It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 254

Starting point is 00:00:00 This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. I'm Melissa Jeltson, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police rode off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing in disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

Starting point is 00:00:24 And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an I-Heart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to IHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for IHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today. Lisa, tell them about our new show. We have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie to Me. I'm Lexi Yuwanu. We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa Di Giulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions, and at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all. Now in my 30s, being the founder of new shoes, good taste is my business.

Starting point is 00:01:07 Listen on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You broke me. You do not deserve happiness. I'm Andrea Gunning. On this season of betrayal, Carl thought he was living a normal, drama-free life until the messages started. Someone's not going to make it out of this alive. Every piece of evidence pointed to the wrong guy. He was not going to stop unless we stopped him. Listen to Betrayal Season 6 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On recent episodes of The Questlove Show, I chat with Jojo about her music and Wallow 267 about his story, everything in between.

Starting point is 00:01:51 Don't invite me to karaoke. I'm going to make it weird. Someone's going to try to sing, leave get out, or too little, too late, or baby it's you. Oh, no. And I'm going to be like, okay, cool. Check out my conversation with JoJo, Wilo, 267, and more on The Questlove Show. Listen to the Questlove show on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Peace.

Starting point is 00:02:14 Bloomberg's Big Take podcast has everything you need to know about the most expensive midterms in U.S. history, like the money being spent to control the Senate. Everyone has been waiting to see how Trump will spend his big war chest. He was sitting on nearly half a billion dollars. how candidates are rewriting their party's playbooks and how big business is throwing its money into the ring. There's obviously the AI super PACs, which are two sides there, so they're spending sometimes on different sides of races, sometimes on the same side of races.

Starting point is 00:02:40 Listen to the big take on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also Media. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with someone, what less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening

Starting point is 00:03:04 to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to It Could Happen here. I'm Garrison Davis, joined by Robert Evans. Hello. Hello, Garrison Davis. How are you doing today? I'm doing okay. I'm getting prepared to vote. I'm psyching myself up. Just like the Iranian Revolutionary Guard told you to do, huh? I think that's what we want to start with. This isn't, this isn't, in general, this episode will be kind of going over the midterm polls as they are in early October, kind of what we can get a sense of the election, about a month

Starting point is 00:03:48 out now that we're just a few weeks away from the election. But a few weeks ago, the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Prince of the pod. Sure. At this point, man, it's one bad day, full stolidist, full Maoist. I mean, that's more, it's a slightly differentist, but. A few weeks ago, the IRC released a 26-page letter, not short. Not strong on brevity, the IRGC.

Starting point is 00:04:24 Addressed to the American people, a spokesperson from the IRC, told Reuters, quote, the American people are not knowledgeable about many developments. We believe if they knew more, they would think differently and take other decisions, unquote. You guys might have more faith in the American people than I do at this point. The start of the letter and how it's addressed reads, to the honorable people of the United States of America, the scholars, the students, and the members of the media. I think that last part is important because at least some of them know that

Starting point is 00:04:58 the American people are not reading a 26-page letter. This is going to be mostly read by journalists. This is going to be read by nerds on Twitter and blue sky. And nerds on Twitter. Yeah. Now, I actually was able to get a short video. The I-R-R-C also released a short video kind of summarizing the letter,

Starting point is 00:05:15 and I will play that here for Robert. So that's, yeah, that's the special video. Yeah, that really is. That's something else. So there's a few sections before. The bulk of the letter is, arguing why Iran is the victor in the war, concrete evidence of Iran's victory. They have a section on the meaning of, quote, death to America. Yeah. Which reads, quote, death to America does not in any

Starting point is 00:05:50 way express any ill will toward the American people who have themselves suffered through the same oppression. Death to America is a prayer for the eradication of the diabolical ruling elite whose seat of power is in the White House. And the letter goes on to say that the RGC and the people of Iran have no feeling of hostility toward the American people. And then they ask, how can the U.S. be saved? And this is what leads to the bulk of the letter, which is essentially trying to get Americans to vote harder. Oh, which you're finished fascism.

Starting point is 00:06:24 Oh, man. But there's also a few other interesting kind of like a name drops here. Quote, God will come to the aid of the American people if they decide to change course. Thankfully, Americans are waking up to the truth. Over the past two years, Americans have participated in numerous demonstrations in cities across the U.S. to express their outrage at Israel's genocidal actions in Gaza. Moreover, the no-kings rallies that swept across the U.S. last year.

Starting point is 00:06:51 Okay, IRGC. We're a nation, right? Repudiation of the burgeoning autocratic tendencies within the American government. These powerful manifestations of collective action are evidence of a national awakening spreading through the U.S. polls show that the majority of Americans, especially younger Americans, no longer wish to be complicit in their government's crimes

Starting point is 00:07:13 against other nations, unquote. Part of what makes this so funny to me is how diametrically opposed it is to the messaging coming out of like, you know, U.S. based, like Maoists or like anti-imperialists. Oh, yeah, like the U.S. far left, absolutely.

Starting point is 00:07:29 Yes. Yes. They're so much, so much more generous to the American people. Yeah, that's something that's really, That's really funny to me. As for the vote harder section, let's read one paragraph here. Your response may be that you do not accept these atrocious actions but are powerless to do anything about them. This answer, however, is not acceptable.

Starting point is 00:07:51 You are the ones who empower with your votes. The government and allowed to do what it wants. Although American politicians often win your votes through deception of false promises, as Trump did, you can change the makeup of the government if you apply the criteria for good leadership in choosing the people you vote. into office. See, guys, I got to tell you, it's not that easy. First off, I've voted every time I've gotten the chance pretty much. I don't think I've ever empowered anyone with my votes.

Starting point is 00:08:19 You know, it's one of those kind of Adam, Adam Curtis moments. Yeah. We have the IRGC advocating the ideal of electoral politics, something that does not exist really in Iran either. It's consistent with, there's that one famous interview with an Iranian cleric where he's like as Alexander de Talkville, who I'm sure all Americans have read one set. It's like, guys, you are way overestimating us. So, yeah, if you have any sort of anti-imperialist impulses, as per the IRGC,

Starting point is 00:08:54 get your voter registration up to date. Get your voter registration card and get out there. If you're in line, stay in line. That's right. So part of why this letter was released is because it is just a few weeks away from the midterms. We are less than a month away from the 26 midterm elections. And so I thought we should do a little update on polling and take a look at some of the close races. Sure.

Starting point is 00:09:19 And let's start by talking about the current makeup of Congress. Right now in the House, 218 seats are held by Republicans, 214 by Democrats, and there's one independent who caucuses with the Republicans. 218 seats are what's needed for a majority. This has been a very small majority that the Republicans have been able to hold on to in the House these past few years. The Cook Political Report is forecasting that the Dems will pick up around 5 to 15 seats in the midterms, likely putting them in charge of the House with anywhere between 220 to 230 seats. And this lead in polling and their projected victory has only grown. these past few weeks. It's not becoming a closer race for the Republicans.

Starting point is 00:10:07 No. Things don't look good for them because gasoline costs all of the money in your pocket now. That is a huge factor. That's a big part of the reason. I'll go over some of the kind of main issues driving the election person polling and gas prices is like number one or number two. Yeah, I have trouble imagining anything other than other cost of living stuff being like a larger impact on voters. Something that is interesting, the redistricting across Alabama, California, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah will likely have a minimal impact in the results like in total.

Starting point is 00:10:44 There's obviously for the people actually impacted, the people whose votes are being diluted, especially. Not that this is not bad or a problem. It's just they have fucked up enough that it's not going to benefit them to the extent. That's what it seemed like to me, that like they're not going to benefit the way that they were. No. So, I mean, I don't want to discount the impact of the erosion of the Voting Rights Act by any means or the just larger structural issues of partisan gerrymandering. But an analysis by Harvard estimated a net gain of only two seats for Republicans in these midterms. Though other estimates give them a few more seats, anywhere between five to nine. So we're looking at somewhere between a couple seats. I think nine is probably a bit optimistic. Yeah, for the Republicans.

Starting point is 00:11:28 Around two to five seats they could net because of the redistricting measures. Could, might, yeah. Even that gain will likely be undone in the coming years going into 2028 when Virginia is able to push forward its redistricting again, which they tried to do earlier. But because of a procedural error, it was shot down. So that will also net Democrats a few more seats that will start to kind of even things out. and then we had this whole little fun redistricting for nothing. Yeah, it's a real, just a marker of how badly they have botched their starting, you know, position going into this administration. Just kind of a catastrophic series of political decisions.

Starting point is 00:12:12 We'll see if any of that matters, but it really does highlight how pissed off people are. Now, obviously, the Senate is kind of the big question here. Yeah. Will Democrats be able to actually take this? Senate will they be able to control all of Congress, not just the House. Yeah. Currently, the Republicans have a 53-seat majority plus a Federman and the vice president who can vote.

Starting point is 00:12:36 So that kind of really throws a wrench in all these numbers, the Federman factor and the Vance factor. Yeah. Democrats just have 45 seats plus two independents to caucus with the Democrats, like Bernie Sanders. So essentially, things actually sit at like 54 to 46, just. for independence and Federman. So Democrats really need a net gain of like four to five seats to be able to have the Senate

Starting point is 00:13:04 be more of a competitive voting arena, also considering J.D. Vance. There are 35 Senate seats on the ballot next month. So Democrats will need to flip around four to five seats, like I said, and one of the seats Democrats have wanted to flip for a long time, and especially this year, is Maine with Susan Collins. One of our worst lawmakers. Yes, and ProPublica, as I reported on ED a few weeks ago, ProPublica did that great investigation into military contracting corruption

Starting point is 00:13:40 and bribery involving Susan Collins. So Union law, Gertoy Jackson is trying to unseat Collins. Right now this race leans D or is a toss-up? Marist has Jackson up four points ahead of Collins among registered voters, but with a margin of error of 3.8%. So that's essentially still almost within the margin of error. This is going to be a very close race, right? A margin of error like that, this is still basically a toss-up. Other polling shows roughly the same results.

Starting point is 00:14:16 Jackson up a few points, but within the margin of error. per Morris, among the main electorate, 57% think Collins will win. That's not saying 57% want Collins to win, but they think that will happen, right? That's what they think is more likely. A survey from the Maine People's Resource Center found Jackson ahead among independent voters,

Starting point is 00:14:39 58% to 33% for Collins. The main People's Resource Center is a progressive-leaning institution. Obviously, this race is a race, in Maine has been a big shit show to say the least. And since Jackson has taken over as the nominee, Democratic Party establishment consultants have really swooped into Maine and have been trying to keep Jackson on a tight leash. Jackson's campaign has not replicated the Platner style,

Starting point is 00:15:08 like intensive town hall strategy. I think that would be a bad idea. Like, it would be really obvious if he just tried to be Graham Platner without the scandal, right? Yeah, let's try to be Graham Platner. Grand Platner, but I think it is the style of campaigning is very different. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:15:25 Jackson's not accessible to the electorate. Consultants have tried to keep him from doing Q&As at the events that he does end up doing. They've been dissuading him from talking about ICE and Israel and Palestine. Great. So they've really have been trying to keep him

Starting point is 00:15:40 on a pretty tight leash. There's a story in New York Magazine a few weeks ago that kind of details how Democratic establishment consultants have been trying to lead the Jackson campaign, that if people are interested in that specific topic, I recommend they check out. So this is one of the races that Democrats really do need to flip

Starting point is 00:16:01 if they have a chance of winning the Senate. And it is, you know, theoretically possible. You know, he may be slightly ahead in the polls, but only very slightly. But I think this is essentially a toss-up. Especially looking back at 2020 when the Democrat in that race also was, you know, a little bit ahead, and Collins still ended up walking away with it. Yeah. I think they're, I mean, they're both trying to avoid having another Platner who gets, like,

Starting point is 00:16:29 out of control of them and is saying shit that the DNC does not want to have to stand by. And I think they are also hoping that Plattener's campaign at least did enough damage to Collins, that she isn't going to be able to, like, pull out a win this time. And maybe that'll be the case, you know, that might wind up being a play that works. Definitely. It's not a great position. to have someone who was doing as well as Platner had been doing, get dropped out with a scandal that fucked up?

Starting point is 00:16:55 Like, that's a, that's not easy to handle. Yes, especially mobilizing that many people who were already kind of disillusioned with politics, giving them that sort of hope, and then having that hope be ripped away. And then those people who maybe, some of them who even still want to, you know, be politically engaged,

Starting point is 00:17:12 the Jackson campaign is not letting them touch the campaign with the 10-foot pull, which you could maybe understand their reasons for, but there's a lot of like grassroots, you know, very like working class oriented activists who want to be involved in some way that are not being tapped. Yeah. And as strong as Platner's campaign was,

Starting point is 00:17:30 it was because it was built on the work that they were doing. Yeah. Not just him as a person. Yeah. So those are sort of complicating factors in this race. And you know what's a complicating factor in this podcast episode, Garrison? The fact that we have to pivot to ads

Starting point is 00:17:43 in order to pay the bills. We have to pivot to ads right now. Yeah. Yeah, that is a complicating factor in our lives. And we're back. How do you feel about North Carolina, Robert? Of the Carolinas, definitely my favorite. That's so true, actually.

Starting point is 00:18:07 It's easily the best of the Carolinas. Top 50% Carolina. Sorry to everyone in Southern Carolina. I'm not apologize. I did not apologize. South Carolina, you need to know that. Well, North Carolina could also be one of the states that flip for the Dems. Former Democratic Governor Roy Cooper is facing a former R&C chair,

Starting point is 00:18:28 Michael Watley. What a name. Who is running to replace Republican Senator Tom Tillis. Those are both silly names. Have some self-respect. God damn it. This race is leaning Democrat.

Starting point is 00:18:41 This is not a toss-up. Yeah. Polls from late September have Cooper ahead five to 13 points. Yeah, that's pretty good. And last week, a Republican Super PAC

Starting point is 00:18:51 pulled $30 million of ad money out of the state to use in other races. So that's a sign that at least even among some Republicans, they're kind of giving up on this. Roy Cooper is a pretty strong candidate for this state. I should say, as we're going through all of these sort of candidates, this is not it could happen here endorsing any candidate just because they belong to one party or another. Not our thing.

Starting point is 00:19:18 I'm just talking about this in terms of what the Democrats want in order to take back power and the sort of how these candidates relate to each state. Roy Cooper is a relatively liked figure in North Carolina that is reflected in the polling for this. His campaign has also helped by the fact he's not going up against an incumbent. He's not going up against someone who voters already are familiar with, already like who they just want to keep in power. He's going up against a new guy, a former RNC chair.

Starting point is 00:19:46 So this is one of those states where the Democrats will probably flip. You can kind of count this on the four to five states needed to flip. this is the most kind of certain one. There'd be a massive polling error if it goes the other way, or some sort of fuckery, but... And just a total misread of the situation on the ground. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:20:05 Now, one of the more interesting kind of surprises is Alaska, which could also flip for Democrats. Former Democratic Congressman Mary Peltola is going up against sitting Senator Dan Sullivan. Paltola is definitely running more as like a centrist, very pro-fossil fuels

Starting point is 00:20:25 you're in Alaska. Yeah. Pro-gun, her campaign slogan is Fish Family Freedom. Yeah, that makes sense. Not a terrible slogan for running in Alaska. Not bad for Alaska. And rather than attacking Republicans,

Starting point is 00:20:42 a lot of her campaign messaging is focused on taking on, quote, D.C. You know, it's very much like Alaska versus D.C. Yeah. Yeah, corruption is a massive issue for the whole electorate, So it makes sense. Like that's, yeah, kind of the obvious play.

Starting point is 00:20:57 And really prioritizing Alaska as like its own special interest because it's so different from every other state. Part of Feltola strategy is trying to, you know, is trying to attract certain Republicans. So why she's not really going hard against Republicans per se, but attacking this sort of like, D.C. swamp establishment. That's, that's her main strategy here. New York Times-Syenne poll from late September to early October has Peltola up seven points. Yeah, that's a pretty solid lead. Alaska's been wavering the last couple of elections between blue and red. So this is not like a sea change, right?

Starting point is 00:21:35 This is kind of an incremental change in some of the, and obviously the disaster that this administration has pushed things further along than I think it otherwise would be, but it's been moving in this direction a while. Yeah, and like Alaska hasn't had a Democratic senator in like almost 20 years. This would be a significant event. if this happened. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't mean to say it wouldn't.

Starting point is 00:21:56 I've just been, like, this pattern has been occurring since before, like, Trump 2, right? And obviously, there's this general pattern of in the midterms usually, especially the House, but sometimes the Senate as well, shifts to the opposition party. This is like Politics 101. This is a very basic pattern. And what we're looking at is this could be even stronger this year than some years previously, probably not as strong as 2018. but taking back the Senate and the House would be huge,

Starting point is 00:22:25 especially because of how far they have to go in the Senate in order to retake it. Yeah. Now, the race in Alaska, this definitely used to lean Republican, right? This was not seen to be a very competitive race. But recently, this went to a toss-up, right? And now some models even have it leaning Democrat. So this is one race where there's been a lot of movement.

Starting point is 00:22:45 And J.D. Vance was dropped in to Alaska to campaign for Sullivan last week. something that they may not have needed to do or thought they needed to do a few months ago but now now this is competitive enough that they're sending in the vice president will jd vans actually help republicans win the state that's that's certainly debatable but i don't know if i would be putting jd. in as my pinch shatter

Starting point is 00:23:08 that's the thing right i don't like i don't know who i put in as my pen shitter right now in the republican bench but it would not vance would be the bottom of my list like honestly send in fetterman No, actually, legitimately, yes. He'll do better for you in this instance. Petting and Fettlement to campaign for the Republicans would be, I think, probably a smarter move. Yeah, you could convince him to do it.

Starting point is 00:23:33 What a nightmare. What a horrible situation. It's, it's, all. Things are really bad, buddy. Things are really bad. I know when, like, we were getting shot at by federal agents in Portland, things were bad, but things are a lot darker.

Starting point is 00:23:49 Yeah, well, I'm a, about to get maybe shot at by federal agents in like 20 minutes. Yeah, because they just shot a dude with an actual gun in New York, yeah. Time is a spiral. Yeah. Let's talk about Texas. Sure, yeah. I'm excited to talk about Texas because this is the first time I get to be like a little

Starting point is 00:24:10 optimistic about more than like two Texas elections actually. So yeah, I'm excited. Let's talk about telephrico. Telephrico. In terms of the set of the big, big question is Texas with James Talleyico going up against Kenny Pax, Ken Paxton. Kay Pax, as I like to call him. You probably didn't see that movie Garrison.

Starting point is 00:24:31 It's not good. No. No. I did just see out of sight, the Steven Soderberg movie. I don't know if I've seen that one. From like the 90s. It's like the proto-Ocean's 11. Okay.

Starting point is 00:24:42 It's the hottest I've ever seen George Clooney. Oh, Cluantang. Okay. He plays like a serial bank robber. That's a good role for him. who keeps going to jail, prison, then he breaks out, and then it kind of cuts between a few different timelines

Starting point is 00:24:55 as he gets into a sort of doomed romance with a federal marshal played by Jennifer Lopez. Okay, I was going to say, I've seen this movie, and then... Well, no, I have seen this movie with J-Lo. Yeah, yeah, I have seen this movie. It's hard to tell because, like, the first half of that description

Starting point is 00:25:10 is like 18 different George Clooney movies. Exactly. He's like a bank robber. He keeps going to prison. No, especially, like, the late 90s, early 2000. This is like his role. He had this like on lock. The hottest bank robber you've ever seen.

Starting point is 00:25:24 Yeah. People love a criminal. Speaking of, Ken Paxton, not doing great in the polls. Yeah. Marist and New York Times slash Sienna have Tala Rico up six points as of late September. With a recent Fox News poll showing Tala Rico at 51% to Paxton's 49%. Not good for. old K Pax.

Starting point is 00:25:50 No. There's also this big enthusiasm gap that the Fox News poll really focused on. Among mega-Republicans, 64% say they're extremely interested in the midterms.

Starting point is 00:26:05 But for non-Mega Republicans, only 50% is extremely interested in the midterms. So that's almost like a 15% gap among Republicans for how much they're invested in these midterms. Wow.

Starting point is 00:26:18 And this difference does exist on the Democratic side. The Fox News polling has Democrats broken down into two categories similar to, you know, MAGA or non-Mega. They have DSA Democrats and non-DSA Democrats, which is funny on its face. DSA Democrats are at 68%. Non-DSA is at 67%. So basically no gap. Jeez. And I think this has less to do with Tala Rico's specific characteristics as a candidate and everything to do with the fact that Ken Paxton is the literal Christian devil. And people want to see him beaten. Yes.

Starting point is 00:26:56 But I mean, these numbers are not just interesting because of the gap between MAGA and non-Mega Republicans, but also, mega-Republicans are at 64% for enthusiasm versus Democrats are at 67, 68. So that's a few points ahead just for enthusiasm against the MAGA kind of hardcore. And the other really worrying part of this for Republicans. Republicans is that out of the percent that say that they will vote, mega is at 76 percent. Non-Mega is at 65 percent. That's an 11 percent gap. And similarly, this gap does not exist for the Democrats, DSA or otherwise.

Starting point is 00:27:34 That is really interesting. And it says a lot about mega Republicans that they have just completely given up any kind of like moral standards for their candidates. Do not care. It does not matter at all. in a lot of the country, Republicans and MAGA Republicans are synonyms, but that's not the case in a lot of Texas. Like, Texas has a lot of Bush Republicans still. Yeah. I mean, like, those people still likely are going to vote for Trump in the presidential elections.

Starting point is 00:28:01 Absolutely. But oversimplifying all of their politics to MAGA is a, I think, is a sort of theoretical mistake. It's a mistake. Those people are not, some of them are, because there's a chunk of Republicans that look like they're going to Tallulica, but it's not a huge chunk. No. It's more that some of them just aren't going to vote or are going to put in like a protest candidate.

Starting point is 00:28:21 You know, I've read some interviews to that as stands with like Republican voters who are on sort of the Bush Republican side of things being like, I'm just going to put in a protest vote or something, which in this instance is just as good as voting for Taurico in terms of stopping Paxton from winning again. Because the Republicans who have some degree of moral fiber left are also disgusted with Ken Paxton.

Starting point is 00:28:41 He's gross. On that topic, I don't know if you saw this, Ken Paxton's ex-wife, who is a Texas state senator, was tapped for an election ad where she does not even say her ex-husband's name but just begs people to vote for the quote, Republican ticket to stay on the team. I want to play the ad.

Starting point is 00:29:03 Yeah, God, this is great. I'm Texas Senator Angela Paxton. People have asked my thoughts about this election and turns out I have some. Let's talk about the elephant in the room. In a general election, it's not as much about the individual players on the team. It's about getting the whole team across the finish line. Either we hold every Republican seat or we hand the future of Texas to the other team.

Starting point is 00:29:27 That's why I'm voting for the Republican ticket on November 3rd. Let's hold the line together. Texas Pack is responsible for the content of this advertising. Rousing. Won't even say his name. Rousing message. Crazy stuff. Wow.

Starting point is 00:29:40 Wild stuff. Hold your nose and vote from my shitty ex, the psychopath. Especially because she starts by saying, let's address the elephant in the room. And then doesn't. Does not address the elephant? Can't bring herself to say his name. Oh my God, that's amazing.

Starting point is 00:29:57 It's one of the most incredible political ads I've ever seen. Almost as good as we may as well play this one. This is technically a house ad. Unfortunately, we're going to drop it here in the Senate section, but in terms of talking about political ads. This is an ad running in Ohio in response to a series of anti-trans ads that the Republicans have been blasting in the airwaves. Seeing these ads, they're a complete lie. Records show not only is this woman actually from Texas, she didn't have any surgery as a minor. But John Hustead, he protected men who abused young girls by voting in the Senate to block the release of the Epstein files.

Starting point is 00:30:37 Maybe that's because Hustead took 116,000. from associates of Jeffrey Epstein, 10 times more than any other senator. John Houston should be ashamed. I'm sure Brown and I approve this message. It's that easy. It's that easy, folks. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:30:54 The ads made for you, really. If the Republicans want to make quote-unquote protecting young girls the center of their politics, they fucking handed you the silver platter. The Epstein's right there. Yeah. It's frustrating because Tala RICO has fucking. recently made some kind of bows to the anti-trans kids in sports panic shit, which was very wishy-washy, flippy, floppy, not standing firmly where he should be, certainly.

Starting point is 00:31:22 No, and I don't think that's helping him. Honestly, I think the primary thing helping him is that Ken Paxton isn't a bombardable monster. He's awful. He's the devil. And to run against the devil, you simply have to not be the devil. I guess it's harder than that. Trump won. And also offer people real things.

Starting point is 00:31:40 things as well. I think... I'm not being fair to the campaign. Like, he has run a much better campaign than that. Well, I'm also just saying, like, in general, I think the sort of running as just not Trump has that, yes, that's not one as a strategy. That's not enough. Talariko has worked hard to portray himself as other than being a Democrat, like a Texas Christian that Texans can, you know, find respectable, right? Yeah. We'll talk a little bit more about Texas, but first, Here are some ads. And we're back. I did want to mention one more thing about the K-Pax campaign.

Starting point is 00:32:27 Paxton Senate campaign recently put out a series of missing posters, demanding proof of life for James Talarico. Oh, yeah. A little less than two weeks ago, he took sick with the flu. He got diagnosed on September 30th, and after that, he had to attend, he attended like a Hispanic Business Council meeting via video that had been scheduled to attend in person.

Starting point is 00:32:49 Yeah. He told attendees, I'm running a fever, and I'm at my most contagious right now, and I guess I've been shaking too many hands on the campaign trail, so I want to keep everybody safe. He stated that if he passed his illness to somebody's grandmother or baby, he couldn't live with himself. Totally reasonable thing. But Paxton's campaign put out this, like, old West-looking, like, wanted poster of him demanding proof of life because he's been absent 12 days from the campaign trail. They're doing the fucking Mitch McConnell bullshit. Yeah, it's nonsense. he's been making statements.

Starting point is 00:33:19 He's just not, he's sick. That happens. He's booked for a CNN town hall in October 14. There's been a pretty bad illness going around, whether I think there's probably a few. I know with that there is a cold. There is a COVID strain. And he's young for politics, but he's also at the age in which flus and shit hit yard. You know, like he's not a baby, right?

Starting point is 00:33:38 I did see a clip from the president in the past few days talking about this. And he said that Paxton's hiding because he's been forced to eat meat when running and so he's been vomiting up meat all the time and that's why he's not what not visible Donald what? What the fuck? Because Trump's been, Trump just learned what veganism is. Yeah. And he says it really funny. And it's been like the main thing he's been attacking Tala, TalaFrico with is that the fact that he's like a let or alleged vegan, right? Because he's not a vegan. Yes. Like no, even if you were a vegan, if you wanted to win a major election in Texas, you would lie about that.

Starting point is 00:34:17 That's almost more of a disqualifying factor in Texas politics than being a Democrat. But, yeah, that's been the main thing Trump's been trying to attack Talafrico for is this alleged vegan status. And the idea that Talafriko is having to fake being a meat eater and has gotten sick from eating meat and is thus vomiting. And that's why he's out of the spotlight. Yeah, of course. That's definitely it. Simple, basic stuff. Politics 101.

Starting point is 00:34:45 Yeah, politics, something or other. The gubernatorial election is also going to be this year for Texas. And this is like the first time in a while that it's looked actually kind of competitive. Gina Hinojosa is running against Greg Abbott, who is right up there with Ken Paxton in terms of being an evil scumbag. Like, he is just a monster, although a much more popular monster than Ken Paxton is with voters. But even so, Hineosa is giving him a run for his money. Right now, the real clear politics average trend has Abbott at 48.1 and Hina Yosa at 46.4. But there are several polls that have Hina Yosa ahead, including UGov.

Starting point is 00:35:31 The New York Times, Siena poll has her up by three. Marist has her up by three. Recon, M.R. at Sienna has her up by four. Now, obviously, there are some, like, Telemundo has Abbott up by seven. Box has Abbott up by five, and there are definitely more polls that have Abbott ahead. But this looks close enough that, like, it's being considered by a lot of people to be a toss-up or close to a toss-up. It's competitive.

Starting point is 00:35:55 It's competitive. Like, she really could pull it off. I'm not saying I think that's the likeliest thing to happen here because this is still Texas, and I just can't be that optimistic about the gubernatorial race. But I would love it if Gina could unseat Greg Abbott because he is. is just a fucking monster. And yeah, she's running a really good campaign. Yeah, she's currently in the House of Representatives representing the 49th district.

Starting point is 00:36:21 The Texas House or the federal? In the Texas House. She's a state legislator. The Texas House, okay. Got it. Yeah. And she worked for the AFL prior to that. She's been a lawyer for quite some time.

Starting point is 00:36:32 She was part of the legal team that sued Tom DeLay. The Hinoosos is like a prominent North Texas family. I went to school with one of her, I don't know if it was her kid or like a cousin or something, but like the hyenas is are like a prominent wealthy family in North Texas. So it's very interesting that she's, and I haven't enough of a deep dive. I think a lot of what's helping her is just the general unpopularity of the Republican Party right now. And I do kind of suspect that Greg Abbott is being dragged down a little bit by Ken Paxton, too, like that just the general, the overall trend. And also like I think

Starting point is 00:37:08 Hinios is probably benefiting from some of the enthusiasm that Talariko's campaign has helped to generate too, right? Obviously, she's also made a lot of really good moves on her own that have increased enthusiasm. But in general, I think because Texas looks competitive in a way it really hasn't, it's benefiting probably both candidates a lot. Just that is bringing more people out to volunteer. It's bringing more people out to donate. Just creating this impression that, like, this might be a winnable fight has done a lot. Yeah. So that's one to keep watch on. Again, I would say a gun to my head, Abbott's still probably going to eke out of victory, but I can't say definitely, right?

Starting point is 00:37:45 Yeah, he does have that sort of incumbent advantage. And that's another factor with the Tala Rico-Riko-Paxon thing. Paxton does not have that incumbent advantage. I think Corbyn would be a much harder candidate for Talleyco to beat. This wouldn't be an election if Corbyn had won the primary. That's why we were sort of softly excited when Paxton won. Because as dangerous as it is for Pax to potentially be in the Senate, he has a much bigger attack.

Starting point is 00:38:12 attack radius or attack surface. Attack surface. Then Cornyn does. Another one of these kind of long shots, actually I would say the biggest long shot for a flip is in Florida, with progressive Democrat Angie Nixon running against Ashley Moody, who took Rubio's seat. The best poll for Nixon as of a few days ago is by Florida politics,

Starting point is 00:38:37 and according to them, the race is at a tie, 45%. but a recent poll from Stetson University has Moody leading 51 to 40, so 11 points. A UGov poll from late September to early October has Moody five points ahead, with 5% of likely voters still undecided. Though, actually, as of just a few hours ago, as of recording, we're recording this on Thursday night. Florida politics did another poll, which shows Moody at 47% and Angie Nixon at 45%.

Starting point is 00:39:10 within margin of error. So a slight difference from the last poll that had them tied. This is one of those races that the Democrats, as like, you know, like the DNC is not actually expecting

Starting point is 00:39:23 Nixon to win. Like, they're not really pumping much money in or, you know, really any money in. So like, they're not helping. All of this is the result of just Nixon being a really good politician. Like the fact that the race is this close.

Starting point is 00:39:36 And like, and Nixon's a sort of like, you know, like sleeper candidate. Like I was not. familiar with Nixon until the primary. And since then, I've watched videos of her working in the state house from these past few years and then campaign appearances. She is great. She is really good. A really clear communicator of working class issues, issues of impacting the black community in Florida, right? Florida's the state we often like reduce to kind of the worst of the

Starting point is 00:40:03 worst people. But there's a lot of like good people in Florida as well. They just haven't been represented in politics for almost as long as I've been alive. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it gets forgotten, but there's like a reason why the 2000 election hinged on Florida, and it was because it was really close. And I'm really interested to see what the results of this race is, because this will indicate kind of how much Trump is hurting the Republicans

Starting point is 00:40:28 if it's like a really, really close race, if the results are really close. And it will also point to Nixon's strength as a candidate, and I'm interested to watch what she does after this election, whether or not she wins. Of course, there's the other close race, which is in Michigan, which currently leans Democrat with Abdul El-Said on average, polling about 3% ahead of former Republican Congressman Mike Rogers.

Starting point is 00:40:53 Amarist poll from late September has El-Said at 51 to Rogers 44, a seven-point lead. That's El-Said's most favorable poll. On New York Times, Sienna poll from mid-September, shows El-Said up five points. A Fox poll has him up one point. If Abdul wins, Dems could hold on to this seat, strengthening their chances of controlling the Senate, but this would not be a flip. So this is something that they really need to hold on to in order to have a chance,

Starting point is 00:41:20 but this will not go towards the sort of four to five seats they need in order to flip. Before we close, I do want to just mention a few of the sort of underlying factors that could be influencing this election. One of the big ones just is Trump and how much everyone hates him. He has a 36% approval rating, which is the lowest pre-midterm approval rating in 50 years. Yeah, that makes sense. Not good.

Starting point is 00:41:45 Not great for the Republicans. Not what you'd want, yeah. Not what you would want. And remember when I was talking about the enthusiasm gap that the Fox poll was showing, the latest KFF health tracking poll that's from the organization formerly known as Kaiser Family Foundation, they found a very large enthusiasm gap between parties

Starting point is 00:42:05 in their last poll with Democratic voters, much more likely than Republican voters to say they're, quote, more motivated to vote this year. Way more than usual. It's 63% to 38%. That's a huge gap. The cost of health care and gas

Starting point is 00:42:23 tie as voters' top affordability worries. A quarter of respondents said that they are very worried about affording each ahead of food, utilities, and housing. So 25% said they were very worried about affording health care, 25% said they're very worried about affording gas. So that's the tie. It's 50% of the

Starting point is 00:42:45 concern. It's those two. The Democratic Party has a clear edge over the Republican Party on who voters trust to handle many top issues in the election, including cost of health care. 42% of respondents trust the Democrats more on these issues. For cost of living, 39% respondents trust Democrats more, more 25% for the Republicans. And the cost of living was the top issue for both Democrat and independent voters, while Republican voters wanted candidates who discussed, quote, fraud. That's the big issue for Republicans right now. This is, you know, J.D. Vance's task force, the post kind of doge thing, is they're really obsessed with this idea of fraud. And not really the type of fraud that Robert or I

Starting point is 00:43:32 would talk about, you know, I think everyone's pretty familiar with how much we're all being ripped off, the time. Scam culture is huge. Corporate fraud. The only culture. It's everything, right? And that's not what Republicans are interested in. They are wanting to kick people off public benefits, right? That's the type of fraud that they are mostly interested in. To close, the most interesting part about this KFF poll, though, is the numbers around Medicare for all. Quote, two-thirds of the public, 66%, said they favor Medicare for all. The highest share KFF has recorded since it began polling the idea in 2016. And this is the really crazy part, quote,

Starting point is 00:44:14 about half, 52% said they would favor Medicare for All if it eliminated private health insurance companies, while 47% oppose. That is a huge change from like five years ago. This has been the biggest kind of protest against Medicare for All is the idea that it would take away your private health care. When respondents get told this in polling, historically we've seen support for Medicare for All take a big dip.

Starting point is 00:44:40 This is the first time a majority of respondents have said they would still support Medicare for All if it took away private health care. To quote KFF, quote, this marks a departure from when KFF last asked this question in October 2020, when the prospect of eliminating private health insurance companies led to lower support for Medicare for All at just 37%. So this is a huge thing. And I would be remiss to mention, you know, most of these candidates were talking about in the Senate, the Democratic ones, you know, Troy Jackson, Angie Nixon, Abdul, El-Said. They are running on Medicare for All. This has become a big resurgent topic this election.

Starting point is 00:45:21 The cost of health care is a big topic in these midterms. And rather than doing this sort of Pete Buttigieg style Medicare for all who want it, you know, just kind of vaguely talking about having a public office. option, right? These candidates are being a bit more strict about Medicare for all as like an actual policy and as a policy guarantee. I think Abdul's policy has some slight differences where it does not completely eliminate private healthcare, but it says that private healthcare should become redundant and still has a focus on a universal single payer system, which is much closer to the Bernie Sanders version than the sort of like half-assed versions that we've seen from other progressive candidates, you know, running for president, like six years ago. So something that,

Starting point is 00:46:08 you know, maybe two or three years ago, I felt like it's kind of like a political, you know, bygone, this is focused on like Medicare for all, is definitely coming back in a big way. And people are not nearly as scared at the prospect of them not having private insurance. Because private insurance sucks. Yeah, it's gotten even worse. Like, we're what, like two years after the Mangione assassination, things still suck. Everyone still hates healthcare companies. Yeah, only hate them more as time goes on. So yeah, that is the kind of rough overview of the issues affecting the midterms and where the polling stands now just a few weeks away from November. I want to say third. Let's see if I'm right. I am right. Boom. We'll probably

Starting point is 00:46:51 do a few more polling updates on executive disorder as we get closer to election day. Absolutely. But yeah, that's all for me here. Yeah. Remember, guys, do what the IRG says. would want you to do. Just do to vote. We're not telling you to vote. No, the IRGCC is. No, the Iranian government is. We're not.

Starting point is 00:47:15 Good stuff. You've heard the chaos. Now you can see it. Do we want to jump right in? Watch all your favorite podcasts from start to finish right inside the free IHAR radio app. Make some noise. Catch every laugh and eye roll on shows like Bestie listen.

Starting point is 00:47:37 Hey Jonas. Sharisas. Now with full video. I'll just leave that there. It's the same hosts and the same chemistry with all the hilarious moments you've been missing right on your screen. Open the free IHard Radio app. Search video podcasts and tap watch. I'm Melissa Jeltsin and in my new podcast what happened to her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival.

Starting point is 00:48:14 The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead. Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her that didn't protect her that didn't see her no child should ever experience that and we were babies she did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it and he got a year you never know

Starting point is 00:48:46 who that devil is because he's wearing the disguise sometimes it's a police uniform listen to what happened to her on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts Lisa we should tell them about our new show oh my god lexie We have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie to Me. I'm Lexi Youanu. We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa Di Giulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references,

Starting point is 00:49:16 occasionally different opinions, and at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all. I'm not going to get anywhere fighting. That is wild. I learned that about you today. Now in my 30s, being the founder of new shoes, good taste is my business. And I've always got something to say. If men were just honest about this, there would be so much more peace in the world. We're going to talk about dating, relationships, beauty, getting older, and a little wiser.

Starting point is 00:49:43 We're best friends, but we don't always agree. Because you told us how accommodating you are. Obviously, I would do what I think I could do to fight the fight, but there's only so much fight I can fight. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Liar. Listen on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I don't really care.

Starting point is 00:50:08 Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say

Starting point is 00:50:23 vote against their own economic interest, and they complain about the very thing they're receiving. It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered. I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all going to scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network.

Starting point is 00:50:52 Twelve seats, those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground. going a heart in the South now. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the IHart radio app, Apple Podcasts. Wherever you get your podcasts. You broke me. You do not deserve happiness. I'm Andrea Gunning.

Starting point is 00:51:14 On this season of betrayal, we meet Carl Bryant. Carl thought he was living a normal, drama-free life until the messages started. You will have hell to pay. For nine months, someone infiltrated every aspect of. of Carl's life threatening to ruin him. Cyberstalking, swatting, extortion, impersonation. And then the text threats escalated. Someone's not going to make it out of this alive.

Starting point is 00:51:44 This department. It's playing out in real life, not just on the phone. Every piece of evidence pointed to one man. But every piece of evidence was a lie. He was not going to stop unless we stopped him. Listen to Betrayal Season 6 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Iqadap and Here, a podcast with a Here is France and the It is It. I am your host, Mia Wong. And today we are going to be talking about the enormous and

Starting point is 00:52:25 incredibly militant student protests in France. And with me to talk about this is FISA, who is a political analyst and feminist theorist in France. And Fesa, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Mia. Hello, everybody. Yeah, I'm really excited to talk with you about this because there has been so much unbelievably wild stuff happening, both good and bad, and like, oh my God,

Starting point is 00:52:51 it's like hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, most of whom are like 15, 16, Like, oh my God. It is so exciting to watch. I mean, I've wanted to see such an uprising for so long. And it's finally starting to happen. Like, it was a slow built up this past couple of years. But I feel like something is maybe happening and not just in France.

Starting point is 00:53:25 Like the whole Gen Z worldwide is really tired. of this shit and is hitting the streets and I love it and I'm here for it It's amazing It is And yeah

Starting point is 00:53:40 We're going to be getting more into Every other country That's also going up right now Because it's like It's like India and Spain and Chile And we've seen a whole bunch of other countries In the past Yes we have

Starting point is 00:53:53 Six months go up But I guess I want to start with Going a bit Into sort of the background of this and going into what the political situation has been in France that's sort of been leading up to this and what kinds of conditions have been sort of producing this. Well, have you heard of neoliberalism? No, like, seriously, like that, that, I mean, well, we've had Macon, which is our very dear

Starting point is 00:54:26 president. No, I'm kidding. We fucking hate the guy. Yeah. The guy is brought into his very core. So, yeah, he's been president for almost 10 years now. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Yeah. And the utter complete destruction of anything public, like public education, public health and everything, didn't start with him.

Starting point is 00:54:50 But let's just say that he put the final nail of the proverbial coffin. and he's been like dismantled public education ever since he arrived and took his job as president and if you want an analogy or something in comparison with what's happening in the US with respect to your public education well when I saw

Starting point is 00:55:19 like 10 years ago Betsy DeVos arrived as a secretary of litigation well you remember her she basically destroyed anything public education wise. Like she wanted to follow all the money to private schools and charter schools. And that's basically what has been happening in France too, like in these past 10 years. All the money has been funneled in more or less legal ways to private school. Yeah, I see more or less legal ways because they're,

Starting point is 00:55:56 There are a lot of loopholes. And McCone and his government are experts at using those loopholes. Basically, they can look at you in the eye and tell you that what they're doing is legal, technically. Yeah. You know what I mean. And they will say that to your face while destroying everything you hold near and dear at the same time. So these past 10 years, the money allocated to education has decreased. The number of teachers has tremendously decreased, like dramatically decreased.

Starting point is 00:56:38 Jesus. The number of a student by class has increased. The way this project started is, well, a school year in France started in September. It's basically from September to June, July. And, well, in the poorest areas of France, high schoolers arrived in their high schools and found basically no, not enough desks, not enough chairs, no teachers, holes in the roof, water leaking in the classroom. Yeah. No AC, like that goes without saying, like, we don't have AC. Like, this is not the standard thing.

Starting point is 00:57:21 thing in France. So you could have like 100 degrees Fahrenheit in, you know, and with no AC, like people, like high schoolers were cooking in their schools. During the winter, some of these schools, the poorest schools also don't have heat. Oh, Jesus. Yeah. So, yeah. So, yeah. Oh, exactly.

Starting point is 00:57:45 I let you imagine how you can learn anything in school. Yeah. while freezing by, I don't know, 50 degrees in your school. Yeah. Like, you know, like, I was the thing you back to buy his high school. And it's like, well, we occasionally had drowned rafts falling out of the ceiling. But like, at least we had heat in the winter. Like, we would have all died.

Starting point is 00:58:07 Even if he is out of the window, like, there's nothing left in some high schools, like really nothing. And the egregious thing is that you can have a very poor area. with the poorest high schoolers, with the most destroyed high school you can see. And in the town nearby, you will find the best high schools with the richest population. Like, for instance, in Paris.

Starting point is 00:58:39 Like, you have Paris, the capital, and you have Persian suburbs. Some are extremely rich, and some are basically the poorest ones in the whole country. So what is happening is that we don't have states. We basically have regions and departments and stuff like that. Like the way France is cut, the map is cut like that.

Starting point is 00:59:04 And so the president of, it's called the Isles. Basically, Paris is part of a region. The president of this region is a right winger, pretty much far right, but officially she's only right winger. and her specialties to funnel money, public money, to private schools. How great. Jesus Christ. Of course.

Starting point is 00:59:29 Many such cases. Many such cases. Amazing. You see the similarities with that city of us? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's basically, those two women are the same picture. Let's just say it like that. So that president has been putting a lot of public money in private schools.

Starting point is 00:59:47 schools in Paris and in the Paris suburb, rich ones. But where is she taking that money? Yeah. Well, instead of distributing this money equally across the whole territory that she's leading, she's only distributing that money to private schools, Catholic schools, and schools that are in the richest suburbs and in the richest area. That makes sense. So that's how you find yourself, when you're a poor, when you're a poor kid, growing up in a poor suburb, that's how you find yourself going in a high school that has holes basically everywhere, that doesn't have enough teachers, that doesn't have enough desks, enough chairs, that is lacking basically everything that has rats running in the hallways.

Starting point is 01:00:35 Yeah. Yeah. So came last September, like a month ago, high schoolers went back to school, and low and told they found their school being just as bad as it was when they, just before, when they went to, like, for the summer holidays and stuff like that. And so they came back and they, they found no teacher. They found no desk, no chair, no nothing. And yeah, they were mad. And they were right. And so they started to protest to ask for teachers, money, for desks for

Starting point is 01:01:16 chairs. I mean, it's the most basic things. They're not asking for, they're not asking for the latest, I don't know, iPhone or iPad or whatever. Yeah. What of the fuck? No, no, they're asking for like the most basic necessities.

Starting point is 01:01:33 Yeah, like we're asking for to be a school. Exactly. Desk plus teacher is like the most basic school. Like, what are we doing here? And they're asking for a chance of life. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:01:48 You know what I mean? Like, we have a system. It's a system that's been in place since 2018. It started, so under McColl again. And it's a very, very opaque system. It's a system that is designed, it's an algorithm, basically, that is designed to pick for you what you're going to do next. Like, basically, when you're in 10th grade, so I was so.

Starting point is 01:02:13 I was telling you that before we started taping, but high school and friends only has three years in it, like 10th to 12th grade. So when you get in 10th grade, you have to choose in 10th grade what you're going to do in college or university. Which is ridiculous. It is utterly ridiculous, like, granted.

Starting point is 01:02:34 Awful. Why? You're 15. You're 15. And people are asking 15 years old to, to pay. with high accuracy what they're going to do as adults for the rest of their lives. That is stressful.

Starting point is 01:02:50 The level of stress these kids are facing is humongous. Ridiculous. Yeah. It is ridiculous. And the level of attempted suicide among high schoolers has increased in a way that you cannot comprehend. Like the number are terrifying. Also, that algorithm is a very racist one. It's a very classist one.

Starting point is 01:03:17 Yeah. Yeah, it basically is a black boss. Like, people, we, the public, we don't know what's in the algorithm. Like, we do not have access to it. The only thing that we know is the result. And the result is poor kids coming from poor areas have basically zero chance at getting access to a proper university. or a university at all.

Starting point is 01:03:44 Yeah. Like you could end in a queue, but like the 5,000 kids. Yeah. In a queue to access a public university. I'm not talking about private schools. I'm talking about public schools. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:04:01 It's something that is deeply unfair. It's a system that when I was in high school didn't exist. When I was in high school, like it was 20, 25 years ago. I'm old. But yeah, we're in high school. Basically, the only thing you had to do, you had an exam at the end of high school.

Starting point is 01:04:20 And if you passed that exam, you could go to university. And that was it. And then the only thing that matters was your grades in university. That's it. Which is also still like a stressful system, but it's like, we've made it worse.

Starting point is 01:04:35 Like, it was a stressful system but it made some sense. Yeah, yeah, there's a one-to-one correlation. Exactly. There was some logic behind it. The logic now is cruelty. It is violence. It is class violence.

Starting point is 01:04:55 It is race violence. It is ableism, obviously, also. And kids, well, they arrive in high school and they already know that their life is crude. That's what's happening. So, and the government, the state doesn't give a fuck. Yeah. Which is basically why you're saying the footage you've been seeing for the last week is this is why the cops have been bidding the shit out of high schoolers.

Starting point is 01:05:25 It's because they don't give a fuck. And also they know that they don't have a choice, what they're going to do. Yeah. It reminds me so much of the protest in India where it's like, yeah, you're facing the same thing of like, And this, I guess, is one of the things of neoliberalism was, like, on the one hand, education was supposed to be, like, your ticket out, right? It was supposed to be, like, if you, you know, like, meritocratic, if you were, like, good enough, you could get into, like, elite university. And that's, you're, like, taking it out of poverty. And then simultaneously, we're going to make that impossible.

Starting point is 01:05:58 And, yeah, I mean, just, like, thinking about, like, yeah, like, the stories of these kids were forced into this, like, unbelievably intense, like, competitive. pressure and are just getting screwed out of the ability to fight their way out of the poverty that they've been born into and just being like, fuck this. If they're going to rig the system where the only thing we can go do is fight them. Exactly. And you know, you were talking about like meritocracy. Like I'm putting it in between quotes for people who can see me. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:06:31 Well, I mean, it was, that term was originally a joke. It was originally a joke. It was invented as a joke Like And it's the same thing with like Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps Which the whole point of that is that you can't It was a joke

Starting point is 01:06:46 But no We've like we decided this is a thing that exists in the world Even though it doesn't God Makes me insane all the time You cannot create a parody out of this reality Like the level of like a comedy Of dramedy is

Starting point is 01:07:03 This dot here Yeah I mean But talking about that, like, a few days ago, we on my stream were watching a clip from the news. I don't remember which news outlet it was. But they were basically talking about a high school, a very famous one, which is called Henri Katre, Henry IV. And this high school is inside of Paris. And it is well known for being like a very bourgeois high school.

Starting point is 01:07:33 Like this is like basically. as bourgeois as you can do, as you can get. Yeah, it's a rich kid one. The anchor, the news anchor, introduced this high school by telling that it was basically poster child for meritocracy. And I choked on my saliva. I was like, no, no, you meant it's bourgeoisie. Like, you used a word instead of another world.

Starting point is 01:08:01 Like, that's not meritocracy, like, that's bourgeoisie. But basically that's the same thing. And thank you for saying it out. I was like, thank you. Yeah. And it's so funny because it's like, it is in the original sense, which is that it was, it was a joke about how it was just rich kids you got into college.

Starting point is 01:08:17 But like, it's not in the sense you're trying to use it. Like, come on. Yeah, like neoliberalism saw the joke and was like, yeah, you know what I can do about it? I can rip the joke out of it. And I can just keep the word and make it something real. How about it? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:08:32 It's like, what if all of the metaphors became literal now? And that's like the world. we live in. Exactly. That's the fucking world we'll live in. Absolutely. The kids have no prospects. I mean, they don't have any in the U.S. Like, Gen Z won't be able to buy a house. That's the same thing in France. Like, that's the same thing in Spain. That's the same thing in Chile. That's the same thing in every capitalist, capitalistic-based society, basically. So, yeah, what we're seeing worldwide and what we are sitting in France right now,

Starting point is 01:09:07 is the product of what you're saying in the US. It's a product of what you're saying in Spain. It's the neoliberal order. It's white supremacy. And of course, to be honest, it's the least surprising thing ever. It's basically one plus one equals two. That's what we're seeing. It's a logical product of our society.

Starting point is 01:09:32 So yeah, the kids are mad. They have the right to be and I'm fully supportive. like really. Yeah. So we're going to take an ad break because yeah, we too are subject to the horrifying violence and whimsy of neoliberal capitalism.

Starting point is 01:09:49 I hear you. And we are back. So let's talk about what the students have been up to. You mean on the streets or do you mean on social media? Yeah, let's get into, I guess the streets first. What have the students been doing? What kinds of tactics have they've been using? So they've been using blockades, a lot of them, which is basically a French tradition.

Starting point is 01:10:27 We're very good at that. Like whenever there's a protest, especially high school protests and students protests, we build blockades. So we go for a disruption. So the purpose is to disrupt high schools, it's to disrupt universities, and to push the adults, basically, to listen to the kids and what they want. So that's what has been happening, except that our dear government basically says, fuck, we don't care, and assent the fuss. So the cops have been answering to the protest by mutilating kids and mutilating adults.

Starting point is 01:11:14 basically that's been this government's response to any protest since 2017, since Macaul arrived in the Elyz, which is our White House, basically. So this time around, even news anchor have been taken aback by the violence coming from the cops. Yeah, because it's like actual children. It is. It's children. But on the other side, you have. have an authoritarian regime. Yeah. And what is evidently behaving as a police state?

Starting point is 01:11:52 I mean, come on. Yeah, like you're blowing kids' hands off. Like, you know who they've been getting their inspiration from? The US? Ice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:12:08 Yeah. Our government, when they saw ice, when they saw how, quote unquote, effective ice is at handling the public in handling protests. They didn't even hide

Starting point is 01:12:23 that it was their wood dreams. What we're seeing is the logical evolution of policing in a neoliberal society. Like the kids are asking for the most basic stuff and the most basic stuff could lead to

Starting point is 01:12:39 assemblance of equality. And they cannot have that. Yeah. So let's just send the cops. Let's just bit the shit out of the kids and terrorize the fuck out of adults. And let's teach everybody, the whole population, what protests looks like. It looks like blood.

Starting point is 01:13:01 It looks like amputation. It looks like losing a lie. The purpose is very clear is to put the fear of God in the population. Whilst the population is scared, shitless, the said population will stop protesting and start complaining. Yeah, which I will say the kind of upside of drawing from the American ICE anti-protest models, that that didn't work. Doing that stuff in the U.S. just pissed everyone off.

Starting point is 01:13:29 And it was only when they stopped doing that kind of confrontation and, like, move to this, like, quiet ethnic cleansing model, I guess, where they didn't do mass confrontation, that, like, everything kind of, I don't know, that they were, like, really effectively able to carry out the ethnic cleansing, which is bleak at its own right, but it did backfire on them, like, sort of spectacularly. Yeah, but it was a polite ethnic cleansing. Like, what is scaring me,

Starting point is 01:13:57 and it's not surprising, but it's still scary as fuck, is that you could do the most violent things with a polite tone and people just... Yeah, yeah. Stop, look at it and just keep living their lives, as long as it's polite, as long as it doesn't make a lot of noise, as long as it's not disruptive. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:14:18 And our government really understands that, but yours also does. Sort of. I feel like they're kind of like, like, our government's like, because our entire government is like designed to produce content, it took them a while to figure out that this is the way that you should actually do it, because their initial instinct was just to like do these giant confrontations to produce content out of, and then eventually they realized, like, if you just do it quietly,

Starting point is 01:14:45 then you can actually do the thing. Yeah, because if you do it quietly, then you get the liberals behind you. Because liberals, at the end of the day, they're not disruptive. Like, they want to keep on living their lives. Yeah. They want to keep on, like, being able to consume.

Starting point is 01:15:02 They want to be able to go to the movies and go on vacation. And, like, they need that kind of scope. they need that sense of normalcy to keep on going and protest, like, disrupt that sense of normalcy. So once you get back to a semblance of normalcy, you get liberals on your side, basically. Or at least you stop having liberals against you. Yeah. And yeah, that's what has been happening in the U.S. That's how our government has been rolling for the past almost 10 years now. What has been happening, though, with this protest

Starting point is 01:15:43 is that liberals have been watching their own kids being beaten up. They've been watching their own kids losing eyes, like being arrested, put up in jail, and stuff like that. And that is way too disruptive. This doesn't fly. So they're going to find another way to do things. I mean, I know how they're going to do stuff. They're just going to point their fingers at black and brown folks.

Starting point is 01:16:10 Yeah. And say that these kids are the bad ones, and they deserve what's everything that's happening to them, and that they are like manipulating the good white kids and stuff like that, like through social media, through what happened. So what our government also has been doing these past almost 10 years is vilifying anything remotely left wing. Like, I don't know if you know Jean-Luc Menon. Yeah, he's the...

Starting point is 01:16:40 kind of, the media you should describe him as like Francis Burney, but he's like, eh. Actually, that's not so far-fetched. I would say that he's not as left-leaning as Bernie. Yeah. It's very funny because, like, when you read about him in the press, he gets described as, like, the hard left guy. And he's like, no, he's not. This guy's like to the right of, like, the PCF who were like right.

Starting point is 01:17:06 I know. No, his political party, France. abashed that France is has been categorized as far left. It's social democracy. Like it's not even from... Yeah. I was like, what are we doing here?

Starting point is 01:17:21 They're not revolutionary at all. They're not anti-capitalist. They're trying to save capitalism for you. And you're like, no, you're communist. It's like, no. They're not even socialist. Like they're... They got a less harmful

Starting point is 01:17:36 capitalism. Like, it's really social democracy. It's Bernie core, basically. Yeah. But they might be a little bit more radical than Bernie here and there. Bernie can be more radical in some stances. But, you know, none of them, neither Bernie nor Menoncho are far left. Like, they're not.

Starting point is 01:17:57 They're just not. Yeah. But when you have such reactionary politics in power, yeah. Anything remotely left-leaning seems far left. So this is how they've been presenting. opposition. And so coming back to what I was telling you, they're linking

Starting point is 01:18:13 the protest to the French and Abash party saying that it was created and originated from France and Abash and that this political party is instrumentalizing the protest and is basically

Starting point is 01:18:29 it's a big puppeteer manipulating the youth. Yeah, this is like exactly the same shit they did in India. Except with India. There was like a, I guess, well actually, I I don't know if the French government has pulled the Islamist card yet. It has. It has.

Starting point is 01:18:45 Oh, it already has. Yeah. They're all the same. Like, Scott, I hate it. Islamophobia, transphobia. Those two things are at the very core of our reactionary figures, political figures. Yeah. And I say are as yours and my.

Starting point is 01:19:06 Like, this is white supremacy, basically. Like, they're defending what they see as whiteness and white femininity. And Islam, to them, is a danger to white women. And so is the existence of trans folks. So, yeah. Yeah, they're coming. They're trying to link everything even removed with left-leaning to trans folks, Islam, Hamas, obviously, of course. And, yeah, the Muslim Brotherhood.

Starting point is 01:19:39 Jesus Christ At least Well okay I'm not gonna say at least But like That was the The one thing in the US To be at least

Starting point is 01:19:47 Kind of moved past Was like We at least Kind of stopped Accusing everything Of being the Muslim Brotherhood Because a bunch of people Started taking money

Starting point is 01:19:56 From the UAE And then it was like Okay We're gonna quiet at that a little bit Yeah It's the same thing in France Like the UAE The UAE have a lot

Starting point is 01:20:05 Of financial interest in France But they're the good ones But they're the good ones But they still do the lots of brothers? Yeah, but they're the good Muslims because, you know, they invest a lot of money. Yeah, yeah. So that's okay. We can do business with them.

Starting point is 01:20:18 So if we want to do business with them, we have to, like, be able to say that they're the good ones. So the U.E., the good ones. Yeah. Algeria, Palestine, and other Muslim countries, not so much. Not so much. I feel like we kind of moved from, like, it used to be everything was the Muslim Brotherhood, and then that changed into everything is Hamas. But it's like,

Starting point is 01:20:41 at least we moved from one to the other. But it's like, no, no, we're still doing the Muslim Brotherhood. They're still doing Muslimphobia is so raw. Like, so raw. They don't even think about, like, are they Shiai? Are they, like, no. No, not at all. Like, they just, Muslim.

Starting point is 01:21:04 The problem is Islam. The problem is brown and black people. And the problem is the left, which is defending Hamas, which is defending the Muslim Brotherhood, which is defending trans folks. Like, when you look at the arguments, that's basically what they're saying. Like, it's... And I'm not even exaggerating. I wish I were, but I'm not... And it's like, they're not even trying.

Starting point is 01:21:31 Like, it's so obvious. But it's those same argument that have been fed to the population through... our media for years now. So, yeah, people, like, just eat it up. Yeah. And I guess that leads into this question of, like, how has the rest of French society been reacting to this? Have other sort of, like, movements been mobilizing?

Starting point is 01:21:56 Yeah. Well, I was going to say apathy, which is kind of true. If you look at people on the center and on the right, it's apathy. It is, they just want to be able to wear their heads in the sand and keep on going just like doing business as usual. Left-leaning people, some of them are scared, some of them are in disbelief. Like they want to believe that if things were as bad, as Gen Z is saying it is, they would have somehow managed to see it. And a lot of, the majority of people still believe that the media are a honest actor, which they are not.

Starting point is 01:22:44 They haven't been for years. And as long as, basically, as long as people keep believing what the media, like mainstream media, traditional media feeds them, then they're not going to be able to see the problem. And it's the same thing in the US. I mean, if people keep watching CNN and NBC and stuff like that, How can they possibly know how bad things are on the ground? They cannot. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:23:15 They cannot. So that's where we are. And it's scary, but it's the truth. There's a quote from the sociologist who rules at Bechie about how basically one of the things that social movements do is like in these moments of rupture. They act like bolts of lightning across the sky, like illuminating the dark. And that's what social movements do to the actual fundamental nature of reality. They reveal the structures of like power and domination in the world that are otherwise hidden by the sort of darkness. And that's what you're trying, but part of what you're trying to do with these protests is to like make the actual function of society clear for a moment where I don't know if there is a more clear expression of what neoliberalism is.

Starting point is 01:24:04 then we took all the money from the schools and gave it to the cops. Yeah, yeah. A lot of signs during the protest like down the streets explicitly say that. Yeah. Like, the kids know where the money is.

Starting point is 01:24:18 Yeah. It is funneled to the very rich through state subsidies and stuff like that. And it is funnels to the cops and to the military complex, defense complex and contractors and stuff like that. They know where it's going. So they know there is money.

Starting point is 01:24:36 Even when like our president say that there is no money left for anything. Like no, there's always money for the bridge somehow. Go figure. Yeah. Yeah. There's always money for the police too. It's like, oh wow. There's always more money for the police.

Starting point is 01:24:49 There's always more budget for the military. There's always more budget for the cops. There's always less budget for hospitals. There's always less budget for teachers and schools and stuff like that. So people are not stupid. So they kind of like can put two together. But people knowing what's happening and people acting on what they know, that's two entirely different things. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:25:15 And that's where the issue is, is what people know, people feel the problem like every end of the month when they realize that they don't have any money left in the bank for food and for anything. Yeah. But they don't act on it. Like, it feels impossible to get out of this way of life for the majority of people. And I would call that a liberal mindset also? Like, do you know thought slime? Like, do you know the YouTuber thought slime? Vakly familiar.

Starting point is 01:25:53 They made a wonderful video about the way liberals think inside of a box and how even the most revolutionary thoughts are still imprisoned within that scope of thought for liberals. Like that scope of thought basically is what makes Bernie or Menonauts far left to them. Yeah. Because it is so out of the possibilities to them that it feels revolutionary, even though it is absolutely not revolutionary. Yeah. And that's why people stay in that episode.

Starting point is 01:26:31 aesthetic state. Like, it feels impossible to them to ask for the most basic stuff. And that's what keeps people in that loop of work, waking up, going to work, going back home, wondering how you're going to pay the bills, going to sleep, and going back to work the next morning. So I don't, I don't think that people don't know what the issue is. But I think the issue is that people feel like they have no leverage on their own lives and on their own governments. And if we stay in a liberal mindset, I think they're right. Which is why we have to get out of that liberal mindset. And which is how we have to like throw away the liberal playbook.

Starting point is 01:27:19 Because if we keep on playing by those rules, we're fucked. Yeah, you either get like more Macron or you get the just the inheritors. You either get the indirect inheritors of the SS or you get the direct inheritors to the SS. Exactly, exactly. And they're all defending the same thing. They're defending capitalism. Yeah. They're defending the very rich.

Starting point is 01:27:44 And we already know who the very rich are. We saw that about a hundred years ago. So we know who they're rolling for. They're rolling for fascism. Yeah. That's all there is. So as long as we keep trying to adapt. and keep on trying to save liberalism,

Starting point is 01:28:03 we're not going to save us ourselves. Like, we're not going to save the population. We're just going to save capitalism. It drives me crazy. Speaking of doing things of, like, finding alternatives to saving liberalism, like this is all happening at the same time as the giant sort of mass movement in Spain has kicked off.

Starting point is 01:28:40 Yes. Which is about for people are familiar. I guess the short and incredibly bleak version is that basically like Spanish authorities evicted a, I think it was like an 80, 90 year old woman. She was 87, I think. Yeah. Yeah, 87. And she fucking died because of it. And this has set off a massive, massive series of protests.

Starting point is 01:29:04 I think they put like a couple of days ago. So we're recording this on like Friday, October 9th. I think like on like the 8th, they put 100,000. people like in the streets of Barcelona over this. There's been a, you know, they've been reoccupying some of like the core sort of places where like the

Starting point is 01:29:21 2011 protests were born and like that sort of the thing that became occupied like the movement of the squares. There still is a massive protest in Madrid and yeah, it is beautiful to see. The solidarity around that woman and around her situation

Starting point is 01:29:37 how she's been evicted from the place she was living. for over seven decades. Yeah. It resonated with so many people. Yeah. So it's social murder, but it's like normally social murder happens at like

Starting point is 01:29:55 one more degree of her move than that. And this is like, no, actually, yeah, she was just murdered by the state and the landlords. Exactly. Exactly. So directly. And yeah, and for everybody to see. Yeah. And so I guess my question is like,

Starting point is 01:30:10 how are you and how are, also like people in the streets kind of like are people looking at this in the context of like the other movements that are happening at the same time where are we kind of still in that what I would call it like 2018, 2019 mode of like isolation where it's hard for people to see themselves as part of like a broader thing. That's a very good question. And I think it's the latter. I think that people are so depoliticized that it is hard for them to link like the most obvious linkable stuff together. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:30:42 Or it's like, you and the kids in India. Exactly. Exactly. But that's, I believe at us.

Starting point is 01:30:48 That's manufactured. Like the de-politization of your population, mine, it's not random. Like,

Starting point is 01:30:55 to be able to keep us doing the 9 to 5 and complying and everything, they need

Starting point is 01:31:02 a depoliticized population to keep on going forward. So I think that social media managed to

Starting point is 01:31:10 get through Gen Z. So they managed to see that what has been happening in France has also been happening in other countries. And they managed to put two in two together. And they managed to see that, yeah, the issue is capitalism. The issue is white supremacy. The issue is patriarchy and imperialism. But when you start looking at millennials, Gen Xers.

Starting point is 01:31:35 Yeah. That's... Which is also like, hey, if you're a millennia, we've literally, you've done this twice already. I know. We did 2011. We did 2020. I believe in us. I believe we could figure this out.

Starting point is 01:31:51 I know we can do this. There's a part of me that believes in us, but there's also a part of me that knows how effective the capitalistic propaganda is. So the moment you start owning, owning stuff like a house, you know, an apartment and stuff like that, you start. wanting to keep that stuff for yourself. Like, you deserve it. Like, suddenly, meritocracy seems real. And that's where the danger's at. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:32:20 And that's where the danger's at. So, I mean, I see people living their lives and having zero realization. Yeah. Like, with respect to what's happening in the streets. Like, it doesn't hit them at all. Like, they keep on going, doing their stuff, and they just don't see how it affects them. Or they, worse than that, they see how it affects them, but they seem to have accepted, like, nothing could be done about it.

Starting point is 01:32:49 Yeah, it's like, I've suffered, you're going to suffer. Yeah. That's how shit works. And to me, this is the scariest thing. This is the scariest thing. I don't have an answer to how, as I have to deal with that. I just know that, again, liberal mindset, and we have to get rid of that, I don't think that we're going to be able to convince the majority of people that what we are doing is the right thing.

Starting point is 01:33:16 But then again, a hundred years ago, when we're fighting against fascism and Nazism, the majority of people weren't resisting. The majority of people were complying. Yeah. So we don't need a majority of people. Yeah, this is the actual lesson of the storming of the Winter Palace. Like the actual lesson of the October Revolution is that you don't need everyone on your side. You just need your enemies to stay home. Exactly.

Starting point is 01:33:46 Then you can knock off Karetsky. Like, all you need is for them to stay home. Like, your enemies to stay home and like enough of your allies to come out and you can do this. But you can see this liberal mindset is so hell-bent on trying to convince the majority of people. Like, no, we're not going to make it. it's not going to happen. Like, this is why the very rich are owning all the media. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:34:11 Because they know, they know what you want to do, and they see what you want to do, and they have already put their, like, chess pieces in place to disrupt that. So you have to do something stuff differently. We have to organize differently. Yeah. Speaking of doing something differently, I want to close on...

Starting point is 01:34:36 So, okay, I think people in France kind of understand, like, logistically what it means when you're doing a blockade of a school. But for people, for example, in the U.S. where, like, I guess I have seen schools, like, I have seen colleges blockaded. But, like, I've never been involved in, like, a high school blockade. What does that actually just look like on a practical level? Like, is it like we're, like, blockading the street leading up to the school? Is it like we're borrowing the entrance? Like, what does that actually, like, physically look like? Well, basically, physically, you are barring the entrance.

Starting point is 01:35:11 Barring the street is complicated because for a lot of legal reasons and, like, logistical reasons, it can be really difficult to block a whole street. Yeah. But, yeah, you can lock the entry of the school. You can, like, put in front of the school whatever you want, like, trash bins, uh, barriers. Like, you can, whatever. Like, you can take desks from the inside, put them outside, pile them up.

Starting point is 01:35:41 Yeah, like, anything. Classic for retrofluciary tradition, stack all the desks. You know, it surprised me when you asked me that because I was like, what? People don't know that? You take shit and you, like, you put that in front of the door and that's it. Yeah. We have less of a tradition of that. Exactly.

Starting point is 01:36:00 Just like burning, like burning trash can. and stuff like that. It's a tradition. We do that all the time. That's protest shit. Like, of course we're going to burn the trash. Like, it's normal. It's normal.

Starting point is 01:36:17 But yeah, it's really, it's that simple. The purpose is to disrupt. So you do everything in your power to stop people from getting in the school. Because you don't want them to be able to get in the school because you want them to ask for the same thing as you do. so that they can go back to school Yeah

Starting point is 01:36:38 So yeah You forbid them from getting into school And you push them to support you That's the whole Blockade mindset Makes sense That's how strikes work Basically also

Starting point is 01:36:49 Yeah yeah yeah Which I guess is the other angle of like Something I've been thinking about a lot Talking to Because one of the things that struck me About these protests Is the extent to which When you like read over the student grievances

Starting point is 01:37:01 It's like Oh this is like exactly the same grievances you would have for a teacher strike. Yeah. Like, it's the same things. It's like, oh, wow, crass size too big. Don't have teachers.

Starting point is 01:37:10 That's very good as you talk about that because our teachers are not really supportive. Yeah, which is like, what is wrong with you? Like, you got to go now. Like, if you want your conditions to suck less, you need to move right now. Like, this is the best you're going to get.

Starting point is 01:37:25 Well, in France, like a few decades ago, teachers used to be seen as left-leaning, left-wing. They're no longer a left-wing. They're more than, like, right-wingers. Like, they want to be paid more, which they deserve to be paid more. Like, really, they're paid. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:37:41 They're not paid enough. But they're not asking for it, like, in a disruptive manner. And basically, they're not getting paid more. Oh, shocking. I know. But so, yeah, the teachers are not really supportive of their students, which shows you everything you need to know about the state of affairs, basically. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:38:02 Which, like, that has been, like, one of the things that's been heartening in the U.S. is seeing a lot of kind of, like, like, students coming out to support teacher strikes and, like, things like that. Or, like, teachers are sometimes, like, are supporting, like, student walkouts and stuff. And that's, that's really sad because, like, I don't know, like, if you were a teacher, like, the thing that you have the responsibility to do is to care for your students. And if you're not doing that, then, like, yeah, I mean, I guess you are just the kind of, like, you're doing education in the Napoleonic sense. yeah, we're cranking you out so you can, like, be canon fodder for, like, the French imperial army. Exactly. No, that's what's happening. Like, again, neoliberalism is a deeply individualistic way of life.

Starting point is 01:38:47 Yeah. And you can see that in the way teachers are not supporting their students who are asking for stuff that teachers are also asking. So, logically, you should see teachers support students. But when you look at reality, they are not. They're not. So, yeah, because they only think about what's in it for me. And we've been molded into only thinking about what's good for me, what's in it for me. And we've stopped thinking us as a society, but just as a son of individuals.

Starting point is 01:39:20 And that's one of the biggest issues we're facing, politically speaking. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, do you have anything else that you want to make sure people, know before we wrap things up? Yeah, I really want to stress the fact that what's happening in France and the problem is at its root is the same problem

Starting point is 01:39:42 that is happening in the US is the same one that is happening in Spain, in the UK, in Germany, and basically the whole West and even more like in Japan, in South Korea, in India, just like we're talking about, that is neoliberalism, that is capitalism,

Starting point is 01:40:02 that is imperialism, that is white supremacy, that is patriarchy. And we need to come together. I don't think that fighting within our borders is going to lead to anything, but we cannot change stuff by just fighting for our countries individually. Yeah. Like we have to fight together because, well, capital doesn't know borders. Yeah, yeah. We share the same enemy.

Starting point is 01:40:30 we share the same enemy and we have to coales and organize worldwide in order to fight back and have a chance at fighting back properly. Yeah. So yeah, organize internationally

Starting point is 01:40:45 to talk to your French folks, to your British folks, Spanish folks, etc. And yeah, teach what you know and learn from them. And I think that's the only way out of that shit. Well, hell yeah.

Starting point is 01:40:59 Faisa, thank you so much. Thank you so much for coming on. Where can people find your work? Thank you for having me, Mia. People can find me on Twitch at F-A-Y-Z-A-U-S-A-U-S-A-U-Skour, and also on Instagram and blue sky, and sometimes on TikTok. Cool. Yeah, we will have links to that in the show notes. Yeah, thank you so much for coming on.

Starting point is 01:41:27 And I don't know, I hope. I hope you all fucking win. Thank you. I also hope that much. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And thank you again for having me. Yeah, it's been great. You've heard the chaos.

Starting point is 01:41:50 Now you can see it. Do we want to jump right in? Watch all your favorite podcasts from start to finish right inside the free IHard Radio app. Make some noise. Oohie! Catch every laugh and eye roll on shows like Bestie Listen. Hey Jonas and Las Culturistas.

Starting point is 01:42:05 Now with full video. I'll just leave that there. It's the same hosts and the same chemistry with all the hilarious moments you've been missing right on your screen. Open the free IR Radio app. Search video podcasts and tap watch. I'm Melissa Jeltsin,

Starting point is 01:42:20 and in my new podcast, what happened to her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck because by all rights, I should be dead. Cases that everyone else called closed.

Starting point is 01:42:48 They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies. She did all of these brave things.

Starting point is 01:43:06 and came out and spoke about it and he got a year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing in disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. Listen to what happened to her on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Lisa, we should tell them about our new show. Oh my God, Lexi. We have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie to Me.

Starting point is 01:43:31 I'm Lexi Youan. We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa Di Giulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions, and at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all. I'm not going to get anyone fighting. That is wild. I learned that about you today. Now in my 30s, being the founder of new shoes, good taste is my business.

Starting point is 01:43:57 And I've always got something to say. If men were just honest about this, there would be so much more peace in the world. We're going to talk about dating, relationships, beauty. getting older and a little wiser. We're best friends, but we don't always agree. Because you told us how accommodating you are. Obviously, I would do what I think I could do to fight the fight, but there's only so much fight I can fight.

Starting point is 01:44:19 Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Liar. Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

Starting point is 01:44:29 or wherever you get your podcasts. I don't really care. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast. Here's what you missed. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests and they complain about the very thing they're receiving. It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered. I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about.

Starting point is 01:45:06 Y'all going to scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. Twelve seats, those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the south now. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts. Wherever you get your podcasts. You broke me. You do not deserve happiness.

Starting point is 01:45:38 I'm Andrea Gunning. On this season of betrayal, we meet Carl Bryant. Carl thought he was living a normal, drama-free life until the messages started. You will have hell to pay. For nine months, someone infiltrated every aspect of Carl's life, threatening to ruin him. Cyberstalking, swatting, extortion, impersonation. And then the text threats escalated. Someone's not going to make it out of this alive.

Starting point is 01:46:10 It's playing out in real life, not just on the phone. Every piece of evidence pointed to one man. But every piece of evidence was a lie. He was not going to stop unless we stopped him. Listen to Betrayal Season 6 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, hi, everyone. listening to It Could Happen here. My name's Carlos Berrios Polanco, and today I'm going to be talking about breadfruit, the climate change resistant crop that also works as a tool for emergency

Starting point is 01:46:51 preparedness. But before I get into that, let me tell you why I started thinking about breadfruit in the first place. If you're anything like me, the effects of human-caused climate change on the food that we eat and grow have been on your mind lately. Maybe you've been thinking about it because you saw a scary looking graph that shows the global temperature shooting up over the last few years and only increasing over the next couple of decades. When this type of graph comes up in an article about food, it's usually accompanied by a rice or cornfield so dry that the ground is cracked to show how bad it's gotten and how much worse it can get. Or maybe you're thinking about it because the price of foods that have become staples in your diet like rice,

Starting point is 01:47:39 chicken, and coffee have gone up significantly year over year because of a mixture of different climate-related causes has caused crop losses all over the world and for the very process of planting and harvesting to become more expensive, a process known as quote-unquote climate inflation. And in the case of more specialty foods, like Florida oranges, for example, maybe they're not even available at the grocery store anymore because of how hard crops have been hit by extreme weather events and illness. To be clear, climate change isn't the only reason that food prices have gone up lately. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz because of the U.S.'s war on Iran has also certainly

Starting point is 01:48:20 led to prices going up for everything across the board. But climate change is the main thing that has been and will continue to affect the way that we consume food into the future, especially as resources become scarcer. and we as a planet start realizing that what once worked to feed us isn't going to be viable forever. A study by the Climate Impact Lab found that every additional degree Celsius of global warming will lead to global production of six stable crops, corn, soybean, rice, wheat, cassava, and sorghum, to decrease by 4.4%, which is roughly equivalent to a loss of 120 calories per person per day. As Solomon Cheyahn, one of the senior offers of this study and a professor of environmental sciences at Stanford Doher School of Sustainability, told the UK Telegraph, quote, if climate warms by free degrees, that's basically like everyone on the planet giving up breakfast, end quote.

Starting point is 01:49:24 This is pretty bad already, but it's going to affect the people already suffering from food insecurity the worst. And that's not to say that we're not growing enough food, just that it's not being distributed to the people who need it most. Three degrees of warming would also cause cataclysmic ecological effects for millions of people around the world, to include cities submerged by rising sea levels, months-long deadly heat waves, and turn people into refugees by the millions. The regions most affected by climate change right now, like Africa, Southern Asia, and the Caribbean, would be, the most affected by this. So I've really been thinking a lot about that lately, and I did what I always do whenever I start to think about collapse and cataclysm like that. I look for the ways that people around me are trying to deal with the effects of climate change in the best way that they can.

Starting point is 01:50:19 That's why, on a recent Friday morning, I found myself about an hour away from my hometown of Gaguas in a tiny little neighborhood called Mariana that's nestled into the mountains of the municipal borderline between Jabucoa and Umakau. As I made my way for the labyrinth-like roads up to the mountain that definitely were not made to fit two cars side by side, I knew that I was getting close because I started seeing nearly 100-foot-tall breadfruit trees reaching towards the heavens. I was there in late September right at the tail end of the breadfruit's harvest season. So the bright yellow-green football-sized fruits weren't as plentiful as they would be if I had

Starting point is 01:50:57 come earlier in the month. If you've never seen a breadfruit or never tasted one, you should probably fix that as soon as you can. It's delicious. Breadfruit trees can grow up to 100 feet tall and are covered in large green leaves. The fruit itself can grow to be almost 15 pounds, but usually tops out at about 6 to 10 pounds. Per the Breadfruit Institute in Hawaii, it's an energy rich food and a good source of complex carbs, fiber, and minerals like potassium and calcium, as well as vitamin B and others. Although some varieties grow with seeds, in my experience, the majority don't. Therefore, about 90% of the time, you're more likely to see breadfruit propagated through root cuttings or tissue cultures or something like that, rather than from seed.

Starting point is 01:51:44 Breadfruit trees grow extremely quickly, like up to four feet per year, and will begin producing fruit in about three years. And it produces a lot of fruit, like between 100 or 200 individual fruits per tree, although some trees could blow past that. Harvest season depends on where these trees are grown, but it's generally late summer to fall, usually. The tree itself doesn't need too much care or perfect growing conditions. Far from it, actually. As long as you can provide it with medium amounts of water and deep, fertile and well-draining soils, it'll grow for you.

Starting point is 01:52:21 And even then, some varieties grow in atolls that are shallow and sandy, according to the Breadfruit Institute. And it'll also grow on hillsides. That's why it's often touted as a quote-unquote climate resilient tree, because it'll grow in a bunch of different conditions. It's really the goat of trees.

Starting point is 01:52:40 As to what the fruit tastes like, while it's in the name. When cooked, it tastes like bread, although I've read some people can describe it as kind of like a starchy and nutty potato. It can be used in a million different recipes and used in all states of ripeness, from completely raw to overripe. Personally, my favorite way to eat it is cooked into tostones, which are these kind of twice-fried flattened

Starting point is 01:53:03 fritters that are usually made from plantain, but I prefer when they're made out of breadfruit. I've been to Mariana before about three years ago to work on a story about how communities affected by the destruction caused by Hurricane Maria in 2017 and Hurricane Fiona in 2022, were designing their just recovery through bottom-up methods, like a community aqueduct, to help ail in neighborhoods decades-long water issues, as well as a community census, to know who is the most vulnerable in case of an emergency, and make sure they got help first. And in a sense, I was back there to cover essentially the same thing, except that this time,

Starting point is 01:53:40 it was community preparedness through a breadfruit farm that they've planted at La Loma de la Niña Mariana, a kind of community park slash rec space. It's a really serene space, especially when it's empty.

Starting point is 01:53:54 It's surrounded by breadfruit and other trees, so there's a lot of green and the breeze is a welcoming reprieve from the near triple-digit temperatures we've been having lately. Mariana is the neighborhood

Starting point is 01:54:04 that grows the most breadfruit in Umakau, Rosalina Abreu, tells me. She's a community leader, who's part of the neighborhood's nonprofit organization, Arekma, which is in charge of community participation and development. As a quick note, I interviewed Rosalina in our native Spanish,

Starting point is 01:54:21 but Mia from the Cool Zone team was gracious enough to read a translation of that interview here and in following sections. It's a tree with a strong root. It's resistant to hurricanes and any environmental changes, and a mature tree can yield a harvest, of between 100 and 300 to 400 bread fruits. Therefore, the harvest is fruitful and abundance. Breadfruit has a long history here.

Starting point is 01:54:52 Rosalina tells me that her family has always had a breadfruit tree or a couple growing near them going back generations because of how much food it produces and because when you preserve it, it can last months with proper refrigeration. In Puerto Rico, it was originally used as sustants for pigs, and other livestock, but little by little, people started paying attention to how good the fruit was, how many nutrients had provided, and people started using it for everything. Mariana has been hosting a breadfruit festival between the end of August and the start of

Starting point is 01:55:25 September amid the peak breadfruit harvest for 38 years. The community has also created a breadfruit recipe book that I'm flipping through as I read this script, and it has dozens and dozens of different things you make with it from Fridivus. Deflan, and even juice. When Hurricane Maria, a category four hurricane tore through Puerto Rico in 2017, leaving thousands of people dead and causing more than $91 billion in damages, Mariana was left more or less incommunicated from the rest of the world. Rosalina told me years ago that it was like a bomb had been dropped in their neighborhood.

Starting point is 01:56:05 But knowing that the government wasn't coming to help their small rural community, they knew that the only people they could count on were themselves. So they got to work and opened a food distribution center at La Loma where they were feeding members of the community with whatever food they had on hand and whatever food they could gather from the hundreds of breadfruit trees and others in the neighborhood. We've seen that when the need arises,

Starting point is 01:56:35 people come here to look for breadfruit. And not only that, But the environment is full of trees that keep us cool that provide a natural space for growth. And eventually we know that we are going to be one of the neighborhoods best prepared for any situation that involves a food shortage. We're going to have breadfruit to share and to use. In fact, we have a kitchen here, a semi-industrial kitchen that opens to feed the neighborhood. During the time of Maria, we served 400 people daily that came looking for food here. We already have the kitchen.

Starting point is 01:57:09 the trees planted. So we're already a step ahead for the survival of our people if an event occurs. Neighbors in Mariana have planted about 80 breadfruit trees throughout La Loma as a kind of disaster insurance policy. There is probably not a fruit tree that can really withstand a hurricane or severe flooding or something like that, but if a breadfruit tree goes down, it'll likely start to spring back up from the roots. Of the four people that I interviewed for this episode, all of them told me something similar. And if a breadfruit tree gets stripped of its leaves and its fruits by a storm,

Starting point is 01:57:48 it'll probably start sprouting leaves a few weeks after and will probably produce breadfruit next harvest season. Something similar, although to a lower degree, happened when Hurricane Fiona hit in 2022. Rosalina explained to me that in the 1920s and 1930s, the U.S. government tried to take down breadfruit trees to grow potatoes, but they didn't take away the roots, so it just sprang back up again. She also says that Puerto Rico's farmers took the tree up into the mountains.

Starting point is 01:58:18 It usually grows closer to the beach and other places, where it has thrived ever since. It looks like a Christmas tree with its bulbs because each branch has two or three breadfruit. And when they're ripe, when it's harvest time, you look at it,

Starting point is 01:58:36 and it's really miraculous. Plus, it provides food, provides shade, it's resistant to the soil, meaning you can plant it in areas prone to landslides, and it will preserve the terrain so there's no collapses or landslides.

Starting point is 01:58:54 So, for many reasons, it's a tree we could consider miraculous. Breadfruit is one of the first crops to grow back in Puerto Rico. after an extreme weather event. It also grows pretty much everywhere throughout the archipelago. And this is super important

Starting point is 01:59:13 because Puerto Rico is one of the countries most affected by climate change, ranking six on German Watch's Climate Risk Index, which looks at how countries are affected by extreme weather events and how they cause loss of life and how it impacts their GDP. Puerto Rico has experienced several disasters

Starting point is 01:59:31 caused by extreme weather over the years, the biggest of which were hurricanes Irma and Maria and Fiona, Maria caused a loss of around 80% of the archipelago's crops or about $800 million worth of food, according to the New York Times. Meanwhile, Fiona caused about 159 million in losses for the agricultural industry per the AP. Breadfruit has proven to be drought resistant. It's wind resistant after Hurricane Maria. We were eating breadfruit first, and we were eating local bananas and local plantings. because they were highly affected by the winds, but they would come back.

Starting point is 02:00:11 So it's very interesting how even if the fruits are smaller, it will bear fruit, especially in a drought season. That's Marisol Villalobos, a co-founder of Amazar, a company that sells breadfruit flour that's shelf-stable and can last years with no problems. Their farms in Hayuya, and in 2017, her and her husband, who's also a co-founder, had planted about two acres of their farm. with breadfruit, but the saplings were little tiny sticks when Maria hit and only one survived. Marisol now calls it the quote-unquote matriarch tree. Nearly 10 years after that, their farm now has 500 breadfruit trees that are producing hundreds and hundreds of pounds of breadfruit that they turn into flour every year. They're one of the first farms in Puerto Rico to grow breadfruit and cocoa at the same time.

Starting point is 02:01:01 The breadfruit trees provide the necessary shade for cocoaa to grow. they've also planted several other native trees throughout their farms. If you wanted to produce breadfruit at an industrial scale, this probably isn't the best way to go. Most industrial agriculture has one singular crop planted over large swathes of land to maximize production, ease of gathering, and resources. This is called monoculture. However, there's serious downsides to it,

Starting point is 02:01:31 like needing to pump tons of fertilizer and compost into the source, to keep it growing the same thing over and over again, as well as increasing the risk that a pest or illness will wreck havoc throughout the crop. The way Marisol grows breadfruit is an ideal if they wanted to maximize production, but Marisol isn't really bothered by it. Instead, she thinks it's better that way because of its positive effects on the soil and on the plants. Some people say, no, it might not be the best synergy. I see it in a way, you know, I'm enriching my...

Starting point is 02:02:04 model of agroforestry. And what we produce is what we produce. But if I have a more secure crop in terms of resilience and protection from sicknesses, illnesses in place, I'm very happy with that. Puerto Rico grows very little of its own food, about 10 to 15 percent depending on the source that you look at. While breadfruit has been part of Puerto Rican's diets for centuries, production of it has been going down over the last few years as Puerto Rico becomes even more reliant on imports. Per data from the Archipelago's Department of Agriculture, production of breadfruit has gone down from 1991 to 2019, the last year for which public data is available by about 771,000 pounds. Only about 650,000 pounds of breadfruit were produced in Puerto Rico in 2019, according to the

Starting point is 02:03:01 data. Meanwhile, imports have risen rapidly from 2015 to 2019, reaching about 830,000 pounds of breadfruit imported in 2019. So people are still eating breadfruit. They're eating more of it, but we just can't grow it fast enough. So we definitely have a great opportunity in Puerto Rico to increase local production and local consumption with a crop like breadfruit and especially incorporating other crops with it. beans, vegetables, a lot of farinaceos, tarot, plants, all that, yeah. And even animals, you know, nice farms that have both things. Silver pasture with trees and with the animals.

Starting point is 02:03:44 And then we have a little bit more protein there too. When we get back from the ad break, we're going to be talking about the history of breadfruit's voyage from the Pacific to the Caribbean and the rest of the world and how breadfruit is being distributed to help combat hunger crises every. And we're back. You're listening to It Could Happen here. I'm Cthalos, your host for today's episode. And while breadfruit has become a staple in the Caribbean because of how easily it grows and its ability to be turned into a gazillion different things, it's not native here. Instead, it's originally from the Western Pacific, specifically from New Guinea and the Indo-Malais region. Thousands of years

Starting point is 02:04:35 ago, it was spread by the indigenous Polynesians who were the literal first people to travel across the region. They would travel on double-hulled canoes that are nothing like what we know of as canoes today. Instead, each hole could reach up to 100 feet in length. They had a sail, and they could fit entire families as well as the food and resources they needed to settle on the islands they were traveling to. And one of the things they carried were breadfruit saplings because of how much fruit it would produce when planted. In the case of breadfruit, it was usually the little saplings that shoot up from the roots. They would cut them and pack them in a ball of earth and leaves and keep them moist so that they could plant them on the New Island and have the same

Starting point is 02:05:17 familiar foods that they were used to wherever they were coming from. That's Russell Fielding, an associate professor at Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina who researches geography and environmental justice, and who wrote the book Breadfruit Free Global Journeys of a Bountiful Tree. He explained that one of the Pacific people's earliest uses for breadfruit was roasting it in an earth oven, which is when you create a pit, put burning coals in there, then the fruit, then more coals on top, and then you cover it all with stones in soil. This type of cooking is common to a bunch of indigenous cultures across the world, and it produces delicious food. Another way that the people of the Pacific used breadfruit that Russell's never seen outside of the region is putting it into a dark pit, making sure there's no airflow and then letting it ferment.

Starting point is 02:06:08 This turns it into a sort of paste that can be stored for a long time. It tastes kind of tart, almost like citrus, Russell told me. Its name depends on which Pacific island you're on, but the people of the Marquesas call it ma. And so this fermented breadfruit was used as kind of an insurance against times of scarcity, where, you know, if you get a big crop of breadfruit, like you said, a single tree and a single season produces lots of fruit. So if it's more than you need for the time being, you can ferment some of it to store it away for later. And then maybe there's a drought or a famine at some point, and you have to dip into your reserves.

Starting point is 02:06:48 This shows that the history of breadfruit is an emergency preparedness to, will goes back millennia. People and the breadfruit they carried continued spreading across the Pacific. When the Europeans colonized the region, they essentially forced the people to switch from breadfruit to imports from the globalized market. Crops like coffee, pineapples, and sugar overtook the breadfruit groves in taro patches, while rice became a staple of the Pacific diet, according to Russell's book. It's a story anyone familiar with colonization or who's been a

Starting point is 02:07:22 victim of it knows all too well. However, breadfruit has seen a resurgence in recent times. In Hawaii, according to an article in Civil Beat, breadfruit production is booming, but similar to Puerto Rico, farmers can't keep up with demand. We'll get back to the modern-day breadfruit situation in a second. But before that, let's talk about how breadfruit made its way all the way from the Pacific to the Caribbean. It wasn't until the very end of the 18th century that breadfruit made its jump to the Caribbean. And this was intentional. This was directed by the European colonialists. It was the British that eventually succeeded first, but they weren't the only ones trying. The French had also made efforts to bring breadfruit to the Caribbean. And there's some

Starting point is 02:08:08 hypothesis that the Spanish were also moving breadfruit around the same time. But the British did it first. You might have heard this story before. The story of the mutiny on the bounty. Every time I mentioned to someone that I was working on this breadfruit project, they would mention the original 1945 movie, the Muni on the Bounty, or the 1962 remake with Marl and Brando to me. And I would be like, yeah, for sure. But let me be honest with you, dear listener. I did not know that these movies existed up until a couple of weeks before recording this episode.

Starting point is 02:08:42 And to be honest, they're pretty good, 3.5 stars on Letterboxed. Anyway, as European colonization wrecked terror and death throughout the Caribbean, the British came up with a plan to transport breadfruit from their Pacific colonies to their Caribbean colonies, all of which had more or less the same climate to feed the enslaved people that they had kidnapped from Africa and forced to work on sugar plantations. So, the British assigned William Bly to the HMS bounty, and they traveled to Tahiti to load upon breadfruit. Bly, as the forreterians commonly do, was quick to anger and routinely verbally berated and physically assaulted his crew,

Starting point is 02:09:23 who eventually mutinied and sent Bly and his loyalist packing. However, Bly eventually made his way back to England, where he would once again make his way back to Tahiti and eventually reach his original goal of bringing Bredfruit to the Caribbean. He first stopped in St. Vincent in 1793, then Jamaica shortly after. Then, breadfruit was all over the Caribbean in a few short years, even reaching the state of Florida a few decades later, where it's still really the only place in the continental U.S. where it can grow outside without too much trouble. Although it really only mostly grows in the keys and the warmest parts of South Florida because it's super susceptible to a cold snap. It was specifically intended to feed people that were enslaved on sugar plantations or otherwise impoverished. I know that not every island was practicing slavery at the time that breadfruit was imported to that island,

Starting point is 02:10:22 but breadfruit was never really intended as a food for everyone. It was for the poor and the enslaved. And unfortunately, that gave breadfruit something of a stigma or a negative reputation in a lot of places throughout the Caribbean. And you can even still find traces of that today where it's referred to as, you know, poor man's food or comida ybarro, where it's still got that association today with poverty. Russell explained that while slavery was still going on, people that were able to eat something else absolutely refused to eat bread food. That's how hated it was. And who could really blame them? This reputation as a food for enslaved people or something that only people in poverty ate

Starting point is 02:11:06 stuck around for decades, and one could make the argument that some of that sentiment still lingers today. Even if Breadfruit's reputation has started to turn around, so much of that evil history of colonialism in slavery is inescapable. Even now, as I read this script, I think about how the communities where this fruit grows the most are some of the ones most affected by human-caused climate change, which they contribute the least to. The Caribbean historically accounts for less than 1% of the world's global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the emissions database for global atmospheric research. Feoretically, there could come a day when breadfruit is not as bountiful as it once was

Starting point is 02:11:50 because of the heat or even refuse to grow altogether. Even though breadfruit is certainly climate resilient and it can take a lot, it can't survive without soil and water, both of which are becoming harder and harder to come by day by day. The Global South, a lot of which relies on breadfruit as part of their diet, will no longer be able to grow this bountiful tree if we reach certain levels of warming. As the hottest year on record morphs into the hottest year so far, the global north will likely get to experience breadfruit for the first time as areas that were once hostile to breadfruit become its new home. This seems to already be happening in the Marshall Islands,

Starting point is 02:12:33 another place that is very, very, very affected by climate change, as in they're literally disappearing before our eyes. Their breadfruit, which they call Oulu, similar to other places in the Pacific, has seen better days. They're growing smaller and less bountiful, according to one farmer, the Civil Beat interviewed. He thinks it's salt, getting into the soil or the aquifer. While breadfruit can resist some salt, the constant presence is killer. Perra study published in PELOS climate about how breadfruit can contribute to climate resilient food systems in areas near the equator, the area suitable for breadfruit cultivation in the tropics and subtropics is projected to decrease by 4.4% in a scenario where we stabilize emissions,

Starting point is 02:13:23 a.k.a. where emission levels go down but do not reach net zero by the year 2100, and they'll decrease by about 4.5% in a high-emission scenario, which essentially means if we burn even more fossil fuels by 2100. In these scenarios, the areas most affected will be Latin America and the Caribbean, where a suitable range for breadfruit growth will decrease by 10.1% if we stabilize emissions and 11.5% in a high-emission scenario. Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia and the Pacific yield quality and consistency show minimal decreases under a high-emission scenario, while the land where you can plant breadfruit will likely go up. In all regions, a high-emission scenario will lead to reduce consistency and quality of breadfruit harvest.

Starting point is 02:14:15 The narrative of the study ends by saying that breadfruit may play a role in alleviating current and future food insecurity, particularly in equatorial Africa. When instituted with an agroforestry model, as Marisol is doing, it could be a potent climate adaptation strategy. This study also mentions that its role can be expanded in countries that already produce it to become even more of a staple and help address growing climate-related issues there. Ironically, tropical regions are where you do find some of the world's underserved people, people with hunger and mannutrition as part of their risks of daily living. So the kinds of tree that we plant and the need are very well matched. That was Mike McLaughlin, co-founder and secretary of the Trees That Feed Foundation. a Chicago-based nonprofit whose mission is to feed people, create jobs, and benefit the environment.

Starting point is 02:15:17 Mike and his wife, Mary, who's president of Trees That Feed, grew up in Jamaica, where breadfruit is incredibly common. However, they didn't think of planting it until years later when they realized how badly climate change was affecting the environment as well as the problems it was causing around the world. And then they started thinking about what they could do about it. And the reason we wanted to plant fruit trees, it was kind of an easier cell. There were, and there still are climate change skeptics, people that don't think anything is happening. They're not worried about soup or el-Nino. They're not doing anything to reduce our fossil fuel use or carbon footprint. And so because of the skeptics, we said if we lead our effort with climate change,

Starting point is 02:16:09 and solving that problem, we kind of have to do more explaining, we're going to be more skeptics. But if we say we're planting trees to feed people, everybody understands that. They know that. Trees that feed gives breadfruit and other trees to farmers in more than 20 countries,

Starting point is 02:16:28 then teaches them how to take care of them, harvest the breadfruit, and process it so that it can be sold and used to feed their families. Part of the reason they have this emphasis with farmers is that it reduces reliance on imported food, which means that more money circulates in the local economy instead of going elsewhere. The organization also buys breadfruit flour and other breadfruit-based products from processors and bakeries, then donates them to schools as part of their school feeding program,

Starting point is 02:17:02 which serves more than 20 schools and orphanages in Haiti, which is the second country that they started working with, Mike explained. 5.8 million Haitians, a little more than half of the country's total population, face crisis levels of food insecurity or worse, according to the United Nations World Food Program. More than 250,000 children aged 6 to 59 months are projected to suffer from acute malnutrition between June 26 and May 27, per a UN analysis. Some people in Haiti are forced to eat mud cookies, which are, exactly what they sound like, a little bit of earth, salt, and oil that's meant to curb hunger pangs.

Starting point is 02:17:44 It's the saddest thing Mike's ever heard of, he told me. Trees that feed foundation have tried to substitute that where they can with con Barre, a type of bread that's dense like cake or a breadfruit porridge. These recipes were co-produced with bakers in Haiti and North America, according to the organization's website. Part of the trouble of growing so much breadfruit is that it ripens really quickly, within a couple of days, it might start rotting if you don't refrigerate it. So to combat that, Mike helped create a solar dehydrator that can dehydrate breadfruit so that it can be stored without refrigeration, without affecting the nutritional benefits of the food.

Starting point is 02:18:24 This means that it can be stored for up to several years and still maintain the same nutritional value. What trees that feed is doing, using breadfruit as a tool for sustainable development, is part of its history all along, Russell, who's also a board member of the organization, told me during our interview. When indigenous communities were carrying it across the Pacific, they were hoping to feed themselves wherever they settled. Although it was a weapon in service of the evils of slavery, the British brought breadfruit to the Caribbean to provide food when it became scarce, in large part because of their own actions, planting monoculture sugar plantations everywhere, to be clear. Meanwhile, in modern times, it continues spreading across the world as an attempt to feed people suffering through hunger because of climate change and other crises.

Starting point is 02:19:17 It's time to for the ads, but when we come back, we'll wrap this episode up by talking about how the real power of breadfruit might have been the friends that we made along the way. You're listening to It Could Happen Here. I'm your host for today, Carlos, and one thing I haven't mentioned yet is about what we call breadfruit in Spanish. It has a bunch of names, depending on where you are. Panabang, frutipang, masapang, buempan. You get the idea. They're all bread-related. However, what I and millions of other Puerto Ricans call it is bana,

Starting point is 02:19:59 which is exactly the same way that we refer to a close friend. A direct translation would be something like buddy or homie. So every breadfruit is a friend. This fruit that grows quickly and produces heart. hundreds of pounds of food from a single tree that has accompanied people into the unknown and been turned from a weapon that sustained humanity's greatest evil into a food that now helps sustain millions and millions of people every day that has started sprouting weeks after disaster raised every other crop that will grow tall and wild without much help

Starting point is 02:20:39 and almost always has something to give is literally named friend that's the kind of beautiful and surreal that only real life could ever be. Marisol from Amazar has a theory about why it's called Pana that I think is worth sharing. We and Amazar have a theory that it has to do that. You know, we have a very strong relationship in Puerto Rico with our godfathers. And comadra and compadre is that relationship of the parents of the God child with the godfather and godmother of that child. So if I were to visit in the 1800s and we were very, very, very poor, extremely poor and a lot of malnutrition, if I were to visit a friend, I would bring a pana with me.

Starting point is 02:21:29 And here's a pana, that kind of like that connotation of I'm giving you something to help nurture your family. So that's something very special. So if you're really my pana, you're dear to me. I will protect you. I will take care of you. and I will have you back. I want to end this episode by returning back to La Loma of La Nina Mariana. After my interview with Rosalina, when I was on my way out,

Starting point is 02:21:54 I stopped to take a photo of a mosaic made with hundreds of little pieces of colorful tiles. It depicts about a dozen hands together in a circle, like they're about to go a free two, one, go team. There's a breadfruit at the center of the circle, almost as if it's the thing they've put their whole faith in. But the inscription under the mosaic glory to the hands that work makes it clear that even though breadfruit might be at the center of this art and one of the most important things in this community, the real greatest thing that this neighborhood has are its people, the ones that are putting in the work when it's needed, the ones that are making sure to help their neighbors when they need help, the ones that are using all this breadfruit and have used it to cook for years and years whenever there's a crisis. It can't happen without them. Breadfruit might grow super quickly.

Starting point is 02:22:45 It might be incredibly abundant as a source of food, but it can't be used to feed people without the community putting in the work to gather it, cook it, store it, and then bring it back out when it's needed. Because to us, if we've done anything, it's that we've seated solidarity. I mean, whenever a situation happens here, People show up and immediately ask, how can I help? What can I do? Where can I pitch in?

Starting point is 02:23:16 People get here hauling water with whatever they have at home, cans of beans, rice. Look, I have this, you can start cooking. People say, I can get to such and such place because I have the right equipment. What can I do? We have that in abundance. This community's greatest resource is its people.

Starting point is 02:23:35 We've always said so. We might not have the vast financial resources, but we do have the people. And that is the primary resource we work with and the people to whom we owe everything we have here. I've been thinking about that mosaic pretty much every day since I was at La Loma. While breadfruit is at the center,

Starting point is 02:23:59 it's the people that are putting in the work who are actually able to help one another by using breadfruit. It's a powerful reminder that the only way out of a crisis is fru, that the only way through is together. Thanks for listening. You've heard the chaos.

Starting point is 02:24:23 Now you can see it. Do we want to jump right in? Watch all your favorite podcasts from start to finish, right inside the free I-Hard Radio app. Make some noise. Woo-ee! Catch every laugh and eye-roll on shows like Bestie Listen, Hey Jonas, and Las Cultureistas.

Starting point is 02:24:38 Now with full video. I'll just leave that there. It's the same hosts and the same chemistry with all the hilarious moments you've been missing. on your screen. Open the free IHR radio app. Search video podcasts and tap watch. I'm Melissa Jeltson and in my new podcast what happened to her,

Starting point is 02:24:55 I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead. Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right?

Starting point is 02:25:23 Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies. She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year.

Starting point is 02:25:44 You never know who that devil is, because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. Listen to what happened to her on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Lisa, we should tell them about our new show. Oh my God, Lexi. We have a new podcast.

Starting point is 02:26:03 It's called Don't Lie to Me. I'm Lexi Youanu. We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa DiGulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions, and at this point in my 50s, I've lived at all. I'm not going to get anyone fighting. That is wild.

Starting point is 02:26:23 I learned that about you today. Now in my 30s, being the founder of new shoes, good taste is my business. And I've always got something to say. If men were just honest about this, there would be so much more peace in the world. We're going to talk about dating, relationships, beauty, getting older, and a little wiser. We're best friends, but we don't always agree. Because you told us how accommodating you are. Obviously, I would do what I think I could do to fight to fight,

Starting point is 02:26:50 but there's only so much fight I can fight. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Liar. Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Starting point is 02:27:04 I don't really care. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people

Starting point is 02:27:21 who I always say vote against their own economic interest and they complain about the very thing to receive. It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered.

Starting point is 02:27:37 I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all going to scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. Twelve seats. Those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the South now.

Starting point is 02:28:00 And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts. Wherever you get your podcasts. You broke me. You do not deserve happiness. I'm Andrea Gunning. On this season of betrayal, we meet Carl Bryant. Carl thought he was living a normal drama-free life until the messages started. You will have hell to pay. For nine months, someone infiltrated every aspect of Carl's life, threatening to ruin him.

Starting point is 02:28:32 Cyberstalking, swatting, extortion, impersonation. And then the text threats escalated. Someone's not going to make it out of this. alive. This department. It's playing out in real life, not just on the phone. Every piece of evidence pointed to one man. But every piece of evidence was a lie.

Starting point is 02:28:56 He was not going to stop unless we stopped him. Listen to Betrayal Season 6 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen here, a show about things falling apart. I'm Robert Evans. We all know what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021. Those events were so consequential and infamous that I fear people have forgotten how they felt about the possibility of an attack on the Capitol by a mob of citizens on January 5th.

Starting point is 02:29:33 That's not something I can forget, as I spent my first days of January that year digging through thousands of comments on social media and MAGA-focused message boards. I came away from my research, convinced an attack on the Capitol was possible, and I tried to warn people. I was not the only researcher who wrote about the possibility of an attack on the Capitol before January 6th. None of our warnings were heated, in part because the authorities, like most people, considered the odds of a mob successfully occupying the capital to be right

Starting point is 02:30:01 around 0%. The United States is the most powerful nation in history. The argument went, and the Capitol building and nearby government facilities are some of the most hardened targets on Earth. There's no way a mob of mostly unarmed protest could just storm them like the Winter Palace and put lawmakers' lives at risk. Your fears are a fantasy. You're just trying to scare people. Shut up. Well, we were correct about January 6th, and over the last few years I've begun to worry about something new. The name I've given this fear is nuclear January 6th. Now, I'm not talking about an all-out nuclear war here, and I'm certainly not talking about a nuclear strike on the U.S. Capitol,

Starting point is 02:30:40 although that's one possible way this could occur. You're all readily familiar. with the possibility and consequences of atomic holocaust. And I'm not using that term for the possibility of a terrorist organization or their non-state actor acquiring a nuke or dirty bomb, which remains possible, but let's say unlikely. A nuclear January 6th would be a lot like its namesake, a catastrophic event that would have seemed impossible, even laughably so, before it occurred and involves the use of a nuclear weapon.

Starting point is 02:31:10 A nuclear January 6th, then, would be a fuck-up, either a disastrous nuclear error caused by incompetence or a limited nuclear deployment inspired by incompetence. Either way, the scenario I'm envisioning doesn't mean the end of the world. It means one or at most a small number of warheads are detonated for a very stupid reason, and we're all left to move forward in a world that is now permanently less safe. In 1989, American political scientist Robert Jervis published a book titled, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution, Statecraft, and the prospect of Armageddon. Looking out at the international situation,

Starting point is 02:31:47 at the tail end of the Cold War, Jervis argued that war between nuclear powers was now unthinkable. Within the context of that conflict, he was correct. Both the U.S. and the USSR, despite their separate battalions of war hawks and substantial doses of paranoia,

Starting point is 02:32:02 avoided stepping over the nuclear brink. The men who ran both nations clearly considered nuclear war unthinkable. In the decades since the Cold War's end, the nations of the world have continued to avoid nuking us all into Cormac McCarthy's The Road. But there is an unfortunate amount of evidence that some of the people in charge of the great powers of our time no longer find deploying a nuke to be unthinkable, even against other nuclear powers. The clearest example of this comes from the Russian Federation and its activities in Ukraine.

Starting point is 02:32:33 Back in January, the Bell, an independent Russian news site, reported on building support in the Kremlin for the battlefield use of a tactical nuclear weapon. This was thought to most likely occur over Crimea. A 2022 U.S. Intel assessment independently estimated 50% odds that Putin would order a nuclear strike if the defenses around Crimea began to fail. Russian nuclear doctrine today supports the use of atomic weapons against an existential threat. And as Kieran Monk's rights in a piece for Ainuz, Russia's deputy foreign minister, Sergei Rybakov, said this morning this meant encroachments on Russia or its territorial integrity by aggressors, including those who may possess such

Starting point is 02:33:12 weapons could prompt us to use these weapons in the worst-case scenario. The loss of Crimea, which Putin calls an inseparable part of Russia, could technically reach that threshold, said Dr. Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher and specialist on Russia's nuclear forces at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research. Now, my understanding of the situation in Ukraine is that Crimea is not under imminent danger of being retaken by Ukrainian forces, somewhat unfortunately. However, the vagueness of Russia's nuclear line being an existential threat means that they might well decide one day that diesel refining facilities count, given the centrality of oil exports to their economy.

Starting point is 02:33:50 Sergei Karganov, head of a defense industry think tank in Moscow and former advisor to Putin, is among Russia's largest nuclear hawks. He has recently argued for limited nuclear strikes on Ukraine's European allies. I bring this up not because that's a scenario I'm discussing today, if Russia nuked a NATO country, that would be a de facto strike on a nuclear power and would likely end up being much worse than my nuclear January 6th theory. I bring this up because comments like this from Russia have contributed to an unfortunate trend in U.S. defense circles. Serious discussion about the need for expanded low-yield and tactical nuclear options.

Starting point is 02:34:25 And folks remember, when we're saying low-yield nuclear weapons, we're still often talking about stuff at least on par with the Hiroshima and Nagasovki bombs, if not still considerably more powerful. Those count as low-yield weapons today. For most of our lifetimes, the U.S. has focused its nuclear research and build up on what we might call big civilization-ending doomsday nukes. I'm using a little hyperbole there, but not much. Most of our standing nuclear weapons are strategic in nature. That means they're very big, and they're meant to deter an enemy from launching a full-scale nuclear attack on us.

Starting point is 02:34:59 The Bulletin of atomic scientists estimates that about 94% of all actively deployed U.S. warheads are long-range strategic weapons. As Gabriel Hunrata noted in an article for Asia Times, this makes tactical nukes a, quote, small, specialized component of overall U.S. nuclear posture. You and I might consider that a good thing because any nuke small enough to use safely is likely to get used. However, when defense planners here, the U.S. has very few tactical nukes alongside news articles about Russia threatening to use small tactical nukes, a funny thing happens. They begin to worry about a gap between our capability and that of an adversary. Fears of that gap have been further exacerbated by recent significant modernization of China's nuclear arsenal. In the last few years, the Chinese military has massively increased the quality of their nuclear weapons and the related equipment, the delivery devices and such. I'm not going to

Starting point is 02:35:52 go into a nerdy, fearmongery deep dive about the exact capabilities of these new tools. That doesn't really matter today. What does matter is that in August of 26, U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for policy Elbridge Colby initiated a policy review of the nation's nuclear posture. The stated goal of this review is, per coverage by breaking defense, quote, focused on providing more options for the White House. Under Secretary Colby expressed the need for what he called rational nuclear options to deal with the changing threats from China and Russia. And, as Honrata wrote in his article,

Starting point is 02:36:27 The policy review comes amid long-standing U.S. DoD concerns over foreign deployments in low-yield warheads, which risk leaving the, the U.S. without proportional non-strategic responses. An expansion in the number of, and potentially the in-theater deployment of, low-yield nuclear weapons does not guarantee their use. Low-yield nukes have been deployed to hot zones or potential hot zones before, albeit decades ago during the height of the Cold War. But I have trouble looking at this current administration in the U.S. and so much of the bombastic, kill-obsessed rhetoric that comes out of the Department of War these days, and believing that the terms low-yield and tactical won't be.

Starting point is 02:37:03 interpreted as safe to use. In fact, there's a real chance that just by accepting the need for more of these weapons and deploying some near-conflict regions, we'll start a countdown, whereby some of our current defense thinkers convince themselves there's a ticking clock, and they need to find a target for a low-yield nuclear strike to prove we've got the guts to use this thing. If that sounds far-fetched, I want you to think back to April of 2017, when the U.S. conducted an air strike in Afghanistan using the largest non-nuclear weapon we've got, the Moab. There were some logical reasons for such a strike. ISIS fighters were using a tunnel network and the Moab is meant to penetrate and take out such underground targets. That said, there's no evidence this facility, or the 36-ish

Starting point is 02:37:46 ISIS fighters killed in the blast represented a threat to U.S. interests in the region necessitating such a dramatic response. Many pundits suspected the real reason we dropped this big bomb had more to do with Trump's campaign promise to bomb the shit out of ISIS. Faisal Pervais, an analyst for the military intelligence forum Stratfor, told VICE's suspicions. When you drop a bomb that weighs 21,000 pounds, that's so big. I think a part of it, or some part of it, is the messaging and the symbolic significance that the U.S. is sending out to countries such as Russia, that we are the premier military in the world.

Starting point is 02:38:19 We are the biggest power. We have the tools and weapons to show you that this is the case. Well, the same man who dropped that bomb is back in power now. We are fighting a losing war with Iran that has endangered his power. Back in April of 26, President Trump threatened Iran by saying, A whole civilization will die tonight if the Strait of Hormuz was not reopened. More recently, he's mused that Iran might take out Los Angeles or San Diego with a nuclear weapon someday, which he viewed as a small price to pay for the permission that would give the U.S. to annihilate Iran in return. We'll keep talking about this, but first, here's some ads.

Starting point is 02:38:56 We're back. If more low-yield nuclear weapons are built and deployed, they will become in startlingly short time, just another option on the menu for military planners. We might expect decades-standing traditions against using such weapons to count for something, but as you're aware, Pete Hegseth has purged a huge number of veteran leaders from the Department of Defense.

Starting point is 02:39:29 Similar brain drains have occurred across all of our primary nation, security institutions. There are fewer cooler heads to prevail. Hegset has also made lethality and kill count into our military's primary measure of operational success. More to my point today, the entire Trump administration runs on social media. Truth, social, Twitter, and Tech Talk aren't just organs the regime uses to disseminate propaganda. They are where Donald Trump and his advisors go for information and to take the pulse of the nation. Let's consider one possible chain of events. Some months from now, Trump orders a tactic. nuke deployed with our forces attacking Iran. The plan isn't to use it, but to threaten the

Starting point is 02:40:06 enemy and generate a groundswell of rage among Trump's domestic enemies, which is always something he thinks about. Soon after the weapon arrives, Iranian forces score a major hit. Maybe one of their ballistic missile strikes and damages a naval vessel killing soldiers. Maybe they hit a base and cause an unprecedented loss of lives and material. Such a strike is not impossible. It could happen tomorrow, and it would not need to debilitate or cripple our military forces long-term to provoke Donald Trump into a nuclear response. All it would need to do is embarrass him. At his footage spreads of fire raging atop an aircraft carrier or a burning frigate listing at sea or wounded and dying U.S. soldiers near a base, Trump's followers begin howling for blood on

Starting point is 02:40:49 social media. One cry sounds out louder than all the others. Newk the bastards. Trump might. Such a would be unlikely to cause an immediate apocalyptic cascade into nuclear war. There would be international outrage, but not outright retaliation. Even so, in a stroke, Trump would have dissolved any remaining stigma against the use of nuclear weapons and war. This would make Russia much likelier to use a tactical nuke in Ukraine. It might change Chinese calculations, r-a-tai-wan, but what it would, inarguably do is make nuclear weapons a normal, conceivable, usable, usable tool of conventional.

Starting point is 02:41:27 I don't know how long it would take the breaking of that taboo to generate a larger nuclear war, but I believe after this point such a future would become almost inevitable. It is still quite possible, even likelier, that Russia would be the first nation state to break the taboo and use a tactical nuke for the reasons I've just outlined. This might lead to a similar outcome worldwide, although I'm less certain of that, Russia is considered an international pariah to many in ways that the United States still isn't quite. That said, I have no doubt that the ultimate chain of events leading to such a deployment would be just as stupid as they would be in the United States.

Starting point is 02:42:04 China feels less likely to be the direct cause of such a deployment. Their nuclear policy originated from Mao Zedong. He did not love nuclear weapons, calling them a paper tiger and talking shit on the U.S. and the USSR for building so many of the damn things. When China became a nuclear state in 1964, Mao stated the only use for this thing, his term for the bomb, was to determine. deter other nuclear armed countries. As a result, China has always had an official no-first-use policy with their nuclear arsenal. This differs from the U.S. and Russia, who operate by launch-on-Warn.

Starting point is 02:42:37 In other words, if we think you're going to nuke us, we will nuke you. China's official policy is minimum deterrence. That's generally translated to mean, we keep our arsenal at the minimum level necessary to deter our adversaries. However, in an article on the evolution of China's nuclear posture, the website DefCon Warning System notes. This declaratory posture also embodies China's strategic ambiguity. For one, minimum deterrence remains undefined. Chinese officials have never quantified what a minimum nuclear capability means in practice. Is it a few dozen warheads able to strike back?

Starting point is 02:43:11 A few hundred? As China's arsenal grows, the goalposts appear to shift. Similarly, what constitutes an arms race is left vague. Beijing's current build-up by far its largest and fastest ever, ostensibly does not violate its pledge to avoid arms racing, at least in its own view. Crucially, China's nuclear doctrine has begun to stress achieving strategic counterbalance with other powers, though not officially defined, this phrase suggests Beijing sees its nuclear forces as vital to shaping the global power equilibrium. It implies a more assertive role for nukes,

Starting point is 02:43:41 not merely to deter an attack on China, but to offset the overall military might of rivals, particularly the United States. This nuanced shift in language contributes to uncertainty. Does counterbalance mean China seeks nuclear parity with the U.S. or simply a survivable second strike? The lack of clarity keeps observers guessing. Now, I don't bring any of this up with the interest of fearmongering over China, but because the questions and ambiguities outlined in that segment are a real cause for concern to the defense analysts who study China, not just for the U.S. government, but over a New Delhi. The Indian state is locked in a continuous low-level border conflict with China,

Starting point is 02:44:18 alongside their border conflict with Pakistan, also a nuclear-armed state. Both China and India have been extremely careful to avoid bringing nuclear threats to the table. But that only underlines how much leaders in both nations fear the possibility. And over on their border with Pakistan, nuclear threats have come up recently. 2025 saw a large skirmish between India and Pakistan that included cross-border aerial raids. After several days of this, Pakistan's Foreign Secretary issued a statement on May 28th. We will not hesitate to use any weapon in our arsenal to defend our territorial integrity. This was interpreted as a nuclear threat and caused a massive international ruckus,

Starting point is 02:44:58 which prompted a spokesman for Pakistan's government to clarify that that was not the intent. We all lucked out that the May 2025 conflict did not occur at the same time as another uptick and hostility between Beijing and New Delhi, but it's easy to imagine something like that might occur. In the event of such a conflict, Pakistan would rely heavily on their naval forces. armed with nuclear weapons to complete the third leg of their nuclear triad. Having a nuclear triad, which means having separate land-sea and air-based weapon systems that can deploy nuclear weapons is considered the gold standard for nuclear deterrence. Most nations that have one fulfill the third leg of the triad with nuclear armed attack submarines. The most advanced of

Starting point is 02:45:40 these are, inarguably, the deadliest weapon systems ever devised by man. Pakistan is generally considered to be the nuclear power with the least reliable protections for their arsenal. These have long-inspired fear that Pakistan might lose control of a weapon, or that rogue elements of their security services might give one to a terrorist group. That's not my concern here. One of my sources for these episodes was an article in the Defense and Security Analysis Journal. Its authors point out that in recent years, Pakistan has gone a decent job of sealing some of the former security holes in their nuclear weapons systems. However, as one researcher noted in 2014, Parts of Pakistan's nuclear management system, like its command element, have been reasonably transparent.

Starting point is 02:46:21 Other parts like the physical security and surety, human reliability elements have been at best translucent. In many areas, there are only bald assertions that programs and methods have been put into place with very few details provided. One of the parts of their management system we know least about is the rules under which shipboard nuclear weapons operate. In theory, any nuclear weapons used by Pakistani forces would have to be authorized by a a special 10-man committee. It's believed, but not known, that some systems require both a civilian and military key to be provided in order for the weapons to become operable. This is because Pakistan's military has a long history of outright running the shop. Today, civilian leadership is meant to have much more oversight. One example of this is the fact that all air and land-based

Starting point is 02:47:06 nuclear weapons in Pakistan are stored separate from their delivery systems. This makes them harder to steal and makes it more complex for, say, rogue military leaders to get a hold of a piece of the arsenal. But we already know that Pakistan's naval nukes do not work exactly the same way. Per that journal article, quote, little information is available for the naval leg of Pakistan's deterrent, currently based on the Bobber 3's submarine-launched cruise missile. First test fired in 2017, and described by Pakistan's inter-services public relations as a second-strike capability because of its naval requirements, the Bobber 3 is assumed to be pre-mated and contained within a vertical launch system or similar canisterized device. Procedures meant to inhibit the use of nuclear

Starting point is 02:47:49 weapons outside authorized uses are called negative controls. We do not know what negative controls Pakistan has for their naval weapons. It is entirely possible the military remains in total control here and justifies that as necessary for guaranteeing their ability to launch retaliatory strikes against India. I want you to think right now about a fun new development in technology that we've all witnessed, the growth of generative AI tools that can convincingly mimic both human posters on social media and create believable fake videos, including fake news videos. These and similar tools make it possible to flood any region with targeted disinformation and make it seem legitimate, at least for a short span of time.

Starting point is 02:48:32 Earlier this year, in March of 2026, the Bulletin of the Atomic Science, published a theoretical article by Herbert Lynn. He's a Stanford fellow, an expert on cyber warfare operations who in 2016 worked for the Obama administration. Back in the 1980s, he was a staff scientist for the House Armed Services Committee, so he's a guy with some knowledge of this area. The article he put together envisioned several scenarios in which AI tools might help cause or exacerbate a nuclear conflict.

Starting point is 02:48:59 None of his scenarios involved anything like Skynet. The dangers he foresees from AI come not from its intelligence so much as its ability to automate the production of targeted bullshit and influence the decisions of political leaders. And speaking of targeted bullshit, here's some ads. We're back, and I was talking about an article for the bulletin of the atomic scientists

Starting point is 02:49:31 written by Herbert Lin. One of his scenarios envisioned a blockade of Taiwan in which the Chinese military deployed an army of AI chatbots to lie about military maneuvers in order to create the impression of high military readiness to deter U.S. intervention. I don't consider the specific scenario very likely, but I do think he's on to something with passages like this.

Starting point is 02:49:53 The accounts adopt personas of professionals or students isolated by the crisis and connect with foreigners through the full suite of channels described above. These spaces attract not only their regular users, but also journalists, analysts, and even mid-level Pentagon staffers looking for unfiltered intelligence. In one instance, a bot mimicking a 28-year-old engineer named Lee Way claims, I saw convoys with TEL's heading east, DF26's probably, referring to mobile, transporter or rector launches used to launch ballistic missiles and land-based dual-capable DF-26 intermediate-range ballistic missiles, before adding,

Starting point is 02:50:25 sirens everywhere, evacuation starting. Then screenshots start flooding the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, amplified by coordinated sock puppets. The bots adapt seamlessly to queries, cross-referencing real-time U.S. open source chatter for added plausibility. A user of Tinder, a dating app in Washington, D.C., matched with Wang Mei, a fabricated nurse in Zemin, who relays her alleged eyewitness panic about explosions near the port and prepping of hypersonic weapons, which aligns with the partial satellite imagery glitches caused by Chinese

Starting point is 02:50:54 jamming and begins to see doubt in U.S. intelligence assessments. State media subtly echoes these stories, framing them as grassroots outrage at U.S. provocation. In the United States, some of this material migrates into expert discourse. Open source intelligence analysts, journalists, and think tank experts incorporate screenshots and chat logs into maps, timelines, and situation reports and present them on cable news and in policy briefs as independent confirmations of missile movements. Congressional staffers and allied governments cite these products in their own assessments, generating a feedback loop in which fabricated chats appear as triangulated multisource evidence. I think the only weakness of Lynn's article is his focus on scenarios

Starting point is 02:51:33 that lead to mass nuclear exchange and in his insistence on considering nation states as the only relevant actors in most of these escalation cycles. But the basic process, he outlined there, a bad actor flooding regional social media with disinformation designed to look like OSENT that suggests an imminent attack, that's entirely possible, and you wouldn't need a nation-state-level actor to pull it off. Let's say you have a well-funded non-state group of ideological hardliners. Let's imagine them as partisans of India or Pakistan, right? You could also imagine they're just trolls, eager to add confusion for the lulls. Or more insidiously, you could imagine them as motivated to pull off a massive score gambling on world events by betting on a limited nuclear attack

Starting point is 02:52:17 and then making one happen. Returning to our hypothetical border conflict between India and Pakistan, let's imagine another outbreak of actual shooting like May of 2025. Imagine whichever of those hypothetical non-state groups you like to pick floods the region with reports of Indian nuclear forces mobilizing or even weapons inbound. This would occur alongside the already nightmarish disruption of communication and command of control that will occur during such times of conflict. Is it so crazy to imagine that one of those Pakistani ships chooses to fire its payload? There's a very good reason why most nuclear armed nations do not give military leaders direct control over how and when to fire these weapons. We don't know how Pakistan governs the use of

Starting point is 02:53:01 their naval nukes, not really, and that means we cannot discount such a possibility. The kind of decisions made in nuclear war planning tend to come with a timer of less than a half hour. New weapon systems like hypersonic missiles have shortened that even further. This means any decision about when to deploy nuclear weapons is likely going to be made on a very short time frame by frightened people. Another equally terrifying vision of that scenario could lead China, Pakistan, and India to each conclude

Starting point is 02:53:28 based on a mix of real movements by neighboring forces and a flood of AI disinformation to activate and position their nuclear arsenals just in case. Once you have nuclear weapons assembled, deployed, and aimed, the odds rise exponentially that something might go wrong, even if no one chooses to fire them. And the same sort of concerted digital disinformation attack executed by a state or non-state actor could happen today

Starting point is 02:53:55 during literally any tense international situation with a potential for nuclear escalation. As I said, my interest here is not in an apocalypse narrative, but in the possibility of a limited nuclear fuck-up. Let me propose another that might occur in this situation. In the U.S., all nuclear weapons are built to be what's called one point safe. This means the weapon has a probability of less than one in a million of causing a nuclear detonation if the weapon explodes unintentionally.

Starting point is 02:54:25 We have had nuclear weapons destroyed in plane crashes, and so far they have never detonated and a proper nuclear explosion on accident because they're one point safe. Other nations do not necessarily abide by the same safety rules in their nuclear weapons, and we simply do not know if Pakistan's nukes are safe in the same way. Imagine then, as the border conflict heats up, Pakistan's military assembles their arsenal and begins flying it in theater. A plane crashes or gets shot down, and the weapon inside detonates in a proper nuclear fireball. Every one of my nuclear fuck-up scenarios relies on terrible decision-making.

Starting point is 02:55:04 Clear-thinking civilian and military leaders do not take the kind of risks that would lead to a nuclear January 6th. Alas, clear-thinking civilian and military leaders are thin on the ground these days, especially where I live. As I noted earlier, the decision-makers in any of these situations, regardless of national identity, might have only minutes to make their decisions. They'll be frightened and probably sleep-deprived. and what do frighten sleep-deprived people turn to these days when they need to get work done? That's right. AI.

Starting point is 02:55:33 In a CNN article from earlier this year, Katie Lillis and Zachary Cohen write, across the U.S. military and the intelligence community, officials are pushing to weave AI into nearly every facet of their work from analyzing the huge volumes of raw intelligence the U.S. collects and selecting targets for strikes to more mundane applications like managing budgeting, logistics, and supply chains. Just a few months ago, back in the spring of 2026, one member, of the Intel community, an analyst, asked one of these chatbots to analyze intelligence around a Chinese vessel sailing to the Middle East. The bot was likely an internal tool, but as one senior U.S. official told CNN, the internal tools are mostly just copies of the commercial stuff wearing lipstick. Said bot did what bots do best. It mixed a bunch of different sources together to create a product for its user. This analysis, based on a mix of Ocent and secret Intel, concluded that

Starting point is 02:56:22 the Chinese ship was carrying components used in the production of nuclear weaponry. The analyst asked his AI tool to take its finding and produce an intelligence report, which was sent up the chain of command. Since the vessel was headed in the general direction of Iran, and since China does sell conventional weapons to Iran, this sparked a panic. Pered that CNN article, the U.S. military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode.

Starting point is 02:56:48 According to two of the sources, armed members of the U.S. military were preparing to board the ship. Military planes were in the air, one of these sources and another source familiar with the incident said. There was only one issue. The AI chatbot that analyst used had hallucinated. Every piece of that report was wrong. China was not sending nuclear weapons equipment to Iran or anywhere else because of fucking course they weren't.

Starting point is 02:57:09 But we came calamitously close to attacking a Chinese ship with military force due to that hallucination. In January, Pete Hegseth gave a speech outlining our Department of Defense's new AI strategy. He insisted, we will unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus our investments, and demonstrate the execution approach needed to ensure we lead in military AI. All that says to me is that these tools will only become more critical to the production of intelligence products than ever before, and we know they'll continue to hallucinate too. This change isn't just happening in the United States, it's occurring

Starting point is 02:57:43 in governments and militaries all across the world, and it's happening at the same time as some nuclear-armed nations seek to expand their low-yield stockpiles. Simultaneously, the U.S. war against Iran and the ongoing war in Ukraine have made it clear to every nation-state actor that the only real guarantee of national sovereignty is a nuclear arsenal. More nations will work to acquire nukes in the near future. This means more nuclear weapons and more conflicts where they might get used, alongside an even wider proliferation of tools like the ones I just described. I'm not trying to be apocalyptic here, because again, that's not really the immediate worry. The worry is that a mix of increasing acceptance, that it's okay to use small nukes and increasing

Starting point is 02:58:23 reliance on these AI tools, alongside the conflicts that we have always had between nations, will lead to a situation in which a very limited nuclear fuck-up not only is disastrous to people on the ground near wherever it occurs, but changes the very nature and all of the decision-making calculus in the world that we live in. I hope it doesn't happen, but what I'm thinking about these days. That's everything for today. We'll be back tomorrow. You've heard the chaos. Now you can see it. Do we want to jump right in? Watch all your favorite podcasts from start to finish right inside the free IHard Radio app. Make some noise.

Starting point is 02:59:07 Wooee! Catch every laugh and eye roll on shows like Bestie Listen, Hey Jonas, and Las Culturistas. Now with full video. I'll just leave that there. It's the same hosts and the same chemistry with all the hilarious moments you've been missing right on your screen. Open the free IHR radio app. Search video podcasts and tap watch. I'm Melissa Jeltsin and in my new podcast What Happened to Her.

Starting point is 02:59:30 I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead. Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence.

Starting point is 03:00:00 These stories all start in the same place with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies. She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it

Starting point is 03:00:17 and he got a year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing the disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. Listen to what happened to her on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Lisa, we should tell them about our new show.

Starting point is 03:00:35 Oh my God, Lexi. We have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie to Me. I'm Lexi Youanu. We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa Di Giulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions,

Starting point is 03:00:50 and at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all. I'm not going to get anyone fighting. That is wild. I learned that about you today. Now in my 30s, being the founder of new shoes, good taste is my business. And I've always got something to say. If men were just honest about this, there would be so much more peace in the world. We're going to talk about dating, relationships, beauty, getting older, and a little wiser.

Starting point is 03:01:17 We're best friends, but we don't always agree. Because you told us how accommodating you are. Obviously, I would do what I think I could do to fight the fight, but there's only so much fight I can fight. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me.

Starting point is 03:01:33 Liar. Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I don't really care. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real.

Starting point is 03:01:55 Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own. economic interest and they complained about the very thing to receive it's raw i knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men roland martin unfiltered i went off i said this is exactly what i'm talking about y'all going to scream at chenel but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein catch roland martin's daily commentary on the black information Network. Twelve seats. Those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the south now. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the IHart radio app, Apple Podcasts. Wherever you get your podcasts. You broke me. You do not

Starting point is 03:02:45 deserve happiness. I'm Andrea Gunning. On this season of betrayal, we meet Carl Bryant. Carl thought he was living a normal drama-free life until the messages started. You will have hell to pay. For nine months, someone infiltrated every aspect of Carl's life threatening to ruin him. Cyberstalking, swatting, extortion, impersonation. And then the tech's threats escalated. Someone's not going to make it out of this alive. It's playing out in real life.

Starting point is 03:03:19 It's playing out in real life. life, not just on the phone. Every piece of evidence pointed to one man. But every piece of evidence was a lie. He was not going to stop unless we stopped him. Listen to Betrayal Season 6 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is, it could happen here, executive disorder. Allegedly.

Starting point is 03:03:51 Covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by Mia Wong, Robert Evans, and Sophie Lichten. Not allegedly. Yeah. No, that's definitely Sophie. But you can't prove it to me. I can prove it's you. Sophie. You have no idea where I am, Sophie, or what I'm doing. I know exactly where you are. I know exactly what you're doing. This is the first episode where we're testing AI Robert. Oh, no. We're not tested. There's no AI Robert. Don't yell at me on Please, Guy. It didn't be shit.

Starting point is 03:04:29 You'll know there's no AI Robert because they would have trained an AI Robert on like the subreddit and all of the different jokes that I can no longer do because people have taken it too seriously. Like if I start talking about a child hunting island, like you'll know it's the AI me. It'll pull like a bagel throwing reference

Starting point is 03:04:46 from like nine years ago. Yeah, all of a sudden you start talking about Doritos like you did 10 years ago. Yeah, talking about Doritos. like 10 years ago, we're talking about the Jamie Locke's murder thing, which I don't do anymore, because now there's a real serial killer in the area that people were making comments about. And being like, as it Jamie, I'm like, guys, there's really people dead. We don't keep the bit up at this point.

Starting point is 03:05:08 All right. Here. This episode, we're covering the week of October 7th to October 14th. And we're actually going to jump straight to our first main story. Last Thursday afternoon, October 8th, ICE shot a 28th, old man named Oscar Belgall in the New York City neighborhood of Marble Hill, which is physically located in the Bronx, but technically in the borough of Manhattan. Oscar was in a car with his five-year-old son. Her video released by the NYPD, around 4 p.m., just in the middle

Starting point is 03:05:43 of the day, masked plainclothes agents, some wearing yellow construction vests, ran up to a parked car with guns already drawn. The driver, Oscar, started backing. away and then an agent began hitting the car windows with the butt of his gun. Oscar then pulls into the street and drives off screen as agents point their guns at the windshield. The actual shooting itself is not captured on this video, but I'll play it here for us to reference. This is security camera footage. Yeah, one of the things that was like noticeably unsettling besides all of it was the fact that like these guys were dressed. like crossing guards

Starting point is 03:06:27 like construction workers crossing guards they had like on normal clothes and then just like a high vis vest yeah which you know somebody in a high vis vest and a machine gun comes towards me that's scary

Starting point is 03:06:43 they look like especially the guy with a long gun he looks like a mass shooter they look like fucking mass shooters like I would not assume those were police officers and I might take steps to defend myself in that situation because they just look like fucking mass shooters. Correct.

Starting point is 03:06:57 Mayor Zora Mamdani said, quote, there was no reasonable way to identify them as ice agents. School had just gotten out. The street was crowded with families and children, unquote. So according to the NYPD, at least one agent fired seven shots. We do not have footage of the actual shooting. As I said, Oscar's five-year-old son was in the backseat of the car.

Starting point is 03:07:21 Now, thank God, he is physically unharmed. but of course he still had to watch masked men with guns run up, shoot his dad in the neck and drag his body away. Jesus Christ. DHS Secretary Mullen said that agents were not aware a kid was in the car. Uh-huh, because they didn't care. They would check. Shoot first, ask questions later.

Starting point is 03:07:46 The child's mother told Governor Hockel that her son is traumatized and won't talk. Quote, the child is not speaking. That's terrible. Yeah, I mean, sure, of course. Jesus. That's horrible, you guys. I mean, I can't really think of anything worse

Starting point is 03:08:03 that could happen to a child than to watch their parent shot in the neck at random when, like, in a normally safe situation like that. Jesus Christ. ICE has still not released body cam footage of the shooting. DHS has said that they were conducting a, quote, targeted enforcement operation and that Oscar quote

Starting point is 03:08:24 weaponized his vehicle this is the thing they always say when something like this happens spoiler plate ass statement DHS also claimed that after I shot and arrested Oscar agents quote rendered first aid and then took him

Starting point is 03:08:38 to the hospital this is a lie this did not happen this is a plain a plain face lie from DHS body camera footage released by NYPD from when they first got to the scene, when the cops got to the scene, show Oscar just sitting in the street,

Starting point is 03:08:56 bleeding out with his hands handcuffed behind his back, surrounded by ice agents who are just standing in a circle around him, offering no assistance. Yeah, and they do this all the fucking time when they shoot someone, just, like, stand there and handcuff them. The NYPD rushes over in this footage, picks up and carries Oscar, who now appears to be going unconscious. They take Oscar into a squad car, they render aid, put pressure on the wound, and drive him to the hospital down. the street. Do you know how hard it is to have less concern for human life than the New York Police Department? My God. That's astonishing. That's, that takes some work. Jesus Christ. We're reaching average Los Angeles Sheriff's Deputy levels of empathy here. Like, it's shocking.

Starting point is 03:09:37 It's like the CPD detectives they brought in to do torture after 9-11. Like, that kind of shit. We don't really know what would have happened if NYPD did not get to the scene as quick as they did. In the body camera footage of them carrying Oscar, like his body is fully limp. Like he is out of it. He looks like he's been shot in the neck.

Starting point is 03:10:01 Now, NYPD had no involvement in the federal operation prior to this point, prior to the shooting. Quite frankly, this kind of shit isn't what they do. They do other bad things, but they don't just shoot and charge people's cars with guns when they're like driving away from school

Starting point is 03:10:17 with their, like, that's just, that's, this so much of an escalation about like our normal police bullshit is what I'm saying. DHS has tried to justify their targeting of Oscar, calling him a, quote, criminal illegal alien from the Dominican Republic. Great. And pointed to prior arrests and a criminal conviction for grand larceny and claim Oscars, quote, associated with a gang. That's the word they keep using, associated or association.

Starting point is 03:10:46 They won't even say he's like a member. they'll say he's associated with the gang. Yeah. I'll play a short clip here from the mayor's press conference later that evening, just down the street from this site of the shooting. There is no explanation for federal officers firing this many rounds into a car that has a five-year-old in the car. There is no explanation.

Starting point is 03:11:11 We are standing here so close to the site of where this actually took place and look at how many people live right here. This is a residential neighborhood. We are right here by a subway. And the pretext of ICE is, in their words, to keep this country safe. How is it keeping anyone safe to have, as you just heard from the police commissioner, individuals wearing construction vests in masks with long guns? Residents have no idea if these are law enforcement agents or if they are simply attacking someone on the street. And when it comes to ICE, it begs the question, what's the difference? There is no expert. explanation for this. After the shooting, soon-to-be DSA congresswoman Dariuswoman Dariusha Vila Chavilla quickly went up to the Bronx and saw that federal agents were going door to door, quote-unquote, collecting evidence, and trying to question residents about the shooting, running down people's names and numbers. So Dari Liza followed behind these HSI agents informing residents that they did not need to speak to or answer questions from these federal agents. And meanwhile, soon to be former congressman,

Starting point is 03:12:18 Adriano Espayotte, and Oscar's own family weren't allowed to see Oscar at the hospital. Jesus. Now, outside the hospital, where Oscar is being treated, a few hundred New Yorkers gathered to protest ice and the shooting of one of their neighbors. Earlier in the evening, ice vehicles were driving through protesters, but pretty quickly, NYPD arrived to do crowd control and clear the street for vehicles to enter and exit the hospital. This led to violent shoving matches over metal,

Starting point is 03:12:48 barricades that NYPD was trying to set up around the street. Daria Liza moved to this protest and she was trying to de-escalate conflict. But NYPD got very aggressive and Daria Lisa was shoved to the ground by a community affairs officer, the NYPD blue

Starting point is 03:13:04 shirts, the ones that are supposed to like de-escalate conflict at protests. Yeah, like average example of community affairs is shoving Congress person to the ground. I arrived at the hospital just after this first big clash over police barricades,

Starting point is 03:13:22 during which NYPD arrested five protesters. After that, things seemed to settle down for a little bit. The crowd got smaller, and about like a little over an hour later, just before 11 p.m., police rapidly cleared the street again, pushing protesters onto the sidewalk as a small caravan of feds departed the hospital at dangerously high speeds. They were zooming by.

Starting point is 03:13:48 Ice just pulled away. The crowd chased them a little bit. It's 10.40 p.m. We've got a group of NYPD now leaving the area, and the crowd is falling behind, yelling at them as well. Again, YPD is splitting off into two directions. Oscar was in one of these vehicles leaving the hospital. After the feds left the hospital, the crowd continued to dwindle to about 40 people who then marched up over the bridge to protest in front of Zoran's press conference.

Starting point is 03:14:37 At the press conference, Zoran said that for the past two hours, he had been on the phone negotiating with President Trump and Secretary Mullen for Oscar's release, but that those negotiations were unsuccessful. I think it is worth noting here that earlier this year, Trump did release someone from ICE custody following us. a request by Mayor Mammondani. With the cries of protesters heard in the background, the mayor reiterated calls for ICE to be abolished, saying, quote, ICE is rotten to its core, operates with impunity, so it's chaos and terror across our country, and they have killed far more of our neighbors than they could have ever claimed to save. I stand here not just as the mayor of our city, but as someone who is proud to be an

Starting point is 03:15:23 immigrant in our city. And I know that these kinds of raids, this kind of terrorizing of this city, leaves the three million immigrants of this city asking if they are safe here, if they belong here, if this two can be their home here. We will not normalize ICE's viciousness. We will not accept its cruelty. We know, and I have said this directly, whether to the president or to the public, ICE undermines public safety. It makes us less safe. New York City will not stand by while ICE agents shoot New Yorkers, and we will not back down from the demand that so many, including myself, have put forward time and again.

Starting point is 03:16:06 This is an agency that must be abolished. Commissioner Jessica Tisch then gave some more details about the shooting, some of which I've already echoed, but also read off Oscar's NYPD rap sheet. Average Commissioner Tisch move, including two prior arrests, one for, robbery, which he pleaded guilty to, and received probation, and another for drug possession. When Zoran got the microphone back, he again undermined ICE's legitimacy and said that while negotiating with the president and Secretary Mullen, he requested ICE agents leave the scene entirely and demanded that ICE stop its enforcement actions in the city.

Starting point is 03:16:44 There is no justification for what we have seen today, and we know that what we have seen today is but a microcosm of what ICE does on a daily basis. across this country. How can that be how we describe public safety? It can't be. And I've shared that with the president. I've shared that with the secretary. This city wants ice out. We want ice out of our city, ice out of our schools, ice out of our hospitals, ice out of our streets, ice away from our kids. We want that because we want to keep the city safe. We do not need them to do so. All they do is terrorize this city. Now, the people chanting outside the press conference weren't just protesting ICE, but also the NYPD and Zoran himself with chance of, quote,

Starting point is 03:17:30 Mamdani is complicit. Most of the ire directed at Mayor Mamdani was due to NYPD facilitating ICE's exit by clearing protesters in front of the hospital off the street before the agents sped off. After leaving the hospital, DHS moved Oscar to New Jersey and then back to New York, where he's currently in federal custody at the Metropolitan Detention. Center. On Monday, Oscar's lawyers released a statement, quote, Mr. Belgall is

Starting point is 03:18:00 living through an unimaginable nightmare. While he is currently in solitary confinement, a bullet remains lodged in his neck. The left side of his face is numb, and he can barely hear out of his left ear. Fuck. Doctors have told him

Starting point is 03:18:16 he urgently needs surgery, unquote. Awful. Federal judge has also temporarily blocked Oscar's deportation. The day after the shooting, Dari Liza called for NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch to step down in a statement. Quote, last night the NYPD and Commissioner Tisch violated the spirit, if not the letter, of our sanctuary city policies and fuel the Trump administration's attempts to demonize our communities. The NYPD's Strategic Response Group, or the SRG, must be disbanded as quickly as possible, and Commissioner Tisch must step down. New York City, DSA, also released a statement.

Starting point is 03:18:54 of which I'll quote a small portion of. ICE's devastating shooting of a New Yorker in front of his child cannot stand. Neither can the NYPD's attack on New Yorkers who stood up for their neighbors. ICE is a terrorist agency that must be expelled from New York City and abolished.

Starting point is 03:19:10 Jessica Tisch must get ICE out of New York and end NYPD complicity with these terrorists. If the commissioner can't put a stop to these injustices, she must be fired. Unquote. Now, initial reports claim that SRG, the strategic response group, was deployed to handle this protest at the hospital. And this is notable because Zoran ran on disbanding the SRG.

Starting point is 03:19:34 And right now, any SRG deployment must get approval from City Hall, according to reporting from Politico. So the idea that Mamdani personally sent the SRG to crack skulls of anti-ice protesters fueled a lot of the anger coming from protesters that night. The SRG or the Strategic Response Group is a specialized unit within the NYPD, which focuses on counterterrorism, but also policing protests. They're sort of the city's de facto riot cops. The unit has been long criticized for violently suppressing political protest. The SRG did not respond to that protest, though. Instead, NYPD sent officers from community affairs, as mentioned, and the Transit Bureau's, quote, anti-terrorism unit,

Starting point is 03:20:24 which doesn't need City Hall's direct sign-off. So while Zoran did not personally send the SRG to crack down on this protest, the violence from NYPD demonstrates that this issue is bigger than just one specific unit. But there is this larger question of, like, crowd control at these protests, and I think this question demonstrates the diverging issue. interests on the part of protesters and city hall. Some protesters want no NYPD crowd control. People want to directly fight ICE and they're willing to put their body on the line. Even if that means they might get hurt. As we've seen in other cities, physical confrontations against ICE could result

Starting point is 03:21:07 in DHS sending more troops to New York and possibly triggering a political crisis, which some on the left also desire. There is a sort of like acceleration as spent towards some of these protests. they kind of want this political crisis, and they want to directly fight and oppose ice. On the other hand, for someone in Zoron's position, there's a desire to prevent ICE agents from hurting more people, whether by running people over or shooting more New Yorkers. I think all of these questions definitely exist in the shadow of Minneapolis.

Starting point is 03:21:36 And furthermore, the mayor wants to limit the amount of DHS and ICE agents deployed to the city. So to that end up doing some level of crowd control to limit protesters' interactions with ICE to avoid provoking a larger deployment. So even if protesters and Zoran have similar ultimate goals vis-a-vis ICE, their respective positions lead them to contradictory impulses. Zoran has said that he will not justify

Starting point is 03:22:04 the use of force against protesters on Thursday night and told MS now he'll be conducting a review of the entire 24-hour period, quote, from the ICE shooting to the NYPD response to the incident and the ensuing protests to ICE's use of a privately owned parking lot as a staging location to every tool that we have at our disposal

Starting point is 03:22:23 to keep New Yorkers safe. Unquote. And on one of those last parts, AOC has also mentioned this, that ICE has been using the rooftop parking lot of a target in the Bronx to stage before going out to do arrests.

Starting point is 03:22:38 And that's something that electeds are looking to crack down on if they can. But Zoron has said that there are no plans to replace Commissioner Tisch, pointing to her history of uprooting NYPD corruption in the later Adams administration and the record low number of murders shootings and shooting victims. But Zoran has reiterated multiple times this week his intention to disband the SRG and said he will provide an update on that timeline in the coming months. Also to the dismay of the

Starting point is 03:23:09 police union, the mayor announced this week that his administration will be conducting the first comprehensive review of NYPD use of force policies and practices for the first time in a decade, and will crack down an officer as getting out of misconduct proceedings by retiring before disciplinary action can take place. After this was announced, there was a very angry statement from the police union about this. And because New York has already ended qualified immunity, the biggest thing City Hall could do to undermine police power is to move certain public safety and administrative rules outside of the NYPD, which Zorn wants to do with the Department of Community Safety,

Starting point is 03:23:47 but that has faced budgetary constraints, especially following the discovery of the $12 billion deficit left over by Mayor Adams. Now, 10 months into his administration, Zoran has not been eager to spend political capital taking on the NYPD. Where he has been spending political capital, it's mostly been to strengthen labor, investing in the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection,

Starting point is 03:24:09 creating and enforcing a new click-to-cancel rule, to crack down on impossible to end subscriptions, winning hundreds of millions of dollars for delivery workers, fighting to pass the Delivery Protection Act to strengthen Amazon workers' right to unionize, and partnering with labor unions to modernize the process of applying for city jobs and launching the mayor's office of worker power. This is in addition to universal child care and the rent freeze, which just went into effect earlier this month. But after attending protests this week, my general sense is that when it comes to NYPD and ICE, protesters want more than just, you know,

Starting point is 03:24:46 well-worded statements in these reviews. They want to see, like, more actionable change, whether that's using his position as mayor, as a sort of bully pulpit to rally the masses against ICE or employ more direct measures to protect New Yorkers from ICE. What those measures may be is not entirely clear. And if the left wants to be effective in agitating for larger social change, beyond making just general demands of electives, it may be worth closely considering why an elected is taking certain actions, the constraints of their power and the contradictions inherent to holding office, so that those not in office can apply targeted outside pressure to counteract the pressure coming from the federal and state level and just the pressures of governing itself. Though firing Tisch may please some of Zoran's left-wing base, more broadly it is politically risky and could damage Zoran as he tries to enact his economic agenda while contending with a centrist governor and a very hostile federal administration.

Starting point is 03:25:51 From City Hall's perspective, choosing to go to war with the NYPD right now could undermine Zoran's ability to protect New York from ice, whether by limiting the scale of ICE operations or ideally keeping ice out of the city in time. Of course, none of this means that people should stop protesting. The protesting is the crucial thing that could apply pressure here. But it's also going to have to be more than 400 of New York's most left-wing protesters. It's going to have to require, like, mass engagement. But the thing I wanted to emphasize here at the end is that, like, a socialist elected to an executive position and a protester and an organizer, you know, outside of government, are very different kinds of political actors whose positions strongly influenced. the actions they take or may be inclined to take. Protests supply an important pressure on city leaders to pursue certain names,

Starting point is 03:26:42 but our political analysis must take account of the balance of forces within the state. Is anyone else have any thoughts on this? I'm sure Mia does. Yeah. Well, I think part of what's happening here on a broader scale is that, like, one of the reasons the ISIS has been successful over the last, call it like three or four months in significant escalations of

Starting point is 03:27:08 of raids and we've talked about this a little bit on this show but there have been huge escalations in raids in Texas and raids in Florida and there's also been kind of beneath the notice of people who aren't there are really significant escalation

Starting point is 03:27:23 in places like Minneapolis but they're doing it quietly like they're not fighting with protesters they're going in they're grabbing people and they're leaving and I think this is one of the things the protesters are thinking about to some extent which is part of what their calculus is different in the mayor's office

Starting point is 03:27:40 because one of the things that's been allowing all of this to happen is that ICE has been able to do this smoothly. Yeah. The fact they've been able to do it smoothly, quietly, and without disturbing the broader public order is a big part of how they've been able

Starting point is 03:27:56 to really ramp up rates without the kind of mass resistance that we saw earlier in the year. And, you know, this leads you to like a structural problem with, you know, like with the position of someone of someone holding office,

Starting point is 03:28:11 which is that like, a holding office in the U.S. does not give you a monopoly on violence because the police are effectively a semi-independent force. And, you know, you can do oversight on them to some extent. But, you know, as long as you're sending them there, even if you tell them, hey, don't beat up protesters,

Starting point is 03:28:30 like they're going to go beat up Congress people. And then you have a secondary problem, which is that, like, if you're running the government of New York, your job is to maintain public order. Yeah. And the way that you defeat ICE is through breaking public order. And this puts you inherently in tension with the state itself in a position where Mondani ends up being aligned, like, structurally with the police trying to do protest control,

Starting point is 03:28:58 right? And this is just sort of like the structural. limits of what kind of power you actually hold in the United States when you are elected. Because, yeah, I was like, no, like, we're keeping on fucking Adams era police commissioner because if you want to try to have the body that's nominally enforcing your legitimacy on violence, like, you have to go to war with people who can, like, fight you. And that's, that's just like a huge structural problem with power in the American government. Yeah, and Tish was also, like, retained essentially following requests from Hokel as a sort of like signed to Hokel that like Zorn will still be like a competent administrator essentially.

Starting point is 03:29:43 It was it was assigned to her to kind of get her on board during the general election. Yeah. And then also, you know, extract economic wins and revenue from the state so that Mom Dani can have the funding for things like universal child care. And that was one of the calculations that was made. and he did like announce his intention to retain her during during the campaign. So this wasn't, this isn't necessarily one of his campaign promises the way abolishing SRG is. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:30:09 And which he seems to be still trying to work on. And you can apply. But as we see from, you know, NYCDSA, Zoran's political home, a pressure can still be applied on both of these things. Yeah. And should be. And that pressure is necessary, even if that means you're going to be going against someone who is like, you know, an economic ally, right?

Starting point is 03:30:28 in terms of how he's trying to run the city. But there are going to, there are going to be these contradictions that part of the left winning power in these places means we have to deal with those contradictions. You have to go through them, not just avoid them. You can't just avoid conflict here. We have to pursue it with like focus and determination. I think sometimes at least in conversations in New York over the NYPD aspect,

Starting point is 03:30:52 I definitely do not want to distract from, you know, the ice angle here as there is a man with a bullet still literally in his neck. Yeah. And I hope that that gets some more focus in these next few days. Yeah. Because that situation is not resolved itself. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:31:13 In the episode description, I will link New York City's immigration resources, the Immigration Legal Support Hotline, the intake form for the rapid response legal collaborative, for people facing the threat of detention or deep, as well as the know-your-rights booklets that the city offers in multiple languages. It's time for us to go on an ad break, and then we will return for more news because it has been a busy week. We are back.

Starting point is 03:32:03 Let's now go through some of our small things here. Mia, do you want to start us off? Yeah, so speaking of the filmed shooting of people in America, Pete Heggseth has announced that he is, yeah, planning to live stream the execution by firing squad of the 2009 Fort Hood shooter. He announced this by quote tweeting a CBS news tweet about the Pentagon's plan with a quote tweet that says, quote, correct. And that's how it was announced by the U.S. government that we were going to execute a man by firing squad, a thing that the military hasn't executed someone in 65 years. and live streamed. The live streaming part specifically is,

Starting point is 03:32:50 that is 30s lynching shit. That's crazy. Like, to be honest, I don't support the death penalty for the military. Like, the state shouldn't be doing that, in my opinion. But among death penalty options, I don't care about like a firing squad. Like, it's,

Starting point is 03:33:03 I actually think that's more ethical than the fucking lethal injections they're doing, but live streaming, it's deprave. It's sick shit. Yeah. That also just more so points to the brutality of lethal injection

Starting point is 03:33:14 despite it being this, yeah, you know, that's marketed as like peaceful and like civil. I'm not saying it's nice to shoot people. Yeah, it's also horrible. It's much worse than shooting them. Like, yeah, the fact that lethal injection is by all accounts actually a more horrific way to die.

Starting point is 03:33:29 It's a nightmare. Then a literal firing squad. Is it self crazy? Yeah. If you know what you're doing, a bullet's quick. But I mean, the live streaming thing is insane. Yeah, it's horrible. Like, obviously there's been widespread condemnation of this.

Starting point is 03:33:44 The people who have been really in support of this. this have been a bunch of the worst Silicon Valley fascists. There was a quote from Palmer Lucky, who is one of the founders of Andriel, which is a Silicon Valley weapons manufacturer we've talked about. They make drones. They make a bunch of other shit. You said, quote, and then there are those who suggest any revel in the death of those who truly deserve it is an indicator of a broken or diseased mind to the contrary. It is normal, good, and aligned with our natural order, that it has not been done here in 60 years

Starting point is 03:34:18 as an indictment in and of itself. And the thing I would say about this is to everyone who wants to do this, like, are you sure you want to live in the world where you've opened this door? Yeah. Like, are you sure you want what follows? Do you want us to talk about

Starting point is 03:34:35 live streaming executions? Because I will tell you, I don't think a lot of Americans want to watch this execution live stream, but there are some executions. I can have made. imagine a lot of Americans would want to watch on a live stream. Read up on your Chochescu is all I'm saying about this.

Starting point is 03:34:50 Look at your poll numbers and read about Chichescu. Yeah. You can't help but think of like when our term comes, we shall make no excuse for the terror. Like, I'm there, baby. I've never understood those words so much as I do now. Yeah. I would prefer that that door remains shut because I don't think you should be publicly executing people. I don't think you should be publicly executing people on live stream.

Starting point is 03:35:13 But like, you're opening this fucking door. If that's what we're doing. And like, it's like, I can agree, perhaps the country would be better if everyone couldn't buy an AR-15. But you open the door, so I have like six. Right? Yes. It's also, it has been reported that Trump is debating canceling the live stream only after he learned that the shooter was paralyzed, which is very interesting. My God.

Starting point is 03:35:42 Every now and then you get like a. little insight into the fact that Trump does have some kind of moral schema in his head, and it's always baffling when you get a hint of how it really looks. Like it's always just completely unhinged. I mean, that just might be an optics thing too. Like, yeah. Yeah, that is an optics thing. But it's showing his awareness of the moral component and the optics.

Starting point is 03:36:09 Yeah, exactly. It's just nuts. It's just like, that was your line, huh? Maybe. Like, okay. Oh, God. All right. Quick update here.

Starting point is 03:36:20 On Thursday, President Trump did, in fact, cancel the planned live stream of the Fort Hood Shooters' execution. Moving on, on Monday, DHS and HSI Homeland Security Investigations, rated the D.C. home of Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar. This follows confirmation at the midterm RNC. from Secretary Mullen that there is an investigation into the allegations of immigration fraud made against Omar based on a years-old racist conspiracy theory. After the raid on Monday, Hulhan made a statement, quote, I'm okay, make no mistake, this is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement. For 10 years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of

Starting point is 03:37:13 political intimidation, I will not be silenced, unquote. It's also worth noting, like, we're coming up on the elections, and this is the shit that's happening right now. Quick update here. Shortly after recording, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration's investigations into Representative Omar is specifically aimed at building a case to strip her of her U.S. citizenship and ultimately deport her. We will likely talk about this more next week.

Starting point is 03:37:41 I do want to take us a little bit further from the United States to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There's a long ongoing conflict there between the Congolese government and the rebel group M23, which is backed by the Rwandan state. Eric Prince and his mercenary corporation Vectis have been contracted by the Congolese government to fight against M23. What I'm talking about actually happened on September 17th, but we just found out about it within the last couple of days. during intense fighting in the Menemwe Highlands, a group of princes mercenaries were ambushed, and roughly 20 of them were killed or injured. This came after a clash earlier in September, in which several Colombian contractors were killed. During this most recent ambush, a New Zealand military veteran was killed, and an American named Tim Kennedy, who was a former Green Beret, and then

Starting point is 03:38:35 after being a green beret, a former UFC fighter, was badly injured. I think he got shot three times the leg. Sounds like there's a good chance to lose a leg, but I don't really know or certain. And was evacked and wound up eventually at a U.S. military hospital in Germany. So there's a couple things about this. First off, I've seen people being like, why is the U.S. military paying for the health care of a mercenary? Because he's a veteran. It's not weird that he went to a military hospital, right? He's entitled to that to health care of that kind. The bigger issues that Eric Prince has a mercenary corporation that's active in the Congo. Things do not seem to be going well for Prince or for Vectus in the Congo, although, again, we don't know, like, we just know 20

Starting point is 03:39:14 injured and killed. I don't know how many killed. I don't know what their nationalities were. They're not a real military, so they don't have to tell anybody that shit, right? Yeah. Once James is back, I'm sure we'll put together an episode covering in more detail like what's happening in the Congo because that's important and it's not really a topic. We've covered a lot on this show. As a little bit of a fun note, because this really pissed off a lot of people on X the Everything app, like a lot of right-wingers who are angry that, turns out U.S. Special Forces guys aren't nearly as badass without air support.

Starting point is 03:39:43 They can just be killed in the jungle like anybody else because bullets don't discriminate on how much training or whatever you have, how cool you look in pictures. So this started a discourse that ended ultimately with a poll and a week-long discussion as to whether or not all of Europe in 1939 could conquer modern 2026 Africa. 78% of X voted they believe in 1939. Let me tell you something, folks. This is objectively true. Anyone who knows anything about modern 20th century warfare will tell you.

Starting point is 03:40:10 It wouldn't take all of Africa. Egypt alone could wipe out 1939 Europe to the man militarily without a single soldier landing in Africa. They have Raffal fighters. They have 1,100 Abrams tanks. Even if you were to take somehow and magically transport all of the tanks in Europe in 1939. And remember, in 1939, none of the cool shit from World War II existed yet, by the way. The German army, I mean, it ended the war horse base, but it was really horse based in 39, right? Yeah.

Starting point is 03:40:40 And we take all of the tanks, every armored vehicle, and put them against just Egypt's Abrams tanks. And by the way, there's 600 T90 tanks or something like that in Algeria. I don't know how many Abrams tanks fucking Morocco has, but it's lot. But if you take just Egypt's Abrams tanks, there was not a single manner vehicle portable weapon on the planet that could pierce Chobam armor in 1939. the battle would be over in seconds. Anyway, one of the more amusing pieces of derangement online lately. Oh, God, I just love it when people are crazy. That's what I got.

Starting point is 03:41:16 One of the other things that James, I assume James, I want to talk more once he gets back, is early this week, J.D. Vance, as part of his fraud task force, announced big crackdowns on H-1B visas at Microsoft and J-1 visas at universities. So this is something that does deserve more dedicated focus in a future episode. Netflix this week has laid off about 1,000 employees. It's roughly 6% of their workforce. Oh, it sucks. Before Paramount acquired Warner Brothers, Netflix was trying to acquire Warner Brothers.

Starting point is 03:41:54 Yeah. In election news, but an even cooler kind, Sean Fane and his left-wing slate at United UIW, just swept the United Auto Worker elections. We are the incumbents now. Yes, yes, yes. Just totally demolished. And look, do some of us find it entertaining

Starting point is 03:42:13 that his name sounds a lot like the Irish political party Sinn Fade? Of course. That's all I have to say. How much did he win by Gary? Sean Fade won with 67. 098% to runner up rich, Boyers, 14%. Nice work, Rich.

Starting point is 03:42:35 A glittery. Nailed it. You really hit the sightguise there, my man. You think that, like, regular politicians have incumbency advantage. You have never seen a union election. Oh, my God. Especially a union election for a guy who, like, made things better in the union. Like, damn.

Starting point is 03:42:52 Yeah. Yeah. There's just a Catholic school in Oregon that fired their football coach because he, like, won by too much. Oh, yeah. He was, like, scoring points when it was just kind of, like, mean. I feel that way about Sean. Or it's like, okay, man.

Starting point is 03:43:04 Did you really need 67% of the vote? Four details, by the way. That guy ran an on-site kick before halftime up 57. So that's so sick oh shit, but also. I did not know Sean had game like that. Yeah. Starting this week, the White House has a new press secretary, Katie Zachariah, and I'll be the first to say, she's doing great. She's amazing work.

Starting point is 03:43:31 No, no notes. I think we can move on, right? I adore my family. I love them. They are my priority. I love being with my kids. The idea of not spending evenings with my kids is completely unacceptable. So my president, excuse me, my husband, that's a good one. My husband is out here. Incredible. Oh, my God. Incredible slip. Oh, my God. Incredible slip. Oh, my God. Is she the one that was, like, claiming to be a lawyer? Yes.

Starting point is 03:44:05 Yes. In China. She passed the bar in China. Which, let me, let me be clear. No, she did it. Like, I would bet my life. I would bet my life. She did not pass the bar in China.

Starting point is 03:44:19 Like, I am that certain. Wow. Like, I am as certain of that as I am certain that 90% of people who write about Taiwanese politics can't name three Taiwanese cities. Like, I don't know me. She seems to have a pretty solid grasp of. foreign policy. Let's say her Mandarin. Here's her talking about Venezuela.

Starting point is 03:44:37 He had a historic one-day war and now we have a booming economy and a great relationship with Venezuela. Incredible. I'm looking forward to covering her. I don't know what you're talking about. This is going to be great. By the way, for

Starting point is 03:44:53 people who can't see this clip, the amazing part is she, when she stops before she says Venezuela, she is looking down at the page. She looks down at her notes. To remember what country she's talking about. Got it. Incredible stuff.

Starting point is 03:45:08 We could do a whole episode about this first press conference. There's some great clips going around if you want to have fun. God. Less fun on the afternoon of October 7th in Sacramento, a day after the county began mailing out ballots. An SUV pulled up to a USPS mail truck. A masked man got out of the SUV and stole trays of mail from the truck. residents have reported their mail-in ballots are now missing.

Starting point is 03:45:35 Great stuff happening here. Love this country. A few days later, the National Guard were videoed standing in front of ballot drop boxes in D.C. They claimed that they were not legally guarding the boxes because that's illegal. But they were meandering in front of ballot drop boxes. Yeah. God. Not great stuff just a few weeks before the election. Lastly, while addressing a mega crowd in Tennessee, Trump made this very accurate comment.

Starting point is 03:46:16 No, it's true. No, there's such love. It's like, I mean, it's amazing. When you stand up here, it's just like the love. I could say the stupidest things in your class. Oh, I love yourself. I'm sure. But we don't say the stupidest things. We say things of common sense. There's so good clapping to that. Uh-huh. He knows his fans.

Starting point is 03:46:46 What could you say? He certainly does. And speaking of fans, I have a segment here for us. It is sports season for me. With the WMBA and MLB playoffs going on and the NBA season starting, it's exciting. I have not approved this message. Fuck off. It's exciting for me, but it also means I'm exposed to television commercial advertisements.

Starting point is 03:47:08 Oh, my God. Besides the... It's so bad. Besides the alarming number of sports betting ads, a new trend I'm upset about is AI ads targeting seniors. Let's take a listen. Can you go to my calendar and find me a half an hour tomorrow so I can mail some of these cookies to my grandson? I've added a post office trip at town. All right, S here.

Starting point is 03:47:27 We're ready. Chat Chachy P.T. Boys got a whole lot. more useful. It's no longer just answering questions. It's better at getting things done. Let me show you an example. Can you go into my finances and let me know if you see any duplicate charges? Jesus. Checking your accounts. Okay, it looks like you're paying twice for a magazine called Sound and Stereo. Well, that's odd. Can you cancel the duplicate and send an e-refund? Of course. So you're just giving it access to your bank details as an old person? That doesn't. doesn't seem like it'll lead you to getting scammed anymore.

Starting point is 03:48:05 Yeah, I was pretty angry when I first thought. And then I thought I was being irrationally angry, but now I think I'm just rational on that it sucks. I can't think of any way in which a chat bot that pulls for its answers from places like Reddit and the social internet would spread like bad advice on what old people should do with their money once it has access to their bank accounts. I can't imagine that causing a problem. So I don't see what your issue is, Sophie.

Starting point is 03:48:30 From the New York Post quote, it's very concerning. says Dr. Stacey Wood, clinical neurosychologist and professor at Scripps College, older people are maybe less aware of the algorithm's power, like how they work. It's really hard for them to discern what's credible and what's not. Older people are also taking up AI in mass. Hugh Data from February found that a full 23% of senior cynicids use chatbots, and 42% of those aged 50 to 64 to the same. And, you know, like, keeping up with tech is not necessarily a bad thing,

Starting point is 03:49:00 but Dr. Stacey Wood says it's slippery slope. as people age would noted, they also tend to be more likely to believe something is true because it is simply repeated to them over and over and they're generally more susceptible to sensationalized and highly partisan content. I can say the dubest things, and you people would clap for me. Yeah. One of the issues, as you stated, Sophie, is that, like, it's actually more important, I think, for the elderly to be aware of what AI is capable of than a lot of other groups because

Starting point is 03:49:28 they're being targeted so relentlessly by different kind of AI-based scams. unfortunately that usually gets translated into you should be using AI, which is going to make a lot of these people more vulnerable to scams. Yeah, I mean, like, I don't like that there's this, like, trend that AI can replace, like, human to human contact for our seniors. No. You guys, Gair and Robert, you saw a number of products at the Sears CES that were targeting seniors in that way.

Starting point is 03:49:54 We saw one or two reasonable ones and a lot of bad ones. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I guess slippery slope, But this commercial comes on a lot with different versions of seniors, almost always seniors that are women, doing things and, you know, the Chad GPT or whatever AI helping them. I just don't see a reason why chat GPT should have access to these people's calendars, finances, that kind of a thing. I don't see this ending well for so many folks. It lacks security and I'm angry about it and I wish it wasn't a trend that I see increasing, but that seems.

Starting point is 03:50:32 to be the path we're going on. Yeah. That's all I had on that. I just felt it was worth mentioning because it was on my mind. Yeah, yeah. Another story that's come out this week is that a bunch of anthropic researchers

Starting point is 03:50:43 are now, or at least there's been stories in San Francisco. And you should always take this stuff with the grain of salt, but this is consistent with a lot of internal conversations that a lot of them have been taking up smoking because they're like, AI will cure cancer, right?

Starting point is 03:50:56 And this has been occurring alongside, like there was just an interview with an AI researcher on the Delphi podcast, for Anthropic, who said he's enjoying his last six months. Part of the issue here is that if you try to engage with what these people are saying, then you wind up sounding to a lot of folks like you're just like ignoring the potential of AI and the things that it is actually capable of doing. But you have to engage with what the people making it are saying.

Starting point is 03:51:22 And everything that the company's making this stuff is saying, it's nuts. It's bullshit. It's lies and it's insane. And that doesn't mean that these are not incredibly powerful. very dangerous tools. They are. They are extraordinarily dangerous because, among other things, they have automated the ability of small groups, of nation states, of non-state actors to carry out massive digital attacks with a level of penetration and speed that was not possible before. And that's a huge problem. These things are very capable tools. It's just that everything

Starting point is 03:51:54 being said by the people making them is insane bullshit. And it makes it very hard to have reasonable conversations about what should be done. Anyway. That's a really good point. Fuck these guys. Yeah. Let's go to ads real quick. Enjoy these hopefully non-AI products.

Starting point is 03:52:11 Yeah. And we're back. And I think it's time for us to head south of the border, that is south of the Polish border, to talk about Ukraine. I don't know why I decided to lead in that way, but I did. Baffling. Things have unfortunately been very spicy. in Ukraine over this last week. Last Friday, President Donald Trump announced that his Russian

Starting point is 03:52:43 counterpart, Vladimir Putin, and he had made a deal to release 300,000 tons of Russian diesel fuel to, quote, the American and global marketplace immediately. This came as a massive surprise to everyone, because last month, Trump signed a massive sanctions law to stop Russia from making money selling oil and gas to fuel their war against Ukraine. The midterms crunch is really hurting. It's really making strange, but not strange, but I guess normal badfellows. All of this seems to be in response to continuing disastrous polling numbers of Republicans in the midterms. An APNORC poll published on October 1st showed that most Americans disapprove of Trump's war with Iran and blame him personally for higher gas prices because he's why we have higher gas prices.

Starting point is 03:53:26 He has destroyed a generation of work. It's trying to tell people the president does not control gas prices by finding the only possible way to actually increase gas prices. He definitely did. This is the first time that's been true. This is like the first time we'd been in what is effectively a recession. You can say, no, it's directly as response of the current policies. Like literally direct. Like, I mean, obviously, the 2008 crash, a lot.

Starting point is 03:53:49 Bush did a lot to do with it, but most of that didn't hit until anyway. You know what I'm saying, right? I did that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So Trump's goal was to make a deal with Putin to lower diesel prices in particular, as diesel prices have been debilitating to American farmers who tend to support Trump. And I think also just a lot of the ads that have been running with farmers being like, Trump fucked me are really bad for Donald and for MAGA.

Starting point is 03:54:12 In addition to the immediate 300,000 tons of diesel promised to be released, another 500,000 tons of Russian diesel were to be released by Russia in November, and one million more tons were to be released immediately hereafter. It's not actually clear if this is any kind of formal deal or if any of this is, like, actually promised anywhere what these numbers are based on. A lot of what Trump says is just like nonsensical. So he says that like in November we'll get another half million. and then another million immediately hereafter, and then three million more tons within a short

Starting point is 03:54:41 period of time? Like, that's not, what, what are you at? How much fuel is supposed to be released? This might just be market manipulation, genuinely. This might just be market manipulation. It's entirely possible, as that probably leads you to believe there are serious doubts as to whether anything like what Trump has promised is possible to get out of Russia right now. And I, we'll talk about the ethical and like the Ukraine stuff, but I'm just talking about,

Starting point is 03:55:04 like, can they do this? Right? Like, do they even have the ability to get this fuel on the marketplace? Per an article in the LA Times, quote, Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski's questioned whether Russia could deliver at all. Citing his embassies reports a fuel shortages even in Moscow and serious sources saying Ukraine is damaged about half of Russia's refining capacity. He asked on X, so where will the surpluses for export come from? Now, well, he says half of Russia's refining capacity has been damaged,

Starting point is 03:55:31 that doesn't necessarily mean that, like, they're down by 50%. The IEA, the International Energy Association, estimates that Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries have cut Russia's diesel output by 30 percent or so. That also could mean that their like gas fuel output is by more on an average is to 50. I don't fully know. I don't know anyone has other than the Russian government exact numbers on how much Russia's refining capacity has been damaged. Russia's deputy prime minister has tries to repost claims like what the Polish deputy minister

Starting point is 03:56:00 said or foreign minister said, arguing that Russian exports. would rise in November and December as previously damaged refineries returned from maintenance. And obviously, I don't doubt that the Russian state is actively repairing and refurbishing damaged facilities, and some of them will come back online periodically, but they also will continue to face targeting from Ukrainian drone strikes. This current phase of the war is largely focused on deep-ranging drone strikes into Russian territory with retaliatory drone swarms and missile attacks from Russia into Ukraine, as the front remains locked in a relatively stable position.

Starting point is 03:56:31 Ukraine's hitting 1,500 miles beyond the line of contact now with drones, which is nuts. Like, that's air power levels, right? Yeah. There's a lot of quetching about like, oh, A is going to change warfare. We've already seen the biggest change in warfare that I think will occur in my lifetime. Maybe I'm wrong, but it's drones. Careful what you wish for. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:56:51 I may be biased because a drone tried to kill me once, but I have trouble imagining something altering the experience of the regular soldier on the ground more than drones have. Robert, I'm so excited for the plague weapons. We'll see. Obviously, I'm not counting the possibility of, like, currently illegal weapons, like, biologicals or nuclear weapons becoming, like, regularly deployed, right? Yeah. Immediately after Trump announced this deal, Ukrainian President Zelenskyy issued a furious

Starting point is 03:57:18 statement on his nation's behalf. In Kiev, a protest gathered at the memorial to fallen soldiers in the Maidan to express their anger. Within a matter of hours after Trump's announcement, Ukraine hit the loading terminal to Russia's Novasakhtink oil refinery, causing a massive fire. For weeks prior, Trump had begged Zelensky to halt strikes on Russian energy infrastructure, even as Russia has continued to hit Ukraine's energy infrastructure. When news broke of this new Ukrainian strike, Trump reacted with fury, telling Ukraine that it needed a new president

Starting point is 03:57:48 and blaming Zelensky for losing 30% of your country. He claimed two million people had been killed in a war that never should have been started. I agree, Putin shouldn't have started the war. Trump has repeatedly stated his belief that it wouldn't have occurred if he'd been president, you know, when Biden was. I think that's nonsense. By the way, his numbers also wrong. Russia currently controls about 20% of Ukraine's territory, not 30%. We don't have official death tolls for this war. We know Russia has lost at least about 500,000 soldiers killed. So it's reasonable to assume Ukrainian civilian and military fatalities would be somewhere in that ballpark. I should also note that Trump made this announcement, you know, complaining about Ukraine hitting Russia energy infrastructure. and promising to buy Russian diesel directly after 20 civilians in Ukraine were killed by Russian strikes, including three children. Russia has continued to devote significant effort to striking Ukrainian civilian property and infrastructure.

Starting point is 03:58:41 On October 13th and 14th, Russian strikes cut power to more than 600,000 Ukrainians. This came just four days after Trump licensed imports of Russian diesel. It also came after an energy ceasefire that Trump unilaterally announced during the weekend in response to Ukraine strike on that binary. Trump was like, there's an energy ceasefire. fire now. Nobody's striking and then there were strikes. And he was like, well, nobody's striking diesel and then there were more

Starting point is 03:59:03 strike. Yeah, right? And Zelensky pointed out on a Monday that Russia had already violated the ceasefire. Since his announcement, Trump has escalated his efforts to defray blame for the high cost of gas and his current strategy is blaming high diesel prices in the states on Ukrainian resistance. In speeches, he's saying

Starting point is 03:59:20 like Ukraine is why your diesel is so expensive, which it's not. And again, they've been fighting in Ukraine for years. Diesel prices didn't skyrocket until Trump decided to fuck with Iran. Yep. On October 11th, Ukraine also struck a facility belonging to Yandex, which I would casually describe as Russian Google.

Starting point is 03:59:38 This facility hosted a massive supercomputer, two massive supercomputers actually, used to train neural networks. It also part of like the Yandex facility there was like a military research facility. By any term, this is a valid target in war, by the way. Just I wanted to make that clear. The strikes caused massive disruption to Yandex services across Russia. Yandex is an interesting company. The founder, Arcadia Volos, was not willing to fall in line and support Putin after the expanded invasion of Ukraine.

Starting point is 04:00:05 He went so far as to condemn the war. This forced his exit from working in Russia and a deal was arranged in 2024 to put Yandex under Kremlin control. This is why Arcady wins my least problematic Russian billionaire award. The strike on that Yandex hub was Ukraine's third major hit on Russian tech infrastructure in four days. It cut access to huge numbers of services for Russians and people, not just, Russians, right? A number of countries that border Russia, including countries that are worried about getting invaded by Russia, Yandex is still like an important service for them. And this was not just like they lost access to Google. They lost access to like ride sharing apps and like AI

Starting point is 04:00:39 like all there, AI apps. Like it did a bunch of damage to just like people being able to use the internet the way that people are used to in the 21st century, not just in Russia, but in bordering countries. This has caused confusion online. In the immediate wake of the strikes, reports began to spread that Yandex going down had cut bot traffic to huge portions of the internet. That is objectively true. What bot traffic means is often misinterpreted. Specific claims were made that traffic had plunged for off day, the German far right party, that like their people commenting and like pro off day boards and stuff had like fallen off a cliff

Starting point is 04:01:15 and that the conservative subreddit was also down that there were no more magabots online, that the Russian bots were had declined. and evidence for these claims was posted in the form of cloud flare graphs that purported to show plunging bot activity. And again, some of those graphs were real, some of them weren't. There is plunging bot activity. The problem is that, and I made a joking comment about this is why we should keep airstriking data centers. And then tried to follow it off by claiming like, look, guys, no one has to abide by the truth in politics anymore. Like, why should we?

Starting point is 04:01:47 Right. But the reality of the situation is that bot traffic did drop precipitant. as a result of this attack. Cloudflare reported that Yandex bot traffic is like 0.4% of the max number of HTTP requests that had been reported over the prior two weeks. But that doesn't mean there are fewer Russian bot accounts on the internet, right? I'll refer to an analysis by Brandon Beeb that he put together on his substack that does a good job of explaining the disconnect in many people's understandings. The bots that dropped are mostly Yandex's own search engine crawler. They aren't troll accounts. No primary data shows that Russian social media

Starting point is 04:02:22 bots went offline. None shows that engagement reform UK, the off day, or MAGA accounts fell because of the strikes. Here's what matters. In cloud fairs language, a bot is any automated web request. Nearly all automated traffic from Yandex's network is Yandex bot. It's search crawler, which is Russia's version of Googlebot, right? So that's what has declined. Now, while the people who are saying, like, no, it's wrong that like Russian bot, you know, influence operations collapse as a result of these strikes, that's also led some people to say, like, there's been no impact in Russia's influence operations as a result of these strikes. I can't imagine that's

Starting point is 04:02:55 true. It's just not true in the way people online assumed it is. Right. They lost a massive access to a massive supercomputer center that the military used, right? This has certainly done some degree of damage. It's certainly frustrated some to some degree some of the shit

Starting point is 04:03:11 that the Russian government does online. It just hasn't gotten rid of all of the bot accounts because that's just like not how any of this works. No. There's not like a death star you can blow up that make Russian influence operation go away. Like, no. It's bad for Russia that these got struck, right?

Starting point is 04:03:28 They prefer that not happen. And that will presumably have impacts that are broader ranging and that are probably kind of obscure to us on a number of their operations. But it's not as simple as all of the bots went away. That's just not what happened. Interesting. Interesting and informative.

Starting point is 04:03:44 So let's close with a segment I am calling dispatches from a world in revolt with the starting claim that, yeah, we're kind of back, by which I mean we're kind of back in what appears to be at least the beginning of another global era of mass protests along the lines of sort of 2011 or 2019, 2020. We have talked about some of these protests on the show. We're going to be going through a few areas that have seen large protests here. Today we are mostly going to be focusing on India.

Starting point is 04:04:15 Now, previously on the show, we've talked about the massive wave of student protests in India under the banner of the meme Cockroach Janta Party, which is named after a Supreme Court justice calling unemployed use their cockroaches. So it's a play on the BJP. It's like the BJP, but it's the CJP because it's cockroaches. Okay. With that out of the way, those original protests from a few months ago have sort of won. The CJP declared victory recently after forcing the resignation of the Minister of Education after government officials leak the answers to standardized tests. But, comma, protests in India have continued, and they have continued over the BJP's attempt to

Starting point is 04:04:55 remove 130 million people from the voting rolls. Now, Mia, I've never done a number before. Is that a lot of people? That would be the 12th largest country on Earth. That is larger for the population of Japan. It is slightly, slightly less than the population of Mexico, but they are trying to trying to strip from the voting rolls. The rhetoric coming out of the BJP is, in a lot of ways, very similar to the rhetoric you see from fascist parties around the world. They're screaming about, like, illegal Muslim aliens casting fake votes. And so, like, basically they're doing on the scale of 130 million people, a thing that, like,

Starting point is 04:05:34 you see in the U.S. where they go through the voting rolls and, like, purge everyone with a non-white name, and here, it's like, yeah, they're purging people with Muslim names at the scale of the 12th largest country on Earth. So in response to this, India's, I would call them largely feckless opposition parties, actually finally did something and they deployed their, so Congress, which is like the main INC are India's main opposition party. They are the party that is like the party that did Indian independence. And they have connected their legacy to Gandhi. And so they deployed their one strategy, which is throwing Gandhi's at the problem. So they staged a protest outside of the electoral commission.

Starting point is 04:06:15 That's not honestly an enjoyable mental image. I'm just savoring that for a second. Literally physically it is what they're doing. They threw Raul Gandhi. How many Gandhi we got? Get him out of it. They have a lot of Gandhi descendants. Like they got a lot of his family tree.

Starting point is 04:06:30 Pick on the ground the Gandhi are these days. That's good to know. Yeah. So they were rule Gandhi and his sister who's also in the party and is like a high-ranking party official, Raul Gandhi is like the opposition leader. they went and were nominally they were trying to like, they went to the electoral commission we're trying to talk to the guy who's in charge

Starting point is 04:06:47 of the electoral commission and they got arrested like multiple times there's a bunch of scenes of like, Raul Gandhi trying to like crawl out of a bus that he was being held. This is like, this was like a week ago Wednesday. Yeah, on October 7th, or maybe this was like,

Starting point is 04:07:03 I was probably like 6th or 7th. Basically it was last week from when we were recording this. And this has led to a bunch more protests, including the CJP, like the Cockroach Party, like going out against these electoral purges, but it's also led to a sort of astonishing level of repression in India, and particularly in the capital of New Delhi, that has turned it over the last weekend into effectively a fairly overt police state. On Saturday, Indian police arrested the founder of the cockroach party as an attempt to try to stop the protest. There was a huge militarized police.

Starting point is 04:07:41 deployment in New Delhi itself, trying to stop anyone from being able to assemble and form protests in the first place. They've also shut down the mile-long road to Junter-Munter, which is basically there's a road there that has been a massive site of protests since like the 90s,

Starting point is 04:07:57 basically whenever someone's doing a protest in the capital, you show up here and you do a protest down the street and you like occupy the street for a while. And this was also a huge hub of the car crash movement was a giant sit-in here. And like the entire street has been declared, like, not a valid site of protest by the police. And the police

Starting point is 04:08:16 have been trying to funnel protesters into other sites around the city that are, like, significantly further from the center of the city. Oh, man. Sometimes the, the, the, just international, like, reflexive solidarity between police officers is just really beautiful, you know? It's always the same, the same move. No, no, no, you can't do it there, though. Can't do it there. Sorry. This is just free speech zones. Like, sorry, sorry, this is not a free speech zone. Yeah, it's a free speech zone. Yeah, they always do this. Like, oh, but there. No, it's fine what you're doing, but not there. Yeah. Yeah. Like, over the weekend, there were these massive attempts to stop the protests, and that did kind of cut down on numbers. But on Monday the 12th, the Congress party.

Starting point is 04:08:54 The terminology is mildly confusing to Americans, but yeah, like a lot of Congress political leaders and a bunch of protesters were able to take the streets again on Monday. On Tuesday, Cockroach protest leaders, like, tried to retake that street, and a bunch of their leaders got arrested after trying to take the main square. The protests do not seem to be slowing down as of now. Congress has been trying to turn this into a sort of sustained attempt, the challenge Modi's rule. I think even as he's trying to purge 130 million people from the voting rolls,

Starting point is 04:09:25 which would be the end, if anything, even remotely democratic in the Indian system, this is a real moment of weakness for him, and the escalation of these protests has been very damaging for the regime, even after they were kind of. able to, like, slow down and stop the original cockroach protests. Now that's been reignited, and Congress has been throwing their base into it, so we're going to continue to fill you in on what's going on there. Do they have any, like, specific demands when it comes to the voter roll purchase?

Starting point is 04:10:00 Yeah, the main one, obviously, like, they want everyone, like, put back in, and they want the chief of the electoral commission to resign. Okay. Those are the demands that everyone seems to agree to, basically. Congress and the cockroach protesters aren't one-to-one overlapping political bases, right? So, you know, it's a bit complicated there. But yeah, those are the main demands that we've seen so far. I want to turn to Europe where we've also seen continuations of, well, both the protests in France and Spain,

Starting point is 04:10:32 there were large French student protests over the weekend. I've seen numbers that suggest it's down to about 160,000, down from like 300,000 the week before. You know, and obviously police have continued to attack student protesters. Things are still really bleak. There's like a horrifying picture of like a kid getting crushed by a gate that a bunch of like a giant metal gate that a bunch of cops are pushing. Yeah, so they're still doing absolutely horrific stuff there. We did a larger episode about this earlier this week. Now, the student protests have also begun to spread.

Starting point is 04:11:06 though kind of in small forms as it this week, we've seen versions of them break out in Greece, Albania, in Belgium. Greek protesters, student protesters put up tents in Stigmatas Square, which is another historic protest site that was, I mean, it's been the core of a 100 million protests, but it's notably was one of the places that was the core of the protest in 2011, which, you know, I think links back in a lot of ways to the ways that the protest in Spain have been reoccupying a lot of the, like, 2011 historic protest.

Starting point is 04:11:36 sites. The Albanian ones, I think, have been pretty small so far. The ones in Belgium are interesting because there have been kind of multiple fairly large protests going on. There was a student protest on Monday, but then also earlier in, like last week, there was a giant anti-austerity protest. There's about like 10,000, well, it's about like 10,000 people. Pretty large, much smaller than the sort of full-scale stuff in France and Spain, but also, yeah, similar cops have been attacking them fairly significant. The cops arrested 10 people, like nine of whom are minors. So the student protests of a very similar sort of composition of like it's like these high school students going into revolt that you see in France.

Starting point is 04:12:17 Meanwhile in Spain, there was like another massive round of the giant protest they've been having. A bunch of the occupations are still going. We're probably going to talk to James next week a bit more in detail about what's been happening there. I think it's also fairly notable that there's been a pretty significant attempt by the. okay, so this is where we have to make a distinction between socialist party and, like, socialist. The socialist party government of Pedro Sanchez, with the caveat that in Spain, the socialist party has been kind of the equivalent of the Democrats for, like, many, many, many years now. The socialist party was, like, one of the two parties that, like, the protests in 2011 were, like,

Starting point is 04:12:59 against, which led to the formation of Podemos. That's a whole other story. But Pedro Sanchez has been trying to use these protests. to save his government, even though it has also been his government that, like, has been presiding over the sort of the housing crisis and these evictions. But he's been attempting to co-op the protests in order to save his flagging electoral things, which, like, obviously, yeah, it would be worse if the far right took power, and that's kind of what things have been looking towards.

Starting point is 04:13:27 Yeah, because, and, like, the far right killed two, like, pro-tenant bills in parliament, like, earlier this month. Yeah. Yeah. And then he's kind of used that and the protests to call for an election. Yeah. But this has also been paired with attempts to sort of like directly co-op the protests themselves, which there's been a whole bunch of stuff around that there that we can get into a detail with later.

Starting point is 04:13:48 But that's a dynamic that we're going to see frequently here. I mean, you don't often get one as blatant as the like, hey, this is the government that did this. That's like now trying to use your movement to do something. But yeah, this is a very common dynamic. in protests like this. And yeah, we're going to be seeing it more and more as protests continue, and we will let you know what other places start having mass protests. Like, I'm just going to briefly note there were some, like, also education protests

Starting point is 04:14:17 a little bit before this in Chile. There's been anti-Bosanaro protests happening all over Brazil. But, yeah, we will keep you updated as we get more, like, really large protest waves. Yeah. All right. That doesn't, for us here at It Could Happen here, if you want to say, send James a marketing email. You can do so at Coolzone Tips at Proton.com.

Starting point is 04:14:40 He will kill you. He will hunt you down with predator vision. Do not say marketing emails too. That email is actually for news-related tips and information. 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.

Starting point is 04:15:07 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 IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources where it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. I'm Melissa Jeltson, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police rode off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing in disguise.

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