It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 85

Episode Date: May 27, 2023

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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 What's... Are we recording? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's... The episode started now. I was gonna say something to do with Texas, but to be honest, you know, why do we do this? Why do we let ourselves, you know, get famous for saying a particular bit

and then just keep repeating it over and over again are we so creatively bankrupt that there's there's nothing else we can do but repeat our greatest hits in order to recapture some of the some of the the excitement that we felt as younger men anyway my co-hosts on this episode are Garrison Davis, James Stout, and Mia Wong. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. Hi, Robert. I'm glad you're doing so well. We're all doing great. James, you've just been having a searing emotional experience at the border.

I have, yeah. And everyone else is busy living in the United States, which is its own searing emotional experience. And today, we're going to be talking about the most and least American state, Texas. Huzzah. Lovely place. Yeah, who here's spent a lot of time in Texas? Garrison, you lived in the Dallas area for a while, right? Not a lot, but I've made my visits to Texas over the years.

With you, even, in the murder house. You and I have quaffed many a Scheiner Bach together, James. Many. Okay, I guess we'll move into the fucking episode. So, there was an email sent out by TexasDemocrats.org recently with the title, Texas moves from solid red to battleground. Sure. You know, like clockwork, a lot of Democrats got very excited. And I made a couple of people made posts being like, hey, this is the same thing that happens every single election. They are never right. Texas is never a battleground, and it always costs an insane

amount of money. It is a con by D.C. political consultants to get your money and pump it into something that will fill up their coffers and not achieve anything of value for the state of Texas or for the Democrats nationwide. And this makes people very angry for two reasons. One, they tend to interpret it as saying, abandon Texas and the people there, which is not the statement I was making or anyone else was making. And number two, everyone kind of obsessively starts pointing out like, look, look at how over the last 30 years, you know, the things have narrowed in Texas and

the proportion of like Democratic votes is, you know, raised. This is winnable. We can do it. We can do it. We're going to talk today about why anyone who talks to you about flipping Texas as a political goal that you should give money to is conning you. And not only conning you, but making it actually more difficult for Democrats to win both in Texas and nationwide. That's the premise of the episode, everybody. Here's how Bernie can still win, though, at the very end. We will give you an insight. Yeah, we're going to let you know.

He's got a shot. Look, if he is capable of putting another three rounds of 6.5 into a dinner plate-sized target at 150 yards. Now, that was, anyway, he'd have to shoot a lot of people to make that happen. He's going to deploy Brianna Joy into a... Do not say that name! Absolutely not. I just maxed out the levels of my microphone.

Horrible person. So I want to talk about this because I find it like, I think people tend to interpret this. I've certainly gotten accused of like, oh, you're just kind of being like a nihilist. You're being, you know, just an anti-electoralist. You're not being practical. There was one particular guy who's like a local Democratic candidate who responded seven times to my tweet being like, with variation. And his obsession was like, if we win Texas, it's impossible for the GOP to win national elections, which is true. If theoretically

the Democrats flipped Texas, the GOP would have no chance at winning a federal election ever again. Yeah, and simultaneous to this, right, if the Republicans, there are more Republicans in California than there are basically in any other state in the Union, and if the Republicans won California, they would win every election

forever? Yeah. Yeah. Not going to happen. Not going to happen. I mean, it's one of those things. I am not saying Texas will never be a blue state. That is something that is possible, even likely, given enough time. What I am saying, the argument that I'm making here, and I'll provide you with evidence, is that number one, focusing on these elections from the top down. And when you're saying we want to flip Texas, that's a top-down approach, right? You are not focusing on we want to fill up and win a bunch of different local elections. We want to flip, you know,

the state houses. We want to flip a bunch of mayoralties and stuff. You are saying what matters is how Texas votes in the national election. And if you were to get if you were to kind of eke out a bear like in Georgia, right, where you get a that actually will help Texans, like Texans currently being targeted by the state government. Because flipping the state in a federal election, but not taking the governor's seat, not taking the lieutenant governor's seat, not like actually taking the state house, doesn't improve life for people in Texas. I think the kind of the degree to which the federal government, Biden's administration, has been unable to push back very effectively against kind of a lot of the shit that DeSantis

has been doing in Florida, you know, they have started to make some attempts, is evidence of this. And kind of more to the point, even if you don't agree with that, fundamentally, these strategies that the Democratic Party has embraced in Texas do not work. The Texas Democratic Party is incompetent. They are bad at their job. They are worse. People bring up Georgia a lot when I talk about flipping Texas. And folks are like, well, we flipped Georgia.

And it's like, yeah, because the state elected officials and candidates in Georgia, number one, the state party did a much better job of kind of harvesting is a weird way to phrase it, but of incubating talent to run for election in a number of local offices than the Texas Democratic Party has ever done. And that was a big part of what allowed them to be competitive and eventually to flip the state. allowed them to be competitive and eventually to flip the state. There's a lot of like kind of dollar sign information on how bad the state party in Texas is at this shit. And I guess I should go ahead and provide some of that now. So in the 2022 election, the midterms, famously an unusually good showing for the Democratic Party nationwide for a midterm election. Everywhere but Texas, O'Rourke ran against Greg Abbott. He lost by 11%. This is kind of to contrast the election that got everyone excited when he was running against Cruz. I think

they were like 3% apart. And again, the only reason, there was this kind of mistaken belief and excitement among Dems that O'Rourke, because he was so close to Cruz, had a real shot of winning Texas. No, he got kind of close to beating Cruz because even Republicans hate Ted Cruz. No one has ever liked that man. His own wife can barely stand to be in a room with him. His political allies would turn the other cheek if fucking somebody. Anyway, we shouldn't talk about political assassinations on this podcast. It wouldn't it wouldn't anger anybody, though.

Right. Lindsey Graham has said that like Lindsey Graham's like what maybe the only good joke a Republican elected officials ever told is that if you were to shoot Ted Cruz on the floor of Congress and the trial was held in Congress, like nobody would vote to convict the murderer. Anyway, so Beto lost quite badly to Greg Abbott. And beyond that, basically every statewide candidate that the Democrats ran lost in that election. It was a bad election for the Democratic Party. And people who pay attention to Texas politics and actually aren't just trying to grift your donation money know this. Joel Montfort, a Democratic consultant in North Texas, said, quote, it's been one election after another where we ramp everybody up and set these expectations that we're going to

finish in first, and then we finish in second. I don't see any indication that we can win at statewide levels or won't continue to bleed house seats to the other party um i love the use of finish in second there as if there's like a podium on elections libertarians like that yeah there's libertarians out of the range yeah the texas democratic party to take the l to like jill ste Yeah. There were some kind of site. There were some wins by Democrats in Texas. They managed to hold on to two out of three seats, congressional seats in a battleground regions in South Texas.

Yeah. But they still lost one. Yeah. They did. They did still lose one. Insane. And you know, the GOP had to spend a lot of money to do that.

But like one of the, one of the points is that, so they, they, they held to two of those seats and they won a contested seat in the suburbs of Dallas. And, you know, like but basically in all of these areas, these were like super narrow wins like these the big successes. And they were narrow wins in areas that Joe Biden had carried by double digits two years ago. And they were narrow wins in areas that Joe Biden had carried by double digits two years ago. And Joe Biden is a historically like that is part some of the some of what will show you how bad the Texas Democratic Party is. Joe Biden is not a popular president. And the fact that he carried a lot of these areas by more than the candidates who narrowly won in 2022 could is not a great sign for the way things are trending. Yeah.

It's probably also worth pointing out that like those southern texas seats like in the rio grande valley right like yeah those people are normally democrats yeah but you have guys like uh henry is it quella quella yeah yeah yeah yeah who like is opposed to abortion rights yeah yeah and extremely hawkish on the border and like yeah yeah what do we gain by having like yeah blue team good like not really if this person's going to take away your bodily autonomy and brutalize people for coming to this country for wanting a better life yeah it's um it's like a lot of the some of these wins are kind of like marginal at best given the compromises or just given the kind of democrats who can win

it's like a joe mansion kind of situation. Yeah, exactly. And more to the point, like, it's not only is this like evidence kind of that the Democrat strategy isn't working. It's not simply that they tried something and it failed. They tried something and it was so expensive that it stopped them from trying things in other areas where the money could have gone better. For an example of how fucking wasteful, particularly the Beto O'Rourke campaign was, right? He loses by 11 points to Greg Abbott. He raised $77 million to lose by that much. A few years earlier, Lupe Valdez ran against Greg Abbott.

She spent, raised like $2 million and lost by 13 points. So $75 million may have bought Beto 2%. You know, if you assume that national trends had nothing to do with that gap closing by a tiny amount. Like with $75 million, I could take control

of a moderately sized Texas city. Like, that is like... You could buy a big chunk of Texas for $75 million. You could purchase a large chunk of Fort Worth with that much money. That's our goal here at Cool Zone Media. Yeah, to own Fort Worth. Finally, my dream completed. I'm going to buy those horse statues at Las Colinas.

Finally be happy. Let's get Blucifer as well. It's probably a good time to pivot to ads that help us pay for our piece of Fort Worth. Sure. Yeah. You know who isn't a waste of money? These fucking ads. So overall, we just talked about, you know, Beto raised $77 million.

The gubernatorial race cost in total something like $140 million, which is a huge amount of money for something that fails that badly and doesn't – there's no evidence that Beto's campaign – like he was – he's obviously good at fundraising, right? And there was kind of this belief among a lot of Dems, an errant belief, that this meant that he would be good for down ballot races, right? He's going to bring the entire – because of how much attention he gets, he's going to raise the entire Democratic Party up.

The poor showing of the Democratic Party in Texas in 2022 suggests that that's not the case. And the money – like there are fights that could have been won and probably weren't because the money wasn't being invested in those fights. It was going to Beto. And I want to quote from an article by the Texas Tribune here. by the Texas Tribune here. This year, the party ran Rochelle Garza, a civil rights lawyer with little political experience against Attorney General Ken Paxton, who was widely seen as the most vulnerable Republican incumbent.

But Garza struggled to raise money or gain traction in O'Rourke's shadow and lost by 10 percentage points against Paxton, who has been indicted on felony security fraud charges and is being investigated by the FBI for abuse of office accusations. And it's what maybe she couldn't have won no matter what you did. But one of the rules of politics in this country is that the money you spend at a big race, like a gubernatorial race, like a Senate or a congressional campaign at the federal level, like a presidential campaign, goes less far per dollar than the money you spend in smaller local elections, right? 10 million bucks going into that election might have done something, you know, as opposed to 75 million going into Beto O'Rourke and accomplishing very little. This has been not

just a problem in Texas in previous elections throughout the Trump area and a little before in particular, this was a problem the Dems had kind of from the middle of the Obama years until the last couple of – like really the last midterm. 2018 is when it started to turn around nationally. And the Dems have learned a lot in other regions about like not spending stupid amounts of money on hopeless contests, but not like comprehensively. So, for example, in 2022, the second most expensive house race was the 14th Congressional District of Georgia, where Marcus Flowers raised 16 million dollars and lost by 32 points. Not not a great return on the investment. And it was like the reason why he raised so much money is because he was running against Marjorie Taylor Greene. It's not a great return on the investment. And it was like the reason why he raised so much money is because he was running against Marjorie Taylor Greene.

And nationally, Dems outside of Georgia wanted to put in money because they hate her. And it's a trend that relies a lot on social media, on kind of the way in which like hardcore Dems, the Dems that do a lot of the small dollar donations um think about politics where it's like marjorie taylor green bad donate money to opponent well her opponent had no chance of winning in that district like no amount of money would have flipped that and you just wasted 16 million dollars that could have helped somewhere else like maybe that's an insane thing and it it's not as bad as it used if you want to look at like the like the kind of the dumbest it ever was, in 2020, Lindsey Graham's seat was up in South Carolina. Oh, my God. And Jamie Harrison ran against Lindsey Graham. And Dems, again, because Lindsey Graham, evil, raised $130 million, and he lost by 10 points.

Amy McGrath lost to Mitch McConnell, who is another. You can always get a shitload of money to fight Mitch McConnell. $94 million lost by 20 points. Either of the, like, $130 million, $94 million, that's two state legislatures. You could have flipped or at least help set up, you know, get a couple of people elected who have a chance at kind of broadening a base of support and becoming, you know, leaders in states that are currently like dominated by red legislatures. Like there's a chance at least here. And that like specifically the state legislature thing is this has been a problem with the Democrats for fucking ages, which that they just yeah like it is only genuinely in the last two years the democrats have started giving a shit about state legislatures like and this is this is one of the things from the obama era like one of the

reasons everything sucks so much is that the democrats managed to lose like oh god it was like they i think i think the total number they they lost like 1,000 seats. Yeah, it was a nightmarish failure. Yeah, and we were seeing the product of this, right? Like Wisconsin was sort of just a hellhole for the last decade. And these are like Minnesota, too. There are lots of these states that like, not Minnesota, what am I talking about? Michigan. Yeah, Michigan.

Yeah, and there's a lot of these states. And both of these places were winnable, right? like the top, not Minnesota. What am I talking about? Michigan? Yeah. Michigan. Yeah. And there's like, there's a lot of these days, you know, like in both of these places were winnable, right? Like, like the Democrats are winning there now.

Right. But they just like fucking left, like, you know, they, they, they fucking left Flint to get poisoned by lead because they just not like the only,

the only things that the problem is there's, there's no money for consultants in, in sort of like down ballot, like state and like local races. Yeah. Just jack shit. Right. And the only things the problem is there's there's no money for consultants in in sort of like down ballot like state and like local races just jack shit right and the democrat yeah the democratic party like is not run by sort of like it's it's not a party in like an actual real sense it is a it is a collection of consultants and those consultants only care about senator about senate races sometimes they care about house races and they care specifically they spend all of their fucking money in presidential races and you know it's like and the republicans don't do that because they have a bunch of like people they you know because they have a bunch of like part of their

base right is these like small and mid-scale capitalists in you know in cities and in rural areas who have like immediate concerns about like you know there's like there there are specific workers who they want like lives to be worse. And so because of that, the Republican machine is like seize the entire fucking country. And the Democrats have been sitting around like spending like a trillion dollars on Wendy Davis losing by 20 points. Yeah. Yeah. It's like you get these cases where you're looking at $30 million being spent failing to unseat Marjorie Taylor Greene or something like $33 million, something like that.

But what you don't – at the same time as that's happening is all of these massive amounts of money are being devoted to these – to the races that get attention because there's famous names involved. You have like in 2020, I think it was you have or no, it was 2022. You have the election between Ted Budd, a Republican against the Democrat Sherry Beasley in North Carolina, where the Democratic Party decided not to prioritize this election because it wasn't winnable. And then Bud wound up wound up winning by just four points, that's a seat you could flip with money. That's not an unreasonable thing, as opposed to, again, the races where it went to and people are losing by like 30-something fucking percent. And if you want to know who a serious candidate is who is not just trying to do the sexy thing or not just trying to, like, thing or not just trying to like,

again, flip the state so that we can win the federal election, but actually wants to help their state. And this is again, there's very nice things about Beto O'Rourke. I was in Texas during the ice storm. He did good work during the ice storm, like actual like community defense kind of stuff that I do have some respect for. He is not and has never been a serious politician, and I will tell you why. He went from winning an election to losing a state election against Ted Cruz to losing a presidential race to losing the governor's seat. That is so fucking scattershot. That is not building a base of power, that is not building from the ground up and like encouraging the growth of other personalities. You're just darting from whatever the sexiest

and most like PR driven race is. That's not serious. I want to talk about what number one, the Democratic Party, the shit that like, as we've said, they're getting better. The National Party got a lot better at this, particularly in 2022. It was less stupid than the previous couple of elections had been. Really difficult to be more dumb than that, but you know. It is. See British labor, et cetera, et cetera.

Israeli labor actually is the big one. Oh my fucking God. No, British labor are taking so much. I want to talk about what has worked and what I think could work again. And to do that, I'm going to talk about what has what has worked and what I think could work again and to do that I'm going to talk about a guy named Howard Dean who here knows who Howard Dean was Garrison

sadly yeah a little bit have you have you all heard the video of him screaming that got him like his career so before okay well James would you load that up for us so we can play that in a second? Let's do the Dean story. Yeah.

Jamie, pull that shit up. Howard Dean ran for president and he was the first national political candidate to use the internet effectively to raise money in the history of U.S. politics. use the internet effectively to raise money in the history of US politics. He's kind of pre-Obama, worked out a lot of the strategies that Obama's people wound up using to very successfully raise money for him. He was really good at it. He was a reasonably intelligent candidate. And then he gave the speech that we're about to play for you, and it completely cratered his – ended him as a candidate. You know, I always say the thing about Dean, Dean is stunningly unlucky that he ran in the time that he did. Because the clip you're about to hear is 1,000 times less weird

than anything DeSantis has ever done. Like, he ran in, I mean, there was Dan Quayle, right? But, like, he ran in an era where, like, the seriousness and, like, non-weirdness of politicians was so much higher. Mia, it's in the chat, so you can... Mia, pull that shit up. This is a good shit. Get straight to that beautiful scream.

We're going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico. We're going to California and Texas and New York. And we're going to South Dakota and Oregon Mexico. We're going to California and Texas and New York. And we're going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan. And then we're going to Washington, D.C. to take back the White House. Yeah! That's it.

That ended his career as a candidate. Yeah. And, like, it's a little silly, but that doesn't – that wouldn't be a 12-second news cycle today. But after kind of failing out as a presidential candidate, he became chairman of the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, and he was a pretty good one. His kind of primary strategic vision was what he called the 50-state strategy, which is don't focus just on swing states. Never write a state off at unwinnable. Instead, spread the money that the DNC has around to campaign throughout the country everywhere, particularly to fund local DNCs so that they can start building a stable of candidates that can attract voters and eventually win local elections. It's not like an easy, it's not a sexy strategy because a lot of it is focused on like the slow kind of grueling fight to build up a base of support in unfriendly terrain.

But it worked like really well, actually. In 20 or so states, those that had voted solidly Republican in previous recent presidential races, Democratic candidates won elections that had previously gone against them. There were about 20 states where the kind of slide to red was arrested and pushed back to blue. to red was arrested and pushed back to blue. These are Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming. You're supposed to scream when you do the list. Yeah. There we go. So basically, Dean's strategy led to a net gain of 39 state House seats and a 2% increase of all seats in the states analyzed. They lost two state Senate seats net, but it worked great in the House and gained an attorney generalship, gained three House seats, gained a Senate seat. generalship, gained three House seats, gained a Senate seat. And in 15 of the 20 states, the Democratic nominee saw an increase in vote share between 2004 and 2008, which was the years that... So again, not super sexy. These aren't like, we flipped Texas suddenly, but it's like, oh, we started to see real gains in a lot of pretty red states. Now, it didn't work everywhere.

It was not particularly successful in a large chunk of the South, like it did not arrest the slide into the red everywhere. But in a lot of the Midwest, particularly the states that were like the Hillary Clinton's so-called firewall that went for Trump in 2020, it was extremely effective. And of course, it got nixed immediately after Obama won election. And this is a big part of why in 2010 the Dems lost disastrously. any conflict, whether it's a war or a political election, is having the resources available, reserves, to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves in the moment. So you have a solidly red statehouse seat or judgeship or something like that or governorship or mayorality, and a candidate has a health scare or has a scandal.

You know, they get caught fucking a 13-year-old or something. And suddenly this seat that was solidly red is in play. And if you have no one who can, like, get votes, who can get voters excited, who can run for that, well, then you're probably not going to win it. It's just going to, like, go to whoever the RNC, you know, picks to pick up the seat next. But if you've got someone waiting in the wings, they have a chance at winning it. And a good example of this is what just happened in Jacksonville, Florida, right? You have DeSantis go like lunge to the fucking most fascist end of the right and pass this abortion bill that something like 75% of the state doesn't like.

And the Dems had a decent candidate there that was able to run against the Republican mayor of Jacksonville and win. And in that election, the Dems spent two million and the Republicans spent nine million. You are not talking about the kind of resources expended that you're seeing in some of these dumb races we're talking about. So anyway, like this is most of what I wanted to get into is just like you can win and you can improve things in Texas and you can build a base from which to actually change things electorally in that state. But you can't do it by just like focusing on whoever is at the top. Like it has to be smarter. It's not just about shoveling money into a pit.

Yeah. And like I think there's a couple of things I want to add. One was that like, oh, God. a couple of things i wanted to add one was that like oh god okay like so tim kane is her yeah tim kane got put in after they ran out dean and i jesus like tim kane might be is a is like a once in a generation terrible politician like one of the worst like you know but like you would see shit like he is the winston churchill of making me bored like yeah like i like you would see shit like he is the Winston Churchill of making me bored. Like, yeah, like like you would see. I mean, and this still happens, right?

But like there are there are seats that are winnable that the Dems like just literally won't even bother finding people to run for because they're just fucking too lazy and they don't give a shit. And, you know, this this happens. This happens in a fucking lot of races. and you know this this happens this happens in a fucking lot of races and you know and part of the other thing that that happens in this sort of period that like you know is is the reason why the top down okay so this is like if we're going to actually do this sort of like complicated electoralism like this is why bernie sanders lost two elections in a row is that you can't actually like like actual sort of like substantive political change like doesn't happen from the top down it it's it's like it happens on bottom-up organizing and you know the the the democratic waves in like

the last two years were basically like them eating actual social movements it's you know like they it's it's them basically like there there's a sort of rejuvenated anti-abortion movement that they just sort of consume right they've been doing a very very good job of sort of like eating like whatever sort of queer rights like movements exist alive and they had kind of stopped doing that for a while because they chose to just like destroy occupy whether rather than like try to co-opt it yeah and you know i mean there are there were reasons for that right but like part of part of the thing like if if you if if you're a democrat and you want to actually like win texas you need to have like actual you need to have

actual sort of social movements that you know the democrats can eventually take over and destroy but in in in the time between they destroy them destroying them and them and you know like like in the brief time while they both exist and are controlled by democratic party that's how you actually sort of like build the kinds of the build the kinds of coalitions to build the kinds of organization that win these races. And the Democratic Party has just no interest in doing that, like almost anywhere, basically outside of Minnesota, where I don't know those. The Minnesota Dems are fucking built different. I don't I don't I don't know. I don't I don't have another explanation for that. But like, yeah, it's – I don't know.

It's like one of the things that you have the opportunity to do at the local level is – and this is a big factor in like politics in Georgia. You've got people who are motivated because of a specific political issue that thems are strong on, like abortion. And you can get people registered. You can get people out organizing. You can get people donating money. And most importantly, you can get people voting and voting in numbers that they haven't before

and make, if you're able to kind of harness that sort of thing. But being able to harness that, again, part of it is – and this is not sexy. This is not something we can say this is going to flip a state in 2024. But putting in the money and the resources to have people who are being supported to go out and make attempts and to build like a reputation and a base of support and networks in the state. Like that's the non-sexy thing that number one, the Republicans are really good at.

If you're asking yourself, looking at all these horrible anti-trans bills, anti-gay bills, anti-abortion bills, how do they do this? Well, because churches organized at the local level to build up the kind of support and the kind of human infrastructure that allowed them to take advantage of the kind of broader social trends that drove some of those states more deeply red. And that kind of like made it possible for them to do things that 10 years before people had said like there's no way to make this happen. That can work on the left side of things, but you have to have the groundwork in they started with like school boards they yeah they started they started with going for school boards going after books then you get a base people riled up that you can go after health care for minors and you can go after health care for adults it was a very easy path and it started by like going to the most accessible places to have

public comment on issues which was complaining about books inside a school yeah yeah yeah and another thing i'd say about the church thing is like the the thing that used to do that for the democrats was unions but then they destroyed them all and but you know but like you can actually you can actually see what this looks like like in in the places where some stuff like this this is why the state level midwest dems are so much further to the left than the dems everywhere else, because, like, the people of Minnesota, the people in Wisconsin are, like, the only reason they're even sort of remotely in power is because, you know, you're seeing this, like, in Chicago, too, with Brandon Johnson, is that, like, those people are, like, functionally dependent on, like, their teachers' unions teachers unions to exist as like a political coalition. Yeah. And so, you know, like union organizing is a – like we're just – like fucking just giving money to a strike fund is a – even if the thing that you want to do is win elections, that is a more effective way of winning elections than fucking giving money to Beto O'Rourke like a seventh time.

Yeah. to Beto O'Rourke like a seventh time. Yeah. And again, when we, the thing I want to get across here is the right thing to do is not say, and no one is suggesting this here, fuck Texas. It can never be fixed.

The right thing is saying, if you're focused on one famous guy running in Texas or this like top level thing of flipping Texas, you don't actually care all that much about the problems being faced by people in Texas, because that's not really going to fix them, right? Beto's not going to win. And even if Texas flips for an election, that doesn't mean the state legislature flips. It doesn't mean the governor flips. It doesn't mean that things get better for people. Doing these kind of bottom-up approaches, number one, will eventually flip the fucking state, right? There is a demographic trend happening. Part of how you flip the state, by the way,

if you're actually responsible, is like proving that you can make people's lives better. If you want to flip the state, that's maybe more ethical than just being like what if we dump 170 million dollars to like try to make this guy who who goes viral on on youtube or twitter sometimes look better right maybe one of those is more ethical than the other anyway i don't want to rant about electoralism anymore but as a as a transplanted texan i get frustrated by this uh so i i felt like we had to say something. Yeah. I also get frustrated by Beto O'Rourke claiming to be punk,

which is the least punk thing in the fucking weather. That's another episode. No, no. We have one elected leader who's gotten anywhere close to being punk. And it was Bernie Sanders when he got into that cold book depository that November morning with a man, liquor, Carcano rifle,

extremely punk. Anyway, cutting the feed here. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

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Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone

from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Oh, yeah. It could happen here. A podcast where I just made my colleagues, I can see them through the Zoom, deeply uncomfortable by opening this podcast with a sound that you shouldn't make in the workplace.

I'm Robert Evans. Joining me today is Mia Wong and Garrison Davis. Mia, take it from here. Oh, boy. So it's been a... You know, this is... Okay, so this, I guess, is now, like, last week's Twitter thing. But, okay, so we...

This is also not... This is not a Twitter thing. No, well, it kind of is. It kind of is. But, like, specifically... Let's not frame this as a Twitter thing. Yeah, okay, okay. So, well, this is this is not a twitter thing no well it kind of is it kind of is but like let's not let's not frame this as a twitter thing yeah okay okay so why this this is we we are okay we we have been experiencing in the last you know like half decade actually longer than that oh god it's like

seven eight years now like the the sort of incredible rise in casual american anti-semitism and the level of anti-semitism that you can just do in in sort of public discourse and it's quote-unquote fine and one of the sort of biggest indicators of this is the like the the extent to which it's now socially acceptable to just do the most like absolutely like unhinged like anti-semitic conspiracy theories about george soros and specifically the thing that specifically was like okay i need to do this episode was last week elon musk like compared george soros to magneto and then said quote you assume they are good intentions they are not he wants to erode the fabric, the very fabric of civilization.

Soros hates humanity. And this is just like the mainstream line of the Republican party. Now, like they just all do this. You can just sort of, I mean, and this is honestly like as bad, like,

you know, this is like the, the stuff that Elon Musk is saying is unbelievably unacceptable. That's not even anywhere near as bad as it goes. It's pretty common to just hear these people talking about the Satan Soros agenda and shit now. It has gotten unbelievably, unfathomably out of control. out of control. And so today I wanted to take a look at,

okay, who George Soros actually is like the real human being and not the sort of like caricature projection that has been created of him on the right. And I wanted to also sort of look at why the right hates him so much. And, you know, Soros is kind of an interesting figure because he falls like right in the middle of like our two shows about people. Cause he he's not he's not really like a cool person. He does cool stuff, though.

He does stuff that's cool sometimes, but he's not also like a bastard properly. So he's done some bastard stuff, too. Oh, he has. We are going to talk about that. He's a he's a. Yeah, I mean, most of what this episode is about. He's I would say he's like 20 percent more complicated than the average billionaire on a on a more. Yeah, I think I think like 20 or 30 percent.

Yeah, there's some there's somewhere in that neighborhood. Yeah. You know, and I think there's three George Soros is two of them are real and one of them is fake. There is, you know,orge soros is a a billionaire philanthropist right and you know so that means that he has a sort of billionaire side and a philanthropist side and they are very often working across purposes sometimes they're not working sometimes they're he aligns them together sometimes he doesn't and so the way i've sort of structured this is like the first episode we're gonna be talking about the sort of billionaire

side and how he did that and the second episode is going to be more about the philanthropist side and how both of these basically have been kind of accidentally structured in such a way that the right was like oh my god this is the perfect guy to do anti-semitic conspiracy theories about and then there's also the the third george soros is like the one who's just literally the devil who the republicans have made up and yeah so george soros uh was born to a jewish family in hungary in 1930 which is not not a good time to be born to a jewish family in hungary no really there's not a good time to be born to a Jewish family in Hungary until like, I'm going to say sometime in the 50s. Yeah, I will say that it gets way, like it is way worse when he is born than it was in like, even like the 1890s, which is like not a great time.

But it's gotten significantly worse. He is 14 when the nazis invade hungary in 1944 and this is the point at which we get to our first sorrows conspiracy which is that there's just there's yeah it's a little more complicated than it's not really the nazis and well it's it's a little more complex than yeah i i i don't when the when the extermination of the hungarian jewish community begins really in in 1944 yeah yeah and so there there's a thing that happens i don't know he and his dad have a kind of complicated like set of things they survive and there there's a part of the story that gets picked up by the right that gets if you've ever heard alex jones talk about soros like the second or third thing he will say is that like soros is a nazi collaborator it was like a willing collaborator

with the nazis which is not true and also like he's 14 like you know like i don't i don't really call even like 14 year olds and the the Hitler youth willing collaborators because they're children. Yeah. You have to have a line at some point. Yeah. With Nazis, where if they're kids, they're not really morally responsible either way. Yeah. And like, you know, so the specific thing that he does is there's these notices that are sent out by the government that's like telling Jewish people to to like go like to a place and if you go

to the place you're going to get routed up and killed and basically so the thing that actually happened is that so george ross's dad is is told to do this and he gives it to george ross and he's like go tell these people that they've been called for this and that if they go they're like they're going to get taken away and And this has been transformed by, this is a nightmarish thing these people are surviving. This has been transformed by a bunch of the worst people who've ever lived into Nazi collaboration, which is also the part of the story that never gets told,

even when people sort of do the dive into like, oh, this is fake, is that the thing that Soros' family spends the rest of the war doing is basically getting like counterfeit papers to jewish families that like says that they're christian and you know they they like they stay legitimately save a bunch of families from dying in the holocaust and yeah the shit that jones pulls on them is like part of this because of like the job this guy who's like saving young George Soros has involves like basically like itemizing stuff left behind by Jewish families forced out of their homes. He's like they were profiting off of the holidays. No, they were like doing whatever job kept them under the radar while they attempted to help.

Like it was the Holocaust. It was messy. Yeah. It's a little like saying like Oscar Schindler took advantage of slave labor. It's like, well, no, it's actually what Schindler was doing.

It was not that like he was using the trappings of this slave labor system in order to rescue people. It's quite different from just enslaving people. Yeah. Yeah. I think the thing that's really disturbing about the show, right. It's like,

okay, like this is like Alex Jones is Alex Jones, right? He's just going to say the worst shit you've ever heard. But like, this is like a thing that mainstream right wing about this though right is like okay like this is like alex jones is alex jones right he's just gonna say the worst shit you've ever heard but like this is like a thing that mainstream right wingers just say now yeah and it's just like unbelievably horrible and it sucks and it's just like not true but fortunately for george soros his family makes it through the hol. Well, his immediate family does. And they like get out and they end up in the U S and this is where,

okay. This is something, this is something that I think is, is very important to the story that isn't told very much. So Soros is like a finance whiz, right? He is very, very, very good at finance. And we're going to be talking a

bit about like how like the things that he figured out to let him do this because it's interesting but he's also not from the sort of like american or the british financial elite like if i don't like there's like a certain kind of person right who like goes into finance and you know it's like like like wasp frat bros or like inbred british aristocrats right and doris soros is like a hung is a hungarian immigrant right he he is not sort of from these people he is like and and you know this is this is going to be a really big deal when he like goes up against a british financial elite later on but you know he he he threw sort of like he's able to turn like a job doing door-to-door salesmen into like a way into a firm and he's able to sort of work his way up to a point where like

he has something like has his own hedge fund and he is really really good at this he's he's one of the sort of early people who does hedge funds. There's a great book called The Influence of Soros, Politics, Power, and the Struggle for an Open Society by Emily Tamkin, who did a lot of really great work, like interviewed Soros, interviewed an enormous number of people who were around him. And I want to read a passage of this about how he figured out how to sort of beat the market. How he figured out how to sort of beat the market. He's talking about this guy named Karl Popper, who's like a philosopher of science, who also wrote this book called The Open Society that we'll talk about next episode more. Popper's philosophy made me more sensitive to the role of misconceptions in financial markets, Soros said decades later. People believe that markets don't lie and should be trusted, but that isn't true, Soros knew. Markets react to humans, and humans are fallible.

Instead of looking at the money being made, or as Sebastian Malaby put it in More Money Than God, his book on the history of hedge funds, the psychology that drove investors' appetites, Soros looked at how one impacted the other, predicting that each would drive the other forward until the trusts were so completely overvalued that a crash was inevitable and this is this is really smart like if if you even today right you know if if you're able to understand that you know like the the way a lot of hedge fund people tend to think about the market is as like the mark you know especially in this period is this is this sort of dogmatic neoliberal thing of like the market is like a perfect conveyance of price signals and so i was just like no it's made out of people and those people like get greedy they they have emotional stuff they like they they they get

into these like FOMO like fear of missing out stuff you know they they like intensely overvalue assets because everyone else sees the assets like expensive so everyone's stuff you know they they like intensely overvalue assets because everyone else sees that the assets like expensive so everyone like you know rushes to buy it and like this is something like like even now right this is this is like a very smart way to understand finance he's figured this out in like the 70s and if you if you were able to do this kind of stuff and like use this to understand how the market works in the 70s you are going to look like a god among men and he starts a hedge fund in 1973 but by 1981 he has a fund that is worth 381 million dollars in like 1981 money i don't know what that is in modern money but assume it's a lot i'm a hack and a fraud i should have actually figured this out yeah no that's like a billion

dollars yeah and like he personally is like Yeah, that's like a billion dollars. Yeah, and he personally has, for himself, like $100 million, right? And at this point, he starts to become sort of very famous in finance circles because he's just absolutely destroying the market. Now, okay, this is where things get... Up until this point, he's kind of like... he's been doing a lot of sort of finance stuff that's kind of shady, but it's mostly just been him like ripping off other finance people, which I'm entirely OK with. Like, that's just very funny. But he starts to get into currency speculation. And in 1985, he has one of his big breaks which is he predicts the plaza accords now okay the

plaza accord is something we've talked about on the show before but i need to talk about it a bit more because unfortunately it's we have to talk about the asian financial collapse this episode and this is a like one of the key moments of the asian financial collapse even though it's like a decade earlier so in in 1985 ronald reagan is trying to like revive the u.s's domestic manufacturing industry because it's like dying and you know the reason part of the like a big part of the reason is dying is that they're getting absolutely destroyed by sort of german and like west german and japanese manufacturers and part of what's happening here is that particularly japan's currencies are worth way currency is worth way less than the dollar this is called having a weak currency and having a

weak currency is really good for if you have like an export-based manufacturing economy and so reagan basically like walks into a meeting with like the germans japanese government the british and like a few other people and basically just like, not quite in so many words, but basically just says like, you are all American military protectorates. And because you're all American military protectorates, like I can, I can force you to increase the value of your currency,

like, or else capital O capital E. And they do, they, they comply. And this is, this, this becomes,

this is a thing called the Plaza Accords. And this, this, you know, weakens the value of the dollar versus a bunch of other currencies. And this like literally single handedly like restores the profitability of American manufacturing like through the 90s, which is really wild. But the important thing for this story is that I don't know how he did this but like george soros predicts that this is going to happen and he makes an unbelievable amount of money basically like no no like basically doing

currency speculation because he knows what like currencies are going to increase in value which you know he knows that like uh for example he knows that like the the japanese yen is going to increase in value so he makes an enormous amount of money doing this stuff. And he gets very famous for like, he'll like make a bunch of money and then he'll lose it again. And then he'll make it again. And this all culminates in...

Okay, so... He starts taking... Truly enormous bets like against national currencies. And there's one of these that's just funny, and there's one of these that's really bad. So we're going to do the funny one first. So in 1992, Soros, and this is the other part that Devereux talked about, it's not just Soros doing this stuff. He has allies, because as big as Soros' firm is, right?

He can't, him and his allies are going to take a $15 billion short position on the pound. And even he doesn't have like nobody, like this is like 15 billion of 1990s money, right? Like you need a bunch of firms working together in order to do this. But he basically takes this massive bet that the pound is going to go down. And because of the way that these, these bets work, like the actual value of the pounds, like collapses and the British central bank,

like it like doesn't have enough. The reason we're able to do this is they figure out that the British central bank doesn't have enough money to stop them. Like they don't have enough money to like maintain, like don't have enough reserves to like maintain the value of the pound. And so he gets like completely blamed for this even though again there's like other people involved in this right

like the the front page of the daily mail is literally his face in the title i made a billion crashing the pound based which is i okay so like on an anti-british level this is very funny um Okay, so, like, on an anti-British level, this is very funny. It's, no, there's a bunch of arguments about, like, what does this mean for, like, the world economy and for national sovereignty? Soros thinks that, like, currency speculation is a necessary evil, and he has this sort of moral- It's easy to think that when you're making that much money off of something. Yeah, right. You know, it's like now okay this you know this like specific thing which is like a a a bank a banker comes in and is able to

manipulate the value of a currency this is like this is like absolutely like this is the fodder for like the absolute most paranoid fantasies of the anti-semitic right like it's this sort of like a rootless cosmopolitan banker like attacks the good and righteous like noble people of britain thing and this is how it gets framed in the press who are like the press is i mean it's the british press right like the british are not known for you know not being anti-semitic And so they just like go wild with this. But, you know, like this particular thing he's doing against the British, part of what's happening here, right, is there's this sort of, there's this kind of like national populist equation thing going on here where there's this assumption that like the bank of, like the bank, like theish central bank is like an entity that is identifiable with like an ordinary person in britain and like no like the british central bank is run by just unbelievably inbred aristocrats right and you know hey i think they're pretty believably inbred. That's fair.

We're just talking about like 0.56 of a Habsburg unit. The Habsburg is the international unit for measuring how inbred someone is, if you're unaware. Yeah, yeah. That seems like a reasonable amount of inbred for these specific people. But this is what I was talking about. Like at the very beginning, I was talking about sort of like Soros not being from this sort of like normal class of, of finance people. And the thing is like the normal class of finance people are fucking

terrible at their jobs, right? Like these inbred British aristocrats and like the fucking American, like cocaine frat boys, like, like just like doing lines of cocaine, obviously there's ass cracks. Like these people all suck at their jobs. And George soros is like smart and is good at his job and so he just like absolutely goes through these people like a fucking flaming chainsaw and she just like you know and the the the maneuvers that he's doing here he just like absolutely humiliates all of the people at the at the at the british central bank he's humiliating

like and not just those guys too he's humiliating the tories he's humiliating like all of the people who are seriously important in the real economy in in the sort of real british economy and he can do this right because like his opponents are you know people who are like they're promoting their like they're okay they take in like their people from like they're they're promoting they're like they're okay they take in like their people from college right and they're promoting them based off how good they are at golf and so when she just sort of like like walks in and just makes it like makes like billions of dollars just like destroying these people he makes just a permanent enemy of a very very powerful like faction of the british ruling class and the the British ruling class like I don't know, they it is hard to find people who will beat the British ruling class and an anti-Semitism off.

And this is this is one of the things that sort of, you know, if you're looking at like why Soro specifically is the guy who all of these sort of right wing conspiracies wind up being about. Like part of it is because he pisses off these specific people. Yeah, these guys who's like dads were all friends with the king of England who was like a close personal buddy with Hitler. Like there it's a bunch of like it's a bunch of guys who are already pretty bigoted and then they get beaten at their own stupid financial game. And so, like, the fact that it's a Jewish dude who does it means that they're going to be even more racist than they already were. And the fact that there's plenty of international anti-Semitism, and that George Soros after this starts funding liberal and, you know, vaguely progressive causes, like it's not this is not a it's not surprising that this is the way things went yeah and and you know and again like i i

can't under emphasize the extent to which this is also very specifically the reaction to british media class who i mean we know now that those people are psychos like we we have seen them see a trans person in a boat race and like, like 10 years ago and like, like draw a giant thing, circling them in a boat and making it a front page news story. Those people in the nineties were like, they,

they are biologic, but biologically better at navigation. That is, that is actually been, been proven. Yeah. But then they're like, they're,

they're, they're just as sort of feral and like terrifyingly bigoted then as they are now and this means that like like just if you're a regular british person and you are like walking down the street and there's a newspaper stand you are seeing like like truly unbelievably terrifying anti-semitic shit like just literally everywhere and this this will have no consequences whatsoever uh yeah it's all good nothing bad ever happens and uh speaking of no consequences i do you know what we can promise about about services 23 minutes in you know look

you're welcome Daniel okay we're back we have to talk about okay so doing it to the British economy was mostly just really funny because the British economy is going to be fine and it the funny part about him doing is the British economy

is that this actually unfortunately helps the Britishish economy because it forces uh the british to like abandon some truly spectacularly not very good financial policy they were doing but he does it to thailand and that is um a lot less justifiable so it in this is five years later this is 1997 soros brings in some economists um arminio fraga like roddy joe's david klowitz uh he brings he's bringing in people who are sort of experts in like developing market uh economics and that's never no one has ever brought in a developing market economist for like a good reason and what they what they realize is that they start doing analysis of southeast asia like the southeast asian markets and they realize very quickly that thailand is fucked um they they figure out that thailand has thailand has its currency pegged to the dollar and this but you know they don't have the reserves to support this the tide like actual thai currency isn't strong enough to, like, stay being pegged to the dollar.

It's not a strong enough currency. And so they do a $2 billion short of, like, Thailand's currency. And I'm going to read from the Influencersaurus again about, like, the process of this. It was a debate we had, Jones told me. We'd gone to work in Asia, and here you are taking large-scale short positions in countries with institutional fragility. Going for the juggler in the United Kingdom was one thing, doing the same in Thailand was another. The Bank of England would surely recover. Thailand was a developing economy and it was unclear what impact outside investors could have. investors could have. Soros has justified speculation with the idea that it could serve as a kind of warning to governments. Look, Thai government, the baht needs to devalue. Change your policy now before a currency collapse is devastating for your people. The trouble is, the Thai government didn't do this. Instead, it spent months using Bank of

Thailand reserves to buy Thai baht. When it finally ran out in early summer 1997, the value of the bot plunged 32% against the dollar and millions of Thai people lost their livelihoods. The Soros fund made $750 million. Yeah, it's a little bit like me being like, look, yes, I made a lot of money selling heroin to those middle schoolers. But really, when you think about it, it was a warning to those schools that it was too easy for me to bribe the janitor to sell heroin to kids there. You know, I was actually performing a public service.

So true, Robert. It is just like that. You know, to be fair, you know, I'm not gonna, never mind, I'm not gonna finish that thought. That's probably for the best. Yeah. We need one person to remain uncanceled here to keep the lights on oh god does it have to be me oh no yeah no legally it does this is really bad yeah no more joking

we can't we can't suffer any other jokes yes somebody's gotta upload this episode all right here here here's the next joke. Soros actually doesn't make money off of his speculating in Southeast Asia because he loses basically the same amount of money taking like a long position in Indonesia. Yeah, the same thing happened to me when I took a long position on doing cocaine in my bathroom with the money that I made selling drugs to all those kids. You know?

We're a lot alike, him and me. We're a lot alike. Well, okay, to be fair, to be fair, and this is something, okay, this is something I, the reason I wanted to talk about this specifically is that, like, okay, like, to this day, if you look under sort of... Every once in a while, there'll be a tweet that's like, what did George Soros do? And immediately there will be a bunch of people talking about how he deliberately destroyed all of the economies in Southeast Asia. And that's not really what happened.

No, that would be, for one thing, too much to put on one guy fucking around with a cup yeah but yeah and i i wanted to actually kind of walk through this a little bit in depth just because okay there's a really really easy way to think about the economy that is bad it leads you into anti-semitic traps which is like hey here is like one banker who wanted to make money and because he wanted to make money he like destroyed all these economies and like on the one hand yeah like like soro's betting against like the thai currency is bad right like this is this is not a thing you should have been doing on the other hand you know okay so that's like the sort of level one thing but but the thing about you know this is the sort of this is the sort of like great man anti-semitism theory of collapse

and this is the theory that a lot of the sort of regional leaders take um you know because and this and this is sort of a crucial thing right this position very conveniently allows them to just like not think about capitalism in general or like their role in this in this crisis which is not insignificant and so in order to figure out what what actually happened here we need to look at so soros sort of like tip like tip some dominoes right but the dominoes were already there and they were going like regardless even if soros had never existed right like they were going to fall and they were going to fall because ironically of the plaza accords so you know we talked about the plaza accords earlier the u.s forces japan to increase the And they were going to fall because, ironically, of the Plaza Accords.

So, you know, we talked about the Plaza Accords earlier. The U.S. forces Japan to increase the value of its currency relative to the dollar. Okay, so this is great for the American economy. This nukes the Japanese economy. I mean, the Japanese economy, you know, and we'll talk about this in a bit, too. It was already kind of doing bad. When the U.S. does this and its manufacturing economy, just like implodes it, it guts the Japanese economy. It has,

the Japanese economy has never recovered from this. It probably will never recover really into what it was. And, you know, the, the, the effect this has is that now, now the government of Japan has to figure out how to grow their

economy without having any like way to make money that grows your economy. And but and now they have a stronger currency. And so their solution is, OK, what what did they all the central bank people look around each other and they go, what is a strong currency good for housing speculation? population and so they they start like they start they start slashing interest rates and they start basically building an entire economy uh based on the assumption that housing prices will always go up and so you should just take out loans so you can buy houses because the value of the housing will um uh because you know housing prices will always go up so you can you can have all these assets based on mortgages uh this is this may or may not be sounding familiar to everyone who literally 2008 uh and so you know in in in like in like

1982 the entire japanese economy implodes sort of again because they they literally built the 2008 machine and so this this forces the u.s to do something called the reverse plaza accords where they they take the original plaza records and they reverse it and they they increase the value of the american dollar american manufacturing dies like it's never recovered it's never coming back and this for a this kind of this stabilizes the japanese economy a little bit but it means that the u.s now no longer has a functional economy and so we do our solution to this is we do 2008 right we build an entire economy also on the japanese model of of currency specula of you know of like housing price speculation speculation like

or like the rising prices of like stocks right we build an economy completely made of bullshit but you know okay what does this have to do with the Asian market collapse? Okay, the problem is that, like, all of the countries in East Asia and, like, Southeast Asia also do this. They also do the thing where they're like, oh, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna Okay, so our manufacturing economies are declining, right? So we're gonna base our entire economy

on housing prices going up. And, you know, that's, and it's not George Soros. That's the thing that actually destroys like this sort of that that's something like that like actually destroys all these economies and you know and i i i i wanted to sort of run through this and you know this is like a lot of like sort of econ shit right but the reason i wanted to run through this is that i i think i think it gets at the the sort of truly the truly horrifying thing about how our economy works that is really difficult to face and is i

think it's at least a part of why people really really want there to just be one guy who is running anything everything but that's the cia whether that's soros whether that's like the the new world order yeah right because if there's if there's like a guy who's doing this right you can stop him but the the great horror of this world is that there is no deep state right there is no satanist cabal there's no one pulling the strings at all the only thing that is there is just sort of the cold lifeless and inexorable death logic of capital. And that logic is moving all of us, right? All it's, you know, the, the, the people who are doing the conspiracies insofar as they exist are being moved by this. All of the rulers are being moved by capital. All of us, the subjects are being moved by capital, but that like sucks, right? Like the, the, the, the fact that all of these economies are destroyed,

not by like the individual actions of people, but by the fact that like returns are less good in Thailand than they are in China. And this is just sort of the inactualable logic of the entire economic system. We have, this is, you know,

this is absolutely terrifying and faced with this sort of reality, right? Like people who want to protect capitalism because you know they have a bunch of assets in it right retreat into this sort of like they you know they they they they they use soros as a smoke screen for like why everything is suddenly going wrong but sort of simultaneous to this right this is also a real problem for george soros because he's like you know when he's not sort of in his role as like capital he's like not a piece of shit he's like a person who wants the world to be better and this you know this causes a sort – there was a contradiction in his ideology, right, which is that he wants the world to be a better place, and simultaneously he's also a capitalist.

And these two things are sort of warring with each other. Even as early as sort of the 90s, he's giving speeches about how his open society that he wants, this liberal democratic society of laws and norms and human rights it the greatest danger to it has ceased to be communism it's now capitalism but he can't do anything about it because he is also a capitalist and next episode we are going to watch soros like through his philanthropic endeavors attempt to solve the problems that his economic system has caused and fail catastrophically and become the sort of boogeyman and the, the, the, the anti-Semitic specter of every conspiracy theory in the world. Yeah. So check out that next time. Uh, and you know, if you're, uh, hanging out around Clark middle school, uh, and you have $40, uh, I can hook you up with some of that sweet black tar. So, you know, give me a ring.

My phone number is posted in the show notes of every episode. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters.

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Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's It Could Happen Here, the podcast where I attempt to wrangle jokes that are enough okay that we keep podcasting uh yeah with with me here to wrangle robert evans and also karrison davis Also, Garrison Davis, welcome back. My two uses in this series are to make corrections on Hungarian history of the Holocaust and talk about selling heroin to children.

So proud to be here. I'm very excited you're going to hear me complain. You're going to listen to me very briefly complain about Plato, a thing I did not think i was gonna do when i started this like the like the the philosophy guy yeah yeah okay okay all right okay so all right why are we eventually gonna talk about plato uh so george soros is probably best known for a foundation that he eventually funds called Open Society. That was originally the Soros Foundation. Then he was like, why am I naming this after myself? And it changed to Open Society.

I'm going to read. The Open Society is a very sort of. Again, I got to say exactly 20% more self-awareness than you get from the average billionaire. Bill Gates is like, we'll call it the Gates Foundation. Bill Gates is like, we'll call it the Gates foundation. Source is like, we'll call it the Soros, you know, wait,

wait, you don't know. You know what? Well, and to be fair to Soros, like Soros has, Soros has a real ideology and it, it can't work,

but if it did, the world wouldn't be that bad, unlike what would happen if you let Bill Gates run rampant over the earth, which is the world we live in right now. So I'm going to read a little bit from The Influenced Soros again about what the open society is. I have lived through Nazi persecution and soviet occupation soros later said popper's book is carl popper open society and its enemies struck me with the force of revelation it showed that fascism and communism have a lot in common that they both stand in opposition to a different principle of social organization the principle of open society. So, okay. I read this and I was like, okay, so let's go read Karl Popper's book, which is called The Open Society Against Enemies.

And so I assumed, right. That's interesting to me. I was also doing Popper's last night. You had the superior experience with your Popper's, I'm assuming. I had a bad fucking time i read this like last week you should have gotten yours from a gas station too yeah no instead i got it from the internet for free which questionable results so okay so i i i read this book right so this is carl popper is like normally a philosopher well he's like a scientist right he's most famous for like philosophy of science stuff, but he also wrote this book. And this is his critique of totalitarianism.

So, OK, I'm expecting, right, it's going to be half of it's going to be about the Nazis and half of it's going to be about the communist, right? No, the first half of this book is about Plato. And the second half of this book is about Marx. But he spends like 200 pages yelling at Plato. And to be fair, everything he says about Plato and about why Plato is totalitarian is completely true. But like his conclusion about what totalitarianism is,

is that totalitarianism is, is descendant. It's like the product of this thing he calls historicism, which is when like you have one thing that like the product of this thing he calls historicism which is when like you have one thing that's the agent of history and so he sees like like i don't know like a great man or like the the guy like whatever hegel's geist or like one great nation or like a great class as like these are all examples of historicism. And if you think about history like this, this is how totalitarianism was born.

And I am incredibly skeptical of that, of the view of, the way you think about history being the origin of totalitarianism. I don't know. It's a very, very weird book in a lot of ways. Popper is trying to do this thing that like a lot of kind of liberal philosophers of that period is doing, which is that he's trying to reconcile sort of like individual freedom, but then also sort of economic egalitarianism. And, you know, OK, so if you are actually serious about doing both of these things right like the the the two things you care about on earth are protecting individual freedom and achieving economic

egalitarianism you have two options you either become an anarchist and you sacrifice neither of your values or you become a neoliberal and you sacrifice both and popper unfortunately takes the second route. like individual weirdos and their obsessions influence history is largely due to, or as largely like related to the degree of power that like different systems allow to be invested into like individual weirdos. Like it's, it's less of a matter of like, you've got these sort of,

you know, in that kind of fascist idea, you've got these sort of individuals who embody the spirit of a people and more. If your system allows huge amounts of power to be invested in individual people with their weird hangups, then those weird hangups of this one guy may wind up defining history. I don't know. This is an unrelated rant. which is that these people conclude okay so like they don't okay the the the thing that they have to do like popper has to do right because he like acknowledges that a lot of the marxist critique is really powerful and that like it is in fact not very good that you have an entire class of people

to like survive off of extracting like labor from another class of people but you know if you accept that right you can't actually like defend capitalism on the merits of it being an economic system you have to like do this like circle run around dance of like defending ideas and this all gets like gets to this point where the problem that you're talking about happens which is that like well okay capitalism is also a system where one really weird guy and he's like terrible ideas can have an enormous impact on how society operates like this is this is this is this is the thing we're all suffering from from like elon musk right or like uh what what's that guy's name uh like robert moses right like yeah like the you know like capitalism is absolutely a system that generates just one guy who can just fuck everyone's entire lives.

And that's a perfect example of it because like the fact that Moses has these weird personal hangups around public transportation and this love of being driven around influences how tens of millions of people live to this day and influences like the global climate crisis. And so it's not like this great man didn't like grab the lathe of heaven. It was more like, no, our society kind of like the system we set up allowed an enormous amount of power for this specific thing, how our cities are set up to be invested in an unelected weirdo because he was the only one interested enough to focus on it. And that led to this very bad situation. Yeah. And like, I think, I think Pompers think of that was like, well, okay, you, you, you do, interested enough to focus on it and that led to this very bad situation yeah and like i think i

think poppers think of that was like well okay you you do you deal with this by like just having elections for everyone and it's like yeah well okay like some so sometimes you have elections we never vote for crazy assholes thank god sometimes sometimes you get donald trump right like i you know these these are these these are things that are going to haunt both popper well popper doesn't live long enough to see like the absolute worst this can possibly go but uh george soros unfortunately has lived to see exactly how badly this could this could possibly go but let's call him let's let's call him by his nickname from now on, G-Sizzle. Is that good?

We're not doing that. We're not doing that. Thank you. Thank you, Garrison. We're not doing that. This is why you're here. You have power of attorney over what nicknames we call the subjects of the episodes. I will keep and

reserve this power for... See, this is... We've built a system to try and stop individuals with weird hang-ups from influencing history so much. It's that simple, folks. Devolve powers.

Yeah, works great. This could work for the presidency. Unfortunately, we're going to have to talk about Yugoslavia this episode, so it doesn't always work. But, alright, so back in sort of the heady days of the

70s and 80s so jordan soros like okay he has a dual thing where he at once has his kind of crisis of conscience thing where he's like i want to actually do something with my life that's not just you know i want to have an impact on the world that is positive and not like i made so much money that like gods look at it and vomit and so and so okay so he his solution is he sets up a tax dodge and he's actually very explicit about this in interviews that his first foundation to do charity work was set up as a tax dodge um but this is where soros is very interesting right right? Because he has, you know, for like a billionaire, right? He has some positions that are startlingly very good.

So he is anti-apartheid. And that is like not a thing you can guarantee from people in that era. Like, oh boy. He also, and this is something that gets him in trouble like to this day, is he is pro-Palestine. And this is part of why like netanyahu absolutely hates him he's he's not like like okay he's not like a radical pro-palestine but by the standards of netanyahu a radical yeah yeah yeah it was like like his you know his sort of like like his sort of like liberal humanism like hey we should like, shoot children with guns thing.

Yeah, broadly anti-shooting children for throwing rocks. Yeah, and, like, that makes you a, like, like, enemy number one of the Israeli state. Well, yeah, no, okay, I'll put him at, like, enemy number three. No, the enemy number one is those kids, but, yeah, enemy number two. Yeah, he's, like, number three or four. They haven't whacked him yet. So, oh, God, speaking of things that the israeli government didn't do uh so he he gets his start i thought you were going

to do an ad i also thought it was going to be an ad break don't worry i have a better one um it's coming good so in the 1980s his first experience like doing charity work is he decides that he's going to go up against like apartheid in South Africa. And, you know, this is good. So he starts doing is he starts giving scholarships to black students to go to the University of Cape Town. And then he learns a very, very important lesson about neoliberalism that he's about. He's going to like promptly forget after this, which is that. OK, so what actually happened, what he thinks is going to

happen, right, is what he's trying to do is he's trying to make, you know, he's trying to make sure there's more money for black kids to go to go to university. What actually happens is that the state uses his money to pay for the existing scholarships and stops paying for any more scholarships. And so there's two things going on here, right? One is the obvious, this is the, this is the apartheid racism, right? Like they don don't want more like they don't want more non-white kids going to school but then two also this is also sort of a classic neoliberal failure which is like if you were if you when you replace the state with like billionaire philanthropists the state simply instead of like you know having more of the of like the resources the services provided the state just stops doing it and spends more money on cops and so he yesaurus very quickly realizes that like he figures this out and is like i do fuck

this like no i'm not gonna help you like i'm not gonna help the apartheid government do racism and so this makes him kind of weary of this stuff because he has sort of he has sort of seen how you see what happens when you when you very explicitly try to work within a system that is unbelievably fucked up, which is that the apartheid government uses your money as a way to funnel more of their own money into their own pockets. And do you know who else uses systems of apartheid to funnel more money into their own pockets? Oh, okay. I see. i now see what you're doing i think the last i think the previous attempt to net break was actually better i was kind of okay you know you know i mean it's me i accept criticism correct that our podcasts

are entirely sponsored via a time machine we used to go back to apartheid South Africa and get their advertising dollars. So please keep the Krugerrands flowing and purchase these products and services. I learned that Krugerrands was the South African currency from the movie Lethal Weapon 2. We're back and I'm sitting uncomfortable in the knowledge that I am the only person on this zoom call who has watched lethal weapon too. Have, have either of you seen any of the lethals weapon? No. Unbelievable.

Oh, you're missing maybe the best Mel Gibson performance outside of that time. He got pulled over in Malibu and gave a racist rant to those California state highway patrol officers. Mel Gibson. Speaking of people who are about to give racist rants. Okay, so the other thing

about Soros, and the thing that is sort of blisteringly ironic about how the sort of course of anti-Soros attacks go is that Soros is like a vehement, like pretty hard of anti-Saurus attacks go is that source is like a, a vehement, like pretty hardline anti-communist. And this is what he spends most of his time like in the eighties doing is,

is, you know, like give, giving money to anti-communist groups and communist countries. So he funds solidarity in Poland, which is this like, I very mixed record. Well, we'll get this all the way to the end.

Yeah, we don't need it. Like, he's funding anti-communist causes. Yeah, yeah, he's funding. But, you know, he's trying to fund, like, a very specific kind of, like, liberal anti-communist cause, right? And, you know, this goes badly for him in a number of ways. One is that the moment, like, the moment the Berlin Wall falls, everyone just, like, suddenly forgets about all of the anti-communism that he did. Because, you know, and this is something about, there's a kind of anti-communist that he is, right? Like, there's a lot of anti-communists who are, like, who are just, like, death squad guys, right?

Like, this is your, like, your guy trained by Chiang Kai- shak who's like shooting peasants in like el salvador right there's also like another kind of anti-communist in this era who are sort of liberal anti-communists who like are anti-communist but like also anti-pinochet for example like soros gives some money to the the people you know when pinochet has his big referendum of his like should i stay in power he gives money to the people who are like, no. And those are people who. Their intentions are better than the just like absolutely horrifying right wingers. But, you know, it doesn't it doesn't go great for him.

So Soros. His initial plan, right, is he's going to, you know, okay, when he's trying to, like, start funding a communist group, he's going to go into Hungary and he's going to, like, give Hungarian students scholarships. And the Hungarian students were like, don't do this. Like, if you just show up and give us money, the state is immediately going to be able to go like,

hey, you were, like, outside funded opposition people doing like regime change stuff and it's gonna like immediately discredit us and so this is the point where he sets up the soros foundation which becomes open there's a whole thing with this this stuff changes names like many times the open society foundation stuff yeah yeah and you know so you know what we should we should look like we should talk about what they actually do because in in sort of like i mean i can tell you one thing that they do because i used to work with when i was a teaching classes at bellingcat my uh my partner my partner Giancarlo, he would go and teach because he was born and for at least a period of time raised in Venezuela. He would teach classes in Latin America to local journalists who wanted to know open

source investigative techniques and who didn't have the kind of money to pay what it usually costs to do a Bellingcat thing. And that program, whereby a bunch of journalists in Latin America, particularly Colombia, got training, was funded by the Open Society Foundation. And so a couple of years ago, when there was that massive swelling of like the police murdering people in protest crowds and stuff in Colombia, the journalists who were like doing open source investigation to track down which police officers were, you know, killing folks and how this was going were a lot of the folks that Giancarlo had trained. Like that's the kind of stuff that one of the kind of things that the Open Society Foundation does.

Yeah, they also do a lot of they do a lot of like giving students scholarships. The other thing they're really big on that doesn't get talked about much is that they were huge on like cultural events basically like like paying people money to like put on plays and like theater stuff and music and like writing poems and books which is like i don't know like i actually think that's cool like like we as a society used to do this like we used to like pay people like the government used to pay people to like write things and like create art like the government used to pay people to like write things and like create art and then we decided that that was bad and i've never done it again and yeah i'm anti-creating art for the record that's why i'm really happy about all this

ai stuff bait bait yeah bait post do not engage so unfortunately for the soros foundation um one of the people they give these these scholarships to is victor or braun which is i victor orban oh you mean i'm in uh yeah yeah the hungarian yeah president in quotation marks yes we we shall we shall return to that. This is, I think, maybe the single greatest example of creating a young gravedigger I've ever seen in my entire life. I don't know. One of the things

that comes up about this, and this is one of the things that another one of the guys who Soros backs, who betrays him later on, says is that Soros is bad at politics. He's not very good at it. he's not you know people like the sort of like thing about him is that he's this sort of like criminal mastermind who can like like bankroll revolutions and stuff and he just like gets outmaneuvered by people constantly in ways that are like kind of depressing um yeah but okay so you're spending the 80s like doing all this you know like doing this sort of cultural work and you know in in

hungary right there's a sort of interesting thing that happens where like he's wealthy enough that like even the communist party is sort of like has to work with him because he has money and they sort of don't but you know the other thing that that's i think important to understand is that he's not like there's a bunch of foundations who do like exactly the same stuff right like maybe slightly worse like you know there's like the ford foundation there's like the rockefellers right or the rockefeller foundation like they all they all like at any place where open society is like doing stuff there's like a worse version of it than the ford foundation and like the rockefellers are doing but you know somehow stunningly only one of these groups is singled out for

being yelled at all the time and i will i will leave as an exercise to the reader why specifically they pick soros and not ford huh huh i wonder i wonder what big mystery i wonder what differences and uh and cultural uh views might be it might be a play here yeah so okay the other real problem that he runs into which is a cultural problem is that okay this is a problem that all the liberal anti-communists run into, which is that, okay, so the walls come down, right, and the communist governments fall, and it turns out that the anti-communists in Eastern Europe are almost all right-wingers, and their base are all, like, right-wing nationalist fanatics. quote about this. I thought I would blaze the trail. I would lead and others would follow. But now that I look back, I find that there was practically nobody behind me. I asked myself, what went wrong? And part of what went wrong is like what Soros is doing in these places. So for example, he, you know, he's, he's involved in funding solidarity. He's involved in some

of solidarity's negotiations with the government. And then the other thing that he does is he's one of the people who helps like do structural adjustment in poland and this goes really badly because so when we're talking about okay we should talk a little bit about what solidarity is because he helps destroy it by accident solidarity is this giant sort of like social democratic e union that forms in you know in like the early 80s in poland that's like the first sort of independent union in one of these communist countries and they eventually are able to sort of like knock off the government but they they come into power and you know so they they do on sort of soros's advice and on the advice of a lot of the sort of financial people they're getting, right? All of the people are telling them to do privatization.

So they do it, right? They privatize all of these giant state-owned, like, facilities. They privatize their docks, like, stuff like that. And this, it turns out, just causes massive deindustrialization. It destroys Solidarity's base because there's suddenly no longer all of these union jobs at all these state-owned factories and so you know they lose the next election and that solidarity like vanishes forever into the midst of time there's like six of those guys left um yeah and this and this is a real sort of soros problem this this like keeps running over and over again right is it you know he spent all this time being an anti-communist but then the actual anti-communists who have bases and who aren't just like destroying their own bases by like doing

privatization which is something he stuff he's also pushing right are these right-wingers and this is this is just sort of a fiasco and you know it's like he he he doesn't like he tries to do like a very similar thing to what he'd been doing in in eastern europe and china and this goes like even worse because he winds up like backing he winds up backing one of the ccp factions who gets purged after tiananmen and so you know sort of like as the sort of 90s go on right like he's kind of slowly starting to realize that like the stuff that he's doing is not working very well and one of the sort of i don't know if consequence is the right word but okay one of soros is sort of like principles that makes him different from a lot of

other these billionaires right he doesn't do humanitarian aid his thing is that like he wants to produce a society that doesn't need humanitarian aid which is sort of noble but like then you then yugoslavia falls apart and he winds up doing a bunch of stuff in yugoslavia like he winds up building like a water purification plant sarajevo while he's under siege and the other thing that I didn't know he was like really heavily involved with is like, he's basically the reason why the UN war crimes tribunal that like tries Milosevic and stuff like happens, like he funds it. It wasn't really like a UN thing. He was, he was like, Hey, we're going to have this tribunal. And then the German government like arrested one of the war criminals just sort of randomly at like an airport or something and he's able to convince sort of like clinton and a bunch of people to like actually turn and the un to like turn this into a real court and this pisses off a lot of people and like by a lot of people i mean like very specifically it pisses melissa

fick off because i somewhat obvious reasons that he's trying to try him for war crimes. Okay, so I think, Gare, you're too young for this. Robert, do you remember Rock the Vote? God, oh, yes. I remember Rock the Vote. Okay, so

one of the things Soros does is he does like a, he brings like a Rock the Vote, he's like one of people who brings the rock to vote to like Slovakia great and you know and this is the first time that like this is how we introduce people to democracy by showing them how cringe it can be perfect and the government is immediately immediately this is sort of the first time that like a government is seriously like well I mean it's not okay this is the first time that like a government is seriously like well i mean it's not okay this is the first time that you've had like a protest movement that starts and the head

of the country goes like it's george soros he's the one doing this even though like the ford foundation again and the rockefellers and just like a bunch of random people in slovakia are also doing this but this is this is this is sort of going to become like a pattern in in in these things because you know he he's sort of like like i think he's kind of like poking a lot of sort of very powerful like increasingly powerful sort of regional right-wing leaders because he looks at the societies and are like it actually it sucks to have like just dog shit right-wingers who are like racist and hate everyone running a country yeah that sounds like it would be bad yeah and this is the thing about soros right like he every once in a while right he sees something really bad going on and goes,

I'm going to throw a bunch of money at it, try to fix it. And so one of the things that he does this for is the war on drugs. Like in the, in sort of the eighties and nineties, like Soros looks at this and is like, this fucking sucks. Like this is really bad. And so he starts working in Baltimore where the government is trying to do like something like pretty like something like even now is considered sort of like pretty radical. I like harm reduction stuff. So, I mean, they like like Baltimore in the 90s has needle exchanges. He's doing like Narcan trainings for people.

He's, you know, he's doing things like fun instead of like like giving money to like he's doing he has these programs to like get people out of like prison faster and he's doing like after-school programs for kids and this stuff like this looks like genuinely good like there's no like i don't know it sucks that like it's it's billionaire money that's like doing it but like i don't know like probably there's a lot of people who are alive because they didn't get hiv from needles that they were able to do exchanges for yeah sure that's all that's all good stuff yeah and but you know the interesting thing about source right he's he's like not like you know he's doing stuff that's like pretty lefty right but he's like not a partisan guy until he sees george bush but he's like not a partisan guy until he sees George Bush.

And he sees, he's like the day after nine 11, he's like, holy shit, this guy is a maniac. And like, it just instantly has like the switch flips of like this man, this man is an enemy to open society,

which is true. And he's like, he's like, gets this braid of like, I need to bring this man down. And so he starts getting really for the first time right he starts getting really really involved in a 2004 election he's doing like like these like micro targeting ad stuff he's like throwing money around everywhere and you know i mean he explicitly like the like the way he looks at it like he's very explicit about this is like he wants to level the

like the playing field between the republicans who are funded by just a trillion right-wing billionaires and the Democrats who are funded by not that many billionaires. The problem with this is that he has like a very weird view of what's wrong with Bush. I'm going to read from the Implementation Sorority again. In imposing its view of freedom on both the American people and a foreign country, the supremacist ideology of the Bush administration is in contradiction with the principles of open society because it claims possession of an ultimate truth. Which, I don't know.

I don't actually think, like, claiming possession of an ultimate truth is, like, specifically the thing that, like, is the reason why the Bush administration is bad. But simultaneously, I don't know like i it's hard for me to be like too mad about a billionaire seeing george bush and just like going oh my god and sort of yeah it didn't it didn't work but it's good that he gave it a gave it the old college try

yeah well and unfortunately this this has a backlash effect which the republicans see him start doing this and they're like oh shit this is incredible campaign material for us and we start seeing like the the sort of the the less openly anti-semitic like precursors to like all the stuff we see today like bill o O'Reilly goes after him. Oh, God. Robert, do you remember Dennis Hastert? Oh, yeah. Oh, man.

Look, if I'm listing my favorite pedophiles who were longstanding speakers of the House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert is easily in the top three. um dennis haster is easily in the top three he i this is the thing that's been like collectively wiped from like america's conscience is that like the republican speaker of the house for like 20 years was like one of one of one of history's most prolific pedophiles he sure was um and he he also it turns out one of the people who mainstream the anti-saurus stuff uh he starts citing a fucking Lyndon LaRouche quote unquote report claiming that Soros got his money from drugs so

Lyndon LaRouche is this like fascist weirdo who cut his teeth and running this like anti-communist cult that would like physically fight leftist groups on campuses and would like give information on like student leftist groups and like other leftist groups of the government like they are

they are so fed it up that like if you start reading about the LaRoucheites like they were nerking the federal orgs like you've never heard of before it's stunningly stunningly bizarre like conspiracy cult thing and Dennis Hastert

was just straight up like reading their anti-semitic conspiracy theories like on tv but you know and i i think i think this is something that some one of the things i wanted to emphasize like in this episode right is like the anti-soro stuff isn't really like i don't know what you call it like a sort of organic anti-semitism like it's not something that like comes from the republican base right this is something that this is a deliberate choice by republican political strategists who are very deliberately like this this is this is a jewish billionaire who's helping the who's helping a democratic party like we can use this to do to

try to do like culture warship to win this election and you know like you you know we can see the results of this and this isn't even you know we're gonna get this in a little bit but like this this isn't even the only time this is gonna happen where like the specific like soros like anti-semitism suffered against them is like it's cooked up by like like very specifically cooked up as a targeted thing by political strategists i love it which it's oh it's good oh anyways we should we should do ads yeah speaking of anti-semitism you know just just speaking about it that's what we're doing here anyway here's some ads about it that's what we're doing here anyway here's some ads ah we're back uh got another email from the adl i'm gonna deal with this y'all continue talking about george soros oh boy so all right well the other thing soros keeps doing like you know so in going after bush right he has now

made himself like he's not enemy number one yet but he's going he's made himself like – he's not enemy number one yet, but he's made himself like a pretty high-profile enemy of the major Republican establishment. He's right up there with that guy who threw the shoe. Yeah, yeah. Also, that guy actually sucks. Yeah, yeah. We're not praising him. We're just noting that a guy threw a shoe. Yeah.

He starts this sort of like arc of pissing off a bunch of really, really powerful and important people who are anti-semitic right-wingers so remember how i a while back i said i was talking about there was a guy who double-crossed soros who was like this guy's bad at politics so that guy was like a uh that that that guy that guy was a a georgian protest leader who Soros helped his protest movements overthrow a pretty shitty pro-Russian government in Georgia. But that guy has a wild arc that you could do his own fucking movie series on. He's now a close ally of Viktor Orban, so it's going great. How do you actually pronounce his name? For some reason, it always just like pings off my brain.

Oh, yeah. I mean, with Garen, Garen and I here are the real brain trust to ask about pronunciations. You've brought together, you know, just the goats of saying words right. Greatest, greatest pronunciators just send me a list of like European cities that's a free episode idea

there you go yeah I'm just gonna say the word Binghamton like 47 times it's gonna be great okay so Soros back to this is called the Rose Revolution seven times. It's going to be great. Okay. So Soros back to say this, this gets called the Rose revolution. And you know,

this, this turns out badly for Soros in every possible way, which is that like one, his guy like sucks and turns on him. And then two, he really like this, like really pisses off Vladimir Putin, a man who was going to hold this grudge,

like on his deathbed, he will be holding this grudge like on his deathbed, he will be holding this grudge now. OK, so one of the things that that sort of like happens, so he's backing these sort of like protest movements in Eastern Europe. I fused the sort of 2000s and, you know, as the 2000s go on and turn to 2008 thing the the world economy goes to shit uh a bunch of right-wingers start taking power and one of victor ruban's like political consultants who's this guy who he met through netanyahu like specifically like this is this is another consultant guy very specifically cooks up the idea

for how he's trying to fend off like a right like a sort of another sort of right-wing challenge trying to fend off like the rest of sort of political establishment and orban's consultant like very specifically he's like what if we go after soros again and you know and so he does and this is this is another one of those things like this is literally the the anti-semitism is fucking cooked up in a pr lab in in order for these people to win elections and i don't know that that that just sort of the just sort of like cynical cold-bloodedness of it like of these people like this political consultant by the way like is also jewish right like and he just doesn't give a shit he's like a fuck it like well

you know like i i i'm like one of netanyahu's guys netanyahu fucking hates this guy too like why don't we just use him as a punching bag and so they do and you know this is this is part of a big part of the reason like why soros turns into the sort of enemy number one is that in 2015, they start blaming him for the influx of refugees from Syria. And this spreads like fucking wildfire. Suddenly, like every single right wing leader on Earth is like, oh, shit, I can blame all of my refugee stuff on this guy. And they start doing it. And, you know, suddenly like like Erdogan is blaming him for like the geddy part protest in 2013 like trump gets on this and you know this stuff sort of like it's it spreads really quickly and once it's sort of out of the bottle right like you know like people like like there there

are the people who sort of first start this right are doing this sort of like you know like incredibly cold cynical political calculus but once, you know, like incredibly cold, cynical political calculus. But once this like incredibly high level of anti-Semitism gets out into the open, it starts turning into just like Soros' Satan shit. is is that like this is this is one of the things like the sort of campaigns against soros is one of the things that is responsible for like our current like migrant policy like why it's so bad like why we need like half of our episodes next week are going to be about like just horrible shit happening at the border which is that like soros in the in the like the late the 90s and 2000s found out that like that Clinton was funding his welfare reform by cutting legal immigrants off

from food stamps and SSI benefits. And he's like, wait, this is fucking... Oh, slick Willie. He caught 1.5 million people off of his awful fucking benefits for just no reason.

Unbelievably demonic act. And Soros finds out about this is like, wait, what the fuck? What do you mean he's doing this? So he like puts a coalition together that like funds a bunch of immigrant advocacy groups. He's able to overturn this,

but there, there, there's a sort of right wing, the right wing reaction to this, right? Like part is partially also part of the right wing reaction to Soros in 2004. There's this very, very effective and like unbelievably brutal sort of right-wing backlash

about immigration politics that is you know it's one of the things that drives the obama administration right the obama administration is like worse than the bush administration on like deportation shit it's you know just utter horror and all of that stuff continues and all of these right wing people figure out that if you can just pin like Trump starts like Trump pins the migrant caravan on Soros and they figure out like this is the this is like the specific

combination right it's like the anti-semitism of like the Jewish banker bringing immigrants into your country is just like the sort of one way shop driving your entire country into like a like fascist right-wing frenzy and it works and now you know like the the cycle that we're in now is like anytime something happens uh like the right blames him for like this so the the the the current right-wing panic is that george soros was funding some like pretty moderate like reform da people because he's a criminal justice reform

guy and the republicans are now all talking about how this is like a scheme by soros to like cause crime and like destroy the entire country and unfortunately like this is just like this this is this is just reality now um all of these like really bleakly cynical political leaders and their like pollsters and pr consultants were like we can use anti-semitism to win elections and they did and now we live in hell. Yeah, but on the upside, you know, the, you know, have you guys had the new Mountain Dew Zero Major Melon?

It's not tasty, but it's in grocery stores. So if you're looking for a diet Mountain Dew flavor, you know, that makes it all kind of worthwhile. Ah, I don't know. No longer delivering flavor. That's what I had for you.

Uh, it was that or another heroin. Why, why would they need to deliver flavor when instead they can just continue to mainstream antisemitism to get right-wing politicians elected so they can make hey but you know what i i've been i've been studying this can for a while now and none of the anthropomorphized watermelons uh look like they could be racial caricatures so that's a win you know look that if that is actually that actually is a racism win to me.

If if Mountain Dew had made a melon version in 1930, it would have been pretty bad. Like we would be sharing pictures of those cans on Twitter today and going, oh, my God, they would have to make a statement. They'd have to donate some money to like, I't know fund uh uh probably scholarships or something it'd be a real problem for mountain dew is what i'm saying but today nothing problematic about the melons on their can yeah i'm sure there's nothing problematic about the soda industry aspartame the health chemical well uh is is is that is that all we had me yeah that's yeah this is this has been a good here well it's is i think now now we finally know why george soros is as bad as magneto um and why comparing george soros to magneto as the one of the richest men in the world who owns

probably the most influential communication app is uh probably not a good thing you know okay one more thing that i want to get it like for one second that i forgot i realized i forgot to say earlier is that like soros is not like in the scale of billionaire soros is not very rich like he's like the 370th richest billionaire like he's not even in the top 100 right elon musk he has like six billion dollars elon musk has like 184 billion dollars or something so like you know the the the the relative levels of influence that these people have no i was talking about elon musk yeah yeah yeah the one of the richest most influential people yeah yeah yeah i just i i just i i i need everyone to understand exactly how much more fucking rich it's it's it's it's like

fucking it's like when fucking henry ford was like doing anti-semitic conspiracy theories it's like you literally like like you personally literally control like more wealth than like all the people you're ranting about combined like shut shut the fuck up. Oh my God. Huh? Anti-Semitism folks. It sucks. And also rich people do it even though they're, they are the actual,

like the, the actual, yeah. In, in, in so far as anything, even remotely like what they're, what they're hypothesizing could even potentially exist.

It's fucking these people. So yeah, they're bad uh yeah welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season

digging into how Tex elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran

with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in

the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars,

from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community,

and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into

todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's It Could Happen Here. Look, I didn't think of an intro for this one. I really should have. I apologize

to the readers I was reading about Chinese osu! wii's instead Yeah, this is a podcast that's I don't know, it's about things I'm here with Garrett What a useful description Unlike all those other podcasts Which aren't about things

And ours is actually about things And today it's about hot dogs. And in order to talk about hot dogs, we're joined by Jamie Loftus, whose new book, Raw Dog, The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs, boldly asked the question, what if a book was good? Welcome to the show, Jamie. Hello. Hello. So good to be here to talk about things. This is like the thingiest thing uh available i think yeah so i

i read this book in okay i don't know how you're actually supposed to divide up like if you stand up to go to the bathroom in the middle of a sitting is that still one sitting but is it now increased to two things yeah so i read this book in one sitting and it was great oh one sitting with a with a bathroom break there. I think there was two technically. But yeah, yeah, it was a good time. Yeah, I'm so glad you liked it. Yeah. And so, OK, so this is a book that's about hot dogs and also about it's a tale of human human and animal misery and suffering.

And so as I was reading the book, my playlist pops up Daniel Kahn and the painted bird song The Butcher's Share. And so I'm like reading about this and the song starts going let's take a walk around the old bazaar where every little thing has traveled far every pair of pants and grain of rice contains a horror story and its price wow really uh really theming right at you yeah i was like wow wow okay i guess reality is just sort of telling me what the what the plot is right now um yeah i mean that in another another case i think that's really important that we're talking about this right now is that i believe your book was officially published on may 23rd yeah which is which is uh the the 23rd day in the fifth month

which is obvious of the year 2023, which is very important in the, in the discordian calendar and your books about hot dogs, which is a specifically, it is the one sacred food in the religion of discordianism. So we, we like for these reasons, I think it's really, it's really important.

We talk about this because you, you must be a very powerful wizard to have figured this out. Yes. Yes, I had to reserve this date years in advance. I saw it coming. And then by the time people caught on, it was too late. I had already wizarded my way into the most potent release date. And now, I mean, it's we all may be fucked

because I didn't. Someone's going to assassinate JFK again. It's going to be great. And this time his head is going to explode like there's twice as much blood in it as the original. It's going to be really shocking. Ask the original. I love that. It's like ask the original

series or movies. There's going to be a second grass Ask the original. I love that. It's like, ask the original series or movies. There's going to be a second grassy knoll stacked on top of the book depository. It's going to be amazing. Has reboot culture gone too far? It's not that good. It's a good question. I was trying to do a reboot culture plug cycle back here thing, and I can't do it.

I'm a hack and a fraud but i wanted to yeah so i wanted to talk to you a bit about one of the things you mentioned the book is that you were trying to get into like like try trying to be able to get tours of these of these uh like packing plants and it's just they just like didn't let you so i wanted to ask a bit about like that process because that seemed like it was incredibly chaotic. Yeah, it was really frustrating and humiliating kind of every step of the way where, I mean, as we were traveling, I had, you know, the map of places that I wanted to go. And then I also had a map of like a meatpacking plant that we could possibly go to on the way. And so I reached out a little bit in advance and either got, I mean, got a ton of just no answers

and I would try to call. But generally the excuse I was given was, well, we don't let people tour anymore since COVID because there were a few places. I know that the Vienna Beef Factory in Chicago used to do tours of very specific areas of the factory, kind of the least gnarly parts, which is saying nothing. But, you know, there were places that you, that used to let civilians tour. And now it's just, unless things have

changed in the last, you know, year or so, no one can. And on top of that, in certain states, and this is also shifting, but ag-gag laws, I think make it way less possible and appealing for any meatpacking plant to allow other people in, which is true. I mean, the ag-gag law which is true. I mean, the Agag law, um, rabbit hole is so sinister of just like, instead of any meaningful improvement in meat packing plants,

they're inventing new laws to combat, uh, technology, which is just like terrifying. Yeah. I mean, that was a, well,

was that, was that technically pre green scare? Uh, that's a good question. I think it was, I think that was mostly like a midcare? That's a good question. I think that was mostly like a mid-90s thing. Yeah, but they've definitely kicked up. I mean, I think awareness of them in general has kicked up in the last couple of years. In sort of in step with how horrible conditions were for workers uh during lockdown after the

executive order um i think there was like all of a sudden a heightened interest in wanting to investigate it and they were just blocked at every single turn and there are some i mean i know that some have been uh overturned or in the in the process of being overturned but um i don't know it it seems pretty bleak to me yeah yeah like you know i think i'd help with that right like we found out like what like a look at was it like a month ago like pretty recently also that there were a bunch of companies of these meatpacking companies that were just like using child labor and the children were getting horribly named yep that yeah that was in didn't make the book but i i could have taken an educated guess like you know like truly it is like often so

comically bad it feels wrong but it's just like so over the top horrible and when it sounds like describing current meatpacking conditions in the U.S. sounds like you're describing meatpacking conditions 100 years ago, and they were actually slightly better 100 years ago. So it is very bleak. And the unions that still exist, but they are somewhat weakened and making it possible for laws like this to sneak through an active child labor. And there's, I know I put this in the book because it's something I think about all the time where, you know, down the line, it was reported that not only was working at a meatpacking plant, one of the least safe jobs in the country during lockdown. But on top of that,

a year later, it was revealed that the top brass at Tyson and Smithfield were directly colluding with the government and essentially drafted the executive order that was given in April 2020 to keep the meat packing plants open. There were foremen and sort of middle managers at these companies that would take bets on how many of their employees would get sick. It was just like, it was cartoon evil. It was- Yeah, I'm like constantly haunted by the taking bets thing. Like that's, I think about that like once a week

and I'm like, I think your line was once a week and i'm like i i i think i think your line was i think your line was like a continued thing of how okay with you are you are you with bringing the guillotine back and i was like you know like and it's the worst when it's like middle managers i'm like what is your what is your end game here like it's i mean i know what end game is, but it's so bleak to, you know, be making, you know, just getting by and still betting against your like, like vulnerable people that work for you, who you see every day. It's just like, I mean, whatever, not surprising, but yeah, it's like, wow, there's no, there's no justice in hot dog land. There really isn't. I'm so curious about how curated, what they they what information is allowed to be shared like I'm curious if I don't know if they know how bad it is even or if they're just like conditioned not to

not to think about it yeah from what I can tell uh there are and I write about one at length in the book because it's one of my favorite YouTube clips of all time this like canadian tv show um that's like a i think it's just called how it's made uh but it's like this is a very popular canadian television show it's i watched this a lot as a kid really yeah yeah yeah i i love i mean i love shows like that and i love specifically when they show you how something gross is made because they're really trying to like keep the mood light in a way that is like so funny with hot dogs where it's like just these big machines farting out goo and then there's like this bass line playing that's like boom boom boom boom the next step in the hot dog's journey is going to the shit fat and you're like what it's so good

but it's really i mean those those clips are ridiculously curated and to the point where it's like i can't even really tell you what's missing but i you know you can tell weird pr when you see it and um and yeah like they're sort of showing the easiest, I don't know. It reminds me, I don't know why I'm like in, I'm like Farrah knows pilled today, but like, it reminds me of the anecdote about Elizabeth Holmes where she was like taking Joe Biden around Farrah knows. And then there were like people in each room setting up the next room to look like it was a functioning business.

As they were taking him through the, through the rooms and successfully deceived him that's very much what hot dog production clips feel like to me which is wild because they're still disgusting like you cannot make it look good um but yeah i don't know i mean going back through years of reports um it's it's uh really, understandably so, to speak with people who work at meatpacking plants as well, because there's not a lot that they stand to gain from talking to reporters. But there was a good Washington Post report about it in the early 2000s that detailed not just labor abuses within the workforce, but how, you know, when you're not

paying your employees enough and not keeping the equipment updated and are, you know, factory farming focused on just production, production, production, the animals are far worse off too. And there were some pretty horrifying descriptions of what would happen to animals when people didn't have the the workforce or the um or the tools to be able to um you know slaughter an animal in not the most horrible way possible um i i i i like thought i had a like i'd like watch stuff before on factory farming and like i i don't i'm gonna have a real fun time sleeping tonight thinking about the fucking... I don't know. We should probably content warning this because this is like... The animal

stuff in this is genuinely horrible. Like the specific thing I was looking at was them talking about stunning an animal to kill it, but then the animal comes back and they're literally chopping the animal apart while it's alive. The animal's blinking at them. I'm like, Jesus Christ. It's like... It's hot. animal apart while it's alive the animals like blinking out there like jesus christ

it's like it's hot and then on the workers end it's like and don't stop or you're fired and like and you have no protection it's just like it's a it's a nightmare in a lot of places and there it came around in an interesting way with um Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest last year. Because they use, I don't know if they use Smithfield plants for all of their food, but certainly some of them. And there was a protester who came on stage while Joey Chestnut was gobbling 75 glizzies or something like that. And the protester was wearing a Darth Vader mask. And he had this sign that said, take down the Smithfield Death Star. And it was a good like a pretty solid protest. It made it on TV.

But then Joey Chestnut tackled him to the ground and then just stood up and kept eating hot dogs. It was like, I mean, the protester was so in the right. But also watching Joey really take someone just in the right but also watching joey really just take someone just in the middle of eating he was like 40 hot dogs deep tackled this guy to the ground and on like the low res feed i was watching it looked like he killed him and i was like what did joey just do on espn did he just kill a man um He didn't. But he injured someone. And he also had a broken leg at the time. Joey, not the protester.

So it was just like... And then he went back to eating hot dogs. And then he finished the contest. And he was like, well, I would have beat my own record, but unfortunately I had to pause for five seconds to kill someone. But anyways,

yeah, the, the, especially Smithfield, I think is uniquely bad, but Smithfield and Tyson, it's just like her, like horrendous with,

with labor practices. Yeah. And I mean, I think that was like, I had a thing I was going to say, and then it, it simply evaporated from my mind. You know what?

Fuck it. Ad break. We're doing an ad break here to cover up my mind. You know what? Fuck it. Ad break. We're doing an ad break here to cover up my failures. I keep having this like false memory. I feel like it's like this like Mandela effect thing

where when everyone says, whenever someone says Joey Chestnut, I keep, I keep thinking it's a character from I Think You Should Leave. But whenever I look at it,

I'm like, no, it's not. It does sound like that. Every single time. I mean, it does sound like that. And I think you should leave has such a God tier hot dog jokes that Joey should be on that show, but unfortunately he lacks charisma. And so he also seems kind's not a bad person.

He's definitely complicit in a number of things. Very hard to know what Joey's politics are, which I know is intentional. But I'm like, what's going on with him? He's from San Diego, but now he lives in Indiana. I just don't feel like it bodes well but i can't say for sure yeah yeah you know that was another part of this that i was like i was reading this and especially like given the shit that's been happening the last few weeks reading about takaru kobayashi uh the the the four the the former champion competitive eating guy coming to the u.s and

then like having the very common asian american experience of like coming to the US and then like having the very common Asian American experience of like coming to the US and then slowly realizing holy shit this place sucks ass like there's just a bunch of racists here and they hate us and my boss is going to like run a racist PR campaign against me for money

like mask off like every day all the time and here's the guy I'm going to be replacing you with. And you will be only abused until this guy can beat you and then goodbye forever. And that's what happened. It's so, I mean, I don't know. I think it's fascinating in a very sick way because it's like, he is just a hot vince mcmahon like it's absolutely who this guy is and clearly idolizes vince mcmahon the guy george shea like

his wife wrote for the wwe and soap operas and so he's just like very well versed in uh very racist anti-woman high drama like it's just like what he it's his favorite um and i hate him and he's so uniquely in control of that world it's it feels very vince mcmahonish where you're like surely someone else could do this job but uh but it's just not not allowed if he's the vince mcmahon of the hot dog world what are what are you now in the hot dog world the study of hot dogs i'm one of the people who vince mcmahon covers up the murder of. I think probably that's eventually me. I'll be involved in a very small, suspicious incident in this man's life. I don't know. I mean, yeah, unfortunately, I feel like that's the best shot I have. It was interesting, though, when I released an excerpt of my book that was about Joey

Chestnut and there, they did not run this by me, but they just named the excerpt. I'm in love with Joey Chestnut. I was like, okay, I guess I do say that. Um, but I wouldn't lead with it anyway. Uh, the, the major league eating PR team reached out to me and I thought it was going to be, I was just going to get like reamed, but they, it was just a light fact. Correct. It was very weird, a little menacing, but I guess that they're fine with me calling them evil. They're like, Hey, when you said we were evil, your number was a little bit off just so you know.

And I'm like, thanks. I guess the press is good press. Knowledge is power. your number was a little bit off just so you know thanks knowledge is power I changed my mind I think they're great now due to this small fact correction ringing endorsements we're attempting to confirm live there is not in fact a gun behind jamie's head right now look i can't say i can't say uh i think the two things yeah with the book being out now

it feels nice in most ways and then two ways where i'm like stressed out about it where i'm like i'm afraid that george shea is going to come for me and I'm also afraid the entire city of Chicago is going to come for me. Okay I want to talk about this because alright so I'm going to have to go into witness protection after this but I agree with you that the Chicago style hot dog is not that good. Yeah like

I think celery salt on hot dog is really good but there's like it doesn't it just it gets too soggy pretty quickly it like the flavors don't necessarily go together like it's it's only okay it's it's too it's wet and there's too much going on and it's just like yeah it's a catastrophe i i well okay i was promising myself i would dial back on chicago hot dog sl, but it's like not, it's not, it's not very good. And the, and I think the main thing, it wouldn't bother me as much if they,

I'm like those people in Chicago, but if the Chicago hot dog loving community was just like, Hey, we have this gross hot dog and and we love it that's fine unbridled enthusiasm for something gross love it but then they top that off by being like and if you like ketchup you should walk into traffic and get hit by a car like so aggressively hate ketchup in a way that i i't know. I love something disgusting, but hating something innocuous is such a weird thing to do. It's very bizarre.

I also got like just absolute whiplash reading this because one of the places you go to is, is the, I died incomprehensibly named fat. So's last stand. And I was literally there last week by accident because i i no way yeah so i i was like an absolute fool i was trying to travel at 7 a.m on two hours of sleep because i was writing an episode and i took a bus the wrong way and i ended up there and i was like

what the fuck have i just walked into and i opened this book and i was like oh my god what is happening to me empty fatso's last stand sounds like a very scary liminal space to exist it was so accursed I was getting off the bus and the bus driver was like are you sure you want to get off here and I was like yeah well I mean that's the beginning of like a I don't know

goosebumps episode it was a whole thing yeah and then you find out that fatso's last stand burned down 20 years ago. Did you get anything? They weren't open. Oh, God. Pretty good.

It was pretty good there. And then I've since gone back to Chicago because I didn't have time to go everywhere I wanted to. And I've since gone back. And I do genuinely like the Chicago-style hot dog at Red Hot Ranch. I'm a big Red Hot Ranch head. I've converted, but, but a lot of it is,

yeah, it's just bizarre. And the hating the ketchup thing is confusing. And then I went to Pittsburgh recently and their ketchup city USA. And so I was having some interesting conversations and yeah, this is what my life is like now. The other thing. Okay. So there's, there's two more very specific hot dog questions you need to ask one is uh do you have portillo takes oh um not really i i like i like portillos and i i've been in illinois and i've

been in uh california too it's it's a classic it's good i i it didn't uh it didn't make it into I, I, it didn't, uh, it didn't make it into the book because there was like so many hot dogs that didn't make it into the book because they were like, all right, that's just you saying like, there were so many paragraphs in a row. Like, and then I had this one and I liked it. And then I had this one and I liked it. So my editor was like, all right, we can, we can, we can cut. I had to cut whole chapters. It's so wild how long this book could have been were I not reined in. But there was, well, this is Chicago relevant too.

I took a two-day course called Hot Dog University through Vienna Beef from this guy. That's a thing. Can you repeat that for me sorry oh uh yeah i'm a graduate of hot dog university uh it's a course where you it was on zoom unfortunately it used to be in person this is guy mark uh phd professor of hot dogs and uh you take the course and he teaches you how to open your own hot dog stand and over the course of two days and it was actually i learned a lot how many people were on the zoom there were three people it was me and two guys from chicago

and i was trying to like be i didn't want to say why i was there so i was trying to like be, I didn't want to say why I was there. So I was trying to just like, oh, my name's Jamie. And I'm interested in opening a California hot dog stand. And Mark was really interested in the idea. And it was a couple months of me kind of like dodging some emails of like, I'm not going to do it. I never told them, but I'm not going to do it. Okay. So, all right. I need to, I got, i'm now conflicted because i have

a great hot dog stand pivot but also i want to ask you the second hot dog question which is have you had japa dogs no i haven't had japa dogs yet i wanted to go because i know that there's like a bunch there's some vancouver is that right like i know yeah yeah it's a very yeah it's a canadian canada coded my my friend in vancouver keeps insisting i eat it and i refuse i wanted to go to vancouver and try it because like northwestern hot dogs there's like there's a lot going on there in a good way like portland teatle big fan of their hot dogs yeah i didn't get to jab a dog there were a few places there was a place in maine i really wanted to go to but it was so on the side of the highway and open two hours a day that it was like,

it would be so logistically hard to be there, but working on it. Yeah. I want to go to Joppa dog someday. I went to, uh, I got hot dog poutine in Montreal recently, which I guess is calm, a common poutine make. It was great. So now that you've dedicated, I'm guessing multiple years of your life. Two years, yeah. Not getting those back. I guess it's studying both hot dogs

and like the cultural conditions that are created around them. Do you feel like a better person? Oh. um do you feel like a better person oh um or have you learned something extremely useful about american culture that will improve your life going forward thank you for the two alternatives to the question i i would say that knowing more about hot dogs didn't make me a better person i think i hope and i also i think that like i don't know it's like it feels better to or or i don't know like i i enjoy uh stuff that it's like

you can get to a really dark and serious place but they seem so innocuous it's like um whatever getting hansel and gretel to come into your candy house and then being like actually it's fucking murder city everyone's fucked in here like you're gonna have fun for a little while the food is delicious but then you're gonna die like i just i like um i like subjects like that um and getting to i don't know i've met genuinely i when we had the book release show the other night i've met so many nice people through the hot dog community. The hot dog community. It's true.

I had this guy I met in a parking lot in Culver City. He was a Wienermobile driver at the time. And he brought his fiance and we talked on stage and he was reflecting on his Wienermobile heyday. And he told me this, i'm excited because at the time he was still working for oscar meyer and i was like do people have sex in here and he was like i don't know probably um but now he doesn't work for oscar meyer so i was like do people have sex in there you have no loyalty at this point and he was like okay well i never did but there is like there's like six seats in the wienermobile and i guess on the back left it's called the meat seat and that's where you fuck the meat seats i know it was really it was really shocking and he's so sweet that it was really scary to hear coming out of his mouth.

So there is the meat seat. Anyways, I've met a lot of nice people through hot dogs. And I've learned stuff I did not know. So it's fun. Well, you too can become a better person by purchasing the book Raw Talk wherever books are sold. One actual serious question. Have you ever watched the movie Food Fight? No.

Wait, when is it from? starring supermarket food mascots that and they unite to fight the generic brand food products in their grocery store and there's a lot of really weird Nazi imagery really uncomfortable like over sexualization and some of the most garish animation

you've ever seen it's a pretty wild movie it It was in development for almost like a decade and a half. Charlie Sheen, Eva Longoria, Hilary Duff. Oh my god. What a different era.

Christopher Lloyd plays one of the villains. It is one of the worst acid trips of a movie just because it is just really bad that is so crazy that I have zero recollection of this movie ever being made

so I mean hot dogs are certainly prominent on this poster I'm just like shocked at them billing the starkest tuna above the Twinkie? It doesn't make sense to me.

Also, there is a dog character who's just like Indiana Jones, but a dog. No. But they're also in a romantic relationship with a human woman. I don't

want to know where the Nazi stuff comes in But I am This is so wild because I thought that Sausage party was the worst thing to happen To this very scary genre And it's horrible but this is worse This is like the dark side of sausage party No

Oh my god Oh and there's a Maybe there's a sequel? Food fight? It's about time? I've not heard of this oh maybe this is fake no maybe this is fake i hope it's fake yeah this is so ugly holy shit no it is it is one of the worst movies ever ever made it's it's it's it's garish it's upsetting it is weirdly fascistic um and it's also like primarily based around like brand promotion. Also,

a lot of these big food companies like signed these contracts in the late nineties. And of course the film didn't come out until 2012. Oh my God. There's a whole bunch of really weird, like food fight merchandise that was made with all of these brand mascots. And it's, it's all extremely questionable.

That does explain the cast. Yeah. Because it's a late 90s cast to have Wayne Brady playing Daredevil Dan and Christopher Lloyd playing Mr. Clickboard. Chris Kattan is in it? Yeah, this movie has been in development for a long time. Wow. Holy shit.

Anyway, I was just wondering since it is supermarket food hot dog adjacent and it does often draw parallels to Sausage Party which is also obviously

one of the most famous hot dog films. One of the most famous, yes. Films? Quote unquote films. Thank you for motion pictures.

Cinema? Cinema. I have, I've been wearing them At the shows I've have They did make Halloween costumes for Sausage party and they Have the bun that looks So visceral like Though like it has like vagina Mouth and then they gave the bun

Huge boobs and a huge Butt anyways she's Voiced by Kristen Wiig and vagina mouth. And then they gave the bun huge boobs and a huge butt. Anyways, she's voiced by Kristen wig. And, um, I have the costume and I've been wearing it. Wait, no,

you have the actual costume. Yeah, I have it. I'm it's, it's right over there. Oh gosh. You're wearing it for your book stuff. Yeah.

I love, I love a costume change especially when it is also a jump scare yeah yeah wow yeah well that's incredibly upsetting that's about all the time we have today Jamie, where can people find the hot dog book? Oh, you can find it all over the place, but I would recommend getting it from bookshop.org. If you're ordering online, it's a really cool website that will automatically purchase from your nearest independent bookstore and send it to you. So yeah, it's a pro labor book,

so don't buy it from somewhere shitty use your head um but yeah get it and there's also i also narrate the audiobook if you like many people have been telling me for the past couple of days or like a book kind of a long podcast in a way and i was like whoa sure feels great feels great to hear all. And where can people find you on the internet and the stuff that you also do that's not the hot dog book? Bravely still on, on Twitter at Jamie Loftus help and Instagram at Jamie Christ superstar. And then you can listen to me on the Bechtel cast every week on this very

network. Well, I sure hope you cover Food Fight in an upcoming episode. I do. We just covered Sausage Party and I think we both have PTSD. Oh no. You have like a detox period first. And then come back with Food Fight

and by the end be like, you know, Sausage Party wasn't actually that bad. Yeah, this is the one you do when the paperback comes out oh my god honestly nice not the worst idea i i i do want to watch this movie now but i like looking at the poster i'm like i don't know if i can watch it alone but i will watch it we can we we can surely plan something let's's do it. All right. Thank you. Thank you for coming on and talking about hot dogs and labor and all of all of your hard work.

You can find us on Cool Zone Media on most of the Instagrams and Twitters and other places. And Happen Here Pod. Keep on dog and yep. Okay. As they yep okay as they say as they say yes welcome I'm Danny Thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people.

I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture,

musica, peliculas and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game if you love hearing real conversations with your favorite latin celebrities artists and culture shifters this is the podcast for you we're talking real conversations with our latin stars from actors and artists to musicians and creators sharing their stories struggles and successes you know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community,

and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. Recently, I just wrapped up a whole five episodes about the previous week of action to stop Cop City in Atlanta, Georgia.

In a somewhat unsuccessful attempt to shorten the running time of those episodes, I had to cut out many of the funny bits, jokes, gaffes, goofs, bloopers, and related tomfoolery. But as demonstrated by the police's massive mobilization to shut down a cancelled comedy event in the woods on March 7th, the Wolani Forest and surrounding area of Atlanta are often home to manifestations of absurdist humor. There's been a lot of not great news recently. Well, there's kind of always a lot of not great news, now that we live in an ever-expanding hyper-reality, oversaturated with information, but I digress.

I think it's just as important to not overlook the comedic, light-hearted side of things as it is to keep up with all of the doom and gloom that we usually platform on our show. So without further ado, I present to you... Jokes from the Atlanta Forest! Side note, I am now invoking Jester's privilege. Legally, everything we say in this episode is a joke as a little heads up. Okay, this episode will probably make more sense if you listened to the four-part Week of Action series or the retrospective episode. But also, I will do my best to pop in via this narration to help fill in any gaps so that listeners will not be completely lost if you've not listened to those other episodes.

Anyway, we shall start by tuning back into my conversation with Matt from the Atlanta Community Press Collective as we discuss the March 5th police raid of the South River Music Festival. Welcome to It Could Happen Herecast. I'm Garrison Davis. Welcome to It Could Happen Herecast. I'm Garrison Davis. In World of Warcraft, you can shield bash. So please don't include that. There's been this effort from police and media to frame these arrests as like, these were arrests that happened at a crime scene. These arrests were people who were torching equipment, who were involved in all these actions, who were doing domestic terrorism. But all the arrests that happened were at a music festival. They were in a completely different

section of the forest. At a music festival, at the parking lot, even away from the music festival. And police surveillance may be good, and they may have been able to pick out an individual or two. But for the most part, like you had something like 200 people, uh, partake in this direct action and then disappear into the woods. There's really no way to, and of course, most of them were wearing block of some form that there's really no way much of that block, which has now been burnt and is no longer existing in the physical material realm. been burnt and is no longer existing in the physical material realm. So there's no way to really tell who was there other than allegedly having mud on your clothes.

Do you want to talk about what the warrants were and the oddity of how the warrants were formatted? Once you started to listen to them, you notice this very repetitive nature of them. And so about halfway through, we get to a lawyer who straight up calls out the fact that these warrants seem like they were just copy pasted. Like every single person. All the way down the line. And one of the such claims. Mud. Mud. So I don't know. i don't know how many uh festivals you've attended um in your life but i've been to a few and they are never clean affairs so it it rained like one day before the night before the festival started there was a tornado warning in Atlanta. I forgot about that. And there was rain, which makes, I don't know if the prosecutors know this, but when rain mixes with dirt, it creates something called that we, that we refer to as mud. My Doc Martens are still caked in mud.

Future me cutting back in here for a sec. So for the record, I have since cleaned my Doc Martens, but the mud was still on there for well over a month until I was forced to wash my shoes after I stepped in much, much more mud while in the Tillamook Forest as I was failing to shoot a Kel-Tec, which, yeah, that was probably my bad. These charges don't make any sense.

There's no evidence these people committed any actual crimes, so they're just being charged with terrorism, this nebulous concept. The judge said that the legal basis of these claims will have to be decided on another day. Similarly, they said that in regards to actual evidence that these people charged did any crimes, that in regards to actual evidence that these people charged did any crimes, she said that she had none of this evidence in front of her and that evidence is for another day. Absolutely. I think bonkers is an appropriate word. One of those kangaroo court moments.

Really, my faith in the legal system was really solidified this day. There was also the threat of arrest for the New York Times reporter that happened. Forgot to mention that. So, you know, we'll leave that commentary by itself. They should have charged Sean Keenan with domestic terrorism. Sorry for making fun of noted trans ally, the New York Times. I promise it won't happen again. Wait,

wait, no, that's a lie. There's at least two more New York Times jokes in this script. Fuck. I guess let's talk about Monday. Monday, Monday. So, uh, don't Is it the editor? danil danil i'm sorry i'm so sorry he's not gonna hear any of this shit

oh because the way these work is i transcribe them and then i copy and paste sections so they only move the section over so when i when i say ask garrison about, so it turns out that was a lie. Danil did need to hear that, so sorry, Danil. Full transparency, most of those bleeps were me making horrible, horrible slurping noises into the microphone, as Danil

can probably attest. So really, all of you should be thanking Danil for suffering through those to bleep them out. Danil died for your sins. I mean content. Truly braver than the troops. Insert joke. Anyway, back to me from the past.

So let's talk about Monday. We'll talk about the clergy event that happened in front of City Hall. So City Council meeting. You work for the Atlanta Community Press Collective. You've covered a lot of city council meetings in Atlanta before. This was my first time covering an Atlanta city council meeting. Due to your wisdom in this field, I would like for you to discuss what happened at the city council meeting in relation to your years of experience in covering these meetings?

So city council meets every other week on Mondays. I cover several other committees, but the big one is always the city council meeting. And over the course of time, there's like a cast of characters that you just begin to understand are going to appear either every week or from time to time. And you had the pleasure of actually getting to see a few of these. And there were a few of us media folks there. And I was actually really happy that people got to experience this with me because I usually have to do it by myself. So you got to meet three of the characters. You got to meet Brother Hakeem. You got to experience this with me because I usually have to do it by myself. So you got to meet three of the characters. You got to meet Brother Hakeem,

you got to meet Rachel, and you got to meet your favorite chef doctor. So this is just somebody who everyone refers to as chef doctor. He is dressed up as what you can only describe as a chef doctor. Someone wearing half of a chef's outfit, half of a doctor's outfit. half of a doctor's outfit. He had a Freemason pin on his shirt

because of course he did. And I just like watched him for a while because like initially in the city council meeting they were just like handing out awards to like

the proclamation ceremonies. The proclamations and awards to like various people including like former city council members like whatever. And then eventually public comment started. And to like various people including like former city council members like whatever um and then eventually public comment started and i guess let's let's talk about chef doctor so he well

no so for for the entirety of the city council meeting during the proclamations in the back in the back of the back of city council there was this large red heart just sitting in the back. But it looked like Bob the Tomato from VeggieTales. That was exactly what I thought. I'm like, why is there this Bob the Tomato-ass heart mascot just sitting in the back of City Council? No one was inside the costume it was just like the heart sitting there next to like another massive heart made up of like flowers um so i was kind of confused for why that was there uh there was like a pediatric surgeon that got like one of

the awards i'm like oh maybe the heart's there because of like because of like heart surgery or something i don't know no no no that would That would make sense. And you have to get out of that mindset for public comment for the most part. So then Chef Doctor gets 10 minutes of public comment. So we should explain that mechanism. Everyone who signs up for public comment gets two minutes. You can award your time or give over your time to somebody else. So there were four other people who gave their time over to Chef Doctor to give him 10 minutes and he used all 10 minutes. So what was Chef Doctor trying to get out of the city? Why was he giving public comments? So a shout out to Chef Doctor, okay? Chef Doctor wants to create a soul food museum in the west side of Atlanta. And she's shown up a few times to kind of ask city council for money.

And as far as I know, that has gone nowhere. But that was what he is ostensibly there for today. However, beyond just the heart, the dancing. We haven't got there yet however beyond just the big red heart and like the paper mache flower heart he he brought a flautist a flautist so a flautist is someone who plays the flute if you are like an uncultured person who's who's listening to this um and he walked up to the microphone, and then for five minutes, he got a flautist to play a flute cover of Amazing Grace.

Yes, but he had backing music from a laptop that just kind of appeared out of nowhere and played into the microphone. They played this funeral song as this now heart that's been brought to life starts dancing starts dancing so this person wearing like heart pajama pants changed into this heart costume at some point i didn't see them change into this i don't know how this happened i must have like missed it it's city council magic next will be uh chef dr kenneth wilhoit you'll

have 10 minutes due to yielded time chef let's go ahead and get started my name is uh chef dr kenneth wilhoit i'm the president of the soul food museum and the soul food University we are celebrating our 20th anniversary and We are asking for the City Council and our honorable mayor to get behind us and so and support us with donating a museum us with donating a museum space building and land with parking in the city of Atlanta for our tourists that come here to have a place to come and experience our hospitality agriculture service

of Atlanta I'm gonna say a quick prayer because I'm spirit-led. I do things by spirit. I'm at that age, you know, it's not about me. It's about the spirit. Now, we'll have a song that was selected by the spirit of the ancestors.

Not by me, but by the spirit of the ancestors. I asked God, I said, hey God, what song should we introduce today? This is the one that was. but this this guy in the heart costume walks up and he starts like kind of dancing to this music for five minutes talk talk about the dancing i don't think it was so much dancing as a swaying with a little bit of hand motion along with the swaying um but like, I, I wasn't expecting it. I, I thought someone like dosed me with hallucinogens.

I, I did actually. Um, I had, there were, there were some strips of LSD. I, I put them in your water bottle when you went looking. This explains so much about what happened on Monday. No, it would make much more sense if that's what happened. Unfortunately, Atlanta is a cartoon town and that's not what happened. This, Atlanta is a cartoon town, and that's not what happened. This was real life. So, this

flout cover of Amazing Grace played for five minutes along with the dancing heart. And then we finally got to public comment for the reason for the reason for why we were there. Not only were we blessed with that stunning rendition of Amazing Grace, the flautist himself

was briefly able to address the city council before President Dave Shipman rudely, very, very rudely called time. Amazing Grace is such a song that means so much to the world. So that's it for now. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, and we are back. And just as a note, I forgot to put this in the script, so I'm going to say it now. It turns out that

that heart costume that was quote unquote dancing to the music, that's actually rentable. You can rent that in Atlanta. So I have some really good ideas for the next week of action, since we can rent more bouncy castles and also that heart costume. I think there's a lot of potential, extremely funny things that could happen. Anyway, back to my conversation with Matt from the Atlantic Community Press Collective.

There are a couple things to note about how City Council public comment works. City Council doesn't tend to pay attention to them. Ostensibly the only one who pays attention is City Council President Doug Shipman because it is his job to call time and to call up the next person uh but you know city councilors will like step in and

out of the room get something to eat um during the 17 hours of public comment for cop city like one of them held a press conference like it is it is weird how they're like legally allowed to not pay attention like that is that is bizarre you you would you would you would think that, uh, allegedly work for the people, like you would have to actually listen to them. Um, so, uh, amongst the city council, there are two in particular, um, that I'm, I'm glad you got to see, uh, there there's Mary Norwood who, who represents Buckhead. And then there is, uh, Dustin Hillis, uh, who is the, um, the committee chair for the Public Safety Legal Administration Committee. So he's basically in charge of police here. Throwing Molotov cocktails at officers and damaging millions of dollars of equipment.

And he gives off that vibe. And neither one of them will pay attention. They were on their phone for almost the entire time I was there. They were on their phone from almost the entire time I was there. The Buckhead woman gave off ontologically evil vibes. Like, I did not know who she was when I went to the city council. But once I saw her, I was like, oh, okay, this person is obviously evil, right? And I asked people about it afterwards.

They're like, oh, yes, that is a person that represents Buckhead. I'm like, oh, okay, yes, of course, of course. Buckhead, of course, being the primarily white neighborhood in North Atlanta, that part of it wants to secede from the city. And that's a whole... Segregation. Yes. That is a whole other issue, but to kind of give context of what Buckhead is. Red lining. That's not a question. But to kind of give context of what Buckhead is. Red lining.

That's not a question. That's just a observation. And so sitting directly next to her is Dustin Hillis, who is known for not paying attention ever. Except, except they did both pay attention after public comment when police gave their testimony on what happened the night previous. And then these two people were very engaged. We will hear more from Mary Norwood, ontologically evil, in a bit. But first, I have to... Stop!

Jesus Christ! Fucking fuck. Jesus, my cats are just running amok. All right. We will hear more from Mary Norwood, ontologically evil, in a bit. But first, I have to include some of Councilman Antonio Lewis's response after Police Chief Darren Sheerbaum gave his little presentation at City Council. Because I don't think I've ever heard January 6th, the Atlanta way and six flags all get mentioned in the same sentence before. It looked like January 6th.

I ain't never seen police run from a group of people. And so the only thing I could think about when I saw that video, I saw it on ATL scoop. The video is all out there. I've been seeing it all over. And when I saw the police officers run, I mean, I was a little nervous when I saw the heat map. I saw a hundred people. I saw I saw it. I mean, like that ain't the Atlanta way. I mean, I never seen I'm just thinking about the at the same time as Six Flags. We had some young men that were fighting at some of our teenagers fighting at Six Flags. that were fighting, some of our teenagers fighting at Six Flags, they didn't run up on the police. They didn't run up on the police with Molotov cocktails throwing to burn up stuff. What I will say, I thank you so much for last night for working. I want to really commend the officers

because y'all were under some immense pressure and to not see a gun fired back. Because when I see the firecrackers, I'm from Cleveland Avenue. If they throw firecrackers at me, I don't know those firecrackers. I've never seen that. So I appreciate APD for doing that. Truly, truly a stunning admission. Just perfect. So I had to listen to Atlanta Police Chief Darren Sheerbaum's testimony a few times for the five episodes that were released earlier this month. So I didn't really feel like fully listening through again to find any, you know, funny bits to put in this episode.

So I just kind of like skimmed through while multitasking. And weirdly enough, I noticed that the chief said some pretty shocking things that I somehow just must have missed in my previous viewings. So I will play those for you now. And I will warn you, it is pretty disturbing. Like all the subjects we put on air, their statements do not reflect our opinions or the official position held by whatever current company owns this podcast. So yeah, like I said, warning, these are shocking, but I will let the chief speak for himself.

Take aggressive action against these officers. Move to the front gates. Warrant Seller and inflict vitally harm upon them. Launch illegal and criminal attacks. Attack members of law enforcement. Bring harm to our officers. These attacks are going to continue. Pretty, pretty shocking stuff coming from a police chief, Jesus. But that is only the tip of the iceberg because, to my surprise, after public comment was over and all the news cameras left after I left and, you know, everyone, everyone left the building, it turns out Darren Shearbaum gave a second testimony at the very end of the city council meeting that I just completely missed until now. So I will warn you, it is kind

of lewd in nature. So if you want to skip past lewd police conduct, just fast forward like a minute or two. But anyway, without further ado, here is the secret recently unearthed second testimony presented by Atlanta Police Chief Darren Shearbaum. President Shipman, members of the council, I'd like to brief you on events that transpired yesterday. I'm going to let the video play here while I walk through each of the situations. What you see here is our partners at the DeKalb County Police Department, the Sheriff of Fulton County, as well as the Georgia State Patrol, were seen changing out of the clothes that they

were wearing. They're going to position themselves what appears to be an attempt to keep pursuing the officers. Notice as the officers see these, we had a rapid response from our partners as well as to change their clothing. Different groups were performing acts within the manner of their training and their discipline. At this time, our officers were repositioning themselves inside of our partners. These officers had been stationary to ensure that they are being restrained.

The officers are on city property and are positioning themselves and repositioning themselves. To be prepared to go back in, our officers are showing great restraint. They remained in a position. What you see here is a lieutenant that is discharging. We're very fortunate that that was the outcome. And I want to commend every man and woman on duty yesterday. As they stood in the gap to do their job, those officers entered our partners. And what you see here, ladies and gentlemen, is as some of the individuals that had just previously entered into those officers, they start changing back into the clothes that they were just wearing moments before. Just last night, officers of this department, as well as DeKalb County,

Georgia State Patrol, and the Sheriff's Department moved in. And I want to thank the men and women, again, of the Atlanta Police Department, the Georgia State Patrol, the Sheriff's Department moved in. And I want to thank the men and women again of the Atlanta Police Department, the Georgia State Patrol, the Sheriff's Department, as well as the DeKalb County Police Department for the professionalism that they demonstrated throughout the night and into the early hours of this morning. While many of us were asleep, they continued to work through the night. I've never seen that so I appreciate APD for doing that. I would have loved for every one of those very hysterical people that we've been sitting listening to for two or three hours to have seen an actual video of what really did happen. And there may be great reasons that the administration chose to do it this way.

But our media is gone and all the people that needed to see this are gone. I'm glad that nobody was hurt and none of our employees were hurt yesterday. Oh boy. Well, that was certainly something. I did not want to know that much about what the APD and their partners get up to after hours. Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled comedic japes. I know a sheer bomb was was addressed with some questions by Unicorn Riot when he was trying to exit, which he then did not. He gave a very frustrated face and then denied answering and and promptly left the building. Well, in the company of the New new york times uh journalist oh with with with a friend of the

show sean keenan so that was that was uh that was most of monday uh yeah that is everything that happened on monday so what uh monday evening um i went home to start working on an article what did you do garrison i went to the purim in the woods i got to share my my memory of the VeggieTales Esther story starring the tickle monsters. I got to bond with a few ex-evangelicals about that. So that was fine. Then there was an experimental noise show in the forest. And then you had a tragic neck injury on Monday night? So Tuesday.

The group that we followed left out of the church and went to Norfolk Southern, um, which is one of the funders of APF and a friend of the environment, um, in Ohio. When they finished reading the letter, like all they asked was that the letter go to the CEO and they denied that. And all they had to do was accept it and and and move on but they uh while people were inside uh the security called ns police and if you're wondering you're like you know ns please what is not that's not a city in atlanta that isn't a city in atlanta what could that be that is the norfolk southern police who are legally allowed to arrest people and And we thankfully we avoided going to Norfolk Southern Police Jail. Going to Norfolk Southern Court. Which certainly would have been a very legitimate court.

It would have been almost as legitimate as the real court that the bail hearings happened at that same day. After successfully evading Norfolk Southern Jail, Matt and I headed downtown for a march that was accompanied by a cadre of over 100 officers pinning this crowd onto the sidewalk. We got a whole police car blocking the sidewalk. A Georgia State University canine unit just blocking off the entire sidewalk next to a Fulton County Sheriff's vehicle. I like that the cops are just also commanding the corporate media on where they can stand. canine unit just blocking off the entire sidewalk next to a Fulton County sheriff's vehicle. I like that the cops are just also commanding the corporate media on where they can stand. And that whatever like boomer journalist is with whatever like mainstream news outlet was very peered off at this cop for telling him to get on the sidewalk. The next day, a smaller crowd met up at the same spot and broke off into little subgroups to walk around downtown

atlanta and hand out defend the forest leaflets so all the little subgroups kind of meet up um on uh on andrew young and peach tree uh right next to the hooters and the hard rock cafe um classic examples of atlantic food there was an atlanta SWAT vehicle parked outside of the hooters outside a fucking hard rock cafe so i can't i keep picking up this copyrighted music but this big uh atlanta police SWAT vehicle parked on the block by uh the atlanta police foundation headquarters all right there's actually a pretty decent number of people gathered here for the flyering event today. They're at the Peachtree and Young International Boulevard intersection

right across from the Hooters and the Hard Rock Cafe. There's a SWAT vehicle parked right behind us. There's about, I don't know, 20 to 30 officers stationed a little bit to our north. You know, normal police response to people handing out flyers, just 50 officers and a SWAT team. Lieutenant Neil Welch approaches the crowd and gives them a dispersal order. They cross the street, walk like a black north, past some of the cops that are guarding the Wells Fargo building. At this point, people chanted the cops to, quit your jobs, quit your jobs.

And one of the cops guarding the Wells Fargo says, that's actually a good idea. You can always quit your fucking job. That's actually a sound advice. Yeah, already tried. And he's like, I tried to, and they wouldn't let me but like i i don't like laughing but that one got me that one got me the cop responded like not in like a glib tone like he was it was actually actually he wanted to quit like like yeah that's actually yeah that's actually

a good idea extremely funny moment while this is happening uh there's another group who comes in to the side of Peachtree Center Mall and enters the mall to find Mayor Andre Dickens Andre Dickens is like the head of some kind of like board or something yeah there there are a couple boards in Atlanta that stipulate the mayor is like the the of the board. And this is one of them. And it meets in Peachtree Center Mall, as one does. So the mayor is having a meeting in the mall. It's office spaces, you know, sort of above the mall. And so three indigenous activists, along with Kamau Franklin, arrive and they find the mayor. They enter the board meeting and they begin to read this letter from the Muscogee Nation out loud. Mayor Dickens, in true mayor fashion, bolts away from this,

running through an exit door, which is then blocked by a guard, which I think that has its own set of legal issues. Essentially just ignoring them uh over his shoulder he calls out i've got a copy of the letter and hides just completely trying to escape what is not a good look for him this this is what we call a ted wheeler moment oh so mares so as this happens i think like a like, SWAT is deployed. So Apex and SWAT had been elsewhere and they were called back to their vehicles like right before this. And then the activists exit and almost like in this very comical moment after they get out and away, squads of these special units start rushing into the building. Of course, finding no one. Charlie Chapman-ass shit, truly.

Okay, even a more future version of Garrison here. Apparently, I've been told by Danil that his name is Charlie Chaplin. I don't know. He's a pedophile, so whatever. Charlie, not Danil. Oh, boy. And I do want to say I did try multiple times to take Matt to the Hard Rock Cafe or the Hooters, either one. And he refused my offer multiple times, very, very rudely. So at some point when I'm back in Atlanta, I will have to gather a troop of femboys and head over to the Hooters. Anyway, next was the Community Movement Builders Rally

on the evening of Thursday, March 9th, which had fewer jokes that night, but there are a few embarrassing recording bloopers at the expense of my own ego. So I will play those for your amusement, you absolute sick fox. It is kind of raining.

We'll see how many people show up and how large the police response will be in comparison. Penis. What could happen here? the police response will be in comparison. Penis. What could happen here? Well, it could happen here. A podcast by Robert Evans.

We are at the site of the Martin Luther King Memorial. Did you see the two Sandy Springs police buses? I did see the Sandy Springs. I lived in Sandy Springs for a year and that brought back some memories. But yes, two Sandy Springs police buses? I did see the Sandy Springs. I lived in Sandy Springs for a year, and that brought back some memories. But yes, two Sandy Springs police buses. Sandy Springs, of course, being mostly outside of the perimeter.

A good drive from here. That was good. That was good. All right. Poggers. Absolutely poggers. The police. Police has been stating. Well, never mind. I cut that.

What am I saying? Big puddle on the street demonstrating the city's commitment to infrastructure. That was a joke because the drain was plugged. I accidentally turned off my recording by tripping on some stairs. They're so close together. They're just sandwiched in. Got a New York Times reporter

standing in the middle of the street. Of course, the only person allowed to stand in the street is the one New York Times reporter. I would estimate almost about a kilometer, but I'm Canadian, so that's not very helpful to you U.S. listeners. The real outside agitators is Sandy Springs Police. Yeah, the police were ready to mass arrest the entire time.

I don't know if you mentioned this, but I will. So in between the police line in front of the APF building and the protesters was essentially like a mixture of Copwatch and National Lawyers Guild and ACLU. Because, of course, you had to have like both both legal observer factions just to make sure everybody's watching each other. So ACLU can watch NLG get arrested. Who can watch ACLU get arrested? It's turtles all the way down. Eagle observers all the way down. Ho ho!

And we are back. That's great. All right. One of the stops on the tour of the Blani Forest that Joe Perry was doing throughout the week was the area of the land swap between the former owner of Blackall Studios, Ryan Millsap, and DeKalb County's Entrenchment Creek Park. So on one side, there's this beautiful forested park that Ryan Millsap wants to trade for. Then on the other side is this massive mound of dirt that he currently owns, which is right next to Boulder Crest Road.

That's a huge, huge dirt field that you see. And what happened is while that swap was being orchestrated, Black Hall was bringing thousands and thousands and thousands of dump truck loads of dirt and just filling it up, filling it up, filling it up. And somebody else is going to have to do the math, but I don't know if you say like 15 acres of dirt that is 20 feet plus high how much dirt that is that's a lot it's not natural it's not something that's helping this flood prone area all that's going to run into here no matter how many silt fences you put up so that's what they're calling Michelle Obama Park that's it exactly exactly

right somebody needs to talk to Michelle and say nah you need to take your name off of that one I don't know who who got away with that but that's that's not it by the way you're seeing the most uh picturesque side of that piece of land yeah you get you get to the top. When you get to the top, it's worse. It's just, it's garbage. Well, the thing, and it is literally garbage because a lot of this stuff, this dirt, you know, Ryan Millsap has, he's not a movie mogul. He's a land baron.

He's in real estate, and he's made billions of dollars in real estate. And so that dirt comes from other properties. He's digging up a place on Boulevard to put some apartments in. He's pulling dirt out of there. That's what's coming in here. That's dirt coming from all these other construction sites you have. That is not topsoil.

And believe me, I'm not making that up. I've been over there, and I've walked, and I've seen what's in there. I've seen water heaters in there. I've seen gut's in there. I've seen water heaters in there. I've seen gutters in there. I've seen pipes. I've seen all kinds of crap. It's trash. It's a big trash mountain.

That's what they want to have be Michelle Obama Park. And that ain't going to happen. So, yeah, I just wanted you to kind of lay your eyes on what the county thought was a good idea and what Blackhall thought. Of course, it was a great idea for Ryan Millsap because the land that he acquired is worth way more, millions more. It's now worth millions more than when he made the swap. So he has made a lot of money on this swap, and that's why he's angry that he can't get his hands on it yet. a lot of money on this swap, and that's why he's angry that he can't get his hands on it yet. Nobody knows what he's going to do with it because the original agreement between him and the county was that he was going to build movie studios on that land.

Well, he can't now because he sold his rights to the movie studios to a company that's now called Shadowbox. They're the ones that owns his previous studios. So he can't have a rival company right across the street from them. So he hasn't said, and nobody knows exactly what he's going to do with the property if he wins this court case and gets those 40 acres. Who knows? It's a mystery. So that's where that stands right now. Hopefully we win the lawsuit. If we do, he will have to foot the bill for repaving the path and redoing the parking lot and putting a new gazebo in. That's what the judge decreed. That's why they said we don't need a restraining order because all that is replaceable,

except for the trees that he tore down. Those are going to take another 75 years but who's counting the fate of michelle obama park is still up in the air as of time of recording so yeah i'm excited excited to visit that if the land swap gets passed um almost done we're gonna we're gonna briefly briefly tap back into my conversation with matt from the atlantic Collective. And then unfortunately, our jokes must come to an end. I think one thing that's been lost in all of this too, is all of the lighthearted events that have continued to go on through the week. And we have this youth rally, or there's the youth rally that's happening on Saturday. We're of course recording this beforehand. And the joy of the movement that was represented in in the bouncy castle rip

um which was uh first pointed at uh a rifle had was pointed at and we haven't talked about the gun we haven't talked about the guns in the bouncy castle so so one thing i think that that that we we didn't mention that. How can you forget about the guns in the bouncy castle? So when the police came running up onto the tarmac at RC Field where the bouncy castle was, of course, they had to point a rifle at the bouncy castle. And if that doesn't show that police are not here to have fun and have joy,

I don't know what is. I don't know if anyone was in it at the time. I don't think so. I think they were literally just pointing a gun at an empty, bouncy castle. Which they destroyed. And I think we

have to take a moment to mourn that. Did they destroy it or deflate it? I think they destroyed it. Wasn't it like a rental or something yes so r.i.p bouncy house uh you will be missed and all the joy that you represented uh my girlfriend's texting me cringe let me let me let me let me Let me check my note. In case Garrison doesn't cut this, ask about Garrison's neck. What? Hmm? What?

What'd you say? Ask about what Garrison did Friday. Fire burn tower. Saturday, Gresham Park. Monday noon Tuesday all right all right okay I'm gonna just gonna look through my other notes app because I keep my notes in three different notes apps because I'm normal so one thing that's been notable especially in how the police talk about the forest is they've begun using like these these militarized terms like the denial of operating area there's some eerie parallels between

the language that was used to describe insurgencies in countries that America is invading or the United States is invading. And a lot of that language, like the military equipment that was used there, has come home and is now being used against americans uh engaged in like these liberation struggles i wonder where we've talked about that before i don't know um it could happen where speaking of uh it is still happening last week approximately 500 people came out to city hall as the City Council is now in the process of voting to approve public funds for the Cop City project. Nearly 300 people signed up for public comment, with hundreds more waiting in line. Public comment lasted seven hours, and during so, not a single person voiced

support of using taxpayer money to fund the police training facility. The Atlanta Community Press Collective have recently reported that the proposed city funds toward the Cop City Project have ballooned to a minimum of $51 million, with the $30 million package awaiting final vote in city council, plus another at least $20 million chunk to be given to the Atlanta Police Foundation via a quote-unquote loan, which indicates that the Atlanta Police Foundation's private fundraising has not gone as well as they initially had hoped. For more on that, I'd recommend checking out the Press Collective's recent article from May 24th, and you can also donate to them to support their continued reporting of the happenings in Atlanta. You can find us on Twitter at Atlanta underscore press. Our website is atlpresscollective.com

and you can find our Instagram at atlpresscollective. We have partnered with Open Collective. We are fiscally sponsored now by the Open Collective Foundation in a way to transparently fundraise in order to sustain our reporting. Everything up until actually the week of action, everything that we have done up until the week of action was all unpaid. And it is our desire to continue to grow with the movement. And it is our desire to continue to grow with the movement. And so we're excited to find a partner in the Open Collective Foundation that can continue that sort of horizontal, open organizing that we have done internally. Okay. Yeah, I think we're good.

I think we have it. Good job, team. Oh, shit. I wasn't recording. I'm kidding. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now

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