Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 85

Episode Date: May 27, 2023

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

So, there is a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Yeah, like does the US government really have alien technology? Or what about the future of AI? What happens when computers actually learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events. Listen to stuff they don't want you to know

on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your favorite shows. What's up y'all? I'm Brian Ford, Artisan Baker and host of the new podcast FlakyBiscuit. I'm going to help y'all learn how to cook and bake new things as we get to know our guests through their favorite nostalgic meal. If you are ever at a place in your life where things are too busy or your head gets too big, having a meal like this,

it reminds you of who you were and also who you still are. Listen to Flaky Biscuit every Tuesday on the i Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Alphabet Boys is a podcast that takes you inside undercover investigations. In the second season, we've got an alphabet soup with the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI all mixed up in the same case. So you do personal security all over the world and you have somebody call you and say can you get renamed and done for this guy in Colombia? No, no, no, no, no. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm steel, alphabet boys, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened

is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads 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 gonna be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. What's... Are we recording? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What's... The episode? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's... The episode? What are we recording? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. What's the episode started now? Yeah. I was going to say something, something to do with Texas. But to be honest, you know, why do we do this? Why do we let ourselves, you know, get famous for saying a particular bit and then just keep repeating it over and over again. Are we so creatively bankrupt

that there's nothing else we can do but repeat our greatest hits in order to recapture some of the excitement that we felt as younger men. Anyway, my co-hosts on this episode are here. Yes, James Stout and me along. Welcome to it, it could happen here. I'm glad you're doing so well.

We're all doing great. James, you've just been having a searing emotional experience at the border. I have, yeah. And everyone else is busy living in the United States, which is its own searing emotional experience. And today, today we're gonna be talking about the most and least American state, Texas.

Hazar. Who here? Yeah, lovely place. Yeah, who here's spent a lot of time in Texas. Garrison, you lived in the Dallas area for a while, right? I have. Not a lot, but I've made my visit to Texas over the years with you, even in the murder house. You, you and I have quaffed many a Shinerbok together. James, many. Um, okay.

I guess we'll move into the fucking episode. So, uh, there was, uh, there was a, uh, uh, an email sent out by TexasDemocrats.org recently with the title Texas moves from solid red to battleground. Um, sure, you know, like clockwork, a lot of Democrats got very excited. Um, and I made a couple of people made posts being like, Hey, this is the same thing that happens every single election. They are never right. Texas is never a battleground. And it always costs an insane amount of money. It is a con by DC political consultants to get your money and pump it into something that will fill up their

coffers and not achieve anything of value for the state of Texas or for the Democrats nationwide. And this makes people very angry for two reasons. One, they tend to interpret it as saying, abandoned Texas and the people there, which is not the statement I was making or anyone else was making. And number two, everyone kind of obsessively starts pointing out like, look, look at how over the last 30 years, you know, the things of narrowed in Texas and the proportion of like democratic votes is, you know, raised. This is, this is winnable.

We can do it. We can do it. Um, we're going to talk today about why the, anyone who talks to you about flipping Texas as a political goal that you should give money to is conning you. And not only conning you, but making it actually more difficult for Democrats to win both in Texas and nationwide. That's the premise of the episode, everybody. Here's, here's how Bernie can still win though at the very end.

We will give you an in. Yeah, we're going to let you know. He's got a shot. Look, look, if he, if he is capable of putting another three rounds of 6.5 into a dinner plate-sized target at 150 yards, now that was, anyway, he'd have to shoot a lot of people to make him do. He's gonna deploy Brianna Joy into a,

to get inside of it. Ah. Do not say that day. Yeah, absolutely not. I just maxed out the level of some horrible horrible person. So I want to talk about this because I find it like I think people tend to interpret this. I've certainly got an accused of like, oh, you're just kind of being like a nihilist. This is you're being, you know, just an anti-electoralist. You're not being practical. There was one particular guy who's like

a local democratic candidate who responded seven times to my tweet being like, with variation, and his obsession was like, if we win Texas, it's impossible for the GOP to win national elections, which is true. If theoretically, the Democrats win Texas, it's impossible for the GOP to win national elections, which is true. If theoretically the Democrats flipped Texas, the GOP would have no chance at winning a federal election ever again. Yeah.

And all like simultaneous to this, right? If there are more Republicans in California than there are basically any other state in the union, and if the Republicans won California, they would win every election forever. Yeah. Yeah. Not going to happen. I mean, it's one of those things. I am not saying Texas will never be a blue state.

That is something that is possible even likely given enough time. What I am saying, the argument that I'm making here, and I'll provide you with evidence is that number one, focusing on these elections from the top down. And when you're saying we want to flip Texas, that's a top down approach, right? You are not focusing on we want to fill up

and win a bunch of different local elections. We want to flip the state houses. We want to flip a bunch of mayoralities and stuff. You are saying what matters is how Texas votes in the national election. And if you were to get, if you were to kind of eke out a bear like in Georgia, right, where you get a narrow victory in the federal election, that would be great for the Democratic Party. One of my issues with it is that kind of focusing obsessively on flipping Texas

isn't focusing on the stuff that actually will help Texans, like Texans currently being targeted by the state government. Because flipping the state in a federal election, but not taking the governor's seat, not taking the lieutenant governor's seat, not like actually taking the state house, doesn't improve life for people in Texas. I think the kind of the degree to which the federal government Biden's administration has been unable to push back very effectively against kind of a lot of the shit that DeSantis has been doing in Florida. They have started to make some attempts is evidence of this.

And kind of more to the point, even if you don't agree with that, fundamentally these strategies that the Democratic Party has embraced in Texas do not work. The Texas Democratic Party is incompetent. They are bad at their job. They are worse people bring up Georgia a lot when I talk about flipping Texas and folks are like, well, we flipped Georgia. And it's like, yeah, because the state elected officials and candidates in Georgia, number one, the state party did a much better job

of kind of harvesting as a weird way to phrase it, but of incubating talent to run for election in a number of local offices than the Texas Democratic Party has ever done. And that was a big part of what allowed them to be competitive and eventually to flip the state. There's a lot of like kind of dollar sign information on how bad the state party in Texas is at this shit. And I guess I should go ahead and provide some of that now. So in the 2022 election, the midterms, famously an unusually good showing

for the Democratic party nationwide for a midterm election. Everywhere but Texas, O'Rourke ran against Greg Abbott. He lost by 11%. This is kind of to contrast the election that got everyone excited when he was running against crews. I think there were like 3% apart. And again, the only reason there was this kind of mistaken belief and excitement among Dems that O'Rourke because he was so close to Cruz had a real shot of winning Texas. No, he got kind of close to beating Cruz because Ted even Republicans hate Ted Cruz. No one has ever liked that man.

His own wife can barely stand to be in a room with him. His political allies would turn the other cheek if fucking somebody, anyway, we shouldn't talk about political assassinations on this podcast. It wouldn't anger anybody, though, right? Lindsey Graham has said that. Like Lindsey Graham's, like, what, maybe the only good joke a Republican elected officials ever told is that if you were to shoot Ted Cruz on the floor of Congress and the trial was held in Congress like nobody

would vote to convict the murderer. Yeah. Anyway, so Beto lost quite badly to Greg Abbott. And beyond that, basically every statewide candidate that the Democrats ran lost in that election. It was a bad election for the Democratic Party. And people who pay attention to Texas politics and actually like, aren't just trying to like, drift your donation money

know this. Joe Montfort, the Democratic consultant in North Texas said, quote, it's been one election after another where we ramp everybody up and set these expectations that we're going to finish in first. And then we finish in second. I don't see any indication that we can win at statewide levels or won't continue to bleed house seats to the other party. I love these finishing second there as if there's like a podium on elections. One, the end of libertarians. Like that, that's not a difference.

Yeah, there's libertarians. That's not out of the range. Yeah, I'm the text of a credit party. You have to take the L to like, Geelstein. Yeah, there were some kind of, there were some wins by Democrats in Texas. They managed to hold on to two out of three seats, congressional seats in the battleground regions in South Texas.

Yeah, but they still lost one. Yeah, they did. They did still lose one in the same. And the, you know, the GOP had to spend a lot of money to do that. But like one of the, one of the points is that. So they held onto two of those seats and they won a contested seat in the suburbs of Dallas. And, you know, like, but basically in all of these areas, these were like super narrow wins,

like these, the big successes. And they were narrow wins and areas that Joe Biden had carried by double digits two years ago. And Joe Biden is a historically, like that is part, part some of the some of what will show you how bad the Texas Democratic Party is Joe Biden is not a popular president and the fact that he carried a lot of these areas by more than the candidates who narrowly won in 2022 could is not a great sign for the way things are trending. Yeah, it's probably also worth pointing out that like those southern Texas seats

like in the Rio Grande Valley, right? Like, those people are normally Democrats, yeah, but you have guys like, is it Quella? Quella? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, who like is opposed to abortion rights? Yeah, yeah, and extremely hawkish on the border. And like, yeah, what do we gain by having like,

yeah, blue team good, like, not really if this person's going to take away your bodily autonomy and brutalize people for coming to this country for wanting a better life. Yeah. It's, like, a lot of the, some of these wins are kind of like marginal at best given the compromises or just given the kind of Democrats who can win it. It's like a joe mansion kind of situation. Yeah.

Exactly. And more to the point, like, it's not only is this like evidence kind of that the Democrat strategy isn't working. It's not simply that they tried something and it failed. They tried something and it was so expensive that it stopped them from trying things in other areas where the money could have gone better.

For example, how fucking wasteful, particularly the Beto orot campaign was, right? He loses by 11 points to Greg Abbott. He raised $77 million to lose by that much. A few years earlier, Lupe of Aldez ran against Greg Abbott. She spent raised like $2 million and lost by 13 points. So $75 million may have bought Beto 2%. If you assume that national trends had nothing to do with that gap closing by a tiny amount, like with $75 million, I could take

control of a moderately sized Texas city. Like, yeah, that is like, yeah, you can buy a big chunk of Texas specifically. You could purchase a large chunk of Fort Worth with that much money, you know. Yeah. That's our goal here at Cool's End Media. Yeah, yeah, to own Fort Worth, finally, my dream is completed. I'll be able to, I'm gonna buy those horse statues

that lost Kaletus, finally be happy. Let's get Blucifer as well. It's probably a good time to pivot to ads to help us pay for our piece of forward. Sure. Yeah. You know, who isn't a waste of money? These fucking ads. So overall, we just talked about, you know, Beto raised $77 million. The gubernatorial race cost in total, something like $140 million, which is a huge amount of money for something that fails that badly. And doesn't, there's no evidence that Beto's campaign, like he was, he's obviously good at fundraising, right?

And there was kind of this belief among a lot of Dims and Aaron belief that this meant that he would be good for down ballot races, right? He's going to bring the entire, because of how much attention he gets, he's going to raise the entire Democratic Party up, the poor showing of the Democratic party in Texas in 2022 suggests that that's not the case. And the money, like, there are, there are fights that could have been one and probably weren't because the money wasn't being invested in, uh, in those fights. I was going to bet. Oh, and I want to quote from an article by the Texas Tribune here. This year, the party ran Rochelle Garza, a civil rights lawyer with little political experience against Attorney General Ken Paxton, who was widely seen as the most vulnerable

Republican incumbent. But Garza struggled to raise money or gain traction in a rork shadow, and lost by 10 percentage points against Paxton, who has been indicted on felony security fraud charges and is being investigated by the FBI for abuse of office accusations. And it's what maybe she's kind of one no matter what you did. But one of the rules of politics in this country is that the money you spend at a big race, like a gubernatorial race, like a, like a,

like a Senate or a congressional campaign at the, at the federal level, like a presidential campaign goes less far per dollar than the money you spend in smaller local elections, right? 10 million bucks going into that election might have done something, you know, as opposed to 75 million going into Beto, O'Rourke and accomplishing very little. This has been not just a problem in Texas in previous elections throughout the Trump area and a little before in particular,

this was a problem the DIMS had kind of from the middle of the Obama years until the last couple of, like really the last midterm, like at 2018 is when it started to turn around nationally. And the DIMS have learned a lot in other regions about like not spending stupid amounts of money on hopeless contests, but not like comprehensively. So for example, in 2022, the second most expensive house race was the 14th Congressional District

of Georgia, where Marcus Flowers raised $16 million and lost by 32 points. Not a great return on the investment. And it was like the reason why he raised so much money is because he was running against Marjorie Taylor Green. And nationally, Dims outside of Georgia wanted to put in money because they hate her. And it's a trend that relies a lot on social media on kind of the way in which like hardcore Dims,

the Dims that do a lot of the small dollar donations, think about politics where it's like, Marjorie Taylor green bad, donate money to a opponent. Well, her opponent had no chance of winning in that district. Like, no amount of money would have flipped that. And you just wasted $16 million that could have helped somewhere else. Like, maybe that's an insane thing.

And it's not as bad as it used. If you want to look at like the kind of the dumbest it ever was, in 2020, So Lindsey Graham's seat was up in South Carolina. Oh my God. And Jamie Harris and Ranagan's Lindsey Graham and Dims again, because Lindsey Graham evil, you know, raised $130 million and he lost by 10 points. Amy McGraft lost to Mitch McConnell, who is another like you can always get a shitload of money to fight Mitch McConnell. $94 million lost by 20 points.

Either of the like 130 million, 94 million, that's two state legislatures. You could have flipped or at least made progress on flipping, right? Like that amount of money could potentially do that or at least help set up, you know, get a couple of people elected who have a chance at kind of broadening a base of support and becoming, you know, leaders in states that are currently like dominated by red legislatures. Like there's a chance at least here. And that like specifically the state legislature thing is, this has been a problem with the Democrats for fucking ages, which is that they just, yeah, like it is only genuinely in the last two years. The Democrats are starting to give you shit about state legislatures.

Like, and this is one of the things from the Obama era, like one of the reasons everything sucks so much is that the Democrats managed to lose like, oh god, I for it was like they look, I think the total, they lost like a thousand seats. Yeah, it was like a nine-marriage failure. Yeah. And you know, we were seeing the product of this, right? Like Wisconsin was sort of just a hellhole for the last decade. And you know what I mean? And these are like Minnesota too. Like there are lots of these states that like,

the top, not Minnesota, what am I talking about? Michigan. Yeah. Michigan. Yeah. Michigan. Yeah. And both of these places were winnable, right? Like the Democrats are winning there now, right? But they just like fucking left, like, you know, they fucking left flint to get poisoned by lead because they just not like the only things that the bomb is, there's no money

for consultants in sort of like down ballot, like state and like local races, just jack shit, right? And the Democrat party is not run by sort of, it's not a party in like an actual real sense. It is a collection of consultants. And those consultants only care about Senate races. Sometimes they care about House races and they care it specifically.

They spend all of their fucking money in presidential races. And the Republicans don't do that because they have a bunch of like, people, you know, because they have a bunch of, like, part of their base, right, is these like small and mid-scale capitalists in, you know, in cities and in rural areas who have like immediate concerns about, like, you know, there's like, there are specific workers who they want, like, lives to be worse. And so because of that, the Republican machine is like, sees the entire fucking country. And the Democrats have been sitting around, like, spending like a trillion dollars on Wendy

Davis losing by 20 points. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, you get these, you get these like cases where, you cases where you're looking at 30 million being spent, you know, failing to unseat a Marjorie Taylor green or something like 33 million, something like that. But what you don't, like at the same time as like that's happening, is all of these massive amounts of money are being devoted to these, like, to the races that get attention because

there's famous names involved. You have like in 2020, I think it was, you have, or no, there's 2022, you have the election between Ted Bud, a Republican against the Democrat Sherry Beasley in North Carolina, where the Democratic Party decided not to prioritize this election because it wasn't winnable. And then Bud wound up winning by just four points. That's a seat you could flip with money. That's not an unreasonable thing. As opposed to again, the race is where I went to

and people are losing by like 30 something fucking percent. And if you wanna know who a serious candidate is, who is not just trying to do the sexy thing and not just trying to like, again, flip the state so that we can win the federal election, but actually wants to help their state. And this is again, there's very nice things about Beto O'Rourke. I was in Texas during the ice storm.

He did good work during the ice storm, like actual, like community defense kind of stuff that I do have some respect for. He has not and has never been a serious politician and I will tell you why. He went from winning an election to losing a state election against Ted Cruz to losing a presidential race to losing the governor seat. That is so fucking scatter shot that is not building a base of power that is not building from the ground up and like encouraging the growth of other personalities. You're just darting from whatever the sexiest

and most PR-driven race is. That's not serious. I wanna talk about what, number one, the Democratic Party, the shit that, as we've said, they're getting better. The National Party got a lot better at this particularly in 2022. It was less stupid than the previous couple of elections

that bitched. Really difficult to be more dumb than that, but you know. It is. Yeah. She British labor, etc., etc. Yeah. Yeah, it's really labor actually is the big one. Oh my fuck.

No, but I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I want to talk about what has worked and what I think could work again. And to do that, I'm going to talk about a guy named Howard Dean. Who here knows who Howard Dean was? Gerasen? Exactly.

Yeah. A little bit. Have you all heard the video of him screaming that guy like his career is so I have before. Okay. Well, James, would you load that up for us so we can play that in a second? Let's do the deem. So,

how would Jamie pull it, yeah. How would Dean ran for president and was he was the first national political candidate to use the internet effectively to raise money in the history of US politics. He's kind of pre-Obama worked out a lot of the strategies that Obama's people wound up using to very successfully raise money for him.

He was really good at it. He was a reasonably intelligent candidate and then he gave the speech that we're about to play for you and it completely created his point and did him as a candidate. You know, I always have to think about Dean. Dean is stunningly unlucky that he ran in the time that he did because the clip you're about to hear is 1,000 times less weird than anything to Santis has ever done.

Like, he ran in an, I mean, there was Dan Quail, right? But like, he ran in an era where like the seriousness and like, non-weirdness of politicians was so much higher. I mean, it's in the chat so you can, uh, me a pull that shit up. This is a good shit. Straight to that beautiful scream. We're going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico. We're going to California and Texas and New York. We're're gonna South Dakota and Oregon and Washington

and Michigan, and then we're gonna watch it and you see it, and take back the White House. Yeah! That's it, that ended this career as a candidate. And like, it's a little silly, but that doesn't, that doesn't, that wouldn't be a 12-second news cycle today. Um, but yeah, after kind of failing out as a presidential candidate, he became chairman

of the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, and he was a pretty good one. He, what, his kind of primary strategic vision was what he called the 50 state strategy, which is don't focus just on swing states, never write a state off at unwinnable, instead spread the money that the DNC has around to campaign throughout the country everywhere, particularly to fund local DNCs so that they can start building a stable of candidates that can attract voters and eventually win local elections. It's not like an easy, it's not a sexy strategy because a lot of it is focused on like the slow

kind of grueling fight to build up a base of support and unfriendly terrain. But it worked like really well actually. In 20 or so states, those that had voted solidly Republican in previous recent presidential races, Democratic candidates, like one elections that had previously gone against them. There were about like 20 states

where the kind of slide to red was arrested and pushed back to blue. These are Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming. You're supposed to scream when you do the list.

Yeah, there we go. So basically Dean's strategy led to a net gain of 39 state house seats seats and a 2% increase of all seats in the states analyzed. They lost two, you know, state senate seats net, but it worked great in the house. And like gained an attorney general ship, gained three house seats, gained a senate seat. And in 15 of the 20 states, the Democratic nominee saw an increase in vote share between 2004 and 2008,

which was the years that, that, that, that. So again, not super sexy. These aren't like, we flipped Texas suddenly, but it's like, oh, we started to see real gains and like a lot of pretty red states. Now, it didn't work everywhere. It was not particularly successful in a large chunk of the South. Like, it did not arrest the slide into the Red Everywhere. But in a lot of the Midwest, particularly the States that were like the Hillary Clinton's so-called Firewall that went for Trump in 2020,

it was extremely effective. And of course, it got nixed immediately after Obama won immediately after Obama won election, and this is a big part of why in 2010, the DIMS lost disastrously. But like the basic idea of we should be putting money into local democratic parties in order to like number one have like a big part of winning, you know, any any conflict, whether it's a war or a political election, is having the resources available reserves to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves in the moment. So you have a solidly red state house seat or judgeship or something like that or governor ship or mayorality and a candidate has a health scare or has a scandal, you know, they get caught fucking a 13 year old or something. And suddenly, this seat that was solidly read as in play. And if you have no one who can like get votes,

who can get voters excited, who can run for that, well, then you're probably not going to win it. It's just going to like go to whoever the RNC, you know, picks to pick up the seat next. But if you've got someone waiting in the wings, they have a chance at winning it. And a good example of this is what just happened in Jacksonville, Florida, right? You have DeSantis make go like lunch to the fucking most fascist end of the right. And past this abortion bill that something like 75% of the state doesn't like, and the DIMS had a decent candidate there that was able to run against the Republican mayor of Jacksonville and win.

And in that election, the DIMS spent $2 million and the Republican spent $9 million. You are not talking about the kind of resources expended that you're seeing in some of these dumb races we're talking about. So anyway, this is most of what I wanted to get into is just like, you can win and you can improve things in Texas and you can build a base from which to actually change things electorally in that state. But you can't do it by just like focusing on whoever is at the top.

Like it has to be smarter. It's not just about shoveling money into a pit. Yeah, and like I think there's a couple of things I want to add. One was at like, oh God, okay, like, so Tim Cain, just for yeah, Tim Cain got put in after they ran out Dean. And I, Jesus, the Tim Cain,

might be, is a, is like a once in a generation terrible politician, like one of the worst, you know, and like, you would see shit. He is the Winston Churchill of making me bored. Like, yeah, like, he, and like, you would see, I He is the Winston Churchill of making me bored. Like, and this still happens, right? But there are seats that are winnable that the Dems just literally won't even bother finding people to run for

because they're just fucking too lazy and they don't give a shit. And this happens in a fucking lot of races. And part of the other thing that happens in this sort of period, is the reason why the top down, this is like, if we're going to actually do this sort of complicated electoral 澳洲, this is why Bernie Sanders lost two elections in a row, is that you can't actually like, like actual sort of like substantive political change, like doesn't happen from the top down, it happens on bottom up organizing.

And you know, the democratic waves in like the last two years were basically like them eating actual social movements. It's, you know, like they, it's them basically like, there's a sort of rejuvenated anti-abortion movement that they just sort of consume, right? They've been doing a very, very good job of sort of like eating, like whatever sort of queer rights, like movements exist alive. And they had kind of stopped doing that for a while because they chose to just like destroy

Occupy, rather than like try to co-opt it. And you know, I mean, there were reasons for that, right? But like part of the thing, like if you, if you're a Democrat and you want to actually, like when Texas, you need to have actual sort of social movements that the Democrats can eventually take over and destroy. But in the time between they destroy them, destroying them and them, and in the brief time,

well, they both exist and are controlled by Democratic Party, that's how you actually sort of build the brief time, well, they both exist and are control by Democratic Party. That's how you actually sort of like builds the kinds of the build the kinds of coalitions to build the kinds of organization that win these races. And the Democratic Party has just no interest in doing that like almost anywhere. Basically outside of Minnesota where I don't know those. And then the Minnesota Debs are fucking built different. I don't know. I don't know. I don't have another explanation for that.

But like, yeah, it's, I don't know, it's, it's, it's like one of the things that you have the opportunity to do at the local level is, and this is, you know, this is a big factor in like politics in Georgia. You've got people who are motivated because of a specific political issue that the Dims are strong on, like abortion. And you can, you can get people registered, you can get people out organizing, you can get people donating money. And more importantly, you can get people voting and voting in numbers that they haven't before and, and, and make, if you're able to kind of harness that sort of thing, but being able to harness

that again, part of it is is this is not sexy. This is not something we can say. This is going to flip a state in 2024, but putting in the money and the resources to have people who are being supported to go out and make attempts and to build like a reputation and a base of support and networks in the state. Like that's, that's the non sexy thing that that the number one, the Republicans are really good at. If you're asking yourself looking at all these horrible anti trans bills, anti gay bills, anti abortion bills, how do they do this? Well, because churches organized at the local level to build up the kind of support and the kind of human infrastructure

that allowed them to take advantage of the kind of broader social trends that drove some of those states more deeply read and that kind of like made it possible for them to do things that 10 years before people had said like there's no way to make this happen. That can work on the left side of things, but you have to have the ground work in. They started with like school boards. They started, they started with going for school boards, going after books, then you get a base people riled up, then you can go after healthcare for minors,

and you can go after healthcare for adults. It was a very easy path, and it started by like going to the most accessible places to have public comment on issues, which was complaining about books inside of school. Yeah. Yeah.

And I don't know the thing I'd say about the church thing is like the thing that you should do that for the Democrats was unions, but then they destroyed them all. And but you know, but like you can actually you can actually see what this looks like like in the places where some something like this. This is why the state level Midwest Dems are so much further to the left than the Dems everywhere else because the people of Minnesota, the people in Wisconsin are the only reason they're even so-to-verbal in power is because, and you know, you're seeing this at like in Chicago too with

Brandon Johnson, is that like those people are like functionally dependent on their teachers' unions to exist as as a political coalition. Yeah. And so, you know, like a union organizing is a, like, we're just like, fucking just giving money to a strike fund is a, even if the thing that you want to do is win elections, that is a more effective way of winning elections than fucking giving money to Beto-Arorac like a seventh time. Yeah.

And again, when we, the thing I want to get across here is the right thing to do is not say, and no one is suggesting this here, a fuck, Texas, it can never be fixed. The right thing is saying, if you're focused on one famous guy running in Texas, or this like top level thing of flipping Texas, you don't actually care all that much about the problems being faced by people in Texas because that's not really going to fix them, right? Beto is not going to win. And even if Texas flips for an election, that doesn't mean the state legislature flips.

It doesn't mean the governor flips. It doesn't mean that things get better for people. Doing these kind of bottom up approaches, number one, will eventually flip the fucking state, right? There are a demographic trend happening. Part of how you flip the state, by the way, if you're actually responsible, it's like proving that you can make people's lives better. If you want to flip the state, that's maybe more ethical than just being like, what if we dump $170 million to like try to make this guy who goes viral on YouTube or Twitter sometimes, look better, right? Maybe one of those is more ethical than the other.

Anyway, I don't want to rant about electoralism anymore, but as a transplant in Texan, I get frustrated by this. So I felt like we had to say something. Yeah, I also get frustrated by Beto or what claiming to be punk, which is the least punk thing in the fucking weather. No, no. No, we have one, we have one elected leader

who's gotten anywhere close to being punk. And it was Bernie Sanders when he got into that cold book depository that November morning with the man liquor carcano rifle extremely punk. Um, anyway. Cutting the feed here. There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Does the U.S. government really have alien technology? And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI? What happens when computers learn to think?

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really who they claim to be? Listen to alphabet boys on the I Heart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up fam? I'm Brian Ford, Artisan Baker and host of the new podcast, Flaky Biscuit. On this podcast, I'm going to get to know my guests by cooking up their favorite nostalgic meal. It could be anything from Twinkies to mom's Thanksgiving dressing.

Sometimes I might get it wrong, sometimes I'll get it right. I'm so happy it's good because man, if it wasn't, I'd be like, you know, everybody not my mom. Either way, we will have a blast. You'll have access to every recipe so you can cook and bake alongside me as I talk to artists, musicians, and chefs about how this meal guided them to success.

And these nostalgic meals, fam, they inspire one of a kind conversations. When I bake this recipe, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Does this podcast come with a therapist? He can. Listen to Flaky Biscuit every Tuesday on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, yeah. Oh yeah!

It could happen here, a podcast where I just made my colleagues, I can see them through the Zoom deeply uncomfortable by opening this podcast with a sound that you shouldn't make in the workplace. I'm Robert Evans. Joining me today is Mia Wong and Garrison Davis. Me, I take it from here. Oh boy, so it's been, you know, this is, okay, so this I guess is now like last week's Twitter thing,

but this is not a Twitter thing. No, it kind of is, it kind of is, but like, let's not frame this as a Twitter thing. Yeah, it kind of is. It kind of is, but like, let's not frame this as a Twitter thing. Yeah, okay, okay. So, what, this is, we are, okay, we have been experiencing in the last, you know, like half decade action long from that. Of course, like the seven, eight years now, like, the sort of incredible rise in casual American anti-Semitism and the level of anti-Semitism that you can just do in sort

of public discourse and it's quote unquote fine. And one of the biggest indicators of this is the extent to which it's now socially acceptable to just do the most like absolutely unhinged, like anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about George Soros and Specifically the thing that specifically was like okay, I need to do this episode was last week Elon Musk like Compared George Soros to Magneto and then said quote you assume they are good intentions. They are not He wants to erode the fabric the very fabric of civilization Soros hates humanity. And this is just like the mainstream line of the Republican party. Now, like, they just all do this. You can just sort of, I mean, and this is, I'm honestly like,

as bad, like, you know, this is like the stuff that Elon Musk is saying is unbelievably unacceptable. That's not even anywhere near as bad as it goes. Like it's pretty common to just shoot these people like talking about the Satan's Soros agenda and shit now. Like it's, it has gotten unbelievably unfathomably out of control. And so today, I wanted to take a look at, okay, who George Soros actually is,

like the real human being, and not the sort of like caricature projection that has been created of him on the right. And I wanted to also sort of look at why the right hates him so much. And you know, Soros is kind of an interesting figure because he falls like right in the middle of like our two shows about people. Because he's not not he's not really like a cool person who does cool stuff

but though he does stuff that's cool sometimes but he's not also like a bastard properly. So although he's done some bastardy stuff too. Oh he has. We are going to talk about that. He said he said he's a yeah. I mean most of what this episode is about. He's I would say he's like 20% more complicated than the average billionaire on a moral.

Yeah. I think I think like 20 or 30%. Yeah, there's a more in that neighborhood. Yeah, you know, and I think, there's three George Soros is, two of them are real and one of them is fake. There is, you know, so George Soros is a billionaire philanthropist, right? And, you know, so George Soros is a billionaire philanthropist,

right? And, you know, so that means that he has a sort of billionaire side and a philanthropist side and they are very often working across purposes. Sometimes they're not working, sometimes they're, he aligns them together, sometimes he doesn't. And so the way I've sort of structured this is like the first episode we're going to be talking about the sort of billionaire side and how he did that and the second episode is going to be more about the philanthropy side and how both of these basically have been kind of accidentally structured in such a way that the right was like, oh my god, this is the perfect guy to do any cinematic conspiracy theories about. And then there's also the third George Soros is like the one who's just literally the devil who the Republicans have made up. And yeah. So George Soros was born to a Jewish

family in Hungary in 1930, which is not a good time to be born to a Jewish family in Hungary. No. Really? There's not a good time to be born to a Jewish and family in Hungary until like, I'm going to say sometime in the 50s. Yeah, I, you know, I will say it gets way, like it, it is way worse when he is born than it was in like, even like the 1890s, which is like not a great time, but it's gotten significantly worse. He is 14 when the Nazis invade Hungary in 1944. And this is the point at which we get to our first sorrows conspiracy, which is that there's just, there's a little more complicated than it's not really the Nazis in, well, it's a little more complex than the Nazis in the day.

When the extermination of the Hungarian Jewish community begins really in 1944. Yeah. And so there's a thing that happens. I don't know. He and his dad have kind of complicated, like, set of things they survive. And there's a part of the story that gets picked up by the right that gets, if you've ever heard Alex Jones talk about Soros, the second or third thing he will say

is that Soros is a Nazi collaborator, it was like a willing collaborator with Nazis, which is not true. And also, he's 14. Like, yeah, I don't really call even 14 year olds in the Hitler youth willing collaborators because they're children Yeah, you have to have a line at some point Yeah, it's not these where if they're kids, they're not really morally responsible either way

Yeah, and like, so the specific thing that he does is there's these notices that are signed up by the government That's like telling Jewish people to like go like to a place and to like go to a place, and if you go to the place, you're gonna get routed up and killed. And basically, so the thing that actually happened is that George Rose's dad is told to do this, and he gives it to George Sorrow,

and it's like go tell these people that they've been called for this and that if they go, they're gonna get taken away. And this has been transformed by, you know, that is, this is a nightmare-ish thing these people are striving. This has been transformed by a bunch of the worst people have ever lived in to Nazi collaboration,

which is also, you know, the part of the story that never gets told even when people sort of like, do the like, dive into like, oh, this is fake, is that the thing that like, Soros's family spends the rest of the war doing is basically getting like counterfeit papers to Jewish families that like says at their Christian. And, you know, they like, they, they, they legitimately save a bunch of families from dying in the Holocaust.

And you know, the shit that Jones pulls on them is like part of this because of like the job this guy who's like saving young George Soros has involves like basically like itemizing stuff left behind by Jewish families forced out of their homes. He's like they were profiting off of the holidays. No, they were like doing whatever job kept them under the radar while they attempted to help. Like it was the Holocaust. It was messy.

Yeah. But like, it's a little like saying like Oscar Schindler took advantage of slave labor. It's like, well, no, it's actually what Schindler was doing was not that. Like he was using the trappings of this slave labor system in order to rescue people. It's quite different from just enslaving people. Yeah, I think the thing that's really just

during about the so right is like, okay, like this is like Alex Jones is Alex Jones, right? He's just gonna say the worst shit you've ever heard. But like this is like a thing that mainstream right wing is just say now. Yeah. And it's just unbelievably horrible and it sucks. And it's just like not true.

But fortunately for George, so his family makes it through the Holocaust. Well, he's his immediate family does. And they get out and they end up in the US. And this is where, okay, this is something that I think is very important to the story that isn't told very much. So Soros is like a finance whiz, right? He is very, very, very good at finance, and we're gonna be talking a bit about like,

like the things that he figured out to let him do this because it's interesting. But he's also not from the sort of like American or the British financial elite. Like if, there's like a certain kind of person, right, who like goes into finance, and you know, it's like like, like wasp frat bros or like in bread, British aristocrats, right?

And Doros is like a hungarian immigrant, right? He is not sort of from these people. He is like, and you know, this is going to be a really big deal when he like goes up against a British financial elite later on. But you know, he through sort of like, he's able to turn like a job doing door-to-door salesman into like a way into a firm and he's able to sort of work his way up to a point where like he has, he's something like has his own hedge fund. And he is really, really good at this. He's, he's one of the sort of early people who does hedge funds. There's a great book called The Influence of Soros,

Politics, Power, and the Struggle for Open Society, by Emily Tamkin, who did a lot of really great work, like interviewed Soros, interviewed an enormous number of people who were around him. And I wanna read a passage of this about like how he figured out how to sort of beat the market. He's talking about this kind named Carl Popper, who's like a philosopher of science, who also wrote this book called The Open Society that we'll

talk about next episode more. Popper's philosophy made me more sensitive to the role of misconceptions in financial markets, Sora said decades later. People believe that markets don't lie and shouldn't be trusted, but that isn't true, Soros knew. Markets react to humans, and humans are fallible. Instead of looking at the money being made, or as Sebastian Malibu put it in more money than God, his book on the history of hedge funds, the psychology that drove investors' appetites, Soros looked at how one impacted the other, predicting that each would drive the other forward until the trust were so completely overvalued that a crash was inevitable.

And this is really smart. Even today, if you're able to understand that the way a lot of hedgehog people tend to think about the market, especially in this period, is this sort of dogmatic, neoliberal thing of like the market is like a perfect conveyance of price signals. And so I was just like, no, it's made out of people. And those people like get greedy, they have emotional stuff. They like, they get into these like fomo, like if you're missing out stuff, you know, they like intensely overvalue assets because everyone else sees it. The assets like expensive. So everyone like, you know, rushes are missing out stuff, they intensely overvalue assets because everyone else sees it as assets expensive

so everyone brushes to buy it. And this is something even now, right? This is a very smart way to understand finance. He's figured this out in the 70s. And if you're able to do this kind of stuff and use this to understand how the market works in the 70s, you are going to look like a God among men. And he starts a hedge fund in 1973.

And by 1981, he has a fund that is worth $381 million in like 1981 money. I don't know what that is in modern money, but it assumes it's a lot. I'm a hack and a fraud. I should have actually figured this out. Yeah, that's like a billion dollars. Yeah, and like he personally has, like for himself,

like a hundred million dollars, right? And he, you know, at this point, he starts to become sort of very famous in finance circles because, you know, I mean, he's just like absolutely destroying the market. Now, okay, this is where things get, you know, I'll up until this point, he's kind of like, he's been doing a lot of sort of

finance stuff that's kind of shady, but it's mostly just been him ripping off other finance people, which I'm entirely okay with. Like that's just very funny. But he starts to get into currency speculation. And in 1985, he has one of his big breaks, which is he predicts the Plaza Accords. Now, okay, the Plaza Accord is something

we've talked about on the show before, but I need to talk about it a bit more because unfortunately, we have to talk about the Asian financial collapse this episode. And this is like one of the key moments of the Asian financial collapse, even though it was like a decade earlier. So in 1985, Ronald Reagan is trying to revive

the US's domestic manufacturing industry because it's like dying. And the big part of the reason is dying is that they're getting absolutely destroyed by sort of German and Japanese manufacturers. And part of what's happening here is that particularly Japan's currencies are worth weight, currency is worth way less than the dollar.

This is called having a weak currency. Having a weak currency is really good for, if you have like an export-based manufacturing economy. And so Reagan basically like walks into a meeting with like the Germans, the Japanese government, the British, like a few other people and just just basically, like, not quite in so many words, but basically just says, like, you are all American military protectors. And because you're all American military protectors,

like I can force you to increase the value of your currency, like, or else capital O, capital E. And they do, they comply. This becomes, this becomes, this is a thing called the plaza cords. And this, this, you know, we can's the value of the dollar versus a bunch of the currencies and This like literally single-handedly like restores the profitability of American manufacturing like through the 90s Which is really wild, but

The other important thing for this story is that I I don't know how he did this but like George Soros predicts that this is gonna happen and she makes an unbelievable amount of money. Basically, like, basically doing currency speculation because he knows what, like, currencies are going to increase in value, which, you know, he knows that, like, for example, like, he knows that like,

the Japanese yen is gonna increase in value. So he makes an enormous amount of money doing this stuff. And he gets very famous for like, he'll like make a much money and then I'll lose it again and then he'll make it again. And this all culminates in, okay, so they're, okay, he starts taking, ah, truly enormous bets

like against national currencies. And there's one of these that's just funny and there's one of these that's really bad. So we're gonna do the funny one first, which is so in 1992 Soros, and this is the other part of the endeavor we're gonna talk about, it's not just Soros doing this stuff.

He has like allies because, like he has biggest soros as far as he is, he can't the human is allies going to take a $15 billion short position on the pound and even heels and have like nobody like this is like 15 billion of 1990s money, right? Like you need a bunch of firms working together in order to do this. But he basically takes this massive bet that the pound is going to go down. And because of the way that these bets work, like the actual value of the pounds, like collapses,

and the British central bank, like, it doesn't have enough, the reason we're able to do this, is they figured out that the British central bank doesn't have enough money to stop them. Like they don't have enough money to maintain, like they don't have enough reserves to maintain the value of the pound.

And so if he gets completely blamed for this, even though, again, there's other people involved in this, right? Like, the front page of the daily mail is literally his face in the title, I made a billion crashing the pound. Paced. Which is, okay, so like,

I mean, at a British level, this is very funny. Oh, it's, no, there's a bunch of arguments about like, what does this mean for like the world economy, international sovereignty, Soros thinks that like currency speculation is a necessary evil. And he, he has this sort of, it's easy to think that when you're making that much money. Yeah, right. Now, right. You know, it's like, now, okay.

I, this, this like specific for like the absolute most paranoid fantasies of the anti-Semitic right. Like if this sort of like a ruthless cosmopolitan banker like attacks the good and righteous, like noble people of Britain thing. And this is how it gets framed in the press. Who are like, the press is, I mean, it's the British press, right?

Like the British are not known for, you know, not being anti-Semitic. And so they just like go wild with this. But this particular thing is doing it to British. Part of what's happening here, right, is there's this sort of, there's this kind of like national populist equation thing going on here,

where there's this assumption that the bank of, like the British central bank is like an entity that is identifiable with like an ordinary person in Britain. And like no, like the British, the British central bank is run by just unbelievably and bread aristocrats, right? And, you know, and I think they're pretty believably in bread. Oh, that's fair. Yeah. they're pretty believably in bread. That's fair. We're just talking about like 0.56 of a Habsburg unit. You know, the Habsburg is the international unit for measuring how in bread

someone is if you're on a wire. I yeah, yeah. That seems like a reasonable amount of in bread for these specific people. But you know, like, this is what I was talking about. Like at the very beginning, I was talking about sort of like Soros not being from this sort of like normal class of, of finance people. And the thing is like the normal class of finance people

are fucking terrible at their jobs, right? Like these, these in British aristocrats and like the fucking American like cocaine, frat boys like just like doing lines and cocaine off your shirt as ass cracks. Like these people all suck at their jobs, and George Soros is smart and is good at his job. And so she just absolutely goes through these people

like a fucking flaming chainsaw, and she just, the maneuver he's doing here, she just absolutely humiliates all of the people at the British Central Bank. He's humiliating, like not just those guys too, he's humiliating the Tories, he's humiliating, like, all of the people who are seriously important in the real economy, in the sort of real British economy. And he can do this, right, because like his opponents are, you know, people who are like,

they're promoting their, like, they're, okay, they take they take in their people from college, right? And they're promoting the base of how good they are at golf. And so when she just sort of walks in and just makes billions of dollars, just destroying these people, she makes just a permanent enemy of a very, very powerful faction of the British ruling class. And the British ruling class, like, I don't know, they, they, it is hard to find people who will beat

the British ruling class in an anti-Semitism off. And this is, this is one of the things that's sort of, you know, if you're looking at like, why Soros specifically is the guy who all of these sort of right-wing conspiracies, why do I being about, like part of it is because he who all of these sort of right wing conspiracies. Why do I being about like part of it is because he pisses off these specific people Yeah, these guys who's like dads were all friends with the king of England who was like a close personal buddy with Hitler like there Yeah, it's a bunch of like it's a bunch of guys who are already pretty bigoted and then they get beaten at their own stupid financial game and so like the fact that it's a Jewish student, as it means that they're going to

be even more racist than they already were. And the fact that there's plenty of international anti-Semitism and that George Soros after this starts funding liberal and, you know, vaguely progressive causes like, yeah, it's not, it's not a, it's not surprising that this is the way things went. Yeah, and, you know, again, I can't under emphasize the extent to which this is also very specifically the reaction to British media class who, I mean, we know now that those people are psychos,

like, we have seen them see a trans person at a boat race and like 10 years ago and like, draw a giant thing circling them in a boat and making it a front page news story. Those people in the 90s were like. Well, that's true. They are biologically better at navigation

that is actually been proven. Yeah, but then they're like just as, they're just a sort of feral and like terrifyingly bigoted then as they are now and this means that like like just if you're a regular British person and you were like walking down the street and there's a newspaper stand you are seeing like like stay truly unbelievably terrifying anti-Semitic shit, like just literally everywhere.

And this will have no consequences whatsoever. Yeah, it's all good, nothing bad ever happens. And speaking of no consequences, I, do you know what we can promise about positive services? 23 minutes in. You don't look. You're welcome, Danil.

Okay, we're back. We have to talk about, okay, so doing it to the British economy was mostly just really funny because the British economy is gonna be fine. And the funny part about, he and doing is the British economy is that this actually unfortunately

helps the British economy because it forces the British to like abandon some truly spectacularly not very good financial policy they were doing. But then he does it to Thailand. And that is a lot less justifiable. So it is, this is five years later, this is 1997. Soros brings in some economists, um, Arminio Fraga, like Roddy Joe's, David Kloewitz. Uh, she, he brings, he's bringing in people who are sort of experts in like developing market economics. And that's never, no one has ever brought in a developing market economist for like a good reason. And what they, what they realize is that they start doing analysis of Southeast Asia,

like the Southeast Asian markets. And they realize very quickly that Thailand is fucked. They figure out that Thailand has this currency pegged to the dollar. And this, but you know, they don't have the reserves to support this. And the tide, like actual Thai currency isn't strong enough to maintain like, like, stay being pegged to the

dollar. It's not a strong enough currency. And so they do a $2 billion short of like Thailand's currency. And I'm going to read from the Infososaurus again about like the process of this. It was a debate we had Jones told me we've gone to work in Asia and here you are taking large scale short positions in countries with institute of fragility. Going for the jugular in the United Kingdom was one thing, doing the same in Thailand was another. The Bank of England would surely recover. Thailand was a developing economy and it was unclear what impact outside investors could

have. Soros has justified speculation with the idea that it could serve as a kind of warning to governments. Look, Thai government, the bot needs to devalue. Change your policy now before a currency collapse is devastating for your people. The trouble is the Thai government didn't do this. Instead, it spent months using Bank of Thailand reserves to buy Thai bot. When it finally ran out in early summer 1997, the value of the bot plunged 32% against the dollar and millions of people lost a Thai people lost their livelihoods. The Soros fund made $750 million. Yeah, it's a little bit like me being like, look, yes, I made a lot of money selling heroin

to those middle schoolers. But really, when you think about it, it was a warning to those schools that it was too easy for me to bribe the janitor to sell heroin to kids there. I was actually performing a public service. So true, Robert, it is just like that. You know, to be fair, I'm not gonna finish that thought. That's probably for the best. Yeah, we need one person to remain un- uncanceled here to keep the lights on.

Oh, God. It's not after me. Oh, no. Yeah, no. Legally it does. It's really bad. Yeah. No more joking, Mia.

We can't suffer any other jokes. Somebody's got to upload this episode. All right. Here's the next joke. Soros actually doesn't make money off of the speculating in Southeast Asia, because he loses basically the same amount of money, taking like a long position in Indonesia. Yeah, the same thing happened to me when I took a long position on doing

cocaine in my bathroom with the money that I made selling drugs to all those kids, you know? We're a lot of like him and me. We're a lot of like. Well, okay, to be fair, to be fair. This is something, okay, this is something I, the reason I wanted to talk about this specifically is, is that like, okay, like two of these days, if you look under sort of, if everyone's in the wild, so there'll be a tweet that's like, what did George Soros do?

And immediately there will be a bunch of people talking about how he like deliberately destroyed all of the economies in Southeast Asia. And that's not really what happened. And I would be for one thing too much to put on one guy fucking around with a cup. Yeah. But yeah. And I wanted to actually kind of walk through this a little bit in depth just because. Okay. There's a really, really easy way to think about the economy that

is bad. It leads you into anti-spinic traps, which is like, Hey, here is like one banker who wanted to make money and because he wanted to make money, he like destroyed all these economies. And like on the one hand, yeah, like like Soros betting against like the tyker and he is bad, right? Like this is not a thing you should have been doing. On the other hand, you know, okay, so that's like the sort of level one thing. But the thing about it, you know, this is the sort of this is the sort of like great man anti-Semitism theory of collapse. And this is a theory that a lot of the sort of like great man anti-Semitism theory of collapse. And this is the theory that a lot of the sort of regional leaders take. And this is sort of a crucial thing, right?

This position very conveniently allows them to just not think about capitalism in general or their role in this crisis, which is not insignificant. And so in order to figure out what actually happened here. We need to look at, so Soros sort of like tip, like tips some dominoes, right? But the dominoes were already there and they were going, like, regardless of even if Soros had never existed, right?

Like they were going to fall. And they were going to fall because ironically of the Plaza Accords. So, you know, we talked about the plaza courts earlier. The US forces Japan to increase the value of its currency relative to the dollar. Okay, so this is great for the American economy. This nukes the Japanese economy. I mean, the Japanese economy, you know, we'll talk about this in a bit too.

It was already kind of doing bad. When the US does this and its manufacturing economy just like implodes, it, it gots the Japanese economy. It has, the Japanese economy has never recovered from this. It probably will never recover really. And into what it was. And, you know, the, the effect this has is that now, now the government of Japan has to figure out how to grow their economy without having any way to make money that grows your economy. But now they have a stronger currency. So their solution is, okay, all the central bank people look around each other and they

go, what is a strong currency good for? Housing speculation. So they start slashing interest rates and they start Basically building an entire economy Based on the assumption that housing prices will always go up And so you should just take out loans so you could buy houses because the value of the housing will Because the housing prices will always go up so you can you can have all these assets based on mortgages This is this may may or may not be sounding familiar

to everyone who lives in 2008. In 1982, the entire Japanese economy implodes sort of again, because they literally built the 2008 machine. And so this forces the US to do something called the reverse plaza of course where they take the original plaza records and they reverse it and they increase the value of the American dollar, American manufacturing dies, like it's never recovered, it's never coming

back. And this for a, this kind of the stabilizes the Japanese economy a little bit, but it means that the US now no longer has a functional economy. And so our solution to this is we do 2008, right? We build an entire economy also on the Japanese model of currency speculation, like the rising prices of stocks, right? We build an economy completely made of bullshit. But you know, okay, what does this have to do with Asian market collapse?

Okay, the problem is that like all of the countries in East Asia and like South East Asia also do this. They also do the thing where they're like, oh, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna, okay, sorry, manufacturing economies are declining, right? So we're gonna, we're gonna base our entire economy on housing prices going up. And you know, that, that's, and it actually destroys all of these economies. And I wanted to sort of run through this, and this is a lot of e-con shit, right? But the reason I wanted to run through this is that I think it gets at the sort of truly, the truly horrifying thing about how our economy works that is really difficult to face and is I think, it's at least a part of why people really, really want there to just be one guy who is running

anything. Everything, whether that's the CIA, whether that's Soros, whether that's like the New World Order. Yeah, right. Because if there's, if there's like a guy who's doing this, right, you can stop him. But the great horror of this world is that there is no deep state, right? There is no state in this football. There's no one pulling the strings at all. The only thing that is there is just sort of the cold lifeless and inexorable death logic of capital. And that logic is moving all of us, right?

All, you know, the people who are doing the conspiracies in so far as they exist are being moved by this. All of the rulers are being moved by capital. All of us, the subjects are being moved by capital. But that like sucks, right? Like the fact that all of these economies are destroyed not by the individual actions of people, but by the fact that returns are less good in Thailand

than they are in China. And this is just sort of the inaction of the logic of the entire economic system we have. This is absolutely terrifying. And faced with this sort of reality, people who want to protect capitalism because, you know, they have a bunch of assets in it, right? Retreat into this sort of like, they, you know, they, they, they, they, they, they, they use soros as a smoke screen for like,

why everything is suddenly going wrong? But sort of simultaneously to this, right? This is also a real problem for George Soros because he's like, when he's not in his role as like capital, he's not a piece of shit. He's like a person who wants the world to be better. And this causes a sort of... There was a contradiction in his ideology, right? Which is that he wants the world to be a better place and simultaneously, he's also a capitalist. And these two things are sort of warring with each other.

Even as early as, even as early as sort of the 90s, he's giving speeches about how like his open society that he wants, it's a sort of like this, a liberal democratic society of like laws and norms and human rights. The greatest danger to it is cease to be communism. It's now capitalism. But it can't do anything about it because he is also a capitalist. And next episode, we are going to watch Soros like through his philanthropic endeavors attempt to solve the problems that his economic system has caused and fail catastrophically and become problems that his economic system has caused and fail catastrophically and become the sort of boogeyman and the anti-Semitic specter of every conspiracy theory

in the world. Yeah. So check out that next time. And if you're hanging out around Clark Middle School and you have $40, I can hook you up with some of that sweet black tar. So, you know, give me a ring. My phone number's posted in the show notes of every episode. Go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know.

Does the US government really have alien technology? And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI? What happens when computers learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science. History is riddled with unexplained events. We spent a decade applying critical thinking

to some of the most bizarre phenomenon civilization and beyond. Each week, we dive deep into unsolved mysteries, conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies. You've heard about these things, but what's the full story? Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your favorite shows. In the podcast Alphabet Boys, we take you inside undercover investigations. I'm Trevor Aronson. And in our second season, we have an alphabet soup

with the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI all mixed up in the same case. At the center of this story is Flavio. But who is Flavio? I see movies with arm dealers on TV. Okay, I'm going there for the AI, but I'm gonna die. When I land, there's Flavio in a suit. It's like, follow me. And he slams down his badge in my passport. And I'm like, uh, something's going on here. So you do personal security all over the world, and you have somebody call you and say,

can you get grenades and guns for this guy in Colombia? Not, not specified grenades, a lot of ammunition. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm steel, who are the cops, who are the criminals, and is anyone really who they claim to be? Listen to Alphabet Boys on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, fam?

I'm Brian Ford, artist and baker, and host of the new podcast, Flaky Biscuits. On this podcast, I'm going to get to know my guests by cooking up their favorite nostalgic meal. It could be anything from Twinkies to moms Thanksgiving Jurassic. Sometimes I might get it wrong, sometimes I'll get it right. I'm so happy it's good because when it was not going to be like, you know, everybody not my mom. Either way, we will have a blast. You'll have access to every recipe

so you can cook and bake alongside me as I talk to artists, musicians, and chefs about how this meal guided them to success. And these nostalgic meals, fam, they inspire one of a kind conversations. When I bake this recipe, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Oh. Does this podcast come with a therapist?

Ha, ha, ha, it can. Listen to Flaky Biscuit every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's a good app in here. The podcast where I attempt to wrangle jokes that are enough okay that we keep podcasting. Yeah, with with me here to wrangle Robert Evans and also I'm very excited you're going to hear me complain. You're going to listen to me very briefly, complain about play dough. I think I did not think I was going to do what I started this.

Like the philosophy guy. Yeah. I think I was going to do what I started this. I think I was going to do what I started this. I think I was going to do what I started this. I think I was going to do what I started this. I think I was going to do what I started this. I think I was going to do what I started this.

I think I was going to do what I started this. I think I was going to do what I started this. I think I was going to do what I started this. I think I was going to do what I started this. I think I was going to do what I started this. I think I was going to do what I started this. I think I was going-Doh. I think I did not think I was gonna do what I started this. Like the philosophy guy? Yeah, yeah. Okay, okay, all right. Okay, so, all right, why are we eventually

gonna talk about Play-Doh? So George Soros is probably best known for a foundation that he eventually funds called Open Society. That was originally the Soros foundation. Then he was like, why am I naming this after myself? And it changed to Open Society. I'm going to read. So the Open Society is a very sort of, again, I got to say exactly 20% more self-awareness

than you get from the average billionaire. I build dates. It's like, we'll call it the Gates Foundation. Bill Gates is like, we'll call it the Gates Foundation. Sores is like, we'll call it the Soros. You know, wait, wait, you know what? Well, and to be fair, no, it's first way out there. Soros has a real ideology and it can't work, but if it did, the world wouldn't be that bad. Unlike what would happen if you let Bill Gates run rampage over the earth, which is the

world we live in right now. So I'm going to read a little bit from the Influenza Soros again about what the Open Society is. I have lived through Nazi persecution and Soviet occupation, Soros later said, Popper's book is Karl Popper, Open Society and his enemies struck me with the force of revelation. It showed that fascism and communism have a lot in common, that they both stand in opposition to a different principle of social organization, the principle of Open Society. So okay, I read this and I was like, okay, so let's go,

let's go, let's go read Carl Popper's book, which is called The Open Society of the Ascension of the Edubes. And so, I assumed, right? That's interesting. I was also doing Poppers last night. You had to superior experience with your Poppers. I'm assuming I had a bad fucking time. I read this like last week. Should've gotten years from a gas station too. Yeah, no, instead I got it from the internet for free, which questionable results.

So, okay, so I read this book, right? So this is, Caropopper is like, normally a philosopher, well, he's like a scientist, right? He's most famous for like philosophy of science stuff, but he also wrote this book. And this is his critique of totalitarianism. So, okay, I'm expecting, right? It's gonna be half of it's gonna be about the Nazis

and half of it's gonna be about the communist, right? No, the first half of this book is about Plato. And the second half of this book is about Marx, but he spends like 200 pages yelling at Plato. And to be fair, everything he says about Plato and about why Plato is totalitarian is completely true. But like his conclusion about what totalitarianism is, is that totalitarianism is, is descendant. It's like the product of this thing, he calls his storicism, which is when like you have one thing that's the agent of history. And so she sees like, like, I don't know, like a

great man or like the guy like whatever, he goes guist or like one great nation or like a great class as like, these are all examples of a storicism. And if you think about history like this, you will, this is how to tell itarianism is born. And I am incredibly skeptical of that, of the view of the way you think about history being the original totalitarianism. I, I don't know, it's a very, very weird book

in a lot of ways. Popper is trying to do this thing that a lot of liberal philosophers of that period is doing, which is that he's trying to reconcile individual freedom, but then also economic egalitarianism. And, you know, okay. So if you were actually serious about doing both of these things, right? Like the two things you care about on earth are protecting the individual freedom and achieving economic egalitarianism. You have two options.

You either become an anarchist and you sacrifice neither of your values or you become a neoliberal and you sacrifice both. And popper unfortunately takes a second route. And I feel like a lot of the conflict between kind of like reconciling, the great man theory of history with some of these other, like it comes out of an unwillingness to look at systems of power because the extent to which individual weirdos

and their obsessions influence history is largely due to or is largely like related to the degree of power that like different systems allow to be invested into like individual weirdos. Like it's less a matter of like you've got these sort of, you know, in that kind of fascist idea, you've got these sort of individuals who embody the spirit of a people. And more, if your system allows Huge amounts of power to be invested in individual people with their weird hangups Then those weird hangups of this one guy may wind up defining history. I don't know this is this is an unrelated rant

Well, no, I think it is related because this is sort of the core flaw of this ideology Which is that these people conclude okay, so like they don't Okay, the the the the thing that they have to do, like pop-ras to do, right? Because she, like, acknowledges that a lot of the Marxist critique is really powerful and that, like, it is, in fact, not very good that you have an entire class of people to, like, survive off of extracting, like, labor from another class of people. But, you know, if you accept that right, you can't actually like defend capitalism

on the merits of it being an economic system. You have to like do this like circle run around dance of like defending ideas. And this all gets to this point where the problem that you're talking about happens, which is that like, well, okay, capitalism is also a system where one really weird guy and he's like terrible ideas can have an enormous impact on how society operates. Like this is this is this is the thing we're all suffering from from like Elon Musk, right?

Or like what was that guy's name? Like Robert Moses, right? Like yeah, like the you know, like capitalism is absolutely assisting the generation's just one guy who can just fuck everyone's entire lives. And then that's a perfect example of it because like the fact that Moses has these weird personal hangups around public transportation and this love of being driven around influences

how tens of millions of people live to this day and influences like the global climate crisis. And so it's not like this great man didn't like grab the lathe of heaven. It was more like, no, ours, we, our society kind of like the system we set up allowed an enormous amount of power for this specific thing. How our cities are set up to be invested in an unelected weirdo because he was the only one interested enough to focus on it. And that led to this very bad situation. Yeah. And like, I think, I think pompers think that was like, well, okay, you, you, you, you,

deal with this by like just having elections for everyone. And it's like, well, okay, like, so, so, sometimes you have elections. We never vote for crazy assholes. Yeah. Like, and God, sometimes, sometimes you get Donald Trump, right? Like, you know, a, b, these, these, these, these are these are things that are going to haunt both popper. Well, popper doesn't live long enough to see like the absolute worst is this can possibly go. But George Soros unfortunately has lived to see exactly how value this can possibly go. But let's call him. Let's let's call him by his nickname from, from now on, a G sizzle. Is that good?

We're not doing that. We're not doing that. We're not doing that. Thank you. Thank you, Harrison. This is why you're, this is why you're here. You have power of attorney over what nicknames we call the subjects of the episodes. I will keep and reserve this power.

See, we've built a system to try and stop individual with weird hang-ups from influencing history so much. It's that simple, folks, you know, devolved powers. Yeah, works great. That's good work for the presidency. Unfortunately, we have to talk about Yugoslavia this episode. So it doesn't always work. But all right, so back, back, back, back, and sort of the heady days of the 70s and 80s. So, Jerd Sura is like,

okay, he has a dual thing where he, at once has his kind of crisis, a conscience thing where he's like, I wanna actually do something with my life. That's not just, you know, I wanna have an impact on the world that is positive and not like, I made so much money that like gods look at and vomit. And so, okay, so his solution is he sets up a tax dodge.

He's actually very explicit about those interviews that his first foundation to do charity work was set up as a tax dodge. But this is where Soros is very interesting, right? Because he has, you know, for like a billionaire, right? He has some positions that are started to be very good. So he is anti apartheid, and that is like not a thing you can guarantee from people in that era, like, oh boy. He also, and this is something that gets him in trouble

like to this day is he is pro Palestine. And this is part of why like Netanyahu absolutely hates him. He's not like, okay, he's not like a radical pro-Palestine but by the standards of Netanyahu, a radical. Yeah, yeah, it was like, like his, you know, his sort of like, his sort of like liberal humanism, like, hey, we should not like shoot children with guns thing.

Yeah, is is broadly anti-shooting children. Yeah. For throwing rocks. Yeah, and like that, that makes you a like, and like enemy number one of the Israelis still out. Yeah, no, I, I, okay, I'll put them in like enemy number two. Now the enemy number one is those kids, but yeah, they're easier for, they haven't wrapped them yet.

So, oh god, speaking of things that these really government didn't do. So she gets his story. I thought you were going to do an ad. I don't worry. I have a better one. It's coming good. So in the next day, his first experience, like doing charity work, he decides that he's going to go up against like apartheid in South Africa. And yeah, this is good. So he, he, he, he starts doing, he starts giving scholarships to black students to go to the University of Cape Town. And then he learns a very, very important lesson about neoliberalism that he's about, he's going to like promptly forget after this,

which is that, okay, so what actually happened, what he thinks is going to happen, right, what he's trying to do is he's trying to make, you know, he's trying to make sure there's more money for black kids to go to, go to university. What actually happens is that the state uses his money to pay for the existing scholarships and stops paying for any more scholarships. And so there's two things going on here, right? One is the obvious, this is the, this is the apartheid racism, right? Like they don't want more, like, they don't want more non-white kids going to school. But then two, also, this is the apartheid racism, right? Like, they don't want more non-white kids going to school. But then two, also, this is also sort of a classic

neoliberal failure, which is like, if you were, when you replace the state with like billionaire philanthropists, the state simply, instead of like, having more of the resources the services provided, the state just stops doing it and spends real money on cops. And so, he, his us very quickly realizes that like the, he figures this out, it is like, I fuck this like, no, I'm not going to help you. Like, I'm not going to help the apartment government do racism. And so this makes

him kind of weary of this stuff because he has sort of, he has sort of seen how, he see what happens when you, would you very explicitly try to work with a system that is unbelievably fucked up, which is that the apartheid government uses your money to as a way to funnel more of their own money into their own pockets. And do you know who else uses systems of apartheid

to funnel more money into their own pockets? Oh, okay. I see. I, I, I know see what you're doing. I think the last, I think the previous attempt to the net break was actually better. I was kind of, you know, you know, you know, I mean, it's me. I accept criticism. Correct. That our podcasts are entirely sponsored via a time machine we used to go back to a

apartheid South Africa and get their advertising dollars. So please keep the Krugerrands flowing and purchase these products and services. I learned that Krugerrands was the South African currency from the movie lethal weapon two. We're back and I'm sitting uncomfortable in the knowledge that I am the only person on this Zoom call who has watched lethal weapon too. Have either of you seen any of the lethal's weapon? No. Unbeliefable.

Oh, you're missing maybe the best Mel Gibson performance outside of that time. He got pulled over and Malibu and gave a racist rant to those California state highway patrol officers. Uh, Mel Gibson. Okay. this rant to those California state highway, but Joe Loughler says. Mel gets it. Okay. Speaking of people who are about to give racist rants. Okay. So the other thing about sorrows and the thing that is sort of blisteringly ironic about how the sort of course of anti-sorrows attacks go is that sorrows is like a, a vehement like pretty hard of anti-so's attacks go, is that source is like a, a, a vehement,

like pretty hard line anti-communist. And this is what he spends most of his time, like in the 80s doing is, is, you know, like giving money to anti-communist groups and communist countries. So he funds solidarity and Poland, which is this like, very mixed record. Well, we'll get the solid. Yeah, we don't need to, like, he's funding like, very mixed record. We'll get this all recording.

Yeah, we don't need to be. Like he's funding anti-communist cause. Yeah, yeah, he's funny, but you know, he's trying to fund like a very specific kind of like liberal anti-communist cause, right? And you know, this goes badly for him in a number of ways. One is that the moment, like the moment the Berlin wall falls, everyone just like suddenly forgets

about all of the anti-communism that he did, because, and this is something about, does we have a kind of anti-communist that he is, right? There's a lot of anti-communists who are like, you were just like desk-wad guys, right? Like, this is your guide train by Chiang Kai-Shak who's shooting peasants in El Salvador, right? There's also another kind of anti-communist in this era who are liberal anti-communists,

who are anti-communists, but also anti-Pinochet, for example, Soros gives somebody to the people when Pinochet has this big referendum of his, should I stay in power, he gives money to the people who are like, no. And those are people who, their intentions are better than the just like, absolutely horrifying right wingers. But, you know, it doesn't go great for him. So Soros, his initial plan, right, is he's gonna, you know, okay, when he's trying to like, start funding't go great for him. So Soros

His initial plan, right? Is he's gonna, you know, okay When he's trying to like start funding a decommunist group. She's gonna use his things like he's gonna go into hungry He's gonna like give Hungarians student scholarships and The Hungarians students were like don't do this like if you if you just show up and give us money The state is immediately going to be able to go like, hey, you were like outside funded opposition people doing like regime change stuff. And it's going to like immediately discredit us. And so this is the point where he sets up the Sora's foundation, which becomes open.

There's a whole thing with this, this stuff changes names like many times. The Open Society Foundation stuff. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, we should talk about what they actually do because in sort of like the thing. I mean, I can tell you one thing that they do because I used to work with when I was a teaching class

as a belling cat, my partner, John Carlo, he would go and teach because he was born and for at least a period of time raised in Venezuela, he would teach classes in Latin America to local journalists who wanted to know open source investigative techniques and who didn't have the kind of money to pay what it usually costs to do a Bellingcat thing. And that program, whereby a bunch of journalists in Latin America, particularly Colombia, got training, was funded by the Open Society Foundation. And so a couple of years ago, when there was that massive swelling of like the police murdering people and protests, crowds and stuff in Colombia, the journalists who were like doing open source investigation to track down which police officers were

killing folks and how this was going were a lot of the folks that John Carlo had trained. Like that's the kind of stuff that one of the kind of things that the Open Society Foundation does. Yeah, they also do a lot of, they do a lot of giving students scholarships. The other thing they're really big on that doesn't get talked about much is that they were huge on like cultural events basically. Like paying people money to like put on plays and like theater stuff and music and like writing poems and books which is like I don't know I like I actually think that's cool like like we as a society used to do this like we used to like pay people like the government used to pay people to like write things and to pay people to write things and create

art. And then we decided that was bad and I've never done it again. And yeah, I'm anti creating art for the record. That's why I'm really happy about all this AI stuff. Bate, bait, bait post. Do not engage. So unfortunately for the Soros Foundation, one of the people they give these these scholarships to is Victor or Braun, which is Victor or Bob. Oh, you mean I'm in the Hungarian president in quotation marks. Yes, we. We shall return to that.

This is, I think, maybe the single greatest example of like creating young Gravedigger I've ever seen in my entire life. I don't know. Like one of the things that comes up about this, and this is one of the things that, another one of the guys who Soros backs who like betrays him later on,

says that Soros is bad at politics. Like he's just not very good at it. Like he's not, you know, people, like, the sort of like thing about him is that he's this sort of like criminal mastermind who can like like banquerel revolutions and stuff. And he just like gets out maneuvered by people constantly in ways that are like kind of depressing. Yeah, but you know, so he's spending the 80s like doing all this, you know, like doing the sort of cultural work. And, you know, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, He sort of like has to work with him because he has money and they sort of don't, but

you know, the other thing that that's I think important to understand is that he's not like, there's a bunch of foundations who do like exactly the same stuff, right? Like maybe slightly worse. Like, you know, there's like the Ford foundation, there's like the Rockefellers, right? Or the Rockefeller Foundation. Like they all, they all like at any place where open society is like doing stuff, there's like a worse version of it than the fourth foundation.

And like the Rockefellers are doing. But you know, somehow, stunningly only one of these groups is singled out for being yelled at all the time. And I will, I will leave as exercise to the reader why specifically they pick Soros and not Ford. Huh, huh, I wonder, I wonder reader, why specifically they pick Soros and not Ford. Huh, huh. I wonder, I wonder what big mystery, I wonder what differences and cultural views might be,

might be a play here. Yeah. So, okay, the other real problem that he runs into, which is a cultural problem is that, okay, this is a problem that all the liberal anti-communist run into, which is that, Okay, this is a problem that all the liberal anti-communist run into, which is that, okay, so the walls come down right, and the communist government's fall. And it turns out that the anti-communist and Eastern Europe are almost all right-wingers, and their base are all like right-wing nationalist fanatics. Here's another story, quote, about this.

I thought I would blaze the trail. I would lead, and others would follow. But now that I look back, I find that there was practically nobody behind me. I ask myself, what went wrong? And part of what went wrong is like what Soros is doing in these places. So for example, he's involved in funding solidarity. He's involved in some of solid areas, negotiations with the government. And then the other thing that he does is he's one of the people who helps like do structure

adjustment in Poland. And this goes really badly because so what we're talking about, we should talk a little bit about what solidarity is because he helps destroy it by accident. Solidarity is this giant sort of like social democratic union that forms in, you know, in like the early 80s in Poland. That's like the first sort of independent union in one of these communist countries. And they eventually are able to sort of like knock off the government, but they come into power.

And you know, so they do, they do on sort of Soros's advice and on the advice of a lot of the certain financial people they're getting, right? All of the people are telling them to do privatization, so they do it, right? They privatize all of these giant state-owned like facilities, they privatize their docs, like stuff like that. And this, it turns out, it just causes massive deindustrialization to destroy solidarity's base because there's suddenly no longer all of these union jobs at all of these state-owned factories. And so, you know, they lose an ex election and it's all-dirty, like, vanishes forever into the midst of time. There's like six of those guys left.

Yeah, and this is a real sort of sort of problem. This, this, that, that, that, that, that, like, keeps running over and over again, right? Is it, you know, he, he spent all this time being an anticommunist, but then, the actual anticommunists who have bases and who aren't just like destroying their own bases by like doing privatization, which is something he, the stuff he's also pushing, right? Are these right-wingers? And this is, this is just sort of a fiasco. And, you know, it's like, he, he, he, he, he doesn't like, he tries to do like a very similar thing that what he'd been doing in, in Eastern, like, he tries to do like a very similar thing to

what he'd been doing in Eastern Europe and China. And this goes like even worse because he winds up like backing, he winds up backing one of the CCP factions who gets purged after Tiananmen. And so, you know, sort of like, has this sort of 90s go on, right? Like, he's sort of slowly starting to realize that like, the stuff that he's doing is not working very well. And one of the sort of, I don't know if consequences are the right word, but what, okay,

one of Sora's is sort of like principles that makes him different from a lot of other of these billionaires, right? He doesn't do humanitarian aid. His thing is that like he wants to produce a society that doesn't need humanitarian aid, which is sort of noble, but like, then you go Slavia falls apart. And he winds up doing a bunch of stuff and you go Slavia. Like he winds up building like a water purification

plant, Sarajevo, while I just see age. And the other thing that I didn't know, he was like really heavily involved with, is like, he's basically the reason why the UN War crimes tribunal that like tries Milosevic and stuff, like happens. Like he funds it, it wasn't really like a UN thing. He was like, hey, we're gonna have this tribunal. And then the German government like arrested one of the war criminals

just sort of randomly at like an airport or something and he's he's able to convince sort of like Clinton and a bunch of other people to like actually turn and the UN to like turn this into a real court and This pisses off a lot of people in like by by a lot of people I mean like very specifically pisses below to pick off because I'd somewhat obvious reasons that you try to try and for war crimes. Okay, so I think Gear you're too young for this rob do you remember rock the vote? God, oh, yeah, I remember rock the vote Okay, so what are the things Soros does is he does like a he brings like a rock to vote

He's like one of people who brings the rock to vote to like Slovakia. Great. And, you know, and this is the first time that like, this is how we introduce people to democracy by showing them how cringe it can be. Perfect. And the government is immediately, immediately this sort of the first time that like a government has seriously like, well, I mean, sorry, okay, this is the first time that a government is seriously like, well, I mean, it's not okay.

This is the first time that you've had a protest movement that starts. And the head of the country goes, it's George Soros. He's the one doing this, even though the Ford Foundation, again, and the Rockefeller is just a bunch of random people in Slovakia are also doing this. But this is sort of going to become like a pattern in these things because he's sort of like, I think so, he's kind of like poking a lot of very powerful, like increasingly powerful sort of regional right wing leaders because he looks at the societies and are like, actually it sucks to have just dog shit right wingers who are racist and hate everyone running a country. Yeah, that sounds like it would be bad. Yeah, and this is the thing about Swarovs, right? Like,

every once in a while, right? He sees something really bad going on and goes, I'm gonna throw a bunch of money at it, try to fix it. And so one of the things that he does this for is the war on drugs. Like in the, in sort of the 80s and 90s, like, Soros looks at this and is like, this fucking sucks. Like, this is really bad. And so he starts working in Baltimore

where the government is trying to do like, something like pretty, like something like even now is to consider sort of like pretty radical. I like harm reduction stuff. So I mean they like like Baltimore in the 90s has needle exchanges. He's doing like Narcan trainings for people. He's you know, he's doing things like fun instead of like like giving money to like he's doing he's doing these programs to trainings for people. He's doing things like fun, instead of like giving money to like, he's doing, he's doing his programs to like get people out of like prison faster and he's doing like after school programs for kids.

And this stuff like, this looks like genuinely good. Like there's no, like, I don't know. It sucks that like it's, it's billionaire money that's like doing it, but like, I don't know. Like probably there's a lot of people who are alive It sucks that like it's it's billionaire money. That's like doing it, but like I don't know like Probably there's a lot of people who are alive because I didn't get HIV from needles Are they were able to do exchanges for yeah, sure that's all that's all good stuff Yeah, and but you know the interesting thing about source right he's he's like not like you know He's doing stuff that's like pretty lefty right but he's like not a partisan guy until he sees George Bush

And he sees he's like the a partisan guy until he sees George Bush. And he sees, he's like the day after 9-11, he's like, holy shit, this guy is a maniac. And like instantly has like the switch flips of like this man, this man is an enemy to open society, which is true. And he's like, he's like, guess this braid of like, I need to bring this man down.

And so he starts getting really, for the first time, right, he starts getting really, really involved in 2004 election. He's doing like, like these like micro targeting ad stuff. He's like throwing money around everywhere. And you know, I mean, he explicitly like, like the way he looks at it, like he's very explicit about this, is like, he wants to level the, like, the playing field

between the Republicans who are funded by just a trillion-round millionaires. And the Republicans who are funded by just a trillion-routing billionaires and the Democrats who are funded by not that many billionaires. The problem with this is that he has a very weird view of what's wrong with Bush. I'm going to read from people in the sorrows again. In imposing its view of freedom on both the American people in a foreign country, quote, the supremacist ideology of the Bush administration is in contradiction with the principles of open society because it claims possession of an ultimate truth.

Which, I don't know, I don't actually think like claiming possession of an ultimate truth is like specifically the thing that like, is the reason why the Bush administration is bad, but simultaneously, I don't know, like, I, it's hard for me to be like too bad about a billionaire seeing George Bush and just like going, oh my God.

And sort of, yeah, it didn't, it didn't work, but it's good that he gave it, it gave it the old college try. Yeah. Well, and unfortunately, this, this has a backlash effect, which the Republican see him start doing this. And they're like, oh shit, this is incredible campaign material for us. And we start seeing like the, the, the, the sort of the less openly anti-semitic like precursor so like all the stuff we see today, like Bill O'Reilly goes after him

Mm-hmm. Oh God Robert do you remember Dennis Hastert? Oh Yeah, oh man Dennis look if I'm listing my favorite pedophiles who were long-standing speakers of the house of representatives Dennis Hastert is easily in the top three She I Dennis Haster is easily in the top three. She, I, this is a thing that's been like collectively wiped from like America's conscience, is that like the Republican speaker of the house for like 20 years was like one of,

what if history was political pedophiles? He sure was. And he, he also, it turns out one of the people who mainstreamed the anti-Sorrows stuff, she starts citing a fucking Lyndon Lourouche quote unquote report claiming that Soros got his money from drugs. So Lyndon Lourouche is this like fascist weirdo who cut his teeth and running this like anti-communist cult that would like physically fight leftist groups on campuses and would like give information

on like student leftist groups and likerescrupes to the government. They are so fed it up that if you start reading about the LaRoucheites, they were nerking to federal orgs you've never heard of before. It's stunningly bizarre conspiracy cult thing. And Dennis Hasser was just straight up reading their anti-Semitic conspiracy theories like on TV. But you know, and I think this is something

that some one of the things I wanted to emphasize like in this episode, right, is like the anti-Suro stuff isn't really like, I don't know what you call it, like sort of organic anti-Semitism, like it's not something that like comes from the Republican base, right? This is something that, this is a deliberate choice by Republican political strategist who

are very deliberately, like, this is, this is a Jewish billionaire who's helping the, who's helping a Democratic party, like, we can use this to do what, to try to do, like, culture worship to win this election. And, you know, like, you, you, we know, we can see the results of this, and this isn't even, you know, we're going to get this in a little bit you know, like, we can see the results of this. And this isn't even, you know, we're gonna get this in a little bit, but like, this isn't even the only time this is gonna happen.

Where, like, the civic like Soros anti-semitism suffered to me, yes, it's cooked up by, like, very specifically cooked up as a targeted thing by political strategists. I love it. Which it's, it's, it's good. Oh, anyways, we should, we should do ads. Yeah, speaking of anti-Semitism, you know, just, just speaking about it.

That's what we're doing here. Anyway, here's a meds. Ah, we're back. Uh, Got another email from the ADL. I'm going to deal with this. Y'all continue talking about George Soros. Oh, boy. So, all right. Well, the other thing Soros keeps doing, like, you know, so in going after Bush, right, he has now made himself like, he's not enemy number one yet, but he's going, he's made himself like a pretty high profile enemy of the repel of the, like, the right. They were that guy who threw the shoe. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So that guy actually sucks. I did. Yeah. Yeah. We're not praising him. We was noting that he got through a shoe. Yeah. He starts this sort of like arc of pissing off a bunch of really, really powerful and important people who are anti-Semitic great-wingers.

So remember how I, a while back, I said I was talking about there was a guy who double crossed Soros, who was like this guy's bad at politics. So that guy was like a, that guy, that guy was a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a close ally, a Victor Abon. So it's going great. How do you actually pronounce his name? I, for some reason, it always just like, pings off my brain. Oh, yeah. I mean, with Garren, Garren, I hear the real brain trust to ask about pronunciation. You, you, you've, you've brought together, you know, just the, the ghosts of saying the greatest, greatest producer. Just send me a list of like European cities. That's a free episode idea. Yeah.

And there you go. Yeah, I'm just going to say the word Binghamton, like 47 times. It's going to be great. Okay. So he sort of spacks. seven times, it's gonna be great. Okay, so Soros back to say this is called the Rose Revolution. And you know, this turns out badly for Soros in every possible way, which is that like one, his guy like sucks and turns on him. And then two, he really like this like really pisses off Vladimir Putin, a man who is going to hold this grudge like on his deathbed, he will be holding this grudge.

Now, okay, so one of the things that sort of like happens, so she's backing these sort of like protest movements in Eastern Europe. I confused the sort of 2000s. And you know, as the 2000s go on and turn to 2008, the world economy goes to shit. A bunch of right-wingers start taking power. And one of Victor Reborn's political consultants, who is this guy who he met through Netanyahu, like specifically, this is another consultant guy, very specifically cooks up the idea for how he's trying to fend off like a right, like a sort of another sort of right wing challenge, he's trying to fend off like the rest of sort of political establishment. And or bonds consultant, like very specifically is like, what if we go after Soros again?

And you know, and so we does. And this is, this is another one of those things, like this is literally the anti-Semitism is fucking cooked up in a PR lab in order for these people to win elections. And I don't know, that just sort of, the just sort of like cynical cold bloodedness of it, like of these people,, this political consultant,

by the way, is also Jewish, right? And he just doesn't give a shity, so he's like a fuck it. I'm like one of Netanyahu's guys, Netanyahu fucking hates this guy too, like why don't we just use him as a punching bag? And so they do. And this is part of a big part of the reason

why Sora turns into this sort of enemy number one, is that in 2015, they start blaming him for the influx of refugees from Syria. And this bridge like fucking wildfire, suddenly like every single right wing leader on earth is like, oh shit, I can blame all of my refugee stuff on this guy. And they start doing it.

And you know, suddenly like, like, Erdogan is blaming him for like the Getzipart protest in just 13, like, Erdogan is blaming him for like the Getsy part protest just at 13. Like, Trump gets on this. And, you know, this stuff sort of like, it spreads really quickly. And once it's sort of out of the bottle, right? Like, you know, like people like,

the people who sort of first start this, right? Are doing this sort of like, you know, like incredibly cold, cynical, political calculus. But once that, once this like incredibly high level, that dissentism gets out of the open, it starts charting into just like Soros' Satan shit. And, you know, and part of what happens here is that like, this is, this is one of the things

like that the sort of campaigns against Soros is one of the things, like the sort of campaigns against Soros, is one of the things that is responsible for our current migrant policy, why it's so bad, why half our episodes next week are gonna be about horrible shit happening at the border, which is that Soros in the late the 90s and 2000s found out that Clinton was funding his welfare reform

by cutting legal immigrants off from food stamps and SSI benefits. And he's like, wait, this is fucking, you know. Oh, slick, Willie. Yeah, like, it's just like, he called 1.5 million people off of his fucking benefits for just no reason, like unbelievably demonic act. And Saras finds out about this is like, wait, what the fuck, what are you mean he's doing this? So he like puts a coalition together that like funds a bunch of immigrant advocacy groups.

He's able to overturn this, but there's a sort of right with right wing reaction to this right. Like part is partially also part of the right wing reaction to source to doesn't for there's this very very effective and like unbelievably brutal sort of right wing backlash. on deportation shit, it's just utter horror. And all of that stuff continues. And all of these right-wing people figure out that if you can just pin Trump starts but Trump pins the migrant care event on Soros. And they figure out this is the specific combination.

It's the anti-Semitism of the Jewish banker bringing immigrants into your country is just the one-way shop to drive in your entire country into like fascist right-wing frenzy. And it works. And now, you know, like the cycle that we're in now was like anytime something happens, like the right blames before like this.

So the current right-wing panic is that George Soros was funding some like pretty moderate like reform DA people because he's a criminal justice reform guy. And the Republicans are now all talking about how this is like a scheme by Soros to like cause crime and like destroy the entire country. And unfortunately like this is just, like this is just reality now. All of these really bleakly cynical political leaders and their posters and PR consultants

were like, we can use anti-Semitism to win elections and they did. And now we live in hell. Yeah, but on the upside, you know, uh, the, you know, have you guys had the, uh, the new, uh, the new Mountain Dew Zero major melon? It's not tasty, but, uh, it's in grocery stores. So if you're looking for a diet, Mountain dew flavor, that makes it all kind of worthwhile. I don't know. I don't know. Lose them no longer in delivering flavor.

That's what I had for you. It was that or another heroin. Why would they need to deliver flavor when instead they can just continue to mainstream anti-Semitism to get right wing politicians elected. So they can make. So, but you know what, I've been studying this can for a while now and none of the anthropomorphized water melons look like they could be racial caricatures. So that's a win, you know. Look, that is actually, that actually is a racist of when, to be the night,

if Mountain Dew had made a melon version in 1930, it would have been pretty bad. Like we would be sharing pictures of those cans on Twitter today and going, oh my God, they would have to make a statement, they'd have to donate some money to like, I don't know, fund a, probably scholarships or something. It'd be a real problem for Mountain Dew is what I'm saying.

But today, nothing problematic about the melons on their can. Yeah, I'm sure there's nothing problematic about the soda industry. Aspartane. That's chemical. Well, is that, is that all we had me? Yeah, that's, yeah,, this is this is what I could have here. Well, it's I think now now we finally know why George Souros is as bad as Magneto. Um, and, and why comparing George Souros to Magneto as the one of the richest men in the

world who owns probably the most influential communication app is probably not a good thing. You know, one more thing that I want to get on. Like for one second, I forgot to say earlier, is it like, Soros is not like, in the scale of billionaire, Soros is not very rich. Like he's like the 370th richest billionaire. Like he's not even at the top 100, right? Elon Musk, he has like $6 billion.

Elon Musk has like $184 billion or something. So like, you know, the relative levels of influence that these people have. No, I was talking about Elon Musk. Yeah, yeah. One of the richest, most influential people on the planet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just, I need people on the planet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just, I need everyone to understand exactly

how much more fucking rich it is. It's like fucking, it's like when fucking Henry Ford was doing anti-Semitic conspiracy series. It's like you literally, like you personally literally control more wealth than all the people you're ranting about combined, like shut the fuck up. Oh my god Ah

Anti-Semitism folks it sucks and also rich people do it even though they're They are the actual Like the actual yeah, and so far as anything even remotely like what they're what they're hypothesizing could even potentially exist It's fucking these people so yeah They're bad. Yeah. There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Does the US government really have alien technology?

And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI? What happens when computers learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers, and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events. We spent a decade applying critical thinking to some of the most bizarre phenomenon civilization and beyond.

Each week, we dive deep into unsolved mysteries, conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies. You've heard about these things, but what's the full story? Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you find your favorite shows. What's up fam? I'm Brian Ford, Artisan Baker and host of the new podcast Flaky Biscuits. On this podcast, I'm going to get to know my guests by cooking up their favorite nostalgic meal. It could be anything from Twinkies to mom's Thanksgiving dressing. Sometimes I might get it wrong, sometimes I'll get it right.

I'm so happy as good, because man, if it wasn't, I'd be like, you know, everybody not my mom. Either way, we will have a blast. You'll have access to every recipe so you can cook and bake alongside me. As I talk to artists, musicians, and chefs about how this meal guided them to success. And these nostalgic meals, fam, they inspire one of a kind conversations.

When I bake this recipe, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Does this podcast come with a therapist? He can. Listen to Flaky Biscuit every Tuesday on the I Heart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. In the podcast Alphabet Boys, we take you inside undercover investigations. I'm Trevor Aronson. And in our second season, we have an Alphabet soup with the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI all mixed up in the same case.

At the center of the story is Flavio. But who is Flavio? I see movies with arm dealers on TV. Okay, I'm going there for C.A. but I'm going to die. When I land, there's Flavio in a suit. It's like follow me. And he slams down his badge in my passport. And I'm like, uh, it's like follow me. And he slams down his badge in my passport.

And I'm like, something's going on here. So you do personal security all over the world and you have somebody call you and say, can you get grenades and guns for this guy in Colombia? Not, not specified grenades, a lot of ammunition. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm steal, who are the cops, who are the criminals? And is anyone really who they claim to be?

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. It's, it could happen here. You'd look, I didn't think of an intro for this one. I really should have. I apologize to the readers. I was reading about Chinese also weasants, instead. Yeah, this is a podcast that's, I don't know, it's about things. I'm here. I'm here. What are you doing? I'm like, how does that their podcast? It's actually about things. It ours is actually about things.

And today it's about hot dogs. And in order to talk about hot dogs, we're joined by Jamie Loftus, whose new book, Raw Dog, The Naked Truth about Hot Dogs, boldly asked the question, what if a book was good? Welcome to the show, Jamie, hello. Hello, so good to be here to talk about things.

This is like the thingiest thing available, I think. Yeah, so I read this book in, okay, I don't know how you're actually supposed to divide up. If you stand up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the sitting, is that still one sitting? But it's a no-insquisite to two things. Yeah, so I read this book in one sitting, it was great. Well, one sitting with a bathroom break? No, I think there was two, technically, but yeah. a with a bathroom break? There I think there was two technically, but yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was a good time. Yeah.

I'm so glad you liked it. Yeah, and so, okay, so this is a book that's about hot dogs and also about, it's a tale of human, human and animal misery and suffering. And so as I was reading the book, my playlist pops up, Daniel Conn and the painted bird song, The Butcher's Share. And so I'm like reading about this and the song starts going, let's take a walk around the old bizarre, where every little thing has traveled far. Every pair of pants and grain of rice contains a horror story and it's price.

My god. It's dramatic too. Wow, really seeming right at you. Yeah, I was like, wow, wow. Okay, I guess reality is just sort of telling me what the plot is right now. Yeah, I mean, in another case, I think it's really important that we're talking about this right now,

is that I believe your book was officially published on May 23rd, which is the 23rd day in the fifth month, which is obviously of the year year 2023, which is very important in the in the discordian calendar and your books about hot dogs, which is specifically, it is the one sacred food in the religion of discordianism. So we, I think it's really, it's really important. We talk about this because you you must be a very powerful wizard to figure this out. Yes. Yes, I had to reserve this date years in advance. I saw it coming and You know, and then by the time people caught on it was too late. I had already

I had already visited it my way into the most potent release date and now now, I mean, it's, we all may be fucked because I didn't. That's cool. Someone's gonna assassinate JFK again. It's gonna be great. And this time his head is gonna explode. Like there's twice as much blood in it as the original. It's gonna be really shocking.

I see original. I love that it's like, I see original. Like, general series or movies. I see. It's gonna be a second,. I love that it's like asking original movies. There's going to be a second grassy knoll stack on top of the book depository. It's going to be amazing. Has reboot culture gone too far? You know, it's not good. It's a good question.

I was trying to do a reboot culture plug cycle back your thing and I can't do it. I'm a hack and a fraud. But I wanted to, yes, I wanted to talk to you a bit about, one of the things you mentioned in the book is that you were trying to get into, like, like trying to be able to get tours of these, of these, like packing plans and you're just,

they just like didn't let you. So I wanted to ask a bit about like that process because that seems like it was incredibly chaotic. Yeah, it was really frustrating and humiliating, kind of every step of the way. Where, I mean, as we were traveling, I had the map of places that I wanted to go and then I also had a map of like meat packing plants

that we could possibly go to on the way. And so I reached out a little bit in advance and either got, I mean, got a ton of just no answers and I would try to call. But generally, the excuse I was given was, was, well, we don't let people tour anymore since COVID because there were a few places. I know that the Vienna beef factory in Chicago used to do tours of very specific areas of the factory, kind of the least gnarly parts, which is saying nothing, but you know, there were places that you that used to let civilians tour. And now it's just, unless things have changed in the last, you know, year or so, no one can.

And on top of that in certain states, and this is also shifting, but agag laws, I think make it way less possible and appealing for any meat packing plant to allow other people in, which is, I mean, the agag law rabbit hole is so sinister of just like, instead of any meaningful improvement in me packing plants, they're inventing new laws to combat technology, which is just terrifying. Yeah, I mean, that was a, I thought, was that technically pre-greenscare? That's a good question. I think it was mostly like a mid 90s thing.

Yeah, but they've definitely kicked up, I mean, I think awareness of them in general has kicked up in the last couple of years because like in sort of in step with how horrible conditions were for workers during lockdown after the executive order. I think there was like all of a sudden a heightened interest in wanting to investigate it

and they were just blocked at every single turn. And there are some, I know that some have been overturned or in the process of being overturned, but I don't know. It seems pretty bleak to me. Yeah. Yeah, like, you know, I think at home with that right, like we found out like what, like a,

like it was like a month ago, like pretty recently also that there were a bunch of companies, though these meat packing companies that were just like using child labor and the children were getting horribly named. Yeah. Yeah, that was and didn't make the book, that were just like using child labor, the children were getting horribly named. Yep. That, yeah, that, that was, and didn't make the book, but I could have taken an educated guess,

like, you know, like a pretty, and it is like, often so, comically bad, it feels wrong, but it's just like so over the top horrible. And it sounds like describing current meatpacking conditions in the US sounds like you're describing meatpacking conditions 100 years ago. And they were actually slightly better 100 years ago. So it is very bleak in the unions that still exist, but they are somewhat weakened and making it possible for laws like this to sneak through

an active child labor. And there's, I know I put this in the book because it's something I think about all the time where, you know, down the line, it was reported that not only was working at a meat packing plant, one of the least safe jobs in the country during lockdown. But on top of that, a year later, it was revealed that the top brass at Tyson and Smithfield were directly colluding with the government and essentially drafted the executive order that was given in April 2020 to keep the meat packing plants open. There were, you know, foreman and sort of middle managers at these companies that would take bets

on how many of their employees would get sick. It was just like, it was cartoon evil. It was, yeah. I'm like constantly haunted by the taking bets thing. Like that's the, I think about that like once a week and I'm like, I think your line was, I think your line was like a continued thing about how okay with you are you with bringing the guillotine back. And I was like, you know, like,

it's the worst one. It's like middle managers and like, what is your end game here? Like, I mean, I know what the end game is, but it's so bleak to be making, just getting by and still betting against your vulnerable people that work for you, who you see every day. It's just like, I mean, whatever, not surprising, but yeah, it's like, wow, there's no justice in hot dog land. There really is. I'm so curious about how curated,

what information is allowed to be shared. I'm curious if they know how bad it is even, or if they're just conditioned not to think about it. Yeah, for what I can tell, there are, and I write about one at length in the book, because it's one of my favorite YouTube clips of all time, about this Canadian TV show that's like, I think it's just called How It's Made. This is a very popular Canadian television show.

I watched this a lot as a kid. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love, I mean, I love shows like that. And I love specifically when they show you how something gross is made. Yeah. They're really trying to keep the mood light in a way that is so funny with hot dogs, where it's just these big machines farting out goo.

And then there's this baseline playing, that's like boom, boom, boom, boom. The next step in the hot dog's journey is going to the shit fat. And you're like, what? It's so good. But it's really, I mean, those clips are ridiculously curated. And to the point where I was like, I can't even really

tell you what's missing. But you know, you could tell weird PR when you see it. And yeah, they're sort of showing the easiest. I don't know, it reminds me, I don't know why I'm like I'm like, Farino's told today, but like it reminds me of the anecdote about Elizabeth Holmes where she was like taking Joe Biden around Farino's And then there were like people in each room setting up the next room to look like it was a functioning business As they like they were taking him through him through the rooms and successfully deceived him. That's very much what hot dog production clips feel like to me, which is wild because they're still

disgusting. Like you cannot make it look good. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, going back through years of reports, It's really difficult, understandably so, to speak with people who work at meat packing plants as well, because there's not a lot of that they stand to gain from talking to reporters, but there was a good Washington Post report about it in the early 2000s that details not just labor abuses within the workforce,

but how when you're not paying your employees enough and not keeping the equipment updated and are factory farming focused on just production, production, production, the animals are far worse off too. And there are some pretty horrifying descriptions of what would happen to animals when people didn't have the workforce or the tools to be able to slaughter an animal in not the most horrible way possible.

Yeah. I like thought I had a, like I'd like watch stuff before on factory farming and like I don't, I have a real fun time sleeping tonight thinking about the fucking, I don't know, I mean, the illusion probably caught up wearing this because this is like the animal stuff and this is genuinely horrible. Like this specific thing I was thinking of was like I'm talking about like they're like starting the animal to kill up and the animal comes back and they're like literally chopping the animal apart while it's alive.

The animal's like blinking out that are like, Jesus Christ. It's like, it's hot. And on the workers end, it's like, and don't stop or you're fired. And like, and you have no protection. It's just like, it's a, it's a nightmare in a lot of places. And there, it came around in an interesting way with, the Nathan Tata Keating Contest last year because they used, I don't know if they used Smithfield plants for all of their food, but they did. Certainly some of them. And there was a protester who came on stage while Joey Chessnet was gobbling 75 guisees

or something like that. And the protester was wearing a Darth Vader mask. And he had this sign that said, like, take down the Smithfield Death Star. And it was a good, like a pretty solid protest. It made it on TV. But then Joey Chessna tackled him to the ground and then just stood up and kept eating hot dogs. It was like, I mean, the protester was so in the right, but also watching Joey really just take someone, just in the middle of, he was like, 40 hot dogs deep, tackled this guy to the ground,

and on the low res feed I was watching, it looks like he killed him. And I was like, what did Joey just do on ESPN? Did he just kill a man? He didn't, but he injured someone. And he also had a broken leg at the time, Joey, not the protester. So it was just like-

Then he went back to the game. He had to be very bizarre. And then he finished the contest. And he was like, well, I would have beat my own record, but unfortunately I had to pause for five seconds to kill someone. But anyways, yeah, the, especially Smithfield, I think is uniquely that

that Smithfield enticed. And it's just like horrendous with like, for practices. Yeah, and I mean, I think that was like, I have a thing I was gonna say, and then it simply evaporated from my mind. You know what, fuck it, add break, you're doing it add break, you're the cover up my mind. You know what? Fuck it and break it.

Do it. Cover up my failures. I keep having this like false memory. I feel like it's like it's like a something Mandela effect thing where when everyone says, whenever someone says Joey Chestnut, I keep, I keep thinking it's a character from I think you should leave. But whenever I look at it, I'm like, no, it's not. Every single time. I mean, it does sound like that. And I think you should leave as such God-tier hot dog jokes that Joey should be on that show, but unfortunately, he lacks charisma.

And so he's not a bad person. He's definitely complicit in a number of things. Very hard to know what Joey's politics are, which I know is intentional, but I'm like, what's going on with him? He's from San Diego, but now he lives in Indiana. I just don't feel like it boasts well, but I can't say for sure.

Yeah. Yeah, you know, that was another part of this that I was like, I was reading this, and especially it like given the shit that's been happening in the last few weeks, reading about to Kari Kobayashi, the former champion competitive eating guy coming to the US and then like having the very combination American experience of like coming to the US and then slowly realizing holy shit This place sucks ass like there's just a bunch of races here and they hate us and my boss is going to like run a racist PR campaign against me for money like like money. Like, like, mask off like every day all the time. And here's the guy I'm going to be replacing you with and you will be only abused until this guy can beat you. And then goodbye forever. And that's what happened. It's so, I mean, I don't know. I think it's fascinating in a very sick way because it's like he is just a hot dog Vince McMahon.

Like it's absolutely who this guy is. And clearly idolizes Vince McMahon, the guy George Shea, like his wife wrote for the WWE and soap operas. And so he's just like very well versed in a very racist anti-woman high drama. Like it's just like what he, it's his favorite. And I hate him. And he's so uniquely in control of that world. It feels very Vince McMahon-ish where you're like, surely someone else could do this job,

but it's just not not allowed. If he's the Vince McMahon of the Hot Dog World, what are you now in the Hot Dog World? The study of Hot Dogs. I'm one of the people who Vince McMahon covers up the murder of. I think probably that's eventually me. I'll be involved in a very small, suspicious incident in this man's life.

I don't know. I mean, yeah, unfortunately, I feel like that's the best shot I have. It was interesting though, when I released an excerpt of my book that was about Joey Chessnet and they did not run this by me, but they just named the excerpt I'm in love with Joey Chessnet. I was like, okay, I guess I do say that, but I wouldn't lead with it. Anyways, the majorly eating PR team reached out to me,

and I thought it was just gonna get like reams, but it was just a light fact correct. It was very weird, a little menacing, but I guess that they're fine with me calling them evil. They're like, hey, when you said we were evil, your number was a little bit off, just so you know. I know And thanks. This guy is fresh as a cross.

Yeah. No, not just power. And I changed my mind. I think they're great now due to this small fact correction. Ringing endorsements. We're attempting to confirm live. There is not in fact a gun behind Jamie's head right now. Look, I can't say.

I can't say. I think the two things, yeah, with the book being out now, it feels nice in most ways and then two ways where I'm like stressed out about it where I'm like I'm afraid that George Shay is gonna come for me. And I'm also afraid the entire city of Chicago is gonna come. Okay, I wanna talk about this because,

all right, so I'm gonna have to go into witness protection after this, but I agree with you. That there's cogs of hot dogs, not that good. Yeah, like, I think the celery salt on hot dog is really good, but yeah. There's, like, it doesn't, it just, it gets too soggy pretty quickly. The flavors don't necessarily

go together. It's only okay. It's wet and there's too much going on. It's just like, yeah, it's a catastrophe. I was promising myself I would dial back on Kogohatog Slender. But it's like not, it's not, it's not very good. And I think the main thing, it wouldn't bother me as much if they, I'm like those people in Chicago. But if the Chicago hot dog loving community was just like, hey, we have this gross hot dog and we love it. That's fine.

Unbridled enthusiasm for something gross, love it. But then they top that off by being like, and if you like ketchup, you should walk into traffic and get hit by a car. Like so aggressively hate ketchup in a way that I don't know. I love something see there. I love to see there. Like, hating something innocuous is such a weird thing to do.

It's very bizarre. I also got like just absolute whiplash reading this because one of the own places you go to is the, I died, incomprehensibly named Faso's last stand. And I was literally there last week by accident because I- No way. Yeah, so I was like an absolute fool.

I was trying to travel at 7 a.m. on two hours of sleep because I was writing an episode and I took a bus the wrong way and I ended up there and I was like, what the fuck if I just walked into and I opened this book and I was like, oh my God, what is happening to me? Empty Fatsos Last dance sounds like a very scary, liminal space to exist.

It was so accursed. Like, I was like getting off the bus and the bus driver was like, are you sure you wanna get off here? And I was like, yeah, well, I mean, like a, like a, I don't know, who scrubs episode. It was all the thing.

Yeah, then you find out that Fatsos last and burned down 20 years ago. Did you get anything? They weren't open. Oh Pretty good. It was pretty good there. And then I've since gone back to Chicago because I didn't have time to go everywhere I wanted to and I've since gone back and I do genuinely like the Chicago style hot dog at Red Hot Ranch. I'm a big red hot ranch head. I've converted. But a lot of it is, yeah, it's just bizarre.

And the hating the ketchup thing is confusing. Then I went to Pittsburgh recently and their ketchup city USA. And so I was having some interesting conversation. And yeah, this is what my life is like now. I never think, okay, so there's two more, it's very specific hot dog question to need to ask. One is, do you have puttillo takes? Oh, not really.

I like puttillo's. And I've been in Illinois, and I've been in California too. It's a classic. It's good. It didn't make it into the book because there was so's good. It didn't make it into the book because there was so many hot dogs that didn't make it into the book

because they were like, all right, that's just you saying, like there were so many paragraphs in a row. And then I had this one, and I liked it. And then I had this one, and I liked it. So my editor was like, all right, we can, we can cut it. But yeah, I'm up.

We can, I had to cut whole chapters. It's so wild how long this book could have been, or I not reined in. But there was, well, this is Chicago relevant too. I took a, a two day course called Hot Dog University through Vienna beef from this guy. That's a thing. I'm gonna, I can't keep that for me. Sorry. Oh, yeah, I'm a graduate of Hot Dog University. It's a course where you, it was on Zoom, unfortunately, it used to be in person. This is Guy Mark, PhD, Professor Hot Dog's, Mark, PhD, Professor Hot Dog's, and you take the course and he teaches you how to open your own Hot Dog stand over the course of two days.

And it was actually, I learned a lot. How many people were on the Zoom? There are three people. It was me and two guys from Chicago. And I was trying to like be, I didn't want to say why I was there. So I was trying to just like, oh, my name's Jamie. And I'm interested in opening a California hot dog stand. And Mark was really interested in the idea.

And it was a couple months of the kind of like dodging some emails of like, I'm not going to do it. I'm not like, I never told them, but I'm not going to do it. Okay. So, all right. And you think I got, I'm now conflicted because I have a great hot dog stand pinnacle. But also I want to ask you the second hot dog question, which is, have you had japa dogs? No, I haven't had japa dogs yet. I wanted to go because I know that there's like a bunch, there's some Vancouver. Is that right? Like, I know. Yeah. Yeah. It's a Canadian. Canada coded my, my friend in Vancouver keeps insisting I eat it and I refuse.

I wanted to go to Vancouver and try it because like Northwestern hot dogs. There's like there's a lot going on there in a good way. Like Portland, Seattle, big fan of their hot dogs. Yeah, I didn't get to Japa Dog. There are a few places. There's a place in Maine I really wanted to go to, but it was so on the side of the highway and opened two hours a day that it was like, it would be so logistically hard to be there, but working on it. Yeah, I want to go to Jaffa Dog someday. I went to, I got hot dog Poutine and Montreal recently, which I guess

is a common Poutine make It was great So now that you've dedicated I'm guessing multiple years of your life two years. Yeah Not in those back I guess it's studying studying both hot dogs and like the cultural conditions that are created around them Do you feel like a better person? around them. Do you feel like a better person? Oh, um, or have you learned something extremely useful about American culture that will improve your life going forward?

Thank you for being too alternatives to the question. I would say that knowing more about hot dogs didn't make me a better person. I think I hope. And I also, I think that like, I don't know. It feels better to, or I don't know. Like I enjoy stuff that it's like, you can get to a really dark and serious place, but they seem so innocuous. It's like, whatever. And getting hands-low and grattled

to come into your candy house, and that being like, actually, it's fucking murder city. Everyone's fucked in here. Like, you're gonna have fun for a little while. The food is delicious, but then you're gonna die. Like, I just, I like subjects like that. And getting to, I don't know, I've met genuinely, I, when we had the Booker Lee show the other night, I've met so many nice people

through the hot dog community. I got my hot dog community. It's true, I had this guy, I met in a parking lot in Culver City. He was a Weenermobile driver at the time, and he like brought us the onsen, we talked on stage and he was reflecting on his Weenermobile heyday, and he was reflecting on his Miner Mobile heyday

and he told me this, oh, I'm excited. Because at the time, he was still working for Oscar Meyer and it's like, do people have sex in here? And he was like, I don't know, probably. But now he doesn't work for Oscar Meyer. So I was like, do people have sex in there? You have no loyalty at this point. And he was like, okay, well, I never did, but there is

like, there's like six seats in the waiter mobile. And I guess on the back left, it's called the meat seat. And that's where he fuck. The meat seats. I know. It was really, it was really shocking and he's so sweet that it was really scary to hear coming out of his mouth. So there is the meat seat. Anyways, I've made a lot of nice, I've been a lot of nice people through hot dogs and I've learned this stuff. I did not know. So it's fun. Well, you too can become a better person by purchasing the book, rock, talk, whatever books are sold. What actual serious question? Have you ever watched the movie Food Fight?

No, wait, when is it from? The 2012 computer animated movie starring, starring supermarket food mascots that in the United, starring supermarket food mascots that and they unite to fight the generic brand food products in their grocery store. And there's a lot of really weird not symmetry, really uncomfortable like over-socialization. And some of the most,

some of the most garish animation you've ever seen. It's a pretty wild move. It was a development for like, oh, it was like almost like a decade and a half. Early machine, evil, Lungoria, Hillary Duff. That's like, that live. What a different world.

Because for Lloyd plays, plays one of the villains. It is one of the worst like acid of a movie just because it is just really bad. That is so crazy. I have zero recollections. I mean hot dogs are certainly prominent on this post. I was just shocked at them billing them building the star-kissed tuna above the twinkie? It doesn't make sense to me. Also, there is a dog character who's just like Indiana Jones, but a dog that was also,

it's like a romantic relationship with a human woman. I don't wanna know where the Nazi stuff comes in, but I am. This is so wild because I thought that sausage party was the worst thing to happen to this very scary genre. And it just feels like this is like the dark side of sausage party. Oh my god. Oh, and there's a maybe there's a a sequel, food fight, it's about time. I've not heard of this. Oh, no. Oh, maybe this is fake.

No, maybe this is fake. I hope it's fake. Yeah, it was so ugly, holy shit. No, it is one of the worst movies ever made. It's garbage, it's upsetting. It is weirdly fascistic. And it's also like primarily based around brand promotion. Also, a lot of these big food companies signed these contracts in the late 90s.

And of course, the film didn't come out until 2012. Oh my God. There's a whole bunch of really weird food fight merchandise that was made with all of these brand mascots. It's all extremely questionable. That does explain the cast. Yeah. Because it's a late 90s cast to have Wayne Brady

playing Daredevil band and Christopher Lloyd playing Mr. Clickboard. Chris Katan, isn't it? Yeah, this movie's been in development for a long time. Well, holy shit. Anyway, I was just wondering since it is super market food, hot dog adjacent and it does often draw, draw parallels to sausage party,

which is also obviously one of the most famous hot dog films. One of the most famous films, photo book films. Thank you for- Motion pictures. Sit-a-baw. Sit-a-baw. I have, film. Film, film. Thank you. Motion pictures. Sit down. Sit down.

Sit down. I have, I've been wearing them at the shows. I've have, they did make Halloween costumes for sausage party. And they have the bun that looks so visceral. Like, though, like, it has like vagina mouse and then they gave the bun huge boobs and a huge butt. Anyways, she's voiced by Kristen Wig and I have the costume. And I've been wearing it.

Wait, no, you have the actual costume? Yeah, I have. I'm it's it's right. Oh, no. Oh, we're tonight. Oh, you're wearing it for your book stuff.

Yeah, I love a costume change, especially when it is also a jump scare. Yeah, yeah, wow. Yeah, well, that's incredibly upsetting. That's about all the time we have today. JB, where can people find the hot dog book? Oh, you can find it all over the place, but I would recommend getting it from bookshop.org if you're ordering online. It's a really cool website that will automatically purchase from your nearest independent bookstore

and send it to you. So yeah, it's a pro-labor book, so don't buy it from somewhere shitty. Use your head. But yeah, get it. And there's also, I also narrate the art in the book. If you, like many people, have been telling me for the past couple of days, are like a book,

kind of a lone podcast, in a way. And I was like, sure. It feels great. Feels great to hear. And where can people find you on the internet and the stuff that you also do that's not the hot dog book? Bravely still on Twitter at Jamie Loftus' help and Instagram at Jamie Christ Superstar.

And then you can listen to me on the Bechtelcast every week on this very network. Well, I sure hope you cover food fight in an upcoming episodes. I do just covered sausage party and I think we both have PTSD. Have like a detox period first. And then come back with food fight and and by the end, be like, you

know, sausage party. No, that's that. That's that. Yeah, this is the one you do when the paperback comes out. Oh, nice. Oh, nice. Oh, nice. Oh, nice.

Not the worst idea. I do want to watch this movie now, but I'm like looking at the poster. I'm like, I don't know if I can watch it alone, but I will watch it. We can surely play in something. Let's do it. All right. Thank you. Thank you for coming on and talking about hot dogs and labor and all of all of your

hard work. You can find us on cool zone media on most of the Instagrams and Twitter's and other places and happen here pod. Keep on dog dog and yep, okay. As they say, as they say, yes. There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Does the US government really have alien technology? And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI? What happens when computers learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town?

From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events. We spent a decade applying critical thinking to some of the most bizarre phenomenon civilization and beyond. Each week, we dive deep into unsolved mysteries, conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies. You've heard about these things, but what's the full story?

Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your favorite shows. What's up fam? I'm Brian Ford, Artisan Vaker and host of the new podcast, Flaky Biscuit. On this podcast, I'm gonna get to know my guests by cooking up their favorite nostalgic meal.

It could be anything from Twinkies to moms thanksgiving Jurassic. Sometimes I might get it wrong, sometimes I'll get it right. I'm so happy as good, because man, if it wasn't, I'd be like, you know, everybody not my mom. Either way, we will have a blast. You'll have access to every recipe so you can cook and bake alongside me

as I talk to artists, musicians, and chefs about how this meal guided them to success. And these nostalgic meals, fam, they inspire one of a kind conversations. When I bake this recipe, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Does this podcast come with a therapist? He can. Listen to Flaky Biscuit every Tuesday on the I Heart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. In the podcast Alphabet Boys, we take you inside undercover investigations. I'm Trevor Aronson. And in our second season, we have an Alphabet suit with the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI all mixed up in the same case.

At the center of the story is Flavio, but who is Flavio? I see movies with arm dealers on TV. Okay, I'm going there for the AI, but I'm gonna die. When I land, there's Flavio in a suit. It's like, follow me. And he slams down his badge in my passport. And I'm like, something's going on here. So you do personal security all over the world and you have somebody call you and say,

can you get grenades and guns for this guy in Colombia? Not, not specified grenades, a lot of ammunition. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm steal, who are the cops? Who are the criminals? And is anyone really who they claim to be? Listen to alphabet boys on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis.

Recently I just wrapped up a whole five episodes about the previous week of action to stop Cop City in Atlanta, Georgia. In a somewhat unsuccessful attempt to shorten the running time of those episodes. I had to cut out many of the funny bits, jokes, gaffs, goofs, bloopers, and related Tom Fulery. But as demonstrated by the police's massive mobilization to shut down a cancelled comedy event in the woods on March 7th, the Wallani Forest and surrounding area of Atlanta are often home to manifestations of absurdist humor. area of Atlanta are often home to manifestations of absurdist humor. There's been a lot of not great news recently. Well, there's kind of always a lot of not great news now that we live in an ever-expanding

hyper-reality, oversaturated with information, but I digress. I think it's just as important to not overlook the comedic lighthearted side of things as it is to keep up with all of the doom and gloom that we usually platform on our show. So without further ado, I present to you jokes from the Atlanta forest. Side note, I am now invoking Jester's privilege, legally, everything we say in this episode is a joke as a little

heads up. Okay. This episode will probably make more sense if you listened to the For Part Week of Action series or the Retrospective episode. But also, I will do my best to pop in via this narration to help fill in any gaps so that listeners will not be completely lost if you've not listened to those other episodes. Anyway, we shall start by tuning back into my conversation with Matt from the Atlanta

Community Press Collective as we discuss the March 5th Police raid of the South River Music Festival. Welcome to It Could Happen Herecast. I'm Garrison Davis. In World of Warcraft, you can't shield bash. So please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't , please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't,

please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't, please were involved in all these actions, who were doing domestic terrorism. But all the rest that happened were at a music festival. Like they were in a completely different section of the forest.

At a music festival, at the parking lot, even away from the music festival, and police surveillance may be good, and they may have been able to pick out an individual or two, but for the most part, like you had something like 200 people partake in this direct action and then disappearing to the woods, there's really no way to, and of course most of them were wearing block of some form. There's really no way to... Much of that block, which has now been burnt

and there's no longer existing in the physical material realm. So there's no way to really tell who was there and other than allegedly having mud on your clothes. Don't talk about what the warrants were and the audity of how the warrants were formatted. Once you started to listen to them, you noticed this very repetitive nature of them. And so about halfway through, we get to a lawyer who straight up calls out the fact that these warrants seem like they were just copy-pasted. Like every single person. All the way down line.

And one of these such claims... Mud. Mud. Mud. So I don't know how many festivals you've attended in your life, but I've been to a few, and they are never clean of fares. So it rained like one day before, the night before the festival started, there was a tornado warning in Atlanta. I forgot about that. And there was rain, which makes, I don't know if the prosecutors know this, but when rain mixes with dirt, it creates something called that we that we refer to as mud.

My talking Martins are still caked in mud. Future me cutting back in here for a sec. So for the record, I have since cleaned my dock martens, but the mud was still on there for well over a month until I was forced to wash my shoes after I stepped in much, much more mud while in the Tillamak forest as I was failing to shoot a keltek, which yeah, that was probably my bad. These charges don't make any sense. There's no evidence these people committed any actual crimes, so they're just being charged

with terrorism, this is a nebulous concept. The judge said that the legal basis of these claims will have to be decided on another day. Similarly, they said that in regards to actual evidence that these people charged did any crimes, she said that in regards to like actual evidence that these people charged did any crimes. She said that she had none of this none of the she said that she had none of this evidence in front of her and that Evidence is for another day. So it's absolutely I think bonkers. It's an appropriate word. One of those one of those kangaroo court moments. Really my faith in the legal system was really solidified this day.

There was also the threat of arrest for the New York Times reporter that happened. forgot to mention that. So, you know, I, I, we'll leave that commentary by itself. They should have charged Sean Keene with domestic terrorism. Sorry for making fun of noted trans ally, the New York Times.

I promise it won't happen again. Wait, wait, no, that's a lie. There's at least two more New York Times jokes in this script. Fuck. I guess let's talk about Monday. Monday, Monday. So, uh, don't- Is it- is the editor?

No, Daniel. Daniel, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. He's not going to hear any of this shit. No. I'm because the way these work is I transcribe them and then I copy and paste sections so they only move this section over. So when I say ask Garrison about-

Okay, so it turns out that was a lie. So when I say ask Garrison about Okay, so it turns out that was a lie. Uh, Daniel did need to hear that. So sorry, Daniel. Full, full transparency. Most of those bleeps were me making horrible, horrible slurping noises into the microphone as Daniel can probably attest. So really, all of you should be thanking Daniel

for suffering through those to bleep them out. Daniel died for your sins. I mean content, truly, truly braver than the troops in search joke anyway, back to me from the past. So let's talk about Monday. We're talking about the clergy event that happened in front of City Hall. So City Council meeting, you work for the Atlantic Community Press Collective. You've covered a lot of city council meetings in Atlanta before. This was my first time covering an Atlanta city council meeting. Due to your wisdom in this field, I would like for you to discuss what happened at the city council meeting in relation to your years of experience in

covering these meetings. So City Council meets every other week on Mondays. I cover several other committees, but the big one is always the City Council meeting. And over the course of time, there's like a cast of characters that you just begin to understand are going to appear either every week or from time to time. And you had the pleasure of actually getting to see a few of these. And I was like, there were, there were a few of us media folks there. And I was actually really happy that like, people got to experience this with me because

I usually have to do it by myself. So you got to meet, yeah, three of the characters you got to meet brother Hakeem. You got to meet Rachel and you got to be your favorite chef doctor. So this is just somebody who everyone refers to as chef doctor. He is dressed up as what you can only describe as a chef doctor. So I wonder, half of a chef's outfit, half of a doctor's outfit, he had a free Mason pin on his shirt,

because of course he did. And I just like watched him for a while because like initially in the city council meeting, they were just like handing out awards to like the proclamation ceremonies. The proclamations in awards, it's like various people, including like former city council members,

like whatever. And then eventually public comment started. And I guess let's talk about chef doctor. So he, well, no. So for the entirety of the city council meeting during the proclamations, in the back of city council, It's like a population of the population. In the back of the back of city council, there was this large red, like, like, heart,

just sitting in the back. It looked like Bob, the tomato from Veggie Towns. It looked, that was exactly what I thought. This heart, like, why is there this Bob, the tomato ass, heart mascot, just sitting in the back of city council. No one was inside the costume. It was just like the heart sitting there next to like another massive heart made up of like flowers.

So I was kind of confused for why that was there. There was like a pediatric surgeon that got like one of the awards and like, oh, maybe the heart's there because of like, because of like heart surgery or something. I don't know. No, no, no. That would make sense. You have to, you have to get out of that mindset for public comment, for the most part.

So then, Chef Doctor gets 10 minutes of public comment. So we should explain that mechanism. Everyone who signs of public comment gets two minutes. You can award your time or give over your time to somebody else. So there were four other people who gave their time over to Chef Doctor to give him 10 minutes. And he used all 10 minutes. And so what was Chef Doctor trying to get out of the city?

Why was he giving public orders? So shout out to Chef Doctor, okay? Like Chef Doctor wants to create a soul food museum in the west side of Atlanta, and he's, she's shown up a few times to kind of ask to the council for money. And as far as I know, that has gone nowhere, but that was what he is ostensibly there for today.

However, beyond just the heart, the dancing... We haven't got there yet. However, beyond just the big red heart and like the paper mache, flower heart, he brought a floutist. A floutist, so a floutist is someone who plays the flute if you are like an uncultured person who's listening to this. And he walked up to the microphone.

And then for five minutes, he got a floutist to play a flute cover of amazing grace. Yes, but he had backing music from a laptop that just kind of appeared up nowhere. And so they went to the microphone. They played this funeral song as

this now heart that's been brought to life. It starts dancing. It starts dancing. So this person wearing like heart pajama pants changed into this hard costume at some point. I didn't see them change into this. I don't know how this happened. I must have missed it.

It's City Council magic. Next will be Chef Dr. Kenneth Wilhoet. You'll have 10 minutes due to yield in time. Chef, let's go ahead and get started. My name is Chef Dr. Kenneth Wilhoet. I'm the president of the Seoul Food Museum and the soul food university. We are celebrating our 20th anniversary. And we are asking for the City Council

and our honorable mayor to get behind us and support us with donating a museum, space, building, and land with parking in the city of Atlanta for our tourists that come here to have a place to come and experience our hospitality, agriculture, service of Atlanta. I'm gonna say a quick prayer, because I'm spirit-lead. I do things by spirit. I'm at that age, you know what, it's not about me, it's about the spirit. Now, we'll have a song that was selected by the spirit of the ancestors, not by me,

but by the spirit of the ancestors. As God is the hey God, what song should we introduce today? This is the one that was true. But this guy in the heart costume walks up and he starts like kind of dancing to this float music for five minutes. Talk about the dancing. I don't think it was so much dancing as a swing with a little bit of hand motion along with the swaying.

But like I wasn't expecting it. I thought someone like dosed me with hallucinogens. But like, I wasn't expecting it. I thought someone, like, dosed me with hallucinogens. I did, actually. Oh, they had, there was some serifs of LSD. I put them in your water bottle when you weren't looking. This explains so much about what happened on Monday. No, it would make much more sense

if that's what happened. Unfortunately, Atlanta is a cartoon town and that's not what happened. This was real life. So this this this flood cover made amazing grace played for five minutes with along with the dancing heart. And then we finally got to public comment for the reason for the reason for why we were there. Not only were we blessed with that stunning rendition of Amazin Grace, the floutist to himself was briefly able to address the city council before President Dave Shipman, very, very, very rudely called time. That made so much to the world. So that's it for today. Okay, thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Okay, and we are back. And just as a note, I forgot to put this in the script, so I'm going to say it now. It turns out that that heart costume that was quote unquote dancing to the script, so I'm gonna say it now. It turns out that, that heart costume that was quote unquote dancing to the music, that's actually rentable. You can rent that in Atlanta. So I have some really good ideas for the next week of action. Since we can rent more bouncy castles

and also that heart costume. I think there's a lot of potential, extremely funny things that could happen. Anyway, back to my conversation with Matt from the Atlantic Community Press Collective. There are a couple of things to note about how city council public comment works. City council doesn't tend to pay attention to them.

A sensibly the only one who pays attention is city council president Judge Shipman because it is his job to call time and to call up the next person uh... but you know city councilors will like step in and out of the room get something to eat um... during the seventeen hours of public comment for cops city like one of them held a press conference like it is it is it is weird how they're like legally allowed to not pay attention like that is that is bizarre you you would you would You would think that if you allegedly work for the people, like you would pay attention to.

You have to actually listen to them. So amongst the city council, there are two in particular that I'm glad you got to see. There's Mary Norwood who represents Buckhead and then there's Dustin Hillis, who is the committee chair for the Public Safety Legal Administration Committee, so he's basically in charge of police here. Donnie Molotov-Cocktails, and officers, and damaging millions of dollars of equipment.

And he gives off that vibe, and neither one of them will pay attention. They were on their phone from almost the entire time I was there. The Buckhead woman gave off an ontologically evil vibe. I did not know who she was when I wanted to the city council, but once I saw her, I was like, oh, okay, this person is obviously evil, right? And I asked people about it afterwards, and they're like, oh, yes, that is a person that represents Bucket. I'm like, oh, okay. Yes. Okay. Of course. Of course. Bucket, of course, being the like primarily white neighborhood in North Atlanta that Part of it wants to secede from the city and you know, that's that's a whole

Yes, that is a whole another issue, but to kind of give context of what Buckhead is. Redlining. That's not a question that's just an observation. And so sitting directly next to her is Dustin Hillis who is known for not paying attention ever. Except, they did both pay attention after public comment when police gave their testimony on what happened the night previous, and then these two people were very engaged.

We will hear more from Mary Norwood, ontologically evil, in a bit, but first I have to stop! Jesus Christ! Fucking fuck! Jesus, my cats are just running amok. All right. We will hear more from Mary Norwood, ontologically evil in a bit. But first, I have to include some of Councilman Antonia Lewis' response after police chief Darren Sheerbaum

gave his little presentation at City Council. Because I don't think I've ever heard January 6th, the Atlanta way and six flags all get mentioned in the same sentence before. It looked like January 6th. I ain't never seen police run from a group of people. And so the only thing I could think about when I saw that video, I saw it on ATL scoop, the video was all out there. I've been seeing it all over. And when I saw the police officers run,

I mean, I was a little nervous when I saw the heat map. I saw 100 people. I saw it. I saw it. I mean, like, that ain't the Atlanta way. I mean, I ain't never seen, I'm just thinking about the, at the same time as six flags,

we had some young men that were fighting. At some of our teenagers fighting their six flags. They didn't run up on the police. They didn't run up on the police with Molytale cocktails throwing to burn up stuff. What I will say, I thank you so much for last night for working. I want to really commend the officers because y'all were under some immense pressure and

to not see a gun fired back. Because when I see the firecrackers, I'm, I'm, I'm from Cleveland, Avenue. If they throw firecrackers at me, I don't know those firecrackers. I've never seen that. So I appreciate APD for doing that. Truly, truly a stunning admission, just, just perfect. So I had to listen to Atlanta police Chief Darren Shearbombs testimony a few times for the five episodes that were released earlier this month. So I didn't really feel like fully listening through again to find any, you know, funny

bits to put in this episode. So I just kind of like skimmed through while multitasking and weirdly enough, I noticed that the chief said some pretty shocking things that I somehow just must have missed in my previous viewings. So I will play those for you now and I will warn you, it is pretty disturbing. Like all the subjects we put on air, their statements do not reflect our opinions or the official position held by whatever current company owns this podcast. So yeah, like I said, well, warning, these are shocking,

but I will let the chief speak for himself. Take aggressive action against these officers, move to the front gate, more accelerant and flick, bite-a-ling hard upon them, launch illegal and criminal attacks, detect members of law enforcement, bring harm to our officers.

These attacks are gonna continue. Pretty, pretty shocking stuff, coming These attacks are going to continue. Pretty shocking stuff coming from a police chief, Jesus. But that is only the tip of the iceberg because to my surprise, after public comment was over and all the news cameras left, after I left and everyone left the building, it turns out, Darren Sheerbaum gave a second testimony at the very end of the city council meeting that I just completely missed until until now. So I will warn you it is kind of lured in nature. So if you want to skip past lured police conduct just fast forward like a minute or two. But anyway, without further ado, here's the secret recently unearthed

second testimony presented by Atlanta Police Chief Darren Sheerbaum. President Sheerbaum, members of the council, I'd like to brief you on events that transpired yesterday. I'm going to let the video play here why I walk through each of the situations. What you see here is in our partners at the Decap County Police Department, the Sheriff's of Fulton County, as well as the Georgia State Patrol, we're seeing changing out of the clothes that they were wearing. They're going to position themselves what it appears to be an attempt to keep pursuing the officers. This is the officer's seat. We had a rapid response from our partners as well as to change their clothing. Different groups were performing acts within the manner of their training and their discipline.

At this time, our officers repositioning themselves inside of our partners. These officers had been stationary to ensure that they are being restrained. The officers are on city property and are positioning themselves and reposition themselves. To be prepared to go back in, our officers are showing great restraint. They remained in a position. What you see here is a lieutenant that is discharging. We're very fortunate that that was the outcome. And I want to commend every man and woman on duty yesterday. As they stood in the gap to do their job. Those officers entered our partners. And what you see here, ladies and gentlemen, is as some of the individuals that had just previously entered into those officers,

they start changing back into the clothes that they were just wearing moments before. Just last night officers at this department, as well as the cab county to Georgia State Patrol and the Sheriff's Department moved in. And I want to thank the men and women again of the Atlanta Police Department, the Georgia State Patrol, the Sheriff's Department as well as the Cap County Police Department for the professionalism that they demonstrated throughout the night. And to the early hours of this morning, while many of us were asleep, they continued to work through the night. I've never seen that, so I appreciate APD for doing that.

I would have loved for every one of those very hysterical people that we've been sitting listening to for two or three hours to have seen an actual video of what really did happen. And there may be great reasons that the administration chose to do it this way, but our media is gone and all the people that needed to see this are gone. I'm glad that nobody was hurt and none of our employees were hurt yesterday. Oh boy, whew. Well, that was certainly something. I did not want to know that much about what the APD and their partners get up to after hours.

Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled comedic tapes. I know a Sheerbomb was addressed with some questions by Unicorn Riot when he was trying to exit, which he then did not, he gave a very frustrated face and then denied answering and promptly left the building. Oh, well, in the company of the New York Times journalist. Oh, with a friend of the show, Sean Keenan. So that was most of Monday.

Yeah, that is everything that happened on Monday. So Monday evening, I went home to start working on article. What did you do, guys? I went to the forum in the woods. I got to share my memory of the Veggie Tales Esther story starring the Tickle Monsters. I got to bond with a few ex-ven geplicos about that, so that was fine, then there was an experimental noise show in the forest. And then you had a tragic neck injury on Monday night?

So Tuesday. The group that we followed left out of the church and went to Norfolk Southern, which is one of the funders of APF and friend of the environment in Ohio. When they finished reading the letter, like all they asked was that the letter go to the CEO and they denied that. And all they had to do was accept it and move on. But they, while people were inside, the security called NS police. And if you're wondering, you're like, you know, NS police, what does that mean?

That's not a city in Atlanta. That isn't a city in Atlanta. What could that be? That is the North-Ox Southern police who are legally allowed to arrest people. And we thankfully we avoided going to Norfolk Southern police jail, going to Norfolk Southern court, which certainly would have been a very legitimate court.

So it would have been almost as legitimate as the real court that the bill here is happening at that same day. After successfully evading Norfolk Southern jail, Matt and I headed downtown for a march that was accompanied by a cadre of over a hundred officers pinning this crowd onto the sidewalk. We've got a whole, a whole police car blocking the sidewalk. Like, I just, like, a Georgia State University canine unit. This blocking off the entire sidewalk next to a Fulton County Sheriff's Vehicle. I like the cops are just also committing the corporate media on where they can stand and

the whatever like boomer journalists with whatever mainstream news outlet was very peed off at this cop for telling you to get on the sidewalk. The next day, a smaller crowd met up at the same spot and broke off into little subgroups to walk around downtown Atlanta and hand out to defend the forest to leaflets. So all the little subgroups kind of meet up on Andrew Young and Peach Tree right next to the Hooters and the Hard Rock Cafe. Um... Hahaha. Classic examples of Atlanta food. There wasn't Atlanta SWAT vehicle parked outside of the hooters. Fuck it.

The fucking outside of fucking Hard Rock Cafe. So I can't, like, I'm keep picking up this complicated music. But there's Viga in Atlanta police SWAT vehicle parked on the block by the Atlanta Police Foundation in quarters. Alright, there's actually a pretty decent number of people gathered here for the flowering event today. They're at the Peach Tree and Young International Boulevard intersection right across from the Hooters and the Hartraut Cafe. There's a SWAT vehicle parked right behind us. There's about, I don't know, 20 to 30

officers stationed a little bit to our north. You know, normal police response to people handing out flyers, just 50 officers in a SWAT team. Lieutenant Neil Welch approaches the crowd and gives them a dispersal order. They cross the street, walk like a black north, pass some of the cops that are guarding the Wells Fargo building. At this point, people chatted the cops to quit your jobs, quit your job. And one of the cops guarding the Wells Fargo says, that's actually a good idea. You can always quit your fucking job. That's actually the sound of the noise.

Yeah, they already tried. And he's like, I tried to, and they wouldn't let me. But like, I don't like laughing, but that one got me. That one got me. The copper spot, not in like a glib tone. Like he was, it was actually, actually, he wanted to create this like, like, yeah, that's actually, yeah,

that's actually a good idea. Extremely funny moment. While this is happening, there's another group who comes in to the side of Peachtree Center Mall and enters the mall to find Mayor Andre Dickens. Andre Dickens is like the head of some kind of like board or something. Yeah, there are a couple boards in Atlanta that stipulate the mayor is like the head of the board. And this is one of them. And it meets in Petri's center mall. So the mayor is having a meeting in the mall. And office spaces, you know, sort of above the mall. And so, so three indigenous activists, along with Kamau Franklin arrive and they find the mayor. They enter the board meeting and they begin to read

this letter from the Muscogee Nation allowed. Mayor Dickens in true mayor fashion bolts away from this, running through an exit door, which is then blocked by a guard, which I think that has its own set of legal issues. Essentially just ignoring them over shoulder, he calls out, I've got a copy of the letter and hides just completely trying to escape

what is not a good look for him. This is what we call a Ted Wheeler moment. So, as this happens, I think like Apex SWAT is deployed. They, so A Apex SWAT is deployed. They so Apex and SWAT had had been elsewhere and they were called back to their vehicles, like right before this. And then the activist exit and almost like in this very comical moment, after they get out and away, squads of these special units start rushing into the building. Of course, finding

no one. Charlie Chapman asked shit truly. Okay, even a more future version of Garrison here. Apparently, I've been told by a Danil that his name is Charlie Chaplin. I don't know, he's a pedophile, so whatever. Charlie, not, not dad. Oh boy. And I do want to say I did try multiple times to take Matt to the hard rock cafe or the hooters, either one, and he refused my offer multiple times very, very rudely. So at some point when I'm back in Atlanta, I will have to gather a troop of hemboys and head over to the hooters. Anyway, next was the community movement builders rally on the evening of Thursday, March 9th, which had fewer jokes that night. But there

are a few embarrassing recording bloopers at the expense of my own ego. So I will play those for your amusement to you absolute sack of fox. It is kind of raining. We'll see how many people show up and how large the police response will be in comparison. So what could happen here? Well, it could happen here. A podcast by Robert Evans. We are at the site of the Martin Luther King Memorial. Did you see the two sandy springs, please?

I did see the sandy, I lived in sandy springs for a year and that brought back some memories. But yes two sandy springs police buses sandy springs of course being mostly outside of the perimeter. A good drive from here. That was good. That poggers. The police has been stating, well I'll never answer that. What am I saying? Big puddle on the street to demonstrating the city's commitment to infrastructure. That was a joke because the drain was cloned. I accidentally turned off my recording by tripping on some stairs. They're so close together, they're just sandwiched in. Got a New York Times reporter standing in the middle of the street.

Of course, the only person allowed to stand in the street. It's the one New York Times reporter. I would estimate almost about a kilometer, but I'm Canadian, so that's not very helpful to you. To you, US listeners. The real outside agitators is, say, in your springs, please. Yeah, the police were ready to master us the entire time. I don't know if you mentioned this, but oh,

so in between the police line in front of the APF building and the protesters, essentially, like a mixture of cop watch and national lawyers killed. And ACLU. ACLU, because of course you had to have both legal observer factions just to make sure everybody's watching each other. So ACLU can watch NLG get arrested. Who can watch ACLU get arrested? West rested who can watch a feel you get arrested.

It's turtles all the way down. We go to the servers all the way down. Ho ho and we are back. That's great. All right, one of the stops on the tour of the Blonnie Forest that Joe Perry was doing throughout the week was the area of the landswap between the former owner of Blackhall Studios Ryan Millsap and the Cabot County's entrenchment Creek Park. So on one side, there's this beautiful forested park that Ryan Millsap wants to trade for. Then on the other side is this massive mound of dirt that he currently owns, which is right

next to Boulder Crest Road. That's a huge, huge dirt field that you see. And what happened is while that swap was being orchestrated, Black Hall was bringing thousands and thousands and thousands of dump truck loads of dirt. They're just filling it up, filling it up, filling it up. And somebody else is going to have to do the math, but I don't know if you say like 15 acres of dirt that is 20 feet plus high, how much dirt that is.

That is a lot. It's not natural. It's not something that's helping this flood prone area. All that's going to run into here, no matter how many silt fences you put up. So that's what they're calling Michelle Obama Park. Ah! That's it, exactly. Exactly right.

So many of you just talk to Michelle and say, no, you need to take your name off of that one. I don't know who got away with that because that's not it. By the way, you're seeing the most picturesque side of that piece of land. Yeah, you get to the top. You get to the top. He gets the top. It's worse.

It's just garbage. Well, the thing, and it is literally garbage because a lot of this stuff, this dirt, you know, Ryan Milcep has, he is not a movie mogul. He's a land barren. He's in real estate. And he's made billions of dollars in real estate. And so that dirt comes from other properties.

He's digging up a place on Boulevard to put some apartments in. He's pulling dirt out of there. That's what's coming in here. That's dirt coming from all these other construction sites you have. That is not topsoil. And I believe me, I'm not making that up. I've been over there, I've walked, and I've seen what's in there I've been over there, I've walked and I've seen what's in there. I've seen water heaters in there, I've seen gutters in there, I've seen pipes, I've seen all kinds of crap.

It's trash, it's a big trash mountain. That's what they want to have be Michelle Obama Park and hang in a half or two. So, yeah, I just wanted you to kind of lay your eyes on what the county thought was a good idea and what black hole thought. Of course, you know, Ryan Mill, it was a great idea for Ryan Mill set because the land that he acquired is worth way more millions more. It's now worth millions more than when he made the swap. So he has made a lot of money on the swap and that's why he's angry that he can't get his hands on it yet. Nobody knows what he's going to do with it because the original agreement between him and the county was that he was going to build movie studios on that land. Well, he can't now because he sold his rights

to the movie studios to a company that's now called Shadowbox. They're the ones that owns his previous studios. So he can't have a rival company right across the street from them. So he hasn't said, and nobody knows exactly what he's going to do with the property, if he wins this court case and gets those 40 acres. Who knows? It's a mystery. So that's where that stands right now.

Hopefully, we win the lawsuit. If we do, he will have to put the bill for repaving the path and redoing the parking lot and putting a new gazebo in. That's what the judge decree. That's why they said we don't need a restraining order. All that is replaceable. So except for the trees that he tore down, you know, those are going to take another 75 years,

but he's counting? The fate of Michelle Obama Park is still up in the air as of time of recording. So yeah, excited to visit that. If the landswap gets passed, almost done. We're going to, we're going to briefly, briefly tap back into my conversation with Matt from the Atlantic Community Press Collective. And then unfortunately, our jokes must come to an end. I think one thing that's been lost in all of this too is all of the light harder events that have continued to go on through the week. And, you know, we have this, this, this

youth rally, or there's the youth rally that's happening on Saturday. We're, of course, recording this beforehand. And like the joy of the movement, that was represented in the bouncy castle rip, which was first pointed at a rifle had it was pointed at. We haven't talked about the guns. We haven't pointed out the guns in the bouncy castle. So one thing I think that we didn't mention how can you forget about the guns in the

bouncy castle? So when the police came running up onto the tarmac at RC field where the bouncy castle was, of course, they had to point a rifle at the bouncy castle. And if that doesn't show that police are not here to have fun and have joy, I don't know what is. I don't know if anyone was in it at the time. I don't think so. I think they were literally just pointing a gun at an empty bouncy castle,

which they destroyed. And I think we have to take a moment to mourn that. Did they destroy it or like deflate it? I think they destroyed it. Wasn't like a rental or something? Yes. Yes. So RIP, bouncy house, you will be missed

and all of the joy that you represented. My girlfriend's texting me. cringe. I'm in the mid-term. I'm in the mid-term. I'm in the mid-term. Pipe, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, Gresham Park Sunday, Monday, Tuesday.

All right, all right. Okay, I'm going to just going to look through my other notes app because I keep my notes in three different notes apps because I'm normal. So one thing that's been notable, especially in how the police talk about the forest is they've begun using like these militarized terms, like the denial

of operating area that we saw when Ryan Millsap was in court into Cap County, he said the GBI told him to clear the area to deny operating space. And the use of terrorism, like there's some eerie parallels between the language that was used to describe insurgencies in countries that America is invading or the United States is invading.

And a lot of that language, like the military equipment that was used there, has come home and is now being used against Americans engaged in these liberation struggles. I wonder where we've talked about that before. I don't know. It could happen where? Speaking of, it is still happening.

The last week, approximately 500 people came out to City Hall as the City Council is now in the process of voting to approve public funds for the cop city project. Nearly 300 people signed up for public comment with hundreds more waiting in line. Public comment lasted seven hours and during so not a single person voiced support of using taxpayer money to fund the police training facility. The Atlanta Community Press Collective have recently reported that the proposed city funds toward the CAHPS City Project have ballooned to a minimum of $51 million. With the $30 million package awaiting final vote and city council, plus another at least $20 million chunk to be given to the Atlanta Police Foundation via a quote unquote loan, which indicates that the Atlanta Police

Foundation's private fundraising has not gone as well as they initially had hoped. For more on that, I'd recommend checking out the press collectives recent article from May 24th. And you can also donate to them to support their continued reporting of the happenings in Atlanta. You can find us on Twitter at Atlanta underscore press. Our website is atlpresscollective.com, and you can find our Instagram at atlpresscollective. We have partnered with Open Collective. We are physically sponsored now by Open the Open Collective Foundation in a way to

transparently fundraise in order to sustain our reporting. Everything up until actually the week of action, everything that we have done up until the week of action was all unpaid. And it is our desire to continue to grow with a movement. And so we were excited to find a partner in the Open Collective Foundation that can continue that horizontal, open organizing that we have done internally. Okay, I think we're good. Good job, team.

Oh, shit, I wasn't recording. Thank you. Oh, cute. Oh, cute. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of CoolZone Media. For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website CoolZoneMedia.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here

updated monthly at CoolZoneMedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. me to dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening. So there is a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Yeah, like does the US government really have alien technology? Or what about the future of AI? What happens when computers actually learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town from UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events. Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts

or wherever you find your favorite shows. What's up, y'all? I'm Brian Ford, Artisan Baker and host of the new podcast, Flaky Biscuit. I'm going to help y'all learn I'm Brian Ford, Artisan Baker and host of the new podcast FlakyBiscuit. I'm gonna help y'all learn how to cook and bake new things as we get to know our guests through their favorite nostalgic meal. If you are ever at a place in your life where things are too busy or your head gets too big, having a meal like this, it reminds you of who you are and also who you still are.

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