It Could Happen Here - How To Buy A Supreme Court

Episode Date: July 17, 2023

Mia and Garrison talk about how a Nazi paraphernalia collecting billionaire bought off the Court and how there's nothing to stop them.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Chris Christodes, Ipsis Christodes. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where the only person who actually took Latin in high school isn't here leaving me to do this Latin bit. I'm your host, Mia Wong, and with me is Garrison. Hello. Hello. I'm not going to try to speak Latin because if I did, it'd be some like weird, like esoteric incantation and then it would open up a whole other can of worms. be some like weird like esoteric incantation and then it would open up a whole other can of worms so you know this is this is this is the most the most well-known latin that's probably not the most well-known latin there's probably some bullshit from like latin mass or something but one of the more well-known latins which is who watches the watchman roughly it's not the popular translation is who watches the watchman and by that i mean

we are asking the question i who ensures that the american supreme court does not just sort of collapse into a ball of pure corruption and the answer was nobody so true i always trust in the supreme court yeah it's great i learned. I learned that we pay these people $285,000 a year. Like, we pay them $285,000 to, like, take our rights away. This is just insane. Why? Why do we do this? Well, I mean, there's a very clear reason why we do this, actually, that maintains the semblance of order and civility. Yes. However, comma.

In a deeply fractured country. However, comma, this is coming apart because these stupid assholes can't even maintain the veneer of not being like the most corrupt people in the history of mankind. coming off of like two i mean not a there wasn't really a potential for this this this session of the court to be as bad as like last year's one where they killed roe but they killed affirmative action and they also did this really really i just sort of really weird ruling on queer stuff and the business's right to discriminate and choose the business's right to choose how to use their creative expression which has resulted in a bunch of really funny things i saw this morning actually there's this hair salon who was refusing to serve lgbtq clients yeah which now all of like all of like the suppliers for the hair salon are no longer sending orders to the hair salon because they're also allowed to discriminate from this hair salon

because of the same ruling. So it's creating all these really complicated, like a supply chain things with businesses choosing to be really homophobic and queer phobic. And then the type of like a supplier is just not, then just not giving these businesses the supplies they need to operate their business, which is pretty funny. It's really amazing to you. So the other thing about this is like,

this is the actual ruling where like any pretense that this is like a functional court was just sort of thrown out the window because, okay. So one of the, one of the, like the fundamental principles of, and this is one of the principles of the common law legal system right of of the legal system that not only the u.s is based off of but like you know i

mean like literally we're talking like like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years of history that predate the american system arguably can trace us back to the roman system one of the things that's fundamentally based on is that you cannot try a case on a hypothetical something has something has to actually happen for you to have a case and this case has just thrown that shit out the window so what this case was is there's this woman who supposedly is a wedding uh wedding website designer and we'll get back to that in a second because, oh boy, just straight up lied to the court and claimed that a guy had requested her

make a wedding website for a gay wedding. And this never happens, right? This did not happen. The journalist tracked down the guy who she said had requested a website, and that guy is A, straight, B, had already been married, and that guy is A, straight, B, had already been married, and C, is a web designer?

The whole story was just a fake example. I think that's the part of the story that I think got the most press, but the part of the story that I think is funnier is that she's not actually a wedding website designer. This entire case case she set up this entire site what appears to have happened she's not wedding website designer now right what appears to have happened is that she and like a sort of like one of the one of the sort

of like right-wing like legal networks got together and cobbled together this business like specifically so they could get this ruling so which which seems like that should be a like illegal let's see this this sounds like it's all of this illegal it sounds like legal fraud or something on trial for perjury right now her lawyers should also be like her lawyers and her lied under oath multiple times to multiple different courts like Yes, but that's obviously never going to happen because we don't live in that. What we're seeing here, right, is the sort of like thin legal veneer that has always been sort of over

the Supreme Court that's supposed to make it seem legitimate is just sort of like unraveling. And at the same time, so if you think that makes the Supreme Court look illegititimate wait till we get to the corruption uh this is the real reason we're doing this episode because oh my god jesus christ

this is i oh god i you know i didn't think i really learned from this is i didn't understand how rich supreme court justices are. Like, Clarence Thomas and in all of the pieces about Clarence Thomas, right, it starts with like he is like the poorest of the Supreme Court justices and his family makes $800,000 a year.

That seems like a lot of money. I was like, what are you even talking about? Like, so in terms of the the the sort of corruption stuff that's been happening there's been a bunch of uh there's a bunch of research done by propublica into a bunch of just like incredibly shady and corrupt things that a bunch of supreme court justices are doing so we're gonna start with bastards pod alum clarence thomas so one of thomas's close friends

is this real estate mogul named harlan crow and he harlan crow sucks ass he harlan crow sounds like what you would name like some like weird like rich villain in like a pulpy 70s like mystery novel i i don't did you see when what like when people figured out who this guy was and it went around on twitter no oh i'm so excited for you okay this is this is gonna be great so okay so so harley crowe is he's one of the country's largest landlords he has like a he's a portfolio of 29 billion dollars of assets he he owns properties like all over the u.s he also okay so he has a giant mansion right and in his giant mansion is a bunch of nazi memorabilia including an autographed copy of mine this this guy yes okay now now that now that you mentioned the nazi memorabilia i now

he has the things that like stereotypically you would assume that like a, like a Nazi paraphernalia guy has, right? Like he has like, he has that signed out autograph copy of my comp. He has like a bunch of pictures that were drawn by a bunch of like actual paintings that were drawn by Hitler. Um,

but he also has weird shit, like something I've never seen before. Like he has like this, these sets of like napkins that just have swastikas on them because they were like official nazi napkins i feel like we probably shouldn't like we can even keep one copy of these and like the holocaust museum and the rest of this stuff should be like burned right like we shouldn't yeah we shouldn't really have to this tough line around you know like okay so i'm gonna circle back to this in a second.

I think there's another piece of context that we need to sort of get here. He also has this thing called the, he has, he has this thing he calls the Garden of Evil, which is this like garden of statues of dictators. The Garden of Evil. He calls it the Garden of Evil.

Yes. And it's a, it's a statue garden behind his house that has like a bunch of a bunch of statues of dictators. They're almost all communists. He really hates Tito for some reason. I don't know why. Well, I mean, he's a billionaire, obviously.

This is why he hates Tito. But the funny thing is, it's almost entirely communist. There's no Mussolini or anything. It's all communist. There's no Mussolini? What? No! No! There's a host named Mubarakarak and then there's one of uh what's that

guy's name i can't remember his name uh princeps the the the guy who shot archduch ferdinand which is weird because that guy was not he wasn't he wasn't evil no well i i that's i i will not i refuse to take a position on that. That's not my position. My position, like... But he's not a dictator. Oh, yeah. On the level of evil on a dictator level, he's not...

He's no Mao. He's no Hitler. Like, come on. He also... Again, he is not a dictator. He was just some fucking random guy. Like, the guy who killed our streak for a day like i okay baffling stuff but but okay the important thing about this well okay first of all who would

be your first five statues in your own garden of evil oh the garden oh okay um this is this is gonna be very biased because i i i'm i'm ranking this by people i have personal grudges against okay well so if you're doing personal grudges that changes the rest of your air to one uh cc uh uh what the fuck is his name uh paul volker who else do i have who else do i have a personal grudge against who's a dictator? Mohammed bin Salman, because he bought my fucking StarCraft League. What the fuck are you talking about? We'll do an episode on that one day.

I'll put, okay, we'll put Mao at number five. Fair, fair, okay. Now, okay, so the reason I bring up the the the the the garden of evil right is that okay so he has like a thing where he puts all the stuff from the evil dictators but then all of the nazi stuff is just like randomly strewn about his house yeah like his living quarters yeah like like they'll just they'll just be paintings by like actually he has like bush paintings too so he'll have paintings it'll be like bush they'll be like like a renoir and then they'll just be a hitler painting and it's like he's this guy you know all of his friends would be because this guy has like a bunch of like right we because he's one of the guys i'm sure his

friends are normal well-adjusted people all of his friends would be like this man is not a nazi and i'm like i i he hasn't he hasn't i don't know man like there are not many non-nazi reasons why you would have like multiple of hitler's paintings hanging on your wall and also the signed autographed copy of i just want to remind myself that there's evil in the world you know okay okay this gets me pissed off. So, my... My... One of my grandpas took a Nazi sword off a dead officer and, like, brought it home from the war.

And we, like, still have it, because what the fuck are you supposed to do with that, right? So, like, that's, like, we have one of those, right? But, like, we didn't take an autographed copy of Mein Kampf. We fucking killed a Nazi officer and took it from him. Like like if you're gonna do this you have to do it correctly yeah i don't know but this guy this guy okay oh also he gets really he's like unfathomably mad that people wear che guevara shirts. Like, he's so mad.

Me too. Whenever I see a Che Guevara shirt, I'm usually not the most pleased. I'm almost circling back around on it just because it makes this guy so mad. Like, this guy in particular, his life needs to be worse. Most of the Che Guevara shirts I've seen

are sold by disgraced right-wing commentator Steven Crowder. Oh, God. What the? No, we've truly entered hell world now. Okay, so why am I talking about Harlan Crowe? Partially because he's really funny. Doesn't he give a lot of money to certain people?

So, okay. Yeah, so he's one of the people who runs a really, really extensive network of sort of, like, this, like, right-wing, like, think tank dark money network that, you know, buys judges, like, pays for people's legal careers. And he's also very close friends with Clarence Thomas. And he's also very close friends with Clarence Thomas. And so I'm going to just run through all of the shit that is like, it's just like incredible corruption that he's doing. So, okay. So I'm going to start with like, this is like, this is like the level one corruption, which is,

so Crowe bought Clarence Thomas's mom's house and then did quote, tens of thousands of dollars of improvements to the home. And he seems to have bought the house for significantly above market rate. And so this is a... I'm going to... We're going to do a corruption anatomy here because this is a classic Chicago corruption scam.

So there's like six revenue streams in this, right? You have the money from the sale, which goes to like, you know, that's like, that's your level one bribe, right? Is you're selling, you know, you're selling your house to someone at above market value. The level two bribe is you're now throwing in the renovations because his mom's still living in

this house right oh so this is like it's like actual bribery huh oh yeah yeah this is and again this is like the mild stuff um so that level level two is you get the you you know you okay so you now now you have the contractors and the contractors allow you to throw in more money into the bribe because you're not you're not doing all this renovation work like for free um the level three of the bribes is that okay so now now once you once you have a renovation contract you now have a contract that pays out money and you can use that to like reward your political allies and so this is a this is this is a classic like absolutely classic like chicago uh like payoff scheme um now the other thing that's so so harlan was contacted about this and she claims that he's buying this house because he wants to preserve it for posterity because clarence thomas lived there like she is very weird he did give a hundred thousand dollars to harvard to buy a portrait

of like to get them to hang up a portrait of clarence thomas so you know he is a deeply weird guy but this uh this reeks of uh of oh boy now yes yes like propublica points out also that they they bought two random vacant lots in the area from thomas for like unclear reasons and you now you can also you can also ask why does the supreme court justice like own a bunch of random vacant lots and the answer to this question is that uh these people are part of the real bourgeoisie they are like they they they are like as alien to us real estate scamming right this is like yeah like basically yeah like they're they're they're they're they're doing stuff like they do stuff with their money that like makes them like like they they are like as dissimilar to us as like

we are from like a fucking neanderthal like these people like the way they are like as dissimilar to us as like we are from like a fucking neanderthal like these people like the way they think about money the way they like just like the way they act in the world the way they relate to other people like the fact that they're just buying random fucking lots like across the street from their parents house like why who knows and and okay so the thing that's very important about this right is if you you know okay

everyone in the government right from like starting from every court that is below the supreme court down to like a fucking astronomer who works for a national lab if you receive a like a large gift over $500 you have to report it to the government and like a large gift over 500 you have to report

it to the government and there's like an ethics process you have to go through and this the standard and again this is the standard that holds from like like the fucking president of the united states down to again like a random astronomer they are not allowed to have to do anything that has quote even the appearance of impropriety now do you want it do you want to know uh who these standards don't apply to the just the supreme court yep does not apply to them they have there's only one thing they have to do right and again this is amazing like so again everyone else has actual enforceable ethics standards the supreme court has you have to report it.

It doesn't have to go to an access commission. You just have to report it. And I'll give you three guesses as to how much of any of the shit that I just talked about that Clarence Thomas reported. Probably none of it. Nope. Absolutely none. Zero. Zero of it.

Like over a hundred thousand, probably like $ Zero, zero of it. Like over a hundred thousand, like probably like $150,000 of bullshit. No reporting at all. I'm sure the cops are going to go arrest him for all these crimes, right? Yeah, yeah. Any day now. Uh-huh. The FBI is going to be busting down his door

now that we've cracked this one wide open. Hey, okay, okay. Do you know who else is, i am not joking legitimately is bound by significantly stricter uh i i i ethic ethics regulations than the supreme court it's me plugging these products and services the fcc advertising guidelines that we have to follow i am a podcaster and i have stronger guidelines of the supreme every few months we have to take like a like a 10 minute training that just

basically just plugs into our brains and it downloads all of these terms and conditions that we then just robotically need to enforce.

So yeah. Do you know who else commits fraud? We are legally not allowed to say that. These products and services. Welcome.

I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. killing brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. ground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone

from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts.

Check out betteroffline.com. game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German,

where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. crime crime is just legal now like this is this is what i'm getting out of this report stuff so all right all right i i started with this housing scam because a it's like okay this is this is like this is like a classic level scam b this because this is like absolute brush league shit compared to like everything else that's about to happen here are you telling me this is this is this is gonna get worse oh okay so all right i i'm just gonna i'm just gonna start reading this from pro publico because i i don't i i cannot think of a funnier way to just do this in late june 2019 right after the u.s supreme court released its final opinion of the term justice clarence thomas

boarded a large private jet headed headed to indonesia he and his wife were going on a vacation, nine days of island hopping in a volcanic archipelago on a super yacht staffed by a coterie of attendants and a private chef. If Thomas had chartered the plane in the 162-foot yacht himself, the total cost of the trip could have exceeded $500,000. Fortunately for him, that wasn't necessary. He was on vacation with real estate mogul and Republican mega-donor Harlan Clough, who owned the jet and the yacht, too. Ah, I see.

This just sounds like a friendly vacation, right? I need to read another, really just genuinely, one of the most brutal polls I've ever seen anyone do is later on this Republic article. Quote, in Thomas's public appearances over the years, he has presented himself as an everyman with modest tastes. I don't have a problem with going to Europe, but I prefer the United States and I prefer seeing the regular parts of the United States. Thomas said in a recent interview for a documentary about his life, which Crow helped

finance. I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There's something normal about it to me. Doubt, doubt. You know, I don't think he's going to be getting a charter to yachts to all the Walmart parking lots. Honestly, I don't think he's going to be getting a chartered yacht to all the Walmart parking lots, honestly. I don't really see that one happening. $500,000. And the thing about this, it seems like he does something like this every fucking year. Oh, that does sound nice, doesn't it? Like, because again, like...

I wish I could take Supreme Court justice out to the open waters of the sea about once a year. You know? Wouldn't that be fun for everybody involved? Well, I mean, here's the thing. We're going to have to pool our money to rent the submarine. That's true. That's true.

But we, look, we will persevere. We will achieve submarine. There's no laws on the ocean. International waters, baby. It is legal as, as, as, as, as, as, as our regrettably off doing actual journalism. Colleague James constantly reminds us it is legal for him to fight the seal in international waters. Just as legal as me disparaging all of our advertisers

so alright you know okay so like obviously what is happening like Harlan Crow like this is a level of like bribery where it's like I the wheels kind of fall off of the word bribery, because like, how do you even.

I don't know, I don't even I don't have a way to adequately describe what this is. What I'm going to do instead is to remind everyone that Thomas was one of the justices who decided Citizens United, the 2010 case that made it legal to bribe politicians through campaign donations and allowed corporations to directly involve themselves in legal campaigns, leading, like, directly to the hellhole we now all live in. Now, once again, Thomas was required to report this as a gift to the government, and he simply did not. And, you know, this is one of those things where, okay, so like if a normal person does this, right, in the government, you would take them to court. But we've now returned to our problem of who watches the watchers because it's the Supreme Court, right?

They've established themselves as a dictatorial ruling council based on a power grab. establish themselves as a dictatorial ruling council based on a power grab and you know i i i'm gonna i'm gonna do my my the supreme court rant i do every time but the supreme court does not have the power of judicial review they do not have the power to strike down laws they don't have it they fucking invented it out of whole cloth in 1802 it doesn't exist it's not real it's never been real you can just fucking ignore them but in the meantime while everyone believes that it's real they get to do this bullshit and you know so yeah so that that indonesia trip is like the big one that we know of uh he took another one to like moscow um at another point the the other thing that that he seems to have been doing a lot is basically like he like just uses Harlan Crowe's private jet as like his own jet

um ProPublica calculated that like one just like one flight that he took in 2016 would have cost $70,000 which is more than I make in a fucking year yeah why did that cost so much

it's really expensive to lease that specific kind of private jet. Oh, yeah, okay. If it's for a whole private jet, that makes sense. Yeah. I simply wouldn't lease a whole private jet, but I'm just built different. Clarence Thomas is built even more different because instead of leasing it, he just has a friend who has the jet, who just lets him take this.

Like, like one of the things Republican was doing is they were just tracking the jet and they, they, they, they, they could match the jet showing up to the airport where Clarence Thomas was going to be.

And then, and the jet would mysteriously then appear in a location where Clarence Thomas appeared. It was like, Hmm. And, and this is something we should specifically know so okay the

reason the Supreme Court has to do any of this at all is that the Supreme is that like someone finally had a good idea right after Watergate that was like we should actually make everyone in the government disclose their gifts and this and this law actually like included the Supreme Court although I feel

like it won't in like two years when they strike that law down or some shit. for like a like many like at least like at least seven years that we know of and has never reported it so let's let's surely i'm sure the fbi is gonna be busting down his doors any day now oh yeah and again like let's you let's you think we've reached the end of the clarence thomas corruption uh crow also like okay so you know how clarence Thomas corruption, uh, crow also like, okay. So, you know how Clarence Thomas's wife is like a QAnon person. Yeah. Tried to overthrow the government.

Yes. So she has like a, she has like a, like a, it's like a basically bullshit, like political lobbying group, but it's like, so it's a lobbying group,

but like the actual thing that it does is reverse lobbying which is you can go to the lobbying group and and use it for like to get access to uh clarence thomas and uh that group uh funded uh god i didn't write down the number amount but like that group got like two hundred thousand dollars that again his wife works for got like $200,000 that again, his wife works for, got like $200,000 from Crow. There was another story that- Which just, now I'm no lawyer. These are not actual, these claims have no basis. This is just an uneducated opinion.

But to me, if I saw this in a movie, I would call this money laundering. Oh yeah. Oh God. Okay. this in a movie i would call this money laundering oh yeah oh god okay so let me just let me just go to the next one because there's fucking more there's more there's like so all right clarence thomas has like a grandnephew that he like adopted as his son basically like he like went to the family of this kid it was like i can give this kid everything in the world so you should like give him to me i'm sure this is all above board i i don't know this is uh what about this man has proved to you that he's untrustworthy what do you mean i okay to be fair Clarence Thomas makes the argument that like he

did this because like he was abandoned by his father as a kid and was raised by his grandfather so he was like okay I'm gonna raise this kid like I'm gonna steal his life his parents seem to have agreed I don't know I you you you could you can read into that the level of sketchiness that you want to the part that I'm gonna I want to talk about is that this kid okay so a thing a thing that i didn't understand until i got to like college is that like okay so like i knew intellectually that private schools existed i did not understand that private schools there are like like there's like because i was used to like like christian private schools right yeah yeah um i i did not like i didn't like get how rich people could be and i didn't understand that that they were like i i like walk in there and there's like nine kids who all speak latin and

every single one of them went to a private school that was like 50, at least 50, like somewhere between 50 and a hundred thousand dollars a quarter. Yeah. I was like, what the fuck? What the shit? So Clarence Thomas, uh, isn't so his,

the, the schools he's going to aren't quite that expensive, but, uh, they, the, the, the,

the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

the, the, the ones he sends this, this kid to, uh uh so for two years the the estimate is that it was 150 000 per per year uh that was for two years so 75 000 a year which again more than i make in a year that's reasonable that's fine that's fine that is more that is more than like that is more that is more than like that is more expensive than my fucking college that is more

expensive like I like that it is it is a ludicrous amount of money and and uh get guess who paid that uh I'm guessing Harlan Crowe yeah just wild I don't know I'm just gonna pick like a random name off the top of my head probably this one this one hitler's number one fan harlan crowe it's so amazing

because like again all of these people have this like every single like conservative like every conservative journalist like every conservative journalist like every conservative judge and every conservative politician are all they all have one of these guys yeah well it's this guy this is the guy and so and every so like everything like the coke brothers fund a whole bunch of like content creators like but yeah every almost every big like right-wing dude has one of these guys which is totally unfair because the entire leftwing dude has one of these guys, which is totally unfair, because the entire left has to share one of these guys. We only get one,

and he has to fund everything on the left. Meanwhile, the right has a dime a dozen of these fucking billionaires. You know, legitimately, this was actually legitimately the thing that caused Soros to get into politics, because he looked at us and he was like, what the fuck is going on like this is insane like what

why what what do you mean like the American Enterprise Institute just like creates Supreme Court justice it's like what and you know but like so but the funniest part about this is again whenever any of these pieces come out like every single conservative like pundits like in unison and like like all of their fucking newspapers all of their magazines they're all funded by these people so they all like publish like identical things going like how dare you criticize like the noble friendship of harley of this billionaire and the supreme court justice who are just pals they're just extending hospitality like you would to any other friend by taking them on a half a

million dollar uh cruise around on your yacht it's it's it's like incredible stuff um all right we should do we should we should do one more ads because you know who's these are advertisements that we are being paid to promote these are not our personal opinions these are these are ads there I followed the FCC guidelines here's the fucking ads welcome

I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible.

Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better.

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i kind of emphasize this enough this is something that was like when these stories first started coming out the way it was framed was like like clarence thomas is like a uniquely corrupt supreme court justice and then people did literally any digging and it turns out that clarence thomas is not a uniquely corrupt Supreme Court like all of the like Supreme Court legal justice like experts were like this is like a unique situation the history of the court and then like like literally two months later

so Samuel Alito who is another Supreme Court justice I in this is in this in 2007 appears on a $200,000 fishing trip in Alaska with billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer, who is...

Singer is like one of the most... As much as I don't like Harlan Crowe, Singer is like one of the most evil people who's ever lived. Do you know who Singer is? No, but I'm sure this opinion is the same opinion as all of our advertisers. Probably our advertisers probably don't like him. It would not surprise me.

So Singer is just like incredibly, unbelievably, relentlessly aggressive hedge fund guy. And his thing is he goes into companies and makes embarrassing like slideshows about their CEOs and then like deposes them and then takes them over and then strips them for assets and sells them all so that's like the one that's like one thing that he does the other thing that he's kind of cool well yeah I mean it sucks because like every single person who had worked at lose

their job but this is that's the less bad thing that he does right like like and this is why I'm talking like this is like legitimately one of the worst people in the world like for like any no like mitt romney right like that was the worst shit that he ever did was was like just destroying a bunch of people's lives by like annihilating these companies for singer that's like that's like the fuck that's the bullshit stuff like that that's like that's the fucking brush league shit um singer's actual game is so one of the things that happens over the course of the 70s and 80s is you get a bunch of uh i've talked about this at length my new labels and episodes

but you get a bunch of these economies that basically like across the global south that just implode and they implode because there's this combination of like commodity prices drop and then they have all these adjustable rate like loans that they've taken out and when paul volcker hot like hikes interest rates all of these like loans suddenly have like 20 interest and so you have all these economies all over the world that just fucking are imploding because they suddenly have this like unbelievable debt they can't pay off and so over the course of the 90s this kind of like anti-imf revolt starts and i am the international monetary fund they're the people who you're borrowing money from who also destroy your economy to like you know like pay the imf back the money by the time you get into like the 2000s it's gotten less bad well i guess bad again 2008 but there had been this process of

debt restructuring where these countries were allowed to like only pay like a small percentage of the debt because they just literally couldn't pay it because their economies have been destroyed or and this is another very common thing uh you you get a country where like a bunch of loans were taken out by like a dictator and he would just like buy planes with them and then he'd get deposed but you know the imf and like the world bank would still hold him liable for the loans it's like well okay like that's like the money's gone right like it's it's in like a bunch of gold bars this guy like drove across the border when he like fled um singer singer is like the last guy who really goes in to buy this debt. And the result is this.

So, for example, he buys a bunch of the debt of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And the result of this is that he turns the entire Congolese economy into this debt servicing machine. They're stripping the copper wires out of the buildings in order to like fucking pay for metaphorically. Metaphorically, they're stripping the copper wires to pay this debt off. Not metaphorically, they are taking food from the mouths of babies because the way this stuff is paid for is they cut a bunch of government assistance programs and they're like, you know, they don't build fucking hospitals. They don't staff hospitals. And so like a lot, like he has killed a lot of people um and his his most famous version of this was this battle that he waged against argentina um so in in 2001 there is this

massive like basically like the the last 20th century like the last 20th century communist revolution happens in argentina in 2001 and they lose but it's they they lose like pretty it like only pretty narrowly doesn't work like there is a there is a timeline that is not that different from this one where like like a bunch of anarchists basically have taken control of argentina um and the result of this is that argentina defaults on its debt and you know they default on this debt so they enter this restructuring program and all of the rest of the like people who are like holding this debt are like okay well in order to let the argentinian economy recover and get like some of this money back we'll just like let like okay well we'll like write off most of our debt but singer like looks at this and is

like oh shit i'm just gonna buy all this debt that i know is junk and can't be repaid and then i'm gonna go to the courts in the u.s and like just force argentina to repay it now this is not how debt is supposed to work right the thing about debt right the thing about like lending someone money or you know this is what essentially what buying someone's debt is right the thing about that right is if the person can't pay you back you're supposed you're out of the money right like that that's that's that's you know this is this is the theoretical economic justification for why you can charge interest, because there's risk. But what Singer figured out is that you could just use the U.S. court system

and, you know, the threat of the implicit and explicit threat of the U.S. military to just, like, force people to pay you whether they have money or not. And so, this is what he does. He's the one creditor, because he buys, like, an enormous amount of this debt. And He's the one creditor because he buys an enormous amount of this debt.

And he's the one creditor who refuses to negotiate. And so he starts running around the US trying to steal Argentinian assets. He tries to have Argentina's central bank reserves seized. The most famous instance is he tries to steal an Argentinian warship in order to pay down the debt um there's another one where like he tries to like he tries to steal argentina's entire pension fund and this causes this like series of of uh like lawsuits that sort of like run their way through the courts and in 2014 one of these cases finally makes it to the Supreme Court

and this is where Singer's $200,000 Alaskan fishing trip pays off because Samuel Alito rules that Argentina has to pay Singer 2.4 billion dollars and eventually they do so Alito like like he's also he also has another guy who just, like, pays for his vacations. Who's the, I don't know if I want to say incredibly named or disturbingly named. But this guy's name is Robin Arkley II. Wait, Robin? Robin Arkley II. The second.

Got it. Okay. Yeah. And he's a, also, also like a genuinely terrible person. Like these are, these are all like, you read Hitchhiker's, wait,

have you read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? No. Okay. So my favorite bit from that is, there's a bit where like the encyclopedia from the foundation series, like from the future, like falls down and it falls open onto a page. And someone had just made a joke about how these people are going to be the first against the wall when the revolution comes and the encyclopedia for the future drops down and they open it and

it says these two people were first against the wall when the revolution came and that's like all of these people these are like the worst people in the fucking world or like in the u.s so this guy um arkley makes his fortune like buying distressed mortgages and then foreclosing on people's houses and flipping them so he is seems like a valuable contributor to the economy like i i you know i mean this is like this is literally like literally one of the old like crime think jokes was uh when the bank seizes your house the gdp gdp goes up like that's literally this guy this is this is the guy who makes the gdp go up by seizing you by stealing your house um and so this guy takes uh alito on a bunch of trips um so when when

republica like reaches out to alito about this, he gets so mad that he... The Wall Street Journal editorial board allows him to publish an op-ed that is just him yelling about how this article that hasn't come out yet is fake. And

one of the specific things that he's really mad about is part of this article is talking about how the wine at this lodge that he's staying at that's being paid for by the fucking mortgage flipper guy has $1,000 a bottle wine. And Clarence Thomas is like, no, the wine was not $1,000 a bottle. You can check the website. And then Republican was like, well, yeah, but that's because the lodge lodge like the the the quality of the lodge was downgraded after alito had like one of the like just just just a truly incredible meltdown that he was just allowed to have in the op-ed section of the wall street journal in like in response

not even in response like before this article came out and the other thing that we learned from this is that also apparently uh former justice antonin scalia uh also was taking trips from this guy so this is just like every conservative like justice in the last like 20 years has just been doing this they've just been getting like flown around the world on fancy vacations by their billionaire friends. Well, I don't actually know if I actually might merely be a millionaire. I'm not, I'm not entirely sure,

but he may, he might be a billionaire. I don't know. The other two definitely are. Wait, millionaire, billionaire. Cause those are two very different.

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I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I,

I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I,

I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, let me Google. Is this, is this guy a billionaire? Yeah. Arkley doesn't seem to be a billionaire. He seems to merely be, well, no, I've seen other places that he is a billionaire. I don't know. There's some dispute.

Actually, it's the guy there's like dispute over. What's his net worth? Oh, we don't know. It's unclear. What's his name? There's,

there's dispute over it. Dispute, dispute, disputed net worth. Yeah. Unclear. The other two guys definitely billionaires.

This guy may be a billionaire. Unclear. But like literally like all of these like literally all these justices have just been like taking just like and again

the thing I forgot to mention that I should have mentioned is that like all of these people have had cases appear before the Supreme Court. Hmm. Curious. Curious. And this is another amazing thing.

This is a thing that came up really prominently when there was a case that... There was a case about the attempt to overthrow the government in 2020 or in 2021 that... Well, in 2020 and 2021 that Thomas objectively should have recused himself from because his wife tried to overthrow the government and he just didn't and this is a really important thing

which is that Supreme Court justices like your fucking daughter like could be one of the plaintiffs in a case and you don't have to recuse yourself recusing yourself is completely voluntary which is not how this works for fucking anything else

right but again the Supreme Court is not how this works for fucking anything else right but again the supreme court is not like it's not actually a court it's just like a fucking it's just this like weird dictatorial tribunal that is subject to like absolutely no authority whatsoever and okay so it also turns out that there's like there's like yet another layer of fuckery with this which is that universities uh use supreme court use supreme court justices to solicit donations by like so so they'll have like a don't invite a justice to like give a talk at the university and they'll pay them a bunch of money and then they'll they'll have them like go to a dinner and then they'll advertise to all their donors like hey if you give us a

bunch of money you can go to this dinner with Supreme Court Justice and so a bunch of like a bunch of people who have cases in front of the Supreme Court use this to go get access to a bunch of Supreme Court Justices so it's great this is really fun oh did I do the Venmo thing?

Venmo? No Oh I forgot the Venmo thing okay okay here's the Venmo thing so two days after I started like two days Venmo thing? No. Oh, I forgot the Venmo thing. Okay, okay. Here's the Venmo thing. So, two days after I started, like, two days ago, like, from the time of writing, this will be, like, this will actually be, like,

almost exact. Wow. It'll be, like, almost a week from when this comes out. There was another thing of this that came out, which is that a bunch of lawyers had just been sending money on Venmo to one of clarence

thomas's aides and these okay like the the these are like these are not just people who have like active cases these are like like one of the guys who venmoed uh thomas's aid is the guy who won the affirmative action case. And another one of the, one of the other lawyers who Venmoed him is the guy who, I don't know if you remember this, like, like in, in like the last like term of the court,

there was a case where I, the Supreme court like fucked the EPA's ability to regulate greenhouse gases. So that lawyer also paid a bunch of money on Venmo to clearance Thomas's aid. So this is this is the level of corruption that we're working at. Right. Which is like people sending public Venmo transactions to the aides of Supreme Court justices who's about who are about to hear their cases. Oh, it's so good.

Now, the reason this is happening is that the right has built like just an extensive, an incredibly extensive network to seize control of the judiciary. Liberals have produced no such network because they're fucking hacks. And this, and this is not, it's not just the sort of like, there's only one like liberal billionaire.

Like, no, there are liberal billionaires. The actual real problem with the liberal attempt to take control of the judiciary is that liberal lawyers are hacks. Instead of actually trying to hold on to judicial positions and attempt to move their way up through circuit courts in order to seize control of increasingly large like large like increasingly large portions of of the court system which is what republicans did uh the democratic lawyers they'll they'll get like like they they do the even lazier corruption which is like they'll just they'll be a judge for like three years and then they'll just leave to private practice because they're all just fucking greedy shits and you know the result of this is that all these like fucking liberal lawyers

i you know they go into private practice they all these like fucking liberal lawyers i'd you know they go into private practice they make a quick buck and they leave us to fucking burn to death in the smoldering heat while they spend their vacations in bali and you know and again the only the only thing that like could conceivably slow down the supreme court is the fact that like technically speaking although it's never actually gone through it is possible for like congress to impeach a supreme court justice but the democrats don't want to do that because because then the right will be able to impeach all of the liberal justices no it's worse than that they're the actual biden's actual stated reason for why he didn't want to do it is because it would undermine the legitimacy

of the court and you know the result of this is that like for all their fucking screaming about lawlessness and rising crime rates the fucking biggest criminals in the entire goddamn country are just literally sitting in their stupid ass robes taking the biggest bribes

in the history of the fucking republic and the democrats are just like well if we do anything it'll undermine the faith in our institutions so i yeah fuck them but also like we don't fucking need these people like you could like you could you can fit all of these people in one submarine and we could just be fucking dumb with it and then we get a whole bunch of new supreme court justices picked by Joe Biden and they would save America. So, that's why we need to vote for Joe Biden in 2024. Save America. Yeah, yeah. Thanks for listening.

This is the submarine plot. It'll go great. We have to mandated submarine vacations for all Supreme Court justices. Yeah, this is the... A submarine is now the only vehicle you're allowed to travel on if you're a Supreme Court justice.

Taxpayer-funded Titanic explorations for all Supreme Court justices. We're already giving them $285,000 a year. It's not actually that. It wouldn't... We would save money if we just built a submarine and put them in.

My position on this is clear it's this is this is a fiscally conservative position most of my budget can be interpreted as fiscally conservative it's cheaper to put all the people in houses than do what we're doing now anyway well glad we could learn about how the Supreme Court is good and just. Well, you know, the second thing you can learn is if you one day somehow are like a semi-minor Chicago politician, you now know how to launder money. Which does sound exciting. Yeah. You never know. You never know.

You never know. You never know. Well, thank you for this insightful look at 1970s mystery villain Harlan Crowe, who has a mansion full of Hitler paintings. This feels like it's the location of an Agatha Christie book or something. Let's all investigate the murder of harlan crowe spoilers it was supreme court it was a supreme court justice

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