if I did it. Don't say I did it. Right. If I did it. That worked great for OJ. Yeah. You got to put the if in front first.

Starting point is 02:41:15 OJ got away with murder. Like, can we just, yes, because he was like, well, if I was going to do it. All right, back to actual death. Okay, so talking of two groups of people who keep shooting each other, let's go to Venezuela first. The United States yesterday, when we're calling this on Wednesday, September 2nd, so that would be Tuesday, September 1st, announced an oil deal with Venezuela,

Starting point is 02:41:41 and when I say Venezuela, I mean specifically with Delci Rodriguez. The way we found out was that the president truce quote, Breaking News, that parts in block capitals. The United States of America has just entered into an agreement with the country of Venezuela, countries capitalized, I'll just do the block caps. On the biggest oil deal in world history, that one's in block caps. At my direction, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegas working closely with highly respected interim president of Venezuela, Delci Rodriguez,

Starting point is 02:42:12 and through a partnership with private business, have secured majority U.S. control of more than 65 billion barrels of proven oil reserves in Venezuela, at no con. to the American taxpayer. This historic transaction more than doubles, that's in block caps. American oil reserves greatly increases our oil supply and will substantially lower gas prices for all Americans long into the future while helping, it's not a full stop, I'm struggling, while helping to continue to set Venezuela on a course toward tremendous success and great prosperity. This transaction will greatly strengthen the already growing relationship between Venezuela and

Starting point is 02:42:43 the United States. Thank you for your attention to this groundbreaking matter, make America great again, President Donald J. Trump. I wouldn't pay too much attention to the claims he's making here. We know that the United States is planning to partner with some kind of private business entity to develop oil fields. It seems like from reporting, they will take 55% of the effective output and have a right to buy oil at cost. If you remember when they first kidnapped Maduro, Trump summoned oil executives to the White House, and none of them were exactly chomping at the bit to go. drill baby drill in Venezuela, right?

Starting point is 02:43:22 That's because the infrastructure is damaged, and the crude oil is among the heaviest and dirtiest on the planet. They would just rather go almost anywhere else, right? They have to do more work to get this oil in worse conditions. I want to recap it a bit where we're at. The United States is effectively running Venezuela as a vassal state now. It literally receives revenue from Venezuela and exports and then sends it back via private banks.

Starting point is 02:43:48 There was a really good NYT article on Delsey and Rubio's relationship that made the analogy that this is like a parent giving a child, what do you call it, an allowance, right? We call it pocket money. The United States deployed hundreds of troops to Venezuela after devastating earthquake. Allegedly, according to this NYT report, Rubio has an effective veto on government appointments. He decides who gets sanctions waivers to work there. He and Delsey send each other birthday messages and selfie. Venezuela in the meantime has quietly wound down its cooperation with Russia

Starting point is 02:44:22 and it coordinated, Venezuelan intelligence coordinated with the US military when they struck Tren der Agua personnel. They have forced Venezuelan ministers to delete tweets condemning the US attack on Iran. Just for reference to people, Iran has been a long-time ally of the regime in Venezuela in so much as we can see. There is continuity, obviously, from Delci, from Maduro to Delci, but things are very much changing.

Starting point is 02:44:46 Delcy has run drafts of tweets past Marco Rubio before posting them. Okay. Oh, boy. Sheesh. All right. When there were reports that DOJ was building a case against her, she approached him for assurance. And it seems like that directly resulted in Trump frothing. Do you remember a few months ago now Trump trothed how great she was and how high, yeah.

Starting point is 02:45:10 It seems like that was the assurance that she was asking for. So it came in the form of the president posting. as he did again yesterday about how great she is. The Posters Republic. Yes. What incentive does the United States have to move towards democracy in Venezuela when it is getting everything at once and it doesn't have to deal with the possibility of the president changing,

Starting point is 02:45:34 of the legislature changing, right? The U.S. is effectively running Venezuela as an informal colony. As it has done in all of its colonies, it is not inclined to give those people more rights. I would focus less on this deal and more on the fact that Trump is very clearly trying to lean on gas prices. And the reason he's doing that is what we're going to talk about next, his ongoing disastrous war with Iran. So the US this week is once again on a path to escalation in Iran. On the 30th of August, a new round of strikes inside Iran began. This followed the kind of reduced

Starting point is 02:46:16 bombing activity that we spoke about last week, right? The United States says it struck launches for rockets which were preparing to deploy mines into the Strait of Hormuz, which Trump has claimed is not mined. In response, Iran launched ballistic missiles at U.S. bases and allies in the region, and a U.S. source told Fox News that, quote, nearly all of them were intercepted. Yeah, all right, great. Well, that's good. You want to know that most of the missiles didn't make it? Nearly all is all the missiles you need to stop. That's what I want out of a missile to. defence system. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 02:46:48 What it means, of course, is that United States has used more of its interceptors, right, which it is already dwindling its supply. The Iranians, meanwhile, struck four vessels in the Strait of Hormuz this week, perhaps soon to be renamed the Strait of America. It does not seem that America has much say on what goes on there. In one incident on Monday, which I saw a UK MTO, so it's American Trade Office, right? that's kind of the entity which puts out these like safety briefings to mariners. A tanker was hit with three projectiles, which is the first time I can recall in this conflict

Starting point is 02:47:24 that happening, right? Like there's a difference between like, we will strike your vessel to show you that we can strike your vessel and hopefully cause people to stop coming through here out of fear and hitting it three times, which seems to me like maybe an attempt to sink a vessel, right? Like that's an escalation. In response, on Tuesday, 1st September, the US began another series of bombings with the President Truthing. The United States is, as we speak, striking Iranian targets near the Strait of Pormuz. Strikes are large and powerful in their retaliation for the Iranian's failed attempt to adding sea mines to distrait, which currently has no mines.

Starting point is 02:48:00 They have been completely removed or detonated. And the Iranians shooting eight missiles all successfully knocked down at our military base in Jordan. If the failed nation of Iran retaliates for this very justified attack, they'll be hitting. again at a much harder and at higher level. But it will not be the biggest attack of them all that is waiting in the wings. And when it is over, there will be very little left of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And then he signs it. He also did another one where he said, it's a failed nation. They have no eight Navy. They have an air force for inflation is 300%. Their leadership is disarray. And then he's blaming fake news for giving you other impressions. He also tweeted a

Starting point is 02:48:37 shit tier AI slop video of missiles hitting Kag Island where the observer was in a helicopter with the missiles flying over their head. It was very bad. What? Yeah. Prop, have you, have you not seen this?

Starting point is 02:48:53 I will drop this in the chat for you to watch. Yeah, let's get a live react. Okay. The video is its own thing. The caption he used for this, or whoever is running his account used for this, is also, I think it's kind of incredible. Smithereens.

Starting point is 02:49:08 Harg Island being blown to smithereens. President DJT. Yeah. It is interesting that that one was not signed. Thank you for your attention on this mat. That's a good point. It looks like a cutscene from like a command and conquer game. Yes.

Starting point is 02:49:25 That is exactly what I thought of. Why is this person lowering themselves into the explosions? Yeah, that doesn't make a lot of sense. I don't understand why you would do this. Yeah. Yeah, I wouldn't want to be there. Who is shooting these missiles? What is happening?

Starting point is 02:49:41 Yeah, there's like infinite secondaries. Every like everything that explodes lands and then explodes again. Like the way the AI understands explosions is, it's fascinating shit. Just on a very basic level, like this is like an interesting thing for a president to do. I know this is Trump, you know, he posts shit from his account all the time. Yeah. But the idea of a president posting of semi-photorealistic, obviously we can tell, But it's in my photo realistic video.

Starting point is 02:50:08 Another location being hit by ostensibly our own military is interesting. I just, oh, man. Like, a more advanced version of this could be an actual video that's indistinguishable from real footage, at least on a service-level glance. That's like, you know, the president saying that X location has been hit. Yeah. And like, no, it hasn't. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:50:33 This is kind of sloppy and bad. And it's not clear he's actually trying to convince people that this actually happened. Yeah. But the very basic components of this are interesting and troubling. Yeah, from the commander-in-chief, it's not great stuff. Yeah. Clearly, like, he's enjoying watching little AI videos. He posted another one today of...

Starting point is 02:50:52 Lake America. Well, yeah, he's kicking the sign for Lake Ontario. He walks up. He's carrying, you know, it's a wooden sign on a couple of fours by fours. He kicks the sign over. At that point, one of the legs... on the science suddenly becomes shorter when it's on the ground. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:51:08 And then YMCA starts playing. And he dances in his characteristic fashion. Yeah. It's just so embarrassing, man. He's having a great time with the AI machine that someone gave him. Yeah. So let's talk about what these mean, right? He's clearly losing patience with this war

Starting point is 02:51:27 and he's worrying about how it's going to impact the midterms. So much of what we're seeing now is like we're going to talk about other stuff with voting rights later, right? DHS is clearly winding up for the midterms in blue states. Yeah, I'll be commenting on that a bit. Yeah, we can see the work requirements

Starting point is 02:51:45 for federal benefits not hitting until January 27. Like, they are still worried about these midterms, right? Yeah. Meanwhile, they are still fucking up in Iran. I saw a video last night of an Iranian missile hitting some thinking, Jordan. Like, this is one of the ones that wasn't most of them, I guess, because it clearly impacted the ground.

Starting point is 02:52:03 Iran claims a shutdowner. a Reaper. Last night, United States missiles, not for the first time in American history, hit a wedding. Yeah, we've done a bit of that. Yeah. Yeah. This was like a defining moment for Obama's air war, right, for his drone campaign. Like, yeah. When people talk about Obama and how he was a disappointment in foreign policy terms, this is what they talk about, right? Like, this is the moment. Yeah. And he bombed a wedding, yeah. Yeah. We did that again. This time, a weapon fragment at the scene show, I think sort of slam ER or slammer. Please email me, Navy people. Tell me how you referred to the missile.

Starting point is 02:52:45 Boeing has touted it as the, quote, most accurate missile on the Navy's Arsenal. It punched straight through the roof of this building. Ballouche weddings are really big. There were hundreds of people there. There were at least 50 people injured, at least five of them dead, including a child. I've seen videos where, like, you can see children's shoes, little tiny. toddlers' wedding shoes among the rubble, right? Damn.

Starting point is 02:53:07 Yeah, this is pretty fucked up, and the images that will come out of it will not look good. Yeah. Funny talking of Iranian missile strikes, I want to speak about this. Discourse about this missile. This missile is generally referred to as a castle breaker.

Starting point is 02:53:23 The Persian name is Kaibar Shakan, I believe. Castle is referring to a specific castle from the Quranic history, and that's relevant only because this missile is designed to hit Israel. That is what this is for. It's a medium-range ballistic missiles, something like a 900-mile range. Recently, though, there's been a lot of reporting that this is some kind of new and

Starting point is 02:53:43 groundbreaking thing that Iran's been dropping in the last few weeks, and they have had them for years. We know this because they unveiled it on live TV. They literally, like, whipped a tablecloth off it and were like, there it is! Which Iran does this a lot with its weapon systems, right? Yeah. But I'll include a link to a Russia Today post about it. they do seem to be likely the missiles that killed several U.S. service people in Jordan in July.

Starting point is 02:54:10 But in part the reason that they were the missiles that snuck through because they're the missiles that Iran uses a lot. Iranian state propaganda is making a big deal of talking about these missiles. They do this occasionally with their weapon systems, right? They portray it as like, oh, the American Patriot has nothing on this missile system that we have. But they are effective, right? They're smallish. They're maneuverable.

Starting point is 02:54:32 and in the terminal phase of their trajectory, they maneuver, which makes them harder to intercept, right? Like, if it's just doing like a ballistic arc, then it's a math problem to intercept it, right? But if it's maneuvering, from what I understand that, that makes the intercept more complicated. They use these in Syria soon after I left, actually. This isn't some secret brand-new technology,

Starting point is 02:54:57 but it is a technology that is effective. And the reason it's continuing to be effective is that despite it's more than six months of war, the United States has failed to destroy their launchers and failed to destroy their missile supplies, right? And that is why they're still able to strike United States bases all around the region, which they have been doing last night,

Starting point is 02:55:18 and they will do again. Tonight, I imagine, and as the US supply of munitions continues to dwindle, this is going to become a bigger and bigger problem for the United States. What an L. Talking of big problems, we haven't done it, break in a while. And we're back.

Starting point is 02:55:46 So at the end of March 26, which is I think like 37 years ago today, at least it feels like that. It feels like it. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to create a national list of verified eligible voters.

Starting point is 02:56:00 Mail in voting would be restricted to the people on this list, which would be essentially an arbitrary list of whoever the administration thought should be on it, right? It was going to be compiled with help from DHS based on like citizenship roles. voting law experts immediately complained that this violated the Constitution for a variety of reasons, and some people have said essentially this is an attempt at a coup.

Starting point is 02:56:21 Under the order, DHS was supposed to work with the Social Security Administration to create lists for each state. Ballots would be given new envelopes with special barcodes for tracking, and federal funds would be withheld from states that refuse to comply with this illegal order. As with many Trump executive orders, this one was immediately met by a federal judge who issued a temporary restraining order that blocked it from going into effect. Trump appealed, and the whole situation remains legally unsettled to this day. Despite the fact that the order has been halted, earlier this week, Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat,

Starting point is 02:56:53 announced that a U.S.PS whistleblower had come forth to assert that the Postal Service was still moving forward to comply with the halted order anyway, according to an article by the AP, quote, The disclosure from the unidentified whistleblower contends that the Postal Service has been scrambling to try and build a complex system that would normally take a year or more in only three months. sometimes in defiance of the judge's orders halting work. The goal is to have it ready for use in the midterm elections. The disclosure contends that, due to the new procedures,

Starting point is 02:57:20 a single scanning error in a batch of tens of thousands of ballot envelopes could prevent any from reaching voters. It details a system that election officials have already warned could not be implemented before the first mail ballots begin going out Friday in North Carolina. The Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans, Blumenthal told reporters in advance of releasing the whistleblower information. this administration seems hell-bent on changing the framework on casting ballots in this country, clearly for political reasons.

Starting point is 02:57:47 Now, for its part, the U.S. Postal Service contends that the judge's restraining order still gave them explicitly the right to develop online tools for states who wanted to voluntarily abide by the order. Even if this is true, it's a massive issue because the changes mandated by the EO are hideously unconstitutional, and no state should be allowed to carry them out. And to make that point, here's a quote from the actual. whistleblower complaint to Blumenthal. When ballots are submitted to U.S.PS in large volume batches, if any one ballot in the batch

Starting point is 02:58:18 cannot be verified against the portal, all ballots in that batch will be rejected. For example, if a state election official brings a batch of 10,000 ballots to U.S.PS, and U.S.PS is unable to match just one of those ballots against the portal because, for example, someone had recently changed their name after marriage or they've moved, then U.S.PS would refuse to mail the remaining 9,999 ballots as well. That's what the whistleblower is contending about the new USPS rules regarding yes, the barcodes and the portal system. Yeah. Like this is how he's describing the system as working, right?

Starting point is 02:58:54 Yeah. He continues, USPS expects the state to take back the entire batch to cure the issue with the single ballot. Should the slapdash portal mistakenly mark a ballot as unverified, there is no clear process by which state election officials or voters themselves can challenge the rejection. The rule simply vaguely states that they will be informed of the escalation procedures should they decide to challenge a rejection. Voters intending to cast ballots by mail may not even be aware that their ballots have been rejected or were part of a rejected badge until it is too late to secure an alternative ballot or vote in person. Now, I would call this a clear attempt to steal an election, or not necessarily to steal,

Starting point is 02:59:32 but at least you create doubt around the midterm elections, right? This is something of a desperate Hail Mary by Trump and his cronies as the numbers to them have gotten much, much worse nationwide. And if individual states are allowed to do this, even if the TROs remain in place, and this is halted from going forward nationwide before the election, if individual states are allowed to use this system, then we could see countless Democrat votes tossed out in red states

Starting point is 02:59:57 where many dims are doing well for the first time in several election cycles. And I think a large part of the goal here, beyond just blunt disenfranchisement, is creating chaos, right? Because chaos is almost as good as outright tossing out vote. It creates doubt and it provides opportunity a period of time in which the administration can set narratives about how the election went in an uncertain election night. That's a big part of, I think, why they're doing this is to provide opportunities to where they can throw doubt on the system.

Starting point is 03:00:25 Here's another relevant quote from the complaint. According to the whistleblower, USPS's effort to develop and deploy the portal has been rushed, risky and haphazard because leadership has demanded an impossible time frame. And an effort to meet impossible deadlines, USPS has eliminated. standard and needed testing, thereby creating a substantial risk of a catastrophic failure of the system that could derail the midterm elections. Quote, the teams building the new portal and accompanying IT were siloed such that when elements were brought together, the teams were unaware of various developments, creating

Starting point is 03:00:55 more work. There were also no clear written requirements, leaving workers to glean requirements from opaque comments at meetings. As late as August 21st, 2026, workers were still receiving new requirements for the project. Without clear guidance, different team members continue to have different understandings of how the system is supposed to work. Now, it's good that this whistleblower came forward, and courage like this is one of, if not the only ways, that we're going to have a chance to catch and stop schemes like this from coming to fruition. It is too early to know what the fallout from this revelation is going to be.

Starting point is 03:01:27 That is still very much ongoing. This all just came out in the last couple of days. So we'll update you on this in the future as this evolves. But I wanted to talk a little bit more about some other midterm fuckery related news, some stuff that's a little bit less dark, right? General Dan Cain, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in a letter to Senator Alyssa Slotkin, a Democrat early this week, promising her, quote, The Joint Force has no plans to send federal military personnel or federalized members of the National Guard to polling places during the 2020 elections. Likewise, the Joint Force has no plans to use such personnel to seize ballots, voting machines, or other election-related materials. Now, this was in response to a request Slotkin's office sent Kane and Pete Hegseth, asking for confirmation that the Pentagon would not interfere with the election by having soldiers at polling places or seizing ballots.

Starting point is 03:02:16 I'd call this a partial positive story, right? It's good that he's saying that. It's not great that elected Democrats are so worried about this that they felt the need to ask. It's not just the military we have to contend with here, because back in February, DHS Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity, Heather Honey, told elected dims any suggestion that ICE would be. present at polling locations is simply not true. And that sounded great, but on September 1st of 2026, just a couple of days ago, Homeland Security Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen made some concerning statements to reporters in New York City. Yeah. Per Politico, quote, The Homeland Security Secretary said that ICE isn't there to patrol the polling areas, we're there to enforce specific threats. He added, however, that reports of specific undocumented

Starting point is 03:02:57 immigrants at a location could be a reason for ICE to deploy. The only reason why we would be at polling places is that there is a threat to that polling place or we're serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down, he said. ICE's job is immigration, customs enforcement. That's their job. If we're serving a warrant, we will be where we need to be. And that does leave the door open to some degree of intimidation in Fakhari at polls, because we've all seen over the last two years that ICE regularly take being brown as a sign that someone might be in a legal alien in need of tasing an arrest. And when the agency was asked for more clarification on Mullen's statement. Ice responded, ice is not planning operations targeting polling locations.

Starting point is 03:03:34 Ice conducts intelligence-driven targeted enforcement. And if an active public safety threat endangered a public location, they may be arrested as a result of that targeted enforcement action. So again, what's going to happen? It's hard to say. So far, DHS and the military are saying the right things. But certainly with ICE, there remains open the possibility of some targeted ice fuckery at polling locations around the country. So something to keep an eye on as well. Yeah, no parts of me trust them in any way that their word means anything. And it sounds like exactly what you said. This is some sort of word judo.

Starting point is 03:04:15 We're like, we're not planning to be there for the purpose of- Keeping the door open. Yeah. Yeah, you know what I'm saying? Well, we told you we wasn't coming for the purpose it is. We're here for that. And again, you know, I don't expect. national rollout of ice, but there's some really close state elections and maybe, you know.

Starting point is 03:04:35 Yeah. There were people who were attempting to do this six years ago in 2020 in swing states, right? Yeah. And like that very narrowly avoided happening through the intervention, I think, of a couple of members of Congress. But like, this is something that has clearly been like a, I guess a strategy, right? It's not a hard one to come up with, but it's, it's, it's a thing that we should be really fucking worried about. Yeah. Yep. To clarify one thing regarding my reporting last week on the plans for this UPS

Starting point is 03:05:11 implementation of the executive order, there was two injunctions that were dropped. Yes. Last week. Yeah. And then after the USPS published the rule change, a new lawsuit was initiated by like over half a dozen states. And then a judge, granted, granted a TRO in regards to that new lawsuit. And there will be a hearing tomorrow, which for us is September 3rd, that will determine if there's going to be a permanent injunction. Yeah. And then based on whatever happens at that hearing, the Trump administration will also

Starting point is 03:05:43 likely appeal to the Supreme Court. And it's really just a matter of, like, days in terms of ballots being sent out. Yeah. It's cutting it super close. And like they're trying to, you know, make this be very close. Right. Yeah, yeah. Usually I can at least follow the logic of the Supreme Court,

Starting point is 03:05:58 but this one I just kind of, whether I agree with them or not, I was like, at least I understand how you got there. But they're just like, I don't know, this ain't illegal yet, but let them cook. No, this seems like one of the more partisan or subservient to Trump kind of type orders that they've had. Yeah. Like, okay, a little bit of our like personal information, but basically we've been waiting for the insurance to, it happened already, my wife needed a particular medical procedure.

Starting point is 03:06:28 This is to like prevent a stroke. You know what I'm saying? And so essentially they was like, well, we can't approve this preventative procedure unless you already have a stroke. Let me get this straight, fam. Perfect. Okay, just say it to yourself again.

Starting point is 03:06:48 Yeah. Like, so they got to, so they got to break a law before, You could say what they're doing is illegal. That is a fair interpretation of the Supreme Court's logic. That's what the Supreme Court just said. They got to break a law before we can tell you what they did is illegal. Okay, okay. Yeah, that does seem to be where we're at.

Starting point is 03:07:12 It's great. Yeah. For our final story, let's talk about Data Republican. Data Republican is a relatively popular conservative influencer or propagandist on X the Everything app. But this isn't just a story about Twitter drama, trust me. Data Republican has almost a million followers on X. Her account started to gain traction in the early days of Musk's doge by her posts that are kind of like data journalism. I use that term very loosely. Using manipulated data to justify Doge in a very questionable way. And now she produces content,

Starting point is 03:07:51 which is essentially like open source, like OSINT style data journalism. four mega or a far right audience. Her bio reads, I'm just a tool builder and has a quote from Musk saying that she's worth following, as well as a quote from Charlie Kirk saying, you're a must follow. Last week, Data Republican published a web tool, mapping out thousands of Antifa, anarchist, and left-wing websites

Starting point is 03:08:20 from across the globe hosted through no blogs. And as we discussed last week, the collective that runs the infrastructure behind NoBlogs was designated as a specially designated global terrorist. Data Republican basically scraped every NoBlog's site that was online as of last week and created an index of posts. If they host doxing information, calls to violence, and if they have any financial information or donation links, as well as, quote, institutional affiliations to other organizations such as the SPLC and any connections to other no blog's sites. She describes a tool like this, quote, introducing an interactive map of

Starting point is 03:09:01 7,000 plus blogs across many countries and languages, anti-fascist, anarchist, ecological, prisoner solidarity, migrant border, revolutionary, everyone classified, geolocated, and searchable down to the verbatim quote. Verified quotes, every claim is a receipt, their words, not mine. 4,000 plus blogs pinned to a live world map, zoom in to your own city. Many blogs classified, quote-unquote, operational. Click any blog, author, or sell,

Starting point is 03:09:30 and walk the network one tie at a time. No grant funded this. No client asked for it. I do this for free on my own time because someone should, unquote. I have a little picture of the tool here below, which was titled Trump Blogs. That's what she calls her tool to start.

Starting point is 03:09:48 search hold these different sites. She has little nodes on this map that are labeled mainstream authority for groups like the SPLC or the ADL. She has another node for Antifa slash watchdog research, which she calls naming shops, basically, like, you know, info sites where anti-fascist researchers will name fascists in their area. Yeah. She's another nodes for movement legal defense, for like official political parties,

Starting point is 03:10:14 mostly like international-based parties, and for movement infrastructure. Now, a few days prior, she posted a similar network map for the DSA, inspired largely by Marco Rubio's Cuba conspiracy document. This quote-unquote DSA explorer allows you to navigate an alleged web of connections between DSA members, journalists, politicians, and other left-wing organizations, other quote-unquote anti-imperialist organizations, foreign political parties, and Islamic terror groups. Data Republican has a few projects like this on, her website. Other projects include the National Endowment for Democracy Explorer,

Starting point is 03:10:53 quote, AI generated summaries of NED's Journal of Democracy Articles, authors, and NGOs, unquote. Perfect. She also has another database of nonprofit NGOs, their employees, and their volunteers, and whether they receive government funding. For instance, she has pages on 92 nonprofits focused on combating hunger. Truly, the worst of the worst being documented here. Yeah. She also has database of grant funding, a 2024 voter turnout analysis, and a link to her book on NGOs and USAID, published under her real name, Jenica Pounds, with a forward by Doge's own Big Balls. Oh, my God.

Starting point is 03:11:35 Is he credited using his legal name there or Big Bulls? No, he is credited as Big Balls. Like I read it, he is credited as Big Falls. At the bottom of the Data Republican website is that, Lakers, to a nearly 5,000-word essay from her pastor titled The Historical Case for Christianity. Last April, Jenica Pounce, date a Republican,

Starting point is 03:12:00 became a credentialed member of Hague Seth's revamped Pentagon Press Corps. Remember when he kicked out all his news outlets out of the Pentagon last March and replaced them with right-wing cheerleaders? Yeah. Pound's admission into the press corps was part of this effort.

Starting point is 03:12:15 And then last month, something odd happened. in the Pentagon Press Corps, Jenica Pounds, Data Republican, accused someone from the State Department of trying to entrap her into leaking old Biden-era documents about Cuba by presenting the documents as an exclusive scoop.

Starting point is 03:12:35 I'm going to read a quick text exchange that Data Republican posted on Twitter. This is her, quote, just to be clear, you want me to leak the material you gave to me, unredacted, question mark, happy to help your efforts. the person that she was texting to responded, quote,

Starting point is 03:12:51 it already contains all necessary redactions. If you'd rather report on already open source stuff, that's fine too. But I wanted to give you the option of quote unquote breaking the story as a sort of gift, unquote. Okay. So as data Republican, Jenica Pounce posted a now deleted tweet reading, It's not okay when the deep state sets you up to commit a crime. I have never been more angry in my life. Meanwhile, the Undersecretary of State, Sarah Rogers,

Starting point is 03:13:23 who oversees Voice of America, basically government-funded media, replied to Pound's thread about this alleged entrapment and tried to explain that this wasn't a deep state plot trying to trick Pounds into committing treason, but rather a sincere offer from her, Sarah Rogers, to just publish some exclusive documents. quote, LOL, these are my text messages and documents.

Starting point is 03:13:48 The quote unquote markings are FOIA redactions required for voluntary disclosure. To prove this isn't a quote unquote trap, I will happily disclose the documents myself. Here they are. And then Sarah Rogers posted a thread of those documents. Also, it's funny that she calls just redactions, FOIA redactions, because these were not FOIA documents,

Starting point is 03:14:09 but she just refers to those as FOIA redactions. Just an interesting note here. Yeah. So essentially, Data Republican just botched a scoop because of her weird paranoia and because she doesn't really know how to do journalism, even like administration propaganda journalism. And in the midst of this shit show, like this caused a lot of drama, like on like, you know, MAGA Twitter.

Starting point is 03:14:32 But in the midst of this shit show, the far right news aggregator account, America First News, claimed that Pounds wasn't just a Pentagon, Court journalist, but was actually a, quote, Department of War employee, unquote. A big claim. And then a few days later, the Pentagon confirmed that Pounds was indeed an employee of the Department of War, the so-called. This is a statement from the DoD or the DOW, quote, Ms. Jenica Pounds serves at the Department of War as a special government employee and is no longer a credentialed journalist at the Pentagon.

Starting point is 03:15:12 Her press credentials expired in June 26, and she did not seek a renewal. She began working for the department in July 26, unquote. So that's pretty wild, and I will invite you to return back to this map of like Antifa anarchist no blogs websites that Pounds created while she was a special government employee of the Department of War.

Starting point is 03:15:35 Same thing with this DHS list. Same thing with this, you know, voter analysis. Although the voter analysis, I think, was an older piece, but it still hosted on her website. But both this no blogs list and this network map of, like, DSA were created and published as public tools while she worked and is still working for the Department of War. And then a few days after this was revealed, the Washington Post published an article revealing that Pounds was not the only right-wing influencer secretly working for Pete Hague Seth. This is a quote from the post. quote, quote, the Pentagon has secretly installed several conservative military veterans with large eyedline followings in government roles, declining to disclose their assignments as they amplify

Starting point is 03:16:16 defense secretary Pete Higgsett's viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration, unquote. So according to the Washington Post, at least three retired colonels who now boast hundreds of thousands of followers each on XE Everything app, have been assigned to civilian roles in the office of Anthony Tata. the Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. And this office has been focusing on how to make the military less woke specifically. Man. These influencers are listed as either special government employees or, quote,

Starting point is 03:16:48 highly qualified experts, which can work on a longer term basis than special government employees who can only work for a few months. And like these are influencers who are actively working on policy, on military policy, on how to make the military less woke, while also posting on their big accounts and in major news publications, you know, like the Daily Caller and as well as Washington Post itself, one of these influencers had a letter to the editor published in the post, like recently. And so they're doing all this and posting about how awesome Pete Haguesteth is

Starting point is 03:17:21 while never disclosing that they also work for Pete Hegssef. Yeah. They work for T.XF. Great. And like, again, Twitter sucks. But unfortunately, Twitter is still very consequential to national politics. It's one of the primary ways the administration communicates with the people and the public

Starting point is 03:17:40 digitally. And as a platform, it's important not just to this administration, but especially for the so-called Department of War. We've seen pictures from like live military operations that show that Hengseth has Twitter feeds pulled up on screen while special operations are underway. Demand is watching Twitter. Yeah, like in the situation room.

Starting point is 03:18:00 Yeah, they're checking hashtags. And now they're really, recruiting staff from Twitter, including staff who are building publicly accessible tools mapping out the left from the DSA and Palestinian Solidarity Organizations to Antifa, you know, info blogs and anarchist reportbacks. She's building those databases while covertly working for the Pentagon. And I want to close with this one reply she made to her posts regarding the no blog's tool. Quote, in the course of building this website, a number of anti-finding. fascists were identified. I

Starting point is 03:18:36 disclosed them, but not on the website directly to the USA government, unquote. The government that she works for, that she is working for. Yeah, yeah. How would you have that direct channel? When I let myself think too long about like,

Starting point is 03:18:51 follow me, what frustrates me about climate change is the fact that we saw it coming a hundred years ago and just watch this slow moving death. And we're like, guys, it's on its way. This is where here's evidence. Here's what's happening. It's coming. If we get above two degrees Celsius up or we're above two degrees Celsius. Like this, what we're trying to, it's right there. It's

Starting point is 03:19:14 right there. I feel like that when Pete Hackseth said, I'm going to fire everybody from the press core. You're not allowed to come. And you're going, he's going to hire his own press people. Guys, he's going to, they're going to put him on the, he's going to, she works for that. She works for him. Like, it's just, I, I, it's just so. this is the slowest moving cool like it's just it's the slowest moving cool that you all see hey hey hey

Starting point is 03:19:44 excuse me excuse me they're going to hire their own press and put they're going to send all of our names to the government oh there it is I just yeah one of the things that gets me the most about this is how literally days ago she was you know ranting about the deep state

Starting point is 03:20:02 you know of which She is part. Well, she is a secret, like, covert, undisclosed special government employee. That's you. She is you and you are it. People will often talk about like sci ops or sci-war, right? And they be like an individual person is a sci-op. And generally that's not how psychological warfare works, right?

Starting point is 03:20:23 But like, now they're doing it. That is what they're doing now. You're the thing. You're the thing. Yeah. It's great stuff. Oh, and one other thing that I do want to briefly mention, and this could just be a curious coincidence, but late last week, No Blogs suffered a hack.

Starting point is 03:20:41 A few days after the group that runs No Blogs, the IA Collective, was declared a specially designated global terrorist. The collective published a statement saying that the hack lasted about two hours, during which the title of No Blogs was changed to Trump blogs, and the attacker, quote, may have had access to the user's database. Now, Trump blogs is also what Data Republican calls her no-blogs tracking tool. Now, I'm not saying that Data Republican scraped NoBlog's data by hacking the website, but these two events did happen around the same time, which could just be a curious coincidence.

Starting point is 03:21:28 There is no direct evidence that Data Republican is the one who hacked no blogs, and the use of Trump blogs as a term isn't very original for one, and could just be a sort of inside joke, troll, or reference. But considering the fact that Data Republican secretly works for the Pentagon, I thought this is something worth mentioning coincidence or not. You can draw your own conclusions. That should do it for us here at It Could Happen Here. If you want to email us, you can do it.

Starting point is 03:22:02 It's cool zone tips at proton.me. Prop, do you have any other podcasts that you'd like us to listen to? Hey, it'd be great, actually. We have a cousin podcast called The Politics with Prop, where we dive into not the breadth of topics that were covered here, but a couple topics that may make you scratch your head a little bit. I feel like what they're saying is, A, B, and C, and I get to go, yes, you're right.

Starting point is 03:22:26 That's exactly what they're saying. So, yeah, tap in with me. I hope politics with prop every Wednesday and Friday. Yeah. 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.

Starting point is 03:22:47 It Could Happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Coolzone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast. or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

Starting point is 03:23:09 I survived nine months in captivity, 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. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes, to make it out alive.

Starting point is 03:23:32 Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement agency and does not have body cameras. It's real.

Starting point is 03:23:51 Black farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything. It's raw. And I'm sitting here going, they are playing y'all for fools. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the IHart radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 03:24:12 Hey, it's Bobby Bones. Join me and former NFL quarterback Matt Castle every Wednesday on our podcast. Lots to say with me Bobby Bones and Matt Castle. You're in training camp and the rookie quarterback has one good throwing session in front of the media. Suddenly, everybody online says he should start over you week one. How do you handle this? You just go back out to practice the next day. I wait for them to mess up.

Starting point is 03:24:35 Listen to lots to say with Bobby Bones and Matt Castle on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. College football will hijack your weekend, ruin your sleep, and break your heart. And that's why we make the Solid Verbal College Football Show. I'm Ty Hildenbrand. He's Dan Rubinstein. Every week, we preview the games that matter

Starting point is 03:24:55 and the storylines that are going to ignite your group chat. And you can join us in the aftermath as we react to what happened, why it matters, and how the sport went completely bonkers yet again. Listen to the Solid Verbal College Football Show on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.

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Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 248

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