Chapo Trap House - 418 - The Cool Zone feat. Steven Donziger (5/11/20)

Episode Date: May 12, 2020

Will interviews Steven Donziger, a human rights attorney who has been under house arrest since August as a result of his work to prosecute oil giant Chevron for their reckless polluting of the Ecuadorian Amazon. It's a wild case that offers a lot of grave visions of the future of the U.S. legal system, so give it a listen. Afterwards, Will, Matt and Felix goof on an 80 ft.-tall holographic Biden and the decline of American empire. To take action to help Steven and to learn more about the case, go to makechevroncleanup.com. To donate to Steven's legal defense fund, go to donzigerdefense.com. You can follow him on Twitter: @SDonziger.

Audacity could be your good name if you were a professional gamer. That is good. That's actually not bad I'm gonna be playing Valorant tonight, but like the eye needs to be like Yeah, the eye needs to be the one yeah I need to be one and then like sort of like the letters should be a little bit like an oddly like upper and lower case Combination, how about this cuz so audacity is like a play on audio, but your game reward would be like odd Oddd audacity, so that's one type of gamer name like it would probably be something that's close to audacity, but Modified in such a word way that makes it not a word like it would be like audacity They never actually know what words are yeah

No, yeah gamers are like yo, you won't believe this. I got the I got the full word for my name. I got a bryonitate What the fuck is that? It's not anything. We're in the we're in the post-verbal world They don't really understand how things are I got a game a comp game with somebody named bryonics Bryonics yeah, he was really shitty too bryonics sucked bryonics also sounds like one of those Endless companies we saw driving from Boston to New Hampshire that everything was just creepy Yeah, they're all companies that you pond family like child sacrifice or weapons scheme Yes, yes, they're all companies that would be like medical or psychological firms in early David Cronenberg films

Yeah, or like where there's a campus where you have to go for treatment. Yeah, exactly Yeah, something's a place that like Damien would work in before omen 3 Greetings friends It's your choppo for the week in a little bit me Matt and Felix who will be up to our usual spoofs and goofs But before then in the first half of the show, I have an interview with you Sorry, I have an interview for you with a human rights attorney Who has been under house arrest with an ankle monitor in his apartment on the Upper West Side since August? for the crime of

Winning a lawsuit against Chevron for poisoning. I don't know half of the Amazon and Ecuador It's an astonishing case. It's like I read this article in the intercept this week and It was it was jaw-dropping I mean it was a vision of the future of what I fear where we're all headed which is a Totally privatized legal system in which corporations wield pretty much absolute authority over everyone and everything So on that note here is my interview with Steven Donziger Okay, hello listeners

Um, you know if you're like me you're now in about month two of quarantine You know probably mostly in your apartment or house, um, you know climbing up the walls losing your mind But for this week, I have an interview and a guest for you who has been Shall we say under quarantine for considerably longer than that since august of last year? I'm speaking with human rights attorney Steven Donziger Um, who has been under house arrest since august because of his involvement in a massive Billion-dollar lawsuit against Chevron So Steven, uh, you were under house arrest now. You've you've been uh, you've basically lapped the rest of the country on this quarantine thing

How's that been going for you? Well, uh, you know, I don't think anybody likes to be Quarantine but when you're quarantined with an ankle bracelet and monitored electronically by you know by the government But for what I think are completely unjustifiable reasons Um, I it's you know, it's not easy. It's tough. But uh, you know, I have a good solid family and uh, a young son 13 year old son and a wife and we just we just you know, battle on and keep working and Um, you know, hopefully we'll get out the other side of this Uh, Steven, I became aware of your case because of an article that was in the intercept last week

Uh by uh Sharon Lerner And it lays out like the the details of like a rather extraordinary and terrifying situation you find yourself in We're essentially you are being They they brought a rico case against you because you were too successful in suing the company chevron for essentially poisoning a large swath of the nation of Ecuador Yeah, I mean the the basics are are you know, kind of simple and terrifying. I agree with you I mean, I work with a team of lawyers for a number of years Both in the united states and ecuador to win an epic environmental judgment on behalf of indigenous

peoples and uh local communities in the amazon rainforest and the northern part of the amazon of ecuador Where texaco now chevron chevron bought texaco, but it was texaco in the 60s 70s 80s early 90s Dump billions of gallons of toxic waste onto indigenous ancestral lands and left behind about a thousand open-air toxic waste pits They'd gouge out of the jungle floor Into which they dumped benzene laden cancer causing oil waste that they ran through pipes into streams and rivers That the local indigenous groups relied on for their drinking water. They're bathing. They're fishing and their sustenance and Really in a few short years they destroyed you know

Thousands of years of prosperous living by the local, you know nations in the amazon um causing cancers and all sorts of medical problems economic problems and really destruction of cultures and displacement from land and that sort of thing I first went down there in 1993. I was just at a law school with a team of lawyers We saw what looked like absolutely apocalyptic seemed oil spread out all over the roads and you know Like like pools of oil and forests

Um, it was very clear that texaco had designed the system of oil extraction to pollute. This was no accident They they planned it this way to save money And they left behind what really was an environmental holocaust. I mean the whole environment was poisoned in a 1500 square mile area and They went decades without any legal accountability. They never paid You know for damages, even though they were doing it openly and notoriously And we decided to file a lawsuit back here in new york against texaco because that this is where texaco's headquarters were at the time They made the decision in new york to pollute in ecuador

in any event Over the next 20 years or so. They tried to obstruct the case every which way they could We ended up winning the case down in ecuador's courts where they had accepted jurisdiction The evidence against them was overwhelming 64 000 chemical sampling results pointing to their pollution over literally dozens and dozens of sites and They when they lost the case, they refused to pay They threatened the indigenous groups with a lifetime of litigation if they persisted

And they went after me and other lawyers, but primarily me. I live here in new york Been to ecuador over 250 times, you know to work on this case I've handled a lot of other cases too, but the last several years. This has been my primary work. It's very important complex case And they went before a federal judge in new york who has a pro-business reputation and who really took it upon himself to try to Work with chevron's lawyers to destroy my life and to silence me and to Blow up the case so chevron could escape from having to pay its liability to the people of ecuador You know over this has been going on now the retaliation part for 10 years and it's resulted in my home detention

for the last 10 months Which I think is a A gross violation of my constitutional rights my human rights. It's arbitrary It's designed again to crush me um The kind of the pretext for the detention is that I refused in order to turn over my computer and cell phone to chevron as part of it Kind of a discovery action

The order that kind of order is unprecedented. It's in itself a major violation of my constitutional rights And more importantly those are my clients to confidential communications And you know what we've seen is just a series of decision after decision in favor of chevron by a judge who seems like he's taken It on as his life's mission even a crusade to To undermine the ability of the ecuadorian people to recover money from chevron for damage that chevron readily admits that it caused So i'm in a tough situation. My family's in a tough situation. I feel Like u.s courts in this case

Have done some very frightening things. It's shocking to me that chevron and judge caplen louis caplen Are able to carry out these types of Decisions, you know and get away with it apparently But we continue to fight and we're hopeful and and more importantly, you know Chevron still faces enormous risk financial risk from the judgment Which can be enforced in any country against their assets and there's a lot of other lawyers working on this case not just me Um who are focused on that right now, but they just seem to really want to destroy me

Um to send a signal I think to environmental activists all over the country in the world that you can't fight big oil and win and get away with it And that's really what I think is happening here. I mean, yeah, that's the that's the critical piece of this here Or one of many is that you know, you won your case and when this started texco now chevron Wanted the case to be tried in ecuador because of their like legal system Uh, it was the correct me if i'm wrong It's they have like like it's a non it would be a non jury trial and they they thought that that like so It's just like this chain of events where they were

Rather than doing even the barest due diligence to uh, I don't know not dump toxic waste into the amazon rainforest They did that to save money and then they chose a trial in ecuador because they thought it would be more amenable to Their company and like but the decision was they were they were found guilty of that and uh What was it was like a nine and a half billion dollars? Was what they were they said and then now everything subsequent to that has been an effort to avoid Paying even a dime. Yeah, I mean it's it's it's just bad faith all around I mean, you know the the ecuadorians with great courage Filed a lawsuit here in the united states

They wanted to be treated fairly by the court system Chevron had other plans they every step of the way they've tried to delay the process pay lawyers to obstruct the Process, you know, they calculated it's cheaper to pay They literally use 60 law firms and 2000 lawyers against us and against me And they calculated it's cheaper to pay for a legal army to fight it and then to actually pay for a cleanup And I also think they're terrified with the concept that they might actually be held accountable To indigenous groups who historically, you know have been unable to Get the resources they need to hire lawyers to protect their rights visa be big fossil fuel industry polluters

No, I want to get into some of the more Just like really shocking and surprising things that were like, you know, when I when I read this story We're jaw dropping about the way you mentioned just Lewis Kaplan has handled this case and some of the things that have happened to you as a result of it But just going back to the beginning of like, you know, the the genesis of this all is the You know, the poisoning of a huge swath of the amazon and the people who live there and you know, like the the scale of this What Chevron did there is like I've seen it compared to like Chernobyl You would have to grab something of that to talk about like just how much land has been poisoned and like the scale of devastation caused by

I mean like not just willful incompetence, but like, you know, like a criminal act like premeditated decision to Carry out like you said this kind of ecological holocaust in another yeah, I mean, that's the key point I mean, it's it was not an accident I mean it's instructed to look at what they did in Ecuador and you know The deliberate dumping at the height of the operation of four million gallons a day of toxic Ends in laden wastewater into the streams and rivers where indigenous people live and that went on day after day for years And they never warned the people they never, you know, put up fences around the waste pits. They never Hired doctors. They never did environmental assessments. I mean, they just literally

You know dump toxic waste within community. It's called the amazon Chernobyl probably the world's worst oil related disaster It's been out there for close to 50 years Um, the judgment of 9.5 billion is actually relatively modest compared to the magnitude of the damage. I mean by comparison BP The deep water horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. They paid about 50 billion dollars and you know compensation and fines For something that fundamentally was an accident Fundamentally an accident but also crucially the deep water horizon was in the Gulf Coast and like spilled all that oil onto the shores of the Continental United States and not a, you know, a poorer country like Ecuador as whereas you mentioned most of the people Poisoned by this were the um, like indigenous nations of that country who are, you know, even, you know

It within that country already pretty oppressed and a disadvantage let alone against a multinational fossil fuel company like Chevron, right? That's entirely right And you know when it really gets down to is a level of total disrespect by Chevron communities, you know I mean Um, it's just shocking to me that they would design this kind of system thinking they could get away with it Um, when they first went down there They started polluting and running all the waste off into the rivers and streams some of the indigenous people would say what is this? What are you doing? We thought you were Texaco like this is Texaco. You're an American company

You can't do this and they would tell the indigenous people don't worry about it. The oil is medicinal It's got vitamin. You can drink it. It's like milk. I mean, there's just a complete Yeah of the local communities And it continues to this day. I mean that was back in the 60s 70s 80s and You know, they when they went to court and filing one a judgment and after the company tried to obstruct them for years and years And delay the trial the end of the trial like oh, we're not going to pay you Um, you know, we agreed to jurisdiction in Ecuador's courts, but we're not going to respect the judgment or pay you come chase us around the world You know, and then and was this and this was a like like a civil action, right? It was a civil case

Yeah, like a regular but what you but what you're talking about like the scale and design of this is is mass murder basically well, you know, look, I believe that it was clearly foreseeable for by Texaco and they designed this system that Thousands of people would die from it. I mean, you can't sit there knowing what the world knows about what's in oil You know, which is heavily carcinogenic chemicals and Dump millions of gallons of it on a systematic deliberate basis every day for year after year after year and not expect that mass number of people will get cancer and die

And that's exactly what's happened. You know, I think it is a mass industrial homicide Um and Ecuador's courts held to their credit, you know, looked at the facts looked at the law and held chevron account of it chevron that has consistently not obeyed the law not complied with the law runaway and attacked lawyers to distract attention from From what I believe is their criminal misconduct And you know, you were working on this case for for years and years and I guess I'm just curious as to what chevrons lawyers argued in their defense like what was their defense against what they were accused of in court? Well, you know, they were accused of

defense like what was their defense against what they were accused of in court well they have various kind of technical defenses i mean the last thing they want to do is engage us on the merits of our claims which is did they right or not i mean they admit they pollute so they have various elaborate technical defenses like oh we polluted but we left so it's no longer our responsibility it's the government's responsibility or you know oh we polluted but you haven't proved it's harmed anybody in other words they have this elaborate theory that you can dump toxic waste all over the place but you know it doesn't hurt a person like if it just hurts the environment or hurts animals then there's nothing to really worry about um and then they have technical defenses they say

oh your judgments against chevron but you know we only operate through our subsidiary so you can't really collect because chevron doesn't have any money all our money and assets are in our holy own subsidiaries around the world 180 of them or so um so you don't have a judgment you never sued the subsidiaries so they use these technical this combination of technical defenses and kind of bs to try to muck up the issues look their goal is not to they know they're not going to win the narrative battle because it's so obvious what they did their goal was simply like the tobacco industry did and still does it's to create enough doubt and uncertainty that people just get confused or they don't know who's right or who's wrong you know as long as there's like two narratives when

there really is one simple narrative of right or wrong as long as there's two and they can confuse the issues they win because they have the power and they're in the you know by default they haven't paid a penny so it's important that people cut through the bs their bs and sort of see the basic facts i mean part of their attacks on me is to confuse the issues you know they want to say oh you know the issue in that equitable case is that lawyer that greedy lawyer from new york i mean he committed fraud i mean they they pay to witness two million bucks to come into court up here and testify falsely that i was in a meeting where i approved a bribe of a trial judge in Ecuador which is just completely false bs i would never do such a thing i'm an ethical person i've

never had a single complaint um from a client in 25 years of law practice so as to that charge of bribery though didn't the person that like they who testified that you would try to bribe this judge been hasn't it been shown that they accepted two million dollars from chevron yeah his name is alberto guerra and chevron gave him all sorts of benefits i believe they still pay him today years later hush money you know how is like but how is his testimony still considered legitimate if if it's been proven that like the i guess the plaintiff in this case has has paid him two million dollars well we don't consider it legitimate we never considered it legitimate from the moment he walked into the courtroom i mean it was very obvious he was lying and he was corrupt um but judge kaplan credited

his testimony over mine i mean again an ethical person who you know i understand my duties as a ethical person as a lawyer so anyway he credited this corrupt guy over my testimony there was no corroborating evidence it was just his testimony he later admitted a year later in a separate legal proceeding under oath that he had lied repeatedly before judge kaplan which kaplan never changed his decision based on that later testimony and judge kaplan was affirmed by the second circuit court of appeals which refused to look at the facts and looked at his recantation of his testimony when they affirmed in the meantime 29 different appellate judges in ecuador and canada have validated the judgment and you know rejected by implication judge kaplan's decision judge kaplan is the only

judge on earth who's ruled it was a fraud every other judge that's looked at the facts is ruled otherwise has ruled that it's a valid judgment and you know i think judge kaplan has staked a good part of his career and reputation on that decision i mean he wrote 500 pages uh and spent a lot of energy on it denied me a jury by the way it was a bench trial and he you know when i kept pushing the case and canada and other jurisdictions he came up with this pretext i believe to charge me criminally um and lock me up and i'm the only lawyer by the way in u.s history that as far as our research shows there's been detained on a contempt charge pretrial i mean it's you know and they're also treating it as a misdemeanor with a maximum sentence of six months in jam and i

believe i'm totally innocent but you know they'll probably try to deny me a jury because misdemeanor those who charge mis those who are charged with misdemeanors don't get a jury generally um and you know and they're going to try to i think falsely imprison me for several months and they've already gotten 10 months out of it and i don't know how much longer it's going to be before i can get a trial but you know the crazy part also which just blows my mind i didn't realize this until recently is that when judge kaplan charged me criminally he took the case to the u.s attorney's office you know the regular prosecutor they rejected the charges they refused to do the case so he took it upon himself to appoint a private prosecutor or corporate law

firm that is stunning to me that was the thing when i read it in the intercept article that i like i i i feel like my brain couldn't quite process it you know like in thinking about this case it's like you know it's it's sad but it probably you know not surprising to find out that a company like chevron could you know poison you know millions of acres of rainforests and the people who live on it and then try to avoid responsibility for it the part in your case is the emergence of the of judge louis kaplan is this kind of singular figure and his like a new york district judge who was able to appoint a private law firm that represents chevron to prosecute you on behalf of new york state am i getting that right well it's on behalf of the

u.s federal government so okay um because he's a federal judge this is all at the federal level but the important point is it's the government you have a private law firm yeah its head has stepped into the shoes of the government the private law firm um is not disinterested i mean they have ties to the oil and gas industry they represent a number of big oil majors and they also we just found out represent chevron so you basically have this this i think it's unprecedented where the private corporation that has been attacking me for 10 years because i won a judgment against it has now had one of its private law firms act in the name of the u.s government to deprive me of my liberty i mean chevron is basically in my view prosecuting me criminally in the name

of the u.s after after they failed to win civil case i mean it's just yeah so the judge cat louis kaplan appointed the law firm of seward and kissle as you said that you've now found out represent has represented chevron in the past to prosecute you on behalf of the u.s government in what is essentially a contempt charge yeah it's a contempt charge because i refuse to turn over my computer and cell phone to chevron which i believe is an unconstitutional order by kaplan that i've appealed now look i'm a man of the rule of law i want to be very clear i respect the courts i told judge kaplan that if i lost my appeal on this very very critical issue i obviously would comply with the order and turn over my devices even though i feel like it's illegal

and unconstitutional and just unjustified but instead of letting my appeal play out by the way my appeal on that issue is still pending in the civil case he charged me criminally he appointed a longtime colleague um to preside over the case who uh you know and and he didn't abide by local rules requiring random assignment of cases and i walked into court and man i was just unbelievably shocked i i never imagined this could happen and she she detained me i mean it was just extraordinary that very first day august 6 and ever since then i've been wearing an ankle bracelet that kind of is big and chafes and looks like a garage door opener around my ankle when it talks to me in blinks and i have to recharge batteries and you know i can't even go out in the hallway

in my apartment building without permission of a court officer now i have been able to get out with permission to take my son to and from school and do some things like that but since the covid pandemic hit i've been pretty much stayed in and unable to leave for a really long time i mean most people in quarantine in new york at least get out to walk around and leave social distance and can get exercise get some sun you know i can't do any of that um so like just going back a little bit like after the original case was ruled in your favor uh do you remember what you felt then did you think that you know like this is a big victory did you expect chevron to pay up or were you expecting them to continue to drag their feet by by any means necessary to like stall this out or

just not pay well i always expected chevron to to do what they could not to pay but i also thought as a public company they would try to take steps to comply with the rule of law and comply with the judgment enter into settlement discussions which they did do but you know they were trying to loathe all the people of ecuador the whole way through and we kept going and they decided um there was a a law firm that had been representing them that got fired and replaced by another law firm that pitched chevron on this theory that they could allege i had committed fraud and that law firm is gibson done in crutches and they have a history of selling to corporations ridden with scandal this theory that oh you got to go after the lawyers because obviously

the indigenous people of ecuador chevron's victims have no lawyers they're defenseless so again rather than litigate on the merits they want to go after the lawyers and and most law firms i don't think would do that but this particular law firm makes a has built an entire practice out of it and i think it's unethical on every level it doesn't work unless there's a judge willing to go along with it and you know judge kaplan signaled from the get go that they should bring this case he he he said it why don't you bring a rico case he said that from the bench which they they then proceeded to do and they filed it before we won the judgment in ecuador in other words they had the rico the racketeering case pending against me and others at the time we won

the case because they wanted to change the narrative and say oh we didn't lose the case look at what really happened read our read our lawsuit in the rico case by the way the rico wall can be used civilly by private parties in the united states and it's very dangerous because it's been it was intended to target the mafia but it's been co-opted by corporations like chevron and others to target environmental activists and try to criminalize people who try to hold corporations accountable particularly in the fossil fuel industry for polluting and for climate change and all the other problems they're causing the earth so you know i'm a i'm a i'm sort of like a climate change political prisoner i mean i yeah forcing an oil company to pay for the cost of its pollution

rather than try to externalize it on the backs of vulnerable communities and grift off the public which is what most oil companies do that's a critical part of it any strategy to change this world for the better and to save the environment so when they attack a person like me an environmental lawyer human rights defender they're attacking the earth i am an earth defender they're attacking indigenous people through me and they're attacking everyone who cares about climate change and wants to save our planet and you know this isn't just a lawyer you know i am a symbol of something that scares the hell out of them which is citizen action which is using the courts to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for all of its pollution all of its misdeeds and all of its

grifting i mean think about it they pulled out billions of dollars of profits from ecuador and left behind a multi-billion dollar disaster that not only is going to cost at least 10 billion or more to clean up i think of all the suffering over the last 40 to 50 years all the people who died i mean that's not even part of the lawsuit compensation to individuals so you know even if they have to pay the full judgment they're still getting away with with not paying for a massive amount of the damage they caused but even that you know which is the judgment again is one fifth of what bp has paid for the spot far smaller albeit disastrous deep water horizon pollution scandal um they don't want to pay that i mean they're literally spending i think in the small

billions fighting us um rather than dealing with the communities um as they should and rather than complying with the law and yeah it's upsetting but i'm hopeful and i actually believe we're you know the people of ecuador are going to get there and get compensation ultimately so but like but ultimately i mean like you said it's not so much about the like the you know the number of zeros on what they have to pay but rather than the precedent set not just for them but the entire fossil fuel extraction industry in general right like that this is like this is more important to them than just being liable for some some like you know an environmental disaster that's exactly right i mean they see this as the tip of the sphere i mean if you go around the world particularly in

developing countries merging economies you know ecuador peru nigeria um so oblivious so many places around the world oil and mining companies have left huge environmental legacy problems that combine probably or have liabilities in the trillions of dollars you know so if the idea of a community with no money can find lawyers like me and the others and raise money that we've been able to do and really tap into this new what i call a human rights economic model it's a paradigm where you can raise capital to actually get into the playing field with the oil companies in ways that you know historically these indigenous groups have never been able to do you can attract top legal talent talent you can win cases and you can really shift shift the liabilities from

you to them as should happen under the law so i think they're terrified by the model they're terrified by the case i don't think it's as much the particular liability in our case as it is the idea of having a lot of liabilities like this across a number of cases which is why they're trying to not only not pay the Ecuadorians in this case but i think they're trying to kill off the very idea of the case by attacking the lawyers and trying to send a message to any young lawyer or any experienced lawyer that if you want to actually do these cases and be successful enough to win them on a level that is commensurate with the damage caused we will go after you and that's what they're doing to me and that's why by the way i need support and i have recently 29 Nobel

laureates signed a statement of support for me and i'm getting a lot of support i need more i need citizen support we set up a website um with the help of amazon watch an environmental group that's been enormously helpful to me um to get support and for people to take action which i'd like to share with your listeners at some point but we need i need help yeah in this case need um yeah absolutely and uh no like if um we will definitely share that at the end but but before we get there i just i was wondering like so i just back to the judge at lewis kaplan like you remember when you first became aware of him or you began to be aware of i don't know his role in being seeming i don't know i guess very eager to uh believe or you know go ahead with this case

against you it's like and and like you know just his general i mean i i think i read that he had you know said and spoke glowingly in the past about the importance of companies like chevron to america's overall economy and security um like what do you make of judge lewis kaplan and when did you first become aware of him as as a figure in this case well he he he was assigned like a discovery action initiated by chevron back in 2010 i think they steered it to him and he just sort of gobbled up the case and just kept building it up i think is a testament to what he wanted to do at that point in his career i mean i i i'd never felt that he was ever treated me or my my clients in a fair way he said things from the bench like he called it mud wrestling not bona fide litigation he refused

to acknowledge i was a lawyer he called me a pr flak um he said i was the next big thing in fixing the balance of payments deficit it just weird comments that show you know a a judge that isn't really temperate and judicious um which is what you would expect from the bench and you know i saw this from the very beginning and you know it's very obvious when he was working closely with chevron lawyers and trying to damage me procedurally every step of the way trying to limit my ability to raise money and limit my ability to protect my documents and in making all these decisions really designed to destroy me i could feel it happening i could see it happening everybody who watched saw it happening um you know i knew it was it was a process that the judge was trying

to engineer the result of and it was not a fair process even even prevented me and my other fellow colleagues from putting in any evidence of any environmental evidence meaning any of the thousands of chemical scientific results that prove chevron a polluter to ecuador as a matter of fact judge cappell wouldn't let us talk about pollution in other words this whole case is about pollution it's about probably the world's worst or related pollution and we get up to judge cappell's courtroom and he wouldn't let us talk about the most important thing about the case it all became about me you know and that was by design it was it was about shifting the narrative and he went along with it unfortunately and it culminated in accepting this witness testimony from gara

who had been paid openly at least two million dollars in cash and benefits from chevron and later admitted lying in a mat testimony largely on that testimony judge cappell and found me libel and from that chevron has taken another series of steps pushed by him that has resulted in the deprivation of my liberty i mean it's extraordinary and it's scary because i really hope this is not where our country is heading you know where activists get put in in in prison or get detained because of their activism and i believe that's what's happening to me and you know when i when i read this story that was to me the most sort of terrifying thing about this case is that i was just wondering you know is this like like an auger of the future is this where we're all

headed where essentially our justice system is not is not just co-opted or captured by corporate power but works for them directly and like either as as as like a judge literally acting as their defense or even more frightening allowing them to prosecute you quite literally and i guess like when we were talking a little earlier about this i guess like you know you talked about how regulatory capture of government by industry is something that we're all aware of and it's a big problem at every level of our our society but like this new level of brazenness and just openly in the legal system itself is is is really shocking and it's terrifying to think you know where that could go if this is allowed to just become a kind of standard where

like i said a corporation can like a judge can appoint a private law firm that represents a corporation to prosecute a citizen of this country um in a federal court like on behalf of the government of the united states well i think it's it's actually even worse than what you described in my case because seward and kissle um has chevron as a client they they work with a company called oak tree capital with just two executives on chevron's board and they never disclosed this when they were appointed by judge caplan to be my prosecutor so basically you have a situation where you you know a private law firm is prosecute it has chevron as a client is prosecuting criminally the lawyer who won the 9.5 billion dollar judgment against chevron it's it's unthinkable

and it's it's even more unthinkable that the judges who are presiding over this case really two judges judge caplan and another judge named loretta presca you know don't seem to be the least bit bothered by it i mean you know there's a flagrant conflict of interest we have expert testimony from a highly regarded expert that says this firm should be disqualified um and the judges just ignore it i mean we just filed today another motion with the federal appellate court to look at this issue you know because there's simply no way in my mind i can get a fair trial in a situation where i don't have a jury and the prosecutor is conflicted and obviously working in the service of chevron and i think it's all related to my detention i mean you know why am i the first

lawyer ever to be detained be detained pre-trial on a criminal contempt charge even one day and i've been here 10 10 months now you know it's obviously in my mind because seward and kissle was working not on behalf of who they should be working for which is the u.s. government and the interested in public the public interest okay of justice no they're clearly working on behalf i think or their royalties are with their private client that has every interest yeah detaining me so i cannot continue to litigate effectively and enforce the judge i mean it would be impossible for anyone who takes like an objective look at the details of this case not to conclude that the judges and prosecutors in this case are basically working on

behalf of chevron and that or not just chevron but like the oil and extraction industries as a whole to guard their interests against you know either future damages or just any criminal liability at all and then to punish the people who again in a court of law won a like a legal case against them well you know i think it's important that as we watch this unfold we don't lose hope for the rule of law in this country i mean i you know this i'd like to think this is an extreme example of a dark kind of underbelly that you see in terms of the corporate influence in our government and our judicial system but you know it doesn't permeate it completely by any means there's a lot of good judges you know there's a lot of decent courts where justice can be done but overall people need

to wake up and be more vigilant because on some of the pockets of our judiciary there are judges and law firms with very pro-corporate agendas and they will literally be ruthless to get what they want even if the law is not respected and i think that's what's happening in my case i mean people need to wake up to this because you know these slot lawsuits which are really filed by corporations for harassment purposes and to intimidate activists you need to train yourself to look for them and notice when they're happening and deal with them effectively and not get sucked into the litigation and spending all your money defending yourself because they're really designed to get people to go bankrupt and to spend all their time defending their reputations versus what they really

want to do which is hold the corporation accountable people need to be aware of this phenomenon by the way there's a new organization called protect the protest which i recommend people go to their website to learn more about this very dangerous trend and by the way i'm not the only one being targeted green peace has been targeted other environmental groups protesters have been targeted there's a fabulous organization in Eugene Oregon called civil liberties defense center that handles a lot of these cases under its leadership under the leadership of its director Warren Regan so you know there's a lot of activity to now to combat this abuse of the legal system but there is a huge amount of work left to do to get people to become more aware of this of this dangerous

trend i guess just uh just just finally here uh could you like could you let me know like let us know just where does your case currently stand now i mean like what like we know what does it look like you know the next five six seven months going forward and then finally at the end like if uh our listeners would like to learn more about this case and get involved uh where can they go what what should they do okay so you know if people want to get involved to help we have a website set up called make chevron clean up dot com all one word make chevron clean up dot com and there's some information there about how you can take action to help me so it'd be great if people could go to that website and sign up and i'll send you an occasional

newsletter about what's going on with the case and you can just sort of build a hopefully a community of support um in terms of my case it's very unclear where it's heading i have a trial right now scheduled to start june 15th but you know there's so many issues that have arisen because of this conflict of interest and what we believe is prosecutorial misconduct that those issues have to be litigated but you know my interest is to have a quick resolution as possible before an impartial fact finder meeting a fair neutral judge and a fair jury um and we're fighting you know in america it's not a given you get a trial um that's fair you have to fight even for you know for your rights in the trial process itself um so you know in the meantime i'm detained

and we're trying to get off my you know get me out of here but judge kaplan and judge presca and you know the seward and kissle law firm keep coming up with all sorts of reasons why i'm a threat to the public order or might flee the jurisdiction which again i reject totally i think those are just pretexts to keep me detained you know keep me from not traveling so i think it's very unclear where it's heading i am hopeful and i want to believe the courts will treat me fairly like i like unlike how judge kaplan has done it in my view so we'll see how it plays out but i'm in a lot of you know a lot of potential danger i don't know where it's heading i need people to become aware of this go to the website you know read our press releases and follow me on twitter too i put a lot

of stuff out on twitter it's at s donziger d o n z i g e r and you can get up more immediate updates about the case if you follow me well uh we will include links to all of those websites and your twitter at in the show description of this episode uh steven donziger i want to thank you so much for your time i and say uh just stay strong stay safe stay sane and we all are really hoping that you will be uh free sometime in the near future and that this uh ridiculous um case against you um is you know sees justice in a court or at least a court of public opinion after this show so once again steven thank you so much for your time well thank you for having me and good luck really appreciate it thank you all right and we're back joining me now of course is

matt and felix hello boys hey hello my hello my lovelies all right so to kick things off uh chris could you bring up that i just sent the link to the uh the chat yeah we're going to watch the video here and uh well you're going to hear the audio i mean this is just something i saw that is uh it let's just say it synthesizes a lot of uh of choppo thought um stephen smith who had worked uh did digital work for people to change um cited the other day how you know travis scott's takeover of fortnight and how that was a really creative um way to think about it that if we could do that with joe biden you know joe biden projected against the grand canyon you know that might be a little bit ambitious but uh we could have exclusive yes yes yes yes yes this is uh this

is this is election blade runner 2049 that's where we're going joe biden like a colossus like virtual joe biden astriding over fortnight island like azimandias just just listen listen mac but i i still want travis scott's music playing in the background yeah yeah i wouldn't well i like the idea that joe by it would be like after dr manhattan restructured himself when uh azimandias uh destroyed him and he comes back listen listen the world's smartest jack it's no more a threat to me than the world's greatest mac i'm in favor of this because if there's one thing that the rich history of human you know politics and also you know films and books when is not the giant floating head of an authority figure not a side of the office

what is that not a good thing to see and know that you're in one of the good parts you're you're not one of those dystopias no the floating giant head of authority figure that's always the side of a utopia for sure it would be a good thing to do in the last year of america oh yeah like yes so when we look back at this we're like oh man we really thought that was gonna do it yeah we thought joe biden in fortnight was gonna do it no we still collapse no but like i uh you know i have to admit i i thought that the fortnight travis scott thing was kind of cool like i don't know maybe a sucker but like i don't know there's something sort of uh yeah it's vaguely like a dystopian and surreal about it but like i just like the the the image

of this like this this giant astride in the fortnight island while people were running around listening to his music but as cool as that was joe biden doing a campaign event where it's just like he's he's 800 feet tall and in like i don't know one of those weird like fortnight skins like the gingerbread man or a men in black or you know coby lebron or something like that thambos yeah than us joe biden in the thando skin would be so sick and then he snaps and balances the budget that would be so fucking cool i mean i don't i don't play fortnight anymore they ruin the box fight meta i have four hours about the box fight meta how it's important to me but i stopped playing it i'm full time playing valorant now and see wait man then who the hell is this for no one else

on fortnight is of age to vote yeah no we discovered yeah you were the last adults on that fucking server wait so they're all like dutch nine-year-olds but uh but felix when when for when travis scott did the like did the concert in the fortnight universe like could you you were so you could still play the game it was just travis scott was just always on the horizon or was it just people running around listening to travis scott i think it was just like a full-on concert it was like you think you're killing in for a 100 player battle royale um i don't want to talk about the the weapons meta right now makes me very upset uh but um so they did one of these before and it was just like there's a concert one of the locations on the map but i think this one was like higher

production value and bigger like he was massive and you couldn't kill each other you could just listen to travis scott so there's no panic also also joe biden's going to drill play wait a minute you couldn't go panic mode no no that's bullshit that would be a pr nightmare if there's a jason oldeen concert in fortnight and someone hacked it so you well a lot that paddock scums i'm i well i'm a little i'm a little disappointed because i mean again i just like the idea of uh colossus joe biden just wandering around we all love the idea of a giant galacticized world-leading joe biden yeah and he's and he's wandering around but then everyone's doing the floss but then you could also you know get the legendary scar and do some parodies at the giant joe biden as well

you know imagine if it was just like joe biden did the fortnight event but like it was just every every teenager logged on just to fire guns at him while he was doing it he would be indestruct they would make him indestructible yeah you know he would be indestructible but like he could he could shoot guns back he could shoot giant like colossus guns and just destroy everyone in fortnight that would be one fell swoop that would be cool i think another thing we have the technology for this other thing like if we work with china uh i saw i live on the 18th floor of the building right imagine one day i wake up and there's just joe biden's giant bloody eye looking through my way that would be oh god imagine a real life colossus joe biden hologram

i feel like if he looks he's feeling like fey rey when colossus joe reaches through his window to rub his shoulders and smell his hair come on man you've got a lot of knots in you come on let's let's get him out let's get him out man hey i'll tell you that planes he gets harassed and surrounded by big cars just huge long cars driving in circles around joe biden as he gets pissed mega joe one reaches into the felix's apartment and he just says come on mac you ever see you ever see manhattan from the top of the empire state building you don't know what you're missing they have they get they find fat from that video the guy and like blow him up to to fight joe biden in state new york like hey up uh pacific dim nice well okay so i mean this is from this

is courtesy of um you know uh choppa all star lis smith um you know i think it's pretty officially established that we like and support her yeah queen of mars dual she's a queen she's a queen she's a hustler she's a winner um i mean her candidate didn't win but let's be honest it doesn't really matter she she is a winner she is a winner she's always going to finish on top she she cannot she she cannot be faded um lifelong winner she's always you don't get you can't get rid of a person like that they're always going to stick around i mean she's uh oh man this feels like so long ago remember would she like i'm not going to say drunkenly but her typing style was like that of someone who was drunk yeah uh yelled at me yeah that was awesome well i mean i just i

give her credit because you know in the original clip she she you know brings up the travis scott fortnight idea and honestly joe biden having campaign events in fortnight i think actually is a brilliant idea save for the fact that no one who plays it can vote and most of them aren't even citizens of america anyway but uh you know it's a better like he's thinking in a more creative way like given the um sort of uh strictures of now the the covid quarantine and joe biden's general inability to campaign at all or you know speak coherently on television she's coming up with like some pretty good ideas i mean i saw like these other these other fucking lambs are either saying it doesn't matter traditional campaigning doesn't actually matter all joe biden needs to do is just

fog a mirror until election day uh bill sure writing in politico today even suggested joe biden go on choppo i mean if you're coming up with dog shit ideas like that that's an awesome idea i would love that i would love and just not talk about the election at all and he would be happy i would love to talk about like hotdog stance he's been to um like whether lawn jockeys are racist or not like what he wants to talk about i mean bill i mean i would i would i look i love no it's just like look i say it's a dog shit idea from what you know would it help his campaign to become oh would help us oh it's a great idea for us and by the way if you are joe biden and would like to come on choppo and maybe because you know we'll give a fair hearing to him obviously and probably

you know introduce a lot of our dirtbag audience to you know getting them on board for voting for joe biden i mean if you're you know you definitely want him to come on our show if that's what you're trying to achieve right so the interesting thing with liz is because joe biden's campaign like the democrats just sort of gave it to him out of fear of bernie winning it it means that he didn't joe's campaign didn't figure out who the dead weight was and i'm starting to think it was everyone on that campaign because they can't even run a fucking Skype call without joe clipping through it like a skyrim NPC so like how the fuck are they gonna do anything but that's the thing for helix i was just thinking about this we've been making fun of how they've been so digitally

inept just getting a facebook live things to work you know talking about how it took him a weeks to set up a podcast studio in his house all that stuff are we sure that he is not a CGI and i'm not really kidding about that because do we know the full capacity for digitally rendering someone considering that that's the only way anyone's going to see joe biden until the election thanks to the goddamn quarantine yeah he's like that al Pacino movie simone or sim one i was thinking that exact thing i mean i'm joking but also is that not is it possible that at least some of the joe biden we're seeing is a hologram for lack of a better term you know what like what if i mean crazier shit's happened i mean my god we saw him what like two weeks ago

when he they wheeled him out and he just gave up halfway through every answer to a question yeah he would just say i never mind that was stupid i should have said that well that was that was like halfway through every answer i've never seen that before that was so depressing yeah i've never seen that before from anybody in politics or anyone anywhere people recovering from head injuries don't talk like that yeah the only the only time you do you see that is if someone was being prosecuted and on the witness stand under being cross-examined by the prosecution and then just like was getting destroyed yeah just decided to like stop and stop answering um before they incriminated oh jeez i yeah forget it can we forget i said that can we strike that for the record the questions

they weren't even asking him to us questions it was like one of those data bash interviews where she's like joe what's your favorite snack to eat on amtrak and he was just folding he was folding under those questions but i mean my original point was that like lou smith is coming up with some pretty fire ideas whereas other people are coming up with ideas like joe biden going choppo obviously i'd love that i'd write you know i'm skeptical of whether it would you know help his campaign it would help our show immensely but uh yeah for the record i don't think it'll you know you know get him a any more of a sympathetic hearing than he would otherwise get from our podcast audience that's not pod save america but liz's original idea was like

using the fortnight idea she was like what if we could project a hologram of joe biden on the grand canyon or in the grand canyon and it's just like yes why can't we do that because matt you know you were saying the other day if the democrats swamp out joe biden at the convention which they might do i go back and forth on this every day because i thought like there's no way it can be quomo with like you know the mass graves filling up on hearts island and his fucking in his state like his idiotic mismanagement of this like he's unable to do anything other than just appear on tv and point at power points in like a semi-convincing way but like on its face like the record the numbers are not good but then again i look at joe biden and i'm like well

what the fuck man like how can they do this there's got to be someone really doesn't feel like it's viable i just don't see a he how can he go through a whole election especially since they should win this thing yes they should but no what you said is if they do swap out joe biden like if if he's not ultimately going to be the guy the final final boss for the democrats the main reason that they would do that is to rob us of the glory that would be a trope biden debate they're fucking assholes but in lieu of the debate i would almost take 10 000 foot tall hologram joe biden just like just a striding across america i am i like if we don't get the fucking trump biden debate like there's no fucking just dissolved the country what's the point of any of

this if we can't have that i want to see the two most confused old men yes have two totally separate conversations at the same time just whipping past each other i want joe biden to like his voice to crack and he starts crying while he defends great and carter i want i want like a serious argument over whose son is more handsome where they both forget several their their children i want to like there's if you're not going to give this to us if you if you're going to have this election and not give us that debate it's like what's the point of any of this seriously we don't even get some just a nice little cherry on top i just have this feeling in my gut we're not going to get it or they're gonna cancel them or something there's just no way we're gonna get anything that good

no yeah i would probably cry if we don't get it i probably will like it's i literally we were talking about this two years ago we i talked about like two years ago we did like half an episode about how much we want to trump biden debate yeah yes this is impossible and now it's supposed to happen and yet i still know it won't yeah okay like yeah what's terrible about it is because like you know we're all aware of um just you know how utterly grim and apocalyptic it is that like these are the two guys who we have to vote for president for but like they've they've moved heaven and earth to make sure that that's the only thing that that can happen something that's stupid and then they're gonna pretend it's not real by not even observing the the traditional forms of going through the

fucking motions of it which is putting them on stage together for a couple hours and letting them talk to each other unadulterated they're not even gonna do that come on man come on man yeah just give me trump thinking it's 1985 and he's like yelling at a bouncer a fucking studio 57 or something and fucking biden thinks it's 1955 and he's like at the enchantment under the sea dance just give me this i want a 45 minute part of the debate where joe biden thinks he's answering a question on the sally hawkins dance and donald trump thinks he's answering a question about louis smith not the louis smith who worked for peepoony judge the one who is very unfair to him well i want to i want to i want to get back to it's a liz smith peepoony judge liz smith because

you know uh in her comments to politico about you know creating the the the biden mech to creating the the biden geiger which will be piloted by um hunter and another son another hunter is hunter is shinji akari like hunter is he's like smoking crack with mesados penguin i mean hunter would have fucked mesado day one oh absolutely shinji no he's not he's not shinji because shinji was too gun-shy like oh uh mesado i think i saw your boob coming out of the bathroom but like no hunter would have just been pounding beers with her uh eating lots of food and um yeah just sucking her toes in front of the penguin yeah no that they would have instantly fucked it's a totally different show hunter would have like felt an obligation to pilot

avi unit one but he would have been the first guy to get a dui it's a totally different show like like like shit like uh evan gellion is just all about like you know oh like shinji's too scared will he pilot the ava oh shinji are you gonna get in the ava or not maybe like okay we need hunter to pilot the oh wait what's that he's already in there he's already in there and he's already walked through a building accidentally hunter you need to put together 12 hours of sobriety to pilot the ava hunter would have gotten a tattoo of all the density scrolls too like you would have seen them and been like oh this is so cool this is the this answer is all my questions of life no that's a it's an even better show well the ford area was drawn out of an opinion piece

that liz smith just wrote for the new york times this week titled how joe biden can defeat trump from his basement and she says here the subhead is if he can win the battle for our screens he can benefit from the death of the traditional presidential campaign how's he gonna win the battle against trump for screens that's impossible he's the screen master yeah all biden's posts like it feels stupid to call biden's posts because they're done by like a 33 year old with a very precise undercut but they're like am i the only one who remembers when we respected the president more fun and shitty like his digital presence is very anemic uh what does this article say okay so it says here if joe biden plays his cards right the death of the traditional presidential

campaign will turn out to be a blessing in disguise the 77 year old mr biden whom the president derisively calls sleepy joe can become the hottest bad boy and disruptor in the media game the hottest bad boy they mean like bad boy like rapist the hottest said he's been sneaking puddings of the in the in the break room the he is the hottest bad boy and disruptor in the media game and you know i was very disruptive when your dementia add old grandfather just comes in and like pours molasses in the coffee maker screams about how uh how like this is how you make a steam bath it's disruptive when your grandfather's pants fall down it's disruptive when you have to put him in a home so he's a disruptor in this sense look you're forgetting he was a member of one of

wilmington's bad asses to do op groups yeah no back when gang sing songs joe biden was terrifying yeah joe biden was like tuki going on she says here it seems likely that social distancing will force the presidential campaign to be played out entirely on our screens that will free mr biden the presumptive democratic nominee of the burden of running a grueling expensive campaign involving incessant travel instead he can be digitally omnipresent at a small fraction of the cost and physical toll and create a new paradigm for how presidential campaigns communicate in the press for years to come mr biden's greatest asset as a campaigner is his palpable empathy politicians can learn a lot of tricks talking points debate and interview strategies but

personal warmth is something that cannot be taught it also happens to be a trait that translates well on television i mean this is just restating what we read last week about hit there they're online digital empathy strategy online content strategy yeah well i mean joe biden like something that joe biden has and has had as a politician is like yeah his dementia shit's funny but he does have an ability to connect with if the conditions are right he meaning like if it's before five o'clock i guess and the person is an antagonistic to them he can have like what looks like a genuine moment with voters because he doesn't hate talking to people yeah but i don't see he needs to be in front of them joe biden is not of the

facetime generation yeah he's not gonna read a fucking comment and have a genuine human moment with him like this is if anything a disaster for the biden campaign for the one thing he could kind of do yeah no that's true it's all it's all he's the king of like that retail one-on-one uh you know uh shini irish bullshit that is not gonna work uh with uh uh fucking zoom calls to like supposed and commercials and stuff no yeah if anything this is the worst thing that could have happened to his campaign yeah i mean yeah he's he's not gonna be doing those tiktok videos where he's just sitting there and like a little bubble will come up that says um uh medicare for all health care free at the point of service nope and then

points to like over his other shoulder and it's just like you know uh means tested employer backed you know health care tax credits yep well he could do do you see that tiktok of like the this is the saddest tiktok i've ever seen it was somebody's dad wearing an aero postal hoodie which is already starting out very sad but it's like him just hitting his kids tv with a baseball bat something like that i could see a tiktok like that with joe biden him doing that to hunt her so it says uh list continues here she says think about biden's 2017 appearance on the view when he comforted a visibly emotional megan mccain after her father senator john mccain learned he had terminal brain cancer it was a raw and remarkable moment of live tv and most seasoned politicians

would have struggled mr biden thrived i mean yeah because i fucked up somebody he was next to somebody in the flesh he wasn't looking at a phone thinking that it's taking his soul which is what's happening now like what the fuck are you talking about also i i don't think it's like you know uh that unique and i i do agree that biden does have a little bit he does have that like a little bit of that politicians charisma and that little twinkle and personal touch um that people respond to yeah honey Fitzgerald yeah in in in person or even i guess when they see a clip of it but like i don't think it was that big of a stretch to comfort someone who's you know just found out that their parent is dying of cancer you know like it was a big stretch because if i was there in

joe biden's place i would have been like aren't you like 40 you just like get over it like relax yeah everyone's everyone's parents die of cancer dude calm down i wouldn't go viral for the like everyone would be mad at me but it would still go viral and metric for all the count uh this human touch is especially important at a time when voters are looking as much for a healer in chief as they are a commander in chief it sets up a stark contrast with president trump who in crisis after crisis has demonstrated a lack of empathy and inability to feel americans pain see i mean like that's only true to a certain extent because like he feels and communicates the pain and empathizes with the segment of the country that really loves him but that segment of the country is so fundamentally

alien to the rest of us that it's impossible to understand but he is showing empathy for the beautiful boaters he's out there for the boaters he's out there for the you know uh the small but the business owners who want you know people to go back to apple they want to go back to the bad food restaurants that's who he's empathizing with but like you know they're like i know that the president wants me to be eating kick and flip and dippers right now it's just yeah the empathy that that trump does it doesn't seem like empathy to you or i or like you know a human being but you know to his fan base to a good chunk of this country trump definitely is a healer in chief you know he's he's healing us every day he's helping us every day and everybody else is

basically checked out of this because they know it's a grisly facade because neither one of them is telling them that there's going to be anything other than pain and horror in the in the foreseeable future because there's no alternative to it yeah that's exactly it like the people that the embassy who wrote this article thinks that uh joe biden is appealing to with those genuine moments he's not really like appealing to people who are on the edge of precarity or are like going to kill themselves because they have no income from this thing and there's like no really not even a tenth of the relief that they need for them and their families um joe biden's like he's relieving people who the reason they care about politics is because trump just like gives them this ambient

anxiety not that he like truly affects their lives like that's the healing he's doing just like how the healing trump is doing is like towards i don't know like a guy in the in the fucking illinois exerbs who remembers when he didn't used to hear baselines coming from people's lifted trucks it's just different it's different types of like fucking dumb idiot healing for different types of fucking dumb idiots with the majority of people completely checked out of the process um you know uh so liz smith goes on here to talk about how like a big part of the strategy should be biden focusing heavily on local tv and radio in pennsylvania michigan and wisconsin um which you know i there's actually you know not a bad idea and also she says focusing heavily on uh

spanish language media and and radio like univision and spanish language radio stations which you know like that is more of uh like you know a pretty smart traditional like campaign thing to do no these are like these aren't awful ideas like liz smith isn't like she's a shitty person but she's not completely dumb but i i want to get into like uh you know outside of like they you know what is it you know pretty pretty standard normal like campaign advice especially considered like you know local media like that is like where the most people still get their news from and are still like trusted like unlike the media as a whole which is almost universally distrusted at this point it's sort of like the phenomenon of like uh everyone distrust congress

but oh yeah but yeah by conservatives uh or you know or people who are really trust the media they love it they think it's all true and they want to kiss all the news people yeah what i mean is like i well i wish i wish journal has got ptsd like like troops i'd be great no but what i mean is it's like it's a little bit like the phenomenon of where everyone says that they hate congress and don't trust it but they like their congressman right and that's sort of like local news and the local radio and media even though like those are also vanishing and owned by probably one or two companies now uh but going on here it says here while mr biden is his own most effective messenger he alone cannot carry out a winning media strategy the campaign should lean on its vast network of

supporters elected officials community leaders celebrities who are chomping at the bit to make their voice heard in this election he can deploy former democratic rivals like pete buddha judge elizabeth warren andrew yang and bernie sanders to blanket local national and partisan media with a message of how important it is for democrats of all stripes and candidate loyalties to turn out for mr biden in november he can lean on his celebrity supporters to share good news about his campaign on their platforms ariana grande an outspoken democrat has over 180 million followers on instagram making her one of the most followed persons in the world dwayne johnson the rock another democrat also tops 180 million followers first of all i thought dwayne johnson was a

republican for sure well he's a biden he's a biden democrat he is a biden democrat okay the same thing is being like you know a republican yeah what he was which is like yeah schwarzenegger republican in 2014 this is this is fucking stupid because like didn't we do this in 2016 like everyone with the most followers was like got vote for hillary yeah i know the only people they appealed to were like cultural liberals and that's it's so insane like they had every no matter what they had everything they had every celeb it was everybody except john voigt and it did not matter they had it i remember yas weeden directed a commercial that had every one of the fucking adventures saying vote for hillary it meant nothing the god dang avengers the dang adventures the guys who

made more money than any film fucking phenomenon of the entire last decade and they were all there looking directly into the camera saying vote for hillary and it didn't fucking matter yeah culture shit the thing with culture shit is like anyone who's watching is usually like made up their mind one way or the other and i don't just mean like made up their mind to vote republican or vote democrat i mean made up their mind to vote democrat republican or that they don't care about this shit at all which is also a logical fucking conclusion i mean if you really want to get extreme with how meaningless this culture shit is i mean like hitler loved charlie chaplin and charlie chaplin made an entire movie about how bad hitler was and he was like oh that's disappointing

i'm still gonna do the holocaust people are gonna do what they're gonna do like this shit doesn't fucking mean anything uh just it's a way it's a way for celebrities who feel like an ambient guilt about how much fucking money they have and how comfortably easy their lives are compared to everyone else to to buy an indulgence and it's perfect indulgence because it doesn't fucking do anything uh well i mean maybe celebrities won't help but uh she also mentions here mr biden could also harness the newfound star power and credibility of the coronavirus governors like andrew quomo gretchen wetmer and gavin newson to highlight the life or death's death stakes of this election yeah no i really actually do support getting quomo out there as a fucking

example of the life and death emphasis on the death part of that yeah there are stakes of this election and here's here's another weird thing she mentions uh quomo newson and whitmer i mean i don't know about whitmer's record i know she's being mentioned as a vp candidate possibly but how come j inslee isn't in this conversation because we know now that like he was the one governor who actually did the right thing and handled the like his outbreak in the best possible way inslee and inslee like his uh his policies otherwise like they suck he's a fucking austerity hog he's a complete cunt with that he uh a lot of a lot of his lockdown policies benefited bowing but like compared to quomo and whitmer he's i mean i'm just saying like just on on on on the

surface like seattle was like the first big outbreak in america and like for whatever reason washington just stayed did flatten the curve in a pretty they got a handle on it in a way that new york and california certainly hasn't largely because they'd like you know they lock that shit down pretty quickly um if you're going to pick a someone like based on how they were starting to corona like inslee that's inslee he did the best job but yeah no one gives i think i think it's it's gonna be it's it's turning into quomo one because i think he is isn't he basically in like the little st james wing of the democratic party you know with the new york democrat yes yeah so so as such like he's on the inside track as opposed to a lot of these other

guys and also there's just good old fashioned east coast media bias which is a real thing yeah like twitter every if every time the rain it rains in new york it's all over it's all over national twitter so every time quomo's on tv if it's it's a real thing uh and so they focus on it and then they just auto hypnotize themselves into thinking that they're looking at a real leader because they're so terrified of how disastrously inept everyone is this country could not break up soon enough i can't wait till andrew quomo he has as much effect on like when i can move back to the fucking great lakes kingdom and andrew quomo has much effect on my life as like a governor in mexico oh my god i'm so sick of seeing him i'm so fucking sick of it i'm so sick of these

fucking journalists who what they really want is a father figure yeah they just want to they want to they want another dad in my face yeah um yeah no but it's like it's just the sort of i mean we talked about this before but like this whole contrast now set up between the federal government and the governors it like it works on every level no matter if the governor is a republican or a democrat like everybody has something to blame but this idea that like quomo or newson has a better handle on this shit than anyone has in the fed i mean maybe like technically you know like the people advising them are not like jared kushner and like a like a heritage foundation economist giving them advice on epidemiology but let's be honest like the fucking flower guy

yeah like the my pillow man the my yeah the my pillow guy but like pretty much nobody really has a handle on this or is handling it in a way that you would hope a fucking incompetent government or executive would no no so but like everybody has someone to blame it's perfect i you know it's gonna drive me insane about this election at no point is it going to be an issue or talked about that this is the richest fucking country on earth that we won the lottery with both with space and resources and also population and we people are like well you know desanitizing wipes will be back in july that we're a completely inept country that everything we had we traded away and the average person's life is no fucking better for it the thing the election is going

to be about will be um how much can i get the average person to fucking bitch about china something that that's not who did this to you or yeah how much can i get the person to care about if there's dignity in the white house and global leadership like those fucking mean anything either we had global leadership that's when we fucking gave away all the supply chains and everything and that's why we can't make enough fucking paper masks in this dog shit country that can do nothing this fucking shitty husk of a dog shit fucking country you put all the money into what like aircraft carriers whose main job is getting lost that won't be an issue just these intangible fucking bullshit things that don't affect anyone's life that will be what it's what's talked about

that's why i mean everyone who's begging the burning people to care about this election care about what i'm gonna start arguing about the soul of the nation go fuck yourself this is the election you wanted go have fun fuck you because and because at the end of the day it will be everyone will acknowledge that this is a non-functional state in critical ways in that it cannot do the basic things that a state is supposed to do especially in crisis even though it has overwhelming resources everyone's gonna have accepted that everyone's gonna accept that nothing's gonna change for the better in fact the things are only gonna get worse even faster than they were but someone's fault and it's just gonna be who is it and every fucking democrat is gonna just be like if we get

trump out of here that'll solve this and every republican will be like yes it was the chinese or the evil governors or whoever the fuck or card and it'll just be the most sterile pointless argument because none of the foundational problems that that government was on it that left government unable to respond even if it had wanted to are addressed by any of that argument and you know like to you know like as a you know uh like a medivastation of just you know how awful and grim this all is like the thing to me about this election that the last thing i want to talk about is it really is like like the final shift in the democrats just becoming the new republican party and you know what i'm talking about is something that happened like you know like we've talked

about this before it's happened in the past but just like there was another round of like democrats praising george w bush and just saying basically saying wouldn't it be you know we may we may have disagreed with them but like wouldn't it be good if we had like competent leadership in this country again the guy who presided over iraq and hurricane katrina like you know absent covet did like an insane amount of like more damage to this country than donald trump fucking did that's what specifically makes me mad about the bush thing like yeah obviously the main thing of this presidency was iraq but like if you're pointing to him as captain job interview did uh you know he wouldn't let he wouldn't let a public health crisis spiral out of here it's like

do you remember what katrina was if anything but a fucking domestic crisis yeah people that you know all you racist if you're not for joe biden yeah exactly like or they'll say like you know oh like obviously i'm aware of george bush's many international war crimes of which i you know i hope he faces justice for but just purely in the domestic realm the idea like yeah he was he was a decent man who wouldn't turn his back on like thousands of americans dying and suffering it's like well they we all saw that on tv yeah remember remember his fucking cunt mom in the in the super dome being like well these people are living in the fucking streets before so yeah yeah what a demonic family how explain to me how they're any better than the trumps and you know and like

the same demons so like we know everyone was talking about that and like either either lamenting or just being like very huffy about well you know obviously i'm not praising george w bush i'm as against the iraq war as you but i think we can all agree he was a decent man who wouldn't you know who wouldn't be so callously accepting you know hundreds of thousands of deaths of his fellow citizens blah blah blah but you know on top of that is there was a couple articles last week one in five thirty eight the other in new york magazine by ed kilgore about the phenomenon of like the never trump republicans and and like you know we've been making fun of them for years on this show because there's about 12 of them left and you know the ones who have stuck by

their guns have been abandoned entirely by the right wing and the republican party and you know like most of the people who wrote in that national review article have completely bent the native donald trump oh yeah they're a hundred percent on his side and will defend anything he says and does like they will defend him saying there are ways we can look into injecting household disinfectants into your bloodstream to deal with the virus he just you know when he said um yeah maybe there's a way we can make that work they said well look he wasn't literally saying suggesting you should drink bleach or injected in your injected into your fucking arm but of the ones you stuck like who stuck to their guns and i'm talking about bill crystal jennifer rubin max

boot like george will like the kind of like the the the real like neocons right because like they they they glommed on to the reagan administration first and then the george h the george w bush administration and sort of like they were in the driver's seat then and they got what they wanted which was you know exercising this ideological project that they had been developing for decades to make america like not gun shy about being a global empire and like a using the us military as like a force for like liberty or democracy in the world and i'm using those in scare quotes and you know now trump ran for president basically on stage shitting on all of that and none of the republican voters cared and in fact anything they've also moved on from

the any idea that like the us mill you know i'm not saying that they're against war but they would be against any war fought on the pretense of like helping other people or building a democracy they would they're just for a war where the president would just openly say we're invading this country to steal its fucking oil or natural resources right yes so like the idea was that like oh you know despite being like numerically fairly small the never trump republicans have actually become a pretty important faction in the democratic party or like they're they're they're exercising a good deal of influence now or like their people are seeking to court them you know through policy or whatever and my response to that is that these people have not

become a faction in the democratic party they are the democratic party they are officially the democratic party now like there is no other wing i mean you can look at it and say well you know like the more progressive sanders wing i guess you might want to call it would make up maybe even 30 or 40 percent of the actual democratic voting base but they've just been you know putting the fucking ground they've been done away with entirely and what we're left with is jennifer rubin will have more leverage over a biden administration than any of these progressive groups currently clamoring for him to do better and like that's not an accident it's because these are all the same fucking people they believe the same thing the never

trump republican faction is just the democratic party they believe the same things like and that's what we're going to be left with is the democratic party is going to be the reliable sort of stakeholders to protect us military empire uh israel and just free markets in general as the republicans move in a kind of you know maybe in kind of like a heronville social democratic model of just you know administering benefits and go cutting against the market if it benefits white people only essentially is right right and that and they are as diluted as the trump people you are as delusional and fantastical to think that we're going to return to an era of global leadership after this a leadership of who a leadership how everyone knows we can't do anything i think

that's the most insane thing about the biden people the biden the never trump democrats those people the people who think we're going to uh in their words bring back american global leadership i these people make fun of trump all day but how do we go back we lined up at the free throw line our shorts fell down and everyone saw our tiny dick and outy belly button we're gonna go back to the world you have to do as we say no no one's fucking listening no one's fucking listening we can't do anything it's done it's done the fucking the era of the american empire is coming to a close and any fucking nicole wallace type who thinks that we're just uh if joban it makes enough speeches we're back it's the nineties again we're the soul superpower they're as insane as the

trump people who think he's gonna be the fucking god emperor oh yeah all i'm saying is living in any type of reality you know should he become president like expect bill crystal and jennifer rubin to have a place in in the administration oh they will they will yeah alongside larry summers rama manuel you know the the ceo of blackstone or whoever whoever the fuck yeah right steven jortsman yeah like that that's going to be who's in charge and like that will be like the democratic party will just be the republican party of like not even like a lot not even though i'm talking like the eisenhower or like earlier like new deal paradigm i'm talking the republican party of the george w bush year is absent like any sort of evangelical culture war bullshit but they'll

other than the cultural issues they will represent what the republican party of george w bush stood for right and they will they will as cynically employ social issues uh on the other side uh as the george w bush administration did because the cultural turning point has now happened where that is now like the default position so they could just whip up culture wars from the left to distract from what they're going to be actually doing which is absolutely stripping every baseboard of any kind of wiring whatsoever in this country well culture war is the only thing left because i mean we literally have a fucking pandemic that is causing everyone tens of millions americans have no income and we've somehow turned it into a culture war issue

you are either someone who you know your main thing is like reopening everywhere everyone's being an alarmist everyone's being a fucking nanny state pussy or you're you're on the side of science oh yeah i believe in science not the not the science that would dictate that you know maybe most americans need income because they will be literally homeless they'll fucking kill themselves so hopefully their kids can get picked up in foster care not the math part of this but the science you pat yourself on the back because you get to you're gonna stay home this entire time and hey it's not a big deal to you that much anyway because you're already a fucking insect person all you like to do is get grubhub from the permanent slave class and watch fucking the

becoming stance on netflix we've turned this issue one of the most material issues of our fucking lifetimes is now a culture war issue it's the only thing left sorry it's the only terrain on which any political disagreement is allowed or like debate is allowed to take place on because everything else has been decided and it has to get more intense because it has to make up it has to take up more emotional energy because conditions are going to keep getting worse so that means it has to get more high-pitched and it has to get more heightened at every level to make up for all that misery that can't be expressed through any other issue any other question of economic distribution and you know like i'm sure people who are skeptical of this idea that like

there's you know basically no difference between what the democrats will be after after joe biden or after this fucking nightmare presidential campaign i mean look they were already basically that to begin with but like this will be the final coup de gras right and people you know like we've talked about this before like that will either you know naively or totally cynically point to like oh look at joe biden's website it's the most progressive platform of any democratic president ever and it's like well yeah that's true any that any subsequent democratic president is technically going to be on paper more progressive than the last one but i just i've just really been thinking about what like what liz franzik said the last time she was on the show where she's

like well yeah we need to talk about that but like the the issue is not that it's the fact that all that will be true but nothing will change that that nothing will everything nothing will change it'll only get slightly shittier like that's felix that's your very very perceptive and like accurate sort of summation of not like even pre-covid crisis where everything was going and i think whatever we emerge from you know after this is done or not officially done but we just all pretend to go back to normal um regardless is what we'll find is basically things are the same but just slightly and then ever slightly more and more shittier and shittier yeah and you know like adam kurtis says there's a generation with nothing to lose well or people just it or it's no longer

viable i mean like the center doesn't hold just in terms of being able to provide uh a continuity of political legitimacy and just basic infrastructure across this entire continent yeah i've been thinking about that and our and our friend shan's tweet about entering the what historians call the cool zone yeah the cool zone of history um yeah we're heading into the cool zone guys like to study this this this is the era of history that kids like to learn about first because it's the it's the most interesting and you know and matt you were talking about this earlier it's like regardless of the outcome of this election it's just we're both sides are prime to the point where like half of the voting population is just not going to accept the results

of it no matter what no way no matter what like if trump wins it's obviously going to be russia again it's going to be china it's going to be us it's going to be the bernie bros or whatever all those excuses that are you know already involved the vote vote's going to be all weird because states are going to have different responses to the virus there's going to be different levels of openness some states are going to have full uh mail-in ballots some states are going to require you to go in and vote and there's going to be the same shit we saw with the primary so there's going to in addition to like the fantasies both sides have there's going to be actual on the ground inconsistencies for the first time since 2000 that could be like pointed to it to say

this is an actual illegitimate election and you know like let's be and also the turnout is probably going to be the lowest in american history we might we might get under 50 this time we might maybe under 50 percent you know because of just how shitty the choices are but also just the hang over from the pandemic as well but yeah like and if biden wins oh man then we're off to the races then we're gonna have an an armada of beautiful boaters that are a fucking state house protest of like rb's technical guy rb fucking barrett 50 cal guys every fucking weekend and then you know we'll see how that turns out and also there's going to be a need for state governors in states filled with those type of people who are going to be hating the president to have some sort of distancing

mechanism from their inability to deal with the problem which means they're going to heighten conflict with the president uh with the with the government uh the federal government from the from the state house and you know i mean again and just i guess like you know we're going long on this episode but like i guess just to wrap things up it's just like this is all by design like to heading we're heading into the careening into the cool zone it's like you know we could have maybe taken an off ramp to the slightly boring zone but as we've said over and over again we've got food at home but man as you said over and over again like the a prerequisite to that and it's not even a hard one in theory is just offering an actual solution or like something

different a change like some sort of like basic help to people or like offering like just anything that would make people's lives like easier less stressful less miserable uh more free time more money like or just any alternative to like what everyone has just decided is like an immutable fact of life which is the markets and the people in control of them and if we've precluded or just pre you know precluded like any any possible alternative within our political system then the you know what we're going to end up with is the cool zone and two got old men challenging each other to push ups the sun contest hopefully let's hope though a little little sundowning contact well i mean like yes and then you know and again what we're all dealing with you know as

philips mentioned is like you know this is the death of the american empire it's it's playing out on a global stage you know i mean like we're going to be the last people to admit it but everyone else is watching this shit right now like you said the wealthiest most powerful country in human history is just basically just you know shitting its insides right out right now because it can't do anything nothing no abilities to do anything well on that on that on that cherry note we will leave you but at least i'm still hoping for cgi colossus joe biden hologram just yeah we've got just come on it's just sort of like just running through every major american city pushing over buildings dancing doing doing doing dabbing but just like a giant a giant fucking like leviathan

joe biden hologram everywhere you wake up in the morning and like with with the sun you see biden standing next to it no matter where you are in the country and we're going super long but i just have to say one thing that i think is insanely funny that this lidsmith article about how biden can win the war of the screens came one day after the president did what was it like 130 tweets in our tweed our retweets just going off on some wild stuff like he he is a born poster and you can't you can't make you can't invent that in a focus you can't fake you can't fake the real you cannot fake the real all i know is if it's gonna be just spectacle then give me some god damn spectacle i want to 300 foot tall biden and trumps debating like the actual trump and

dub biden are debating and then they're projected to be the size of like those budas in afghanistan in every like town square in america just give me something and you know joe joe biden if you're listening like squad up with felix and valorant you know yeah yeah maybe you're good i don't know well what character do you think joe biden should play just real i think he would play well he can't take jet that's my character uh i think joe should play uh yeah probably omen because omen is a character that can teleport all over the map and throw shadows everywhere it reminds me of how joe clips in real life and he's always teleporting to a memory in 1954 well you know there you go showing up places uh joe biden if you want to be a the new bad boy

of digital media disruption um go on choppo fym and just watch some frank the tank videos with the boys yeah no i think we'd love to see joe talk about the two average guys all right matt felix um until next time and uh dear listener i would encourage you once again please look at the show information part of this episode and check out those websites that steven donsinger shared with us about what you can do to support him currently under house arrest and also um the people of ecuador um in their case against chevron so uh please look into those the case and do what you can to support uh our boy on house arrest right now so until next time guys bye bye

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