It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 189

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Starting point is 00:02:35 about organizing. I'm your host, Mia Wong. And with me is one of the most experienced organizers I know, Margaret Killjoy. Oh, no. Hi. I'm a little out of practice, but I have done it a lot Yeah Mark Margaret says this and also has been doing shit for like one bazillion years And this is this is and I will say this The sign of you that you are running into a good organizer is when you talk to them about their organizing and they immediately start downplaying

Starting point is 00:03:02 It that's what you know that you have encountered a good organizer. If they start immediately going, I'm the best fucking organizer in the world, run like hell. This is an asshole who sucks. If you're someone who's like, ah, I did this a billion years ago, I'm not good at it, but I didn't know it didn't matter, blah, blah, blah, blah. Very good organizer. Thank you. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:03:22 I remember once I went to a thing, wait, that was put on and there was this, they were kind of turfy people who were coming through and we didn't totally know that right away. And their pitch about why they were such a good experienced organizers is one of them was like, and this person has been organizing for more than three years. And it was just like, okay, every person you are giving this talk to has done this for at least three times as long as that. Like and don't get me wrong if you're listening and you've been organizing for three years you've learned a lot I'm not trying to tell you that you're a bad organizer You might be a better organizer and someone's been doing it longer, but don't use that as your selling point. Anyway, that's very funny

Starting point is 00:04:03 Yeah, so okay this episode we are asking you a very, very important question. Okay, you want to change something about the world, I don't know what that thing is, that is for you to determine. The question that you need to be asking is, are you organizing because you want to feel cool or are you organizing because you want whatever you're doing to fucking work? And if you want your organizing to work, literally no matter what it is, you actually need to listen to this episode and you need to have some rudimentary knowledge of the thing we're about to talk about.

Starting point is 00:04:31 Because if you do not, your organizing will fail. If you cannot do this, the thing we're going to talk about in this episode, if you cannot do this, everything else you know, all of your experience, all of your knowledge, all of your passion, all of it is fucking useless Because the actual work of organizing is Incredibly unglamorous. It is unsexy. A lot of it is very time-consuming A lot of it is not cool. It is you sitting there and talking to a bunch of people Yeah

Starting point is 00:04:59 And if you want your movement to succeed You have to be able to do this kind of like groundwork the gistical work because if you don't it won't work So what we are going to teach you the very very very very basics of in this episode is a social Technology that has been developed over the course of literal centuries of movements, right? This is something this is something that has been passed down and refined Like through generations and generations of organizers. I mean, I could do a genealogy of this.

Starting point is 00:05:28 A lot of the modern stuff sort of came through the Quakers, moved through the civil rights movements, moved through the anti-war movements, moved through like in Vietnam, moved through a whole bunch of other movements, like to be passed down to you today. This is a complicated social technology. It does not sound complicated. If you do not know how to do this, it is impossible to try to replicate on the fly. And that is, we are going to explain to you the very basics of how to run a meeting. Yeah, I really like this way of phrasing it,

Starting point is 00:05:57 that it's a technology. Like it's a way of applying ideas to get something to happen. Even if a lot of it is instinctive, there is an art to it. But like, yeah, no, there's stuff you can like learn and apply and it's, technology is a good way of framing it. Yeah. And it's one of these things where, you know, you can kind of, if you don't know how to

Starting point is 00:06:19 do this and you have a group of people, you can kind of sort of maybe approximate something that is a little bit functional. And the moment it runs into a stress point, it will collapse completely. And this is a thing that like, you know, I have talked to, I have done a lot of these. I have talked to a lot of people who've done this. I have like, I have been in rooms, people knew how to run meetings. I've been in rooms, people didn't know how to run meetings. I have talked to a bunch of people who have been in rooms who don't know how to run meetings. And like there are rooms of people with collectively hundreds of PhDs.

Starting point is 00:06:49 And because nobody in the room knew how to fucking run a meeting, complete disaster their organizing didn't work. Yeah. Right. You have to be able to do this. And it doesn't really matter. You know, we're not going to get that much into like what mechanism you're using to make decisions because this is this is like even like a layer below that. And so this is not that you can use it, you know, regardless of whether you're doing consensus and like, you know, like, and I think that like if you're trying to make a decision as a group, right, and you're trying to get everyone to want to do the thing and do it, I think that some version of consensus is a good idea. But this can be for a sort of just like a, you know, like a majority of world democratic process, whatever process you are using to decide things, you need some kind of structure thing there.

Starting point is 00:07:32 Otherwise it's just not going to function. Like none of it will. What's wild to me is that it's almost like the important thing is that there is a structure. There's so many different structures you can use. Like when we come at this, I don't actually know, I'm the podcast idiot on this episode, me is gonna explain stuff to me. But like, there's a lot of different ways to do this. And the important way, the important thing is that

Starting point is 00:07:52 you do one of them. Like there are ways that I think are better or worse, right? But you do actually need to create a structure and move forward with that structure in order to get anything done, which is the whole secret of organizing. That is what organizing is, is you actually have to say, not only do I want something to get done, but I'm going to figure out the steps by which to get that done.

Starting point is 00:08:13 And it also applies to meetings. Yeah. And that kind of undergirding thing of figuring out how you're going to do it. That's the part of organizing that, as you're saying, it's like nothing works without it because it is like half of what organizing is and otherwise you are just saying things into the wind. And admittedly, my job is to say things into the wind. So I hope you do it. So like, you know, I have a little bit of respect for that, but also you need to have some way of getting other people to do things. Yeah, it's like a, when you sit around with your friends and like, oh, someone should do this.

Starting point is 00:08:46 No one's actually named someone, you know? I mean, somewhere there's a non-binary person named someone. But... Shout outs to someone. Yeah, yeah. If you're listening to someone, congratulations, you're a master level troll. But like, my friend Donask,

Starting point is 00:08:59 her name was Donask, it's great. Anyway, whatever. Uh, but... But someone needs to get something done. And if you leave a thing being like, oh, someone should do this, you didn't organize. You have to say, this is what the following people are doing. Also, shout out also to everyone who has been in meetings with me and are like, why is Mark? I'm insufferable in meetings. I try really hard hard Anyway, whatever. Oh

Starting point is 00:09:27 God okay. Okay. So this largely is going to be like how to run a meeting 101 We're gonna start at like zero zero zero, which is you need a place to meet Mm-hmm, and that place to meet has to be accessible to everyone who's trying to go to the meeting This is a thing that people screw up a lot It is not that hard to find the place that accessible's trying to go to the meeting. This is a thing that people screw up a lot. It is not that hard to find a place that's accessible for everyone to go. You can do this. There are lots of places you can have meetings, depending on how sensitive the meeting is,

Starting point is 00:09:53 you know, how formal and informal it is. I've done meetings in restaurants, I've done meetings in bars, I've done them in libraries. People use churches sometimes, like queer centers, union halls, parks. I wanna shit talk bars really quickly. Yeah, I don't think bars is a great idea, but... I don't think it's accessible to people who are under 21,

Starting point is 00:10:11 and I don't think it's accessible to people who have problems being around drinking. That said, they happen there, and I'm not trying to say you're bad for having had meetings there, but I just want to say that... Yeah, bars is one that, like, people go to a lot, and, like, yeah, there's definitely issues with it. Right. But I don't know, like you can have them in people's houses. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:10:29 Sometimes you can like go into like a Mesa or whatever and you can go have a meeting there. You can get people to just like go out somewhere and do it. You know, I don't know, like you are capable of thinking of lots of places where you could have meetings, but you actually do need to have a location. And this is actually again, I've talked about this before, but it's like one of the organizing things that's actually really important is like knowing how to get a room for a meeting or get a room for something to happen. You have to be able to do this. This is like zero zero. Like, okay, you know, okay, so you've now achieved this and congratulations.

Starting point is 00:11:02 You clowns have now achieved a location. I am going to stick a provisional thing in here, which is... This is this is jumping the gun a little bit, but I need to put in here. Do not use Robert's Rules of Order. One of the things you will be told and if you have been in organizations before a lot of them use a thing called Robert's Rules of Orders, which is this old Organizations before a lot of them use a thing called Robert's Rules of Orders, which is this old Like incredibly elaborate set of parliamentary procedures do not use them. They suck And this this gets into before we can even talk about what a meeting is right and how you do it

Starting point is 00:11:41 You really really do not want your meetings to get bogged down in everyone having to learn 1,000,000 lines of parliamentary. And this is a problem for any meeting technology that you use, because they all do involve a little bit of technical stuff, because you have to get people to be able to do things. Oh, but we think with Robert Fools of Order is that like, it's like hundreds of pages, right? And in those hundreds of pages are the recipe for one asshole to derail your entire meeting by doing a whole bunch of unhinged parliamentary shit.

Starting point is 00:12:11 I have seen this happen. It sucks. This is something that you can technically do in any meeting structure. But the more opaque the rules of the meeting are, the easier this shit is to do. And the harder it is to be like, please stop. Yeah, there's, you have to have a certain amount of flexibility in the way that you do things, because every system, it's the problem with law as a concept, right, is every system can, you can find loopholes and anyone who's been in a lot of meetings has seen people

Starting point is 00:12:41 learn how to abuse the process in order to get their position to win by making everyone else too tired to continue or to use up all of the space in the room or you know whatever but I think that yeah this idea that the rules that are used in your meeting I think that a very good facilitator which is something that I tend to believe in for meetings, is capable of explaining the process in such a way that even when a lot of people come who are not familiar with the process, they will leave familiar with the process. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:13:17 Yeah. Like to that sort of end, if you need a like, okay, we need a written procedure thing, the thing I would recommend is called Rusty's Rules of Order, which is an unbelievably pared down version of Robert's Rules of Order that was specifically developed to be used in, like, Union Circles, in activist circles. And it's like, the total PDF of it is 25 pages. That makes it sound way longer than it actually is.

Starting point is 00:13:43 Like, several of those pages are like a glossary and like the cover. It's very easy to read. It's easy to understand. If you have to use a like, this is a formalized procedure. Do Rusty's, don't do Robert's. This is just a, I need to do this before we say anything else because a bunch of people are going to push you to use this and it sucks. So having gotten that out of the way, we can now get into, okay, things from meetings. I was supposed to make a joke about at the top of all this.

Starting point is 00:14:09 I'm sorry everyone. Everyone has been waiting for me to make this joke, I'm certain. But Mia, which one of us is going to keep stack during this meeting so that we know who can talk? The products and services who support this podcast are going to keep stack and we're going to go to the right the fuck down We are back and I really just want to say as timekeeper I'm a little bit upset about how much time that those ads used during the meeting and if we can how much time that those ads used during the meeting. And if we can... God fucking damn it. Okay, we will explain what a stack is

Starting point is 00:14:50 and what a timekeeper is in a second. However, comma. So things you need to do at the very start of a meeting, you need to take like two minutes to do this. But you need to explain how the meeting fucking works and you need to assign everyone roles. And you can't assume that everyone who is going to be in this meeting understands how the rules work. Like you cannot and this is something I've run into is like you can't assume that everyone

Starting point is 00:15:14 understands what your hand signals are or even just basic like everyone has been in a thing before and understands what a stack is. Right? You can't assume that unless you know everyone in the room and more than that, like unless you know everyone's level of experience in the room and you've been in meetings with them before, like you can't assume the level of knowledge that everyone has. And I have watched these processes not work because people just did that. And then a bunch of people in the room were like, what the fuck is going on?

Starting point is 00:15:39 So you need to, at the start of the meeting, explain how the meeting is going to work, like at least a little bit. This doesn't have to be super formal. This can be like fucking two minutes of like, we're going to have a stack, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And for anyone just so you know what we're saying right now, we'll explain stack more. That is the order in which people talk. It is a way of like keeping track of the line of who's going to talk when. Yeah, I realizing this explanation is jumping around a little bit, but you need to make sure that everyone understands how the meeting is supposed to work.

Starting point is 00:16:04 And, you know, usually that's really quick. Sometimes someone will just not know something, and then, okay, you explain it to them, and that's like fine and chill. And like, I don't know, I remember being a little tiny baby anarchist and like not knowing anything and going to my first meeting and like, people were talking about restorative justice. And I was like, Hi, what's restorative justice? I'm like a little tiny child. I don't know anything. And they explained it and it was like chill and good and you can just do this and it helps people feel included and yeah. Totally. Okay, so general meeting facilitation. Things you need. You need one. An agenda.

Starting point is 00:16:39 An agenda is what the fuck are you doing? And generally speaking, secondarily, you want to try to have time planned out because one of the one of the failure modes of a meeting is the meeting goes for fucking 30 hours and everyone's miserable. So you generally want to have an agenda that has what you're going to talk about and then kind of guidelines roughly for how long you think it'll take to talk about the thing. We'll get more into that in a second. Sometimes people create the agenda beforehand.

Starting point is 00:17:05 Sometimes you set the agenda at the beginning of the meeting, but like you do want an agenda so people know what you're doing. And it should be somewhere that everyone can see on a whiteboard, or like, I guess in a Zoom meeting notes, or a dock that everyone has open. Yeah, yeah. You want to make sure everyone has it. Okay, and this is the point where we need to talk about roles. So part of the technology for this, right, You want to make sure everyone has it. Okay, and this is the point where we need to talk about roles. So part of the technology for this, right,

Starting point is 00:17:27 and the stack is a big piece of technology to keep track of who's talking, but a big part of what the technology of this is, is a bunch of roles that you assign people, and that ideally everyone rotates through, so you learn how to do all of them. And so to prevent people from sort of concentrating power by like monopolizing one role

Starting point is 00:17:46 so the first role we need to talk about and this is I don't know if the big ones the right one but this is The one that I think people know kind of I don't know if intuitively understand is the right word But like this is the one that there are usually versions of in a meeting and a lot of those versions are bad is a facilitator Yeah usually versions of in a meeting and a lot of those versions are bad is a facilitator. Yeah. So, okay. My, my explanation of what a facilitator is and Morgan, I'm going to ask you for yours too because I don't know. So as a facilitator, your job is to like point to the agenda and go, okay, we're talking

Starting point is 00:18:16 about this. Your job is to move people through discussions. Your job is to try to get people to a consensus on what you're doing. And your job is to stop people from giving speeches. And this is, I'm going to take a little digression here, which is, okay, we've been talking about ways meetings fail, right? Number one, no one can go to it. That that's, that's way meeting fails.

Starting point is 00:18:37 Two, you don't have an agenda and everyone, it just goes off the rails and no one has any idea what you're supposed to be meeting about. Three, and this is a huge one, is that one of the biggest ways that meetings fail, and I have seen this in every single context I've ever worked in, is that someone, and it is usually a dude, it's almost always a dude, it can not be a dude, but it's usually a dude, just keeps talking and keeps talking and keeps talking and will not shut the fuck up and nothing gets done because the entire beating is one hour of this guy just yabbering.

Starting point is 00:19:07 And one of your most important jobs as the facilitator, and this is genuinely a huge part of the social technology of the structure of meetings, is to make sure that your beating is not one person talking. This is why this exists. Yeah And you know if you want to get into the sort of dire part of this, right if you do not Stop you're in all of your meetings from being one annoying guy talking your projects will fail. You must do this This is the one thing here that is like you absolutely Positively must yeah get this guy to stop talking I think that the important thing to think about a facilitator is that most people come from a background of assumed authoritarian politics. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:19:51 Assumed politics where someone is in charge. Even our democracies are built around this idea that you elect someone to tell you what to do. When we talk about meetings, we are talking about building bottom-up structures. Even when we later, I think we'll end up talking maybe a different episode or something about larger structures you can build up out of these sort of local assemblies or meetings. The idea is that everyone is empowered. And so because we're really used to this competitive decision-making around who is in charge, we

Starting point is 00:20:21 struggle a little bit adapting to egalitarian meetings and also to, consensus isn't the only way to make decisions, but people struggle with consensus because they'll think of that at meaning 100% vote, where everyone votes for the same thing, and that's a mistake. And so we think of the facilitator accidentally as the leader, and they are a leader in the sense of a whatever, you could use the word leader in a lot of ways and Some of them are positive and not authoritarian and so in that context they are leading people through the meeting but they are absolutely Not only not the decision-maker They are less the decision-maker than everyone else choosing to be a facilitator of a meeting is choosing to go in and say

Starting point is 00:21:02 I'm not actually even gonna to push for my side. Unless you are in a like tight knit enough group where everyone knows each other and everyone kind of knows, oh, in this group, Margaret's opinion is always going to be this and so and so's opinions always can be this. If you know people really well, you can kind of still be both facilitator and a participant. But by and large, when you are the facilitator, your job is to help the decision form. It is to help take what people are saying and say, okay, this seems like what we're saying is this the proposal? And not say, I think

Starting point is 00:21:38 this is the proposal, but say, is this the proposal? And yeah, it is to keep people on track. And every meeting is going to have different, I really like a strong facilitator. I really like someone who's going to shut me up. I really like someone who's like, yeah, that's not what we're talking about right now. And it's hard because you're feeling to get hurt, like especially for example, someone says a joke,

Starting point is 00:21:59 and then someone else says a joke. And then you're the third person and you say the joke too. And the facilitator is like, yeah, that's enough of that. We got to keep going. You're the third person who said the joke. And you're like, why am I getting yelled at? And the other two people didn't. And that's the wrong way to look at it. We're not yelling at anyone. We're trying to keep things moving forward. And you're absolutely right also about the people grandstanding and, you know, a particular habit that men often have, especially cis men, is that they'll come in and be like, they'll listen to what someone else says and then repeat it louder

Starting point is 00:22:31 and then be like, yeah, yeah, right. And as if it's their idea and they don't even realize they're doing it. It's kind of cute. But there's a lot of that you can learn about yourself by going into these meetings and learning about your own habits and what you've been inculturated to do. And it shouldn't be about shaming people around this as long as people are able to, like, kind of get called in and listen to it.

Starting point is 00:22:50 And one of the things that I think, when you teach the meeting at the beginning of the meeting, you also explain some of this social stuff. And you say, like, you know, we believe in a step up, step back thing. If you are someone who generally feels comfortable talking in large groups, we invite you to step back a little bit. And if If you are someone who generally feels comfortable talking in large groups, we invite you to step back a little bit.

Starting point is 00:23:06 And if you're not someone who generally feels comfortable expressing your opinion in groups, we invite you to step up. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Do you know what also needs to learn to step up is I actually think we don't get enough advertising in our lives. I think that the people who are afraid to take up space

Starting point is 00:23:22 are the people who pay a lot of money to take up space. I'm using a block, money to take up space. I'm using a block. I'm using a block. Sorry, babe, this ain't consensus. Here's ads. We are back. I think this is also, you know, as we've talked about sort of in some way, in a lot of ways,

Starting point is 00:23:49 like how important the role of the facilitator is, this is a role you need to rotate because that is a role, it's like those are skills that everyone needs. Like if everyone knows, did you just do the hand? I did. I did. I don't know whether people still do it metal hands versus twinkle fingers. Everyone knows did you just do the hand? I did I did People still do it metal hands versus twinkle fingers Okay, this is complete unfortunately podcasting is an audio medium So all of you just missed me losing my mind because Margaret Margaret did one of the hand signs for agreement. That's like shit

Starting point is 00:24:21 Okay, sorry, we're talking about meetings. It just came naturally Shit, okay. I'm sorry. We're talking about meetings. It just came naturally We'll get the hands on later but like you know you actually do you all of these things should be rotating and you should be teaching everyone to be able to do all of the facilitation roles because Hey, okay. There's a lot of reasons for this right one facilitation in particular can be kind of dangerous because There's a real risk of someone who is facilitating deciding that they are the leader and they're going to steer how everything goes and they're going to make their decisions. And by rotating that around, it becomes a lot easier to not have

Starting point is 00:24:55 that happen. And also doing a role makes you a more active participant in the meeting a lot of times. It depends on the role, obviously, but like it's a way to get people to keep everyone engaged in the thing. That of times. It depends on the role, obviously, but it's a way to get people to keep everyone engaged in the thing. That's a good point. Thank you. I stole this from my friend who is going to remain nameless. But if you're out there, I love you. Your friend's name is Nameless.

Starting point is 00:25:14 I understand. Yeah, friend's name is the Nameless Child. Oh. Oh. Somewhere there's somebody whose name is the Olmalas Kid. And anyway. Whatever. Anyway. OK. OK. Yeah. But the other thing about it, right name is the old molasse kid and anyway

Starting point is 00:25:32 Yeah, but I the other thing about it right is the more everyone knows about these skills the more effective of a participant and the More effective you can be at making decisions in the meeting like the more everyone understands how the process works and knows how to do it and knows how to because like like being in a meeting and being in community with other people and Making decisions together is a skill. Yeah, and we don't have it Because like being in a meeting and being in community with other people and making decisions together is a skill. And we don't have it. There's this great David Graeber, the anthropologist David Graeber, who actually spent a lot of time like writing about these meetings in a way that doesn't usually happen as like

Starting point is 00:25:56 as as an anthropologist. Yeah. Yeah, as an anthropologist, right? Because he was both both an activist and an anthropologist. And he has this great line where he says, Americans are great at communism and terrible at democracy. Which is that they're really, really good at, like, doing things to each according to their needs

Starting point is 00:26:11 and from each according to their ability. Like, if you try to organize a barbecue, everyone can do the things through the barbecue. But no one knows how to make decisions together, because that's a skill. And the more you're rotating through all the roles, and the more you understand how everything works, and the more you understand, you know,

Starting point is 00:26:24 how to do the facilitation stuff of like, getting everyone to figure out what the thing that they want is and how to express that and how to like, and how to work together. The more you understand that as like a person who's not facilitating, the more you can understand like, how to actually do democracy and it rules. And there's also the fact that like,

Starting point is 00:26:45 if you are indispensable to your group, you've actually failed your group. Yeah. Especially when you're talking about stuff like activism that has a certain risk. If you are the only medic in your affinity group, that is a problem, because if you get arrested, now there's no medic.

Starting point is 00:27:00 If you're the only facilitator who is a very skilled facilitator, what happens when you're sick or in jail andator who is a very skilled facilitator, what happens when you're sick or in jail and you all have a very intense meeting that you have to do and you need a skilled facilitator? Not that everyone needs to be equal in all skills within a given group, but you need to learn to, if you are very good at something, your job is to make someone else very good at it too. That's the thing, both for meetings and the way it was explained to me,

Starting point is 00:27:27 and this is a more kind of... I don't know what term you'd use for it, but it was taught to me as your job is to organize yourself out of a job. Yeah, totally. Okay, so we're going to move on to the second role, which is the stack taker. So, okay, the stack. This... When first like started talking about this as a social technology, the thing I specifically meant was the stack. And then eventually I was like, no, this is actually the whole process. But the stack, very, very simple invention. But if you don't have it, it's a disaster. The stack, as we said before, is just literally a list of names of who's going to talk in what order.

Starting point is 00:28:03 So one raises their hand, they can add to the stack. Yep. That is very simple. It is also absolutely crucial to making sure a meeting runs at all. Most groups tend to use some variation of what's called a progressive stack where, you know, this is part of what we were talking about earlier, like step forward and step back. But when you're compiling a stack, you want to have the people who speak less in front. And this works sort of in two ways, right? One is it's, okay, so if there's someone who's not like a cis white dude,

Starting point is 00:28:35 and who is trying to say something, you probably want them to say something because they are less likely to be the one who says something. Yeah. Just because of the way that sort of whiteness is structured because of the way that like masculinity is structured because of the way that these things work. So you want to give opportunities to speak to people who like don't usually get heard. And then also if someone just like hasn't been talking in a meeting and they want to say something and that's also part of the sort of facilitation and sometimes I know that this is the thing that like a role that I've seen passed out between a bunch of different roles and I guess everyone kind of has a responsibility to do this. But if there's someone in a meeting who has not been saying anything, it's generally a good idea to be like, Hey, are you okay? And also like, more important lead some extent

Starting point is 00:29:20 than that, are you okay? Of like, what do you think about this? Yeah, although I do think that there's a little bit of a like, some people don't want to specifically be called on in that way. And so that's kind of like learning to read the room skill about when you want to encourage people to step up versus other people are like, no, I don't have anything in particular to say and I don't want to get, you know, singled out. I think that in a smaller meeting, sometimes the facilitator can keep stack larger meetings. That's a terrible plan.

Starting point is 00:29:45 Yeah, if large meetings, you need to you can't have them both be doing it. Yeah, because you need someone keeping track of who's raising their hands when and things like that. Sometimes you're actually even writing the stack on a whiteboard so people can see. Yeah, yeah, you have like a piece of paper. Yeah, I have been in in meetings that sort of self facilitate fairly effectively in smaller groups, where a thing that people can do is if they have a thing they want to say, they hold up one finger

Starting point is 00:30:10 and they keep that finger up. And if someone else has something that they want to say, they put up two fingers. And then if someone else has something they want to say, they put up three fingers. And so you can have this method by which people track their own stack. But this is a small group thing. This is not a, and this is a people who know each other and know how to do the balancing that we're talking about, about making sure everyone gets heard. Yeah. And I think part of this also, it's important to remember is like, this is like 101.

Starting point is 00:30:36 Oh, yeah. Sorry. As an advanced skill. Kind of. And I'm introducing some things that are probably more advanced than 101. Like, like, like the like, okay, figuring out why someone isn't comfortable talking on a like, this person wants to talk, doesn't feel comfortable to and if you ask them, they will say something and this person doesn't feel comfortable talking because they don't want to talk. That's kind of a more advanced thing. Fair enough. I guess we should talk about hand gestures here, which is that, okay, over the course of these meetings, one of over the course of like movements, one of the things that is built up is hand gestures, One of the course of like movements one of the things that is built up is hand gestures

Starting point is 00:31:07 because they can be a very effective way of You know someone expressing something without having to talk over someone else. This is I don't know. This is the 101 I'm not going to teach hand gestures because Everyone has different ones and there are some that are pretty universal But like the number of different gestures I've seen for like direct response mm-hmm and shit like It's the thing that like like hand gestures can work and can be really efficient. Yes, you're doing one of the hedges You're doing one of the Is like a triangle of your hands process fuck I forgot about point of process. Oh, no

Starting point is 00:31:42 There's all of this very very complicated stuff it's not that complicated but like like point of process sucks like that's just actually complicated i'm actually derailing again i'm so sorry this is an example if there was a facilitator in this call they would be making me shut up is what's happening yeah i know but but but this is actually like this this is this is the one time i've ever wished there was like videos you could see the hand gestures because like the thing about this right is once you are good at meetings and like if you have people who do this and you talk about what the hand gestures are beforehand that's also important you can't even if you're very good at meetings and you're still

Starting point is 00:32:14 listening to this episode for some reason I mean I don't know it's a good episode but like you can't assume that everyone knows what your hand gestures are yeah sometimes people have different hand gestures for different things sometimes you have contextual hand gestures for like, like there are like, okay, like you're, if you are trying to meet in the dark, your, your, your, your hand gestures don't work, right? This is also stolen from another friend, right? Like sometimes you need to use snaps for that because, so that you can hear, right? Like, well all of this is to say that like, the stuff with hand gestures, it can make your meetings a lot more effective.

Starting point is 00:32:47 This is a thing you can do if everyone in the group understands how they work. Um, I'm not gonna be, like, teaching you sets of hand gestures here because I can't guarantee that any gesture I teach you will be the one that people use. Can I, though, like, speed run the concepts of some of them because I think they're useful to understand. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it's hard to imagine, when you imagine meetings, I think about this a lot because I write meetings into fiction, which is a very hard thing to do and make them entertaining

Starting point is 00:33:09 because they're also hard to be entertained by when you're in them unless they're contentious. But there are certain things that you learn derail meetings and there are ways in which by using hand gestures, you can avoid having more people speak. And the single most important and common one is a way of saying, I agree. And so that way people, when they really want to say something, but they're not on stack and they get really frustrated, they can do that hand gesture, which, you know, is very easy to make fun of. You know, when I was coming up, it was twinkle fingers where you waggle your fingers.

Starting point is 00:33:44 And then we were like punk. so we did metal fingers instead, which was literally the same thing, but reversed. It's kind of like the look that you do when you like really like music, and it's actually sort of like mimicking playing a guitar. And so that's a very important concept. And sometimes people use snaps, although sometimes people prefer non-audio, and other people prefer audio. Yeah, yeah. And sometimes that's like, and that's, that's possibly why I was talking about like, like

Starting point is 00:34:08 that's dependent on who's in the room and what the room is and like, so. But I think that a, a, I agree without needing to say anything is essential. Yeah, yeah, that's a good one. Other ones to just know of is that there are things like people will say like, please move this along. It's a way of saying, hey, facilitator, please shut this person up usually, or can we talk about something else? There's ones that are direct response, which is saying, I would like to jump stack because

Starting point is 00:34:34 this person has just insulted the honor of my family or whatever. And it's like, it's up to the facilitator to decide whether to do these. Another one is point of process, which is saying like, hey, I actually don't want to talk about the thing we're talking about. I want to talk about how the meeting is going. Meetings get real meta and it's real frustrating. Anyway, so it's worth knowing that this is part of the technology. It seems cringy from the outside, but like, our other options, I mean, there are other technologies about decision making that people have developed, but like, actually living democratic lives in which we all have a say in our decisions sometimes

Starting point is 00:35:09 means that we go to meetings and we can actually kind of learn to, I'm talking shit on meetings, but that's, meetings are also ways to get to know your friends and express yourself and get things done. Yeah. You know, as much as I've been talking about the being boring, like I've had things that were technically organizing meetings that were like some of the most transformational experiences of my life. Yeah, you know, as much as I've been talking about the being boring, like I've had things that were technically organizing meetings that were like some of the most transformational experiences of my life. Because me and a bunch of people who, you know, a bunch of people really close to me,

Starting point is 00:35:33 like came together and we figured out how to do something. And there is a beauty there that is, and this is part of the issue why it's hard to talk about these things, right? Because like the technical process of it, like the technical description of what we're saying is at the same time being used to do something that can only be described in sort of poetic terms. Yeah, like the actual experience of like you and a bunch of other people coming together to do something and figure out how to do it and fucking doing it is a transcendent act of creation.

Starting point is 00:36:07 And these are like, you know, yeah, like it doesn't like the fucking hammers and shovels and like fucking slide rules that you use to construct something don't look very pretty. And then at the end of it, you've built something together and it's beautiful. Yeah, no, it's the other side of the coin of the first time you watch the police run away from you. Yeah. It is a way of coming together with other people to accomplish something and make something powerful is meetings. And it is also, it's interesting because we talk about how men will often take up too much space in meetings. So this is not a universal thing anytime we say this kind of thing.

Starting point is 00:36:43 But it is actually often feminized labor because it's this invisibilized labor that happens behind the scenes that is not as sexy, right? And is about just actually hearing people out. It is like conflict resolution speed run. Anyway, I accidentally went off on the meta of meetings also, but. No, it's good. Well, but and I think there was an important thing here too, because like we're talking about the politics of like meetings themselves, right of like the you know, the actual political angle of

Starting point is 00:37:13 What it means to have a democracy where what democracy means is you make decisions together. Yeah, and this is something there's all this also a very important actual procedural meeting note here, which is that one of the things you will learn over the course of doing meetings is that a lot of times people wage battles over the contents of political ideology in the form of fighting over how a meeting works. Yeah, totally. And you can see this everywhere from like your fucking local organizing meeting and people yelling about who's on stack or whatever, all the way up to like, you know, when like when like the Democrats are saying that like, like in Congress that like the part, the budget parliamentarian won't let them like raise the minimum wage.

Starting point is 00:37:55 That's what they're doing. They're using an argument over procedure to like, disguise the fact that what they're really arguing about is like it is an actual political argument. Yeah. But this is also a thing where like, the way you structure a meeting is political. It doesn't seem like it, right? But you can have a meeting where, you know, it's like the fucking plenipotentiary meeting of like the executive committee of, I don't know,

Starting point is 00:38:20 the People's Congress, the Chinese Communist Party, whatever, those are not the right words. I'm on five hours of sleep. But you can have a meeting where it's just like, yeah, the way the meeting works is one guy stands out there and he gives a speech and he tells everyone what to say and then everyone votes yes. That's the way you can do a meeting, right? And that's political and it fucking sucks. And we're trying to teach you how to do a meeting where, you know, we do democracy, where everyone comes together and we like do a thing.

Starting point is 00:38:42 Yeah. And we will get to more roles next week. This was originally planned to be one episode. It is not one episode. It is now two episodes. But the upside is that we solved a bunch of the fundamental logistical problems about how to build a free society. So stay tuned for that.

Starting point is 00:39:00 Stay tuned for more roles you want in your meetings. And yes, Spinnaker could happen here. Thank you, Mark, for coming on the show. I'm Robert Evans. And on my podcast, Behind the the Bastards we talk about the worst people in all of history. We've discussed a lot of horrible monsters in our time, but this week we have one of the very worst we'll ever talk about. David Berg, founder of a cult called the Children of God. We'll talk about all of his horrible crimes with special guest Ed Helms.

Starting point is 00:39:41 He's not just like a weird religious cult leader. He was like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology in with this kind of like evangelical Christianity, Pentecostal preaching in the mid-century. He's a very weird guy. But yeah, I'll just get into it. Like nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't say. But that's the beauty of cults. Listen to Behind the Bastards on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Open AI is a financial abomination. A thing that should not be. An aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'm gonna tell you why on my show, Better Offline, the rudest show in the tech industry.

Starting point is 00:40:17 Where we're breaking down why open AI, along with other AI companies, are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job. I'm also gonna be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this Taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them.

Starting point is 00:41:02 From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Inc. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes one, two, and three on May 21st,

Starting point is 00:41:36 and episodes four, five, and six on June 4th. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebene, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebene and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all, childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles, and more,

Starting point is 00:42:17 and found the strength to make it to the other side. My dad was shot and killed in his house. Yes, he was a drug dealer. Yes, he was a confidential informant, but he wasn't shot on a street corner. He wasn't shot in the middle of a drug deal. He was shot in his house, unarmed. Pretty Private isn't just a podcast. It's your personal guide for turning storylines into lifelines.

Starting point is 00:42:40 Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about organizing. I am your host Mia Wong, and in a moment we will be continuing our episode about how to run a meeting, which is one of the fundamental tools of building democracy and free societies. Here we go! Okay, so other roles. So we talked about that that was a long digression about the concept of a stack taker, which is at

Starting point is 00:43:21 a very simple level. You write the the names down you call the names in order Yep, yeah We're gonna move on to some of the other ones. Those are like the two I Don't know if most important is the right word Funnily enough stack takers not the one I thought the digression was going to happen on that was I thought that was gonna be The last one we're gonna get to but no taker. Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, this is vibes check Oh shit the vibes checker one we're gonna get to. Oh, note taker? Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you can do is like, okay, so we know we have this much time allocated for something, right? So we have 20 minutes to talk about this. Okay, so like 10 minutes in you go, we have 10 minutes left. We have 5 minutes left.

Starting point is 00:44:12 We have like 15 minutes left. Yeah, this is really important. And at the end of it, the timekeeper's job is to go like, hey, this is our allotted time. Do we want to keep talking about this and use more time or do we want to move on? Yeah. And that's a really important role. It's also kind of why you want to generally have like an idea of how long you want to talk about something in the agenda. It's also worth noting that like this is all guidelines, right? Like these are all... Mia's guidelines of order. Is that what you're calling this?

Starting point is 00:44:37 Oh, God, no. We're taking one more digression. Oh, no. One more digression, which is that the anarchy symbol, the A with the circle around it is from a Pridon phrase that's the the circle is actually an O Because the original thing was anarchy, the original saying is anarchy is the mother of order Yeah

Starting point is 00:44:53 And that's that's where that comes from so I was gonna make a like Mia's like procedure disorder Whatever joke, but it's like no no no this is actually like Anarchy is order, baby. I believe in an organized society I just believe in an organically organized society that is from the to use the Zapatista phrase from the bottom and the left yep Okay, so that that's the timekeeper the note-taker Sometimes you need to decide whether you want notes of your meeting. Yeah depends on how crime you are Yeah, I hear this all the time from people making jokes about the scene for the wire that I've never seen the wire But it was making jokes as the scene for the wire where a guy goes. Are you taking notes of the criminal conspiracy?

Starting point is 00:45:33 So, okay Are you going to have a note taker and then secondly like okay, they don't take her takes notes of what's being talked about I actually this is also Mia going into a little bit more advanced stuff I actually like the practice of kind of rotating this throughout the meeting, because the problem with being the note taker. So if you're the timekeeper, right, you can be involved in the conversation. Stack taker is also hard to, but the thing about the note taker and it is, you know, if you get good enough at this, you can rotate all of these roles during the

Starting point is 00:46:03 meeting. So that everyone has a chance to participate. So you don't just have a If you get good enough at this, you can rotate all of these roles during the meeting so that everyone has a chance to participate. So you don't just have a group of people who perpetually can't be in a meeting. And so note takers are things that you can pretty easily just like pass to someone else. You'd be like, hey, you're not the note taker. So the person who is being the note taker can like say things. Yeah. Although, okay, so there's two weird funny things about this.

Starting point is 00:46:24 One, sometimes people who tend not to want to talk much in a meeting, but also maybe have an attention span where they would prefer to be doing something at all times, prefer to be note taker. Yeah. But famously, the International Working Men's Association or whatever, the first international was an organization of a lot of different stripes of leftists. And someone went to someone's friend's apartment. This anarchist went to this anarchist friend's apartment and was like, hey, I want to invite my friend to this

Starting point is 00:46:54 meeting. And this guy answers the door and his name is Karl Marx. And he's like, oh, well, so and so is not here. And he's like, all right, well, you can come too. So an anarchist invites Marx to the International. I don't have my notes in front of me, don't at me, but then Marx goes and he becomes the note taker. And by means of that takes a minority position, which within the group and makes it the majority position by controlling the way that a lot of the media and expression and stuff around this was, because Marx was a good writer.

Starting point is 00:47:26 And for better or worse, I have my opinion about whether it's for better or worse. And so there's a power within note-taker that actually is a reason to rotate this task. On the other hand, if you're like, not worried about that, you can just have a person who's like, I just really want to be the one who takes notes. It really depends on everything's gonna be contextual I just wanted to tell that story about marks the story of how marks became marks by taking the note taking job and then becoming the person who could write the declarations for the organization yeah we should note like

Starting point is 00:47:58 this is also kind of how Stalin took power it's like being the person in the back of the room we didn't say anything and keeping track of what everyone was doing and saying and being able to manipulate like the inner workings of these sort of parliamentary procedures that the Bolsheviks were using. That's what the Robert, not of the rules of order, but of the behind the bastards was saying about, oh, the Cambodian man, the horrible man who killed everyone. Pol Pot. Pol Pot.

Starting point is 00:48:22 It was that he was the quiet guy at the back. Yep, yep, yep. Same kind of guy. Can be extremely dangerous. The guy who says everything all the time can be dangerous. Quiet person also can be very dangerous. Yeah, just never trust anyone. That's the answer. Wait, no, hold on. Hopefully we're not producing Pol Pot in these meetings. Okay, so the last like official role that I want to talk about, and there's a lot, there's like a million other roles that people use. I want to talk about the vibes checker. So this is the one that's kind of not obvious from like the name, but the vibes checker is someone who actually has a really, really important role.

Starting point is 00:48:58 And your role is to figure out like, is everyone in the group okay? Does this meeting feel okay? Yeah. And is just something we need to do about it and some of this is like, okay, everyone is clearly really tired Let's go get lunch and that's like a pretty easy sort of vibes checker thing But then also like yeah, I don't know This is partially facilitation job like I don't know if someone says something racist in a meeting and a bunch of people are uncomfortable It's like now you're suddenly glad you have the person whose job it is to be like, Hey, what the fuck? Like, and that's also that's like, obviously, like, that's a blatant enough thing that everyone can be like, hold on, hold on. Like, don't like say a slur or whatever. But like, you know, the vibe checkers job is if there's a lot of people

Starting point is 00:49:39 who are uncomfortable with something or if something like they're kind of there or something is going wrong or if people are checked out or if like stuff's happening. Sometimes this is behind the scenes thing. Sometimes this is like explicit. Like you make it, you bring it to the group to be like, hey, this is okay. We need to address this kind of thing. I don't know. It's a hard role to sort of like explain. It's fuzzy.

Starting point is 00:50:05 Yeah. I mean, but it's in the name. How are the vibes? And vibe is a fuzzy word. And you know, it's a word that people are going to interpret in different ways. Yeah. And like I, as a very sort of materialist, godless atheist, I it's like, okay, this is how people are feeling. Right. People also take this in sort of more new agey directions, people take it in like, but like, you know, the important thing about this is right, you can feel in a meeting when it's really tense, or when things are like, just weird, everything feels off, everyone is like, pissed off or tired or like, grossed out or like, you know, and that's this person's job. This is why I'm putting it in here because it's

Starting point is 00:50:48 it's one of these roles that like Ideally, I guess this person doesn't do anything for a whole meeting but they're just they're sort of watching it I mean like it is it can be good if they intervene but like It's especially important if something is going wrong in ways the group isn't addressing It's especially important if something is going wrong in ways the group isn't addressing. Totally. It is good to have someone who's ready to step up and say, this is what's going on. Can I make a pitch for another role?

Starting point is 00:51:14 I don't have a name for this role. The very first activist meeting I went to when the world was young, during the ultra-globalization movement, I went into a meeting for New York City Ind Indy media, and I had no idea what was happening, but it was a public open meeting and I was a young activist, anarchist or whatever. And I went to this thing and someone sat next to me knew that I was new and sat next to me and explained what the fuck was happening. That's a good role. And I don't know if I would have become an activist if that person hadn't done that. Because I went in and it was the middle of a contentious meeting about people talking about some stuff that like was pretty important and I had no idea what was happening and someone

Starting point is 00:51:56 explained it to me. I think it is very important to have someone know who is new and help them feel comfortable. You could call it like an usher if I was gonna have a word, but that's like, because I'm really into this idea that our movements don't need gatekeepers, we need ushers, we need people to help people figure, find their seats and figure out how to plug in. Yes, onboarding.

Starting point is 00:52:15 But then the other thing I wanna say is that with roles, the larger and more formal a meeting, the more likely you need these to be formalized roles. But I also think that these as generalized skills can be dispersed through, like I think that a lot of groups, especially if they're kind of comfortable with each other, you maybe have a rotating facilitator,

Starting point is 00:52:35 you maybe have a stack taker and you maybe are like who's taking notes right now, but stuff like timekeeper and vibes check might be a thing that everyone feels empowered to do. I think that understanding these as roles is different than saying at the top of the meeting, this is the way it is done. You must assign these things. It is always contextual based on the meeting.

Starting point is 00:52:54 Yeah. The range inside of meeting structure of like how formal and informal it is changes a lot and that, yeah, that like changes, you know, that changes the roles, that changes how all of this stuff works. Totally. And that's one of the most important things about this is like being flexible because the point of a meeting is not everyone followed the exact parliamentary procedures.

Starting point is 00:53:18 Yeah. The point of a meeting is we did the thing we came there to do, or sometimes if we did, we did a different thing. Right. But it's like, we,'s like we all did something together and that thing happened. But we figured out how to make that thing happen. And that's the actual important part. The content of the meeting is what's important. Not this. All of the structure is to enable the content. It's not the other way around. Yeah, totally. Right. Totally. And like, yeah, I don't know. Like if you have a timekeeper and someone else ends up doing time stuff too, right? Like that's a significantly

Starting point is 00:53:48 better result than we just kept talking. So... Okay, can I make one more pitch about a thing that's important at a meeting? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Food. I think that it's not always going to be appropriate in every specific situation and there's a lot of things around dietary restrictions and all of these things, but making the meeting feel like a place that is worth going to and a thing that like, I think food is basically like hosting and good hospitality and these sort of, again,

Starting point is 00:54:25 invisibilized feminine labor things. It goes a really long way towards making everyone feel comfortable. It also helps people's attention spans and blood sugar. Like whether every meeting's a potluck or whether everyone just brings snacks or whether it's at someone's house and they're like, fuck yeah, I'm hosting. I'm going to make a bunch of food and you know, whatever it is. Yeah, I've been theorizing this for a while that like we need because like, obviously a lot of this technology has been worked out already. But also we have so much further to go in order to like, be able to make decisions together in a free society.

Starting point is 00:55:00 And like, I think we need to just have an initiative of like, how do we make meetings fucking rip? What one of my ideas has always been like you have a meeting that's just like the standing barbecue meeting That happens like every like it's like the endless meeting and it's like, okay You have it at like yeah this time and there's just like a barbecue and everyone does barbecue stuff And yes, it's a standing thing where if you want to come in like... And then okay, just to keep talking about some of the stuff, childcare. Childcare. I think when you mentioned at the beginning being like making sure that the space is accessible to everyone and there's a lot of stuff that gets forgotten about and particular, I would

Starting point is 00:55:35 say that single parents are often forgotten about. And I think that having or parents in general or children in general are often forgotten about. And I think that having a plan in place for accessibility of all kinds of different people often includes child care. I used to do this. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, that was like one of the things that I did for some meetings and like, yeah, there were like meetings that happened. There were like tennis meetings that happened because like people stayed and played with everyone's kids. It was a good time. And yeah. There's also this idea where sometimes meetings, people can people stayed and played with everyone's kids. It was a good time. And, yeah.

Starting point is 00:56:05 There's also this idea where sometimes meetings, people can come in and out of. The society that I want to live in has neighborhood assemblies that then move up to larger structures and make decisions, right? And in those, there's also this thing where it's like, you don't always have to go to meetings. There's a thing about democracy that people don't quite always get, which is that sometimes the most beautiful thing we can do for each other is give our agency freely to other people to

Starting point is 00:56:30 make decisions for us that we trust. Working groups are actually a good part, big part of this where I'm like, I don't actually want to have a say in every single decision that affects me. I want to be able to have a say in every single decision that affects me. Anyway, I'm again going kind of meta on this, sorry. No, no, this is important, right? And also like doing the childcare was part of that because like, yeah, it meant like, you know, I was kind of, I was like trusting my people in the group

Starting point is 00:56:55 to like do the meeting without me while I was just sort of like taking care of, like just taking care of kids. And that was a really beautiful thing. And it worked really well. It fucking ripped. Yeah. And you can build multi-generational movements,

Starting point is 00:57:11 which are the only movements that accomplish, that's not true. Sudden movements also accomplish things. But when I look at some of the real high water marks from the bottom and the left organizing around the world, you're talking about people who are drawn from hundreds of years of radical legacies or at least a couple of generations.

Starting point is 00:57:29 Yeah. Speaking of generations, I don't know, I don't have a good pivot into this. But okay, so we've been talking a lot of about a lot of the technology that's used for meetings. I want to talk about a couple of other kinds of meetings that you can have. When I originally was writing this I was like oh I could fit this whole this whole section how to run a meeting this will be like this will be like 20 minutes and I could have 20 minutes about like spokes councils and 20 minutes about General Assemblies and we're not like it out this is like this is episode 2 and we have not even started talking.

Starting point is 00:58:00 So okay that's gonna be another the General Assembly episode is going to be another episode completely in and of itself. But I do want to talk about spokes councils, because this is a thing that I've been finding really, really useful that I think people just don't know about anymore. And because people have lost the knowledge of this, a really valuable organizational tactic has been lost. So, okay, the thing that a meeting is there to do is so a group group of people can come together and make decisions But how do you make decisions between groups? Or and this is also often more important less than having like because you know a lot of the spokes councils Aren't usually supposed to be like we're all making like we're all sort of like this is like a binding decision handed down by the spokes Council, right? This is also a really useful coordinating tool

Starting point is 00:58:45 Yeah, and this is what it's you know, what it's actually designed for is how do you get groups to sort of talk to each other and work with each other in a way that also lets them continue to be like their own groups and not you know, a sort of like subservient to the larger coalition. Yeah. And you know, the answer to this turns out as a technology that was developed. I actually don't know the history of the spokes council. I mean, it's been around for like a long time. I don't either. Like at least like 30, 40 years in anarchist circles, but it hasn't really made it out

Starting point is 00:59:15 of them. And so spokes council is a meeting of groups. And so it's it's it's a meeting of spokespeople, right? So your group sends like one or two people to a thing. You send like a couple of people. And all of the other groups send some people and you come talk about a thing. Yep.

Starting point is 00:59:32 And this is really useful for a number of reasons. One, it's a way for different kinds of groups to interface with each other in ways that they usually don't. So this can be anything from like an affinity group to like an NGO group to like an NGO to like a union. Yeah. It can scale between different kinds of things. It can theoretically you can do this with like your like fucking spokes council

Starting point is 00:59:55 could theoretically send a person to another spokes council. Totally. Right. And this is you know we'll get more to this in a second. But like this is a way for a bunch of different types of organizations to come together and do something. And it's a way for them to coordinate with each other. It's a way for them to share information. It's a way for them to, and this is like one of the sort of secrets of organizing is that like actual organizing is built through personal relationships

Starting point is 01:00:18 with people knowing each other. Yeah. And so this is a way for like people to like meet each other and get to do things. There's different kinds of these. A traditional one is like, okay, there's like a thing happening, right? Like there was a, there was a giant protest and like a bunch of people who are going to be a bunch of the different groups and organizations and affinity groups and whatever we're going to be at this thing come together and they're

Starting point is 01:00:38 like, okay, how, what are we doing? How are we going to sort of do this and And how do we coordinate this with each other? Yeah. And yeah, Mark, I assume you've been in like a million of these. You know, I have been in a lot of spokes council meetings. I've been in a fewer of them. And I think that you're right.

Starting point is 01:00:55 There's been a bit of a drop-off. Yeah. It's funny, we were talking earlier and I was like, oh, I haven't done this in a while. I actually do go to meetings every week. See, this is... But I used to go to meetings specifically for direct action protests. And that is a thing that I used to have more direct experience with.

Starting point is 01:01:12 And so I don't want to be like, oh, people stop doing it because I don't totally know because I'm not totally plugged in. But I do think the ultra globalization movement of like 1999 to 2003 or so is where a lot of modern protest tactics and stuff were developed, or rather, it came to a head the tactics had been developed for decades by various different groups. Yeah. And actually a lot of the technologies around spokes councils and stuff, they come from a lot of different sources, including I think anarchists and the Spanish Civil War, but I'm not 100%

Starting point is 01:01:42 certain about that. But a lot of the ultra globalization movement stuff comes from the Zapatistas and Chiapas. I know you didn't ask for history lesson and I'll speed run it. No, no, no, no, this is good though. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The folks in Chiapas and the Zapatistas have developed a lot of different ideas

Starting point is 01:01:56 about how to have bottom up democracy and they've been moving through different ones. They actually moved to a more decentralized model than they were doing about two years ago in 2023. But they went around the world and built organizations by saying, everyone send your people, we're getting together, the People's Global Alliance, like all of these like, you know, global south, I'm putting air quotes here, we're getting together and we're building direct action movements together.

Starting point is 01:02:23 And that is where the ultra globalization movement comes from, at least as much as anything else. And some of that is that technology of saying, send your representatives and do this thing. But it's interesting because in some ways, it's actually just an upside down version of parliamentary democracy, right? Where theoretically, we elect a politician and they go speak for us. They don't. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:02:48 That is the concept behind a democracy. Right? And so theoretically, you can send a delegate and there's two ways of doing it. There's a decision making larger body and there's a coordinating larger body. And if you want to maintain every group's autonomy, it is a coordinating body. You get together and at the spokes council, you say, the 10 people I represent who will remain nameless are all willing to get arrested tomorrow. And we're all willing to lock ourselves down. And someone else will say, we don't want to get arrested. The 14 people that I'm representing kind of

Starting point is 01:03:18 want to break shit. And then other people will be like, the 15 people that I represent kind of wish you all wouldn't break shit. And you can get together and coordinate and then the the break shit people can be like, oh, okay, well, we'll make sure we break shit somewhere else than where you are and, and all of this stuff. And whereas a decision making body would get together and your spoke would have a mandate from your group, they would be empowered to make decisions for everyone, knowing that the decision has to be within a certain framework.

Starting point is 01:03:49 And then basically when they're done, you'd be like, okay, you did or didn't succeed at your mandate and we're gonna send someone else next time or whatever. So there's two different ways of doing spokes council meetings. I think one of the reasons that they fell out of favor is that by and large, open organizing of direct action has diminished in the movement. Because it may or may not be legal to show up somewhere and say, well, the 15 people I represent want to break shit. Or even the 15 people that I represent want to lock ourselves down into big puppets with

Starting point is 01:04:18 lock boxes, right? And disrupt global trade. Because of the ramping up of repression, people have backed off of certain types of open organizing. I have opinions about that, but that's kind of, I'm actually not trying to tell anyone what to do about it. But so I think that that's part of why the spokes council has a little bit diminished. And I actually think that we just need to adapt

Starting point is 01:04:37 the spokes council to the modern context. And I'm sure people do still do them. So this is where we're getting, this is what I'm calling the MIA technology which is there have been spokes councils recently that are not like that are not this that are using the idea of the spokes council but are kind of a different thing. Okay. Because there's another thing that you can do with this organizational form. Mm-hmm. Right of everyone sends their delegates together whatever like everyone sends their delegates together, whatever, like everyone sends their, like, spokespeople, and everyone meets each other.

Starting point is 01:05:08 You can also do this for, like, not planning a direct action. Yeah, totally. You can do this as a way to get all of the different organizations and, like, affinity groups and shit in a city talking to each other. Yeah. And this turns out to be extremely useful. Yeah. I've seen this a lot recently in sort of trans organizing, where like all the trans different groups in the city will be like,

Starting point is 01:05:30 fuck it, we're showing up to a thing. Yeah. This is a different thing that we will be talking, hopefully to some people who run this soon. This was originally supposed to be part of this episode before I realized that it was impossible to fit this into this episode, which is now two episodes. But there's a really, really cool thing in Portland that was called the trans General Assembly

Starting point is 01:05:47 Oh, where they people were just like fuck it We're running a General Assembly for like all of the trans people come you can say things and everyone meets at the end And that was awesome. Yeah, but you can do this on a very very targeted level with like, okay I know a bunch of different orgs that like for example, okay We need to we need to coordinate a response to like, the situation of trans people in the US. So you can go through all of your networks, you can be like, okay, I know this person who is in this org that does this thing, right? And you can bring all of those resources together.

Starting point is 01:06:18 And then you can turn that into a spokes council that's not quite the same thing exactly as as the kind of like direct action spokes councils that have been organized. Right. It is a closer to a general assembly maybe but maybe that's a pedantic difference or semantic difference. Yeah it kind of is but it's well so okay the way I've been conceiving of it is like if you're specifically getting people together who are there as organizations it's a spokes council. Yeah totally. If they're there as themselves it's a general assembly. Oh, totally. If they're there as themselves, it's a general assembly. Oh, that makes sense.

Starting point is 01:06:46 Even if they are sort of like representing a thing, but like, yeah, like the scopes and who shows up to them are very different, I think. Oh, and there's also fish bowls. What's a fish bowl? I actually haven't heard this one before. A fish bowl is a spokes council where everyone can come and only the spoke can speak. So you can look in on the fish. Oh, that's what that's called.

Starting point is 01:07:06 Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Anyway, which is a way to do it. It maintains transparency. It's a way to have a still open meeting, but only, but if only one person from the group is empowered to speak, then it's not a nightmare of trying to have 6,000 people in a room talk. The basic beating technology, all of these things can be used for a whole bunch of different things in a whole bunch of different ways that like we haven't thought of yet.

Starting point is 01:07:40 You could arrange trash pickup in a neighborhood. You can make the government obsolete Yeah with meetings and spokes councils and General Assemblies and federations and all of these like levels of bottom-up organizing And there are places in the world where people have done this Yeah, and you know if we want to close on sort of like this is the political angle of this right like a free society Is one that is structured like this? Yeah, where a bunch of where things happen by people coming together to do them Right? Like a free society is one that is structured like this. Yeah. Where a bunch of where things happen by people coming together to do them.

Starting point is 01:08:09 Yeah. Right. And you can take the sort of like, I don't know, I guess you'd call it the workarist angle of like, I don't know, we need to run a waste treatment plant. Yeah. Right. So the way the brace treatment plan is run is that the people who do waste treatments have their own like workers council or whatever.

Starting point is 01:08:26 And they decide how they're going to do it and they go do it. Right. Almost every, I would say every real revolution and revolutionary movement in history is doing a version of this. You can even look at the, the Soviet concept. The Soviet was the decision-making body. It was the assembly. And all power to the Soviets was this slogan

Starting point is 01:08:50 that literally was inverted by the Bolsheviks, where the entire idea was a democratic but revolutionary movement. And this happens constantly, even when societies break down on some level naturally, and a ton, not all, a ton of indigenous societies, this is the default model. And so, you know, in Chiapas with the Zapatistas, what happened was, is that you had this like

Starting point is 01:09:14 Marxist-Leninist army and they were like, oh, we're going to do this thing this way. And the indigenous people who lived in Chiapas were like, that's not how we do things. And they were like, this is how we do things. And then the Zapatistas who were good people were like, you're right, that is how we do things. And then there's appetizers who are good people were like, you're right. That's how we do things. You know, and they like built up this model and you have a similar thing happening with the area called Rojava in Northeast Syria, where like, basically people are like, actually, the indigenous Kurdish model of doing things is much more of this egalitarian method and

Starting point is 01:09:39 democratic method. And then, okay, and the other thing is you can do it in the workers model, but there's also people who have messed around with it and done things like, you know what, maybe the school isn't run by the teachers. Maybe the school is run by the teachers, the parents and the students. And maybe the food distribution center is a combination of the workers of the food distribution center and the people who make use of it. So maybe the trash pickup is both the workers and the people who need the services.

Starting point is 01:10:06 But the specifics almost, they do matter and we can, but we don't know. We don't know the actual formulation. But this is the core of bottom left organizing. And it is a beautiful thing. And it is funny how it all comes down to meetings and making sure that there's food and childcare and not one person taking up all the time, which is really hard when you podcast for a living. I will tell you that.

Starting point is 01:10:29 Yeah, but this is like, you know, I have had to learn to shut the fuck up in meetings. Yeah, me too. But doing it has made meetings better. I know. It's great. You can learn to shut the fuck up. Someone else says the thing and you don't have to say it. Yeah, but then also I do want to point this out, right?

Starting point is 01:10:42 The things that we're describing here, right? It's okay, like how do you do the beach work? You need food. You need childcare You need structure that makes sure one person isn't running the thing. Yeah This is the entire political situation of the modern United States, right? We are trying to get food We're trying to get childcare We are trying to have a place to do our thing and we're trying to have to not be ruled by like a fucking king Yeah, totally again. This all seems very, very basic like shit, right? But if you don't have this, and this is a problem that the US has constantly in protest

Starting point is 01:11:12 movements, is like, most Americans don't have a democratic tradition. And so when shit happens and there's suddenly riots and there's suddenly like mass protest movements break out, right? People don't know how to make democratic decisions, so they don't. And that means that nobody's talking to each other. That means that everyone is locked in these very small circles of extremely violent paranoia. And that sucks. And we can avoid that by knowing how to do democracy, because that's fundamentally what

Starting point is 01:11:44 running and beating is. This is what democracy looks like. Yeah. Yeah and I also want to say one more thing. This is a podcast that would probably could have used the facilitator especially on my end right now because unmedicated Mia is a fucking trip. But like you know when we talk about sort of our how do you apply this to your sort of broad vision of society right and it's like okay like, OK, anarchists, how do you run USAID? Right. Because like, yeah, like the destruction of USAID is going to kill an unbelievable number of people because people are getting HIV vaccines.

Starting point is 01:12:12 Right. Right. And the way you run that is the way that you run a meeting. Right. The workers who produce to act who are the people who actually figure out how to make an HIV vaccine Yeah, distribute it distribute information about it those people form fucking form fucking councils and they form fucking meeting groups They exist they and they work in collaboration with the people who need them. Yeah, and that is how you build society, right? It's like David Gaber's thing was always like the ultimate hidden truth of this world Is that it is something we make and we Could just as easily make differently and when he says something we make he was talking about it in a more abstract sense But like we do literally make it

Starting point is 01:12:52 Yeah, like all of this stuff is the product of stuff that we did right like we all physically built every aspect of this world Right everything everything that you see and touch and hear right now are things that we designed and engineered and built. And we don't lose that capacity when we cease to be ruled. We can still do that. And as long as we have the ability to do democracy, right? And we have the ability to make decisions with each other, we can fucking do those things and we can do them for each other and not for a king. Yeah. It's like people ask, how would you make and distribute insulin in an anarchist society or an anti-capitalist society or a bottom-up society and you're like, well, we know how

Starting point is 01:13:34 to make and distribute insulin and we just need to change some of the social technologies that are doing it and I think we could probably do it better because it's currently not working great, you know? it. And I think we could probably do it better. Because it's currently not working great. You know, and my other like go to quote, I love the Graber quote is the DeRudi quote, anarchist general in Spanish of war, probably didn't actually say this was probably a journalist put these words in his mouth, but we're not actually certain. And he says like the boot, I'm paraphrasing the bourgeoisie can blast and ruin the world on their way out of history. That's fine. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:14:06 We the workers built all of these cities. We can build. We know how to do that. The part of it that always stuck with me is like, I think the exact quote that I got was, we are not the least afraid of ruins. Yeah. You're the ones who built this world. And we'll do it again.

Starting point is 01:14:24 Yeah. And yeah. So I don't know what these episodes are gonna be called, but if they're called The Answer is Meetings, comma, Sorry. I think I'll put that. Okay, I don't know if this is gonna end up being the provisional title right now is the most important organizing skill you don't know, because unfortunately we do need people to click on this and they won't if it's a meeting thing So I'm sorry I click baited you into this Right well then that's the monster at the end of the book is that uh, it's meetings all the way down. Yeah. Yeah Yeah Margaret thanks for thanks for talking with me about the actual fundamental

Starting point is 01:14:58 Building blocks and tools of democratic life. Yeah. Thanks for thanks for having me. Thanks for talking about this stuff of democratic life. Yeah. Thanks for having me and thanks for talking about this stuff. Yeah. And this has been a get-up in here. You can go out in your community and you can do these things. You can form spokes councils. You can form assemblies.

Starting point is 01:15:12 You can go work with the people around you to do things and you can use structures to do it and you can change the world. The secret is to really begin. Hell Yeah. I'm Robert Evans and on my podcast Behind the Bastards we talk about the worst people in all of history. We've discussed a lot of horrible monsters in our time, but this week we have one of the very worst we'll ever talk about. David Berg, founder of a cult called the Children of God. We'll talk about all of his horrible crimes with special guest Ed Helms. He's not just like a weird religious cult

Starting point is 01:16:00 leader. He was like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology in with this kind of like evangelical Christianity, Pentecostal preaching in the mid century. He's a very weird guy. But yeah, I'll just get into it. Like nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't say. But that's the beauty of cults. Listen to Behind the Bastards on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Open AI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be, an aberration, a symbol podcasts or wherever you get your job. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you happen to get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your

Starting point is 01:16:59 gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this Taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad.

Starting point is 01:17:41 Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated on the really bad. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebene, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebene and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that will challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all, childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles, and more, and found the shrimp to make it to the other side.

Starting point is 01:18:37 My dad was shot and killed in his house. Yes, he was a drug dealer. Yes, he was a confidential informant, but he wasn't shot on the street corner. He wasn't shot in the middle of a drug dealer. Yes, he was a confidential informant, but he wasn't shot on a street corner. He wasn't shot in the middle of a drug deal. He was shot in his house unarmed. Pretty Private isn't just a podcast. It's your personal guide for turning storylines into lifelines.

Starting point is 01:18:57 Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. ["It Could Happen Here," by The Terrors plays.] Ah, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is normally about the terrors. But today, today we're talking about, I mean, technically still the terrors. But today, today we're talking about,

Starting point is 01:19:25 I mean, technically still the terrors, but we're talking about a more fun part of the terrors. We're talking about the liver king. Thank God, thank God. Dodges and kings, two things we famously appreciate on this podcast. With me today is James Stout and Mio Wong. What do y'all know about the liver king?

Starting point is 01:19:45 I thought you were gonna give us cool titles Just if we could just go back and you could each give us some kind of some kind of nobility and a food stuff yeah, sure James you are the Tea leaf salad that made you really sick that one time I think that tea leaf saddle ruled me, actually. Yeah. It made me its subject. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:20:11 And Mia, you know, you and I haven't eaten a lot of meals together. We need to do more of that. Right. We need to do more of that. You're the, I have not eaten many meals with me yet, but hopefully will, Queen. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Now the liver king is the king of liver,

Starting point is 01:20:27 as you're all, I'm certain, well aware. And we did a Bastards, this was a live episode I did a couple of years ago with Dr. Kavehoda. And in case you're not aware, the liver king is a guy who like three, two or three years ago, started to get really famous very suddenly and obtained millions of followers, I think up to like six at one point on Instagram

Starting point is 01:20:49 by getting super jacked. He was this huge shredded guy, or he's not actually very tall, but he was shredded. And he was always perpetually shirtless, usually wearing very little and talking about his different primal rules, how mainly you need to eat nothing but liver and testicles, often raw.

Starting point is 01:21:07 And that's all you need to do in order to get huge. That, and then you can just lift hundreds and hundreds of pounds and you'll get swollen and gigantic, totally natty, because we're supposed to eat like primal cavemen who only ate testicles and liver. And then they left the rest. Now, accepting that how none of this is accurate,

Starting point is 01:21:26 it came out very soon after that, because the liver king, prior to becoming the liver king, had been a series of petty grifters of lower nobility and had written an email to a guy who was like an expert on performance enhancing drugs, asking like what kind of regimen he could take in order to get the size that he eventually became. Anyway, it came out that he's been spending like $13,000 a month on steroids.

Starting point is 01:21:48 That's how he got huge. It's not the testicles, it's not the livers, it's not these absurd videos of him eating different organ meats or making his kids eat different organ meats. It's not his weird workout tactics, it's the fact that he's taking $13,000 worth of gear a month, right? Now one of the first people to call him out before this came out was Joe Rogan, who saw the, and you know, I'll give Joe Rogan credit for one thing. He knows when someone's on steroids. So Joe Rogan had called him out initially being like, there's no way this guy's natural, right?

Starting point is 01:22:22 Like he's taking fucking steroids. It's very obvious. Now, to be fair, everyone fucking steroids. It's very obvious now to be fair Everyone knew that because it's very like I don't know shit about steroids And I look at that guy like his belly button pushes out It is in like it Roberts not talking about an outie no no I'm talking about It's a golf ball size protrusion like the organs of drives Is so clearly 80% steroids by volume You will steroid to body mass that is ever existed

Starting point is 01:22:54 Yeah, it's nuts stuff so he lost a shitload of his followers, and he still got like three million on Instagram But his videos he's lucky to get a couple of of thousand likes and shares these days on an Instagram video. And before that all came out, he was doing much more. He had to do a mea culpa. He claims he's all natty now. And he has, just over the last couple of years, just continually degraded. Now, this guy's business, which he made millions doing, or one of his businesses, was selling different supplements.

Starting point is 01:23:22 He's very expensive supplements. And he's built kind of a little cult at his compound in Texas around, you know, listening to fucking dance music from the mid aughts. A lot of like Mike Posner remixes and weird shit. What? While giving rants about being a caveman

Starting point is 01:23:38 and like pulling, trapped your equipment and shit. Well, he likes to always walk around with fucking a plate carrier on, which he calls his exoskeleton in order to like, you know, build up muscle mass or whatever. In any way, he's continually degenerated to the point where those of us who call ourselves liver king watchers have all kind of been saying

Starting point is 01:24:01 for a while now, oh, he's not just on gear anymore. Like he's doing other drugs and they are really having a negative effect on his mental health. Yeah, he doesn't seem well. He does not seem well. So I'm gonna play a video on this. This is a video that started it all. He started a couple of weeks ago,

Starting point is 01:24:17 increasingly threatening Joe Rogan. And he doesn't live that far away from Austin. He started posting this series of videos trying to threaten Joe Rogan to a fight. And I'm gonna post to you the one, this is kind of like the key video And he doesn't live that far away from Austin. He started posting this series of videos trying to threaten Joe Rogan to a fight. And I'm gonna post you the one, this is kind of like the key video that gets this series of events started.

Starting point is 01:24:30 It's the video that is the inciting incident video for everything that's happening now, right? So that's what I'm gonna play for you guys. You see the Instagram? Okay, so in this video listeners, you're gonna hear him talk. In this video, he's got, again, like music playing in the background.

Starting point is 01:24:46 He's wearing a badly taxidermied wolf head that's like a cape over his regular head. It looks like a, it's like a, he's shirtless. He's wearing shorts. And as one user noted in the comments, his pants are vibrating as he talks and he is carrying in each hand, he has a gold-plated AR-15 short-barreled rifle. With a fucking blast forwarder.

Starting point is 01:25:12 Yes! In my entire life, I have never seen a man look less intimidating while holding a gun, wearing a wolf pelt. Two guns, man! Two guns! That's a second gun? Two guns, yes. Holy shit! It looks like a blunderbuss! Those are two gold plated AR-15 SBRs with a gold EOTech on top in case he hadn't spent enough money.

Starting point is 01:25:34 Yeah, yeah, and I think a gold one on the other. So anyway, listen to this man. Joe Rogan, I'm calling you out. My name's Leonard Key. Man to man, I'm picking a fight with you. Yes. I have still training as you did, so you're a black belt. You should just man to me. But I'm picking a fight with you. Your rules. Whatever you want me to wait, I'll wait. I waited one nighty this morning. I'll come to you whenever you're ready,

Starting point is 01:26:07 whenever you're ready to go. I'm on a vibration plate, by the way. That's what I'm chasing, go off. And then he just starts dancing. I'm strange. So, I'm on a vibration plate, by the way. That's a healthy man. That's a guy who's doing well, right?

Starting point is 01:26:29 We can all agree. He's literally buzzing. I saw a video one time where someone was reacting to a Drake video and his response was, those are the least intimidating goons I've ever seen in my entire life. And that is the entire vibe of watching him trying to like It's something else it's it's it is special It is special and if you couldn't quite make out the audio over whatever the fuck that music was What he says and that is Joe Rogan. I'm calling you out. My name is liver King man to man I'm picking a fight with you. I have no training in jujitsu. You're a black belt

Starting point is 01:27:02 You should just dismantle me, but I'm picking a fight with you. Your rules. I'll come to you whenever you're ready." Holding the ARs does give that a slightly different... A slightly more terroristic threat vibe, right? Why are you holding the ARs? Because he goes on to say in another post, you never come across something like this, willing to die, hoping that you'll choke me out because that's a dream come true, which makes it sound like a sex thing, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes it sound like a sex thing.

Starting point is 01:27:31 He closed out Pride Month. So this video comes out, and then Liver King starts making a series of videos in Austin, right? He drives to Austin, he's making videos on the way, he makes videos when he gets there, and he keeps saying he wants to fight Joe Rogan. Now, he's just saying he wants to fight him, right?

Starting point is 01:27:48 He's not saying, I'm gonna kill you. He's not saying like, I'm going to assault you. He's like, he's asking for a consensual fight, but he's also posing with weapons and he has now traveled to Austin and he's clearly unwell. So Joe Rogan has a security team. He's got a bunch of like former operators and shit that he pays to watch over his security and whatnot. and sometimes go on his podcast if I'm not mistaken.

Starting point is 01:28:09 And they do their job, which is, oh, there's a guy threatening our boss holding guns and photos and he's traveled to Austin. We should probably call the cops. We should probably do something about this. So they they give a call to the police and they're like hey we consider this to be through like serious numerous threats Right. He's traveled to Austin like this seems like a guy who might actually act seriously on his threats We're concerned about this. So the police wind up talking to Joe Rogan himself and Rogan says yeah, I was you know My security team told me about this. I consider these to be threats like and I'm willing to file a police report, right? He tells the police that Brian Johnson has a drug issue, which again, it's weird to be like,

Starting point is 01:28:52 yeah, Joe Rogan so far, not wrong about any of this. And he's like, he's unstable, he probably needs help, which again, probably accurate, right? I don't think there's much to argue with here. So the police decide decide these cross the line into terroristic threats and they file charges. The liver King is arrested. He's not in jail long.

Starting point is 01:29:13 He's released within a day on $20,000 bond. There's restraining order. He's not allowed to have guns anymore for a while. He's got to stay 200 yards away from Rogan. So the liver King does exactly what a guy like the the, you'd expect a guy like the Liver King to do, right? In the wake of something like this happening, which is he immediately gets out of jail and starts making more videos, right?

Starting point is 01:29:36 Oh, of course. Yeah. Yeah. From his hotel room in Austin. And again, these are just the videos of a really healthy guy who's doing well, whose brain has not liquefied and isn't coming out of his ears. Just a man who seems healthy. Thank you for all the prayers, by the way,

Starting point is 01:29:53 people praying for me. You should also pray for yourself, pray for your family, lock that down, fifth bump pound, lock it down. You should do all that. I am going to the Capitol. I'm already in the Capitol, but we're going to like capital capital the location and I've been given the gift of a restraining order just recently and so if anybody knows if someone else whose

Starting point is 01:30:19 first name rhymes with blow whose last name isan. I'm not allowed to say it for copyright. I might sue you about every, you're not allowed to laugh. I'll put you in jail on that one too. Okay, so first off, he starts this. He admits in another video, he pulls a little earlier, that he hasn't slept in days. Like, and he hasn't been eating.

Starting point is 01:30:44 And he is slurring his words at the start of this. He is not well. I don't think he's sober, but it could just be sleep deprivation and the fact that something else is awry. And he's like going to the Capitol. He says he wants to go to the Capitol to like start a legal precedent.

Starting point is 01:30:58 He says, liver King V Joe Rogan is gonna be like one of the great legal battles of our century in terms of setting precedents. What kind of precedent? It's gonna be the new Dred Scott. I gotta play you guys another video from right after his arrest in terms of like, seeing how well this man is doing.

Starting point is 01:31:18 This is the one where he talks about having not slept a day. It's gonna zoom in on his eyes. And I need you to look at his pupils, okay? Because this seems like a man who's had a serious head injury to me. Because one of his pupils is a very different size from the others.

Starting point is 01:31:36 Good morning, Primus. Oh, wow. From the vibration plate of the greatest home state in the world. Austin, Texas. Texas is the state, just to be clear. Bags under my eyes. Haven't slept a whole lot. And it's been an amazing gift. What do you, what do you see there, people with medical training? Yeah, the human eye shouldn't do that. That is like. Yeah, the human eyes shouldn't do that

Starting point is 01:32:05 Yeah, they're not supposed to look like that. That's one of the It's bad, yeah, like it's if I cared about this man, I would get him to a hospital immediately Yeah, and to be clear, I don't. I kind of wonder the liver, a filtering organ, right? It takes the bad stuff out. I feel like if that's all you eat, you're going to concentrate the bad stuff. You're going to get vitamin A poisoning. She almost certainly has by now.

Starting point is 01:32:40 You did this. I would like slip him a bear liver or something. Pull a bear liver. Like what? What is going on here? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He went up the food chain until he ate that wolf's liver and then put it on his head. Yeah, it's very unclear to me.

Starting point is 01:32:53 Is he actually eating that much liver? Like there's videos where he does, but like on a daily basis, he's also taking gear. So maybe he has a normal diet in order to like, you know, outside of it and this is just for show. There's been a lot of theorizing about that and we just don't know. But either way, I think it's safe to say, this is a sick man, right?

Starting point is 01:33:12 This is not a well person. His Instagram comments are not helping. Just give this man a gun and be Italy. Keep trying to fight Joe Rogan, but I believe you can do it. To be fair, right now, if someone is putting out a casting call for deranged man and like prophet in the desert, he looks exactly like that. Absolutely. Be incredible at it before he went completely nuts.

Starting point is 01:33:37 He looks amazing. He looks incredible. Yeah. He's got like two foot of beard, his hair is unkempt. He looks like, if you know the mural of John Brown. Yeah. John Brown is like yoked and really angry. Yes, yes.

Starting point is 01:33:49 That is what he looks like. He does. Different vibes. Speaking of different vibes, let's change to the Capitol and this is him going through security at the Capitol as best I can tell. Oh, God. And he is, he's wearing like, a fucking wading length pants, like pants that cut off just below your knees. So like they're high water sweatpants. He's wearing like a sleeveless green hoodie

Starting point is 01:34:31 and he has the hood up over his head. And then he's wearing a plate carrier and he's trying to go through Capitol security. Oh God. Oh. It's just, it's just really funny. Do the problem. It's just really funny. It's just two ladies in security uniforms, they're letting him try to go through.

Starting point is 01:34:59 And I think this proves that if he was wearing ceramic plates, I don't think it would set off the metal detector, but it does. So he's gotta be wearing those cheap AR 500 metal plates. Oh it's set off the detector, wow. Yeah I mean it's possible this doesn't look like just a weight vest that looks like just a normal plate carrier. Although it's a 511 Tactec. Yeah yeah it looks like yeah. So I think he's just got AR 500 plates in there. Of course I mean they're probably just weight plates. They may not even be AR500.

Starting point is 01:35:25 Yeah, they may not even be ballistic. They could be cast iron. He tells them it's his exoskeleton, so he has to keep it on. I don't think he gets in wearing this. Oh no, I can't. There's my skeleton. There's nothing called that.

Starting point is 01:35:35 Oh man, I love the liver kick. I was really not expecting him to turn into a lobster, but apparently that's just where we're at now. That's where we're at, yeah. Yeah, you're right, given his redness. So, I'm gonna go ahead and say that I'm not gonna be wearing this. I'm not gonna be wearing this.

Starting point is 01:35:43 I'm not gonna be wearing this. I'm not gonna be wearing this. I'm not gonna be wearing this. I'm not gonna be wearing this. I'm not gonna be wearing this. I'm really not expecting him to turn into a lobster but apparently that's where we're at now. That's where we're at yeah. You're right given his redness. So there's one more video from his time in Austin before we'll get back to the liver king compound and see the liver queen a little bit. Oh no. That person is going through the mental health equivalent of the Q course right now watching their one source of income. Yeah, I don't know. I have to hope if you're the liver queen, you have pretty good insurance for the liver king. Yeah, you hope so.

Starting point is 01:36:14 I don't know how long they've been liver monarchs together, whether she was with him before he went completely fucking mongers or... I don't know how much time there was before that happened, to be honest. Was it an arranged marriage? Like previous monarchies? Yeah, sure, yeah. She's actually from the Lung family, but they had to marry her off to forge an alliance. I'm gonna have to demand that we watch, is LK's back vulnerable if he only stands to strike? Because I need to see that. There's a lot of liver King fighting videos and none of them are all that impressive.

Starting point is 01:36:53 So one where he fights like a horse sized duck or a hundred duck sized horses. There's a video where he goes hunting with his kid and he's talking about how it's like a primal experience, but all that happens is he pays a guy to take him into the woods, it's like 40 feet away from a deer, and then they just shoot the deer.

Starting point is 01:37:10 That was tiny. Where his native American guide is like, okay, you can shoot it now. Fuck sake. It's really funny. It's pretty good. Okay. What?

Starting point is 01:37:22 What the fuck is happening? He's just crab walking like a gorilla down like the hall of his hotel. What is happening? It's beautiful stuff. It's good stuff. What's happening now? He's doing fake martial arts moves.

Starting point is 01:37:38 And he comes out the door with straight gorilla crab walking. He's just doing his gorilla crab walk that he does his like fist bump. He has like a little chant that he makes people say. We're just following the pounds, what do we do? Lock it down. He appears to be wearing an ankle monitor. Yeah, he is wearing an ankle monitor.

Starting point is 01:37:57 Yes, that's my favorite part of the video. He does have to wear an ankle monitor now. Someone's commented, is that an ancestral ankle monitor? I can't emphasize enough, ankle monitor now someone's coming to it's that an ancestral ankle monitor That is not a normal crab walk. I don't know how to describe what that is I It did it genuinely defies description. It is the weird Forms of motion I've ever seen a human Was drunk Can you undertake? Imagine if a gorilla was drunk. I like it, he's probably the...

Starting point is 01:38:25 So, we're gonna go back to ads real quick, and then when we come back, we're gonna finally see the liver queen and him back in his compound, talking to his fellow friends about how things are really good, how he wanted to get arrested for threatening Joe Rogan, how it's a blessing to have a restraining order against him

Starting point is 01:38:44 and to not be able to be in possession of his guns anymore. And we're back. And I'm going to play that video for you guys once again. So he is standing in the yard of the liver King compound. His wife is drinking a glass of wine next to him. And a point of this kind of reluctantly takes his hand. They are listening to a, like, I think it's a, I think you'd call it a trance remix of Mike Posner's,

Starting point is 01:39:18 I took a pill in Ibiza. So I don't know why it's just blasted over the yard as he talks, as he rants about his arrest. There's zero grace, there's zero... I really understand, I really, I did, I really do. And I'm not asking for it, I don't need it. But it's, it's hard. It's, it's, uh... The hardest part's over. The hardest part's fuckin' over. That's gravy. That's really good. The hardest part's over.

Starting point is 01:39:52 Getting arrested. For threatening JoRogen. His wife really doesn't want to take his hand. He has a keffiyeh draped around his shoulders. A tactical keffiyeh, no less. He's wearing a tactical keffiyeh. He loves his tactical keffiyeh draped around his shoulders. A tactical keffiyeh, no less. He's wearing a tactical keffiyeh. He loves his tactical keffiyeh.

Starting point is 01:40:08 Okay. It's good stuff. Yeah, he's just doing really healthy. He seems to have added mag pouches for this one, which suggests that he removed them for his trip to the Capitol. He didn't have to remove the mag pouches to go to the Capitol.

Starting point is 01:40:24 So he really thought it through and thought, I bet I can wear it if to remove the mag pouches to go to the Capitol. So he really thought it through and thought, I bet I can wear it if I take the mag pouches off. Mm-hmm. Yeah. He looks like a puffer fish. It's incredible. He does look like a puffer fish. He does.

Starting point is 01:40:35 And it looks like he's taken so many steroids that he is literally inflated. They are trying to get out. Yeah. So in this last video that we're going to play, he's sitting on a throne He's got a throne talks about how he thinks the throne is silly now and how he wouldn't have liked past liver King and how people talk about how he's lost it and he thinks that's a compliment because

Starting point is 01:40:56 I think he's making a point about ego death here, but it's not very coherent So here's the liver King talking about how it's good to lose your mind I saw these old So here's the liver King talking about how it's good to lose your mind Walking through the foyer. I saw these old thrones and I just kind of laughed I was like Kind of a little bit embarrassed and I thought oh, you know what? I don't think I made a video today. I Said I was going to so I better I better deliver on it, but it was Sunday Family Day God's Day capital G day And we did that then man. It was that was good. And so I'm walking by this one this

Starting point is 01:41:41 Throne old throne and I thought buffalo's real. That's that's legit. That's gonna stay but I thought oh my god, you know the predecessor me I Would have hated me too. I read some comments today or yesterday and I saw he's losing a lot. And this is says it on my desk. Lose yourself. The thing is like when you actually lose yourself though, and you lose the ego, you can't really tell people, you know, cause then it's like,

Starting point is 01:42:13 hey, yeah, I actually shed my ego. And now I'm better, you know? That's the ego talking. So if other people are seeing it whoa Thank you. Thank you, or I can also go back to the egomaniac So here's the thing folks the new DSM that's coming out I think they're going to increase the age at which you could be diagnosed as a schizophrenic for the male up to like 40 or Something like that and boy howdy up to like 40 or something like that and boy howdy. Oh no.

Starting point is 01:42:45 Real truly like real Rasputin vibes from this one. He's got like a hood on. He really is obsessed because his hair he's got less and less of it every day. That'll happen if you put testosterone. Would you take anything but pure test? Yes. Yeah, yeah. When you don't pour testosterone on your cereal in the morning.

Starting point is 01:43:05 Yeah. So anyway, that's, that's my update for everyone on the Lipper King. He's doing well. I'll be shocked if he's alive in a year. What a fantastic man. He's got kids, but he also makes them eat raw testicles. So I don't know if they're going to be worse off. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:43:20 Yeah. Yeah. I think that is probably one of those rare station intervene moments. Yeah. Something should have, something should be done here. Yeah, this doesn't seem like a healthy guy. I don't know if you should eat just organ meats. No, apparently like eating a diet that is entirely consists of raw organs,

Starting point is 01:43:37 random pharmaceuticals and gear makes you like talk exactly the same as like a 19 year old art student. Yeah. Like another like sucking enough ketamine to like tranquilize a horse. These are apparently equivalent states of being. This is what I've learned from this. Yeah. I think ketamine is one possible explanation because some of his some of his behavior is definitely like ketamine-coated.

Starting point is 01:44:09 But I also think there's a good chance that this is just like, he's been abusing drugs for such a long period of time that his, he's just suffering permanent brain damage now at this point, right? Like he's, he's not able to like, he's not very cogent anymore. And I don't know, I feel like the people who are still around him are largely taking advantage of him for money, like he was good at making money at one point, they're still cash flooding in and that's kind of what's happening here. But on the other hand, like this guy made his own hell, he made his own bed, he's getting exactly what he wants.

Starting point is 01:44:39 Yeah, he lied to people about their health, which is a pretty fucked up thing to do. Like, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the liver king. Yeah. I don't have a lot of sympathy for the liver king. No, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the liver king. Anyway, any questions about the liver king before we roll out? I mean, so many, Robert. More than you can ever imagine, but, uh... Okay, on a scale of like 0.01 to 1 Gaddafi, how are his golden ARs? I mean, they're golden ARs.

Starting point is 01:45:10 Like, they're fine. Like, they're definitely like dictator-grade ARs. I'll give them that. Like, if you saw that in like some fucking junta leader, you know, carrying around and screaming about executing his enemies, you'd be like, yeah, that fits. That said, I do think if you are going to be carrying a gold-plated weapon, an AR is just inherently less impressive than an AK-47. Like a golden AK-47 says something about you, and a golden AR just says that you have like $15,000 to light on fire for no good reason.

Starting point is 01:45:42 Whereas a gold-plated AK-47 says, you've probably mixed cocaine and gun powder. You know? Yeah. Yeah. I, uh, that's some advice for the liver king for free. Yeah. You have to be, you have to be sending positive messages out into the world with your apparel.

Starting point is 01:45:57 Exactly. Exactly. Yes. Just why I'm wearing the derpiest wolf. Find theiest wolf. Mankind is effecy. You guys have to just look, find the fucking wolf. Like the indignity of it being killed is not its final indignity as it turns out. Yeah. No, that's as bad as it can go for a wolf. Yeah, pretty much.

Starting point is 01:46:18 You go from the top of the food chain to this guy's balding, uh, cranium. Yeah, I don't know. have a fucking vegetable, everyone. That's what I have for you. Yeah, have, have vegetables. Eat more vegetables. Oh, we haven't talked about how he squats. He doesn't squat with the bar, he squats with the rack. We squats with the rack, actually.

Starting point is 01:46:39 Oh, yeah, no, we forgot to mention that. That is very funny. Yeah. God. Everyone, go on this. It's a mention that that is very funny. Yeah, God Go on this and it's a terrible fucking time to be alive go on his Instagram. It's funny. Yeah, it's really funny Have some fun. Enjoy the liver Kings Instagram While he's still alive for another like four to six months. I'm not taking any pleasure in this I don't want him to die. I'm just looking at a man and being like well, that's not gonna last much longer Yeah, this is like watching a car without brakes. Yeah. Traveling downhill at speed.

Starting point is 01:47:08 Yeah. All right, everyone. Have a good night. I'm Robert Evans and on my podcast Behind the Bastards we talk about the worst people in all of history. We've discussed a lot of horrible monsters in our time, but this week we have one of the very worst we'll ever talk about. David Berg, founder of a cult called the Children of God. We'll talk about all of his horrible crimes with special guest, Ed Helms. He's not just like a weird religious cult leader.

Starting point is 01:47:49 He was like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology in with this kind of like evangelical Christianity, Pentecostal preaching in the mid century. He's a very weird guy. But yeah, I'll just get into it. Like nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't say. Right. But that's the beauty of cults. Listen to Behind the Bastards on the iHeart radio app, But yeah, I'll just get into it. Like nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't say. Right.

Starting point is 01:48:05 But that's the beauty of cults. Listen to Behind the Bastards on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Open AI is a financial abomination. A thing that should not be. An aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'm going to tell you why on my show Better Offline, the rudest show in the tech industry, where we're breaking down why open AI, along with all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun?

Starting point is 01:48:48 Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this Taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad.

Starting point is 01:49:31 Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser, Inc. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st, and episodes 4, 5, and six on June 4th. Ad free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple podcasts. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebene, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebene, and every Tuesday, I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories

Starting point is 01:50:04 that will challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all, childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles, and more, and found the strength to make it to the other side. My dad was shot and killed in his house. Yes, he was a drug dealer. Yes, he was a confidential informant, but he wasn't shot on the street corner.

Starting point is 01:50:33 He wasn't shot in the middle of a drug deal. He was shot in his house, unarmed. Pretty Private isn't just a podcast. It's your personal guide for turning storylines into lifelines. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you.

Starting point is 01:51:13 I'm Garrison Davis. Today I am joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and later, a special report by Robert Evans. This episode we are covering the week of June 25th to July 2nd. It is the end of Pride Month. It was Canada Day. Fourth of July is coming up. I will say no one in our team wished me a happy Canada Day. Not that I noticed. Mm-hmm. That's correct. I hate the Trump administration because I can't do my Death of Canada jokes anymore. It sucks. It's terrible. Canada, welcome to the Resistance. I'm to start with a brief

Starting point is 01:51:47 news roundup because there's been so many news stories this past week that we cannot do big sections on all of them. We already have three main stories, but there's some mini stories that I didn't want to get forgotten. I'm going to start by talking about the Supreme Court, which has now limited the ability of lower court judges to use nationwide injunctions. So now Trump's order to end birthright citizenship can be enforced, if even temporarily, for those who are not affiliated with the actual court cases on the constitutionality of ending birthright citizenship. What this means on a broader scale is that Trump's very obviously illegal executive orders can now be enforced in a lot of states because the injunctions that judges are putting on only apply to the people in

Starting point is 01:52:33 those specific cases. So enforcement of the orders can start before the final order on if it's legal or not gets issued. So this is really bad because it will cause some intense, if temporary, like short-term headaches for many people whose now citizenship is in a big question mark. But this also affects many other cases regarding judge's ability to actually issue injunctions that affect things across the whole country. Yeah, there is some sort of like weird hack shit you can do where like there's been some stuff the judges have been trying to do

Starting point is 01:53:12 and to be like everyone in the country is a plaintiff or whatever the fuck. Yeah, and I don't know how long that's gonna hold up. And like the fuck thing about this is again, it's just like what this means is Trump administration can kind of do whatever the fuck thing about this is, again, it's just like, what this means is the Trump administration can kind of do whatever the fuck they want, and it's just legal until the Supreme Court looks at it and that's completely unhinged. Yeah, like, egregiously illegal orders can now be enforced for a period of months to years as the court cases eventually will turn their way up to the Supreme Court. Yeah, and this is a particularly egregious one too because the birthright citizenship is so obviously it's just literally in the Constitution

Starting point is 01:53:50 It's literally the Constitution just says if you're born here, you're a citizen Yeah Well, it says that section of the amendment that is under question is subject to the authority thereof Which is what is being litigated here? There is a section there that that I guess is perceived by some people to be debatable, doesn't seem very debatable to me, right? No, it's completely insane. It's like unhinged shit. Like, it's like stuff you wouldn't have seen even from like unhinged conservative legal cranks 15 years ago.

Starting point is 01:54:19 You absolutely would have seen this particular case, unfortunately. Well, I guess I... The absolute most unhinged baby, but you wouldn't even see even like... I don't know. The normal person on Fox News kind of unhinged thing, arguing this even 15 years ago and now. This was like on the blogs that have the GeoCities era web design. Yeah. Yeah. Trying to restrict and quantify citizenship is going to be probably the main theme of this episode, as we will get to in the future.

Starting point is 01:54:49 And if even temporarily trying to strip the citizenship of already thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who live in this country is incredibly worrying, considering the massive amount of increased funding that ICE is about to receive. Speaking of ICE, second little mini story, an explosive ICE raid in Huntington Park, California. Bortack and ICE agents used explosives to breach and raid the home of US citizens. A drone was sent into the home after explosives shattered the windows,

Starting point is 01:55:16 sending glass shards flying into the home, occupied by a mother and two young children. The target of the raid was not in the home. Now, Border Patrol was looking for a man that got into a car accident during a previous ICE raid who was questioned at the scene and was allowed to leave. But now, the DHS alleges the man was obstructing the actions of ICE when he rammed his car into a vehicle carrying CBP agents. Though witnesses at the scene say that the feds break checked, leading to a rear ending. The man turned himself

Starting point is 01:55:45 in on Friday after the raid. So what actually happened here is that ICE caused a car accident and in response they blew up the home of US citizens. Yeah well they dynamically breached a home with a little child in it. Two young kids I think like a six-year-old and a two-year-old. Yeah you see them presumably the mother of the mother with the child in her arms leaving They sent a fucking drone in there. They're acting like it's a house full of like active combatants You have like dozens dozens of people in in military fatigues raiding this home Yeah

Starting point is 01:56:19 Except they didn't do it in such a fashion as you would if you if you were actually worried, right? They didn't there wasn't a flashbang right that they bre breached, stood around for a while, sent a drone in. They didn't dynamically breach in a dynamic way like they would if they were expecting a real threat. No, they just wanted to blow up this person's fucking house because they were pissed off that they caused a car accident. Yes. These are the tiniest fucking baby secret police I have ever seen in my entire goddamn life. Fucking Christ. tiniest fucking baby secret police I have ever seen in my entire goddamn life.

Starting point is 01:56:47 Fucking Christ. It reminds me of that one picture of a police raid in the 90s that conservatives used to use in terms of the governments taking over of this retro 90s SWAT cop pointing a gun at a family that's hiding in like hiding in like a closet and the alien Gonzales raid Do you mean yeah? And how much this was used as like fear of like federal overreach like used by conservatives and now This is like their entire platform is raiding the home of US citizens. Yeah, it's pretty worth noting I believe Huntington part their mayor has directed their police to enforce the California law which requires law enforcement officers to identify themselves. It's been very common to see ICE agents refuse to identify

Starting point is 01:57:30 themselves and wear masks. I believe this was passed by their council and then their mayor, whose name is Arturo Flores, released a statement calling the ICE mask abductions, masked abductions, and directing his police to intervene if what was happening was unlawful or unauthorized. And I can't help but think that that is why we saw this happen here, right? I think it may not be so much so. So, car crash is a chance to do something in this city, which has been one of the very few that has taken meaningful action to prevent this. Absolutely. Because people don't like ICE. There's new ICE approval ratings that came out by Quinnipiac on June 24, 2025. Net approval of ICE negative 17%. Democrats negative 80%, independents negative 32%. This is the centrist position. Independents negative 32%.

Starting point is 01:58:22 Oh, yeah, you've got like Bush admin staffers saying abolish ICE, it's a win for Mia. Oh yeah, GOP is up 60 but that's it. This is like the centrist position now and also 60% is nearly half the GOP. Like people don't like ICE, the majority of people in this country don't like ICE, negative 17%. Candidates that need to run on abolishing ICE, this is like one of the most important issues facing the country right now. And they are wildly unpopular, including for independence. This is this that abolishing ICE should be the centrist position. Yeah. But this is but this is this is sort of the problem, right? Which is that the Democrats did this like well, at least some of them, at least AOC.

Starting point is 01:58:58 So some of that democratic wave ran on that in 2018. And then the Democrats were just like, eat shit. We're never going to do that again. And like AOC never fucking mentioned it again. Like they all came into power and were like, okay, we got to deal with some border crackdown shit. It's like, they need to. They fucking need to do this. Yeah. But people should bring it back. I think that the data here is in support. Yeah. And like ICE is younger than I am. ICE is younger than all of us. Like ICE is a fucking fake agency. Yeah. And DHS is younger than most of us. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:59:26 Like, the ICE as an agency should be like disappearing. We should like try to be forgiven for it over the course of hundreds of years. Like... Yeah. Yeah. People want to learn more about the history of DHS. I did a series about Title 42 where I talk about it a whole lot. Speaking of agencies that shouldn't exist,

Starting point is 01:59:42 the BBC cut the feed of the Glass Free Music Festival during recap's performance to block pro-Palestinian messaging, but they failed to stop Bob Villain from leading a Death to the IDF chant. Wait, Bob Dylan? Bob Villain. Bob Villain. Oh, Bob Villain. Okay, okay.

Starting point is 02:00:02 That sounds like, what? Hold on. Thanks, Bob Villain. Thanks, Bob Villain? Okay, okay. That sounds like what? Hold on. Thanks Bob Villain! Thanks Bob Villain! They are a punk rap group and they were leading Death to the IDF Chance, broadcast live on the stage. Both of these music groups, Necap and Bob Villain, are now under investigation by the British police from their political comments at this music festival. And the US State Department has revoked Bob Villain's work visa ahead of an upcoming US tour as punishment for criticizing the military of a foreign country. The party of free speech strikes once again.

Starting point is 02:00:36 Yeah, I do want to say that, like, as a consumer of Glastonbury Music Festival content, right, I guess... As a British person. Yeah, and at the target, like age demographic, I guess. What this has overshadowed is the massive amount of support for the Palestinian cause that you saw. Like go watch a Glastonbury video and you will not not see Palestinian flags in the crowd. Most of them you will hear the artists acknowledging

Starting point is 02:01:00 that there was a genocide in Palestine, right? I don't know if anyone at the BBC is familiar with Bob Villain. I'm sure they've played their music, but whoever made the choice to stream them and not stream kneecap clearly had not done a fucking Wikipedia level research. You know what you're getting into with these guys. Both the people in the band are called Bobby Villain, right? That's their stage name that they use in order to have a little bit of privacy. But there's an interview with him a while ago where he's like,

Starting point is 02:01:28 yeah, I just like pissing people off because it's the only thing that brings me joy in this miserable fucking country. Incredible. Yeah, they've been very outspoken about a large number of things. The British police have been going completely unhinged with this, too. The parliament's currently I don't know what the result. I think they may have voted to do it already They've been trying to vote to like make it illegal for like Palestinian action to exist after they did it after they did a pretty big action at a

Starting point is 02:01:54 Action. Yeah after possum action did a pretty big like action at a like fucking British arms manufacturer that sells to Israel So they're going so unhinged on all of this shit. And they've been going after kneecap for years. There's multiple investigations into kneecap now. You should check out kneecaps new movie. It's pretty good. For our first main story, I guess I'll throw to James to discuss denaturalization. Yeah. Yeah, less exciting than Glastonbury Music Festival. So denaturalisation, if you're not familiar, were at the removal of US citizenship from people who became US citizens at some point in their life.

Starting point is 02:02:32 The DOJ has issued instructions to its Civil Division employees to pursue denaturalisation proceedings against naturalised US citizens, quote, in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence. It goes on to list some categories. These include some of the things you might expect, including being in excess to terrorism and organized crime, people who engage in war crimes, people who committed violent crimes or failed to disclose felonies on their application for naturalization. But they also include fraud, both against private individuals and against Medicaid, Medicare and the Pay You Check Protection Plan, maybe program, the PPP, COVID era government bailout, right?

Starting point is 02:03:13 The last one, however, is the most concerning, quote, any cases referred to the Civil Division that the Division considers sufficiently important to pursue. Any cases that are found to be sufficient, sufficiently important. Just, people aren't familiar, right? Civil and criminal law are distinct, right? Civil law has a lower burden of proof and crucially, the accused person is not entitled to legal representation. In addition, this could have trickle-down effects, right?

Starting point is 02:03:44 Children of naturalized citizens are also citizens, so their citizenship derives from their parents' citizenship. So it's possible that children who are not even accused of doing anything wrong could be de-naturalized, not naturalized, de-citizenized, and left stateless, right? Many of these children will not be dual nationals. This is the other big problem with ending birthright citizenship. Yes, it will leave people... So this is something that I do feel like,

Starting point is 02:04:12 much like I feel like in the UK, people should have pushed back against the government prosecuting people for saying shit that was fucking hateful and disgusting about migrants when there was a stabbing attack last year. I still feel people should approach back because it's not a good situation when the government gets to decide what you can and can't think. Likewise, in this instance, nations in the global north

Starting point is 02:04:33 have been leaving people who fought for the, or people who are accused of fighting for the Islamic State or joining the Islamic State stateless for a long time. And I think that was a bad precedent. And they were able to, as we'll get into, they will always use an odious person as the first example to set the precedent and then go from there. Yep. So in the odious person example in this case is someone called Elliot Duke. They have been denaturalized. Duke was a UK citizen, served in the United States military while serving in Germany, they received and distributed child sex abuse material. According to the DOJ, they were later contacted by the

Starting point is 02:05:13 FBI about this and prosecuted. The DOJ stated that their case was identified as part of Operation Prison Lookout, which aims to identify sex offenders who have naturalized. I haven't seen any reporting on Prison Lookout. It's in the press release, but I think maybe people don't read to the bottom. But it appears that the DOJ, this case has been going on for months, the Duke case, right? And so the DOJ, as early as February this year, was looking through prosecution records to find naturalized citizens who have been convicted of sex crimes. Duke was not able to get an

Starting point is 02:05:45 attorney to represent them. They also, it appears, renounced their UK citizenship and it's not very clear what happens now. Like in other stateless person cases, where does this person go? Denaturalization has been used before. The time when the United States did the most denaturalization was during the second Red Scare, second Red Scare, AKA McCarthyism, right? And oh boy, are they trying to bring it back. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. 20,000 cases a year in the McCarthy era.

Starting point is 02:06:16 For reference, the stats I could find suggest about 25 million naturalized citizens in the United States. Both Obama, Obama had something called Operation Janus, they identified people who were eligible for denaturalization. Trump won, also had higher rates of denaturalization, but nothing on this McCarthy-era scale, right? People will be familiar with denaturalization also. Before that, that happened to Emma Goldman, for example. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:06:42 One other story from this week that's kind of related is it was announced that tool to check the citizenship status of all Americans. This is the first time we've had a centralized tool like this or we've attempted to. The US has for a while has resisted creating like a dossier of like official citizens because this is like a kind of problematic thing to have. There's a lot of issues with this concept. Actually verifying that this list is accurate is very tricky. You have to add people who have been naturalized, how they've been naturalized. There's other people who acquire citizenship through other means

Starting point is 02:07:15 than the standard like naturalization process, like including like through through your parents. There's the Child Citizenship Act of 2000 where if one of your parents is a US citizen, and you are not a US citizen, but you live with your US citizen parent while being a legal permanent resident, that then gives you automatic citizenship. But you don't need to apply for the naturalization process. So this is like a really weird thing to prove. You have to like apply for a certificate or apply for a passport as proof of citizenship. how would those cases be added to this list? This is an incredibly problematic thing to have, and it's going to be used mainly just to hunt people down and try to deport them.

Starting point is 02:07:54 Yeah. Massive information security risk. It's really problematic and tied in with these other denaturalization programs, it's a really worrying sign of where things are going to be going. Yeah. Talking of worrying signs, this is a worrying sign that we have to pivot to advertisements. All right, we are back. James, you do have one piece of good news in the immigration front. Well, I do, Garrison, but I gotta hit you with some bad news first, buddy. That's the way this show works.

Starting point is 02:08:34 That's how we do it here at Cool Zone Media. It could happen here special. Immigrant Defenders Law Center, a legal nonprofit, says one of their clients, Julie Calderon, was abducted by armed men in Los Angeles and taken to San Ysidro. People are not familiar with San Ysidro, the border that you might call San Diego border, the town that actually has the physical nexus of Tijuana is San Ysidro. The city of San Diego also has some land down there.

Starting point is 02:09:00 She was told at San Ysidro that she was to sign voluntary deportation papers. She very reasonably refused to ask to see a lawyer and a judge, and at this point she was taken and returned to the armed men and is now being detained in a warehouse with no beds, blankets, or food. She was able to make a call to her family from a blocked number. She described the people as bounty hunters. And at this point, she said she has not seen any uniformed officers in her detention, right? She's being detained in an area where men and women are mixed, which is not usual in border patrol detention,

Starting point is 02:09:34 according to IMDEF. According to IMDEF, she has not been able to shower and the only water source is a sink. The Mexican consulate has been informed and thinks that she might now be in the Otay Mesa detention center, but because she's not showing up on the ICE detainee locator, they don't know that for sure and they are therefore still a little bit unclear on where this lady has gone. I have seen reports of bounty hunters, many of you have sent them to me. I have seen none that I find to be credible before this. ImDeaf are an established group. They are not people who I've found to be prone to making things up or exaggerating. Like I trust them as a source. And this is deeply, deeply worrying.

Starting point is 02:10:20 I don't know why it's not getting more coverage other than most people on the migration and border beat perhaps don't speak Spanish or have actually just turned up on this beat a few weeks ago and have no notion of like who the actors and these groups are and they tend to go off government press releases. This is like shit that we haven't seen in the United States since I know the Fugitive Slave Act. Yeah. Like it's appalling.

Starting point is 02:10:47 Yeah, this is like the most just actual straight up 1930s Nazi shit that we've seen from them. Like it's hideous. Yeah, it's happening here in San Diego. But it's also of course like as Californians we are entering this time with the most cowardly and like pathetic governor that we've had in a long time like Arnold Schwarzenegger was a Republican but I bet he'd have handled this better than Newsom who is just a slimeball. Yeah like the fact that Newsom isn't like like if this was happening in fucking Illinois Pritzker would have SWAT teams

Starting point is 02:11:22 like these these these people would be like dead right now, but like this is completely fucking unhinged. Yeah, no, this is- What the fuck? Yeah. James, I was promised good news after the break. You're right, Garrison. And I do have some, lucky you.

Starting point is 02:11:41 Finally, a judge has ordered that Trump's sweeping asylum ban exceeds his authority as president and granted broad class protection. So we're going to see, like literally this happened maybe 30 minutes before we started recording. I'm going to read over the court documents. I've linked them in the notes here and see what this means. But it suggests that Trump's authority under the Immigration Naturalization Act doesn't allow him to just say, we're not doing asylum anymore. And therefore, it could

Starting point is 02:12:10 mean that it is possible for people to once again apply for asylum in the United States. I don't know how that will look. The Biden administration had great success gating asylum through CBP-1, right? And making it practically impossible for many people. People have darker skin, people who don't have fancy cell phones, people don't have access to wifi, et cetera, et cetera, to apply for asylum. That was the Biden administration. The people who we're supposed to think are good, they were terrible for migrants. But they got that through, right? So what we'll see from the Trump administration, I don't imagine we will see a return to regular Title A asylum processing, as we saw.

Starting point is 02:12:51 Like, last time we saw it, I guess, was in the Obama era, and that was pretty bad. So yeah, I don't know. What we'll see. All right, now I'm going to throw to Robert Evans for a special report on the Diddy trial. Hey everybody, Robert here. I guess I'm our resident P Diddy expert because I did the Bastards episodes on him. Just felt like it was appropriate to give y'all a brief update. So on the day that we record this, which is Wednesday, the second of July, Sean Diddy

Starting point is 02:13:20 Combs was found guilty on two of the five charges in his trial. He was being charged with racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking, and he was not found Sean Deddy Combs was found guilty on two of the five charges in his trial. He was being charged with racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking, and he was not found guilty of racketeering conspiracy or of both sex trafficking counts, each of which carried 15-year mandatory minimums. But he was found guilty on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. These were for one for a woman who was sued named Jane and one for his former partner Cassie Ventura. So, you know, this is not what people who understand the case

Starting point is 02:13:51 had hoped entirely, right? Like this is not ideal. It's not nothing, but it's not ideal. Now, if you're looking at like, why did this happen? Right? Why didn't he get convicted on these higher charges? He was absolutely guilty guilty of? It's because the prosecutor's fucked up. There were a number of different felony charges they could have gone after him for that were less difficult to prove than racketeering and sex trafficking, and did he had good lawyers? There's a lot of weirdness about, well, they didn't go after him for the guns and drugs that he had both at his properties or for a number of the other things that they could have done after him. You know, this is because prosecutors have to make choices as to like what to charge someone with.

Starting point is 02:14:29 And they tried for some of the harder stuff that was always going to be a little more difficult to prove. Now the two charges he's been convicted on, he could do up to 20 years, each has up to a maximum 10 year sentence. So he could get sentenced to do 10 years for each. Prosecutors have said that they're looking for a four to five-year prison sentence, which I think is much too light. 20 years would be, I would say, like, okay, that's a serious punishment. 10 years are over, I would say that's still at least, we can say it's not all the things you should have been convicted on, but that's not,

Starting point is 02:14:58 you can't, no one's going to spit at 10 years in prison, especially at his age, he's in his mid-50s right now. But four or five years, I wouldn't quite say that's a slap on the wrist, but it's not nearly what is deserved here. Now you do with federal sentences like this tend to serve a lot more of this, this is not a hope and he'll be out in a year kind of situation. One of the things that's kind of worth noting here is that he and his team did ask for bail while he waited for, because next week they're going to set up when he's going to get sentenced.

Starting point is 02:15:30 So that doesn't mean he'll be sentenced next week, but they'll be scheduling his sentencing next week. The legal system moves pretty slow. And his team asked for bail. There's evidence that he had people setting up, getting extra security up around his primary home and they were expecting of expecting him to be able to go home today. That's not going to happen.

Starting point is 02:15:47 The judge has denied his bail. This is after one of his accusers basically said, hey, I think this guy is really dangerous. He has a history of going after his accusers. I don't feel safe with him out before sentencing. That's maybe a good sign that maybe the judge will go further than the prosecutor. So I don't know if that's maybe a good sign that maybe the judge will go further than the prosecutor. So I don't know if that's likely again. I'll be like, okay, well at least this is serious if it gets 10 years or something like that.

Starting point is 02:16:12 If it is four or five, I'm going to be pretty frustrated. But you know, that's the case. This is, we are talking about a billionaire going to court here. So any serious prison sentence is more than you usually would expect. And this is a guy who's been used to living with kind of impunity for a while. And if he spends years in prison, either way, it's not totally impunity, but yeah, not ideal. That's the situation as it stands right now with P Diddy. You know, we'll see again next week, they're going to schedule his sentencing.

Starting point is 02:16:41 So, yeah, we'll see how things shake out. Now we'll pass over to Mia to discuss our second main story this episode. The formerly named One Big Beautiful Bill. Oh, God. So actually reading through this, I refuse to call this anything over in the genocide budget because this budget, what is designed to do is a genocide. And that's not an Exaggeration well, there's multiple types of killing included in this bill. Not just genocide. Yeah, the Medicare cuts I think that's true aren't aren't technically genocide, but they but they could lead to mass death

Starting point is 02:17:16 So we should be we should be inclusive We should be inclusive of all the types of deaths. I think we'll get into the Medicaid shit later We need to start with the mass deportation. We want to do an ethnic cleansing. We want to just simply wipe out entire peoples who live in the US and like fucking deport them from this country. Right. And by we, you mean the bill, not you, Mia Wong or us, Cool Zone Media.

Starting point is 02:17:38 No, no, by we, I mean the Republican Party who fucking wrote this bill. Okay, just checking. So, okay, what is actually in this so there's a very good write-up of this from the American immigration council and a lot of the stuff is from They are Okay, so across Homeland Security and government affairs the judiciary and the military the version of the budget that just passed the Senate allocates 170 billion dollars to their fucking unhinged deportation shit. This would be the third largest military budget in the world.

Starting point is 02:18:10 It is 30% larger than the military budget of Russia, which is currently fighting an active full-scale ground war. Right? This is a genocide budget. They are trying to get $170 billion for all of their border enforcement shit because they want to do a genocide. They are trying to remove entire peoples from the United States. And to do that, they need this kind of money. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:18:31 So let's, let's, let's break down a little bit of where this money is fucking going. We're going to do a longer thing. I'm going to do a longer episode about this thing, probably Tuesday, about like everything that's in this budget. But this needs to be understood. They are running $ billion dollars specifically for immigration detention. And as the American Immigration Council points out, that is at minimum five and a half billion more dollars per year than the entire budget of the entire federal prison system.

Starting point is 02:19:02 Yeah. What the shit? That's again, at minimum, that's again at minimum that's like 14 it's like 14 and a half billion at minimum for detention just just for immigration detention again significantly look like over 50% larger than the budget for the fucking entire federal prison system they want to put into this they're also giving out 3.5 billion dollars to state and local governments spent on working with ICE. The American Immigration Council estimates this could be 125,000 holding beds for people which is, and I quote, only just a bit below the current population of the entire federal prison system. They basically want to create a

Starting point is 02:19:40 whole new prison system just for immigrants. Yes, yeah, and again and again and I cannot emphasize this enough, the United States has one of the largest prison systems on earth, and they want to- The largest? China might push it? I think it's technically smaller than the Chinese- oh actually, let me actually pull the numbers up. I think it's technically smaller than America- per capita. Per capita, yeah, it's like- There's like no contest. Yeah, well, statistics are weird because there's countries that have like a Really really small number of people sure like in terms of like large countries or major countries major companies not even close Yeah, not even close then now obviously that's also counting like state prisons

Starting point is 02:20:15 But like still that with the far federal prison system is still like Like unfathomably massive yeah, and they basically want to double the size of it specifically just to fucking do this. Just to do these deportations. There's 30 billion dollars in this for direct deportations and just like to hire 10,000 more ICE agents. Which Trump's also been calling for in executive orders. Yeah, there is 48 billion dollars for building the wall and like border and like physical border enforcement infrastructure. There's an additional 5 billion dollars for checkpoints and Like like border patrol like facilities and outposts and shit. There's also about 15 billion dollars For states to do deportation shit. There's so much

Starting point is 02:20:58 Unhinged anti-immigrant shit in this bill that like again, I can't we don't have time to get into it here This is gonna be a full episode on fucking Tuesday that like again, we don't have time to get into it here. This is going to be a full episode on fucking Tuesday. This is why you have people like Stephen Miller trying to rally the whole party in support of this bill, which massively raises the deficit, something that Elon's been complaining about quite famously. Yeah, five trillion dollar hole in the budget. It doesn't matter.

Starting point is 02:21:18 Now there's all these Republican congressmen who constantly complain about the federal debt who are totally fine increasing the federal debt massively, people compromising their fiscal conservatism in support of a bill that furthers the United States as a white supremacist penal colony. And if these senators and congressmen vote against it, then that will be used against them in future elections. Being flanked from further on the right with attack ads claiming that the senators failed to Round up the illegals in not voting for the big beautiful budget bill Yeah, and I want to point this out right like they're not gonna stop at immigrants I need to make this incredibly clear once you have this infrastructure. You have to use it. Yeah, okay

Starting point is 02:21:59 Look like the people on the furthest left of the US have long I've talked about for a long time, but this is a country that is built on genocide, right? This is an apparatus that is designed to turn the US specifically into a machine to... And again, I need to point this out, the definition of genocide includes like removing people from a place. Yeah. Right, like that is a genocide. If you force a bunch of people to, if you fucking

Starting point is 02:22:25 round them up, put them into camps, and then fucking send them somewhere else, that's a genocide. That is what they are trying to do. Like Laura Loomer has been talking today about like the number she was citing was 65 million people, which is just every Latino person in the entire US. Yeah, that's Latino people, that's what she's talking about. Specifically talking about how she wants to feed them to alligators, which we'll talk about later Yes, the context of the number was feeding them to alligators. Yeah Yeah, right So like Trump has been joking for a long time about how if Stephen Miller got his way there would be like

Starting point is 02:22:53 115 million people in this country and they would all look like Stephen Miller like that's where they're going and that's not like oh Like this is the infrastructure for them to be able to do this And so like killing this fucking bill is unbelievably important. We're going to get into more of the fucking unhinged shit in here, but they only passed it by one vote in the House last time. And because of the way that reconciliation works, if anything changes in the House version of the bill, it has to go back to the Senate, where they also only barely passed it by like buying off Susan Collins. It was a 50-50 split in the Senate. Yeah, with like Murkowski voting for it, for example. Yeah, so like, you know, on the one hand, being able to pass this bill is precarious. On the other hand, if they do it, that limits the window for which we have to like make

Starting point is 02:23:45 ICE non-functional a lot because as they ramp up this capacity, it's going to take them a while to ramp up this capacity, right, even if this passes. But like they haven't had the capacity to do the genocide they've been trying to do, right? This will give it to them. With this amount of resources, yeah, with the third largest military budget in the world, they can do this kind of shit. And we have to stop them before they get there.

Starting point is 02:24:05 Yeah, like this is one of those call everyone you can in Congress situations, like not always a big call your rep person. Yeah, we're going to get to at the end of this, like how we've actually met we've gotten provisions killed from this bill already, we're gonna get to that later. We also need to talk about the Medicaid shit because Garrison you were saying Oh, I don't think it's gonna be considered a genocide, but it's so killing. I actually disagree with that because Okay, let's explain what's going on with Medicaid. They want you to a trillion dollars of cuts I think it's like just slightly under a trillion or maybe it's actually a trillion dollars of cuts over the next ten years to Medicaid

Starting point is 02:24:42 They want to put an 80 hour a month work requirement for Medicaid and food stamps. Now if you are disabled, right, this is just like a fuck you die proposal. Because there are a lot of people who fucking can't work 80 hours a month and this is just like literally eat shit and die. Right? They're also expanding this shit, the work requirements to,, well, they want these work requirements to apply to people who have children ages 13 and older. So if you are trying to like raise a child, fuck you, eat shit and die. And again, also like this is both Medicaid and SNAP. So this is a targeted, the estimates by the CBO, this is per PBS, the

Starting point is 02:25:22 Correctional Budget Office estimates that it will, that by 2034, 18.8 million people will be uninsured from this. It will keep three million people off of food stamps. A lot of those people are just going to be disabled and unbelievable numbers of those people are going to fucking die. And that's the point of this, right? Also, it's going to be just hideous for trans people who use Medicaid and SNAP at enormous rates because disabled and trans people are like the two poorest populations in the US. It's fucking hideous. These systems are already so hard to get in on

Starting point is 02:25:57 and stay on. Like both SNAP and Medicaid require substantial revisions and reforms to make them easier to access, to strengthen the infrastructure capacity of these things, to get more people on them. They need more funding. This is basically trying to take an already kind of dying system and just take it out back and shoot it in the head. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:26:17 Well, and they intentionally just want it to be harder and more frustrating and shitty to use. Like, they literally rolled back. Part of this bill is rolling back a bunch of reforms that Biden made to make it like slightly easier to get on. Yeah. And this is just going like, yeah, fuck you. This is going to be an absolute fucking catastrophe. Not just because of the people that it immediately affects,

Starting point is 02:26:37 although it is again going to kill unbelievable numbers of people. The other thing with this is that this is going to fucking annihilate rural hospitals because rural hospitals get a huge amount of their money from Medicaid and You know, there's a very good Kaiser Family Foundation report where they talk about how like yeah one in four people in rural areas Get their health insurance from from Medicaid And it's estimated a hundred and fifty five billion dollar decrease in in in money to hospitals in rural regions over the course of a decade, those hospitals are already closing. Those hospitals are fucking gone. If this fucking

Starting point is 02:27:10 passes as is, and there is a provision in there that's like, oh, we're going to spend $50 billion on like, to give money to rural hospitals, that's not enough. That's like, that's a third of the amount that they're getting cut by. Right? And even if those hospitals are open, how the fuck are people going to pay for the treatments because they're now kicked off Medicaid but this is going to fucking just absolutely eviscerate like the tiny remains of our rural healthcare system which is a complete fucking shambolic mess this is just going to fucking liquidate it is going to cause mass suffering and death on a scale that like we are going to look back at the height

Starting point is 02:27:43 of the opioid crisis and like in fucking nostalgia Because we're going to have the opioid crisis and this at the same time So it's real real fucking bad. I'm going to mention a couple of other things that are in it's like there's two points to this bill Right. One of the two points of it is to do is to again just like technically cleanse every non-white person from the us The second point of this bill is to give corporations 4.5 trillion dollars in tax cuts. It's mostly for rich people. That shit sucks.

Starting point is 02:28:12 That's like the buy in for like the business people is you get these tax cuts. They also want to end the tax credit for electric cars because their response to climate change is fuck you die. Now, again, as I mentioned, this only passed in the house by one vote last time and that was actually a less extreme version of the well okay there were some there's some more running shit in it that we'll talk about in the other episodes

Starting point is 02:28:33 in the house version of it but this only passed in the house by one vote and it only passed by one vote because three democrats died in office. Great system. It's great so things going great however comma it is possible to like that like it is possible to beat these people. It is possible to get shit cut from this fucking bill. To end on a positive note on this, we talked a bit last week, maybe. Last week, two weeks ago, one recent executive disorder. Yeah, yeah. I think it's on two different ones now, about how we beat the fucking ban on using Medicaid for trans healthcare.

Starting point is 02:29:07 And by we, I mean a combination of trans journalists like Maddie Castigan, Mira Levine, David Forbes, our like resident trans policy analyst, Kieran Green. I did some work on it, not like a huge amount, but like, I don't know, I did a little bit. A lot of like local queer orgs did a bunch of really good work on this. And like, quite frankly, like the other people who killed this is every single one of you who like fucking called and emailed and harassed your Senator. Like Ron Wyden, there was like, there was, there was, there was queer orgs like lobbying him directly.

Starting point is 02:29:35 And then also his office got fucking flooded by shit from like you who went and like screamed at them until they stopped doing this. And because of that, we got this thing killed from the fucking bill and the who went and like screamed at them until they stopped doing this and because of that we got this thing killed from the fucking bill and the Republicans are so mad about it that like they could theoretically Re-add it to the house one and there's a chance where they get so mad that they re-add this to the house bill And then that causes the house bill to fill it fell in the Senate because if they re-add this into the house bill then Reconciliation fails and has to go back to the Senate again so, you know it is possible to fucking beat these people.

Starting point is 02:30:06 And it's also important to understand that this was not done by, like, the giant national, like, gay inc., like, huge non-profit, like, Human Rights Commission bullshit council stuff. They did a little bit of stuff on the fucking trailing end. This was accomplished almost entirely by a combination of non-white and working-class trans journalists and organizers and just like a bunch of random fucking people who were like, eat shit, fuck you, get this out. And, you know, on a thing that would have killed unbelievable numbers of trans people, we fought the Republican Party and we beat them.

Starting point is 02:30:39 So, this can be done and this bill is not guaranteed to fucking pass. The bill can still be it can still be killed. Yeah. Yeah. Like it is it is it is devastating enough to like rural health care that even Republican senators are talking about not wanting to cut Medicaid. So it's a very unpopular bill. And when you tell regular Republicans about the details of the bill, they don't like it. They fucking hate it. They're being, like the Republican media machine is being so selective in how they're talking about the bill.

Starting point is 02:31:11 Because if you discuss the way that it just rips the heart out of Medicaid, that's not what most older Republicans want because they actually also rely on Medicaid. So it is a pretty unpopular bill. and the more people learn about the bill, the more they dislike it and you can see stats on this. Yeah. And the unhinged thing about this, right, is that even with limited information most Republicans have about this,

Starting point is 02:31:35 it still has like a 20 to 30% approval rating. It's so unpopular. Even in the low information environment we're currently in, it has like a 20 to 30% approval rating. I think if everyone actually understood what was in the bill, I think its approval rating would fucking drop even further. Yeah. Nobody wants this except for like the overt genocide people. So...

Starting point is 02:31:53 Most people, if they're not personally harmed, will know someone who's being personally harmed. Yeah. Do you know what is popular, James? Uh... I can guess. The products and services that support this podcast! Beautiful. Woo! You know what else is extremely popular?

Starting point is 02:32:23 It is my hit theme song about tariffs. Let's fucking go. Tariff, if you don't like it. Rockin' to Casbah. Rockin' to Casbah. Tariff, if you don't like it. Rockin' to Casbah. Rockin' to Casbah. Mia, what do we have for tariff talk this week? So this is an important week for tariffs. Next week will be the really, really critical one. So next week-

Starting point is 02:32:52 Allegedly. Allegedly. We'll see. I'm skeptical. So next week, all of the tariffs on every other country in the world from the Liberation Day tariff tariffs are supposed to like come off. We're going to see what happens. I've become Iqodapen here's biggest tariffier I'm I'm the tariff denier conspiracy theorist

Starting point is 02:33:07 Well, so here's the okay So so the Trump administration is claiming that they cut a deal with Vietnam again as a kind of recording on Wednesday I haven't actually seen anything from like Vietnam confirming this. It's just worry about it Fucking knows so the deal that he's saying is that Vietnam is going to levy or the US is going to levy a 20% tariff on all goods from Vietnam and a 40% tariff on goods that are produced elsewhere and move through Vietnam. Now I know we're all used to like looking at like 130% tariffs, but I cannot emphasize enough that like a 20% tariffs on goods from Vietnam is also just fucking ruinous.

Starting point is 02:33:44 Most tariff coverage on Vietnam focuses on the fact that like companies like Nintendo, for example, deliberately move production to Vietnam to avoid tariffs on China. Now, coverage is like this because all of these people fucking learned about Vietnam producing things like a week ago, they missed a decade of capital flight along, I mean, it's a decade and a half, really. So 2011, a bunch of Chinese capital has been flowing into Vietnam, like down the Mekong Delta. So these tariffs are not just affecting the ability of China to evade the tariffs on it by like moving

Starting point is 02:34:14 products to other countries, which has been a lot of what's been keeping the inflation from just fucking exploding. Has been the ability of producers to route goods through places like Vietnam. This is also hitting one of the world's largest manufacturing hubs, right? In a developing manufacturing hub that has very good infrastructure, etc, etc, etc. That capital from China had been moving to. This is still even this 20% tariff on Vietnam is like catastrophic. Yeah. So we'll see what happens next week if the rest of the turf tariffs kick in.

Starting point is 02:34:41 I don't know what's going to happen. Who fucking knows? I've been leaning towards, I think they will. But yeah, even this stuff is really fucking bad and we're going to start seeing the impacts of it. But yeah, this has been Tariff Talk. There's enough skepticism in the market about the tariffs in general that so far, not all, but most corporations have been eating the tariffs in the short term. Not all, like famously, like Walmart has been raising some prices. But a bunch of corporations have been eating the costs because they do not think these will be largely effective long term.

Starting point is 02:35:19 And this will slowly change, especially as more of these start like being taken into effect on like a rolling basis. We'll probably see corporations adjust to this and we'll see the market adjust to this. Yeah. But I think that's part of why maybe people haven't been seeing the massive price hikes that were expected back, you know, like two months ago. Yeah. Well, and I think also, again, the important thing here is what this is going to do to logistics firms, which have very, very low margins. And right now, they've been surviving by just running shit through other places. But like, again, if this is if 20% is the rate on Vietnam, plus there's now a massive

Starting point is 02:35:58 incentive not to run goods through Vietnam. That's really bad, because that like kneecaps the evasion tools people have been using. Yeah. So we'll see what happens. Yeah wait for me and Ma to come into play. Yeah yeah. Let's talk about alligator Alcatraz. So, Florida's new immigration detention center has opened this Wednesday. It's built on a remote airport with aircraft hangers outfitted with cages and bunk beds to incarcerate between 3,000 to 5,000 people. The facility is surrounded by a moat of alligators and python snakes. They're calling it Alligator Alcatraz. It was designed to be the most efficient deportation

Starting point is 02:36:40 machine in the country. National Guard members will act as immigration judges on site to speed up deportation proceedings. I'm going to play a short clip here. Apologize for hearing DeSantis. I mean, this is going to be illegals will come in, they'll be processed, there'll be places for them to be housed. You'll have an ability for food, you'll have an ability for them to consult legal rights if they have that, because there is a process that's involved with this. So the Florida Attorney General has called this a quote, one stop shop for immigration enforcement.

Starting point is 02:37:16 Come in, get your process and fly out, unquote. Jesus. So immigrants will be flown here. They will have some degree of due process here. Not really real due process, but enough to fast track their deportation, stay basically at this facility like less than a week and get deported from it. It has a working airport. They want to start running thousands of people through this facility basically every week.

Starting point is 02:37:44 Yeah. They want to start running thousands of people through his facility basically every week. Trump toured the facility on Tuesday and he said, quote, Biden wanted me in here. Okay. He wanted me didn't work out that way, but he wanted me in here. That son of a bitch unquote, which is an insane thing to say. And, but it gives you an actual look into why the current Trump administration, like, like why Trump term 2.0 is kind of different from 1.0 because it's purely built on this, like, this, like animosity. It's built on this idea that Trump thinks that the entire, like, entire world conspired against him to lock him up and somehow he beat them. And now he's getting his revenge on the entire

Starting point is 02:38:24 world. Right? This is what's... That's how he's governing. It's because Biden wanted to send him to the alligator Alcatraz, but he was able to beat him. And now he's going to get revenge on everyone who's tried to stop him. And that's how he's running the country because that's the thing he's obsessed with. He can't stop talking about Biden. He brings up Biden fucking every day. Because it's not about what Biden actually did. It's this, it's this like symbol of like everyone who's tried to like, tried to beat me, everyone who's tried to like lock me up.

Starting point is 02:38:54 Now, now I get to take my revenge out on them. They wanted to disappear me to this alligator concentration camp, which no they didn't because this thing fucking didn't exist a week ago. Like this, this facility was built in the last eight days. It's going to cost $450 million annually to operate. I remember when I went to the Charlie Kirk event in Atlanta, they're talking about how much money we're spending to give immigrants free cell phones and to give them housing. Meanwhile, you have not only this bill that massively increases the deficit in ways we've

Starting point is 02:39:26 never seen before, plus on the local level, you have $400 million a year for these deportation facilities. And this facility specifically built on the Florida Everglades, it's not hurricane proof. After one day of operating, they've already had flooding issues. This is an incredibly dangerous facility. It could lead to like a natural disaster could kill thousands of people here. And currently the state of Florida is selling alligator Alcatraz merchandise on their website. It's always a grift as well.

Starting point is 02:39:55 So you can get deportation merchandise, you can get concentration camp merchandise. This is the this is this is the soul of the of the Republican Party. For our last main story tonight, let's talk about how Trump and the Democrats are trying to stop the Zomentum! Because ranked choice voting has now been completed. Zoran has defeated Cuomo 56 to 44. 12 points. Which were tallied in just the third round of ranked choice voting. The other tallies will come out eventually, but this is the last legitimate tally because of the elimination rules.

Starting point is 02:40:30 Zoran got 150,000 more votes than Eric Adams won with in 2021. Phenomenal sweep. That's unbelievable. It's wild. We've never seen anything like this. Call me summer, baby! Let's go! So Republican representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi asking to investigate Mamdani for denaturalization on the grounds that he obtained citizenship through misrepresentation or concealing material support for terrorism. I'm going to read this disgusting quote from Ogles because I think people should hear it. Quote,

Starting point is 02:41:05 Zoran Little Mohammed Mondani is an anti-Semitic socialist communist who will destroy the great city of New York. He needs to be deported, which is why I'm calling for him to be the subject to denaturalization proceedings. This is a guy who would be petrified if he ever had to walk around New York because seeing brown people is very scary, when you know this kind of person. Zoran's been facing this huge wave of egregious, like, Islamophobic attacks, including from members of his own party.

Starting point is 02:41:35 On a radio show, Democrat New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand falsely claimed that Momdani had made references in support of quote-unquote, global jihad. Outrageous stuff. On Monday, she apologized for these comments in a private call to Mom Dhani and expressed that she believes that Zoran is sincere when he says he wants to protect all New Yorkers and combat anti-Semitism. But fucking gross stuff. Yeah. It was so hideous. It's like 2003 level. It's, yeah, it's really bad.

Starting point is 02:42:08 Wait, no, it's considerably worse than that. Like, Bush gave the Islam is the fabric of America speech in 2001. Yeah. Like, we now have Democrats just knee-jerk-ing to fuck them all, they're terrorists. In their own party. And like many top New York Democrats have still refused to endorse the now like Democratic nominee. Yeah, including Governor Kathy Hoechl, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Chuck Schumer Jeffries posted in support of him today

Starting point is 02:42:34 I believe some of them have expressed like support of him specifically support against islamophobic attacks But have explicitly refused to endorse him got it as a nominee Yeah, which is like it's vote blue no matter who until you have like a Muslim Democratic Socialist and it's like, we have to discuss, like you know, there's some, we have some skeptical things about his candidacy and his ability to keep New Yorkers safe. And you're like, oh boy. Yeah. Yeah, you voted for the three people who die you endorsed the three people who died in office I guess like since the last election in the house like Now the attacks have continued on Monday Fox News reporter Peter Doocy Asked White House press secretary Carolyn Levitt about deporting Zoran. Let's play the clip Peter thank you, Caroline does President Trump want Zoran Mamdani deported?

Starting point is 02:43:29 I haven't heard him say that. I haven't heard him call for that. But certainly he does not want this individual to be elected. I was just speaking to him about it and his radical policies that will completely crush New York City, which is obviously a city that the president holds near and dear to his heart. There's this Congressman, Andy Ogles, he wants the Attorney General, Bondi, to explore denaturalization proceedings because he thinks Mamdani could have misrepresented or concealed material support for terrorism based on rap lyrics he wrote in 2017. Does President Trump think this is a

Starting point is 02:44:02 worthwhile use of the Attorney General's time? Well, I'll let the President speak to that. I have not seen those claims, but shortly, if they are true, it's something that should be investigated. It's ridiculous to suggest that you could wrap your material support for terrorism, like that they have to prove that you materially supported a group which is listed as an FTO. Yeah. Then on Tuesday, a day later, Trump himself attacked Zoran, threatening to arrest him if he interferes with ICE. Your beloved New York City may well be led by a communist soon, Zoran Mondami, who in

Starting point is 02:44:38 his nomination speech said he will defy ICE and will not allow ICE to arrest criminal aliens in New York City. Your message to communist Zoran Mondani. Well, then we'll have to arrest him. Look, we don't need a communist in this country, but if we have one, I'm going to be watching over him very carefully on behalf of the nation. Later, Trump suggested that Zoran, quote unquote, may be here illegally, and that the Trump administration would be looking into that while in the same clip praising the now independent nominee and current mayor,

Starting point is 02:45:13 Eric Adams. ...independent running, Mayor Adams, who's a very good person. I helped him out a little bit. He had a problem and he was unfairly hurt over this question. He made a statement to the effect that this is terrible. New York City can't have all these immigrants come in. And like he was indicted the following day. Just openly admitting to corruption and collusion.

Starting point is 02:45:36 He had a little problem and I helped him out. Yeah, yeah. Just a little problem with accepting massive payments from Turkey to fucking corrupt his whole city And I want to say here too, like as you're watching just like Trump openly targeting Um, Donnie like all of the Democrats who are attacking him are just on the side of Trump here And this has been a significant problem the entire administration is that one of Trump's like core bases of support is like Sitting Democratic fucking legislatures. It's like fucking Chuck Schumer

Starting point is 02:46:06 Yeah, like all of these people. Yeah, they're working with Trump rhetorically on all of this and sometimes literally with like Schumer voting for the original like budget resolution shit like They're just they're just actively collaborating on Tuesday is or unreleased a statement regarding Trump's comments, saying, quote, The President of the United States just threatened to have me arrested, stripped of my citizenship, and put in a detention camp and deported. Not because I have broken any law, but because I will refuse to let ICE terrorize our city. His statements don't just represent an attack on our democracy, but an attempt to send a message to every New Yorker who refuses to hide in the shadows, if you speak up, they will come for you. We will not accept this intimidation.

Starting point is 02:46:44 That Trump included praise for Eric Adams and his authoritarian threats is unsurprising, shadows, if you speak up, they will come for you. We will not accept this intimidation." That Trump included praise for Eric Adams and his authoritarian threats is unsurprising, but highlights the urgency of bringing an end to this mayor's time in City Hall. At the very moment when mega Republicans are attempting to destroy the social safety net, kick millions of New Yorkers off healthcare, and enrich their billionaire donors at the expense of working families, it is a scandal that Eric Adams echoes this president's division, distraction, and hate. Voters will resoundingly reject it in November." And former mayor Bill de Blasio came out in support of Zoran saying, quote, Donald Trump

Starting point is 02:47:16 will have to go through a lot of us first if he wants to arrest Zoran Mamdani. We New Yorkers will put a human shield around him if we need to. No one gets to intimidate us Build a Blasio if you get arrested doing the human shield we will forgive you for one of your many crimes What crime off for a rest bill good for bill But no everyone needs to do this like everyone needs to get behind him right now If he's gonna be the target of this, like, denaturalization push. Yeah, no, fuck this. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:47:46 If he becomes, like, the symbol of everything that Trump hates, like, Democrats need to fall in line fucking right now. And you can't be attacking this guy for, like, innate Islamophobia. Yeah. It's outrageous. Yeah. He also has made one of the funniest music videos I have ever seen. There's some good stuff.

Starting point is 02:48:04 His video about how much he loves his grandmother with Mada Jaffrey in it is outstanding. Now we do have some good news to close this episode on, including the return of the Stinky Musk segment. In Pennsylvania, a Tesla turned into train tracks and drove into an oncoming train. It's okay, people were able to exit the car before the crash. Great stuff. Great stuff in the self-driving car department. And Trump truth on Monday, quote, Elon might get more subsidy than any human being in history by far. And without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa. No more rocket launches,

Starting point is 02:48:45 satellites, or electric car production, and our country would save a fortune. Perhaps we should have Doge take a good hard look at this. Big money to be saved. And then on July 1st, on his way to alligator Alcatraz, Trump was questioned again about Elon and said, quote, we'll have to take a look. We might have to put Doge on Elon. You know what that Doge is? That monster that might have to go back and eat Elon. Wouldn't that be terrible? He gets a lot of subsidies. Elon responded to this on X, the Everything app, quote, so tempting to escalate this.

Starting point is 02:49:16 So, so tempting, but I will refrain for now. I will say, Musk has also been talking about forming a new party if this budget bill passes, so... God, I hope so. It would be the funniest thing. Oh, it would be so good. What other good news do we have to end on here? I think the other good news was the asylum ban getting stopped in the courts. Oh, we already did that good news.

Starting point is 02:49:36 Yeah, we already did that. Oh, that's it then? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Alright, well, people like ED being an hour long. I've been told this. Yeah, they do. The longer the better.

Starting point is 02:49:48 That's one thing they say about ED. It goes without saying, James. We reported the news. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedmedia.com, or check

Starting point is 02:50:15 us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. down why OpenAI, along with other AI companies, are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops.

Starting point is 02:51:00 They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebene, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free.

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