It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 230

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Starting point is 00:02:41 for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hey, everybody, this is It Could Happen here, and I am Robert Evans. And initially, this is supposed to be a slightly different episode. I have been pondering over the fact recently that I feel weirdly optimistic, particularly in the last couple of weeks, especially compared to a lot of the people that I know and spend time around. And I think it's because I've been interpreting some of the same pieces of news differently than they have and because I've been coming across some different pieces of information than they have. And I wanted to kind of walk people through why I've been feeling

Starting point is 00:03:19 so optimistic. And so I wrote something and I recorded it around Thursday of last week. And then over the weekend, a gunman attack the White House correspondence dinner. And actually, this hasn't really changed any of my overall feelings. We'll talk about that this week, probably on ED, but I did make some alterations to the episode as a result of that, although I do think it reinforces my primary point, which is that the political era that we now find ourselves in is one dominated by extremophiles. Extremophiles are organisms with unique cellular and molecular mechanisms that allow them to survive and thrive in extreme habitats. I'm talking about places like volcanic vents at the very

Starting point is 00:04:01 bottom of the ocean, or the Dead Sea. If you've ever wondered why it's called the Dead Sea, it's because for a very long time, people thought it was too salty to host any life. Modern research has disabused us of this notion. The Dead Sea hosts life. It's just weird life, because the Dead Sea is a weird place. The term extremophile was coined in 1974 by R.D. McElroy to describe microorganisms scientists were increasingly finding in places that should have been devoid of life. The word is a hybrid term that literally means love of extremes. And while it is usually used in a scientific context to describe small organisms and very odd locations, some experts have, over the years, pointed out that the label might well apply to humans too.

Starting point is 00:04:46 In the journal article All About Extremophiles, Johns Hopkins University's James A. Coker wrote that, quote, Despite common perception, most of Earth is what is often referred to as an extreme environment. Yet to the organisms that call these places home, it is simply, that, home. They have adapted to thrive in these environments, and in the process have evolved many unique adaptations at the molecular and atomic level. In our human-centric view of the planet Earth, we tend to think of ourselves as being in the Goldilocks zone, not too hot or too cold, protected from radiation, and filled with all the things necessary for life to exist. To some extent, this is true. However, this view keeps us from acknowledging several basic facts, including that

Starting point is 00:05:26 the Earth is mostly a cold place. Over 90% of its oceans are at or or below 5 degrees Celsius, and it has an average temperature of around 15 degrees Celsius, and several conditions we humans consider normal, i.e. 20% oxygen in the air, actually make us extremophiles from the point of view of other species. End quote. Now, I have a bad tendency to want to apply literal knowledge like this, metaphorically, to my understanding of politics. It's a bit of a sickness, but it also makes more sense sometimes than you'd expect.

Starting point is 00:05:57 There's a tendency among many millennials and even Gen Z and Alis. of kids, too young to have known the 90s, to look back on that decade as a sort of cultural goldilocks zone, as if the brief period post-Cold War and pre-9-11 was some sort of cultural peak for our species. And everything since has been a slow downhill slide. People have different reasons for this. Some of them blame 9-11. Some people argue that we were in that sweet spot where the internet existed and could tap

Starting point is 00:06:23 you into cool and interesting things, but social media hadn't come along yet and ruined it all. You know, different people come up with different justifications. for this. But this view keeps people from acknowledging some very basic facts about the 1990s, which is that they were full of genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, just to name two, and repeated U.S. military adventures and misadventures in other parts of the globe, some of which ended disastrously, as in Mogadishu. Our president, for most of the 90s, was a sex pest, and members of the far right staged a series of bloody terrorist attacks, including the Oklahoma City bombing and Olympic Park

Starting point is 00:06:58 bombing. And while all this was happening, a new and more openly extremist Republican Party captured Congress while hapless outmaneuvered Democrats gawked in awe. The reality is that the 90s were a time of extremity, of extreme weirdness and darkness, just like every other period of human existence. And the extremity of the era helped birth a new conservative movement,

Starting point is 00:07:20 one radical enough to wrench power from the liberals and bring us ultimately into the slavering jaws of the Bush era. Today, those same neo-conservatives seem tame next to their modern descendants, the MAGA movement. But in their own time, they were the craziest bastards out there, and this hits at a fundamental reality in American politics. If survival in extreme times requires extreme adaptations, then it's no wonder that for much of our lives,

Starting point is 00:07:46 the extremists are the ones who have primarily thrived electorally. Democrats like to forget this. But Bill Clinton felt like a pretty big swing to folks exiting the era of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, just as Barack Obama was seen, as the most extreme choice imaginable by roughly half of this country. In fact, he was such an extreme choice that the conservative movement had to birth the Tea Party and eventually the MAGA movement in order to unseat the Democratic Party

Starting point is 00:08:13 and repeal the changes from the Obama years in power. I like thinking about this stuff because I find it interesting that one common theme from evolutionary biology to modern politics is this. In extreme environments, extreme adaptations are necessary to survive. We homo sapiens have been in the business of extreme adaptations for as long as we've existed. That's all central heating and air, vaccines, antibiotics, and the AR-15 are adaptations to extreme environments and situations, many of them, extreme environments and situations that we created for ourselves. The problem is our adaptations have a nasty tendency to drive even more extreme circumstances,

Starting point is 00:08:50 which in turn foster further adaptations, and so on and so forth until we invent the internet and satellite-guided thermonuclear bombs. Extreme adaptations are not always good. But once you've found yourself thrown into an extreme environment, you can't just wish the weather was different. You've got to adapt. That's the bad news about our current political situation. The good news is that the pendulum has started to swing back our way.

Starting point is 00:09:16 The extremism of the Trump era is provoking its own equal but opposite reaction, and you can see the first stirrings of that and the popularity of Zoranamdani, or the fact that a fourths. former pillow of neoconservatism like Bill Crystal is currently advocating for the abolition of ICE. We are in the process of deciding the next extreme that will dominate American politics, which means we have the opportunity to adapt with policies and changes that are every bit as good as the ones that Trump administration has forced through our bad. To do that, we're going to have to be brave, and we're going to have to start getting our shit together now, because this window

Starting point is 00:09:50 of opportunity won't last long. The way I see it, the GOP entered office. this time around intent on waging the political equivalent of a shock and awe campaign. They burnt up any goodwill or benefit of the doubt they might have had in an orgy of careless and brutal cuts to basic government functions, carried out by the least sympathetic group of Groopers imaginable, one of whom was nicknamed Big Balls. A flurry of state and local legislative pushes and criminal investigations aimed at hurting left-wing activists and queer, particularly trans people, have done tremendous damage, as have relentless ice raids on mostly non-white Americans.

Starting point is 00:10:26 It's been bad, and yet we're still here. I won't pretend we're in a good situation today, not at least in terms of what we'd like, good to mean in the everyday sense of the word. Many of us haven't survived the first 16 months or so of the second Trump presidency. Fewer of us are going to make it to the end. But this regime came to power with the knowledge

Starting point is 00:10:46 that their success or failure hinged on speed and violence of action. They had a limited window to make resistance impossible, and they missed it. You can see some evidence of this in our war of choice against Iran. President Trump wanted a quick, brutal triumph that would look good on the evening news, so he told his military to bear down on Iran with all the speed and violence of action they could muster. That plan failed, and the reasons why are weirdly similar to how the Republican Party has overplayed their hand in our ongoing culture war.

Starting point is 00:11:15 Back in Trump's first term, the DoD established the algorithmic warfare cross-functional team, nicknamed Project Maven. The goal of the project, as per Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan, was to automate the analysis of drone footage in other data humans previously would have gone over by hand in order to speed up the rate at which targets were identified and struck in wartime. Project Maven, from the jump, was a product of the worst kind of military thinking. How can we automate as much of our planning of warfare as possible? This is the kind of project you pursue when your finest military minds still believe that

Starting point is 00:11:50 Victory is as simple as killing or destroying a preset number of bad guys, causing them to give up. The goal was to create a system that could co-late and synthesize huge quantities of data in order to allow 1,000 targeting decisions per hour. Kevin Baker, writing for The Guardian, notes that this means, quote, 3.6 seconds per decision, or from the individual targeteer's perspective, one decision every 72 seconds. Now, we're going to talk about where this kind of thinking has led us in our conflict with Iran. But first, here's some ads. We're back. Now, if you listen to the advocates at this kind of military buildup, the people who are really bullish on AI for military purposes, talk in their podcasts and on their blogs, the reasoning behind why you need to be able to make a thousand targeting decisions per hour is pretty obvious. They're obsessed with the idea that a future war between the U.S. and a peer-or-neouser.

Starting point is 00:12:55 near-peer adversary, most prominently China, right? That's what they're planning on. Now, the Chinese military is also heavily invested in AI. There was a major New York Times article earlier this month in April of 26 titled Mutually Automated Destruction, the escalating Global AI Arms Race. I'm going to quote from that now. China and Russia are experimenting with letting AI make battlefield decisions on its own, two U.S. officials said. China is developing systems for dozens of autonomous drones to coordinate attacks without human thought, while Russia is building lancet drones that can circle the sky and autonomously pick targets, they said. Even as the specifics of the technologies remain veiled, the intentions are clear. In 2017, Mr. Putin declared that whoever leads in AI will

Starting point is 00:13:35 become the ruler of the world. Mr. Z said in 2024 that the technology would be the main battleground of geopolitical competition. In January, defense secretary Pete Hegeseth directed all branches of the U.S. military to adopt AI, saying they needed to accelerate like hell. Now, my interpretation of what I've read from most of these guys is that they see future conflict as a massive but almost instantaneous chess game, right? Whoever has the AI that can most quickly and effectively sort through their intelligence, come up with target packages, and then strike those targets first, wins, right? If we can make a thousand decisions and a thousand strikes in an hour and they can only make

Starting point is 00:14:13 800, then we'll destroy more of them and we'll win the war, right? It'll all be decided right at the start. And this may well be how a shooting war between China and the U.S. proceed. But given that very few people in either country want that war to happen because it would kill us all, I think we might do best focusing on the war our country is currently fighting, where this logic has resulted in a catastrophic failure for at least the second time in my life. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq after more than a year of buildup and years of intelligence gathering. Our military planners put together a list of 50 high-value targets. The idea was if we

Starting point is 00:14:49 could use our incredible super advanced spying equipment and our precision-guided weapons to wipe out the most important figures of resistance in Iraq, we could hobble any response to the invasion. All 50 targets were struck. None of the people targeted were killed. Now, that doesn't mean no one was killed. It just means we missed all the people we thought we were going to hit. To quote from Kevin Baker's great article again, the targeting cycle had been fast enough to hit 50 buildings and too fast to discover it was hitting the wrong ones. Fast forward to earlier this year, the Trump administration orders the launch of Operation Epic Fury and unleashed a nightmare arsenal of hyper-advanced weaponry on the people and leaders of Iran, alongside the Israeli Air Force.

Starting point is 00:15:29 In the first two weeks, U.S. forces hit 6,000 targets picked with the help of Project Maven. One of them was the Menab Girls Elementary School, which was destroyed by a missile, killing 156 and wounding 95. Now, Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir's hyper-advanced AI and a multi-billion-dollar network of satellites backed up by decades of intelligence gathering by the CIA and the Mossad wasn't enough to stop us from striking a school that we knew contained none of our targets. We had data that the people we thought were there at one point were no longer there, and it was a school now. But some of the data may even relied on was old and outdated, and these machines aren't

Starting point is 00:16:08 capable of real judgment in the way we think of it, and because people trusted them so much, no one thought to check before ordering the strikes. This is a human error. This is not an AI error, but it illustrates a massive flaw in the fantasy that winning a war could be as easy as building a smarter machine. That'd be accurate, and it is important to note, a lot of those 6,000 targets were what we thought, and they were accurately struck and killed in the opening salvo of the war. President Trump and his mouthpieces celebrated their successful assassination of Iran's supreme leader, alongside many other prominent military and governmental officials. This seemed at first to be way more successful than the opening strikes against Iraq. They didn't get any of those

Starting point is 00:16:47 50 guys, we got a bunch of our initial targets in this first wave of strikes. Maybe we just didn't have the right technology when we invaded Iraq. Maybe now we're doing it right. You know, finally, we'll be able to win a war this way. However, that quickly proved untrue. All of those strikes put together were not enough to break Iran's will or its capacity to fight and fight back effectively. Now Donald Trump finds himself trapped in an expensive quagmire, one that is already bleeding him advanced munitions and equipment while it crashes the global economy. The most recent APNORC poll puts Trump's overall approval at 33%, which is down 5% since just back in March.

Starting point is 00:17:25 Only 32% of Americans approve of his leadership on Iran, because most of this country can still see a man shooting himself in the dick for what it is. Pete Hegeseth is our most lethality-obsessed Secretary of Defense and history, and in him we see the result of a long sickness, first incubated during the Vietnam War, when embarrassed generals needed to spin their failure to make progress as a kind of victory. So they turned to bragging about how many fighters they'd killed, inevitably defining many civilian dead as enemy combatants and bragging about the tonnage of trucking that they'd destroyed,

Starting point is 00:17:59 based on wildly incomplete and inaccurate intelligence. Ever since this calamitous era, informed students of military theory have seen doing body counts as the death knell of a military entity's ability to make intelligent decisions that move their forces closer to victory. But because the entire conservative project in this country is built on the thoughtless worship of military prowess and power, we've seen this kind of thinking trickle down to the sorry cadre of influencers who call themselves right-wing intellectuals today. I'm talking about dudes like Matt Walsh and Chris Rufo,

Starting point is 00:18:29 who've built their reputations on picking targets to drum up mobs against and uses the basis of attack ads. These people have proven legitimately good at stirring up hate and forcing laws all over the country, restricting things like drag shows or the use of chosen pronouns on government documents. All these people are, by definition, huge assholes, and so are their followers. And thus, when those people get radicalized to take action in their communities, they make those communities worse. This pisses off their neighbors, which has resulted in significant backlash across the country. As an example, Moms for Liberty was formed in Florida on January 1, 2021 by Republican activists

Starting point is 00:19:08 and former school board members who were out. about pandemic safety protocols and schools. They became a vehicle for the parental rights movement, a nebulous and deeply toxic force in American political life that sees the parent as a kind of absolute sovereign over the life and mind of their child. Any influence that might lead that child to become a different kind of person than the parent envisions must be pruned away. The group used the then-fresh moral panic over critical race theory as a lever from which to force themselves into American life. In June of 2021, they started filing what would become a long series of criminal complaints against books available in specific school libraries across the nation.

Starting point is 00:19:44 School started removing books, and Moms for Liberty-inspired candidates began winning school board elections around the country. It looked for a little while like a popular wave of hysterical fear might yank America into a Fahrenheit 451-style future slightly ahead of schedule. But just a couple of years later, a funny thing happened. Moms for Liberty-backed candidates started losing major elections. First, a series of school board races in 2023 and Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Iowa. But even as the Biden administration careened towards a disastrous new election in 2024,

Starting point is 00:20:17 one in which the far right seemed to have all the momentum, regular people kept rising up and organizing to protect their schools. One of the first was Karen's Foboda, a mother of seven in Duchess County, New York. In 2023, she told NPR reporter Jim Zeroli, I looked into the local Facebook page of Moms for Liberty and just browsed through some of the social media of some of these individuals,

Starting point is 00:20:37 and what I saw was very upsetting, as a mom of kids who are members of that community, it was very concerning to think that these people would be trying to get onto the school board, because what does that mean for my kids? So she started a group of her own, defensive democracy, which organized like-minded parents in her community

Starting point is 00:20:53 to warn each other about Moms for Liberty. It defeated an entire slate of Moms for Liberty-backed candidates in 2023, all with the infrastructure of a Facebook page and weekly Zoom calls. And the really remarkable thing is that even while the 2024 election took over the national discourse, and the Democratic Party completely shat the bed, people kept connecting and organizing in school districts across the country to fight for their children's educations. In November of 2025, the Houston suburb of Cyprus, Texas, saw Democratic candidates sweep three school board seats and take the majority, ending two years of Republican dominance.

Starting point is 00:21:28 This trend was repeated elsewhere that same month per a political article by Liz Crampton and Madison Fernandez. Quote, in Pennsylvania, Democrats slipped at least two dozen school board seats, per an ongoing tally from Progressive Recruitment Group Pipeline Fund. The under-the-radar trend was enabled by voters' increasing weariness with the culture wars that helped the MAGA movement engineer school board takeovers and generate hyper-local interest in politics as the COVID-19 pandemic raged. In addition to Texas, Republicans lost seats in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, and the National Battleground of Pennsylvania,

Starting point is 00:21:57 the result of well-funded campaigns orchestrated by local leaders. Now, one of my favorite details from that piece is a quote from one of the new school board members, Leslie Gilmart, who stated, folks just wanted their school boards to be boring again. They wanted normalcy. Once the board was taken over by a super-partisan extremist majority, folks across the political spectrum were dismayed. Now, I continue to be an advocate of the thought

Starting point is 00:22:20 that Tim Walls might have made a more effective vice-presidential candidate if he'd kept calling the Republicans out for being freaks, because they are. Their obsession with the lives and behavior of their fellow citizens and their naked, slavering need to control their neighbors is upsetting and unnatural. The way I see it, we're in a time of incredible opportunity right now. The devil has played his hand and wound up slipping on a puddle of his own flop sweat along the way. The momentum is with

Starting point is 00:22:44 anyone but these fucks, at least right now, which is why a bunch of tertiary Trump supporters like Tucker Carlson have been cutting bait. Donald did the thing fascists often do. He kept reaching until he reached for something that exceeded his grasp. Now, I don't know what's going to happen next in our absolutely unnecessary struggle with Iran. I think there's a non-zero chance Trump tries to extricate our forces, save for some token, so Israel won't say we abandon them, and tries to take out the Cuban government next. It's also possible he'll escalate the violence against Iran

Starting point is 00:23:14 in some massive apocalyptic, hideous way. In either case, the human cost will be nightmarish, but either action would just be the flailing of a busted gambler, putting everything he has on a fantasy that Americans want to see foreign enemies broken while they can't afford to fill their car at home. Every poll of the American people seems to suggest that most of us has a pretty low appetite,

Starting point is 00:23:34 for unnecessary wars. Outside of Florida, it's hard to find regular people who are scared of the Cuban government. The idea that they represent any kind of threat to folks in Michigan or Kansas is absurd on its face. The further Trump reaches the angrier people get. Fascist governments rely on the complicity of the masses, even more than their enthusiastic support. And many Americans have proven themselves unwilling to be complicit in most of what the Heritage Foundation and their friends want for this country. And that's a nice note to roll to add. on. We're back. If you want a direct example of how weak the cultural conservatives are right now, think back to the stunt President Trump pulled with Door Dash earlier in April. He ordered several

Starting point is 00:24:25 bags and had them delivered by a Dasher who was there to get photographed praising the president's no tax on tips policy. While they were standing outside the Oval Office, Trump asked the Dasher if they thought trans women should be allowed to compete in women's sports. And the Dasher in question was 58-year-old Sharon Simmons, who was a, I mean, it's been widely reported, is a Republican activist. She'd previously spoken out in favor of the no tax on tips policy at the House Ways and Means Committee field hearing. And even when she was under the gun next to the president, Simmons wasn't willing to agree with him on the weird anti-trans stuff. She replied, I don't really have an opinion on that. And I'm not here to call her a hero for that. She's not,

Starting point is 00:25:02 but it shows a crack in the rhetorical wall these people have built for themselves. A Republican can't just support low taxes now. They have to endorse a whole raft of psychotic vengeance politics and anti-scientific views that are deeply alienating to anyone who has a chance of being called normal. Any discussion of life after Trump nowadays has to include an acknowledgement of the big lurking question of our age. What if he won't give up power? And that's a bigger question than the just Trump. A large number of government officials of elected leaders, military officers, and law enforcement officers have implicated themselves in the crimes and what we might call the ought to be crimes of this administration.

Starting point is 00:25:39 It's not unreasonable to ask, what if they won't leave power without a function? fight, and I don't have a comprehensive answer for you that I feel comfortable putting in the last couple of pages of a podcast script. But I will point out that just in the last month, as I write this, Victor Orban and his entire political movement faced sweeping defeat at the polls. Orban had been previously referred to as a quasi-dictatorial figure. He was the leader of the Hungarian government, and he had led a massive right-wing crackdown that attacked schools, that attacked the LGBT movement, and that became a major funder for much of our own right-wing movement. It's come out, that the Orban government was sending money

Starting point is 00:26:14 helping to fund CPAC. They were sending money to specific right-wing influencers like Rod Dreher. And despite the fact that Orban was the guy that people like Tucker Carlson a couple years ago was saying this is the future of American politics. Orbanism is what we want. Despite that fact, when they lost an election,

Starting point is 00:26:31 he and his cronies backed down without a fight. Now, ultimately, they did this because they still think they're bulletproof, right? We've got enough people in the government that we can stop. Peter Magger, the new guy, from doing any damage to us, right? And thus temporarily leaving power is an acceptable sacrifice

Starting point is 00:26:47 because that lets us avoid a civil war and the rest of the EU won't look timely on that. I'm sure that's a lot of their thinking. And obviously the U.S. is in a very different position geopolitically. But the rapidity with which some former Trump stalwarts like Marjorie Taylor Green and Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson have abandoned Maga suggests one thing, they think it's more personally profitable for them

Starting point is 00:27:08 to not be seen standing next to the president or the MAGA movement right now. And here's more good news. Remember how basically every social network is now owned by an openly evil right-wing billionaire? Well, Americans have responded to this by discarding social media and ever-growing numbers. This has been about one of the most consequential shifts

Starting point is 00:27:27 of the last few years, and just this week, University of Amsterdam professor Peter Tornberg published a study on shifts in U.S. social media use from 2020 to 2024. Quote, online platform reached a client, driven by growth in the share of Americans especially the youngest and oldest cohorts who report using no social media.

Starting point is 00:27:45 Visiting and posting activity on Twitter slash X and Facebook have fallen by nearly 50% since 2020, with the decline on Twitter X driven primarily by reduced participation among Democratic users. Now, this is broadly speaking a good thing for the mental health of Americans overall and for the future of our body politic. But the Americans who remain in social media aren't all doing so hot. Over the same time period, traffic on Twitter and Facebook grew markedly more right-wing, as both sites shrank. In his paper, Tornburg Warns, as casual users disengaged while polarized partisans remain vocal,

Starting point is 00:28:18 online discourse becomes narrower and more ideologically extreme. Or, in other words, as the algorithms that govern what gets seen on these shrinking social media sites reward more extreme content, less extreme users leave, and the ones who succeed and become more widely shared are the most extreme. It's, you know, another extremophile kind of situation. Part of why the people near Trump all believe they're winning is they live in these same internet fever swamps and they've gotten used to the internet mattering a lot more than it does right now.

Starting point is 00:28:49 I don't mean to suggest that what happens online isn't important, but that importance has been softened by the sheer deluge of AI slop, spam, and weird right-wing propaganda that we've been forcibly drowned in for years. Less people are using these things than they used to, which means their reach has declined because people find them off-putting and gross. The data shows that folks particularly over 65 and under 24 are increasingly fed up with not just social media, but the whole state of affairs we've been locked in politically. In the recent Virginia governor's race, Democrat Abigail Spanberger won by a comfortable margin. Republicans devoted a huge amount of their budget against her to anti-trans attack ads, writing high off their inaccurate belief that anti-trans propaganda had won Trump the re-election in 2024.

Starting point is 00:29:33 But only 4% of voters in that election listed transgender policies. as a top issue. Now, that alone might just point to the overwhelming impulse towards centristism shared by much of the American middle class. People don't like to stand out, particularly as a political radical. But a year after Spanberger's election, a majority of Virginia voters approved a radical redistricting measure. This was entirely framed as a response to the Republican Party fighting for the right to redistrict several states in their favor. The usual chorus of voices piped up to say, oh, I don't know, guys, we shouldn't do the same thing they keep doing in order to defend ourselves, that doesn't seem fair. And this time, thank goodness, most people ignored

Starting point is 00:30:12 them. The controversial measure outperformed Kamala Harris by eight points. And yes, a federal judge did immediately rule the measure unconstitutional, but you know how these things go. We're off to a series of court battles now. And however those end up, two useful things have been accomplished. The liberal majority of a state has banded together to fight the Republicans on their own terms, and a clear message has been sent to those same people that Republicans benefit from a different set of laws than Democrats. Now, any anarchist or leftist political organizer you've ever known would have told you the right wing always benefits from an interpretation of the law that she shucks seems to

Starting point is 00:30:48 deny their opponents the right to do the same things in self-defense. It's bad that things work this way, but good for rank-and-file liberals to be reminded of that reality. If it weren't, the current gatekeepers of our news media wouldn't be rallying so hard against this measure. The same day I wrote all of this, the Washington Post published an opinion column by Theodore Johnson, titled Why Virginia Went Back on Its Word. It opens with a particularly idiotic paragraph.

Starting point is 00:31:14 Partizhip did its best impression of democracy in Virginia on Tuesday. Voters approved a referendum permitting the state's congressional districts to be redrawn to help Democrats win four additional seats. It's retaliation to recent redistricting by Texas to hand Republicans five more seats at the behest of President Donald Trump. It's a red versus blue tit for tad over who can gerrymander more efficiently, a necessary evil, the parties say, to protect democracy. It's actually not necessarily.

Starting point is 00:31:39 I mean, not that it's a necessary evil the parties say. It's that one party was already doing this for years, the Republicans, and you didn't speak up. The Washington Post, you know, this guy didn't write the same column when this shit's been happening other states. He only does it when Democrats do it in Virginia, right? And I also might point out to Theo that a majority of voters approving a measure is democracy. You know, if your only concern is the overall health of democracy, redistricting that favors Democrats merely corrects a structure. imbalance in our political system that favors loosely populated rural areas with an unfair proportion of political power and marginalizes the greater number of citizens who live in urban areas

Starting point is 00:32:15 and tend to vote Democrat. Anyway, there are other good reasons to see hope for a fierce swing in American politics, not merely back to the middle, but far to the left, simply as a matter of practical necessity. The Republicans have spent their time in power gutting the Parks Department, the Post Office, the VA, the FAA, and every other useful part of our state structure, and this is a big part of what's radicalized people because they very quickly come to notice that things are missing and shit is not working right. For decades, the government has been the enemy

Starting point is 00:32:44 to millions of Americans who went out in the world and relied on government services every day of their lives. And yes, that's irritating and unfair. And no, we don't have time to fix that right now. What we can do is use the fact that the Republicans broke all these systems to point out to people, actually, you don't hate it when the government does stuff.

Starting point is 00:33:03 You just hate the way we're, Republicans won the government, and the fact that the Democrats have usually been too scared to push for policies as extreme as they need to, right? This is an opportunity to convince a lot of people, oh shit, paying taxes to support a vibrant civil society with extensive and functional infrastructure is a lot better than letting big balls delete half of civil service, right? Like, that's, I think, the opportunity we have right now. And pushing that basic line on as many Americans as possible in the next two years is,

Starting point is 00:33:32 I think one of the most important things we can do at the moment. Along with that, we need to keep building support for enforcement of consequences against the cadre of billionaires and their lackeys who have been robbing our shared heritage blind this whole while. If I had my way about it, I'd point out to people that there are an awful lot of billionaires who we knew colluded to take over the federal government and put something like Elon Musk's doge in place. You can just see that in some of the texts between Mark Zuckerberg getting in Elon Musk.

Starting point is 00:33:58 These people are enemies of the state with an awful lot of money, that we could confiscate to do things like replace the books. Moms for Liberty tore out of public libraries. Now, we also need to seek consequences for the criminals who have weaponized the organs of the state to fight their war against transgender Americans. This is an issue you can, in fact, get centrist voters to support.

Starting point is 00:34:19 The average swing voter may not be particularly woke on gender theory, but they don't like seeing the government bully people who are just trying to get by. The widespread suffering created by the MAGA movement also creates potential for widespread solid, between its victims. If the midterms go badly for the GOP and the 2028 elections go even worse, the USA's new elected officials and surviving citizens will find themselves in the same situation as the man who just unseated Victor Orban and his supporters. We all learned how temporary

Starting point is 00:34:48 a victory can be after 2024. I've seen more than a few comments online by liberals who decided Orban's defeat was a good time to attack a strawman caricature of a leftist, and these posts were generally laughing at this idea that a lot of people on the left express that electoralism can't defeat fascism. Now, I do share a frustration with the blanket rejection of electoral politics that some people on the left champion, but every online and real-life lefty that I know is thrilled to see Orban get the boot. However, they all did share a fear, and this is one fear that I've seen in common with every analyst and expert on Hungarian politics that I've read, which is winning the election isn't going to be enough for Magyar. Orban is an extreme.

Starting point is 00:35:29 someone who took power because things were extremely shitty in Hungary, and voters got angry enough to vote for a guy who promised to burn things down. They did come to regret that, but things are still extremely bad in Hungary. Joe Biden was a moderate who tried to govern in an environment of raging extremes. His promise was that he would bring things back to the normal of the Obama era. He failed to do that because it's impossible, and his failure opened up the way for Trump 2.0. If we don't want to repeat that cycle, the failure. failures and ultimate collapse of the MAGA movement have to be met with new strategies,

Starting point is 00:36:03 new tactics, and new politics as we seek to fill the void that they're going to leave behind. I wrote and recorded the first draft of this piece, as I said earlier, just a few days before a gunman stormed into the correspondence dinner. His manifesto has made it clear that he wanted to harm the president and members of his cabinet. Within hours, his social media accounts were archived and his life was put under a microscope, as it always happens with gunmen these days. all of this revealed a liberal man, one who had previously expressed very common centrist opinions, including a dislike of firearms. I've seen this used by people to justify a conspiratorial narrative that immediately followed the attack.

Starting point is 00:36:42 This guy is a perfect patsy. Obviously they cooked this up in a lab as an excuse to crack down on Democrats. I don't believe that, and here is not a place for an argument as to why. Again, we'll talk about that I'm sure later this week. What is interesting to me is that before any of this happened, I'd been planning to revise the ending of this. episode by commenting on an article that came out in April of 2025. It's published by Axios, and the title was, Democrats told to get shot for the anti-Trump resistance. Here's a quote from that article. At town halls in their districts and in one-on-one meetings with constituents and activists,

Starting point is 00:37:15 Democratic members of Congress are facing a growing thrum of demands to break the rules, fight dirty, and not be afraid to get hurt. One of the lawmakers that they talked to for that article related a conversation that he'd had in a meeting with a constituent. Quote, I actually said in a meeting. When they light a fire, my thought is, grab an extinguisher, and someone at the table said, have you tried gasoline? So many regular liberals are embracing extreme rhetoric and measures today because they know on some level that that's the only way you survive in an extreme environment. We see this in the thousands of Normies in Minneapolis who have been willing and eager to confront armed federal agents in bathrobes and risk their own life and limb to protect their neighbors from ice.

Starting point is 00:37:56 and we've also seen a very dark reflection of that and the actions of that gunman last weekend. Now, the fact that an educated and informed 31-year-old man decided to buy a firearm that he hated and attack the president represents many failures. One of them is a failure of the Democratic Party and the liberal project to provide him with anything that felt like a useful outlet

Starting point is 00:38:16 for his rage and hopelessness. When people start talking and acting like this guy was acting, you can either throw your hands up and back away or you can try like hell to present them with a counter-offer. In this case, I mean a set of policies, activist campaigns, and organized actions to make this country a less horrific place. The victory and wild popularity of Zoran Mamdani is proof that you can, in fact, to do this even in 2026. The widespread support for formerly extreme positions,

Starting point is 00:38:45 like abolishing ICE, taxing billionaires, radically redistricting states, halting the construction of data centers, and expanding and packing the Supreme Court are more than enough evidence to show that people will get in line to back a candidate and a party who promises radical change. Moreover, everything I've seen lately suggests that people are starving for a movement like this, hungry for their own candidate who feels like Mamdani, hungry more than anything, to feel hopeful again. When Oregon Senator Ron Wyden posted CU at Nuremberg 2.0 after Christy Noem got fired, I watched a coalition of left-wing radicals and centrist dims who never came together over anything

Starting point is 00:39:24 else express wild glee at the very thought. We can do this. We have the tools and we have the opportunity. It's going to take a big old step into the unknown. But that's our only option, besides waiting until we get another chance to look through the social media archives of a gunman. 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. I'm Jennifer Stuart. 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

Starting point is 00:40:16 podcast and IHart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Our 2026 IHard Country Festival presented by Capital One. Tickets are on sale now to see Luke Bryant, Kane Brad, Riley. Green. Carly Pierce. Oh, you're happy now. Shaboozy, Dylan Scott, Russell Dickerson, Gretchen Wilson, Chase Matthew, Lauren Elena. Special guest George Birch, Saturday, May 2nd at the Moody Center in Austin. Stream live on Disney Plus and Hulu.

Starting point is 00:40:52 Do you remember when Diana Ross double-tapped Little Kim's boobs at the VMAs? Or when Kanye said that George Bush didn't like black people. I know what you're thinking. What the hell does George Bush got to do with Little Kim? Well, you can find out on the Look Back at it podcast. I'm Sam J. And I'm Alex English. Each episode, we pick it here, unpack what went down,

Starting point is 00:41:12 and try to make sense of how we survived it. Including a recent episode with Mark Lamont Hill, waxing all about crack in the 80s. To be clear, 84 is big to me, not just because of crack. I'm down to talk about crack on day, but just so you all know. I mean, at this point, Mark, this is the second episode where we've discussed crack. So I'm starting to see that there's a through line. We also have AIDS on the table.

Starting point is 00:41:33 right now. Thank you finishing that sentence. I don't think there's a more important year for black people. Really? Yeah. For me, it's one of the most important years for black people in American history. Listen to look back at it on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

Starting point is 00:41:51 podcasts. Welcome to my new podcast, Learn the Hard Way with me, your host, and your favorite therapist, Care Games. And in recognition of mental health awareness month, I'm bringing over a decade of my own experience in the mental health field and conversations with so many incredible guests. I'm talking.

Starting point is 00:42:06 Tripp Fontaine, Ryan Clark. Sometimes when we're in the pursuit of the thing, we get so wrapped up in the chase that we don't realize that we are in possession of the thing. And we're still chasing it. And we don't know when we've done enough. Because people scoreboard watch. Life becomes about wins and losses.

Starting point is 00:42:25 Steve Burns, Dustin Ross. Because you find it important to be a good person while you hear on earth? Or are you a good person because you're afraid? Because that's two different. intentions, bro. Absolutely. And that's two different levels of trust.

Starting point is 00:42:37 I want you to just really be a good person. Join me, Kear Gaines, is we have real conversations about healing, growth, fatherhood, pressure, and purpose on my new podcast, Learn the Hard Way. Open your free iHeartRadio app. Search Learn the hard way and listen now. So by the time you hear this, the situation may evolve in any number of directions. I'm speaking in the immediate week of the United States and Israel's root. invasion of Iran. Thus far, over a thousand have been killed, including over 100 schoolchildren

Starting point is 00:43:14 and the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamini. In response to this American Israeli aggression, Iran has retaliated by targeting both American bases and civilian and energy infrastructure in the neighboring countries that have facilitated American presence in the region. With the strategically and economically critical straight to Hormuz in jeopardy, with France, the UK and Germany, aka the usual suspects, indicating potential involvement, and with the potential Russian and Chinese involvement also being floated in some circles, it seems to me that without any formal announcement, the war on the world has escalated potentially to a point of no return.

Starting point is 00:43:57 Hello and welcome to Ikraappen here. I'm Andrew Sage, Andrewism on YouTube, and I'm joined again by... It's James. Hi, Andrew. How you doing? as well as I can be. Yeah, that's about the best we can hope for these days, isn't it? Yeah. And in a time like this, I want to take a look back at history, particularly how past U.S. interventions have left devastation in their way.

Starting point is 00:44:23 Today I want to look at the fate of Libya, a country still dealing with his simmer intentions following the end of the post-intervention civil war. So I suppose we should begin in mid-February in 2011. The Arab Spring was sweeping the Middle East and North Africa. Among the countries caught up in the fervor against the prevailing states was Libya. A North African state ruled for the previous 42 years by the Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi's government. Masses had taken to the streets across the country, starting in Benghazi.

Starting point is 00:44:56 The government had some successes in putting down the revolt, killing hundreds of rebels and demonstrators alike, and some failures, as the masses managed to hold position. The people had many motivations, span an Islamist to democratic, to militant, to tribal, to just disaffected, against a government intent on its continued survival. Revolutions, uprisings, protests, revolts, they tend to be messy affairs. I'm sure James, you're well away of that. Yeah, yeah. I think it's really easy as to like outside observers or when we're looking back at history to be like, oh, this revolution was an individual. Islamist revolution. This was a Marxist-Leninist revolution. This one was an anarchist revolution, but every revolution that I have been at, they have witnessed happening, is in everything

Starting point is 00:45:48 revolution when it starts. And it later becomes a something revolution. But especially in the Arab Spring, right? Like in that time, it was just like, we've had enough of being under the boot of these regimes. And it was extraordinarily heterodox. And that was quite beautiful in the early days. Exactly. Exactly. The heterodox nature of revolutions is really what I want to drill here.

Starting point is 00:46:15 Because I think it's very easy people to caricaturize and sweep up broad brush and this determined, oh, this is, in the case of Iran, people are saying, oh, it's only monarchists. It's monarchists and Zionists going out in the streets when they were protests. and when the situation on the ground is always more complex than that. Yeah, maybe I'll just take a second to address the, like, annoying campus tendency. I understand that every time the United States rains down death on some part of the world, it's terrible, right? It's sad, as you've just said, Andrew. In Iran, we've seen a girl's school bombed not once but twice, it seems, right?

Starting point is 00:46:54 Like, let me call a double attack. attack, that doesn't mean that your response has to be to support the other people who are killing those same civilians in that same place. It is possible for two things to be bad. And like in Iran, yeah, there is a monarchist opposition. It sucks. I spoke just this morning to a Kurdish group, which is opposing the regime in Iran. And they had nothing but bad things to say about the monarchists, right? They said, is the P.A.K. The Kurdistan Freedom Party.

Starting point is 00:47:29 I'm quoting here, they do not have a foothold in society to actually achieve anything. The lies and delusions of a group of people sitting in nightclubs cannot make any real impact. You're free to use that one next time someone tells you all the opposition in Iran is monochist.

Starting point is 00:47:44 It's nonsense. Exactly. I mean, just on its face, it's obviously nonsense. There's this notion that these people are high of minds. It's really a racist notion that you see pop and again and again.

Starting point is 00:47:56 Yeah, very orientalist. Yeah, anytime people step outside and they have something that they're upset about, they just get labeled with this one broad sweeping ideological moniker, whether they're listening to subscribe to it or not. Yeah. And even within the ideological monocas, there's always a lot of nuance in how people understand those ideologies. You know, no two Islamists are necessarily alike,

Starting point is 00:48:22 no two monarchists even are necessarily alike. And those are both ideologies that I absolutely abhor, you know? Right. Yeah. I don't understand how you can be a leftist and spend your life, like, as such. And then also think that in other parts of the world, people don't want the same things. Like, I believe it is inherently human. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:48:44 To want dignity and respect and the same for others and to want our communities to govern themselves. And I don't believe that it's any less human if you live in North Africa or the Middle East. or South Africa or an island in the Caribbean or an island in the Pacific. Like, I believe it comes from our human nature. And so it strikes me as therefore obvious that there cannot be a country where people's human nature is fundamentally distinct and they're all just like knee-jerk monarchists. I wouldn't see the world the way I see it if I was able to believe that. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:49:16 Yeah. These movements, they're always composed by the choices and actions of sometimes millions of people, each with their own motivations. And now that's easy, particularly in retrospect, to pick particular leaders or organizations as representative of them all. That doesn't make it so. One of the things that defined the Arab Spring, as you mentioned,

Starting point is 00:49:37 was it's a leaderless nature. You had neoliberal, you had monarchists, you had socialists, you had most of all, I would say, people without any ideological commitments at all. The majority of the human population is not ideologically committed. one way or the other, most people are just trying to live their lives and meet their basic needs. And they're submerging a society that lends them towards a particular inclination, but that's not set in stone. Most people in the Arab Spring likely sought just the end

Starting point is 00:50:08 of whatever it was that they were suffering under before. And of course, in these kind of incidents, geopolitical actors will choose to back particular factions, lend them credence and prominence according to their geopolitical interests. But, of course, don't give them undue credit. During the Cold War, for example, the US would have backed rebellions that they believe would benefit them and vice versa, the USSR backed rebellions that they thought would benefit them. And even today, the US is claiming to care about freedom but has continued to work with the Saudis,

Starting point is 00:50:37 who infamously invaded Bahrain to crush the Arab Spring that occurred there. Yeah. And at the time, France's love for democracy didn't exactly match their offer to aid Algeria and Tunisia in putting down their own Arab Springs. Now, as I've been saying quite often, pointing out hypocrisy is kind of a baby's first geopolitical analysis, right? None of these governments have any consistent values beyond their own interests. But I think it's important to make this kind of heterodoxy in movements clear to contextualize what happened next. There's another notion that U.S. intervention is entering these countries.

Starting point is 00:51:32 during these conflicts to uphold humanitarian aims to liberate the women or to liberate minorities in that region. The United States, like all the government, is opportunistic, right? It is taking advantage of often genuine struggles by people to serve its own situation or goals without a care for what happens to those people, either openly intervening or covertly intervening. Most obvious recent examples with the Kurds in Syria. At the time, they were convenient to the United States' interests until they weren't, and they were abandoned.

Starting point is 00:52:07 And this is especially the case when resources like oil come into the picture, and Libya is extremely oil rich. So tragically, the West saw this uprising in Libya as an opportunity. Following a timeline in Cyclopedia Britannica, on the 19th of March 2011, Libya was attacked by the combined forces of the United States, the UK and France. These countries now condemned Gaddafi as an oppressor of the civilians they were swooping in to save, though for years before the UK and France were selling him weapons. They, alongside their Qatari and Saudi allies, took advantage of the protests to assert their military might. This move was authorized by the UN Resolution 1973 and NATO would soon take command of the operation. While claiming to protect civilians under a responsibility to protect doctrine,

Starting point is 00:53:01 they bombed them. An allegedly humanitarian intervention led to the deaths of tens of thousands, of a national population of just over six million. Key infrastructure was devastated by the NATO Warman campaign and by the struggles between the government and the now armed rebels of the National Transitional Council, or NTC. A quick note by the way, the NTC appointed themselves as the leaders of the movement. And despite the struggle being kick-started by mostly working and middle-class militants, often of an Islamic orientation, the NTC was composed mainly of regime defectors, businessmen, and exiles who had a broadly pro-Western, conservative, and free market stance. Some of the elements in Gaddafi's government and military had defected to the rebels and equipped

Starting point is 00:53:49 those previously unarmed protesters with firepower. And so up to now we only have estimates regarding the civilian death dole, infrastructural devastation, and arbitrary detentions, disappearances, and kidnappings carried out by both pro-Gaddafi and anti-Gaddafi forces. Not to mention the deliberate targeting of black Libyans and sub-Saharan African migrants by rebel forces that took place during and after the 2011 war,

Starting point is 00:54:15 with the claim that they were Gaddafi's hired mercenaries. Many of those Africans attempts to escape were met with callous disregard by Europe. Yeah, callus Gist regard. I mean, there are no words strong enough to express the way I feel about the way the European Union has treated migrants in Libya. It is absolutely disgusting and continues to be. It's despicable. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:54:40 Have you read Sally Hayden's book about this? No, I haven't. It's called My Fourth Time We Drowned. Very good book. Difficult read, I would say. It very much is some of the type of reporting that I try and do myself on migration and that it talks about people, not numbers, and it centers migrants as individuals with stories.

Starting point is 00:55:00 It's a great book, but probably not one to read right before bed. I could imagine. It sounds heavy. Yeah, definitely heavy going. So, following a steelmate between the pro-and-Gadhafi camps in late spring of 2011, the rebels assisted by NATO forces took Tripoli and toppled Gaddafi's government. and the NTC was recognised internationally, almost immediately, as the legitimate government of Libya. As Matt Wilgris notes in Jack Bin, quote,

Starting point is 00:55:32 On the day Tripoli fell, the New York Times headline, The Scramble for Access to Libya's oil wealth begins, was telling. Libya's vast oil reserves, along prized by the West for being the largest in Africa and incredibly close to Europe, were now open to business for foreign investors. As is the case with all imperial interventions, the attempts to get profits flowing for multinational corporations comes long before any ideas of reconstruction, such as essential infrastructural projects or insurance services, end quote. And really up to now, that infrastructure has not been established, and even access to Libya's oil is not yet secured, even though they allegedly managed to loot some of that oil in 2012.

Starting point is 00:56:14 Now, Gaddafi himself fled after the fall of Tripoli, but he was found. NATO bombed his convoy and he was captured alive, then executed by NTC forces in October 2011, after which the war was declared over and the NTC declared Libya and Islamic democracy in their constitutional declaration. The NTC estimated 30,000 dead and a UN report from 2012 estimated that more than 900,000 people had to leave the country since February of 2011. Many were not Libya nationals, but more than 660,000. Libyans also fled and an estimate to 200,000 people had been internally displaced.

Starting point is 00:56:55 Continuing with our timeline, in 2012, the NTC handed power over to the General National Congress, or GNC. And despite a formal end to the war, Gaddafi loyalists, local militias, and tribes shaved against each other and the GNC. The militias wouldn't disarm, the Gaddafi loyalists continued to fight. And the GNC failed to put forward a new constitution. So in 2014, they were ousted by the newly elected House of Representatives, and in 2014, a second civil war would begin in Libya, with a nation split, meaning between the House of Representatives, or H-O-R, with its Libya National Army, or LNA, based in Tobruk to the east,

Starting point is 00:57:34 and their rival made up of mostly Islamists from the former GNC with their Libya-Dorn militia based in Tripoli to the west. They didn't win the election, they didn't consider it legitimate because of its low turnout, and they didn't appreciate the amount of former Gaddafi supporters in the new government. So they rose up to fight, claiming to be the National Salvation Government or NSG. So you have the HOR and you have the NSG. Beyond these two factions, you also had an Al-Qaeda affiliated militia and the Islamic State,

Starting point is 00:58:06 both engaged in insurgent struggle around the country, sometimes holding entire cities. Eventually, the two governments came together to sign the LPA, the Libyan political agreement to form the interim presidential council and government of national accord or GNA in late 2015. With that attempt at cohesion didn't really work out as the UN backed GNA, now based in Tripoli, couldn't consolidate power. By the end of 2016, factions affiliated with the NSG still resisted the GNA, and the HOR, still based in Tobruk, refused to endorse the GNA's appointments.

Starting point is 00:58:42 So they went from having two competing governments to kind of having three, though the main opposing forces were now the GNA and the HOR. The GNA was backed by Turkey, Qatar and the EU, especially Italy, and the UN, while the HOR was backed by Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and to some extent France, who technically recognized the GNA, but also provided support the HOR for their struggle against the Islamists. The US was also supposed to be back in the GNA, but Trump jumped out to praise the H-O-R at one point. So the US's position was exposed as a lot more ambiguous in practice.

Starting point is 00:59:27 So the GNA and the H-O-R would keep on struggling against each other for control over the central bank and oil companies and territory over the years. By the end of one particularly significant offensive in 2019, which saw the country's largest oil field brought under H-O-WRs, control. The situation was such that the H-R's leverage came from their control over the oil fields, and the GNA's leverage was that it was internationally recognized and could legally sell the oil. GNA leader Fayez Al-Saraj and H-R leader Shalif Aftar seemed to be developing cooperative relations, and in March of 2019, they were supposed to have a national unity conference, but then the H-O-R tried to take Tripoli. Whoopsy. So they kind of had to postpone that conference. The resulting fighting led to the HOR taken SIRT, a major city between Libya's east and

Starting point is 01:00:30 west halves. With Turkish support, the JNA successfully repelled the HOR from Nair Tripoli, and the situation was stabilized with a battle line just east of Sirti in 2020. Yeah. Not just Turkish support. Turkey deployed the Syrian National Army, aka the TFSA, the Turkish Free Syrian Army. They are widely believed to be rebadged Islamist from previous iterations of various Islamist groups in Syria that Turkey has formed into kind of its own proxy force. I mean, I'm sure if you go to their Wikipedia page, there are like 17 million different war crimes listed.

Starting point is 01:01:10 Like, they are well known for their affinity for war crimes, yeah. I could imagine. The fact that Turkey, Turkey's back in them tells me everything I need to know, I think. Yeah, right. Yeah, and they're considered like a deniable proxy, right? Like they can be like, Turkey can be like, oh, well, that wasn't us. That was these Syrian guys who we happened to arm and equip and air support for. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:01:34 What is their situation now, now that Turkey is kind of back in the new government in Syria? They have largely been folded into the STG's armed forces. So, like, Abu Hamza is, I think, a general or a brigadier. I can't quite remember his rank. but as guy who has been widely condemned is now a military officer within the STG's Ministry of Defence. Huh. Okay.

Starting point is 01:02:01 So a more accurate description than would be that Turkey sent their war criminal proxies to support the GNA in repelling the H-OR from NAPR Tripoli. Yeah. And the situation stabilized with a battle line just east of 30 in 2020. and after other attempts to reach an agreement failed, they agreed to share oil revenue, establish a permanent ceasefire, and get both Turkish forces and Russian mercenaries out of the country. So the second civil war was officially over in October 2020. According to reporting by Al Jazeera, the UN initiated a new attempt at a unifying government in 2021,

Starting point is 01:02:42 which was approved originally by both rival parliaments, leading to the establishment of the interim government of national unity, or GNU, in March 2021, thus replacing the previously UN-backed GNA. So we went from GNA to GNU. But then the GNU would be opposed by the H-R, which withdrew from the GNU in September of 2021, and established the government of national stability, or GNS, in March 22. So the GNA was replaced by the GNU, and the GNU, and the GNU was now opposed by the GNS. And thus the country remains split in two up to today between the UN backed GNU

Starting point is 01:03:26 and the HOR slash Libyan National Army backed GNS. And in all of this chaos, people on the ground have been suffering. They've been suffering human rights abuses, disappearances, up to recently the GNU imposed a morality police, and there have been numerous reports about open slave markets in Libya,

Starting point is 01:03:46 where migrant black African, are auctioned to the highest bidder. Yeah. This is a result of human trafficking and debt bondage, so not exactly the same as chattel slavery, but the experience and racial undertones are all too familiar. The suffering in Libya has also spread beyond its borders. Following Gaddafi's fall,

Starting point is 01:04:07 the weapons of his military stockpiles ended up in the hands of militants across the Sahel region of Africa and even in Syria. You'll remember in my episode on the situation in Nigeria, some of those weapons ended up in the hands of Boko Haram and other Islamic militant groups in the region, Pulani Hoodsmen, and so on. Tragically, because Libya just can't seem to catch a break at all. September 23 also saw catastrophic floods devastating the country. The hurricane strong storm Daniel caused two dams to burst in the coastal city of Durna,

Starting point is 01:04:45 which is within JANS territory in eastern Libya. The flooding killed at least 4,000 people, though potentially even more, left thousands missing and displaced more than 40,000 others. The nation still roared by civil war and still unrecovered from the devastation of the NATO bombing campaign surely could have mustered a more adequate response to the tragedy, if not for those conditions. In fact, it is theorized that the tragedy could have been avoided altogether, because, according to reports by the Middle East eye, a Turkish company was supposed to rehabilitate the field dams,

Starting point is 01:05:21 but their works were reportedly interrupted by the 2011 uprising and subsequent civil war. Yeah. It's always the cost of war that we don't count, right? Like, if you look at the 2023 earthquake that killed people in Syria and Turkey, right? Like, undoubtedly, that would have done a lot less damage. If it hadn't been for the fact that war had been raging in those places for so long, So like everything else got put on hold, right? All the normal infrastructure repair and incurs that you would expect had to stop because of that war. And that made things like the earthquake worse. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:05:57 I don't think the people who rose up against Gaddafi and fought and died back in February of 2011 had sought this outcome. Unfortunately, in a world dictated by the whims of imperialist powers, this was the end. of their actions. I don't want people to get it twisted, though, because in the time since, as people have observed, the devastation brought by these civil wars, there has been an effort to almost whitewash Gaddafi

Starting point is 01:06:31 and to limit our vision of possibilities to a binary of either perpetual Gaddafi rule on one end or perpetual civil war on the other end. Those are not the only possibilities. So we've discussed the legacy of NATO intervention, which deserves condemnation, in this episode. And it should be an indication that who the Western invasions and wars are not going to liberate anyone. Yeah. But aside from that accurate analysis of Libya since the fall of Gaddafi, I want to bring in some conversation on demand himself in the next episode.

Starting point is 01:07:10 Until then, all power to all the people. This has been Akkadapen here. I've been Andra Siege. Peace. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are at them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart.

Starting point is 01:07:38 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 IHart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Our 2026 IHard Country Festival presented by Capital One. Tickets are on sale now to see Luke Bryan, Kane Brown, Parker McCollum, Riley Green, Shaboole Dickerson, Gretchen Wilson, Chase Matthew, Lauren Elena, special guest George Birch,

Starting point is 01:08:22 Saturday, May 2nd at the Moody Center in Austin. Stream live on Disney Plus and Hulu. Do you remember when Diana Ross double-tap Little Kim's boobs at the VMAs? Or when Kanye said that George Bush didn't like black people. I know what you're thinking. What the hell does George Bush got to do with Little Kim? Well, you can find out on the Look Back at it podcast. I'm Sam Jek.

Starting point is 01:08:43 And I'm Alex English. Each episode, we pick it here, unpack what went down, and try to make sense of how we survived it. Including a recent episode with Mark Lamont Hill, waxing all about cracking the A&S. To be clear, 84 is big to me, not just because of crack. I'm down to talk about crack all day, but just so y'all know. I mean, at this point, this is the second episode where we've discussed crack.

Starting point is 01:09:05 So I'm starting to see that there's a through line. We also have AIDS on the table right now. Thank you for finishing that sentence. Yes. I don't think there's a more important year for black people. Really? Yeah. For me, it's one of the most important years for black people in American history.

Starting point is 01:09:21 Listen to look back at it on the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to my new podcast, Learn the Hardway with me, your host, and your favorite therapist, Keer Games. And in recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month, I'm bringing over a decade of my own experience in the mental health field and conversations with so many incredible guests. I'm talking, Tripp Fontaine, Ryan Clark. Sometimes when we're in the pursuit of the thing, we get so wrapped up in the chase

Starting point is 01:09:49 that we don't realize that we are in possession of the thing. and we're still chasing it and we don't know when we've done enough because people scoreboard watch. Life becomes about wins and losses. Steve Burns, Dustin Ross, because you find it important to be a good person while you hear on earth?

Starting point is 01:10:06 Are you a good person because you're afraid? Because that's two different intentions, bro. Absolutely. And that's two different levels of trust. I want you to just really be a good person. Join me, Kear Gaines, as we have real conversations about healing, growth, fatherhood, pressure, and purpose

Starting point is 01:10:21 on my new podcast. Learn the hard way. Open your free iHeartRadio app. Search Learn the Hardway and listen now. Hello and welcome to I Kid Appen here. I'm Andrew C. Chandarism on YouTube and joined again by... It's James again.

Starting point is 01:10:41 Yes. I've noticed a phenomenon. I'm not sure if you've noticed it too. Mm-hmm. Where anti-imperialist solidarity somehow goes a step beyond opposing imperialist aggression itself and crosses into line. or whitewashing the targets of that aggression, or rather the sensible leaders of the target to that

Starting point is 01:11:05 aggression. Yeah, I have noticed this too. It's one of the things that makes me most angry in the world, what's been referred to as the anti-imperialism of idiots. Yes. Not so relevant now, but I used to like to apply the Assad test to anybody who claimed to be interested in the politics of liberation, right? If you if you think Bashar al-Assad is a based anti-imperialist people's socialist hero, then your politics are shit.

Starting point is 01:11:32 I have nothing good to say about that. Like, you're an idiot. Yeah. Yeah. It should be a fringe phenomenon, right? But I haven't seen it get an increase in traction. Yeah, even in like relatively, you know, like I won't start a war with various U.S.

Starting point is 01:11:49 leftist publications. But I went to pitch some people, this last week, thinking, like, there is speculation that the United States will once again ally itself with Kurdish groups, so I'm sure it had then planned to once again abandon when that became politically more expedient. But I happened to have some insight into these various Kurdish groups, having spent some time there and having contacts there. And so I went to the websites of these various, you know, big publications which are left or left-leaning or even sort of liberal. And I saw these borderline campus

Starting point is 01:12:22 takes on what's happening in Iran. And it's just so so frustrating to me. It makes me so angry that people continue to view the world through this binary, Marvel movie lens, which sees it as impossible that two things

Starting point is 01:12:39 could be bad at the same time. Yeah, it's infuriating to me. Yeah. And if I was more inclined to conspiracy, I might say that this binary is intentionally constructed. you know, it's by design that the most vocal anti-imperialist voices also just so happen to align themselves with state power.

Starting point is 01:13:05 Yeah. And campism. But I'm not inclined to conspiracy, so. Yeah, yeah. One could make a pretty reasonable argument for that, right? One could make that argument. Yeah. I won't, but one could.

Starting point is 01:13:19 I might. I think one of the best examples, examples of this is the sort of odd obsession that some people have with Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi. Now, last episode, we spoke about the long-term consequences of Western intervention in Libya, beginning with the 2011 uprising during the Arab Spring against the 42-year rule of Muammar Gaddafi. What began as a broad, largely leaderless protest movement was quickly shaped by foreign intervention. In March of 2011, the U.S., the UK, and France launched a military campaign through NATO under a UN mandate to protect civilians.

Starting point is 01:13:57 The war toppled Gaddafi but killed tens of thousands and devastated infrastructure. In the aftermath, Libya fractured into rival governments, militias and foreign-backed factions, triggering yet another civil war in 2014. And despite a ceasefire in 2020, the country remains divided between competing administrations, while ordinary Libyans face instability, human rights abuses, and economic hardship. I think it's fair to say that the NATO intervention was a net negative for the country. But in the same breath, I cannot agree with those who seem to believe that Gaddafi's rule could have continued either, that he was some force for good in the country.

Starting point is 01:14:38 And in this episode, I really want to get into the why, to identify and dissect the actions of the man Gaddafi. According to his biography in Encyclopedia Britannica, Murma al-Qaddafi was born in 1942 near Sirti, Libya. 69 years later, he would be captured and killed in Sirti, Libya. After spending his early years in a tent, he graduated from the University of Libya in 1963 and then graduated from a military academy in 1965. In 1969, at the age of 27, Gaddafi pulled off a bloodless coup to seize power from King Idris I of First of Libya. For the next four decades plus, he would be the de facto ruler of Libya. Gaddafi was both a passionate Arab nationalist and a Muslim.

Starting point is 01:15:30 In power, he tried to push both of his ideologies. He expelled Western military forces, expelled remaining Italian settlers and Jewish communities, in Libya, nationalized the country's oil industry, banned alcohol and gambling, tried to unify with his Arab neighbors, occasionally by attempting coups in their countries, and stood against normalization with Israel. So a very mixed bag, so far. Until 1977, Gaddafi ruled the Libyan Arab Republic. But the culmination of his cultural revolution period from 1973 to 1977 would sideline his political and religious opponents, who would begin in to see him as unstable, hubristic, and authoritarian. That period would instead cement Gaddafi as the sole ruler of what he would rename

Starting point is 01:16:22 the socialist people's Libyan Arab Jamahiria. As recounted in Libya, the history of Gaddafi's pariah state by John Oaks, Jamahiria was a term he coined in his green book, likely inspired by Mao's little red book published during the Libyan Cultural Revolution period. Jamahiria was his idea of a state of the masses, governed by People's Congresses and Popular Assemblies. And if it's one thing that makes a political movement, it's empowering, it's slapping the peoples and popular label on everything, regardless of any additional context. So they had these Democratic local assemblies called Basic People's Congresses that met three

Starting point is 01:17:05 times a year. And those congresses appointed executive people's committees, which did most of the day-to-day stuff. And above at all was the General People's Congress. This period was simultaneously an effort to encourage popular participation through these congresses, while suppressing descent through his control over the secret services. It was clear that Gaddafi was still in charge, even after he stepped down from his formal position as Secretary General in 1979, and simply and humbly dubbed himself the brotherly leader

Starting point is 01:17:39 and guide of the revolution some of his hubristic stuff like his rhetoric his outfit his reference to himself it's like

Starting point is 01:17:51 you couldn't parody some of it it is where like the parodies of dictators in this part of the world come from is Gaddafi's

Starting point is 01:17:59 kind of effect I guess yeah he was a character yes that he was yeah he was

Starting point is 01:18:05 Definitely a character. Yeah. So, I mean, anarchist critiques of democracy are easy to find. And although Gaddafi's Libya was never solely directly democratic, even in his project,

Starting point is 01:18:21 you could see some of the flaws, some of the issues that anarchists have identified in this approach to popular power. As the Congresses or the People's Congresses were poorly attended and easily manipulated. Issues were often raised and were rarely resolved.

Starting point is 01:18:37 And of course, compounding those flaws was the fact that these people's congresses had no actual power over the things that mattered in Libya. Yeah. The oil industry, the armed forces, the security services, and foreign policy. Where Gaddafi and his compatriots still ruled. Gaddafi decided where the oil money went, and he directed some of it to a great man-made river project that would extract from the ancient and non-renewable aquifer under the Libyan desert to supply the coast with a more stable water supply.

Starting point is 01:19:08 Frustratingly for him, I could assume, Gaddafi did not get what he wanted out of the revolutionary people's congresses. So he created revolutionary committees to mobilize the people and safeguard their rule through commandos that answered to Gaddafi directly. These revolutionary committees could arrest counter-revolutionaries, establish revolutionary courts, and eliminate enemies of the revolution at. home and abroad. The people he called stray dogs. All of this for the people, of course, and for the revolution. So on people, his system had some degree of people power and people voice,

Starting point is 01:19:59 but in practice, he exercised near total control and suppression of opposition, both within the country and outside the country. The same went for workplaces, of course. He spoke about worker partnership and power in the Green Book, but it was a state-controlled and state-distributed economy in Libya, run by oil money, with very few worker-run enterprises. There was also no real freedom of organization or strike in Libya, as independent unions were banned, and Gaddafi explicitly rejected class struggle, despite claiming to be a socialist. So, in the return of Muammar Gaddafi by Tunisian academic Hatham Gussemi. He highlights the cult of personality that was forged over the years of Gaddafi's rule that has resurfaced up to the sea. His proponents often point to the

Starting point is 01:20:52 good that he did for the country, establishing basic social services, free health care and education, housing and land distribution, accessible loan programs, women's rights, and so on. And with that welfare state came naturally some base of popular support for a people who had little to nothing before. Other fans of Gaddafi point to what I like to call hype moments and aura. So there was a time when he was in the UN General Assembly and he had what was supposed to be a short time to speak and he just went on and on and on and on and on and on and he tore up the UN Charter, Hype moments and aura, right? And that's like something that a lot of people point to. He was also at one point in time the chairman of the African Union and he wanted to

Starting point is 01:21:43 keep that position permanently and he was proposing a whole United States of Africa, like he had a whole period of African solidarity, which we'll get to. Yeah, okay, good. Yeah, his pan-Africanist arc is just fascinating. Yeah. So none of this, however, erases his dark, dark side. for one, for all the women's rights that he put forward in Libya, he was not that great to women. The Green Book presents Gaddafi as someone who cared about women's dignity and rights, but even in that book, you see a very complementarist take on women's place in society. It's like, yeah, they're equal to men, but also their role is in the household. They're supposed to be mothers above everything else.

Starting point is 01:22:31 Yeah. He was like, they need to be mothers, but they shouldn't be treated as property or objects. Yeah, I think he based a lot of this in, like, his interpretation of hadith or the Quran, like, his idea that, like, there was some kind of divine guidance on gender roles, right? I've actually seen this in recent days. Like, you can go and find Hamina's tweets, right? Like Ayatollah Haminai, not his son. And, like, you can see his stuff where he's like, you should not mistreat your wife.

Starting point is 01:22:59 You can literally find those in his timeline on. Twitter, right? He was a big poster. And people have somehow attempted to, like, construe this as, like, he was a leader of enlightened feminist regime in Iran, which, I don't know. It's benevolent patriarchy all over again. Yeah, like, you have to be really on a special fucking truth trajectory to convince yourself that that is the case. Like, it takes remarkable capacity for self-delusion to rather, rather than, you know, than listening to women in Iran, women from Iran, many of whom I have spoken to, to look at the evidence of the killing, for example, with Jinnaharmini, right? To be like, I know, but I found this

Starting point is 01:23:44 tweet from 2013, so we're good here. This is fine. It's just remarkable people's tendency to do that. Yeah, it's remarkable and stupid. Yeah, yeah, stupid is a good word. Yeah, and going back to Gaddafi, aside from that sort of benevolent patriarchy take on women's equality. Investigative reporting by Anna Kajin also gathered testimony since his fall that alleged his procurement, cohesion, and sexual abuse of women inside his compound, aided by a network of officials. Unfortunately, many of these women are far too afraid to come forward, even all these years after his death, due to,

Starting point is 01:24:28 the persistence of pro-Gaddafi sentiment in the country up to today. So not the best for women. What about for Africa, right? His whole pan-Africanist arc. Yeah. He styled himself as a pan-African who would support the struggles of people like Mandela and would fund infrastructure projects around the continent. But he had a history of attempting to overthrow governments in Africa

Starting point is 01:24:58 and support oppressive ones, including Idi Amin of Uganda and Charles Taylor of Liberia. Since Pan-Africanism was never concerned with the freedom or well-being of African people, it was, I think, very much according to his own self-aggrandizement. Yeah, like, he, didn't he propose, like an African Union, which was more akin to, like, a United States, like a federal Africa? Yes, the United States of Africa. That was his proposal. Fantastic, yeah.

Starting point is 01:25:30 Yeah. Great. And as he's proposing this pan-African vision, within Libya itself, he was pushing for an Arab Libya. The Amazique and other non-Arab Africans in Libya were mistreated. His vision of an Arab Libya led to the suppression of the Tuaregs, the Taboos, and the Amaziv. He had policies, as reported in the beginning.

Starting point is 01:25:58 BBC, New Internationalist, Al Jazeera and Osway, he had policies that included the banning of minority languages, the banning of minority names, the discouraging of cultural expression, and sometimes denying citizenship to groups outside the Arab identity. So naturally, many of these minorities took part in the 2011 movement, and after Gaddafi's fall, there was a revival of language, cultural institutions, and publications. However, the NTC and those that followed have continued to ignore the minority plight. Minority groups are still struggling for constitutional recognition, representation, and equal rights in a country that is, of course, still divided. And some minorities have chosen to boycott the national political process entirely in favor of pursuing local self-governance. Also, minorities were not the only people being persecuted in Gaddafi's Libya.

Starting point is 01:26:51 On the political front, despite calling himself a socialist, Gaddafi was really all over the place ideologically. Now, internationally, he may have backed the Palestinian struggle, the Irish struggle, the African-American struggle, but he was consistent in suppressing actual leftists in Libya. Marxist.com identified some of these repressive efforts in their article on Gaddafi. Quote, Gaddafi was very clear in expressing his anti-communism. In 1971, he sent a plane full of Sudanese communists back to Sudan where they were executed by Nimeri. In 1973, the regime published an official document to commemorate the fourth anniversary of Gaddafi's rise to power, under the title, Holy War Against Communism, end quote.

Starting point is 01:27:37 Quite eccentric. Later on, however, he would get more chummy with the USSR, but Gaddafi was no Marxistist. And communists and leftists and workers were not legally capable of organizing independently in Libya. Aside from them, you also had the murder and torture of civilians and Germans and journalists. journalists, the assassinations of rivals in Libya and around the world. It was not the free speech utopia that Gaddafi tried to paint it as. Instead of emboldening the left discernments, he emboldened these tribal groups and set the foundation for the Libya that we see today.

Starting point is 01:28:16 His consistent through line is that he liked strong men and sees himself among them and wants to associate himself with them. At some point in the early 2000s, he was supporting York Haider, a neo-fascist in Austria, and telling Europeans they needed to get past their obsession with the Second World War. He had no consistent politics. Well, I mean, that tracks with his expulsion of Jewish communities in Libya. Yeah. He didn't only expel Jewish settlers.

Starting point is 01:28:46 He expelled Jewish communities that had arrived prior to Italian colonization that had existed in Libya for centuries. Yeah, that maybe, I guess, anti-Semitism can often be the link that brings terrible people together. He had a lot of other notorious incidents of suppression, but one of the most significant was the Abusalan massacre. In short, as recounted by John Oakes, Abu Salon was the site of a prisoner's protest on the 28th of June 1996. The prisoners escaped their cells and were protesting their mistreatment as guards shot at them from the roof. Two top security officials came and took command, ordering the shooting to stop, and promising to address the prisoners' complaints if they returned to their cells and gave up the guards they had hostage.

Starting point is 01:29:34 And the following day, shots fired from 11am to 1.35 p.m. A mass slaughter of approximately 1,200 of the 16 to 1,700 prisoners in Abu Salinas. The families who suffered that blow were among the first on the streets of Benghazi, 2011. But those families were not originally told that their loved ones had been killed. Some of them continued to visit the prison for weeks, months, years after

Starting point is 01:30:04 bringing gifts for the relatives who were already long dead. In the twists and turns of Gaddafi's ideological development, or lack thereof, following the fall of the USSR, Gaddafi would also pursue economic liberalization. He started open,

Starting point is 01:30:23 putting up to the West, ever so slightly. There was slow progress and a brief hiccup. But by 2003, free market advocate Shukri Ganim was appointed Prime Minister. Before long, 360 state enterprises were privatized. By 2007, Libya was laying off as many as a third of the government workforce. 400,000 public sector workers. According to a New York Times article from 2011, the IMF had actually praised Libya's economic reforms. So by 2011, conditions were so unbearable for so many workers, especially

Starting point is 01:30:59 young people, there's no wonder that some of them fought with nothing to lose. The last aspects of Gaddafi's rule that I want to touch on was his complex relationship with Western powers. Lillianist rule in the 70s and 80s, he did style himself an anti-imperish revolutionary, and that is the image that a lot of people uphold of him to this day. Libya funded and armed revolutionary and militant movements worldwide from the African National Congress or the ANC to the Palestine Liberation Organization or PLO to the Irish Republican Army or IRA.

Starting point is 01:31:44 He aligned himself with the so-called radical camp in the Middle East, including Bathis Syria and Iran. And Western governments accused Libya of supporting international terrorism. Libya was considered a rogue state. but as noted by Syrian anarchist Mazzen Kamalmas in an interview with Jose Antonio Guitares, quote, even when Gaddafi was declaring himself an anti-imperialist long ago, it was just a lip service while he engaged as an authoritarian in trivial terrorist acts

Starting point is 01:32:15 that never meant to support libertarian objectives of the victims of imperialism, end quote. Still, Reagan called him a mad dog and the US bombed Libya in 1986 after attacks in a West Berlin nightclub were attributed to Libyan agents. Those bombings narrowly missed Gaddafi himself, but they killed his adopted baby daughter. Libya was also blamed for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerby, which led to sanctions by the United Nations and the US, which isolated Libya economically and diplomatically. In the 90s, however, before the USSR, are, Libya began solely shifting toward co-operation.

Starting point is 01:32:57 They handed over the suspects in the Lockerbie bombing, and sanctions began to loosen as they attempted to normalize relations. Western intelligence soon started cooperating with Libyan intelligence against Islamist militant groups, including the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which is a thorn in Gaddafi side. The early 2000s had Libya renounce its weapons of mass destruction program following the invasion of Iraq. The U.S. and the U.N. subsequently lifted sanctions and diplomatic relations were restored fully with Western countries. Gaddafi hosted Tony Blair of the UK, Nicholas Sarkozy of France, and met with Obama as well. And many of these meetings with Western leaders produced multi-billion dollar energy and business deals. BP, Royal Dot Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Total Energies, they were all getting pieces of Libya's wealth.

Starting point is 01:33:48 as Libya began adopting more neoliberal economic reforms like currency devaluation, trade liberalization, and more openness to foreign investment, Libya was also able to cooperate closely with Western intelligence during war on terror, including assisting the CIA and MI6 in rendition and torture, as uncovered by Human Rights Watch. So by the mid-2000s, Libya had mostly reintegrated into the Western-led global system, and the West, for their part, simply in its own. ignored Gaddafi's continued human rights abuses, the counterterrorism cooperation, the oil and gas contracts, and don't forget the brutal African migrant control,

Starting point is 01:34:28 were all too valuable for America and Europe. I remember this period quite a while. It was when I was in my undergraduate university, and Gaddafi was invited to speak. The Oxford Union, I did my undergraduate there, and myself and a number of her friends. So you met Gaddafi? No, he spoke via video.

Starting point is 01:34:48 conference. Okay. Which they paused while they removed us for protesting Gaddafi's. It just seemed like this decades of abuse of his own people have been completely forgotten, right, because he was now prepared to do abuse of other people that was beneficial to the United Kingdom, the United States. And we felt like that was apparent and wrong. So we went to make our feelings known. And the Oxford Union is a very silly institution, right? We deprive itself on free speech. And really it just does kind of class reproduction for the most part.

Starting point is 01:35:23 Right. And of course, there was not freedom of speech for people who were going to be rude to someone who was in charge of a state, even if they were being rude on behalf of the thousands of people. He's had murdered and tortured. And, yeah, that was my little personal running with Gaddafi when I was, what, like 18. But, yeah, I can't remember if we were, like, not allowed in or we were booted out because I am like two decades and half a dozen traumatic brain injuries since my teenage years. But yeah, I do remember just being like people are treating with like some kind of fucking novelty.

Starting point is 01:35:59 And this person has real blood on his hands. Real people have suffered tremendously and died because of actions he's taken. Like it's not funny or cute. Wow. What year was that? It would have been in the early 2000s, the Bush era, because that's when I was in my undergraduate. second Bush term. So like it would have been bought in 2006, someone somewhere there. Yeah, thankfully I never had any run-ins with Gaddafi.

Starting point is 01:36:25 Yeah. Even at that time, I can remember just being sort of somewhat appalled by the Marxist-Leninist tendency to excuse crimes against humanity as long as they were done by people who said the right things, who had the right vibes, who condemned the right people. and the liberal tendency to excuse crimes against humanity so long as they were done in service of capitalism and the state. Yeah. Yeah. Shockingly similar tendencies in some ways.

Starting point is 01:36:55 Yeah, right. Like this fundamentally not rooted in the idea that people have a right to dignity. Both of them hold people as less valuable than other things, right? Be it capital or, I mean, the Marxist-ledmish tendency. Honestly, like, it's not even the revolution that they believe it's more valuable than people. It's the revolutionary rhetoric. Yeah. Like with Assad, right?

Starting point is 01:37:20 Like, you can murder your own people with chemical weapons so long as you pretend to give a single shit about Palestinians, even though you've spent decades using your weapons to kill your own people and never once use them to actually help the people of Palestine to actually protect people. Exactly. Exactly. So at this point now, you know, Gaddafi's trying to be all chummy with the West after he spent some time being chummy with Africa and spent some time being chummy with USSR and with rebel groups around the world.

Starting point is 01:37:56 But that was just the thing, right? He had this track record of flip-flop-in, you know? And even though relations had normalized, these Western powers could not trust him. They still saw him as that mad dog. They still saw him as unpredictable. and unreliable. In fact, even while he was cutting deals with these multi-billion dollar corporations for the oil contracts and so on, when he wasn't getting what he wanted, he would threaten to nationalize to get what he wanted. And so, the West being opportunistic, were just waiting for an opportunity.

Starting point is 01:38:31 They were done with playing his game. And that opportunity came when the people organically rose up against Gaddafi in 2011. not long after NATO intervened, and the years since Libyans have suffered and died with no end in sight. It shouldn't be uncontroversial to say this. Gaddafi was not a true anti-imperialist. I don't think it's possible for a statesman or a government to be truly anti-imperialist. Government is foundationally exploitative internally, and when turned externally, that drive exploitation is what we understand,

Starting point is 01:39:10 as imperialism. All the markers of imperialism worthy of condemnation, be it economic exploitation, cultural dominance, military violence, etc., is carried out under the label of governance when done within its own borders, when done against, for example, the non-Arab minorities in Libya. I think what's missing from now popular anti-imperialist narratives is that connection, that analysis. And a gap in the analysis is what's creating this false consciousness that leads people to come to the conclusion that anti-imperialism means that XYZ government is anti-imperialist and good and ABC government is imperialist and bad. That's not how the world works. States are never going to be liberatory. They're not able to produce a liberatory framework.

Starting point is 01:39:59 At their best, they function as a welfare state. At their worst, you get mass suppression and cults of, personality. Sometimes you get a combination of both, as with Libya and Gaddafi. And that's my message for today. Please stop lionizing leaders. Stay woke. Yeah. And all power to all the people. I've been Andrew Sage. This is a catapineer. Peace. 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. I'm Jennifer Stewart.

Starting point is 01:40:49 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 IHart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Our 26, IHard Country Festival, presented by Capital One. Tickets are on sale now to see Luke Bryant, Kane Brown, Dickerson, Gretchen Wilson, Chase Matthew, Lauren Elena, special guest George Birch, Saturday, May 2nd at the Moody Center in Austin. Stream live on Disney Plus and Hulu.

Starting point is 01:41:39 Do you remember when Diana Ross double-tapped Little Kim's boobs at the VMAs? Or when Kanye said that George Bush didn't like black people. I know what you're thinking. What the hell does George Bush got to do with Little Kim? Well, you can find out. on the Look Back at it podcast. I'm Sam Jett. And I'm Alex English.

Starting point is 01:41:56 Each episode, we pick a here, unpack what went down, and try to make sense of how we survived it. Including a recent episode with Mark Lamont Hill waxing all about crack in the 80s. To be clear, 84 is big to me, not just because of crack. I'm down to talk about crack on day,

Starting point is 01:42:12 but just so y'all know. I mean, at this point, Mark, this is the second episode where we've discussed crack. So I'm starting to see that there's a through line. We also have AIDS on the table right now. Thank you for finishing that sentence. I don't think there's a more important year for black people. Really?

Starting point is 01:42:29 Yeah. For me, it's one of the most important years for black people in American history. Listen to look back at it on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to my new podcast, Learn the Hard Way with me, your host, and your favorite therapist, Kear Games. And in recognition of mental health awareness month, I'm bringing over a decade of my own experience in the mental health field and conversations with so many incredible guests. I'm talking. Trip Fontaine, Ryan Clark.

Starting point is 01:42:56 Sometimes when we're in the pursuit of the thing, we get so wrapped up in the chase that we don't realize that we are in possession of the thing and we're still chasing it and we don't know when we've done enough because people scoreboard watch. Life becomes about wins and losses. Steve Burns, Dustin Ross,

Starting point is 01:43:14 because you find it important to be a good person while you hear on earth? Are you a good person because you're afraid? Because that's two different intentions, bro. Absolutely. And that's two different levels of trust. I want you to just really be a good person. Join me, Kear Gaines, is we have real conversations about healing, growth, fatherhood, pressure, and purpose on my new podcast, Learn the Hard Way. Open your free, I Heart Radio app. Search Learn the Hardway and listen now. On Sunday, April 12th, I went to the basement nightclub in Queens.

Starting point is 01:43:49 Like usual, someone scanned my ticket at the big gate off Flushing Avenue. I had to wait in a winding line. outside the door, went through security, and finally reached the DJ and bar. But instead of the regular collection of twinks, dolls, and bisexuals, the room was full of city workers, politicians, journalists, and DSA members, a decent number of which probably were bisexual, I suppose. Technically, we were directly above the basement nightclub in the knockdown center event venue gathered this Sunday afternoon to attend Mayor Zoron on Mamdani's 100-day address.

Starting point is 01:44:29 I'm Garrison Davis. This is It Could Happen Here, a showboat things falling apart and sometimes putting stuff back together. This one is one of those rare episodes focused on the latter. Earlier this April, marked Mayor Mamdani's first 100 days in office.

Starting point is 01:44:46 This episode, I'll discuss what Zoran has done these first 100 days, some of the challenges he's faced. If he's been able to deliver on the promises of his campaign, and how he's adapted to the power and constraints of running the biggest city in the country. And finally, what all this could mean for the future of working class and left-wing politics in the United States. Let's first return to the 100-day address above the basement nightclub.

Starting point is 01:45:14 Upon entering the venue, you found yourself in a museum of the administration's first 100 days. This little installation displayed the mayor's snow shovel from the historic blizzard during Zoran's first few weeks in office. a tenant organizing suggestion board from the rental rip-off hearings, and a child-sized mayoral podium used to announce a new free child care program for two-year-olds. Museum plaques detailed victories for labor and tenants' rights, as well as infrastructure accomplishments like scaffolding reform, and a pothole blitz that filled over 20,000 potholes in just three days. Before the mayor's speech, a Bronx parent, two tenant organizers,

Starting point is 01:45:53 and a city worker from the Department of Transportation, spoke to the crowd about how life is different under the new administration. Momdani's speech was effectively a state of the union for New York City. The mayor outlined the campaign promises the administration has fulfilled so far in their short time in office, and connected his style of governing to the sewer socialists of Milwaukee from the first half the 20th century, who focused on strengthening public services. Because for too long, City Hall had not just failed to meet expectations. It had lowered them.

Starting point is 01:46:28 After years of broken promises, no one in this city could be blamed for doubting that government held either the ability or the ambition to upend the status quo. It, as I said, on that freezing January afternoon to more than eight and a half million New Yorkers, we will make no apology for what we believe. I was elected as a Democratic socialist and I will govern as a Democratic socialist. This speech was really the first time since the inauguration that the mayor has talked at length about what it means to govern as a democratic socialist, and the example that New York City can set for the rest of the country. The address was mostly attended by city workers, who the mayor invited to enter into a ticket lottery. For most of the speech, I was pinned between a group of Uniformed Department of Sanitation Employees and workers from the Department of Consumer and Worker

Starting point is 01:47:28 Protection. The event in general was focused on uplifting civil servants and celebrating public service, whether that be bus drivers, school teachers, or the sanitation workers that kept this city running during the worst snowstorm in years. It feels like for the past few decades, the only public sector job that gets regularly celebrated as noble by those in government or in the media, and promoted by pop culture, is being a police officer. Being a cop is the only public sector job that gets uplifted with propaganda. Zoron's little videos promoting 311 city call center workers is, to quote, front of the pod, Ben Lorber, rolling back decades of neoliberal propaganda,

Starting point is 01:48:13 reasserting the dignity of public sector work and workers. A common turn of phrase uttered by Mayor Mamdani is, If you can't solve the smallest task in someone's life, why would they ever trust you to solve the biggest one? So, let's go over some things, big and small, that Mamdani has been able to do in his first 100 days. One of Mamdani's core campaign promises was to freeze the rent. On February 18th, Mayor Mamdani appointed six new members to the nine-member Rent Guidelines Board, which each year is tasked with determining the rent-increased percentages for the more than one million rent-stabilized apartments in the city. Under Eric Adams, the board approved a 3%

Starting point is 01:48:57 rent increase for one-year leases and a 4.5% increase for two-year leases. In just a few weeks, the new board will hold a preliminary vote to freeze or raise rents before their final vote in June. Public testimony on rent adjustments is currently underway. Housing in general is one of the top issues affecting affordability in the city, and the mayor's approach has not been limited to filling vacancies on the rent guidelines board. After Zoran's inauguration speech on January 1st, he went to a neglected apartment building just east of Prospect Park to sign an executive order revitalizing the mayor's office to protect tenants and appointed a tenant organizer to lead the office. This apartment building was owned by a literally bankrupt landlord called the Pinnacle Group, who was responsible for

Starting point is 01:49:47 more than 5,000 housing violations and 14,000 complaints. The revamped office to protect tenants and the mayor intervened in the bankruptcy proceedings and successfully secured $30 million in repairs and upgrades for tenants, as well as protection from future displacement. Through this office, the administration has continued to crack down on bad landlords who violate New York City law and mistreat tenants. Just a few weeks after the inauguration, Momdani announced a $2.1 million settlement from A&E real estate properties for tenant harassment

Starting point is 01:50:22 and hazardous conditions across 14 buildings in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens. As a part of the settlement, A&E was also required to correct more than 4,000 building condition violations. In February, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development released a public list of the 250 buildings with the most severe housing code violations a citywide and put them under heightened oversight via the alternative enforcement program. With the city stepping in to make repairs, then billing the landlords if they failed to address violations. Since January 1st, we have won more than $34 million in settlements, judgments, and repairs for tenants. Delivered improvements to 6,070 apartments so far and issued 195,8299 violations.

Starting point is 01:51:17 New York City will no longer tolerate exploitation as a business model. In March, Mayor Mamdani announced a quote-unquote landmark victory against famously bad landlord Seth Miller of Aegis Realty. You can say the landlord was egregious at Realty. The city brought a case against Miller for dangerously derelict, conditions at 919 Prospect Avenue in the South Bronx, and for the first time ever, courts imposed the maximum penalties under the city's nuisance abatement law, a $1,000 fine per day until housing violations are addressed, and $2.174 million in retroactive penalties. During the first 100 days,

Starting point is 01:52:05 the city held five rental rip-off hearings, one in each borough, providing New Yorkers a platform to discuss various problems with their landlord from poor conditions to repair delays or junk fees. This was a dedicated public forum for tenants to speak directly to city officials and collectively shape housing policy going forward. A month into office, the mayor announced a $38 million investment to install modern heating and cooling in 712 of New York City's public housing units at the Beach 41st Street houses in Queens. And technically, this is after the first 100 days, but I think it's worth mentioning that just a few days ago, Zoran announced a $2.5 billion investment in public housing to deliver new energy-efficient

Starting point is 01:52:51 lighting and faucets to 45,000 homes, heat pumps in 20,000 and 10,000 new induction stoves, all affecting the NYCHA public housing in New York City. On Zoran's very first day in office, he also signed two executive orders to accelerate housing construction by building on city-owned properties to increase the supply of affordable housing and cutting red tape to make it faster and more affordable to build. The development approval process for building affordable housing has been reduced by more than two years by the administration's implementation of the new voter-approved expedited land use review procedure, combined with a new program called the Neighborhood Builders Fast Track, which will pre-select qualified developers to shorten the pre-development timeline by eight months

Starting point is 01:53:36 for certain projects on city-owned land. Another of Zoran's core campaign promises was universal child care. On his eighth day in office, Mayor Ramdani announced a partnership with Governor Kathy Hokel to provide free child care for thousands of two-year-olds in New York City with a $1.2 billion increase in state funding. Since then, the mayor has expanded the free 3K program for 3-year-olds to more than half of all school districts in the city and announced 2K fall enrollment for school districts 18, 20,

Starting point is 01:54:09 23, 10, 6, and 27, which serve lower-income neighborhoods. 2K applications open for the first time on June 2nd, with the program operating on a full-day schedule from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. all year around. As a part of the 3K expansion, 7 new early child care education centers are opening in Western Queens, Staten Island, South Brooklyn, and the South Bronx. And on March 30th, the mayor announced the city's first pilot program for free on site childcare for city workers based at the David Dinkins Municipal Building, with applications opening on April 30th. The city also created a new accessible child care provider map with

Starting point is 01:54:51 interactive features to filter by location, age group, and cost. The mayor says that all these steps will lead to free child care for every three-year-old and two-year-old in the city by the end of his first term. Another key promise was fast and free buses. The administration is making headway on the fast part by building more bus lanes, redesigning streets, as well as adding protected bike lanes on McGinnis Boulevard, 31st Street in Astoria, Ashland's Place, across Flatbush, East Flatbush, Midwood, and Brooklyn and Kingston Avenues in central Brooklyn. Amdani restarted the stalled Madison Ave bus lane redesign to make buses faster and more reliable

Starting point is 01:55:32 for 92,000 daily riders. The city announced a new bus lane for the Bronx Cross Town Bus Service to, Yankee Stadium, and restarted the Fordham Road bus lane project to improve the bus corridor in the Bronx, servicing an average of 130,000 daily riders across four routes. Just this week, construction began in Brooklyn for the redesign of Flatbush Avenue, with the goal of improving bus speeds by over 40% for 132,000 daily riders. And before the World Cup this summer, Zoran has promised to complete new bike lanes and pedestrian upgrades in Lower Manhattan.

Starting point is 01:56:09 As for the free part, that will be a bit harder. Mamdani maintains that his administration is working with the state government in Albany and the MTA to eventually make New York City buses free and proposed a five-week free bus pilot program during the World Cup, though it's unclear if that will happen. It's not all sunshine and rainbows in New York City. Upon taking office, Mayor Mamdani discovered the city was facing an unexpected financial crisis in the form of a hidden $12 billion deficit left by former Mayor Eric Adams, stemming from years of fiscal mismanagement

Starting point is 01:56:56 and the under budgeting of essential services like rental and cash assistance, shelters, health insurance, and special ed. As mayor, Eric Adams covered up this massive budget deficit by leaving the gaps grossly understated, gaps that were made worse by divestment in New York City by the state under former governor Andrew Cuomo. The mayor is actually required by law. to have a balanced budget. So rather than sweeping this under the rug by continuing to cook the

Starting point is 01:57:23 city's books like his predecessor, Zoron chose transparency about the financial crisis he's inherited and signed an executive order to designate chief savings officers in every city agency to streamline processes and eliminate waste. Some of these savings so far include canceling $20,000 of slack subscriptions to saving hundreds of thousands of dollars by foregoing vacant office space. Through his relationship with Governor Kathy Hokel, the mayor secured $1.5 billion in state aid in February. That, combined with higher than expected Wall Street revenues and savings measures, shrunk the deficit to $5.4 billion. Zoron's preliminary budget released last February sparked criticism for failing short of promises to increase funding to parks and libraries.

Starting point is 01:58:15 While campaigning, Zoron advocated for city library. to receive 0.5% of the city budget, but the preliminary budget only allocated 0.39%, which is actually a $29 million cut from the last Adams budget, down to $456 million. Meanwhile, the park budget remained effectively flat at about 0.5% rather than boosting it to 1% of the total budget, as Momdani previously hoped. Though in March, Mayor Mamdani announced new capital investment of $50 million to reconstruct 10 parks in underserved neighborhoods. This February budget is preliminary and subject to change as Zoron's negotiations with the city council and the state continue. In February, Mamdani reversed a previous policy against the forced removal of homeless encampments

Starting point is 01:59:07 after 20 people died in the street during a horrific blizzard and sudden cold snap in late January, despite the efforts of outreach workers visiting known homeless people every two hours to offer warm shelter and check if they needed help. 1,400 people were placed into shelters and warming centers during that first freeze, with 85 people involuntarily moved or hospitalized. The new encampment suite policy will be led by the Department of Homeless Services, rather than the NYPD, as they were under Eric Adams, which Momdani said put homeless New Yorkers in danger and was ineffective in moving people into shelter or housing.

Starting point is 01:59:47 Under the new plan, after posting a removal notice, outreach workers will visit encampments every day for a week with the goal of connecting people to shelter and establishing a pipeline to stable housing, while opening new shelters across the city, including New York City's first ever pet-inclusive transitional housing facility for families. Much of the criticism levied at Zoran revolves around his choice to retain NYPD-K Commissioner Jessica Tisch, something he announced before the election. Zoran did cancel an Eric Adams plan to add 5,000 more NYPD officers, but as promised, their budget remained effectively the same, despite the financial deficit.

Starting point is 02:00:28 But Tish specifically has been seen as a rare moderating force in the administration, an outlier that may be preventing police reforms that Zoron campaigned on, like disbanding the SRG, the strategic response group, tasked with respond. to both protests and terrorism, as well as getting rid of the NYPD gang database. Critics have noted that Zoron seems to be moving towards, quote-unquote, reforms of the gang database, rather than his previous call to get rid of it, saying in early April, quote, I've made my critiques of the database clear, and the NYPD has also implemented a number of reforms as per the recommendation that came through, and the implementation of those reforms,

Starting point is 02:01:09 and the results of that are part of the active discussion that we are having, unquote. The gang database in New York has shrunk by 40% in the last two years. As for the SRG, Mayor Mamdani still maintains that he remains, quote, steadfast in my commitment to disband the SRG to do so in a manner that upholds both First Amendment rights of New Yorkers and keeps New Yorkers safe, and that is the subject of an active conversation that we are having, unquote. Commissioner Tish has been particularly resistant to the idea of disbanding the SRG, though earlier this month, Mayor Mamdani's chief of staff, Elbezgard Church, said on the news that the administration remains committed to fulfilling the campaign promise of disbanding the SRG

Starting point is 02:01:55 and that a delegation of City Hall and NYPD officials traveled to Columbus, Ohio, to learn about their protest policing model focused on, quote, communication and, quote, de-escalation over mass arrests and aggressive force. The commitment is to disband the SRG, and I think that the Columbus visit showcases that we are committed to a really disciplined approach here. We want it to work, and we want to do it in collaboration with the NYPD. So the mayor is in regular conversation with his police commissioner, and our teams also meet regularly, so that we can design something that is best suited to that commitment being fulfilled and not compromising any of the safety and the protection that New Yorkers deserve. In an April interview, Mayor Mamdani did express to the New York Times that, when unable to reach

Starting point is 02:02:45 an agreement with Tish, he does have the power to overrule her on police policy if needed. Quote, ultimately, I hold the final decision no matter which department or agency were speaking about, unquote. Mamdani has not exercised his power with the NYPD as of yet. In March, Zoran took the first step in establishing the Department of Community Safety by opening the Office of Community Safety, led by Deputy Mayor Renita Francois, who directed De Blasio's action plan for neighborhood safety and advised Campaign Zero, which opposes the gang database. The new Office of Community Safety will develop strategies and coordinate efforts to combat

Starting point is 02:03:26 gun violence, mental health crisis response, hate crimes, and substance abuse issues. At the announcement, Francois said, quote, the evidence is clear, addressing what ails our communities, whether that be crumbling physical infrastructure, social disconnection, or a lack of access to economic opportunity is how we best ensure that our communities are safe, unquote. It's too early to judge the impact of the office, but such an office or city department has the potential to challenge the police's monopoly on public safety. The other common critique of Mamdani is based on his endorsement of liberal governor Kathy Hokel and his decision to focus on governing, rather than dedicating resources and political capital towards further uphill

Starting point is 02:04:11 primary challenges. Zoran has said, quote, the success of our movement will be defined by the success of our government. Through his working partnership with Governor Hokel, the mayor has been able to extract wins from the state, particularly for universal child care and the $1.5 billion in state aid. In the realm of discourse, some leftists, anarchists, or ultras, have jumped on. on any fault or policy shift as a sign that Zoran has wholly moved to the right or betrayed the movement. Such opinions are rewarded by the social media economy, which tends to encourage whatever is seen as the most radical, extreme, or divisive opinion. This tendency has been present, even among some of Zoran's earliest online supporters. Behind this tendency is a willingness and, frankly,

Starting point is 02:05:01 hunger to turn on Zoron, not necessarily for anything he has or has not done, but because of the position he now occupies. Zoron used to be an outsider, challenging the Democratic establishment embodied by Andrew Cuomo. But now he's one of the most popular Democrats in the country. DNC social media accounts are hosting Zoron memes and hype videos. This could be viewed as a massive accomplishment, evidence that the Democratic Party can be forced to be forced to. to bend toward left-wing populism because of the working-class voters and mass-organizing that put Zoron in the position

Starting point is 02:05:39 he's currently in. But others view Zoran's acceptance and select promotion within the party as a sign he's been corrupted, co-opted, recuperated, or made palatable. Both of these things can be partially true. The Democratic elite certainly have their own motives for dipping their toes into the Mamdani hot tub.

Starting point is 02:06:01 just as Zoran and the New York City DSA have their own aspirations for influencing the direction of the party towards social democracy and democratic socialism. In general, there's a lot of confusion or disagreement on what it means to be a democratic socialist in a position of power. As an executive, Zoran is in a unique position that not many other DSA members have ever had. Being in such a position of power informs and shapes the way someone interacts with the systems of party and state in a way that those outside of power

Starting point is 02:06:36 cannot fully understand. It filters ideology into material actions. This idea frightens many, but differences in political horizons also affect the way people interact and move with these systems. The question is not, what should Zoron do if there were no constraints on his power?

Starting point is 02:06:57 Because then, obviously, he should just implement utopian communism. but his power obviously does have constraints. If the goal for the left is to build a working-class movement, to that end, as a function of Zoron's constraints, it may actually be more effective for him to operate down to certain state pathways that allow him to facilitate the building of a working-class movement and avoid other more extreme pathways

Starting point is 02:07:22 that because of the current constraints on executive power would either be ineffective at best or self-destructive at work. As the mayor, Zoron's job is to run the biggest city in the country. And as a democratic socialist, that means using government to make life better for the working class. His task is to govern in a way that alleviates economic conditions to make it easier to organize and build a working class movement. But building that movement is not his job. It's yours. It's the job of the people.

Starting point is 02:07:56 And such a movement is the only way of holding election. leaders like Zoron accountable. Zoron is not a revolutionary, nor is he an organizer. He's the mayor of New York City, and as mayor, he has to serve more than 8 million New Yorkers, not just the 14,000 members of New York City DSA. The mayor may join the picket line with striking nurses and fight for working class New Yorkers in City Hall, or even open an office of mass engagement, like Zoran has done. But it is up to those outside City Hall to make.

Starting point is 02:08:30 move in tandem by working to rebuild a labor movement. Assuming that Zoron or some random public official can just do whatever is the most extreme radical thing, mistakenly sees the state as having more power than it actually does. People often see the state as an ahistorical abstracted seat of power. But no, the state is just the mediator between capital and labor. The power of the state to support labor is exercised by doing things that are in the interest of labor and society as a whole rather than just capital. But this ability is directly linked to the extent that labor is organized. So if labor is largely unorganized, then Zoron is

Starting point is 02:09:13 more restrained in what he can do. What he can do then is use his position to help build working class power, which will then enable him further, so on and so on. The state has no power against capital, outside of the power that labor gives it. Our situation is one where capital is very strong, which means when the state serves capital, it's quite strong. But in its function of serving labor, it's rather weak, because the left is built to reckon with the fact that right now, labor is actually quite weak, which means that state actors, even those on the pro-labor left, are very constrained.

Starting point is 02:09:54 So the main thing they can do to strengthen labor is providing better conditions for which labor power may be built. And importantly, organizers must utilize those conditions to build the labor movement. Zoran's other task is to demonstrate that left-wing working-class politics can actually govern, not just critique. Whether or not he succeeds at governing and delivering for working-class New Yorkers determines the perceived viability of Democratic Socialist politics nationally going forward. As Mamdani has said, the worth of an ideology can only be judged by its delivery. Mamdani is not the first Democratic socialist to be put in such a position. In his 100-day address, Mayor Mamdani spoke about the so-called sewer socialists of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who 100 years ago,

Starting point is 02:10:55 quote, built the greatest public park system in the nation and weathered the Great Depression better than almost any other American city. Milwaukee, Persian, corruption, built the first municipally sponsored public housing development in the nation, and transformed the city's sewage disposal system, unquote. Mayor Mamdani is trying to revive this legacy of municipal socialism by acting on his mantra, there is no problem too big, no task too small. On day six of office, Mamdani fixed the infamous Williamsburg Bridge bump that has long-plagued cyclists. And in response to the historic winter damage affecting city streets, the administration launched a five-borrow pothole blitz filling 100,000 potholes in less than 100 days.

Starting point is 02:11:43 This is pothole politics. Our 2026 answer to sewer socialism. Where government is not too busy, not too self-important, not too mired in paperwork to fix the problems of this city no matter their size. This quote-unquote pothole politics has extended to scaffolding reforms, reducing the time that sheds clutter our sidewalks. In January, the mayor announced a new program to expand modular public restrooms, and starting this summer, the roof of the historic David Dinkins Municipal Building will be open to the public for free viewing and tours. Fighting for workers from within City Hall isn't just an abstract ideal. In the first 100

Starting point is 02:12:25 days, the administration secured $9.3 million in restitution. No longer will city government be afraid of its own shadow. If anyone should be afraid, it is those who take advantage of working people. On January 15th, the city filed a lawsuit against a predatory delivery app called Motoclick for violating worker laws like minimal pay rate. At the end of January, Zoron announced more than $5 million in worker restitution and penalties due to minimum pay rate violations from three major restaurant delivery apps, Uber Eats, Fanton, and Hungry Panda. This money will be paid to almost 50,000 workers, and as a part of the settlement,

Starting point is 02:13:07 Uber also agreed to reinstate 10,000 wrongfully deactivated delivery workers. In March, the administration won almost $2 million for over 800 fast food workers at Taco Bell and retail workers for violations of worker protection laws against unpredictable. scheduling. The mayor signed executive orders strengthening consumer protections by targeting hidden junk fees and impossible to cancel subscriptions and expanded the protected time off law to 4.3 million previously unprotected workers and issued compliance warnings to nearly 60,000 employers. Speaking of sewer socialism, at the end of March, Mayor Mamdani announced a $108 million investment to upgrade and replace more than $6,700,000.

Starting point is 02:13:53 water catch basins to combat flooding. This quote-unquote pothole politics leaves the groundwork of public trust needed for larger systematic transformations. If government can't do the small things, how could you ever trust it to do the big ones? How can we promise to transform our city if we can't pave your street?

Starting point is 02:14:15 At the end of the 100-day address, Mayor Mamdani made a series of announcements. The administration is restarting trash containerization and will make buses faster for 1 million New Yorkers by speeding up buses by 20% along 45 priority corridors and constructing new rapid bus routes for 100,000 New Yorkers who live more than half a mile away from a subway or rail stop. But the big announcement was an update to another of Zoran's core campaign promises. The first of five city-owned grocery stores will open next year, with one store being opened in each borough by the end of Mamdani's first term.

Starting point is 02:14:56 The location of the Manhattan Municipal Grocery Store has already been selected. Le Marquetta in East Harlem, a public market opened by the New Deal-era Mayor Fierro LaGuardia. The city will build a 9,000 square foot store at the site to offer cheaper groceries than the capitalist competitors. I know there are many who use socialist as a dirty word. something to be ashamed of. They can try all they want, but we will not be ashamed of using government to fight for the many, not simply the few.

Starting point is 02:15:28 We will not be ashamed of adding more heat pumps to Nica buildings in the Rockaways or building more supportive housing in Harlem or standing steadfast alongside our trans neighbors. We will not be ashamed of investing in youth mental health clinics or working to close Rikers or fighting for immigrants targeted by ICE. To any New Yorker, whether you're under attack from the federal government's cruelty or suffocating under the affordability crisis, we will stand beside you.

Starting point is 02:16:14 Because government is a series of choices, and socialism is the choice to fight for every New Yorker. To extend democracy from the ballot box to the rest of our lives. Three days after Mamdani's 100-day address, on tax day, April 15, the mayor announced that he and Governor Hokel, had agreed to a new tax the rich proposal. New York State will have its first ever He-a-Tare tax, a wealth tax on second homes in New York City valued above $5 million, owned by out-of-state elites.

Starting point is 02:16:56 This tax on the ultra-wealthy is projected to generate $500 million in annual revenue. And if owners want to avoid the tax by moving into the residence, that's fine too, because then they'll have to pay New York resident taxes, so you get taxed either way. Part of pushing back against the libertarian ethos in America by showing that government can actually make your life better is actually showing people what local government is doing. Since taking office, Zoron has employed the same

Starting point is 02:17:29 widely successful messaging style that helped get him elected to make PSAs and inform New Yorkers about what the administration has been able to accomplish. This is something Democrats have largely failed to do by either just not doing this sort of outreach while governing, making any outreach inaccessible or hard to understand, or having your outreach come off as cringe or out of touch. Regardless of how much effort is put into outreach, the people have to also see the improvements being talked about in their own lives or in their own neighborhoods.

Starting point is 02:18:02 A dense population and having a cohesive city culture like New York helps with that. millions of cyclists cross the Williamsburg Bridge every year. So when the mayor fixes the bump during his first week in office, that's an easy reference point for people. The success of the administration's comm strategy has been by using Zoron's popularity to promote the public sector and public sector workers, while actually showing people how social services help city residents.

Starting point is 02:18:32 As the mayor says, New York belongs to all who live in it. While in office, Zoran has largely declined to explicitly talk about how his administration may impact the future of democratic socialism across the country. Instead, keeping his vision laser-focused on improving the lives of working New Yorkers and making the city more affordable. To quote the mayor, we cannot burden ourselves with the question of what this means beyond this city. But before the mayor went on stage at the 100-day address, They played a clip of the progressive New Deal mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia,

Starting point is 02:19:12 saying that the greatness of New York City is in the services to its people, where public problems are really the problems of all the people. Quote, and if we succeed here, surely it can be done elsewhere. When former socialist mayor Bernie Sanders made a surprise appearance during Zoran's speech, the senator spoke about how what's happening in New York is influencing those outside the state. city. And I want to tell all of you and the mayor that what you guys are doing here in New York City is important not only to the people here. What you are doing, what the mayor is doing, is providing hope and inspiration not only to people all across our country, but honestly all across the world.

Starting point is 02:20:03 As a part of Mamdani's first 100 days press circuit, he was asked on CBS News about the future of the Democratic Party and if his socialist politics are really viable. You know, what I find is that New Yorkers ask me less about how I describe my politics and more about whether my politics includes them. And I think what we can see is that a democratic socialist politics is one that should be judged on its delivery, like any ideology. And what we're showing in this city is we can pursue the big things like universal child care and do the pothole politics at the same time that we're showing and not just filling in the potholes, changing the catch basins, but also repaving over 1,000 miles of roadway. But Mr. Mr. Mayor, presidential and statewide elections are often decided in battleground regions that do not look like New York City. Yeah. I'll be honest with you. Before I was the mayor, I was an assembly member of Astoria in Long Island City. At that time, I was told that you could only be a Democratic socialist in Northwest Queens. then I became the mayor. Now the next question is the state. Then it'll be the next question will be the country. I think that this is a politics that can flourish anywhere because

Starting point is 02:21:07 frankly, there is only one majority in this country. That's the working class. And it's time we have a politics that puts them at the heart of what it is that we're pursuing and not as part of the appendix. Mamdani still has over 1,300 days left in his first term. And there will be more challenges along the way. Challenges with the NYPD, the MTA, the state government, federal government, the billionaires and the blood-sucking monsters among the Democratic Party elite. Attempts to hold politicians, like Zoran, truly accountable to their politics, will require more than Twitter Maoists and your small DSA caucus. Navigating all these problems will require not just principal leadership with a commitment to working-class politics, but also growing

Starting point is 02:21:52 the mass organizing apparatus that helped get Zorn elected and continuing to build power in city, whole, state government, and in the workplace. That does it today for it could happen here. See you on the other side. 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. 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 02:22:42 Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Our 2026 IHard Country Festival presented by Capital One. Tickets are on sale now to see Luke Bryant, Book column, Riley Green, Shaboozy, Dylan Scott, Russell Dickerson, Gretchen Wilson, Chase Matthew, Lauren Elena, special guest George Birch, Saturday, May 2nd at the Moody Center in Austin. Stream live on Disney Plus and Hulu. Do you remember when Diana Ross double-tapped Little Kim's boobs at the VMAs?

Starting point is 02:23:23 Or when Kanye said that George Bush didn't like black people. I know what you're thinking. What the hell does George Bush got to do with Little Kim? Well, you can find out on the Look Back at it podcast. I'm Sam Jett. And I'm Alex English. Each episode, we pick a here, unpack what went down, and try to make sense of how we survived it.

Starting point is 02:23:40 Including a recent episode with Mark Lamont Hill, waxing all about crack in the aliens. To be clear, 84 is big to me, not just because of crack. I'm down to talk about crack all day, but just so you all know. I mean, at this point, Mark, this is the second episode where we've discussed crack. So I'm starting to see that there's a through line. We also have AIDS on the table right now. Thank you for finishing that sentence.

Starting point is 02:24:04 Yes. I don't think there's a more important year for black people. Really? Yeah. For me, it's one of the most important years for black people in American history. Listen to look back at it on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to my new podcast, Learn the Hardway with me, your host, and your favorite therapist,

Starting point is 02:24:23 Kier Games. And in recognition of mental health awareness month, I'm bringing over a decade of my own experience in the mental health field and conversations with so many incredible guests. I'm talking, Tripp Fontaine, Ryan Clark. Sometimes when we're in the pursuit of the thing, we get so wrapped up in the chase that we don't realize that we are in possession of the thing. and we're still chasing it and we don't know when we've done enough

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Starting point is 02:25:30 in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by James Stout and Robert Evans. This episode recovering the week of April 22nd, April 30th. Anything, anything interesting happened this week? Very little, not much news. Oh, not much. I mean, Garrison, you've joined the ranks of the vaccine injured, right? Yeah, yeah. Also joining us of four live vaccines inside Garrison's body. Yes, thank you. Thank you for having me and my four live vaccines,

Starting point is 02:26:00 which have obliterated my body and mind this week as I scrambled to finish the Mamdani piece. But news happens, whether or not I feel bad. So let's get to it. In fact, I think to happen a lot when we feel. That does seem to that news sometimes, I just conspies that way. Now, we will talk about the thing, obviously.

Starting point is 02:26:20 We'll talk about the thing. But first, some smaller news items to start. Congress has voted to end the 76 day DHS shutdown without funding for ICE or Border Patrol. The bill now goes to Trump today. And if he signs it, the shutdown will be over. The House voted to reauthorize FISA Section 702, the warrantless surveillance authority. 42 House Democrats voted to reauthorize. 22 Republicans voted against the bills expected to be stalled in the Senate,

Starting point is 02:26:53 at least this version of the bill, as it included an amendment about digital currency, which the Senate will fight over. The ATF released a new list of proposed reforms and regulations, repealing the Biden pistol brace rule, as well as requiring, quote-unquote, biological sex be used on ATF forms. The State Department is releasing a limited edition passport for the United States 250th anniversary, featuring a portrait of President Trump superimposed on the Declaration of Independence and an American flag with his golden signature below.

Starting point is 02:27:27 Google Trump golden signature for more. Look, I'm just going to say if we have any foreign border control agents listening, you have to detain anybody who see with that passport. It is now possible for Nikki Minaj, and only not. Nikki Minaj to assemble the most unique collection of United States government documents in history if she become the citizen because she is apparently the only recipient of the gold card. The golden visa? Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:27:56 She could really get a unique, you know, Pokemon combination here of, I guess it would be, she'd have to advance pretty quickly from. She would. I'm not clear how one goes from gold card citizenship. And the only way we'll find out is by closely following Nikki Minaj. The DOJ indicted former FBI Dr. James Comey for the second time, this time, for posting an Instagram image

Starting point is 02:28:18 with the numbers 86-47. Once again, Trump's FCC is going after Disney's ABC licenses by directing Disney to file an early renewal order. After Jimmy Kimmel made a joke a few days before the White House correspondent's dinner about First Lady Melania Trump having the, quote,

Starting point is 02:28:37 glow of an expectant widow. It pains me to say, critical support to Jimmy Kimmel. President Trump, David Ellison, Todd Blanche, Stephen Miller, Barry Weiss, Paramount's chief legal officer, and several CBS journalists met in a closed-door dinner

Starting point is 02:28:52 in Washington, D.C. last week as the Paramount buyout of Warner Brothers and CNN progresses. Nightmare blunt rotation. Maine governor, Janet Mills, vetoed the state's 18-month data center moratorium, the first of its kind in the country. Days later, Mills dropped out of the Senate race,

Starting point is 02:29:10 paving the way for populist candidate Graham Platner to receive the Democratic nomination and go up against Susan Collins in the midterms. Most of Dem seem to already be behind him a sort of post from the At-Democrats account, picture of Graham. Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how the Democratic Party kind of falls in line behind this guy,

Starting point is 02:29:30 given the fairly unique degree of controversy over the Nazi tattoo and a couple of other things that have come up. But this has been in general the gap between kind of how random progressives and Democrats online talk about Platner and how people in Maine feel about him has been massive from the jump. And I think a lot of it has to do just with the fact that this guy went about campaigning in a very dedicated way. He visited basically every county that like he could. And it goes to show that the consensus that builds online around candidates

Starting point is 02:30:01 will never matter as much as like what they're out there actually doing in the world. And it's It's useful to get a reminder of that whether or not you think this is a tremendous disaster, just the degree to which all of the talk about this guy online had no impact on his ability to actually like win. Now, this is a unique case. There aren't a whole lot of seats that are like the seat that he's going to be taking, right? In terms of like both the weakness of your primary rival and the weakness of the other party, if you should happen to win the primary.

Starting point is 02:30:34 Like, this is not every congressional district. but it's still kind of an interesting case study. Maine is also like, it's not California, you know, like a Californian, so discourse happens online because we're a vast state and, you know, these big cities and such. And Maine is different. Like he has good ground game and that matters more there, it seems. And this signifies like a rejection of democratic establishment politicians. Like a hunger for change.

Starting point is 02:30:58 And the fact that someone with all the controversies that come with Platner was able to beat the democratic establishment, I think, shows how hungry. how hungry people are to upseat these blood-sucking monsters. Yeah, we'll keep reporting on that. I'm kind of interested in this race, so. Yes, no, absolutely. Susan Collins plays a unique role in the Senate right now. Finally, for me, on Saturday, a car bomb exploded at a police station in Dunmary,

Starting point is 02:31:27 northern Ireland, outside Belfast, a group calling itself the quote-unquote new IRA claimed responsibility and a 66-year-old man has been arrested. Yeah. New IRA, 66-year-old man. Well, the new IRA is a, it grows out of the real IRA, right? Was it the new IRA who killed that journalist a few years back in Belfast? You know what? I don't know.

Starting point is 02:31:53 The new IRA, yep, admitted responsibility. Yeah. Yeah. That's the new IRA as well. Lara McKee is the name of the journalist who was killed. Okay. I think just out of negligence and incompetence during an action these people were a part of.

Starting point is 02:32:06 Yeah, this is like just before COVID times. Yeah. Vaguely remember. So two large vessels, including a tanker, have been seized by pirates off Somalia. Another attempted hijacking by pirates was prevented. I'm just going to quote the UKMTO here, quote,

Starting point is 02:32:24 The master of a cargo vessel was approached by two small fishing vessels with armed person support. One vessel approached within 600, meters. Warning shots were fired and the suspicious craft returned fire. The suspicious boat moved away and made clear the vessel. All crew are safe and accounted for. Vessels are advised to transit with caution and report any suspicious activities UKMTO. Authorities are investigating. I saw another incident where a ship had fired a flare, people who were allegedly attempting to board it, right, but it seems like there has been an uptick in instance, especially as ships generally are having a hard

Starting point is 02:33:01 time right now. The United States has also been boarding a number of vessels to inspect them as part of its blockade on Iran and Iranian goods. Secondly, JNIM, that's Jiamat Nostrad al-Islam, while Muslimin, and the Aswa al-Libration Front in Mali launched a shock offensive this week that saw them sweep into Mali's capital, assassinate the defense minister and force the military hunter and its allied Russian forces to abandon whole cities. They also abandoned a number of basis, right? The J&I have captured like massive amounts of Russian Africa core material. But this is a pretty ground-shaking offensive. This is a big change for Mali. The Hunter in Myanmar, I think I'm going to still keep calling them that. They've rebranded

Starting point is 02:33:47 themselves as a civilian government. They're not. No. Min Anhalang gets retired as a general and just become president. It changed clothes and done the same shit. Like the Hunter reclaimed Falam this week, which is in Chin State. It's capital of Chin State. Fighting has been happening there for months. I've been talking to people pretty regularly who are taking part in the battle there. They're obviously, you know, they lost friends in the battle. They are not happy about this, but I think it's fair to say that spirits among their resistance generally remain pretty high, and they hope that they'll return to Falam soon enough. Doug Bergam has announced a United States geographic, is it geographical or geological survey?

Starting point is 02:34:30 USGS, geological survey. Yeah. I know that because of the film evolution starring David Docoven. Not familiar. This is an important piece of news for the listeners. There was a brief period of time in between X-Files and Californication where we thought that David Docovenny might have a career as a comedic actor. And no, he did not.

Starting point is 02:34:48 That he might have a career. Hey, I love Du Covingney. He's had a great career, just not as a comedic actor. Yeah. Okay, so Doug Bergam has announced that the United States Geological Survey found enough lithium to replace three centuries of imports in Appalachia. Enough lithium to do that or make one American small town normal for a weekend. I want to read from this because it's kind of interesting, quote, the Southern Appalachians hold an estimated 1.43 million metric tons of lithium oxide,

Starting point is 02:35:26 concentrated in the Carolinas and the Northern Appalachians hold an estimated 900,000 metric tons, concentrated in Maine and New Hampshire, according to estimates in a new USGS scientific paper. That is like, I guess, big Appalachia, like going up into Maine there. Leaving that aside, lithium mining is incredibly disruptive to the environment, right?

Starting point is 02:35:50 Generally, there's two ways you could do it. You can extract it from brine, like they do in Chile, and I think other places, they're trying to do that in California. Otherwise, it's open pit mining. The water use, energy use, ecological damage will be huge. The potential for disasters is not zero, and the people of Appalachia should be more than familiar with how this tends to go. Right. This is a long history of mining and mining disasters.

Starting point is 02:36:17 Moving on, Donald Trump has reposted a tweet about changing the name of ice to nice. Nice agents. They should do this. I want them to do this. Yeah, it would be absolutely disastrous for audio journalism. It'd be like, look, we understand, you know, it's 1943, people have a lot of issues with the Gestapo. We're going to call them the funstapo now. Yeah, the nice stopo.

Starting point is 02:36:44 Yeah, the great stoppo. SS now stands for super sweet, actually. The White House account and the DHS account, have posted nice images or hype videos since this as well. Yeah, we have to consider. There's like a 40% chance this happens at least. Yeah, no, this might happen. This could very much happen.

Starting point is 02:37:05 Like, we're laughing, but this could be the future. Yeah. What does the N stand for? National. National. It's just what they call a backronym. I know Garrison, with these guys, the end could have stood for a couple of things.

Starting point is 02:37:18 A few things. Yeah, sure. Trump truth, great idea, do it. That is how policy is made these days. This is how government policy works now via truth. This has made something clear to me that I was kind of dancing around for all, which is that I am in support in general of any policy that just pulls the wool off of people's eyes. Like, this is one of those things where it's now should be clearer to even the really stupid people where we are as a country when we do something like this happens. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:37:48 And so I'm supportive of it. Like, we can't have any artifice. The more you dress things up, the more people get deranged. So at least this, everyone knows what's happening. Yeah. It's really clear. I'm also in favor of, like, they have a budget. It is vast, but it is fixed.

Starting point is 02:38:02 And if they want to spend it all rewrapping their vehicles to say nice, yeah, fine. Also, it's going to make them feel lame. Are they going to do that by buying N stickers? Or do they have to get the whole new sticker, do you think? Right. Are they just slap the end on there? I hope they just slap it in.

Starting point is 02:38:17 I don't know if we want to open the, uh, Open the door to them having stickers with Anne on that. Yeah. Who knows, Garrison. They had previously spent quite a lot of money wrapping vehicles, so it's not beyond them to get. Maybe they'll get a whole rebrand. Maybe it'll be nice and a picture of someone like holding cake or they got to find some way to spend the seven billion dollars that they have. Either that or, you know, when we get someone better in, we could keep the name, but just create like a brand partnership with the city of Nice.

Starting point is 02:38:46 I was going to say that. Yeah. And turn them into advertising. Instead of pulling people away from their families, they can tell people about all of the new deals on airfare to France that are available right now. We don't even need to abolish nice. We can just perform it. Yeah, we could just reform it to a tourism agency for one city in France. There is a type of biscuit in Britain, which I suspect maybe comes from these.

Starting point is 02:39:08 But it's generally referred to as a nice biscuit because it has nice stamped on the biscuit. So perhaps we could instead of guns, give them biscuits, and they can hand those out. Think of how much better it'll be. Some guy shows up for his, like, you know, immigration court meeting, and he finishes that. And on his way out, there's a delegation of guys from Nice just being like, you want to go on vacation. What of France's top five or six cities? I assume. The Nisois, cops.

Starting point is 02:39:36 Yeah, they give you, like, one of those special salads they make there with that. Yeah. So many, yeah, it could be great. Hit us up. This could be it. This could work. Yeah, if you're the mayor of Nice, we can introduce you. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:39:47 Finally, the United States has indicted the governor of Sinaloa on drug trafficking charges, which is a pretty significant thing. Well, that's not as funny. Yeah, no, no. Well, they're not going to be rebranding at Sinaloa, clearly are they? Speaking of not being funny, let's actually talk about the bad news this week. Yeah. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana voting map as a, quote, unconstitutional racial gerrymander, unquote, that effectively created a black voting district.

Starting point is 02:40:23 The ruling was split 6'3 on ideological lines. Alito wrote the majority opinion, saying that the district violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution. The new ruling substantially undermines the 1965 Voting Rights Act, reinterpreting Section 2 provisions against racial discrimination to require evidence of intentional racial discrimination, not just discrimination as the effect. So in the future, proving discriminatory motives may be needed in order to win legal challenges against gerrymandering by citing the Voting Rights Act.

Starting point is 02:41:03 This ruling specifically depowers black voters while enabling Republican gerrymandering to continue. Republicans in the South will now be able to redraw House district maps that lean Democrat that have a high number of black voters. NPR states at least 15 House districts are now at risk of elimination. In the dissent, Justice Alana Kagan wrote, that court's decision will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity, unquote.

Starting point is 02:41:35 Yeah, this is bad. This is possibly the worst escalation of the continued undermining of the voting rights. Act. Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, this is, arguably the most important thing going on this week, even with the shooting that we haven't talked about, like the gutting of this act that people died for. Like, the Voting Rights Act has a body count attached to it. Yeah. The court has to be packed the next, like, if there's ever another Democratic or left-of-center administration and they don't pack the court, there's simply no chance of

Starting point is 02:42:06 improving or fixing any of the problems this country has, like it's a necessary prerequisite. It's no coming back from this. DC and Puerto Rico also need to become states and have their own congressional representation. Any future opposition administration has to go completely gloves off. Yeah, and we have to imprison a bunch

Starting point is 02:42:25 of the people currently running things. Yeah. Like there's a lot of stuff that has to happen. But one of those is the Supreme Court needs to get packed because by God, these people are not going to approve of anything that isn't insane. It's unclear if this ruling will have immediate impacts on the upcoming midterms, but by 2028, it will certainly have impacts.

Starting point is 02:42:44 Yeah. Yeah, they had filed for an emergency decision on redistricting, or I guess not redistricting, like pre-districted, I don't know what you would call that, but to get this in effect before the midterms, basically. Yeah. The Supreme Court also sent this to a lower court to work out more details.

Starting point is 02:43:03 It's going to obviously be ongoing litigation about it, just as there will be about Florida's redistricting measure that they are trying to finalize before the midterms as well. Yeah. And indeed, California, as I think there have been some arguments made, like, now that this decision has been made by the Supreme Court, right, like, either states will have to consider this and they're redistricting. Should we take a break? We shall. Mm-hmm.

Starting point is 02:43:26 And then we can talk about the dinner. Yep. Okay, we are back. Let's talk about the dinner. Let's talk about the shooting that happened at the dinner, the thing that everyone else has been talking about for the past five, six days. So, yeah, on April 25th, during the White House Correspondence dinner, everyone's favorite event. It's a shame we weren't there. It is unfortunate that we were not there to point our vertical video at our face as the news happens in front of us.

Starting point is 02:44:04 Oh, I would have been filming just your face, Garrison, and just like really tight in, like, to the point where it's difficult for you to get up and move. I keep wedging. No, Garrison, face the camera, come on. The people need to see this. I'd be assuming the war fighter posture. You're gonna get up like Eggsteth and storm around. I would also be shielding myself

Starting point is 02:44:27 behind Stephen Miller's wife. Hey, that could have been either way. He could have been protecting the wife. I know it could have been either way. It's funny. It's funny. At least Miller wasn't getting cucked unlike the FBI director.

Starting point is 02:44:42 Yeah. That is funny that he abandoned his wife. Yeah. Girlfriend. Girlfriend. Sorry. I guess we should just go. Let's recap the events for people who live under a rock.

Starting point is 02:44:54 So shortly before 8.30 p.m., the alleged shooter approached the Secret Service security screening checkpoint located on the terrace level of the hotel. This was the level above the ballroom level where the actual dinner was taking place. James, we should probably just read from the court document. Yeah, I think I'm just going to. I read this straight from the government's DFJ statement in the court, right. Before the defendant approached the checkpoint, he discarded a long black coat that concealed a 12-gauge pump action shock. The defendant then sprinted through one of the magnetometers at the checkpoint and ran in the direction of the stairs leading to the ballroom where the president and members of his family and cabinet were located.

Starting point is 02:45:39 As the defendant did so, he held a shotgun in both hands in a raised position parallel to the ground. A United States Secret Service officer observed the defendant fire the shotgun in the direction of the stairs leading down to the ballroom. The Secret Service officer and others at the checkpoint heard the gunshot. The Secret Service officer drew his service weapon and fired five times the defendant. The defendant fell to the ground and was restrained by law enforcement and was placed under arrest. The defendant suffered a minor injury to his knee but was not shot. We can in a second talk about whether he was. shot the secret service officer. Yeah, because there's an interesting Washington Post review

Starting point is 02:46:20 that's out too now. Yeah, and a couple of court documents just filed today. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about the just circumstances is this, right? This person had purchased, according to court documents, he purchased two weapons from separate firearm stealers in California, buying a shotgun on or about August 17, 2025, and the pistol on or about October 6th, 2023. He had the pistol for a while, the shotgun was more of a recent purchase. Yeah, yeah. The pistol is a fascinating choice. Amazing choice.

Starting point is 02:46:53 38 super. Yeah, I have never seen a 38 super handgun outside of them. They're very common in Mexico because they have a certain cachet and cultural value. Every 38 super handgun that I have personally held was embossed in gold and silver. Yeah, yeah. And usually a Mexican flag, but not exclusively. Yeah, or like some sort of heraldry that denotes that is associated sometimes with organized crime. Like, I'm not, when I say associated with organized crime, a few weeks ago, right, I talked about a material support for terrorism case, which centered on a firearms dealer who was selling grips for 38 super pistols with images that are associated with cartels.

Starting point is 02:47:38 Like, when you buy a 38 super, someone at the ATF gets an email, I bet. Like, these things are very rare and they have a certain consumer base. Now, obviously, there are normal 38 super pistols that exist. They're just like today most people buy it because it's a weird moon round too. There's not a normal, like it's not a, there's nothing wrong with it, but it's not a round that's commonly carried. It's expensive. It's primarily something that has like cash A for drug dealers. But I guess also my interpretation, and I guess we're, I know, maybe this is getting too much.

Starting point is 02:48:13 to my side of things. But I do have a theory as to why he would have picked this gun and the shotgun that he picked. But we can talk about that later if you want. We'll get that in a sec, yeah. He also had a, I believe, two knives and four daggers. Yeah. Six bladed weapons. Really want to see pictures of those bladed weapons.

Starting point is 02:48:31 They are in the court documents, buddy. Oh, have you. Let me just find those for you. We have an enhanced image of some of them, too. Yeah. So we should talk about this. the government submitted a quote-unquote enhanced image in the court case. Mr. Allen took a picture of himself at about 803 p.m.

Starting point is 02:48:51 So about half an hour before he rushed past a magnetometer there. In the picture, we can see he is wearing black suit pants. He is wearing a black shirt. He has a red tie, which inexplicably is tucked into his pants. He has a shoulder holster and a large K-by-knife in a, in a, Downwards Draw configuration. He is carrying a pair of pliers and a pair of wire cutters in a holster on his left side. On his right side, he is carrying a small leather bag, which allegedly contained more shotgun rounds.

Starting point is 02:49:28 And the 1911 is in a cluster or shoulder holster, right? None of this screams highly trained. The quote unquote enhanced image was basically a zoomed-in copy of this photo. that if I were to guess, the word enhanced means that they use some kind of sharpening or AI image sharpening tool. Yes. Yes. None of which are real in terms of like none of which are actually enhancing or sharpening.

Starting point is 02:49:57 The details that you are seeing should not be allowed to be like viewed in court. No. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The AI is guessing. There's not extra data in the photo that the AI is uncovering. Like the AI is basically attempting to clean up. an image, which is fine if you have like a blurry photo of you and like your wife when you got your first apartment together, that you went cleaned up. Yeah. But that's not, it's not valid in court.

Starting point is 02:50:21 It should not be. Yeah. I'm sure we'll see the defense challenges and I'll be interested to know like what AI they used. Yeah. Did they ask for various iterations of the enhancement or did they, you know, like this will be interesting. I don't think it materially inserted anything. We can see the same Samsung phone. I can see the handle of the knife in both images. I can see. the handle of the hang gun. This is more of like a principal thing. Yeah. Then like did this specifically affect the photo in this case in any way that would lead to

Starting point is 02:50:52 the evidence being more useful? Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah. This is a bad, slippery slope. So talking of his phone, he kept it with him as he traveled across the country on a train, taking notes about the landscape as he went. Amtrak. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 02:51:05 He took Amtrak and like he was enchanted by like the deserts and the, he liked Chicago. he thought the woods on the East Coast were great. He kept like a journal where he wrote about the trip. Yeah, in the no tap of his phone. And then the day of his attempted shooting, he used open sources to track the president's movements. Should we move on to Did He Fire His Gun? Yeah, that's a big, because that is a big question right now.

Starting point is 02:51:31 That's one half of the question. The other half is, did he shoot a Secret Service agent, which... Right. Did he shoot anybody? Mm-hmm. The DOJ is saying, he fired a gun. The DOJ claims that. But is not really affirmatively saying that he shot an agent. Yeah. No, they've said a couple of different things. They've said that an agent was struck by gunfire. They've said that it was not friendly fire, but they have not said that he was struck by the assailant shotgun,

Starting point is 02:52:03 by the gunman's actual weapon. And that's partly because there's not hard evidence yet that the gunman actually fired his shotgun. Let me read to you what they filed in court today. Yeah. The evidence gathered and analyzed to date establishes that your client fired his Mosberg 12-gauge pump action shotgun at least one time as he ran past some

Starting point is 02:52:22 magnetometers on the terrorist level of the Washington Hilton on April 25, 26. When the weapon was recovered, had one spent cartridge case in the chamber, which has been identified as having been fired in the Mossburg shotgun. The government's preliminary ballistics video analysis showed that your client fired his shotgun

Starting point is 02:52:38 in the direction of Secret Service officers VG, which Officer VG observed. Additionally, at least one fragment was recovered from the crime scene that was physically consistent with a single buckshot pellet. That fragment was recovered from a location at the scene consistent with your client firing his shotgun in the direction of Officer VG. The government is aware of no physical evidence, digital video evidence or witness statements that are inconsistent with the theory that your client fired a shotgun in the direction of Officer VG, or the officer VG was indeed shot once in the chest while well. a ballistic vest.

Starting point is 02:53:13 They go on them further to say the government also recovered five spent nine millimeter Luga cartridge cases, each of which was determined to have been fired from Officer VG's service weapon. The government also identified five separate bullet holes in the walls opposite from Officer VG consistent with the direction. So Officer VG fired his service weapon. That's like the most, yeah, that's the most detail that we've seen from them of their case, right. His defense had previously suggested that because of some of the public statements

Starting point is 02:53:44 Attorney General Blanche had made, the government may have exculpatory evidence, either that he didn't fire his gun or that he didn't shoot the secret service agent in question. Which administration officials have gone on the news to say that the secret service agent did not shoot himself, which is not saying that another secret service agent did not shoot him, though? Yeah. Yeah. And it doesn't seem like he shot into like a plasterboard wall, it seems, right? So he didn't maybe get splashback, which is... No, the only holes we've seen look like they came from pistols,

Starting point is 02:54:19 and that's something the Washington Post actually did, like, look into. Because there's at least one... There's a couple, I think, of live stream videos that showed, like, holes from a bullet in the wall. But the Post talked to Rick Vasquez, a firearms consultant and former chief of the firearms technology branch at the ATF, or what was then the ATF, who said that the holes were consistent with handgun rounds. Now, that's not like a firearms technology.

Starting point is 02:54:45 There's a lot of woo there, but it's also pretty easy to look. I mean, sometimes it can be kind of messy because, like, the balls and like a double-a-bought buck shot shell are kind of similar in size to 9mm, right? Some are in a 30-calibre range, right? But they don't tend to hit with the same kinds of patterns, right? Like, it does, there does tend to be a significant difference,

Starting point is 02:55:04 especially at that kind of range. the night of the shooting, or within a few hours of it, Trump posted security camera footage. And the post got a hold of a higher resolution copy of that footage. And they went through like a frame by frame analysis of it. Because as you noted, James, they claim that Cole discharged his shotgun while he was passing through the magnometers, the magnetometers, right? They didn't say it happened to elsewhere. They said it like as he was going through that checkpoint that you can watch him sprint through

Starting point is 02:55:32 like he's fucking Naruto running his way into the correspondence. And in their frame-by-frame analysis, the post only found evidence of four muzzle flashes, all of them from the agent who was allegedly struck by something's weapon, right? So first, I mean, and you can hear in other footage, you can clearly hear more shots than that. Like, I don't doubt that there were, that he discharged five shots, but the video only shows four. And crucially, it does not show Cole's shotgun firing. And the video follows him until he goes off screen. So, Maybe whoever wrote that out should have written after passing through the magnetometers, but they seem to pretty clearly be saying it was while he was in that little security area. And there's not evidence in the footage of him firing. We don't see anything that looks like firing. Like nobody reacts as if he has fired. Like there's just no evidence that he shot.

Starting point is 02:56:27 And, you know, they're hinging a lot on the fact that there's a spent cartridge in the chamber of his 12 gauge. But number one, that's actually not an uncommon way to. store that kind of 12-gauge shotgun with a spent shell in the in the breach because it makes it easy if something were to happen it makes it easier to basically get a fresh round in without needing to have a chambered round at all times which a lot of people most people don't like to do yeah and they're not drop safe either like it's a bad idea to do that you don't want to do that with a shotgun you know is it possible that he was storing it that way is it possible that he loaded a empty round in there intentionally because he didn't actually, he was hoping to do a

Starting point is 02:57:08 suicide by cop and he didn't intend to actually shoot anybody. Is it possible he just fucked up? It's also perfectly possible he fired later, but it's really weird that they wrote it out that way, if that's what they're alleging, because we see him when he's at the security checkpoint at the magnometer, and he doesn't fire in the footage that we have. Yeah, There's been a lot of press statements that are sort of talking around exactly, not making the explicit statement, he fired his shotgun and he shot the officer in the chest. Right. And certainly, like, I don't know.

Starting point is 02:57:45 I'm not sure about the distance we're talking about. Like, and then thus the spread that would happen with, uh... It would be minimal spread, even with a sod off in a, in a narrow corridor like that. Yeah. I mean, you go by an inch per yard, right? Like, that's the amount that it generally spreads. So if you hit this person once, assuming this person has a chest at 20 inches wide, that doesn't line up, right?

Starting point is 02:58:08 Yeah. Might be different with bugshot. I mean, obviously, if they had evidence that the secret certification was shot by Mr. Allen, we'd have seen it. They would be running with that. The fact that they do not have evidence that the agent was shot by Alan is shown in the way that they're, like, talking about this. Like, he was shot. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:58:28 And the guy discharged a shotgun. Separate statements. Exactly. Two separate statements. Yep. They're still affirming that the agent did not shoot himself, which does not mean that he was not shot by another agent. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:58:41 Yeah. And there's a, in that Washington Post article, they talked to an acting attorney general Todd Blanche and asked him to explain, like, why are you guys never willing to say like where the round that hit the officer came from? Right. They asked him the question that we've been asking. And Blanche answered, We want to get that right.

Starting point is 02:58:58 We're still looking at that. There you go. Right. And that is a big change, as the post notes, a day earlier, he told ABC that officials believe the gunman had shot the officer. So he has pulled back. Which leads me to think, maybe this guy didn't shoot at all. Or maybe he fired later, maybe even totally by accident. Maybe when he was falling down, he, like, discharged.

Starting point is 02:59:18 But if so, also, you would think there'd be a photo somewhere of where he discharged the shotgun. It's surprisingly easy for bullets to get lost, right? And by that, I mean, just get so destroyed and whatnot by impact that there's not really much of anything to find. That happens all the time. It's really rare, and I would argue, impossible to discharge a 12-gauge shotgun with any kind of shot shell in a fucking hotel like this. And not have there be some sign of what you hit. They make holes in things. That's what they're for.

Starting point is 02:59:49 They make multiple holes, unless it's a slug, but then they make a really big hole. And Cole had specifically written that he was not intending to use slugs. In his manifesto, suicide, no, whatever you want to call it, he specifically stated that he was using a 12-gauge loaded with buckshot because he wanted to reduce the chances of overpenetration and of injuring or killing someone he did not intend to hit. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about his background,

Starting point is 03:00:14 maybe a few other things from that manifesto. I know, Robert, you've done some digging into that. I did the normal thing that at least one of us does, generally all of us do in some form, ever after every kind of mass shooting or like publicly notable terror attack or whatever and just found myself looking through a stranger social media. There's been a couple of good articles out about him now. Most of like the first things that we knew about this guy, like the very first fact is when

Starting point is 03:00:41 his name came out, there were two different guys who kind of lived in the Torrance area who were immediately like there were responses under Cole Thomas Allen or Cole Allen. And one of them was like some fucking white dude who worked at, I think it was a consulting firm or something. I don't know. It wasn't very, but he just looked like he might have been 30. And the other was Cole Thomas Allen. And it was him winning a Teacher of the Year award at the, he worked at a company that was basically doing like college test prep tutoring. Right.

Starting point is 03:01:10 Yeah. So he was a teacher. Some people got really angry at the description of him as a teacher because they're being like, he's trying to like bad mouth public school teachers. He's not a public school teacher. But there are other kinds of teachers. he was the teacher of the month at the tutoring academy that he worked at yeah yeah yeah i had found by the time i got there which is like 20 minutes after the name started spreading the facebook page of the school that he worked or of the tutoring academy whatever that he worked at which i'm not

Starting point is 03:01:37 going to name but it was hundreds of posts already being like good to see this is who's teaching your kids you know like you hired a terrorist all this kind of like yeah yeah it's it's it's It's bleak. It's the normal thing that happens, you know, with anything related to this. In this case, right after that, Trump posted a picture of the detained and stripped mostly naked gunman that was obviously the Cole Allen who had won the teacher of the month, like immediately visible. Like, you could, it was a positive idea was very quick. Yeah. From that point on. So at that point, a couple other things started coming out because, you know, I had looked through from that Facebook page. I had found a couple other posts about Cole Thomas Allen or different places where he had accounts,

Starting point is 03:02:22 which made a couple other details of his background obvious. He was a mechanical engineering student in Caltech, kind of during the first Trump administration. Yep. You know, that was honestly like most of what was like immediately obvious is that like he'd been an engineering student at Caltech. He'd worked as a teacher. And he'd been a part of, in his LinkedIn, you can see that he'd been a part of Caltech's Christian Fellowship and the Nerf Club. Right? Yeah.

Starting point is 03:02:48 Now, Ken Klippenstein talked to one of his co-fellow peers during this period of time who noted that while he was at Nerf Club, Cal had like kind of led, there was like a conflict within the club over people modifying and otherwise altering their Nerf guns to make them more resemble real weapons, as Nerf has also come out with more guns that look like real guns over the years. Yeah. And he was really against this. Like, he was very against the idea of like Nerf guns that were modified to look like real

Starting point is 03:03:15 guns or just like people playing with things that look like real guns. Now, fast forward to the actual day of the shooting. His blue sky account got found fairly quickly alongside the LinkedIn. Obviously, that got deleted in very short order, but it was archived, thankfully, by a very nice person who realized that it was probably be useful to have actual documentation about what this guy was doing online rather than rely on a bunch of different articles making claims. So I went through all of that, as soon as it came out. He had about 500 followers, who was following about 114 people.

Starting point is 03:03:50 He did not post often on his own, but when he did in like the two different occasions I could find of him like posting on his own in this incomplete archive of his blue sky, one of them was him posting in like sympathy and solidarity with Ukraine, which is something that was very consistent. He reposted a ton of different fundraisers from different Ukrainian military units.

Starting point is 03:04:13 That was in his user bio, Wells support for Ukraine. Yeah, he was massively supportive of Ukraine. Yeah. And very angry at the Trump administration's failure to like follow through with U.S. obligations in that regard. And the only other post of his that was like him writing something that I saw was him basically critiquing an article about using AI in the classroom and like people who were advocated, the use of AI in the classroom. He's very much against that. He was a reposter, though. He was a reposter. And we'll talk about like some of the things he reposted. His bioposted. His biopold. I read, hi, I'm a random Californian guy with posts about American politics, support for Ukraine, and observations of small creatures.

Starting point is 03:04:51 And then he includes a quote, I choose my own battlefields, not through my blood, but with my heart. I stand on the battlefield to protect what I want. So that is, I like type that quote in, and that is a quote from an anime, the same anime that his profile picture was also from this like specific anime, which is Kagura. I don't know how that's pronounced. I think the character that he had is PFP of was Cigura. It's this like red-haired lady with these weird like ball things on either side of her hair. Like I don't fully know how to describe this lady's hairstyle. It's kind of like vaguely Princess Leia-esque and that appears to be who his PFP photo is.

Starting point is 03:05:32 Okay. The series is called Gintama. I don't know much about this. I've heard people online being like, oh, he was a fan of like this anime. that means something or other. But like, I don't actually understand enough about the anime to much of an analysis of that. I think it's just people being like,

Starting point is 03:05:49 because of the character he likes, it makes sense that he's a guy who would do something very extreme. I don't know enough about the anime to say how relevant that is. But the quote kind of does sound relevant to what he actually did. I stand on the battlefield

Starting point is 03:06:04 to protect what I want. And you can read stuff like that in his manifesto. Yeah, and you can read stuff like that in his manifesto, which we'll talk about. actual reposts are very normal lib. Yeah, he's a liberal.

Starting point is 03:06:14 Hugely supportive of Ukraine. Nothing about Palestine in there. Nothing about Israel in there. A photo has since come out that appears to be legitimate of him wearing like an IDF shirt some time ago. Yeah. He doesn't say anything. Again, in the limited, we don't also have, we don't have his whole blue sky in here.

Starting point is 03:06:31 In the limited archive, we have, I don't see anything of him, like, him talking at all about Israel. So, like, I don't have enough to say that, like, he was strongly supportive. but he certainly there's a real discrepancy between how he talks about Ukraine and him mentioning anything at all about what's happening in Gaza, right? Yeah.

Starting point is 03:06:49 What is believed to be his Twitter account has also been scraped and not as well archived, but there's screenshots of reposts on Twitter reposting Brianna Wu with some criticism of pro-Palestine protesters or things that are critical of Palestine and in a nominal way supportive of Israel. Yeah, and it's kind of hard to tell.

Starting point is 03:07:11 Was he just more quiet about this online because he wanted to avoid, you know, getting dog piled or is this just something that as the genocide got worse and worse, he became less willing to talk about? I don't know. But it's kind of, it's just noteworthy how much, like, how absent that kind of discussion is next to how often he talks about Ukraine. Next to the Ukraine stuff, yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:07:31 He also reposted a bunch of very normal posts. There was one from a user, you know, if you guys remember, like a week or so ago, the New York Times published an interview with Hassan Piker, the streamer, and the article was titled, The Rich Don't Play by the Rules, So Why Should I? Why Petty Thft might be the new political protest. It's where Hassan tried to introduce the term micro-looting to the discourse, which I don't support at all. But it was like a pro-shoplifting kind of, like, kind of kind of kind of a casual and jokey pro-shoplifting argument, right? I don't want to, people have blown this out of proportion. But it's interesting that he came down against Hassan's side on that. He was basically reposted,

Starting point is 03:08:08 someone who was like, hey, I've been a lot of, I've spent a lot of time in countries where graft and grifting are like normal, and it's really bad for that to happen. You don't want that to happen to your country. So he's certainly not, like, on the far left, like, direct action is good. I love committing crimes anarchist side of things. He is not at all that kind of guy. Yeah. He's a liberal. He is a liberal. He is a little bit. A lot of Will Stancilite. He is like... A lot of Will Stancil reposts. Yeah. He reposted me a couple of times. He posted me like talking about like the hope, right? Like, because making fun of Trump for calling the Pope, uh, soft on crime. Like, not any of my like, spicy takes, right? Um, yeah, just like viral posts on blue sky.

Starting point is 03:08:50 He didn't do a lot of spicy tapes. Uh, he, he reposted a lot of, like, normal viral stuff you'd expect. He was really angry about COVID-19. He hates Elon Musk. He reposted a lot of, like, you know, Elon Musk wants poor African children to die, like kind of content talking about that after some of the more recent articles about how many people died as a result of like the American like aid cuts that Musk was a major pardon. He was very angry about that. He reposted Bill Crystal saying abolish ice. Okay. And there's a couple of different posts that he shared about or from people who were criticizing the White House correspondence dinner. And particularly like when Jake Tapper fucking made a post about like, here's the the napkins that we've got that have like, you know,

Starting point is 03:09:35 freedom of the press, you know, the First Amendment stuff on it, that like, it was supposed to be like, this is our protest against the president, right? Like, we've got these monogram napkins. And he made fun of that, like a lot of people did. He was generally critical of anyone who would be at the correspondence dinner, which was reflected in his manifesto, where he said that, like, the journalists and other people at the event who are not in the administration aren't my targets. And, you know, he said he didn't want to hit them. But also, he was, quote, I would still go through most everyone here to get to the targets if it were absolutely necessary on the basis that most people chose to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor,

Starting point is 03:10:13 and are thus complicit. But I really hope it doesn't come to that, right? Yeah. Another interesting bit from this manifesto is, quote, administration officials, not including Mr. Patel, they are targets, prioritized from highest ranking to lowest. Yeah. Interesting, parenthetical.

Starting point is 03:10:32 I wonder if that's just because some people were joking after that article. came out about how Cash Patel, they had to, like, break down his door because he was too drunk to reach. People were joking, like, maybe it's best of Cash stays in office, because he's so, I wonder if that was the joke he was making. Unclear what he meant by that. But he doesn't give us any reason to believe. It's possible. And he doesn't share any jokes like that, right?

Starting point is 03:10:53 So that is kind of legitimately baffling. No, most of the manifesto is, like, apologizing to people he knows for how this will be, like, disruptive. Yeah. And then talking about his own, like, rules of engagement. Yes. which he says, quote, probably in a terrible format, but I'm not military, so too bad, unquote. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:11:11 And it's interesting because he had also shared at least one post on Blue Sky that was like kind of pro-gun control that was like talking about how it's bad to have a gun basically. Like it increases the danger that you're in, which it did for this guy. But it is interesting in terms of the firearms he chose because this is clearly a guy who supports more gun control. He seems to find it distasteful certainly to like celebrate. guns, right, and celebrate like military-style weapons. I kind of wonder if he picked the firearms he picked because they did not look like, the pistol didn't look like a Glock or like the standard police guns that he sees people owning. And a shotgun doesn't look like an AR-15.

Starting point is 03:11:51 Like an AR-15. Yeah, I kind of wonder, although he says it was to minimize penetration, so maybe that's more likely. Other thing I want to mention is because the shotgun was purchased in August. And he does make a few references in the manifesto to, like, thinking of having done something like this for quite a while, but this was his first opportunity that he saw that seemed semi-possible. Yeah. And I also had the thought that, well, when he bought the shotgun, because he specifically states that he wants to use a shotgun to minimize, like, casualties, then the date at which

Starting point is 03:12:22 he bought the shotgun might be the date at which he decided he was going to do this, right? Or it might be the point at which he started taking actions. Yeah. It would make sense that maybe that would be around when he had started planning to do this. And, you know, there's so much different shit happened around August of 2025. It's kind of impossible to say this is definitely it. I did notice that August 25th, 2025 is when Trump issued his additional measures to address the crime emergency in the District of Columbia, executive order. Yeah, the military occupation of D.C. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:12:55 Okay. So, and this is when Trump is really, and a bunch of, there's a bunch of different news stories around Trump trying to, deploy the National Guard in U.S. cities. And I kind of wonder if that's when he, but that's purely theoretical. There was a lot of other bad stuff happening. You know? So who's to say? He also seems to be angry about our war against Iran, like the fact, like the war of choice

Starting point is 03:13:16 that Trump launched against Iran. He didn't get a post a lot about it. But there are some references in the manifesto that kind of make me feel like that may have also been like a major thing that helped push him to make this decision. Yeah. Because he specifically stated that I'm at a citizen of the United States of America, what my representatives do reflects me, and I am no longer one to permit a pedophile rapist and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes, right?

Starting point is 03:13:41 Like, there's some reasons to believe that that probably played into it as well. Interestingly, he does sign the manifesto with his blue sky username. He sure does. Cold force. Yeah, he thought that was cool. Yeah. Perhaps that was her name he used, I don't know, in his nerfing activity. or like it was maybe

Starting point is 03:14:00 meant something to him. Another thing that's probably worth talking about because Trump has made the claim several times that this guy was anti-Christian, that hatred of Christianity is what drove him. As I said before in Caltech, he was a member of the Christian group. I'll talk about that in a second.

Starting point is 03:14:13 But in his manifesto, he specifically justifies what he's doing as a Christian. There is a segment in there where he's going through like some objections he knows people in his life will have and kind of rebutting them. An objection, one is as a Christian, you should turn the other cheek.

Starting point is 03:14:27 Rebuttal. Turning the other cheek is for when you, yourself are oppressed. I'm not the person raped in a detention camp. I'm not the fisherman executed without trial. I'm not a school kid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration. Right. So he specifically is justifying this as a Christian. On Christian grounds. He thanks his church, which seems to have been a major part of his life. So there's a quote from Ken Klippenstein's article about his time at Caltech. He was pretty prominent at the Caltech Christian Fellowship, pretty Christian and

Starting point is 03:14:59 Mello, if I didn't see his face eating carpet, I would have never believed it. And then I found a Christianity Today piece that just came up a few hours ago. And a line from that is Allen's father, Thomas Allen, was listed as an elder at Grace United Reformed Church and Torrance and an evangelical congregation that describes itself as preaching, a gospel that is Christ-centered, covenantal, and confessional. The church's leadership page, and social media pages have been pulled down. And, yeah, it's fucked up. They had to have, like, security guards, armed guards, like escort worshippers inside and out

Starting point is 03:15:28 this weekend just because of like all of the the press around this. Yeah, but Elizabeth Terlinden, who also knew him at the time, told the New York Times, he was definitely a strong believer in evangelical Christianity at the time that I knew him. She was in the Caltech Christian fellowship with him. So this guy appears to have been like a very strong evangelical Christian, like a liberal Christian. Yeah. We don't exactly know was he always, was his Christianity always like progressive and like liberal tinted or was he kind of, you know, more conservative at a different point in his life?

Starting point is 03:15:58 We do know that within the last couple of years, he got involved in left-wing activism in Los Angeles. His sister told law enforcement that after he got more involved in left-wing activism, particularly a group who called themselves the White Awakes, which was referencing an anti-slavery protest in the 1860s. Oh, yeah. Okay. Right? Like, these were some of the people who like back Lincoln. So he joined some group in Alicca's called the White Awakes for some period of time.

Starting point is 03:16:23 He starts talking more radically, starts showing up to more protests. And I think he's helping with a couple of different kinds of things with a couple of different groups. But that's when his sister says he starts making like a lot more radical statements and maybe sometimes aggressive statements. And that lines up with when he buys a gun and he starts training after 2023. So this may have just been a thing where he he didn't have a full plan at that point, but he accepted the possibility that he might need to do violence in order to support, you know, his ideals. We don't really know. But that's all we've got in terms of a journey. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:16:57 In October of 2024, he did make one donation to the Kamala Harris presidential campaign via Act Blue. $25. Yeah. But not a lot of, not a long history of donations to the party. Not a long history of like volunteering for the Democratic Party specifically. Seems to have been a pretty loyal voter. Yeah. But this is a guy who I think really during like the, it would be during the Biden years gets more involved in like left wing protests and organizing.

Starting point is 03:17:23 He becomes angrier. And then after 2024, he gets really. really angry at Trump and eventually probably sometime late last year decides to take action and for whatever reason picks the correspondence dinner to do it. It's probably also worth noting that he sends this manifesto thing out right before he carries out the attack. Like he's staying in the hotel for a couple of days before all this happens. He booked two nights.

Starting point is 03:17:48 We actually get him to reflect a little on the security that he's experienced while he's been there. And that's a really interesting part of this. He says, I expected security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, armed agents every 10 feet, metal detectors out the wazoo. What I got, who knows, maybe they're pranking me is nothing. No damn security, not in transport, not in the hotel, not in the event. Like the one thing that I immediately noticed walking into the hotel is the sense of arrogance. I walk in with multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the possibility that I could be a threat.

Starting point is 03:18:17 Crazy stuff. Most of the security seemed to be isolated around the actual ballroom and the levels immediately above and below. And again, he doesn't get anywhere close to the president. or any other, like, important person, right? So you could argue the security did its job. He was just in the same hotel. But, yeah, crazy stuff. I don't know.

Starting point is 03:18:38 I don't have anything else. Yeah. Let's go on ad break and then return to briefly discuss some of the conspiracy theories that have spawned after this alleged shooting. Love it. Okay, we are back immediately after the event took place. tons of conspiracy theories started cropping up obviously piggybacking off of the butler

Starting point is 03:19:11 Pennsylvania ones this was not helped by the confusion in early reports because once you get every journalist in DC in one room and then an event happens that means every journalist has a kind of different version of the event that gets immediately blasted out online and on the news so there was not not a clear sequence of events in the immediate aftermath of the shooting there was reports that maybe was just dishes being dropped. Eventually it was clear that, no, there was an actual shooting, and Wolf Blitzer did lose a shoe in the course of the events. He sure did.

Starting point is 03:19:46 Poor Wolf. Now, also not helping things. Trump was basically live-truthing this investigation on the night of the shooting. Uh-huh. And it was not clear to many people that the shooting did not happen on the ballroom level. Yeah. And that the shooter did not get close to the targets. Well, also, the people in the main room were,

Starting point is 03:20:05 still very scared because, like, they had no real context on what was happening, and everyone around them just started freaking out. Yeah. Because there's the military running around, Secret Service running around. They heard gunshots. Yeah, it is a frightening thing. You're seeing JD Vance get pulled off stage, Trump's ducking down. What I do feel is kind of interesting about this is you've got this whole DC class of, like, press and other important people who are not in power themselves, but are close to it. And they do a lot of the things that they do because they like being close to power. And there's this illusion that comes with that, I think, for a lot of these people of importance, that gets ripped away when the Secret Service pulls all of the

Starting point is 03:20:43 people who are important out of the room and you're just left wondering if you're in danger? Like, that's what it'll be like if there's a nuclear war. All of these people will suddenly have the few folks who have a detail get ripped out of the room and then you'll just hear the sirens start and have nothing, no idea what's happening and realize that your whole life in pursuit of being close to power has brought you no security. Crazy stuff, wild times. Anyway, Garrison. One of the core pieces of quote-unquote evidence that was used to assert that the shooting was some kind of false flag or sci-op was a comment made by press secretary Carolyn Levitt shortly before the dinner. This speech tonight will be classic Donald J. Trump. It'll be funny.

Starting point is 03:21:26 It'll be entertaining. There will be some shots fired tonight in the road. Great stuff. Poor choice of words there on behalf of the press secretary. Excellent choice of words. Also, though, like, it's not a Dan Brown novel. When people are actually plotting conspiracy, they don't go around leaving the little Easter eggs for you to find. Of course. Yeah, why else would the deep state orchestrate a top,

Starting point is 03:21:51 a top-level secret sci-op and not decide to leave little clues beforehand? Yeah. They have to leave little clues, Garrison. Haven't you listen to Alex Jones? That's part of the deal they make with the demons is that they have to leave little clues for the evil that they're doing while they're doing it. They call that the Riddler's Law.

Starting point is 03:22:13 Uh-huh, that's right. Now, another thing that got amplified in the conspiratorial milieu was a Twitter account with a Pepe profile picture wearing the same outfit as President Trump the night of the dinner who tweeted the alleged shooter's name

Starting point is 03:22:30 about two and a half years ago. This post is the account's only visible post. The banner image of the account is a bunch of streaks of color, but if you overlay the image of Trump holding his fist up in the air at Butler, the color streaks and the darkened areas line up with the Trump-Butler photo.

Starting point is 03:22:50 What? Now, the alleged shooter also had an undergraduate research fellowship at NASA for the summer of 2014, and the name of this Twitter account matches the name of someone at Lockheed Martin who published a NASA paper at the same time that the shooter was at NASA. And the shooter worked for the jet propulsion lab, the same labs that those scientists who have gone missing also have been working out of.

Starting point is 03:23:15 Garrison, you want to get out of the paintboard? When I saw this, I started feeling a little bit scared because I thought I was getting too close. Too close to the truth. I don't know. I was afraid. Too close to us needing help. But that's not all. because the Pepe

Starting point is 03:23:30 Twitter account was also connected to a time travel study because the color streak banner photo was traced to a website on how to build a time machine and this photo was used on the web page

Starting point is 03:23:44 for the time machine study. So, what's really going on here? First of all, this quote-unquote time machine website is actually a Europe-based project for quote, 3D digitalization of cultural heritage, scanning artifacts and uploading them online as like 3D models.

Starting point is 03:24:05 That's their quote-unquote time machine is preserving cultural heritage. Yes, an archive. And actually this color streak image has actually been floating around the internet for a long time. I found versions of it since at least 2018. There are hundreds of people named Cole Allen in the U.S. on data broker sites, right?

Starting point is 03:24:24 Now, the first archive of this Pepe Twitter account whose profile picture only matches Trump's because it's a tuxedo, one of the most common outfits for men at events like this. Yes, it is the same outfit that Trump was wearing at the dinner. It's also the same outfit Trump has worn at every dinner because it's what you wear at dinners if you're the president. A tuxedo.

Starting point is 03:24:46 But the first archive of this post is from after the shooting. So we don't know what this account looked like prior to the shooting. Now, this account could have tweeted tons of random names and then deleted all the other posts to pull a stunt like this. Or people at Twitter, like X the Everything app, the people who work there, could have backdated the account and the post to boost engagement on the platform. Now, those aren't any more likely than just a simple coincidence, but there are other explanations other than gesturing vaguely towards a pre-planned sciop.

Starting point is 03:25:21 Spreading images of this Twitter account isn't necessarily putting forward a specific conspiracy theory, he just gets used as a data point among other unconnected data points to sow public mistrust and undermine reality, inferring meaning from odd coincidences, right? This is seeing patterns that aren't there, and literally in the case of seeing the butler photo in a splash of colors. And again, like, why would quote unquote they drop hints beforehand, right? Is this, is this predictive programming? But predictive programming isn't really necessary to get the public to accept an event like an attempted assassination. In fact, that would only sow suspicion.

Starting point is 03:26:02 Dropping these little hints, just so suspicion for an event like this, it doesn't actually make it more acceptable, right? The whole idea of predictive programming is sowing seeds to get the public to accept an otherwise unacceptable thing. And that's not necessary for a presidential assassination. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:26:19 Now, there are some other things that propped up in this conspiratorial shenanigans in the wake of the shooting. A Fox News reporter was calling in to report her experience at the dinner and suddenly cut out when she started talking about something that Carolyn Levitt's husband said to her. He kind of leaned over and said, you know, I watched her on TV. You're a great job. You need to be very safe. And he was very serious when he said that to me. And he kind of looked around the room and he said, you know, there are some...

Starting point is 03:26:56 Sounds like we lost Aisha's phone there. well, well, well. What? So her audio actually cuts out at different points during this televised call. The anchor said that she was having cell service issues and later on X, this reporter, posted that she was about to say that Carolyn Levitt's husband was, quote, telling me to be careful with my own safety because the world is crazy, unquote. But it does make for a funny moment.

Starting point is 03:27:26 A funny moment of television. That's a good moment. That's an incredible time. time for your call to cut out. Like, just awesome stuff. Yeah. There's other other viral posts spreading video of the military storming past the red carpet or people in military fatigues storming past the red carpet after the shooting. Yeah. With one person writing, quote, law enforcement doesn't act like this. Neither does the military. This is a staged event with a shitty script and pre-positioned cameras. Unquote,

Starting point is 03:27:56 the cameras are there because they're there to film the red carpet. They're pre-positioned. Yeah, because this is an organization where all the press gathers. Because this is a press event. That's why there's pre-positioned cameras. Yeah, it's how you do, you know, the White House correspondence dinner. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:28:13 Also, you're going to see some types of cops that you have never previously seen when someone tries to assassinate the president. There are a whole lot of people whose job it is to stop that happening. Lots of them aren't necessarily uniformed officers who you see every day in the Secret Service. Yeah. Other people also thought it was odd that Trump has skipped every correspondent dinner across his two terms, except for this one. And then all of a sudden there's a shooter in the lobby. How did the shooter know that Trump would go to this one?

Starting point is 03:28:44 Because the shooter planned this since early April. How would the shooter know this? Well, that's actually quite simple. Because Trump announced he was attending this dinner in early March. And according to court documents, Cole Allen started searching for information about this dinner. in early April, a month later, before then booking two nights at the Washington Hilton. Trump already announced that he was going to be attending the dinner.

Starting point is 03:29:09 The oddest aspect of the conspiracy system post-this event is that Trump needed to stage this, not for any national security reasons or to seize more power, but to construct the White House ballroom, which has been the main thing that people on the right have been talking about after the shooting. The people on the right have not been using this shooting to like go after liberal terrorists, but have been talking nonstop about how this security breach demonstrates the need to construct Trump's massive ballroom. And that's the main thing they're talking about.

Starting point is 03:29:43 It's so funny. The idea that they would stage, that the deep state is going to stage a false flag just to push for the ballroom. Yeah. Is to me, frankly, very funny. Yeah, we don't get an enabling act in our new fascist. we just get a fucking ballroom. Yeah, yeah, right. Like, okay. I mean, I guess I prefer this. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:30:05 The Reichs take fire to construct a nice, a nice dance floor. Yeah. Yeah. Just, yeah. I mean, a lot of this was like centered on the safety and security exemption, which was provided in the injunction against the building of the new ballroom, right? The issue here is that the Trump administration already filed on the third of April, a claim that the entire building was a contiguous hole.

Starting point is 03:30:31 They couldn't do the security part without doing the fancy dance floor part, right? And like, yes. Trump has also truce about this previous to this event. This wouldn't have really added anything. They did try and get the National Trust for Historical Preservation to withdraw their court case, which they didn't. Like, get subsequently to the events of the White House correspondence, you know. So, yeah, that's most of what I have.

Starting point is 03:30:57 have on the conspiracy stuff. There's certainly more, but that's... Oh, there's more. Yeah, we're going to leave it. There's always going to be more, right? Like, that's the way how it is. We don't have good data on, like, the widespread belief of this theory. There was a poll that circulated, that said, like, something like 47% of Democrats thought the attempted assassination was staged. But this poll, which is from the Manhattan Institute, so take that with a grain of fascism, this poll is actually pulling the butler shooting, not this recent one, and people did not acknowledge that when they were spreading this poll around. So we don't know how many people actually believe that this shooting was staged.

Starting point is 03:31:40 But you can certainly see a lot of people asserting as such on the internet. Shall we move on to a couple of other topics that we need to cover? Yes, this will be a super, super sized episode. but it is what it is. Yeah, let's go. Talking of people talking about things on the internet, I think some people got this one, got a little carried away.

Starting point is 03:32:04 A's 3-0 decision of a panel of second circuit court judges has rejected ICE's mandatory detention of people seeking to deport with a few exceptions. The opinion was written by Judge Bianco, who is a Trump appointee, and it stated that, quote, Petitioner entered the United States unlawfully in 2004 or 2005 and has resided here ever since. He is therefore deemed to be an

Starting point is 03:32:31 applicant for admission by Section 1-225A, that he is not, quote, seeking admission because he is not requesting lawful entry into the United States after inspection and authorization. The government's attempt to muddy these textually clear waters defies the statute's context, structure, history and purpose contradicts the Supreme Court's dictator in Jennings and longstanding executive branch practice, and its interpretation of this statute raises serious constitutional questions. It should be avoided, even if the statutory language were ambiguous. The statute in question here is the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, and specifically the fact that it has a mandatory detainer for people, quote, unquote, seeking admission to the USA.

Starting point is 03:33:16 Now, this ruling puts the Second Circuit in agreement with over 370 judges across the nation, but notably at odds with the 5th and 8th Circuit, right? Judge Bianco, in a really incredibly New York analogy here for seeking admission, wrote, If someone sneaks into Yankee Stadium at the start of the game with no ticket for admission and no intention of ever paying, and he is later found by security in a seat in the 7th inning, no one would consider that to be seeking admission to the game. So hopefully that's that. They explain to people that the argument that the government is making here

Starting point is 03:33:53 is that someone who has been in the country for a long period of time is still seeking admission, right? The Trump administrations place itself odds with other administrations, right? This has been law since 1996. As Bianca wrote, quote, for five presidential administrations over nearly three decades, it did consistently release detainees on bond, whom the government now argues are covered by Section 1225B2A,

Starting point is 03:34:19 even in President Trump's first term and the first few months of his second, the agency adhered to the decades-old understanding and the relative scopes of Sections 1-225 or 1-226. Under these circumstances, the fact that no President has ever found such power in the statute is strong evidence that it does not exist. That pretty much explains itself, right? What I have not been able to work out is whether this pertains to people who are detained, as in who are arrested in the Second Circuit, or people who are held in the

Starting point is 03:34:49 Second Circuit, or both. My guess would be both because it is the law in the Second Circuit, right? So it applies in the Second Circuit. Certainly most detention facilities are not in the Second Circuit. A lot of them are in the Fifth, which has come down the opposite way on this. This is why the Supreme Court exists, right? A big disagreement between these several circuit courts here. Moving on, let's talk about the border wall. Before leaving office, Secretary no, assigned several waivers for border wall construction. This was not in a week before she left office, but this year. One of them waived 28 laws in the Big Bend area of Texas. The waiver included 175 miles of the riverfront of the Rio Grande, including parts of the state park,

Starting point is 03:35:35 National Park and federally protected river. Some of these areas are very popular for outdoor recreation. These waivers are now being challenged in court by the Centre for Biological Diversity. They're out of Tucson. You'll see them in a lot of border legal cases. The Friends of Ruehosa Church and a Telangua River Guide named Billy Miller. It's an interesting coalition, right, that we don't often see. Like a church group has the sort of approach to this, that it would destroy historical and cultural heritage to build the wall there. Obviously, the river guide, Billy Miller, Mr. Miller has a,

Starting point is 03:36:10 the claim that it would be disruptive to a business and to people's enjoyment of nature on the river. Currently, what they are doing is focusing on Chispa Road. It's near like Valentine, Texas, northwest of Martha, where the carrying Garrett Road improvements that they did not notify county officials about, which is obviously cause of disruption. I've actually rid my bike out there a fair bit. I did some work making a film out there a few years ago. It's a really beautiful part of the country. I'm sure a lot of people will be familiar with Martha, which is nearer. by.

Starting point is 03:36:41 Oh, it's a great city. Yeah, Marfa's great. I love that area, Texas. Yeah. I watched it all burn down one beautiful, beautiful afternoon when those horrible fires started. Yeah, it was wild. Yeah, I bet.

Starting point is 03:36:52 Geez. Luckily, Marfa has recovered. Great place to visit. You can go and see the Prada store, which people now think is AI generated, which is great. Our reality is cool. You can go see the Judd Foundations or the Chinati Foundation, at the Donald Judd Museum, you know, a lot of good stuff out in Marfa. Pretty good cheese sandwich, a restaurant.

Starting point is 03:37:17 Pretty fancy glamping set up there as well. Yep. So I checked out the CBP SmartWall Interactive Map, which sometimes, like, they don't always have to give notice when they're changing their plans. So sometimes you find out via the Smart Wall Interactive Map. And right now it shows vehicle barriers and patrol road planned inside the National Park, right? So this will cause damage far, far beyond the riverfront.

Starting point is 03:37:44 Evidently, to build barriers at the riverfront. They have to build roads to get to the riverfront, which will also spread this damage over an area that, like, especially in Texas, Texas is not a state which is abundant with public land. It is not like those states further west in that regard. And I know this is an area which is very special to a great deal of people. I'm really interested in writing more about this. So, like, especially people in the outdoor industry or folks in that region,

Starting point is 03:38:09 and I'd love to hear from you. You can do Coolzone Tips at Proton.me. If you want to talk about that. Do you want to do the... We reported the news. All of it. Yeah. Again, Coolzone tips at Proton.me for story tips, for your marketing emails,

Starting point is 03:38:28 you can just go ahead and flush those. 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 Coolzone Media, visit our website, Coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources where it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions.

Starting point is 03:39:00 Thanks for listening. Our 26, IHard Country Festival, presented by Capital One. Tickets are on sale now to see Luke Bryant, Kane Brown, Parker McCullum, Riley Green, Carly Pier, Shaboozy, Dylan Scott, Russell Dickerson, Gretchen Wilson, Chase Matthew, Lauren Elena, special guest George Birch, Saturday, May 2nd at the Moody Center in Austin. Stream live on Disney Plus and Hulu.

Starting point is 03:39:33 Hey, what's good, y'all? You're listening to Learn the Hardway with your favorite therapist and host, Kear Games. This space is about black men's experiences, having honest conversations that's really not safe to have anywhere, but you're having him with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing. How many men carry a suit or armor. It signals to the world that you're not to be played with. And just because you have the capability that does not mean that you need to,

Starting point is 03:39:58 listen to learn the hard way on the AHA radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd was accused of fathering twins. But the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax. You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct? I doctored the test ones. It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing.

Starting point is 03:40:24 Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini. My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 2%. That's the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available.

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