It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 147
Episode Date: September 14, 2024All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. How to Stop the Far Right in Three Easy Steps What’s The Matter With Texas? feat. Steven Monacelli & Dr. Mich...ael Phillips Inside the Russian Government's Big YouTube Scam Harris V. Trump: The Thriller in Wherever They Filmed This Debate What Happens When Temperatures Soar at the Border? You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.
So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.
If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to put
them back together again. I'm your host, B.O. Wong. With me is Robert Evans.
So we have spent a lot of time on this show talking about the rise of the far right and
what that's looked like electorally, what that's looked like in the streets and the sort of, you
know, deleterious effects that it has had on effectively everyone in the US. And this is
going to be a little bit of a different episode. We've talked about a lot of the responses to the
far right, sort of, you know, in terms of sort of direct actions and sort of confrontations.
What we haven't really done is talked about what can be done electorally. And I do think that a
significant portion of the far right can be defanged and eventually defeated through a series
of things that are not particularly complicated.
But the problem is that defeating the far right means going beyond simply trying to
win every single election, which is the current sort of democratic strategy, right?
Yeah.
If you want to actually defeat the far right, winning every election is not a viable strategy.
We've seen this fail already with Hillary Clinton.
We cannot rely on simply winning every election into the future. You have to go beyond mere electoral victory towards using your
electoral victory to actually defeat the base of the far right. When the Republican Party held
power for 12 years following the ascension of Ronald Reagan, they did it by destroying the
political base of the Democratic Party. They shattered America's trade unions and rebuilt the economy to ensure unions would
no longer be able to provide the ideological and financial support the Democrats had relied on.
If we are going to defeat the far right, we need to wage the same kind of campaign against them.
Now, luckily for us, unlike Ronald Reagan, we do not need to completely rebuild the American
economy to knock the legs of the far right out from under them. There is, in fact, a pretty minimal program
that we can implement to defeat the far right that is very simple. It has three components.
First, a crackdown on MLMs that drives them effectively completely underground.
Yeah. By which we mean multi-level marketing for these are period schemes
right which are a major source of funding for the far right i mean this is where trump comes out of
right this is why he did that fake university like this is a big part of his base yeah yeah we're
going to get more into that in a second uh the the second very important one is a regulatory overhaul
of how the f FDA regulates supplements.
Oh boy.
Which sounds like an extremely technical and nerdy thing,
but supplements are another enormous cash spigot for the far right.
Yeah.
This is where Alex Jones and Joe Rogan get their shit.
Yeah.
Yep.
Yep.
And the third is another kind of wonky change that will be extremely important,
which is making sure to allow car companies to
make direct sales to customers, thus undercutting the enormous and extremely politically powerful
base of right-wing American car dealership owners. Yeah, who donate more money to political causes
than any other career field in this country. Yeah, and you may not believe us yet just from
this sort of basic introduction,
but these three simple reforms, MLM regulation, regulation of dietary supplements, and the direct
sales of cars will destroy so much of the financial and political base of the far right
that they will, at least temporarily, and in the sort of mid-range term, become significantly less
of a threat than they are now. we are going to start with mlms yeah
as robert has sort of alluded to mlms are a very very important political base for the far right
i'm probably the most famous and the one that robert has done an entire show on so go listen
to that if you want to really actually in detailed thing on the history of amway ah amway and the sort
of political family the devosses that they've
generated are an incredibly important part of of of the emerging far right i mean obviously most
famously betsy devoss who married into the clan was our secretary of education under trump you
know the sort of prince family is is embedded into this and amway famously used its own internal communications to stump for republican
party candidates and also uses its base and also directly its own funds to fund the republican
party and a bunch of republican congressional candidates now obviously and and this is
something that is true of all of these reforms is that everything we're doing here they're morally and politically good in their own right, right? MLMs are scams,
they're extremely exploitative. And their role, I think, in the far right is a lot more important
than people understand. Even if you just look at the money, you're sort of missing part of what's
going on with MLMs. MLMs aren't just a cash spigot, they're a part of how the far right
builds its ideological base. MLMs teach you to convert all of your personal relations into
potential assets for sales. This is obviously evil on a moral level, but it's also insidious
on an ideological level. The MLM logic of turning all of your most precious relationships into sales vectors changes how you see the world.
And this is why Republican recruiting inside Amway worked so well.
Once you've been trained that literally everything, even your closest friends and your dearest relationships with your family, are just business opportunities,
it's extremely easy to convince you of the rest of the Republican Party platform.
In the same way, the experience of being in a union and
organizing with your co-workers once reliably turned out the ideological base of the left,
MLMs have generated enormous political bases for the right. And unfortunately, this sort of
ideological threat doesn't just go away if people are able to get out of MLMs or especially if,
you know, they're sort of cast out of MLMs because they simply are broke and ran out of money and are in debt.
The isolation and alienation that comes from pushing away
every single relation that's close to you
from attempting to sell them soap or whatever
makes people isolated and alienated
and makes them more vulnerable to far-right radicalization.
Yep.
And this is why driving these mlms under isn't just a way to sort of cost republican party money
because that's not enough to to defeat the republicans they can find other sources of money
what you need to do is systematically remove parts of their political base and when i say
remove parts of their political base what i mean is you have to go after the systems that are creating more members of the far right. Going after MLMs is a way to do that. Now,
the FTC has gone after MLMs before. They sort of famously, as you talked about in that episode on
Amway, they went after a bunch of MLMs in the 80s. But this sort of caused MLMs to get smarter and has, you know, has been pretty effective in sort of warding the FTC off from really going after MLMs since then.
Yeah, which is, by the way, like another you were just talking about how the way MLMs impact like the minds of the people participating in them, like prepares them, you know, for the far right.
prepares them for the far right.
The way in which this sense of impunity has developed among the people
who run and participate in these things
due to their capture of the legal system
is also a part of why the far right
works the way it does.
That sense of impunity.
Yeah, and part of the reason
why they have that impunity
is just the way the FTC
goes after these companies. In the mid-2010 the way the FTC goes after these companies, right?
I mean, there was in the mid-2010s, the FTC went after Neutralight, which is one of the biggest and oldest MLMs.
But the way they went after them was they issued them a $200 million fine, and that's a means setting fines, and if the fines still allow the business to make more money than they lost from the fines, then that's just the government taking a cut.
It's not actual regulation.
And if you're one of these businesses, and the worst that could happen to you is the government takes a cut, you end up with 2008, right?
is the government takes a cut,
you end up with 2008, right?
Where all these banks know they're going to get bailed out and they know the worst punishment
that's going to happen to them
is just the government taking a small cut
and they can go back to just making all their money.
So in order to actually go after MLMs,
we can't simply rely on the FTC,
even if you were to sort of put in charge
a more militant FTC
that was more willing to go after stuff. there needs to be actual regulatory change here.
And that is possible, but difficult.
But if we're actually deeply serious about wielding political power to defeat the far right and to keep them from re-emerging and to keep them out of power generationally, then this is the start of what we have to do.
So we mentioned Nutrilite,
which is a very, very powerful MLM.
Nutrilite is important
because it is actually two kinds of business
that are extremely important to the far right
at the same time.
It is part MLM,
but it's an MLM that also sells dietary supplements.
And when we come back from these ads,
we will be considering the role of the virtually unregulated dietary supplement markets
in the rise of the far right more broadly.
And we are back.
Oh boy.
The supplement market.
There is a lot less that has been written about this than there should be.
So dietary supplements are barely regulated by the FDA.
People are getting scammed all over the place.
Enormous numbers.
I mean, I've seen numbers that were suggesting, I mean, 200 million people take some kind of dietary supplement if you include things like sort of vitamin gummies etc etc this is an
enormous this is an enormous business i'm gonna read from johnny r star who wrote an article about
supplement regulation in the american journal of public health uh if you're gonna read this by the
way this is slightly out of date because the next year i don't know if this is part of this the next year at ftc a little bit overhauled their supplement regulations but here is star
quote the dietary supplement health and education act which is the big thing that sort of deregulated
supplements prohibits supplements that pose a substantial risk of injury allows the secretary
of health and human services to issue immediate bans on
substances that are imminent hazards, and authorizes the FDA to implement current good
manufacturing practice guidelines. The law also requires pre-market notification for new dietary
supplements defined as supplements that were not marketed in the U.S. before October 15, 1944,
which is when the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act went into effect.
Products violating these regulations are deemed dangerous, adulterated, misbranded,
or otherwise unlawful. And that all sounds well and good until you get to the next sentence,
which is, quote, however, supplements need not be evaluated for efficiency, and only limited data on safety are required for new supplement ingredients.
Yeah, so like, you're not supposed to let people sell dangerous supplements,
but we're also not supposed to check to make sure the supplements are safe or work.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And as the FDA itself admits that even the little tiny notifications
for things like new ingredients that the FDA, you know, FDA imposes in 2016,
you're supposed to like notify the FDA if you put new ingredients.
But like even that just isn't happening these companies just don't care they're just not either not even
like doing the little tiny legal mandate stuff they're required to i should also note a large
part of the blame for particularly the supplements but also i mean mlms actually they play a role in
it too it's the state of utah yeah by the way the political power of the state of Utah. Yeah. By the way, the political power of the state of Utah is a huge part of why,
because supplements are a massive fucking industry in Utah.
So are MLMs.
So, by the way, are teen treatment facilities,
the ones where they like kidnap your children and torture them.
These are all things that the state of Utah in specific
will fight like hell to stop from being fixed in any way, shape or form.
Yeah. And that bill I keep talking about the dietary supplement health education act that is the baby of utah
senator orrin hatch who is a terrible right-wing force in american politics and the fact that orrin
hatch has been this effective and the fact that utah serves as as such a powerful base here
demonstrate something that's important about this political strategy, which is that it has to be a federal level political strategy. Because there are a
lot of states where Republicans effectively have strangleholds. You need to use the federal
government to bypass the unbelievable block of sort of political power in these states.
I want to read a little bit more from that article by Star about what kind of regulations
are required for
supplements because i think it's it's extremely dire in and of itself yeah quote manufacturers
are not required to confirm the identity of all ingredients supplied to them sure why would they
need to do that yeah no unbelievable and they're not required to follow remember how i talked about
there's uh current good manufacturing practices guidelines yeah following those guidelines does not guarantee the absence
of all contaminants moreover unlike drugs which are considered unadulterated or misbranded if
they do not achieve compliance with national standards set by u.s pharmacopoeia and national formulary, dietary supplements may choose to be compliant.
Only six brands of dietary supplements
are currently verified by U.S. Pharmacopoeia.
So they don't have to work.
They can choose whether or not they want to be submitted
to see if any of this stuff works.
Now, in theory also,
the marketing of dietary supplements
is supposed to be regulated by the FTC.
But is the FTC regulating, you know, all of these false claims people are making with their dietary supplements?
No, of course they're not doing that.
So, why do we care about supplement market?
Robert has kind of talked about this at the very beginning of the episode.
The easiest answer for why we should care about supplement markets is simply the figure of Alex Jones.
Who, you know, we have talked about extensively on this show the figure of alex jones who you know we
have talked about extensively on this show it's been all behind the bastards if you want a really
really in-depth look at who alex jones is the podcast knowledge fight is the single best resource
i think anyone has ever created yeah it would be hard to beat yeah it's i it unbelievably detailed
but alex jones has you know as an figure, has done more to sort of spread the ideology of the far right and turn this country into what it is now than maybe almost any other single person other than someone like Trump, right?
He is probably most well known now as, quote, the Sandy Hook guy, which he's extremely mad at all people calling him.
But he's why everyone thinks that, not everyone, but a bunch of people think that Sandy Hook was, which he's extremely mad at all people calling him, but he's why everyone thinks that
not everyone, but a bunch of people think that Sandy Hook
was a false flag.
And, importantly, here's
from NPR, quote, most of
free speech systems, which is Alex Jones,
the corporate name for Alex Jones' company,
most of free speech systems'
revenue to this day, about 80%,
comes from dietary supplements,
according to court records.
Now, these court records come from one of a number of lawsuits
against Alex Jones for defaming the families of the victims
of the Alex Jones shooting.
I mean, sorry.
For defaming the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting.
Sorry.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, in the process of discovery, we got a bunch of information about how
Alex Jones' internal media empire actually works. Now, if you followed Alex Jones over the years,
you know that he's hawked everything from silver to satellite phones. But it is the dietary
supplements that actually sell, right? As an NPR article said, about 80% of his revenue comes from dietary
supplements. And this is not a sort of small independent media outlet, right? Free speech
systems, again, is Alex Jones' company, was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
This is an enormous far-right media empire. And supplement sales allow right-wing figures like
Alex Jones to bypass the reliance on ads, which removes a lot of potential leverage from activist groups who wage pressure campaigns against, you know, they did this against Tucker Carlson, for example, where people went after their advertisers and showed them the stuff Tucker Carlson was saying on Fox before he got kicked off and went, do you want to fund this?
want to fund this and you know that was actually a decent sort of effective strategy but you know and the funny part about this is if you look at the end of tucker carlson's show right the ads on
that show were ads from the my pillow guy who is a a far-right extremist in his own right and a very
important election denier and a bunch of supplement companies. Supplement sales are a durable and renewable grift.
Because there's already an extensive network
of suppliers and distributors,
right-wing brands who want to make a bunch of money
can just sort of slap their name
onto existing supplements that they buy wholesale,
and then they can market them to their viewers,
and this gives them an extremely profitable
and lucrative source of funding and
this is used all over the place right again it impacts what they say and like how they like the
obsession they have with like seed oils and what's destroying your ability like your testosterone and
all of these like different far-right conspiracy theories about you know what kind of stuff you
shouldn't be eating like all of this stuff is related to the supplement business, right? Like they are
trying to drum up and destroy trust in public health and drum up conspiracy theories for their
own profit. And so it's not just a matter of like, this is how they get money, but this also
is why they do some of the things that are so harmful. Yeah. And as you're saying, this is
cyclical, right? The incentive structure for going further and further into these conspiracies and
selling more and more of these supplement things, it's a spiral. It keeps on just increasing in
size and increasing in size due to the feedback loop from the incentive structure that selling
these supplements creates. Now, this is actually not a enormously
difficult sort of field to just completely shut down the next branch we're going to talk about i
think is actually a much harder political fight but a lot of the market for this can be defeated
by just having the ftc actually regulate supplements the way they do drugs because
and this is really important these supplements are being marketed as drugs right the advertisements that these people are already doing
are already illegal the ftc is not supposed to allow people to sell supplements like this
they shouldn't be able to be manufactured like this and this is again as with banning mlms
this is something that helps the consumer because it'll mean that whatever like supplement market
exists after sort of a massive regulatory sweep and crackdown will be much safer it will be much
more effective and it will also destroy the base of far-right media if you can cut the knees out
of this sort of far-right media ecosystem you can go an enormous way towards solving the crisis of
the far right that has been brought
upon this country. Speaking of
crisis... Yeah, we're going to let
the ads talk about the ads, and then we're going to come back
and close by talking about
car manufacturers and the American gentry.
Yeah.
We're back. And this is a fun one this is also like one of my particular favorite things to hit because i don't think a lot of people know how much the republican party is just a party of
used car dealers yep probably the most famous piece that talks it's not really fully about carhips, but it mentions their sort of political effect and the kind of class that they belong to is maybe the best thing the Atlantic has published in the last decade, or at least one of the best things they've published.
And it's an article on the American gentry by the journalist Patrick Wyman.
Wyman argues that huge swaths of America are ruled by what he calls the local gentry.
These are millionaires,
and notably these are not billionaires,
these are multi-multi-millionaires,
whose wealth derives from immediate wealth extraction
from the surrounding communities
and places like Wyman's childhood home
of Yakima, Washington.
These elites have enormous local power
over the territory they rule,
like the landed gentry of old here's wyman quote the conspicuously consuming celebrities and jet-setting cosmopolitans of
popular imagination exist but they are far outnumbered by a less exalted and less discussed
elite group one that sits at the pinnacle of the local hierarchies that govern life for tens of
millions of people.
Donald Trump grasped this group's existence and its importance, acting, as he often does,
on unthinking but effective instinct. When he crowed about his quote beautiful boaters lauding the flotilla of his supporters trailing MAGA flags from their watercraft in his honor,
or addressed his devoted followers among a rioting january 6th crowd that
included people who had flown to the event on private jets he knew what he was doing trump was
courting the support of the american gentry the salt of the earth multi-millionaires you see them
as local leaders in business and politics the underappreciated backbone of a once great nation
now wyman is largely focused on the agricultural
gentry because that's you know the the sort of agro barons who are very important to this story
but are kind of are kind of auxiliary to this and that you know that that's largely because he's
talking a lot about the places where he grew up which are which are agricultural hubs but a very
critical component of this American gentry,
of this local elite class, are car dealership owners, and their wealth and influence literally
cannot be overstated. The journalist Alexander Salmon wrote this in an article in Slate in 2023,
quote, auto dealers are one of the five most common professions among the top 0.1% of American
earners. Car dealers, gas station
owners, and building contractors, it turns out, make up the majority of the country's 140,000
Americans who earn more than $1.5 million a year. Crunching numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau,
data scientists and author Stefan Zdavodowicz found that over 20% of car dealerships in the US have an owner banking more than 1.5 million a year, which is absolutely absurd.
That is an unbelievable amount of money for people who really, when you think about it, don't do anything.
What is the actual service that a car dealer is doing?
Well, I mean, the primary thing that they do is rip people off because the entire way that car sales work is based on fraud.
Yep.
Right?
Like, it's based on getting you to buy things that do not actually work, like service packages and whatnot that you often will not get any benefit from.
of it is based around also just outright scams you know altering the information buyers have access to so they don't realize like problems with a used car or whatever like it's it's all
fraud right yeah and and as as is becoming ever true of american life fraudsters scammers and
people who are just their entire existence is dedicated to ripping you off have more and more
political power in this country.
Here's a salmon from that same article. As of 2021, the top 100 dealership groups in the U.S. had annual revenues of around $100 billion, more than any company that actually makes cars.
Automotive Dealer Association, NADA, became one of the most influential lobbying entities in Washington, with 16,000 dues-paying members spanning 32,500 franchises. Soon enough, a stop
at the annual NADA convention became routine for presidential hopefuls and even presidents.
Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Hillary Clinton all attended ahead of presidential runs.
Bill Clinton and both Bushes came after they left the White House. And the fact that Democrats are showing up to this is
appalling on a moral level, right? This is an entire organization of fraudsters. And it's not,
it doesn't even work, right? Car dealers donate six to one for Republican causes.
But they really want that one. Yeah. It's the same thing with like,
you've got Schumer going out for the crypto caucus now,
where like, well, only a fraction of those guys are going to donate to DIMS.
And it's all a scam.
He doesn't really care as long as some of it goes to him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, the thing that's more, that's dangerous about these people, and I think it's even
more dangerous than something like crypto money, is that these are local elites right and they are dispersed
enormously across the country this is this is something that salmon is very sort of specific
about and something that comes up in wyman's piece something comes up if you do any research
about this at all a huge part of the power is because these people are spread geographically
across the country and because they are the richest people or among the richest people in
the sort of small areas that they dominate, they have unbelievable amounts of political power.
And because they are, again, unbelievably wealthy, they can funnel this money directly into local politics on a scale that cannot be matched by your sort of grassroots organizations.
This allows them to buy everything from city councils to seats in Congress.
And they effectively unionize like in portland they've got the portland business association right which is
to a significant extent allied with the police and like dominates local politics they're the
ones who buy the mayor's election like they're the ones who you know make deals with the uh
portland police officers union like this is this is the way in
which a lot of power gets exercised that actually impacts your daily life yeah and they've also been
doing things like coordinating and doing strategy sharing about defeating unions but i mean this is
why most of these business associations were formed was specifically to destroy unions in
the early 20th century and you know i mean the the auto lobbying
group was formed to do auto lobbying because these car dealerships don't have unions that that that's
another thing that we'll come back to it a little bit but yeah these car dealerships are a durable
and extremely powerful force in electoral politics and they deliver seats and this is this is the
most important thing if you're an electoralist, right? These people consistently deliver seats to Republicans by flooding an amount of money into local races
that people can't compete with. And because of this, they immiserate the lives of hundreds of
millions of people. And they can also largely be destroyed in a single stroke. That's maybe
overselling it a little bit, but their power largely rests on an enormous array of state-level monopolies that ban the direct sales of cars to consumers or prevent car companies from competing with local retailers.
This is something the auto association lobby, NADA, has been fighting for for ages.
They've gotten it in an enormous number of states.
Yeah.
And this, by the way, in terms of abilities to disrupt things, this is a big part of like how tesla is different from other auto manufacturers is in most states
there are some states where they're not allowed to do this but in most states they sell directly
to the customer which is like back before musk became as political a figure was actually a major
reason why these people didn't like him well Well, they still don't. This is actually a really interesting thing is what the thing I want to close on here. Yes, yes. These people still hate
Musk and they hate electric cars because electric cars to a large extent are both a being directly
sold by companies and B it's harder to, you actually have to do service on them in a way
that, that, that makes it more expensive for these, these companies to write about. This is,
this is something that salmon has written about extensively.
So they absolutely despise electric cars.
And this is actually a political opportunity for us, right?
Because Elon Musk now is, again, one of the, I think he's still the richest person in the world, technically, until sort of all of his stocks implode.
But this is an opportunity also to split parts of the Republican base, right?
This is an opportunity also to split parts of the Republican base, right?
Because the local government monopolies that these car dealers have are actually enormously unpopular among a lot of the other parts of the Republican base, right?
Elon hates them.
Actual car manufacturers hate it.
No one likes car dealers.
No! No!
Yeah.
And this is everything.
This is all something that libertarians hate because libertarians look at this, and this is one of the few times libertarians are right. They look at this and go, oh yeah, well these people have been literally granted market monopolies. There are a lot of places where if there's already a car dealer there, if you're a car company, you can, you can use this as a wedge issue to split the Republican base.
And that's sort of where I want to close on.
As much as I've been talking about these three very specific things, right?
Banning MLMs, or at least having extremely large regulatory crackdowns, regulatory crackdowns
on supplements, and legislation to allow direct car sales.
crackdowns on supplements and legislation to allow direct car sales what we're trying to do here isn't just getting rid of the money that supports the far right we're trying to destroy their
institutions and we're trying to fracture their base right going after mlms destroys their ability
to sort of produce more like produce more republicans from these mlms and produce more
people in the far right from these mlms going after supplements as a way to destroy the right-wing media ecosystem which has been crucial
to the rise of the far right and going after cars can help split the emerging republican coalition
by you know pitting two parts of the republican base against each other pitting these car dealers
versus elon and versus the auto manufacturers well mia great episode this is a nice starter. This is, again, something we're
going to continue to talk about because I really think we can't hit enough on this. Obviously,
these three things don't solve every problem with the far right, but this is like, if you could
actually package these together into a legislative agenda, it could be the equivalent of the nuclear option for these people.
So yeah, I think this is a
smart thing to be hitting. We will continue
to talk about this in more detail,
but you know what? We're done for
the day. Go do something else. 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 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. Hey, I'm Gianna Prandenti. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts
of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts.
One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking,
yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like,
how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k?
Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down.
I always get roasted on the internet
when I say this out loud,
but I'm like, every single year,
you need to be asking for a raise
of somewhere between 10 to 15%.
I'm not saying you're gonna get 15% every single year,
but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight,
that is actually a true raise.
Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating.
I don't feel emotions correctly.
I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not.
Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko.
It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world
as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about
their lives.
I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot.
Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show.
I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment.
I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails.
I have very overbearing parents.
Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house.
So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it.
Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature.
I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audio books while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace,
wisdom, and refuge between the chapters.
From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry,
we'll explore the stories that shape our culture.
Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories
of the brilliant writers behind them.
Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers
and to bring their words to life.
Listen to Blacklit on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming.
This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award.
Submit your podcast for nomination now at
iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey,
you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it.
Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards.
I'm Stephen Monticelli, a journalist in Dallas who covers political extremism in Texas.
I'm Michael Phillips, an historian who wrote a history of racism in Dallas called White Metropolis.
Both of us grew up in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas.
And for both of us, our home state has been a matter of both wonder and horrified fascination.
In this episode of It Could Happen Here, we're going to try to explain Texas culture and politics and why the country and the world should care.
Spoiler alert, what happens in Texas doesn't stay in Texas.
The state has always had a disproportionate impact on national politics.
The annexation of Texas in 1845 provoked the Mexican-American War from 1846 to 1848.
The United States grabbed two-thirds of Mexico's territory, and there was an ugly and bitter fight over the status of slavery and all that new land the United States acquired.
That's going to turn out to be one of the major causes of the Civil War, a conflict that resulted in the liberation of 4 million African Americans from slavery,
but also the death of three-quarters of a million Americans.
Texas also was the epicenter of the populist movement,
Texas also was the epicenter of the populist movement, a leftist movement largely based in Texas that actually challenged the power of the Democratic Party in the South. And if the populist party had succeeded, everything else that happened in America in the 20th century in terms of Jim Crow, lynching, the Klan, etc., may have had a very different outcome.
lynching the clan etc may have had a very different outcome slavery didn't end in texas until june 19th 1865 months after it ended in the rest of the country it's a state that today is the
second most populous state in the nation and it's the eighth largest economy in the world two of the
most consequential presidents over the last 60 years hailed from the Lone Star State. There was Democrat Lyndon Johnson, who brought the country not only Medicare
and Medicaid, but the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, two issues that the
right wing continue to fight against to this day. Those laws made African Americans perhaps the most important
constituency in the Democratic Party. Racist backlash to Johnson's civil rights legislation,
urban uprisings in places like the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles,
and white flight generally led segregationists and their children in the South who had been
loyal Democratic voters to switch allegiance to the Republican Party over the next three decades.
loyal Democratic voters to switch allegiance to the Republican Party over the next three decades.
Another Texas president, Republican George W. Bush, he aggressively embraced homophobia,
tightened the ties between the Republican Party and the most right-wing Christians in the country,
and made denial of climate change strict GOP orthodoxy. Of course, the Bush family's oil wealth was central to their rise to power, and broadly speaking, the wealth of right-wing
oil barons in Texas has helped push the Republican Party further and further to the right, in no
small part due to a particular belief in a particular strain of Christianity, which we'll
get to later in this episode. Bush's response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon on September 11th led to the rise
of the modern surveillance state and the two longest wars in American history, both of them
disastrous failures. The combination of white backlash to the LBJ-era civil rights initiatives,
the intense religiosity of the Bush era and the Republican Party in that time period,
and the sense that the United States was a declining power, unable to impose its will on Afghanistan and Iraq,
opened the door to Donald Trump's ascendancy.
In short, two Texas presidents played a major role in making the Democratic Party vastly more diverse,
making the Democratic Party vastly more diverse, more urban-based, and more mainstream liberal,
and the Republican Party more white, more right-wing, more isolationist,
and far more fundamentalist and skeptical of science.
Texas has been in the national news frequently in recent years, and often for the worst reasons.
It's become famous and infamous for its wide-open gun laws and several of the worst mass shootings in American history, including at an army base in Killeen, a Walmart
in El Paso, and an outlet mall in Allen. Draconian abortion laws allow complete strangers to sue
women who go out of state and their pregnancy, And new laws are being considered to prevent women from
traveling through particular counties on highways who, if they are seeking abortion, you know,
they could be arrested for basically trying to leave the state to seek an abortion.
In the last three years in this state, a group of teachers in the Southlake School District
in the Dallas-Fort Worth area were instructed to tell, quote, both sides of the Holocaust
in order to not run afoul of the legislature's ban on critical race theory.
A beloved teacher in Irving was fired for displaying a rainbow sticker in her classroom
as a sign of support for LGBTQ students.
The first ever African-American high school principal at Heritage High in yet another
Dallas suburb, Colleyville, was forced from his job when he sent an email to his high school community after the murder of George Floyd that acknowledged the existence of systemic racism in the United States.
that our fundamental rights like free speech are under threat, particularly if you run afoul of the orthodoxy that comes out of the Republican Party. And one target of that orthodoxy has been books.
All across this nation, we've seen dust-ups over books in schools, books in libraries, and Texas has been one of the
main flashpoints of this fight. So the literary organization, Pen America,
reports that Texas and Florida lead the nation in book bans at public schools,
with more than 1,500 books banned in the state of Texas. Most of those books deal with issues like racism or LGBTQ experience. And one deputy
constable in Granbury, a suburb near Dallas-Fort Worth, even spent two years investigating three
librarians on alleged felony charges of providing so-called harmful materials to minors simply because they allowed minors to access acclaimed
books like The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. According to an investigation by NBC News,
the law enforcement officer, Scott London, was a member of the extremist Oath Keepers organization.
He subpoenaed names of young readers who checked out supposedly objectable material, and he even secretly recorded his conversations with the librarians who drew his unwanted attention.
The investigative report that came out of this investigation into so-called harmful materials was 824 pages long, and no charges were ever filed. But nonetheless, a lot of people's
lives were made difficult and a bunch of books have been taken off the shelves.
So as we mentioned, Texas has been on the cutting edge of right-wing politics in America on issues
like abortion, the treatment of trans children, and on immigration in particular.
Texas has modeled the Republican attitude on newcomers and migrants and policies towards them.
The state's governor, Greg Abbott, essentially tried to establish his own independent border policy,
even though the Constitution makes that the responsibility of the federal government. Texas so far has built 34 miles of a wall Abbott vows will eventually
extend along the entirety of Texas' 1,254-mile international border with Mexico. One estimate
says that project, if it were completed, would take 30 years and cost $20 billion.
The state of Texas has placed buoys entangled with razor wire in the Rio Grande River near
Eagle Pass, a border town that's a major crossing point for migrants fleeing the violence and
economic hardship in Central America, Venezuela, and the rest of Latin America. One of Governor Abbott's border initiatives, Operation Lone Star, has flooded the border with
hundreds of law enforcement agents and has touted thousands of arrests. But it's also cost
$11 billion. And it's unclear what it's really done in terms of making the state safer. Texas insists through statements
from people like Greg Abbott that immigrants are dangerous and that they are flooding our
streets with crime. Nevermind the fact that studies indicate that immigrants are far less
likely to commit crimes on average. These initiatives have been deadly. In August 2023,
these initiatives have been deadly. In August 2023, a buoy trapped a 20-year-old Honduran and a small child, causing them both to drown. The Texas Border Patrol's El Paso sector has
become one of the deadliest areas of the border, here with 149 immigrants dying over a 12-month
period between 2022 and 2023. Recently on a podcast, Abbott expressed regret that Texas has been
unable to shoot immigrants who are attempting to enter Texas by crossing the Rio Grande,
and has complained that the Biden administration might file murder charges against border agents
if such lethal force was used. The only thing that we're not doing is we're not
shooting people who come across the border because, of course,
the Biden administration would charge us with murder. One of the issues about immigration
is a panic amongst the Anglos living in the state that white people will become a shrinking
and less politically powerful minority. And this connects to the issue of abortion.
And this connects to the issue of abortion. Throughout the history of abortion laws in Texas, there's been a discussion of whether or not white Texans were committing what they said in the early 20th century was so-called race suicide, a real panic that black and brown people would eventually outnumber whites and would seize political control of the state. And this is tied to the abortion issue because throughout the history of abortion laws in America
and in Texas, there's been a concern that white women are having abortions.
And that really fuels some of the extremism in how Texas has approached this issue.
In 2022, the state legislature passed a law that would allow a third party to sue anyone who
helped a woman getting an abortion, although the courts have so far blocked enforcement of that law
called Senate Bill 8. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, meanwhile, has addressed another issue
dealing with trans children. And again, trans children, if they're white,
would be out of the reproductive demographic race
that panics white racists in the state.
He has tried to force doctors in other states
to provide medical information on young people
receiving gender-affirming care outside of Texas.
And the parents of trans children in Texas
have been investigated for child
abuse. In each case, these extreme laws have been discussed and in some cases imitated in other red
states. So on the one hand, we've got anxieties about immigrants allegedly replacing the white
race rhetoric that has been repeated by people as high up as
Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who has said that immigrants are trying to take over our country
without firing a shot. This is something that people like the Hitler admirer Nick Fuentes,
who has met with a high-ranking and influential Republican consultant who works for one of the
largest political donors in the country. He believes that sort of rhetoric and pushes it.
On the other hand, we've got the issue with LGBTQ issues in general. We've seen books being taken
off the shelves, as we previously mentioned. We've seen rights taken away from students with regard to their access to bathrooms. We have seen, as Dr. Phillips mentioned,
the targeting of parents. And a lot of this comes from this anxiety that students are being groomed
into becoming LGBTQ in public schools, in public libraries, and other settings.
The idea being that, yes,
they're trying to turn your kids gay. That's what they're saying. And so, of course, they're going
to be extremely upset about any shrinking demographic numbers among the white population
or a growing acceptance of queerness or people being transgender. And so much of that is rooted in religious belief.
But all of this, it matters in a bigger perspective. And I think we can understand
why some of this is so prevalent in Texas through the lens of Texas's importance to national politics. Texas counts for 40 of 270 votes needed to win the
Electoral College. Only California has more Electoral College votes. And the Republican
Party has been able to rely on winning every single presidential election in this state
since 1980. If Texas should ever flip politically, it'd be hard to see how the
Republicans could ever win the White House again. And it always seems like Texas is just on the
verge of flipping blue. Right. There's been a lot of talk for a long time about this
pending demographic revolution, the idea that eventually, you know, the numbers are just baked
in and that Republicans will no longer control the state. So let's look at some of those numbers.
So Tejanos or people of Latino, Hispanic descent make up more than 40% of the state's population.
So they're the largest single population group. Non-whites account for 60% of all Texans.
And as a group, they vote mostly for Democrats.
They control most of the state's largest cities in terms of political dominance,
but because of low voter turnout among people of color, laws that intentionally make registering
to vote harder, making voting itself even more difficult, gerrymandering, and the general
feebleness of the Democratic party in the state the state has
remained in control of a very conservative very white republican minority for three decades in
texas every major city is blue except for one and that's fort worth which is in a place called
tarrant county and i think it is not a coincidence that the largest,
flashiest conflicts have often been in Tarrant County when it comes to things like schools,
when it comes to things like books. Colleyville, as we previously mentioned, is in Tarrant County.
If you've ever heard of the name Southlake, that's a town in Tarrant County. There are numerous national articles about issues that have
emerged from this one single stronghold of Republican power in the state, which, if it were
to fall, would pretend great changes, not just for the politics in the state of Texas, but perhaps
even the nation. It's been remarkable because school board meetings used to be really dull.
You used to talk about boundaries for particular campuses, what students are going to attend
which class.
But now, over the last few years, very often, there have been scenes of screaming matches,
threats, and so on.
Texas, in many ways, has become a laboratory of autocracy.
And again, it's a model for other states that have a right-wing political leadership.
For instance, the Texas Republican Party platform adopted this year called for changes in the way
statewide officials like governor
would be elected. And essentially, the Republican Party called for creating a local version of the
Electoral College. Under these proposed changes, a candidate for governor, lieutenant governor,
all the down-ballot statewide offices could win the popular vote and still lose the election unless they carry a
majority of the 254 counties in the state, most of which are very white, very conservative,
very fundamentalist. If this became law, the proposal would guarantee permanent Republican
rule in the state.
As I said, other Republican states are looking at this proposal.
It hasn't been proposed as legislation, but that would really end any pretense of democracy because most people in Texas live in cities like the rest of the United States.
Another way that Republicans have maintained their grip on the state is by waging a
never-ending culture war centered on matters of faith. So if you really want to understand Texas,
its culture, and its politics, you can't avoid a discussion of religion. You have to dive into
one particular type of Christianity we've already referred to. This interpretation of the Bible motivates right-wing voters in the vast rural sections of the state
and the outer suburbs and the major cities.
It's disproportionately molded the state's laws and attitudes towards African Americans,
immigrants, and the people we've talked about, women, gay and trans people and also non-christians
like jews and muslims if you trap the sort of issues that are being discussed by the republican
party of texas and you look back say to the time of george hw bush and you look to now it will be
very clear to you that the topics have changed the sort sort of things that they talk about, it's less about low taxes.
It's less about being business friendly.
It's less about letting you do what you want in your personal life.
And it is much more about imposing a particular religious viewpoint on others through policy.
on others through policy. And the most vocal, perhaps one of the most highly organized and certainly flush with funds sect of Christianity that is driving this is this group of Christian
fundamentalists that religious scholars broadly describe as dispensationalists.
So, what's a dispensationalist? It's a fancy word
for someone who believes that we are living in the end times. The end times being this idea that
at any moment now, all true Christians will be whisked up into the clouds in an event called
the rapture, that an embodiment of Satan called the Antichrist will take over the world and try to destroy Israel. And all of this is presaging the final judgment, the day when the Lord, Jesus, comes down and he basically decides who's done well and who's done bad.
And that settles it for all eternity.
This particular strain of fundamentalism in Texas culture and politics has a profound impact on global politics.
The dispensationalists are certain World War III is going to consume the planet.
They believe there's going to be a final battle between good and evil called the Battle of Armageddon.
And they believe this, and this is significant, they believe that Jesus Christ will come back specifically to stop World War III
for a particular purpose. He's going to come to prevent the destruction of all remaining Jewish
people on the planet. And they believe that millions of Jewish people are
going to die. Those who survive are going to convert to Christianity. And when Jesus returns,
he will establish what's essentially a divine dictatorship that will be a time of perfect
peace and harmony called the millennium. Texans have played a major role in popularizing dispensationalism
and its doomsday theology, both in modern times, but also historically. One Texas writer named
Michael Ennis once called the city of Dallas the Athens of the apocalypse. And in the late 20th
century, predicting the end of the world was a lucrative business. So there was a theological center here
in Dallas that was one of the most influential groups when it came to originating and promoting
this idea of the end times. And it also has to do with one gentleman named Cyrus Schofield.
But before we talk about Cyrus Schofield, a quick ad break.
What happened was there's this member, a convert to the Congregationalist Church who came from Kansas.
He had been a politician in Kansas who had to leave office because he was accused of accepting bribes.
He later said he was struggling with alcoholism at the time.
His name is Cyrus Schofield.
And he converts to Christianity,
and he's invited to head this Congregationalist church
that has a tiny congregation in Dallas, Texas.
And when he gets here, he brings this dispensationalism
he's learned from other evangelists.
And he's a modernizer.
He has adult education classes.
He correspondence courses on the Bible.
And eventually he produces something published in 1909 called the Schofield
Reference Bible.
reference Bible that basically is the King James Bible with footnotes that he and his co-editors have put together where they say these strange verses in the book of Daniel,
in the book of Revelation, that refer to beasts with seven heads and ten horns and these other strange creatures and this highly symbolic
language has a very literal, obvious meaning, and that is the return of Jewish people to the
state of Israel and how that marks the beginning of the end. So, the Schofield Reference Bible,
beginning of the end so the scofield reference bible extremely popular when it comes out um it was so popular it didn't save effectively the oxford university press from going yeah under
during the great depression that was uh very much a possibility that oxford university press would
go under and scofield was lucky in some ways, if you could
put it that way, because the reference Bible comes out in 1909. And four years later, what was at
that point the most catastrophic war in human history, World War I breaks out, with a level of death and technology that was unprecedented in its destructiveness.
Then the Depression happens.
You have the rise of these fascist dictators,
and there's a sense that the world as we knew it was collapsing.
Capitalism might collapse.
You might have communists take over.
You might have fascists take over.
And then, of course, World War II.
And then finally, the thing that really makes Schofield seem like he was onto something
in terms of his biblical interpretation, and this particular interpretation
had been around in certain variants for centuries and centuries,
but it had always been a minority view.
But what really made it seem like Schofield was onto something was 1948,
when the state of Israel is established, the modern state of Israel,
because he had been saying this would happen, this would be the sign of the end.
because he had been saying this would happen, this would be the sign of the end.
It becomes the point where a lot of churches' ministers are measured by the degree to which they promote Schofieldism. And Protestant churches' ministers get fired if they don't
begin to talk about the end times.
Schofield kind of won the lottery with timing. And you can imagine a world maybe where the Schofield Bible didn't take off because it hadn't come out at that time that it did.
Now, one of Schofield's acolytes, separated by several decades, Schofield had been dead for a long time.
when you have a student at the Dallas Theological Seminary named Hal Lindsey,
who had been a tugboat captain, is attending this particular school.
Dallas Theological Seminary had actually been established in the 1920s by allies, associates of Cyrus Schofield.
It had been a center of the study of biblical prophecy and basically
lindsey's a student and a lot of his peers said basically he took his class notes and turned it
into a book and his real effort he had been a leader in the campus crusade for christ which
was an evangelical group that was trying to
fight the counterculture, hippies, LSD, and so on. And so he had that experience,
and he brought it into the writing of a bestselling book called The Late Great Planet
Earth. And The Late Great Planet Earth is written in the language of the time. He tries to use
hippie type of lingo to catch on with the youth culture and it's his
timing just like schofield's is great this is a time where there's an obsession with hidden
knowledge uh you have really popular books selling about the lost continent of atlantis
ufos uh the phenomena supposedly a spontaneous human combustion, did ancient aliens build
the pyramids.
And if you went to a convenience store or a department store, you might find racks of
paper books with all this hidden knowledge.
And people believed that there was something hidden because of Watergate and because of
Vietnam.
And so this became a phenomenal seller.
It was the best-selling, quote-unquote, nonfiction book of the 1970s.
It later got made into a pseudo-documentary that was narrated by the movie star Orson Welles.
Yeah, I mean, it was so successful that it was like 28 million copies by 1990 had been sold.
And if you've got Orson Welles' buttery voice narrating it as if it has some real import, certainly many, many, many people were exposed to the ideas of Hal Lindsey.
Man is faced by unprecedented perils.
Threatened to send him crashing into extinction.
unprecedented perils threatened to send him crashing into extinction now from hal lindsey's incredible best-selling book comes the film which explores the terrifying prophecies of the
revelations is our planet truly in mortal peril the late great planet earth featuring orson wells
but it didn't stop there lindsey's book inspired inspired some other guys who you may have heard of. These two right-wing political activists and Christian evangelicals named Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. And they are the creators of the Left Behind series.
now if you don't know the left behind series you may have been living under a rock or maybe you weren't born yet and that's not your fault but it is this publishing empire at this point
retail giants like walmart stocked the books they sold 80 million copies that you know warehouses
full of merch sequels prequels graphic novels audiobookars, greeting cards, a shoot-em-up computer game based on the books.
All of this stuff was centrally talking about the rapture, the end times.
That's what the Left Behind series was about.
And those who are left behind are those who were not raptured.
And these films center on the chaos that breaks out right after the rapture really really popular
stuff we'll play a quick clip so you can get a sense of what that's like he took them to protect
them from what from the darkest time in the history of this world persecution and seven
years of darkness he took them to heaven the left Left Behind books, they basically depict Jesus not as a source of love and forgiveness,
but as this source of vengeance and bloodshed.
One person we spoke to in the preparation of this episode described him as a sort of Rambo Jesus.
As to be compared to Mr. Rogers Jesus, you could say.
is to be compared to Mr. Rogers' Jesus, you could say.
And what's particularly dangerous is sometimes believers in this interpretation of the Bible
try to make the end times happen sooner rather than later.
Yeah, I can mention two cases, one better known than the other.
You had a father-son evangelical team called garner ted
armstrong his father was named herbert w armstrong they had a radio broadcasting empire the program
was called the world tomorrow and they had college campuses and in uh california and in Big Sandy, Texas. Unaccredited college. Unaccredited college, absolutely.
And one person who had listened to the Armstrongs on the radio, and it was an Australian named Michael Dennis Rohan on August 21st, 1969, actually travels to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.
travels to the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem because he believes that's a key focal point of where Armageddon is going to take place. And he actually starts a fire in that mosque,
and it's revered one of those holy sites in Islam. And there was a time where there was a
diplomatic crisis caused by this believer in dispensationalism um then of course we
have what had happened in waco uh where you had a sect very much obsessed with end times and with
dispensationalism led by a man named david koresh 1993 he led his followers on this 51-day standoff with federal and state officials over the illegal weapons that this group, the Branch Davidians, held.
Eventually, you have an exchange of gunfire between the agents and the Branch Davidians. And then on April 19th, the feds decide to charge in.
And there's a fire and 76 people die, including 25 children.
In the modern day, we've got two hugely influential people who promote end times theology. Now, one of them is the biggest political donor in the entire state
of Texas. More money donated than anyone else. And his name is Tim Dunn. And we'll talk about
him in a second. But first, I want to talk about someone who is also pretty influential,
maybe not as wealthy as Tim Dunn, who I should mention got his money
through oil. But this is a man named John Hagee. He is the pastor of a 22,000 member church
in Texas called Cornerstone Church. And I think he has a global audience as large as 100 million
people. So back in the day as a 28-year-old young man,
he took part in the Wallace Youth, which is an organization devoted to supporting
the presidential candidacy of white supremacist Alabama governor George Wallace in 1968.
Yeah, let's just hear from Wallace real quick.
In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth,
I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny,
and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.
So, since then, in his 58 years as a non-denominational pastor haig has proven to be as
much of a lightning rod as wallace when hurricane katrina killed nearly 1400 people in new orleans
in 2005 haig insisted the superstorm represented god's wrath at a planned gay pride parade i can't
even believe that that's real um Yeah. So, he really said,
oh, you celebrated the gays and so God killed a bunch of you with a hurricane. He really said
that. He's also called the Catholic Church a false cult and has falsely claimed that Muslims
are commanded by the Quran to kill Christians and Jews. So, he's a really moderate guy when he comes to his word
choice and his rhetoric. Hagee, for instance, believes that Jewish people are still God's
chosen, and he often quotes a line from Genesis 12, 3, 12th chapter, third verse, in which God
says to Abraham, I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you.
And he interprets that to mean that if the United States ever fails to support the state of Israel in any of its policies,
or if it attempts to encourage Israel to trade land for peace, to set aside land for the Palestinians to establish their own nation,
that that leader is violating a divine commandment to, quote, not divide my land, and there will be terrible consequences.
So one dispensationalist pastor basically said that the United States has economic problems whenever it fails to support Israel.
Hagee in 2014 said that a small outbreak of the Ebola virus in the United States was God's vengeance
against President Barack Obama for supporting the establishment of a Palestinian state.
And of course, when that is a big attitude amongst a really significant block of voters,
that makes the United States really have problems when it tries to mediate in that conflict.
We'll talk a little bit more about John Hagee right after this ad break. you might be asking who cares about this guy john hagie like why does his interpretation of the
bible matter at all why does what he say have anything to do with my life and it there's a
number of reasons uh why it matters um so i mean he could
be considered the most important leader of the christian zionist movement for starters um he
formed an organization in 2006 called christians united for israel which has like a reported 10
million members in the united states not sure how accurate or real that is, but he has donated through his organizations more than $58 million to right-wing extremists in Israel, specifically ones that have sponsored settlers to move to the occupied West Bank in violation of international law.
And he's pushed Congress to take a hard line on the issue ofinian issue of palestinian statehood he has the ear of elected officials in texas so uh state level politicians
like greg abbott and dan patrick have been seen with him at campaign events have featured him at
campaign events hagi has tried to you know influence a number of issues and has had success. He was sought as someone whose endorsement
mattered in the presidential elections of George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. He was an early
supporter of Donald Trump, and he influences other major pastors as well. And so it's hard to say that people like this don't matter, particularly whenever they have been invited to speak during big events like the March for Israel in 2023, which drew tens of thousands of people to Washington, D.C.
And who was there?
John Hagee.
And here's one of the paradoxes of this movement. When Hagee was invited to speak at this
pro-Israel event after the October 7th Hamas attacks near Israeli kibbutz, Hagee was invited
and a lot of Jewish people were horrified because he really does capture one of the central paradoxes of dispensationalism,
and that is someone can be inflexibly pro-Israel and anti-Semitic at the same time.
And so John Hagee has promoted a very old anti-Semitic myth that rich jewish people control the world's finances he talks about the
rothschild family which has always been an obsession of anti-semites uh you know the secret
puppet masters of the world you know who rob the typical the average person of money to gain wealth. They cause wars to enrich themselves.
He actually described Hitler, based on nothing, as a half-breed Jew.
And he said that Hitler was sent by God himself.
So Hitler was an emissary of God as a hunter to persecute Jews in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, specifically for the
purpose of forcing them to leave Europe and settle in Palestine.
And, you know, he said that this was all part of the divine plan.
Nazism was part of the divine plan.
Yeah, but don't just take our word for it.
You can listen to him say
something along these lines right now. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen.
Why did it happen? Because God said, my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them
to come back to the land of Israel. Today, Israel is back in the land, and they are at
Ezekiel 37 and 8. They're physically alive, but they're not spiritually alive now how is god going to cause the jewish people to come spiritually alive
and say the god of abraham isaac and jacob he is god so yeah you know hagi has predicted that the
antichrist will be a half-breed gay jew and will rule the planet on behalf of Satan. Those are the kinds of things
that he believes and he spreads. And in spite of statements like these, several Israeli governments
have welcomed the support of right-wing and Times pastors like Hagee. I mean, they don't have any
issue with working with someone like Hagee, and obviously that relationship is cynical because, you know, people like Hagee are able to help bring material resources to Israel and further solidify the relationship that Israel has with the state of Texas.
And there's a real interesting synthesis between the far right in Texas and the very right-wing government that rules Israel now.
Israel depends on Texas oil.
Many of the weapons Israel is using in its war in Gaza are manufactured in Texas,
including in the Dallas-Fort Worth area where Steve and I are having this conversation.
in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where Steve and I are having this conversation.
You have some of the wealthiest American supporters of Israel, like hyper-conservatives,
such as the widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Addison, who have spent quite a bit of money flying Texas politicians like Governor Greg Abbott, the Agricultural Commissioner Sid Miller, members of the state legislature to Israel to promote close business ties and ensure that weapons manufactured in Texas and that Texas oil flows to that state. In the background of all of this is the money, the money backing these politicians.
And the largest and most powerful political donor in Texas is someone who we have mentioned already,
billionaire oil man, Tim Dunn. So Tim Dunn, who is he? What's his deal? He's a pastor he's based in midland which is in west texas and over the last decade
dunn has dumped tens of millions of dollars into the campaign coffers of far-right politicians and
political action committees that promote incendiary messages including the one group that i previously
mentioned was caught meeting with a self-admitted Hitler fan, Nick Fuentes.
Nevertheless, Dunn is named alongside Hagee on the annual list of Israel's top 50 Christian allies published by the Israel Allies Foundation, of which Dunn, incidentally, is the chairman of
the Christian Advisory Board. So um yeah this this really really powerful
donor who has his thumb on the scales all across the state he too is an end times prophecy believer
and he's not just a believer he preaches it at his own church in Midland where he's a pastor. God is a consuming fire,
taking vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our
Lord Jesus Christ. The word obey means listen to. So we're talking here about unbelievers.
These shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord
and from the glory of his power.
And, you know, it's completely changed the nature of the Republican Party, his influence.
They were already conservative and already religious to begin with, but the sort of wave of politicians that have been supported by Dunn has taken that to a new level.
a new level. And, you know, I mean, it's resulted in, I think, a real assault on free speech in the state of Texas. We have religious groups like Christians United for Israel and the Texas Eagle
Forum lobbying the state legislature and persuading politicians like Greg Abbott and
Dan Patrick, who are sympathetic to their agenda, to pass laws that limit the way people
who oppose Israeli policies can protest.
So for instance, 2017, Texas passed House Bill 89, a law that banned the state from
doing any business with any company or individual
contractors who participate in the boycott of Israel that many activists have participated in.
And on March 27th of this year, when you began to have a wave of protests across the nation
and in Texas, and there were major protests at the UT Austin campus, at the University of Texas at Dallas, which is in a suburb called Richardson, another one at the University of North Texas, UT Arlington, University of Texas at San Antonio. to these protests by issuing an executive order that defined a common slogan chanted
by supporters of Palestinian statehood, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,
as anti-Semitic.
And it required public colleges and universities to review their free speech policies and to punish what the state regards as anti-Semitic speech by faculty and students.
And it targeted two specific groups, two student groups, the Palestine Solidarity Committee and Students for Justice in Palestine,
to be disciplined for violating these policies.
The state of Texas is saying these words are forbidden.
Indeed.
And despite the fact that the University of Texas at Austin had issued a video
celebrating their so-called free speech week,
I think it was just a matter of months before they arrested 136 pro-Palestinian
demonstrators at the University of Texas at
Austin. All across the state, we've seen pro-Palestinian protests, or what you could
call anti-genocide protests, or calls for divestment at these various universities.
And arrests have happened at least three different universities.
I mentioned earlier a paradox in dispensationalism, and that is that some of the
people who have absolute devotion to promoting the state of Israel are at the same time anti-Semitic.
And another paradox is that Schofield himself, Cyrus Schofield himself, said that Jesus wasn't into politics.
He said that when Jesus was alive, slavery, inequality of wealth,
all of these political oppression were all at their worst,
and Jesus and his apostles didn't address any of that.
They focused on salvation, that Christianity is not about changing this world because this world is doomed.
And the only person who's going to fix anything is Jesus himself.
But nevertheless, these dispensationalists at the same time are very happy to be involved in politics that's not involved in social reform.
They don't want you to, you know, Schofield was living at a time of progressive movement
when they were trying to end child labor,
trying to make workplaces safer and so on.
Today, we're dealing with issues of wealth inequality and so on.
The dispensationalists will say,
believing that humans can fix those problems is satanic.
But nevertheless, you should be involved in politics
if it involves denying women
sovereignty over their bodies if it involves banning uh people from uh uh gender affirming
care and so on but that politics is okay and so and we see this with this activism
and trying to suppress a particular side of the Israel-Palestine debate.
Right. And I think that if that strain of dispensationalism that Schofield represented,
that sort of apolitical dispensationalism, if it still exists, it is certainly no longer dominant.
Because today, you know, we're seeing this end times theology, this belief in this theory around
the end times, it's increasingly overlapping with other sort of distinct trends in Christianity.
So, on the one hand, there's things like the prosperity gospel, which is, you know,
best represented by Kenneth Copeland. He's the richest pastor in all of the United States.
by Kenneth Copeland. He's the richest pastor in all of the United States. And his whole thing is,
yeah, if you give, you get. And so, you give me your money and you prove that you're a holy person, you will be rewarded in turn. You will be healed. All of your things will be solved.
And then the other thing that it's overlapping with, this end times theology belief is what we might just call the seven mountains dominionist trend or dominionism
broadly speaking, which you may or may not be familiar with, but it really just breaks down
to this idea that Christians should be at the top of all of the mountains of society. And these are just basically stand-ins for
the segments of society they think are important. So, education, media, politics, what have you.
This is a really growing idea. It's a sort of meme in right-wing Christianity in these sort of non-denominational churches, which are the
fastest growing and largest segment of churches I think we're talking about.
And those dominionists are the ones who are taking over these school boards
that are adopting the anti-trans policies and also banning the books.
That's right. And it is a very active form of Christianity,
very politically active. And so through people like Hagee and people like Tim Dunn,
we see that embodied in what they do, the sort of advocacy that John Hagee takes part in and the
millions and millions of dollars that Tim Dunn dumps into the state of Texas.
of dollars that Tim Dunn dumps into the state of Texas.
You could almost characterize the Republican Party in Texas, which is one of the most important state wings of the Republican Party in the United States, as a wholly owned Dunn subsidiary.
Many of the most infamous Texas politicians in this era, such as Ken Paxton, are generously supported by Dunn.
And so I think if we kind of wrap this up, I think that we could say that the disdain from activism that dispensationalists claim is a ruse.
is a ruse. That activism is bad if it advances any attempt to create equal opportunity,
reduce income inequality, and dispensationalists vote. And they, you know, with Texas as one of the major bases for dispensationalism, they are a hugely influential voting bloc. 39% of Americans have told pollsters
that they believe we're living in the end times. And the simple fact is, if you think the world's
going to end, you're not going to invest much time in making the world better, making it a more
just place. You're not going to try to clean the water, clean the air. Half of
evangelical Protestants in the United States believe that supporting Israel is absolutely
essential to fulfilling Bible prophecy. And that group constitutes a third of all adult Texans.
And they want to love Israel to death because they believe that if they push
Israel to annex the West Bank, to take the most aggressive stand towards Palestinians,
that will provoke the wrath of the Antichrist, which will lead to Armageddon. And they're
willing to make that sacrifice. They're willing to fight for the second coming to happen down to the last Jewish person. And this is creating instability for the world and putting the United States in
a very difficult place on the world stage. And the chain of events leading to our position
currently vis-a-vis the Middle East can be drawn back to this state.
That's right. And I think one thing that I really want to emphasize that we haven't
dived into as much as we could have is that this sort of belief system tends towards dehumanization.
So, if you believe that your opponents are in league with the devil or are satanic or are doing the bidding of evil and that you are on the side of good unequivocally and you are doing the Lord's work, it is easy to treat your opponents as inhuman, less than human, to see them as other than someone who has equal rights
and equal standing. And if you're wondering if it could happen here, it meaning fascism,
in many ways, it's happened in Texas already. And we have a large population here. As they wait for
the end, they're building walls around the lives of more than 30 million people who live in this state. I'm Stephen Monacelli. I'm Michael Phillips. Thank you for listening.
Thank you. 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
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Hey, I'm Gianna Pardenti.
And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden.
We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts.
One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck.
You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean,
how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian
Toot, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say
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I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise.
Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I found out I was related
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Those were some callers from my call-in
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It's a show where I take real
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Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show.
I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar
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I collect my roommate's toenails
and fingernails.
I have very overbearing parents.
Even at the age of 29,
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So if you want an excuse
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search for Therapy Gecko
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It's the one with the green guy on it.
Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit,
the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature.
I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories.
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Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app,
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Hola, mi gente.
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Oh, what's getting indicted by the FBI?
My several people I don't like.
It could happen here.
A podcast about things falling apart.
And today, this week, well, for the last couple of weeks,
the thing that's fallen apart is Tenet Media.
This is not related to Christopher Nolan that we can prove at this exact moment.
It is instead a media venture starring a bunch of assholes that turned out to all be an op by the Russian government.
And none of said assholes claim they knew anything, even though they got paid $100,000 a video.
Anyway, we're going to talk about all that and more today. But I'm going to bring onto the program now my co-hosts, Garrison Davis and James Stout. Thank you. I'm not getting 100K per episode here, but if I was, I certainly wouldn't
tell the government that it was actually a foreign government that's paying me. I would keep tweeting
about it. Fun fact about both of you guys
before we get into this.
If you reverse your last names,
you sound like Confederate-era generals.
Garrison Stout.
James Davis, I can see.
James Davis, Garrison Stout, yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah, yeah.
That is our secret backstory.
We had to actually switch them
when we joined Cool Zone Media
due to our Confederate ties.
Yeah.
And the fact that you're 190 years old so kirsten you want to take us off here yeah so tenant media was this
kind of small right-wing startup that hired a whole bunch of more well-known content creators
on the right-wing sphere from like tim pool dle, Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Lauren Southern.
People who are either just like conservative commentators
or someone like Lauren Southern's case
has been like an alt-right kind of white supremacist
media figure for quite a while.
And they put together this little collection of people
to make like content for tenants on
YouTube channel as well as licensing
some of their regular content.
And this company was
ostensibly.
Started by another right wing YouTuber.
Named Lauren Chen.
And her husband Liam Donovan.
Now Chen's been like on.
Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire.
And was employed at the Blaze.
Where she's no longer employed.
Based on the allegations inside.
This DOJ indictment.
So yeah it was a small collection. Not
super kind of noteworthy, honestly,
in a lot of cases. Lots of people weren't
super familiar with Tenet Media.
I know they also hired Taylor Hansen,
who was kind of one of the first guys to
report on grooming,
LGBTQ stuff a few years ago.
That's kind of what was immediately weird about
them, to everyone who pays attention to this stuff,
is that their videos did not get a crazy amount of engagement.
They were clearly not an established like they came out of nowhere, but they had the money, the money to pay for people who aren't cheap.
Tim Pool, if you don't know, Tim is one of the most profitable influencers on the right wing chunks of the Internet.
He's a guy who kind of got his start as a citizen journalist during Occupy.
Really, he's one of these guys,
all he does is he gets on, he reads news articles.
He reads the headlines of news articles.
He talks about how we're all doomed
to left-wing terrorism or whatever.
And then he makes millions of dollars.
He's a frustrating individual to say the least,
but he doesn't come cheap.
And Hansen also doesn't come cheap. Dave Rubin is not an inexpensive person to bring onto your team so it was kind of clear from
the beginning there's a lot of money behind this thing that seems to have come out of nowhere
whose money is it and that is what the federal government's been trying to figure out and we
have now a better indication on where all of these right-wing content firms, or at least
this one who is employing some very
influential people, where they are
getting some of their money from. Because
there's a lot of money flying around this space.
Lots of these guys are obviously filled by
fossil fuel billionaires.
You can look at the early funding
for the Daily Wire. That has a lot of money.
But for this smaller
lesser-known company,
how are they paying $100,000 per episode to these guys?
The Daily Wire definitely started inorganically
by getting a lot of fossil fuel money pumped into it.
But one thing you have to hand it to them
is they built a business that is a functional business.
They are now profitable in their own regard,
or at least were.
There's evidence that traffic collapsed recently.
But you saw them have a growth curve that looked pretty organic for a media organization,
which you didn't see with Tenet.
No, no.
And it seems the only way to actually pay these millions and millions of dollars to
all these people is if you are actually the government of russia um who is starting covert operations that's their words not mine to influence the u.s
election by uh like i was talking about like ukraine using these mouthpieces but also just
kind of so general division which seems to be kind of the main tactic and robert elected to actually go through some of this geez 23 page indictment
and kind of uh hopefully we can find some of some of the some of the better funnier little tidbits
here because there's a lot of interesting information about kind of the interworkings
of some of these like uh like media groups and how exactly tim pool was convinced by a Russian agent.
Yeah. A Russian agent pretending to be three different people.
Pretending to be some mysterious European billionaire.
Yeah. So the document starts with some stuff that I had been unaware, which is that,
you know, because Russia Today is kind of the first large Russian government affiliated mediailiated media organization that has been putting out propaganda in the United States.
And the FBI has been watching them like a hawk. When he describes Russia Today, which has always argued that it's a legitimate news organization,
as an entire empire of covert projects designed to shape public opinion in Western audiences.
And one of these covert projects, it described as the funding of what we now know as Tenet Media,
right? It's described in these documents because they're indictments. It's a Tennessee-based
online creation company, but it can only be referring to Tenet Media.
As employees have since admitted that, yes, can only be referring to Tenant Media. As employees have since admitted that,
yes, it is for sure to Tenant Media.
Yes, yes.
There's no doubt about this.
We're not like reading into what the Fed said here at all.
Yeah.
So they spent over the course of about a year,
$10 million.
I think it's actually was more like 9.6,
but $10 million basically just buying these influencers.
Oh my God. First off, things we could do with $10 million basically just buying these influencers. Oh my God.
First off, things we could do with $10 million.
Yeah.
Oh, James, we'd be sailing to Myanmar on a pallet full of rocket launchers.
The things that their military could do with $10 million.
Like sending dudes to the front with airsoft plates.
Yeah.
Anyway, whatever.
So the kind of key detail there is how much they were making per one of these dog shit videos,
which is about $100,000 per YouTube video.
That's what Tim was getting.
I think Dave Rubin was getting close to just half a million a month to do a weekly video.
So that is the kind of money we're talking
about and tim was also being paid a hundred thousand dollars per weekly video as well he
was making one video a week that was what they decided on in his contract so he was ranking in
at least 400 000 if not 500 000 a month yeah and then they had signing and download bonuses on top
of that which is like even for them is more than you could get on
youtube for the kind of traffic that they get that is that is like the top one percent of the top one
percent of youtube creators are making money like that and and certainly no one with the kind of
views these 10 videos we're getting so anyway garrison you've got a clip to play yeah here's
here's a here's a clip that's definitely a totally genuine opinion not impacted by those a hundred thousand dollars of tim pool talking about uh ukraine
trigger warning most annoying man on earth this is psychotic ukraine is the enemy of this country
ukraine is our enemy being funded by the democrats i will will stress this again. One of the greatest enemies of our nation right now is Ukraine.
They are expanding this war.
Now, don't get me wrong, I know.
You've got criminal elements of the U.S. government
pushing them and guiding them and telling them what to do.
Ukraine is now accused, a German warrant issued,
for blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline.
Triggering this conflict. Ukraine is the greatest threat to
this nation and to the world. We should rescind all funding and financing, pull out all military
support, and we should apologize to Russia. Interesting. I wonder what would compel a man
to say that. Huh? Curious. Very curious. There's no way to know, Garrison. So since they publicly launched in November of last year,
Tenant Media posted almost 2,000 videos
that got about 16 million views.
And 16 million views is a lot for a YouTube channel,
but not if you've put out 2,000 videos.
So again, that's what I mean when I say like,
this is not the kind of audience
that you would get this kind of money organically for, right?
Like this is, was obviously, and I mentioned this because this is obviously suspicious
to the creators.
You cannot be, Tim Pool is not a smart man, but you cannot work for YouTube the way that
he has and not know that something is fucked up with the money.
Yeah.
Just if you're not a mental arithmetician like myself, that is 8,000 views video.
Yeah.
I made a video once about how to use hiking poles, which has around that many views.
I have a video that I fucked up when filming another video while I was reviewing products
15 years ago before anyone knew who I was that has more than 8,000 views.
Where is our money, Vladimir?
Yeah. Yeah. Come on, Vladimir. There's a lot I'll do for half a million dollars.
Well, and I think part of this as well
is not just trying to prop up
tenants' own views itself.
It's making these specific content creators'
lives more comfortable.
Because the better that these guys do,
that's all that Russia is interested in,
as alleged in this document, right?
It's that they just want to make sure that these guys can can still talk about ukraine certainly as like this like evil and how
russia is like the traditionalist christian empire and right-wing resistance to globalist domination
but in terms of like just wanting to amplify u.s domestic divisions in order to weaken u.s
opposition to core government of russia's interests in the ongoing war in Ukraine, as
said in the document. All they need to do is just make sure
these guys have a lot of money, so they're
comfortable. Tenet doesn't need to be a successful media
operation where they're making more money
on YouTube than they're paying their influencers.
No, no, no. That's not the point.
The point is just to give these guys a lot of
money to keep talking the way they're talking.
Yeah. What was also interesting to me,
and this comes from a Wired article,
Wired downloaded as many of these videos
as they could and then ran them through, this
is actually one of the journalistic uses
for these large language models, they ran them
through one of those
machine learning algorithms
to just kind of look at how
often different subjects are mentioned, because
no human being could analyze that many
videos with any kind of like speed.
Right.
And one thing they found is that Ukraine, which you would imagine being the focus of a horrific war that is bleeding Russia's military, was mentioned about like a third as often as transgender people.
The vast majority of the content was U.S. culture war stuff.
Right.
Yeah. people, the vast majority of the content was U.S. culture war stuff, right? Like woke is much more of a focus than anything to do directly with Russian military operations or Russian government,
like what you would imagine, right? And the reason for that is that they see it as, number one,
building a sense of solidarity between American conservatives and Russia, which is largely
imaginary. I'll be talking about this in an episode later, but like Russia is not the country a lot of conservatives in the U.S. think
it is. But more to the point, it's just sort of stoking division, right? Rather than actually
needing to change American minds on Ukraine in much of a concerted way. Like if you kind of keep
them ginned up and angry about everything the quote-unquote left is doing, they will be
against supporting Ukrainian resistance anyway, right? And that's the bet the Russians made very,
very astutely, and it seems to be paying off for them. One of the more interesting facts here is
that one of the primary contacts, this is one of the people who has been indicted, who was working
with, you know, Poole and and these other creators is an employee of russia
today with the perfect spy name constantine kalashnikov just amazing stuff uh how how is
that literally their name yeah how do they not just change it we call it a kalashnikov because
the guy's name was kalashnikov it's it's it's it's just it's just lovely it's just yeah it's beautiful
it's breathtaking because if you put a character with that name in a bond film everyone would be
like come on man it's not 1965 anymore what are we doing here but that's just that that's just
the person's actual name it's beautiful so they had a couple of fake personas within the company
but this was a person who like directly talked to the employees of people like
Poole, the editors and whatnot, without disclosing that he worked at Russia Today. Now, there's
evidence that people who worked for some of these creators in their discords, like editors and
whatnot, saw this as deeply suspicious. Probably the most interesting came from when we now know
it was Tucker Carlson posted a video during his trip in Moscow, like where he was going to a Russian grocery store to be like, look, Russia has grocery stores.
Everything's fine here.
His editor in the discord was like, this seems like a little much.
What are we doing here, basically?
And the statement made was along the lines of like, you know, this is what the people paying us want us to get out.
Right. the lines of like you know this is what the people paying us want us to get out right like it which
is clear evidence that people were aware of what they were doing to some extent at least among like
the tenant media producers there was a growing awareness of what was actually going on obviously
all of the on-air talent still maintains that they are the victims of an international conspiracy. Being a victim pays, I guess.
Oh my God.
And no, I think one of the funniest parts is definitely this fake European businessman.
I believe he's referred to as Edouard Gringorian.
Yeah, this was very funny.
We'll talk about Edouard.
Let's throw to ads first,
and then we'll get back to this.
And we're back. Garrison, let's talk about how Kalashnikov, this other RT person, as well as Tenant's founders,
worked together to deceive commentators one and two, who we believe are Tim Pool and Dave Rubin.
The point was to leverage their existing audiences and license their videos they were already making.
So together, the RT people and the Tenant founders tried to trick Pool and who we believe is ruben into thinking that the person providing these 100 000 per episodes was a european businessman and private investor named edward
gregorian uh which is a wonderful a wonderful fake name and this was a not real person this
was a completely fake person at some point i I believe Dave Rubin or commentator number one
requested that the founder
provide like a profile
or an article.
Yeah, yeah.
It was commentator two
that wanted to know more about,
quote,
would like to know more about the company
and who he will be working with.
Yeah.
So they asked for like this,
like one page profile
on like who this guy was.
And this was provided
and he was described as an accomplished
finance professional who had various positions in brussels and france at a multinational bank
including the director of private banking division and wealth management the the one page on this guy
who is supposedly their investor shows an obvious stock photo of a man on a private jet with his
face blurred out his face blurred blurred is the best, yeah.
That looks real. Yeah, not sketchy at all. This is an actual guy.
Quote, Founder One transmitted the Edward Gregorian profile to Commentator One,
who is either Pool or Rubin.
We believe it's Rubin.
Yeah, I think that one's Rubin, because Tim wouldn't have asked for more details.
On or about May 12th, 2023,
Founder One reported to Persona One
that Commentator One had a problem
with the profile we sent over,
specifically the reference to social justice.
I think it may be because that's usually a term
used by liberals,
but we're trying to create a conservative network.
Founder One suggested that Commentator One
and Edward could simply speak together
to clarify the profile.
Yes.
And I know there was a secure call that commentator one and edward could simply speak together to clarify the profile yes and i know
there was a secure call between a russian agent pretending to be mr gregorian to tim pool and
allegedly this this this other call with commentator one who we think is ruben so there was
like conversations between like ruben and pool with people like further involved in the
actual like espionage parts of this and the actual like you're talking to people affiliated with like
russian spies in order to like sell this lie i did find it very funny where did you read the
section where they sort of did a forensic analysis of the three personas email accounts
yeah no i'm not far enough into it yet so they had three different personas
so all access from the same ip address and had different uh were presenting as three different
individuals right with three different email accounts uh obviously the doj has been able to
get access to those email accounts and they found that the uh the people using those email accounts
made mistakes in signing them so one was supposed to come from Persona 3, but they mistakenly signed it Edward Gregorian.
And another time, Persona 1 sent a draft of an email to Persona 2,
which Persona 2 then copied and pasted into an email.
Like their OPSEC was extremely poor, it would seem,
and it didn't set anyone off.
To kind of make that point in terms of like,
what's happening to these guys right now,
what they've been indicted for is violations of the foreign agent uh registration act like if you
are acting as the agent of a foreign government you have to register in the united states you
you have a freedom of speech but you don't have freedom to create propaganda for another government
and pretend that you're you're not right yeah and so you know obviously one of the things the feds
needed to
indict them is evidence that they knew specifically they were being employed by the Russian government,
right? That like the Russians hadn't somehow snuck money to the people who founded Tenant Media,
right? And so at one point, Founder 2 gets on the investor discord channel to submit
one of the influencers, I think it's Ruben's, invoices to Persona 1
and press for payment of those invoices.
On September 11th, 2023,
never forget,
at approximately 8.07 p.m. Central Time,
Founder 2 wrote in that Discord channel,
Today marks two weeks
since I submitted the invoice for August.
Any idea for the delay?
We are signing the large contracts.
We need to be certain
we will get the funding to pay these people.
While waiting for a response, they searched for the current time in Moscow.
So just unbelievable OPSEC, like giving the government absolute knowledge of intent.
I mean, similarly, earlier on in the document, quote,
In their private correspondence while working directly for RT purs pursuant to founder one's written contract founder one and founder two regularly referred to their
sponsor as the russians for example on or about may 12 2021 founder two message founder one on
discord quote so we're billing the russians from the corporation right on or about may 22nd founder
one message founder two on discord also the russians paid so we're
good to build them for the second month i guess nailed it on her boat june 2nd founder one message
founder two on discord also i say we bill the russians for the last month once we're done the
extra op-eds i wonder if they knew they were working for the russian government there's there's
a lot more that's just like this they constantly referred to the source of their income at least to each other as
quote unquote the russians and and then uh in like outreach to like talent which is you know a
generous word to refer to tim pool and others they were a little bit more vague but they certainly
made kind of coy references to it in their producer discord. Beautiful. Well, yeah. So, I mean, the big question here
with all of this is like, did any of these major right wing media figures who have like they got
hired in part because they were already doing the job the Russians wanted them doing, you know,
building up this kind of hatred that exists on the right over the idea of funding Ukraine
and Ukrainian resistance to the Russian
war machine. Like all of that kind of stuff is like why these people got brought on anyway.
Tim Pool has just kind of been one of the most reflexively anti-Ukraine voices in conservative
media. And Rubin is very effective at getting Americans to hate other Americans. Like he's
one of the big kind of anti-trans culture warriors out there,
ditto Hanson. That's why they wanted these guys. They wanted to encourage them basically to keep
it up. The question then is, what did these guys know and when did they know it? The bigger
question, because I have my suspicions, and my suspicions are a lot and immediately,
but none of that is in this indictment, obviously.
And the big question then is,
is the federal government going to attempt
to prove anything?
Like, do they want to actually go after these guys?
And I don't know.
My guess is not because there very rarely
are consequences for these people.
But I'm curious as to what y'all think.
No, it seems not.
Both Poole and I think
three others have made statements saying that they've
been contacted by the FBI as a potential
victim of a crime, and
that they'll be happy to assist the FBI
investigating this matter.
Now, that doesn't mean the FBI
isn't necessarily looking into
them, because that is also the language the FBI
would use if they suspected them,
but my guess
is that they lawyered up absolutely it was funny both in there in in benny johnson's and tim pool's
immediate immediate statements they called this a leak doj indictment which is not true it was not
leaked it was just unsealed yeah they just arrested people yeah i'm fairly sure there's a press release
like also one of the final posts from tenant media was talking about
how this woman named lauren's son was charged with acting as an agent of the chinese communist party
quote here she is talking about dei why would the chinese government want to push a dei in america
oh yeah i remember this and this is this this is i think one of one of their final twitter posts
before their account got taken down. Yeah.
Beautiful.
Their Rumble account is still alive and kicking.
Yeah.
Oh, thank goodness.
Check that out.
Also, can we talk about their graphic design just for a moment?
Because it is dog shit.
Yeah.
Tenant medias?
Tenant, yeah.
Like, have you been on their Rumble account, Garrison? You know, i can't say i have been on their rumble account as
of as of recent the last time i looked at rumble it was their booth at the rnc well let me tell you
they're back uh and genuinely some of the most like deranged it's just it's extremely busy it's
very 90s like it's a lot of bright colors i mean the clearest indication to me that this was absolutely
a russian op was that the company described itself as quote a network of heterodox commentators that
focus on western political and cultural issues definitely russians definitely russians you're
like oh i wonder who wrote that who would ever describe themselves? Tim Pool had never even seen the word heterodox before.
It's crazy.
It's wild.
Yeah, they put multipolar into a thesaurus
and that's what they came up with.
It's crazy.
It is interesting.
One of the things in this indictment
that I did find kind of worth talking about
is that it specifically notes
that folks at Russia today,
when they were,
because they were largely deplatformed
after the expanded Russian invasion
in 2022, early 2022.
And the indictment quotes
the editor-in-chief of Russia Today
being like, but it's fine
because we were able to rebuild
our following on Twitter.
So I don't know if you just,
in case you had any questions
about like what Elon Musk's reforms
at Twitter have accomplished.
One of them is that.
We should probably roll to ads
again. And then Garrison, you had a very fun document you wanted to take us through.
Yes. To kind of talk about why they might be doing some of this. There was one other document
that was unsealed that kind of kind of sheds a light on Russia's exact focus on influencing
U.S. politics. Well, that's great. Speaking of influencing U.S. politics,
our advertisers probably don't.
And we're back.
called Exhibit 9A, which is originally in Russian. And this translated copy is provided in this PDF.
And this appears to be some kind of instructional manual for why exactly people are going about this. Why exactly is Tim Pool and all these others getting paid to talk about what they talk about?
And then it also kind of explains tactics and how like how to actually go about it so the first bit of this
of this document they just are talking about like the u.s two-party system uh which is really funny
and they primarily explain the two-party system's differences as being like the way that they affect
race that the u.s political political party B, or Democratic Party,
includes people of color and, quote-unquote,
supporters of affirmative action and reverse discrimination,
i.e. infringement on the rights of the white population of the United States.
And then, meanwhile, the Republican Party
are victims of discrimination by people of color, unquote.
So that's how they kind of frame the U.S. two-party system,
is that there's these poor white people being oppressed by wokeism. They end this little introduction on the two-party system by saying, quote, a key characteristic of the American media is its ske over 75 situation for the republicans is made
complicated by the censorship on social media and democrats oriented new media so some kind of weird
phrasing there because it is being translated from russia but they're they're talking about how
liberalism isn't is inherently uh biased in media and that's something that's promoted while being
like racist and being a republican is
something that is harder to get paid for by big media to talk about and that's why they have this
campaign which they title guerrilla media campaign in the united states they justify this by saying
that there is no pro-russian and or pro-putin mainstream politicians or succinctly large numbers of influencers and voters.
And this is one of the things they're trying to do.
Another quote is that Americans are, quote,
dissatisfied by the dramatic decline in standard of living
and large expenditures of offensive policy
in the United States, in Europe, and Ukraine.
They are afraid of losing the American way of life
and the American dream.
It is these sentiments that should be exploited in the course of an information campaign in the united states
smart the campaign topics used in their guerrilla media campaign are included here
first one's encroaching universal poverty number two is the risk of job loss for white americans
privileges for people of color pervertsverts and disabled, constant lies of the
Democratic Party administration, the threat of crime coming from people of color and immigrants,
including new immigrants from Ukraine, overspending on foreign policy at the expense of interests of
white U.S. citizens, constant lies to the voters by the Democrats in power. Last but not least,
to the voters by the Democrats in power. Last but not least, America is suffering a defeat despite liberals' efforts. We are being drawn into the water. Our guys will die in Ukraine.
The target audience of their campaign is listed as Republican voters, Donald Trump supporters,
supporters of, quote, traditional family values, white Americans representing the lower and middle class yeah i mean it's one of
those things it's frustrating that it is working yeah to be quite frank it's exactly what the
russiagate conspiracy theorists have been saying for years unfortunately yeah unfortunately and
like a shitload of people on the left have just been mocking them endlessly in part because they
bought a lot of this propaganda and this is certainly different from the way they were going about it
in in 2016 right this isn't absolutely yeah like this this isn't the same like facebook stuff
they're doing although tenant did have facebook accounts these are like weaponizing these people
that have gotten gotten big on youtube and other platforms for talking about the same type of
things that russia kind of wants them to talk about and it's just making sure that they have
the ability to do so kind of lastly in this information doc they they
talk about kind of like where you can spread this disinformation it says here quote on facebook
twitter and youtube we need to create multiple perishable accounts primarily for the work with
comments websites should serve as the sources of information for dissemination and for video
content youtube accounts with a relatively small number of subscribers and commentators unquote the list
of information products can be disseminated includes texts of posts comments on social media
memes including characters and collages and video content including news stories in the fox news
style they then propose creating a quote-unquote project office to run this style
of media campaign. This consists of three segments, monitoring US media and social media accounts
of Republican politicians, a text factory with a minimum of five to four main topic-based
recommendations, including about 10 basic posts on social media and 40 to 60
comments, and then managing an editorial office with a daily output of three to four pictures and
memes, and a video editorial office with a daily output of three to four videos per day.
Quote, in order for this work to be effective, you need to use a minimum of fake news and a maximum
of realistic
information at the same time you should continuously repeat that this is what's really
happening but the official media will never tell you about it or show it to you unquote so i mean
like part of what's frustrating to the about this number one is just like they clearly have watched
alex jones and like i've learned a great deal from how he's done this, which
unfortunately is something Alex used to claim about Putin that, fuck, maybe he was right.
But the bigger, more frustrating point to me is that like, oh, they didn't need to do any of this
at all. Like this was all working just fine without them directly getting involved this way.
I kind of am interested. I think it's probably just a reaction to the fact that they had a lot of their more traditional stuff get de-platformed after february 2022
yeah but like this was all stuff the right was doing organically in their media without russian
money they didn't need this they certainly are trying to kind of rebuild some of their
like direct ability to influence after like rt got de-platformed the other part that's interesting
to me is because
like this indictment focuses on like tenant media as being kind of one of these video editorial
offices with a daily output of three to four videos a day like that that's what this that's
what this kind of guide it describes that's what tenant is this evidence talk also talks about how
like they're also just like faking engagement getting like 60 comments uh per day on various
social media posts on political
topics so that also like points towards like a lot of people like driving like discussions
and trying to like increase the actual like visibility and engagement is being boosted by
this like non-authentic interference a lot of videos will go viral not just because they had
a lot of people watch them initially it's because they have a lot of engagement in
the comments. And that's what's going to push something
to actually show up on more people's feeds. That is how
Twitter currently works. There's a degree to which
that's how things work on YouTube.
So it's also just trying to engineer
virality by
faking a certain amount of
engagement. There's also
that degree of interference
beyond just
actually you know paying for tim pool uh to talk about ukraine and talk about how gay people are
evil once a week yeah i don't know i think that's probably all we've got to say about this for right
now this is not the most surprising news in the world it is good that it's embarrassing to some
of these guys i don't know that i think it's actually going to hurt their listenership at all the people who listen to them don't really care
yeah they'll lie out of it yeah they'll find some way to make themselves the victim out of it
yeah they will not have any reflection that there was a whole russian operation to identify like
like influencers to scout for that would serve russia's purposes that they will never reflect
on why they specifically were scouted for no yeah they will never reflect that the only bit of like the only bit of hesitation
that they had to take to take this money was that the profile for the fake business man mentioned
social justice that was the only thing that they like protested uh that's the only thing that he
actually wanted to look further into was the fact that he listed social justice as something he
cares about and not the fact that uh he just doesn't exist at all.
This is a completely fake person.
They were able to flag social justice, but not flag that he just did not exist.
None of this will cause any kind of recollection because these guys don't care.
The reason why they say what they say is because they can make $500,000 a month extra saying it.
So imagine how much money they're already making.
Yeah.
Like that explains why they're doing what they're doing.
Like they don't care what they say anymore.
They make such a ridiculous amount of money that it doesn't matter.
Yeah.
And that's what it's always been about.
Like they have never believed in anything.
Yeah.
They don't need to like reflect on,
on any of this because they're still making tons of money.
They're making slightly less than they used to now that russia's not paying them but they are still making tons
especially like if this is what they thought like the going price was like they suggested these
amounts like they this is like the regular price for them and that kind of points towards how much
money is flying around this right-wing media ecosystem yep great good stuff yeah the last
couple of videos were focusing on this ridiculous lie
that migrants taken over an apartment complex in uh in colorado like all this shit that just
isn't true that they've been able to make true i don't know it's so frustrating i find it so
frustrating also how like pool has been able to run this line of like the media won't tell you this
because there are things that
legitimately are neoliberal establishment media completely ignores and like that leaves the door
open for this kind of shit and as a result people can fill that space with lies as we're seeing here
yeah well so the next time you get contacted by a shady man on WhatsApp to pay you $500,000
a month talking about how
gay people are evil, you might want to check
to see if he's actually a Russian agent first.
You might want to do a little
bit of work. Yeah.
They have to tell you. It's like cops. You just ask them, they have to
tell you. You know what? Just send them my way.
Got some exciting new content news for
you guys. I will not get paid by Russia
to lie. I might get paid by like Sweden, you know, to like advance Swedish interests, maybe.
There's a number of most countries I would lie for.
Beside that aren't Russia.
I would lie for like Japan, probably.
No, that could get dark, actually.
No, that could get dark.
Never mind.
Yeah, yeah.
Leave that one out, bro.
Sweden.
Sweden's perfect.
No.
Garrison, I think you're underestimating the kind of shit sweden gets up to oh no they're certainly evil
they're certainly evil but in terms of like a very like milquetoast country to get paid to
increase their foreign interest in i think sweden's about about as good as you're gonna get
like come on like hungary come on come on switzerland you know although switzerland oh
boy you would you would quickly
get implicated but but they could pay yeah all the financial all the financial price
yeah robert and i received material benefits from the burmese pdf we got we both had a nice lunch
from them and that has been why we've done all our coverage it's time for us to come clean now
we did although you did get very sick afterwards sobelievably sick and you locked me out of the toilet.
So, yeah.
Putting that out there.
That was pretty funny.
Oh, what a time.
Anyway,
RIP Tenant Media.
You were a fake one.
We'll be back tomorrow.
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
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Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Ah, what's not doing great, my democracy.
Although better than a couple of months ago, maybe.
If we're comparing this debate to the last debate,
I think the short answer everyone will agree with is better debate.
My gosh.
I'm Robert Evans. With me tonight for a quick reaction to everything that went on, in case you don't want to sit through it yourself, is Garrison Davis and Sophie Lichterman.
Yeah, this was like a real debate. We haven't had one of these in a long time.
yeah this was like a real debate we haven't had one of these in a long time no no maybe never i can't actually think of a time in in my life it's certainly not in my adult life where we have had
one i don't know you know what maybe i'm not remembering the romney one well enough but
certainly it's been a long time since we've got this was really was about the issues to a
significant extent not all of the issues i would have picked to talk about but there was a lot of
discussion of issues and policy and like actual moderating and actual moderating yes live fact
checks which i've never seen to this extent at any yeah at any presidential debate ever it was
almost shocking to see the moderators actually do their job that was the highlight of the night for
me yeah and if you didn't catch the debate it was was hosted by Disney's ABC, and the moderators were Lindsay Davis and David Muir.
And both of them each did a very decent job, I believe, with live fact-checking when Trump said some very out-of-pocket, unhinged comments.
They deferred to him a couple of times when he would demand to be allowed to speak that I wasn't
thrilled with, but it was made up for, you know, one of the things going around in right-wing media
the last couple of days has been this claim that Haitian immigrants to the United States are eating
people's pets. We'll probably do an episode on this. It's worth covering. Like it's all lies.
It's like evil racist lies, but Trump brought it up in detail during the debate and got pressed pretty
effectively by david who essentially what i'm saying like well that's just not true like we've
talked to the city manager uh there's no reports of anyone's pets being yeah you've just made this
up and and trump said it was true because he saw it on tv he said he said
it twice but but like you know i just want to like per per like a reuters fact check like this
started from a facebook post and then determined that it was uh there was no evidence to this claim
and that didn't stop the likes of jd vance and other horrible individuals spreading it on the internet
and donald trump announcing it to be true multiple times during the biggest presidential debate of
our lifetime as they kept saying it seems every every debate is the most historic debate that's
ever happened yeah i'm gonna say this one wasn Sorry. The last one definitely was because one of the guys who was in it is no longer running for president.
That's fair.
That one was a little historic.
Yeah.
Do we want to get into a little bit of the pre-show at all?
Sure. We can talk about the pre-show first.
Yeah, why not? Why don't you start there, Sophie?
During the pre-show, Fox News was talking about how the Trump campaign says that he will only go low on the issues.
And he did not. They also had a guy who is on TV way too much, Byron Donald, where he said that,
Kamala, we know Biden is not running the country. You're VP now. what they they kind of just did the same sad talking points and then
cnn did i mean this is not that interesting to be honest like cnn talked about how important this was
and chris wallace specifically said that trump's biggest strength is he doesn't talk like a
politician i don't think that helped him tonight to to be honest. Not tonight. Well, you know, to be honest, here's what I would say. That was true of why he won. That played a major
role in winning. But he talks like a politician now because politics has reordered itself around
Trumpism, particularly on the right. But even Harris and Walls are a little Trumpier than
certainly any Democratic politician was before this election.
And the most interesting thing that was said in both of these things to me, which will bring us to the start of the debate, CNN was heavily focusing on the fact that President Trump is almost a foot taller than Vice President Harris and asking if he will take advantage of that.
He wouldn't even meet her across the stage to shake her hand.
She walked all the way over to him.
I genuinely think he did not want to shake her hand.
No, he didn't.
And I thought that was, again, this all seems like very petty stuff to talk about.
But this is the pettiest man alive.
And this stuff actually does matter.
And I think it was a pretty intelligent strategic move.
I think it started off the night with him off balance she immediately put him off balance and pissed him off
and he didn't really recover he had some moments he certainly was not weak everywhere i think
he was he was like his economy everything he says about like tariffs is like it's a nonsense policy
that would devastate like large chunks of this country.
But I think his messaging was pretty effective there.
It probably is going to work for a lot of moderates.
I thought his messaging on Afghanistan was really effective.
I think he probably won that segment of the debate just in terms of what's going to play better.
Those were the two definitely.
Right.
But, you know, he didn't lose every clash they had he never got momentum and he
was never able to build momentum even when he had a win he was never able to tie that into a greater
pattern like he was with biden he was never able to get any kind of weight behind him he just kind
of was wobbling the whole night which i think i at this scale is the first we've seen from him
no it was definitely kamala going in hard for the handshake at the very like very start of the
debate was her equivalent of trump following around hillary clinton on that debate stage
yup um it it threw him off balance he wasn't expecting it it immediately kind of gave her
the upper hand literally wow. Wow. And controlling where
the conversation was going to go. Trump refused to look at Kamala throughout the entire debate.
He only looked straight ahead. Kamala was often addressing Trump directly, looking at him,
and then also turning towards the cameras. Trump was just straight faced the entire time.
He never looked at her or acknowledged her visually like visually it was it was kind of odd to see
and throughout the debate he just kept getting really angry and almost like childish harris
maintained her ability to present herself as like the more hopeful candidate and by and large like
led the debate yeah yeah he kept having to like follow her he just came off as like an angry child
now she she did not answer uh some of the
questions about like her policy shifts but she was able to deflect those questions and get trump
to go off topic to talking about like crowd sizes and rumors about eating dogs trump wasn't able to
actually talk about what his plans for the country were and harris just kept him like complaining
about weird nonsense going off on tagents and always going back to talking about immigrants.
He just,
he just couldn't control the conversation at all.
No.
And the crowd size stuff,
like he was very clearly like on the verge of kind of losing it there,
which was interesting to see.
CNN claimed during their post show that that moment was when he never
recovered after the crowd size stuff.
Yeah.
I think that's probably accurate.
Yeah.
That's a fair analysis from CNN.
I would say that he,
he didn't,
he never recovered from the opening handshake.
Like,
but that's when it was kind of undeniable,
the crowd size thing.
Like he,
cause he,
he kept trying to get back on the rails and I think he gave up.
And the clearest example of that was his closing statements,
which I know we're kind of jumping around here but kamala's closing statements were the kind of closing statements you give if
you are trying to become the president and trump's you can contrast it to the way he was talking
during his big rnc speech which was certainly much too long but was clearly intentional for the most part.
It was a better speech.
Yeah, there was some ad-libbing there. He did some.
But this was clearly not written down ahead of time. It did not sound like that.
It made no sense.
Yeah, it was nonsense.
Kamala's ending statement was talking about how this is a fight for two different versions
of what this country will look like, a very politician-y speech.
Trump didn't talk about himself at all he just was complaining that if kamala harris has so many great ideas for
the country why hasn't she enacted them um and the answer is because she's not the president yes but
he did not talk about his own version of the country he was just complaining about how much
he didn't like kamala harris and that kam Kamala Harris is promising to do great things, even though that she's not doing them right now
as vice president.
And that was his messaging.
At least in the pre-show that I watched
and in a lot of the punditry I read before this,
the thing that kept getting reinforced
was that this has to be a debate about the issues.
The Americans that are still undecided
want to hear what people's plans are for the country.
Now, do I believe that's the case?
I'm not necessarily the most optimistic about how seriously Americans take political policy.
But if that is the case, Trump blew his chance to talk about what he wants to do as president
because he, number one, was extremely defensive.
He spent more time denying things that he wasn't going to do as president because he number one was extremely defensive he spent more time
denying things that he didn't wasn't going to do like it she got him very good on 2025 that has
proven to be an extremely effective line of attack and he was really he had to he had to not just
deny that he planned to in like in state project 2025 as president but like he had to repeatedly
claim i've never read it like I don't know what's in
it. I don't want to read it. I have nothing to do with Project 2025, end quote. In a way that
sounded almost panicked, right? I'm kind of surprised they didn't give him a better response
on that, that they didn't really drill that down. And I wonder if they did and he just
was so flustered and pissed that he didn't do it, down. And I wonder if they did and he just was so flustered and pissed
that he didn't do it,
but he certainly did not have
an effective response to that one.
And when he kept repeatedly being asked
to give his policy
on how he would like fix
the Affordable Care Act or replace it,
he just punted?
He just kept saying it's terrible.
It's like, okay.
Yeah, it's terrible,
but I can't do anything about it. so I'm not going to repeal it.
But we've got to do better.
It was a really weak answer.
Yeah.
One thing I found interesting is that the last debate
was full of so many ad breaks, and we
went full like... A one hour.
A full hour before
ads. And speaking of
ads, we have gone a full 13 minutes
and that means it's time for us to take an ad break.
Alright, we are back.
Yeah, can I get to one thing first?
Because I just came across this.
It's about the Haitian immigrants.
PBS put up a documentary like literally a day or two ago.
Yeah, one day ago talking about this.
And they interview a factory owner in Springfield, Ohio about what he thinks of Haitian migration.
He's like, I wish a lot more of them would come.
They're the only people in town who don't do drugs and come to work on time.
I just thought that was a great, great Springfield, Ohio representation.
I hope that guy's having a good night.
Great quote there, Robert.
Yeah.
Gary, what do you want to talk about next?
I now in this middle section, just kind of want to go over some of what they actually
talked about during the debate.
A few of kind of the main topics. They started with
the economy. Kamala was talking about how
there's a shortage of homes, the cost
of housing is just too high,
and she's going to have
tax cuts for families, and
warned about Trump's quote-unquote
sales tax that would rise
costs for households
by nearly $4,000 a year.
This is in reference to Trump's tariffs,
which he then talked about next.
They know they're not sales tax, they're tariffs.
And that countries will pay us back
for all that we've done in the world.
It's insane.
Which will mainly mean that our economy will do worse
and things will be more expensive for us.
I thought Cuomo was pretty strong during that section
in terms of her response.
She directly mentioned Goldman Sachs, which is something that's come out thought i thought kamala was pretty strong during that section in terms of like her response she uh
directly mentioned goldman sachs which is something that's come out in the last couple days from
reuters it's that the goldman sachs's biggest boost to u.s economy from a harris win talking
about u.s economic growth would likely get the biggest boost in the coming two years from
democrats headed by kamala harris winning the white house and congress in november's election and she specifically like called out to
that and be her being actually able to call out to something like that in a debate was something we
i haven't seen in a while in a debate and so that was something that i particularly took note of
yeah actually slight relevant authorities on economic issues yeah
yeah she did a lot of that she definitely had her moments where she would avoid responses i noted she
she consistently refused to answer are there limitations you think should be in place on
when people can get abortions right yeah she just kind of did not answer that one now to be frank
i think that's a bullshit question and i think
her redirection was pretty effective yeah but as a general rule when she answered questions she
cited statistics and like studies and did a pretty a pretty good job now again how well is that going
to matter we're still very early in the kind of pundit cycle here, it seems pretty clear that most of the mainstream media, including Fox,
like agrees Harris won the night. Polly Market predicts a 97% chance that Harris is judged the
winner in the debate snap polls, which I found out from Nate Silver's quick reaction, where he
also notes, quote, Bitcoin prices are down, which also implies a loss for Trump.
That's very funny.
I love that Bitcoin's a good political needle to see where the country's going.
I'll tell you, the happiest, assuming that we don't usher in a new fascist or, you know,
a significantly worse state in November, the best thing about it is going to be not needing to pay attention to Nate Silver for another four years. But yeah, he did make one other point that I found kind of funny,
which was his argument that like, well, Trump is a lot taller. The stature gap in terms of
physical size was also notable, especially with Harris having a shorter podium. Sometimes you'll
hear people say that you should watch the debate with the sound off and by that measure it was much closer than with the sound on who says that nate who has ever
said that who who's gonna watch the debate with the sound off stick to polls man what the fuck
is wrong with you these debates used to be audio only they were radio broadcasts that is that's
how this tradition started that is so unwell of him to say what are
you what are you doing why keep think that in your head and don't put that on the internet he is a
good life advice yes every second nate silver isn't writing a blog post or looking at polls
he is he is sitting in a a shitty bar in like fremont street vegas yeah playing like mid-stakes poker so he probably
does consume a lot of television with the sound off but to go back to the economy so as kamala
was talking about her plans for like tax credits and tax cuts helping people uh buy homes trump
was just talking about tariffs and immediately brought up that one of the things that's affecting
the economy is that there's there's millions of people pouring in from prisons and insane asylums
taking jobs from black and hispanic and union workers that these immigrants are taking over
towns and buildings violently and it's just immediately that's that that's what that's
what he goes to because he has really just nothing else. He also said people can't buy bacon, cereal and eggs,
cereal, cereal of all the foods to choose cereal.
So, yeah, tried to talk about like inflation and stuff.
It just it just didn't go very well,
especially because inflation has rose so much during the pandemic when he was president.
It just didn't play very well at all.
Immediately, it was clear that that Kamala was kind of the front runner. The next topic was abortion, which Kam didn't play very well at all. Immediately, it was clear that Kamala was
kind of the frontrunner. The next topic was abortion, which Kamala also did very well.
And Trump just really lost it because he couldn't stop talking about how Tim Walz wants to execute
babies after birth. And this was the main thing he talked about. He was very defensive
about his stance on a national abortion ban. Moderators asked him about his contradictory
abortion statements, about how he's voting for an abortion ban in Florida, but is claiming to not
want one nationally. And Trump just didn't know how to talk about this topic very well and just
kept saying that Democrats are evil because they want to do nine-month abortions, seven-month,
eight-month abortions, post-birth executions.
They will execute the baby.
Which was, I believe this was like the first fact check of the night.
And this is what kind of really scared Trump is he was like,
oh, they're actually going to call me on this stuff.
Moderator said that there's no states where you can kill babies after birth.
And Trump just didn't know what to do.
Kamala brought up Project 2025 and their plans for a national abortion ban.
Trump made a little funny comment, kind of throwing J.D. Vance under the bus.
Oh, my God.
His statements about Trump vetoing a national abortion ban if it was passed by Congress.
Trump said that he actually hadn't talked to Vance about that.
I didn't discuss it with J.D.
By the way, I've been taking a break from twitter but i did catch a good
post recently jd vance before the debate made a claim that a bunch of people from springfield who
he won't name have reached out to him talking about haitians eating their pets um and then
ended it by saying like it's possible this will prove to be untrue and someone just quote tweeted
that and said every day i see something that makes me understand why vance's mom
traded him for a couple of perk 30s incredible uh but kamala basically said most of her regular
talking points on abortion she you know would like for the house in the senate to put abortion
protections into law and she would sign that bill and wants to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade and also talked about how it's absurd to be talking about post-birth executions and how
this is like insulting. Yep, she's correct. Thank you so much. Yeah. Next thing was the border,
very similar to both their RNC and their DNC speeches. Kamala talking about this kind of
very conservative border bill that Trump shot down for political gain
and then
invited us to attend a Trump rally
where he talks about fictional characters like
Hannibal Lecter and how windmills
cause cancer and that people leave
early and he never talks about you
the American people. So this was
obviously giant bait for Trump which he
took immediately.
He just couldn't stop talking about people actually
come to my rallies way more than they go
to your rallies. They don't leave early.
You have to bus in people
to your rallies. And he claims
she pays people to attend her rallies
as well. He got so flustered
is that this is what he started talking
about the eating dogs thing.
It's because he got so flustered on this line of argument
about his crowd size that he just had to immediately talk about how there's immigrants eating dogs thing it's because he got so flustered on this line of argument about uh
about his crowd size that he just he just had to immediately talk about how there's immigrants
eating dogs yeah because he has he just didn't know what to do i mean it's actually kind of just a
a very like on the nose but perfect representation of how racism works culturally a lot of the time
which is like white man feels aggrieved and threatened and
immediately turns to attacking an entire group of people based on their race.
Like, like it really was the most direct example of that, that you could possibly get.
Like he felt vulnerable.
And so he attacked a group of people for eating cats.
He did a blood libel.
I think a big part of Kamala's strategy here was to paint trump as like
an illegitimate figure in politics like someone who's not like responsible to like lead the
military and it was dangerous yeah she bragged about the endorsement of 200 republicans including
dick cheney hated that moment like no but you know is is not great but we'll see if it plays
politically well it might might work, yeah.
It doesn't play well for us, but that doesn't mean it doesn't overall play well, unfortunately.
A lot of her statements seemed like she was trying to court both the NatSec people and the courts. If there's ever a contested election, she wants those people to be on her side.
And there was a lot of comments throughout the debate
that was kind of pointing to that and like showing how trump's just like an unreliable and like
dangerous figure to be in control of national security trump went on this interesting tangent
about how he was actually good because he fired a whole bunch of those republicans because they
were because they were bad at their jobs i thought it was one of his more effective moments that was
something we've never really seen done before,
openly attacking military leaders in that fashion.
Yeah.
I didn't read it as attacking military leaders.
I read it as him specifically stating,
because she was,
Harris had been talking about the Republicans
from the Bush White House who had endorsed her.
And I read it as Trump saying,
I brought in a lot of like rhinos,
what he would call rhinos,
but I brought in a lot of like rhinos, what he would call rhinos, but I brought in a lot of like old Republican veterans and fired them because they were bad at their job.
And I thought that was one where I was like, well, yeah, they were, you know, like, you're not wrong.
You didn't replace them with anyone better, but like they, they were, in fact, you, you did hire
a bunch of Republican like officials who had a long history working in other administrations
who sucked at what they did, you know, like not wrong. Now it's interesting to have him say,
I brought in a lot of people. Some of them were good and some of them were bad.
Yes. I don't think I've ever heard a former president admit that during a debate.
He was like, we don't talk about the good people. And it's like,
well, why don't you do that now during
your debate yeah here's your chance jd vance great guy great guy great great guy so jd vance
great guy never met him don't know who he is who are you talking about never talked to him
what one of the more interesting questions uh the moderator asked was just directly asking trump
how would you go about your massive deportation program? How would you
actually go about deporting 11 million or more undocumented immigrants? And Trump did not have
a real answer to this question. Trump said that, you know, there's actually way more of them here
than what you would think. South America is sending all their criminals here. It was really
interesting because he said they say 15 million. It's really 21 million and then he said and it's a lot more than 21 million it's okay how many is it donald um the moderators
challenged him on like rising crime rates uh saying that the the fbi is actually you know
showing that crime is going down and trump then claimed that the fbi crime rates are fraudulent
fraudulent which is the first time that you've, at least that I've seen him talk about it that way.
Like usually on Fox News, they will like mention that, but they'll be like, but people feel crime is going up.
So that's what really matters.
Even if the FBI claims it's going down, people still feel less safe.
But he just openly said that those numbers are just like fake.
Like the FBI is
just like lying, saying that they aren't counting crimes in like the biggest major cities. Conley's
response to this was saying that that's rich coming from a convicted criminal. So we got that
first like prosecutor girl boss moment. K-Hive rise up. Trump complained about all of like the
legal witch hunts he's been facing and said that, quote, I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things they say about me,
unquote, which is just a fascinating way to frame that.
Unhinged thing to say.
It is, especially given how many Americans don't think he was shot in the head.
You just know his advisors were like, what the fuck? fuck like what are you saying right now oh fuck
oh they are drinking tonight oh they they are drinking tonight yeah yeah and that's not even
like the most unhinged thing he said because the most unhinged thing he said the entire night came shortly after that which was she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison based
she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison she wants to do transgender uh-huh operations on illegal aliens in prison and the
leader says she's a radical liberal i believe that a president can perform surgery if that
president wants to sophie uh and i support kamala harris's policy you should have voted for ben
carson then i did i write him in every year okay jesus christ no you don't
there was a good uh tweet that remarked that it just sounds like he's talking like he's playing
cards against humanity he's just like change he's just like changing out different words like
transgender aliens prison surgery i i believe what he's referencing here is that both fox news and
trump's campaign team the
past few days have been talking about how in 2020 Kamala made a statement basically saying that,
yeah, we should like offer gender affirming health care to people in prison. Like if you're in prison,
we should not like deny health care to you just because you're locked up. That's like what he's
talking about. That is specifically what what he's referring to. But it sounds just absolutely
batshit. Let's have another
quick ad break. We will come back. I want
to talk a little bit about January 6th,
foreign policy, Israel-Palestine,
and then some of Trump's and Kamala's
post-debate statements made
to the press. all right we are so bad so bad it's just like the harris campaign kind of kind of kind of
she's been slowly kind of like flatlining in some of these polls i do want to talk about that a
little before we get into this because it has been interesting.
She's been losing
national
popular vote momentum
and that has been narrowing.
The swing states have not really
narrowed in the same way, which is not
to say that she is a clear favorite.
Everything basically is within the margin of error.
She's barely ahead, but she's still ahead.
It has been a really interesting change. It has not been the same. There's a newsletter I check
on occasionally for stuff like this, Ettinger Mintum, that made what I thought was an interesting
point, which was that it's possible that a lot of that has to do with the fact that the national
popular vote has been narrowing as a result of the ads the Republicans have been pumping out,
because there wasn't a real strong consensus about who Harris was, and now that's growing. But in a lot of these swing states, which are red states, people have been living
under Republicans and are just a lot less kind of vulnerable to being drawn away by that kind
of propaganda because they know what it's like. No, I mean, especially if you're looking at North
Carolina, you're looking at Georgia. Those are two battlegrounds that the Harris campaign is
targeting. I can definitely see that being an aspect. So the mods turned the questions towards
January 6th. Trump immediately claimed that nobody on the other side was killed only ashley babbitt was killed by a bad police officer
very ironic but easily the only cop i'll go to bat for the best shoot in 2021 by a lot by a mile
um and he then complained that like why haven't blm rioters been prosecuted in seattle and
minneapolis which of course they have they are still they're still arresting people
man i've spent time in courtrooms with people like yes i was shocked he did not call out portland it
is interesting that he went for seattle and not portland i guess i think it maybe just says a lot
about his media diet that he he just maybe got a lot more yeah chas stuff than he did portland stuff
i don't know he certainly did go after Kamala a few times
for being pro-defend the police back in 2020.
He really tried.
He tried several times.
He clearly...
She never took the bait.
No.
Yeah, she never took the bait,
and that must have been one that his advisors
really pushed him on.
Yeah.
They must have said,
you'll get her on this.
It was both that and her previous fracking policies,
which she has backtracked on.
And you have to if you want to win Pennsylvania.
So I understand why they're doing it.
It sucks because the planet's burning.
But right now they're trying to win Pennsylvania.
The debate was in Pennsylvania.
That's why she has backtracked on those policies.
I think it's smart to deflect from that,
at least right now.
But yeah, that's not surprising to me. Now, I think Kamala did a pretty good statement
about January 6th. She said, I was at the Capitol on J6. He incited a violent mob, and now she got
kind of emotional. She said that 140 officers were injured and some died. Trump was impeached,
which is something that just hasn't been talked about very much. It's like has been impeached why isn't that talked about very much because so many other
things have happened that everyone has forgotten yeah he was literally impeached yeah multiple
times and then she pointed to january 6th as like not the only incident no she pointed back to
charlottesville talked about trump's statements about proud boys and how the proud boy militia
was told to stand back and stand by and she she kind of closed this little January 6th monologue by saying, we don't have
to go back to this. He says that if the election doesn't go to his liking, there will be a blood
bath. We don't have to go back. And she's positioning herself as an alternative towards
that type of chaos. Trump got very mad at this uh very mad i'm talking about how
fox news debunked the charlottesville quote yeah i'm sure i'm sure yeah i'm sure um i know one
other like fact checker i think it's snopes is like oh actually the charlottesville quote is
different in context and at least a whole bunch of fact checkers that like i know and extremism
reporters have kind of gotten on snopes ass for this because it's it's
very clear it's a very like disingenuous way of framing what he was trying to say
yeah we all know what happened on charlottesville we all know what he was talking about yeah cataboo
is a really good video on it if you want to watch more yeah yes she does and then the moderators
talked about how trump has been falsely claiming for for three and a half years that he won the
2020 election but now says that he
lost by a whisker and trump was startled by this he's like did i actually say that i said that i
said that no no no no that was sarcastic and it was like the only time i've ever heard him he
sounded genuinely like confused like maybe there was a little old man but we were just like oh
shit what have i been saying he's like no no no that was a sarcastic statement i i still think i won the 2020 election
yeah and he really and i that was one of the more effective moderator moments because you
could see the moderator was like oh what a gift i've been given i just want to make very clear
let's let's have him say let's have him confirm what he means like three times and then we could move on.
Kambala had a good reply talking about how like we can't have a candidate who's confused
about how the elections work and being like, like, like she is correct.
Yes.
Come on.
Great response.
And then Trump immediately went on to defend Victor Orban.
Yes.
The president of Hungary saying that some people call him a strong man because he's
a really tough guy.
He loves the strongman thing.
That was my favorite part because he clearly misunderstood.
No, strongman is a term for dictator.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
He just.
That was quite a moment for this country.
It was just the fumbling and bumbling.
I love it.
You know what?
Overall, good time.
Except for one thing that really sucked, which is several things that really sucked,
which is whenever it came to something where a huge number of human lives were involved.
Yeah.
Almost always it got kind of brushed over.
Ukraine, I will say, I don't think it got a very good set of questions.
I will say, I don't think it got a very good set of questions. It was the same shit that they've been asking both sides, right? The Dems get asked, how are you going to actually conclude this
conflict in a favorable way? And the Republicans get asked, are you just going to abandon Ukraine,
right? Like that's the gist of what both candidates are being pushed on. And the gist
of their responses is unchanged
from everything we've heard earlier this year, right?
And despite being asked multiple times,
Trump refused to answer if it was in the world's best interest
if Ukraine wins the war.
He was asked that several times and he just said,
I want the war to end, not an answer.
And there wouldn't have been a war if I'd been president.
He said, this wouldn't have happened.
Yeah.
This wouldn't have happened. That's his claim. But, you know, Harris did not have an answer because there isn't have been a war if I'd been president. He said this wouldn't have happened. Yeah, this wouldn't have happened.
That's his claim.
But, you know, Harris did not have an answer because there isn't one.
No, no.
This is an incredibly difficult war.
Right now, I will say, I think like the actual thing she should have done and the thing that Biden should have done is say, like, we are removing all extant limitations on the weapons that we ship Ukraine and how they can use them.
You know, at this point, they have now invaded Russian territory and occupied hundreds of miles
of it. Like, you know, that was something I was interested in that she should have hit on and did
not, which Trump brought up the fact that Russia has nuclear weapons and a matter of like, we can't
push him too much. Who knows what they'll do? Right. That was clearly what he wanted people to
take from him bringing up the fact that Russia has a nuclear arsenal. And Harris didn't bring up like, yeah, you know, they invaded
Russia a couple of weeks back. No nukes. Like this kind of threat is clearly something that the Putin
regime wants the international community to have. But when push comes to shove, he's not suicidal.
But when push comes to shove, he's not suicidal. And the idea that like Putin is going to start nuking people one very quick question. You could tell the moderators wanted to move the fuck past it as fast as
possible. And both Trump and Harris wanted to get past it. Harris more so than Trump.
Harris stayed with about the same statement she made at the DNC.
Yep. She first mentioned October 7th, talking about how far too many innocent Palestinians
have been killed. The war must end. We need a ceasefire
deal. The hostage is out. We need to chart
a course for a two-state solution and rebuild
Gaza. We will always give Israel the
ability to defend itself, especially in relation to Iran.
That was most of her statement.
Which is nothing new from her.
No. Trump first tried to skip the question
and just immediately talk about Russia.
He then said that Kamala hates
Israel and she also hates the arab people the whole area will will be bombed under her presidency
saying that if he gets elected as president-elect he will he will solve the war and then he just
talked about like how oil pipelines are important um it was so weird interesting to me that he tried
to skip this when this is one of the things she's weakest on and one of the
things but i think it may just be that like americans overwhelmingly at this point do not
think israel is categorically in the wrong they think that israel is often in the wrong in this
war and has been killing a lot of innocent people and so it may just be that he knows that like
this isn't really a great issue for me either let's move back to something but it was it was war and has been killing a lot of innocent people. And so it may just be that he knows that like,
this isn't really a great issue for me either. Let's move back to something. But it was, it was interesting to me that he didn't have any kind of concerted attack, like saying she hates
Israel and Arabs is such a strange tactic to take here. And I don't see how he thought it could help
him. Who are you trying to appeal to?
Right. How is this supposed to get
you a vote? What vote does this get you
that you don't have? There's just no way
that was what was in his campaign prep.
That was not advised.
There's no way. Yeah. Kamala did
have a good line here to think points towards
her courting the NatSec
people. She said,
it's well known that trump is weak on foreign
policy and national security he's pro dictator yeah yeah trump just doesn't have any way to
answer that because yeah he does want to be a dictator he just yeah he just defended the
president of hungary like like a few minutes ago yeah like called him a strong man and said that
that means he's tough well he also she had a good line about how like he's not going to be tough with these people.
They're just going to like say something nice to him and then he'll immediately want to be their friends.
Like there was a that was a decent little jab.
She got a few of those more than a few.
I want to talk about since we're kind of running long just a little bit at the end here after the debate ended.
I caught this.
I don't think you guys did.
a little bit at the end here after the debate ended i caught this i don't think you guys did but trump went down to what's called the no spin zone which is a just a thing fox did i think it
started in the hannity show i caught the the fox immediate after the debate response do you want
me to get into that it's just a one one quick thing sure yeah so immediate response from fox
was vice president harris was clearly well
prepared but she was never held to the fire it felt like abc was helping her out he went down
a few cat and cat and dog holes instead of rabbit holes and not rabbit holes that was that was a
direct thing to the eating pets thing make no mistake about it trump had a bad night
yeah that's interesting then just talked about how she was calm and prepared and whatnot but
then you know hannity came on and did his hannity thing and then i i'm no spin zone that that must
have been why trump was heading down to the no spin zone so what happened you've got this it's
the floor of where they did the debate so everyone everyone is everywhere. Tons of media and Trump. There's like this huge scrum
around him. And I'm watching on ABC and the ABC anchors just start screaming at him from like
Donald Trump, Mr. President, trying to get him to answer their questions. And like everyone is
doing this. And he eventually like gives a statement where he says well this was my
favorite debate this was like the best debate i've ever had uh i clearly won someone was like so are
you going to do a second debate harris says she wants another debate and he's like well she just
wants another debate because she lost so i don't know if i'm gonna do another debate i found that
very funny i found it kind of shameful how the abc guys just kept howling at him him to give them some attention in the middle of this very crowded room.
There was no way he could hear you.
He's an old man.
Guys, have some self fucking respect.
You're supposed to be journalists.
And you had a colleague down there who was actually asking him questions.
But anyway.
Yeah.
So, yeah, there wasn't a ton there other than him kind of desperately trying and one of them did make the good point
that like he is claiming i obviously won the debate as he heads down to the spin zone to spin
his loss which is like yeah that's not not a position of strength no i don't know that you
would have been doing this if this had been a clean win but it certainly wasn't and yeah like
i i think tonight went pretty badly for him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
CNN was like foaming at the mouth.
Happy or sad?
CNN was thrilled.
Oh, good.
They're foaming at the mouth for Kamala Harris that nobody else has done what she's been
able to do.
And then something else happened that made CNN and MSNBC thrilled and ruined one Trump advisor's day. I'm sure Taylor Swift
endorsed Kamala Harris for president right after the debate. And if only we could have seen
that Trump advisor whispered in his ear that he did not, in fact, despite that AI fake endorsement,
get endorsed by childless cat lady,
Taylor Swift.
That's so interesting to me that she couched her endorsement in.
I am doing this because of the AI that Trump kept retweeting.
Yeah.
Retruthing.
Sorry.
Retruthing.
Retruthing.
Yes,
you're right.
I apologize.
I didn't mean to,
I'm not going to make that joke.
Anyway, Garrison, what were you going to say?
No, just that.
That's all.
Just retruthing.
It's interesting to me that she did specifically couch it.
It's because of what he did with this AI video that I felt like I had a need to come out and say who I'm voting for.
Yeah.
Also, she has a cute cat.
I hadn't seen her cat before.
It's also that.
But because I pay attention to Taylor Swift news, she was getting hammered a little bit in the last week because one of her good friends, Brittany Mahomes, who's the wife of Patrick Mahomes, who is Taylor Swift's boyfriend, Travis Kelsey's teammate.
Jesus Christ.
You're welcome. Has liked several of trump's posts and uh truth truths
no i i don't know where it was to be i think it was actually i don't i actually don't think it
was his posts i think it was just posts about him pro trump posts on instagram very important to
this election yes and and then they were seen together at the u.s open and and the girl bosses
were very unhappy with Taylor about this.
So I think that also
played into the timing. Robert, just so you
know, know your Taylor Swift facts. Bye, Sophie Lichterman.
Sorry, Sophie. Well, you were
talking about washed-up musician Taylor
Swift. Oh my god!
No! Don't ruin our lives!
They're gonna get on...
The Swifties are gonna get on our ass.
They will get our show canceled robert evans
we are not in that era i was getting in that i was getting crucial debate take from america's
most influential celebrity dilbert artist scott adams what do you think no the debate is a tie
so far with lots of hopes is flying a tie is a win for harris oh well that's
true i think that is true there you go scott good work scott comes out saying that harris won the
debate there you go that's great finally i do i do think it's funny that trump claimed that he
didn't know about his previous comments questioning if kamala harris was black that was a very bizarre
little section talk about that moment oh were you accused her of putting out too what was that
talk he was also like saying uh well the central park five pled guilty so actually i think it was
okay i wanted them executed it's a a wild a wild unforced error there. Man.
That whole little racism section was just, just crazy.
Look, I will take one quick victory lap because I said after the last debate, which it was a disaster in every possible way for Biden.
Trump's not himself either.
He is definitely an older man than he was in 2016 and even 2020. like yeah this this was that well hopefully this was
the only presidential debate that we'll have to talk about with kamala v trump what an exciting
time i i'm excited for that for that vance wall's debate uh if that ever happens so am i oh
interesting that like our reaction after this debate was like okay she shouldn't do any other
debates and he's gonna want to do more debates yeah and it was the exact opposite in their in
their reactions yeah i i was interested by that which like on on msnbc tim walls was like she
should do one every day i mean she did good she did well but like my reaction was like okay you
did the job you did the job i do think
like i have like oh boy is i think this might be hubris coming in here and a bad idea but she could
be right i i don't know yeah yeah like one of the problems is that if the election doesn't turn
around as much or if something else happens that pushes momentum back towards trump she might need a third
debate and you kind of have to you kind of can't know like you're you are rolling the dice on this
one way or the other yeah well that was that was the best debate i've ever i've ever watched um
yeah just in terms of it actually being a debate yeah there was not a half dead man on screen or
yeah maybe there was there just wasn't two half dead men on screen so you just get a good look
at like okay yeah these are these are pretty decent pictures of the kinds of president that
these people want to be and like it literally comes down to he was not willing to shake her hand
and she walked across the stage to shake his hand. And that's basically what the debate was.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Anyways, this has been It Could Happen Here.
We're going to post our source links from this episode in the episode description.
So look out for that.
Yeah, that's right.
And, you know, until next time, I don't really have any advice. Bye.
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 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.
Hey, I'm Gianna Prandti.
And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden.
We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline,
the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts.
One of the most exciting things about having your first real job
is that first real paycheck.
You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone.
But you also have a lot of questions like,
how should I be investing this money?
I mean, how much do I save?
And what about my 401k?
Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down.
I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year,
you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going
to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually
a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly.
I am talking to a felon right now and I cannot decide if I like him or not.
Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko.
It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world
as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives.
I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds
of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment.
I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age
of 29, they won't let me move out of their house.
So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your
podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand
new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature.
I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories.
Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters.
From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture.
Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them.
Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers
and to bring their words to life.
Listen to Blacklit on the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming.
This is the chance to nominate your podcast
for the industry's biggest award.
Submit your podcast for nomination now
at iHeart.com slash podcast awards.
But hurry, submissions close on December 8th.
Hey, you've been doing all that talking.
It's time to get rewarded for it.
Submit your podcast today
at iHeart.com slash podcast awards.
That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards.
Hi, everyone.
It's me, James.
This is a pickup.
It's Thursday morning.
I recorded with Joseph on Wednesday night.
Someone destroyed or removed one of our coolers since then.
I've received photos this morning of a place where
we put it and it's gone you can probably draw your own conclusions as to how i feel about that
and probably tell from how i'm talking to you that i'm pretty pissed off also our friend rafael
rafael from los angeles del desierto is without a vehicle at the moment his truck broke this is a
person who gives every ounce of his being to rescuing migrants. He is there with them in their hardest times.
When they pass away, he's there to recover their remains with dignity, to connect their families.
With the passing moments of their loved ones, he's there to rescue people.
He rescued a woman and child on Monday.
His truck's broken.
And if you're able to give, I'm going to include a link in the show notes i talked
to borderlands relief collective and we all agreed that the most important thing right now is to get
money to rafael so he can continue doing that life-saving search and rescue work as we hit
record temperatures here and before it gets freezing cold in the winter so if you can please
please just a few bucks like we'll buy him an old truck. I'll fix it.
I just don't want more people to die out there.
And I think having a truck for Raphael would meaningfully make it safer for people.
So if you're able to give, please give.
Otherwise, please enjoy this podcast.
And yeah, I understand if you can't.
It's a hard time for everyone.
But yeah, either way, help if you can.
Enjoy this podcast.
Bye.
Hi, everyone, and welcome to the podcast.
Today, it's me, James, and I'm joined by Joseph Hauser,
who's a volunteer from Borderlands Relief Collective,
who was out with me on Sunday.
We're recording this on Wednesday night,
and we were dropping water at the border.
We wanted to describe for you a little bit of our what we saw out there it was very hot
and things were in a bad way I think it's fair to say like despite all of our best efforts things
were really difficult there there's only so much we can do when it's 105 degrees and there are
dozens of people and we're trying to get water to all of them so welcome to the show yeah yeah
thank you James thanks for having me on no I appreciate you being here so i think if we begin by like describing
preps for people um we first started messaging about going out on sunday like
saturday afternoon right i think yeah yeah it was um yeah early saturday afternoon i had
just finished getting my haircut um i'd gone and grabbed an early lunch.
And I saw a message from you in one of our group chats
that some of the local grocery stores were selling those big orange five-gallon water jugs for like $13.
Apparently, they're trying to get rid of their stock or something.
So you, me, a couple of other people were scrambling around the county trying to buy up as many of them as we could yeah like i think
that's like normally 100 bucks for reference there like a insulated water vessel with a spout on the
bottom and given that we knew it was going to be a record temperature and it was already really
hot on saturday we wanted to try and get folks water that was as cold as possible so yeah we
went all around bought all the uh all the ones from that chain of grocery stores that we could
and uh sort of corralled them and then we put ice in them right yeah this is the next day on sunday
and then you and i met up and we went out do you want to just give people a sense of like the people
we met right from all over the world uh the different places we met them and then the sort of conditions that we found them in yeah so uh the first group of people we met we
ran into uh four mauritanian men uh yeah they seemed to be in pretty good spirits they were
all traveling together uh gave them some food gatorade water kind of our typical stuff that we hand out and I don't know maybe
three minutes down the road
from there, I don't know
where the man was from
but it was an Asian man that did not
look to be in great shape, his clothes
was torn up, his face was really
dirty
from what we could understand
he was saying he had been mugged
his cell phone had
been stolen from him yeah and he just looked in a bad way so we yeah you know gave him water gave
him uh again some gatorade and when we tried to give him some food he was just like i i can't like
i'm i'm so like he's just so dehydrated he he couldn't stomach anything
other than liquid yeah it was like we see people all the time who are who are in a bad state but
like it's pretty rare for people to be like i can't eat yeah i'm too dehydrated i can't face
food right now because he'd been walking for at least seven eight hours i'm guessing if not days
yeah depends how he came.
Man, because we were just driving along and he came out of the verge, like, with his hands in the air,
like, looking just so afraid.
Like, they'll stay with me for a while.
Yeah.
Like, the absolute, like, fear that he had.
Yeah, like, he just looked stricken.
Yeah, yeah.
Like, just really, I don't know.
It's just so sad to see someone reduced to that.
I'm glad we were able to help him and get him the stuff that he needed.
And then from there, we moved on to, I'm trying to think where we went next.
We went up to the top, right?
We drove up to the top of the mountain.
Yeah, we went up to an area where Borderlands Relief Collective
has set up what
we call a welcome station it's up on top of one of the smaller peaks in the area uh it gives us
a good view like you can see all the way down to the actual border and stuff and kind of take
note of like okay like we've got a group coming up they're here there's some people crossing over
there and then we've primarily done that in the winter time
just to greet people with some like some hot teas some water food just basically things to say like
hey like you know you're here yeah and at least give them a friendly face because who knows what
they've you know what everyone's been through just to get to that point yeah so we dropped
one of our uh water jugs there and then went a little bit
further down the road to a gate that i think border patrol maintains that gate maybe cal fire
yeah as well um they they keep that locked pretty much always but we know people take that road up
obviously so uh we left one of the smaller uh water jugs we were able to pick up.
I think that one was like a two or three gallon that we left there.
Right. Yeah, because people walk up to the border.
I always like that spot.
Oh, it's weird because sometimes you see people and you're like,
oh, they've got a long walk and it's hot and I'm up here and they're down there and that sucks.
Sometimes it's a really, if it was anywhere else, it'd be a beautiful view.
There's a valley below with a little oak grove. And like, sometimes you'll see like a red-tailed hawk or something and it'll be like level with your eye line because you're at the top
there and it's, but unfortunately, yeah, it's at the border so people have to suffer miserably
there.
Yeah, it's absolutely gorgeous, like natural landscape, but it is like just so unbelievably
deadly and unforgiving yeah like
you and i have both hiked like uh alongside hiking up and down the road we've hiked on the trails
that migrants often take and i've hiked a lot you've hiked a lot yeah it's incredibly difficult
going yeah it's difficult for us as like fit people with technical apparel and good shoes
and like we often see people in flip-flops or like crappy sneakers
yeah if they have footwear at all at that point yeah i remember a number of the people we ran into
um didn't have shoes like later in the day yeah and i've definitely given away shoes before i
normally have some in my truck but i'm a giant person not everyone fits that's like penguin flipper feet so i wasn't able to help everyone um so yeah we went
from there we dropped another we hiked to water in a little bit because we the road was too narrow
to turn the truck around and we dropped that and another gate and then i think at that point things
were pretty normal and that was like a a normal water drop day or like a driving water drop day
i should say not a hiking one do you want to describe what we saw at the next place you went
to because i think that was when both of us realized that like things were going to be worse
than normal and people needed as much help as we could possibly get them yeah so um basically once
we finished up in that area we we went from where we were.
We went a little bit further south.
I don't know.
It's like maybe a 10 minute drive.
You think once we got back to the main road?
Yeah.
We ran into a group of three men.
I believe they were Mauritanian.
Again, a different group of men.
Yeah.
When we came across them, they were kind of walking almost like just middle of the lane on the road yeah yeah which was kind of like keyed us in that like oh
like we should stop and check on these guys they overall seem to be doing pretty well like they
were obviously very tired exhausted from their journey but they were telling us that you know
like oh we've got another two we've got
two more they fell behind so we gave these guys you know again the normal like food gatorade water
checked in with them to see if they had like any wounds or anything we could treat and they seemed
pretty good um so we hung out in that area for i don't know it was maybe five ten minutes max before we saw the people
that they had mentioned were further down the road uh so another two guys came up we again gave them
what supplies they seemed like they needed the um the fifth guy in that group seemed to be in the
worst shape of all of them um yeah he was. He was upright and moving under his own power,
but you just kind of see that little wobble in his step.
So we kind of took some extra time with him.
I believe we got him a little ice pack to put on the back of his neck
just to try and bring his body temperature down.
And then kind of just got all five of them regrouped together
under a tree uh in some shade and then from there we went i don't know maybe we got maybe 300 feet
down the road and we uh came across a group of five i I believe they were all Spanish speakers.
I didn't catch where they were from.
Yeah, I think one said from Colombia.
I can't remember where the whole group were from, though.
But that was... So far, everyone we had run into was,
by appearance, middle-aged men.
I shouldn't say middle-aged, like young adult.
Yeah, yeah.
Like 30, 35 maybe 35 maybe like you know
somewhere in that range yeah yeah they could be anywhere from like 20s to 30s yeah like i think
some of that is because it was such a difficult day that like some folks who have children or
older people maybe decided not to make the journey that day yeah they had that choice but this yeah this group was yeah this group of five we uh i want to say it was
three men in that age range uh there was a woman with them and then a kid that if i had to guess
probably 15 at the oldest like i yeah seem to remember like clocking that he had braces on
like he just he seemed young yeah he seemed like a child yeah it wasn't like a
young man and so you know we got off to the side of the road again we're giving them food water
all that um again like this is all off the main road for that area and like as we're interacting
with these groups uh you know like several border patrol cars are just zooming past like yeah just
cruising by nobody nobody's stopping to check in nobody's you know like you know stopping them from
big finger quotes here invading yeah yeah getting getting on a bus as like people got so mad about
last week before they got mad about Haitian people.
But yeah, so we worked with that group.
Nobody really seemed to be in dire straits there.
So we're working towards a trailhead, which we could actually see from where we were working with this group of five.
And there's like a little bridge there and we just kind of see some heads popping up yeah and we're like oh i think you have my binoculars and we were like checking
to see yeah and so we're like oh like we like we need to get over there so we uh get back in the
truck after we get them kind of you know as settled as we can and we get over to this trailhead which is like
really i think where the day because like you said like it was kind of a normal day
up until we got to this trailhead and then things kind of seem to take a turn
yeah talking of taking a turn why don't we take a turn to advertisements and then come back that's
why they pay you the big bucks that is yeah you. Did you see that? No one saw that coming.
All right.
All right.
We are back.
I hope that you haven't bought anything.
You can give money to Borderlands Relief Collective.
Google it.
Oh, yeah, that would be really nice i would appreciate that yeah so would it who would i
do that don't go to chumba casino yeah so we got over there and like that location just to give
people like paint a picture there's the road which we were traveling on and then parallel to that oh
not parallel to at 90 degrees there's a dirt road which we pulled into the road that we were traveling on and then parallel to that oh no parallel to at 90 degrees there's a
dirt road which we pulled into the road that we are traveling on was going over a creek which is
dry at this time of year so there's a bridge and it was under that bridge that people were hiding
from the sun and so that's why we couldn't see them until we were very close and yeah like
describe what we saw there because that one was when i was like oh
shit yeah that was when we started to run out of um enough bottles for people to drink out of so
we had to like just start opening like cans of energy drink and beer and stuff or whatever we
had in the truck just to use them as bottles yeah so we um we pull off the road and underneath that bridge, I didn't do a head count necessarily or anything, but it was a group of 15, 20 at least.
Yeah.
Again, mostly men in that 20 to 30 age range, but there were moms with kids and there were so many people. At that point, we had some water bottles, some Gatorades.
We had that one five-gallon jug with the ice water in it left
that we were going to take up to the top of this pass.
And by the time we got done getting every one water,
we ran out of water in the jug.
I think we had just about cleared out all the food we had we had no more gatorades we were scrounging around in the back of your truck
trying to just find vessels essentially to give people what liquid we could you know like get that that shake out of the ice yeah it was not good and so then that was when uh there was uh one
young man i believe he said he was from jordan he was trying to get our attention and telling us you
know like i've i've got two like i've got family up there two two family and he keeps pointing up
up the mountain toward the pass saying he's got two family members up there.
And then another man, I didn't catch where he was from, but he was telling us there were two family members of the first man.
And then there was another three men traveling up there.
And they were trying to indicate to us that one of them had heart problems yeah uh was how they uh how
they put it so we kept telling like hey like you know we're we're gonna go help them but the gate
to access that dirt road that goes up that pass was locked so first we had to figure out like who
we could contact to get through the gate.
And then that poor guy that said his family members were up on that mountain,
he desperately, desperately wanted us to drive him up there with us.
But we had to keep telling him, we can't.
It is so illegal for us to put you in a vehicle and take you anywhere.
Yeah, at least the
interpretation of the law is border patrol sees is that we would be like trafficking them at that
point and like maybe one could defend it in court if the person was like bleeding out or you know
something but pretty much that is something that we can't do yeah we've been out on a water drop
together and just handing out food and water to people
on foot next to the truck and border patrol has threatened like an agent has threatened to uh
write us up for trafficking yeah yeah in this particular incident which like i don't really
care this agent can go fuck himself um like we were this girl was probably four years old i would say i don't know exactly
i didn't ask wasn't the most important thing at the time she was with her mother they were both
from guinea and a nigerian woman like um i speak french so i was speaking to the guinean family
and like i remember you were trying to feed the little girl right like she had
yeah another uh another volunteer and i were trying to feed her some trail mix i had and um she she wouldn't touch any of it but
the um but the dried banana chips that were in there so um yeah like actually ever since then
anytime i make trail mix for drops i always make sure that i've got dry banana trips in there just
you know in case there's another kid that that's all they'll eat yeah and i remember
like she wasn't very responsive i've been talking to her mom and her mother's feet were in a very
bad way like uh like immersion foot and after a while we were like how this little girl has
is like not very talkative at all like maybe to a degree that we should be concerned and i think
we both we all kind of quickly realized
she was very cold like potentially hypothermic i remember having the i tried to record some of
this for the podcast but it's all it's all i had to wrap her up in a mylar blanket such that like
i was sitting behind her so that she would um get like warm from me right and then i'd unzip my jacket so she would
get warm from me uh and uh obviously the whole fucking podcast bit is my love blanket noise which
is a shame because at that point a border patrol agent arrived started swearing at us uh accusing
us of trafficking just like as if this little girl wasn't having the worst day of her life anyway yeah just like someone
who's paid by my taxes and your taxes turns up to scream at the only people who are helping her that
day and her right like it scared them and eventually one of our friends was able to
de-escalate that situation and uh those people got taken and hopefully processed and i hope that they are living a happy life in the u.s yeah for
sure but yeah it that was a bad day so yeah we as you said right we can't take this guy with us
back up the hill and we're now trying to get so it's about 10 kilometers to the top and it's 10
kilometers and i have no idea how it's a lot of climbing like it's it's 10 kilometers
all uphill yeah and so like it's not really possible for us to hike up that road and get
to these people who need help in a timely manner right in a manner that would last so we need to
drive um i think in the end we ended up calling 9-1-1 yeah I think that was what... We also called a friend who personally contacted us.
Yeah, somebody got Cal Fire out for us.
They opened the gate, kind of let us take the lead up that dirt road.
Yeah, I thought that was really cool of them.
It would have been easy for them to be like,
yeah, we're here to save you and credit where it's due.
They were like your
truck is going to go faster than our fire engine you guys should go first yeah so we get um a
portion of the way up and we run into the group of three men that we were told were there and
where at this point i think is when we realized like shit. Like the only water we have on our,
that we have at all is our personal water.
Um,
so I,
um,
actually I have water bottle right here next to me.
I,
um,
I like was literally pouring what I had left into their water bottle for
them.
Yeah.
Luckily this is like an insulated thing.
So it's cold for them,
but you know, we're trying to
figure out like shit like when we get to when we find these you know two women the family members
the guy kept talking about like yeah what are like what are we gonna do then like um i think we ended
up giving when we came across them further up the mountain at that point like we basically just had my backup nalgene yeah left so uh we were
like hey we want you to to take this like we just gave them the full nalgene and tried our best to
explain to them that we were going to go to the top make sure that there wasn't anybody else
up there and then we were going to come back down to check on them so we do that we go up to the top
where uh you and some other volunteers have built like a little shade structure to try and just give
people some relief yeah i didn't build that one i built the uh that previous one that that got
torn down okay by some type of cop. Lovely.
Yeah, great.
Really nice.
Really helpful.
It wasn't actually a cop, to be fair.
I'm pretty sure it was some other federal agency,
BLM or BP or someone.
But so when we got up to the top,
we didn't see anybody else. We couldn't find anybody up there.
We were doing our best to try and use our language skills to uh yeah we were
just shouting in various languages to see if anyone needed help then the cal fire guys met
back up with us up there you know figured out like hey like you know we were not seeing anybody else
so you and i decided that basically all we could do at that point was go back down the
mountain uh and go further south to a little town that's like pretty much right on the border i
think yeah it's literally a border crossing yeah because we ended up we drove down checked in on
the women the two women that were traveling down uh They seemed to be doing about as okay as they could at the time.
Again, it's like, I don't know, 105?
Yeah.
Completely exposed up there.
Yeah, there's no tree cover.
You're not getting any shade.
I don't remember it being particularly windy at all.
So it's just like hot, still.
Still, yeah.
Miserable.
But we get down the mountain, kind of
give everyone, like the
big group that's there
under the tree at the bridge at the bottom
a heads up of what we're
doing. We go into
this little town and again
tiny little place. It's basically
from what I saw
just parking lots
and then a gas station and a border crossing.
Yeah.
And that's it.
We went into this gas station and bought, I think, 16 gallons worth of water.
Yeah, they had to go around the back to get the rest of the water.
We took all the gallon jugs they had.
They had one of those little displays displays of like i don't know
i think it was like little keebler like cheese cracker sandwiches like we just bought the whole
display yeah um just to try and give people some uh some more food and then from there like we
just hightailed it back yeah to the bridge like distributed out some more water, checked in with them again, just explained we're going
back up. And as
we were going back up the mountain,
we started seeing these
little raindrops hitting our
windshield. Yeah.
Like, oh, that can't
be good. So we continue
up. When we found
the two women, they were both just
kind of lying in some shade just on the
road yeah it was not a good scene yeah and so we got out we mixed i think it was we got one
gallon of cold water and then we took another of the gallon jugs and just mixed up like a full
thing with some gatorade powder we found in your truck. Yeah. And just kind of sat down with them.
And then we got help with some translation over the phone,
trying to like talk to these women,
figure out like what exactly was going on.
Cause one of them kept like kind of pointing to her chest.
Yeah.
And she was doing the like thump,
thump,
thump.
Yeah.
Which is concerning.
Yeah. You know, like through, through the help we got translating over the phone just basically explained like we like we just
absolutely cannot transport you like we we want nothing more in this world than to be able to
take you down the mountain but we just can't yeah like i would have very happily put those ladies
in my truck and driven them down
like it that would have considerably improved my day yeah to do that because it is fucking
heartbreaking trying to tell someone they have to keep walking when they're maybe halfway down
and they're like just lying there exhausted ready to yeah i don't know what just give up but um yeah it fucking
sucks it sucks we now know that several people died that day and the day before and the day
after i guess i don't know exactly how many because the medical examiner hasn't confirmed
and i'm not going to say their names uh or really much by the location beyond that because i want to respect the privacy of their remains and their family
yeah and so until we hear from them i won't but like it's i found out some people had died in the
vicinity of where we were and i it was only i don't know exactly where people died i don't know
who they were but like it's a really fucking hard thing to sit with.
Like, I think those people we helped were probably okay.
I think between the fact that as we'll get onto a giant thunderstorm,
soaks them to the degree that we had to give them like ponchos.
And then just having to deal with like,
I would happily have driven up and down that road all day,
put people in my truck. It have bothered me in the slightest yeah we're not not able to
and somebody's journey ended in tragedy and like it's i don't know like we we try our best we're
out there a lot and it's not we we do more than enough like i'm not saying that like it's it's
on any way on us but like we would love to do
more if they would let us and like shit like that like not being able to put people in the vehicle
it's just it's just hard to live with um you know when you're sitting in bed at night or whatever
yeah having your dinner like it sucks but yeah because like there's i feel like there's this
picture like when you talk about san diego or just kind of Southern California in general, it's, oh, like it's sunny beaches, it's nice days, like it's mild weather year round. degrees on that mountain a thunderstorm rolled in and in a matter of i don't know 20 30 minutes
our conversation went from like oh like i hope they are you know are not coming down with like
a heat illness or you know gonna get heat stroke to like oh shit like are they gonna go hyperthermic
like what what do we have to get them warm we're trying to cool them down now we're trying to warm
them up like what what kind of cruel joke is this yeah like it does seem like this is the most perverse
thing to be like then worried about fucking lightning on the other side of the valley
you know like it was insane just like we then we carried on up the mountain dropped some water and
then returned down to check on these women again and when we were at the top of the mountain we
could look down on the thunderstorm yeah see it beneath us and then yeah we drove into it and like just what an apocalyptic
scenario to be in you know like it's dumping with rain triple digit temperatures and all you have
the only thing you're allowed to do is walk like it was difficult and then like i guess the last thing the last person
we ran into as we came down the mountain was the guy who'd been pleading with us to go help them
yeah god and like had decided border patrol had collected everyone to take them to process them
right for their asylum claim and that we've heard on this podcast before about what it's like when that happens it's not nice it's not a pleasant stay it's now considerably
worse i imagine people are being moved to texas they stayed for weeks uh i met a young man a few
months ago now who was in detention for three or four weeks before i presume being deported back i
can't find any record of him being released which fucking sucks so like
this guy had chosen not to go back and instead he'd chosen to hike back up the mountain without
any food without any water to try and rescue these women which i mean it's an incredibly
selfless thing to do but he was in a bad yeah bad way right yeah because when bad way so we passed the two women on the way down
gave them little snacks
just tried to encourage them as much as we could
and when we ran into this man
he had that crazed look in his eyes
he wasn't sure
do I just go back down?
I can't leave
them like i need to keep going like i feel like i can't and so we like tried to get him settled as
much as we could we got him some water i think you dug out some like gummy worms or something
from one of your bags yeah i had a bag of hot it wasn't it's like an open bag of haribo that he
like an open bag of haribo that he was happy to receive yeah and uh you know we just did our best to try and convince him to just kind of sit there rest a little bit and um you know like assure him
that they're coming they're walking down now and um it was honestly kind of beautiful the um the
one woman because the two women had kind of split up, uh,
a little bit while they were walking downhill.
So the one comes around the bend and like when they saw each other,
like he just kind of like,
you could see like just everything about him just kind of elevated.
And he,
you know,
pep in his stuff was like,
Oh my God,
like I'm so happy to see you.
And yeah,
he got up cause he'd just been kind of slouched there almost like uh
just looking exhausted yeah so like seeing them kind of reunite was really nice and they
had a quick conversation and seemed like they kind of decided she was going to keep going down and
um you know he just seemed like energized by that and decided to keep going up to find the
other woman to make sure she made it down as well yeah which was like not an easy choice i'm sure
for him like no yeah like at that point again we were out of food we uh we mixed him up some
gatorade i think we took the sugar packets from an mre and like mix them in there and some salt just to like,
yeah.
Try and give him like,
I guess something,
some fluid he could hold onto.
So he doesn't get hyponatremic.
Right.
Which is definitely something.
When you see the amount of salt on people,
like the white crusting on them, like,
and they're only drinking water and they're not replacing electrolytes.
Like it becomes a concern.
Yeah.
That I guess was us for the day, right?
Like we, we drove home and like, we didn't get to really find out how anyone did.
Um, we didn't get to follow up, right?
Like it's kind of not how that works, but yeah, that's just one day.
Like I spoke to Raphael from Angeles del Desierto and he was out on monday said it was just as bad
right yeah doing a search and rescue on monday for a mother and child and they were able to rescue
them and like i felt like it was a value to highlight what we saw in one day because it's
it's every day i mean it's cooled off now on wednesday it's a little less hot which is good but it's
every day at the moment well and i guess for like context cooled off means it's like low to mid 90s
yes yeah yeah yeah it's still like it's still not safe to make that hike without water people are
often mugged right when they cross the border or sometimes before sometimes they get their
bags stolen that often involves them getting their water bottle stolen that they've taken with them
right it makes that journey a lot more dangerous they also get their phone stolen so even if they
need help they can't call 9-1-1 border patrol sometimes has like rescue beacons that you can
press them and it calls border patrol on the route that we were on for the back half of the day there are none of those i saw
like i know i came back and you know sort of tried to process my day and get on with my life
like you do and uh and i saw the presidential debate last night and it just makes me so
fucking angry i mean we shouldn't expect any more from these people they're politicians they don't
give a shit about you they don't give a shit about me and they certainly don't care about these poor desperate people
and like i understand that people want to vote for kamala because maybe she's less bad than trump
but like i have a real fucking hard time thinking about the parents of the young man who died at the
border yeah having to deal with okay well she's less bad than Trump. Cool.
It doesn't bring that baby boy back, you know, like, and, uh, just seeing both of them, like
the whole framing of the immigration discussion was how do we reduce numbers and make it harder?
They didn't entertain for a moment that someone might come here because they've got nowhere
else to go and they need to be safe or because they want to work hard and have a better
future for their family there are a million reasons to come here right i came here to
fucking do a phd in spanish history and no one made me uh embrace my bike no no one made me
walk across the desert you know yeah it's uh their reasons are a lot more valid than mine were
and like i don't i guess i guess we should take a commercial break.
Okay, we're back.
I guess I want to finish up.
You told me a story about why you started volunteering,
which I thought was really meaningful,
and I'd like people to hear it.
So would you mind sharing that with everyone? Oh, yeah, no problem. So my grandmother on my father's side came to the U S from Panama, uh, to go to college. My grandma on my mother's side,
my understanding is they originally came to the U S because somewhere down the line,
they were German. Um. One of them was a
Duke, fell in love with
a servant girl or something.
That old story. Got ostracized
from the family and fled
to the United States.
Even though
looking at me,
white is white can be freckles and all.
My family
is immigrants. You gockles and all right like um my family is immigrants like you go back
like you know as we all are and god this was 2019 i didn't know what i was doing
um i felt stuck in my job um i just kind of wanted to get away from my family for, you know, lack of a better phrase.
And I thought, oh, why not?
Like, why not the Peace Corps?
Go do something good on the government's dime and, you know, see the world.
It's, you know, it's big, it's sexy, it's foreign.
And so I went, I got placed in Eswatini, which is a country in southern Africa.
And I was in the youth development sector there.
So I got placed, I was working at a high school there.
And I was having a conversation one day with the religion teacher who just couldn't, he could not understand the idea of like why we don't teach
religion in high schools in the u.s like he's like you know how can you learn to understand
somebody else's point of view if you're not allowed to learn about it and so like talked
about like how we value the concept of separation of church and state and just kind of got on the topic of different viewpoints between our two
cultures like that and this man looked at me and said i feel so blessed that there is a country
in this world like the united states where there's no poverty nobody goes hungry everybody has a job and there are people like you
willing to leave such a beautiful place to come here and help us which you know naturally i was
like oh like that's you know really nice of you to say but you know like in the united states like
we have people that go hungry we you know deal with poverty homelessness etc etc and i'll
never forget this guy looked me dead in the eyes and just said like oh then why are you here why
aren't you at home helping them and it just kind of shattered me in this you know like yeah no like you're right like i totally and
completely joined the peace corps for like these super selfish reasons and so like i said i was
there 2019 so um i was there i don't know if you or the listeners heard about this thing called
covid and the pandemic that happened but i was part of the global evacuation order that went out for Peace Corps, came back to the US, moved around a little
bit. And last year I was listening to your podcast at work. You interviewed a couple of people that
do work with Borderlands Relief Collective and just kind of thought to myself, well, like,
shit, I live near there like
i can carry stuff in a backpack like i know how to hike you know why not me why not go see how i
can help out and you know it's been a year and some change at this point that i've been with
the group and you know like it's not like i've got some big fancy degree in like international relations or anything like that i'm just a i'm
some guy i'm a graphic i'm a graphic designer that can carry stuff in a backpack yeah uh but
you know that makes all the difference sometimes yeah it's just being willing to go out there and
you know like put that compassion to you know to work yeah Yeah, I think we're just two dudes with a truck
and a credit card to buy water bottles.
It doesn't take either brilliance or command.
I speak a couple of other languages,
but often maybe I'll make the image for the show
my Google Translate app for that day.
We're just using the tools that most of us have right like and it
doesn't have to be at the border obviously lots of people listen on the border but like
things would be so much worse there if if local folks didn't just take it upon themselves to do
the things that the state refuses to do and like that applies to the unhoused population too right
like i know my friends were
also carrying water for them this weekend because it was hot i'm trying to get and the uh the city
shut down the homelessness resource center because uh the temperatures were too high in for the staff
which is fucking just something else but i don't think we should expect any more from the state
that's not what it's for it's not to to keep us safe. It's to keep capital safe.
It's to keep wealth safe.
It's to keep a certain class of people safe.
And it camouflages itself in all these institutions,
which say they're there to look after us.
But when it comes down to it,
when those ladies are lying on the dirt,
it's just two toots in a truck
trying to scrounge around for Gatorade.
I want people listening.
I know I harp on this a lot,
but like the only way that we fix it is you.
It's not someone else.
It's not posting.
I would love it if you could donate, right?
I mean, I'll include a link in the show.
That'd be great.
But I would love it so much more
if you could do something wherever you are.
Like, just don't think that anyone doing this is special like we of
course the things that i think they're special people enjoy spending time with them but like
you could do it too there's nothing that's inherently stopping you from doing it and
it doesn't matter who wins the election right it really doesn't matter every year that joe biden
has been president more people have
died than the year before and he was the guy who was supposed to be kind he didn't even run
on a harsh border policy harris is running on a hard policy it's it's only going to get worse
she's even reneged on building more wall like they are beginning to construct wall around
okumba and the places where we looked after people last winter.
So that'll push people to Valley of the Moon
where it is impassable terrain.
Yeah.
Where more people will die in the cold
and more people will die in the heat.
And I guess we'll probably be out there too
trying to help them.
But I just want everyone listening,
like I know we've covered the election a lot.
It doesn't, I don't want to tell you it doesn't matter.
I'm sure it matters.
Like it matters for my friends in Kurdistan
who Trump fucking abandoned and left to die
after they gave thousands of their children to fight ISIS, right?
But even if Harris wins,
like donations went down so much in the Biden era
compared to the Trump era.
And people died in the desert.
People died in Tijuana, right?
Because that's what this system does.
But people stopped caring
when a lot of big commercial networks
start reporting on it.
And I would like you all still to care
whoever wins the election.
I'd like you all still to care before the election
and the way you can show that you care
is showing up for your community,
whatever it is, right?
Armando isn't going to fucking solve homelessness either.
So yeah.
You got anything to leave people with, Joseph?
Anything you want to say, want to plug?
Just, you know, Borderlands Relief Collective,
Border Kindness,
Rafael's group, the Ángeles de Desierto, I think.
Yeah.
You know, just if you can come out, like if think um yeah you know just if you can come out like if you're in the area if you can come out you can help great like the more people that carry supplies
the more we can leave if you're not in the area or you know like hiking carrying heavy things is not
what you're into donating always super appreciated um i know specifically borderlands relief
collective every single cent that is donated to us goes to supplies that we leave for migrants
and even if it's only a few dollars i mean like we're talking bottled water i mean the 16 gallons
of water that we bought i think ended up running somewhere in ballpark,
like 50 bucks.
Like,
you know,
like it's,
it's water Gatorade.
Sometimes it's,
you know,
off brand Gatorade.
So like a few,
a few dollars can go a long way.
And that long way could mean saving someone's life.
Yeah,
totally.
So,
you know,
whatever you can give,
I will be appreciated.
I know our friend Raphael from Los Angeles del Desierto,
his vehicle broke this weekend.
He does search and rescue.
If you've got a few bucks and you want to pass them his way,
it's Los Angeles, like the town, deldesierto.org.
I'll put that in the link too.
But we'll put both those in the show notes.
Please do whatever you can.
And yeah, hopefully next time I talk to you about border stuff, it'll be better news.
Thank you, James.
Yeah, thanks, man.
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
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