It Could Happen Here - Executive Disorder: French Student Protests, Flavio Bolsonaro, ‘Third Country’ Deportations

Episode Date: October 9, 2026

The gang discuss a tree-sit on the border, massive student protests in France, a Supreme Court ruling on rendition, the Brazilian election, a Russian researcher who was accidentally exposed to the pneumonic plague, and the death of former House Speaker and pedophile Dennis Hastert. Sources: https://austinkocher.substack.com/p/julian-curo-churata-is-the-37th-person  https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/government-affairs/pdfs/ORDER%20GRANTING%2034%20Motion%20for%20Preliminary%20Injunction%20Signed%20by%20Judge%20Kathleen%20Cardone.pdf https://acampada26s.net/ https://www.wfla.com/news/florida/crocodile-dies-of-lead-poisoning-first-time-in-florida-fwc/ https://x.com/UK_MTO/status/2107444098806546566?s=20  https://x.com/vvanwilgenburg/status/2107171768121311518?s=20  https://apnews.com/article/warner-bros-skydance-ellison-studio-hollywood-5f4326c083ca2fc084ff399c1b8aa035?utm_source=copy&utm_medium=share https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/092926zr2_1a7d.pdf  https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2026/10/05/third-country-deportations-ice-dhs-26-federal-plaza-west-africa/  https://www.thirdcountrydeportationwatch.org/eswatini  https://www.camp-oshad.org/ https://crimethinc.com/2026/10/06/french-youth-fight-against-a-bleak-future  https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/2/protests-shutter-hundreds-of-french-schools-as-violence-flares?utm_source=bluesky&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=socialPulse  https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/30/french-public-workers-strike-over-pay-as-student-protests-turn-violent  https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2026/10/06/vincent-tiberj-politiste-la-reaction-du-gouvernement-a-la-mobilisation-lyceenne-en-dit-beaucoup-sur-la-facon-dont-une-partie-des-medias-et-des-politiques-considerent-la-jeunesse_6788833_3232.html https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2026-10-05/former-us-house-speaker-dennis-hastert-dies-cbs-news-reports https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/fox-news-runs-memoriam-serial-233040454.html https://apnews.com/article/dennis-hastert-dead-obituary-4a04ca4b4c0741a38f4b4a7e0f2bc78c https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/fox-news-runs-memoriam-serial-233040454.html https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2026-10-05/former-us-house-speaker-dennis-hastert-dies-cbs-news-reports https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazil-ex-president-bolsonaro-wins-big-without-his-name-ballot-2026-10-06/ https://archive.is/6j85h https://archive.is/DqaJi https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/04/world/video/worker-at-russian-plague-lab-dies-of-unknown-infection See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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The whole gang back together. This episode, we are covering the week of September 30th to October 7th. James, I think you can take it away with your barrage of news. All right. So, yeah, we've got a lot of small things this week. Another person has died in ICE custody, making this the deadliest year on record, with 37 reported deaths so far. Of course, it's only October.

Yeah, like, we're entering the final quarter of the year, like, this week. Julian Kuro-Curata died. in Louisiana. After being transported from the Richwood Correctional Center, the Ritual Center has a long and dark history of neglect and even homicide. I've linked to an article about that in the show notes. This week, the president suggested in a rally that it would be acceptable for him to allow Iran to bomb San Diego and Los Angeles. A small price to pay. Yeah, I remain neutral on the issue of Los Angeles, but we're not having that in San Diego. He's not so much remarkable. He always says crazy shit, right? His round.

rallies, he just goes on a world one. But, like, what's remarkable, I think, is a response to the administration. It is itself a kind of interesting thing for a president to say. It is a remarkable choice in the months before an election. It's a little bit high. It's a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They can take out a city. Let them take out Los Angeles.

Let them take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay. The cheering is what's. also very interesting. I'm looking at the faces of the people immediately behind him. They're turning to each other. Yeah, they all look a little confused. I'm going to read a post from Rapid Response 47.

It's one of the White House-associated Twitter accounts. The LA Times had said that, like the Trump had suggested, it'll be okay to take out Los Angeles or San Diego because that is a phrase that he said, quote, no, he didn't, you buffoons. He was saying the U.S. is fighting to stop Iran from having the ability to take out L.A. and San Diego with a nuclear weapon. which they would if they had the chance. That's not true.

That's just not what Trump said. That's just very clearly. And this isn't taken out of context. He was saying that if Iran nuked Los Angeles or San Diego, that would be a small price to pay for us to beat Iran, for us to then, you know, like, destroy Iran. That's what he's saying. He was previously talking about gas prices.

Yes, there's no other context. Like he was saying it would be awesome if this liberal city was wiped off the face of the earth because it would let us do what we're going to do already. We also have, like, most of the Pacific Fleet, a massive Marine Corps base, fucking nuclear submarines. Like, it would be very inconvenient for the States if we lost San Diego.

But, yeah, there's this line in 1984. The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was a final most essential command. No, he didn't, you buffoons. Yeah, people love to be fucking wrong about George Orwell. It is the bane of my existence. This is an excellent time to be quoting in 1984 by George, well, because this is the kind of shit it is about.

Moving on. A lawsuit in Texas has stopped the border wall construction, not just a Big Bend National Park, but also in the region at large. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. People seem a little confused about the implications it is. Border wall construction is still ongoing in other places. There are other areas where there are still waivers for land protections,

which are still using. And I think it's worth noting that the ultimate victory is a temporary pause in the wall, right? The ultimate victory is the wall comes down and the land is restored as best it can be. Like this wall is still doing damage to construction, has still done damage. And I think sometimes people get a little lost in a source, but it's still a good thing. United States troops have completed their withdrawal from Iraq, leaving the Kurdistan region of Iraq, especially vulnerable without the air defense that it's relied on. So heavily, since February, there have been a thousand drone and missile attacks on Kurdistan.

Following this withdrawal, there was an Islamic State attack in Kirkuk last night. It looks like they attacked a PMF position and killed one person, but they already claimed responsibility for destroying a thermal camera. Can you storm with the PMFs? Yeah, a popular mobilization forces like militia that was mobilized to fight the Islamic state. Right. In the fighting against ISIS in Mosul, you had like two primary, like, non-state militias. There was the Peshmerger, which is like the Kurdish militias from the north,

and then you had the popular mobilization forces, which were the Iranian-backed guys. And the dudes you wanted to avoid when you were there, to be honest. They were not the least trustworthy of the Iraqi state forces. Some of those guys run a wild one. Yeah. And remain on a wild one to this day in some cases. Oh, boy. I know Iraq is supposed to be doing some sort of regularization there, but they keep pushing back the deadline of that.

It's a big ask. It is. Yeah, that's a lot of people with guns you don't want to come back. Well, and the Iraqi state has never, in its modern incarnation, managed a functional military without huge numbers of, like, non-state but state-aligned militias. Yeah. And so it's just a massive change for them to make. Yeah, right. The monopoly they have, they have a legitimate violence is very tenuous at all, right? Like, it's just not, it's not the way that it is in the U.S.

It's certainly not a monopoly. The Iraqi state is like the Microsoft of having, like, a legitimate, like, a legitimate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's like an oligopoly. There's like an apple out there. There's an Android. You've got Samsung.

I think of Curtis. Yeah, yeah. That's a good analogy. Yeah. I want to move to Spain, right? There's been a huge series of protests in Spain following the eviction of an 87-year-old woman named Maria del Carmen Abascal.

She's known as Marie Carmen. It's pretty common to contract your name. Yeah. People began occupying the Puerto del Sol in Madrid. Many of you'll remember this as one of the very early seeds of the Occupy movement, right? Or of the movement that became known as the Occupy Movement. Pedro Sanchez attempted to pass a reform package, but he ran up against right-wing opposition in Parliament, which he then dissolved and called a snap general election.

He has now proposed a new set of steps which would need to be ratified by an interim legislature because Parliament has been dissolved, right? In Barcelona, over the weekend, there were huge protests. Cops ordered people at the street. The protesters in Gracia, where I used to live. filled the streets with burning trash and threw stuff at the cops instead of leaving. You love to see it. It's so funny to me that I can picture the exact street that it's being filled with burning trash

because I have been there several times where that has been happening. The Circle of Life continues on the Rambler. People use construction materials to try and hold arguably one of the most iconic boulevards on the planet. It's ironic this is happening 90 years and a couple of months after Catalan workers fought the country's army and defeated it in the same streets. Moving on to Crocodile News. Florida Crocodile.

Did you guys know they have crocodiles in Florida? No. Are you sure? Yeah, I've heard from Florida, man, and their allies on this one. It does seem they have crocodiles. James, I, I have heard from Florida. We've all heard from the Floridians. Yeah, thank you.

And let's put people in quotation marks there. We're talking Florida. Hey, okay, the Floridian French genders are cool. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about people from the northern part of Florida. Yeah, the Florida, Georgia. People in quotation marks.

Well, unfortunately, there is one less crocodile in Florida now. Yeah. Crocodile has been found dead from lead poisoning. It got into a pool and started behaving weirdly and had this kind of foul smelling, I think, like vomit. And then they got it back into a... canal and then they found it dead the next day. Did an autopsy and it had

a bunch of lead in its stomach, 23 air rifle pellets and a fishing sinker. This is important because this is a policy issue, right? Like specifically the use of lead projectiles for hunting is something that's been prohibited in California and in like Condor.

I don't think it's prohibited in Condor region. I think it is prohibited in Condor parts of Arizona but it's also like a voluntary program where they'll pay for you to have copper monolithic ammunition. And there's been a whole lot of pushback on this recently. In Florida, I know a lot of people hunt iguanas with air rifles, but this is a very direct causal relationship that we can point to from, like,

led to dead animal. I don't know how commonplace this is, but I thought it was interesting as a relatively rarer species. I do want to get into depth on this on natural causes, but I'm going to find some people to interview so it can be clear on where the science stands on that. Finally, in the straight of Hormuz, Hormuz news, Iran is once again attacking ships with anti-ship cruise missiles, things that they still have, despite months and months and months of the US trying to bomb them. I think there have been six attacks since the UN General Assembly happened in late September.

That were recorded this on Wednesday. It seems like they're taking along about one a day at the minute. So there might be a couple more by the time you hear this. Also this week, Paramount has closed the $11 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers, forming a new conglomerate called Skydance, which is the Ellison company that originally bought Paramount a few years back. So now both CNN and CBS are in control of the Ellison's. Ellison sent out a day one memo to all these new employees, which warned them, Quote, integrating two companies will bring change, including difficult decisions that affect our workforce. Layoffs are obviously expected in the next few months.

The state of California was able to secure concessions such as a promise to release about 30 movies a year for five years and a $5 million fund for independent movies. Cool. Then we'll fix it. Yeah. This will put a dent in obviously the absolute and total consolidation of media in general of all forms

into the hands of an extremely small number of people who absolutely suck. This is the worst merger that I can like remember in my life. Like this is the worst thing that I can like see and remember as like a conscious living human. Like yeah. The scale of this is like absurd. It shouldn't be allowed.

Yeah. No, it very clearly violates antitrust. If Lena Khan was in charge, it's obviously it wouldn't happen. No, they would have the Navy SEALs at the Ellison compound. Yeah. Hey, minimum viable 2028 program.

Yeah. No, breaking up this company should become a project that gets promoted by people like Khan and us. And if we're going to have Navy SEALs, this is what you use them for. Yeah.

The anti-Ellison seal division. Yeah. I will note that the very last Warner Brothers production as an independent studio was the movie Digger. Which I heard is actually pretty good. It is not doing well.

It's a catastrophic. I heard it's really good. I'm looking forward to seeing it. Very divisive film. Yeah. Very divisive film. I'm not anti-digger, but it is very funny that that is their last release is Tom Cruz's biggest box office bomb in a generation.

Obviously, David Zazlov has been, in many ways, a disaster from Warner Brothers, and his reign of the company is partially what's led them to being acquired here. But Warner Brothers has put out a bunch of really interesting. interesting and good films the past few years. And the current batch of executives promoted and fought for those movies like sinners, movies like one battle after another. Those executives are already gone. Those executives are not going to be sticking around David Ellison's new, New Warner brothers. So the people that brought you one battle and sinners are no longer at the helm. So I wanted to update everyone on what's been happening in Lucchia. If you didn't listen last week,

You can get the very basics, but I was there last week, not there now. A number of people had been defending a pair of cottonwood trees that had once been part of a stand of cottonwood trees that joined canopies over the border. Construction workers for fisher sand and gravel. I previously dropped three of them in their construction of the border wall, at which point someone had been sitting in the one remaining tree on the northern side. There's another tree which seems to be very close to or spanning the border. which had been sat in briefly by someone who'd come from the Mexican side before they came down.

On the 5th of October, Border Patrol staged a huge raid on this camp. The camp for what it's worth it on private land. Generally, BP doesn't need a warrant to enter private land unless it's a domicile if they're 25 miles or less from the border, which they were in this instance. So they raided the camp. They then came in with a cherry picker, pulled the person who was in the tree out of the tree, detained them and then pushed over the tree with an excavator very, very quickly. They moved extremely fast to do this whole thing.

They detained 10 people that day. I'm not quite sure of what those people or if those people have been cited or charged yet. I'm still trying to get that information. The next day, five more people were detained, and somebody began defending by sitting in it the other tree, the tree that straddles the border perhaps, or the tree that people thought was in Mexico, but it's not exactly clear, like without seeing the border monuments exactly where they line up.

Like the thickness of a line on a map is way too thick to have this kind of definition. And so currently the other tree is still being defended. That doesn't mean the border wall construction is completely stopped. It seems they're working at a very frenzied pace. As we recorded until Wednesday, they began working overnight on Tuesday night. And what they're doing now is it appears that they are building. So this is an area where they have double barrier, right? two walls about 60 foot apart.

One wall just inside the Roosevelt reservation and then one wall just inside the United States. And then there's a road between them that BP can drive, right? And it kind of exceeds hundreds of acres of the United States to border patrol control, right? Most of it was public land in this case, right? Forest Service or some of it's state wildlife refuge. Some of it, I think BLM manages that Roosevelt reservation

for what I can understand because BLM posted notice that they were closing it last week. So what Border Patrol is now doing is building that northernmost wall first to prevent access to the southernmost wall. And it seems that they're doing this at a very frenzy pace. It seems like they might be skipping some of us,

just from pictures I've seen, they might be skipping some of the usual smart wall fiber optic conduit that they would put in there and just trying to get up a barrier as quickly as they can, obviously to prevent people continuing to protest. The protest had the permission of landowners

to be on their land and their local sheriff had said that he wasn't going to be arresting any of the protesters. So BP decided to do it themselves after 71 days of that tree being defended. So that tree is now gone, but the other tree remains. I thought it's also very sweet that people have taken cuttings from the trees that were taken down and those cuttings are already growing to, which is nice to see nature springs eternal. But yeah, I'm going to cover this in a two-parter and natural causes. It will not be the Monday after you hear this, but it will be the Monday after that. That'll be the first episode and there'll be two episodes. So you'll have to wait to then to get the long version of this. Talking of long, we've got a long time without

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So we mentioned earlier that there are a large protest going on in Spain. There are also very, very large student protests going on in France right now. He started September 18th where high school students, and this is an interesting development because most of the written history of student movements is about college students, these are high school students. And they have started en masse blockading their schools and taking to the streets. These protests started in the Parisian suburbs.

It is worth bearing in mind that French urban infrastructure is effectively the exact inversion of the way American infrastructure worked with white flight, where in the U.S. you have white people fleeing the urban core into the suburbs. France has built

the opposite where working class and non-white people were forced into the suburbs because they were not able to live in the urban core, which is predominantly whiter and significantly richer. Everyone watch Lahain. It's great. I wish I had any of you what that was. It's a French film about this.

Ah, okay. It's about people living in these sorts of like suburbs. It's two immigrants and I think a young Jewish kid who then travel into the city center and bad things happen. It's very similar to the story that you're going to be talking about. Yep. But it's like looking at the conditions 20 years ago

and the same conditions now. Yeah, and conditions are worse, yes. Not the same, actually. Yeah. So these protests read very, very quickly. And it is now spread effectively everywhere. It's not just in Paris. It is across the entire country.

I think right now, the last number that I saw, and this changed while I was writing this, the last number that I saw is 500 of France's 3,500, like high schools were fully shut down. Yeah. So these purchased, again, started a couple of weeks ago on September 18th. As of Wednesday the 7th, they are not just continuing, but escalating.

Now, we're going to get into the police response in a second, but I can't count the number of times on this show. I have said there was a giant police crackdown and the images of the police crackdown spread the protests, but that's what happened here. Why is this happening? Why is it specifically high school students who are now in the streets in full-on conflict with riot police who are reacting to and treating them the way that they treat. I mean, frankly, worse than most protesters get treated in France, which is sort of astonishing.

Yeah, so there's actually a good crime think piece about this. There's a lot of things happening here. Part of it is a reaction to class sizes where you have, I mean, 30 and 35 kids, sometimes a lot more than that. Class sizes is an issue that's familiar also to, I mean, a lot of these demands look like the demands you see in teacher strikes effectively everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. These classes are enormous. Part of it is the structure of the French education system, which is French schools have breaks, but also you're in school from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., which is longer than most places and also causes, you know, this also causes teachers to have to work longer hours. And that means that, you know, because they're working longer hours, the number of teachers you have is strained because you're covering more time. This plus, you know, decades of neolomers. liberal austerity has led to conditions where there will just not be a substitute teacher. So a teacher will get sick. They'll have like maybe a person there, but it's not even a substitute teacher who can take over

lesson plans. You just have a week at a time where you're in a subject that's on the national exam system and there's no teacher, which is just sort of appalling given one of the other things that these protests are about, which is this sort of algorithmic program. I remember we had a much less, I don't know, ferocious, a less strict version of this when I was in high school. But in France, they have this sort of student program where you're supposed to put in your choices

and it looks at your test scores and it spits out what you should be doing after high school. Okay. And this is one of the things that like it feeds you into what track you're going into, right? So it feeds you into vocational schools. It feeds you into like what kind of colleges you can get into. it has turned into the system

kind of like we talked about with the Indian student protests where there's this incredibly intense pressure on students to like fight against each other basically for you know it's promoted intense competition and then also it's just it's a weird algorithm system and everyone is

like forced to manage these issues you have with this weird algorithm taking what your information you're giving it and spitting you out this thing that like determines the rest of your life I mean, there's a lot of other problems. The actual conditions in the schools themselves are very bad.

Like, you know, it's leaking roofs, things like that. There's also, I saw a thing about, like, lunch breaks where students weren't able to eat because the lunch break wasn't, like, they don't have enough cafeteria staff. The lunch break wasn't long enough for all the students to, like, get food. Jeez. Yeah, that's a problem. Yeah. These conditions are emblematic of, I mean, just a lot of what,

of this sort of deterioration of social services and, you know, the sort of death of opportunity for these students in a way that the more I'm thinking about, the more is just, oh, this reminds me a lot of the Indian protests. And so the protest themselves, the McRod administration made a decision very, very early on that they were not going to negotiate with the students. They have kind of become more open to it. In the past day, we'll see what happens there. But their immediate response was, you know, a brutal police crackdown, which has been the Macron administration's response to most things. And this has been, this has been a full-on French police assault on a bunch of children. A 15-year-old got his hand blown off. I've seen conflicting

reports about this. It seems like he was trying to pick up what he thought was a tear gas canister, but was actually a stun grenade. Yeah. But I've also seen reports that, like, it hit him. I don't know. But regardless, somehow the police fired a grenade and it blew this kid's hand off. Yeah. Another student has lost an eye. I think that kid was 16. The kid who got his hand blown off again was 15.

I'm going to quote from crime thing here because there's another really bleak case. But currently, the 14-year-old boy can't open his mouth as all of his bottom teeth were knocked up by the impact and all of his upper teeth are broken. Jesus. So, yeah, that kid is 14. Yeah. These are, again, I cannot emphasize enough. these are actual children and this is also kind of

part of what's complicated in covering this because I think it's important to mention that a cop should not be knocking out the teeth of anyone the fact that they're doing this to 14 year olds is particularly brutal and also I think that it's true and this has been one of the debates that's been sort of raging across French society

is like are these students legitimate political actors like do they have the right to have their voices heard and you know like go and take political action like this and the right has kind of said no and argued that these people are sort of pawns of, you know,

they're pawns of what I would describe as the center left party, France Unbowd. The media will describe them as hard left, but like, come on. They're like to the right of the old PCF, and the old French Communist Party was like not a particularly like communist Communist Party. But it's worth noting that while France Unbound has talked to students and like spoken at some of their protests. This was not a protest that was organized through the parties at all. There's an interesting interview in Le Monde with the French sociologist Vincent Tiberge, where he points out that, you know, France is a country that has seen high school, organized high school student protests too.

But these are not those kind of protests. You know, 2006 was kind of the last big high school student protest. But those ones were organized by leftist student unions that were directly affiliated with the parties. this is not that. This is a bunch of students taking action autonomously. They are self-organized and they are not particularly connected to any of the French political parties, even the sort of far-left ones. And the scale is like huge, right? Oh, it's massive. For something that's more autonomously organized, like hundreds and hundreds of thousands of participants.

Yeah, like all across the country. Yeah, I mean, they fully have shut down. Okay, I'm not going to try to do the math on air. Hold on. One in seven. 500 out of 3500. Yeah, that sounds right. That's why they call him PhD James, everyone. Hercane historian over here.

Hell yeah, hell yeah. Look, I picked an anthropology degree specifically so I wouldn't have to do this kind of math. You just got to measure people's skulls instead in anthropology and do that kind of math. Yeah, well, look, anthropology consists of two things. Racism and a discourse about whether or not it's doing racism. So, you know, this is why I'm a podcaster now,

a discipline that has never done anything wrong. That is most of what my anthropology class is. There's some good stuff in there. Every once in a while they accidentally start a social movement. But... Yeah. Oh, you do linguistic anthropology and it melts your brain. Oh, that's so scary.

Yeah. From the perspective of La France insumis is a French word for France unbowed, right? Like, it's like a demsock in that it has people who are left of other people in that but like, me is right. This isn't a particularly radical. party, at least sort of on a global scale. Like, you've seen some politicians do a lot better than others. Like, I'm sure everyone by now will have seen the Bali Bagayoko video, right, of the

mayor getting tear gas with the kids. Yeah. But, like, it's not about politicians and, like, attempts to make it about politicians other than being pissed off at them. Yeah, and people asking for, like, huge, like, structural changes. Yes. And frustration at both. the left's inability to address this political situation in France and, you know, continuing

is sort of like, like, like, we talked about in like Brazil and in some parts of the states, it's sort of like gerotocracy, even among the left, where we have these kind of old guys who may have done good things, but they're still in their 80s. And you need to pass the torch. And like a lot of, a lot of what I'm seeing from these protests in France, it is a very, like, generational uprising. Yeah. Yeah. Built, also built on the frustrations about how like 10% of the budget is being diverted to the to the pension system. So there's a lot of this kind of generational frustration and the left in France has also run into that. I was going to say, like, I did, I did use calculator for this one, but it is 58 years since 1968. But you have this, like,

this generation of like Svartan Wittar, like, like 608ers. Yeah. They've gone in a number of directions, right, but like to include like part of the electoral left. And like, it's not like we haven't seen protests, it's seen 68 in France, right? But like, yeah. It shouldn't be the one generation gets to have the, like we were the radical students who changed the world. And therefore you students now have to listen to us, even though we're old as fuck and don't understand the shit that you're going through.

Yeah. And I think the sort of structural issue in terms of how, yeah, on a generational level, like how the left has been and has not been connecting to these students, I think it's also very important, again, like where this started. and the kind of like working class suburbs that the French left has had a really tenuous relationship with like kind of since the 70s.

We talked about this. So like I got three years ago now, there was a huge series a huge uprising over a police killing in a different set of, in a different set of French suburbs that really came in this moment of what had been really fierce upheaval in France.

like in the wake of the yellow vests and all these other protests. Other pension protests. Yeah, right. And, but this, this was the one where, like, the non-white people in the suburbs went up, and the rest of France was like, oh, God, no, fuck off. We hate you.

You're, like, and to this day, like, that the interview with the sociologist I was talking about in LeMond, which is, like, the biggest newspaper in France is talking about how of all these students are, like, actually different than, like, the, like, urban disturbances from those 2023 protests. about police brutality and sort of structural racism and class violence. And when you look at it, it's like, no, they're not.

Like, they're actually a lot, in some ways, they're a lot more similar to that than they are to the other protests which have been going on, which is where I kind of want to close this, where we have also started to see the rest of French society move slowly in sort of line with these student protests where, you know, obviously part of the student protests are about this. neoliberal kind of austerity budgets that the Macron administration keeps trying to pass. And so there's also been a one-day strike of about 300,000 workers from the sort of like traditional leftist unions. Also, about 11% of teachers and faculty are now on strike in the middle of this, too. So it remains to be seen exactly the extent to which the rest of the French left is going to join into these. protests. I want to mention something briefly about schools here and why it's important that

these are starting here, which is that schools are not just places where you get education. They're also, you know, it's not just the basic part of like the reproductive labor that reproduces capital. It's not just that it produces future workers, but it's also a place where like the basic care for students and the basic social reproduction of like children is carried out by the state, which allows workers to work, right? And this is why. shutting schools down is also a giant lever that allows you to, like actually fully shutting down schools en masse, is a lever that allows you to disrupt the rest of the economy

because it forces parents to, like, not work. It's not exactly analogous, but it can serve the effect of what coal strikes used to, where if you shut down the supply of coal, it shuts out all of the workers down the line, where if you force all of these parents to have to stay home, like all of these workers are now also on strike as a sort of secondary thing of shutting these schools down.

And this is why the state always tries to make it really hard for teachers' unions to strike, because schools are a lever of power that you can use in a labor system if you use them correctly. I want to close by mentioning that as this has been going on, there's been unrest building in France over, I mean, a whole bunch of things. There's a police bill I think we talked about in this show that is trying to allow the French police to... Basically what it would do is it's a proposed bill that if it was passed, if a French police officer shot someone, they would be immediately assumed

to have killed them legitimately, and then they would have to be proven that they illegitimately killed them instead of there being an investigation immediately. So it's a bill that says that if a cop drags you into an alley and shoots you, and there's no one there, there's nothing you can do about it.

That's been causing unrest. And one of the old sort of signals that's been set up in the middle of this, and it's unclear who is doing this, but there's been this giant call put out from these mass demonstrations on October 17th. And there's this question, you know, a crime thing is talking about this.

I've seen this in other places of, are these student protests going to last until then until that giant uprising? Are people going to come out into the streets before then? And at this point, all we can sort of do is wait and also, I guess if you're in France, go now, you're not going to get a better shot. If you're trying to overthrow the government, stay in line.

you know? Yeah. Like, I want to like end of like one actual important note, which is you see this a lot in the nature. French protests,

you see this in American protest where like one section of society will go into a revolt and everyone else just kind of waits. And you get these like cycles where like the people who were kind of in the streets and Occupy like weren't the same people necessarily.

I mean, some all of these either was crossover, but they weren't the same section of society that went in like went into revolt in Ferguson. Right? They like waited until the next one. was out. Or like, you see this with like the British student movements. And then right after the British student movement kind of gets crushed, there's like, there's like the riots in London

2010. And you've seen this here where there were a bunch of like strikes by like the organized left and there was like the yellow vests. And then when the suburbs went up in 2023, everyone else stayed home. And if you do that, they're going to, they're going to line you up and they're going to knock you out one at a time. And the only way that you can win is like when one sector of society goes out, even if it's not yours, go with them. Yeah. Don't leave the kids to die alone. Like, go support and go fight with them.

I do have something that's not on my script that I wanted to bring up really quickly, because this just came out today, and I do think it's an important story. This happened back in August, but we didn't know about it until today. So a congressional candidate in Arizona, Bernadette Green Placincia, who is running in Arizona's eighth congressional district and trying to unseesied. incumbent Republican representative Abe Hamida was raped in August while she was repairing a damaged campaign sign in Sun City. This was like a regular thing for her.

Signs would get damaged, you know, either purposefully or just like by the climate and she would go out and fix them in the morning. And one day when she was out doing this in August, at about 2 a.m., she was struck in the head and lost consciousness and regained consciousness to a man sexually assaulting her. She believes he had said something about her being a democratic bitch, although she's not 100% certain about what he was saying. I think this is just kind of an important thing for people to be aware of for obvious reasons. God, that's bleak.

Yeah, it's pretty fucking horrifying. Anyway, this story came out within hours of us recording this, so I don't have much more on it than that. The way that we tend to talk about, like, sexual violence, we tend to talk about it as something that's, like, an individual phenomena and not as a regime of violence that's done to discipline people into falling in line. And this is a really bleak and blatant example of like,

oh, yeah, no, sexual violence also is a social phenomenon that is designed to keep people in line. And fuck that. I mean, it's just worth noting that, like, even in a position of, like, relative cultural power to certainly the average victim, she didn't feel safe coming out about what had happened. for months.

Yeah. So that's pretty worth acknowledging too. Moving along, on October 4th, 2026th, Russian public health regulator

Rospatrin, Ross, sorry, guys, is going to take a second. This is a bad one. It looks rough. I'm not even going to try it.

The Russian public health regulator, their equivalent of the Department of Health, I'm not going to try to say the name. You don't listen to this podcast because of my

pronunciation of foreign language. Right? I'm not even going to try here. Famously our strongest suit. I've never seen a B and an N come together without a vowel right now. It's really softened. Yeah, there's some there's some complicated phonetic shit going on in that word. Norley. Fascinating.

Well, now I have to try to say it. Ros Potrabnaz. Nazor? Rospotribnaz. Yeah. The Russian Department of Health issued a, sorry, it took a lock, time to get to the meat of this. Issued a public statement that one employee of the Anti-Plaug Institute of Siberia and the Far East

had perished due to her accidental exposure to pneumonic plague. This employee, 28-year-old Darya Shepilova, had apparently broken a vial containing plague bacteria and contracted the deadly disease. In short order, 200-some-odd people who had close contact with Darya before her death were isolated and put under observation. multiple hospitals and other facilities in the area were closed and or put under observation. As news of this all trickled out into the wider world,

people began to freak out. I think I first came across this story and like it was pushed to me. I don't even follow this subreddit, but the prepper subreddit like pushed it to me. Because people were freaking out about it so much, right? Yeah, that makes sense.

That makes sense. To be fair, this is not worth being concerned about, right? And I think this panic was an equal mix of PTSD from COVID, and quite frankly, the enduring popularity of Stephen King's best novel, The Stand. I bring up the stand because, I can't lie, I initially got a little worried because the way in which this started is exactly how the world-ending plague and the stand begins. There's like a U.S. scientist at a bioweapons lab who like breaks a vial and it kills everybody and it escapes containment and it wipes out, you know, the whole world, right?

And to be clear, this is the sort of story that should generate some anxiety. It's not unreasonable if you were concerned about this. But on closer inspection, I truly don't believe the specific case is worth freaking out over. For one thing, there's zero evidence that it has spread beyond its initial victim. It sounds scary to hear that hundreds of people have been contained after an accidental fatal plague exposure. But that's what you'd want the Russian government to do, right? You would want them to take this kind of precaution, right? They are, I don't normally say this about the Russian government.

the Russian government, but they seem to be responding responsibly to this. They seem to have an understanding that you have to respond very seriously to this sort of thing. Yeah, and it being the Plague Institute where this happened, does raise the odds of the people dealing with it knowing what to do. Right, right. It's the Plague Institute. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. I do want to note here, so far, 60% of the people who have been detained have already been

tested and been declared free of any sickness, and it seems like the rest are going to be given a good bill of health soon, a spokesperson for Russia's public health entity that I will not try to pronounce and form the New York Times. Laboratory tests have identified two cases of COVID-19 and two cases of rhinovirus infection or the common cold. The regulator said, according to the Interfax News agency, no other infectious disease pathogens were detected in any of the contacts. Sorry, it wasn't directly to the Times was to Interfax. And you do have to imagine that those like four people who had the cold or COVID, we're like freaking the fuck out. Yeah, yeah.

So like, oh my God. Is this the end? Worst days of your life? I don't think sniffles are a sign of the pneumonic plague, but I would imagine you're not thinking super logically in this instance. Yeah. Now, the pneumonic plague is insanely deadly. It has a 71% case fatality rate.

For some idea of how bad that is, the case fatality rate for Ebola is only around 50%, right? And although rates in past outbreaks have varied wildly. There's a lot of factors that can influence that Ebola case fatality rates in different outbreaks have been anywhere from 25 to 90 percent, right? There's different variants of Ebola, right? Just as we don't exactly know what variant of the pneumonic plague this is, right? If I'd actually have a lower or a higher case fatality rate. This may be the only case of someone getting infected with this specific strain of pneumonia plague that we have. I don't know that we really know exactly what she has.

But yeah, this is a scary, deadly plague. But that also makes the case that, like, if it had broken containment, there would be way more sick and dying people by now. And given the overall competence of the Russian state, if this was an out-of-control plague in Siberia, I don't think they'd be able to keep this lockdown very long, right? No. If 71% of people exposed to this were dying, right? Like had contracted it and were dying. I don't think they'd be able to keep this. I'm like we'd be able to keep this thing secret, right?

The other thing I should point out is that scary as that case fatality rate is, that's not the only thing that should make a disease worrying to you, right? That's super worrying if you catch it, but pneumonic plague is not widely transmissible. Think back to COVID. If one person on a bus or a plane or in a room has COVID and sneezes, not back to you, but I mean, COVID's still here. If one person in a room has COVID and sneezes, a bunch of people around them have a very good chance of getting infected, especially if they're not vaccinated, right?

Pneumonic Plague does not work this way. There's a very good CNN interview with biologist Angela Rasmussen, and she points out that this plague variant requires a lot of contact with the infected person, and even someone dying of plague is not coughing up a bunch of infectious material, right? It's just not the same kind of illness in any way, shape, or form. This is why none of the contained people who were close to Daria have gotten sick. Pneumonic Plague victims are not super infectious. That interview with Dr. Rasmussen also brought up a very good point.

This anti-plague lab is being described often as like a bioweapons factory. And the Russian state has surely done weapons research at this and other similar facilities. I'm not going to doubt that. But if absolutely no one anywhere on planet Earth was doing any biorepins research, this facility would still exist because plague is endemic to the region, right? Right. There's not plague in this facility because the Russian government loves cooking up plague. it's because this part of Siberia, tons of animals have the plague,

and people get plague all the time in this part of the world. This is the exact same thing with Wuhan, like the Wuhan CDC there, which is like, yeah, there's a bunch of disease research there because there's a bunch of bats there. This is where you do it. Yeah, you put the lab in the place where stuff is happening so you can study it. And yeah, plague is carried by animals. And by the way, Siberia, this part of Eastern Russia is not the only place where plague is super endemic. The Midwestern U.S. is riddled with plague carrying prairie dogs and occasionally

a person here too. Right, California. I'm not saying that's not the end. Those aren't the only animals that can give you plague. Occasionally a person will catch bubonic plague in this country, which is a variant of the same disease as pneumonic plague, and they'll get it from, you know, some fucking animal. You may recall that the whole U.S. has not been wiped out by an outbreak of the bubotic plague. This is because the bubonic plague is super treatable, but also not super easy to spread in the modern world. This may sound weird given that bubonic plague

wiped out much of Europe, but that was because the primary vectors for plague are wild animals that bite people and flees from infected animals. The OG plague took centuries to get its teeth

into the populace and only succeeded because back then people lived in super close contact with livestock and had no real way of dealing with fleas and we also didn't have like antibiotics, right?

Yeah. You know? There's a ton of reasons why that happened then and it doesn't happen now. Now, not to say a treatment-resistant form of the plague that's more infectious couldn't spread and evolve under these conditions. There's just not any evidence that that's happened yet, right?

And so I would say this is not really something that should be on your front burner of concern. And like in terms of like where a disease like this would come from, then this is something that Angelis like talked about before. Like the odds that this comes from a bio-weapons lab is significantly looking. lower than the odds that it comes from just like a factory farm. Right. Where you have all these animals in really close containment and diseases spread extremely fast and get to mutate extremely quickly.

Like that's, that's like the primary disease factor risk is stuff. Is that and the human contact in the wild. Yeah, that's a great point, Mia. And we should probably move to ads right now. And then when we come back, I will talk about Brazil, which is honestly a little more worrying than the plague right now. An I Heart Radio experience. Carly Pierce, live at the Opera House, October 16th.

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I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead. Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right?

Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies. She did all of these brave things

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So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the south now. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Chelsea Hanler from Dear Chelsea. This season, we've got some awesome guests ready to dole out advice. Guests like Portia Williams. I like the wave of adult onset, lesbianism that has taken a hold. No, she's right.

I have a girlfriend of mine who I think is really becoming attracted to me that I need to nip in the bud. No, please nip it. Nip it, because now that I have people know, I feel like a lot of my friends are giving me an extra eye. Adam Scott. How does that make you feel? Did I look like Tom Cruise? First of all, do you think? Do you think?

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Not me and not anyone I know, but you could call Brazil that. It wouldn't be very accurate, but you could call them that. It's big. Flavio Bolsonaro emerged ahead of the current Brazilian president, Lula. in the first round of voting. Neither candidate emerged with an outright majority, so the election will proceed to a runoff, but most experts seem to consider Flavio's victory all but a foregone conclusion at this point. Political consulting firm think policy told Reuters they estimated Lula would need to win 62% of voters who supported other conservative candidates in the first round of voting

to have a chance. This does not seem likely. If you read a lot of coverage of this election, one thing you'll encounter is that every expert on Brazilian politics is very convinced that Flavio's will be an extension of Jayao Bolsoniaro's presidency. A lot of Brazilian voters are convinced, and in fact, it's probable that most people who voted for Flavio did so because they wanted another term for Jair. Right? Flavio himself said at a recent rally, I asked God for the opportunity to walk up the ramp of Plano Alto Palace next year

alongside President Jairo Messias Bolsonaro, right? It's a pretty clear signposting there. Yeah. Javier is currently serving a 27-year sentence from House arrest, he is legally forbidden from holding office again as a result of his conviction over the coup attempt. Flavio has promised to seek amnesty for not just his father, but for the rioters who marched on Brazil's capital to keep his father in office. He's also promised to impeach the Supreme Court justices who ruled against Jairn and as supporters. This is deeply concerning for a number of reasons.

I want to quote from a New York Times article that came out today on the subject. The Bolsnihara family's comeback mirrors the enduring hold of other powerful political dynacies around the world, including the... the Marques's in the Philippines, the sheriffs in Pakistan, the Fujimori's in Peru, and the Kurchner's in Argentina. But Mr. Lula's political movement has failed to produce a successor and appears to have lost touch with its base, as many Brazilians link it to corruption and government mismanagement. If Mr. Bolsignaro now succeeds in unseating his leftist rival in the October 25th runoff, he would gain unusually broad powers to shape Brazil, that ex-president will be able to appoint

up to four new justices in this nation's Supreme Court, which has 11 seats in total. So one thing that's really worrying about this is that Flavio and, you know, Jair, kind of through the transit of property, will have nearly total power when he takes office for a lot of very frustrating reasons to do with the way Brazil's democracy is structured. There's very little, if anything, in the way of like constitutional governing rails that would limit what Flavio can do. This is an extremely concerning situation. It's very dispiriting. It's a good reason not to listen to, quite frankly, most of, like, the Western left's takes on politics outside of, and sometimes including the United States.

Because if you would listen to what people were saying about Lula prior to this, it's entirely like he's this wonderful, like, leftist hero. And the reality is, you know, Lula's done some great things. He has some great political stances. But you can't look at his regime as anything but a failure if it's led to Bolsonaroism. Yeah. Right. It failed to stop this, you know?

It just as Biden failed, just as Clinton failed, right? Just as Obama failed to stop the rise of Trump, right? We can't pretend that in this case, because we can ignore the downsides and the failures of Lula's regime because we don't live in Brazil, that, like, he didn't fail. He did, you know? and that's just something the left has to grapple with. Like, this is a guy who said and did a lot of the right things and who went pretty hard after prosecuting Bolsonaro, and it was a catastrophic failure.

I don't know what else to say. Yeah, I mean, I think something I've talked about, back in the last election, I did a very long series of episodes on Lula, and one of the sort of structural problems of the program of the Workers Party was always dependent on the commodity boom. and the massive export prices you get from that.

And the moment the commodity boom collapsed, the entire project was on borrowed time because it became impossible to do the kind of like sort of class negotiation of redistributing a bunch of the profits from the commodities that were selling overseas and like raising living conditions for people while paying off Bolivia's sort of like oligarchical ruling class.

And the moment that coalition fell apart, you know, everything went to shit. And the problem is, like, there isn't really a way to deal with Bolsonaro without, like, systemically going through and, like, destroying, like, the media oligarchy and, like, a whole bunch of different sectors of the Brazilian ruling class. But Lulow wasn't, it was a difficult position for them even in the 2000s when they had a really, really strong political mandate. And there wasn't any way to do it, even if they'd wanted to, under the last electoral coalition,

which was this very fragile coalition with a bunch of anti-Bulsanoa conservatives and this weird parliamentary left-center-right coalition that ended up with a bunch of sort of like very shitty, like, neoliberal economic policy going through that just continued to enable sort of Bolsonaroism. And yeah, you have to grapple with like, if you aren't able to fundamentally destroy

like the material basis of your opponents, they're eventually going to overthrow you. and you're going to be back here. Yep. Yep. It's, I don't know, it's disappointing. We'll have more coverage on this in the future because this is really important, right? Just as it's very important to look at what's happening in Hungary right now as like an example of what a post-Trump United States might look like. It's very important to look at Lula's and his coalition's failures in terms of like, well, number one, this also does mirror in, in some ways, mirrors what happened with Biden, but this is also evidence of like, you don't want to take anything to directly, because again,

these are all very different countries and very different from the United States, but there are some lessons here for the entire world and like how hard it is to unseat an authoritarian regime that is entirely predicated on making stupid, easy promises to people, right? as opposed to coalitions that are attempting to do the very difficult job of governing. And that you're always going to be in an uphill battle if the other guy is just spouting fantasies. And if the media goes along with it, that's a huge part of it too. The media aspect is a huge part of this. As much as this is a warning for us going forward, I think this is an example of like,

what if, you know, someone even much more progressive than Joe Biden would take office in 2028? What if we get a sort of like ineffectual social democratic administration? Right. Who might actually do some things that are... Might say the right things and fail. And it might even do things that are kind of sensible. Might actually put forward some good policies. Yeah.

But that just not end up mattering because of whatever kind of structural limitations they hit, whatever kind of media narratives really take hold. You see this kind of really big focus on like fraud and corruption on the right right now. Yeah. That's a big part of what government is supposed to do. And this is something that Zorin is tried to take by the horns and try to like make sure that the right can't fully co-opt that sort of language. Be like if we want to have a socialist or a social democratic government,

it needs to be efficient. And that should be actually real efficiency. I continue to think one of the things that any leftist movement trying to unseat authoritarianism in the United States particularly needs to have as a central issue is fighting fraud and fighting. scams. Yeah. Almost nothing is more important

from an electoral standpoint, in my opinion. Yeah. There's a new poll from KFF looking at issues that voters care about for the midterms. Cost of living is the top issue

for Democratic and independent voters. Yeah. Of course. Of course. While Republican voters want candidates to discuss, quote, fraud. And I think that's a really interesting look at where we are right now

as a country. Yeah. I think tying this back to Brazil, too. Like, this is one of the problems that the PT, the Workers Party had was like, the way that the media was able to steer, like, all anti-corruption stuff in Brazil, like, ended up going after the Workers Party, even though all of the corruption scandals implicated literally everyone across the entire political spectrum. Yeah. Like, this is part of what happened. This election where, like, there's a bunch of fraud scandals with, like, the Supreme Court. But that's been, like, tied to Lula.

And he's the one who's taken the hit from it, even though it also involves, like, all of the. right-wing political parties. And that's like one of the dangers of sort of, I don't know, it's like one of the persistent problems of like the way that fraud and the way the anti-corruption politics get deployed by the right. That's just this like, decades-long issue. Another weird example of this is that the mayor of New York went on to a podcast by a guy named Theo Vaughn, if you're familiar.

Yeah, I know. Theo Vaugh. Christ, yeah. And one interesting thing that that, that, that, happened is Zoran was talking about how the city just secured a historic $130 million settlement from Doordash. And 115 million of that is going to go directly to Doordash workers who Doordash was underpaying for years, with workers receiving anywhere between 500 to thousands of dollars in pay that was stolen from them. Yeah. But part of this settlement is also $16 million in civil

penalties and funding to build this tool, which will be operated by the city and workers, to monitor DoorDash to make sure that they don't rip off their workers going forward. And it's something that was very interesting. When Theo heard that, he's like, why? Why would you use that money? Why not just give that money to the workers? You know, he kind of inquired about this as a possible example of fraud. Like, why is the city taking, you know, $16 million?

Like, is it actually going to be, you know, good? or is that another example of fraud and corruption? And I think that's a really interesting look at like the mind of the kind of right-wing, you know, focus on fraud. I was like, no, that money is actually going to build a tool to make sure that Dornash cannot defraud its own workers. Yeah. Going forward and it'll be operated by the city and workers themselves. But it's a really interesting look at like this sort of like distrust.

And even in something like a, you know, a $130 million settlement. which is, you know, history, that's the largest worker, like, labor settlement in municipal history. That's massive, yeah. Even in that, there's this kind of, like, you know, like a worry in the mind of the right that somehow this will be used for, you know, fraudulent means. Yeah. I do want to reiterate here, like, when I say that, like, Lula failed, that's not even coming from a point of necessarily, like, moral condemnation.

It's just like, we lost. We have to be factual. It didn't work. We have to look at what went wrong here. You can't just pretend that this. this was a good presidency because he said the right things and went after Bolsonaro, we lost, right? We have to deal with that.

We have to play the ball where it fucking lies, right? Anyway, let's talk about Dennis Hastert, huh? Famous paedophile. Oh, Denny? Dinny was his nickname. Unfortunately, too many people still do love Denny. Jesus Christ. Yeah, yeah, a lot of people sharing our profession

have some serious fucking issues. Multiple articles that I have read today, all pointed out that he went by the nickname Denny and was considered a very cool and approachable Republican Speaker of the House. Yeah, it was real approachable. He was approaching some fucking other people. I'm saying this because Dennis Hastert,

the longest serving Republican Speaker of the House and a serial pedophile died earlier this week on October 5th. Hastert's legacy, such as it was, was ruined after he left office when regulators noticed a bunch of really weirdly structured payments that he initially characterized as blackmail payments based on false allegations. Oh, some guy made me, you know, is blackmailing me and it's all bullshit, but it's just easier to pay.

This was a lie. The payments were to a man who as a boy had been molested and I think raped by Dennis. This was during his time as a high school wrestling coach. This guy was 14 when Hastert abused him. And when he approached the former Speaker of the House decades later, Hastert agreed to who buy his silence with three and a half million dollars in hush money. This is not an amount you would spend on like bullshit blackmail allegations, right? This is a fortune.

Yeah, that's a lot of money. The financial crimes are the only ones Hastert was actually convicted over. His abuse of his students had occurred too long ago. The statute of limitations was up. But the resulting investigation in court case revealed at least four victims. And I don't know that I know of any convicted pedophiles who had four. four victims and only four victims, right? Yeah, once you're doing it a lot.

Four came forward. This is a guy who was abusing kids in his years-long time as a wrestling coach. He had other victims. The judge in that case declared him a serial child molester. Now, the kind of abuse he engaged in varied, sort of the most common thing that he did was he had a recliner that he set up outside of the boy's locker room. What?

So. Jesus. He also engaged in fondling and outright rape on at least one occasion in the form of forced oral sex. Make no mistake, Dennis Hastert was a serial child rapist and molester. During his court case, he stated that I want to apologize to the boys I mistreated when I was their coach, and the sisters of one of the victims said to him, Don't be a coward, Mr. Hastert. Tell the truth.

What you did wasn't misconduct. It was sexual abuse of a minor. Now, that was solid speaking out in court on her part. A lot of journalists and media figures could stand to take a lesson from that. The AP's obituary for him just read Dennis Hastert, longtime Republican House speaker who went to prison, dies at age 84. Oh, my God. Went to prison.

Went to prison. Yeah, like he went on a visit to check it out. Like, hmm, why? Yeah, what could have happened there? Now, Foxes... main article on him did note, although I think this may have been, I'm not sure if this was like something they added after the fact, but it did call him like a child molester. However, and I'm going to quote here from an article in Yahoo News, Fox News gave former Republican House Speaker

Dennis Hastert an in-memorium send-off Monday, memorializing a man whom a federal judge called a serial child molester while relegating a sexual abuse of teenage boys to a brief reference to allegations that had tainted his reputation. As we go to break, Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert has died, Bayer said, as archival footage played beneath a banner reading. In memoriam, former House Speaker Dennis Hastert dies at 84. Bayer then highlighted Haster's political resume, noting that the Illinois Republicans served as Speaker from 1999 to 2007, was the longest serving Republican House Speaker in American history. Then came an extraordinarily sanitized depiction of why Hastert became one of the most disgraced political figures in modern American history.

His reputation was later tainted by allegations he and molested athletes during his career as a teacher and wrestling coach, Bear said. He spent more than a year in prison. Allegations? A judge called him a serial child molester. You don't have to say allegations anymore, Brett. You can just say he fucked kids. You're legally in the clear here. You're not going to get sued to just being a coward. Point to the judge. Like, who's going to sue you, Dennis Hastert's people? Yeah. Like, do they really want that discovery? Like, yeah. Okay, man. Go for it. Anyway, that's all I got. Last Tuesday, in a short and unsigned order,

the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to continue sending people to countries that are not their own. It's a protest. It's often referred to as third country deportation. It's hard not to see this as just rendition, right? Like, you're sending people to places where they have no ties, often to be tortured. The court will hear oral arguments about this in December,

but for now this practice can continue. This is manifesting in New York, for example, in the removal of people who have a status called withholding of removal. According to reporting in the city reporter and documented people with this status, which there's a very high burden of proof for this, right? Like it's a higher burden of proof than just saying it wrote, they have to, these people have to prove that they will be in danger if they are returned. They're being called into federal buildings for a quote, ICE check-in. They sent these like very brief letters. like document update or like some pretext for bringing them into buildings where they're then detained and sent to third countries.

Yeah. The Trump administration has been doing this more and more, right? It is trying to find loopholes in the law, which is very clearly designed to protect very vulnerable people and prevent a risk of what is called chain refoulement. Chain refoulement, if you're not familiar, is a process whereby someone is sent back to their country where they have proven they're not safe by route of a third country. So let's say I'm trying to send Garifton to Canada, but I send them to France and then France sends up to Canada, right? People deported to third countries have faced torture, harassment, extortion, and worse. The Trump

administration has managed to cajole nearly two dozen countries into accepting people this way. Previously, this practice was extremely rare. Obviously, reddishin, which did not really an immigration procedure when it is carried out as rendition has happened before. There was also a practice of returning people to Mexico who had crossed the southern border. Biden did that. Trump won did that, right? But those people weren't being removed when they had withholding of removal. They were being removed under Title 42, which is, again, legally distinct. In several cases, there has been an effort by the states involved to cast doubt about who is legally responsible for people removed this way. So in the United States case. It claimed that people moved to Secold, if you remember that.

Scandal, I guess, had travesty. The U.S. claimed that they were the responsibility of the Salvadoran government. The U.S.N. went on to broker a deal with Venezuela, in which it returned them to Venezuela. Panama has claimed that people who are non-Panamanian there were in the custody of the U.N., but the U.N. said that they were in the responsibility of the Panamanian government. The government clearly uses this practice, I guess, as a punishment. We can see it in the case of Kilma, Abrago-Garthia, who was offered a chance to be deported to Costa Rica if he played guilty and threatened with Uganda if he did not.

And you hear this a lot from people. Migrants who have signed quote-unquote self-deportation paperwork, perhaps saying, oh, I didn't want to get sent. Generally, the way they waive this is we'll send you to Africa. A large portions of the United States population still believe that Africa is a country, not a continent. This is an ongoing issue, but for migrants who have never been anywhere in Africa, That is extremely scary, right?

A continent where you know no one where people's human rights are abused. Yeah. Well, and honestly, like, as you noted, James, we're probably, for most people, your only knowledge of the continent is like war and disease. Yes, through this dark continent, trope, right? Yes, people's understanding of Africa is extremely problematic, but it's understandable. The people are very afraid. But that influences why this is such a scary thing. Yes, absolutely.

So let's take the example of. of more than a dozen people who have been sent to Eswartini. They were held in a maximum security prison without meaningful access to counsel. For nine months, the government there prevented them from meeting a local attorney and denied them unmonitored calls to attorneys in the United States. The government of Eswotini has repeatedly said that they want to participate in chain refoulement, saying the goal of the procedure was, quote, facilitating their eventual repatriation. This is happening all over the world.

like right out in the open. It's a very clear attempt to evade the protections that these people have. Evidently, international law is not a real thing for powerful countries and that's what we're seeing here. All of this comes as ISIS once again surging arrests. They were in San Diego. I saw ICE. S.R.T. We're in San Diego today. There's been a sharp increase reported in Los Angeles. These call-ins are happening more and more in New York. Like I think we can probably expect to see them doing liberal cities before the midterms. They're all over Chicago right now too. Yeah.

They're really going after it at this time. And I think that's because it's red meat to their base, right? They want to kind of own the lib, especially in New York when Mamm Darni has had success, right? And they don't like that. It is also going to result in people who have every right to go to the polls and vote being afraid to do so. Yeah. And that is not a coincidence.

This is all part of a coordinated strategy going into next month. Yeah, that's what we talked about a little bit last week with this new save verification system. Yeah. And part of the system is so that people who are eligible to vote might be too scared to even register to vote if the system flags you as a non-citizen and then puts you into contact with ICE. And even if you are, you know, legally here, maybe you're living with someone who isn't. And it could just scare people out of exercising their right to vote. Yeah, maybe you just don't think it's worth all that stress, right? You don't want those people around your neighborhood.

Like, all of those are very real concerns, especially if you feel like your vote, you know, doesn't matter or whatever. Like, yeah, it's all part of voter suppression. It's a really, a really kind of an insidious tactic of voter suppression. Yeah. Obviously, the Trump administration wants this few people to vote in these midterms as possible. and certainly going forward. Speaking of voting, it could happen here as well as two other Cool Zone media shows

behind the bastards and weird little guys are nominated for a Signal Award, which is not related to the encrypted messaging app. As cool as that would be as cool as that would be if they had a podcast award for some reason. As opposed to an award for the people who have said the most things on Signal

that they would not have wanted to say on any other app, which is I think we might also be in contention for a victory. Rewards for most bonkers group chat would also be... Yeah, oh my God. If you would like to vote for us for the Signal Awards, voting is open until October 15th. This is good prep if you intend to vote for the midterms. I know voting is scary.

Not everyone believes in it, but if you could at least vote in the Signal Awards, that would be appreciated. This is not electoralism, folks. This is not going to give us any power. It will give some of us small statues. I don't know. I think it is harm reduction to beat Prof G market.

Yeah, can I just say one of these people repudence, fuck me. Yeah, yeah, we got to beat G markets. Prof G markets? The fuck is G markets. My God. Yeah, yeah, Prof G. It's an economist who talks every fucking day about capital markets. I cannot imagine what that does to the human soul.

Why? Nightmare. I mean, I guess not why, but yeah. We are polling at 41%. We are a few points ahead, but it's still fluctuated. So if you would like to be a big part... Yeah, if you're in line, stay in line. Stay in line.

If you want to be a big part of helping beat profigy markets, follow the link... And some other shit there. And some others. Housing Wire Daily, polling at 1% L.O.L. Yeah. Owned. Look, you can't stop Flavio Bolsonaro from winning in Brazil, but we can stop him from winning a Signal Award. And of course, by that I mean Prof G would clearly hand his Signal Award over to the Bolsonaros.

We all know that. A vote for Profji is a vote for Jair Bolsonaro to win the Signal Awards. When I discovered this was happening, I did go on the Profi markets YouTube. And they were discussing what Bolsonaro would mean for the markets. Well, there you go. There you go. Let's not look any further into that, James. He's fries.

I have a high threshold for stress, but I wasn't able to watch that. I've seen too much. But what will the markets think? What will the markets think? They'll think vote for CoolZone. Yeah. If you would like to help us beat ProvG, follow the link in the show notes.

Does G stand for Jair? No, because that's spelled with a J. But it might. Theoretically, it might, you know. Vote for us just in case. Yeah. If you want to email us, it's Coolzone tips at Proton.com.

Unless you're a marketing person and go fuck yourself. We reported the news. We reported the news. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Coolzone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can now find sources where it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast. Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement agency. It does not have body cameras. It's real. Black farmers have been.

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