It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 236

Starting point is 00:00:00 This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. 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.

Starting point is 00:00:20 We dropped, like, five right now. That's the rate we got to 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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. 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 00:00:46 Getting a new one put up in its place. I'm Akila Hughes, and Rebel Spirit season two is about both of those things. As I was watching these statues come down, I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority black city, in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslave people. Listen to Rebel Spirit Season 2 on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It just came out. Jeremy, what did you just do? You just sit yourself up for failure.

Starting point is 00:01:11 I've never heard you tell this story. I've never told this story. This must have been tucked deep, deep into Jeremy Lynn file. My name is MC Jen. I'm excited to tell you about laugh, but not least. I'll be chatting with guests from all walks of life about the power of humor when it comes to facing difficult times. These will be conversations that remind us all, life is hard, laugh harder. Listen and laugh but not least with MCJIN on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Starting point is 00:01:38 This is Saigon, 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. This is for Vietnam. They're pouring patrols 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 00:02:01 Listen to Saigon on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also 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 for you, but you can make your own decisions. Mia, are you excited today to learn about Gregory Hay Bavino? You know, I would describe myself going into this as an amateur but enthusiast, Greg Bovino Hater. I am very familiar with his work in Chicago.

Starting point is 00:02:52 I'm familiar with his work in Minneapolis. I am less familiar with his other work. I'm excited to tell me a higher tier of hater of one of the worst. people we've ever had. Yeah, really a gem of the American law enforcement system. We're going to talk mostly today about Greg Bovino's post-career pivot, which seems mostly to be asking to have his old career back. But we can talk also a little bit about his previous career work when he was down here. He was in IB, he was in El Centro, he was in Blythe for a while. But last week, Mia, he was in Portugal. Oh, boy. Yeah, do you want to guess why? You know, okay, going through

Starting point is 00:03:29 my history of Portugal. It's a country that had a left-wing military coup that didn't go far enough by which they never quite got rid of all the fascists. Yeah, a country that notably has a long history of fascism. Yes. Which is why he was there. Actually, he was there in a remigration summit. Oh, no.

Starting point is 00:03:52 Yeah. Like, so I'm just going to use the conference's own website here. It is a set fiscal, cultural, economic, social, political, and logistical policies whose objective is to prevent population replacement through the reversal of migratory flows. There's nothing there about undocumented people. There's nothing there about visas, right? Because this isn't about that. This is about race and ethnicity and removing people who do not line up with what you consider to be the national. race.

Starting point is 00:04:27 Yeah, this is, this is the ethnic cleansing campaign. Yeah. I mean, obviously there's, like, a lot of parallels in the history of all of these countries, but, like, I think if you look at the most immediate one, it's, oh, this is, like, the shit the Nazis were talking about doing while they were building the concentration camps with, like, Jewish people, right? Is that they were going to, like, deport them all to Israel or whatever? Yeah, we'll keep moving them east.

Starting point is 00:04:51 At the very least, this is an ethnic cleansing plan. Yeah, that's the explicit goal, right? There is not mention in that definition of undocumented people, even the way that Bavino prefers to refer to it as illegal aliens. A term he uses a lot, and I think he sometimes uses it in quite elastic fashion, but even in this case, that is not what this conference is about. No, yeah. This is very much a conference about a white Europe.

Starting point is 00:05:18 Yeah. It was organized by Martin Selner. Selma is a neo-Nazi who famously exchanged emails with Brent. and Tarrant at a Christchurch shooter. Oh, great. Yeah. Pavino spoke about this at the conference and he said that they hadn't met in person before,

Starting point is 00:05:36 but after talking for a little while, they found they were on the same sheet of music. Incredible. Yeah, you got to Google people, man. And he Google Martin Selner, and the first thing that comes up is that he emailed Brent and Tarrant unless I guess that's not an issue. Yeah, right.

Starting point is 00:05:52 Judging by the general company he kept, I don't think that's an issue because he's joint Like Spanish Vox party are there. Afde are there, AFD, the German far right party, racists from all over Europe. Yeah. We also saw the sort of racist in America

Starting point is 00:06:09 who I would describe as like fancy racists, the race science guys, right? Oh, they're kind of like the Buray people? Yeah. Is it those guys or is it the kind of newer gen, like, tech fascist people? So there's overlap between them. No, it's like the VDA kind of tendency.

Starting point is 00:06:27 I know. Should we explain what the V-Dair? Yeah, a little bit. Go ahead, man, yeah, take it. Yeah, well, I was just going to say, at some point we're going to have Mali on. I am what you would call a, I guess technically a professional Nazi identifier or whatever,

Starting point is 00:06:44 but I'm like a low-level one and everyone else in this network is a very high-level one. So we'll probably have Mali on at some point to like actually really go into V-Dair and like that kind of shit. But, yeah. it's broadly speaking, it's Peter Brimelow's anti-immigration website. We're not talking about anti-immigration in terms of discussions about what visas we should give, right? We're talking about like white nationalism. Yeah, these are like Nazi Nazis. These are people that, you know,

Starting point is 00:07:15 like I don't think the US has ever really had what would in Europe is called like the Kordaun Sanitaire, which is supposed to separate out like the mainstream right-wing parties from like the Nazis. Like, we've never had that. So Vidaire has been kind of more in anti-immigration circles. But it's also like those are people that, you know, even you're kind of like really, really far right, like people on the radio or politicians don't associate with

Starting point is 00:07:42 because they are fairly open Nazis. Yeah, there was some stuff that traced back to Vida in Agenda 47. I remember thinking like, This ain't good. Yeah. V-Dair, just for people who, like, have lived a blessed life and don't know, refers to Virginia Dare, who is, I believe, the first white child, or the first child, first girl.

Starting point is 00:08:06 I don't know, maybe it was the first white child born in the United States of settlers. One of the, one of the Roanoke people, right? Yeah. Which is, I don't know, like, maybe you motherfuckers could have made, like, the Roanoke people and disappeared. But, yeah, yeah, but, yeah, that would be nice. Unfortunately, me, no. Unfortunately, they didn't, and they didn't, unfortunately,

Starting point is 00:08:26 assimilate into indigenous cultures the way that the rown people almost certainly did. Yes. And instead, decided to do half a millennia long campaign of terror and bloodshed. Yeah. It's interesting to see Bovino, I guess, like aligning with these. European anti-migration discussion is different. It's not really dealing so much in undocumented people. It's dealing with people under various legal statuses.

Starting point is 00:08:53 I'm not saying there aren't undocumented people in Europe there are, but the discussion there has moved past that in a toxic way in a way that it's like we need to remove these people, even though they do have legal documentation that allows them to be here. If the state says you're cool or you're not cool, that's not my concern. But it's still alarming to see the bigotry move past even that, right, without the pretense of enforcing the law. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:09:22 and just simply being about removing people who we don't think we want to live next to because they're not white. You know, one of the groups that you talked about there, like the AFD in Germany, like, this has been happening for like a long time, but one of their like slogans is remove kebab. Yeah. And that's just literally like remove all Turkish people from the country. Yeah. And the AFD wants to do this. There are documents that have leaked from them that have been planning at conferences to, okay, this is how we're going to remove the non-white people. This is how we're going to remove the Jewish people.

Starting point is 00:09:49 this is not even like the pretense of anything as to with the law. This is just like we are the original Nazis. We want to do ethnic cleansing against non-white people. Yeah. Most of the people at the conference are peddling great replacement shit, right? And they genuinely believe that that is something that exists and that they can reverse it. At the conference, Pavino gave an interview. I found it on a website called Braise Info, E-I-Z-H.

Starting point is 00:10:18 It's a Breton and French language website. It's also published I saw on a couple of other substacks, so I wonder if it was a pool interview that he gave. There are various people translated it. I should note that I translated it from French. I don't think Bovino speaks French, so I'm imagining they translated it from English to French. And there is an editor's note that says the editor was an AI.

Starting point is 00:10:42 Oh, great. So any of the quotations here, we can't attribute them directly, right? We can't assume that those are the words he said in English because it's been through three layers of bullshit. So I understand that going in. Nonetheless, I think it's a very interesting insight into how Greg Bevino sees the world. And what's interesting about that is,

Starting point is 00:11:05 like, Greg Bevino was very popular in Border Patrol. He was, by the standards of the patrol, a good Border Patrol agent, right? He was liked. And I don't think he developed these opinions in a few months since he retired. No. And like a lot of the way he talks

Starting point is 00:11:23 is not dissimilar to the way Border Patrol agents talk among themselves, right? I think that like what is interesting about this is not like Greg Bovino is essentially sharing a platform and agreeing with Nazis. It is after 25, 26 years in more than 90, 30 years

Starting point is 00:11:42 in the Border Patrol, this is what the Border Patrol formed him into. Yeah. Because the point I want to make here is this shit is not something we can easily reform. This is not something we can train. If this country gets through this and in 2028, yes, we have another election. God.

Starting point is 00:12:04 We can't fucking let this keep happening, right? The tool that Bovino was deploying in Minneapolis, in Chicago, in Charlotte, in all these other cities in Los Angeles. in Los Angeles, right? Yeah, Memphis. Like, New Orleans. Like, yeah, like, all over the country. Yeah. Yeah, it is a tool that Democrats built as well as Republicans.

Starting point is 00:12:29 Yeah. And the place he's at, he got to, with eight years working under Barack Obama, with four years working under Joe Biden. Like, we need to understand what we are diverting a fire hose of money towards. Yeah. With the Border Patrol, right? And I guess, I guess. guess we can just start with where Greg Pavino started, which was comparing himself to Nazi

Starting point is 00:12:51 General Irwin Rommel. Great. Yeah, right out the gate. He also compared himself to Patton and T.E. Lawrence. You know, like, historically, it makes you wonder. Yeah. I think he probably has some kind of clean Vermark thing going on in his head where they're just soldiers and he can respect both of them for their tactical prowess, you know?

Starting point is 00:13:10 Like, he says, quote, they grasp the overall strategy where others in government or in the political class did not see it or refuse to see it. Strategic expertise combined with field command, especially in chaotic exposed events, is very rare. I also listened to a couple of podcasts that Bovino did with a former Border Patrol agent who used to work in San Diego sector. And you hear this a lot, right? Talk about battle. Talk about soldiers.

Starting point is 00:13:34 Bovino sees himself as like a general on Border Patrol as his soldiers fighting in a war. Yeah. That's not what they do. Clearly they see it as that. I understand why because they've got around the country generating so much ill will that yeah, everywhere they go people fucking hate them.

Starting point is 00:13:54 Your actual job, and this only thing we saw in Chicago, is dragging, screaming babies out of their fucking homes and putting them in camps. Yeah. I think this is going back to the thing you were talking about earlier about this not being something that's reformable, is that, yeah, that task is what border patrol was built for.

Starting point is 00:14:13 That's what it was doing, under all of these administrations, just fucking dragging people screaming from their homes in the dark of the night. And like, the only way you can get people to do that is by creating a crucible that creates Nazis. You can't have compassion for the people whose families you're tearing apart, right? Like, people should read Jen Bud's book if they want to know what going through Border Patrol Academy is like, you know, so just give a trigger warning that Jen was sexually assaulted and writes about that. Border Patrol has a very high rate of sexual assault, right? Border Patrol is 95% male.

Starting point is 00:14:46 I have seen people in Border Patrol who do have compassion, and then I have not seen them anymore. Like it drives those people away. Yeah. They have a high dropout rate. And like, I think there are people who genuinely believe that what they will do is keep their community safe and rescue people who get stuck crossing the border in the desert, adjudicate them a fair process, deliver them to a fair process, and they will do the best

Starting point is 00:15:13 they can. I don't see those people remain in the patrol for very long, right? Like, I interact with, obviously, like, the stance to this podcast is that you should remain silent, not talk to cops. But, like, I interact with Border Patrol agents more often than most people do, right? That is the nature of my job and the place I live and the places I go. And, like, I think these days they're recruiting they're doing, they're getting a lot of people who are coming in and starting like this. But I don't think that's, that's always been the case. Like, I understand that there are people also in communities along the border where there's very little economic opportunity.

Starting point is 00:15:41 and then this is the only chance they have. But I see those people get spat out. Like you said, Mia, if you are going to train people to tear families apart, then you have to train them to hate. And I think that is what we see in this, right? Yeah. It's really interesting. Vino tells his own story a little bit,

Starting point is 00:16:00 and he tells his own story on this podcast I listen to as well. He starts with Operation Don't Let Em Ride. You're familiar with Operation Don't Let him Ride? No. Okay. So you have to go all this. the way back to 2010. Oh, God.

Starting point is 00:16:13 In Las Vegas, Nevada. Little tiny baby, Mia. Yeah. 13-year-old Mia. Oh, God, fuck me. I feel old. I was in grad school. And Greg Bovino, I think he's the Blythe station at that time.

Starting point is 00:16:32 And they do this operation at a bus station in Nevada. It lasts for 60 minutes. It gets called off. The Nevada. senator is pissed off about it. Their goal, they said, was to apprehend traffickers and to rescue people who had been trafficked or smuggled, right? In a community meeting, which was convened because the whole Latino community in Las Vegas was like, the fuck, right? This internal enforcement was not a common thing at the time. Paul Beeson, who was chief agent of the humor sector at the time,

Starting point is 00:17:07 said, quote, in that short period of time, we did not apprehend anybody we felt was active engaged in alien smuggling, we did not encounter any human trafficking victims. So to me, that doesn't sound like a win. Yeah, so wait, so they like, they were just rounding people up at bus stops. Correct. They went to like a bus depo station. Yeah, yeah, like one of the big bus. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:17:29 And they just rounded people up. Yeah, exactly. So his interview with this former Border Patrol agent, he said that they apprehended more than one alien per minute of the operation. That was called Operation Don't Let Them Ride. And that operation was set for about three days. It lasted 60 minutes. But the interesting thing is we caught more aliens than there were minutes in the operation.

Starting point is 00:17:56 It was a very successful operation. Very successful. Yes, sir. Harry Reid called Hussein Obama and had that shut down immediately. But we never forgot that. We never forgot. the vast amount of criminals that we apprehended in 2010 on those bus checks in Las Vegas and the pervasive problem, even then that we solved.

Starting point is 00:18:20 A lot of that problem came in under Barack Hussein Obama as well as Bill Reeflin. I want to note that the newspapers at the time reported a number that was more than two dozen. Technically, let's say the operation lasted 60 minutes. That is more than two dozen. It would be unusual to report a number of 60 by saying more than two dozen, right? Yeah. What is more interesting to me is that this operation was supposed to find people who had been trafficked and people who were trafficking and it failed. Greg Bovino seems to have seen it as a success because it just found people.

Starting point is 00:18:55 Yeah. Right? People who were undocumented, people who were otherwise an infraction of immigration laws, but who were not involved in trafficking. Because for him, it seems like the goal was slightly different. different and therefore the criteria for success are slightly different, right? And this kind of fits into this narrative of him. So like I can see why he, it is, especially in the context of him talking to the remigration conference, for him it's a win. But for the explicit goals of the Border Patrol at that time, it's not. So he cites this as the beginning of his journey to where

Starting point is 00:19:31 he is, right? It's a guy they went to for massive surges of Border Patrol agents into cities, tearing families apart. And I think if we think, if we see it the way he sees it, then we can see why he sees it as a success. Bavino in his early career had worked a lot in the Alcentro sector, right? And he eventually became chief patrol agent in Alcentro sector. He was in Bortak for a while. I've read a defense university paper that interviewed him. He was in Honduras with Bortak training Border Patrol there.

Starting point is 00:20:01 Oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah, I mean, everyone should read Empire of Borders. Everyone should read Border Patrol Nation. But the DHS has done this for years, right? Funded, armed and equipped and trained border patrol units all over the Americas, because that is how America externalizes its border. Yeah, in a very similar way to the way Europe does with Frontex and, you know, like the deals they cut with Gaddafi and then the successive governments in Libya and stuff like that. Yes. And the people they're training there. It's like school the Americas shit are just like actual monsters. Like, yeah, I mean, the Sally Hayden's book, my third time we drowned is one of the more heartbreaking books.

Starting point is 00:20:37 available for a human to read. But if you want to know about the fucked up stuff Europe's doing in Libya, it's a good book. Yeah. Yes. It moves the violence away from the metropolis, right? It moves it further. I've seen this from my own eyes, right? I've seen what happens in Panama, not necessarily the actions of any border patrols there,

Starting point is 00:20:56 but just by forcing people to take that route. Like, I've seen how the externalization of our borders kills people. And I have seen how the Biden administration funded deportations of people who, who I can't find any criminal record for. And I have seen literally babies taken out of people's hands. Yeah. And they were deporting young men at that point. But I've literally watched families torn apart right there just after crossing the Daring Gap.

Starting point is 00:21:22 And it's heartbreaking. Yeah. Talking of heartbreaking, we haven't done an ad pivot. Oh, boy. Hopefully these products and services will fix your heartbreak. Yeah. Oh, God. Yeah, here's an advert for whiskey.

Starting point is 00:21:45 Okay, we are back. So one of the things Bevino did alert in this interview is he sought to kind of distinguish himself from what he calls status quo bureaucrats. He's not wrong that one of the roles of a chief in a sector is to speak to the press, right? He seems to be very upset that Roddy Scott and Tom Homan didn't speak to the press when they started these big operations. He says, quote, CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott and Bordersar, Tom Homan, not only had no experience was full enforcement of migration laws, but refused to speak, public leader in operations. Their reluctance triggered the unique situation I mentioned above. I neither sought nor asked to become the public faith of the operation. But for this type of

Starting point is 00:22:26 operation, there can only be one. The responsibility fell to me. When you listen to this interviews he did when he was in the patrol, he wasn't as critical of his leadership as he is now. Yeah. Probably for the fairly obvious reasons. But like, the let down by leadership thing is a thing. We've seen this on the right so many times, right? Yeah, it's the classic backstab of this. employed by one Adolf Hitler. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, and many cases thereafter. And he kind of seeks in this to,

Starting point is 00:22:58 to differentiate field agents from, like, I guess he, what he calls status quo bureaucrats, right? And he is genuinely very popular among field agents. Like, and he did, like, grow through the Border Patrol, right? Like, he's not a guy who, like, came from somewhere else. Like, he has a 30-year career. He's done, like, mounting interdiction stuff down in the Hocumbah wilderness. He's definitely had his boots on the ground.

Starting point is 00:23:20 I think they like that. And I think for him, that gives him like the, he feels like he speaks for the border patrol. And that like these people who are like bureaucrats are what is constraining him and his guys from doing what they want to do. And like, it's really interesting to see the terms how he describes what they want to do, right?

Starting point is 00:23:42 He called the withdrawal from Minneapolis a surrender. He called protesters. the opposition in this podcast I listen to. He calls protesters pro-fascist, which is very, given the company he keeps his fucking ridiculous. I feel like the other people at that conference can't be happy with that.

Starting point is 00:24:00 Yeah, that's the thing, right? Where are the fascists here, damn? Yeah, they're not hiding it. Like, it's very interesting to see him, like, not willing to kind of surrender that term. You know what I mean? Like, to not quite say it at the same time as, like, there are other people at the conference

Starting point is 00:24:18 who are like, no way they're they're fascists, what are you talking about? They're not pro-fascists. They hate us. He's still like one step removed from joining his buddies there. Another thing I found interesting was he says, Border Patrol is often referred to as

Starting point is 00:24:32 quote, the federal law enforcement Marine Corps. What? Does anyone say that? I've not heard them say that. No, I, I, I, what? I've never heard of that. It's a very strange, I'm guessing what he's referring to is like, the Marine Corps has these expeditionary units which

Starting point is 00:24:48 can deploy very quickly to conflict zones. Like we saw in Iran, right? Yeah. And I'm guessing that's what he means. Like they're the hit squad. Yeah. They're the like, oh my God, we found like four children

Starting point is 00:24:59 sleeping in a bedroom. We have to go, we have to go send their like tactical squad after them. Yeah. There are first line of defense against tiny babies. Yeah. And against like Americans

Starting point is 00:25:10 exercising their First Amendment rights. Yeah. When people were in the street in Portland, it was Border Patrol, they said. It was Bortak, yeah. Yeah. Right. They do have something of a history of being the federal government's hit squad.

Starting point is 00:25:23 Yeah. When they want to stamp on Americans, they do send the Border Patrol. Interestingly, he went on to cite the Old Miss Riot. Are you familiar the Ole Miss Riot? It sounds vaguely familiar, but I'm not sure. Yeah. I mean, you can surmise what's going to happen, right? It's a university in the South.

Starting point is 00:25:42 Yeah. Yeah. What happens is that James Meredith, a black man. had attempted to register at the school several times. He had been prevented by racists, including the governor. And at one point, JFK sent Border Patrol agents along with federal, I think they were cross sworn as marshals maybe, to accompany him to register. They ended up surrounded in the Lyceum.

Starting point is 00:26:05 28 federal agents were shot. Jesus. Yeah, no, this is like, they had a fucking fight about it. Like, two of the people surrounding the Lyceum were killed. I'm not sure I've ever in my entire life seen a government deployment and thought you should have sent the National Guard but like, yeah, I guess you should have sent the National Guard.

Starting point is 00:26:25 Jesus, yeah, but the way Southern racist really, I guess, love shooting beds to oppose integration. Yeah, like in this case, they sent the regular ass army to come get him out. Yeah. I think this was the era when they felt like national guides in the South were not entirely trustworthy. Yeah, well, yeah, you'd have to do a Trump.

Starting point is 00:26:45 style, like we're sending the fucking, like, California National Guard to Mississippi or whatever. Yeah, yeah. They normally send, like, one of those QRF, like, 82nd Airborne or something like that. Yeah, I, wow, I can't believe I'm in a position where I support the deployment of U.S. troops against America. Yeah, I know.

Starting point is 00:27:03 How is it possible? I know, but it's a wild scenario. I guess it's like, because they're trying to do a lynching. So, yeah. Like, in that case, yeah, maybe. stop the lynching. But it's a really interesting choice because he's talking about how Border Patrol, you know, like, had this long history of doing this. And again, he's not wrong. And I guess maybe the Ole Miss thing plays a part in their mythos because they were fighting

Starting point is 00:27:30 against the racists. I can see why they would want to hold on to that. It's interesting to see him doing that at the racist conference. Yeah. It's like, oh, no, no, no. We are a different kind of racist. We are California racist. We are we are not like the primaries. Southern racist. We have advanced our level of racism to cleansing levels. Yeah, and he's very popular amongst the like, we're a different kind of racist, racist, right?

Starting point is 00:27:56 Like, the V-Dair tendency is the like, quote-unquote, scientific racists. Yeah. By the way, I want to clarify before I get screamed at, the thing I just said was like his perspective, not mine, Jesus Christ, fuck these people. Yeah, yeah. All of them.

Starting point is 00:28:11 Yeah, yeah, please don't clip me out of context. So, like, he then goes on after he's explained this to explain like his history of migration. He says that around in the year 2000, quote-unquote, the floodgates open. His basic thesis is summed up in his statement from 2000 to 2026, our borders were nothing but speed bumps. Illegals and smugglers need it. Once they cross the border, they were virtually safe from any consequences. A couple things there that obviously includes Trump's first term and part of the second term. Amnesia about Trump having a first term seems to be quite a common issue on the right.

Starting point is 00:28:46 It's really astonishing. And on the left, too. I don't know. I'm seeing it more and more. Certain people who will go unmentioned who were working for Blackwater under the first Trump administration. I couldn't be bad. Yeah. It's very interesting to see this narrative.

Starting point is 00:29:01 But again, not an uncommon one, right? He talks about how he wrote a paper called Illegal Aliens, Detruction of Natural Resources. So he has two master's degrees. is from the National Defense University. And I'm not sure if that's his second master's thesis, which I'd be interested to read it, but I haven't been able to find it.

Starting point is 00:29:21 I'm not sure NDU makes master stuff public. I think generally how it works is you have to opt to make it public. Like, I'm interested to know is this kind of eco-nativism? Is it like carrying capacity shit? Like what... It kind of, the other thing kind of reminds me is like, you get this from like

Starting point is 00:29:37 Scandinavian racists where they're like... They have this line about the welfare state the welfare stays of fire and you can only have so many people huddled around the fire. Yeah, and it's like, okay, well, God. We see this, like, we saw a lot

Starting point is 00:29:51 from Mike Lee, right, when he was attempting another pathetic excuse for selling off our public lands. Like, Lee was saying how, like, so much of our wilderness areas are destroyed by migrants, so we have to destroy them and sell them to protect them. The logic of Mike Lee is unknowable,

Starting point is 00:30:06 but I'm interested to read that. If anyone, if anyone's like a library ninja, get in touch. I'd love to find that out. He spent a great deal of time explaining his 100 million number and he refers to these people as illegal

Starting point is 00:30:24 aliens, right? He contrasts this with the number of 20 million. He says that comes from Pew Research and he says it hasn't changed since the 1970s. What? That is not a statistic which is played out in Pew's published documents. I'm looking at looking here at a 2023 paper from Pew. The number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States,

Starting point is 00:30:47 19903.5 million, 2008.6, 2015, 11.0, thanks Obama, and up to 14 million in 2023. He claims it's been 20 since the 1970s. Obviously, he's not giving a source here, but he claims Pew has said that, and that's not what I found from Pew. He sort of arrived at his hundred million dollar number.

Starting point is 00:31:08 First, he said he was looking at some stuff from investing, Bank, Dare Stearns, I don't know what he was looking at. Why? Yeah, it's very strange. He then goes on to give the only hard statistics he gives, if he's talking about Charlotte, North Carolina here when they were doing Operation Charlotte's Web, estimates indicated that 30% or more of commuters

Starting point is 00:31:27 were no longer traveling. This means at least 30% of there were most likely illegal immigrants. This is based on traffic delays. He's getting the about time people spending traffic jet. Like, he's going on Google Maps. This is a massive logical leap. He then says, that's about a quarter of Charlotte's commuters, 30%, not a quarter. And this figure, you guessed it, fits perfectly with the total of 100 million out of 420 million people in the United States.

Starting point is 00:31:52 I estimate that 100 million are illegal immigrants. Same as the observation for children absent from Charlotte schools. More than 30% of students were missing. These were, of course, illegal children or children of illegal immigrants. The category of illegal children, fascinating choice of words. Oh, God. I'm guessing he's talking about, like, undocumented kids or kids whose parents are undocumented as separate categories there.

Starting point is 00:32:16 But, like, there are many reasons. I don't think we have to explain this to listeners, why some people might not have wanted to be out and about or at school when board patrol are dragging people out of cars and smashing their windows. Yeah, this is an extremely common thing, which is like, yeah. Yeah, like, not wanting to die. I want to point this out, too. Like, they shot, like, American citizens.

Starting point is 00:32:35 Not that it's, like, worse to shoot an American citizen than a non-citizen, but, like, they did that. that everyone, everyone knew that they had done that. Yeah. Like, they did that in Chicago. Yeah. Like, yeah, they did it in Chicago. They were going to go do it again in Minneapolis.

Starting point is 00:32:48 Yeah. Obviously, they shot protesters. They also just shot random people, like, who they were like, oh, you're non-white. Fuck you, right? Like, it's like that kind of shit. Yeah, people who got in most of the instance, we've seen that what they have said is a person tried to ram them with their car. And most of the times we have seen video evidence.

Starting point is 00:33:04 It certainly don't look like that to me. No. Yeah. Yeah, this idea that's 30%. with students are there for undocumented people as ludicrous. Yeah. They were in Charlotte in like middle to late November.

Starting point is 00:33:15 Like there's a time when American just often travel. Uh-huh. Don't go to school, right? They have this Thanksgiving thing here. Uh-huh. And people like to enjoy time with their families. Oh. He then goes on to talk about the differences between U.S. and Europe.

Starting point is 00:33:43 There's a phrase here that I want to read. Again, I want you to understand. that this is translated twice. Uncontrolled immigration to the United States now poses the greatest threat to our culture and our very existence. This goes for you in Europe too. Even when we managed to get past these cumbersome bureaucrats and politicians, the grassroots will take care of it for us. The precise tactics for removing those who need to be removed may take different forms in Europe and the United States.

Starting point is 00:34:11 The grassroots will take care of it for us is between M-Dashes. I don't know if he means the grassroots will. vote them out. Otherwise, that seems like a pogrom, right? Like, yeah, that's, that's not, that's not good. Yeah. Yeah, that just seems like an ethnic cleansing campaign conducted by people. I want to be like, like, but, because that's a really scary concept, right? Yeah, but also, yeah, it's an AI translation that was then translated by you. I don't know, I don't know how your French is these days. My French is fine, but like, yeah. I forget who said all translation is an act of violence, but yeah, like, like, Humans doing translation is an act of violence.

Starting point is 00:34:52 AI doing translations is like the fucking future Terminator. Yeah. Bullshit where the machines have killed everyone. Yeah, a lot of really is lost in translation. In between the M dashes, the French is La Bass Popularer Sans Charterreux. So, yeah, come at me, French speakers. Let me know if you think there's a better translation for that. They then goes on to try and not blame Trump, which was a sense.

Starting point is 00:35:19 interesting, said, I don't believe Trump has abandoned his campaign promise. I believe that his advisors do not bring him back to reality on the ground. And then I skipped a little here. If I had to do it again, I would have brief Trump directly several times rather than relying on this inner circle who might have interests elsewhere. Trump is the best president I've ever worked for. I believe he will return to that campaign promise soon. Again, it's kind of a fashy thing, right? Like it wasn't the leader. It wasn't the dear leader. It was some people who failed to reflect the dear leader's thought. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very interesting. to see him speaking so clearly this way.

Starting point is 00:35:51 Like, there's two ways he could be going with this. He could be angling for his job back. To be clear, right, the reason we don't have Norman Buffino anymore, in my opinion, is that after ICE and then CBP, both murdered US citizens in the plain light of day on camera, and then took to the television to lie about those US citizens and the hours after they murdered them, they became too toxic for even the Trump administration to touch. Yeah. They were staggeringly unpopular.

Starting point is 00:36:21 Everyone fucking hated them. Yeah, yeah. You literally lost, like, uh, the old guys with NRA hats at the gun range who I sometimes talk to. Like, yeah, fucking,

Starting point is 00:36:31 again, I can't keep coming back to like, they lost fucking Kurt Warner who like, is like a quarterback who has never once talked about politics ever. And is like, like, made like a documentary that was like, a bunch about like his like faith journey,

Starting point is 00:36:46 right? And they like, yeah, when, when, when, Kurt Warner is being like, hey, what the fuck? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:36:53 You've lost. You're losing the conservative football guys. Yeah. I mean, you shoot a white man on his knees in the street in the back. Yeah. While you're beating him up. Yeah. That's how you lose Americans.

Starting point is 00:37:05 Yeah. That's how you lose barstool. Like, it's hideous. Yeah. He kind of has two choices, right? Like, he can go into the consulting world. He can go into the grifting world. Right.

Starting point is 00:37:19 it just become like a podcast grifter, welcome to the club, or he can go into politics. And I wonder which, like, he's kind of left two of those pathways open, right? Like,

Starting point is 00:37:29 he kind of, podcast grifter or politics. Well, and you can do both now, too, I guess. That's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:37:35 See the head of the FBI. It was too much for Dan Bonchino. He retired and returned to the pod phase. I guess, I guess, I guess, I guess, I guess,

Starting point is 00:37:45 I guess it's like our noble, like, health and human services secretary, the, the latest, shit-eating Kennedy or whatever, like, can still do that shit. But, yeah, the serial podcast guest, I just want to come back to, like, we need to reflect on this now, right?

Starting point is 00:38:00 Like, we're doing primaries for the midterms right now. The Democrats have doubled down on same old shit almost everywhere across the country. Like, we have seen some better candidates, right? But, like, I understand that, like, the pathway to a beautiful life is not through the Democratic Party. But if they are incapable of seeing that this isn't. something that we can reform. If they do what Biden did in 2020, which is like, oh, they just need more money. Yeah. This ratchet will continue to only move in one direction, which is towards a

Starting point is 00:38:28 brutalization of more people. Yeah. Just on a very basic level, like having a massive institutional apparatus that produces Nazis and gives them the authority to do the thing that the Nazis want to do is not a way that any kind of democracy can survive. Yeah. And that's what we've seen. To paraphrase, we have created an entity which is exempt from the law in order to enforce it. We can't keep up with that. And like, now is a moment, I guess it demands bravery. And from the Democrats, I've seen cowardice. And like, if they continue to be cowards right now, we're going to go so far down this path, there's no coming back.

Starting point is 00:39:10 Yeah. And I don't fucking know. but I think that's something we really need to reflect on. Yeah, we have 20,000 bovinos. Yeah. Who we've given guns and training and authority to. Yeah, and who we've allowed to kill people in our streets and not face accountability, right?

Starting point is 00:39:32 Yeah. Like, I am not a county attorney appreciated generally, but it makes me happy to see that Hennepin County attorney go after the ICE agent who shot someone through their front door and they lied about it. Like, if a liberal democracy can't do any of that kind of stuff, then it's worthless. It doesn't mean anything anymore. Yeah, and it won't be a democracy afterwards, right?

Starting point is 00:39:55 Yeah, it'll die. It made its own bed to die on. There's examples of this fucking everywhere, right? But, like, the Biden administration was tragedy as farce of, like, Ayende promoting Pinochet. Yeah. Like, that's a thing. That's a thing that he did. He promoted Pinochet, right?

Starting point is 00:40:11 Yeah. Like, if you don't get rid of the. people who want to fucking kill you and you instead give them more power, they're going to fucking kill you. Yeah. And like, Biden tried to, they tried pretty hard to retire Bavino because he would talk a lot about the situation at the border and Biden administration. But they didn't.

Starting point is 00:40:30 No, they didn't. And then also, like, they made more of them. Yeah. And also they threw as much money, like the money that your kid doesn't get for free meals. It's because Border Patrol has Blackhawks. Like, yeah. Yeah. That was a heartwarming, an inspiring episode of It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart.

Starting point is 00:40:52 Yeah. But hey, we beat the Nazis once, we can do it again. Yeah, and Minneapolis beat these people. That's the other thing, right? Like, they won. Yeah. They came out and they stood together as a community. They didn't focus on trivial bullshit that divides them.

Starting point is 00:41:06 They looked out for one another. Border Patrol thought they were in a battle. And if they were in a battle, then they did lose it. They surrendered, right? Yeah, and like that's also not to say that there aren't still, like, horrifying shit happening there, right? Like, there's still raids going on. You're absolutely correct, yeah. And that, like, people aren't dealing with the many other ills for capitalism and the distance under the state as it is today.

Starting point is 00:41:27 But, like, they were not able to make those people cower in fear. Yeah. And that has shown the rest of the country how brave we can be together. And I just don't think we should forget that. Yeah. Pride month, Toronto. Pride is an awesome. opportunity for you to create your own space, to celebrate your existence.

Starting point is 00:41:56 Iheart Radio is proud to be an official sponsor of Pride Toronto Festival, and we won't stop. Celebrate Pride. Turn up the love and listen to IHeart Pride Canada, your 24-7 radio stream and the only playlist you need for your Toronto Pride celebrations. Pride is so great because it gives a whole bunch of people this visibility that they've never had before. We have a ton to celebrate Toronto. Happy Pride. IHeart Radio. 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 00:42:30 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. Like, 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 Nas' early videos.

Starting point is 00:42:48 Which one? One love. Wow. Yes. literally filmed in his apartment in Queensbridge. His moms were still up in that apartment. Nans was just beginning to take off. His pops used to live near me in Harlem.

Starting point is 00:43:02 His dad introduced him to a whole lot of, you know, conscious stuff, and 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. If you're watching the latest season of the Real Housewives of Atlanta,

Starting point is 00:43:25 you already know there's a lot to break down. Corsha accusing Kelly of sleeping with a merry man. They holding Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew. Pinky has financial issues. I like the bougie style of Housewives show. I think it looks like it's going to be interesting. On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments

Starting point is 00:43:45 from your favorite reality shows, including the Real House Wise franchise, the drama, the alliances, and the T, everybody's talking about. As an executive producer in reality television, I'm not just watching it. I understand the game. As somebody who creates shows, I'll even say this. At the end of the day, when people are at home, they want entertainment. To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Starting point is 00:44:16 Happy pride from the Outspoken Podcast Network. 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. The more you get comfortable with someone, the more their real self comes out, they're going to be gross. What's the grossest thing about a man? Burping.

Starting point is 00:44:38 Shut it down. 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 Kikis, check outlaws with T.S. Madison. Wait, so Luke was the son of Vader. And Vader was turned by Rupal. Yeah, well, somebody's heard of some old, old, old witch. Learn to love yourself unapologetically with BFF, Black Fat Fem.

Starting point is 00:45:02 And start your day with intention with waking up with Ryan coming in July. Celebrate Pride with the outspoken network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Open your free IHeart Radio app. Search Pride and listen now. Isis. Al-Shinrikio and Christian sign this on. At first glance, these movements appear to have almost nothing in common. One is a transnational but territorially weakened terror network,

Starting point is 00:45:34 most active in the 2000s and 2010s. One was a fringe Japanese doomsday cult from the 90s, and one remains a powerful political movement embedded in the heart of the US, the world's premier imperialist power. The ideologies may be irreconcilable, their enemies may be different, and their methods even may vary from guerrilla warfare to political lobbying, and yet they have more in common than meets the eye. Welcome to Grapin here. I'm Andrew Sage or Andrews-I'm on YouTube, and I'm joined today by...

Starting point is 00:46:07 Garrison Davis. Hello. Welcome, welcome. So my goal is to try and understand these movements through the lens of ideological totalism, which was a specific theoretical framework developed by Robert J. Lifton to identify the outcome of a successful thought reform process, characterized by Denesterish and Tim Warforth in On the Edge, as a, quote, mood of absolute conviction, which embeds ideas so deeply in people's heads that they grow inoculated against doubt. Ideas cease to be provisional theories about the world and instead become sacred convictions, dependent on the word of hallowed authorities for their validation rather than evidence. End quote.

Starting point is 00:46:51 Lifton saw the potential for the emergence of ideological totalism within everyone. But he noted, quote, totalistic convictions are most likely to occur with those ideologies which are most sweeping in their content and most ambitious or messianic in their claims, whether religious, political or scientific. The eight criteria that he identified for thought reform were milieu control, which is the control of communication and information within the environment, mystical manipulation, which is the orchestrating of spontaneous events to serve the group's message, the demand for purity, which divides the world into black and white, good and evil categories,

Starting point is 00:47:31 the cult of confession, which pushes members to confess past sins and personal feelings to the group, the secret science, which elevates the group's dogma to an unquestionable truth, loading the language, which is using jargon or cliches to minimize critical things, thinking, doctrine over person which subordinates individual experiences and identity to the group's beliefs, and finally the dispensing of existence, declaring that only those in the group have the right to exist. Now, not all of these factors may be at play for each of the specific movements that I would have mentioned, but we still see the outcome of this ideological totalism in each of these movements to very extent. The systematic erosion of individual autonomy

Starting point is 00:48:16 in favor of an unassailable authority. Whether we're speaking about ISIS or Amshuikio or Christian Zionism within the evangelical movement or in any other case, we will see how movements replace individual identity with a collective pro-round persona, where loaded language and thought-terminating cliches make dissent literally unthinkable, where the enemy other is manufactured, and where power is concentrated so tightly that the leader or the dogma becomes the only source of truth. So the foundation of ideological totalism is the destruction of nuance. To build a cohesive us and them, there must be clearly defined and definitionally polarized. First comes the categorization where the complexity of human

Starting point is 00:49:06 identity is reduced into a single non-negotiable trait, be it religion or nationality or ideology, and then comes to humanization, which is stripping the other of human qualities, transforming them from a person into a threat, impure, and infidel and obstacle. And finally, there's enclosure, which creates social or psychological walls that prevent the us from interacting with them. This ensures the only information the group receives is that of the others perceived malice. In the context of groups like ISIS, the us versus them in gin is expressed both ideologically and through physical violence.

Starting point is 00:49:45 By committing acts of terror, the group forces the rest of the world to recognize their boundary. There's no cross-contamination to be had with the infidel world, no middle ground. You're either part of their struggle for a global caliphate

Starting point is 00:49:58 or you're an enemy to be eradicated, whether you consider yourself a Muslim or anything else. With Amshamu, the cults Us versus them in Jinn operated through isolation in communes and the severing of external ties. The them was defined as the corrupted world or the spiritually dead,

Starting point is 00:50:18 and the group sought purity and enlightenment, so they targeted the individual's existing social networks, family, friends, mainstream society, labelling them as sources of contamination. By cutting off the member from the outside world, the cult ensured that the only reality that existed was the one provided by the leader. And with the political, religious, Christian Zionists,

Starting point is 00:50:40 the Us versus Them engine is built through, a historical and eschatological narrative that sees the entire secular world as enemies to the apocalyptic ambitions of Christ's return. They are frequently warned to avoid worldly influences, temptations from the devil that might skew them from the righteous path. The other, in all these cases, is successfully stripped of their humanity. The destruction of the them becomes a logical necessity for the survival of the us. And the isolation ensures the group's total control over an individual's interpretation of reality. Interesting how all these various cultish elements build on or use the techniques written about by,

Starting point is 00:51:24 like, Carl Schmidt, the front enemy distinction and how like creating groups like this, you know, you have to choose like a border point to choose the point that determines what we are and what our enemy is. And then in order to keep your group active or like say that border has to be moved, it has to always be like pushing. It can't actually stay at the same point. And you see that movement with all these groups, right? They have this like millinarianist, like apocalyptic focus, but they're still like moving towards this like larger enemy population.

Starting point is 00:51:54 Yeah, I mean, you see it in, like I mentioned, ISIS has erected this barrier that separates them even from Muslims who may share some of their other religious convictions, but do not share their political ambitions. Yeah. You see it with the evangelical movement, which distinguishes themselves from other Christian sects as being heretical or not fully committed to the wood or have gone astray in some way. Yeah, I mean, you can see that with the evangelical leaders and like the president picking fights with the literal pope of the Catholic Church. Yeah, I mean, the beef between the Catholics and the Protestants go kind of far back.

Starting point is 00:52:36 you suppose at least share this scripture or this overarching religious framework and yet there's still a desire to delineate to separate to define an enemy even within that cohort. And a lot of those current differences that do relate to like military action in the Middle East and what's happening in Palestine like specifically. And I found that to be an interesting connection as you're as you're talking about, you know, specifically like Christian Zionists and how the situation in the Middle East is extremely important for their apocalyptic worldview. And that is like one of the key differences between, between like evangelical Christians and, you know, the current stuff like that the Pope is saying, which is, you know, very much opposed

Starting point is 00:53:20 to what's happening in the Middle East. Yeah, because they've constructed this very robust eschatological framework, which is the next thing that I want to get into. The language that these movements use helps to control their people. You're controlling people not just through physical barriers, but through psychological barriers. If you can control the vocabulary available to a person, how a person understands the meaning of words, how they understand the meaning of their scriptures, you can control the range of thoughts that they're capable of having. You know, that was kind of the point that, and it's cliche at this point, is the point that George Orwell, was making when they had the ministry of truth in 1984 that you limit even language available

Starting point is 00:54:20 so that even dissent cannot be fully expressed. You don't have to censor anybody because you've already censor their minds. Yeah. And you see that even their own creation of like phrases and terms of terms of terms of phrase. They just get repeated and that just starts like replacing language. It turns to filling in the gap of language in communication. It's a thought terminating cliches. Exactly. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:54:48 Thoughtsiminating cliches and also just a broader cognitive enclosure. So in the case of Shinrikyo, you had the group using this dense, pseudoscientific and pseudo-religious jargon that blended spirituality, quantum physics, biology, and those who were most elevated in that group were able to, wield that language and make themselves sound so sophisticated and elevated and on a higher plane of truth and reality that made it very easy for them to swindle people within their circle. It created a linguistic barrier to entry so that you couldn't participate even in the group's truth without committing to their incomprehensible dogma.

Starting point is 00:55:31 Yeah. And if you don't commit to their incomprehensible dogma, then you just, you don't get it. You're going to be an outsider forever. you are not enlightened, you are outside of the truth. Yeah. And this is a problem across a lot of different groups, including groups that are not this, you know, apocalyptic or fascist or like religiously based,

Starting point is 00:55:51 but they even see versions of this among like the contemporary left. Yeah. Which creates like, yeah, this like barrier to entry by using certain like phrases like academic language. Yeah. And very idiosyncratic definitions of words that have otherwise common definitions. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:56:08 No, and how much politics is like this subcultural purpose of like maintaining a certain like subgroup, like a social circle versus actually building like mass politics and how the idiosyncratic small like purity of groups with their special language and these like barriers to entry makes it very hard to do larger political organizing that actually goes towards like a working class movement. Yeah. lifting points out that there is a tendency for ideological totalism in a lot of movements, as I already mentioned. So it's something we have to be on guard for if we want to avoid

Starting point is 00:56:48 falling into these traps. And so we look at the example of Omshanikio in this case, but ISIS also has a kind of a total elimination of nuance through polarized, emotionally charged vocabulary. And you have the believer and you have the infidel, which again, includes, fellow Muslims, you have the pure and you have the corrupt. Every dynamic, every binary is zero sum. You know, you're either with the caliphate or you're an enemy of God to be wiped out. And within the eschatological framework of Christian Zionism, opposing the apocalyptic and formed geopolitical ambitions is tantamount opposing God's plan.

Starting point is 00:57:27 You know, it's like, how dare you? They use these thought-terminating cliches, as you would have mentioned, things like, it is written. Yeah. It's in revelation. You know, it's God's will. And there's no way to actually challenge their policies or actions in their minds on whether it be humanitarian, legal, or logical grounds because it's like you're speaking Greek. I mean, doing something like arguing with God. It's like attacking their faith. And so we also see these movements stripping individuals of their agency for the sake of a transaction. the exchange of the self with all its very real vulnerabilities and mortality and earthly limitations

Starting point is 00:58:09 for a higher purpose that is eternal and absolute. In the case of Omshin Riccio, the destruction of the self was achieved through the redefinition of morality that used a distorted interpretation of Vajrayana Buddhism and placed the master's will above all conventional ethics. To follow the master and achieve spiritual evolution, one had to abandon the ego with its moral compass and its human attachments. And in its place, Amishan Rukyo offered the merit of absolute obedience. By following their leader's commands, even those of mass violence that would expose the wider world to their threat, the practitioner believed they were performing a ritual act of spiritual cleansing to become an instrument of a higher cosmic order. You see the same thing with the rise of ISIS, the destruction of the self achieved through the total absorption of the individual into the monolith.

Starting point is 00:59:07 The individuals stripped of their specific context, whatever nationality or background they may have had, and being reduced to a singular functional component of the struggle. Being given up purpose that was compensated with the promise of eternal significance, the promise of martyrdom, of fighting and dying for the caliphate. and with that the individual could bypass the mundane struggles of earthy life to secure a place in a permanent divine reality. And in the political theological sphere of Christian Zionism, the destruction of the self has more to do with relinquishing the self's agency and become an instrumentalized for the sake of God's plan, by frame an Israel's ascendance in the Middle East as an essential precursor to the Second Coming of Christ, and doing everything in their power to lobby for and support it, the movement disregards the genocidal costs for the reward, being the fulfillment of a defined apocalyptic timeline.

Starting point is 01:00:06 And so in all three cases, the follower is convinced that the destruction of this world, as they know it, and the destruction of the self within it, is not a tragedy, but actually a kind of liberation. But all three of these movements have been tragedies for the rest of the world. Arm Shon Rikio deployed chemical weapons in Tokyo's subway system. They killed 13 people and injured over 5,800 others, instilling a long-term anxiety for those living in the city that their shared space could be the site of potential terror.

Starting point is 01:00:37 And the person sitting next to you could be the vessel for a hidden, lethal ideology. ISIS has forcibly displaced millions, killed tens of thousands, and destroyed ancient heritage sites, all in their end. effort to erase the other, and the Middle East and Africa in particular continued to be scarred by its violence. Christian Zionist ideology has introduced a variable to the political equation that is immune to reason and negotiation that cannot question its theological justifications. Of course, Zionism is not entirely dependent on Christian Zionist support. You know, Jewish colonial settlements would have predated British support, American support, and Christian Zionist support,

Starting point is 01:01:21 But the political cosine that Christian Zionists provide within the premier superpower does aid in the continued support for the Palestinian genocide. So ideological totalism seeks to eliminate pluralism, to eliminate shared truth, and to literally kill. But we should not view the rise of totalizing ideologies as some freak-isolated phenomenon because it deprives its strength from the very framework and conditioning embedded in our existing social structures. The mechanisms of milieu control, loading the language and other techniques used by cultic tendencies exists in subtle forms within our mainstream institutions. We see the seeds of thought reform in the echo chambers of media ecosystems. We see the loading of language in the polarity.

Starting point is 01:02:15 rhetoric of politics. We see the demand for purity in the most aggressive forms of cultural and religious tribalism. The extremist can sometimes be the most honest, uninhibited expression, the natural endpoint of our world's authoritarian tendencies and subtle lifelong conditioning. At home in the classroom, at work in civic life, we are trained in the soft versions of the very deference that totalizing leaders eventually demand. We are conditioned to respect authority without question, to prioritize the greater good of the institution over individual agency, and to accept official narratives as the only valid reality. So when a leader arrives who promises to replace the complex, messy uncertainty of our political and social reality

Starting point is 01:03:01 with the clarity of absolute truth, the most conditioned minds naturally find the offer are they seductive? And so this disease, caught through social conditioning, must be treated by a fundamental reclamation of the individual's capacity for critical thought and autonomy. We have to move beyond the mere consumption of information to the active interrogation of it. This means cultivating the ability to recognize the traps of thought reform, the logical fallacies, the loading of the language, to recognize when an ideology is attempting to bypass our reason in favor of our emotions. The primary defense against thought reform is the refusal to let any authority, religious, political, or otherwise, become secret and beyond questioning.

Starting point is 01:03:49 Yeah, I think that point that you made towards the end there, but this thing just being the most visible consequence of the contradictions of our current social system is, like, really important. It's because, yeah, I mean, we're all sorting through the same sorts of causes that produce groups like this or produce the people that move into groups like this. And we might sort these out in different ways, but in the way that they do it, it's not fully alien.

Starting point is 01:04:19 It's just a very visible outward manifestation of the same sorts of internal contradictions. And like fascism feeds on these same things. You can see how much fascism overlaps with a lot of the stuff that you're talking about here. And it seemed kind of like suicidal tendencies, this destruction of the self, right? That is dealing with those same sorts of like social tensions

Starting point is 01:04:40 and internal contradictions that produce, like outbursts of antisocial behavior like this or in some cases like genocidal behavior. Yeah, yeah. I think it's very much resultant. There's the structure of our system. You know, the stresses, the anxieties, the pains and pressure points. And, you know, we are all different as individuals. And I think that some people respond to these conditions in ways that are very much either self-destructive, externally destructive, or both. I think a part of our task, in like a general sense, is providing some alternative to this, right?

Starting point is 01:05:30 You can look at the way the, really on like a global level, like the left has really receded a lot in the past 50, 60, 70 years. And that leaves a lot of, you know, people who are trying to look for this sort of purpose, right? They're trying to understand the contradictions of the world. and there may not be a humanistic option for that. So it gets directed into a much more destructive ways sometimes. You can see what happened in Rojava with Democratic Confederalism. They actually did that, right?

Starting point is 01:06:01 They saw what was needed and they did it. And it's directly opposing the sort of alternative version, which is ISIS, which is like super interesting, right? But I think we have the same problem here. But we don't really have a strong alternative to that, a healthy and growing working class movement which attempts to actually solve

Starting point is 01:06:24 the sort of problems that are in the world that these sorts of other things like feed on, right? They grab onto these very present problems and apply an emotionally soothing response to it, even if it is self-destructive.

Starting point is 01:06:41 Yeah. The work of building an alternative and demonstrating it and ensuring people live in it, I think is very, very important. Yeah. I also think that when you consider the fact that the whole mark of totalizing systems is the elimination of the other and the criminalization of dissent, our antidotes, our alternative has to embrace, it has to be committed to diversity of thought and expression.

Starting point is 01:07:10 And I also think that it has to be willing to sit with conflict, to sit with tensions. Yeah. to allow them to engage with each other without trying to just override it with some false unity. Those tensions and conflict are like important. And that is that is how we will like develop our thought and develop our movement forward. You have to, you have to have those tensions. You have to have that conflict and disagreement, which will hopefully produce more positive outcomes. Yeah, hopefully it's generative conflict and not destructive conflict. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:07:45 Yeah, I mean, and some conflicts can be. generative, if we accept that they can't be resolved. Yeah. I think part of what makes some conflicts destructive is this effort to kind of, uh, just paint over them with some kumbaya sense of, oh, we'll just, will you just unify like that's not consequential or we'll figure it out or that's just how it is. And I think we, yeah, we have to be willing to be uncomfortable with not having the answers. I mean, we never having the answers in some cases.

Starting point is 01:08:16 there are those who I think will have the capacity to engage into de-radicalization of ideological totalists. I don't think I'm among them. And I think that there are others that we can care outreach towards. Yes. I get irritated sometimes when I see people who believe that the focus of our attention right now as people trying to build an alternative, trying to build a better tomorrow, that our focus should be. on trying to de-radicalize right-wingers.

Starting point is 01:08:50 Yeah. The vast majority of people are politically unaffiliated, politically uncommitted, apathetic, disengaged. And I think that we can do far more if we were to focus on reaching those people and helping those people see the problems

Starting point is 01:09:07 with the system and the solutions that we have on offer, than engaging in fruitless debate with right-winger and Zoh. Yeah, and I think that's actually the most effective form of de-radicalization. Exactly, exactly. There is a lot of problems with the sort of de-radicalization framework that emerged in like 2018 to kind of meet the rise of like the alt-right.

Starting point is 01:09:32 A lot of it doesn't work. A lot of it can be fruitless. But there is like a noble intention behind it. And I think the best way to actually do that is by just providing a healthy alternative. That does appeal to most people. It doesn't need to be catered toward someone who's on like the right or like the far right.

Starting point is 01:09:50 Because in a lot of cases, those people are suffering from the same sorts of problems that the rest of people are. They've just found a false solution for it. And so if you're able to provide a better solution, a lot of them will move over. There's really very few that are like through and tried, like ideologically committed, right?

Starting point is 01:10:06 There's some and they're maybe very vocal on the internet. But that's not actually like most... Yeah, and also the internet is at least half thoughts at this point. So you know, you take some of those internet discussions with a grain of salt in terms of being representative of any population significantly. But I did have some tips with regard to outreach for those who may have a special interest in it or maybe have a loved one that they really want to help where they see being immersed in an ideologically totalistic environment, for one, directly attacking a person's core beliefs are going to trigger something

Starting point is 01:10:49 called the backfire effect, which is where contradictory evidence actually strengthens their conviction because their identity is now fused to their ideology. So an attack on the idea is perceived as a mortal attack on their self. Debeating them is not going to help. It's better to think of yourself more as a connecting force rather than a correctly. force. You're a lifeline, yeah. To gently guide them out of their radical mindset, rather than trying to instruct them out of it, to berate them out of it. And when you notice that they are experiencing doubt in their ideas, it can be very exciting to try and rush in and show them the way, but you don't want to overwhelm them. Doubt, especially for people immersed in that mindset, might literally

Starting point is 01:11:40 collapse their entire social and cognitive world. So your focus, I think, needs to be on providing a safe harbor where their doubts can be expressed freely without judgment or any pressure to immediately betray all that they've ever known. You also need to consider the conditions that led the person into that situation in the first place. If you know what they were like and what their situation was like prior to indoctrination, whether they had certain relationship issues, financial issues, systemic abuses, traumas, isolation,

Starting point is 01:12:15 some kind of yearning for meaning or purpose, that can help you contextualize their situation. And while you can always fundamentally disagree with their conclusions, it's good to recognize the needs that drove them to those conclusions. But in addition to that, you can try to find out what their passions and hobbies will or are outside of that doctrine, so that they have some kind of psychological landing pad if they were to escape the environment so that they're not without a sense of self, so they're not floundering for some form of identity. These movements and this tendency for ideological totalism derived from hierarchy will not be overcome in one fell swoop. It is a continuous,

Starting point is 01:13:04 daily struggle within the human mind and the social fabric. It's a struggle to remain unconditioned by the temptations of certainty, to hold on to the messy, the diverse, the complex, to create a social foundation of individuals who are capable of saying no. And that's it for me. All power to all the people. Peace. Pride month, Toronto.

Starting point is 01:13:41 Pride is an opportunity for you to create your own space. celebrate your existence. Iheart Radio is proud to be an official sponsor of Pride Toronto Festival, and we won't stop. Celebrate Pride. Turn up the love and listen to IHeart Pride Canada. Your 24-7 radio stream and the only playlist you need for your Toronto Pride celebrations. Pride is so great because it gives a whole bunch of people this visibility that they've never had before. We have a ton to celebrate Toronto.

Starting point is 01:14:08 Happy Pride. Iheart Radio. 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.

Starting point is 01:14:27 We dropped, like, five right now. Like, that's the rate we gotta be going. Yep, that's a good attitude. You also hear stories from industry legends and hip-hop pioneers like Fab Five Freddy. I directed when Nas's early videos. Which one? One love.

Starting point is 01:14:41 Wow. Yes. I literally filmed in his apartment in Queens. Bridge. His moms were still up in that apartment. Nans was just beginning to take off. His pops used to live near me in Harlem. His dad introduced him to a whole lot of, you know, conscious stuff and 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

Starting point is 01:15:10 podcast. If you're watching the latest season of the Real Housewives of Atlanta, you already know a lot to break down. Georgia accusing Kelly of sleeping with a merry man. They holding Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew. Pinky has financial issues. I like the bougie style of Housewives show. I think it looks like it's going to be interesting. On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King,

Starting point is 01:15:35 recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Real Housewives franchise, the drama, the alliances, and the team everybody's talking about. As an executive producer in reality, I'm not just watching it. I understand the game. As somebody who creates shows, I'll even say this. At the end of the day, when people are at home, they want entertainment.

Starting point is 01:15:58 To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Happy Pride from the Outspoken Podcast Network. All month long and all year round, we're celebrating being loud, proud, and always original. It's me, Brandon Kyle Goodman, host to you. of the podcast, tell me something messy. Check out my show for unfiltered takes on dating, relationships, and adulting. The more you get comfortable with someone,

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Starting point is 01:16:40 was the son of Vader. Yeah. And Vader was turned by Rupal. Yeah, well, somebody's heard of us. Some old, old, old witch. Learn to love yourself unapologetically with BFF, Black Fat Fem, and start your day with intention with waking up with Ryan coming in July. Celebrate Pride with the outspoken network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 01:17:03 Open your free IHeart Radio app, search pride, and listen now. When we think of globalization, we often think of trade and late 20th century technological interconnection and the movement of capital. But there was another kind of globalization emerging in the late 19th century. That was the globalization of resistance. In the closing decades of the 1800s, a network of ideas, outlaws, and revolutionaries would emerge to challenge the empires of the time. Welcome to I could happen here.

Starting point is 01:17:40 I'm Andrew Sage, Andrewsum on YouTube, and I'm joined again by... Garrison Davis. Hello. Welcome again. and in this episode, using the research of historian Bendick Anderson in chapter five of the age of mobilization, I want to look at this period in history where the tools of empire were appropriated by the very people the empire sought to suppress, to link anarchist prisoners in Montreich, to intellectuals in Paris, to agitators in Cuba, to nationalists into Philippines. Now, the story doesn't actually begin in Montreish prison in Barcelona, Spain, but a narrative begins there. Following the June 7, 1896 bombing in Corpus Christi,

Starting point is 01:18:25 300 people were imprisoned in a wave of Spanish state repression. Among those caught in the crackdown was Fernando Tarida del Marmol, a Cuban creole whose background connected him to both metropole and colony. His imprisonment was a direct consequence of the state's attempt to suppress the burgeoning anarchist movement in Catalonia, but it would only end up fueling the movement, thanks to the efforts of the radical international press. Territo was a math teacher, which actually helped him out when he got arrested because a young lieutenant warden recognized his former teacher and managed to sound the alarm of his incarceration. Territo also happens to be the cousin of a conservative senator who used his influence to ensure Therida's release. But Tarita didn't let these privileges

Starting point is 01:19:11 cause him to forget his less privileged fellow prisoners, because he immediately upon release went to Paris, the city of duality, a city that was both the central capital of colonial power and a premier global hub for political dissent. So there in Paris, Terrida gained access to La Revue Blanche, a very popular periodical of the era. He'd been a recognized writer from before his imprisonment,

Starting point is 01:19:37 as he'd popularly advocated for anarchism without adjectives. and he had gotten into a back and forth about workers' associations and bureaucracy and propaganda of the deed with a certain Jean Grave, who was another popular French anarchist of the period. So in La Revue Blanche, Terrida published his personal, brutal experience of imprisonment and contextualized it as a broader political indictment by connecting the gruesome suppression of dissent in Barcelona to the exact same mechanisms being deployed in the Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Thus, he demonstrated that repression in Spanish provinces was not an isolated domestic issue, but a fundamental characteristic of Spanish colonial policy, and this narrative was taken up and amplified by the efforts of Felifignon and Georges Clemenchow. Felifignon was an influential art critic and prominent anarchist intellectual,

Starting point is 01:20:31 who helped frame the struggle against Spanish repression as a significant moral crisis. He also wrote strongly against French imperialism and revanchist nationalists. And Georges Clement Chow was a radical journalist and politician, considered a formidable figure in the defense of political prisoners, as he had the capacity to mobilize public opinion around issues of justice, state authority. So together these figures helped ensure that the grievances of Tarida and the Spanish prisoners were integrated into the global conversation. Now historian Benedict Anderson situates these events within the long 19th century,

Starting point is 01:21:07 which had a lot of high-profile political violence. specifically anarchist bombings and targeted assassinations, which prompted a corresponding escalation in state power through much more stringent legal frameworks and surveillance apparatuses. Parallel to the rise of anti-terror legislation was the emergence of a new structured infrastructure of dissent, consisting of labor organizations and radical press, which served as a vital node in the global network, capable of circulating revolutionary ideas and coordinating and resistance across borders. In addition to the Montreux Affair, the Dreyfus Affair would also be amplified by this network. The Dreyfus affair was an incident in French history where in 1894,

Starting point is 01:21:53 a certain Alfred Dreyfus, who was a Jewish captain in the French army, was accused of treason, alleged to have passed sensitive military documents to the German intelligence services. The evidence against him was largely based on forged documents and a high degree of antisemitic prejudice, So Dreyfus was convicted, stripped of his rank, and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island. But the radical press began calling this out, especially when evidence surfists suggesting that the actual spy was another officer, Ferdinand Walson Estahezy. But the French military high command had covered it up, suppressing evidence manipulating court proceedings and intimidating witnesses to ensure that Dreyfus remained convicted. A pivotal moment in the affair was the publication of, non-radical Emil Zola's open letter,

Starting point is 01:22:43 Czechuse, in the newspaper La Roar in 1898, as Zola used the power of the press to directly challenge the military high command after the real culprit was acquitted the day after his trial began. This landed Zola in jail for libel, where he eventually got out on a plea deal, but it also earned him the tenuous respect of some critical left-wing intellectuals. Meanwhile, Terida had already left Paris for Belgium, then London, where he made use of his contacts around the world to create a coalition of, quote,

Starting point is 01:23:14 liberals, freemasons, socialists, anarchists, anti-imperialists, and anti-clericals, end quote, against the Spanish government and especially against Prime Minister Antonio Canova's del Castillo, the Conservative who was the chief architect of the brutal repression of Spanish anarchists, socialists, and labour activists domestically. His aim was to ensure the stability of the Spanish monarchy amidst growing pressures of anarchism, labor unrest, cluna rebellion, and American aggression. On August 9, 1897, the Italian anarchist Michelangolillo assassinated Canova. Angiolillo was a real monarchy hater.

Starting point is 01:23:56 He had traveled to Barcelona under a fake name and was working as a freelance printer when the Corpus Christi bombing occurred. The city was put under martial law, and he had been a real estate. his anarchist friends were incarcerated in Montreich. After hearing about how they were being tortured, he fled for Paris, was expelled to Belgium, then moved to London,

Starting point is 01:24:15 where Tirida's agitation against the Canova's regime was at full strength. He continued to work as a printer and engaged in activism in London for some time, where people asked who would avenge those tortured and murdered by the Spanish state, including the recently executed Jose Rizal, who was a Filipino nationalist.

Starting point is 01:24:33 So after hearing this, Angiolillo was like, okay, bet, and he makes his way back to the continent of Europe with a pistol in his pocket. In France, he meets Dr. Ramon Betanus, was a Puerto Rican physician, revolutionary, who sought the independence of Puerto Rico and the dismantling of Spanish colonial authority in the Antelis. He spent his life country hopping, helping the sick, and fleeing Spanish spies. And although he wasn't an anarchist, he was connected with a lot of anarchists, particularly French and Italian. Italian anarchists through the heterogeneous front against the Spanish state, against imperialism, and monarchical tyranny. The European anarchists and socialists found a natural ally in the anti-colonial movement he was part of, as the liberation of Puerto Rico and Cuba would represent a vital blow against the same imperialist structures they were fighting to dismantle in Europe. Now, Betancis claims

Starting point is 01:25:27 he redirected the target of Angio Lilo's planned assassination from the Spanish Queen Regent and infant to the Prime Minister. But Benedict Anderson calls this narrative into question because there doesn't seem to be any corroborating evidence. Anyway, so Angiolillo gets to Madrid, he learns Canova's location, he stalks him for a bit, and then he shoots him dead with the pistol he brought from London. In his trial, Angiolino defends himself with reference to Montjuish and Cuba and the Philippines and says, quote, Canova's personified in their most repugnant forms. religious ferocity, military cruelty, the implacability of the judiciary, the tyranny of power,

Starting point is 01:26:10 and the greed of the possessing classes. I have rid Spain, Europe, and the entire world of him. That is why I am no assassin, but rather an executioner. End quote. That does go pretty hard. It does go hard. When is this? Is this late 1800s or early 1900s? Late 1800s. Late 1800s. Okay. Yeah. So after his rousing speech, he was then himself executed at just 26 years old.

Starting point is 01:26:39 Now, beyond being a symptom of imperial crisis, Canova's assassination functioned as an accelerant. By removing such a central figure of the political machinery of Spain in the midst of its war against the US, Angiolillo's Act triggered the volatility that would culminate in the loss of Spain's final colonial possession. In 1898, Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico were in the hands of the United States, and the bullets that killed Canova just kept going, well into the decades to come. Now, speaking of the Philippines, we can turn now to that Pacific node of the Movement Network. Isabello de Los Reyes was a moderate liberal of his time, somewhat privileged as a businessman, publisher, and journalist, but he wasn't afraid to advocate strongly against,

Starting point is 01:27:40 Spanish colonial rule, and was arrested in connection to the Philippine Revolution of 1896, as part of a broader repression against rebels, intellectuals, and activists. The revolution had begun prematurely after the Spanish authorities discovered their plot, and so many of the revolutionaries were imprisoned as a result. Now, while imprisoned, Isabello had to deal with the death of his wife and was unable to attend her funeral or do anything for their children. Naturally, after an experience like that, he would be pissed at the colonial injustices that he and his people suffered at the hands of the government and at the hands of the religious orders. He demanded political reform and was met with relocation, first to a Barcelona municipal jail and then to the infamous

Starting point is 01:28:27 Montuich. While in Spain, he met several brave anarchists who had been imprisoned for various crimes, crimes including advocating for Cuban independence, protesting trials by military courts, and opening secular schools gasp for children. Which, I mean, it was Catholic Spain at that point in time. Yeah. So that was like the worst thing you could possibly do. There was some anarchists who were in jail for assassinations.

Starting point is 01:28:56 But I mean, come on. What's a little assassination between friends? I mean, yeah, assassination and opening a school, I think is the same level of, of danger to the state at this point. Indeed. And these dangerous criminals demonstrated a level of solidarity that really inspired Isabello. And while in prison, he also got access to anarchist literature and was able to take part

Starting point is 01:29:22 in discussions with anarchists, where he learned about the rejection of state authority, colonial domination, and class hierarchy. Now, in this exile period, I don't think he ever be able to be. became an anarchist, and I mean, later in his life even served as a senator, but he was profoundly influenced by the anarchists and did come to admire them for decades to come. Eventually, following the assassination of Canova's and the change in government, in 1898, Isabello was freed. He then moved to Madrid and started a fortnightly publication, Filipinas and Europa, an anti-imperialist critique with particular focus on the growing American empire. And it's funny because

Starting point is 01:30:03 after Spain lost their colonies to the US, all of a sudden public opinion in Spain started to become sympathetic to the Filipino fight. It was like, oh, now we could start to feel bad for all. You know, the Americans embarrassed us, so now we have some sympathy for your plight. And so Isabello criticized America's claim to be liberating the Philippines and Cuba as hypocrisy

Starting point is 01:30:27 by pointing to the regular occurrence of lynchings and racist institutions within the US. and he also criticized the Filipino elite for their willingness to collaborate with the new colonial rulers. The Philippine Revolution was basically over by 1901. As a key leader named Emilio Aguinaldo was captured and had to swear allegiance to the U.S. By the way, Alginardo would also prove to be a collaborator later in his life as he worked with the Japanese occupiers of the Philippines during World War II. So it's a pattern of behavior for that guy.

Starting point is 01:31:01 Anyway, so after the end of the revolution, Isabelo decided to finally return to the Philippines, to reunite with the six children he had with his first wife, who he hadn't seen in years, and to continue the struggle. Also, when he was in Spain, he got married. Isabello arrived in Manila with the works of Thomas Aquinas, Voltaire, Pedroos of Prudon, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Peter Cropotkin, and Erico Malatester. He might have been the first person to bring the work works of some of these thinkers to the Philippines. And I think we kind of understate that luck of the draw, I suppose, when we talk about the movement of ideas in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Starting point is 01:31:45 You know, they didn't have the internet. They didn't have the Anacus Library. It takes a lot of work. Yeah. Yeah. They didn't have all these accessible means of learning about these ideas. So if you didn't happen to know somebody who could bring in that kind of literature for you, well, first of all, you wouldn't even know that literature

Starting point is 01:32:00 existed unless somebody told you about it. The access to information was severely limited. And so fortunately, Isabelo brought these ideas to Philippines that he was the first to do so in his time. But as we'll soon see, the history of the Philippines could have gone in a slightly different trajectory if he had not brought in that literature, learned about those ideas, started engaging and agitating on that basis,

Starting point is 01:32:24 based on his experiences. I mean, he ended up in a Spanish prison of all places. So the Spanish Empire that imprisoned him ended up sowing the seeds for rebellion in the former territory later on. As it happens. A not uncommon turn of events, actually. Indeed.

Starting point is 01:32:42 So Isabelo pulls up in Manila and his reputation as an anti-imperialist preceded him. He was labeled a dangerous anarchist. And it really didn't help that the US President McKinley had literally been shot to death by an anarchist just a month prior.

Starting point is 01:33:00 This whole period of time is just while every time that I've done an episode with you about like the late 1800s to early to early 1900s. It's always stuff like this. It's like an unbelievable collection of happening. Like history really has such a momentum during this period. Like it's unbelievable. Yeah, I just, I really enjoy drawing those connections. Because I mean, he came to Manila with all these organizational plays. He was going to start a party. He was going to launch a news people. But as he pulls up and he realizes he's literally on a list. Yeah. You know, he kind of had to scrap those ideas and pull back a bit. And like Lenin's doing the same stuff like in Germany and Russia during the same time. Like everyone, like everyone understands the mission. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone knows what has to happen. And this is like before the standardization of passports. Yeah. This is before. the global visa system.

Starting point is 01:34:02 And so people are literally just moving around. Yeah. I mean, I always marvel at the fact that Eric Comanatester was like, he was getting active in Egypt. At one point he pulled up in Brazil. You know, everybody has to come to Brazil eventually. He was everywhere, right? And these ideas were everywhere too as a result of the movement of people

Starting point is 01:34:24 bringing these books, bringing these ideas, get involved in conversation. It also helped, of course, that a lot of, of anarchists were printmakers. Still are. Still are. Yeah. Many such cases. So Isabello switched strategies. In his words, he took advantage of the occasion to put into practice the good ideas

Starting point is 01:34:56 that he had learned from the anarchists of Barcelona, who were imprisoned with him in the infamous fortress of Montreche. So he started organizing the working class in Manila. He had the benefit of actually being able to speak the language of the swaths of workers in Manila because he happened to come from the same region of the fastly linguistically diverse Philippines that they did.

Starting point is 01:35:18 He was from the Ilocos region of the island of Luson, and he natively spoke the Ilocano language like many of the workers that had migrated to Milan. Though he was technically part of the intelligentsia, Isabello had a connection to the roots, you know, to the people, the streets, until he began by organizing the prince,

Starting point is 01:35:39 of course, and helping them with their strikes, and from there the efforts very quickly snowballed, far quicker than the elites could have anticipated into a cross-industry worker federation, called the Union Obrera Democratica, the first of its kind in the entire country. The Federation was flexible and loosely structured, which made it quite suited to undertaking various strike actions. But beyond demonstrations and strikes, Isabello also incorporated a little local flavor because the union was also involved in festivals and theatre and music events. So it was a combination of worker and non-worker-based organization. You get a little bit of everybody involved when you do that,

Starting point is 01:36:24 rather than strictly focusing on just one plane of struggle and connection. Eventually, however, the Americans got their act together and met this movement with surveillance, arrest and trials. And though they couldn't legally justify keeping him in jail for very long, they did throw Isabello back into jail for a short period. Now, the Wilco Federation would eventually collapse, but the ideas remained, and those ideas fed directly into various labor organizations, socialist parties, and guerrilla movements going forward.

Starting point is 01:36:57 As for Isabello, his second wife, the one he married in Spain, died, and two years later, he married again, to an 18-year-old. Isabello married and was widowed three times. He actually outlived all of his wives and had a grand total of 27 children. Jesus Christ. Yeah. I have no comments on what kind of father he may have been, but that's just... I mean, yeah, you can kind of assume based on those numbers.

Starting point is 01:37:30 But yeah, that is one of this. And the fact that he was in Spain, got married in Spain, had to be. six children back home who had lost their mother. Yeah. I mean, he wasn't in Spain by choice, right? But, you know, he was middle class. He may have had family back at home taking care of his children, but still as rough. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:37:50 That is rough. So later on his life, like I mentioned before, he got into electoral politics on the municipal level and the Senate level. And he also in his life got to work in religious reform, eventually found in the Aglipayan. church, which was the first ever Filipino independent Catholic Christian church. Yeah, I was wondering, because like you mentioned he brought over Thomas Aquinas. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:38:17 He was very critical of the religious orders, the Spanish Catholic religious orders, but yeah, he ended up forming an independent Catholic church, so a Catholic church that is not associated with Rome. Hmm. You said he didn't identify as an anarchist. Did he identify as like a socialist? us, like, what kind of was this, like, self-defined politics, like, around this point and, like, when he started running for office on the municipal level? I didn't see how he defined himself.

Starting point is 01:38:44 I think he considered himself to be a patriot. You know, a patriot, somebody who is pro-labor. I don't know that he assigned himself necessarily the title of socialist or anarchist or liberal or anything like that. Yeah. He has, however, been called the father of the Philippine labor movement. and the father of Filipino socialism. But what do we take from all of this? You know, the empire might globalize trade, might globalize capital, might globalize various forms of suppression,

Starting point is 01:39:18 but it inadvertently globalizes resistance. The same infrastructure that empires use to extend their reach across the claim territories is the same infrastructure that radicals can use to fight. you know, even prison was used as a site of connection. A literal place of repression became a place that connected people across multiple countries. I think the lesson that I take away from this kind of narrative I've spun here between the Cuban Creole Fernando Terida, the Puerto Rican Dr. Ramon Betancis, the Italian Michelangelo,

Starting point is 01:40:01 and the Filipino Isabello de los race is that the globalization was not a one-way imposition. We could potentially adopt the empire's tools to fight back and to network or resistance. People who are doing resistance, but on the other side of the political spectrum,

Starting point is 01:40:24 do this same thing, like the formation of ISIS in prisons because of how we imprisoned Al-Qaeda members is a pretty key example of this. Yeah. This is a very common thing. Like, it turns out, very, very often, the master's tools actually are used

Starting point is 01:40:41 to dismantle the master's house. That phrase still has some, like, I think, metaphorical uses. But in a sort of like literalist sense, I occasionally push back on it. Because, yeah, it does view movement as a one-way thing. It has, it has like no dialectical analysis.

Starting point is 01:41:01 And I think part of part of our job is like adapting and moving as empire and capital adapts and moves to the flow of history. 100%. And with that, as always, all power to all the people. Peace. Osiaga, with four nights at residents in downtown Montreal, flights from Porter Airlines, two weekend gold tickets, and $1,000 of cash. Lord, Zara Larson, Dame Grey, Somer, 21 pilots, and more.

Starting point is 01:41:50 Download IHeard Radio, listen to IHeard new music for 10 minutes, and enter to win. Osiaga, 26. Every day you listen is another chance to win. June is Black Music Month, and on the Drink Chams podcast, we're speaking with the hottest names in the culture,

Starting point is 01:42:06 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 01:42:17 That's the rate we got to be going. Yep, that's a good attitude. You also hear stories from industry legends and hip-hop pioneers like Fab Five Freddie. I directed when Nas' early videos. Which one? One love. Wow. I literally filmed in his apartment in Queensbridge.

Starting point is 01:42:36 His moms were still up in that apartment. Nause was just beginning to take off. His pops used to live near me in Harlem. His dad introduced him to a whole lot of. the old conscious stuff, and he made a young prodigy. No matter the era, Drinkchamps brings you the biggest names and the most unfiltered conversations. Listen to Drink Chams from the Black Effect Podcast Network

Starting point is 01:42:55 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. If you're watching the latest season of the Real Housewives of Atlanta, you already know there's a lot to break down. Gorsha accusing Kelly of sleeping with a merry man. They holding Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew. Pinky has financial issues. I like the bougie style of Housewives show.

Starting point is 01:43:17 I think it looks like it's going to be interesting. On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Real Housewives franchise, the drama, the alliances, and the team everybody's talking about. As an executive producer in reality television, I'm not just watching it. I understand the game.

Starting point is 01:43:39 As somebody who creates shows, I'll even say this. At the end of the day, when people are at home, they want entertainment. To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Happy Pride from the Outspoken Podcast Network. All month long and all year round,

Starting point is 01:44:00 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. The more you get comfortable with someone, more their real self comes out, they're going to be gross. What's the grossest thing about a man?

Starting point is 01:44:17 Burping. Shut it down. 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. Wait, so Luke was the son of Vader. And Vader was turned by Rupal. Yeah, well, somebody's heard of some old, old witch. Learn to love yourself unapologetically with BFF, Black Fat Fem.

Starting point is 01:44:41 And start your day with intention with waking up. with Ryan coming in July. Celebrate Pride with the outspoken network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Open your free IHeart Radio app. Search Pride and listen now. Hello everyone and welcome to It Happen here. My name is Dan Al-Kurd.

Starting point is 01:45:02 I'm a researcher and analyst of Arab and Palestinian politics. And today I have with me, Andrew Lieber. Andrew Lieber is a non-resident scholar in the Carnegie Middle East program and an assistant professor in Tulane University's Department of Political Science and their Middle East and North Africa Studies Program. His research and teaching focuses on the domestic politics and international relations of the Middle East and North Africa region with that particular focus on Saudi Arabia. Andrew, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. So I wanted to have you on today because, well, the war on Iran, but also because I think there's been a lot of reporting and some that's

Starting point is 01:45:36 not very well sourced in mainstream media like the New York Times about the GCC States, GCC Gulf Cooperation Council, so the Arab Gulf States. about their motivations and the actions of the Gulf states during this war, I think that there's been a lot of obfuscation for a variety of reasons. So I wanted to bring you on, giving your expertise, to kind of clarify fact from fiction on some of that. We're recording May 28th, so maybe people have seen this. Trump also recently threatened to bomb Aman,

Starting point is 01:46:05 who were acting as mediators initially. So, yeah, I wanted to go through all the main GCC actors and get your analysis of their behavior during this war, what they want to happen when it's over? Sure, yeah, happy to do so. I think one thing that has been a little hard for people to follow maybe has been the tendency for U.S. and English language. Media outlets just talk about the Gulf states or the G states are what they want from this conflict.

Starting point is 01:46:31 But even heading into this war, there were already key differences among these countries. There was a diplomatic and increasingly potentially a military rift between Saudi Arabia and the neighboring United Arab Emirates. There have been past disputes between different cult countries as well. And even though initially the Iran War seemed like it would paper over the cracks in these divisions, in many ways, it's also deepened the divides as different countries have interpreted the threats posed by Iran and by Israel and potentially even the United States in different ways. So at present, we can maybe think of three broad camps within the GCC. So there's Saudi Arabia, the largest by

Starting point is 01:47:13 landmass of these countries, and to a lesser extent, Kuwait, and also Qatar have taken the approach of trying to just get things back to, quote-unquote, normal, or like a new normal, supporting mediation efforts by other countries like Pakistan, and now, at least for Qatar, increasingly engaged in direct mediation to try to lock in some kind of agreement that restores flows of energy and other goods in and out of the Strait of Hormuz, the key body of water that allows things in and out of the Persian Gulf. In one direction, you've had the United Arab Emirates, which has presented itself as kind of much more hawkish in terms of its willingness to potentially use military force against

Starting point is 01:47:56 Iran or to join the United States in a military effort to open the Strait of Hormuz. In the past few days, it's been quietly walking back some of those positions, but it has tried to draw back contrast between its more assertive stance towards Iranian actions in the region. and Saudi Arabia. And then the other direction has discussed, we have the Sultan of Oman, which leaned much further in the other direction during the war, being the only country that criticized openly from the start, both the U.S. and Israeli-led attacks on Iran and Iran's reprisals on the other side of the Gulf. Omani foreign minister Badrubu Saidi went on U.S. television prior to the war to make the case that this was the possible ongoing talks between

Starting point is 01:48:39 the U.S. and Iran could bear fruit. That was unsuccessful. intervention, but also Omani diplomats of various points have offered much more critical commentary of the United States. But they have likewise kind of walked that back, or at least not emphasized there as much in recent weeks, but clearly there is a narrative critical of their role that circulates in some parts of D.C., which percolated its way up into the president saying, well, if Oman is not going to cooperate with certain things, then we'll just bond them until they do, which, you know, is not the nicest way to ask for the question. cooperation of other countries and a sensitive geopolitical issue, but so it goes. Right. We're not the most

Starting point is 01:49:17 effective these days, let's say. Yeah, so thank you for kind of laying that out. There are so many questions I have. I want to talk about kind of how Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, you've already mentioned, differ on this issue, but also like how their differences speak to different visions for the region, especially vis-à-vis Israel. But also just like before we get to that, there's been a lot of reporting about how Saudi Arabia is like secretly really gunned whole about the war and is encouraging the Trump administration to be more aggressive. What weight do you put on those reports? Yeah, I mean, those have been around since the start of the conflict.

Starting point is 01:49:55 I'll preface this by giving a major caveat, which is that every week that goes by, we learn more about what we didn't know earlier in the war. Like, you know, we know now that both the UAE and Saudi Arabia have carried out airstrikes on Iran at certain points that they didn't publicize. that, but I'm broadly skeptical of accounts that Saudi Arabia and specifically Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman advocated for this war, pushed for the war. Saudi Arabia and Iran have not always had very great relations, but they nominally reestablished diplomatic ties in 2023. And generally, I think Saudi Arabia's view is they want to keep the

Starting point is 01:50:32 geopolitical peace in the surrounding neighborhood because otherwise Saudi Arabia can't get the kind of foreign investment or the kind of economic partnerships it needs to generate economic growth and employ its citizen population, a major political concern. And I think even the United Arab Emirates prior to this war was not pushing for it actively. I think these countries also don't want to tell, with the possible exception of Vermont, don't want to tell President Trump no directly. So my understanding of things is that everything prior to the world was phrased in a kind of conditional. We would recommend you don't do this, but just make sure if you just think this is a good idea that you can militarily defeat Iran in a rather quick and decisive fashion. Of course, that

Starting point is 01:51:16 banked on the United States as current policymakers having an accurate view of their own capabilities, which seem to be not a correct assumption. But I think that also during the war, you had kind of a panic in different directions, like a belief that, well, I guess if the United States has gone to war, clearly they can solve this militarily, right? So I think you had some leaders, especially the United Arab Emirates, pushing the United States to, like, finish the job, don't leave the conflict in a state where it's very clear that the United States can militarily force Iran to do certain things, but you also haven't kind of secured meaningful concessions from Iran. And that, I think, is, I guess one thing that the United States now, again, with the possible exception of Oman,

Starting point is 01:51:59 is concerned about where they get left if there is any kind of deal. It's very clear that they do not have a seat at the table in terms of these negotiations. And there's certainly a lot of complaints online or in media outlets in the Gulf about that fact. But it doesn't change the reality that these are U.S.-Iran negotiations with maybe some consultation with Israel, maybe some communication with Saudi Arabia with the UA, but not a ton of consultation of them. And just to be clear, they've paid the brunt of the price here. and Iran has attacked civilian infrastructure and desalination plants and all those things. Yeah, no, I mean, Iran calculated, I think, well, we could attack Israel, but most of the rockets

Starting point is 01:52:39 and missiles be shot down. Israel's farther away, it's harder to hit them with a larger payload, whereas you can hit a lot of infrastructure in the Gulf. It's been very clear that Iran targeted not only U.S. military bases, but also civilian infrastructure in an attempt to put a lot of economic pressure on these countries, especially the UAE, and even countries that had sought to mediate between the conflict, there had been more openly, you know, critical of any U.S. military adventurism like Qatar basically have their entire economy frozen right now because they can get very little of the liquid natural gas they produce in or out. Same thing with Kuwait, same thing with Bahrain. One interesting, maybe unintended consequence of this, though, is that some of the gold

Starting point is 01:53:16 states are doing better than others economically from this Saudi Arabia and the UAE have made up, you know, a significant portion of the ground lost from lost oil exports because they can export some oil over land. And Oman is exporting about as much oil as before, but at a much higher price, so economically or even doing perhaps better. But yeah, these are the countries that are primarily paid the price in direct terms. And then by extension, every country that relies on their energy supplies is also paying the price in terms of higher costs for cooking gas, diesel, fertilizer, and so on. Right. Really, this is an American-Israeli war, even if the United States kind of holds the final say. But, you know, recently on social media and in a number of repeated

Starting point is 01:54:11 statements, President Trump himself and his administration have talked about the Abraham Accords and normalization with Israel, tying it into possible outcomes for this war. How do you, how do you explain that? I'm sure your audience is familiar with the Abraham Accords, but the diplomatic normalization between the UAE Bahrain and some other countries and Israel back in 2020. I think for President Trump, this is motive, talking about this now is motivated by a sense of, you know, there's a real loss of face and status by having talked up how he was going to have this decisive victory against Iran and then it being a disaster on every single front. So I think there's now going to be a hunt for like some other kind of quick win that he can show. But I think also the lead

Starting point is 01:54:49 up to this war demonstrated that the Abraham Accords as a framework for U.S. policy towards the Middle East was pretty bankrupt in every direction. On the one hand, all of the like carrots that the United States was supposed to offer to encourage countries to normalize. ties with Israel, it had effectively already been given out. So for Saudi Arabia, it was like, here are all our concessions that we were going to use in order to encourage you to normalize ties with Israel. We can just give those to you as long as you promised to invest money in the United States. So that's already been allowed to happen. At the same time, the downside for these countries in normalizing ties with Israel is pretty high. There's nothing that Israeli leaders at present

Starting point is 01:55:27 can do to guarantee that there won't be another catastrophic and genocidal war against the Palestinian population, that's something that, you know, a Saudi leadership that is dealing with, you know, potentially rising unemployment, that other countries dealing with ethnic or sectarian divides within their borders, not something they really want to take on as well. And I think that the war has kind of created divergent perceptions of Israel as well. I think for countries like Saudi Arabia and especially Oman, there's a view of Israel, even for a newer generation of leadership like Muhammad bin Salman, who were not particularly opposed to a greater role for Israel in the region, greater ties with Israel, or just now concerned about Israel as a chaotic and unreliable partner

Starting point is 01:56:14 in the region that will throw the security interests of its allies to the wind, you know, at a moment's notice, you know, their interpretation of the Abraham Accords is that it did nothing to protect the UAE and Bahrain from attacks by Iran or from getting dragged into an Israeli-led, or partly Israeli-led war. In the other direction, however, the UAE itself kind of views its ties with Israel is more important than ever. Their view is like, well, this is a region of unreliable actors. Israel has a capable military, even if they don't admit it openly. Israel's the only nuclear armed actor in the region. And Israel did send what's it called the Iron Dome Defense Technology to the UAE during the conflict. On the one hand, I think we're, just as we saw during the Biden

Starting point is 01:56:57 administration, the Abraham Accords, remains this kind of like cargo cult for American foreign policymakers, this idea that we'll just say the Abraham Accords and it'll magically make countries kind of change their foreign policy orientation. But I think the Abraham Accords as a UAE, Israeli, security, economic, political alliance in the region is stronger than ever and will continue to be the case into the future. But that Saudi Arabia will not participate in the way that the Trump administration assumes. Yeah, I think that Saudi Arabia will continue their policy they've had ever since October 7th, or at least since roughly thereafter,

Starting point is 01:57:33 of saying, like, well, we're not ruling out. We just have some conditions in order to move on that. And then, you know, I don't think those are unreasonable conditions of making progress towards a Palestinian state, but they are not anything that Netanyahu, or even probably any other political coalition that comes to power in Israel, is willing to even think about. So, you know, I don't really see it happening soon. I suppose the thing is Trump is so unpredictable that he could just, like, lash out and declare

Starting point is 01:58:02 that he's going to do something to Saudi Arabia if they don't normalize. But then it's a real question of, like, well, how long is he going to sustain that? And, like, what does he do if Saudi Arabia or Mohammed bin some of that himself, like, snaps back over this past winter. We saw, for example, as part of that diplomatic riff between the UA and Saudi Arabia, we saw Emirati-backed forces in Yemen make gains, a lot of commentary online about like, oh, Mohammed bin Salman, isn't willing to do anything about this. And then ultimately wind up, the Saudi foreign ministry condemned the UAE's role in Yemen and Saudi forces bombed like an

Starting point is 01:58:37 Emirati shipment coming into Yemen. So there's also the potential here as well. Like, these are two political systems where power is highly personalized around specific individuals. And so if President Trump decides to go down that route, there's the possibility for this to become a very personalized conflict. Right. And I think it's important for listeners to understand the connection, why the Palestinian issue holds such weight for Gulf leaders. You mentioned, for example, ethnic and sectarian divides in particular countries, I'm thinking Bahrain, or, you know, rising unemployment and dissent in places like Saudi Arabia. It's because either explicitly or implicitly,

Starting point is 01:59:15 the Palestinian issue in some parts of the Gulf is connected to people's and anti-regime sentiment, which, of course, the Iranian regime is very good at stoking and exploiting. And so it's not just that they're worried about regional instability outside their borders. It's also, like you said, there are domestic implications for all of these regimes. Yeah, I think if we want to turn back the clock to like the first Trump administration, and even right up to October 7th, in places like Saudi Arabia, I think there was a belief that you could just suppress people's solidarity with Palestine. or that this was like a dead issue for most Saudi citizens.

Starting point is 01:59:55 But what kind of October 7th showed or changed was that that sentiment had really never gone away as much as it had seemed. And also that there's now an entirely new generation that has seen the atrocities perpetrated in Gaza over the past few years that is now well aware of everything has been done. And this is not something you can hide from people or pretend that it will go away. And it's even harder to do so if people aren't seeing kind of rapid economic. gains in their own lives. So it becomes yet another thing that, yeah, if you wanted to fault Saudi leaders for kind of weakness and international stage, if you wanted to fault them for

Starting point is 02:00:34 not demonstrating political courage, that could be a cudgel to use against them. So inside Saudi Arabia, the one consistent thing over the past five, six, seven years is the complete suppression of talking about the Palestinian issue because political authorities are so worried, that if people start talking about one political issue, maybe they start linking into other concerns. At the same time, there has been a shift among kind of regime-aligned commentators from, you know, if this were back in 2019, 2020, you would hear them say, well, Saudi Arabia is now our country that acts in its own national interest. That means we don't have to listen to the Palestinian leadership. That's their own concern. Now you hear kind of same tune, like different

Starting point is 02:01:14 variation where it's like, because Saudi Arabia is acting in its own national interest, we can decide that we want to act in solidarity with the Palestinian leadership, not just do whatever the West tells us to do. But then this leads into, I think, kind of the polarization among some of the Gulf countries, because it's the exact opposite dynamic for the UAE, where the UAE goes the route of presenting itself as closer than ever to the United States, very aware that they can use Saudi skepticism towards Israel as something to attack Saudi Arabia in U.S. commentary and U.S. commentary in U.S. media markets. And then even if the country seemed to be able to patch these differences up from time to time,

Starting point is 02:01:56 it's going to keep driving them apart as well. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but during the first Trump administration, the propaganda around Palestinians emerging from the UAE was extremely vehement, let's say. Like, there was so much rhetoric coming out of UAE, like government officials and, associated influencers and things like that, that was attempting to kind of change the image of the Palestinian to an Arab audience. And even though you're right that they are clinging more than ever to the Abraham Accords, again, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that like they can't do that as much anymore. I'm not seeing as much of that kind of rhetoric and kind of anti-Palestinian

Starting point is 02:02:51 racism that I used to see. Yeah. And it used to be that, you know, you could walk this like, I don't want to call it a fine line, but you could play this game. I'm more familiar with this in the Saudi case, but the rhetoric would go, of course, Saudi Arabia stands with the Saudi issue, but the Palestinian leadership, they would basically adopt the same tropes we were familiar with the United States. Like, the Palestinian leadership, never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, or they would just do a correct translation of that. Yeah. But yeah, it's much harder. Like, you can't get away with that anymore because the pushback online would be incredibly intense. And likewise, even from the UAE, we see continued coordination with Israel. But it's

Starting point is 02:03:27 interesting how the UAE denies or doesn't confirm certain things. So bombing Iran during the war, the UAE foreign ministry kind of does a wink, wink, wink, nudge, like, well, look at our policies where we said we were to retaliate if we were attacked Jaya and conclusions. Whereas when it comes to Benjamin Netanyahu, like, visiting the UAE, they're like absolutely not, this is false news. It did not happen. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that points to the extent to which, especially Netanyahu has become extremely toxic and hard to separate from that. And that, you know, even though I don't thinks the UA is going to be hosting any like major Palestinian solidarity events anytime soon. At the same time, they're not like, you know, this is not like a warm piece in terms of how

Starting point is 02:04:07 they're approaching Israelis either. I'm pretty sure the UA even condemned the recent law, like basically allowing executions of the death penalty. You will specifically define to basically beat Palestinians on the West Bank, also condemned Israel's actions in Lebanon as well. So it's become harder to mount the kind of media campaign. against Palestinians, I think partly because they backfire and then partly in recognition that this was done for years and years. And then ultimately, what distinguishes Saudi Arabia from the UAE is not that their citizen publics have different views about the Palestinians, but just that in the UAE, you can surveil, coerce, and bribe your citizen population so much better than in Saudi

Starting point is 02:04:50 Arabia. It's like, sorry to be kind of crass about it, but like the Jews just isn't worth the squeeze in terms of the Saudi monarchy relative to at least being in this kind of middle path where they're maybe not pushing the United States too much for Palestinian statehood, but are like doing at least the bare minimum to keep, I guess, the idea of a two-state solution alive. Yeah, and to stay adhering to the Arab Peace Initiative in some capacity. What's kind of the takeaway, do you think, for all of these countries in the aftermath of this war do you foresee a change in their positions vis-a-vis the United States in particular? For years and years, analysts of the Gulfmen talking about, like, these states hedging.

Starting point is 02:05:30 And I think in one direction, this war showed that, like, most of that amounted to just trying to get, like, more concessions from the United States. Like, you had a couple European countries show up. You had, like, Pakistan get involved a little bit. But their strategies for the course of this war still revolved around trying to influence U.S. thinking, you know, frame how they were viewed in the United States. States, but I do think it is going to trigger changes down the line. Like we saw Saudi Arabia normalized ties with Iran four years after the United States failed to intervene after

Starting point is 02:06:02 Iranian-line groups attacked Saudi oil fields. I think something similar here, where we're going to see developments three or four years down the line that have been cooking in the background as a result of what has happened in 2026. I think we're starting to see some of that now. And it's not going to be like, oh, we're going to get a Chinese military base in the Gulf. It's going to be other things like we're seeing Saudi Arabia try to work with what it views as the other regional middle powers that can trust and work with Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan. The UAE, meanwhile, is trying to like double or triple down on its direct security ties with Israel. But I think the way these ghost states are going to react is going to figure out how can we shape the diplomas here

Starting point is 02:06:45 on the region? How can we shape our own security in ways that don't rely on the United States, but aren't like, how to put it. I think in Washington, D.C., because of the obsession with Chinese influence in the world, there's always this belief of like, oh, like, if not us, then it will be like the Chinese will be involved. And I think the reality is going to look very different. I don't think China wants to get involved in a security fashion of the Gulf, but there are other countries that have an interest in like some degree of peaceful economic development

Starting point is 02:07:10 or some degree of like maximalized security. And that's going to be the future of these state security relations. Well, thank you so much, Andrew. really appreciate your expertise. I'll link your profile at Carnegie in the show notes, as well as given that we talked about kind of the Palestinian question in relation to some of these other issues domestically in the Gulf states. I'll also link to some of my own research on this topic. So thank you so much. Thanks for having me. With four nights at residents in downtown Montreal, flights from Porter Airlines,

Starting point is 02:07:58 two weekend gold tickets, and $1,000 of cash. Lord, Zara Larson, Tema Gray, somber, 21 pilots, and more. Download IHeard Radio. Listen to IHeart new music for 10 minutes and enter to win.

Starting point is 02:08:13 Osiaga, 26. Every day you listen is another chance to win. 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.

Starting point is 02:08:28 I'd be seeing it, but I'm like, man, I still got so much more to do. Prince, he dropped like 30 albums. We dropped like five right now. Like, 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 Nas' early videos.

Starting point is 02:08:46 Which one? One love. Wow. 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. His dad introduced him to a whole.

Starting point is 02:09:01 lot of, you know, conscious stuff, and he made a young prodigy. No matter the era, Drinkchamps 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. If you're watching the latest season of the Real Housewives of Atlanta, you already know, that's a lot to break down. Gorsha accusing Kelly of sleeping with a merry man. They hold and Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew. Pinky has finance.

Starting point is 02:09:31 issues. I like the bougie style of Housewives show. I think it looks like it's going to be interesting. On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Real House Wise franchise, the drama, the alliances, and the team everybody's talking about. As an executive producer in reality television, I'm not just watching it. I understand the game. As somebody who creates shows, I'll even say this. At the end of the day, When people are at home, they want entertainment. To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Happy Pride from the Outspoken Podcast Network. All month long and all year round, we're celebrating being loud, proud, and always original.

Starting point is 02:10:21 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. The more you get comfortable with someone, the more they're not. their real self comes out, they're going to be gross. What's the grossest thing about a man? Burping. Shut it down. Listen to High Key for the best pop culture takes, and there are no girls on the internet for all your tech news.

Starting point is 02:10:43 For your favorite celebrity keycues, check outlaws with T.S. Madison. Wait, so Luke was the son of Vader. And Vader was turned by Rupal? Yeah, well, somebody's heard of some old, old, old witch. Learn to love yourself unapologetically with BFF, Black Fat Fem. And start your day with intention with waking up with. Ryan coming in July. Celebrate Pride with the outspoken network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Open your free IHeart Radio app, search Pride,

Starting point is 02:11:12 and listen now. Garrison thinks. That's good. That's good. If we were brave, if we... Yeah, it would... New Halloween cut you unlocked. That's not happening. Howard. This is, it could happen here, executive disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, The Crumbling World and What It Means for You. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans. This episode, we're covering the week of June 3rd to June 10th. James, some small news items to start. Yeah, many small things this week comes.

Starting point is 02:11:50 New details have emerged about the Santa Rosa Island fire. If you remember, the fire was started by a mariner. At first, it was reported that the mariner had started the fire by firing distress flares. It now appears that the, The marioness engine caught fire, starting to fire. Then he fired distress flares, but there's more. Okay. How many fires did this guy have involved in his boating trip?

Starting point is 02:12:13 Well, he ran into the island next door a week before. Okay. Oh, boy. And was towed by Coast Guard to their harbor, where they found that he didn't have a number of items that you have to have on his boat for safety equipment reasons, right? So they pounded his boat for six days until a good Samaritan donated those items. He then left the harbor and crashed into the next island. I think that good Samaritan made a

Starting point is 02:12:38 mistake. I think we can agree. This is not the man now. Yeah. I think doing anything to enable this man to re-float on the seven seas. He should not be in the sea. Yeah. This guy listened to too much Jimmy Buffett. Yeah. Unfortunately, like, there seems to be one of those situations, he bought the boat for a single dollar. What? We generally don't give advice on this podcast, but I will say... You couldn't have said a funnier thing than that. It's not uncommon in Southern California for people to buy boats in order to find a cheaper place to live.

Starting point is 02:13:18 Yes, of course. Things like slip fees, rate stretch. People don't really see things out of that. I have worked on some old diesel engines on these boats. They're not particularly straight... I'm not a great deal with, but they're not particularly straightforward. And this results in... And what I think we've seen here, which is a delta between confidence and ability on the seven seas.

Starting point is 02:13:41 This isn't a boat that one should be saving alone, much less so if they only bought a couple of years ago for a single American dollar. No. Unfortunately, it did destroy a large grove of Tory pine, which only exists there and here. So, yeah, I know. Be careful out there would be pirates. Moving on now. ICE has reported it's 19th in custody death this year when correctional. centers.

Starting point is 02:14:03 Sordia. Yeah. Continuing to set all the worst records. A court has vacated the president's $100,000 H-1B visa tax.

Starting point is 02:14:14 Case is bought by California et al, but it's more than a dozen states that will be impacted by the tax. This is a good one. Gregory Bovino

Starting point is 02:14:22 appears to be eyeing a run of the presidency. Sure. This is interesting. So he launched an experiment website. Yeah, why not?

Starting point is 02:14:31 Why? Fuck. Like, His website in Bhavino-2020.com, the campaign appears to have originated from Jacob Engels. Engels is a right where he's kind of Roger Stone Protégé, they broke ways. Engels was, Pierce's a big charge with methamphetamine possession earlier this year. Oh, wow. It was Engels who was first posting this House Bovino, 2028 thing, in Bovino's replies.

Starting point is 02:14:58 And Engels now appears, is listed on Bovino, 2028.com. Oh, God. In this house Bavino thing, he's just, he watched too much Game of Thrones, right? That's why he's saying that. I think so. Because I looked into it, and that's as far as I can tell, it's him trying to do like a nightly, like, we're the new nightly order.

Starting point is 02:15:19 I mean, it's part of his SS cosplay is how I kind of interpreted it. Because he clearly is obsessed with the fucking shitstaffel, and they were like a nightly order. And that's, I get those vibes from Greg. Yeah. If you look at the website, right, like, he's prominently featured wearing its now infamous great coat, trench coat, whatever you want to call that. Yeah, his big fucking coat, yes. I don't know if Pavino, like, Bovino, maybe he's just trying to run this as far as it'll go, right? He just lost his job.

Starting point is 02:15:47 So maybe he's looking for, like, something new to do. Oh, sure. Like, I'm not sure how serious Bevito is with this. I do think he's definitely trying to continue to, I guess, influence the national, uh, discussion, I guess. Well, in the internet, I mean, he's hanging out with the fucking Martin Selner over in Portugal. He's hanging out with, like, straight up, like, Christchurch math shooting affiliated Nazis, you know? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:16:13 Like, he's going for it. Everyone should just scroll down to the our founders section of this website. Okay, hold up. Before we do that, this link has now appeared in our group chat. That is the most Nazi-ass, like, just profile pictures thing I have seen. in a long time. It's like a Wolfenstein. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:16:33 Very Wolfenstein. Yeah. Yeah. Right. But like in the same way that like they're also clearly aping from like communist aesthetics. Like in a way. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:16:43 The red background, the way he's kind of framed is this like weird. Yeah. Is it kind of West German? I would almost say it's like generic propaganda now, which is sort of like a mix of like West German. U.S. Or East German. Or East German.

Starting point is 02:16:55 Like the, the, the use of red, the use of the olive branches. The sun rays coming from his body. Yeah, the Oakley. It's just kind of like generic propaganda, House Bovino, men fight back. Well, it's an AI generated image, right? So it is. Based on the way the text is formed,

Starting point is 02:17:12 it does appear to be an AI generated image. It looks AI, yeah. It's not properly framed, right? The framing on the left and right is thicker than a framing of the top. There is no framing at the bottom, like Zammick around shit. Oh my God. No, I think we're all missing something, which is that's right underneath the big propaganda image.

Starting point is 02:17:29 He's in very tiny text, the words. In very tiny text, almost hidden. Bovino knows what America needs. America's men. It's not in quotation marks. No. The slogan of the campaign is men fight back. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:17:46 Or the slogan to House Bovino, it's a little unclear. Yeah, right. Uncle. Maybe it made its house, Bovino. Maybe he's struggling to make rent, having lost his job at the Boy Patrol, and this is sending up a pack to pay his rent. But yeah, incredible, our founders section, really. Oh, my God.

Starting point is 02:18:04 Okay, I have scrolled down to the Our Founders section. And there is an incredible specimen. The bold national strategy part is really upsetting to me. Yeah. Because he's calling himself the commander in capitalizing the V and the C. In a very, like, here's the ways, following the commanders, maximum effectiveness and quelling the foreign hordes that have subsumed our nation's cities, both large and small, the American people witnessed what true leadership, powered by a

Starting point is 02:18:34 warrior mindset, actually looks like as the commander endeavored to restore order and national sovereignty. That is one sentence. Second sentence, America as a whole has already fallen to the grasps of the foreign global one-world hellscape ushered in by Barack Hussein Obama. However, we believe that the commander can not only usher in the Great Restoration of America, but also cement the continuity of a strong and sovereign United States that will last in millennia. A thousand year rike, in other words. And that also was one sentence. That is two sentences that I just read.

Starting point is 02:19:03 Yeah. I need to be clear. Yeah, the campaign, a couple of Gmail addresses they're using here. Some really small font, by the way. It's inconsistently. Yeah, it's very inconsistently. This looks like they had AI layout his website, too.

Starting point is 02:19:18 Well, they have one woman on their founders page. And everyone else who's size like 20 and she's like size 11. Yeah. Like the set will have, you know, images of him or of his post where you can see his name. but it refers to him only as the commander. So like there's a post of Greg's where it like, it's that post that he made at the airport where he's like pointing at the flight to Newark when he was on his way to Portugal being like,

Starting point is 02:19:39 should I just handle it myself and, you know, go to Jersey to deal with this? And above that is perhaps I must resolve this personally as a quote, the commander challenging the inertia of the open borders bureaucracy in response to, like it's written like Greg Bevino became the overall dictator of America and this is a history book 60 years later. That's the way his website is written. Yeah, it's incredibly low effort. And quite concerning. And he really has a high opinion of himself.

Starting point is 02:20:07 Yeah. I got to say that. Yeah. I do wonder how much this is just angles, just writing this like as a fan. Yeah, I wonder how much he had to do with this. But this does not seem like he had nothing to do with it. I will say that based on my knowledge of Greg Bevino.

Starting point is 02:20:22 Yeah. He's shared it on his own social media. Great. In other news, the months-long fight over ICE and CBP funding has come to an end. In a 214 to 212 vote on Tuesday, the House has passed a reconciliation bill funding ICE and CBP. Yeah, this is the so-called Secure America Act, right? It'll give them $70 billion. So if we look at that combined with the Big Beautiful Bill, there's about 240 billion allocations.

Starting point is 02:20:56 them in a single year. It doesn't mean they have to spend it all this year, right? The Sesecure America Act gives them a window up to September 30th, 2029, with no particular allocations for any given year. To me, that strikes me as a hedge against funding after the midterms. I think that's about. Also notable, Lig Karas said that they used reconciliation to allow simple majority in the Senate. We went over the details of a previous version of this bill a few weeks ago. This money is going to go towards hiring and arming, new officers. hiring more administrative staff, attorneys, and this is all going to be towards immigration enforcement,

Starting point is 02:21:32 as well as some money allocated for acquiring new border technology. The $1 billion of, quote-unquote, security funding for Trump's ballroom was removed from the bill by the Senate last week. Two other short things I want to mention. Yesterday, a federal grand jury indicted two people in relation to stop cop city protests and alleged crimes in 2022. And Wednesday morning,

Starting point is 02:22:01 the FBI rated about seven people in Michigan related to pro-Palestime protests at the University of Michigan and protests against University of Michigan officials. As of recording, like this just happened a few hours ago and relates to an indictment that was unsealed this morning as well, which charges eight people. We'll cover this more in detail in the future.

Starting point is 02:22:25 We're going to do one more quick segment here, and then when we return, we're going to talk about the programs in Belfast. Yay. Some updates related to primary elections. In Maine, Graham Platner has won the Democratic primary with about 72% of the vote. The governor's race is too close to call with the ranked choice voting yet to be tallied. But I'm keeping my eye on the Sanders and Labor-backed candidate Troy Jackson, who campaigned with Platner. Jackson is about 9,000 votes behind the pre-ranked choice vote candidate, Dr. Niraav Shaw. After a week of counting, we have more definitive results from the elections in California last week.

Starting point is 02:23:09 Yeah, which a lot of people are saying is an unforgivable fup of democracy that they counted all of the votes and it took them a while. But yeah, Gares, please continue. And we'll talk about the chaos that is, is. being justified by the fact that this took a wild account. Tom Steyer will not be making it onto the ballot this coming November. Nope. With 91% of the votes counted, Steyer has earned 1,928,381 votes, or 22.5%. Republican Steve Hilton, former Fox News host, has edged Steyer out by about 200,000 votes, earning 25% of the vote and advancing to the general election, where he will go up against Liberal Democrat Javier Becerra with 27.9% of the vote. Katie Porter won just under 400,000 votes.

Starting point is 02:24:07 Karen Bass still leads the L.A. mayoral primary with 95% of the votes counted. Bass has nearly 300,000 votes winning 34.3%. Progressive Nithia Rahman has moved into second place with 29% beating Republican Spencer Pratt with 25.5%. So the general election will see Ramon go up against Bass. Reality TV star Spencer Pratt was up in the early vote, but as Ramon started to pull ahead, Trump and others began claiming the election was being stolen from Republicans. Pratt has insinuated that Raman's lead came from L.A.'s homeless population and must grow out that, quote, the level of fraud here is mind-blowing. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:24:57 So homeless people can vote. Like, what? Yeah, yeah. Provided they are U.S. citizens. Like, yeah. Yes, yes. It's all lies. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:25:06 I mean, and a lot of what's, even what's being reported in the Washington Post is straight up lies. Yeah. They just published an article today that includes this line. And again, the theme of the article is like, well, you know, obviously this election wasn't stolen, but the fact that it's taken so long is really a problem. And you can't actually blame all these people if they think it's suspicious. This is not evidence of a rigged election, but it creates fertile ground for conspiracy theories to take root. It didn't help that Rahman tearfully conceded last Tuesday, but it's irresponsible for Pratt to intimate on social media. She did not concede.

Starting point is 02:25:40 and she didn't tearfully concede. That did not happen. That never happened. The Washington Post lied. Like, that's just in a post article. That's just a lie by the Washington Post. Like, an intentional lie, I would argue. Incredible.

Starting point is 02:25:53 I guess to just go into this, to people understand, like, you know, like I've written for broadsheet newspapers, several people, this is not one person fucking up, right? This is an institutional fuck up. This was a choice. Yeah. It was a choice to get this wrong. The person whose name is on the byline wrote that, yes. An editor then edited.

Starting point is 02:26:09 A copy editor. then edited it, and then somebody laid it out for the website. Yep. And you know this. If you're listening and you work for the post, you know this. You know that your editors, your bosses and your colleagues chose to lie and are choosing to continue to lie and spread lies through their publication. You're aware of this if you work there still. Anyway. I don't know. Benny Johnson, Tim Poole, or Ingram and Sean Hannity are alleged that Democrats stole the election, and Trump has continued to make claims that the election was rigged. Quote, here we go with the very late and massive numbers of mail-in ballots.

Starting point is 02:26:44 Yeah, no shit. Truth. Sorry. Yeah, man. It's convenient. Just eternal 2020. Trump truth earlier this week, quote, Not possible for Spencer Pratt do have lost the L.A. runoffs after the big lead he had.

Starting point is 02:26:58 Third World Nation, unquote. Did he understand what the word nation means? No. No. I don't think. They start these truths. I don't think he. understands how election works, obviously.

Starting point is 02:27:10 Or he does, and he's just saying what he needs to say here. Notably, on Sunday, Trump stormed out of an interview on Meet the Press when asked if he had any evidence of, quote, unquote, cheating in California. The election was rigged. It was a dirty election. And it's happening again right now in California. It's happening right now in California. Right now it's looking, look at what's happening in California.

Starting point is 02:27:36 It's four days. The Republicans are doing well. In California, it's, no, they're not there. They're dropping fast because it's a rigged election. Let me tell you, it's four days, and they aren't even close to coming up with them. You know why they're doing that? Because they're cheating on the election. Do you have evidence to support that?

Starting point is 02:27:54 All I have to do is look. All you have to do is look. Is he in front of a green screen that depicts a John Deere tractor and planter? No, they are in Wisconsin, in some kind of barn, and it's raining outside in this barn with a John Deere Tractor and like haybells. It's an interesting kind of like real world set they have. Yeah, okay. And the focus is very weird. Like the... Yeah. Trump later called vote counting in California, quote unquote, crooked, just like how the press is crooked. Quote, you're either crooked or you're stupid. You know that these elections are

Starting point is 02:28:28 rigged. Your network knows that they're rigged. We're like a third world country. Your elections are crooked and you're crooked and Mr. Press is crooked. And so is ABC and CBS and CNN. But Mr. President. You're one-sided crooked network. So let's call it quits because I've had enough. Thank you, darling.

Starting point is 02:28:47 Have a good time. Mr. President, let's please. I traveled all the way to Wisconsin. God, that's embarrassing. Yeah. Just being mean to him. Be rude. Yell at him.

Starting point is 02:28:57 Call him a fucking liar. Scream at him. Stop doing this bullshit. Like, I'm sorry. I have no sympathy for that. Like, people booed him, dreamed the national anthem at a Knicks games. You can fucking do this. Scream him. Call him a piece of shit.

Starting point is 02:29:10 Yeah. Like, you know, you're not getting anything out of just letting him talk. Call him a liar. Shout over him. Yeah. Stop pretending. Yeah, yeah. Fucking cowards. I'm sorry. And yeah, Mia, you're right. I think we should definitely pay attention to the fact that Trump did cause

Starting point is 02:29:26 the Knicks to lose that game. Oh, yeah, he did. And honestly, that's what I like about him. Because it continues James Jolens streak of House Speaker Mike Johnson was asked about these claims on Monday and said that the vote counting in California, quote-unquote, stinks to high heaven, and that the schemes are so, quote-unquote, diabolical that it's impossible to prove election rigging.

Starting point is 02:29:52 The president keeps saying that there's election fraud in the California mayor's race is what evidence is there to prove that? You tell me, Manu. They are counting votes weeks after the election. We have entire nations with huge population. like India that can count their votes in 24 to 40. You're saying it's rigged like the president?

Starting point is 02:30:08 I'm not saying it's rigged. I'm saying it stinks to high heaven, and everybody knows that. Let's remove the appearance of impropriety. Let's have, what a concept. Let's have votes on an election the day of the election. That's what many states are able to do. I think California is playing around with this. But what evidence is there to prove that there was is rigged?

Starting point is 02:30:28 Some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream, it is impossible to prove. But I think everybody knows instinctively something is wrong here. So this is, I think, very clearly a preview of what's to come in the midterm elections. Oh, yeah, for sure. And they are kind of laying this out here. It's, of course, impossible to prove, but we all know that it's wrong. Yeah. This is going to be every election for the rest of my life.

Starting point is 02:30:51 Yeah. Yep. Yeah. But there's going to be anything that happens that does not meet the increasingly fanciful version of reality they have to believe. Yeah. Right? It's not just elections. It's literally any fact that, like, is inconvenient.

Starting point is 02:31:06 There's any storm that shouldn't have happened based on when they think a storm should happen, right? Yeah. This is just life now. Yeah, it's necessary to, like, create the version of reality that they're existing in. Yeah. We're going to go on break and then discuss the pogroms in Northern Ireland. We are back. Ooh.

Starting point is 02:31:39 Yeah. On Tuesday, July 9th, this is the... day before we are recording this, which is important because we don't know how vets are going to proceed from here when you're listening to it. But on June 9th, there were widespread attacks on the homes of non-white people in Ireland in what I and many others have described as a pogrom. Mass assailants kicked down doors, forced down white people from their homes, and lit houses and cars on fire. People were being stopped in the streets. I'm going to read a little bit from a report from Hennel Othman, who was on this scene reporting on what was going on, quote,

Starting point is 02:32:20 As a woman from an ethnic minority background looked down from an upstairs window, some of the men rushed the front door and broke it down. With the attack thick with smoke from fireworks, they attacked the downstairs windows with bricks. As they stormed the property, some claimed to be, quote, liberating it. Graffiti nearby demanded, quote, local homes for local people. A woman in the crowd said to her friend, quote, There's we girls inside. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:32:49 It is an extremely bleak and worrying event. The nominal cause of this program was a video of a stabbing in Belfast that has gone viral on social media, which has been amplified by right-ring forces, both in Ireland, the UK and across the world, probably most famously by Elon Musk. We will touch on that more in a second. But before we say anything about the broader context,

Starting point is 02:33:17 I think it's important to state two things here. One, Ireland and also particularly the factions of Irish politics are going to be getting to here, has had racism problems long before any of these events. Famously, you know, if you want to look at the most immediate stuff in the recent past, exactly one year ago today in Northern Ireland, there was a smaller race riot. There was a smaller scale version

Starting point is 02:33:42 of the thing we're seeing here with less damage but still absolutely terrifying effects. This very much rhymes with the race riots that we saw in the UK a couple of years ago. Yeah. Right? Like a similar deal, similar motivation,

Starting point is 02:33:58 mobs attacking. At that point was more focused on hotels that refugees were believed at. But yeah, like you were saying, we had basically the same idea. Yeah, these are white mobs. It's also, I think, important to note on top of just the general sort of racism of Irish society, this program's largely taking place in loyalist neighborhoods. You know, these are places with very, very longstanding far-right paramilitaries with very

Starting point is 02:34:22 close ties to the police. A lot of the people in the streets are, you know, sort of parts of old loyalist paramilitarian criminal networks. these are in many cases believe to be the same networks that we're doing shit during the troubles and have been active in various forms throughout the occupation of Ireland

Starting point is 02:34:42 and deportations Belfast notes that leaked emails from police after the 2025 riots they are from the riots themselves and they said quote it is important for you to understand our expectations unless there is an obvious article to issue we do not expect you to expose yourself

Starting point is 02:35:00 to significant unnecessary risk. So what that in effect is saying is that this is in effect to stand down order if you don't if you think that anything would be even Let the mobs do what they're going to do. Yeah, right. And that's just the stuff this is from the 2025 riots. Presumably

Starting point is 02:35:16 similar orders went out during these riots and that's just the stuff that they sent via email, right? That has been leaked out. The police, again, very notably did very, very little while all of this was happening while people's houses were being burned down while people were being dragged out of their homes.

Starting point is 02:35:33 These attacks also come after weeks of far-right discourse in the UK about the killings of two white men by non-white men. Yeah. I mean, on the BBC, they are having debates about whether there is a, quote, two-tiered police system, which, you know, when I initially saw that, I was confused because, yeah, two-tiered police system has been the way that, you know, like anti-police violence activists have to about the way the police system functions, where there is a way the police function for white people, which is that it treats them significantly better, and then there's the way it works for non-white people. The far right has flipped this on his head and is now arguing to an extent that his now sort of national discourse on the fucking BBC is arguing that there is a two-tier police system where non-white people are let off the hook for their crimes and where white people aren't

Starting point is 02:36:21 protected by the law. This is nonsense, but it has been spreading rapidly pushed by far-right actors like Tommy Robinson and, of course, Elon Musk. Yeah. Yeah. Musk specifically has been really pushing this. Yeah. He was a big figure, too, in what happened in the UK a bit ago. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:36:41 And the 2025 Irish riots, too. Right. That's exactly right. And he's been nonstop pushing and making posts, making claims to the extent of, like, we need to, the only way things will get better is if we keep protesting, you know, this has to be handled, like forcefully, yada, yada, like that sort of shit. Like, he has been, he's been. he's been basically devoting, as far as I can tell, the week that he is about to have

Starting point is 02:37:02 and that he is having his IPO devoting the majority of his time to inciting up a gram. Yes, seems to be. Yeah, he retweeted a post from Restore Britain, which is a somehow even further right, just straight up, effectively fascist party, but even further right than the already horrifying reform party saying, quote, do not make peace with evil destroy. Yeah, there's another one where either you fight back or you die. That's what it comes down to. There's been a lot of comparisons between Elon Musk and Radio Rwanda, which is a radio

Starting point is 02:37:38 outlet that was broadcasting calls for the Redmond. Well, and that's not accurate, really. You're referring to RTLM, right? Radio Television Libre Melcholina. Yeah. Yes. Radio Rwanda is a different thing. Oh, sorry.

Starting point is 02:37:51 Am I? Like, Radio Rwanda is a currently existing corporation. So we need to be extremely clear in our terminology. Let me be very clear here because I actually had this pulled up for this. RTLM was the radio station that is often accused of helping to coordinate or some people will just say straight up and cited the genocide. It was owned by a guy named Felicia and Kabuga, who was an extremely wealthy Rwandan man and who was personally very much involved in wanting to push for the genocide. RTLM regularly called Tutsi's cockroaches and encouraged people to cut down the tall trees. However, there are also good reasons why this is not quite as direct as it seems.

Starting point is 02:38:33 RTLM did not coordinate attacks. They did not plan specific actions. And analysis in the modern day has shown that a lot of the worst massacres, in fact, the majority of the worst massacres did not have any direct relation to RTLM. Now, RTLM's propaganda and broadcasts played a... role in the genocide and incited and continue to like escalate the violence. But it's not exactly, I would argue it looks like, and we also, we don't have perfect analysis of what's just happened in Northern Ireland. So maybe this will prove to be wrong. It looks like what Musk is doing has more of a direct causative effect. Yeah. But that's also not clear to me at the moment. Yeah. Yeah. My estimation so far, but again, like this is changing, my estimation so far is that I

Starting point is 02:39:18 I think it is actually closer to it in that I think, I think even if Musk isn't there, something like this happens. Sure. Because I think a lot of this is mobilization through like very local Irish political forces and these sort of unionist networks. But it's also really difficult to say just because all of those networks have been heavily influenced by Musk's X in the last few years too. So it's, I don't know how you want to.

Starting point is 02:39:43 Yeah. And it's feeding off of like a decade of intensifying anti-immigrant sentiment. across the UK, including Ireland and Northern Ireland. Yeah. And this is also something people will point out when you're talking about Rwanda and RTLM, which is that like, well, as much blame as you want to give RTLM and some of these other media organizations that unquestionably had some role in motivating and fueling what happened. I mean, the root of the Rwandan genocide comes from the period of colonialism when the Tutsis

Starting point is 02:40:13 were like a favored group of people within the country, which is what started a lot of these like underlying hatreds, right, is the way in which the colonial power played these different groups off of each other. So anyway, whatever. As is always the case, it's always going to be deeper than some guy has a media outlet, right? But that doesn't mean the media outlet is not involved in what's happened. Yeah. It was the same in Rwanda, right? Like, we had the interrahumway, like, they existed and they distinct from RTLM, but like the environment that allow those two things to happen. Nothing's monocausal. People want to do this in history. No, and it's the difficult thing of both, it's very important to point out when something

Starting point is 02:40:51 like this rhymes with something that happened in a genocide that killed a million people. And also, the more you learn about stuff like this when people make those comparisons, the more learned people are like, well, that's not quite right. Actually, this is, it was a little different thing, you know. Yeah. The Genocide Memorial Museum in Kigali is the most moving museum of its student in my life. It's incredible. You have the chance everyone should go. We need to do more in bastards. on Rwanda. But yeah, anyway. Wonderful country. Yeah. The one thing I also want to mention sort of in closing here is that, you know, again, like part of the reason this is happening,

Starting point is 02:41:26 part of the reason it's been a lot of, you know, of these, of these unionist networks. Part of the reason it's happening the way that it is is that this is a very, very old white supremacist project. Yeah. Going back like, you know, like through the British occupation of Ireland, right? And it's a project that's been aligned with like the Rwandans were once British in the sense of like, like the, you know, this, this is carrying on the sort of long imperial British tradition is like, the world, one of the world's, like, largest and most flooding in Bruce those white supremacist organizations. Yeah. We talked about this in the meeting we were having beforehand, but like loyalists in

Starting point is 02:42:03 Northern Ireland have regularly made a habit of, particularly in the 70s and 80s, displaying Rhodesia flags in the 90s, apartheid South Africa flags. It's very common to find. Petit flex. Like, you know. Yeah, partly as a direct response to the internationalism of republicanism, they just decided to align with the worst people on the planet. Yep. Yeah, there'll be another episode of Up on this Monday that goes into more detail

Starting point is 02:42:28 and we'll have more information as it comes out. This is, again, a rapidly changing situation. There might be more. Yeah, by the time you hear it. Days of this, it's possible that the police will crack down harder because there's been some pressure put on them by basically every government. involved in this, but we just simply don't know that at this time. And yeah, it's a absolutely horrifying day. Yeah, pretty horrible to see. Let's do immigration in the U.S. now. Another country

Starting point is 02:42:59 where things are going great. So a judge has ruled that the Trump administration's broad restrictions on asylum and work permit. These were issued after the shooting of two national guards, people in D.C. are unlawful. To quote from the court order here, more than months ago, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services enacted a series of policies that threw the lives of countless immigrants living in the United States into indeterminate legal limbo. The agency announced that it would be placing an indefinite pause on the adjudication of immigration benefit requests from individuals from 39 African Asian, Latin American, Middle East and countries. Since then, individuals from these countries have been categorically

Starting point is 02:43:35 barred from receiving final decisions on, among other things, their asylum, work permit, green card and citizenship application. And USCIS's hold on adjudication to cannot be attributed to anything that these individuals did wrong. Rather, it arises solely by the happenstance of their birth. And then I found this interesting in the court documents here. In ruling on these motions, the court is reminded of a line often repeated in discussions around immigration policy. If people wish to immigrate to the United States, they ought to follow the law and do things the right way. This case serves as a perfect example of immigrants doing just that. they went on to say that the USCIS had used what they called pretextual concerns of national security

Starting point is 02:44:18 that mask anti-immigrant sentiment that is forbidden from letting influence its decision-making. Legal terms, that means that USCIS's actions of a contrary to law, arbitrary, and capricious. There's a fairly like emphatic court response, right? This will affect a great deal of people. This has effect left a great deal of people in limbo, right? Most famously, I guess there were people who were at the stage of their naturalization where they take the oath to become American citizens, right? The very final step. It is obviously a formality.

Starting point is 02:44:50 You've passed a background checks, done the interviews, et cetera, et cetera, but it's still a necessary step without doing it. You do not become a citizen. And those people had been delayed and unable to do that. They will be able to proceed with that. Other people will be able to proceed with their process with the caveat that USCAS, if we have reported before in this show, is heavily focused. on denaturalization, and it might be very hard for them to actually make that progress and get USCIS to move on stuff. Talking of denaturalization, the DOJ has begun proceedings against 17 people, these people are either accused or convicted of serious crimes. What it seems that in most cases,

Starting point is 02:45:28 people have been adjudicated to have committed crimes. In some cases, they pled guilty to crimes after they naturalized, but that they were doing before they naturalized. And what they are arguing here, the DOJ is arguing, is that therefore, they lied when they were naturalized because they were asked if they had committed any crimes for which they had not been arrested. So by not confessing to those crimes in their interview, they were therefore lying. They were lying on the form. Yes, on the form or in the interview or both. And therefore, that is why they are trying to denaturalize them. This is a large denaturalization.

Starting point is 02:46:05 17 people is a lot. A couple of them also are alleged to have applied for immigration benefits under multiple different identities. One that I found particularly interesting is a Catholic priest who abused a minor parishioner. It's interesting because it's interesting to see them going there. I'll follow these and kind of keep tabs on how these progress, but that they have been ramping up denaturalizations. We are beginning to see them kind of reaping the work U.S.S. has been doing

Starting point is 02:46:32 since the Trump administration fundamentally turned that agency around and pointed it at denaturalization. Meanwhile, a GAO report on immigration detention in Camp East Montana. I've never seen it written like Montania with, so I'm guessing it's Camp Monta.

Starting point is 02:46:48 Like Joe Montania, almost? Yeah, well, like, they write, it says Montana, so like, I don't know, but it's in Bliss, right? Like, it's inside Fort Bliss. So, like, one would expect to normally, like, a Spanish-style pronunciation given the region

Starting point is 02:47:03 but maybe they just like a fucking NIA. I don't know like why they're not anyway. It's camp its name is spelled like the state not the Spanish word for Mounted. Some of the things detailed in this report are pretty shocking. A guard lost a loaded gun.

Starting point is 02:47:19 Oh boy yeah. People with diabetes and HIV did not receive treatment plans and quote on Jesus. Yeah. On February 20th 26 I issued a discrepancy report for detained non-sis and death by use of force in January of 2026. The coroner's autopsy found

Starting point is 02:47:35 the death to be a homicide due to asphyxia. However, the contractor did not provide use of force and death reports to ICE as required. In addition, evidence associated with the incident was missing or destroyed. Jesus. Yeah. Like, one of their guards strangled someone to death. It appears.

Starting point is 02:47:51 Yeah, there's a range of ways someone could be asphyxiated, right? Yeah. That's true, but... I'm guessing they're tempted to restrain this person violently, and like, as we've seen many other times in American history, murdered them. Yeah. And then evidence of that was destroyed.

Starting point is 02:48:08 What is allowing this to happen? It's that the contract was solicited using a worldwide expeditionary multiple award contract vehicle. That's a dimly like a military contract vehicle. It allows an experience pool of military contractors to apply for the contract. They probably did it like this to expedite the awarding implementation, right? Camp East Montana is a soft-sided facility on Fort Bliss. I've talked about it before here. Soft-sided facility means tents, right? It means keeping hundreds of people in tents.

Starting point is 02:48:37 They hired a contractor who had no experience using what's called a lowest price technically acceptable evaluation approach. So they filter out people who can't do the requirements that they have for the contract and then they look at which of the ones that does meet the requirements has the lowest price, right? This has resulted very clearly in them contracting someone who is completely incapable of managing a facility like this. And even among ice facilities, this one appears to be particularly heinous. And this has resulted in very, very predictable and easily foreseen human tragedies, right? They are capable of doing better than this. Conditions were very bad at bliss for Afghan people, Ray, who came here after the withdrawal from Afghanistan. I wrote about

Starting point is 02:49:24 that for the nation. You can look it up. I interviewed someone who was there. But this is even worse. Rather than learning from that, they've just gone deeper. This has resulted in at least one person being killed. It's pretty horrific. Let's go on break. And then we will return for some stories about trans-health care and war with Iran. All right, we are back. I have a sort of hodgepodge collection of stories-related. to trans health care and trans rights of the United States, that I'm going to go kind of sequentially, and some of them tie together.

Starting point is 02:50:15 But let's start with the trans military ban. We've an update on this. A federal appeals court has at least temporarily blocked the Pentagon from expelling transgender members of the military, though trans people may be barred from enlisting. So this is kind of sort of like a new form of don't ask, don't tell in a way. of you can get in if you're not trans, but once you're in and you are trans,

Starting point is 02:50:42 there's no legal grounds to remove you from the military. This was a 2-1 ruling that found Hague Seth's anti-trans policy was, quote, driven by the bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group and, quote, both arbitrary and based on animus. For those reasons, the policy violates the plaintiff appellee's constitutional right to equal protection of the law, unquote. Now, last bit is very important, like the Equal Protection Clause, in cases like this, is going to be the main thing

Starting point is 02:51:14 that trans people are able to rely on. Now, Circuit Judge Robert Wilkins, an Obama appointee, wrote that the Trump admin claimed their anti-trans policy is solely about whether the military can disqualify people from service due to a mental health condition, like gender dysphoria. Judge Wilkins wrote, quote, But the record shows that the purpose of the Higgs-Seth policy is to target applicants and service members who express what the administration believes is a quote-unquote false gender identity. And the policy goes far beyond disqualifying persons currently or recently suffering from gender dysphoria.

Starting point is 02:51:53 Some of those disqualifications are completely unexplained and have no reasonable justification, unquote. Heg-Seth almost immediately announced he is appealing to the Supreme Court. Oh boy. We will see where this goes. Yeah. Last month, the DOJ announced a settlement with the Texas Children's Hospital as part of an ongoing national investigation into violations of federal law for providing gender affirming care to minors. The Texas Children's Hospital has entered into agreements with both the DOJ and the Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton, that includes a commitment to not perform quote-unquote sex rejecting procedures. on minors, which the DOJ says includes puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. This is a new term that they're really, really rolling out.

Starting point is 02:52:43 Sex-rejecting procedures. You're going to see this a lot more in these next few weeks to months. Yeah. The hospital in Texas also agreed to pay over $10 million in damages and civil penalties to, quote, resolve allegations that it submitted false billings to public and private payers to secure insurance coverage for pediatric sex-rejecting procedures. The Department alleges this conduct violated the Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act, the False Claims Act, and Federal Fraud and Conspiracy Laws, unquote.

Starting point is 02:53:19 So they're saying that by billing insurance, whether public or private, for quote-unquote sex-rejecting procedures, trans-health care, that this was an act of fraud. Now, this is a settlement, and at the end of the settlement, they do note that these are just allegations that these have not actually been proven, the liability has not been proven in a court, but these are the allegations that resulted in the settlement. Now, as a part of the settlement, the Children's Hospital will also open the first ever, quote-unquote, detransition clinic. So detransition care is the same as transition care, right? It is the same type of care. Yeah. I know this. This is like what I do. There's not enough detransitioners out in the world

Starting point is 02:54:00 to sustain an actual full clinic, which points to the fact that this clinic is not going to be used for consenting detransition. This is mainly going to be used as a conversion therapy clinic for kids who want to transition, but are now going to be forced to go to a clinic like this because they're not able to get their health care through this hospital, or really, like, in Texas as a minor.

Starting point is 02:54:27 The Cleveland Clinic in Ohio settled a very similar case last week paying a $308,000 fine and agreeing to dedicate $2 million in funds for detransition care while promising to not provide gender affirming health care to minors for 20 years. Jesus.

Starting point is 02:54:49 That is the part of the settlement in the Cleveland Clinic case. My God. In mid-May, Oklahoma passed a bill prohibiting Medicaid coverage of gender-affirming care, including surgery and HRT, as well as offering this care in state-owned facilities. The bill does not cut funding to doctors at private health care facilities to provide HRT, as I have seen some claim online. This, like many of the Medicaid restrictions, primarily affects poor trans people on state Medicaid and may make care hard to access in the future

Starting point is 02:55:25 depending on how private hospitals react to this bill, even though it does not necessarily force them to change the way they operate. Lastly, later this summer, New York City will begin testing a pilot program for a direct low-slash-no-cost gender-affirming care clinic for adults, opening in a low-income neighborhood in Queens. I think this is a good first step in providing access to care, considering the Trump administration's threats to,

Starting point is 02:55:55 restrict Medicaid and Medicare coverage, or remove Medicare-Medicaid eligibility from hospitals that provide gender-firming care services. But as we know, trans youths have borne the brunt of these threats. Now, Bose-Mam-Dani and the City Health Commissioner have said they are working to expand city-provided gender-affirming care services to cover trans youth. Commissioner Martin told the City Council last Friday, quote, we are committed to this issue and want to make sure that we provide the services and resources for youth, as well as making sure we don't expose ourselves to clawbacks from the federal government, which disrupt the rest of the care we can give. There's much more to come on this, but rest assured we are working on this, unquote. Something that is worth understanding here

Starting point is 02:56:39 is that this new pilot program, this city-run low-slash-no-cost drop-in clinic, is completely separate from the city's H&H municipal hospital system, which already operates multiple H&H prize centers that currently offer youth gender affirming care, including HRT. I called one this morning to confirm that they are still offering services to children, people of all ages. Now, H&H is funded through city subsidies and patient revenue through Medicare. The new pilot program is attempting to launch an alternative care service that isn't reliant on insurance or federal funding, if that comes into question. And they're trying to get this clinic up and running off the ground as soon as possible, and then, once the pilot program is tested, expand it. Last week, Momdani announced a $15 million

Starting point is 02:57:31 investment in gender affirming care, quote-unquote, as a first step and said that the funds would be used to, quote-unquote, unlock care for youth who have had their health care restricted by private hospitals. So it's currently unclear how exactly these funds will be used. For a while, advocates in New York City and State were fighting for care in the state budget, which delayed some of the process on this city provided care because they were expecting about $8 million of care from the state budget, which eventually fell through. So now the city process is ramping up on this. Earlier this year, two major hospital systems in New York City stopped providing gender affirming care to trans youth, ahead of prospective HHS federal rule changes that would prevent hospitals from receiving federal funding

Starting point is 02:58:18 if they offer gender affirming care services to youth. These rules have yet to go in effect, but two major hospitals essentially complied beforehand. The risks from the federal government aren't just isolated to restricting federal funding. The Trump administration has employed a variety of threats in an attempt to intimidate patients and care providers. Last month, the two hospitals that discontinued care for trans youth received a criminal grand jury subpoena from the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Northern District of Texas,

Starting point is 02:58:48 requesting information on pageants under 18 years of age. At least one of the hospitals, Mount Sinai, is complying with the subpoena, though telling parents the records would be anonymized, whatever that means. Oh, yeah. A group of trans New Yorkers

Starting point is 02:59:03 who have received care at NYU Langone and their parents have filed a class action lawsuit to protect their medical records. Though patients at Nounce-Syne, I could also sign on to this suit. The suit has extended the deadline for the subpoena till late June,

Starting point is 02:59:21 as both the hospital and patients fight this in court. A similar administrative subpoena, requesting records for youth patients was challenged and successfully blocked in Rhode Island. These subpoenas should be fought on the strongest grounds by both the patients, the state, the city, and the hospitals themselves. And beyond the all ages care,

Starting point is 02:59:43 currently offered by the H&H health system, I think it was also fair to advocate that the direct low, no-cost drop in clinic expand to cover all ages once the pilot program is up and running this summer. We'll briefly discuss the detention of an ICE officer and the war on Iran. We do have a good ICE arrest for you this week.

Starting point is 03:00:07 Yeah, yeah, yeah. The one good out the rest. Right. Let's just start there then. So the Henampin County Attorney has filed charges against ICE agent Christian Castro. Castro was arrested in Texas. He was arrested by Texas Rangers with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Investigators and DHS Security Office of the Inspector General Staff at the scene.

Starting point is 03:00:29 According to a statement by the Hanapin County Attorney's Office, Castro is charged with, quote, four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime for an incident on January 14, 2026, when he discharged his weapon through the front door of a home, knowing there were people who had just run inside. The bullet traveled through the door and struck one victim in the leg before making its final impact in the wall of a child's room. They didn't know in this that the case might be removed to federal court, but they say that he would still be ineligible for presidential pardon. It is not usual when announcing any prosecution to consider the impact of a presidential pardon.

Starting point is 03:01:08 It is interesting that they did. The case in question refers to Castro shooting of Julio Soros-Ser-Selis, in which DHS claimed that Sosa-Selis and two others attacked Castro with a broom at a snow shovel and that Castro, quote, fired the defensive shot to defend his life. DHS very quickly dropped its case, put two agents on leave for providing accounts that were contradicted by video evidence. Probably Castro was one of them, right? this is interesting

Starting point is 03:01:35 A, that they were able to obtain the DHSOIG support. I had forgotten the DHSOIG were still doing stuff like this. To be honest, I didn't think they were. So this will be one that we will follow. That only leaves us with Iran, where this week a

Starting point is 03:01:52 A United States Apache helicopter was, people have been using shot down. I'm not sure if it was shot. It was taken down, reportedly by an Iranian drone and reportedly by a collision with that drone. It's possible that this happened accidentally, but given other things we've seen, right, in Ukraine, for example,

Starting point is 03:02:18 it is possible to take down a helicopter with a FPV drone. That would be my guess as to what happened here. Its crew were then rescued from the Strait of Hormuz by another drone, an uncrewed surface vessel. The US only bought these online. in March of this year. So this is the first time that we're aware of that they were used in this capacity, right? So this is like a boat drone, an uncrewed surface vessel. And it scoop, well, it didn't scoot them up. They got on it. It collected them. And then it took them to a second

Starting point is 03:02:48 location where a helicopter was able to lift them up. As a direct result, and according to St.com, at the direct order of the president, the US then began self-defense, I'm quoting here, right, quote-unquote, self-defense strikes against Iran. They claim these. strikes were a quote-unquote warning shot and will not impact negotiations, but as we record this on Wednesday afternoon, they have just announced another series of strikes. This all comes after Israel and Iran exchanged missile solvers when Iran responded to Israeli bombing in Beirut. And the Houthis have also claimed a missile attack on Israel and have said that they would begin targeting Israeli shipping again. We are already teetering on the edge of this

Starting point is 03:03:33 becoming a massive international conflict in a region again. I mean, it is a massive international conflict, right? But returning to these full-scale conflict that we saw until the ceasefire, which has been repeatedly violated, but nonetheless has reduced the amount of bombing that's happening. Israel also bombed Palestine this week. Among the people killed was an eight-year-old boy named Judd Soleiman in northern Gaza, which is tragic.

Starting point is 03:04:00 Yeah, we'll keep reporting on this. I've tried really hard not to make our coverage of especially what's happening on a round Twitter review because real people are killing and real people are dying. And like it's focusing on the stupid shit that the president said or that, you know, Netanyahu said on Twitter, like isn't or true social converted to Twitter or whatever. Like that's not really what's at stake here. Like what's the stake is people's lives. And so I want to kind of avoid doing the back and forth social media review. But yeah, that's what I got this week.

Starting point is 03:04:31 Cool. Oh, breaking news. As we go to press here, the Berlin Zoo has announced the name of its newborn pygmy hippopotamus. And I thought Hitler was a mistake. I'm going to be honest with you guys. I don't think that's an appropriate name for them to use. A little Hitler. I'll drop a link in the chat so you all can appreciate it.

Starting point is 03:04:56 It's like a new Moudang just dropped moment. They are calling it Brochen, Brochen, I don't speak German. Sure, okay, guys. That's marketable. Yeah, Bruchin. Yeah. Great. Horrible.

Starting point is 03:05:10 Good work, guys. That sounds like a candy. Children aren't legally allowed to eat in my country. Another dub for German marketing. It means bread roll, I guess. It's a very cute hippopotamus. That's a pretty cute name. Breadwell would be a cute name for, yeah.

Starting point is 03:05:24 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess if you're German, it's a cute name. Hit us up, German language listeners. Does it seem cute to you? No, don't, because you'll just get angry at us for not understanding your strange language. In my defense, you live outside of America, the only other country in the world. Right?

Starting point is 03:05:39 Yeah, I think that's it. Yeah, I'm just going to ignore the Iran reporting that you said. Yeah, we'll not mention that. Email us at HoolZone tips at proton.me. Some of you marketing fuckers are still trying. Remarkable. I'm pretty sure it's one person who just creates new aliases, but I'm, playing whackamol over there in the block list.

Starting point is 03:06:02 Okay. I will read your name. Z out if you keep doing it. All right. Well, I think that's going to be it for all of us here. And it could happen here. That's the it. And it could happen here is this, is us doing it.

Starting point is 03:06:17 Mm-hmm. Podcast. Goodbye. Put a trance girl on your couch. We reported the news. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday. with more episodes every week from now

Starting point is 03:06:36 until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Coolzone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions.

Starting point is 03:06:56 Thanks for listening. 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. I'm Akila Hughes, and Rebel Spirit Season 2 is about both of those things. As I was watching these statues come down, I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority Black City in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslave people. Listen to Rebel Spirit Season 2 on the

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Starting point is 03:08:19 Freedom for Vietnam! There's a fire coming to this country, and it's going to burn out everything. Listen to Saigon on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're watching the latest season of the Real Housewives of Atlanta, You already know, there's a lot to break down. Gorsha accusing Kelly of sleeping with a merry man. They holding Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew. Pinky has financial issues.

Starting point is 03:08:46 On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Real House Wise franchise, the drama, the alliances, and the T, everybody's talking about. To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast.

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