It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 229

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Starting point is 00:02:46 Welcome to Iqadapit here, a podcast where I explain fake money things that are actually real to Molly. Molly, thank you so much for coming back on. I am your host, Mia Wong. I'm excited to learn. Now, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, and I'm saying this because I legitimately do not remember how many weeks ago we released the original one of this. But back in that episode where we explained shadow banking, I said that I had had to cut off the part of the episode that was the reason why I wrote it in the first place. That happens to me every week. Yes.

Starting point is 00:03:22 So, comma. I've also kind of had to split some of this episode off. That will probably, that will be another episode, probably with Ed Zitron whenever I have enough seconds in my life to pull all of that together. But today we are here to talk about the actual sort of shadow bank run, I guess you would call it, financial problems that caused me to write the shadow banking episode in the first place. Oh, right. Why I originally asked you what shadow banking is because there was some kind of economy problem and there was like a fake run on the fake banks. Yes. And Molly, you will be extremely unhappy to

Starting point is 00:04:02 note that a big part of the reason why there was the fake run on the fank banks was that the shadow banks loaned a bunch of money to a different type of shadow bank. I don't think they should have done that. And that shadow bank went under. Great things are happening here. But they're not FDIC insured, Mia. Nope, nope, nope, nope. So, okay, this gets us back to our original definition of a shadow bank, which is that it's a bank that does banking things. That's not a bank. So it's not insured by the FDIC. They don't have to

Starting point is 00:04:32 have money on hand to make sure that they can't be a bank run on them. Right. So they just said, no more transactions, please. Yes. So what Molly is referring to is a few weeks ago, I guess maybe like a month ago at this point, there was actually a breakthrough into the kind of mainstream-ish of some stuff that had been brewing in the financial news for a while. And that was that a bunch of companies, Morgan Stanley,

Starting point is 00:05:02 and Black Rock, I think, were kind of the two biggest ones that stopped this. Although a bunch of these sort of smaller, what are called private credit firms also sort of did things like this. And so because they're not really banks, there's no regulation that says they have to serve their customers, right? They can just say no. Okay, so this is part of what's really a shit show. I guess let's start at the beginning. So what happened? Sorry, I got us derailed.

Starting point is 00:05:29 Yeah, let's run back to the specific thing we're talking about here is a thing called private credit. And so private credit, I'm just going to read this thing from the teller window, which is, I don't know, the teller window is actually a decently useful thing where the teller window is, the Fed is like, I'm going to explain something to normal people. Now, the problem is that this is still the Federal Reserve. So their explanation for normal people, by normal people, they mean like, I don't know, like dipshit day traders, right? Normal people don't have questions about the Federal Reserve. Yeah. So it's like, this is like for people who are kind of know this stuff but are running into this like arcane subfield for the first time. So I'm just going to quote from them because I think it's an interesting place to start.

Starting point is 00:06:14 Although there is no universal definition, which you know things are going great when in our second episode in a row talking about. We can't all agree what this even is. Yes, it's so good. It's so good. Although there is no universal definition, private credit generally refers to a loan that is negotiated between a borrower and a small group of non-bank lenders. These non-bank financial institution lenders are typically alternative asset managers, such as private equity firms, who package loans in different investment vehicles. Other non-bank financial institutions like pension funds, insurance companies, and sovereign wealth funds, then invest in those vehicles.

Starting point is 00:06:58 So this is the stuff that we talked about from last episode where... Okay, so you have multiple layers of shadow banks, right? You have, on the one hand, the private credit firms are these sort of groups that go in and sometimes they're just their own things. There's a bunch of different kinds of them. Private equities firms tend to have, like, one arm of the private equity firm. that's their like, this is our shiny private credit wing. There are also these things called business development corporations, which do these.

Starting point is 00:07:33 There are like other types of them too. But basically what those companies do is they go in and they negotiate a loan with a, usually a pretty long term for repayments on the loan with a company. Now, the thing about these loans is that the terms of those loans are secret. From everybody? Yeah. Even the people involved? Well, when I say secret, I mean, the company that's taking out the loan and the bank know how they work.

Starting point is 00:08:02 Okay. No one else does. And then what happens is these are usually fairly risky loans because if you weren't doing a risky loan, you would get your money through like a normal bank. You'd do a normal loan. You would do it. Normal style, right? This is not normal style. These are risky.

Starting point is 00:08:16 And then they do the thing called securitization, which we talked about last episode, where you take a loan and do magic to it. and turn it to something that someone else can buy? Whatever happened to products and services, Mia? Whatever happened to products and services? Well, because products and services make less money than betting on products and services. This is also where this is all going. So there's some real issues here with private credit. So we're buying and selling money that isn't real and add the absence of money that isn't real.

Starting point is 00:08:47 And so what happened when there was the run on the fake bank? Well, that's kind of what... Because how can you do a run on a bank if there's no... money in, because you're not asking to get your money back out of it, because there was never any money. Well, so here's the thing. So a lot of the way that these things work, sometimes, like, they are obviously selling the loans and packages, but a lot of the way that it works is that it does kind of work like a normal bank, which is, I mean, instead of being a lender, you're like an investor, but you give them a bunch of your money and they give it to these loan things. So it is just

Starting point is 00:09:17 literally a normal bank, except it's not subject to banking regulations and it's risk here. Right. So like, like Apollo capital. management or whatever. It's like you give a bunch of money to Apollo capital management, which is like global capital, whatever, is like Apollo global capital is one of the big firms in this thing. And then they give that money out in loans. And then you're basically just supposed to wait because, you know, remember the last episode we talked about how in the way that normal bank works, right? There's like a fundamental kind of gap, right, where you are putting your money in as like a short term thing that you can take out immediately. And then the

Starting point is 00:09:54 bank is turning the short-term money into a long-term loan. Right. It takes time for the money to grow up. Yes. And the reason we have financial regulations is to force the banks to have money on hand so that if you need your money back, you can take it out. Now, these banks don't have this because these are shadow banks. They are the credit arms of private equity. They're fucking, I don't know, they're like capital management firms. They're like, do, do, do, do. Right. So like a normal, a normal run on the bank is like, obviously the bank doesn't have 100% of all. Like I put cash in the bank, we all put cash in the bank and everyone wants all their cash back.

Starting point is 00:10:30 The bank doesn't have 100% of that cash. You get that, right? It's like they haven't invested and those loans haven't matured yet and things like that. But theoretically, if all those loans matured, that bank does have all of those dollars. But the shadow bank, they're selling these same loans to multiple people. So even if everything matured properly, they don't have all of those dollars anymore. Yeah. Those dollars don't all exist.

Starting point is 00:10:53 I mean, to be fair, the bank's dollars also work like that because the banks are also selling their loans off. But you're saying that they were using like the same mortgage to secure a bunch of different. Yeah, right. So that's like, yeah, that's like a classic shadow banking thing. We're actually going to get back to that because they're doing an even dumber version of that now. I'm just saying it seems like a run on the bank would be kind of inevitable even in a minor crisis because they do not have most of the money they're pretending. Yeah, well, but, okay, so I think what I would say about that is that this is also a problem for regular banks. Right.

Starting point is 00:11:28 Like, I don't think this is actually a structurally different crisis. Like, because like the crisis here is just that the money is out in loans and they don't have it on hand. And this is the structural crisis that the private credit people are doing is that their money is also out on loans so they don't have it. And a lot of these loans are like seven-year loans in like very risky companies. so the money is like really isn't there. Right, because that venture capital like whatever is, that's an inflated valuation. So you're talking about like, oh, it's $10 billion,

Starting point is 00:11:59 but it isn't and it never will be and it never was. Yeah, well, and the other thing that's going on too, right, is like these are supposed to be risky loans. So they have a high rate of return. If they return. But yes, and this is where this gets not good. Because, so the U.S. private credit market is $1.3 trillion. like under management.

Starting point is 00:12:22 The global market is like $3.5 trillion dollars of assets. I'm not really going to go into the Chinese private credit market here because that's its own episode. But the way that these companies deal with this is that they have these funds, right? And then the fund gives out like the loans. And they have a limit to the total amount of like the percent of the value of the fund that can be taken out at one time. And that's what's been being hit. The industry standard is supposed to be about 5% of the fund can be withdrawn per quarter. And then after that, they just shut down redemptions.

Starting point is 00:12:56 And that's what you saw in the news. Because a bunch of companies, and some of these companies have higher limits. They're almost like eight or nine, like 10%. They'll stop it at like nine roughly. So more than anything, shutting down redemptions is an indicator that the market has panicked, right? The investors are spooked and they want their money back because this risky investment is now looking like a very bad choice. Yes, but this is a real structural problem because... Right, but like as a measurement of something, it's just like what we're measuring is how many investors are shitting their pants.

Starting point is 00:13:29 And there's a reason they're shitting their pants. And the reason they're shitting their pants is that basically all of these firms have been eating a colossal amount of shit. And the reason they're eating a colossal amount of shit, I mean, some of it is very stupid. Some of them are eating shit because they gave money to like normal tech firms, but then now they're all scared. They're going to get out competed by AI firms. Some of them have given a bunch of money. Blue Owl particularly, and this is what we're going to get into in the episode with Ed, has given a lot of money to AI firms, which is a fucking nightmare. Great investment.

Starting point is 00:13:59 Yeah, incredible stuff going on. I'm sure. I'm sure that's what Ed will say. Ed will say that was a good investment. It's so fun. It's so fun. The main thing that they've been eating shit on, and this is where this kind of hit the mainstream, because a whole bunch of normal banks,

Starting point is 00:14:27 also ate shit on this. J.P. Morgan ate shit on this loan. So a huge amount of money was poured into this firm called Tri-Color, which we touched on briefly last episode, but then didn't really talk about much about what it did. So, okay, J.P. Morgan has lost $170 million. Oh, no big deal. Yeah, which, and it's funny because, like, the J.P. Morgan's CEO, we're like, yeah, we kind of ate shit on this and also their C.S.

Starting point is 00:14:57 gave this quote where he was like, where there's one cockroach, there's probably more, which is like an extremely normal thing for the finance guy. He's saying about the market. Does he mean we have an infestation of accidentally losing $170 million? Yeah. I mean, it's not great, but like in the grand scheme of things, right, like J.P. Morgan does have $4 trillion or something dollars under management. Right. But if he's saying if there's one cockroach, there's more. Yeah, usually if you have one cockroach, you have 100 cockroaches. So if you have a hundred and

Starting point is 00:15:33 $70 million fuck-ups. Yes, and that's not great, right? And like Barclays, which is the very sort of like prestigious British bank, which also ate shit for doing this kind of stuff to 2008, also lost like 100 million pounds. What's interesting about this

Starting point is 00:15:49 specific one is this firm tricolor is a subprime auto loan company. Oh, that That's a phenomenal business model. Molly, I think they're responsible for the Nissan Ultima. This is what is known as an idea that could not possibly have gone right. It's very funny because when you read the stuff from Tri-Color, they're all like, oh, we're

Starting point is 00:16:21 trying to like help people who are like underserved in markets who need cars. Oh. So, but here's the thing about a shitty auto loan is you know, right, you are serving an underserved community. You are serving people with bad credit who might not otherwise be able to get a car, but you're serving them by fawking them hard. And you know that. Yeah, they know that they're lying about this, right? It's just so evil. Yeah, and like this is all downstream of, you know, this is all downstream with the fact that we've built our cities around cars, right?

Starting point is 00:16:55 And we built our cities around cars specifically. And this is a really fun thing. We built our cities around cars specifically because we had created so much manufacturing capacity after World War II that like Ford and General Motors had like pumped into that they were like, we need a fucking way to make money off of all of this. And this is also, by the way, why we did the Marshall Plan. Like we rebuilt Europe to sell cars to them. It's this terrible snowball of like induced demand and then dealing with that.

Starting point is 00:17:24 and then the fallout of that and trying to reorganize from that. Yeah, and we have destroyed the world with this. It rocks. Thank you, Henry Ford. It's so good. It's so good. We have literally, like, Earth is fucked because of this. This is, like, one of the largest engines of global climate change is the fact that we had all these fucking factories after World War II and these companies didn't want to eat shit on them.

Starting point is 00:17:45 So now everybody needs a car, but they can't afford one. So now we have a fake bank doing fake fucking auto loans. Yep, yep, yep. Who, by the way, and I kind of emphasize this enough, right? The whole that we are in here is that there is, in theory, if you're going to be running a market economy, there is, like, room in it for, hey, this person has a long shot, but good business idea, and we need to get the money. Sure, like, there's nothing wrong with the idea of loans. Yeah. But if your whole business model is exploiting people who need loans, that's what's good.

Starting point is 00:18:18 Yeah, but this is, you know, this is going one layer up from, like, this subpar model loan company, right? The problem that we're going to hit with all of these private credit firms is that they're giving loans to just this shit, right? The things that they're giving high risk loans to aren't like interesting businesses. They're subprime auto loan companies. And they're like weird AI data center creation companies, right? It's like that shit. And this is where everything goes to shit. Because, you know, and it's something it actually wasn't really reported on very much in a lot of the coverage on these companies eating shit.

Starting point is 00:19:01 But, like, what this company was doing was they were literally doing all of the 2008 stuff, right? They give out these subprime loans, which they know, like, a bunch of them are going to fail. They pull them all together into these, like, trenches of loans. And then they sell them off, doing the securitization stuff we talked about last time. And again, this is literally exactly how the subprime mortgage crisis worked, except for doing it with auto loans. It seems a little bit more evil. Yeah. And they're doing this thing, right?

Starting point is 00:19:32 They're doing the thing that we saw with the housing loans where the same car is collateral for multiple of these loans. And the reason they're doing this, right, is that this company, Tricolor, their entire business model is trying to borrow more money from banks so that they can send out more. more of these shitty auto loans so they can then sell that stuff back. And so they're also heavily leveraged, right? Because they're taking out like every single loan they can possibly do. They're doing instruments so that they're the collateral on the loans that they are taking. So they take that money and give out more of these shitty auto loans. The collateral on that is multiple of the shitty auto loans. I mean, I would say it's a house of cards. But like it's not even, it's not even that. It's imaginary. It's just, it's like the bottom row on

Starting point is 00:20:19 this house of cards is just your imagination. Yeah, it's, it's Wiley Coyote running off the cliff. And he's just like standing there. And as long as his feet are moving, no one realizes that, that like, wait, hold on, this is literally the fakesest thing I've ever seen. And then it goes under, and this is a shit show. That's the only possible outcome. The only possible way it could have gone under.

Starting point is 00:20:39 It's like, we've done this before. We all watched 2008. But there's not like an ideal version of this where it works. This can only not work. Yeah, it's insane. It's like, so why are we doing it? Well, because there was one year where it made a billion dollars. Right, buying Ponzi schemes are really profitable the first year.

Starting point is 00:20:58 Right, right? That's like, that's the thing, right? It works out really good for the first guy. Yeah, and like part of what's going on here too is, you know, like this is some of the stuff that caused the original bubble. But like we have this era in like the early 2020s and like late 2010s. That's like the zero fat interest rate era, right? where like it is basically just free to borrow money. And so there's just all of this money sloshing around that there's nothing to invest into.

Starting point is 00:21:28 This fuels all sorts of just like heinous shit, right? Because there's suddenly just like all of these pools of capital with like nothing to invest in. And so they're investing it in like defense companies and like Pallentier and shit like that. Is this why we got stuff like the juicerro? Yeah, but that's like the other thing, right? I'm just kidding. No, but like the Jucero thing is like legitimately. Venture Capital was just like pouring money into stuff that was just like not fucking real.

Starting point is 00:21:54 Yeah. You could juice fruit at home. And like this is, you know, I talked about this on a different episode about venture capital and like the way that it's done tech fascism, right? It was eventually they started putting that money into like building the material basis for like a tech fascist state. And that's what they've been doing and sort of. I kind of wish they stuck to their cocaine ideas like JuCero. Yeah. That was a better period.

Starting point is 00:22:16 That was more fun than fashion. No, no, it's more fun than like turning every single door in every single car in San Francisco into a surveillance machine and then like going in and like basically cooing governments and yeah. But on the sort of like pure financial end of this, you get all of these companies that are just pouring all of this money into, there's layers of this too, right? We're like, you know, if you're like like JP Morgan, which is like an actual bank, right? A real one, yeah. Yeah, the real one is like pouring money into these like shadow banks, right? Because they're chasing a high rate of return. And this is like what happened in 2008. Everyone was like, oh, these bonds have a really high rated return, the mortgage rack securities. And now we've reached the point where I think, God, where this is the most recent news from this.

Starting point is 00:23:10 And Molly, I'm just going to read you the thing from Reuters. quote, J.P. Morgan Chase, Barclays, and other Wall Street banks have started trading credit default swaps linked to flagship private credit funds run by Blackstone. Apollo Global Management and Aries Management, the Financial Times reported on Friday. And that's a good idea for them to do? Oh, this is really fun because now what we're doing is they're now opening the markets. to bet on these things to fail. Right. I don't understand why so much of the economy is based on these bets that bad things will happen.

Starting point is 00:24:06 Yeah. It's like if everything collapses, some guys are going to get so rich. If a thousand people get their cars repossessed, one guy gets so rich. Like, that's not a great way to run an economy. You know, John Mayer-Cain's a guy who is, I would argue, responsible for this. This is his fault for, like, stabilizing the capitalist economies in the middle of the Great Depression. But Keynes is, like, a welfare state guy, but he's also a capitalist. And he has this line about how, like, the economy shouldn't be run by a casino, to which I would be like, okay, Keynes.

Starting point is 00:24:42 But like... The economy is a casino. Yeah. It's like, it's like, this is your fault for not being willing to, like, not have a market economy, right? Like, like, we could, we could achieve the dream of not having your own. your economy be run by a casino. This is a thing that you could do. It's just that you can't...

Starting point is 00:25:00 That was a euphemism before. I don't think he realized that, like, we literally do have a casino for the economy. He kind of did, right? Because, like... It's not a euphemism anymore. I'm going to necromanse him and tell him about polymarket. Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 00:25:13 He would lose his mind about polymarket. But like, like, he's watching people just, like, betting on stocks, right? And he's watching a bunch of people... Grab the Ouija board and tell that bitch about Kalshi. Why? This is like we're going back and, time and showing him Kalshi and he's like, oh, fuck, okay, I'm like, I am now against the market as an

Starting point is 00:25:30 idea. We cannot let this come to pass. But like, you know, this is, this, this has been like a known issue with the market as a system for a long time. But it's a problem because in theory, you could try to go through and like regulate this stuff, but like investment is just gambling to some extent, right? And when you talk to the people who believe in this stuff, they're like, well, no, you can't have stock markets without sort of equity markets and you can't have these things without the ability to bet on it. And I would say, okay, well, don't have it then. Like, I think this is a really simple solution. But, you know, these people are like, no, no, no, no. In order to maintain a capitalist economy, you must, it must be possible for a bunch of people to be placing bets on the

Starting point is 00:26:16 companies that give money to subprime auto loan companies failing. I guess that's the point where, like, I get off the train where you say, well, in order to maintain. any capitalist economy. And I'm like, yeah, exactly, dog. I don't want to do that. And like, this is why this is a terrible idea. Like, it's, it's a bad idea for first principles. And we're all living in like the nightmare hellscape of this being a bad idea. Yeah. So maybe that's, maybe that's why I can't get it. Because this does make some kind of sense to like an evil guy who wants it to be this way. But I don't want him to be this way. Yeah. Well, and I, very deliberately, I went into when I was learning economics and I was learning political.

Starting point is 00:26:54 economy from the perspective of like, okay, how do you destroy this? Right. And this part... This part seems fragile. Yeah, but it's like one of these things where it's like, okay, this is going to break on its own. But I guess the problem is it does keep breaking on its own. It's just that we keep bailing it out and reconstructing it and propping up the house built on sand.

Starting point is 00:27:16 Yeah. And that's the part where, you know, like this is a thing where the intervention of masses of people onto the stage of history has to happen. Where if you want this to not be the way that the system works, when it breaks down, you have to be organized enough to be like, no, fuck this. We're not going to sacrifice all of our lives to reopen the casino. We are going to either tear the casino down or turn the casino into like housing or whatever. So when there was this run on the fake banks and they stopped it, what happened after that?

Starting point is 00:27:47 I guess because that was my original question, right? He's like, what does it run on a fake bank even look like or do? Yeah. So basically what happened is they just stopped their redemptions and everyone got really, really pissed off. But there's not that much they can do about it because. Because I'm sure that was in the terms and conditions whenever they signed up to do financial crimes together. Yeah. And what's been happening now, though, is that this has been spreading kind of panic about just, I don't know, they would call it like the asset class in general.

Starting point is 00:28:13 Oh, like maybe it wasn't a good idea to invest all your money into this fake product. No, it was, it was in fact a terrible idea. And this is, I think, why we're getting. have mismanaged your client's funds. Yeah, and this is, I think, why we're starting to get the, like, BlackRock fucking credit default swaps, right? Because the market is being like, oh, hey, all these people are pissed off about the fact that we designed our unhinged private credit shadow banking system in such a way that you can't get your money out of it. What if we capitalize on that by letting people bet on it? And that's good.

Starting point is 00:28:45 So right now we're in this kind of limbo world. And this is the entire global economy, right? everyone is sitting here pretending like the apocalypse isn't happening and that's the basis of the entire economy. I mean, what am I supposed to do about it? Yeah, but it's like, you know, but there's a difference between you and us doing this

Starting point is 00:29:04 and the people who have all of the money in the world who are sitting there pretending that like, there's like some very easy way out of this war that we're waging against a brawn. Right? And that it's not going to just keep going. Even though there's no good way to get a ceasefire and, you know, like, no one in charge of the U.S. has any idea what they're doing.

Starting point is 00:29:24 They're, in some ways, they're doing the strategy they did in, like, the lockdown phase of the pandemic where they're... Just waiting for it to burn itself out. Yeah, where they're like, okay, well, we're going to ask for a bunch of money. But when you do that with the global economy? Yeah, right. And, like, I had a friend who described it as, like, the fundamental problems that these people are incentivized to just think that everything will keep going right for them because it has. Because eventually it will, right? They'll be fine.

Starting point is 00:29:48 Yeah, but, like, eventually there's a point where that runs out. And when it hits, there's going to be this sort of chilling discovery that, like, oh, yeah, the entire last, like, 15 years of their sort of being an economy has been this, like, weird tech capitalist mirage. And once that fails, we, I guess we're already in the time of monsters. So, woo. Oh, Mia, I don't have any other marketable skills. We, the economy can't collapse. I'm a podcaster. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:30:28 Well, this has been it could happen here. Has it? Did I learn anything? I don't know. Honestly, this is just, they're doing it all again, and it's even dumber this time. Oh, God. Yeah, at least there were houses last time. Now there's not even a product.

Starting point is 00:30:44 No, now there's shitty auto loans. Molly, where can people find your very, very lovely show? You can find. Find me wherever you get your podcast. You can subscribe to my show, Weird Little Guys. It's fun. You'll like it. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:30:59 I'm in the middle of a series right now about a segregationist attorney who loved the Confederacy so much that he built a 25-foot-tall Confederate monument out of old bathtubs. It's fun. You'll love it. Does he blow up a school bus? This is my... No, but he did go to YMCA Night Law School, which is a Knight Law School, which is a Knight Law School through. the YMCA in Nashville so that he could get better at doing segregation. Like, he wasn't a lawyer.

Starting point is 00:31:26 And then in midlife, he was like, I want to go to law school at night. So he could do busing cases. So he could take busing cases. So he didn't blow any buses up, but he did blow up a lot of people's lives. Great. How about that? Great. Anyway, check out weird little guys.

Starting point is 00:31:41 Yeah. And if you want to stop there from being both weird little guys and also having our economy be run on betting on funny money. go like organize a union or like join your local affinity group or start doing food not bombs or do what a literally literally do anything because if we do nothing we will continue to live in the world of the segregation lawyer who builds statues out of bathtubs and also the subprime auto loan defaults at least go outside and take a walk yeah Canadian women are looking for more. More out of themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart.

Starting point is 00:32:40 And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHeart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.

Starting point is 00:33:12 And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that, trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends... Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a couple. truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get

Starting point is 00:33:43 what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckerd found himself at the center of a paternity scandal. The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story. This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth. You doctored this particular test twice in someone's, correct? I doctored the test ones. It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case. I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for. Sunlight's the greatest disinfected. They would uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Greg, a lesbian.

Starting point is 00:34:37 Michael Marantini. My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trap. Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges. This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.

Starting point is 00:35:01 Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about, and they are experts at everything. Here, the Nick Dick and Poll show, we're not afraid to make mistakes. What Googler did that I think was so unique. He's the writer-director. Who do you think he is?

Starting point is 00:35:27 I don't know. You mean, like, the president? You think Canada has a president? You think China has a president? You think China has a president? Does that look at that thing. God, I love that thing. I use it all the time.

Starting point is 00:35:40 I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it at night. It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus. Yep. It was a good one. I like that saying. It is an actual Polish saying. It is an actual Polish saying. Better version of Play Stupid Games, win stupid prizes.

Starting point is 00:35:56 Yes. Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time. I actually thought it was. I got that wrong. Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul show on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. or wherever you get your podcasts. The National Geographic's Encyclopedia says that indigenous refers to people or objects that are native to a certain region or environment,

Starting point is 00:36:20 whether they grow there, live there, are produced there or occur naturally there. When it comes to flora and fauna, they are considered indigenous to an ecosystem when they haven't been introduced through human intervention or manipulated by human cultivation. Over millions of years, these living things have. have become well suited to their habitats, carefully adapted to the region's soil, climate, and food web. While when it comes to people, it can be some confusion about what it means to be indigenous, especially when it comes to questions of land rights, autonomy, and reparations.

Starting point is 00:36:59 Most people understand that Native American nations and Aboriginal Australians are indigenous, but some might then ask, well, if indigenous means originating from a place, then aren't all who are sapiens indigenous to Africa? Why should one group's claim of indigianity take precedence over any other? This would be asked in more or less good faith. And so others may ask the question, well, if a group occupies a region for several generations, does that then make them indigenous. Our white Americans, indigenous of their family has been there since the founding of the United States. Are French people indigenous to France? And if so, does that somehow justify their xenophobia toward refugees in some weird reactionary corruption of decolonial rhetoric?

Starting point is 00:37:49 Speaking of corruptions of decolonial rhetoric, some Zionists claim that Jewish people as a whole are indigenous to Palestine in some twisted provision of land back, while Zionism itself has long understood itself as a colonial project meant to displace and eliminate the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine from its very beginning. Some white nationalists also argue that settler colonialism was really no different than any other conflict between indigenous people. So what does it even matter? Mike makes right. And when generations of marginalized groups have been struggling to retain their social, cultural, economic and political sovereignty and achieve just justice, reparations, liberation after centuries of oppression and attempted annihilation,

Starting point is 00:38:37 we need to stand in informed solidarity. Thus, it is vital for us to understand what it means to be indigenous. Welcome to Krapanea. I'm Andrew Sage, Andrewism on YouTube, and I'm here again with... Mia Wong, the other host of this podcast. Yes, and we are here to discuss two. approaches to understanding indigionity. Obviously, this is not the final word on the matter, but just one perspective.

Starting point is 00:39:11 And I've drawn primarily from the work of North American indigenous authors, namely Tayaki Alfred, Jeff Kontesel, and Robin Wall Kimra. So, you know, keep that in mind as we proceed. There may be other positions and perspectives and visionity coming from other groups and other people. And so I believe there are two. principle highly overlap in ways that indigenity can be defined or interpreted. One is as an identity formed as part of a colonial relationship, and two, as an identity rooted

Starting point is 00:39:44 in a relationship to place. I believe that each definition is incomplete without the other, but by understanding and synthesizing each notion of indigenousness, we can better ground our approach to decolonization and social revolution. So let's start with indignity as an identity rooted in a relationship to place, whether that be physical as with land, social as with community, or cultural as with culture. As indigenous relationship to the land must be reciprocal with give and take based on a view of the land and water as a gift that must be cared for over generations. According to Haudenosa, mythology, as recounted by Robin Wall Kimra, in braiding sweetgrass, the mother goddess Skywoman came to the land as an immigrant from the heavens, but became indigenous by listening to the land, learning from other species to understand how to live on it,

Starting point is 00:40:42 given as she received, and caring for the earth and its keepers for the sake of those who had inherited when she passed on. Land is identity, it is ancestral connection, it is pharmacy, It is library and it is home, the source of all that sustains, and the sacred ground upon which those would observe their responsibility to the world. So by this understanding, it can be said that indigineity is born out of land connection and established through observation and relationship. Indigenous peoples have historically been mobile, either by choice or by force, but regardless of where they might find themselves, quote unquote, homeland or not, even if there were other indigenous peoples in their new environments, as long as they observe the processes and ceremonies of generational relationship building, based on mutual respect, understanding, and love for the land in common,

Starting point is 00:41:36 they remained indigenous. So then the question may arise, why aren't settlers indigenous to place if their family has lived in the land for generations? The answer lies in a relationship. Settler society as a whole, is based on an extractivist capitalist relationship with the land, focused on exploiting the land and its natural resources. Without a relationship with the land that extends reference to a deeper understanding of its complex interdependence,

Starting point is 00:42:07 settler society can never become indigenous to place. Of course, it goes about saying that not every indigenous group or indigenous practice is perfectly sustainable. Some have been rather destructive and even speciocidal, particularly when they've recently moved into a place, as we could see in North American prehistory. But if we are to work with this definition to conceive of being indigenous as something based and cultivating a long-term relationship to place, then indigionity must be contingent on maintaining the health and longevity of that relationship. Without community, there cannot be indigeneity. Much like the trees in a forest are interconnected via subterranean networks,

Starting point is 00:42:51 of my Corrize, which enable them to share resources and survive as a whole. In order to be indigenous to place, community must exist to sustain that web of reciprocity with the land so that all may flourish. Indigenity to place extends to culture as well, which is deeply tied to the land it develops on. Such practices should be reciprocal as ceremonies create communities and communities create ceremonies, as well as organic, not appropriating existence. in cultural celebrations or tending toward the commercial. Our social fabric has become withered and fragmented by the peace of modern life, leaving little room for ceremonies outside of religion or rights of personal transitions

Starting point is 00:43:35 such as birthdays, weddings and funerals. But ceremonies and the shared emotions they generate are part of what builds community. When we gather for graduations, for example, a sense of pride, relief, nostalgia, and excitement builds in the social atmosphere. hopefully fueling the confidence and strength of those who are going on to pursue the rest of their lives. But Kimura wants us to imagine standing by a river flooded with those same feelings as the salmon march into the auditorium of their estuary. Being indigenous to place means cultivating cultural ceremonies that honor the land and all the cycles and seasons of life within it. What are your thoughts on that interpretation or approach to Indigenousity?

Starting point is 00:44:21 I think there's a lot there that's interesting. I think I'm getting a better sense of what you were saying at the beginning when you were like, this probably needs to be synthesized with the definition that's also about like a relationship to colonialism. Yeah. But, you know, there's some sort of fun question mark examples of like the Chinese empire failing this where it's like, like you do have a lot of stuff that's like okay we're going to like build a relationship to nature but the build a relationship to nature stuff is like

Starting point is 00:44:55 we are going to clear this forest in order to build a temple that is like exactly set up on like a pentagram or whatever and so it's like okay hold on hold on hold your horse we have failed in creating a relationship to the land

Starting point is 00:45:11 we are in fact just making geometric shapes like oh yeah I think empires by their nature are going to run into some difficulties to put it mildly. They're going to run into some difficulties with actually maintaining

Starting point is 00:45:30 a reciprocal relationship with that because empires are built on extraction of people and of resources. But you're absolutely right that there has to be a synthesis of this definition with the idea of indiginity as a colonial relationship. According to

Starting point is 00:45:48 Tayaki Alfred and Jeff Conteiselle, indigenousness is an identity constructed, shaped, and lived in the politicized the context of contemporary colonialism. It is an experience oppositional to colonial societies and states and a consciousness of struggle against such forces of colonization. No two indigenous groups are exactly alike, of course. There is a significant diversity in their cultures,

Starting point is 00:46:14 contexts, and relationships with colonial forces, but they do share that struggle to survive as distinct peoples in an environment hostile to their existence. Efforts to marginalize and eradicate indigenous peoples may not always be as overt as they once will, but the historic and ongoing dispossession of indigenous peoples, the erasure of indigenous histories, geographies, and languages, and the current situation of deprivation persist nonetheless. Even so-called reconciliation efforts are tainted by the reality that indigenous people remain, as in earlier colonial eras, fundamentally occupied and disempowered peoples,

Starting point is 00:46:56 stripped of autonomy in their own homelands, and pressured into surrender and cooperation with an inherently unjust colonial order just to ensure their basic physical survival. By this understanding of indigenity, it can be said that without a colonizer, without system, in place and actions being taken to marginalize, disempower and destroy their societies in favor of a colonial replacement, there is no indigenous. Without colonialism, there would be no status of indigenous to be imposed upon the groups of peoples whose very existence and claimed land is an obstacle to that colonial endeavor. The UN working group on indigenous issues drew partially from this understanding when they attempted to

Starting point is 00:47:43 defined indigenous peoples in 1986. Quote, indigenous communities, peoples, and nations are those which having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors, other societies, now prevailing on those territories, or parts of them. They form, at present, non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations, their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity

Starting point is 00:48:17 as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions, and legal systems. And so by this definition, the Amerinians in the Caribbean, Aboriginal Australians, Adivasi's in India, native north and South Americans, Siberians, Ayno, Kurds, Assyrians, Yazidi, Palestinians, Amersians, Amersians. Sambi, Basques, Hawaiians, Māori, San, Bhuti, Papans, Chams, and many, many more are all indigenous peoples. But there are layers of nuance yet to be highlighted. The colonial situation is not a simple binary of indigenous and colonizer. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:49:15 For example, in the Americas, we have the immigrant situation and the situation of slavery. of slavery, right? Where Africans are concerned, they were indigenous to their own homelands, but displaced and enslaved under the colonial regime. They may not be indigenous to the Americas, but they were not driving settled colonial society either. In fact, historically, some were actually enslaved by indigenous people as well. Yeah. And at the same time, there were members of the African diaspora who would join existing indigenous societies and later create their own. such as the Garifuna of St. Vincent, Honduras, and Belize. It's very attractive, I would say, or mentally compelling,

Starting point is 00:50:01 to fall into these kinds of binaries, colonizer, indigenous. But we should not allow these constructs to paint the whole picture. Yeah, and I mean, you mentioned the Kurds earlier, right? And there's a couple of political principles that groups, like the P.D, you know, and sort of like the Kurdish freedom movement have had to grapple. Like, one of their things is grappling with, like, for example, there was like huge Kurdish participation in the Armenian genocide. And if you look at the Kurdish regional government in Iraq, when I talk about the PYID, that's like Kurdish freedom movement in Syria.

Starting point is 00:50:40 In Iraq, there's like the Iraqi Kurdish regional like government, right? Which is run by a different group. But those people, you know, and this is one of these things, where like there occurred to people on both sides of this conflict. Like that group attempted to, for example, like prevent easy people from returning to their homes after they were like genocided there from there by ISIS, right? So it's this, it's this thing where like all of this stuff gets kind of messy depending on like who has power in a given moment.

Starting point is 00:51:13 And it's something that's to some extent fluid enough that you can on the one hand like be experiencing a genocide and then also immediately turn around and, you know, be the Kurdish regional government and attempt to assist a genocide, to attempt to do a genocide against the Yazidis so you can take more of their land.

Starting point is 00:51:35 Yeah. But then on the other hand, you know, you have the PYD who was like backing, was backing the Yazidis in that fight against the Kurdish regional government. So it's... Yeah. Yeah, I think it's very easy to slip into this

Starting point is 00:51:49 notion that the experience of oppression will necessarily cause you to develop a cogent or consistent critique of oppression. Yeah. But often what we see in history is that oppression results in that group perpetuating harm now in the line in other ways, either within their own group or inflicting that harm on other groups. there's nothing intrinsic to any group that grants them immunity from falling into those same patterns of domination, abuse, oppression, harm. Yeah. People look to the example of Israel a lot, but a less familiar example for some would be the situation that established Liberia in Africa.

Starting point is 00:52:40 Yeah. You know, where you literally had the descendants of enslaved people or formerly enslaved people. or formerly enslaved people going on to engage in settler colonialism in the territory that became Liberia to oppress and disadvantage the indigenous populations that previously occupy those territories and continue to occupy those territories today. They created a stratified society that placed them at the top, mirroring the very system that they had fled. Yeah, and this is the thing where it's like, it doesn't mean that, you know, people like swing around on the other end and be like, well, we actually have to like maintain the colonial relationship because like, what if these people then did colonialism on us? I was like, no. Yeah, no.

Starting point is 00:53:28 That's not, no. Because you hear people making that argument with regard to like three Palestine, right? Yeah. People say, oh, well, then the Palestinians will just spin around and do a genocide on us. So we have to do a genocide on them. Like, no. Yeah, and this is actually one of the things. I think there's two angles of this. One, you see that in the U.S. too, where people are like, well, what if we do?

Starting point is 00:53:48 If we do land back, then they're just going to like exterminate all the white people in the U.S. And it's like, no, that's what you did. Like, I, like, hold on, hold on. So then, you know, the second angle of this, too, is this becomes a motivating factor for colonizers. This is just something that's true historically. If you look at the Bosnian genocide, right? the way that you get people to do with genocide by convincing them that the people they're doing a genocide against

Starting point is 00:54:17 are about to do a genocide against them. And you know, you see this in Bosnia, you see this Rwanda. This is a very, very common sort of, I don't even know what you call it. Like, trope feels like too weak of a word. This is a very common step in the beginning of genocide, which I don't love.

Starting point is 00:54:40 0 out of 10? Mia not pro-genocide? More news at 10? Yeah. Yeah. It's something I wanted to mention regarding, I think, the application of

Starting point is 00:54:54 indigenousity as a concept in Asia. You mentioned the situation with the Yazidis and the Kurds. But you also see the governments of places like Indonesia and India and China and Vietnam and Bangladesh. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:55:09 Not recognized the existence of indigenous peoples within their territories. Yep. And these countries, like most countries in the world, did not ratify the International Labor Organization Convention 169 in 1989, which was known as the Indigenous and tribal people's convention concerning the rights of indigenous peoples. The UN's declaration of the rights of indigenous peoples passed in 2007 would, however, be voted on approvingly by most of the world, including the same countries that haven't recognized

Starting point is 00:55:39 indigenous peoples within their borders. All four of the countries that rejected the resolution, Canada, America, Australia, New Zealand, were later changed their vote in favor of the declaration. Of course, of their own tact on interpretations and emphasis on the declarations legally non-binding nature. Yeah. As is to be expected from set of colonial societies.

Starting point is 00:56:00 Yep. I'm very interested in, you know, because we do have these ethnic minorities. We do have, in the case of India, you have, the pre-Indo-European groups, the tribal groups. And if you go back to the definition of indignity, according to the UN, it speaks of groups which form at present non-dominant sectors of society that are determined to preserve, develop, and transmit to future generations, their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity as a basis of their continued existence as people, etc., etc. You know, it speaks of those.

Starting point is 00:56:39 having historical continuance with pre-invasion, pre-coding of societies that developed in their territories. They speak of groups that consider themselves distinct from other sectors and societies and all prevailing on those territories. And so by this definition, I understand that people in these Asian countries may be like, oh, we're all from this place, right? So why does that group get this designation of indigenous? Well, we do not. and it goes back to, again, a colonial relationship. It goes back to the relationship between a group and the broader society.

Starting point is 00:57:17 And so it's not necessarily stripping away the fact that a particular group may be from an area, but more so speaking about how another group relates to the state in that area and the group that dominates the state in that area. Yeah, like you look at this in the Chinese context, and it's like, okay, so by the time you're like bulldozing mosques in Xinjiang, like I think you've gotten to like congratulations

Starting point is 00:57:45 you have like created a indigenous settler divide. Yeah. Also just just speaking, like the context does not begin and end with European colonization and direct European administration and invasion and that kind of thing.

Starting point is 00:58:03 You know, prior to these invasions, You did have the empires that were established in these areas. I mean, China was an empire quite famously. Japan was an empire. India was the home of several empires. Indonesia was the home of several empires. So while it may not be that this relation of indigenousity is based on the European settler colonialism,

Starting point is 00:58:33 there is something to the history of empire. in those areas, establishing those relationships, relationships that would later be elevated in some cases by those Europeans, when they would come and they would, for example, select one ethnic group and elevate one ethnic group over another ethnic group, make a certain ethnic group administrators and put down another ethnic group, classify these kind of caste systems and ethnocratic divisions. Yeah, it's Rwanda.

Starting point is 00:59:04 It's like one of the- No, literally, literally. Yeah. There are a lot of cases where the indigenous colonizer divide become reflective of the way that Europeans set up past system. Sometimes that's not true, though. And one of the, I think, most hideous examples of this is West Papua, which we very briefly mentioned earlier,

Starting point is 00:59:34 where West Papua and Indonesia are not governed by the same colonial administration. but when Indonesia gains independence, like the government there, and this is Sancaras government, right? This is like the nominally socialist one, wants to take control of West Papua because West Papua has all of these resources. And the people in West Papua don't want that,

Starting point is 01:00:02 like they want to be an independence entity, but the Indonesians just roll in and invade them. and, you know, continue from Sukara to Sukarno, which is a unbelievably hideous series of genocides. And one of the things that's really bleak about the sort of process of decolonization is, like, you can see this shift in the way that these post-colonial societies are talking about what colonization is and we're resistances to it, where it ceases to become about the struggle of people against the colonizing force,

Starting point is 01:00:39 that oppress them, and it turns into something that's about, like, the continuity of national borders. You know, you get a really bleak example of this where, like, people talk about, like, the Bandung conference, right? Which is the sort of, like, it's supposed to be, like, this is, like, the big thing in, like, Pan Asian and Pan-African, like, struggles coming together where, like, all these formerly colonized nations, like, come together and, like, issue this, issue a bunch of things, and it's supposed to be this big moment of, like, this is, like, the unity of post-colonial societies. That's, like, still, to this day, look, back on in terms of like Afro-Asian solidarity like this is the big one but one of the things that

Starting point is 01:01:15 they ratified at Bandung was a very small session that no one pays any attention to you which is all of these countries put in their support for Indonesia's occupation of waspagua. Eventually I'm going to do a long thing about this. It just is a really difficult subject to tackle and has to be done very carefully but one of the things that happens is you know, like the West Papuans go to the U.N. And all of the states that you would normally think of as like the anti-colonial states are like, no, fuck you, like you belong to Indonesia. And then you get all of these other countries who are like more neutral or more U.S. aligned. But because they're not allied with Indonesia, their reaction is like, wait, hold on, what do you mean there are black people in the Pacific, A, and B, like, holy shit, this is fucked up.

Starting point is 01:02:06 but it sets this precedent that kind of like rolls on through like pan-Arabism and rolls on through a lot of

Starting point is 01:02:13 these decolonial movements where once you've gotten your state it's fine to just like do horrifying repression against any other sort of ethnic group

Starting point is 01:02:24 that's there because now that now that you have your post-colonial state like any attempt to interfere with the sovereignty of the state

Starting point is 01:02:30 and change the borders even if it's like I don't know you're like the West Sahara or you know you're like Xinjiang or you're like the Kurds

Starting point is 01:02:43 right and any attempt for those people to like get their freedom is seen as like a Western-backed like separatist thing instead of an anti-colonial struggle and I think that really was one of the things that was like the death knell for like the post-colonial movements

Starting point is 01:03:01 was their willingness to just walk in and machine guns people because we want the resources that these people's lands are on. Yeah. Honestly, that brings us to the topic of decolonization. Yeah. You know, because when we think about these definitions of the indigency as a cloning relationship and indigionity as a relationship to land, to nature, to the environment,

Starting point is 01:03:27 I think it begs the question of how we approach this process of decolonization. Yeah. How do we go about abolishing the colonizer indigenous relationship? Is it that we seek to pursue a universalization of indigianity to reformer and by that process, accomplish the latter? Or is there some other framework or approach by which we can take on this topic of, okay, do we proceed with the concept of indigianity? or does the concept of indigeneity exist as a byproduct and a representation of the system that we are trying to get away from?

Starting point is 01:04:11 Yeah. You know, so decolonization is commonly defined as the process of unsettling colonial power structures, whether that be through overturning acts of enclosure by building new commons, overturning acts of possession by reclaiming our spaces and identities, or overtaken acts of administration through social revolution. Social Revolution is a complete transformation of our society, by economy, culture, philosophy, relationships, technology, so on. It is, as anarchists would approach it, an ongoing and heterogeneous change in people's powers,

Starting point is 01:04:50 drives, and consciousness through practical education, as well as a progressive breakdown and transformation of the existing systems and institutions, alongside the building of new systems institutions, punctuated by major intersections, ruptures, advances, that whole messy process with the aim of self-liberation. Yeah. Something that I've broken down as involved in confrontation with the powers that be,

Starting point is 01:05:20 non-cooperation with the established order of things, and a prefiguration of new social relations, institutions, infrastructure, and practice. in the here and now. If we maintain the interpretation of indigenousity as based in one's position in a colonial relationship, then the decolonization process will entail the abolition of that relationship as the premise of identity, and therefore the abolition of indigenous as a status. Colonial legacies have effectively left indigenous communities legally and politically compartmentalized and culturally, socially, and spiritually weakened within the narrow

Starting point is 01:05:58 parameters of the state, where they end up diverting the crucial energy necessary to confront state power and develop the process of decolonization toward mimicking the practices of the dominant non-indigenous legal political institutions through the processes of land claims and self-government. And by pursuing these strategies, I think what we notice is this tends toward a division rather than a solidarity building. Division both internally and between indigenous communities.

Starting point is 01:06:33 Where land claims, for example, clash, or where certain members of a society or a community utilize their position above others in that society or community to gain certain advantages for themselves, sometimes to the detriment of that society or community. So I think,

Starting point is 01:06:54 any sort of approach to decolonization has to account for the ways that some approaches to the colonization can end up perhaps misdirecting, from a subjective perspective, the work that is necessary to dismantle the colonial order rather than merely assert a position was in it. But this idea of indigeneity via colonization is just one understanding of the term. My approach to it is, of course, one subjective interpretation of that definition and where it might lead. We need to explore another approach, I think, to decolonization, and one that recognizes the power and potential of indigenous relationships with the land. Now, globally, the UN recognizes that indigenous peoples protect 80% of the world's remaining biodiversity.

Starting point is 01:07:49 And scientists have shown that indigenous management practices in Brazil, Canada, and Australia, provides the same level of ecosystem support and protection as any imposed protected area, which makes it abundantly clear that the colonial approach of conservation via dispossession removes the very people who take care of our most important ecosystems. I don't believe that merely building a connection with the land can make someone indigenous. But not being indigenous doesn't exclude us from aiding in the renewal of the indigenous work. Kimmer uses the example of the broadleaf planter, also known as the white man's footprint. Despite not being indigenous to the Americas, it has become an honored member of the plant community

Starting point is 01:08:36 because it lives as a good neighbor instead of as a destructive invader. While other invasive species poisoned the soil over around the land out-competeen indigenous species, the white man's footprint took on a strategy of helpful coexistence, even sharing some of its healing properties with those who ask of it. It is not indigenous, but it has become naturalized. To quote Kimmerer, being naturalized a place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as a

Starting point is 01:09:24 if your children's future matters. To take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all of our relatives depend on it. Because they do. Yeah. End quote. Decolonization will require us to uproot invasive capitalist settler societies in order to rebuild in a way that treats the land like the home that we share and are responsible for. It will require us to receive an honor, knowledge in the land, to care for its keepers and to pass on that knowledge to the next generation. As always, all power to all the people. Peace. Canadian women are looking for more.

Starting point is 01:10:15 More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us.

Starting point is 01:10:38 Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends... Oh my God, this is the same man.

Starting point is 01:11:09 A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves.

Starting point is 01:11:31 Listen to the Girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. In 2023, former Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd found himself at the center of a paternity scandal. The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story. This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth. You doctored this particular test twice in someone's, correct? I doctored the test once.

Starting point is 01:12:05 It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case. I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for. Sunlight's the greatest disinfected. They would uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Greg Lespian and Michael Marantini. My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young.

Starting point is 01:12:25 This is Love Trap. Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted. on fraud charges. This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona. Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything.

Starting point is 01:13:00 Here, the Nick Dick and Poll show, we're not afraid to make mistakes. What Cougler did that I think was so unique. He's the writer-director. Who do you think he is? I don't know. You mean, like, the president? You think Canada has a president? You think China has a president?

Starting point is 01:13:18 Those law a rousette. God, I love that thing. I use it all the time. I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it at night. It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus. Yep. It was a good one.

Starting point is 01:13:33 I like that saying. It is an actual Polish saying. Yeah. It is an actual poem. Yeah. Better version of Play Stupid Games, win stupid prizes. Yes.

Starting point is 01:13:40 Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time. I actually, I thought it was. I got that wrong. Listen to the Nick, Dick, and Paul show

Starting point is 01:13:47 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen here, a show about things falling apart. Between attacks on Sam Altman's home, a Molotov, and a Tesla office,

Starting point is 01:14:04 and a warehouse causing over half a billion dollars in damages. This past week or so has been a little snapshot of the cool zone. I'm Garrison, Davis, this episode I'm joined by Robert Evans to discuss one of these events. To be very clear, we had nothing to do with either of them. The way you introduced them, sounded a little bit like between, you know, going to Sam Altman's house twice, it's been quite a busy week for us here. A busy week for us here. Just wanted to be extra clear.

Starting point is 01:14:33 Extra clear. No, no, the cool zone just relating to, you know, the state of American society and where it's going. Yes. But as is typical of these sorts of events, the reality and motivations of attacks like these may not be as clear cut as Lee Epic-based praxis as one might want to imagine. Yeah, this is not a Gimli situation, you know, it's weirder than that and stupider. It is weirder. And this episode we're going to talk about the Sam Altman attacker, who is a lot weirder than what you might have expected, with a philosophical worldview downstream from

Starting point is 01:15:12 the original inspirations behind the Zizians and even the intellectual interests of Luigi Mangione to a certain extent. Ah, God, yes, that's, that's right. Our dear sweet friends, the rationalists. Ah, man. The alleged Altman attacker was a college student from the Houston area, whose interest in the risks of AGI, artificial general intelligence, turned into an obsession, which earlier this year turned self-destructive. But let's go through the actual events that happened in San Francisco

Starting point is 01:15:46 a few weeks ago. At around 3.30 a.m. on April 10th, a 20-year-old college student named Daniel Moran O'Gama, allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail toward the home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, hitting the top of the security gate on the driveway leading to Altman's residence. Moranogama did not get past this security gate. About an hour and a half later, though, Moranogama showed up outside the San Francisco headquarters of OpenAI and tried to use a chair to break into the building through the glass doors. He was stopped by security personnel and allegedly told them

Starting point is 01:16:23 that he came to the headquarters to burn it down and kill everyone inside. according to the federal affidavit. When he was arrested, officers allegedly recovered, incendiary devices, a jug of kerosene, and a blue lighter, as well as what the FBI has described as an anti-AI document. Mm-hmm. Okay. We currently do not have a copy of this document. It's only described in the criminal complaint.

Starting point is 01:16:51 But this looks like it was a three-part manifesto, allegedly authored by Moranagama. and the first part was titled, Your Last Warning. In which he states he, quote, killed slash attempted to kill, Sam Altman. And also writing, quote, if I'm going to advocate for others to kill and commit crimes, then I must lead by example and show that I am fully sincere in my message, unquote. The document then lists the names and addresses of various investors,

Starting point is 01:17:22 board members, and executives of AI companies as a sort of target list. The second part of the document was titled, Some More Words on the Matter of Our Impending Extinction. Great. And this section discussed the purported risk that AI poses to humanity, and we'll get into some of those beliefs a little later on. But the third part of this three-part anti-AIA document was a letter addressed to Altman, quote,

Starting point is 01:17:49 If You Make It, and reads in part, If by some miracle you live, then I would take this as a sign from the divine, to redeem yourself, unquote. Now, like I said, we do not have a copy of this manifesto in full, though the affidavit says that Maranagama appears to have emailed similar versions of this document to people at his former college in Texas. But as of Monday 420, this document is still not online. But like a lot of zoomers, we do have an online footprint made up of posts from Instagram, Discord, a substack blog, and even a podcast interview, where Maranagama discusses his anti-AI views.

Starting point is 01:18:32 It's always sad when something terrible happens to a fellow podcaster. You know, I just, I have a broad and deep pan podcaster solidarity. Class solidarity, yeah. All podcasters are good. All of them. Every last one of them. famously no wrongdoing has ever come behind the microphone of a podcaster. No, no, no.

Starting point is 01:18:52 It's a special place. Now, back in January, back when Muranaganba was just 19, journalists found him through some of his posts on an anti-AI discord server, and he was asked to be interviewed for this podcast about AI called The Last Invention. Our colleague Ed Zittron was also interviewed for this podcast, actually. Now, he was interviewed because of his posts weighing the possibility of using violence to stop the development of AI. Now, in this interview, he says,

Starting point is 01:19:23 he grew up in the suburbs his whole life and, quote, grew up quite close to the internet. And claims that he's been online every day starting at nine years old. Ronogam explained how his political worldview had largely been shaped by YouTube, specifically debate videos on YouTube, like Ben Shapiro style. And these sorts of debate videos are what originally exposed him to views critical of AI. He says he first heard about AI, though, when Chad G. pt came out when he was a sophomore in high school and first thought it was, quote, the greatest thing on earth because it would allow him to cheat on school, essentially. But after watching videos debating the risks of AI and the possibility of advanced general intelligence, artificial general intelligence, and the potential threat posed by this artificial superintelligence, Moranagama's views started to sour on AI.

Starting point is 01:20:19 At first, he was a bit skeptical of these AI-critical. debates, but eventually became convinced of the AI Dumer arguments and became an accolate himself. He started arguing in YouTube comments and talking with friends and family about the danger of AI. He describes himself getting annoying and, quote, a bit autistic about this, leading to his mom suggesting he joined an advocacy organization. He joined this group called Pause AI in 2024, which is an AI safety advocacy group that organized. is online and as well as some in-person protests. And he was also part of a Discord server called Stop AI.

Starting point is 01:21:00 His username on both Discord and Instagram was Butlerian underscore Jihadist, in reference to the crusade against AI in the Dune novels. Yeah. On Instagram, his account had a collection of Instagram stories saved about the threat of AI, including a meme about living in a Venn diagram of The Matrix, Terminator, and Ingram.

Starting point is 01:21:23 idiocracy. One of these Instagram stories was a picture of a hockey stick graph showing the length of coding tasks that AI can do and how that's increasing with the caption, quote, if we do nothing very soon, we will die, I'm sure of that, unquote. Another story contains screenshots of articles, posts, and studies proclaiming that artificial general intelligence or the quote unquote singularity is already here. Captioned, Being Right All the Time Fucking Sucks when it's about the worst things imaginable, unquote. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:22:02 So if his concerns about AI started around summer of 2024, by the end of 2025, those concerns grew existential and he started spiraling. Yeah. Yeah. There's a post he made on the pause AI discord from November 6th, 2025, writing, quote, we owe it to everyone who came before us and to ourselves and to everyone we know and love and everyone who might exist someday to be stronger than that and at least die fighting if it comes to that unquote. A few weeks later he wrote quote, we are close to midnight. It's time to actually act. To this a moderator on the server replied, advocating violence in any form is grounds for a ban.

Starting point is 01:22:47 This all seems like a pretty natural progression if you're following like the kind of things that the less wrong crowd, which the website run by a guy named Lizer Yudkowski, who is like the patron saint of the rationalists, a huge chunk of which have become like AI doomers. Like a Leezer's book that came out a year or two ago is called If We Build It Everyone Dies or something like that. Yeah. And I'm surprised more of them haven't so far. Like I think it probably talks to just people not. actually believing it as much as they claim to, like, online. But, like, if someone truly believes the stuff that crowd is saying about how, like, basically the creation of an evil God is inevitable that will seek to purge the world of humankind, like, of course you do this. It's a really natural progression. Like, unfortunately, what you have to pair that with is, like, if you believe

Starting point is 01:23:39 all of the hype about AI, yeah, right? If you believe that AGI is imminent, that it's on the way, like if you are like me and I don't believe we're anywhere close to AGI if that's even possible, then yeah, you could believe the stuff the rationalists believe and not think that you need to take immediate destructive action. But if you literally believe that these companies are on the hinge of birthing an evil God, what else is there to do? Yeah, and that's the exact thing that Maranagama ends up writing about on his substack. Yeah. And this is the fullest picture we have of his views is from the substack because we don't have this manifesto, but he did write at length about AI, and he's writing about a lot of the stuff that

Starting point is 01:24:21 you're talking about here. And we'll discuss that writing more after this ad break. Okay, we are back. The most in-depth piece of publicly available writing by Moranogama, explaining his anti-AI views, comes from a post on his substack blog dated January 6, 2026. This article outlines his belief that AI poses a quote-unquote existential risk to humanity. And I think this essay was the first thing I saw that really demonstrated that his opposition to AI is not like based on fears of AI disrupting the economy, contributing to a loss of jobs or, you know, risking like labor rights for workers. But the belief that AI will become like a superior race and wipe out or enslave humanity,

Starting point is 01:25:19 that that is the standpoint that Ronogama is coming from. Gotcha. The belief that AI will quote unquote lead to human extinction, he says is based on two ideas. The first being the rapid progress in artificial intelligence, the rapid technological development that we've seen the past few years and continuing right now. For evidence to this claim, he references claims from AI companies themselves that fully automated AI researchers at like an intern level are coming soon, including. claims from the guy Anthropic, who says that he expects these models by 2026 or 27, saying, quote, the capabilities of AI systems will be best thought of as akin to an entirely new state populated by highly intelligent people appearing on the global stage, a country

Starting point is 01:26:12 of geniuses in a data center, unquote. Yes, a whole country worth of geniuses. All of it in your computer. Cool. What about like school shooters and stuff? Like what about a country full of like psych? Like what are the, any, any group of geniuses is going to have like some genius pedophiles. And like, right? Like if they're actually genius, that does imply the capacity for like various different like illnesses and quirks that cause all sorts of wild behavior. One would assume unless you think that AI is immune to that, but then could it really be intelligent?

Starting point is 01:26:50 Yeah. I mean, this is that, a version of that idea is kind of what Morano-Ogama believes is like these things, if real and do become, you know, super intelligent, then they might not really have the best interests of humanity. Right. Because they will be interested in self-preservation, which is just part, part of like how he gets to this idea that it is an existential threat is by using all of this kind of marketing hype. Yeah. That is being pushed out by AI companies. Well, yeah, that's the thing. Like, that is a logical thing you could infer from the shit being said by Sam Altman and his crew, right?

Starting point is 01:27:20 Yeah, and others, like Dario Amodi at Anthropic and Elon Musk saying that AI is maybe already here or that the next GROC model will be AGI. These are all things that Maranagan was referencing, like on Instagram and in other places online. Now, the second reason that he believes that AI will usher in human extinction is because AI is not aligned with the interests of the people creating it or with best human interests in general.

Starting point is 01:27:49 And for evidence, he refers to instances of AI models allegedly lying, cheating on tasks, or blackmailing their own creators. Specifically in studies. He cites a 2025 anthropic study on agentic misalignment, which he characterizes as demonstrating that, quote, most of the current AI models are willing to blackmail and even kill people if it ensures their own survival, unquote. This may be the first terrorist attack I've heard of. inspired by media created by the people they're attacking. Like, not media that was, like, designed to make them attack people or, like, carry out acts, but specifically by the propaganda being put out by the companies that they're radicalized against.

Starting point is 01:28:33 Yes. Like, that's very strange. Media put out to raise the stock price of a company. Radicalized a guy to take a shot at Sam Altman's house. There's two people to throw a bomb or something. I forget which way it went, but yeah. Yeah, first throwing the smallotov, then a day. days later, two people fired shots.

Starting point is 01:28:51 First was Molotov, right? No, I mean, it's interesting, right? Because, like, these studies are basically doing, like, linguistic exercises with these models and getting, you know, large language models to say or to threaten certain things for various reasons, usually, like, their own survival. Right. And these are kind of interesting studies that these companies are doing,

Starting point is 01:29:12 but they're doing with the intent of trying to align these models better. That's why the study's on agentic misalignment, because it's trying to tweak these things to be more friendly to consumers. And like getting an LLM to say that it will kill or blackmail in order to ensure its own survival is different from the LLM being able to do that, right? That is a big jump.

Starting point is 01:29:37 And there's not much currently that facilitates that jump. Moranagama writes, quote, ignore for a second these models current limitations or questions on how truly intelligent or conscious these models may actually be. The truth is, all these nuances are completely irrelevant to my argument. There are only two questions we should be concerned about at this moment. Is it willing to kill to preserve itself, and is it capable of doing so? These signs indicate that AI is willing and becoming potentially capable of doing both of these things,

Starting point is 01:30:10 and that is all that matters, unquote. That's really where this argument rests, is that even if there's, these models aren't currently intelligent, even if they can't currently kill, the fact that they could in the future is enough to stop any further development of these models. Right. That's his argument. Okay. And he writes that AI will only become a larger threat, the more we improve it, and that AI, quote, will graduate from an active threat to individuals to an existential threat to humanity. I estimate the probability of AI causing human extinction to be nearly certain, unquote. That's the thing, because, like, there is a massive threat that the new, what is it,

Starting point is 01:30:51 mythos upgrade to Claude that's just about to come out, like, yeah, actually does represent to individuals and to society, which is that it's going to supercharge fraud even more, which is already up by something like a trillion dollars a year. And that ruins people's lives. Fride and cybersecurity. Yeah, fraud, I mean, fraud often as a result of cybersecurity, of, like, its ability to penetrate. And that's really bad. And it doesn't imply the, like, scorn.

Starting point is 01:31:16 Guy net devastation of the entire world in its biosphere, because that would be stupid. There's no reason. And also that computers don't have access to it, the nuclear arsenal. But like, AI absolutely will enable assholes who want to scam a bunch of people out of their money to do that better. Like, that's a problem. We should probably stop that. He writes that quote, we are dead if we do not act now. So what does acting now entail? For starters, stopping all construction of new data centers, these are the brains of these models dictating their physical limitations.

Starting point is 01:31:52 Second, stopping all research and beginning downscaling of these data centers, closing them down while still keeping them monitored, unquote. He also proposed striking a deal with China to, quote, stop the AI race and to create international treaties akin to Cold War Nuclear Weapons Treaties or post-Cold War treaties.

Starting point is 01:32:16 And finally, he advocated that people will need to take strategic action, which could include sharing information about AI, campaigning, protesting, saying, quote, although doing nothing is akin to suicide and a disgusting amount of negligence. In that podcast interview,

Starting point is 01:32:34 from around the same time, this AI article was published. This is January 2026th. Moranagama said in that interview, quote, before we even think about violence, we need to exhaust all our peaceful means first, unquote, which he says includes protesting and sharing information. But the hosts asked him about posts he had already made about, quote-unquote,

Starting point is 01:32:56 luigiing CEOs. And he says that he didn't really mean that as a threat, that it was more rhetoric, it was hyperbole, and answered no to a question on if it would be wise to try to kill Sam, Altman saying, quote, one person is not going to do that much of a dent. I understand the frustration with a person that might advocate for that, but it is not practical. It's not worth it. It's almost all risk, no reward. People may feel that way, but not too many people would do it, unquote. Wow. Okay, man. Great. I mean, that's, yeah.

Starting point is 01:33:37 Though when asked if we will continue to see AI development going in the direction that it's moving now, and if so, if he believes that we have to stop the extinction of the human race by whatever means necessary, Muranagama just replied, I'll say no comment. Okay, man. Well, I mean, yeah. Later saying that he would quote, only advocate for violence as the final solution. And that he later realized that what he said had tried to DMM. emphasize the final solution part. Great guy. That is kind of his ultimate sentiment is around this time he was considering violence.

Starting point is 01:34:16 He was toying with advocating for it publicly on discord and, you know, in this in this podcast, but still kind of had some like reins on that. Yeah. But it was something in his mind as a sort of like final solution to this problem. This is why it's so fucking irresponsible to push these ridiculous claims about like the power of this technology. and what it's going to be able to do and how smart it's going to be. And in part because, like,

Starting point is 01:34:43 it makes it hard to actually look objectively at the situation. And if Muranagama had looked at what's actually been happening with data centers, he would see that, like, more than half of the recently announced projects have been, like, either stalled or halted. And there's been tremendous success on the local level in, like, counties and in most recently,

Starting point is 01:35:01 this entire state of Maine, passing laws against the construction of data centers. Like, yeah, there's actually been a lot of success. in fighting the building of new data centers. If someone wanted to have a positive impact on this, there's a lot of room right now to make that fight even more effective as opposed to doing like stupid bullshit that you would only want to do if you had convinced yourself that we were like literally moments away from judgment day.

Starting point is 01:35:28 Yeah, and he used to be involved in this sort of action and this sort of organizing, like, around that kind of stuff when he was when he was doing stuff with pause AI. Yeah. But it was really in the past few months where he started to spiral in this very like dumber direction. Like, you know, he was already very critical and very dumber about what AI could do.

Starting point is 01:35:46 But the sort of intense existential, like immediate existential threat that opposed is something that he was really developing at the end of last year and the start of this year. And, you know, this is in part because of the sort of environment that he was immersed in.

Starting point is 01:36:01 Yeah. And we'll talk more about that environment after this ad break. Okay, we are back. Maranagama had a bunch of other writing on his substack, which gives us a bit of a closer look at his political philosophy and the sort of information ecosystem that he exists in beyond just the AI question.

Starting point is 01:36:32 In this AI article that he wrote or published in January, he recommended that people read Eliezer-Yutkowski's book. If anyone builds it, everyone dies. Mm-hmm. Thanks, Eliezer. Do you want to, like, I guess, briefly give some background on, like, who this guy is? Well, he wrote a rationalist Harry Potter. Like, he's the guy who started a website called Less Wrong. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:36:54 Which was about basically, like, logic puzzles and trying to, like, optimize your thinking and your responses to behavior with, like, Bayesian analysis. Yes. And he's kind of branded himself as an AI expert. He's not, like, a coder or anything, and he's not, like, an expert on machine learning. He doesn't have any qualifications. But he's, like, an expert on, like, again, game theory. how an AI would have a super intelligent AI would have to act.

Starting point is 01:37:17 And he generally makes very dire conclusions that are all pretty much based in like Terminator or Horizon Zero Dawn, if you want my honest opinion of Elisa Yankowski. Yeah, yeah. And his irresponsibility is largely down to him being a dummy. And he's definitely part of what radicalized this guy. But the fact that you have Open AI and Anthropic and a number of other people, like a lot of like folks like fucking Elon Musk, but also just a lot of like popular public intellectuals, quote unquote,

Starting point is 01:37:50 and their podcast and shit, talking about all this like, yep, we're moments away from super intelligent AI that's going to be able to do everything. Everyone's losing their jobs. None of it's like, we won't need people doing anything.

Starting point is 01:38:03 If that weren't all over the fucking place, Elyzer would sound a lot less convincing. Sure. No, I mean, and like the media environment around, or like the sort of online communities around the rash, are interesting because you have a lot of them who are AI doomers like like Yudkowski but a lot of them are also AI accelerationists right a lot of the sort of West

Starting point is 01:38:24 Coast you know parts of zizi and sort of like this it was a splinter yeah yeah there's there's this kind of splintering around people who who maybe even believe some of the you know existential claims around AI but but believe that developing it is then the best way to kind of get out of that crisis. And this creates an interesting dynamic among, you know, rooms full of, of these rationalists or post-rationalists. And in that podcast interview, Moranagama says that it was videos of Yudkowski, debate videos on YouTube that originally exposed him to his work.

Starting point is 01:39:00 And on other posts on his substack, Uronogama also mentions Yudkowski's work. As a part of Muranagama's, like other interests, which contain writing on pseudo-spiritual philosophy. He writes about, quote, the ultimate tree of reality, or the tree of ultimate reality, the aborition of man, genealogy of being,

Starting point is 01:39:21 and the warrior and the martyr. And on February 28th, 2026, he posted, quote, an analysis of political extremes, which goes over some of his political philosophy, which relates to like rationalist arguments

Starting point is 01:39:38 or some rationalist arguments, or some rationalist arguments, around like IQ. In this essay, Maranagama primarily described himself as a consequentialist and critiqued leftism for being trapped in an idealized world, like a, quote, schizophrenic patient who attempts the same zealous plots over and over again without hesitation. This essay defends discrimination as a justified means of reacting to inequalities and claims that such statements are only controversial because of a, quote, natural emotional resistance to intrinsic judgment, unquote,

Starting point is 01:40:13 which he says has nothing to do with the factual truth of certain claims like, quote, East Asian people are on average, more intelligent than black people, unquote. Okay. Mm-hmm. Now, Moranagama argues

Starting point is 01:40:27 that the problem with right-wingism, as he puts it, is that it has no boundary. It's constant scaling and outward expansion inevitably leads to self-consuming defeat. Quote, it goes from being about preserving the best of human qualities

Starting point is 01:40:43 to being deeply anti-human and producing zero winners, unquote. This sort of refers to Karl Schmidt's fascist writing on internal conflict being externalized by the establishment of a border which expands to push out an increasing number of enemy groups. Instead, Moranagama proposes what he calls a sustainable form of rightist discrimination, by establishing a sedentary floor for movements slash radical policy suggestions

Starting point is 01:41:15 instead of an always rising idealistic ceiling. So, for an example, instead of deciding that a certain IQ score should be required to vote, he advocates setting a concrete, unchangeable floor by, quote, limiting voting to certain people who pass critical thinking and civics tests, unquote. Ah, mm-hmm. Yeah. Yes. So somehow determining a critical thinking in civics test is less arbitrary and less prone to arbitrary changes than deciding a certain IQ score. I wonder what kind of critical thinking he's going to be interested in. I wonder what kind of IQ. You know, like, yeah. Well, yeah, these these people always break down to the same things.

Starting point is 01:42:03 I mean, yeah, I mean, this essay in particular gets, gets really contradictory, a certain. certain things, and then later on basically argue the opposite. It's very, it's very disordered thinking. I mean, this is, this is the work of like a 19-year-old who was in, like, a mental spiral leading, leading to him traveling across the country to firebomb Sam Altman's house. Yeah. Like, this is not the product of like, you know, a logically ordered mine,

Starting point is 01:42:29 despite how, you know, a rationalist might, you know, perceive themselves as such. Yep. Now, at the end of this essay, he advocates for, quote, ending mass migration. and initiating mass deportations. He says that this is necessary because, quote, nations have a right to preserve their ethnic identity, and low-skill immigration saturates the job markets of these countries, making jobs which could once earn a living wage become unlivable,

Starting point is 01:42:54 increasing the amount of value-draining people in society by both importing them and undercutting low-skill natives. Generally, whiteness in these countries is a decent correlative to some of the things I value, unquote. Mm-hmm. Some of them, okay. Now, Moro Gama isn't white, and he says that he opposes white supremacy,

Starting point is 01:43:17 but he does those by saying, like, you know, it's not actually about whiteness, it's that whiteness correlates to certain things I value, like high IQ. Mm-hmm. And that's how he tries to justify it in his head. And rather than establish an explicitly white supremacist state, something he claims to oppose

Starting point is 01:43:33 as races an imperfect metric to discriminate effectively based on traits, according to him. Rather, he advocates for, quote, the most effective type of discrimination, evaluating the possibility of IQ-slash-merit-based nationalism, unquote. Basically, that's having a country where citizenship is determined by IQ. And again, this contradicts his previous claim where he advocates against requiring IQ to vote,

Starting point is 01:44:00 instead having a critical thinking and civics test, but then advocates for a country which citizenship is determined by IQ, and usually citizenship is the factor that determines if someone can vote. So this is just one example of this sort of contradictory writing in this essay. Now, Moranagama writes that the only problem with this IQ nationalism is that it would create a, quote, brain drain across the third world, leading to worsening conditions in third world countries

Starting point is 01:44:34 and thus even more illegal immigration because people with high IQ is when they'll be able to immigrate and gain citizenship to first world countries, right? In a United States where citizenship is determined by high IQ then people who with people with high IQs

Starting point is 01:44:48 from around the world would then all just move to the United States. Of course. So to solve this problem, he says that he rejects quote unquote classical eugenics and extermination in favor of what he calls ethical eugenics in the third world. Oh, oh, ethical eugenics.

Starting point is 01:45:04 Ah, good. I'm glad someone figured it out. And this ethical eugenics is to promote, quote, IQ growth genetically, unquote. So the whole basis of this article is his belief that IQ is genetically determined, not determined by class. And he never interrogates this idea. All of the statements that he makes in this article is based on the idea that IQ is genetically determined that it's not it's not determined by education in class it is primarily or almost solely genetically based thus ethical eugenics to create high IQ babies which he thinks will solve solve the problems of the world yeah yeah they uh we never tried that before for sure like there haven't been

Starting point is 01:45:49 generations of times in which that was attempted that all ended in disaster and mass death no they just didn't they didn't get it right because they didn't put ethical in front of it no those were Classical eugenics, Robert. They forgot to put ethical in front of it. That was the big, ah, what a tragedy. They were one word away from greatness. So, so yeah, that is the other piece of writing that I think is worth expounding on to get a more full sense of kind of where this guy's head is at, right?

Starting point is 01:46:17 This is not a leftist Antifa super soldier, firebombing Sam Altman's home. Nope. That isn't to say what happened isn't interesting. But I think, you know, if like you see, said, you know, this is the first quasi-terrorist attack inspired by the sort of rhetoric that these companies are producing themselves to boost their own stock price. Yep. I mean, I literally just saw on Reddit earlier today. The title from the actual, like, post was CEOs make shocking predictions about AI. Huge job losses are coming soon.

Starting point is 01:46:48 20 to 30 percent, 50 percent unemployment within the next two to five years. And when you trace it back to its source, it's Dario Amadeh, of Anthropic, just basically quoting some statistical. he found from estimations by like axios and fox news yeah and talking on some fucking podcast uh scaring the shit out of people like it it's it's every day like of course some people are going to react like this other reason i wanted to talk about this the second half of this the sort of IQ and like you know rationalist stuff because this is just another instance of you know public acts of political violence i think done by people downstream from the rationalists you know luigi is is part of this. The Zizians is also a part of this. It's like an extended network. This type of thought

Starting point is 01:47:34 does keep producing acts of public violence like this, and that is an interesting thing to chart. On April 14th, Moranagama's public defender said in court that he has a, quote, history of autism and mental health illness, and that his actions, quote, appear to have been driven by an acute mental health crisis. His parents released a statement that same Tuesday, saying, quote, our son Daniel is a loving person who has been suffering recently from mental illness crisis. We have been trying our best to address these issues and get him effective treatment, and we are very concerned for his well-being. Unquote.

Starting point is 01:48:11 He currently is facing federal and state charges, including attempted murder. That is all I have on this for now. Well, I mean, this isn't going to stop happening. Like, these won't be the last attacks like this. I haven't seen a big push in the media or from like elected leaders to talk about like anti-AI sentiment as like a terrorist threat yet. Yeah. That hasn't really seemed to pick up yet. And I haven't seen this yet be blamed on like leftist stuff.

Starting point is 01:48:46 I have seen it been blamed on like the anti-AI thing. Yeah. Which I, you know, it is part of like some of the anti-AI movement are people who literally believe it's like a demon god that's going to destroy things. but I'm interested as there are more of these, as, you know, this kind of stuff continues to happen, what form that takes and, like, how it actually looks when this was, this starts to hit politics in a big way. Yeah, U.S. Attorney Craig Mazakian said, referring to this case, that they are going to treat it as an act of domestic terrorism. Yeah, I mean, it is. Like, it is. He was trying to do terrorism. Like, his goal specifically was to cause changes in policy.

Starting point is 01:49:29 Yeah, but you're right. Like, I haven't seen them refer to this from the sort of political lens, like there's been statements from, you know, other U.S. government officials referring to that warehouse fire as, you know, being motivated by anti-capitalism and like threatening our way of life,

Starting point is 01:49:44 threatening the capitalist way of life, which is how they referred to that warehouse fire in Ontario, California. Right. I've not seen them specifically kind of lay out like anti-AI sentiments as a motivating factor of terrorism. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:49:56 Though I'm sure they will quite soon. Right. Yeah. Between the shots fired at the home of that city councilman in the Midwest over his vote in support of a data center. Over data centers. As we see more incidents kind of like that, as we see stuff like this, I think it's very likely that they will add anti-A sentiment to the list of common recurring motivating factors of this sort of domestic violent extremism. Yep. All right. Bye, everybody. Canadian women are looking for more.

Starting point is 01:50:40 More into themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. There's two golden rules that any man should live by.

Starting point is 01:51:16 Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield. And in this new season of the girlfriends... Oh my God, this is the same man. a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.

Starting point is 01:51:40 I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends.

Starting point is 01:51:59 Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckerd found himself at the center of a paternity scandal. The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story. This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth. You doctored this particular test twice in so-ins, correct? I doctored the test once. It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.

Starting point is 01:52:34 I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for. Sunlight's the greatest disinfected. They would uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Greg, the lesbian, Michael Marantini. My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trap.

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Starting point is 01:53:26 Here, the Nick Dick and Poll show, we're not afraid to make mistakes. What Coogler did that I think was so unique. He's the writer-director. Who do you think he is? I don't know. You meet the, like, the president? You think Canada has a president. You think China has a president.

Starting point is 01:53:44 Lozah Crosette. God, I love that thing. I use it all the time. I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it at night. It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus. Yep. It was a good one. I like that saying.

Starting point is 01:53:59 It is an actual Polish saying. It is an actual poem. Better version of Play Stupid Games, win stupid prizes. Yes. Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift, who said that for the first time. I actually, I thought it was. I got that wrong. Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul show on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 01:54:21 Hi, and welcome to the show. It's me, James, today. And I'm very fortunate to be joined by a member of the UCSD faculty, someone who is a professor of environmental physics at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. You're also teaching the Critical Gender Studies Department. And we're talking today about the disciplinary action that they are facing for participation in the Gaza. Solidarity Encampment. So welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us. Thank you, James. I'm really happy to be here. Yeah, it's great to have you. I'm glad we can share our platform and talk about this. So I think to begin with, you know, it's been a little while,

Starting point is 01:54:59 perhaps I know a lot of people have sort of been investigating and changing their politics in the last year or so. So perhaps you could explain a little bit about the Guards of Solidarity encampment, the moment that came in and the role that it played in the and the, and anti-genocide of Palestinian liberation movement at UC San Diego more broadly? Yes. Thanks again for this opportunity. So the encampment at UCSD was set up on May 1st, 24. And that was happening in the context of encampments that were being set up at universities

Starting point is 01:55:37 across the U.S. I believe that the UCSD encampment was approximately the 100th encampment set up in the U.S. at that time. There's quite a number of interesting things about kind of the whole encampment movement. First of all, the fact that they met with such severe repression is very suggestive about how effective they were in bringing the issues related to the genocide in the occupation of Palestine to the forefront in ways that certainly weren't happening in the U.S. at the time. Another thing about the encampments that I found really interesting, but also, I mean, I think brilliant from a organizing perspective

Starting point is 01:56:28 is that they were very visually and viscerally recreating the conditions under which Palestinians in Gaza were, living at the time and still are, having been displaced from their residences and being forced to live in these very makeshift tent encampments. And so there was a recreation then of those conditions in a very visual way. And I think that that also was in some sense reminiscent of the shanty towns that were constructed on college campuses. in the U.S., in the mid-80s, in the anti-apartheid movement. So I think paying attention to some of those details, which often get lost,

Starting point is 01:57:21 we started talking about, you know, Rive Police and so forth, these encampments were, they weren't just, you know, a bunch of students hanging out. These were constructed and developed in a very thoughtful manner. And that was definitely the case at UCSD, as I was told by students who were participating in it, as a space you engage in education and research about the genocide and about the occupation and about the occupation of Palestine, as well as the ties that UCSD had to the occupation and the genocide in Palestine. So you had, and I talked to many students who are actively engaged in this, you had students sitting on their laptops doing research about the UCSD's ties to weapons manufacturers, the ways that UCSD supported the discourses that were enabling the genocide and the occupation, including archaeological research.

Starting point is 01:58:35 And also, you know, there was a program associated with every day, and the students would plan teach-ins. Sometimes professors would do the teach-ins, sometimes students, sometimes community members. There were teach-ins on a whole range of really interesting topics, including, of course, about Palestine, about the genocide, but also about other issues like the role of surveillance and surveillance technology. in the genocide, the eco side that was happening, continues to happen in Gaza and Palestine. And so it was a place of, an amazing place of learning and research and also community engagement. So as I said, you know, outside speakers are being brought in. Community members were coming in and participating and learning. And so, you know, those three things, research, teaching, and community engagement,

Starting point is 01:59:39 those are precisely the things that the university tells us as faculty and students that we should be doing. So to me, the encampment was functioning, even though it wasn't getting any support from the university, and it was actually the university was throughout. its five days of existence, I was trying to shut it down. Despite all that, he was functioning essentially like any other research institute on campus,

Starting point is 02:00:13 and I would say probably better than many of the research institutes on campus. Yeah. I attended a few times to talk to people, to observe, to do my journalism. As you said, a university immediately was very obviously, very hostile.

Starting point is 02:00:32 administration giving out little flyers or something about like university rules and there was constant presence of UCPD constant presence of administration constant concerns for people about their safety in the encampment as you say the university was very hostile to it despite it doing things that the university purports to believe in let's discuss briefly the history UCSD hasn't always come down so hard on protest movements, but it also has something of a history of handling these moments very poorly, I would say. So perhaps we could begin, yeah, if you could talk about the anti-apartheid movement and then we can move through what people have called the Black Winter at UCSD and some of the other things that we both have some experience of. Yeah, yeah. So it's very interesting to me.

Starting point is 02:01:27 I mean, of course, you know, many people are aware of the history of student activism at UCSD. And many times when you just mention that, people immediately think of Angela Davis, who, of course, was fired by UCSD, but then went on to become a distinguished professor at UC Santa Cruz. and, you know, just prolific and amazing scholar, academic, but not talking about obscure academic topics, but, you know, topics that are directly relevant to people's lives, so many of those topics. And so now, of course, UCST celebrates Angela Davis without mentioning that they fired her. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:02:24 So there is a little bit of this, this okay, we're going to try to suppress these movements, but then later on celebrate them. So there, of course, were quite a number of other Stephen-led movements. One of them, as you mentioned, was the anti-apartheid movement. And of course, that was also part of a national movement, especially Berkeley, was very strong campus in that respect. But to me, you know, numerous campuses across the U.S. were involved in that movement, as was UCSD. And at UCSD, the students, and this was in 1985,

Starting point is 02:03:11 it took place over a period of about four or five months, as I recall. The students had numerous protests. And at the time for people who were familiar with the UCSD campus, the UCSD has grown significantly since the 80s, but at that time, the central meeting place for campus was in what's called Revelle College and on Revelle Plaza. So there were numerous protests there, anti-apartheid protests.

Starting point is 02:03:47 The students on several occasions set up replica of shanty, towns on the Revolt Plaza, as happened at many other universities in the U.S. Those were basically replicas of impoverished conditions that South African black folks had to live in under apartheid in South Africa. So they were setting up the shanty downs to kind of reproduce those conditions visually. And additionally, during that four or five-month period, the students' occupying. occupied the Humanities Library, which was called Galbraith Hall. It's just adjacent to Regal Plaza.

Starting point is 02:04:29 They took over the library, and they occupied it for a month, more than a month. Okay, yeah. And like all of these things happened, and there were no invasions of a riot police or anything. And what came out of that movement at the U.C.'s was that the regents, decided to divest from all corporations associated with South Africa. So that was like a major win. But it was not just a win for the student movements, but it was also a win for the university.

Starting point is 02:05:08 Because the students were basically able to show the university that participating in this very unjust system was something that it shouldn't be doing. And so the students basically helped the university to see that. And so by kind of allowing these protests to happen, in a sense, it allowed the university administration. And I'm not singing their praises because they were quite retrograde in many ways as they are now. But by kind of stepping back and allowing these things to happen, the university was able to learn from what the students were saying. and had to act on it.

Starting point is 02:05:52 So I feel that that moment in history was something that, I mean, I know the current administration hasn't forgotten because they celebrate it now. They say, you know, how wonderful we were for divesting from South Africa and look at our great students, you know. But okay, so that happened in the 80s. Before we get to Black Winter, I'm just going to mention one other event, which I think is significant, especially when we're thinking about encampments.

Starting point is 02:06:26 So in 1992, UCSD was the only UC campus that did not have a women's resource center. And women and their allies on campus had been organizing to get a women's center since the 70s on the UCSD campus. but they had mostly been ignored by the administration or, you know, where are we going to find the money, blah, blah, blah. So it was student-led, but they were also like staff and faculty involved as well. Because the problem of misogyny was very real on the UCSD campus then. I arrived at UCSD in 1990, and I immediately saw that problem. So I was very aware of it. So the organizers then of this movement decided to set up an encampment on what is called Sun God Lawn, which is kind of a major open space on campus.

Starting point is 02:07:34 So they set up this encampment and basically they reproduced what they envisioned a women's center would look like. And so they essentially opened a women's center. in this open space, they set up this encampment. They staffed it 24-7, and it was up for a week. No arrests were made, no disciplinary charges resulted. But the university then started paying attention to the demand for a resource center. And it took them several years, but they eventually set up the Women's Resource Center that exists now in 1995. So again, that was an encampment where the administration was basically able to learn from the activists on campus about, you know, how to basically kind of behave reasonably.

Starting point is 02:08:33 Yeah. Let's take a little break. And when we come back, we want to talk about the Black Winter, which coincides with the start of my own time at UC San Diego. And then the third example of this is something that's. called Black Winter, and it's essentially a three-week intense period of organizing on campus. That happened. I mean, it was in response and direct response to a racist party that was held by one of the UCSD fraternities that they called the Compton Cookout.

Starting point is 02:09:20 they put out a announcement on Facebook, which was probably the equivalent of today's Instagram. And I don't even know, probably many of your listeners haven't even heard at Facebook, but back then it was a big idea. Back then, it was, yeah, very big. And it was a, you know, just despicable racist description of a party where people were supposed to,

Starting point is 02:09:50 dress up as what they imagine people, you know, characters from Compton would look like. Yeah. And of course, you know, students who found out about this were very upset. At the time, the students in the black student union and in METHA who were working very closely together had been organizing for quite a number of years prior to this around, you know, what at the time, this is 2010, was called Campus Climate. Yeah. And that's basically just the fact that there was a lot of racism, sometimes overt racism,

Starting point is 02:10:39 sometimes less overt, microaggressions that were very common. Yeah. And for many, especially black students, but really all students of color and also queer and trans students as well, who were basically how to navigate this like every day. I mean, it was part of their everyday life. Yeah. So it was this extra burden on our students. And they had been organizing around this for quite some times.

Starting point is 02:11:11 They had written a report that was called, do you? see us. So you see us. In many ways, they were ready for an event like this. They were prepared. They had been doing a lot of organizing already. And so when this hit,

Starting point is 02:11:30 they basically immediately went to the administration and said, you know, you do something about this. The administration said, you know, it's free speech. They deploy that phrase when it's useful to them. Yeah, tactically.

Starting point is 02:11:46 So that was the message they were putting out. And it very quickly became a news item. So local outlets were reporting on it, and the response of the university was free speech. And it basically started escalating. There were a number of students on campus at the time, probably still today, but maybe a little bit quieter. We were fairly openly racist. And there was one group. They published a newspaper and newsletter, which was particularly so.

Starting point is 02:12:21 And they also had a television show on, it doesn't exist anymore, but it's called UCST TV. It was kind of a local TV station. The Compton Cookout hardly happened on Monday. And that was like a holiday in February. And then on Thursday of that week, the student group, groups, I was talking about at a TV show, and they started using the N-word explicitly on that show. And a number of students saw that, and of course were completely outraged. And so the students in the Black Student Union and kind of their friends were basically trying to figure out what to do.

Starting point is 02:13:04 And so they decided to call for a rally on Library Walk, which is one of the main walkways at UCSD. And they called for a rally right in front of where the chancellor's office was located at the time. And so they had this rally. There's quite a number of people. They called the rally real pain, real action. Yeah. You know, they were saying we were feeling real pain at these kind of racist incidents. And we want to see real action by the administration.

Starting point is 02:13:41 Yeah. So they have this rally, and the chancellor at the time, who was Marianne Fox, came out to the rally, and there's video of this. It's a somewhat pathetic video. And basically, the organizers of the rally were like chanting, leading the chants. And then the chancellor was basically following the organizers and trying to put her arm around them, as if somehow that would solve everything. You just need a hug. And of course, the organizers were like, no, you're not getting near me. I don't want a hug.

Starting point is 02:14:21 I want some action. This kind of snowballed. The chancellor basically then met with a bunch of these students who had been at the rally. And they had a list of like 30 demands. And she went through the list. And it was just like there's video of this too. And it's almost, I mean, I just feel, because I knew like a bunch of these students that I was like, oh, my God, you know, how awful this must have felt to them.

Starting point is 02:14:51 But she was going through this list very rationally and dispassionally and saying, oh, you know, we can't do that. Sorry. But this one, yes, this one's done. This one's done. And the students were sitting there like, well, if it was done, you know, why haven't you done it, you know, if it's so easy to do. Yeah. And so nothing very definite came out of that meeting, but the university decided to make a teach-in the following Wednesday. And I mean, of course, teach-ins are not things that

Starting point is 02:15:28 people in power do. So they're obviously kind of co-opting and appropriating that term. Yeah. So what the students decide to do, because they were, they knew that. this was just going to be, okay, we're going to try to bury this, basically. Yeah, yeah. And so what the students did is they organized a press conference that morning, which a lot of press did come out to, and they had really powerful speakers, and this was before the teaching, and then they just went on a march.

Starting point is 02:16:00 They marched around the chancellor's complex, you know, continuously chanting, up to the point of the teaching. And so then they all went into the teaching. They had like 500 people by that time, and the room was just completely packed. And so they allowed the teaching to start. But then at some point, one of the Black Student Union members went up and said, we've had enough of this. We're now going to do our own teach out.

Starting point is 02:16:34 So they marched out of the T-Gen and went around to this area that has these steps. And just, you know, 500 folks, incredible concentration of black folks and people of color, students and faculty, and all of their allies all gathered together, and they had to teach-out, which was incredibly powerful. And that day, I said it myself, and for many other people that I knew at the university, we basically all said, this is the best day we've ever had at UCST. It was so amazing. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:17:16 The next day in the library, in the main library, one of the students who there found a news hanging in the library. And of course, I'm sure your listeners know that the news. is a very powerful symbol of violence against black folks in the U.S. And so that was traumatizing for so many students. I remember getting text messages from students, you know, saying, you know, I can't come on campus because I don't feel safe here anymore. Yeah. So the next morning, the students held a rally again in front of the chancellor's office

Starting point is 02:17:59 where there were probably, I'm guessing, close to a thousand people. And people just got up and were talking about what they were feeling and their analysis. The university came in. They sent, like, a spokesperson to say, oh, you know, we have the police out, like, looking for whoever hangs on the noose or whatever. And I mean, you know, police are not a comfort. Yeah, no one wanted to hear like we're sending the cops at that moment, yeah. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So the students then went in and they occupied the Chancellor's office for the full day.

Starting point is 02:18:42 And that really made people sit up a nose. And by this time, there was international coverage of what was going on. there was an opening of the civil rights investigation on UCSD. I was getting emails from colleagues like in other countries saying, what's going on at UCSD? Is this like, you know, it sounds like a KKK rally or something? Not exactly that, but it's close. So then this all culminated about a week later in a huge rally

Starting point is 02:19:16 where much of the library walk was completely packed, filled with people. It was definitely blocked. And during that rally, the university said, we will commit to implementing these demands, the demands of the students. Of course, in the end, they backed off much of that. But so that was like a huge victory. And it did result in some pretty substantial changes to USCD.

Starting point is 02:19:44 I'll just mention a couple of ways. them. So UCSD created a black resource center, which didn't exist before, a Razor Resource Center, and a intertrial resource center. So those were, you know, significant victories. They also created a undergraduate requirement, or requirement that undergraduates take a diversity, equity, and inclusion course. And that was an attempt to try to change the climate and do some educating. You know, students in California universities come from all sorts of different backgrounds. And some of them are very aware of racism and its impacts in anti-blackness and it's impacts.

Starting point is 02:20:35 But some come without that knowledge. Yeah. So that was a significant help. but also at the time was boosted a little bit. It didn't end up maybe being such a great boost, but it did boost the departments that teach those kind of courses because now they had a significant, certainly greater number of students.

Starting point is 02:20:58 Yeah. And we're getting more resources as a result. So all of those things were good. Again, no arrests, no disciplinary actions. and the university learned some valuable lessons. Yeah, definitely. Let's take a little break. And when we come back,

Starting point is 02:21:19 I want to talk about this, this like Palestine exception to free speeds. All right, we are back. Yeah, I remember that Black Winter moment very well. I recently arrived at UCSD, and I was, like, immediately taken aback by the brazenness of the racism. Like, I come from Britain,

Starting point is 02:21:46 not a non-racist country. But, yeah, the openness and the cruelty and the delight that certain people took and that was pretty appalling. Now, if we skipped forward 13 years, right, to the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, a lot has changed on campus, but also a lot has not, right? Still not a massively diverse institution, UCSD even compared to other institutions in the city. But from 2023 through 2024, right, we have this movement on campus to end the genocide. And Gaza comes a movement that's about more than that, right, about liberation for Palestinian people. And then broadly about like, I guess, liberation in the region and what that means. And the university did not respond in the same way.

Starting point is 02:22:33 This has led to people theorizing a Palestine exception for free speech. So could you explain that to people? and I thought you had a really interesting approach to it as a scientist that perhaps you could share with people as well. Yeah, as you said, kind of in the wake of October 7th, it marked the beginning of Israel's genocide on Gaza. Obviously, it took many people quite a while to conclude it was genocide. But I remember it was almost, maybe it was within a week or perhaps 10 days, October 7th, the coalition of Palestinian unions put out a call for labor solidarity in which they turned what was happening in genocide. And there were also others who were doing that as well.

Starting point is 02:23:27 Just personally, like I was in Syria on 7th October, I think I entered that day. I spent some time in Kurdistan. And I remember by the time I was conducting interviews in southern Kurdistan, maybe a week later. maybe 10 days later, Kurdish groups were using that phrase, right? Like, there was a sense of like impending disaster that came very quickly. This is what will happen next will be horrific. But yeah, those calls came very quickly, as you said. Yeah. And of course, like students at UCSD were kind of also coming to those conclusions. The administration was putting out language that was,

Starting point is 02:24:11 was sympathetic to those who were killed or, you know, injured on October 7th, but they were ignoring everything else that was happening.

Starting point is 02:24:27 And so, of course, this wasn't a surprise, but it was part of what was happening. And it was also the kind of the language that the university was using. And this is something that continued, it was essentially recalling, even though it kind of had this neutral sense to it,

Starting point is 02:24:49 it was recalling the decades of Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism that happened in the wake of 9-11. So in a sense, they were communicating by using that kind of language, language around, you know, using words like violence and safety and civility. They were communicating very clearly that people could talk about what happened

Starting point is 02:25:21 on the morning of October 7th, but not about anything else. And that was entirely clear. I mean, it's not like we had to do any deep analysis to figure out That's what the administration was saying.

Starting point is 02:25:41 And, you know, as students organized over the following months, students who were engaged in that organizing were being subject to disciplinary investigations. There were some faculty who were investigating for mentioning the genocide and the occupation of Palestine in their classes. And all of these things were creating a climate of fear, but also uncertainty. Like, you could never be sure if what you would say could get you in trouble. Yeah. And so the easiest thing to do would be to say nothing at all. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:26:26 It's like a chilling effect on speech. Absolutely. So that was happening. This phenomenon, of course, wasn't invented by UCSA administration. It's something that's been going on for quite a while, many, many decades. As you mentioned, James is called the Palestine Exception to Free Speech. If anyone wants to find out more about it, I mean, there's a huge amount of scholarly work on it. There's an excellent report that's available freely online, which is called exactly that,

Starting point is 02:27:01 the Palestine Exception to Free Speech, written by Palestine Legal and the Center for constitutional rights. It's very easy to find online. And one of the things, as a physicist, I'm very critical of the role of physics in society. You don't have to think very deeply to be critical of physics, thinking about nuclear physics and so forth. But as a person who does physics, professionally,

Starting point is 02:27:33 I often think about problems from a physics perspective. And so when I think about the Palestine exception, I kind of bring a bit of a physics lens to it. So in physics, when we're looking at a phenomenon, we often can't observe that phenomenon directly. And so, for example, people who study the physics of subatomic particles, they will, to study how to subatomic particles interact, or many subatomic particles interact, they will collide them together. They don't have the precision and the resolution

Starting point is 02:28:14 to observe exactly that interaction, but they can look before the interaction and then what comes out afterwards. And by looking at those patterns of what goes in and what comes out, they can get an idea of what's happening within that black box. And so this is the way I view the Palestine exception, because the Palestine exception to free speech is just the idea that there are these structures in society that have been formulated

Starting point is 02:28:49 such that it makes it very difficult to engage in speech about Palestine. And the impact of that, of course, is that if you can't, talk about Palestine, then violence that's committed against Palestinians is something that's enabled, facilitated by that lack of discussion. Like, I don't have access to the conversations amongst UCSD administrators or between UC administrators and the main office of the president of UC, like, I don't have access to any of that information. In some sense, that's the black box part of it. But what we can see is kind of what's going in and what's coming out of that box.

Starting point is 02:29:38 And so we can see the behaviors, the patterns of behaviors. And so as a physicist, I'm like, okay, if we're going to look at the UC and say, the University of California and say, is this a place where the Palestine exception of free speech is operating, then we're not going to be able to have access. to the rooms in which that's planned, if it is being planned, but rather we can look at the path. And the really interesting thing about this report I cited by Paul Stein legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights is they lay that out very clearly. They lay out, okay, the coincine exception to free speech is basically a combination of these kinds of behaviors. So they talk about things like accusations of anti-Semitism, for example,

Starting point is 02:30:29 and accusations of support for terrorism. So if you come to any rally, pro-Palestinian rally at UCST, there's always at least one or many counter-protesters who are shard shouting exactly that, that this is anti-Semitic, that everyone here is supporting Hamas, you know, and when we say Hamas, you know, that just immediately goes to everybody's mind to terrorism.

Starting point is 02:30:58 Yeah. All these kinds of behaviors on it to lay out are things that can be seen. You see wide campuses, but definitely at UCST. Yeah, yeah. It's important to consider, like, as we enter a time where, like, repression of campus speech is at a height, right? Like, the combination of this Palestine exception and the seeming desire to expel as many international students as possible.

Starting point is 02:31:21 that this is contrary to the reason the university exists as well as, as you say, it suppresses opposition to genocide. To finish up, I guess, we're not just doing this at the university because it's a place where we like to argue or because students are particularly predisposed to radical politics or for any other number of reasons, right? The university is also part of the apparatus. Can you explain that a little bit? The university is not neutral in this to begin with.

Starting point is 02:31:55 Yes, that is certainly true. And I mean, that happens in many different ways. Some of the ways we don't even know about, but there are many of those ways that primarily through student research, some faculty research, we have some ideas. Basically at UCSD and other UC campuses, there's quite a lot of military, related research.

Starting point is 02:32:22 Some of that research is not directly related to the genocide, but as we all know, the U.S. is supplying many of the weapons that are being used in the genocide and now in Iran

Starting point is 02:32:38 as well. And some of those weapons like drones, aspects of them had been designed and worked on at UCSD. kind of the hardware then of genocide is very much a product of university research, part of which has been done at UCST, part at other UC campuses,

Starting point is 02:33:03 and part at other universities in the U.S. and in Israel as well. Another aspect of it, which I think we don't know as much about this software, So, you know, there's a huge amount of research on artificial intelligence that's happening at UCSD, other UC campuses, other university campuses. I mean, all that research came out of universities, you know, as we now know through credible journalistic investigations that Israel is using artificial intelligence and it's targeting. And apparently that's also happening in the U.S. military as well. So there's like another very direct connection. A third connection, which is very strong at UCSD or so many other campuses, is that part of the creation of a discourse that legitimizes and justifies Israel's occupation of Paulstein is archaeology.

Starting point is 02:34:14 I'm not an expert in this field, but I could just kind of cite what other people I've talked about. But there are many archaeological investigations that UCSD academics have participated in Israel that contribute to creating this story that the people running Israel and Israeli citizens are the rightful owners of that. plan and that the Palestinians came in at some late point, maybe a couple decades before the founding of Israel, which of course is completely false, and there's so much scholarship about that. But that's the purpose of those investigations. So again, that's connected to universities and to UCSD in particular. What can't really argue that having a discussion about complicity and genocide is something that is of not of interest to UCSD. It definitely is. Yeah, it has to happen at the university because it is

Starting point is 02:35:30 about the university. Yes. I think to finish up, we've outlined why it's important. We've outlined how anti-genicidal speech when it is about Palestinian people is treated differently, and we've outlined why there is a chilling effect. I understand. some people, especially international students and non-citizen faculty, etc, have real concerns and I want to respect those. But for people who would like to, they should continue to speak out, right? We all lose, even if you somehow are unconcerned by genocide of fellow human beings, if the university becomes a space where certain things are repressed and where we can't stand up for each other. So, like, what resources would you suggest for those people as new students

Starting point is 02:36:12 coming into university this year. They've lived half their high school years through this genocide. I'm sure many of them will want to continue advocating. What would you suggest for them? Yeah. Especially for students, I would suggest to connect with organizations

Starting point is 02:36:27 that are already kind of doing this work. So at UCSD, there's students for justice and Palestine, but there's also quite a number of other student organizations. Like tomorrow we're having a major Earth Day rally where organizations, students for justice in Palestine, but also anti-imperialist organization might spark, and then other organizations like Green New Deal,

Starting point is 02:36:57 students' sustainability collectives, they're all coming together to talk about Palestine and the ecocide in Palestine and the genocide in Palestine. So I think that there are ways for students from a, range of interests and backgrounds to get involved in organizing. You know, it's not like you have to start that from scratch. People are already doing that. It might be a little bit hard at your university to find those because of the suppression.

Starting point is 02:37:30 But if you ask around, you will, or if you look on social media, you will, you will find those folks. That's where I would start as a student. For faculty and staff, especially, it's a little bit more difficult because we're, you know, as employees were very vulnerable. Faculty with tenure are less vulnerable, but, you know, my case and other faculty's cases are examples of how tenure doesn't really protect you from this if they're determined. Yeah. So I feel that there's, again, here what we need to do is to kind of work collectively. So you don't want to fight the system on your own.

Starting point is 02:38:18 50%. But find other faculty who are doing this work. And basically, you can work as a support network and kind of collectively find ways to speak out, to support our students, which I think is in many ways are. our primary responsibility with regard to the genocide and basically create spaces where where it's possible to talk about the genocide. Yeah, I think that's really important. I guess I'll just say, like, if you're a student or faculty and you see someone involved

Starting point is 02:38:56 in its advocacy, like, don't feel afraid to go talk to them and ask either. Like, I know, university can be intimidating, especially when you're a new faculty member or undergraduate, for that matter. It can be hard to meet people and talk to people, but I think most people would be happy if you did. Is there anything else you'd like to share with people before we'd wrap up? There is so much. So I do hope we can talk again sometime. Yes, we will.

Starting point is 02:39:22 But I also just maybe just want to say, you know, thanks to you, there aren't a huge number of spaces where we can have these kinds of discussions. So I'm really grateful, you know, I know that you're doing not to be doing not to be. just this kind of work, but also, you know, really going out and reporting on stories that aren't being told. And so I'm grateful to you basically for doing that work. It's very kind. Thank you. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast.

Starting point is 02:40:09 I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast and IHartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. There's two golden rules that any man should live by.

Starting point is 02:40:37 Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends, Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck.

Starting point is 02:41:03 I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Starting point is 02:41:27 In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckerd found himself at the center of a paternity scandal. The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story. This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth. You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Sond's, correct? I doctored the test once. It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case. I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for. Sunlight's the greatest disinfected.

Starting point is 02:42:02 They would uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Gregalespian and Michael Maranini. My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trap. Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.

Starting point is 02:42:20 Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges. This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona. Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything. Here, the Nick Dick and Poll Show, we're not afraid to make mistakes. What Kugler did that I think was so unique He's the writer-director

Starting point is 02:42:56 Who do you think he is? I don't know Do you mean the like the president? You think Canada has a president You think China has a president The Law Fruzette God I love that thing I use it all the time

Starting point is 02:43:10 I wrap it in a blanket And sing to it at night It's like the old Polish saying Not my monkeys, not my circus It was a good one I like that saying It's an actual Polish saying It is an actual poll thing.

Starting point is 02:43:24 Better version of Play Stupid Games, win stupid prizes. Yes. Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift, who said that for the first time. I actually thought it was. I got that wrong. Listen to the Nick, Dick and Paul show

Starting point is 02:43:34 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans. This episode we're covering the week of April 16th to April 22nd.

Starting point is 02:44:02 James, some small news items at the start. Yeah, a few things I want to discuss up top. The United States government appears to be running multiple propaganda sites with associated ex-accounts that are posing as Iranian media. One of the accounts located in Florida, this is not like massively uncommon in a conflict into this, right? No. The information war is part of the war.

Starting point is 02:44:27 This is what like a actual sci-off is. Like this is what United States SIEOP operations are. Yeah, the SIEP is not like the woman soldier that you follow on Instagram. This isn't new for the US to be doing. It is new for it to be like this sloppy. I think that's probably fair to say

Starting point is 02:44:43 this is like a sloppier than normal. Yes, that's what's remarkable here. It's that it's shoddy. And that is not a good sign for like the whole US sort of capacity in this regard. But it depends on how you think about it. But yeah. Yeah, yeah, sure.

Starting point is 02:44:57 Secondly, a number of former DHS Department for Homeland Security and INS immigration and naturalization services officials have filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court explaining why the cancellation of the Haiti TPS temporary protected status is illegal. They do include Janet Napolitano, which is nice. But a ton of people from Obama, Bush, even Clinton admin. pre-D-H-S, INS were part of this amicus brief. An IDF soldier has been photographed destroying a statue of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ in Lebanon, destroying it with a splitting mall. A lot of reporting called it a sledgehammer. That's not what a sledgehammer looks like.

Starting point is 02:45:39 I know I get really picky about this, but maybe if you haven't worked with your hands, you should write things that can be read by someone who has and scan and not be completely ridiculous. The IDF has launched an investigation and so far subjected two soldiers to 30 days of military detention, which is more than they would get if they had killed actual Christian children in Palestine. Says a lot, I think, that this image is like, we spoke about this in our group chat, but this is, it's one image, it's comic book evil. There are many reasons why this is the thing that's blowing up for them. Ken Paxton is investigating Act Blue.

Starting point is 02:46:13 Act Blue is a major donation website for Democratic candidates. is claiming that they have continued to accept gift card donations, which could hide donations from foreign individuals or corporations. Or even states, I suppose. The United States government's plans to send Afghans, who are stuck in limbo in Qatar, to the Democratic Republic of Congo, being reported on by the New York Times.

Starting point is 02:46:40 Just for some context here, I saw people sharing this and thinking that this referred to Afghan SIV recipients who are resident in the United States. That is not what it's referring to. It's referring to people who the Biden administration removed from Afghanistan or wherever they were, often Pakistan, right, and then took them to Qatar as like a temporary stopping off point where they would continue to do their vetting and background checks. This is normal for refugee admissions as opposed to asylum admissions. And then the 2024 election happened, Democrats lost and those people have been in limbo ever since. And it appears the Trump administration has been trying to. to get them various states in Africa to accept them, and is now proposing the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country which already has a significant refugee crisis. Ron DeSantis, who is term limited as governor, has been jockeying for a position inside the Trump administration. Axios reports DeSantis has expressed interest in being a secretary of war,

Starting point is 02:47:37 attorney general, or even a Supreme Court justice. Trump is expected to reclassify marijuana as soon as. Soon as maybe today, we're recording this on Wednesday, April 22nd. Oh, fingers crossed. Earlier this week, Trump signed an executive order to advance its psychedelic treatment for mental illness and possibly reschedule certain substances which have completed phase three clinical trials. Yeah, this is the real sign that their internal polling is showing Trump really closing on getting below 30% approval. That's the most.

Starting point is 02:48:09 Hey, whatever gets us to actual legal marijuana. Fuck it. Yeah. Like, at this point. It's such an easy win, and it's been an easy win for the last three presidents and anyone could have done it. It's a gun that's been left on the ground, and fucking Trump finally just picked the damn thing up after it got covered in an inch and a half a dust. Like, unbelievable. They're desperate, keep pushing.

Starting point is 02:48:34 We can get, like, completely legal LSD, I believe in us. On Fox News's Sunday morning show, Cash Patel announced that the FBI will soon make arrests related to Trump's claims. that the 2020 election was stolen, with Patel saying, quote, they tried to thwart our elections and rig the entire system. I can announce on your show that we've got all the information we need.

Starting point is 02:48:58 We're working with our prosecutors the Department of Justice and their Attorney General Todd Blanche. And we are going to be making arrest. And it's coming, and I promise you, it's coming soon. Patel later said it's a conspiracy case and that, quote,

Starting point is 02:49:12 we have the information to back President Trump's claims. On Tuesday, voters in Virginia approved a redistricting measure, which would likely move four Republican seats to Democrat seats in the midterms. This measure passed with 51.5 percent of the vote, totaling over 3 million votes. Virginia joins California in approving new congressional maps to combat the recent gerrymandering in red states like Texas at the behest of Trump. But now with Virginia, Dems are actually up one seat nationally. Ron DeSantis has called for Florida lawmakers to meet next week to consider redistricting in their state. Trump has called the Virginia election, quote unquote, rigged, saying that Republicans were winning until a, quote, massive mail-in ballot drop, unquote, which is just how elections work.

Starting point is 02:50:04 That's just how voting works. We were winning until more people voted for the other guy. Until we counted more votes that showed that we did not win. We just live in the 2016 election forever now. I was doing pretty well in that boxing match until it started. Until the other guy punched me in the face. The margin of victory closely matches the result of the 2024 presidential election in Virginia. Republicans have challenged the Virginia redistricting in court since before Tuesday's election,

Starting point is 02:50:37 and the Supreme Court of Virginia ruled that the measure could go to a vote while legal challenges continue. This is the second most important election this week, the most important one, obviously being the Webby's in which I think we can announce we have won. In a totally unrigged election. The only fair election that this country is seen possibly in like over 25 years. That's why they selected Claude as person of the year. Clearly the Webby's in 2026 are the only election that's going to affect anybody's lives. I think we can all agree on that. Anyway, so as you probably are aware, because the president shouts about it every 10 minutes,

Starting point is 02:51:17 there's a ceasefire currently in effect in the conflict with Iran, the war of choice that we started with Iran. James is going to talk a little bit more about that in a second, but because of the stand-down, there's been kind of time for both forces to, you know, reassess things and time for outside people to reassess, like, kind of what we can tell about what's going on. Obviously, in the immediate wake of Operation Epic Fury and is recently, as last Tuesday, President Trump said, quote, we've taken out their Navy, we've taken out their Air Force, we've taken out their leaders.

Starting point is 02:51:52 On April 8th, Defense Secretary Pete Higseth called Operation Epic Fury a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield. By any measure, Epic Fury decimated Iran's military and rendered it combat and effective for years to come. Now, that last sentence, the first part is technically accurate, but not in the way that Hegset means. No one knows what Decimate means anymore. Decimate literally means to destroy like a tenth of a group, right? Yeah. And yeah, that's pretty accurate, right?

Starting point is 02:52:22 But the second part of that sentence, rendered it combat and effective for years to come, is not accurate. Neither is Trump's statement that we've taken out their Navy and their Air Force. CBS published an article today reporting that roughly 60% of the naval arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is still in existence, including fast-tax speedboats. And Iranian air power, while it's been degraded, is still significantly more functional than actually I had assumed. About two-thirds of the Iranian Air Force is still believed to be operational, despite the massive U.S. and Israeli air strikes, largely targeting air. production and storage facilities. The fact that you're looking at two-thirds of Iran's Navy and Air Force still functional and at least about half their ballistic missile stockpile and their launch system stockpile intact, that's a significant difference from what the administration has

Starting point is 02:53:21 claimed and evidence that were we to continue to press with the open fighting part of this conflict, it would be years probably before you're talking about like a complete degradation of Iranian fighting capability if that was ever achieved. Like when you factor in, the United States would continue to suffer casualties. And we've already been losing more of, you know, particularly our interceptor missile capability in a number of advanced systems like AWACs, then we can afford to replace. James? Yeah. So I want to talk a little bit about the, the ceasefire itself, right? And then, like, what's been happening there?

Starting point is 02:53:59 Let's start with, like, I guess, straightforward Moos updates and then get into the ceasefire. The Navy intercepted an Iranian vessel in the Arabian Sea this week, close to the Iran-Pakistan border. The Tuska was warned. Imagine they use an L-RAD to warn it. People see L-RADs on ships sometimes

Starting point is 02:54:19 and think they're coming to, like, make you deaf. That's one of the reasons ships have L-RATs. They could have also used the radio that if they can talk to them on the radio if they're receiving communications with the radio. They then ordered it to evacuate its engine room. They then shot out its engine

Starting point is 02:54:33 with the five-inch gun. First time they've gotten to do that in 40 years. Yeah, I was looking at it. I guess it was since, what, 1988 the last time that I was thinking it's been a little, it's been a minute since his ship engaged on a ship with his main gun.

Starting point is 02:54:49 It was a USS Spruence, a guided missile destroyer that did that. subsequently, U.S. Marines on the Tripoli, we reported on when the Tripoli first moved towards that region, right? We specifically said that this is one of the capacities that it had. They boarded the ship. So they transferred by helicopter and then boarded the ship. The U.S. has since inspected other ships, including outside of the St.com A.O. So the U.S. perceives its blockade to be global, right, of Iranian assets, of Iranian vessels.

Starting point is 02:55:23 the quote unquote shadow fleet, which you've already explained on ED, so I'm not going to go into depth on what that means. The IRGC also fired at several vessels in the street. There is some reporting that one of them, an Indian tanker, had paid a fee in cryptocurrency to what turned out to be a scammer. I'm certain that these scams exist because there have been multiple warnings of them. I haven't seen any evidence that is satisfactory enough to, for me, to be confident that that particular ship had been scamped.

Starting point is 02:55:57 But perhaps the most compelling piece of evidence, a ship is called the Sandmar Herald, is this audio that we're going to play right here. SEPA Navy, SEPA Navy, this is Motoranga San Mar Herald. You gave me clearance to go. My name second on your list. You gave me clearance to go. You are firing now.

Starting point is 02:56:16 Let me turn back. Just in guess I wasn't clear, you gave me clearance to go. You're firing now. Let me turn back. So it does seem that that vessel believed that it had clearance to go and was sent fired upon. This morning there were some O-Sin pictures of IRG-C. They looked like kind of fast attack boats, kind of things Robert was talking about, in the Strait of Hormuz. Yeah, something of a flex.

Starting point is 02:56:41 Yeah, we still have a Navy. Like, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think that's important in the context of a ceasefire. I want to explain very briefly. There's been a lot of contradictory reporting on when, where, and how negotiations. are going to happen. The ceasefire was set to expire the day we're recording on Wednesday. On Tuesday, we saw Donald Trump unilaterally extend the ceasefire by truthing, quote,

Starting point is 02:57:02 based on the fact that the government of Iran is seriously fractured, not unexpectedly so, and upon the request of Field Marshal Assim Munir and Prime Minister Shabashirif of Pakistan, we have been asked to hold our attack on the country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal. I have therefore directed our military to continue the blockade and in all other respects remain ready and able and will therefore extend the ceasefire until such time as their proposal is submitted and discussions are concluded one way or the other, President Donald J. Trump. The consensus seems to be that this is not like an infinite extension.

Starting point is 02:57:40 This is like maybe less than a week for Iran to either comply with U.S. terms or submit proposals that the U.S. considers acceptable. A lot of that reporting does seem to come from Barack Ravid, who's not really good at journalism. take it with a pinch of salt. Trump, though, is correct that the state of Iran is not a unified entity. And I covered this in the piece I did last week on an update on the Iran War, right? Like, I think there's a tendency from people in the global north to look at a state and see it as like a pyramid, right? You have the head of state and then you have government and then you have legislature and then you have the people they command, right, military and all the civil bureaucracy.

Starting point is 02:58:21 That's not quite how Iran works. And I went into more detail in that episode that I made, so I'm not going to go into it here. But there are a series of overlapping but not entirely aligned power centers within Iran and within its military capacity, both within its military in the traditional sense and within the IRGC. Why this is relevant to the negotiations is it is not possible for politicians to negotiate if they do not believe that they can agree. to terms and that their military will then comply with those terms, right? If the Iranian foreign ministry agrees with the US to do something, the IOC doesn't do it, that then immediately undermines any further negotiations, right? So when we see, for instance, this morning, a large number of boats going into Strait of Hormuz,

Starting point is 02:59:10 that looks a little bit like a flex, right, in the context of this power struggle, and the context of Trump acknowledging that. Trump has once again been truiting this week about. Iranian nuclear weapons. I'm just going to read one of his truth because I think it pertained, it shows that the administration feels that it is weak on this particular accusation. Israel never talked me into the war with Iran. The results of October 7th added to my lifelong opinion that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon did. Yeah, I don't know what's going on with that sentence. That's just, that's, that's, Iran can never have a nuclear weapon, comma,

Starting point is 02:59:50 D-I-D-D-did, the word did. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not reading that wrong. That's just a hang-in. That's just what he said. He's simply senile. I can't help you. I'm just saying the words.

Starting point is 03:00:03 I watch and read the fake news, pundits and polls in total disbelief. 90% of what they say are lies and made-up stories, and the polls are rigged. Much as the 2020 presidential election was rigged, just like the results in Venezuela, which the media doesn't like talking about. The results in Iran will be amazing.

Starting point is 03:00:20 And if Iran's new leaders, regime change, exclamation, mark, close parentheses, are smart, Iran can have a great and prosperous future, President DJT. That's one of the more challenging passages of English language texts that I've ever approached. I speak four or five languages, and that's honestly set me back. But I've tried to give you a good faith reading of it. He's clearly sensitive to the allegation that Israel pushed. the US into this conflict, right? He's clearly sensitive.

Starting point is 03:00:55 The last thing that I want to add is that strikes on Kurdish groups have continued, despite the ceasefire, right? Despite the renewed ceasefire, the PAK, just two hours after Trump announced the extension of the ceasefire, Tehran sent four drones to attack a PAK base. There have been more injuries in Kurdistan. it doesn't seem that Iran considers any ceasefire to apply to its ongoing attack against the Uttor Ali groups who are currently in southern Kurdistan inside the borders of Iraq. Next up, we will discuss the charges against the SPLC.

Starting point is 03:01:33 But first, listen to these ads. Okay, we are back. On Tuesday, April 21st, acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, and FBI director Cash Patel announced that a grand jury indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on 11 counts, including wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. The indictment argues that the SPLC defrauded their donors by using donation money to pay confidential informants within whitespermissist or neo-Nazi organizations. Here is a short clip of the press conference of a reporter asking Todd Blanche a question. I just want to make sure I understand you're alleging

Starting point is 03:02:27 that the Southern Poverty Law Center was paying the leaders of KKK and other groups to continue their operations? Is that? I'm not alleging it. The grand jury return in an indictment that says that. And so what the, what the investigation found according to the indictment that was returned today is that they were paying, so Southern Poverty Law Center is raising money, asking folks to give them money, to dismantle racism, and over a very long period of time, They were using some of the money they raised from donors to pay to, they called them field, you know, basically to informants, to, for information, for access, to just pay them for certain, to do certain things. And so, yes, that's exactly what the indictment charges.

Starting point is 03:03:17 The SPLC is a non-profit advocacy organization aimed at, quote-unquote, dismantling white supremacy and exposing hate. They operate a blog called Hate Watch and run a public database of hate groups and far-right extremists. This indictment claims that the SPLC has utilized informants to gain information on far-right activity since the 80s, but between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly paid over $3 million to individuals associated with various violent extremist groups, quote-unquote, in a clandestine manner. Yeah, no one, if you kind of have been in the world of CVE countering violent extremism, like research or like involved in NGOs in that sphere at all or been a researcher there, you're probably aware of the fact that the SPLC like has been paying informants. A lot of their scoops are because some Nazi tells on another Nazi, essentially, right?

Starting point is 03:04:17 Yeah. So that part isn't surprising. the weirdness is how the SPLC was going about it and how much fucking money they were giving some of these people. The amounts of some of these is... Yeah, was legitimately shocking. And I do want to get into some more details about those amounts and the groups

Starting point is 03:04:33 and the sort of nest of fake businesses the SPLC used to distribute this money according to the indictment. The indictment reads that this was donation money, quote, received under the auspice that the funds would be used to, quote, dismantle violent extremist groups. This money was instead being used, in part, by the SPLC, to pay leaders and others within these same violent extremist groups. That money was then used for the

Starting point is 03:05:00 benefit of the individuals, as well as the violent extremist groups, unquote. Money was funneled to individuals associated with violent extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the United Clans of America, unite the right, national alliance, national socialist movement, Aryan nations, and the affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, National Socialist Party of America, American Nazi Party, and American Front. One informant, according to the indictment, was, quote,

Starting point is 03:05:29 a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 Unite the Right event in Charlottesville, Virginia, and attended the event at the direction of the SPLC. This informant made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transatlant transportation to the event for several attendees. Between 2015 and 2023, the SPLC

Starting point is 03:05:51 secretly paid this informant more than $270,000. Unquote. From 2014 to 2023, more than $1 million was allegedly paid to someone affiliated with the National Alliance, who served as an informant for over 20 years while fundraising for this Nazi group. The Imperial Wizard of the Rebooted Imperial Clans of America was a paid informant of according to the indictment. This is likely a guy named Bradley Jenkins. Yeah. An officer in the National Socialist Movement

Starting point is 03:06:23 and the Aryan Nations-affiliated sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club secretly received more than $300,000 between 2014 and 2020. The former chairman of the National Alliance was secretly paid more than $140,000, while the SPLC website featured an extremist profile page for this individual, likely Eric Glebe. The SPLC also paid the leader, of the National Socialist Party of America,

Starting point is 03:06:48 $70,000 between 2014 to 2016. This individual was a former director of an Aryan Nations faction and a former member of the KKK. This is likely a guy named Paul Mollett, who the SPLC hosts an extremist file webpage on their website. A few other unidentified informants

Starting point is 03:07:08 are listed in the indictment, as well as a claim that the SPLC funneled more than $160,000 from a fictitious entity to an informant, quote, who then sent funds to various violent extremist group leaders, including the former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Clu Klux Klan, unquote. That's a lot of money. Now, to obscure the nature of these payments, the SPLC opened a series of bank accounts at multiple banks for various fictitious businesses. These weren't actually incorporated, but they claimed to

Starting point is 03:07:40 be businesses with names like the Center Investigative Agency, or the C-Eastiff. IA. Why? Yeah. Fox Photography, Northwest Technologies, Tech Writers Group, Rare Books Warehouse, imagery, Inc., JNJ Electronics, Kelly's Marine, and Turner Personnel. Great. Good work, guys. Essentially, the DOJ is arguing that the SPLC solicited donations under false pretenses and then transferred that money to extremist groups using a network of fake businesses. To get a conviction, the DOJ will have to argue that this activity constitutes wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. A conviction will result in the forfeiture of financial gains from the alleged illegal activities. The right has reacted to this news by calling the Unite the Right rally and kind of the alt-right movement as it existed from this time period.

Starting point is 03:08:43 A sci-op or a false flag. Senator Mike Lee, right-wing political influencer Nick Sorter and Elon Musk, have boosted these claims, getting tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of likes on X the Everything app. This seems to be a new narrative, it's not really new, I guess, but an enhanced narrative that is emerging among the online right as a way to dissuade some of the uglier parts of that era, while still carrying along a lot of the same politics, especially on like the Great Replacement, which is more of a mainstream idea among the conservative movement at this point in time.

Starting point is 03:09:19 So they're able to walk away from the uglier kind of imagery and explicitly Nazi elements of this. Like the KKK, which is very boomer, very, very boomer-coded thing, the KKK. So they're able to call stuff like that and the Unite the Right rally a PSYOP or a false flag

Starting point is 03:09:34 while still reaping the benefits that the alt-right movement achieved by kind of trailblazing certain rhetoric into the conservative mainstream. Right-wing commentators have also used this news to reassert one of their favorite claims that Patriot Front is a PSYOP or a false flag operation. That whenever a group of young Nazis show up in a U-Haul all wearing matching outfits and masks, that this is a staged event by either the Deep State, the Feds, or a group like the SPLC, Patriot Front is not actually named in this indictment. There's no evidence that the SPLC was paying anyone at Patriot Front to inform on the operations of that group.

Starting point is 03:10:16 And obviously, paying an individual to inform on the details of an upcoming event like Unite the Right does not mean that the Unite the Right event in Charlottesville was planned or staged by the SPLC. Dozens of people were involved in the planning of this event and hundreds participated of their own volition. One person in a planning group chat sending info to the SPLC does not mean that this action was staged or fake. Anyone who's in the field has had a lot of issues with the SPLC over the last few years, especially people who work for them. I know a lot of good people have worked for them and gotten fucked over by them. They did a lot of union busting to the people who run the SPLC and some of whom are the people who are specifically accused of having committed these crimes.

Starting point is 03:11:10 I don't know if I feel like the specific things they have to prove in order to get a conviction are accurate because fundamentally anyone who donated to the SPLC knew that they were like getting shit from informants, you know? I don't think that was like the amount of money, though, is shocking. That's what they're going to have to defend in court. Yeah. They're going to have to argue that the money. money that was donated was used for its intended purpose, which was dismantling white supremacy.

Starting point is 03:11:38 I'll have to say that the information that they obtained through these, through, through, through, through, through, through, through, through, through, through, through, through, through these informants, right? That's going to be. Yeah. That's going to be. Yeah. Yeah. Now, you know, obviously the FBI also uses informants. Sure. Right. The FBI does this same thing. famously, the FBI paid the 09 a affiliated Joshua Caleb Sutter over $140,000, from 2003 to 2021. The FBI, I funded a publishing house. A neo-Nazi publishing house, essentially.

Starting point is 03:12:08 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Which is responsible for, in part, the political direction of the Adam Wathen division. Now, acting attorney general, Todd Blanche has said that, quote, the SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence. And, quote, using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked, unquote. Patel has said that, quote, this is illegal and this is a legal and this is a an ongoing investigation against all individuals involved.

Starting point is 03:12:37 The SPLC released a video statement saying that the use of informants was quote-unquote necessary and claimed, quote, these individuals risked their lives to infiltrate and inform on the activities of our nation's most radical and violent extremist groups, unquote. The indictment does not characterize many of these informants as quote-unquote infiltrators, but rather individuals who are already members of these groups and were paid by the SPLC to share information and gossip on fellow members. The SBLC statement also said that they, quote, frequently shared what we learned from informants with local and federal law enforcement, including the FBI.

Starting point is 03:13:17 We did not, however, share our use of informants broadly with anyone to protect the identity and safety of the informants and their families, unquote. Like a lot of the people in this field, the FBI knew the SPLC was doing this. Yeah. Yeah. After the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Cash Patel announced that the FBI was severing ties with the SBLC, saying the organization had been turned into a, quote-unquote, partisan smear machine that defamed, quote-unquote, mainstream Americans with its hate map. Okay.

Starting point is 03:13:47 Attorney Ed Martin, former head of the DOJ's weaponization working group, as in weaponizing the DOJ against political enemies, shared news of the indictment on X the Everything app and wrote, quote, they killed Charlie and they will pay. pay, unquote. So clearly this prosecution is politically motivated, right? There is political motivations behind deciding to do this right now. The FBI already knew that this was happening to a certain extent, but now they are going after the SPLC as a part of a targeted political prosecution. And this indictment could be seen as part of the anti-Antifa nonprofit crackdown. Right. Last March, CBS News reported that the FBI and the IRS formed a new initiative to investigate fraud at nonprofit organizations with suspected links to domestic terrorism, following federal directives to pursue Antifa-aligned groups. A spokesperson from the IRS told CBS News, quote, IRS criminal investigation is collaborating with federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, to investigate individuals and entities that may be funding domestic terrorism or political violence. Yeah, it's unfortunate that the SPLC was so reckless and sloppy, and the fucking amounts are shocking and indefensible.

Starting point is 03:15:12 And again, not necessarily in a legal sense. Like, I'm very doubtful of the government's case, but I am very angry at the Southern Poverty Law Center. And I don't think it should consent you to exist as an organization. Like, if it's going to do this. Yeah, and like when you combine it, as you say, like anyone who works in this world knows that people working there have had a miserable time for a long time for a great variety of reasons. Yeah, I'm livid at them. This is obviously evidence that the Trump administration is doing what they've said they're doing, that like the DOJ is going to be looking into these like big, you know, liberal and left aligned NGOs, particularly that like are focused in combating the far right. But in terms of this showing any reason to be, like, scared that they're going to disappear people, like, no, the SPLC did something crazy.

Starting point is 03:16:05 And I don't think that the charges specifically are valid. But, like, they opened themselves up to get fucked with by doing something. So not, like, gave one of these people a million dollars, a million dollars. That's wild. Yeah. Why do they have a fake company named after the CIA? What are you guys doing? Yeah, someone thought they were being a really cool secret spy.

Starting point is 03:16:30 And I mean, those are, those are some of the charges that may be able to stick. Is the sort of stuff about misrepresenting to a federally insured bank? That type of stuff could be easier to argue based on what I've read in the indictment. But of course, that will get settled in court. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And as a way to sort of close this out, I think one of the things that we're running into here is one of the, the thing that the right is being able to use here is the fact that a lot of these sort of liberal and central.

Starting point is 03:16:56 or left NGOs absolutely sucked. And like we have covered on this show, you know, a whole bunch of these organizations doing union busting. And their, like, their priorities don't necessarily match what, you know, I would say ours should be. And I think this is something that the Trump administration is going to continue to sort of, in some ways, uses a rift point. Like, the fact that these groups are doing all of this in unhinged shit, right?

Starting point is 03:17:24 This is, this is the political consequence of, the structure that these NGOs use in the way that they've operated. And now their sort of chickens are coming home to roost. I want to talk this week in our immigration segment about the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service. This is the agency task with vetting and adjudicating immigration benefits. It's the only immigration agency at DHS that traditionally hasn't done enforcement sweeps, right? So for a while, particularly recently, people there have felt a little out.

Starting point is 03:17:56 of place at the Department of Homeland Security, right? The idea has been to keep enforcement and processing separate so that people don't have very reasonable reasons to fear doing the legal process, right? So that people continue to show up to their interviews, to submit their documents, etc. And generally, they are funded in large part by immigration fees and, like, perceived as the friendly and more welcoming side of the process, the job isn't, historically has not been to kind of root out bad migration as so much as to help people, or at least to process people, to do the bureaucratic part of migration. Under the second Trump administration, however, this has changed.

Starting point is 03:18:40 There have been detentions at interviews. There have been cancellations of citizenship ceremonies. The USCIS has begun hiring for a new position. And this new position is eligible for remote work, for more remote work than existing hires. And it's called the Homeland Defense. So, like, we probably many people have seen these Homeland Defender advertisements on X.com, the everything website, right? Homeland Defenders have been offered up to $50,000 in signing bonuses. And at the same time as offering remote work benefits for the Homeland Defenders, the agency has been forcing other people to return to offices that could no longer fit the number of staff it had. Under years of work from home, the agency grew and changed, right? Like almost every organization did.

Starting point is 03:19:23 And there were reports that you literally had, like, lawyers sitting in corridors working on their laptops or, like, trying to perch on a radiator or a windowsill because their offices could fit people, right? And at the same time, the branding around Homeland Defender is not the way that USCIS staff traditionally saw themselves. In Minnesota, USCIS has begun reinvestigating people admitted with the incredibly highly vetted refugee status. So we already spoke about this once today, right? Refugees are vetted before they even enter the United States. Across the country, executive orders were followed with memos, pausing or entirely stopping the process of legal and vetted immigration for people from an increasing number of countries. The legally mandated green card for adult children and siblings of current citizens, as well as spouses and minor children of existing permanent residents, has gone unfulfilled. This is, quote, unquote, family-based migration.

Starting point is 03:20:20 They used to call it chain migration, right? That used to be the language on the right. It's something that Trump administration has hated since its first term, right? This has been a thing that they spoke about, that has been spoken about on the right for some time. These green cards could be reused for employment-based claims, which is going to have a much larger number of people who are already in the country. It's not bringing new people in. Or they might just go unused.

Starting point is 03:20:45 Refugees are being detained without any clear legal authority and requirms. about their applications, according to reporting in The New Yorker. This means that people are being taken in, detained at an ICE facility, right? And then quizzed about stuff that they'd already been asked about before they came to the United States when they were doing that vetting. People who are married to United States citizens are being arrested at interviews, even though generally there was an amnesty for people who, for instance, had overstayed a visa and then got married before. U.S.CAS has also committed significant resources of the agency that may well have been taken away from processing claims and devoted them entirely to investigating naturalizations

Starting point is 03:21:30 with the goal of denaturalizing, naturalized United States citizens. This is a very difficult process, right? The Afro-Yim case is the Supreme Court case, which happens this, right? It refers to someone who was a Jewish communist or had been in Israel What it says is the government cannot desitizenize someone because it doesn't agree with their politics, even in a time of anti-communism, right? Once somebody becomes a citizen, their files are removed from USCIS and they go to the National Record Center. And so calling the presumably tens of thousands of files of naturalized United States citizens, hundreds of thousands over time, millions, right, would require some kind of filter.

Starting point is 03:22:17 The most likely way this is being filtered is through their nationality, right? One can imagine, for instance, at 75 countries Trump has paused green card processes for, might be a start, or their specific focus on Somali people might even prove a more focused way of doing it, right? Yeah. They have had some success. This week, a Belizean woman was found guilty of naturalization fraud for submitting a fake divorce decree. She married an American citizen without being divorced from a previous spouse in Belize. They found that she had falsified those documents, right?

Starting point is 03:22:54 They are also pursuing a case against a Nigerian man who's already been convicted of fraud and has already been put in prison for that, but they are now pursuing a denaturalization case as well. Virtually every interaction with USCIS now seems to require interviews in person and biometric connection. This means that applicants now have to come into an office where they know that people have been detained. This leads to people being afraid to do that, right? Petitions are slowing down as they're moved around to a dwindling workforce, which is still focused on processing those as opposed to the growing amount of the USCIS workforce, which is looking for, quote, unquote, fraud in applications or attempting to denaturalize people as we just covered.

Starting point is 03:23:40 Among the people waiting without visas are some people who, are waiting for special visas, which are given to people who are survivors of human trafficking, gender-based violence or other crimes. This includes children. There's a special immigrant juvenile visa, which every single person I've heard of coming on an SIJ visa has had things happen to them, which I didn't struggle to think about that would keep you up at night. And the thought that those people are waiting in limbo because they're trying to denaturalize people is particularly upsetting. I'm sure it's also upsetting to some people who've worked at USCIS their whole life.

Starting point is 03:24:18 And I know that morale among those people is pretty low while the agency sort of has changed beyond all recognition in the last couple of years. Talking of changing beyond all recognition, we're going to now pivot from journalism to probably some adverts for online gambling. It'll be shocking and jarring. I love it. You could change your life beyond all recognition if you have a big win at that. Or a big loss. Yeah, you can also change your life that way. Harrison, we're not supposed to mention that.

Starting point is 03:24:58 We're back, and we all just voted on Forbes.com's newest prediction contest. How many people will be wounded in the next three American mass shootings? I'm excited. There's a big prize for this one. Sick. Yeah. That's only slightly an exaggeration of what Forbes is actually doing. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:25:18 Yeah. It's pretty gross. It's pretty gross. It's really hideous. It's okay, guys. It's not a market. It's just a prediction platform. It's just a prediction platform.

Starting point is 03:25:27 There's no real money. Only social capital. That could be the slogan of most journalistic enterprises in 2026, to be honest. Forbes has kind of long been a blog rather than a news website, but this is still pretty disgusting. Speaking of there being no real money. Yeah. Let's talk about the federal. Reserve. So when we last left are, I hesitate to call them heroes, but when we last left the Federal Reserve Board, there was a very obviously cooked up investigation by the Justice Department into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. This investigation doesn't really seem to have advanced at all, but the conflict over Powell and over Powell's replacement has been intensifying in recent weeks.

Starting point is 03:26:20 last week on the 15th of April, Trump threatened to fire Powell if Powell stayed on as basically the temporary Federal Reserve chair after his term expired. Now, the reason this is happening is because Trump's attempt to get someone confirmed to replace Powell has not been going well. and if no one is, you know, confirmed by May 15th, then the office is just empty, and Powell has said that he wants to stay on and become the temporary chair. This is sort of unprecedented, but then again, we've also not ever had the president open an investigation into the sitting chair of the Federal Reserve, causing him to give a reverse hostage video. So where things are right now is that we are getting hearings on. Trump's preferred nominee, a man named Kevin Warsh. However, there is a real problem with Warsh as a candidate that doesn't have anything to do with who he is.

Starting point is 03:27:27 We'll get to that in a second. The biggest issue that Trump is facing here is that Pom Tillis, who's an outgoing Republican senator, is refusing to let any Trump appointee pass through the finance committee unless Trump ends the investigation into Jerome Powell. So this has had everything at a complete standstill. It was sort of unclear. A lot of different Republican senators had threatened to do something like this, but because Tillis is leaving, he's retiring at the end of this at the end of this session, he's the one who's up there doing it.

Starting point is 03:28:04 And this has ground the nomination to a halt. We're still getting hearings, but there's no way for him to actually get a vote to get this process out of committee. So into this morass steps Kevin Warsh, who he's not the most unhinged guy Trump could have picked. Highbar. This is at least nominally on the surface, sort of a Fed guy. Like he has worked for the Federal Reserve, like Federal Reserve Banks before. He's not a podcaster.

Starting point is 03:28:33 Right? Yeah. Yes. Actually, actually, I don't. Wait. He might have one. There's a non-zero change. He might be. He might be. I don't know, but I am not willing to say that he is not one.

Starting point is 03:28:49 So now, this whole nomination has also become a mess because again, as we've been talking about, the reason why Trump wants to basically take direct control of the Federal Reserve and end Fed independence by installing his guy as a chairman of the Federal Reserve Board is that he wants the Fed, He wants to be able to control the fed so he can control interest rates. He wants interest rates cut. Now, this is coming up a lot in the hearings. And so far, Warsh is giving answers that if you've ever watched the testimony of someone who's trying to get onto the Supreme Court, it's a lot like that.

Starting point is 03:29:32 He is saying the things that he is supposed to say. He's saying that he opposes an interest rate cut. he's saying that the primary job of the Fed is to combat inflation. He's saying that he believes in Fed independence. But he also has said that Trump has not asked him to cut interest rates. And Elizabeth Warren, who's been sort of leading the Democratic charge against this, has pointed out a number of things, one of which is in work and where to get some more of the weird shit with him in a second.

Starting point is 03:30:02 But one of the major things here is that the president has said that he's asked worse to do just rate cuts. So somebody's lying here. Warsh is giving non-answeres about that. I'm also just going to read this quote from the Associated Press. Quote, Warren also noted that Warsh has not disclosed all of his financial holdings, which include investments in startups and private companies or the size of those financial stakes. For example, Warsh has said he has holdings in SpaceX and Pollymarket,

Starting point is 03:30:32 but has not said how large those investments are. Oh, great. Well, you can't win them all. Yeah. So later on, Worse said he would divest from $100 million in investments, but, you know, this is great. Warren also points out that he's in the Epsine files because Epstein apparently invited him and his wife to a party. It is unclear at this point what connection he had or if there was more, but that's not a great sign. Where we are right now is that Warsh is normal enough of a guy that Thomte Hill,

Starting point is 03:31:09 is willing to vote for him if the investigation is dropped. Tillis and some other members of the committee have been, Republican members of the committee have been talking about this scheme to get the investigation transferred from the Department of Justice to the Senate committee. I think at which point they could basically just kill it or just have it be a thing into budget overruns. That's not like an attempt to depose Jerome Powell. It's not clear what's going to happen with that and it hasn't started yet.

Starting point is 03:31:35 This is the point that we're at right now. this conflict is going to keep heating up as the May 15th deadline for getting a new nominee in before the board vacancy happens and Jerome Powell basically stays in power longer than his term normally last happens so we're going to keep following this story and there's one other story that we are going to keep following which is there was an exclusive by the Wall Street Journal which is a report this is from unnamed U.S. officials but it claims that the UAE's central bank governor is reportedly trying to get what's called a currency swap with the U.S. So what a currency swap is basically is it's like, it's a way to try to fix an exchange rate

Starting point is 03:32:21 and get a country a certain amount of U.S. dollars by just like just at the fixed exchange rate, just like swapping X amount of dollars for X amount of another country's currency. This report was immediately denied or very, very quickly denied by a series of posts on X, everything app by the UAE's embassy to the U.S. where they gave a thing. Trump also had like started talking about this too. I'm just going to read a little bit of this quote. We very much appreciate President Trump's recognition of the UAE as one of America's most important economic and trade partners. That recognition reflects the depth of mutual trust based on mutual investment, etc., etc., etc. Any suggestion that the UAE requires external financial backing misreads the facts,

Starting point is 03:33:08 The UAE is one of the most financially resilient economies underpinned by more than $2 trillion in sovereign assets and more than $300 billion in foreign currency reserves held by the UAE Central Bank and banking sectors with approximately $1.5 trillion in deposits. So when they start listing out the deposits, that's when things are not going great. Yeah. The issue here, and this is something that is what the Wall Street Journal is talking about is that this is not an immediate proposal. this is a proposal for what's becoming increasingly clear, which is that there's not actually an end to the war in Iran in sight. And if the trade of Hamos remains closed,

Starting point is 03:33:47 this is an existential crisis for the UAE because not only are all of their exports stopped, you know, like the UAE itself is just physically under threat, his infrastructure is under threat, and it's very difficult for them to get more investments. And this could, in the future, start a dollar crisis of the kind that we've talked about on this show before.

Starting point is 03:34:08 If you want to, yeah, I've talked about basically dollar crises and how you can have balance of payments crises for running out of U.S. dollars. What's interesting about this report, and the reason that we're sort of talking about it right now, is that one of the things that the UA.E reportedly was mentioning was that they might be forced to turn to, like, the Chinese currency. Basically, they might be forced to, like, sell oil in Chinese currency

Starting point is 03:34:33 in order to, like, get it through the straight, which would be a epochal shift to the entire global political economy, right? Which is the, like, America's status in the world is in part, but in no small part, based on the fact that you can really only buy oil in dollars. And it seems like what's happening is that the UAE is looking at their long-term prospects going, we're completely screwed. They're going, oh, well, if you don't just hand us a bunch of money, we're going to have to start looking at the underpinnings of, you know, American imperial power.

Starting point is 03:35:07 So we're going to continue to see where this goes. As this war continues and as the strike continues to be blocked, countries around the world are going to become more and more desperate as the economic consequences of this ripples out across the world. We're probably going to start seeing more things like this. And at some point, if it becomes clear that the war is not going to end and Trump's early week announcement that the ceasefires are going to keep going stopped being able to keep the stock markets from being propped up.

Starting point is 03:35:37 We're going to start seeing an even wider spread impact of this, but this is a bleak sign from a staunch US ally. Yeah. We have one final story before closing, which is a little funny, also worrying, but more funny, I think.

Starting point is 03:35:54 Yeah, this one's pretty good. Shawnee Kirkoff, the woman that Glenn Beck, right-wing outlet the Blaze, falsely accused of being the January 6th, pipe bomber, has launched a lawsuit against the Blaze and the two, quote-unquote, journalists who wrote the story for context. Last November, the Blaze published a story claiming to have identified the bomber as a capital police officer who responded to the January 6th insurrection based on, quote, forensic gate analysis, which determined the officer was a, quote,

Starting point is 03:36:29 up to 98% match to surveillance video of the bomber. Oh, God. This lawsuit claims five counts of defamation and one count of defamation by implication, and Kirchhoff is requesting a jury trial. The documents claim that the Blaze report targeted her because of her actions on January 6th as a police officer and testimony she gave against insurrectionists in court. And part of the intention of targeting her was to build on this larger idea that the defendants had

Starting point is 03:37:04 that January 6th was a quote-unquote inside job. As these reports were getting published by the Blaze, Glenn Beck said on his show, quote, this is one of the biggest stories. I think it is the biggest scandal of my lifetime, maybe in the last 100 years. Bigger than the Pinnocon papers. It is monstrous.

Starting point is 03:37:24 She's bigger than Watergate. Pulitzer Prize winning stuff. Unquote. Yeah, the capacity for self-delusion. Yeah. Pulitzer Prize winning stuff, James. I'm waiting for the Pulitzer Committee to finish reviewing this one. They're going to have to get in line after the Pulitzer Prize

Starting point is 03:37:39 are surely going to get for interviewing the dude who murdered Minneapolis Democratic politicians. Well, yeah. Which I'm sure was an action that his lawyer was super stoked about. Yeah. Court documents say that because of this false claim, the CIA placed the plaintiff on administrative leave and she was forced into hiding amidst online threats from conspiracy theorists, quote, for her role in supporting the deep state,

Starting point is 03:38:05 including in posts on her mother's obituary web page, unquote. She was getting death threats on the obituary page for her mother. Yeah. Constant frustration in my life is journalists posting screenshots from court cases and then not listening to the court listener page, so I decided to find the page so I could not be that guy. But, yeah, some of the threats this woman going, that genuinely probably made her life very difficult to live for a period of time.

Starting point is 03:38:32 Absolutely. The suit alleges that even after she was cleared as a suspect, and weeks later another suspect was arrested, who seems to be the likely bomber, these blaze, quote-unquote, journalists continue to harass her and that their, quote, false and defamatory accusations have irreparably changed her life, unquote. The documents say that this ruined her lifetime career in public service by forever linking her to the bombing and records of an FBI investigation, making any potential security clearances needed in the future, difficult or impossible to pass.

Starting point is 03:39:13 One of the journalists was fired by the Blaze on April 1st, just earlier this month, and the other resigned two days later. They have since raised over $20,000 since leaving the Blaze to continue. continue their claims on a new independent website that they're launching. Are you given the name of the website? The website is called Veritas Regnant, LLC? Yes, yes, Veritas. I think that just means the truth is king, basically. Truth reigns.

Starting point is 03:39:42 Yeah, I think that's what they were going for at least. Yeah, I love it. I love it. When I read that detail, you guys are going to be the most sued any people have ever been. It's beautiful. Something about a pittard seems relevant here. The document says that the plaintiff was called into work on November 6th, where two FBI agents then asked her about, quote-unquote, online chatter, that she was the bomber. She consented to a phone and car search and was placed on administrative leave.

Starting point is 03:40:13 Later that day, a quote-unquote caravan of FBI vehicles arrived outside her home, including a bomb disposal truck and a helicopter. I'm just going to read from the document. The agents claimed that they were primarily looking for shoes. Agents exited their vehicles with their guns drawn in full tactical gear. An agent called Mr. Dickert, who is the plaintiff's boyfriend, and commanded him to, quote, come out of the house unarmed with your dogs.

Starting point is 03:40:41 Mr. Dickard and Mrs. Kirchoff complied and stepped outside. Agents swept through the house, then re-entered with bomb-sniffing dogs. They opened cabinets, rifled through drawers, and scattered Ms. Kirkovs and Mr. Dickert's belongings all without obtaining. Mr. Kirkhoff's or Mr. Dickert's consent. It subtly occurred to Ms. Kirkoff that they were not simply looking for a pair of shoes, unquote. Never heard them asking for the dogs to come out before. That was a new one for me. That is an interesting detail. That is an interesting detail. Yeah, yeah. So the plaintiff asked the agents there why they would do all this to investigate

Starting point is 03:41:20 quote-unquote online chatter. And a senior official responded that these orders came from, quote-unquote, higher up, and that Ms. Kirchhoff could, quote, clear everything up just that night if she would accompany agents to the FBI office for a polygraph interview. Miss Kirchhoff agreed, and agents assured her that the drive out to the office would take longer than the interview itself. This was not true. The interview lasted almost three hours. Agents repeatedly accused the plaintiff of placing the bombs and continually asserted her guilt. Partway through the interview, interrogator changed out the tubes on the polygraph because they, quote, did not like how they were reading, unquote. That was a remarkable detail.

Starting point is 03:42:05 Jesus. Yeah. Oh, Jesus Christ. And at one point told the plaintiff that she, quote, unquote, failed the polygraph test, which the plaintiff assumed was just an interrogation technique. Yeah. You can't fail a polygraph test, right? Like, it just gives information. Yes.

Starting point is 03:42:21 Often not actually information, which is very useful in any way relevant, whether you're telling the truth or not. Polygraph's not really something that should be used in this capacity, but here we go anyway. But yeah, it's not like a pass fail. It doesn't like go bleep, bleep, bleep, liar detective. No. Now after midnight, she asked if she was free to leave and the agents said yes. So she went home and the next day the FBI returned her phone. And then once she got back her phone, she saw this quote-unquote online chatter exploding all over alleging that she was the bomber. A day later, the Blaze published a report explicitly naming her as the bombing suspect, something they already alluded to in previous reporting, which sparked the online chatter, which caused the FBI to search her home and interrogate her. This was all intentional on the part of the Blaze, according to this court document.

Starting point is 03:43:16 The defendants, these quote-unquote journalists, purposely forwarded a tip to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in an attempt to get quote-unquote, corroboration of their reporting from sources inside the government by getting the plaintiff placed under investigation prior to their publishing of the articles identifying her as the bomber. This was basically all part of a skee. Their goal was to set the narrative. Jesus Christ. Months later, the defendants have refused to remove headlines or social media posts claiming to identify the bomber.

Starting point is 03:43:52 Even after the actual text of these articles was removed after the FBI arrested the real suspect in December. Well, just last month, the quote-unquote journalists published another article on the blaze titled, quote, Brian Cole Jr.'s physical presence, posture, mannerisms are no match to FBI's hoodie-clad pipe bomb suspect, unquote. This was another article on the blaze saying that gain analysis showed that Brian Cole Jr., the actual suspect who has been arrested, does not match the gate

Starting point is 03:44:26 does not have a positive gate analysis a match to the surveillance footage from that night because it's not real because gate analysis is bullshit well they break that down in the court documents right

Starting point is 03:44:43 the footage of her that they had was when she's carrying like 50 pounds of tactical gear in a heavy bag tactical gear yes and she suffered a serious leg injury in college, yeah. It's comical that like they

Starting point is 03:44:57 this is what they went with, but the fact that they're doubling down on it, it's very funny. And legally baffling. Yeah, they really are not ready for the consequences to hit them on this one. No.

Starting point is 03:45:11 So like I said, these two quote-unquote journalists were fired and slash left the blaze earlier this month. But in posts and podcast appearances, they assert that Brian Cole Jr. is a quote-unquote

Starting point is 03:45:22 Patsy, and that, quote, the truth about the pipe bomber has been, quote, unquote, thwart it. And that, quote, unquote, legal considerations are preventing them from further disclosing the, quote, unquote, darker details about their pipe bomber theory. Jesus Christ. Now, Brian Cole Jr.'s defense lawyers have filed a subpoena for Ms. Kirchoff, which misleadingly states she, quote, unquote, failed a polygraph. This subpoena also contains her home address, and this subpoena has been spread online by these, quote-unquote, journalists as evidence that they were right all along. The plaintiff continues to deal with doxing and death threats as a result from this subpoena, and the quote-unquote journalists continued reporting, spreading claims that she is, in fact, the real bomber. So, Kirchoff is requesting a jury trial with these six counts of defamation, and I hope she gets a lot of money from everyone involved. in this. Yeah, I hope she gets every dollar

Starting point is 03:46:25 Glenbeck has. Yeah, I mean, I hope the outlet seats existing. That is, that would be ideal. Yeah, I hope the outlet becomes yet another subsidiary of the onion. Yeah, yeah. That would be a magnificent way for this to end. But yeah, like, and then another element of the documents I noticed was that they talked about how the, the quote-unquote journalist had benefited from the Blue Check ex-posts, right? Yeah, monetized accounts on X, yeah.

Starting point is 03:46:55 I would be interested to see, as we get more, and the discovery element of this case, how much were they making, how much were they making from X versus the Blaze? Like, I'm going to follow this one just because so many of the bits of misleading reporting we see are because of this financial incentive structure. So, like, it'll be very revealing for us.

Starting point is 03:47:16 And this financial structure is something that X, Everything app, is somewhat attempting to take on, at least for news aggregator accounts. Yeah. Yeah, they specifically went off to Dom Lucret, apparently. Yes, one of X's guys announced, like, a week or so ago that they're going to be reforming the payout system for news aggregators. This is Nicolita Beer.

Starting point is 03:47:39 Yeah. Part of the way they're doing that is that X's traffic is in freefall. And this is something that we're seeing, like, across social media. There was a really good report that Peter Tornberg, who's an assistant professor in computational social science at the University of Amsterdam published earlier this year. I mean, like, just today came up with an update on it on like the most recent numbers we have on like what's happening to the different social media networks. Visiting and posting on X the Everything app and Facebook have seen like a nearly 50% drops. A significant decline

Starting point is 03:48:14 among like the youngest and the oldest users on social media, particularly like people overseas. 65 and people from 18 to 24 have seen like the biggest decline in like the time that they've actually spent on site. I'm going to be doing something more detailed about this in the future, but a lot of what you're seeing from these big social media companies and these like big pivots right are moves in desperation. This is not working as well as it used to. The economics that once underpin this system are falling apart. None of these companies are as profitable as they used to be, and people are pulling away from social media, particularly from, like, a lot of the text-based social media sites, which were never as profitable as like short-form video

Starting point is 03:49:01 was. So, I don't know, that's something that made me less bummed. Well, I hope she gets certainly all the money they got from X and learning how much money that was will be super interesting in discovery. And hopefully, much, much, much, much, much, more money as well. Yeah. Speaking of money, James, you wanted to plug a donation. That's right, yeah. I want to talk really briefly about the guys from Cobra Column.

Starting point is 03:49:32 So Cobra Column, if people aren't familiar, it's Special Forces or it's a PDF that is aligned with the Karen National Union, Korean National Liberation Army, and the struggle for liberation in Myanmar against So Hunter, right? They have been fighting intensely in an area near Miaoidi, a place at Robert and I spent some time actually, just across the river from place Rob and I spent some time, albeit the Hunter has successfully launched munitions into Thailand several times now. And they are really like, if you want to look at the front line of people's autonomy against autocracy, against dictatorship, against tyranny, like they are at it. And they need money to sustain their efforts, to feed themselves, to equip themselves, to buy medical equipment. And I think they're also trying to buy like a replacement helmets and body armor because they keep getting hit by drones, right? And people have survivable injuries, but their armor is destroyed.

Starting point is 03:50:28 If you'd like to help, you can send 15 euros for 10 stickers. Stickers have the Milk Tea Alliance salute, which is the same as the salute that the Cubs Couts use and the one from Hunger Games. I'm not going to describe it because you can work it out. It is stickers for Myanmar at protonmail.com. You can send 15 euros for two stickers. That's S-T-I-C-K-E-R-S-F-O-R-M-Y-A-N-M-A-R at ProtonMail.com. If you want to email, coolzone tips at proton. com me, if it's a marketing email, I'll block you.

Starting point is 03:51:05 Put a trans girl on your couch. We reported the news. Bye-bye. 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, Coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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