It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 235

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Starting point is 00:02:20 AllZone Media. Hey everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here

Starting point is 00:02:40 for you, but you can make your own decisions. It's bear time. Yep, it's bear time. Hi, everyone. Welcome to It Could Happen here, a podcast where I talk to Molly Conger about animals. Hi, Molly. I'm so excited to learn about bears. I've been thinking about it all week.

Starting point is 00:03:00 That's fantastic. Good. I hope you've had good, bad thoughts. because there are people who think about bears a lot and I think it's not good for their mental well-being. I was trying to find if I took a picture of that time a baby bear was like standing on the median strip outside my old apartment and I couldn't find it.

Starting point is 00:03:13 So I was thinking about him. Okay, yeah, I hope he's okay. I hope he's found a better place to be than the median strip. I bought a show and tell item today. Molly can see it. No one else can. I was hoping it was going to be a live bear. It's not a live bear.

Starting point is 00:03:26 I don't. I'm not allowed because of woke. You can't have a pet, grisly bear. If you're about to tell me that those are bear antlers, I'm leaving. Yeah, these are actually original jackalove antlers from the California jackalope. No, it's a mule deer shed antler.

Starting point is 00:03:39 I thought it was cool. Thought you'd like to see it. It's beautiful. Yeah, I think lots of people don't realize that their antlers fall off and regenerate. I feel like he spent a long time growing those. Yeah, he did. And then he just left them there as a gift for me

Starting point is 00:03:52 in the wilderness. So I have a few of these. He's not getting laid this spring. Oh, no, he's going to grow some more. Oh, okay. And he's going to fight another dude with them in order to get laid. So that fell off in a fight, so he's just walking around with one right now.

Starting point is 00:04:07 Looking to the uniform. Oh, he shed them. Okay, he shed them. Yeah, they shed them and regenerate them. Okay. Like, this is how they get bigger and more robust antlers each time. But they put a lot of a caloric energy into growing these. It seems like that would really take a lot out of you. Yeah, well, then they get horny and fight with other male deer for quite a while.

Starting point is 00:04:28 No, those are antlers, not horns. That's correct. Yeah. But the horny is not related to them. Yeah, they go. And then, yeah, they lose a lot of weight in that rutting time. And then they have to gain it all back before the winter. Just so focused on fighting and fucking.

Starting point is 00:04:42 They can't even eat. Yep. It's the, many such cases. Many such cases. Yeah. So I'm not talking about mule deer today. They are cool. The first time I saw one, I was like, I see why they call it a mule deer.

Starting point is 00:04:55 Really got the ears going on. I want to talk about another type of charismatic North American megafauna. Bears. So there are three species of bear in North America. Should we do quiz, Molly? Do you know what they are? Okay. Grizzly.

Starting point is 00:05:12 Brown. Black. Polar? Close. That's four. You've got to keep spraying. Panda. Those aren't even bears.

Starting point is 00:05:24 Nominally they are. But I think, yeah. You did get them all during your period of guessing. Brown, black and polar. Within brown bear, we have grizzly bears, brown bears, and kodiak bears. We used to think that the California bears were different species. They're not. They just lived here.

Starting point is 00:05:42 They just have different politics. Yeah, yeah, exactly. We'd have been legalized, so they just saw things differently. The brown bear is the one I want to talk about. So I'm going to use brown bear as like a blanket term for when they're on the coast in Alaska. They're called brown bears, right? And those are generally the biggest ones. I know if you've ever seen her.

Starting point is 00:06:02 Have you been to Alaska, Molly? No, I would love to go to Alaska. I've never been. Yeah, Alaska fucking rips. I love Alaska. I found out recently that black bears can be brown. And I just think we need to re-evaluate the naming system. It's not good, yes.

Starting point is 00:06:17 Because people are, you know, the advice about a brown bear versus a black bear is different. But if a black bear can be brown and you're relying on a rhyming phrase to know what to do, you don't know what kind of bear that is. Yeah. They call them cinnamon bears sometimes. the brown black bears. Yeah. You can tell a grizzly bear, right, the bigger,

Starting point is 00:06:35 they've got that more pronounced hump. They have a different shape to them. No, you can tell. I cannot. You'll fucking know the grizzly bears coming. They don't make themselves, you know, quiet. But yeah, the big hump, they've got a more pronounced hump. Grizzly bears can also really get into like a blonde coloration even.

Starting point is 00:06:54 Well, yeah, in California, sure. Everybody's blonde out there. Yeah, they get frosted tips when they live by the coast for too long. and they listen to Sublime here. Yeah, let's talk about bears. My bear interactions by way of establishing some credibility. I want to point out that interacting with bears doesn't make you an expert. I'm not an expert.

Starting point is 00:07:13 And what we're going to talk about here is non-experts interjecting their in-expert opinions about bears and why that's actually a problem. I'm probably interacting with bears is not a desirable outcome for most listeners. Yeah, I love a bear. Like, I see, because I come from a place where there's very little that can kill you. Well, I mean, there are things. They're cars, and we have cancer in the UK as well, of course. But, like, animal-wise, you're more or less in a clear.

Starting point is 00:07:38 We have adders, which is a type of snake, and they are venomous. But, like, I can't think of the last time I've ever heard of someone getting killed. I'm sure someone has been killed by an adabyte. But it's very rare. Now, you don't have, I mean, you have a lion on, like, a flag or something. Somebody has one. But there's no lions. Yeah, we have a few lions.

Starting point is 00:07:53 We've got some flag lions. Yeah, you know, the lions, the lions, in fact, In fact, I love the lions on a flag because they're drawn by someone who's never seen a lion. Just like a game of telephone has resulted in... But he knows they're very majestic. Yeah, it's majestic, kind of like a dog, longer hair. I think there was the input before he drew the lions. I kind of like being on the landscape with animals that are bigger than me.

Starting point is 00:08:14 And they are the apex predator. First time I saw a grizzly bear, I had bush-plained to a lake in the Wrangell, St. Elias Wilderness. It's in Alaska, southeast in Alaska, massive wilderness area. We were going to hike around a bit and then pack raft off the end of the glacier there. It goes into like a meltwater river, right? And so the river's kind of different every year as it melts and the river streams braid together. Then we were going to pack a row for a few days and then hike out. And that was a fun adventure.

Starting point is 00:08:48 So we landed, we hiked a bit, we inflated our little boats and we paddled across the lake at the end of the glacier. and then we got to a place where we're camping, went on a walk, and immediately saw a sour a sour, a sour, grizzly bear and her cups, which was sick. That's cute as hell. I would love to see that. I would love to see some baby bears.

Starting point is 00:09:06 Yeah, it's sick. It'd best to stay away from them. That's when they can get angry. I would like to see them from, like, over here. Yeah. And then they can be over there. Like, maybe on the other side of a river. Yeah, well, bears can,

Starting point is 00:09:17 but they're not afraid of water. That's true. They do love to eat salmon. Yeah, it was sick. That was a sick trip, generally. We got to see the Glacier carving. So like, it's when a little baby Glacier is born, right? But the glacial, a section of it broke off.

Starting point is 00:09:35 And I'm talking a section of the size of like a city block here. But it's so shiny when it breaks. Yeah, it's shiny. And it's allowed. It's like an earth-shattering rumble, right? And then this thing, it was majestic, right? Like it looks like a mountain has fallen into the water and that was cool as far. And then you realize that, like, it has done.

Starting point is 00:09:54 displaced a mountain-sized amount of water. Oh, you better move. And now there are like fridge-sized ice blocks coming at head height towards you. So yeah, we did some fast uphill running in that moment. But it was Alaska. So it was summertime. So it wasn't getting dark, right? You have like 24-hour sunlight.

Starting point is 00:10:11 So at least it wasn't dark when that happened. Plenty time to run from the glacier. Yeah, great time to run from the glacier. I wouldn't want to do it in the wintertime. I don't think they carve in the wintertime. Maybe they still do. I think it's to do with temperature rising. So that was my, I've seen a lot of black bears.

Starting point is 00:10:25 I'm a San Diego black bear truther, but it's another fun thing about me. For some reason, people don't think there are black bears in San Diego, and that is not true. I have seen bear footprints. People have seen bears on game cameras. Bears pop up on top of Mount Palomar all the time. It's like the ongoing feud about whether or not we have panthers on the East Coast. Oh yeah, you guys love to. It's like a Carolina panther or something.

Starting point is 00:10:51 People are very sure. I have no skin in this game. Yeah. I think there's a breeding family of mountain lions now, maybe in Michigan. So they're getting closer. They're coming your way. You soon will. I've seen a lot of bears, or a good number of bears.

Starting point is 00:11:06 A lot of black bears, where we have them in California. The fact that I've seen bears does not make me a bear expert. And another non-bear expert has been diving into the discourse on bears after a tragedy. Like, genuinely a terrible thing when a hiker lost their life in Glacier. We're trying to say the American way. Glacier National Park. I'll just say we're going to get messages about this. This British word. Yeah, right.

Starting point is 00:11:29 It's not like a buffalo issue. I'm just straight colonizing it. I'm sure it had an indigenous name. And so, so are you, if you're saying, Glacier. This is really sad, right? A hiker from Florida was mauled by a bear and tied. Very shortly, in relation to that, serious injuries occurred in another malling in Yellowstone National Park. Not so long ago, a contractor already uranium.

Starting point is 00:11:50 mining site was killed by a black bear in British Columbia, in Canada, a couple of weeks ago, maybe 13th of May. It looks like unusual to be killed by a black bear. Probably worth pointing out that very rare for black bears to kill people. And also someone at that site clearly had a firearm because they euthanized the bear. Euthanized is a phrase they used there. They killed it, right? Like it wasn't suffering, I don't think. But they killed the bear pretty shortly thereafter. And it's undergoing a necropsy now. But that's a... another incident, I guess, to add to this list. And again, right there was a firearm present there, it seems,

Starting point is 00:12:26 and that didn't prevent the person being walled by the bear. And so, former Interior Secretary, Ryan Zinke, has decided to wade into the debate. Do we remember Ryan Zinke? He's not the one from Real World Road Rules, right? Now, that's the transportation guy. I don't think so. If he is, I'm not aware of what Real World Road Rules is.

Starting point is 00:12:48 I'm just having dribble remembering which members of Cabd have been on reality TV. And I don't think this is one of them. Okay. Sorry. No, not to my knowledge. I think he, he was a Navy SEAL officer. He's now representative from Montana. He was Interior Secretary in Trump's first administration. He presided over a series of attacks on public lands that we saw in Trump 1.0. Exactly what you want to see from your secretary of the interior. Yeah. Yeah. He's trying to rebrand himself as some kind of protector of public lands now. He's kind of too late on that one, in my opinion. But he's certainly not a protector.

Starting point is 00:13:20 of bears. Last week, he tweeted, maybe he's Zieted. I don't know. We're not doing that. Yeah, we're not doing that. We're going to keep dead naming it. Last week, two grizzly bear attacks claimed the life of a hiker in Glacier National Park and seriously injured two others in Yellowstone National Park. The tragedies are a sobering reminder that grizzly bear populations have recovered well beyond sustainable levels, and it is time for... Oh, so we should start killing them? Yep. It's past time for the federal government to de-list them. It gives states for management tools. Kill them back!

Starting point is 00:13:50 Yeah, we've got to kill them. Kill them back. This is what we do. Eye for an eye for Florida man. Yeah. Fuck off. I was speaking to a bear, a scientist who studies human bear interactions this week. And he referred to these as revenge killings.

Starting point is 00:14:03 Yeah. Because they won't just kill. They often, in many instances, don't know which bear. Sometimes we can know the size of the bear, right, from like the size of the jaws. We can have several bears that are different sizes of jaws. Things are distance between the different teeth, stuff like this, right? Right. Like if one bear is like if it's like a Jaws situation and like one bear just has it out for hikers.

Starting point is 00:14:25 Yeah. Sure. I guess go get him. But that's not like. But that's not what's happening. Yeah. And they will end up killing a number of bears in an area when this stuff happens, right? It's just a revenge killing. So we're taking out like we're taking out our anger on that species because they came after our species.

Starting point is 00:14:39 It seems like the problem is not that there's too many bears. That is correct, Molly. That is that is why we're here today. He seems to be positioning this as. There's just too many bears. People just can't avoid the bears because there's so many bears. That is not the case. Millions of people every year visit the greater Yellowstone Econ system and very few of them see a bear.

Starting point is 00:15:00 Right. And even fewer of them touch a bear. Yeah. If you're touching a grizzly bear, it's a bad day for you. Unless, I guess it has decided it wants to be touched. I don't want a victim blame. Obviously, like these are wild animals. They're unpredictable.

Starting point is 00:15:12 You're in their home. What this guy do? Why was he so close to the bear? We don't know exactly what this guy did. There were a number of bears. you think which I do want to talk about. And I spoke to Tom Smith last week, and I'm going to turn that into another podcast.

Starting point is 00:15:25 But like, this is the person who is the guy who writes the studies on human interactions with bears, right? And specifically on how those could be, like, de-escalated. And he said he's not aware of an incident in which someone has been killed by a bear in which they were adhering to all the best principles, right?

Starting point is 00:15:42 Now... I'm not blaming the victim. Like, if you don't know, you don't know, you're an inexperienced outdoorsman or whatever. But I feel like there's a series of Just like pieces of advice that if you follow them, you're not going to get in that situation. Most of the time. Most of the time.

Starting point is 00:15:57 Yeah. I think if I was going into bear country, I wouldn't take a dog. A lot of people take dogs. Dog is a great way to find a bear. If you're looking for a bear, you could go send out your dog and it'll come back to you with a bear in tow. Some like hunting dogs can also tree bears, but that's not what I'm talking about here. It's because the bear sees the dog as a delicious snack? I think the dog sees the bear as a threat, right?

Starting point is 00:16:19 and it'll stop back, back, back, back, back. And then, like, the bear then obviously sees a dog as a what the fuck is this little animal doing. So now we're just engaged. I'm the apex predator here. Yeah, like, we're locked in. And the dog can smell the bear, right? So it's going to find it. And the bear can smell the dog.

Starting point is 00:16:34 So they're going to find each other. I guess I was thinking of my dog, which a bear would definitely see is a delicious snack. Yeah, your dog, I could see. Maybe it would be sub-snack size. It wouldn't be worth it. Like a little cocktail weenie. Yeah. A sausage dog would try it.

Starting point is 00:16:47 It wouldn't give it. Like, I've seen, I've sent you a video of it. a sausage dog chasing off a mountain lion. They didn't give a fuck. Very brave.

Starting point is 00:16:55 So yeah, don't take a dog. Don't try and pet it. Yeah, don't take a dog. Don't try and pet it. In this instance, I think the person

Starting point is 00:17:02 was moving through thick country where the bear was probably foraging for berries and they probably startled the bear. So you don't want to startle the bear. If you're moving through

Starting point is 00:17:10 thick country like that, that's when people will say, hey, bear, or they'll use a bear bell, or they'll talk loudly and converse with people in their

Starting point is 00:17:19 group. It is generally preferred to be in a group when we're in grizzly country, right? Not on our own. We don't know the details of this like incident. There have been some reports that the person discharged bear spray. And I want to get onto the bear's topic later because I have a lot to say about that. Let's go back and talk about bears in history. Yes. Contextualize the bear. Yeah. Ransink he wants to delist the bear from the Endangered Species Act, right? Bears haven't always been protected by the Endangered Species Act. that's why California has a bear on its flag that doesn't live here anymore. Oh, we don't have those anymore? No, we killed them all.

Starting point is 00:17:57 We don't have brown bears here. So is he on the flag because you're sorry about it or because you're proud of it? No, I think it's more of a pride thing. I think it's more of a fucking, yeah, yeah. I don't actually know what he's on the flag. I'll do some searching. I'm pretty sure it's not because we're sorry about it. Okay.

Starting point is 00:18:13 We have a good source, right, of what European people did when they first encountered bears. It's not my story from Alaska. Oh, I bet they did not know about them. Well, they did. Because as it turns out, as Lewis and Clark were moving across the plains, right? They encountered indigenous people who very specifically told them not to fuck with bears. Let me quote from Lewis's diary. I think you would not have to tell.

Starting point is 00:18:37 Like, if I have no concept of bear and I see a bear, my instinct is going to be, I'm going to leave that guy alone. See, yeah, but you're just, they're me of these guys who just built different. as it turns out their bear poking, I don't know, desire is extremely, turns out kind of productive for them. Let's read from the Lewis and Clark Diaries, a first on the podcast. Quote, the Indians give a very formidable account of the strength of ferusty of this animal, which they never dare to attack but in parties of six, eight or ten persons, and are even then frequently defeated with a loss of one or more of their party. This animal is said to more frequently attack a man on meeting with him than flee from him,

Starting point is 00:19:15 When the Indians are about to go in quest of the white bear, previous to their departure, they paint themselves and perform all these superstitious rights commonly observed when they are about to make war upon a neighboring nation. I think he's talking about brown bears. He talks about white bears there. I was going to say, is he talking about polar bears? Because you definitely don't do that.

Starting point is 00:19:31 That doesn't even worse idea. Yeah, do not fuck with a polar bear will end you. That was on the 15th of April. So he's like, yeah, you take eight or ten guys. Usually one of them dies. They don't always succeed. I want to go check it out. I got it.

Starting point is 00:19:45 Yeah, so by early May, Captain Clark and Drya killed the largest brown bear this evening, which we have ever yet seen. It was a most tremendous looking animal and extremely hard to kill, notwithstanding he had five balls through his lungs and five others in various parts. He swam more than half the distance across the river to a sandbar, and it was at least 20 minutes before he died. Then they go and say they thought it weighed about 500 pounds, but they didn't have any apparatus to weigh it. So that's the first interaction with the bear. less than a month later, quote, six good hunters of the party fired at a brown or yellow bear several times before they killed him.

Starting point is 00:20:21 And indeed, he had liked to have defeated the whole party. He pursued them separately as they fired on him and was near catching several of them. He pursued two of them separately so close that they were obliged to throw aside their guns and pouches and throw themselves into the river, although the bank was nearly 20 feet perpendicular. Oh my God.

Starting point is 00:20:40 So enraged was this animal that he plunged into the river only a few peep behind a second man, he had compelled to take refuge in the water, when one of those who still remained on the shore, shot him through the head, and finally killed him. That's not fair. If they should have him have that guy. Yeah, it should.

Starting point is 00:20:55 It's eye for an eye. It's fascinating to me, right? That, like, you do see this sometimes in, like, indigenous, like, people's records, right? There was a guy, I forget his name. I forget, I was reading about this one indigenous American guy. He was like, every time I see a bear, I've got to go try to take it on.

Starting point is 00:21:12 But, like, he records. I recognize that was not a normal response, right? Whereas apparently everyone in Lewis and Clark's party was immediately after killing the first bear they saw, despite having been told. We found the murder monster. Yeah. It tells me so much about the American psyche, right? That the indigenous people were like, you know, they will kill you. And like how much bear meat were they eating?

Starting point is 00:21:34 Yeah. I mean, maybe a bit. I don't know. Like you can eat bear meat. It's kind of greasy from what I understand. So they're just going after bears just because it's fun. I do understand that Lewis and Clark had to collect and catalogue animals, which obviously they didn't bring them back alive, right?

Starting point is 00:21:49 They brought back skulls and hides and that kind of thing so that the Western way of understanding the world could catalogue and understand these animals. And there is a great deal of knowledge that that way of seeing the world gained from that expedition, but they also mixed it up with a lot of bears. You can read more examples in their diaries. There's this idea that still exists in parts of the American sort of. of psyche that we don't have to live alongside nature. We have to conquer it, right? That we have to prove us our like apex position. And that doesn't always go well for us.

Starting point is 00:22:21 I don't need to prove anything to a bear. Yeah. I'm at peace. I'm happy to coexist with bears. I'm happy that they're there. They're happy that I'm here. I hope. We can have a nice time. I don't want to fight with bears. Lewis and Clark, by the way, I find the Lewis and Clark exhibition fascinating. At the time they were crossing the plains, they were meeting with indigenous people who had been to Paris to check it out and come home. I have no concept of that. Right. We see them as like questing into the great unknown and these people are like, yeah, no, I went over.

Starting point is 00:22:52 But those people have, they've been out back. Yeah, yeah, they just didn't want it, right? They came back because they liked it. They were having, they were fine. It wasn't that they hadn't been exposed to the European world. It was just that the European world had not physically expanded to attempt to colonize the places that they lived. So this idea that they're going in...

Starting point is 00:23:11 That really makes what they did a lot less impressive. Yeah, I mean, it was a long journey. Sure, but, right? I mean, people hide the Appalachian Trail every year. I'm not impressed. That does go a perpendicular to the... Sure, but I'm just saying, people walk a thousand miles all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they did a lot of canoeing.

Starting point is 00:23:27 It's a weird hobby. It's a weird hobby. It's a fun hobby. I like walking. But, yeah, I mean, it's an impressive journey, but, like, I think sometimes we have this idea of some, like, questing into the unknown, and that's just not it. They'd have met people who have been like, oh, yeah, I've been there. Like, what are you?

Starting point is 00:23:39 What do you think of Paris? Sadly, the Lewis and Clark expedition was not the low point for the grizzly bear population. But, Mully, talking of low points, now is a time for us to transition to an advertisement for products and services. All right, we are back. I want to quote from a federal court case here on protections for bears, by the 1930s, just 125 years after European settlers moved into grizzly country, grizzly bears were found in only 2% of their former range. Nor did this mark the low point for the grizzly. The 37 separate grizzly populations were identified in the contiguous United States in 1922.

Starting point is 00:24:28 Only six remained in 1975. So is this largely habitat encroachment or overhunting? I mean, obviously both. It's all of the above. So we were just going out there and shooting them just... Yeah, they were bounties. They were bounties for bears. By the millions.

Starting point is 00:24:43 Yeah, they were paying people to shoot the bears. We got a buffalo situation. Yeah, yeah, we got a buffalo situation here. So this wasn't just like people doing hobby hunting and like concurrent habitat encroachment. This was like an intentional destruction of bear. The bear doesn't coexist well with like human habitation and specifically like animal agriculture, right? Like it. Yeah, it's not a great neighbor.

Starting point is 00:25:05 Yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't give a fuck. And it's a big animal and it will tear shit down and people are scared of it. bears used to live all across the plains, right? It was only a small segment of the bears that lived in the mountains. They're the ones that survived just because those are the areas that it was harder to make amenable to capitalism. That never occurred to me. Yeah. That never occurred to me that they have retreated from the hills to get away from us.

Starting point is 00:25:31 Yeah. I don't think it's that the plains bears went to the hills. I think it's that the plains bears are gone. Right. They're just the ones that survived because they were like, that's crazy. The bears just used to be roaming around down here. Yeah. The bears would be out and about.

Starting point is 00:25:44 Actually, the eastern most grizzly bear sow with cubs that I'm aware of is on the APR, like in the Missouri River breaks. So the American Prairie Reserve, people who didn't listen to our Buffalo episode. Callback. Yeah, that's what they call a callback in the industry. The bears used to be all around, right? Like, I guess maybe the planes, right, or an area that's especially kind of appealing, especially when we look at like the period after the 1920s, right,

Starting point is 00:26:11 when people were trying to bring the planet to heal through the application of technology, right? I think it's Aldo Leopold, who talks about the way humans fuck with ecosystems as a bit like somebody who doesn't know how a watch works, taking a part of watch, just being like, oh, that fucking cocktail doesn't look like it's doing much to me. Let me whip that bad boy out and make it lighter. I always think of, what was it,

Starting point is 00:26:34 somebody who's colonizing and farming in Hawaii brought mongoose because they thought the mongoose would eat something that was causing a problem for the crop so it turns out the mongoose don't even eat that so now it's feral mongies sometimes like around sunset at the beach you'll see all these like mongoose just like coming out of the underbrush and taking over the beach

Starting point is 00:26:53 okay that's amazing because like they have no natural predators there yeah right like introducing animals into ecosystems and removing animals from ecosystems has all these downstream effects that like we never think like I talked to sophie about this today Like, I grew up in the UK, right, where we have tons of rabbits.

Starting point is 00:27:12 Oh, she has a rabbit in the garden today. Did she show you? Yeah, yeah, I've seen the rabbit, yeah. It's able to identify it. The rabbit population is high in part because we've removed many of their predators, right? The wolves are gone in the UK. The bears are gone in the UK. We have some foxes, but not as many because they are dangerous to sheep populations, right?

Starting point is 00:27:33 We have some raptors, but not as many. So now we have tons of rabbits. One of the rabbits do, well, they eat. crops in part, right? And they come in and eat your carrots as depicted in the Peter Rabbit. Oh, a Peter Rabbit is just tearing the garden apart. Yeah, every day. Mr. McGregor was right. Molly, that is a bold statement. Molly, Molly Kong, a childhood villain. Now the rabbits have a disease called mixomatosis, which is this horrific disease where like they sort of become almost like zombieified. Oh. Yeah, I think it came from Australia. They got a rabbit problem. Well, they were trying to eradicate them, right?

Starting point is 00:28:07 Oh, so they invented a rabbit disease? I don't know. This is what, now I'm wondering if they invented the rabbit disease. Because they did that to another invasive animal, right? Well, they lost a war. They gave them a disease? I'm not sure. Didn't they lose a war against emus?

Starting point is 00:28:23 That's right. Yeah, the Australians really have a bad record. Yeah, so basically it is a disease that existed in American rabbits only causes mild issues with them, but it is horrific in European rabbits. Yeah, it looks like. they did it on purpose. Yep. You know,

Starting point is 00:28:39 great job, guys. Yeah, Mixamatosis and rabbits, like, is a thing that, like, genuinely as a kid would, like,

Starting point is 00:28:46 so I used to shoot a lot of rabbits when I was a kid, right? And you shoot these rabbits with mixomatosis and be like, what the fuck is this? Like,

Starting point is 00:28:53 how have we done this to a living creature? They become so incapacitated that, like, sometimes crows will start eating them before they've died or, like, they wander onto the road

Starting point is 00:29:05 and get hit, right? It's really, really, really horrible. Oh, I'm looking this up and I regret. Yeah, no, yeah, Google meximatosis pictures at your own risk. No, don't.

Starting point is 00:29:14 Actually, don't. Yeah, it almost looks like they have like cataracts over their eyes. It's really, really horrible, right? But like, this is what happens when we continually try and mess with an ecosystem that has existed in harmony. And like it changes based on inputs and changes in the climate, right? Like, it's not like it's a fixed thing. It has shifted and changed through time, but it has found about. every time. And then we come in and just keep pressing one side of the scale.

Starting point is 00:29:42 This will fix it. Yeah. This is more. But we just keep chucking more on there and wondering. Kill the Bears back. I just, I can't get over. That's just like a child's approach to things. This is our policy, right?

Starting point is 00:29:54 Like, okay, so let's talk about Zinke. Right. Let's talk about, let's talk about the protections that he wants to take away. These protections were passed into law by the Endangered Species Act in 1973. three, and the Endangered Species Act lists Grizzly Bears in the lower 48 as threatened. If you're not familiar with the ESA, it prevents you from hunting, harming, or harassing listed species without a special permit. Maybe he thought he's supposed to threaten them.

Starting point is 00:30:21 Yeah, like harass them. Like, maybe it's going to do it. They're threatened. These are threatening animals. We should threaten them. He was going to post a mean tweet about them. They didn't want to be accused of harassing them and violating the ESA. One thing the ESA does not do is prevent you from defending yourself.

Starting point is 00:30:36 against these bears, which seems to be the implication in his post, right? That, like... Because, you mean, you're allowed to defend yourself against a person, so I'm sure an animal. It's likewise a bear. There was a ninth case not so long ago about someone who had killed three grizzly bears. So if you get arrested for killing an endangered animal, is it like a murder trial where you have to, like, prove self-defense? I think it would depend on where you did it, right? I was standing my ground, Your Honor.

Starting point is 00:31:01 Yeah, sure. I was... I don't even want to make jokes about standing your ground, those, because fucking horrible. The nice second opinion says, we hold the good faith belief defense for a prosecution under, and then they give the legal code, right? It's governed by subjective rather than objective standard, and it's satisfied when a defendant actually,

Starting point is 00:31:20 even as unreasonably, believes his actions are necessary to protect himself or others from perceived danger from a grisly bear. That's interesting that the language, because you don't see that, so in self-defense, in, like, if I harmed you and argued... It's been actual. No, it doesn't have to be actual,

Starting point is 00:31:35 but it has to be a real. reasonable assumption. Like, my belief has to be reasonable. Yeah. But in this and they're saying, it's okay if your belief was unreasonable. Yeah, if you're just scared of the bears. It's okay if you're dumb as hell. Yeah. Yeah. If you have no idea what you're doing, you can still kill these bears, right? Like, it gives you a very broad remit for self-defense. Because you could just say you felt that way because it doesn't matter if that's reasonable or not. Yeah. So it effectively doesn't matter. Yeah. Effectively, if you, if you are willing to state in court that you were threatened by the bear. I felt that way.

Starting point is 00:32:06 Right. It seems like you can, you can shoot the bear. I was just scared. I'm a scared of cat. Maybe it relies on toxic masculinity to like self-police itself. Right. I ain't scared. No.

Starting point is 00:32:17 It also, of course, the ESA does not include animals based on how dangerous they are. So, like, Zinkie's argument that we should deal as bears because two people got hurt, one person got killed. It doesn't line up with why the ESA exists. And like, I'm very sorry for those people, of course, but like that's not like an epidemic of bear attacks. No. Cattle kill more people. By a factor of 10 than bears, it would be... Toddlers kill more people with guns.

Starting point is 00:32:39 Yeah. Lightning kills more people than bears. A dog shot a lady with a gun the other day. Oh, wow. Well, good for him. It's good to see people pushing boundaries. Bad for her, I guess. I'm sorry to hear that. But I do think there are some best practices that could have been followed there

Starting point is 00:32:55 than I prevented the dog shooting. The dog was certainly not certified on the range. Right, yeah. The dog hadn't gone and taken his apple seed clinic or whatever. So the ESA, right, it distinguishes between a threatened and engaged species. An endangered species is, quote, endangered species is, quote, endangered extinction throughout all or a significant part of its range. A threatened species is, quote, likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range. Right, like if we start killing them?

Starting point is 00:33:22 Yeah, or keep killing them. Right. Yeah. If Ryan Zinke just opens up on bears. Yeah, yeah. Zinkey taken his Navy SEAL training and going, uh... Seal Team 6 is going to be. yellow stone.

Starting point is 00:33:34 Yeah. Yeah, they're going after that bear. Then they look at reasons for this, right, disease, predation, destruction of habitat, commercial take, inadequacy of regulatory mechanisms to protect them, or natural or man-made factors, including Brian Zinke, killing them. Because grizzly bears in the lower 48 are threatened, there are defined ecosystems. There are six of them in which we're trying to recover the bear populations. And one of these is the greater Yellowstone ecosystem.

Starting point is 00:34:05 The Yellowstone bears have been ping-ponged around the ESA for some time, as it turns out. Bears were removed in 2007 and then returned in 2009 by a court decision. Then it was removed again under Zinky in the first Trump administration. I feel like if you're on the cusp like that, leave it alone. Like obviously if every time you delist them, they become threatened again. Like, leave them alone. Yeah, that's it. Well, in this case, it wasn't the reason for the delist.

Starting point is 00:34:32 The sting was challenged in court and found to be insufficient. It wasn't that a population who could dive. We're just changing our mind about how much we care about bears. Yeah. Or like in this case, basically what the court said, I can actually read to you from the court order. It's Crow Indian tribe, Al versus USA. The policy implications are greater Yellowstone.

Starting point is 00:34:51 Grizzly delisting are significant, but they cannot affect the court's disposition. Although, the order may have impacts throughout grizzly country beyond. This case is not about the ethics of hunting. It is not about solving human or life. stop grisly conflicts as a practical or philosophical matter. These issues are not before the court. Then little ellipsies, where I've skipped a bit,

Starting point is 00:35:09 by delisting the Greater Yellowstone Grizzly, without analysing how delisting would affect the remaining members of the lower 48 grizzly designation, the service failed to consider how reduced protections for the greater Yellowstone ecosystem would impact the other grizzly populations. Thus, the service entirely failed to consider an important aspect of the problem.

Starting point is 00:35:27 So the bear's got a good lawyer. There were two different court cases and they were combined in this Montana case, that they got a good lawyer. Essentially, what they're saying, though, right, is that, like, this is an issue which we have to look at, like, nationally, because if we have state control it and Wyoming or Montana, the three states, right, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, one of them says, have we got too many bears, killing too many cows, let's open it up on the bears, open season on bears.

Starting point is 00:35:52 The bears don't know what state they're in. They simply do not respect borders. They do not. They, yeah, they refuse to... The jurisdictional boundary is meaningless to him. They engage in interstate commerce. So this one, it's got to be like a federally controlled issue. Unfortunately, our federal government right now is not one that's massively amenable to conservation.

Starting point is 00:36:13 It's run by bear murderers. Yeah, they would love to murder. I mean, Donald Trump's son, right, is big into. Oh, he does love big game hunting, doesn't he? It does, yeah. He goes on those, like, rich boy safaris. Yeah, he's got, it's funny. Someone was like, oh, someone was talking to me the other day about like, you should pitch this outdoor publication.

Starting point is 00:36:27 And then I realized it was owned by Trump Jr. So that's a no from me. No. Just a clear no for me, dog. I bet they love conservation stories. Yeah, I would be down to picture hunting publication about the damage that the border wall does to our landscapes and our, like, I've seen a mule deer try and get through the border wall. And it's very, very, yeah, it's really sad because she had been habituated to going that way for water genetically, for generations, right? And now she can't.

Starting point is 00:36:54 And yeah, that's pretty fucked. I'd love to write that for a hunting publication, not writing it for Donald Trump's union's one. I don't think he's commissioning it either, to be honest. I don't think they'd pay for it. No, I think they're probably using a VAD hat to guess, some artificial intelligence. But I've never actually read it. I'm not going to. Don't care.

Starting point is 00:37:12 If you're interested in the ESA and what is done for Grisly Bears, I'm going to link to a Centre for Biological Diversity Report, which is pretty good. This was published when the ESA was 50, so it's a few years old now. But people will be thinking, I have seen pictures of people hunting grizzly bears. I thought that you couldn't do that. that's because those bears are in Alaska. So they are not considered to be threatened. Different bears.

Starting point is 00:37:34 Or like the same species of bear, where they just live somewhere else? Usses, Arctos, Heriblis. Yeah, the same. Horiblus? Horribless, yeah. That's bad PR for him. Yeah, they really screwed him on the name. This is part of the way the colonial mindset interacts with nature, right?

Starting point is 00:37:52 Horrible bear. Like they named him Mr. Horrible. Yeah, horrible bear. That's mean. The other, like, I'm aware of like, Oster's. Arctos Syriarchus, which is the Syrian bear, fine, acceptable. That makes sense. That's descriptive.

Starting point is 00:38:04 Yeah. It also lives in other parts of the region, but that's okay. Misleading. Yeah, yeah. We could call him Ursus Arctos-Alsham, I guess, if we wanted to get with it. But there are translations to the Bible that used Syria to describe the whole region as well, so it's okay. But like horrible bear? Yeah, horrible bear.

Starting point is 00:38:22 They really did them dirty on that one. Could it call it nice bear? Maybe I'll petition for that. He should call up those lawyers from Montana. Yeah, I got the coalition together again with the crow tribe. The bear is not inherently horrible, right? We've just been horrible to the bear. He's just doing what he does.

Starting point is 00:38:37 Maybe that's why he's so bad. Maybe. Right? He's like, you know, if you're going to call me horrible, I'll be horrible. Yeah. Maybe he's playing to the stereotype. So the Alaska bears can be hunted, right? They are hunted.

Starting point is 00:38:49 Things do get a little complicated in Alaska with different rules governing sport hunting and subsistence hunting at federal land and state land. And there is a coal program in Alaska right now that is understandably very controversial. The idea is that they will cull the bear to help the caribou population recover. You are looking at a thing which is multifactorial and only – but this is like taking the part out of the watch, right? They was talking about – Right.

Starting point is 00:39:17 Like there's other things going on for the caribou. Yeah, yeah. It's not the bear who moves into the caribou's home. It is people, right? Like it's not the bear who caused climate change. Right. Like, there are other factors we can address, but we're taking it out on the bear. Yeah, which will be a common theme through our discussion here today.

Starting point is 00:39:34 But I understand that we want the caribou herd to survive as well. But if you're trying to manage the caribou herd for hunting by controlling bear populations to allow more caribou, I don't think that's... We're modifying the wrong variable. Yes, you know, pretty good, yeah. There is Alaska legislation that I thought was interesting to make such programs go through peer review. That appears to be going absolutely nowhere. seems stuck in the Alaska house. So we had to get a bunch of scientists to determine whether or not

Starting point is 00:40:01 there will be environmental impact of Buffalo going back to where Buffalo live, but we can't get a scientific review of whether or not we should be killing the bears. Yes, I know that there are other reasons for us to do environmental impact studies, like hydrology and stuff. Thank you, EIS people who reached out. We appreciate all our science listeners. But yeah, it is pretty sad that we can't get a, get a, I guess the argument would be peer review takes too long. Okay.

Starting point is 00:40:24 But like, you could get a couple of people to be like, you know what? It takes a lot longer to get all the bears back. Get a couple of scientists. It wouldn't take that long. That they need jobs right now. Got a couple of bear scientists and employ them. See how it goes. So let's talk about, I guess, like, why Zinke wants to delist them.

Starting point is 00:40:42 A bear stole his wife. And I'm like in an eating way. No, she's fine. They live together happily. She lives in the woods now. Yeah, yeah. She's living a best life. it seems that one incident was a sow with cubs who was foraging for berries.

Starting point is 00:40:58 And the other one was a bear foraging for berries who was surprised. This is nothing to as a population levels, as I said earlier. Right, it's just like it's an unfortunate thing where somebody was in a bad situation. Yeah, we live in a landscape where things can kill you. Most of those things are cars, but some of them are animals. Well, we should start shooting the cars. Yeah, but we don't do a revenge attack on Ford every time someone gets in a motor accident, right? I looked at Bear Vault.

Starting point is 00:41:25 So Bear Vault, if you're not familiar, money makes bear cans. You familiar with bear cans? Was it like tin cans you wear around your neck? You jingle jangle? Yes. You can talk to the bear. He holds one can.

Starting point is 00:41:36 You hold the other one. There's a string. He's in his tree house. You're in your tree house. Exactly. Yeah. You say, I'm coming through. Please don't eat me.

Starting point is 00:41:42 No. A bear can is a thing that you put your food in when you're camping. I was picturing like a big necklace made out of like old tin cans. Like an old-timey. Like a lay. For bear country. Yeah. I don't know why you wouldn't need to buy that.

Starting point is 00:41:58 You could make that at home. Yeah, you can make that for free. Bear Vault keeps like an open source collection of bear mallings. Bears, according to their data, have killed 66 people since 1974. That's not very many. It's not a lot of people. That's like one a year. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:42:14 A little more than that. It's very, very hard to make a public health argument for delisting brown bears. More people, more people than that have measles. like in my immediate area. Yeah, well, that's a whole other fucking public health issue, I'm afraid. When they do ESA studies on what kills bears, it's human interactions. I noticed a lot of bears. Probably guns, mostly.

Starting point is 00:42:35 Trains. Trains kill a lot of bears. That's so sad. Yeah, it's really sad. So maybe... Wait, so you're supposed to make noise of the bear here as you come in. Trains are loud as hell. They come pretty fast, I think. Oh.

Starting point is 00:42:46 And I think they're not like super loud if you're just like, if they're not trying to be loud. Like if you're in a linear direction to the train. Maybe they're habituated to it because the trains come so regularly. I don't know. That's so sad. Yeah. Never thought about a bear getting hit by a train. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:43:03 Bears get hit by cars too, especially black bears. I mean, I'm sure brown bears do. They're just bigger. I wonder if that's part of why, you know, like there's a sort of, we can't afford to keep smashing our trains on bears situation here. I'm not sure. I think the train's probably fine. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:43:17 I mean, the train keeps going. Some of those bears are pretty big. I'm sure it delays their train. operations. I mean, if there was like a massive train derailment, yeah, that's maybe we need to build a bare fence or something. I don't know. Yeah, well, we have these wildlife underpasses, right, that allow wildlife to go under or over freeways. A while ago, the right was getting really mad about one in Santa Monica. This was like a, I think Benny Johnson had done like an investigation into this overpass. His theory here was that the overpass was allowing, I'm not

Starting point is 00:43:46 joking, terrible cougars to come into neighborhoods and kill people's children. We came into the cougars neighborhood. The cougars, Benny, are already fucking there because... And how many children have been eaten by cougars in Santa Monica? I'm aware of one person in California being killed by a mountain line in the last few years. And a few more people have been killed. Like, I can think of a couple more people. But mostly on, like, hiking trails, right?

Starting point is 00:44:16 Like, not their yards. Yes. I'm not aware of a cougar coming into anybody's house. It's not really how the mountain lion lives its life. I mean, sometimes people's chihuahuas have lost their lives to this scourge. I understand. Yeah, yeah. But not their children.

Starting point is 00:44:30 Not their children. And like- Animals aren't coming to your house and taking your child. And the idea that they're not there anyway. Like, if they want to come into your neighborhood, they can come into your neighborhood. They're good at moving across country. That's what they do. This will just keep you from running into it with your Lexus.

Starting point is 00:44:44 Yeah, exactly. Like, it's, and it's going to allow, like, the little mice and other. small creatures, right, that can't so nimbly jump over highway barriers. The obvious other argument for delisting bears is that people want to kill them. Get a different hobby. You can even kill black bears in most states in the Western United States if that's your thing, right? It seems like a lot of people just don't want bears around.

Starting point is 00:45:09 And that makes me sad because I think sharing our landscape with bears is beautiful. And I think it's special that we have this thing in this country that, like, it's one Navarlic national symbolic mammals, right? I mean, he's like a gigantic guy who just wants to eat berries and hang out. Yeah, he wants to kill stuff. Sure, but like just I love the idea of just like this huge animal just like roaming around looking for a little sweet treat. Yep.

Starting point is 00:45:36 Yeah, they, they're incredibly adaptable, right? They can eat berries, they can eat meat, they can eat fish. I love when they just take one bite of a fish and throw it back. So wasteful. He's just like me for real. It's too fishyy. He wants it like a fresher one. The other argument, I guess, is a certain populations have recovered, which kind of,

Starting point is 00:45:57 it shows a misunderstanding that the importance of having a population for genetic diversity, right? But also, like, I just, I'm really stuck on, like, just because there's a lot of them doesn't mean you have to kill. There's a lot of squirrels in my neighborhood, but I'm not allowed to shoot them. And you can't just do a squirrel genocide, yeah. Oh, there's just a lot of these. I'm going to do violence on them. Just don't do that. There are a lot of these, and it's been incoming convenient for us, like, and therefore.

Starting point is 00:46:20 It's interesting to look at like the certain populations that are doing well at the Yellowstone bears. The Yellowstone bears have a much higher meat content in their diet than they used to. From all the tourists they're eating. Yes, that's right. Yeah, that's mostly it. They feed them into the moor. Every year they drop off a bus at the Bear Cave as an offering. And then the bears violated the treaty.

Starting point is 00:46:40 That's why they're mad. No, it's because climate change is making it hard of them to find their berries. Right. And human pressure is pushing them further and further. away from certain areas. Eating more meat is going to lead to more conflict with hunters, both in terms of them both being in the same space at the same time, trying to do the same thing.

Starting point is 00:46:59 And honestly, it's so harmful for the bears that they've all been listening to Jordan Peterson. The carnivore diet is not for everybody. Just imagining a bear. It's not good advice, you guys. Yeah, they've become terrible transphobes. That's really why we want to t-list them. I think we can look at what happens when animals lose their protections. We can see the way that Wyoming, for instance, dealt with wolves, right?

Starting point is 00:47:23 Are you familiar with this incident last year of that wolf that was like horrifically mistreated in Wyoming? No. It was really fucking gross. Did they like torture it? Yes. Why? Because I guess it made them feel big and strong. Right.

Starting point is 00:47:38 So again, this isn't about like managing conflict with livestock. It's not about like, you know, ecological management. It's not, this is about people who just want to hurt animals. Yeah. Because they didn't just kill them. this wolf because they didn't want it around, they did something horrible to it. Yeah, I mean, this guy, there were videos of this, right? But this guy...

Starting point is 00:47:58 So they tormented in an animal and then they made a video of it. They made an animal snuff film. This is just about torture. I'm not saying everyone who wants to deal as Disney Bears, grizzly bears, wants to torture them in this way. But like... But it is this, like, this desire to engage in this violence. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:48:14 Like, for certain people, right, there's an idea somehow that they can prove their, like, strength and virility and masculinity. Get into powerlifting. Yeah. So what this guy did if people aren't familiar, his name is Cody Roberts. Never met a good Cody. I've met some nice Cody's. Oh, no. There's, okay, we know one. Yeah. He hit the wolf on his, he ran down the wolf on his snowmobile. So it wasn't bothering you. You pursued it.

Starting point is 00:48:40 Yeah, he chased it on his snowmobile. He taped its mouth shut and took it to a bar. Does this man have a wife and is she okay? That's a good question. I'm trying to work out if he went to jail. 18 months probation. Promation. And he gets a prison term if he fails. He filed a guilty plea to felony animal cruelty.

Starting point is 00:49:00 I understand that there are people like within the hunting, ranching, outdoor space who think this guy is a piece of shit. There are many of them. I know many of them. Because that's a very weird thing to do. Yeah, it's psycho. What's the thought process here? What is shooting it? I don't agree with, but I.

Starting point is 00:49:17 I understand that you would do that. That's the thing people do. But why did you, like, chase it down and abduct it? Yeah. Why did you choose to make this animal suffer? Like, did you just show no respect for life? Right? Like, we joke like, oh, does he have a wife?

Starting point is 00:49:32 She's okay. But genuinely, this is a person who is like a psycho. Like, yeah. No, I'm not joking. I'm not joking, actually. Like, if you, if this is your first instinct for how you treat a living creature, like, I bet he's not good to women either. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:49:46 Like, this doesn't seem like a person. person who people should feel safe around. Oh, it was a young female wolf too. Yeah. Oh, no. What have you found? Sorry, I just found a picture of her. Yeah, no, it's really sad.

Starting point is 00:50:00 The whole thing is really sad. Like, to injure this animal, right, to the extent that it can't get away or defend itself and then tape up its mouth and then drag it to a place where it's going to be in fear for the rest of its life before you kill it, it's, it's unconscionable. It's horrific. I'm not saying that that will happen to bears, but I'm saying that like... A bear would be a lot harder to do that too.

Starting point is 00:50:25 Yeah, yeah, it would be. You know, I think, as his punishment, this guy should try to do this to a bear. What I am saying is that even if we, like, go ahead and de-list bears without serious controls, if we start to manage them just as like a vermin, right? Like, as a pest, like this opens up all kinds of avenues. And I think a lot of people,

Starting point is 00:50:47 find themselves in a situation that is beyond their grasp. Yeah. Right? Like if suddenly you're, if you're a guy who's like, yeah, I'd love to shoot a bear. Now you're allowed to. I think people are going to find themselves in situations they didn't anticipate. Yeah. I know in Alaska, for instance, if you want to hunt a brown bear and you're not an

Starting point is 00:51:03 Aska resident, you have to go with a guide. That's probably a good thing. Right. Like, I think if we start killing the bears back, more people will get killed by bears. A lot of these guys are going to die. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The bear deaths will go up. Without a doubt, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:51:18 Already your best chance of getting into an encounter with a bear is probably hunting, right? Like if you're not hunting bears necessarily, but let's say you're in bear hunting. Yeah, because you're moving around the woods quietly. You could start one. Right. So that's already against the advice for not encountering a bear. And then if you then you're able to shoot something and then you, let's say you're in a, your backcountry hunting, right?

Starting point is 00:51:44 You have to backpack the... Now you have me. Meat out. Yeah. But then now you're coming back to the carcass for your second load of meat. A bear may have found that carcass, right? Somebody might already be there. He might not want to give that up. It's his now. Yeah. You find yourself in a difficult situation. Talking to difficult situations, Molly, I have to pivot to advertisements again. Yeah. Hopefully this one's not for wolf tape. We are back. Let's talk, Molly, about safety in bear country. Grisly Country specifically, right? After this tragedy where this hiker died in Glacier National Park,

Starting point is 00:52:34 I have seen a number of articles claiming that bear spray is, quote, a placebo or that you, quote, shouldn't bet your life on it. Well, I think if you think it's a placebo, you should taste it. Yeah, it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of not only how bear spray works, but also what a placebo is, right? Like, you three of the words in your title, all of the nouns, you don't understand. The bear doesn't know what it is. The placebo effect will not work on bears.

Starting point is 00:53:02 Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, the placebo effect actually does work on bears. You can spray things that are not bear spray, and they still don't like it. Oh, if it's been bear spray before. Yeah. It's just the, I guess not maybe the placebo effect.

Starting point is 00:53:15 Yeah, it's a noise. It's the cloud. Like, I guess it's not really a placebo because you're not. A bewildering, because it's startling to them. Yeah, yeah. But you're not saying it's bears spray. It's not actually a placebo. The bear will not.

Starting point is 00:53:26 have sort of imaginary symptoms of bear spray exposure due to their belief. Yeah. Yeah, that they have been bear sprayed. I should note that most of the articles are written by the same person. So what's his motivation here? Why is it? He's like, does he own a company that sells something that, like, rivals Big Bear Spray? No, it's a person who's got a guy called Wes Seiler, who used to write for Outside magazine and no longer does.

Starting point is 00:53:52 There's a escalating trend in the severity of his claims about the lack of efficacy of bear spray that correlates with him making income that is directly related to the number of views on the articles making those claims. That is really destroying the information landscape. Yeah, I mean, I think also people not knowing what the fuck they're talking about and being given a platform is also destroying the information landscape. And both of those are at play here. Really see this sort of escalating way people write because their income is dependent on clickbait.

Starting point is 00:54:22 Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The clicks to cash pipeline is not helping us. I make the same amount of money, even if none of you listen to my podcast. Yeah, you guys, you could all turn this off right now. I'd still be poor. This is not true, right? I take really strong offense at this.

Starting point is 00:54:41 I don't know, it was quite a way to say that this is bullshit, right? Like, if Bear Spade never worked and couldn't work, he wouldn't be the only one saying it. Correct. There would be scores of people saying, I tried this had nothing happened. Yeah. Also, like, we have data on this, right? This is not a thing that we need to pull out of our ass. This is not a thing that we need to rely on individual anecdotes for.

Starting point is 00:55:04 This is not a thing that will be determined by the outcome of a single incident in Glacier National Park. This is a thing that we have masses of data on. There's bare scientists. I spoke to one, Molly. I can't wait to hear that. I had a very lovely conversation. He has the two studies. And to be clear, where sight sees.

Starting point is 00:55:22 And I don't know if it's just that he didn't read them or he didn't read them well or that he read them to the best of his ability and this is what we're getting. I mean, scientific literacy is pretty poor. Sure. It's always okay not to write an article making claims about something that impacts people's safety if you don't know what you're talking about. It's always okay to be quiet when we're discussing other people's well-being. That's fine. The adults talk about theirs.

Starting point is 00:55:48 It doesn't impact your substack in the same way. Oh, it's a substack situation. Yeah, it's a sub-sac situation. I would suggest that writing that bear spray is dangerous or useless is akin to saying that seatbelts are dangerous or useless in that we can. If we look hard enough, find one person who was killed by their seatbelt. No one's ever been killed by bear spray. Sure. I have been bears sprayed more than once.

Starting point is 00:56:12 Didn't kill me. And when we were talking about this earlier, this is the most shocking fact of all to me so far. Bear spray is less potent than police pepper spray. I believe there's less OC in bear spray. I would have assumed it's more, but it's less. Yeah, I think the idea is... Because bears have such sensitive noses. Very sensitive noses.

Starting point is 00:56:31 To be clear, it's still very unpleasant for humans. Like, I consider myself to have a nose of average sensitivity. And having been a recipient of bear spray, it's highly unpleasant. Right, but I just, I thought, you know, I, if we would have assumed you said, oh, I've been bear sprayed, like, oh, that's like way more hardcore. Sure, yeah, yeah, because a bear is bigger. But it's not. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:56:50 So the bear spray, part of the reason, I think that it has less of the OC oil. in it is that it has to be propelled out at a velocity that allows it to be used even if the bear is coming at you and the wind is blowing towards you, right? So the bear is coming with the wind, so you're spraying the pay. And then the spray would be, you don't want the spray to all be blown back to you, right? You want it to be able to get out to create that barrier between you and the bear. And it does, again, Dr. Smith studies have shown that bears bay does work, even with an unfavorable wind, right? I will link to both these studies. everything he's done, which I think is really cool because this stuff impacts like your safety in Gris country.

Starting point is 00:57:31 Everything he's done is available publicly for free. Hell yeah. Very unusual in the academic research space, right? But I think it's great because it allows you to look at this bears bears a placebo article. And then you can go find the study. I will link it right here. And you can say, huh, sure seems like this guy can't read a study. And does he, has he read those studies?

Starting point is 00:57:51 He claims to, yeah. He quotes them. So it's not that he just isn't aware of them. He just doesn't believe the expert because of a personal experience. I think he either didn't grasp the table or didn't grasp. So again, like, the person who wrote these studies is extremely easy to contact and anyone doing reasonable journalism would do so. Right.

Starting point is 00:58:13 So I guess is he saying, I read this study and it's wrong? Or is he saying I read the study and it agrees with me? He's saying I read the study and it says bear spray doesn't work. It agrees with me. Oh, no. Yeah, yeah. He could have just emailed the author. Could it just asked? Could it just asked? Yeah. So, like, there are incidents in the study which are considered successful and non-successful uses. Some of the non-successful uses are with a black bear when you spray it and it comes back later. Then it's still, the brown bear is not killing you in that situation, right? I'm sorry, a black bear. It still worked. Like, efficacy doesn't mean permanent.

Starting point is 00:58:48 Yeah. And at some point when you're making a study like this, you have to decide, like, what a, you're trying to create a binary relationship about a thing. theories of things, right? The other study he wrote was efficacy of firearms for bear defense in Alaska. It's worth noting that in the efficacy of firearm study, more than 120 bears died out of a data set, something like 250. None of the bear spray bears died. Oh, that's a lot. Right? Yeah. Yeah, it's a lot. And I feel like it's better if everybody survives the encounter. Yeah. It's better for all of us if we use this extremely well-researched tool, right? And again, having read zero studies. I read zero studies.

Starting point is 00:59:28 Yeah. But I know only 1.1 persons a year are killed by bears. Yeah. So if this never worked and couldn't work, more people would have been killed by bears. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Certainly a lot of people who used the bear spray didn't get killed by bears, right?

Starting point is 00:59:46 None of them did. It is possible to use bears spray and be killed by bears, like, especially. It's happened to maybe 50 people. Residia. Residues of bear spray will attract bears in the, like... Well, that's unfair. Well, it's an interesting smell, right? And they have an amazing nose.

Starting point is 01:00:02 So I'm guessing, like, they will come check it out. And I know that, like, there are incidents where people have, for instance, use bear spray in the way that one might use bug spray, are you spraying their tent? That's not going to work, yeah. Yeah, well, you're going to bring them in. That's like saying I'm going to use this gun to protect myself by making a circle around me with bullets. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 01:00:21 Smearing myself with the bullets in a circle around my tent. it's not quite cargo cult thinking, but like it's a, I know, it's like magical thought process, I guess. Like, that's not her best spray works. You spray at the best. Homeopathic gun is where you just lick the bullets. Yeah. Let's talk about the things that you can do, right? Like, you can keep a clean camp. This is really big.

Starting point is 01:00:42 Don't attract them. Yeah. So if we look at like Yosemite, right? Yosemite and that, like, Yosemite Kings Canyon, Sequoia Park system, you can't bring bear spray in there, right? Oh. But you have to have a bear can. So I backpacked in that area. They have done surveys that showed that, like, most people were acquainted with best bear practices,

Starting point is 01:01:03 but we're not following them on the trail. So it's not that they didn't know better or they just don't care. I think people, it's hard to, like, fathom a giant several hundred pound, half-ton creature is going to come in and steal my cliff bars. Right. But it will. And it's hard to fathom how good their smell is. Because they love a delicious snack.

Starting point is 01:01:24 Like, they're berry boys. They're berry boys. They're going to come get your little treats. Yeah, they love a high carbohydrate, like energy snack. They're endurance athletes. They want to eat your cliff bar. If you're keto, you're fine. But they would like candy.

Starting point is 01:01:37 But they love candy, yeah. I know. It would be unethical to give a bear skittles. Yeah. It'll be wrong. So we want to keep a clean camp. We're in bear country. Right.

Starting point is 01:01:47 That means stuff with odors. It's not just our food, but also like the, maybe the clothes we cooked in. We have a scented toothpaste, stuff like that. Wow. Yeah. Like if I had, if I was in the habit of using a shampoo that smelled like, I think I spoke to Dr. Smith about this, like he said, if I used apricot shampoo, probably wouldn't bring it with me.

Starting point is 01:02:05 Wow. Because they just want to come check out that sweet tree. Yeah. Like, it's a, if you think that they eat berries, right? You make yourself smell like a fruit. Like, it's kind of on you. Like I get. Yeah, it makes sense.

Starting point is 01:02:15 Like, Winnie the Pooh, he's just like following his nose. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to blame anyone for not knowing things because we're all, none of us are born knowing anything. and it's not like they issue PSAs about bears every day. I bet there's a pamphlet at the trailhead.

Starting point is 01:02:29 Yeah, there's definitely, well, when you go to Yosemite, you have to sign in with a ranger for a wilderness permit, and then they'll give you the once over. But there are other things we would not do, right? I would not sleep alone in a tent in bear country. And there were two of us, I'd probably two tents, right? Like, just gives one of us a chance to deploy the bear spray, and the bear does come in.

Starting point is 01:02:49 We can get bare fences. We can try very hard not to support. cries bears, right? So I was trail running in Alaska last year in some pretty thick brush, right? I used a little bear bell. Yeah, it's dorky. But like... No, it sounds cute as hell. I'm going to look it up. Yeah. Well, there's an unfortunate video that you'll probably see when you Google Bearbell of a hiker who thought the bell bell bell with a repellent. And so the black bear is charging him and he's waving his bell. Oh, just ringing the bell at it. No. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it sounds like people are purchasing these.

Starting point is 01:03:23 solutions but not understanding the functions of them. Yeah, and like, I don't want to, like, blame people for that because part of the way we get to a place where we could destroy so much of our megafauna is so few people care about or understand it, right? That's an education issue that we can't solve quickly or, like, on a podcast. I think that it would behoove anyone who's going camping in, especially LaGris country, right? So in Alaska, Wyoming, not all of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho. And I've camped in those places.

Starting point is 01:03:53 I've camped in all those places to learn about these things, right? Because it's not just a negative instant for you. Like, it's also a negative incident for the bear. Even if you have to bear spray a bear, right? That fucking sucks for the bear. I mean, I've been pepper sprayed. And the bear can't even go, like, wash his hair with dawn. Right.

Starting point is 01:04:09 Yeah, he can't stand in the shower, like, looking down. Like, I don't know, there's this. I guess the positive outcome of that is that the bear will be like likely to not want to come around people so much, right? because they'll associate this negative attraction with the bear spray. Right, so this seems like it's, that it does work. And then also if we're all doing it, you'll have you don't have to do it as much. Yeah. Because the bears will leave us alone.

Starting point is 01:04:30 Yeah, we have the solution for being in bear country, right? Like, it is to carry our bear repellent. Unless the bears are like me. You know, I've been pepper spray by all kinds of cops. And I'm still going to go look and see what they're up to. Just keep on tanking. Yeah. I'm a very stupid bear.

Starting point is 01:04:44 Monty. Yeah, Monty. They just keep spraying me. These people, why are they? There were some incidents where, I guess, brown bears got sprayed, charged the person, but, like, as they were charging the person, sprayed them, and they came through the spray,

Starting point is 01:05:00 but then as a spray got more condensed, they knocked the person over and kept on charging. They were like, okay, I don't want any part of this. Yeah, which is obviously not a great outcome, but it's a better outcome than you're getting more by the bear, right? Better than get eaten by bear. But, like, I really want to push back on this narrative that we should be all carrying firearms.

Starting point is 01:05:18 First of all... Most people, most people, most people don't need a gun. Yeah, I mean, like, there are reasons to own guns, I have lots of them. But, like, defending yourself from bears

Starting point is 01:05:28 probably isn't one unless you're already very proficient with firearms. And even then, I don't want to kill a bear. Like... But I just think, if you're telling every casual hiker

Starting point is 01:05:41 who goes to where bears might be that they need to own a gun, a lot of those people would not have otherwise owned a gun. Yeah. Are not good at handling a gun in a situation where they need to use the gun against the bear, it's going to go badly, but also...

Starting point is 01:05:52 100%. Now there's a gun in their home that they would not otherwise have had in their home. Yeah. And the odds of a firearm accident in the home are now higher. Yeah, well, yeah, infinitely higher than it didn't have one, right? So, like, it's not going to work out for you in this limited instance that you think you need it for. Yeah. And then you've introduced a dangerous...

Starting point is 01:06:09 And now you have a gun you didn't need. Yeah. Like, it is impossible, Mully, if you are getting... If I am getting more by a grizzly bear and you bear spray that bear, I will have spicy eyes and hopefully... survive. If you shoot that bear, it is very possible and it has happened that you will also shoot me. Because the average person, not a good shot under controlled circumstances. Bear attack, not a controlled circumstance. Yeah. Like everyone, like this is especially a thing with men,

Starting point is 01:06:35 right, they will tend to overestimate their ability with firearms dramatically in my experience. This is not a fuck around and find out situation. You don't want to find out that you're not very good at shooting as the grizzly bear is charging you. And even if you are very good at shooting at the range, you're not in this situation. You're not. You have to deploy the firearm right now. Your hands are shaking. There's piss running down your leg.

Starting point is 01:06:57 We're scared. Yeah, you have to incapacitate the bear. Like, I've been in up-close situations with big animals. It's scary. Like, thinking I'm going to die now, it has a profound effect on the human body. And it's not one that... And it doesn't improve your aim.

Starting point is 01:07:13 It doesn't actually enhance your John Wick characteristics. Yeah. So I would highly recommend that if you're going to bear country you get some bear spray. Don't fly what you can't fly with bear spray. So you're going to have to buy it when you get there. This is not like big bear spray. This is also an accusation that like big bear spray sort of funded these studies or that

Starting point is 01:07:33 this is silly, right? The dare spray industry is not that big guys. It works. It is statistically more effective than using firearms. It works. What does it cost like 40 bucks? Yeah, not even that. And how much does a gun cost?

Starting point is 01:07:46 A lot more than that. Yeah, a lot more than that, especially if you're going to actually practice with it, right? If you're going to get bear spray, I would suggest you can get a dummy. It's just got water in it and you can practice, right? There are a couple of safeties on a bear spray. I don't have one. I've got one here.

Starting point is 01:08:01 Within arms reach in your office. Yeah, I've got one over here. Yeah, I've got my rack of stuff in some of my bear spray. But like, it's a safety on it and there's actually a zip tie when you get it to stop the safety coming off just to stop it. Just to blow up in your bag. Going off in the shipping container, yeah, or in the Walmart or whatever. So you're going to want to remove that, right? And then they sell packs, which has the water one and the spicy one.

Starting point is 01:08:25 And you're going to practice deploying the water one, right? And like... That's smart. Yeah. When you're carrying your bear spray, if it's in the bottom of your backpack, the bear doesn't give you that much advance notice. Yeah. So the bear spray is like when I was, when I'm running in places where there are grizzly bears, I wear a little running vest.

Starting point is 01:08:45 I put it in the front here. If I have binoculars and I have a little binocular pack, I put it on the side there. I've done it on my belt before. I've Googled Bear Spray and the pictures, the pictures that are used to advertise this product. I got to see this. How do I send you this picture? You can just put it in the chat. This is not a real picture.

Starting point is 01:09:09 Is this a real picture of a man spraying a bear? Because the bear is sort of enveloped in this cloud of spray. so it just looks like one of those soft effects paintings of the bear silhouette in like a cloud. Yeah, it looks like a... I'm a big fan of T-shirts of wolves howling at the moon. Exactly. It's like that. It's a bear and an old man's brain.

Starting point is 01:09:30 I don't know why, if you're staging it, it's... This is bizarre. Because that's not a real picture of that happening. I don't know. I don't think so, because there's no bear body. And you can see this, you can see the bush, right? Like, it's just its head. They haven't bothered...

Starting point is 01:09:43 It's very close. Yeah, also, yeah. And the bear doesn't look too upset. It's kind of, yeah. Because that is a fascinating... If we scroll down, there are better images of people using bear spray. Which is incredible, incredible product photos. Yeah, that is really quite remarkable.

Starting point is 01:09:59 I would suggest everybody who is going into bear country buy bear spray and practice using it. Like, it's better for you. It's better for bears. It's cheaper than a gun. You can if you want buy a bear fence. electric fence that goes around your camp if you're camping in the backcountry. I think that's a good idea

Starting point is 01:10:19 if you're in an area with lots of bears. They weigh very little now. I'm by myself one actually after talking to Dr. Smith. Well, I won't because I haven't got enough money, but I'd like to. Maybe I'll hear from the bear fence people. You can follow all the best practices, right? And you're not just going to learn it from a podcast.

Starting point is 01:10:36 You're going to look up the park system. You're going to look at Dr. Smith's research. Ask a park ranger. He'll tell you. Yeah. That's his job. Yeah, some of their jobs. Depends what kind of ranges there are.

Starting point is 01:10:47 Some of them are cops. The overwhelming bulk of evidence suggests that the way to go with bears is bear spray. Until a bear kills an oil rig, we will continue to have bears on a landscape. But it is something that we should genuinely care about. The trophic cascade is not as much of a thing as it was once made out to be. I'm sure you've seen that thing about how wolves change rivers. No. You have to tell me about wolves too.

Starting point is 01:11:23 A whole other episode. Yeah, well, fucking wolf management is a whole other thing. The bears have entered the discourse this week because a bear killed someone. We don't talk about it when someone kills a bear, right? Like Alaska, they're culling bears from aircraft right now. And I'm not saying that like a human life is equal to a bear life, but I'm saying that... Hunting from an aircraft is such bitch behavior. I know.

Starting point is 01:11:47 If you want to take a bear, do it with a knife like a hero or a bow. Or, you know, do it Lewis and Clark style. Use a musket. That's fine. Yeah, yeah. Try it. Eight of your friends and a musket at the edge of the river and you don't have bear spray. So your only option is to jump into the river.

Starting point is 01:12:01 20 feet off a clip. Just with a bear that you could have left alone. So, yeah, I want to, I guess, like, end by saying that, like, the outdoors isn't entirely safe. And that's part of what makes it beautiful. There have been times when I have been in. the wilderness where I have thought I was going to die. And I keep going back to the wilderness because it's also one of the things that makes me feel so grateful to be alive. And it's okay if it isn't entirely safe. We know that when we enter the wilderness and we do our best to mitigate

Starting point is 01:12:34 that risk, right? We plan. We take safety precautions. We bring our first aid kit in our bear spray and we tell someone where we're going and when we're coming back and we do all this stuff. But we understand that there is some inherent risk and that's all right. Like, if we wanted to see wildlife and have no inherent risk and have it be comfortable, we would just go to the zoo. Right. And the zoo sucks

Starting point is 01:12:55 compared to the outdoors, right? Like, I don't want to see a bear in a cage. It's undignified for the bear. It's so sad for them in there. Yeah, like, it's demeaning to me to see something demeaned for my entertainment in that fashion. Like, I, I, I, and we can't comprehend animals outside of the habitat,

Starting point is 01:13:12 I don't think. Like, seeing a grizzly bear in Alaska trying to eat salmon or seeing a black bear in California doing its thing, having some berries. Like, that's cool. And I want you all to have that. I want your children and grandchildren to have that. And so, like, I think we should be very skeptical about people making safety-based arguments for destroying our mega fauna here.

Starting point is 01:13:39 Like, you'll hear it with wolves, right? You're hearing people doing it with cougars, which is absolutely ridiculous. Most of these animals will not bother you if you leave them alone. Yeah. And like if very occasionally people have been killed by cougars who are not bothering the cougar, right? Very occasionally. You know, a freak accident does it justify destruction of an ecosystem? People get killed by lightning, but we're not just killing clouds.

Starting point is 01:14:02 People get killed by cars. We don't get bombing the Ford factory. I understand the desire to be safe. But like we will take away a lot of things that are really beautiful if we just want to be safe. But again, we're controlling the wrong very. If you're worried about people dying in unfair and, you know, terrible accidents, there are things we could talk about. There are policy decisions that could be made that would save thousands and thousands of lives. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:14:24 If you want people to be safe, then be concerned about free health care. Bears have killed 66 people. I bet that many people died today from not being able to get their insulin. Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, there's a perfect example, right? Like, if you want to keep people safe, then think about things or keep them safe. And I think we can we can very easily keep people, bears safe. But the threat to the bears is us.

Starting point is 01:14:48 That's it. The only other thing that kills bears really is other bears. And so it's on us, therefore, to advocate, right? Like the bears can't advocate for themselves. Luckily, they had people who brought that court case in 2019. But like, if we want to continue to enjoy the outdoors in the way that they are, we need to stop randomly removing shit. And bears are one of those things, especially.

Starting point is 01:15:12 brown bears that it's very easy to whip up fear about, but I think we should just leave them alone. I think we should be worried also of sort of anthropomorphizing them. Like I see this sometimes with people and animals. Like they don't exist for entertainment. They don't see the world in the way we do. And that's okay. They're animals. They have their own logic. We coexist with them. But like it's not like a Disney animal. It's an animal which goes about the world using its own logic, using its own understanding, trying to pursue its own ends for its own means. rent. Nonetheless, it is a majestic thing to see on the landscape and something that we should take care that, you know, we don't let corporate interests and people who find it entertaining

Starting point is 01:15:54 destroy. I would love to see a bear. Okay, we'll do that. We'll add that to our list, okay? Yeah, take me to see a bear. Yeah, I am going to take Molly camping. We will go, maybe we'll go to, we'll go to Yellowstone area. Like, I've never been. Haven't you? Have you not been to Yellowstone? I've never been out west. Wow. Okay. I've got some friends who got a cabin outside the park. Maybe we could have a little cabin trip. Sophie said many Yellowstone. We can go in there and look at the guys. I enjoy the Yellowstone ecosystem. No disrespect to my Yellowstone friends. But that's a lot of tourists. Like I ain't going outside to be around that many people. Yeah. Like there's Yellowstone style nature outside the bounds of the park. You go there.

Starting point is 01:16:37 Yeah. I mean, even if you're just getting away from you can get it. You can get it. would just get away from Old Faithful and that park road and you can get away from people just fine. But yeah, we could go to Yellowstone to see a bear, maybe see an elk, pretty cool. Elk make it pretty cool. I bet that's big as hell. Yeah, elk's as big as shit. They're like a cow with horns. Well, not the cows.

Starting point is 01:16:54 Caves have horns. Elk have antlers. Sorry, no, it's a mistake. But, yeah, we could go to, or like that, like the greater, yeah, like outside of the park. Like that Wyoming area just outside of Yellowstone. It's really beautiful. Be a fun place to go camping. Maybe see a bear.

Starting point is 01:17:09 Have a clean camp. Maybe we can find a way to expense that bear fence. As I'm saying, we'll podcast from out there. It becomes business. Yeah, we will podcasts from bear country, proving that we can happily coexist with bears. Thank you to all the ferret people, by the way. I can't believe how many ferret people contacted you. Yeah, massive outreach from the ferret people.

Starting point is 01:17:29 So, yeah, if you are someone who can help me get on one of the ferret counting surveys, I will count ferrets with you. We will make a ferret podcast and we will change America's perception of the black-footed ferret on your behalf. It's already working. You got me. I love them now. Yeah. Molly's team ferret. Yeah. You can't see this because it's a podcast, but she has a massive tattoo.

Starting point is 01:17:52 It's one of the big... Around the neck. Yeah. Around the neck, yeah. And there's a further one in the lip, but it just says team ferret. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, Molly's become a ferret advocate.

Starting point is 01:18:04 I hope you have all become ferret and black bear advocates. Send me pictures of your bears. Molly, do you know what? Fat Bear Week is before we go. That is my favorite thing about bears is fat bear week. Okay. Sick. Good. Yeah. Bears getting plump in the autumn before they hibernate is... I mean, how could you hate them? How could you hate them? They're just

Starting point is 01:18:23 roly-poly little guys hunting for a little sweet treat. Yeah, their bulking cycle is incredible to me. Like the way a bear just adds thickness in a relatively short period of time. It's remarkable. Yeah, it's powerful. That lives in power of salmon. Maybe we didn't have trawlers. we'll eat more fish. But yeah, check out Fat Bear Week if you haven't. If you're not from the US, I hope this has been fun. Fun little diversion into animals that live here.

Starting point is 01:18:50 They used to live all the way down into Mexico, actually. But now, sadly... Mexican bears. Yeah, well, there are still Mexican black bears. They have bears too. Yeah, yeah. I got to look up where bears live. Yeah, they live...

Starting point is 01:19:03 God, we could do a whole other one on the Jaguars that are being fucked by the border world right now pretty badly. but that'll be a fun episode up in uh over in Arizona there. Uh, yeah, there's pretty cool animals. Our friends don't kill them. Pride is like love.

Starting point is 01:19:29 You feel it in your heart. IR radio. Canada's number one streaming app for radio and podcasts, including IHart Pride Canada, your favorite hits and must have party bangers, plus personalized and curated playlists. Like back in the day pride. Come together.

Starting point is 01:19:45 Celebrate Lo! Take pride with you anytime, anywhere. Just ask your smart speaker to play IHart Pride Canada. Stream us on your phone. Or listen now at IHartRadio.ca. Hey, Ontario, come on down to BetMGM Casino and check out our newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. Don't miss out.

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Starting point is 01:20:28 Number one hits, millions of records sold, awards, sold-out tours. You think that Jonas brothers are satisfied? Nope, it's podcast time. We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions. Hey, Jonas is available now, and their first guest is a big one. Paul Rudd. You know, Steve Carell is a great singer. Can you tell you not to audition the office or something?

Starting point is 01:20:47 I told him. Whoa. We were filming Anchorman. Clearly, I was the idiot. Thank God he didn't listen to him, right? Listen to Hey Jonas on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. June is Black Music Month, and on the Drink Chams podcast, we're speaking with the hottest names in the culture, like Sway Lee. Do you realize how legendary you are?

Starting point is 01:21:08 I appreciate that. I'd be seeing it, but I'm like, man, I still got, like, so much more to do. Like, Prince, he dropped like 30 albums. We job like five right now. That's the rate we got to be going. Yeah, that's a good attitude. You also hear stories from industry legends and hip-hop pioneers like Fab Five Freddy. I directed when the Nas' early videos.

Starting point is 01:21:27 Which one? One love. Wow. Yes. I literally filmed in his apartment in Queensbridge. His moms were still up in that apartment. Nas was just beginning to take off. His pops used to live near me in Harlem.

Starting point is 01:21:40 His dad introduced him to a whole lot of, you know, conscious stuff. He made a young prodigy. No matter the era, Drink Chams brings you the biggest names and the most unfiltered conversations. Listen to Drink Chams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Starting point is 01:22:03 Welcome to Aikadap and Here, a podcast about what workers can do when they try. I am your host, Beowong, and with me today to talk about a company known, I guess, in Portland for being a place where you shop and known most other places for being the, people who make pens is Morgan and Renee from Moji Workers United. Morgan, Renee, welcome to the show. Thank you. Hi, thank you, Mia. Yeah. So, and obviously, I guess as you may have gotten from the word union and the title probably containing the word union, I don't know, we haven't written it yet, is that, yeah, one of the, one of the Moji stories in Portland is unionizing. Can you talk a little bit about like what Moji is for people who are unaware of this slash don't

Starting point is 01:22:48 follow pens and or haven't been to the store? Yeah, so Mugi is probably, I would describe it as a worldwide Japanese minimalist lifestyle department store. And that's a lot of words to say it's a department store that is for essentially basics. Mugi is short for a full name that essentially translates to no brand. And that's the idea that they're trying to push for. And they're trying to show to people that it's like an eco-economic. friendly company, and they try and push, like, high-quality products. And at our location in Portland,

Starting point is 01:23:26 it's the only one on the American West Coast. And we have a relatively small shop. There's only 32 people in our bargaining unit. And this is a wall-to-wall bargaining unit, which essentially means that everyone below the lowest management level at this location is, is involved with the union. Yeah, which is A, really cool. And B, so you're talking about how this is the only one on the West Coast. This is mostly a Japanese company that operates a little bit in the U.S. and does things here, right? My understanding?

Starting point is 01:23:58 So it is a Japanese company. It actually primarily operates like all over the world. It was began in Japan in the 80s, I believe, if I know my company history correctly. But they pretty rapidly expanded to across Asia and Europe. and then have also since expanded into Africa and the Americas. If the Americas were relatively late, I don't think that there was a store in the Americas before the turn of the millennium. And the Portland location itself opened in, I want to say,

Starting point is 01:24:29 2018 sometime, like just pre-COVID. Yeah, so it's relatively recent. And I guess the thing that's even more relatively recent is y'all starting to organize a union. So can I ask, how did that start and what was the sort of things that started to get the ball rolling on it? So I guess the way that organizing started was back in November of 2025, maybe shortly before that. We had a round of appraisals. These are like yearly end of fiscal year appraisals that are technically supposed to be the end of the fourth quarter.

Starting point is 01:25:04 Typically they get pushed back by a month or two, just company practice because the appraisals are tied to our raises. And each employee who's worked for a year or more at the company gets appraised. And so we're scored in a system of one to five. And if you get a three or better, I believe the system goes, you get a raise that is directly tied to the number that you got. They use decimal systems. So the thing is that this year, they gave us the lowest raise in a memory of any of the workers that are currently there, myself included, for context.

Starting point is 01:25:40 I'm one of the workers that has been at the store the longest and at four, no, more than four years now, we have a pretty high turnaround, which is how I ended up being the longest tenured of the lower the management workers. And this came in a year that was the best year in the Portland locations history. Yeah, there's this competition that Mucci runs internally, where it puts each store under like a group of stores worldwide, almost like, almost like World Cup groups in a way, where you're just kind of like randomly sorted into groups. And each year, one of the groups is chosen,

Starting point is 01:26:19 and within that group, they examine the performances of each of the stores within that group and select a winner to be the store of the year. So in 2024, we won store of the year, and it was kind of a shock to a bunch of us to have such low races after that. Yeah. For example, my raise of 65 cents last,

Starting point is 01:26:40 summer. Jesus Christ. Was the highest by a significant margin. What? Yes. It went as low as around like 25 cents. Yeah, that's right. I haven't done the math, but like, is that subinflation? Like I, yes, that is subinflation.

Starting point is 01:26:58 It tends to be, there are employees who have been working for more than two years who still get paid around minimum wage. Jesus Christ. In addition to that, the. staff members who are keyholders and full-timers and above get bonuses, and the bonuses are directly tied to the amount of money that the store makes over the target amount for the month, and they drastically increased the targets for the year going forward, which meant that because of that, our bonuses were getting lower. So this year, for the last month since that raise,

Starting point is 01:27:36 I've actually been making less money per month than I was the year before. Jesus Christ. So you're getting pay cuts? Basically, yes. Jesus Christ. After winning store of the year. Incredible stuff. Incredible stuff from the people who are running their company in an extremely normal way.

Starting point is 01:27:58 That was the spark that set this push for the Union ablaze. And so in November, I contacted the IWW. industrial workers of the world, and received a response. And so at first it was just me and one of the IWW representatives that were meeting together to talk about forming a union. And we ended up having those meetings somewhat regularly, and the amount of people attending those meetings slowly started to grow. So it was maybe like two people, three people here and there. And then we took a break for the holidays because people were just generally unable to make it out and everything was super chaotic at the store.

Starting point is 01:28:35 And after the holidays, I had the idea of hosting potlucks, essentially, and inviting people to potlux. Ah. I can't remember, Renee, were you coming to these meetings before or after the potlux? The first meeting I went to was at the hall, where it was essentially just us grieving about our working conditions while the seasonals were there. and sort of it was, I don't know how much it was in the works for you, how much stuff you had done up until that point. But I think that was the moment where we sort of became confident as a body in our prospects for unionizing.

Starting point is 01:29:21 And then the potlucks thereafter. Yeah. And the potlucks ended up starting to pull around. Around 10 people. I think the highest attended one was actually 12. And so when you have a shop that has about 32 people in the bargaining unit, that is about a third of the shop attending an early union meeting while we're still in the underground phase of organizing. And we managed to successfully remain underground up until we decided to go public on our own terms on March 31st. We had a march on the boss, which slightly inconveniently, the boss had actually left the shop about 45 minutes

Starting point is 01:30:01 early into a shift. And we had accounted for her leaving early, but we didn't account for her leaving that early. And so the march on the boss kind of had this anti-climic moment where the manager just wasn't in the store anymore. And there wasn't anyone that actually had supervisory authority at the store for the march. Which I think there's two things there. I want to, I want to, I want to come back to. One is the like, oh yeah, of course management. Management never found out about the union, but just left early because they're management. And it's like, oh, right, no, yeah.

Starting point is 01:30:36 What happens if you leave just randomly walk off your job site like 45 minutes early? You're fucked. But management is just like, yeah, fucking I'm just done. I'm just out. Like, I'm just leaving. Everything's going to be fine, even if I'm not there. So I'm just going to leave early. Right.

Starting point is 01:30:52 God. I wanted to talk about the potluck. a little bit because that's a really good idea as just a way to make sure you can consistently get a bunch of people there. And yeah, can you talk about sort of what that was like and how they've been and what the effect of that has been? The Pollux came about because I had the idea that people are going to be more willing to come to an event if it wasn't just going to be a meeting where they sat down and had to talk shop and they had to start talking about work while they're off the clock, but they'd be much more likely to come if the meeting was framed more

Starting point is 01:31:28 as a way to just hang out with their co-workers and eat dinner. Yeah. So this actually came from my experience. When I was a kid, I grew up Baha'i. And even though I'm no longer Baha'i, the way that our community did it back home was mostly through community feasts and having, prioritizing the feasts first and then the religious discussion later. So taking that sort of idea and putting a more of a union spin on it.

Starting point is 01:31:53 was the idea behind that, and it was a massive hit. Hell yeah. Renee, do you have any more thoughts on that? Yeah, I think the fact, too, that our worker body is, I don't know if uniquely is the right word, but especially tight-knit and supportive of one another, really just sort of helped things flow in a very natural and easygoing way. It was just super, like, salient for everything to come about out of these Pollux. We just sort of, like, sat down and immediately started, like, complaining about work.

Starting point is 01:32:36 Hell yeah, hell yeah. So we got us going. And, like, pretty much every meeting sense, like, that's how we just, like, start our discussion in our meetings. It's just what bullshit have you been facing from your managers? etc. And we have to cut it short every time. Yeah, it feels bad sometimes to have to cut these complaints periods short because I think they can go on for two to three hours if we're not careful. And I think the early ones did actually go on for two to three hours and we had entirely potlucks that we didn't get any actual business

Starting point is 01:33:16 done. We just spent two to three hours eating food and complaining about work with each other. And honestly, that kind of helped people get more comfortable with the idea and it really agitated people in a way that I don't think we would have been able to do if we had just like tried to talk to people at work about unionizing or had like a more formal meeting. And it really just kept the moment and going. Yeah. I think it has this effect of like realizing everything. Because I mean, even I would walk in and be thinking like, you know, this is like such a. taxing endeavor unionizing the workplace and yeah every once in a while you'd have some sort of hesitation i guess but then every time i would leave it would just sort of be like this is like this is

Starting point is 01:34:05 the only option and we're definitely going to do it and we're all with it and it feels good yeah yeah it's it seems like from everything that i've heard and everything that you're saying it seems like it's a really powerful way to sort of both combat atomization, both is just like, oh, this is like a social space where you and the people you work with who are your friends can exist with each other. And then also in a, we can combat sort of alienation and atomization stuff by just doing the union work of, oh my God, we all have all of these issues with our bosses. Yeah. Yeah. And when we return, we're going to start talking and going to ask about the issues with the bosses. But first, Here are, I don't know, the product and services that support this podcast.

Starting point is 01:35:04 We are back. I was like, oh, I have a good transition. I can go from complaining about the bosses to talk about what the bosses are doing. And then I was like, shit, I was supposed to cut an ad pivot here. We didn't think of that one fast enough. But, you know, speaking of doing things fast enough. So, yeah, I wanted to ask before we get into sort of how things have been going more recently and where the campaign is going in election stuff,

Starting point is 01:35:31 other than sort of the pay-raised stuff, what are the kinds of things that people have been dealing with at Mugi? So there's a lot of small things that have kind of piled up. And honestly, I say small things, but each one of these is kind of just, like, shocking on its own,

Starting point is 01:35:48 but not surprising necessarily to anyone that's worked in the service industry at all. Yeah. So beyond the raises, there's just been, like, a long pattern of emotional abuse the bosses. People have been yelled at for pretty much no reason. The bosses have directly insulted workers' abilities, like, on the floor as they're doing stuff. They've done things like pressure

Starting point is 01:36:11 staff not to use their sick time, even going so far as occasionally implying that getting sick is like your own fault and that people are able to perfectly prevent themselves from getting sick. Yeah. In your job, you have to be around people all the time because you're doing a service. God, I hate this, like, being weird pseudo-ugenicist shit about disease that's just everywhere now that runs the Department of Health and Human Services in the CDC. Like, this weekend, this weekend, or this last weekend, at the time of recording, was Memorial Day weekend. And on Saturday, the peak day of that weekend, there were 3,000 customers approximately in store over the course of the day.

Starting point is 01:36:56 And reminder that we are a team of 32 people in total. And so, of course, not all 32 people are going to be at the store at once at the same time. And so when your crew was maybe 10, 15, if you're lucky, people big. And handling a customer volume of about 3,000 over the course of a day, you're interacting with so many people that it's worse than, maybe it's not worse than because kids can get pretty nasty sometimes. much respect to all the teachers out there. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:37:27 It can get to be a bit of a biohazard, especially when you're working in places like the fitting room that don't have ventilation, and you're possibly interacting the closest with customers, and you're constantly interacting with, like, clothing that has been, like, pressed up against people's bodies. Mm-hmm. You're interacting with people that just aren't being super conscious about the space,

Starting point is 01:37:47 and maybe you're in this small confined area with two, three, even four other people for a prolonged period of time. Of course the customer service team is going to get sick more. Yeah, that's like a small, median-sized, like, convention. That's just running through your store over the course of one day. It's like, oh, yeah, everyone has, like, PACs or whatever the, like, convention plague is. But that's just, like, going to work.

Starting point is 01:38:10 It's like, oh, yeah, no, of course, apparently somehow you're supposed to, like, magically have the, like, anti-disease talismans. Yeah. As, like, the plagued masses. And on top of that, I've called out maybe once. a month. I think that maybe there's one month where it was twice a month since January. And I've already used up all the allocated sick time that I get for a year. Jesus. And that's with one of the better sick pay plans as a full-timer. And so I can't imagine what people are having to go through

Starting point is 01:38:42 at part-time where they're already not getting enough hours to pay rent off of their job. And they're having to decide essentially between coming to work sick or calling out and taking that financial hit. Yeah. I know one of our staff members has actually been evicted because they were not able to make rent because they didn't make enough hours. Oh, my God. Or just having your sick hours rejected on the app. What? This is an app? Oh, my God.

Starting point is 01:39:08 Yeah, that's right. If your sick hours can get rejected, you don't have sick hours. Like, yeah. What? And there's more, too. It doesn't end there. They apply policies that we have this employee handbook that has this list of requirements that they're. and expectations. And it is not really a huge part of our employment, typically, but the policies that

Starting point is 01:39:29 they have listed, there are applied and consistently. Stuff like the uniform code is one of the biggest examples of this, where they will more heavily enforce the uniform code against people of color or people with alternative styles of dress. Or even they can be fairly fatphobic. There have been multiple people that have said that the managers will pressure them to essentially cover up parts of their body that they will allow skinnier people to show. What? Jesus Christ. Oh, my God.

Starting point is 01:39:58 That is so incredibly shitty. And that's got to be illegal somehow, even under, like, unhinged American labor law. That just feels like it feels like a very open form of discrimination. But Jesus Christ. Oh, my God. Yeah. Do you have anything to add, Renee?

Starting point is 01:40:17 Along those lines, just sort of like being asked. to profile people. All employees can be scheduled to cover the securities breaks, which basically just involves standing around one of the entrances and reporting anything, quote, fishy on the radios. Anything suspicious. They say suspicious. So they could just co-opped you into being a security guard?

Starting point is 01:40:46 What? Yeah. The security guard doesn't have any duties regarding, like, loss prevention. All the managers do that as part of their duties, I guess. But yeah, so they just sort of say suspicious people. And on that note, too, there have been times where people have been, maybe not strictly disciplined. I actually don't know for sure if there's been an incident of someone being written up, but there have been times where the managers have approached people and essentially just,

Starting point is 01:41:15 I yelled at them for allowing someone to get out of the store with merchandise, even though loss prevention is very specifically not part of our job description, and that the official store policy actively discourages staff from engaging an active loss prevention like that. So you're getting yelled at for doing the thing you were told to do that is explicitly not part of your job. That's supposed to be the manager's job, and the managers are pissed off that you're not doing what's nominally their job that you also, in the written thing, you're not supposed to do.

Starting point is 01:41:47 Exactly. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible catch-22 logic here. It's real just, oh yeah, you're explicitly not supposed to do this, so you could get punished if you do it, but also if you don't do it, we're going to yell at you. It's God. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Yeah. Naturally, there's not really anything that we can do about this besides unionize and besides start taking actions on our own, because the law certainly isn't going to help us. for this. Even Oregon State law, which is, which tends to be more protective of workers than other states are, they're incredibly overwhelmed right now with requests. And going through the Bully Bureau of Oregon Labor and Industries, I think is the acronym, going down the bully website lists, there's a complaints box, but it says on the website that they have an incredibly high backlog of complaints that they're trying to process and that they're going through a triage system. And none of the things that we've listed so far would be placed very highly on that triage.

Starting point is 01:42:51 In addition to that, we don't have access to, like direct access to our HR department at work. They ask us to go through a third-party reporting company called Lighthouse. And as far as I know, no one has ever heard anything about Lighthouse doing anything to resolve a situation between them and management when management is treating them unfairly. Incredible. And it's, it's, It essentially feels like just shouting into the void, interacting with Lighthouse, because you're just sending a complaint to a body that you don't have any access to and just hoping that they fix something. So they've contracted out their HR department. So you're just like talking to their, or is it that you can't communicate with them directly? And that's very weird.

Starting point is 01:43:37 So they have an HR department. The workers at the physical location cannot communicate with HR. We are not given their phone numbers or their emails or anything like that. All of our HR communication has to be done through our general store manager. So when we have problems with the general store manager or assistant store managers, we can't really go to HR because we have to go through the very people that we're having problems with in order to reach our HR. Incredible. It's almost making HR even faker, which is incredible.

Starting point is 01:44:10 Oh, good Lord. It would also be remiss, I guess, to forget about the sexual assault. Oh, Jesus Christ. Maybe not specifically sexual assault, but definitely sexual harassment, possible sexual assault that has been raised to management before, where the management supposedly pushed those complaints to HR, but then HR would wait for weeks before doing anything about it. Oh, my God. This happened a year or two ago.

Starting point is 01:44:40 No, it was probably more than that. the realm of two to three years ago, if my memory is correct, where we had a co-worker that was not just profiling people and calling security on people that were doing nothing, but he was also sexually harassing other co-workers. Jesus Christ. And the store managers told us that they had pushed these complaints to HR, but HR wasn't doing anything. And it took them about a month, I believe, to fire this person. and essentially what they were doing before is they were telling people that if they talked about the situation or created drama about the situation, that they would retaliate against the people that were talking about the situation. Oh, my God.

Starting point is 01:45:26 Jesus. They didn't say outright, but they implied everything up to job loss for the people that were talking about this. Oh, my God. And they started pulling people into the office and essentially having one-on-one conversations that were, well, one. that were honestly quite scary to the people that were trying to spread the word about this. And they created quite a hostile store environment for a long time. Around that time was actually the first time that we had attempted to try and get a push to unionize, but that ended up dissolving.

Starting point is 01:45:56 And that was essentially the end of that up until this most recent push. Yeah, God, that's really hideous. Both the way in which they just pushed it up the ladder to HR and then just didn't do anything about it for, like a fucking month, that also just, the only thing they did do about it was retaliating against the people who were trying to talk about it. That is, Jesus, that's disgusting.

Starting point is 01:46:20 Yeah, about the most that they did during that month to the actual co-worker in question that was doing. The harassment was they tried to maintain some degree of physical separation between him and the other co-workers, and that was it. They kept him on the roster.

Starting point is 01:46:36 They kept him at the same positions that other people were working. He had essentially all the same job responsibilities as other people and still had a pretty high degree of contact with other co-workers during this whole time. Yeah. So the people who were trying to speak out a guest said until this guy was fired, we're getting punished more than he was. Essentially, yeah. Jesus. All the way up until he was finally fired. And I don't know what it was that actually got them to do it this time, but they wanted to wait until they had got something actually on camera, I believe. But it's kind of hard for you to catch something like harassment, words.

Starting point is 01:47:10 on camera. Yeah. If their bar for sexual harassment is stuff that they can catch on camera, they're never going to get most instances of harassment. And they're not doing their proper job investigating these accusations. Yeah. And that also means that there's a little bit of strategies to wait for someone to get hurt again. Exactly.

Starting point is 01:47:29 That's right. They're just throwing them to the fucking lion's den. Mm-hmm. Your strategy to, like, detect that a bus is about to hit someone, is to push someone in front of the bus and take a picture of it, which is just so unlawful. unbelievably unacceptable. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:47:42 And I want to be clear, too, that this whole list is very much non-exhaustive. There's been so many cases of just patterns of abuse from management, and it's not possible for me to go down the entire list of things. I mean, as I mentioned previously, it would be two to three hours of people complaining about stuff that they had gone through at work during these meetings. Yeah. And occasionally, you get some repetition. But this is something that is very consistent.

Starting point is 01:48:13 It's just a part of working at the store. Yeah, every day there's another unique horror that someone is experiencing. And I guess this brings us to, okay, so how do you make the horror stop? And that is unionizing. So, yeah, let's talk about what's been happening recently in terms of, like, how the union is immobilizing and about the upcoming election, which will be a, a few days after you're hearing this, assuming you're listening to this the day it comes out.

Starting point is 01:48:44 Yeah, so we've been sort of ramping up a little bit. It's been ebbing and flowing since we started, you know, last like November. But we're really trying to kick it into gear, get people aware, get people back engaged. So we have a few things we've been to. doing. On May 1st, for May Day, we tabled with the IWW and just started a petition just for signatures from the community, for support, for acknowledgement, if we ever need to, you know, pull it out and show our bosses that, you know, this is no light endeavor. This is not like something they can laugh off. Yeah. But it ended up being sort of successful beyond what I imagined. We got lots of attention, lots of people saying that they didn't know that we were unionizing, people taking lots of pictures of us, our big banner.

Starting point is 01:49:55 We got one inquiry for a journal report that I think is out now. And we were also written about in, what was it? Was it Oregon Live or was it the Oregonian? Do you remember, Luna? We had a small article published about us by the Northwest Labor Press that was then picked up by the Portland Mercury. That's right. Yeah, so we did that. And then other than that, we're sort of fighting some recently published propaganda from our boss is with just a hilarious amount of misinformation.

Starting point is 01:50:34 Oh, no. Yeah, average boss communication. The other big thing that's been happening is that the reason that the election is happening so long after our initial march and declaration of intent to unionize is that the bosses have been trying to divide up the bargaining unit in a fairly strange case where the employer has been contending that the merchandising staff, which is essentially the back of the house staff, but only like a subsection of the back of the house staff, are not eligible for unionizing. under the same union as the rest of the staff are. They did this under the notion that the merchandising staff don't share a community of interest with the rest of the staff. And the other thing that they tried to do is they tried to take the keyholders, which are sort of like a shift lead position, away from the bargaining unit by trying to get them designated as supervisors, specifically section 211 supervisors under the National Labor Relations Act. and we managed to shoot down both of those contests in a board hearing with the National Labor Relations Board.

Starting point is 01:51:40 Hell yeah. And the process took a little bit over a month, if I remember correctly. And without going too heavily into detail about it, the community of interest rule basically says that if employees don't share a community of interest with members of a bargaining unit, they have to unionize under a different union. and then the other thing is that the NLRA says that if you have supervisory authority, and there's a whole laundry list of authorities that are defined in the act, if you are a supervisor, then you don't get to unionize legally, period. And so what made this case strange is that typically employers try and add groups of employees onto the unit, they believe are on the side of the employer, the anti-union side. And the union side, and the union.

Starting point is 01:52:28 and generally has to contend that these people don't share community of interest or our supervisors or whatever. So it was kind of a bit of a strange situation where it's turned on its head, where instead the employer is having to prove that these people are not sharing community of interest or our supervisors. And so even though we couldn't afford proper legal counsel, and so the union representatives were myself and a friend of ours who was a member of the IWW, you, we were able to essentially represent ourselves in this board hearing, and the case was decided in our faith for on both counts. Hell yeah. So that rocks.

Starting point is 01:53:04 It really does. I was not shocked to find out that the case was decided in our favor on the community of interest issue, because that would be like saying that the back of the houseworkers at a restaurant can't unionize with the front of the houseworkers just because they have different job descriptions. Yeah. Chibberish. Right? However, I was surprised, at first I was surprised at least that we managed to win on the issues of supervisory authority with the key holders. I thought that it would take a pretty solid case in order for us to defend against that.

Starting point is 01:53:38 And huge props to our friend who I'm not sure if they're comfortable being named dropped as a IWW member, like 5 to the world. So I'm not going to name them. But it is large thanks to this friend of ours that we won that case. Oh. So that's where we stand now. And the board hearing was decided in our favor. And the election has been decided for next week.

Starting point is 01:54:12 And both sides are now just trying to have our campaigns in preparation. Yeah. Hell yeah. It's a sort of different version of like the very common tactic of, because bosses want there to be more time in between when you like file your paperwork to unionize and the election because it gives them more time to do intimidation and fear tactics. Like that period in between deciding to unionize and getting to actually do the vote is one of the periods where a union is most vulnerable. And it's also really impressive that, yeah, you just sort of walked into the board hearing and beat them by just reading a bunch of labor law.

Starting point is 01:54:48 Stop. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Workers of the world, too. Fucking anti-union lawyer zero. Yeah. Basically, yeah.

Starting point is 01:55:01 It was very strange across. cross-examining my manager under oath. Hell yeah. And then going to work, I didn't manage to attend the entirety of either of the days of the hearing because I had to close. I had to go to work at noon on both days that the hearing was. That's so nuts. Which is why I wasn't there for the full hearing for either of the days.

Starting point is 01:55:25 So I ended up having to log on in the morning onto the Zoom meeting and attend the first two and a half hours, and then hop off call and leave, and then go to work and see my managers at work. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. It's also, that's so nuts that you didn't get time off to go to the union hearing. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, they were getting paid, right? That's wild. They were getting paid. Oh, my God. The managers that were testifying in favor of the employer. Capitalism, bad system. Wow. We could possibly have expected this? Yeah, it was actively a challenge to find witnesses to testify for us because the people who we'd be able to call us witnesses or coworkers are people who are maybe working the days of the hearing and can't actually get time off to come testify because they have to be at

Starting point is 01:56:25 work. Oh my God. That's so fucked. There was one person who we approached because we were hoping that they would testify for us who couldn't because she was working that day. Oh my God. It's too too complicated of a process to want to try and subpoena them and illegally get them to have the time off to come to the hearing. Jesus. So we ended up just having to figure out a way to present different witnesses and have a slightly weaker case because of it. And thankfully, that didn't end up mattering. But for a minute, I was worried that we wouldn't be able to have as good of a case as we could have because we were not able to get a keyholder on the stand like we were hoping. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:57:03 I'm glad you're able to. to pull it together. That's really impressive. And yeah, that you still just beat them, even though they had. And I guess that is one of the lessons of this is like, yeah, if you're willing to put the work in and work together and figure out how to navigate the system and figure out where you can apply pressure, like, yeah, you can beat a bunch of people who have way, way, way, way more resources than you do. Because they're usually just wrong. Yeah. Yeah. I want to actually really drive that point home that neither I or my co-representative have experience in any sort of like legal fields.

Starting point is 01:57:41 Neither of us are even law students. We are just the people that decided to step up and take on this role. And I don't think that there is some like special unique quality about us that allowed us to do it. It was just putting in the work that was required. It's a scary thing being asked to essentially represent yourself in a legal setting. And I think it's a testament to how people are capable of things that they're not necessarily trained to do. And that this whole process of unionization does not necessarily require the vast resources that you might think it entails. It requires some planning.

Starting point is 01:58:26 It requires some tactics, but it is something that everyone is able to do. Hell yeah. I guess if I was really on my game here, I would have something about like the concept of the organic, intellectual, etc., etc. But I don't even think that's really what's going on here. It's just like in the same way that like economics is designed to be esoteric and, you know, like finance is designed to be difficult to understand. But in the immortal words of Dan Olson, there are plenty of C students who've gotten

Starting point is 01:58:56 economics degrees. Like, you can't understand this. It's just, it just takes some work and it takes some dedication to fighting together and it takes, yeah, people working together. But these people are not smarter than you. They're not better than you. They have more money, but that's ultimately not the fact that it decides everything. And I don't want to discount the amount of support that we've received from the rest of our coworkers as well. Yeah. This was truly a group effort. And everyone helped out in their own small ways, whether it was helping take care of social media posts, whether it was helping cook for us, host meeting locations. I've been dealing with a pest problem at my apartment. So I've been unable to, for about the amount of time that all this legal

Starting point is 01:59:41 process has been going on. So I haven't been able to host potlucks anymore. And a former coworker of ours has been hosting instead and putting in the work for that. It really is something that works when everyone comes together and takes part in the process. Hell yeah. So speaking of everyone coming together and helping to work for the process, if people want to help you all, what can they do? We are looking actually at a bit of a financial struggle right now. The biggest thing is that we don't have enough of the funds at the moment to go on strike, not for any significant duration at least.

Starting point is 02:00:20 Yeah. We have a GoFundMe, Muti Workers United. Yeah, we will put that in the description. The other thing is that we are looking for a lot of social media support, actually. Mucci is a very media-driven company, and we are trying to set up an Instagram account that has a lot of visibility. You can follow us also Mujy Workers United on Instagram, and it seems like people have been sharing our articles and across the Internet, both the NWLP article about us, and then now you're interviewing. us, which is an enormous help to us, Mia. Thank you. We super appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you so much. Of course. Coffee to. I don't know if you have anything to add to that, Renee.

Starting point is 02:01:05 Yeah, just the Instagram. We have lots of very talented artists working at NUji, like everyone. It's great graphic designers, a lot of just very fun and cool people. So yeah, I'm sure that will be expressed in our future social media posts. Yeah. Hell yeah. We'll link that in the description too. Awesome. Thank you, Mia.

Starting point is 02:01:30 Yeah, on one final thing, you want to plug direct action? Yes, I do. So we've spent a lot of time talking about the legal side of unionization because our union is currently seeking federal recognition with the NLRB. I want to emphasize that this is not the end of unionization. The goal is not a contract. The goal is to use direct.

Starting point is 02:01:53 action to enact the changes that you want to see in your workplace. For what are probably obvious reasons, I don't want to talk about specifically stuff that we have planned or maybe not even stuff that we've done in the past. But for example, one thing that I can talk about is that we have an ICE response plan. Like, what do we do if ICE shows up at a workplace and tries to rate us? We have a plan for that. And I obviously don't want to go further into detail about that, but that is something that we did as an example of a direct action. There's a, also other stuff. There's lots of historical examples of workers getting gains in their workplace. You have examples of stuff like just a simple march on the boss has historically worked

Starting point is 02:02:34 to sway the boss even without necessarily a change in the contract. Or you can have stuff that's all very legal and above board, obviously, of people like just agreeing to not be as friendly with their boss at work and an emotionally sway their boss that way. Or have having smaller outside of work actions where people are helping each other out and having a workplace mutual aid project. Or even something as simple as implementing like a workplace fitness plan. That's something that we've discussed a couple of times at meetings very loosely, like just going on hikes together or having like the community sports and stuff just to keep each other in shape and keep our communities healthy. All of this stuff is stuff that exists beyond the

Starting point is 02:03:16 contract. We're currently emphasizing the contract because that's what we are at the moment seeking because the contract helps this feel more real for people who aren't quite on board with the idea of unionization yet. Yeah. But unionization at a workplace gets you much more than just a better contract with your employer. And you can enact changes at your workplace faster if you work together with your coworkers and organize your coworkers. Hell yeah. Anything to add, Renee? everyone in the union is very aware, you know, regarding their respective capacities to help what they can, you know, and cannot do their limits.

Starting point is 02:04:02 And I think just after, you know, working together enough, everything marries in a very effective way. And, yeah, even just like, like all of these sort of direct actions that Luna was naming are. just came out of our meetings, just ideas that people think might be fun to do or, or, you know, people sharing their hobbies and, and want to share them with other people. Yeah. And so, yeah, it really is just sort of a fun hangout. I don't want to trivialize it, but it's like, you know, extreme hanging out. Well, yeah, I think it touches on something that's really,

Starting point is 02:04:48 really important about all of this, which is, you know, people will in the abstract talk about unions as like social institutions. But like, what that actually means is this like, yeah, it's a place where you and your friends and the people you work with go and do stuff together. And, you know, I guess I want to wrap up on like, if you want a way out of the stultifying boredom and isolation and crushing poverty of the modern capitalist experience, you too, can create a union and resist all of those things simultaneously. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:05:27 Pride is like love. You feel it in your heart. IR. Radio. Canada's number one streaming app for radio and podcasts, including IHart Pride Canada, your favorite hits and must have party bangers, plus personalized and curated playlists like back in the day pride. Come together, celebrate love. Take pride with you.

Starting point is 02:05:54 Anytime, anywhere. Just ask your smart speaker to play IHeart Pride Canada. Stream us on your phone or listen now at iHeartRadio.com. Hey Ontario, come on down to BetMGM Casino and check out our newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. Don't miss out. Play exciting casino games based on the iconic game show. Only at BetMGM.

Starting point is 02:06:14 Access to the Price is right fortune pick is only available at BetMGM Casino. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager, Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, Please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BEDMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Hey, it's us, the Jonas Brothers, and guess what?

Starting point is 02:06:37 We have some big news. What's the news, Nick? Huge news. We created our own podcast called, Hey, Jonas. We invented a podcast? Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to it. We're the first people to do podcasts.

Starting point is 02:06:48 Pretty, yeah, pretty wide range of podcasts throughout there. But this one's extra special. So how do we actually come up with? the name Hey Jonas, guys. I honestly don't remember. I think it was on a call about what we should call it. Oh, we were thinking I'm originally calling it one of the early names of our band before Jonas Brothers was...

Starting point is 02:07:10 This is how you guys remember it going down? Yes. I have a very different memory of this. We were talking about a thing, a bit for the podcast, where people could call in and say, Hey Jonas. And then I wrote down on my little notepad, Hey Jonas, Jonas, and offered it up as a potential title for the podcast. But thanks for remembering that, guys.

Starting point is 02:07:27 Listen to Hey Jonas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Just listen. We don't care where you hear it. Here's something that should not be as complicated as it is. Getting a racist statue removed. And here's something that should be a whole lot easier than it is. Getting a new one put up in its place. As long as there's a politics of race in America,

Starting point is 02:07:48 there's going to be a politics of remembering the Civil War. To get to school, I had to go down Robert Lee Boulevard. Get to the grocery store. I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway. If you're an historian and you leave out half of what the history is, you're not doing your job. I'm Akila Hughes, and Rebel Spirit Season 2 goes deep on both of those things. The fights, the politics, the people who won, and my personal campaign to add something to the Kentucky State House that's actually worth the wall space.

Starting point is 02:08:15 We are more than our bodies. We contain essence. We contain spirit. How do you represent that? They are just fueling a fire that is really careful. You'll see what I mean. Listen to Rebel Spirit Season 2 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a show about things falling apart, the thing falling apart the past few years, the Democratic Party.

Starting point is 02:08:47 That's what we're going to be talking about today. I'm joined by Sophie Ray Lichtenen. Hello. Hi, I'm not excited about this. This is great. Last time we were on an episode together, we were talking about our two favorite Democrats, Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Starting point is 02:09:05 Ah, yes. They gave me COVID at the DNC. I'll never forgive them. Not talking about them today, but we are talking about the DNC, the other DNC, the one who puts on the DNC, the Democratic National Committee. So we're going to be talking about the DNC autopsy.

Starting point is 02:09:21 Oh, boy. First, some background. Yes. After the Democrats lost the House, the Senate, and the presidency in 2024, if I'm reading that correctly, including losing the popular vote, something that has not happened in 20 years, the Democratic National Committee, the DNC, wondered, why did that happen? So, the DNC commissioned a report on what happened with the 2024 election, and this report came

Starting point is 02:09:46 to be known as the 2024 autopsy. The newly elected DNC chair Ken Martin pledged to make the upcoming report public, announcing after his chair election, quote, There has to be some lessons that we glean on that so we can operationalize it, not just here in D.C., but through all the 57 state parties, we have to look backwards and look forward at the same time. The 2024 election autopsy was commissioned in early 2025 and was supposed to come out later that spring, but got pushed back to the end of summer and then the fall. And finally, in December of 2025, Ken Martin announced that the DNC would not, in fact, be releasing the autopsy report. In Martin's brief statement explaining, or rather not explaining why he's backpedaling on his promise to make the report public, he claimed that the committee is, quote, already putting our learnings into motion. Who votes Ken Martin in to be the chair?

Starting point is 02:10:49 Because I know his career is basically Minnesota guy. Yes. interning government jobs, vice president chair, and then... Basically, around 400 members of state party chapters are chosen to be members of the Democratic National Committee, who then in turn vote on national party leadership and decide how primaries operate. Though if a sitting president is a Democrat, the president can effectively choose the chair. CNN reported that DNC officials had concerns that the report would, quote, inflame ongoing tensions within the party at a time they felt they had

Starting point is 02:11:30 begun to generate winning momentum, unquote, and the committee officials decided that it would be a, quote, unquote, strategic failure on the part of the DNC to publicly look backward. That was their reasons for not releasing the report. We're already winning elections in 2025, so there's actually no point in just looking back at why we lost to 2024. for. And this was alluded to in Ken Martin's statement announcing that he would not be releasing the report, quote, we are aligned on what's important, and that's learning from the past and winning the future. Here's our North Star. Does this help us win? If the answer is no,

Starting point is 02:12:07 it's a distraction from the core mission. So the report would just be a distraction from letting us currently win going forward, per the DNC chair. That logic is ridiculous. No, because that's not the real reason why the report wasn't released. We'll get to why the report wasn't released very soon. That sounds like a majorly half-assed reason. So, okay, say more, say more. I'm listening. As the public release of the autopsy was continuously delayed in 2025 and just eventually canceled, the speculation about the contents of the report grew, that the DNC must be hiding the report because its findings on why the Dems lost so bad in 2024 must run contrary to the interests of party elites. So by burying the report, the DNC must be trying to protect the future political

Starting point is 02:13:01 prospects of Kamala Harris, obscure the misuse of massive funds donated to the DNC and election campaigns, or the report must actually definitively prove the Biden-Harris administration's failure to act on the genocide of Palestinians while aiding and abetting Israel must have played significant factor in the election, possibly the determining factor. So if the report found such things, then the DNC might want to suppress the report to not have that information be public. But now we know that's not the reason the report was not released. The autopsy finding that the Democrats pro-Israel position cost in the election was not the reason the report was buried, because last month, the DNC begrudgingly released an incomplete version of the election autopsy,

Starting point is 02:13:51 which actually does not contain a single mention of Israel, Palestine, or Gaza. It is not discussed in any way in a 192-page report. And what is in this report? We will also be getting into what's in the report. Okay. Yeah. A lot of bad statistics, for one, unsourced graphs. and discussions on whether you should spend more money on digital ads or TV ads is really, really the bulk of the report, honestly.

Starting point is 02:14:25 But before we get more into the report's findings, let's discuss the circumstances that led to the publishing of the unfinished autopsy that nearly a year after the finished version was supposed to come out. So this autopsy was authored by a guy named Paul Riviera, who's a longtime Democratic strategist and personal friend of DNC chair Ken Martin. Now, Riviera has not worked on a presidential campaign since 2004. Oh, wow. And despite being the sole person, like, tasked with running the report. And it's unclear how many people actually worked on it, but it was led by Riviera and seems to be mostly be done by him. And despite that, Riviera only worked on it part time

Starting point is 02:15:09 while managing other contracts with CNN reporting that Rivera would say that he would, would only be available to conduct autopsy interviews before 9 a.m. or after 7 p.m. or on weekends. That's when he conducted interviews for the report. It was only before 9 a.m. in the morning or after 7 p.m. in the evening on weekdays and then also weekends. What's this weird or doing? What's this problem? Not much. Yeah, apparently. Not much. Sir? Because yeah, this report was like delayed almost a full year. Yeah. Sheesh. Only after his initial spring 2025 deadline, did Rivera actually reach out to state party chairs in battleground states to interview them for the report.

Starting point is 02:15:59 And he did not contact like Key Harris campaign staff until September. And many were not even asked to be interviewed. Portions of the autopsy were first revealed at a DNC National Finance Committee retreat for top donors held at a hotel in Millburg, Virginia last October. Now, Percy and N, at the donor retreat, Riviera himself gave a, quote, hour-long presentation with slides, in part drawn directly from the report, in part via running his findings through an AI engine, unquote. There was AI generated slides. He ran his report findings through an AI engine, according to CNN, which also generated slides. And that was what his presentation on the report at this donut retreat was based on. It was the AI's regurgitation of report findings. Hold on a second.

Starting point is 02:16:58 So he's not willing to do work after 9 a.m. or after 7 p.m. Cannot conduct interviews at that time. No, too busy. He can't do any of that time, but yet he's just like using AI. Yeah. Great. DNC, feeling really hopeful. Continue.

Starting point is 02:17:13 What did CNN find? So one of the slides that Riviera presented at this donor retreat attract the candidates, quote unquote, area of focus by quote unquote content slash theme. CNN notes, quote, Riviera used an unclear methodology for the breakdown, assigning percentages to 10 categories of content or theme for Trump, Harris, and their running mates. the percentages in every column, one for each candidate, added up to well over 100%. What he was trying to do here is measure campaign themes, like, you know, how much Trump

Starting point is 02:17:51 focused on immigration compared to Harris, right? So he had these like 10 categories of like what the campaigns were focused on. But the percentages did not actually add up to 100%. Of course they didn't. So he's just like making this stuff up, right? Like it's, again, they know there's like an unclear methodology for the breakdown. The fact that these add up to over 100%, like you cannot trust the legitimacy of any of this research now. So after parts of the presentation were leaked to CNN, CNN then obtained even more information

Starting point is 02:18:19 about the contents of the shelved autopsy. Before publishing their findings, CNN presented the DNC with what they knew about the report, prompting the DNC to just release the full report as submitted by Paul Rivera. And around this time, donors were also threatening to withhold funds for not publishing the report, so that probably also contributed. One of CNN's sources said that after the autopsy was published, Ken Martin informed DNC staff

Starting point is 02:18:49 that Paul Riviera was no longer associated with the committee. These people, these fucking people. I mean, I did not read the entire report intentionally so that you could tell me about it, but the highlights that have been spread across the internet did not mention Gaza. did not mention Joe Biden's age and did not mention when Joe Biden dropped out late. Effectively so. Well, we'll get into some of those in a little bit more detail.

Starting point is 02:19:16 I think one of the most interesting parts about the DNC's publishing of the unfinished report is that the published version of the autopsy contains annotations and corrections marked in red that the DNC added to the copy of the report as submitted by Riviera. And these were added for its public release. Okay. At the top of every single page, all 192 pages, reads a disclaimer, quote,

Starting point is 02:19:42 disclaimer, this document reflects the views of the author, not the DNC. The DNC was not provided with the underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting data for many of the assertions contained herein and therefore cannot independently verify the claims presented, unquote. That is in red at the top of every single page. Ken Martin did issue a statement when the. autopsy was published. Read and quote, when I was elected DNC chair, I commissioned an after-action review of the 2024 election that I wanted to be honest and transparent, and with actionable and specific takeaways for the future of the Democratic Party. When I received the report late last

Starting point is 02:20:23 year, it wasn't ready for prime time, not even close. And because no source material was provided, it would have meant starting over. I could not in good faith put the DNC's stamp of approval on the that was produced. After last November's massive Democratic wins, I didn't want to create a distraction. But by not putting the report out, I ended up creating an even bigger distraction. For that, I sincerely apologize. For full transparency, I am releasing the report as we received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged. It does not meet my standards, and it won't meet your standards. But I'm doing this because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word. Unquote.

Starting point is 02:21:04 I don't know, man. That doesn't really sound very trustworthy, bro. Sounds pretty bad. Sounds pretty bad. Here's a half-assed report. It's not very good. And I've delayed it for over a year. But yeah, I guess here it is. No, it doesn't include any of the big issue things. Enjoy. It's a stunning sequence of events that kind of highlights all of the issues that everyone already has with the Democratic Party. like the guy who was chosen to do the autopsy just happens to be a personal friend of the DNC chair and said friend then fails to interrogate the institutional bias of the party.

Starting point is 02:21:44 It's such a condensed, condensed little version of why the party has had so many troubles and the report as published seems unwilling to actually feel to learn from successes that have been happening since the 2024 election. Effectively, what this report actually is. is a poorly sourced opinion piece.

Starting point is 02:22:03 Yeah. That's dressed up as an election autopsy. It misspells names. It has typos, factual and statistical errors, and unsourced claims. Multiple key sections are left completely blank because Riviera never submitted them. The report is less interested in collecting data and interviews to inform analysis, but rather starts with certain assumptions and then cherry picks data to support these assumptions. But it doesn't even do that.

Starting point is 02:22:31 well because the included data is often inaccurate and at times the analysis contradicts itself. Jesus Christ. A state party chair told CNN, quote, it was very clear that it felt like Ken's theory of the case for the future of the party through the lens of 2024 as opposed to a quote unquote autopsy. And after reading the report, I agree. This is very much a report that's designed to fit in with what Ken Martin wants the message of the last election to be, and it tries to squeeze that

Starting point is 02:23:05 into the, like, very rough shape of like an after election report, but it's really not. This just, like, reeks of, like, lazy AI work with all the, like, left out sections that, the things that don't add up, the misspelling.

Starting point is 02:23:23 Specifically, the statistical and, like, factual errors. Yeah. are really confusing. It feels like someone's getting, if not the actual writing, but it feels like the research was like AI assistant in the way that, you know, AIs will shoot out different answers for the same question. Sure. So it feels like that in a few areas. And like you've already mentioned, right, the report never brings up Biden's age or mental state as a factor contributing to the election. And in as much as the report criticizes Biden, it critiques the Biden administration's

Starting point is 02:23:53 failure to adequately prepare Harris to be a viable candidate. Does it discuss the debate? No. It doesn't bring up the debate where now we know that like from an interview from Dr. Jill Biden from a few weeks ago that she legitimately thought that Joe was having a stroke on stage during that debate with Donald Trump. Even though she took him onto a different stage afterwards to tell him how good he did. And then they went to a waffle house.

Starting point is 02:24:22 I mean. The things you do after you believe your husband has had a stroke. When shit has hit the fan, Garrett, you go to Waffle House. Maybe the Waffle House actually is to move. That's what I'm saying. The Waffle House is the least shocking of the entire situation. But that's not mentioned in there at all. No.

Starting point is 02:24:43 It says, quote, The White House did not effectively support Vice President Harris over three and a half years to improve her standing before the can. candidate switch, unquote. That's all it says about about switching from Biden to Harris. That's all it says. I don't disagree with that statement because, you know, the amount of people that we spoke to when we went to both political conventions, one of the common things that they said about

Starting point is 02:25:10 Kamala Harris is like how ineffective she's been and how they don't use her and how can we trust her when they don't even trust her to do basic things for the administration, which was one of the main, like, Republican talking points about her is, like, she has no skills, which is not true. But that was a position that was against her, is not utilizing her enough. And then, you know, they're like, bibbabity boo, she's your candidate without a primary. Do they mention anything about their not being a primary? No. Okay.

Starting point is 02:25:45 The port never interrogates or considers Biden's decision to run for re-election or lay blame on those who encouraged and enable that decision, nor does it identify the lack of a legitimate primary as a contributing factor leading to the results of the 2024 election. We're going to take a quick break while I have, you know, an attack of my mind. And we're back. Let's now pivot to how the report describes its own research methodology.

Starting point is 02:26:32 Jesus Christ. This is quoting from the start of the autopsy. Quote, The report analyzes a range of publicly and commercially available data to identify actual investments, actions, and eventual voter behavior. The analysis also includes qualitative data obtained in the form of in-person and virtual interviews with more than 300 organizations and individuals. After this sentence, the DNC has highlighted and annotated a little note that reads,

Starting point is 02:26:58 No source material or data provided. unsourced claims cannot be independently verified. So despite claiming that 300 people or organizations were interviewed, which may be true, the report never says who these people are, nor does it allude to their relevant expertise. This is just an op-ed. A source at the DNC told CNN that Riviera did not even provide a list of names of the people he spoke to, to the DNC, nor did he submit interview notes or recording. So there's no record that we have of like who these people are or why they were interviewed or what they actually said.

Starting point is 02:27:40 And it's not like he's like quoting from people like with quotation marks. It's like regurgitating maybe portions of interviews into different text. Right. Riviera also failed to provide data that he said was given to him by senior campaign leadership that he says is influencing the report. But we don't see it. And he did not provide it to the DNC. like they don't know. It's just, it's just some guy saying, trust me, bro. That's what it sounds like. So after the introduction to the report is a section called

Starting point is 02:28:11 the executive summary. This section was not provided by the author. This section is completely missing. Great. After the missing executive summary section, the report moves on to the electoral landscape, which has just very basic stuff. Quote, millions of Americans are suffering from poor access to health care, manufacturing, a job losses, and failing infrastructure, yet continued to be persuaded to vote against their best interests because they do not see themselves reflected in the America of the Democratic Party, unquote.

Starting point is 02:28:41 Just really basic stuff. Very, like, average, a 10-year-old can say this. Next, the report talks about how the Democratic Party rebuilt itself in the 90s, how after three consecutive presidential losses, the Democrats embraced a new strategy, which got Clinton elected in 1992. And we all know how well that.

Starting point is 02:28:59 went. Then there's seven pages of summarizing party history from 2008 to 2024. I don't know if he was getting paid by the word, but that's just like, it's just seven pages that just don't need to be there. And

Starting point is 02:29:15 then the report reads, quote, we must be careful to draw the right lessons from this experience and not miss opportunities to identify and build upon some of the positives of the 2024 cycle. We must acknowledge how close the margins actually were. The report then goes on to misstate how close the margins were.

Starting point is 02:29:35 But on the other hand, it goes on to say that in the past 16 years, quote, Democrats have lost ground at every level of government. This remains true even in the face of the blue wave in the most recent elections. 2025 gubernatorial and mayoral wins in Virginia, New Jersey, New York City, Detroit, and elsewhere may lead to a false sense of security and a belief that Democratic Party has again found ways to bring voters back to the booth with their messaging. While these wins are welcome and point to optimism entrenched in the major party strategy, a dive into the details shows some of these elections were tighter than Democrats should be comfortable

Starting point is 02:30:12 with and point to room for improvement in future efforts. It never gives this dive into the details, so we don't even know what it's taking there. And to me, this paragraph just demonstrates an unwillingness to understand why some of elections went the way they did, especially the one in New York City. It doesn't want to acknowledge why someone like Zoran ran such a successful campaign. And claiming that the margins were tighter than what Democrats should be comfortable with. Also ignores the fact that Zoron's biggest opponent in both the primary and general election was another Democrat who ran as an independent, someone who was associated with the Democratic

Starting point is 02:30:52 establishment. It's a bizarre little tidbit that they throw in there. This is so weird. just like a highly unnecessary tangent. And it just shows this like uncomfortableness and, you know, on one side being uncomfortable and the other side just, you know, also being curious about why those elections have gone the way they did. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:31:14 And what you can actually learn from them. This baffling. I'm not going to go over every single section of the report because there's a lot. And the way that DNC annotated it gets interesting because at a certain point, point, they stop actually trying to address or annotate specific claims. Yeah. And instead, just to annotate the titles of entire sections, writing, no sourcing provided for several claims in this section, and no evidence provided for many claims in this section.

Starting point is 02:31:43 Public reporting and data contradict several claims. Wow. The introduction for the What Happened, Electoral Overview Section, is also completely missing, as well as the National Review Section. These are just not included. The author did not provide those sections. The next section, the one on battleground state outcomes, contains very basic factual errors in just the second sentence.

Starting point is 02:32:12 Quote, states which had consistently and reliably voted for Democratic candidates, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, voted for Trump, unquote. All these three states voted for Trump in 2016. I don't know if Rivera has a different definition of, consistent or reliable. But these are, these are notably swing states. And swing states that voted for Trump in 2016. Yeah. Just like a lot of little details like that just don't make sense. And later on in this section and beyond, it gets dates wrong. It gets the percentage of votes wrong. It falsely claims that a capital police officer was beaten to death by insurrectionists on January 6th. That's not true.

Starting point is 02:32:54 that did not happen. An officer killed himself a few days later, but he was not beaten to death on site at January 6th. The report uses the word gaslighting, which I think is funny. I just kind of wonder if you, like, uploaded this to one of the like AI software is to tell you if it's AI,

Starting point is 02:33:14 or tell you if it was, you know, plagiarized and those kinds of things, how much of it would be flagged. Yeah, who knows, right? Like those sorts of tools aren't the most accurate themselves. No, but it's just crazy. But the level of errors is shocking.

Starting point is 02:33:31 Yeah. Like, for instance, the report claims that in the 2024 election, Democrats netted two seats in the House, flipping 10 seats from Republicans while losing eight. This is not true. This is just not a true claim. Democrats netted one seat rather than two, flipping nine Republican-held seats while losing eight Democrat seats. It's just small little errors like that.

Starting point is 02:33:55 And I'm like, how? How did you do this? Unbelievable. There's also a bunch of just unfounded claims about the intentions or assumptions coming from the Harris campaign, which may be true, but they're not supported in the actual report. Like, you're not providing evidence. You're not providing citations for some of the claims about what the Harris Party intended in some of their...

Starting point is 02:34:23 messaging or stances. But I want to move on to one of the biggest takeaways that the report had. It argues that anti-Trump sentiment was assumed by Democratic campaigns and that campaign ads should have hit Trump harder to remind voters of how bad he is. Quote, the national campaign did not effectively drive Trump's negatives. The retrospective job approval for Trump was too high, and the campaign and allies failed to remind voters of his incompetence. The idea Trump's negatives were, quote, unquote, baked in is a major failure of analysis and reality, given how his favorability has cratered less than a year into this term, unquote. The DNC notes that no evidence was provided for these claims, and that this claim

Starting point is 02:35:11 contradicts claims elsewhere in the report. Because a lot of the report also criticizes Harris for only defining herself as not being Trump, as focusing too much on Trump and not defining herself. So the report kind of tries to have it both ways here. The campaigns did not hit Trump hard enough, but were also too focused on Trump, never illuminating what attacks against Trump should have looked like exactly.

Starting point is 02:35:41 Is there any mention in these reports about Epstein? No. No? No. No. No. No. No. No. Absolutely not. Yeah. Because it was baffling to me that because they needed to have Bill Clinton make the worst speech at the DNC that they didn't target Trump over his relationship with Epstein at all during the campaign. So, you know, of course it's not in there. I mean, yeah, there's a lot of a lot of things that you could hit Trump on. And a lot of Democratic ads like did. maybe not in ways that people found convincing. You know, like when we were at the DNC, a lot of the anti-Trump stuff was based around like the horror of January 6th. Yeah. Not his regular failures as president.

Starting point is 02:36:29 Yeah. Right? Like the day-to-day incompetence that he showed as president. It was like Trump is threat to democracy, which just did not turn out to be a compelling enough reason to vote against Trump. Oh my goodness.

Starting point is 02:36:43 The report claims that Harris struggled with defining herself beyond not being Trump and just framing the race as prosecutor versus felon. The report notes, quote, the truncated campaign timeline didn't help. But the campaign did not quickly resolve

Starting point is 02:36:59 on how to tag Trump and define Harris. The report says that the enthusiasm gap was predictable that Trump just generated more enthusiasm than Harris does not provide evidence to support this claim, though some people may believe,

Starting point is 02:37:14 believe this to be true, but this claim is not supported in the actual report. And it reads, quote, anti-Trump sentiment alone was insufficient to motivate voters. The Harris campaign appears to have relied on Trump being unacceptable rather than building an affirmative case for Harris. Base voters needed reasons to vote for Harris as well as vote against Trump. DNC notes, no evidence provided for these claims. So, like, I kind of agree with portions of this. I think, I think, yeah, you do need reasons to vote for Harris.

Starting point is 02:37:48 You cannot be just defined as not being Trump. This does contradict the previous takeaway that anti-Trump sentiment was not driven hard enough into voters. So perhaps this claim isn't necessarily wrong, but it is armchair analysis. It's not actually attempting to substantiate its claims. It's lazy and sloppy. And it ignores that there were also reasons to not vote for Harris. It's not just that the campaign needed to generate reasons. to vote for Harris, but it also should have addressed or changed its course to address the reasons

Starting point is 02:38:21 that people might not want to vote for Harris, which we will get to at the end of this episode. In terms of the election analysis included in this report, a lot of it is focused on comparing Harris's performance to state-level races, where Democratic candidates outperformed her, but also where she outreformed them, and the analysis often conflates the two. It reiterates that, quote, lower profile races needed affirmative cases to vote for candidates, not just opposition to Trump,

Starting point is 02:38:55 and it credits successful state campaigns to local name recognition and digital presence. Things that Harris was not necessarily lacking in, Harris spent a decent amount of money on digital presence, and as vice president had a degree of name recognition. There's more just odd errors here. The report gets the number of 2024 gubernatorial races wrong. It forgets that Delaware had a gubernatorial race.

Starting point is 02:39:23 And it focuses much of the section of the report on Josh Stein of North Carolina, who's the governor. Yeah. Quote, while Stein was able to keep the governor's office under Democratic control, it is concerning how Robinson was able to capture 45% of the state's vote, even after his repudiation of equal rights for everyone, and proudly and loudly asserting, he was a black Nazi, unquote. Man, I forgot about that guy. I'm mad that you brought him up. I forgot he existed.

Starting point is 02:39:55 A lot of the section of this report is actually praising Josh Stein for how well he ran his campaign, while also finding it concerning of how much the vote Robinson was able to still get, Except it gets the number wrong. Robinson did not get 45% of the vote. He got just over 40%. And later in the report, it says he got 42.7%, which is also wrong. So it has two different numbers. The report says 45 and 42.7, neither of which are correct. The correct number is 40. People. There's a lot of stuff like this. It's just kind of baffling. And it's even more baffling because of how. much of a load-bearing section this Josh Stein bit is. It writes about how Josh Stein ran almost eight points ahead of Harris. And it says that, quote, Stein didn't just win by default. He addressed the exact problems Harris did not.

Starting point is 02:40:54 But it never actually explains what those are. It doesn't actually explain this. It just says it in a sentence. Later on, it says that based on the North Carolina governor's race, Democrats should, quote, focus less on abstract issues and identity politics and connect with voters on the issues they say matter most, including the economy, disaster relief, and addressing housing affordability, unquote. But the Harris campaign was not actually focused on abstract issues and identity politics. They were trying to address these things, often inadequately,

Starting point is 02:41:27 especially on the economy, because of how much Harris had tied herself to Biden. But she did address housing affordability for like a decent bit of the campaign. Whether voters actually knew that, that's a whole other question, right? It's whether they were successful in communicating her platform on housing affordability is a different question. But it's not that Stein's success was focused on this as opposed to focusing on abstract issues, which is not really what the Harris campaign was actually focused on. The report continues, quote, Harris saw dramatic drops in support among young Latino men and young black man compared to Biden's 2020 performance. However, Stein recovered significant ground with both groups, suggesting his campaign found effective ways to reach these voters.

Starting point is 02:42:14 Stein's results suggests it's possible to win women and compete with men with the right approach. Unquote. Does it explain how Stein did this? No. No, it doesn't. Of course it doesn't. It doesn't say. Now, the report also praises Washington Governor Bob Ferguson, who was elected in 2020.

Starting point is 02:42:34 quote, running on a platform of housing affordability, reducing costs for families throughout the state, and improving public safety allowed him to easily capture the governor's office. His message resonated with voters concerned about how binonomics failed to lower the cost of eggs and how the Trump administration would gut avenues of education and upward mobility. Stein and Ferguson, notably both then-incumbent attorneys general for their states, had a definitive strategy to approach voters. their wins provide a blueprint for candidates in other states seeking to align themselves with their voters, unquote. So Ferguson's win in Washington state is presented as a blueprint for candidates as compared to Harris's failed strategy. But in fact, Ferguson ran almost four points behind Harris. Harris did better in Washington than Ferguson did, but the report promotes Ferguson's strategy or its opinion on Ferguson's strategy as the winning blueprint,

Starting point is 02:43:32 despite it doing worse in Washington. So that's what I mean in terms of there being lots of self-contradictory claims. Yeah. Did nobody proofread or edit or peer review? Well, no. I think that is a big part of this, right? Is that once the DNC received this, they saw how bad it was. And it was like, we don't even want to prove-free and edit this.

Starting point is 02:43:54 Like, this is just so bad. We just don't even want to deal with it anymore. Like, it's just done. We're just putting on the shelf. But dude released it anyways. Well, I mean, they released it. after public pressure because of, you know, accusations that they were hiding certain findings that were damaging to the Democratic Party or the interests of party elites.

Starting point is 02:44:11 No, it's just, it's just that somebody did a bad job. When in fact, it's just like, oh, this was just like a massive fuck-up. Like, that's why you're hiding it. Right, right. Like, this section that I just, like, read and the section on like Stein, that's the only time where the word cost is used in relation to prices. This is the only mention of affordability. Oh, my God.

Starting point is 02:44:35 The report does not a single time mention inflation. Oh, my God. Except in adjusting, like, donation numbers for inflation. But it does not mention inflation as an issue. It does not mention the causes of inflation, messaging around inflation, and how that may have been a factor contributing to the results of the election. The economy only gets mentioned six times. Okay.

Starting point is 02:45:01 Just thinking back to when we were at the RNC, and I'm sure you had the conversations with, you know, newly eligible voters, young males. Yeah. And you ask them, you know, why they were voting for Donald Trump. They would always say the economy. It's the first thing. It's the first thing, yeah. And that's the core of Trump's ad strategy. How are they not understanding that, you know, bringing out Oprah at the DNC,

Starting point is 02:45:31 instead of talking about how you're going to lower the price of milk and eggs and gas and help people get jobs, like, how are they not realizing that you're not reaching normal human connection? And this, like, continues to be a problem now, right? Yeah. People will look at macroeconomic factors. Sure. And be like, by some accounts, the honeymoon is actually not doing terrible. Uh-huh.

Starting point is 02:45:56 But those sorts of statements don't reflect the reality of Americans who are dealing with, It's rising prices and may not be experiencing the same wage growth that some statistics show in the macro sense. And specifically the way that there's this like condescending messaging around macroeconomics. Yeah. That really like polarizes people against you because they're having a very hard time. They don't have a lot of hope for the future. And just asserting that actually on a macro's level, the economy is doing well, it feels like you're gaslighting them, right? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:46:27 So you see this in like the discussion of like, you know, the vibe session. Yeah. Which, I mean, I have a lot of opinions on, but that's, that's, that's another episode. Oh, man. And right now, we're going to go to ads. Oh, boy. Okay, we are back. So after this section talking about the gubernatorial races and stuff, it has a list of strategic implications for Democrats based on these state level races. And these implications are, quote, anti-Trump sentiment has.

Starting point is 02:47:11 has its limits. Oregular voters are swing voters. Candidate definition is essential. Clear accomplishments and concrete plans matter more than vibes. State parties matter. Voters are sophisticated. The 8 to 10% who split tickets are decisive. They evaluate candidates individually. Geographic formula is non-negotiable, strong urban plus competitive suburbs plus limited rural losses. You need all three, unquote. no shit. In order to win elections, you must win elections. Yeah. That's what this is saying is that in order to win elections, you have to win the election. Yeah, we know. We know. Yeah, there's this, there's this announcer in the NBA that got slammed many years back

Starting point is 02:47:58 for stating, well, you know, the team with the most points at the end of the game wins. And that's exactly what this is. They're like, hey, if you get more votes than the other guy, you win. It's crazy. It's lazy. This whole thing reeks of just like... Yes. Lacksadaisical, insufferable laziness.

Starting point is 02:48:21 Yes. I want to mention two other strategic implications. Please. One. Elections remain winnable with the right candidates and strategies, even in difficult environments. Demographics are tendencies, not destiny. And voter support is impacted, good and bad. through campaign choices, unquote.

Starting point is 02:48:42 Wow, thank you so much for saying that if people, genius. If people believe in and like the candidate, maybe they'll vote for them. Wow. Voter support is impacted through campaign choices. Just, just, oh, my goodness. So that's obviously laughable. Yes.

Starting point is 02:49:00 This last one is more interesting. Male voters require direct engagement. The gender gap can be narrowed. deploy male messengers, address economic concerns, and don't assume identity politics will hold male voters of color. Men hate women. Men hate girls. It's not the messenger. It's not the messenger. It's the message. It's not about who the messenger is. It's the message itself. And they can't grasp that. Why is that their take? They're doing the same identity politics. Yes. That is like trying to critique. It's like, no.

Starting point is 02:49:37 we need men to talk to male voters. That's the only way. That's also identity politics. You don't understand that it's not about who's giving the message. It's about what the message actually is. How did white dudes for Harris work out? You literally tried this. You literally tried to do this.

Starting point is 02:49:55 It did not work. Karrison, once again, I did block that out of my brain. I did not like hearing it. Yeah. Their take is, sorry, if you want to talk to the boys, you also have to be a boy. It's crazy. What?

Starting point is 02:50:12 It's lazy. It's stupid. God. All right. What else? Hit me. I know that you're saving some of the worst for the end.

Starting point is 02:50:22 Yeah, I am saving some of the bad stuff for last. There's a few other small errors I want to go through. Let's do it. Like it claims that tens of thousands of voters and a handful of states

Starting point is 02:50:31 are who sent Trump back to the White House. That's not, that's not accurate. That's just, that's just, That's just not inaccurate, and the DNC notes this. That's not what happened at all. Okay. And out of 34 Senate races, the report only reviews six of them, which it attempts to extrapolate a pattern from. And it does not review Wisconsin, a key swing state. And the author also just did not include this section on House races.

Starting point is 02:50:56 This section is completely blank. It's also missing. Cool. Now, it does have a list of, you know, lessons that we can learn from Senate level and state. level races. The positive ones are that Democrats should maintain a year-round presence. We should kind of always be campaigning. Don't just wait till the end, just to always keep a level of engagement. And that engagement should be community-oriented. It should be grassroots in nature. You should be establishing partnerships with local community organizations and groups in working-class

Starting point is 02:51:28 communities because member-to-member outreach is more effective. Rather than having strangers do door knocking. You should have people from that neighborhood be door knocking in their own neighborhoods. And their messaging should be bilingual and culturally competent. So like all the stuff is like, yeah, like I sure. This is like, I kind of agree, right? This is like, yeah, very, very basic. But yes, this is, this is a good idea. You should strengthen your connections in Latino neighborhoods and with unions. And you should lean on those to help win elections. Yep, that's how politics works. learn very young, stranger danger. And so it's like if you are someone like me who has cameras at their house and you see a strange person coming to your door, you're not necessarily going

Starting point is 02:52:14 to answer that. No, someone with a clipboard is going to approach me. It's like, no way. I'm not having to do it. I can't. I'm already oversimulated. Please leave me on. But if it's like, oh, hey, it's my neighbor. Yeah. I'm going to open the door for them and hear them out. I fear that's just common sense. I don't think that was necessarily needed in this. report, that's common sense. But it's something I don't disagree with for like the first time and all these things that you've said. Now, the sort of negative things that the Democrats can learn from include what the report calls the leadership voter gap. The fact that the Democratic Party leadership seems increasingly alienated from the priorities of voters. And voters may still support their

Starting point is 02:52:57 local Democrat on the state level or local, local races. But maybe we'll vote for Trump because he's offering an alternative to the stagnating corpse of the Democratic Party, even if that alternative turns out to be also terrible and in some ways worse. So this is what they call the leadership voter gap. They also identify late engagement doing the bulk of your campaigning from like September to November, ceding the entire summer for the Republicans to establish kind of the territory of the race, like what the issues are. The report mentions messaging misalignment.

Starting point is 02:53:35 This is similar to the leadership voter gap, where there's tensions between the leadership of the party or the concerns of the president and what working class Americans are concerned about. Quote, the Bidenomics framing emphasized macro statistics rather than the micro realities voters experienced daily and specifically tied President Biden by name to actual economic anxiety, unquote. I think that's completely fair. Another of the key challenges is Republican inroads with working class voters. This section has a typo, so it's kind of hard to read, but it essentially states... There's so many typos. But it essentially states that the Trump

Starting point is 02:54:17 campaign targeted working class households with populist messaging, which distracted from his anti-worker record. And working class men, particularly manufacturing and construction, saw Trump as more aligned with their cultural values than Democratic candidates. To Conncy's down, Democrats need to have a year-round presence, more economic messaging, and address cost-of-living concerns that resonate more than, quote-unquote, identity politics. This is kind of where the actual election analysis portion of the document ends. The rest of the document is on how to more effectively spend campaign funds, debating door-knocking versus text and phone banking.

Starting point is 02:54:59 addressing dropping voter registration rates, comparing media and ad spending, digital versus TV ads. Is there anything interesting in those findings? No, not really. Okay. It's filling the page count. Like, the Democrats got a lot of money.

Starting point is 02:55:15 The problem isn't the funds. We have the funds. It's that there's small ways that you can use them better and sure. Yeah. But all of this is just treating the symptom, not the problem. The problem wasn't that you were

Starting point is 02:55:29 spending more on digital and not enough on broadcast. The problem was the candidate and the message, not differences in ad spending. It's not that you had ads running. It's that the ads you had running weren't connecting with the people whose votes you needed. The people that were going to vote for you already, that's who those ads were targeting to, as opposed to bringing in voters who were like, oh man, I'm really not sure Trump was pretty bad last time. I'm on the fence here. Or just for first time voters. The first time voter registration was down significantly. Yeah. The fact that you ran ads in certain places,

Starting point is 02:56:12 that was not the problem. No. You weren't advertising to the people that needed to be advertised to. Your messaging was wrong. And there's, yeah, there's this more core issue that people did not get to actually pick the Democratic nominee. And the Democratic nominee had a lot of issues and direct ties to the many failures of the Biden administration, which brings us to our final section here. I'm afraid. Based on three polling studies, the campaign pollsters concluded that it was, quote, important for the vice president to find separation from the status quo. They recognized voters were looking for change and felt it was necessary to find ways to demonstrate how a Harris-Walls administration would be more effective in addressing American needs. The pollsters acknowledged the loyalty

Starting point is 02:56:58 demonstrated by the vice president, but also suggested it was contrary to strong signals in their data about how even measured breaks would help position the vice president to win, unquote. And the vice president, Harris, did not do these measured breaks. She remained extremely loyal to the legacy of the Biden administration while she was vice president and while she was campaigning for president in 2024. Now, these campaign pollsters were also part of discussions on how to respond to Trump attack ads. Quote, in particular, the attack ad

Starting point is 02:57:35 focused on the vice president's prior statements on transgendered Americans. You can't call them that, bro. They all recognized the attack as very effective and felt the campaign was boxed in. The ad was a video of her saying what she said,

Starting point is 02:57:51 and it was framed as an attack on her economic priorities. If the vice president would not change her position and she did not, then there was nothing which would have worked as a response, unquote. The polling section is also missing its conclusion. But let's get into that a little bit more. Okay.

Starting point is 02:58:10 Before the autopsy was released, Rob Flattery, I'm going to say flattery, I don't know what it actually is, but I'm calling it flattery. He was Harris's deputy campaign manager, and he wrote an article in the bulwark about what he said in his autopsy interview, also noting he was one of the few Harris staffers who was actually. actually interviewed. Flattery argued the main issue the 2024 campaign was branding. And he clarified that the Kamala is for they, them ad was not actually the most effective attack ad. According to campaign data, it was the Trump ad from July 24 with clips of Harris saying that, quote, unquote,

Starting point is 02:58:49 Bidenomics is working. Flattery wrote that, quote, the brilliance of the Trump team's ad strategy was that everything was a proof point that leveled up to a core narrative. She cares about liberal shit, not you. Her position on immigrants, she's focused on the wrong thing. Harris talking about trans prisoners, focused on the wrong thing.

Starting point is 02:59:09 Says Bidenomics is working, focused on the wrong stuff. It was brands, not messages. The trans ad worked because of what it implied, not what it said, unquote. Rob flattery, like the autopsy, insists that there was no way to do directly respond to the Kamala is for they, them, Trump is for you ad,

Starting point is 02:59:30 claiming that they tested five to six response ads against ads about the economy, and the economy ones tested better. Quote, so not wanting to make the fight about an issue we were losing, we talked about the economy more. A literal rebuttal would have been a loser. I absolutely stand by this decision. Look at the 2025 elections in Virginia, where Republicans made trans issues, the core of their advertising strategy.

Starting point is 02:59:54 it failed because voters didn't find it relevant, unquote. Except that's exactly what Trump did with the they-them ad. That was a big part of his ad strategy as well. So there's this sort of learned helplessness with how to address both like the trans issues as well as the Israel-Palestine stuff, which we'll get to in one sec. Like Harris not seriously addressing the they-them ad also did not seem to help. And you don't need to run an ad directly opposing that slop, but through media appearances, you can pull the old Uno Reverso

Starting point is 03:00:33 while affirming that you'll stand up for the rights of all Americans, no matter their gender or race. And that includes making health care more affordable and more accessible. And it's Trump and the Republicans who are focusing on bullying a disadvantaged small minority of Americans to distract from the fact that they have no real economic plan. You can talk about the economy while still standing up for trans people. It doesn't need to be the focus of your campaign, but it sure as hell was a key focus of Trump's campaign, and you not addressing it did not help.

Starting point is 03:01:06 And contributed to real harm and negative polarization against trans people. Yeah, I mean, a trans person did not speak at the 2024 DNC, which was weird and not normal. Trans people have spoken at many DNC conventions in the past, but in the 2024, nope, and trans issues were barely even mentioned, largely absent. And like, it doesn't need to be a key issue, but the fact that Republicans made it, made it a key issue means that it is worth addressing in some way

Starting point is 03:01:38 and affirming that you will actually stand up for the rights of trans people beyond making very kind of vague, confusing statements like Kamala made that she'll follow the law. which just does not make sense to anyone. This sort of learned helplessness around not being able to address these issues, this is the same thing with Palestine. Yes.

Starting point is 03:01:58 Altering course is simply not considered possible and in part with Palestine because Harris was the vice president. Flattery wrote, quote, given the Biden administration's position, Gaza was an impossible issue to communicate around. Protesters drove coverage away from campaign events, Digital creators, or even supporters, were afraid to say anything nice about Biden because their

Starting point is 03:02:23 comments sections would get rocked. For many voters, watching the horrific, painful footage out of Gaza, it became a moral question, one we didn't have a good answer for. In ways that may not be reflected in a poll, it meaningfully reduced enthusiasm. As one person from the campaign told me, we spent the entire election with a giant rotting fish around our necks. Is Joe Biden the giant rotting fish? Well, no. I mean, it's, I mean, in part, yes, but like the genocide in Gaza, like, like, like, you know, well-documented mass death. They didn't let a Palestinian person speak at the DNC either.

Starting point is 03:03:01 They had, they had one panel on it, which I attended. It was phenomenal. It was the largest attended panel of the convention. And then they refused to let a Palestinian person speak. I mean, and even beyond just letting people speak, it's like there was no. real plan to actually stop this from happening. Like you can you can cut off aid to Israel. You can do

Starting point is 03:03:22 serious things. You can not send them weapons. You can take away weapons. You can do more things. As we've seen, America is not afraid to occupy territories in that region. You could literally invade and be like, no, you have to stop. But like not being able to

Starting point is 03:03:39 even consider that you could have an answer for this moral question. You could just change your position, not being able to even consider that, and the compounding difficulty of Harris being in the VP role made this the giant rotting fish around the campaign's neck. Yeah. And the fact that the autopsy does not actually address this question, and flattery does, I think,

Starting point is 03:04:03 is another damning indictment against the autopsy and its sheer incompetence of the deputy campaign manager himself acknowledging that this was a serious, a serious issue that meaningfully reduced enthusiasm. And like, the whole deal in this bulwark article is that politics is now about brands, not messages. And this is kind of silly, right? Because these two things are related. Yeah. But the brand of the Harris campaign was largely defined as not being Trump and just being more of the same, which in 2024 wasn't exactly great. No. Another of Trump's main ads featured a clip of Harris saying that she wouldn't have done anything different from Biden. So the branding issue certainly wasn't helped by the campaign's unwillingness to sever ties with Biden and criticize his policy.

Starting point is 03:04:53 Flattery argues that would have been hard, if not impossible, because of Kamala's position as sitting vice president. If she doesn't go against Biden's policy, it puts fractures within the party and the White House itself, but also it would demonstrate how she effectively held no power as vice president. So, like, there is these issues, but if you actually have principles, that would not actually be an issue. You could just blaze through that. you could actually take the real correct stance on issues like Palestine and acknowledge the massive failures that the administration had. And you are now going against the status quo of the administration despite being the vice president, right? That could have been an option,

Starting point is 03:05:32 one that was just never actually considered for whatever reason, right? I mean, statistically speaking, at that time, Joe Biden had a very low approval rating. And so, you know, Kamala running as the pro-Joe candidate doesn't really resonate with voters because they're unhappy. Yeah, exactly, right? And if your message is just more of the same, then it seems pretty easy for your opponents to define what your brand is. And whenever she tried to say, you know, I'm going to change this, I'm going to change that. They were like, but you're in office now. And like, Harris herself did not actually campaign on, like, progressive immigration policies.

Starting point is 03:06:15 She did not campaign on trans rights. She didn't campaign on identity politics. No. But in absence of a real message, it's all too easy to associate the campaign with the concerns of, like, liberal elites disconnected from the economic realities of most Americans. And her previous statements on Bidenomics and how she wouldn't have done anything differently, absolutely compounded this. Flattery wrote that the campaign underestimated

Starting point is 03:06:42 just how disillusioned people were and the widespread degree of anti-institutionalism. But unlike the autopsy, he at least acknowledges Biden should have never have run for re-election in the first place and that Democrats should have run a real primary, which would have provided an opportunity

Starting point is 03:06:58 to actually address all of these issues about feeling tied to the death-worshipping aspects of the Biden administration. with Kamala being the VP. Yeah. Now, speaking of the autopsy, let's get to the final sections of the autopsy. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:07:15 Near the end of the report, a paragraph reads, Building to win requires new thinking. And building to last requires thinking about more than the next election. It requires finding the best way to connect with the right voters in the right places.

Starting point is 03:07:31 And if 2024 has proven anything, there is enough money to do it all the right way. And that's kind of the end. That's not the conclusion of the report because the final conclusion section is left blank. Super. It's missing as well. So that sentence is kind of the last piece of analysis because it actually has no conclusion. I think that's the perfect, the perfect representation of what this report is, is that it does not have a conclusion. It's literally missing the conclusion. There is very little you can actually take away from this report,

Starting point is 03:08:06 positively to improve election strategy going forward because there is no conclusion. Anyway, that's the that's the 2024 autopsy that turns out was real but was just really bad. And didn't address anything real? No, it did not address what I would argue were the key issues affecting the campaign. Biden's decision to run again, his age, the lack of a primary, and Israel. of Palestine. Yeah. That and honestly, people like to choose their candidate. In a democracy? Really? And this entire thing really is very frustrating because who knows when a non-sys male will be the candidate again after that. Yeah. I mean, at this point,

Starting point is 03:09:00 I think anyone who can address serious economic as well as these moral issues where I had like imperialism and the U.S. military, it's going to serve a better, a better chance. Yeah. Because that is the situation we have found ourselves in. Yeah. The Democratic National Committee. It's a bummer.

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Starting point is 03:10:11 I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Number one hits, millions of records sold, awards, sold out tours.

Starting point is 03:10:35 You think that Jonas Brothers are satisfied? Nope, it's podcast time. We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions. Hey Jonas is available now, and their first guest is a big one. Paul Rudd. You know, Steve Carell is a great singer. Can you tell you not to audition at the office or something? I told him.

Starting point is 03:10:51 Whoa. We were filming Anchorman. Clearly, I was the idiot. Thank God he didn't listen to him, right? Listen to Hey Jonas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's something that should not be as complicated as it is. Getting a racist statue removed. And here's something that should be a whole lot easier than it is.

Starting point is 03:11:11 getting a new one put up in its place. As long as there's a politics of race in America, there's going to be a politics of remembering the Civil War. To get to school, I had to go down Robert Lee Boulevard. Get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway. If you're an historian and you leave out half of what the history is, you're not doing your job. I'm Akila Hughes, and Rebel Spirit Season 2 goes deep on both of those things,

Starting point is 03:11:34 the fights, the politics, the people who won, and my personal campaign to add something to the Kentucky State House that's actually worth the wall space. We are more than our bodies. We contain essence. We contain spirit. How do you represent that? They are just fueling a fire that is really catching.

Starting point is 03:11:53 You'll see what I mean. Listen to Rebel Spirit Season 2 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen here. My name is Dan Al-Kurd. I'm a researcher and analyst of Arab and Palestinian politics. And today I'm joined by Dr. Nagar Razavi. She is a political anthropologist at the, I'm going to get this right,

Starting point is 03:12:19 Masavar Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University. And her work is on the role of think tanks in shaping U.S. security policies towards the Middle East and Iran specifically. And I've recently had the pleasure of being at a symposium with Dr. Rossavi. And I thought she would be a really welcome viewpoint for our audience. Thank you for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. So I think in regards to the war on Iran, there has been such a focus on the Strait of Permuz

Starting point is 03:12:50 and the economic impact of that that conditions on the ground have really slipped from our radars. Like, I don't see it as often, and I think I'm a very well-plugged-in person. So can we start there? Can you tell us more about the situation and what it's like for, like, the average Iranian right now? Yeah, thank you so much for leading with that because I do think that is absolutely missing in not only mainstream media, but in much of the policy discussions that both of us follow closely.

Starting point is 03:13:19 It's very bad on the ground for ordinary Iranians on all fronts. Economically, it is very dire at the moment. Inflation is now at unbelievably high rates. The level of damage that happened to the country, the physical damage, caused a lot of, of people to lose their jobs, if not their lives, because they hit hospitals, they hit schools, they hit factories. These are places where people work. So now all of those people are without a job. The cost of living, again, has skyrocketed. People who depended on the internet somehow to do their work are also now out of a job because it's been the longest internet shutdown in Iran's

Starting point is 03:14:07 history at this point. So that's the economic aspect that implicates every single person inside Iran at the moment. And we're hearing that even people can't exchange the dollar. So things are really, really bad at this point. And then you add on the layer of the number of people who have been killed by the latest count. I think I saw 1,700 civilians have been killed. 3.5 million and Iranians were displaced, and this was mainly people trying to escape major city centers. They went to areas that were very under-resourced, and so they were also suffering from lack of water and electricity wherever they were going. Those people have now slowly been coming back to the major cities.

Starting point is 03:14:52 Many more thousands of people were injured or maimed. And then, of course, the entire population has been terrorized by this war. and the uncertainty of whether it's going to start again. I mean, the threats that Trump has given up until just a few hours ago was at any moment the bombings could start again. And then lastly, I want to say in terms of, I touched on the infrastructure, but they hit desalination plants, they hit hospitals, they hit oil depots. People's quality of life right now inside Iran is pretty bad.

Starting point is 03:15:28 And then you layer onto that a now even-neutral. more repressive government that has been executing people they accuse of being traitors at unbelievable rates, a total clampdown on levels we haven't seen previously. So again, short story, it's very bad inside of Iran right now. Yeah, I really wanted to make sure that people got that full scope. You know, we forget that there's an internet blackout. We forget that Iranians have already dealt with such a repressive crackdown right before the war started. You know, like, I want people to make the connection that, like, conditions are super, super dire. You know, since you did mention that point, maybe we can elaborate a little bit. How do you think the Iranian regime is using

Starting point is 03:16:16 this moment? I know short term, they are utilizing it to just crack down on any dissent, but how do you think it'll be used kind of medium and long term? Yeah. So, you know, and, you know, and, In our line of work, it's always hard to make predictions, but we can use past experiences as a somewhat of a guide here. So just to remind your listeners, in January, there was a major uprising of Iranians against their government, and there was one of the most massive crackdowns since the 1980s when there was a massacre against political dissidents. And so going into this war, there was already one of the most brutal crackdowns happening. And then what people who are much more knowledgeable about Iran's domestic politics are telling me is that the people who are essentially replacing the leaders that were killed by U.S. Israeli strikes are more hardliner and are more aligned with the hardline factions of the IRGC or Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is one branch of the military in Iran that is very, very powerful.

Starting point is 03:17:28 and is loyal to the supreme leader, who is now the son of the previous supreme leader who was killed on the first day of the war, actually. And so using the last time Iran was at a war, which was in the Iran-Iraq war, repression is going to get so much worse under war conditions because anyone who they don't like or who anyone who speaks out can then be made a traitor and an enemy of the Iranian people.

Starting point is 03:17:56 And so they can use warfare as the grounds to essentially go even further in their oppression. And that's what a lot of human rights activists and people on the ground are worried about. Yeah. I also read a really interesting article I'll put in the show notes about the popular mobilization that the Iranian regime has like really fostered over, you know, many years through a variety of ways, whether it's through inserting, you know, their forces in universities or through particular kinds of cultural practices around like martyrs and things like that. So like the Iranian regime is also kind of mobilizing its supporters in a way that, I mean, obviously for people who like

Starting point is 03:18:37 want democracy and freedom, like this is, this is the worst case scenario. We, as in the United States, I shouldn't take responsibility for that at all. But neither of us should. Yeah, neither really. It's not, it's not our fault. But we really have, you know, given the worst actors, a huge victory. And also to that point, if you don't mind me jumping in. Yeah, yeah. Of course. It's also, you know, triggered nationalism among segments of the population. The war has made many people who were even protesting in January against the government, now coming out and defending at least not the sovereignty of their country or the integrity of their country.

Starting point is 03:19:12 I mean, it makes sense. Yeah. So there's all these strange now alliances forming. And the government is actually playing some parts of it smartly where you'll see them having women without hijab, coming to pro-government rallies and having a Lebanese woman singer's voice at their rallies, which, for those of you who don't know, women are not allowed to sing as solo artists in Iran. They can be part of a chorus. So they're also playing this interesting imaging game where they want to also show,

Starting point is 03:19:46 look, we can also be open and inclusive at the same time that they're executing people at the highest rate since the 1980s. Yeah, I'm going to have to look for that video of the Lebanese singer. So we participated both of us in a symposium at Princeton, I think was titled like the long arc of fascism, very interesting set of presentations. And your presentation was about the different kind of political strands that facilitated this war on Iran. So I just wanted to just start off with, could you outline the argument of your presentation for our listeners? Yes. What I argued in the conference, which was fantastic. and I really learned so much from your presentation as well, was the idea that this war was made possible in a sense

Starting point is 03:20:43 because several different strands of fascism have come together in this moment, and I called it converging fascisms, just to go quickly through it, because I don't want to drill on and on. But the idea is that one of the core strands has been this growing anti-Muslim sentiment that really goes across so much,

Starting point is 03:21:07 many different fascist movements that we see, whether it's the far right in Europe, here in the United States, Islamophobia is so central. And of course, the shootings at the mosque in San Diego is just the latest of long string of violence. The Hindutfa in India, anti-Muslim sentiments, racism is central to the fascism that we see there. And then, of course, in Israel, that's been a core element of their anti-Palestinian racism generally, but also specifically anti-Muslim racism. So that's kind of the big strand that I identified as coming together. And within that, there's an inflection of anti-Shea sentiment. And there's lots of scholars who have talked about how really the anti-Muslim project starts with the 79 revolution, this like modern

Starting point is 03:21:57 manifestation of it. And so it's always had this anti-Shiah sentiment to it. And so it's always had this anti-Shiah sentiment to it. Inflection. Yeah. Infliction. Thank you. The second strand that I wanted to highlight was this white supremacy and Aryanism, which is interesting because it actually loops in the far right of Iranian actors and Iranian diasporic actors in particular, those that are tied to the former Shah of Iran's son, Reza Pahlavi, who are. are really linking their wanting to overthrow the regime in Iran to restoring this Aryan nation that existed before, and this is their words, not mine, the Arab invasion of Islam. And this is really important for the far right movement that supported this invasion,

Starting point is 03:22:53 was this idea that they're going to save Iran from Islam, which again, the Islamophobia, but also the racialized violence against Arabs. in the region, and particularly against Palestinians. There's this very strong anti-Palestinian current in this movement that I'm talking about, where they are actively recruiting and aligning themselves with Israel in the genocide, which is so horrible. The third strand that I wanted to talk about was settler colonialism and nativism. And I think your listeners probably know enough about this,

Starting point is 03:23:30 but this is essentially the bringing together of both the settler colonial violence that we see in Israel, the United States, Australia, et cetera, with the anti-immigrant sentiment that has swept across much of the world, including in places like South Africa. Then the next strand that I talk about is nostalgic paternalism, I call it that. You always need a little bit of patriarchy. Right, right? Yeah, yeah. And it's basically like the people who close.

Starting point is 03:24:00 Trump daddy, you know, this idea that we need some strong man in our lives. And like, Egyptians have this with Sisi, you know, this, this idea that we just need this strong man to guide us forward is, is so dominant in a lot of these fascist groups. Modi is somebody's, you know, paternal figure. And again, Rasa Pahlavi, this self-proclaimed leader of the Iranian opposition in exile has numerous times called himself the father of the Iranian people. And he's used really cringe language around how Iran is this abused woman and he's going to come in and save it and completely out of touch with this amazing feminist movement that came out of Iran organically in 2022 called the Woman Life Freedom Movement. He's put himself in direct opposition

Starting point is 03:24:55 against that movement, which is wild to think about. And then the last kind of fascist strand that I identified, and this really also links to Naomi Klein's work, who was also at the conference, are these techno-fascists. And that's like the Palantiers, the anthropic, dystopian future that a lot of these techno-brose want to impose on the world.

Starting point is 03:25:19 That is very anti-human. And so all of these strands come together, at this very particular moment to justify and advance a war that some actors have wanted for a long time. And I say that it's kind of the blending of these at this particular moment that enabled this war. Yeah, I think the convergence is an apt description. And yet, especially the patriarchal stuff, like, cringe is the right word. Like, it's extremely cringe, but also, you know, dangerous, that all of these things are coming, coming together to facilitate this kind of violence,

Starting point is 03:25:58 and then the war in Iran is facilitating the expansion of fascism here and vice versa. I wanted to just kind of get your opinion of something. I read this article by Mustafa Bayoumi in The Guardian about how in the United States what actually drives Islamophobia is at its root anti-Palestinian racism. I mean, and you certainly, you know,

Starting point is 03:26:20 in your presentation talked about that strand as well. in the Iranian context, is the anti-Palestinian racism kind of tangential to the kind of broader racialized Islamophobia? Yeah, how would you see that? Yeah, no, I agree to a large extent what Biomi is saying, I think anti-Palestinian racism is central to how the opposition in Iran views itself. This hasn't been helped by the fact that the Iranian government, the current Iranian government has been at least materially and ideologically one of the biggest supporters of Palestinian liberation and has used the issue, as many other dictators in the region have, by the way, has used the issue to actually suppress and oppress their own people. And so for a long

Starting point is 03:27:11 time, there was this sentiment inside Iran that the Iranian government is sending its resources, sending its weapons, making Iran an isolated rogue state on behalf of the Palestinians, while we, the Iranian people, suffer. And so this created this people-to-people tension, where anti-Palestinian sentiment grew inside Iran and outside Iran, obviously, in these fascist movements. And then that feeds back into the Islamophobia, this idea that we have nothing in common with the Palestinians because they're a part of a religion that has also oppressed us or a part of an ethnic group that has oppressed us.

Starting point is 03:27:55 So it's its feedback loop. That's pretty horrible. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's good that we outlined kind of the different mechanisms there. And it's really, you know, it's so unfortunate because, like, you see polling of, like, Palestinians. And Palestinians were very much against what the Iranian regime did in Syria, for example.

Starting point is 03:28:14 Yeah. But like you said, there's a weaponization. of these different causes, just like the United States weaponizes the woman life freedom movement. Every regime uses things for its benefit. Just to add like a slightly hopeful note is that I actually think the experience of this war

Starting point is 03:28:32 has actually made more thoughtful Iranians see more of themselves now in the struggle of Palestinians. Interesting. Because they are actually seeing the hollowness and hypocrisy of what the U.S. and Israel say and do. And so now I think there's been a little bit of a shift back in the direction of solidarity with the Palestinians. Oh, that's excellent to hear. You know, we could talk about this all day. Like, there's such a disconnect between diaspora's and what happens on the ground. And this is not

Starting point is 03:29:07 specific to the Iranians. But I imagine, even if you lean that way, but you're in Iran being bombed by Israel, that's going to change your opinion in a way that, like, if you're in Los Angeles, the Israeli flag, it's a little bit different. Absolutely. There's kind of stakes there. Yeah, yeah. You're like, who's the one dropping the bombs? Exactly.

Starting point is 03:29:25 Yeah. Yeah. That is actually a very hopeful note before I turn it to a less hopeful one. So your research is on, as I said earlier, like kind of the think tank landscape in D.C. I remember, by the way, finding out about you back in the heydays of Twitter and being like, somebody's studying think tanks? Like, that's so cool. That's so clever.

Starting point is 03:29:54 Like, yes, we should be studying them in this way. And basically, like, your research is like the types of knowledge and the sources of knowledge that become hegemonic in these spaces. And then that, of course, impact American policy. So could you, I know this is kind of a hard ask, but could you tell us like some basic findings of your research the past couple of years? Yeah. So thanks for that setup because I actually have a book coming out on this. And it's called The Geopolitics of Expertise. And that's one of the central findings of the book is that this thing. tank landscape needs to be understood as a transnational space. That's one of the key findings in which a lot of actors and stakeholders, especially from the Middle East or Swana region, are invested in shaping the narrative from the inside out. And this is something that I think traditional models of understanding U.S. Empire, for example, failed in understanding, which is that, you know, when you have Arab Gulf states or Turkey or Morocco or Israel,

Starting point is 03:30:59 invested in ensuring the debate in Washington is shaped in a particular way that meets their interest, which is not always aligned with the U.S., they're going to throw millions of dollars into think tanks to essentially shape what I call the common sense on any number of issues. And so they are co-constructing the imperial imagination. And this is one of the key findings. And then when it comes to Iran in particular, they paradoxically want to ensure that Iran remains an unknowable enemy. That's the other key piece of the book,

Starting point is 03:31:37 which is that this constructed unknowability is key to ensuring that the U.S. maintains a posture of confrontation with Iran. And that means that you want to have this enemy, that you can never fully figure out. Or this enemy that's always unpredictable. This enemy that never follows the rules. Because if you had a predictable, rational enemy, you'd eventually have to make some type of peace with them

Starting point is 03:32:05 because that's actually the rational course of action. But when you have weapons manufacturers, when you have foreign governments, when you have all kinds of interests shaping the debate in Washington, and you don't actually do what's quote unquote the rational policy for U.S. national security interests as narrowly defined. So sorry if that was too rambly of an explanation of the book, but no, not at all. I mean, it's interesting because we come at it from different disciplines.

Starting point is 03:32:35 I'm a political scientist. And in the international relations landscape, there was, you know, well, first and foremost, like, American Empire is not really recognized in like American political science. But there was this argument that percolated. And like, I remember going to grad school and learning this is that like the United States is hegemonic and we can like study hierarchy. And there have been political scientists who have studied like global hierarchies. But it's a liberal hegemon and it can't be considered an empire because it does provide these voice opportunities for our subordinates essentially to come and shape policy. And so it's an interesting, not a flip on its head, but it's like kind of a. the nuancing of that argument here is like, yeah, they are here and they are shaping policy

Starting point is 03:33:22 and shaping kind of U.S. Empire, which I think poses some questions about like the agency of these actors, of course, but also like what is the broader project of U.S. Empire? Like, we don't need to think of it all the time as like kind of top down in a way. Exactly. There's lots of actors implicated. Or coherent or, you right? Right. Or, you know, even the Iran war is a clear example, right?

Starting point is 03:33:47 There's been winners and losers, as people in D.C. like to say, of this war. Oil companies are reaping the greatest profits of like the last decade because of this war, because of the shortages coming through the Strait of Hormuz. Weapons manufacturers are doing really well right now. Private equity and AI are doing well. but the damages that we are now seeing coming out of the production side across the Gulf, including inside Iran, is going to have very long-term detrimental effects for all of these same industries paradoxically. But in the short term, they're winning. Meanwhile,

Starting point is 03:34:27 everybody else is losing. Food prices are going up. Gas prices are going up. I have a friend who works in research with helium. There's no helium in the world right now. So if you want to go get an MRI, I, good law, because there's not much healing. Most of it comes out of this one facility in Qatar. And I was just reading an article about how Qatar has lost so many billions of dollars as a result of this war, as a result of the attacks on some of its facilities. And it's like Doha has a ghost town. And I used to live in Doha and for anybody who has been there or whatever.

Starting point is 03:34:58 I mean, Doha, like, at its best is a ghost town. Like often it is a ghost town if it's not like a busy season. So like what even does it mean that these places, I can't even fathomely. them what's going to happen long term, given the impact of this war. And that was with just 60 days of war. Right. Yeah. So we don't know.

Starting point is 03:35:15 It's like in such a short amount of time, the amount of damage it caused is unbelievable. Yeah. Like you said, it's good to start to disentangle who's benefiting in service of which actors here are we attacking Iran. Yeah. And this is like the most corrupt administration imaginable. It really is like kind of breathtaking the level of corruption. So yeah, hopefully, you know, historians and political scientists and political anthropologists will have years and years of research to study this moment.

Starting point is 03:35:47 All right. Well, is there anything else you think people should keep an eye on when it comes to the situation in Iran? Moving forward, I think we need to be much more critical about who is shaping the narrative on Iran moving forward. A lot of the figures who are now disavowing the war in these things. tanks and saying, you know, war was such a bad idea. Trump fumbled it and this was a terrible idea had essentially been, I say, hedging for this war for a long time, which is that by constructing Iran as this unknowable enemy, you can't negotiate with an enemy that you can never predict. You can never negotiate with an enemy that lies about everything. These are the narratives that these Iran experts have been advancing for years. And now we're expected to go and turn back to that same

Starting point is 03:36:36 group to get us out of this mess. And that's what I would urge all of the listeners is being much more critical about who is analyzing Iran in such a moment. Look at who they work for. Look at what types of analysis they've done in the past. How do they access Iran? How do they know what they know about Iran? It sometimes takes five extra minutes when you're reading a New York Times piece to just go through and highlight who they're quoting as experts, for example. And New York Times says all kinds of of problems, but pick whatever Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and just do five minutes of due diligence on who that piece is citing as an expert on Iran. And that's my key takeaway for people. Yeah, that's such a good takeaway. I mean, I think there's so many

Starting point is 03:37:25 aspects of our politics in which people are trying to convince us, the same people who got us into these messes are like all we have. Like Democratic Party operatives that like led us to Trump are the ones like now pretending they really dislike the genocide in Gaza and whatever. And it's the same thing. These Iranian experts, they're not even Iranian sometimes. It's just Iran experts claiming expertise. And it's like the way that you have shaped this discussion is why we're at this point.

Starting point is 03:37:53 So yeah, that's a very good takeaway. I appreciate that. Yeah. Thank you so much, Nagar. This has been really enriching. you so much, Dana. I will put all of the things we talked about in the show notes. Does your book have a publication date yet? No, but I signed the contract. So, good, good. So people be on the lookout. But it'll be with Stanford University Press. So, yeah. Excellent. Excellent. So I will

Starting point is 03:38:17 make sure to note that and flag that. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Of course. Media and women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world around 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.

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Starting point is 03:39:34 Hey, it's us, the Jonas Brothers, and guess what? We have some big news. What's the news, new news? we created our own podcast called Hey Jonas. We invented a podcast? Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to it. We're the first people to do podcasts.

Starting point is 03:39:47 Pretty, yeah, pretty wide range of podcasts throughout there. But this one's extra special. So how do we actually come up with a name Hey Jonas, guys? I honestly don't remember. I think it was on a call about what we should call it. Well, we were thinking I'm originally calling it one of the early names of our band before Jonas Brothers. This is how you guys remember it going down? Yes.

Starting point is 03:40:11 I have a very different memory of this. We were talking about a thing, a bit for the podcast, where people could call in and say, Hey, Jonas, and then I wrote down on my little notepad, Hey Jonas, and offered it up as a potential title for the podcast. But thanks for remembering that, guys. Listen to Hey Jonas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Starting point is 03:40:31 Just listen. We don't care where you hear it. Here's something that should not be as complicated as it is. getting a racist statue removed. And here's something that should be a whole lot easier than it is, getting a new one put up in its place. As long as there's a politics of race in America, there's going to be a politics of remembering the Civil War. To get to school, I had to go down Robert Lee Boulevard.

Starting point is 03:40:52 Get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway. If you're an historian and you leave out half of what the history is, you're not doing your job. I'm Akila Hughes, and Rebel Spirit Season 2 goes deep on both of those things. The fights, the politics, the people who won, and my personal campaign to add something to the Kentucky State House that's actually worth the wall space. We are more than our bodies.

Starting point is 03:41:16 We contain essence. We contain spirit. How do you represent that? They are just fueling a fire that is really catching. You'll see what I mean. Listen to Rebel Spirit Season 2 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to executive dysfunction. No.

Starting point is 03:41:42 happen here. No? Is that all right, Garrison? I thought we were, I thought it was pretty close. There's another like show or column called Executive Dysfunction now. Oh, is there? Yep. Sons of bitches. They stole it from us? That covers like legal issues relating to the Trump administration. So. Okay. Well, that brings us neatly into our first story. Who did it? This is a good happen here. Executive Disorder. Our weekly newscast covering what's happening, the White House, the crumbling world and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis today, joined by James Stout, Robert Evans, Mia Wong, and Sofa. Feelechterman. We're covering the week of May 27th to June 3rd. Let's talk about intellectual property lawsuits. Let's.

Starting point is 03:42:20 Right off the bat. Anyone who is in any capacity using ED or on notice, it is going to be us against the Viagra people. I'm talking today about Patagonia, the brand, suing Patagonia, the drag queen. God, dear, this is, Goddiam. Yeah, I've successfully walked you into my little world. This is a situation very reminiscent of people who remember the North Faces lawsuit against the South Butt. Yes.

Starting point is 03:42:49 I would argue it's actually kind of different. But, okay, I get what you're saying. The South butt lawsuit was funny. People aren't familiar. It's really funny. They were bound to arbitration. They arbitrated. They settled.

Starting point is 03:43:00 Then the guy turned around and launched the butt face. Like a few weeks later and they sued him again. That was a beautiful case of somebody trying to try. troll a company and also like trolling the concept of like intellectual property laws in like a really creative way which is which is different from what's happening yeah yes what is happening here is that win wiley whose drag persona is patty gonier right does a lot of fundraising for outdoors causes environmental causes public lands that kind of thing has attempted to trademark their use of patty gonia for clothing patagonia is suing wiley

Starting point is 03:43:38 to protect its trademark on its logo because some of the logos that Patagonia has used are very obviously, like they're mirrored Patagonia logos. Yeah, she's trying to get a trademark for her Patagonia logo, which is just Patagonia instead of Patagonia in the company logo for Patagonia. Yeah, I'm not sure she tried to trademark

Starting point is 03:43:59 like the, it's the Sarah Fitzroy, right? Like it's a mountain escape, or she just tried to trademark Patagonia. It looked like it, well, I'll double check that right now. Yeah, because I think, what she has offered as a settlement right now is to stop using the logo, but continue using that name. Yeah, the second is whether Patagonia should be entitled to trademark registration. And at least

Starting point is 03:44:17 they have a picture in the trademark application of her Patagonia logo. Yeah, yeah. And they've claimed it's confusingly similar. Yeah. And you made a good point when we were talking about this earlier, James, that I hadn't thought of, because you are a better mind than I am in this way, which is that because my initial thinking on this was like when I saw that she was trying to trademark just like her version of the Patagonia logo, I was like, well, you just took their logo and put your name on. Like, that is fucked up. But you pointed out, well, Patagonia's logo includes this, like, actual mountain range that she includes.

Starting point is 03:44:48 And Patagonia doesn't really have the right to trademark the silhouette of a mountain range. It is a little more nuanced than I thought initially. Yeah. Yeah, there are a couple of things at stake here to people perhaps don't understand. One, like... I'm in a moral level, not a legal one, folks. But, yeah, yeah. Yeah, morally, I think we should be asking the question, is it okay for a company that

Starting point is 03:45:05 grossest $1.4 billion a year to own the rights to a skyline. Like, I think we should be asking that. I think also people maybe should look a little bit deeper into, I've written about this a bunch and a bunch of outlets, but like Patagonia has millions of dollars of military contracts that they don't like to talk about and they did through a different company called Lost Arrow. And like people just need to stop seeing a giant company like this is woke. That's like the companies ain't going to save us.

Starting point is 03:45:31 The sustainable shorts aren't going to save us. buying a fancy fleece is not the way that you're going to make the better world that you want to live in. That's my take. Yeah. I feel like Patty was kind of poking the bear here. Yeah, 100% like in a massive way, really?

Starting point is 03:45:47 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, no. Clearly she knew what she was going for here. Yeah. And Patagoni clearly doesn't want to be fighting this lawsuit. Where are you seeing this stuff? Is this like a blue sky news story?

Starting point is 03:45:58 Where are you seeing this? No, this is like a big, this is like, I came into it. I saw it first on Reddit, but it's also just been pushed into my newsfeed. I've had four or five different article. It's a big story right now, unfortunately.

Starting point is 03:46:11 I followed her, just like generally been aware of her for probably six or seven years. Six, seven. The New York Times has a feature that's just on this right now. It's a sizable tale. Interesting. I did note that most of her merch is sold out, so the stricent effect, it's in full force here. Yeah, yeah. Like, if you wanted to find a way to sell as many patagonia stickers, it looked like the

Starting point is 03:46:35 Patagonia logo as possible. You would sue her. This is the way to do it. Yeah. They're suing her for $1 plus legal fees. People don't seem to have grasped, but that doesn't mean that all that is at stake is a buck here. The fees will be very substantial. Yes. Although the fees will be substantial. That said, this is clearly a fight Patty wanted to have. Yeah. So, like, I am not in a situation where, like, I feel particularly angry or disturbed about this lawsuit. Like, this is something that any company would have done some version of this in response. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:47:07 It's not good that Patagonia's doing this. It's just what any corporation would do that has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders. And that shouldn't change your opinion of Patagonia from what it was previously, but your opinion of Patagonia should never have been that it's like an altruistic entity, right? Yeah, 2% of its shares are held by its purpose trust, which are all the voting shares, and 98% of its shares are held by the Holdfast Collective, which is a 501C4. four. So, like, I think people see that as like, you know, they'd like to say that Earth is their

Starting point is 03:47:39 only shareholder. But like the purpose trust is, as you say, Robert duty bound to make a profit to give to the C4. This is not the same thing as like activism. It's different. It's a company. It's a company that has to make profit. Like you said, Robert, and I think people need to grasp that. Yes. And if they, I mean, literally if they were not, if they were to not fight what she's doing here, like this could cause serious issues for them. Yeah. Yeah. I think someone, tried to put their logo on a gun. I couldn't find reporting on this, but a couple of people have mentioned it to me. And obviously, they'd sued about that.

Starting point is 03:48:12 And they'd, you know, so if they hadn't done this one, they couldn't do that. Right. And it's, again, this should not, I'm not, you shouldn't be like, well, Patagonia's in the right. And, but also you shouldn't be like, wow, I've completely changed my opinion about this company, you know. Yeah, yeah. It's just they're doing what they do.

Starting point is 03:48:28 Yeah. I think the underlying structural thing here, and something we've talked about on this show at some length is just the underlying violence of the intellectual property system, like, irrespective of this case. This is a kind of silly case of it, but, you know, like, there are a lot of people in the world who are dead right now because a bunch of corporations get to hold, like, patents on vaccines, for example. Yeah. Or insulin. This has always been an extremely violent regime that is enforced by quite, like, one of the most powerful international bodies that has ever existed. And, And, yeah, if you want to hear more about this,

Starting point is 03:49:06 a friend of the show, Vicky Osterwild, released a book called The Extended Universe about how Disney pioneered a whole bunch of this that, yeah, you should read about because the entire system is just pure violence and always has been. Yeah, we have some episodes from years ago that I made about drug IP and evergreening as well.

Starting point is 03:49:26 Yep. That's a very good point, mea. Moving on, we learned this week that the F-15E pilot, who was shot down over Iran in April, had been shot down the week before over Q8. What? Horrible. Horrible week.

Starting point is 03:49:42 You think you've had a bad week at work. This person is joining just the list of all timers. Like that guy who got nuked at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There's that guy who got sunk on four consecutive ships. Is there such thing as a reverse ace? Like if this guy gets shot down three more times, is he like an anti-aase? If you get shut down three months, he ain't going to be able to reach the controls of the plane.

Starting point is 03:50:05 Like, he's already compressed his spine so much. Yeah, I'm surprised. I didn't think they would let them, I didn't think period after getting shot down and ejecting, you would be allowed to fly a plane at all, like, that quickly. I was not aware that it was supposed to call. My understanding is you're not normally supposed to. Like, I don't think this is how normally things would be done, which kind of suggests that there was, like, they didn't have enough pilots.

Starting point is 03:50:32 Yeah, right. It's kind of remarkable that they were able to get him another F-15 quickly, I guess. But yeah, yeah, he probably not flying any more planes for a while. I would imagine not. Yeah, I mean, who knows? Maybe the F-15s are free, I found, etc. Yeah, it sounds like he's just feeding F-15 to ante-airdrawn. He must, yeah, the desert god to demand an F-15 sacrifice every six days.

Starting point is 03:50:57 Marco Rubio in the house has claimed that Afrikaners, we spoke quite this far as he, right, raising the cap to admit Afrikanas as refugees. Afrikanis should be admitted and others not because they, quote, have a high likelihood of assimilation. We have gauged that there is real interest from a unique subset who would be interested to coming in the United States and who we assess have a high likelihood of rapid assimilation and success in our society, and hence this program was created.

Starting point is 03:51:25 Now, that's not a program that's going to exist in perpetuity. It's a program that's designed to the fact that we are seeing the demand. We are seeing applications from South Africa of people willing to enter the United States, and we think this is a group of potential refugees. So our Afghan allies are refugees. They have been vetted, 1,100 versus this new 17,000. But it's more than just vetting. We're also trying to determine, again, does the immigration policy of the United States,

Starting point is 03:51:52 like everything we do, has to be geared by the national interest. And it is in our national interest if we are allowing people in our country be people that can quickly assimilate into society and be successful. Why can't they assimilate into society? A background check is not to their centers in my district and queen. They have assimilated and contribute and pay taxes. Yeah, but we've already assumed a lot of Afghan refugees. As you said, you have them in your district.

Starting point is 03:52:18 We've already assumed a large number in the past. The point is that the general policy has been to limit the entry of refugees from all over the world and then to create the special track because of a unique circumstance in the short term of a high demand from a number of immigrants that we have determined if they passed the vetting and the checking, we very quickly assimilating contribute to our society. I think it's really interesting. It's one of the more clear elucidations of the way they see immigration that we've had.

Starting point is 03:52:46 Like he said, it's not about vetting. It's not about background checks. It's specifically about people who can quote-unquote assimilate. I wonder what the economic strata of the Afrikaners getting reference. status are. I mean, in terms of the way the Rubio's looking at it, their economic strata is white,

Starting point is 03:53:04 which... Yeah. Well, I wonder what their actual economic strata is, that is an interesting aspect. Like, South Africa is a place where that maps on very, very cleanly.

Starting point is 03:53:13 Yes, that is... Right, like, that's what I'm saying, right? Like, it's like... That's what I'm saying. Yeah, like, definitely a lot. Yeah, and I think it's just having the means to apply for this. Yeah, I mean, that's...

Starting point is 03:53:23 Clearly, like, Rubio's saying, like, he's doing this because there is a demand. Let me tell you there is a demand all over the world. Like I have seen demand to live in the United States in every continent on the planet, apart from the ones that are covered in ice. This is as clear as you're going to get to them saying these folks are white, they're coming to America and we're going to lock out the folks who are not. I thought it was very interesting to see him go right up to that line. Next, I have Medicaid work requirements, work, study of volunteering requirements of

Starting point is 03:53:54 80 hours a month, will be imposed by the first of first. January for the 40 states who expanded the program under the Affordable Care Act. This is, according to a notice published today in the Federal Register, today being Wednesday. This will impact millions of Americans. And the speed at which this is being done will also be very hard for state bureaucracies to keep up with. We have less than six months for a massive change. and the requirement for states to monitor this, it's going to be very difficult for them to retain the stability

Starting point is 03:54:31 and pivot to this, and that's going to impact people whether or not they are working. Yeah. Which sucks. This is something that particularly impacts trans people because they're a shit ton of trans people on Medicaid. And a lot of those people are also disabled, and that's just been an absolute nightmare for them.

Starting point is 03:54:52 if you are in a position where you can hire someone for, I think the work, what's the word, is like 30 hours a week, I think is the requirement. 80 hours a month. Yeah, 80 hours a month. It's 20-ish a week. Yeah. Like, if you're in a position to just hire someone for that, you should do it because that's the difference between these people, like having food and not having food. Yeah, this is a potential. This will kill people.

Starting point is 03:55:19 Yeah. Like just the fuck-ups in the bureaucracy, even if people are able to find the work or volunteer or study or whatever. Yeah. The delays that that will cause will kill people. This is also a thing, by the way, that some unions have historically done. IWW has done this, which is like getting people positions to be able to do volunteering. Yeah. And if that's a thing you can do, you should do this because this is a unfathomable humanitarian crisis.

Starting point is 03:55:45 Yeah. For a bunch of the most vulnerable people in the U.S. and yeah it's real bad yeah it's not good at all I think that is a good point me that like if you're in a place to help people coordinate their volunteering

Starting point is 03:55:58 and document that like that's a good thing to start thinking about garrison you got any small things a few more small things Trump signed an executive order to expand AI cyber security capabilities and protections

Starting point is 03:56:12 and last Friday Tulsi Gabbard resigned as director of national intelligence citing her husband's recent cancer diagnosis. Trump has selected Bill Pulte, head of the federal housing finance agency, to serve as acting director of national intelligence. Pulte is a Trump loyalist with no intelligence background. And even Republican senators don't seem too keen on this choice.

Starting point is 03:56:36 Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters, quote, Well, we don't need a weaponized DNI. We need professionals there. If he's somebody, they wanted that position permanently. He's got, as you know, a lengthy road ahead of him. Let's catch up with the war in Iran. Iran this week hit a commercial vessel with an anti-ship cruise missile in the Persian Gulf, as well as firing at U.S. facilities and hitting the international airport in Kuwait,

Starting point is 03:57:05 or they've killed at least. One person there, this comes as talks are continuing to fail to reach a resolution, at least in part because Israel refuses to stop attacking Lebanon and committing war crimes. Axios is reporting that Trump said in a call to Netanyahu, quote, you're fucking crazy, you'd be in prison if it weren't for me. I'm saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.

Starting point is 03:57:31 Sure. In recent days, the IDF has explicitly threatened Beirut and further expanded its ground campaign. Again, right, like this war is now becoming very much a regional thing, has been a regional thing since it started, but like the peace deal is also a regional. thing and the fact that Israel refuses to do anything other than exactly what it wants, which seems to be killing more and more people in its neighboring countries, means that it's going to be very hard for this water come to an end, which is going to have long-term economic consequences for the whole world.

Starting point is 03:58:05 NBC has also reported, talking of the whole world, that it was a Chinese manpads that shot down the F-15E. That's for the second time in April, that such equipment, along with long-range radar, was possibly supplied to Iran in the early days of the conflict by China. Obviously, this makes any kind of detent with the US and China more difficult, right? It's not clear if the particular actual, man-pads, man-portable air defence system, people aren't familiar, if the particular service to MSR used her to arrive recently or had been in stockpiles for some time. but it appears that China at least right before or early on in the conflict was perhaps supplying some air defences to Iran.

Starting point is 03:58:53 Maybe this can explain just a little bit about how the bombing campaign has been relatively unsuccessful in its objectives in many ways. Let's go on a break and then we could talk about the California elections and the Supreme Court. Okay. Elections in California. Why is California like that? What is going on over there? That's because I left. It's my fault. Yeah, oh, grieving, Sophie.

Starting point is 03:59:31 That was the last thing holding it together there. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Let's start with the L.A. mayoral race. I want to talk about it. It's my duty to talk about this. I would like to talk a bit about Spencer Pratt. Who may, may be advancing. Who may be advancing.

Starting point is 03:59:51 That's what I'm saying at time of recording, which is Wednesday, June 3rd, around. 3.30 p.m. Pacific time. Pratt is currently in second place with 30% of the votes. Bass is at 35% and has already been guaranteed to move forward. And Nithia Raman is in third with 22%. And like I said, there's 60% of the votes counted. So why the fuck is Spencer Pratt a former reality TV cast member? I'm not even going to give him star running for mayor. Pratt grew up in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood and live there until the fires happened. And he and his parents' houses were unfortunately burned down.

Starting point is 04:00:31 And he started making videos on TikTok, was getting a lot of attention for it, and decided that it was his destiny to, it was his, according to his website, his mission to run for mayor. His own campaign website, Pratt is a media entrepreneur, questionable, outspoken advocate, depends on who you're talking about. and an emerging political leader, he does have a political science degree from USC. I will say that. But he does claim to be Karen Bass's worst nightmare.

Starting point is 04:01:03 Now, if you're not a millennial who had television in the late 2000s, you're probably unaware of how unhinged Spencer Pratt is. Here are some highlights. Listeners, we apologize for what Sophie's about to make you experience. This is a lot of audio, Sophie. We need all of it. Oh, God. Oh, no.

Starting point is 04:01:23 Just do it, Garrison. Are you getting copyrighted? Just do it. Just do it. For me, that was the best. Like, I was proud of myself for not doing what I wanted to do to you. Because what I wanted to do and say to you, dear, who! I didn't because I was praying, praying like I do every day to not say the things that I want to say to you, to your mom.

Starting point is 04:01:43 No, I know. I'm not. Do you see how I'm not saying them? Yeah. I'm very proud of myself. Like your head's about to explode. So I'm sorry if I disrespected you, but I'm going to. very emotional these days. Very. Very. So I say things that I feel. I was the one that wanted to

Starting point is 04:02:00 kill anybody that would ever talk like that about my sister. And I still would. But that goes for my mom, too. And as a family, that's how we all should be. Well, I didn't say anything negative about your mom. Your mom is just the vagina that made Heidi come onto earth. Your mom is not Jesus or God or the creator. So why can't I say that? So why can't I say that? Why can't I say that? No, it's not. It's my opinion. It's my opinion. It's my opinion. Your mother and father. That's one that tends to me of it.

Starting point is 04:02:26 Preacher. This isn't Bible study. You has no one's preaching all the time. No one's preaching. No one's preaching here. This is life. Oh, man. You're not her sister.

Starting point is 04:02:37 You're not her friend. You're a liar. I'm going to walk away from these lies because she's going to sit here and keep lying to you. You're the biggest poser in this town. You know what you're going to burn for it. Stop it. I know. Spencer, that's so out of line.

Starting point is 04:02:49 No, I know. She's a, go back to your real estate job, you fucking liar. Yeah, that was Spencer talking to his sister-in-law about his mother-in-law. But all this is fake, this is all acting. Like this, this, I don't, this, this doesn't move me at all. Half of this is acting. Half of this is not acting. Yeah, I mean, yes, that is, that is.

Starting point is 04:03:09 Here he is talking to his own sister. Okay. Oh, no. We've already cataloged this shit. I'm going to leave, but I didn't get to say hi. Are you guys? Good. How are you?

Starting point is 04:03:25 Excellent. How are you? What are you crying about, Stephanie? What the fuck are you crying about it? That's why you're not in my life, you crazy bitch, because you come do barbecues and just start crying. I was just enjoying myself with my wife and I get crying sisters in front of me.

Starting point is 04:03:43 She just wanted to say hi. But that gets us crying away. What the fuck do I need to do to you? What's your alma, huh? He just didn't ignore it. What just happened? We're having a little conversation and then all of a sudden they got people,

Starting point is 04:04:03 storming out of here. I can't even talk right now. You know what's your brother, but he's off his rocker. I don't know what's on with it. Here I'm talking about my little sister who's not relevant to my life. Oh, God. Oh, no. Okay.

Starting point is 04:04:18 I like to fade out. And just to say, just to say, she has told people not to vote for her brother in modern times. Just to say. That's shocking. Shacking stuff. He seems like he's an even-tempered guy. Yeah, one less. clip just because I'll, I never want to talk about him again.

Starting point is 04:04:35 So I'm going to get all out. So I am the managing executive producer of this podcast. Let me have this. Thank you. You're on this club. Dude, relax, bro. I hate that bitch. Excuse my French.

Starting point is 04:04:51 Hey, you're crazy. You're fucking being a weirdo, bro. You just yelled at me very gnarly. I so loud as somebody's yelled in my face for three years. I'm over here. I don't want to hear anything else. You're off in my face, huh? Walked away from me before.

Starting point is 04:05:04 we have a problem. Walk them away. God. People don't know how dangerous I am. Like I just really had to like hold myself smashing his head off. You know, like, this is like. All right.

Starting point is 04:05:25 So this is like if like clavicular run, like ran for office in like 10 years. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. 20 years. Yeah. And, and, you know, it's a reality TV show. there's parts of it that are scripted,

Starting point is 04:05:39 there's parts of it that are enhanced, there's parts of it. But you can't fake that fucking vein popping out of his head. A lot of it's scripted, but you don't get cast, so to speak, to be that kind of character if you're not already a giant asshole, right? I mean, yeah, it's in some ways less explicitly scripted

Starting point is 04:05:57 than like WWE, but you fall into certain roles because that's what you are getting paid to. Like that is your job is contingent on performing this kind of real, not real thing. And I honestly, you know, like, the sort of like, like, IRL streamer thing is a very similar version of that for the contemporary age.

Starting point is 04:06:15 And so it really, there was, there was one specific, like, like, line there that really reminded me of, like, one of, one of, uh, clavoculars, like, on camera meltdowns. And like, oh, this is really just if, what if you had a guy like that just run for office for, like, the mayor of whatever city in, like, 20 years, yeah. Yeah, well, I want to talk a little bit about his campaign style. Um, he shared this, this video on X the Everything app. And it got millions and millions of views with people saying it's the best campaign video of all time. And so we're going to play it for you now.

Starting point is 04:06:45 Oh, no. This is more of him than I've ever seen. This is the Batman one. Mm-hmm. I haven't seen this. He was there. He did not make this video. He did not make this.

Starting point is 04:06:55 He shared it. And he's big on the AI sharing video trend. Yes. His website is filled with it. Yeah. There have been a lot of AI videos in the L.A. race this time. There's been a lot of these LA election like Batman videos. Yes. Let's, I guess let's watch this one. Sure. Until we get bored with it. Yeah.

Starting point is 04:07:21 Wait, hang on. Just break that down. Yeah. I think this makes sense to watch a little bit than pause and talk. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we have to explain. First, we start with the entire Hollywood sign of flame. And the next thing you see is these these goons dressed in all black tactical gear with white text that says DSA, which is one of the best things I've ever seen. That was one of my favorite part about this video. Yes, the paramilitary DSA forces in Los Angeles. And then it goes into the sort of Dark Night Rises like courtroom. Karen Bass in the middle.

Starting point is 04:08:00 Except Karen Bass has Joker makeup on. And Kamala Harris is, I think, drinking alcohol on one side and that's new so. She's straight from the bottle, too. I'll say, too, I think there's a little bit of district fucking... Hunger Games? Hunger Games. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Hunger Games capital in that design, too.

Starting point is 04:08:17 Ken Am? Yeah, and Gavin Newsom's in, like, you know, like, yeah. Like, aristocratic garb. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, that's Gavin. Okay. Please, I'm begging you. There's homeless drug addicts in front of the schools.

Starting point is 04:08:33 My children aren't safe. Look, if you were a transgender, gender migrant, I could get you a free pussy. All right. Wow. Wow. I know. Holy shit.

Starting point is 04:08:48 Holy shit. I'm fascinated by what we've got here. James, have you not seen this before? Absolutely not. No, I haven't seen this either. I shared this video in our work chat like a month and a half. Yeah. Oh, wait.

Starting point is 04:09:00 No, shit, I have seen it. Oh, God. I didn't watch it. I've got to control my exposure to this shit. It's made me very angry. So we now have a much. Marionette of like a Latina. Nithia ramen.

Starting point is 04:09:11 Okay. God. Yeah, that makes sense. But no, there's like DSA people. DSA thugs and tactile gear like pushing people around. Yeah, they throw the woman on the ground who's complaining about, yeah, the homeless drug addicts. Yeah.

Starting point is 04:09:23 I think we're good. It's all that kind of stuff. Like it's, yeah. Whatever. There's like a fake Batman scene. They ask for Spencer. Spencer in a fake Batman costume. Blah, blah, blah.

Starting point is 04:09:33 Yeah. Yeah. Spencer Pratt is Batman. That's what that's Spencer Pratt's Batman. Yes, you know, that's the kind of stuff they're sharing. And, you know, one of the biggest things he's run on is that his house was burned down and he was, didn't have a place to live. And he claimed that he was living in a trailer on the property where his house used to be. And then it turned out that he was actually not staying in that trailer, but he was staying at the Hotel Bel Air, which is one of the nicest hotels in Los Angeles. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I bet. And in response to that, he made this video. Now this is a story all about how my life got to turn upside down And I have to take a minute to run for a man

Starting point is 04:10:15 Wow Oh God I don't want to get me get no No no no no no no You get the picture though No millions of views millions of views and yeah and this like weird rogue No no qualification political candidate thing is working. People are like, we need a change. And I'm pretty of BBC in terms of fundraising

Starting point is 04:10:43 during the race. Pratt has blown away the other two. He raised $2.7 million between April 19th and May 16th. That's nearly 10 times what Bass, a longtime politician, raised in the same period, and approximately seven times what Nithio Rahman raised. I mean, no one likes Bass, right? It's the other thing, right? The Democrats have, like, doubled down on doing exactly the same shit they've been doing for decades across California. Yeah, it's this like factless moderate liberalism. Yeah, like castoral lips will be how I describe the Democrats. Yeah. And just to say like Nithia Ram did enter the race late and she is far, far left from Karen Bass. So we're seeing that. But the thing that's really interesting to me about this is there's 9.69 million people in LA County. And, you know,

Starting point is 04:11:33 I'm comparing it to what I think will probably be about what it'll be for. 2026, but in 2022, you know, Karen Bass got 278,000 votes. Rick Caruso only got 232,000 votes, and Kevin DeLeon only got 50,000 votes. Out of 9.69 million people, that's the amount of people that actually voted in the primary in 2022. And it's, and it's looking to be very similar for 26. Yeah, maybe even a little bit lower. I mean, I agree. I think it might be a little bit lower. That only has 150,000 votes, but he's in second place right now. But he's in second place. Yeah. Again, this is interesting because you're seeing higher than, and a lot of places, higher than average turnout. And I think part of why is just because most people voting know that like with both the California mayor and gubernatorial elections, the likeliest outcome is like someone who isn't the worst possible choice, but isn't going to like make things better.

Starting point is 04:12:28 Like LA is not going to have a good mayor. Most people are fairly confident of that. And so there's just not a lot of there's not, there's not, I don't think people are very motivated because they feel like. Like, what the fuck is the point of caring about this? You know? And I'm not saying that's the right way to look at it. I'm just saying that that's what I think is part of what's going on here. Yeah.

Starting point is 04:12:46 Like, I know, like, just from the discourse around San Diego, like, people, they're tired of being shamed into vote for like some mediocre-ass candidate who will just give all their money to the cops, like the last five mayors have done. Yeah. We're going to keep seeing these kind of candidates. It's going to become a regular thing. We even have, you know, Jersey Shorestar. Mike, the situation, Sorrentino, saying he's thinking about running for New Jersey governor.

Starting point is 04:13:11 I hate this trend. This trend sucks. And in the words of Lauren Conrad, he's a sucky person. He's a sucky person. I hate Spencer. I've never going to like Spencer. Please don't make him your mayor, Los Angeles. Do better.

Starting point is 04:13:23 He's awful. He's horrific. He hates unhoused people. Terrible person. No. Bad. Shame. I'm done.

Starting point is 04:13:32 I hope to never have to talk about this person ever again. Yeah. In case people don't know, the two top winners of the L.A. mayoral primary advance to a runoff. So Bass is going to be there. She is in the lead. And right now it is between Pratt and Raman. Pratt's lead in second place has been sliding as more and more votes come in.

Starting point is 04:13:54 But as of Wednesday afternoon, he's still in second. As for governor, Steve Hilton Republican is in the number one spot with one. 1.3, almost 1.4 million votes as of Wednesday afternoon. Sarah is in number two with 25% of the vote. Tom Steyer is in number three with almost 20% of the vote. And this is about 55% of the vote in. Sarah is a former Biden cabinet member, Health and Human Services, Secretary. Yeah. So more of kind of moderate, liberal, Steyer, the more progressive candidate, but it seems because he is a billionaire that did in some ways affect enthusiasm to vote for him on the Democratic side. Yeah.

Starting point is 04:14:41 There's another Republican candidate who's in fourth place with over half a million votes. But again, the amount of votes that are actually happening compared to the amount of people is insane. It's so low. Yeah, it's really bad. There's a massive field of candidates, but no one really captured the imagination of people here. No one with enthusiastic for this. No.

Starting point is 04:15:05 I guess I can cover a couple of small San Diego things quickly. San Diego Measure A. Measure A was a tax on second homes defined as unoccupied for the majority of the year. He did a tear. Yeah, it looks like it's going down. It's sweeping the nation. Oh, it's not super. Sorry.

Starting point is 04:15:21 It's not super. Yeah, it's not super. Yeah, unfortunately not. Like, it's, I mean, there is nothing that unites San Diego's more than hating tourists. But I think you have this interesting alliance of like boomer, homeowners, thinking this will mess with their property prices. and generally not wanting to pay taxes. Yeah.

Starting point is 04:15:37 And people who understand that any money we give to our city is just going to go directly to the cops. Where do you get that idea from that that is a sentiment among the people who voted for this? Like is this like demonstrated anywhere? Yeah. Like if you go, if you look on social media, right? Like, let's say San Diego next door, Reddit, etc. Right. And then from meetings, like, we've had discussions within unions.

Starting point is 04:16:00 I'm part of like. So if you look at what our city is doing right now, it's slashing the arts budget. It's slashing the park's budget. Yeah. It's slashing everything apart from the police budget, which is continuing to increase, right? Most notably in San Diego, they have started to try and charge for parking at the park and at the beach and on major thoroughfares, which, like, charging San Diego's to go to the beach is the most radicalizing thing that any politician could ever do. It's incredibly stupid as a revenue-generating measure. Like, people have vandalized parking machines in very bushy neighborhoods.

Starting point is 04:16:35 because this is just so offensive to people. And I think there's like just a growing disgust with our mayor. And then like the idea that giving them any more money would result in better outcomes for people. Just isn't going to fly anymore, if that makes sense. Like they've done all these revenue generating measures. It's like a loss in faith that any revenue will actually just go towards improving their standard of living. Our city spent, I think, $100 million on a building filled with asbestos, is worth less money than the land would be if the building wasn't on it.

Starting point is 04:17:09 And from years and years tried to kind of play political football with the fact that they bought a cancer tower. Like, yeah, there's a reason that San Diego is sometimes referred to as Enron by the sea. And I think folks are kind of having enough of it. They're reissuing under the perfect sun for folks who want to read more about San Diego politics. This sort of like alliance between like small capital, you know, people who don't want to pay for a tax on the second home, that alliance with people who've like lost faith in city services, right? Who are going to oppose funding because they don't think it's actually like worthwhile. That's an interesting coalition of the modern moment.

Starting point is 04:17:47 Right. Yeah, yeah. And it's definitely like a creation of, like specifically in California, right? This idea that we don't get to choose, basically we're going to get a Democrat and that Democrat will just do whatever they want. It's made that position very appealing to people, I guess. Moving on from California, I do want to mention just briefly that Sam Forstack. one, the Democrat primary from Montana's House District.

Starting point is 04:18:08 This is really interesting. He's a progressive union organizer. He used to be a smoke jumper, forest service firefighter. He is one of those folks who was like, I guess his entry to national politics came from Doge. Doge was cutting all these guys like GS2 people, right? People at the Forest Service, people at these big public lands management agencies who are making, barely making a living.

Starting point is 04:18:33 And who have struggled for a long time. time in places like Bozeman, right, where second homeowners have driven out the price significantly. That sort of pathway to progressive politics is one that's very interesting to me and one I want to do a lot more reporting on. I thought it was a positive sign to see

Starting point is 04:18:48 him winning that primary. Speaking of elections, before we go on break, I do want to talk about the Supreme Court, following up on a story from last week. Last week, our final segment on the show was on the five-year battle in Alabama over two different house maps or

Starting point is 04:19:04 technically three, but the Republican ones were very similar. It was about these Republican-drawn maps that have only one black majority district and a court-ordered map that has two. Following the Supreme Court's weakening of Section 2, the Voting Rights Act earlier this year, late last month, a federal district court ruled that the GOP-drawn map in Alabama intentionally discriminated based on race and diluted the voting power of black Alabamas. So they placed an injunction on that map and ordered the state to use the court-approved map that was already in use in previous elections for the upcoming primaries. This ruling was appealed to the Supreme Court, who on Tuesday night overruled a district court issuing a four-page unsigned shadow docket ruling, allowing Alabama to use

Starting point is 04:19:50 the GOP map that eliminates a black majority or a black opportunity district. Supreme Court said that the state is likely to succeed on the merits of its claims. Quote, at this preliminary stage, the state has shown that it is entitled to interim relief from the district court's injunction, unquote. So this is the first time the Supreme Court has evaluated another court's interpretation of their Louisiana ruling, and in this case, the Supreme Court is saying the district court got it wrong. In the updated rules for Section 2 as a part of the Louisiana ruling, in order to succeed in arguing a Section 2 violation. Plaintiffs have to submit an alternative map that must, quote, meet all the state's legitimate districting objectives just as well as the state's

Starting point is 04:20:39 own map, including, quote unquote, the state's specified political goals and any other goal not prohibited by the Constitution. Yeah. So the alternative map that plaintiffs need to submit when challenging about based on Section 2, has to have the same like partisan goals represented is what these updated rules in Louisiana ruling stead. And the Supreme Court said that this was not followed by the district court's ruling. Section 2 challenges must also, quote,

Starting point is 04:21:11 provide an analysis that controls for party affiliation and, quote, show that voters engage in racial block voting that cannot be explained by partisan affiliation, unquote. So basically, the Supreme Court claimed that the district court ordered map fails to do all this by not maintaining the state's, quote, constitutionally permissible community of interest on the Gulf Coast by cutting into a section of the Gulf Coast in the Black Opportunity District, also failing to avoid contests between incumbents. The Supreme Court said that the district court's ruling, quote unquote, departed from the updated standards set in the Louisiana ruling.

Starting point is 04:21:53 quote, as to intentional vote dilution, the district court did not heed the presumption of legislative good faith because it interpreted the state's legal disagreement with the court's earlier remedial order as proof of discriminatory animus, unquote. Scudus is basically saying that just because it was definitively demonstrated to Alabama Republicans that their map had a discriminatory effect, and then they pass it anyway, that itself does not qualify as intent. So showing quote unquote intent is effectively impossible, like at this point, because maps can be sliced up like crazy and they can just do that based on party. And this is what the Supreme Court is saying. Quote, the district court

Starting point is 04:22:42 also failed to follow our instructions that the mere fact that voters of different races vote for different parties is not relevant to proving racially polarized voting patterns, unquote. This was specifically the thing I was most curious about, is if this idea that the district court wrote, if this idea that showing someone that their map is doing discrimination, if you show someone that and then they pass it anyway, does that prove that that that person then had intent because they knew it was discriminatory? And the Supreme Court is saying, no, that does not. That does not actually show intent.

Starting point is 04:23:18 That is the main way that the Supreme Court has overruled the district court ruling. They also argue that the district court meddled in the state election too close to the primary, even though it's actually the Supreme Court ruling that is greenlighting with this redistricting midway through the primary process. But that's kind of added on at the very end of the four page on signed shadow docket ruling. The macro level implication of this is that voting rights act is unenforceable. like the parts of the Voting Rights Act that are supposed to protect from literally this specific thing

Starting point is 04:23:53 this specific thing of intentionally diluting black people's votes so that they can't elect candidates was the Jim Crow practice that this part of the Voting Rights Act was specifically designed to do and you can't do that anymore. It is just the Supreme Court

Starting point is 04:24:08 has decided that this part of the Voting Rights Act doesn't exist. Yeah. And they've decided this because they want to They want to do racist gerrymandering so Republicans can win elections. And that's, I don't know. I mean, like, arguably the death of multiracial, like any semblance of multiracial democracy in the U.S., which is not great.

Starting point is 04:24:28 Yeah. I don't know. It's really, really bad. Yeah. I mean, it's what they've been working for for decades, right? It's what Yarvins always talking about, right? It's repealing the 20th century, you know? Like, that has been the goal for a very long time.

Starting point is 04:24:43 and they see this as one of the most important steps towards doing that. Yeah, this is pretty devastating. I think there is a way to do, I think, some more in-depth analysis, like, on this topic. That might have to be in the future. Yeah, I mean, I did a full episode on this, like, a couple weeks ago. I mean, specifically the way that the interpretation in the Shadow Docket ruling, how it clarifies certain things, like, you know, just because statistically different races may vote for different parties, that does not actually prove racially polarized voting pattern.

Starting point is 04:25:16 There's certain things here that we can do a lot more analysis of. And like, in terms of proving intent, a lot of states don't even need to do like mustache twirling. I'm going to look at race maps and draw it based on race maps. They can just draw based on party affiliation. And that is going to get the party, the actual effect, right? Because these maps are passed by the party that's in control of the state legislature. and they want to maintain power with their party.

Starting point is 04:25:44 So that's going to be the most effective way to do that. And if they just do that, then there leaves very little ground for these maps to be challenged on any sorts of racial grounds, even if there is racial discrimination as an effect, right? And this was the biggest change of the Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana. It was Alito, right, who technically wrote that one? Yeah, yeah. But being like, like, we are in a different place. We are in a different social place now than when the Voting Rights Act was passed.

Starting point is 04:26:10 and so therefore we are going to update these rules accordingly. Even though literally, you know, three years ago, the Supreme Court was ruling in the opposite way in Alabama, in a very similar situation. The change in those few years is very stark. And this is all goes downstream from the ruling in 2019 that specifically allows partisan gerrymandering because there's no law in the United States disallowing that.

Starting point is 04:26:35 So like the Supreme Court is like, we cannot make a new law by saying this isn't allowed because there's just no law. the books. So if the legislation wants to pass laws against that, then they can. But we cannot disallowed partisan gerrymandering in the courts effectively because there's no law preventing it. Yeah. And it's worth keeping in mind that the specific standard in the Voting Rights Act literally says effects, which is specifically an effects-based test and not an interpretation or like not a like proving intent test. And the Supreme Court was just like, no, fuck you. So that that's sort of

Starting point is 04:27:08 just where we are now legally is that they're just making up what they think the test should be and making everyone else follow that. Yeah, I mean, three justices did dissent in this recent ruling, Sertimer Kagan and Jackson. They wrote, quote, before the court are two paths. Down one lies an orderly election held under a tried and tested congressional map that protects Black Alabama's right to vote, and with which all voters, election officials and candidates alike are familiar. Down the other lies a chaotic election held under a never-before-use congressional map that intentionally discriminates against black Alabamans, that Alabama adopted in unabashed defiance of a prior court order directly affirmed by this court, and that will require

Starting point is 04:27:53 officials to change the voter registrations of hundreds of thousands of voters in just days at best. A task Alabama previously represented would take months. The majority chooses the second path and disregards both democratic values and the rule of law. I respectfully dissent. We'll go on a break now and conclude with one more, one more section of these. And we are back. So, all right, we need to talk about a fairly obscure bureaucratic rule change that is being rushed out by the Office of Management and Budget,

Starting point is 04:28:45 OMB, which is where it's the management bureaucracy office that's currently headed by one of the guys who wrote Project 2025. This change that they are proposing right now is effectively the formalization of

Starting point is 04:29:01 all of the sort of doge cuts and then sort of post doge departmental cuts of grants from the U.S. government. The way this is largely being covered right now, and I understand why we're going to run through that one first,

Starting point is 04:29:18 is that this is effectively the death of American science, because one of the things that this does, it's like a 400-page document. One of the early sections of it is that instead of the current system where grants for scientific projects go before a peer review committee of scientists that are usually independent, and then those scientists give their recommendations to the department on whether or not this is a good use of funds

Starting point is 04:29:46 and the department executes those recommendations, right? So grants are determined by scientific, by a scientific peer review process. This kills that and says that instead of the way that it has worked, which is that agencies adopt the recommendations of it, this has not been how it works formally. Like it hasn't been a legal stipulation that this is how it works, but this is just literally how all science has worked since World War II,

Starting point is 04:30:12 basically with the exception of the McCarthy era is that these independent committees do the review of the grant and the federal agencies submit the grants. Instead of that, the heads of federal agencies will appoint one person who will individually look through every single grant and approve or deny them.

Starting point is 04:30:31 So this is the formalization of the Doge process. This is the administration basically centralizing control of the entire scientific grant process. And this actually turns out, it turns out, is for all grants. which we'll get to in a second. But what this means is that instead of, again, like scientific peer review being the thing at the science,

Starting point is 04:30:50 what science gets funding, it's now political appointees. And specifically, Trump administration political appointees, there are a whole, in this ruling, there are a whole bunch of absolutely, or not this rule, the proposed change. There is just a bunch of just absolutely unhinged screeds about the U.S. anti-AIDS programs turning into woke left

Starting point is 04:31:13 mobs in Africa that support like gender politics and stuff I sound very incoherent explaining that I swear to God I am more coherent than actually reading out the quote it's just it's completely unhinged like

Starting point is 04:31:30 weird right wing conspiracy stuff for like half of it and half of it is like extremely technical budget change stuff I know that in the Doge stuff this has been talking about like you know sexual health clinics in like a country in Africa that's supported by the U.S. government, right? Yeah. Yeah, they're pulling all these examples and then just like screaming stuff about how

Starting point is 04:31:48 they're like abortion centers and, you know, like doing like genital mutilation or whatever. There's been some good reporting on this by Elizabeth Janeksi, who used to do like program reviews for the NIH before a lot of things, including this administration, took over. So this is effectively the centralization of all of the grants given up, the U.S. government, right? If we remember, if we think back to like the early days of Doge, right? Well, you'd find these giant lists of grants that they'd gone

Starting point is 04:32:20 through and just cut. And they had absolutely no legal authority to do that. They just did it. Yeah. This is the formalization of that process, right? This is, this is setting up to bureaucratic apparatus to allow just one random griper they've like hired and stashed off at a room

Starting point is 04:32:36 and like BNIH or something to just go through and cut whatever grants they want. They also have the power to terminate grants that have already been given out at will. There's other even weirder things where they're also very paranoid about scientific collaboration with other countries, which is just the basis of how all science is done.

Starting point is 04:32:55 There's, like, restricted countries effectively where you can't collaborate with scientists from those countries, which even by U.S. standards is, like, not how things work that's, like, messed up by the standards of like American foreign policy. And then also, if you are doing any collaboration with any scientists from another country and there's money involved in it, that grant has to be individually approved by like this person

Starting point is 04:33:26 that they've set up. So this makes scientific collaboration effectively impossible, right? Because most of those things aren't going to happen because this is going to, you know, reproduce the sort of Doge bottlenecks that we saw where suddenly all these grants are disappearing, even ones that would eventually get approved, the people who were. we're supposed to be getting them are completely screwed because their reliance on that grant coming in in order to do their research. And the pivot in control of how these grants are being given out from people who are at the very least scientists to, you know, just the people

Starting point is 04:34:00 who are currently running the NIH, who are like RFK Jr., right? It's those kind of people who are going to be running these kinds of grants and they are going to be able to do damage to this that is quite frankly incalculable, this is the destruction of the entire system of American science. Like almost like, vast, vast percentages of all the science in the U.S. is done off of government grants. Either it's done by like the NIH or like by government institutions

Starting point is 04:34:34 or not entirely all, but a huge portion of science that's done at research universities, which is, again, how most science happens, is also supported by these grants. And if we're in this situation now, where all of these grants are, again, going through one person who is, like, solely motivated by political factors

Starting point is 04:34:54 as to whether or not they're going to approve this, which is what the system media attempting is set up, this is the death of American science. And it's worse than that, too, because, and this is the thing where I'm going to do a full episode about this next week, because there are a lot more implications, but the section of rules that's being changed here

Starting point is 04:35:11 by the Office of Management and Budget, this is not the section for the grant allocation for science, right? This is the section for all grants given out by the U.S. by the U.S. government. So, for example, Medicaid. Oh, wow. Yeah, so all of that is now subject to this stuff, right? Like disaster aid. Yeah.

Starting point is 04:35:31 You know, like any money the government is giving out, right, that this going through the grant system is now going through this process. Yeah, there's, I think, public comment on this ends July 7th. So I guess if you want to scream at them, that's technically possible. It's really not clear if Democratic politicians are going to actually try to substantively do something to stop this, which there's no direct legal mechanism for them to stop this. They could do another government shutdown or something.

Starting point is 04:36:03 Right. But, yeah, this is just sort of the state of things, which is that a lot, and a lot of the stuff has already been happening. It's worth saying, right, like a lot of these funding for everything from like vaccine programs to like the very small amount of research that was going in the trans health care or like queer health care in general. Like those grants are just gone and, you know, we've already seen a whole bunch of chaos from the interruption of the grant system on the sort of university level for scientists. But this is all just going to get significantly worse as this real change rules out.

Starting point is 04:36:36 Yeah. Yeah. So on. On that happy note. Last week, the former Chief Patrol agent for the Alcentro sector and also commander of Border Patrol's operation, a large Gregory Bovino took to X, the Everything app, to announce that he was on his way to Delaney Hall. It wasn't exactly clear why, because Bovino is no longer a serving law enforcement officer.

Starting point is 04:37:03 In fact, he was en route to a remigration summit in Portugal At the conference, Bavino joined politicians from Fox and AFDE. They spoke sort of behind closed doors. Journalists who wanted to cover the event had to stay in a car park outside where they were harassed by a drone. He's not listed on the website, but it's like a sort of mystery speaker, and I'm guessing that that was him, right? Remigration, if people aren't familiar, we're going to do a whole episode on this next week, but the website for the conference sets it out as a set of fiscal, cultural, economic, social, political, and logistical policies whose objective is to prevent population replacement

Starting point is 04:37:39 through the reversal of migratory flows. It is very explicitly about undocumented, documented, and naturalized people. It's not about following the law. It is explicitly racial. It's about racistity, religion, and the idea of national purity and cleansing the nation of people

Starting point is 04:37:56 who it considers not to be pure. If you think this is something that has maybe happened before in European history, you would not be alone. Greg Bevino took the chance to compare himself to Rommel in one, interviewed for a also compared himself

Starting point is 04:38:09 to T.E. Lawrence and Patton which is a fairly remarkable set of... Rommel and Patton. Yes. Yeah, right. Without skipping a beep. Maybe he's one of those guys who's like a clean, fair marked guy.

Starting point is 04:38:23 He also sort of, it was interesting, like I said, I'm going to break this down more next week. I think what was more interesting than like Greg Pavino talks to Nazis about Nazi shit which, like, come on. What does one expect? is the way he talked about stuff

Starting point is 04:38:39 in terms of like the role he sees Border Patrol having. He referred to them. He said they are often referred to as a federal law enforcement Marine Corps. The Border Patrol can operate anywhere in the United States and associated territories and simultaneously fulfill all enforcement missions. It goes on, he goes on to talk about them.

Starting point is 04:38:57 He says that they are the only organization capable of planning and executing this type of operation. He's not wrong. They are the only agency that could do something. think like a mass deportation campaign like we're seeing. But like this Marine Corps of the internal Marine Corps is interesting. That is how they have been used, especially by the Trump administration, right? Think of Portland in 2020, right?

Starting point is 04:39:19 Like, these are the government's goons. Yeah. Like when they need a hit squad to fuck people up, this is who they go to. Yeah. And that identity is something that Bovino at Al have clearly embraced, right? But Brevino was in Bortak, not extremely recently. But he has some points in his career been in Bortak. He also kind of tried to set distance between BP and ICE, which is interesting.

Starting point is 04:39:41 He called them, he said, the Newark fiasco last night in New Jersey illustrates what happens when untrained investigators are sent to handle a situation that is the responsibility of uniformed specialists. He's suggesting that ICE's employees lacked the necessary training to do what I guess they would call crowd control. Which is really funny because that's also the Democrats line. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Fair. It's like,

Starting point is 04:40:06 yeah. It's like, oh, no, these people aren't well enough. Yeah, well,

Starting point is 04:40:10 his line is therefore, like, turn it over to the people who are well trained enough so we can fuck them up, which I guess is also

Starting point is 04:40:15 kind of what the Democrats are, it's not a million miles apart. But Vino has also been doing some right-wing podcast. He went on a Border Hawk podcast where he appeared, seemingly from his office. Behind him he had a shadow box.

Starting point is 04:40:30 Does anyone want to hazard a guess what was in the shadow box? Military memorabilia. Of a certain kind, yeah. Is it German? No, no, no, it is. It is contemporary. Oh, good.

Starting point is 04:40:41 It pertains to his career. That's good. Is it one of his challenge coins that he got from fucking Chicago or wherever? They're probably smart enough not to put their challenge coins on public display anywhere. Yeah. No, it's a bunch of less diesel grenades. Ah, okay, of course. Oh, great.

Starting point is 04:40:57 Like the thing with which I guess he wishes to be associated. I have a lot of those at my house, too. the used ones. It's just like taking pride in being the guy who stamped down harder on the First Amendment than anyone has in recent history. Cool. He's also been very critical of current DHS leadership, right? After Buffino and Nome took to the national media to lie about Alex Preti

Starting point is 04:41:22 in the hours after Alex Prettie guide, they both became too toxic even for this administration. And he clearly has some hard feelings about this. He mentioned the 20 million figure. My figure is 100 million. His is 20 million. Now, let's take a look at that number, Dan. So we've got, by Tom Holman's estimate, 20 million illegal aliens. If that's the case, then he's already arrested one-tenth of all illegal aliens present in the United States. Do you see that with your eyes on the streets? Do I see that with my eyes on the streets? If it's really going to that good a tenth of all illegal aliens, and they're all illegal

Starting point is 04:42:01 aliens, they're not immigrants or anything else, illegal aliens, a tenth, if there were a tenth already deported, the rest would be buttoned up, tighter than you can imagine, those lines southbound for self-deportation would be out the door. That's not happening. This is really interesting. Yeah, we'll go into this in our specific episode. The way he arrives at that number is through the number of traffic delays in Charlotte, North Carolina during the Border Patrol operation there. What? This is the evidence he cites. Yeah.

Starting point is 04:42:32 Okay. It's fascinating. Like, he talks about how he thinks a number is higher because of his time at border patrol rate. He may think there is like a hundred million illegal immigrants. He believes this in his, yeah, like deep down in it. Yeah, like he. Interesting. This is 100% what he believes.

Starting point is 04:42:49 And he wants to deport that many people. Yeah. I don't know if it's that he believes there's that many people who are illegal in the way. Yeah, he doesn't differentiate or he's just considering. everyone who is not, you know, white here. Yeah. Well, I mean, he did differentiate in this video, which is interesting. He did. No, no, no. That's not what that meant, but yet. Yeah. He was making the case that anyone border patrol goes after as an illegal alien, I think. I mean, but that's not what he said.

Starting point is 04:43:19 Well, I mean, what he said was the term that you should use for these people as illegal aliens, not migrants or something. Like, he does not like that a lot of folks think it's wrong to refer to a human being as illegal. That's specifically what he's saying. Like, he's not making a deeper point than that, but I do think his belief is that that $100 million number includes a lot of people who were, for example, naturalized or who were made citizens through like Ju Soleil, which we've seen, like, he thinks should go away and so does the administration. Yeah. Oh, indeed, like, people on theses, right? Yes. Well, but I mean, more like, if you want to get to a hundred million, you're deporting people who are just non-white. Like, you can't, there aren't a hundred million, like,

Starting point is 04:43:58 natural, like, but it's, it sounds like he just believes there is, like, way more undocumented immigrants in the United States than what there actually is. Like, that is, yes, he does. In this short clip, but that is what he's, like, referring to. In part because he believes a lot of people who everyone else would consider legally immigrating have not. Like, that is part of why he's saying that. Now, there's also a belief that, like, the, that the government's lying to you about how many of them there are. There's vastly more. But part of it is he does not believe a lot of the ways that people become citizens who are not white are legitimate. Like that is an aspect of what he's saying.

Starting point is 04:44:32 Yeah, he spoke about this at length in his interview, right? He was saying how many people he'd seen come. He talks about whole villages in Mexico coming across the board. Like, lots of this is fairly familiar rhetoric, right? I can, I'm just scrolling down here if I can find his, his hundred million claim. That's a hundred million. Pew Research's figure hasn't changed since the 1970s, he said, he says, 30 years ago, illegal immigrants were absent from large portions of American territory.

Starting point is 04:45:00 I don't know where he's getting that information. He said he began seriously examining these numbers in 2008. He then says that around 2006, he found some information from Bear Stearns. That's a bank. They're like an investment bank, I think. He claims that drove his number. He saw an uninterrupted flow of illegal immigrants across the border without any internal application capable of producing mass expulsions from 2000.

Starting point is 04:45:25 2006, our borders were nothing but speedbunks. Illegals and smugglers knew that once they crossed the border, they were virtually safe from any consequences. Of course, that does include Trump's first term. But then he goes on to cite these bizarre statistics, like I'll just, I'll give you the Charlotte traffic example. One of the indicators that we're looking at is commuting times. For these times to be considered, quote unquote, unquote, good. Between 15 and 20 percent of commuters must be taken off the road. In Charlotte, there are 153,000 computers per day, approximately. As soon as we launched Operation Charlotte's Web, travel times did not move into the good category.

Starting point is 04:46:00 They moved into the excellent category. Estimates indicated that 30% or more of commuters were no longer traveling. This means that at least 30% of them were most like illegal immigrants. That is a logical... Yeah. Across the Grand Canyon of Logic. Jesus Christ. Yeah, I read that that's how he's calculating.

Starting point is 04:46:18 Which, you know, it cuts out a lot of obvious reasons people might not drive during this who are legal. like the fact that ICE has undeniably deported citizens and taking people into custody for long periods of time who were citizens, you know? Yeah, that they've pulled random brown people out of cars that they've shot and killed people? Yes, yeah. This happened also in late November of 2025,

Starting point is 04:46:41 a time where people travel, a time where people get sick. Yeah. Commutes generally go down in late November. Commutes just fluctuate, yeah. So it's just gibberish. It's an insane way to draw the conclusion he's drawn. Yeah, yeah, it's bonkers. it's also this thing where it's like

Starting point is 04:46:56 in order to like think this is what's going on like one of the premises of this is like oh it's like the illegal aliens that are like making every single problem bad like you see this with yeah the people like the people who support of this online who are like oh the housing crisis would end if we just deported everyone and it's like yeah yeah obviously

Starting point is 04:47:12 no but like they're coming at it from the motivated reasoning of I want to do an ethnic cleansing and then they're sort of post hoc creating justifications for it this is what fascism does right it blames all the all the problems of the chosen group on the It claims these economic problems. Yeah.

Starting point is 04:47:26 Yeah. Yes. Like, they've seen in quite non of fascism. And its very core is this idea of a frozen group and a scapego group and the scapegoat group are responsible for the decline of the chosen group. And if they can be removed, the chosen group will return to its former glory. Like that is, yeah, fascism in five minutes. And that's what we're seeing, right?

Starting point is 04:47:47 Unsurprisingly, given that he's at a conference with straight up Nazis. But I think this 100 million numbers. interesting. And like, what's interesting is him talking in a way that he didn't talk to the press when he was in charge of Border Patrol, but he probably did believe. But Vino is popular among Border Patrol agents, right? There are a number of them who feel that he was the leader that they needed. He showed up in the field, right? He had the support of agents because he was there with them. And like, him believing this tells us a lot about the agency. And I think that's something I want to dive deeper into next week. Okay. And email us with your news tips, cool zone tips at proton.

Starting point is 04:48:31 Yeah. Put a trans girl on your couch. Well, friends, that's going to be it from all of us at it could happen here. E.D. this week, we'll be back with more episodes on the normal schedule that we put out episodes and you should keep listening to them because we love you and we reported the news. We reported the news. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, CoolzoneMedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Starting point is 04:49:17 You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Hey, guys, it's us, the Jonas Brothers. I'm Joe. I'm Kevin. And I'm Nick. And guess what? We created our own podcast called Hey Jonas.

Starting point is 04:49:34 We invented a podcast? Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to it. We're the first people to do podcasts. We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions. Well, sick and tired is a strong way to put it, but, you know. Tired and sick. Listen to Hey Jonas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Starting point is 04:49:52 Just listen. We don't care where you hear it. June is Black Music Month, and on the Drink Chams podcast, we're speaking with the hottest names. in the culture, like Sway Lee. Do you realize how legendary you are? I appreciate that. I'd be seeing it, but I'm like, man, I still got, like, so much more to do. Like Prince, he dropped like 30 albums. We dropped like five right now.

Starting point is 04:50:12 Like, that's the rate we gotta be going. Yep, that's a good attitude. No matter the era, Drink Chams brings you the biggest names and the most unfiltered conversations. Listen to Drink Chams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is Saigon.

Starting point is 04:50:30 The story of my family and of the country that shaped us. From IHeart Podcasts, Saigon. You don't think I'm serious about a free Vietnam? One city, a divided country, and the war that tore America apart. It's for Vietnam. They're pouring patril all over here. Freedom for Vietnam! There's a fire coming to this country, and it's going to burn out everything.

Starting point is 04:50:52 Listen to Saigon on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Happy Pride from the Outspoken Podcasts. Network. All month long and all year round, we're celebrating being loud, proud, and always original. It's me, Brandon Kyle Goodman, host of the podcast, Tell Me Something Messy. Check out my show for unfiltered takes on dating, relationships, and adulting. Listen to High Key for the best pop culture takes, and there are no girls on the internet for all your tech news. For your favorite celebrity key keys, check outlaws with T.S. Madison. Learn to love yourself unapologetically with BFF, Black Fat Fem. And start your day with intention with

Starting point is 04:51:30 waking up with Ryan coming in July. Celebrate Pride with the Outspoken Network. Open your free IHeart Radio app. Search Pride and listen now. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.

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