It Could Happen Here Weekly 199

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's going to be nothing new here for you, But
you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 3 (00:28):
What's up, y'alls.

Speaker 4 (00:29):
Your favorite cousin again, prop is in the building? Yeah,
saying well in your earbuds or speakers, however the hell
you listen it is your favorite cousin is here. I
am going to assume that that is the truth, and
since you can't answer me, we just gonna go with that.
It's been a while since I tapped in with y'all.
I ruined your music festivals and then told you about

(00:52):
your municipalities and your waters. Somebody reached out to us,
who you know, gestures wildly. We have not been able
to get back to her, but about how she was
a part of an effort to non privatize the water
inside of her neighborhood and district and they won. So
shout out to you. We apologize if you've you know,

(01:13):
our job has not been boring since the start of
twenty twenty five. But today I'm gonna bring you some blackness,
some genuine blackness, and then some This has to be
a black conversation.

Speaker 3 (01:25):
Because you might of facts are racist.

Speaker 4 (01:30):
I have to approach it like this because crime has
become a color mute term in the era of Trump.
It kind of always has been, but it's really obvious
now with the National Guard being unleashed onto the streets

(01:51):
of Washington, d C. There's some sort of clearly obvious
conflation between the houseless population, poverty, crime black folks. Like,
it's all kind of like one thing with this food,
which is not rocket science for y'all, it's just you
know what he talking about. You know how I know
this how he thinks is because whenever he talks about

(02:13):
black people supporting him, he talks about criminal reform, because
apparently that's what all black people care about. Only just
like you know, when he say immigration, he mean Latino
and the whole not feeling safe is just because you know,
the crime that the houseless population of DC have is
being ill.

Speaker 3 (02:32):
That's the crime because they No one has ever given me.

Speaker 4 (02:36):
A legitimate reason as to why not having a place
to stay as a crime.

Speaker 3 (02:40):
Hell, you know, Margaret kill.

Speaker 4 (02:42):
Joined him have this whole joint about loitering and loitering
laws like truancies. Why I'm getting ahead of myself. The
point is the crime is that you exist. So today
I want to talk to y'all about something that y'all
already know, which is it's never.

Speaker 3 (03:01):
Been about the crime.

Speaker 5 (03:03):
All right.

Speaker 4 (03:03):
Now, First of all, some stuff that don't matter. Y'all
still following Drake. I don't know if y'all like, Okay,
my crowd is following Drake. Let me stop making a
difference between us. But listen, so you know, Drake's suing
UMG and his label over you know, not like us,
and just proving that he's not like us anyway. The
new thing in this man's lawsuit he is he's the

(03:26):
man in UMG. Bring evidence over to push the teeth thing?
What do I mean by to push the teeth thing?
When push the t came at him, which we can
all agree if you in the rap, he won also
shout out the clips. So when you go back to
the push the teeth time, this is the back to
back and I'm charged up that time. He was like, Yo,

(03:46):
I'm gonna show y'all the emails, and y'all bring in
the emails from when you guys were suppressing Push the
T's stuff, when you guys were like making sure that
like it got copyright claimed and stuff getting off the
streamers and pulled down all this. Say, man, you helped
me suppress this man's music when Push the Tea came
after me, Why y'all don't do it with not like us,

(04:09):
which means your corny ass you just told on yourself.

Speaker 3 (04:15):
Oh so Push It was right.

Speaker 4 (04:18):
So what you're saying is in you trying to take
down Kendrick You done snitched on twenty eighteen? You right, Okay,
So because you had to label interfere with this battle fam. Now,
if you want to hear some more like real just
rapping ass rappers, there's this great battle that was going
on between Joey Badass and Ray Vaughn and then somehow

(04:40):
it became a triple with this dude named Daylight and
this other brother named Reason. These were some really really
dope bars. Now Absol got into the middle of it.
But now Apsol Rhapsody and Joey are going on tour,
which sucks because I'm on the same management team as
all of them and I ain't on that tour. I

(05:00):
wish I was, though it'd be a rap and rapping tour,
But I definitely don't do the numbers they do anyway. Today,
you know, in light of like I said, the Feds
in DC, Trump keep claiming these emergency cases that gives
him these powers to do these different things. And as
a side note, remember when J six happened and he

(05:22):
was like, well, Nancy Pelosi should have called in the
National Guard. Shan't call in the passional Guard? What was
President Trump's supposed to do? Well, I would think what
He's doing now, because they used to say these same
people that was arguing that Trump ain't had a power
to stop it, meaning he didn't have the power to
call in the national Guard, are also praising him right

(05:43):
now for using his presidential power to call in the
National Guard. Boy, I tell you, racism make you dumb
as hell. But in light of this, despite all evidence
showing that the crime rate has dropped thirty percent in DC,
this man still keeps talking about the crime wave and

(06:04):
the safety or the lack of safety that people feel
in DC. Now, I'm gonna let Bridget do a full
episode on really what's going on in Chocolate City? My
mama from DC. You know, my whole mama side of
the family still out there. So I used to spend
every other summer in DC. Now, don't get me wrong,
being down thirty percent is absolutely positive. But DC ain't safe.

(06:30):
Now it depends on what part you in.

Speaker 3 (06:33):
See. That's the thing about crime statistics.

Speaker 4 (06:35):
But before I get into crime statistics, I need to
talk about the concept of crime.

Speaker 6 (06:39):
Period.

Speaker 4 (06:40):
This will be no surprise to y'all because you listen
to Cools on media.

Speaker 3 (06:45):
Crime is made up.

Speaker 4 (06:47):
Now, criminal crime, I think it's very important to understand
that it is a social construct. Now what do I
mean by that? But on me is it's situational? Right,
How the same act can mean two different things. Now,

(07:07):
this is a conceptual thing that obviously our felt experience
is a little more real.

Speaker 3 (07:12):
But let me give you an example.

Speaker 4 (07:15):
Let a disaster hit, a hurricane, an earthquake, a flood.
If I go into that grocery store and get some bread,
am I looting or scavenging? Am I stealing or surviving.
And the answer is depends on what color you are.
Crime is a social construct. Because if that's the case,

(07:35):
how is George Zimmerman still walking? Having said that, one
could take this argument and go super bonkers on it
and say the same thing about pedophilia, Like, who's to
say that what Epstein did is a crime? Because, like
you said, crime is a social construct. Here's my answer
to that, it's social because we live in a social

(07:55):
souci it t fam. Although borders are made up, so
is money, and sow are driver's licenses. Of course, there's
no force field at the forty ninth parallel that separates
Canada from America. However, we have decided that before you
get behind the wheel of a car, you better have

(08:16):
passed some sort of examination for us to know that
you're safe enough to drive behind this You could physically
drive this car, but we live in a society that says, hey, homy,
I need you to make sure.

Speaker 3 (08:29):
We need to have some sort of due diligence.

Speaker 4 (08:33):
We have decided, as a species that is self aware
that our children matter.

Speaker 3 (08:39):
Their safety is important to us.

Speaker 4 (08:42):
The person standing next to you has the right to exist,
whether you like that person or not. They have the
right to exist. You cannot hold them against they will.
That's heybeas corpus, apparently unbeknownst to Christy Nole, who clearly
don't know what hate be as corpus means as all
the time it what is criminal and what is lawful

(09:02):
is something that we've agreed upon in our social contract. Now, we, however,
live in a modern secular democracy, which says that we
have a say in what becomes laws or not so
and got to just lay down and let you just
call stuff a crime that ain't a crime or that
shouldn't be a crime. Now, speaking of what is and
isn't a crime, here's the thing. Black people have been

(09:24):
telling you the answer for a long time, specifically rappers. Okay, Now,
I saw a TikTok about this, and it's very irresponsible
of me that I can't remember the hommy's name and
I can't you know, you get the suggested, you know,
or yeah, just stuff pop in like before you I
cannot find brad Brush TikTok black Man, super brilliant. But

(09:49):
he reminded me of some lyrics that Freeway said that
captures the point of what we're trying to make I
love his dude's TikTok Man, God, I gotta find it.

Speaker 3 (10:01):
Hopefully, Hopefully I'll find it and put it in the
show notes.

Speaker 4 (10:04):
But Freeway's verse with a song with jay Z, says,
we still hustle till the sun come up. Crack a forty.
When the sun go down, it's a cold winter. Y'all,
niggas better bundle up. I bet it's a hot summer.
Grab an onion just to rock it down. You hot,
Now listen up, follow me. You don't know the cops
soul purposes to lock us down.

Speaker 3 (10:26):
Throw away to key.

Speaker 4 (10:27):
But without this drug shit, your kids ain't got no
way to eat.

Speaker 7 (10:32):
Huh.

Speaker 4 (10:33):
We still trying to keep mom smiling because when her
teeth stops showing and her stomach start growling, then the
heat start flowing. If you from my hood, you know
you feel me keep going, the sneaks start leaning and
the heat stop working, then my heat start working.

Speaker 3 (10:54):
I'm gonna rob me a person. Okay, now listen.

Speaker 4 (10:58):
These are the lyrics that Little Bruh quoted in his TikTok,
and the point he's making, which is the same point
I'm making, is that he's talking about the solutions to crime.
Like he said it right there, like I just want
my mom to smile. My kids don't have any other

(11:18):
way to eat. And then he says, when the heat
stopped working, then my heat start working.

Speaker 3 (11:24):
I'm gonna rob me a person. It is resources.

Speaker 4 (11:29):
But again, follow what this brud trying to tell you
is that you putting law enforcement in our neighborhoods doesn't
fix anything. Does you follow? Does what we're saying? He's like, no,
you just want to lock us up. That is not
solving the problem. The problem is I'm hungry, My mama's hungry,

(11:53):
my kids are hungry. My sneaks start leaning. What he's
talking about is this tennis shoes as sneakers, they're leaning.
You know, when you walk on your sneakers too much
in the back of your shoes in the back house,
start running around the side, then it start thinning out,
so it's like the back of your shoe just looks uneven.
That's when your sneaks are leaning. This is what he's
trying to say. My stomach is rumbling. Had we had

(12:14):
better funded schools, had we had more opportunities, He was like,
I'm robbing this person because there is no other option.

Speaker 3 (12:22):
Now, are there other options?

Speaker 4 (12:24):
Maybe, But if you gonna do the math, listen, this
is simple economics. If you want to make one thousand
dollars tonight because the rents do tomorrow, you go over
to Spanish Jose's house. Spanish Jose say, hey, listen, you
ain't got to do nothing. Just put this bag in
your back seat and drive the park slope, drop it

(12:47):
off a comeback. Or you can go work twenty dollars
an hour at McDonald's. Ain't no uncles with endowments and
check this out. Let me push you even further, even
if you are smarty autar, even if you're a smart one.
The government just told Harvard that they can't recruit in
my neighborhood even if I got the grades for it,

(13:08):
because that's woke shit.

Speaker 3 (13:10):
So what you want? What the fuck you want me
to do?

Speaker 4 (13:12):
Now here's the premise of what I'm talking about, which is,
we know the solutions.

Speaker 3 (13:19):
It's never been about crime.

Speaker 4 (13:20):
Okay, but let me talk about some folks, some black
folks who do care about the solution, who do care
about crime, Because if we're talking about crime in our
urban areas, who the fuck do you think the crimes
are against and see that's the part that makes me
so mad.

Speaker 3 (13:36):
When I be talking to these people.

Speaker 4 (13:38):
You think we don't care because who are these crimes
getting carried out against.

Speaker 3 (13:44):
You think we happy to see all them police.

Speaker 4 (13:46):
One would think if it worked, we would be happy
to see all these police in our streets.

Speaker 3 (13:50):
But you know what, the shit don't help.

Speaker 4 (13:53):
Okay, what I'm gonna do in the rest of this
show is prove to y'all, based on decades of research,
what does reduce crime.

Speaker 3 (14:05):
We're gonna link all the things in the bio.

Speaker 4 (14:06):
I knew I had to come my a game if
I'm going on the cap and Year, because these some
of the smartest people like y'all. Listen, the people on
this show, y'all. Y'all is like real journalists. I'm just
a rapper that knows how to explain shit. So I
needed to make sure that I had my ducks in
a row. So I'm about to show y'all a trillion
examples of where if you really from these blocks, if

(14:31):
you really do care about the welfare of black people,
then maybe you should listen to black people. See and
let me bring in my trans community here because they
problem with you this to be honest with y'all, I'm
gonna be transparent, which this is part of what radicalized
me whilst really started to understand the trans experience is
because the shit they say about us is the shit

(14:54):
they say about you.

Speaker 3 (14:55):
Your crime is we just don't like you around.

Speaker 4 (14:58):
At the end of the day, all these laws against
trans people is really just because you just think they gross.
And so with us, it was just like you, like,
what is redlining, discriminatory practices in jobs?

Speaker 3 (15:12):
You just don't want us around. What is white flight?
You just don't want us around?

Speaker 4 (15:18):
And your justification of this is this made up ass
word name crime and that you care that crime matter.
But Nikki, you don't. Okay, I'm getting getting ahead of myself.
Let's take a break. All right, here we go. I've

(15:40):
calmed down. So the first thing you want to think
about is how crime is reported, right in the ways
for which it's reported, and then the geographical locations that
we're talking about. So when you say the crime in Washington, DC,
it's not like the crime happens in an even distributed thing,

(16:01):
like it's not all of DC. If you will, there's northeast, northwest, southeast,
south southeast and southwest now due to gentrification. Southeast which
is where Anacostia is and was at one time the
sort of mecha of just like Black DC of chocolate
cy Chocola Cy's, The whole city was chocolate forever. Like

(16:24):
I said, I noticed because I spent every other summer
there and my mama from there. But like Southeast, DC
is the last non gentrified area.

Speaker 3 (16:32):
Now do you.

Speaker 4 (16:33):
Think it's thugs sitting on the National Monument sipping forty ounces?

Speaker 3 (16:39):
No, you out there with the tourists sipping macha.

Speaker 4 (16:43):
So in one sense is when you say crime has
dropped thirty percent, it's like thirty percent since when?

Speaker 3 (16:53):
Okay?

Speaker 4 (16:54):
And is it averaged across all of DC or are
you talking about in its areas where things like carjackings,
homicides and stuff like that happen right now? Remember what
I talked about a long time ago, at least on
my show. Hopefully y'all remember this that the crime rates
in America is always a weird situation because we don't

(17:18):
live in America. You live in your city, so maybe
it is going crazy in your own local neighborhoods, so
you feel like, damn this place is wild. Or maybe,
like I said, maybe you're in like Northwest Portland, you
know what I'm saying, Like you know over there off Gleason,
you feel me in like it's nice, you know what
I mean, Like you don't never see a single But
if you live over there in Chinatown next to Voodoo Donuts, Dog,

(17:41):
you seem like you walking over zombies.

Speaker 3 (17:43):
I don't know.

Speaker 4 (17:44):
What I'm trying to say is sometimes the statistics can
be deceiving. Now Granny and them who you know, bought
their house a long time ago. They see the graffiti
on the wall and they think, you know, YadA YadA,
the boys like loitering outside. How do you fix it? Well,
allow me to introduce it to Philadelphia, which coincidentally is

(18:08):
where Freeway is from.

Speaker 3 (18:10):
So the data is pretty clear, you know.

Speaker 4 (18:13):
If you look at the Violent Crime Reduction Report, it's
literally it's at the Department of Justice.

Speaker 3 (18:19):
You can read it yourself.

Speaker 4 (18:21):
It tells you exactly what has worked to drop homicide,
violent crime, carjacking, theft.

Speaker 3 (18:31):
It tells you what has worked what has not worked.
A simple google right.

Speaker 4 (18:37):
And the intro of this is this is a violent
crime reduction between twenty twenty one and twenty twenty five,
and it says for the past three years, the Justice
Department has been executing comprehensive strategies to reduce violent crime
rooted in local communities, and we're seeing trends in the
form of crimes being prevented and live saved. According to

(19:01):
available data from twenty twenty three, murder, rape, robbery, and
aggregated assault is in a considerable decline and nearly ninety
major cities across the country violent crime has continued to
drop during the last six months of this year compared
to the same period last year, including a seventeen percent

(19:21):
decreasing homicides. This is the Deputy Attorney General Monkyo on
September seventeenth, twenty twenty four. Now, to keep it very
real again, violent crime rates being up and down are
obviously relative.

Speaker 3 (19:37):
Now.

Speaker 4 (19:38):
One thing was, well, we were in a pandemic, so
there's that, right. Another thing is it's almost like how
everybody was complaining again that crime was up. It is
like y'all forgot the nineties existed, like I'd lived it,
and baby, this ain't nothing, you know, the actual fear

(19:59):
of pain and suffering. This pales in comparison we live
in a great place in relation to what we went
through in the eighties and nineties. Now again we're talking
national trends right again in your local neighborhood.

Speaker 3 (20:18):
It may be a green light afvenent. I don't know.
I'm just saying for you to.

Speaker 4 (20:23):
Say that our country's becoming a cesspool means you not
reading the data. According to the Conversation, it's like independent journalist.
This author, her name is Katerina g Roman. She's a
professor of criminal justice at Temple University and as a
side note, at Temple University, Mahomie Timothy, he's teaching a

(20:44):
class on Kendrick.

Speaker 3 (20:45):
Lamar and his lyrics and hip hop and justice.

Speaker 4 (20:47):
I actually spoke at his class a couple of times,
so that was pretty dope to hear what he's doing.

Speaker 3 (20:52):
But now check this out.

Speaker 4 (20:53):
According to her writing, it says that the Pennsylvania spends
roughly two hundred thousand dollars a year for each juvenile
it incarcerates. According to the twenty twenty one report from
a bipartisan Pennsylvania Juvenile Justice Track Force, that's fifty times
the cost to deliver evidence based family therapy that would

(21:15):
prevent kids from going into the justice system in the
first place. I'm gonna tell you before I even read
the rest of this, because I lived it. We just
be bored. It ain't nothing to do. There are no opportunities.
When the heat stopped working, then my heat start working.
In Philadelphia, juvenile incarceration involves the confinement in City ran

(21:35):
Philadelphia Juvenile Services and other residential placements facilities. Young people
leave these facilities with lower chances of graduating high school,
freed mental health, and the higher likelihood of re arrest
or being shot.

Speaker 3 (21:50):
Can I again, please speak from my own experience.

Speaker 4 (21:53):
When you go into these juveniles cases, you have to
pick a location of people that you would be You'll
pretend even if you don't run with them, even if
you don't know them niggas outside of here. When y'all
get outside, y'all may never have talked again. But in here,
even if you went in there over some stupid like
shoplift and some damn spray paint, whatever the case may be,
you now got to run with the people that got

(22:16):
your same skin tone and are from your part of town.
You have to kids don't go in being members of gangs.
You have to join one to stay alive. Now check
this out. When you get out. Part of the terms
of your probation is you can't be around certain criminal

(22:36):
festivities or activities or people with criminal records.

Speaker 3 (22:41):
Where you're gonna go.

Speaker 4 (22:42):
If I just happen to live on sixtieth Street next
to my uncle, I just live here. You mess around,
go visit your granny house and then got a report
to your PO. You've been fragnized with known gang members.
You're probably going back. The shit don't work, y'all. But
what does now?

Speaker 3 (23:02):
Again?

Speaker 4 (23:02):
Back to this article, drawing from about thirty five years
of work in Philadelphia and other cities to understand what
makes neighborhoods safe for I believe the surist returns home
from prevention strategies aimed at young people who are not
yet immersed in robbery, shootings and gun activities. So they
give some examples of the things that they've done. First

(23:23):
of it is a school based case management In Barthrom
High now in southwest Philly, John Bartram High Schools has
a youth violence reduction initiative that launched in twenty twenty three.
It was designed by former school safety chief in Philadelphia
now Philadelphia Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel, School Safety Offer Programs

(23:44):
Manager Ken Rosa, and criminal justice researcher Brandy Blasco and.

Speaker 3 (23:50):
This person that wrote the article.

Speaker 4 (23:52):
Students who have been involved in fights or show other
risk factors of violence and street gang involvements are referred
to this pro The initiative's core idea is simple, earn
students trust through consistent, credible mentorship, and step in when needy.
Stepping in means teaching conflict resolution skills, running engaging workshops,

(24:13):
buying a meal, intervening when a fight is brewing or
a student is on the verge of being expelled. Each week,
a team of administrators, counselors, school safety officers, and community
outreach workers, most of whom are based in the school,
review the participants progress tracks, follow through referrals, and coordinate
communication with family, school and staff. This is a tightly managed,

(24:39):
relationship driven safety net that gives students quicker access to
help make school climates calmer and safer. This seems so obvious.
You just need somebody you trust.

Speaker 3 (24:52):
Listen. One of the things even.

Speaker 4 (24:54):
In my own house, my own life, was I knew
my neighbors and my neighbors knew me, and if they
call me outside standing with the wrong people, I knew
they was gonna tell mama. Sometimes, since they're teenagers, they
don't have conflict resolution skills. All they know is to
pop off. You ever been angry, You don't think kids

(25:17):
be angry. Your teacher in there asking you about your
algebra homework, your stomach rumbling. I ain't got shit to
say to her because I'm hungry. And sometimes it's just
the meal. Sometimes it's just knowing somebody cares. Sometimes it's
just you feel like I know. I've experienced it too.
I feel like it's not even they ain't even know no
reason to explain my position to you, because you're not

(25:38):
gonna believe me, or you just gonna call the police.

Speaker 3 (25:41):
I taught a kid.

Speaker 4 (25:42):
I've said this story so many times, who used to
show up late in class? When I used to teach,
you show up late in class maybe three to four
times a week, always had his homework in his hand.
You've tarty that many times were supposed to call a
truancy officer. Ain't no way in the world I'm calling
a truancy officer because that mean they Mama gonna have
to pay a twenty five hundred dollar fee number one

(26:03):
and number two. Now he got a record. All I did, guys,
I just asked him, why are you late every day?
He say, because he trusts me. My daddy'd be drinking
too much a night, so he can't get up and
take us to school. So I take my brother to
school first and then come here.

Speaker 3 (26:26):
And this is just the time I get here. I
never marked him.

Speaker 4 (26:29):
Thwarty, since all you do is ask, right, which leads
me to the second thing, the power of credible caring adults.

Speaker 3 (26:38):
It's real simple. You got people that care, you got
food programs. All right, let me nerd it up again.

Speaker 6 (26:45):
Now.

Speaker 4 (26:46):
According to the Youth Justice Services, Relationships, Rehabilitation, and the
Reality of Young People Involved a metasynthesis of qualitative literature.
This is a scholarly literature review dude results that says
that just having an adult who you know cares, just

(27:11):
having one that cared, changes significantly the chances of a
student getting into a life of crime.

Speaker 3 (27:19):
But just knowing somebody care.

Speaker 4 (27:22):
I'm going to link in it again into these show notes,
all of the data, all the stuff I've been looking at,
so you can check it out yourself. I know, it
seems like a gross oversimplification by the way that I'm
just saying it right now.

Speaker 3 (27:34):
Usually you know what I'm saying. We was doing the
it can happen here thing.

Speaker 4 (27:37):
I gotta be able to read this stuff out to you,
but I can read a part of it.

Speaker 3 (27:42):
It says that that the themes.

Speaker 4 (27:45):
That broke out after interviewing one hundred and fifty kids
is that young people reported first being pessimistic about entering
these services, and their past experiences impacted their ability to
trust and were initially.

Speaker 3 (27:58):
Cautious of professionals. But watch this.

Speaker 4 (28:02):
These were the themes and sub themes they felt valued
and finding worth within their system. The reciprocal nature of
understanding and respect these kids felt respected, the importance of
having one good person, creating a secure base for expiration
and development, and then showing a genuine care by going
above and beyond.

Speaker 3 (28:22):
So basically, just.

Speaker 4 (28:24):
Be kind and it helps a student sixsed.

Speaker 3 (28:35):
Ain't that crazy?

Speaker 4 (28:37):
But at the end of the day, homicides in Philadelphia
at the lowest level they've been in twenty five years.
How it's long time and it takes effort. But next
I want to talk about who the city of Baltimore.

Speaker 3 (28:53):
What is new? Mayor up there cooking? All right?

Speaker 6 (28:57):
Next?

Speaker 3 (29:08):
All right, we bike. Now Baltimore.

Speaker 4 (29:11):
I don't know if you know this, which I love
about it, and of course you probably don't know about it.

Speaker 3 (29:15):
Because a black man did this.

Speaker 4 (29:18):
Baltimore's homicide rate has fallen forty percent. Now, Baltimore, you
understand this is where the wire took place. Don't get
me wrong about Baltimore. Baltimore active murder capital of a dog.
Oh listen, Baltimore was active now. According to the Guardian,
violent crime in America's big cities has been receiving since

(29:40):
the pandemic for about two years, but even in comparisons
Baltimore improvement is breathtaking. Fewer people have been killed in
the city over the last seven months than any other
particular period for fifty years. Here's the funny part. Mississippi
talking about sending a National Guard up to DC. Do
you help with the crime in DC? Meanwhile, Jackson, Mississippi,

(30:05):
got a higher murder rate than DC. Right now, y'all, people,
is weird. It's never been about crime. Now, back to Guardian.
As of fifteen August, the running three hundred and sixty
five day total for murders in Baltimore stood at one.

Speaker 3 (30:19):
Hundred and sixty five dead.

Speaker 4 (30:21):
Assuming the city remains at this pace, the murder rate
will finish below thirty per ten thousand residents for the
first time since nineteen eighty six. If it remains on
pace since the first of January, it would have finished
twenty twenty five at one hundred and forty three murders,
a rate of about twenty five per one hundred thousand,

(30:43):
the last scene in Baltimore since nineteen seventy eight.

Speaker 3 (30:48):
Now check this out.

Speaker 4 (30:49):
Y'all may not remember this, but y'all remember Freddie Gray,
the boy that got killed in the back of the
police holding tank.

Speaker 3 (30:58):
See, that's what happens when you just bring into a place.

Speaker 4 (31:01):
It ain't about the crime though, back to the Guardian,
since twenty fifteen, there has been here in Baltimore, this
acknowledgment that the equity needs to be the priority.

Speaker 3 (31:12):
Right.

Speaker 4 (31:12):
Mayor Brown said the riots were as much about the
conditions of poverty as it was about Gray's death. I
hope you hearing that people losing their homes and foreclosures
to water bills, for example, as they were about police brutality.
But the heavy handed response to the cops to the protests,
failed to hold the police accountable for misconduct, right, viscerating

(31:38):
the relationship between the Baltimore police and the public. Baltimore
State Attorney Marion Moseley laid murder.

Speaker 3 (31:45):
Charges on the officers.

Speaker 4 (31:46):
Involved in Baltimore's police union, closed ranks and response, eviscerating
the relationship between the police and politicians, and serious scandals
at the city Hall and the state's attorney offers, and
the failure of Moseley's charges to result in convictions.

Speaker 3 (32:03):
Violence skyrocket.

Speaker 4 (32:06):
Here come this young brother, Brandon Scott, young black man. Right,
he's a former city council member. Right, he's been a
long observer of the violence, you know what I'm saying.
And before he became the mayor in twenty twenty, then
he implemented what he's calling a comprehensive three pillar approach.

Speaker 5 (32:26):
Right.

Speaker 3 (32:27):
The first pillar is called public health approach to violence. Right.

Speaker 4 (32:31):
The second pillar is community engagement and interagency coordination.

Speaker 3 (32:36):
Right. The third pillar is evaluation and accountability.

Speaker 6 (32:39):
Right.

Speaker 4 (32:40):
So, like I said in the beginning, it starts with
the community, all right. So check this out again from
The Guardian against Baltimore's police budget topping a half a
billion dollars, the largest police budget per capital of any
large city in the USA. The political establishment gave its
new millennial mayor room to experiment with fifty million dollars

(33:01):
of Washington's money. So they took that budget that was
a half a billion, gave him fifty million, right, And
since Trust was like solo, the first step was to
get everybody aboard. So he took that money the cops,
the hospitals, the jails, the school the social services, the
state Department, the Feds, and he appointed this dude named
Richard Worley Oh who is the city police commissioner in

(33:23):
June twenty twenty three. Wesley was a lifelong Baltimore officer,
picked in part to bring the rank and file in
line with Scott's anti violence program. Scott emphasizes partnerships as
an important part of the process. Now, he took other
federal grants, and he gave the money to the people
that actually do the services.

Speaker 3 (33:45):
He ain't just keeping for them.

Speaker 4 (33:46):
Now here's the thing cuts my mouth to say it,
But if you are going to stop violence in the
situation that we live in, the cops got to be involved.
Because most of the time, the cops are the problem.
It's always punishment in prison with them. They only come
with a stick when something already happened. So you got
to get them on the table, and you got to

(34:08):
get them at the table with somebody that's gonna be
willing to be held accountable.

Speaker 3 (34:12):
And remember that's pillar three.

Speaker 4 (34:14):
Now now far being for me because I don't live
in Baltimore.

Speaker 3 (34:17):
Would I ever shill for no mayor like this.

Speaker 4 (34:19):
I'm just telling you what the data say is and
I got family in Baltimore. Now, what Scott said is
again we focus on the individuals and groups that are
most likely to be the victim or perpetuator of violence.

Speaker 3 (34:33):
We go to them. Listen, they knock on doors.

Speaker 4 (34:37):
There's a social worker that comes to the door with
a letter from the mayor that says, yo, you're trying
to be a part of this, and they're only targeting kids,
are families that they know got low poverty rates and
high chances of crime. You looking for the people who
are most likely gonna fall a victim, to perpetuating it

(34:59):
or receive you get because remember how we started this
whole thing before you think we don't care about crime,
we're the ones that's happening too, so, he says. Quote
Curtis Palomero, who runs the youth violence prevention nonprofit RAKKA
in Baltimore, says, we're talking about young people with the
elevated risk. We're not talking about the young person that
says FU to his teacher or tells his mom and

(35:21):
dad or grandpa he don't want to do X y Z.
We're talking about kids who have literally probably have two tracks,
jail and death. He knocks on the door while the
cop is carrying met the mayor's letter, and as often
as not he has to knock on a dozen doors
before he gets a chance. Why cause niggas don't trust
the cops right, Why would they? But since there's no

(35:44):
single thing that is preventative, trust must be built. Right
moving on in this article, there are two types of
people that are most vulnerable, nasays, the people in their
early twenties who are feuding over trivial matters someone looked
at me wrong, somebody bumped in as somebody right, or
other people who are in the drug game more around.
The violence that has to do with other criminal enterprises

(36:07):
are so much more calculated. Critically, it's not every young
person with Instagram beef, and not every stand down neighborhood
street dealer that rises to their attention. The risk factors
creates a reasonable, articulatable, illegally defensible basis for contact, which
means you're not being hunted by the cops.

Speaker 3 (36:28):
Do you understand the piece I would have felt hit.

Speaker 4 (36:30):
I known that since I wasn't involved in none of
this shit, they may not be coming up to me.
You've already calmed my nervous system down right. There's another
story about a young man who was recovering after a
gunshot and in this life coach Nigga from a youth
advocate program approached him and Jalen said, this is This
man said, he just had been in the wrong part

(36:52):
of West Baltimore at the wrong time. Now, most of
us who grew up like this, that's true. He wasn't
especially receptive to this first life life coach at all.

Speaker 3 (37:01):
He said, I thought there was a catch.

Speaker 4 (37:03):
I thought I'd have to pay them back in the future,
because when the police do it to you, that's exactly
what it is.

Speaker 3 (37:08):
You got to pay them back later.

Speaker 4 (37:10):
But this person is funded by the city to just
be a life coach, I ain't asking you to snitch
on nobody. I ain't asking you to make yourself put
yourself in danger. Outside is somebody who understands what it's
like to live out here. This life coach says, it's
about follow up. Today, they might say get the fuck
out of here tomorrow. They might be wanting some services.

(37:32):
It might be something tragic that happens and they need change.
Like I said, my mother's not smiling no more. I
need a way to pay my mama's life bill. Can
you help me with that? Here's what's crazy. Yes, I
can help you with that. We have services. Why because
I'm talking to the other departments. Right on the law side,

(37:53):
here's the prevention. They dismissed thirty four percent of non
violent charge. I was a non violet offender. It was graffiti.
Just make me pay the fine, Like it's fine. I
gotta pay the fine. I don't care. Right, you have
like a nickel bag of weed in your pocket. You

(38:13):
looking at five years. The shit is not working. That's
over policing. But if the district attorney look at you
and say, nigga's some weed man, get the fuck out
of here. Go take care of your mama. Matter of fact,
I want you to talk to this brother over here.
You're gonna help get your plumber's license. Oh so there's
job placement, right. There's all that, and then finally evaluation. Listen,

(38:35):
you got a carrying adult, you got services available to you,
and you know if somebody in this program, if any
of these law enforcement, these city people act the fuck up,
there are consequences.

Speaker 3 (38:48):
That is pillar three. I'm gonna link all this stuff
to you.

Speaker 4 (38:51):
There's a four year evaluation, and you will get fucking fired.
If I know that if you treat me right, something
gonna happen to you. I might think a little. Listen,
the heat stopped working, so my heat start working. But
if my stomach is full, and the bills are paid,
and there's after school programs that go to and I

(39:12):
know these old people around me are gonna trust me
when I tell them stuff. When I'm dealing with situations
that may or may not be out of my control,
when I got big homies pressing me to do this,
and there's somebody I could trust that I could talk
to that's not gonna turn me into a snitch, because
you ain't telling the cops just to get them to
give me information about a crime that happened over there.

(39:33):
That's not what's happening right now. You are trying to
prevent the violence. You're not trying to catch a criminal.
You're trying to prevent criminality, and it's at a fifty
year low. But sure, go and send the National Guard.
Now listen. Obviously this ain't the system. I won't, but
it's the system we got.

Speaker 3 (39:54):
This is not ideal.

Speaker 4 (39:55):
You would never see me shill for no police department
or mayor, but cities like Philly in Baltimore are proven. Nigga,
if you just care and you spend money on trusted
sources and provide resources, the crime it drops itself. Seems

(40:19):
so simple. But you know what do we know? We're
just black people and all this tells me what we
already knew. It was never about crime, ever, because there's
research that shows what actually works in reducing crime.

Speaker 3 (40:34):
What this about? You just think we're you and you're
a white supremacist.

Speaker 4 (40:40):
You just want a white world and you think it's
cool to have military in our streets.

Speaker 3 (40:43):
Don't get me wrong, you didn't invent that. You was
in Trump.

Speaker 4 (40:48):
You know how I know you ain't invent that because
there's an amendment in the Constitution.

Speaker 3 (40:55):
That says that we don't want to.

Speaker 4 (40:56):
Live in a world where the military is on every corner,
but apparently you do.

Speaker 3 (41:03):
It's clearly not about crime.

Speaker 1 (41:26):
Welcome to it could happen here a podcast about a
world on fire and how to put it out. I'm
your host, Nia Wong. The world is fucked. It's the
one thing everyone agrees on in the vacuum of a
defeated Democratic Party and a hideously unpopular fascist takeover that
is nevertheless on the march ideologies VI for the mantle

(41:50):
of resistance to the fascist purge, Sir on mom Donnie's
victory in New York represents a resurgent social democracy in
the streets. Everyone from the roles to communists to anarchists
are fighting against ice and the National Guard occupations. To
get our bearings in the swirling vortex of ideology, let
us check in slightly further to the right, but still

(42:13):
firmly in the grounds of liberalism, on a new movement
called abundance. What is abundance? Brust into Prominence by a
book in March twenty twenty five simply called Abundance by
liberal stalwart Asracline and Derek Thompson, who was well known

(42:33):
futures people like Matthew and Glycias. They argue that growth
is good. They argue we should make more things. They
argue we should have bold visions of the future with
to quote Malcolm Harris's description in The Baffler, desalinated ocean
water flowing from the taps, skyscraper farms, growing our food indoors,
and quote star pills manufactured in space, clean air, and

(42:56):
super fast planes. Think big, think fastest, solve problems by
building more. They even have a new magazine run off
of Substack called The Argument, which is supposed to be
about bringing these new ideas to the left. It includes
Social Democratic stalwart Matt Prunek Isn't that nice? Semaphore, and

(43:18):
the reporting on the launch of The Argument wrote, quote
many of The Argument's writers have supported or, in Thompson's case,
authored The Ideas of Abundance, a recent book advocating for
reforms to improve government deficiency, lower the cost of housing,
and improve public transportation, among other initiatives. And those sound
like good things, don't they. Let's take a look at

(43:41):
who's funding The Argument. It's funded in part by Emergent Ventures,
which was created by the Coke Brothers work can'tas Center
with seed money from Peter Keel Wait what they have
a conference every year? They had one in twenty twenty four.
The twenty twenty five conference was last week. Who was

(44:03):
speaking the Appondance Conference twenty twenty five? Speakers include Charles
Lehman from the right wing Manhattan Institute, an organization founded
by Ronald Reagan's director of the CIA. Well, let's hear
him outs, Let's see what he thinks. Lehman advocates what
he calls deportation Abundance witches his plan to make a

(44:27):
more efficient deportation machine that could actually deport every undocumented
person in the US.

Speaker 5 (44:35):
Wait what?

Speaker 1 (44:37):
This conference is also sponsored by the Koch Families organizations
Stand Together. It includes speakers from the American Enterprise Institute,
one of the co sponsors of the event, did another
conference with special guest Kevin Roberts, the guy who wrote
Project twenty twenty five. Isn't this supposed to be a
liberal movement?

Speaker 7 (44:58):
Oh no, what's coming here?

Speaker 1 (45:01):
Can Abundance really be funded by all these right wing
billionaires and tech fascists? Oh no, as you may have
guessed from the title, most of today's episode is going
to be about what the people behind Abundance actually want,
and it's not what you or I want. It is

(45:21):
what Peter Teal wants, what Mark Andrieson wants, what jd
Vance wants. In a sense, it is what Donald Trump wants.
Because Abundance as an ideology is an attempt by the
tech oligarchs to take over the left the same way
they took over the right, and that makes the ideology
extremely dangerous, as we are going to unfailed. This project

(45:46):
is directly tied to many of the worst people in
this country right now. It is tied to Peter Teal,
It is funded by Peter Teele. It is funded by
Mark Urson, who is another effectively Tea Ali, who believes
in most of this, if not all, of the same
things that Heel does. These ideas are normally unacceptable on
the liberal left, but because Abundance is wrapped in the

(46:09):
ideology of liberalism, because it wears the faces of liberal
star warts like Ezra Kleine, it can be smuggled in
in a way that leaves the left and liberalism as
a whole subsceptible to broad ideological capture by the very
same tech fascists we are all trying to oppose. Before

(46:31):
we fully get into what the funders of abundance actually want,
let's talk a little bit about what the ideology of
abundance is. The very very basic ideology of abundance is
that we need more things, we need to build more,
and that government regulations are standing in the way of

(46:52):
building things. Now, if this sounds suspiciously Reaganite to you,
that's because, in a sense is asra client describes this
as the progressive supply side economics. Now, supply side economics
famously is Reagan's thing. You will note that basically everyone
across the entire political spectrum, at least sort of when pressed,

(47:14):
will agree that supply side economics simply does not work.
But let's hear them out. I think another way to
understand what abundance is and why it works the way
that it does is to look at it in the
context not of American political ideology and debates, but of
Chinese political debates. Now, Chinese political debates have for most

(47:36):
of the last decade, really decade and a half, taken
the form of arguments about either increasing the size of
the pie or splitting the pie more evenly. On the left,
you have a case for redistribution right, for higher taxation,
for higher welfare benefits, for giving people things from the
states and redistributing it from rich people to the poor.

(47:58):
On the rights, you have grown the pie which argues
that instead of redistributing wealth, we should simply grow more
wealth and that wealth will trickle down to everyone else. Wait,
this is just Reaganism again. It's it's all Reaganism. This
is This is the very frustrating thing about abundance is
that when you actually go past the language they're using
and you look at what they think will happen, it's
just trickle down economics. Again, It's just trickled down economics,

(48:20):
and abundance is on the right wing side of it. Now,
you know, there are definitely arguments for places where we
do in fact need to build more things, right, and
this argument has become particularly prominent with the rise of yembiism,
and like, yeah, I don't know, building more houses is good.
I mean it was literally a demand of the Hungarian Revolution, right, Like, yeah,

(48:41):
we need more of it. But Comma, we need to
be very very careful here because the way that abundance
structures its arguments, and the ways that, for example, a
really really vulgar version of yembiism has been deployed by
these people in order to just sort of wholesale opposed

(49:02):
government regulations. And we're not just talking about things here
like eliminating zoning requirements, right. We are talking about, as
we'll get into later, the people behind this movement wants
to create their own city states and special economic zones
where no government regulations supply. But the fundamental argument here

(49:23):
is that lifting government restrictions on production will increase the
size of the market, and because price is just supply
and demand, prices will fall because there's more supply. None
of this is how markets actually work. One of the
crucial insights of anthropology is that markets are not simply
neutral objective forces that function according to precise mathematical laws.

(49:45):
They are socially constructed, even in neoclassical economics, by their
own logic. Price is not just supply and demand. That's
something that's only true in perfectly competitive markets, and perfectly
competitive markets do not exist. They probably cannot exist, but
they do not exist in the real world, and they

(50:06):
do not represent something like the housing markets in the
real world, markets are defined by power. Neoclassical economist attempt
to explain the role of power in markets through monopoly. Right,
you know, you can look at monopoly and monops Andy,
there are a bunch of very different things that they
think are sort of deviations of this perfect competitive market
where people band together to build power and thus are

(50:30):
able to distort what the perfect free market should be doing.
And this is a feature of basically every market that
actually exists. Right, There aren't perfectly competitive markets. They all
have power in them, and they all have degrees of
monopoly to use a sort of Marxian term in them
as well. Now do you know what else has a

(50:53):
degree of monopoly? That's right, it is the products and
services that support this podcast. So what does this actually
have to.

Speaker 6 (51:10):
Do with abundance?

Speaker 1 (51:13):
Long long ago, in a galaxy far far away, I
explained rent on this show, and this is specifically here
rent in the context of what you pay to your landlords.
I promise this will circle back to this will circle
back to sort of abundance the mbeism.

Speaker 8 (51:27):
In a second I.

Speaker 1 (51:29):
Attempted to explain rent by drawing on the work of
the legendary Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando corneal To argue that the
rent that we paid to our landlords functions similarly to
oil rent. Reprice is not set by supply and demand,
but instead by the social power of oil producers. Now
people got very, very mad at me for this, but

(51:51):
the long derier of history has vindicated me. In the
real world, it turns out I was right. The most
powerful example of this in the housing market is the
case a Real Page, a service that allowed landlords to
get recommendations on their pricing based on information from all
the landlords who submitted their data, thus creating an algorithmic
machine for price fixing. This got bad enough that even

(52:13):
the Biden Just Department got involved. Here's from the Department
of Justice's lawsuits against Real Page.

Speaker 3 (52:19):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (52:19):
Real Page acknowledged that its software is aimed at maximizing
prices for landlords, referring to its products as quote driving
every possible opportunity to increase price, avoiding the race to
the bottom in down markets, and quote a rising tide
raises all ships. A Real Page executive observed that its

(52:39):
products help landlords avoid competing on the merits, noting quote
there is a greater good in everybody succeeding versus essentially
trying to compete against one another in a way that
actually keeps the entire industry down. A Real Page executive
explains to a landlord that using competitor data can help
identify situations where a landlord may have a fifty dollars
increase a seat of ten dollars increased for the day.

(53:02):
Another landlord commented about Real Page's product, I always liked
this product because your augurithms used proprietary data from other
subscribers to suggest rents in terms that's classical price fixing. Now,
I was derided for arguing that landlords would ban together
use in the social power to prevent rents from falling

(53:22):
even with the units sit an empty, And it turns
out I was right the whole time. They were doing
exactly that. It turns out, in the actual real world
of the market, all of these companies on all of
these landlords had found a way to ban together in
order to use their social power and use the information
in their possession to fix the price of rent. Here

(53:45):
is from Reuters, drawing from yet another lawsuit, this time
from the Attorney General of DC. A monthly report from W. C.
Smith in twenty twenty two showed the company had increased
revenues per unit by four point six to four point
seven percent despite decreased occupancy levels. According to the lawsuit,

(54:06):
so what is that saying. That is saying that the
actual number of people in these apartments is decreasing, the
number of apartments staying open that have no one in
them is increasing, But the price is not going down,
even though there's more supply, the price is still going up.

(54:26):
Why is the price still going up? Well, well, well,
the Justice Department calls this price fixing large scale collusion
to disrupt the functioning of the perfectly normal competitive market.
The anthropologist for Nando Coronel, as I argued before, calls
it absolute rent, rent extracted by virtue of the social
power of the landowner. As I wrote in that episode, quote,

(54:49):
absolute rent does not obey the law of supply and demand.
It is the product of social power, of the power
of landownership itself and the organization of the landowning class.
And they're backing by the state, and it's b militaries
and police. And this causes economists attempting to use supply
and demand to explain rent to get very very important
events very wrong. Morris Aedelman, the famous oil economists, predicted

(55:12):
in nineteen seventy two that the price of oil was
going to collapse based on over supplying competition. Instead, it
increased four hundred percent between nineteen seventy three and nineteen
seventy four because oil producers banned together to exercise their power,
and their organization, known as OPEK, became a genuine world power.
As Coroneial put it, quote, the sharp increase of nineteen

(55:35):
seventy three and nineteen seventy four and oil prices did
not result from a world shortage oil. It was rather
the outcome of a long historical process by which OPEK nations,
acting as landowners, developed a means to extract a rent
on the basis of their ownership of the oil fields
and absolute rent in addition to the differential rents they
had collected in the past. In nineteen seventy three, a

(55:56):
set of converging political and economic conditions helped establish their
collective ability to restrict the world's supply of oil. With
this power, OPECK felt entitled to set the market price
of oil, thus freeing the level of rent from the
previous constraints of market price. Now rent itself, absolute and
differential would determine the market price of oil.

Speaker 3 (56:16):
What does that.

Speaker 1 (56:16):
Sound like, Oh, it sounds like Real Pages price fixing algorithm.
Why does it sound like Real Pages price fixing algorithm.
It's because in the real world, markets are not neutral
institutions that operate according to neutral laws. Their institutions created
and enforced by the state. Landlords can check up your

(56:36):
rent because they wield collective power together and have the
ability to use the state to drag you out of
your home at gunpoint. Abundance is, to a large extent,
an attempt to harness widespread discontent over the price of goods,
the price of rent, the price of food, and argue
that you can simply produce more and this will make
all of the prices go down. As we've seen here,

(56:58):
as long as the social power is held by the
rent extractors, they can simply set their own price. None
of this is addressed in abundance, and there's a simple
reason for that. The people funding the abundance agenda are
the very same people profiting from their social power. So
let's talk about the money. I'm going to be quoting

(57:19):
here from a report from Prospect, which is very good.
The Institute for Progress IFP, which co hosted Abundance twenty
twenty four and is listed as a key institutional partner
by the Inclusive Abundance Initiative, has a bevy of corporate ties.
In twenty twenty two, IFP received one hundred and ten
thousand dollars from FAI and has fai's executive director on

(57:41):
its board. Now, FAI is the Foundation for American Innovation.
I'm going to read this is also an Abundance co host,
which is very funny. I am going to read a
quote from Kate Willett, who has also done some excellent
reporting on this, and she describes how the FAI hosted
another conference in twenty twenty four called rebootquote the quote.
Surprise guest of the conference was Kevin Roberts, president of

(58:04):
the Heritage Foundation in chief architect of twenty twenty five.
Now back to the Institute for Progress. Part of what's
going on here, right is that this is an increadin,
you know. And what I'm trying to emphasize by how
confusing this whole thing is, is that Abundance is composed
of a series of think tanks and weird institutes that
are all tied into a bunch of tech money. Right,
keeping the acronym straight is very difficult. You do not

(58:27):
need to hold all of them in your head. The
other thing that you need to understand about this right
is if you look at who is co hosting these conferences,
and who was behind these books, and who was behind
these media outlets, a very very clear picture starts to emerge.
I'm gonna go back to quoting from Prospect. One of
the funders of the Institute for Progress was Emergent Ventures,

(58:47):
which is a product of the Coke Back Mercantis Institute
at George Mason University. Emergent itself was launched by a
grant from Peter thel Peter Thial is a right wing
billionaire with a vast influence network at the intersection of
technofuturism anti democratic thought, who has called technology an alternative
to democratic politics small d democratic by the way, he
means the concert of democracy to quote unilaterally change the world.

(59:11):
Vice President elect J. D. Vance is a known scion
of Peter Thiel. Let's look at the Chamber of Progress,
another one of the groups that is heavily involved in abundance.
Chamber of Progress, which self identifies its work as part
of a growing abundance policy movement, is a trade group
started with Google seed money by Google alum Adam Kovakovich.

(59:33):
Kovakovic proudly touts his college activism, leading an effort to
cross a United farm Worker's picket line. The Chamber of
Progress's partners red funders include A sixteen Z Circle, Coinbase, Google,
Kraken Ripple, Wai Mo, and Dreesen Horowitz or A sixteen
Z is, a venture capital firm heavily invested in Ai

(59:56):
and Crypto co founder Merchandrisen believes the technology solution to
every problem. He's also on Meta's board. He is also
a theolite tech fascist. This is it, in some sense,
a very very interesting collusion of forces. Right, we have
the Koch Brothers, who are, you know, sort of the
ancient libertarian right side of Republican dark money. They are,

(01:00:20):
you know, the people who have traditionally funded right wing
movements in the past. They are the tea party people.
They are, you know, they are sort of the boogeyman
under the bed for anyone who has wanted to make
the world a better place for a very very long time,
and they and their organizations are working with the emergent

(01:00:42):
tech fascist rights you know, people like people like Mark Andreeson,
people with Peter Teel, and these are the organizations that
have gotten in bed together in order.

Speaker 6 (01:00:52):
To do this.

Speaker 1 (01:00:53):
Now, these people have a bunch of absolutely hideous beliefs.
We're not even going to get in to the eugenics here,
but like these the people funding this thing are huge eugenesis.
We literally do not have time to do all of
the eugenic shit associated with this, because if I were
to actually do the eugenic I mean we talked about
some of like Mattie and gleciass bullshit on this podcast earlier,

(01:01:14):
but like if I actually went through and did this,
this episode would be like twelve hours long. I am
going to cover this sort of Network States peer theolite
eugenics circle at some point later. That is a forthcoming episode.

Speaker 6 (01:01:28):
But yeah, for.

Speaker 1 (01:01:29):
Now, here are these ads hopefully are not eugenics.

Speaker 6 (01:01:34):
Woo.

Speaker 1 (01:01:46):
So let's get back to who I think are really
the two primary villains of this story, and that is
Peter Theal and Mark Entrieson, who are two of the
most dangerous people in the entire world. Teal and Reason
are fascists who believe the state should be a corporation
run by the tech elite. They do not believe in democracy,

(01:02:08):
and particularly thel has said that democracy is the enemy
of freedom.

Speaker 3 (01:02:11):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:02:12):
When these people talk about running the state like a business,
they mean that there should be an unaccountable fucking philosopher
CEO king, and that there shouldn't be democracy. A common
feature of this, and you know, the physical manifestation of
this thing is an idea called the network state, and
a very common theme of the founders of Abundance is
their support for the network state, both as a concept

(01:02:36):
and in terms of building them. So what is the
network state? The network state is, to a large extent,
the thing I've just been describing, Right, The version of
it that they pitch is that these are like they're
like opportunity zones, right, they are these like tech cities,
you know that will eventually become like real states that
are that are based off of special economic zones where
you know, special economic zones are like the normal regulations

(01:02:58):
of the state do not apply. So you can and
you know, do whatever you want, right, you can we
can build prosperity by having no government regulations and run
everything through corporations. These network states would be again actual
straight up corporations that own and control territory and run
it as the state. These states are already coming into existence.

(01:03:23):
Maybe the most important prospera a corporate city for profit
in hont Duras that is run by a corporation, again
in a special economic zone where the state does not apply.
It does not have a mayor, it has somewhat appointed
by the corporation who runs the city. This is happening
all over the world, particularly in developing countries, where it
is being pushed by all of these just absolutely demonic

(01:03:46):
tech cools, and they're also being started in attempts at
being started to run them in the United States. I'm
going to quote here from Shanley's venture capital blog, venture
Capital Status, which is a very very good resource on
the network state, which will be covering more fully later,
because we don't have time to do much more than
a brief introduction to their ideas here. In Soleerro County, California,

(01:04:09):
a cartel of venture capitalists associated with Andreas and Horowitz,
which is again a mark Entrecent's firm bought up over
sixty five thousand acres of rich, fertile farmland and using
secretive and threatening methodologies including suing local farmers, they plan
to build a city with weapons, developments and manufacturing, aerospace

(01:04:32):
and robotics companies, shipbuilding homes, and schools. This network state
is called California Forever. Also in California, there has been
a discussion by network state operatives of taking over Presidio
in San Francisco, and there is a network state planned
in Somona County. Its founder is a quote former promonist
venture capitalists. These are the same people funding Abundance. Here's

(01:04:57):
from Kate Willet again, one of the California Forever millionaires.
California Forever is again the name of the network state
they want to set up by buying a bunch of
land in Soledo County. One of the California Forever billionaires,
Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe, looms large in abundance world.
Along with open Philanthropy. He donated to fund a one

(01:05:18):
hundred and twenty million dollar Abundance grant tied to Ezra
Klein's book release. Coulson is a key backer and inspiration
for the Institute for Progress, the think tank which works
closely with others in the Abundance network, including the Abundance
twenty twenty four conference. The goal of the network state
movement is to accelerate the destruction of the United States

(01:05:40):
and create these corporate network states in their wake. They
want the world to be composed of these networks of
venture capital tech corporations, run and ruled by them by
the tech elite for profit. These are the people that
are funding all of the fucking movements. These are the

(01:06:02):
people funding the argument. These are the people funding the
Abundance Conference. These are the people that people like Ezrakline
have been brought in to run cover for. These are
Trump people. They are the forces behind jd Vance. They
want to inflict their vision of tech fascism on the world,
but they are hideously popular in power. In order to

(01:06:25):
achieve their regenda, they cannot simply rely on their incredible
hegemony on the right. They need you, They need your
buy in. They need the support of good and kind
hearted liberals who they can radicalize into TRUMPI and tech fascists.
This is their opening gambit, and they've played it well,
but there is still time for them to fail. There

(01:06:46):
are still time for us to build a future built
by us and for us, by and for each other,
based on mutual aid and the benefit of all of
worlds without death squads and ice, of world ruled not
by corporations but by us. The fight for that world

(01:07:07):
he can's here and now.

Speaker 7 (01:07:26):
Welcome to it could happen here a show about things
falling apart. One such thing frequently falling apart is any
notion of privacy or digital privacy. Ever, encroaching surveillance is
one of the biggest global issues affecting free expression and
a free press, both directly through surveillance technology but also

(01:07:47):
by chilling speech. I'm Garrison Davis, and this past week,
news has swept the Internet that ICE is using software
from an Israeli company called Paragon, which allows ICE or
DHS to secretly hack into any smartphone, break encryption, access messages,

(01:08:07):
track real time location, and turn your iPhone or Android
into a walking listening device, all of which sounds very
scary and some of which is true, though some of
these claims are exaggerated or even likely false based on
what we can currently infer from published research. Due to

(01:08:28):
legitimate fears, we live in a world of surveillance paranoia,
which can lead to surveillance myths. This is a core
function of the Panopticon. People should take ICE's new enhanced
smartphone surveillance capacity seriously, but to adequately do so requires
an accurate understanding of the threat model, which we will

(01:08:51):
get into later this episode with some help from the
Electronic Frontier Foundation. But first let's address the news where
the aspect of this story what has actually changed recently?
DHS first contracted with the US branch of Paragon in
September of twenty twenty four for two million dollars, but

(01:09:13):
later that October the contract was put on hold thanks
to a Biden executive order restricting a government use of
foreign spyware, and ever since then the contract has been
frozen pending a compliance review. But then on September first,
twenty twenty five. Just last week, investigative journalist Jack Paulson
reported that the stop work order affecting the Paragon contract

(01:09:36):
had quietly been lifted, allowing Ice to follow through on
the contract and start using Paragon's spyware technology, most likely
including their flagship product, Graphite. What is Graphite? Great question
one that I felt underqualified to fully answer myself. So
I spoke with an expert, Cooper Quentin of the digital

(01:09:58):
rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation. You'll hear from him
throughout the episode.

Speaker 6 (01:10:03):
My name is Cooper Clinton.

Speaker 9 (01:10:05):
I am a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Speaker 6 (01:10:09):
There I do a lot of different things.

Speaker 9 (01:10:12):
Most specifically for the purposes of this talk, I do
malware research on malware that targets activists, journalists, and civil society.
So Graphite is a type of spyware that is able
to read your messages from your phone the same way
that you or you know, maybe a cop could if
they had physical access to your unlocked phone, right.

Speaker 6 (01:10:35):
That is the main capability that it has.

Speaker 9 (01:10:37):
According to the reporting published by Citizen Lab, its main
job is to hook into WhatsApp and into other encrypted
chat apps and just read the messages in those apps,
like in the messages you've already sent and any future
messages that you send.

Speaker 6 (01:10:53):
That's really it's the that's the meat of Graphite.

Speaker 7 (01:10:56):
Something that sets paragone apart from their fellow is ray
Le competitors is that Paragon has marketed itself as the
ethical choice for spyware. One of their early investors in
Israeli firm called Red Dot wrote quote Paragon builds best
in class cyber intelligence software to empower democratic countries, providing

(01:11:16):
cutting edge capabilities that make the world safer unquote. On
their US website, Paragon says that they are quote unquote
empowering ethical cyber defense and that they provide customers with
quote ethically based tools, teams, and insights to disrupt intractable
threats unquote. Though they use the term cyber defense on

(01:11:39):
their US site, Paragon's startup page reads quote Paragon is
an offense focused cyber company using digital intelligence for smartphone
and internet surveillance solutions. The company applies strict moral restrictions
on itself, limiting its extraction of information from targeted devices
to conversations on chat apps. Paragon works solely with police

(01:12:02):
forces and intelligence agencies that meet the standards of an
enlightened democracy, which includes only thirty nine countries unquote. One
of Paragon's senior executives told Forbes in twenty twenty one
that they would only sell their technology to governments that
quote unquote abide by international norms and respect fundamental rights
and freedoms, and that quote authoritarian or non democratic regimes

(01:12:27):
would never be customers. Unfortunately, Paragon was not pressed on
what their definition of authoritarian regimes includes. In recent reporting,
there's been a lot of misconceptions about the capabilities of
Paragon's main product, Graphite. The Guardian wrote, quote By essentially
taking control of the mobile phone, ice can not only

(01:12:48):
track in individuals whereabouts, read their messages, look at their photographs,
but also open and read information held on encrypted applications
like WhatsApp or signal. Spyware like Graphite can also be
used as a listening device through manipulation of the phone's
recorder unquote. But research into Graphite by the surveillance watchdog
group Citizen Lab has not indicated that graph Fight has

(01:13:11):
all these capabilities or tries to quote unquote take control
of the entire device. But other tech journalists have since
parroted The Guardian's unfounded claims that Graphight fully takes over
a phone and can record audio through the microphone.

Speaker 9 (01:13:26):
This is actually less full featured than other spyware we've
seen in the past, like NSL groups, Pegasus spyware. Other
types of spyware that I've seen tend to have a
lot more capabilities. Right, they have the capability of like
turning on GPS location tracking, the capability to turn on
a hot.

Speaker 6 (01:13:46):
Mic, to do all these other things.

Speaker 9 (01:13:47):
And this seems as far as as far as Citizen
Lab has reported to not be present within the graphie
maware and I think this is because Paragon has presented
themselves as kind of being the quote unquote responsible malware
manufacturer rate and they're like like trying to minimize the
amount of data they collect. It doesn't mean they couldn't

(01:14:08):
add this stuff in the future, but that's the gist
of it. It's actually, you know, kind of a very
stripped down malwur. I don't want to minimize like how
impactful it would be for this mawur to get all
of your messages, right, Like that could have a huge
impact for people. But we don't need to make up
capabilities that our adversary has, especially under fascism, right, like

(01:14:30):
we can we can just work with the capabilities that
we know they have.

Speaker 7 (01:14:34):
A lot of reporting and discussion of graphite and Paragon
frame it as an equivalent to nsoss by where Pegasus,
which has been banned in the United States for four years.
Pegasus seeks to completely hijack the target device more broadly,
similar to guardians claims about graphite, but by forcing this comparison,

(01:14:55):
people might be inadvertently boosting Paragon's brand with free marketing
by making the product ought to be something that I'm
sure Paragon would like to have people think it is,
but doesn't actually equate their realistic threat model, similar to
how predictions of an evil super intelligent AI actually currently
serve to boost the stock price of AI companies.

Speaker 9 (01:15:17):
I think a lot of people are doing the work
for these companies that are aligning themselves with fascism, right,
And I don't think it's a great trend actually, Right,
Like people are assuming that you know, Palenteer is sort
of watching everything, right, and it really Palenteer is just
like fancy visual graphing software essentially, right, Like the danger

(01:15:42):
of Palenteer is combining these two government databases, right, this
malware the GRAPHI maware, right, Like, yeah, it's it's not good,
but you know it's not magical, right, it's not omniscient.
It's not able to you know, I don't know, go
eat the fridge out of your food and you know,
beat up your dad or something. You know.

Speaker 7 (01:16:00):
Well, now we're talking now, now that's a good app.

Speaker 9 (01:16:04):
If only, if only tech bros could solve such social problems.

Speaker 7 (01:16:08):
No, no, they would never no.

Speaker 9 (01:16:10):
But yeah, you know it's not it's not a magical right,
and we don't need to do their work for them, right,
We don't need to do their myth making for them.

Speaker 10 (01:16:17):
Right.

Speaker 6 (01:16:17):
A bigger threat to the majority.

Speaker 9 (01:16:19):
Of people in the US is getting your phone seized
by the cops.

Speaker 6 (01:16:25):
Right, totally.

Speaker 9 (01:16:26):
There's nothing this maur can do, according to public reports,
at least that the cops can't do if they get
hold of your unlocked phone.

Speaker 7 (01:16:33):
Right. Having faced idea or fordit pass code is much
more dangerous to your digital security. Yes, as an average person,
even as it like an anaged person, like going to
a protest.

Speaker 6 (01:16:44):
Yes, yes, absolutely absolutely.

Speaker 9 (01:16:48):
You know, Celebrate, which is the machine that police plug
your phone into to make a copy of all the
data on it, is much more dangerous to the.

Speaker 6 (01:16:56):
Average American than the paragont is. They're much more likely
to encounter that.

Speaker 7 (01:17:00):
This is more of a niche gripe, but one that's
still important. There's been claims that quote ice can now
hack any phone and break encryption, but graphite doesn't actually
a quote unquote break encryption. It's not going after the
encryption on Signal or WhatsApp. Instead, Paragon tries to circumvent
end to end encryption by trying to gain access to

(01:17:22):
content on a target device once it's been unencrypted by
an application like WhatsApp for the user to read. Similar
to how if you have push notifications on for an
application like Signal. If the police seese your phone and
push notifications display messages from Signal, that doesn't mean the
police have quote unquote broken signals encryption. Now, in order

(01:17:46):
for Graphite to extract messages from your phone, it needs
to get onto your phone in the first place. Graphite
is just the implanted code that can read and extract
your messages. First, it needs to get onto your phone
via what's called an exploit, which is usually a message
sent to a phone number or a WhatsApp account that
attacks a vulnerability in your phone's code to gain permissions

(01:18:09):
to load the Graphite onto the messaging apps. Graphite and
the exploit are two separate programs that work together, but
exploits need to be frequently changed to keep up with
software security updates, and that's expensive. You need different exploits
for Android and iOS Paragon has been using zero click exploits,

(01:18:30):
meaning the owner of the phone doesn't have to manually
click a link or intentionally download a file for the
exploit to try to gain permissions on the device. You
don't have to click or do anything. You just have
to receive the message and then the spyware gets to work,
which is very scary. But this technology cannot be deployed
on mass because of how expensive and specific it needs

(01:18:52):
to be in order to work.

Speaker 9 (01:18:54):
The other thing that I think is missing a lot
from the conversation about Graphite in particular.

Speaker 6 (01:18:58):
Is that the malware is just the program.

Speaker 9 (01:19:01):
That runs when it gets on your phone, and first
before they can install Graphite, they have to get onto
your phone through some sort of exploit. If your phone
is up to date and fully patched, this will have
to be as zero day exploit, which means it's an
exploit that has had zero days for Apple or Google
or whoever to fix it because it is unknown to them.

(01:19:22):
And these exploits cost millions of dollars right now. Paragon
is not going to pay that millions of dollars for
each person they're exploiting, but there is a large per
person cost to ice for each person they're going to exploit,
because Paragon doesn't want to blow their zero day, which
costs them millions of dollars to either buy or develop themselves.

Speaker 7 (01:19:53):
Welcome back. I'd like to get into a little bit
of Paragon's backstory and how they've grown as a company.
Farragon was founded in twenty nineteen by former Israeli Prime
Minister A hood Brock and A hood Schnorsen, a former
commander of the IDF's cyber warfare unit, basically Israel's equivalent
of the NSA called Unit eight two hundred three. Other

(01:20:17):
Paragon co founders are also ex Israeli intelligence. The startup
got early financing from a Tel Aviv investment fund called
Red Dot Capital. The Paragon also received backing from American
venture capital. In twenty twenty one, Forbes reported that the
Boston based Battery Ventures had invested between five to ten
million in Paragon. Bloomberg Capital has also supported the company.

(01:20:41):
In twenty twenty two, Paragon launched a US subsidiary and
started recruiting former US Feds to help break into the
American market. The New York Times reported that the DEA
has used graphite as far back as twenty twenty two.
Former CIA assistant director John Finbar Fleming became the exis
executive chairman of Paragon US in January of twenty twenty four,

(01:21:04):
according to his LinkedIn. In December of twenty twenty four,
Paragon was acquired by AE Industrial Partners for nine hundred
million dollars. AE Industrial Partners is a Florida based private
equity fund with a specialized security portfolio. Once they bought
Paragon emerged with another AE asset, the cybersecurity company red Lattice.

(01:21:28):
Back in twenty twenty one, Paragon had about fifty employees.
Now it has over five hundred. In June of twenty
twenty five, they were hiring one hundred and fifty more.
Just a week ago, executive chairman John Finbar Fleming shared
a recruitment post that red Lattice was hiring quote emerging
and offensive cyber engineers unquote. Next, let's discuss the biggest

(01:21:53):
case study of graphite being deployed that we know of.
On January thirty first, twenty twenty five, Meta, this encrypted
messaging app WhatsApp, sent a notification to ninety accounts that
their smartphones were suspected of being targeted by spyware, which
has since been traced to the Paragon product Graphite. People
targeted were journalists, human rights activists, and members of civil

(01:22:17):
society across Europe and the Mediterranean, but primarily based out
of Italy. This was a zero day and zero click exploit,
meaning it both attacked of previously unknown vulnerability and required
zero user interaction to infect the device. At first, the
Italian government denied knowledge, but Paragon canceled two contracts with

(01:22:40):
customers in Italy and a parliamentary oversight committee later confirmed
the Italian government was using Paragon technology for spyware attacks
against c migration activists. One thing that's interesting to me
is that we talk about this technology is being very expensive,
verily individual. They have to individually target you. But then
you see ninety people on WhatsApp and you're like, that's

(01:23:02):
that's a lot of people can talk about how this
attack was like structured and what we've learned from it.

Speaker 9 (01:23:08):
For sure, ninety people is a lot of people for
such a targeted attack, although it's you know, in terms
of most malware, like most commercial maer, ninety people would
be a very very small attack, right, Like it wouldn't
be worth your time.

Speaker 6 (01:23:23):
So, you know, it depends on the scale of things.

Speaker 9 (01:23:25):
I don't know what the scale of Italian civil society is, right,
but ninety people is likely, I think a small fraction
of the whole of Italian civil society.

Speaker 6 (01:23:35):
Right.

Speaker 9 (01:23:35):
But yeah, those so those people that were targeted by Paragon.

Speaker 6 (01:23:40):
The ones that we know about.

Speaker 9 (01:23:41):
You know, one was a Italian anti fascist journalist, right,
I think another there were a couple of other journalists
that were covering migration issues, and you know, just a
sort of a large swath across Italian civil society. So
the way they were targeted was on WhatsApp. They were
added to a group and then they were sent a

(01:24:04):
malicious PDF which they didn't even have to open, and
they didn't have to approve being added to the group.
But as soon as that malicious PDF was received by
their WhatsApp app, but by their WhatsApp client, the WhatsApp
client processed the PDF and it contained code which exploited
WhatsApp and allowed Graphite to start running. So Graphie doesn't

(01:24:24):
actually install anything. To get a little bit technical, Graphite
only runs in memory of the phone, right, it only
runs in the like temporary ram so to speak. Okay, right,
So rebooting the phone would have cleared out of the
graphite infection and they would have had to reinfect the person.

Speaker 6 (01:24:40):
Interesting, right in this case.

Speaker 9 (01:24:42):
Yeah, it's possible that in the future Paragon will find
a way to make graphite persistent. But it does make
it more stealthy, It makes it harder to detect, it
makes it harder to forensically analyze. For people like citizen
Lab and like eff if it just runs in them sure, right,
so it kind of makes sense that they would want

(01:25:03):
to keep running it in memory, even though rebooting it
would clear out the infection because you can just reinfect
the person.

Speaker 7 (01:25:08):
Even like like developers like WhatsApp or like Apple might
have a harder time, like yeah, realizing that they've been attacked.
If it can get cleared out so quickly, I guess.

Speaker 9 (01:25:17):
Yeah, absolutely absolutely, And in this case WhatsApp, they'd realized
they had been attacked, they quickly figured out the pattern,
and you know, to their credit, warned everybody immediately. Often,
the only way I think people will find out they've
been you know, infected by this spywere is if WhatsApp
or you know, somebody else maybe Apple warned you. That's

(01:25:39):
not great, but it is, but it is better than
the alternative where they just don't warn you at all.

Speaker 7 (01:25:45):
Right after the targets were notified of the spyware attack,
some including journalists and migrant refugee activists in Italy, agreed
to participate in a forensic analysis of Graphite by citizen Lab.
They found that Paragon spyware had spread from one to
at least two other apps on the device. In April
of twenty twenty five, we got forensic confirmation of Graphite

(01:26:07):
spyware on iPhone with a zero click exploit attacking I message.
Citizen Lab was able to analyze the devices of a
prominent European journalist who requested to remain anonymous, and an
Italian journalist linked to the previous cluster of attacks in Italy.
iPhone is slightly harder to target than your average Android,
but certainly not impervious to this sort of attack, as

(01:26:29):
we've seen from these examples in Europe. To date, citizen
Lab has also identified suspected Paragon deployments in Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Israel,
and Singapore. Though the encrypted messaging app signal is not
mentioned in the citizen Lab reporting. Their analysis did find
that graph Fight had the capability of going after several
different messaging apps, and it's probably safe to assume that

(01:26:52):
Signal would be one of the apps that Paragon would
want to extract messages from. We don't have much information
about this spy where targeting Signal, possibly because Signal does
not have as large as an international user base compared
to other apps like WhatsApp, I Message or Telegram, despite
Signal being much more secure. So what can you do?

(01:27:15):
Though Graphite might not be the total phone hijacking super
spyware that the Guardian and others claim it to be,
it still poses a significant security threat. Some basic digital
security precautions apply here. Get into a habit of regular
digital cleaning. Remove unnecessary content from your device, save space.

(01:27:37):
Old photos can be uploaded to an external encrypted hard
drive in question. If you really need years of messages
stored on your phone, use an encrypted chat app like Signal,
which has disappearing messages, so that there isn't a large
backlog of communications that could be suddenly accessed by a
hostile actor. Be very wary of cloud back They're often

(01:28:01):
one of the least secure aspects of your digital life.
Especially if they are unencrypted, And though it won't deter
zero click exploits, it's still best practice to avoid clicking
mysterious links or downloading files and photos is sent to
your phone. Another tip is to regularly reboot your phone.
Contrary to claims that once your phone has been targeted
by graph its now compromised forever something called malware persistence,

(01:28:26):
to our current knowledge, rebooting can wipe Paragon's exploits. It
does not appear that Paragon spyware is at the moment
reboot persistent, and it seems that rebooting would actually remove
it from the phone.

Speaker 6 (01:28:39):
My reading is that rebooting it would remove.

Speaker 9 (01:28:41):
The malware from your phone until you were re exploit,
which so you know, if you just reboot and you
don't update, or you know, the zero day isn't out yet, right,
they're just going to run the exploit again.

Speaker 11 (01:28:52):
Right.

Speaker 6 (01:28:52):
I think it's a fair bet that they're just going
to run the exploit again, But it would be.

Speaker 12 (01:28:55):
Enough to get it off for that time, right, And
I mean, I think as far as the mitigations, my
friend recommends that people like reboot their phone every every
morning when they're brushing their teeth, right, and I don't
think it's a bad bit of security hygiene.

Speaker 6 (01:29:10):
If these guys are going dude, in fact.

Speaker 9 (01:29:11):
You might as well make it, you know, more of
a headache for them, right, You might as well make
it more costly to them, because there is going to
be a charge to them for each time they have
to reinfect you.

Speaker 6 (01:29:20):
Right.

Speaker 9 (01:29:21):
But yeah, it's certainly I think overblown to say that.
You know, once it's on your phone, it's on your
phone forever. There's you know, you just got to, you know.

Speaker 6 (01:29:28):
Throw your a thousand dollars phone in the trash and
go buy another one.

Speaker 9 (01:29:32):
Like, no, you can, you know, if you don't feel safe,
just rebooting it, right, like a factory reset, that would
be the next step, right, I think that would That
would most likely get rid.

Speaker 6 (01:29:41):
Of any persistence mechanisms that were installed.

Speaker 9 (01:29:44):
I'm not familiar with any iOS mawer certainly that would
survive a factory reset.

Speaker 7 (01:29:48):
But probably the most important thing besides using signal is
to keep your phone software updated. That's the simplest and
best way to make it harder for spyware like graphites
to make it onto your phone in the first place.
Out Of date software has many more known vulnerabilities to attack.
For extra protection, enable lockdown mode on iPhone or Advanced

(01:30:09):
Protection on Android.

Speaker 9 (01:30:11):
So the reason it's important to keep your phone up
to date and always install the latest security updates, even
if it's a pain in the ass, and I know
it's a pain in the ass, is because this makes
an attacker have to use zero day exploits. So, if
you have an old version of the software on your phone,
there are known exploits. Known exploits are you know, more

(01:30:35):
or less free?

Speaker 6 (01:30:36):
Right? They are already out there, they are already burned.
They do not matter, right, like the company already knows
about them.

Speaker 9 (01:30:43):
An exploit loses basically all of its value as soon
as you know the company knows about it and it's patched.

Speaker 6 (01:30:50):
Right, So if you.

Speaker 9 (01:30:51):
Have out of date software on your phone, if you
have out of data software in a computer, it changes
the entire economics of attacking. Right, It's basically free for
me to exploit your phone at this point, and I
you know, I will exploit it as many times as
I want, and I don't care if that exploit is burned.
I don't care if you find it, because again it's free, right.
Zero A exploits for especially for Apple for like you know,

(01:31:13):
Android pixel phones, for for Graphene, the alternative Android OS
not graphite.

Speaker 6 (01:31:20):
This has been giving me real problems lately. Zero a exploits,
meaning exploits that the manufacturer does not know about and
has not had a chance to patch, cost millions of
dollars for these platforms, and a zero click exploit where
where the victim doesn't have to interact with it at all. Right,
I don't have to click a link, I don't have

(01:31:40):
to do something.

Speaker 9 (01:31:41):
You just send me, you know, a PDF, an infected
PDF or a magic file, right or something, and my
phone is infected.

Speaker 6 (01:31:50):
Those are the most expensive above all, Right, those.

Speaker 9 (01:31:53):
Those are sort of the Those are the golden ticket
for malware companies, right a million, These cost million dollars
And if you burn it, right, if it gets caught,
like like you know what happened with WhatsApp and citizen
lab in Italy, right, that's millions of dollars.

Speaker 6 (01:32:09):
Down the drain for para con.

Speaker 9 (01:32:12):
You know, they're going to pass that on to the
Italian government to ice to whoever their contractors are. Right,
So keeping your front up today totally changes the economics
of running a malware attack against you, right, like anybody
can run, you know, out of their office old you know,
end day, right more than zero day malware attacks against
any me, right Like, those are cheap. But if your

(01:32:33):
stuff is patched, no, it's gonna it's it's It totally
changes the entire game. And you've got to be doing
really good work for ICE to to want to burn
that much money on you.

Speaker 7 (01:32:42):
All these tips can make it considerably harder and more importantly,
extremely expensive for this spy work to get onto your device.
These exploits could only be deployed against individual targets, and
that gets quite expensive. Just because ICE could theoretically hack
your phone, that doesn't mean that your phone is necessarily
at a high risk of being hacked by ICE. Who

(01:33:05):
are the possible targets for graphites bywear Who is at
higher risk? Journalists who report on ICE and immigration, people
who work for immigration advocacy organizations, immigration lawyers, as well
as high profile activists. It goes without saying that anything
you do on your phone or on the Internet carries
a level of inherent risk. We'll close this episode with

(01:33:38):
a longer segment from my interview with Cooper discussing who's
at the most risk of ICE using Paragon software and
more of Cooper's recommended surveillance mitigation practices. This is not
something that can be deployed at a protest and sweep
up you know, thousands of people. This does go after
like individuals because of its cost and the way that

(01:33:59):
it needs to be deployed. Yeah, who are the people
that you would say are most at risk of this?

Speaker 3 (01:34:05):
Like is this here like your.

Speaker 7 (01:34:06):
Local like you know, food not bombs organizer, or like
an immigration lawyer?

Speaker 6 (01:34:11):
Like? Right?

Speaker 7 (01:34:11):
Who should be concerned? I guess and and take take
this threat like more seriously?

Speaker 9 (01:34:16):
Definitely, I think people who should be concerned are I mean,
you hit the nail on the head, right. The people
that should be concerned about this are people who have
you know, been a special pain in.

Speaker 6 (01:34:32):
The ass for ICE and basic heure.

Speaker 9 (01:34:35):
Right, you know, people who might be under HSI investigation. Right,
people who you know have been threatened by the president
or by Pam Bondi you know specifically, right, like had
their name called out specifically, right, People who are you know,
very loud, very active, right, like the sort of leaders

(01:34:57):
what's the term tall poppies?

Speaker 11 (01:34:58):
Right?

Speaker 9 (01:34:58):
Like the people that are really have their heads sticking
out right in a way that's like very public and
very well known. If you have risen to the level
where like Calm Homan knows your name personally, right, that
makes it a pretty good chance that you know, you
might become a target with this, right, Like that's that's
who we're talking about.

Speaker 7 (01:35:18):
Well, and like as we've seen in Italy, like that
can that can include like like anti fascist journalists, Yeah, definitely,
people who work for like migrant human rights organizations, yes,
high profile activists. And I think like there's a real
concern with with you know, trying to comprise the phone
of journalists because of how journalists like talk to sources.
The journalists might have information about like other people besides

(01:35:39):
the journalists on their phone, and they may be targeting
through the journalists, but trying to get after other people
who they're talking to. Same thing with like immigration lawyers,
and like there is real concern about harm spreading from
those factors. And I think that's why if you are
in those sorts of like roles that like like a
human rights organization, a journalist, or a lawyer, you need
to be like extra careful about keeping your phone updated

(01:36:03):
regularly engaging in like digital hygiene, having disappearing messages, maybe
putting on lockdown mode onto your iPhone, be very ware
of being added to mysterious group chats. These are just
general practices that are I think worthwhile to like engage in,
whether or not you're actually gonna get tuck targeted by.

Speaker 9 (01:36:21):
This, absolutely, and I want to especially single out lockdown
mode there, Like, we are not aware of any infections
of anymour right, Pegasus, Graphite Right, any others that have
managed to successfully infect an iPhone on lockdown mode. So
if you are worried about this, lockdown mode is the

(01:36:42):
single most effective thing you can do to protect yourself
against this mour right, is go turn on lockdown mod.

Speaker 6 (01:36:48):
If you're on Android.

Speaker 7 (01:36:49):
I think Google calls it advanced protection mode.

Speaker 6 (01:36:51):
Yeah, yeah, advanced protection mode.

Speaker 9 (01:36:53):
So advanced Protection mode used to be not very comprehensive,
and I think like with the new Android update with
Android sixteen that came out, you know, I think like
last week or something, it's now much more comparable to
lockdown mode. So you know, I highly recommend churning that
on if you're on Android.

Speaker 7 (01:37:14):
All my homies love lockdown mode.

Speaker 6 (01:37:16):
Yes, yes, that is the number one protection right.

Speaker 9 (01:37:20):
The other The other thing I strongly recommend always and
I be this drum like every day is turn on
disappearing messages. If you're on Signal or WhatsApp, go turn
on disappearing messages, right because this is good against you
know a lot of different things, right, Like this is
good against celebrate as well as pigass, as well as
grab me. Right, Like if the messages are gone by

(01:37:42):
the time you get infected, there's no way to recover those, right,
You're minimizing your footprint. Right, ye, go delete old chats
right like if you if you get a second right,
like we've all Google has trained us to all be
digital hoarders, right and keep depending How will you are
twenty years of email.

Speaker 6 (01:37:57):
Ten years whatever?

Speaker 4 (01:37:58):
Right?

Speaker 9 (01:37:58):
Never never delete? Right, And that's don't ignore them, ignore Google.
Google doesn't want you to delete things because they want
to use all that data for selling you ads.

Speaker 6 (01:38:07):
Right, delete everything.

Speaker 7 (01:38:09):
I want more underwater data set.

Speaker 6 (01:38:11):
Yes, yes, exactly, delete everything. Delete your files, you know, like,
get rid of those old group chats, right, get rid
of those old chats that you don't need anymore.

Speaker 7 (01:38:20):
You need to be like that lawyer in death notes.
Delete yes, delete.

Speaker 6 (01:38:26):
The death note referenced.

Speaker 7 (01:38:31):
Do you wanna plug Citizen Labs slash EFF and tell
people where to find both your work and then also
other people who are doing research into graphite And like,
you know, if you've been suspected of being targeted by
you know, maybe a notification how you can participate in
forensic analysis to help everyone be more secure against this
in the future.

Speaker 6 (01:38:51):
Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 9 (01:38:52):
So one of the best ways to find out you've
been targeted by state sponsor malware is to get a
notification from Apple or Google or WhatsApp or some other
large company that you have been targeted by state sponsored malware. Typically,
these notifications don't contain much more information than we believe
you've been targeted by a nation of state or by

(01:39:12):
state sponsor maware. But if you do get one of
those notifications, take it very seriously, you know, reach out
to access now or to EFF or to Citizen Lab
and let us know, right, and we will.

Speaker 6 (01:39:25):
Help figure out what's going on.

Speaker 9 (01:39:26):
Right, Like this is this is the number one indicator,
right because like this malware is usually fairly stealthy, right,
Like it's not actually, but you know, I don't know
flashing you're infected on your screen, right, But yeah, citizen
Lab is always doing amazing work. I'm a fellow there,
so I get to work with them sometimes, which is

(01:39:47):
very exciting. They are based out of the Monk School
of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto and their
website is CitizenLab dot org, where you can find a
lot of really excellent research on the types of threat
the target civil society.

Speaker 7 (01:40:01):
Er erm, I have citizen Lab dot c A. Oh,
but I'm Canadian.

Speaker 6 (01:40:06):
You are probably correct. I can never remember.

Speaker 7 (01:40:11):
The as a Canadian. I was very I was very
put off by you erasing our nation's history, of our
of our coveted dot c A. We love, we love
our dot c A.

Speaker 6 (01:40:21):
I am not trying to start a war with Canada.

Speaker 7 (01:40:23):
Uh well, many many people are, so.

Speaker 6 (01:40:27):
Listen, I'm firmly on the side of Canada and the
war against Canada. Okay, please take me in lease.

Speaker 7 (01:40:34):
Yeah, your solidarity is a is a noted So citizen
lab dot.

Speaker 6 (01:40:39):
Org actually redirection cism Lab dot c So we were
both right there you go, or you were maybe more right.

Speaker 9 (01:40:45):
So yeah, citizen Law and yeah, they're they're really fantastic,
A lot of really good research going on there at
e FF dot org, the Electronic Frontier Foundation where US
based nonprofit been around for thirty five years defending civil
liberties as they intersect with technology. So a lot of
a lot of free speech work, a lot of you know,

(01:41:05):
privacy and Fourth Amendment work. And we also have a
really excellent set of guides called the Surveillance Self Defense Guides,
which are at SSD dot e FF dot.

Speaker 6 (01:41:14):
Org, which I highly recommend people go and check out.

Speaker 9 (01:41:16):
It's the most sort of evergreen guide for defending yourself online.
A lot of the problem with the online security guides
that they get out of date very quickly, and we
have a totally whole, full time person dedicated to making
sure that our guides stay up to date.

Speaker 7 (01:41:29):
I'll put a link in the description.

Speaker 6 (01:41:31):
Yeah, and we're a nonprofit.

Speaker 9 (01:41:33):
Members support a nonprofit, so you know, if you like
to work, throw us a few bucks. We work for
tips and yeah. Are the chief places that I'm at
that I want to plug? Only other thing to plug?
I guess you can follow me on social media. I'm
at cooperq dot com on blue Sky and cooper q
at Masto dot hackers dot town on Mastodon.

Speaker 7 (01:41:52):
Hell yeah, yeah, all right, well, thank you so much.
Thank you for the work you do at a e
FF and Citizen Lab.

Speaker 6 (01:42:00):
Thank you.

Speaker 7 (01:42:01):
Yeah. I guess we should alwas throw away our phone
since there's no way to use our phone safely anymore.

Speaker 6 (01:42:05):
I mean, throwing away our phones isn't a terrible idea.

Speaker 7 (01:42:09):
That's why I bad. You know what I could be
onto something I.

Speaker 6 (01:42:12):
Think for our own sanity just in general.

Speaker 7 (01:42:15):
No, I think they're making us more connected, and I
think they're making us more stable.

Speaker 9 (01:42:21):
They are making us more connected, that's for sure. In
that I get five billion notifications per day, if that's
what connected means.

Speaker 11 (01:42:28):
Yeah, all right.

Speaker 13 (01:42:47):
Hello everyone, and welcome to say it could happen here.
My name is Dan el Kerd. I'm a writer, analyst,
and researcher of Palestinian and Arab politics. I'm an associate
professor of political science and a senior non resident fellow
at the Arab Center Washington. What a wild time in
the Middle East? Am I right? I mean not to
be flippant, that's putting it mildly. Today before I recorded,

(01:43:09):
Israel bombed the capital of Katar, Doha, in an assassination
attempt against Tamas leadership. They bombed in a residential area
in the middle of the city, surrounded by nurseries, schools, businesses,
and you know people. I have a lot to say
about Arab Israeli relations historically and what's happening on that
front today and the sometimes shared interests of Arab regimes

(01:43:31):
with the Israeli state. So stay tuned for a deep
dive episode on that topic soon. Today, I want to
talk about the issue of Palestinian statehood. It's been in
the news quite a bit these days. A number of
different countries have expressed a willingness to recognize Palestine as
a state. In July, for example, France announced it would
recognize Palestinian statehood, and it was soon joined by a

(01:43:52):
number of other countries, Canada, Malta, Belgium, the UK. Kir Starmer,
the Prime Minister of the UK, actually made it into
an explicit threat. Basically, we will recognize the state of
Palestine if the Israelis don't agree to a ceasefire. I'd
like to underscore the absurdity of that comment for a second,
but we'll get.

Speaker 7 (01:44:08):
Back to that one.

Speaker 13 (01:44:10):
For all these countries, they say that they are recognizing
Palestine as a state because they desire a two state solution.
Their condition for recognizing Palestine as a state also includes
Hamas being completely out of the picture quote demilitarized in
the language of French President Macron, as NPR reported back
in August first, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Karney also said

(01:44:34):
that the Palestinian authority needs to hold elections in this scenario,
but one that excludes Hamas. So all of these recent
announcements are coalescing around the same conditions. I guess the
big deal here is that these are major powers, France
and the UK who have veto power in the UN
Security Council, for example. So the plan to recognize Palestinian

(01:44:55):
statehood has gotten a lot of press and attention.

Speaker 6 (01:44:58):
But the thing is a one.

Speaker 13 (01:45:00):
Hundred and forty five countries already recognize Palestine as a state.
Palestine was given observer status at the UN in twenty twelve,
and the Palestinian authority has been working for quite some
time to get more recognition internationally and to be able
to use the international legal system to advocate for themselves.
So what does this recognition actually mean a state that

(01:45:23):
is occupied entirely by another and is currently undergoing ethnic
cleansing at different levels of severity in all parts of
its territories. What state is actually being recognized here? What
does statehood mean in the context of occupation and ethnic cleansing.
It might help to go back to the Oscilocords that
were signed by the Palestine Liberation Organization the PLO, and

(01:45:45):
the State of Israel. This was the first time that
Israel and the Palestinians agreed to something directly. A stipulation
of the OSCOLO Accords was mutual recognition, meaning Israel would
recognize that the PLO was the representative of the Palestinian people,
and the PLO would recognize Israel's right to exist. This
was later criticized as uneven by Palsaidinian negotiators such as

(01:46:07):
Hannan Ashroi, because the PLO was already internationally recognized as
the representative of the Palestinian people. So her argument more
recently has been they accepted Israel's control for getting recognition
in return. The US ambassador to Israel at the time,
Daniel Kurtzer, concurred with that assessment, saying to The New
York Times that the OSCLO agreement was full of holes.

(01:46:28):
The mutual recognition was asymmetrical, and that was to hurt
the Palestinian negotiating position for years to come.

Speaker 7 (01:46:35):
End quote.

Speaker 13 (01:46:36):
Nevertheless, the Osclo Accords of nineteen ninety three are widely
understood to be the attempt to bring about a two
state solution of some kind, and it's been the framework
that many international powers have paid lip service to ever since.
By the way, September twenty twenty three marked the thirty
year anniversary of the accords, we all know what happened
October seventh, just a few days later. The thing is,

(01:46:59):
the also framework didn't say two states. The Alsco Accords
just said that they would continue negotiations on some eventual
final framework. Now Palestinians wanted a state, of course, and
the Israelis were committing to negotiations. So the Palestinians were
told to start building up a sort of state, a
quasi state in parts of the occupied territories, to start

(01:47:22):
governing themselves in particular ways, and this was called the
Palestinian National Authority. I talked about this at more length
than the episode for it could happen here titled Palestine's
Stolen Future. So if you're interested, you can listen to
that one. The Also Accords split the occupied territories into
three parts, Area A, B, and C, all of which

(01:47:43):
remained under the Israeli occupation's control, but still there were
some differences between them. In Area A, which is less
than twenty percent of the land, that's where a lot
of the urban centers are, the Palestinian Authority was allowed
to function, build and run institutions of governance. So if
you go to Ramalo, for example, you'll see big bil
buildings with Palstinian Authority insignia. An Area B the Palstein

(01:48:04):
and Authority had partial access, and an Area C, which
is the majority of the territories, the Palstien Authority was
and continues to not be allowed to function, But the
PA did use this as an opportunity to create the
basis of a state, creating ministries, beginning of parliament, writing laws,
and importantly creating security forces. Throughout all this, Israel maintained

(01:48:29):
military control over the entire territory, and Israeli settlements continued
to expand. So what the Israeli has got out of
the Also Accords was they got out of providing certain
services and they let Palestinians do that for themselves. But
they didn't actually seed meaningful control over any part of
the territory. Now it's important to pause here. An occupying

(01:48:53):
force is obligated under international law to provide services to
the population it occupies and to return the land to
the sovereign the occupy people as soon as possible, As
the European Society of International Law notes, quote, the nineteen
oh seven Haigue Regulations, the nineteen forty nine Fourth Geneva Convention,

(01:49:15):
and modern body of international human rights instruments contain a
number of provisions which protect the lives, property, natural resources, institutions,
civil life, fundamental human rights and latent sovereignty of the
people under occupation, while curbing the security powers of the
occupying power to those genuinely required to safely administer the occupation.

(01:49:38):
And if the occupier occupies indefinitely, then it's not really
an occupation anymore, is it. Again? As the European Society
of International Law notes, the concept of prolonged occupation may
well become a legal guise that masks a de facto
colonial exercise and defeats the transient and exceptional nature which
occupations are intended to be end quote, but that is

(01:50:02):
exactly what has continued before and after the Ascol Accords.
The Asco Accords never ended, the occupation never gave back
land to Palestinians. All it did is strip the occupier

(01:50:24):
of its responsibility under the guise of working towards a
two state solution. And really, anybody who has looked at
what has transpired honestly would say that there has always
been a mismatch between what the Israelis wanted and we're
willing to give, and what the Palestinians wanted. Even to
the degree of what both sides meant when they set
state has always been mismatched. So I'll explain what I mean.

(01:50:46):
Palestinians have always wanted a legitimate state. What does that mean. Well,
a state has sovereignty, It has control over its own territory,
it has the monopoly on the use of violence within
its boundaries. That's the most basic definition of state sovereignty.
Israel never intended for any of that. Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin,

(01:51:06):
who signed the Oscio Accords, in his final address to
the Kanesset before he was assassinated by a right wing Israeli,
clearly stated that what was on offer for the Palestinians
was something quote less than a state. Yitzak Rabin was
in the Labor Party. But again, if people are being honest,
this is a bipartisan position Israel. Israeli political leaders have

(01:51:27):
at best offered something less than a state, and at
worst offered surrender or annihilation. I'm not being hyperbolic here.
Bezdals Mootrich of the Religious Zionist Party, who is now
the Finance Minister, has for years actively promoted his quote
decisive plan, which has become the policy of the state today.

(01:51:48):
The plan proposes that one any Palestinian who was willing
and able to relinquish the fulfillment of his national aspirations
would be able to stay and live as an individual
in the Jewish State, not as a citizen. And two,
any Palestinian who is unwilling or unable to relinquish his
national aspirations will receive assistance from them to immigrate to

(01:52:11):
one of the Arab countries. So essentially, what he's saying
is Palestinians have to either give up and be a
subject or leave, surrender or transfer. The US as a
supposed mediator and third party has not really straight from that.
Sovereignty has always been approximated with self governance from the

(01:52:31):
United States perspective. Jared Kushner, for example, in his Peace
to Prosperity plan, which was the lynchpin of Donald Trump's
Israel Palestine proposer back in the first Trump administration, invokes
the idea of sovereignty, only to insist that it should
no longer be the crux of negotiations. According to the
Trump administration quote, the notion that sovereignty is a static

(01:52:53):
and consistently defined term has been an unnecessary stumbling block
in past negotiations, and this amorphous concept is best put
aside to focus on pragmatic and operational concerns. Ironically, the
liberal version of a two state solution espoused by every
democratic administration, essentially envisions the same endpoint, a Palestinian entity

(01:53:16):
demilitarized and subordinate to Israel's economic and security concerns. But
Palestinians want a state. They want a state in the
full meaning of the term, and that state has to
be legitimate, not only internationally, but in the eyes of
the Palestinian people. Political scientist Tanya Alberts argues that sovereignty
is an identity of states. It's constituted by the norms

(01:53:39):
of international society. States are recognized as sovereign if they
achieve self determination for a group of people. The fact that,
on rare occasions, the international system has refused to recognize
certain political entities as states, specifically because they had violated
the right of self determination, highlights how we now think
of political authority. So, for example, the international community did

(01:54:03):
not recognize Rhodesia as a state because it violated the
self determination of the black majority in that country, even
though white people in Rhodesia did exercise material control over
that country. In other words, the state's right to sovereignty
must flow from some sort of legitimacy. A state rules
because society approves. This doesn't mean that every sovereign state

(01:54:26):
is democratic, but simply that states derive their status from
the citizens buy in, and because the state claims to
represent the will of maybe a certain ethnic or civic identity,
it's understood as an executor of the law enacted by
the people who are sovereign. So sovereignty then should also
be understood as the ability of people who consider themselves

(01:54:49):
of that place to exercise control over territory and have
a say in its future. Populist movements, secessionist movements, and
other movements that challenge a certain state, sometimes popular sovereignty,
legitimizing their assertions with reference to their historical legacy or
continuity or indigenity, even in the absence of a representative state.

(01:55:10):
And Palestinians are one such group. They've struggled not merely
for the right to exist, but also for political control
in state institutions that represent and uphold their national identity.
And the legitimacy of their sovereignty claim stems not only
from their long ties to the territory, but also from

(01:55:32):
the fact that they have long conceived themselves as a nation,
a nation that has never ceded its demand for a
sovereign state with the promise of subjugation, subsistence, or integration
into another state. So, to make us very clear, Palestinians
want the state that is sovereign. They certainly don't mean

(01:55:52):
self governance. And Palestinians, after thirty years of OSLO that
has only left them worse off, certainly don't want to
go back to trying the same process again. So when
these countries recognize Palestine as a state as a way
of pretending to pressure for the two state solution. They're
not saying anything about what happens to the territories that

(01:56:15):
are currently being wiped out, like literally all of Gaza
and even parts of the West Bank. They're not saying
anything about Israeli settlements, They're not saying anything about reparations.
And because of that, some Palestinians have argued that these
statehood recognition things are a cynical ploy to distract from
the inaction of these countries on addressing the genocide in Gaza,

(01:56:38):
basically pretending to act without actually doing anything. Palestinian analyst
Main Nobani said this to NPR recently. Quote in the end,
simply recognizing Palestinian statehood is a low cost option. It
may placate that domestic audience demanding action, while doing very
little to actually change the situation on the ground end quote.

(01:56:58):
Others have argued even further that not only are these
declarations of recognition a cynical ploy to distract, but they
may even be a sort of trap. Legal expert and
professor nouraa At and international lawyer and professor shad Haamuri
wrote for Jidlia on this, which I'll link in the
show notes. They argue effectively that the best thing to

(01:57:21):
come out of this is a challenge maybe to the US.

Speaker 7 (01:57:24):
Quote.

Speaker 13 (01:57:25):
The greatest promise of this renewed statehood bid, the most
recent push being in twenty eleven twenty twelve, is a
united front to challenge US and transigent support for Israel
end quote. However, they also point out that quote states
do not need to recognize Palestine to end the occupation,
to end the genocide and advance Palestinian self determination. They

(01:57:48):
argue that states quote need decisive will to impose arms
and energy embargoes and trade with an investment in Israel
unseated from the UN, hold Israeli war criminals and complicit
corporations accountable in their national courts, and arrest Prime Minister
Benjamin Nataniehu in compliance with the ICC's arrest warrant end quote.

(01:58:19):
So the bit for statehood doesn't solve problems. It only
gives states the fig leaf to actually delay solving problems.
On top of that, it risks empowering illegitimate and corrupt
Palestinian leadership in any future negotiations. I'm talking a leadership
that includes Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who eighty percent of

(01:58:40):
Palestinians polled said they want him to resign and an
institution like the Palestinian Authority that only fifteen percent of
Palestinians are satisfied with, according to the latest polling as
at the Hamorine quote. The terms of the High Level
International Conference for the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine,
convened in New York, led by France and the Kingdom

(01:59:01):
of Saudi Arabia confirm these risks. The Palestinian Authority is
glorified in at least seven clauses entrusted with governing the state,
effectively paving the way for a police state alongside a
settler colonial entity end quote. None of the talk of
recognizing Palestine amid all of these conditions and stipulations ever

(01:59:24):
say anything about the power imbalance between the two parties
or address the root causes of conflict now. On the
other hand, political scientist Paul Post, writing for a World
Politics Review, says, quote, recognition isn't just theater. Recognition is
a long standing legal institution that has the important function
of identifying major actors in the international system, and for policymakers,

(01:59:47):
recognition is the looseness in the rules that allows them
to use recognition not only to identify actors but also
to express opinions about them or to secure concessions from them. So,
from his perspective, these declarations of recognition are meaningful in
some shape or form. Here's my take. Statehood recognition is

(02:00:08):
not meaningless. In fact, it's probably dangerous in this current moment,
because what it's trying to do is to cement the
conflict in its place. These countries recognizing Palestine want to
hurry the current Palestinian leadership into accepting a state and
name only that is not sovereign. They want to force
the Israelis to the table to do that, and they

(02:00:29):
want these conditions to become the precedent for future negotiations.
And we see signs of this in other ways. For example,
the international community and regional powers pressured Palestinian President Mahmoud
Abbass into changing the rules of the PLO's internal governance
in order to appoint a successor because they were afraid

(02:00:50):
he was going to keep over, and he appointed a
very unpopular figure named sen richech as I wrote for
The Guardian alongside palestiniancially and activist Pablo of ABUFOM. In
May of this year. Abbas also expanded the Central Council
of the PLO and appointed friendly people to it. All
of this shows that the international community, in pressuring the

(02:01:10):
Pastinian leadership in these directions, has no interest in democratic
buy in, in actually getting the buy in of the
Palestinian people, really thinking that a legitimate negotiation would ever
be sustainable under these circumstances. This state of affairs, these
schemes where international powers try to ignore what the Palestinian

(02:01:32):
people want yet again, is the reason Palestinians don't really
have any hope in any solution. In polling on one state,
two states, etc. Forty seven percent prefer the two state
solution based on the nineteen sixty seven borders, fifteen percent
prefer confederation between the two states, and fourteen percent of
Palestinians prefer the establishment of a single state with equality

(02:01:54):
between the two sides. Twenty four percent of Palestinians polled
said that they did not know or did not want
to answer. Also, when asked about the public's support or
opposition to specific political measures to break the current political deadlock,
sixty eight percent of Palestinians supported joining more international organizations
but still fifty percent supported resorting to unarmed popular resistance,

(02:02:18):
forty six percent supported a return to armed intefaldo, and
forty two percent supported the dissolution of the Palstinian authority.
Twenty six percent supported abandoning the two state solution and
demanding one state for Postinians and Israelis. What this sort
of polling shows is that Palestinians now understand very clearly
that the international system is screwing them over, international law

(02:02:41):
hasn't been able to help them, and that the solutions
for a two state solution being proposed with all of
these conditions won't ever actually get to two states and
won't give them real sovereignty. The mass protests and actions
that took place in twenty twenty one Palestinian activists called
this the Unity Uprising or Intefalda, showed that this has
always been about sovereignty. In the unit Intofada of twenty

(02:03:03):
twenty one, Palstinian activists spoke of a shared struggle against
Israel's continued erasure of Palestinians. Palestinians living under Israeli rule
across the country, whether they had citizenship or they didn't,
rejected the old style of politics. They rejected what they
saw as artificial fragmentation and they insisted instead on their
national identity and shared struggle. As a result, at that time,

(02:03:27):
we witnessed an extraordinary amount of organizing across the Green line,
so in the territories and in Israel with Palestinian citizens
of Israel, and it was a way of reclaiming Palestinian sovereignty.
The same activists in groups involved in the Jerusalem neighborhood
of Sheesharrah linked up with those organizing in Haifa and Umlfahim.
They built on these connections to launch campaigns over and

(02:03:50):
over in Massafarieta, the Knapbub and much more. Sovereignty has
always been an animating demand for Palestinians since before October seventh,
and that's surely on everyone's minds now that the war
in Gaza has extended this long. So the takeaway here
is recognition isn't the solution. Statehood may not even be
the solution, at least not in the terms they're offering.

Speaker 7 (02:04:13):
Sovereignty has always.

Speaker 13 (02:04:14):
Been what the demand is and these pushes for recognition
miss that point. Yet again. That's it for me. Thank
you for listening to another Palestine episode, and I'll be
back with more soon.

Speaker 11 (02:04:26):
Take care.

Speaker 7 (02:04:41):
This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly
newscast covering what is happening in the White House, the
crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison
Davis today I'm joined by Sophie Lecterman, Robert Evans, and
James Stout. This episode, we are covering the week of
September fourth to September eleven events.

Speaker 2 (02:05:01):
Never wait, remember what, never forget, whichever one of those
were supposed to do.

Speaker 7 (02:05:07):
So we had a very big news week already, and
then a very big piece of news happened yesterday when
we usually record Executive Disorder, but this is Thursday. We
waited a little bit to get some more information before
we talk about this story, which will probably be the
biggest story of the week, the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 2 (02:05:31):
So on Wednesday, September tenth, at Utah Valley University at
around twelve twenty three pm Mountain time, Charlie kirk was
shot during a campus event. It was a big outdoor event.
The crowd, I mean, there's some good footage of elevation
of the size of the crowd it was. It looked
like several thousand people who had shown up to I

(02:05:51):
think it did all. It seemed like largely supporters, but
there was certainly a mix of supporters and protesters around. Yeah,
and yeah, Kirk was shot one from a distance of
I think the right now. The best estimate is around
one hundred and fifty yards. I mean that's precise, not accurate,
because people are kind of basing it on just sort
of like looking at the images and doing like that.

Speaker 7 (02:06:14):
Perhaps the satellite estimation right.

Speaker 2 (02:06:16):
Right, But that does seem credible based on what I've seen,
about one hundred and fifty yards or so, Yeah, which
is not long range. That's not like short range. It's
like low medium range for a rifle. And they found,
or at least the FBI is saying they found the rifle,
and the pictures show it to be an extremely normal
looking bolt action hunting rifle. Kirk was shot once in
the neck. It hit his brain stem. You can kind

(02:06:38):
of tell by the way his arms moved after he
was shot, so he probably lost consciousness immediately and he
was declared dead about two hours later at the hospital.
But that's largely because that tends to be how it's handled.
When somebody is shot like this, they don't like to
announce their death immediately, even if they died immediately, Like
that's just kind of it's best pret you want to

(02:07:00):
make sure you've contacted the family and everything like that.
So that's what happened.

Speaker 14 (02:07:05):
Yeah, and his case of family were present I think
at the at the event.

Speaker 2 (02:07:10):
I mean, I'm sure some of them, but there's yeah,
like not ever like they would have probably wanted, Like
I doubt his parents or whatever were all there or whatever,
like even if his wife and kids were sure.

Speaker 8 (02:07:20):
Yeah, totally makes sense.

Speaker 2 (02:07:21):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, those are the facts that we can verify.
And there's actually fairly little besides this other than some
time stuff that we can verify perfectly. Like they're currently
saying that about eleven fifty two am Mountain time the
shooter arrived near campus, because they do have some videos
of the person they think was the shooter. There were
at least two people who were taken into custody right

(02:07:43):
after the shooting who proved not to be the guy,
and I think they were just grabbing people like it
did not They did not seem to be any good reason.
One of them had a pellet rifle.

Speaker 7 (02:07:52):
The first guy started shouting after the shooting and I'll
do it again, and this prompted him to be detained,
but was later found to not be a legitimate suspect
in the shooting.

Speaker 2 (02:08:04):
No, because he was right next to the shooting. Yeah,
had no weapon, nothing. So I mean, those are the
facts as they stand right now. The photo that has
been released of the guy they think did it looks
like about eighty percent of the male population of Utah
clean shaven, but otherwise he looked just as nondescriptives like

(02:08:28):
this dude takes his hat off, maybe shaves his head
like it would not be wildly difficult for him to
hide because he does not look like.

Speaker 7 (02:08:35):
Pretty greeny pictures not as clear as something like the
healthcare CEO shooting.

Speaker 15 (02:08:41):
Yeah, and the FBI did offer a reward of up
to one hundred thousand dollars for information.

Speaker 7 (02:08:48):
We do know that, Yeah, which points towards the usefulness
of the tips they have been getting so far. Exactly.

Speaker 8 (02:08:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 14 (02:08:58):
Yeah, the rightfle is for anyone interested. It looks they
thought it was a mauser.

Speaker 2 (02:09:02):
I guess it didn't look like one from the photos
that they released, but maybe that maybe that was yet again,
not the gun, because the FBI has said a lot
of things and then backtracked on it.

Speaker 14 (02:09:12):
Yeah, the New York Post has a picture of a
sporterized Spanish mouser with a composite stock.

Speaker 8 (02:09:20):
Have you seen that one, Robert.

Speaker 2 (02:09:21):
Yes, that's the one I saw that. It looked like
a savage to me. But is that is that a
sportized eight millimeter that was rebarrel the thirty eight six?

Speaker 8 (02:09:30):
That would be my guess.

Speaker 14 (02:09:31):
The Spanish mousers the only one I'm aware of that
has the bolt turned down in that way. Good idea,
but that it's not a great picture. It could also
be something else.

Speaker 2 (02:09:39):
Because it just looked like any hunting rifle on a
store rack the photo that I saw.

Speaker 14 (02:09:45):
Yeah, Yeah, No, I think it's someone has done a
sported job on it.

Speaker 5 (02:09:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 14 (02:09:49):
What's somewhat interesting about that, like, other than just being adweeb,
is that potentially one could acquire a gun like that
without having filled out forty four to seventy three form
right like an FBI background check. I know they will
if they have the weapon, they will certainly be pursuing
trying to trace that as one of the ways they're

(02:10:09):
trying to locate the shooter. Yes, so if this person's
either a relative could have acquired it before it was
necessary to do a forty four to seventy three yes,
or I think with curios and relics in some states,
or antique weapons, you don't have to do a background check.

Speaker 2 (02:10:26):
No, and you don't have to do a background check.
I mean, face to face sales are I believe legal
in Utah. Yes, private, face to face sales are legal
in Utah.

Speaker 7 (02:10:35):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (02:10:36):
So if this guy bought Basically, what that means is
if this guy just bought a gun in cash from
a dude, there's not a record of that, although said
dude might come forward.

Speaker 6 (02:10:44):
Sure.

Speaker 2 (02:10:45):
That said, the fact that this is a sportized old
mouser means this could be a gun that's put in
the family a while that he's sportalized, in which case
there's absolutely no record of it.

Speaker 3 (02:10:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:10:55):
Yeah, definitely, I'm guessing.

Speaker 14 (02:10:58):
I've seen people call it a high powered rifle and
stuff like, just just be aware it's kind of an
old gun.

Speaker 5 (02:11:03):
It's an old gun.

Speaker 2 (02:11:04):
I mean, if it's thirty, If it is thirty at six,
I would say that's a high power cartridge.

Speaker 8 (02:11:08):
No it is.

Speaker 5 (02:11:08):
That's a big round.

Speaker 8 (02:11:09):
But yeah, it's a full size rifle cartridge for sure.

Speaker 2 (02:11:12):
People hunt deer with thirty at six all the time.
It's an extremely normal hunting rifle.

Speaker 14 (02:11:17):
Yeah, like probably top five most common kinds of rifle
for someone to have in this country.

Speaker 2 (02:11:22):
And that was bolt action hunting rifle was my assumption
as soon as I saw the video, because the guy
fired one shot, and it's relatively uncommon for people who
are shooting in mass crowded public situations like this to
limit themselves to a single round, which it just suggests
number one, like a bolt action, which I also thought
was likely because they didn't leave any amo behind. Yeah,

(02:11:43):
and if he was firing something like an AR, those
can fling brass so widely that you can't easily catch it,
like if you're especially if you're trying to escape immediately
after shooting. And yeah, I would guess. I'm seeing a
lot of people online obviously conspiracy start. I'm seeing so
many people say like this had to have been a hit,
This was a professional, Only a.

Speaker 8 (02:12:01):
Professional could have done this.

Speaker 7 (02:12:02):
This trump distracting from Epstein. This was the massage that
this was any number of unhinged theories around this event.

Speaker 2 (02:12:11):
And I will say right now as pertains the competence
of the shooter, anyone who had picked up a gun
for the first time couldn't have easily done this. Like
I doubt this as someone who was new to firearms,
but anyone who like shot a deer once or twice
a year could have made this happen. Anybody who went
to the range, you know, once or twice a month

(02:12:32):
for a while, could have gotten competent enough to make
a shot like this very easily.

Speaker 7 (02:12:37):
Very doable for like hobbyist shooters, which there are many
of in the United States, and any other in Utah.

Speaker 2 (02:12:42):
I would be shocked if like less than about eighty
percent of the adult male population of Utah could have
made this shot.

Speaker 5 (02:12:48):
Right.

Speaker 7 (02:12:48):
You do not need like military training, You do not
need to be a veteran to make this shot.

Speaker 5 (02:12:52):
Absolutely not.

Speaker 14 (02:12:53):
And I think it's very irresponsible to see so many people,
like including people who had journalists Spec eighteen like that. Like,
I know that generally firearms are not covered well in
the US media despite being ubiquitous here, but like in
cases like this, it's okay no to no, but it's
better to be quiet if you don't know.

Speaker 2 (02:13:10):
Yes, the other thing I guess we should get into
is in terms of the escape and what we know.
This is also not something that necessitates fucking Navy seal training, right, Like, Yeah,
you're a white, clean cut guy in fucking Salt Lake City.
If you have a bag that you can hide your
gun in and you get down, maybe throw on a
different jacket or something like that over your shirt or

(02:13:32):
change shirts, walk away, get to your car, drive off.
Very hard for them to track you. Salt Lake City's
not New York. It's not blanketed in cameras, not like
New York. There's not a massive police presence for this rally,
and there certainly wasn't a massive police presence doing concentric
circles around the rally. This was not like a fucking
the President's in town and the Secret Service is walking

(02:13:53):
everything down for two miles.

Speaker 7 (02:13:54):
And Charlie's own security tends to stay close to him
at the event. They're not set up with giant perimeters.

Speaker 2 (02:14:01):
No, because none of them expected something like this.

Speaker 14 (02:14:03):
Yeah, I'm sure that Charlie Kirk has received threats before,
But yes, I mean, there's only so much a private
individual can do.

Speaker 7 (02:14:11):
Right In these situations, he often wears a bulletproof vest.

Speaker 8 (02:14:14):
Yes, a really Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:14:15):
Yeah, there's only so much a private individual can do,
And there's only so much you can do if you're
holding an event outside, Yeah, like to stop somebody who's
got us a scoped rifle from getting on top of
a roof, right Like. I'm sure his family is firing
their current security right now, obviously, But I really don't

(02:14:36):
know what they could have done, like what his personal
security could realistically have done, other than say, don't do
an event outside, Charlie.

Speaker 5 (02:14:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:14:44):
A few other notes that we should touch on. On
Thursday morning, some unverified information related to the ongoing investigation
notes leaked online through fellow campus to be Stephen Crowder.
Stephen Crowder shared an internal memo which contained unverified information,

(02:15:06):
which reads in part quote atf another law enforcement located
an older model imported Mouser thirty odd six caliber bolt
action rifle wrapped in a towel in a wooded area
near the campus. The location of the fire room appears
to match the suspect's route of travel. The spent cartridge
was still chambered, in addition to three unspent rounds in

(02:15:28):
the top Fed magazine. All cartridges have engraved wording on
them expressing transgender and anti fascist ideology unquote. So this
claim linking the shooting to transgender and quote unquote anti
fascist ideology, whatever that means, spread around the internet like
wild as expected, though a few hours later, The New

(02:15:50):
York Times reported quote according to a preliminary internal report
circulated inside the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives,
federal and local officials recovered ammunition with the show tutor's
rifle that appeared to be engrave with statements expressing transgender
and anti fascist ideology. But a senior law enforcement official
with direct knowledge of the investigation cautioned that report had

(02:16:11):
not been verified by ATF analysts, did not match other
summaries of the evidence, and might turn out to have
been misread or misinterpreted. In fast moving investigations, such status
reports are not made public because they often contain a
mixture of accurate and inaccurate information unquote.

Speaker 5 (02:16:29):
Yes and again.

Speaker 2 (02:16:31):
When that person with the pellet rifle was arrested, Cash Betel,
director of the FBI, posted on Twitter, we have the
man who killed Charlie Kirk. And then had to post
like an hour later. Nope, which is not a thing
you saw with previous directors of the FBI. For a
good reason.

Speaker 14 (02:16:48):
Yeah, like that their handling of this has been pretty unorphodox.

Speaker 2 (02:16:53):
No, And I can see why a fucking Stephen Crowder
fan in the ATF would want to get that out
immediately totally actually, because he probably knew at some point
that's going to get corrected. But what matters is it
gets out for some degree of time.

Speaker 7 (02:17:05):
Yeah, and then that bakes into the reality of a
certain number of people forever.

Speaker 5 (02:17:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:17:10):
Right, And that's what matters. Whether or not it's true.
We don't know yet. Is it true or not?

Speaker 5 (02:17:14):
Right? We simply don't know.

Speaker 7 (02:17:16):
Heyesus Garrison. This is just a short update. On Thursday evening,
law Enforcement gave a press conference where Utah Governor Spencer
Cox cautioned against quote unquote a tremendous amount of disinformation
circulating online about the killing of Charlie Kirk and specifically
cited boughts from China and Russia which were encouraging violence

(02:17:41):
and instilling disinformation into discourse around the shooting. Now, while
there certainly have been many on the left who have
been joking or even celebrating this shooting.

Speaker 5 (02:17:53):
Oh yeah, lots of people.

Speaker 7 (02:17:55):
Rhetoric from the right has been similarly violent, with calls
to do mass violence or purge the Democrats or people
on the left. I'm going to play video of the
White House released late Wednesday night of Trump giving a
statement on the shooting.

Speaker 10 (02:18:10):
It's a long past time for all Americans and the
media to confront the fact that violence and murder are
the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree,
day after day, year after year, in the most hateful
and despicable way possible. For years, those on the radical

(02:18:31):
left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and
the world's worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of
rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing
in our country today, and it must stop right now.

(02:18:52):
My administration will find each and every one of those
who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence
and voting, the organizations that funded and support it, as
well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials,
and everyone else who.

Speaker 6 (02:19:10):
Brings order to our country.

Speaker 10 (02:19:12):
From the attack on my life, in Butler, Pennsylvania last year,
which killed a husband and father, to the attacks on
ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a healthcare executive
in the streets of New York, to the shooting of
House Majority leaders Steve Scalise and three others. Radical of
political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken

(02:19:36):
too many lives.

Speaker 7 (02:19:37):
The Trump assassin was not left wing.

Speaker 5 (02:19:41):
Now he was a registered Republican.

Speaker 7 (02:19:44):
There's currently no indication of the political alignment of this
shooter whatsoever. Just because they killed Charlie Kirk does not
mean that this was a left wing ANTIFA super soldier.
Charlie Kirk has had a memafied status on the Internet
for the past few years, which is encouraged vitriol and
threats from those on the extreme right as well as
the far left.

Speaker 14 (02:20:04):
Yeah, he's particularly disliked by like the hardcore anti Semites
on their right, and.

Speaker 7 (02:20:09):
The Grapers have long had fun with making threats against
Charlie Kirk and the quote unquote groper war, which we
don't have time to get into. But it's not just
Trump's worrying statement there promising a degree of crackdown. Jesse
Waters on Fox has claimed quote, We're gonna avenge Charlie's death.

Speaker 5 (02:20:28):
Yep.

Speaker 7 (02:20:29):
Here's a clip of Jesse Waters on Fox News last night.

Speaker 16 (02:20:32):
Trump gets hit in the ear, Charlie gets shot dead.
They came after Kavanaugh with a rifle to his neighborhood.
They went after Musk's cars. They just shot two Jews
outside the embassy.

Speaker 5 (02:20:47):
Think about it.

Speaker 16 (02:20:48):
Scalice got shot, barely survived.

Speaker 6 (02:20:51):
It's happening.

Speaker 16 (02:20:52):
We've got transshooters, the got Riots and la They are
at war with us. Whether we want to accept it
or not, they are at war with us. What are
we going to do about it? How much political violence
are we going to tolerate? And that's the question we're
just going to have to ask ourselves now. Charlie would
want us to put as much pressure on these people

(02:21:16):
as possible.

Speaker 3 (02:21:17):
Dana nailed it.

Speaker 16 (02:21:18):
This is unacceptable and has to stop, and it has
to stop now.

Speaker 6 (02:21:24):
And everybody's accountable.

Speaker 16 (02:21:25):
And we're watching what they're saying on television and who's
saying what the politicians and the media and all these
rats out there. This can never happen again. It ends now.
Greg's right again. This is a turning point.

Speaker 2 (02:21:41):
And we know which direction we're going he made a
turning point.

Speaker 7 (02:21:44):
Joe huh, Yes, that's Jesse Waters doing a turning point. Time.

Speaker 14 (02:21:48):
Also, the use of rats to refer to other people is,
I know, it's giving like radio milklan vibes.

Speaker 2 (02:21:57):
It's also worth noting Republican Repersentative Clay Higgins from Louisiana
is saying that he's seeking to have social media companies
place lifetime bans on users who celebrated the assassination.

Speaker 7 (02:22:08):
It's not just Jesse Waters calling for war. Other commentators
are employing very similar rhetoric, including Alex Jones and Steve Bannon.

Speaker 5 (02:22:16):
We're in a war.

Speaker 1 (02:22:18):
The Latins was saying, put a bulls on Trump at
Bullson As supporters.

Speaker 6 (02:22:22):
Charlie Kirk's a casualty of war? Would war in this country?

Speaker 7 (02:22:27):
Chaia Wrtcheck tweeted on the lips of TikTok account quote
this is war. The Oathkeeper founder Stuart Rhodes announced on
Info Wars that his militia would be reforming to help
with security at right wing events.

Speaker 5 (02:22:40):
Great, oh gosh.

Speaker 7 (02:22:41):
It was a good Wired article Wednesday night, which collected
various cost of violence among the right in the aftermath
of the shooting. Quote. Ed Martin, US pardon attorney and
former acting with Stornay for DC wrote on Twitter, quote
for it is written, vengeance is mine. I will repay,
says the Lord. Citing Romans twelve nineteen, Elon must posted
the left is the party of murder, then quoted a

(02:23:03):
post blaming the left wing and mainstream media, as well
as figures like Gavin Newsom for radicalizing people against right
wing figures like Kirk. Katie Miller, who works with Moscat
Doge and is the wife of Stephen Miller, wrote on
x that even liberals condemning violence quote have blood on
their hands. You could be.

Speaker 6 (02:23:20):
Next.

Speaker 7 (02:23:20):
Influencer and unofficial Trump advisor Laura Lumer posted on Twitter,
the left are terrorists. Christopher Ruffo, a conservative activist who
popularized the demonization of critical race theory, suggested in a
Twitter post that the radical left was responsible for the
shooting and urged the US government to quote infiltrate, disrupt, arrest,
and incars rate all those who are responsible for this
chaos unquote. There's many, many more. This is after the

(02:23:45):
right has long celebrated certain types of political violence.

Speaker 5 (02:23:50):
Oh yes, constantly.

Speaker 7 (02:23:52):
Yeah, like that old guy in Panama who shot a
protester blocking the street. The entire right rallied behind that man.
Kirk himself has embraced Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot and killed
two people after a plastic bag was thrown in the
direction of Kyle Rittenhouse. Kirk was vocally supportive of the

(02:24:12):
man who tried to attack Nancy Pelosi in her home
and did attack pol Pelosi.

Speaker 2 (02:24:17):
Yes, specifically specifically urged his audience to bail him out.

Speaker 7 (02:24:21):
It was like not even two months ago that Minnesota
state senator and her husband were killed. Political violence exists
across the spectrum. This is not a left wing problem.
This is an American problem.

Speaker 5 (02:24:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:24:35):
I mean the vast majority of political of terrorist attacks
that are politically motivated in the US are right wing
like and have been for the last several decades.

Speaker 7 (02:24:43):
Per the FBI, in the twenty twelve to twenty twenty one,
fifty five percent of murders tied to political streamism came
from white supremacy fourteen percent, anti government six percent to
other right wing twenty percent, Islamist four percent left wing,
and the white supremacy fifty five percent are far right Nazis.

Speaker 5 (02:25:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:25:04):
In terms of like who did this? Yeah, I think
we touched on Grouper's a little bit. We should probably
talk a bit more about the kind of online feud
between a chunk of Nick Fuintes's fan base and Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 7 (02:25:18):
It was certainly more prominent a few years ago. As
Kirk has himself has moved further to right, has adopted
great replacement theory, the feud kind of dissipated, but it
certainly was like a legitimate thing in the right for years.

Speaker 2 (02:25:31):
Yes, to the extent that that's a number of folks
that kind of have suspected that, like maybe that's who
did it.

Speaker 5 (02:25:37):
Again, we really have no idea.

Speaker 2 (02:25:38):
I'm just bringing this up to make the point that, like,
there's a variety of reasons why this guy could have
done this, why this person could have done this, including
could be an Epstein related thing. Right, there's a lot
of anger at figures who kind of bought into the
Trump line that we're done now with the Epstein stuff.
There's no way to know, and I think that's kind
of where we have to end that part of artist

(02:26:00):
here is we don't know why this was done, and
to extent, it doesn't matter if it comes out tomorrow
that this guy was like a White House staffer working
for Donald Trump who did it because he thought Charlie
Kirk had disre Like if some crazy shit like that happened,
it wouldn't change at all the way that they're talking
about this shooting, right, like it just doesn't matter, Like

(02:26:20):
we are where we are with them, and they're saying
a lot of the same stuff like that, this is
an escalation in rhetoric, but it's not a massive escalation
in rhetoric over the way they've been talking about fucking
the people, changing light, like the.

Speaker 7 (02:26:34):
Crocker barrel logo logo, we have to go to war,
we have to.

Speaker 5 (02:26:37):
Go to war, We're at war.

Speaker 14 (02:26:38):
I was thinking about that when you said that, like
the lips of TikTok had tweeted that we were at war,
Like you could probably go back and see dozens of
other instances almost exactly the same statement.

Speaker 2 (02:26:48):
Right, And is this something that could lead to mass
Could this be because I've seen people comparing this guy
like Charlie Kirk to Horst Wessel, who was a Nazi,
was literally a pimp, was a member of the Nazi
brown Shirts who was murdered and it became a huge
rallying cry for the Nazi Party, right, they made a
song about him. It was a big deal. I think
that's kind of a very silly comparison. For one thing,

(02:27:10):
Horse Wessel is meaningful because he was killed before the
Nazis came to power, and they used his death in
order to get to power, and Trump is in power.

Speaker 7 (02:27:19):
If you're not aware, they don't need to invent excuses
either to like crack down on the left or no,
or carry out their policies. They're already doing that. I've
seen people go into complete panic mode because they're gonna
be like, they're gonna use this this shooting to now
do terrible things, as if they're not already doing terrible things,

(02:27:42):
Like they don't need to wait for events to happen.
They are more than willing just to do whatever they
want when they want to.

Speaker 2 (02:27:49):
Yes, that is exactly like, that's exactly what I would
tell you. And in terms of like comparisons, I don't
even think it's super useful to try to compare this
to specific figures from fucking German history, because there's.

Speaker 7 (02:28:05):
Really not America in twenty twenty five. Yeah, there's a
viral TikTok of a man talking about the Book of Mormon,
like like seconds after the shooting.

Speaker 2 (02:28:16):
Standing next to where Kirk died, and we now know
that he stole a bunch of shit from the booth
that was covered in blood to sell it online. Like this,
this is all of the books of the America in Germany.

Speaker 5 (02:28:27):
You won't find anything like that in it.

Speaker 14 (02:28:29):
Yeah, Like a better historical comparison we will see, right,
might be Jose Carvo, whose death did immediately sort of
was one of the things that accelerated the start of
the Spanish Civil War, I guess, yeah, But even then, like,
no one was tiktoking and grabbing much that was stained
by his blood.

Speaker 2 (02:28:48):
No, And there's no you can like say, like, oh, well,
this figure's assassination preceded this kind of violence, but like, okay,
was that figure a guy who did what Charlie Kirk
did and was connected in the way that No, like
this is an American thing, this is new. Yeah, this
is a novel. His moment in history, and we don't
know what's going to happen. I'm not saying, don't you

(02:29:09):
know if you're the kind of person who has been
worried about right wing violence accelerating. You shouldn't be less
worried right now, and I think that's a good thing
to be worried about. There's been a spree of bomb
threats called into like historically black colleges today and DNC
headquarters last I checked. I don't think anything actually has

(02:29:30):
been done, but it makes sense. It's an anger reaction
from the right. You know, you've got some people who
woke up pissed off this morning and decided to call
in some bomb threats. Apparently we'll see you know who
the culprits were there. But I didn't want to touch
on something else that I've seen in the wake of
all this that is pretty novel. But we should do
an ad break first, all right, coming back, I wanted

(02:30:03):
to talk briefly about the way AI is being used
by civilian investigators to try and crack this caper. People
have been using AI to enhance the images that the
FBI released of the maybe shooter. Again, we don't even
know that that guy's the shooter because they fucked up
very badly on this initially, but people have been using

(02:30:26):
to like clarify and we know that the AI is
doing a bad job because again he's wearing a distinctive shirt.
People found the shirt online and when the AI was
like solidifying the image on the shirt, it did it wrong,
Like it put like a silhouette of a man on
there that wasn't on there.

Speaker 7 (02:30:42):
Like it like you can also submit the same image
to like five different AI imaging programs and get five
wildly different results for what the face quote unquote looks like.

Speaker 2 (02:30:51):
And I just brought that up because I haven't seen
that happen before with one of these things. And it
was like, oh, okay, cool, that's a fun new.

Speaker 7 (02:30:58):
This is gonna be something we'd have to deal with
now for every single right preceding event in absolutely, yes,
whatever this hellscape of the American century of humiliation looks like.

Speaker 5 (02:31:08):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (02:31:09):
The other thing I wanted to bring up is, within
about like two to three hours after Kirk was killed,
and after again it had been announced that he was dead,
people were asking Grock is this video? Because the video
was spreading wildly of him dying on everywhere. Really, but
people asked on Twitter, they asked grok elon Musk's AI
is this real? And the response that was posted initially

(02:31:31):
was Charlie Kirk takes the roast in stride with a laugh.
He's faced tougher crowds. Yes, he survives this one easily.
And then someone responded, Grok, he got shot through the neck.
What are you talking about? And Grok responded, it's a
meme video with edited effects to look like a dramatic shot,
not a real event. Charlie Kirk is fine, he handles
roasts like a pro. So again, I bring this up

(02:31:52):
just because this is going to only become more of
a factor in the immediate wake of shootings and terror
to tax and disasters. Is people going to AI's for
information about the validity of videos, about the validity of threats.
And what scares me is not this didn't do any damage, right, Like,
this doesn't didn't hurt the man hunt for the killer.

(02:32:14):
It didn't like do anything. It's just ridiculous. But let's
say you've got videos of a disaster ongoing, I mean,
like a fucking natural disaster coming or whatever, and people
are being told to leave their homes and somebody asks
the fucking groc hey do I need to hear I'll
plug this video and it'll tell me if the storm's
going to hit my house or if I can stay here,

(02:32:36):
people are gonna do shit like that, like.

Speaker 5 (02:32:38):
That's gonna happen.

Speaker 8 (02:32:39):
Yeah, you're right anyway, just as heads up. Ah, that's bleak. Yeah,
that's pretty terrible.

Speaker 5 (02:32:47):
All right.

Speaker 2 (02:32:48):
Well that's that's I think all we got to say
on this.

Speaker 14 (02:32:50):
Yeah, we'll keep updating you is we learn more. I'm
sure this will be developing over the weekend.

Speaker 2 (02:32:56):
Yeah, this is going to keep being a major story. Well,
I'm sure we'll do a dedicated episode on it next week.

Speaker 5 (02:33:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:33:02):
Something else that happened on Wednesday, the same day as
the Charlie Kirk assassination, was a school shooting in Colorado.
Two students were shot before the shooter killed himself. Police
have said, quote, we are looking at a mode if
we don't have one yet. He was radicalized by some
extremist network in the details of that will be down

(02:33:23):
the road, and we wanted to give you that much
about maybe a mindset for him. Unquote.

Speaker 2 (02:33:29):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I guess it's just a marking
of what kind of shootings Americans are aneured to and
not school shootings that's business as.

Speaker 7 (02:33:39):
Usual, especially if it's just a regular white male teenager.

Speaker 8 (02:33:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 14 (02:33:44):
Yeah, we'll be kind of following that one as well
to see what it's online radicalization was. Yeah, they've already
found so early, but yeah, it's pretty tragic that two
school shootings happened in a day.

Speaker 7 (02:33:57):
It was reported in multiple outlets last week that the
Department of Justice was considering restricting gun ownership rights for
transgender Americans in the wake of the Minneapolist Catholic school
shooting last month. This was first reported by the Diggity Wire,
who quoted the source inside the Justice Department saying, quote,
Individuals within the DOJ are reviewing ways to ensure that

(02:34:18):
mentally ill individuals suffering from gender dysphoria are unable to
obtain fire arms while they are unstable and unwell unquote.
CNN said that their sources described the proposal for a
transgun ban as quote preliminary in nature, and since then,
the DOJ and the Trump administration have not made any
clear statements confirming or denying this reporting. A DOJ spokesperson

(02:34:42):
acknowledg THEES reports with the statement, reading, quote, the DOJ
is actively evaluating options to prevent the pattern of violence
we have seen from individuals with specific mental health challenges
and substance abuse disorders. No specific criminal justice proposals have
been advanced at this time. Unquote. Trump declined to answer
a question about it possible transgun ban last Friday. This
is something right wing influencers have been advocating for years now.

Speaker 6 (02:35:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:35:07):
On September fifth, the NRA made a statement reading, the
Second Amendment isn't up for debate. The NRA supports the
Second Amendment rights for all law abiding Americans to purchase, possess,
and use firearms. The energy does not and will not
support any policy proposals that implement sweeping gun bands that
arbitrarily strict law abiding citizens of their Second Amendment rights

(02:35:28):
without due process. Yep, which you know is consistent with
the NRA's messaging four years because the Lion is the
recent messaging yet definitely Yeah, well, I mean the lion
has been for as long as I have been a
gun owner, which is twenty years now from the NRA
that after the Civil Rights movement.

Speaker 8 (02:35:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:35:46):
Yeah, registration and like laws forcing people to register their.

Speaker 5 (02:35:51):
Guns, and like gun control laws in general.

Speaker 2 (02:35:53):
Are that restrict at all access to firearms are a
prelude inevitably to mass confiscation. Right, Like that has been
the that has been the line for a long time.
This does not surprise me. Yeah, No, the stance doesn't.
The fact that they said something publicly during this does.
Because the NRA has been quiet a lot when there's
an issue, like, for example, that the shooting the Filando

(02:36:15):
Castile right, who was legally carrying a concealed firearm when
the police murdered him in his car. They kept pretty
fucking quiet about that. So I am a little surprised
that they said something. But what they're saying is is
very consistent with other shit they've been saying.

Speaker 7 (02:36:29):
Yeah, there's no current legal mechanism that exists for them
to do this. They would have to invent or heavily
alter the current weight that gun rights can be taken away,
which is right now through individual court cases where a
judge finds an individual person quote unquote mentally deficient. Yeah,
and it's highly unlikely that the gun lobby will support

(02:36:50):
any policy proposals that start adding certain diagnoses to a
list that excludes you from gun ownership, because sure you
if you add gender dysphoria, Now, that might not be
a huge problem to many on the right, But let's
say a Democrat administration and Democrat House and Senate come
into power. Now there was this precedent that you can

(02:37:13):
add diagnoses to take away gun rights, which would enable
adding things like depression or PTSD, which a lot of
veterans have. And this is like the slippery slope that
the NRA warns about, So it makes sense that they
would be taking this stance. Similarly, I don't necessarily see
a very clear path for them to restrict HRT through

(02:37:34):
this mechanism. SIS people, including a lot of men who
own guns, take testosterone and CIS women take estrogen, so
that would be a very tricky way to handle this.

Speaker 2 (02:37:46):
I think the only way they could again would be
if they try to restrict en mass like the prescription
of hormones specifically to people with gender dysphoria or trans people,
which is difficult for a lot of reasons, but would
provide it like a pretext for Okay, these people are
now taking stuff an illegal substance, and you can go

(02:38:07):
after people with guns for that. But I feel like
I don't know how you would judicate that how you
like force like the federal government does not theoretically have
the ability to force the medical community to say nobody
who's got generous for you gets hormones.

Speaker 11 (02:38:24):
Ever.

Speaker 14 (02:38:24):
Again, Yeah, I mean, you could maybe do something through
the FDA, but I don't see how you could do
it just to trans people and.

Speaker 2 (02:38:30):
How right, like, how would you keep it legal for
all of Joe Rogan's friends, and that's just like through
the FDA, right, I don't I literally just don't know.

Speaker 8 (02:38:39):
Yeah, I'm not super familiar with that.

Speaker 7 (02:38:41):
But this is obviously something that we will keep an
eye on. This is this is like a possibility that
we've discussed the right wanting to enact for years now,
and the fact that the DOJ might even have some
people in there who are doing preliminary considerations. It obviously
is a worrying sign of the general position on trans

(02:39:02):
rights and transgund rights.

Speaker 14 (02:39:03):
Yeah, for our immigration update this week, I want to
start by talking about the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court
confirmed in its case that CBP and more permanently ICE
can continue their policy of racial profiling. This overturned a
lower court judges ordered that prohibits them from stopping someone
in Los Angeles based on ethnicity alone. It didn't just

(02:39:24):
look at ethnicity, It said that it prohibits them from
using either one or a combination of four factors, which
were a parent race, their accent, or their use for
non English language, their job. Their jobs that tend to
have a higher proportion of undocumented people. Right, they get
construction and some agricultural jobs. And their presence at a
certain place again right, places like a home depot or

(02:39:47):
a farm garrison. Smiling at how I correctly pronounce the
word defo there. CBP has always been able to profile
you at the border. Right, that's kind of what they do.
There was a nineteen seventy five Supreme Court decision that
one is called USA versus Bridnion. I think it's BRIDNIONI
like Italian Brigni ponce. That decision looked a roving traffic

(02:40:09):
stop up hearing. I lives in San Clemente. And in
that case, the CBP had stopped someone not a checkpoint,
but while sitting by the side of the highway in
their vehicle, and they had done so solely based on
the apparent ethnicity of the driver. That was ruled unconstitutional,
and the standard that offices needed to have was quote

(02:40:30):
reasonable suspicion that pertains to roving stops, which is kind
of what Ice is doing in La right. CBP officers
have also previously been sued, more recently for using a
language as a sold basis for the tension, like if
you're speaking Spanish, yeah, exactly, that was the case, right,
it's pseudo and Hernandez versus US Customs and Border Protection.

Speaker 8 (02:40:50):
That one was in Montana.

Speaker 14 (02:40:52):
The ACLU of Montana sued them to Spanish speaking ladies
were speaking Spanish in a store. They actually said hello
to a board of drill agent in Englis, who proceeded
to detain them on the basis that not many people
speak Spanish in Montana.

Speaker 8 (02:41:05):
I think the name is from Spanish, like Montagna, but
maybe I'm wrong.

Speaker 14 (02:41:09):
The State Department has also issued guidance that non immigrant
visa applicants can now only schedule interviews in their own country.
So this is a further burden for people seeking visas
to come to the United States. Right Previously, you could
do it another US embassy or consulate for instance. You know,

(02:41:30):
if you were let's say French but resident in Spain,
you could apply at the consulate or embassy there. Right
now you have to go to your country's embassy. In
some cases, there are designated embassies or consular places for
for national states where the US has no embassy or
similar presence, like a US hasn't got an embassy in

(02:41:52):
Afghanistan right now for pretty obvious reasons, right, So I
believe it's such a lama bad for those people.

Speaker 8 (02:41:57):
For example.

Speaker 14 (02:41:58):
Finally, I want to get onto the case of the
dozens of watermelon children who came to the US and
accompanied by adults they are related to and who the
Trump admin attempted to deport over the Labor Day weekend.
Sometimes I don't like the phrase ou accompanied miners because
maybe they are accompanied by someone who's just not in
their family, right that people have taken care of them
on the journey, almost certainly, and I've seen this myself,

(02:42:21):
and so I don't know the idea that they're not
just walking alone, but they are not with their relatives,
right if undertaking this journey themselves. So Judge Sparkle sugno
Nan temporarily halted their removal in the early hours of
Sunday morning of Labor Day weekend. This is an extremely
unusual decision, right, but the judge decided it was warranted

(02:42:42):
because not doing so would put the children in potential
extreme danger. The government categorically attempted to remove these children,
like very quickly and literally got them out of bed
right like, we've got these little children out of beds
in their foster homes and attempted to shove them on
a plane to Guatemala. Their attorney literally ran onto the

(02:43:02):
tarmac at the airport to tell flight control personnel that
they were likely in violation of a court order if
they allowed the plane to take off. It couldn't be
more last minute than this, right, They were literally working
all night. Judge Tim Kelly now has to rule on
the legitimacy of the government's claims. The claim the government
makes here is that it was quote reuniting children with

(02:43:25):
parents abroad, not deporting them, and that would mean the
children don't have the statutory protections that they do if
it were being deported as quote unquote unaccompanied miners.

Speaker 8 (02:43:35):
Right.

Speaker 14 (02:43:36):
Previously, the government had made the claim that the children's
parents wanted them to be returned. It's dropped that claim
after Router's published a Guatemalan government document which completely refutes
that none of the children's parents seem to want them
to come home. So what the government is claiming here
is that the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is under HHS,

(02:43:57):
is moving the children, not the Department of Homeland Security.
So they're not being deported, they're being reunified with their families. Yeah,
that's a pretty sketchy claim. Meanwhile, the kids are in shelters.
Many of them were in long term foster care and
have been now removed from that environment, and they're in shelters.

(02:44:18):
Law Fare, which is an online publication, has a pretty
good account of the courtroom exchange that I've linked in
the notes. I also several people have asked about this,
so I should talk about it. I wanted to talk
about the Hyundai plant in Georgia. I don't know what
to call this raid. Yeah, in Georgia, I guess raid
is the right word. Yeah, absolutely, Yeah, Like more than

(02:44:41):
three hundred South Korean workers were attained.

Speaker 8 (02:44:43):
At the plant. They should be going home today.

Speaker 14 (02:44:46):
They were supposed to go home yesterday, but there were
some delays so far. ICE has claimed that these people
were working without proper authorization and Slash or but not
in the US with proper authorization, their lawyers have claimed,
and The Guardian has foundly documents that confirm that many
of them had B one visa status.

Speaker 8 (02:45:07):
B one is like you can do some work on
a B one.

Speaker 14 (02:45:10):
It also can be just an extended term tourist visa
and you can do certain jobs but not other jobs,
and you still get paid at home where you were
on to B one, which seems to be what these
people were doing. Right, Like, they can supervise construction on
a B one, but you can't do construction, and it
would make sense for people who are very expert in
the construction of these highly technical buildings to supervise that construction.

Speaker 7 (02:45:32):
It seems that they were in the country to supervise
the setting up of this car plant.

Speaker 14 (02:45:38):
Correct, Yeah, most South Koreans can also get est visa waivers,
which like it's not exactly the same, but it's kind
of a ninety day B one visa.

Speaker 8 (02:45:46):
So there are some people who cannot.

Speaker 14 (02:45:48):
Right like, if they have been cremated of crimes in
such that they'd have to go through the B one process.

Speaker 7 (02:45:54):
But it seems very.

Speaker 14 (02:45:55):
Unlikely at least that that they were not in the
country without any documentation and because like that would be
a stranging to do when they can get a best
of visa waiver. What's really weird about this is the
state of Georgia has invested millions, if not billions, in
bringing this plant to Georgia. Right, it has created a
significant economic boost. Something like ninety percent of the products

(02:46:18):
that go into the car come from there. So there
are lots of small businesses and local businesses that have
started up to provide this factory with the goods it needs.
You know, there are all the other services that come
with that. Right, Like, it's brought economic benefit to the region.
I know the state has spent more than three hundred
million on improving the roads. Apparently they've deepened ports in

(02:46:43):
some regions to allow larger, larger ships to arrive. It's
bought in over twelve billion investment, more than eight thousand jobs.
It's received massive tax breaks. It's going to total over
two billion dollars according to reporting that are link to
in the notes. Yet, Georgia State Police blocked off roads

(02:47:04):
as part of the raid, and it was Georgia Department
of Corrections buses that took people away. This seems an
odd choice for Kemp. Brian Kemp, right, Georgia governor. He's
not Trump's favorite. Maybe he's trying to become Trump's favorite,
but previously even Republicans in Georgia have been very behind this.
I mean, Garrison, you lived in Georgia for a bit, right,

(02:47:26):
this was a thing that, yeah, the Republicans has supported,
a way to revitalize a place where there wasn't much
economic opportunity before.

Speaker 7 (02:47:33):
Well, and this follows the whole point of Trump's tariffs.
We're trying to bring, Yeah, manufacturing to the United States.
You have these specialized workers to help supervise the construction
and managing of equipment. They get this plant up and running.
And even if you're even if you're doing that, even
if you're bringing manufacturing back to the States, somehow you
still get bitten, Yeah, big time, bitten by the Trump horse.

Speaker 8 (02:47:57):
I guess yeah.

Speaker 14 (02:47:58):
I mean it does sort of line up with this
working closer to the Feurer hypothesis, right that you have
these counter valent impulses and everyone's just trying to do
things that they think Trump will like, and kind of
sometimes those can directly contradict each other, as is happening here.
There's not really a coherent policy platform.

Speaker 7 (02:48:15):
No, they're just so focused on trying to get like
the base numbers up, to get the number of deportations
higher than it's ever been.

Speaker 6 (02:48:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 14 (02:48:23):
And therefore, and you have this this sort of series
of impulses which motivate Trump is and one of which
is deport as many people as possible.

Speaker 7 (02:48:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 14 (02:48:31):
Another is broadly bring manufacturing jobs back to America, but
not if foreign people are helping supervise the construction. I
guess Understandably, South Carea is very upset. More so, I
think because these are like middle class professionals who have
been detained. Right, they appear to have negotiated a voluntary
departure for these people, which it's not like a voluntary

(02:48:53):
departure like you came on toil they Disney landed, you're
going home on the plane. It can still have long
term consequences. But the hope there is that that won't
make it harder for these people to get US visas
in the future. They have to come back, because obviously
it's going to be very hard for this company to
build a plant in Georgia if they can't bring any
of their staff to Georgia.

Speaker 8 (02:49:13):
Yeah, that is about all I have.

Speaker 14 (02:49:15):
I'm going to keep looking, especially this Georgia story, see
if it develops any further, and if it's worthy of
a whole episode.

Speaker 8 (02:49:22):
We'll we'll do a whole episode on that.

Speaker 7 (02:49:24):
Speaking of Georgia, the long delayed Cop City reco case
has finally made some progress in the courts. I have
been working on the final scripted piece of my Cop
City coverage for basically this whole summer. I've been slowly
chipping away at it. Part of the reason why I

(02:49:44):
have not finished that yet is because essentially the whole
court case, like the sixty one defendant Rico case, got
reset in May. They changed judges, and that has delayed
an already long delayed case even further. I was waiting
to see a little bit of the results of the
court case, or at least get a better indication where
the court case is going to go before I finish

(02:50:06):
that final piece. And we're going to get that final
piece out properly in the next six month or two here,
but I will give this small update because it's pretty substantial.
This past Tuesday, September ninth, the defense successfully argued that
the State Attorney General's office did not have the jurisdictional
authority to prosecute the sixty one defendants under the state's

(02:50:28):
reco statute. This was due to simple procedural error in
neglecting to first ask Governor Brian Kemp if the AG's
office could prosecute the case. Judge Farmer found that the
AG does not have the authority to prosecute Count one
of the Rico indictment, which is the racketeering and conspiracy
charges affecting sixty one people. So without the sweeping Rico

(02:50:49):
charges in golfing the sixty one defendants, just five defendants
would be left with Count two of the indictment, the
domestic terrorism charges, which the AG does have the authority prosecute,
and Count three, which is the arson charge, which Judge
Farmer indicated could be thrown out on a similar technicality
as the racketeering and conspiracy charges. This is still heavily

(02:51:13):
in flux. The prosecution is going to appeal this decision,
and it's unclear how this ruling will affect how the
rest of the Copcity case will unfold, as removal of
the Rico charges kind of undermines the rest of the indictment.
On Wednesday, they were arguing about the constitutionality of George's
domestic terrorism statute, which has never been tested in course before,

(02:51:35):
so a lot of this case is currently up in
the air, but this is a positive sign for the
defendants at this point. One brief RFK Junior update. I
guess RFK Juniors soon to be released autism report from
HHS is reportedly going to include the claim that use

(02:51:56):
of tailanol during pregnancy could cause autoism in children.

Speaker 6 (02:52:01):
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 7 (02:52:03):
This is not believed to be true by reputable medical authorities,
but the report is set to release some time in September.
It was announced like months ago when Aarvika Junior said
that by September we will finally know the cause of
autism quote quote, And it seems the report is still
churning away but set to be released this month, and

(02:52:24):
it will include a few other claims, which we will
report on in more detail once the report is actually out.
But the Wall Street Journal got this little heads up
about the Thailand all inclusion in the report.

Speaker 8 (02:52:35):
Fantastic.

Speaker 14 (02:52:37):
So I heard from somebody who is waiting on their
work permit. A Kurdish woman who came to the United
States to claim asylum from Turkey from Northern Kurdistan, and
because she doesn't have a work permit yet and she's
gonna be waiting for her work permit. Sometime she's asking
for help to cover her basic sort of day to
day expenses. And this is a thing that people often

(02:53:00):
find themselves in a situation. Right, they have come here,
done all the documentation, but it can take a long
time to get their work permit, and without friends or family,
it can be very.

Speaker 3 (02:53:07):
Hard for them.

Speaker 14 (02:53:09):
The website is gofund dot me slash DA thirty nine
F seven D zero B. We'll have that link in
the show notes as well. If you'd like to email us,
you can do so. The way to do it is
to reach out to cool Zone tips at proton dot me.

Speaker 8 (02:53:28):
That is an encrypted email address.

Speaker 14 (02:53:30):
All that means is that you will have to also
use an encrypted email address if you like it to
be end to end encrypted.

Speaker 2 (02:53:38):
All right, and here's some ads. We're back and I
guess it's time to drop some bars about Jeffrey Epstein.

Speaker 7 (02:53:58):
Somehow Epstein has returned learned.

Speaker 5 (02:54:00):
Yeah, that's that joke. It always gets old.

Speaker 2 (02:54:04):
So one of the big pieces of news this week
before the thing that we started the episode with, I mean,
this was the story before that happened, is that, as
a result of the ongoing investigation into Epstein and whether
or not you know how involved was Trump, how involved
were Democrats? What do we care that the book, the

(02:54:24):
first fifty years birthday book, that that drawing that Trump
is accused of having done, where he signed his name
as the pubic care of a very obviously young girl
with a poem that seemed to hint at child molestation.
That the whole book that Epstein had has has been

(02:54:45):
released to Congress and is now public right now.

Speaker 7 (02:54:49):
We did Democrats on the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the
Epstein birthday book from Jeffrey Epstein's estate once the estate
made a statement saying that they have the book and
wouldn't cooperate with a subpoena.

Speaker 2 (02:54:59):
And there's a a bunch of news articles summarizing it.
If you want to read the thing for yourself, just
google document cloud Jeffrey Epstein fiftieth Birthday Book, and the
whole thing is in there.

Speaker 3 (02:55:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 14 (02:55:10):
Right, I would say, like just the kind of slight devotion,
I guess between this and Charlie kirkshooting, maybe.

Speaker 7 (02:55:16):
You don't need to give yourself a break.

Speaker 5 (02:55:19):
I'm not saying you should.

Speaker 2 (02:55:21):
I just wanted to let people know where they can
get to the original source if they don't want to
have it mediated by a media, right.

Speaker 8 (02:55:27):
It's always good to do that.

Speaker 5 (02:55:29):
We're going to mediate it for you now.

Speaker 8 (02:55:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:55:32):
So it opens, as far as I can tell. The
first well, I mean, there's there's a list of contents.
The prologue is written by Gilan Maxwell. Then there's letters
from the family, Paula Seymour and Marco I guess your relatives.
Then it's split into Brooklyn. So there's friends of his
from Brooklyn who are Warren Eisenstein, neutral, I don't know
who that is, Terry Kafka. Very funny that there's a

(02:55:54):
Kafka involved, doctor Stephen Levy, and Michael Bookoles. The next
section is all girlfriends, their letters from girlfriends. All of
those names have been blacked out for reasons that should
be obvious. The section after that is children. God almighty,
I don't know whose kids because this is blacked out too,
but oh boy. Yeah, and then we get to the
section that is friends. That is all the letters from friends,

(02:56:17):
and the friends are Leon Black is on there, Bill
Clinton is on there, Alan Dershowitz is on there. The
dersh himself.

Speaker 7 (02:56:25):
Is the letter is really unsettling.

Speaker 2 (02:56:29):
Yeah, Donald Trump is in there. We'll get to that
in a second. Yet, Donald Trump is in there, obviously
these are not. Morton Zuckerman is on there, Leslie Wexner
is on there. So a number of like very prominent
people unknown is at the very end. I don't know
like that. That's like literally how the book listed it.
So they just have a letter from someone who's presumably
his friend but didn't put a name.

Speaker 14 (02:56:51):
I mean, it's it's a smart move if you're doing
things which you have federal crimes.

Speaker 2 (02:56:55):
And then after that you've got the letters from scientists
friends of his, which include people we brought up on
my episode about a bioscience company who pretends that they're
cloning dire wolves and Martin Noak are both on here,
so that's great, oh good. And then after that, I
just noted girlfriends is like the third group of people
who had letters, and all those names were blacked out.

(02:57:16):
But then under science there's another section that's girl dash
friends that's longer, and all of those names are blacked out.
No fucking idea what that is supposed to meet. But upsetting, Okay, it's.

Speaker 8 (02:57:29):
No good whatever it is.

Speaker 2 (02:57:30):
Yeah, anyway, There's some more names on there, but they're
not super relevant. Gilan Maxwell's prologue is handwritten, or at
least the note in front of it is handwritten. I
know you will enjoy looking through the book, and I
hope you will derive as much pleasure looking through it
as I did putting it together for you. Happy birthday, Love,

(02:57:52):
Gilan Maxwell. So that's the prologue. One of the first pictures,
I mean, the first picture in the book is Jeffrey
Epstein's standing around with a bunch of soldiers. They look like,
I mean, I would guess from some African country. They're
all in a camo pattern that's not immediately familiar to me.
And yeah, I can't fully read what it says down here.

(02:58:16):
Some of the line say something about a president and
the Secret Service to greet you. I don't know who
these soldiers were that Jeffrey's standing around. I kind of
want to know, but it's a weird photo to start.
And then immediately after that is Jeffrey Epstein's cub scout
graduation photo. They've got that in there. It's just a
bunch of like pictures of Epstein throughout his life. Like
that's kind of how this thing opens before we get

(02:58:38):
down to the letters. Yeah, one thing I wanted to
get at there. So there's on page fifty seven there's
a photo of Jeffrey Epstein wearing a weird shirt with
a bunch of handprints on it when he was younger.
That's just titled girls on my Boat. We picked up
girls on beach, went out on boat. I tell them
with knife in my hand, to take suits off. But
Warren tells me, don't worry. His name is Jahan. He's

(02:58:59):
just joking. He lives at so and so I tell
Mark to throw him into water. He did no idea
what the fuck that's about. But like a lot of
it's like that is like very upsetting stories that are
handwritten crudely, I think, and often by Gillan. But yeah,
it's it's it's like pretty deeply upsetting stuff. Okay, I

(02:59:20):
do kind of want to read this Bill Elks letter.
It just starts with it's no secret that Jeffrey appreciates
beautiful women that not many people know. He can create
them at a thin ware air, as he did in
Iowa in nineteen eighty eight.

Speaker 14 (02:59:32):
Good to give a place in times that are illegal.

Speaker 2 (02:59:36):
Yeah, this guy says that he was managing the money
of a family who lived in Fairfield, Iowa. Hog farming
is a serious industry there, and many people feel there
is more than a little truth in the saying that
it's hard to tell the difference between the girls and
the hogs in southeast Iowa. Jeffrey came to Fairfield to
check in on their investigation on their investment opportunities. He
asked about the nightlife and we could only laugh as

(02:59:58):
we dropped him off at the local motel.

Speaker 6 (03:00:00):
Well.

Speaker 2 (03:00:00):
The next morning, a group before of us picked up
Jeffrey to give him a tour of the area. At
our first stop, we parked in front of a bookstore.
As we were getting out of the car, a spectacular, tall,
blonde woman suddenly came out of the store, walked directly
up to Jeffrey and announced, I am new to this area.
What's going on? It turns out she was a sales
representative for a firm solling academic brand and athletic clothing.
She was literally driving through Iowa visiting local campuses. Jeffrey

(03:00:20):
invited her to join us and did his magic. Within
a few hours, he had invited her to return to
New York with him for the weekend. Yeah, a lot
of stuff like that. We should probably read Dershowitz's letter.

Speaker 8 (03:00:33):
Yeah, yeah, what seck, Yeah, you can do that.

Speaker 2 (03:00:37):
Okay, here's Dershowitz's Who was that Man with Epstein? Is
the title of the letter. Inquiring minds are asking who
is that man with Epstein? Jeffrey Epstein is, of course
one of the world's most famous men, a household name
throughout the planet. His picture has appeared on the cover
of every magazine in the world. Everyone knows his story,
from his humble roots on Coney Island to his rise
to one of the most envied public figures in the

(03:00:57):
Western world. But what is he doing flying to Africa
with an obscure former politician from Hope, Arkansas. Who is
that politician? And why would Epstein have picked him for
the coveted seat on his private jet. Vanity Unfair was
determined to get to the bottom of this mystery man
and to reveal the story behind the story. Normally, we
would not pry into the private life of an obscure
Arkansas politician, particularly one who has tried so hard up
to now so successfully to keep his private life to himself.

(03:01:20):
But the moment this obscure man stepped under the Epstein jet,
he became fair game for probing inquiry. Why would a
man like Epstein, who can pick and choose his companions
from princes to professors, select a flying companion from the
Ozark Mountains. To be sure, he was a Rhodes scholar,
but we all know how easy it is to get
a roads if you're from Arkansas. There must be something else.
Vanity Unfair decided to snoop around this obscure politician reluctantly
agreed to be to an interview on the express condition

(03:01:42):
that it was completely off the record. This is what
he told us, and then it's blank. The letter ends.

Speaker 7 (03:01:48):
It comes with a note yes, reading Dear Jeffrey, As
a birthday gift to you, I managed to obtain an
early version of the Vanity Unfair article. I talked them
into changing the focus from you to Bill Clinton. As
you will see from the enclosed excerpt, Happy birthday in
best regards.

Speaker 2 (03:02:05):
And then there's a fake Vanity Unfair article. Yeah or cover?

Speaker 5 (03:02:10):
Yeah? That who is Jack the Ripper?

Speaker 14 (03:02:12):
Was it?

Speaker 2 (03:02:12):
Jeffrey Epstein? Al Qaeda in South America? Financed by Epstein
Jeffrey Epstein stole my heart in another courtroom dispatches. It's
like really crudely animated, but yeah, yeah, I mean it's
it's what do you even say? Oh, there is a
quote the fat on the Vanity Fair cover attributed to
Epstein that says life is a pure flame and we
live by an invisible sun within us. So I guess

(03:02:34):
that's a Jeffrey Epstein original.

Speaker 8 (03:02:35):
Wow, how profound.

Speaker 7 (03:02:37):
Before we talk about the Trump letter, there's this one
other image I didn't like to discuss this what I
can only described as a grooming themed drawing Oh God
yeah to him as part of its birthday card, depicting
Jeffrey Epstein in nineteen eighty three giving balloons in a
lolly pomp to three young children girls like children, children.

Speaker 2 (03:02:59):
And importantly, his pockets are turned out out and the
pants he's wearing are like patched and old. He's clearly
poor in this. In nineteen eighty three, by the way,
he was working as a tutor and a teacher, like
he was teaching kids at private schools like, So that's
what's represented here.

Speaker 7 (03:03:15):
The other section of the drawing is in two thousand
and three and has Jeffrey Epstein sitting on the beach
with four women touching his body.

Speaker 2 (03:03:24):
One woman is very clearly touching his genitals and has
JE tattooed on her ass.

Speaker 7 (03:03:30):
Jeffrey Epstein's jet is flying above.

Speaker 2 (03:03:34):
You know it's his jet because the actual in number
of his real jet is written on the side of
the jet.

Speaker 7 (03:03:40):
And on the beach he is on a lawn chair
outside of what sort of resembles Trump's Marlago resort in
terms of the architectural style, the arched doorways, the tiered
structure and lay out of the palm trees, and the beach.
This building does not match his house in Florida, or
his house in the Southwest, or his house on the island,

(03:04:03):
which appears very different with blue roofing. I'm not saying
this necessarily is mar A Lago, but if I were
to try to draw mar A Lago from memory, it
might look something like this. There's certainly a resemblance which
is notable.

Speaker 2 (03:04:20):
Yeah, we should talk about literally. The next photo from
this is a picture of Jeffrey Epstein holding a check
for twenty two thousand dollars to him from Donald Trump.
There's three people posing next to him. One of them
is a woman whose face is blacked out. There's also
another woman with her face blacked out behind them. But

(03:04:42):
the man who's sitting next to the woman at what
looks like a dinner table does not have his face
blacked out.

Speaker 5 (03:04:46):
I don't know why.

Speaker 2 (03:04:48):
And it says on this Jeffrey is showing early talents
with money and women cells fully depreciated. And then the
name of the woman who is being sold is blacked
out to Donald Trump for twenty two five hundred dollars.
Shoot early people skills too. Even though I handled the deal,
I didn't get any of the money for the girl.

Speaker 7 (03:05:05):
So pretty sickening.

Speaker 14 (03:05:07):
Joke, Yeah, yeah, genuinely like nauseating literally, yeah, like him
holding up a check Donald Trump gave him for a girl.

Speaker 7 (03:05:15):
Like a fake novelty check signed by someone who's not Trump,
just someone signing Donald Trump, not Donald Trump's signat JEM.
But people joking. It's a bit about Jeffrey selling a
woman to Trump four twenty two five hundred dollars?

Speaker 14 (03:05:29):
Was this a fully depreciated Is that the phrasing used,
That is the phraseated? Yes, yes, yeah, it's fucking disgusting.

Speaker 2 (03:05:38):
And then we get down to the original Trump letter,
which we've talked about on the show.

Speaker 5 (03:05:42):
We've read it to you.

Speaker 2 (03:05:43):
This is the one where's Donald says it's framed as
a conversation between them, and Donald says, enigma's never age.
Have you noticed that anyway? The only thing noteworthy about
this is now we have the drawing of the woman.
It's drawn around the script, and it's I would say,
pretty clear a pubescent girl. Like there's breasts drawn on.

Speaker 7 (03:06:03):
Their breasts do not look fully developed, and they do
not look they're not large like no, and the position
of them is higher. They look like underdeveloped breasts.

Speaker 2 (03:06:13):
Yes, it looks like a drawing of a young girl,
like of a child.

Speaker 7 (03:06:17):
It's so much more creepy than anyone who like tried
to draw what this might have looked like, has like
previously imagined like they were all drawing you know, like
conventionally attractive like adult female bodies. This is much more creepy.

Speaker 2 (03:06:31):
Now I will say, it doesn't look like his signature
is meant to be pubic care here.

Speaker 7 (03:06:36):
It's in a similar position. But you know this is
this is a very abstract drawing. Yes, his signature is
just his first name, Donald, which he signs a lot
of personal notes with not his full Donald Trump's signature.
Trump is maintaining that he did not sign this, that
this is a forgery. He is unaware of this letter,
even though the signature matches other signatures from him around

(03:06:57):
this time. And this just feels like a very Donald
Trump thing to do. Yeah, and is worded similarly to
how he talked about women in this era. He now
makes statements being like I don't talk this way all
my everyone who knows me knows I don't talk this way.
And if you watch like clips from Donald Trump in
the early two thousands talking about women, it is this

(03:07:18):
type of language. It is. It is very gross. Yeah,
Like everyone remembers the Howard Stern clip, like come on.

Speaker 5 (03:07:24):
Right, oh yeah, No.

Speaker 2 (03:07:27):
It's also worth noting one of the last things in
the book is recipe for like chocolate chip chip cookies.
I try to figure out who put the recipe in there,
but their name is blacked out. They're right under Henry
Rossofsky and read above Les Wexner. I don't know who
put that chocolate chip cookie recipe in here, but I
might try to make those cookies.

Speaker 8 (03:07:48):
The epsteine biscuit I wouldn't eat those.

Speaker 3 (03:07:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (03:07:52):
A few other things before we close this episode related
to Epstein. On September, fifth House Speaker Mike Johnson told
reporters that Trump was actually a secret FBI informant tasked
with taking down Jeffrey Epstein.

Speaker 8 (03:08:08):
I hadn't heard it did a great job. Yeah, Well, I'm.

Speaker 17 (03:08:12):
Saying that when Epstein did as a hoax, it's a terrible,
unspeakable evil. He believes that himself when he first heard
the room where kicked Hm out of Mildago, who was
an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down.
The President knows and has great sympathy for the women
who suffered these unspeakable arms. It's detestable to him, and
I've spoken about this as recently as twenty hours ago.

Speaker 8 (03:08:29):
This should be documents that could that could corroborate that. Onment,
imagine what think.

Speaker 7 (03:08:33):
The temver eighth Mike Johnson walked back his FBI informant comments,
telling reporters he was referring to what epstein victims attorneys
has said that Trump was quote willing to help law
enforcement to go after the guy who was a disgusting
child abuser as at trafficker. All the allegations. That's what
they heard. I don't know if I used the right terminology,
but that's common knowledge, and everybody knows that I was

(03:08:55):
repeating what has been common knowledge for a long time.
The President was helpful in trying to get Epstein for
the law enforcement to go after Epstein unquote great stuff
from Mike Johnson share. A day later, Whitehouse Press Secretary
Carolyn Levitt confirmed that Trump was not, in fact an
FBI informant. One other weird Epstein story from this week

(03:09:19):
is how the DOJ has been beefing with James O'Keeffe's
Project Veritas.

Speaker 5 (03:09:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (03:09:26):
Project Veritas did a operation against a DOJ employee in
which they recorded him saying this. Those files do exist.

Speaker 18 (03:09:36):
Yeah, thousands and thousands of Page five still redactor every
Republican or conservative person in those files.

Speaker 3 (03:09:44):
Leave all the liberal democratic people in those files.

Speaker 7 (03:09:48):
I mean they visited that Maxwell person.

Speaker 6 (03:09:50):
Yeah, and also involved got.

Speaker 17 (03:09:53):
Transferred to a minimum security Quiston series, which is against
BOP positive because it's just a so he's a committed
sex minter.

Speaker 6 (03:10:02):
The offer or something to keep about.

Speaker 18 (03:10:04):
Yet, that was the acting Deputy Chief of the Office
of Enforcement operations Joseph Schnitt telling a stranger about the
FBI and DOJ's handling of the Epstein files.

Speaker 7 (03:10:16):
The DOJ responded to O'Keefe saying, quote, Joseph schnid had
no role in the department's internal review of Epstein materials.
He has confirmed as much to leadership, and we plan
on publishing his written statement to that effect when we
have it. In his words, the comments he made were
based on quote what he learned in the media, and
he has quote no knowledge of the circumstances surrounding Miss

(03:10:36):
Maxwell other than what was reported in the news unquote.
And then Schnitt used the Department of Justice X account
to post a what it could be described as like
an Apple Notes apology statement with thirty percent battery displayed
on his phone. When he talks about he talks about

(03:10:59):
meeting a quote woman named Skyler on Hinge a dating
gap in July twenty twenty five. Her profiles no longer findable.
We had two dates. She gave no clues that she
was a reporter or recording car dates. Had I clue,
the first date would have ended immediately and there would
have never been a second one. My profile indicated I
did quote unquote government work, but did not specify for

(03:11:22):
which agency. I never discussed what I do at DOJ.
The comments I made were my own personal comments on
what I've learned in the media and not from anything
I've done or learned via work. Incredible the United States government, everybody.

Speaker 14 (03:11:36):
Yeah, and James O'Keeffe out there with the journalism first trap.
I guess I wonder if it's is it a one
party consent? This is in DC, right, I don't believe
DC is one party consent.

Speaker 7 (03:11:48):
Yeah, that I would be shocked. I'm not sure how
O'Keefe pulls all this stuff off legally.

Speaker 5 (03:11:53):
He could get in trouble for this one. Yeah.

Speaker 14 (03:11:56):
My understanding would be just to be clear for people
who want in on the jog, and like in most
states of the Union, I think you need both people's
consent to record a conversation. You could argue, I guess
he didn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy sitting out there,
but I think this is very clearly a clandestine recording.

Speaker 2 (03:12:13):
Oh wait, no, no, no, sorry, d d C is
a one party consents area. Dam Okay, well there you go. Wow, Okay,
I did yet I did not know that.

Speaker 6 (03:12:21):
Yep.

Speaker 5 (03:12:22):
So well he's safe.

Speaker 14 (03:12:23):
Yeah, I guess if that date was in DC. You
got to look if the date was in DC. A
lot of jurisdictions around there bumping up. But yeah, that's surprising.

Speaker 8 (03:12:31):
No, he's good.

Speaker 7 (03:12:32):
All right. Well, I think that's all we have for
this week, which is a lot. This was a massive
news week. This is an extra long episode, but sometimes
that happens.

Speaker 8 (03:12:42):
Congratulations on making it this far.

Speaker 2 (03:12:45):
Yeah, and may every day be a new wonderful secret
as no. Donald Trump told Jeffrey Epstein.

Speaker 8 (03:12:53):
Stop him to turn it off.

Speaker 7 (03:12:54):
We reported the news, We reported the news.

Speaker 2 (03:13:04):
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 15 (03:13:10):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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 7 (03:13:27):
Thanks for listening.

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