It Could Happen Here Weekly 151

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Al Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
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.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
Welcome, Dick.

Speaker 4 (00:27):
It happened here a podcast where we're bringing shitty Mayor
Monday back to celebrate an incredibly special occasion, which is
the unbelievably funny federal indictment of what New York Mayor
Eric Adams with me to talk about. This is Garrison Davis,
is James Stout and and we have a New York expert,

(00:49):
our fellow trade unionist, Yeah, Joey pat who works on
what we Love an Afterlives.

Speaker 3 (00:55):
Joey. Welcome to the show.

Speaker 5 (00:57):
Hey, thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

Speaker 6 (01:00):
I hope I can I can provide some insight to
New York City and everything that's been happening lately.

Speaker 5 (01:08):
The Eric Adams news really is kind of the most
positive piece of deuce that we've had the past month.
It's been a really bad it's keeping me going, Yeah,
I feel like I gotta say.

Speaker 6 (01:19):
I found out the news of the indictment. I was
at like a gay bar near me, like at a
like queer Pool event, and like everybody got the news
at the same time, and it was one of the
funniest ways to learn that Eric Adams has been a Yeah.
That was that was the like the most joy I've
seen from a from a group of New Yorkers in

(01:40):
a while.

Speaker 5 (01:41):
What a beauty.

Speaker 4 (01:42):
Yeah, Okay, So I want to I want to open
the floor up to Eric Adams stories, but first I
need to complain about the fact that so I have
I have long as a proud Chicago Wan who has
now fled Chicago for Portland. I have long made fun
of New York for being a tier two Chinese city
that thinks that it's the greatest city in the world.
And then I learned they didn't have trash cans, which

(02:03):
pushed this at like this is not even like a
two or five. This is a level of trash collection
that you see in like rural Hoobe, Like what the fuck?

Speaker 3 (02:12):
Britain the United Kingdom where we got ready to trash
cans too.

Speaker 5 (02:15):
Oh my god, that's not true though, because luckily Eric
Adams didn't make the trash can.

Speaker 3 (02:21):
Just what is going on.

Speaker 6 (02:24):
The first American city to ever think of this idea
for contacts. I am also in a unique position here
because I'm from Chicago, and yeah, oftentimes get my friends
and family that still live in Chicago confused as to
why I live out here.

Speaker 5 (02:41):
I do love New York. It is a great detity
to live in. But these are the kind.

Speaker 6 (02:46):
Of moments we have where I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:49):
I can't. I can't.

Speaker 4 (02:52):
I don't know, I honestly. And then I think about
this Eric Adams stuff too. It's like the stuff he's so,
there's gonna be a second federal indict with more people
in it, but the first one it's kind of brush
league ship by Chicago standards.

Speaker 3 (03:06):
Like like if you compare this.

Speaker 4 (03:07):
To like like Rob Lagoyevitch trying to sell off, like
trying to sell Obama's Senate seat, It's like, okay, yeah,
I've been saying New York.

Speaker 5 (03:17):
Wants to be Chicago.

Speaker 6 (03:18):
They're starting a second city here too. No, No, there's
been adds in the subway, and every time like takes
away a part of my soul. Like, I'm like, you
cannot claim that that is us.

Speaker 5 (03:32):
It just means there's going to be even more insufferable people.
That sucks.

Speaker 4 (03:36):
Yeah, a second second city has hit the Towers.

Speaker 5 (03:41):
Another great Ragadom's moment with Eric Adams hit the Towers. No, no,
but he had he had this great interview where he
was asked to summarize, like what makes New York great
in one word? And he gave the answer new York,
which is two words, and that explained it's because it's
the only city where you can wake up and have
nine eleven happen and also open up a small business.

(04:04):
It's one of the one of the funniest Eric Adams
moments I've ever seen till until he was indicted, which
is now the new funniest Rogats moment, which we should
probably get to because this is not a short indictment.

Speaker 3 (04:17):
Wait are we're doing all Eric adams favorite moments yet?
Because I have a family, we got to run that.

Speaker 5 (04:22):
Yeah, I've already done mine.

Speaker 3 (04:24):
Yeah, do you want to hit this with you? As Jerry?

Speaker 5 (04:26):
Mine's definitely.

Speaker 6 (04:28):
I think the ongoing saga of just whether or not
he's a vegan, and the fact that he repeatedly claims
he's a vegan and thinks that vegan.

Speaker 3 (04:35):
I didn't know this. Yeah, he's a vegan.

Speaker 6 (04:38):
He talks a lot about how he's a vegan and
all the health benefits and how it's he has a
lot of weird like beliefs about health and stuff that
have come out over his you know, mayr Oll run.
But apparently he's not actually a vegan because he's been
seen like eating chicken on camera and like that weird

(04:58):
video of his apartment when he was running. That was
the Brooklyn apartment that he may or may not live in,
Like there was like some sort of meat.

Speaker 5 (05:05):
Product in the fridge or something. There's been a whole.

Speaker 6 (05:07):
Thing about how like he maybe and he's like admitted
that he's like eaten meat sometimes, like he's like, oh, well,
you know, I'll just have like a little nibble, like
it's it's it doesn't count.

Speaker 5 (05:15):
Chicken isn't beacon What do you mean he identifies as
a vacant.

Speaker 3 (05:21):
Yeah, he's like some kind of like like sixteenth century
Catholic you know, where they have all these weird exceptions
for fish.

Speaker 6 (05:29):
And like right right, that's the repent and then whatever
to confass and and then he's getting he gets as
we get a card back.

Speaker 5 (05:36):
That's a good one. That's a good one.

Speaker 4 (05:37):
Yeah, Joe's Jewey's kind of mentioned mine. But the fact
that he definitely is from New Jersey, which I think
is what allowed him to use a trash can, Like
she definitely does not live in New York.

Speaker 3 (05:45):
There's there's no way. Like my favorite also relates to
him not living in New York, which is when Curb
staked out his New York apartment and he came back
once parked illegally and then caused a traffic jam. I
parking illegally so that he couldn't put out of the pocket.
He wasn't in a pocket space. He was in someone's driveway.

(06:06):
So then he proceeded to drive along the sidewalk and
they like filmed him doing this, and he confessed to
doing it and was like it was a terrible mistake,
just an incredible sequence of events.

Speaker 6 (06:19):
I mean, maybe that is like a New York mayor
who can't drive, Like I guess that makes sense.

Speaker 3 (06:25):
Like yet refuses to use mass transit Oh.

Speaker 5 (06:28):
God, that's true. That's true. He does hate public transportation. God,
you can just send more cops in the subway. That'll
fix it, all right.

Speaker 3 (06:35):
Oh god, let's uh yeah, let me, let's let's get
into this. Get start. So okay.

Speaker 4 (06:41):
So the things here is being indicted for are effectively okay.
So he took a bunch of different bribes in different ways.
So he took I guess there's two broad categories of
bribes that he took, which is the bribes that are
campaign donations that he funneled through straw donors, which is

(07:01):
the thing where you like there's like limits on how
much money you could donate to someone, right, So what
you do is you find like ten people and you
give them all two thousand dollars so they can still
donate it even though it's the Moodey's from you. This
is unbelievably illegal. And the second type is him just
accepting unbelievable amounts of like gifts and stuff from a
Turkish airliner. Now, the interesting thing about this is that

(07:26):
you would expect this is the thing that started when
he was a mayor, but like, no, he was so
he was he was the borough president of Brooklyn for
a bunch of years before he became mayor, And this
is like as Burro President is when he like really
started doing all of this random, weird corruption stuff.

Speaker 5 (07:43):
He's been doing this for like almost like ten years.

Speaker 6 (07:46):
Yeah, I kind of love this too, because the like
Brooklyn Borough president, it's kind of a fake job, like
you don't really do anything.

Speaker 5 (07:55):
And I love the fact that.

Speaker 6 (07:56):
He still managed to find ways to be corrupt in
his like fake job that he adds.

Speaker 4 (08:01):
It's stunning because I'm going to read starting with the
indictment a bit. By smuggling their contributions to Adams through
US based straw donors, Adams oversees contributors defeated federal laws
that serve to prevent for an influence on US elections.
Both the individuals evaded laws designed to limit their power
over elected officials by restricting the amount of money one
person could donate to a candidate, and businesses circumvented New

(08:23):
York City's ban on corporate contributions by fundeling the donations
through multiple employees, frustrating a law that sees reduced corporate
power in politics. Adams increases fundraising by accepting these concealed
illegal donations at the cost of giving his secret patients
undue influence over him that the law tries to prevent.
So this is really funny because so there's three different
illegal like things that he's done, like through these straw donors.

(08:47):
So like there's like there's three kinds of campaign contributions.

Speaker 3 (08:50):
You can't do. It's like corporations.

Speaker 4 (08:52):
One person, there's like limits on how men watch an
individual person can donate and you can't get you can't
get donations from like people not from the US. And
he managed to both individually and in the same scheme
violate every single one of these laws.

Speaker 3 (09:07):
It's it's genuinely incredible.

Speaker 5 (09:09):
I guess I would like to learn more. I mean
at some point, and I'm sure we'll get into it
as how like explicit this whole like Turkish funding really
is like extremely.

Speaker 3 (09:20):
About it. Yeah yet will I'm sure we'll get to this.
It's when they're like, hey, Eric, you're not going to
say anything about the Median genocide. Arue that Tony didn't happen, bro,
don't mention the genocide. Oh yeah, we'll get to that.

Speaker 4 (09:32):
So Eric Adams, a defendant, also saw and received other
improper benefits from some of the same co conspirators who
funded shra altonations to his campaign, In particular, a senior
official in the Turkish diplomatic establishments henceforth Turkish official who
facilitated many Charlton nations to Adams, also arranged for Adams
and his companions to receive free or discount to travel

(09:53):
on Turkey's national airline, quote the Turkish Airline, which is
owned a significant part by the Turkish governments. Nations including France, China,
Sri Lanka, India, Hungary and Turkey itself. The Turkish officials
and other Turkish nationals further arranged for Adams and his
companions to receive, among other things, free rooms at opulent hotels,
free meals a high end restaurants, and free luxurious entertainment

(10:14):
while in Turkey. So this is all very very explicit.

Speaker 5 (10:18):
He's got wanderlust. You know, he was supposed to be
like a travel.

Speaker 6 (10:23):
Blogger like Girley, like doing tiktoks, and you know, unfortunately
he had to become mayor.

Speaker 3 (10:29):
So, yeah, a bunt of log forster.

Speaker 5 (10:32):
Mayor starting to do the job he wants to.

Speaker 4 (10:37):
Yeah, it's very tragic. Okay, So actually the first thing
Turkish influence thing that he did. I actually, this is
weirdly the one part of this I don't have a
problem with. One of the big things he was trying
to get was there's a giant like newke Turkish consulate
building that they opened kind of recently, and a big
part of this was getting permission to open the Turkish
consulate without a fire inspection, so that aired one could

(10:58):
visit for like the opening of the consulate and look, okay,
we already can't fly to Turkey because of republic support
for the Curtis Free movement. So like, I'm just gonna
say this, I am entirely okay with this. I am
I don't I don't give a shit if they don't
do fire inspections.

Speaker 5 (11:14):
I'm okay with her to one being in a non
fire safe building.

Speaker 3 (11:17):
Yeah yeah, like fuck them.

Speaker 4 (11:20):
Like if the guy who burned one hundred and fifty
people alive and Cindy wants to fucking burn a death
in his own consulate, then let him. Like I Jennie
Whitely don't give a shit about this. She did threaten
the job of like the New York Fire Department's fire inspector,
which kind of sucks, but like if everyone wants to
burn a death in his death trap, let him do that.

Speaker 3 (11:40):
This is one of the.

Speaker 6 (11:41):
Text conversations that then was was uh, I don't know
if leaked is the right word, but yeah, like because
it was. It was they were like there was something
they said to where they were like, we've done a
lot for you, now it's time for you to do
something for the Republic of Turkey.

Speaker 3 (11:54):
Yeah, yeah, we'll get we'll get to that.

Speaker 4 (11:56):
This is yeah, yeah, yeah, it's good.

Speaker 3 (12:00):
Ex tolown shit.

Speaker 5 (12:01):
That like all right.

Speaker 4 (12:04):
After Eric Adams, a defendant, first travel to Turkey in
twenty fifteen, the Turkish official introduced Adams to Turkish Airlines
general manager in New York City area in twenty sixteen
and twice in twenty seventeen. Again, this is all before
he's mayor. Adams solicited and accepted free and heavily discounted
luxury air travel from Turkish Airlines as part of Turkish officials'
efforts to gain influence over Adams on three separate trips.

(12:27):
Basically like he's getting first class tickets from all of
these people.

Speaker 3 (12:30):
It's so much money worth of stuff, like just like
thousands of dollars.

Speaker 4 (12:35):
The exact totals, like all of the gifts he took
from Turkish Airlines, it's like one hundred and it's like
one hundred and thirty thousand something dollars.

Speaker 3 (12:41):
Jesus Christ. Yeah damn.

Speaker 4 (12:43):
So, like any time I read a paragraph of this,
just assume that in between, like whatever paragraph I'm reading
and the stuff I didn't read before it, he's taken
another ten thousand dollars of free like first class rides
to Turkish airline.

Speaker 3 (12:58):
It is a blessing in disguise. I will say that
I will never see Eric Adams on a flight because
I cannot fly. It was Turkish Airlines.

Speaker 4 (13:05):
That's true. There's a very funny line about this, because
the Turkish airline provided free travel benefits were tens of
thousands of dollars to Eric Adams, the defendants. He flew
the Turkish airline even when doing so was otherwise inconvenience.

Speaker 3 (13:17):
Yeah, this is fucking correct.

Speaker 4 (13:18):
For example, for example, dreamed the July and August twenty
seventeen trip. Adam's partner was surprised to learn that Adams
was in Turkey when she had understood him to be
flying from New York to France. Adams responded in a
text message quote transferring here, you know first stop is
always an istanbul spelled very wrong and lowercase is true rather.

(13:44):
When adams partner later inquired about planning a trip to
the eastern island Chile, Adams repeatedly asked her whether Turkish
airlines could be used for these flights, requesting her to
call Turkish Airlines to confirm they did not have roots
between New York and Chile.

Speaker 5 (14:00):
Why wouldn't you have a flight from New York?

Speaker 3 (14:05):
Oh my god, it Spit's part of the greater Ottoman Empire.

Speaker 5 (14:09):
You know, I would take bribes from Eric Canada. But
I'm also not running for mayor.

Speaker 3 (14:14):
So yeah, well you could run for a Bira president.

Speaker 5 (14:17):
That's true. That's true. I could. I could become elected
the mayor of South Fulton. That is very doable. Every Similarly,
lots of the mayors of South Fulton have had very
odd kind of controversies. So what I'm saying is South
Fulton is basically Georgia's version of New York.

Speaker 3 (14:33):
New York is a South Fulton of America. Have you
have you guys seen a video clip of him? Every
city he goes to. He says, like New York is
the city of America.

Speaker 6 (14:42):
It's crazy, It's crazy, it standbul of America.

Speaker 3 (14:53):
So this is all very funny.

Speaker 4 (14:54):
But this is all happening all of the the tens
of thousands of dollars at this point of money that
he's taking from Turkey, it's all happening in a period where
Turkey is butchering curds across the Middle East, like his
first trip there. And this is all again well before
his mayor while he's like Brooklyn Borough president is four
months before the fire bombing of the city that I
talked about where they were again, they burned one hundred
and fifty civilians alive in a fucking building. If I'm

(15:17):
remembering correctly, I'm pretty sure they killed. I'm pretty sure
they burned the city council alive. That's just the stuff
in Turkey. And like we have covered extensively on this show,
Turkey's like drone warfare program. There's the whole thing of it.
Has been long suspected that the Turkish government was aiding
Isis during the period because they were like using basically
using them as a proxy to fight like Kurtish Freedom

(15:38):
movement forces in Syria.

Speaker 3 (15:40):
I think you could definitely say that, like former ISIS
fighters are now fighting for the Turkish against the Kurds
in the Rocky Curtis done. Yeah, I've said that before.
The Kurds will tell you that.

Speaker 4 (15:52):
For I know, David Graebrin anthropologists, you spent actually who
smuggled a bunch of drone parts. You had a story
about how we talking people like yeah, they would like
they would pick up ISIS fighters and they would look
at their possessions and they every single one of them
as Turkish passports. They all have like Turkish id shit.
It's like, hmm, I wonder where these people came from.

Speaker 3 (16:12):
Even like I'll just say I have spoken to some
people who were part of the fight against ISIS who
discovered blank Turkish passports. Uh when taking like ISIS buildings
and ISIS strongholds.

Speaker 4 (16:25):
Yeah, so there's there's I mean, just this is a
period of even by the standards of Turkey, like unbelievable
Turkish violence. This is their their invasion of Syria, and
you know this is this is the period in which
Eric Adams decides that he's going to become an Asian
to the Turkish State, and so obviously like he lies
about this to the governments, because again you're not allowed
to do this. There's a bunch of very funny schemes

(16:47):
that he does. As Brooklyn Borough President, Adams employed a
scheduler henceforth known as the Adams Scheduler, who pointed it
who managed appointments, meetings, and other official events. Despite her
status as a New York City employee, the Adams scheduler
was used by Adams to perform personal tax for him,
such as collecting rent at a Brooklyn property he owned.

(17:09):
Adams also assigned the scheduler to pay various expenses for him,
after which Adams would reimburse the scheduler in cash.

Speaker 3 (17:16):
In twenty seventeen, Adams sent.

Speaker 4 (17:18):
A series of emails to the scheduler directing the scheduler
to pay for the free twenty seventeen flights that he
and his companions had already taken on the Turkish Airline,
but the emails provided inconsistent explanations. In some Adams suggested
that the Adams schedulers should pay using Adam's credit card,
while on others, Adams claimed to have left cash in
an envelope for the Adams scheduler to send to the

(17:40):
Turkish airline.

Speaker 3 (17:41):
Ah, it's that's how you pay. It's how I pay
for all my fights. Cash it an envido.

Speaker 4 (17:46):
This is how he tried to cover up for the
fact that he's not paying for these flights. And he'll
pay like six hundred dollars for a theater dollar ticket.

Speaker 3 (17:52):
But he's like.

Speaker 4 (17:52):
Sending envelopes to his scheduler to hand to the Turkish
air line.

Speaker 3 (17:56):
A man who was a call doing an absolutely terrible
job of covering his own ass.

Speaker 4 (18:01):
You know who else is taking bribes from the turkeysh government.
It's not our products and services. It's it's someone else's
products and services. Ours are all fine, we are back.

(18:28):
So there's actually another paragraph of that part. For example,
on November twenty fifth, twenty seventeen, Adam sent an email
to the scheduler saying that, with respects to the July
trip quote, I left you the money for the international
airline and an envelope and your top gest drawer, please send.

Speaker 3 (18:44):
It to them.

Speaker 4 (18:46):
So the funny one about this, right, So he's supposed
to have this like cash dead drop to pay for
the airline tickets, then he just like never does it
because the tickets are free.

Speaker 3 (18:53):
So he just like stops covering his tracks. Yeah amazing
and doesn't use signal. Yeah it's it's it really is
sounding Okay. So what is Turkish government getting from this
in return for travel benefits? The Turkish official provided or range.
In about twenty fifteen or twenty sixteen, Eric Adams, the defendant,
granted a political request from the Turkish official prior to

(19:15):
adams twenty fifteen travel to Turkey, which Adams knew and
disclosed to the One of the monitoring agencies have been
funded by, among other entities, the Turkish Consulate, the Turkish
Airline in three separate municipalities in Turkey. Adams maintained a
relationship with a Turkish community center in Brooklyn. In or
about twenty sixteen, the Turkish official told Adams that the
community center was affiliated with a Turkish movement that was

(19:37):
hostile to Turkey's government, and that if Adams wished to
continue receiving support from the Turkish government, Adams could no
longer associate with the community center. Adam zach Wies Scott,
I wonder who it was, see, Okay, so I looked
into this.

Speaker 4 (19:50):
No one that I've seen doing reporting on this seems
to know which center this was. But but this has
to be a Gulinist thing. Yeah, So to people who
didn't spend all of their childhoodmired in the of Turkish politics,
everyone's the current rule of Turkey.

Speaker 3 (20:06):
Gulm was like one.

Speaker 4 (20:07):
Of his old old allies, but they had this giant
falling out and a huge part of what everyone was
doing in the twenty tens was like trying to purge
all of the Gulanists from everywhere. Like there was this
whole scheme running I think through Michael Flynn where Turkey
was trying to get Trump to like the Gulan's like
in like a compound and I think Virginia or something,

(20:29):
and Turkey was trying to get Trump to like raid
the compound and send them to Turkey, which didn't happen.

Speaker 3 (20:35):
Yeah, that line's up with the coup they did twenty
sixteen coup, right, yeah.

Speaker 4 (20:39):
Yeah, So, you know, it's always been unclear to me
exactly how much influences people have. But the one thing
I will say is that so I had a classmate
in college who was in Turkey for a long time,
and their line about it was like, yeah, I don't know,
like how much of this sort of Guladist deep state
shit is true. But also there were like gulanest people
who you could go to who had like all the
answers to like state exams.

Speaker 3 (21:01):
So if you want to be willing to get in bed,
whether they would just give.

Speaker 4 (21:04):
Him all the answers. So, like you know, they were
not a part of this. And I'm pretty sure what
happened here was that Adams was like cutting off all
contact with these people because this is part of the
gool and is split. I'm not one hundred percent sure
because there are multiple community centers in Brookly in Brooklyn,
like Turchi Media centers in Brooklyn, but I'm about eighty
percent sure that's what happens. So that's like one of

(21:24):
the first direct influence things. Okay, so he's doing the
influence peddling stuff, right, He's doing his partially through the airlines.
And then also he's just taking a bunch of legal
fundraising money.

Speaker 3 (21:35):
Quote.

Speaker 4 (21:35):
On July twenty second, twenty eighteen, the same day as
this fundraising event, the Adam staffer and the promoter discussed
by text message a possible trip by Adams the Turkey.
The promoter stated, in part, fundraising Turkey is not legal,
but I think I can raise money for your campaign
off the record. The Adam Stafford inquired, how will Adams
declare that money? The promoter responded, he won't declare it

(21:58):
or will make the do do an American citizen in
the US a Turk. I'll give cash to him in Turkey.
We'll I'll send it to an American he will make
the donation to you. The Adam Stafford replied, I think
he won't get involved in such games. That might cause
a stink later on, but I'll ask anyways. The Adam
Stafford then asked how much do you think would come
from you. The promoter responded, max one hundred k. The

(22:20):
Adam Stafford wrote, one hundred k. Do you have a
chance to transfer that here? We can't do it while
Eric is in Turkey, to which your promoter replied, let's think.
After the conversation, the Adam Stafford asked Adams whether that
Adam Stafford should pursue the unlawful for contributions offered by
the promoter, and contrary to the staffers expectations, Adams directed

(22:40):
the staffer to pursue the promoter's illegal scheme.

Speaker 3 (22:43):
That's crazy.

Speaker 4 (22:44):
I feel like you should know who you're working for
well enough to be like, hey, this guy is offering
a completely illegal fundraising scheme that we know is illegal,
and I don't think my boss will take it.

Speaker 3 (22:54):
And then the boss turns around to be he's.

Speaker 5 (22:55):
Like, yeah, fuck it raised, buddy, it might cause a
big stink later on. You don't say, yeah, that's wild.

Speaker 3 (23:04):
To be fair, it did.

Speaker 5 (23:06):
Yeah, it's so explicit, and I do want to get
to some some of the other text messages sooner or later,
because it really just shows how like aware everyone involved
is of over like what's going on?

Speaker 3 (23:16):
Yeah, they're doing crimes.

Speaker 6 (23:18):
It's literally just hey, what should I do with the
crime money?

Speaker 5 (23:21):
The illegal crime? By the way, have we mentioned this illegal?

Speaker 4 (23:26):
So partially this is being run through Turkish airlines, Partially
this is being run through Turkish university, and partially this
is being run through just a bunch of businessmen, some
of whom are Turkish, some of them aren't. So here's
like the next thing I was gonna read. Although Adams
knew that businessman one was a Turkish national who could
not lawfully contribute to US elections, Adams directed the staffer
to obtain the illegal contributions offered by Businessman one. Following
up on this directive, Adams wrote to the staffer that

(23:48):
business or one quote is ready to help. I don't
want his help to be wasted. So they are just
like unbelievably directly being like, yeah, we know this guy
can't do this, but we're just gonna tell them to
send this money anyways.

Speaker 3 (24:02):
Yeah, it's insane how slapstick they are about this. Yeah,
and like you know, they're kind of trying to come
from tretch. I think that this part of it is
one of the things that I think, like was one
of the things that kind of went viral over this.
So Adams is trying to arrange another like fifty thousand
dollars contribution from a third Turkish businessman.

Speaker 4 (24:24):
And in the middle of this, he's saying to the
staffer quote to be on the safe side, Please delete
capital P, capital D. Please delete all messages you send me,
Adams responded, always do. Now, we don't for a fact
that a bunch of these messages were simply not deleted,
because I have considering.

Speaker 5 (24:44):
That you just read.

Speaker 3 (24:44):
Though.

Speaker 5 (24:46):
Yeah, I do also think It was worth noting that
some of these efforts certainly started to ramp up around
his mayoral campaign, because some of these Turkish officials thought
that if Adams becomes a more like prominent member in politics,
never like runs for president, and if they can gain
influence over him from like pretty early on, that would
be really useful for the Turkish government. That is some

(25:07):
of like the reasoning behind this like decades long campaign. Yeah,
like puppet Eric Adams.

Speaker 3 (25:13):
Maybe the Turkish government had seen Nate Silver's now infamous
tweet how it will be the.

Speaker 5 (25:19):
Next Yeah, I mean it's all many such cases.

Speaker 3 (25:23):
Yeah, Snate Silver who got them to chase us around
with drones last last October.

Speaker 5 (25:29):
He keeps getting more businessman to donate tens of thousands
of dollars.

Speaker 3 (25:33):
Oh yeah, it's so funny.

Speaker 5 (25:34):
It's like repeatedly, he just keeps getting more and more
and more.

Speaker 3 (25:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (25:39):
And the funniest part is that like by like guy
number four he's doing this with he's like telling the
guy how to do straw donations where he's like, yeah, no,
you can't donate ten thousand dollars to give two thousand
dollars to.

Speaker 3 (25:50):
Each of your employees and they'll do it.

Speaker 5 (25:53):
Yeah, he's doing like instructions for each of these guys,
and it's like at a certain point, like some of
the early airline stuff is yes, a llegal sketchy, but
like you know, it's it's just getting some nice plane
tickets by like twenty twenty one. He's just teaching them
how to do like super illegal like campaign fraud. Yeah,
you've like committed so much that you're just like into deep,

(26:14):
like you can't like what's there to do?

Speaker 7 (26:17):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (26:18):
You know who else is in too deep?

Speaker 4 (26:19):
It's the products and services who controlled this podcast, this
podcast support that one.

Speaker 8 (26:24):
Yeah, oh wow, wow, so much to say by the
Reagan coin people.

Speaker 3 (26:33):
It's ump.

Speaker 5 (26:34):
They have a very little editorial control.

Speaker 6 (26:36):
Are you supposed to delete those tags?

Speaker 3 (26:49):
There are so many funny ones.

Speaker 4 (26:51):
He also he also is taking money from this construction
guy where he takes a bunch of buddy that it
like shows up at this like New York's big Pride
event to give a speech because he took money from
this like antruction guy.

Speaker 3 (27:04):
Did he say New York isse s Hee Wasbekistan of America?

Speaker 5 (27:09):
Honestly, he probably has said that. That's like, yeah, he's.

Speaker 4 (27:13):
Probably said Kazakhstan by accident because he always says the
wrong count giving his speech like that.

Speaker 6 (27:18):
My favorite moment was the video of him speaking to
like the Indian group that he kept saying Pakistani, Oh god, yeah, yeah,
oh dear yeah.

Speaker 3 (27:29):
I think that went down like a chocolate tipa. He
did it like twice too. They corrected him that he
kept doing.

Speaker 5 (27:34):
It well, they were only yelling over him, and.

Speaker 3 (27:36):
He said, stout God.

Speaker 4 (27:39):
So there's another kind of funny one where he's he's
getting a bunch of money from this university and he
actually returns the money because his campaign is like his
Mayora campaign is over, but he's still going to go
to prison for it because he lied to the government
at where he got the money even though he gave
it away. Okay, So I want to start reading some
of these texts so we can get into like how
explicit the stuff is. On July twenty second, twenty twenty one, Adams,

(28:03):
through the staffer, requested that the airline manager book flights
to Istabul for Adams in order to conceal the favorable treatment.
The Adam stafford requested the airline manager charge Adams what
would appear to be a real price, Adam Stafford, how
much does he owe? Please let them make a call
and now will make the payments. Airline manager. It is
very expensive because it is last minute. I am working

(28:24):
on a discount, Adam Stafford. Okay, thank you, airline manager.
I am going to charge fifty dollars, Adam Stafford. No,
airline manager. That wouldn't work, wouldn't it, Adam Stafford, No, dear,
fifty dollars? What quote a proper price? How much should
I charge? A smiley face emoji, Adam Stafford. His every

(28:45):
step is being watched right now. One thousand dollars or so,
let it be somewhat real. We don't want them to
say that he is flying for free. At the moment,
the media's attention is on Eric.

Speaker 3 (28:57):
Amazing stuff.

Speaker 6 (28:58):
The smiley faith of the tax is really throwing off.

Speaker 5 (29:01):
It's so good. So he paid about like one one
hundred dollars for these round trip tickets, and he was
upgraded to business classes. Suck at him, and in actuality
these tickets would would again be like fifteen thousand dollars.
And this is like the same type of stuff he
was doing like eight years ago, except this time he
actually is paying some money, whereas last time he did

(29:23):
not actually fill up those envelopes with cash. Yeah, but
still he's about he's about fourteen thousand short.

Speaker 4 (29:30):
He also was this a great one where like the
staffers like, do you have recommendations of where he can
go to Turkey?

Speaker 3 (29:37):
At the airline manager?

Speaker 4 (29:38):
Four season staffer, it's too expensive airline manager, why does
he care? He's not going to fake his name, will
not be at anything either, Adam stafford super super.

Speaker 3 (29:47):
Yeah, it's all so super illegal.

Speaker 6 (29:50):
I want to meet the person who's sending these taxs.

Speaker 3 (29:53):
Yeah, so bad. It's so funny.

Speaker 6 (29:56):
Why is this like the cadence with which they're speaking
and these tacks, that's just insane.

Speaker 4 (30:01):
It's incredible stuff. There's some great ones. I gotta read
this one. On the day the Adams fundraiser was scheduled
to depart Istanbul, Adams created a message thread between himself
and the Adams fundraiser and the airline manager quote, he
will try to help with the issue with the form
he can see about a hotel or business class lounge.
The manager then arranged for the Adams fundraiser, who was

(30:21):
otherwise flying on an economy ticket, to have access to
not only the Turkish Airlines business lounge, but also an
exclusive private suite inside the lounge, complete with a bed
and free food. The Turkish airline manager explained, this is
our suite for VIPs and we want you to feel yourself.
Two words yourself sick VIP, smiley face emoji.

Speaker 3 (30:41):
Fail yourself VIP. That's what we will want.

Speaker 4 (30:44):
At another point in the exchange, Adams wrote, quote, thanks
a million airline manager, my brother. Which airline managers wanted anytime?

Speaker 3 (30:52):
Brother?

Speaker 7 (30:53):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (30:53):
No?

Speaker 4 (31:00):
This on the day he won the election, Like the
day after, the airline manager sent the following text message, brother, congratulations.

Speaker 3 (31:08):
Adams responded, cannot thank you enough.

Speaker 5 (31:12):
So true, so true. That is good, although it's not
as good as kind of the next thing when in
December twenty one he was putting together his like mayoral
like team for like policy advisors and his transition team,
and he did not have like people from Turkey on

(31:32):
this list, so this air manager said, didn't. It's it's
not quite blackmail, but it is certainly like bribery, saying like, hey,
maybe you should put me on like your senior on
your senior advisory team. And if you don't, then you're
not going to get free tickets anymore.

Speaker 3 (31:52):
Yeah, I want to read the exact line because it's
so funny.

Speaker 4 (31:56):
The staffer sense of the airline manager list, and the
airline manager responded, it would suit me well to be
lead or senior advisor. Two days later, the airline manager
sent a message reiterating, lead please plz please smiley face,
otherwise fifty two is empty on the way back.

Speaker 3 (32:15):
Seat.

Speaker 5 (32:16):
Oh god, oh my god, Lead, please, you don't make
me a lead advisor. We're not going to give you
free free airplane tickets anymore. Oh my god, it's so funny.

Speaker 3 (32:31):
Winky face.

Speaker 5 (32:32):
And then uh, I believe he did add someone onto
onto his team.

Speaker 3 (32:37):
Yep, yep, yeah.

Speaker 4 (32:38):
He was added to the Infrastructure, Climate and Sustainability Committee
transition team Jesus Christ, which the whole Sustainability Commission is
just like a slush. There's another thing later where like
he's like a secret meeting of like these Turkish donors,
and he calls it like a sustainability transition meetings, so
no one will know that he's having this meeting.

Speaker 5 (32:58):
Man, you should read what the airline manager wrote after
he was added to the Climate and Sustainability and Infrastructure
Committee yeah.

Speaker 7 (33:06):
So.

Speaker 4 (33:07):
On December twenty twenty one, the senior Turkish government official
set the airline manager a series of texts noting the
airline manager's membership on Adam's Infrastructure Climate Sustainability can be
and sending.

Speaker 3 (33:17):
Applause about you. Oh no.

Speaker 4 (33:20):
The airline manager responded that his membership on the Tradition
Committee was in service of Turkey. Quote, thank you, brother.
We are doing our best to server country adequately. Your
support gives us strength here.

Speaker 3 (33:31):
Thank you. You were always there for us, and we're
trying to be loyal.

Speaker 5 (33:34):
It's amazing.

Speaker 6 (33:35):
Oh wait is it. We're trying to be worthy.

Speaker 3 (33:38):
Yeah, we're trying to be worthy. Yeah, we're trying.

Speaker 5 (33:40):
To be worthy. Yeah. That is so sorry. I'm trying
to be worthy of you. Thank you so much for
being there.

Speaker 3 (33:46):
Please be so good.

Speaker 5 (33:48):
I just like want to be worthy of you. Ericata.

Speaker 4 (33:51):
So by this point I total that the Turkish airline bribes,
specifically that all the benefits total one hundred and twenty
three thousand.

Speaker 3 (33:58):
Dollars seats general.

Speaker 5 (34:00):
Life, which is also just a small fraction of like
the total amount of money he received to be fat.

Speaker 3 (34:05):
That's probably like the face prices of business class tickets
and lounge access which no one actually pays for. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (34:11):
Yeah, because like beyond the actual airline stuff because of
like the campaign like match like policy deals, like he
he received in the end like like ten million dollars
right from from like all of this whole ordeal.

Speaker 3 (34:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (34:27):
So, so so the match funding thing basically is like
there's public matching funds for like private donations for for
mayoral candidates.

Speaker 3 (34:34):
There's like some things you have to go through.

Speaker 4 (34:36):
But in order to get that money right, you have
to abide by campaign finance law and all of the
So all of these like straw donor bribe donations that
he's getting are being are also I think it's like
eight to one or something like matching funds are being matched.

Speaker 3 (34:49):
By the paid government. Say you got like ten million
dollars matching funds.

Speaker 5 (34:54):
He's not only like doing like campaign fraud by getting
this like foreign influence amount of money. He's also just
like stealing from from everyone else too by having all
of these illegal contributions matched.

Speaker 4 (35:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (35:06):
So in the end, I think he's like he's like
charged with like like basically ten million dollars.

Speaker 3 (35:11):
Yeah, of like fraud.

Speaker 4 (35:13):
The other thing is like this is this is how
he won the election, Like he won the election by
spending an unbelievable amount of money and like that money,
who's like this like stuff that he defrauded the government for.

Speaker 3 (35:24):
And it's ironic that like the campaign funding matching is
designed to like amplify the donations made by regular New
Yorkers and not make it all like a super Pac game. Yeah,
Eric Adams thought he they made an end run around that.

Speaker 5 (35:37):
Like I did not realize just because I had been
keeping up with like Eric Adams news previous to this,
I did not realize how often his house was getting
rated by the FBI.

Speaker 4 (35:46):
There were so many There's been so many, Like this
is all just one angle on the like thirty five,
because there's there's so much other corruption he was doing,
Like this is just the stuff they gone specifically around
him for. But like basic everyone in the circle around
him is like also going to prison. Like to the
point where remember I was talking about the Uzbek construction

(36:06):
guy that he donated money to, Yeah, that guy also
paid off like the guy who's going to become mayor
when Adams gets arrested, So like the deputy mayor like
also took money for that guy.

Speaker 3 (36:16):
Amazing.

Speaker 4 (36:17):
Yeah, so one of the worst parts of this. On
April twenty first, twenty two, the Turkish official messaged the
Adam Stafford noting that our Median Genocide Remembrance Day was
approaching and repeatedly asking the Adam Stafford for assurances that
Adams would not make any statements about their Armedian genocide.

Speaker 3 (36:34):
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 4 (36:35):
The Adam Stafford confirmed that Adams did not make a
statement about the Armenian genocide.

Speaker 3 (36:40):
Adams did not make such a statement New York, not
the Yerevan of America.

Speaker 4 (36:44):
Yeah, so he just straight up took money from the
Turkish government. Did genocide's nile for them. Yeah, so that's great,
that's incredible stuff.

Speaker 3 (36:53):
To be fair.

Speaker 5 (36:54):
That is that is a mainstay of current American politics.

Speaker 3 (36:57):
Oh yeah yeah, and it's the best fund of old
genocide denials.

Speaker 5 (37:02):
Yes, yes, Well, this Raganams guy doesn't seem like a
doesn't seem too good. It is just fascinating to me
that out of all the cities, New York is just
the one city that you cannot have a normal mayor,
just like every single mayor is is weird and fucked
up in like a different way. Like it's just impossible.

Speaker 3 (37:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (37:19):
There was like an onion onion headline on Time that was,
it's like the mayor de Blasio like, well, well, well
it's it's not so easy to have a not fucked
up mayor or something.

Speaker 7 (37:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (37:30):
I think the exact line was, well, well, well, not
so easy to find a mayor he doesn't suck ship down.

Speaker 5 (37:37):
Exactly. The Erganta was one hits so much harder because
he's like the law and order mayor. Like he's like,
you know, like like former cop blah blah blah. He's
he's the one making New York worse through all of
like the fucked up police stuff. Meanwhile, he's just been
doing like major crimes and having his house rated by
the FBI like every other month, also having like his

(37:59):
friend's house is rated by the FBI having was it
like a police chief or a police commissioner who was
just rated.

Speaker 3 (38:04):
Yeah, and then the interim police commissioner they put in
often the first one.

Speaker 5 (38:08):
Yeah, it's wild stuff.

Speaker 3 (38:12):
We got to talk about his phone password before we finish. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (38:15):
Yeah. So the's why I want to close on is
like before he goes under, like all of his staffers
are getting visited by the FBI, and A you could
tell they're all cops and are dumb at shit because
they all they all agreed to talk to the FBI
and like lied to this so funny, and then we're
trying to like coordinate destroying the messages which the FBI
got all the data from. On October sixth, twenty twenty three,

(38:36):
FBI agents executed a search warrant for the electronic devices
used by Eric Adams, a defendant. So Adams was carrying
several electronic devices, including two cell phones. He was not
carrying his personal cell phone, which is a device he
used to communicate about the conduct described in this indictment.
When Adams produced his personal cell phone the next day
in response to a subpoena, it was locked, such as
the device required a password to open. Adams claimed that

(38:59):
after he learned the investigation into his contact he learned
about the investigation, he changed the password the day before
and increased the complexity of his password from four to
six digits. Adams had done this, he claimed, to prevent
members of his staff from intently You're intentionally deleting the
contents of his phone. According to Adams, he wished to

(39:20):
preserve the context of his phone due to the investigation,
But Adams further claimed he'd forgotten the password he just
said and was unable to provide the NBA with the
password that can unlock.

Speaker 3 (39:30):
The phone if they tried his birthday.

Speaker 5 (39:32):
It's the funniest argument. Yeah, yeah, they like, no, no, no,
I changed. I changed the password so that the information
was safe and wouldn't be deleted. Also, I forgot the password.

Speaker 4 (39:41):
Okay, so like presumably this is encrypted, right, but like
I cannot Like, what the fuck is the FBI doing that?

Speaker 3 (39:47):
They can't just break into this phone?

Speaker 5 (39:50):
Like, I mean, some phones are hard to break into,
like it it is it is true.

Speaker 3 (39:54):
Yeah, have struggled with iPhones for what Yes, but this
is but this is Eric Adams.

Speaker 5 (39:59):
Yeah yeah, I mean yeah it might.

Speaker 3 (40:02):
Be zero zero zero zero, like they ought to give
it the cat. It's try to be honest.

Speaker 4 (40:06):
Yeah, Like they've got to have some fucking like spook
from the NSA that they can illegally send this phone
over to.

Speaker 5 (40:12):
Like I'm sure they've tried Celebright. I'm sure they've tried
a whole bunch of stuff. It just doesn't always work.

Speaker 4 (40:18):
Yeah, Like I don't know it makes you feel wildly
better about phone security. Oh, by the way, this is
a message about this public safety announcement. If you use
a face print or a fingerprint to lock your phone,
the cops can just use your face or your fingerprint
worlock it, or they can get it with a warrant.
But if it's like an actual number, like they can't
put a gun to your head and say open it,

(40:38):
which is the way that this would normally sort of work. Yeah,
so yeah, basic security thing. So in all, Adams is
being charged with simultaneously conspiracy to commit wire fraud Federal
program Brian and to receive campaign contributions by foreign national.

Speaker 3 (40:52):
There's a kind of wire fraud.

Speaker 4 (40:54):
There's another count of solicitation of a contribution by foreign national.
There's subsequently, the fourth is the same as a third count.
It's it's solicitation of a contribution by forig national and
the fifth count is bribery. So he's like probably going down,
going down.

Speaker 5 (41:10):
He sounds pretty fucked. I mean, it has been interesting
how much the federal government has been cracking down on
foreign influence before the selection, both with like tennant media,
like a Russian foreign influence stuff like this there's been
like some of like Jimmy Dore or like orbiters that
have I know, have have been getting looked into by
the FEDS for like Russian foreign influence.

Speaker 3 (41:29):
Dude.

Speaker 5 (41:30):
And this is not a show where we regularly praise
the actions of the fedral government. But it's always funny
to see my enemies having a hard time. Yeah, And
I'm pray I'm praying for that Jackson Hinkle one, which
is fea yeah, because it's so it's so obvious, so
obvious that he's he's absolutely getting paid by some by
some foreign government.

Speaker 3 (41:50):
Yeah, Wonda which one?

Speaker 4 (41:52):
This one is air to one versus the FBI, which
I'm just like just chomping down popcorn and clapping like
a seal watching most hated rifles finding yes.

Speaker 3 (42:01):
Yes, destroy each other no matter what happens.

Speaker 5 (42:04):
I'm okay with it.

Speaker 3 (42:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (42:06):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (42:07):
I will repeat my position here at the end of
the show that I am prepared to vote for Joe
Biden on the condition that he immediately begins trading Eric
Adams for Abdullajan, who does not belong to jail unlike
Eric Adams. It's free Ajulan week this week, and so yeah,
he shouldn't be in prison. Let him out.

Speaker 5 (42:26):
How do you feel about your mayor, Joey?

Speaker 6 (42:28):
You know, it sounds like he's he's broken on some shit.
He's got to figure out if he really wants you know, see.
This is the thing too, is it's like, do I
want to be like, Wow, congrats to the FBI on
this investigation. No, that being said, it is really funny
to see this all go down. I think also just

(42:50):
the amount of bullshit that he has done while he's
in office.

Speaker 5 (42:55):
But both legally and over the.

Speaker 6 (42:57):
Table and under the table, and it's kind of funny
to see like this meet.

Speaker 3 (42:59):
The thing that but takes him down. Yeah. Got other.

Speaker 6 (43:02):
One of my favorite tweets about all this was somebody
was like, I'm sure Eric Adams all of a sudden
it's going to be uh really pro a prison reform
all of a sudden, But I.

Speaker 5 (43:13):
Hope so, you know that would be a crazy It's like, Alista.

Speaker 6 (43:17):
I'm getting flashbacks person abolition arts. I'm getting flashbacks when
a when a oh god, what's the same the Blasio, Uh,
the governor, the governor, oh my god, former governor. Well
like what he was having all of the ship come
out and like the last thing he did in office
was the legalized weed, and it was like such a
like last ditch, like fine.

Speaker 5 (43:38):
Here, you guys go like you want, like are we
going to get something like that?

Speaker 3 (43:41):
Are we gonna get?

Speaker 7 (43:42):
Well?

Speaker 6 (43:42):
I guess he tried with the trash cans and people
rejected that. But uh, it's been an experience. I hope
for the sake of the city that uh, you know,
he faces consequences for this and it's never.

Speaker 5 (43:57):
Back in New York politics. But I guess we'll see
what happens. No, I'm not going to cheer on the FBI,
but I am pro cop on cop of violence. That's true,
and that's true, and that's all this is. That's all
this is. So that's fine.

Speaker 6 (44:12):
I'm pro irony. I'm pro like like you're getting got
by the same like people your bros.

Speaker 3 (44:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (44:20):
I am interested in what the next New York mayoral
election will look like. We're bringing in Lori Lightfoot, let's go,
and the small possibility that, depending on how this next
election goes, we could have a Trump versus Clinton mayoral
race in New York, which I would love to watch.

Speaker 3 (44:42):
Maybe Hillary Clinton will finally make her film about the
Syrian democratic forces she's been promising to make for years.

Speaker 4 (44:51):
I want to close on a kind of slightly more
serious struggles are connected note because the thing about Eric
Adams is that he was the guy who was brought
in black cop like very specifically brought in and his
thing was basically to contain the twenty twenty uprising, right
he was he was the guy whose thing was we're
bringing in the kind of revolution. We're stomping all of
this stuff out, like all of the sort of like

(45:13):
gains of anti police stuff that you'd made, all the
sort of ideological games have been made, We're going to
wipe all that out. And I think it is really
significant that the government who is funding him is is
a Turkish government because if you look at the last cycle,
right when so Eric Adams is starting to do this
in twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, what's what's happening in Turkey
in that time is that Turkey have been one of
the big sites of huge uprisings. In twenty thirteen, they

(45:36):
have one of the biggest, like of that cycle of protests.
So twenty thirteen is the second of the of the
waves from like the Occupy twenty eleven waves. Right, there's
a big wave in twenty eleven, and then twenty thirteen
to the second one. One of the biggest one is
in Turkey. And Turkey's eventual solution to this is basically
just the wholesale slaughter of the Curtish revolution that was happening.
And you know, literally in twenty fourteen, at the same

(45:59):
time twenty fourteen twenty at the same time as the
Michael Brown uprising is going on, and then Baltimore goes up,
right at the same time that's happening, There's like, these
are these Kurdish uprisings in Turkey, That's where all the
fire bombing happens. Right, These these these things are very,
very intimately connected. There's a reason why other than just
sort of country his corruption stuff, that these that these
forces are aligned with each other because the same the

(46:19):
same people behind the American prison state are also the
same people who are fucking backing this Turkish extermination as
movement against the Kurds. And we're going to either win
our freedom together or we're going to have a thousand
more fucking Eric Adams.

Speaker 5 (46:32):
Is exactly yeah.

Speaker 6 (46:34):
And I mean, I think going back to what I
was saying before like the craziest thing about all this,
and like this is definitely something that I've kind of
had to like step back and be like, all right,
Like I obviously am existing within like a specific community,
like New York is a huge city.

Speaker 5 (46:50):
It's the lowerest city in.

Speaker 6 (46:51):
The US, and there's lots of different smaller communities, and
I was like, I feel like everybody that I know
and everybody I interact with hate Sarah Adams, how like
their own list of reasons why, like he has done X,
Y Z thing and they're like whether it's like my
friends that are teachers or like work for or just
use public libraries that he has like really decided to

(47:14):
attack and like defund for various reasons, or like friends
that have had to deal with like the prison system
or whatever. Or last year, I'd been working on an
investigative show that was looking into a lot of the
the situation at Rikers, and you know, Rikers is supposed
to be closed in twenty twenty seven at a RK.
Adams has really tried to push back against that, despite

(47:36):
the fact that it's like there's a federal invested investigation
into the situation there and it's not like the conditions
are not good. It is an unpopular solution, you know,
like most New Yorkers agree that there needs to be
some other alternative than rikers and just sending people to
like literally an island. That being said, like he won

(47:56):
the election. He won his mayoral election it which sort
of like surprising. He was kind of the underdog. There
were other candidates that I think people had kind of
been expecting to win. And yeah, he was the law
and order guy. He was coming in is supposed to
be this like alternative to like the twenty twenty uprising
to what was seen as this like chaos. And again, yeah,

(48:16):
it's the irony of him getting got by its own system,
getting got by the fact that like he just keeps
doing crimes. He loves doing crimes, favorite thing. And then
at the same time, it's like he's caused all this
damage to like individual like specific programs in the city,
specific systems that were really helping people. He has spread

(48:37):
like misinformation about migrants that have been in New York.
He has been like there's just a laundry list of
things that he has done that has been like insanely
harmful for like various reasons. And you know what, if
this is going to be the thing that's gonna got
on at the end of the day. This and Sabrina
Carpenter apparently that also those of you who don't know,

(48:58):
the Sabrina car Feather music video apparently was a big
part of the Eric Adams indictment from kind of the
more local side involving the church that she was filming
at h and the I'm not sure what his official
position is, but like the priest who had kind of
allowed her to come in and film, and then it
ended up that he was demoted because if you've listened

(49:20):
to a Sabrina Carpenter song, you can see why the
Catholic Church might not be super excited about that. And
then he decided to cooperate with the investigation since the
church wasn't super happy with him.

Speaker 5 (49:32):
This whole thing is just there's something.

Speaker 6 (49:34):
It's like, there's so many aspects of this that are
so crazy.

Speaker 5 (49:39):
This is gonna be like that gets him.

Speaker 4 (49:41):
Yeah, Yeah, So someone's gonna do like a thirty part
podcast series about this something. I'm gonna listen to every
single ex.

Speaker 5 (49:47):
Episode and there's gonna be so much more stuff that's
gonna come out.

Speaker 3 (49:50):
That's yeah.

Speaker 5 (49:52):
Speaking of podcasts, Joey, do you want to plug your
work for sure? Yeah.

Speaker 6 (49:56):
So, I'm right now producing a show called that We Loved,
which just on Iheart's network.

Speaker 5 (50:02):
It's part of our Outspoken Network, which.

Speaker 6 (50:03):
Is our LGBTQ plus kind of focus shows, and you
can find that on Spotify, Apple Music, iHeartMedia, app whatever,
all the places. I also previously had worked on a
show called Afterlives. If you are interested in learning more
about wrikers and particularly some of the policy that you know,
Eric Adams himself has worked to either stop.

Speaker 5 (50:27):
From being effective or stop.

Speaker 6 (50:29):
From making the reforms it's supposed to be happening regards
the whole riker situation, you should check out that show.

Speaker 5 (50:35):
Yeah, that's that's where I met.

Speaker 6 (50:37):
You can also follow me on Twitter and Instagram at
pat not Pratt.

Speaker 5 (50:42):
That's p A T T n O T p R
A T T. People get my last.

Speaker 3 (50:46):
Name wrong a lot, we'll put them in the description.

Speaker 5 (50:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (50:49):
Yeah, Joey, thank you for coming on.

Speaker 4 (50:51):
And fuck I hope I hope we all get rid
of our fucking Beyers because Jesus Christ God.

Speaker 3 (50:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (50:57):
Future the Democratic Party Lightbook Airic.

Speaker 5 (51:01):
Adams twenty twenty eight.

Speaker 3 (51:03):
Let's go.

Speaker 9 (51:26):
Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast
about things falling apart and how people work to put
them back together again, because it's the Humpty Dumpty of podcasts,
except Humpty Dumpty couldn't be put back together in the
end because there was a bunch of state actors who
were trying and really that's not how you usually get
things done. I'm your guest host today, Martyr Kiljoy, and
with me as my regular host today is James Hi.

Speaker 3 (51:48):
James Hi, Margaret, thank you for having me on the
podcast that I work for.

Speaker 9 (51:51):
I'm glad to have you on your podcast. So this
episode is about what I learned about prepping by going
down to western North Carolina in the immediate wake of
the flooding caused by two storms, one of which was
Hurricane Helen. And there's a few things I like an
awful lot. One of them is prepping. Another one of

(52:12):
them is Ashville, North Carolina, where I lived longer than
I have lived anywhere else in my adult life, which
isn't actually saying that much because I lived there for
about six years.

Speaker 3 (52:21):
But it's a decent amount of time. You know a place. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (52:24):
Before that, I was fully vagabondie. This is a story
about prepping in Asheville, North Carolina, and so I thought
i'd bring on another it could happen here prepper James.

Speaker 3 (52:36):
Yeah, it's me someone who has been to Ashville, North Carolina.
But oh yeah, still lives in San Diego. Yeah. Nice,
nice pace to go outside normally.

Speaker 9 (52:44):
Okay, but have you ever heard that song though, like
I've been everywhere man song, I've been everywhere.

Speaker 6 (52:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (52:49):
I don't think I'm allowed to sing things on this podcast.

Speaker 7 (52:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (52:51):
I started liking that song because like, yeah, I've been everywhere.
That man starts listening where he's been, and I'm like, no,
I haven't been. I ain't been shit, I have never
been anywhere in my life.

Speaker 3 (53:00):
I've not made it. Yeah. Yeah. It is one of
the nice things about my job that people get to
go places and meet people. Yeah. Yeah, that is fun.

Speaker 9 (53:11):
So, as I assume listeners are aware, about two weeks ago,
Hurricane Helene dumped an enormous quantity of water onto the
mountains of western North Carolina, which would have been bad
no matter what, but another unnamed storm had already been
dropping unconscious able unconscious not good amounts of water on
the area for a day or so. The two storms

(53:33):
together caused the worst natural disaster and recorded history for
the region. The only thing that came close was the
nineteen sixteen flood, which was again like a regular storm,
and then I think a coastal tropical storm hitting at
the same time. So the way to have everything fail
is to have two storms at once. In case anyone's
curious how to have bad things happen, do two storms anyway.

(53:54):
I drove down in a vanful of supplies because my
friends were the eron they needed the supplies more than
my basement did, and because I had enough cash on
hand to hit up a bunch of stores to get
more stuff to bring to them to I also drove
down there as a journalist, figuring i'd talk to people
about mutual aid and about preparedness. This week on my
own podcast, Cool People Did Cool Stuff, I talk about
my experiences there, what I saw, with an emphasis on

(54:17):
the mutual aid side, on the enormous amount of grassroots
and informal disaster response. But this is it could happen here,
and I wanted to talk about preparedness. I want to
talk about what worked and what didn't, what lessons we
can draw anywhere we are listening to this from what
people experienced there in Asheville, North Carolina, or at least

(54:38):
what lessons I was able to pick up on. And
we're going to talk about.

Speaker 3 (54:42):
Like stuff and specific things in a second good.

Speaker 9 (54:45):
But first, when I talk about preparedness, which I do
a lot, I talk about how I'm interested in both
the individual and community as two different types of preparedness.
And I had some hypotheses that these were deeply related
and reliant on each other in fact, and that you
do one better by doing the other better. But now

(55:06):
that I've seen those hypotheses tested, I was right. That's
that's my answer.

Speaker 3 (55:13):
It's in fact to approven hypotheses. Yeah exactly.

Speaker 9 (55:16):
I mean, you know, I don't want to run more tests,
but yeah, we probably will.

Speaker 3 (55:20):
Yeah exactly, because we ain't doing shit to stop being alas. No, No,
we're mostly doing things to make it worse. Hm hm cool.

Speaker 9 (55:27):
Basically, we need both individual and community preparedness, and we
should stop seeing them as opposing forces. There might be
no single false dichotomy that has more wrecked our imaginations
than the idea that the individual and the community are
two opposing forces that they must be balanced against one
another instead of interwoven. Instead of allowing what's best about

(55:50):
both things to reinforce the other. I would argue the
twentieth century did us dirty?

Speaker 3 (55:57):
The Cold War? Did us dirty? In the US?

Speaker 9 (55:59):
I grew up presented with the idea that the USSR
represented community in that side, and that meant being a
cog in the machine, devoid of individuality in thrall to
an authoritarian state. If I cared about the individual and
individual freedom and liberty, I had to accept capitalism and
competition and to see myself in a war against everyone else.

(56:20):
I don't know how you feel. I don't want to
be a cargon machine, and I also don't want to
be in a war against everyone else.

Speaker 3 (56:25):
Yeah, this is the This is the sort of false
dichultion media were presented with. It's like I'll tell an
anecdote here. When I was writing my dissertation, I would
describe my politics as left libertarian, and I would describe
the politics of the many different types of anarchists in
an arcosyndicalis in Spain similarly, because it accurately describes the perspective, right,
and I was forbidden from doing so. The probably fair

(56:50):
enough objection that Americans could not comprehend the idea of
libertarianism without individualism.

Speaker 9 (56:56):
Yeah, which is annoying because oh is it Rathbard. Someone
consciously stole that word from us. You used to not
have to say left libertarian because if you said libertarian
you meant left libertarian.

Speaker 3 (57:08):
Yeah. This was the pre date to Rothbud. It is
something I've written about on my patreon. Wow. But yeah,
libertarian began to be used by French anarchists to avoid
censorship and persecution of anarchists for being anarchists. Yeah, and
then it came to America, where, like many things in America,
it was stolen from its original original creators and custodians

(57:31):
and fucking ruined by chuds. Yeah, which is a shame.
But yeah, there is in fact an option where you
don't have to pick one or the other. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (57:41):
What is good for me as an individual is to
be able to express the full range of my possibilities, right,
And I'm more able to do that in a supportive
community than like alone in the woods somewhere, cut off
from everyone else, chasing rabbits with a hatchet and dying
of easily preventable infections, Like, it's.

Speaker 3 (57:58):
The American dream. Ug, what are you talking about.

Speaker 9 (58:02):
I used to joke that I was going to start
a YouTube channel called how to Survive alone in the
woods of the hatchet eating squirrels that you kill with
the aforementioned hatchet.

Speaker 3 (58:11):
But unfortunately you died of tetanus before.

Speaker 9 (58:14):
Yeah, exactly. The existence of society makes me more free,
It makes me more capable of doing what I want
to do. I really like I don't remember which old
theorist came up with it, but I really like the
idea of understanding freedom as a relationship between people, not
a like static state. It is something that we offer
each other and that we like work to maximize with

(58:36):
each other.

Speaker 3 (58:36):
Yeah. On the other side of things, what's good for
communities is not to be rigidly top down controlled, but
instead to allow people free expression, develop new ideas, try
new things, to have communities grow organically. We are not
actually factory cogs. We do better as a garden. Yeah,

(58:59):
And that's been my working theory with preparedness. It's been similar.
On one side, are these deals, these goods and services,
the ads that interrupt things. Yeah, magnificent, thank you, thank you.
I live to do this. Here's the ads, and we're

(59:27):
back on one side.

Speaker 9 (59:28):
I saw preppers as being kind of a primarily an
individualistic bunch of folks obsessed with what I've called the
bunker mentality, the hole up and guns and shoot anyone
who comes to close mentality that I've got, mind fuck
you mentality you've ever seen on like older prepper Reddit
and stuff like that, where people like kind of get
sad when they realize they're all planning to shoot each other,

(59:49):
all their friends after the apocalypse.

Speaker 3 (59:52):
Yeah that like, anyone who's able to has more than
two weeks of food storges, it's inherently going to kill
anyone else. Yeah, who has more than two? Yeah, it's
great when they all come around to educationally.

Speaker 9 (01:00:02):
Yeah, and they're like, wait, but I like this community
I've built.

Speaker 3 (01:00:07):
Yeah, they're also the only friends because they've alienated everyone
else with their weird obsessions. Yeah, fallout.

Speaker 9 (01:00:12):
This is not a good mentality to have. I would
argue it's behind a lot of what's happening on the
border right now. Actually, I think that the right wing
actually does believe in climate change and is not willing
to just say it publicly because it doesn't play to
their base. But they they're like, we've got ours, fuck you,
and want to close down the borders as best as
they can in the global North.

Speaker 3 (01:00:32):
Yeah, and we'll move the borders as far from your
eyesight as possible. That's what I saw in Panama was
oh yeah, listeners will know I was in the daddy
and gap. But like Panama without funding you and me,
Margaret Home, we pay our taxes, we pay for families
to be split out. Hell yeah, deportations to happen, fences
to be built in Panama because that makes it further

(01:00:53):
from our site and from our mind. Right. That's what
liberty means. Yep.

Speaker 9 (01:00:58):
Liberty is the ability to interfere in other countries' families.

Speaker 3 (01:01:03):
Yeap, domestic politics in other countries by fire hose of money.

Speaker 9 (01:01:07):
I mean, it's funny because it's the same like justification.
Every now and then you meet the people who genuinely
think Russia is like allowed to invade Ukraine because border
security because Ukraine's too close to it.

Speaker 3 (01:01:21):
You're like, amazing, Yeah, Ukraine bad, therefore fuck it. Why not?
Like it's yeah, yeah, it's like the Monroe doctrine. But
for Russia, like this is my hemisphere. Don't fuck with me.

Speaker 9 (01:01:34):
Yeah, burn down your neighbor's house because you're just like, nah,
you're living too close to me.

Speaker 3 (01:01:40):
Don't like it. Yeah, senior yard sign. They've got one
of those in this house signs. Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah,
which they've all taken down now because it's no human
beings legal and they no longer believe that. Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:01:54):
Cool.

Speaker 9 (01:01:55):
Well, I would argue this is a fundamentally right wing
individualistic mentality, whether it's coming from ostensibly left as tankies
or ostensibly center left Democrats, or they admit their right
wing individualistic preppers. Yeah, And this was dominant in prepping
circles before around twenty twenty, when an awful lot more
people with different ideas came into the space. But the

(01:02:18):
older school preppers focused on individual preparedness or family level
household level preparedness, and they have an awful lot of
really good ideas around some of these things, around storing
food and water, around maintaining communications, around all sorts of
things to help the individual or family during crisis to
be prepared. On the other end of things, there are

(01:02:42):
mutual aid groups and other community organizations that do community preparedness.
They build organizational communication and logistical networks, and they're fantastic
and their overall what's been left out of preparedness conversations,
but until more recently I haven't seen as many of
those places is the people who are doing those things
also concerned themselves with individual preparedness.

Speaker 1 (01:03:05):
You know.

Speaker 9 (01:03:06):
Yeah, I've been operating under the assumption for years that
the two can work really well in tandem with each other.
If you are self sufficient, you're in a better place
to help others. That was my hypothesis. This is really
just the Margaret was Right episode of it could happen.

Speaker 3 (01:03:21):
Here, the victory lap Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:03:25):
Oh wait, it's a victory wrap around bodies. I don't
like it anymore. Well, it's people who did do these
things getting to have not thrived but did not died.
I don't know how to say this.

Speaker 3 (01:03:38):
It's a tricky subject getting credit for being right and
putting in the work.

Speaker 9 (01:03:43):
Yeah, and a lot of people were and a lot
of people had done that, and it showed really well in.

Speaker 3 (01:03:48):
The disaster response in Ashville, because.

Speaker 9 (01:03:50):
When I went down to Ashville, one of the things
that I asked most of the people I talked to
is what they prepared, what they wished they'd prepared, and
what lessons they were taking away from all this about preparedness.
And one of my friends is old Punk, and he
was one of the first old He's like my age whatever,
it might be a few years older than me.

Speaker 3 (01:04:08):
I don't know. Margaret crushed by moment of reflection live
on Podcasts.

Speaker 9 (01:04:15):
Yeah, I'm jealous because I don't have enough gray hair.

Speaker 3 (01:04:19):
They keep falling out of my head.

Speaker 9 (01:04:21):
But one of my friends who does have very nice
gray hair, Old Punk, is one of the first people
who was out.

Speaker 3 (01:04:26):
On the street cooking food to give away.

Speaker 9 (01:04:29):
He told me that he was able to do that
because he knew he was fine by and large during
this particular crisis. Every crisis is going to be real
different if your house wasn't in the actual floodplain, and
since it was in the mountains, that was not most houses. Instead,
it was like most roads and some houses. You know, Yeah,
the big problems you were dealing with was lack of food,
lack of water, lack of cell service. And he had

(01:04:52):
plenty of water and food stored, and at one point
someone had even kind of come up to him, been
like are you no, You're fine, aren't you? And he
was like, yeah, no, I'm fine.

Speaker 3 (01:05:02):
So just being like getting off prepared vibes, I guess yeah, No.
I was real proud.

Speaker 9 (01:05:07):
Like once I was doing this community defense thing and
we were like, oh, we need a flashlight. Does anyone hey, Margaret,
you're a flashlight right, And I was like, yeah, with.

Speaker 3 (01:05:13):
Any want Yeah, being the flashlight person, Yeah, it's a
huge win the moment you get to deploy that flashlight
you've been toting around. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:05:23):
Well, And that's actually part of my like core argument
that I make in the other podcasts I recorded today
that's going to come out some sign around now, is
that like people want to help people. Oh yeah, like
the average pickup truck guy. We even kind of see.
I mean, I'm a pickup truck girl, but like we
see the average pickup truck guy is the like, ah,

(01:05:43):
good out of my way, limberal, guns, dogs, whatever, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:05:49):
And I like pickup trucks and guns and dogs and
as I don't really like.

Speaker 9 (01:05:52):
But one of the main things you want to make
a man with a pickup truck happy. Get your car
stuck in a ditch.

Speaker 3 (01:05:58):
Oh yeah, there are a whole groups where people love
to pull other people out of stupid situations they've got
themselves into off road. Yeah it is fun for them.

Speaker 9 (01:06:07):
Yeah, Like because then the fact that you've been doing
this thing had a purpose. I carry a flashlight and
a knife every single moment in my life, So when
someone needs a flashlight or a knife, I'm like, oh, yeah,
I am fucking the reincarnation of the goddess. Like, no
one is better than me. Yeah, you're the all powerful
light carrier.

Speaker 3 (01:06:27):
Yeah, exactly exactly when all other lights go out for me,
it's the moment I get to deploy. Like obviously this
has been an audio podcast, but I have a leatherman
that I like to carry around. Yeah, like where someone
needs pliers or wire cutting, you have that capability.

Speaker 9 (01:06:41):
Yeah, you're just like Chad, You're a superhero, You're a mutant,
you know. Like yeah, so yeah, this friend of mine
had plenty of water and food stored, and you can
usually go a couple of days without communication if you
don't have any immediate crisis, right.

Speaker 3 (01:06:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:06:54):
He told me that what most people did or needed
to do, was first they needed to make sure to
meet their own needs, you know, like thele to fix
your own oxygen mask before helping your seat mate. So
it was the people who were the most resilient, the
most prepared, who were out driving around in their trucks
or cars whatever, giving away food, or were working to

(01:07:14):
coordinate meetings most immediately. And the other part of it
was that people who had community preparedness skills were also
among the first people getting stuff done on the ground
because mutual aid it's organic, and it's chaotic and it's spontaneous, right,
but it is organized. It is a developed skill about

(01:07:35):
how to organically organize. The more people who were experienced
with chaotic, decentralized organizing, the better a community was able
to weather the immediate aftermath of the storm because people
knew how to set up distribution hubs and connect people
and so basically like a solid church or an anarchist group,
and your rural town was in a much better spot. Yeah,

(01:07:56):
that makes sense, And this is one of the main
places in the country where you're going to find entire
anarchist groups in random rural small towns. Having been one
of those people in one of those small towns, I
keep saying I lived in Nashville, I lived in Sandy Mush.

Speaker 3 (01:08:10):
Where Sandy Mush is. I don't bother saying it because
no one knows where it is. Hell of a name
though I know it's almost British and it's weirdness. I
was like two fem for baseball caps back then, and
all my landmates were the Cama baseball caps from the
local store that says Sandy.

Speaker 5 (01:08:25):
Mush, you know.

Speaker 9 (01:08:26):
And I'm really sad that I didn't get one, especially
now because now I have one and I'm wearing it
now that has the name of the town I live in.
But I can't wear it anywhere because it doses me.

Speaker 7 (01:08:39):
Ah.

Speaker 3 (01:08:39):
Yeah, see that's a fun yea. If you had a
Sandy Mush one, you'd be Yeah. Someone send Margaret a
baseball cap, yeah, from Sandy Mush, Yeah with Camma.

Speaker 7 (01:08:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:08:47):
Oh, I probably won't wear it otherwise I'll be real
because I still got to be fem and somehow that
is how things work in my subculture. So you need
individual preparedness so that you're free enough to help people,
and you need community preparedness so you.

Speaker 3 (01:09:02):
Know what to do.

Speaker 9 (01:09:03):
And then you also have all of these people with
really specialized skills and tools and these are the kinds
of things that I can't say that every prepper needs
to go out and do. But like ATVs have been
crucial to disaster relief efforts, that doesn't mean that everyone
should run out and buy an ATV to keep around
in the case of flooding. This is a note for
me because I don't quite live on enough land to

(01:09:24):
justify an ATV, and I really want one.

Speaker 3 (01:09:27):
But yeah, scared one of those little ones. Yeah, there's
little children ones.

Speaker 4 (01:09:32):
I know.

Speaker 3 (01:09:32):
I'm just a drive around a circle.

Speaker 9 (01:09:34):
I'd like mostly live in the woods and so there's
like just not a lot of ATVs. Are great when
you got like twelve acres with horses on them, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:09:42):
Yeah you're going out, you can get a sheep dog
on the back. Very practical for that kind of thing. Yeah,
rifle case.

Speaker 9 (01:09:47):
But that said, A dirt bike friend of mine, who
was a quite prepared person, immediately went out and spent
days going into hard to reach areas to connect with
people and bring them supplies. Yeah, so maybe I can.

Speaker 3 (01:09:58):
Just fight a dirt bike. Yeah, dirt bike, E bike,
E dirt bike. Then you can run off solar power,
don't need gas, store it sideways.

Speaker 9 (01:10:07):
Okay, we're gonna talk about electronics versus gas later in
the episode.

Speaker 3 (01:10:10):
I got a whole part about it. Yeaheah, okay, good.

Speaker 9 (01:10:12):
But first, what we really need for the apocalypse is
whatever comes next in the ads. That is what will
save you in the apocalypse. If it's a podcast, yeap
that is the podcast that will give you the secret
to surviving the apocalypse.

Speaker 3 (01:10:25):
Hopefully it's the Reagan gold coins, which will become the
currency as soon as the state collapses. I bet it's gambling,
and if you go gamble, you're guaranteed to win. That's
how I think we legally cannot say that. Oh well
then yeah, yeah, I wonder if we can get away
with saying don't gamble, it's a bad idea. Yeah. No,
I think we actually can't say that. Okay, great, don't

(01:10:45):
gamble it's a bad idea.

Speaker 7 (01:10:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:10:58):
And Rebecca, the we're all lesson was that some stuff
is and was useful for everyone to have.

Speaker 3 (01:11:05):
We're going to talk about some of.

Speaker 9 (01:11:06):
That stuff, while other certain specialized tools and skill sets
only made sense for some people to have. Not everyone
needs to know how to repair a chainsaw or even
own a chainsaw, but it sure proved to be a
handy skill in this particular crisis. Ashville is easily an
image of the climate crisis future. I think you and
Robert got into that in the episode you did about this.

Speaker 3 (01:11:27):
Yeah, we spoke a little bit about how like this
is a vision it was coming from a lot of us.

Speaker 9 (01:11:32):
Yeah, I'm basically doing a like me too. I couldn't
be on the call because I was busy. That's what
this episode is.

Speaker 3 (01:11:40):
No, we Robert and I have not been there. My
house was when I was younger, but yeah, we were
not at this time.

Speaker 9 (01:11:45):
Ashville is not okay. It is a somewhat remote part
of the country in terms of its raw geography. You're
not getting into that city without taking steep, curving freeways
or flying into a regional airport. But culturally, and because
of the level of infrastructure the United States provides, it
is not an isolated city. It is a very much
a modern and hip city with about I think one

(01:12:05):
hundred thousand people had I think about eighty thousand when
I left a couple of years ago, but it's been growing. Yeah,
partly because lots of Silicon Valley folks moved there to
work remote much to the sorrow of locals.

Speaker 3 (01:12:15):
Like everywhere else a people moved, I know.

Speaker 9 (01:12:17):
And then I'm also like I work remote and lived
I actually can't throw the stones here.

Speaker 3 (01:12:22):
Yeah, I have lived here since I didn't work remote. Yeah,
fair enough. I'll take my stern throwing opportunity.

Speaker 9 (01:12:31):
Asheville is a very climate stable area. All of Appalachia is,
and it's nowhere near the coast. There's not a lot
of earthquakes. There are far fewer forest fires than there
are out west. There were some forest fires that were
there one of the years that I lived there, but
you know, they didn't. It didn't impact my life the
way it impacts my friends' lives.

Speaker 3 (01:12:48):
To live out west.

Speaker 9 (01:12:49):
Yeah, there are industrial accidents and there's occasional flooding, but
no one had any reason to expect anything like this,
except that all of us have every reason to exp
something like this. Areas hit more regularly by climate disasters
have protocols in place for those sorts of things. People
in California pay attention to the fires during that fire season.

(01:13:11):
People on the Gulf Coast track the hurricanes. And not
that these disasters aren't disastrous, but they're expected. They're part
of living where you live Ashville. What happened there could
be any of us at any time, So what was
useful for them for prepping seems like it might be
really useful for all of us. And most of that,

(01:13:32):
most of what was useful is the basics. People I
talked to were either real happy that they stored water
or real sad that they hadn't stored water. With the
storm coming, people filled up their bath tubs. One friend
cut the down spouts on his house to direct them
into trash cans, and now a week later, they still

(01:13:53):
have water.

Speaker 3 (01:13:53):
To flush the toilet. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:13:56):
And you know, if you're like super ahead of it,
you've got your little rain collectors all the time, right,
but yeah, worst case scenario, cut your down spout and
throw a trash can there, yep, or anything else that's
food safe. Yeah, well, in this case is mostly water flushing.

Speaker 3 (01:14:10):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:14:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:14:10):
But it's funny just as you mentioned this, Like I
was in the village I stayed in last week didn't
have rain water electricity, and that's exactly what they did.
They had a person I stayed with had like a
normal toilet, but they don't have plumbed in water, so
they just collect rainwater and use that every time they
want to flush it. Yeah, every time.

Speaker 9 (01:14:27):
I've lived off gread and dot a busy access running
water instead of bucket flushing.

Speaker 3 (01:14:30):
I'm shit in a bucket with sawdust. Yeah yeah, they
I think, like there's a hole underneath. I'm interesting, but
you have to flush it to get it in. I
think this was like a status upgrade to have the
physical toilet. Yeah yeah, yeah, no, that actually makes a
lot of sense. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:14:47):
Some of the first water distribution centers that came online
after the storm in Ashville didn't have water containers, and
this is actually still the case as of recording, so
people had to bring their own. One friend only had
those big clear water drugs, the kind that you put
into like a water cooler and like get refilled at
the grocery store, you know. Yeah, and these don't have

(01:15:08):
good caps and you can't really bicycle with them while
they're full.

Speaker 3 (01:15:12):
I've bicycled with one when it was full. But yeah, okay,
it's not a fun, not a fun. This is where
you need a long tail cargo bike, the ultimate prep
of vehicle. Fair enough, I would argue, Jerry cans, that's
my pitch instead of yeah, yeah, you can also get
jerry kNs or like the like big opaque water jugs
for storing water. But yeah, or even bags, what are

(01:15:34):
bags like the like MSI drown bags? Okay, ifew says before,
there's a pretty robust I've only seen little ones that
it makes sense of those big ones too. Yeah, big
ones expedition stuff.

Speaker 9 (01:15:45):
I would argue that if you're thinking about getting the stuff,
opaque water containers with good lids are more useful than
the blue clear ones. But if you have access to
the blue clear ones and that's what you got, go
get them.

Speaker 7 (01:15:55):
Yea.

Speaker 9 (01:15:56):
And many people lacked any containers at all, so the
water distribution site was not as directly useful as it
could have otherwise been.

Speaker 3 (01:16:04):
That's tough.

Speaker 9 (01:16:06):
One friend during the storm pulled out all the recycling
and filled every jug with water and put it in
the fridge, which did two things. One it gave you
slightly orange tasting water to drink for a while, and
two it added thermal mass to keep the fridge cool longer.
And of course, you know story, more water always good.

Speaker 3 (01:16:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:16:24):
For the most part, most water people had access to
had a boil advisory on it before it went out completely.
Oh you're a water filter expert. I want to talk
to you about this.

Speaker 3 (01:16:33):
I was about to fucking dive into that shit. I
was so I was ready to go. Okay, hold on,
all right.

Speaker 9 (01:16:37):
Yeah, floodwater itself is generally an awe, or at least
it is in this case too toxic to use a
simple filter or boil at home. Things like pesticides are
incredibly hard to get out of water. Yeah, and lightweight
backpacking type filters, which overall are what I recommend for
most things like sawyers and life straws. They don't really

(01:16:57):
cut it as from what I understand. From what I understand,
and the two methods that can work are the like
fairly slow and like intense charcoal filters, activated charcoal filters,
and then in home style reverse osmosis filters, which normally
I don't like, but for this it seems like they might.

Speaker 3 (01:17:18):
Yeah, you have enough power for an arrow filter. Yeah,
it's a nice touch. Also, if you get one, then
your home appliance did if you'd have in a hard
water area, which is a lot of the West, won't
get fucked up by the classification so much.

Speaker 9 (01:17:30):
Oh that makes sense. I use a water softener AM
I well, similar approach, but I like reverse osmosis seems
like it has some advantages. Maybe I never like reverse
osmosis because when I first was looking into it, I
lived off grid and reverse osmosis creates a lot of
waste water.

Speaker 3 (01:17:45):
Yeah, and I was just like, all of this water
was hard to come by. Fuck that. There are some
filters that have an activated charchole element, specifically the pesticide
runoff and like industrial guitaminates is something I have been
really worried about in a couple of places I've been
for work. You know. Actually I was somewhat concerned about
that on a recent trip, the one, the one in Panama.

(01:18:07):
But it's not so much pesticides. There's human waste and
decaying human remains, which is pretty rough. But in the
end my that was a big concern for we went there.
The MSI Guardian I think has an activated charkhole element,
and so does the camelback in line filter. Oh interest
kind of a small one. Yeah, that And what's really
cool about that is a lot of them you can't

(01:18:29):
replace because the activated charcol is you can't backflush it
in the same way that you can BackFlash a filter,
right Camelback will sell you just the actual activated charkhole
element that you can then replace. I've got a few
of them in a cupboard behind. Yeah, but that would
be what to look for if you're but yeah, don't
be just boiling it or just filtering it. And those

(01:18:50):
are for like something like a soayer. They're great for rainwater.
But if you're filtering water, you wann't a fast flowing
clear not a herbid or a stagnant water source or
industrially bllluted water source. A fast flowing clear mountain stream great,
but like turbid, stagnant water with industrial pollutants not so good.

(01:19:11):
That makes sense.

Speaker 9 (01:19:12):
And so if you're listening as a Nashville or elsewhere,
I'm like, I'm trying to think of what I'm like.
I'll probably I have some activated charcoal stuff, but I
don't like it as much because I don't like I
don't like disposable things.

Speaker 3 (01:19:24):
I'm like, yeah, but I yeah, things that you can
reuse or always better.

Speaker 9 (01:19:27):
Yeah, but for certain threat models, especially if you don't
have the power for reversus messus.

Speaker 3 (01:19:33):
Yeah, and it's not that expensive. Yeah, the MSR ones
actually the that's what the US military issues to some
of it's like I guess more special people sottimes. They
pop up on the surplus market, pretty cheap, okay, and
they have a bomber warranty. You could trash it and
they'll replace it.

Speaker 9 (01:19:49):
Oh hell yeah, I like that. A lot of outdoors
gear is like pretty like they'll stand by their product.
Yeah I would.

Speaker 3 (01:19:54):
I keep wanting trying to pitch his story Italy, but yeah,
like I have an MSR quilt. This is not like
an MSR sponsored episode, but I've used that shit on
It's a very small, very light with like an ultralight quill.
I've used I think literally on almost every continent in
the world. Well, and just through like it's down and
through like my body's greasiness, my inherent oiliness gradually down

(01:20:18):
even if you take really good care of it, right,
the down gets packed in and there. Yeah, I had
it for probably six years. I was like, fuck it,
this isn't working anymore. Let me see if they'll do
me a discount of a new one, put in a
warranty claim, send it back to them. Okay, here's a
new one. Just just sent me one.

Speaker 9 (01:20:32):
That's cool. Yeah, yeah, no, I like that more outdoor stuff.
I like people who stand by the shit they do.

Speaker 3 (01:20:39):
Yeah, and they also fixed stuff, which is cool, Like
I like that, and they will ship you the part
to fix it well, which is I feel less wasteful
when that happens. Yeah. So with food, this one's real simple.
People are either glad they stockpiled food or they were
sad that they hadn't a stockpiled food. Yeah, that's an

(01:21:00):
easy one.

Speaker 9 (01:21:01):
One friend immediately took about half a stash of freeze
dried foods to distribute out to friends and strangers. Most
people I talked to did not have any real amount
of backup power available to them. On any given street,
I would pass only a few houses with generators running,
which also, of course, takes gas or propane. Propane has
the advantage of storing indefinitely, it has the disadvantage of

(01:21:23):
being substantially more expensive per like kill abot hour or
whatever of power.

Speaker 3 (01:21:27):
M h yeah, probably more bulky too to store right,
like per energy unit totally.

Speaker 9 (01:21:32):
When I was off grid, I used a dual fuel
gener I actually I took it down and I no
longer have the generator and gave.

Speaker 3 (01:21:36):
It to some folks.

Speaker 9 (01:21:37):
But I had a gas propane generator, and I ran
it off of propane because it also is like cleaner
on the engines.

Speaker 3 (01:21:45):
You have to do less maintenance.

Speaker 9 (01:21:46):
Yeah, but you know, if I needed it all the time,
it was a backup to my solar. If I had
to run it all the time, I would have used
gas because it Yeah. Anyway, I talked with one homeowner
with solar on his roof about how he hadn't sprung
for the house battery because after all, power in the
area never really went out for.

Speaker 3 (01:22:03):
More than a day at a time, right.

Speaker 9 (01:22:05):
Yeah, I personally delivered two solar generators, which just means
like big ol' lithium batteries with inputs and outputs built in,
And those would be my personal primary recommendation for people
who want to run lights and charge phones and things.

Speaker 3 (01:22:20):
Like that during power outages for a while.

Speaker 9 (01:22:23):
Yeah, while gas or propane generators more useful for keeping
heavy duty appliances going like fridges.

Speaker 3 (01:22:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:22:30):
I also passed out a couple different like portable or
luggable solar panel setups that can charge phones or other devices.
And there were some mutual aid folks going around and
helping people with their solar setups. But overall, I didn't
see as much of it as I expected.

Speaker 3 (01:22:44):
I expected to show up and they'll just be like
outside the mutual aid stations, a big old foldable solar
panel with a power brick. I think fewer people had
that the night.

Speaker 7 (01:22:52):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (01:22:52):
So what are you doing to go buy?

Speaker 8 (01:22:55):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (01:22:55):
Right, because money is hard to come by, that's the reason. Yeah,
you haven't made them self save a little bit, uh
that way, but be careful with big blocks of cells
and shit.

Speaker 9 (01:23:06):
Yeah, And like I'm always trying to price out the
difference between like I build my own solar setups. Yeah,
but I also like just get these solar generators. Sometimes,
until you're looking at like big systems, the price difference
is not as dramatic as you want, you.

Speaker 3 (01:23:20):
Know, because yeah, actually putting in a lot of time
and or.

Speaker 9 (01:23:23):
Even like an inverter costs a fair amount of money.
And so if you're building a big system, the inverter
is like worth the expense, right, But if it's a
little system, the little thing that has a built an
inverter and be cheaper, right.

Speaker 7 (01:23:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:23:35):
And like the charge controller edge controller, Yeah, I was
recently building one out for leaving out for migrants. Yeah,
or having in the bed of my truck so when
I run into people and need to charge their phones,
they can just do that without my truck being gone.
Yeah and yeah, I ended up shoving a bunch of
twelve fort batter reason that ammocan and hooking it up
to a bunch of USB boards on the outside of
the amacan and then just bringing them home at charging

(01:23:57):
them make other than doing a charge controller, And yeah,
it's not worth it. No, that makes sense.

Speaker 9 (01:24:02):
And honestly, like my van's off grid setup is I
have the equipment to run it off my alternator or
solar panels on the roof, I just have a fuck
ton of batteries in my van, so I just plug
it in every couple of weeks and it's fine, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:24:15):
Yeah, yeah, you end up doing I've tried a bunch
of the different solar panels I use them when I'm
this company called Pale Blue that I used a decent amount.
I left it with someone on a work trip because
they needed it more than me. Yeah, it's alsouly useful,
But like, if you're really trying to run anything big,
you need a lot more solar panel then you're probably
gonna you know, carry around on your backpack.

Speaker 9 (01:24:35):
That's what I think people don't quite recognize is that,
like I used to have a pretty large array of
twelve hundred watts, and you know, I had to go
run hundreds of feet of cable to put that in
a field and build like a whole structure to hold
it and get it to the right angle and things
like that. Yeah, and even then in the winter I
ran the generator. And this is to keep my laptop

(01:24:57):
and a little tiny super efficient fridge going right and
some other stuff right. But like, solar is not space efficient.
It's not going to do what you think it does
because it's not gonna do what it's advertised to do.
But it'll keep your cell phone alive, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:25:12):
Which is important. Or if you use a satellite communicator
or something, then you can keep that charged. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:25:18):
With gas, one friend usually keeps her car half full
of gas, but forgot that week because you've been driving
so much and started the crisis with only an eighth
of a tank and was extra stuck. You need to
have a gas can if you want to drive out
of the city and get as much gas as possible.
Of course, you can store gas in a good container
for a while, but it goes bad after three to

(01:25:38):
six months. You store gas that way, So you should
set an alarm for yourself. This is kind of telling myself.
I have like gas cans where I was like, oh,
I should store some gas, and then I'm like, oh, wait,
how long has that one been there?

Speaker 3 (01:25:48):
Yeah? Crap? Now am I dealing with it? Yeah? You
have to take it to real specialized places to deal
with it. Yeah, it's hard to get rid of it
once you Yeah, let it go bad.

Speaker 9 (01:25:57):
And so an empty gas can actually would have done
people in Ashville a lot of good. A full gas
can even better, right, But honestly, full tank of gas
in your car better in a full gas can, empty
gas can allow people to leave and go get gas
because they were not. Civilization didn't end. Civilization ended a
ninety minute radius, you know. Yeah, So you can set

(01:26:18):
an alarm for yourself if.

Speaker 3 (01:26:19):
You're going to keep full gas and then you put
it in your gas tank and then you go refill
it again, and then you get annoyed about doing this,
and then you stop doing it, and then an apocalypse happens,
and then you're really annoyed that you forgot. Don't ask
me how I know. Just if you have the money
to not let your vehicle get below half full, you'll
probably be fine. You can get a long way in
a tank.

Speaker 9 (01:26:36):
Well, it's about when you have the money is an
important part. But at the end of the day, it
does not cost you more money to keep your gas
tank at half full.

Speaker 3 (01:26:44):
Right, No, it doesn't because you're and unless you're driving
a long way to get the gas, but like you're
still driving the same amount, you're just stopping off a
little more.

Speaker 9 (01:26:52):
Yeah, empty gas can ended up crucial, and people who
stored them were glad, and a lot of them were
donated immediately. Volunteers collected gas cans and drove the three
hour round trip to fill them up with gas several
times a day. You should learn the range of your vehicle.
Newer cars will tell you automatically, but if not, it's
not super hard to figure out your gas mileage. You
have to like look at your mileage when you fill

(01:27:13):
it up and do some division and shit and find
out the size of your fuel tank and your gas mileage,
and you'll know whether or not you have enough gas
to reach an area, especially if you're doing disaster relief.
You never want to do disaster relief if you can't
get out of the situation yourself, because then you're a
fucking asshole, because then you are just actually another person
who needs relief. Communications, as this show covered last week,

(01:27:36):
were one of the hardest hit areas of preparedness in
this crisis. There were Ham radio operators doing stuff, but
a lot of my activist and anarchist friends with Bao fangs,
which are these cheap Ham radios, struggle to get them
to work well during the storm due to the mountains,
water in the air, lack of repeaters, and frankly that
Ham radios are really goddamn complicated. Everyone has fully up

(01:28:01):
on exactly how it works at that moment, right yeah,
and this has put a fire under them to get
better at it. But especially in the mountains, repeaters need
to be a part of a radio communications plan. People
with satellite phones were some of the only people in
communication at the beginning. I was curious about and did
not find any information about whether or not the new

(01:28:23):
iPhone satellite texting.

Speaker 3 (01:28:25):
I wanted to ask about that. I didn't find anyone
who used it. Okay, I found it to be less
reliable than what I have is Garment in Reach. I
pay for it, yeah, and it works real well. Used
it in the dairy and gap. I've used it again
every continent part from Antarctica. So you would say that
the iPhone doesn't replace the garment in Reach in terms
of well the iPhone works in North America. So for me,

(01:28:48):
my model has been absolutely not Like it didn't work
in Panama, Central America, I guess, so yeah, no, for me,
the in Reach has been faster. It's also another device
that's not yourself. Yeah, and like sometimes you know the
device that you're playing Angry Birds on and then you
run out of battery or whatever. You know, Like, yeah,
it's useful to have a device which is only for

(01:29:09):
emergencies which lasts for two weeks if you charged it up. Yeah, one,
I leave mine off and so yeah yeah yeah, I
mean if you're getting one for that purpose, I would
say that, like the bigger in Reach is better. There's
in Reach Mini and Mini two. Again. I used the
Mini for about eight years I think, eventually destroyed it
and got it warranty replace with a Mini too. The
bigger one allows you to type on the device, the

(01:29:32):
Mini too, sending any kind of message without a cell
phone to do the input is a real bastard. But this, yeah,
it's just like remember when you used to do predictive
texts and you do like one was ABC two. Yeah,
it's like that.

Speaker 9 (01:29:47):
Okay, Yeah, I have the in reach too, and I've
only proof of concept of that. I'm often driving around
replaces where I could break our down the middle of nowhere.
Actually I broke down yesterday about free my from where
I lose cell service in the mountains that I live in.

Speaker 3 (01:30:02):
Oh, that could have been rough. I know. I also
broke down in an auto mechanic shop.

Speaker 9 (01:30:07):
I got real lucky with what was otherwise a real
bad situation.

Speaker 3 (01:30:11):
If you're getting it in reach Mini, this is my soapbox.
Don't trust the crappy little caribiner it comes with by
a small locking DMM makes a tiny locking carabiner. It's
an important thing to lose it because you didn't want
to spend ten bucks on a carabiner. Would be a
bad day you mentioned this. I'll end up doing this
because I trust you, because your user is more than mine.

(01:30:31):
Mine just is like clip to my hiking bag, but
it hasn't. Yeah, inherently and unlocking and unlocking caribine. You
want to be using a locker for something that's like
an essential safety. Now that makes sense. Threadlock the little Yeah,
it uses I think a talks or an Alan threadlock
that bad boy in. Okay, you're good to go.

Speaker 9 (01:30:50):
I know that starlink doesn't work very well during storms.
There's this method of internet called starlink that's owned by
someone who I don't like and wouldn't like me because
I'm a transperson. But starlink is not incredibly reliable during storms.
I know that because I live remote and you starlink.
I'm on talking on starlink right now. It does not

(01:31:10):
work great during storms. But after the storm passed and
when cell service was still out, a restaurant with starlink
was where many people first were able to reach their
loved ones. That's cool, and so that is a thing
to know. It is a fairly reliable service.

Speaker 3 (01:31:27):
Frankly, same deal in the Darien. Actually, that's how migrants
are first able to contact their loved ones and let
them know that they're safe. Yeah, it's an indigenous village
where someone has a starlink, unless you personally piss off
a particular billionaire, in which case he will personally turn
it off for you. Yeah. Great.

Speaker 9 (01:31:44):
Everyone I talked to had a regular like AMFM weather
blah blah blah radio at home, which is great. Yeah,
people should have radios in their homes. Radio is the
main mechanism that the city used to broadcast information about
various threats, like evacuations of regions threatened by the destruction
of dams or the can tamination in the water. However,
how you charge them is you know, I fortunately had

(01:32:05):
some d batteries in my van to give to someone because.

Speaker 3 (01:32:08):
Oh wow, that soul school. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:32:09):
No, yeah, some of my stuff I brought like in
case someone I knew needed and some stuff I just
like brought to give away. Yeah, and my like stash
of batteries was just like came with me in case
anyone needed you know.

Speaker 3 (01:32:20):
Yeah, you can get wind up weather radios. I have one. Yeah, no, totally.

Speaker 9 (01:32:23):
That's actually I dislike most all in one gadgets for survival,
but the wind up radio with the little shitty solar
panel is one of the ones that I'm like, no,
that's they're thirty to fifty bucks and they work. Yeah,
and you don't need much power to listen to a radio,
you know.

Speaker 3 (01:32:38):
No, they are a whole potst of world where wind
up weather radios or how people get their information.

Speaker 9 (01:32:44):
Yeah, it makes sense for travel. Most people still got
around by vehicle, just with limited gas, though I saw
more than the usual number of people walking or biking,
pulling trailers or wagons. As a general rule, consider floodwaters
to be impassable and do not attempt to drive through them. Interestingly,
electric cars do better in floods than gas engines because

(01:33:04):
if water gets into the air intake of a gas engine,
the engine will stall. And usually it's people with giant
pickup trucks who overestimate the capabilities of their vehicles.

Speaker 3 (01:33:14):
Who go out and do this. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:33:17):
When I got my truck and I was like, I'm
a prepper, I'm going to get those like bullbars or
the front cage things or whatever.

Speaker 3 (01:33:23):
Grown. Yeah, and I looked into it and I read
about it, and they just murder people. Yeah, as someone
who rides a bicycle a lot, those things do.

Speaker 9 (01:33:32):
Not like it's already bad that pickup trucks are so gigantic,
but the if you add one of those things to
the front of your car, front of your truck, you're
just gonna and you have to think about it. Are
you more likely to need to push broken down cars
during the end of the world or accidentally hit a
pedestrian with your vehicle that is taller than a child. Yeah,

(01:33:56):
and I would guess for most people, including me, I
am more likely to accidentally hit a pedestrian. So I
ran that through my cost benefit analysis, and I do
not have one of those things on my truck. I
could imagine a world is like low, low low on
my list of priorities, Like one day I'm going to
get one and I'm going to keep it in my garage,
and then it's like, yeah, and the world has ended,

(01:34:17):
and I'm gonna put it on my truck in case
I need to push cars out of the way.

Speaker 3 (01:34:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:34:20):
With the three hundred and fifty miles, I can drive
my truck before it's useless.

Speaker 3 (01:34:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:34:26):
Yeah, using all that gas stooled Yeah, yeah, exactly. That
totally lasts a long time anyway. One of the problems
electric vehicles with flooding that I think we're starting to see.
I think these videos were from Ashville, but I'm not certain,
is that electric vehicles if they are underwater for long enough,
especially with salt water. This is less of a North
Carolina and more of a coastal thing. Yeah, the salt
water can cause fires if it hits the battery long enough.

(01:34:48):
Don't drive through flood water, and floods in the mountains
are particularly fast moving as compared to like coastal area
floods where the water might be still and staying around.

Speaker 3 (01:34:58):
Yeah. On the other hand, moving floodwater goes away faster
and on its own.

Speaker 7 (01:35:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:35:04):
So yeah, with gravity, don't cycle through it. I've cycled
through a couple of rivers once in Iceland. It just
picked up the bike from underneath me, and it like
not an optimal situation actually, to be swimming down a
river chasing after your bicycle in Iceland. Yeah, I don't
want to do that. Yeah. Avoid famously warm place Iceland. Yeah. Hm,

(01:35:25):
only one hundred kilometers from the nearest place I could
re warm myself. It's a great day.

Speaker 9 (01:35:31):
Roads were washed away in many places, while many many
more were blocked by downtrees. Improper chainsaw use is one
of the leading causes of injuries and disasters.

Speaker 3 (01:35:40):
Oh I bet.

Speaker 9 (01:35:41):
Proper use of chainsaws has been absolutely essential. Although there
were reports of people who self rescued with hand saws. Yeah,
and you know, yeah, you got time and people and
you got a handsaw, and there's a tree in your way,
you can get through it.

Speaker 3 (01:35:56):
Yeah, don't be like the guy maybe Margaret's so there's
some like homesteader on. Oh god, that's dot com who
I've started war with. Yeah, because he's he's lying, He's
not like I'm sorry this guy is. Don't braid their hair.
Both of them have long hair and they don't braid it.
I do not believe that they work outside regularly if
they don't braid their hair. Yeah, your hair will get
caught and shit and it'll just tangle. It is not

(01:36:18):
worth it. The reason rural people with long hair wear
their hair and braids, Yeah, it's it keeps it out
the way.

Speaker 7 (01:36:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:36:25):
Yeah, I would say that if you have a saw,
keep it, you know, keep it in a reasonable condition.
The old sword has been kicking around your shed and
it's rusty and blunt. Yeah, likewise the old chainsaw, So
don't be dragging that out. Yeah, you haven't used it
for a while.

Speaker 9 (01:36:38):
That said one of the things I was expecting but
wasn't true, because I brought down a generator that I
didn't know if worked right, And I was like, what
a jerk move, because if I was going down to
like there's like ten people and I'm like, don't worry,
I'm here to rescue you.

Speaker 3 (01:36:49):
I've got a generator. I don't know if works. That's
not so great.

Speaker 9 (01:36:52):
Yeah, right, there's one hundred thousand people who live in Asheville.
There was the Asheville Tool Library and the Western North
Carolina Pair Cafe hold up outside the Anarchist Bookstore fixing
generators and chainsaws. Oh listen, yeah, hero shit, and it
was great.

Speaker 3 (01:37:09):
Of all the various generators people brought, I was like,
I don't know if this one works, and they added
gas and it worked, and so I was like I
brought the best shitty generator, you know. Yeah, but no,
Sometimes things can be handy, and knowing how to fix
things is always useful.

Speaker 9 (01:37:23):
And there are people around with more specialized skills. You
don't have to learn to do everything. For example, chainsawing
is a specialized skill. I own a bunch of devices
that are scary and dangerous, and some of them are guns,
and one of them is a table saw, and the
chainsaw is the most likely to hurt me. Yeah, for sure,

(01:37:44):
and I've been to a chainsaw class. I'm very glad.
Cutting a downed tree is an entirely different skill than
cutting a live tree or a standing tree because of
the way that tension works. And I cannot teach you
this over Well, you might already know it, but don't
listen to a podcast. Learn how to go to a class.

Speaker 3 (01:38:01):
Yeah, pay someone to teach you and get the right
protective stuff like, yeah, absolutely proper detective trousers and things. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:38:09):
Also, never cut up trees woven with power lines without
ascertaining that the power line is dead. As for how
to ascertain it, I asked someone who was on a
chainsaw crew how to ascertain it, and he didn't know.
So they just avoid those ones. Yeah, I mean mains
power is not a joke.

Speaker 3 (01:38:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:38:25):
People have been reaching the more isolated communities out there
by hiking, by ATV, by dirt bike, by helicopter, and
most famously, by a string of pack mules. There are
a lot of ways that people have been getting help
to people. This doesn't mean you need to go out
and buy a helicopter, Like, just get a mule. You
don't even need to google how much a helicopter is, Margaret,
I wonder how much a helicopter is anyway. And then

(01:38:47):
there was one tool and tool set that a lot
of my friends have that as of yet, has had
more or less no use in responding to this crisis,
and that is guns.

Speaker 3 (01:38:58):
I asked. I figured it might be.

Speaker 9 (01:39:01):
This is interesting for a few reasons. One is that
North Carolina is a pretty gun friendly state. It's also
a pretty culture war ass state.

Speaker 3 (01:39:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:39:10):
Where I live in West Virginia, people don't I mean, yeah,
you see the punisher skull every now and then or whatever,
but like overall, people are like, I don't know, We're
all just trying to live, you know. Yeah, in western
North Carolina you have intense tensions between strong pockets of
blue and red right and a lot of people on
both sides that are armed. I have a North Carolina

(01:39:31):
concealed carry permit myself. I'm not anti gun, but it
was not what was wanted or needed. Yeah, if food
stays scarce long enough down there, I would expect some
people might be doing some out of season survival hunting.
But I haven't even heard rumors of that yet. Yeah,
there have been occasional rumors of robberies and the occasional
rumors of Nazi activity in the areas, and I believe

(01:39:53):
both have happened, Yeah, but there's been nothing widespread, and
so far there hasn't even been a need for community
defense organizations. By and large, the culture war is on pause,
and I'm grateful. I like getting along with people.

Speaker 3 (01:40:10):
Yeah, no, it's much more fun they' shooting at them. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:40:14):
Like talk about shared interests like guns, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:40:19):
Yeah, I've had some positive discussions of people who don't pose. Yeah,
probably aligned with me because we both enjoy all guns.

Speaker 9 (01:40:27):
And this is not to say the firearms are not
a useful skill set for different threat models within the apocalypse,
but it hasn't proved particularly useful so far in this
particular crisis. And I think overall, I would put this
at an overrated skill and an overrated tool.

Speaker 3 (01:40:41):
Yeah, and definitely an overage way to spend a shit
ton of money. Oh my god. Yeah. No.

Speaker 9 (01:40:47):
One magazine of bullets is a movie that you can
go see at the theater. Yeah, yeah, like a dinner.
And I'm saying this, yeah, I'm looking.

Speaker 3 (01:40:58):
At like what that one, two, three, four, like maybe
twelve ammunition? Canful of ammunition mainly I buy the I
like to go shoot clay pigeons and the targets and stuff,
and I buy and it is cheap. But also, if
you have a gun, you should know how to use
it otherwise you're dangerous. Yeah. Yeah, like, don't don't be
buying a gun and then loading it and storing it
and not knowing how to use it than your liability. Yeah,

(01:41:20):
But like I also have a bunch of lentils, and like,
just in terms of preparedness, by the lentils first.

Speaker 9 (01:41:28):
Totally more useful, way more useful in the circumstance. And
this circumstance is more likely the most and one thing
almost everyone I talked to was happy about. No one
was sad about just this came up. Everyone was happy
that they had extra to share. A random woman who
showed up to get water at the Anarchist bookstore saw
what was happening and turned and told me, like, oh,

(01:41:49):
I have a chainsaw. I don't really you should I
bring it here? And the answer is yes, And everyone
is happy when we give things to each other. That's
the That's the these of the other podcast episode I
did this week, is that when you give stuff to someone.

Speaker 3 (01:42:04):
It's good for both of you. You just literally are
both happier, Yeah, without a doubt. And like, I remember
when my house flood. I think I was seventeen eighteen
something like that. My little sister and I were at home,
and I remember at first being like, oh no, back
in the daily you know, we had a TV that
was relatively flat. It's probably six inches thick still, you know,
but we thought it was shit, and then being like,

(01:42:25):
oh no, this TV that was so cool, it's being destroyed.
H And then immediately being like, my neighbors were in
their eighties and fucked the TV. Yeah, Like, and we
got our neighbors and there was one house in our
village that was on the hill. Everyone in our village
went to the house on the hill. We had a
great time. Yeah, Like we hung out and everyone was
so much happier not having to go through that shit alone. Yeah,

(01:42:47):
and they would have been sitting in the house watching
all their stuff wash you we. Yeah, we stayed there
a couple of days and then we went home and
it was fine. Well that's what I got.

Speaker 9 (01:42:55):
I thought it was going to be thirty minutes and
then I forgot I was going to talk about gear
with my friend James, where we both separately off Mike
often do this for hours of the time. Yeah, and
so go out and get yourself three days to three
weeks worth of food and water. Slowly build it up.
Go out and talk to your neighbors, figure who they are,
and uh, is it gonna be okay?

Speaker 3 (01:43:18):
The main reason's gonna be okay? Is we all die
eventually anyway, But like that's gonna be okay. Yeah, We're
gonna take care of each other as best we can. Yeah,
that's what we do. Anything you want to plug, I
guess this is your podcast. Yeah, I mean participant in
mutual aid anyway, because then you have the structures to
help yourself and know other people when you need them. Yes,
Like if things went shit here tomorrow, I could communicate

(01:43:41):
with my border friends because we use ham radios, and
we could help one another because we already engage in
the helping of people, and we organize horizontally because it
is better and that way, it doesn't matter if the
person who is quote unquote in charge isn't here, because
no one's in charge.

Speaker 9 (01:43:56):
Yep, totally, So do anarchism if you want to support
Asheville and the relief efforts there and the surrounding areas. Financially,
there's a million different small organizations that could absolutely ease
your help. But the two that I think we've been
shouting out a lot on the show, and I can
personally vouch for it very strongly is Appalachian Medical Solidarity

(01:44:16):
and Mutual Aid Disaster Relief. And both of those are
volunteer organizations. Every all the little money, all the money
you send is going to buy people's stuff. And if
you are within a day's drive of western North Carolina,
there might be a hub collecting things. Don't bring them
your old sweaters, bring them stuff that people want.

Speaker 3 (01:44:34):
You could ask them and they'll tell you, yeah, And
that's what I got. That's what I got to plug.
I will talk to you all some other times on
It could happen he.

Speaker 4 (01:45:04):
Welcome to It could happen to hear a podcast about
ice training guest squads. I guess I'm your host via Wong.
I guess I don't know if formerly or better is
the correct word, but sometimes also not. As the ice
was be destroyed, girl, So I'm mad about this one
with me? Is someone else's extremely bad about the existence

(01:45:27):
of ICE, which is James Yep.

Speaker 3 (01:45:29):
I'm here, I'm mad as a waste. I guess just
another Monday. Yeah, this shit sucks, This does suck. Yeah,
you know, I had this realization.

Speaker 4 (01:45:38):
I get this on Twitter a lot, where I realized
that there are people who don't know what ICE is
because they're like, they're not from the US, or they're like, yeah,
so ICE is immigrations and customs enforcements. The shortest description
of what they are is that they are one of
the like four American border gestapos.

Speaker 3 (01:45:55):
Yeah. The number of agencies under DHS is fucking baffling,
constantly rebranding every time they have a scandal or they
kill too many people. That yeah, ICE is kind of
their flagship evil program.

Speaker 4 (01:46:09):
Yeah, and they like they do raids on fucking houses,
they do raised on businesses.

Speaker 3 (01:46:16):
They suck.

Speaker 4 (01:46:17):
Like if you vaguely remember, there was a whole bunch
of protests in like twenty eighteen over this stuff, and
that was mostly anti ICE stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:46:23):
Yeah, if someone's getting deported, it's ICE for the most
part doing it. Like, Yeah, they also run detention centers
where people go, you know, they work with Jeff Bezos
on deporting people.

Speaker 4 (01:46:34):
Oh my fucking god. Okay, I just remembered a story
I had. I had a flashback to standing in a protest,
a very very large protest in twenty eighteen. This is
one of like the big pro immigrant rallies. Yeah, and
in this fucking protest, I saw a thing for this
group called Heartland Alliance. Now PROBA people who probably don't
outside of Chicago probably don't know what this is. The

(01:46:56):
Heartland Alliance runs like fucking child prison facilities, like for
ICE school, and they were at this protest against ICE.
Fucking it was the worst. That shit was terrible. You know,
this whole thing is all extremely bad. But what we've
been learning more details about recently is this program called

(01:47:18):
Citizens Academies, which is run by ICE's Homeland Security Investigations.

Speaker 3 (01:47:23):
I didn't think HSI was under ICE. I thought HSI
was a different branch of dhs I might be wrong,
but they used to be under ICE as far as
I know, and then they became HSI.

Speaker 4 (01:47:36):
Okay, I might be wrong about that, because the stuff
that I was reading was saying that they are still
part of ICE, but they might not be. It's also
possible that it's literally has gone back and forward multiple times.

Speaker 3 (01:47:46):
Yeah, this is merecrareck. Things fucking suck.

Speaker 4 (01:47:49):
But HSI also does, like a lot of the times,
there's some of the people who like do like physically
the people on the ground doing a raid will be HSI, like.

Speaker 3 (01:47:57):
Fucking stormtroopers or whatever. Yeah, they do arrests. Yeah, often
they appear in like these Joint counter Terrorism Task task forces,
like when they especially when they're doing stuff with like
drugs and that kind of thing.

Speaker 4 (01:48:10):
Yeah, the civilian academies are I think really the only
way you could describe them, even though this is not
how it's being described really is that they're treating random
people to like become desk what.

Speaker 3 (01:48:26):
Yeah, it's what's interesting is like the protest that you
talked about seem to have been the sort of reason
that they started this program, right, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:48:35):
We need to rewind this a little bit because they
started in the US as a reaction to those protests,
like specifically as like a pr thing. But the original
version of these programs started in Puerto Rico under Obama.

Speaker 3 (01:48:49):
Look, we don't give Obama or anything like enough shit, right,
Like fucking Obama just like in terms of killing people,
in terms of deporting people, fucked up. Human being.

Speaker 4 (01:49:00):
Yeah, he was the deporter in chief and like, yeah,
part of part of what's sort of brutal about the
mom administration is like a lot of his support had
been from like the huge undocumented that could have like
peaked in like two thousand and six, and he comes
in on this and they just fucking deports everyone.

Speaker 3 (01:49:16):
Yeah, as Democrats too every time. Yeah, we're seeing it
again with Biden.

Speaker 4 (01:49:20):
Right, It's like it's the same sort of process and
and under under Obama, these these programs start. There's specifically
as you're talking about, there's specifically supposed to be these
like training programs are supposed to be for community out Well, okay,
so this is and this is one of these things.
Was like, this is what they say that it's for.
And given what they're doing, I don't know how much
I believe them what they're what they say that it's for.

(01:49:40):
Is it's because there's been all of these anti ice things,
Like I mean, there's lots of people who now are
like don't say shit about ice, who like like AOC
hasn't fucking said anything about abolishing ICE in like half
a decade, right, and she ran on that. Yeah, because
of how powerful those social movements were. I mean, there's
like Sean mcguey, whatever the fuck guy whose whole thing

(01:50:03):
was abolish ice and then he became a Democratic staffer
and now it never talks about it again, and he's
like my absolute wordal nemesis, like I will face at
the end of days. Yeah, I will destroy hiss fucking
traders ass and yeah, many, many, many such cases. But yeah,
like and I think probably peak like anti ice sentiment
was in the Trump era, right when people, Yeah, people

(01:50:26):
started to look at immigration as the way that like
people have immigrant communities and diasporas, see it, right, which
is this thing that tears families apart, that destroys communities,
that rich children from their parents, and people obviously recognized
it was bad. And then Biden got in and the
Democrats had to do this like kind of cover your
eyes and turn away thing where they continue to do

(01:50:48):
the same shit. Kids and cages are good now, yeah, yeah, yeah,
in cages great Democratic kids and cage is incredible.

Speaker 3 (01:50:54):
What if no cage is what do we just leave
them out in the fucking mountains and James's friend have
to feed them beans or wind?

Speaker 4 (01:51:00):
Yeah, but the thing is in twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen.
It's not entirely clear that the Democrats are going to
swing that way. No, And so you get these programs
and what's interesting about them, and so a lot of
this is coming from that. There's a very very good
piece by Barrizio Guerrero indocumented, who got a bunch of
Foya documents about this program and what they were actually doing. Yeah,

(01:51:25):
and one of the things that he discovers about this
is that it's like a lot of rich guys. Like
it's some of them are like really rich. It's also
it's a lot of like bank employees.

Speaker 3 (01:51:35):
Yeah, that was a funny almost, I guess kind of
it got through that little social circle or whatever.

Speaker 4 (01:51:41):
Yeah, and like there's this sort of feed in program
that sends people into this. And I actually I realized
I had vaguely known about these but didn't quite understand
how bad it was because he didn't have a bunch
of the documents we have now. But this was a
big thing in Chicago in twenty twenty one, where there
was proposed to open one of these things. It's like

(01:52:02):
these like training centers for these like fucking people. Oh yeah,
and you know twenty twenty one was still in Chicago.
There was still like like there's some protest stuff going on,
because I mean there's you know, like twenty twenty hadn't
quite faded yet. And there was also like our cops
We've talked about this a couple times on the show,
but like shot a fucking fourteen year old, like yeah,

(01:52:23):
it's fucking bmurdered him cold blood. And the protests were
bad enough that like even lower Lightfoot was like like
fuck this, like this is this Trump ice stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:52:33):
We can't let them do it.

Speaker 4 (01:52:34):
This was back with the when like these people like
the Democrats were started pretending that they didn't like all
of these like federal deportation machine things. But the things
that we have now are we have the actual This
is like I think with the public most valuable part
of this whole thing is that we actually have a
bunch of the documents now of what they were showing people.

Speaker 3 (01:52:55):
Yeah, I'd love to see the fucking Foyer fight for this,
because I have foyed the Department of Homeland Security a
lot and getting any like I have a fire out
right now regarding the CBP one and the fact that
it doesn't work on non Apple phones, and they very
clearly know this, right, Like if I know it, they

(01:53:17):
know it. And I would love to know if that
was from the outset that they knew and they just
didn't give a fuck, Like I would like to see
those emails regarding it doesn't work on Samsung. I think
I think they got it from a court order. Oh okay,
so they went to court to get Yeah yeah, yeah,
every like people, Freedom Information Act is great, it only

(01:53:37):
works if you have a lawyer who's prepared to sue
over it. Like that is the especially with DHS. You're
just not like, yeah, I've got stuff, so I found
in twenty twenty. They'll just kick it down, kick can
down the road, like yep, I'm not going to get it,
but yeah, kudos to them for doing it. Yeah, it's
so hard if you are a First Amendment lawyer. Hit
me up.

Speaker 4 (01:53:58):
But okay, So the shit that's in this one of
these things. The first page of this is maybe the
most deranged chart I have ever seen in anything, which
is it is It is a picture of a naked
human body. Is the fronds and back of it, right,
And they've labeled all of the parts of the body
by and they've been. So we only have a black

(01:54:19):
and white version of this, but they've they've been they've
been labeled by how effective it is to hit someone
there with the baton.

Speaker 3 (01:54:27):
Yeah, yeah, and they're like green in the in the
actual document, they're green, yellow, and red. I guess, uh.
And then it says like reasoning for the red one,
I'll just read it highest level of resultant trauma injury
tends to range from serious to lung lasting rather than temporary,
and may include unconsciousness, serious body injury, shock, or death.
So I guess like it's saying like, don't hit them

(01:54:50):
in the in the in the red area. No, that's
the thing. That's the thing. They're not saying that. They're
just saying, these are your options.

Speaker 7 (01:54:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:54:57):
Is so part of this is supposed to be part
of like a force escal thing. But the point of
this is that it is actually like they're trying to
explain force escalation. And the thing is that like, yeah,
you actually can do this, but you can only do
this if you're in like the highest level of force.

Speaker 3 (01:55:09):
Escalation or whatever.

Speaker 4 (01:55:10):
Okay, and if any of you have ever been around
a cop, you know, but those people jump to the
highest level of force escalation at like, yeah, a fucking again,
we have literally seen an acorn drop and it can't
be able to do this, right, and so and so
what they're what they're teaching these people, And this is
like I think, like Genny widely horrifying. It's like, yeah,
they are teaching these people like the specific technical details

(01:55:32):
of how you like fucking maim someone with a baton.

Speaker 3 (01:55:35):
Yeah, I meant to reading the force escalation this is.
And they actually did physical training right, like I think
they did weapons training. I think they did a bunch
of a bunch of simulation kind of exercises. And then
if you if you scroll down, this is like a
PowerPoint for those listening at home. They gave an overview
of like use of force to include a bunch of

(01:55:58):
Supreme Court cases. I think Supreme Court cases is certainly, yeah,
Supreme Court cases about use of force. None of these
apply to you as a civilian, and you know, like
unless you're a sworn law enforcement officer, I guess I'm
not entirely sure like what the use case for civilian
baton training is aside from like, well, I mean my guess,

(01:56:20):
and this is the way I've been like sort of
looking at this program is that this is the thing
partially being designed for PR, but it's partially also being
designed to create parabilitaries that if you're in a situation
like twenty twenty but about the border, for example, you
suddenly have all of these people that you could just
fucking call up because like part of what's going on
with this too record you remember, like actually, I guess

(01:56:42):
it is funnily enough, like we are we are the
only two of the four hosts who didn't end up
having to deal with fucking Bortak getting deployed in Portland
in twenty twenty. But Bortak is border patrols like swat teams.

Speaker 4 (01:56:55):
Yeah, basically, yeah, there are stated reason is like oh
so this is this is how you unders and what
it's like to like be one of these people, how
hot it is to be a cop, and well, like
I think the actual reason again is so that you
could you're training a bunch of people who you can
just sort of call up and be like, we need
a bunch of people to come like fucking obliterate a

(01:57:16):
bunch of like protesters or whatever, help them do mass deportations. Yeah,
which is another thing because like part of what this
is too, is they're teaching them to do like raids
on houses, right, and like how do how do like
physically fucking deport people?

Speaker 3 (01:57:28):
So this is yeah, like like Trump era ICE, which
were where there were open discussions of how many people
can we deport, how much will it cost, how easy
will it be?

Speaker 4 (01:57:37):
Yeah, and like right now, like Trump is like his
big one of his big things is mass deportations. But
I think people don't realize that the only reason that
this stuff didn't happen under Trump was that pushback to
it was so enormous. Yeah, that like like there are
Democrats now who are screaming about the border who in
like twenty eighteen were like sanctuary cities, ICE can't do

(01:57:57):
raids here and sometimes that which sure, sometimes that was yeah,
but like there was real systemic pushback to this, and
I think like we're heading to a place where there
isn't a kind of reaction to this anymore, where this
can get really really scary really quickly. And these are
the kinds of programs that you would need in order

(01:58:19):
to just do actual mass deportations. Is that like, yeah,
like ICE doesn't have enough people, Like they have a
lot of people, but they don't have enough people to
deport like several million people.

Speaker 3 (01:58:27):
You need people like this.

Speaker 4 (01:58:29):
Yeah, and the scale of this program is kind of small,
but this is something that can be scaled up right, Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:58:33):
To try and extremely large numbers of people, like fairly quickly.

Speaker 3 (01:58:37):
Yeah. You know what it reminds me of Maya products
and services and support this podcast does. Yeah, all right,
I hope you enjoyed this. Products and sev suits way back.

Speaker 5 (01:58:56):
Well, let's go do like the other thing they were
fucking doing.

Speaker 3 (01:58:58):
Oh yeah, it's more Jesus wept. So I want to
quote from the article. Yeah. Quote.

Speaker 4 (01:59:02):
Documents also contain presentations on how to shoot a gun,
point at targets, and stand in position to fire. The
shooting practices include military style of rifles. Likewise, A training
in Atlanta organized drills to shoot at human like manikers
and fires M four assault rifles employed exclusively with the military.

Speaker 3 (01:59:19):
The training.

Speaker 4 (01:59:19):
Also included isis guidelines for use of force encompassing deadly force.
One presentation suggests yelling drop the gun as potential cover
when employing lethal force against someone. So they're telling it
and this is definitely supposed to be thinking like, oh
if you're in playing clothes, like you fucking yell police
and yell drop your gun and then you shoot them

(01:59:41):
and this is how you get away with it. So
like they are straight up teaching people how to murder people,
like how to get away with murder.

Speaker 3 (01:59:48):
That's what's happening here. Yeah, wild yeah, Like the government's
offered firearms trading for civilians, like that's kind of what
the NRA wasn't a government initiative, but like, yeah, this
is not that. This is not like, No, I would
broadly be in favor of the government funding free gun
safety classes for people, because I've seen some shit with

(02:00:08):
you know, like that would be one of the useful things.
But this is not that.

Speaker 4 (02:00:12):
No, And like and like the reason those specific classes
like don't look like that anymore is because, and I've
talked about this in some of the episodes on them
Okay assassination, it's like, well, yeah, when the government taught
a bunch of people how to use rifles, those people
use those rifles to like fight the cops in the streets.
Yeah right yeah, and now they're all this insane shit
that's like teaching people how to get away with murder
of their cop or like, I want to read a

(02:00:33):
PowerPoint slide from that from that thing, because it's it's
the most deranged thing I've ever seen.

Speaker 3 (02:00:39):
Have you read the Graham versus Connor one, because it's
one of the more powerful uses of passive voice I've
ever seen. Oh no, I haven't seen that yet. Let
me read that while you look for yours. This one
is just incredible instance of cops speak. Graham Comma diabetic.
Comma asks friend to drive him to convenience store for juice.
Good like cop sentences here, ran in and out of store.

(02:01:01):
Comma also observed the suspicious activity. What suspicious activity, dear listener,
I don't know. We left to imagine. Investigative stopped made
and Graham was handcuffed by whom doesn't say weird. Graham
received multiple injuries during the encounter with police, Like someone
gave him the fucking injuries? Was it the cop?

Speaker 4 (02:01:23):
It's just an incredible use of passive voice here throughout. Yeah,
there's this great tweet that was like, the US has
a passive voice, in an active voice and a special
exonerative voice.

Speaker 3 (02:01:34):
It's only used for.

Speaker 4 (02:01:37):
Yeah, yeah, Israel gets the exerative voice.

Speaker 3 (02:01:41):
It rails in the Greater cop Nation.

Speaker 7 (02:01:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:01:44):
Yeah, and like also one of the things that I
don't think people understand on the Streme Court is like
if you think that like Supreme Court rulings about abortions
are bad, like then they are right. But like, if
you think those things are bad, look up the Supreme
Court cases about police use of force. You will get
will get nine no decisions with like all of like
fucking like like fucking Thurgood Marshall will be signing on

(02:02:06):
to like a nine O thing where he says that
cops have the right to just like shoot you in
the back of the head because they couldn't shoot you
in the back of the head like that the police
couldn't function. It's it's fucking dranged, like the kind of
shit they have. Okay, I want to read I want
to read the slide because it's it's amazing. It's just
a giant letters. It says survival and then there's like
bullet points and the bullet points are never give up,

(02:02:29):
never concede defeat. I will not die this way. I
must go home to my family. How you trade is
how you will fight.

Speaker 3 (02:02:40):
Just imagining that the you know, the person who I
go to at the bank when I need to take
out large amounts of cash to go on one of
my work trips, learning that I will not die this way.

Speaker 4 (02:02:53):
Okay, So that that that's basically what I have about
this program, other than the bleak note that on on
a pr level, these people one right.

Speaker 3 (02:02:58):
They didn't They didn't win because of anything they did.

Speaker 4 (02:03:01):
They won because the Democrats decided that they fucking hated immigrants,
and because views of integration are largely driven by by
party politics, are driven by what your party tells you
about immigrants, Like, yeah, all the support that had been
built in the late twenty tens has evaporated, and yeah, even.

Speaker 3 (02:03:19):
Like I did a thing for my Patreon yesterday then
made me think of this, Like I was trying to
just do a sort of listing of Joe Biden's immigration
policies right from twenty twenty one to present, and like
twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two, I was selling stories
to NBC, to Slate, to the nation right about Haitian migration,
about Title forty two, about remain in Mexico, about especial

(02:03:43):
immigrant visas for Afghans, and after twenty twenty two, you
don't even get a response to your email. You know,
the same shit keeps having. Twenty twenty three is the
end of title forty two. Right, So when we see
the beginning of out door detention, arguably the most heinous
shit that the Biden administration has done, and it's sounds
some pretty heanish it. I mean, genocide is worse, evidently,
but on the on the border, this is the worst. Yeah,

(02:04:06):
some of its worst domestic policy. And you just can't
tell stories. Literally, every time I post about this on Twitter,
people will be like, what the fuck? Why didn't I
read about this? Because an editor made a choice that
they didn't matter, that the people out there in the
cold and the wind at the rain didn't matter, and
that they don't have rights because AOC or Joe Biden
Orkamala Harris decided that that was how it was going

(02:04:27):
to be, And apparently every corporate media outlet just kind
of stepped in line and went, yeah, fucking we don't
care anymore. Yeah, it's pretty bad.

Speaker 4 (02:04:37):
Yeah, they've achieved their stated aim and they're not moving
on to their unstated aim, which is mass deportations. All right,
we're back everything I know about the program that you
were about to talk about comes from you, and that
is oh.

Speaker 3 (02:04:57):
Boy, it's not good. All right. So I'm going to
read you a small story here, and then we're going
to talk about whether or not it's a good idea
for the Border Patrol to have programs for children, Okay,
And then I gave a content warning for sexual assault
of children. I'm just in kiitch. You don't want to
listen to this. In August of this year, Aaron Mitchell,

(02:05:19):
a former CBP agent, was found guilty of a federal
civil rights violation and also kidnapping. On April the fifth,
twenty twenty two, in Douglas, Arizona, Mitchell found a fifteen
year old girl waiting for school to begin, and for
this next part, I'm just going to read directly from
the Department of Justice presser. He introduced himself as the
law enforcement officer and asked for her papers. Next, after

(02:05:41):
flashing his police badge and credentials, Mitchell ordered the child
into his car and explained that he was taking her
to the police station. Instead, Mitchell drove the car miles
away from her school, pulled over, and restrained her hands
and feet with two pairs of handcuffs. The victim testified
that after being handcuffs, the defendant told her to do
every I think he said because he didn't want to

(02:06:02):
have to hurt her. I'm not going to describe the
next by in detail. He repeatedly sexually assaulted this young
women fucking christ in his apartment, then returned her to
the middle school where he had abducted her, and reminded
her not to tell anyone. Fortunately, she immediately reported the
abduction to her friends, family members, and multiple law enforcement agencies.

(02:06:24):
During an interview with the police, a defendant exclaim exclaimed
that the victim had better hope I don't get out
of here, which is an insane thing to say when
you're being interviewed by the police. Yeah. He also googled
several times for how long does it take to smug someone?
And he googled a lot about sexual assault, how to
stop someone from screaming. It's some of the darkest shit

(02:06:46):
fuck you're ever going to read. Yeah, oh my god.
This is one of the relatively few instances of a
Border Patrol agent actually being convicted of sexual assault. Sexual
assault is a massive fucking problem in the Border Patrol,
and the fact that it's such a big problem and
people get away with it is why we get shit
that is horrific, Like the incident that I've just related

(02:07:08):
to you right in twenty nineteen. I don't know if
you remember this, but there was a pro publicer thing
about this Facebook group which had nine five hundred agents
in it. The Facebook group they proted videos of migrant desks,
their children, and rape fantasies, as well as doctored images,
including ghost images of AFC. At the time Karla provoked,

(02:07:29):
the Border Patrol chief condemned the group as inappropriate. Shortly thereafter,
the intercept reveal that she had been a member of
it for years. Yep, just classics, dove right. Border Patrol
has consistently failed to hold its offices to account for rape.
Like if you want to read more about this, Jen Bud,
She's been on the show before, is the person to

(02:07:49):
go to about this. I'm also going to include in
the show notes links to a story about a Border
Ptrol agent who was sexually assaulted at the academy, which
I know is a thing that is not unique to her.
This is this is a problem. Border Patrol is ninety
five percent male at this point. They call the women
the Fierce five percent. But it's like it's probably the

(02:08:11):
most like gender biased of the federal agencies, Like Border
patrol agents by and large, like do not do well
around women. This is something I've observed, this is something
other volunteers have observed, Like it's such a like masculine agency,
I guess, and they just don't encounter women in a
professional capacity very often. So I think with this in mind,

(02:08:32):
I want to talk about the Border Patrol Explorers, Right.
It's a youth program that teaches kids the skills of
a patrol agent from as young as forty fucking crust. Yeah,
what's really weird. There's been very little coverage. The two
places I would send people these will be in the notes,
would be Morley Music write a really good piece in

(02:08:52):
the Nation, and Todd Miller's book Border Patrol Nation, which
is a book that everyone should read. I think really
like details the beginning of how Border patrol became what
it is today. Those are really two of the very
few places you'd read about it. The training that they
do is insane. They'll learn firearms drills, they learn to
do checkpoints, they learned to make arrests. I'm going to

(02:09:15):
read from an interview from Monie Music's piece, Fabian explained
why his posts would practice shooting sometimes and then this
is like parentheses. Undocumented migrants are not compliant when we
find them. He said, they paid all this money to
get here to start another life. They're just not going
to give up when they see us. Some would fight back,
some would be compliant. Maybe they tried to kill you

(02:09:37):
or threaten you. Sometimes they pick up an element a
rock lying around anything, and that could be used to
kill you. This is not the stuff that fourteen year
olds should be reckoning with, right. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:09:47):
This is also like I know people have done the
like connect the border to Palestine things so much that
it's like hackneyed, but like that is straight up that
could be lifted from a press release, like from the
idea Yeah, yeah, about why they shot someone. Yeah, and
it's like, yeah, I mean, you shouldn't be teaching anyone this.
You especially shouldn't be eating fourteen year olds. Yeah, that

(02:10:09):
someone might throw a rock at them and that's a
reasonable way people had gone and shoot them.

Speaker 3 (02:10:14):
Yeah, Like if you back that into your mind at fourteen,
I would argue that makes you very unsuitable to carry
a gun in public. Later in life. Kids start out
by doing this kind of boot camp style academy, and
then they pretty much begin doing stuff like drill PT
they practice, conducting vehicle stops and tracking Border Patrol. On
their website, they claim to have more than seven hundred Explorers,

(02:10:35):
but over twenty eight posts around the country, it's very
hard to find anything about them. Like, it's not something
that they talk about a great deal. You have to
sort of apply. I looked at how one would apply.
It's one in Santa Sedra, Right. You sort of fill
out this form and you get some kind of clearance
and then I'm guessing they're checking that people are eligible
to be hired by Border Patrol.

Speaker 7 (02:10:56):
Right.

Speaker 3 (02:10:57):
But if there is data on how many of these
kids go on to hired by BP, I haven't found it,
but I did find one. I think this is again
from Morley Music's piece when extremely amusing incident the Douglas
Arizona chapters. The Explorers teamed up with a local high
school drama club and they had the kids play migrantsios. Yeah,

(02:11:17):
Jesus Christ, many of these people will themselves be like
first generation or like a.

Speaker 4 (02:11:26):
Wild anyway, the country cannot be allowed to continue imagine, like,
what are we doing at school today?

Speaker 3 (02:11:34):
The theater kids are going to get arrested by the
border patrol kids. Jesus Christ. Some of the theater kids
got really into character. One of them cried, I guess
several of them managed to avoid arrest and give the
young agents the slip, and then they got told by

(02:11:55):
the agents overseeing the exercise that they've done it wrong
because they outsmarted the junior gobs.

Speaker 4 (02:12:03):
There's a story I can't remember what fucking town it
was in like the fifties, that the Army was running
these like infiltration drills where they would like have a
town and they talk to people to town. They'd be like, Okay,
we're gonna like unleash like a communist diversive agent into
the town and then you're gonna help the army capture them.
And it said, what happens, everyone has hit the agent
because I just had a great time like stuff.

Speaker 3 (02:12:27):
Yeah, that is the American spirit. It's it's the people
of Dugs Arizona. We salute you. One of the things
I found really interesting in in the morning music piece
was this idea of like defensive asylum only being for criminals,
so it seems like the students learned this very binary
immigration law. Where defensive asylum, which is when you claim
asylum as a defense against being deported. Yeah, it's only

(02:12:50):
for people who are criminals versus affirmative asylum. It's for
the people who like really needed or whatever, we fast
forward making an affirmative asylum claim. It's extreme seemly difficult
right now. Yeah, you know, I spoke to one hundred
people who wanted to come to this country in the Darien.
Every single one of those people told me that they

(02:13:10):
wanted to use CBP one, that they wanted to do
it the correct way, that they wanted to wait their
turn and do an interview. But like every single one
of those people is now reckoning with the fact that
if they can make CVP want work on their phone,
they will wake eight or nine months in Mexico. That
is not a safe place if you're a woman on
your own, God forbid, if you're a trans woman or
a gay person like aside from like within certain communities,

(02:13:34):
it's not a safe place. I think Mexico is the
second highest rate of killings of trans people anywhere in
the world. Yeah, I think Brazil is maybe more. Yeah,
I think is the highest. I don't know if that's
like raw numbers because Brazil is a bigger country, or
if it's like stags the population. Yeah, my memory is
that it's the rate, but I'm not harm so sure
either way. That people who are coming to be safe

(02:13:56):
or not to be in a place where they're in danger,
and that is what they right. And so undoubtedly some
of those people who wanted to come the right way
will cross between ports of entry, they will surrender themselves
to border patrol and if they get a chance to
file for asylum at all, because it's it's a shout
test now. But there are numerous incidents that I've seen

(02:14:18):
described in court cases of people doing what sounds to
me like asserting an asylum claim and not having a
chance to then make their case. If they do at all,
it'll be defensive asylum, right. And these are the people
who are like textbook asylum places, you know, like I
am a trans person in a place where that might
well be punishable by death, the facto of du jure right,

(02:14:39):
I am a political dissident in a country where my
political views would be a reason to kill me. I
am a woman from Iran, who doesn't wear hijab, nicab whatever,
you know, Like these are like why asylum exists. There
are lots of people who deserve a help who are
not covered by these little buckets that we put people
in to asylum. But even people who are who falls

(02:15:02):
but slap in the middle of what your average Midwestern
liberal dad would be like, Yeah, that's an asylum case.
We should help that person. Yeah they have to come
and they fare the defense of asylum, and like that's
what we're teaching. I guess these border patrol kids that
these are these are the quite unquite bad guys and
they're not and yeah, they they're doing this sort of

(02:15:24):
twenty eight posts. It's just one. I read a terrible
account of a young woman who was sexually abused by
a cop in a police Explorer program. Like these Explorer
programs go all across law enforcement. They are administered by
the Boy Scouts of America. They have a serious problem
with abuse of young people as serious problem, and it

(02:15:45):
seems like it's not getting I mean, it does get
some coverage like this, this piece about the agent in
Douglas got some coverage, right, the piece about this this cop.
But like, I mean, look at this country. We still
have the Catholic Church. Just because people abuse kids doesn't
mean they get shut down. But like, yeah, I don't, don't,
don't send your kids. I guess you're listening to this.
You're quite unlikely to send your kids to be junior cops.

(02:16:05):
But like, I get young people living in small towns
on the border who don't have many economic opportunities. I
know those towns. I spend a lot of time in
those towns, And I get that the guys who joined
Border Patrol, they have big trucks, they have nice houses,
right that it's one of the few areas of economic opportunity.

(02:16:26):
I get that none of that is worth having your
kid abused. And like I'm not saying that, of course
all of these programs resulting child abuse, they don't, but
like law enforcement explorer programs absolutely have a problem with
child abuse.

Speaker 4 (02:16:37):
And yeah, yeah, there was a whole thing in like
the last couple of years about this happening in tousion
facilities in Chicago, or in facilities things that were supposed
to be like now figurant housing, and that got reported. Yeah, Weirdly, Weirdly,
the Chicago proces has actually been pretty good on immigration stuff.
But it's literally solely because they hate Brandon Johnson, and

(02:16:58):
Brandon Johnson's the one running it. Because of this, we've
actually gotten a bunch of good good reporting that accident.
Yeah yeah, in many such cases. But yeah, like the
culture of border patrol is not one.

Speaker 3 (02:17:10):
That you want to be introducing your child too. Yeah,
absolutely not. You know, I would really encourage people to
read Todd's book Border Patrol Nation, like he talks about
this use of They invented a new slur, which you
know is cool. Good for them for expanding the English language.
I guess they call people tonks. Oh yeah, yeah, some
noise that makes when you hit someone on the head
with your torch, your flashlight.

Speaker 4 (02:17:32):
Yeah yeah, just really great stuff. Some of the worst
people who've ever lived.

Speaker 3 (02:17:38):
Yeah, don't don't volunteer to be a cop. Don't do
it for money either. Like that's what I got for you.

Speaker 4 (02:17:43):
Yeah yeah, I think I think that's all we've got
for today.

Speaker 3 (02:17:46):
Yeah. Shit fucking sucks. I don't know.

Speaker 4 (02:17:49):
We gave you, we gave you some less depressing episodes.
But yeah, now we're back, we're in your week. Actually,
I could promise I could promise tomorrow's episode is going
to be a lot brighter for this one. Yeah, come
back tomorrow to be less worribly depressed.

Speaker 3 (02:18:04):
Yeah, I got nothing good for you coming up for
the near future. To be honest, I'm rite I think
about the Darien Gap and having to take little walks outside. Yeah, yeah,
dire for a walk.

Speaker 8 (02:18:34):
There's nothing wrong with your podcast feed. This is prop
and I am invading that it can happen here podcasts.
To the four or five of y'all in the subreddit
that can't stand my voice and say I'm the most
annoying person in the Cool Zone extended universe, I apologize.

Speaker 10 (02:18:53):
My mama used to say, be who you is, because
who you ain't a who he is.

Speaker 8 (02:18:58):
We're gonna talk about some things, specifically coffee and how
your children will probably never be able to drink the
coffee that you have drank because climate change bounds. But
before we do, I'm also realizing how many singers in
the eighties was singing the teenagers to children.

Speaker 10 (02:19:14):
You know the absolute banger of a song If I.

Speaker 11 (02:19:18):
Could fly, I pick you up, I take you into
the night, great song right and show you love that
you live.

Speaker 3 (02:19:31):
See do you.

Speaker 10 (02:19:32):
Know what The first lyric in that song is she's.

Speaker 8 (02:19:35):
Only sixteen years old, leave her alone? Unless he wasn't
a teenager just openly singing, what was we thinking?

Speaker 3 (02:19:47):
Freaking bel biv devout.

Speaker 8 (02:19:48):
In dude may babe backstage, underage, gotta leggat.

Speaker 10 (02:19:54):
I fly, I like to do the wild thing.

Speaker 3 (02:19:58):
Oh you're.

Speaker 8 (02:20:00):
We were just openly singing the kids. Let me get
back on topic, because not only could.

Speaker 1 (02:20:06):
It happen here, it is happening here.

Speaker 3 (02:20:09):
So you may or may not know me.

Speaker 8 (02:20:11):
I am Los Angeles born and raised our host politics
with Prop Coules on media team, and I am your
resident coffee nerd, and a lot of that grew out
of just a natural passion for coffee, which you will
hear me gush about later. But I think I'm going
to back into this topic with back that thing up

(02:20:31):
with the story from a few years back.

Speaker 3 (02:20:32):
See a few years back, I had.

Speaker 8 (02:20:34):
A chance to put out a poetry book called Terrorform,
building a Liverpool World, and Terrorform also had four musical
EP seven song EPs called the Sky, the Soil, the People,
and the Possibility. And while I was working on the Soil,
I had a chance to partner with one of the
I mean really it's like, I don't know if there's
a better roaster in America called Onyx believe it.

Speaker 10 (02:20:57):
Or not, in Northwest Arkansas.

Speaker 8 (02:21:00):
And in a collab sort of coffee release we were
doing in partnership with Mirror, which is a drinkwaar company
I'm also an ambassador for. We had a chance to
go to Colombia and if you've if you've been to
South America or anywhere close to the equator, it's I mean,
you're walking into the Avatar, you know, minus the aliens.

(02:21:23):
It's this raw sort of earth that us in the
northern hemisphere. It's just colors of green that you just
can't imagine that, Like our pantones have yet to match
the type of green in a forest that has to
be a certain amount of miles above sea level for

(02:21:46):
it to grow coffee.

Speaker 10 (02:21:48):
So we fly into Bogata.

Speaker 8 (02:21:52):
We go about an hour and a half outside of
the city, which normally when you go to Origin it's
like you have to like take a rickety a helicopter
or traverse twelve hours into you know, an African jungle,
which is like not the most plush riding, but it's
just it's this beautiful South American you know, Colombian road,

(02:22:13):
and then you go up this small sort of windy
road and while it's sunny, beautiful, I don't know what
the combination of indigenous African European settlers that just made
whatever combination of human made these Colombians so beautiful. But

(02:22:36):
there's not I mean, everyone's beautiful. It is the most
off putting, how gorgeous every human is there along with
this plush green you come over this hill and because
of the way that this farmer going to is set

(02:22:58):
inside in between the small valley that's about four to
five thousand feet above sea level, there's this beautiful fog
that lays over the top of this just gorgeous, gorgeous rainforest. Right,
there's grape vineyards, there's a few of those, there's allvocados,

(02:23:21):
there's all these just beautiful multi instead of a monoculture,
monoculture is a form of just one thing.

Speaker 10 (02:23:28):
This is a multi.

Speaker 8 (02:23:29):
Culture place that this crew called La pama Eltua kan
That's who I was with. And all this beauty and
vegetation that I'm describing, apparently twelve years ago was not
a thing. This place was the textbook like cartoonish level

(02:23:51):
example of deforestation where all of this natural beauty was
cleared out for cattle raising.

Speaker 3 (02:24:00):
And the land was dead.

Speaker 8 (02:24:02):
But you would never guess, you would never guess that
this was ever an issue, because what I'm looking at
is Narnia. So this group of local born and raised
brothers came up with a business plan and started restoring
this land. I can't overstate the before and after picture,
like the land was dying them with their reginative, like

(02:24:25):
you know, farming practices made this a rainforest again that
is now growing some of the best coffee on earth.
So anyway we come in there, it's beautiful. Just there
are no words to express how beautiful this is. I
have a song called the Soil Is Sacred that I
shot the video at that farm. So if you want

(02:24:48):
to just go ahead and peep that, peep that to
understand this place, this place is not only just a
coffee farm, it's also a bike trail adventure place.

Speaker 3 (02:24:59):
It's a whole tell.

Speaker 8 (02:25:00):
You stay in these bungalows that are like up on sticks,
and then the shower is outdoors, just covered around bamboo
sticks that like hei the thing, and it's got like
the what we like to call the anti black shower heads.

Speaker 10 (02:25:14):
You know that those are the I don't.

Speaker 8 (02:25:16):
Know if y'all notice, because Black people don't always like
to wet our hair in the shower.

Speaker 10 (02:25:19):
We wash our hair much less than y'all do.

Speaker 8 (02:25:21):
But if you got that waterfall shower head, then that
means we got to tilt our heads back a little bit,
or make sure we got a shower cap. Because I
don't know if you know any black women, but you don't.
Don't wet my hair in the shower anyway. But you're
showering out there, and it's just beautiful. You're in the rainforest.
You can hear the animals and it's just this gentle

(02:25:42):
breeze is blowing. And then around eleven thirty the fog
kind of clears out.

Speaker 10 (02:25:48):
You get to sit down.

Speaker 8 (02:25:49):
You're having some breakfasts that's just chopped up papaya and
mango that they grew right there right. I can see
the mango tree, it's right there. Then the fry up
some plantain from the plantain tree right there, scrambling up
with some eggs from the chicken nest right there right.

Speaker 3 (02:26:08):
Just it's a dream.

Speaker 8 (02:26:11):
And as we're talking, as we're moving through this thing,
the man that runs it, who like I wish I
could have his baby. It was just the most gorgeous
human I've ever seen, just flowing, flowing, quaft hair, speaking
English and Spanish. The guy could play seven instruments. At
some point where we're cutting coffee, the dude breaks into

(02:26:33):
a bachata and then some Cumbia and he's just singing
these Colombian folklore songs while flipping over a bucket and
playing drums. It's just like you, guys, you're in a movie.
You're in a movie. And then he casually drops, yeah,
we only got twenty seven more of those. I was like,
twenty seven more? What he goes, Oh yeah, part of

(02:26:55):
the mission of this farm is if we don't do
something thing, there is twenty seven harvests left.

Speaker 10 (02:27:04):
I was like, of what he goes of.

Speaker 8 (02:27:06):
Top soil, Coffee's going to go extinct in twenty seven years.
Sam to talk about the possibility of a world without coffee,
how we got here, and what people are doing to
hopefully save the glorious being. All right, I feel like
coffee is like the perfect analogy, the perfect one to

(02:27:27):
one ratio for the ways for which the global North
has treated the global South, specifically black people, but by
and large just it's the perfect metaphor for the raping
and pillaging of resources, including people, that has happened across

(02:27:49):
the world. So coffee originates solely from Ethiopia. Okay, so
it's already it's it's black. This is the early fifteen
huns undreds. Legend is that some sheep farmers saw that
their sheeps were going crazy, like just mad, mad energy

(02:28:11):
after they had ate a particular cherry. Because again, coffee
is a cherry, which is actually a very delicious cherry,
you know, and the bean inside is not the bean,
it's the pit or the seed that's inside of the
coffee cherry. So yeah, legend is like that's how they
figured it out, Like dang, they eat these these cherries
and then they go crazy, like I wonder if that's

(02:28:32):
going to give us strength to you know. So it's
originally discovered in Ethiopia. Ethiopia is the only natural place
that coffee grows, and every other coffee bean across the
world was propagated from the Ethiopian one. It only grows
between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn along
the equator that is the only place that it naturally grows.

(02:28:54):
But because of climate change and because of you know,
GMO and genetically modifying and all these different things that
we've done with cross breeding and stuff like, you know,
we've been able to grow it in in regions that
aren't naturally the temperature and elevation that they naturally grow in.
There are many different varieties of what we call that's

(02:29:14):
what they're called varietals of this particular cherry or plant.
But overall, you can break the species of coffee plant
into three types. So you have typica, which most people
don't drink unless like if you have a coffee farm
that you actually export from, like a lot of times,
the typical stuff is just the stuff that you keep
for yourself, Like most coffee farmers have never actually tasted

(02:29:37):
their best coffee because you ship that off to the
rest of the world to make your money. Then there's robustica,
which is like what most of the like instant coffee
is made from. Really a lot of the world actually
drinks that, but it's an acquired taste, like when you
go through South America, like I know when I went
to my grandmother in last house, like she you know,

(02:29:59):
she boil the water with the canela the cinnamon sticks
and poured instant coffee in it, and like as much
of a coffee snob as I am, I'm like, that's
the best.

Speaker 10 (02:30:09):
That's one of the best cups of cofee ive ever
had in my life.

Speaker 1 (02:30:11):
You know.

Speaker 8 (02:30:11):
People always ask me, what's what's the best cup of
coffee ever had, and I'm like, honestly, it's the one
in your hand.

Speaker 1 (02:30:16):
That's the best cup.

Speaker 8 (02:30:17):
I feel like there's like a bell curve where it's like, yeah,
you discover it, then you hit this level of snob
at then you become like a like a new Christian
about it and you're just like one of the evangelize
and tell everybody. And then you become just like a
theological snob and you're just like, uh, are you putting
cream like full extraction or die death over decaf? Like
you become that dude, and then you just come over

(02:30:38):
the other end of that hump and you're just like, dude,
it's just coffee, man.

Speaker 4 (02:30:43):
You know.

Speaker 8 (02:30:44):
So yeah, so that's Robusticut, which, like I said, most
of the world actually drinks that. And then the specialty level,
the one that most of us are used to drinking
now is called a rabica, and it's kind of like
it's the top tier based on and whatever subjective scale
we use to say.

Speaker 10 (02:31:05):
What is the best coffee.

Speaker 8 (02:31:07):
But the fertile band, as what we call it around
the coffee industry, is this span that kind of belts
around the equator. So that's why in Central and South America,
in certain parts of Africa and in Asia, coffee can
naturally be grown. It takes a particular elevation, right, And

(02:31:29):
you can even follow the transatlantic slave trade. You could
follow the transit Lantic slave trade by following the distribution
of coffee. How coffee got to the America's transatlantic slave trade. Anyway,
there used to be this beef between Ethiopia and Yemen
as to like who made coffee first, because without getting
too much in a nerdery, I want to stay in

(02:31:49):
the narrative here, but coffee first from Ethiopia went to Yemen.
And the argument with the yemen ease is that they
were the ones that grounded it and made it into
a hot drink. So that's their argument that the Ethiopians
didn't do that first.

Speaker 10 (02:32:03):
But anybody that really knows it's it's like.

Speaker 1 (02:32:04):
Dude, it originates in Africa.

Speaker 8 (02:32:06):
I'd be willing to bet too that if you kind
of have developed somewhat of a palette for like a
good clean cup of coffee, you would probably feel like
Ethiopian beans are the best. And mostly it's just because, like, well,
that's where it's from, and they have like at least
one hundred year head start in cultivating how to make

(02:32:29):
a bomb. Being as a fun aside, if you get
your hand on a Yemenese bean, it's a flavor profile
you've probably never had in your life. That's why if
you ever go to a place and they have like
a Yemenese geisha, it costs so much because Yemen has
been with the Huthis and such like that have been
locked into this civil war funded by America, Saudi Arabia,

(02:32:51):
and Iran. You know, let's tie it all together, guys,
That's what I'm saying. It's a metaphor for everything why
coffee can't get exported out of Yemen. It is because
of this sil war. It cost so much to get
coffee out of Yemen because of these you know, wars
funded by Western countries.

Speaker 10 (02:33:09):
Anyway, So from Yemen it got to Turkey.

Speaker 8 (02:33:12):
You know, this is around the time of like when
the Islamic world was really the superpower of the planet.
You know, with people like Avaroez. You could do your
little history on that, and just all of the most
beautiful library science, history, algebra, math, philosophy was all coming
from the Muslim world. And it was through the Muslim

(02:33:34):
world that coffee got to Europe. So at first Europe
wouldn't drink coffee because they thought it was Muslim. That's
what the dirty little brown folks is doing, right until
it got to Belgium, which is one of the funnest
stories to me again as coffee remaining this metaphor for
the suffering of people of color everywhere. So anyway, remember

(02:33:56):
Europe is a place for tea, but you know they
got day tea from India. Anyway, So one of the
archbishops in Belgium was presented this coffee thing, and because
it was brought to Europe by the Muslims, the people
there thought they couldn't drink it.

Speaker 3 (02:34:17):
So this bishop was like, I don't know, let me
try it. So I this might be folklore.

Speaker 8 (02:34:24):
But he drinks this coffee and he says, now I'm
not gonna quote him direct. This is the part that
I think is folks, this happened, but this is the
part that says folklore. He was like, uh, if this
is evil, let's baptize it.

Speaker 3 (02:34:37):
Because we can make it for good. He was like,
this is too delicious to let go.

Speaker 8 (02:34:46):
Watching the devil get all the good drinks. Yo, I'm said,
I'm trying to drink good too. We could drink unto
the land. All things was made for his glory, including
this coffee. There used to be it is argument over
which one was better for you, coffee your tea. They
even did this test with these prisoners where they gave
one of them all coffee the other one all tea

(02:35:08):
to see who would live longer. And of course, since
that is like the least scientific thing you could do possible,
you do. Even if the guy that coffee live longer,
it don't matter because it's not real science. Anyway, I
personally am very thankful that coffee got to Europe because again,
something that was discovered and came from black people for

(02:35:29):
which we're willing to share freely, Like our music, like
our slang, like our style address, You're welcome, you know
what I'm saying, but don't act like this your house.
You could put your flavor on it and we could
all enjoy. Because it was the Scandinavian countries that figured
out light roasting and a lot of the nerdery for
like the third wave specialty coffee that you that you

(02:35:51):
see now that you're right, that's from Europe. Italy did
not discover coffee. Italy did espresso. I'm thankful for that.
But they were only able to do espresso because of
the labor of people of color in the global cum.
You're following my metaphor here. Coffee got to the Americas
via the slave trade. But if you can just look

(02:36:12):
at a map, the jungles in Angola and the jungles
of Brazil are the same jungle.

Speaker 10 (02:36:19):
There's just the ocean in between it.

Speaker 8 (02:36:21):
So of course when the Africans got there, they would
recognize the soil and be able to grow the same things.

Speaker 10 (02:36:28):
Are y'all following me.

Speaker 8 (02:36:30):
We're talking about an industry that makes four hundred and
sixty billion dollars globally every year and less than one
percent goes back to Africa.

Speaker 3 (02:36:41):
Less than one percent.

Speaker 8 (02:36:43):
Actually goes to those that actually grow the product. You
are you following me on this metaphor. Coffee has its
own stock market because it's a commodity. It's called the
c market like it fluctuates like that, you know when
you look on a bag and it says fair trade
and direct trade.

Speaker 10 (02:36:59):
Let me tell you what that means.

Speaker 8 (02:37:01):
The price per pound for coffee per pellet is set
at what they call a fair trade price. So there's
a coffee commission that sets what is a fair amount
for that coffee. So you're supposed to it's like a
fair market value for a house. You know, who sets that? Germany.
Here's the problem with that. Germany can't grow coffee. How

(02:37:22):
are y'all setting up for a farm to be considered
organic or meeting specialty?

Speaker 3 (02:37:29):
Called somebody a farmer in Kenya? Oh they die.

Speaker 8 (02:37:34):
Gotta fly somebody from Germany down today farm for them
to test their soil to tell them that they soil
is healthy enough to tell these people from Germany it
can't grow coffee. This was so that's fair trade is
if Germany says that this price is right. Direct trade
is when me, the American buyer, goes to the farmer

(02:37:56):
themselves and I ask the farmer how much is it
direct traded with them. The farmer tells us, Now, why
I partnered with Onyx and all the other people that
you see me partnering with, first of all is because
whatever that price is, what ONYX does is they'll pay
thirty percent more.

Speaker 3 (02:38:14):
So that's to guarantee.

Speaker 8 (02:38:16):
Not only is this a price that the farmer said,
we're gonna pay you even more than that. There's an
understanding of value in the fact that we don't have
an industry without you. And sometimes I work at this
other crew crawled BECKX three sixty, which I'm gonna talk
about a little later at the end of this, I'm saying,
these are ways for you to be able to say.

Speaker 10 (02:38:35):
Because everyone should be able to drink coffee.

Speaker 8 (02:38:38):
These are ways for which you could say, I am
not being a part of the problem.

Speaker 10 (02:38:42):
In these ways, I could be part of the solution.

Speaker 8 (02:38:44):
But yes, a billion dollar industry created on the backs
of brown folk, controlled by white folks.

Speaker 3 (02:38:51):
I'm just saying it's a metaphor billion dollar industry.

Speaker 8 (02:38:54):
When's the last time you walked into a coffee shop
and thought, Wow, this is something invented, harvested, and nurtured
by people of color. No, you don't think that. People
think Italy. It's such a metaphor. And now because of
harsh conditions, irrosive top soil, and abusive practices, we only

(02:39:18):
got twenty seven harvests left.

Speaker 10 (02:39:19):
Now, let's get to the science and things we can do.

Speaker 8 (02:39:23):
All right, let's go to some sort of ad break, Right,
how do y'all do them at?

Speaker 10 (02:39:27):
It could have been here?

Speaker 8 (02:39:28):
Am I supposed to do some sort of like speaking
of situation?

Speaker 1 (02:39:32):
I don't know.

Speaker 8 (02:39:42):
So I think the best way to get into the
science of it all is to maybe think about it
through just the supply chain period. For centuries, the coffee
plant or even farm have been just local, indigenous, this
rainforest living families. It's your grandma, And I know this

(02:40:06):
from my own experience. This is like your grandparents' house.
Like you inherit this farm, you know, or you inherit
this plot of land, and you got a couple of
coffee plants in the back. Now, us being, you know,
in a neoliberal, globally connected, late stage capitalistic society, how
do you get that commodity if we're not growing them

(02:40:27):
in the heartland of America.

Speaker 10 (02:40:29):
Well, because we can't.

Speaker 8 (02:40:30):
Number one, we have to create a supply chain, and
the supply chain is just as industrial as every other
thing is. So from the origin, you have a green buyer,
and the green buyer is essentially the middle person. So
that person has all the relationships with the farms.

Speaker 10 (02:40:50):
So they create these relationship with these farms.

Speaker 8 (02:40:53):
Usually depending on your relationship with that green buyers, you
take orders from them that sometimes depending on how big
or small that green buyer is. Some of those are
like multi state, multi country, like big old corporations that
you know, go across the world and they swoop up
in a Walmart of it all and like just like
buy up all these small farms. Now some of these places,

(02:41:15):
some of these green buyers own the farms because they've
bought them from the indigenous populations, and others are like, no,
we just have relationships and we pay. I got to
explained before fair market value, fair trade. And then I
on the other end, like let's just say I'm you know,
I will use my own company terror form. This isn't
the process I use, but this is just the supply chain.
So I would approach that green buyer, I'd go to

(02:41:37):
their website and say, hey, I want to roast a
Kenyon heirloom that would be the varietal, like I want
to that's a type of being.

Speaker 10 (02:41:43):
I want a Kenyon airloom.

Speaker 8 (02:41:44):
And I go, oh, dope, they got it at I'm
making up this number eighteen cents a pound. It's not
like that. It's much more, but okay, dope. So they
get the order. On the other end, they see what
they got in stock or they got to go to origin, right,
So they go to origin, they get the thing, and
then some countries make you buy an entire shipping container
because it's just not worth it. If you're you know,

(02:42:07):
you're in Costa Rica, you're a farmer in Costa Rica,
it doesn't make any financial sense to try to ship
out just like one burlap bag.

Speaker 3 (02:42:15):
Like the cost is too high.

Speaker 8 (02:42:17):
So it's like, yo, you got to buy a palette
or not a pal you gotta buy a shipping container.

Speaker 3 (02:42:21):
Right.

Speaker 8 (02:42:22):
So what most small like micro roasters do is they
buddy up with other people that are like, yo, let's
all do this.

Speaker 10 (02:42:29):
We'll kind of go in on this shipping container.

Speaker 8 (02:42:31):
So you have the farmer, you have the green buyer,
and then the green buyer makes the deal with the
shipment team. The shipping container gets filled, then you got
to pay the nation's tariff. So then that's where the
country comes in. Now, why some coffees cost more than others,
some of it has to do with the tariffs. It's
like Ethiopia charges some like fifty nine percent tariff, as

(02:42:52):
they should because they tired of being raped by white people,
just like everybody else is from there. Once it hits land,
us as the roasters, we would go give you up
the funds. We've already paid them, and then you go
to your roasting facility. Now, if you a big boy,
you got your own roasting facility. But most of the time,
you know, a person may have one machine in the

(02:43:13):
back of their coffee shop, or if they don't even
have that, then they share a facility where they roast
a bunch of different roasters roasted that one place. Once
it's roast, getting in a bag and into your cup.
Now this is the like specialty coffee way. Now, if
we talk at Starbucks, Starbucks walks over there and they say, hey,
let me buy this city, and they got their own

(02:43:35):
shipping people in their own situation, and then they roast
in like something the size of a mountain. Now what
I'm talking about is third wave coffee. What that means
is there is a lot of nerdy stuff. That means
it's first wave coffee is like the coffee that your
grandpa drank in World War Two.

Speaker 10 (02:43:49):
It's just you know mud, you know what I'm saying.

Speaker 8 (02:43:52):
Even the term Americano was because when the American gis
were in Europe and they wanted a cup of CoFe,
because in Europe day drankon espresso. The Americans was like,
this is disgusting, what is this? So they just add
water to it. So they called that an Americano because
that's the type the Americans like anyway.

Speaker 10 (02:44:10):
So that's first wave coffee.

Speaker 8 (02:44:12):
Second wave coffee is like Starbucks or the coffee spots
that like have the ton of syrups in the back
and the name of their shop is probably some sort
of pun like in Friends, the Central Perk, Java Chip.
Those are the ones that, like the big suburban churches
would have their own coffee shops like corn and Nia
House Hebrews, just some sort of corny that's second where

(02:44:36):
it's like, you know, that's your triple machiato, you know,
with's double pump all of the sweet fruitfru stuff that's
second wave, and then third wave is what we call
specialty coffee, and that's where the big bucks come in
because you can sell them at a higher premium. Now,
for it to be considered specialty coffee on a scale

(02:44:56):
of one nine hundred, you have to grade that bean
at an eighty or a bus Now, coffees that are
graded in the nineties, unless you've been to Dubai or Qatar,
you've never drank it. Those go there because American we
can't afford it, so the farmer don't even show.

Speaker 3 (02:45:11):
It to it.

Speaker 8 (02:45:11):
But the most of the like if you go to
like a good coffee shop, you're drinking about an eighty
three to a eighty five. But it's not like their
whole crop is that. Most farmers are just small plots.
So what do you do with the rest of it? Well,
the rest of it, which is the most of your harvest.
To make the numbers round, Let's just say you have
one hundred coffee trees. Maybe ten of them produced an

(02:45:33):
eighty five, right, so that's ten percent. So you've spent
all year fighting drought, fighting climate change, fighting excessive heat,
fighting all that only for of your whole plantation, only
to get ten percent of it to be actually be
available to sell. The rest of it, it just goes
to the stock market and you just hope and pray
that you're able to sell it. But you have that

(02:45:55):
three weeks to try to make your year's salary. So
what happens is since you can only sell ten percent,
only ten percent of it is even available to sell,
right I'm talking specialty cofee is where we are now.
If in fact, somebody comes in here and pays it,
and then they only pay fair trade rather than direct
trade price, you're getting a price set by Germany is
not even enough to pay the little kids that just

(02:46:18):
miss school to be able to pick your farm, because
that's who actually picks the cherries. This is daywork, just
kids from the farming community that come in there. They
try to make a day's wage to pick their things.
So what happens is to be able to survive. This
is how it is in Honduras. To be able to survive,
you go get a loan from the government to be
able to make your money for the year, and then

(02:46:39):
hopefully off that harvest, you can pay that loan back
and make enough for the next year, so you don't
have to get a loan. The problem is they're charging
these farmers thirty percent interests, so they're locked into this
situation that says, I can't even afford to even keep
my family plot because I'm just staying in debt. So

(02:46:59):
then what are you do? Governinate dumb, They'll re up
your loan. So they're like, oh cool, no problem, We'll
just we'll reup your loan. These so these farmers end
up being hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and
it's adding every year because they can never catch up,
which is bonkers. Considering how much coffee we drink across
the world, one would think they would be fine.

Speaker 10 (02:47:22):
So I mean, what's your option. You sell the land
or just.

Speaker 8 (02:47:25):
Remove the coffee, just yo, get some cows, sell beef
right the forests, I mean there's money to make there,
or you sell it to a big conglomerate. And what
does the big conglomerate do burn down all of the
forests and create a monoculture? Right, and a monoculture are
like what you would pitch what we do in America
for corn or all through the Amazon rainforest.

Speaker 10 (02:47:46):
And if you know, obviously you've seen.

Speaker 8 (02:47:48):
A force monoculture ain't how earth works, right, The diversity
of plants becomes its own fertilizer. But if you don't
have that, if you don't have chickens that survive off
the avocados, and and you know, I'm pulling things out
of nowhere. But like the point I'm trying to make
is when you create a monoculture, you have to also
create a way to sustain that. And the only way

(02:48:09):
to sustain it is destructive. One cup of coffee in
this way releases was it eighty grams of co two?
I mean it's like driving half a mile, Like your
cup of coffee is a half a mile full of poison.
If done the way that most of the bigger names
in the industry do it, which is now rising our

(02:48:30):
carbon right. And if you're going to do that, then
that means you need a gang of fertilizer, right, which
is bad for the soil. And then you also need
to use way more water than naturally required. Matter of fact,
according to the UN, one cup of coffee uses one
hundred and thirty liters of water. If you're doing this

(02:48:50):
like monoculture style, right, that looks like farming the way
we do it here one cup of coffee, one hundred
and thirty liters of water, which is a bathtub. That's
like a bathtub for of water to create this one cup,
so obviously multiply that times a billion. Not only is
this practice like everything else in this neo capitalistic world,

(02:49:12):
the demand was so big and the desire to get
the most amount of money with the least amount of
price is destroying the very thing that makes the product possible. Now,
the rest of the world isn't stupid. We understand that
this process is not sustainable.

Speaker 3 (02:49:29):
Right.

Speaker 10 (02:49:29):
We're killing the soil, We're killing the land. Everybody knows that.

Speaker 8 (02:49:32):
So the EU passed this law that says if you're
going to import any sort of commodity, including coffee, you
have to prove that it didn't come from deforestation. Right,
So this is them trying to do their best. The
only problem is if I'm an indigenous farmer on a
small plot, I don't even have access to deforestation. But

(02:49:52):
the only way for me to prove that is, like
I said before, with the fair trade, I have to
fly somebody down.

Speaker 10 (02:49:57):
It's on my own dime.

Speaker 8 (02:49:59):
It's because the e who doesn't understand regenative practices because
they don't know any indigenous people, right, So this is
now adding a double burden to the farmers that are
actually doing it right, who can't possibly do the volume
of the people that are doing it wrong. So the
first problem is like the system is not even financially sustainable,

(02:50:21):
Like I haven't even got to the specifics of the
deforestation and all those things that have caused this problem. Now,
according to Bloomberg, there's a twenty twenty two study of
tropical cash crops included Arabica as well as avocado and
cashew are probably the most vulnerable to climate change because
the regions that are suitable for this production continue to

(02:50:42):
shrink because of why heat. It's too hot, which means
that Arabica won't be able to grow. So we'll probably
have to start drinking robusticut.

Speaker 7 (02:50:51):
Right.

Speaker 8 (02:50:52):
It's estimated that in thirty years from now, basically fifty
percent of lands that can grow coffee will not be
able to grow coffee anymore if we don't do anything
fifty percent. You think they're making fun of you for
your twelve dollars cup of coffee is crazy, now listen.
Nestley reports that there are more than six thousand cups

(02:51:13):
of neskfe coffee drink every second? Are y'all following me
every second? That's how much coffee we drink. Now, granted
that coffee is not a rabica, it's robustica. Robustica is
what really most of the rest of the world drinks.
It's us again, being a part of the northern hemisphere,

(02:51:35):
being a part of the global north that like the
pristine kind of good, shiny type.

Speaker 3 (02:51:41):
Right.

Speaker 8 (02:51:41):
The problem is our insatiable desire to consume things as
fast as we can. And I don't want to blame
I'm not blaming the victim here, I'm just saying it's
impossible to do the volume is the argument. How do
you do this volume that we all want on in
this global supply chain and the waight for which we've

(02:52:05):
set this up. How do you do this volume and
still keep the price where the price is? And you
know what the solution has always been, You just rip
off the farmer and destroy the earth. So deforestation given
us too much carbon, which has made the weather erratic,
which means that some years the crop is flooded and

(02:52:25):
it doesn't grow right because it's too much rain. Other
years it's complete drought, and you have to dig even
further into the ground to try to get the amount
of water that had we not raised the temperature one
point five degrees celsius, had we done some changes, the
earth would be the same. So Brazil is the biggest
coffee producer in the world right and this year, this

(02:52:52):
year was the worst drought they've had in seven decades,
with above average temperatures, and one of the biggest producers
out there. Associated Press interviewed him, Silvio Almita, and that
fool's coffee plantation. The AP just reported this was expected
to harvest one hundred and twenty sacks of coffee beans,

(02:53:13):
but they only got one hundred and then their quoted saying,
given the conditions here in twenty twenty five, crop is
already affected, he told Associated Press, pointing out that part
of his plantation where flower buds have already died before blooming.

Speaker 3 (02:53:27):
I won't say it's.

Speaker 8 (02:53:28):
Doomed, because God can do anything, but based on the situation,
it's already compromised. What these people are saying is like
next year's crops already did this. Where we are, y'all,
are y'all hearing what I'm saying. He's saying, we ain't
gonna have no coffee next year. It's already dead, y'all.

(02:53:49):
Remember when Robert read off his little book, you know,
the hole started off the whole. It could happen here
thing and in one of them places. After the civil
ward have went down, coffee was something you had to
smuggle into the country like a drug. This is what
he talking about. Dan ain't gonna be no coffee, y'all.
I was at an event two years ago. It's called
the Color of Coffee Collective. It was for black people

(02:54:12):
in the coffee industry. And of course this is stretched
to the whole diaspora. So you know, Central and South
American just ultimately people of color in the coffee industry connect,
you know, plot strategize, have some transparency in our supply
chains because a lot of us in America in the
West screen you know, pro black, pro black, be for

(02:54:32):
the culture, we for the people, and like to put
you know, the faces of our farmers on our bags
in you know, part of the marketing. But most people
who are in the coffee just have never gone to
the source, so you don't know it'ally. You know what
I'm saying, you don't know Tabby who like is actually
like growing your coffee?

Speaker 10 (02:54:52):
You know what I'm saying.

Speaker 8 (02:54:52):
It's just a name on a spreadsheet, brought into you
from an importer.

Speaker 10 (02:54:56):
Right.

Speaker 8 (02:54:57):
Anyway, So there was a panel discussion about about climate
change and about ways for which we can do better.

Speaker 10 (02:55:04):
So they had a bunch of farmers. I remember it
was a farmer from Kenya.

Speaker 8 (02:55:08):
Who gave us these just heaters, just these heat rocks,
these bars during this panel discussion. And after I show
you these bars, I'm gonna go for a break, and
then I'm gonna tell you about people that are doing
things better in ways for which we can maybe save
our soil so that your kids can possibly enjoy coffee. Also,

(02:55:29):
so someone asked, I believe it was a roaster from
Puerto Rico, was like, hey, so what are some of
the ways that you're adapting and hoping to mitigate climate change?
Like how are y'all dealing with climate change? So he
was asking this Kenyan farmer like what's he doing for
climate change? And his answer was, I mean, you tell
me we're at source. He's like, we're a third world country.

(02:55:54):
We didn't cause climate change.

Speaker 3 (02:55:57):
You did. What are you doing.

Speaker 8 (02:56:00):
We're the ones suffering, and not only are we suffering
from the effects of climate change in our own life,
because of your greediness, you created the climate change that
is causing the problems in the very crop that you're
trying to get from us. So because of your problems,
this is why he's explaining it. I now can't grow
something that we've grown for hundreds and hundreds of years,

(02:56:21):
and you asking me what I'm doing for about it?

Speaker 7 (02:56:23):
Now?

Speaker 10 (02:56:23):
What are you doing about it? Ouch?

Speaker 8 (02:56:27):
So here's some things that are being done next.

Speaker 3 (02:56:41):
All right, we're back now.

Speaker 8 (02:56:43):
The wildest thing about how complicated any of these solutions are,
which are you going to take many, many decades to
actually see the difference in the actual top soil. The
most bonkers part is the fact that, like the solutions
by and large are kind of.

Speaker 10 (02:57:02):
The same across any world problem.

Speaker 8 (02:57:06):
It's mutual aid, it's collective, communal, collaborative work among every
part of the supply chain. It's so in some senses,
it's so beautiful that like, really the solution is us.
I say that to not grossly oversimplify, but I say
that to say that there's hope. So I'm going to
introduce you to a couple programs and a couple of

(02:57:28):
farms and sort of some things to look for in
your coffee purchasing.

Speaker 1 (02:57:34):
Because you guys want to see the world be better.

Speaker 8 (02:57:36):
Also, first thing is farms, going back to indigenous practices.
Now two I know personally, and one I'm going to
tell you about from Ecuador. There's a whole documentary on
it if you look up on YouTube, it's called How
Climate Change Threatened Coffee Production by DW Documentaries.

Speaker 10 (02:57:56):
And I mean right like pretty on the nose.

Speaker 8 (02:58:00):
So a coffee collective in Ecuador called Viilakory.

Speaker 10 (02:58:03):
It's their Kichua language.

Speaker 8 (02:58:05):
It means green gold and their indigenous language, and they're
doing something very similar to my friends in Honduras called
Kadacha coffee.

Speaker 3 (02:58:15):
Now, what they.

Speaker 8 (02:58:16):
Are are cooperatives on the business side.

Speaker 3 (02:58:20):
So I'm so excited.

Speaker 8 (02:58:21):
I'm going to get to the business cooperative side after
I explain to you the indigenous practices.

Speaker 10 (02:58:26):
Even though all of these things are related.

Speaker 8 (02:58:28):
So what they do is something that's so obvious, which
is like, you got to stop doing monocultures. First of all,
it makes sense financially because now you're diversifying your commodities,
So you have your coffee plants. If you see a
coffee plant, coffee plants are pretty short, like, they don't
grow taller than six foot normally. So since the climate

(02:58:49):
is so hot, what is the natural way to shade them? Well,
the natural way to shave them is trees. So if
you plant them among trees. The types of trees that
first of all naturally fertilize the soil. Number two, they
produce fruit. Number three, they produce raw materials. Right, so
these people have planted trees that are indigenous to the area.

(02:59:09):
So a lot of times in coffee places, like there
are certain species of beans that really only grow in
particular regions. But the only reason they grow in those
particular regions is because of the mineral the way that
the minerals are in the ground in that area. So
if you can mimic those minerals, if you bring those
minerals to this place, you could grow that bean. So
technically speaking, if I have the my minerals, I can

(02:59:31):
be in Costa Rica and grow a Rwandan coffee because
it's just the Rwandan soil in Costa Rica. And you
could still argue that it is this is some of
the future of like if it do ever get so bad.
Right when they grow in coffee in Sacramento, you know
what I'm saying in Vancouver in some sort of building,

(02:59:53):
it's because we just gather the minerals that we've destroyed
and put them in a that's not good for the earth.
That's that's an invasive not only invasive pieces, an invasive mineral.
So you're completely changing the biosphere of that land just
to grow that one crop.

Speaker 10 (03:00:09):
That's absurd. The land already does what it needs to do.

Speaker 8 (03:00:13):
So what these guys do in Ecuador is the same
thing they do in Colombia in Zipa Coln that was
the name of the city that they were in. Also,
what's happening on doors is like you just let the
land do what it does. What I learned on one
of these farms is like the quickest way to know
a place is not organic is there's no insects. Like,

(03:00:34):
if there's no ants, that means the ground's poisonous.

Speaker 3 (03:00:37):
Right.

Speaker 8 (03:00:38):
The ants come out, they eat whatever waste is on
the ground, whatever like natural waste is on the ground.
They come back in, they go back into the soil.
They're irrigating them soils themselves. You don't need lawnmowers if
you have chickens, right, the chickens eat the thing. The
shade of the trees keeps the temperature down. It produces
fruits like avocado, papaya, like I said before, for mongos, plantains.

(03:01:02):
These trees that naturally grow in this area keep the
soil rich and the coffee strong.

Speaker 3 (03:01:08):
So you're keeping the temperature down.

Speaker 8 (03:01:10):
The land does what it absolutely does, so now you
don't need pesticides. You also need less water because when
the temperature being shaded and brought down, the water's not
evaporating as fast. Whoa, and then the quality of the
bean is higher. Now here's where the indigenous practices move
from just the ground to also the community. Rather than

(03:01:31):
having one hundred small farms compete against each other, they
just work as a community. So rather than waiting for
Johnny European to come down and say buy my beans, no,
by byes, by my means, they're like.

Speaker 3 (03:01:42):
No, by our beans.

Speaker 8 (03:01:44):
They pull all the beans together, bring all of their
crops together, and they say, yeah, maybe I can't produce
whatever kilos that this person needs by themselves, but we
can produce that.

Speaker 3 (03:01:58):
So that way if there's a.

Speaker 8 (03:01:59):
Farm over here that's got a smaller crop because maybe
you know, mother in law got sick so they weren't
able to work as hard as they can for those beans.
Or maybe collectively, again heat dome was too high, there
was too much of a drought. We really couldn't grow
that much on our own. Together though we could meet
this order. You follow me and when that happens, because again,

(03:02:20):
who usually picks the beans are the community's kids. Now,
if we can collectively fill the order, right after we
cup and we say collectively our coffees are good enough.
And there's different types of species, like you know what
I'm saying, Like this is a I don't want to
get too much into a nerdery, but each each bean
in each tree is a particular species. Maybe when we cup,
we say, hey, listen, this is the same thing that

(03:02:42):
happened on Doris. It's like, you know, we sit around
and we're tasting, basically doing a taste test these different
batches of beans. I don't know which farm they came from.
I know they're all a part of this collective. But
if I say, yo, I want these, then when we pay,
since it's not a middleman, and it's a community.

Speaker 3 (03:03:01):
Now, the main load goes.

Speaker 8 (03:03:03):
To the particular farm that it was ordered from, but
the rest of it goes and it's spread across the
entire community.

Speaker 3 (03:03:11):
Following me.

Speaker 10 (03:03:12):
Okay, now back to the soil situation.

Speaker 8 (03:03:14):
I feel like I'm all over the place, but you
have to understand because the problem's all over the place,
and a lot of these places are connected.

Speaker 3 (03:03:20):
So in Colombia they kind of did the same thing.

Speaker 8 (03:03:23):
So Lapamel tu Acon is the place that everybody comes
into and since every individual farmer does not have connections
across the world with bringing buyers in and there's no
promise that they won't be taking advantage of and ain't
gonna be able to sell but maybe five ten percent
of the crop. The rest of it either goes to
the trash or goes to the sea market. It's just

(03:03:45):
the open stock market. You just hope somebody buys your beans.
It's just no way to live. As I explained before,
what Lapama ends up doing is this is they say, okay,
we'll check this out.

Speaker 10 (03:03:56):
We'll buy your coffee, all of it.

Speaker 8 (03:03:58):
And not only will we buy your coffee, because we
know you need soil. We're gonna set you up with
a business so that not only can you sell your
coffee to us, you can also sell your fertilizer to us.
And the fertilizer that you're creating, we're going to build
that business for you. And how they do this is
this thing called biochar. Now it makes so much sense.

(03:04:20):
If you have donkeys and other places at, pigs and
other animals that have waste, you can make fertilizer.

Speaker 3 (03:04:30):
Duh, right, So what they do is this.

Speaker 8 (03:04:33):
They have these composts, these big old flat things that
they build in front of you.

Speaker 3 (03:04:37):
They basically they build it for you.

Speaker 8 (03:04:38):
They went to all the local farms and they were like,
we'll build this for you, right, and then we'll buy
the product from you. So they build these flatbed things
where you could take all the stuff that you would
compost anyway and put it in this flatbed, cover it,
and then we're going to give you this stuff called biochar,
which is some of the dope. It's like Mother Nature

(03:05:02):
showing off. So basically it's made from like you heat
wood right at the highest of temperature with no oxygen,
so once it becomes carbon, it doesn't turn to ash.
You know what, I mean it's almost like you know
when you like after you light a fire, when you
hold the charred pieces, like how it crumbles away this
one because you heat it at the highest of temperature

(03:05:23):
without letting oxygen in, so like it doesn't become like
a like a red fire, you know what I'm saying.
And then you mix that into your compost and it
just makes this pristine soil. So now guess what. These
farmers don't have to pay for soil. They don't have
to pay for nutrient wrench soil. Matter of fact, they

(03:05:45):
can sell off the excess. Their crops already been sold.
So you don't have to go get a loan from
the state. You would need that loan to be able
to set up your like your washing stations. Like how
you get the coffee from a cherry to the roast
or to the green bean. Is like it's a long process.
It could be very expensive. It's all good. The homies
down Narrow do that for you. We'll put you in

(03:06:06):
this system and we're gonna pay you even if your
particular crop, your particular bean isn't sold, because we'll sell
it somehow, like if it doesn't sell on the high
end eighty percent Arabica specialty coffee thing.

Speaker 10 (03:06:22):
We'll figure out a way to sell it. You're still
getting paid anyway.

Speaker 8 (03:06:25):
We're buying your whole crop rather than the ten percent
that would happen, Like I said before, if your beans
aren't as good as they're supposed to be. These programs
by one hundred percent from these farmers. So these farmers
are able to sustain themselves. Right, and now you can
pass these farms down to your children, right because we're
doing this collectively. Since we're doing this collectively, especially it's

(03:06:45):
what happens in Honduras, a third of the money goes
to the community itself. I've wrapped at a school that
was built by them selling the coffee like this, there's
now a medical clinic because a lot of times these
farms are hundreds of miles away from the city.

Speaker 10 (03:06:59):
You have to get lifted as something's wrong.

Speaker 8 (03:07:01):
And since these are indigenous communities, they're the most forgotten
oftentimes in these areas. So purchasing these coffees really at
a high price, which is what we're supposed to do,
guarantees that the individual farmers paid, the community is paid.
It's done in a way that's tied much more to

(03:07:22):
the indigenous practices and now collectively, because we're buying from
responsible places that are locally grown, now we can afford
to bring the EU people down here to prove that
this is not a process of deforestation because they're moving
collectively for real. It's just like fast fashion. It's like

(03:07:45):
that T shirt only three dollars because the sweatshop. You
truly do get what you pay for in a lot
of way. And finally, I'm gonna tell you where tech
is actually helping, and it's this program called Bext three sixty.
Could use a little help on the marketing, but it's
essentially they're using blockchain to create transparency and it's probably

(03:08:10):
the dopest thing I've ever seen. And I saw it
from wanted of the supply chain to the other. So
in this program, these local farmers right who had just
have these small home plots, who have been running these
plots for centuries. Is their grandfather's land they you know,
they grandmama's land that.

Speaker 10 (03:08:27):
They got it.

Speaker 8 (03:08:28):
Who don't have access to American and worldwide coffee buyers
meet up with this collective, right, the Karacha collective. That's
one of them that I'm that I'm specifically talking about.
And Karacha signed up with this thing called bext. And
what happens in bext is if you've ever been to
developing countries, not everybody ain't got a smartphone. So in

(03:08:50):
this thing, once the farmer harvest is alls beans, washes
them and says, hey, I got these many kilos of
this type of being. Click, opens his bext app on
his smartphone, takes a picture of it and puts the
weights and the numbers so that we know everybody and
everybody in the supply chain can see this. There's a
QR code even on the bag. Once you buy the

(03:09:12):
bag in Sacramento, there's a QR code on it, so
you could see all this. So the kid from the
farm snaps the thing. It goes to the exporter, which
who just lives down the street. It's not like some
you multi conglomerate company from the North.

Speaker 10 (03:09:28):
No, this lady lives down the street. She's born and
raised here.

Speaker 8 (03:09:32):
She opens it up and she says to us who
flew in from America to be like, yo, we want
to try some coffee. Opens the app and says, hey,
this is the farmer, this where it is this how
much he wants this, how much he asking for it?
Here's our price. But I'm looking at the app that's
what he's charging. And then I know she's adding a

(03:09:52):
third of that price because the other third of what
she's asking for is literally paying for the hospital that's
across the street. So it makes perfect sense to me.
And I'm looking at it and I'm like, Okay, cool,
I know how much the shipping container costs because I'm
seeing it.

Speaker 3 (03:10:09):
Of course I got to pay for shipping. What did
you talking about?

Speaker 8 (03:10:12):
So it's all transparent, it all makes sense, and it's
all regentitive financially in climate wise. Once we buy it,
I can see if she paid the farmer, because that's
also in the app. So once the farmer gets his money,
takes a picture, got the money, screenshot received, and then
a portion of that money is given in cash so

(03:10:34):
that you could pay the kids that picked your farm.

Speaker 3 (03:10:37):
Click saw that. That's in the app. Right as that.

Speaker 8 (03:10:40):
Stuff is shipped across the country or across the ocean,
you can put in all of the roasting notes, which
are kind of lame if you're not really into stuff
like that. And then finally the sealed bag that says
here's one from Denver, Queen City Collective Coffee right that. Hey, look,
this is a Honduras being. We bought it this price,

(03:11:01):
and then when you pay it's called a third cost.
When you buy the bag, there's an extra dollar added
to the cost of the bag, and that extra dollar
does not go to the roaster.

Speaker 10 (03:11:11):
It goes back to the farmer.

Speaker 3 (03:11:13):
You know how.

Speaker 8 (03:11:13):
I know because there's a QR code. You could check
it and the farmer can confirm if they got they money.
It's transparency. It's us taking care of us. So obviously,
because the world works the way it works. If this
continues to be financially viable, here's some of the things
we could do. One is we could start drinking more
robustica like everybody else, and it's actually delicious if you

(03:11:36):
could find a good roaster. And Tabby is a great
roaster New Yen Supply. She's amazing. She does cold brew
and like Vietnamese coffee, it's robustica. But then there's other
spots across the world. It's going to cost a little more,
but I'm telling you why it costs a little more
because they come from a multiculture land that uses indigenous practices.

(03:11:59):
That has lowered its car and footprint, that is direct
traded and has transparency.

Speaker 10 (03:12:04):
This is not a list of everybody doing this.

Speaker 8 (03:12:07):
These are the listed of people that I know personally
and people that have researched.

Speaker 10 (03:12:12):
So in North Caak and South Cak you got Black.

Speaker 8 (03:12:15):
And White Roasters, and you got Bridge City Roasters Denver.
There's Queen City Collective up in Sacramento. There's Old Soul Coffee, Onyx,
Coffee Lab, Coffee Black that's there in Memphis. All these
people you could order their coffee is online don Cavo
Hall in New York. The transparency is there and is

(03:12:38):
doing its best to make sure that this being stays
on this planet. So I'll link in the show notes
all of the data that I'm pulling this from and
ways for which you can connect with like very socially
responsible and climate responsible coffee roasters Geez only sixteen years old.

Speaker 3 (03:12:57):
Boy, I tell you that's the first lyric.

Speaker 10 (03:13:00):
Yes, all.

Speaker 3 (03:13:20):
Its it could happen here. It's the podcast.

Speaker 4 (03:13:23):
I didn't write an intro for this because everything, everything
incredibly sucks. This is the podcast where bad things happened.
I'm your host with me as Garrison.

Speaker 5 (03:13:33):
Yeah, it's been a lot of bad things the past week,
past year, but the past week and a half it's
been pretty bad.

Speaker 4 (03:13:41):
Yeah, And one of the things that's been very bad
is literally everything Israel has been up to, like I mean,
since it was founded, but the last three four weeks,
somehow things have gotten worse, which is a sort of
unbelievable thing to say about a genocide, but it's expanding.
So yeah, there is at the end of this one

(03:14:03):
of the most bizarre trunk quotes I've ever seen. So
that's why I promise to you to stick with this.
But oh boy, everything is very, very bad. So we
now have I guess I don't even know if France
is the right way to talk about this. But what
we have in Gaza, which is where the main Israeli
offensive is going right now, well we'll get into that.

(03:14:26):
There's a bunch of stuff in Lebanon too, where they're
pulling troops to, but in Gaza, everything just continues to
get worse, even though so these Raelis have pulled out
some troops from Gaza, but they're also still making another
offensive into northern Gaza. And the thing about the way
that the Israelis make offensive into places is that the

(03:14:47):
thing that the Israelis do is they just immediately start
shooting at hospitals.

Speaker 3 (03:14:50):
So that's been a big part of what's happening.

Speaker 5 (03:14:54):
Something that used to be like controversial and like widely
newsworthy a year ago attacks on hospitals now have become
so normalized and he sensitized that it doesn't even make headlines,
which that's been one of the most indicative factors that
this has gone about as bad as it could have.
I remember a year ago, we were like debating whether

(03:15:17):
or not the Israeli military intentionally like struck a hospital,
and this was like this was like a week's long
debate trying to figure out what exactly happened. And now
attacks on hospitals are just complete commonplace. It's like we've
just totally lost.

Speaker 4 (03:15:31):
Yeah, And I mean, you know, like it's not even
just that that the Israelis are deliberately targeting hospitals, it's
that the temporary facilities people have been trying to set
up because the hospitals are being blown up are also being.

Speaker 5 (03:15:45):
Attacked, Yeah, which has also been going on for ages, Yeah,
almost a year now, like almost immediately as soon as
like humanitarian aid and like and like like impromptu medical
tents were set up. Those were also the targets, and
this is this is all discontinued.

Speaker 4 (03:16:01):
Yeah, And I think the thing that's you know, it's
bleak about it, right is like I mean, I mean,
it's not the thing. The thing that's bleak about it
is that they're blowing up hospitals. But I mean, we've
reached a point into this where it's not even newsory
but be the Israelis don't even like attempt to justify
it anymore. I mean, if you if you remember a
year ago when they were doing this, it'd be all

(03:16:22):
of the stuff about how, oh we found Homas tunnels
under the hospitals, and there's just not event anymore. They're
just they're just shooting at hospitals. Sometimes they give evacuation orders.
They've been That's the other thing that's been happening periodically
is the Israelis keep basically you know, in places in
northern Gaza, they'll be like everyone has to leave now,

(03:16:43):
and then they'll bomb it and they'll keep bombing it.
Part of the thing about covering Gaza, right is all
of the stuff that we're saying is stuff that was
a major news story like six months ago, and is
no longer a major news story because the slaughter has
become just sort of so rutinized. But you know, so
people are fleeing from northern Gaza into what's supposed to

(03:17:06):
be the safe zone in central Gaza, except that Israelis
keeps shooting at their refugee camps in central Gaza, so
it's not actually there's there's not actually a place you
can be in Gaza where you're not getting bombed. What
there is is some places sometimes are less bombed than

(03:17:28):
other places. And you know, I think there had been
a tiny amount of hope that the only conceivable upside
about the invasion of Lebanon was that there would be
a pull out of troops and we'd see less offensive.
But you know, they've just been escalating bombing campaigns and
are doing some offensive anyways. So yeah, there's there's there's

(03:17:48):
continuingly sort of Israeli attacks into into partial northern Gaza.
The other big thing, and this is what most of
this episode is going to be about, is a new front.
After already having like having this entire thing in Gauza.
There was also like an invasion of the West Bank,
which again is like I don't know how to express

(03:18:09):
how insane it is to have a war where you're
nominally fighting against Hamas and then invade the West Bank,
a place where there isn't Hamas. But they've done that too.
There's been parts of the West Bank, there's been a
bunch of really troops and you know, we know they've
been fighting in Yemen as much bombings in Yemen, but
also now they've just straight up invaded Lebanon, And this

(03:18:31):
is the sort of chain of events of this was
I don't know if kicked off is the right word,
but it was. It was dramatically accelerated by the assassination
of Hassan Nosraala, who is I think most people are
aware that he's the head of Hesbalon has been the
head of this BLAS since like nineteen ninety two, which
is longer than anyone who's on this episode right now

(03:18:53):
has been alive.

Speaker 5 (03:18:54):
Was this the one who was killed in those like
apartment like carpet carpet bombings? Yeah, yeah, so, I mean yeah,
even still, assassination is a strong word for uh or
I guess a light word for just bombing. Like it
was like what three large apartment complexes.

Speaker 4 (03:19:11):
Yeah, they just obliterated a bunch of complexes with like
something like eighty bunker busters.

Speaker 3 (03:19:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (03:19:18):
So this is actually the second time that the Israelis
have just straight up killed someone they were supposed to
nominally be negotiating with. They killed the head of Hamas
like in a ran. So you know, we talked about
on this show the initial wave of attacks on Lebanon,
which is the sort of the pager explosions, and the
fallow up to the pager explosions was that they figured

(03:19:40):
out what bunker that ISRAELA was in and they just
killed him. This is extremely bad for a lot of reasons,
one of which is that has blawed kind of hadn't
really been on full war footing until this point. Like
they've been doing a bunch of rocket attacks on northern Israel,
right and they've been these sort of exchanges of rocket

(03:20:01):
fire across the border, but they hadn't really escalated beyond that.
And then the Israelis were like, well, just fuck it, okay,
we want our invasion of Lebanon. Andraal was kind of like,
I don't know if like moderating force is quite the
right term here, but his policy wasn't that Hesbolah was
going to fight a total war against Israel, and the

(03:20:23):
Israelis just fucking murdered him anyways, So we should probably
talk about who Nosrauala is. He's not from like the
original Hesbela cadres, from from the original Lebanese of war
when the emergenes in eighty two. He's not from that cadre.
But he's a pretty old school Hesbola guy by this point.
He's you know, I've talking about like he's been in
charge of Hesbelog for fucking ever. Like I am not

(03:20:45):
old enough to remember a time when he was not
in charge of Hesblah because I wasn't born yet, I
don't know he's he's one of the people who's seen
Hesbelah's sort of expansion and also seen Hesbelod be able
to be like the only of the sort of major
Lebanese political parties who were in the negotiations to end

(03:21:06):
the civil war kind of oversaw the process of Hesbela
being like the only armed party like left in Lebanon
other than like the regular army right. He was also
very famously in charge of Hesbela's I don't know how
exactly you wanted. I don't know, there's a whole bunch
of stuff about how the war in two thousand and
six started. But in two thousand and six, Israel made

(03:21:29):
this attempt to sort of like do their big anti
Hesbelah push.

Speaker 3 (03:21:33):
They invaded Lebanon, and Israel didn't do very well.

Speaker 4 (03:21:38):
They were expecting, and I think what most people were
expecting Hesbla to fight like, you know, like a gorilla army,
right doing hit a run attacks, doing doing the sort
of like the whole sort of last century of gorilla
hit and run campaigns.

Speaker 3 (03:21:49):
And they didn't do that.

Speaker 4 (03:21:50):
They basically they sat there and fought like a conventional
army with a bunch of bunker networks. And the Israelis
did extremely poorly in that war. And I think this
is influenced a lot of the way that people were
thinking about how this how this fight was going to work,
and it hasn't.

Speaker 3 (03:22:06):
But you know the fact that Hesbla was able to
sort of.

Speaker 4 (03:22:09):
Stave off the initial attack and then the Israelis spent
like forty more days doing a bombing campaign and everyone
just called it quits was absolutely huge for Hesbela as
a political force. Unfortunately for them, I guess they burned
an unbelievable amount of that political capital that they they'd
gotten from being really the first people in a long

(03:22:31):
time to like actually be able to viably claim that
they defeated Israel. And I mean, it's obviously like both
both sides of that declared victory, but Hesblood puts up
a better fight against the Israelis and like it's like
stops their ground advance in a way that like was
almost unimaginable at that point, even though Hesbola had sort
of fought pretty well during the Lebanies of the world,

(03:22:53):
is better than most of the other sort of like
anti Israeli factions that weren't a state, and even I
mean even most of the states that a thought as
you have done extremely poorly. We're going to go to
ads and then when we come back, we're going to
talk a bit about how has a Blot's position weakened
and how the Israelis have just sort of decided that
this is a moment they can just murder everyone in

(03:23:23):
So we are back with more I guess very very
short summary of what has Bust been up to over
the last about thirty years. So part of the reason
that things haven't been going enormously well for HESB Law
is that a lot of their capacity was weakened by
the fact that HESBA Law during Theuserian Civil War through

(03:23:46):
their entire backing behind the SAD and this was like
hideously unpopular for I think, I think reasons that are
obvious most people listening. But one of the big ones
is it's hitting unpopular in like in Palestine, I got
I guess who ran the poll, but there so there's
a fairy famous pole that was showing like the disapproval

(03:24:07):
rating in paleside different world leaders. I mean they didn't
pull in net Yahoo because obviously like is net Yahoo,
but like the two highest ones that weren't in net
in Yahoo were it was like Biden at eighty percent,
and then slightly higher than Biden was Bashar al Assad
because he is hideously unpopular, partially for a bunch of
shit that he did in a very very large Palasinian

(03:24:29):
refugee camp there that you know has been a lot
fucking backed them for and so has well spent a
lot of the last decade just sort of running around
Syria backing the assaud rechime, and that I don't know Garrison.

Speaker 3 (03:24:44):
That doesn't make you.

Speaker 4 (03:24:45):
Popular anywhere other than like extremely weird sections of the
American left.

Speaker 5 (03:24:50):
Yeah, I mean, I guess some of the American right.

Speaker 4 (03:24:52):
When you're backing a guy who is just like who
was doing a thing the Israelis do, like obviously on
a smaller scale, but like shooting up like palsi refugee cans.

Speaker 3 (03:25:00):
He's not going to be enormously popular.

Speaker 5 (03:25:02):
Whenever there's a guy who's like seriously maimed your family members, yeah,
it's pretty pretty easy to dislike him.

Speaker 4 (03:25:09):
Yeah, and like whatever things that's going on in the
story that like we need a fucking seventy part episode
to talk about. But Syria occupied a bunch of Lebanon
for a long time, and that also like hasn't made
him enormously popular in the region. But you know, Heswal's
position is that they like they have the slogan that

(03:25:30):
goes the road to Jerusalem runs to Aleppo, which is
just like just not how any of this has worked.
It's been a complete fiasco. Has lost performance in Syria
hasn't been very good. Can you explain what that phrase means? Yeah, yeah, So,
so the point of this basically was that in order
to defeat the Zionists through some incredibly murky logic, like

(03:25:50):
the Asad regime had to be kept in power, and
this was this was a sort of the justification that
was used by Hesbela to just send a bunch of
troops there to ornate with a bunch of other different
groups there.

Speaker 3 (03:26:03):
And I mean, like it's.

Speaker 4 (03:26:03):
It's a really terrible decision, both on a moral and
a strategic level, in the sense that like it caused
a rift between what it's supposed to be the resistance
factions in Palestine, and it just killed a bunch of people,
and like the Iranians are sending I don't actually know
how many people know about the story, but one of
the like terrifying things that's happening in this is that
that there's a bunch of refugees from Afghanistan, you flee

(03:26:25):
to Iran, and the Iranians like basically conscrict a bunch
of these people and send them into Syria with rifles.
So it's like these people are like fighting alongside has
blon Hesla. They don't do great because Hezeblah has always
been good at fighting, like fairly obviously morally justified defensive
wars inside of Lebanon and then they go off and

(03:26:46):
fight basically like a semi imperial war in Syria.

Speaker 3 (03:26:50):
It's fucking shit show.

Speaker 4 (03:26:52):
And this has been extremely bad for their capacity, and
it also really hurt has Blot politically because again it
was also very very unpopular in Lebanon. And this kind
of all leads us to the last few weeks of
like terrible shit that's been happening, where yeah, the Israelis
just fucking launched this hideous bombing campaign, I mean just

(03:27:17):
really just all over Lebanon, right, you know, most of
the most of the reporting has been about their attacks
in the south, but like, they've bombed the capital, they've
bombed Tripoli, they've killed I think so far it's one
of these things where the death counts kind of have
stopped updating, but in the last few days it looks
like they've killed about two thousand people. It's not enormously clear,

(03:27:40):
but yeah, it's things that things have gotten extremely unbelievably bad.
And this has also really, I think been a kind
of mask off moment for both the US and the Israelis,
where all of the things that they've been pretending for
the last year they're just straight up saying that they
don't believe anymore. I think that the best indicator of

(03:28:02):
this is there's a White House press conference and Matthew Miller,
who's one of the White House spokesperson answered a question about, Yeah,
it's just about the conflicts, and he said, quote, yes,
we do support Israel launching these incursions to degrade has
blaws infrastructure, which like kind of sounds like a standard
like the US words is real thing. But if you

(03:28:24):
actually read into what that's saying, he's saying, the US's
official position is no longer ret there trying to get
a ceasefire. Right, That's that's what he's saying. This is
immediate and active support for the israelis not not only
not attempting to end the war, but expanding it into Lebanon.
And this is something that like hadn't been in an
explicit like war goal for Israel sort of until this point.

(03:28:48):
The line had always been that the point of this
was to bring back the hostages. Right, But like there's
no fucking hostages in Lebanon, Like there isn't there just aren't, right,
That's that's not how any of this works. And at
this point all of the sort of pretenses falling away
and it just degrading into this pure slaughter. And when
we come back from this ADS, we're gonna wrap up

(03:29:08):
with more stuff that mostly sucks. And also Trump's latest
thing on this, which is very weird.

Speaker 3 (03:29:26):
We are back.

Speaker 4 (03:29:27):
So as this has been going on in the past
couple of days, net Niyahoo posted a I don't even
know how to describe it, one of the weirdest videos
I've seen since, like that insane Kevin Bacon won that's
just him threatening Lebanon. He says, quote, you have an
opportunity to save Lebanon before it falls into the abyss

(03:29:48):
of a long war that will lead to destruction and
suffering like we see in Gaza. She's just straight up
threatening Lebanon as Israeli troops are moving across the borders.
She's for occupying a tempted occupied He's just straight up saying,
like Lebanon needs to just throw out Hesbela somehow, even
though it's just like a political party. They need to

(03:30:09):
completely destroy Hesbela somehow. Otherwise Israel is going to do
to Lebanon when they've done to Gaza. And that I
don't know is a unbelievably hideous expansion of the war.

Speaker 5 (03:30:19):
Could you give some context for like why Israel is
making moves into Lebanon. We know, like they're targeting has Beila,
but there's also like a degree of territorial dispute over
where Israel ends and Lebanon begins. Yeah, that Israel has
been kind of like wanting to increase tensions over for

(03:30:39):
a while, and it feels like they're just using the
war in Gaza as a cover to also try to
claim like territory of southern Lebanon.

Speaker 4 (03:30:48):
Yeah, and I mean this gets into so I think
there's three kind of reasons, and I think that are
all overlapping factors for different groups of people, you know,
because like dif different Israeli political factions, different sort of
strategic like elements of the military set, et cetera, are
doing things for sometimes overlapping sometimes different reasons. Like there's
the obvious one, which is like, Okay, there's a dislike

(03:31:10):
for has blawed, that's being that's been funneled because a
bunch of people in settlements in northern Israel have been
like have been evacuated because they keep getting bombed, right,
and those people are unbelievably pissed off, and they've been
pushing for this for a long time. There's the second one,
which is I think the one that liberals use is
like the excuse for the entire the entire genocide was wrong.
But it is also true that net and Yahoo does

(03:31:32):
like personally need this war to keep going because the
moment the war.

Speaker 5 (03:31:34):
Stops, he's gonna be out of office. He's screwed.

Speaker 3 (03:31:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (03:31:37):
Yeah, So like that that's a personal extendent for net
and Yahoo. There's also another one outside of the political
pressure from from the northern settlers, and you know, the
general idea has Bluffing and nen Yahoo personally, which is
like Israeli sodas have always been, it's it's most extreme,
like most sort of far right, most genocidal like political
element right. But increasingly we're watching them get radicalized even

(03:31:59):
further in real time, and we're watching them become increasingly powerful.
And one of the things that those people want is
they have this unbelievably deranged thing that I mean, I
guess all nationalist movements eventually get to their greater whatever
your country is thing, but they've entered the Greater Israel
phase where they're talking about just like you're talking about

(03:32:19):
Israel as this as a state that's supposed to like
encompass like all of Lebanon, and like, I mean, I've
seen so many different maps like encompassing a bunch of
partial of Syria.

Speaker 5 (03:32:30):
Well, I mean, and this is also what's influenced their
continued attacks in the West Bank, specifically in the past
few months, where they're similarly using what's going on in Gaza,
like hiding behind their own atrocities in Gaza as a
cover to like try to actually claim more territory in
the West Bank, or at least at least push more
of like the Palestinian people out of their homes to

(03:32:52):
expand the Israeli settlements. So I think both of these
are kind of happening for similar reasons. And Israel's trying
to like just weaponize the actual atrocities that are going
on in Gaza as like a big shield because those
are getting so much more attention, trying to get away
with this territorial expansion in other areas, not just the Strip.

Speaker 4 (03:33:13):
Yeah, And I mean also I should say that there's
a lot of a lot of the people on the
ground are pretty convinced that the Israelis are trying to
basically just like completely ethnically cleanse like parts of the
strip so they can annex it. And I mean it's
not something that we like have, like we don't have

(03:33:34):
like a document from Israeli High command that says we're
going to annex all of this stuff, but it's it's
something that's very least consistent with everything they've been doing.
And this is also like another sort of one of
the cyclical factors here. This is a cyclical factor behind
the settlements. We've talked about this back when we did
episodes about the West Bank, is that the is really
housing market is such a fucking disaster and this this

(03:33:57):
is something that you know, like this kind of real
estate speculation shit, and the same way that like George Washington,
as a real estate speculator was was sort of like
motivated to do more attacks on indigenous land in the
US and this sort of like fueled westward expansions. All
these land speculators, you know, moved out, and people who
couldn't afford like houses in like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem

(03:34:17):
where housing prices are really high, those people have become
this political force to keep pushing this and this is
you know, fueling the expansion of the Israeli occupation into
more and more places. Yeah, so right now where we're
at with Lebanon is that one point two million people
have fled their homes, Which is I mean, even if

(03:34:40):
like the Israelis had literally done nothing else in the
entire time that this has been happening, right, forcing one
point two million people to flee their homes, is it
an unimaginable level of suffering. And this is like just
effectively being reported as a footnote in the fact that
they've fucking done all of this other shit.

Speaker 5 (03:35:00):
And just in the past week and a half, they've
killed thirteen hundred people.

Speaker 3 (03:35:05):
Yeah, it's insane, Like that's.

Speaker 5 (03:35:07):
More than the number of people who ever were killed
in Israel on October like seventh. Yeah, that just doesn't
matter because of like all of the racialized aspects of
how of how like israel genocide campaign has been able
to operate, Like you're not going to see memorials in
the States or the thirteen for the thirteen hundred people

(03:35:30):
killed in Lebanon the same way that we will for
October seventh.

Speaker 4 (03:35:34):
Yeah, you might get them on a college campus for
the cops destroy it.

Speaker 5 (03:35:37):
But like, that's and that's just in one week.

Speaker 3 (03:35:42):
It's over.

Speaker 5 (03:35:42):
They've done over a thousand air strikes the past week.
They've killed all these people, and that's I don't Yeah,
I don't know what else to say.

Speaker 4 (03:35:51):
Yeah, I'm going to close by on a slightly lighter
note from this one of the like even by Trump's standards,
an extremely weird quote that he gave about Gaza.

Speaker 3 (03:36:05):
This is from the Guardian.

Speaker 4 (03:36:06):
Quote asked by Hewitt, which is a guy whose podcast
he was on, if Gaza could be transformed into Monaco
if properly rebuilt, Trump replied to quote, it could be
better than Monaco. It has the best location in the
Middle East, the best water, the best everything it's got.
It's the best. I've said for years. I've been there,
and it's rough. It's a rough place before all the
attacks and back and forth it's happened over the last

(03:36:28):
couple of years. He went on. I mean they have
the back of a plant facing the ocean. You know,
there was no ocean as far as that was concerned.
They never took advantage of it. You know, as a developer,
it could be the most beautiful place the weather, the water,
the whole thing in the climate. It was so beautiful
it could be the best thing in the Middle East.

Speaker 5 (03:36:44):
Yeah, I mean that's in line with stuff that Kushner
has been saying for a long time yep. And how
they are hoping to turn Gaza into a part of Israel,
specifically to do real estate development, to turn it into
like a resort, to turn it into a golf course,
and they're willing to kill tens of thousands of people
to do it. And that is like the primary driver
at least like for them, for like Trump's team, for

(03:37:06):
why they are They're very happy to seet Nyahuu just
do whatever he wants.

Speaker 3 (03:37:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (03:37:12):
And I think there's something else here too, which is
that like a lot of the kind of Marxist analysis
of this from like a very sort of kind of
Marxist has been about how Palestine has been rendered as
like surplus population. This is the population that has been
kicked out of the circuit of like capital accumulation. They're

(03:37:33):
not necessary for capital to reproduce itself to make more capital,
and so no one cares if you kill them. And
I think that's wrong. And I think this quote is
actually evidence of why they're wrong like this. You know,
these people think purely, and like people like Trump right
think purely in terms of economic assets, and there are
there's an unbelievable amount of economic assets, like in Palestine

(03:37:53):
that a regime that is like maybe only thirty percent
less like hideously cruel and murderous like could have turned
into viable economic engines. But the Israelis don't want that.
They have made a decision, like an actual conscious decision
that instead of trying to expect people for labor, they'd
rather just fucking killed them all and try to steal
their land.

Speaker 3 (03:38:14):
Right.

Speaker 4 (03:38:14):
They have decided that this fucking real estate speculation bullshit
on a bunch of land that they're taking by just
fucking slaughtering all of its inhabitants is more efficient for
them than even doing fucking regular capitalism. And that's an
absolutely fucking hideous note. And it's the kind of thing
that Biden is saying okay to and Trump fucking loves

(03:38:35):
because fundamentally, like Trump's fucking real estate brain is pro genocide,
and Biden doesn't give a shit about stopping them, and
he's also pro this. So yeah, the gears of genocide
continue to grind. The Israelis are plotting their attack against
Iran that they're going to do in response to Ron

(03:38:56):
shooting missiles at them in response to them killing the
leader of festival. I don't know by the time this
comes out, it's possible that attack will have happened.

Speaker 3 (03:39:08):
They're going to do something. It's going to make everything worse.

Speaker 4 (03:39:12):
But yeah, until then, this has been an update on
the genocide and Palestine and the new invasion of Lebanon.

Speaker 2 (03:39:23):
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the Universe.

Speaker 12 (03:39:29):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can now find sources for It Could Happen here,
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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