It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 238

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Starting point is 00:02:32 but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to It Could Happen here on Garrison Davis. This show originally focused on the potentiality of a Second American Civil War and the conditions or events that might set one into motion. And we will return to that topic later this episode. But first, let me introduce my guest, friend of the pod artist and noted live streamer, Bailey New Poster. I don't like that that's what we're attributable.

Starting point is 00:03:05 to me nowadays, but that's, you know, that's fine. That's fair. Hello, everybody. Thank you for coming back on the show. Let's start our main topic. Last summer, President Trump announced a UFC championship fight at the White House in 26 as a part of the festivities for America's 250th birthday. The event was initially planned to take place on July 4th, but last October, Trump announced it was rescheduled to take place on Flag Day, June 14th, which coincides with his 80th birthday. Come Memorial Day, a giant claw-like canopy was being erected on the South Lawn right in front of the White House. The event, officially titled UFC Freedom 250, had a lower capacity than originally envisioned, just 4,000 attendees, far from the 25,000 spectators on the White House grounds that Trump pitched last summer. The 4,000 seats in the miniature stadium arena were invite only.

Starting point is 00:04:08 Most tickets went to members of the military, while Trump had a thousand tickets to give out at his discretion. Though there were 85,000 free tickets to watch the fights on big screens from the Ellipse Park near the Washington Monument. UFC Free M250 was streamed on Paramount Plus and began with Trump and UFC CEO Dana White walking together from the Oval Office to the Octagon. Zach Brown sang the national anthem featuring a military flyover. This was a $60 million production with fireworks, dirt bike tricks, and music by the U.S. Marine Band, which played Trump's favorite song YMCA. Billionaires like David Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg were in attendance, along with members of Trump's cabinet and politicians.

Starting point is 00:04:59 Before the first fight, UFC announcer Bruce Buffer kick things off in a way that really encapsulated the entire event. And I'll show you this clip here. And I'll have the audience listen to the audio. From the South Lloyd House in Washington, D.C. For UFC Freedom 250, presented by Ram Trucks. Nothing stops RAM. And by Crypto.com. world's leading cryptocurrency platform.

Starting point is 00:05:33 Yes. Sponsorships on the White House lawn. Let's go, dude. Crypto shoutouts literally within 30 seconds of like the actual like event like starting. Like after the anthem, like when the fight starts, within 30 seconds, we get cryptocurrency ads. And I mean, the stage was covered in logos

Starting point is 00:05:51 for red, white, and blue monster energy, meta, rumble, the far right video streaming platform, crypto.com, as mentioned, steak gambling, and of course, Polymarket. UFC fighters were actually paid in the form of a crypto coin called USD1, issued by the Trump family's own crypto company, World Liberty Financial. Awesome. Crypto all the way in this event. But UFC Freedom 50 went off largely without a hitch, save for a stunt pulled by UFC heel, Josh Hokit, after winning his heavyweight match where he called Michelle Obama a man while being interviewed by Joe Rogan.

Starting point is 00:06:40 That's probably one of my favorite conspiracy theories, the Michelle Obama is a man stuff. It's pretty old. People have been writing that for like over a decade. That's a classic. I like the ones that mix it with Michelle Obama is a man and Obama used to be a woman. Those are the ones that I really respect. A solid straight, T for T relationship there. Yeah. Joe Rogan never addressed this comment for the rest of the night, and the UFC cut out this comment from Hokit from the YouTube upload, and it's been issuing takedown requests across social media. UFC CEO, Dan & White told Time magazine that he's, quote, completely against saying nasty and false things about people's families. Everyone knows my position on free speech, but I hate that kind of

Starting point is 00:07:26 nonsense, unquote. But according to the FBI, this event could have gone very differently. On the morning of Tuesday, June 16th, the DOJ announced that the FBI and law enforcement had prevented a mass casualty attack, attempting to kill government officials with five arrests in multiple states over that weekend. Early reports framed the alleged plot as a sophisticated multi-step plan involving explosives, drones, and snipers. Vice President J.D. Vance addressed the alleged terror plot on Fox and Friends Tuesday morning, saying, quote, so much of the far-left rhetoric is driving itself towards violence. Let's take a listen.

Starting point is 00:08:11 This is very, very dark stuff. This is what happens when people turn the rhetoric up so loud that disagreeing with somebody is a cause for violence. That's the place that we've come to, unfortunately. I think a lot of my Democratic colleagues in Washington have got to look themselves in the mirror and say, why is so much of this political violence coming from our side of the spectrum? Maybe they can do something different. His eyes are getting deeper set. Like, he looks waxier and waxier as the days go on.

Starting point is 00:08:38 Maybe he's just using a thicker eyeliner. Or maybe he's moved to eye shadow. That's possible. That is... Which is the sensible move. You start off with eyeliner. It doesn't look good. And then you realize what I should really be doing is eye shadow.

Starting point is 00:08:51 Imagine tears streaking down his face and his aisle. Midwest emo. Oh. Midwest emo, JD fans. A shiver ran up my spine. So, according to the vice president, this alleged terror plot was coming from the Democrat side of politics and simply the result of them turning up political rhetoric. Fox News reported that upwards of 23 people were involved in this plot, five of whom are currently in custody, with the details of the plan being uncovered on the encrypted. messaging app signal. Fox News claimed the thwarted attack was targeting capitalism, billionaires,

Starting point is 00:09:28 and APAC. J.D. Vance also mentioned how the administration is going after the terrorist funding networks facilitating this kind of violence. We're trying to look at the underground networks that drive towards this violence. 23 people do not get to the point where they're going to commit a mass terror incident in Washington, D.C., without some serious funding, without some serious coordination. And we've actually been trying to go with those networks of coordination because this is a, that's a terrorist plot. That's not a few guys doing crazy stuff. That is a coordinated plan terrorist plot.

Starting point is 00:10:03 Thank God we thwarted it, but we got to do more of that stuff. According to the charges announced by the DOJ, Tyson Proper, 19 years old of Ohio, Brian Rao, 24 of California, Michael Thomas, 32 of California, Daniel Eskridge, 32 of Missouri. and Abraham Alvarez, 31 of Nebraska, all conspired to plan and execute a mass casualty event, targeting politicians and other, quote-unquote, high-value targets at the UFC Freedom 250 event. The co-conspirators allegedly planned to use drones

Starting point is 00:10:37 to drop unspecified explosives on the north side of the UFC arena, forcing event attendees to evacuate south, where other co-conspirators would be set up with sniper rifles to fire on the fleeing crowd. It's sort of a real shame that the Iowa Interactive guys aren't making another hitman game for a minute. A lot of this is like very hitman, very, yeah, very Agent 47's type stuff.

Starting point is 00:11:09 And as we get more into the plan, it's going to get increasingly video gamey. Yeah, yeah. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said, quote, the FBI, our law enforcement partners and our U.S. attorneys, what they do every day to make America safe through quick response and vigilance in investigating, disrupting, and dismantling this alleged plan before it could be carried out.

Starting point is 00:11:31 FBI director Katta Patel said, quote, thanks to the rapid action of this FBI, our partners and the DOJ in a multi-state operation, multiple individuals are now in custody, and allegedly planned attacks were stopped cold. While the results represented the best of investigative work, it was also nothing under the ordinary for this law enforcement team. We are built to detect respond to and bring to justice those who threaten the lives of American citizens, unquote. And he said all that without blinking those big wet eyes of his. I think this was mostly in the form of a tweet. So it sounds like the FBI did a darn fine job preventing this terrorist attack.

Starting point is 00:12:08 Except what happened here was not the result of the FBI's excellent investigative prowess. They did not just stumble across this attack because of their, you know, diligent, diligent efforts to disrupt terrorist planning. Law enforcement only learned about this potential attack because on June 10th, the mother of one of the co-conspirators called local law enforcement in Ohio concerned about her son's recent firearm practices

Starting point is 00:12:37 and contact with individuals online. Officers went to their family home and spoke with 19-year-old Tyson Proper and his family. According to the criminal complaint, a family member told officers that Proper had, quote, recently met random people online and quit his job in preparation to conduct quote unquote missions

Starting point is 00:12:58 and quote unquote recons with these individuals as soon as that upcoming weekend. Proper allegedly spent about $3,000 of his graduation money to buy, quote, camping gear, food, ballistic plates, a new shotgun, a rifle, lots of ammunition,

Starting point is 00:13:16 extra magazines, and plate carriers, unquote. The family turned, all this equipment over to the police voluntarily. After local law enforcement interviewed Proper and his family, Tyson Proper was transported to Dublin Springs Mental Health Center. I think this is quite notable, is that they did not take him into custody, but was transferred to a mental hospital. In the DOJ announcement, they refer to this as a medical facility, but in court documents, they specify it's a mental health facility, and the criminal complaint says, quote, law enforcement submitted an application for an emergency admission based on his

Starting point is 00:13:53 homicidal ideations, detailing that proper had been thinking about joining the military or police force with the goal of being able to kill people, unquote. I like that it's always like these guys, no matter what political ideology they have, at one point they're like, maybe I should just fucking join the military, maybe I should just join the police. I just really want to fucking shoot people. It's like I want to cause. I want like a duty. Yeah, I mean, that's sort of kind of more like floaty mindset. I think there's more of a factor here than like any specific political ideology in a sense.

Starting point is 00:14:28 And we'll get into that once we talk about the way that this group envisioned itself, like the role that it had on starting a second American revolution. But there's very little like defined ideology happening with these individuals. And for someone like proper, there's a large degree of delusional thinking at play here. Yeah, it's guys who want to do missions. Yeah, exactly. Like, that's it. Like, they want to do missions and recon.

Starting point is 00:14:55 It's very, it's like aesthetically based on like the military and this like idea of like tactics. And we'll get into this sort of like, you know, military fetishism later on as well. But yeah, it's it's very much like very video gamey, very much like I want to plan like a mission to do in real life like what we play in video games. That's the sort of feeling across reading about their plan. Because their plan is relatively complicated, and there's no way that they could have pulled a plan like this off. Like, this type of plan would be hard for a nation state to be able to do successfully. There's no way that, like, five guys from, like, across the United States with, like, a, you know, nerdy focus on, like, tactical kit would be able to, like, do this.

Starting point is 00:15:41 about like halfway through planning they would have given up and all gone gay probably what would you mean gone gay well they would have turned into I was just thinking like you know really quitting your job this guy quits his job to meet his online

Starting point is 00:15:55 friends you know go hang out with them in the woods that's like 50 50 50 like they either try to plan a mass terror attack or they like all end up like kissing and stuff you know I mean yeah can't having a gay camp out in the woods is the more positive path for people like this? Yes. Because that's really all they need.

Starting point is 00:16:14 It's just a group of friends to go camping with. Well, I do like how Vance and them are talking about it. They're like, we got these guys who are definitely going to try and shoot up our UFC event. And they were going to successfully do it if we didn't stop them. And it's like, if you look at the kid, it's like a mentally ill teenager. Yes. And as we will also get into, you know, far from this like left. wing anti-capitalist motivation, which JD Vans and Fox News are promoting, that is not at all

Starting point is 00:16:46 what was going on here. So the day after Tyson Proper was admitted to the mental health facility, the sheriff's office contacted the FBI. After searching Propper's phone, investigators found signal chats detailing a planned attack with maps highlighting potential sniper locations and drone launch points. According to the criminal complaint, Tyson Proper's family saw him researching and mapping locations around Washington, D.C. And when asked what he was doing, he said that he intended to conduct quote unquote recon and quote unquote, hit and run missions.

Starting point is 00:17:21 Hit and run missions. Awesome, dude. That's fantastic. I'm going to do GTA5 online, like, heist, like prerequisite missions before we go blow up this UFC event. So on June 11th, the FF. FBI searched Proper's home and found a journal that the criminal complaint says contained a list of approximately 46 names, including celebrities and politicians, as well as pages, quote,

Starting point is 00:17:51 in which proper wrote that the government sought to control people and to sacrifice children and others to a demonic figure, unquote. Awesome. We're going. It's getting better. It's getting better. So yes, this is obviously evidence of, like, delusional thinking. Like, this is not, this is not someone who's, doing well. And this is also not your typical rhetoric from a democratic politician, considering the claims made by J.D. Vance. This is not, this is not regular democratic politician rhetoric. The proper family told the FBI that he recently began to interact with a group of people online who, quote, represented themselves as ex-military and that may share some

Starting point is 00:18:34 Christian-based ideology, unquote. The family believed that these people, people online were using religion to manipulate proper, and that they, quote, expressed ultra-religious and anti-government sentiments, specifically citing grievances about government corruption, the handling of the Epstein files, data centers taking up all the water in communities, and other government actions, unquote. So rather than a sort of general, like, left-wing anti-capitalist or rhetoric from democratic politicians motivating this attack, this is very general, kind of libertarian-esque anti-government sentiments. And this, as we will discuss, the script did not consider itself on the right or the left,

Starting point is 00:19:16 but saw themselves as American patriots more than anything else. And they were upset about government corruption and had this anti-establishment kind of leaning that was pushing them to plan very complicated and far-fetched attacks against the establishment and corrupt politicians. This is very average guy who sells cars ideology. Yes. Oftentimes, when people read through these sorts of court documents, they'll be like, they had an incoherent ideology. It's not really incoherent, right? They're responding to real things in the world. Like, everyone knows we're all being fucked over. Government did mishandle

Starting point is 00:19:54 the Epstein files. There is a lot of corruption, right? And it does exist on both sides of the political spectrum. So, like, they are responding to real things, but there's not an avenue that it's being channeled in a helpful or useful direction. So it gets dispersed through these very larpy, like idealistic, violent avenues where you get a group of people who don't really know what to do but are seeing these problems in the world. And then what they end up doing is larping themselves into federal custody by typing on signal about their dreams to shoot politicians. Spending their college money on guns. Yeah. Now, the criminal complaint in Ohio for Tyson Proper also specifies that family members highlighted concerning statements he'd made in recent

Starting point is 00:20:38 months on social media, quote, such as making sympathetic comments about Adolf Hitler and posting anti-Semitic comments on Facebook, unquote. Wow. Left wing. Well, they are national socialists after all. True, true. We will return to discuss Tyson proper and the alleged attack on UFC 200 after this app break. Okay, we are back. On June 11th, the FBI interviewed, proper at the mental hospital, where he admitted to planning an attack on the Freedom 250 event at the White House. The FBI ran their own search of Propper's phone, and on the encrypted messaging app, Simplex, found messages identifying possible targets. The criminal complaint alleges that in mid-May, Proper identified a senator from Tennessee and wrote, quote, she's taken money from the

Starting point is 00:21:41 pro-Israel lobby and supports them, unquote. A few weeks later, Proper sent pictures of four members of Congress, apparently taken from the track APEC website, writing, quote, these are the people we're going to focus on. Proper allegedly told police that members of this group that were planning the attack were primarily recruited through TikTok, where members shared photos and videos of tactical kits and physical training via TikTok direct messages. Once a recruit had proven himself on TikTok, they were then let into a quote-unquote vetted signal chat. So glad this isn't happening on my video app of choice Instagram Reels. I really don't want to start restricting that.

Starting point is 00:22:27 The TikTok aspect is super interesting because there's elements of this that's similar to the accelerationist Nazi terrorism of 2016 to 2020. These people are not explicitly Nazis, even if there's an aspect of anti-Semitism, kind of directing this violence. But this is anti-Semitism that is largely focused on the role that Israel has in influence in the U.S. government and the Israel lobby and politicians taking money from Israel. That's where most of the anti-Semitic aspect comes from.

Starting point is 00:22:59 And then in proper case, he is posting about Hitler on Facebook. But this is not driven by like neo-Nazi style anti-Semitic ideology. Like these guys aren't posting about Saan and Rads or, Germany or race science. At least that's not what's outlined in the court documents. So some of this does feel downstream from the accelerations Nazis like the base and Adam Woffon and their target selection that we'll get into in a sec kind of also is similar to this. But they're not primarily organizing this on like Telegram, right? This is guys posting like shooting videos and tactical kit on TikTok. And that's how they meet each other.

Starting point is 00:23:38 is through TikTok, sharing videos of their, you know, plate carrier and doing shooting drills, and then they start, you know, talking, and they start planning these sorts of operations, as they call them, and then they move to Signal to plan these things more in depth. Now, Propper's phone contained a large signal chat with approximately 19 individuals, along with smaller chats consisting of four to five people that were divided based on role assignments and locations. In these chats, the group discussed exit, escape, and evasion resources for the Freedom 250 attack, including the location of potential safe houses. One of the signal chats was titled Hunters, which the complaint says, quote, contained detailed

Starting point is 00:24:23 instructions for carrying out the attack and plans to safely escape. Proper showed the FBI the TikTok profiles of other co-conspirators. And based on this, investigators were able to identify someone in California, and someone in Missouri. The guy in Missouri, Daniel Eskridge, had the username Fulcrum Resist on TikTok, and they were able to identify him because he followed himself

Starting point is 00:24:50 from another account with his legal name. And the account with his legal name, largely just reposted the tactical videos from at Fulcrum Resist. Like, reposting your own videos and being like, I don't know, this guy looks pretty sick.

Starting point is 00:25:07 This guy looks like a badass. And dope. Have you guys seen this guy shooting? Oh my God. I bet he's going to do something crazy one day. This guy has a wife and five kids. Oh my God. He is like, I think it's like 32 years old.

Starting point is 00:25:19 He lives on a rural property about an hour north of Kansas City. And he's, he's kind of the most interesting guy in this whole deal for me. The FBI was also able to identify co-conspirators based on information in the simple X messages given to them by proper. Now, one of these Simplex group chats was called Vanguard of

Starting point is 00:25:42 the Old Republic. God! Yes! This was the main name that this group used to refer to themselves was Vanguard of the Old Republic. And there was another Simplex chat that was called Vanguard of the Old Republic parenthesis Ops

Starting point is 00:25:58 Stage 1, which was which was like an you know, an op planning chat. Awesome. That's So dope. I'm going to read some messages from fulcrum. That is Daniel Eskridge of Missouri. He wrote that the vanguard of the older public should intend to, quote,

Starting point is 00:26:19 recruit operators into this group and start making teams to complete tasks and objectives to push our lines forward. So good. Quote, the definition of a vanguard is the leading group in an advancing army or the foremost pioneers in any field, movement, or industry, that is what we strive to be. This chat here will be insulated for the most part from each team's detailed plan. So we won't post exact details in this chat. This will be the main chat for everyone as we grow and we will have specific ops chats. Our goal is in a general sense to quote, restore the old republic. Our constitutional

Starting point is 00:27:00 Republic has been stolen by corporations, politicians, and foreign actors, they have usurped power from the people and concentrated it at the top to the point that we now live in late stage, quote unquote, democracy. When I say restore the old republic, I'm not talking about all the flaws that we had in the past times, but merely talking about the fact that in a constitutional republic, the people truly hold the power, and that's what we intend to restore. To get there, this country needs more fuel on the fire to show our fellow Americans at the time has come to stand up and reclaim that power. May 22nd, 2026. Oh my God. People who are on like the Star Wars Wiki Forum like way too much. Like I'm on the, what is it, Wukipedia? Wookie. Yeah, Wukipedia mod.

Starting point is 00:27:53 Another co-conspirator named Michael Thomas of California wrote, quote, to be clear, I intend to escalate this group, and I don't want to take six business years to do it, unquote. Six business years. He's making it sound more professional. That's good. So much of this is like LARPie, right? They're using all these, like, you know, the sort of like tier one operator terms, which we'll get into it in a sack and like, you know, missions. They want it to sound professional, six business years. A business year is the same as a regular year. It's not, but Thomas also wrote that everyone in the group should, quote, consider yourselves an enemy of the state. and discussed imagining executions. Another co-conspirator named Brian Rowe of California

Starting point is 00:28:35 wrote about the need for quote-unquote guerrilla-style warfare and quote-unquote raid attacks with, quote, skilled operators to work like ghosts to conduct infiltration missions, unquote. Yes! Very hitman, very ancient 47, right? Right, these are frankly just like totally, totally delusional. The criminal complaint says that Thomas and Rao met at least once

Starting point is 00:28:59 in the last month in Southern California to, quote, practice marksmanship and tactics. Michael Thomas of California described different tiers of operators within the vanguard of the old republic, and this is largely taking from like military terms. Quote, tier one operators may be asked to put themselves in harm's way,

Starting point is 00:29:19 break the law, and potentially go into hiding. Tier two would consist of getaway drivers, drone operators, and direct support. May still be asked to seriously break the law. Tier 3 may be a runner or part of the Underground Railroad. Indirect support, recruitment, supply, logistics, tech, still actively contributing, but most likely safe from legal issues. Tier 4, social media influencers, protesters, funders, press, followers, nobody is being

Starting point is 00:29:48 asked too much or taking any risks. Tier 1 status is not something to take lightly. You'll be sacrificing for your country and carrying a brunt of the weight. we will try to break them out of jail if we need to, unquote. Oh, my God, dude. Oh, God. This is kind of them at their larpeiest, is like when they're talking about like four different tiers of operators,

Starting point is 00:30:14 and it's like you and like at, you know, at the most, like 19 of your internet buddies. Yeah. And kind of at the least, kind of you and your five closest friends talking about how you want to like wage insurgent warfare against the government. They're structuring their discord server. Yes, yes. Yes, that is, that's what's happening, just not on Discord, but on Simple X and Signal. But, like, a lot of people, like, know guys like this, right? These are guys in their 20s or 30s who played a lot of, like, tactical military video games

Starting point is 00:30:42 who have this sort of, like, military tactical fetishism. And they're looking for, like, an outlet for this, combined with this anti-establishment sentiment that is based on very real things happening out in the world. But it has nowhere to be directed. So they just do this LARP and eventually wind up in federal custody. and get charged with conspiracy to commit murder on the White House grounds. Fulcrum, Daniel Eskridge of Missouri, wrote, quote, so right now in the historical timeline, I believe we are at the trigger event point,

Starting point is 00:31:14 meaning to set this off, we need an event or events that cause people to realize the revolution has officially begun, unquote. So this is what the group intended to do. They intended to execute attacks that served as trigger events, to cause this sort of mass like upswell of support for a second American revolution. They didn't call it a civil war. They called it a second American revolution. And that is how they envisioned themselves as being the operators that will do trigger events to put this all into motion. It's kind of similar to like the boo-galoo boy type stuff from, you know, five, six years ago.

Starting point is 00:31:53 This group allegedly talked about attacking power grids with a fleet of drones to hit specific transformers and discussed assassinating several U.S. senators, House representatives, and prominent business executives. So this sort of target selection, very similar to like the base and Adam Woffin and, like, you know, neo-Nazi accelerationist terrorism from around like the, you know, 2016 to 2022 type era. The group did debate how they should choose assassination targets with fulcrum writing, quote, we need to make sure it's someone that can't be easily turned into a right versus

Starting point is 00:32:28 his left thing. We want someone both sides would celebrate, would cheer and support us for taking out. Both sides would celebrate us shooting up this one guy, like this one guy's weird America birthday event? Like, what did? I mean, I think what they're pulling on from here is stuff like the Luigi Mangione incident. Yeah, yeah. They're trying to identify, like, and I find this part to be very interesting because a lot of these guys do have this sort of like Christian nationalist or like Christian, like libertarian. It's kind of unclear. But they definitely have this like Christian element to their motivation. They see them as themselves as patriots. But they do not as explicitly associate themselves with like the right or the left, right? They see themselves as kind of like outside

Starting point is 00:33:10 politics. But I find this aspect to be rather interesting. When they're trying to specifically find targets that will allow for both people on the right and left to like cheer them on or like join in on like a second American revolution. This does push them towards a talking a lot about like A-PAC-backed politicians and unnamed prominent business executives. Their names are redacted in their criminal complaint.

Starting point is 00:33:37 But I'm sure that's, you know, it's... It's Black Rock. It's... Well, it's like... Because it could be people like Jeff Bezos or like Elon Musk. It doesn't... It's not totally clear, but I'm assuming that's the sort of range in which they're discussing. Folkram texted, quote, so the goal here is to get

Starting point is 00:33:53 at least three trigger event ops fully planned and and to the best of our ability to have them executed on the same day or in rapid succession so that our message is undeniably clear to our illegitimate government and our fellow Americans that we are waging war. We don't need to wait for resistance infrastructure, supply lines, and all these other things. That's what every other group in this movement is working on, and I'm sure one of them will be able to get it right. But they can't do that without mass support and they won't get mass support as long as people think all anyone is doing is holding

Starting point is 00:34:26 signs and chanting. All we need is three small groups of fully committed operators with a fully fleshed out and perfectly formulated plan and all real world on the ground intel they will need for each op to be successful. Once we've decided on what three events would provide the most impact and bring in the most support, we will create special chats for those ops specifically so that only the people on those ops know the details, unquote. All of this planning just for one 19-year-old I got to invite my mentally ill 19 year old buddy into this group chat so he can, his mom can get really worried. That's how a lot of this stuff goes.

Starting point is 00:35:10 And like, I don't want to, I don't want to diminish the possible harm that a group like this could cause. I think something that Robert pointed out last week when discussing this on executive disorder. It's like, this group could have easily spawned like one or two like mass shooters, right? Or they could have acted on a plan that was way too difficult. to pull off that caused a lot of collateral damage, right? This group could have done something very bad. This group could have set a plan into motion that ended up killing or wounding a bunch of people or driven people towards other sorts of violent acts, right? Because they're encouraging each other to buy weapons, buy kit, you know, do all these things, right? So there was a potential

Starting point is 00:35:48 for real harm here. Was the UFC Freedom 250 event ever in serious harm from these people? Absolutely not. There is no way they were able to pull off their plan, as we will soon discuss. But first, let's go on another ad break. Okay, we are back. I have one more encrypted message from from fulcrum or Daniel Eskrich of Missouri. Exciting. Quote, I can't speak for everyone in saying we're tired of not making shit happen and tired of being ruled over by treasonous, pedophilic criminal politicians and foreign agents, unquote. The fulcrum wrote that what they're doing is not only our birthright, but also our duty as Americans. It's about time the elites in the government are reminded of why they should fear the people, especially the American people.

Starting point is 00:36:49 Unquote. So Eskridge wrote that the American people is the largest standing army in the world with 107 million gun owners. He also believed that half of the military would join their cause and not follow quote-unquote unlawful orders after the second American Revolution kicks off, and that following a successful trigger event operation, potentially 3% of the U.S. population would stand with their group, writing that just like America's forefathers, quote, what we do here will reverberate around the world and echo throughout history, long live the republic, unquote. Oh, God. So that's the most we know about the group formation and the sort of drivers that they themselves are discussing. Let's close by getting back into the UFC Freedom 250 attack plan. Because the more that I learned about this plan, the more it became clear that this would just simply never happen. This is not a feasible operation.

Starting point is 00:37:53 It would be hard for a special ops military team to pull us off at this location, let alone five of your TikTok friends. to pull this off. And like, the plan to target Freedom 250 really only kicked off a week before the event was scheduled to take place. Well, there's your issue, guys. If you had a little, maybe a month's heads up,

Starting point is 00:38:17 you know, maybe you could have gotten something going. On June 7th, Fulcrum messaged the Vanguard of the Old Republic about using the White House UFC event to take out, quote-unquote, high-value target. In his message, he mentioned communication with, quote, unquote, other groups, and said that the UFC attack would require cooperation from everyone, and that they would need to, quote, put a hold

Starting point is 00:38:42 on the other ops that were currently being planned. Quote, we need five teams of three, each team consisting of one sniper, one tier one operator as support slash lookout, and one drone operator, unquote. As a part of the planning, they needed to pick five locations, ideal, for, quote, precise sniper shots and for the drone pilot to operate from. Folkram wrote, quote, once each team is mission ready, the green light will be given and the drone rigged with explosives will fly

Starting point is 00:39:15 and they will initiate the attack, unquote. So after the explosives detonate, the attention will be, quote, on the skies and not the rooftop snipers, who will then eliminate, quote, quote-unquote high-value targets. Oh, also, I feel like the skies and rooftop targets are remarkably close to each other. Sort of, yeah, same range.

Starting point is 00:39:41 Lacket. I feel like if you're looking up, you might see on the roof. I don't know. No, even the idea that you can get a sniper on a rooftop anywhere close to the White House without getting your head blown off is like insane, right? There's just no way that's going to happen. You're not going to be able to get a sniper on a roof within a site. line of the White House. I mean, following the attempted assassination on Donald Trump in Butler, I can see why people might think it's easier to set up a sniper location than one might

Starting point is 00:40:10 expect. The White House is like the most defended place in the country. Like, especially at an event like this where there's even more security, I just don't see how this is in any way feasible. Now, the group believed that there would be a protest outside of the event and that this would help allow quote-unquote extraction teams to evacuate the quote-unquote operative. to a location out of state after successful completion of mission objectives. Fulcrum wrote, quote, If we're successful, this could be the first battle of the Second American Revolution. Who is willing to be able to drop everything and be one of these 10 operators

Starting point is 00:40:48 and who is confident and capable of flying drones? June 7th, 10.28 p.m. 19 year old, raise your hand. Babe, please come to bed. No, no, honey. I've been activated. I got to go. You know those friends

Starting point is 00:41:04 have been hanging out in the woods with? I got to go. They need me. So even if this group got enough quote-unquote operators to pull off this mission, which is highly questionable, if not impossible,

Starting point is 00:41:15 they simply did not have the funds, the materials, or the resources to carry out an attack like this, let alone the skill or logistical capacity. Folkram texted the group, quote,

Starting point is 00:41:25 we also need to come up with $1,300, ASAP. We need to come up with $1,300. You can't just pull it. This guy has three kids and a wife and he can't pull five kids and he can't pull like one. Kids are expensive. We have.

Starting point is 00:41:42 Oh, true, true. Yeah, but you're going to die. Like he's going to, he knows he's going to die. He's larping like he's going to get out, but he knows he's going to die and he can't be like I will go and I'll sell some bullshit and I'll get like a thousand three hundred dollars. We got to fund this. Do you have a credit card? Yeah. Anyone have a credit card?

Starting point is 00:42:03 Quote, $1,300 gets us the drones and the charges. We should all pitch in and we need it to ASAP. What kind of drones are they getting? Like, is this Amazon, like, you look up drone on there? I'm just picturing, like, the drones that you see getting flown around, like, at the park by a family that just bought it. Just carrying a grenade. Exactly, yeah.

Starting point is 00:42:28 Thomas of California replied, quote, I'm flat broke. I can pay in manpower though. I bet you can come up with $100 in a week somehow. Maybe just hold a sign by the freeway saying, quote, fund the freedom fighters. Oh, God. That's awesome, dude. So unable to pay for bombs. The group talked about. trying to build drones and discussed breaking into military facilities to steal the explosives needed for their attack plan. Does anybody, does any of us know how to build this? Oh, shit. I, we might have to redo the whole, or, or we can break into some of the most protected facilities in America.

Starting point is 00:43:20 I think that might be the, that might be the better choice. To be fair, some of those military facilities are not as protected than what you might think. That's fair. The criminal complaints reads, quote, a member of the group stated he knew how to build drones, connected via fiber optic cable, and capable of carrying explosive charges,

Starting point is 00:43:38 but did not have access to the materials needed for explosive charges. That number suggested that they, quote, may need to hit a military industrial complex facility for the things we need, unquote. Fulcrum or Eskridge responded, 10-4, I'm liking the sound of this. Awesome. What? You're texting people. 10-4. What are you doing? What are we doing? The complaint alleges that the group continued to discuss the, quote, benefits and the

Starting point is 00:44:07 detriments of obtaining a, quote-unquote, cook for explosive charges versus stealing military ordinance from a manufacturing plant, unquote. They were looking at a few locations in Kansas and zeroed in on the Kansas Army ammunition plant, though they never actually. stole explosives from this plant. But they sure to talk about it. And their conversations are in the charging documents. Awesome. So again, this is all happening days before this attack is supposed to kick off.

Starting point is 00:44:39 And a part of the plan is for a day or two, before UFC Freedom 250, the group was to meet up in Fredericksburg, Virginia, to, like, go over plans again in person and, like, practice and prepare. So they needed to get guys in Fredericksburg around the 12th or the 3rd,000. One of the members who was interviewed by the FBI confirmed that the group was communicating online about attacking the event, but claimed that the attack plan was canceled on June 12th. And of course, Tyson Proper was placed in the mental health facility on June 10th. So somewhere between June 10th and June 12th, the group called off their plans. It is notable, however, that at least one of the co-conspirators, did attempt to drive to Washington, D.C. When Brian Rao was interviewed by the FBI, he admitted that he tried to drive to Washington, D.C., to protest UFC Freedom 250, but denied any involvement in this conspiracy.

Starting point is 00:45:42 And he told the FBI that his vehicle malfunctioned and had to return home. One of the most interesting parts in the criminal complaint is this FBI agent writing about how, when he was interviewing Rao, Rao discussed how someone could hypothetically use drones armed with explosives to bomb buildings near the White House, which would cause a mass panic with limited deaths at UFC Freedom 250, and mentioned this as an example of how to use drones to enact political change in a more targeted way rather than indiscriminate killing. The FBI agent wrote,

Starting point is 00:46:18 quote, based on this exchange, I believe Rao was privy to the operational details of the plan, unquote. So Brian Raab just like talked about the plan, just like as a hypothetical to an FBI agent while the FBI was searching his vehicle after admitting he tried to drive to D.C. to protest the event, but was not involved in any criminal conspiracy. That's like being, you know, you just got caught. Your spouse has found all of your, your secret messages or whatever to your, your grinder lover. And while they're going through your phone, you're like, I mean, what if somebody was hypothetically going to do that? Like, you know, it wouldn't be that bad because it's with a, it's with a man and not a woman. So it's like, we love each other completely different ways. I'm not, but that's just like me, you know, that's not real. That's not like, it's not, it wouldn't be anything real.

Starting point is 00:47:06 Just like hypothetically. You'd be cool with that, right? You'd be cool with that? The FBI was not cool with that. Especially considering that when executing a federal search warrant of Rouse vehicle and home, they seized an AR-15 style rifle, a Glock 19 handgun. a tactical belt, an ammo can full of bullets, a two-way radio, an infrared laser target pointer, and a rifle magazine.

Starting point is 00:47:30 Brian Rao's family members told law enforcement that Rao had alluded to traveling to D.C., and according to the California criminal complaint, Rao told his family that, quote, one day they would wake up and he would be gone, and that he intended to travel to Washington, D.C., where, quote, unquote, something big would happen. Similar to Proper's family, family, Brian Rao's family suspected that he may be intending to commit an act of violence

Starting point is 00:47:57 based on a, quote, increased time spent shooting weapons, and a noticeable change in behavior, including increased anxiety, irritation, and seclusion, unquote. Dad's spending a lot of time in the shed with a gun in his mouth. Family also told law enforcement that Rao had been spending a lot of time online with a new group of friends, with his family also telling law enforcement that they considered reporting him to the police after he left on his way to D.C., but did not because he returned home so quickly. Rowe told the FBI he had vehicle trouble. On June 13th, law enforcement officials executed a federal search warrant of Daniel Eskridge

Starting point is 00:48:42 or Fulcrum's residence, and agents seized rifles, a shotgun, a pistol, and other tactical gear that matched photos, Eskridge posted online. That same day, FBI searched the home of Michael Thomas in California, where they seized a hunting rifle, an AR-15 style rifle, 30-round extended magazines, with approximately 180 rounds of ammunition, as well as a pistol. While Michael Thomas was being interviewed, to quote the criminal complaint, quote, he stated that he saw himself as the planner and advisor for the group, and while he was not willing to take action himself, wanted to guide and instruct to others on how to carry out attacks. Thomas expressed frustration that some members of the group seemed non-committal and his excuses as to why they could not take action. Thomas said

Starting point is 00:49:29 that the aim of this and subsequent attacks was to create enough chaos to bring about the overthrow of the U.S. government, which he believed was being, quote, run by an elite group of individuals who sacrifice and consume infants, who are also deeply involved with Jeffrey Epstein and are now protected by President Donald Trump. Thomas places some of the responsibility of this corruption, of the U.S. government with Jewish people and blames them and Israel for the current war with Iran, unquote. So yeah, that is what did not happen

Starting point is 00:49:58 at UFC Freedom 250. Nothing will ever happen. J.D. Vance did go back on Fox News Tuesday night on Fox News as the 5 and said, quote, it turns out the plot was like, not that advanced. They weren't in town. They had not really done.

Starting point is 00:50:18 done that much planning, unquote. So slightly backtracking his previous assertions. We've got to find who's funding these guys. These guys who can't pull out 1,300 bucks from like between the couch questions. Between five people. Yeah, but what is going on? Like, no, I didn't, wasn't it like 19 or something in the signal chat? In the biggest signal chat related to the group, there's, there was 19 people. So far only have been arrested. More have been interviewed, right? Because the FBI mentioned interviewing someone in West Virginia who said that the attack plan was canceled. As of recording, this guy's not been arrested in charge,

Starting point is 00:50:55 we don't know his name. So they definitely are talking with other people related to this network. Well, they know he was a tier four operator. He wasn't... The law can't touch him. No, yeah. Famously how conspiracy charges were.

Starting point is 00:51:08 Yeah, yeah. The last thing I want to mention is the fifth guy that was arrested, right? Because there was five people arrested initially. And that is Abraham Alvarez. He was known as quote-unquote shepherd online. Call of duty, of course, classic. And the DOJ claims that he was responsible for planning, organizing, and directing the planned attack.

Starting point is 00:51:28 Alvarez allegedly picked out the drone launch points and sniper locations and claimed to have one drone and was trying to get others. He also selected a safe zone meetup location in Nebraska for after the attack. Alvira's also claimed to be, quote unquote, cooking explosives. But court documents never specify that drones or explosives were seized during any of the searches. So we don't know if he actually had a drone or actually had explosives. It seems unlikely because of the whole plan of needing to steal explosives from this military facility in Kansas. But he may have been trying to make explosives. But at this point, it's kind of unclear.

Starting point is 00:52:09 Now, before any of the details of any of the alleged attackers was released, a Fox News contributor said that, considering President Biden led in, quote, unquote, millions of unvetted people into the country, quote, it would be a very dangerous delusion to believe that these terrorist organizations and countries did not use that open border to bring people inside, unquote. And as we've already discussed, this was not the operation of a foreign terrorist organization or people that were brought into the country. These are Americans. These are American patriots. Self-escribed. But on Thursday, June 18th, the DHS announced, quote, alleged ringleader of UFC terrorist plot is a Mexican illegal alien, unquote. With acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Biss writing,

Starting point is 00:52:59 this illegal alien from Mexico should have never been allowed in our country. He was the ringleader of a failed terror attack targeting UFC Freedom 250 at the White House. The current legal status of Abraham Alvarez is kind of unclear, but he was not brought into the country under Biden's open borders. He entered the country as a child on a B2 visitor visa that expired in December of 2021. He's been in this country nearly his whole life, and under Obama, he was granted deferred action for childhood arrivals or DACA in 2014, suspending possible deportation. So while it looks like he currently may not have legal status. This was not an illegal alien who snuck across the border from Mexico. This guy was brought to the United States as a child and has lived here for

Starting point is 00:53:50 over 25 years, over 27 years. So I do think that is worth noting. But I'm sure going forward, the Trump administration will be running with this idea that this illegal alien from Mexico planned the UFC Freedom 250 terrorist attack. And the actual context of how Alvarez entered the country is important. Not that it will matter to Fox News or the Trump administration, but I do think it is worth specifying. And of course, there was upwards of 19 other people involved in this. And the four others that I've spent most of the episode talking about are all U.S.-born citizens.

Starting point is 00:54:26 Anyway, yeah, that's what did not happen at UFC Freedom 250. And let things, I suppose, continue to not happen. It could not happen here. It will continue not happening. So, Bailey New Poster, where can people find you online? Oh, God. I'm on Blue Sky as New Poster 2. Very smart pick.

Starting point is 00:54:50 Yes. I'm also on the other app, X, as New Poster 2, but I, you know, not very well. Not very woke of you. I'm also on. Instagram as post-litical bling because that account has not been suspended three different times. And then on Twitch as, I think on Twitch as new post or two as well. Excellent. There's four little options for you.

Starting point is 00:55:15 Yes. Good luck in your streaming endeavors. Oh, God. All right. That does it for us here that could happen here. See you on the other side. Bye-bye. It is like love.

Starting point is 00:55:32 You feel it in your heart. IR. Radio. Canada's number one streaming app for radio and podcasts. including IHart Pride Canada, your favorite hits and must have party bangers, plus personalized and curated playlists, like back in the day pride. Come together, celebrate, low. Take pride with you anytime, anywhere. Just ask your smart speaker to play IHartPride Canada.

Starting point is 00:55:56 Stream us on your phone. Or listen now at iHeartRadio.ca. Hey, I'm Hoda Kotby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby. Okay, if you know me, you know this. I'm always searching for inspiration, for support, and useful tools to help maximize joy. So this podcast lets us uncover all of that together. We're going to have these meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people. Like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she never saw coming.

Starting point is 00:56:30 I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer. And that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartner retarious. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety. Olympic champ Sean Johnson revealed why she had no choice but to be a gymnast. There was something about gymnastics that was intoxicating to me. It's given me a belief that we all have one of those treasures inside of us. We just have to find it.

Starting point is 00:56:53 Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You said to me, yo, you know, keep at it, because you let me rap for you. It was magical for all of us. We made it, we made it. I'm like, we? You know, I'm like, I know these guys, but who are you? I'm MC Jen, and this is laugh but not least. I'll be chatting with guests from all walks of life

Starting point is 00:57:18 about the power of humor when it comes to facing difficult times, like the co-founder of Rough Riders, Darren D. Dean. Talking about as a kid, do you remember that we met even way before that? Let me think, did you walk up to the gate? That was me, Dee. That was me. The day we found out that you and the whole crew was at Hit Factory, the mission was to get me to go to the gate, start freestyling, and see if I could get in the studio.

Starting point is 00:57:41 I'm rapping, and then suddenly I hear a voice, hey, open the gate, let him in. The gate slowly went, come, come, come, come, come. They all, they're watching this, and they watch me walk into there, and that is a moment that I will remember for the rest of my life. Listen, and laugh but not least with MC Jen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Here at the Happiness Lab, we're serving up some hot takes for the summer. Big ideas that just might reshape how you think about your well-being. Like, we've been thinking about the loneliness epidemic all wrong. You can be lonely in a marriage.

Starting point is 00:58:15 You can be lonely at a party. I don't think loneliness is actually about solitude. Loneliness is about something much bigger. Or that we should get rid of small talk altogether. We talk about current events. We talk about what you do for a living. But not, do you love what you do for a living? Is this your dream job?

Starting point is 00:58:31 Or that the mental health crisis isn't what we think it is, and that kids today are doing better than we assume. It was really disorienting for us as researchers to be so wrong about our hypothesis. We are so scared that we are going to underreact to a severe challenge that we tend to overreact. For more surprising ideas backed by psychological science, check out our new series, Happiness Hot Takes. Listen to the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and this is It Could Happen here. I wanted to talk today a little bit about Belfast and about what happened there earlier this month, the racist riots in which mobs of bigots ran through the city forcing people out of their homes for not being white, destroying businesses, terrorizing people. It was horrific. And if you spent any time watching live streams or videos or just the coverage, I'm sure you felt as frightened both for those people directly and just for the future as many of us. And in the wake of something like that, it

Starting point is 00:59:38 can often be hard to know, like, what to do? And what would I do if this were happening in my community, right? Like, what is the proper response, especially if there isn't, you know, an immediate response in the moment that meets, you know, the rage of one of these nights and actually is able to stop it? You know, if these bigots are able to go through and attack and harm people, how do you both respond to that and help the people who have been hurt? And how do you deal with the fact that that could be a very dangerous situation, you know, especially if you've still got these mobs of people out there who are willing to hurt the folks that you're trying to protect and anyone potentially trying to protect them. Well, obviously, the people who live in Belfast are dealing with that problem immediately.

Starting point is 01:00:21 And so the best place to go if I wanted to know what that was like was to someone who's been living through it. And fortunately, I found the posts on Blue Sky of Lee Hurley. He's a Belfast-based writer. He's the owner of Dailycanon.com. Lee also runs the Trans Agenda, which records and documents anti-trans media coverage in UK papers. You can subscribe at Transagenda. Info. I reached out to Lee after saying some posts that Lee had made about what he had witnessed in terms of the local response to people trying to organize to help folks who had been attacked and brutalized. And Lee wrote an essay for us and read it and thankfully it was good enough to do both of those things.

Starting point is 01:00:59 So this is some direct firsthand reporting both on what it was like to live in Belfast, that was going on and what it's been like to watch the community spring into action to try and make right some of the wrongs that were done. So without further ado, here's Lee. Last week, Belfast hit the headlines worldwide. In usual Belfast fashion, it wasn't for anything good. On Monday 8th of June, 26, a man was attacked and stabbed in North Belfast by a refugee. It was a vicious attack caught on camera that resulted in the victim losing an eye and being placed in the medically induced coma. At the time of recording, the victim remains in hospital.

Starting point is 01:01:42 The next day the city exploded, riots took place across Belfast, fires raged and people were forced to flee from their homes. Today I want to talk to you about what happened, what really happened, not the attack and not the riots themselves, but what went on in the hours and the days after that? Beyond the brick-throwing and the burning and the fear, because something good did happen, and I think it's important that the world knows about that.

Starting point is 01:02:06 You need to know that Belfast isn't all bad, it isn't what you saw on the TV. That while the horror happened on the streets, the rest of the city said, enough. We mobilised. This is the story of the real community of Belfast. Belfast is a beautiful city, rich in culture, history, world-renowned for its food, and, if you would believe it, it's welcome in the future. Ask anyone who's visited for recommendations about what to do in the city, and you'll like me hear them rave about the Titanic Museum,

Starting point is 01:02:35 a Game of Thrones tour or the stunning architecture. They'll tell you how nice everybody they met was. You'll be told about some wonderful restaurant they visited and the amazing trad music session they stumbled upon in some quaint backstreet pub. They'll tell you they want to go back. One of our most popular tourist activities

Starting point is 01:02:53 is a tour of the key sites that played key roles in our Civil War. Taxi drivers will take you to the places where blood was shed, bombs exploded and those left behind still visit them on. The tours aren't even that excited. Here in Belfast we've made a small industry out of the darkest parts of our country's history, the troubles. Although the days of bombs and murders and army-controlled streets are spoken off in past tense by those tour guides,

Starting point is 01:03:18 the beliefs, culture and division that fuelled the fighting are still just as strongly held in many communities throughout the city as they were on the day that peace agreement was signed nearly 30 years ago. Belfast is a beautiful city, but it's a city that requires context to be fully understood and somewhat or fully appreciated. Like almost all wars, the troubles centered around identity and access to resources. On one side, the nationalists or Catholics who identify with and wish the country to be a United Ireland. On the other, royalists or Protestants who want Northern Ireland to remain part of the UK. The division goes deeper than that is much more complicated, but it's a bit like the left-right divide of Democrats and Republicans in the US. Knowing what side someone falls on can usually tell you a lot about their other beliefs and morals. Even international politics gets divvied up here

Starting point is 01:04:10 to one side of the other. Loyalist support Israel. Nice to support Palestine. Of course, it's not that simple. Not all Protestants and Catholics hold the same viewpoints, but for the sake of brevity and generalising, and this is, of course, a very short and brief explanation of what is actually a very complex history that spans hundreds of years. We simply don't have the time to win at all with any more depth than that. It's not the focus of this podcast anyway. But even that oversimplified summary should help you see the contextual ends through its Belfast and what happened must be viewed. And it is within this context where tribalism and nationality and identity are so important that whole housing estates advertise theirs by painting their curbstones in the colours of the British or Irish flag.

Starting point is 01:04:53 Jamp murals celebrating both murderers and the murdered alike are painted on the sides of houses, where hate for the other continues and where resources are fiercely protected and fought over that this story takes. takes place. Tension has been bubbling up about migration for the last several years in Northern Ireland and elsewhere. Just last summer we saw riots in nearby Balamina and in Belfast after an alleged sexual assault took place with the accused perpetrators being two teenage boys from Romania. Houses and businesses were smashed up and burnt if the rioters believed there was any connection whatsoever to an immigrant. No matter where in the world they hailed from, I remember driving through Botanic, a vibrant multicultural area of Belfast we live a few minutes away from,

Starting point is 01:05:33 and seeing business after business destroyed, the hookabar, the international supermarket cafes. Several months later, the charges against those two teenage boys were quietly dropped due to significant evidential developments. Like everything else here, attitudes to immigration and race in general has a pretty clear split between our two main communities. Throughout loyalist areas, you will find graffiti and signs

Starting point is 01:05:56 stapled on the lampposts. Foreigners not welcome here. No Muslims allowed. Stop the boats. a lot of the time these vitroly messages aren't even spelled correctly education is just one of the many areas neglected here that nobody ever riots over

Starting point is 01:06:10 that's not to say there's no such thing as a racist nationalist there are assholes everywhere Belfast is of course no different on that front when this most recent horrific attack took place in a city where immigrants legal illegal refugee asylum doesn't actually matter in fact because you don't have to be a migrant to be targeted

Starting point is 01:06:28 you just have to be non-white where they're already treated escape boats for every problem where racist riots have become something of a summer tradition everyone knew what was common within our social media was full of AI-generated posters telling people to take to the streets to protest immigrants when they said protest we all knew they meant riot and so the city shut down

Starting point is 01:06:51 for three days shops schools community centres swimming clothes public transport and businesses were held hostage to racism some places opened for a few hours in the mornings before having to close again. The buses were running, the buses were off. Half the city worked from home. Fake protest posters popped up on social media. Everyday life and routine was thrown into disarray and chaos. But it was when the sun went down that the actual horror happened. From the comfort of our homes were the blinds down. Many of us sat scared, scrolling social media trying to find out what was happening. Via helicopter footage streamed live on YouTube, we watched our city get destroyed.

Starting point is 01:07:28 We texted each other and made phone calls and even shit posted on our own. trying to find some levity or light in the situation. For others, those days, changed their lives forever. They watched the cars get burnt out, and along with the metal and the tires, tomorrow's school running transport went up in smoke. Sand from the last family trip to the beach still in the footwheels, a favourite cardigan left in the passenger seat, gone.

Starting point is 01:07:51 All of it gone. Whole homes, gone. Whether physically set on fire or threatened through the letterboxes or driven out by a fear many of us will never have to know, the true number of people who fled their homes since the 8th of June is hard to gauge. Some have gone to stay with relatives or friends across the city. Some have moved to completely new places, waiting to feel safe enough to try again. Many have left the country altogether, and who can blame them?

Starting point is 01:08:16 That is our loss. They say in times of trouble, look for the helpers, but here in Belfast you wouldn't have seen too many at first glance. That's for the same reason you didn't see people rise up and take on the rioters face to face. Fear. Fear of purpose. personal reprisal from the loyalist paramilitary organisations, fear of alerting the rioters and making the situation even worse for those you're trying to help. Fear is endemic here. But there were

Starting point is 01:08:40 helpers, hundreds in fact. But our helpers moved quietly and in the shadows. Without fuss or fanfire, people across, Spelfast began taking action almost immediately. As everyday life began to return to normal in schools and shops cautiously reopened, strangers became small heroes. Families were moved from their homes under darkness and children taking to and from school. The elderly and sick and pregnant accompanied the hospital and doctor appointments. In church halls and community centres, supermarket-sized food banks sprung up from nothing. Money was raised from all over the world. Where there was need, somebody met it.

Starting point is 01:09:16 Then they returned and asked who they could help next. In those moments, the real Belfast was seen. On Thursday afternoon, 48 hours after it all started, my fiancé arrived home from work. Let's call her Elle. I couldn't sit and do nothing anymore, so here's what is happening, she said. She'd already contacted a church in a room's use of their hall. She'd contacted people she knew through her community work to get word out. I posted about it on blue sky, not mentioning anything about where it would be located, out of fears would be targeted.

Starting point is 01:09:55 And someone asked if there was a fundraiser. There wasn't. There hadn't been anything just a few hours ago. Not thinking it would get much attention, I threw up a link to my PayPal and said I'd pass the money on if anyone wanted to donate. Thousands came flooding in. from all over the world, particularly from Minnesota. Saturday came and we were up at 6 a.m. to hit the wholesalers, having roped in another friend to help with her car. By 9 a.m. we were at the church with two car rolls of food and essentials,

Starting point is 01:10:21 not knowing if it would just be the three of us standing there all day with a load of food. None of us had ever done this before, although Elle has experienced working with immigrants and asylum seekers in other areas. We couldn't have been more wrong. Through the networks Elle had formed over the previous 48 hours, an organisation started sending us addresses of people who needed food. Volunteers kept arriving. People flowed in with donations of food and money and essentials. By the afternoon people were dropping

Starting point is 01:10:46 stuff in, taking photos of our board that showed items. We were low in and then go and shopping to get those items specifically. Hundreds of food parcels were packed up. Need one for a family of five went to call across the hall as L coordinated everything that needed to go out. What ages of the children? Do they need

Starting point is 01:11:02 nappies? Came a reply without fail. Everybody just pipsed in with whatever was needed to be done. Others dealt with people who came in themselves and need to help. Drivers sent from other small charities arrived to collect parcels for people they were helping. I found myself managing the stock running to the shop running to the shop and the wholesalers time and time again

Starting point is 01:11:19 to fill up with items we couldn't keep up with. Basics like oil and sugar, flour, rice, pasta, soap, sanitary products, nappies. The list was endless, as was the number of people we were trying to help. For three days, people who had never met before stood side by side sorting food parcels. strangers took strangers into their car and into their homes.

Starting point is 01:11:41 Is this definitely halal was desperately googled by a lot of white people? I've lost count of the amount of people I've met over the last week, but I know it's more than I would usually meet in the year. To be fair, I'm not actually that social, but it was still a lot of people. I don't think I got the names of half of the ones I worked alongside in that pop-up food bank that my partner seemed to imagine you got a thin error using the relationships she'd built up through her job. But it didn't matter. There wasn't time for small talk.

Starting point is 01:12:07 It was more, hello, thank you for helping. Pass me some cooking oil, please. Are we out of deodorant again? That's not to say there was no bonding. When you share an intense experience like that under the weight of emotions we were working with, there's a connection built. There was a sense of community that I've never experienced before and, given the circumstances, I sincerely hope to never experience again. But that seems unlikely. In that church hall where we ran the food bank, nobody needed to be told what to do. There was no induction or even delegation of rules. For three days, as people turned up and they found themselves something to do. And I don't know if it will surprise you, because it shouldn't. But there were many migrants and refugees who turned up to help themselves.

Starting point is 01:12:47 One woman came because she was in need of food for herself. But she asked if she could take some extra to make meals for others. Within two hours, we had 30 containers of home-cooked halal curry to deliver the homes, thanks to her work. I'm not sure I've ever been able to truly define what love or selflessness or solidarity mean, but I'm pretty sure that's what it looks like. This was not work being done by professional charities or organisations. That's not to say they weren't doing anything far from it.

Starting point is 01:13:14 But I want to take a moment to press upon you that this was everyday people, figuring it out together, many of whom who had never done anything of this before. WhatsApp groups were created, phone numbers shared and Google Doc databases thrown together. Across the city, volunteers together and apart. Does anyone help close for a baby? Can someone drive a lady to an appointment tomorrow at 10 a.m? Resources were shared across makeshift donation centres. If one centre had run out of diapers, another was sharing their supply.

Starting point is 01:13:42 Volunteers drove from centres to shops to homes, trying to find what was required. It was beautiful chaos, and it worked. Nobody had to be there. Almost all the volunteers had arrived through word of mouth. I don't think I saw one single social media poster advert calling out for help, apart from the one I posted on our last day. Help just came. Like me, many of the volunteers felt complete.

Starting point is 01:14:05 Pell to do something. Sitting at home beyond the locked door and watching he had to film the city via live stream, just wasn't cutting it anymore. One volunteer told me that when the violence erupted, they simply couldn't get the affected people out of her head. They took Friday afternoon off work to deliver food and essential supplies to families who were too afraid to leave their homes.

Starting point is 01:14:24 More than anything, she said she wanted to show that people of Belfast Care and the newcomers to our city are welcome. At a time when fear and uncertainty was affecting so many families, it felt important to her to offer practical support and remind people that they were not alone. The work people have been doing and are still doing is not without risk. I spoke earlier of fear. There's a dark rumour that Northern Ireland has the best knee surgeons in the world

Starting point is 01:14:48 due to the paramilitary's favourite punishment style of knee-capping where they place a gun to the back of your knee and put the trigger blowing out the front. If you live in a community running by the paras and you piss them off, you're going to know about it. It might be a brick through your window, graffiti on your door, from the local police to tell you,

Starting point is 01:15:05 they would strongly advise you leave the premises and find somewhere else to live. For many community volunteers, this was a case of heart over mind. They were driving into loyalist strongholds that had been rioting just hours before to deliver food to the very people that had been targeted.

Starting point is 01:15:20 But their compassion for those sitting hungry, tired and scared, outweighed the fear they felt for their own safety. Many of the volunteers who helped will never tell their neighbours what they did. They may never tell anyone about it. The drivers arrived back to the hall stories of family sitting in the dark with no electric in the meter,

Starting point is 01:15:37 of mothers hiding in the back room by the door with their babies in their arms, ready to run should a flaming bottle come through the window. If you've wondered for a moment what kept us motivated? Now you know. Some volunteers sprung into action from the first moment and some are still going. There are still people from ethnic minority communities in great need. I cannot imagine the fear they're still living in. But why was it left to the people to take action?

Starting point is 01:16:00 I've heard that question asked several times during the last week. It's hard to know. Many people are rightly wondering where their government was and all this. Where are our politicians? Yes, some get on their podium from time to time to condemn the valance, but if it wasn't for the community on the ground and the wonderful, generous people who donated money, all of those people that we helped would still be sitting there,

Starting point is 01:16:21 hungry, tired and scurred, even more than they are now. I know that here on the ground, we're putting together a contingency plan so that we're ready to spring in the action should this happen once more. and we've done that without any of the resources at the disposal of the government, albeit in our own small way. So why after so many summers of this happening do we know nothing of any government plan? If there was any sort of plan, surely we would be seeing it in action by now. The sad reality is this is likely going to happen again, probably this very summer.

Starting point is 01:16:53 We have a lot of problems and very little solution. How do we guarantee housing that's safe in a city that's littered with hate? How do we say to people, we're giving you a food parcel with a week's worth of food, but next week you're going to have to sort it out yourself and go to the shop. Next week you're going to have to walk past your neighbour's smashed windows and the graffiti send Muslims out. Next week you're going to have to walk past the house of that loyalist

Starting point is 01:17:16 who insists on calling you slurs every time he sees you. Even as I'm recording this, there are new calls for so-called protests over the next few days. There's a rumour a non-white man was arrested for trying to break into someone's house. I'm not being coy by saying non-white, that's the base level of racism we're currently operating with here. And an incident like that is enough to set this all off again. For the rest of the summer,

Starting point is 01:17:38 eyes on both sides of the immigration argument will skim over news articles searching for a race or nationality to be mentioned. I cannot imagine how it feels to be a member of an ethnic minority and beyond Tenderhooks, hoping and praying someone of colour does not commit a crime. You may be forgiven for thinking that we have absolutely no other crimes occurring on a daily basis,

Starting point is 01:17:59 especially non-committed by. white people. Of course we do. They're the majority. We have one of the highest rates of violence against women and girls in the whole of Europe. Since 2020, 30 women had been violently killed by a man, a local man. Did they riot then? I'll give you two guesses. Our community action was not enough. That's the sad reality. What does some toilet roll and a few vegetables matter when someone's car has been burnt out? How does a bag of rice compensate for having to leave your home? It just doesn't, but maybe it will bring a small bit of hope when we decided

Starting point is 01:18:33 we were going to do something to help that's all we started with hope and now a week later after thousands of pounds worth of food electric vudgers phones SIM cards blankets and pajamas have passed in and out of our doors into the homes an emergency accommodation across Belfast

Starting point is 01:18:47 it's all we're left with hope that we helped hope that we won't ever have to do it again as one recipient of financial help put it the real value is not in the amount it's the kindness, humanity and compassion behind it. At the very start of this podcast, I told you Belfast is a beautiful city,

Starting point is 01:19:05 rich in culture and history. But to borrow the wonderful words of that recipient, I think it's also a city rich in kindness, humanity and compassion. It is a city that is shown that can and will come together when it really matters. Even if you can't always see it, that's the real face of Belfast.

Starting point is 01:19:22 I want to say thank you. Thank you to everyone who I met but never got the names of. The people I'd never have met and I hope I don't have to meet again. Thank you to everyone who donated from across the world. That support meant everything to us and allowed us to help those who needed it the most. And I also want to say thank you to the people here in Belfast and Northern Ireland who have been the most affected by these riots, to the immigrants, the refugees and the asylum seekers.

Starting point is 01:19:49 Thank you for coming here, for adding to our community and for becoming our community. We are the real community of Belfiq. and we are nothing without you. Close your eyes and you can hear the entire world come alive. 2026 FIFA World Cup is on

Starting point is 01:20:20 and you can stream it all live on TSN Radio from the opening kickoff to the final celebration every match, every moment listen to FIFA World Cup on TSN Radio. Is Canada the Lift Off!

Starting point is 01:20:36 Available on IHeart Radio. Hey, I'm Hoda Kotby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby. Okay, if you know me, you know this. I'm always searching for inspiration, for support, and useful tools to help maximize joy. So this podcast lets us uncover all of that together. We're going to have these meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people, like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she never saw coming. I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer,

Starting point is 01:21:13 and that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartum depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety. Olympic champ Sean Johnson revealed why she had no choice but to be a gymnast. There was something about gymnastics that was intoxicating to me. It's given me a belief that we all have one of those treasures inside of us. We just have to find it. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

Starting point is 01:21:38 or wherever you get your podcast. You said to me, yo, you know, keep at it, because you let me rap for you. It was magical for all of us. We made it. We made it. Yeah. I'm like, we? You know, I'm like, I know these guys, but who are you?

Starting point is 01:21:54 I'm MC Jen, and this is 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. Like the co-founder of Rough Riders, Darren D. Dean. Talking about as a kid, do you remember that we met even way before that? Let me think. Did you walk up to the gate? That was me, Dee. That was you?

Starting point is 01:22:12 That was me. The day we found out that you and the whole crew was at Hit Factory, the mission was to get me to go to the gate, start freestyling, and see if I could get in the studio. I'm rapping, and then suddenly I hear a voice, hey, open the gate, let him in. The gate slowly went, come, come, come, come. They all, they're watching this,

Starting point is 01:22:29 and they watch me walk into there, and that is a moment that I will remember for the rest of my life. Listen, and laugh but not least with MC Jen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Here at the Happiness Lab, we're serving up some hot takes for the summer. Big ideas that just might reshape how you think about your well-being. Like, we've been thinking about the loneliness epidemic all wrong. You can be lonely in a marriage.

Starting point is 01:22:55 You can be lonely at a party. I don't think loneliness is actually about solitude. Loneliness is about something much bigger. Or that we should get rid of small talk altogether. We talk about current events. We talk about what you do for a living. Not do you love what you do for a minute? Is this your dream job?

Starting point is 01:23:11 Or that the mental health crisis isn't what we think it is, and that kids today are doing better than we assume. It was really disorienting for us as researchers to be so wrong about our hypothesis. We are so scared that we are going to underreact to a severe challenge that we tend to overreact. For more surprising ideas backed by psychological science, check out our new series, Happiness Hot Takes. Listen to the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos,

Starting point is 01:23:37 on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Ika Dhaban here, a podcast that is often about being trans in America and living under a regime that is actively hostile to our mere existence. I'm your host, Mia Wong, and today we're going to take a somewhat broad view and look at what it means to be trans in America. from a class standpoint. Now, I think if you are trans, you are at least broadly speaking,

Starting point is 01:24:20 not a capitalist in the sense of you do not own the means of production. You are not the bourgeoisie. There are so few of us at all who can be said to own the means of production. We are all almost entirely as a class, like some kind of worker or another. but there is a lot of specificity to the specific trans experience of class and where we fit into the broader American class structure that I want to talk about

Starting point is 01:24:51 today and I want to simultaneously get people an actual understanding in one place of just kind of the outskirts of how bad it is but then also talk about how good it is isn't maybe the right term, but want to give people a sense of what this class position means for our place and ability to fight back, because that is also a critically important part of not just being trans, but a critically important part of every leftist and liberation movements in the U.S. for the past, you know, decade has been,

Starting point is 01:25:35 and longer than a decade, you know, like two decades, has been us. And obviously, there have been a lot of trans people who are involved in a bunch of shit before then, but the extent to which trans people have been involved and have been central to every social movement you've ever heard of in the modern era is exceptional, and I want to talk about why that is.

Starting point is 01:25:56 I want to start talking about why that is by looking at some of the data that we have on what it's like to be trans in the U.S. And this is one of the things that's very difficult when you're writing about trans people because, you know, we all have our experience of transness. And anybody who's tried to get trans health care, I think, is aware that there was so much research

Starting point is 01:26:27 that has just not been done about, This is medical research on the effects of specific hormone regimens and what kinds of medicines do and don't help and what the effects are. A lot of the information that you do get from doctors is based on really, really old studies that aren't applicable to what actually exists. And this is also true when you're trying to look at economic data where there just aren't that many studies of what it's like for trans people in the U.S. and the ones that do exist, and there are people who have done some, they're very reliant on data sets that are not specifically designed to be of trans people. And that's a problem, because a lot of what you end up with, and the reason why there are some things that I've read that are just not going to be in this episode,

Starting point is 01:27:20 is that they are very reliant on things like, okay, we know this person has gender markers have changed, or their names have changed. And that's fine, kind of, if you want to sort of get a sense of what's going on. But like the percentage of trans people, the sort of demographics of trans people who have officially changed their gender markers is not reflective of trans people in general. So we're going to be using a lot of data in this from what's called the U.S. Trans Survey. So USTS, it's run by advocates for trans equality, and God fucking bless them. These people are doing the transgender's work.

Starting point is 01:28:00 It's an invaluable resource. I don't know of a better sort of repository of information about trans people that has been collected. So these surveys are run fairly and frequently. There was one in 2015 and one in 2022. But in the 2022 one, they got 92,000 trans and non-binary respondents, which is unbelievable. that is a staggering sample size. But the information they got from it is in a lot of ways extremely bleak. I mean, you know, you can look at the positive stuff, which is that, yeah, people who transitioned

Starting point is 01:28:34 to say that, yeah, their lives are happier. Now they transitions. Like, they like transitioning. It's good. It's, I don't know, do the thing. It will make you happier. However, comma, the economic numbers, Jesus Christ. Oh, boy.

Starting point is 01:28:49 Oh, boy. Now, as I've said, right, the people who work on the U.S. Trans Survey, they do astonishing work, but as with all trans people, they're doing astonishing work with not that many resources, and it takes them a long time to put their studies together. So again, the information that we're using is from 2022. So this means a couple of things. One, this is Dreen the Biden administration, right? A regime that is significantly less hostile to trans people than this current one,

Starting point is 01:29:16 even though there was a bunch of bad shit going on then, some of it done by the the Biden administration, dear God, is Trump administration significantly, significantly more hostile trans people? So the conditions that we're seeing now are going to be worse than the ones that we have data for. So all of the numbers I'm about to tell you about poverty rates, unemployment, and homelessness, it's gotten worse. The second thing is when the U.S. Transervy Rights Reports, I mean, they released recently, yeah, they released in June, health and well-being, a report of the 2020-U.S. Transgender survey, it is 110 pages long. So they do very, very good and detailed work. However, what that means is that we still, for example, don't have like a granular

Starting point is 01:29:59 economic report and we don't have just the full report that they write on this stuff. And we also don't have really the sort of granular reports that they had from the 2015 numbers on the experience of trans people of different races. So those are sort of what I would say are the limits going into this that we have. However, what we do have from the early insights report is just horrifying. So one of the sort of defining conditions of being trans is dispossession. And you can look at dispossession in a whole bunch of different ways. You can look at, for example, the poverty rate. The poverty rate from the U.S. Trans Survey among trans people is 34%. The American poverty rate is 12%.

Starting point is 01:30:45 So that's almost three times higher than the general population's poverty rate. And 34% is really bad, right? Even looking at other demographics and other poverty rates, that's really, really, really bad. The trans unemployment rate is, I think, in some ways, even worse.

Starting point is 01:31:07 The U.S. trans unemployment rate is 18%. The U.S. unemployment rate in general in 2022 was 3.6%. So let's try to get an understanding of what it means. Unemployment rate is a weird number. There are some people it doesn't count in terms of people who have stopped looking for work, right? But to put this into perspective, during the peak of the lockdowns in 2020, the unemployment rate in the U.S. was 14%. And that was the highest that's been in ages.

Starting point is 01:31:35 For trans people, it's 18%. So if you are trans in America, right, trying to find a job, It is worse than it was for everyone during the lockdowns. 18% unemployment is like 1937, early 1938 Great Depression levels of unemployment. It's almost one in five people. And again, these are the numbers from 2022 between the Biden administration when the situation was better for trans people. We don't have more recent numbers for the U.S. at sort of any kind of scale. And even back then, four years ago, when things were better for us and the economy in general was running a little bit better, it was, again, 1938 Great Depression levels for just a regular trans person, right?

Starting point is 01:32:30 This has a really, really broad array of effects, right, in terms of, you know, just the experience of the world that you have if you are trans. because you are fundamentally living in a different world than an economic world than cis people do. Like, again, the cis people's unemployment rate, 2022 was like 3.6% and yours is 18. You are living through the Great Depression and they are living through a normal economy. And that means that just fundamentally,

Starting point is 01:32:59 from a class position, you have a different experience of reality than they do. You are living in something that is not the same as theirs. I also want to talk about homelessness numbers because, you know, queer homelessness has always been really, really bad for reasons that, kind of obvious reasons that we'll get into here. But it's also related to, for example, the unemployment rate and the poverty rate because, you know, having an apartment or just any place to stay is expensive. We got a report recently that was a joint effort between advocates for trans equality and the National Alliance to End Homelessness, who did a report using the U.S. T.S.S. data, and they talked about how 30% of trans people have experienced homelessness in their lifetime.

Starting point is 01:33:47 For Americans, it's about 4%. For Americans at large, right? You know, just like cis-Americans in general, it's about 4%. So that is a homelessness rate of 8 times the rate of the general population. And again, that is the 2022 numbers, which are now worse. and this is something that I think is borne out by if you are around any like I mean not even working class trans people

Starting point is 01:34:15 if you're just around trans people in general you have met people who have been homeless right like you were just constantly around people who have been homeless and this is one of I think the defining elements of what being a trans worker is is that the level of of precarity is so great.

Starting point is 01:34:38 And the odds that through some kind of employment discrimination or just some bullshit happening with your employer or just like, I don't know, the employer is doing layoffs, it is so, so easy to move back and forth between having an apartment and being on the street in a way that to some extent the general American population has. But again, the rate for the general population, if they've been homeless in their lifetime, percent and for trans people it's 30 percent. And this rate, this 30 percent rate of people who've experienced homelessness. And also, by the way, a lot of the people who have experienced this have experienced them more than once. And, you know, there's a lot of just people who are trans

Starting point is 01:35:21 who are homeless right the fuck now. This is why I say, like, put a trans girl on your couch at the end of every executive disorder, because there aren't, like, widespread solutions to this right now. It's something that we have to figure out for ourselves. And we just don't have the resources to do it. Now, this discrimination is intensified both in the housing market, right, by just general anti-trans discrimination, by poverty. And this is also sort of a cyclical process, right? Like, part of what's difficult about me writing this is that I, like, I haven't been homeless and I haven't been a sex worker, which means that I'm missing experiences that a lot of trans workers have. What I can say about it is, like, obviously being homeless makes it harder to get even just

Starting point is 01:36:04 an apartment afterwards because it has a whole bunch of negative effects on a whole bunch of shit, including, for example, like, it, like, you know, obviously it, like, fucks with your credit score. It fucks with just, like, oh, do you have, like, previous landlord references that you can use? There's a whole bunch of different sort of spiraling effects of this. There's, obviously, there's health effects, there's safety effects. So what you're facing is, on the one hand, you're squeezed out through discrimination of the workplace, through the fact that also, and this is another fairly common thing, trans people make significantly less money than cis people do,

Starting point is 01:36:41 just on the dollar. It's way, way worse. So you have lower income when you get a job, you have less access to jobs, and you also just have housing market discrimination. And also, trans people have weaker access to family support networks that function in a way to subsidize social reproduction for cis people. A lot of trans people's families and parents, don't accept them and they just get kicked out.

Starting point is 01:37:06 Or if they are able to access resources from them, it's under conditions of extreme violence. And that has a massive effect on homelessness, right? Like a whole bunch of homelessness is caused by queer youth getting kicked out of their houses. And because you also don't have places you can go back to, right? You don't have the kind of familial safety net that a lot of cis people have access to

Starting point is 01:37:32 and you're less likely to have access to it. This intensifies the rate of homelessness and it intensifies the consequences of it and how difficult it is to get out. All right, we are going to go to ads, and then we're going to come back and talk about some more bleak shit, but also, this is not just the things fall apart podcast,

Starting point is 01:37:51 this is also the put it back together, but in a better way, podcast. We are back. Now, there's another fact something that's becoming increasingly a factor of trans life that has existed obviously for a long time, but has been enormously exacerbated by the current regime. And that is the trans refugee population.

Starting point is 01:38:27 There is in the U.S. a massive trans refugee population. These are, you know, what you would call, I guess, internally displaced people. The Movement Advancement Project, or MAP, did a study in 2024-2020-25, looking at trans people who moved from one state to another because of anti-trans legislation, right? And they found, and this is just between November and June of 2025, they found that 9% of all trans people had moved in just that 8-month span.

Starting point is 01:39:03 Right. That's 9% of trans people had just, just in the span between, November 2020, and June 2025, right? Just in that span, 9% of the trans population moved. That's over 1% of the total trans population moving per month to a different state

Starting point is 01:39:23 specifically because of anti-trans legislation, right? That's really bad. If you look at sort of the general population of trans people in the U.S., that's 400,000 people in just that eight-month span. that's the entire population of Cleveland, Ohio, and then 35,000 more people. Right. I mean, obviously, it's not like the complete metropolitan.

Starting point is 01:39:49 It's like the actual city of Cleveland, right? But like, again, that's in the span of eight months. We moved the entire city of Cleveland. And it's definitely gotten, like, almost certainly has, like, there have been more people who have moved, you know, since June 2025, because the anti-trans discrimination, anti-trans crackdowns from the state have only gotten. worse. This is a refugee crisis, right? And the things that they're fleeing from are also things that are just, you know, conditions of what, of what being trans is in the U.S., right? Which they're fleeing

Starting point is 01:40:20 restrictions on health care access from the national level, from the state level. Also, as we talked about, like, from religious hospitals who can also just like, even if you're in a so-called blue state, can just be like, fuck you eat shit, we're not going to give you health care. They're fleeing bathroom bills. they're fleeing don't say gay bans, they're fleeing also just an increase in social violence, right? Because the thing that this all legitimizes, right, that anti-trans rhetoric legitimizes, that anti-transstate action legitimizes, is just getting assaulted for being trans, a thing that has always happened, but is now happening more than it did before. And yeah, that not being, you know, assaulted, and this happens at work, this happens, like coming back from work,

Starting point is 01:41:06 this happens in other places too, is also, you know, a part of the condition of your labor. When you combine the fact that trans people were already, and I want to point this out, right, the homelessness rates, you know, the 18% rate of unemployment, the 30% rate of experiencing homelessness in their lifetime, right? That was before the refugee crisis, like really, really intensified into what we're seeing now, right? It was not as bad in 2022. as it is right now, when, again, like, we were seeing, for a period of eight months, we were seeing over a percent of the population per month, the trans population per month moving. All of the, all of the unemployment numbers and the poverty numbers and the homeless numbers,

Starting point is 01:41:53 those were all pre the sort of real intensification after the election of the mass migration and refugee sort of status of trans people. And this has had an effect on trans people. And this has had an effect on trans people's class position, right? What this has created in the places that trans people are fleeing to, and this is places like Portland, this is places like New York, like L.A. There's a lot of sort of regional centers too, right? I mean, obviously Chicago is like the other sort of big one, but you know, they're like places like Missoula, right, for people who don't know what Missoula. Missoula is a city with a, you know, like a pretty large university population in Montana that has a fairly large trans population because it collects trans people from a whole bunch of the region around it,

Starting point is 01:42:37 and there's also a bunch of people who go there for college and realize that they're trans. But what this has done, right, is it's forced a bunch of people to leave their homes, which is expensive, right? And then you have to find jobs in these new places. And it's already really difficult to find jobs in the places that you were. And so, you know, what you're facing just in general, right? Is you're facing this trade-off between can you survive in the place that you are with the life that

Starting point is 01:43:09 you have, or do you need to pick up and go to another place where it's less illegal for you to be yourself? And what this has created is this sort of mass underclass of trans workers that is especially large in places with large refugee populations. these workers are of any subgroup that like trans people are in the trans people in that group are the most marginalized and the most just absolutely fought of everyone in that group right you know you can look at like the violence rates for black trans women particularly is appalling right there's a lot of disabled trans people and among disabled people who already have it really really bad in the u.s right like you look at disabled trans people and it's it's even fucking harder that that's that's That's especially an issue with, you know, something that's been affecting a whole bunch of people, which is the Medicaid work requirements, which have been just unbelievably harmful to a whole bunch of disabled trans people who suddenly are being, like, forced to work, who just can't, right?

Starting point is 01:44:16 And what this has created is this incredibly, incredibly precarious class of workers all over the spectrum of the working class, right? There are a lot of trans people, an unbelievable number of trans people working service jobs. and like the lower end and shittier the service job, the more likely you are to find trans people there, there's always been a lot of trans sex work because a lot of times that's the thing you can do, right? And this is sex work across the entire spectrum of what sex work is,

Starting point is 01:44:45 of sort of like greater and lesser degrees of risk. This also is the thing that contributes to the criminalization of trans people because there's a bunch of criminalization of sex workers in ways that gets trans people targeted by the police and subject even more police violence than they are already, which they are also subject to extraordinary amounts of police violence.

Starting point is 01:45:04 I don't know, every trans person has seen some shit. But I'm not just saying this to be like the trans-class position is bad, but what this has done is create this class of trans workers that moves between parts of the class that don't have contact with each other very much.

Starting point is 01:45:34 There's a whole bunch of movement between being housed and being unhoused. in a way that is at a significantly broader scale than it is for the rest of the population. There are a whole bunch of different kinds of trans workers who are able to unify around being trans and have contact with each other and who organize with each other

Starting point is 01:45:52 and who fight alongside each other, right, from different parts of the working class that don't often particularly get along. And in particular, in terms of, like, you know, service workers and unhoused people, there is a really systemic effort by the states and by the rights and even they need to buy the done

Starting point is 01:46:09 by the Democratic Party too to pit these groups against each other but also with trans people it's like well I don't know like there's also an extent to which yeah like if you're a trans person you are you know X number of days away from being that person on the street

Starting point is 01:46:24 and so this has created a fairly unique class position right of unbelievable precarity you know state enforcement precarity it's obviously not the only right class position in the U.S. of like legally mandated precarity. You can look at undocumented workers

Starting point is 01:46:42 who have even more genocidal shit happening against them right now in terms of just like, yeah, no, yeah, there's just ice rounding people up. But what has been produced here is this incredibly precarious class like down the remobil workers. And it's also worth noting that like,

Starting point is 01:46:59 to some extent, this is a deliberate strategy of the right. Like this is what, the right wants, you know, if you look at like the rise of neoliberalism, you look at Reagan, you look at Thatcher, right? One of the big things that they are about in this era is control over gender and control over social reproduction. This is one of the things, you know, if you look at how these people come to power, they come to power on the back of very, very right-wing social movements, right, that are, you know, in the U.S., it's like the, you know, the sort of like the rise

Starting point is 01:47:35 the evangelicals who, one of their big things, right, one of the things that they're interested in is suppressing queer people specifically, right? But you can look at this in other contexts, too, where, you know, you can look at China in the 1980s as the beginning of sort of the reform period is starting when you start to see the return of capitalism to China. In 1980, you get the one-child policy. I'm going on a little bit of a tangent here, but something I don't think is really acknowledged

Starting point is 01:48:04 in the way that people think and talk about China, which is that the one child policy was not a thing from the Maoist period. This was the reformers, right? Deng Xiaoping is in power. When this goes into effect, right? And when it's like written into the Constitution, like this is Deng Xiaoping.

Starting point is 01:48:19 This is, you know, the sort of pro-capitalist reform movement that is imposing the one child policy on people. In the U.S., you also have, like, restrictions on abortion that are sort of part and parcel of the rights attempt to expand capitalism because control over the family, control over, you know, social reproduction, the production of new workers

Starting point is 01:48:40 and the ability for people to continue to be workers for the capitalist system, that's something that is important to them, right? And the maintenance of right-wing gender roles

Starting point is 01:48:51 is something that is important for them to be able to reproduce their ideology and also reproduce capital in general. And so they came after us. But on the other hand, right, you know, as much as we have been targeted

Starting point is 01:49:03 by the right. Trans people have also, as I sort of talked about a bit at the beginning of this episode, been overrepresented in just every leftist social movement for the past two decades, right? Everything from like union organizing

Starting point is 01:49:19 to mutual aid to like who shows up in the street to protest to like blocks from like occupy to the uprising, right? There are trans people in all of these social movements in extremely key roles. And the only real way for this not to happen is when trans people are specifically

Starting point is 01:49:37 driven out of these movements, and that happens a lot, right? Like, that's also, like, one of the things that you experience being a trans, like, worker is that, you know, people who are transphobic in the left will run you out of the shit that you're doing. Usually, I say usually, because sometimes they are explicitly push off for being trans. Usually there's, like, some other excuse

Starting point is 01:49:58 that's found to do this. But, you know, even with how much, you know, persecution of trans people there have been in the social movements, so trans people still show up for it, right? You know, they take just sort of a random example, right? Friend of the show, Vicky Osterwhile, was the facilitator of the first Occupy meeting in New York, right? We're just always there.

Starting point is 01:50:20 We have always been there. We've been there everywhere, and we will continue to be there in all of these movements, in the anti-ice movements, in I say movements, because, like, this is true in, like, the 2018 anti-Isafe movement, movement is true in the current anti-ice movement. It is true in the student encampments in 2024. And there's a reason for this. And the reason for this, to a large extent, is that very precarity, right? If you are going to be trans, especially now, you have no choice but to fight if you want to

Starting point is 01:50:53 exist, if you want to have access to your healthcare. If you want to be upgraded to the status of mere proletarians, if you want your life to just merely be the life of a cis worker, which is significantly less fucked than your life is, you have to fight. And this is something that is also spread to some extent by sort of trans culture, I would say broadly, but also just like the kind of social groups that form. And also it's spread. And this is particularly something you see in unions a lot, right? We've talked a lot in the show about trans people being overrepresented in unions. And it's like, well, we're overrepresented in unions because we're work.

Starting point is 01:51:33 Right. And this is in some sense the potential of what the right has wrought, right? Which is that they have created this extremely large population of trans service workers and trans refugees who have nothing to lose but their chains and a world to win. Slightly elsewhere in the manifesto, like Marx writes, what the bourgeoisie produce above all are its own grave diggers. and if you look out at the world in 2026, right, you can see the graves being dug. The question is who is going to be buried there? The capitalist class would very much like it to be us. I, for one thing, don't want to fucking be buried in a mass grave. And if we're going to put something in that grave,

Starting point is 01:52:25 better it be the class system itself. And that's a world worth fighting for. a world where there are no grave diggers, where there are no mass graves, where the state and the landlord don't throw you on the street in the night, where you can live in your community and not be run out, where you have your health care and you are able to be the person that you want to be. And that world is winnable. All that is left is to fight for it.

Starting point is 01:53:03 Close your eyes, and you can hear the entire world. Live, 2026 FIFA World Cup is on. And you can stream it all live on TSN Radio. From the opening kickoff to the final celebration, every match, every moment. Listen to FIFA World Cup on TSN Radio. Is Canada the Lift Off? Available on Iheart Radio. Hey, I'm Hoda Kotby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with Hotacobie.

Starting point is 01:53:38 Okay, if you know me, you know this. I'm always searching for inspiration, for support, and useful tools to help maximize joy. So this podcast lets us uncover all of that together. We're going to have these meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people. Like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she never saw coming. I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer. And that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartner retirement.

Starting point is 01:54:10 I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety. Olympic champ Sean Johnson revealed why she had no choice but to be a gymnast. There was something about gymnastics that was intoxicating to me. It's given me a belief that we all have one of those treasures inside of us. We just have to find it. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You said to me, yo, you know, keep at it, because you let me rap for you. It was magical for all of us.

Starting point is 01:54:40 We made it, we made it. I'm like, we? You know, I'm like, I know these guys, but who are you? I'm MC Jen, and this is 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, like the co-founder of Rough Riders, Darren D. Dean. Talking about as a kid, do you remember that we met even way before that?

Starting point is 01:55:02 Let me think. Did you walk up to the gate? That was me, Dee. That was you? That was me. The day we found out that you and the whole crew was at Hit Factory. the mission was to get me to go to the gate, start freestyling, and see if I could get in the studio. I'm rapping, and then suddenly I hear a voice, hey, open the gate, let him in.

Starting point is 01:55:19 The gate slowly went, come, come, come, come, come. They all, they're watching this, and they watch me walk into there, and that is a moment that I will remember for the rest of my life. Listen, and laugh but not least with MC Jen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Here at the Happiness Lab, we're serving up some hot takes for the summer. big ideas that just might reshape how you think about your well-being. Like, we've been thinking about the loneliness epidemic all wrong. You can be lonely in a marriage. You can be lonely at a party.

Starting point is 01:55:50 I don't think loneliness is actually about solitude. Loneliness is about something much bigger. Or that we should get rid of small talk altogether. We talk about current events. We talk about what you do for a living. But not, do you love what you do for a living? Is this your dream job? Or that the mental health crisis isn't what we think it is,

Starting point is 01:56:07 and that kids today are doing better than we assume. It was really disorienting for us as researchers to be so wrong about our hypothesis. We are so scared that we are going to underreact to a severe challenge that we tend to overreact. For more surprising ideas backed by psychological science, check out our new series, Happiness Hot Takes. Listen to the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen here, a show about things falling apart. putting them back together. I'm Garrison Davis.

Starting point is 01:56:45 This episode is on probably the most controversial midterm election happening this year, the U.S. Senate race in Maine, where the new Democratic nominee, Graham Platner, is running to end the 30-year reign of Republican Senator Susan Collins, who brands herself as a moderate, independent-leaning Republican, but has consistently backed Trump's on popular policies while holding on to power. beating Susan Collins would be a key part of taking the Senate away from the Republicans. Much of the media coverage and discussion of this election has focused on the scandals relating to Graham Platner's personal life, with very little on the real relations of his campaign,

Starting point is 01:57:31 the political platform he's running on, the relations between him and organized labor, unions, and working class manors. Platter's campaign has attracted overwhelming support from voters in Maine, despite the series of well-reported personal controversies, the Nazi-linked tattoo he got as a Marine, old offense of Reddit posts, marital issues, relationship issues, and an ex-girlfriend who worked at the Heritage Foundation, accusing him of quote-unquote disturbing behavior after he got out of the military. Mainstream outlets have covered those at length. This episode, I'm going to narrowly focus on the relations of Graham Platner's campaign. I'll start by going to go and over his campaign platform, then his ties to labor unions and community organizing, and finally,

Starting point is 01:58:18 how those ties set up his campaign for massive success in the Democratic primary. Platner calls himself a New Deal Democrat, and like Bernie Sanders, believes we need a, quote-unquote, political revolution in this country. He wants to shake up the Supreme Court, increase the federal minimum wage, and ban billionaires from buying elections. His platform is also designed to address the concerns of working-class Mainers, like declining manufacturing, decaying infrastructure, closing hospitals, and spiking energy costs. Platner supports universal health care and ultimately wants to pass a Medicare for all type system while pointing to how the country could build on the VA model, saying, quote, the level of health care I've received with Maine's excellent VA

Starting point is 01:59:04 system should be available to all, unquote. We all know that going up against for-profit health care will be a hard battle to win. His platform contains a list of policies that will start to break up health care monopolies and crack down on pharma corruption, like banning insurance companies and private equity from buying medical practices and hospitals and banning prescription drug advertising.

Starting point is 01:59:30 Platon says he wants to expand Medicare and Medicaid's power to negotiate drug prices, allow the import of low-cost prescription drugs from other markets, and ban stock buybacks and impose a cap on executive compensation for pharmaceutical companies that receive public funds. His platform calls to direct federal funds to reopen recently closed hospitals,

Starting point is 01:59:49 birthing units and clinics, establish a national public drug manufacturing sector, make Medicare telehealth coverage permanent, reverse doge cuts to the VA, national legislation mandating a safe level of nurse-to-patient ratios to counter chronic hospital understaffing, and to open a new medical school at University of Maine. A large part of Graham Platner's policy platform is focused on protecting democracy by keeping money out of elections. Quote, democracy cannot function when wealth buys power. Since Citizens United, unlimited dark money has flooded American politics, giving billionaires and special interests enormous influence, unquote. Platner wants to overturn Citizens United, either through a constitutional amendment or a different Supreme Court.

Starting point is 02:00:37 More on that later. He also campaigns on banning congressional stock trading and advocates that former members of Congress should be banned from congressional lobbying. Quote, public service should never become a pathway to private affluence, unquote. Platner supports mandating congressional term limits, two for the Senate and six for the House, and at a minimum, returning to the talking filibuster. His platform also includes congressional representation for everyone in the country, quote unquote, including in places like Washington DC.

Starting point is 02:01:08 As for the Supreme Court, Plattner wants to pack the court and end lifetime appointments with staggered time-limited terms. He's also in favor of impeaching justices on the Supreme Court by, quote, holding the court to the same ethics standards we hold all other federal judges, unquote. Platinum supports passing a constitutional amendment to, quote, prohibit partisan gerrymandering and require independent redistricting commissions to draw fair maps. which he says would keep elected officials more accountable and make voters' voices stronger. To combat anti-labor legislation like the Taft-Hartley Act, Platner wants to strengthen our quote-unquote right-to-organize by passing the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would crack down on union busting by issuing significant penalties

Starting point is 02:01:58 and override right-to-work laws. Plattenor also supports creating a union job requirement for all jobs funded by federal dollars. In interviews, Plattner was advocated for something akin to FDR's proposed economic bill of rights. Quote, in order to democratize our economy, we need to provide, as rights, things like housing, health care, education, and collective bargaining, unquote. He also wants to pass the Equal Rights Amendment to protect against sex discrimination while addressing how communities of color, LGBTQ Americans, and immigrants, have had the legal protections that were meant to guarantee them equal rights, quote, turned against them instead of one. working in their defense. We need a 21st century constitution that restores the original purpose of these guarantees, equal rights under the law protected for every person in this country, unquote.

Starting point is 02:02:48 His policy platform includes passing federal LGBTQ anti-discrimination legislation and calls out Democrats for, quote-unquote, peddling soft bigotry to pander to Trump voters. One of Platner's most in-depth policy pages is for his billionaire tax plan. which he says represents, quote, the bare minimum of what I believe we should expect a Democratic Congress under our next president to pass. Planner believes that income taxes alone, quote, cannot address the massive concentration of wealth in the hands of a few.

Starting point is 02:03:23 Only a tax on wealth can do so. He promotes a 5 to 6% annual tax on wealth over $1 billion, as well as taxing capital gains the same as wages, quadrupling taxes on stock buybacks and taxing excessive CEO pay to pressure corporations to reinvest profits back into their workers through higher wages, better benefits, and long-term security. On the campaign trail, he's talked with voters about removing the $167,000 a year income tax cap on Social Security payments so that the ultra-rich contribute to the same payroll tax rate as the rest of us. He also wants to restore the enhanced child tax credit.

Starting point is 02:04:05 Platter's tax plan doesn't just include raising taxes on the rich, but closing loopholes make a corporation's use to avoid paying taxes altogether. Quote, by closing corporate loopholes, we ensure that the giants who profit off our shared infrastructure, courts, and educated workforce finally pay their way and that we can sustain investments into schools, safety, and services every community depends on. One way to stop corporate tax dodging is by ending worker misclassification that is hiring workers as quote-unquote contractors to deprive workers of labor protections and health care while using this misclassification to dodge payroll taxes. Instead of foreign policy dominated by trade agreements that exploits workers and promotes endless war,

Starting point is 02:04:52 Platner's platform calls for a new era of American quote-unquote economic diplomacy that takes on billionaires who, quote, defund the societies that made their fortunes possible, simply by shuffling money into an offshore account, unquote. He advocates a global billionaire minimum tax to, quote, ensure that extreme wealth is finally reinvested in the public good, regardless of where it is parked, unquote. This is based on a proposal by the EU's internal tax observatory. To accomplish this, Plattner says we would need to overhaul

Starting point is 02:05:27 global economic institutions, use our leverage as a trading partner, and use international economic diplomacy to target concentrated wealth and coordinate taxes and sanctions on ultra-wealthy individuals rather than relying on broad trade sanctions that harm ordinary people. He also wants to close an inheritance tax loophole

Starting point is 02:05:50 by stopping billionaires from passing down their wealth to their heirs tax-free through buying appreciating assets, borrowing against those assets and then passing down the assets after they die, while avoiding any taxes on the increased asset value. Platner says time for those gains to be taxed too.

Starting point is 02:06:09 The tax plan also includes ways to lower taxes for working and middle class Americans. Quote, if we tax millionaires and billionaires at fair levels, we can provide a quote-unquote cost of living exemption from federal income tax up to a reasonable threshold for working and middle-class Americans. If we stop multinational monopolies from dodging their taxes, we can cut taxes on the small businesses and self-employed individuals who are struggling to survive. The federal government could adopt a property tax fairness credit similar to Mainz that ensures low and middle-income families do not pay more than 4% of their income in property taxes by providing a refundable credit, including a fair calculation of rent attributable to property

Starting point is 02:06:52 taxes so that renters are treated equitably, unquote. Something we've previously reported on is Plattner's opposition to what he calls regressive gas and diesel taxes. Quote, relying on fossil fuels to fund basic infrastructure does not make sense if we want to reduce fossil fuels used in transportation. Instead, public goods should be financed by progressive general revenues, as outlined in my end billionaire welfare tax plan, unquote. Platner notes that an extra $275 billion has supplemented the tax-based highway Trust Fund since 2008. Platter also supports Rokana's Big Oil Windfall Profits Bill that would implement a per barrel tax equal to 50% of the difference between the current oil price and the price per

Starting point is 02:07:42 barrel last year. And he promotes a national electricity rate freeze by, quote, providing direct low-cost energy infrastructure financing to any state that freezes or lowers electricity rates for four years. Funded by the windfall profits tax and repurposed federal fossil fuel subsidies, unquote. His platform states that the most effective national security project would be a huge buildout of domestic clean energy production. Rather than relying on private equity to invest in new clean energy, Platner supports a national energy infrastructure fund that would issue debt backed by the federal government

Starting point is 02:08:21 and, quote, partner with state lending authorities to provide cheap capital directly to utilities, rural electric cooperatives, public energy authorities, and other developers of low-risk clean energy projects, unquote. Planner believes this fund could cut Wall Street speculators out of the equation, help build at scale with union jobs, lower costs, and pass savings onto ratepayers. He also wants the Department of Energy to use the Defense Production Act to revive domestic manufacturing, to procure and stockpile critical clean energy technologies. His platform also includes creating a strategic fuel reserve for farmers and fisheries, a national whole home repair program to assist in weatherization, electrification, and heat pumps

Starting point is 02:09:08 to lower household bills by partnering with public housing authorities, county programs, and local trade unions, as well as reinvesting the money funneled to big defense contractors back into shipbuilding. On the campaign trail, Platner talks a lot about being a veteran and the various ways that's informed his politics. He's promised to, quote, never send Americans into a pointless war. And to solve the issue of a president effectively being able to declare wars, but just not call them wars, Platner is called on Congress to reclaim its war powers and other authorities over the executive, quote, we must pass a new war powers act. The same must go for ending the executive's intrusion on congressional powers of the purse,

Starting point is 02:09:52 taxation, and other legislative prerogatives, unquote. talk more about Graham Platner's campaign platform and ties to organized labor after this ad break. Welcome back to It Could Happen here. Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, Graham Platner, was interviewed by the New York Times and said that since the end of the Second World War, American foreign policy, our wars and interventions haven't been good for workers or American families. Quote, they often are very good for corporate interests, defense-colds. contractors and people in places of political power who want to use war as a mechanism of protecting

Starting point is 02:10:42 their political power, unquote. Platter told the Times that he has a complicated relationship with the military, where he's still proud of being a Marine, but is ashamed of what's happened in the Middle East and says that the policies and systems orchestrating those wars are, quote, unquote flawed from the top down and that he considers himself anti-war. But it doesn't matter if you try your best inside of a flawed policy and a flawed system. It's flawed from the top down. It's bound to fail. It's bound to bring an immense amount of violence upon people who, in no way, shape, or form are deserving of it.

Starting point is 02:11:19 Because, I mean, we destroyed Iraq and we destroyed Afghanistan. And all the suffering, all the killing, all the dying, all the displacement, all of it was was that we brought that we the United States did that and that I'm ashamed of the anger that I feel is for the people that sent me who are frankly still the same people who are sending people off right now to go but be in harm's way so we can start and have the stupid war with Iran. Platner has been clear that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza and that the U.S. has aided in the genocide of Palestinians. Quote, it is the moral question of our time, and we failed as a nation.

Starting point is 02:12:09 Platner believes that Israel should not receive any U.S. tax dollars and has proudly opposed A-PAC, though he has voiced support for sending aid to Ukraine. Platner calls abolishing ICE the quote-unquote moderate position, and that he supports a path to citizenship, strong border security, and a quote-unquote end to the men. mass deportation machine. His policy platform says that, quote, unquote, many multinational corporations have no interest in immigration reform because, quote, they want illegal workers with no rights who they can pay slave wages and abuse at will, unquote. In response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which Susan Collins assisted in by voting for Brett Kavanaugh, Plattner wants to codify

Starting point is 02:12:58 abortion rights and protect privacy rights. His platform states, quote, the Constitution should make clear that Americans have a fundamental right to privacy, including personal medical decisions, control over one's own body, and freedom from unjust surveillance. In an age of mass data collection

Starting point is 02:13:15 and artificial intelligence, this protection is more important than ever, unquote. Platner certainly leans pro-gun, he's taught leftist-armed self-defense classes, and owns Air 15s. He doesn't support an assault. weapons ban, but did back a referendum to create a red flag law in the state of Maine. Other miscellaneous campaign planks include more funding for the post office, passing the Postal Banking Act,

Starting point is 02:13:40 developing a federal child care policy for kids under six, defending Medicare access for people with disabilities, strengthening the Clean Air and Clean Water Act, opposing any federal support for private school vouchers, reviving federal support for housing, something like the VA Home Loan Program for more Americans. banning hedge funds from buying homes through legislation like the end hedge fund control of American Homes Act and legalizing cannabis and clemency for people caught up in the war on drugs. That is a long list of policies, goals, and prospective legislation. That would be no easy task to enact.

Starting point is 02:14:20 Some would mean a fundamental transformation in American politics and the world economy. Platner knows that not everything in his platform can be passed overnight, but says that Democrats need a strategic vision to fight for. Telling the Maine monitor, quote, I'll be the first one to say that me being in the Senate as the junior senator from Maine is not going to get us Medicare for all. There is this sort of establishment pushback where people are often like, well, you're not going to be able to do that immediately. Like, well, no shit. That's what power building is. that's what a long-term plan is, unquote. In interviews, Plattner often talks about his quote-unquote theory of power

Starting point is 02:15:01 and how the Democratic Party has, quote, never been able to articulate what it's trying to do. Like, what's the end goal? It never really articulates a clear set of policies to get us there and then never seems to want to wield power to make those policies a reality, unquote. Platner told the New York Times that Democratic party leadership has failed the moment that the party needs new leadership and that Chuck Schumer should be replaced. Of course, candidates can say anything to get elected. We've all seen politicians

Starting point is 02:15:36 run on populist platforms, only to then serve lobbyists, corporate interests, and themselves, once in office. Trump himself first ran as a populist outsider, despite being a billionaire. Senator John Fetterman also comes to mind. Though the only thing that really really is a made Harvard graduate John Federman and quote-unquote outsider was that he wore a hoodie and had stupid facial hair. Prior to his Senate campaign, he served as mayor of Braddock for 13 years and Lieutenant Governor for four. Fetterman also claims that suffering a stroke, quote-unquote, liberated him from quote-unquote progressivism. All is to say, John Fetterman and Graham Platner's respective backgrounds are quite different. But obviously, words and promises aren't enough.

Starting point is 02:16:27 To measure a candidate's worth, one must look deeper at the ties to local communities and organizations that might inform a candidate's political platform and facilitate their ability to run for office. To quote Graham Platner, we need to build political power through getting people like me into the U.S. Senate, into Congress. And we also need to do it while building organizational power outside of the system. There's never been a moment in American history where we've gotten good things just because the institutions or people in power

Starting point is 02:17:00 decided to do it. They need to be pressed. I mean, this is honestly why the country has killed the labor movement. We did it on purpose. We did it because the labor movement is the foundation of power that can actually push back

Starting point is 02:17:15 against the system, unquote. Graham Platner is only running for Senate, because last summer, the AFL-CIO, along with other local labor unions, were looking to put up a candidate to run against Susan Collins on a working-class platform. In July 2025, candidate scouts showed up outside Plattenor's door asking him to run for Senate. Platner says he and his wife told him to quote-unquote fuck off. The scouts, including progressive strategist Daniel Moroff, had learned about Platner from a video he was in a few years ago, about

Starting point is 02:17:48 community organizing against a corporate Norwegian salmon farm that was trying to move in to their bay. My daily grind is coming out in the morning, cleaning equipment and tying knots and fixing rope and fixing line and fixing boats, and cleaning oysters and listening

Starting point is 02:18:05 to podcasts. My name is Graham Platner, and I live in Sullivan, Maine, the owner of Frenchman Bay Oyster Company, born and raised here in Sullivan. I grew up three-house down from the house I currently live in. Banker Daily News reported that in July,

Starting point is 02:18:22 Platner spoke with Jason Shedlock, the president of the main state building and construction trades council via Zoom, to quote, talk about the potential run while working on his oyster boat. About a week after first knocking on his door, the campaign scouts showed up again.

Starting point is 02:18:39 But this time, with a detailed plan and the connections to get a campaign up and running, Union's support helped provide resources to shoot a launch video, facilitate small dollar fundraising, and get Platner's name in local papers. He had never run for office before, but did serve as the harbor master and chair of the planning board for the town of Sullivan. In terms of Platner's own working class or middle class background, Plattner's father was a lawyer in rural Maine, and his mom was a small business owner who currently owns a local

Starting point is 02:19:15 restaurant. As a kid, his family got a financial aid package for a fancy private school in Connecticut, but Plattner got himself kicked out after three months and then went back to Maine. After exiting the military, he worked as a bartender while going to university in D.C., dropped out, then worked as a private military contractor for six months at the embassy in Afghanistan. While there, Plattner says he got deeply disillusioned with government corruption and the military industrial complex, quit, moved back to Maine, started working at a friend's oyster farm, and got into local organizing. In a less reported on a Reddit post made by Graham Platner, he credited late political commentator Michael Brooks with moving him towards left-wing working class

Starting point is 02:20:05 politics around 2019 to 2020. Plattner also made Reddit posts about being an anti-fascist. The Senate campaign launched in mid-August, and in just nine days it raised $1 million. Was an average donation of $33. 98% of the donations were under $100. During its first week, the campaign was attracting 300 volunteers per day. Pretty soon, the campaign attracted the attention of Bernie Sanders, who, come September, invited Platner to speak on his upcoming fight oligarchy tour and has continued to campaign with and back Platner.

Starting point is 02:20:43 Meanwhile, Governor Janet Mills was recruited by Chuck Schumer to beat Platner in the Democratic primary. From early on in the race, Plattenor had received backing from local labor unions. Beyond the main AFL-CIO, Platner has received endorsements from Ironworkers Local 7, National Nurses United, Maine State Nurses Association,

Starting point is 02:21:04 American Postal Workers Local 458, the National Postal Mail Handlers Local 301, the Electrical Workers Union, local 2327, the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, Main State Council of Building and Construction Trades, North Atlantic States Regional Council of Carpenters, Carpenters Local 349 and 352, Painters and Allied Trades, DC-35,

Starting point is 02:21:33 Massachusetts and Northern New England Labor's District Council, Millwright's Local 1-1. Laborers International Union of North America, local 327-668 and 976, Teamsters Local 340, and the United Auto Workers, who represents nearly 2,000 workers in Maine, including Marine Draftsmen at the Bath Iron Works, non-profit employees, workers at the Portland Museum of Art, and graduate employees across the University of Maine system.

Starting point is 02:22:04 In their endorsement, UAW Region 9A, Mr. Brandon Mancilla said, quote, Graham Platiner has emerged as a voice for the people of Maine fed up with the corrupting influence of the oligarchy and money in our politics. More importantly, he's building a mass movement that will not only power his campaign, but will be ready to take on the challenges

Starting point is 02:22:25 facing working families in Maine and across the country once in office. Our members are ready to hit the ground running with Graham's campaign and take back the power for Maine's working class, unquote. Platner has said he wanted this campaign to be an extension of the local community organizing that he and his wife were already engaged in, telling the main monitor the campaign is a, quote, organizing strategy first and an electoral strategy second.

Starting point is 02:22:54 For the past few years, Plattenor is organized with a mutual aid and community activist group called Arcadia Action and was named in local news coverage for organizing a protest after Trump was re-elected. The protest focused on, quote, the preservation of constitutional rights, support for Ukraine, and protecting transgender manors, unquote. Platner was also an active member of the Panopskitt County chapter of the Maine's People's Alliance, the largest, quote-unquote, progressive community action organization in the state, which claims to have more than 32,000 members. As a member of the Maine People's Alliance, Platiner traveled to Washington, D.C. a couple years ago for a march to protest access to health care, and since then has been doing grassroots community organizing in Hanuk County, according to the organization.

Starting point is 02:23:45 The member-led board of directors of Maine People's Alliance voted unanimously to endorse Graham Platner. To quote the announcement, Maine People's Alliance board co-chair Gina Morin, they them, said, quote, listening to Platner during interviews in town halls, it is clear that he addresses the critical issues affecting our country and specifically Maine, He speaks directly to the reality that the top 1% are hoarding wealth, while the middle class and the poor are left to go without. He's also addressed the need to fix these same issues that we have been working on for years, such as health care affordability, the housing crisis, and immigrant rights.

Starting point is 02:24:26 His activism drove him to seek this office out of frustration. His values and dedication are what align him with the main people's alliance, unquote. The organization said back in February that Platner has been, quote, active and vocal in resisting ISIS' presence here in Maine and has been calling on our members of Congress to do more to protect everyone in Maine and across the country from ICE's violent racist tactics, unquote.

Starting point is 02:24:53 Maine People's Alliance board member Sean Donnelly said, Graham names the oligarchy and corporate greed as the true enemies of progress in Washington and he understands that the only way to defeat them is through grassroots organizing. His personal story of finding purpose through his community and activism has the power to inspire many

Starting point is 02:25:12 who may feel angry, disconnected, or hopeless about politics. Graham is a talented leader whose values, vision, and strategy are aligned with the mission of the main people's alliance, unquote. Following the primary, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund

Starting point is 02:25:26 endorsed Platterner over Susan Collins, who was one of the deciding votes in sending Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and last week, the main service employees association, which represents more than 13,000 active and retired public service workers in the state, formerly endorsed Graham Platner. So why are these endorsements and community ties important? These relations are what a working class campaign's political platform emerges from.

Starting point is 02:25:55 And this community voting block is a mechanism to hold working class candidates accountable to their constituents. Platner has told the New York Times that he's a, quote, firm believer that organized people is the only actual place of power to conflict with organized money. And in our society, money is very organized, unquote. He echoed this sentiment at a campaign rally covered by more perfect union.

Starting point is 02:26:22 Politics is about power. And in this society, power is either organized money or it's organized people. And the money is organized. It always has been. and it always will be until we organize enough people to pull it back. In May, Platner told John Stewart that getting someone like him elected, quote, needs to be in tandem with a fully organized, broad-based coalition here in the state of Maine

Starting point is 02:26:48 that can put pressure on members of our delegation, if need be, because it's not going to be enough to just rely on the systems, unquote. Two days before the primary election, Plattner spoke at a town hall about building a Senate office that prioritizes a relationship with labor unions rather than the owners of the industries that labor works in. A Senate office where a worker, labor organizer, or civil rights representative should get more face-to-face time with a senator than any lobbyist. I very much believe that we need to connect that kind of local organizing work directly to a Senate. office in D.C. So something, like I used to have been an organizer with Maine People's Alliance before. And I firmly believe that we need closer coordination between community organizations,

Starting point is 02:27:43 environmental organizations, frankly, all of the organizing groups around Maine with institutional power. Because I do think that that's, history tends to show that you're most successful when outside organizing is working in tandem with institutional power. That tends to be when we get the most significant wins. I'll come back to discuss how the Platner campaign was actually run after this ad break. Welcome back to what could happen here. This past April, one of Platner's former high school classmates turned journalist named Josh

Starting point is 02:28:32 Keith wrote an article for the main monitor about why Platner's campaign has been so successful in Maine. Plattner told his former classmate that the campaign is being run like a community organizing project. Quote, this kind of campaign and kind of politics with an organizing focus,

Starting point is 02:28:53 this doesn't work if you just run TV ads. My background is in organizing and I want to take that on the road as a candidate. And the only way it ever works is by going out and engaging with people directly. You got to like not sleep, unquote. Direct person-to-person engagement has been the hallmark of Platner's campaign strategy. Here, age is certainly playing a factor in the race.

Starting point is 02:29:19 Platner is 41. Janet Mills is 78 and Susan Collins is 73. Platner's younger age is not just compelling to voters who want a younger generation of candidates, but it also impacts how he can campaign. Platner is effectively campaigning full-time, making three to six campaign appearances a day while his business partner handles the oyster farm. From late September to the early June primary, his campaign held 83 town hall events across the state, pulling in hundreds of people per event and filling out community venues.

Starting point is 02:29:58 In comparison, Susan Collins has not held a single public town hall meeting in over 25, years. Janet Mills didn't even release a policy platform until April. Platner told a more perfect union, quote, people want to hear about the future, people want to hear about your policies, and people also want access to you so they can figure out if you're full of shit or not, unquote. Considering the smaller size of Maine, come the November election, there's a good chance Plattenor will have spoken face to face with nearly every voter in the state. At these town halls, he often talks about power, how working class power won the new deal, and how since the 70s, corporate interests have been undermining that power, using money to influence policy.

Starting point is 02:30:49 At an event in Freiburg, Maine, Platner said, quote, we are the richest society in the history of humanity. We can have universal health care. We can have universal child care. We can have universal education going from kindergarten all the way through higher education. we can have a tax code that pulls back the wealth that was stolen from the working class of this country for the past 50 years. What we need to do is from the ground up build power the old-fashioned way. This comes from organizing, unquote.

Starting point is 02:31:20 Platner's campaign has helped with other local electoral and legislative efforts, and the main monitor reported that Platner's events often serve as locations for, quote, food donation drop-offs. He is frequently introduced by a local activist who gets to talk about their work, unquote. Plattner told the main monitor, quote, We really have to fundamentally understand that no one is coming to save us. And the only way to build that power on your own is here in the real world, face to face with your neighbors, building trust in relationships again, unquote.

Starting point is 02:31:57 Platner's also said that building that kind of outside power is also how to find more people to run for office and gather the resources needed to get them elected to take power. In an interview with John Stewart, Platterner said that because the U.S. Senate is in many ways a uniquely undemocratic institution, quote, set up to be a specific bulwark against working class people to protect the elites, that actually makes it a quote-unquote unique place of power if candidates with strong ties to working-class communities can occupy those seats. Following their historic loss in 2024, the Democratic Party establishment has been in a uniquely weak position,

Starting point is 02:32:41 opening up the opportunity to address the issues that have led the party into national irrelevancy. Graham Platner lays blame on the Democrats abandoning the working class. And that doesn't just mean white construction workers, but the actual multicultural, multiracial working class, wage workers and those who cannot live off their investments. For the past 40 years, the party has abandoned organized labor and begun catering to upper middle class professionals and has become a party of the elites and Ivy leagues.

Starting point is 02:33:13 In the United States, there are a lot of people who don't vote based on an ideology they hold, but in response to what's happening in their communities. Hospitals closing, jobs disappearing, groceries and utilities getting more expensive, Why would they vote for a party that says everything is fine? The economy is technically doing great. The Democratic establishment has wagered that voters would rather protect the system rather than change it.

Starting point is 02:33:42 And in 2024, that wager was proven wrong. People want change, even if that change is being promised by a billionaire charlatan whose real interest is in serving the upper class and tech companies. But for as many people who decided to vote for Trump, there were many others who saw through the charade, but were so disillusioned by party politics that they chose not to vote at all. Plattenor's campaign has made itself not just about taking on Trump or even Susan Collins,

Starting point is 02:34:15 but a part of a larger seismic shift, the working class reasserting its power and taking back the Democratic Party. To quote the main monitor, quote, unlike Janet Mills, he's not trying to convince, Vince voters, he will stand up to Trump. He's trying to start a movement to build a world without the despair and resentment that he

Starting point is 02:34:37 believes allows Trump's brand of politics to flourish, unquote. Later at that event in the town of Freiburg, Platner told the crowd, quote, people, when their lives begin to deteriorate, are going to look for folks to blame. And if we don't have an actual answer, then hatred and xenophobia and racism and homophobia and transobia, all of them will fill the vacuum. This means we have to go out in our community and we have to wear our hearts on our sleeves, unquote. Maine has semi-open primaries, meaning that unenrolled voters can vote in a party primary.

Starting point is 02:35:17 In the lead up to the primary, Plattner's campaign did a series of videos where he gets coffee with Republican-leaning voters, and they talk about how their interests are more aligned compared to the interests of Trump, the billionaire class, and Susan Collins. Plater himself has said that his rise in Maine says more about the appetite for a new kind of politics rather than him specifically as a candidate. But from the perspective of some voters, the slow drip of scandals and controversies might actually bolster Platner's image as an anti-establishment candidate. For example, these people interviewed by CNN and MS Now.

Starting point is 02:36:00 Are you considering holding your breath and voting for him? I got until Tuesday to decide, but I'm pretty sure I'll vote for him. I don't think a lot of this crap is anybody else's business. For some Democrats, they're willing to look past the interpersonal stories. I'm not really interested in the guy's foibles. You know, I'm interested in his vision and what he has to say. And I love what he has to say. So, yeah, it's been definitely difficult because everybody is piling on this guy.

Starting point is 02:36:33 Does he have a problematic past? Yes. But I would rather have a redemption story than somebody telling you how wonderful they are, how much research they do. And yet they still make the wrong decision for the people of me. On Election Day, June 9th, Platner won 71.9% of the vote, with 100, with 154,058 votes. Governor Janet Mills, who stopped campaigning a month or a half prior but remained on the ballot

Starting point is 02:37:04 won 41,000 votes, or 19.3%. Grand Platner won more primary votes than any other Democratic Senate candidate in the history of Maine. As he walked onto the stage for his victory speech, dropkick Murphy's cover of which side are you on, blared in the background. Plattner promised, quote, I will be a senator for the people who cannot afford to buy a senator. Now, the national pundits, the political establishment, they keep looking for that one story, that one headline, that one moment in my life that they can define the campaign by. But in trying so hard to understand me, they failed to understand

Starting point is 02:37:52 that this is not about me at all. This is a movement about us, about the far too many working far too hard in struggling, far too much at the hands of the ruling class. At a town hall, just a few days before the primary, Platner spoke about the need to rebuild our old alliances with labor unions, community organizations,

Starting point is 02:38:27 and civil rights groups. Quote, the only thing that's ever beat fascism is a broad-based working-class coalition. Fascism is what we are up against. I think a lot of the folks at the national level misunderstand the reason they keep getting everything wrong. They think this is a race about me, but it isn't. This is a race about us.

Starting point is 02:38:48 This is a race about the future of politics in Maine. This is a race about building power the old-fashioned way from the ground up, going out into our communities, and having hard conversations, putting in time and energy that many of us do not have. We've got to do it anyway. So what I'm asking to do, if you don't want to volunteer on this campaign, that's fine. Join a labor union. Go help out at the local food pantry. Go help out at a food bank. It doesn't matter what you do, but you got to do something. Because the moment we're in right now, it's going to require all of us, unquote. There were 215,000 votes in the Democratic primary. Plattner's campaign had 3,000. It's going to require all of us, unquote. There were 215,000 votes in the Democratic primary. Plattener's campaign had 15,000 volunteers. These volunteers went up against and beat the Democratic establishment, and now they face the

Starting point is 02:39:41 GOP establishment. This shift in the politics of the Democratic Party is not isolated to Maine. Democratic socialists just won in Washington, D.C. And following the election of Zora Mamdani, nine more DSA candidates just won the Democratic primary in New York, including three seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. But Maine occupies a unique place in American politics, the stereotypical purple state. Unseeding Susan Collins would prove that real working class politics don't just win liberal cities, but can take down what Bernie Sanders would call the oligarchy.

Starting point is 02:40:19 There's an old saying, as Maine goes, so goes the nation. If you want to stop, if you want to stop, war with Iran and end the forever wars. If you want to give workers the raise they deserve, seniors, the security they worked for, you want to bring back Roe v. Wade, as Maine goes, so goes the nation. If you want to stop a Trump family slush fund, their bowl room, their deals with Saudi princes and tech oligarchs, if you want to stop the corruption, as Maine goes, so goes the nation.

Starting point is 02:40:59 If we want to dismantle ice, win back the Senate, check Donald Trump's power, and take back ours. As Maine goes, so goes the nation. Together, we will defeat Susan Collins. Grand Platner is slightly ahead in the polls above Susan Collins, but the race is still quite close. In 2020, when Collins was facing a challenger, she too was behind in the polls. but still pulled off a victory. That doesn't for me, and it could happen here. See you on the other side.

Starting point is 02:41:36 Canadian women are looking for more. More out of themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers,

Starting point is 02:42:06 all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on I Heart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Hey, I'm Hoda Kotby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby. Okay, if you know me, you know this. I'm always searching for inspiration, for support, and useful tools to help maximize joy. So this podcast lets us uncover all of that together. We're going to have these meaningful conversations with the world's most important.

Starting point is 02:42:38 fascinating people like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she never saw coming I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer and that was more difficult there's a lot of people who understand postpartner depression I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety Olympic champ Sean Johnson revealed why she had no choice but to be a gymnast there was something about gymnastics that was intoxicating to me it's given me a belief that we all have one of those treasures and of us. We just have to find it.

Starting point is 02:43:09 Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You said to me, yo, you know, keep at it, because you let me rap for you. It was magical for all of us. We made it. We made it. Yeah. I'm like, we? You know, I'm like, I know these guys, but who are you?

Starting point is 02:43:29 I'm MC Jen, and this is 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. like the co-founder of Rough Riders, Darren D. Dean. Talking about as a kid, do you remember that we met even way before that? Let me think. Did you walk up to the gate?

Starting point is 02:43:47 That was me, Dee. That was you? That was me. The day we found out that you and the whole crew was at Hit Factory, the mission was to get me to go to the gate, start freestyleing, and see if I could get in the studio. I'm rapping, and then suddenly I hear a voice, hey, open the gate, let him in.

Starting point is 02:44:01 The gate slowly went, come, come, come, come. They all, they're watching this, and they watch me walk into there, and that is a moment that I will remember for the rest of my life. Listen, and laugh but not least with MC Jen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Here at the Happiness Lab, we're serving up some hot takes for the summer. Big ideas that just might reshape how you think about your well-being.

Starting point is 02:44:25 Like, we've been thinking about the loneliness epidemic all wrong. You can be lonely in a marriage. You can be lonely at a party. I don't think loneliness is actually about solitude. loneliness is about something much bigger, or that we should get rid of small talk altogether. We talk about current events. We talk about what you do for a living, but not do you love what you for a living. Is this your dream job? Or that the mental health crisis isn't what we think it is, and that kids today are doing better than we assume. It was really disorienting for us as

Starting point is 02:44:54 researchers to be so wrong about our hypothesis. We are so scared that we are going to underreact to a severe challenge that we tend to overreact. For more surprising ideas backed by psychological science, check out our new series, Happiness Hot Takes. Listen to the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by James Stout, Mia Wong, and Robert Evans. Hey, hey. This episode, we are covering the week of June 17th to John.

Starting point is 02:45:38 June 24th. Yeah. Should we start off with some little things? Yeah. Let's start out with some small things. Mm-hmm.

Starting point is 02:45:46 So I guess to begin with, the federal judge, Sparkle, Sucan, Nairn, actually, who we've heard about before in the show, has Buckner-Trop administration from,

Starting point is 02:45:55 quote, haphazardly assembling a list of citizens that would be used to purge voter rolls. Great. Yeah. I'm glad they can't do

Starting point is 02:46:03 that haphazardly. Yeah. Given the timing, right, like, before the mid-term, hopefully that means that this isn't going to happen in a way that will impact them in terms. The State Department has announced it's going to begin revoking passports people with outstanding child support of more than 2,500 United States dollars.

Starting point is 02:46:22 They can contact an embassy to get a temporary passport to come back to the US, but they'll only have their full passport restored, I guess, if they pay their outstanding child support debt. Okay. Yeah. I'm wondering what got this to their ears. How big a problem is this? I'm not against this. I'm just wondering why they moved to do this. I saw it on the Twitter feed of the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria,

Starting point is 02:46:47 and I would be interested, and I don't know how possible this would be to go after with public records, to know which particular embassies are revoking passports of which particular people, if you see what I mean. Yeah, I think in general revoking passports is a bad thing to do. Yeah, I think this isn't the way to go after child support. You are a piece of shit if you're not playing, paying your child support. But I think generally the possibility of someone being left stateless, that's not how we get to a better world here.

Starting point is 02:47:21 I'm just wondering why they're doing this. Like, this has to be, they have to be targeting somebody with this. Like, I don't believe this is about the problem of, like, there being a lot of people who are getting out of child support by fleeing the country. Like, I don't believe that's the motivation here. I'm kind of curious what it is. I can tell you for sure, but the fact that I saw this on the Nigeria embassy website, I mean, I can look right now and see what if other embassies posted it, I guess. Here we go, U.S. Embassy in Spain.

Starting point is 02:47:48 I don't see it on their page, for example. Interesting. Okay. It'd be interesting to follow. That's just a, yeah, sure. It's something I came across, like, you know, about half an hour before we recorded this. No, that's not worthy. A judge has quashed a subpoena aimed at Governor Walts and Mayor

Starting point is 02:48:07 fray, along with other state politicians in Minneapolis, writing, quote, this course of events in and of itself establishes beyond a reasonable dispute that the subpoenas were part of a broader campaign to coerce state and local officials in Minnesota to assist the Trump administration in its enforcement of immigration laws. And of course, this campaign played out against a backdrop of the Trump administration's well-established history of using criminal investigations to retaliate against and pressure the president's political and personal adversaries. Very clearly, the other thing that the Trump administration has done with the DOJ,

Starting point is 02:48:40 right, but it's good to see it called out, I guess. Sure. USCIS is looking to increase fees for existing permanent residents to naturalize. I become U.S. citizens, as well as removing fee waivers for lower income migrants. This will be a barrier to people,

Starting point is 02:48:56 right? And that is why it's happening. Yep. A. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna used Claude A.I. God. Damn. Legislation. God. She's delisible. She's deleted her tweet, but I actually posted a link to her tweet on Blue Sky, and it still contains the cashed text of the tweet if you want to go read it.

Starting point is 02:49:13 She immediately responded by throwing her staff under the bus, claiming that it was not uncommon for staff to use Claude fucking amend national legislation. My people just don't like to do their job, do you? My God. Yeah, I don't know how for hundreds of years people wrote legislation without asking fucking Claude. She left the, like, it had Claude responded in the text. of the bill that's her great good good stuff yeah claude is very popular in

Starting point is 02:49:40 Washington DC like specifically yeah yeah yeah I mean it's it's widely agreed to be the best of the of the chat box thinking person's chat bot yeah yeah the thinking man's chat by there is like a weird bizono universe where you get like the Mark Fisher clod outputs that writes on tons of legislation that gets suddenly passed where the US enters a very odd on time because they kept using this chat bot that really liked like certain certain writing from... Certain shit that people

Starting point is 02:50:11 were reading online in 2001. Yeah, have certain biases baked in. Yeah. Yeah, I'm having this nightmare image. I'm having this nightmare image of people doing like prompt injection attacks specifically to like get clod to like auto spit out certain lines of regulation.

Starting point is 02:50:27 Yeah. Yeah. Or just inserting trans rights into a defense appropriations bill. Claude amending prescription drug laws to allow me specifically to purchase allotted over the counter. I can see a lot of good places to go here. The Evans Amendment. The Evans Amendment. I just get to call.

Starting point is 02:50:46 It can actually be delivered. You don't even have to purchase it. Yeah, they put it in a trash bag for me, yeah. I dropped it with a drone. Talking of inserting shit into bills, let's talk about Mike Lee, the only person worse for the planet than the sport of golf. Mike Lee mentioned two weeks in a row. Are we on three? I'm mentioning Mike Lee until he's talking.

Starting point is 02:51:05 stops with this shit, let me tell you. A bipartisan group of legislators has introduced legislation to block the backdoor sale of public lands through the reconciliation process. Hazzah. They might as well have called this to fuck you, Mike Lee, stop doing this bill.

Starting point is 02:51:18 Mike, stop. Stop. It's exclusively one person who is doing this, and it is Mike Lee. The bill equivalent of spritzing a single guy on the nose with a bottle of water. Stop it, get out of here. Yeah, he's been slapped down.

Starting point is 02:51:33 It's interesting to see You know, see less bipartisan shit than you used to But no one likes Mike Lee in this shit Apart from people in Utah Who inexplicably elected him There's nothing people in Utah hate more Than the beautiful land in which they inhabit Yeah, not being able to mine and graze it

Starting point is 02:51:51 As much as they like The Atlantic is reporting that Pete Hexas Has pressured General Donahue Into stepping down It seems Donahue will leave his job Next week Yeah, I guess I'd be rubbing I'm sure you're familiar as well.

Starting point is 02:52:05 Donahue is a massive figure. He's very famously like the last U.S. military official to leave Afghanistan during the withdrawal. Yeah. He's a pretty major guy and was widely considered to be kind of one of the folks you'd think would be sort of bulletproof outside of the fact that he was involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan famously. And I think most people assumed that because it was in a very like stereotypically heroic way and because this guy had such a reputation within like special operation. that he would be protected. But this is kind of further example of the brain drain that's been hitting all of the guys who know how to do stuff

Starting point is 02:52:43 in the Department of Defense. Yeah, like, it is quite remarkable when you look at a list of the people who have been purged, like, you know, quote-unquote retired, right? Like, in terms of U.S. military leadership capacity, it has been significantly diminished by Pete Hankseth. I just want to put a note in here for later on, hopefully, Hopefully this never becomes relevant, but I really, really do not like that in a two-year span there has been a significant purge of both the senior leadership of the American and Chinese militaries.

Starting point is 02:53:11 Really do not like that. Just putting this note in the record that like, yeah, very similar. You mean all the guys who like know each other? Yeah. You can say, no, I don't think that means that. I know this guy. He wouldn't do that for this reason. Like everyone like that on both sides is gone and that maybe is how traditionally disasters happen. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't like this. I'm just putting a note in.

Starting point is 02:53:35 It's actually like, say what you want about, I mean, say many different things about, like, the fucking militaries of both China and the United States. But it's really good, actually, when you have, like, a professional officer cadre that's insulated from politics and also, like, kind of socially know the guys in the other countries at the higher levels because they've, like, spoken. Like, that's actually really useful in de-escalation of conflict. Exactly, yeah, it gives an informal de-escalation mechanism. And when that disappears, it can lead the problems. Yeah, when you're promoting people of the hegg-theth fucking tendency especially, right? A surprising number of disasters have been averted, and not just because military officials, but because people in two countries who were high up in the government,

Starting point is 02:54:18 like, just kind of had hung out with each other at events. And one was able to call the other and be like, hey, Joe, like, you guys aren't doing this, are you? Because my people are fucking flipping out. Those relationships are really load-bearing in the us-all-not-dying-dying-a-tall-d-dying. atomic fire thing. So, you know. There seems to be some kind of counterfactual.

Starting point is 02:54:39 There's just a lie going around X.com that, like, Donahue, Donahue's last soldier to leave Afghanistan, as Robert said, and like they were being shot at and there were, like, junior enlisted folks. Why? Being shot at. That wasn't happening. The last 13 U.S. troops who died in Afghanistan were not shot by the Taliban. They were killed in an Islamic State suicide bombing.

Starting point is 02:55:00 Again, because the Taliban was cooperating. with our withdrawal. They were not like, the Taliban was not fighting, shooting at the U.S. as we were leaving, because they wanted us to do what we were doing. Yeah, yeah, they got their desired outcome without having to do that. If you're the Taliban and the war is almost over,

Starting point is 02:55:19 and you know, if you know one thing about the U.S. as the Taliban, which is like, if we just suddenly kill a bunch of their guys, maybe they don't leave. Yeah, I know, they will return and do a fucking murdering people spree. Like, I don't know, once again, right, like things that have happened, the last five years seem to not exist in the mind of people who use X.com to get their news. It never existed for them.

Starting point is 02:55:38 I guess finally, some good news from Magway PDF who destroyed a topmodor, MI17 helicopter using FPV drones yesterday. Oh, wow. Yeah, not the first time it's happened in Myanmar. I constantly see when a drone is used in Ukraine in a sort of relatively novel way, people are saying this is the first time it has happened, and almost always it has already happened in Myanmar. Not always, like there was some autonomous drone.

Starting point is 02:56:03 that kill people in Ukraine a couple of years ago that I'm not aware of existing in Myanmar, but like Orientalism definitely plays a role in people's ignorance when it comes to like military firsts happening in the Spring Revolution. But yeah, in this instance, they seemed to hit it with multiple FPV drones taking out its landing gear, then its engines. I do have one short story here that I've tried to avoid covering because I really don't think it's that important.

Starting point is 02:56:31 Yeah. But much like the LG-E's, just keeps creeping back into the headlines. So last month, President Trump got super obsessed with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, spent $14 million in a no-contract bid to get rid of the algae. Trump used his own pool guys,

Starting point is 02:56:45 and they drained the reflection pool. They painted the bottom, quote-unquote, American flag blue, and then filled that thing up again. Brilliant marketing decision by whoever named that paint, by the way. Yeah. Yet somehow the algae returned.

Starting point is 02:57:01 And in an even worse state, turning the entirety of the blue reflecting water green. So in response, they started dumping gallons of hydrogen peroxide into the pool to kill the algae. Now, hydrogen peroxide, also a paint thinner. And strips of the American flag blue paint started peeling off the bottom of the pool, making the situation worse. Now, here's where things get really interesting. This is the only reason why we're covering this. Because last weekend, Trump began making the completely unsubstantiated claims that the algae-filled blue paint fiasco was the result of, quote-unquote, radical left lunatics who vandalized the pool. The National Guard and the Park Police have since then been arresting people for standing near the reflecting pool.

Starting point is 02:57:54 On Tuesday night, President Trump truthed, quote, six people have been arrested and seven people have been sighted. for the damage they did to our country's now beautiful reflecting pool. The 350-foot gash made by a very sharp knife or razors is actually numerous slashes over a very long 350-foot length. It was purposefully and criminally done, and someone had to work very hard, probably in the dark of the night, to create such a situation. Unquote, no evidence this has happened, obviously.

Starting point is 02:58:31 people have been watching the pool nonstop. No one's been seen. National God. Waiting in there with a knife, cutting the floor. Now, Garrison, Garrison, Garrison, you're not understanding what the president's saying.

Starting point is 02:58:44 One man didn't wait in there with a knife. A team of hundreds each made a single slash. That's the kind of discipline Andif is capable of. You don't understand these people. Of course in the dark of the night. They wear black. There's outlets like the Washington Post just reported on Trump's claims without noting that this is just a lie.

Starting point is 02:59:04 Just for complete nonsense, yeah. But as the president has said, six people have been arrested, one of whom for sticking his hand in the pool and touching one of the floating pieces of blue paint. Yeah. Trump has said they will need to join the pool again to make further repairs ahead of the 4th of July 250th celebration. If you read the actual report that was made by, I think it was the Parts Department or whatever, like analyzing what had happened in the reflecting pool.

Starting point is 02:59:31 they did notice some like things that were described as cuts but concluded they had nothing to do with the paint itself. Like if you actually read the report, like what he's talking about is not like what his own people said. He just saw cuts in the report and ignored that it was like, but these were somewhere else and not relevant to the paint peeling and just went with it. Like that's the root of all this. The thing with the story is like, yeah, on the one hand, it is very funny that the pool, the pool green. but also the fact that Trump can just lie about this stuff and then also a bunch of people get arrested is really bad. It is in fact really bad

Starting point is 03:00:11 that you can be arrested for putting your hands in a pool. That's very bad. I just, just on a fundamental level, not a sign of a society that is functioning or healthy or at all not doing well. Yeah. Yeah, no great, no good. No.

Starting point is 03:00:29 Not a good look for us on the U.S.H. 250th birthday. Yeah, it was a deeply authoritarian society. Speaking of, let's discuss probably the worst piece of news this week. Yeah, yeah, which is the sentencing in the Prairie Land case where the Trump administration brought terrorism charges against what they allege as an Antifa cell, who attended a protest outside of an ICE detention facility last 4th of July. Benjamin Song was sentenced to 100 years in prison. Song was convicted of attempted murder for shooting toward a police officer who was pointing a handgun at fleeing protesters.

Starting point is 03:01:12 Marcella Rada was sentenced to 70 years in prison. Zachary Evitz, Autumn Hill, Savannah Baton, Elizabeth Soto, and Megan Morris were sentenced to 50 years in prison after being convicted of providing quote-unquote material support to terrorists. Some of these people weren't even involved in planning the protest, but just knew others who were. One of the people in this case wasn't even at the protest. Daniel Sanchez Des Estrada, who was sentenced to 30 years in prison, did not attend the protest, but was convicted of concealing documents for moving a box of personal items and anarchist zines from one house to another. That got him sentenced to 30 years in prison. One of the judges, Judge O'Connor, who was not the judge for the trial, said that the maximum sentences are to quote,

Starting point is 03:02:02 send a message to anyone who shares similar ideologies. Yeah. These are brutal sentences, right? Yeah. These are sort of things that you see in the potential liability, but in my experience, I haven't seen many people get like maximum sentences. Like I'm familiar with guys who are convicted

Starting point is 03:02:23 of providing material support to the Islamic State, for instance, who did not get sentences anywhere near this. No, this is, like, absolutely insane. It's just like unprecedented. Very clearly, politically motivated as the judge openly said during sentencing. Yeah, deliberately admitted it was. Yeah. Like, the Adam Woff and guy who planned to attack power grids a few years ago was just sentenced to 20. This is absurd. Like, it was a song sentence of a hundred years is, is pretty insane itself for, even for being convicted of attempted murder. But all of these material support charges and concealing documents 30 to 70 years is like here it's outrageous yeah it's a very clear attempt to

Starting point is 03:03:05 have a chilling it yeah right like that's the goal here that's the goal with the with the prosecutions in uh minneapolis as well like yeah you know it's all the same part of the same strategy yeah no using conspiracy charges to rope in people to this larger case arguing that this conspiracy is evidenced through reading zines through wearing certain clothes at a protest being put out of quote unquote Antifa. And then they don't need to actually argue that every single person did a specific violent crime, but justice association with each other can lead to a conviction. And we are seeing this, you know, copied in Minnesota, where just like one or two people are charged with doing violence, like, you know, kicking a vehicle. But what links to 15 defendants

Starting point is 03:03:50 together in Minnesota are these conspiracy charges. Yeah. Yeah. The thing that it reminds me the most of is just, is Haymarket, where, you know, in a very similar way, you have an attempt to not even necessarily go after the people who did the thing. You have an attempt to put the ideology on trial. I mean, the judge explicitly says this, right? This is not a trial that is happening because something happened. This is specifically an attempt to send a message, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, to send a message and to stop resistance to everything the Trump administration has been doing, and particularly to try to try to, like, bring down the level of resistance to ice and border patrols, like raids and actions.

Starting point is 03:04:33 Going forward, the defendants will absolutely need support for what's going to be a lengthy appeals process. Yeah. The worst case scenario is going to require building a mass movement to push for pardoning anti-ice protesters, including the Prairie Line defendants, in a, post-Trump government. A complicating factor in this case is that some of these defendants are also facing state charges, which a federal pardon would not cover in Texas. Yeah. But rallying behind these people is of the utmost urgency, same as all the anti-hice protesters around the

Starting point is 03:05:10 country who are facing repression. I do want to note that our previous coverage of Prairie, like my previous coverage, focused on how the government used these specific charges, how they used specific testimony and flimsy evidence to successfully argue a conviction. Well, also mentioning that some of the mistakes that the public defenders made during that case, missing deadlines to file motions, not calling witnesses, right? There is unique aspects of this case. And I think knowing what those are is important. When I was putting together that episode, a lot of the coverage I saw talked about how

Starting point is 03:05:42 you know, fucked up this situation is. And it really is, right? But I think it's also important to actually know how the state is able to do this, like how they're able to argue this in very specific ways, to understand some of the unique aspects of this case, and to know what the state and jurors consider relevant evidence, saying certain things in group chats. But also just being at a protest with someone else wearing possibly matching clothing, right?

Starting point is 03:06:08 Understanding those specifics, I think is also important. But going forward, supporting these defendants, regardless of the conviction is of the utmost urgency. We will link to the support committee for the Prairie Line defendants and the donation link to help with legal costs and other expenses resulting from the state repression. Yeah, I'm sure these people will have a lengthy and challenging appeal process ahead of them. They will need significant legal support if they're going to get out of prison.

Starting point is 03:06:38 And, you know, like if we look at like a previous movement in the U.S., like Biden pardoned Leonard Peltier after decades, right? Yep. Of him being in prison, like most of the rest of his life was spent in jail. And we can contrast that

Starting point is 03:06:52 to how Trump pardoned the J6s very rapidly. No, 100%. Yeah. Specifically in a post-J6 pardon world and considering the popular resistance to ICE, I think it's imperative that we go forward

Starting point is 03:07:08 with the specific intention of even if the appeals fail, an anti-ice movement needs to include these people in their advocacy and getting them pardons in the future. Yeah, yeah. And I think it is also just worth saying that, you know, I think there's an extent to which this repression would have happened regardless, but part of the reason why this is happening,

Starting point is 03:07:28 part of the reason why the judge is saying this stuff, part of the reason why they find the need to try to do a chilling effect and use fear and terror to stop anything else, you know, to stop any of the resistance, is that the resistance is working. That doesn't mean that people aren't getting hurt in unbelievably sort of hideous ways. It doesn't mean the deportations are continuing, but they have not been able to do the things that they wanted to do. No, this is defensive lashing out. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:07:56 Yeah, you know, there is an extent to which they're doing this because they're losing and they know it. And they have something has to happen in order to change the balance of how this whole sort of conflict between ICE and people's communities has been unfolding. And this is one of the things they're trying to do to do that. Yeah, and more broadly, they're just trying to chill anything that could become part of successful resistance. Like, they understand that anything that's public to the administration that looks bad can make them look bad. Like, that's why they're lashing out at the fucking reflecting pool tool. Like, the goal is to just, like, to instill a sort of instinctive fear of doing anything that could make the administration look bad. They're trying to, like, force their own sort of, like, less majestic situation out through just, like, arresting people whenever they,

Starting point is 03:08:40 embarrass the regime. Yeah. And specifically trying to criminalize common protest tactics and picking specific cases like, you know, Prairieland and like the 15 defendants in Minneapolis. And rather than actually focusing the majority of the case on alleged crimes, instead focusing on Antifa as this scary specter, right, is anarchism, violent militancy. Yeah. We're just discussions or aesthetics of militancy is really what is, is really what is. It is really, what the case is like resting on and convincing a jury that these people are a scary group of outside agitators but by solidifying a conviction that actually criminalizes what are legal protest tactics like this is the scary part of the case in Minneapolis in the Twin Cities is that most of

Starting point is 03:09:26 that document is is covering legal like ice watch rapid response networks right legal actions but they're trying to criminalize people's coordination to do that legal action by focusing on a that the government thinks is specifically, you know, militant or has certain political beliefs. Yeah, I would say that the Minneapolis indictment is not the Puryland indictment. Like, that is a very different thing. Totally. And, yeah, we made an episode and that people go back and listen to it. But, like, I think people, I understand the fear that people, people are feeling.

Starting point is 03:10:02 But, like, I want you to know that, like, this isn't every case going forward, right? for this is a case that they have had success and they extracted like a really horrific burden. Most of the cases they bought in Minnesota have been thrown out. The details and evidence of these cases are very, very different. I'm only invoking the comparison because the strategy from the DOJ is similar, even if the specific details and evidence in these cases do why they differ. And regardless of those differences, I think both the defendants in both cases should receive the same amount of support. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:10:37 Like I mentioned links for the support committee, and the donation link will be at the very top of the description below. Let's go on a break and return for more news. We are back and we're talking about Iran. We saw like a lot of back and forth over the weekend about the MOU, about Trump threatening the Iranian delegation, about them not signing it. The MOU of Versailles didn't work out. The MOU event. We have an MOU in place, right? At the time of writing, this rests on a very fragile piece in Lebanon.

Starting point is 03:11:28 And I want to read something from Bengavia about Lebanon. He's a national security minister in Israel. Yeah, last time we spoke about him, he was physically assaulting people from the flotilla, I think. I'm just going to read this out. For every tier of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn. With all due respect to the Americans, Israel must make it clear to the entire world that the blood of our sons and the security of our citizens are not forfeit. All of Lebanon must burn. Our supreme duty is to protect the citizens of Israel and the soldiers the IDF,

Starting point is 03:12:00 and this commitment takes precedence over every other consideration. I told the Prime Minister, even in a private meeting, it's for every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. Enough with a ping pong. In the Middle East, you don't win with measured responses and restraint, you need to go berserk to obliterate, to crush the terror. That's just a genocide post. There's insanely genocidal. Yeah, super genocidal. Like, he might as well just say, like, what I want is a genocide.

Starting point is 03:12:26 The genocide is what I want. Like, in other historically documented genocides, it is relatively rare to have the person just being like, we're doing a genocide over here. This is a genocide. Seems like a good time for it. Yeah. Like, it is historically somewhat remarkable. to just be like, yes, we want to wipe them all out, actually.

Starting point is 03:12:46 If anyone wonders if this is genocide or not, absolutely. Like, you will not find a clearer statement of genocidal intent than this. And so the Iran peace deal being contingent on Israel, at least finding peace in Lebanon. Right now they're occupying southern Lebanon. It doesn't look like they're leaving. It's contingent on this government, which includes someone who is openly genocidal. They're finding a peace deal with Lebanon, which, I mean, what kind of peace, what kind of compromise can you come to with that person?

Starting point is 03:13:17 Like, Israel continues to be the force that continues to destabilize the region and cause more death and suffering. Let's move back to America. The Senate did pass a war powers resolution this week. It came through from the House. A resolution here, it expresses the will of Congress. It's slightly different for a piece of legislation. It is a setback for Trump, right? Like, it's not nothing, especially because some Republicans supported it.

Starting point is 03:13:43 Rand Paul, Lisa Mikowski, Susan Collins, and Bill Cassidy. Of course, John Fetterman crossed the other way because he is a Marga Republican. He just has a blue badge next to him. So in 2019, probably the most analogous kind of recent example, Trump vetoed resolution concerning U.S. support for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, right? He will likely ignore this. History understanders will know that we didn't stop supporting the Saudis, right? and he is very unlikely to change his policy about this, but he is clearly very upset about it.

Starting point is 03:14:17 And this is important because Trump has a record as we go into the midterms of attempting to destroy the careers of any Republican who he considers to have spoken out against him, right? So in a general sense, with a war, Congress would have to approve it within 60 days, sometimes for national security reasons. that could be extended by the executive branch to 90 days. What the White House is arguing here is that the April ceasefire means that that clock has stopped and that the war powers resolution therefore pertains to a war that no longer exists.

Starting point is 03:14:49 And if they start again, it will be a completely different, separate, and unrelated thing and that clock would start again from zero. Yeah. Jesus Christ. That's kind of magical thinking, but that's what they're going with, right? Just before we recorded, it was reported that Trump had a lunch, like a closed-door lunch with GOP senators. which resulted in him getting into a screaming match with some of those senators, including Cassidy.

Starting point is 03:15:12 Clearly, the peace deal, the 14 points that we spoke about last time, have been extremely unpopular with the Republicans, right? Because Trump eventually caved on, like Iran's coming out of this, perhaps strategically in a better position than it went into this. Now, obviously, the US has done massive damage to Iranian infrastructure to kill people, right? but in terms of actually their military capacity, it seems to be a much less degraded than we initially thought. It looks like this continues to be one of the areas

Starting point is 03:15:47 where Trump is bleeding GOP support, and so it is interesting to keep track of this. Let's move on to talk about immigration now. So the D.C. District Court had a ruling this week. In order the government to facilitate the return of a man, Mr. Martinez and Dino, that they had deported to Honduras. The quote from the opinion,

Starting point is 03:16:09 I'm going to quote kind of extensively here, I have removed, like when you get these opinions, right, they will have in-text citations for other court cases, and I've removed those for reading clarity. Quote, after being arrested and detained in Montana by immigration authorities, a move between at least six detention centres

Starting point is 03:16:23 in different states across the country, he seemingly disappeared. He was not permitted to contact his attorneys for more than 10 days, and neither immigration and customs enforcement nor Customs and Border Protection would tell his attorneys where he was or in which agency's custody despite repeated requests. Not until his attorneys filed this lawsuit,

Starting point is 03:16:45 initially seeking only a temporary restraining order, directing defendants to tell them where and in whose custody plaintiff was located, did the government disclose that he had been removed to Honduras the same day, purportedly because he had voluntarily agreed to that departure. So this guy was kept. without contact to his lawyer who was trying to contact him and who he was asking to talk to for 10 days, he disputes in this case that he voluntarily agreed to depart because he was deprived of access to his legal team, because he wasn't able to understand the documents he was asked to sign.

Starting point is 03:17:20 I can say from numerous interviews I've conducted with people who have been in detention that there is a great deal of pressure to sign those documents, and they're there all the time, right? Like in the middle of the night when you can't sleep and it's freezing fucking cold, that document is right there on the wall for you to sign. The court ordered the government to, quote, ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to Honduras. And they cited Abrago Garcia versus Noam, right?

Starting point is 03:17:46 So they're using that as like a precedent here. That doesn't mean that he gets to come home and he's not going to be pursued by immigration, right? That means that they have to process him and not hide him away from his lawyer for 10 days. Because effectively, what they did was hid this man from his lawyers for more than a week and then forced him to sign a document that he couldn't meaningfully consent to. Some background here, he entered as a 14-year-old without family members. I don't like the term unaccompanied minor

Starting point is 03:18:15 because I've spent time with migrants traveling to the US and there are often children who are traveling without their family, but they're still accompanied by somebody or somebody who's just decided to take care of them. But that would be the legal term here, right? He was granted SIG, special immigrant juvenile status. And then when he got back to Honduras, he contacted his lawyer, filed an affidavit, stating that the paperwork he signed when he was detained was not explained to him. And he was, quote, told the only option he had detention was to sign for the paperwork. He, quote, asked to speak with his attorneys for nine days between March 31st and April 9th. And his, quote, requests were ignored or denied.

Starting point is 03:18:54 And he, quote, told immigration officials that he was afraid to return to Honduras and wanted an interview or a hearing with the judge. These requests were also, quote, ignored or denied. He also says he felt terribly mistreated due to poor food and no access to showers. He also gave a different timeline of deportation than that which the government presented in his case, suggesting that he may not have entered the country at the time the government said he was out of their custody, which is important, right, because the government's saying, we don't have him anymore. His timeline when they landed, how long they sat on the tarmac, when they transited, the border there is different from the one that the government provided.

Starting point is 03:19:36 It's good to see this case, right, but he will still face an uphill battle. I also want to talk very briefly about Blanche v. Lau. This is a ruling that returning green card holders are now considered or can be considered applicants for admission, which means they can be placed on immigration parole when entering the country. The case here pertains to Mr. Lau, who returned in 2012 and was placed on parole while facing charges related to trademark counterfeiting. I do want to go back and reference that date again.

Starting point is 03:20:03 2012. This is something that happened when Barack Obama was president. God Obama loved to deport people. Anybody who's telling you that that isn't the case is lying to you. Mr. Lau later pled guilty and therefore was swiftly praised in removal proceedings because the government argued he was inadmissible. So when you are paroled, you're not technically admitted. You are paroled pending admission.

Starting point is 03:20:30 Therefore, if you're found to be inadmissible, it is quicker to begin that removal. So this is where the Supreme Court had to decide, right? Generally, green card holders are considered to have already been admitted when they are returning, right? This ruling, there will have serious consequences for LPRs, legal permanent residence, green card holders, right? This pertains to crimes involving moral turpitude. I spoke about these a great deal, and I don't think we already have the space or time to go into them here, but we're going to say that it is a broad and nebulous category, because quote from the Supreme Court opinion here,

Starting point is 03:21:07 nothing in the INA required the border officer to have a clear and convincing evidence that Lowe had committed a crime involving moral turpitude before deeming him an applicant for admission. So Mr. Lowe had not been convicted of that crime, right? He had been charged with that crime. Mr. Lowe is still contesting whether this particular crime does involve moral turpitude, it seems. But nonetheless, this is a significant thing that Green Card Holders' Legal Perman and residents need to be aware of. That's it for James reads a bunch of court documents this week.

Starting point is 03:21:36 I'll link to all the court docs in the thing if you guys want to get deep in there. So in other extremely bleak news, we're moving to the climate front where we are seeing a whole bunch of heat waves across the world. I want to start in India and Pakistan. So India has been dealing with very, very serious heat wave

Starting point is 03:21:56 for a lot of parts of May and June. temperatures just in parts of New Delhi have hit 123 degrees Fahrenheit, which is a nightmare. Yeah, that's really bad. Yeah. Yeah, in New Delhi, it's consistently been over 100 degrees. We're also talking about over 100 degrees in one of the most humid

Starting point is 03:22:12 and worst AQI places on Earth. That's just hell. Yeah. That's hell. Yeah. Yeah, and as we're going to get to you in a second, in places where people don't have access to air conditioning and especially the more rural and the more

Starting point is 03:22:28 the further out you get, you're dealing with people where you don't have good access to electricity. And electricity grids tend to fail on the heat, especially when it is this hot and also this humid. Just that we know of the direct reporting from the Indian health ministry is reporting 100 dead from the heat. It's probably much larger than that. One of the very consistent things when you're reporting on this. And the BBC, for example, will talk to researchers is that, Yeah, the deaths are probably way higher, but there's real problems with how heat-related deaths are categorized because the thing that kills you is the heat, but you're dying from like another sort of health factor you had going on. So we're probably not going to know what the magnitude of this was for a pretty long time.

Starting point is 03:23:18 Things have been bad enough that almost half of the states in India have either, and it depends a lot on the region, but a lot of these places have just straight up shut down their schools or have revised the schedule. for their schools and effectively just started the summer break early because it is too hot to send kids to classrooms. Sometimes there's been sort of like Zoom school, a lot of stuff people probably are familiar from from like the lockdowns. But yeah, yeah, the BBC did a report from Bando, which is a district in Uttu Pradesh, where there was a full week in May where it was between 116 and 118 degrees,

Starting point is 03:23:56 which is just a night. nightmare and the other extremely dangerous part. And this is also true with the other places we want to be talking about, but it's particularly has been true in a lot of places in India, is that it's not really cooling at night. And that, as we've discussed on this show before, in a whole bunch of different segments, but it's worth repeating every single time it is hot.

Starting point is 03:24:17 That's one of the ways that things get very, very dangerous, because when there aren't periods, you can cool off at night. That is part of the way that heat stroke and deaths from heat injury are exacerbated. be it intensified. Now, there's also a heat wave going on across Europe. Yeah. A lot of heat waves to go around here. Yeah, fortunately.

Starting point is 03:24:38 Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So both the UK and France are seeing their hottest weather on record. France saw their hottest day on record and their hottest night on record, which is extremely bad. 40 people have died in France, I think this is the beginning of June, just from drownings, from people trying to escape the heat.

Starting point is 03:24:59 My God. Yeah. That's really weak. Yeah. That's brutal. Yeah. And there's also been record temperatures of places in Spain.

Starting point is 03:25:09 You're seeing temperatures that should not be happening, not just at sea level, but up in the mountains. You're seeing temperatures that are astounding and temperatures that, you know,

Starting point is 03:25:21 the architecture of these places and they're electrical grids and just like, do you have air conditioning? Right. Like a lot of the places with these huge ways are striking are not places that they've necessarily hit before. Yeah. And they're not designed to handle this kind of heat. Yeah, I mean, people aren't familiar. Most of our houses in Europe are built differently from houses in the U.S. They're not particularly designed, like especially as you get into Spain.

Starting point is 03:25:48 Like, some that were designed with shade in mind, but not with like a temperature conservation insulation. And so it's specifically air conditioning. Right. Air conditioning is much, much less common than it is in the United States. Yep. Yeah. It's also worth noting that, like, one of the things is intensifying this in a lot of places in India, but this is true, the more into the developing world you are, like, the more fucked you are in a lot of ways about this. But, like, you're also dealing with a lot of places where just the trees have been cut down for industrial and sort of mining purposes. And that also was increasing temperatures. And I want to close by just saying that, right, we're seeing the hottest temperatures.

Starting point is 03:26:27 on record. And this is what's happening under 1.4 degrees of global warming, right? Like, the versions of this where we're supposed to be stabilizing are, you know, the sort of, what's supposed to be the sort of habitable

Starting point is 03:26:41 zone, right? The case in areas where we, like, quote, unquote, deal with climate change are, like, two degrees of warming, two point five degrees of warming. It's already this bad. It is just going to get worse. And this is one of the, just

Starting point is 03:26:56 persistent kind of quiet crises that is happening in the back up of everything else, which is that, yeah, the way that we're powering all of our industries is causing the world to burn. Yeah. Complicated further by like austerity measures and make it harder for people to fund cooling their homes in Europe, right? And the things you might need to buy or do to keep your house cool. Margaret and I made an episode a while ago about heat waves, so you're looking for some resources.

Starting point is 03:27:25 You might be able to find some there. Yeah. Let's go and break, and then we will return for a few more news stories. Hopefully not all of them depressing. Don't worry, I've got a happy one. Yay. We're back. And as promised, I have some less depressing stuff to talk to you all about.

Starting point is 03:27:53 Oh, sorry, no, I messed up. We're going to talk about the deaths of millions. So if you can recall, back to the first months of the Trump administration, in, like, February 3rd, 2025, this is a little bit after Musk started his, you know, the early stages of his work with Doge, he tweeted, quote, we spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood shipper. I think we all remember that, that great moment. And this has since been widely criticized, and there are numerous articles, studies, and reports that have come out and made the case that the cuts to USAID that Doge made have resulted in a tremendous amount of human death and suffering.

Starting point is 03:28:28 Musk has consistently denied this. Earlier this week, he quote tweeted a fan who had written, If cutting USAID killed a child, a single child, it would be covered by the media like the biggest story in history, Musk added exactly in his quote tweet. Now, there actually have been several stories that specify individual children that have died because of cuts to USAID, and we'll be talking about some of them. Oh, yeah. But I want to quote from a recent article by Matt Novak and Gizmodo. The trillionaire oligarchy had insisted that USAID is the one that's killed people,

Starting point is 03:28:58 retweeting a conspiracy theory from Rand Paul that Anthony Fauci was to blame for the COVID-19 pandemic because federal funds were being used to conduct gain of function research. U.S.A. Money killed millions, Musk wrote Tuesday. Admittedly, U.S. intelligence agencies now endorsed the idea that COVID-19 escaped from a lab, but that only happened after President Trump took office for a second time. Before Trump took control, Intel agencies were largely skeptical of the idea. So you're already seeing like the dimensions of sort of the spin here to all of the many deaths as a result of, and this will come down to not just, you know, the USAID cuts, but any time this is pointed out is the counterfactual will be, well, but, you know, actually these, these, these. these groups were killing way more people because of, and then insert this insane conspiracy theory, right? We've reached the point where they're now load-bearing, both for, like, the personal, like, mental health of the richest man in the world

Starting point is 03:29:48 and for the federal government itself. Like, the conspiracy theories aren't just a thing that are being signposted to get votes. They're a load-bearing part of the ideology because otherwise everything's a failure, right? Good stuff. Glad we're here. So Novak's article noted,

Starting point is 03:30:06 And as I opened the episode by mentioning, a ton of people have done the important work of documenting just how many human beings have been killed as a result of the cuts that Elon Musk was integral in pushing. We'll talk more about that later. But I want to give one example from a Washington Post article published in September of 2025 that does specify a single child that was killed as a result of these cuts. Quote, fever ravaged the body of five-year-old Susa Kenyabi as she sweated and shivered on a thin mattress in a two-room clinic in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The pig-tailed girl who had liked pretty dresses was battling malaria and desperately needed medication that could save her life. That medication, already purchased by a U.S. taxpayer-funded program, was tantalizingly close, a little more than seven miles away. But it hadn't reached the clinic where Susan was being treated because President Donald Trump's suspension of foreign aid had thrown supply chains into chaos. The injection Susan needed had traveled thousands of miles to the Central African nation, U.S. aid, and other records show, only to be stranded in a regional distribution warehouse in the same city where she was gasping for air.

Starting point is 03:31:05 Less than a week after her symptoms began, Susa was dead. Congolese government data shows that in Susa province, deaths caused by malaria nearly tripled in the first half of this year. So keep that in mind during this next, but that's just one of many stories. We may, I think I will cover this at some point on BTB in more detail. But a couple of days ago, you know, the same week that we're recording this episode, Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, went on the IHIP News podcast, which I am not familiar with, but is apparently a sister podcast. to what the Hill calls the notable I've Had It podcast? I don't know who any of these people are, but whatever. Canada was asked like, what will your party do if the Democrats win the midterms?

Starting point is 03:31:47 Here's what the Hill says happen next. I do believe that once we take power, there has to be accountability. There needs to be accountability for Elon Musk, kind of told Welch. You know, they're celebrating that he created 40, 400 millionaires, but they don't talk about the four and a half million children around the world who he possibly sentenced to death by dismantling the U.S. agency for Internet. National Development, USAID. Kana added, he needs to answer for that. He needs to be suspended. He needs to face investigation. He needs to answer for what he did with the Department

Starting point is 03:32:13 of Government Efficiency. Kana's comments were quickly exerted from the podcast itself and shared all around the Internet until they reached Musk, and he made a comment of his own on the website that he owns. The standard applied by Doge was very simple and easy. Provide contact information for the recipients of AIDS that we can confirm it's not fraudulent, the tech trillionaire said in one of the posts. The reality is that money was being sent to correct. politicians under the guise of aid. Liars and stock inside traders like Roe the robbers should be in prison. Musk went on to claim that it's time to sue this liar.

Starting point is 03:32:43 It would be great if he sued them. That would be a fantastic outcome. Great. I'd be fine with that. It looks like the direction Roe wants to go is much dumber because everything and every one of U.S. politics is annoying. Kana responded to this by challenging Elon Musk to a televised debate. And I'm...

Starting point is 03:33:00 Fuck off. I'm not going to say what I think. I'm frustrated. Anyway, instead of going into that, want to talk about where the number rose-sighted came from, because that is worth discussing. It was claimed four and a half million children who might die as a result of U.S.A. cuts. On January 1st of 2025, the U.C. Fielding School of Public Health carried out research that found that over the prior 20 years, USAID funding, it helped save 91 million lives.

Starting point is 03:33:26 Obviously, that same study also concluded that the massive cuts to USAID under Trump would imperil that work, and they calculated that the cuts would cause 14 million additional deaths around the world by 2030, including the deaths of more than 4.5 million children under five. So if you look back to Rose phrasing, I think he actually did a reasonably good job of, like, citing this information, because what Rose said was they don't talk about the 4.5 million children around the world who he possibly sends to death by dismantling USA, right? That's a reasonably accurate way to sum that up. So I'll give Roe some points there, although I'll take a couple of points away because this phrasing does somewhat admit that these are predicted future deaths. He's not like not saying that, but he could have

Starting point is 03:34:04 been a little clearer here. Yeah. And I might also say, because I think you could argue that he undercounted the severity of what that study says, because the study just notes that four and a half million children under five could die as a result of these cuts, which suggests way more than four and a half million total children deaths, right? There are a lot of children who are over five. Yeah, yeah. Most of the children are over five. Most children are probably over five years. old. I do want to quote from UCLA studies again here, just to clarify where their data came from. Quote, the London-based journal, The Lancet, analyzed data from 133 countries. The work combined two approaches, a retrospective evaluation covering the years 2001 to 2021 and forecasting models projecting

Starting point is 03:34:46 impacts through 2030, based on reductions to the budget of USAID. U.S. citizens contribute about 17 cents per day to USAID, about $64 per year. I think most people would support continued USAID funding if they knew just how effective such a small contribution can be to saving millions of lives, said Dr. James Machinko. And I agree with that. I think those are the kind of numbers that we should be putting out, which is like, this is how little money it costs per U.S. tax payer to save this huge number of lives around the world. It's worth digging into some of the more specific reporting we've seen on the consequences of these U.S. aid cuts because the reporting that Roe was citing is just predicting future possible deaths. Yeah. But there's documentation,

Starting point is 03:35:26 as I cited earlier, about the people that Elon Musk and Doge have all. already helped to kill or right or who have the cuts that they have championed have led to these people's deaths would be the the most accurate way of saying that and celebrated like yeah and celebrated it great they have yeah so again i'll probably do a whole btb and all this stuff later but i want to discuss one more story which was published earlier this year in the new york times uh the title that article was in afghanistan a trail of hunger and death behind u.s aid cuts Trump last year very suddenly cut U.S.A. to Afghanistan. Even after our 2021 pullout from the country, we had continued to send a significant amount

Starting point is 03:36:05 about a billion dollars worth of aid a year, which was more than a third of all of the aid flowing into Afghanistan. So given the status of that country, you can see how load-bearing that is to their, like, infrastructure of health. Yeah. Cutting that has caused the worst child starvation crisis in 25 years in Afghanistan, and this catastrophe has been exacerbated by the closing of 450. the health centers as a result of these cuts.

Starting point is 03:36:28 Here's a selection from that Times article. The isolated province of Daikundi has lost many of its health clinics to the U.S. aid cuts. The clinic in Nalaj, surrounded by parched fields of almond and mulberry trees, was a lifeline for 850 families. The villagers say its closure has hurt children the most. Sakia, three months old, has been vomiting since birth and her condition is deteriorating, said her mother, Sharifa Kowari. For weeks, she hoped her husband would bring back enough money from the coal mine

Starting point is 03:36:52 where he worked to finance a taxi ride to the nearest clinic. but he said his pay was barely enough to put food on the table. The loss of the clinic erased years of monitoring that had saved children's lives. When I was giving birth, we were losing babies, said Nick Bach, Miss Koware's mother-in-law. One would hope that younger mothers these days wouldn't face that. And another tragedy contained in that article. Quote, in 2024, the United States funded over half of Afghanistan's nutrition and agricultural programs. Food insecurity has skyrocketed since last year's cuts.

Starting point is 03:37:19 More than 17 million Afghans, 40% of the population, now face acute levels of hunger, two million more than last year. Seven provinces face critical food and security, the final stage before famine, according to the integrated food security phase classification, a group of international organizations that the United Nations and aid agencies rely on to monitor global hunger. None were at this level a year ago. Malnutrition is also hitting cities, affecting the most vulnerable, the very young, sick and elderly, first as it does elsewhere. Muhammad Ali, nine months old, was one of a dozen toddlers way late or dozing in a Kabul nutrition ward on a recent morning. He was too weak to ingest milk, said his mother. Her husband's meager income as a housekeeper means they often eat only once a day. And there's millions of stories like this already. And just a hit, I mean, the number of deaths already as a result of these cuts is hideous and undeniable.

Starting point is 03:38:06 And one of the counters you'll see when this get brought up to Musk and his fawning fans is that like, oh, the money was just going to corrupt dictators and local rulers. And like, no, the damage that we're already seeing shows that it wasn't. There was aid in place that was catching some people, and it's not catching them now. And the human consequences of this have been atrocious. And that's just inarguable. Anyway, that's all I got for today. I remember that time receiving calls and messages from people, like in the Burmese diaspora on the Thai-Burmese border, about one of the only clinics where people could deliver their babies closing down,

Starting point is 03:38:41 and people literally going to the clinic, you get locked, like inaccessible to them and delivering their babies on the street outside. Like, and this is within maybe days, hours after the USA, after, Aston Musk tweeted about how he didn't go to a party because he was too busy axing this shit. Like, yeah, I've seen USAID all over the world. And yeah, undoubtedly, not every penny that goes into that goes directly to like buying food because that's not how that shit works, right? People have to administer this. People have to get things done. Sometimes the way you get things done is through things that we would consider corruption. I don't particularly care as long as it results in the person who needs food getting food or who

Starting point is 03:39:25 needs medicine getting medicine. And like there are of course other ways to achieve the end and I think we should pursue them. But like this is one of the worst things that the Trump administration has done, one of the cruelest and most evil things that the United States has done in a very long time. And like USAID often crowded out other agencies, right? So that like local networks, local NGOs, other NGOs couldn't exist in that space. And then bait and switching like this is particularly evil. For our last main story, something that is arguably, arguably less depressing. On Tuesday night, we saw the first real test of Zora Mamdani and New York City DSA's political power.

Starting point is 03:40:09 All three. of the Mamdani endorsed candidates won the Congressional Democratic primary, and nine out of ten insurgent candidates on the DSA slate won their races for Congress, State Assembly, and State Senate. These insurgent candidates are non-income, people challenging seats. Now, as for the Mamdani slate, former city comptroller Bradlander beat incumbent Congressman Dan Goldman with 65.8% of the vote in District 10,

Starting point is 03:40:39 which is park slope to lower Manhattan. Dan Goldman is an establishment Democrat who's supported by A-PAC. He got famous for Trump's first impeachment hearings. Oh, how well that went. Bradlander opposes A-PAC, has long called Israel's actions in Gaza genocide, but also describes himself as a quote-unquote liberal Zionist, the one that would vote against offensive weapons sales to Israel. When campaigning with Mamdani and Palestinian,

Starting point is 03:41:09 activist Mosin Madhui, who's been targeted by the Trump administration. Bradlander said, quote, as a proud Jewish New Yorker, I will join you in that fight to end occupation and apartheid and genocide, unquote. Landers' victory here is a pretty significant upset. He was projected to win. He was doing good in the polls, but unseating Goldman is not a small feat. The second congressional race I want to talk about is in Bushwick, Greenpoint, and Williamsburg. And this was technically an empty seat. But the... The outgoing congresswoman threw her backing behind progressive Antonio Renoso, the Brooklyn Bureau president. Mamdani and the DSA backed Claire Valdez, a state assembly member and a union organizer.

Starting point is 03:41:53 There was a huge organizing push for Claire in the weeks leading up to the election. There's a massive ground game from DSA. 300,000 doors knocked. Meanwhile, a dark money super pack dropped up to a million dollars in the last week of the election to blast pro-Rinoso ads. And Rinozo had backing of a bunch of unions and the Working Families Party, more kind of like typical,

Starting point is 03:42:17 you know, progressive democratic establishment organizations in New York. This is the, quote, unquote, like, commie corridor. This is like kind of one of the further left districts in the country. And Rinozo is a progressive figure, but Claire was absolutely running to his left

Starting point is 03:42:35 and had support from the UAW, as well as the DSA. And come election day, Claire won with 56.1% of the vote, while Rinozo earned 35.8%. But the biggest upset of the night was in the 13th district, Upper Manhattan and parts of the West Bronx.

Starting point is 03:42:57 Community organizer Daryaliza Avila Chavez beat the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Adriano Espayat. Espiont has been a powerhouse in New York City politics for 30 years. He's deeply tied to the New York City democratic political establishment. And this was the closest race.

Starting point is 03:43:16 Avela Chavier won with 49.4% of the vote to Espayat's 45.9%. Avila Chavier has been very active in pro-Palestinian organizing in New York City, including the Columbia encampments. Pro-espiont attack ads against her highlighted a tweet she wrote a few years ago reading quote unquote,

Starting point is 03:43:36 fuck Kamala Harris. A PAC pumped $650,000 into a pro-espayat super PAC, which spent almost $3 million to help re-elect him. And in total, Espyat received over $7 million from the real estate, Wall Street, pro-Israel lobby, and from GOP donors, as well as a collection of super PACs. In the lead-up to this primary, things were getting pretty ugly. In response to a campaign speech where Mamdani,

Starting point is 03:44:06 quoted GZX's translation of Gramsci, quote, the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born, now is the time of monsters. Before discussing how A-PACs and Super PACs are using dark money to hide the identity of donors while blanketing the airways in bad faith attacks. In response to this speech, New Jersey Democratic House rep,

Starting point is 03:44:26 Josh Gottheimer responded, Monsters, dark money, a hidden hand turning us against each other? swap A-PAC for Jews, and it's the oldest anti-Semitic conspiracy theory in the books, unquote. It shall make up a bunch of shit, and it means a different thing. Yeah, if you swap this word for this word, it means different. Yeah, if you said something completely different, it would have a different meaning. But Mamdani has faced multiple questions about this in the past few days,

Starting point is 03:44:56 and I think he has answered them fairly well. But, yeah, people are trying to insinuate that dark money is like an answer. anti-Semitic term when it just refers to like an actual process of hiding the identity of donors to a super PAC. Yeah. And a term people have been using for 20 years. It's a real term. It's a real term.

Starting point is 03:45:17 There's a book called Dark Money. It's a term people who've been using for forever. It's completely absurd. But things got way worse in this. While campaigning, Daria Liza was harassed by people yelling, quote unquote, Jew hater. Jew hater. Jew hater. and someone following her around screaming,

Starting point is 03:45:40 she's Haitian. Jesus. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Racial animus continued to be weaponized in the District 13 election. A senior advisor to Representative Espayat, who is then on leave, went on a Spanish-language podcast to say that Mamdani wanted to change the racial demographics of Washington Heights, Northern Manhattan, by making it, quote,

Starting point is 03:46:03 no longer a bastion of the Dominican community, unquote, but instead a quote unquote bastion of the Haitian Muslim community allied to him. Oh boy. Anti-Hatian bigotry specifically among Dominicans is a real and vicious thing, where we've made a whole podcast about this a couple of weeks ago. But I did wonder when someone was shouting she's Haitian

Starting point is 03:46:28 if that was what was happening there. Yes, and that was definitely weaponized by campaign advisors and volunteers going into this race. Daryaliza herself is a child of Dominican immigrants. She's Afro-Latina. But this advisor's invocation of this great replacement theory-style attack is an extremely disgusting play. Yeah, this exists in the discourse in the Dominican Republic, to be clear.

Starting point is 03:46:53 They didn't whip that one out thin air. Politicians from the Dominican Republic echoed this rhetoric on X the Everything app. In specific reference to this district 13 election. Come election day, espayat's canvassers screamed at Darylisa voters and volunteers. Quote, Dominicans only go to Cuba if you want communism. Shut up, get educated. We don't want Islam here either.

Starting point is 03:47:19 We're Christians here, unquote. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Very ugly weaponization of racial nationalism. Yeah, yeah. Now, this did not work. Terry Halisa won in what is a, massive upset and her Palestinian activism was a big part of her campaign and proof that anti-Israel

Starting point is 03:47:39 politics do have a strong place in the Democratic Party moving forward. And to do that, you have to unseat these A-PAC backed candidates. Yeah. This was a really big night for New York City DSA. And this election has cemented that New York City DSA is possibly the strongest political machine in the city, at least in terms of elections, right? And if you want to look at political power more broadly. It's like the New York City DSA and like the NYPD right now that are like strong dueling factions and part of Zorn Mamdani's mayorship is a manifestation of those contradictions. But also based on this sweep of DSA candidates going against establishment Democrat incumbents, people are also reconsidering Zoron and the DSA's decision to curb councilman Cheosay's

Starting point is 03:48:24 primary challenge against Hakeem Jeffries. Yeah. Who knows how that would have gone? Possibly she could have tapped into this incredible momentum and beaten House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. That could have certainly been possible. DSA was also pretty thinly stretched this election. They had a lot of stuff going on, and it's possible that a primary of this scale would have prohibited their ability

Starting point is 03:48:48 to win some of these other elections. We don't know. I don't think it's super useful to retroactively speculate so much, but this sweep is useful information going forward that supports the idea that there is a real hunger to unseat these establishment democratic figures. And that has been proven Tuesday night in New York City. It's the, it's the polar opposite of what we've seen in

Starting point is 03:49:11 California, right, which is like the Democratic Party doubling down without as many successful left primary challenges. Yeah. And I mean, New York City, DSA is like a uniquely, highly organized, like faction in the city. Like the fact that it was able to out-organize the Working Family's Party is significant. Yeah, yeah. And to a pretty extensive degree in Bushwick, the Commi Corridor, Greenpoint, Williamsburg. There's still space for those attempts to run on the Working Families Party and run a spoiler, but we'll see how it goes. Yeah, and, I mean, if specifically if Dary Liza gets into Congress, which it is almost certain that

Starting point is 03:49:52 she will, based on how this night went, she could very likely be the farthest left Congress member in the history of the country, or at least in the past, like, 50 years, like significantly to the left of AOC. And, like, the campaign itself was significantly to the left of AOC's campaign. Yeah. Anyway, that is what happened in New York, Tuesday night.

Starting point is 03:50:13 Cool. I guess last, we should talk about a couple of mass shootings that have, unfortunately, occurred in the last week. Two mass shootings that I wanted to talk about. One happened just the day before we are recording this,

Starting point is 03:50:27 So on June 23rd of 26th in Montreal. 25-year-old Seth Hatfield of Lethbridge, Virginia, allegedly started shooting from a hotel window in the Caudenay Borough of Montreal. Footage posted to social media shows the shooter, firing at police on street level, before being shot and killed himself. Two other people were killed during this incident,

Starting point is 03:50:53 a police officer and a civilian. There's a manifesto. It's about 104 pages that is out. I have not gotten to read the whole thing yet, but early reporting on it suggests it's a lot of in-cell type rhetoric, a lot of discussion about like how it's unfair that women are, you know, hypergamous and going for all of this like tiny number of attractive guys. And so this huge, it's very normal like in-cell stuff.

Starting point is 03:51:19 He like lists out the different like classes of targets that he thinks are okay. One thing that does kind of make this interesting is he's grafting. this weird kind of like reactionary anti-capitalism to the inseldom, which has been done before. This is not like the first time I've seen this. We also mixing in... The West is preventing me from getting my girlfriend.

Starting point is 03:51:41 Right. Yeah. Mixing in some anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism and also mixing in like at least some like kind of left-wing and right-wing signifying, really. Like there's some calls to, you know, ending capitalism that can seem kind of

Starting point is 03:51:56 of socialist, but then a lot of really reactionary anti-immigrant stuff in there, too. He's also really angry at pickup artists. The shooting took place outside of the head office of ALO, which is the parent company of Pornhub. And he was also really angry about Pornhub. A big chunk of the manifest was apparently him justifying, like, attacking executives of specific companies, including, like, the people who put out pornography. This is not, like, super weird stuff, unfortunately. But, yeah, it is very sad.

Starting point is 03:52:26 It's not the first time this has happened in Canada. There have been, in 2018, there was a van attack in Toronto that killed 10 that was kind of an in-cell-linked attack. There was a 2020 machetech attack. And then, of course, there was the Cole Pauley Technic attack, which was a couple of decades ago at this point, which is considered to be, in some case. Some people would argue, like, the first of the in cell kind of like, public, like mass attacks. Yeah. And then also this week, there was a mass shooting in Chico, California. We don't know a whole lot about this one yet, but I did want to note that.

Starting point is 03:52:56 that it's happened. Law enforcement officials have said that the shooter was wearing clothing like that of the Columbine killer, Eric Harris. And it seems to have been like a Columbiner, someone who was like interested in mass shootings as a fan and was carrying out this almost as an active fandom. Again, this is the kind of thing we've seen, like well over a hundred times in the past. So it's very sad. We'll probably talk a little more about Chico in the future. There's just not a ton of information out, but I didn't want people to not be aware of it. Those country sucks.

Starting point is 03:53:28 Yeah, well, the news. Yeah, it's not a great time in America. Well, to quote Zoron's quote of Gijek mistranslating Gramsci The World has died and the new one struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.

Starting point is 03:53:46 No, no, no, no. I disagree. I think now was the time of the Monstars, the antagonists from the classic film Space Jam. This is their year. Go Nix. Yep. Put a trans girl in your couch. We reported the news.

Starting point is 03:54:03 We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here. I listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Joy is essential and it's also elusive, but now there's a new and exciting way to start

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Starting point is 03:56:11 It just came out. Jeremy, what did you just do? You just sit yourself up for failure. 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.

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