It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 248

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Starting point is 00:02:41 But you can make your own decisions. Hello, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen here. My name is Dan Al-Kurd, and I'm a researcher and analyst of Arab and Palestinian politics. Today, I want to talk about the recent announcement that Hamas agreed to a second phase of the Gaza ceasefire. So the Board of Peace and mediator countries announced July 30th, last Thursday I'm recording on August 4th, that Hamas had agreed to a sort of roadmap in which they would relinquish some of their weapons. So this whole scenario has hinged on Hamas disarming, even though in other conflicts when there have been two parties, disarmament comes at later stages. but in this scenario, the Board of Peace and the Director General Nikolai Mladenov has basically hinged the entire process on Hamas disarming first. And so in the recent announcement, which President Donald Trump basically celebrated on his social media,

Starting point is 00:03:44 calling it a historic agreement for the complete disarmament of Hamas, Hamas basically said that they had been in conversation with not only the mediators in their proposals, but with other Palestinian factions and had agreed to relinquish their weapons in a particular way. So they said it was contingent and conditional on a permanent end to Israeli attacks and a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, as well as recovery and reconstruction.

Starting point is 00:04:11 And importantly, they basically said that no weapons would be handed over to Israel or to any non-Palestinian party. So what Hamas is saying is we're going to give up our weapons eventually if Israel also adheres to the guidelines of the ceasefire, and we will relinquish our weapons to the National Committee, which is a governance structure made up of Palestinian technocrats. So since the National Committee is supposed to govern Gaza eventually,

Starting point is 00:04:41 or at least that's the intention of this committee, even though they haven't actually been allowed to do that, the idea here is Hamas is saying, you want to claim that disarmament is the reason that the ceasefire and recovery and reconstruction can't proceed. Okay, so we'll disarm, but we'll only disarm to other Palestinians. And like I said, it's contingent on Israel also agreeing, withdrawing from Gaza, ceasing the continued attacks. Israeli officials have basically said that they have like severe worries about it and they're not interested. The national security minister, Ithamar bin Gavir, basically said,

Starting point is 00:05:19 that it's not acceptable to Israel. So, you know, it's very much up in the air, but Hamas basically threw the ball in Israel's court with this announcement. It's also important to point out that throughout these past couple of months since the ceasefire was announced, over a thousand Palestinians have been killed in the week that this announcement was made.

Starting point is 00:05:42 Israel killed at least six in Gaza and wounded many others. And so all of that is going on, and that's not even mentioning what's happening in the West Bank, where things have really escalated in terms of both Israeli army and Israeli settler violence, which often, of course, goes hand in hand. This announcement might really amount to nothing here, especially if Israel doesn't comply. But I think it poses a bigger question around the Board of Peace and its design and its objectives. So that's basically what this episode is going to be about, answering the question of whether the board's design, who sits on it, who pays for seat, who answers,

Starting point is 00:06:19 as to who actually makes a fair outcome for Palestinians structurally impossible, regardless of this announcement or any other announcements or decisions that Palestinians may make. So just as a reminder to listeners, the Board of Peace was announced as part of President Trump's 20-point Gaza plan back in September 2025, 20 points to get Gaza back on track. I shouldn't make jokes here, but that's what it was called, and it was launched in January 26. Its stated purpose is to promote stability, restore dependable, and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace in conflict-affected areas. So not only in Gaza, at the start, the Board of Peace was announced around what was happening in Gaza, but eventually it grew

Starting point is 00:07:05 into a bigger idea, and Gaza was framed as a template. So this Board of Peace is supposed to be a model for managing future conflicts globally. But as I've argued in the past, this This really is not about conflict resolution. It's about conflict management and a very particular type of conflict management where you subdue conflict through repressive means rather than reconciliation or recovery or reparations or anything kind of long term. So I think it's important to maybe discuss at this point how the Board of Peace is structured. It's basically a three-tier hierarchy with Gaza at the bottom.

Starting point is 00:07:45 At the top, there's the founding executive board. This is chaired by President Trump. In fact, in the founding documents of the Board of Peace, he is named explicitly. It's not that the president of the United States will continue to chair the Board of Peace. No, it's specifically Donald Trump. So apparently he's going to be president for life here. That's the top decision-making body. And then underneath that is the Gaza Executive Board.

Starting point is 00:08:10 It includes a lot of different interesting characters. I'll talk about them in a second. The Gaza Executive Board oversees implementation of what happens in Gaza. Farther, farther, farther, farther underneath that is the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, who are 15 unelected Palestinian technocrats approved by Palestinian factions, but, you know, they are not of any particular party. They are civil servants, and they're supposed to actually administer Gaza day to day. Now, the National Committee reports to the Director General of the Gaza Executive Board, who is Nikolay Mladenov, not to any Palestinian constituency or to the Palestinian Authority, for example,

Starting point is 00:08:48 any Palestinian body. Now, the six-page charter of the Board of Peace never actually mentions Gaza or human rights. And I don't think this is an oversight. You know, the board is designed as a template for managing future conflicts. It's not designed to uphold human rights. And I think even though, of course, these are problematic positions to take, I think the European reaction serves as a sort of legitimacy check here. When the Board of Peace and its mechanisms were supposed to be applied to Gaza, the EU attended the board's first meeting as an observer, for example, and a number of countries kind of floated the idea of joining. But then when the Board of Peace was expanded as an idea to become a template for future conflicts, for example, Ukraine,

Starting point is 00:09:35 then, you know, the European Union and other European actors basically cited serious doubts about compatibility with the UN Charter. And then France and the UK voiced reservations when Putin, for example, was invited to be on the board. So, yeah, who is on the top tier board here? It's got people like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who holds a seat on the Board of Peace, despite being a party to a conflict that's literally ongoing and is the reason why the Board of Peace supposedly came into existence. And despite having an ICC arrest warrant for war crimes.

Starting point is 00:10:13 So clearly, you know, one party to the conflict in this scenario, in the Gaza, case is elevated while the other is administered. Then there are a bunch of business figures, so CEOs, venture capitalists, they sit alongside heads of state. So reconstruction is really framed as a business opportunity, as much as it's framed as an issue of governance. There's not a single Palestinian, nor does the PA actually hold a seat anywhere in this hierarchy. Even though the Palestinian Authority did actually want to join the Board of Peace and it sought full membership on it, all they got was basically a consolation prize, which was this coordination committee between the Palestinian Authority and the board, with the Palestinian Authority Prime Minister

Starting point is 00:10:53 Muhammad Mustafa, basically representing the Palestinian Authority one-on-one to Milaninoff, which, you know, has been described as a type of compromise because the PA doesn't actually have a seat by itself. There was much made about a $1 billion price tag for a permanent seat on the board. So people like Victor Orban and Vladimir Putin and Lukashenko basically were invited to participate in this way. And it's kind of obviously a sham turning participation in, you know, quote unquote peace governance into a commodity for heads of state. Now, Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, who is inexplicably also involved in this,

Starting point is 00:11:36 at Davos in January, basically presented a master plan that projected $10 billion for Gaza's GDP by 2035. and he talked about new towers and industrial parks and all of this, of course, drawn up without consulting Palestinians living in Gaza. And Trump himself has described Gaza as a, quote, beautiful piece of property over and over. So to me, this is a shorthand for how the plan frames the conflict or wants to, wants to convince people that this conflict is fundamentally about underdevelopment. Palestinians have grievances because they're poor rather than the occupation, rather than the genocide. So, you know, poses a question, what does it mean? for this peace architecture, when the same people who oversee reconstruction also profit from it.

Starting point is 00:12:30 Now, who is on the Gaza Executive Board, that second tier? You can find the full roster online. It is important to note that they actually haven't met ever as a board. You know, some of these people have their names and their pictures on the website, and this Gaza Executive Board has really not functioned except as kind of a legitimacy stamp on the Board of Peace's activities. But it really is very indicative of what the Board of Peace is supposed to be and how they want to deal with Gaza here when you look at who has been invited, even if they've never met. So it's got Gulf diplomats, Turkish diplomats. It has an Egyptian intelligence chief. It has a bunch of Trump administration people, Kushner, Susan Wiles, Steve Whitkoff. And then finance and business interests, like I said,

Starting point is 00:13:13 are very heavily represented here. So you have the CEO of Apollo, Mark Rowan, you have venture capitalist Michael Eisenberg and a number of other businessmen, many of them with ties to Israel. There's only really two, let's say, peace process veterans on this board. There's the director general, Ladenev, who I've discussed in a previous episode, who's very problematic. I'll talk about him in just a second. And then Tony Blair, Tony Blair also extremely problematic. He has a history of basically delivering the Good Friday Agreement in the Northern Ireland conflict, but it doesn't seem to be applying any of the lessons of those previous conflicts to the Middle East in any way. But the point here is that security, finance, and U.S. political operatives

Starting point is 00:13:59 clearly outweigh conflict resolution expertise on this executive board. So who's actually running this? Like I said, they've never actually met. Maybe some of them have been promised a bigger role in the future. I'm thinking particularly the business people here. But let's linger on Nikolai, or Nikolai. I don't know how to pronounce his name, Ladinov, who is the direct. General here. I've talked about him before in a previous episode, but he's the former Bulgarian

Starting point is 00:14:25 foreign minister under a government that was toppled by anti-corruption protests. Since 2022, he was the head of an Emirati diplomatic academy, which championed the Abraham Accords, the so-called peace agreements between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain and a few others. And this is a framework that was disastrous. It's seen especially by Palestinians as essentially cementing their exclusion from statehood. So this is the guy who's supposed to run the Gaza Executive Board and who has turned the peace process on its head by basically, again, like I said at the beginning of the episode, conditioning the entire process on disarmament first. We have the rest of the Gaza Executive Board, and then we have the Center for Civilian Military Control. So this is a center. It's based in the

Starting point is 00:15:14 South of Israel. It's supposed to oversee the ceasefire. But every ceasefire enforcement decision basically has no sway on Israel itself. Like there's no mechanism to actually hold Israel accountable. It has no independent authority. It coordinates with the White House. And in particular, the liaison to the White House is this man, Ariya Lightstone, who was a senior advisor to a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, who was extremely right-wing. And there's been recent reporting, which I'll link in the show notes,

Starting point is 00:15:44 about how intensely hostile he is to Palestinians. So this is the guy who's supposed to oversee the ceasefire and report to the White House. So what are the consequences on the ground? As I said, more than a thousand Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the ceasefire was announced. Over half of Gaza is now behind this quote-unquote yellow line, which is Israeli-controlled territory. Humanitarian and agricultural access is restricted or prohibited in that area. So Gaza is more and more squeezed. The aid that was supposed to reach 600 trucks a day has never reached that promised six.

Starting point is 00:16:18 600 trucks, and much of what enters is basically private sector goods that's sold for profit, with the Israelis also getting like a coordination fee on each truck. Now, Hamas dissolved its emergency committee in July 26, before they announced that they had accepted the mediator's proposals about disarmament. They dissolved this emergency committee and said they were handing authority over to the national committee. But the board basically was uninterested in this move. They said that they were guided by actions, not promises.

Starting point is 00:16:49 And it really points to the fact that these kind of procedural concessions that Hames is attempting to make don't really fix the structural design flaws. I think it's also important to point out here that even though on paper, HMS has given up its civilian government, on the ground, like, that doesn't actually change much. It's still involved in security and policing and bureaucracy. And what they dissolved is this civilian cabinet body that had run Gaza since October 20, 23. and it's a very like specific administrative organ and it's not all of Hamas's governing capacity.

Starting point is 00:17:21 So it was kind of again a way of like throwing the ball in Israel's court and claiming that we are dissolving the committee, we are making these concessions, but they're being very, you know, strategic about this. And in the same announcement, when they dissolved the emergency committee, they basically said that their technical and professional staff would remain in their posts

Starting point is 00:17:38 and it hasn't, you know, relinquished control over the civil service and security bureaucracy. So a few months ago, much was made about Hamas's strategy and whether there were going to be shifts in that strategy, because there was an internal election in Hamas that basically cemented the divide between a kind of more hardline camp and a more pragmatist camp. And the more hardline camp won. So between Khaled Mishal, who was supposedly, you know, more pragmatist and arguing for political accommodation, and Khalil Al-Haya, who was, who was supposedly, you know, more pragmatist and arguing for political accommodation, and Khalil Al-Hia, who, who, who. demanded kind of more confrontation, the second guy won. And so there was a lot of speculation back in February that that meant if the hardliners won, that this is going to impact disarmament. And that that means Hamas will never disarm and would never actually acquiesce to what was being demanded of them. But in the last couple of weeks, months, you can see that Hamas' strategy

Starting point is 00:18:41 is much more, let's say, nuanced and attempting to kind of buy time with the United States and with the international community while still saying, okay, we're going to make concessions. This is not to imply that the victory of the kind of more hardline camp isn't going to impact Hamas strategy in the future. They are much more Gaza-rooted and a more pro-Iran faction. You know, obviously these are internal shifts between them,

Starting point is 00:19:10 but we'll see how that plays out in the near future. But again, I think we go back to the idea of how the Board of Peace is designed and whether the flaws in its design and the dangerous precedent that sets for not only, quote unquote, you know, conflict resolution in Gaza, but conflict resolution in every other arena of conflict here, where in this scenario there isn't neutral mediation, there isn't buy-in from all parties. one side is completely missing from the board.

Starting point is 00:19:41 One side is administered. It really poses the question of whether any kind of political movement, any concessions, anything that can be mediated and agreed upon, actually impacts how the board is going to function. How much Hada, who was speaking at a Carnegie Endowment Roundtable back in April, he is a Gaza journalist,

Starting point is 00:20:04 I think put it really well when he said that, quote, Gaza is no longer just a year, unique, extraordinary case of human savagery. It is a canary in a coal mine. What starts there does not end there. And I think I want to end on that note of framing Gaza as a canary in the coal mine, because the Board of Peace is this model that combines billionaires, profiteering, and kind of the worst actors in the world in terms of dictators and those who are invested in a more authoritarian world, that is going to be the model that's going to be exported to other weak states or contested

Starting point is 00:20:39 territories. That's all for me today. Hope that this was at least eye-opening. And thanks for listening. Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pasto survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode eight before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on Internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything.

Starting point is 00:21:25 When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor File. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.

Starting point is 00:22:10 but these aren't stories about what's taken from them. They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero.

Starting point is 00:22:39 and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people, and they were like, you smiled at us. Not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is, and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran

Starting point is 00:23:14 or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your for-you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters,

Starting point is 00:23:38 pop culture obsessives, anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments,

Starting point is 00:23:59 nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro Society on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. The drums of war are beaten. Everywhere you look, people are picking sight.

Starting point is 00:24:35 Governments are demanding unity. Critics are being denounced as naive, irresponsible, even treacherous. us and a movement built on international solidarity has been split in the kiosk. The years 1914 at the beginning of the First World War, though you'll be excused if you thought I was describing today. Hello and welcome to Ikadapin here. I'm Andrew Sage, also Andrewism on YouTube, joined again by... Neil Wong.

Starting point is 00:25:07 To discuss the infamous split among the anarchists over world. War I, of all things. So just to be clear, the common anarchist stance prior to the war was fairly straightforward. It was a stance of internationalist worker solidarity against imperialist wars, a solidarity that transcended borders and nationalities, recognizing that ordinary people had more in common with one another than with the ruling classes of their own countries. Such wars were never fought in the interests of workers, but in the interests of states, empires, dynasties and caps list. If war came, the task of revolutionaries was not to rally behind their own government,

Starting point is 00:25:48 but to oppose the conflict and preserve international working class solidarity. However, the Great War would strain the internationalist cause, forcing splits and theoretical developments owing to the ensuing debates personified in the disagreement between Erikaumalatesta and Peter Cropotkin, as well as many others, who clashed intellectually over the nature of war, history, national struggle, and revolutionary change. The First World War emerged from decades of imperial rivalry, colonial competition, military expansion, and competing alliance systems among Europe's great powers.

Starting point is 00:26:27 The assassination of Archduke France Fernand in Sarajevo on the 28th of June 1914 served as the immediate catalyst, but it merely ignited tension. that have been building for years. Within weeks, a regional dispute between Austria-Hungary and Serbia escalated into a continental and eventually global conflict. On one side stood the central powers, led by Germany and Austria-Hungary, later joined by the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria, and opposing them with the allied powers, initially consistent of France, Russia, and Britain, with countries such as Italy, Romania, Japan, and eventually the United States

Starting point is 00:27:06 entering the war on the Allied side as the conflict expanded. Attitudes toward the First World War across Europe were deeply divided and often changed dramatically in the opening weeks of the conflict. A powerful wave of patriotic enthusiasm swept through many cities with countless people volunteering for military service under the belief that the war would be short, necessary or even glorious. Governments, newspapers, churches and much of the political establishment promoted national unity and portrayed the conflict as a defensive struggle against foreign aggression.

Starting point is 00:27:42 For socialists, trade unionists, religious pacifists, and most relevantly anarchists, the stance was deeply skeptical or openly oppositional to the war, as it appeared to be a catastrophic clash between rival empires in which ordinary people would bear the costs while elites pursued their geopolitical ambitions. However, one of the attitudes had flared up as a result of the war, even amongst some anarchists and socialists, was anti-German sentiment, manifest in Kropotkin's open letter in the anarchist newspaper Freedom. This open letter would spark the ensuing debate between Kropotkin and Malatester.

Starting point is 00:28:20 As documented by historian Matthew S. Adam in anarchism in the First World War, Capotkin wrote, quote, I consider that the duty of everyone who cherishes the idea of human progress is to crushed the invasion of the Germans into Western Europe. Since 1871, Germany has become a standing menace to European progress. All were living under the menace of sudden invasion. More than that, Germany was the chief support and protection of reaction, end quote. For many anarchists, and even Leon Trotsky, this seemed a clear break from Koppotkin's anarchism, which would be in opposition to alignment with nation-state-based struggles. However, as noted by historian George Woodcock,

Starting point is 00:29:02 Peter Kropotkin from Prince to Rebel, quote, anti-German sentiment was probably an influence on Kropotkin long before this point, as it was a current in Russian revolutionary movements due to the German rule by the Romanov dynasty, and perhaps also because his fellow Russian anarchist Mikhail Bikunin had an infamous rivalry with the German Karl Marx, end quote. Though of course, you know, this is speculation. Kropotkin and Malatesta were both in Britain when their exchange of, took place. Malatester wrote in his article, Anarchists have forgotten their principles that the only

Starting point is 00:29:38 war worth fighting was one of liberation and there was no siding with national acclamations. He said, I have no greater confidence in the bloody Tsar, nor in the English diplomatists who oppress India, who betrayed Persia, who crushed the Boer Republics, nor in the French bourgeoisie who massacred the natives of Morocco, nor in those of Belgium, who have allowed the Congo atrocity. and profited by them. The victory of Germany would certainly mean the triumph of militarism, but the triumph of the Allies would mean Russell English domination in Europe and in Asia. End quote.

Starting point is 00:30:15 Now, Krapartkin had previously argued that modern wars were fundamentally driven by capitalist competition for markets, resources, and opportunities to exploit less industrialized nations. He pointed to the imperial conquests and colonial conflicts of his time as evidence that finance and economic interests, rather than ordinary people, were the true beneficiaries of war. And while he saw capitalism as the primary engine of modern militarism, he also condemned the state as the political institution that organized and carried out these conflicts. So it was odd for Kapotkin to seemingly come out the contrary of his previous positions, and take one state's side over another when he had seen through such sides before.

Starting point is 00:31:04 But, of course, people and their motivations are more complex. Krapotkin had sympathy for France and hostility toward Germany. He saw France as the heir to the revolutionary tradition of 1789 and the Paris Commune, and he saw Germany as the embodiment of militarism and authoritarianism. He believed the war was a poor moment for the war. social revolution and faired that a German victory would usher in decades of political reaction, wiping out the hard-worn freedoms that had been achieved in countries like Britain and France. His support for the Allies was rooted in his broader view of history, that social progress

Starting point is 00:31:45 was never guaranteed and could always be reversed, that periods of freedom and cooperation could collapse into authoritarianism. He also believed that national liberation struggles were a space ripe for anarchist social insurrection and radicalization, and that in times of war, an anti-militarist general strike within the targeted nation would simply gift the country to its invaders, and that anti-militarists advocating such action were thus siding with the invaders and making social revolution more difficult to carry out in the future. This is, for me, a somewhat compelling argument. I feel this way about current struggle. While the worker has no friend in the states of the world, and I don't think it should be framed as a matter of campism, the way we see running rampant

Starting point is 00:32:36 today, it is undeniable that there are some victories and defeats that will be more or less preferable to the viability of the struggle long term. I am rooting against an Israeli victory anywhere. And while I reserve my right to criticize the politics, the policy, politics, ideologies, and other actions of the groups carrying out that resistance, it remains true that the defeat of their oppressors can open up the space for further struggles. If it was that anarchists were arguing and acting solely for anti-militarism in the targeted countries, then I would be fully with Krapotkin, you know, I would get where he's coming from, we would indeed have a problem.

Starting point is 00:33:16 But I think he mischaracterized the anarchist position, or perhaps did not give them enough credit. As for the anarchist's primary responsibility for anti-militarist ends is in agitating within the invader countries themselves to disrupt the militarism within the threatening nations to the bitter end. Anything less would be an incomplete and flaccid anti-militarist struggle. Kropotkin addresses this in the manifesto of the 16, which will get to shortly, and yet with the context of hindsight, I share Malatester's criticism of the pitfalls of lesser evilism, as he kind of predicted World War II.

Starting point is 00:33:56 Adam wrote of Malatester's position, quote, German victory would certainly mean the triumph of militarism, but the triumph of the Allies would result in much the same. Both guaranteed the victory of the state principle, with statism delivered in both cases, and the tensions that caused the war remaining unresolved, Malatester perspicaciously warned that with both sides exhausted,

Starting point is 00:34:19 some kind of peace will be patched up, leaving all questions open, thus preparing for a new war more murderous than the present. End quote. In 1915, Malachester, along with Emma Goldman, Alexander Bulkman and 32 other signatories, co-signed a manifesto titled The Anarchist International and the War, otherwise known as the International Anarchist Manifesto on the War, Manifesto the 35 and Anti-War Manifesto. In this text, the anarchists call out the ridiculous notion that,

Starting point is 00:35:02 any side of this clash of civilizations had claimed to righteousness, freedom, or civilization. Quote, in the current conflict, the governments in Berlin and Vienna have justified themselves by producing documents every bit as authentic as those produced by the governments in Paris, London, and Petrograd. It is for whoever on each side who will produce the most unchallengeable, most telling documentation to prove their bona fides, and portray themselves as the unblemished defender of the right and of freedom, the champion of civilization. Civilization? Who stands for that at the moment? Is it the German state with its redoubtable militarism, so powerful that it has stifled

Starting point is 00:35:43 every vestige of rebellion? Or the Russian state, whose only methods of persuasion are the Naught, the Gibbet, and Siberia, or the French state, with Espiribe, its bloody conquests in Tonkin, Madagascar, Morocco, and forcible conscription of black troops, the first whose prisons have housed for years past, comrades whose only crime was to have written and spoken out against the war? Or England, as she exploits, divides, starves, and oppresses the peoples of her huge colonial empire? No, none of the belligerents has any right to lay claim to civilisation, just as none of them is entitled to claim legitimate self-defence.

Starting point is 00:36:22 The truth is that the root of wars, of the war currently bloody in the plains of Europe, just like all the ones that went before it, is located exclusively in the existence of the state, which is the political form of privilege. The state is born of military might. It has grown through recourse to military might, and logically, it is upon military might that it must rely if it is to retain its own impotence.

Starting point is 00:36:47 Whatever the form it may assume, the state is merely oppression organized for the benefit of a privileged minority. The present conflict offers a striking illustration of the, this. All forms of the state are embroiled in the present war. Absolutism is represented by Russia. Absolutism mitigated by parliamentarism and by Germany. A state ruling over very different peoples by Austria, constitutional democracy by England, and the democratic republican system by France. End quote. Maltester rejected the idea that anarchist should support one state over another because it was supposedly the lesser evil. Doing so, he argued,

Starting point is 00:37:27 placed the struggles of some workers above those of others and abandoned international working class solidarity. While he accepted that anti-colonial wars and social revolutions could be justified, he maintained that anarchists should oppose wars between rival capitalist and imperialist states, refusing to become complicit in their violence and exploitation. Later in the brief manifesto, quote, No matter where they may find themselves, The anarchist's role in the current tragedy is to carry on proclaiming that there is but one war of liberation,

Starting point is 00:38:02 the one waged in every country by the oppressed against the oppressor, by the exploited against the exploiter. Our task is to summon the slaves to revolt against their masters. Anarchist propaganda and anarchist action should set about doggedly undermining and breaking up the various states, cultivating the spirit of rebellion and acting as midwife to the discontent in the, the peoples and in the armies." End quote. Going on to describe how anarchists might convince the soldiers, the factory workers, the peasants, the outcasts, the women, and, quote,

Starting point is 00:38:35 capitalize upon every stirring of rebellion, every discontent, in order to foment interaction to organize the revolution to which we look for the ending of all of society's inequities, end quote. Powerful words. Yeah. And indeed, in line with what anarchists had long proclaimed. But Kropotkin, and Kropotkin was not alone, mind you, he took a different position on the war. He and 14 allies published in 1916, The Manifesto of the 16, as a reply.

Starting point is 00:39:08 It was not 16 of them who signed that manifesto. It was 15. It just got called the manifesto of the 16 because the home address of one of the contributors was mistaken for another contributor. Incredible. Stop. Yeah, and so that's what I was known today, but it's like he was living in some town in Algeria, I believe, and they thought the name of the town was a person's name. Oh my God.

Starting point is 00:39:36 Publishing mistakes are tale as old as time. In the manifesto of the 16, Kropotkin and the other signatories reaffirmed their opposition to militarism and wars of conquest, but argued that peace could not simply be declared while Germany continued its invasion and expansion. They contended that German workers have failed to resist their own government's imperial ambitions, leaving no meaningful internal opposition to militarism. Although they maintained their commitment to internationalism and the eventual abolition of borders, they concluded that the defeat of German militarism was a necessary precondition for a just and lasting peace, believing it would ultimately benefit both the German people and the cause of human liberation. So I get where Kropotkin is coming from too, as I see parallels to the situation today vis-à-vis

Starting point is 00:40:29 American imperialism and the flawed actors that resisted. Even though I generally share Malatesta's sentiment, and Malatesta was ultimately correct in his assessment that maintaining a consistent stance is necessary for the clarity of the movement, and also that this war's outcome would be nothing but a precursor to further war and would not advance the class struggle and in fact worsened its conditions. All that being said, I think there's room for a more sympathetic appraisal of Kropotkin's position. As for responses and just the overall outcome of this rift,

Starting point is 00:41:05 for one, the Bolshevik party had something to see. Lenin condemned the supporters of World War I as anarcho-chovenists. Stalin and Trotsky dismissed Kropotkin's pro-war stance as evidence of anarchism's failure, despite the fact that the majority of the anarchist movement remained opposed to the Great War. Amalatesta, responding to the manifesto of the 16 with his article, pro-government anarchists, accused its signatories of abandoning anarchist principles by siding with states in wartime. He also pointed out that in the name of defeating German militarism,

Starting point is 00:41:41 they had instead strengthened in militarism, authoritarianism, and nationalism across Europe, including in the countries they were siding with the governments of. Alexander Burttman, echoing this criticism, argue that Kapotkin had wrongly treated nations as if they were their governments, when in reality the war was being driven by ruling elites, not ordinary people. Malatesta maintained the position that anarchists should capitalise on the imperialist war for class war by encouraging workers to resist their own governments and revive genuine international solidarity. Although wartime repression made revolutionary activity extremely difficult,

Starting point is 00:42:22 he believed the crisis created new opportunities of insurrection rather than justification for supporting any state. The anarchist movement emerged from the other side of the Great War fragmented. Some of its adherents forever stained by their inconsistency of principle. The war forced anarchists to reconsider strategy and revolutionary tactics, and alongside the economic devastation and political instability to unleashed, helped create conditions of fueled revolutionary upheavals across Europe, most notably the Russian Revolution and the wave of labor unrest that followed the war. Though the revolution was initially carried out by a diversity of forces,

Starting point is 00:43:15 the Bolsheviks claimed it, and with the seeming success of the Marxist model in Russia, it appeared anarchism would be on the downturn. Though disillusionment with that model would follow, and as many anarchists have highlighted, the metrics of success between the respective movements were in many ways different. It wasn't all bad news coming out of the war. The collapse of old regimes inspired experiments in workers' self-governance, such as the German Revolution of 1918 and the Bavarian Council Republic, where anarchist like Gustav Landaule and Eric Musam sought to build a federation of workers' councils

Starting point is 00:43:50 rather than a new state. Similar anti-authoritarian current appeared in the Cronstadt rebellion of 1921, were rebels called for free Soviets independent of Bolshevik control. Despite the growing dominance of state socialism, anarchist ideas continue to shape revolutionary struggles in the aftermath of the Great War. Though the war marked a shift in the movement that some would argue anarchism has never fully recovered from, anarchism has persisted, continues to reach people worldwide, and has the potential still to intercede in the diversity of struggles and places today. What is needed is a clarity and consistency of principles and analyses across context that can encourage initiative and responsibility and solidarity and revolutionary achievement.

Starting point is 00:44:39 It's easy, I think, to reduce this story to Cropotkin standing alone, betraying anachiazza. While ultimately I end up aligning more with Malatester's position than Cropotkins, I do think that Cropotkin deserves a bit more credit. than he has sometimes been afforded in retrospect. While his prejudices played a role, he did seem to genuinely believe that German militarism posed a unique threat to freedom that British, French, and Russian powers did not, whether he was right is another question.

Starting point is 00:45:14 But I think he was still coming from an anarchist police, coloured as he may have been by his anti-German prejudices. I think the whole incident revealed the liveliness of the anarchist movement, as one that was constantly questioning and adapting and conflicting and refining its ideas. Something that I hope that we would be willing to carry on today. But what were your thoughts on this bit of early 20th century drama alert? Yeah, I mean, I think in a lot of ways, this is the anarchist version of a debate that played out throughout the entire socialist movement and effectively ended up destroying it. in the sense that, you know, the logic that Kropotkin is operating from, to some extent, makes sense.

Starting point is 00:46:04 But it's also the logic that was taken by every single individual side in the conflict, where, like, the German Social Democratic Party, you know, ends up supporting the war because they think that if they don't, they're going to be sort of, like, annihilated by the reactionary forces of the Tsar. But then, like, the French think they're going to be destroyed by the reactionary forces of the Germans and so on and so forth. And so everyone ends up operating from this logic of like, it's going to be really bad for us if like the other side of this wins this war. And it ends up squandering this moment of possibility. And instead everyone just gets sort of fed into the meat grinder.

Starting point is 00:46:45 And I think the struggle playing out this way was effectively the worst possible thing that could have happened. Because it meant that like some of the only people who were left with, resisting it were people who shouldn't be running a dog kennel, much less, you know, like controlling the fate of the socialist movement. And also it meant that the war was allowed to continue. And so I think from a theoretical perspective, it's like, it makes sense why people took the positions that they did. And also, like, supporting this war was so catastrophically wrong that basically every subsequent horror of the 20th century can be laid upon it. But I don't know.

Starting point is 00:47:29 The other thing I'll say about is, like, it's not clear to me if Caprappin acting differently would have, like, changed anything. Yeah. But the sort of general failure of the socialist movement to actually grapple with this moment was this sort of apocalyptic moment in the history of class struggle that we have never recovered from. Yeah, I definitely don't think that the blame for World War II and all subsequent wars in the 20th century, which. Can in some way be connected to that World War I? I don't think we should lay the blame on the feet of Carpotkin or on the anarchist movement or the socialist movement. Yeah. All we can really do is speculate the what if, you know?

Starting point is 00:48:11 Yeah. And what if there was a unified front, a unified stand across all these countries, a commitment, a solid commitment to, we will not cooperate with our respective states. how might the course of the war turned out differently, how might history have played out differently? I guess we'll never know. Yeah. But we are in a position to shape the course of history here and now. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:48:38 As the title of the podcast goes, you know, it could happen here. It kind of is happening here by here, I mean, on this planet across the world, we are dealing with wars, we're dealing with interstate conflicts. diplomatic, economic, and military. And despite how interconnected we are through the internet, it certainly doesn't feel like we've come any closer to the kind of international solidarity that the great war demanded, let alone the many wars being raged across the world today.

Starting point is 00:49:16 Yeah, but even, you know, the bleakness of the past and the bleakness of the present does not mean that the future need necessarily be as big. As I've said before, the definitional quality of modernity is that today is not like yesterday. And so we don't actually have to live through yet another round of imperialist butchery where different parts of the working class slaughter each other. We don't have to live in a world that's defined by endless status and capitalist war. We can build something else. But that's something that is the responsibility of not the state,

Starting point is 00:49:55 because the state will never choose to abandon its privilege and abandon its wars. And it's not up to, you know, Capital, because Capital will also continue fighting its wars. The only people who can do it is us. As usual, all power to all the people. Peace. Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches,

Starting point is 00:50:24 there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pastos survive the first place? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability.

Starting point is 00:50:48 Bell, connection is everything. On the new podcast Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or. this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people, and they were like, you smiled at us. Not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world

Starting point is 00:51:28 as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months.

Starting point is 00:51:57 I survived and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed,

Starting point is 00:52:28 and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. There's stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Pro's Society.

Starting point is 00:52:58 the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments,

Starting point is 00:53:25 nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real. messages inside compelling characters, and that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro Society on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. Robert Evans here, and this is It Could Happen here, a podcast about our crumbling world and the

Starting point is 00:53:59 people making it crumble. And a good chunk of those people happened to be race scientists, which is why today I'm going to be talking about the gang of race scientists who went after Jason Ardei, the former Cambridge professor who recently died by suicide just earlier this year in August of 2026. And I came across a very good article about what happened to Jason and the people kind of responsible to that by Stephanie Lammy. Stephanie is a researcher, a feminist, and an expert in influence operations. She's the former Secretary General of Internet Without Borders and the co-founder of D-A-N-A-I-D-E-S.org, which develops and deploys technology for civil society organizations operating in conflict and crisis environments. She's a PhD candidate in political sociology, and she wrote this really, really good article that was published initially on the Club de Media part, which is a French journalism blog, effectively. And she published also a really good translation of it. and I enjoyed it very much.

Starting point is 00:54:58 I thought it was really valuable. So I reached out to Stephanie and asked if we could pay to host the audio version of her investigation. And she agreed. So I'm going to be reading it. She wanted me to do that,

Starting point is 00:55:10 but I want to make it clear. None of this is my work. And I don't say that to, you know, defray any sort of responsibility or whatever. Like, this is much better work than I could have done on the same subject. And I'm really proud to be able to host Stephanie's article. Before I get into our article,

Starting point is 00:55:24 I do want to note that she is the author of two books, or a toxica uncivil society in the internet age, which is about how anti-democratic actors use influence operations and digital platforms to mobilize and undermine democratic societies. And la terour masculinist in 2024, an investigation into masculinist radical milieu, their ideologies networks,

Starting point is 00:55:43 and the use of violence as a political strategy. Both are published by editions due to tour. I think, unfortunately, they're, I mean, unless you speak French, then it's very fortunate, but they are in French. Obviously, I'm going to be reading Stephanie's article in English. And here it goes. The Hunt for Jason Ardei. Race science is a pseudoscience that feeds far-right propaganda.

Starting point is 00:56:04 Long relegated to the margins, it is gaining traction in universities and seeks to establish its proponents as arbiters of knowledge. The hunt that led to Jason Arde's death reveals how this machinery of epistemic domination operates and who helps normalize it. From day one, everything pointed to the fact that Jason Ardei, the black neurodivergent Cambridge professor who died in August of 2026, was being subjected to racist and ableist harassment, exactly the kind of targeting he himself had described.

Starting point is 00:56:31 Artie had been marked as quarry long before the fatal media pile on. An open and immensely well-funded race science international network enabled its hunters to unleash the pack, to give the pursuit scale, reach, and political unity. But to break out of the margins of race science, the chase had to become something else. Its extremist ideology needed to be laundered into a story about scientific and journalistic integrity.

Starting point is 00:56:53 The media had ample evidence to challenge the frame imposed on them by the eugenicists. Instead, they adopted it, running with the hounds, and in doing so, legitimized both the aims and the epistemic authority of race scientists. Marking the Quarry. The hunt for Professor Jason Ardeve began quietly, three years earlier,

Starting point is 00:57:11 couched in the civilized nodes of a scholarly society, a professor who was merely asking questions. In May of 2023, Dave Harris, a retired white academic and professor emeritus at Plymouth Marjean University, began examining Ardei's publications. Ardey's appointment as professor of sociology and education at Cambridge had made national news.

Starting point is 00:57:31 At 37, he was the youngest black professor in the university's history. From the moment he arrived at Cambridge, Ardei was targeted by freedom of information requests. In the United States, Christian nationalist organizations opposed to teaching and researching drawing on critical race theory, CRT, which examines, among other things, how racism is reproduced through law and institutions, were already explicitly encouraging their supporters

Starting point is 00:57:54 to use public records procedures to target academics and then identify or manufacture misconduct. Such smear campaigns are now part of the academic far-rights repertoire, aimed particularly at researchers who examine power relations, but also at those whose very presence, whose perceived identity, appears to embody the gains of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. The largely covert campaign against Black scholars also surfaced in 2023, when the work of Claudine Gay, Harvard's first Black president, came under heightened scrutiny against, a backdrop of misogy noir. Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and former visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, both Christian nationalist organizations, is one of the

Starting point is 00:58:34 principal architects of the American campaigns against CRT and DEI. He helped turn the plagiarism allegations against gay into a broader political offensive against minority representation in American institutions. What connects Rufo to what would later come for Ardei is not only the method, but also the network. Rufo has repeatedly promoted race. science-focused online magazine, Aporia, and appeared on its podcast in 2023. Research by the anti-fascist organization Hope Not Hate identifies Aporia as the public-facing arm of the Human Diversity Foundation, or HDF, a Wyoming registered company created as the successor to the Pioneer Fund, the American Eugenics Organization established in 1937.

Starting point is 00:59:15 Byline Times reports that Rufo and HDF also shared a funder. Tech entrepreneur Andrew Conru invested $1.3 million in HDF, while he, he said, his foundation gave $25,000 to Rufo's documentary foundation in 2021. Aporia repeatedly provided a platform for Nathan Koffness, the race science researcher who would later propel the allegations against Ardae to a mass audience. HDF co-founder Emile Kerkigard had met Peter Thiel in 2019. According to Kerkigard's own account, Teal subsequently asked him to recommend other researchers. Kirkagard named Koffness and Noah Carl, Aporia's editor.

Starting point is 00:59:51 Both have been run out of Cambridge for their mediocre work and, overt racism. This network also overlaps directly with Britain's Free Speech Union, FSU, founded by Spectator Magazine Associate Toby Young, who has himself advocated what he called progressive eugenics. Aporia's Noah Carl is the co-director of Skeptics LTD, the publishing company controlled by Young, while Aporia contributor Eric Kaufman sits on the FSU's Advisory Council. The funding of race science by Christian nationalist and extractive industry billionaires, including surveillance capitalism, serves a political function. As historian of neoliberalism, Quinn Slobodian shows in Hayek's bastards,

Starting point is 01:00:31 racialist theories and the obsession with IQ make it possible to naturalize inequality. Social hierarchies are no longer presented as the product of power relations, but as the expression of supposedly objective biological differences that are hereditary. In largely secular societies, race science therefore provides Christian nationalist with a substitute for the authority religion no longer commands. It also provides intelligence-obsessed techno-masculinists with a scientific veneer for the hierarchies they seek to uphold or even reinforce. The day Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard president, Rufo announced an initial $10,000

Starting point is 01:01:06 fund for plagiarism hunting at elite universities, explicitly tying the bounty hunt to his campaign to defeat we called racialist ideology. Plagiarism hunting reconfigures legitimacy, promoters of the junk science, that is, race science reposition themselves as arbiters of scientific. integrity, from which position they can disqualify those who expose the cultural foundations of systems of power. By June 2024, Black academics were describing the climate and their universities as open season. The Pursuit. So, against this backdrop of racist attacks on scholars at elite universities, on the 4th of May, 2003, Ardae received his first email from Dave Harris.

Starting point is 01:01:47 Harris challenged his public work. When Arda did not reply, Harris wrote again. On the 11th of May, Ardei eventually responded, accusing Harris of spending hours combing through his work looking for mistakes. He told him not to contact him again. Anything further from you will be considered bullying and harassment, citing a past incident of bullying in which Harris had been involved. Harris replied anyway. Ardei had explicitly asked him to stop, but Harris willfully oblivious of his own oppressive behavior, treated the pursuit of academic standards as an entitlement to continue. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, this very posture was growing. The self-appointed investigator of black academics could recast himself as a guardian of merit, simply a man of learning

Starting point is 01:02:28 asking questions. With no reply to his last email, Harris took his claims elsewhere and enlisted another retired academic, Martin Hammersley, Professor Emeritus of Education and Social Research at the Open University, who has a history of wild claims about feminist standpoint theory. His grievance is what he regards as the influence of activist research on the social sciences and the diversity of viewpoints. On the 19th of May, 2003, Hammersley wrote to Hillary Crimin, head of Cambridge's Faculty of Education, in Rees Morgan, the university's head of research policy, governance and integrity, setting out allegations concerning Ardei's 2018 paper in social sciences. Crimin then met with Ardei and the faculty's director of research. Artie agreed that the article

Starting point is 01:03:10 could be temporarily removed from the journal's platform while the issues raised were examined. On the 21st of June, 23, Crimmin told Hammersley that Arde retained the faculty, full support. Morgan separately informed him that because the work predated Arde's employment at Cambridge, the university did not consider an investigation to fall within its remit. Hammersley escalated the pursuit, rejecting the resolution and demanding a systematic investigation of Arde's other publications. Crimin did not respond. The chase then spread beyond Cambridge. Harris and Hammersley contacted academic journals in Liverpool John Moore's University, which had awarded Arde his Ph.D. Harrison Hammersley also harried Ardee outside University.

Starting point is 01:03:49 channels. As early as 2023, he contacted Jack Grove, a journalist at Times Higher Education, drawing his attention to the correction to Ardae's 2018 paper. Times Higher Education, T.H.E. did not investigate the allegations in earnest until June 2025, when another professor contacted the publication about Ardae's work. Harris then supplied material to Grove, whose scrutiny extended far beyond Ardae's publications to his CV, sporting achievements, charitable activities, and personal biography. By September, Grove had compiled a 63-page dossier and approached Ardei for comment not only on his work, but on his private life.

Starting point is 01:04:26 By all accounts, Ardee experienced this as a continuation of the harassment he had already identified. The man he had asked to stop pursuing him had now enlisted journalists for the hunt. It's important at this stage to understand what the hunt had failed to achieve. After years of relentless scrutiny, only two of Jason Arde's 33 peer-reviewed papers had been challenged. The article in social sciences was amended on December of 2020. with additional references and clarification of its relationship to earlier work. The paper and educational philosophy and theory was corrected in May of 2024. Neither was retracted.

Starting point is 01:05:00 By the time T.H.E. began his investigation in 2025. Both matters had been closed. When the allegations eventually reached our day's PhD, Liverpool John Moore's University found citation defects but cleared him from plagiarism, including that they resulted from honest and reasonable error, compounded by inadequate supervision related to his learning disabilities. It's also important to center the story here. From Arde's standpoint, and from LJMU's own standards,

Starting point is 01:05:26 there was no intent to commit academic fraud. Ardei, for his part, consistently described what was happening to him as racist and ablest harassment, not legitimate academic debate. In April of 2006, in his British Sociological Association keynote, wanted dead or alive, the playbook, he described how black academics were being targeted through an identifiable repertoire already deployed against prominent scholars in the United States. He explicitly warned that the very instruments designed to protect academic integrity were being weaponized against them.

Starting point is 01:05:57 By then, Arde had already made public the very tangible effects of the campaign, racist abuse, threats, and intimidation. In a July 2025 letter to Jackie Smith, then minister for skills at the UK Department of Education, he reported a physical assault, death and rape threats against himself and his family, and racist objects and threats sent both through Cambridge and to his family home. In his memoir, he likewise described targeted campaigns driven by racial animus. In fact, the entire media coverage of the plagiarism affair cast Dave Harris in the familiar role of the reasonable, concerned academic, a variation on the concerned parent or concerned citizen routinely mobilized

Starting point is 01:06:36 to lend the appearance of spontaneous, reasonable concern to far-right campaigns against sex education, trans rights, racial equality, and public health measures, while Ardei became the eccentric young black professor resisting legitimate scrutiny. His attempts to protect himself were recoded as aggression through the classic mechanism of Darvaux, deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender, first identified by psychologist Jennifer Freed.

Starting point is 01:07:00 The reversal drew on the myth of the perfect victim. Inaccuracy in Arde's autobiographical narrative, as well as unprovable facts, were used to discredit his testimony. If he was not beyond reproach, perhaps he was not a victim at all, and perhaps his place at Cambridge was itself suspect, and maybe he even deserved to be harassed.

Starting point is 01:07:18 In a historically white and male elite institution, credibility, merit, and belonging became entangled. The racist trope of the threatening black man did the rest. Arde could be cast simultaneously as aggressor and fraud, while those pursuing him became the hapless victims of an interloper with something to hide. But for the reversal to take hold, it had to be made public. Darvo works by manipulating how,

Starting point is 01:07:40 third parties perceived victim and offender. On the 5th of August, as Ardei resigned from Cambridge and lost the institutional protections that came with his position, the Committee for Academic Freedom, CAF, an anti-DEI organization, revealed that Ardei had reported Dave Harris to the police and that the case had been closed without further action. CAF's Frederick Attenborough, who had previously headed research at the Free Speech Union, FSU, framed Ardei's report to the police as a threat to academic freedom. Also on the 5th of August, Times Higher Education helped

Starting point is 01:08:10 publicized the same reversal. Jack Grove published his account under the headline, I was reported to police over the Ardei case. I was just doing my job. Ardei's complaint to the police and his instruction of Carter Rook, the London firm specializing in media and defamation, were framed as attempts to obstruct legitimate journalism, while Arde's attempts to protect himself from harassment became threats to press freedom. On the 10th of August, the FSU fused the supposed attacks on academic and press freedom into a single conspiratorial narrative, casting Ardee as a powerful censor, determined to intimidate his critics. Quote, in a desperate bid to avoid scrutiny, Professor Ardei tried to use the police to silence a journalist

Starting point is 01:08:49 and an academic. This threat frame survived Arde's death on the 14th of August. That same day, T. He published an opinion piece by Ian Pace, an advisory board member of Academics for Academic Freedom, AFAF, who campaigns on institutional neutrality and academic free speech alongside Cambridge Professor and Reform UK head of policy James Orr. as Byline Times is documented Orr himself as a keynote in the same network. Peter Thiel made a secret five-figure donation to Cambridge

Starting point is 01:09:17 through or around the time of his appointment, while Orr later helped bring the race science publication Aporia into organized national conservative politics. Pace argued that the Ardei affair demonstrated, quote, the danger of treating criticism as injury. Three days after Arde's death, THE news editor Tom Williams maintained that the journalistic inquiry into the person of Ardeba Grove was,

Starting point is 01:09:39 justified. And we'll continue, but first, here's some ads. And we're back. The Code of Gentlemanly Conduct. The Chase had remained largely confined to allegations and rumors circulated by Harris and others through academic and journalistic channels. The public frenzy began in earnest on the far-right French on the 21st of July, 26, when Nathan Kaufness, the race scientist, published allegations based on a dossier he said he had recently received from an unidentified source inside Cambridge. That claim is unverifiable. Three days later, the telegraph,

Starting point is 01:10:23 to which Free Speech Union founder and General Secretary Toby Young regularly contributes, published an article with the title Cambridge Diversity Posterboy and Plagiarism Row. The Times and the Daily Mail followed that same day with similar articles. By the 1st of August, The Guardian published its investigation

Starting point is 01:10:39 under the sensational headline, plagiarism, playbooks, and a pig's head, the new claim surrounding Cambridge professor Jason Arday. The story had become a national media affair, still oriented by the race science network's framing. Four days after the Guardian piece, Cambridge announced a new investigation into Ardei's qualifications and career, citing new information. Ardei resigned later that day, saying that the relentless accusation, speculation, and public commentary had taken a profound toll on him and those

Starting point is 01:11:07 he loved. The scrutiny had to be of Ardei, not the pack. The Guardian article subjected Arde's accounts of racist harassment to my newt scrutiny, going so far as to check some of the them with police and witnesses and finding discrepancies, but the three-year pursuit initiated by Harris, the Corey, the Chase, and the context, was entirely absent from the story. Harris briefly appears in the article as a concerned academic. But Dave Harris' own history should have complicated his portrayal as a neutral source. For example, it's publicly available information that, in May of 1998, Times Higher Education reported that Harris had been dismissed from what is now Plymouth Marion following a complaint,

Starting point is 01:11:44 alleging harassment and bullying. Harris maintained that the dispute had begun after he and a colleague raised concerns about academic standards, and his union supported his appeal. He was reinstated the following month, although the rehearing upheld a finding of misconduct and issued him with a formal warning.

Starting point is 01:12:00 This history should have at least alerted the Guardian to a possible recurring pattern of behavior. Although Arde had pitched specifically to him, maybe sending the arts and culture editor to cover the story was not the appropriate choice to cover a far-right propaganda campaign, In a video published after Ardei's death, Harris lied saying he had been cleared. Furthermore, Times' higher education accounts repeatedly conflated civility with integrity.

Starting point is 01:12:24 Harris's correspondence was described as notably, even excessively polite, as though civility of tone guaranteed disinterestedness of purpose. Times' higher educations Jack Grove recalled his first email in his August 5th account as softly phrased. By then, Ardae had already asked Harris to stop contacting him and reported him to the police. When Times' higher education had resumed its investigation in 2025, Tom Williams similarly described the anonymous professor who contacted him as almost apologetic about raising his concerns. Politeness became a proxy for trustworthiness, while the repetition and escalation of

Starting point is 01:12:58 approaching THE, the very conduct Ardei had identified as harassment, disappeared from view. Two things can be true at once. A harasser can also be perfectly gentlemanly. As race and performance scholars, Kyla Wazana Tompkins and Tavia Njongo have argued, civility operates as a covert political aesthetic and a rhetorical mode which guards the boundaries of access to politicity. It helps determine whose speech and conduct are recognized in the first place as legitimate political participation. Harris's softly phrased manner helped make him legible as reasonable, measured, rational, and therefore credible, irrespective of the cumulative effect of his conduct.

Starting point is 01:13:37 The veneer of politeness, combined with other markers of legitimacy, a white man, a professor emeritus, a selfless defender of academic standards, positioned Harris as an arbiter of scientific integrity rather than an object of scrutiny himself. Retraction Watch, a specialist publication dedicated to research integrity and misconduct,

Starting point is 01:13:55 glaringly failed to scrutinize Harris' own track record. In its lengthy investigation published on the 27th of July, it detailed Harris' pursuit and quoted Arde explicitly asking him to stop, yet did not frame that conduct as harassment, nor did it mention that Harris had himself previously been dismissed following allegations

Starting point is 01:14:12 of harassment and bullying in a dispute he said arose from concerns about academic standards. Instead, Harris was given space to complain that bloody awful work could get through when standards were relaxed for special issues devoted to activist issues, like racial inequality. Harris' own record received no comparable scrutiny, nor was his sustained campaign against critical race theory treated as activism. The very man denouncing other people's work as bloody awful had himself faced questions about the quality of his research. In April of 2025, internal Plymouth Marjan correspondence described publications produced in the Marjan name as poor quality and often controversial,

Starting point is 01:14:51 a criticism Harris himself understood to refer to his methodological assessments of critical race theory. His resulting critique of CRT was self-published in March 2024, rather than published by an academic press. The pamphlet attracted just five reviews, including a generic endorsement for Martin Hammersley. Concerns about the poor standard of Harris' research had already been public knowledge since January of 26 when the Telegraph reported Plymouth Marjohn's decision to suspend his emeritus status. In that article, the Telegraph explained the university's assessment of the publications produced in the Marjan name or poor quality and often controversial.

Starting point is 01:15:26 Although the Telegraph framed Harris as the injured party, an academic stripped of title after critiquing critical race theory, the information was now in the public domain, readily available to any journalist assessing his credibility. when the Ardei allegations resurfaced in July. Between the 24th of July and Arde's death on the 14th of August, the Telegraph published 43 articles about Jason Arde. It even ran a box-headed. How the Telegraph's reporting led to Jason Arde's resignation. After his death, the newspaper quietly altered the headline.

Starting point is 01:15:57 Jason Ardei is living proof that you reap what you're so, removing the word living. Meanwhile, the January article about Harris briefly disappeared from the Telegraph's website, the very article containing information that should have disqualified Harris from being treated as an unimpeachably credible source. What Feldarday was not the action of isolated actors but that of a single well-connected and well-financed pack with a not-so-secret plan. In 2023, Nathan Kauffness laid out a roadmap to power on his substack, how to take back

Starting point is 01:16:26 academia. He was not alone in articulating such a strategy, and the prescriptions tend to look very similar. Quote, there are two ways to reduce the power of the wokesters on campus, remove them by showing that they don't satisfy minimal criteria for contract renewal or academic promotion, or dilute their influence by bringing in some of the non-woke scholars who have been pushed out of academia for political reasons. The two-pronged approach, eliminate the black scholars, platform the mediocre white males, is a parent with the support system they enjoy.

Starting point is 01:16:54 When Dave Harris had his emeritus status suspended in January of 26, he became a cause-celeb in Britain's anti-woke ecosystem, with the Committee for Academic Freedom, CAF, rallying to his defense. CAF's Frederick Attenborough, during his time at the Free Speech Union, had also defended Nathan Koffness. When Emanuel College, Cambridge, terminated Koffness's affiliation on 5th of April 24 following his writings on race, heredity, and intelligence, the FSU assisted him in the proceedings, with Attenborough personally promoting his case. Koffness later stated that FSU chief legal counsel Bryn Harris assisted his appeal. The FSU subsequently backed his legal challenge and urged supporters to contribute to his legal fund. The FSU

Starting point is 01:17:34 itself says it has supported Coffinus throughout and helped him bring legal action against Emanuel College. In March of 26, Attenborough, now at CAF, intervened on Coffness's behalf again, urging Ghent University to resist demands that his appointment be rescinded. Coffness had been recruited to Ghent by Boop DeVry, whose own work on intelligence and dysgenic fertility draws extensively on hereditarian researchers. In 2024, DeVry also attended the London Conference on Intelligence alongside Human Diversity Foundation, founder, Emil Kirkagard. Deverry had already sought university funding to bring Koffness to Ghent for a lecture in February of 2024, just days after Koffness published A Guide for Hereditarian

Starting point is 01:18:15 Revolution, before later hiring him as a postdoctoral researcher on his liberalism's fertility problem project. So when, on the 21st of July, Nathan Koffens published DEI Fraud and Cover Up at Cambridge on his substack, the architecture of uncivil society actors to immediately scale the harassment initiated by Harris, as well as give cover to the attackers, was already in place. So was the framing. Koffness heavily promoted his blog entry on X, where the post exceeded 1 million views. It was amplified by figures such as Richard Hanania, the American race and IQ writer from the same reactionary intellectual milieu as Curtis Yarvin.

Starting point is 01:18:53 A foundational figure of the anti-democratic dark enlightenment, Yarvin coined the concept of the cathedral to describe what in secular societies he presented as a new church. a decentralized system made up in particular of universities and mainstream media, responsible for producing and disseminating progressive orthodoxy and policing the boundaries between truth and heresy. The concept made refutation almost impossible. If academic institutions rejected race science, that rejection itself could be presented as proof of their membership in the cathedral,

Starting point is 01:19:23 discrediting academic knowledge production on race, while recasting hereditarian race science as censored truth fitted directly into this logic. By the time the first national newspaper, articles appeared three days later in the telegraph, the Times and the Daily Mail, Coffness and those amplifying his narrative had already transformed Ardei into a symbol of the supposed corruption of universities by DEI. A DEI star whose alleged failings were presented as proof that Cambridge had sacrificed academic standards to racial hiring and then sought to conceal

Starting point is 01:19:52 the consequences. Brought to bay on the 31st of July, Ardey submitted to an interview with the Times to defend himself against the allegations. But by then, the media pack was closing in and the kill seemed inevitable. According to Newscord's verified corpus, 52 articles about Ardei had appeared by the time of his resignation statement was published on the 5th of August. Arde's resignation did not stop the hunt, because the actions of the victim have no bearing on the level of harassment they receive. It stops when the harassers stop, whether because they move on to another target or because institutions and bystanders intervene. If the prey is isolated, the hunt can intensify. Another 222 articles appeared between his resignation and the moment he was found dead on the

Starting point is 01:20:32 14th of August, 214 through the 13th, and eight more that day before his death became known. In all, NewsCord records 274 articles across 26 outlets in the 22 days between the first national coverage on the 24th of July and his death. Of those articles, my own, Stephanie's, mapping identifies at least 23 produced by outlets or authors with links to the FSU, 19 of them after Arde resigned. 21 appeared in the Spectator alone, where FSU founder, Toby Young as associate editor and columnist. Another was written in the telegraph by FSU linked Alison Pearson, and another in the Times by FSU chair, Nigel Bigger.

Starting point is 01:21:11 And we'll continue, but first, we've got one last ad break. And we're back. The trophy. Rather than a media pile on, this was predatory propaganda. Fighting propaganda is not simply a matter of determining whether each individual claim is true or false. It is first and foremost to struggle over who has the power to define reality. that is what framing does.

Starting point is 01:21:45 It places certain perspectives at the center, relegates others to the margins, and determines what becomes visible, sayable, and relevant. That authority, that power, is precisely what is at stake. Race science, a belief system fundamentally untethered from reality, needs to be received as science. Its proponents crave legitimacy because their very existence depends on it. Without recognition from journalists, universities, and the public,

Starting point is 01:22:07 they remain what they are, marginal and extremist. With it, they acquire the authority to pull least the boundaries of knowledge, to decide what counts as evidence, what constitutes merit, whose scholarship warrants investigation, and whose testimony can be dismissed as mere grievance. And Arde was an extraordinarily useful object around which to manufacture that authority. A young black professor at Cambridge with a remarkable life story working on racism, sanism, and inequality. Make him doubtful enough, and he can be made to carry the weight of a much larger proposition. Perhaps inclusion policies put him there. Perhaps standards were lowered.

Starting point is 01:22:42 perhaps research on racism itself is suspect. Perhaps the people telling us racism structures the academy are precisely the people who do not belong in it. You do not have to prove the whole proposition. You only have to keep the doubt moving. As defense researcher Olivier Schmidt, now research director at the Institute for Military Operations at the Royal Danish Defense College has shown,

Starting point is 01:23:02 methodological doubt can be turned into systematic doubt. I'm just asking questions, then becomes a posture through which suspicion can be kept moving, alive indefinitely, even in the absence of sufficient evidence, while claiming the credibility of critical thinking. Ardei did not have to be proved a fraud. He only had to be made permanently suspect, and with him, everyone who looked like him. But the hunt could continue only as long as the pact kept running and the hounds baying. Arde's mass harassment on social media was participatory. For some, the serialization of revelations discrediting him became collective fun, harassedainment. Adam Surwer,

Starting point is 01:23:40 American journalist at the Atlantic, whose work examines race in American politics, capture this political pleasure in collective humiliation in one phrase. The cruelty is the point. For others, the reward was informational ascendancy and a misguided impression that their contribution would protect science somehow. Kate Starboard, a University of Washington professor who studies collective sense-making, has shown that online crowds do not merely consume a narrative. They participate in investigating, producing, and circulating the material that sustains it.

Starting point is 01:24:09 The invitation to go and look for yourself to check another supposedly outlandish claim to uncover another discrepancy was particularly enticing to those who define themselves as rationalists or skeptics. Participation could be experienced as independent inquiry, affording a sense of intellectual superiority over those who brought the issue back to the reality of harassment and thereby established ascendancy over them. Participation in the harassment offered epistemic domination. That reward helps explain why, even after Arde's death, So many of those who engaged with the ready stream of revelations

Starting point is 01:24:42 remain invested in fact-checking him to this day, unable to let him go, even the reasonable minds. Kate Starboard has also argued that the answer to information disorder lies, quote, not in better facts, but better frames. Arde was hounded to death. But the frame that made the hunt possible survives, a frame centered on the feelings of cisgender white men who believe themselves be being greatly replaced from the institutions

Starting point is 01:25:06 that produce knowledge, while pushing Arde's own perspective out of view. On the 20th of August, six days after the kill, Gent University suspended coughness as a precautionary measure pending a disciplinary investigation and to conduct that, in part, predated his post about Ardei. The disciplinary letter describes months of complaints, reports and concerns about his conduct and public statements and their impact on staff and students. It accuses him, among other things, of using his position and Gint affiliation to pursue and promote his race realism and hereditarian revolution, despite having been hired to work on the future of liberalism. The university regarded this as a breach of his professional obligations,

Starting point is 01:25:44 a misuse of his institutional reputation, and a conflict with its code of ethics, which prohibits, among other things, the dissemination of ideas of racial superiority and incitement to racial segregation. This time, fraud really was at the heart of the case. Koffness immediately recast his suspensionist censorship, an attack on his freedom of speech, the experiences of his racialized colleagues disappeared from the story. His claim amplified by the very architecture of actors implicated in the hunt, but now with an American dimension. Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal

Starting point is 01:26:14 handed him its opinion pages to consolidate the frame. How I became the scapegoat and the Jason Arday affair. My university suspended me, the article declared. All I did was tell the truth. U.S. ambassador to Belgium, Bill White, then reproduced the free speech frame, pressuring Ghent to reinstate Koffness and warning that all options were on the table

Starting point is 01:26:34 as the United States reviewed its relationship with the university. Its rector, Petra de Sutter, a transwoman and former Green Party deputy prime minister of Belgium, then became the new target onto which the frame could be transferred. Within days, an open letter opposing the punishment of a whistleblower and the person of Kauffness attracted more than 800 academics. Among them, actors embedded in a billionaire-funded Christian nationalist and transphobic networks across Europe. In France and Belgium, for example, signatories Florence Beauregard Blackner

Starting point is 01:27:04 and Xavier Lawrence Salvador led back to Christian Nationalist, billionaire Pierre Edward Stern, who funds Salvador's Observatoire due to colonialism, while his Pericles project funds Justicia, created with the Institute Thomas More in Belgium. The latter collaborates with Beauregard Blackner and is linked to a French transphobic organization that fuels campaigns against trans-rights. Pierre Edward Sterron's Observatory has since expanded its remit. The organization intervenes in academic controversies in the name of academic freedom, opposition to censorship and scientific integrity, a function comparable to that of the free speech union in the United Kingdom. And like the FSU, it has relays across several media spaces. Its actors circulate in

Starting point is 01:27:46 particular through the neo-secularist cluster around LePointe, Marianne, Frank Tirur, and Charlie Hebdo, but also through far-right media organs such as Le Figaro, Kassur, Belior's Actuals, and Atlantico. Added to this as Christian nationalist Vincent Belor's media apparatus, C-News, Europe 1, JDD, and others. But Beauregard Blackner and Salvador are not the only French signatories. Martine Benoit, Jean Fischot, Andreas Bikfallby, and Charles Ramond have, like Beauregard Blackner and Salvador, signed initiatives organized by vigilance universities, a collective founded in 2016 to combat what it describes as racialism, communitarianism, and attacks on universalism in higher

Starting point is 01:28:28 education. The neo-secularist milieu thus performs both a function of monitoring and that of ideological laundering. the dominant group's identity, anxieties, and the objectives advanced by crystal-fascist networks are stripped of their religious matrix and translated into the language of universalism, secularism, science, and academic freedom. Nathan Koffness has since been permitted to return to his mediocre work, albeit remotely in pending investigations. But he is only a cog and a well-oiled machine, the one who looks the part. Behind him, billionaire money flows through think tanks, media, and strategic litigation,

Starting point is 01:29:01 and concerned academics, allowing the same politics of white, cis-male supremacy to circulate under the cover of neutrality, a very long way from the besieged dissidents they claim to be. The hood is not what makes the racist. Sometimes it simply makes the racist easier to recognize, and race science is a lab coat with an equally white hood. The onslaught against Jason Ardeh was not inevitable. It became possible because, at every stage of the pursuit, people in institutions, the police, universities, the media, the commentariat, chose to ignore his warnings, legitimize the frame and amplify the reality imposed by the the proponents of race science.

Starting point is 01:29:36 Collectively, we did not simply follow the hunt. We handed them the trophy, the power to define what is real. To overturn that frame, to take back the power, we first have to lift the hood, collectively name what is wearing it. That starts with bringing the voices of those producing knowledge from the front lines back to the center and listening when they sound the alarm. Jason Ardeh was afforded no such attention. The stakes are huge.

Starting point is 01:29:59 As Jafari Sinclair Allen, professor of black studies at Columbia University, writes in the nation. This is a transatlantic movement to end the independent production of knowledge about race and power, and to decide on both shores who is permitted to produce it at all. The question now is whether we can recognize the hunt for power when it disguises itself as free speech, academic freedom, or scientific concern, and refuse our assigned role in the killing of our democracies. And that's it. Again, this was written by Stephanie Lammy. You can find more of her work on the Club de Media part, and we'll have that linked in the show notes. Thank you again. Stephanie. We'll be back tomorrow.

Starting point is 01:30:36 Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pasto survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.com for details and to check availability. Bell. Connection is everything. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months.

Starting point is 01:31:21 I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkings. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.

Starting point is 01:32:03 There's stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinheiro, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first.

Starting point is 01:32:36 I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people, and they were like, you smiled at us. Not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're at your podcasts.

Starting point is 01:33:15 If your bookshelf and your for-you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story.

Starting point is 01:33:42 I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives,

Starting point is 01:34:00 smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to pro society on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. See you between the pages.

Starting point is 01:34:19 Did you have a favorite ancient civilization that you were learning about grown up? Oh, man. So many. I guess I enjoyed, like, Celtic things because that's like part of the world I'm from. I wasn't even without Celtic. I think she was Celtic, like a Celtic warrior, queen, Bodhisia. Bodhis. How Bodhis is how people used to say, Budica, I think, is more accurate.

Starting point is 01:34:44 That speed. like she was someone who had resisted the Roman invasions right yeah that's right where my dad lives is like where the Romans built their border wall called Hadrian's wall and it's just kind of cool to be like you know the Romans bought their colonialism to all of Europe and they got here and I can't fucking do it it might have been they got to that part of the world

Starting point is 01:35:08 and they were like it's raining so fucking much I want to go back to Italy but yeah it was just it was always interesting to me to think of like, you know, the amount of our modern world that's still impacted by Roman colonization and then these people who were able to resist it. Yeah, I remember as a child, I was a really big fan of Egypt, of course, I guess, classic. Of course. Greece, you can't go wrong. Yeah. Babylon. Big fan. I like the bards. Yeah. You know, very cool. Yeah. As someone who, you know, I grew up like with a voracious, appetite for those living long ago, how people live in the past, like historical books,

Starting point is 01:35:53 how people dressed, what they eat, how they live day to day. And a lot of those ancient civilizations were presented to me as humanity's great achievements, you know, the magnificent architecture, the advances in agriculture, the remarkable works of art, and so on. But as I got Ola and I started reading more history from below rather than history to the lens of kings and empires. I learned more about life before civilization and outside of empire, and I really became less interested in civilization as something to be held up as the pinnacle of what he won't Saki-Bulov, although I am still very much interested in it as an idea. and how we think about and talk about it as an idea. And so this is It Could Happen here. I am Andrew Sage or Andrewism on YouTube, joined again by...

Starting point is 01:36:55 James. People have already heard be sounding off, but yeah, it's nice to be here again. Yes, in case you didn't recognize the voice. Yeah. And I want to talk about the meaning of civilization. If I were to ask you if you were civilized, how would you respond? I think I aspire not to be but like I have been raised in a society

Starting point is 01:37:20 which very much proposed is binary between like the civilized and the uncivilized right that I guess savage is a word you could use if you were looking at how that society portrayed it right and like even though I think British education and stuff wouldn't use that word anymore it says a lot about like the state and its desire to shape narratives in its favour

Starting point is 01:37:42 So I think I would aspire to desimilize myself, I guess. I'm not like anti-siv in the like big scheme of things, but I think in the way that it's often used to describe indigenous peoples or people who are not under control of the state. I don't like that very much. Yeah, it's interesting to me because if you ask most people, they'll probably just be like, yes. They would say yes without hesitation.

Starting point is 01:38:05 Sure. You know, obviously we're not most people. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, as you mentioned, like the alternative being, you know, the savage, that is something that has kind of fallen out of fashion. You know, that exact binary of civilized and savage is not in vogue. You know, it's not treated as something that you say. And yet we maintain one half of the binary as something to uphold. So we still say, you know, we are civilized.

Starting point is 01:38:37 It's a civilization. But you wouldn't as much see descriptions of the old. alternative of the barbarian, the uncivilized, the savage, the primitive. I think you can ask people like, what is a civilization? What do you mean by being civilized? And it's a bit shaky. You know, it's one of those concepts that is so familiar, so used to being referenced, that not many people stop to interrogate it. You know, we throw the word around all the time and it can mean cities or technology or modernity or law, or culture or the state

Starting point is 01:39:14 or simply not being barbaric. Historically, it's also been a way of dividing humanity. The Greeks, I believe, were the ones who referred to basically anyone who didn't speak Greek as a barbarian. Yeah. You know, China infamously treated everything outside of China as the barbarian.

Starting point is 01:39:37 Yeah, isn't it like a literally an onomatopoeia? Like people are saying like, I think I've heard that story as well, yeah. I'm not sure how true it is. Yeah, I'm not super familiar with the little sourcing on that one, I guess. Yeah, but you know, the distinction of the civilized and barbarian is something that has been weaponized across history to justify conquest and colonization and hierarchical taxonomies of the human race. white man's burden quote and quote was to bring civilization to the less advanced people.

Starting point is 01:40:17 Civilization being, of course, the most advanced stage of human social and cultural development, which to me is itself a hubris because I think that presumption that we made it, you know, we reach where we go and, you know, what we figured out here, this is it. Yeah. You know, I think that is a very damaging way of thinking. Definitely. And it's something that I think is embedded into a very popular perception of what civilization is. You know, usually historically, civilization has also been tied to cities, writing, large populations, agriculture, social stratification of some kind, specialized labor, monumental architecture, and, of course, the state.

Starting point is 01:41:03 Buried in many of these associations is the assumption that hierarchy is a, advanced, that this way of structure in human society is the destination we were always headed to. You know, we have this term in anthropology, stateless. The presumption being that lacking a state is itself, you know, something that perhaps needs to be rectified. I'm not saying that every anthropologist takes its perspective, but, you know, the words that we use carries in connotations. And I think that for some people, particularly people, in a civilization context, it's like, oh, yeah, they haven't reached where we have reached yet.

Starting point is 01:41:44 They haven't gotten there yet. They haven't evolved to a point where they've developed a state yet. But that is the trajectory that they are on or are supposed to be on. Yeah. The more bureaucracy and rule and classes and institutions your society has, the more advanced it is presumed to be. And then, of course, you have people like Samuel Huntington. who used civilization in this very broad sense as cultural identity.

Starting point is 01:42:10 Yeah. I have a pretty negative impression of Samuel Huntington as a human being and as theorist. As do I. I mean, I think we all do. To give you the listener an indication, he treats Islam as a civilization. Hinduism as a civilization. Orthodoxy as a civilization. And then everything south of the Sahara in Africa is just one.

Starting point is 01:42:33 civilization, Tim. Yeah. I love that, like, Islam is civilization and also, like, south of the Sahara is a civilization as if never the two shall meet, right? Like, like, famously, there are no Muslims in Africa. Yeah. The maps that I've seen, he does have, like,

Starting point is 01:42:55 Islam in Africa as well. If you ever look at the map, the map is awful. The map is just awful. Yeah, the map, like, gives me, fucking, yeah, like, admittedly has been a long time since I have engaged. Yeah, Muslim and African. I guess, yeah, he includes a horn of Africa in Muslim.

Starting point is 01:43:14 Fucking unbelievable. Yeah, Confucian. Japan just exists as like a, like every other culture is like massively homogenized. And then Japanese is completely unique in this little bubble. Yeah, yeah. This is such like, I'm sorry, like that's so weeb-coded to me. Yeah, it's incredibly white dude who hasn't fucking really engaged with the world coded, you know?

Starting point is 01:43:42 Yeah, yeah. It's like, oh yeah, the entire continent of Africa, sure, fine, whatever. That's Africa. Japan, though, like, Japan is distinct from Korea, from China, from the Philippines, from all of Asia. Japan's its own thing. Yeah, from these places it's had exchange with for centuries. Yeah, and then, like, the entirety of North and, like, the entirety of North and. America, Greenland, Western Europe, and Australasia, it's just Western. The indigenous people's there

Starting point is 01:44:10 don't exist, right? Like, the differences in those cultures. Yeah, well, Western is called for white, so it's not surprising. Yeah, that's definitely what he's doing there. His famous argument was that future conflicts would be predicated on clashes between these civilizations, hence clashes of civilizations being the title of his book. Yeah. I don't find it very convincing. I don't think you do either. Yeah. No, I'm not buying it, to be honest. Yeah, it treats these big cultural blobs as if they're unified entities and discrete entities when, you know, history has been a long story of exchange, borrowing, overlap, divergence, migration and transformation. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:44:58 Finally, for another perspective, I wanted to share on the subject of civilization. we have David Wendrew, who many of you may know as the co-author of The Dawn of Everything. And for him, he argued that if we're going to keep using the word civilization, we should think of it as a product of interaction between societies. So through trade and conflict and migration and imitation collaboration, civilization is like an emergent phenomenon of that interconnectedness. I think that is a somewhat idiosyncratic, but still compelling and somewhat familiar approach to the idea. Typically, people do think of civilizations as discrete entities, though.

Starting point is 01:45:57 Yeah. At least in the layman's perspective. But the field of anthropology and historical research I know is rife with comparative studies and, you know, investigations of those very exchanges between societies. So as he is speaking from an anthropological perspective, I see why he would want to put forward that reframing. And the thing about definitions of words and connotations and stuff, is none of it is really objectively correct.

Starting point is 01:46:25 The orders point into different things, and the way that we use language is always going to be subject to debate. I think the fact that we can't even agree on what civilization exactly is should probably make us a bit more cautious in how we make sweeping claims about it. And really, I feel like I hear about many of the words that we throw around so casually. But one consistency I've seen across most definitions of civilization is this packaging with, of course, the city, but also with ideas of advancement and development, which of course begs the question advanced according to whom,

Starting point is 01:47:03 in a measured by what standard? how do you actually quantify how much more advanced one society is compared to another? You know if the benchmark is skyscrapers and bureaucracies and standing armies or industrial output? Then yeah, sure, modern states score very highly in terms of advancement. But then we can ask, you know, why should those be the specific metrics we use? Why not measure the advancement of a society according to how much leisure its members enjoy? or by how equal they are, or by how sustainable they engage with the ecosystem that they're embedded in,

Starting point is 01:47:40 or by how much freedom regular people have over their own lives. You know, we can pick different measure and sticks and get different winners and losers in this competition of advancement. But the measure and stick we're working with when we speak of civilization clearly isn't very helpful for many of us. All societies are not working with the same measure and stick, despite the efforts to impose this capitalist, neoliberal measuring stick on everybody. You know, we have countless experiments in examples of different ways of organizing life across history.

Starting point is 01:48:12 Some lasting for centuries, others millennia, some expanding its empires, others staying small, some prioritize in equality, others prioritize in hierarchy, accumulation versus mobility. You know, we can't assume that all of humanity is trying to reach the same predetermined destination. So the whole language of more and less civilized doesn't really cut it for me. But the language of civilization does work for the people that it serves. The people who see their society as the highest stage of human development, which must be imposed on others by evangelism and conquest and so on to bring development. And same attitude, which is extended to people by European colonial powers,

Starting point is 01:48:59 to invade these lands for wealth and territory, to conquer them, to treat them as a lesser on the ladder of human development, that very same attitude extends beyond people to nature itself as something wild and unproductive and waiting to be mastered by civilization. But one thing is really stuck with me in reading, for instance, James E. Scott, which talks about this and against the grain, it's just how fragile and not inevitable this civilization development was, you know?

Starting point is 01:49:36 Yeah. These early states very often collapsed, very often fragmented. And for many people, in those contexts, the collapse, quote and quote, was an escape to freedom. You know, it was something that gave them an opportunity to disperse and to create smaller communities. and to have greater autonomy and fewer obligations to rulers. And so with all that history in mind,

Starting point is 01:50:05 I find the concert of civilization, you know, something to think about, but certainly not something to idealize. Yeah. Something that just came to my mind is a speech that Derruti gave to the cops on the eve of the Catalan Revolution, right? So 19th of July. So the cops have been sent, right?

Starting point is 01:50:25 They know that the military has got a right, rise up against them, right? They know that in the coming days, that they will either have to fight their own military or accept the end of this liberal democracy in Spain, right? This republic in Spain. The Catalan government has still sent the police to seize weapons from the anarchists, right, who are the most capable people of fighting this coup. They would rather state than no state, I guess, right? The state's always going to have more solidarity with the state then it's its constituents. And he says to the COBS,

Starting point is 01:50:59 sometimes when we're given an order, we have to disobey it. And even if the order comes from a very big and important person to translate, obviously, and paraphrase to, we civilize ourselves with disobedience. It's a really interesting phrase, right?

Starting point is 01:51:14 Like, to him, I guess, the concept of civilization is dignity and, like, autonomy. The person who is given up their autonomy to the state is not civilized because they have given up that autonomy and allowed the state to be the one that makes their decisions for them, right?

Starting point is 01:51:34 Like, it's an alternative use. It's like an inversion, basically. Exactly, yeah, yeah. Like, he's taken that term and said, like, it's fundamentally uncivilized of you to allow the state to be the one that makes the choices for you. It's just a really interesting, yeah, inversion of the terminology. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:51:54 I think it's curious because when I look at, for instance, there's this book Civilized Death by Christopher Ryan, and he uses this concept of human domestication. Okay. And he argues that, you know, just as humans selectively bred and conditioned animals to fit into environments that we designed for all-unpubuses, civilization shaped us to fit the needs of these large hierarchical systems. Okay. You know, we sort of routines and obedience and punctuality for activity,

Starting point is 01:52:30 dependence on these institutions. And so it's kind of interesting to me that, you know, by Dureutis Freeman, the domestication of civilization is precisely what makes us uncivilized. Yeah, like the forced pasticism, I don't know how to say it. Like, it is what makes us uncivilized. It makes us undignified. Yeah. And I guess that that is.

Starting point is 01:52:53 another use or connotation associated with civilization that he's utilising there, which is civilization as dignity. Right. As being upright or dignified as a person to be civilized is to be a certain standard or caliber of person. Yeah, exactly that, yeah.

Starting point is 01:53:13 And so he's kind of pointing to civilization as corrupting that caliber by making us slavishly dependent on the institutions over which we have very little control over. Yeah, it's like, it's interesting, like inversion. I'm not sure how useful it is. Like, I'm not sure if the term anyone needs to recapture, but it's interesting, you know. First thing, even if I find that an invasion is not necessarily practical in terms of day-to-day communication, I think playing with concepts, you know, tinkering with concepts,

Starting point is 01:53:49 invulting them, I think it's still useful in better grasping them. Yes. In better formulating our sense of what they are and what they are not. Yeah, definitely. The meaning of a word is something we co-create over time, right? It's not like a fixed thing. And obviously we have these dictionaries and they have the meanings of words, but language is just a way of communicating concepts.

Starting point is 01:54:14 And so we co-create that meaning as we redefine those concepts. Exactly. So much of modern civilized life clearly isn't good for us. I say that after stretching my back with great futility as I spent most of my day sitting. Yeah. Working at a desk. You know, a lot of people are working jobs they find meaningless, simply because they need the income to survive. You know, they are spending most of their waking hours indoors on exposes. to fresh air. Yeah. If they even have fresh air out of doors, because many of us live in

Starting point is 01:55:05 urban environments where the standards of air quality are not the best. Could also speak of the rates of stress and loneliness and anxiety and depression and burnout that have continued to rise even as our material,

Starting point is 01:55:20 wealth, as societies, not necessarily as individuals, but as societies and our technological capabilities have both increased. I don't think you have to be a primitivist and advocate for some return to prehistory to recognize the negatives, the race here. And while I think many technological developments associated with civilization have genuinely improved people's lives, you know, antibiotics, dentistry, planes, the internet, especially for disabled people and those medical conditions that would otherwise be untreatable. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:55:56 You know, these are very beneficial innovations. I just don't think that civilization, as we have structured it and conceived of it, has a monopoly on innovation. In his book, Wild Thoughts, had made the point that many of humanity's greatest technological breakthroughs in agriculture, weaving, pottery, animal domestication. They were developed long before we conventionally think of as civilization. Human beings have always been creative. we've always experimented, we've always invented, and we always will. Nothing we can or should go back, because I mean, there are billions of us now, mostly in cities that are far from ecologically sustainable.

Starting point is 01:56:41 But I think if we keep the history of our diverse social forms in mind, then as we go forward, we can try to preserve what generally enriches human life, while leaving behind the institutions and assumptions that no longer. longer do. By the way, do you by chance have a blueprint for the future of our species? No, I don't think I do other than working it out together. Yeah, I mean, neither. Hope in someone might. I guess we have to figure that out together, exactly. Yeah. Maybe that is a blueprint. Exactly. I'm really not interested in seeing that there's like one correct society that everybody has to adopt.

Starting point is 01:57:27 Yeah. I think we can learn something from the incredible diversity of human societies that have existed. And we can use that not for mimicry, but for inspiration, you know, to realize that we too can pursue these uncharted territories and develop something new or to take old concepts and stretch them into new forms. Yeah, definitely. The author Daniel Quinn in his book, Ishmael, had made a point that, tribes can be defined not by Huntsin and Gathering or ethnicity,

Starting point is 01:58:02 but as a social organization that allows people to make a living together. And so by this definition, you know, people still today create tribal forms of organization all the time, whether it be mutual aid networks, affinity groups, intentional communities, wherever people freely organize themselves around shared needs and shared purposes. One thing Quinn emphasizes is that these kinds of societies can be very, flexible. You know, when these arrangements are no longer working for us, we can change them, we can walk away from them. We're not tied to them in the way that we are basically bound by an enormous bureaucracy that we're supposedly in social contract with today. And so really,

Starting point is 01:58:43 for me, that's what I want to focus on, a world where people have greater control over their lives, more decentralized, more cooperation, a world where organizations are things that people can freely join at reshape and split and leave and they no longer saving their needs. I really care about GDP metrics and, you know, megacity concentrations. I just want to know, you know, how we get from here to there together. And to me, that is something that requires, as I said many times before, on this podcast and on my YouTube channel. It requires opposition to systems of domination,

Starting point is 01:59:29 through confrontation and non-cooperation, through things like strikes and boycotts and other forms of resistance. And it also requires on the other end of that equation that we prefigure the world we want to live in by promoting certain ideas and philosophies, but more so by building the actual relationships and institutions,

Starting point is 01:59:50 we want to live in and live. in and be a part of. And I think these are two processes that will reinforce each other. People see and experience different ways of organizing their lives and that informs their ideology. They become more confident

Starting point is 02:00:06 that these alternatives are possible and it drives them to push them in new directions. So I see all that to say that the idea of civilization had its place and has had its time, but I think that we can let go of that old idea, you know, that we don't have to assume, but there is no other alternative. And I think that requires not just a rejection, but an active replacement.

Starting point is 02:00:39 To make the cracks of the old order apparent and to make the idea, the omni idea of liberalism, capitalism and civilization, unconvincent by the presentation of this other alternative. I know some people might call that next thing a better civilization, but I would prefer to be, you know, didn't bind ourselves to that old terminology. At least that's how I try to approach it. And what about you? Yeah. I don't think we should be beholden to these things that can hold us back, right?

Starting point is 02:01:19 And as you say, we should be more focused in, like, building the world that we want to live in. And not so much of building the world we've been told we should want to live in. Language can turn into a way of seeing the world. And I think we need to be careful of letting language determine how we see the world in a way that inherently limits our ability to create a better one. And I think this is a concept that we need to be very careful of when it comes to that. And just like the inherent bigotree. that came with a lot of civilization narratives, right?

Starting point is 02:01:52 Sometimes I do like the idea. Scott talks about this a little bit, right? But in fact, it is people in states who are domesticated and they were domesticated by grain crops. Grain crops brought those people in, forced them to live in a certain place, force them to live in a certain way, or so they could tend and care for grain crops, right?

Starting point is 02:02:10 Yeah. Like, I think maybe it's flipping that around might help people understand a little bit. Yeah, I think there's a, I forget the name of the book, It said botany of desire. Yeah, I haven't read that. I've been recommended that book before. Yeah, I've read that couple years ago.

Starting point is 02:02:28 And I think it was on that very subject. The idea that the plans that we've raised have in some ways domesticated us. Right. Just as we have domesticated them, it's been a reciprocal process. Yeah, I like that idea. That, I think, was like a theme or an element of that book, if I remember correctly. Okay, nice, yeah. or maybe it's a theme that I read into it.

Starting point is 02:02:52 Right. Either way, I think it's a sometimes a useful way of seeing the world. And yeah, I guess that's one of my takeaways as well. Play around with concepts. Think of with them, flip them upside down. And I think that is also how we innovate, how we create new things, new meaning. You know, there is this,

Starting point is 02:03:12 I think it's a proverb, or it might be in Ecclesiastes, but it's like, there's nothing new under the sun. Yeah. So it's like creativity is just the ways that we repurpose, what already exists. We build upon everything that came before. And we have to be willing to play around with it if we want to get to that point of innovator.

Starting point is 02:03:34 Yeah. That's pretty much what I have for today. All power to all the people. Peace. Behind every night spent making the kids lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pesto survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all?

Starting point is 02:04:05 And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.orgia for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. On the new podcast Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B.

Starting point is 02:04:36 I'm Julie Pinheiro, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people, and they were like, you smiled at us. Not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most. receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel

Starting point is 02:05:11 veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me.

Starting point is 02:05:56 I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my... and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. There's stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality,

Starting point is 02:06:27 welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is the Trojan horse.

Starting point is 02:07:06 Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to pro society on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering once happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. This episode, we are covering the week of August 26th to September 2nd. Today I'm joined by James Stout, Robert Evans, and special correspondent, Prop from our show Hood Politics. Welcome.

Starting point is 02:07:50 Hey, long-time listener, first-time caller, you know. Glad to be here. First time on ED. You've been on it could happen here a few times. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, your favorite cousin, you know. James do want to start with your little short news items? This is a barrage of bad news. Perhaps you're not familiar with this. Last week, I guess, barrage was an unfortunate choice of words. Right when we were releasing this, a flood in Nepal caused catastrophic damage. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:08:20 If you're on the internet, you've seen the videos, right? Yeah. 1,000 people have been reported dead so far, with nearly 4,000 missing. the current hypothesis is that a glacial collapse so large and fast that it caused a seismic event caused a detached portion of the glacier to melt due to friction as it fell. So there was like a seismic event. Yeah. And there was some question of the timeline, right?

Starting point is 02:08:45 Did the seismic event precipitate the collapse or did the collapse? Yeah. From what I've seen, the current hypothesis is that so much of the glacier fell that it created the seismic event. Yeah, yeah, that's what I remember hearing. Me too. Yeah, and the most logical. Yeah, yeah, it does seem like it wasn't a tectonic situation here. No, it was purely as a result of the glacier degrading.

Starting point is 02:09:10 Yeah. I've seen a glacier carve before. It's an incredible thing, but this is on a scale that, like, is almost infathomable. There are early warning systems for flooding on that river, but the flooding moves so fast that it swamped and destroyed those facilities before they could trigger it. Yeah. We're talking seconds here. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:09:31 Secondly, I'm going to talk about the SDF, the Syrian Democratic Forces, which was officially dissolved on August 25th, had its forces absorbed into the new Syrian army. Maslum Ebdi. The SDF being, of course, the armed forces of Rojava, the self-administration, the AANES, you know, in northeast Syria. James and I both reported from there. Yeah, and I know it's been really an important. Place an important thing for both of us.

Starting point is 02:10:00 We will break this down in more detail in another episode. But I wanted to say really briefly, Maslu Mabdi made the announcement, and he said that approximately 10,000 SDF fighters have been integrated into a new Syrian army. The integration that matters is the women's protection forces, the YPJ. And some of the ethnic minority militias.

Starting point is 02:10:23 Sure, yeah, yeah. The non-Kurdish ethnic minorities. Yeah, the Armenians and, and the Assyrians and the like. The Assyrians, yeah, yeah. As it seems right now, the offer is for the YPGA to integrate as individuals into the Ministry of the Interior, so doing stuff like Taurus and Police, Border Police. And it does not seem that the new Syrian government is interested in having women in its armed forces,

Starting point is 02:10:49 right, despite these particular women being some of the most capable fighters in the world who have been trained by the U.S. and by other militaries and have. been fighting for more than a decade in some cases. Right now, what they want is to remain as a distinct entity with their own structures and not to be broken up as a group of like disparate individuals. In related news, I guess there have been protest in Camiselo this week after the government failed to follow through on its promise in the constitution to have Kurdish be a language of instruction. Instead, lessons are optional and three hours a week. This would be a disaster for people. There are generations who have grown up in Rojava where Kurdish was the language they spoke at home.

Starting point is 02:11:32 Kurdish was the language they spoke at school. Of course, Kamaji Kurdish has different alphabet to Arabic. There are older generations who were educated in Arabic, right? And they're very aware of this difference. But the right to education in your mother tongue, when we look at like autonomous movements across the world, I write about this from a PhD dissertation actually. This is one of the things that is considered sufficient autonomy. these sub-state national groups and taking it away, it's a very serious thing.

Starting point is 02:12:01 No, especially since, I mean, a lot of these people, like in Turkey it's been criminalized and there have been degrees of this in Syria under different regimes, but in Turkey it's been criminalized for a long time to speak the Kurdish language. Yeah, and school textbooks have explicitly in Turkey, like,

Starting point is 02:12:18 I mean, they've written Kurds out of history, right? Let's move to Myanmar, where a Burmese Hunter resupply convoy to Barmo has been targeted by numerous, as FPV drones and attacks on its way at the Arrawaddy River to resupply the town. The KIA-Kachina Independent Army is attacking government forces there. It seems like this

Starting point is 02:12:36 morning, two boats seem to have surrendered, and there are videos of what looked like hundreds of what are probably conscript soldiers being captured by the KIA and associated PDFs. They're relying incredibly heavily on conscripts right now. Someone sent me some documents from a Hunter officer who they captured.

Starting point is 02:12:56 showing that something like a single digit percentage of the troops under his command had been in the military before the conscription began. So they're like taking people with very little training and sent into the front line very quickly, which relates to my next point, which is that Malaysia is planning to forcibly return Myanmar nationals on Myanmar Navy ships at the end of this month. We can pretty safely assume that these will be Rohingya or other Muslim peoples from Myanmar, right? Malaysia has been one of the places where people have tended to go, especially with conditions being what they are in Cox's bizarre. This would lead to those people

Starting point is 02:13:31 most likely immediately being conscripted if they were sent back. That's all I've got. Gara, you have some stuff too. Yes, I do have some stuff because it was a big news week for White House extended universe related news. Okay. On August 28th, Trump signed an executive order to create the country's first U.S. Space Academy. The order starts by saying, quote, is a critical domain for American national security, economic growth, scientific discovery, and technological innovation. More details on this will come out in the next 120 days. I'm really excited to see how they're going to work in the Confederate flag into that, because you know they're going to. It's that mid-military academies love that shit.

Starting point is 02:14:15 Trump starts the evil Star Trek. Amid trade disputes with Canada on August 27th, President Trump signed an executive order to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America. And as of recording, both Google and Apple Maps have complied with Trump's order. This move has not received universal praise, even among Trump's followers on the right. Matt Walsh came out against this, saying, quote, this will be an unpopular opinion on the right. But I think this is kind of dumb, even as a troll. Lake Ontario was given that name on maps by European explorers.

Starting point is 02:14:55 Long before the Canadian province of Ontario was named. There are several cities in America called Ontario, at least one of them, predating the Canadian province by like 100 years. Because the word originates with native tribes in North America. Yeah. It is not a Canadian invention. Canadians never uniquely owned the lake or the name. So in effect, all you're doing here is actually giving them credit for a thing that wasn't theirs to begin with. Yeah, it's funny when Canadians are upset, I guess, or whatever.

Starting point is 02:15:23 but Lake Ontario name itself is American history dating back many centuries. Not sure how you own Canada by deleting your own history, unquote. So that's Matt Walsh's long, long take on this if you are interested. Man, of all the things I would think he'd break with the administration on. Right. Yeah. Okay. All right, Matt.

Starting point is 02:15:48 All right. Well, because European explorers named did that. I know. I know. it's just also stupid. Yeah. And also, okay, it's stupid. It doesn't matter.

Starting point is 02:15:59 It doesn't matter. But America's the name of the continent. It shouldn't bother me as much as it does. But like Canada's a part of America. Like you understand it. The Americas. Yeah. Even if it is a troll.

Starting point is 02:16:14 It's not even I shouldn't care that your troll sucks. It's deeply frustrating. It's yes. It's so stupid. stupid. And even calling the Gulf of Mexico, calling the Gulf of America. You know, Mexico is a part of America.

Starting point is 02:16:30 It's still, it's not a, it's just not a, this doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It's one of the most annoying things that he's, that he has done and continues to do as president. Yeah. And the fact that Apple and Google Maps is like, the key towing to this is just,

Starting point is 02:16:43 is completely embarrassing. A pundant on Fox News is the Five, also did not like this. But because he, he was concerned that the new acronym that would be given to kids to memorize the Great Lakes, right? Because the acronym used to be homes to go over all of the Great Lakes.

Starting point is 02:17:02 That's the first letter of each said lake. Yeah. Her on Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior. Work well for you. This Fox News prudent is concerned that now the acronym will be too close to Hamas because you have to trade the OPA. Yep, yep, yep, yep.

Starting point is 02:17:22 All right. If we could get a merry-go-vespucci in there, if Lake Erie, we'd be there. Right. I think we could make it to Homo. We could probably get to Homo pretty easily. If we're close to Hamos, we've got to be close to Homo. The next liberal president has to replace the name of Lake Erie with another O word and have homos. Lake Obama.

Starting point is 02:17:44 There we go. Lake Obama. Yeah, that's good. Trump has also since renaming, quote-unquote, renaming the lake. He has also suggested changing the name of either the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean to the American Ocean. The American Ocean, absolutely. And has also talked repeatedly about changing the name of the Strait of Hormuz to the Strait of America. So we'll see how that works out for him.

Starting point is 02:18:10 How's that going for him? We'll check in later. How's that going? Yeah. How about to go to your backyard and change the name of it? this is just for clout right like this is just a fucking like he's found out that he gets a lot of attention and owns the libs and yeah yeah yeah creates like a news cycle whenever he does this bullshit that's the reason this is happening right yeah that's why i don't want to speak any more about it but right it's it's it's worth a little mention there and for sure homes to hamas uh is undeniably funny homes for hamas is an amazing like uh yeah like the fictional NGO that would come out of like a mat wall tweet. That is true. And then maybe the new Daily Wire Plus film. The next film, yeah. It's Habitat for Humanity, but it's

Starting point is 02:18:58 a Habitat for Hamas instead. Speaking of something that could come out of a Daily Wire exclusive film, a former staffer for Mike Collins, a Republican congressman from Georgia, who's currently running for Senate against John Ossoff, has been linked to a Nazi account on X the Everything app. This ex-staffer is a 24-year-old who interned for Collins in 2024 and then the next year worked as a contractor at a pro-Collins pack. On X,

Starting point is 02:19:26 this staffer described himself as a quote-unquote twink fascist. Okay. Yeah. And in one post from July of this year, he used the word twink to type out the shape of a swastika.

Starting point is 02:19:42 Okay. All right. I have it in the dock here. If you guys would see. Yeah, I saw it. What is happening? How does he think that's going to end for him? I don't think he cares. Oh, yeah. I think there's a chunk of people for whom all it matters is the lulls, right?

Starting point is 02:19:59 So it would seem. Yeah. Wow. He also posted thirst traps of himself, captioned racist. That's not desperate. And also shared a grok-generated photo of himself in a clan robe. Fascinating. I never thought I'd see the day of, like, bored Nazis.

Starting point is 02:20:16 With too much time on their hands on. mind. Yeah. I was like, y'all was just bored now. I mean, that's where these Nazis started. Okay. Yeah. It began in boredom, and I guess to some extent, you know, it should end there. Yeah. Tusha. Yeah, it's downstream of being on the internet too much. Yeah. On Monday, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy announced an emergency shutdown of 110 commercial driver's license schools, which according to the White House accounted for, quote, more than 5,000 of the drivers who have failed English proficiency tests, unquote. So this will make it harder for people to work as commercial drivers.

Starting point is 02:20:59 Yeah, we've got too many of those as it is, so that's good. Yeah. Things are going great. A federal appeals court ruled three to one, and that's Trump appointees on that court, that states can regulate prediction market platforms like Kaushi as gambling. This case originated from regulators in Nevada with support from their Republican governor. Obviously, the state of Nevada has an interest in keeping these platforms regulated as gambling or kicking the platforms out of their state entirely because it's Nevada.

Starting point is 02:21:31 It's Las Vegas. The judges in this case wrote, quote, The substance of the sports event contracts offered on Kalshi's exchange is sports gambling, regardless of whether Kalshi calls them swaps. Calh's attempts to distinguish its sports event contracts from sports books betting are unpersuasive, unquote. The judges also highlighted how in court, Kalshi argued that its platform wasn't actually sports betting, but Kalshi had previously used that term to market its platform to users. I didn't go too deep into this, but yesterday that the first person to get a lifetime ban from Kalshi, did you see this?

Starting point is 02:22:16 No. No. Is it Trump's teleprompter guy? No. It's even funnier. It's George Santos. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's back.

Starting point is 02:22:29 Yeah. No way. Pour one out for Santos. For insider trading. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did he bat on himself getting booed out of Congress? I can only imagine him being like, oh, me, right? Oh, fuck me, right?

Starting point is 02:22:44 Fuck me. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. This case here will most likely escalate to the Supreme Court. Another case which might end up going to the Supreme Court relates to this next short story, a district court judge in California ruled that Rubio's use of the NIA to deport non-citizens based on their political speech, violates the first and fifth amendments.

Starting point is 02:23:08 Stephen Miller reacted to this ruling by writing, quote, A district court judge says America must admit and keep forward. foreigners who hate America and hate Americans. Court-ordered civilizational suicide. It will not stand, unquote. Yeah. Very much in line with Stephen Miller's stance on restricting free speech in order to save our civilization.

Starting point is 02:23:35 Second to last here, I'm going to talk about a story in The Guardian, which everyone should just read the full story. It'll be at the top of our show notes, so you can check it out. usually keep the small things show notes at the top, and this one will be at the top of the top, because you should just read the story. Last Saturday, the Guardian reported

Starting point is 02:23:51 that the Trump admin has been using a, quote, obscure legal maneuver to try to obtain private information on journalists, nonprofits, and unions, on quote. All without judicial oversight. How the Guardian learned about this is that feds tried to get a search warrant for digital information from a Minneapolis journalist named George Ford and Don Lemon.

Starting point is 02:24:13 The judge denied, this request, citing a lack of probable cause. And the government then withdrew its request. But weeks later, DHS requested the information from Google anyway. They went straight to Google. And per the Guardian, they used a, quote, administrative summons, citing an arcane provision of federal law, 19 U.S.C. 1509, dealing with customs imports, unquote. All that was needed to send a summons was a sign-off from a DHS official. There was a no judge involved. Google denied the requests for information on Fort, but DHS did secretly obtain her phone records from T-Mobile with no opportunity for her to challenge the summons.

Starting point is 02:24:59 For more information, people should read this full article on The Guardian. It has other instances of DHS using this little piece of customs law. Basically, DHS is arguing that because this involves people interfering with ICE agents, it is. is subject to this like customs, like duties and taxes import law, which is in cases where this has been actually argued in court, has not succeeded, but they have been able to successfully get information on a number of people and have also requested information on outlets like democracy now, independent journalists, and nonprofits. And this follows, you know, a few weeks ago, we reported DHS obtaining information, financial information on unions in Minneapolis as well.

Starting point is 02:25:42 This is all kind of part of this same time zone in terms of the response to Operation Metro Surge. Lastly, for small things, and this will be a future episode, probably next week. Far-right provocateur Milo Yanopoulos was deported last week. Yeah, he sure was. Yeah, buddy. After promoting ICE and deportations

Starting point is 02:26:05 pretty gloriously for years and years. Yeah. Talking about wanting to masturbate while ICE tore people away from their... families. He specifically and directly stated, like, that, yeah, yeah, I don't know. I got no sympathy for the man. Certainly not. Like, fuck eyes, but yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is Milo suffering the consequences of the world that he helped bring into existence and has cheered on for years and years and years. This, you know, this should not be a thing that we have in our country. This process

Starting point is 02:26:34 should not be something that exists, but it's one that Milo wants to exist and he still wants it to exist and his interview with Pierce Morgan after his deportation. He said that the problem is not deportations, but that they're just deporting the wrong people. Yeah, after saying no one deserves this kind of treatment, he then went on to say like, but obviously some people do. Yes. But even that, like, this man's treatment, he still got the like white glove treatment. He's fine. He's fine. Yeah, did you miss a meal, bro? Like, was they handing you stuff? Yeah, maggots in it? No. He spent less than a day in detention and now he is free to go back in Britain with all of the money and resources that he has. He is not suffering the way thousands and thousands of other people have suffered.

Starting point is 02:27:19 Yeah. Yeah. Now, DHS claims that he overstayed a visa. Meanwhile, Milo himself claims that his green card was quote unquote canceled without him knowing and that summons to immigration court were sent to an address that he no longer lives at and he never learned about the summons. That's what he's claiming we will go over all of these in much more detail next week. Unless anyone has anything to add on that. Nope. I think we can... Yeah, whatever.

Starting point is 02:27:49 Yeah, whatever. It's funny. I think last time me and prop talked at length, it was about Kanye West, who Milo was working for at the time. He was working for him. Yep. And his is actually working for Kanye again. Yes.

Starting point is 02:28:03 He started working with him again earlier this year. Oh, good. I think that's what he was in. Louisiana for it looked like. Quite possibly. Yeah. Okay, obviously there's exceptions to everything, right?

Starting point is 02:28:16 But within sort of like black American culture, it's, we're done talking about you, we're done, dragging, we won't even check for you. I'm like, Kanye dropped an album. And like, wait, what?

Starting point is 02:28:30 Like, I don't know anyone who heard this record. just like dropped it into a void I was just like this is how you know how thoroughly you burnt your brand like honestly as a person who

Starting point is 02:28:47 bleeds hip hop is arguably a generational talent when it comes to production, soundscaping like creating music but is so

Starting point is 02:28:59 completely insufferable and just just so we're just so done with you. And your boy Milo going, as he should be. Yeah. That's what happens when you hire the man who perfected the art of the fall-off. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:29:20 To work for your company. To help you in your fall off. Sir. And you can argue. He's like he sold out five days at crypto. Okay. But that's not five days in every city. in America, which is what he was doing.

Starting point is 02:29:39 Yeah. Anyway. Yeah, I'll talk a little bit more about what Miles has been up to and other issues regarding his ongoing separation from his husband and questions about his legal status next week in a special episode. But for now, let's go to a quick ad break and then return for some more news. Okay, so 27 years ago, one of the greatest rappers of all time was murdered. in front of everybody. This is Tupac. And the killer just now got sentenced. One would wonder,

Starting point is 02:30:24 first of all, why this is so important to put it on executive order. And I have a theory as to why. But also, why did it take 27 years to solve this? And everybody involved except for one dude has been dead. So what is we talking about? So to understand this is important to this. I think we have to understand really just how singular Tupac was as a person. And I think anybody born post his birth, it's like you weren't a part of the monoculture that we had all existed in in the sense that at some point in our lives, we used to all sit down at 8 o'clock Thursday night to watch the same television show, like across the world. You know, like that just doesn't exist. So to be a star in that era means the planet is watching you. And

Starting point is 02:31:11 I think Pock was such an enigma. We're talking about a guy's life who's like his life would be a bad script. Like if somebody was writing what he actually lived in a script, you'd be like, come on, guys. Yeah, like his last words is he was bleeding out and the police

Starting point is 02:31:27 asked him who did it were something along lines of fuck you pig, right? Like it was something like that. Yeah, fuck you pig. Like, you're talking about a guy whose godfather was Geronimo Pratt, the legendary Black Panther. His mama and auntie of Fannie and Asada Shakur defended themselves in federal court while she was pregnant with him.

Starting point is 02:31:49 The man was clearly Jada Pinkett's first love, which means that Will Smith is the consolation prize to Tupac. Like, that's what I'm trying to say. Like, the man dated Madonna. He dated Quincy Jones's daughter. Like, there was just genre-defining films. The guy lived four lives. Like, he literally lived four lives. inside of the five years that he was a public figure.

Starting point is 02:32:15 Rapper, gangster, sex symbol, revolutionary, all before he was 26. So, backstory before we get this court case. So in 1996, honestly the biggest star in the world, him and Notorious B.I.G. Two biggest rappers, that rap has ever seen. Pock and his friends, part of Defro Records, Shug Knight, who was the leader of Defro, went to Vegas to a Mike Tyson fight. At the Mike Tyson fight, they see a man named Orlando. Now, Orlando was a crib, important to the story, Shook being a notorious Compton Pairo blood in charge of death row records at this fight for Mike Tyson, which only lasted 15 seconds, which was why they were so bored,

Starting point is 02:33:01 because the fight was done immediately. So while they were out trying to party, still kind of bored because the fight they came to see didn't happen, they run into this guy named Orlando. Now, Orlando's important because, again, he's a Crip, and a few months earlier, he snatched a chain, a DeFro Records like Gold Chain, from another person at the Lakewood Mall, no less, which is very funny because Lakewood is a suburb of Long Beach. It's not even like a city. It's just, it's literally just a mall. So these murderous crypts steal this chain from this guy, they see him in their like, hey, that's the dude that snatched the homies chain. So him and Shug go stomp the guy out. It's all, you could see it all. It's all on, you know, surveillance footage, camera footage. They see him stomp them out. They're still on a high. They're about to go party. They want to go do their thing. The problem is the guy that they stomped out, his uncle is his man named

Starting point is 02:33:59 Keefe D. Keep Kee-Dee's name in mind because Keefe D. Because Keefe Dee had a friend named Zip, I know. But Zip worked for P. Diddy, as in Sean Puffy Combs, as in the the worst human we've ever met. You know what I'm saying? So he works for him. Puffy is the leader of bad boy records, who's got Biggie. They're in this amazing, like,

Starting point is 02:34:19 struggle for power to be the king of hip hop. It was pretty well known, worst kept secret. Puffy wanted Shug and Pock dead. Right? So Zip works for Diddy. Kee Dee gets a gun from Zip and says, you're going to let that man,

Starting point is 02:34:37 you know, stomp you out like that in front of the homies. we got to go get your get back. They get in the car, find out where he's going to be at the club. He's not there. They were going to give up. And then some girls on the side of the road at the gas station realize that that's Tupac in the car because, again, he's the biggest star on the planet at the time. They're screaming, oh, my God, oh, my God, it's Pock.

Starting point is 02:34:55 They go, oh, dude, it's him. He's there. Flip a U-turn, roll a window down, shoot through the car, kill Tupac. Right. Now, all kinds of conspiracy theories as to how this happened because the case went unsolved, but of course it was solved. He's the biggest artist on the planet. They absolutely knew who killed this guy.

Starting point is 02:35:14 It's just you didn't have enough to convict him, right? Because it's still all hearsay, it's still all this, the word of a bunch of cribs who all tell war stories all the time. You can't prove it, right? Anyway, they're waiting for a chance to actually solve this. Six months later, Biggie gets killed, right? So now you got two of the biggest stars in the world in hip hop murdered. Biggie's mom sues NYPD for not solving the case, right?

Starting point is 02:35:41 Which means that, damn, we better solve this shit. Well, we kind of know who did it, but we can't prove it yet. 2008, KFEDD gets picked up on a drug charge, right? It's a federal case because he's doing a whole lot of drugs, right? So now the man's been to get put up under the jail. The cops say to him, hey, listen, we know you got all them drugs, but can you tell us about what happened in 96? He was like, what you're talking about? They was like, we don't play dumb.

Starting point is 02:36:05 You know that we know it was you. right and let me tell y'all something about this code that the gangsters have you throw enough time at somebody they're going to start singing boy and keefie sang right he told him the whole story exactly what happened all the names let me tell you look this is where we were sitting in the car this the homie this is the one who actually shot i got the gun from this person and the gun i got from ditty's homie told the whole thing in exchange for immunity they was like all right we got you good Shut your mouth. Everything's fine.

Starting point is 02:36:39 They would go to trial, except they can't go to trial because, again, it's the word of just Keefei by himself because everybody else in the car is dead. And are you going to press charges against Puffy, against Ditty? It's absolutely you can't do it.

Starting point is 02:36:54 Anyway, it had been fine right after the sunset. We wouldn't have known until this fool got on YouTube. And then, guys, and listen, it can happen here podcast team. My friends, my friends, he wrote a book. He wrote a book confessing all of this, right? He wrote a book. Perfect.

Starting point is 02:37:22 He got on every podcast he could get on telling this story. Two years ago, Las Vegas PDs say, hey, homie, we got to charge you for murder. He was like, what are you talking about? I got a deal. They was like, first of all, deal was with the feds, not with the Las Vegas, PD, number one. And number two, the deal was for your testimony to us. You just told the planet what you did.

Starting point is 02:37:50 You got on the internet and you told the planet, sir, you confessed to a murder. So he like, okay, well, I guess what we got to do? The trial started last month. The man's defense was, I need you to look me in my eyes. The man's defense was, I was making that up for clout. I was lying the whole time. We're seeing a lot of that in court these days. Yeah, I made it up.

Starting point is 02:38:18 There's not real. I made it up. They was like, sir, we're going to put you up under the jail. So he just got convicted for murder. He was not the one that pulled the trigger. The one that pulled the trigger is dead. But he was the one that attained the gun to make sure this happened. He had the last one left.

Starting point is 02:38:33 Okay. Right. 63 years old. about to go to jail for the rest of his life. Now, the reason why I bring this up for executive disorder is I really think this is the destiny of the Epstein case. They're going to wait until everybody did except for one dude and then put him in jail. That's my theory. Thomas Massey was unwarning Congress again today reading off a bunch of the Epstein co-conspirators.

Starting point is 02:39:02 I'm not sure if you saw that bit. Yes, I did. Oh, yeah. And so what I'm trying to say is the case was solved within a week. Yeah. Like, everyone knows who's guilty. Now, I'm not a gangster, okay. I'm from here, but I do not at all report to be a member of an active game.

Starting point is 02:39:27 I don't think there's a single gang member in Los Angeles who did not know who killed Tupac. Yeah. I'm like, everyone knew who did it. But you don't talk to the cops. It's a day job to figure it out. All right, that's your job. I'm not my job. That's your job.

Starting point is 02:39:44 That's their job to figure it out. But either way, now officially, case closed, Tupac was murdered by Kee Fee D's friend who shot through the thing. And now he's going to jail for a murder that happened 27 years ago. But yeah, you know, keep fun in the police, right? Yeah. They're good at their job. They'll solve murders. I mean, not like they can't solve like a kidnapping of an incredibly famous person's mom.

Starting point is 02:40:10 Right. But, you know, eventually they solve the really obvious crimes if they're forced to. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's why we should be funding millions of dollars to big podcast so we can continue to have people confess to murders on podcasts. Honestly. That's what we replace the police with. It's just podcast where people confess to crimes.

Starting point is 02:40:31 Yeah. It's just promise them five. $500 in a Vlad TV interview. They will tell you every crime they did. That's something you take on true crime. Someone just comes on and talks about their crimes. Right. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:40:45 I think being forced to talk on the Joe Rogan experience would qualify as cruel and unusual punishment. So I don't know about that. Constitutionally prohibited. Yeah, I don't know. It's one of the amendments. Like, okay, guys, just give me the time. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:41:03 Yeah. So, moral of the story, guys, yeah. Like, hey, listen, if you were about to get away with murder, just like shut the fuck up. Like, I can't stress this enough, listeners. He was going to get away with it. If you're going to write a book, at least title it something like, if I did it. Don't say I did it. Right.

Starting point is 02:41:21 If I did it. That worked great for OJ. Yeah. You got to put the if in front first. OJ got away with murder. Like, can we just, yes, because he was like, well, if I was going to do it. All right, back to actual death. Okay, so talking of two groups of people who keep shooting each other,

Starting point is 02:41:41 let's go to Venezuela first. The United States yesterday, when we're calling this on Wednesday, September 2nd, so that would be Tuesday, September 1st, announced an oil deal with Venezuela, and when I say Venezuela, I mean specifically with Delci Rodriguez. The way we found out was that the President truce quote, Breaking News, that parts in block capitals. The United States of America has just entered into an agreement with the country of Venezuela.

Starting point is 02:42:07 Countries capitalized, I'll just do the block caps. On the biggest oil deal in world history, that one's in block caps. At my direction, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegas working closely with highly respected interim president of Venezuela, Delci Rodriguez, and through a partnership with private business, have secured majority U.S. control of more than 65 billion barrels of proven oil reserves in Venezuela at no cost to the American taxpayer. This historic transaction more than doubles, that's in block caps.

Starting point is 02:42:37 American oil reserves greatly increases our oil supply and will substantially lower gas prices for all Americans long into the future while helping... It's not a full stop, I'm struggling. While helping to continue to set Venezuela on a course toward tremendous success and great prosperity. This transaction will greatly strengthen the already growing relationship between Venezuela and the United States.

Starting point is 02:42:56 Thank you for your attention to this groundbreaking matter. Make America great again, President Donald J. Trump. I wouldn't pay too much attention to the claims he's making here. We know that the United States is planning to partner with some kind of private business entity to develop oil fields. It seems like from reporting, they will take 55% of the effective output and have a right to buy oil at cost. If you remember when they first kidnapped Maduro, Trump summoned oil executives to the White House, and none of them were exactly chomping at the bit to go. drill baby drill in Venezuela, right?

Starting point is 02:43:34 That's because the infrastructure is damaged, and the crude oil is among the heaviest and dirtiest on the planet. They would just rather go almost anywhere else, right? They have to do more work to get this oil in worse conditions. I want to recap it a bit well. The United States is effectively running Venezuela as a vassal state now. It literally receives revenue from Venezuela exports and then sends it back via private banks.

Starting point is 02:43:59 There was a really good NYT article on Delsey and Rubio's relationship that made the analogy that this is like a parent giving a child, what do you call it, an allowance, right? We call it pocket money. The United States deployed hundreds of troops to Venezuela after devastating earthquake. Allegedly, according to this NYT report, Rubio has an effective veto on government appointments. He decides who gets sanctions waivers to work there. He and Deli send each other birthday messages and selfie. Venezuela in the meantime has quietly wound down its cooperation with Russia

Starting point is 02:44:33 and it coordinated, Venezuelan intelligence coordinated with the US military when they struck Tren der Agua personnel. They have forced Venezuelan ministers to delete tweets condemning the US attack on Iran. Just for reference to people, Iran has been a long-time ally of the regime of Venezuela in so much as we can see. There is continuity, obviously, from Delci, from Maduro to Delci, but things are very much changing.

Starting point is 02:44:57 Delcy has run drafts of tweets past Marco Rubio before posting them. Okay. Oh, boy. Sheesh. All right. When there were reports that DOJ was building a case against her, she approached him for assurance. And it seems like that directly resulted in Trump frothing. Do you remember a few months ago now Trump trothed how great she was and how high, yeah.

Starting point is 02:45:21 It seems like that was the assurance that she was asking for. So it came in the form of the president posting. as he did again yesterday about how great she is. The Posters Republic. Yes. What incentive does the United States have to move towards democracy in Venezuela when it is getting everything it wants, and it doesn't have to deal with the possibility of the president changing,

Starting point is 02:45:45 of the legislature changing, right? The U.S. is effectively running Venezuela as an informal colony. As it has done in all of its colonies, it is not inclined to give those people more rights. I would focus less on this deal and more on the fact that Trump is very clearly trying to lean on gas prices. And the reason he's doing that is what we're going to talk about next, his ongoing disastrous war with Iran. So the US this week is once again on a path to escalation in Iran. On the 30th of August, a new round of strikes inside Iran began. This followed the kind of reduced

Starting point is 02:46:27 bombing activity that we spoke about last week, right? The United States says it struck launches for rockets which were repairing to deploy mines into the Strait of Hormuz, which Trump has claimed is not mined. In response, Iran launched ballistic missiles at U.S. bases and allies in the region, and a U.S. source told Fox News that, quote, nearly all of them were intercepted. Yeah, all right, great. Well, that's good. You want to know that most of the missiles didn't make it? Nearly all is all the missiles you need to stop. That's what I want out of a missile. defence system. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 02:46:59 What it means, of course, is that United States has used more of its interceptors, right, which it is already dwindling its supply of. The Iranians, meanwhile, struck four vessels in the Strait of Hormuz this week, perhaps soon to be renamed the Strait of America.

Starting point is 02:47:16 It does not seem that America has much say on what goes on there. In one incident on Monday, which I saw a UK MTO, so it's American Trade Office, right? That's kind of the entity which puts out these, like, safety briefings to mariners. A tanker was hit with three projectiles, which is the first time I can recall in this conflict that happening, right? Like, there's a difference between, like,

Starting point is 02:47:39 we will strike your vessel to show you that we can strike your vessel and hopefully cause people to stop coming through here out of fear and hitting it three times, which seems to me like maybe an attempt to sink a vessel, right? Like, that's an escalation. In response, on Tuesday, 1st, September, the US began another series of bombings with the President Trouthing. The United States is, as we speak, striking Iranian targets near the Strait poor moves. Strikes are large and powerful in retaliation for the Iranians' failed attempt to adding sea mines to distraight, which currently has no mines. They have been completely removed or detonated. And the Iran shooting eight missiles all successfully knocked down at our military base in Jordan. If the failed nation of Iran

Starting point is 02:48:20 retaliates for this very justified attack, they'll be hit again at a much harder and at higher level. but it will not be the biggest attack of them all that is waiting in the wings. And when it is over, there will be very little left of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And then he signs it. He also did another one where he said, it's a failed nation, they have no eight Navy, they have an air force for inflation to 300%. Their leadership is disarray. And then he's blaming fake news for giving you other impressions.

Starting point is 02:48:47 He also tweeted a shit-tier AI slop video of missiles hitting Khaarg Island, where the observer was in a helicopter with the missiles flying over their head. It was very bad. What? Yeah. Prop, have you, have you not seen this? I will drop this in the chat for you to watch.

Starting point is 02:49:07 Yeah, let's get a live react. Okay. The video is its own thing. The caption he used for this or whoever is running his account used for this is also, I think it's kind of incredible. Smithereens. The Harg Island being blown to smithereens.

Starting point is 02:49:23 Yeah. President DJT Yeah And it's interesting that that one was not signed Thank you for your attention on this matter That's a good point It looks like a cut scene From like a command and conquer game

Starting point is 02:49:35 Yes, that is exactly what I thought of Why is this person lowering themselves Into the explosions Yeah, that doesn't make a lot of sense I don't understand why you would do this Yeah I wouldn't want to be there Who is shooting these missiles

Starting point is 02:49:50 What is happening Yeah, there's like infinite secondaries. Every like everything that explodes lands and then explodes again. Like the way the AI understands explosions is, it's fascinating shit. Just on a very basic level, like this is like an interesting thing for a president to do. I know this is Trump, you know, he posts shit from his account all the time. But the idea of a president posting of semi-photorealistic, obviously we can tell, but a semi-photo-reliolic video, another location being hit.

Starting point is 02:50:22 by ostensibly our own military is interesting. I just... Like, a more advanced version of this could be an actual video that's indistinguishable from real footage, at least on a service level glance. That's like, you know,

Starting point is 02:50:38 the president saying that ex-location has been hit. Yeah. And like, no, it hasn't. Yeah. Yeah. This is kind of sloppy and bad. It's not clear.

Starting point is 02:50:47 He's actually trying to convince people that this actually happened. Yeah. But the very basic, components of this are interesting and troubling. Yeah, from the commander-in-chief, it's not great stuff. Yeah. Clearly, like, he's enjoying watching little AI videos.

Starting point is 02:51:02 He posted another one today of... Lake America. Well, yeah, he's kicking the sign for Lake Ontario. He walks up. He's carrying, you know, it's a wooden sign on a couple of four-by-fours. He kicks the sign over. At that point, one of the legs on the sign suddenly becomes shorter when it's on the ground. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:51:19 And then YMCA starts to play. And he dances in his characteristic fashion. It's just so embarrassing, man. He's having a great time with the AI machine that someone gave him. Yeah. So let's talk about what these mean, right?

Starting point is 02:51:36 He's clearly losing patience with this war and he's worrying about how it's going to impact the midterms. So much of what we're seeing now is like we're going to talk about other stuff with voting rights later, right? DHS is clearly winding up for the midterms in blue states. Yeah, I'll be commenting on that a bit. Yeah, we can see the work requirements for federal benefits not hitting until January 27. Like, they are still worried about these midterms,

Starting point is 02:52:01 right? Yeah. Meanwhile, they are still fucking up in Iran. I saw a video last night of an Iranian missile hitting some thinking, Jordan. Like, this is one of the ones that wasn't most of them, I guess, because it clearly impacted the ground. Iran claims a shot down a Reaper. Last night, United States missiles, not for the first time in American history, a wedding. Yeah, we've done a bit of that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. This was like a defining moment of, for Obama's, like, air war, right, for his drone campaign. Like, yeah. When people talk about Obama and how he was a disappointment in foreign policy terms, this is what they talk about, right? Like, this is the moment. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:52:42 And he bombed a wedding, yeah. Yeah. We did that again. This time, a weapon fragment at the scene show, I think sort of slam ER or slammer. Please email me, Navy people. Tell me how you refer to the missile. Boeing has touted it as the quote, most accurate missile on the Navy's Arsenal. It punched straight through the roof for this building. Balooch weddings are really big. Yeah. There were hundreds of people there. There were at least 50 people injured, at least five of them dead, including a child. I've seen videos where like you can see children's shoes, little tiny toddler's wedding shoes among the rubble, right? Like, yeah. Yeah, it's pretty fucked up and the images that will come out of it will not look good.

Starting point is 02:53:24 Yeah. Funny talking of Iranian missile strikes, I want to speak about this. This course about this missile. This missile is generally referred to as a castle breaker. The Persian name is Kaibar Shakan, I believe. Castle is referring to a specific castle from like Quranic history. And that's relevant only because this missile is designed to hit Israel, right? Like that is what this is for.

Starting point is 02:53:47 It's a medium range ballistic missile, something like a 900-mile range. Recently, though, there's been a lot of reporting that this is some kind of new and groundbreaking thing that Iran's been dropping in the last few weeks, and they have had them for years. We know this because they unveiled it on live TV. They literally like whipped a tablecloth off it and were like, there it is! Which Iran does this a lot with its weapon systems, right? Yeah. But I'll include a link to a Russia Today post about it.

Starting point is 02:54:14 they do seem to be likely the missiles that killed several U.S. service people in Jordan in July. But in part the reason that they were the missiles that snuck through because they're the missiles that Iran uses a lot. Iranian state propaganda is making a big deal of talking about these missiles. They do this occasionally with their weapon systems, right? They portray it as like, oh, the American Patriot has nothing on this missile system that we have. But they are effective, right? They're smallish. they're maneuverable, and in the terminal phase of their trajectory, they maneuver, which makes them harder to intercept, right? Like, if it's just doing like a ballistic arc, then it's a math

Starting point is 02:54:54 problem to intercept it, right? But if it's maneuvering, from what I understand that, that makes the intercept more complicated. They use these in Syria soon after I left, actually. This isn't some secret brand new technology, but it is a technology that is effective. And like, the reason it's continuing to be effective is that despite it's more than six months of war, the United States has failed to destroy their launches and failed to destroy their missile supplies, right?

Starting point is 02:55:21 And that is why they're still able to strike United States bases all around the region, which they have been doing last night, and they will do again. Tonight, I imagine, and as a US supply of munitions continues to dwindle, this is going to become a bigger and bigger problem for the

Starting point is 02:55:37 United States. What an L. Talking of big problems, We haven't done an ad break in a while. And we're back. So at the end of March 26, which is, I think, like 37 years ago today, at least it feels like that. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to create a national list of verified eligible voters. Mail in voting would be restricted to the people on this list, which would be essentially an arbitrary list of whoever the administration thought should be on it, right? it was going to be compiled with help from DHS based on like citizenship roles.

Starting point is 02:56:24 Voting law experts immediately complained that this violated the Constitution for a variety of reasons, and some people have said essentially this is an attempt at a coup. Under the order, DHS was supposed to work with the Social Security Administration to create lists for each state. Ballots would be given new envelopes with special barcodes for tracking, and federal funds would be withheld from states that refuse to comply with this illegal order. As with many Trump executive orders, this one was immediately met by a federal judge. who issued a temporary restraining order that blocked it from going into effect. Trump appealed and the whole situation remains legally unsettled to this day.

Starting point is 02:56:58 Despite the fact that the order has been halted, earlier this week, Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, announced that a U.S.PS whistleblower had come forth to assert that the Postal Service was still moving forward to comply with the halted order anyway. According to an article by the AP, quote, The disclosure from the unidentified whistleblower contends that the Postal Service has been scrambling to try and build a comment. complex system that would normally take a year or more in only three months, sometimes in defiance

Starting point is 02:57:24 of the judge's orders halting work. The goal is to have it ready for use in the midterm elections. The disclosure contends that, due to the new procedures, a single scanning error in a batch of tens of thousands of ballot envelopes could prevent any from reaching voters. It details a system that election officials have already warned could not be implemented before the first mail ballots begin going out Friday in North Carolina. The Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans, Blumenthal told reporters, in advance of releasing the whistleblower information. This administration seems hell-bent on changing the framework

Starting point is 02:57:55 on casting ballots in this country clearly for political reasons. Now, for its part, the U.S. Postal Service contends that the judge's restraining order still gave them explicitly the right to develop online tools for states who wanted to voluntarily abide by the order. Even if this is true, it's a massive issue because the changes mandated by the EO are hideously unconstitutional and no state should be allowed to carry them out. And to make that point, here's a quote from the actual whistleblower complaint to Blumenthal.

Starting point is 02:58:24 When ballots are submitted to USPS in large volume batches, if any one ballot in the batch cannot be verified against the portal, all ballots in that batch will be rejected. For example, if a state election official brings a batch of 10,000 ballots to USPS, and USPS is unable to match just one of those ballots against the portal because, for example, someone had recently changed their name after marriage or they've moved, then USPS would refuse to mail the remaining 9,000, 9,99 ballots as well. That's what the whistleblower is contending about the new USPS rules regarding Yes. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:58:58 The barcodes and the portal system. Yeah. Like this is how he's describing the system as working, right? Yeah. He continues, USPS expects the state to take back the entire batch to cure the issue with the single ballot. Should the slapdash portal mistakenly mark a ballot as unverified, there is no clear process by which state election officials or voters themselves can challenge their

Starting point is 02:59:20 rejection. The rule simply vaguely states that they will be informed of the escalation procedures should they decide to challenge a rejection. Voters intending to cast ballots by mail may not even be aware that their ballots have been rejected or were part of a rejected batch until it is too late to secure an alternative ballot or vote in person. Now, I would call this a clear attempt to steal an election, or not necessarily to steal, but at least you create doubt around the midterm elections, right? This is something of a desperate Hail Mary by Trump and his cronies is the numbers of them have gotten much, much worse nationwide. And if individual states are allowed to do this,

Starting point is 02:59:55 even if the TROs remain in place, and this is halted from going forward nationwide before the election, if individual states are allowed to use this system, then we could see countless Democrat votes tossed out in red states where many dims are doing well for the first time in several election cycles. And I think a large part of the goal here, beyond just blunt disenfranchisement, is creating chaos, right? Because chaos is almost as good as outright tossing

Starting point is 03:00:19 out votes. It creates doubt and it provides opportunity a period of time in which the administration can set narratives about how the election went in an uncertain election night. Right? That's a big part of, I think, why they're doing this is to provide opportunities to where they can throw doubt on the system. Here's another relevant quote from the complaint. According to the whistleblower, USPS's effort to develop and deploy the portal has been rushed, risky, and haphazard, because leadership has demanded an impossible timeframe and an effort to meet impossible deadlines, USPS's eliminated standard and needed testing, thereby creating a substantial risk of a catastrophic failure of the system that could derail the midterm elections.

Starting point is 03:00:58 Quote, the teams building the new portal and accompanying IT were siloed such that when elements were brought together, the teams were unaware of various developments, creating more work. There were also no clear written requirements, leaving workers to glean requirements from opaque comments at meetings. As late as August 21st, 2026, workers were still receiving new requirements for the project. Without clear guidance, different team members continue to have different understandings of how the system is supposed to work. Now, it's good that this whistleblower came forward, and courage like this is one of, if not the only ways, that we're going to have a chance to catch and stop schemes like this from coming to fruition.

Starting point is 03:01:35 It is too early to know what the fallout from this revelation is going to be. That is still very much ongoing. This all just came out in the last couple of days. So we'll update you on this in the future as this evolves. But I wanted to talk a little bit more about some other midterm fuckery related news, some stuff that's a little bit less dark, right? General Dan Cain, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in a letter to Senator Alyssa Slotkin, a Democrat early this week, promising her, quote, The Joint Force has no plans to send federal military personnel or federalized members of the National Guard to polling places during the 2020 elections. Likewise, the Joint Force has no plans to use such personnel to seize ballots, voting machines, or other election-related materials.

Starting point is 03:02:15 Now, this was in response to a request Slotkin's office sent Cain and Pete Hegseth, asking for confirmation that the Pentagon would not interfere with the election by having soldiers at polling places or seizing ballots. I'd call this a partial positive story, right? It's good that he's saying that. It's not great that elected Democrats are so worried about this that they felt the need to ask. It's not just the military we have to contend with here, because back in February, DHS Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity, Heather Honey, told elected dims any suggestion that ICE will be present at polling locations is simply not true. And that sounded great, but on September 1st of 26, just a couple of days ago, Homeland Security Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen made some concerning

Starting point is 03:02:56 statements to reporters in New York City. Yep. Per Politico, quote, the Homeland Security Secretary said that ICE isn't there to patrol the polling areas, we're there to enforce specific threats. He added, however, that reports of specific undocumented immigrants at a location could be a reason for ICE to deploy. The only reason why we would be at polling places is that there is a threat to that polling place or we're serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down, he said. ICE's job is immigration, customs enforcement. That's their job.

Starting point is 03:03:23 If we're serving a warrant, we will be where we need to be. And that does leave the door open to some degree of intimidation in Fakhari at polls, because we've all seen over the last two years that ICE regularly take being brown as a sign that someone might be in a legal alien in need of tasing an arrest. And when the agency was asked for more clarification on Mullen's statement, ICE responded, ICE is not planning operations targeting polling locations. Ice conducts intelligence-driven targeted enforcement. And if an active public safety threat endangered a public location, they may be arrested as a result of that targeted enforcement action. So again, what's going to happen?

Starting point is 03:03:58 Yeah, it's hard to say. So far, DHS and the military are saying the right things. But certainly with ICE, there remains open the possibility of some targeted ice fuckery at polling locations around the country. So something to keep an eye on as well. Yeah. Yeah. No point. parts of me trust them in any way that their word means anything. And it sounds like exactly what you said. This is some sort of word judo. We're not planning to be there for the purpose of... Keeping the door open.

Starting point is 03:04:33 Yeah. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Well, we told you we wasn't coming for the purpose it is. We hear for that. And again, you know, I don't expect some national rollout of ice. but there's some really close state elections and maybe, you know,

Starting point is 03:04:46 there were people who were attempting to do this six years ago in 2020 in swing states, right? Yeah. And like that very narrowly avoided happening through the intervention, I think of a couple of members of Congress, but like this is something that has clearly been like a,

Starting point is 03:05:08 I guess a strategy, right? It's not a hard one to come up with, but it's a thing that we should be really fucking worried about. Yeah. Yep. To clarify one thing regarding my reporting last week on the plans for this UPS implementation of the executive order, there was two injunctions that were dropped. Yes.

Starting point is 03:05:28 Last week. And then after the USPS published the rule change, a new lawsuit was initiated by like over a dozen states. And then a judge granted a TRO in regards to that. that new lawsuit, and there will be a hearing tomorrow, which for us is September 3rd, that will determine if there's going to be a permanent injunction. Yeah. And then based on whatever happens at that hearing, the Trump administration will also likely

Starting point is 03:05:55 appeal to the Supreme Court. And it's really just a matter of, like, days in terms of ballots being sent out. Yeah. It's cutting it super close. And like they're trying to, you know, make this be very close. Right. Yeah, yeah. Usually I can at least follow the logic of the Supreme Court, but this one I just kind of,

Starting point is 03:06:10 Whether I agree with them or not, I was like, at least I understand how you got there. But they're just like, I don't know. This ain't illegal yet, but let them cook. No, this seems like some of the, one of the more partisan or like subservient to Trump kind of type orders that they've had. Yeah. Like, okay, a little bit of our like personal information, but basically we've been waiting for the insurance to, it happened already. But my wife needed a particular medical procedure. This is to like prevent a stroke.

Starting point is 03:06:42 You know what I'm saying? And so essentially they was like, well, we can't approve this preventative procedure unless you already have a stroke. Let me get this straight, fam. Perfect. Okay. Just say it to yourself again. Yeah. Like, so they got to break a law before you could say what they doing is illegal?

Starting point is 03:07:09 I just... That is a fair interpretation of the Supreme Court's logic. Yeah. That's what the Supreme Court just said. They got to break a law before we can tell you what they did is illegal. Okay. Okay. Yeah, that does seem to be where we're at.

Starting point is 03:07:23 It's great. Yeah. For our final story, let's talk about Data Republican. Data Republican is a relatively popular conservative influencer or propagandist on X the Everything app. But this isn't just a story about Twitter. drama, trust me. Data Republican has almost a million followers on X, and her account started to gain traction in the early days of Musk's doge by her posts that are kind of like data journalism. I use that term very loosely. Using manipulated data to justify Doge in a very

Starting point is 03:07:59 questionable way. And now she produces content, which is essentially like open source, like OSINT style data journalism for mega or a far right. audience. Her bio reads, I'm just a tool builder and has a quote from Musk saying that she's worth following, as well as a quote from Charlie Kirk saying, you're a must follow. Last week, Data Republican published a web tool, mapping out thousands of Antifa, anarchist, and left-wing websites from across the globe hosted through no blogs. And as we discussed last week, the collective that runs the infrastructure behind NoBlogs was designated as a specially designated global terrorist. Data Republican basically scraped every NoBlog's site that was online as of last

Starting point is 03:08:49 week and created an index of posts. If they host doxing information, calls to violence, and if they have any financial information or donation links, as well as, quote, institutional affiliations to other organizations such as the SPLC and any connections to other no blog's sites. She described a tool like this, quote, introducing an interactive map of 7,000 plus blogs across many countries and languages, anti-fascist, anarchist, ecological, prisoner solidarity, migrant border, revolutionary, everyone classified, geolocated, and searchable down to the verbatim quote. Verified quotes, every claim is a receipt, their words, not mine.

Starting point is 03:09:31 4,000 plus blogs pinned to a live world map, zoom in to your own city. Many blogs classified, quote-unquote, operational. Click any blog, author, or sell, and walk the network one tie at a time. No grant funded this. No client asked for it. I do this for free on my own time

Starting point is 03:09:49 because someone should, unquote. I have a little picture of the tool here below, which was titled Trump blogs. That's what she calls her tool to start. search all these different sites. She has little nodes on this map that are labeled mainstream authority for groups like the SPLC or the ADL. She has another node for Antifa slash watchdog

Starting point is 03:10:11 research, which she calls naming shops, basically, like, you know, info sites where anti-fascist researchers will name fascists in their area. Yeah. She's another nodes for movement legal defense, for like official political parties, mostly like international-based parties, and for movement infrastructure.

Starting point is 03:10:29 structures. Now, a few days prior, she posted a similar network map for the DSA, inspired largely by Marco Rubio's Cuba conspiracy document. This quote-unquote DSA explorer allows you to navigate an alleged web of connections between DSA members, journalists, politicians, and other left-wing organizations, other quote-unquote anti-imperialist organizations, foreign political parties, and Islamic terror groups. Data Republican has a few projects like this on, on her website. Other projects include the National Endowment for Democracy Explorer, quote, AI generated summaries of NED's Journal of Democracy Articles, authors, and NGOs, unquote. Perfect.

Starting point is 03:11:12 She also has another database of non-profit NGOs, their employees, and their volunteers, and whether they receive government funding. For instance, she has pages on 92 nonprofits focused on combating hunger. Truly, the worst of the worst being documented here. Yeah. She also has a database of grant funding, a 2024 voter turnout analysis,

Starting point is 03:11:36 and a link to her book on NGOs and USAID published under her real name, Jenna Capounds, with a forward by Doge's own Big Balls. Oh, my God. Is he credited using his legal name there or Big Bulls? No, he is credited as Big Balls. Like I read it, he is credited as Big Balls.

Starting point is 03:11:54 at the bottom of the Data Republican website is that link to a nearly 5,000-word essay from her pastor titled The Historical Case for Christianity. Last April, Jennifer Pounce, Data Republican, became a credentialed member of Hague Seth's revamped Pentagon Press Corps. Remember when he kicked out all this news outlets out of the Pentagon last March and replaced them with right-wing cheerleaders?

Starting point is 03:12:22 Pound's admission into the press corps. was part of this effort. And then last month, something odd happened in the Pentagon Press Corps. Jenica Pounce, Data Republican, accused someone from the State Department of trying to entrap her into leaking old Biden-era documents about Cuba by presenting the documents as an exclusive scoop. I'm going to read a quick text exchange that Data Republican posted on Twitter. This is her, quote, just to be clear, you want me to leak the material you.

Starting point is 03:12:54 You gave to me? Unredacted? Question mark? Happy to help your efforts. The person that she was texting to responded, quote, it already contains all necessary redactions. If you'd rather report on already open source stuff, that's fine too. But I wanted to give you the option of quote unquote breaking the story as a sort of gift, unquote. Okay. So as Data Republican, Jennifer Pounce posted a now deleted tweet reading, it's not okay when the date. deep state sets you up to commit a crime. I have never been more angry in my life. Meanwhile, the Undersecretary of State, Sarah Rogers, who oversees Voice of America, basically government-funded media, replied to Pound's thread about this alleged entrapment and tried to explain

Starting point is 03:13:43 that this wasn't a deep state plot trying to trick Pounds into committing treason, but rather a sincere offer from her, Sarah Rogers, to just publish some exclusive document. quote, L.O.L. These are my text messages and documents. The quote-unquote markings are FOIA redactions required for voluntary disclosure. To prove this isn't a quote-unquote trap, I will happily disclose the documents myself.

Starting point is 03:14:10 Here they are. And then Sarah Rogers posted a thread of those documents. Also, it's funny that she calls just redactions FOIA redactions, because these were not FOIA documents, but she just refers to those as FOIA redactions. Just an interesting note here. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:14:26 So essentially, Data Republican just botched a scoop because of her weird paranoia and because she doesn't really know how to do journalism, even like administration propaganda journalism. And in the midst of this shit show, like this caused a lot of drama, like on like, you know, MAGA Twitter. But in the midst of this shit show, the far right news aggregator account, America First News, claimed that Pounds wasn't just a Pentagon,

Starting point is 03:14:53 Press Court journalist, but was actually a, quote, Department of War employee, unquote. A big claim. And then a few days later, the Pentagon confirmed that Pounds was indeed an employee of the Department of War, the so-called. This is a statement from the DoD or the DOW, quote, Ms. Jenica Pounds serves at the Department of War as a special government employee and is no longer a credential journalist at the Pentagon. Her press credentials expired in June 26, and she did not seek a renewal.

Starting point is 03:15:28 She began working for the department in July 26, unquote. So that's pretty wild. And I will invite you to return back to this map of like Antifa Anarchist No Blogs websites that Pounds created while she was a special government employee of the Department of War. You know, same thing with this DHS list. Same thing with this, you know, voter analysis. Although the voter analysis, what I think was an older piece, but it's still hosted on her website.

Starting point is 03:15:54 But both this no blogs list and this network map of DSA were created and published as public tools while she worked and is still working for the Department of War. And then a few days after this was revealed,

Starting point is 03:16:09 the Washington Post published an article revealing that Pounce was not the only right-wing influencer secretly working for Pete Hague Seth. This is a quote from the Post. Quote, The Pentagon has secretly installed several conservative military veterans

Starting point is 03:16:22 with large eyeline followings in government roles, declining to disclose their assignments as they amplify Defense Secretary Pete Higgsett's viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration, unquote. So according to the Washington Post, at least three retired colonels who now boast hundreds of thousands of followers each on X-Eeverything app, have been assigned to civilian roles in the office of Anthony Tata,

Starting point is 03:16:47 the Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. And this office has been focusing on, on how to make the military less woke specifically. Man. These influencers are listed as either special government employees or, quote, highly qualified experts, which can work on a longer-term basis than special government employees

Starting point is 03:17:05 who can only work for a few months. And like these are influencers who are actively working on policy, on military policy, on how to make the military less woke, while also posting on their big accounts and in major, like, news publications, you know, like the Daily Caller and as well as Washington Post itself,

Starting point is 03:17:22 one of these influencers had a letter to the editor published in the post, like recently. And so they're doing all this and posting about how awesome Pete Hague set is, while never disclosing that they also work for Pete Hagstaff. Yeah. They work for T.E.X.F. Great. And like, again, Twitter sucks. But unfortunately, Twitter is still very consequential to national politics. It's one of the primary ways the administration, like, communicates with the people and, like, the public, like, digitally. And as a platform, it's important, not just to this administration, but especially for the so-called Department of War.

Starting point is 03:17:59 We've seen pictures from like live military operations that show that Hengseth has Twitter feeds pulled up on screen while special operations are underway. Demand is watching Twitter. Yeah, like in the situation room. Yeah, they're checking hashtags. And now they're recruiting staff from Twitter, including staff who are building publicly accessible tools mapping out the left. From the DSA and Palestinian solidarity organizations to Antifa, you know, Info blogs and anarchist reportbacks. She's building those databases while covertly working for the Pentagon.

Starting point is 03:18:34 And I want to close with this one reply she made to her posts regarding the no blogs tool. Quote, in the course of building this website, a number of anti-fascists were identified. I disclosed them, but not on the website directly to the USA government. unquote. The government that she works for, that she is working for. Yeah, yeah. How would you have that direct channel? When I let myself think too long about like, follow me, what frustrates me about climate change is the fact that we saw it coming a hundred years ago and just watch this slow, yeah, slow moving death and we're like, guys, it's, it's, it's on its way. This is where here's evidence, here's what's happening. It's coming. If we get above two degrees Celsius up,

Starting point is 03:19:21 we're above two degrees. Like this, what we're trying to, it's right there. It's right there. I feel like that when Pete Hackseth said, I'm going to fire everybody from the press corps. You're not allowed to come.

Starting point is 03:19:34 And you're going, he's going to hire his own press people. Guys, they're going to put him on the, he's going to, they're, she works for, she works for him.

Starting point is 03:19:42 Like, it's just, I, it's just so, this is the slowest moving, cool. Like, it's just, It's the slowest moving coup that you all see.

Starting point is 03:19:54 Hey, hey, hey, excuse me, excuse me. They're going to hire their own press and put, they're going to send all of our names to the government. Oh, there it is. I just, yeah, yeah. One of the things that gets me the most about this is how literally days ago, she was, you know, ranting about the deep state, you know. Of which she is part.

Starting point is 03:20:15 Well, she is a secret, like, covert, undisclosed, special government employee. That's you! She is you and you are it. People will often talk about like sci-ops or sci-war, right? And be like an individual person is a sci-op. And generally that's not how psychological warfare works, right? But like, now they're doing it.

Starting point is 03:20:36 That is what they're doing now. You're the thing. You're the thing. Yeah. It's great stuff. Oh, and one other thing that I do want to briefly mention, and this could just be a curious coincidence, but late last week,

Starting point is 03:20:51 No Blogs suffered a hack. A few days after the group that runs No Blogs, the IA Collective, was declared a specially designated global terrorist. The collective published a statement saying that the hack lasted about two hours, during which the title of No Blogs was changed to Trump blogs,

Starting point is 03:21:12 and the attacker, quote, may have had access to the user's database. Now, Trump blogs is also what Data Republican calls her no-blogs tracking tool. Now, I'm not saying that Data-Republican scraped No-Blogs data by hacking the website, but these two events did happen around the same time, which could just be a curious coincidence. There is no direct evidence that Data-Republican is the one who hacked no blogs, and the use of Trump blogs as a term isn't very original for one and could just be a sort of inside joke, troll, or reference.

Starting point is 03:21:55 But considering the fact that data Republican secretly works for the Pentagon, I thought this is something worth mentioning coincidence or not. You can draw your own conclusions. That should do it for us here at It Could Happen Here. If you want to email us, you can do it. cool zone tips at proton.me. Prop. Do you have any other podcasts

Starting point is 03:22:18 that you'd like us to listen to? Hey, it'd be great, actually. We have a cousin podcast called Hood Politics with Prop, where we dive into not the breadth of topics that were covered here, but a couple topics

Starting point is 03:22:31 that may make you scratch your head a little bit. Like, I feel like what they're saying is A, B, and C, and I get to go, yes, you're right. That's exactly what they're saying. So, yeah, tap in with me. Hood Politics with Prop every Wednesday and Friday.

Starting point is 03:22:44 Yep. We reported the news. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen here

Starting point is 03:22:59 is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, poolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Starting point is 03:23:11 You can now find sources where it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast. Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement agency that does not have body cameras. It's real. Black farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything. It's raw. And I'm sitting here going, they are playing y'all for fools. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information

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