It Could Happen Here Weekly 153

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
A 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. Oh, welcome back to

(00:28):
It could Happen Here a podcast about it happening. Here.
Things falling apart, and today the thing that is falling
apart is info Wars. Now, this is not a new situation.
Info Wars has been falling apart for like half a
decade now, but we are reaching certainly a point in
that process. And to talk about that point, I have

(00:50):
been bringing on really the only two people you can
bring on if you want an expert opinion on Alex Jones,
Dan and Jordan of Knowledge Fight Dan Jordan, Welcome to
the program.

Speaker 3 (01:01):
Hello, Thank you for having us.

Speaker 4 (01:04):
Hello.

Speaker 5 (01:06):
You can bring us on to tell you things that
every other expert in the world will say are wrong.

Speaker 2 (01:12):
Yeah, yeah, Well.

Speaker 3 (01:13):
It's nice to know that we are once again at
that point where shit is looking that bad for Alex yep,
that it's relevant for us to, uh yeah, get to start.

Speaker 4 (01:24):
Doing your media tours.

Speaker 5 (01:26):
Yeah, I mean, I mean, hey, well we're I'm enjoying
this because I know we're gonna see you next year
to have the same conversation.

Speaker 3 (01:35):
And I was flashing back to earlier times we've talked.
We've probably been like, hey, things are looking bad for Alex.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
Oh yeah, my fingers are crossed that he gets a
bad batch of supplements and goes on like not a
sad murdering spree, but like a cannibal spree, Like he
eats three or four people. And then the news like
you guys, you guys are on fucking CNN talking about well,
actually Alex has been discussing eating people for quite some time. Sure,
this is this is really a long story for him. Really,

(02:03):
anyone should have seen this coming up. The lighting was
on the wall. This is some of the least surprising
cannibalism in media history.

Speaker 3 (02:11):
It turns out this supplement, it didn't make him a cannibal.
It just brought out that cannibal that was already there.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
Yeah, that's what the iodine does first before we get
into it. You know, elephant in the room, by which
I mean Dan, you look like you're ready to lead
the Union Army in a series of Civil War battles.
That's a compliment to your facial hair.

Speaker 3 (02:33):
So by elephant you mean the tusks. Yes, well, thank
you very much. I'm learning to accept compliments. Yeah, I've
got a ridiculous handlebar situation that I did as a joke.
I got this as a joke to go to undercover
to a Tucker Carlson event.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
That's an incredible decision.

Speaker 3 (02:49):
And then the positive feedback spit too much for me
to handle.

Speaker 4 (02:53):
It's good.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
Well, I mean, this is really changing things for me
because prior to seeing this, Jordan would have been my
go to if I needed someone to help me burn Atlanta.
But now I don't know, I don't know, I don't know,
could be either of you.

Speaker 3 (03:06):
There's a lot of Civil war jokes, a lot of
hitting home runs in the seventies, sure, sure jokes.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
So okay, I have a whole subreddit full of people
that just photoshot my face on the pictures of rass Button.

Speaker 4 (03:17):
So it's what happens.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
Speaking of ras Button, he was psychic, and so is Alex.
According to Alex. Yeah, yeah, what do you guys want
to start here, because like, obviously the big news right
now is all of info Wars is up for auction,
including apparently Alex is twittering. It sounds like will probably
be part of the deal, although I guess that's a

(03:41):
little unclear right now.

Speaker 3 (03:43):
He's trying to fight that inclusion of the Twitter handle
in his bankruptcy estate. But I think almost anybody could
make a pretty solid argument that it's company property. Yeah,
Like he uses it to broadcast his show. He takes
calls on it for his show, Yeah, from Twitter spaces,
So like, yeah, he's probably going to lose that fight,

(04:04):
and it's probably going to be part of the auction.

Speaker 5 (04:06):
Yeah, But I mean, at the same time, him not
having it makes it valueless, so it's worthless.

Speaker 4 (04:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (04:12):
So if I were going to auction it, it would
be worth zero dollars, But if I were going to
give it to Alex, it would be worth to him
millions upon millions of dollars.

Speaker 4 (04:22):
And that's the issue here.

Speaker 2 (04:23):
Yeah, it does kind of seem and I listened to
Alex primarily through you, but it does seem like, from
what I'm here on your show, he's kind of more
concerned about the Twitter account than the multimillion dollar studio
space yeah time.

Speaker 3 (04:37):
Yeah, yeah, which actually is kind of funny because I
think it belies a lack of confidence. Yeah, because I
think if he loses real Alex Jones on Twitter, he
could have reeler Alex Jones. Yep.

Speaker 2 (04:50):
It doesn't seem like that would be a problem for him. Actually,
do you think.

Speaker 3 (04:54):
You can't gather this audience back together.

Speaker 4 (04:57):
I think that's the problem. He's worried he can't get
it back.

Speaker 6 (05:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
Yeah, well and specifically him, Like Elon would tell people
to follow him, there'd be a bunch of people with
huge accounts saying this is the new Alex yit Like,
I really don't think it would be much more than
a speed bump. Actually, unfortunately you.

Speaker 4 (05:12):
Can think that, but these aren't your friends.

Speaker 5 (05:15):
Can't trust Elon fucking Musk help you out.

Speaker 3 (05:22):
I do think that there's an abandonment fear possibly, yeah,
or some some sort of lack of confidence that like,
if this speed bump does hit, I won't be able
to rebuild.

Speaker 2 (05:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (05:33):
No, And it makes sense.

Speaker 3 (05:34):
Yeah, I think it's delusional. I think he's totally fine.
Start one hundred new Twitter accounts. You'd get a million
followers on all of those, agreed.

Speaker 5 (05:41):
Yeah, yeah, But I mean he's delusionable about just about everything,
so it makes sense that in this case he would
be delusional in the wrong direction.

Speaker 3 (05:49):
That's true.

Speaker 2 (05:50):
Yeah, So yeah, how does this seem to be going?
My big concern when I'm when I'm thinking about it,
is like, well, there's probably someone rich out there, some
like rich asshole, you know, think tank funding oil billionaire
that would consider it chump change to buy all this
shit up and just give it back to Alex. But
my understanding is that that's not actually like a thing

(06:11):
you can do in these kind of situations. Although I'm
not not an expert.

Speaker 3 (06:15):
On it, Oh, I think you can. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (06:17):
The trustee has the ability to even say, like if
there is if there was like a bid that was
from whomever you want to say, like out of nowhere,
George Soros, if you.

Speaker 2 (06:27):
Like, fucking William Regnery the fifth or whichever rignary were
on now, Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 (06:32):
Ten billion dollars more money than God could imagine. But
the trustee you wanted it to stay in right wing
billionaire hands. He could give it to somebody who bid
six million dollars for it or five, don't.

Speaker 3 (06:45):
I don't think that that's actually accurate, fully, And I
also don't think that the trustee is beholden to Alex
in any way.

Speaker 4 (06:53):
I'm saying that.

Speaker 5 (06:54):
I'm just saying that there is that level of control
that is not just like it's going to the highest bidder.

Speaker 3 (07:00):
I understand it. The trustees control in terms of that
is more about a minimum bid. Like, if there were
higher bids, it would be very difficult to rationalize not
taking them if they are from people who have the
actual money. Sure, aren't I guess involved with terrorism, sure
or something. Unless there is a concrete reason not to
accept it, I would be surprised. Yeah, if they didn't

(07:22):
accept Soros if he made a bid.

Speaker 4 (07:24):
I mean I would be too.

Speaker 5 (07:25):
But also, currently we are on surprise number seven and
a half thousand.

Speaker 4 (07:30):
It's not more.

Speaker 5 (07:30):
Yeah, so that would be the least surprising thing if
it was a surprising thing.

Speaker 3 (07:34):
Yeah, I guess.

Speaker 4 (07:35):
So.

Speaker 2 (07:35):
I think we're all agreed. Alex isn't going to just
shut up and ride into the sunset. He's physically incapable
of doing that. Like he would literally literally explode like
a soda with mintos dropped into it if that were
to happen. Yeah, But also there's a massive judgment on him, right,
So my understanding is that like any money beyond whatever
a court decides would be necessary for him to maintain existence,

(08:00):
although I understand there's also like ways you can fuck
around with that too, Like what do you guys know about,
like what kind of limitations the court has placed on
Alex for the future after all of his shit gets
sold out from underneath him.

Speaker 3 (08:12):
Well, I don't know about like specific details, but because
his judgment was deemed to be like malicious and intentional,
the amount that he owes personally is not dischargeable by bankruptcy. Yeah,
so he's in chapter seven bankruptcy now personally, and so
he's liquidating all the assets. So he has to sell

(08:33):
off the company, which is how we get to the
auction in the first place. And so he will sell
off these assets to go towards the payment of these people.
But that's not going to erase the debts and set
things even so in theory, he could be hounded for
the rest of his life. Sure, he could have wages

(08:55):
garnished have some oversight of his finances in theory. Yeah,
to the amount that that's exercised, I'm not sure how
much it will be, but yeah, that's going to be
hanging over him for the rest of his life. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (09:07):
Or I mean, if I was him, and based on
how things are going for him so far and the
direction things are taking, then once this is handled, then
he's going to move all of his money to Alex
jonestore dot com. And then once they catch him there,
he's gonna move all of his money to Alex jonestore
dot com two. And then once they catch him there,

(09:27):
he's gonna move his stuff to Alex Jones dot com three.
Until eventually everybody gets so fucking tired that they're like, fine,
either we're no longer going to come after you, or
will settle for fucking nothing.

Speaker 3 (09:40):
Yeah, Because and him and his lawyers explained that even
as part of their legal strategy early on, which is
that you exhaust people with delays and to the point
where someone's just willing to settle because you're such a
pain in the ass. Yeah, And that's just kind of
his mode of operation.

Speaker 5 (09:56):
Yeah, And every time people have been like, well, clearly
you can't continue to be a pain in the ass
this way anymore. It won't be allowed. It has instead
been allowed, so you can do it.

Speaker 4 (10:08):
It's fun.

Speaker 2 (10:09):
I don't want to get like in the way of
people's you know, celebrating the downfall of Alex Jones. But
it does kind of seem like nothing realistically is going
to stop him from being rich and being able to
talk to an audience of people who are dangerously devoted
to his shit. Like none of this is actually going
to I'm sure it's unpleasant and stressful, right, but it's

(10:31):
not going to stop him. It's just not possible.

Speaker 5 (10:34):
Yeah, this is why you get other experts, because I
do want to get in the way of people enjoying
quote unquote info.

Speaker 2 (10:42):
I'm just talking about like when I'm when I'm watching
people celebrate on Twitter, like you can't correct everybody. It's
like whenever, whenever there's like this info about Alex Jones
that people listen to your show, know, like there was
a period of time where I would correct people about
that or really literally anything else. And I've increasing the
out to the point where like everyone's wrong about almost

(11:03):
everything they say on the Internet, and there's really no
point in correcting anybody about it anymore, Like, what am
I going to do? How is this going to help?

Speaker 3 (11:11):
Yeah? I see people like posting videos of Alex crying, yeah,
and like changing the context of what it is for
some post and it's like, you guys are just it's
not worth the energy to correct here. Yeah, to your point, though,
Jordanan does want to stop people from celebrating and ruining
everyone's fun. I'm in the middle, okay. I would like

(11:33):
people to be a little half at the time to
do it. I want people to be a little bit
more realistic about their expectations, people being like celebrating prematurely,
Like you're just gonna have to deal with the hangover
of this. That is, there's a pretty decent chance somebody
aligned with Alex is going to buy the company and
then all of it is going to get just given

(11:54):
back to him, And it's equally likely that someone you know,
like a Soro or whatever, does end up buying it.
Info Wars is destroyed and Alex's revenue streams remain intact
because his dad runs his supplement company now that's outside
of the bankruptcy. He shifted all of his merch over
to this Alex Jones store dot com that's run by

(12:15):
somebody else, So like all the meaningful ways that he
can make money are now protected, and he can just
start Alex Jones Fuck Around Hour or whatever and have
these people be sponsors, and you know, it'll feel fun
that Info Wars is gone or someone else bought it
or whatever. But like you know, like you're saying, Robert,
it doesn't it doesn't really address the issue, and nothing

(12:39):
is nothing's really gained.

Speaker 5 (12:40):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's kind of been a massive waste
of everybody's time. But but a lot of lawyers are
ever going to make a lot of money, so that's good.

Speaker 2 (12:50):
It does seem if I'm going out of my way
to kind of look at what are the most positive
results of this, Like if I mean, it does look
like he's probably going to lose control of all all
of the shit that they have to film Info Wars, Right,
that won't stop them from filming and doing videos, but
maybe they'll look like crap, and maybe that will have

(13:11):
an impact on like the degree of credence people give them,
you know, like maybe the fact that info Wars has
a nice studio isn't zero percent of like why their
shit gets taken seriously by people. I don't think it's
most of why, but it's not nothing either, otherwise like
they wouldn't be doing it. Like I do think that
that although I don't know, maybe that was in a

(13:33):
different era is when that mattered.

Speaker 3 (13:36):
I think it's also psychologically important for him. Yeah, that
might be the most he wants to think he's doing
a real show, and without the trappings of a fake
CNN studio. It's harder to pretend that you're not just
reading Twitter headlines and then getting mad about them. But
I do I do feel like this idea that it's
a waste of time and everything has been a waste

(13:58):
of time. I just want to give a little bit
of voice to the fact that it may feel like
a waste of time and nothing has been achieved. But
you know, if you listen to the perspective of some
of the plaintiffs and some of the families, the ability
to face him in court and reclaim some of the
power that he had over memories, yeah, and the power

(14:20):
and the pain. You know, that isn't something that is
quantifiable in terms of the money or you know, all
of his feet dragging, but it is something that matters,
and I don't want to pretend that that hasn't been achieved.
Oh great, as much as it's not the catharsis of
him getting arrested or losing all of his money or
whatever that.

Speaker 5 (14:41):
Yeah, well, I mean, I just I think we all
needed to understand clearly from the beginning what this was,
and that would have altered kind of the way that
this is perceived. Like if we had all known from
the jump, Like if all the lawyers and everybody and
all the media had gotten together and been like, listen,
this is going to be a moral victory, and it's

(15:02):
gonna be good to have this like in public, to
have this airing for all of us to see and
for the families to have.

Speaker 4 (15:10):
I think we would have been fine with that.

Speaker 5 (15:12):
The problem was all the rest of the stuff was
a waste of everybody's time.

Speaker 2 (15:17):
Yeah, does that make sense? Yeah, No, that makes sense
to me.

Speaker 3 (15:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (15:21):
I think if we had just had that, this could
all have been banged out in a day.

Speaker 4 (15:25):
Really.

Speaker 5 (15:25):
Yeah, Like we get everybody in court, everybody gets to
say their piece, and then we're done, and Alex gets
to remain rich.

Speaker 4 (15:32):
It's basically the same thing.

Speaker 2 (15:35):
All right, Well, We're gonna keep talking on this, and
I'm gonna ask you guys for an update on how
Alex is handling the election too. But first, what's all
handle some ads and we're back. You know, this is

(15:58):
one thing, this is gonna right.

Speaker 3 (16:00):
I got to stop you. I can't believe you're running
an ad for doctor Jones Natural.

Speaker 2 (16:04):
Well, that's just very different, very different naturals. Though, very
different naturals. Not we are, we are using that in
the porn sense. My okay, My Alex Jones deep fake
pornography website is off the ground. For seventy dollars a month.
You two can have a subscription Doctor j Jones Shrunk Natural.

Speaker 5 (16:23):
Yeah yeah, doctor doctor Jones Supplements.

Speaker 4 (16:27):
You have some real trunk naturals.

Speaker 2 (16:31):
Honestly, most of what I do is just take clips
from the graduate and uh and put him in as
the as the male elite. I don't know why.

Speaker 3 (16:39):
I don't know why to give people what they want.

Speaker 2 (16:43):
Anyway, we made forty million dollars last month.

Speaker 6 (16:47):
Damn.

Speaker 4 (16:48):
Yeah, we should. We should have stopped with this whole
no ads thing.

Speaker 2 (16:51):
So I I I want to talk a little bit
about how Alex has been handling the election. Because you know,
one of the things that's always interesting to me is
how his sense about whether or not everyone's doomed to be,
you know, murdered by the New World Order and have
their corpse disposed of by a robot is not related

(17:11):
at all to like how conservatism is doing, how how
his party has picked candidates are doing. It's it's a
pure his own personal vibes, because right now is not
a terrible time if you're a fascist in the United States.
There's a real good chance they're going to have a
have a runaway win here in the next couple of weeks.
But alex is, at least based on the most recent

(17:32):
episode of Knowledge Fight I've listened to more or less
on the everything is fucked and we're all doomed. The
New World Order is going to eat you all things.
I think it's just because he's got the auction team
coming by his office.

Speaker 3 (17:43):
Well a spoiler alert in the next episode, he's had
a euphorium moment because he's realized that they're gonna win.

Speaker 5 (17:50):
They've already won. You've you're far you're way too far behind.
Now Tomorrow, of course, they will be losing, and we're
all gonna die.

Speaker 3 (17:58):
He's a rapid cycling kind of guy.

Speaker 4 (18:00):
I don't do that We're gonna win.

Speaker 3 (18:03):
Yeah, but I mean I think I think that, you know,
we've even talked about this before, this dynamic of like
your enemy has to be uh, super strong and then
super defeatable and super weak, like all of that must
exist simultaneously or else. Yeah, you know his game doesn't
really work as well. Yeah, so that that energy is
going to keep going until the election.

Speaker 4 (18:23):
And also it makes sense.

Speaker 5 (18:24):
I mean, I can't imagine the idea of a bunch
of professional people coming into my home or place of
business and just like cataloging things, just taking each individual pictures,
the amount of stress and nervous energy that that would provide. Yeah,
like I'd be like I did, I didn't know. I
don't know if I needed to clean that. I don't
know if I needed to clean it.

Speaker 3 (18:44):
She would be getting real.

Speaker 2 (18:46):
But yeah, I just like cleaning up my dad's place
after he died was like this whole thing of all
of these are items that have meaning to our family,
and I would be okay burning them all in a
fire in.

Speaker 4 (18:57):
A pit, right yeah, right, Like I'm just I'm done.

Speaker 2 (18:59):
I'm done. So I can't imagine like the sense of
fuck it I would have and Alex is, especially if
I had Alex Jones money, like he really it's just
more evidence that there's a deep sickness involved in all
this with him, like he can't stop himself, like yes,
go fish or something, bro like go on a nice
fishing trip. What are you doing sitting in your office

(19:20):
watching your life get picked apart? What a miserable place.

Speaker 4 (19:24):
Give everybody the day off. It's great.

Speaker 3 (19:27):
Fishing's not going to stop the devil, and that is
really uh, you.

Speaker 5 (19:30):
Know, fishing is actually how the devil gets out. It's
every water is a portal to the fifth dimension of Hell,
which is actually the lower fifth. There's a higher fifth
dimension where good demons come I mean, angels come out
of but then the lower fifth dimension comes up through
the pond, and that's where catfish come from.

Speaker 3 (19:48):
This is not an Alex theory, but it plausibly could be.

Speaker 4 (19:51):
Yeah, I feel like I wasn't far off.

Speaker 2 (19:53):
No, no, So how are we? How are we doing
with Alex in terms of like one thing I've noticed
maybe I have a You can tell me if you
agree with my kind of interpretation here is that he
seems to be at a little bit of a lower
ebb in terms of getting invited on and talking with
like much more popular creators. I haven't seen like last year,

(20:13):
I felt like I saw him on a lot of stuff,
and this year. I don't know if it's just that
he's not, you know, as sexy as he was to
them last year. But I'm just not seeing him out
as much as I kind of expected to in an election.
And I'm wondering if that's your interpretation too, or if
I'm just kind of you think I'm off.

Speaker 3 (20:31):
I think it's fifty to fifty because I think that
there is something to that, Like he was on he's
been on more fun stuff before in the past, and
it's been it's been a little bit limited this year,
but he was just on Tucker's Live show in Pennsylvania,
which is about as big as anything he's done. Probably
it at least it feels pretty big.

Speaker 4 (20:52):
Yeah, it wasn't the two drunk sports guys.

Speaker 3 (20:54):
Yeah, no, flagrant two flagrant too. That might have been
a few years ago too.

Speaker 4 (20:59):
Yeah, my memory is terrible.

Speaker 3 (21:01):
He hasn't been back on Rogan. Yeah, you know, there's
some big there's some big gaps in terms of like
where he feels like he should be appearing. But you know,
if you look at the luminaries that were on the
Tucker Carlson tour, like him being included in that list
of people is pretty you know, that's that's rarefied air.

Speaker 4 (21:19):
I mean, unfortunately, I guess it is in a way.

Speaker 3 (21:21):
You got RFK Junior, Yeah, you got the vic.

Speaker 5 (21:25):
They're consequential people, which is the most desruning part is
that these are the dregs of humanity and yet they
are very consequential people that we should be paying attention.

Speaker 2 (21:34):
It's absolutely infuriating that, Yeah, I have to care about
especially fucking Vivac. Yeah, because I ran into him at
the fucking RNC and he was being surrounded by a
cloud of guys who all looked like Nick Fuintes. Like
the only reason I didn't assume one of them was
Nick Fuintes is that any one of them could have
been Nick Fuintes. And I had to fight this urge.

(21:55):
Do you're seeing those like old man comics, like a
guy I'll be fighting one hundred shrews and like eating
one of them to death with the others, I had
to fight off the urge to pick up one Fuintes
by the lakes. It just starts swinging him.

Speaker 4 (22:06):
Just start swinging.

Speaker 3 (22:09):
You are my weapon.

Speaker 2 (22:12):
So like, where do you where do you see Alex
a year from now?

Speaker 3 (22:16):
Right?

Speaker 2 (22:16):
Like, do you have any kind of expectation for where
he's going to be, because like, at some point his
dad has to die, which I understand is a pretty
important part right now of how he's able to keep
money flowing well to his operation the face of the judgment, right.

Speaker 3 (22:29):
His dad and his brother in law both run. Okay,
the Doctor Jones naturals, So even if Old David Jones
catch the bucket, his brother is still going to be there.
So I think, I think Alex is fine. But he
almost killed his dad with COVID.

Speaker 2 (22:44):
Yeah yeah, I am surprised Doctor Jones lived through that,
given alexis.

Speaker 3 (22:48):
Yeah gorilla sitting on his chest, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (22:50):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 (22:51):
I think it is a little bit of a testament
to how insane and how the best torture for Alex
is just being cursed with being Alex is. Like if
I was in this scenario where I plausibly have a
reason to never touch or talk about money again, and
yet still make the almost exact same amount of it.

Speaker 4 (23:11):
That would be perfect. That's just taking a job away
from me right now.

Speaker 5 (23:14):
It's my dad's problem to look at the sales numbers.

Speaker 4 (23:18):
Dr tr anywhere else.

Speaker 3 (23:19):
That's not a good ad man. That's the thing you
can do a good read.

Speaker 5 (23:23):
Yeah, if Alex is the face guy, doctor Jones handles
the business, that means that Alex doesn't have to do both.

Speaker 4 (23:29):
It makes perfect sense.

Speaker 3 (23:31):
But to your question, though, like I really do feel
like right now we're in the most chaotic possible moment
because you have these two things that could go any
direction that are happening around the same time. Like you
have the election, and then you also have the auction, right,
and if Trump wins or loses, there's a lot of

(23:54):
different possibilities of how his path might go. And if
someone who he's aligned with ends up buying the company
or not, that's another Like the world would be very
different in terms of the choices that he has in
front of him. Yeah, but I think it'll be bad.
I think he'll be unhappy that I think, no matter
what I think, will be pretty miserable. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (24:14):
Yeah, and that's just because of him. He's just a
real miserable piece of shit.

Speaker 2 (24:20):
Yeah, I spend a lot of time thinking about his
bee cast and how they might do because I again,
I I don't see a world in which Alex gives
up what he's doing. But I do see a world
in which he can no longer pay Owen Schroyer.

Speaker 4 (24:34):
Uh.

Speaker 5 (24:36):
And that's that's the truth, that's the true goal, when it's.

Speaker 2 (24:42):
Not making what a heartbreaking amount of money. I'm sure
more further into the six figures than Owen Shrotier ot
to be.

Speaker 3 (24:52):
I wonder what the deal with him would be though,
Like he went to jail for Alex.

Speaker 2 (24:58):
God, it's true, he sure did.

Speaker 3 (25:02):
He did. Time, Like what could he tell if he
was off the payroll or you know, like or how
much do you pay to keep him on the payroll?
Because he's the kind of guy who went to jail
for you.

Speaker 5 (25:13):
I mean, if you look at a I mean, David
Knight's not going to jail for you. But if that's
if that's a comparable exit for a personal popularity, I
don't think Owen's got much of a shot.

Speaker 4 (25:22):
Yeah, I think he can be tossed into the ocean.

Speaker 3 (25:25):
But I think Chase Chase Geyser is more of a
beat player than Owen.

Speaker 5 (25:29):
We just have a personal he just Chase Geyser is
a new character who's popped up in the later seasons
of the show.

Speaker 4 (25:36):
Yeah, and he's.

Speaker 5 (25:37):
Really brought a new He's brought a lot of a
late season juice to it that I think we needed.

Speaker 3 (25:42):
Yeah, it's better than No One though, that's fr Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:45):
See I was going to say, it's like when Fraser
brought on all those British people. But speaking of British people,
our sponsors might be British. We don't check and we're back. Okay, guys,

(26:09):
So I guess, kind of closing stuff out, what do
you think this year have been the big pieces of
Alex misinformation that you've seen people spreading online? Like, what's
kind of been your biggest I'm guessing this is gonna
be a Jordan heavy question, but.

Speaker 5 (26:22):
Like stuff about Alex or stuff yeah, yeah, yeah, stuff
about Alex that's like specifically, what kind of stuff have
you heard, like people in media saying about Alex this
year that has pissed you off the most? I Mean,
the funny part of this question is that I've actually
left the Internet about as much as possible because of
the rage that the rage that I feel at this

(26:44):
very situation.

Speaker 2 (26:45):
A wise move.

Speaker 5 (26:46):
Yeah, So, I honestly, I think I think the big
thing for me personally is just the if we are
going to talk about Alex's auction, then to me, what
we're talking about is how much money the families are
going to receive. That's to me in my head of
if we're gonna talk money, then what we should talk
about is the end point. How much do the families

(27:07):
get And even if this auction just goes gangbusters, the
families are going to get so so little of whatever
happens because they're the last in line before you pay,
like Norm Pattis is going to make more money at
the end of all of this process than any of
the family members.

Speaker 4 (27:27):
That's just that's just probably.

Speaker 5 (27:29):
True, I would say, if not guaranteed true at this point,
unless of course Mark Cuban or somebody a billionaire shows
up and showers them with money. But for the most part,
it's it's like, the end goals should be the families,
they should be first, but that's the wrong thing.

Speaker 4 (27:46):
They're the last. So it's very annoying, it's very frustrating.

Speaker 2 (27:49):
Yeah, that is especially given that, like that's the whole
reason for the suit, Like that's.

Speaker 4 (27:54):
The whole reason for the season.

Speaker 2 (27:55):
But I mean, obviously the system is not conducted to
benefit family last who are suffering. That's not who makes
the rules, that's not who operates the system. The system. Yeah, okay,
we don't need to rant about that. It is a bummer, Dan,
what about you?

Speaker 3 (28:10):
I mean, maybe it's recency bias and stuff, but like,
I do think that the conversation around the auction is
missing a little bit of the point, whether it be
in terms of you know, what the sale is, like
you were bringing up Jordan, or like people thinking that
there is a solution to the problem that Alex represents,

(28:31):
Like this isn't going to be like a ding Dong
the Witch's dead type moment. You're going to have, you know,
his new thing funded by the companies that he's been
building up to avoid the bankruptcy, or you're going to
have somebody who's with him but that buys it in
for wars is going to be the same problem on

(28:52):
November fourteenth or whatever as it was the day before.
And I think that I think that people are getting
themselves may be a little bit up for a disappointment. Yeah,
and I think that we've seen that a couple times,
like with the alexad the night where he claimed that
security guards were trying to shut him down. You know,

(29:12):
people got excited about like this is it? Yeah yep,
And I think maybe I'm jaded too because of years
of doing this.

Speaker 6 (29:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (29:20):
Yeah, it's almost never it.

Speaker 5 (29:22):
I mean, I want to say this and I want
people to recognize that this is true in regards to
this scenario. You are never going to come. You're never
going to come. It's never going to happen. You're going
to be perpetually close, and then you're not gonna make it,
and then you're gonna come back. That's how it is.

Speaker 2 (29:40):
If you're into edging, Alex is the guy to follow.

Speaker 3 (29:43):
Yeah, it's perfect.

Speaker 2 (29:44):
So I think that that's actually really good advice. Like
if you if you just as a layman, are hearing
people talk about Alex Jones on social media or like
seeing some sort of like opinion column or whatever and
some you know, left wing or liberal rag and you
want to know, like how credible is this? I guess
the first question to ask is are they predicting a

(30:04):
massive change to Alex and what he actually does, because
if so, probably nothing has got Unless it's like an
article that he's been diagnosed with the disease, nothing's probably
going to change, right, at some point he's going to die.
I'm not being mean.

Speaker 3 (30:18):
I don't even know.

Speaker 4 (30:19):
I wouldn't believe that article. I wouldn't believe a word
in that article.

Speaker 3 (30:22):
They're lying, well, you take that illness with doctor Marbles to.

Speaker 4 (30:26):
Get out, Yes, exactly.

Speaker 3 (30:29):
The deposition of them, so like he you know, fu
fuck even that. Yeah, I think I look at it
slightly differently, and that is that I do predict that
there will be a massive change. We just don't know
what it'll be. Sure like there'll be something. He's got
to do something, because his content is really stagnant and

(30:50):
a bit uninteresting in the Trump sense. Yeah, and I do.
I think that there is a change that will be
needed if he wants to maintain whatever he's doing. But
I mean, anybody who has an idea of what it
is is wrong.

Speaker 5 (31:02):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I imagine that predicting anything in the
next sixty days is going to be a ridiculous proposition.
If you had predicted a new hurricane fucking two weeks ago,
people would have thought you were crazy.

Speaker 2 (31:14):
Yeah, well I think that's all I had to ask. Guys,
anything you wanted to plug will bring up before we
close out.

Speaker 3 (31:23):
Uh no, just we exist to where we have a show.

Speaker 2 (31:27):
I'll check out Knowledge Fight. It's my favorite podcast. It's
the only only reasonable way to keep up with Alex
Jones and a whole network of other con men and
grifters who who kind of latch onto him like that
fish that lives on the underside of a shark, except
for Alex. Alex is also a remora or remera. Right,

(31:49):
So it's just like a It's like a just a
series of smaller and smaller ones, each sucking each other off.

Speaker 4 (31:56):
Yeah, that sounds about right.

Speaker 2 (31:57):
And Alex is latched onto the side of a crew
ship toilet. Yeah, there were more on the cruise ship toilet.

Speaker 3 (32:04):
Yeah, you've now turned this into a human centipede situation.
I have, I have.

Speaker 2 (32:08):
I don't know why again again, it's all this is
all viral marketing for doctor Jones's Big Naturals.

Speaker 5 (32:15):
Now figured out an appropriate punishment for defamation of character
human centipedes.

Speaker 2 (32:20):
Yeah, I've been saying that for years years.

Speaker 3 (32:24):
Yeah, I feel like and I do have to point
this out. Sure, that is both cruel and very unusual.

Speaker 5 (32:30):
It is perhaps the most unusual thing you could imagine.

Speaker 2 (32:33):
Really, I hate to say, but somebody, it would it
would take like some of these people three months to
have several thousand people convinced that human centipeding is like
a mental health hack, like it's it's it's like getting
rid of seed oils. You know, that's how you accelerate
muscle development.

Speaker 4 (32:48):
Right, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:50):
Ancient cavemen were always eating each other ship you know
what You've also you've also made a very good point.

Speaker 5 (32:58):
If you this this whole thing. If you want to
stop Alex, Alex is a symptom. Alex is a symptom
of the larger problem. You need to regulate supplements, Yes,
FDA approved supplements.

Speaker 2 (33:09):
We'll get rid of most of these guys every podcast
episode we can. We are pushing the line. In my dream.
If I accomplish one thing in my life, it would
be getting this to become widely agreed upon by liberals
and the left. Regulate supplements, allowed direct sales of cars
to consumers yep, and ban MLMs, and prosecute people criminally

(33:30):
for trying to operate them. Do that, and you fix
a lot of other problems.

Speaker 3 (33:35):
I would do something about precious metals businesses too, I
would throw that.

Speaker 2 (33:39):
Well. Hey, now, hey, now, Mike Lindell's giving us some
gold money. Sir, right, you just wait wait right there
untill he runs out.

Speaker 3 (33:46):
Dan, pillow sales are illegal, also, I should.

Speaker 2 (33:52):
Pillows are illegal? Makes your neck week Yep, all right,
everybody listen to knowledge by Thank you, Dan and Jordan.
As always, we'll be back tomorrow with some other episode
of this podcast that we do every day.

Speaker 7 (34:26):
Welcome to it could happen here. I'm Garrison. This is
a little special episode today. I'm joined by Alex from
Corvalis Antifa and Hank, who's using a pseudonym for personal
safety from the Left Coast Right Watch Team. Hello to
you both, and thank you so much for joining me.

Speaker 8 (34:43):
Hey, what's happening? Thank you so much for having us,
Thanks for having us.

Speaker 9 (34:47):
Good to be here.

Speaker 7 (34:48):
So today we're gonna be talking about this group called
White Lives Matter. I guess originally White Lives Matter was
like a slogan and like a very a very loose
group from like twenty fifteen, or at least it kind
of started in twenty fifteen as a reaction to the
growing Black Lives Matter movement. I know, I definitely saw this,

(35:10):
this phrase propagated via like memes, flyers, billboards, and other
forms of propaganda as a way to like seed white
nationalist rhetoric to the then like growing and burgeoning.

Speaker 8 (35:22):
Al Right, Yeah, so there was a formation that was
kind of like an NSM splinter formation that happened in
an in reaction to the initial Black Lives Matter protests
in twenty fifteen. The White Lives Matter that we're talking
about today is a different formation entirely that utilizes sort
of the same slogan. They are a group that started

(35:44):
in like twenty twenty one and have been organizing primarily
on telegram and have grown really rapidly across the country
of the years since.

Speaker 7 (35:52):
Yeah, like we can see the early use of this
phrase spread by you mentioned the National Socialist Movement, along
with a few other kind of collection of neo Nazis,
the Aryan Resistance Society and the Aryan Nationalist Alliance. But
then things kind of like died down. It was just
it was like a slogan you could see at rallies,
but it wasn't it wasn't anything like too prominent, honestly.
But then we had this big second wave in twenty

(36:14):
twenty one with Telegram channels promoting a White Lives Matter
march or a series of martians to be held across
the country on like April eleventh. This batch of rallies
were mostly a failure, in part due to the efforts
of anti fascists who worked disabotage the planning of these
rallies ahead of time. Of the rallies that did eventually

(36:35):
take place, really only a handful of white supremacists showed
up and most were outnumbered by anti fascist counter demonstrators.
So then after this initial event with these with this
like big batch of like of like channels on Telegram,
which is this like encrypted messaging platform based out of Russia.
It's not very good. Don't use it unless you're trying
to infiltrate a Nazi group. But after these like fail rallies,

(37:00):
White Lives Matter kind of turned into yet another one
of these networks for white supremacists and neo Nazis that
advocate quote unquote pro white activism. Typically this includes like
putting up white nationalists like stickers around neighborhoods, hanging large
banners with fascist rhetoric or Nazi imagery, flyering, and just
spreading propaganda online with the occasional like in person rally.

(37:23):
I think you can see kind of the peak of
like the White Lives Matter slogan, at least was when
it was propagated to the degree that Kanye west Ward
on a T shirt during his little Nazi era back
in twenty twenty two. And I think now you see
White Lives Matter as like a network. It overlaps and
crosses over a lot with like similar groups like the

(37:44):
GDL that's the Going Defense League, as well as the
National Socialist Club and Patriot Front to some degree. I
guess one thing that I wanted to talk about is that,
and this is mentioned in the Corvalis and TIFA article
on the organ chapter of White Lives Matter, is like
the idea of hiding your power level, which we used
to talk about it a little bit more. I think

(38:05):
in some ways a much Nazis kind of blew their
cover back around twenty twenty, but now you see kind
of more attempts to try to seed a white nationalist
rhetoric into other kind of right wing spaces to push
them farther along that radicalization pathway. And I would like
to have a discussion at least a little bit about
how White Lives Matter specifically tries to hide their power level,

(38:27):
like kind of disguise the level of like overt fascism
that they're really proposing by employing this like quote unquote
like pro white rhetoric.

Speaker 4 (38:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (38:36):
So White Lives Matter as a national organization is extremely
like conscious of what they would describe as like their optics.
They are very intent on like radicalizing who they perceive
to be everyday white people into sort of fascist politics.
And in their national level manuals and the materials that

(38:57):
they provide the leaders of statewide organizations, they specifically talk
about stuff like not displaying Nazi flags or using like
neo Nazi rhetoric despite that being what they believe. But
their sort of goal is to use more innocuous styles
of sloganeering, like you know, the phrase like white lives
matter and protect white babies stuff like that as ways

(39:20):
to kind of open the door to get people to
become interested in a more like overtly national socialist politic
that they can radicalize people to who like join their group.
And you see a lot of groups like Active Clubs,
Patriot Front, other sort of white nationalists formations using the
national WL on the BORG as sort of a way

(39:42):
to recruit to their own organizations with this sort of
more innocuous, subtle style of propaganda.

Speaker 7 (39:49):
Yeah, and like one other thing that's pointed out in
the in the Crabalis and Tifa article is like they
don't just do agit prop, Like they're not just a
group that is composed of only doing stickering. There's been
multiple instances when their online propaganda as well as their
like in person stickering, escalates to real to real violence.

(40:09):
Last year, a twenty eight year old from New Jersey
attacked an anti racism concert at a church. He yelled
White Lives Matter at attendees, threw smoke pomps at the church,
and then tried to bear spray the crowd, think inadvertently
bear sprague himself, which he then recorded a video talking
about and posted online. Later in air, fifteen and high

(40:30):
capacity magazines were found in his home alongside White Lives
Matter propaganda, and later that year, a twenty year old
male associated with White Lives Matter firebombed a church in Ohio,
and the church was picked as a target because it
planned to host two drag events. After being arrested, police
found six firearms and dozens of loaded magazines alongside Nazi paraphernalia.

(40:50):
This guy also wrote a manifestor defending his actions and
specifically stating that he was happy about it because people
online were proud of him. And you can even go
back to the White Lives Matter rallies back in twenty
twenty one, especially the one in Huntington Beach which saw
a degree of physical violence. It's important not just not
to just write these groups off as being like, oh,
they only do banner drops, oh they only do stickers,

(41:12):
because not only is like propaganda really important part of
growing the number of them out there, but they also
do real world violence.

Speaker 8 (41:20):
It's also important to talk about like the ways that
WLM is organizationally connected to like more like scary elements
of the neo Nazi right. Recently, Left Coast Right Watch
published proof that Matthew Allison, who was one of the
leaders of the Terrogram collective who was recently arrested, was
responsible for some of the national WLM like propaganda that

(41:44):
they published, which is quite concerning. So you know, even
these groups that are more movementarian than nature and are
trying to appeal to you know, you know more quote
unquote nor me white people are like directly in bed
with people who are like as scene with mass shooters and.

Speaker 7 (42:02):
Like terrorists yep, specifically try to like groom people into
becoming mass shooters. Yes, I mean, and like that's why
I think specifically with both these guys who did physical violence,
you can see violence as like it as like an
escalatory thing for the person who's like doing it right,
you start off with throwing am al top cocktail, and
then later you might do a mass shooting. It's like
a testing ground. You can see the same thing with

(42:24):
you know, bear macing and anti racism concert. The fact
that both these guys, specifically the one in Ohio had
like a lot a lot of guns, and like we're
in America, there's a lot of guns around, but having
that many guns and loaded magazines in Ohio as a
twenty year old with all that Nazi paraphernalia like that,
that is what a Nazi mass shooter's like bedroom looks like.

(42:46):
And these are not like isolated incidents. I guess let's
let's take a bit of a break and we will
come back to talk about specifically the organ chapter of
White Lives Matter and what they've been getting up to
the past few months. All Right, So, after Krela Santifa

(43:11):
leaked like chatlogs from the organ White Lives Matter group
back in twenty twenty one, the chapter went to dormant,
and then it restarted earlier this year. I guess, Alex,
can you walk us through kind of the rebirth of
White Lives Matter Oregon.

Speaker 8 (43:26):
Yeah, So, the way that WOLM works as a national
organization is there's like a series of groups that all
kind of are extant, like they there are groups, and
then people would like apply to be with the national
org to be like a leader of a state group.
So back when w OLM initially began as a thing
in twenty twenty one, our group was running the Oregon

(43:50):
chapter and exposed several people who tried to join that group,
and then after that like interest in that organization became
it stopped existing for several years.

Speaker 3 (44:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (44:03):
Then earlier this year we noticed that somebody had taken
over the chapter and had started engaging in some stickering
and some propaganda. So we were like, well, you know,
we may as well join this group and see what's up.
So we infiltrated the organization, gathered information about the membership,

(44:24):
and published that information online in order to warn the
communities that these guys in habit about their activities. The group,
you know, was doing stuff that was not like extremely intense,
like they were doing stickers, they did two banner drops
or three banner drops successfully rather But in their chat

(44:44):
we also found that they were talking a lot about
like you know, military training and escalating and you know,
even though this group kind of like seemed very low
key and was like not doing anything, you know, super scary, like,
the stuff they're talking about is concerning, and they're getting
organized and they're getting to know each other. So we

(45:05):
put a kibosh on that.

Speaker 7 (45:07):
So it looks like, according to a research the new
leader is this guy named Cruz. Dean Walters.

Speaker 8 (45:13):
Yeah, yeah, so Cruz is marine kind of wash out
who lives in McMinnville, Oregon. Until very recently was living
a double life. He was living with his mom and
his fiance, neither of who knew about his racist beliefs
and now knew he was a highly incompetent leader who

(45:33):
you know, really had a tremendous number of security flaws
in his organization, you know, as is evidenced by the
fact that we were able to you know, infiltrate and
destroy it in a matter of just a few months.
But you know, it is worth noting that, like the
group grew from just a handful of people to you know,
doing banner drops with like, you know, six or seven

(45:56):
folks in just a couple, you know, a couple of
short months. Like, even though these groups can kind of
be benign, if there winds up being somebody who is
like particularly passed it behind the channel, like, they can
transform into something less benign very very quickly. And that's
something we want to impart to other anti fascists across

(46:17):
the country, is there are all these channels and they
might be seen in kind of like benign now, but
they can turn into something very malignant very quickly.

Speaker 7 (46:26):
I wanted to ask specifically about Cruise's radicalization. It's written
in your piece that he was radicalized in part by
the GDL, the Going Defense League, and participated in the
city council desk squads, as reported by our own Molly Conger,
and then just seemingly like just getting bored of just
calling into city council meetings to Yelsler's he then like

(46:47):
coued the organization. So I'm curious if he ever wrote
about or talked about his background with the GDL and
his like apparent boredom at their particular style of like
a white supremacist activism.

Speaker 8 (46:59):
Yeah, so he, I think was just kind of like
sitting on the internet as like a fucking, you know, dorky, lonely,
sad little man, and you know, got into the GDL.
For those who have the fortune of not knowing, the
GDL is sort of this network of like really grotesque,
highly cringey racist Twitch streamers or not on Twitch anymore,

(47:24):
but like you know there's streamers.

Speaker 4 (47:25):
Nonetheless, they've been banned from Twitch. But yeah, but.

Speaker 8 (47:30):
Yeah, so they have this program called the City Council
Death Squad where they will like call into like your
local city council meeting and just like yellow slurs at
the bleeder municipal employees that have to sit and watch.
They did one Corvalis and like watching the footage was
just like watching like these like grown men acting like children,

(47:51):
like you know, hollering at like random like city councilor
twenty three or whatever. It's really like pathetic. So I think,
you know, Cruse kind of saw that and many do
you know, the GDL is just a tremendously fucking pathetic organization.
And he was like kind of decided that he wanted
to get more involved, and he chose to get involved

(48:12):
with WLM as opposed to like another neo Nazi formation
because WLM is like a really really easy entry point
and has a very like, you know, kind of base politic.
It's not like you know, Patriot Front or an active
club where there are you know, membership requirements and you
have to engage in certain amounts of organizing activity or whatever.

(48:32):
It's just very easy for you know, your lazy Nazi
to engage with.

Speaker 10 (48:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (48:37):
Absolutely, it definitely feels like the lazy person's option who
doesn't want to go through the work of being vetted
by like actual, like larger organizations.

Speaker 8 (48:45):
Yeah, and he he took over the chapter from an
even lazier Nazi named Christian Coats who lives in Portland, Orion,
who is like this old school bonehead from the two
thousands who like has some hate crime charges from like
I think like attempting to and failing to assault some
black teams in like two thousand and seven. So Christian

(49:06):
had in the interceding years between us destroying the initial
iteration of w Olm taking it over and basically done
like zilch with it. He posts like one photo on
the channel. Ever, but then he got taken over by
this dude Cruise, who grew the organization from like just
a few people to you know, being a reasonable street
presence in a short number of months, obviously at the

(49:31):
expense of including an anti fascist infiltrator, and you know,
also just a true coterie of scumbags and idiots in
the in the group.

Speaker 4 (49:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (49:42):
One of the other guys that you've identified is I
don't know how to say his last name, but Casey
I want to say Nutson.

Speaker 8 (49:48):
Oh yeah, Casey Knutson, who.

Speaker 7 (49:50):
After being kicked out of both the Proud Boys and
Patriot Front, made his own group in twenty twenty two,
the Rose City Nationalists, which is kind of the laughing
stock of all white pharmacist groups in the PNW, and
the group has the group has largely fallen apart after
being just extensively investigated and exposed by local antie fascists
almost to a comical extent.

Speaker 8 (50:11):
Yeah, ourselves, Rose City Antifa and the Stufftown Research Collective
have been kind of going through and just you know,
ripping apart. RCN and RCIEN is at this point more
or less just Casey and this fella named Jared Huber
who is an absolute like freak. He's got a bunch

(50:31):
of tattoos all over his face. He was arrested for
kicking a puppy nearly to death and beating up his grandfather.
Just real scumbag.

Speaker 4 (50:40):
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 8 (50:42):
Yeah, they all have like domestic violence charges and you know.

Speaker 4 (50:45):
Are just yes.

Speaker 8 (50:46):
Real nightmare folks. The funniest thing about Rose City Nationalists
is they gotten this conflict with the Proud Boys that
I believe it was in Oregon City where they got
just absolutely washed by some drunken Proud Boys on the street.
Not because of like ideological issues, but just because they
like have you know, interpersonal issues between Casey and the

(51:09):
Portland chapter of the Proud Boys.

Speaker 6 (51:10):
It was.

Speaker 8 (51:11):
You know, they are truly just a laughing stock and
are just like you know, I hate to use the term,
but kind of like locals at this point.

Speaker 7 (51:19):
No, I mean and one thing that you do, like
document is just how many of these guys are like
domestic abusers, and like this is not uncommon for like
these types of fellows. But also Cruise like both admitted
to stealing a gun and also abusing his wife and
threatening other family with firearms. And this is like a
trend across as so many of the people exposed in

(51:41):
these articles. Is the extent to which they're all in
viewed in like disposal abuse, child abuse. It's it's just
it's one of the very consistent factors.

Speaker 8 (51:50):
Yeah, misogyny is you know, one of the very very
core parts of neo Nazism and white nationalism. And yeah,
there's a really really horrible like section of texts in
art article that where Cruz discusses like physically hitting his
fiance and then threatening his brother with a firearm. And yeah,

(52:10):
it's really really common that these people have domestic abuse charges.
Multiple people in w lam Oregon have histories of domestic abuse,
including Jaron Huber and Casey Knutson, who are the two
other members. And yeah, it's just anytime you look at
a Nazi group, there's a dude who beats his wife,
and it like kind of barn On. As long as
we've been doing this work, we've been seeing it.

Speaker 7 (52:31):
I'd like to talk now about the second in command
of White Lives Matter Oregon, this small business owner in
Couse Bay named Michael Witt Gaiton Byne who usually just
goes by Wit. Now, Witt has been a part of
the White Lives Matter Oregon banner drops, and that was
also responsible for a lot of the stickering that gets

(52:52):
done as he leaves stickers across the truck stop bathrooms
up and down the coast. Now, WIT's kind of a
fascinating fellow to me. He has shockingly bad op SEC,
kind of one of the worst examples I've ever seen.
His very easily recognized custom flatbed truck can be seen
at banner drops in August and it even appears in

(53:12):
their own like propaganda videos for another banner drop in September.
He like talked about his just like utter disregard for
off SEC in one of the audio archives that you
have hosted on left Goo's right watch, what else can
you tell us about kind of WIT's background here?

Speaker 9 (53:29):
Yeah, so what is a Nazi?

Speaker 6 (53:33):
And I believe his mother is actually you know, he
said at one point his mother was like quote awakened.

Speaker 9 (53:38):
To the truth about the Jews or something like that.

Speaker 6 (53:41):
So he seems to come from at the very least
an anti Semitic family. But he himself is certainly a Nazi,
and I think he has believed he can operate with
impunity in kous Bay. So I think it's less that
he has bad op second, more believes he seems to
think of himself as living in a world where it's
okay to be a Nazi. Sure, we can talk a
little bit more about that, but yeah, he runs a

(54:02):
company called Wit Industries, which he's claimed does business from
Mexico to Russia. He works in the marine, marine and
maritime industry within the Port of Kouz Bay and kous County.
We know that he's gotten about a quarter million dollars
in public contracts, primarily from the Port of kous Bay,
but also the Port of Aumqua, the City of North Bend,

(54:25):
Kou's County, South Coast Education Service District.

Speaker 9 (54:28):
That's just what we've found so far.

Speaker 6 (54:30):
It can be pretty difficult to find, you know, even
though this is public money, it can still be sort
of a pretty difficult process to get public records and
things like that.

Speaker 9 (54:37):
But you know, we know that the Port of kus Bay.

Speaker 6 (54:40):
Alone has awarded him like two hundred nineteen thousand dollars
in contracts for work ranging from hydraulics repairs and replacements
on vessels on the bridge. He's also pained the state
dredge and the trailer and things like that.

Speaker 9 (54:57):
You mentioned him using his work vehicle.

Speaker 8 (54:58):
So he he has.

Speaker 6 (55:00):
Stated, and this is from you know, information we have
from the Cornellis INTI for infiltration. He stated that part
of his goal is to build a white supremacist called
in Coos Bay. He wants to get guys elected to
mayor and city council and things like that. And he
actually was using White Lives Matter to recruit guys to

(55:21):
come and work for him. He was recruiting a guy
named wand And Calhoun, who is also an alleged pedophile.
And we go into in the left Colus Right Watch article,
but if he got this alleged pedophile land In to
come and work for him, they met in White Lives
Matter and he said, hey, come work for an all
white organization where we can come and build the movement together.

Speaker 9 (55:42):
And as far as we know, it does.

Speaker 6 (55:43):
Appear that Landon has moved there, who's planning to move
there in this fall, and we believe he's currently there.

Speaker 4 (55:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (55:49):
I like to kind of go by some of these
points one by one because he's he's certainly like a
worrying figure. The fact that he's using his income, which
is largely derived of government contracts, to like specif defictly,
like fund white Ermas detectivity in the PNW, and like
use his own company resources to grow the number of
far right extremists in cus Bay, specifically his plans of

(56:12):
like having them eventually like occupied positions of local government.
It's a degree of like long term planning that isn't
always present in some of these types of guys. You know,
plans are one thing, but when you actually have a
business that you are like hiring people to move to
this town to like actually build this plan up, like,
it shows a degree of hutspa. I guess on his

(56:34):
part that he's actually like doing this. It kind of
reminds me of the Rise Above movements tree trimming business,
but that was just to pay bills. They had no
plans to like slowly actually just like take over a
small town. There's a lot of these businesses that are
run by Nazis that primarily hire other Nazis. But the
degree to which that Michael wit Is is able to

(56:57):
operate without much oversight and just get get all of
this money from local government is certainly worrying.

Speaker 3 (57:02):
I know.

Speaker 7 (57:03):
He stated that one of his employees like prints out
all of his White Lives Matter stickers and has gotten
help from employees to do one banner drop outside of Roseberg,
and has a history of hiring far right people, conspiracy
theorists and like monetarily supporting them to like help them
continue their own far right activism.

Speaker 6 (57:23):
Yeah, and you mentioned his employees that were printing the
stickers for him. That was before he hired Landon, So yeah,
he already has guys that are that are doing this
and the port. I think it's important to point out
that the point of cou'se bay, it's public body. The
commissioners are elected by the governor and they're confirmed by
the organ Senate you know, or yeah, the Moorgan.

Speaker 9 (57:43):
Senate, I believe it is.

Speaker 6 (57:44):
So this is a state body that is giving state
funding to this Nazi and I think that's really important
to name.

Speaker 9 (57:52):
It's also like just to give people a.

Speaker 6 (57:54):
Little bit of the geography, because it's a small town
that actually geographically takes quite.

Speaker 9 (58:00):
A while to like drive from North Bend to Coos Bay.

Speaker 6 (58:04):
And Witt lives right over by the Charleston Marina, and
we know he's pretty in bed with the marina folks.

Speaker 10 (58:10):
There.

Speaker 6 (58:11):
There was a big organ Department of Transportation grant to
the state level that the port had written that Wit
would have been one of the.

Speaker 9 (58:18):
Like people making money. He was like written.

Speaker 6 (58:21):
Officially into this grant for it was a three point
five million dollar grant that.

Speaker 9 (58:27):
Wit was written into, right, so.

Speaker 4 (58:28):
They're like his friends, you know, like they're like, yeah.

Speaker 9 (58:30):
They're writing him into these grants. Witt's office is.

Speaker 6 (58:34):
Over there on Ocean View Boulevard, which is right next
to the Confenrated Tribes of Kuzler m Quan sayslaw Indians
tribal housing office, and right next to one of their casinos.
And just to give folks the terrain of where he's
living and kind of operate and too.

Speaker 7 (58:50):
Yeah, hello Garrison from the future, just to cutting in
to say something that Hank said, but I got a
little bit garbled in the voice modulation. So I just
want to stay at a little bit more clearly here,
there's some other events that can help contextualize what WIT
is doing in Kuse Bay, because currently in Kous County
there's this sort of intense far right power grab that

(59:11):
is slowly happening. Some people might know of this radio
host named Rob Taylor. He's said to be one of
the guys who coordinated the breaching of the Oregon Capital
in late December, which was basically a test run for
January sixth, and he's hosted people with the far right
group Patriot Prayer. He has an old gab account which
was essentially like Nazi Twitter before Twitter just became Nazi

(59:33):
Twitter under Elon Musk. So this guy is like very
comfortable and associates with extremely far right people as well
as engaged in a level of activism in Oregon at least.
So that's Rob Taylor, the radio guy. There's this other
person named Rod Taylor who's a Kus County commissioner who
actually was a January sixth insurrectionist. He was arrested at

(59:54):
the capitol on Jay six Now Michael went to Geitonbine
has also previously impled this guy named Matt Wilbanks who's
a buddy of Rob Taylor. He runs this blog called
The Daily Resistor and also one of the kous County
neighborhood watch groups in the Empire District of cous Bay,
which is mostly just focused on like doxing and harassing

(01:00:16):
homeless people. And these guys are also part of various
mega groups like Citizens Restoring Liberty, and Wit himself is
a part of this network. He has attended Citizens Restoring
Liberty events. He's also an admin on a Telegram channel
called the organ Patriot Alliance, which is like this mega
patriots organizing channel on Telegram. Nominally, these mega types typically

(01:00:39):
say that they are, you know, not for Nazis, They
are against Nazis, they are against pedophiles, and yet they
are associating with Wit here who employs a pedophile and
is a Nazi. But one other thing that Hank said
that I want to reiter rate is that Kuspe is
also a contested space. Although there is this intensely far

(01:01:00):
right power graph happening, there's also a whole bunch of
other much more positive activism. Hank pointed to the tribal
communities of fighting for Indigenous sovereignty as well as environmentalist
groups calling bs on the port's greenwashing of all their projects.
So it's not just that like everyone's Nazis now in
Cuse Bay. Yes, Wit is a Nazi and people should

(01:01:21):
be concerned about that, but it is a contested space
home to a diverse group of people who are also
fighting for good things. We're now going to have an
ad break and then return to talk more about White
Lives Matter Oregon. Okay, we are back, and uh, Alex,

(01:01:46):
you said you wanted to add something on this point
about Toose Bay being a contested space.

Speaker 3 (01:01:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:01:51):
I think one thing that is important to just like
throw onto what Hank is saying about Who's Bay as
a contested space is like it's not entirely unheard of
for neo Nazis to kind of try to do these
projects of like moving a bunch of people to certain
usually rural areas to you know, try to take them over,

(01:02:13):
you know, most notably like Leaf, North Dakota, where Crane
Com tried to take over. But well, I think has
been shown really repeatedly is that these projects have failed
because the communities that live there, you know, even if
they're rural communities, even if they're small towns, don't have
it and are willing to fight back. And that's what
we're really hoping to see from folks on the Oregon

(01:02:36):
South coast being willing to push back against this sort
of thing like was done in Leaf and you know,
forcing these people out of the institutions they're trying to inhabit.

Speaker 7 (01:02:46):
Yeah, and especially with someone like Michael here, because he's
like hiring people who advocate going much farther than white
lives matter to actually engage in like paramilitary training, hiring
someone who is like not just accused of being a pedophile,
but has admitted to Michael that his family like hates
him because of an allegation that he's that he's touched
someone and that Michael himself witnessed this guy Calhoun being

(01:03:08):
quote unquote hands on with an eight year old girl
while while they were meeting together in Cuspe. There's like
that side of it. And then you have him like
posting on telegram about like wanting the day of the
rope to come faster, kind of like an old like
Nazi slogan about like racial like lynchings and like furthering
racial conflict as well as like sharing instructions from the

(01:03:29):
meme Woffen telegram channel about how to make Maltov cocktails.
I believe we've talked about Meme Waffen on the show before.
So he's like doing all of this type of stuff
that's like so much more obviously objectionable, while also trying
to like make like space for himself within like the
mega community, right being the admin of this organ Patriots
Alliance telegram channel, which is like also an attempt just

(01:03:51):
to like further the radicalization of these like mega centric
members by like inundating them with more explicit kind of
fascistic propaganda, but on like a slow level.

Speaker 4 (01:04:00):
And then there are.

Speaker 7 (01:04:01):
Multi million and multi billion dollar government projects to improve
the port that is expected to receive funds from. And
I feel like this is something that's pretty pretty objectionable
and it should be easy to stop, but it requires
like attention and it requires a degree of public pressure
to make sure that the government, both state and federal,
are not giving funds to like an explicit neo Nazi

(01:04:23):
who hires alleged pedophiles to fund like right wing activism
across the Pacific Northwest.

Speaker 9 (01:04:29):
Yeah, totally.

Speaker 6 (01:04:30):
And I think it's important to point out too, like
you know, kus Bay is in this process. They have
the intermodal Port of Kus Bay, which is like a
two point three billion dollar project where they want to
become like, you know, they want to be as big
of a port as Oakland, California or whatever. And you know,
one of the things, I mean, my understanding from talking

(01:04:50):
to folks in Cuz Bay is that it's just greenwashed
capitalism that will be destructive to the environment.

Speaker 9 (01:04:56):
It won't actually bring the community the.

Speaker 6 (01:04:59):
Kind of like are like what about bike lanes, you know,
like there's like community infrastructure people want in cus Bay
and dredging the port is not that, you know.

Speaker 9 (01:05:09):
And I think there's also like a couple of examples
of that is it.

Speaker 6 (01:05:12):
Will destroy eel grass, which is a really important marine
habitat and also source of storage carbon. It will destroy
indigenous cultural resources or impact those spaces. And you know,
we haven't seen the exact financials yet for what this
project will be, but it's a two point three billion
dollar project that involves dredging, you know, which is sort

(01:05:33):
of deepening and widening.

Speaker 9 (01:05:35):
The port and the channels.

Speaker 6 (01:05:37):
And we know that Witt has gotten money, for example,
to work on the state dredge and do work on
it so I think it's very possible that wit would
be until the Port takes the stand and says, hey,
we're not funding this nazi who uses his work truck
to do Nazi stuff. I think people should be really
concerned about this port money going back to help build

(01:05:59):
or not community that he's trying to build there.

Speaker 7 (01:06:03):
Yeah, and like to your previous point, like the fact
that he's able to be so flagrant about his white
supremacist beliefs, the way that he doesn't feel like he
needs to care about OPSEC because he has a job
that's like irreplaceable, Like he provides a service to this
community that he feels like no one else can do.
Therefore he is secure in that, Like you can't allow
them that level of comfortability, and that's something that has
to be like opposed due to both like public pressure

(01:06:26):
and research that like you have done, as well as
the crucial work from corbetto Sentiva.

Speaker 6 (01:06:32):
Yeah, you know, I think just to add to like,
like groups like the Organ's Bay Area, which is like
a popular Facebook group has been doing a really great
job like raising.

Speaker 9 (01:06:41):
Just talking about and what's going on.

Speaker 6 (01:06:44):
I think largely we really haven't seen much response from
the Port of Cosbe or the governor who's confirming these commissioners,
Like largely the sort of institutions of power are not
yet responding, and so I think that's something that with
local folks in KUSBEI could be pressuring. And also at
a statewide level, right Like this is state funding and

(01:07:07):
the Port of Caussebae development has.

Speaker 9 (01:07:08):
Federal funding too.

Speaker 6 (01:07:10):
But I think those are places where where there could
really be a lot more pressure being applied, and I
think a lot more people should be talking about all
of this as well.

Speaker 9 (01:07:19):
As we mentioned earlier.

Speaker 6 (01:07:20):
You know, WIT claims to have a reputation and work
and contracts all up and down the entire West coast.
So certainly if there are listeners in here in Oakland
or Alaska or Washington.

Speaker 9 (01:07:33):
Or wherever you might be who know the name.

Speaker 6 (01:07:35):
With GAT and Bne or WIT Industries and you want
to send in a tip to Cornella's Antifa or whatever
Marco's right watch, we would be really happy to hear
what you know about this guy, because we know we
know he's working in other communities. We we would love
details or any tips folks might have.

Speaker 4 (01:07:52):
Yeah, would either of you like to kind of add
anything else?

Speaker 7 (01:07:55):
Before we close out and point to people towards both
your work and where to send.

Speaker 8 (01:08:00):
Yeah, I guess the thing that I would just close
out with is WLM is not just an organ problem,
it's a national problem. I know, this podcast reaches folks
all across the country. If you are somebody who is
Antifa curious or is interested in making a difference in
your community, it's a group with really terrible security culture,

(01:08:22):
and it might be worth taking a gander at that.
And then, you know, God, it feels so silly to
do a podcast plug, but please check out our work
at CV antifa dot no blogs dot org. We're also
on Twitter at CV against fash and Instagram at cv Antifa,
and you know, we have lots of articles exposing neo
Nazis in Oregon and across the country, and you might

(01:08:46):
just find somebody in your community who sucks.

Speaker 6 (01:08:49):
Thank Yeah, I'll just add you know, if you want
to see the of course, the LEFTUS Right Watch article
gives a really deep dive on what and also information
for public.

Speaker 9 (01:08:58):
Use has posted like the financials, so if you.

Speaker 6 (01:09:01):
Really want to like get into the numbers, it's worth
looking there. And yeah, just to reiterate, I mean, I
think kus Bay and so many other places are really
contested spaces, and I think these Nazis want us to
believe that they're in charge and that they're powerful, and
they have this idea that they can operate with impunity,
and it's really not true. Like we've seen small and

(01:09:23):
rural towns take down Nazis all over this country, and
I think that will continue. And I think that, yeah,
like what tactics in ways people might do that from
place to place can look different, but I just you know,
encourage folks to dig into your local Nazis and get
together and figure out how to how to mess them up,
you know. And it's a it's a good way to

(01:09:44):
have fun with your friends and uh and we can
do it, you know, and and we need we need
to be doing it. I mean, there just shouldn't be
state money going to help a Nazi build a white
supremacist utopia. I mean, that's the that's the history of
this country, right, Like, that's the history.

Speaker 7 (01:10:00):
Colonization, that's the history of Oregon specifically. So yeah, it's
a time to do something else.

Speaker 8 (01:10:06):
Yeah, And Antifa isn't just for you big city folk,
you know, those must live in rural communities can and
should be involved in these struggles, and it is something
that like is not just something that happens in Portland.

Speaker 9 (01:10:20):
People in rural orient are.

Speaker 8 (01:10:22):
Doing anti fascism and will continue to do it and
will continue to win.

Speaker 4 (01:10:27):
Thank you both so much.

Speaker 7 (01:10:28):
I will leave links to your orgs and your and
your articles in the description below. Thank you for listening.
And yeah, if you are antifa curious, give it a shot.
It is indeed fun.

Speaker 2 (01:10:59):
What Brett my cavanaughs. I'm Robert Evans, and this is
it could happen here? A podcast about it happening here
with me today is Sophie Lichterman and Mia Wong. We're
going to be talking about a guy who is near
and dear to my heart because the second to the
last conversation I ever had with my mom was about
Brett Kavanaugh. Mia, what are we gonna learn today?

Speaker 4 (01:11:21):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (01:11:22):
Boy, God, have you done the what's breading my Kavanaugh before?

Speaker 7 (01:11:27):
Like?

Speaker 2 (01:11:28):
I'm certain I haven't. Why would I have?

Speaker 4 (01:11:30):
I don't know if I oddly familiar? So if he has,
somebody let me know. Thank you.

Speaker 10 (01:11:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:11:38):
Tell us the good and the bad.

Speaker 2 (01:11:40):
Yeah, we already know the ugly. Yeah, I'm body shaming
Brett Kavanaugh. Yeah that's right, motherfucker.

Speaker 4 (01:11:46):
That's right, motherfucker. The worst thing he consequences he's ever
going to suffer are this bad news cycle and me
saying something that's not legally defamatory, and if he wants
to fucking prove it, you could sue me over it.

Speaker 2 (01:12:00):
He has a sweet gig for life. Yeah, he's set,
is set, bro.

Speaker 1 (01:12:05):
Yeah, Yeah, he sucks so bad that even like you know,
Midwest dads hate him, so at least there's that.

Speaker 4 (01:12:15):
Yeah, he's he's really rad sid And so I think
I think the place to start with this actually is
not with Kavanaugh, but with Trump, because what we're talking
about today is a thing that we kind of knew
was true but didn't know the extent of until now,
which is that the supposed FBI investigation into everything that
Brett Kavanaugh did was like fake and deliberately fucked by

(01:12:37):
Trump specifically, Like this is Trump specifically told them to
just like not do the investigation, and so they didn't
do the investigation and nothing happened. This is the sort
of how we got confirmed. And I think the interesting
thing about this, partially it's because I hate breck Capital.

Speaker 2 (01:12:51):
Yeah, he sucks the worst guy, a real dick.

Speaker 4 (01:12:55):
Yeah, But I think the everything about him is like
I feel like everyone has forgotten what it was like
to live under Trump. I agree, because there was just
so much shit happening all the time, Like every single
every single day was like a new one of these things.
And I want to go back to what like one
week of Trump was like, because every single fucking week

(01:13:17):
was like this, and it was the most miserable thing.
So who is Brett Kavanaugh. He's one of the nine
assholes who get to decide whether we all have rights
for people who've sort of forgotten his background. So he's
like an old old like nineties era, kind of like
protege of the nineties Republican gruls. He's like one of

(01:13:38):
the people who helps Ken Starr do the like Monica
Lewinsky trial. Like he's he's involved in a whole bunch
of sort of like Republican rat fucking operations. He's also
and I think this one's actually important to remembers, to
go up to the election, Kavanall was part of the
legal team that helped Bush do the original Stop the
Steal in two thousands, just like straight up stole the
election in Florida.

Speaker 2 (01:13:59):
So love that these guys keep getting jobs as opposed
to I don't know, getting the punishment for treason.

Speaker 4 (01:14:06):
And he's only fifty nine years old. Yeah, he's so
young for that job. We have like forty more years
of him.

Speaker 2 (01:14:15):
If you ever wanted like a clear reason why we
shouldn't do things like the death penalty for treason, it's
because when people commit treason, nothing happens to them, and
when people I don't know agitate for Puerto Rican independence,
they get executed. Like that's that's what happens with those laws.
I just bad avoid laws existing.

Speaker 4 (01:14:38):
Yeah, and especially avoid all of your laws being dictated
by a bunch of a bunch of fucking serial predators. Yeah,
and this gets us too. So Kevinaugh's appointment was very
very close. The Republicans at the time they controlled the Senate,
but they had a fifty two to forty eight margin,
and a lot of those kind kind of marginal senators

(01:15:03):
were like.

Speaker 1 (01:15:04):
There was there was a more realistic chance of it
not happening then typically Yeah, but they still fucked it
in the end.

Speaker 4 (01:15:14):
Oh yeah, of course. But you know the reason, the
reason why it was close. Is as I think most
people probably remember, Kavanaugh is a serial sexual predator. He
has sexually assaulted so many fucking people. People saw him
do it. There were times when he was the only
fucking person there he did there were times when we
did it in crowds. He definitely one hundred percent did it.
And if he wants to fucking sue me about it, like,

(01:15:35):
I'll see you in court, motherfucker.

Speaker 1 (01:15:37):
And while we're here, Clarence Thomas also a predator, thank you.

Speaker 4 (01:15:41):
We're going to get to that.

Speaker 2 (01:15:43):
Let's let's be clear here, Like if we're doing an
Olympics of predators, Clarence Thomas is up in the number
one spot. Brett Kavanaugh's down in place three. You know,
Thomas is a much, much more I don't know, expansive predator.

Speaker 4 (01:15:58):
Yeah, there was some belief at the time in this
is sort of like every single article about this like
talks about how this is peakb too, but it is
of important that like this, it was a real possibility
that he was going to go down in flames. Yeah,
it has happened before, it can happen again, and it
was a real issue for him. It was a real
issue for him in large part because Christine Blossi Forde,

(01:16:19):
who's a psychology professor, just like testified under oath in
one of the most like fucking harrowing things I've ever
seen on the floor of the Senate.

Speaker 2 (01:16:28):
Horrific.

Speaker 4 (01:16:29):
Yeah. The thing I stuck with b was like he
was laughing while he did it. It's just like, this
guy is a fucking monster.

Speaker 2 (01:16:36):
I Mean. One of the things that you do have
to take into account is that, like the media infrastructure
that world up to defend Brett Kavanaugh to ensure that
this didn't take him down existed in part because about
a third of right wing media, like about a third
of that whole infrastructure system exists because of the Clarence
Thomas hearings. Ye, Like that and Nixon's resignation being for

(01:17:00):
are kind of the two two inciting incidents of modern
conservative media. Those were the things that made them really
commit to the idea that, like, we have to build
a completely separate ecosystem of facts because if we let
reality in at all, like our guys who are all
sex predators and criminals will never be able to win
or stay in office.

Speaker 4 (01:17:20):
Yeah. Yeah, And also, I mean it's worth noting too
that like Roger ayles Off, who is like one of
the people responsible for building all this infrastructure, was also
himself just a serial predator on a like frankly incomprehensible scale. Yes,
And so all these people were also just defending themselves
because they also are all fucking their own sometimes miniature capital,

(01:17:43):
sometimes worse Kavenaughs. And it into this sort of breach,
right like, so this is this is this is a
real pr crisis to Republicans, this is this is going
even worse for them then the last time that they
fucking did this, which was, as we've alluded to, when
they got Clarence Thomas on and when Joe Biden didn't
like personally helped Railroad Anita Hill to make sure that

(01:18:04):
when she would get fucked when she to testify against
claris Thomas. So that's great, incredible stuff. There was a
point in our nation's history where that was actually like
a political problem for Joe Biden. We're fucking no longer
there anymore. And into this breach steps what's supposed to
be an FBI investigation. Yeah, ostensibly, Yeah, so I'm going

(01:18:25):
to read from a recently released report, and there's gonna
be I'm going to quote from this report a lot,
because this is this is the sort of new information
that we have. Where can people see the report? It
will be in the description. If you just like search
Sheldon white House Report, you should be able to find it.
There'll be a link in the notes. Yeah, we'll link it.

Speaker 3 (01:18:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:18:44):
It's like it's like thirty pages. It's actually not third
it's more like twenty pages because like a bunch of
the mergercizations, so it's pretty easy read. I'm going to
read some of it. And also I do want to
point out the fact that the Senate Judiciary Committee member
who wrote this thing is named Sheldon white House. Incredible name,
incredible center.

Speaker 2 (01:19:01):
That is a great name. Where does that come from?
That can't be a real name. That can't be a
name that existed. That can't be a name that existed
before the White House, right, Like it has to have
at some point been named after the White House, right,
I mean, why else would you have that name?

Speaker 4 (01:19:16):
Well, it could just be that this family historically lived
in a White House for seven hundred years.

Speaker 2 (01:19:20):
You'd have to be in a White House for a
long ass time to get.

Speaker 4 (01:19:23):
That last name. So here's from the report quote after
hearing the testimony by Ford and Kavanaugh, the Judiciary Committee
agreed to request the FBI he knocked a supplemental background
investigation quote limited to current credible allegations against Kavanaugh, before
the full Senate voted on his confirmation. And so there's

(01:19:43):
an important detail here that wasn't clear to anyone at
the time, because fucking no one knows how the minutia
of FBI investigations work. But this was not actually a
full FBI investigation. This is this is something called a
like supplemental background investigation, and we'll get into what exactly

(01:20:04):
that is in a second, but it's not like a
real FBI investigation. And this investigation does what it was
supposed to do, which was, you know, clear Kavanaugh's name
and off of Republican senators to be able to vote
for him without immediately getting destroyed politically. What it didn't
do was like actually conduct an investigation. Trump very famously
at this time it says that the investigation had quote

(01:20:26):
free reign and it unbelievably did not bull fucking shit. Yeah,
he just lied about this, like yep.

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

Speaker 4 (01:20:34):
The administration directly ran the investigation, killed it, and then
used its political power and the FBI itself to you know,
illegitimately railroad a serial predator or on at the Supreme
Court to take away of when's right to get into abortion.
And then after that they stonewalled the investigation for six years.
So this is how that sort of process worked. I'm
going to quote from that report again. Third, although the

(01:20:56):
Trump administration and the FBI assured the Senate that the
FBI's investigation was being conducted quote by the book, they
failed to disclose that there was actually no quote unquote
book at all. The FBI produced no written records for
supplemental background investigation, saying it was merely acting as the
quote agent for the White House in such matters.

Speaker 2 (01:21:17):
Which white House was it? Sheldon White?

Speaker 9 (01:21:20):
Sorry?

Speaker 4 (01:21:21):
No, white House? Bad, the one with the president White House.

Speaker 2 (01:21:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:21:26):
By the way, I was, I was trying to debunk
his last name. He comes from the longest line of
nepotism of that he.

Speaker 2 (01:21:34):
I was like, I was like, oh, they must have
gotten named that back when like the fact that they
had a house at all was noteworthy.

Speaker 4 (01:21:40):
Yeah, these people have paint it literally kept going.

Speaker 1 (01:21:44):
I was like, okay, one level, okay, two levels okay, three,
okay for this, Okay, when does it end?

Speaker 4 (01:21:50):
And then I got bored? And the funny part of
back of this again is that, like this is the
good guy in this story is my NEPO baby like
like corruption Junior Senator of Rhode Island. Yeah, okay, yeah,
And I want to kind of focus in on this
statement in and of itself, because this is just like

(01:22:10):
an absolutely hideous a view of just like the hideous
power of the unitary executive just do whatever the fuck
it wants. Like, what do you mean that the FBI
produced no written protocols for for how they're supposed to
do supplements of background investigation? What do you mean that
they were quote acting as an agent for the White House?

(01:22:30):
That's batshit? Why why their security service is literally directly
answered to one guy who could just tell them what
to do whatever the fuck he wants. That's insane. That
is a that is a fucking that is a drange
political system. And yet this is you know, this is
this is the system I'm supposed to be doing this stuff,
which is also very funny because White House is like

(01:22:51):
not really trying to get into a feud with the FBI,
So there's a lot of kind of like a sculptory
stuff in the FBI. But like, also everything the FBI
does in this is such a fiasco that it's very
clearly like also very much their fault. I'm gonna read
another quote from this. This is from a bit later
in the report. Fourth, the FBI's tip line was not

(01:23:11):
used to facilitate the FBI supplemental background investigation into the
allegations against Kavanall on instructions from the White House. The
FBI did not investigate thousands of tips that came through
the FBI's tip line. Instead, all tips related to Kavandall
were forwarded to the White House without investigation. If anything,
the White House may have used the tip line to

(01:23:33):
steer FBI investigators away from derogatory or damaging information, which
is again absolutely nuts insane.

Speaker 2 (01:23:42):
And like, yes, so this is the kind of thing
that like should be serious crime, right, like yeah, you go,
you get locked up for forever, Like this is a
forever crime. Yeah, it seems much more serious than I
don't know, robbing a bank to try and fund the
Puerto Rican independence movement.

Speaker 4 (01:23:57):
Yeah, it's not clear to me whether this would have
been a giant scandal for a normal administration, just because
the American presidency has so much power. But it should
have been like this was just like a thing that
would happen every week under Trump, was like he would
just do shit like this. Do you know also what
you should do? Shit like I don't know. That was
not my best pivot.

Speaker 2 (01:24:15):
No, no, but but do shit like.

Speaker 4 (01:24:18):
Yeah, like like these products and services that support the podcast,
we are back. We've gotten to the point where again
the FBI's tip line is not actually being used of
the investigation. They're sending it all to the White House.

(01:24:39):
The report found that so the FBI, like and I
talked about the public at the time, they talked to
ten people who they said had like direct knowledge of
the situation. But again they only talked to ten people,
and there is a whole bunch of people who had
very relevant evidence about a lot of important stuff in
this Like so one of the claims that's going on

(01:24:59):
here is that Kavanaugh was just wasted all the time.
And this is like every single person you talk to
who knew Kavanaugh in college and isn't like directly employed
by the Republican Party was like, oh yeah, this guy
wasted all the time, right, and this became a big
part of the trial. And there were a whole bunch
of people who tried to go to the FBI to
be like, hey, he did this, and they just like
would not talk to them. People who tried to come forward,

(01:25:22):
like they wouldn't talk to people who sent them information
to the tip line. They just like didn't talk to
them at all. I'm going going to read from the
thing again. According to a quote executive summary, if the
FBI supplemental background investigation issued by the Judiciary Committee majority,
the majority of that time was Republican majority, So that's
why it's fucked. These people were quote all witnesses with

(01:25:45):
potential firsthand knowledge at the allegations. The FBI did not, however,
interview Ford or Kavanaugh, the witnesses potentially with the most
firsthand knowledge, nor did it speak to other potentially corroborating
witnesses who had not witnessed the events firsthand. Nevertheless, the
Judiciary Committee's Republicans executive summary concluded that the quote supplemental

(01:26:06):
background investigation confirms there is no cooberation of allegations made
by doctor Ford and Ms Ramirez, So they didn't talk
to either Kavanaugh or Ford, the two people who the
thing was a ballot.

Speaker 2 (01:26:19):
Well, I mean, you know, why would you need to
do that, right, Like.

Speaker 4 (01:26:23):
Wait, what the fuck? This is so insane. No. Oother
part of this is so the FBI's initial background check
didn't turn up any of this, and so the supplemental
thing is being done in place of like the normal
background check because the normal background check was also done
like shit, and so they never figured out any of
this incredibly obvious stuff about him. And meanwhile, like the
supplemental one just they just kept being like, oh, well,

(01:26:44):
we don't actually need to talk to the people who
this is about for incredibly nebulous reasons. And the other
part of this that's going on is that like, while
this process is happening, the Democratic on the Judiciary Committee
are trying to figure out how this process works, and
Trump but just like refuses to talk to any of
them and the FBI refuses to send any of them.

(01:27:04):
People are fighting out like we we know that there's
no specific process for this like supplemental investigation thing, because
like their staffers found it out from a YouTube video Jesus,
like they did not find this out from the FBI.
It was like this guy. Senator staffers were like watching
YouTube videos to figure out how this investigation was supposed
to work. So, and it turns out we had known

(01:27:26):
at the time that the FBI was doing some kind
of shady stuff. But what we know now is that
so Ford and her lawyers repeatedly tried to talk to
the FBI and they were just never able to do so, right,
the FBI completely stonewalled them. And it turns out that
they ston malled them because Trump specifically ordered the FBI

(01:27:46):
not to talk to her or kavanall what what, which
is absolutely insane. Yeah, the law It turns out this
is this is this is the part of this is
the most insane.

Speaker 1 (01:27:57):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:27:57):
Everyone thought that the FBI, which is doing a normal
FBI investigation, right, And part of what's going on here
is that the media is just these like absolute credulous idiots, right,
because every single day the media is reporting that like
Trump is allowing an open investigation because like somehow again
this is this is like two years into him being
in office. Right, none of these people have figured out
that every single thing he says is a lie. They're

(01:28:18):
all like, oh, yeah, Trump keep saying that these people
can talk to whoever they want, and they can investigate
whoever they want. And this gets to the point where
the FBI is calling the White House every day because
they'll be reading the news reports that say we can
talk to anyone, and they'll be like, hey, you told
us we can't talk to these people, and they'll be like, no, no, actually,
you still can't talk to these people. And it turns
out that what's happening is this like quote unquote supplemental investigation.

(01:28:39):
It's not an FBI investigation. They can only do things
that are like quote unquote directed by the president, So
they can only talk to the people who the President
tells them to talk to, and they can't look at
evidence that the President doesn't tell them to to look at.
And so what ends up happening is that like you know,
there's initially like four people that they're they're supposed to

(01:28:59):
be talking to, right, and you know, they keep getting
these like press things that are like, oh, hey, this
is the full this is an open investigation. You can
like do whatever you want. And eventually they put in
like six more people, so like they talked to ten
total people. But because this is an investigation that is
not being run by the FBI. Really it's being it's
being directly ran by Trump himself, which he's lying about

(01:29:21):
because of that, they fucking never talked to anyone. And
then also again as we talked about, right that that
tip line they set up a bunch of the people
who tried to talk to the FBI, who the FBI
wouldn't talk to, were like told, okay, go submit stuff
to this tip line. And the FBI later admits that
the tip line was like never real.

Speaker 2 (01:29:37):
Sure have a nice fake tip line.

Speaker 4 (01:29:39):
Yeah, they never used any of an investigation. They sent
it all the Trump Yeah. And the reason they did
it was that they were sick of people calling their
regular tip line, so they set up a specific tip
line so they could just have all the stuff that
they would never listen to, and the same sense of
the White House so they could do I guess like
oppo research bullshit on it. So this is just straight
up a sham. There's no actual investigation going on. The

(01:30:12):
media people at the time should have been able to
figure out that obviously this thing was bullshit, right, but
nobody looked into it except for this one guy and
the Senate Duciary Committee, And so the support comes back
and goes like, yeah, we did no research. We talked
to like ten people and we didn't like ask them anything,
and we didn't use any of the research that we had,
and we have cleared this guy. As this is happening, right,

(01:30:32):
the Judiciary Committee Democrats are like trying to figure out
what the fuck is going on. And this begins a
six year process of a Senator White House just fighting
a war with the actual White House and the FBI
and the DODA to try to figure out what the
fuck just happens. And the interesting part of this also
is that so obviously the Trump administration was never going

(01:30:53):
to talk to them, right, which is idience of itself
incredibly disturbing that like the Senate Judiciary Committee, who in
theory is one of the organizations supposed to be doing
oversight of the FBI, would send requests of the FBI
for your information, the FBI would just tell him to
fuck off. Yeah. But the interesting part is they kept
doing this under Biden. So Biden's FBI was also doing this.
It was awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:31:13):
I love, I love they do a greta, which fucking
liberals like have concluded politically at least that they have
to be as like vociferously pro law enforcement as they can,
and all cops ever do is say, we are just
waiting for the chance to kill you. Like, yeah, it's great, cool,
good stuff.

Speaker 4 (01:31:31):
I'm going to go relign from this. It's so insane.
When the Senators followed up, they faced the challenge of
aligning FBI, DOJ, and White House equities. They sent like
requests for the emails between Trump and the FBI right
figure out whether Trump was doing the thing he was doing,
which was like directly running the investigation himself. The FBI
claimed it cannot answer without authorization from the DOJ in

(01:31:53):
the White House. The DOJ directed the senator's inquiries to
the White House and the FBI, and the White House
referred the senators back to the agency. So they're doing
this like they're doing the like the circular run around
thing you give him your insurance company where they tell
you to talk to three people and every single one
of them tells you to talk to the other one.
But again, this is the Biden DOJ, the Biden FBI,
and the Biden administration all doing this. The FBI finally

(01:32:15):
provides documents about like their contact with Trump for the investigation.
They finally provide the documents in November of twenty twenty three.
This investigation started in late twenty eighteen. It took half
a decade, almost half of which was under the Biden administration.

(01:32:35):
And also Senator Whitehouse literally threatening to torpedo and nomination
for the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel, Like he had
to threaten the Department of Justice in order to get
them to send the documents that proved that Trump colluded
to top Kavanaugh investigation, which even just some like a
political standpoint from the Democrats, right, why the fuck would
you not want that in the open? I mean, I guess,

(01:32:58):
I guess unless you're Jo Biden, you don't want every
remembering like all the shit you need to need a hill.
But like this is literally free political amministionat of your opponent,
like abusing the political process. And it still took a
Democratic senator just directly threatening the DOJ of a democratic
administration to get this out.

Speaker 1 (01:33:17):
I just like it also took so many years, Like yeah,
Havanat has has been able to take away and fuck
up our rights since what twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen. Yeah,
and the damage he's done is permanent.

Speaker 2 (01:33:34):
Yeah, he will be around in office, possible, very likely
for most of the rest of our lives.

Speaker 3 (01:33:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:33:40):
Like I said earlier, it's only fifty nine years old.

Speaker 2 (01:33:43):
Yeah, he could have another thirty years there at least.

Speaker 4 (01:33:45):
Yeah. And if this stuff had been known, she absolutely
would not have gotten nominated.

Speaker 3 (01:33:50):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:33:50):
There were two unbelievably close votes to get him appointed.

Speaker 1 (01:33:54):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:33:55):
There was a first vote where the Republicans trade a
bypassed the Fillow Bobster and still almost lost. And it
turns out that, Okay, the actual final vote ended up
being fifty to forty eight with two abstensions, and one
of the essensions is this guy was going to his
daughter's wedding or something. But the other abstention was Lisa Morowski,

(01:34:15):
who's the senator from Alaska who's like the most sort
of liberal Republican senators and she does like a coward
present vote so it can happen. And if she had
voted no, and if Joe Manchin hadn't fucking cross party
lines to get to get him in office, which I
think I also people just forget about. Joe mentioned that
he is also like, individually specifically the guy who got

(01:34:36):
fucking Kavanaugh pointed this would have failed, and the only
reason that it didn't fail and that this guy was
able to fucking destroy Roephi Wade is that Trump just
straight up ran a fake FBI investigation and lied to
everyone about it and fucking railroad of the nomination through.
That's fucking Kavanaugh. And I think I think the thing

(01:34:57):
that calls on here again is like every single week
of Trump is just like this, yeah, right, Like every
single day has some bullshit like this. It just like
fucks everyone for the rest of their lives.

Speaker 2 (01:35:07):
Yep.

Speaker 4 (01:35:08):
And it's deeply grim that he could take power again
and we could get back to like the stuff he
was doing at the end of his administratory. Who's just
like having protesters killed with federal worshels, Like.

Speaker 2 (01:35:21):
Yeah, That's the scary thing about it, right, is there's
not any kind of like functional resistance to this. Right,
the left has no power, has no serious organizing capacity
in the United States, and can't get on the same
page about anything that matters, whereas liberals, when they have
four years of control of the federal government cannot adequately

(01:35:45):
prosecute an attempt to overthrow the government and murder them. Yeah,
so I don't know, you know, make sure you got
clean water, folks, check on that garden. I don't know
what to tell you.

Speaker 1 (01:35:58):
It's just so bleak because, like I said earlier, everything
is so permanent.

Speaker 4 (01:36:03):
Yeah, you know what I mean, like.

Speaker 2 (01:36:05):
Just lasts so fucking long.

Speaker 1 (01:36:07):
Yeah, it lasts so long, and like and like we
we don't even know the damage that Kavanaugh is going
to do to our society because of Trump. And it's
also just terrifying that, you know, Trump was able to
manipulate the system in this way and that so many
people were silenced and now our rights are gone, yeah,

(01:36:29):
or our rights are going to be taken away. We
have no idea what else is going to be taken Yea,
we have no idea. What else is going to get
fucked up? We have ideas we have.

Speaker 2 (01:36:38):
The idea is that that Again, the problem is the
root of the problem is that liberals work tirelessly in
this country to stop the left from gaining any power,
and the left works tirelessly to stop itself from having
any kind of influence by having no capacity to organize
or compromise with people who do not agree with whatever

(01:36:59):
their little brand of leftism is. Right, whereas conservatives are
willing to work together with other conservatives they hate for
forty straight years in order to get us to the
position that we're in. That's what happened is they had
message discipline, they had organizing discipline, and they successfully pushed
their madness into the mainstream in such a way that

(01:37:20):
now the Democratic Party, in a lot of ways is
expending a huge amount of its efforts on moving in
the direction of that madness, especially as regards immigration. Look
at where we've moved on immigration from twenty sixteen to
twenty twenty four. Right, That is the result of disciplined
power building as opposed to know what liberals and the

(01:37:41):
left to do, which is fight with each other and
fight amongst each other and engage in a mix of
like craven power politics and worshiping various con artists, and
the right worships con artists too. They just actually get
power out of the deal.

Speaker 1 (01:37:58):
Yeah, like this. The other terrifying thing about this story
is that it's not fucking everywhere. It's not everywhere. Ten
years ago, this would be the scandal of all scandals,
and it's barely barely a headline.

Speaker 2 (01:38:15):
No, because no one's going to do anything about it.
It's like, it's like Elon Musk paying people a million
dollars a day to vote in Pennsylvania, Like that should
be illegal. Like you can at least make a strong
case based on existing laws that that is election interference,
the kind of which that can land you in prison.
Everyone knows, nothing's going to happen to him.

Speaker 4 (01:38:33):
Nothing's going to happen to him.

Speaker 2 (01:38:34):
If Kamala wins, right, if the Dims have a blowout
and wipe up with both Houses of Congress, nothing is
going to happen to Elon Musk.

Speaker 1 (01:38:41):
It's yeah, again, just like we have no idea how
how long this is going to get throw on and
how much worse it could get.

Speaker 2 (01:38:50):
And uh, yeah I have some ideas, but I podcasted
about those back in twenty nineteen. Sophie.

Speaker 4 (01:39:00):
I was there. I was quite literally there.

Speaker 2 (01:39:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:39:03):
But yeah, so thanks Miyah.

Speaker 2 (01:39:06):
That was a boomer, Thank you, Mia. No, this was good.
I uh, this is solid.

Speaker 4 (01:39:10):
And again when.

Speaker 2 (01:39:11):
I started this by saying, my second to the last
conversation I had in person with my mom was about Kavanaugh.
It was hers almost screaming at me because of how
unfair what the Democrats did to Brett Kavanaugh was because
of the good man that they and she felt the
same way about Clarence Thomas right that like these guys
were the victims of media assassination attempts. She feels the

(01:39:31):
same way about Bill Cosby. By the way, anyway, whatever,
I don't need to yell about my mom. I've yelled
about enough this episode.

Speaker 4 (01:39:39):
Tomorrow's episode will be more fun. I promise we're gonna
We're gonna yell about why the Kunda Wild Prizes fake
and read some of the dubbest things you've ever seen
in your life.

Speaker 2 (01:39:46):
Hell, yeah, there we go. There we go, back to
the good stuff, Back to the good stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:39:52):
Yeah. MEA has been deeply excited to do this episode,
So look look out for that one. And I don't know, uh,
touch grass and peta dog if it wants you to.

Speaker 10 (01:40:01):
Yeah bye, no.

Speaker 4 (01:40:24):
Bell prize, welcome to it could happen here a podcast
about Nobel Prizes. I guess I'm your host via loog
with Me with Me?

Speaker 11 (01:40:33):
Is James Himia excited to hear about the dynamite guy prices.

Speaker 4 (01:40:37):
Yeah, so, as people I think are aware, the man
who invented dynamite established a bunch of prizes to be
like the pinnacle of human achievement. Right, every years decided
I'm a bunch of judges and you know, and this
year in the Nobel Prize in physics, right, Nobel Prize
in Physics went to two guys who did a whole
bunch of the sort of fundamental basic work on what

(01:40:59):
became machine learning algorithms. And as annoying as modern AI is,
like machine learning algorithms has fundamentally changed the way that
science works. It changed the strong and I've used it.
I used the new astronomy like there's all this. You know,
it has fundamentally changed the way that humanity functions. Yeah,
it's an important discovery. Yeah, and you know, the Nobel
Price in Medicine went to a group of people who

(01:41:21):
discovered micro rna, which is like a different type of
RNA that fundamentally changed the way that we understand how
like gene regulation works. It's like a fundamental path breaking
thing in biology. They got that, they got the fucking
medicine double price for the Nobel Price in Economics went
to uh three guys who discovered that institutions affect prosperity.

Speaker 11 (01:41:47):
Huge groundbreaking shit. It's like economists don't discover shit. They
just they just say shit, and then other economists are like, yeah,
cool this okay.

Speaker 4 (01:42:00):
So I when I was originally planning this episode, this
is going to be an episode about the fake Nobel Prize,
which is the economics Nobel Prize wich We've talked about
on the show before, but it's worth saying again this
is not a real Nobel Prize, Like, this is not
one of the prizes that was established by Alfred Nobel.
This was a thing established by the sweetest central Bank
as a way to push neoliberal economics new classical economics.

(01:42:21):
And every year they're always very stupid, is the thing, right,
And my plan for this episode because I started seeing
stuff about this Nobel Prize and I was looking at
this and I was like, this is the this is
the one of the dumbest ones they've had since they
gave out one in the two thousands for realizing that
people could simply not make a trade. Like But I

(01:42:41):
was like, Okay, I'm going to go read all of
these papers, right, We're going to come back, We're going
to have a detail analysis of it. And and I'm
reading these papers and it's like it's nothing these three
economists are They're from what's called institutional economics. These are
supposed to be the smart ones, right, These are These
are the economists that like the neoclassical economists had to
bring in, like the normalio classical comments has to bring in,

(01:43:02):
because their models don't work right. And and the thing
that makes them like quote unquote smart is that they
understand the institutions exist, and they know how to use
really really basic game theory models. And this makes them
like the cutting edge, the absolute elite cutting edge of
bortlaw economics on the front lines. What are these people discovered?
Want the people win this prize for? Right? Okay, the

(01:43:24):
thing that they won this prize for like the initial thing,
and there's a couple of stuff that will get you
in a second, but like the big thing that they
figured out is do a series of thunderously stupid regression analyzes.
They discovered something. I don't even know how to frame
the magnitude of this discovery. But it took them a
shit ton of math and like a bunch of like

(01:43:48):
tabulations of mortality data to discover that in some places
European colonial powers formed settular colonies and in some places
they established colonial rule that wasn't based on settler colonies,
and that these were different. This is what they won
the Nobel Prize for. They did a bunch of regression
analyses and were like, holy shit, in some places the

(01:44:12):
Europeans did similar colonies and in some places they didn't,
and it had to do with like disease and a
level of redistance from the indigenous population. They won a
Nobel Prize in Economics for this Are you fucking kidding?

Speaker 11 (01:44:26):
As also a paper that you could write for my
history one ten class at community college.

Speaker 4 (01:44:32):
Okay, some of the discourse about this, right, the Marxist
economist Sharramazar pointed out that, like these fundamental observations were
made by another guy we've talked about on this show,
the red again Marxist economist Paul Baran. And that's a
good point. But also what I was thinking about how
to do this episode, right, This isn't a thing like

(01:44:53):
with like Donald Harris, like we talked abou Kabal Harris's
dad's book, right, and that's that's a book where there's
there's like ideas in it.

Speaker 3 (01:45:00):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:45:01):
You can go through it and you can watch them
developing ideas. You can't do that with this because these
people are not developing ideas. They have discovered the most
obvious things. They have read a single book about history,
and they have attempted to use a bunch of regression
analyses to prove things that like you can just read
a Wikipedia article and discover about the course of colonization.

Speaker 11 (01:45:23):
Yeah, and then you can go back and to a
bunch of aggressionalities to prove something that everyone already needs.

Speaker 4 (01:45:28):
Yeah. And the place that I got to about this
is I have the shoke about Maoism where all the
things that people get from Maoism are things that you
should have learned in elementary school. Like one of the
most common things you get from maoist is like, ah,
you have to read no investigation, no right to speak,
And like, my friend, okay, if you needed maose done

(01:45:48):
to tell you that you needed to research something before
you talked about it, what the fuck happened in your
like the rest with your life? What we're wrong with
your education? Like what has gone wrong with the way
you think about the world that you needed? Nowse Dung
can tell you this and this this is what most

(01:46:10):
Nobel prizes and economics are and this is the most
that it has ever been. So basically their argument is that, like,
this is also an argument that Paul Baran makes is
that like, okay, depending on whether you're dealing with a
settler quality or a sort of like India style like
administrative colony, I guess I'm like a term for it.

Speaker 11 (01:46:31):
It gets like an extractive colony, where you have more
about extracted labor, raw materials and settling.

Speaker 4 (01:46:36):
Yeah, like that changes the kinds of institutions that are
set up. And like, okay, you can if you want
to credit Paul Baron for the discovery that like the
settler colonies and like extractive colonies have different legal institutions
and they function differently, and that has had long range
economic impacts, like stretching into the future. But like this

(01:46:59):
is something again that you you can just you can
find in a history book and immediately understand. And these
people have tried to do this. They're trying to like
track the difference in why were like some colonies more
prosperous later than other colonies. Right, They're trying to track
this process through a whole bunch of incredibly sketchy regression
analyzes and weird assumptions about what income is they're trying

(01:47:19):
to track, Like why was it that like China and
Turkey were like rich in the fifteen hundreds, but they
ceased to be rich after that. Oh sick.

Speaker 11 (01:47:27):
They're doing a fucking Jared Diamond. Yeah, they're doing a
West and the rest.

Speaker 4 (01:47:31):
Yeah, yeah, it's wonder a Jared Diamond bullshit, except you know,
with China standard of living in Europe, if you actually
go back to the historical record and aren't doing their
like stupid weird like using population density as an index
for stuff, whether they start bringing Malthus into it. If
you don't do that and you look at like the

(01:47:51):
actual historical record, like the average quality of life in
China like is not eclipsed by Europe until like the
May eighteen hundreds. Yeah, like you know, so like this
is all this is all like very even.

Speaker 11 (01:48:03):
Then, like life expects in the midic and hundreds didn't
it took decades to go up after the Industrial Revolution
right lately.

Speaker 4 (01:48:10):
Yeah, Oh, this is this is sort of drawing to
what they're trying to do here, is that like a
lot of this is it's just it's directly it's the
product of colonialism, right, and they sort of acknowledge that
colonialism existed and that it was like extractive. But their
job is to take the basic insights of history and
depoliticize it. Right, We're going to get you later. One
of the things they win this prize for is depoliticizing revolution,

(01:48:32):
turning revolution into like a Nashi Colubrium game theory thing.
Oh god, which is unbelievable. It's incredible.

Speaker 11 (01:48:39):
Yeah, these are the kind of people who I have
to deal with on a daily basis on list serves,
Like these are the economists emailing the entire list serve
with a unique insight into something that we all you
thirty ye, like the old faculty email list is plagued
by this kind of individual.

Speaker 4 (01:48:54):
Yeah, and like like this is a thing where so
they're absolutely convinced that, like, like the one hundred percent
convinced that the thing that leads to economic prosperity is
like the safeguarding of individual property rights. And like I
will give them a little tiny bit of credit where
they're like, well, yeah, so direct colonial institutions were attractive

(01:49:15):
and they're bad because they infringe on property rights. And
that's mildly better than most of these people yeah, but
these are these are these are again, these are the
most advanced Bushwai economists, right, they're not. They're not like
pro Rhodesia and neoclassical guys, right, they do. They do
have a lie where they say, we're not going to
say when the colonialism is good or bad. And I
think that's been misinterpreted a little bit because like in

(01:49:36):
their work they're pretty clear that it's bad.

Speaker 11 (01:49:39):
They're just trying to make like a moral judgment because
God forbid.

Speaker 4 (01:49:43):
Yeah, well they said, they're saying it's extractive and they
think that like attractions bad because it's inefficients. Yeah, but
basically the things like that, they think that like, Okay,
so like if you if you set up like regimes
that like safeguard private property, this will like make people
like richer. But I want to read a quote from
one of the papers they wrote. Quote, in comparatively poor

(01:50:03):
and less dense populated regions where Europeans could easily settle,
it was in the colonizer's interest to introduce inclusive economic
institutions that helped to boost prosperity for the majority in
the long run.

Speaker 12 (01:50:15):
No, now me, like they didn't go on to say
how like yeah, but Britain built the railways in India,
like like like.

Speaker 4 (01:50:27):
This is what he says, right, because what's happening here.
You know, this is something that economists love to do.
It's like economists love to go into other fields and
to have to colonize them, right, Yes, Like what they're
doing here is there they've gone into like this field
of history. Yeah, and their attempting to colonized them, right,
many such cases. Yeah, and you know they're looking at
this stuff, right, and you got things like this where

(01:50:48):
it's like no, like the economic institutions that were set
up in like settler colonies were not designed to introduce
inclusive economic institutions to like help boost the prosperity for
the majority of the long run, like that was the
result of social struggle. But they for some reason basically
think that social struggles started in like the eighteen eighties. Yeah,

(01:51:10):
the Noble Bell like committee, they're like econ fake Econdo
Bell Committee like releases like a giant statement, Like there's
like press summaries they have like a slightly more detail
and they have like the econy one and I want
to read this from so part of what they're doing, right,
you're talking about like the work that was inspired by this,
by the understanding that like the different institutions change economic

(01:51:31):
outcomes quote better g and Ivery two thousand and five
examined the legacy of British land institutions in India that
gave cultivators in certain regions proprietary rights, including that productivity
was higher in these regions post independence. Genioli and Rainier
and Michaelopolis and Papa Iyadu studied the impact of differences

(01:51:55):
in political centralization along ethnic groups dream dream pre colonial times.
None documented the long run negative impacts of the slave
trade Del ten by my non paper in two thousand
and eight, so we'll go back to that. A second
Del twenty ten investigated the long run effects of the
so called meta system in operation between fifteen seventy three
and eighteen twelve and Peru and Bolivian Peru, where men

(01:52:17):
were forced to work in minds. Within the boundaries of
meta household consumption was twenty five percent lower in twenty
twenty one than just outside the boundaries. So what they
have discovered here again in the late two thousands and
early twenty tens, they discovered that slavery had long run
negative economic impacts on the places where there was slavery.

Speaker 11 (01:52:40):
Jesus Christ, thanks for trying guys like this.

Speaker 4 (01:52:48):
And shit that they gave these people a Nobell prize
for inspiring this is insane.

Speaker 11 (01:52:58):
You're right, economists due just love to tourists in someone
else's discipline and like fucking have the most basic insight possible.
Like all of these are things that would be like
an interesting undergraduate paper, right, Like.

Speaker 4 (01:53:14):
Insane that these people are getting Noble.

Speaker 11 (01:53:16):
Prizes for this. So it's not insane, it's economics, but
the same difference, I guess.

Speaker 4 (01:53:20):
All right, So speaking of economics, we need to go
to ads because so it'll be a long term detrimental
consequence for us. We don't, but when we come back,
there's some more unreal bullshit. We are back, okay, So

(01:53:43):
speaking of undergred bullshit, Well, what of the big things
in their like initial paper where they did the whole
Oh my god, they discovered that there's difference between settler
colonies and like distractive colonies. One of the big things
in that paper was they spent a whole bunch of
time looking into it was the economic difference in these
countries because of the climate which now, for those of
you who are students of history, right, the thing you

(01:54:05):
will remember is that this this was like the most
advanced race science theory of the early eighteen hundreds. Yes,
and these people are, like the economists are finally getting
around to busting this. In like two thousand and four.

Speaker 11 (01:54:20):
They had a looked at skull measurements because I felt like,
I feel like we're heading down that pod, like econophrenology.

Speaker 4 (01:54:27):
So bad, incredible. That was actually a whole thing in
fascist Japan where they had all I can't remember if
I ever talked about this in the episodes that I
did on Bachelor's episodes, but they had this whole thing
where they had like racial categorizations and like biological characteristics
of like the races, and they would use them to
like determine allocated efficiency of which slaves you should use

(01:54:49):
to do what. Oh cool, cool, cool, cool cool. It
was great and like great, I mean, like, holy fucking shit,
it's so bad.

Speaker 11 (01:54:58):
They just missed that time. Those people could kick the
shit out of a Nobel price. In like twenty twenty five,
they came back with that stuff.

Speaker 4 (01:55:04):
Yeah, I get, like, you know, I mean, one of
the things we were talking about, right, is like you
were mentioning, is like these these are like these are
like such obvious insights. And I remember, so I went
to the University of Chicago, right, and that means that
I fucking know all of these fucking ghouls, Like I
met all the people who are going to become these
econ dipshits. Yeah, you at ground zero for that shit.
One of the things that's funny is that like this

(01:55:26):
is like a particular thing of the University of Chicago ecome.
People's like they all think they can do math and
they can't, right, they suck at it. But one of
the thin things I was almost like, so a bunch
of my friends are math majors, and math majors can
like actually do math, Like they could do the kind
of math that's like there's no there aren't like numbers involved.
Like it's like they're doing like field theory or some shit,
or like they're doing a kind of math that when

(01:55:47):
someone tries to explain it to you, they have to
start like making diagrams of like the faces of cubes
and then like explaining how there's like thirty two dimensional
edges or whatever. And there's always this joke from the
math professors where they'd be mad because like they look
at the kondable price and they'd be like, this person made
like an incredibly minor optimization to a trading algorithm that's

(01:56:08):
like incredibly obvious to anyone who even sort of knows math,
and they gave them at a mole price for this. And
this is that before history. Yeah. So the other thing
that they discovered, right, oh god, I I I'm trying
to find the least depressing way to put this. They
they discovered that there are revolutions, and they discovered that,

(01:56:34):
like there are different interest groups in a revolution who
have different interests and like like literally one of the
things that they won this prize for is a paper
where they they discovered that giving people like the franchise,
like giving people the ability to vote, and setting up
the welfare state was something that was done by elites
to stop revolutions. Yeah. Again, Yeah, they have all these

(01:56:56):
mathematical models that look very impressive until you realize they're
just they're like incredibly stupid game theory bullshit to like
determine whether or not a country will do a revolution.
And their model for it basically is and they've discovered
some some genuinely impressive insights for like a sixteen year
old who wants to go into into political science. Right, Like,
they discovered that, for example, elites have economic interests and

(01:57:20):
that those economic interests are different from masses. But because
they're economists, the only way they can conceptualize this is
in terms of tax rates. So they make the argument,
and this is not a joke. I am being serious
about this. I read this fucking footnote. They make the
argument that the overthrow of Salvador Allende was about elite

(01:57:41):
tax rates.

Speaker 2 (01:57:44):
Oh, that one is fucking like.

Speaker 4 (01:57:47):
Jesus wept and it's so funny too. And this is
this is like one of the biggest most obvious problems
with their models, right, and this is this is this
is from all the way back to like their whole
thing about like how the institutions that were set up
by colonialists being different affected like the long term trajectory
of these countries. They treat these entire process because one

(01:58:09):
of the things that they've discovered is that there are
revolutions and counter revolutions. Because they read a Wikipedia article
about like right wing coups in Latin America and they
discovered that elites can do antidemocratic coups because they don't
want their taxes to be too high. That's the only
reason they do it. Yeah, But their discovery of this right,
that that right wingers do antidemocratic cups to like preserve
their wealth and political power. Right, But never, at any

(01:58:32):
point in their process does it seem to have occurred
to them that elites are not purely single national figures,
and that there are in fact multinational elites and in
fact there's something called the Central Intelligence Agency that doesn't
come for me. These people do curse, and this is
this is like the fundamental core of this right. It's
like these models talk about sort of like elite distraction, right,

(01:58:54):
but it's all framed through the language of sort of
like taxes or like rents, basically like make thinking like
land ranch or like they're fighting over a surplus.

Speaker 1 (01:59:03):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:59:03):
Okay, but what they're trying to do is depoliticize how
this actually works, because the thing you're trying to present
is that all extraction happens through the state, right, Yeah,
Like the state is the tool that at least use
And now if you think about those about five seconds,
we like, well, no, obviously, like there's an exploitation in
like the workplace that's actually in these right military statorships,

(01:59:24):
that's actually like the primary place where extraction happens. Where
you shoot all the union organizers and then you fucking
force solved the peasants to work in the fields and
shoot them if they don't.

Speaker 3 (01:59:32):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:59:33):
But but what what they're doing is attempting to sort
of depoliticize the deep plicize this entire process. This is
what I'm talking about. Like they are the most advanced
bushwiw economists, and being the most advanced bushwise economists, they
have finally figured out that the whole they call it
modernization theory. That's not really what modernization theory is. But
they're economists. They're fucking stupid. They don't know anything. You

(01:59:55):
can't judge them for not actually knowing what modernization theory is.
But they finally discovered that the old old line about
how economic development and evidently brought democracy was wrong. Again,
huge insight here. Yeah, but this this brings them into
the world of democratic transitions. Now, after we come back

(02:00:16):
from these ad breaks, I would to read you the
most thunderously stupid line I've ever read in a paper
in my entire life. And that is fucking saying something
given how many eCOM papers I've read. Yeah, you've been
in the trenches. Okay, oh god, let mean let me

(02:00:39):
let me, let me read this line. This is This
is a quote from the the ECON Nobel Prizes site.
In the two thousand and sixth book, the two of
the three economists made an ambitious attempt to provide quote,
the first systematic formal analysis of the creation and consultalidation

(02:01:00):
of democracy, the first. This is very funny. This is
fucking insane.

Speaker 11 (02:01:11):
This is like an entire field of international relations, of
political science.

Speaker 4 (02:01:15):
This is shit. Not notice that there are literally multiple disciplines.
This is an entire field of study, right, like I
have read it, Like obviously, this is an entire matcho
political science. This is an entire branch of international relations.
This is an entire branch of sociology. There's like there's
like an anthropological school kind of that that's about this.

Speaker 11 (02:01:35):
They're interdisciplinary fucking institute, So that exists for this reason.
Like this is shit that I studied from people who
wrote books about it in the nineteen fifties.

Speaker 4 (02:01:46):
Like this is like like you and The funny thing
is they are they literally quote people who are writing
about this from the ages. People have been studying this
for fucking it as long as they're it has been democracy.
People have been studying this shita their ECON thing. They
always was like, oh, nobody ever did formal analysis before.

(02:02:07):
It's like, have you ever fucking read have you read
a poly side paper? I understand, I too dropped my
public policy major the moment I realized that public policy
was just fucking econ with the lines in the graph relabeled, Yeah,
have you ever fucking read one of these papers? Like
you actually have a chance of understanding them because they
are you know, okay, I can't bet you mean to

(02:02:28):
political science. They are about one hundred and fifty times
more advanced than the ECON papers on this subject. But
that's still not like a very high level of advancement, right,
But like still they're like they have formal models of this,
They've done all the stupid math bullshit, the sociologists done
all the number crunching, Like okay, okay, here's another go
from this. The authors start the paper by showing that

(02:02:49):
democratic transitions are precipitated by falls in GDP per capita.
They discovered this two nineteen. I was having Twitter argument,
like arguments again with like sixteen year olds on Twitter
in like twenty sixteen about what the relationship between revolutions
and declining and raising living standards were. Like this was

(02:03:11):
Twitter discourse, right.

Speaker 11 (02:03:13):
This is seven years after the Arab Spring, just twenty nine.

Speaker 4 (02:03:19):
Yes, insane, they discovered this. Yeah, so they do form
an analyzes.

Speaker 11 (02:03:25):
Is the Arab Spring famously the first and only democratic
transition that's ever happened?

Speaker 4 (02:03:29):
No, that's like two recents. Okay, they're all all their stuff.
Is what they call the quote the second wave of
democratic transitions, which is the second wave of all because
they're two social idiots, so that they're talking about the
protomocracy movements in the eighties in Latin America and you,
Sasha great, Yeah, which they also were just thunderously wrong
about like all of the time. Yeah, I was gonna say,

(02:03:50):
I can't wait to hear what they have to say
about those. I'm literally not even gonna talk about it
because it's nothing. It's just like air.

Speaker 11 (02:03:58):
I'm just looking up a very insightful paper that Ali
Khadeva wrote, who I've been feuded several times, so different things.

Speaker 4 (02:04:04):
It's called stick stones and Molotovs cocktails that it.

Speaker 11 (02:04:08):
Is a fantastic analysis of democratic transitions. It's about like
the strategic use of violence against property and the correlation
it has between like successful democratic transition movements.

Speaker 4 (02:04:20):
It's good paper read that. Yeah, there's a lot of
great like analysis. We'll put that in like the notes here.
There's a lot of great analysis of this. But what
they're trying to do is they're trying to build this
model where they're like looking at like basically bargaining between
like the masses and elites to decide whether you do
a revolution or a counter revolution. And they're trying to
build like a game theory model based on like fuck
off the elites and like give ranting concessions and when

(02:04:42):
they don'te grant concessions, and whether people believe they're getting
grant concession. The other thing that's also very stupid about this, right,
is that like the thing that they're interested in is
why or why not people like believe that the olibal
economical forms are going to work? And a lot of
democratic transitions are also about like resistance to that shit. Yeah,
like the revolutions to Dan for example, like he is

(02:05:04):
a proto Marcus move, but like it is also in
large part a reaction to imf in constructural reforms. These
people all think are good and will like cause long
term prospority and like a lot of the democratic disitions
they're talking about, like like, for example, again Pinochet, right,
like that was like you know, and like obviously the
protomocracy reformers did more neoliberalism, but like a part of
the part of the reason like that stuff worked was

(02:05:24):
because Pinochet ran the economy into the graduating yeah, right,
which is what he was sad to do. But yeah,
but like I want to close it on two things. One,
I want to read this line right from I'm talking
about like the advances in their papers. This is again
from the equitible prize thing. Yea quote in the earlier models.

(02:05:46):
The probability that the masses are successful when they stage
a revolution is always one. But this is a strong
assumption that does not reflect real world events very well.
They published a paper about how people make a decision
to do a revolution. This was peer reviewed in an
economics journal. It's one of the papers that incited in

(02:06:07):
the noble price they gave them when they assumed that
revolutions always succeed. Yeah, Nobel Prize, And the second paper
was one they realized, Holy shit, that's not true, mom mouth,
isn't it. This is the kind of assumption that these
absolute fucking morons make all of the time, all of
the funk. This is why they had to bring in
the institucial columnists in the first place, to bring the

(02:06:28):
shit in, right, because like, they're basic models of how
humans work. Were like every single human like sits out
and calculates a fucking utility curve figure out where they're
going to brush their hair in the morning. Was obviously
not true. That's what I had to bring in game
theory in the first place.

Speaker 9 (02:06:40):
Right.

Speaker 4 (02:06:40):
They make stupid assumptions like this literally all the time.
And again, this is one of the ones they're making
in one of the papers that was cited in here
as the reason they want to know what price in economics.

Speaker 11 (02:06:50):
Yeah, I want to read this models off Cocktail's paper
to everyone. Here's a fun little sentence, and event history
analysis finds it, right, so positively associated with political liberalizing
in one hundred and three non democracies from nineteen ninety
to two thousand and four attacks by civilians on police
stations during the January twenty fifth Egyptian Revolution illustrate one
way in which un noncollective violence can bring about a

(02:07:11):
democratic breakthrough. Incredible, thank you, We love to see it.

Speaker 4 (02:07:18):
Yeah, we love this. That's a pretty normal thing from like,
I guess you would call it like the center left
of like Democrats edition studies stuff. Right, Yeah, it's the
sociology paper. Yeah, that's like a pretty normal it's like
a good life, a good paper. This is from one
of the books written by the people who won the
Economics Nobel Prize. Quote. Chapter six explains why several European

(02:07:40):
countries have managed to build broadly participatory societies capable but
still shackled states. Our answer focuses on the factor is
that led much of Europe towards the corridor during the
early Middle Ages, as Germanic tribes, especially the Franks, came
to invade lands dominated by the Western Roman Empire. Afterwards collapse,
we argue, but the marriage of bottom up participatory is
a tutions and norms of dramatic tribes and the centralizing

(02:08:04):
bureaucratic and legal traditions of the Roman Empire forged a
unique balance of power between the state and society enabling
the rise of the.

Speaker 2 (02:08:15):
Oh god, me.

Speaker 4 (02:08:20):
Is so depressing.

Speaker 11 (02:08:21):
I spent ten years getting a PhD in history and
they've just given these people a Nobel Prize.

Speaker 4 (02:08:26):
But like Jordan Peterson ship, they have discovered. But this
is the thing, Like these people have discovered the concept
of history. Yeah, and they've read like four Wikipedia articles
and they've used those Wikipedia articles they started doing regression analysis. Yeah,
and this is this is what they want a Nobel prize. Yeah,

(02:08:46):
this is fake Nobel prize. Like again, like I've been
thinking about, like you know, in physics, what you have
to do to win a Nobel Prize. You have to
make a prediction about the fundamental nature of the universe
that can only be tested by building a fucking machine
that can measure a vibration of gravitational ways, which is

(02:09:09):
a It has to be able to measure a ripple
in the fabric of space time that is smaller than
the diameter of the fucking nucleus of an atom. That
is what you have to do to win the Nobel
Prize in physics. What you have to do to win
the Nobel Prize in economics is realize that institutions affect prosparity. Jesus,

(02:09:33):
I just cannot this has been. This has been the
ViBe's econdoble Prize episode. I don't know. I hope this
made your day slightly slightly better, because holy shit, this
is the fakest prize in the entire world.

Speaker 11 (02:09:49):
Shout out to the economists like I guess I'm eagerly
awaiting you discovering some other ship from my one oh
one class. Feel free to sign up at anytime if
you want to get a noble fi prize in economics.

Speaker 4 (02:10:01):
I guess ah. All right, well this has been. It
could happen here. I will return.

Speaker 11 (02:10:07):
Yeah, next time we give an economy's surprised for tying
the issues of.

Speaker 7 (02:10:10):
Something this is it could happen here today. I'm your host,

(02:10:34):
Garrison Davis, and they're sure has been a lot happening
this past year. I am kind of feeling emotionally exhausted
and just numb in general. It's a different feeling from
the political desensitization that my job usually provides me. I'm
frankly still recovering from attending the DNC, even more so

(02:10:57):
than the RNC. At the RNC I knew I was
going to be walking through the pits of hell, and
despite the immense evil on display, the side show conspiracy
theory freak nature of the event made it almost absurdly amusing.
But the DNC kind of broke me between the infighting

(02:11:18):
among Palestine protesters and the insistence from the official organizers
TM to oppose any course of action that would actually
disrupt the event or apply pressure to attendees and instead
just use the Palestine protests to promote their little socialist
newspapers and political orgs. Meanwhile, inside the actual event, I
was surrounded by some of the richest and most powerful

(02:11:41):
people I had ever been around, and just watching them
maintain their like kamala Is bracked party atmosphere at all
costs and purposely blind themselves to the atrocities happening around
the world, especially Gaza, was a deeply unsettling experience. Like
they're supposed to be the if not the good guys,

(02:12:02):
at least the better guys or the less openly fascist guys,
and like among the American right wings, unprecedented focus and
organized attack on trans rights. This was the first d
n C SINS twenty twelve to not feature a trans speaker,
and trans people were never directly mentioned during the convention's
prime time speaking slots. And now with the election ramping

(02:12:27):
up and the Southeast still recovering from two devastating hurricanes,
Israel escalating tensions with Iran, and with the backing of
the United States continuing strikes in Lebanon and Palestine, I
am just feeling more lost and discombobulated than I have
been in years.

Speaker 4 (02:12:45):
So to cheer.

Speaker 7 (02:12:46):
Myself up, I decided to go to a Charlie Kirk
and vivek Ramaswami rally at Georgia State University. Now to
some that may sound just completely bat shit or perhaps
some form of bizarre self harm, but look like I've
been covering far right rallies and writing about these weird
conservative influencers for years now, it's almost second nature to me.

(02:13:11):
Going to these events can feel paradoxically relaxing, even though
it may trigger some stress. My body just kind of
subconsciously knows what to do in environments like this. The
RNC was so easy, it's like an autopilot just takes over,
and so I thought going to this Turning Point USA
event might help reset my brain by giving myself a

(02:13:34):
simple task that I know I can excel at. But
before we get into all that, first, for those more
fortunate than I, here's some background on Charlie Kirk, also
known as the far right podcaster with the Smallest Face.
As a teenager, back in twenty twelve, Charles J. Kirk
co founded in organization for campus conservatives called Turning Point USA,

(02:14:00):
and then in twenty nineteen he founded a sister organization
called Turning Point Action, which focuses on elections and conservative
political advocacy. Though initially more aligned with the so called
alt light rather than the alt right, Kirk has slowly
moved farther and farther to the right during the past
ten years, and by twenty twenty he embraced election fraud,

(02:14:21):
COVID nineteen, and vaccine conspiracy theories. Also during twenty twenty,
he started his own podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show, which
is now somehow ranked as the number seven podcast for
news in Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 4 (02:14:36):
So that's not good.

Speaker 7 (02:14:38):
At this point, Charlie has kind of taken the place of,
if not surpassed, the role that was previously occupied by
Stephen Crowder before his fall from grace isteming from his
breakup with Ben Shapiro and the allegations of abusing his
ex wife. Through the Turning Point Action organization, Kirk is

(02:14:59):
more tight with the actual mechanisms of the Republican Party
then even the Daily Wire is just This past Wednesday,
Turning Point Action hosted a rally for Trump in Duluth, Georgia,
just outside of Atlanta. Trump spoke at this event, and
Tucker Carlson made a very fascist speech advocating to refuse

(02:15:19):
the results of the election if Trump loses, and likening
Trump to a quote unquote daddy figure, needing to punish
the country for being a quote unquote bad girl the
past four years. It's a huge indictment against Americans, deeply
Freudian politics.

Speaker 4 (02:15:38):
Now.

Speaker 7 (02:15:39):
The event that I attended on October twenty first was
a part of Charlie Kirk's You're Being Brainwashed tour, where
Kirk and friends travel from swing state to swing state
to debate college students on camera about why Trump is
the better candidate. Charlie's focus on debating unprepared college students
shows how he he has kind of picked up the

(02:16:01):
baton from Stephen Crowder and his old change My mind videos,
but this year specifically, Charlie's version of this college debate
content creation strategy is more in line with this overall
strategy to inflate Kirk's political influence leading up to the
election so that he can get more directly involved in

(02:16:21):
the GOPS get out the vote campaign in key swing states.
As a part of this strategy, Kirk has been on
a bit of a media blitz the past few months
to promote himself. Some listeners may have seen the viral
video featuring Charlie Kirk debating twenty five quote unquote woke
college students for over ninety minutes. This video, from the

(02:16:42):
YouTube channel Jubilee, has over twenty million views, and like
just as an aside, Jubilee is just so deeply evil.
This company claims to advocate for like empathy and human
connection while turning life and death political issues into fucking
game show segments for YouTube ad revenue, often pitting media

(02:17:05):
trained conservative activists against just random clueless liberals. I hate
this company. They are so bad, but I digress now.
I actually attended a Turning Point USA event on the
GSU campus last year. It was a smaller event that
was ostensibly about defending the Cop City training facility in Atlanta.

(02:17:27):
Though halfway through the event it just stopped being about
cop City and it just turned into an ad for
Turning Point USA and this other political organization started by
Candice Owens called BLEXIT, which stands for the quote Black
Exit from the Victimhood mentality unquote. This was one of
the most racist events I've ever been to. The main speaker,

(02:17:51):
in his best metrosexual attire, blamed black people for creating
situations that result in police murders, said that the real
problem is that black kids are never taught accountability and
that in the MLK days, people only ever advocated for
more police training. He also claimed that rap music is

(02:18:11):
causing a spike in violent crime and ranted against jay
Z and Beyonce and closed by saying that we need
to support more conservative rappers and singers. It was really bad,
But on the plus side, I went undercover to this event,
and when talking with the Turning Point USA officials, I

(02:18:31):
convinced them that I was actually a student at a
different nearby university and I reserve the right to start
a fake TPUSA chapter in that school, so hopefully that
will never happen. Since I'm the one who's supposed to
be doing it. For the Brainwashed Tour event this past Monday,

(02:18:51):
I dressed like an unfashionable campus conservative and donned my
Reagan movie baseball cap acquired at the RNC welcome party,
and arrived at campus an hour early to scope out
the terrain. They didn't announce the exact location for the
event ahead of time, so for about half an hour
I just walked around to GSU with the fucking Ronald

(02:19:12):
Reagan hat, looking for like a TPUSA booth. Now, luckily
I spotted some people with red mega hats that I
tailed to the nearby Hurt Park, where it was immediately
evident that this would be a much bigger event than
the Copcity one I attended a year prior. In the
middle of the park was a big table with microphones

(02:19:33):
set up for questions and debate, and on either side
there were booths with turning point stickers, buttons, flyers, a
pocket constitution, and sign up sheets to get involved in
their political advocacy programs. I took home a big button
that read Republicans are Hotter, and I got another what

(02:19:55):
I would call a brat style button, but brown instead
of green. That re D's high period, stop being a
socialist period. Thanks period. Not good, not good. But I
watched the crowd grow from like twenty people I would

(02:20:15):
say around two hundred. You know, it got kind of fluid,
but yeah, around two hundred to fifty. Maybe A small
majority were students or at least young, and appeared to
be equally made up of liberals and conservatives, with the
rest of the crowd mostly made up of conservatives from
all ages who came to campus just to see Charlie Kirk.

(02:20:39):
As the event was about to begin, TPUSA staff moved
all of the older quote unquote non college students out
of frame of the cameras to make the video seem
more focused on liberal college students, and after waiting in
the surprisingly warm October sun for over an hour, Charles J.

(02:21:01):
Kirk finally arrived thirty minutes late from the official start time,
tossing free mega hats wildly into the crowd, one of
which I am now in possession of. For this leg
of the tour, Kirk has been accompanied by the twenty
twenty four Republican presidential candidate with the tallest hair, the
vek Ramaswami, who, by the way, has also won the

(02:21:23):
Cool Zone Media Award for presidential candidate with the most
Nick Fuentes groyper energy.

Speaker 4 (02:21:30):
So there you go.

Speaker 7 (02:21:33):
I can't believe I've seen the vek Ramaswami like four
different times this year. That doesn't feel good. But do
you know what does feel good? That's right, these products
and services that support this podcast. Okay, we are back.

(02:21:58):
It's time to finally talk about this fucking rally. So
I'm not gonna go over like the whole event play
by play, because there was over two hours of quote
unquote debating that I have neither the time nor the
desire to recap, but I will mention some of the
overarching topics and common lines of questioning. Even as the

(02:22:20):
first student took the mic, I knew that this was
gonna be a rough day. The first person to quote
unquote debate, Charlie and Vivek, stated that their quote primary
opposition to Trump is that he's anti American and anti
patriotic unquote. They said that they believed that Trump fundamentally

(02:22:42):
undermines American values, and they specifically invoked Trump's rhetoric online
about suspending the Constitution and the whole January sixth incident. Look,
I don't think this is a very compelling line of attack,
especially in a debate setting. And I just don't believe
that patriotism is like an inherently good thing. And I

(02:23:02):
think Grifters and Conman are pretty darn American. But Vivek
and Kirk responded by talking about how social media censorship
in twenty twenty was a much greater act of anti Americanism,
although later on in the day they defended Elon Musk
in his running of Twitter, since he's a private citizen
and should be allowed to do whatever he wants with

(02:23:23):
his own platform. This is, of course ironic amidst reporting
from The New York Times that Musk and the Trump
team colluded to suppress information damaging to Trump on the platform,
basically exactly what the right was accusing the old Twitter
doing the last election. But none of that really matters.
There's no such thing as hypocrisy. You can never hold
anyone account to this sort of thing on the right.

(02:23:46):
Charlie Kirk then just went on to deny that Trump
called to suspend the Constitution. Here's a clip he ever has.

Speaker 13 (02:23:52):
You're misquoting him. But let's just look at what he did,
not just rhetoric.

Speaker 7 (02:23:56):
Nice little quick pivot there from Charles. But yes, technical
Trump didn't say suspend. He actually said terminate, which is
like worse.

Speaker 4 (02:24:06):
I don't know.

Speaker 7 (02:24:08):
In twenty twenty two, Trump posted on truth Social calling
for the quote unquote termination of all rules, regulations, and articles,
even those found in the Constitution unquote, in response to
the twenty twenty election. I don't know how Kirk thinks
that saying terminate is better than suspend. Of course he doesn't.

(02:24:30):
He's just playing this game. It doesn't matter. Kirk went
on to lie about the nature of January sixth and
whether Trump literally personally committed the legal act of insurrection,
eventually saying that even if Trump did, it would be
thrown out under the new presidential immunity ruling by the
Supreme Court, and stating that though Trump didn't actually do

(02:24:52):
a coup, the Democrats did actually do a coup to
get Kamala Harris on the ticket.

Speaker 4 (02:24:58):
Okay, sure, but.

Speaker 7 (02:25:01):
Now part of Kirk's just flagrant January sixth revisionist history
was claiming that Ashley Babbitt was suddenly killed with no
warning as she was retreating from the Capitol and just
none of that is true.

Speaker 4 (02:25:19):
That just isn't what happened.

Speaker 13 (02:25:21):
The only person to die on January sixth is a
Trump supporter killed by one of Nancy Pelosi's bodyguards.

Speaker 7 (02:25:26):
Okay, even that part isn't true. Two other Trump supporters
died of heart attacks, and another died holding a Don't
tread on Me flag after being trampled by fellow rioters.
Now a student countered Kirk's claim of Babbitt's innocence by
confirming that he believes in stands your ground laws that
if you're breaking into property you can be shot hold on.

Speaker 13 (02:25:49):
But Ashley Babbitt was unarmed. Isn't the whole kind of
stick of the American left, like, don't shoot unarmed people.
If I break into your house, then I was unarmed,
but I broken I was.

Speaker 8 (02:25:56):
Breaking into your house?

Speaker 13 (02:25:57):
Was George Floyd? Was that a rightful death?

Speaker 7 (02:25:59):
Okay, first of all, incredible deflection, but oh yes, as
if these two situations are in any way comparable, a
black man being pinned down and choked to death for
over nine minutes and a woman leading a mob intent
on killing US politicians right up to the last line
of defense protecting set of politicians as they try to

(02:26:20):
evacuate the capital. Kirk tried to make this same gross
George Floyd comparison like an hour later, again to booze
from the audience. Later in the day, a second student
hit the Charlie Kirk debate chair debating on whether Trump
is anti American, and mentioned Trump's recent comments talking about

(02:26:41):
a quote unquote enemy within, some enemy inside the United
States that poses a far bigger threat than foreign enemies.
The Veck claimed that Trump was referring to people who
shot at Trump, and Kirk claimed that it was a
reference to drug cartels.

Speaker 13 (02:26:57):
So Donald Trump is talking with enemy, then he's talking
about the cartels that are here that are poisoning our
streets with drugs, that are bringing illegal guns into the country.
That is the enemy within. Yet we say Russia is
an enemy. Russia has never attacked the United States of America.

Speaker 7 (02:27:08):
Curious Russia comment there, certainly, But like for this enemy
within thing, we know that's just not true. Trump has
specifically named multiple Democrats as the enemy within. It's not
about cartels, it's not about people shooting him. There's just
non stop lying coming from Kirk and Vek and none

(02:27:28):
of the students are like equipped or researched enough to
call him out on it. Another common topic of debate
was war and the insistence that Trump didn't start to
any new wars, unlike Biden and Harris, who have personally
started wars. I guess with Kirk crediting Biden for starting
the Russia Ukraine War by financing the Ukrainian defensive, as

(02:27:51):
well as roping in Harris by saying that she was
quote in charge of the Russia Ukrainian War before it happened, unquote,
which really doesn't make much sense as a sentence. The
Veck later added that Kamala Harris was personally in charge
of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which again just isn't true.

(02:28:12):
The Vek is parroting of failed attempt by Republican lawmakers
from last September to invent some way to blame Harris
for the Afghanistan withdrawal now that she is the presidential nominee.
Harris is only mentioned three times in the three thousand,
two hundred and eighty eight pages of interview transcripts from
the Foreign Affairs Committee's investigation of the withdrawal, but by

(02:28:36):
far Charlie and Vivek's main focus on the topic of
war is just defending Russia.

Speaker 8 (02:28:42):
Donald Trump's going to negotiate an end of that war.
That's reasonable.

Speaker 14 (02:28:44):
Kamala Harrison and Joe Biden have created that war and
escalated that over the last three year.

Speaker 7 (02:28:49):
Trump did not really end any wars in his first term.
In fact, he increased US troop levels in twenty seventeen
and raised the number of civilian deaths in Afghanistan from
drones strikes by three hundred and thirty percent according to
Brown University. Still, the Veck tried to frame Trump as
the much more principled anti war candidate, But which candadate?

Speaker 14 (02:29:10):
Was there a major war in the Middle East? Was
there a major war in the Middle East or Donald Trump?

Speaker 7 (02:29:13):
There were multiple arms deal packages to Saudi Arabia for
the war in Yemen, and the US increased its involvement
in the series of a war under Trump. But to
the Vek's earlier point, I really don't see a way
Trump would end the war in Ukraine. That isn't just
giving more territory over to Russia. But to Charlie Kirk
that might not be such a bad thing, since he

(02:29:36):
seems to be kind of fond of Russia.

Speaker 13 (02:29:38):
You know who is the enemy. China is the enemy.

Speaker 8 (02:29:40):
Russia.

Speaker 13 (02:29:41):
Well, Russia's not the enemy. Exactly how many of your
friends have died because of Russians?

Speaker 4 (02:29:45):
Here's another SoundBite from the Veck.

Speaker 8 (02:29:48):
Joe Biden and Kyple Harris along with some Republican help.

Speaker 14 (02:29:50):
I'm gonna admit is sending more money to escalate that
war that otherwise would have resolve itself if we had
just negotiated peace back in twenty twenty two.

Speaker 7 (02:29:57):
Resolves itself. Sounds a lot like Vivek just means that
Russia would have just seized territory, and like later on,
Vavek argued that Ukraine just shouldn't be getting any native
protection at all.

Speaker 14 (02:30:11):
So the US actually made a commitment back in nineteen
ninety to say that NATO would expand not one inch
past East Germany.

Speaker 7 (02:30:18):
Hmmm, I wonder what may have been different geopolitically in
nineteen ninety in relation to Russia. Vivek, I wonder if
anything has happened since nineteen ninety that might affect certain
Slavic territories. Avek, I wonder, Oh my god. Now, the

(02:30:38):
topic discussed probably the most during this event was immigration
even the liberal college students seem to believe that an
influx of immigration was the biggest problem currently facing the
United States. Kirk claimed that Kamala Harris let ten million
new quote unquote illegal immigrants into the cunt and like no,

(02:31:01):
the total population of undocumented immigrants in this country has
fluctuated between ten to twelve million over the course of
the past twenty years.

Speaker 4 (02:31:11):
Though, like JD.

Speaker 7 (02:31:11):
Vance, Kirk considers most immigrants illegal regardless of their actual status.
Kirk claimed that the quote unquote nine million immigrants seeking
asylum that have come into this country under Biden are
all illegal because they are quote cartel sponsored fraudulent asylum
claims unquote. Kirk said that these false asylum seekers pay

(02:31:34):
cartels ten thousand dollars to be smuggled into the United States.

Speaker 13 (02:31:38):
They're all illegal because they're we know it's actually, we
know it to be true. It's not the question nine
they're frauds. That they're defrauding the American immigration system is
what they're doing.

Speaker 7 (02:31:46):
When pressed for proof on this, Kirk just stumbled, and
Viveck took over and later just plugged his new movie
about illegal immigration.

Speaker 13 (02:31:56):
Yes, I mean, so, for example, what is the asylum
claim if you're coming from from George, Korea.

Speaker 7 (02:32:02):
Actually, wow, wow, very very convincing stuff happening. Viveck argued
that most immigrants lie about seeking asylum in order to
enter the country, and since that's illegal, that makes them
more likely to commit other crimes once in the United States.

Speaker 15 (02:32:21):
So right now, our immigration system literally selects for the
people who are most willing to lie to the US
government to get in. And that's why it's no surprise
that the people whose first act of entering the country
breaks the law often continue to break the law while
they're already here.

Speaker 13 (02:32:35):
I don't think that's racist or xenophobic.

Speaker 15 (02:32:37):
I think it's a fact based on who we're actually
selecting to come into the country in actuality.

Speaker 7 (02:32:42):
Immigrants and especially undocumented or quote unquote illegal immigrants, are
far less likely to commit crimes than US citizens. Most
research puts it between forty to sixty percent less likely,
at least according to Stanford, the Texas Department of Public Safety,
and the Cato Institute, all famously liberal organizations. One thing

(02:33:02):
that Kirk kept trying to do is pander his nationalism
towards the racially diverse audience of Atlanta.

Speaker 4 (02:33:10):
Students.

Speaker 13 (02:33:11):
The people in this audience, which is a very diverse audience,
specifically Black Americans, should be incensed that they're being replaced
by foreigners. Black Americans are now being put aside so
that a bunch of foreigners can come, undercut wages and
fill your city. The black community, which you obviously both
care a lot about, is actually not being prioritized. Instead,

(02:33:32):
people from the Third World. They're coming in and Black
America is getting put last, which seems to be a
common theme over the last sixty years when Democrats are
in control. Well, okay, we'll find that. Thank you guys,
so much. Thank you, Thank you guys.

Speaker 7 (02:33:47):
The worst part is that this seems to work. The
audience seems to resonate with this grossly fascistic framing, seemingly
unable to recognize what Kirk was doing. And at this
point I was just like fucking losing it. Vivek said
that if you don't know English, you shouldn't be allowed
in the United States, and like no one cared, no

(02:34:08):
one pushed back on that. A pro Kamala person repeated
false migrant crime wave rhetoric in her question about the
Venezuelan refugee crisis. That student said that three hundred thousand
Venezuelan refugees came to the United States in twenty twenty three,
and Kirk then claimed that three million more would arrive
if Kamala is elected, along with twenty million more immigrants.

(02:34:33):
Kirk promised that if Trump's elected, any immigrant, whether legal, undocumented,
or a refugee, just any immigrant who commits a crime
like a dui will be immediately deported. And unfortunately, when
pressed to defend or even just openly express their own
personal views on whatever the topic of debate was, multiple

(02:34:54):
students just like completely backed down, saying that they would
rather quote unquote stay out of the political realm or
in another instance.

Speaker 4 (02:35:04):
Politically charge you fair enough, what are you doing.

Speaker 7 (02:35:07):
You're trying to debate about access to abortion or if
all immigrants should be rounded up and deported, but you
don't want to get quote unquote too political.

Speaker 4 (02:35:16):
What are you talking about?

Speaker 7 (02:35:17):
I'm sorry you couldn't get a fast dunk on Charlie Kirk,
but come on. But perhaps the most disheartening moment was
when Charlie Kirk was challenged on his opposition to the
Civil Rights Act. Someone asked why Charlie thinks that the
Civil Rights Act was a mistake. Kirk started by saying

(02:35:38):
that even if some of the original intent was good,
it's now being used for bad things, like allowing men
in women's locker rooms, to the complete shock of the questionnaire,
Kirk and Viveki then went on to explain why we
should repeal the Civil Rights Act.

Speaker 13 (02:35:55):
The fanfare that the Civil Rights Actor is met with.
It's almost like the new Constitution. We talk about the
Civil Rights Act more than the Constitution. Is it is
cited more than the Constitution. We almost had a new
American founding in the nineteen sixties with the Civil Rights Act.

Speaker 14 (02:36:11):
So let me share a couple of couple hard facts
with you, which is that turns out that you're much
more likely to end up in prison, you're much more
likely to end up in poverty, you're much more likely
not to graduate from high school if you grow up
in a single parent household versus the dual parent household.
Today you're talking about upwards of sixty percent of black
kids born into single parent households rather than dual parent

(02:36:33):
What number do you think that was in the nineteen fifties,
before the Great Society, Probably it was even less twenty
percent twenty percent back then. So then we look at
what the results have been of this entire agenda. Put
the Civil Rights Act, put the LBJ great society. Black
Americans are worse off today even economically in terms of

(02:36:53):
mobility than they were back then, in the name of
laws that were passed to supposedly advance black interests.

Speaker 7 (02:36:59):
Oh god, do you know what that can actually be
attributed to. It's the massive increase in policing and the
carcinal justice system that was specifically intensified as a conservative
reaction to black people gaining more civil rights in society.

Speaker 13 (02:37:14):
The Civil Rights Act has nine different titles in it,
and you have this this leviathan that was created, and
something that most Black Americans dunt support is men in
female sports. Would you agree men playing in female sports?
I have no, Yeah, I know, no, no for sure, right,
but believe it or not, the Civil Rights Act is
now being used to keep men playing in women's sports.

(02:37:37):
So the Civil Rights Act was used to help Black
America originally totally get that, but now the way it
was written is that any claim of identification, so someone
says I'm a woman, therefore I can compete in your
volleyball team. They come in with a civil rights claim,
and so what we're saying is no, no, no, it
should be specified to racial, not gender all that other stuff.

(02:37:58):
And there were all these other privilegis as well.

Speaker 7 (02:38:01):
How sad is it that this kid was convinced that
the fucking Civil Rights Act is bad through transphobia. It's
so fucking predatory what Kirk is doing here. This was
so fucking gross to watch in person. As the day
went on, things just started to get more and more kookie.
A whole batch of like libertarian Austrian trained economists went

(02:38:24):
back and forth with Charles and Viveka on tariffs, free markets,
and the validity of the economic philosophy of Frederick Hayek.
This fucking dude with a little mustache, who ostensibly got
up to debate Kirk on abortion said that quote, I
think my generation has started to abuse the option of abortion. Unquote,

(02:38:46):
like why the fuck are you up there debating him?
Then Jesus Christ and then what I would call generously
a himbo in a white dude's for Harris shirt said
that Kamala's greatest to pumplishment is being an idol. After
debating Kirk about FEMA money being spent on illegal immigrants. Meanwhile,

(02:39:07):
Kirk just continued to spew COVID nineteen conspiracy theories to
very little pushback.

Speaker 13 (02:39:14):
They were wrong about everything. They were wrong about six
feet to solder spread. They were wrong about the vaccine
safe and effective.

Speaker 14 (02:39:19):
They were hey, they we were wrong about whether the
Arthur revolves around the sun.

Speaker 4 (02:39:21):
What are you talking about?

Speaker 1 (02:39:23):
Oh my god.

Speaker 7 (02:39:24):
One student just got so fed up with Kirk's endless
rambling about topics unrelated to their question and decided to
walk away, which then, of course, Kirk claimed as a
rhetorical victory.

Speaker 13 (02:39:36):
How to biden laptop misinformation? Where did the virus come from? Biolabs?
It's exactly how fine? That's okay, go to your fics class.

Speaker 7 (02:39:46):
I was losing it and frankly just shocked at how
little pushback Charles and Vivek were receiving for what I
saw is very clear lies and manipulative debate tactics. The
majority of some people clearly did not think too hard
about the question they were going to ask, or let
alone research the topic of debate beforehand. I saw people

(02:40:09):
in line to ask a question using chat GPT to
generate questions to ask using a prompt about how to
debate Charlie Kirk at a Turning Point USA event, like
what the fuck is going on now? I fundamentally refuse
to participate in quote unquote debates like this for reasons

(02:40:31):
that I will soon get into. So I just started
taking notes of all the things Charlie was lying about,
and I was right at the very front of the crowd.
So whenever TPUSA publishes the video Charlie Kirk destroying silly
liberal college students, you should be able to see me
pretty clearly in the background in my fucking Ronald reag

(02:40:53):
at a hat, just furiously scribbling down notes. Though I
would recommend watching with an ad blocker not to give
Kirk extra money. The whole event was a pretty pathetic affair.
By my count, there were only eight liberal leaning challengers
who questioned Kirk compared to thirteen conservative leaning questionnaires who

(02:41:14):
entered a friendly discussion with Kirk. Out of all the
liberal debaters, too backed down because they didn't want to
get too political, and three others appeared to be at
least somewhat swayed by Kirk and vivek now like I
can't entirely blame these students right like, this setting is

(02:41:35):
not a real debate. Kirk holds all of the power.
He does this for a living, and he fucking brought
a friend with him to help. It's two of them
versus one. It's Kirk and Vivek. There's a reason he
prefers debating college students rather than working professionals. Most students
are not prepared to effectively counter Kirk's claims and don't

(02:41:55):
have enough general knowledge on current events to call him
out on every one of his many lies. And even
if they do catch him on something, Kirk will try
to project authority to sway the uneducated audience into believing
that he is correct. Just because teens are chronically online
doesn't mean that they have better media literacy, critical thinking,

(02:42:17):
or know how to determine the validity of information. A
twenty twenty four survey by News Literacy America found that
only fifty percent of teens could identify that in article
labeled as branded content on a news site was in
fact an advertisement. Barely over half of teens could accurately
identify an op ed with the word commentary in the

(02:42:38):
headline as an opinion piece, forty four percent claimed that
a company's own press release was more credible than an
independent news report on the same subject, and thirty four
percent of teens incorrectly labeled a random picture of damaged
traffic lights as quote unquote strong evidence supporting a viral

(02:42:58):
false claim that hot July temperatures had melted traffic lights.
These teens surveyed said that local TV news and TikTok
were the most trustworthy sources of information, and thirty five
percent of teens said that professional journalists are more biased
than social media content creators. Meanwhile, forty five percent said

(02:43:19):
that journalists are just as biased as these TikTok influencers.
Let's do a test right now, try to see if
you can determine that these following clips are in fact advertisements. Okay,

(02:43:43):
we are back now. This was technically my first time
seeing this format of conservative YouTube debate in person. The
videos that got published online later get heavily edited down,
and while I was going at it in my notepad,
I started to recognize the repeating patterns that Kirk and

(02:44:03):
Vivek employed to gain dominance in almost every single debate matchup.
So now I'm going to talk about some of these
common tactics used by Kirk. When Kirk or Vivek wants
to end a particular line of questioning or move on
to the next person, they'll just restate their own opinions
as fact and then end that debate, leaving the impression

(02:44:26):
that they won. They can just stop whenever they feel
like they have made the final point that gives them victory.

Speaker 4 (02:44:34):
Here's Vivek.

Speaker 14 (02:44:34):
The number one human attribute that our legal immigration system
selects for isn't who's smart. Isn't who's going to work hard,
isn't who loves the country. It's are you willing to
lie to the US government or not. If you are,
you get in.

Speaker 13 (02:44:45):
If not, you don't. That's the way it works.

Speaker 4 (02:44:46):
Thank you so much.

Speaker 3 (02:44:47):
Thank you.

Speaker 4 (02:44:48):
And here's another example from Kirk.

Speaker 13 (02:44:50):
Black Americans are treated far worse than illegals in this country,
and we have violated our social contract to our own citizens.
And I just want you to think about that, okay.
Is that if you into America, you get a flight
to the country the city of your choosing, You get
taxpayer funded luxury hotels, you get a taxpayer funded phone,
taxpayer funded food stamps, whereas many Americans are struggling to

(02:45:11):
even make ends meet, So thank you so much for coming.

Speaker 7 (02:45:13):
Yeah, what a convenient way to say a bunch of
bullshit without having to back any of it enough. Now,
of of course, welfare programs like food stamps and even
assistants to get access to smartphones, since they basically are
now a requirement of everyday life, those programs do exist, right,
Those are important programs. But those free flights to any city,

(02:45:34):
that's actually a reference to New York City's reticketing program,
which offers one way bus or plane tickets out of
the city. This program was actually started because the governor
of Texas sent forty thousand immigrants to New York against
their will. And those quote unquote luxury hotels are actually
a small part of an emergency housing program that utilizes

(02:45:56):
some converted hotels as well as airport motels and even
office buildings as temporary shelter for immigrants. But I'm sure
Kirk would rather these people just be homeless living on
the street. I'm sure he wouldn't find ways to complain
about that too. A very common Kirk tactic to avoid
answering a question is just to simply flip it around

(02:46:18):
and ask the students a different question that might eventually
be related to the student's original question, but not necessarily.

Speaker 13 (02:46:26):
Let me ask you just one more question. Can men
give birth?

Speaker 8 (02:46:29):
Can men give birth?

Speaker 13 (02:46:30):
Yeah?

Speaker 8 (02:46:31):
If they're transgender? Q?

Speaker 7 (02:46:34):
The audience's shocked response. These people probably don't even know
if this refers to a transgender woman or a transgender man.

Speaker 4 (02:46:41):
Whatever.

Speaker 7 (02:46:42):
For another example, here's how Levek responded to a question
about voter fraud allegations.

Speaker 13 (02:46:47):
Do you think dal Trump committed a coup against the
US government?

Speaker 7 (02:46:50):
This was part of Kirk's response to a question about
US aid to Israel.

Speaker 13 (02:46:54):
What is your strong opinion about the civil war happening
in the Central African Republic.

Speaker 7 (02:46:58):
For another example, a student asked Kirk what should be
done about hate crimes against Venezuelan immigrants in cities like Chicago?

Speaker 13 (02:47:05):
Chicago?

Speaker 8 (02:47:05):
I think that we should do.

Speaker 13 (02:47:07):
I have a question, so what part of Chicago from?

Speaker 4 (02:47:08):
So these are all just classic red herricks. Here's another.

Speaker 13 (02:47:13):
Do you admit that the Hamas tried to commit genocide
on October seven?

Speaker 7 (02:47:16):
Also simply not what a genocide is. Now, Sometimes students
can catch what Kirk is doing with red herrings and deflections,
but even when drilled down on the original line of questioning,
Kirk will try hard to pivot away whenever the momentum
is not going in his favor.

Speaker 13 (02:47:33):
You guys are super focused on technical things that we
could talk about forever. Let me just ask a question.
I asked you, what is Kamala Harris's greatest accomplishment? Can
you tell me what that would be?

Speaker 7 (02:47:44):
Perhaps the most common tactic Charlie Kirk employes to maintain
control over the interaction is instead of just stating his opinion,
Kirk will throw a question back to his opponent with
the intent of getting them to say something that's in
support of Kirk's own argument. Alternatively, Kirk will ask a

(02:48:05):
question that the student probably doesn't know, like some specific
stat but something that Kirk already has a prepared answer for,
so that he can throw off his opponent, make them
question their own ability to debate, and make himself seem smarter.
Here's a short compilation.

Speaker 13 (02:48:24):
If there was a policy that made markets more free
but hurt your country, would you support it? Do you
believe that FDR was right and partnering with Joseph Stalin
to defeat Hitler?

Speaker 4 (02:48:35):
Yeah?

Speaker 13 (02:48:35):
So I guess two questions with tariff's how do you
avoid a tariff's? Ask another moral question, then, is it
ever okay to do something evil after an l under abortion?
Do you carve out a new morality? Is there like
a different kind of morality that we apply only to abortion?
At what point does it get human rights?

Speaker 8 (02:48:50):
Let me ask you just a question.

Speaker 14 (02:48:51):
Do you know which nation is the biggest supplier of
the US military today?

Speaker 8 (02:48:55):
You could probably guess it.

Speaker 13 (02:48:56):
Is your phone, paid for by US taxpayers. Let me
ask you, did you have a big this summer in
a luxury hotel paid for by taxpayers? Ten people are
murdered in Chicago. Out of those ten, how many of
those cases will be solved on average?

Speaker 2 (02:49:08):
Do you think?

Speaker 13 (02:49:08):
Okay? So you said wanted to suspend the Constitution? Did
he do that when he was president?

Speaker 7 (02:49:13):
His argumentative style looks pretty goofy when it's all broken
down into its respective parts. Now to circle back to
my stance of just never engaging with these bad faith
debate spectacles. Lastly, I'll show you what happens when you
quote unquote do well against someone like Charlie Kirk. I
think the only time Kirk was really thrown off was

(02:49:35):
during one of the very last matchups, with a student
asking about Kirk's support of military aid to Israel despite
his alleged anti war stance and his call for the
US to pause all foreign aid until the southern border
is secured. Like usual, Kirk first tried to deflect by
using red herrings and turn questions back on the student.

Speaker 13 (02:49:57):
Let me ask you this a first principal question. Do
you think the Jewish people have a moral rights to
their religions?

Speaker 10 (02:50:03):
Do not have?

Speaker 7 (02:50:06):
Kirk then failed to accuse the student of anti Semitism.
Kirk then tried to trick the student into saying that
Hamas is more morally good than Israel, But the student
saw what Kirk was trying to do with his bizarre
moralistic framing.

Speaker 13 (02:50:21):
Do you think that Israel as it's currently constituted is
morally equivalent with Hamas?

Speaker 7 (02:50:26):
The student quite wisely did not answer Kirk's precariously worded
yes or no question and instead reframed the question in
their own words and only then stated their opinion that
both Hamas and the IDs actions can be constituted as evil.

Speaker 4 (02:50:45):
Still, Kirk wouldn't relent.

Speaker 13 (02:50:47):
So which one is better? Which one is good is better.

Speaker 7 (02:50:50):
His nonsensical framing was once again rejected, but then Kirk
accused the student of being propagandized and then asked if
they had personally been to Israel to assess the situation.

Speaker 4 (02:51:02):
And this is when everything fell apart.

Speaker 13 (02:51:05):
Let me tell you this that you know that.

Speaker 16 (02:51:06):
There's Arab serving in the Kannesset, you know that, and
there why you're a point of Jews saying I don't
like Jews because Israel absolutely.

Speaker 13 (02:51:14):
Saying I'm just gonna I'm gonna go back to this
because I think it's so interesting though, which is that
I believe that the Jewish people do have a rights
their ancestral body.

Speaker 16 (02:51:20):
Well, first of all, that you believe that they should
be leveling buildings because that's their ancestral home.

Speaker 13 (02:51:24):
I'm not I'm not defending every decision they made, but
that's exactly what they're doing. Interrupt every you're interrupting. I'm
gonna ask for our next question because you're not arguing.

Speaker 4 (02:51:31):
The more questions.

Speaker 13 (02:51:32):
Not much to debate, because I believe that Israel should
exist in its current form, you do not, thank you
very much. Okay, last couple the moral confusion on the
Israel topic. Is it's it's hard to clear up in
a vendy like this.

Speaker 7 (02:51:47):
Again, like these aren't real debates. If the conversation goes
any way other than how Kirk wants it to go,
he has complete control of the environment and can move
on to a more desirable apent because, like, beyond convincing
any gullible people that might happen to be in the crowd,
the real reason Kirk does events like this is to

(02:52:08):
make content.

Speaker 4 (02:52:10):
It's YouTube debate.

Speaker 7 (02:52:12):
These debate videos rack up thousands and sometimes millions of
views on YouTube and TikTok, and every single person that
participates as if these are real debates is directly helping
Charlie Kirk make money and grow his brand. This TPUSA
Brainwash Tour will continue into November, and I'm sure Charlie

(02:52:33):
Kirk will keep doing events like this in the years
to come, regardless of who wins the election. So what's
the options to counter something like this? I'm of three minds.
My default response to stuff like this is usually just
to ignore. Don't give these attention hounds what they're looking for,
don't try to debate, don't try to own Charlie Kirk

(02:52:56):
with facts and logic, there's no real benefit from engaging
with him and his ilk on their own terms, but
there will always be at least a few college students
who think they can get one up on Charlie Kirk.
So since these events are gonna continue to happen even
if my friends and I withhold our participation, the second

(02:53:20):
option is just to simply confuse. This is what I
call the skibbity Biden strategy, one which I deployed against
the my pillow guy Mike Lindell in front of the
Israeli Consulate as he tried to suck up as much
attention as possible during the DNC.

Speaker 4 (02:53:37):
They might come work. Skibbity Biden, skibbity Biden, give me
buy one. This was probably my favorite moment of the DNC.

Speaker 7 (02:53:47):
This strategy of complete confusion doesn't just deny the subject
what they want. If you're the my pillow guy attention
from reporters or, in the case of Charlie Kirk, an
unfair debate against a non media trained college friend Shuman,
but the skibbity Biden strategy also eats up their time,
prohibiting others from being able to engage on the terms

(02:54:08):
decided upon by Turning Point USA, the more time you
spend spewing your near unintelligible gibberish about how Warhammer connects
to US foreign policy or explaining your made up conspiracy
theory about how the Hawktua girl is a CIA asset.
All of that is less time for some nineteen year

(02:54:29):
olds to challenge Kirk on his abortion views, and a
knowing Charlie Kirk is just a fun bonus, now that
I think about it, this is essentially the patent Oswalt
filibuster tactic. Now, obviously Kirk has control of the mic
and probably won't let you ramble on about gibberish for
too long, So this strategy becomes more successful if you

(02:54:52):
can get a whole team lined up in front of
the microphone. Now, finally, the last option is disruption through force,
preferably in a way that limits the possibility of creating
an on camera spectacle that can be utilized by TPUSA.
This has typically not been a common tactic used to
counter Turning Point events on campus, but it may be

(02:55:15):
time to reconsider. Forceful disruptions were often utilized when figures
like Milo Uanapolis toured college campuses back in twenty sixteen
to twenty eighteen, and more recently against campus events featuring
Daily Wire employees like Michael Knowles and Matt Walsh. Historically,
this strategy has not been applied to Charlie Kirk, as

(02:55:37):
he's been viewed as less radical than some of these
other figures. But I just don't think that's true anymore.
Kirk is spreading and normalizing hardcore as xenophobic and nationalist
rhetoric across college campuses with little to no resistance, not
to mention his complete embrace of conspiracy theories and use

(02:55:57):
of transphobia to undermine civil rights. There's many ways to
disrupt events like this through forceful means, sound disruption, visual disruption,
physical disruption, planning an alternate event to take place at
the same time, and place big banners with Charles's tiny
face carefully placed in view of the debate cameras. Creative

(02:56:20):
opportunities abound, but it requires people to be actively monitoring
when and where these events take place and actually plan
a counterdemo ahead of time, and that just doesn't seem
to be happening at the moment. And so I thought
going to this event would help reboot my brain cheer

(02:56:40):
myself up and amuse me with Charlie's childish display of
debate kid politics. But it just left me more sad
watching hapless kids fall prey to Kirk's transparent scheme, just
feeling like I had no way to stop the train wreck.
But it doesn't have to be this way. With a

(02:57:01):
few friends and a little preparation, there is an alternative
and hey, it could happen here. Well that's my recap
on this fucking Charlie Kirk rally. Oh and heads up,
next week, there's gonna be no Spooky Week episodes for
the first time in four years. Sorry, the world has

(02:57:23):
just gotten too spooky this year. Between the election and
hurricanes and the genocide and Gaza and everything else happening,
the world's just too spooky. I'm really just not feeling
Halloween pilled as I usually am. Hopefully things will get
better soon. But in lieu of Spooky Week, we actually

(02:57:44):
have a special series from James on the Darien Gap,
so you have that to look forward to next week.
Goodbye everyone, see you on the other side.

Speaker 2 (02:57:54):
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat Death of the Universe.

Speaker 4 (02:58:00):
It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 1 (02:58:03):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonmedia 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.

Speaker 4 (02:58:17):
Thanks for listening.

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