It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 249

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Starting point is 00:02:10 So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hello, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen here. My name is Dan Al Curd. I'm a researcher of Arab and Palestinian politics, and today I'm joined by Hossam al-Hamilawi. Hossam is a journalist and socialist from Cairo, who was among the organizers of the 2011 protest.

Starting point is 00:02:44 He's been involved in the labor movement and the fight against police brutality in Egypt for many years, and holds a PhD in political science from the Free University of Berlin. He publishes a weekly newsletter on Egyptian politics, which I'll be linking in the show notes, and is author of the new book, Counter-Revolution in Egypt, Cici's New Republic. Hassam, thanks for joining us. Thank you, Diana, for having me. So let me start off by talking about the beginning of your book. At the beginning of your book, you talk about your own abduction and torture by state security in 2000.

Starting point is 00:03:16 And then you were an organizer, as I said, of the 2011 uprising. So how did living through this repression on a personal level shape the way that you studied the repression? And what can a participant see that maybe an outside scholar might make? There was like a long-running tradition in academia and in journalism, which fortunately it's being challenged over the past couple of decades at least, whereby this tradition tended to regard the scholar or the journalist as someone who's completely separate from whatever they are studying or reporting gone. They should be, between quotes, neutral, between quotes, objective. any form of attachment or passion for any cause would be considered a conflict of interest, more or less. But, I mean, a great chunk of my career, and this is also expressed in this book, I've been trying to challenge that. I consider myself a scholar activist, not just a scholar.

Starting point is 00:04:25 I was also an activist journalist, not just a journalist. And in that regards, in answer to your question, my experience when it comes to state repression has definitely shaped not just my intellectual trajectory, but my own personal life. After all, I'm doing this interview with you from Berlin, not from my home in Cairo, which I had to leave in 2015 and can't go back as long as this regime is. exists. My repression, which included the repeated arrests, torture, continuous threats to me and my family, exclusion from jobs, and I mean, the list is too long, have planted in me curiosity and also an existential reason to study who's repressing me, actually. I mean,

Starting point is 00:05:23 we tend to talk about the state or the security application. And I was very much interested in putting faces and names to these kind of entities. Who's doing what when it comes to repression? Who's doing the monitoring and who's doing the arrest? What's the profile of the officers who conduct these missions? Where do they come from? What's their background? What's their life trajectories?

Starting point is 00:05:53 How do they justify for themselves their actions? what's their worldview. And in so many ways, this curiosity has took me on a very long journey to study this apparatus also with the declared aim of dismantling it

Starting point is 00:06:13 one day when we are victorious in the coming revolution. Yeah, so you really opened up kind of the black box of the security apparatus and disentangled, I think, the ways in which maybe outside scholars kind of gloss over or lump different things together.

Starting point is 00:06:29 And everything you're saying really resonates with me as a Palestinian studying Palestine, like this endless suspicion of your own perspective. I'm glad that, as you said, there has been a pushback from our region and from scholars and activists in other places. But on this question of actually doing the research, you know, it must have been challenging because this regime wants to obfuscate. It wants to hide its doers. So it must have been challenging to find sources.

Starting point is 00:06:54 How did you find that information? what was your methodology for the book? That's a very good question. From the outside, Egypt looks like a very opaque country for very reasonable causes at the end of the day. This is a repressive regime. It's allergic to the flow of information and freedom of expression in general.

Starting point is 00:07:18 Egypt is not a researcher-friendly country at all. Once you mention Egypt in academia, people are always reminded with Giulio Regini, the Italian PhD scholar who was brutally tortured and murdered in Egypt. We don't have freedom of information acts in Egypt that allows us access into the archives of this security apparatus and the military and the other institutions that belong to that sector. but you can always find your way if you decide to become innovative. And I will just cite a couple of examples. First is that sometimes the best information you can get about an opaque military like the Egyptians is through their sponsors.

Starting point is 00:08:10 The Egyptian military is sponsored by the US. In the US, even when it's, of course, becoming sissified in so many aspects. but still there is a room, Freedom of Information Acts and other laws that allows you access. So if you go down, after we're done with the recording, just go to the US State Department website, check the FOIA section, and go back to 2011,

Starting point is 00:08:38 and check Hillary Clinton's emails that have been declassified. Right. The intelligence reports in these emails almost contain the Scap General's meeting, meetings, minutes, where Hillary is like saying, General Ruehaney said this, while the other general replied back saying, no, and it's as if she is sitting, you know, I mean, on the same meeting. But anyways, I mean, they are her proxies and clients, so she must get the information right away.

Starting point is 00:09:07 So I managed to get tons of information through actually declassified U.S. documents. the second method which I also invested some time in just by the fact that the military are now in the front seat not in the back seat when it comes to ruling and I guess we'll touch more on this later there are tons of mics that are shoved in front of the mouths of the different generals and the different senior officials

Starting point is 00:09:39 as well as CC and these guys don't have any filters They haven't received the same sophisticated training, I guess, where militaries in Western, quote-unquote democracies have, where they are always in contact with the media. So the kind of garbage and so many secretive things that you actually can't believe that they are saying, it's unbelievable. So just by browsing through their public statements, they are spilling the beans left and right. it. The last thing that I will say about the sources, I once heard a story in the beginning of the 2000s or late 1990s when I was still a student. And to be honest, I have no idea if this story was, I mean, it did happen or it's just an urban myth. But when I heard it, it resonated with

Starting point is 00:10:36 me and it stayed with me for four years to come and inspired me. The story goes like as follows. Following the peace treaty with Israel, when the Egyptians and the Israelis were sitting discussing joint cooperation projects, so the Israelis would propose some agricultural project, for example, and then they would tell the Egyptians, and we think that Mr. Muhammad, blah, blah, blah, at this department, at your agricultural ministry, would be the most qualified to lead it. and then they would like suggest others and they would like keep on proposing names and the Egyptians were shocked to find out

Starting point is 00:11:19 that as the story goes, that the Musad had the entire map of the Egyptian bureaucracy just by monitoring the obituaries because you know obituaries maybe the Westerners don't know this but obituaries in the Arab world you tend to put your entire family tree and brag about all the members

Starting point is 00:11:38 you know of the family This engineer and this doctor, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the entire family tree. And each one, you know, you start posting their CVs and, you know, their achievements. So actually, when I heard this, it stuck with me that story. And I applied that same methodology on like trying to track down police officers who are involved in torture in the years, like in the run up to the 2011 revolution. And I used the same technique in my reason. So I managed to map, for example, the new administrative structure of the military intelligence through obituaries, through surfing through the obituaries and, you know, digging up names and departments and things like that.

Starting point is 00:12:25 So, yeah, I mean, there is always a way to maneuver. I like how the security apparatus becomes a family business and the military becomes a family business. And I also love the fact that we can use the like the structures of American Empire to see. study its outposts. So yeah, that's very clever on your part to weaponize those sources. Okay, so let's get into the argument of the book. Basically, there's this idea of a counter-revolution, I think maybe for like the layman, also I think in some of the theoretical literature, but just generally speaking, the way that people think of counter-revolutions, we're thinking of a restoration of an old regime. But your main argument is that, as C.C.,

Starting point is 00:13:09 didn't restore Mubarak's Egypt. Mubarak was the president prior to the 2011 uprising. But he built something fundamentally different. You'll call it a second republic. So what makes this order different? And why does that distinction matter for how the world should understand Egypt right now? This indeed was the main argument of the book. My book was sort of an intervention in political debates that have been happening among the Egyptian dissident community. When I started this research, I'm talking here about the end of 2017, because I mean my book is, as you said earlier, it's my doctoral actually dissertation, which I did here in Berlin. So at the time, there were still debates about whether this regime is a return to the

Starting point is 00:14:01 Mubarak order or is it something new? Now, speaking to you in 2026, any five-year-old in Egypt would definitely, you know, would know would know that this is something completely different. You don't need to do a PhD about. But at the time, there was still so much unclarity. And my argument was a victorious counter-revolution does not restore the old order simply because the old order has failed. And by failure here, I don't mean the kind of failure that you and I would think of that the old regime was not democratic enough.

Starting point is 00:14:39 The old regime did not distribute wealth in an equal fashion. No, in the eyes of the counter-revolutionaries, the old regime failed because it failed to repress the revolution. So the kind of victorious regimes that come out of such a counter-revolution are usually regimes that try to avoid the mistakes of the past. So the generals, for example, who led the 2013 military coup, they regarded Mubarak as too lenient, as too weak. They completely detested the way that Husni Mubarak, between quotes, allowed those human rights NGOs to operate in the country. They couldn't believe that Hosni Mubarak allowed, again, between quotes, people to denounce him in the press, for example.

Starting point is 00:15:38 So this was not a restoration of the old Mubarak authoritarian formula. I mean, make no mistake. I'm not nostalgic to the Mubarak days. I don't see it as a viable model. but this was not a restoration of that old authoritarian formula. Instead, Cici built a new regime, which by the way, he's the one who coined the phrase the new republic or the second republic. And I know many people, they like to ridicule, you know, this term for very obvious reasons.

Starting point is 00:16:14 But it's actually, it's quite accurate. He contrasts the first republic, which lots of, it from 1953, that's one year after the three officers' coup when they abolished the monarchy and declared the republic, till 2013. This is all of it. It included three successive regimes, Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak. C.C. lumped them all together in one lot as the first republic. And actually, I'm arguing that he's right.

Starting point is 00:16:47 even when on the surface they had different inclinations, different stated goals, different international alliances. But when it comes to the core of how the state machine was organized, actually, they didn't differ that much. And there was some logic in organizing the security apparatus, which completely changed after 2013. Let's get into that in particular. It's the fact that Abdan Nalsar and Onward, they pitted different parts of the security apparatus against each other.

Starting point is 00:17:35 Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm not a scholar of Egypt. But my understanding is that under Mobadok's regime, they really bolstered, for example, general intelligence and things like this. So always kind of historically fragmenting different parts of the security apparatus so that they are rivals. And, of course, the dictator can be the arbiter. What you're saying is, in the book, especially is that CC unifies them for the first time.

Starting point is 00:18:01 And why is that unification the key to kind of understanding not only the type of repression, but the scale? And could it have happened without the 2011 revolution? There is a vast amount of literature in political science that discuss this term. It's called the dominant perceived threat. And the arguments usually that revolves around this term is that when autocrats reach power, they usually have a dominant perceived threat. I mean, don't get me wrong, any good autocrat. If they want to stay in power for a long time, they have to sheed themselves from all sorts of dangers.

Starting point is 00:18:47 But there is always a dominant one. And according to that dominant one, they start structuring. their security sector or security apparatus. So the argument also goes, and I mean, I support it, and I think it's correct and accurate, that if your dominant perceived threat is that of a military coup, then you tend to fragment your apparatus as you've just clarified. So you create multiple security institutions.

Starting point is 00:19:21 And I mean security here in the functional sense, like the military would be a security institution. They will all have overlapping mandates, hardly any communication or information sharing between them. They are always in a state of competition for resources. And there isn't much horizontal channels of communication. The only channels of communication are vertical. So that, as you also clarified earlier,

Starting point is 00:19:51 only the ruler would have the birth. eye view of what's happening beneath them. At the same time, you know, this ruler or this autocrat would definitely take precautions against riots, against foreign invasions, against, you know, what have you. But that if the dominant perceived threat was that of a military coup, they will do, as we just explained. So during the First Republic, I mean, how did the First Republic start? In case your listeners do not know, in July 1952, an eclectic group of nationalist army officers led by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Starting point is 00:20:36 They overthrew the British-backed king, and they declared the republic a year later. This was a time, Dana, where coups were almost a fashionable thing to do, I mean, across the global south. These were the years of decolonization. At the time, like, the militaries were still regarded in a favorable, actually, kind of lied by the nations that were still being formed. Many of them came from the anti-colonial fights. The military was regarded as a modernizing force professional that can get the country to go forward and catch up with the West. and break dependency ties. There was all of these kind of nostalgic,

Starting point is 00:21:28 romanticized visions of the military. So Egypt in that case was not really that unique. It was happening across our region and it was happening across the global south. So the immediate concern of these conspirators was a counter-coor. It makes sense. So this was their dominant perceived threat

Starting point is 00:21:48 and that's when the military intelligence Colonel Zakeria Mohi Dine, who was dubbed Nasser's barrier in reference to Stalin's barrier, he organized this security setup, which continued with us all the way up until 2013, whereby he fragmented the security sector. So you had the military, you had the Interior Ministry and its secret police, which changed its name, you know, several times, from the Mabakhf al-Amma to Mabash of Dahlia, to then after the revolution, Amn al-Watoni. And he created the General Intelligence Service in 1954,

Starting point is 00:22:29 or our Mukhabharat, as we call it. And by the way, it was modeled along the structure of the CIA from the start. They were very impressed, you know, with the CIA. And actually, they enjoyed good relations in order to fight communism. Because, you know, many people actually don't know that initially the free officers. they didn't really express any left-leaning sympathies, but they were kind of like pushed into it in the following years. So this was the security setup.

Starting point is 00:23:00 Not in their wildest dreams did they ever imagine that a revolution could happen in Egypt. I mean here a proper like popular revolution. And this is because our rulers, even when they, you know, came in the post-colonial years, they still maintain this colonial look whereby they despised their people. They saw the Egyptians as human beings without agency.

Starting point is 00:23:30 They regarded the Egyptians as incapable of self-organizing and that if they are let free or let loose, that they will bring the whole country together. So there always has to be some patriarchal kind of guardian of the Egyptians. They expected few riots to happen here and there, maybe some strikes

Starting point is 00:23:56 here and there, but not in their wildest nightmares that they thought a revolution could happen. Comes to 2011, and suddenly they are all shocked. And for two and half years,

Starting point is 00:24:12 they were panicking about the fact that the entire regime could have collapsed. So out of this, trauma and paranoia comes out the counter-revolutionary regime of Abdul Fattah Sisi, where the dominant perceived threat now is that of a popular revolution. And this is not, I mean, my own analysis. I mean, again, C-C does not miss a single occasion where he brings up 2011 and warns of 2011 and talks about, you know, the conspiracies to bring down the state.

Starting point is 00:24:48 even, you know, a few days ago before we record this podcast, he inaugurated the octagon. If the Americans have the Pentagon, we have the octagon. And the octagon is not really to protect, you know, the head of the state and the head of the army and the senior brass from, you know, foreign invasions, God forbid it. It's, Cici said it. He said that, you know, we're not going to repeat another 2011, which brought the whole country to. a standstill. So now we're moving the brain of the state, you know, somewhere safe. What ensued was the unification of the security apparatus for the first time since 1952. Don't get me wrong. I mean, they are still like three separate institutions. Friction is bound

Starting point is 00:25:39 to happen between them and it does happen every now and then between them. They might have different views, but they are not in competition. They are coordinating. They are sharing information. Sometimes they even share the same structures. I mean, there are units within the Egyptian army now that officially has the police as part of it, like unit triple eight, for example. They coordinate and they do joint operations all throughout the Sinai counterinsurgency and in the war on terror between codes in the Nile Valley. And in so many ways, everyone now, they understand that the military is the apex ruler. It's on the top.

Starting point is 00:26:22 But with it, it's younger siblings, the Makhabharat and the Interior Ministry, are in this kind of unholy alliance trying to protect the state from the conspiracies of the evil Egyptian people at the end of the day. Yeah, I have so many questions. I could talk to you forever. Shoot me. Well, I mean, one of the questions that popped up while you were talking about, talking about is because of the emergence from decolonization and because of the wars with Israel,

Starting point is 00:26:54 you know, because of all of the history that the military, the Egyptian military has in the country, I mean, I think it's common knowledge and public opinion would back it up to some degree that Egyptian public perception has been very pro-military and every ruler has come from a military background, as you mentioned. And given that the Egyptian people have now been named the dominant threat, do you think that that is changing public perception of the military apparatus? Let me first just go back to, I mean, even before 2011, whether Egyptians regarded the military favorably or not. There is definitely, I mean, this factor, which exists almost in every country, and you're in America, so you understand this too.

Starting point is 00:27:39 The military is always a core pillar of whatever nationalism or wherever nationalist ideology and patriotic ideology that exists in any country. And in the case of Egypt, the military, especially, you know, its role in the 1973 war against Israel, which is always depicted in our school curriculums and in our movies and, you know, whatever culture production, as a smashing victory against the Israel. Israelis, which is not, you know, I mean completely accurate to be fair. So there is definitely this glorification, but here is the thing, you know, those who tell me that, you know, Egyptians love the military and they regard it favorably. I always tell them, you know,

Starting point is 00:28:26 when it's conscription time, do you find everyone just running to the conscription centers because they can't really wait, you know, for the moment they put on the uniform and they get humiliated, you know, in some military factory or in some desert camp? Or do people try to find whatever excuses and fabricate whatever medical reasons in order to

Starting point is 00:28:53 and buy their way out of the military? You know, I honestly, like from my humble knowledge and from what I saw all throughout my life in Egypt, it's a nightmare. Everyone tries to buy their way out from the military.

Starting point is 00:29:09 Now, when the military intervened in the revolution, I'll go back also a little bit. Maybe the military was not running traffic. Maybe the military was not doing the actual daily policing before 2011. So most of the hatred was directed against the police because they are the ones that, you know, that you see on a daily basis who interact with you on a daily basis. The military, it is true that they were in their camps, but their tentacles were all over society. They had their own social clubs. As an Egyptian man, like, until a certain age, I can't leave the country except with their permission. They have their own economic and business ventures.

Starting point is 00:29:59 They have their own special status. So, yeah, you don't see the brass daily, but they are always there somehow. remotely. After 2011, I mean, they first deployed nationally on the streets following the collapse of the police. And in my book, I actually do go in details to clarify that not everyone welcomed their deployment initially. And with their own acknowledgement, I got statements from the military that talked about, you know, confrontations with the people as soon as they were deployed. But at the same time, there wasn't any other choice at the time in front of the people except trying to win over the conscripts and win over the military.

Starting point is 00:30:52 Confronting the military at the time after a very bloody war of attrition with the police over the previous days would have been suicide. So the famous chant, El Geshu Shiaub Iid Wadda, or the people. and the army are one hand, that came out in that context of us trying to win over the conscripts. An appeal. Exactly. So I know that this slogan then later got, you know, co-opted by the military and by the counter-revolution to mean something else. But initially, that's what it meant. So did the military keep its clout throughout the revolution?

Starting point is 00:31:31 I belong to the Egyptian revolutionary socialist, which is a revolution. leftist organization in the country. We were the only ones to issue an anti-military statement on the 1st of February during the 18 days. No other political organization issued any anti-military statements. And the 1st of February here was kind of like prophetic even, like this was one day before the Battle of the Camel, that was enabled partially also by the military at the time. And initially, we were an isolated minority. Most of the public were against us.

Starting point is 00:32:06 But then as the revolution progressed and people started to get disillusioned about the role of SCAF, the Supreme Council for the Armed Forces, they started to remember, oh, it was the Egyptian arrests who were warning us from the early on about this. And several confrontations exploded when it comes to SCAF in the streets, whether it's the Muhammad Mahmoud uprising in November. or the Occupy cabinet clashes in December 2011. So the thing of the military, like, it goes back and forth, back and forth up and down. I cannot say that it's something constant. With 2013, there were sections of Egyptian society who supported the massacus and supported the army's intervention. But also there were victims of that intervention.

Starting point is 00:33:01 And I think SCC lost cloud, as he proceeded, because he's now running the country and governing it solely by coercion, no consent. People can see in front of them how the military turned into a monster that's basically taking over everything in the country. Does that mean when another revolution breaks out that everyone will be anti-military from the start? I don't think so. If there isn't a clear alternative that's telling the people that another solution is possible other than the military, I think they will play the same game of like getting rid of the regime and retreating for few steps, but keeping things as they are.

Starting point is 00:33:48 And they are, you know, unfortunately, in some ways in a strengthened position, as you said, because they learned the lesson of the possibility of popular mobilization. I mean, they've moved the capital. there's the octagon like everything you've mentioned. And I think it's so apt the way that you describe the regime acting like a colonial occupier more than a national government because it does, as you mentioned, have this view of its own people as underdeveloped and unworthy of having their own political agency. So for Egyptians today in Egypt, what does daily life look like under this, you know,

Starting point is 00:34:35 unfortunately more aggressive system? Unfortunately, it's a very miserable situation. When Cece rose to power and took office officially in 2014 as a president, Egypt's foreign debt was roughly $41 billion. Today, it's over $163 billion. In this year's government budget, we're talking about 63% at least of the government budget, will go for the debt service, 63%.

Starting point is 00:35:13 Let me repeat that again, 63% of the government budget. It's not going to go for education, it's not going to go for health, it's not going to go for whatever, it's going just to pay the interest on the debt. So this means also the following. It means that there is austerity measures on steroids to the extent that people are sharing their memories of the 2000s and 1990s as the good old days. And again, these were the days of the height of our neoliberal transition, which is part of why we had the revolution in the first place.

Starting point is 00:35:52 But the situation now, the economic situation, is that bad that even the austerity of the 1990s and the 2000s, they sound like heaven today. Secondly, when it comes to political repression, the political repression, the political repression also it's compared to CC, Mubarak is a human rights activist, is a human rights defender, you know, compared to what we're seeing today. The unification of the repressive apparatus in Egypt only led to heightened lethal and carceral violence. The regime, and this might sound Orwellian, but the regime was boosting in the public media that were building the biggest prison on earth. and they are listing this as part of their achievements.

Starting point is 00:36:42 So how does life look like today? You have three or four generations of Egyptians from, let's say, 2013 up until today, who graduated from university without ever taking part in a protest, without ever taking part in a political debate, without ever drafting a statement or distributing a leaflet. without ever taking part in a string union election, without ever taking part in a parliamentary electoral campaign in their neighborhoods.

Starting point is 00:37:18 Cici has desertified the political scene in Egypt. He dismantled most of the political organizations in the country. Even apolitical charities, any entity that's independent from the state got taken over or dismantled. by the state apparatus. So you have really a draconian kind of regime that we've never witnessed in our modern history. Even under Nasser, I mean, Nasser usually is always referred to as the reference when it comes to military dictatorships and what have you. But it's not true. Yeah, I mean, he was a dictator, of course, but he feared the military.

Starting point is 00:37:59 He feared a coup. So he had to create a vast array of political institutions in order to counter the military. is power. And these political institutions were a vehicle for Egyptians, though with limits, of course, but to mobilize, to conduct, to discuss, to organize. And there was some space, some kind of political education, which is now non-existent. As I'm talking to you now, you know, the Egyptian national team has returned to Egypt, our football national team. and they have done like really a great achievement at the World Cup which you know it never happened in our history the government announced that they are preparing like a mass popular welcome for the national team

Starting point is 00:38:51 alamain not in cairo so they arrived at the libyan border at our border with Libya like all the way in the desert to be received by the state officials and later they will meet cilio you see. And, you know, like a few hundred people like showed up in the desert in that scratching, you know, sun heat to wait for them. Because this regime is so crowdphobic, so people phobic that they wouldn't even dream that, you know, they would have this welcoming Cairo where the real crowds are. It is to that extent, our football league, for example, which has always been famous and popular, you know, in the Arab world, let alone Egypt, is being played without fans. It stayed for years and the stadiums were empty. And then

Starting point is 00:39:46 they now allowed only 5,000 people to show up. The capacity of the Cairo Stadium, for example, is 120,000. And I used to attend matches where it was full. Now they only allow like, you know, 5,000 fans for each one because they are so crowdphobic. This is the reality we're living under, but I'm also arguing at the end of the book that this is not a sustainable model. Yeah, an incarcerated population. But as you said, at the end of the book, you're saying there are cracks in the regime's internal unity and I think you also mentioned the parliamentary crisis. So what do you think are the seeds of another 2011? What would resistance look like this time?

Starting point is 00:40:31 What would it need to look like this time? Because, I mean, you and I both agree that coercion alone cannot sustain these types of regimes. You were saying earlier that they have learned their lessons, which, you know, on the surface, this might be true. But I would argue that they have probably learned the wrong lessons because there are counter-revolutions across history that, yeah, was violent. was repressive, you know, and there was bloodshed. But at the same time, these counter-revolutions also, since they were far-sighted, they tried to address some of the problems that led to the outbreak of the revolution in the first place, not because they are Democrats, but they just want to diffuse, you know, any

Starting point is 00:41:21 potential problems. Now, let's look at Egypt. And actually, the Arab Spring in general, not just Egypt. There are tons of reasons why the Egyptian and the Arab revolutions broke out in 2011. But I can, in a reductionist way, I can simplify them into two main problems. One is the issue of political repression and police brutality. The other one is the social question or the unequal distribution of wealth. these were the two main structural problems

Starting point is 00:42:00 that provided the objective conditions to have an uprising in Egypt. And actually the Arab world, I mean, I can generalize here. Again, knowing that each country had its own specificities, Syria had its own, you know, I mean, conditions and problems, Tunisia had its own, blah, blah, blah. But, you know, these two were the common denominator and the main motor force for these revolutions.

Starting point is 00:42:25 Now, let's look at Egypt. The counter-revolution, yes. I mean, it killed the revolutionaries. It repressed the revolutionaries. But did they provide answers to these two problems? No. Any child in Egypt could answer this. You don't need a PhD scholar to tell you that actually political repression is even much, much, much worse today.

Starting point is 00:42:48 Secondly, when it comes to the distribution of wealth, it's even as much the economic condition is, it's unlawful. unbelievable at this point. So as long as these two structural problems continue with us, there will always be the objective conditions for another revolt. What's missing here is the subjective conditions, which means is Husam and Dana and X and Y and Z and Muhammad and Michael. And are we organized? Are we trying to put out new ideas?

Starting point is 00:43:25 Are we trying to mobilize even under repression, you know, in these campaigns here and there? That's what's missing. The repression was extremely effective in terms of dismantling the different political organizations and the independent unions in the country. But part of also why the repression was effective was the fact that there was full blank check backing from the regional. and the global allies of the regime. The UAE and Saudi Arabia in specific in the region. And globally, you had the US and more importantly the EU. I would actually be arguing that it's the EU that's much more complicit

Starting point is 00:44:11 in enabling the CC regime more than America, which goes against the historical trajectory of that regime. So the regime was confident. The regime could ask, you know, the Gulf allies and the West, as long as he was fighting the revolution, as long as he was dismantling the Islamists, and as long as he's killing this boogeyman called the January 2011 revolution. Until Cici woke up by 2021 with COVID and the war in Ukraine, to find out that first our death has spiraled out of control and that the Gulf were not really that keen on

Starting point is 00:44:55 keeping, you know, these bailouts to continue. There were even like some leaked reports that Muhammad bin Zayed of the UAE complaining that Cici thinks he's some ATM. I don't know if it's true or not, but, you know, it signaled a different mood. And there was even a famous statement by Cici, which then was taken down from most of the news websites

Starting point is 00:45:22 at the time, but I had screenshoted it. and I listened to that speech, where he was complaining, saying something along the line of some of our Arab brothers, they think that Egypt is incapable of progress and blah, blah, blah. And he was like lamenting, you know what I mean, the situation. And that's when, you know, the regime started to act in a very unconfident way, released some political prisoners, called for a national dialogue, which, I mean, it never really materialized into anything important, but it was just a signal that they were scared. They were scared because the economic situation was bad and because that if any form of

Starting point is 00:46:08 revolts take place, whether it's local or whether it's on the national level, they don't have that civil society in the Grammcian sense that can act as a buffer to protect them. Husni Mubarak was an autocrat, it's true, but Husni Mubarak was presiding over very vibrant civil society. And it's that civil society that actually saved the state from a full-fledged revolution in January 2011. There was the Muslim Brotherhood that you can try to negotiate with in exchange for, you know, suspending the Harir and will give you, you know, a share of the cake. there used to be like left-wing political parties that you can try to negotiate with

Starting point is 00:46:55 and promise some parliamentary seats in exchange for diffusing industrial militancy there was this, there was that, there was this, there was that this, there was that. This is what enabled Husni Mubarak to rule Egypt for three decades but it is exactly that authoritarian formula that Sisi and the generals regarded as the main reason for 2011.

Starting point is 00:47:20 So what we have now is the state presiding over society without any buffers. It's the military that's micromanaging the society on daily basis. It's the police that's micromanaging society on a daily basis. It's the Mukhabarat who are also doing the same. And there is division of labor between them. They will remain united as long as things are going really well. But once you hit the wall, once a crisis erupts, whether you are a political organization, whether you are the state,

Starting point is 00:47:52 whether you are a group of friends, that's when people, you know, start looking at one another and exchange blames or propose very diverse ideas. Some will think we should go left, others will say we should go right, and that's when cracks start to happen. I'm not implying that, you know, the divisions are now deep, but you can say, start seeing few cracks here and there. And in the background, you started to see also an incremental rise in industrial actions over the past few years. It's not like the 2006 till 2011 strike wave, which, you know, once erupted in the Halle,

Starting point is 00:48:37 it spread by the domino effect all over, you know, the country. It's very incremental. Has its own problems, but it's rising. And it's that social movement which I always bet on for the future. A lot to think about and a lot of historical events

Starting point is 00:48:55 come to mind. So as you were talking, I was thinking about the bread into Philadelphia, but like you mentioned, there's not some sort of buffer to absorb in today's Egypt. Another thing I was thinking about as we were talking the entire time

Starting point is 00:49:07 was this sci-fi collection, Egypt 100, about what Egypt looks like 100 years after 2011. I'm going to put that in the show notes if people are interested because it imagines what, like, moving the capital and doing all these things, like, what will that mean for Egyptians in 100 years? It's a little dystopian, but you are leaving me more hopeful than sci-fi leaves me. Thank you so much for coming on and I really appreciate your time. Thank you, Dan. It's always a pleasure to speak to you.

Starting point is 00:49:40 Take care, everybody. 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. Hey, everyone. It's the Jonas Brothers with the Hey Jonas podcast. We've been catching up with some great friends, Paul Rudd, Michael Boubley, Seth Myers, Nile Horan, Jake Shane, and making some new friends while getting into what's really like to have sisters, like Alex and Asgen-Earl. She likes to control everyone and tell everyone. Okay, well, control is a harsh word. I would say that's a harsh word. I am more outspoken.

Starting point is 00:50:26 Growing up a lot of the times because she was so quiet, I would speak for the both of us. Now I'm working on, like, thinking a moment, really not controlling a minute. Not controlling a minute. And Joey King. You know if you're like, mom is yelling at your sibling, and even if you're annoyed with your sibling, you just like won't let that slide.

Starting point is 00:50:44 It's like, only you can yell at your sibling. I'm like, you can't do that here. That is, you do not talk about her like that. Only I talk about her like that. Plus, we've been taking. your calls, listening to your voicemails and giving advice, or at least trying to. So if you've got catching up to do, now's

Starting point is 00:50:59 the perfect time. Listen to Hey Jonas 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 Proz Society. The weekly podcast, that's

Starting point is 00:51:15 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. So 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

Starting point is 00:51:43 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 IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. 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.

Starting point is 00:52:18 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, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from.

Starting point is 00:52:53 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. Welcome to It Could Happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. On Monday, August 27th, ICE arrested right-wing provocateur Milo Yianoplas at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. and within just a day, Milo was deported to the UK. In a statement from August 28th, the Department of Homeland Security referred to Milo as a quote-unquote,

Starting point is 00:53:33 illegal alien from the United Kingdom, and said that he, quote, legally entered the country on May 14, 2019, through New York City, New York. He chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation's laws. Yonapolis was issued a final order of removal by an immigration judge on July 22nd,

Starting point is 00:53:55 after failing to show up for his immigration hearing. So according to DHS, Milo Yianoplas both overstayed a visa and did not show up to immigration court hearings. And so, in abstentia, a judge ordered his removal. We'll get more into that later this episode, and we'll also get into some of Milo's background in a bit. But safe to say that the former rising story, star of the alt-right, currently has more enemies than friends on the political right and in the

Starting point is 00:54:28 mega world. His deportation has been met with some amusement among the online left, but even more so among the online right. In fact, multiple far-right influencers have claimed credit for Milo's deportation, most notably and plausibly, one of Milo's old friends-turned-enemies, Laura Lumer. After reports of Milo's arrest broke online, Lumer posted on X-The- Everything app, quote, breaking. Illegaliannipolle has been detained by ICE. I was the first person to report on the fact that Milo is in the U.S. illegally where he incited violence against President Trump and worked for Marjorie Trader Green. Recently, Candice Owens invited this illegal alien into her home. When Milo called for me to be assassinated, I reported him to ICE and the FBI. I told you all that Milo was an illegal alien. He was

Starting point is 00:55:25 detained in Louisiana by ICE. Milo's going to be deported back to the UK where he can live among the Muslims he has recently chosen to embrace. Today is a great day for America. The next day, Lumer said that DHS told her that Milo is, quote, never allowed to come back to the United States ever again. Now, I'm not doing this episode to dunk on Milo Giannoplas and cheer on that he has been deported. This mechanism of deportation should not exist in the country, whether it's used against poor working-class immigrants from Haiti or the most annoying right-wing fascist that you can imagine. Milo still has access to millions and millions of dollars of wealth. He will be completely fine. The same cannot be said of the majority of immigrants who are deported by ICE. But this

Starting point is 00:56:20 situation does represent a very interesting moment in right-wing politics. I never thought the leopards would eat my face, etc., etc. Milo played a not insignificant role in getting Trump elected back in 2016, and now is suffering some consequences from the world that he helped bring into being. And before I continue, I want to make one other note. I'm trying to to be really careful in how I cover this story, because Milo himself is a professional attention seeker. It is not completely impossible that whether he knew he had a final order of removal or not, he claims he didn't, but usually an inobstantial ruling only comes after the court knows the person is receiving notices to appear in court and is choosing not to, but regardless

Starting point is 00:57:10 of whether he knew that he could be deported, Milo will certainly try to use. this moment for political and personal benefit. A few days after being deported, Milo made his first public appearance on Pierce Morgan's show. And I will play a few clips from this appearance, but let's keep in mind that Milo has his own careerist interests at the center of nearly everything he does in the public eye. That said, here are Milo's very first comments after being deported. I don't think I've ever been afraid before like I was the last week. Maybe I've lived in especially posited and cosseted life. But I think for the first time I know what it feels like to be really, really terrified.

Starting point is 00:57:58 What were you terrified of? Well, I'd like to get to some of the claims that were made by Homan in a moment. But I didn't really understand the... the physical reality of how institutionalized the brutality is in America. The manner in which they arrest you, they put your manacles, your hands, your feet, chain it together. I mean, like, everybody is arrested is like an MS-13 gang member, and it hurts a lot more than it looks like on television.

Starting point is 00:58:28 So right off the bat, he is lying and trying to garner sympathy. He absolutely did know about the physical institutional brutality of deportation. While he is certainly correct that he has lived a shell- altered, privileged life. He has also watched those videos of the U.S. government deporting or renditioning hundreds of people to Seacot. And in this interview, he references MS-13 gang members, even though most of the people sent to Seacot had no criminal convictions and no due process.

Starting point is 00:59:00 And back then, Milo just didn't care about that and only cares about due process now for himself after facing a tiny shred of the pain and suffering. thousands of people less fortunate than him have been subjected to. You know, I was put from, you know, detention facility to a correction facility. You know, every three hours, they were sort of trying to keep ahead of my lawyers, so I couldn't, you know, whatever. But no one would tell me anything. It was, I mean, I know it's designed to be like that, but it's, it was, sure, it was humiliating and it was disorientating all the rest of it. it was physically degrading.

Starting point is 00:59:44 It was frightening. It was frightening. I don't think I've ever been frightening like that before. Yeah, that sounds like it sucks, dude. But the thing is, later on in this very interview, Milo says he's still not opposed to ICE as an organization or deportations in general. But rather, the problem is,

Starting point is 01:00:03 is that we're just not deporting the right people. On January 2nd, 2025, you posted punishing, Somalis indiscriminately as a group and deported them all as the only way this administration will persuade the voters. It is serious enough to the job. And then again in May 25, there's one concrete thing we must insist on this administration delivering. It matters a lot more than debts measured in imaginary money. We've got to deport millions and millions of people without that nothing else matters in September 2025, total legal immunity for ICE agents when they're on

Starting point is 01:00:36 duty. And 21st of September 2025, justice system should be just ice. So, there you are aggressively promoting ICE being very aggressive and demanding that millions of people be deported. People say, Milo, you've been hoisted by your own partard. And I don't have a word to say. You got me. I'm very... Look, I mean, they're doing what you told them to do. Deport millions of people.

Starting point is 01:01:00 Not really. It just happened to include you. They're not doing it lawfully. And I think... You did say about Somalis, they should be deported indiscriminately. Well, I'm obviously exaggerating. Deporting them all. Obviously exaggerating there.

Starting point is 01:01:12 I thought is that ISIS supposed to be deporting criminals. So first it's you got me. Then it's no, see, they're not actually doing it lawfully. And later on, Milo plainly states that ICE is supposed to be deporting criminals. Just in the past year, Milo has made multiple posts on X the Everything app calling for 10,000 deportations a day. has warned that if the Trump administration doesn't get real fast about left-wing terror and deporting millions of illegals, Americans will adopt vigilante justice. In June of 2025, Milo called for ice checkpoints at supermarket entrances, gas stations, strip malls, intersections, government buildings,

Starting point is 01:01:59 with, quote, on-the-spotation for anyone who can't prove they are in the U.S. legally. He has justified and celebrated DHS executing anti-ice protesters and has talked about getting horny while watching ice raids. Quote, what is the etiquette if you are going about your business and find yourself observing an ice raid? I want to show a little respect and decency. Are you allowed to masturbate where you stand, in the street, or should you find some kind of awning or motor vehicle? Unquote. Let's back up for a second.

Starting point is 01:02:34 Who is Milo Ionopoulos for those lucky enough to not be in the know? Milo is a right-wing provocateur in the truest sense of the term. His engagement with politics is based on provoking people. One of Milo's protégés, who lives in New York, has described their own life as a form of performance art, and I think Milo sees his life in a very similar way. I'm not going to go over his whole history from the past 10, 20 years, because that would take up multiple full-length episodes, and I just don't think it matters all that much. But here's the broad strokes for context.

Starting point is 01:03:16 Milo Yanoplas is a British, far-right political commentator. In 2014, he started working for Breitbart. He was a major participant in Gamergate, and in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election, he became one of the first big figures in the then-emerging alt-es. right. Milo was an early mega-adopter. Starting in the summer of 2016, he began promoting a series of events called Twinks for Trump. Twinks for Trump is a so-called art exhibition, featuring scantily clad photos of boys or young men wearing Make America Great Again hats. Milo's canceled 2017 autobiography titled Dangerous, which was canceled by Simon and Schuster, discusses the Twinks for Trump art exhibit, which struggled to open after the gallery

Starting point is 01:04:08 venue pulled out. To quote, Milo, I bathed in freezing cold pig's blood for 45 minutes, surrounded by images of innocent Americans, slain by terrorists and illegal aliens. Now there was a genuinely subversive piece of art, gay men celebrating the orange Antichrist. Could you imagine if Madonna or Paris Hilton released a video with a bunch of underage boys in mega hats? No, of course you can't, because the only people pushing the envelope in art these days are Republicans. Unquote. Keep that underage boys comment in mind. It's a surprise tool that will help us later.

Starting point is 01:04:48 So in this era of the mid-20 teens, Milo was a pretty big figure, big enough to earn a major book deal. But as I said, his book deal fell through. because in 2017, Milo suffered a major fall-off after some pro-petaphaeolia comments he made in 2016 went viral ahead of a speaking gig at CPAC 2017. In this frenzy around Milo's comments defending pedophilia, CPAC canceled Milo's speaking slot. His autobiography was pulled by Simon & Schuster, and he resigned from Breitbart. After stepping down from Breitbart,

Starting point is 01:05:32 Milo addressed public calls for him to be deported based on the assumption that his work visa was tied to his job at Breitbart, something Milo denied. February 2017 was a big month for Milo Yanopoulos. Because right before things started going downhill for him, he was also supposed to give a speech at UC Berkeley, after being invited to campus by the college Republicans, as a part of his quote-unquote dangerous faggot tour,

Starting point is 01:06:03 where he goes to various universities and tries to make college students upset, over 1,500 people showed up to UC Berkeley to protest his speaking event, including about 150 people who the school referred to in a statement as masked agitators. These would be black block antifa-style protesters. Based on the size and intensity of the protest, the police canceled Milo's speaking event two hours before he was scheduled to speak. Masked protesters, smashed windows, set off fireworks, lit fires through Roxette police and used Molotov cocktails in and around campus.

Starting point is 01:06:42 This event was one of the first times that I can consciously remember Antifa as a concept of people like talking about like Antifa. It was in the aftermath of this UC Berkeley event. This was a pretty big deal. The day after this protest, President Donald Trump tweeted, quote, If UC Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people

Starting point is 01:07:09 with a different point of view, no federal funds? Question mark. This protest was a big turning point for left-wing street demos during this period and intensified what would become a nationwide conflict between right-wing agitators proclaiming their right to free speech

Starting point is 01:07:28 and so-called anti-fascists seeking to counter and disrupt far-right events and de-platform figures like Milo. Around 2017, Milo started becoming more of a sideshow figure in the rapidly changing alt-right, far-right world. Later in 2017, he married his husband in Hawaii and the world carried on

Starting point is 01:08:03 without Milo taking up as much oxygen. which made it all the more not really surprising but annoying, that in 2021, Milo attempted to emerge from irrelevancy to proclaim that he was no longer gay, that he had embraced Catholicism and is now, quote, ex-gay and, quote, demoted his husband to housemate. You should remember this for later. Now, one of Milo's openly stated goals regarding this,

Starting point is 01:08:35 what I'm going to call an ex-gay stunt, was to reintroduce conversion therapy as a political project. To quote Milo, given my new spiritual preoccupations, over the next decade, I would like to help rehabilitate what the media calls conversion therapy. And unfortunately, he may have been more successful in this endeavor than what one may have assumed back in 2021. conversion therapy laws have since been loosened,

Starting point is 01:09:07 and forms of conversion therapy are now actively promoted by the federal government for trans youth. In 2022, Milo interned for Marjorie Taylor Green, and maybe did some ghostwriting for her, at least according to a lower loomer. Also, that year, Milo started working for Kanye West, along with Nick Fuentes, and we all know how that turned out. I am Adolf Hitler, command of the Third Reich. Oh, and little-known fact, Milo began working for Kanye again this year after resigning in 2024 because of Kanye's decision to launch an adult entertainment division of the Yeezy brand.

Starting point is 01:09:46 During this 2022-24 time period, Milo was burning whatever bridges that hadn't already totally combusted among the online right. In 2023, Milo accused Laura Lumer of sexually assaulting one of her employees after Lumer criticized Marjorie Taylor Green on Twitter. Lumer and Marjorie Taylor Green have beefed for years. Lumer has said that Green saw her as like a rival to the queen of the Maga throne and has claimed that Green was responsible for Trump not hiring Lumer in 2003. Though more recently, Lumer, who is strongly pro-Israel, has attacked Marjorie Taylor Green for her opinions on Gaza and Israel. But Milo and Lumer had been friends, or at least friendly, since at least 2018.

Starting point is 01:10:35 And in 2020, Milo worked on Lumer's first unsuccessful congressional campaign. They suffered a pretty severe falling out around when Milo started working for Marjor, Taylor Green, severe enough to possibly lead to his deportation. And since then, Milo has not done himself any favors. After Trump took office, again, Milo has been reigniting or, conflict between himself and the mega hardline influencers who defend any and all of Trump's actions. For years, Milo has claimed to have blackmail and a bunch of right-wing influencers. A few years ago, Milo accused Benny Johnson of secretly being gay. Johnson promised to sue Milo in

Starting point is 01:11:20 response, which he never did, and now says he couldn't do because Milo was running from ice. In response to Milo posting that President Trump has lost his way, on March 16, 26, Lumer wrote, Why hasn't the Trump administration deported Milo? He's allegedly living in Los Angeles on an expired visa. He's calling for regime change in the U.S. and posts Holocaust denial as an immigrant. It's time for him to be deported. He didn't campaign for Trump. Milo is a foreigner, unquote.

Starting point is 01:11:57 From what I can find, this post by Lumer is the first time she accused Milo of being in the country illegally and called for his deportation. Next month in April, Lumer said that, quote unquote, sources told her that Milo was facing deportation proceedings. And after Milo was deported last month, Lumer told reporter Will Sommer that she reported Milo to DHS years ago. Here's borders are Tom Homan on CNN, being asked whether Laura Lumer put ice on Milo's trail. With several, a lot of people tipped ice off.

Starting point is 01:12:34 There are a lot of people calling ICE. And she said she's one of them. She probably was. But bottom line is, it doesn't matter. He was ordered removed by an immigration judge, and ICE's job should execute that order. On Pierce Morgan, Milo insisted that he did not overstay a visa. Quote, but even if I had, things are supposed to. to happen in a particular order.

Starting point is 01:12:54 Everything that happened was very off, unquote. Milo says he was swarmed by 15 ice agents after he got off the plane in Louisiana and said that two ice agents recognized him and said, yeah, I'm not doing this and this is not what I got into this for and quote unquote walked off the job. Milo also told Pierce Morgan that when he got to Houston, ice agents were getting calls from Washington every 20 minutes to inquire about Milo's whereabouts. Well, people on the left have come forward, interestingly, who don't even like you, and to say that this is a disturbing infringement potentially of your First Amendment rights to free speech, that you're being punished for your views of Donald Trump and the Trump administration and so on. that Laura Luma, who is, you know, extremely devoted to President Trump and in his ear all the time,

Starting point is 01:13:52 has used your association with Candice Owens and with Marjorie Taylor Green and others, has decided to basically shut you up by sending you back to the UK. I don't know how we can come to any other conclusion. This is not how immigration systems are supposed to work. And there are, you know, seven, eight, nine things that are supposed to happen that do for everybody else that didn't in my case. because they were so anxious to just throw me on a plane because they know how much more difficult it gets once you know, once you're out. But, you know, I've very good lawyers,

Starting point is 01:14:24 and they do not believe this will stand at all. On CNN, Tom Homan denied that the Trump administration chose to make an example of Yanopolis by deporting him to send a message. We don't deport people based on political affiliation. Again, as soon as we get an order of removal, our goal is removed as quick as possible, regardless of who they are.

Starting point is 01:14:44 He overstated his visa. I believe his visitor's visa, but I'm sure. But he overstayed the visa. He was ordered to appear in immigration court. He didn't show up. The judge ordered him deported. So once ICE gets an order deportation from a federal judge, their job should execute that order, and that's what they did.

Starting point is 01:15:02 On Pierce Morgan's show, Milo pushed back on homins and DHS's claims about his visa and legal status. Milo insists that he never overstayed a visa and did not know he had a final removal order. The thing that astonishes me, I have to say, is to see the various bits of the American government, all the machinery of the government, kind of lining up to lie in the manner that Tom Homer just did. I mean, I want to be completely clear with you and with your viewers, like, I manage, I don't really do, you know, the right-wing provocateur thing anymore. I manage lawyers for a living. You know, I'm pretty organized and together person when I'm, you know,

Starting point is 01:15:39 when I'm not being silly on Twitter. And I'm married to an American. There's no reason I would take a risk like this. I didn't need to have a visa. There were dozens of companies who could have sponsored me, and I'm married to an American. Milo later said that he first entered the U.S. legally under an O-1 visa years ago. That's a

Starting point is 01:15:58 temporary work visa for, quote, individuals with extraordinary ability or achievement. Milo told peers that he's actually had a few of these O-1 visas, and the last one he had expired in 2019. But before that happened in 2017,

Starting point is 01:16:14 Milo married an American citizen and got a green card. Filed for an adjustment of status, basically to switch tracks from a visa to a green card. And that's what I did. Went to the interviews, and that's what I had. And you got a green card? Yes. But when... So if you have a green card, on what basis have they thrown you out of the country?

Starting point is 01:16:36 They sent notices to an address they knew I didn't live at anymore. Two addresses ago in Florida, almost 10 years ago. in order to get an in absentia hearing, which is basically they show up with a judge, they tell the judge you didn't show up, you didn't respond to the notices, and they ask the judge to give them an order. That's what happened.

Starting point is 01:16:57 So Milo claims that notices regarding his immigration status and court summons were purposefully sent to an address that the government knew he didn't live at so that he wouldn't show up to court so that they could get a judge to agree to deport him. He's arguing that all of the... this was politically motivated because he has enemies close to the administration and was essentially set up. Milo also told Pierce that, quote unquote, they had previously canceled his work permit

Starting point is 01:17:26 without telling him and claimed that the ICE agents who detained him said that they, quote unquote, deliberately excluded Milo's lawyer from the immigration court process. Milo did claim that he had given his new address to immigration authorities, but that they only mailed these hearing notices to his old address in Florida. And what of his green card? Is your green card still valid? No, because they cancelled it without telling me. When? That I don't know. But what period of time could it have been cancelled? Well, it must have been cancelled sometime the last year. I mean, you presume we, have you travelled to and from America? I happened not to have done the last year. When was the last time you entered America? Probably two years ago.

Starting point is 01:18:11 So Milo also says his green card was quote-unquote cancelled within the last year without him knowing it. Revoking green cards is a very serious civil rights issue. This is something we have spoken on this show about the Trump administration's efforts to revoke green cards from protesters speaking out about the genocide in Palestine. The issue of green card revocation is a serious one. Though Milo admits that the last time he entered the country with his green card. card was two years ago. And this is interesting, Milo says he only had a two-year green card, that he had been renewing every two years. How long is the green card valid for? Well, you can either get it for two or ten years. What did you have it for? So I had two years,

Starting point is 01:18:58 and I was renewing on a two-year basis. Had that elapsed? No, no, I had not. No, had not. So at least according to Milo, the world's most trustworthy man, his green card had not expired by the time of his deportation. It is certainly theoretically possible that Milo just did not renew his green card in time, had issues renewing his green card, or his card was revoked in relation to issues with his marriage, which is how he obtained the two-year green card in the first place. More on that in a sec. But during this interview, Milo did confirm to peers that he is still married to a man despite coming out as quote, ex-gay five years ago. Well, I'm married to an American.

Starting point is 01:19:41 I've got dependents. I've got cats. I've got, you know, I've got employees. I have a whole life there. I've been there for 10 years. You know, everything is there. You're married to an American woman? No.

Starting point is 01:19:51 Man? Does it have been... I don't know a prime to your sexuality. Yeah, I don't... I know you've... I mean, you're a gay man and you're married to a gay man. I... Yes.

Starting point is 01:20:02 I don't... Yeah. Is that? I don't... I don't do the sex stuff anymore, but yes. Okay. Listen, I'm only asking because I just want to know what family you have left in America. Yeah. Where is your spouse?

Starting point is 01:20:12 Living in the same house at the other end of the corridor. In which state is this? This is in California. In California, in L.A. Yes. Right. What Milo doesn't say in this interview is that he's actually in the middle of a really ugly divorce. And that might actually be one of the main factors leading to his deportation.

Starting point is 01:20:33 A few days after Milo is deported, some less than reputable news outlets reported that Milo's ex-husband, though they're still technically married, threatened to get him deported in 2025, called him an illegal immigrant, and said that he would call the, quote, ICE hotline, according to court documents from their divorce. And so last week, I spent about $100 of company money requesting over a dozen documents from the LA Superior Court, totaling hundreds of pages to find out what was actually going on with this divorce and if it could relate to Milo's deportation. I read through hundreds of pages of court declarations, motions, requests, and evidence exhibits. Emails between Milo and his husband indicate that their relationship was falling apart around 2022. Milo told the court that his husband started withholding sexual activity and denying physical affection that same year, which was shortly after Milo publicly announced

Starting point is 01:21:48 he was no longer gay. In one of those emails about their relationship from 2022, Milo asked his husband for help with a new residency application. By 2024, Milo's husband seemingly had enough and began the process of separating. I'm going to read an alleged text exchange between Milo and his husband, submitted to the court by Milo's husband. quote, you cannot keep me captive and disenfranchised because you decided not to be gay.

Starting point is 01:22:19 You cannot abuse me or your power over me anymore. Milo, shut up, stupid cunt, just get out. Husband. I've petitioned the court for a legal separation. Milo, great news. Now that you violated our deal and can no longer assist with my immigration affairs, you will be evicted from this house in seven days. Start packing, unquote.

Starting point is 01:22:46 Another series of texts submitted by Milo from Milo's husband reads, quote, go fuck yourself, Milo, L.O.L.L. You can have the cats. I've been staying around, tolerating your abuse because I feel sorry for you. But enough is enough. Unquote. In 2025, they started pursuing a divorce. And about a year ago, the husband got a temporary restraining order against Milo. And again, this is not something Milo said on Pierce Morgan's show, but Milo himself has admitted in court documents that he has run into issues renewing his green card because of a lack of cooperation from his husband or ex-husband stemming from their ongoing divorce. For whatever reason, Milo seemingly never applied for

Starting point is 01:23:34 naturalization or a 10-year green card after getting married and continued to only do those two-year renewals. And if someone with a two-year green card gets divorced, they have to fill out a special waiver form, and USCIS needs to confirm that the marriage was actually a real marriage and not just a way to obtain residency. This is to prevent immigration fraud. Now I will read a text allegedly sent by Milo to his husband, submitted to court. Quote, I will pay you $100,000 in four installments in exchange for completing my green card process. You can have $25,000 upon agreement, $50,000 at interview, and $25,000 when the status is awarded. After that, I want nothing more to do with you, unquote. Milo has claimed that some of the text messages submitted to court were fabricated,

Starting point is 01:24:32 though he has not directly challenged the legitimacy of this particular message in the court documents that I have reviewed. In a declaration in response to a motion for a domestic violence restraining order filed October 20th, 2025, Milo claimed that his ex-husband secretly sent himself messages from one of Milo's devices. To quote the motion, quote, actively endangering Yanopolis's status in the country. His husband has forged messages in which he poses as Yanopolis and admits green card fraud, unquote. The specific message which Yonopoulos claims was

Starting point is 01:25:12 falsified was sent in February of 2025. It reads, quote, fuck you, stupid, worthless N-word. I hope you rot in hell with your monkey ancestors. I was only using you for a green card in the first

Starting point is 01:25:28 place, but since you filed for divorce, I no longer have need of you. And if you tell the court about this, I will fucking end your life. You're worthless leach with no purpose in my life, your threats of reporting me for not paying taxes are nothing. No one believes N-words, stupid cunt. You should know what my friends are capable of by now, so I suggest you think twice about going to the police. You eat when I choose to let you eat. Your car is in repossession and will stay that way for as long as I wanted to. Enjoy poverty or

Starting point is 01:26:01 shut your mouth and do what I say when I tell you. In the meantime, get fucked. Your little to the court means nothing to me. I've gotten myself out of way worse, against people with much more value than you'll ever have. Now, for the last time, get fucked and enjoy poverty. As long as we're still married, I own you. Remember that, and start acting the part. Or next time, it'll be your face I kick in, not your door.

Starting point is 01:26:28 What makes you think a judge will believe you over me? No one believes the black man. Too bad you didn't take photos of your bruises, huh? not even man enough to hit me back. Get fucked, John. Do your worst file divorce. See if I give a fuck. White always beats black.

Starting point is 01:26:45 You're the one with a master's degree in criminology. You should know this already. Unquote. So, that is the message sent from Milo's account to his husband that Milo claims is fake. It does contain some phrases which are mirrored in other text messages sent by Milo. In his court declaration, Milo does like armchair forensic text analysis to try to prove that this message is actually fake, while also just not addressing the other messages submitted to the court, alluding to this same general situation. Milo's motion reads, quote, For years, his husband has explicitly threatened Ianapolis with deportation from the country, calling him an illegal immigrant. He is not.

Starting point is 01:27:34 He has informed Yianopolis he would call the, quote, ice hotline, knowing that Yonoplas's green card status is dependent upon their continued marriage and has in the past refused to appear at mandated USCIS appointments, delaying Yenoplas's application process until his latest set of financial demands is met. Yianoplas has endured years of extortion on these grounds, purchasing sports cars for his husband and making huge cash gifts to him in an effort to save their marriage, but also, of course, with these threats unavoidably in the back of his mind, unquote. And just that last statement by Milo could itself put his legal status into question, because

Starting point is 01:28:20 there, Milo is admitting in a sense that he has paid huge cash gifts to his ex to get him to cooperate with immigration proceedings. In this same declaration, seemingly written by Milo, it's signed that way, even though Milo has lawyers, he spends a considerable amount of time on the N-word and accusations from his ex that he's used the N-word many times as a form of abusive language.

Starting point is 01:28:50 Milo writes that the, quote, N-word is a kind of sick preoccupation of his husbands, and that his husband, quote, displays selective moral outrage about certain words and phrases, choosing to receive them as hateful and dective when it suits his purposes. Yianopolis is British and has no particular attachment to the N-word epithet. Like most Europeans, he finds its outsized presence in American life, puzzling and absurd. And he enjoys expressing amusement at the hold it has over Americans of all backgrounds.

Starting point is 01:29:23 In the course of his work for Ye, formerly Kanye West, Yinoplas was issued with a physical N-word pass by the star who was tickled by the sound of the word in Yenoplas's English accent, unquote. And Milo submitted evidence to the court regarding his N-word past. He shared articles in the evidence exhibits proving that this N-word pass is a real thing that was given to him by Kanye West. Not sure how this is supposed to help with his divorce. proceedings. But there's another document filed by Milo from late October, a motion to suspend

Starting point is 01:30:02 spousal support to his husband. And in this document, Milo writes that he, quote, now realizes that their relationship has been over for many years. Throughout their divorce, there's been a lot of conflict over how much Milo should be legally required to financially support his husband, $5,000, $8,000 or $15,000 a month. In October of last year, Milo claimed that he had given his ex, payments and gifts totaling over $600,000 in 2025 alone. Now, part of this may include almost $40,000 a month in rent, paid a year in advance.

Starting point is 01:30:42 Milo's ex-husband has claimed that Milo earns between $35,000 to $60,000 a month from his work with quote-unquote hip-hop moguls. In this October motion regarding Spuzzle support, Milo wrote that demands for payments from his ex were, quote, manipulative and accompanied by threats, including threats to Unopolis's immigration status, as well as half a dozen malicious calls to the LAPD. Milo also claims in this motion that his husband threatened him

Starting point is 01:31:12 by saying he's opening a criminal case in the UK regarding the quote-unquote fraudulent papers Milo filed. In evaluating all these different claims and text messages, it's hard to say what exactly is true, false, or exaggerated, because it's two angry exes accusing each other of stuff in an expensive divorce. But the contents of at least three text messages could amount to immigration fraud. Whether those texts are authenticated or not, the fact that they are in a court record, certainly would not help Milo's case. And if his ex-husband is willing to say that Milo used him for a green card,

Starting point is 01:31:59 whether that is a true statement or not, is similarly not great for Milo in the eyes of DHS. Even just the presence of widely publicized articles where Milo claims he's no longer gay and that he's demoted his husband to housemate just three or four years after getting married could be hard to explain to DHS if he's under scrutiny for possible immigration fraud. That accompanied by text messages promising $100,000 in exchange for completing a green card process, and Milo accusing his husband of, quote, violating their deal, and that he can no longer assist with immigration affairs, could create trouble for Milo in his appeal following his deportation,

Starting point is 01:32:46 which, yes, Milo is pursuing, and through that we may get more information regarding the exact sequence of events that led to him being deported to the UK. These divorce documents demonstrate Milo was well aware of issues regarding his green card renewal and he was certainly aware of lower Loomers calls for him to be deported.

Starting point is 01:33:08 And Milo may have just decided to use this situation as an opportunity for one more career pivot or he just never thought that someone like him would actually be deported. Even if his status was questionable for a brief or maybe not so brief amount of time, he could have had it in his head that his politics or his social status would make him special and immune to enforcement, which of course is reserved for dangerous violent criminals, which, for whatever reason, he himself would never fit into said category,

Starting point is 01:33:44 as opposed to someone like, say, Alon Omar, who, last year, Milo accused of committing, quote, the most brazen and shameless public immigration fraud in American history, and called on Tom Homan to have her arrested and deported. This post was just months before Milo told the L.A. Superior Court that his own ex-husband has accused him of immigration fraud. Get Bell, Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus. From $94 a month, price,

Starting point is 01:34:26 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. Hey, everyone. It's the Jonas Brothers with the Hey Jonas podcast. We've been catching up with some great friends, Paul Rudd, Michael Boubley, Seth Myers, Nile Horan, Jake Shane, and making some new friends while getting into what's really like to have sisters, like Alex and Ashton Earl. She likes to control everyone and tell everyone. Okay, well, control is a harsh word.

Starting point is 01:34:51 I would say that's a harsh word. I am more outspoken, growing up. up a lot of the times because she was so quiet. I would speak for like the both of us. Now I'm working on like thinking a moment, really not-controlling her name. And Joey King. You know if you're like mom is yelling at your sibling and even if you're annoyed with your sibling, you just like won't let that slide. It's like only you can yell at your sibling. I'm like, you can't do that here. That is, you do not talk about her like that. Plus, we've been taking your calls, listening to your voicemails and giving you advice.

Starting point is 01:35:26 trying to. So if you've got catching up to do, now's the perfect time. Listen to Hey Jonas 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 Proz 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.

Starting point is 01:36:03 I'm obsessed. From best-selling 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, 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.

Starting point is 01:36:35 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. 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.

Starting point is 01:37:16 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. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about the death of empire and its nightmare afterlife. I'm your host, Mia Wong. We are living through the end of something. An epoch, an age, a way of life, a democracy.

Starting point is 01:37:58 We have covered this end through a series of prisms, from the pure and total dissent of the presidency into a form of autocratic rule by fiat, to the destruction of even the most basic state capacity, virology, meteorology, that now largely forgotten time that he funded the nuke police, the death of American science and the wounds dealt to the education system, ISIS full on ethnic clenting of a significant,

Starting point is 01:38:28 portion of the American population. This is the end of America that has existed since the end of World War II. But it is also the death of the Pax Americana. And today

Starting point is 01:38:45 we're going to be looking not just at the death of what was in America. We're going to be looking at what it means in terms of the American Empire. We're going to be looking at the Pax Americana, the modern era of American hegemony, we're going to be

Starting point is 01:39:06 looking at what it was, its deep and profound ties and origins in the U.S. Navy, and how the remnants of that era and the empire that had been so carefully and bloodily constructed over the course of centuries was shattered by the Trump administration's attempt to do an even more overt form of imperialism. The era of American hegemony is over. And before we continue into the endless waking nightmare, let us look at what it was. Now, I have been talking about the death of American hegemony for a while now, originally in the context of the apoccal disaster of the American war with Iran. And recently we've seen one of the most embarrassing and humiliating incidents and evidences of failure of the old American system,

Starting point is 01:40:02 which is the declaration and then subsequent walking back, immediate walking back, failure to launch of what was called Economic D-Day. So for people who have forgotten what Economic Deer was, because I don't blame you, this was such a fiasco. economic deed-day was supposed to be this enormous campaign of secondary sanctions against anyone trading with Iran spread over a number of sectors. This was designed to cripple what remained of the Iranian economy. And there was a giant press blitz about it. Again, they were calling it economic deed-day. And now, multiple weeks later, we have a couple of sanctions. You have a few

Starting point is 01:40:49 sanctions that they applied at the time. We now have some sanctions against some Iranian airlines and a sanction against a Turkish bank. Now, again, originally, when this was described, this was described as a sort of like American total economic war, that the U.S. would completely isolate Iran from all of his trading partners. However, comma, in order to do this, you would have to actually go after China. And the Trump administration has obviously had trade disputes with China, but the kind of sanctions they would need to levy in order to actually, you know, completely isolate Iran, are something that the U.S. is simply not willing to pursue because, get this, the U.S. and China make an enormous amount of money both from trading with each other.

Starting point is 01:41:38 Now, what's interesting here is that this kind of devastating economic campaign, this is something that the United States used to be able to. to do. Now, obviously, wouldn't have been able to do it easily, right? But this kind of sort of, in theory, right, coalition-built, large-scale sanction package to completely economically isolate a country, this is what the American Empire has always been best at. And the fact that the U.S. can't do it now signals a fundamental transformation in death of what the old American empire was. Now, to do the tie-in, to do the tie-in, the Navy here, because

Starting point is 01:42:19 the Navy is a crucial part of the story and about what the sort of Paxs Americana was, just to explain this very simply, right, a huge portion of whatever the Pax Americana was, was the ability of the American Navy and its sort of supremacy

Starting point is 01:42:35 over most of the world's oceans, its ability to maintain open, safe, and stable trade routes for global capital. And to sort of inelegantly pivot to this sort of naval apparatus. We can notice that D-Day was also an exercise in American naval power that is sort of astounding. I mean, the ability to do force projection on the other side of the world on that scale is sort of mind-boggling for most of human history.

Starting point is 01:43:02 And it's a demonstration of the way in which American hegemony was built by the Navy. Now, obviously, the U.S. originally is a land empire in ways that are very easily sort of naturalized and forgotten, right? United States is a settler colony. It was built on a series of genocidal exterminations and land seizures from the indigenous people who had been here before over the course of centuries and centuries continuing to this day. So there is, on the one hand, right, this in some ways, very conventional settler colonial land empire. But there's also always been a significant naval component to the United States because of, you know, how settlers got to the colony. And then also because of the economic ties that those settlers maintained with Europe and the

Starting point is 01:43:58 ways that trade networks developed, you know, the U.S. has always to some extent been a naval-oriented power as it's sort of established and as it sort of did its genocides across the continent of North America. But for our purposes, there's an important departure in the history of the American Empire and how it functions in the mid to late 1800s. And it particularly intensifies around this guy who was just kind of a random Navy captain named Alfred Thayer Mayhan who writes this book called The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. It's this book basically arguing that if you're going to be a great empire, you need to have sea power, right? You need to be able to sort of like maintain control over the world's oceans.

Starting point is 01:44:45 he releases this in 1890. A lot of what this turns into was this attempt and this sort of reorientation of the American Navy around pushing into the Pacific. Now, obviously, the Navy had always been a tool

Starting point is 01:45:00 of American imperialism. It is what the U.S. used to enforce its rule over Latin America. And this is even before this sort of late era that we're talking about, even before the 1890s, right? When you're looking at

Starting point is 01:45:13 sort of American interventions in Latin America. A lot of that is being done through the U.S. Navy. But Mayan is responsible is kind of too strong of a word, but he's an influential theorist

Starting point is 01:45:28 of this push you know west into the Pacific, right? It's this, the 1890s is this era of, oh, well, we've done manifest destiny, we've like conquered this fucking brutal genocidal empire

Starting point is 01:45:41 from coast to coast. And there's this question of where we're going next. and where we're going next turns out to be, okay, we need to be able to sort of refuel ships across the Pacific. So we need to seize control of these islands that will allow us to have coal refueling stations so we can continuously move and project naval power through the Pacific.

Starting point is 01:45:58 This turns into a, like the Spanish-American War, which is, you know, not a war that is fought in Spain. It is a war that is fought in Cuba and in the Philippines. and at sea. And it also leads to the creation of what's called the White Fleet by Theodore Roosevelt, which is...

Starting point is 01:46:26 I can plan a lot on this show about how just there is no such thing as subtlety anymore. And it's true that there is not subtlety now. There was also not subtlety back then. When you read historical stuff about it, everyone goes, oh, it was called the White Fleet because the holes of the ship were white.

Starting point is 01:46:43 And it's like, yeah, okay, like, yes, technically speaking, that is true. But every single one of these just unhinged racists who are involved in this entire project, like everyone knows what it means to have a fleet called the white fleet. Right. You know, this is the fleece that is used to sort of, like, it was called opening Japan, but like, you know, is used to just force Japan to open itself, sort of Western traders and Western imperialism. as a result of this you also see eventually

Starting point is 01:47:14 the various stages of conquest and annexation of Hawaii what you're seeing is in effect the American Empire entering its sea era its sea era is the era in which its international ambitions really really expands now obviously the US has been doing

Starting point is 01:47:45 naval interventions on the other side of the world basically since the moment it was founded There's obviously like the very famous like war with the Barbary states that the U.S. has like right after it's founded. But this, this period marks this sort of transformation of the U.S. into something that's, it's not quite accurate to call it like true global force projection. But that's kind of what happens over the course of World War I and then World War II. And this gets us into talking about the sort of Pax Americana itself, right? Because if you're familiar with the term, it comes from this period, you know, of sort of Roman history that was called like the Pax Romano where you have this kind of relatively unchallenged Roman Empire ruling as sort of a regional and global hegemon and that it was able to, you know, enforce some kind of degree of peace.

Starting point is 01:48:44 Now, obviously, like, like, do you say peace, right? And obviously anyone who has, like, lived through this period is well aware that, like, no, obviously this is not, like, an enormously peaceful time. It is, I guess, technically less war than, like, World Wars 1 and 2. But, you know, and this is true with the Pax Ramana, too, is it. This isn't, like, actual peace. It's just a time in. in which there is an empire that is large enough that there aren't really as many sort of hot wars.

Starting point is 01:49:22 But what was sort of called the Pax Americana starts after World War II. And this is important for a number of regions. One is the effect of World War II on the rest of the world, right? The U.S. has a significant portion of the entire world's manufacturing economy after the end of the war. It's one of a very small number of intact industrial belts that exist in the world's after the war. And also, World War II shatters,

Starting point is 01:49:50 it overturns the old sort of world-powered system in which the French and British empires, and also, you know, by this point, like this sort of burgeoning German empire, Nazi empire, and the Japanese fascist empire had sort of been dividing up the world. But it's this real sort of death knell,

Starting point is 01:50:08 specifically for our purposes for the British, who go from being the kind of naval power the U.S. was modeling itself after, right? This naval empire with the ability to project force anywhere that's able to rule over vast swaths of territory because it completely controls the seas or controls enough of the seas, it has control of sort of, like, naval and trade lines. But like that fleet, like the British Navy gets just annihilated in World War II, and the British Empire just doesn't have the resources to maintain itself. And through also a bunch of anti-colonial rebellions, it begins to tear itself apart.

Starting point is 01:50:41 and for sort of capitalism to function, and for it to function efficiently, you need someone who has the naval power to control the seas. And you need this because this is how trade operates, right? And this is going to become especially true as this period goes on in ways we will talk about in a moment. So at the end of World War II, the U.S. is sort of the driving force in a lot of ways behind, I mean, obviously, Allied powers are involved in various ways in the establishing of the United Nations. But the U.S. becomes kind of the seat of the world's sort of global economic

Starting point is 01:51:23 and institutional apparatus, right? If the IMF of the World Bank, you know, I mean, like the United Nations meets in New York, right? And, and this is maybe the most important thing for our purposes right now, the U.S. becomes the world's reserve currency. and it also becomes the currency in which you buy oil,

Starting point is 01:51:45 which is also just an incredibly important advantage. And this is the basis of the American Empire. And one of the things that makes it so powerful is that, you know, this is what's called seniorage privilege, right? Which is that, like, everything is being operated. The whole world economy is being operated in U.S. dollars. It is the World Reserve currency. You can buy almost anything with it.

Starting point is 01:52:09 And what that means for the U.S. is like, A, every time the U.S. prints a dollar bill, right, it's however much it costs to, like, make a bill and then like $100 exists now. And then B, and this is also extremely important, the U.S. can't run out of dollars in the same way that, you know, other countries, we've talked about this before in other episodes, in the same way that other countries can run out of American dollars, which causes massive sort of economic crises. The U.S. doesn't have that problem. right? Like obviously you have to do like inflation management but you can't just like run out of dollars in a way that like anyone else in the world can and this is also the currency where you know

Starting point is 01:52:52 US government bonds become the currency that the rest of the world's reserve banks put their money in. So this means that the entire rest of the world by like by purchasing these bonds right is effectively just like subsidizing anything the US government wants to do

Starting point is 01:53:08 you know government bonds are government debt right and most of the government debt, it turns out, is war debt, because what the U.S. wants to do over this period, and again, we're calling it the Pax Americana, but like, the thing the U.S. ramps up government spending to do is fight horrifying imperialist wars in Korea and Vietnam. But these are, like, bankrolled for a large extent by these sort of large-scale bond purchases. But that is the deal of sort of the Pax Americana, which is that the U.S. has this enormous military, it will, quote, unquote, protect you from communism. That is a twin-pronged thing.

Starting point is 01:53:46 On the one hand, right, you have, and this is why I've been talking so much about the role of the U.S. Navy, you have the U.S. Navy maintaining open shipping lines around the world. And then on the other hand, you have the U.S., shall we say, three-letter agencies and also the military and also still the Navy, you know, doing interventions. and doing genocides and a whole bunch of countries in order to, like, keep the communists out of power. But the deal is,

Starting point is 01:54:16 you buy into the American protection racket, right? The U.S. will put a shit ton of military bases in your country. You will buy American bonds. You let the dollar be the World Reserve currency. And in exchange for this, you're supposed to get, again, secure trade lines,

Starting point is 01:54:34 and the capitalist class gets to, like, maintain its control of the means of production and the workers do not get to have that stuff. Now, the importance of these shipping lanes are exacerbated by the other sort of wing of what you would call this. I don't know. It's maybe a little bit too, well, I don't think it's too out there to say this is also sort of another wing of American anti-communism and, you know, just like the war on the global working class in general, which is the expansion intensification of what's called containerization, which is, you know, based on shipping containers, right? it's the process that begins what's called offshoring,

Starting point is 01:55:24 where dealing with this sort of declining global profits and the rising power of the working class in a number of countries, the global capitalist economy spearheaded by the United States figure out that using these giant shipping and logistics lines and using these shipping containers, they can ship their manufacturing off to more impoverished countries and countries in which it's easier to just machine gun workers, and this allows companies to reduce wages

Starting point is 01:55:50 and have a firmer grasp on the control of the means of production by, again, just machine-gunning workers if they try to go on strike. But in order to be able to suddenly make your cars not in the United States, but somewhere else, say, for example, Mexico or China, you need to be able to do this massive set of shipping things, right? Because also you're now working in these extremely large, supply chains that like stretch all over the world and they're bringing parts of a bunch of different places and they're being assembled a different place and they're being assembled in another

Starting point is 01:56:28 place in order to sort of pit the workers of every single one of these places against each other and then pit those workers who are working on it against the workers you know how longer have work. This is what's known as the spatial fix by the way. It's a story that was popularized by a Marxist geographer David Harvey. I think it's older than him or his work, but I I am blanking right now on exactly where it's from. Yeah, but the product of the spatial fix is that the capitalist class is able to keep making money. The international workers movement is sort of gutted and then has its spine ripped out. And you have the sort of like the end of history era.

Starting point is 01:57:12 And even at this point, right, for a lot of countries around the world, this deal is worth it because, But this deal is like, shut the fuck up and let the U.S. sort of rig things in its favor. It's obviously going to have a bunch of carve-outs in all these massive free trade deals that advantage it. You know, it's going to be running an empire. You're going to be complicit in this empire. It's going to force you to go do its imperialist stuff. But, you know, it's worth it because you, the capitalist class of your country, get to keep making money. but again, all of this was based on the American ability to maintain control of the world shipping lanes.

Starting point is 01:57:57 And this was something that had been uncontested, right? Like, I mean, I guess you could argue like Somali pirates or whatever. But like, yeah, the U.S.'s ability to maintain global shipping isn't even a thing that until Trump decided to invade Iran, that anyone was like thinking about really being contested. Like obviously, you know, you can look at sort of like Chinese expansion in the South China Sea or whatever. But like, like, that's not threatening the ability to move oil around the world. But the problem here for this empire is that it was taken over by people who don't understand how it works. Like, Trump doesn't really understand. And I mean, I say doesn't really.

Starting point is 01:58:38 Trump doesn't understand any of this at all. Which is why, you know, it just never really seemed to have occurred to any of the people around them that like, they wouldn't be able to take control of the Strait of Fremuse. And American policy towards the Strait of Formuz, other than that period where they said they were annexing it, has kind of just been to pretend that it's open and also screaming about it not being open at the same time. But this event, this loss of control

Starting point is 01:59:01 of one of the most vital shipping lanes in the entire world, which the American Empire had been able to maintain and keep open even though one of its mortal enemies like borders it, right? He had been able to keep... the shipping lanes open, not by actually necessarily applying military power, but by threatening it. And this is also the important thing about the American Empire is that American military power always works best when you're threatening it and not when you're actually deploying it. Because once you actually have to deploy the U.S. Army to a place and fight a war, that usually turns into a shit show. I mean, you know, you look at the modern American history of wars.

Starting point is 01:59:39 And it's like, okay, well, you know, you have like the absolute nightmares in Vietnam and in Iraq and Afghanistan. and these sort of like, you know, actually like deploying the American military tends not to work out particularly well for the American Empire. But the threat of it and the threat of the ability to just, you know, to kill an unbelievable number of people to inflict this damage is enough to cause other countries to fall in line. One of the sort of Mia Wong promises if it could happen here is that if you're listening to this show, you will know what the Plaza Accords are and you will know what the reverse

Starting point is 02:00:15 Plaza Accords are. So the Plaza Accords are this thing in the 1980s with the U.S. You know, the U.S. manufacturing economy is tanking. And the U.S. basically goes to the negotiating table and just says, like, fuck it, you're American military protectorates. And the U here is Japan and West Germany, which are these rising industrial powerhouses, right? And the U.S. goes, fuck you, you're going to nuke your own manufacturing economies by increasing the value of your currency so that the U.S. can have a manufacturing economy. And Japan and Germany are forced to do it. You know, they're not like explicit about this, right? But that's the underlying tension of what's happening here. This is the American Empire functioning in the Paxi-Mir economy as it was designed to

Starting point is 02:01:03 function, where, yeah, you have the Japanese economy, which in this period is like threatening to overtake the American economy as a large economy in the world, and the U.S. is able to just kneecap it. because it's like, no, we control the seas, we have a million military bases there, we can just dictate your economic policy. And this is like Ronald Reagan, right? Like, we're not talking about like the most subtle, technocratic, like, manager of empire, right?

Starting point is 02:01:29 This is like a senile actor. He's become president. And he's able to do this. But Trump is not, right? You know, Trump sees the raw power of the American Empire and goes, oh, right, the point is to use it, right? Like the thing that makes you a man, the thing that makes you a nation is just deploying this shit and killing and trying to kill everyone who opposes you. And this has led to him ending the basis of American global hegemony, which is like for the first time, like since World War II, it's like, yeah, no, the U.S. just like can't maintain the global shipping supply, right?

Starting point is 02:02:08 And you know, and you can look at the other sort of major challenge to this in OPEC, right? where OPEC is, to some extent, doing this attempt to, like, prevent the flow of goods through the capitalist economy, but OPEC is trying to do it directly from the production end, not through the distribution end. And the U.S. responds to this and the attempts by a bunch of other countries to form what we're called mini-pex, to form like OPEX for, like, copper instead of oil, to form these, like, mini-cartels for all of the sort of, like, world's primary commodities. and the U.S. takes this enormously seriously. This is the G8, which was originally the G7,

Starting point is 02:02:46 was founded specifically to head off this threat and to defeat it. So the U.S. has always taken these kind of threats enormously seriously. But even OPEC was threatening the production of primary commodities, right? It was threatening oil, but it was threatening oil from the production side, not from the distribution end. And now it's like, no, the U.S. is like losing control of the distribution side. for no actual, like, strategic reason. And I obviously, like, I don't want it to sound like I'm angry that the U.S. Empire is failing.

Starting point is 02:03:21 I am, in fact, quite glad that the U.S. Empire is failing. Although, obviously, you know, the way that it's going out in his death spasm is going to be absolutely hideous, right? The death of rule by a single giant empire, if it's not actually replaced by the end of empire, more generally, tends to be. become a bunch of different empires fighting and, you know, a bunch of empires fighting and also one empire rule are both bad. There are outcomes that we, Czechs notes, do not like, obviously, but it is astonishing the extent to which an incredibly sophisticated and old empire has just been torn apart in a year for no reason.

Starting point is 02:04:06 And now we have to sort of grapple with what it means that this older form of vampire has died and that we're having this sort of new more fascist form of empire rise and fight its horrifying wars. And the actual meaning of this is not just the peer examination of history. What this all means is something that is going to be created by people like you and people like me. and how we rise or fail to rise to the moment the death of vampire is created. Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Crave, Netflix, and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet

Starting point is 02:04:59 with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Hey, everyone. It's the Jonas Brothers with the Hey Jonas Podcast. We've been catching up with some great friends, Paul Rudd, Michael Bubet, Seth Myers, Nile Horan, Jake Shane, and making some new friends while getting some new friends while getting into what's really like to have sisters,

Starting point is 02:05:17 like Alex and Ashton Earl. She likes to control everyone and tell everyone what to do. Okay, well, control is a harsh word. I would say that's a harsh word. I am more outspoken. Growing up a lot of the times because she was so quiet. I would speak for like the both of us. Now I'm working on like thinking a moment,

Starting point is 02:05:35 really not controlling a minute, thinking before I speak. And Joey King. You know if your like mom is yelling at your sibling and even if you're annoyed with your sibling, you just like won't let that slide. It's like only you can yell at your sibling. I'm like, you can't do that here.

Starting point is 02:05:49 That is, you do not talk about her like that. Only I talk about her like that. Plus, we've been taking your calls, listening to your voicemails and giving advice. Or at least trying to. So if you've got catching up to do, now is the perfect time. Listen to Hey Jonas on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 02:06:06 If your bookshelf and your for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Pro's 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 02:06:34 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, 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.

Starting point is 02:06:59 Listen to Pro Society on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. 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.

Starting point is 02:07:35 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. 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. 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.

Starting point is 02:08:11 This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder. Our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, crumbling world and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by James Stout, Mia Wong, and Sophie Lichtenman. This episode we're covering the week of September 2nd to September 9th. Welcome. Before we start, I have a tiny correction, massive correction, depending on who you are. Many people have reached out, at least half of the people who live in Florida and listen to this podcast to let me know that there are in fact crocodiles in Florida. Many of them live near some kind of large power plant. I didn't know about this. That is because in my life I have avoided Florida,

Starting point is 02:08:54 you know, apart from when I was eight and went to see the animals that they keep in a little prison there. But yeah, thank you for letting me know. I'm excited to learn more about your crocodiles. Maybe I'll come visit them one day. I actually showed this chomp the oligarchy poster to a friend who's from Florida after we recorded. And they confirmed it is indeed a crocky. Even though alligators are much more common. They're like, it probably should have been an alligator. But I spent like five minutes looking at like comparisons of crocodile photos and alligator photos. I think it's maybe a crocodile, but I don't know for sure.

Starting point is 02:09:32 Because it's kind of like a crunchy kind of low poly image. But crocodile confirmed. People in Florida, it turns out, really fucking love that crocodile. They're pretty cool. They're pretty scary. Yeah, congratulations on having a crocodile. I went bass fishing in Florida once. don't do that.

Starting point is 02:09:49 Credibly dull. Let's talk about the news. Let's talk about the news. I hope everyone had a good fake Labor Day. I worked. Also worked. Well, there you go. I went camping.

Starting point is 02:10:03 Well, on Monday, Labor Day, Mayor Mamdani signed an executive order, creating the Office of Worker Power, which will be led by labor organizer Tony Perlstein, who recently served as the organizing director of the, UAW. It's the United Auto Workers. This quote-unquote First in the Nation office aims to use city resources to help workers organize

Starting point is 02:10:25 themselves, connect them with contacts, unionize, and build power. And this is inspired by the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, which is a joint initiative by DSA and the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers. Ah, Ewak.

Starting point is 02:10:41 Conceptually really interested to see how this turns out. Yes. And you can go to the website to NYC.gov slash worker power to learn more. Similar to the rental rip-off hearings earlier this year to address the concerns of tenants, the Office of Worker Power will be holding public hearings on worker issues, which will then drive policy going forward. But there's way more than just these hearings as a part of this office. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:11:04 And I'm excited to see how this develops in the next few months. Sounds good. Let's see if it can be executed in a very helpful way. In other news, according to a new legal opinion by the DOJ, states must report any undocumented immigrants that they know of to DHS in order to receive federal welfare funds to assist low-income families. To quote from this opinion, quote, when a state chooses to participate in the temporary assistance for needy families and the supplemental security income programs, all agencies within that state, not only those

Starting point is 02:11:37 that administer benefits, must report individuals known to be not lawfully present in the United States to the Department of Homeland Security." It's a new interpretation of law, revising an earlier opinion from 1998. Yeah, I haven't alluded to this. I was going to look into this. I thought about doing a whole episode on where we're at with public charge and like generally was, so I think I might kind of hold off. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 02:12:06 I will say that like generally the states wouldn't have a, they have a, they have consciously not kept lists of undocumented people as sanctuary states, right? Which is largely who this will be targeting. Yeah. So, like, it's not as if, like, the absence from one list does not necessarily mean you're undocumented. And, like, creating a list of undocumented people would be a very unwise move. So, like, I don't know what this means practically, right?

Starting point is 02:12:35 Like, like, if it's saying you have, if you have a list of undocumented people, you have to turn it over to get 10th and they can just be like, we don't have it. cool, but I do need to spend a bit more time reading up on this in combination with the public charge stuff I spoke about a couple weeks ago. It just occurred to me the States would probably know who would dreamers, right? So they would have that available to them. It is expected that this will face some challenges, that this new opinion from the DOJ will face challenges in court,

Starting point is 02:13:03 but this did come out last week. Finally for me, one of the staffers who was fired after posting that Ron DeSantis Fashwave video in 2023, which we did a whole thing on. It had a son and rat. It had all the stuff. All the things. That staffer now works at the State Department as Mark Rubio's chief speechwriter

Starting point is 02:13:28 and deputy director of the agency's policy planning office, according to your reporting, from the New York Times. Oh my. Yes. Yeah. That's cool and bad. Yeah. I'm recalling this.

Starting point is 02:13:41 sort of like language of like of like the left as this like you know gross diseased like anti-civilizational force that was used in like mark rubio's like uh left wing terrorism address at that conference a few weeks ago and and thinking about who who his chief speechwriter is it does help contextualize some of the words that mark rubio and others were saying right mm-hmm all right moving on starting out a A Russian drone transited Romanian airspace on Tuesday. They've been like, I don't really know how to drive this other than like drone trolling. There were two Spanish jets that were stationed there that scrambled to like intercept the drone. But their continuation of drone trolling states like within the EU and NATO, like this is a serious thing, right?

Starting point is 02:14:33 Like these are serious and ongoing provocations. Yeah. Secondly, the Barmo Flotilla. So the Bamar Flatrilla, if you remember, was reduced to six ships on its way to resupply the embattled Hunter Garrison in Myanmar. It lost five of those six ships on the way back. Now the flotilla is just a boat. Incredible. Yeah, I think it illustrates how unconventional warfare or guerrilla warfare has changed in the last 10 years, right, that like the Upper Irawaddy River now is dominated by the

Starting point is 02:15:08 resistance with FPV drones. That is what's taking. There are also like just straight up standing on the bank and shooting them with Carl Gustavs, but it's the FPV drones that have changed the way that this state can move. In this case, move. Rivers are very important in Myanmar,

Starting point is 02:15:25 and this is just an illustration of how much harder it is for the state to use those rivers. Next, a DC circuit court has ruled that the IRS's choice to share the information of thousands of taxpayers with DHS violates the law, it also said that arguments to the contrary were, quote, weak source. And the court also suggested that there could be civil and criminal consequences for IRS staff who keep doing this. The United Kingdom, France and Canada this week announced sanctions on some of the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. This is part of a new approach that we spoke about some time ago on ED, right?

Starting point is 02:16:06 where they are claiming that there will be consequences for some of Israel's more flagrant violations of international law, obviously not all of them. And like this alone is not going to be the thing that stops Israel just doing what the fuck it wants, including, yeah. Would have been nice like 50 years ago. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like some point in early, in the middle of the last century, would have been a great time to start doing shit. This is an interesting one that I thought kind of initially, I thought maybe this fitted into, the state-sponsored attacks on European countries, but a number of rocket attacks on German infrastructure have occurred in the last 10 days. And infrastructure for these rocket attacks have been

Starting point is 02:16:47 found by German police who arrested a man yesterday. So they're claiming the actions are like a single person, perhaps someone from like the ecological movement, as opposed to like a state incursion. This is still very new. So I'm going to keep an eye on this, especially given some of the attacks on like energy infrastructure that were mentioned by the State Department when they were most recently designated organizations to SDGTOs. There has been a degree of militant environmentalist action in Germany, specifically the past few years. It's like the only left-wing movement that's like kind of alive there. That's a little unfair, but yeah. Finally, the White House has posted a picture of New Mexico or a map of New Mexico, a part of it.

Starting point is 02:17:34 But Mexico is crossed out and America is written instead. This is very silly. I'm going to come back to this a little bit in my section because it's weirdly Canada related. It's amazing. Yeah, I mean, I don't quite know what they're going for here. Like, it's not, I guess it is all of New Mexico. Hey, our Supreme Ruler is a toddler. I've just noticed this map of New Mexico.

Starting point is 02:17:58 Like, it has the bordering United States states, but it does not appear to acknowledge Mexico exists. Great. Great. Yeah. Great. Sensational. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:18:11 In related news, television show, South Park has changed their name to South America. Wait, what? Really? In a, yes, their newest season will be called South America. Jesus Christ. Because it's just as I'm sure it's a whole thing with mocking Trump. They've always been a satirical show, but they've gone very hard and. to Trumpist satire the past few years. I don't know. A lot of it's really funny personally.

Starting point is 02:18:42 But, you know. Finally, we've deployed South Park against the enemy. They're doomed now. Yeah, yeah. Some of the most ideological committed libertarians out there. Yeah, yeah. So speaking of surging fascism in very bleak ways, there were recent German state elections in the state of Saxon. on halt. Now, on the one hand, this is not a very well-populated state. However, comma, the neo-Nazi party, the alternative for Germany has come in first in this election with technically sub a majority of 45% of the vote, but this is the first time that a fairly overtly neo-Nazi party has been the largest party in a German election since the Nazis were in power. This is extremely alarming. The AFD is the most far-right of the European far-right parties that are anywhere close to power.

Starting point is 02:19:42 They are further right even than something like Marie-LePen's party in France. They are fairly openly talking about kinds of mass deportations that, on the one hand, are happening right now in the United States, but journalists repeatedly infiltrating their meetings, you know, the stuff we're talking about publicly is the kind of stuff that ICE is doing in the United States. stuff we're talking about in private, and not even that in private, is removing all immigrants and Jews from the country. So this is extremely alarming. It's unclear exactly if AFD can form a government. It kind of doesn't look like it. However, there is a small chance that the breakaway, I don't even want to call them left. Germany has a another kind of like what I would call

Starting point is 02:20:30 like a quote unquote left wing fascist party called BSW that was a breakaway from their left party that is a like what if we went

Starting point is 02:20:39 fascist on social issues but also did a welfare state party and if those guys tolerate an AFD government they could put them in power the problem is in order to form a non-AFD government you need every single

Starting point is 02:20:50 other party to work together so it's a catastrophe and the ruling CDU, a Christian Democratic Union, which is also like an increasingly right-wing party, lost an enormous amount of support and is unable to form a government. So, AFT is just three seats away from forming a majority on their own in the state parliament. Yeah. And ESW could put them over the line.

Starting point is 02:21:15 So not great results in the regional election in Germany if you... Terrifying. Yeah. Care about people. Yeah. Also, like, notable, I think, because we had seen this tendency towards, like, a Trump endorsement is, like, the death now of electoral success. This has obviously not been the case here.

Starting point is 02:21:35 Trump trothed about AFDA, calling them a populist party today. And I think it's also worth mentioning that part of the danger here is the almost unique dysfunction of the German left, which has had its Green Party basically discredited by pedophile scandals that we talked about, or that Robert talked about behind the bastards. Dyerlinka, their left party is a complete disaster and has been basically since its inception as a weird merger of like East German communists and Western social movements. Even their autonomous theme is a wreck because there's a bunch of like ultra Zionists who will do things like push people in front of train tracks for like not supporting Israel.

Starting point is 02:22:17 So yeah, the like one of the things that is a contributor to the rise of. AFD and their continued rise is the almost unique catastrophe that is the German left. There are obviously good people there fighting the good fight, but it's a bleak situation. Also, bleak is the amount of sports betting and other life betting apps, ads increased a sponsorship fuckery that's been

Starting point is 02:22:49 happening. And in our face, is particularly in the last week. I just want to talk about a few of them. Like former Los Angeles Laker and now active Philadelphia 76er and man, I used to admire, I told the team this, but I used to have what I call my La Barbie,

Starting point is 02:23:07 which was a LeBron James Kendall. I had to put in the basement. I couldn't look at him. Wait, is this the guy from Space Jam 2? That's the guy from Space Jam 2. But not Space Jam 1. That's very important. Oh, God. Okay, now I understand. Very different.

Starting point is 02:23:21 No, no, no, the guy from Space Jam 1 made gambling his own problem. He didn't make it anybody else's problem. Very different. All the goats are involved with gambling in some way or another. But LeBron James is now one of the new faces of the prediction market platform, Polymarket. He teased on X the Everything app and a ad that was about 14 seconds with him like walking into Polymarket. Market HQ and then put out a further ad that, like, showed him with a bunch of other very famous athletes and celebrities, like, thinking back, it was like Derek Jeter,

Starting point is 02:24:06 director Spike Lee. Spike Lee, brother, come on. You've got to do better than this. Yeah, that sucks. A number of, like, current and both former athletes, Eli Manning across the board. And her sports business journal. dot com, quote, the terms of his deal with polymarket have not been discussed, but NBA rules, restrict players, financial risks, and companies that offer league-related wagering or similar products,

Starting point is 02:24:33 including limits on ownership stakes. However, back in February, also very famous NBA player, Yonis Antedacupo, who is now on the Miami Heat, wild off season in the NBA, posted, we all on Kalshi now. And he posted this black and white image. Everyone is online. The internet is full of opinions. I decided it was time to make some of my own. Today I'm joining Kaushi as a shareholder.

Starting point is 02:25:01 We all on Kauci now, Yana Sant'Kupa. I think that it is really bad to have active athletes as the face of sports betting. Even if LeBron is talking not about basketball, you still, when you think LeBron James, you think basketball. So it's still having an impact there. I wish this out was the only part of the story that I was going to talk about. But as someone with a uniquely knowledgeable mind when it comes to bad people, ads and podcasting, I have to talk about someone who, you know, has, if you could guess by the name of her podcast, not great takes all the time. Amanda Hirsch, the host of the popular, and it is very popular. I mean, very, very, very popular. Probably

Starting point is 02:25:50 not with our audience, but very popular podcast. Not skinny, but not fat. That's what the podcast called. Apologized on Sunday, and this is per the cut, and I went and tracked down some of the things that they mentioned this, apologized on Sunday after facing backlash for posting a polymarket ad pegged to the Lindsay Clancy trial. Her shared a statement calling the ad insensitive wrong and out of character for her, but the original ad was posted shortly after the judge presiding of the Clancy case declared a mistrial.

Starting point is 02:26:23 And in this video, she shared that 36% of traders thought that Clancy, who was on trial for strangling her three children, would be convicted of murder. Hersh all added that she had been so glued to this case and it was on the edge of her seat waiting for the verdict. According to a screenshot, the ad was captioned, quote, the judge declared a mistrial in the Lindsay Cancer trial. On at Polymarket, it was predicted that the verdict would be not guilty. Are you supplied? Hashtag Polymarket partner. What the fuck?

Starting point is 02:26:56 Yeah. She since deleted it and apologized. But what in the actual fuck? Are we cooked? That was my first thought. I read this article from the cut and I kind of sat in silence for a good amount of time. Yeah. Like, what are we doing here?

Starting point is 02:27:13 Yeah. What are we doing here? What are we doing here? Like, she did an ad about betting on a trial where multiple children were killed. Like, how despicable are we as humans that that's even an option? Like, why are we betting on that? Why is that something people can bet on? That should not be okay.

Starting point is 02:27:36 And then if that wasn't, you know, bad enough, I got the whiplash of waking up this morning after staying up far too late watching the U.S. Open to see that actor Sidney Sweeney, who's dating a horrible ex-manager and famous Zionist Scooter Braun. I just wanted to add that context. Quote, this is from variety. Sidney Scrib down for a steamy new ad for Novig. I don't know if that's how you pronounce it, but that's how I'm going to pronounce it. The latest sports trading app and prediction market for fans of football, baseball, soccer, tennis, and more. The Euphoria Star goes nude in the ad. That's not the problem. Be as naked as you want. And poses with a variety of sports equipment like footballs, basketballs, a hockey net, and other athletic gear. She also joins Novig, bad name, as a strategic partner and equity holder. Quote, the campaign was all about embracing a fun idea, said Sweeney, in a statement. The concept is simple, cut through the noise, and put the focus entirely on sports. The campaign brings that idea to life with confidence, humor, and playful edge. Um, it ruined my morning.

Starting point is 02:28:40 it's out of control. Something must be done. Yeah. I'm kind of hoping, and I posted this on blue sky. I'm like, I'm kind of hoping it's like that one time in the Super Bowl where a bunch of really famous people got in trouble for doing like crypto scam ads. And I'm kind of hoping that's what happens here. But I don't have a lot of faith, especially under this administration, that that will be the case.

Starting point is 02:29:03 Yeah. The last thing I want to say in this, this is, I guess, anecdotal and I don't know if it's statistically significant, but I think it is interesting. I have been seeing a move from kind of like mid-sized, like independent people who do sports stuff away from and sort of getting pissed off at sports betting and pushing away from it. And this has been people who had taken money from these companies before and have looked at what this has done. And it just been like, oh my God. So I'm hoping that maybe in the long run we're seeing sports where this was born become a place where people like lower. we're down on the totem pole, start to push against it in a way that can eventually do something.

Starting point is 02:29:44 But right now, it's, it's so bleak. It's bleak and it's just in our faces. And speaking of things that are bleak and are in our faces, it's time for our capitalism. Here's some ads. Nice. All right, we are back. And we are now going to discuss two of America's longest standing foes. Of course, I'm talking about Iran and Canada.

Starting point is 02:30:19 no particular order, but we're going to start with Iran, because it's not the alphabetical one, I guess. So the US-Iran conflict has really been significantly escalating again just last week. The United States has sunk a tanker. The Houthis have been launching into much as the conflict. Obviously, the Houthis are neither the United States nor Iran, but conflict in the region. The Houthis launched a drone barrage on Saudi cities, and Iran has responded by threatening boats all over the region. So if we start with that Houthi drone attack, 73 civilians were injured as infrastructure, including oil refineries, other civilian targets were hit by these Houthi long-range drones.

Starting point is 02:31:01 In response, of course, Saudis have attacked the Houthis. And it appears that, like, we're likely to see a return of full-scale maneuver warfare in Yemen, right, with Saudi support. Just to clarify, the Houthi drone trucks are against positions in Saudi Arabia. Yes, correct. Yeah, yeah. So they're not against positions of, of the Yemeni state. They're there against positions of the Saudi state. Yeah. That's like a low blow to the Saudis.

Starting point is 02:31:26 I don't know how to say it. You know, like, if you go after the Saudi oil refineries, they're going to be pissed. Like, that's a way to trigger a response. Yeah, yeah. Now, the United States has also been going after oil infrastructure and transport this week. Notably, they sunk motor tanker Kylo this weekend,

Starting point is 02:31:42 along with striking two other tankers over the weekend. Audio from one of the attacks, which CNN. I couldn't find the actual audio anywhere, but CNN has a transcript of it. So I'm just going to read out that transcript from, this is from US aircraft on an emergency frequency to mariners on those vessels. Motor tank, a stark one. This is the United States military aircraft. I am preparing to fire at your stern. You have 10 minutes to clear the crew from the stern of your ship over. In a later exchange, ship is warned. This is your final warning. Get into your lifeboats and abandon the ship immediately. So I do like this vessel that Mototankakeyla that went down, it does appear that people had got into their lifeboats and evacuated that boat, right? Like I think there was some misunderstanding there on the part of some, like I saw people, like I think it's just assuming that they'd kind of struck it out the blue. But the way they'd generally do this is that they warn the people on emergency frequency,

Starting point is 02:32:39 which they did again on Tuesday when they hit five boats in a single day. So Sentcom published footage of this. Generally, it's like black and white thermal footage. We see a couple of different like methodologies here. We see strikes in the sterns of the vessels in some cases. And in other cases, absolutely massive explosions and multiple munitions slamming into ships. One of these was near Kagg Island.

Starting point is 02:33:07 Now, the United States says it is doing this in retaliation for Iran firing ballistic missiles at a US ship. Interestingly, not all of the missiles Iran has used recently have been anti-ship missiles. They've been using some of those Castle Breaker missiles that we spoke about last week as well. I don't know if that's because they're trying with that maneuverable warhead, just like a different way of trying to get past defenses, or what they're going for there, or maybe it does suggest that Iran is running into supply issues of its own. But either way, it does rather undermine the claims of the United States to destroy Iran's ability

Starting point is 02:33:43 to fire ballistic missiles because they are farming a shit ton of ballistic missiles right now. Iran today has, once again, we're recording on Wednesday for those listening on Friday. It's fired missiles, United States destroyers, facilities, and commercial vessels, and including one in Iraqi waters. Over the weekend, we learned that Amman had to rescue 16 mariners after one of the strikes last week. And Iran has also attacked Jordan again. What we've seen this time is interesting. They're using cluster munition equipped medium range ballistic missiles. And they are burning through this supply of Patriot interceptors, right?

Starting point is 02:34:26 We've seen like so much reporting on the US running low on missiles and specifically interceptors, right? And so some of this appears to just be forcing the United States to burn up more and more interceptors over Jordan. Iran also this week captured a large displacement. andril underwater drone. So these had not been confirmed by the US military to be operating in the region. And so the capture is kind of significant. I don't think this is likely a weaponized drone. I'm guessing it is used for like reconnaissance work, right?

Starting point is 02:35:03 Andril lists a bunch of functions on its website, things like ISR, also like anti-mine operations. After Iran published photos of this clearly showed that, Andril drone. Sinkom made a comment saying, quote, An underwater drone operated by U.S. forces malfunctioned more than a day ago. It was surveying regional waters in support of ongoing operations. The defective drone was an older model that neither collected sensitive data nor carried any classified sonar or radio equipment. US operations in area waters continue.

Starting point is 02:35:35 You could collect sensitive data with a notebook and a pen. The age of the drone doesn't matter. I'm not an underwater drone. guy. I do know underwater drone people. This to me looks very similar to the model that is currently listed on Andrew's website. And it is significant, right, that Iran has been able to capture this. Like if nothing else, it'll give them sort of a propaganda victory. And Iran loves a propaganda victory. Yeah. I'm returning after recording this to let everyone know that Palmer Lucky has tweeted, Zetid, a touching memorial to the drone. It reads as follows. Everyone watching Iran state-run T-E

Starting point is 02:36:13 V news program probably noticed they picked up an Andril Drive LD. Our mass produced a treatable submarine. This particular vehicle has been swimming in Centcom for months, successfully operating in support of American forces for thousands of hours. It was explicitly designed to operate an environment too dangerous for humans, where capture is an expected possibility. I can't get into the details, but it provided significant value for months before capture. Rest in peace, little buzz.

Starting point is 02:36:43 And then he has included a picture of the drone and a picture of an IRGC post of the drone, where they know that they have captured it. Finally, the United States military has begun turning off, or has advised senators that it's turning off, advertising trackers on a range of devices. Reuters is claiming an exclusive on this. I don't know if they're suggesting that, like, I would hope they're suggesting that the turning off, that they have confirmed that these are being turned off is an exclusive. because we and others reported months ago that Iran was using ad tech to target US military personnel, right? And this is the nature of modern warfare, right?

Starting point is 02:37:23 Like the surveillance done on us by capitalism is even more pervasive than the surveillance done on us by the state. It makes sense, therefore, that states are going to these companies and purchasing that data. Why would you not? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:37:38 It's so much cheaper for them to do that than to run their own intelligence operations. or recruit someone in the US military or whatever. So this use of ad tech is not particularly new. We are finding out about it because Ron Wyden, who's an Oregon senator, has been pushing for months to get the military to say they've done something about this.

Starting point is 02:37:58 And they've finally disclosed in a letter that they are turning off some of their advertising, tracking stuff on their devices. But I think it's a really good illustration of how pervasive surveillance of capitalism is so much more powerful than even like Iran is a state that does love to be spying on people and they still are nowhere near as effective at this

Starting point is 02:38:19 as we are at giving away our own data on our Instagram clicks. Oil has hit 100 American dollars a barrel as a result of all this fuckery, which is a perfect time for us to talk about our other enemy which also has its own strategic oil reserve Canada. So speak, Speaking of our other war, are just absolutely baffling trade war with Canada for no reason whatsoever other than someone showed Trump a graph of the countries that the U.S. trades with the most. And Mexico and Canada were at the top because they are right next to us and we've integrated our economies with them since we're both British colonies.

Starting point is 02:39:18 Is continuing. Now, as we have talked about on this show extensively, Trump illegally invoked the almost certainly defunct. Moot-Hawley Tariff Act to impose a 50% sanction rate on a swath of Canadian exports, though again, this does not include key sectors of the auto industry or energy imports. Canada threatened retaliatory tariffs on $20 million of U.S. goods. Now, on Tuesday, as we were recording this, those tariffs went into effect. These are a range of tariffs. I'm going to do one kind of important one and one extremely silly one.

Starting point is 02:39:55 as we've talked about this before. So as we mentioned last time we talked about this, part of the reason these negotiations collapsed was the U.S. wanting to be able to set Canada's steel tariff rates to put them in line with other countries' tariff rates. Canada has responded to this by increasing its tariff rate on American steel from 25% to 50%. There's also tariffs on cheese in what seems to be a very specific measure to piss off Wisconsin. They do this sometimes, right? Like when they do these tariffs, they do them on symbolic goods. like I think the EU tariffed bourbon for a while. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:40:28 Well, what's interesting is that the reporting on this has said that, oh, there aren't symbolic tariff items that Canada did in like 2018. And no, if he's reading the tariffs, why else are you opposing a tariff on cheese? Now, as we mentioned earlier, in the middle of the negotiations collapsing and now as these tariffs went into effect, Trump has tried to change the name of Lake Ontario

Starting point is 02:40:51 to Lake America. a thing which Google and other sort of bootlicking companies have bowed to, I guess. And also, again, as we mentioned earlier, Trump is posting memes about changing New Mexico to New America. A fun aside on that map thing, I found out after we recorded last week that the company that I used to work for that owned how stuff works now owns MapQuest. Oh, wow. Great. Incredible. The based map service. Because, like, I don't know if everybody knows, knows this entire thing.

Starting point is 02:41:31 But they're the ones that said that they would refuse to change the map, which, like, great. But, like, some personal Sophie history is, like, before Cool Zone, it was like, IHart, before IHart, I worked at How Stuff Works. The company was owned by a company called System 1, and then System 1 sold How Stuff Works to IHard. and then we started Cool Zone. So there's like this weird thing where and then all of a sudden I'm reading it and I was like, and I still talk to a couple of people that work there because they're lovely. And I was like, why the fuck does this company own math class?

Starting point is 02:42:11 And so that's just a fun aside. Anyways, continue. Well, I mean, there is something real here in that in these kind of just weird symbolic power moves, you're getting to see which companies are sort of purely just falling in line with the administration because it's profitable on which companies are not because they're trying to cash in on the other side. There's probably some genuine principle there too because this is absolutely ridiculous.

Starting point is 02:42:33 The reason I bring up Ontario is that Trump has also been specifically feuding with Ontario because Ontario's premier, Doug Ford has been very, very vocal in resistance to American tariffs. Doug Ford, welcome to the resistance. God, Doug. She's Christ. One of the worst guys.

Starting point is 02:42:53 in Canadian politics. I hate all of this. So in response to what Trump claims is discrimination against American trade, which like, again, I can't emphasize enough like this is happening because you impose 50% tariff on it. It's all nonsense. Trump is now threatening to put a ban on using U.S. government purchasing power to buy planes from Canadian airplane manufacturer Bombadier unless those planes are built in the U.S. Now, Bombadier, now Bombadie, already has a bunch of plants in the U.S., and this is pissing off. So Trump's congressional allies who have this company's plants in their state. It is not clear to me that Trump understands exactly what rate he's stepping on here

Starting point is 02:43:34 by having the U.S. fuck with a specifically a Canadian aircraft manufacturer where this is the site of one of the most humiliating chapters of the history of Canada as a branch plant economy. And the destruction of the Arvo Arrow, which was a really quite good late 50s Canadian jet fighter. that was created by this Canadian manufacturer named Arvo, which was supposed to be produced in this effort to have Canada become its own kind of like semi-independent military power in the ability to have a Canadian fighter jet

Starting point is 02:44:05 that would be used by the Canadian Air Force and then sold to the rest of the world. And then the Canadian government, under pressure from the United States, scrapped the entire project, destroyed all the planes, and physically destroyed all of the manufacturing capacity. And this is one of sort of the peak moments of the U.S. just going absolutely not. You are not allowed to sell. you're not allowed to develop your own fighter technology. You are a pseudo colony of the U.S.

Starting point is 02:44:29 and this is the kind of pressure that canon has always been leveraged by the United States against Canada. But obviously, I personally want to talk about this because we're getting a peek into the imperialist nature of both of these settler colonies in that we are talking about sort of Canadian independence from the United States in the context of a fight over who gets to sell jet fighting. to the rest of the world. Yeah. And like, you are Canada. What the fuck do you need an Air Force for? Like, why are you, like, manufacturing fighter jets?

Starting point is 02:45:02 And the answer is to bomb Iraq. But, you know, this is, I just wanted to have this as a reminder that A, Trump is stepping on very old rakes in Canadian politics. He doesn't even seem to understand exist. And then B, also, like, as much as it is, like, obviously trivially true that the U.S. is acting as aggressors here and that the U.S. U.S. is, you know, run by an unbelievably hideous right-wing imperialist government. Like, Canada is also a slightly less, like, brutal settler state. So, you know, we're not dealing with great nationalisms

Starting point is 02:45:36 here. Now, technically speaking, and this is something that if you get to, like, page nine of the reporting on this, you will get to the part where, like, the news mentions that these tariffs on both sides are on something like 5 and 6% of Canadian and American imports. They are to some extent more symbolic than anything else, although it is worth noting that Trump's threat to, you know, stop the import and also like stop U.S. government from purchasing things with Canadian companies is a fairly significant escalation. There's two things that are important here. One, Trump is once again wielding the hideously illegal powers of the defunct Smoot-Hawley Terror Fact, she could also use it any other country at any point if he wants to.

Starting point is 02:46:21 And the other thing is that negotiations have broken down completely and are unlikely to reach a deal, especially as Trump pivots to China in a weird mirror of the bomb administration's pivot to Asia in the run-up to his upcoming September bilateral meeting with Xi Jinping. Now, I want to close. I'm mentioning the U.S. Justice Department is attempting to prosecute Chinese electronics manufacturer, Huawei. I assume this is just a way of trying to put pressure on the U.S. government. Nominally, this is about Chinese sanctions violation and also technology theft, things that Huawei is, like, doing, but hasn't really been cared about until now. It's sort of unclear what's going to happen with these investigations. It's also weird that this is an investigation purely against a corporation and none of its employees, which is odd and baffling in why the announcement of this seems.

Starting point is 02:47:15 like a sort of negotiating play, so we can also expect there'll be some kind of weird sanction stuff with China over the next couple of weeks as we go into this meeting with Xi Jinping. And that's our trade war that we're fighting for some reason as we fight another actual war. Yeah, it's six bucks, six bucks for a gallon of gas here now. Oh, boy. Yeah. Love to live in the consequences of our ruler's actions. Yeah, it's great.

Starting point is 02:47:44 Do you know what else is the consequences of our rulers actions? Yeah. It's the products and services that support this podcast. What to you, but big oil. All right, Garrison, what do you got? So, although we are dealing with, you know, $6 gas, a pointless war, a pointless trade war, there is one thing the Trump government can still do without a problem, and that's post. Oh, yeah, they'd be posting.

Starting point is 02:48:20 They can keep on posting. In terms of symbolic actions, the actions that's from the administration, have in the real world, have not diminished their ability to take symbolic action online. Since Trump took office in 2025, the White House social media accounts have been used for some pretty heinous stuff. I often think of the ASMR-style edits of people being deported from 2025. The one I'm haunted by, I want to mention briefly, is the one where they synced up a bunch of hits from football players, and at the point of the hit, they synced it up to various drugs. of missile strikes killing people.

Starting point is 02:48:57 Yeah. Yep. Haunted by that. The social media strategy of the second Trump administration has nearly fully embraced this kind of like internet brain rot fascism with, you know, edits. So I previously mentioned the dissantis staffer who was fired after posting that fashion wave edit is now, now works for the state department. And this sort of like edit culture is one of the main ways the White House accounts have been posting online.

Starting point is 02:49:23 But as we've mentioned earlier this episode, The White House accounts also get used for a lot of just really stupid stuff. New Mexico turning into New America, right? Attempts at trolling that kind of just portray just how hollow their politics really are. As Trump has just completely failed to economically deliver, has murdered children in a pointless war, the public has loudly rejected his inhumane and deadly nativist immigration policies, and he's fractured his own right-wing base but continuing to unequivocally support Israel, start a neocon-style war, waste billions of dollars and kill 18 U.S. service members. With this total level of failure, the politics of Trump administration are forced to fall back on

Starting point is 02:50:06 punishing their enemies, just pure cruelty to satisfy some of their most bloodthirsty supporters, and trolling the lips. And in particular, I want to focus on the latter here, how this politics as trolling reveals how empty their political, really is. A few days ago, the White House posted a short AI video of Donald Trump using the Green Lantern Power Ring to construct the border wall to manifest American manufacturing to summon military jets, helicopters, and naval vessels. I gotta watch this. This is time to the release of the HBO Green Lantern TV show. Yeah, that's the link right there. Okay. I refuse to watch this that can't make me. I've seen it. You

Starting point is 02:50:55 don't need to. Jesus, wept. Just yesterday, they also released this Legend of Zelda video to match the Ocarina of Time announcement from Nintendo. That's just a side point. And there's actually a bunch of this kind of cringy

Starting point is 02:51:10 Reddit stuff that's tied to the release of various pop culture shows and games. Earlier this summer, the White House posted what is almost certainly an AI-generated version of the Rick and Morty opening theme with Trump and J.D. Vance in place of Rick and Mori. A CBP agent arrests like a literal alien

Starting point is 02:51:29 And Chuck Schumer's a robot Whatever God, they're so boring and just like Middle school humor Like grow up Mr. President Like ew Every Wednesday before we do this I very briefly scroll

Starting point is 02:51:46 The President of the United States True Social Feed Uh It's fucking It's just right now there's like a bunch of super cuts of AI stuff about Iran where he does not look like himself

Starting point is 02:52:00 and a video of him saying communism will never come to America or with music he probably didn't pay for the rights for. That's wild. You should instead not do that and be on my feed which is just Nathan Fielder Elizabeth Holmes

Starting point is 02:52:17 memes from his upcoming documentary. Every meme is good. I got to be honest, every single meme hits Garrison. continue, sorry. Anyway, a month after the White House shared this Rick and Morty video, they also posted an X-Men 97-style video featuring the presidential cabinet, captioned, to me, my mega-patriots. For like a week in July, the White House just kept posting AI hydraulic press videos. What is an AI-generated video of a hydraulic press

Starting point is 02:52:49 crushing various mega slogans, like no tax on tips. Why would you That seems like... Good question, Jay. That's, you know... Okay. Fascinating shit. Yeah. Okay.

Starting point is 02:53:01 During the World Cup, they tried to make one of those like AI Lego videos. But maybe the worst one of these that I've seen was posted on July 4th, titled, P-O-V. America entered its 2000s era, which is like a 25-second... Oh, wow. 2000s nostalgia edit. They've used Mr. Brightside here. They used Mr. Brightside here. They used Mr. Brightside.

Starting point is 02:53:25 It features clips of like music videos, video games and children's cartoons from this era. We've got Shrek, Simon Cowell, Britney Spears. It's like a remember when you were a kid and everything was awesome type stuff? Like that's what they're trying to. And everyone was white. It's just exclusively white people, I think. There's a lot of content on the White House account. That's just trying to like pander to Gen Z by tapping into this early 2000s of nostalgia.

Starting point is 02:53:53 and launder Trump and his policies as like epic-based awesome sauce by, hey, look, here's the Clone Wars 2008 show. Here's a clip of whatever bullshit children's cartoon at the time that's popular in Gen Z memes right now. That that guy fucking sucked. It was fucking 9-11, the War on Terror Katrina and the 2008 economic collapse. Like, what are we doing? Well, I think most of the kids that they're trying to appeal to don't really remember much of the 2000s, but they have this sort of displaced nostalgia

Starting point is 02:54:24 about things from their childhood, right? For being a child, yeah. Like, you know, when the war in Iran started back in March, the White House posted a video of an Operation Epic Fury video game on the Nintendo Wii, which was actually just cutting between Wii sports clips and real footage of people being blown up. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:54:44 Both the White House and ICE have previously used Pokemon imagery and music and social media posts, leading the Pokemon Company International to rebuke the use of their brand. Though, besides the occasional musical artists, companies like Pokemon have seemingly avoided or failed to take legal action to protect their trademark property and brand, which leads us to why I'm talking about all of this today.

Starting point is 02:55:11 On September 3rd, the White House launched Arcade.gov, five pixel art arcade games where you can build the wall, deport immigrants, fill a Trump bank account and remove pre-packaged food from kids' school lunches. After this site went online, the White House posted a series of videos riffing on the GameCube, Xbox 360, and PS3 startup animations. This is some of the most Reddit occupied government stuff we've ever seen. These games are really just bad copies, like bad, bad copies of other games, like Fluffy Bird,

Starting point is 02:55:48 snake and Tetris with a fascist coat of low quality pixel art. Yeah, wow. In the Tetris rip-off, you have to build the wall to quote, protect the border from the coming horde as an endless, quote, zombie

Starting point is 02:56:03 border siege sends green aliens and zombies advancing toward the wall. Now, mechanically, this game makes no sense. The point of Tetris is to clear rows of blocks, not build a wall, and also a On release, this game was just completely broken.

Starting point is 02:56:21 The blocks didn't clear after you completed a row. Inevitably, the screen just fills up with blocks to the top and it forces you into game over. It looks like they've removed that one from the... Once I... This is... This will come up later. Now, even more confusingly, the game over screen is labeled border breached. So, once you build the wall to the top, you lose the game and the border is breached.

Starting point is 02:56:48 That's right. From your lips to God's ears. Yeah, I will say that you... Maybe there's a metaphor in here somewhere. So while this failed Tetris clode displays the kind of garbage quality of their incompetent troll-the-lib's provocation, the rip-off of the arcade game Snake openly demonstrates their racist cruelty, even more so than the Tetris one, frankly. In Rio Run, you play as a pixelized version of Tom Homan,

Starting point is 02:57:17 patrolling along the Rio Grande, rounding up immigrants who have crossed the river, immigrants who are almost exclusively a darker pixel shade than Tom Homan, who will then follow Homan in a line wearing matching orange jumpsuits. At the end of the game, your score is labeled as the number of immigrants deported. This is obviously gross, empty posturing, troll the lips, etc. In another game, you sort through a conveyor belt of food for school lunches, removing unhealthy items and sending healthy food like beef tallow to children. As a reminder, we are in the midst of a food safety crisis with a record high number of food

Starting point is 02:57:58 recalls last month following massive staffing cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services, the FDA and the Department of Agriculture just last year. And as a result of those cuts, the FDA was forced to suspend some food safety quality checks. For more on that, checkout James Stout's episode on Sop. Cyclospura on his weekly podcast, Natural Causes. That's right. Great interviews. Great journalism.

Starting point is 02:58:23 Bad government. Yay. Yeah. That is one of our themes over there. Hell yeah. Based on all the different brands or properties or references I mentioned, to date only one company has come out strongly against the Trump administration for stealing their stuff, in this case, stealing their game.

Starting point is 02:58:43 Pretty soon after RK.K.gov went live. The Tetris Company publicly announced it was, quote, not involved in the creation of Build the Wall and said, quote, at Tetris, we believe in the power of connection and bringing people together, not dividing them. We take copier infringement very seriously, unquote, and a few days later, the Build the Wall Tetris clone was taken down from the White House website. Victory for communist Tetris. But, you know, we've talked a lot about this stuff this episode. you know, renaming the Gulf of Mexico, lakes, who knows, maybe renaming a state in honor of America, these little arcade games, these annoying social media posts, these are all lazily constructed symbolic representations of Trump's political goals, created or AI generated in hopes of pissing off liberals and satisfying the sickos by letting them, in the case these games,

Starting point is 02:59:39 literally act out the desires of mega in the midst of their political failure. It sort out school lunches in the midst of a food safety crisis, in the midst of total economic failure on the part of the Trump administration. And to me, the most interesting example of this tendency to substitute real politics, like delivering real politics, actually improving people's lives with this sort of punishing your enemies and pissing off liberals. comes also from this last week. On Sunday, Trump posted an agenary design for a United States Space Force Service dress uniform. Oh, God. I will trough this one into the chat here.

Starting point is 03:00:27 Let me see. Unfortunately, I've seen this. You've seen it? All right, all right, all right. Send it to me. I want to see the... Let's drop this right here. It's a long, gray tunic-style jacket

Starting point is 03:00:37 with a black belt sitting high on the waist and knee-high black shiny boots. It looks like something made for an evil space fascist sci-fi military. Yeah, it's giving low-budget bad guy. Right, yeah, exactly. And well, well, well, some very small text near the top of the AI image reads, quote, inspired by the discipline and functionality of the Starship Trooper Uniform, modernized for the Guardians of the Space Domain, unquote.

Starting point is 03:01:09 Between this Starship Trooper uniform and the Marines playing hell, divers to music during their 250th anniversary celebration, Baudriard is rolling over in a one-to-one map of his grave. They've got the eag on everything here. It's pretty astonishing. Yeah, because you think an American's going for a gray uniform, they're going to be doing Confederacy shit. But no, this is just like, yeah, like 90s low budget.

Starting point is 03:01:33 Like, I'm pretty sure I've seen like a puppet, like animation, a bad guy. He looks like fucking Joe Tracy is what he looks like. And the book Starship Troopers is a largely pro-war exploration of militarism using a science fiction setting, in contrast to the film adaptation by Paul Verenhoven, which criticizes and satirizes what the book was exploring in earnest. In Vernehoven's film, the officer uniforms are inspired by real military uniforms of the 20th century. This AI image posted by Trump seems to be more based on the Galactic Empire in Star Wars, whose design was pulling from both the imperial British and German Nazi uniforms.

Starting point is 03:02:12 Someone more annoying than me could do a whole simulacra and simulation essay about this fucking space force uniform. But this is a good example of how the Trump administration is obsessed with creating these little simulacrums. In the case of arcade.gov, propagating signs and symbols

Starting point is 03:02:30 to create this illusion of actuality. And as Trump often does, scribbling on a map and voila, the territory is now Lake America. Should probably note the Space Force already has addressed uniform and it doesn't look like this. Yes. No, this is the new version that may or may not ever actually exist. But the image is what's important.

Starting point is 03:02:56 Right, exactly, yeah, that's the point. The point is not the change. It's the appearance of change. Who knows? Huh. Well, this is all. all been fun. And let's close by talking about 9-11, because 9-11 is this Friday, which means the center-right media is being super-duper-normal, as usual. Late last month, Barry Weiss personally

Starting point is 03:03:22 intervened to create the CBS headline, Michigan Democrat Abdul al-Said's deleted tweets on September 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks, unquote. And one of the deleted tweets in question reads, quote, Today I mourn the 3,000 lives, 6,000 injuries, and infrastructural devastation in New York City perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my faith. Tomorrow I'll mourn the 1 million lives, millions of injuries, and infrastructural devastation in three countries perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my country. A somewhat brave but completely defensible statement.

Starting point is 03:04:00 Yeah. The post from CBS promoting this little article of theirs. read quote. As the nation prepares to mark 25 years since September 11, 2001, Abdul al-Said, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, may be facing the risk of renewed scrutiny and fresh political attack. And now today, September 9th, the day of recording, an attack ad against Abdul al-Assid has been released with like a minute of 9-11 footage. And I will play a little bit of the ending here. 25 years ago, America was attacked. Not for something we did, but for who we are.

Starting point is 03:04:40 The attackers tried to divide us with hatred. It had the opposite effect. We united with courage and with resolve. But the hatred behind 9-11 did not disappear. America deserved 9-11, dude. I hate America so much. Abdul-El-Sayed gives comfort to that hatred. I don't know if that's a Chiron or a subtype.

Starting point is 03:05:02 It will hurt people, hurt people. It's a quote from Abdul. Okay. They're getting really, really weird about Hassan. Yeah. Yes. So this ad has about 30 seconds of 9-11 footage, and then also has some footage of Hassan Piker.

Starting point is 03:05:19 Last month, mentions of Hassan Piker were very close in total, depending on the count, around like 400 mentions on Fox News last month. It was nearly matching the number of mentions of trans or transgender. So, Hassan and transgender, about equal levels of focus on Fox News now. Yeah, that tells you all the things. Well, all right, Hassan, get that up to 100%. I believe in you. You can do it.

Starting point is 03:05:48 Be useful. Take one for the team. I was about to say, come on, step up, my guy. This ad is pretty, pretty wild. We saw ads like this when Mom Dani was running in New York last year. there's also been articles focused on clips from Abdul Dool Seeds podcast from years ago

Starting point is 03:06:08 I'll play a clip here 9-11 scarred our country in profound ways but what we did after 9-11 scarred millions of other people when we talk about 9-11 we often fail to center them again completely defensible completely accurate and true statement

Starting point is 03:06:23 that is being turned into political controversy yeah these are completely normal by those on the right who certainly have no other reason to specifically attack Abdul al-Said. Fascinating choice to appear at an event with someone that much taller than you. Like, the high disparity is profound.

Starting point is 03:06:44 James is referencing photos of Hassan Piker and Abdul standing next to each other. Yes, there is a considerable height difference. It looks like they're on a podium, but I don't think they are. Speaking of New York City, following months of propaganda from The New York Post, Earlier this week, ABC ran the headline, quote, Mayor Momdani's has he'll attend 9-11 ceremony despite growing criticism. Unquote. Like, insane.

Starting point is 03:07:12 An insane headline to run, like, completely absurd. Journalist Peter Stern in New York has talked about how there's about, at most, like, 5% of, like, 9-11 survivor victim families who have been spreading this petition to ban mom Donnie and vastly more 9-11 families have released a counter petition in support of the mayor. This is a controversy that The New York Post and others have been stoking for quite a while in the lead-up to 9-11. But this ABC headline talking about the story is completely absurd. There's another story that came out today in Variety, which they've edited since publishing, because the first version just did not address the blatant Islamophobic motivation.

Starting point is 03:07:59 in a lot of the attacks against Momdani. And the Vanity Fair piece also has this crazy quote from Bruce Blakeman, the Republican running for governor of New York, talking of Mamdani, quote, he's not welcome there because he has yet to say anything in opposition to the global antifada, unquote.

Starting point is 03:08:19 The whole Vanity Fair piece is similar to this ABC article, just completely gross. There's no reason to cover it in the way that they are. imagine the actual media crisis, the frenzy that would happen if the mayor of New York City, if the Muslim mayor of New York City chose to not attend the 9-11 service? Like, that would be crazy. They would light up, right? This is a perfectly concocted political controversy.

Starting point is 03:08:49 Like, they could win either way. Now, Mom, Donnie would, of course, never not attend that. That makes no sense. But the right and the center media gets to kind of position themselves. and, you know, talk about the controversy about him attending, even though it's like, what is he, what's he going to do, not attend? Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Mayor Mbondani released about 170,000 pages of records city officials have kept from the public regarding air quality at ground zero following the 9-11 attack.

Starting point is 03:09:17 These reports show that city officials at the time knew that the air was toxic and hazardous and get lied to the public by saying it was safe. The mayor said, quote, now close to 25 years later, more people have died from 9-11 related illness than were killed on the day itself. These documents are now searchable on a new portal, and they include the recently discovered, quote-unquote, Harding memo, which was sent to the then-depity Mayor Robert Harding. This memo was titled, quote, legislative alternatives to limit the city's liability relating to September 11, 2001, unquote. Mumdani said these records, quote, show what the city knew about the toxic air around Ground Zero, when they knew it, and how they acted to limit liability.

Starting point is 03:10:05 John Stewart was also at this press conference announcing the release of these documents, and he has been a longtime advocate of transparency for 9-11-related illnesses and supporting the first responders and their families who have died or gotten sick in relation to 9-11 health complications. I'll play a short clip from him before we close this episode. The city began covering their ass three weeks in in a memo. The memo is entitled Legislative Alternatives to the fiscal responsibility for 9-11. And what we all knew who live in downtown Manhattan is that there was poison in the air and

Starting point is 03:10:49 on the ground and in the windowsills and in your air can conditioners and covering your pets and your clothes and it stayed there for months. Everyone knew. And now it's very clear that the city knew as well. And rather than take the steps to ameliorate the damage that that would cause to its citizens and to the people that were down there, they instead covered it up to get back to business as usual. But unfortunately, after 9-11, business will never be usual again. If you'd like to email us, you can do so.

Starting point is 03:11:33 It's Coolzone Tips at Proton.me. If you want it to be encrypted, send it from a proton address. Put a trans girl on your couch. We reported the news. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, Coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Starting point is 03:12:06 You can now find sources where it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Hi, this is Kylie Brakeman. Angel Geratana. Jeremy Colhain, Patrick McDonald. And we're the hosts of the Artists on Artists on Artists on Artists Podcast. The Improvised Character Comedy Podcast where each week a new panel of artists discuss their craft. Join us for a panel of Eurovision participants.

Starting point is 03:12:30 And we do a little Halloween sometimes. Does the Pope dress up? He winks on Halloween. He gets right up next to the microphone. I hear you can almost hear the eyelashes hit each other. You never seen Italy so quiet as when the Pope gets up to wink on Halloween. Listen to Artists on Artists on Artists every Thursday on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I survived nine months in captivity.

Starting point is 03:12:57 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. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are 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. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed.

Starting point is 03:13:30 There should not be a single law enforcement agency. It 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 Network.

Starting point is 03:13:49 And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts. Whether you're a seasoned NFL fan or new to the game, there's one place to keep up with all of it, the league's newest podcast, the NFL report, hosted by me, Andrew Siciliano. It is your home for everything football, breaking news, expert analysis, game picks, and hear from your favorite players, too. Join me at an all-star cast of experts for everything you need to know from around the league. Get new episode to the NFL report Monday through Friday all season long. Listen to the NFL report podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.

Starting point is 03:14:30 Guaranteed Human.

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