It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 255

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. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. People wake up and go, oh, damn, wait a hold up. They change all of that?

Starting point is 00:00:51 Yes. It's real. This is a wholesale attack. It is targeting black people in every federal agency. It's raw. White folks have never. allowed that reckoning to last more than a decade. Catch Roland Martin's

Starting point is 00:01:03 daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast playing along is back with more of my favorite musicians. Check up my new episode

Starting point is 00:01:19 with Linda Perry. Like all my songs, they just show up. Yeah. I don't, I never write a lyric ever. And I say, hey, yeah. So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to playing along on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, it's me, Debbie Kamaabelle. This season on my podcast, who's with me, I speak with Bruce Lee's daughter, Brandon Lee's sister, and my friend, Shannon Lee.

Starting point is 00:01:54 Back to your initial point of stewarding my father's legacy and giving my energy to that. You're lending your life to stewarding somebody else's life. Listen to Who's With Me with me with Debbie Chmobel on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On recent episodes of the Questlove show, I chatted with Jojo about her music and Wallow 267 about his story and everything in between.

Starting point is 00:02:20 Don't invite me to karaoke. I'm going to make it weird. Someone's going to try to sing, leave it 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, Walo 267, and more on the Questlove show.

Starting point is 00:02:34 Listen to the Questlove show on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Peace. AllZone Media. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you. but you can make your own decisions.

Starting point is 00:03:11 Hello, everyone. My name is Dan Al-Kurd, and I'm a researcher and analyst of Arab and Palestinian politics. Today, I want to read remarks I gave at an event about higher education, where I was invited to give the introductory remarks before a panel of experts were going to speak on the subject of higher ed around the world. And I was asked specifically to talk about attacks on academic freedom

Starting point is 00:03:33 here in the United States. And I'm a good sport, always happy to be of service, so I did. but then I was accused after my remarks of downplaying anti-Semitism. So for this episode, I want to read those remarks that I gave at this event. And then I'll explain why that accusation that was leveled against me is so insidious and harmful and outrageous and is part of a broader problem of rampant anti-Palestinian racism in the United States. Okay, here are the remarks I made at that event. Thank you all for attending this panel.

Starting point is 00:04:06 I wanted to briefly situate this next discussion in the current political landscape and give a quick rundown of what has been happening. The news is so overwhelming some of these details can be lost. First, I think most of us have heard of the Trump administration freezing funding for a number of universities. Many of these universities have entered into negotiations with the administration and agreed to make changes to the curriculum and internal structures in order to drop the investigations against them and release that funding. For example, Columbia University agreed to pay the Trump administration $220 million, punish 70 of its students in a variety of ways, including expulsion, and agreed to monitor and report their programs for, quote, unlawful DEI goals. One of the ways Columbia has agreed to monitor their own departments, as the Intercept reported back in April,

Starting point is 00:04:58 is by appointing a vice provost in charge of ensuring a balanced curriculum, that's in quotes, within the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department. So the faculty in that department will no longer run the department. As the Middle East Studies Association, in a statement back in March 2025, noted, placing the department under, quote, administrative receivership is a fundamental abrogation of the autonomy of university governance. Like at Columbia, a lot of these investigations and targeting of universities has focused on the presence of DEI programs and allegations of anti-Semitism. The Trump administration has been aided by recent Supreme Court rulings,

Starting point is 00:05:39 particularly the cases of students for fair admissions versus the University of North Carolina, and Student for Fair Admissions versus Harvard. These cases overturned the 2003 case of Greta v. Bollinger that had allowed higher education institutions to consider race in admissions. Using this ruling, the Trump administration has gone after universities with programs that assist students of color, as well as initiatives focused on diversity. Allegations of anti-Semitism,

Starting point is 00:06:05 especially in the wake of campus protests over the past two years, have also been used to attack universities. The American Association of University Professors, in partnership with the Middle East Studies Association, analyzed the data on the Title VI complaints around anti-Semitism, which have indeed ballooned over the past two years.

Starting point is 00:06:25 In their report titled, Discriminating Against Dissent, they found that most government investigations of anti-Semitism, 78%, are prompted by complaints received from outside of university and college campuses, including from people and organizations who have no relationship with the schools under investigation. Of the 102 complaints filed with the Office of Civil Rights that the report analyzes, all but one focus on speech critical of Israel. The report documents the surge in investigation since October 7, 2023. With more investigations opened in the

Starting point is 00:07:00 last two months of 2023, 25 investigations, then in all previous years combined, 24 investigations. Investigations broke record numbers in 2024, 39 investigations, and are on track to do so again in 2025, with 38 investigations as of September 30th. This was back in 2025. So the Trump administration has used both of these things, DEI and anti-Semitism, to investigate universities. At the same time, they have also attacked the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Institutes of Health, all federal funding sources for the majority of research that happens at universities across disciplines, the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The Trump administration has additionally attacked foreign students,

Starting point is 00:07:47 and the processes by which they are able to get visas to study in the United States, which is another way to get at a major revenue source for many universities. Finally, and most recently, the Trump administration put together what they called the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. This compact offers universities that sign preferential treatment for federal research money in exchange for agreeing to a list of conditions. Conditions include freezing tuition, capping international enrollment, requiring the SAT, and limiting faculty speech on political issues. Only one university thus far has indicated their willingness to sign, the University of Texas at Austin, with most rejecting and a few expressing reservations. Whatever you personally think of these trends,

Starting point is 00:08:31 I think what they make clear is that there is a concerted effort to change the trajectory and scope of higher education in this country. And members of the Trump administration have certainly made this explicitly clear. Vice President J.D. Vance, speaking to the National Conservatism Conference back in 2021, said, quote, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country, and that, quote, universities are the enemy. So this is the reality we are facing, and there is an urgency in understanding how this impacts the quality of education in American universities for students, the quality of faculty research, the ability of universities to maintain their independence, and the role of universities in generating social mobility for marginalized people.

Starting point is 00:09:21 Okay, so that's what I said in my introductory remarks before I turned it over to the speakers. Again, I was accused of downplaying anti-Semitism, and I was also. likened to neo-Nazis. Why? For citing the report by the AAUP. In case people don't know, this is a very insidious trope of anti-Palestinian racism, often leveled at Palestinians. The idea that Palestinians are inherently anti-Semitic, that they are akin to Nazis, that their identity is not a national one similar to every other nationality, but that Palestinian is a type of ideology centered on the hatred of Jews. That is anti-Palestinian racism.

Starting point is 00:10:05 UC Berkeley's Department of Ethnic Studies has a pretty useful video on the subject on how anti-Palestinian racism is predicated on the assumption that Palestinians are a threat to public order and that it presupposes Palestinians, quote, do not enjoy the same rights to safety and flourishing as others. Now, this overlaps with racism against Arabs and white supremacy against people of color generally. It overlaps with Islamophobia.

Starting point is 00:10:31 but it is also something distinct. There's a large literature on this. Dina Hurwitz and Walter White, writing for the American Bar Association, highlight how, quote, anti-Palestinian racism may also be Islamophobic, but importantly, not all Palestinians or all Arabs are Muslim, just as not all Muslims are Arab. Anti-Palestinian racism foments a distinct form of discrimination faced by Palestinians

Starting point is 00:10:56 and those advocating for Palestinian rights, including non-Arabs and non-Muslims. for example, Christians and Jews. Palestinians and their advocates encounter anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia, regardless of whether they identify as secular, Muslim, Christian, Thruz, or Jewish. End quote.

Starting point is 00:11:14 The Arab-Canadian Lawyers Association has a report, also on this subject, titled Anti-Palestinian Racism, naming, framing, and manifestations. And they define it right on the first page. Quote, anti-Palestinian racism is a form of anti-Arab racism that silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames, or dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives.

Starting point is 00:11:39 Anti-Palestinian racism takes various forms, including denying the Nekba and justifying violence against Palestinians, failing to acknowledge Palestinians as an indigenous people with a collective identity, belonging, and rights in relation to occupied Palestine, erasing the human rights and equal dignity and worth of Palestinians, excluding or pressuring others to exclude Palestinian perspectives, Palestinians and their allies, defaming Palestinians and their allies with slander, such as being inherently anti-Semitic, a terrorist threat slash sympathizer, or opposed to democratic values. And finally, political scientists Yassimin Abu Laban and Abigail Bakan

Starting point is 00:12:15 wrote a helpful essay on the matter for the project on Middle East political science, which I will link in the show notes as well. They write, quote, anti-Palestinian racism is a form of racism which does not say its name. Anti-Palestinian racism relies on various forms of coding to hide divisive undemocratic practices of exclusion in an age where over racism is considered ideologically distasteful. Now, they were writing a few years ago, so I'm not sure how distasteful it remains. But let me continue, quote, the complexity is furthered in that the language of anti-Semitism and Jewish suffering, language that addresses systemic racism against the Jewish people, is essential means through which to code

Starting point is 00:12:55 anti-Palestinian racism and thereby suppress claims for redress. I am currently, while recording this podcast for you all, doing this thing where I'm going to great lengths to prove that what I experienced isn't just in my head. It isn't just me being overly sensitive, that it isn't a situation where maybe the person who complained had a good reason, that this was anti-Palestinian racism. There is this huge body of work and so much evidence outlining what anti-Palestinian racism is. There's even an argument that it animates broader Islamophobia in the United States. And it is a very real problem. But as Tony Morrison said, quote, the function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining

Starting point is 00:13:40 over and over again your reason for being. So every time we take the accusation at face value and launch into justifications into mustering all the evidence that the accusation is false, compiling the research and reports. That is a waste of time. Arguably, even this episode is me wasting my time in the way that racists intended. But I also think there is an important function of discussing anti-Palestinian racism, both for this episode and for the broader discourse. The function is to start more immediately identifying it, pointing and calling it out, and distinguishing it as a separate thing that Palestinians in this country face. Because for Palestinians in this country, and a number of other countries, but I'm speaking about the United

Starting point is 00:14:23 States here, the situation has gotten worse. And for Palestinian academics, which I can specifically speak to, the situation in higher education has gotten worse. The Middle East Studies Association has launched something called the Academic Freedom Initiative, where they collect data on how institutions of higher education are cracking down on their employees and students in a variety of ways around the issue of Palestine. And let's be clear, they weaponize the issue of Palestine to take away faculty governance or any kind of independence, whatever is left of it on these campuses. So, for example, the Academic Freedom Initiative record 139 instances of employment retaliation. So that's the universities retaliating against their employees, with 46% of those who faced

Starting point is 00:15:09 retaliation eventually terminated from employment altogether. According to the latest update on their website, August 20, 20, 26, 6,000% of the of Title VI investigations at universities about anti-Semitism were instigated by outside actors outside the university. And out of 116 events that they record universities interfering with, events related to Palestine, 55% were cancelled. This is the state of affairs in higher ed. Anti-Palestinian racism is rampant, but it's also, of course, rampant in other sectors, and in our discourse. And last but not least, this country's official policies. but allies can refuse to allow this to go unchecked

Starting point is 00:15:53 and can start to insist that this kind of racism is identified and not tolerated. So the racists wanted me to waste my time. But hopefully this can also be a call to action to stand up against anti-Palestinian racism more staunchly than before because we need it. That's all I have for you today. Thanks for listening. and chilling playlists to non-stop Halloween radio and more. We have all the thrills and chills you're craving this season.

Starting point is 00:16:45 Press Play. I'm Melissa Jeltson, 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 00:17:21 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 who that devil is

Starting point is 00:17:44 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. I'm Hamza. And I'm Martin. And we're the hosts of Out of Character. It's a podcast. I know.

Starting point is 00:18:00 There's a lot of them to listen to these days. How are you going to get to us? Well, there's a specific reason why you should listen to us. We are the best podcast in the entire world. I swear. I know. bold, but why don't we list some of the things we might talk about on a regular episode? So sometimes we'll talk about, I don't know, the Uber driver we just had. And how nice they were, or if we tipped them or not, come and find out.

Starting point is 00:18:22 Sometimes we'll talk about that weird news story from last week. It's the one you're thinking about, trust me. Or maybe we'll talk about music and what's happening in the underground or drama in music or TV shows or the Met Gala and what the actors wore. What we're saying is we're not afraid to talk about everything under the sun. And if you want to see what that's like, come join us. It's a place where everyone can hang out, anyone. Wherever you're from, whatever you're like, you're welcome.

Starting point is 00:18:49 Listen out of character from Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Pods, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 interest and they complain about the very thing to receive.

Starting point is 00:19:15 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. Twelve seats. Those are moving south.

Starting point is 00:19:43 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. Or wherever you get your podcasts. Vampires, Minotaurs, 12-foot skeletons, and apartment doors? Believe it or not, we're talking about romance. It's a monster romance, extremely. Dravaganza on Radio 831, a romance podcast.

Starting point is 00:20:09 So join me, Sanjana Basker and my co-host Tyler McCall as we dive into the strange, horny, and wonderfully thoughtful world of falling for something not quite human. I give Tyler a crash course in monster romance, and the villain edit author Rosie Dannon joins to talk vampires, blood play, and finding tenderness in a monstrous love interest. Then, Sentient Object Romance expert Racy Delgado takes us even deeper into the genre. Finally, I assigned Tyler some homework to rebecca. reads C. Mnuscastas Morning Glory milking farm. And it's a doozy, but spoiler alert, Tyler emerges ready for more monster tales. Because sometimes non-human romances can tell us the most about

Starting point is 00:20:47 our desire, our fantasies, and what we actually want. Listen to Radio 831, a romance podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The midterm elections are just two weeks away, with early voting already underway. And this year, more than many others in recent memory, there has been a plethora of attempts to make it harder for you to vote, or making it so your vote may not count the same way it has before. Literally, in cases legislating whether Trump can prevent mail and ballots from being counted after election day, which he cannot, but also through partisan gerrymandering, mid-decade redistricting, and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, which has resolved.

Starting point is 00:21:39 in the votes of some black Americans in the South being diluted across newly drawn districts. The president has promised to give each U.S. citizen adult $5,000 if Republicans maintain control of Congress. And this past month, the White House has used taxpayer dollars to broadcast pro-Trump campaign ads. About a week and a half ago, there was widely publicized photos of National Guard troops standing in front of ballot drop boxes in Washington, D.C. Troops, who National Guard officials say, were not stationed there to guard boxes. But voter intimidation through the presence of military, federal agents, or police officers at polling sites is a huge concern going into these midterms, especially as ICE is detaining

Starting point is 00:22:33 both immigrants and U.S. citizens suspected of being immigrants at levels, never be foreseen. Earlier this year, the Michigan Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers, who's going up against Abdul al-Said, told Kalamazoo County Republicans that he plans to recruit cops as, quote, poll watchers, according to leaked audio from a GOP meeting, also saying, quote, go ahead, try to intimidate them. So we called the RNC early and said, hey, you know, if we're going to do this again, I don't want to, wake up at three, you know, go to bed at 2 a.m., a winter, and wake up at 4 a.m. A loose, I'm kind of done with that.

Starting point is 00:23:16 And so, in a van full of Dallas that shows up in the middle of the year, which I wish didn't happen. So what we got them to commit to was they're going to have a healthy voter integrity program. The fact that they've already hired a decade, told you how far ahead of the game. We weren't that far before. And I've been telling them, you know what, let's put police officers,

Starting point is 00:23:39 retired for off-duty police officers as our pole walkers in the truck. Because go ahead, try to intimidate them. Yeah, please. Yeah. What's that? We're trying to find them. I mean, they wouldn't be able to wear their uniforms, but they would, you know, all you've got to do is open your jacket,

Starting point is 00:23:59 and you see the badge on the belt, right? Also notable in this leaked audio is how Mike Rogers insinuates his last Senate race, which he lost to Alyssa Slotkin, was stolen from him because of a van full of ballots. It seems almost inevitable that if Republicans lose these midterms, they will invent all sorts of election conspiracy theories and spread false claims of mass voter fraud to both contest these results and limit free and fair elections in the future.

Starting point is 00:24:32 But this episode, I want to do an overview. of the way the Trump administration is currently trying to make it harder to vote, what they have been able to do before the midterms, and finally, what they could do in the future. This is It Could Happen Here. I'm your host, Garrison Davis. The big thing Trump wants, but he'll probably never get, is the passage of the Save America Act,

Starting point is 00:25:01 a bill that would require voters provide photo ID and proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections, not just a driver's license or even a real ID card. This would disenfranchise over 20 million Americans who do not have citizenship documents like passports or birth certificates readily available. Trump's Save Act would also mandate regular voter roll purges and aims to heavily restrict mail-in or absentee voting. To quote the White House, quote, no mail-in ballots except for illness, disability, military, or travel.

Starting point is 00:25:42 Much of Trump's election ire has been directed at absentee or mail-in-voting, despite this being the very method by which Trump himself casts his ballot. I'm not going to focus on what passing the Save America Act specifically would mean for U.S. elections, because it's just not very likely that this bill will ever pass the Senate. But as Trump grew frustrated at the Save Act being indefinitely stalled, he turned to other means for similar ends. On March 31, 26, President Trump signed Executive Order 14399, or ensuring citizenship verification and integrity in federal elections.

Starting point is 00:26:28 This order was a test of executive power by attempting to institute federal policies similar to provisions within the SAVE Act, but through bypassing Congress entirely. In particular, the order focused on two things, having DHS create, quote, state citizenship lists, a list of individuals confirmed to be U.S. citizens who will be above the age of 18 at the time of an upcoming federal election, and who maintain residence in the subject state. And the order also directed the United States Postal Service to, quote, initiate a proposed rulemaking on mail-in and absentee ballots to, quote, establish uniform standards for mail-in or absentee ballot services. These new standards would include a new requirement that outbound absentee ballots feature a unique barcode to facilitate tracking and a provision

Starting point is 00:27:28 specifying that the USPS would not transmit any mail-in or absentee ballots for any individual who does not appear on a federal state-by-state list of pre-verified voters. To create this list, which may or may not be the same as the state citizenship list, the order keeps this kind of vague, but to create this list, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Commissioner of the Social Security Administration, and the Postmaster of General General would coordinate to implement this executive order. According to the order, states would be able to, quote, suggest modifications to the Postal Service's state-specific mail-in and absentee participation list. So that all sounds bad, and a group of 23 states and the District of Columbia

Starting point is 00:28:19 sued, alleging the executive order was unconstitutional and violated separation of powers by infringing on the state's authority to administer elections. In June, a district court in Massachusetts agreed and blocked the order. The Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court, and in August, the court issued an order on the shadow docket, with the conservative majority ruling 6'3, that the coalition of states and the district court lacked the legal authority to block the order because no harm had yet come from the executive order. So essentially, the Supreme Court lifted the lower court's injunction, allowing Trump's executive order to go into effect,

Starting point is 00:29:05 because they thought it was just too soon for states to file a challenge because the order hadn't yet gone into effect, and so the plaintiffs had yet to suffer any injury. This was totally crazy, and, like, totally defeats the entire point of, the shadow docket. The whole point of the shadow docket, or the emergency in-term docket, is that there's potential of serious irreparable harm if the court does not intervene. But in this ruling, the conservative majority wrote that the state's supposed concrete injury

Starting point is 00:29:41 was only a, quote, unduly long chain of inferences. So this ruling in August gave the Trump administration the green light to have DHS create and send state citizenship lists to each state 60 days ahead of the upcoming federal elections, cataloging each person in every state who DHS believes is eligible to vote. Now, the Supreme Court wrote, quote, states are not required to use the lists. But this executive order also requires the attorney general to quote, prioritize the investigation and as appropriate, the prosecution of state and local officials or any others who issue federal ballots to ineligible voters. So Trump is effectively compelling states to follow these DHS lists or else they will face prosecution. In their ruling, the conservative majority wrote that

Starting point is 00:30:42 the lower court concluded states did suffer a present injury because the order required them to, quote, begin planning now on how to comply with it. But, as the Supreme Court wrote, states, quote, cannot manufacture standing merely by inflicting harm on themselves based on their fears of hypothetical future harm that is certainly not impending, unquote. Though, of course, the conservative majority found that the government is, quote, likely to suffer irreparable harm without a stay. And so the stay was granted, lifting the injunction.

Starting point is 00:31:23 But there was something interesting at the end of this Supreme Court ruling. They wrote, quote, The court's disposition on this application does not mean that any measure taken by the government to implement the order will necessarily be lawful. On that score, time will tell. But the order itself does not harm the states, so the district court lacked jurisdiction to bar the government from trying to implement it, unquote. So the Supreme Court at least insinuates there that the Trump administration may not necessarily

Starting point is 00:32:01 lawfully implement this executive order, but in order for states to file a challenge, the order has to at least partially go into effect. When this ruling was issued, the Postal Service had, had not yet published their final rule, implementing parts of Trump's executive order. And so, the court never addressed the part of the executive order, requiring the Postal Service to review the eligibility of voters before transmitting their absentee ballots. And again, following this idea that the state's lawsuit was premature, the conservative majority wrote in the order, quote, if the Postal Service's final rule harms the states,

Starting point is 00:32:47 they may challenge that rule. And literally two days after the Supreme Court issued this order, the USPS published their new final rule, amending the mailing standards regarding the transmission of mail-in or absentee ballots for federal elections. Quote, The final rule introduces new mail peace preparation requirements and data reporting standards for federal ballot mail

Starting point is 00:33:11 that must be satisfied prior to presenting outbound federal ballot mail for acceptance into the mail stream, unquote. As outlined in Trump's executive order, the Postal Service's final rule would require states use new standardized mail-in ballot envelope designs to be compatible with automated processing, display a consistent election mail logo, and a unique, intelligent mail barcode.

Starting point is 00:33:39 But the rule also introduced a new, digital, quote, federal ballot mail portal that state and local election officials would have to use to administer absentee ballots. Not only would this portal be how state officials certified the design of their standardized envelopes, but election officials would also have to upload the name and address of each absentee or mail-in voter, as found on the outbound federal ballot mail envelope, the issuing state, and the intelligent mail barcode. This data would have to be submitted to the portal, quote, prior to presenting an outbound federal ballot mailing for acceptance. Rather than the 60-day deadline in Trump's executive order, the Postal Service's final rule recommends states upload this voter data into the portal at least 30 days before the election.

Starting point is 00:34:35 This, quote, flexible 30-day timeline accommodates variations in state law, unquote. But importantly, this voter data must be submitted to this new digital portal before the Postal Service will accept any mail-in ballots. Quote, there should be minimal to no delay between portal upload and a mailer's ability to present the mailing for acceptance. The Postal Service will generally not accept outbound federal ballot mailings unless compliance with the new rules standards has been verified. unquote. This new final rule did state that the Postal Service would not play, quote, any role in determining voter eligibility, maintaining voter rules, or counting ballots. But the rule also states, quote, portal data will also be available for verification purposes on a nationwide basis, unquote. If some of that just sounds confusing, that's because

Starting point is 00:35:43 it is. The implementation of Trump's executive order in this final rule was not very clear at all, did not follow proper protocol, and resulted in whistleblowers from USPS coming forward with concerns about the implementation of this final rule. And though the Supreme Court stayed one injunction blocking the implementation of the executive order, a separate temporary restraining order prevented certain sections of this final rule from immediately going into effect. The published final rule says that the Postal Service is ready to immediately implement these new standards in preparation for the 2026 election as soon as all of the lower court injunctions are lifted. But a few days after the rule was published, a coalition of 23 states,

Starting point is 00:36:34 again, filed a lawsuit as instructed by the Supreme Court, and the same district court judge issued a new preliminary injunction. And then on September 13th, a second federal judge also blocked the Postal Service's newly adopted final rule. Trump appointee Judge Carl Nichols found that the Postal Service lacked the authority to require states submit a list of eligible voters to this online portal

Starting point is 00:37:03 and only transmit ballots to voters verified on the portal. Judge Nichols wrote that if the rule was implemented, there would be a, quote, increased risk that a significant number of otherwise appropriate absentee or mail-in ballots will ultimately not be counted in the upcoming elections, unquote. And then just a day later, the Supreme Court issued a shadow docket ruling, denying the Trump administration's request to lift the first injunction blocking the implementation of the Postal Services for. final rule, finding that, quote, the government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge. And this appeared to be a seven-two ruling with Samuel Alito penning a dissent, which was joined by Clarence Thomas. Though Brett Kavanaugh wrote a one paragraph concurring opinion, agreeing to let the injunction against the rule remain, though he suggested that the Postal Service may have the authority to implement the rule in the future, just not in the two months prior to an election,

Starting point is 00:38:16 stating, quote, in my view, based on the briefing the court has received at this interim stage, there is at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service's statutory authority. But applying the rule in the 26 elections would be arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, because state and local officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections. For that reason, I concur in the denial of the application for stay, unquote. We'll come back to the future implications of this ruling at the end of the episode. But first, here's some ads. Okay, we are back.

Starting point is 00:39:13 Restricting mail-in voting and this final rule from the Postal Service is only one half. of Trump's executive order. The other concerns the creation of state citizenship lists to verify voters. The federal government does not have a centralized registry of citizens. But since last year, DHS has been trying to retrofit something called the Save System, not to be confused with the Save Act, though both aim to suppress voters. but the DHS has been trying to expand this SAVE system so it can be used to verify large batches of voters

Starting point is 00:39:55 by integrating data from other agencies like the State Department and the Social Security Administration. Save, in this case, stands for systematic alien verification for entitlements. It was created in the 80s to verify the citizenship and immigration status of people applying for public benefits like Medicaid and food stamps. In March of 2025, Trump signed a different executive order titled Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections, which instructed DHS to put new systems into place to allow state and local authorities to verify the citizenship status of those registered to vote

Starting point is 00:40:41 and directed the Social Security Administration to make their records available to DHS for that purpose. So DHS began modifying the saved system by incorporating confidential data from the Social Security Administration and altering the system to allow authorities to conduct bulk searches of multiple individuals at once. To date, 27 states already used the save system to verify voters. and last year, some states began testing the newly modified database. After Trump signed this election integrity order last year, voting rights organizations sued, and a district court blocked the order, finding that the overhauled save system,

Starting point is 00:41:30 quote, trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote. But the Trump administration went to the source. Supreme Court, asking them to lift the district court's injunction, alleging that the government faced irreparable harm if they weren't allowed to use the save system to purge voter rolls. Without a full briefing or oral argument, the conservative majority ruled 6'3, granting the stay, clearing the way for Trump to implement the new save system and allow DHS to purge voter rolls. I talked about this a little bit in an executive disorder episode a few weeks ago.

Starting point is 00:42:14 In the lawsuit that first prevented the government from using this newly modified saved system, the plaintiffs alleged that the integration of SSA, Social Security Administration data, violates multiple privacy protections, and that the use of the data to purge voter rules risks irreparable harm to voters who are mistakenly removed from voter rolls due to inaccurate or out-of-date information in the databases that save is using. And this harm is not just hypothetical.

Starting point is 00:42:49 When Texas began testing out the newly modified save system last year, it had an error rate of over 20%. And part of why the save system is so inaccurate, especially now that it's pulling from social security data is because social security administration data does not necessarily reflect someone's current immigration or citizenship status.

Starting point is 00:43:16 For example, I was given in SSN as a teenager after my family immigrated to the U.S., but because I later acquired U.S. citizenship through one of my parents, my social security number does not correspond to my citizenship status. status, and I often have to verify my citizenship status with a passport. It's also important to keep in mind that social security administration data is not just

Starting point is 00:43:41 social security numbers, but also, quote, names, dates and places of birth, citizenship indicators, death records, and information obtained while processing requests for social security numbers, per the Supreme Court. So if the save system flags someone or a search comes up inconclusive, voters could be required to take additional affirmative steps to prove their citizenship or naturalization, possibly within a very short window, or risk being removed from the voter rules and unable to exercise their right to vote. In the short, unsigned opinion, the conservative majority writes, quote, if the modified save program is unable to confirm that an individual is a citizen,

Starting point is 00:44:32 the agency is required to contact the individual and request that he provide proof of citizenship to register or remain registered to vote, unquote. In her dissent, Justice Jackson echoed the concerns of the plaintiffs, that the, quote, staleness of Social Security Administration's citizenship records risked disenfranchising recently naturalized U.S. citizens. And again, this is not some sort of hypothetical harm. According to a ProPublica report from last February, quote, DHS has had to correct information provided to at least five states

Starting point is 00:45:11 after save misidentified some voters as non-citizens. And per Jackson's dissent, in Texas, one woman had her, voter registration revoked without her knowledge, and two more had to provide proof of citizenship to maintain registered voter status. I really don't want to gloss over the fact that already in Texas, a U.S. citizen was removed from voter registration because of the safe system without her knowledge. She did not know that this happened. Imagine you walk up to the polling site ready to vote, only to learn that you've been removed from the voter rolls because of DHS's janky verification system.

Starting point is 00:46:00 That is actual irreparable harm, but the majority opinion of the Supreme Court just didn't consider this harm posed to lawful voters, but rather focused on the harms the government could purportedly suffer if they aren't allowed to use the revamped save system. The bulk of the majority opinion focuses on defending the legality of DHS using what is otherwise protected confidential data from the Social Security Administration. In contrast with the district court, the Supreme Court agreed with the government's argument that a provision of the illegal immigration reform and immigrant responsibility act, Section 1373, actually already granted DHS permission,

Starting point is 00:46:49 to access confidential SSA data. Thus, the use of that data in the SAV program does not violate the privacy protections within the Social Security Act or the Privacy Act. And I apologize for this getting a little jargony, but I cannot emphasize the magnitude of this enough. Section 1373 has never before been invoked this way and poses massive threats to privacy.

Starting point is 00:47:21 I will lightly paraphrase for clarity 8 U.S.C. 1373. Quote, notwithstanding any other provision of federal, state, or local law, no person, agency, government entity, or official may prohibit, or in any way restrict any government entity or official from sending or receiving information regarding the citizenship or immigration status, lawful or unlawful, of any individual to DHS, unquote. Now, because of that first bit, unquote, notwithstanding other laws, the Supreme Court majority found that Section 1373, quote, likely supersedes restrictions on disclosure elsewhere

Starting point is 00:48:04 in the code. And thus, DHS is authorized to request, receive, and send otherwise confidential information from the Social Security Administration. What the majority is doing here is they're combining that notwithstanding clause with 1373 subsection C, which, quote, requires DHS to respond to inquiries from state and local agencies seeking to verify or ascertain the citizenship or immigration status of any individual, unquote. But as written, that subsection does not require DHS to respond to requests with confidential

Starting point is 00:48:44 data from other agencies. It doesn't entitle them to otherwise protected data. In her dissent, Jackson summarizes what the majority's opinion here is. Quote, as the majority sees things, Congress's prohibiting interference with the disclosure of information regarding citizenship status to DHS necessarily authorizes DHS to request and receive that information from the SSA, regardless of whether some other law prohibits disclosure. The majority thus treats Section 1373 as essentially overriding the limits that privacy laws impose on the sharing of citizenship information with DHS. Now, Jackson calls the majority's interpretation, quote, implausible, and accuses them

Starting point is 00:49:39 of, quote, misreading the statutory text in a few of. important ways. Mainly, that these provisions don't empower government agencies to take any affirmative action to overrule privacy protections, but rather they bar government entities, officials, persons, or agencies from unlawfully prohibiting or restricting the exchange of citizenship information with DHS. To quote Jackson, quote, these provisions do not affirmatively grant any power, nor do they override any explicit statutory limits on information sharing. Rather, both provisions bar government entities or employees from interfering with otherwise lawful exchanges of citizenship information, notwithstanding that such interference may be permitted

Starting point is 00:50:32 under some other law. When a law imposes an express restriction on disclosure, it is that law, not an entity, official, person, or agency, that is doing the, quote, prohibiting or, quote, restricting. In the majority's opinion, they have a little footnote, responding to Jackson's claim here, quote, the distinction the dissent draws between laws and those tasked with enforcing them is illusory. Prohibitions necessarily include invoking a law to deny a request for or transfer of of such information, unquote. But this snarky little remark ignores that other provisions in the illegal immigration reform and Immigant Responsibility Act place, quote, strict limits on what information

Starting point is 00:51:26 SSA can disclose. And Jackson notes that those limits would be pointless if Section 1373 supersedes any and all privacy protections, as claimed by the government and the Supreme Court majority. To quote Jackson, there is no reason to believe that Congress meant to repeal laws that would otherwise prohibit federal agencies from disclosing citizenship information. Nothing in 1373 authorizes the modified save system or overrides the provisions of the Social Security Act and the Privacy Act, unquote. To bolster her argument, Jackson, also notes that Bill Clinton's Office of Legal Counsel

Starting point is 00:52:11 shared this same interpretation of Section 1373 all the way back in 1999, writing that the section does, quote, not clearly invest government officials or entities with the affirmative authority to disclose information and circumstances where they would otherwise be prohibited from doing so by a federal statute, unquote. And I go over all of these details, not to be confusing or annoying, but because again, this is a shadow docket ruling,

Starting point is 00:52:46 meaning that this case will likely be heard again by the Supreme Court, and some of these justifications may matter in the future. So as bad and frankly bullshit as this ruling is, According to Jackson, it will, quote, likely have minimal short-term impact. And that's because the National Voter Registration Act prohibits states from, quote, systematically removing the names of ineligible voters from their rules in the 90 days prior to any primary or general election. But this doesn't mean that it will have no impact on the midterms, because the government is still allowed to use the new save system. to conduct, quote, individualized inquiries per the majority.

Starting point is 00:53:46 Jackson writes that states will, quote, at most, conduct individualized voter rule maintenance using the modified save system prior to the midterms. But at the end of her dissent, she stresses, quote, the harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the non-existent harm that the government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take. For 2026, voter intimidation remains the biggest threat to elections, whether that's coming from Mike Rogers' personal goons or some federal force near polling sites, be that National Guard or ICE, which DHS officials have said,

Starting point is 00:54:38 won't patrol the polls, but told the Associated Press, quote, if an active public safety threat endangered a polling location, they may be arrested as a result of that targeted enforcement action. With DHS also saying they are, quote, laser focused on prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and preventing the dilution of the votes of U.S. citizens. Beyond voter intimidation, the Trump administration and Republicans may also attempt to de-legitimize election results based on allegations of fraud. And this is yet another way the new save system

Starting point is 00:55:19 could be of some use. Given its high error rate, it's quite simple to inflate the number of votes that are under suspicion of being fraudulently cast if the Trump administration gains access to cast ballots or voting machines and tries to audit the results. They don't even need to prove fraud. They just need to create an error of uncertainty to manufacture a political crisis, and the save system can provide that uncertainty. But what really concerns me is what could happen after the midterms in the two years before the 2028 election. There will be enough time for the constitutionality of the Postal Service's final rule, with the digital federal ballot mail portal and vague verification requirements, to be fully litigated and potentially implemented.

Starting point is 00:56:14 Supreme Court justices Elito and Thomas have already made it clear that they want the rule implemented, and Kavanaugh seems sympathetic. Without the time constraint of an impending election, where the rest of the conservative of justices stand on questions of constitutionality, delegating election authority, and separation of powers as they relate to the Postal Service's final rule, is not yet clear. And whenever they decide, I do want to echo the opinion of Trump appointee Judge Nichols that the USPS final rule poses a, quote, increased risk that a significant number of otherwise appropriate absentee or mail-in ballots will ultimately not be counted.

Starting point is 00:56:59 If the Republicans lose the midterms, which seems likely, Trump's general power may be more limited, but that may also result in his efforts being tailored to a few select issues that he can direct his full executive power towards. And the election issue has been a quite personal issue for President Trump. I can't see him doing anything other than doubling down on implementing. the full extent of these executive orders, including the, quote, state citizenship lists. But in terms of something that can immediately happen right after the midterms, literally the day after the election,

Starting point is 00:57:43 states can start using DHS's safe system to purge voter rolls en masse by quote-unquote verifying large batches of voters. The only thing preventing that right now is the 90-day prohibition on the quote-unquote systemic removal before an election. On the question of saves legality, the Supreme Court's conservative majority wrote that the challengers are unlikely to prevail on the merits of their claims. Even though Jackson points out in her dissent that the majority opinion breaks from previous interpretations of federal law and plainly misreads the statutory text.

Starting point is 00:58:25 Reversing their decision may require an entirely new. Supreme Court. Retrofitting the save system to conduct bulk searches of potentially ineligible voters is one part of a much larger strategy. Since 2025, the Trump administration has tried to gain access to state's voter rules, with the DOJ suing over 30 states for not complying with federal requests. Over a dozen states, mostly Republican-controlled states, have complied and handed over their voter registration lists. For states that have not complied, the Trump administration has employed multiple tactics to try to gain access to their voting records, including by just seizing them physically,

Starting point is 00:59:12 like in Georgia. We don't know if this was done with SAVE specifically, but this past summer, DHS notified the state of Nevada that they had almost 16,000 non-citizens on their voter rolls. then DHS said that they were able to confirm at least 185 individual cases of non-citizens registered to vote. But when state election officials looked into these cases, they found that every one of those 185 voters was actually a U.S. citizen. Meanwhile, in Texas, save falsely flagged over 500 voters as non-citizens. Simply put, having DHS try to determine the eligibility of U.S. citizen voters

Starting point is 01:00:01 doesn't seem like a good idea, and it doesn't seem like they are very good at it. Except, of course, this is precisely what DHS is setting out to do, remove as many people from the voter rolls as possible, whether or not they are actually eligible to vote. The new save system would not only disenfranchise eligible voters by removing them from voter rolls, potentially even without their knowledge, like in Texas,

Starting point is 01:00:31 but also in the age of ICE mass deportations, the prospect that you, as a voter, could be investigated or scrutinized by DHS, based on your name being flagged by some database, could absolutely dissuade U.S. citizens born or naturalized from registering to vote and exercising their right to vote, especially if they live with or are in proximity to undocumented immigrants.

Starting point is 01:01:02 And that fear, that intimidation, that is part of the point. If Stephen Miller can't strip naturalized citizens of their right to vote, this is his compromise. Radio presents the soundtrack to your October. From spooky podcasts and chilling playlists to non-stop. Stop Halloween Radio and more. We have all the thrills and chills you're craving this season. Press Play.

Starting point is 01:01:49 I'm Melissa Jeltson, 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. Between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead.

Starting point is 01:02:20 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.

Starting point is 01:02:39 She did all of these brave things 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. I'm Hamza. And I'm Martin. And we're the hosts of Out of Character.

Starting point is 01:03:01 It's a podcast. I know there's a lot of them going around. But why should you listen to ours? Well, we're only the best podcast in the entire world. And we talk about pretty much everything under the sun. For example, music we're listening to, underground music, trending music, drama in music worlds. Yes, sometimes we even talk about just everyday mundane situations in our lives,

Starting point is 01:03:23 like the cool Uber driver we just had. Or the food we just say, that is surprisingly delicious. Or we'll talk about the Med Gala and the looks that they wore. Are they awesome? Are they trendy? Come find out. Because our opinion matters. And so does yours. And this is a place where all of our minds can come together and connect.

Starting point is 01:03:42 So what are you waiting for? Come connect with us. Listen out of character from Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network On the Iheart radio app, Apple Pods, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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.

Starting point is 01:04:03 It's real. Those are the very people who I always say 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.

Starting point is 01:04:23 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.

Starting point is 01:04:49 Or wherever you get your podcasts. Vampires, Minotars, 12-foot skeletons, and apartment doors? Believe it or not, we're talking about romance. It's a monster romance extravaganza on Radio 831, a romance podcast. So join me, Sanjana Basker, and my co-host Tyler McCall as we dive into the strange, horny, and wonderfully thoughtful world of falling for something not quite human. I give Tyler a crash course in monster romance, and the villain edit author Rosie Danin joins to talk vampires, blood play, and finding tenderness in a monstrous love interest.

Starting point is 01:05:23 Then, Sentient Object Romance expert Racy Delgado takes us even deeper into the genre. Finally, I assigned Tyler some homework to read CEMNus Costas Morning Glory Moking Farm. And it's a doozy, but spoiler alert, Tyler emerges ready for more monster tales. Because sometimes non-human romances can tell us the most about our desire, our fantasy, and what we actually want. Listen to Radio 831, a romance podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everyone.

Starting point is 01:05:55 This is Future Mick adding some stuff for less Future Mick. We'll be hearing most of during the podcast. This episode took a pretty long while. I'm not sure how long it will be in post-production, but per my own recording, we talked for almost three hours, which is a lot. Therefore, this episode will be cut into multiple pieces. Make sure to start at part one.

Starting point is 01:06:22 I'm sorry for any awkward breaks in the post-production, but it was very hard to keep that in mind while we were recording. Hope you enjoy it. Welcome, everyone. Welcome to It Could Happen here, the podcast of Things Falling Apart and possibly how to put them back a little bit. My name is Mick. As expected, I'm here.

Starting point is 01:06:45 James Stout because James is always here with me. But I'm also very happy to say hello to Molly Congor, who's also agreed to join. How are you guys doing? I'm great. I'm excited and pumped to learn about some weird Nazis. It's me and Molly, but it's not an animal.

Starting point is 01:07:01 So I guess some people are already sad. I like doing podcasts with both of you. So it's going to be fun. I'm looking forward to whatever horrors we're about to learn. Yes. I knew once I dove into this, I was like, okay, I need to light the Molly signal.

Starting point is 01:07:15 and make sure that I get you to come on as well. You're about somebody else's Nazis for a change. Yeah, exactly. Like European Nazis with whom you're probably much less familiar, but probably no less horrifying. So what we'll be talking about today is to save Europe act, what it is, what kind of European mechanisms it tries to use to push through horrible shit.

Starting point is 01:07:39 That sounds xenophobic. Anytime people are wanting to save a thing, like nine times out of ten we've got to ask who they're saving it from and if it's the presence of people who aren't white that's... Why do you think it needs to be saved? Yeah. Are you worried about the dilution of Aryan blood?

Starting point is 01:07:56 Oh, you're so on point, Molly. You have no idea. We're also going to look a bit at the people who are orchestrating this because there are funny instances and also horrifying instances. I've tried to make it a bit of a mix

Starting point is 01:08:13 of the two, but I'll be honest. I've put this little project down a few times because I just got angry about it. I need to make jokes in order to make it palpable. Also, I have, against my better judgment, decided to make a blue sky account. So if anyone wants to reach me or if I do stuff incorrectly, you can contact me there. It's at two sober possums. Stop harassing James if I'm the one you're mad at.

Starting point is 01:08:42 Originally, I intended to have a little fun opening, but over the course of this research, I got upset and angry. After reading an in-depth report from the Justice for Prosperity, it became clear that a bunch of four Reich enthusiasts can be funny where you just look at it superficially, but the report suggests that more nefarious people are, at the very least, facilitating profoundly racist and anti-democratic movements. at worst, it's the rich and powerful, deliberately pushing Europe towards fascism, and emboldening want to be brown shirts to commit more acts of violence for...

Starting point is 01:09:20 Again? Again, yeah. And it gets better because it's for like a democratic proposal that was like doomed from the very start. Like red shirt in Star Trek doomed. Like that one teenage couple having sex somewhere in a horror film doomed. It's like, I can't exaggerate how to. doomed this was. So let's get going. What is the Safe Europe Act and who are the ones behind it? According to their own website, the Safe Europe Act is the first ever campaign to launch a patriotic

Starting point is 01:09:51 European Citizens Initiative. We demand that the political elite halt their replacement migration, secure our borders, and protect the ethnocultural identity of European nations. Oh dear. My eyes are getting wider with every clause of that sentence. Yeah, there's just some trigger words. Like those TikToks have like, you know, when you say like a dog's favorite words, you say, you want to go to the park? Do you want to get a treat and the dog gets like progressively more alarmed? Yeah, but in a bad way. Yeah, that's me, but negative.

Starting point is 01:10:21 Okay, well, it's not getting any better. So at first we're going to dive into like the Safe Europe Act itself and then we're going to look at the European Citizens Initiative. So is that like a referendum, like a ballot initiative, but for all of Europe? We're sorry. Most of the audience is American, so I'm going to be the token dumb American here. I need you to explain to me what's that. We'll get there because I've laid it out. Because Europe is not a country.

Starting point is 01:10:50 No, no, no. Europe is a state of mind, Molly. And a band. Really? Is it? The final countdown. Oh, I've heard that at a sports event. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:11:03 I've heard those words in the long, long ago sometime. But okay. to make it a bit more clear for Molly specifically. For the Americans. I'm not Americans, so I can't banter like that. It's a legislative request that has to be considered by the EU if certain conditions are met. In the grander machine of the EU,

Starting point is 01:11:24 Citizens Initiative is a way for Europeans to directly influence laws through the collection of support and signatures. So they got a big petition going. They got all the races in Europe to sign their petition. Yeah, think of it like a petition. non-steroids or a protest that for a change cannot be simply be ignored by the powers that be. The charter itself is barely a three-minute read, but I thought it would still be too lengthy and dull. So it will skip the preamble and move on to the core claims and demands that they make.

Starting point is 01:11:55 Should you have the desire or the masochism to want to read it yourself, you can find it on their website. It will be in the show notes together with all the other sources. I've had the misfortune of reading. So this is part two of the Charter, I quote, acknowledging further that Article 22 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union requires the Union to respect cultural, religious and linguistic diversity, which must include the protection of the historic cultures and traditions of Europe's nations against erosion through demographic replacement. Oh, there it is.

Starting point is 01:12:30 That's very clever. That's so like, oh, we just, we want to respect the diversity of our beautiful, all these different white cultures. Exactly. That's cute. The first time that a fascist has used the word diversity, not in a completely bad faith way. Right. Yeah, that's really cute of them. There's so much diversity of all the different whites.

Starting point is 01:12:52 Yeah, yes. We have to protect our cultural heritage. Nothing but premium whites. So at point three, testing how replacement migration. both legal and illegal over recent decades has violated that right by causing significant damage to the social cohesion, public services, security, and ethnic and cultural continuity of the European nations,

Starting point is 01:13:14 leading to parallel societies, increased crime, and the marginalization of native populations in their ancestral homelands. Come on. Anytime you hear a fucking European white person using the word native or indigenous to describe themselves, just tell them to fuck off. just a most puerile shit. Come on.

Starting point is 01:13:33 I've been reading a lot of like 20th century sort of eugenics writing lately, early 1900s. And every time they say, you know, he was a Native American. I'm like, he was what? They mean he was a white person whose family came here in the 1700s.

Starting point is 01:13:47 He was a Native American. Like, that's not how we use that phrase now. This is still a giant problem in like local journalism in the United States. Like I remember I was writing for Pointer, which if people aren't familiar, a pointer is like a institute of journalism, I think. It's like a journal about journalism.

Starting point is 01:14:02 Mm, meta. And I remember two reporters, I was writing about how people just can't stop saying that cops overdosed on fentanyl when they didn't, they had a panic attack. Mm-hmm. This is a problem, and it's a problem that it's apparently insurmountable for many local newspapers, including the San Diego Union Tribune.

Starting point is 01:14:19 Both reporters there called themselves San Diego natives, and like the Native American Journalist Association style guide suggests that you should generally put tribal affiliation afterwards. So I asked him, and they got very upset. But, like, I genuinely, like, if you're a person who makes a living with words and you're just a white person who was born somewhere and you're using native, you're showing that you're incapable of, like, using words accurately. I think that should be disqualifying in itself if you're a journalist.

Starting point is 01:14:46 I find it about your job. Yeah, I find it really fucking annoying. So it's interesting in that clause, right? So they're not just upset about illegal immigration, right? They're not just upset about, like, refugees and asylum. They're saying legal and illegal. So right from the jump, they're saying, this is just an ethnic thing.

Starting point is 01:15:01 We just want everyone to be white. There's not even pretending that's not about everyone being white. It gets worse. Oh, good. Good. But it started very bad. It started bad, yeah.

Starting point is 01:15:11 They're not even pretending. No, no, you're starting like already knee-deep in shit. And the more you wade through like the sewer. We started with the Nuremberg laws. Yes. It's kind of a heated first sentence. That was like genuinely one of my first thoughts. Like,

Starting point is 01:15:28 should shit go incredibly bad in Europe with shit like this, then this is something that will be brought up in whatever the new... In the tribunals. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, when they're writing the history book. I have that thought often. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:15:43 I have that thought in my fantasies often. Molly has a tribunals folder on her computer, which is... He's got a whole hard drive now. Look, when they come, when they're ready, I have files. Just come get me. You got their receipts. Okay. Point four.

Starting point is 01:15:58 Underlying the urgency of the matter by acknowledging the imminent reality that the native peoples of Europe risk becoming minority populations in their own homelands, if radical changes to the asylum and migration system are not made. I'm sorry, like this level of just open bitching, like, oh, I'm sorry, you believe in great replacement conspiracy theories. Like, that's embarrassing for you. That's embarrassing. Yeah, and this pathetic concern trolling, like, oh, we, the indigenous people are being colonized. by people seeking fucking asylum. Our beautiful brave Teutonic ancestors

Starting point is 01:16:33 are being like grow up. I would accept it if they would just refer it back to like the original Celts before like

Starting point is 01:16:41 the Christendom and the Romans came like yeah sure yeah yeah it's the people from Italy they're really mad about

Starting point is 01:16:49 we need to fucking like praise Tutatis and then Katuriks again from like the old Golic Golic days you know

Starting point is 01:16:56 I would respect that These probably are the same, like, German neo-Nazis who still celebrate, like, Arminius Day. These are the same people who would also have, like, done Africa starts at the Pyrenees stuff, not so long ago, and, like, absolutely excluded anyone from Iberia

Starting point is 01:17:13 from being, like, European or white. So, you know, maybe that's the diversity they're talking about, maybe. I do love that, that inter-white racism. Like, the really niche stuff, like, are Macedonians white? Yeah. Yeah, being someone, who was a historian of Iberia for much of my 20s.

Starting point is 01:17:32 It's wild. It's wild shit that you will see in like old-timey texts and from old-timey people at history conferences. Oh, I'm talking about stuff I've seen on those from front. Oh, yeah, that's also. Could be the same people. Probably. They'll probably be in contact through like a telegram group.

Starting point is 01:17:51 Yeah. Sorry, we keep interrupting the document. Yeah, we've ruined. That's fine. So point five, determining that migration does not solve the aging population crisis, but instead places further strain on European welfare systems and worsens the fundamental problem of low birth rates among the native population. I was hoping we would get to birth rates.

Starting point is 01:18:14 I'm surprised it took all the way to number five. I mean, are you even a proper racist if you're not concerned about the fecundity of ethnic women? Probably. It's, um, they're very worried about being outbred. Yes, but for some reason, the women promoting this are not having like 20 children within like their first five years. So funny how they make exceptions for themselves all the time. One thing of note that I found is at point to about like the cultural, religious and linguistic

Starting point is 01:18:46 diversity, which as I said before, fascists using diversity not entirely in bad faith, but also using it and bind faith. Right, you know, all the different romance languages, but God forbid we have too much diversity. Yeah, exactly. But that argument is so fucking stupid on its face. Because, like, first of all, is your faith in your own culture and language so incredibly weak

Starting point is 01:19:13 that like the presence of any other is a threat? I mean, they do keep a pretty strict hold on French. They're very worried about it. Yeah, yeah. the state is leaning on the scale in France. But like the idea that the wonderful diversity of romance languages is great and should be celebrated and protected. But like, where the fuck do you think like all the words

Starting point is 01:19:33 that begin with A.L. in Spanish come from? It's not France. No. Like, or any words with S.K. in English, this originally some Scandinavian origins there. Like, this isn't the first time anyone came to Europe. This isn't new. Yeah. Yeah. People have been doing this for a minute.

Starting point is 01:19:51 It's like, if you were really, really good at, like, probably not if you're really good at throwing, but you can definitely swim to North Africa from the European Union pretty easily. Well, not easily. Be a pretty rough trip. Between Spain and Morocco, I think it's the most doable. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:20:09 So it's, I'm sure a human could do it. People swim to France. No one knows why. So avoid Spain? I think they're going from the United Kingdom. So it would be, like, if people do this as like a physical insurance challenge. Okay. I thought they stopped letting people do it.

Starting point is 01:20:24 Quite possibly. I've not been funny. I just remember when I was a kid, it would be a thing that people would do. They would like grease themselves and then swim the channel. Yeah. Okay, well, I do respect the English fleeing away from England to France where there's at least a proper cuisine present. Damn.

Starting point is 01:20:43 I'm sorry, Jafz. I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, again. So have they gotten this ballot initiative or whatever you guys call it in Europe? Have they gotten this to be considered? Like, did they get enough support to force someone to consider this seriously? Yes and no. But we'll get there.

Starting point is 01:20:59 But I love thinking ahead with me. I just don't know how the government works over there. I'm to be so honest. We don't either. I barely know how our government works. Oh, barely, I think is the correct answer to that. Yeah. Yeah, it doesn't.

Starting point is 01:21:15 But I also still wanted to point out, like, with back to the initiative, like, what about migrants who speak air quotes are languages or practice our quotes are religions. Large parts of Africa speak English or French or even Portuguese in some areas. Well, a lot of those people of African descent in those countries are from countries that were colonized by the people who don't want them there. Yeah. Why do you think there are so many African people in France? And when they all speak French, don't they?

Starting point is 01:21:47 How do they get there? Consider your actions. But that's exactly the point. Like if they're in Africa and they already speak the language, do they make the cut? Well, no, it sounds like under this initiative, no. So much of what they're putting forward is bad faith, right? They're like, oh, you know, it's about our cultural heritage or our linguistic heritage. It's like, okay, well, what about people who grew up in a French colony in Africa?

Starting point is 01:22:10 Are they not French? No, they're not white. No, but that is exactly where they're not white. That's exactly where just leading. And that's why, okay, they speak your language. They can have your religion. Is this enough? Which is why this just sounds like the Nuremberg loss to me.

Starting point is 01:22:23 Like, honestly, we shouldn't even engage with these arguments because it just reduces any form of nuance or complexity. No. To the barest fucking minimum. They just, they wrote racism by committee. They made a very fancy document to say, we're very racist. Oh. Like, I checked the comments on the Save Europe website when I was working on this and would

Starting point is 01:22:45 not recommend. Oh, I bet. Yeah. Not great. but it's essentially just this bit. And we're going through at like point three again, their demands. It's just grafting the great replacement theory,

Starting point is 01:22:59 trying to get it like considered under European law. And if you consider how large Europe is and how few people they would need to get this to be considered is absolutely baffling. But we'll get there because I'm trying to keep us some sort of structure here. Sorry. That's on me. I love how engaged you are, Molly, so don't apologize.

Starting point is 01:23:24 Continue. And also the whole notion demographic replacement in countries that barely exist for 200 years. Can you call this like your ancestral homeland? There was no Italy 200 years ago. There was no Germany 200 years ago. Like what grand historical narrative are you pretending exists here? Yeah. Like if you're following that lead, then you must join my side with like, we need to be

Starting point is 01:23:48 Gaelic again and just return to like our Celtic forefathers before the Romans dared to show up. And then then at least there would be some historical accuracy to what they're claiming. But I dislike these people. I think they're full of shit. They very much are. Yeah. So part three of the charter is about the demands that these people have of Europe and items they wish to see turned into law and policy.

Starting point is 01:24:12 We therefore demand that the European Commission exercise its right of initiative under the to propose and advance the following legislative and policy measures without delay. Article 1. Declare a formal moratorium on the new non-Western slash non-European immigration channels, including the suspension of asylum processes for economic migrants and applicants from safe countries of origin, the halting of new study and family reunification visas for non-Europeans, and the strict limitation of legal migration channels, until social cohesion and cultural continuity in the member states are restored.

Starting point is 01:24:52 That's fucking mental. We've done this before. We've done racist immigration quotas before. Yeah, and just like good luck at your universities, taking those students from outside Europe. Like, let's see how that goes for you. Like, why do you think they're printing money? Oh, that's a problem in Europe too. I know, so in American universities, like, they're highly reliant on the tuition dollars of international students.

Starting point is 01:25:13 Is that the case in Europe as well? not to the American extent, but... Yeah, not to the same extent, but work at universities in Europe long enough and you'll be like, I see as I have some of these folks. Like, European universities have largely also received budget cuts, so I wouldn't be surprised if this is also happening in Europe, but then to a lesser extent.

Starting point is 01:25:34 Yeah, I think the move towards the American model of education. Yeah. Sadly, sadly upon all of us. Yeah, we're just four or five years behind on America. in cultural waves. Well, I don't know. You're leading the charge here with this. Yeah, like even that haunted mannequin you have in the White House,

Starting point is 01:25:53 the bald one, the bald one. I forgot his name. Stephen Miller? Yes, that one. Yeah, yeah. Bald haunted doll. That's got to be him. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:26:02 You narrowed it right down. Yeah. But as far as I know, like even Stephen Miller hasn't put anything this explicitly great replacement into law. but I'm no expert on America. Yeah, Miller will certainly say stuff that's very great replacement to you, right, like on his ex-account. But, yeah, attempting to get this. But in terms of like legislative proposed, I mean, this is giving like 1920s immigration law, right?

Starting point is 01:26:28 Yeah. The sort of quotas that we set to keep essentially Jews out of the United States in the 20s and 30s. Yeah, or the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was like how our immigration policy began in the United States. Not great. So yeah, we have done this before. And it was one of the during the, like, the nader of American race relations. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Germany wants to chime in as well as of recent.

Starting point is 01:26:52 So going on a great path, guys. Yeah, things are going pretty good there, right? Yeah. Politically right now. Yes, no notes. Absolutely great. So we have four more articles. Sorry.

Starting point is 01:27:04 Article two. I'm sorry. Establish a fundamental reform of the existing EU migration and a asylum systems during the time of this moratorium, including a total reform of the current migration framework, focusing on external border protection, physical and technological barriers at the frontiers, rapid screening, and immediate return mechanisms. Are they going to build a wall around Europe? Europe already kills more people with its border than we do.

Starting point is 01:27:33 Like, Europe's physical border protection is the most murderous on the planet. Oh, yeah. They're not even very knowledgeable about the shit that they're racist about. It's probably worse than you think because what they mean with like the external border protection is also us. I think, James, we talked a little bit about this about when Trump wanted to send migrants to Libya. But there are just sort of European control zones within Africa.

Starting point is 01:28:00 Like a few weeks ago, there was the migrants storming the gates in Spain. And it was in Suta. Siltre. Thank you. But that's it That's the Spanish territory of Morocco What these people want It's more Alan Kurdis

Starting point is 01:28:16 Right Like more little dead children Yeah That we just passed the 11th anniversary Of his death Right It was in September 2015 But like

Starting point is 01:28:26 Either we've got far away from that That you can con people Into thinking Talking about hard borders again And not understanding That hard borders Means dead children Or people remember that

Starting point is 01:28:37 And they think That was a good thing that they'll stop people coming if we just kill a few more little innocent kids like this. That's what Europe's physical borders do, is that they drown children. Oh yeah, Fortress Europe, the mortar is exclusively dead children. Because also, I think it was in Hungary

Starting point is 01:28:56 from the top of my hat, where they had just like these chain-linked fences with razor wire. And there was also the lighthouse reports where they had people in literal dog canals or some shit. Yeah. Okay. Let's rush a bit through this bit so we can go to the funny bits. Yeah. So I just like, I just looked this up. I spoiled it for myself and now I know who wrote this. Okay. Come on. I don't right. Guys, you've got a live react for me, listeners.

Starting point is 01:29:26 Oh, I think there's stuff in here that Molly does not yet know, so. Oh, no, I just got one little peek and I was like, I can't spoil it for myself anymore. Okay. Great. Then Article 3 of the Act, ensure the system. and accelerated return, remigration, in quotes, of illegally staying migrants, reject asylum seekers, and persons who have committed criminal offenses are posed a threat to public order, with full mutual recognition of return decisions across the union, and enhanced cooperation with third countries for readmission. Wow, really at the Trump playbook on the last one. I made some comments for myself here, and it's mostly like, how do you define this? How do you quote this?

Starting point is 01:30:07 How do you force third countries to cooperate? It's like you can't. Yeah. Well, this is a Trump fantasy, right? Like, we'll use our economic power to lean on you to do our crimes against humanity for us. It's the sort of might-makes-right approach to international relations. Our leaning on other countries hasn't gone so well, right? Like, it ain't going to go better for the EU.

Starting point is 01:30:33 No, because most of the countries that we send them to don't want to engage in this. process or don't want them back. So how are you going to force it unless we want to build some island in the middle of the Mediterranean to put all the stateless people? Don't give many ideas. Yeah, making a bunch of people stateless is not a really bad sign. No, that's a sign of a healthy system. Mm-hmm.

Starting point is 01:30:56 Let's not this is a proceed tragedy. Yeah. Never. Never in the history. Establish a harmonized EU-wide framework for broader remigration, including voluntary and incentivized remigration measures for non-European migrants who are unintegrated or constitute a serious cultural or financial burden to member states. Unintegrated. Yeah, cultural burden. They just don't look like I think they should look. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:31:25 To support the restoration of demographic balance. This is obviously someone who's just really worried about Western culture. Definitely not someone who's been a well-known neo-Nazi for more than a decade. Ah, now I know which name you read. That person is an identitarian, Molly. Learned a difference. Yeah, he's involvement with the Aryan Ugand in Austria. There's nothing to do with this. Molly, are you really saying that Nazis come from Austria?

Starting point is 01:31:53 Please, read a history book. Name me one example. Exactly. Nothing bad politically ever came out of Austria. Maybe we should replace them all. Maybe they're onto something here. Maybe the replacement is going to be great. if we replace them with literally anything.

Starting point is 01:32:12 And the last one, because Jesus fucking Christ. Remove social welfare incentives and benefits that function as pool factors for migration, including restrictions in accordance with union law on access by non-citizens and recent migrants to selected welfare benefits and support systems. So as to reduce incentives for further migration, lessen the burden on Europe, and taxpayers and encourage remigration. Oh, yeah. People are just coming there for the welfare because it's like really good. They're risking, drowning in the sea because they really want to participate in the social welfare system.

Starting point is 01:32:49 It's not because they're fleeing other forms of violence. No, no. They're paying money to the smugglers so they can get to our welfare. Yeah, so they can be on the doll because it's such a fucking great life. And I'm sure there's no ulterior motive here where these people actually want to cut welfare for everyone because they also probably just hate poor people. Oh, definitely, definitely. There is some very rich people involved in this as well. You don't say.

Starting point is 01:33:14 Yeah. I do say. Shocking. It's an American plot twist. So I think this is a good point to do a very good impromptu ad break because this took a bit longer than expected. That's my fault. Yeah, this is what you get with me and Molly.

Starting point is 01:33:30 This is fucking chaos. This is honestly why I do it. But I think we all need a pallet class. or so. Yeah, enjoy these ads. Yeah. Probably not as horrible as the Safe Europe Act. Oh, you don't know, some rich people.

Starting point is 01:33:43 People don't get rich without selling shit from advertisement. Yeah, that's true. You don't know where that money's going. Yeah. Let it be dick pills. Fingers crossed. And we're back. Clensed from horrible shit.

Starting point is 01:34:07 That will continue onward with. So, near the end of May this year, the two co-founders of the Safe Europe Act submitted to the European Citizens Initiative. Those names are Martin Selner. Yeah. Molly's BFF, judging by her reaction. And my favorite country person, Eva Flardingerbrook.

Starting point is 01:34:29 Okay, I haven't heard of her. I'm looking forward to learning about, say that Dutch name again. Yeah, can we take a second pass at that surname? Take a charge of that. Flardingerbrook. I'm not saying that. This is the language here said we have to fight to preserve. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:34:45 Dutch is such a beautiful, beautiful. It doesn't sound like a German with a terrible head injury had 17 beers. Sorry. How did you know the origins of my beautiful language? It's like that origin, but it's German. It's still better than English because that's just like English, French and Scandinavian and gay like all thrown into a blunder. Yeah. No, it's our indigenous language.

Starting point is 01:35:14 that we're Native Americans. It's our indigenous British people, a country that famously was never colonized and received migration from anywhere until about 1998. That was the first time the culture was adulterated. Because of woke. Famously true. Because of woke.

Starting point is 01:35:31 It does get me to another point because, like, James, when I texted you about this, you already said, like, people will not be able to pronounce her name. And I jokingly said to you, like, we could just call her Ava Brown I have a brown shirt No, Ava Brown like

Starting point is 01:35:47 the Yeah, yeah, I know Hitler's girlfriend, I know But I will not do that So if Vlardinger broke Put some more throat Into it

Starting point is 01:35:59 I will not do that Because Well, in part because Liable laws exist But much more importantly I think it's an unfair Comparison The original Ava Brown

Starting point is 01:36:11 Was just Hitler's wife And she had very little to do with politics or policy or governance or anything else. She was asked or instructed to leave anytime business or politics came up. And Flaringerbrook is much more involved in the political discourse and as the Save Europe Act shows in theorizing and crafting policy. So a much more apt but far less funny comparison would be to call her Eva Goebbels or Eva Hydrich.

Starting point is 01:36:38 But that's just less funny. So I will just call her Eva. We'll get to her. Yeah. So I never heard of Eva. Martin Selner, just for the, well, I was so excited that this is fucking Martin Selner. He was involved with the American alt-right 10 years ago. There was an attempt to sort of create bridges between the American sort of burgeoning, sort of mainstreaming of neo-Nazis into the sort of political right.

Starting point is 01:37:01 There was attempts to merge with the identitarian movements of France and I guess in Austria, where Martin Selner is from. Identity Europa was modeled after Generation Identity. in France, which Martin Selner also modeled his group off of in Austria. And so there were some connections there. Like in 2017, when, oh, that horrible bitch from Canada, Lauren Southern, when Southern got detained because she and Martin Selner were on a boat that was like trying to drown migrants in the sea. Oh, God, I'd forgotten about that.

Starting point is 01:37:32 So, yeah, no, we know this man. He's trying to drown migrants in the sea. Okay. Yeah, well, that answers my question about what they meant by the borders. But on the bright side, Molly. I do think Martin Selner looks like a looks maxing Richard Spencer. Well, I don't know if you've seen Richard Spencer lately. It's not hard to look better than that.

Starting point is 01:37:51 We're looking like shit, brother. I missed my weekly Zoom call with him, so I'm not sure what's going on. Yeah, divorce did not treat him well. Okay, good. He deserves it. Okay. The European Citizens Initiative. At the time of writing, it obtained about 740,000 signature.

Starting point is 01:38:09 Oh, that's more than I would have preferred. Well, there's sort of good news on that front later. The system itself is less known among both Europeans and Americans, and the rejection of the Safe Europe Act is incredibly simple and dumb once you realize how it works. The ECI is pretty much a mechanism for some diluted form of direct democracy within the European Union. ECI proposals that are accepted call directly on the European Council to propose a legal act, usually a directive for legislation on certain conditions. One of them is that the petition reaches one million signatures.

Starting point is 01:38:46 Oh, so they didn't make it. So we don't have to take this seriously at all. We do, unfortunately. Oh, we do. When you got three quarters of a million people signing on to something as openly racist as this shit, I think you do have to. But like it's not going to get voted on. No, we'll get there.

Starting point is 01:39:02 Okay. Explain Europe to me. Oh, he bet. So point two. that those signatures are from at least seven different member states with minimum amounts for each of those seven or more states. That makes sense. You can't just get like a million racist Croatians design it. No, exactly. No offense to Croatia. You just do have a lot of neo-Nazis.

Starting point is 01:39:23 Don't look into the history. On top, there's also a minimum amount of signatures that's needed per member state to ensure there's like broad support for an idea across the EU. For example, you cannot have all the votes coming from Germany and only six votes from other member states. The minimums are based on the number of EU parliament members multiplied by 750. For example, like the Dutch must deliver 20,445 votes of this million, while Luxembourg only needs 4,230.

Starting point is 01:39:55 So just like some proportional representation there. Right. So all the European Union member states have to kind of be on board. Yeah, or at least enough of them. Yeah. Right. Like you can't get something through just because two or three states are being nasty. That makes sense. Yes. And specifically because it is directed, it doesn't have to go through like your national parliament and to be then like thrown upwards towards the EU. This is directly between the citizens and the European Commission.

Starting point is 01:40:27 I guess I don't really know what the EU can and cannot do. How much power would something pass by at the EU level have to change the immigration laws of a country? I'm not smart enough to answer that. In the universe where the EU does say, we're signing on to this, this is real, we're doing it, does that supersede the immigration laws at the national level of the member states? Can this even be something, I guess is my question. I don't know with how the EU works, to be so honest. In any worst case scenario, how you see this happening would be that it would get passed. I suppose that then some form of like that legislation or directive will be conjured up from the bowels of caucuses of caucuses. or whatever. And then it would have to be voted on within the EU parliament.

Starting point is 01:41:12 And should that for some reason happen, then I think that would be a not insignificant amount of power that the EU holds over individual member states. Because we also do that for trade and for, you know, regulating things across European borders. Like even for us, how the EU functions exactly is shrouded in mystery. It's a great mystery. Yeah. They cooperate on migration, right?

Starting point is 01:41:37 Like, you see this with, like, the way the EU places its borders, the way that the EU kind of takes something of a united front on, like, how it deals with things. And you saw this, like, in the beginnings of the Syrian Civil War, right? You saw Europe cooperating first to, in some cases, receive Syrian migrants, and in many cases, to repel them violently. But, like, states also still would have... sovereignty, but like the exact nature of their laws.

Starting point is 01:42:07 It's not like the EU can dictate what it takes to be a British, a British bad example. Because they left. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, and so did I. But you can't say to France, like, you can't admit any more immigrants. Yeah, or like, we are obliging you to remove the citizenship or to, like, defranchify these people. To outlaw the speaking of other languages.

Starting point is 01:42:29 As far as I'm aware. Yeah, like, there could be, like, giving passes through the EU parliament. Then I guess there would be like a set of principles. that the states would have to try and adhere to with their own policies. Which they're not having trouble doing. They found a lot of racist in Germany recently, apparently. Oh, but we have them in Netherlands as well.

Starting point is 01:42:45 Don't worry. Yeah, Britain's not immune from that either. We'll shock people to hear. But to get back to Molly, I do think that to a certain extent the EU could put diplomatic or economic pressure on member states to enforce something like this or to nudge them.

Starting point is 01:43:01 Or like obliquely, like you would have to comply with certain, I don't know, like language restrictions on things that are involved in trade and that would sort of obliquely enforce restrictions at the national level. Yes, but also I think this would heavily strain relations between the EU and the member states because it is, like I don't want to call it authoritarian, but it is a power, like a supernatural power that's sort of going to tell countries what to do. And I can't imagine if it is something as vile as this, that that would go over well. It's just, it's so funny to me that the nationalists we have today, there's no nationalism there.

Starting point is 01:43:39 Like a true nationalist would find this abhorrent. I agree with you completely. Our nationalists can't even do it right. But it's only nationalism if you hate certain people. Otherwise, it's just being a rhino. I think you call them in the United States. And I know. So to get back to the ECI.

Starting point is 01:43:58 In the original treaty that formalized this mechanism, it states several conditions that the proposed act must adhere to report passes. An initiative must be within the legal constraints of the EU, obviously, and the initiative must not be, and I quote, manifestly abusive, frivolous or vexatious. Okay, is this not manifestly abusive, frivolous and vexatious? Yeah. I read those sentences as legal code for no bullshit, please.

Starting point is 01:44:26 Yeah, but that's what this is bullshit. Yeah. Yeah. This is manifestly abusive. Yeah, it's the abusive one. I think they don't want you doing one that's like so-and-so is ugly and has a big nose or whatever they want it. But this is vexatious and frivolous.

Starting point is 01:44:45 Yeah, like it's fucking vexing me, I can tell you. I'm vexed. Yeah. Well, then it's good that we're slowly getting to define your parts of this. One of the more important things that were in this statement from the European Commission, because usually they all have to rule after the one million votes has been met. They already ruled on this, but not on its merits, but on the legality of it.

Starting point is 01:45:10 And I'll be quoting directly from the document here. Article 6.3 of the ECI states that the initiative is not manifestly contrary to the values of the union as set out in Article 2. And the rights and stride in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. essentially, like, whatever people want to pass and sign on to, it can't violate European law. I think this is important because proponents of the Safe Europe Act will say that this petition was denied due to its politics and thus it's an anti-democratic ruling. Oh, I'm being canceled. I'm being canceled. No, you just didn't read the rules. Yeah, exactly. There is like a Twitter clip somewhere of Eva and Martin discussing this. It's like, oh, this is just anti-democratic. and no, no, it isn't, Eva.

Starting point is 01:45:58 You're a legal philosopher. You're smart enough to understand this. Yeah, you've never read the Talkville. Yeah, I'll say that. Like, she at least has credentials, you know? Right, because this is disingenuous. They know, but they also know that it is very effective to say, we're being silenced because of how right we are.

Starting point is 01:46:17 But these mobs of people, the ones we think need to be brought under control, they're stopping us from doing this good thing. Like, that's a very effective. form of this particular kind of rhetoric. Doing it wrong and pretending you're being silenced is more effective than actually doing it right. Yeah. And easier. That is the very scary part of like the savior act

Starting point is 01:46:39 because in the end, this is much more about influencing the discourse and pushing the overton window than it is about anything else. Right. If you can get the EU to even look at your petition, you have legitimized that this is something that belongs in the political sphere. Right. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:46:57 You've moved it from stormfront to in the middle of the Overton window. Like you're not just like a little fucking piss boy on a ship screaming and crying because you want migrants to drown in the sea. You're being considered by the European Union. Yes. And now they've just tested its legal viability with European law. And we're like, nope, get out. Which like the fascist immediately claim as some sort of anti-democratic political violence against

Starting point is 01:47:23 them. Yeah. We're being silenced. We're being silenced. Probably by the Jews. I mean, knowing Martin, I don't know if he says it out loud anymore. Used to. Like, even in the statement, like,

Starting point is 01:47:34 the commission does not analyze the policy merits at the stage of the eligibility check. So in layman's terms, the proposed act is incompatible with existing legal mumbo-jumbo. Yeah. I can file any lawsuit I want in court. I can file a lawsuit saying that you put a spell on my dog that made him racist.

Starting point is 01:47:54 but I could file that in court and the judge is not going to rule on the facts of the case. He's just going to throw it out because that's not a real, you know what I mean? Like the ruling at that early stage is just that, well, this isn't real. This doesn't, there's no standing. There's no jurisdiction. This is not an actionable matter. So they're not saying whether this is good or bad. They're just saying this can't be here because they didn't meet the legal requirements.

Starting point is 01:48:16 You're so succinctly. I appreciate that. I read a lot of lawsuits that are a lot like this petition. Yeah. Well, given that the Alex Jones lawsuit existed. No, but when you throw something out of this early stage and you have people say like, oh, I'm being denied access to the system. No, it's that the system looked at what you produced and said, this is fake. You have to wear a yellow sweater in order to access this bit.

Starting point is 01:48:41 You're not wearing a yellow sweater, therefore you cannot come in. You're not being silenced. You're just not participating in the process properly. For shits and giggles, if I read between the lines, I think the commission itself was also a bit short. at it because in the same press release about this, they state, the initiative must contain a genuine proposal and not be used as a vehicle for offensive or caricatural messages, which I think is pretty sassy. And so far as like legal sassy this goes, that they're essentially saying, like, the fuck you're

Starting point is 01:49:12 doing is how I interpret it. There is, however, another threshold that they fail to meet, which is that anyone can sign an online petition. Uh-oh, these weren't valid signature. Yes, there is no stopping you, the listener, from going to a website right now, sign in and sign the Safe Europe Act. But I'm not a citizen of the European Union. But you can still sign it in a show of support. But that wouldn't count towards the one million signatures that they need.

Starting point is 01:49:41 We're coming close because different states could require different identification. It can be 10 people in a basement, continuously making new email addresses and resigning the petition. That doesn't work. So how do they go about validating those? That sounds complex. Not through how they're doing it right now. Because all you need is a name that can be checked with an email address that can be checked. Oh, so they're not validating them.

Starting point is 01:50:09 No, not in a way that would meet the criteria as set by the European Union. So they knew they weren't doing this properly because that was never the point. It was never the point. Because if you were running an actual sort of political campaign to get this thing advanced in a very serious way, you would have been collecting valid signatures that you would be able to validate if a legal challenge was brought. And they didn't do that. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:50:32 Yes, and you'd also put in safeguards to prevent people from outside the EU for voting on this or signing it. So this was never sincere. Absolutely not. That's shocking. I am shocked and appalled. A Nazi?

Starting point is 01:50:45 Playing in my face? Well, it gets better, Molly, because now there's a bunch of names that I'm sure you'll recognize. Oh, yes. But there's also been American far-right agitators who have promoted this on Twitter. How many people signed it with the name Rudolph Hess? At least 10, right?

Starting point is 01:51:02 Do you have a list of the signatures? I would love to look at them. I'll send you the website in a bit, but I'm not sure. But one of the very cool Americans who promoted this was Benny Johnson. No shit. Oh, wow. Yeah. He had one of the co-founders on his bigot cast and even tweeted a link to the petition.

Starting point is 01:51:20 I don't know, Benny Johnson, but I'm going to guess. that his audience is largely American. So yeah, not really sure how much good signature-wise that has done. But we can't rule out that there's a bunch of Americans who have signed it. And therefore, we don't know how many of those 750,000 are legitimate. I would guess not a lot. Like, genuinely, I don't know. I also don't think there's any way to like to find out.

Starting point is 01:51:51 exactly because if they did not collect them in a way that could be validated they're not going to be this was a waste of time because it was never the point well that we it wasn't a waste of time it's just it's not doing what it says on the tin collecting valid signatures was never actually the goal or they would have collected them in a way that would have been functional yes yeah well i can sign it right now it's right at the top of the page sign now please do not to do that i'm not going to do that thank you Besides Benny, there were also others who did that, including, like, friend of the pod, Jack Posobic. Oh, cool. And Joey Manarino, who tweeted, everyone, no matter where they are from, should go and sign this act.

Starting point is 01:52:37 The momentum for re-migration is so real, and it can absolutely be pulled off if there is unity. Sign the act to save Europe, end quote. I wonder if Greg Bovino signed it. He's been ever there doing some remigration chats. I'm sure he would enthusiastically sign it but I didn't see him there's also like Lucy White a restore Britain candidate who also signed it

Starting point is 01:52:59 but she knows she doesn't live in the EU you won't assume one can assume and also not to forget the worst thing that came out of apartheid South Africa Elon Musk who also shared a safe Europe video bold statement yes oh wow Victor Orban signed it that's shocking

Starting point is 01:53:17 yeah no surprises there really surprise there Yeah, yeah. Wow. Like, if Midlife Price's Edison tweets about this, then we can safely assume that it has reached at least millions of people worldwide. But that still doesn't matter in terms of like the act being passed. Because again, no way to validate this.

Starting point is 01:53:36 I just don't think there are a lot of Europeans are watching. Not a lot of Europeans are watching Benny Johnson. Yeah. I mean, not a lot of Americans are watching it. No, but not a lot of people are watching it. And nobody should watch him. But this is what upsets me because this is so incredible. Domed from the start, if you look at it.

Starting point is 01:53:54 Like, this is seeing Bruce Wayne's parents walk at the beginning of a Batman movie or like Spider-Man's Uncle Ben or Kenny from fucking South Park. Like, you know, you know it's going to fail. You know they're going to die. And for some reason, these people have, like, taped them over the corpses over mannequins and just parade them around as if there's still a possibility. It's, ah. But they are sort of continuing to advance the agenda that this is something that is up for legitimate debate. Right. That preserving Western culture is a real political topic for debate, right?

Starting point is 01:54:33 That like we need to have debates on the floor of the parliament about whether or not we should all be speaking one language. From the top of my head, I didn't check this. I think Europe has like 280 million people, probably more. And you're so nationalistic yet you want to. use this shortcut of one million people to bypass like... Your own national sovereignty. That's what I'm saying.

Starting point is 01:54:55 Like this is... What kind of nationalism involves subverting national sovereignty? You fucking cucks. This is what gets me because it is working in terms of like public discourse and normalizing remigration.

Starting point is 01:55:08 Yeah, definitely is. And that's Elon Musk's primary goal right now is just normalizing this level of Hitlerian discourse. Yeah, which he has successfully done, right? Yeah, he's doing it every day. Yeah. He's doing like race and IQ posting constantly.

Starting point is 01:55:23 Yeah, nothing screams high IQ as much as talking nonstop about IQ. Like everyone who has to tell you that they're so fucking smart is probably not. Yeah. Well, that's why none of his rockets blow up because he's so smart. Don't look it up. I'm sure he spent a great deal of time designing those rockets personally as well. I'm not posting 18 hours a day. well, I'll respect Jeff Bezos's rocket just because they look more original.

Starting point is 01:55:51 I'll never respect Jeff Bezos and no one can make me. Bare point. When I picture Jeff Bezos, the only thing I picture is him on vacation with that like deep fee, like unbuttoned dress shirt with the roast iguana. That's the only thing I think of when I think of Jess Bezos. It's him holding a roasted iguana. Molly, I'm trying to focus on a podcast here. Stop, stop selling me this graphic, erotic picture of Jeff Bezos.

Starting point is 01:56:16 Bezos. That's not why we're here. We can do that on the other podcast. I think I'm combining two pictures in my mind. The iguana picture, he doesn't have the unbuttoned vacation shirt. Wow. I guess I'm just inventing an image in my mind. Yeah, Molly's head cannon. But the iguana pick is scary. But the good thing is you can now invent it on Grock. Cursed fan art. No, it'll just make child porn of Jeff Bezos. Yeah, it is a life girl comments or texts. I forgot about all. I forgot about I love you a lot. I love you. Live girl. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:56:50 Soul is ghouls, a bunch of them. So the signatures were fake. Yeah, pretty much. Could be 10 people in a basement with like a supercomputer, just generating clicks. We don't know, but I don't think it'll even reach the million, but even if it did, then the signatures would come in question. And yeah, just absolutely doomed.

Starting point is 01:57:13 Well, actually, I hope they have to raise a bunch of money from a bunch of fucking rubes to hire someone to validate the signatures, which they won't be able to do. I would love that. There will be a lawyer out there who will. I mean, if I had a law degree, I would take it on just to get that money. Yeah. Oh, yeah, someone's going to take this on. So yeah, by all means, start a fundraising campaign. Get money out of the pockets of the dumbest racists in the world. Go for it. I should have gotten for that law degree. But anyway, I think we already discussed solar schools and we're going to be discussing more. more of them. But first, I think the soulless ghouls that support this podcast. Can I say that?

Starting point is 01:57:53 No, I think so. You don't work here. Perfect. And we're back and we're exchanging the soulless ghouls for humanoid husks filled with unending appetite for atrocities. I think we said all the nice things about the act itself, even though I wish I could have said less about it. Unfortunately, this is just the Rivendale's top of our quest to destroy the ring. And we have yet to meet the spawns that have emerged from Minos, Morgul and Gorgorov. Deep cut. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:58:33 The three people that understand those references, this one's for you. So, first, we have the person you were giggling about, Bali. Co-founder and hipster Nazi impersonator Martin Selner. I haven't thought about Martin Selner in years. I'm so surprised to see him here. Who could have imagined that the country who produced the most iconic Nazi would once again produce a Nazi. The original. The original.

Starting point is 01:59:00 At least this is from the original sourcing material, you know? Right. So by under EU laws, he can really be a Nazi, right? Because it's like champagne. Sure. Yeah, I have to come. He comes from the original source. Exactly. If it's a Nazi stemming from anywhere not Austria, then we have to

Starting point is 01:59:16 call them identitarians. Yep. Sparkling identitarianism. Yeah, that's the brand distinction. So Selders seems to be pretty far right all of his life. becoming involved in nationalist politics when he was a teenager and being part of the Austrian neo-Nazi scene.

Starting point is 01:59:32 So before we get into the good stuff, I want to read a small paragraph from an article inside campus. It was published in 2017 before all the significant shit was released. But I had to read this paragraph so you'll have to listen to it. Martin Selner,

Starting point is 01:59:49 who has a bachelor's degree in philosophy and dropped out of law school, is something like the Justin Bieber and Raynor Langhands of the new right-wing radicalism in one person, a handsome young man with neatly trimmed hair and a dreamy look, and a creative inventor of media effective, perhaps even somewhat dangerous protests. You know, maybe it's, I don't know if it's discouraging or comforting

Starting point is 02:00:13 to know that your press do that too. The European press does that same thing. He's really racist, but in like kind of a sexy way. Like, why do they do that? What if Hitler was hot? He washed his hair and I thought he would be dirty. Like he does look like a hipster. I mean, I'll give them that one.

Starting point is 02:00:32 I mean, it's like that New York Times article. You probably remember this, James. It was in 2017 about Tony Hobator, one of the second in commands at the traditional worker party. And it was like, just going on and on about like, how interesting. And just with this interesting working class, man, kind of handsome. Like, he's a Nazi. That's a Nazi.

Starting point is 02:00:50 Yeah, this mysterious exotic Nazis. or like the amount of like Richard Spencer things but they were like but he wears a waistcoat did you know he does his own bow tie that's a nice seat yeah that is a type of article that it's just like the fentanyl thing

Starting point is 02:01:06 you just can't stop people doing it well I would be impressed with any like two year old being able to do his own bow tie and you know actually I don't think Richard Spencer can tie a bow tie not anymore anyway back to Martin Selner at the age of 17 he and another person placed sticker

Starting point is 02:01:23 on a synagogue in Baden by Wien, stickers with the text legalize it with the letters AJ near it. AJ's in this case stands for Arishe Jungend, Aryan Youth. And other stickers portrayed as swastika. Wow. That's illegal there.

Starting point is 02:01:41 Yes. Very state to state. So like in Virginia it actually would be illegal to place a swastika on a synagogue. It's a classic felony. But I think in Austria and Germany, it's like really illegal. In Germany, any for,

Starting point is 02:01:53 of Nazi glorification. You're not supposed to be doing that. They're kind of sensitive about it. You could probably find it on YouTube, but there's clips of people just, even for fun, doing like a Roman salute in German public and be arrested for it.

Starting point is 02:02:06 So, yeah, unfortunately, he was a minor because under European law, like, with 17 years still a minor. So I think that's why he got off pretty scot-free. He had to do like, I think, a hundred hours of community service. And he learned his lesson.

Starting point is 02:02:20 Yes. Right? Well, he didn't do anything wrong. because this was a response to the conviction of David Irving a British Holocaust denier. Oh, God.

Starting point is 02:02:32 There it is. There it is. For anyone, not watching Molly's almost in tears. There it is. We're hitting the highlights here, aren't we? So he doesn't think the Holocaust happened. Because that's what David Irving was in trouble for.

Starting point is 02:02:48 Yeah, I think, I think Martin has, genuine questions about what happened during the Holocaust in the same way that Alex Jones had questions about Sandy Hook. He's just asking questions. Yes. Unfortunately, he can't read

Starting point is 02:03:03 because those questions have been answered. You only need to open your eyes to see the answers. He lived in Austria. You could go to one of the camps. Well, he actually did, Molly, because... Oh, no. At the tender age... I bet that went well.

Starting point is 02:03:18 And he behaved very normal there, right? Well, it wasn't a camp, but at the age of 19, he did help organize ways to hinder liberal demonstrations and pilgrimages to Wehrmacht soldiers, brave sites, and hold memorial services for them. Yes. He self-profess that he was a neo-Nazi until 2011, around, he should have been 22 around that time. As of 2017, he's also banned from carrying weapons after an incident where he pepper sprayed an alleged far-left activists during a fight in Vienna,

Starting point is 02:03:56 which is funny because generally carrying weapons is already illegal here. Yeah, so I was going to say. Yeah. So, like, he double gets the not-wear weapons, I suppose. He would get punished twice. Oh, that would be good.

Starting point is 02:04:11 Okay, Wally, brace yourself. In early 2018, Martin Selner received around $1,500, 500, $1,500, euros, roughly from Brenton Terrance. Brenton Terrant.

Starting point is 02:04:28 Received from? Yes, received from. What year? Early 2018. So before the Christchurch Mosque shooting. Yes. That's very good. Yes, yeah.

Starting point is 02:04:40 So his ideas about immigration and presumably Islam were pretty similar, I guess. And he was just showing his support for a guy whose idea were very similar to his own. And Martin is carrying out these same ideas by writing this stupid little petition. And what Britain Terrant did was he murdered more than 50 people in two mosques. Yeah, it's... Very good.

Starting point is 02:05:05 That's a cool friend to have. Yeah, it's always a good sign. It gets worse because... It gets worse. I looked it up, but apparently Terrant was like planning this attack for at least two years. Self-proclaimed, by the way. So take that however you will. But that means...

Starting point is 02:05:23 So in the planning phases of this mass murder, he thought part of my plan is going to be giving Martin Selner $1,500. Yes. He should be banned from New Zealand. We should exile him to the sun. Because New Zealand is pretty sincere about their, about like, sort of quarantining the existence of Brent and Terrant. Like, it's illegal to possess his manifesto there.

Starting point is 02:05:43 Like, they should ban Martin Selner from the country. Tarrant doesn't strike me as a very wealthy person. That's a significant amount of money for him. Yeah, highly committed to Selner. It was. And it was also like a significant amount of money for Selner because most donations were on the high end like 100 to 100 euros. That should have been a career render. Like anyone is free to send me money.

Starting point is 02:06:05 But if someone like this would send me money and I was very committed to not being called a Nazi, this would be a good time for some like some introspection. Yeah. If somebody who really thinks you're doing a great job and you have all. all the same ideas, but what he does with those ideas is one of the largest mass murders in recent years. Yeah, it's... I don't know.

Starting point is 02:06:28 I think you've got to think about that. I think you got to think about that. Yeah. Yeah. To give you pause for thought. Luckily, Molly, Selner did nothing else to further incriminate himself. And then he was normal after that, right? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:06:41 Because it's not just this donation that is a connection between the two of them. I'm quoting from a piece by the Austrian outlet ORF. Selner and Terrant had exchanged praise via email. If you ever come to Vienna, we have to go for a coffee or a beer, says Selner. The same goes for you if you ever come to Australia or New Zealand. We have people in both countries who would like to host you in their home, the Australian replied. We? According to ZIB2, the last email exchange to place in July 2018.

Starting point is 02:07:14 One day later, Terrant booked vehicles and accommodation in Austria. Yeah. Whether the two actually met each other was, according to that article being investigated at the time, I haven't been able to find confirmation because Terrant is silent on the issue. And that was a few months before the Christchard shooting? A year. You said it was late 2018? Yeah. Okay, yeah, like nine months. Yeah. But anyway, there is a non-zero chance that the two have actually shook hands and met. there's no way to confirm it unless one of them confirms it,

Starting point is 02:07:48 which I don't think will happen either way. But still anything, anything short of a vigorous public disavowal is very incriminating. I don't even think that would be enough. No, it wouldn't. It wouldn't be very convincing to me, but he hasn't even done it. No. So this is just further evidence that this petition of his is, is violence. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:08:08 It is, this is a, on these sort of spectrum of the same kind of, violence and it is in furtherance of advancing the normalization of that kind of violence. Yes. And also like different kinds of violence because even though they mentioned like giving people incentives to remigrate, not everyone is going to do that. There is no peaceful way to create an ethno state. If your goal is an ethno state, you understand from the outset that there will be mass bloodshed because there's no peaceful ethno state. It's never happened and it never will and they know that. And I think it was it,

Starting point is 02:08:43 Heimbach or Spencer, who admitted to that under oath. During the United Rights civil trial, they were talking. They're like, so when you say, you know, we're going to have a peaceful ethnos, I think it must have been Heimbach.

Starting point is 02:08:55 So I think it was from the TWP charter, you know, about creating an ethno state through peaceful means. And he's like, yeah, I know that's not real. Yeah, that's not a thing. I mean, like, at least, Selner is pretty open about this.

Starting point is 02:09:10 right. Like, Selna was one of the major hosts of the Remigration Conference that happened in May of this year. That was still this year, right? Yeah, the Portugal one. In Portugal. Yeah, like, where they explicitly, like, talked with Greg Bevino about, like, how they wanted to do this kind of shit in Europe. I wrote about this at a time, but, like, you can see, they made the regular media stand outside and then harassed them with a drone while they were in the car park.

Starting point is 02:09:38 But Bovino did do some interviews with some right-wing blogs. I think it seems like he did one interview and multiple people translated it because I don't think he was talking to Breton nationalists specifically. But you can see them openly discussing this. And this is May of 26, right? This is René Good and Alex Prattie have been killed a few months before. Like this is when ICE and CBP were doing their violence most openly. And you can see these people, including Selham the Blurte.

Starting point is 02:10:08 personally, like, literally clapping for this and saying, yeah, this is what we need. We need more shit like this. It's just disgusting. File doesn't begin to cut it. Right. Like we know what mass deportation looks like. There's no way to do it peacefully or bloodlessly. No.

Starting point is 02:10:24 Yeah. But that is like, there is an attempt to make some sort of veneer possible where that could be if you look at like how they phrased everything in the act. Oh, economic incentives, right? Like, fuck you. Yep. I looked at this like an anthropologist because that is one part of my background. And even if you're going to say, okay, everyone's going to accept those incentives,

Starting point is 02:10:47 then we're still talking about people having to move. Families broken apart, communities broken apart, people having to upend their entire lives, including the lives of their children. And why did they come here in the first place? What were they fleeing that they risked their lives to come here in the first place? they're just ignoring just an avalanche of different pieces of structural violence. But that's exactly where I'm getting at. Even if you could like delude yourself into thinking that these people will leave voluntarily,

Starting point is 02:11:19 then think of the violence. It is in and of itself of having to uproot so many lives and start all over again from square one at another place. Even if no one resisted and everyone accepted that with stoicism, it's still an inherently violent act. Yeah. It tears communities apart. It tears families apart. There's no way to do this,

Starting point is 02:11:44 which is not deliberately hurting people for the crime in their case of not being white. Right. And they're not just talking about immigrants. They're talking about everyone who isn't white because they said legal and illegal immigration. They're culturally threatening, culturally disruptive. They're just talking about people they don't think belong.

Starting point is 02:12:03 And some of those people they don't think belong. have been here for a very long time. Yeah, and they don't belong because of their skin color. So you can't, there's nowhere to send them, there's nowhere to send them back to, even if they would agree to your terms. Yeah, like, you can see it in the language of, like, when we were looking at that, the tour that they did around Europe, right? Like, the open use of the reconquista language,

Starting point is 02:12:28 that similar words in other Iberian languages, right? Like, like, the idea that, like, we will violently expel these. people, crusader style. Like the idea that like Spain without Islam is not something fundamentally different to what it is today, right? Like that that exchange has not happened for as long as there has been Spain and before. Right. There's no, there's no authentic Spain to return to.

Starting point is 02:12:53 The thing you're imagining was never real. Exactly. Yeah. It's laughable to suggest that like you're going to have some kind of like Spain was pure crescentermen and, you know, it's silly. It really bums me out to the fucking, I mean, I know that the Catalan right has become particularly relevant, and Catalan identityitarianism is a big fucking problem. But, like, it wasn't always that way.

Starting point is 02:13:15 And it's sad to see, like, I think those people have already existed, but they look like everywhere else are gaining more of a foothold now. Great stuff. Yeah. Let's go to some funny stuff. Yeah. Give us the good stuff. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:13:29 We need that. Yeah. To catch up real quick, like, I think it's safe to say that. that Tarrant wasn't radicalized further during his last known contact with Selner and the day he committed his atrocities. Yeah. Like if you're European and there's someone in your orbit who thinks positively if they save Europe act, highlight this part. Because two weeks after the shooting of the Christchurch, the Austrian police raided Martin Selner's house due to his connections with Tarrant. However, the police waited 12 minutes before Selner opened.

Starting point is 02:14:04 to the door. They were knocking at his door for 12 minutes. There is suspicion that he was warned beforehand about the appending rate as during those 12 minutes he was deleting emails, screenshots, and other proofs of his connection with Tarrant. And they don't have subpoena power to get those emails from somewhere else? Like deleting an email doesn't make it gone. It doesn't disappear, yeah. And honestly, at that point, deleting the email, you should have been charged with destruction of evidence. Yeah, if the cops are literally knocking on your door and you're deleting emails, those emails aren't disappearing. In America, they charge you with that.

Starting point is 02:14:38 But in America, they wouldn't wait 12 minutes. No, they wouldn't knock. Yeah, your door wouldn't be a door anymore. You would wake up at 3.45 AM and then they would already be having your computer in their hands. Are you sure? Because he is white. I don't know. Warrant like this, I think they would do a 4 a.m. no knock.

Starting point is 02:14:57 Ah. In cops, uh... They love the 4 a.m. Okay. Yeah. I guess they probably don't do that in Europe because not everyone has guns. That's why they do it in America because everyone has guns. Yeah. Well, they do it because they enjoy doing it.

Starting point is 02:15:11 But they say it's because we all have guns. The guns provide them with a justification, yeah. I'm sure it's part of the reason. But there was an investigation within the Austrian Justice Department to see if they could find out who it was that tipped him off because it can be a coincidence that the very same day he was deleting all that shit. And did they not subpoenaed the emails from the provider? Because you can get those.

Starting point is 02:15:35 They're not gone. I haven't read about that. It didn't come up in what I saw. I'm not sure. I run the same time, though. His travel permit to the US was cancelled. And therefore he could not meet with his fiancé, Brittany Petchybone. That's right.

Starting point is 02:15:51 They're married. They have a child. He's married to an American far-right conspiracy theorist. Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah, white nationalist and conspiracy theorist. Also does some trite-wife content. because of course.

Starting point is 02:16:05 Well, what else would she do now? Of course. All their avenues are closed. Yeah. And I forgot this bit. I think this might also help you understand, Molly. Later in 2019, then, Austrian police expanded the searches of a Selner's property. However, Selner did file several complaints and a judge ruled that multiple actions taken by Austrian authorities were deemed to be unlawful.

Starting point is 02:16:28 Oh, that's right. You guys have like civil rights and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and look what it got us. Maybe the safe Europe act isn't so bad after all. Maybe we need to get less civil rights.

Starting point is 02:16:41 I'm not signing on to that. I can't help but be cynical. Well, to sum up everything about Martin Selner, an uncool person would not have a beer with him. I know. And this is like if Richard Spencer was trying to get a constitutional amendment pass. It's like, you don't have to look further into it. You're like, oh, that's some like dumb Nazi stuff. this is like a washed-up Nazi from 10 years ago

Starting point is 02:17:03 trying to get back in the news by doing some more dumb Nazi stuff. Like, you don't need to take it seriously. I mean, I need to take it seriously on a broader scale. I mean, you don't need to engage seriously in the text of the petition because it is not sincere.

Starting point is 02:17:16 But like, as soon as I saw his name, I was like, oh, that's a washed-up Nazi from 10 years ago. He's not washed up anymore. He's been trying very hard with this remigration stuff to like to glom on to this sort of Trumpist

Starting point is 02:17:30 But this is a known quantity. This isn't a mystery. Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, we're not like, oh, this guy has some real concerns about his community and neighborhood. And this man is engaging with the political process in a sincere and earnest way. No, it's a Nazi. Yeah. Even though he says, like, he might have not been a neo-Nazi if the identitarian movement had existed when he was younger.

Starting point is 02:17:52 I don't believe that. The identitarians are white supremacist movement. I love that. If we'd had another thing to call my Nazism, I wouldn't. have done the naughty shit because that's explicitly illegal. Yeah. Yeah, that swastika stuff I used to be into. I still believe all the same stuff, but I wouldn't have used the embarrassing branding

Starting point is 02:18:10 if I'd been smarter. Yeah. Fuck off. Yep. And after this, we're going to speak of the fascist counterpart, the fascist barbidol. Eva Lardingopc. Oh, great. Or Eva Hydrie, if that's easier on the tongue.

Starting point is 02:18:26 The video presents the soundtrack to your October. spooky podcasts and chilling playlists to non-stop Halloween radio and more. We have all the thrills and chills you're craving this season. Press play. I'm Melissa Jeltson, 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.

Starting point is 02:19:23 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. 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.

Starting point is 02:19:49 And we were babies. She did all of these grave things. came out and spoke about it and he got a year. I 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. I'm Hamza. And I'm Martin.

Starting point is 02:20:11 And we're the hosts of Out of Character. It's a podcast. I know there's a lot of them going around. But why should you listen to ours? Well, we're only the best podcast in the entire world. And we talk about pretty much everything under the sun. Example, music we're listening to, underground music, trending music, drama in music worlds. Yes, sometimes we even talk about just everyday mundane situations in our lives, like the cool Uber driver we just had.

Starting point is 02:20:37 Or the food we just say, that is surprisingly delicious. Or we'll talk about the Med Gala and the looks that they wore. Are they awesome? Are they trendy? Come find out. Because our opinion matters. And so does yours. And this is a place where all of our minds can come together and connect. So what are you waiting for? Come connect with us. Listen out of character from Will Ferrell's

Starting point is 02:20:57 Big Money Players Network on the Iheart radio app, Apple Pods, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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,

Starting point is 02:21:12 you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people 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

Starting point is 02:21:25 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.

Starting point is 02:21:42 Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. Twelve seats, those are moving south. So you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be here. in 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. Vampires, minotars, 12 foot skeletons, and apartment doors?

Starting point is 02:22:09 Believe it or not, we're talking about romance. It's a monster romance extravaganza on Radio 831, a romance podcast. So join me, Sanjana Basker, and my co-host Tyler McCull as we dive into the strange, horny and wonderfully thoughtful world of falling for something not quite human. I give Tyler a crash course in monster romance, and the villain edit author Rosie Dannon joins to talk vampires, blood play, and finding tenderness in a monstrous love interest. Then, Sentient Object Romance expert Racy Delgado takes us even deeper into the genre. Finally, I assigned Tyler some homework to read C. Mnuscastas Morning Glory Milking Farm. And it's a doozy, but spoiler alert, Tyler emerges ready for more monster

Starting point is 02:22:49 tales because sometimes non-human romances can tell us the most about our desire, our fantasies, and what we actually want. Listen to Radio 831, a romance podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everyone. This is Future Mick, adding some stuff for less Future Mick. We'll be hearing most of during the podcast. This episode took a pretty long while. I'm not sure how long it will be post-production, but for my own recording, we talked for almost three hours, which is a lot. Therefore, this episode will be cut into multiple pieces. Make sure to start at part one.

Starting point is 02:23:34 I'm sorry for any awkward breaks in the post-production, but it was very hard to keep that in mind while we were recording. Hope you enjoy it. And we're back, and we're going to speak of the fascist Barbie doll that Molly knows nothing about. Say the name again. Eva Vlaardingerbrook. Yeah, the American mouth simply can't make those sounds.

Starting point is 02:23:58 Eva, Hyder. You can do that. Because, you know, we were already compared it to the Nuremberg Law. So we might as well, like, drag the Hydrig and the Wandsay conference in it as well. So I wouldn't be surprised if this was written at a lakehouse somewhere. So Eva Vladenegrook is the self-proclaimed shield maiden of the far right. That's an actual title she uses in her Twitter bio. Great.

Starting point is 02:24:24 That sucks. It was used as an insult by a columnist and she cleverly adopted it into her brand. That's not a very good insult. Like, of course she liked that. Yeah, yeah, you're giving her what she wants. I'm not going to defend our columnist ever. I should note that she's significantly more clean than our boy Martin Selner. No swastika related arrests.

Starting point is 02:24:49 Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Or like any ties to neo-Nazis or with figures as unsafety as the Christchurch, the shooter. That we know about. That we know about. She does have a master's in Encyclopedia and Philosophy of Law. During her study, she became more active with the Dutch Conspiracy slash Fascist Party, forum for democracy.

Starting point is 02:25:12 With them, she also partook in an internship at their faction in Brussels. After that, she worked as a lecturer, which she later gave. up to join the Dutch parliament as a member of sad fascist party. She would later quit this after a political fallout with party leader Cheri Baudet and the league of group chats of their youth party, which were distasteful to say the least. To women, to minorities. I don't need to explain how this group chat looked like.

Starting point is 02:25:42 You can make an educated guess and be correct. Yeah, I mean, anytime the group chats of the right party youth group get least. It's not going to be wholesome shit, is it? No, that happens here every now and again. We know what those are like. It happens everywhere. Like, don't be in chats at all. Like, don't do it.

Starting point is 02:26:00 I will, like, a small detour. Like a few months ago that was, like, on the subreddit, a discussion on which Dutch bastard should be covered. And everyone said it should be Hirt Wilders. Okay. That was what name? Hirt Wilders. That's how you say that?

Starting point is 02:26:15 Yes. Yeah. Go give it a cry, Molling. See where you're, where, are you at with it. No. Okay. We've lost Molly.

Starting point is 02:26:23 But anyway, like, I strongly disagree with that because Wilders is also like an overt fascist, but he's not funny. Like, there's no funny

Starting point is 02:26:32 behind the bastards to do about it. Sometimes there's no jokes you could make about the fascist. No. Yeah, I mean, the comedy about him

Starting point is 02:26:39 lends itself to a visual medium. Yeah. That's what I will say. He looks like Sonic the fucking hedgehog. Yeah. But Cheri Boda is really funny.

Starting point is 02:26:48 Like, he's also a fascist, but he was, assaulted in public multiple times. He was hit in the face with an umbrella. That's a European way of going about to. I respect that. Yeah, I think it was a Ukrainian national.

Starting point is 02:27:02 They don't have guns. They have to be creative. It was caught on tape. So that's really funny. You can make a more funny episode about him. He had a motion in our parliament for the humane treatment of Andrew Tate when he was arrested in Romania. Okay.

Starting point is 02:27:20 Because he's always been, I'm sure, a passionate defender of prisoner civil rights, right? That's something he's always been interested in. Love to advocate. He was also very passionate about consent saying that when women say no, they actually want you to go on. Oh dear. Also on camera. So great figure. Anyway, details aside, during the waves, this fallout between Eva and Baudet was caused,

Starting point is 02:27:42 he would retaliate by repeatedly mentioning their relationship publicly, which forced their hand to denounce it as being just the fact. few dates after which their fling ended. Eva would later tell Das Telegraph. Cherry knew how scared I was of this coming out. If it gets out, you don't owe anything you've achieved to yourself.

Starting point is 02:28:02 What I feared happened. I was the resentful ex and even more blatant sexist remarks poured in. Oh no. Did she not know sexism could happen to her? This happens to far-right influencers all the time. Like it happened to Lauren Southern and maybe Brittany Pettibone too. But like these women in this

Starting point is 02:28:20 movement. They're like, I didn't know they were going to be sexist to me. Girl, you're at a Nazi party. Maybe I'm giving her too much sympathy, but... You are. Probably. But like, this entire piece is heavily colored by my own opinion, but also trying to sometimes be a bit more distant with it. But clearly, she received some pretty harsh comments that were dripping with sexism during the fallout. I'm no doubt that she did. I'm not saying that's good or that it's acceptable, but like, what did you think would happen when you laid down with dogs. That is very fair, but I also

Starting point is 02:28:53 would say, like, her womanhood was like very... I just want to exterminate people I don't like. I didn't know anyone would be mean to me. I guess I'm just mean. Your words, not mine. I'm still trying to, like, have a... For this specific instance, have, like, some sort of sympathy for her, because

Starting point is 02:29:12 her relationship and her womanhood were essentially like weaponized against her in a way to incite that sexism. And she would know nothing about weaponizing people's identities against them to produce any kind of violent result? No, like, she's a horrible person with horrible politics. Like, I'm not denying any of that. No, I'm not saying it's good or acceptable that these things happen to these women. It's just like, what do you not see that that's what you're doing to others?

Starting point is 02:29:37 I think there isn't enough introspection for that. No, there's not, no. Yeah. Well, no, because they think that bad things should not happen to them because they're fully huge. human and the people they're doing it to art. Right. Like if you're going to draw lines around humanity, don't find yourself surprised when the line is drawn and you're on the other side of it. And like the underpin the underpinning of so many of these ideas heavily relies on

Starting point is 02:30:03 misogyny too. Like, you know, you're not just going to do fascism and white supremacy and xenophobia and immigration restriction without. Those guys are misogynist too, babe. That's very true. I think I was mostly just trying to find my own moral line in there. like two horrible people but still I would somewhere nah I'm just always

Starting point is 02:30:24 surprised they're surprised it's the lie I couldn't believe the leopards eating my face happened after voting for the leopards eating faces party yeah

Starting point is 02:30:35 obviously the way I still think it's fucked up that it happens that way to her and maybe sympathy is going too far but I think that's for each to their own

Starting point is 02:30:44 to decide upon but to go back to funnier stuff. Our first breakthrough in political activism was in December of 2019 when the Dutch newspaper at Barol published that opinion piece that we mentioned earlier, criticizing her anti-feminist speech at the Forum for Democracy Party Congress. Her disdain for modern feminism could also be seen in her master thesis, the contractualization of sex in the meteor era. You think feminism is damaging to society? Why do you think you deserve the benefits of feminism? You know?

Starting point is 02:31:18 because. Because. Probably. And this is where she gets funny again a bit. Because unfortunately, I couldn't find her full thesis because I had looked for it. I was curious because she completed it with honors. So I was like, okay, I want to know what this looks like. Maybe it's good.

Starting point is 02:31:38 Change my mind, Eva. Yeah, share it on Twitter. She did, however, post an essay in English on her Twitter account, which drew heavily on her thesis. And to be a bit fair and balanced, it's not horrible. I'll be the judge of that. Let me see it. Well, for the most part, it's just like concerns about like a social structure, such as consent being codified into law.

Starting point is 02:32:04 So she's saying rape should be legal. That's not what she is explicitly saying, but she does seem to see consent as exclusively like a contract between two people rather than like an agreement. Right, I mean, their petition is explicitly saying something very different than what it actually means. I don't think we have to take these people at their word. Yeah. I'm not going to take a fascist at her word.

Starting point is 02:32:26 That's not what I'm in the business of doing. Now I'm feeling like I'm very uncritical. No, you're just much nicer than I have. Again, your words. And you live in a country with much stricter libel laws. That's also true. But, okay, I think there should be room for, like, good things. debate on this codification into law and possible side effects.

Starting point is 02:32:50 She doesn't. No, no, she absolutely doesn't. Like the existence of good faith debate, sure, I'll concede to that. We can have a good faith debate on the legal structure of consent. I wouldn't say there should be no legal structure for it because that just means rape is legal. But the thing is, is I'm not going to engage in a good faith debate with her because she isn't. Because she isn't and she knows it. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:33:13 And so by allowing room for good faith debate with people like Eva for blah blah, you are opening the door for this, right? You are making room for a bad faith argument that is essentially just rape should be legal. But it shouldn't happen to nice girls like me. Okay. Well, yeah. Like, it's not bad faith. It ends in bad shit. No, it's bad faith.

Starting point is 02:33:38 It is. It is explicitly in bad faith. Okay. Molly, hold your horses. because I've got here like the last one and a half paragraphs of that piece. As kind as I was for like the preceding paragraphs, I'm going to be as blunt about the last one. It's absolute bonkers.

Starting point is 02:33:56 I'm looking forward to it. This is not like even going from zero to a hundred. This is zero to a thousand in the span of a couple sentences. Quoting this from her essay, which was posted on Twitter on April 29th, 2026, for those who want to see it for themselves. To compensate for the legal uncertainty this law will create, people will seek refuge in contracts,

Starting point is 02:34:19 which can now simply be downloaded via mobile apps such as legal fling and have a direct legal effect. Although the desire to create a consent culture may stem from good intentions, this consent culture has unforeseen consequences that pose a danger to romance and freedom. Oh, fuck off. Okay.

Starting point is 02:34:38 Always interesting to see what the libertarians, I'm using libertarian in the American sense here, right? Like, want the states to not take an interest in and what they, like this same person who wants a state to take an interest in, like tearing people's lives apart, doesn't think the state belongs in determining what is and is not consent because we've an app for that. Fuck off.

Starting point is 02:35:00 James, I'll heavily disagree with you here. Nothing is more romantic than when I want to engage in some adult fun with a partner than having, a app to sign a literal contract on what is and isn't acceptable. You know AI drafts contract. You know Chad GBT's getting up in there and some weird shit in your contract. And this is such a tired thing. Like, I'm, you know, showing my age here.

Starting point is 02:35:24 But when I was in college 20 years ago and we had these, you know, mandatory trainings on like, what is consent? Like, don't get raped at a party. And guys would say, like, these 18-year-old guys would say shit like, oh, I'm going to have her sign a contract. This is like tired, dumb shit that guys who rape people say. I wasn't even done, but I'm glad for your passion knowledge. Okay, carry on. Suppose such a contract is signed. How do we know for certain that it was not signed under coercion?

Starting point is 02:35:53 Or, for example, under the influence of alcohol and or drugs? And what if a woman signs that the... Right, those are the same questions about consent we already have. Coercion, alcohol. Yeah, but now we have an app. But now there's an app. Yeah. Yeah, so then to solve all of those questions, right?

Starting point is 02:36:08 Yeah, now it's about the legality of such a contract instead of the legality of... And so the legality of rape. Yeah, you've made a get-out-of-jail-free card app. That's what she seemed to think. That's literally the phrase she uses. What if a woman signs at 11 p.m., but changes her mind at 11.10 p.m. And her partner acts in bad faith. Then he rapes her and he has a get-out-of-chale-free card.

Starting point is 02:36:32 After all, she signed a contract. So no one will believe her anymore, right? Oh, wait, so she's not proposing the app contract. No, no, no. She's saying it wouldn't work. Oh, my apologies. So she's saying there just should be no legal concept of consent at all. She's just against the concept of consent.

Starting point is 02:36:49 I mean, one consent can be withdrawn. It's not the fucking, like, end game argument that a 12-year-old Reddit user might think it is. I was still not done with the... This is an essay a moron would write. Oh, oh, my. This is a sort of show. I have graded some essays of like undergraduate and even like postgraduate students. And like this is the kind of puerile shit that like anyone who's going through like a serious attempt to be a serious writer should be fucking like I know like whack a mold.

Starting point is 02:37:24 All of the points in this essay came up in my mandatory don't rate people training in college in 2007. Yeah. Like this is like the logic of like a frat guy trying to be funny. First, she sees consent as like exclusively contractual and I think that's where she goes. That's very romantic. Yes. Yeah. Also, I wasn't done because that was not the bonkers part.

Starting point is 02:37:50 Oh, okay. Oh, the last sentence is phenomenal. You're going to love this, James. Okay, great. Yeah, hit me. Okay, after all, she signed a contract so no one will believe her anymore, right? solutions to this kind of problem will not be found in anything other than

Starting point is 02:38:04 even more rules and even more government interference. What is the next step? Cameras in the bedroom or a civil servant standing beside your bed. This new sexual offense law creates more problems than it solves. All of this legal uncertainty, the erosion of

Starting point is 02:38:20 the presumption of innocence, the extinguishing of romance, in the case that we should not even want to crack the door open to this Orwellian nightmare. No! Every Time! No! No, dove! I knew it was coming.

Starting point is 02:38:34 I knew it was coming and I'm still angry. What is it in 1984? It may still sound abstract to you, but ask yourself the following question in all seriousness. How many totalitarian regimes in history can you name that went so far as the right rules and laws, dictating how people must behave in the bedroom? The question answers itself. Making rape illegal? basically makes you Hitler.

Starting point is 02:39:01 Yeah. This is insane. The same person who wants the state to fucking kick people out for not being white. It's like, it's a little too far

Starting point is 02:39:10 of their policing rape though, isn't it? That should be something we settle amongst ourselves. They always do this and I find it so fucking annoying. Obviously, the most annoying thing here

Starting point is 02:39:20 is not being wrong about Georgia Orwell who had some fucking issues with consent himself. But God, it pisses it. The whole thing, it's just like, It's so puerile.

Starting point is 02:39:31 This would be better if she did let chat GPT write it. Yeah. Now I'm wondering how this person, like, if this is the topic she explored for her master's degree. We do need to find the thesis. They also let chat GPT grade it, is what I'm wondering. Because like Molly said, like if you worked in education, like I've been in higher education for 20 years. And yeah, you've heard this shit from an 18-year-old guy whose shirt doesn't have sleeves for the most part, right? Like, I wear a little sleeve the shirt myself.

Starting point is 02:40:02 Like, that's fine. But there's a type of dude who's been saying this shit to you every September since you started talking about this shit, right? And like, just because a lady wrote it in a fucking thesis doesn't make it any less dumb. Well, this is actually a Twitter post. But if this is more sense, that makes a lot more sense. If this is drawn from her thesis. If that's a line of argumentation she went with. If this is the quality of thinking in her master's thesis, I actually do really want to see it now.

Starting point is 02:40:28 We have to find it. Where did she do her master's thesis? Leiden University. Okay. Did she make a significant donation at any point to Leidon's university? Well, like for detouring already, there is like a prominent supporter of the fascist party who teaches at Leiden Law School. So great.

Starting point is 02:40:49 And that's also where Chetty Badat, who we mentioned earlier, did his promotion research, which was also incredibly bad. Great. To the point that one of people graded it said, you should not get a PhD. This is like for anyone who does it, no. Yeah, it doesn't happen very often. You defending your PhD is mostly a formality. Yeah, like you might get some difficult questions.

Starting point is 02:41:12 Yeah. But people who go into their defense normally expect to leave with a PhD, right? Like, if your shit's so bad. And like, if they don't tell you about it before you get to the exam, it's because they really don't like you very much, right? Like, if you've got to that point where you're having your, you're defending with your committee, and they haven't been like, hey, this is really bad,

Starting point is 02:41:37 you need to rewrite this, you have made an enemy. Yeah, I guess done is good enough in most cases. Yeah, yeah. Because I don't have occasion to read very many theses or dissertations, but every time I do, I'm surprised that it worked. You know what I mean? I did a close reading of there was a Holocaust denier

Starting point is 02:41:58 who died in a murder, suicide, he killed his wife. And his history thesis was one of the worst things I've ever read and I was so surprised. And a bunch of listeners wrote in to my show email to say, oh no, it's pretty normal for a thesis to be just absolute dog shit. Yeah, I don't want to take

Starting point is 02:42:14 that one as a representative sample. But they do say your thesis should be the first draft of your book or your dissertation if you're in the U.S. And it's real easy if you're in grad school to get way too wrapped up in making it perfect. But also, some people still manage to do some Nazi shit. And I'm glad that someone held the line. Like all of his citations were to David Irving books. And like they still gave him the degree. Yeah. There's a couple of info.

Starting point is 02:42:40 Citations. Yeah. Citation. Authors email with David Irving. Maybe David Ike gets in there for some like real old school credibility. I had a professor during my master's. And at some point he said, Like, all of your master thesis will probably be shit. And that's fine because the master thesis is for you to learn. There's value to having a piece of writing that doesn't have to be perfect. And like, I'm sure if I looked at lots of academics who I deeply respect and read their master's thesis or their PhD dissertation, I would be able to witness their growth. And that would give me hope as an academic that we can all get better.

Starting point is 02:43:18 But it sounds like she didn't learn much because this essay is something a moron would write. I'm sorry. Oh, no. the Orwell mentioned because like anyone mentioning Orwell in a piece of academic writing needs to Are you a teenager? No, but like Orwell did have some pretty good opinions

Starting point is 02:43:32 on how to deal with fascists, you know? So I find it ironic that a fascist is quoting it. Because she hasn't read it. Yeah, many such cases, right? Yeah, exactly. She's engaged with 1984 through cultural memes in the same way fucking Elon Musk has. Like Orwell, I read Dorian Lynxie's book

Starting point is 02:43:51 about Orwell writing in 1984 recent me. And the amount of his life that he spent after Animal Farm being like, no, you guys don't fucking understand it. That's not what I meant. Please stop it. Specifically with Americans, but on a much broader scale, the amount of time he spent like trying to refuse interviews being like, no, I'm a, like, I'm a man of the left and that is a group, and like that a remain or something was one that he wrote in a letter refusing an interview. But the poor guy spent his dying days being like, you motherfuckers haven't understood my book. you stupid pricks.

Starting point is 02:44:25 And every year they dig him up and do the same shit. That must be absolute torture for him. Like the rat's pill from the Matrix. I'm going to use a Ouija board to tell George Warwell about Alex Jones. The guy has suffered enough, Molly. The answer to 1984, 1776. It's one of Alex's favorite lines. I know that. God.

Starting point is 02:44:48 Just as an inside joke, I love that when he goes on a rent, her camera, like automatically seems in a little bit and it just gets extra ominous. Yeah, you get like, she's doing it. That's an old Alex Jones drink, actually. Get them forehead veins to pop. To try to get us back on track again. Sorry. Like, she's very much into the same, like, female nationalism that we discussed with.

Starting point is 02:45:22 Also, you're Molly there during the Quentin Derank episodes. But without any feminism or proper nationalism. No, it's a good. It's again, all feminism is we need to stop being raped by migrants and then everything is solved, which is not the case. No, we just should be raped by our husbands, I guess is her argument. I don't want to be raped by an immigrant. I want to be raped by a husband. As is tradition.

Starting point is 02:45:43 She would probably agree that that would be fine or deny that that such a thing is possible. Yeah, I think. Yeah, more likely. But this is a contract. Yeah. Anyway, some of the listeners may also have had the misfortune of seeing Eva on the Tucker Carlson show. He knows how to pick him. Yeah. At the moment, she is married to Francesco Gargallo di Castellantini, a Roman-based lawyer who is descended from a long line of Italian nobleman.

Starting point is 02:46:10 Gross. He's a constitutional lawyer who practices in a number of countries. And recently defended a woman who in 2021 refused to take a PCR test when she traveled from Spain to Norway. God, the Venn diagram. I want the government to be powerful enough to rip apart families and sink boats full of children in the sea but I don't want the government to be able to make me put a swab in my nose to prove I don't have a deadly disease. Cool and normal stuff. I don't want to be surprised and I'm not, but also I am.

Starting point is 02:46:48 Further, she spoke at multiple Unites the Kingdom rallies in the UK including in the September of 2025 one where she encouraged attendees to stand up to their governments, protest ended in violence, 26 police officers injured and 24 people arrested, according to the Daily Mail. It does, however, not mention if the police were there in their professional capacity or not, which I think is a meaningful distinction to make there.

Starting point is 02:47:15 This incident also led her from being barred from the UK as her presence was not considered conductive to the public good. after this she labeled Keir Starmor a tyrant if anyone has ever seen an interview with Keir Starmor you know this is untrue because Keir Starmor is the dark crevice where charisma goes to die

Starting point is 02:47:35 Yeah he lacks a charisma for fascism For anything He is the most bland, flavorless politician You've ever seen I don't want to slander Key Starrmer Because I would like to visit the UK At some point again

Starting point is 02:47:50 But not that The man Calling a British British politician a little bit bland. It's not slander. Well, we got Andy Burnham now, who played the smiths to a group of soldiers in Ukraine on a guitar recently. Why? It's like the most, it's the most British thing that anyone's ever done.

Starting point is 02:48:11 He was visiting Ukrainian soldiers. Was he trying to cure them up? That's what I can't understand, like doing a morale trip and being like, here's a sad song written by a really annoying guy. I like this mess, but Morrissey's a prick. I think we can all acknowledge that. Maybe that's proof he's on Russia's side trying to inside like mass suicide. Yeah, it's trying to moralize the troops.

Starting point is 02:48:34 It's a song about suicide. I heard you were having a hard day. Why don't you enjoy some Morrissey? Yeah, his heaven knows un miserable. You have to be as miserable as I am, so I'm playing this song. Okay. That was all the fun stuff I had on the fascist Shield Maiden to be. honest. Still some funny stuff

Starting point is 02:48:55 in there, but also Jesus fucking Christ. But like unsurprising on all fronts. These people are exactly he would expect them to be. Yeah. I'm not even surprised that she married a nobleman. No, that's classic fascism stuff. Love that for her. Yeah, yeah, all of this.

Starting point is 02:49:11 Like Italian nobles, famously unproblematic. It's like Colin Jordan marrying the Dior heiress. Like, okay, I got it. I got it. There is one more composed Golan that we have to talk about. And this one takes great effort in remaining more behind the scenes. I'm curious if you've guys heard of him.

Starting point is 02:49:27 That applies to both his role in pulling Europe even further to the right, but also his personal life. It is the chairman of the World Congress for the family, hailing from the United States, Mr. Brian Stephen Brown. I've never heard of Brian. He sounds very boring. Ah, yeah. Just like a garden variety, like a weird pervert.

Starting point is 02:49:49 Brian Stephen Brown. Yeah, he has a Wikipedia page. Oh, okay. I recognize the symbol on the podium where he is here. Now, oh, he's the National Organization for Marriage guy. Yes, I think I wrote it down wrong in my script then. No, he's both. It's a World Congress of Families I've never heard of. A National Organization for Marriage, that's a classic. Now, I'll consider this feedback on my script writing. Oh, no, it's just that's the hate group I'm familiar with of the hate groups he's affiliated with. Yeah, there is more hate groups that he's affiliated with than we could name. It's a lot. But, yeah, America's full of these like vague sounding foundations for the focus on the family, the family Congress, world wives and babies or whatever. Like, it's just like this word salad basically about weird white natalism and hating gay people and immigration. It's just sort of a grab bag, like whatever part of that you're into. So the Justice for Prosperity Report that I used earlier states that the World Congress for Families is an ultra-conservative and transnational anti-rights network that a public. all the things you imagine it opposes. Abortion, same-sex marriage. It was labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Brown is also on the board of Citizen Go, a Spanish anti-abortion and anti-LGB advocacy group. In fact, if you needed just a little bit more evidence of the type of bastard he is, he physically stood in the Russian Duma as it passed like the anti-gay bill legislation. Great. Yeah, I've seen that.

Starting point is 02:51:21 picture as well. Oh, wow. Like, he looks exactly like you think he's going to look. It's like a hairy thumb. Yeah, this isn't a surprise to me. Like an otter or something? Like a bald otter. Yeah. Mole rat is what I'm thinking of. Wait, so what's our American homophob got to do with this?

Starting point is 02:51:39 I got distracted looking at how weird he looks. Yeah. That's understandable. We'll get there first, because he was not only like just at the Duma for that legislation to pass. after that he was present at that legislation passing, he was also repeatedly returned to Russia to chat with his buddies Konstantin Malofiath and his right-hand man Alexei Komo, allies of Putin. Well, what do they chat about?

Starting point is 02:52:07 Probably about how great it is not to have polonium in your underwear or how dangerous falling out of a basement window is. I'm guessing. I don't know. And I don't want to know because I don't want either of those things to happen to me. But Malafif has been on the both EU and US sanctions list since 2014

Starting point is 02:52:28 for arming pro-Russian separatists. Oh, cool. So not a guy you should really be hanging out with. I feel like this is the true line, but it gets worse. It gets worse. He also helped finance regular conferences that merge multiple

Starting point is 02:52:42 pro-family groups. Read pro-family as anti-abortion, anti-LGB. Yeah, pro-family is a bold. Pro-exactly what kind of family Yeah, anti-self-determination. And through this process, allegedly, they also extend the influence of Russian geopolitical policy into other countries. Other investigations from Justice for Prosperity also identified him as the primary coordinator and fundraiser behind the systemic deportations and relocation of Ukrainian children. Through his St. Basil, the Great Foundation.

Starting point is 02:53:15 Jesus. Under the aptly chosen name, Happy Childhood. Fuck me. Yeah. And like, I also want to mention because, James, we also had a chat about this. Yeah, forcefully displacing or relocating children constitutes genocide. That's one that's the genocide. Yes.

Starting point is 02:53:35 That's in the UN definition of a genocide. Yeah. Yeah. But it has to specifically be children. So like the quasi-Norberg laws that we read earlier are technically not genocidal because it's not explicitly children. but one could imagine what it would be if you followed their policies to their logical conclusion. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:53:58 But Brown is also involved with the Safe Europe Act. He was present at the first demonstration in Brussels, but his true involvement is much more behind the scenes. He co-owns a digital infrastructure company called Altern Cloud, self-described as infrastructure as a service. Donations and other forms of digital infrastructure are moving through this. which originate either in the Safe Europe Act, the donations I mean then,

Starting point is 02:54:25 or people that like the initiative. And Alter and Cloud itself is also not shy about showcasing their political leanings. I'm quoting from their website. We are excited to report we are now the digital backbone of businesses, organizations, websites and apps across America and Europe.

Starting point is 02:54:42 Current clients include conservative organizations like no next row, never Newsompack, conservative and Catholic news organizations such as Info Cato La Salon Beige and Le For Verite, family advocacy, non-profits like international organization for the family

Starting point is 02:55:01 and tech companies such as titanium secure, tech IG and ad hoc capital. I love that they can just call it family advocacy when what it is is like violent homophobia and transphobia and anti-women's rights, anti-abortion. Yeah, we're just a hate group. family advocacy for a very particular kind of family and everyone else can fuck off and die. Yeah. I'll say this much. At least he lives to his values because allegedly he has nine children.

Starting point is 02:55:29 His poor wife. Oh, yes, 100%. Yeah, those poor children. So the names mentioned earlier, we can already safely assume just what kind of clientele all alternate clients are alternate likes to engage with. But what I find most disturbing is that he's clearly a very influential person of who we know very little say what you will about Musk or Zuckerberg or Bezos. At least we know what kind of crepuscular crotch goblins they are. No, but the more effective guys are not making so much fucking noise. That is what scares me about him. Like, at that end, the picture you shared.

Starting point is 02:56:05 Not a handsome man. No, would not want to wake up to that. Would not want to make nine children with that. Well, we don't know if his wife had any sane. Yeah. So. Yeah, I mean, I guess I'd be signing on to do business with. the woman who thinks rape should be legal.

Starting point is 02:56:19 Yeah. Or like Russian genocide enjoyers. Yeah. He's not huge on women's rights. Yeah. Like he's just sort of a connection, a connection point or a nexus for like Kremlin affiliates, European Identitarian groups, the American Christian Rights, and like similar anti-rights groups with like these conferences that his contacts also finance.

Starting point is 02:56:43 That's all I have on him because there's just not much to find. Well, now I'm curious. I'm going to keep looking. Let me know if you find something. Yeah, it is always interesting to find these guys who are pulling the strings and funding these giant hate campaigns, right? Like, they very successfully astroturf these as like ground level, especially like we see this all over the world with anti-migrant shit, right? Like, oh, the people are rising up. There's 750,000 signatures on this petition.

Starting point is 02:57:14 Yeah, right? They're arch. slash names. Like, there are 750,000 marks on my piece of paper. Yeah. But, like, the British far right does this all the time, right? They're like, oh, Britain desperately wants to have an independence day, which is largely overlooking the fact that people who have independence days generally do so because Britain colonize them.

Starting point is 02:57:31 Because they're independent from Britain now? From Britain. Yeah. Who is Britain going to be independent from, like, Brussels? Come on, fuck off. Like, yeah, the famously belligerent colonization of the Belgians. Oh, like, they want their own Fourth of July? That's so cute.

Starting point is 02:57:44 Yeah. That's cute. just do the king's birthday or whatever the fuck you guys are into. We have a day. We have a day on the 5th of November when we let off fireworks, because in a very British way, it is a day that people like to burn a Catholic and effigy. I don't like that.

Starting point is 02:58:01 Yeah, no, it's actually not great. But, like, they have very successfully astroturfed their hate as like a popular uprising, and that is why they have been able to get some, electoral support for it, right? Like, I was literally skeeting, I believe it's the correct verb. I don't think we're saying that.

Starting point is 02:58:24 Are we not saying it? Okay. Posting. I was posting. Let's use a generic term. I was posting today a poll of British people who think London has a poll of people, I should say, who think London have no go areas. It's fucking ludicrous. Like, of big cities, London is like super safe.

Starting point is 02:58:42 I have gone all over London, like walking or on my bicycle. And so that's that thing where white people think that there are some neighborhoods that like they'll be murdered by immigrants if they go there? Yeah, I mean, the construct that exists in the right-wing mind is that like there are areas that are like under Sharia law in so much as that is a thing. The whole neighborhoods of London under Sharia law. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:59:02 Go into the Ayatollah even, probably. Yeah, exactly. The IRGC in a form of the Kud's force is patrolling. They're fatrolling. They're fatten babies. They're such babies. Yeah, like this is being scared of anything that isn't. Like a woman who had a job.

Starting point is 02:59:14 job looked at you and you thought you were going to get beheaded by ISIS. Like, grow up. Yeah. Like, also, if you were really worried about ISIS, you know, could have gone to fight with the, yep, it gave more than a decade, but you didn't. I've been to London and I've had a very pleasant cigarette smoke with a homeless person and never felt threatened. Yeah, London's like, I've walked all around London.

Starting point is 02:59:36 I've literally just wandered into mosques in London because, like, I come from a very small village, right? I mean, have a mosque in my tiny village, and I've been to some mosques and I like them, so I want to check out other ones. Like, not a fucking problem. People will be nice to you. I mean, I think it's projection, right? Like, they want to hurt these people, so they assume that those people want to hurt them.

Starting point is 02:59:57 Yeah, yes, I think that's probably a fair. It's that, what is that Thomas Jefferson thing? You know, we have the wolf by the ear. We can't let him go. If we let the immigrants have rights, they'll do to us what we've done to them. Yeah, well, yeah. Jefferson was saying that about the slaves, but the principle holds. if you live your whole life by like the clash of civilisation's narrative then like it didn't

Starting point is 03:00:17 it's impossible to understand the world in any other way right because you see yourself as fundamentally opposed to people who are different from you but not everyone sucks as bad as you do yeah in fact like most people are not pieces of shit maybe if we're looking to kick some people out we could start with the fucking names on the petition that would be a good start the real the ones of them who are even real yeah yeah i mean i don't think the state should be tearing anyone from their family to be clear. I don't think it's funny when someone gets deported. I don't care if they're a bad person. I find the laughing about people who you don't like being deported. Deeply frustrating, actually, because we should abolish ICE and DHS and the whole deportation machine.

Starting point is 03:00:54 And Europe while we're at it. Yeah, sure. I mean, in the grand scheme of history, most of those countries are just a blip on the radar. Just abolish Germany. I could support that. But I do want to piggyback a little bit on what you just said about the astroturfing, James, because, yeah, the last bit of my script regards, like, the discourse and violence that has happened in the Netherlands in the past few months, like downright terrorist attacks. But a lot of these local anti-immigrant protests, at least in the Netherlands, a core part is the defend groups that, you know, the three of us spoke about.

Starting point is 03:01:34 They just go to small municipalities, stir shit up and make this whole anti-immigration sentiment seems so much bigger than it actually is. It's people taking a day off of work to go protest in some municipality that they don't live in and do violence and then claim like, oh, look at all these violent immigrants. Don't look at me throwing heavy fireworks at people, which is a thing. I've had fireworks thrown at me by those people. It's not fun. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:02:05 It's preferable to being shot, I suppose. But, yeah. That's a low bar. Yeah, it's still deeply unenjoyable. Yeah. Also, like, our communities are so intertwined, even more so than the US, right? Like, we don't have, in much of Europe, this long history of redlining and using capitalism to do racial segregation. To an extent, we still have, like, neighborhoods where people will want to live around services that they like to access, right?

Starting point is 03:02:34 If you like to go to the mosque, it makes sense to live relatively near to the mosque. if you want to go to the good water, same thing, right? But like, the idea that you could tear these communities apart is just so fucking, like it's complete pie in the sky shit from people whose like entire politics is informed by the internet and watching what's happening in America. You could no more like tear immigrants from European cities and have them function than you could be like, all right, we're doing away with everyone who was born on an even number day. fucking society doesn't function without each other.

Starting point is 03:03:11 And again, you just, you fall into this trap of how are we defining this? Who are you talking about exactly? How far back are you going? Who counts? Yeah, I mean, it seems like what they want. It's like the apartheid thing, right? Right. Which even apartheid got into its own questions of how do we define people's race?

Starting point is 03:03:27 It became very messy. And the government was deciding people's race with, you know, without their input. And it was not a great situation. Yeah, yeah. But like the idea that our society could. function without people who aren't white or even people who have arrived one or two generations ago. It's just pure, rather and ridiculous. These people fucking suck. I don't know. Like, they're like unsurious people. On the previous job of mine, I met this woman from Afghanistan

Starting point is 03:03:55 and she was allowed to move to the Netherlands because she worked, I think, for like NATO or an NGO. Because we all were also involved in Afghanistan, of course. And she was so incredibly pleasant to work with. All Dutch people speak English. It pretty much is a rule. So if someone doesn't speak Dutch very well, we tend to like immediately turn to English. And she was very much like,

Starting point is 03:04:18 please talk Dutch to me. I want to work here in a different job, but I need... That's so brave of her to want to learn Dutch. Yeah, yes. I tried to discourage her. It did not work. It's a garbage language.

Starting point is 03:04:32 I'd rather have a hundred of her than whatever pathetic defense group. or whatever racist shit. Because she's actually contributing and trying her very best. And these people are just out there, you know, stirring shit up.

Starting point is 03:04:49 The fascists. But much respect to that particular woman. She won't hear this, but beside the point. No, but there are hundreds of thousands of people just like her, right? Contributing to their communities. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 03:05:02 Yeah, it was very valuable work at the time what we did. Like, it was necessary. it was necessary. Even if the work that she was doing was not valuable to humanity on a broader scale. Like there are hundreds of thousands of people like that woman who have gone to a place where they were not born and contributed to a community. And that's just not part of the conversation for these people because they don't care

Starting point is 03:05:23 because they don't see people like her as human beings. Yeah. And also because they're not part of their communities, right? Because they're odious pieces of shit. Like all their friends are on stormfront or what have you because no one wants to be around hateful bigots like this. No, they're in a Twitter space going, yes, exactly, to each other. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:05:41 But they don't have real world community. This perspective doesn't survive contact with the outside world. No. But they're trying to force it on all of us through bullshit like this, by like shoehorning this discourse into respectable places and hoping some of that respectability rubs off on it. You're so sick and Molly. I'm jealous.

Starting point is 03:06:11 To get back to the last bit, because ultimately, the entirety of the Save Europe Act is exactly what you just said. It's shoehorning it in, making it normal to have seemingly civil conversations around something that is, no matter which way you turn a phrase it, inherently violent in multiple ways to people who don't deserve it and have done nothing but trying to exist in a different place. No, but if they can make us all have this conversation in, you know, in our respectable avenues of civil discourse, then it becomes a normal thing that we have to talk about.

Starting point is 03:06:50 And if we have to talk about it, maybe more people will be convinced by it. Whereas if you relegate this shit to Stormfront, where it belongs, normal people aren't coming into contact with it and becoming convinced by it or tricked into it or mainstreaming it. Yeah. On October 7th, 2020, before, Eva tweeted the following. So cool, this timeline of the main accounts pushing the remigration debate on X this year. proud to be on the list with Alternative for Deutschland, Martin Selner, Elon Musk, Renaud Camus, and Donald Trump.

Starting point is 03:07:21 Together we're pushing the Overton window in real time. So she knows what she's doing. A hundred percent. Not only does she know, she said it. She knows what she's doing, but she's not smart enough to know she shouldn't tell you she knows. Yeah. You're not supposed to say, I know all I'm doing is pushing the Overton window. I'm here to throw a brick through the Overton fucking window.

Starting point is 03:07:43 Girl, shut up. My job is to push you all to the right. My job is to defenestrate you through the Overton window. Yeah. Yeah, I would say that, like, talking about the Overton window, right? Talking about this being a list on Twitter is a perfect illustration of how, like, the alienation that people feel under capitalism has made them so vulnerable to this shit. Because I understand that, like, it is fucking hard for people in Europe as it is here, right?

Starting point is 03:08:08 Like, existing as a working person is fucking hard. paying your bills is hard. It's not getting any easier, especially now that petrol slash gas is even more expensive. But like, because people are increasingly alienated, it's easier and easier to do this scapegoating bullshit. It just happens that we've found someone who's stupid enough to basically say that. But like that is the basis of the entire right around the world right now. It's like blaming the things that capitalism has done to us on people who have suffered more

Starting point is 03:08:39 under capitalism than anyone. And Elon Musk's ownership of Twitter has made spreading that message so much easier than it would have been otherwise. But he's like he's algorithmically boosting and disseminating this at a scale as previously unheard of. Yeah. For these kinds of ideas. Especially when you've got so many journalists on Twitter so much. Like that's where they get a sense of the debate. Get over there.

Starting point is 03:09:05 Yeah. And because these journalists are so used to pulling their stories from just like shit they saw on Twitter, that they think these ideas must be very popular. We must engage with them. We must write a million fucking stories about these posts we saw on Twitter because they obviously represent a very important discourse for society right now

Starting point is 03:09:23 and they don't. They don't. Stop doing it. Yeah. Speaking of journalists, please follow me on Blue Sky at Two Sober Possums if you want to criticize my poor attempt at journalism.

Starting point is 03:09:38 But yeah, I wanted to take this last bits to highlight some. instances of like political violence in the Netherlands. All of these incidents happen between late April and now this year. Oh my God. I'm not attributing it to the Safe Europe Act because the discourse has been toxic for a while now. But I also can't say that it has a non-zero effect because maybe I've had my head in the sand for for years, but this level of violence is pretty unheard of year.

Starting point is 03:10:09 And it's all part of the same sort of. ambient raising of the temperature on this topic. And they know they're contributing to that. So, of course, you can't say they're directly responsible for these attacks. They're not directing them. But they're raising the temperature and they know this contributes to that. Especially, I don't know, a guy who received a large sum of money from Brenton Tarrant shortly before he murdered 51 people in two mosques in New Zealand. I don't know. Maybe they know what they're doing. Anyway. Okay. I'm not going too deeply into these instances because then we'd had like, we'll add another

Starting point is 03:10:40 hour or two to this already long recording session. I'm also sorry for all the Dutch words because our towns are not named in English words. So the town of Lozdrecht, there was going to be a migrant center there. Severe destruction at the old municipal building, which was used to house them. Doors and windows destroyed near the end of April. In early May, also in Lozdrecht, the same building caught on fire due to torches and heavy fireworks being thrown at it. Jesus.

Starting point is 03:11:14 Migrants were inside this building when it caught on fire. Fuck. To my knowledge, the harm to people was minimal or non-existent, but still, they threw fireworks and torches to the point that this building caught on fire. Yeah. The psychological damage is still very real. Yeah. Okay, this is my personal little tension, but our prime minister has not called these

Starting point is 03:11:39 things terrorism. Well, by any definition of the word, this is fucking terrorism. Yeah. Like, this is political violence used to either scare people away or scare people into submission and bypassing the democratic process in the meantime. So also in early May in the town of Engelen, an explosion caused by heavy fireworks destroyed mainly glass windows at a center for underage migrants. Further, houses and cards of either. pro-migration citizens. Note, not activists, just citizens with an opinion, were vandalized with slurs and threats. One of the cars was stolen and driven into a body of water. Again, this was minor vandalism, not minor, this was vandalism, according to our PM. Among the targets for people

Starting point is 03:12:29 who were not even explicitly in favor of having this center, but simply stated that they had the desire to have a good faith debate and conversation around it, where you were, is reasonable. May 13th, Loztrecht again, again torches and fireworks, the fire department had to come in at that time. Also May 13th in another town called Appledorn, riots for five consecutive days, including abuse of police and security.

Starting point is 03:12:58 Later in May, fireworks were thrown through the windows of the municipal building and theater in the town of Isselstein, the town of Eudgeist at roughly the same time, A explosive constructed out of fireworks was thrown through the window during a municipal meeting. And this was part of a larger set of violent incidents, again, mainly involving like torches and fireworks. June 18th, a pipe bomb was found at a migration center in Nunan. The explosive ordnance unit had to be a cold in in order to clean it up.

Starting point is 03:13:32 Windows were broken and a small fire broke out. This was the third instance of destruction at this point. particular building. Not great. I've witnessed some of these people protesting, and I'm using the heaviest air quotes possible there. It's just fucking hooligans wanting to riot. Racist fucking hooligans as well. The Save Europe Act is not explicitly called for this. It doesn't have to. It doesn't have to. It doesn't have to. And they know that. It's laying the groundwork. They know it's more effective. It's more effective for them to just raise the temperature and put the implication out there.

Starting point is 03:14:09 Yeah, and then wave their hands in the air and say, oh, I don't know how this happened when someone... I didn't say that. I never said they should do that. But you know. No, you didn't give these people a baby-kicking class. There's no proof Hitler called for the industrialized mass murder of the Jews. There's no proof that Hitler explicitly directed for the Holocaust to happen, is there? But he's still responsible for it. That's what they're going for, right? They're going for, like, a structuralist approach. to mass violence against migrants, like creating a structure where it takes care of itself.

Starting point is 03:14:42 You create the conditions where it becomes inevitable. Yeah. And then you deny responsibility. You're not giving them the baby kicking class, but you're giving them a bunch of babies and pointing them towards the building where they teach the baby kicking class. Again, there's a reason it matters so much that he was emailing back and forth with Brent and Terrant because they have the exact same ideas about what the problem is. they are just personally going about different versions of the solution.

Starting point is 03:15:11 Yeah. Yeah, that was most horrifying thing about it. And also, I'm so disappointed in so much media here in the Netherlands that any time they even mention Martin Selner, the best they can do is that he received that donation. But nothing about, oh, he destroyed evidence of his contact with him. He possibly would have met him. They agreed on stuff while Terrant was radical enough to plan. and it's like a fucking massacre.

Starting point is 03:15:37 It's lazy journalism. Yeah. Like I'm sure I make plenty mistakes, but I'm also not making my living out of it or claiming that I'm super great at it. But you could at least pretend you're going beyond something as surface level. As, oh, he made a donation.

Starting point is 03:15:53 Okay, fair. That's it. It's like, no, these guys were ideologically aligned enough to possibly meet. Yeah. And like that is a very explicit and obvious connection, right? But it's all these other. attacks and these people being

Starting point is 03:16:06 burned in buildings, that's the same that's the same relationship just without the exchange of money. You can only tell people that some people will violently come to kill them unless they come into action, which is not a legal, not provable

Starting point is 03:16:23 in the court of law inciting people to do violence. And I'm not arguing legal liability. I'm not arguing legal liability. I'm just saying there is a moral and ideological culpability here, that there is a visible relationship between these things that exists outside the framework of legal

Starting point is 03:16:39 culpability, illegal liability here, but there is a relationship between these events, and they know that, and we need to be honest about it. It's a moral culpability. I hate the facade that they put up, like, oh, this is all anti-democratic that they canceled it, and

Starting point is 03:16:55 they're just out for us. I hate that. I even have to sort of engage on their terms. You don't. That's the beauty of it, you don't. Yeah, yeah, you don't. You don't have to debate these people in there, like, debate where they don't acknowledge facts. No, but also broader because they have a platform, they can say things, and you can ignore it, but other people who enjoy it will read it.

Starting point is 03:17:21 Right, and I'm not saying ignore it and it will go away. I'm just saying engaging with the existence of these ideas does not mean you have to engage with what they are saying in the way that they want you to. You don't have to engage in a good faith debate with them, with their ideas, with their stated purpose. You can engage with the idea that you know is underneath of that. Yeah. But I mean more in the sense of like engaging with it in the discourse. Because other people will pick up on the ideas. And if you want to have trying to have a civil conversation with people who have been influenced by the ideas, then like indirectly you still have to engage with them.

Starting point is 03:18:01 And even that is becoming difficult. because they become these two, like, different realities. Yeah. Because they're not interested in having a debate with you. So at the risk of reading another long quote, this reminds me of something that I come back to a lot in this particular debate, in this debate of do we have to engage with them? Do we have to debate them?

Starting point is 03:18:24 The answer is no. And the question has been answered. So Sart wrote an essay in 1946. So in post-war France, like Nazis, you know, Nazis, that occupied France, and there were a lot of Nazi sympathizers, the essay was called the anti-Semite and Jew. And this is a passage that I come back to a lot for this particular question. Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies.

Starting point is 03:18:49 They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with their discourse, for by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument, but to intimidate and disconcert. They don't want to debate you. They want to change the terms of what that debate looks like.

Starting point is 03:19:24 So don't do it. The question is asked and answered. Yeah. We don't have to engage them on terms of their choosing where they get to define the very outlines of reality, which, as you said, make results in something which is completely distinct from actual reality, and it's not worth arguing with someone. I think the Sartre quote would be a good place to finish up, because I think that's probably the most pertinent thing people could take from this.

Starting point is 03:19:51 I hope you all are not having to debate this with your families. So engage with the idea, take the threat seriously, but you don't have to engage. engage with the guy trying to engage with you on a debate. Don't let him set the terms. Now, I fear I've come off a bit wrong there, but... I'm not arguing with you. This is, again, like, for the listener, because I think this is a place a lot of people find themselves, like, well, this guy is wrong.

Starting point is 03:20:15 He's saying these things that are incorrect. I should have a factual debate with him. And that's what he wants. It's very tempting. And it may feel like the right thing to do, but you can't win. No matter how right you are, no matter how wrong he is, you will not win this debate because that's not the point. Yeah, I think like it is always worth reinforcing this. Like, especially with this show, right? We have so many people who are so new to this.

Starting point is 03:20:38 And like they haven't been doing this for 10, 15, 20 years. And it can seem, oh, it's going to X.com and I'll tell them they're wrong and it'll be fine. But like, yeah, you're playing in the Nazi sandbox and they get to choose like how big the box is and what the sand looks like. It's not going to go well for you. And they want to have that argument with you because the louder the argument is, the more people will hear it and the more people will be exposed to the unserious shit that they are saying. Yeah, it dignifies them with a response. It makes it look like something worth arguing about. It's playing chess with a pigeon. No matter how good I am at chess, the pigeon will strut around on the board, knock over the

Starting point is 03:21:16 pieces. And then don't you let's do it. Take a big shit all on the board and strut around like it's victorious. And then, and now the headline is, pigeon plays chess. Isn't that impressive? The pigeon, even if he didn't win, isn't it amazing that he played? Ah, I'm going to find a nice void to scream in for a good minute. Yeah. Okay, Dr. James Stout, anything you want to plug. Dr. Stout? Dr. Stout, yes.

Starting point is 03:21:43 Yeah. Having shot on dissertations. Molly, you have a show where we could learn more about Nazis and this stupid shit they go after, weren't you? Oh, my gosh. Actually, the reason I'm so passionate about not arguing these people on their terms, because I've been writing a lot about race science and eugenics lately. And so this sort of trojing-horsing this argument into the discourse in bad faith is something I'm very mad about this week because I just read a bunch of books about race science. So if you want to hear about that, if you want to hear the fruit of that frustration, you can listen to weird little guys wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 03:22:15 Oh, yeah. I have a podcast called Natural Causes where unfortunately I have made four episodes and I have already had to confront the scope of the fucking need. Rhodesians. They're everywhere. Yeah, well, the Washington State National Guard responding to the little giant fire specifically, I guess. For a country that never existed wasn't very big and only pretended to exist for a couple of years? Yeah. If you're looking at Nazi shit, they just keep coming back.

Starting point is 03:22:42 Yeah. Also, if you're responding to a large fire and you're thinking which white nationalist flag should I take, that is probably the least appropriate, right? Like, if we consider how Rhodesia ending. What you say would be the most appropriate white nationalist flag? Oh, one of the, surely one of the repurpose Viking ones, because they love to fire, right? Like, if I was going that way. Good answer. Good answer. Yeah, thank you.

Starting point is 03:23:04 I think about this a lot. Yeah, if you work for The Seattle Times, you can listen to my podcast, deal on my story, and not attribute it. If you're anyone else, yeah, you can listen to my podcast and hear about how going outside is political. I don't have any other podcasts. I try to keep my mental health somewhat intact. What a way to live. I'm so happy for you. Insofar as that's possible.

Starting point is 03:23:29 Sick burn on us, James. Yeah, yeah. Owned again. I know. I just have a much less tolerance for this than you guys. You're much better at it. It's broken us. So if you want to contact me for some reason, it's now on Blue Sky at two sober possums. For the love of God, don't ask me for feedbacks.

Starting point is 03:23:47 I will not send them. And confront fascists in a peaceful way when they gather. I suppose. Yeah. Radio presents the soundtrack to your October. From spooky podcasts and chilling playlists to nonstop Halloween radio and more. We have all the thrills and chills you're craving this season. Press play.

Starting point is 03:24:29 I'm Melissa Jeltson, 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 03:25:03 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 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,

Starting point is 03:25:35 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Hamza. And I'm Martin. And we're the host of Out of Character. It's a podcast. I know there's a lot of them going around. But why should you listen to ours. Well, we're only the best podcast in the entire world. And we talk about pretty much everything under the sun. For example, music we're listening to, underground music, trending music, drama in music worlds. Yes, sometimes we even talk about just everyday mundane situations in our lives, like the cool Uber driver we just had. Or the food we just say, that is surprisingly delicious. Or we'll talk about the Med Gala and the looks that they wore. Are they awesome? Are they trendy? Come find Because our opinion matters.

Starting point is 03:26:16 And so does yours. And this is a place where all of our minds can come together and connect. So what are you waiting for? Come connect with us. Listen out of character from Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Pods, or wherever you get your podcasts. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. And the argument is, do you want to win?

Starting point is 03:26:39 If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who are. I always say 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.

Starting point is 03:27:00 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. 12 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.

Starting point is 03:27:29 Wherever you get your podcasts. Vampires, minotars, 12-foot skeletons, and apartment doors? Believe it or not, we're talking about romance. It's a monster romance extravaganza on Radio 831, a romance podcast. So join me, Sanjana Basker and my co-host Tyler McCull as we dive into the strange, horny, and wonderfully thoughtful world of falling for something not quite human. I give Tyler a crash course in monster romance, and the villain edit author Rosie Dannon joins to talk vampires, blood play, and finding tenderness in a monstrous love interest. Then, Sentient Object Romance expert Racy Delgado takes us even deeper into the genre. Finally, I assigned Tyler some homework to read Ciennes Costas Morning Glory Milking Farm, and

Starting point is 03:28:13 it's a dozy, but spoiler alert, Tyler emerges ready for more monster tales, because sometimes non-human romances can tell us the most about our desire, our fantasies, and what we actually want. Listen to Radio 831, a romance podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis, Today I'm joined by James Stout, Mia Wong, and Robert Evans. This episode we are covering the week of October 14th to October 21st.

Starting point is 03:28:54 Diva Down, I am sad to report the new White House press secretary, Katie Zagariah, was fired after just five days on the jar. RIP, you guys can't see it, but I'm pouring a 40 out for her right now. It is all over my floor. This is going to cause damage to the wood. This is half a scaramucci. Is it half? I thought it was 70% of a Scareamuchi.

Starting point is 03:29:18 Half a Scareamucci. Scaramucci was 10 days. She was five days. All right. I thought I heard seven for some reason. Good to know. Maybe it's that Scaremucci did more press conferences. She only did one press conference.

Starting point is 03:29:31 All right. That's all it took. Before being fired. That's all it took. To give a sense, I was camping without signal for the entire duration of her career and didn't know who she was. You missed an entire press conference. secretary? Yes.

Starting point is 03:29:45 I am a journalist who covers this shit, and I completely missed her. Her firing came after poor reception to her first performance and reporting, scrutinizing her claims about being a lawyer, despite not passing the bar exam.

Starting point is 03:30:01 Trump told her, quote, honestly, if I were you, I'd reconsider, is this for you, Katie? Because honestly, you don't need this, unquote.

Starting point is 03:30:13 She sure does. One of the funniest Trump exchanges I've ever read. Yeah, wow. Really coming in with empathy. Is this for you, Katie? You don't need this. Trump channeling HR manager. It's incredible.

Starting point is 03:30:28 Yeah, no, he's handling this very delicately by most accounts. Politico reported that Trump told the White House officials Katie had, quote, no talent and shouldn't be on TV. But the White House disputes this. And the White House says that she is, quote, transitioning to a new role. Though Katie said on Twitter, it was quote,

Starting point is 03:30:49 an honor to work for Trump in the past tense. So who knows what she's going to be up to in the future. Incredible. But yeah, no, we have lost out on a lot of potential content in the future. So poor one out for all the all the podcasters out there who was relying on years of press conferences to mine content.

Starting point is 03:31:08 Yeah, Saturday Night Live's got to be really fucking scrambling after that. Oh my God. Yeah. Damn. Yeah, I mean, you know, sometimes a beautiful thing comes into your life and it's just there for a little while and all we can do is enjoy the time we had together with what's her name. Yeah, what's her name?

Starting point is 03:31:24 Yeah, I know a name, Matt. Like I said, I was camping the whole time. Luckily for us, we have so many things to cover, so we'll be fine. Everyone else in danger. Us, deluge. Yeah. Speaking of other things to cover, threatening letters containing a mysterious white powder have been sent to the offices of over three dozen congressional representatives and election offices across at least 32 states.

Starting point is 03:31:50 At least one of these letters sent to Democratic Congresswoman Hillary Shulton of Michigan made a, quote, direct and specific reference to an impending civil war beginning after the election, according to the congresswoman. And interestingly, according to Shulton, the letter claimed to be from the Democratic Socialists of America. So I guess they're kind of moving beyond labor organizing and electoral reform towards some much more interesting tactics. This, of course, is not true. The DSA did not send letters containing mysterious white powder. The implication being it could be anthrax.

Starting point is 03:32:32 It has not been found to be anthrax or dangerous. Usually when letters are received containing white powder, that is the sort of like implicit threat. The return address on several of these envelopes mailed two various addresses across the country was for an old DSA office in New York City, an office that DSA hasn't used in over a decade. Nice. Congresswoman Schulton released a statement which reads in part, quote, This is another instance where the DSA has excused or ignored extremism.

Starting point is 03:33:04 DSA has allowed extremists in its movement, which not only allow, but justify violence. as a viable means to achieve political ends, unquote. Man, they sort of kicked out all my friends who were doing, who were being street medics. Like, come on. They don't got the juice for, I mean, it's not even the juice. Like, no one in the DSA is doing anthrax letters. Come on.

Starting point is 03:33:29 DSA told CBS, quote, needless to say, if we are not involved with these letters, and we are glad to learn no one was harmed, unquote. What are we doing there? Yeah. If a bunch of amateurs with no, like, chemical and biological weapons experience were attempting to distribute anthrax around the country, you would hear about it first when they infected themselves with anthrax. Yeah. Like, that would be the story.

Starting point is 03:33:54 Yeah. And, like, it's worth mentioning, like, yeah, like, this is a fairly common right-wing tactic. This is not a thing where even you're sort of, like, I don't know, you're like 1970s, like red brigades guys who are, like kidnapping people off the streets. Like, even they didn't do this. No, because it's really hard and dangerous. It's really hard and dangerous. It's very much giving, like, learned about terrorism in the 1990s, hasn't paid much attention since and decided to do a hoax.

Starting point is 03:34:22 Early 2000s, but yeah. Yeah, yeah, sure, early 2000s. Come on. I don't know, such a weird option to go with anthrax. I guess there are other white powder, so it's kind of an easy one to go with. I mean, yeah, they're just mailing a white powder. They're not mailing anthrax, right? It's just flour or something.

Starting point is 03:34:40 It's a low effort hoax, sure. Yeah. There's all sorts of white powders out there. There sure are. Powder trigger. The Germans have this fake cocaine that's not intoxicating that comes in this little glass thing. If you just want to snort something, it's cute.

Starting point is 03:34:56 Oh, wow. Snuff. No, it's not snuff. There's no drug in it at all. It's just basically like mint. Just like talcum powder. Yeah, it's kind of. It's just like something that you can snort if you really need to snort.

Starting point is 03:35:06 If you just your nose needs that stimulates. Germany is quite the place. Yeah. Thank you, Germans. So I heard from someone in Northern California this week, and it's a pretty credible source, that ICE agents have been seen outside the Sutter County Veterans Hall in Yuba City, which is a polling place. I didn't see any evidence that they were making detentions there or of people there,

Starting point is 03:35:27 or whether they were just using that as a staging area, I don't know. But this is something I'm really hyper-focused on in the weeks coming up to this mid-term election. Secondly, DHS is leaving TPS recipients from Ukraine and Sudan in limbo. It's not renewing their TPS, but it's not cancelling it either. So TPS generally is already a status which has to be renewed on a very fixed and short timeline, right? So it doesn't give people much permanence to begin with. But at this point, they have even less permanence, right?

Starting point is 03:35:59 It makes it very hard for them to know what to do next. like we saw what happened to Haitian communities after the removal of that TPS, right? Part of me wonder is if this is just like a rate limiting thing for DHS. Like they're still going hard on the TPSs they've already cancelled and like maybe they want to sort of divide and conquer with their surges in different communities or if it's a pretty midterm thing because it is still somewhat unpopular to go after Ukraine. Next, I have CNN reporting that the Department of, Department of Defense is loaning an active denial system to CBP. This thing is often called a heat ray.

Starting point is 03:36:41 The idea, of course, is that CBP might use it at the border for areas of high migrant traffic. They have experimented with this before, and what's interesting is that the Pentagon seemed to have refused to have their people run the system or develop training tactics and procedures to use with the system. This is in line with how the Pentagon has previously approached this. They had these for like almost two decades. And they took them to Afghanistan, but they never used them. And I'm guessing they never used them because some jag somewhere was like, yeah, that's giving war crimes.

Starting point is 03:37:14 It's not a new technology, right? They've never really been able to find a place where they felt, and for younger folks, they did some shit during the war on terror, which is generally considered to be a flagrant violation of international law. But they didn't do this. CBP has evaluated it before two in the L-Central. sector when Rodney Scott, who's now CBP Commissioner, was there. El Centro sector, of course, is ground zero for this ship, right? Greg Bovino, O's Chief Patrol agent there. Obviously,

Starting point is 03:37:44 this comes with massive human rights concerns, as well as international law concerned. If you're using some kind of heat ray to attack people who are not in the United States, the obvious other issue here is that we have fires all the fucking time at the border and turning on a heat ray is probably a great way to have more of them. I guess an interesting development and this is right before we recorded. Hegsex, one of his deputy chiefs of staff, Patrick Weaver, used to be an advisor to Hegther. He's bumped around a bunch of like executive branch appointments. He posted, quote, the border is now a military installation and a battle lab for testing new systems to include directed energy weapons. The border is locked down. And then he posted a picture

Starting point is 03:38:22 of the story. I just want to point out that like, again, it's not Department of Defense staff using this. It would be CBP and CBP would have to develop a whole set of training tactics and procedures to do it before they used it. Last time they did it, they decided basically the juice wasn't worth to squeeze, right? And especially in the Alcentecetre sector at that time, people were coming through a lot of irrigation canals and the chances of somebody drowning, large number of people drowning because you use this on them in a place where they're already in danger. Obviously, they decided not to use it. So we'll keep an eye on that, I guess. This has also a very interesting like imperial boomerang effect of military technology then being used to the border and then as

Starting point is 03:39:03 we've seen across the country that also increases the possibility of border patrol using this technology against American citizens. Yeah. Doing like crowd control like in Portland in 2020 where they used a very specific LRAD that induced, you know, piercing headaches. The idea of this technology getting, you know, closer and closer to being used within our national borders. I mean, as bad as it is, that it exists, the best that CBP could use it at the border itself, which is that this whole issue. Yeah. This also kind of shows the tendency of this sort of development to get closer and closer to the Imperial Corps. To the metropole, yeah. And I think that that's towards ever-the-earth, right?

Starting point is 03:39:42 Like Miller's book, Empire of Borders, I don't know when that came out, but like he talks about the U.S.-Palestine border, the direct pathway, testing systems on Palestinian people to selling them to border patrol. And then, as you say, to them finding their way into the metropole, right? The whole country is experiencing now what we have experienced at the border, which is the state is either hostile or completely absent. And talking of that, like in Pensacola, right, where people are working to repair from storm damage, I saw that ICE had come to arrest two roofers who were working to repair that storm damage, right?

Starting point is 03:40:14 Like, what you expect from the federal government is FEMA. FEMA is pretty much on its knees right now, but ice has swallowed up all that funding, gobbled it up, and it's there. I think it resulted in, like, Like we're not coming down from the roof and eventually ice leaving, which has happened in several cases specifically with roofers, right? Good for them.

Starting point is 03:40:33 Glad they didn't get caught. Yeah, talking of weird DHS shit, the United States Coast Guard has released a bizarre promo video detailing their work in San Diego, which features, I think I would describe it as an emo cover of Pink Pony Club by Chapel Rhone. What? It's real weird.

Starting point is 03:40:49 Yeah, we can listen to it, but we don't have to. No. No, I'm good. I'm good. Yeah. continuing in their trend of like trolling intellectual property, right? Finally, the Hunter in Myanmar is continuing to flounder in its assault on Rakhine or Araka state. It's sort of continuing with its major tactical philosophy,

Starting point is 03:41:10 which seems to be doing World War II shit in 2026. This time they've gone with an imposed amphibious assault. They're trying to stop the Arika armies offensive on Sitway, and the way they've done that is like big landing crafts full of conscripts, which has resulted in massive casualties, right? There's been a bunch of reporting over the last few months on how these big hunter-offensive work, and it seems to be like straight up human wave attacks at which the officers, at least the higher ranking officers, the officers who would plan such an operation are not present.

Starting point is 03:41:47 And then any of the NCOs or officers who are present, Their role is not to think tactically and adapt. It's to enforce discipline and continue enforcing the plan even as everybody's dying. So yeah, it's a pretty brutal scene for conscripts in Myanmar right now. Early voting has begun in Texas. And this past week in the lead up to the election, pamphlets have been mailed to households across Texas from a group identified as the quote, Texas transgender student union. These pamphlets were addressed to students in the household and contained resources for LGBTQ youth and a guide on how trans teens can emancipate themselves.

Starting point is 03:42:31 These mailers have sparked outrage among conservatives, and that appears to have been the point. This, quote, Texas transgender student union doesn't actually exist, or at least didn't exist until last month, when a group by that name, registered as an LLC in Wyoming, according to business records. I said LLC in Wyoming. Okay. Hell yeah. Great stuff happening here.

Starting point is 03:42:58 This is not a real student advocacy group in Texas. This is an op. This pamphlet does include some resources from Tent. That's Transgender Education Network of Texas, which is a real advocacy group. But they were not involved in the making of this mailer, nor do they have emancipation resources. Tent has since faced a huge wave of harassment and threats following the mailing out of this pamphlet. The Texas Tribune traced the mailer ID of two pamphlets to a mail tracking company called Snailworks,

Starting point is 03:43:33 who, the National Republican Congressional Committee, has paid almost $60,000 over the past two years for mailing services, according to a Federal Election Commission, search of campaign finance records. Stephen Manichelli is currently kind of running this lead down and trying to figure out exactly where this mailer has come from. He's been like live tweeting his investigation. We don't know tons yet, but if you want an update on it, check out our correspondent Stephen Monticelli on social media.

Starting point is 03:44:03 He'll probably have some more info about where exactly this letter came from and who might be behind it. Texas Smith County Republican precinct chair Sarah Fields posted a picture of one of these mailers that she received. and wrote, People are getting pissed. Let this be a reminder to take your anger to the voting booth.

Starting point is 03:44:22 Though a later follow-up post noted the suspicious origin of these pamphlets, quote, I just check my messages. No less than 100 parents have messaged me. Enraged over the mailers. Is this an op? If it is, it's not okay.

Starting point is 03:44:37 It even gives tips on how to get emancipated, unquote. So it appears that this mailer was sent out specifically just to make some Texans upset enough to go to the polls trying to mobilize anti-trans sentiment to get them to vote for the Republicans. Yeah, it's an extension of a theme, I guess.

Starting point is 03:44:58 In some other, I guess, transgender-related news, earlier this month, the New York City Health Department announced a plan to spend $9 million to provide gender-affirming care to minors after two hospitals in the city, NYU Langone and Mount Sinai caved to pressure from the Trump administration and cut services to trans youth. This funding is set to go into effect early next year, likely partnering with Callan Lord, which is a local LGBTQ hospital system in the city. And as of the day of recording this, Wednesday, October 21st, the Supreme Court, at least temporarily, blocked the Trump administration from denying gender affirming care to trans prisoners.

Starting point is 03:45:37 This was just a two-sentence unsigned order, which leaves in place a previous court order from a U.S. District Judge in D.C., which originally blocked the Bureau of Prisons New Policy going to effect, which would have taken away trans-prisoners' gender-affirming care, including their health care. The second sentence of this two-sentence order from the Supreme Court reads, quote, Justice Thomas and Justice Alito would grant the application for state. day, meaning that these two justices would have let the new anti-trans policy from the Bureau of Prisons go into effect. So the fact that those two are singled out is interesting. You could interpret this possibly as like a seven two ruling, but there's really no legal justification given. It's just two sentences. It's the shortest like shadow docket ruling I've seen. We'll see what happens going forward. Yeah, I hope we got a good one. Yeah, we got another small thing

Starting point is 03:46:36 that literally broke while we were doing this. Great. So San Diego City Council Committee voted on Wednesday to rescind the ALPR use policy. That doesn't take ALPRs completely out in San Diego. It means that any future contract would have to go through the whole process again, including this like a privacy review board.

Starting point is 03:46:58 That is automated license plate readers? Readers, yeah, flock cameras in the colloquial, but in this case and other analogs, right? A lot of places said, oh, yeah, a counselling flock and then gone to Axon or another provider. Switch to Axon. Yeah, that's the move. Yeah. Bravely, Mayor Todd Gloria has immediately stepped him to put himself between the flock cameras

Starting point is 03:47:18 and the people of San Diego. Like the hero he is. Todd Gloria has cloned himself and is personally standing in front of every license plate reader. Most useful thing he's ever done. Todd Gloria is watching. Would that work? Are clones people?

Starting point is 03:47:35 Could we just do that with the, with the flops? flock cameras. I don't know. Somebody get to work on that. A flock of Todd. Give everyone, instead of a digital twin, everybody just has a clone twin that stands in front of the flock cameras.

Starting point is 03:47:46 Just constantly flipping them off. Yeah, Todd said, automated license plate readers are helping San Diego, please solve serious crimes, cover stolen of vehicles and property and locate missing people. Taking this proven tool away from our officers will be a serious mistake

Starting point is 03:47:58 and a step backwards for public safety. Shut the fuck up, Todd Gloria. A number of people in San Diego have been wrongly arrested. and detained because of flock cameras, right? People will remember that San Diego police had the vehicle description and number plate for the people who shot up the Islamic Center of San Diego, the mosque, right?

Starting point is 03:48:19 Four hours, and they did fuck all. Not one of the cops engaged those people, right? The only person who stepped up, who kept that community safe were people who were already at that mosque, two of whom died in the act of stopping the shooter, killing more people. Surveillance is not safety. That is not the same thing.

Starting point is 03:48:38 And it is particularly pathetic for our mayor, right? Who was shouted down at a press conference that night at the ICSD to attempt to lie about this when he has failed our city so badly. Fuck this guy. Like, there is very little nice I have to say about Todd Gloria. Let's move on, I guess, to other contract shit. ICE has issued a no-bit extension to the contract that I'm pretty sure it's ormentum services. has to keep running East Montana. I know what the company is called. I'm guessing that's how they

Starting point is 03:49:09 pronounce it. It could be Almentum, but I don't really care. In the justification, they say, quote, momentum owns and controls key facility infrastructure and operational assets at Camp East Montana. These assets include temporary housing unit security systems, generators, food service equipment, and other infrastructure necessary to operate this facility. Because of this ownership and operational control, Ammintam uniquely possesses the ability to continue services without a break in performance, no other vendor can assume responsibility for the facility and provide the required services without substantial transition time, duplicity cost, operational disruption and unacceptable risk to detainee welfare and mission continuity. They then go on to mention the Office of the

Starting point is 03:49:50 Inspector General report on the horrific conditions there, including three deaths and the destruction of evidence in one of those cases. They say, quote, recent oversight by the ICE Office of Detention Oversight yielded a preliminary report identifying more findings. The circumstances created and contributed to a need for immediate contractual action to protect any detainees and staff and ensure performance under ICE standards. So they are renewing and extending this contract, right, for this agency, which is remarkably bad among ICE contractors, among immigration detention, right? This contract is vast. It has a base period of seven months, followed by a 12 months option and then two six months options. The payout for these, and then there's

Starting point is 03:50:33 There's quite a lot of redactions in this. A redacted item on the budget combined with all these extensions would together be $2.8 billion. Jesus. Yeah, this is for a tent camp, right, on a military base. So, like, these people are not having to build buildings,

Starting point is 03:50:52 they have to maintain their tent camp, right? But they also don't own the land. Like, they're doing this as a contractor on a military base. That's crazy. I mean, you're left to wonder how much of this whole thing as like state subsidies for like allies for the Republican Party or like it's just it seems why. That's a lot of stuff right now.

Starting point is 03:51:12 Beyond the morality of like what's going on, it seems like a wildly inefficient use of funds. Yeah, well, what's particularly remarkable, I don't think Amentum had ever, we've reported on this before, but I'm pretty sure at the time we reported that this isn't what they do or they hadn't done this before.

Starting point is 03:51:26 This is going to be the biggest contract by orders of magnitude they've ever had. Also, the monthly rate escalates from 68, million a month to 97 million a month. Whoa. Yeah, I mean, maybe Trump's just going to go after it a bit more with inflation. You know, maybe he's going to invade some more places that make oil and everything's going to get more expensive.

Starting point is 03:51:46 Maybe that's what they're predicting. But, like, it could also be that they plan to scale up this facility, right? Yeah. Yeah, it is remarkable. Like, this one hasn't had as much reporting, I don't think, as some of the geo-group and core civic facilities, because it's harder to, right? because it's hard of people to protest outside. Often we find out about things by either migrants shouting them out over the walls

Starting point is 03:52:09 or like writing notes and tossing them out. So we haven't heard as much about this, but the conditions we have heard in that report were horrific. And nonetheless, these guys are about to net massive bounty. Talking of bounties, is it time for us to make some money with an advertising break? I'm afraid of this. Yes.

Starting point is 03:52:31 Nice. And we're back. So first, kind of a quick story. I mean, this is actually a huge story. It might wind up being one of the biggest ones we've covered in the last few months, but at the moment there's just not a ton out in terms of like knowing what the consequences are going to be. But there was a massive vulnerability revealed in PHP this week. PHP, which stands for personal homepage, is a scripting language used to develop websites,

Starting point is 03:53:08 like most of the websites in one way or another. I think like 70% of the Internet these days really, relies on PHP in some way, you know, aspects of the website or whatever, like I still use it. WordPress uses it heavily, so do platforms like Drupal and Magneto. It wouldn't be too far off to view PHP as a foundation level of the modern internet. Late Tuesday, a massive vulnerability was discovered in PHP by AI systems. Two vulnerabilities actually were found, and without getting technical, these could provide bad actors with a way to run whatever code they want on an affected server without even logging in. One thing a bad actor could do with this is create a backdoor

Starting point is 03:53:43 or edit the content of a website to embed malicious code. This is a tremendously like broad reaching and severe vulnerability. Yeah. Now, when stuff like this gets found, the ideal thing to do is to inform, you know, the people who maintain PHB or whatever or whatever thing a vulnerability has been found in so they can patch it before it becomes known to everybody that there's this massive vulnerability. But that's not what happened. The vulnerability was leaked hours before the patch came out.

Starting point is 03:54:09 The patch was set for Wednesday. and on Tuesday, like late afternoon, early evening, everyone knew that there was a vulnerability. And so every major website on the planet scrambled, taking themselves down or disabling pHP related parts of the website and applying emergency fixes. Like the Netherlands, like a bunch of government websites went down. Fourchan was down.

Starting point is 03:54:26 A bunch of like very large and influential websites were down, including a lot of government sites. You've probably noticed this to some extent. I want to quote now from an article by Malwarebyte Labs. The longer term concern is forgotten infrastructure, abandoned websites, unsupported applications, and connected devices with PHP-based management interfaces. Vulnerable installations may remain exposed if nobody maintains them or a vendor no longer supplies updates.

Starting point is 03:54:51 So it's way too early to know what the long-term impacts of all these vulnerabilities and of like the hacks that are going to be carried out as a result of these vulnerabilities will be, but this is a big story. You should expect to hear a lot more in the near future. This is an example of how, you know, one of the things these AI tools have done is that Hacking has always involved a lot of automated stuff, like running scripts and whatnot to search for vulnerabilities, and AI has allowed us to supercharge the speed at which vulnerabilities are found

Starting point is 03:55:19 and exploited. And so shit like this is going to become much more common. This is all part of like the decreasing reliability with which we'll all be able to access and utilize the internet safely. And yeah, it's just kind of worth keeping an eye on this, even though it's not clear what the fallout entirely is going to be at this point. Scary. But everybody you know in digital security says this is a very big deal.

Starting point is 03:55:41 Yeah, it's real bad. Heads on a swivel. Family. So, moving outside of the internet and over to a place that has no internet, let's talk about Canada. Garrison, is that accurate? Does Canada not have the internet? I don't know, man. You don't know.

Starting point is 03:55:56 Okay, that's good. Good to know. That's our Canadian correspondent, Garrison Davis. Thanks. Yeah. Sorry. I'll be up there to report in person in a few months. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 03:56:05 If you can text me, we'll know there's internet. Well, actually, that's not the internet. That's good for it. Those of you who pay attention to the most important goings on of our neighbors to the north, and I mean, Canadians, not Yankees, for our southern listeners, know that the province of Alberta just held a referendum on whether or not to hold a binding referendum on separating from Canada. And the separatists failed, just like in Star Wars. Also like in Star Wars, the roots of the Alberta secession movement have a lot to do with complex issues of trade,

Starting point is 03:56:30 particularly the oil and gas trade. In 1969, only about 5% of Albertans, expressed interest in discussing separation from Canada during a provincial poll. But then came the 1970s and the 1973 oil crisis, which was sparked by the Yom Kippur War, and then OPEC getting big mad, that OPEC got really mad a couple of times in the 70s. And there were a bunch of fuel shocks. If you grew up in like the time most of the people this podcast did and you went to like an elementary or a middle school or any kind of public school that had no windows, that's because it was

Starting point is 03:57:00 probably built around this period. And they were like desperate to find ways to reduce heating and cooling costs. Amazing. And another impact that those fuel shocks had was that it caused a lot of North America to go like, well, I guess we have to exploit our own oil reserves much more because we cannot rely on the stuff we had been relying on. This helps spur massive and rapid growth in the North American oil sector, obviously across the United States, but in Canada as well. This was a big deal in Canada because Alberta happens to be one of the most oil rich places on planet Earth. The province alone has the fourth highest proven reserves of oil on planet Earth, according to a 20, 25 report by a consulting firm McDaniel and associates.

Starting point is 03:57:40 And we actually didn't, like, this is actually a change in terms of what we knew about Alberta's oil reserves. They keep going up as we, like, figure out how to get better at, you know, it's a mix of hydraulic fracking and like better science and whatnot, but they're getting better at finding out and exploiting, like, how much oil there is in Alberta. About two million more barrels of oil were recently discovered in Alberta, thanks to a mix of hydraulic fracturing and new technology for drilling wells. For a write-up by the Bow Report, oil sands production has grown substantially in the past decade, up 70% from 2 million to 3.4 million barrels per day.

Starting point is 03:58:13 The growth of several projects has increased confidence in the commercial viability of developing additional lands. Now, this is significant for a couple of reasons, but one thing that has grown over the past few decades, alongside Alberta's proven oil reserves, is secessionist or separatist sentiment. There are different opinions among those people about what should be done when and if Alberta separates, but a decent challenge. of them do support joining the United States. And I don't think it takes a lot of imagining to wonder why some people in the charge of the United States government right now might support that. To continue with that Bo report analysis. Since the Shale Revolution in 2008, there's been a massive growth from North America and the rest of the world hasn't grown oil production. We're now seeing that the tight plays in the U.S. aren't infinite and are showing signs of plateauing. Specifically,

Starting point is 03:58:59 when we look at the United States' largest oil play, the Permian, it has essentially been flat at 5.5 million barrels per day since December of 2023. Flat production from the Permian is contrary to the previous decade, where we saw tight oil production grow by half a million barrels per day per year. Oil demand has gone up by about a million barrels a day per year for the last several decades, and at this point we do expect that to continue, at least in the very near term. Given the growing demand for oil and stagnation in supply growth, since the shale revolution, it's expected that Alberta's oil sands reserves will become increasingly critical, as global oil demand continues to rise, and with limited growth and production from other sources,

Starting point is 03:59:35 oil sands reserves will be relied upon more heavily. So Alberta is one of the places in North America that we keep finding more oil. And as we start to plateau in the United States, people in the U.S. government, particularly the Trump administration, are looking at Alberta as a potential crucial resource for the future. So while there's a lot of wackiness around the Alberta secession movement, as there is with any secession movement in the U.S. or in Canada,

Starting point is 04:00:00 there's also major geopolitical implications behind the mere discussion of Albertan independence, and the prize of Alberta oil was considered well worth some scheming by people in the Trump administration. The movement had gotten supercharged first during a conflict in the early 1980s between then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and the Albertan Premier Peter Lauheed, who disagreed about how fair Canada's revenue-sharing energy policy was. Trudeau argued that the federal government needed to control Canada's natural resources and sought to impose further taxes and oil and gas revenues. Lougheed threatened to cut production in response to new taxes.

Starting point is 04:00:34 49% of respondents in a 1981 poll by the Canada West Foundation agreed that Western Canadians benefited so little from membership in the Canadian state that independence made sense. And in the decades since, the issue has remained bubbling in the background, like crude. It was ignited in the modern era in 2015, when Pierre Trudeau's son, Justin, became the prime minister. And to make a log story short, over the last several years, things have really come to a head. Separatist parties who had attracted like one or two percent of the vote previously were supercharged

Starting point is 04:01:03 by COVID-19 restrictions. And then the fact that Trump's been launching a trade war and talking about making Canada the 51st state, that's also helped kind of clamp down on some of the separatist sentiment. It's a big part of what Prime Minister Carney has used to sort of like argue that Canadians need to stand together in this time. And he's right that the separatist movement is being like deliberately pushed by a whole bunch of people in the United States. Now, obviously, the most direct reason why this referendum came about is because in May, Albertan premier Danielle Smith announced that the independence question

Starting point is 04:01:33 would come to a vote. She supported a unified Canada, but was willing to have a referendum vote because over 300,000 Albertans had signed a petition asking for a referendum. The petition's signatures had been gathered after a mass town hall campaign by pro-separation citizens. It was blocked by a court for reasons to do with indigenous rights initially, but was allowed to go through. voters in this referendum had a number of choices to make, not just as to whether or not to do a binding referendum. Although first they did have to choose, do we remain with Canada, or do we start the process of holding a binding separation referendum? But, per the BBC, quote, there are nine other questions that have been put to voters, though they have been overshadowed by the one on independence. They deal with two main topics, immigration and constitutional matters.

Starting point is 04:02:14 For the most part, all of them seek to ask Albertans about options to gain autonomy from Ottawa. Voters were also asked, for example, if they wanted more control on immigration, and whether people, people should have to provide proof of citizenship to vote. U.S. interests repeatedly attempted to influence the election in a number of ways. A write-up in McLean's documents how U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Besant held an interview with Jack Posobic where he said, I think we should let them come down into the U.S. Alberta is a natural partner for the U.S. rumor that they may have a referendum on whether they want to stay in the U.S. or not.

Starting point is 04:02:44 This was taken very seriously by Canadians as a statement of U.S. support for intervention in Canadian politics, consistent with a 2025 national security strategy, regime released, which revealed what's known as the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The Don Roe Doctrine? Yeah. This, per the White House, put Canada in the U.S. sphere of influence. As McLeans wrote, quote, The document was read with dread in Ottawa.

Starting point is 04:03:07 The strategy has, of course, played out in rhetoric and policy. The administration wants a say on Canada's trade agreements. It wants specialized access to resources, and it has zero regard for notions of sovereignty, except, it seems, when it comes to Alberta. Now, the most direct U.S. influence in this whole process so far has been online. Tons of MAGA-affiliated accounts pushed Albertan secession. Benny Johnson suggested taking Alberta militarily, Stephen Crowder, supported Albertan statehood, all sorts of stupid shit.

Starting point is 04:03:34 McGill's study found pro-independence accounts on social media outperformed anti-independence accounts by an eight-to-one ratio, which is pretty clear evidence of interference by social media companies, I would say. Right before the referendum, public interest Alberta called for an inquiry into foreign interference in Alberta's secession referendation. after it was found that Albertan separatist leaders held a meeting with U.S. Republican political strategists in the province about how to push the referendum. This is all very fucked up, and Canadians should be pissed at us. The good news is that, for now, things did not go MAGA's way, did not go the Trump administration's way. Albertans voted overwhelmingly to stay part of Canada.

Starting point is 04:04:15 Nearly 2 million people cast their ballots, and so far about 75% of them look to have supported remaining Canadian. and I think we'll be continuing to cover aspects of this in the future, but that's what you need to know right now. Nice. Anything to add, Gare? Yeah, I'm glad that Alberta voted to not have a vote on whether to leave Canada. Yeah. Unfortunately, though, some of the more confusingly worded referendum questions

Starting point is 04:04:39 on stuff like immigration or not as unanimous, the early count on a bunch of those immigration questions leans yes in favor of pursuing more restrictions, but the margins on those are pretty small, and votes from cities like Edmonton and Calgary are still coming in and could theoretically switch those over, but they'd have to go up a couple percent. Some of the other questions on like changes to the Constitution have already flipped from yes to know as we've been getting in more results from the cities. But these other questions are pretty close. We don't have to full results quite yet. So although U.S. interference did not produce the result on separation

Starting point is 04:05:26 that MAGA may have wanted, the type of immigration rhetoric that spreads on social media is not unique to the United States or really any kind of quote-unquote Western country right now. There's pretty ugly stuff everywhere. But yeah, in terms of the separation referendum that all lines up with what I've been reading in the old CBC and what I've been talking with my family about because, yeah, they've been voting. They're voting. I don't know, Canada, I'm going to give you the same advice

Starting point is 04:05:57 I give every country these days. Invest in long-range missile defenses. Well, I don't know. Sorry. I don't know if that's the best use of Canadian state money. It might be.

Starting point is 04:06:13 There are some countries who really do like this. But no, I mean, Alberta really is the heart of the of the kind of conservative conservative movement in Canada right now. This is where like, you know, like the, the trucker convoy was organized,

Starting point is 04:06:28 all of those, all those many years ago. It is one of three provinces I've heard described as Canada's Texas. It's the, that's the only one that's accurate, right? People could say like maybe like Manitoba or Saskatchewan,

Starting point is 04:06:40 they're lying. Those are obviously like Midwest states. Nova Scotia's got a little bit of Texas in it, but only a little. Interesting. No, it's, it's definitely, it's definitely Alberta. I mean, my family lives surrounded by oil derricks. It's quite incredible.

Starting point is 04:06:54 Should we stick to non-U.S. countries and pivot to Mia Wong? So speaking of places where people are pissed off at the Trump administration, we are moving to our dispatches from a world in revolt. And we're moving first to Albania, which has seen staggeringly large protests over the last roughly a... week. It's very difficult to get good numbers on how big the Albanian protests are. I will say just off the top as a indication of how successful they've been. They lit the Supreme Court on fire. They lit part of the Albanian Central Bank on fire. So the protests that have rocked Albania over the last week are a massive escalation of ongoing protests over a basically city-sized seaside real estate development tied to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, whose firm affinity partners.

Starting point is 04:07:54 Okay, so this is where it gets murky because they've been granted special investment status by the government. I also talked about this development project. There's like a video of, I think on Instagram of them talking about it and how they discovered this place when they went on vacation. It's kind of unclear exactly the extent to which they are involved in it. I don't know. No one seems to exactly know how closely tied there in.

Starting point is 04:08:17 I've seen some reports, like, the rumor is that they're just straight up selling it to Cushner's, like firm, right? This development is going to be built on a wildlife reserve that is home to a whole bunch of animals like sea turtles, and importantly, a bunch of flamingos, which has led to this, you know, these protests, the original version of these protests being dubbed the Flamingo Revolution. Nice. But the protest kicked into a higher gear in the last week. As I mentioned before, the protesters have been extremely successful in competition.

Starting point is 04:08:47 betting security forces. Again, they lit the Supreme Court on fire. They have spread rapidly across the country. Albania's nominally socialist party president has blamed conservatives and also Iran for fomenting the protests. But this rings somewhat hollow given that a very prominent young member of his own party who he had handpicked or run at like age 25 also joined the protest during the original phase of it. And the intensification of these protests and their expansion from being sort of solely about this real estate development to being about the things that all the rest of the uprisings are about, which is to say unemployment, you know, terrible education, like bad economic prospects are very directly linked to the other uprisings

Starting point is 04:09:34 in France, Spain, India, and other places. People, yeah, people are directly inspired when, you know, when you read interviews of them in the streets, they're directly inspired by what, I don't know if I like the name the Gen Z Revolt, but that's kind of what it's being called. Yeah, and there is this massive, like, generational, like, conflict element of these protests. Yeah. Yeah. Although, again, like, it's worth noting that, like, a lot of the people involved in this are a lot older than that.

Starting point is 04:10:00 Like, I think, I think part of what's happening is, like, it's, like, the students who are the first people to take the street, and then everyone else goes with them. And that tends to be the case, like, generally, right? Like, it's generally young people who are just a bit of, like, it's generally young people who are just a bit less risk averse and who tend to do those things. They have less a stake in ways continuing exactly how they are. Yeah, and more to gain, right? Like, they have the rest of their lives to deal with this shit.

Starting point is 04:10:26 Yeah. Yep. And, you know, I think this is actually very encouraging that you're seeing very, very deliberate sort of tying of these protests to the protests going on in other countries in a way that wasn't really true of like the 2018, 2019, 2020 wave of protests. And it harkens back to the sort of international. of 2011, where you would have things like protesters who were occupying Tucker Square would be like ordering pizzas for striking teachers in Wisconsin.

Starting point is 04:10:54 Like that kind of, this is closer, not fully there, but closer to that kind of era of solidarity between these movements. And a lot of that is because, you know, the people taking the streets are seeing the same economic conditions everywhere and are seeing people like go fight to break. And that helps to break the passivity of, you know, the passivity of the hour and get people into the streets. Speaking of getting people into the streets, we're going to turn from Albania to France,

Starting point is 04:11:21 where the question in France for the last few weeks had been fairly simple. The question was, will the rest of French society join the French students in the streets, or would they let the student movement be crushed alone? And this weekend, to its credit, French society issued a fairly resounding answer. Yes, we are going to go into the streets.

Starting point is 04:11:42 and the result of that was over the weekend, France saw the largest protest the country has seen since at minimum the peak of the Gillesjean like yellow vest uprising, possibly larger, and it's been defined by a level of militancy that even in a nation defined by the riot is almost more characteristic of a small revolution than a large protest. the gilles jean like they've set up a whole website to convene people to protest and they have another one coming up on the 24th yeah yeah and that that's part of what's been happening here is that you know the student protest survived long enough

Starting point is 04:12:21 for the dates that the LFS had set up and what this has caused is a huge swath of both the French left and the French working class out there you're seeing everyone from like proles and like you know French territories in Reunion in Guadalupe, where in Guadalupe people seem to be like shooting at police stations and

Starting point is 04:12:39 stuff to, you know, you have the remains of the yellow vests. And in something that is genuinely sort of remarkable French society, you're seeing both the white and non-white French working classes go out at the same time, which is something that very, very rarely happens. Usually when one segment goes out, the other one doesn't. So if you look at like the 20, you know, the riots in 20203 against like police killings,

Starting point is 04:13:00 were probably the most like militant, like, street movement you've seen in France. in ages, but it was just the non-white workers going out. And this time it's been both, partially because the student movement was born in a bunch of working class suburbs of Paris, but then spread to the rest of Paris and the rest of the country. You've been seeing a sort of alliance here in a way that you haven't in a long time. And the consequence of this is that when enough of the French working class goes out together, you know, you can start doing the thing that they're doing right now, which is burying

Starting point is 04:13:33 down city halls. And you know, you can see this. When you read accounts from people on the ground, it doesn't read like an account of, you know, even a pretty militant French protest. Like, it reads like something out of like 1848. You're reading things like, quote, thousands of people are in the Elise district, setting up barricades. These are the largest mobilizations we've seen this decade. It's probably, it's hard to get good numbers of like the peak of the Gillesje on the government is estimating 500,000. The unions estimate 800,000, which I think is much closer. I've seen estimates up into the millions.

Starting point is 04:14:09 This was also a massive shock to the government. The government had been projecting that about 100,000 people would come out. They were projecting the movement was about to die. And then suddenly, you know, eight to 10 times as many people as the government thought was going to be out came out. And this is also surprising to some extent in that this uprising differs a lot from the last half decade of anti-austerity protests and general strikes, right? There have been a lot of, general strikes in the last, like half a decade, but the call for this didn't come out from the

Starting point is 04:14:39 unions. You know, it came out from a whole bunch of decentralized networks, including the sort of yellow vestings, including the student movement networks. And because of that, it was able to put into the streets almost an order of magnitude more people than anyone else has been able to call out. And it puts the French state in a somewhat difficult position because there isn't really a force that can just rein the protests in in a way that you had with the French general strikes where you can negotiate with the unions. There's just an unbelievable number of extremely angry people in the streets

Starting point is 04:15:06 and we're going to see how the protest continues to escalate this weekend. I'm going to move to a couple of kind of small ones. So in Tunisia, we had Tunisia's largest union calling a pretty large anti-government protest, which is pretty notable because, So Tunisia's been under the rule of, like, effectively a dictator who came in promising to sort of, like, end the rampant corruption and unemployment of the sort of post-revolutionary in Tunisia. That hasn't happened. But Tate has been, like, incredibly effective at repressing protests and repressing opposition.

Starting point is 04:15:45 And this is the largest group, like, group of people anyone's been able to put in the streets in basically since he came to power. So we're going to be monitoring what's happening there. It's also worth mentioning what's going on in Italy, where there. where there have been some small protests in the north. I say small. Very effective, but small protests in the north that, like, managed to sack a whole bunch of Milan shopping district, which pissed off the government enormously.

Starting point is 04:16:10 So there's a troop deployment going on in Milan. But I think more interestingly are the protests happening in the south at the same time, where there's a set of roadblocks that are being maintained as part of a trucker's protest over sort of rising diesel. diesel prices are skyrocketing. There just isn't diesel to buy as well, which means that a bunch of the trucking sector that fuels a sort of export economy of the agricultural parts of Southern Italy are collapsing because the truckers who are independent contractors can't afford diesel.

Starting point is 04:16:42 And that's been crushing their industry. And so we're starting to see blockades of the roads leading up to ports. And that's something that I think can escalate because there just has not really been a government solution to these problems. Finally, I want to talk about Indonesia, where on Tuesday the 19th, or yesterday as we're recording this, but protests sort of begun in earnest against the country's increasingly battled right-wing president, Prabowo Subiento, who is a former general and a former minister of defense and who came in on a very sort of like right-wing military fascist platform. Subiento has come under fire, and I use that term quite literally here, for his failure to even vaguely contain. a massive series of wildfires in Sumatra and Borneo that have been going on since July.

Starting point is 04:17:30 So this is not a situation where people are mad at the government for not being able to control the weather. These fires have been going on for four months, and they have covered not just Indonesia, but a broad swath of the entire region, like in these clouds of toxic smoke. And I mean, like, these clouds of toxic smoke are reaching Vietnam, right? And this has been going on for four months now,

Starting point is 04:17:51 and the government has not been able to put them out. people are extremely pissed. I'm going to quote here from Arab news, quote, the Ministry of Health, this is just in Indonesia. The Ministry of Health has recorded at least 277,000 cases of acute respiratory infection related to the fires so far, of which 60,000 are children under five. So this has pushed people into the streets in the last couple of days. Again, this is a set of protests that begun with students,

Starting point is 04:18:19 like, hearkening to the student protests across the world. The government has said it will deploy 9,000 police officers to crush the protests. It's unclear exactly how this is going to go because we're in effectively day two of them as we're recording. Yeah, and we will keep you informed as that situation unfolds. Let's go on one more ad break and then return for two more important stories. So talking of like a world in world on fire. Yeah. Let's talk about Iran and Ukraine, right?

Starting point is 04:18:59 So the UKMTO's report maritime trade office, I believe, indicated that the maritime reporting agency has struggled to, I'm just going to quote from it, struggling to accurately report true numbers of attacks with majority of vessels refusing to report to UKMTO. And then the next bullet point, UKMTO is aware via other sources of incidents but constrained on reporting through lack of verification.

Starting point is 04:19:23 Despite this, they recorded more than a dozen attacks last week. and they recorded the transit straight with 70% lower, straight of Hormuz, obviously, than pre-conflict levels. While oil is moving through that east-west Saudi pipeline that bypasses straight-of-hormuz, it seems the move in Hormuz right now is to use smaller craft to offload to larger vessels. This, of course, is all happening at the same time that Ukraine has continued to use long-range drone attacks to batter Russian fuel infrastructure. Launched a bunch of larger-scale operations over the weekend. And it appears that the world's most divorced man is not happy about this.

Starting point is 04:20:05 That's Elon Musk, if you're not familiar. Elon Musk has been gating the speed at which Ukraine can remain connected to the internet through his Star Shield system. He started doing this about the 14th of October, which was last Wednesday for you listening on Friday. this has serious impacts for Ukrainian drone offensives. According to posts by Ukrainian officials on Telegram, they weren't warned about this.

Starting point is 04:20:30 They already can't use the Star Shield itself in Russian territory, but for other operations, it seems that they've been limited to connecting at speeds below 100 miles an hour 160 KPH. This 100-mile limit seems to be something that they've now arrived at, but when this was first happening, people were experiencing connectivity issues even slower than that. So it's not uncommon for drones to be equipped with a terminal, right?

Starting point is 04:20:56 Like a Star Shield or Starlink terminal to either function as a relay or in some cases like the actual drone that engages the Russians will have a terminal on it. They also use them on interceptor drones. I'm not entirely clear how. I can guess, but I'm not going to dig it in public. Someone knows I'd love to hear Coolzone Tips at Proton.me. If you're not familiar with Star Shield, Star Shield is a Gov-slash-military version of Starlink.

Starting point is 04:21:25 Sometimes the high-acist fast as speed, certain specific satellites. They're not entirely interchangeable, but Star Shield can use that Starlink network kind of plus, I guess. Ukraine has a couple of things. It has Star Shield, and then it has a registry of Ukraine Ministry of Defense Starlink terminals, which seems to be a separate thing, right? but like when it took a long time, but eventually Starlink turned off support for the Starlink terminals of Russians were using, right? And it seems like they have this registry, which is oftentimes units in Ukraine will either fundraise to purchase or have donated to them

Starting point is 04:22:02 a Starlink terminal. And then they can go to the Ministry of Defense and be like, hey, can you add this to a list? And then it's treated differently by the company as opposed to like, and I guess the deal there is to avoid Russians buying it. And they don't want to be supportive of Russia invading Ukraine, at least in that way. On X.com, the everything website, Elon Musk claim that, quote, Star Shield systems are owned and controlled by the US government. Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS. Starlink, of course, is a commercial service owned by Space X. And this is, I'm continuing quote from Musk here. Usage of Starlink is limited to civilian or defense activities cannot be used for offensive

Starting point is 04:22:43 military action as doing so would be inappropriate for a commercial company. On the 17th of October, Marco Rubio then went on to claim that Ukraine does not have Star Shield. On Star Shield, what's going on? Because Elon Musk said it's up to the president. Well, it's Star Shield or Starlink? Well, yeah, I know. It's confusing. So Starlink is a commercial product, okay? And so it's regulated and handled as a commercial product. Star Shield is a defense product, a military product. And as I said, I mean, that is something that we have a, you. The military, United States military uses, it's not at this moment available to Ukraine,

Starting point is 04:23:22 and that's under conversation. I mean, it's under discussion right now of how they would want to use it. No, but did the U.S. have anything to do with it not working in Ukraine at the moment? Zelensky said it was deliberate. Well, I don't know what Zolensky said. I don't sure Zolinski knows what he's talking about, but it wasn't deliberate. We had nothing to do with it. I don't, the United States, nobody ordered that Starlink speed to be slowed down.

Starting point is 04:23:41 So, subsequently, the Wall Street Journal reported that, quote, A person familiar with the situation said Musk talked to multiple senior administration officials, including with Trump, before imposing the new speed cap, which Ukrainian officials said had allowed Russian missiles to evade their defensive. Tensions between the United States and Ukraine are really growing right now. Zelensky has claimed that Trump administration has cut intelligence support, which has resulted in failing to track missile strikes into Ukraine. Trump has claimed the U.S. still shares intelligence, but he went on to say, We've given a lot to Ukraine.

Starting point is 04:24:13 You know what? We've given a lot to Ukraine. They've given nothing to us. Remember that. We've given hundreds of billions of dollars. I gave the javelins to Ukraine when he knocked out. That was me. Obama gave him pillows.

Starting point is 04:24:29 You know the expression? Obama gave him sheets and pillows. Trump gave him the javelets. So don't tell me about Ukraine. We've given a lot to Ukraine. They've given us nothing. So Trump being pretty combative. there. This seems to obviously be ignoring the minerals deal. People will remember the very

Starting point is 04:24:47 infamous Trump Vance Zelensky meeting at the White House, right, which resulted in this minerals deal. Trump has also repeatedly tried to blame Zelensky for diesel prices. I want Zelensky to stop and I want Putin. Now, if you tell me that Zelensky is again shooting at refineries, all he's doing is making the world oil price higher. And he is doing that. Well, I think that's a disgrace of it. There's plenty of other targets. They don't have to hit. There are a lot of targets that you can hit.

Starting point is 04:25:16 But when you shoot at diesel refineries where you make diesel oil, and we need that, and the world needs that, then he's not doing a good service for the world. Failure of the convention in the English language to use one's voice going up to indicate a question, which is great. Of course, the far bigger issue is that Trump has started war with Iran, right? which is the major issue. It's more. Yeah.

Starting point is 04:25:41 That's the actual reason is diesel shortage. I want to play this clip, though, because he really went in on Zelenskyy on Monday. I think it's time for somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine. Because what's happened? Very little land is moved. But a million people, a tremendous number of people are dead. They're losing their male population.

Starting point is 04:26:02 Ukraine could have had this thing settled a long time ago. If he would have listened to me and you remember the Oval Office, He would have had this settled a long time ago. Maybe it's time for Zelensky to get somebody else to negotiate. So it seems that like this is Trump's move going into the midterm, right? It's that among other things that he's tried to do, to draw attention from what's happening to fuel prices because of his war in Iran, he's now trying to blame Zelensky. Just to wrap up on Starlink, Starlink is a reality of war everywhere. today. It's used in Myanmar and in Ukraine and all over the world. And this has the really

Starting point is 04:26:44 unfortunate effect of making so many people directly reliant on Elon Musk specifically. It's a massive structural problem in conflict everywhere today. But Elon Musk, especially in cases where there's not Star Shield, right, where it's just Starlink, the commercial product, Elon Musk has the ability to turn off the connection to the outside world of so many places and movements. I'd be naive if I said I expected this to be the last time we saw that. So yep, that's what I got on conflict today. For our last story, let's return to this show's namesake and discuss a new executive order. On Monday, First Lady Melania Trump made a rare public appearance with her husband to announce

Starting point is 04:27:30 the creation of a new Women's Health Division within the NIH, the National Institutes of Health. According to Health and Human Services, quote, The division will advance research into conditions that uniquely or disproportionately affect women, strengthen accountability in federally funded research, and accelerate the translation of scientific discoveries into prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and clinical care. Trump created this new division via executive order, and this order also established a, quote, White House Women's Health Task Force, which, according to Trump, will quote,

Starting point is 04:28:06 mobilize the entire federal government to coordinate action focused on improving women's health. Here is the president announcing who will run the Women's Health Task Force. And this task force will be led by Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, that's a big one. And he's been fantastic, I have to tell you. He's a little different. We understand that, don't we? Cheryl, do we understand he is a little different?

Starting point is 04:28:35 but that's what makes him good, I think. I'll let you know about it. That's what makes him good. I think. I'll let you know about it. Very reassuring, very reassuring stuff. Ringing endorsement for the dude in charge of the women's health program. Now, this task force will also be co-chaired by Chief of Staff, Susie Willis.

Starting point is 04:28:59 And the task force will also include Pete Hegseth, among other cabinet members, though, Hegseth is the first one mentioned in the order. So, real star-studded cast there in charge of women's health. Jesus. Great stuff. I'll read from the executive order, quote, My administration is committed to ensuring that American women are receiving the best scientifically supported medical advice in the world, unquote.

Starting point is 04:29:28 Now, the NIH already has an office of research on women's health and has since the 90s. So it's unclear how the work of this division will differ from the office. To quote the New York Times, quote, Alina Salganikoff, the co-chairwoman of the committee that produced the 2024 National Academy of Medicine report on, quote, ending unequal treatment, questioned how the new division would set research priorities and wondered whether it would end up focusing on the interests of the Make America Healthy Again movement, like non-hormonal approaches to contraception and fertility awareness, for example. Quote, If you have a fixed amount of money and you're going to invest in new research,

Starting point is 04:30:11 what are the tradeoffs? What are you not funding in order to fund these new studies? Said Ms. Sligenikoff, who now directs the Women's Health Policy Program at the nonprofit health research organization, KFF. Unquote. The questionable priorities of this division is not the only issue. Trump's new order does not secure or promise any research funding. And just last month, Trump cut $810 million from HHS. This was funding that was already pre-approved by Congress. During the wave of Doge cuts last year, HHS slashed funding for the Women's Health Initiative, a decades-long ongoing study focused on women's health, aging, menopause, and the effects of hormone therapy. After public pushback, funds for the initiative

Starting point is 04:31:00 were reinstated, but the massive cuts to the NIH still have negatively impacted research into women's health. Trump has cut or froze over $3 billion in previously approved research grants, 2.3 billion of which from the NIH, and Trump's 2026 budget proposal sought to slash the NIH budget by 41%, a cut of almost $20 billion. Since Trump took office, NIH has been rewarding grants much, much more slowly, with HHS, the Office of Management and Budget, or the White House, flagging certain awards as, quote, not acceptable, according to former NIH director Jennifer Toyer in an interview with NPR.

Starting point is 04:31:50 Toyer explained how this interference from the White House has continued, even after Doge, quote, went away, but the other systems had been put in place to do the same. same function, unquote. I think this is something that doesn't get reported on enough, even though DOGE doesn't exist in name the same way it did in the early months of the Trump administration. A lot of those same sorts of policies are being done by other institutions, other departments, other agencies, especially the Office of Management and Budget. Yeah. Yeah. They've learned this, right? Like, it's the same with, like, we don't have Greg Bevino anymore, but we still have massive ICE

Starting point is 04:32:27 detentions. They've learned you can't do it quite as loud and proud. Yeah, they can shut down the most sort of obviously obstructive and disagreeable parts while still doing the same stuff just quieter. Yeah. According to the Washington Post in fiscal year 2025, there was a 31% drop in the number of NIH-funded projects that included the word woman. Oof. An analysis by NPR found that between fiscal year 24 and 25, research areas that lost NIH funding included women's health, which was down almost $300 million. Jesus.

Starting point is 04:33:06 Cervical cancer vaccine research, down $6 million. Stem cell research on umbilical cord, blood, and the placenta, down $6 million. And quote, violence against women research, which was down $2 million. Not to mention the other sort of health disparity cuts in regards to minority populations. Last July, HHS imposed new conditions on Title X funding to align the program with conservative values. Title X is the only federal grant program dedicated specifically to family planning, providing birth control, STI testing, and related preventative health services. According to New York Attorney General Letitia James, who led a coalition of 22 other states

Starting point is 04:33:50 ensuing to block the changes, to qualify for Title X funding under Trump, applicants would be required to align their programs, quote, with a sweeping set of political priorities as a condition of receiving or keeping federal funds. The priorities include eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion practices, excluding and stigmatizing transgender people, discouraging the use of contraception in favor of natural family planning, and requiring clinics to counsel all patients toward marriage and parenthood, unquote. Jesus Christ.

Starting point is 04:34:25 insane stuff. Yeah. Yeah, this is like we've spoken on this show before about Romania, you know, and their natalist policies. Like, I don't know, that shit scares me a lot. Yeah. So the idea of HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and friends being put in charge of a new women's health initiative and task force, not very reassuring, to say the least. No. Trump's executive order also revokes a Biden memorandum and an executive order from 2020.

Starting point is 04:34:55 to quote, advance women's health research and innovation. The memo established the first ever White House initiative on women's health research. And following Biden's executive order, the NIH dedicated 200 million to close the women's research gap. Biden then requested 12 billion from Congress, and ultimately the administration invested about 1 billion into women's health research in just 10 months. So the sort of novel aspects of this announcement from Trump is just cribbing. something Biden already tried to do and actually provided funding for, while Trump's version has no funding, is in the wake of hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to funding for women's research and is in control of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. So not great to say the least. Yeah, really,

Starting point is 04:35:45 really bad. It's, yeah, yeah. Other reporting from the Times has noted how this announcement is, you know, just weeks away from the midterms. And Trump is, you know, pulling it like 30% among women. And this could be some sort of ploy to like get some more support for the administration going into the midterms. I don't know if that's part of the intent, but the timing has been highlighted. Great stuff. Yeah, it seems such a weird one to go for before the midterms because you're like giving

Starting point is 04:36:14 a massive middle finger to half the population. Slightly more than half. But who am I? Previously, this has been a successful tactic for them. Yeah. Well, that doesn't, for us, I believe. Here, it could happen here. Sweet. Would you like to email us? You can do so. It's cool zone tips at proton.com. Still, occasionally a marketing company email will sneak through and earn a ban for its entire domain name. Oh, I did. I did actually specifically request marketing companies to send emails to that address last week when you were out, James. Fantastic. So that might be my bad. Fantastic.

Starting point is 04:36:56 I tried to stop. Great. Yeah, thank you. I look forward to hearing more about how your fucking book about investing is going to make you a great fucking guest on our podcast and that you haven't sent this to everyone else who has a podcast. Great.

Starting point is 04:37:09 Let's just clip out James saying, I look forward to hearing more and then throw that in every future episode along with a link to the email. Oh, God. Put a try and scroll on your couch. We reported the news. We reported the news.

Starting point is 04:37:32 Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, poolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for 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

Starting point is 04:38:12 wore a badge. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing in disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an IHeart 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. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. People wake up and go, oh, damn, wait a hold up. They change all of that?

Starting point is 04:38:46 Yes. It's real. This is a wholesale attack. It is targeting black people in every federal agency. It's raw. White folks have never allowed that reckoning to last more than a decade. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. and download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

Starting point is 04:39:05 wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast Playing Along is back with more of my favorite musicians. Check up my new episode with Linda Perry. Like all my songs, they just show up. Yeah. I don't, I never write a lyric, ever. So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 04:39:39 Hey, everybody, it's me, Debbie Kamaabelle. This season on my podcast, who's with me, I speak with Bruce Lee's daughter, Brandon Lee's sister, and my friend, Shannon Lee. Back to your initial point of stewarding my father's legacy and giving my energy to that.

Starting point is 04:39:54 You're lending your life to stewarding somebody else's life. Listen to Who's With Me with Debbie Kmartbell on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On recent episodes of the Questlove show, I chatted with Jojo about her music and Wallow 267 about his story, everything in between. Don't invite me to karaoke. I'm going to make it weird.

Starting point is 04:40:18 Someone's going to try to sing, leave it 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, Wolo 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. This is an I-Heart podcast, guaranteed human.

It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 255

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.