It Could Happen Here Weekly 229

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted
to let you know this is a compilation episode. So
every episode of the week that just happened is here
in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for
you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.
If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's going to be nothing new here for you, but

(00:23):
you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Welcome to it could happen here a podcast where I
explained fake money things that are actually real too, Molly, Molly,
thank you so much for coming back on. I am
your host, Bio long. I am excited to learn now
long ago in a galaxy far far away. And I'm
saying this because I legitimately do not remember how many
weeks ago have you released the original one of this.

(00:50):
But back in that episode where we explain shadow banking,
I said that I had had to cut off the
part of the episode that was the reason why I
wrote it in the first voice, it happens to me
every week, Yes, so Comma, I've also kind of had
to split some of this episode off. That will probably
that will be another episode, probably with ezetron whenever I

(01:12):
have enough seconds in my life to pull all of
that together. But today we are here to talk about
the actual sort of shadow bank run. I guess you
would call it financial problems that caused me to write
the shadow banking episode in the first place.

Speaker 3 (01:31):
Oh right, why I originally asked you what shadow banking
is some kind of economy problem? And there was like
a fake run on the fake banks.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
Yes, and Molly, you will be extremely unhappy to note
that a big part of the reason why there was
the fake run on the fank banks was that the
shadow banks loaned a bunch of money to a different
type of shadow bank.

Speaker 3 (01:51):
I don't think they should have done that, and.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
That shadow bank went under. Great things are.

Speaker 3 (01:55):
Happening here, but they're not FDIC insured.

Speaker 4 (01:58):
Me ah, no, no, nope, nope.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
So okay, this gets us back to our original definition
of a shadow bank, which is that it's a bank
that does banking things. That's not a bank, so it's
not ensured by the FDIC. They don't have to have
money on hand to make sure that they can't be
a bank run on them.

Speaker 3 (02:18):
Right, So they just said no more transactions please.

Speaker 2 (02:22):
Yes, So what Molly is referring to is a few
weeks ago. I guess maybe like a month ago. At
this point, there was actually a breakthrough into the kind
of mainstream ish of some stuff that I've been brewing
in the financial news for a while, and that was
that a bunch of companies, Morgan stan Lee and Blackrock

(02:44):
I think we're kind of the two biggest ones that
stopped this, although a bunch of these sort of smaller
what are called private credit firms also sort of did
things like this.

Speaker 3 (02:55):
And so because they're not really banks, there's no regulation
that says they have have to serve their customers, right,
They can just say no, okay.

Speaker 2 (03:04):
So this is part of what's really a shit show.

Speaker 4 (03:07):
I guess let's start.

Speaker 3 (03:07):
At the beginning. So what happened? Sorry I got as derailed.

Speaker 2 (03:11):
Yeah, let's run back to the specific thing we're talking
about here is a thing called private credit, and so
private credit, I'm just going to read this thing from
the teller window, which is, I don't know, the telor
window is actually a decently useful thing. Where the telor
window is the FED is like I'm going to explain
something to normal people. Now. The problem is that this

(03:33):
is still the Federal Reserve. So their explanation for normal people.
By normal people, they mean.

Speaker 4 (03:37):
Like, I don't know, like dipshit day traders, right.

Speaker 3 (03:39):
Normal people don't have questions about the Federal Reserve.

Speaker 2 (03:43):
Yeah, so it's like this is like for people who
are kind of know this stuff but are running into
this like arcane subfield for the first time. So I'm
just going to quote from them because I think it's
an interesting place to start. Although there is no universal definition,
which you know things are going great when our second
episode in a road talking about it, you can't all

(04:03):
agree what it's so good? It's so good, Although there
is no universal definition. Private credit generally refers to a
loan that is negotiated between a borrower and a small
group of non bank lenders. These non bank financial institution
lenders are typically alternative asset managers such as private equity firms,

(04:27):
who package loans in different investment vehicles. Other non bank
financial institutions like pension funds, insurance companies, and sovereign wealth
funds then invest in those vehicles. So this is the
stuff that we talked about from last episode, where Okay,
so you have multiple layers of shadow banks, right, you

(04:49):
have on the one hand that the private credit firms
are these these sort of groups that go in and
sometimes they're just their own things. There's a bunch of
different kinds of of them. Private equities firms tend to
have like one arm of the private equity firm that's there,
like this is our shiny private credit wing. There were

(05:10):
also these things called business development corporations which do these.
There are like other types of them too, But basically
what those companies do is they go in and they
negotiate a loan with a usually a pretty long term
for repayments on the loan with a company. Now, the
thing about these loans is that the terms of those

(05:31):
loans are secret from everybody. Yeah, even the people involved.
Well when I say secret, I mean the company that's
taking out the loan and the bank know how they work.
No one else does. And then what happens is these
are usually fairly risky loans, because if you weren't doing
a risky loan, you would get your money through like

(05:52):
a normal bank. Yeah, you will to do it normal style, right,
this is not normal style. These are risky. And then
they do the thing called curitization, which we talked about
last episode where you take a loan and do magic
to it and turn it into something that someone else
can buy.

Speaker 3 (06:08):
Whatever happened to products and services? Meo, whatever happened to products?

Speaker 2 (06:12):
Well, because products and services make less money than betting
on products and services. This is this is also where
this is all going. So there are some real issues
here with private credit.

Speaker 3 (06:23):
So we're buying and selling money that isn't real, and
add the absence of money that isn't real. And then
so what happened when there was the run on the
fake bank.

Speaker 2 (06:31):
Well, that's that's kind of work because you how can
you do a run on a bank if there's no
money because you're not asking to get your money back
out of it because.

Speaker 3 (06:39):
There was never any money.

Speaker 2 (06:40):
Well, so here's the thing. So a lot of the
way that these things work sometimes like they are obviously
selling the loans and packages, but a lot of the
way that it works is that it does kind of
work like a normal bank, which is, I mean, instead
of being a lender, you're like an investor, but you
give them a bunch of your money and they give
it to these loan things. So it is just literally
a normal bank, except it's not subject to banking regulations

(07:02):
and it's risk here, right, So like like Apollo Capital
Management or whatever, it's like you give a bunch of
money to Apollo Capital Management, just like lower capital whatever
is like Apollogobal Capital is one of the big firms
in this thing, and then they give that money out
and loans and then you're basically just supposed to wait
because you know, remember last episode we talked about how

(07:23):
in the way that normal bank works, Right, there's like
a fundamental kind of gap right where you are putting
your money in as like a short term thing that
you can take out immediately, and then the bank is
turning the short term money into a long term loan.

Speaker 4 (07:38):
Right.

Speaker 3 (07:38):
It takes time for the money to grow up.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
Yes, And the reason we have financial regulations is to
force the banks to have money on hand so that
if you need your money back, you can take it out. Now,
these banks don't have this because these are shadow banks.

Speaker 4 (07:55):
They're the credit rs of private equity.

Speaker 2 (07:58):
They're fucking, I don't know, they're like capital management firms.

Speaker 3 (08:01):
They're like dude, Right, So, like a normal run on
the bank is like obviously the bank doesn't have one
hundred percent of all like I put cash in the bank.
We all put cash in the bank, and everyone wants
all their cash back. The bank doesn't have one hundred
percent of that cash to get that, right, It's like
they haven't invested, and it hasn't those loans haven't.

Speaker 4 (08:16):
Matured yet and things like that.

Speaker 3 (08:18):
But theoretically, if all those loans matured, that bank does
have all of those dollars. But the shadow bank, they're
selling these same loans to multiple people, So even if
everything matured properly, they don't have all of those dollars anymore.

Speaker 4 (08:32):
Yeah, dollars don't all exist.

Speaker 2 (08:34):
I mean, Jimmy fair, the bank's dollars also work like
that because the banks are also selling their loans off.

Speaker 3 (08:41):
But well, you're saying that they were using like the
same mortgage to secure a bunch of different.

Speaker 2 (08:45):
Yeah, right, so that's like, yeah, that's like a classic
shadow banking thing. We're actually going to get back to
that because they're doing an even dumber version of that now.

Speaker 3 (08:53):
I'm just saying it seems like a run on the
bank would be kind of inevitable even in a minor crisis,
because they're too have most of the money they're pretending
exists yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:04):
Well, but so okay, So I think what I would
say about that is that this is also a problem
for regular banks, right, Like I don't think this is
actually a structurally different crisis, like because like the crisis
here is just that the money is out in loans
and they they don't have it on hand. And this
is the structural crisis that the private credit people are doing,
is that their money is also out on loans, so
they don't have it. And a lot of these loans

(09:27):
are like seven year loans in like very risky companies.
So the money like really isn't.

Speaker 3 (09:33):
There, right because that venture capital like whatever is that's
an inflated valuation. So you're talking about like almost ten
billion dollars, but it isn't it never will be, and
it never was.

Speaker 5 (09:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:44):
Well, and the other thing that's going on too, right,
it is like these are supposed to be risky loans,
so they have a high rate of.

Speaker 4 (09:50):
Return if they return.

Speaker 2 (09:53):
But yes, and this and this is where this gets
not good because so the US private credit market is
one point three trillion dollars like under management. The global
market is like three point five trillion dollars of assets.
I'm not really going to go into the Chinese private
credit market here, because that's its own episode. But the

(10:16):
way that these that these companies deal with this is
that they have these funds, right, and then the fund
gives out like the loans, and they have a limit
to the total amount of like the percent of the
value of the fund that can be taken out at
one time. And that's what's been being hit. The industry
standard is supposed to be about five percent of the
fund can be withdrawn per quarter, and then after that

(10:37):
they just shut down redemptions. And that's what you saw
in the news because a bunch of companies, and some
of these companies have higher limits than are like almost
like eight or nine, like like ten percent, and they'll
stop it at like nine roughly.

Speaker 3 (10:48):
So, more than anything, shutting down redemptions is an indicator
that the market has panicked, right, that the investors are
spooked and they want their money back because this risky
investment is now looking like a very bad choice.

Speaker 2 (11:01):
Yes, but this is a real structural problem because right.

Speaker 3 (11:04):
But like as a measurement of something, it's just like
what we're measuring is how many investors are shitting their pants.

Speaker 2 (11:10):
And there's a reason they're shitting their pants, and the
reason they're shitting their pants is that basically all of
these firms have been eating a colossal amount of shit.
And the reason they're eating a colossal amount.

Speaker 4 (11:20):
Of shit, I mean, some of it is very stupid.

Speaker 2 (11:22):
Some of them are eating shit because they gave money
to like normal tech firms, but then now they're all
scared they're gonna get out competed by AI firms. Some
of them have given a bunch of money Blue Owl particularly,
and this is what we're gonna get into in the
episode with Ed has given a lot of money to
AI firms, which is a fucking nightmare. Great investment, Yeah,
incredible stuff going on.

Speaker 3 (11:43):
I'm sure. I'm sure that's what Ed will say. Ed
will say that was a good investment.

Speaker 2 (11:46):
It's so fun. It's so fun. The main thing that
they've been eating shit on. And this is where this
kind of hit the mainstream because a whole bunch of

(12:07):
normal banks also ate shit on this JP Morgan ate
shit on this loan. So a huge amount of money
was poured into this firm called Tricolor, which we touched
on briefly last episode but then didn't really talk about much.

Speaker 6 (12:23):
About what it did.

Speaker 2 (12:25):
So, Okay, JP Morgan has lost one hundred and seventy
million dollars. Oh no, big gill Yeah, which and it's
fun It's funny because like the JP Morgan CEO were like, yeah,
we kind of ate shit on this, and also their
CEO gave this quote where he was like, where there's
one cockroach, there's probably more, which is like an extremely
normal thing for the finance kind of saying about the market.

Speaker 3 (12:51):
Haven't we have an infestation of accidentally losing one hundred
and seventy million dollars?

Speaker 2 (12:55):
Yeah, I mean it's not great, but like in the
grand scheme of things, right, like JP Morgan does have
four trillion or something dollars under management.

Speaker 3 (13:07):
Right, But if he's saying, if there's one cockroach, there's more, yeah,
Usually if you have one cockroach, you have one hundred cockroaches.
So if you have one hundred, one hundred and seventy
million dollar fuck.

Speaker 2 (13:16):
Ups, yes, and that's not great, right. And like Barclays,
which is the very sort of like prestigious British bank,
which also ate shit for doing this kind of stuff.
Two two thousand and eight also lost like one hundred
million pounds what's interesting about this specific one is this firm, Tricolor,
is a subprime auto loan company.

Speaker 4 (13:38):
Oh, that's a phenomenal business model, Molly.

Speaker 3 (13:44):
So they're responsible for the Nissan Ultima.

Speaker 2 (13:47):
Yeah, this is that this is what is known as
an idea that could not possibly have gone right. It's
very funny because when you read the stuff from Tricolor,
they're all like, oh, we're trying to like help people
who are like underserved in markets who need cars.

Speaker 3 (14:09):
Oh so, but here's the thing about a shitty auto
loan is you know, right, you are serving an underserved community.
You are serving people with bad credit who might not
otherwise be able to get a car. But you're serving
them by fucking them. Yes, and this is what you
can tell. Yeah, they they know that they're lying about this, right,
it's just so evil.

Speaker 2 (14:30):
Yeah, And like this is all downstream of you know,
this is all downstream with the fact that we've built
our cities around cars, right, And we built our cities
around cars specifically, and this is a really fun thing.
We built our cities around cars specifically because we had
created so much manufacturing capacity after World War Two that
like Ford and General Motors had like pumped into that.

(14:52):
They were like, we need a fucking way to make
money off of all of this. And this is also,
by the way, why we did the Marshall Plan, like
we rebuilt Europe to sell cars to them.

Speaker 3 (15:02):
It's this terrible snowball of like induced demand and then
dealing with that and then the fallout of that, and yeah,
trying to reorganize from that. Yeah, and we have destroyed
the world with this.

Speaker 4 (15:12):
It rocks.

Speaker 3 (15:13):
Thank you, Henry Ford.

Speaker 2 (15:14):
It's so good.

Speaker 6 (15:15):
It's so good.

Speaker 2 (15:15):
We have literally like Earth is fucked because of this.
This is like one of the largest engines of global
climate change is the fact that we had all these
fucking factories after World War Two and these companies didn't
want to eat shit on them.

Speaker 3 (15:27):
So now so everybody needs a car, but they can't
afford one. So now we have a fake bank doing
fake fucking auto loans.

Speaker 6 (15:33):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (15:33):
Who By the way, and I kind of emphasize this enough, right,
The hole that we are in here is that there
is in theory, if you're gonna be running a market economy,
there is like room in it for Hey, this person
has a long shot but good business idea, and we
need to get the money.

Speaker 3 (15:51):
Sure, Like there's nothing wrong with the idea of loans.

Speaker 4 (15:54):
Yeah, but if your whole.

Speaker 3 (15:55):
Business model is exploiting people who need loans, yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:00):
But this is you know, this is going one layer
up from like this subprime model loan company.

Speaker 6 (16:05):
Right.

Speaker 2 (16:05):
The problem that we're going to hit with all of
these private credit firms is that they're giving loans to
just this shit.

Speaker 6 (16:16):
Right.

Speaker 2 (16:17):
The things that they're giving high risk loans to aren't
like interesting businesses. They're subprime auto loan companies and they're
like weird ai data center creation companies. Right, It's like
that shit. And this is this is where everything goes
to shit because you know, and it's something that actually

(16:37):
wasn't really reported on very much in in a lot
of the coverage on these companies eating shit. But like
what this company was doing was they were literally doing
all of the two thousand and eight stuff.

Speaker 6 (16:47):
Right.

Speaker 2 (16:48):
They give out these subprime loans, which they know like
a bunch of them are going to fail, They pull
them all together into these like tranches of loans, and
then they sell them off doing doing the secure stuff
we talked about last time, and again this is literally
exactly how the subprime mortgage crisis worked, except we're doing
it with auto loans. It seems a little bit more evil. Yeah,

(17:12):
And they're doing this thing right. They're doing the thing
that we saw with the housing loans, where the same
card is collateral for multiple of these loans. And the
reason they're doing this right is that this company, Tricolor,
their entire business model is trying to borrow more money
from banks so that they can send out more of
these shitty auto loans so they can then sell that

(17:33):
stuff back. And so they're also like heavily leveraged, right
because they're they're taking out like every single loan they
can possibly do. They're doing instruments so that they're the
collateral on the loans that they are taking. So they
take that money and give out more of these shitty
auto loans. The collateral on that is multiple of the
shitty auto loans.

Speaker 3 (17:53):
I mean, I would say it's a house of cards,
but like, ye, it's not even it's not even that
it's imaginary. It's just it's h like the bottom row
on this house of cards is just your imagination.

Speaker 2 (18:03):
Yeah, it's it's wildly coyote running off the cliff and
he's just sitting there and as long as his feet
are moving, no one realizes that that like, wait, hold on,
this is the This is literally the fakest thing I've
ever seen. And then it goes under and this is
a shit show. That's the only possible outcome, the only
possile way it could have one under is like we've
we've done this before, we all washed two thousand and eight.

Speaker 3 (18:24):
But there's not like an ideal version of this where
it works.

Speaker 4 (18:27):
This can only not work. Yeah, it's insane.

Speaker 2 (18:31):
It's like, why are we doing because there was one
year where it made a billion dollars?

Speaker 3 (18:37):
Right, Buying Ponzi schemes are really profitable the first year.

Speaker 4 (18:40):
Right, right, that's like that's the thing, right.

Speaker 3 (18:42):
It really it works out really good for the first guy.

Speaker 2 (18:46):
Yeah, And like like part of what's going on here
too is you know, like and this is some of
the stuff that caused the original bubble. But like we
have this era like the the early twenty twenties and
like late twenty tens that's like the zero fed in
just rate errow, right, where like it is basically just
free to borrow money, and so there's just all of
this money slashing around that there's nothing to invest into.

(19:10):
This fuels all sorts of just like heinous shit, right,
because there's suddenly just like all of these pools of
capital with like nothing to invest in, and so they're
investing it in like defense companies and like Palanier and shit,
like that.

Speaker 4 (19:24):
Is this why we got stuff like the juice.

Speaker 2 (19:26):
Ro Yeah, but that's like the everything right is like no,
but like like like the JUICEO thing is like legitimate.

Speaker 3 (19:32):
Venture capital was just like pouring money into stuff that
was just like not fucking real. Yeah you could, you
could juice fruit a huh.

Speaker 2 (19:38):
And like like this is you know, I talked about
this on a different episode about venture capital, and like
the way that it's done tech fascistm right, was eventually
they started putting that money into like building the material
basis for like a tech fascist state. And that's what
they've been doing in sort of I.

Speaker 3 (19:53):
Kind of wish they stuck to their cocaine ideas.

Speaker 4 (19:55):
Like juice ero.

Speaker 2 (19:56):
Yeah, that was a better more fun than fascism. No,
it's more fun than like turning every single door in
every single car in San Francisco into a surveillance machine
and then like going in and like basically cooing governments
and yeah, but on the sort of like pure financial
end of this, you get all of these companies that

(20:17):
are just pouring all of this money into there's those
layers of this too, right where like you know, if
you're like like JP Morgan, which is like an actual bank,
right one, Yeah, yeah, the real one is like pouring
money into these like into these like shadow banks, right
because they're they're chasing a high rate of return. And
this is like what happened in two thousand and eight

(20:39):
was like there everyone was like, oh, these bonds have
a really high rated return, the mortgage rack securities. And
now we've reached the point where I think, God where
this is the most recent news from this and Molly,
I'm just gonna read you the thing from Reuters quote
JP Morgan, Chase, Barclays and other Wall Street banks have

(21:02):
started trading credit default swaps linked to flagship private credit
funds run by Blackstone, Apollo Global Management, and Aris Managements,
the Financial Times reported on Friday.

Speaker 3 (21:16):
And that's a good idea for them to do.

Speaker 2 (21:19):
Oh this is really fun because now what we're doing
is they're now opening the markets to bet on these
things to fail.

Speaker 3 (21:28):
Ray, I just I don't understand why so much of
the economy is based on these bets that bad things
will happen. Yeah, it's like if everything collapses, some guys

(21:51):
are gonna get so rich. If a thousand people get
their cars repossessed, one guy gets so rich. Like that's
not a great way to run an.

Speaker 2 (21:59):
Economy, you know. John Mayard Kines a guy who is
I would argue responsible for this. This is his fault
for like stabilizing the capitalist economies in the middle of
the Great Depression. But Canes is like a welfare state guy,
but he's also a capitalist. And he has this line
about how, like the economy shouldn't be run by a casino,

(22:21):
to which I would be like, okay, Canes, but like.

Speaker 3 (22:24):
The economy is a casino.

Speaker 6 (22:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (22:26):
It's like it's like, this.

Speaker 2 (22:27):
Is your fault for not being willing to like not
have a market economy, right, Like, like we could, we
could achieve the dream of not having your economy be
run by a casino. This is a thing that you
could do. It's just that you can't.

Speaker 4 (22:41):
Was a youth before.

Speaker 3 (22:43):
I don't think he realized that, like we literally do
have a.

Speaker 2 (22:45):
Casttell one kind of did, right, because it's it's not
a euphemism anymore.

Speaker 3 (22:51):
I'm going to necromans him and tell him about polymarket.

Speaker 2 (22:54):
Oh yeah, he he would lose his mind about polymarket.
But like, like he's watching people just like betting on
stock right, and he's watching a bunch of people.

Speaker 3 (23:01):
Have the Ouiji board and tell that bitch about college.

Speaker 2 (23:04):
Well you know this, this this is like we're going
back in time and showing him Calshi and he's like,
oh fuck, okay, I'm like I am now again. I
am now against the market as an idea. We cannot
let this come to pass. But like you know this,
this this has been like a known issue with the
market as a system for a long time. But it's
a problem because in theory you could try to go

(23:25):
through and like regulate this stuff, but like investment is
just gambling to some extent, right, And when you talk
to the people who believe in this stuff, they're like, well, no,
you can't have stock markets without sort of equities markets,
and you can't have these things without the ability to
bet on it. And I would say, okay, well don't

(23:45):
have it then, Like I think this is a really
simple solution. But you know, these people are like, no, no, no, no.
In order to mention a capital's economy, you must it
must be possible for a bunch of people to be
placing bets on the companies that give money to some
I'm auto loan companies failing.

Speaker 3 (24:02):
I guess that's the point where like I get off
the train where you say, well, in order to maintain
a capitalist economy, and I'm like, yeah, exactly, dog, I.

Speaker 5 (24:08):
Don't want to do that, and like, this is why
this is a terrible idea, Like it's it's a bad
idea for first principles, and we're all living in like
the nightmare healthscape of this being a bad idea.

Speaker 3 (24:19):
Yeah, so the movie that's maybe that's why I can't
get it, because this does make some kind of sense
to like an evil guy who wants it to be
this way, but I don't want it to be this way.

Speaker 2 (24:30):
Yeah. Well, and I very deliberately I went and I
went into when I was learning economics and when I
was learning political economy from the perspective of like, okay,
how do you destroy this right and this part, this
part seems fragile. Yeah, but it's like one of these
things where it's like, okay, this is going to break
on its own.

Speaker 3 (24:48):
But I guess the problem is is it does keep
breaking on its own. It's just that we keep bailing
it out and reconstructing it, propping up the house built
on sand.

Speaker 2 (24:58):
Yeah, and that's the part, or you know, like this
is a thing where the intervention of masses of people
onto the stage of history has to happen. Where if
you want this to not be the way that the
system works when it breaks down, you have to be
organized enough to be like, no, fuck this, We're not
going to sacrifice all of our lives to reopen the casino.

(25:18):
We are going to either tear the casino down or
turn the casino into like housing or whatever.

Speaker 3 (25:24):
So when there was this run on the fake banks
and they stopped it, what happened after that? I guess
because that was my original question, right, It's like, what
does the run on a fake bank even look like
or do?

Speaker 2 (25:33):
Yeah? So basically what happened is that they just like
stopped the redemptions and everyone got really really pissed off.
But there's not that much they can do about it because.

Speaker 3 (25:41):
Because I'm sure that was in the terms and conditions
whenever they signed up to do financial crimes together.

Speaker 2 (25:46):
Yeah. And what's been happening now though, is that this
is this has been spreading kind of panic about just
I don't know, they would call it like the asset
class in general.

Speaker 3 (25:55):
Oh, like, maybe it wasn't a good idea to invest
all your money into this fake product.

Speaker 2 (25:59):
No, it was, in fact a terrible idea. And this
is this is, this is I think why we're we've
mismanaged your client's funds. Yeah, and this this is I
think why we're starting to get the like Blackrock fucking
credit default swaps, right, because the market is being like, oh, hey,
all these people are pissed off about the fact that
we designed our unhinged private credit shadow banking system in

(26:19):
such a way that you can't get your money out
of it. What if we capitalize on that by letting
people bet on it? And that's that's good. So right
now we're in this kind of limbo world and this
is this is this is the entire global economy, right.
Everyone is sitting here pretending like the apocalypse isn't happening.
And that's the basis of the entire economy. I mean,

(26:41):
what am I supposed to do about it?

Speaker 6 (26:43):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (26:43):
But it's like, you know, but there's there's there's a
difference between you and us doing this and the people
who have all of the money in the world who
are sitting there pretending that like there's like some very
easy way out of this war that we're that we're
waging as lebron right, and that it's not going to
just keep going even though there's no good way to
get a ceasefire. And you know, like no one, no

(27:04):
one in charge of the US as any idea what
they're doing. They're they're they're in some ways, they're they're
doing the strategy they did in like the lockdown phase
of the pandemic, where they're.

Speaker 3 (27:10):
Just waiting for it to burn itself out.

Speaker 2 (27:12):
Yeah, where they're like, Okay, well we're going to ask
for a bunch of money.

Speaker 3 (27:15):
But when you do that with the global economy.

Speaker 2 (27:17):
Yeah, right, And like I had a friend who described
it as like the fundamental problems that these people are
incentivized to just think that everything will keep going right
for them because.

Speaker 4 (27:26):
It has because eventually it will right, they'll be fine.

Speaker 2 (27:30):
Yeah, But like eventually there's a point where that runs out,
and when it hits there's going to be this sort
of chilling discovery that like, oh yeah, the entire last
like fifteen years of their sort of being an economy
has been this like weird tech capitalist mirage, and once

(27:52):
that fails, we I guess we're already in the time
of monsters.

Speaker 4 (27:56):
So whoo oh.

Speaker 3 (28:00):
I don't have any other marketable skills. You can't collapse.
I'm a podcaster.

Speaker 2 (28:06):
Yeah. Hum, well, this has been it could happen here
it did I learn anything? I don't know, honestly, this
is just they're doing it all again, and it's even
dumber this time. Oh god.

Speaker 3 (28:22):
Yeah, at least there were houses last time. Now there's
not even a no.

Speaker 2 (28:25):
Now there's a problem. Shitty auto loans. Mollie. Where can
people find your very very lovely show.

Speaker 3 (28:31):
You can find me wherever you get your podcast, you
can subscribe to my show, Weird Little Guys. It's fun,
you'll like it. Yeah. I'm in the middle of a
series right now about a segregationist attorney who loved the
Confederacy so much that he built a twenty five foot
tall Confederate monument out of old bathtubs. It's fun, you'll
love it.

Speaker 2 (28:52):
Does he blow up a school bus? This is fine, No.

Speaker 3 (28:56):
But he did go to YMC a night YMC a
Night Last, which is a night law school through the
YMCA in Nashville, so that he could get better at
doing segregation.

Speaker 4 (29:06):
Like he wasn't a lawyer.

Speaker 3 (29:07):
And then in mid life he was like, I were
go to law school at night so he could do
busing cases, so he could take bussing cases. So he
didn't blow any buses up, but he did blow up.

Speaker 4 (29:16):
A lot of people's lives.

Speaker 3 (29:18):
Great, but that great anyway, check out We're little guys.

Speaker 2 (29:23):
Yeah, And if you want to stop there from being
both we're little guys and also having our economy be
run on betting on funny money, go like organize a union,
or like join your local affinity group, or start doing
food not bombs, or do what literally literally do anything,

(29:45):
because if we do nothing, we will continue to live
in the world of the segregation lawyer who build statues
out of bathtubs, and also the subprime auto loan defaults.

Speaker 4 (29:58):
At least go outside and take a walk.

Speaker 7 (30:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (30:13):
The National Geographics Encyclopedia says that indigenous refers to people
or objects that are native to a certain region or environment,
whether they grow there, live there, or produced there, or
occur naturally there. When it comes to flora and fauna,
they are considered indigenous to an ecosystem when they haven't
been introduced through human intervention or manipulated by human cultivation.

(30:38):
Over millions of years, these living things have become well
suited to their habitats, carefully adapted to the region's soil, climate,
and food web. Or when it comes to people, it
can be some confusion about what it means to be indigenous,
especially when it comes to questions of land rights, autonomy,

(30:59):
and a rapria. Most people understand that Native American nations
and Aboriginal Austragulians are indigenous, but some might then ask, well,
if indigenous means originating from a place, then aren't all
holesapiens indigenous to Africa? Why should one group's claim of
indigena and you take precedence over any other. This would

(31:21):
be asked in more or less good faith, and so
others may ask the question, well, if a group occupies
a region for several generations, does that then make them indigenous?
White Americans indigenous if their family has been there since
they found in the United States, French people indigenous to France,

(31:42):
and if so does that somehow justify their xenophobia to
water refugees and some weird reactionary corruption of declonial rhetoric.
Speaking of corruptions of de colonial rhetoric, some Zionists claim
that Jewish people as a whole are indigenous to Palestine
in some twisted perversion of land back, while Zionism itself

(32:03):
has long understood itself as a colonial project meant to
displace and eliminate the indigenous inhabitants of past Die from
its very beginning. Some white nationalists also argue that settler
columnalism was really no different than any other conflict between
indigenous people, So what does it even matter? Might mix

(32:23):
right among? Generations of marginalized groups have been struggling to
retain their social, cultural, economic, and political sovereignty and achieved justice, reparations,
liberation after centuries of oppression and attempted annihilation. We need
to stand in informed solidarity. Thus it is vital for

(32:43):
us to understand what it means to be indigenous. Welcome
take it up here. I'm Andrew Sage Andrewism on YouTube
and I'm here again.

Speaker 2 (32:54):
With Miir Wong, the other host of this podcast.

Speaker 8 (33:00):
Yes, and we are here to discuss two approaches to
understand and indignity. Obviously, this is not the final word
on the matter, but just one perspective that I've drawn
primarily from the work of North American Indigenous authors, namely
Tayaki Alfred, Jeff Conticel, and Robin Wall Kimera. So you know,

(33:23):
keep that in mind as we proceed. There may be
other positions and perspectives and indignity coming from other groups,
other people, and so I believe there are two principle
highly overlapping ways that indignity can be defined or interpreted.
One is as an identity formed as part of a
colonial relationship, and two as an identity rooted in a

(33:46):
relationship to police. I believe that each definition is incomplete
without the other. But by understanding and synthesizing each notion
of indigenousness, we can better ground our approach dec organization
and social revolution. So let's start with indignity as identity
rooted in a relationship to place, whether it be physical

(34:09):
as with land, social as with community, or cultural as
with culture. As indigenous relationship to the land must be
reciprocal with give and take, base on a view of
the land and water as a gift that must be
cared for over generations. According to Honotiony mythology, as recounted
by Robin Wild Kimra in braidin Sweet Grass, the mother

(34:32):
goddess Skywoman came to the land as an immigrant from
the heavens, but became indigenous by listening to the land,
learning from other species to understand how to live on it,
given as she received, and caring for the earth and
its keepers for the sake of those who would inherit
it when she passed on. Land is identity, it is

(34:53):
ancestral connection, It is pharmacy, it is library, and it
is home, the source of all the sustains and the
sacred ground upon which those would observe their responsibility to boot.
So by this understanding, it can be said that indigenity
is born out of land connection and established through observation
and relationship. Indigenous peoples have historically been mobile, either by

(35:17):
choice or by force, but regardless of where they might
find themselves quote unquote whole land or not, even if
there were other indigenous peoples in their new environments, as
long as they observe the processes and ceremonies of generational
relationship building based on mutual respect, understanding, and love for
the land in common, they remained indigenous. So then the

(35:40):
question may arise, why aren't settlers indigenous to place if
their family has lived in the land for generations. The
answer lies in relationship. Settler society as a whole is
based on an extractivist capitalist relationship with the land. Focus
are exploiting the land and it's now natural resources. Without

(36:02):
a relationship with the land that extends the reference to
a deeper understanding of its complex interdependence, settler society can
never become indigenous to place. Of course, it goes without
saying that not every indigenous group or indigious practice is
perfectly sustainable. Some have been rather destructive and even speciocidal,

(36:23):
particularly when they have recently moved into a place, as
we could see in North American prehistory. But if we
are to work with this definition to conceive of being
indigenous as something based and cultivating a long term relationship
to place, then indignity must be contingent on maintaining the
health and longevity of that relationship. Without community, they cannot

(36:46):
be indignity. Much like the trees in a forest are
interconnected via subterranean networks of microreze which enable them to
share resources and survive as a whole. In order to
be indigenous to place, community must exist sustain that web
of reciprocity with the land so that all may flourish.

(37:07):
Indigenaity to place extends to culture as well, which is
deeply tied to the land it develops on. Such practices
should be reciprocal, as ceremonies create communities, and communities create
ceremonies as well as organic not appropriate in existing cultural
celebrations or tending toward commercial. Our social fabric has become

(37:28):
withered and fragmented by the peace of modern life, leaving
little room for ceremonies outside of religion or rights of
personal transitions such as birth these weddings and funerals, but
ceremonies and the shared emotions they generate are part of
what builds community. When we gather for graduations, for example,
a sense of pride, relief, nostalgia, and excitement builds in

(37:51):
the social atmosphere, hopefully fuel in the confidence and strength
of those who are going on to pursue the rest
of their lives. But Kimura wants us to imagine standing
by a river flooded with those same feelings as the
salmon marched into the auditorium of the estuary. The indigenous
to police means cultivating cultural ceremonies that on other land

(38:14):
and all the cycles and seasons of life within it.
What are your thoughts on that interpretation or approach to indigenousy.

Speaker 2 (38:23):
I think there's a lot there that's interesting. I think
I'm getting a better sense of what you were saying
at the beginning when you were like, this probably needs
to be synthesized with the definition that's also about like
a relationship to colonialism. Yeah, but you know, there's some
sort of fun question mark examples of like the Chinese

(38:47):
Empire failing this where it's like like you do have
a lot of stuff that's like, Okay, we're going to
like build a relationship in nature, but the build a
relationship in nature stuff is like we are going to
clear this forest in order to build a temple that
is like exactly set up on like a pentagram or whatever.
So it's like, okay, hold on, hold on, hold on.

(39:10):
We have failed in creating a relationship to the land
if we are in fact just making geometry shapes.

Speaker 8 (39:19):
Yeah, I think empires by then nature, yeah, are going
to run into some difficulties, to put it mildly, they're
going to run into some difficulties with actually maintaining a
reciprocal relationship with that because empires are built on extraction
of people and of resources, yep. Which you're absolutely right

(39:41):
that there has to be a synthesis of this definition
with the idea of indignity as a colonial relationship. According
to Taiyaki Alfred and Jeff Contis, indigenousness is an identity constructed, shaped,
and lived in the politicized context of contemporary clue nalism.

(40:01):
It is an experience oppositional to colonial societies and states,
and a consciousness of struggle against such forces of colonization.
No two indigenous groups are exactly alike, of course, there
is a significant diversity in their cultures, contexts, and relationships
with colonial forces, but they do share that struggle to
survive as distinct peoples in an environment hostile to their existence.

(40:26):
Efforts to marginalize and eradicate indigenous peoples may not always
be as overt as they once were, but the historic
and ongoing dispossession of indigenous peoples, the erasure of indigenous histories, geographies,
and languages and the current situation of deprivation persists. Nonetheless,
even so called reconciliation efforts are tainted by the reality

(40:50):
that Indigenous people remain, as in earlier colonial eras fundamentally
occupied and disempowered peoples, stripped of autonomy in their own
home life and pressured into surrender and cooperation with an
inherently unjust colonial order just to ensure their basic physical survival.
By this understanding of indigenity, it can be said that

(41:13):
without a colonizer, without systems in place and actions being
taken to marginalize, disempower and destroy their societies in favor
of a colonial replacement, there is no indigenous. Without colonialism,
there would be no status of indigenous to be imposed
upon the groups of peoples whose very existence and claimed

(41:35):
land is an obstacle to that colonial endeavor. The un
work In Group on Indigenous Issues drew partially from this
understanding when they attempted to define indigenous peoples in nineteen
eighty six. Quote Indigenous communities, peoples, and nations are those
which having a historical continuity with pre invasion and pre

(41:57):
colonial societies that develops on their territories, consider themselves distinct
from other sectors other societies now prevailing on those territories
or parts of them. They form at present non dominant
sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop, and
transmit to future generations their ancestral territories and their ethnic

(42:18):
identity as the basis of their continued existence as peoples
in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions, and
legal systems. And so by this definition, the Amerindians in
the Caribbean, Aboriginal Australians, Adivasis in India, Native North and
South Americans, Siberians, Ainu, kurds, Assyrians, Yazidi Palestinians, Amy Sikh Sambi, Basques, Hawaiians, Maori,

(42:48):
san Wuti, Papuans, Chams, and many many more are all
indigenous peoples. But there are layers of nuance yet to

(43:08):
be highlighted. The colonial situation is not a simple binary
of indigenous and colonizer. For example, in the Americas, we
have the immigrant situation and the situation of slavery. Right
where Africans are concerned they were indigenous to their own
homelands but displaced and enslaved under the colonial regime, they

(43:34):
may not be indigenous to the Americas, but they were
not driving settled colonial society either. In fact, historically some
were actually enslaved by indigenous people as well. At the
same time, there were members of the African aspora who
would join existing indigenous societies and later create their own,
such as the Garifuna of Saint Vincent Tranduras and belize.

(43:57):
It's very attractive, i would say, or mentally compelling to
fall into these kinds of binaries colonizer and visions. But
we should not allow these constructs to pindhole picture. Yeah,
And I mean this is you mentioned the Kurds earlier, right,

(44:17):
And there's a couple of political principles that groups like
the pew Id, you know, and sort of like the
Kurtish Freedom Movement have had to grapple, like what of
their things is grappling with Like for example, there was
like huge Courtish participation in the Armenian genocide.

Speaker 2 (44:34):
And if you look at the Kurdish Regional government in
a rock when I want to talk about the PEWID,
that's like like Curtaish freedom movement in Syria in a rock,
there's like the Iraqi Kurdish Regional government right, which is
run by a different group, but those people, you know,
and this is one of these things where like there
are Kurtish people on both sides of this conflict, like

(44:55):
that group attempted to, for example, like prevent Ezd people
from returning to their homes after they were like genocided
there from there.

Speaker 4 (45:02):
By isis right.

Speaker 2 (45:03):
So it's it's this, it's this thing where like all
of this stuff gets kind of messy depending on like
who has power in a given moment. And it's something
that's to some extent fluid enough that you can on
the one hand, like be experiencing a genocide and then

(45:24):
also immediately turn around and you know, be be the
Kurdish regional government and attempt to assist the genocide, to
attempt to like do a genocide against the disease you
can take more of their land.

Speaker 6 (45:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:37):
But then on the other hand, you know, you have
the PYD who was like backing was backing the Azids
in that fight against like against the kurs regional government.
So it's yeah.

Speaker 8 (45:48):
Yeah, I think it's very it's very easy to slip
into this notion that the experience of oppression will necessarily
cause you to develop cold or consistent critique of oppression.
But often what we see in history is that oppression
results in that group perfatuating harm down the line in

(46:14):
other ways, either within their own group or inflicting that
harm and other groups. There's something intrinsic to any group
that grants them immunity from falling into those same patterns
of domination, abuse, oppression, and harm. People look to the
example of Israel a lot, but a less similiar example

(46:36):
for some would be the situation that established Liberia in Africa.

Speaker 6 (46:42):
You know, where you.

Speaker 8 (46:43):
Literally had the descendants of enslave people or formerly enslaved
people going on to engage in settler cunalism in the
territory that became Liberia, to oppress disadvantage the indigenous populations
that previously occupy those territories and well continue to occupy

(47:07):
those territories today. They created a stratified society that placed
them at the top, mirroring the very system that they
had fled.

Speaker 2 (47:15):
Yeah, and this is the thing where it's like it
doesn't mean that, you know, people like swing around on
the other end and be like, well, we actually have
to like maintain the colonial relationship, because like, what if
these people then did colonialism on us it's like no, yeah, no,
it's not no.

Speaker 8 (47:32):
Because you hear people making that argument with three gods
to like three Palestine, right yeah, people say, oh, well
then the past Indians will just spin around and do
a genocide on us, so we have to do a
genocide on them, Like no.

Speaker 4 (47:44):
Yeah, And this is actually one of the things. I
think there's two angles of this.

Speaker 2 (47:47):
One. You see that in the US too, where people
are like, well, what if we do if we do
land back, then they're just going to like exterminate all
the white people in the US. And it's like, no,
that's that's that's what you did, like like hold on,
hold time. So then you know, the second angle of
this too is this becomes like a motivating factor for colonizers.

(48:08):
And this is just something that's true historically if you
look at the Bosnian genocide, right, the way that you
get people to do with genocide by convincing them that
the people they're doing a gedocide against are about to
do a genocide against them. And you know, you see
this in Bosnia, you see this Wanda. This is a
very very common sort of I don't even know what

(48:29):
you call it, like trope feels like two weeks of
a word. This is a very common step in the
beginning of genocide, which I don't love. Uh So you're right,
of ten Mia not pro genocide more news at ten.

Speaker 8 (48:49):
Yeah, Yeah, it's something wanted to mention regarding I think
the application of indigenity as a concept in Asia. You know,
you mentioned the situation with the zds and the goods,
but your city governments of places like Indonesia and India
and China and Vietnam and Bangladesh not recognizing the existence

(49:13):
of indigenous peoples within their territories yep. And these countries,
like most countries in the world, did not ratify the
International Labor Organization Convention one sixty nine in nineteen eighty nine,
which was known as the Indigenous and Tribal People's Convention
considering the rights of Indigenous peoples. The UN's Declaration of
the Rights and Indigenous Peoples, passed in two thousand and seven,

(49:35):
would however, be voted on approvally by most of the world,
including the same countries that haven't recognized indigenous peoples within
their borders. All four of the countries that rejected the resolution, Canada, America,
Australia and New Zealand will later changed their vote in
favor of the declaration of course of their own tact
on interpretations and emphasies, and the declarations legally non bind

(49:58):
in nature, as is to be expected from set the
colonial societies.

Speaker 6 (50:02):
Yep.

Speaker 8 (50:03):
I'm very interested in, you know, because we do have
these ethnic minorities. We do have in in case India,
you have the pre Indo European groups, the tribal groups.
And if you go back to the definition of indigeneity
according to the UN, it speaks of groups which form

(50:26):
at present non dominant sectors of society that are determined
to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations the ancestral
territories and the ethnic identity as the basis of the
continued ex systems as people, et cetera, et cetera. You know,
it speaks of those having historical continuancy with pre invasion,
pre colonial societies that developed in their territories. They speak

(50:48):
of groups that consider themselves distinct other sectors as societies
and all prevailing on those territories. And so by this definition,
I understand that people in in these Asian countries maybe like, oh,
we're all from this place, right, So why does that
group get this designation and additioners, so we do not,

(51:10):
And it goes back to again a colonial relationship. It
goes back to the relationship between a group and the
broader society. And so it's not necessarily stripping away the
fact that a particular group may be from an area,
but more so speaking about how another group relates to

(51:30):
the states in that area and the group that dominates
the state in that area.

Speaker 2 (51:36):
Yeah, like you look this in the Chinese context, and
it's like, okay, so like by the time you're like
bulldozing masques and shin juan, like, I think you've gotten too,
Like congratulations, you have like created a indigenous settler divide.

Speaker 6 (51:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (51:53):
Also just just speaking like the context does not begin
and end with European colonization and direct European administration and
invasion and that kind of thing. You know, prior to
these invasions, you did have the empires that were established
in these areas. I mean, China was an empire quite famously,

(52:16):
Japan was an empire. India was the home of several empires.
Indonesia was the home of several empires. So while it
may not be that this relation of indignity is based
on the Europeans attler colonialism. There is something to the

(52:37):
history of empire in those areas, establishing those relationships, relationships
that would later be elevated in some cases by those
Europeans when they would come and they would for example,
select one ethnic group and elevate one ethnic group over
another ethnic group, make us in ethnic group administrators and

(52:57):
put down another ethnic group. Calcify these kind of caste
systems and ethnocratic divisions.

Speaker 2 (53:05):
Yes, Rwanda, it's like one of the literally literally yeah,
there are a lot of cases where these sort of
the indigenous colonizer divides become reflective of like the way

(53:26):
that Europeans set up past systems. Sometimes that's not true though,
And one of the I think most hideous examples of
this is West Papua, which we very briefly mentioned earlier,
where West Papua and Indonesia are like not governed by
the same colonial administration. But when Indonesia gains independence, like

(53:47):
the government there and this is this is Sankaras government, right,
this is like the nominally socialist one wants to take
control of West Papua because West Papua has all of
these resources and the people in West Papua don't want that,
like they want to be an independence entity, but the

(54:08):
Indonesians just roll in and invade them and you know,
continue from Sukara to Sukarno. Just a unbelievably hideous series
of genocides. And one of the things that's really bleak
about the sort of process of decolonization is like you
can see the shift in the way that these post

(54:30):
colonial societies are talking about what colonization is and we're
resistance to it, where it ceases to become about the
struggle of people against the colonizing forces that oppress them,
and it turns into a something that's about like the
continuity of national borders. You know, you get a really
bleak example of this where like people talk about like
the Bandung conference, right, which is the sort of like

(54:52):
it's supposed to be, like this is like the big
thing in like pan Asian and Pan African like struggles
coming together. We're like all these formally colonized nations like
come together and like issue this issue a bunch of things,
and it's supposed to be this big moment of like
this is like the unity of post colonial societies. That's
like still to this day look back on in terms
of like Affroasian solidarity, like this is the big one.

(55:15):
But one of the things that they ratified at Bandung
was a very small session that no one pays any
attention to, which is all of these countries put in
their support for Indonesia's occupation of West Papua.

Speaker 6 (55:27):
HM.

Speaker 2 (55:28):
Eventually, I'm going to do a long thing about this.
It just is a really difficult subject that tackle on
has to be done very carefully. But one of the
things that happens is, you know, like the West Papua
WANs go to the UN and all of the states
that you would normally think of as like the anti
colonial states are like no, fuck you, like you belong

(55:49):
to Indonesia. And then you get all of these other
countries who are like more neutral or more US aligned,
but because they're not allied with Indonesia, They're reaction is
like wait, hold on, what do you mean there are
black people in the Pacific A and be like holy shit,
this is fucked up. But it sets this precedent that

(56:10):
kind of like rolls on through like pan Arabism and
rolls on through a lot of these decolonial movements where
once you've gotten your state, it's fine to just like
do horrifying repression against any other sort of ethnic group
that's there, because now that now that you have your
post colonial state, like, any attempt to interfere with the

(56:31):
sovereignty of the state and change the borders, even if
it's like, I don't know, you're like the West Sahara,
or you know, you're like shing Johan or you're like
the Kurds, right, and any attempt for those people to
like get their freedom is seen as like a Western
back like separatist thing instead of an anti colonial struggle.

(56:54):
And I think that really was one of the things
that was like the death now for like the post
colonial movements was their willingness to just walk in and
machine gun people because we want the resources that these
people's lands are on.

Speaker 6 (57:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (57:13):
Honestly, that brings us to the topic of decolonization. Yeah,
you know, because when we think about these definitions of
indignity as a clonal relationship and indignity as a relationship
to land, the nature, to the environment, I think it
begs the question of how we approach this process of decolonization. Yeah,

(57:38):
how do we go about abolish in the colonizer indigenous relationship.
Is it that we seek to pursue a universalization of
indigenity to the former and by that process accomplish the
better or is it there's some other framework or approach
by which we can take on this topic of Okay,

(58:01):
do we proceed with the with the concept of digenity
or does the concept of indigenity exist as a byproducts
and a representation of the system that we are trying
to get Where you're from, Yeah, So, decization is commonly
defined as the process of unsettain colonial power structures, whether
that be through overtad and acts of enclosure by building

(58:24):
new commons, overtad and acts of possession by reclaiming our
spaces and identities, or overtain and acts of administration.

Speaker 6 (58:31):
Through social revolution.

Speaker 8 (58:33):
Social revolution is a complete transformation of our society by economy, culture, philosophy, relationships, technology,
so on. It is, as anarchists would approach it, an
ongoing and heterogeneous change in people's powers, drives, and consciousness

(58:53):
through practical education, as well as a progressive breakdown and
transformation of the existences and institutions alongside the building of
new systems institutions, punctuated by major insurrections, ruptures, advances, that
whole messy process with the aim of self liberation. Yeah,

(59:17):
something that I've broken down as involved in confrontation with
the powers that be, non cooperation with the established order
of things, and the prefiguration of new social relations, institutions, infrastructure,
and practices in the hered Now. If we maintain the
interpretation of indignity as based in one's position in a

(59:37):
colonial relationship, then the decolonization process will until the abolition
of that relationship as the premise of identity and therefore
the abolition of indigenity as a status. Colonial legacies have
effectively left indigenous communities legally and politically compartmentalized and culturally,
socially and spiritually weakened within the narrow parameters of the state,

(01:00:01):
where they end up diverting the crucial energy necessary to
confront state power and develop the process of deconalization toward
mimicking the practices of the dominant non additional legal political
institutions through the processes of land claims and self government.
And by pursuing these strategies, I think what we notice

(01:00:23):
is this tends toward a division rather than a solidarity
builder division, both internally and between indigious communities where land claims,
for example, clash, or where certain members of a society
of a community utilize their position above others in that

(01:00:47):
society of community to gain certain advantages for themselves, sometimes
to the detriment of that society of community. So I
think any sort of a pros deconization has to account
for the ways that some approaches the deconization can end up,
perhaps misdirecting from a subjective perspective, the work that is

(01:01:10):
necessary to dismantle the clonal order, rather than merely assert
a position was in it. But this idea of indigenity
via colonization is just one understanding of the team, and
my approach to it is of course one subjective interpretation
of that definition and where it might lead. We need

(01:01:34):
to explore another approach, I think, to decononization, and one
that recognizes the power and potential of indigenous relationships with
the land. Now globally, the UN recognizes that indigenous peoples
protect eighty percent of the world's remaining bio diversity, and
scientists have shown that indigenous management practices in Brazil, Canada,

(01:01:54):
and Australia provides the same level of ecosystem support and
protection as any imposed protected area, which makes it abundantly
clear that the colonial approach of conservation via dispossession removes
the very people who take care of our most important ecosystems.
I don't believe that merely building a connection with the

(01:02:17):
land can make someone indigenous, but not being indigenous doesn't
exclude us from aiden in the renewal of the indigenous world.
Kimmer uses the example of the broad leaf planter, also
known as the white Man's footprint. Despite not being indigenous
to the Americas, it has become an honored member of
the plant community because it lives as a good neighbor

(01:02:40):
instead of as a destructive invader. While other invasive species
poison the soil over around the land outcompetes indigenous species,
the white Man's footprint took on a strategy of helpful
co existence, even sharing some of its healing properties with
those who ask of it. It is not indigenous, but
it has become naturalized. To quote Chimera, being naturalized a

(01:03:05):
place means to live as if this is the land
that feeds you, as if these are the streams from
which you drink that build your body. And fill the spirit.
To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie.

Speaker 6 (01:03:18):
In this ground.

Speaker 8 (01:03:19):
Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities.
To become naturalized is to live as if your children's
future matters, To take care of the land as if
our lives and the lives of all of our relatives
depend on it, because they do. End quote, decolonization will
require us to uproot invasive, capitalist settler societies in order

(01:03:43):
to rebuild in a way that treats the land like
the home that we share and are responsible for. It
will require us to receive an honor knowledge in the land,
to care for its keepers, and to pass on that
knowledge to the next generation. As always is all column
to all the people.

Speaker 4 (01:04:04):
Peace, welcome to it. Could happen here a show about
things falling apart between attacks on Sam Altman's home, a
molotav at, a Tesla office, and a warehouse causing over

(01:04:27):
half a billion dollars in damages. This past week or
so has been a little snapshot of the cool Zone.
I'm Garrison Davis. This episode, I'm joined by Robert Evans, Yeah,
to discuss one of these events.

Speaker 1 (01:04:41):
To be very clear, we had nothing to do with
either of them. The way you introduced them sounded a
little bit like between you know, going to Sam Altman's
house twice.

Speaker 9 (01:04:49):
It's been quite a busy.

Speaker 4 (01:04:50):
Week for us, a busy week for us here.

Speaker 9 (01:04:52):
I just wanted to be extra clear, extra clear.

Speaker 4 (01:04:56):
No, no, the cool zone, just relating to, you know,
the state of American society and where it's going. Yes,
but as is typical of these sorts of events, the
reality and motivations of attacks like these may not be
as clear cut as lee epic based praxis as one
might want to imagine.

Speaker 1 (01:05:17):
Yeah, this is not a Gimli situation. You know, it's
weirder than that and stupider.

Speaker 4 (01:05:23):
It is weirder. And this episode we want to talk
about the Sam Altman Attacker, who is a lot weirder
than what you might have expected, with a philosophical worldview
downstream from the original inspirations behind the Zizians and even
the intellectual interests of Luigi Mangioni to a certain extent.

Speaker 1 (01:05:40):
Ah, God, Yes, that's right, our dear sweet friends, the rationalists.

Speaker 4 (01:05:46):
A man, the alleged Altman attacker, was a college student
from the Houston area whose interest in the risks of
AGI artificial general intelligence turned into an obsession, which earlier
this year turned self destructive. But let's go through the
actual events that happened in San Francisco a few weeks ago.

(01:06:09):
At around three point thirty am on April tenth, a
twenty year old college student named Daniel Moranogama allegedly threw
a Molotov cocktail toward the home of open AI CEO
Sam Altman, hitting the top of the security gate on
the driveway leading to Altman's residence. Moranogama did not get

(01:06:29):
past the security gate. About an hour and a half later, though,
Moronogama showed up outside the San Francisco headquarters of Open
AI and tried to use a chair to break into
the building through the glass doors. He was stopped by
security personnel and allegedly told them that he came to
the headquarters to burn it down and kill everyone inside.

(01:06:51):
According to the federal affidavit, When he was arrested, officers
allegedly recovered incendiary devices, a jug of kerosene, and a
blue lighter, as well as what the FBI has described
as an ANTIAI document. Okay, we currently do not have
a copy of this document. It's only described in the

(01:07:12):
criminal complaint, but this looks like it was a three
part manifesto allegedly authored by Moranogama, and the first part
was titled Your Last Warning, in which he states he
quote killed slash, attempted to kill Sam Altman, and also
writing quote if I'm going to advocate for others to

(01:07:32):
kill and commit crimes, that I must lead by example
and show that I am fully sincere in my message.
The document then lists the names and addresses of various investors,
board members, and executives of AI companies as a sort
of target list. The second part of the document was
titled some more Words on the matter of our impending

(01:07:54):
Extinction Great, and this section discussed the purported that AI
poses to humanity. And we'll get into some of those
beliefs a little later on. But the third part of
this three part anti AA document was a letter addressed
to Altman quote if you make it, and reads in part,

(01:08:14):
if by some miracle you live, then I would take
this as a sign from the divine to redeem yourself
on quote. Now, like I said, we do not have
a copy of this manifesto in full, though the Affidavid
says that Mornagama appears to have emailed similar versions of
this document to people at his former college in Texas,

(01:08:35):
but as of Monday four twenty, this document is still
not online. But like a lot of zoomers, we do
have an online footprint made up of posts from Instagram, discord,
a substack blog, and even a podcast interview where Mornagama
discusses his anti AI views.

Speaker 1 (01:08:54):
It's always sad when something terrible happens to a fellow podcaster.
You know, I just have a I have such a
broad and deep pan podcaster.

Speaker 4 (01:09:03):
Solidarity, class, solidarity.

Speaker 1 (01:09:04):
Yeah, all podcasters are good, all of them, every last.

Speaker 4 (01:09:08):
No wrongdoing has ever come behind the microphone a podcaster.

Speaker 9 (01:09:13):
No, no, no, it's a special place.

Speaker 6 (01:09:15):
Now.

Speaker 4 (01:09:15):
Back in January, back when Monona Gama was just nineteen,
journalists found him through some of his posts on an
anti AI discord server, and he was asked to be
interviewed for this podcast about AI called The Last Invention.
Our colleague Ed Zittron was also interviewed for this podcast.
Actually now, he was interviewed because of his posts weighing

(01:09:38):
the possibility of using violence to stop the development of AI. Now,
in this interview. He says that he grew up in
the suburbs his whole life and quote grew up quite
close to the Internet and claims that he's been online
every day starting at nine years old.

Speaker 6 (01:09:55):
Baron A.

Speaker 4 (01:09:55):
Gama explained how his political worldview had largely been shaped
by YouTube, specifically debate videos on YouTube like Ben Shapiro Style,
and these sorts of debate videos are what originally exposed
him to views critical of AI. He says he first
heard about AI though when Chad GPT came out when

(01:10:16):
he was a sophomore in high school and first thought
it was quote the greatest thing on earth because it
would allow him to cheat on school essentially. But after
watching videos debating the risks of AI and the possibility
of advanced general intelligence artificial general intelligence, and the potential
threat posed by this artificial superintelligence, Moronagama's views started to

(01:10:40):
sour on AI. At first, he was a bit skeptical
of these AI critical debates, but eventually became convinced of
the AI doomer arguments and became an accolade himself. He
started arguing in YouTube comments and talking with friends and
family about the danger of AI. He describes himself getting

(01:11:00):
annoying and quote a bit autistic about this, leading to
his mom suggesting he joined an advocacy organization. He joined
his group called Pause AI in twenty twenty four, which
is an AI safety advocacy group that organizes online as
well as some in person protests, and he was also
part of a Discord server called stop AI. His username

(01:11:23):
on both Discord and Instagram was but Larian underscore g hottist,
in reference to the crusade against AI in the Do
novels Yeah. On Instagram, his account had a collection of
Instagram stories saved about the threat of AI, including a
meme about living in a ven, diagram of the matrix terminator,

(01:11:44):
and idiocrasy. One of these Instagram stories was a picture
of a hockey stick graph showing the length of coding
tasks that AI can do and how that's increasing, with
the caption quote if we do nothing soon, we will die.
I'm sure of that unquote. Another story contains screenshots of articles,

(01:12:07):
posts and studies proclaiming that artificial general intelligence or the
quote unquote singularity is already here, captioned being right all
the time fucking sucks when it's about the worst things
imaginable unquote.

Speaker 6 (01:12:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:12:23):
So if his concerns about AI started around summer of
twenty twenty four, by the end of twenty twenty five,
those concerns grew existential, and he started spiraling Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:12:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:12:36):
There's a post he made on the Pause AI discord
from November sixth, twenty twenty five, writing quote, we owe
it to everyone who came before us, and to ourselves
and to everyone we know and love and everyone who
might exist someday to be stronger than that and at
least die fighting if it comes to that unquote. A

(01:12:56):
few weeks later, he wrote quote, we are close to midnight.
It's time to actually act to this. A moderator on
the server replied, advocating violence in any form is grounds
for a band.

Speaker 1 (01:13:09):
This all seems like a pretty natural progression if you're
following like the kind of things that the Less Wrong Crowd,
which is the website run by guy named Aleezer Yeddkowski,
who is like the patron saint of the Rationalists, which
a huge chunk of which have become.

Speaker 9 (01:13:25):
Like AI doomers.

Speaker 1 (01:13:26):
Like a Leiser's book that came out a year or
two ago is called If We Build It, Everyone dies
or something like that. Yeah, and I'm surprised more of
them haven't so far. Like I think it probably toxic,
just people not actually believing it as much as they
claim to, like online, But like if someone truly believes
the stuff that crowd is saying about, how like basically,

(01:13:47):
the creation of an evil god is inevitable that will
seek to purge the world of humankind, Like, of course
you do this, It's a really natural progression.

Speaker 9 (01:13:58):
Like Unfortunately, what you have to pair that with is
like if.

Speaker 1 (01:14:00):
You believe all of the hype about AI, Yeah, right,
if you believe that AGI is imminent, that it's on
the way, Like if you are like me and I
don't believe we're anywhere close to AGI, if that's even possible,
then yeah, you could believe the stuff the rationalists believe
and not think that you need to take immediate destructive action.

(01:14:21):
But if you literally believe that these companies are on
the hinge of birthing and evil God, what else is
there to do?

Speaker 4 (01:14:27):
Yeah, And that's the exact thing that Morana Gama ends
up writing about on his substack. Yeah, and this is
the fullest picture we have of his views is from
the substack because we don't have this manifesto. But he
did write at length about AI, and he's writing about
a lot of the stuff that you're talking about here,
and we'll discuss that writing more after this at break. Okay,

(01:14:59):
we are back. The most in depth piece of publicly
available writing by Moranogama explaining his anti AI views comes
from a post on his substack blog dated January sixth,
twenty twenty six. This article outlines his belief that AI
poses a quote unquote existential risk to humanity. And I

(01:15:21):
think this essay was the first thing I saw that
really demonstrated that his opposition to AI is not like
based on fears of AI disrupting the economy, contributing to
a loss of jobs, or risking like labor rights for workers,
but the belief that AI will become like a superior
race and wipeout or enslave humanity. That that is the

(01:15:42):
standpoint that Ronagama.

Speaker 10 (01:15:43):
Is coming from.

Speaker 9 (01:15:44):
Gotcha.

Speaker 4 (01:15:46):
The belief that AI will quote unquote lead to human extinction,
he says, is based on two ideas, the first being
the rapid progress in artificial intelligence, the rapid technological development
that we've seen the past few years, and continuing right now.
For evidence to this claim, he references claims from AI

(01:16:06):
companies themselves that fully automated AI researchers that like an
intern level are coming soon, including claims from the Guy,
ananthropic who says that he expects these models by twenty
twenty six or twenty twenty seven, saying, quote, the capabilities
of AI systems will be best thought of as a

(01:16:27):
kin to an entirely new state populated by highly intelligent
people appearing on the global stage. A country of geniuses
in a data center unquote, Yes, whole country worth of
geniuses all living in your computer.

Speaker 9 (01:16:43):
Cool? What about like school shooters and stuff?

Speaker 6 (01:16:48):
Like?

Speaker 1 (01:16:48):
What about a country full of like psycho Like what
are they? Any group of geniuses is going to have
like some genius pedophiles and like right, like if they're
actually genius, that doesn't imply capacity for like various different
like illnesses and quirks that cause all sorts of wild behavior,
one would assume unless you think that AI is I

(01:17:09):
mean to that, but then could it really be intelligent?

Speaker 4 (01:17:12):
Yeah? I mean this is that A version of that
idea is kind of what morano O Gama believes is
like these things if if real and do become you know,
super intelligent, then they might not really have the best
interests of humanity, right because they will be interested in
self preservation, which is just part part of Like how
how he gets to this idea that it is an
existential threat is by using all of this kind of

(01:17:32):
marketing hype that is being pushed out by AI companies. Well, yeah,
that's the thing.

Speaker 1 (01:17:37):
Like that is a logical thing you could infer from
the ship being said by Sam Altman and his crew, right.

Speaker 4 (01:17:42):
Yeah, and others like like like Dario Emodi, ad Anthropic
and Elon Musk saying that the AGI is maybe already
here or that the next Grock model will be AGI.
These are all things that that Rona Gama is referencing
like on Instagram and yeah, and and in other places online. Now,
the second reason that he believes that AI will usher

(01:18:04):
in human extinction is because AI is not aligned with
the interests of the people creating it or with best
human interests in general. And for evidence, he refers to
instances of A models allegedly lying, cheating on tasks, or
blackmailing their own creators. Specifically, in studies, he sets a
twenty twenty five anthropic study on a gentic misalignment, which

(01:18:26):
he characterizes as demonstrating that quote most of the current
AI models are willing to blackmail and even kill people
if it ensures their own survival unquote. This may be.

Speaker 1 (01:18:38):
The first terrorist attack I've heard of inspired by media
created by the people they're attacking, Like, not media that
was like designed to make them attack people or like
carry out acts, but specifically by the propaganda being put
out by the companies that they're radicalized against.

Speaker 9 (01:18:55):
Yes, like that's very strange.

Speaker 4 (01:18:57):
The media put out to raise the stock price of
right of a company.

Speaker 1 (01:19:01):
Radicalized a guy to take a shot at Sam Altman's house.
There's two people to throw a bomb or something. I
forget which way it went, but yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:19:09):
Yeah, for the first throwing this molotovs. Then days later
two people fired shots.

Speaker 9 (01:19:13):
First was molotov?

Speaker 6 (01:19:14):
Right?

Speaker 4 (01:19:15):
No, I mean it's interesting, right, because like these studies
are basically doing like linguistic exercises with these models and
getting you know, large language models to say or to
threaten certain things for various reasons, usually their own survival. Right,
And these are kind of interesting studies that that these
companies are doing. But they're doing with the intent of

(01:19:36):
trying to align these models better. That so it's why
the studies on a gentic misalignment, because it's trying to
tweak these things to be more friendly to consumers. And
like getting an LLM to say that it will kill
or blackmail in order to ensure its own survival is
different from the LLM being able to do that, right.

(01:19:56):
That is that is that is a big jump, and
there is there's no not much currently that facilitates that jump.
Moronogama writes, quote ignore for a second these models current
limitations or questions on how truly intelligent or conscious these
models may actually be. The truth is, all these nuances
are completely irrelevant to my argument. There are only two

(01:20:17):
questions we should be concerned about at this moment. Is
it willing to kill to preserve itself and is it
capable of doing so? These signs indicate that AI is
willing and becoming potentially capable of doing both of these things,
and that is all that matters.

Speaker 6 (01:20:34):
Unquote.

Speaker 4 (01:20:35):
That's really where this argument rests is that even if
these models aren't currently intelligent, even if they can't currently kill,
the fact that they could in the future is enough
to stop any further development of these models, right, that's
his argument, Okay, And he writes that AI will only
become a larger threat the more we improve it, and

(01:20:55):
that AI quote will graduate from an active threat to
individuals to an existential threat to humanity. I estimate the
probability of AI causing human extinction to be nearly certain unquote.

Speaker 1 (01:21:08):
Think that's the thing, because like there is a massive
threat that the new what is it mythos upgrade to
Claude that's just about to come out, like yeah, actually
does represent to individuals and to society, which is that
it's going to supercharge fraud even more, which is already
up by something like a trillion dollars a year, and
that ruins.

Speaker 4 (01:21:27):
People's lives ride and cybersecurity.

Speaker 1 (01:21:29):
Yeah, frau, I mean fraud often as a result of
cybersecurity of like its ability to penetrate and that's really bad.
And it doesn't imply the like Skynet devastation of the
entire world in its biosphere, because that would be stupid,
there's no reason. And also that computers don't have access
to the nuclear arsenal. But like AI absolutely will enable

(01:21:50):
assholes who want to scam a bunch of people out
of their money to do that better. Like that's a problem,
we should probably stop that. He writes that quote, we
are dead if we do not act now. So what
does acting now entail for Starters, stopping all construction of
new data centers. These are the brains of these models,

(01:22:11):
dictating their physical limitations. Second, stopping all research and beginning
downscaling of these data centers, closing them down while still
keeping them monitored unquote. He also proposed striking a deal
with China to quote stop the AI race and to
create international treaties akin to Cold War nuclear weapons treaties

(01:22:36):
or post Cold War treaties. And finally, he advocated that
people will need to take strategic action, which could include
sharing information about AI, campaigning, protesting, saying quote, although doing
nothing is akin to suicide and a disgusting amount of negligence.
In that podcast interview from around the same time this

(01:22:57):
AI article was published as a Genuine twenty twenty sixth
Ronagama said in that interview, quote, before we even think
about violence, we need to exhaust all our peaceful means
first unquote, which he says includes protesting and sharing information,
but the hosts asked him about posts he had already
made about quote unquote luigiing CEOs. He says that he

(01:23:22):
didn't really mean that as a threat that it was.

Speaker 4 (01:23:26):
It was more rhetoric. It was hyperbole, and answered no
to a question on if it would be wise to
try to kill Sam Altman, saying quote, one person is
not going to do that much of a dent. I
understand the frustration with a person that might advocate for that,
but it is not practical, it's not worth it. It's
almost all risk, no reward. People may feel that way,

(01:23:49):
but not too many people would do it.

Speaker 1 (01:23:51):
Unquote Wow, okay man, great, I mean that's yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:24:00):
Though. When asked if we will continue to see AI
development going the direction that it's moving now, and if so,
if he believes that we have to stop the extinction
of the human race by whatever means necessary, Moranagama just replied,
I'll say no comment.

Speaker 9 (01:24:15):
Okayh Well, I mean yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:24:19):
Later saying that he would quote only advocate for violence
as the final solution, and then he later realized that
what he said try to demphasize the final solution part.
But great guy, that is kind of his ultimate sentiment
is around this time he was considering violence. He was
toying with advocating for it publicly on discord and you

(01:24:41):
know in this in this podcast, but still still kind
of had some like rains on that, but it was
something in his mind as a sort of like final
solution to this problem.

Speaker 1 (01:24:52):
This is why it's so fucking irresponsible to push these
ridiculous claims about like the power of this technology and
what it's going to be be able to do and
how smart it's going to be, and in part because
it makes it hard to actually look objectively at the situation.
And if Mornagama had looked at what's actually been happening
was data centers, he would see that like more than

(01:25:14):
half of the recently announced projects have been like either
stalled or halted. And there's been tremendous success on the
local level in like counties and in most recently this
entire state of Maine passing laws against the construction of
data centers. Like, yeah, there's actually been a lot of
success in fighting the building of new data centers. If
someone wanted to have a positive impact on this, there's

(01:25:35):
a lot of room right now to make that fight
even more effective, as opposed to doing like stupid bullshit
that you would only want to do if you had
convinced yourself that we were like literally moments away from
judgment day.

Speaker 6 (01:25:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:25:50):
And he used to be involved in this sort of action,
in this sort of organizing around that kind of stuff
when he was when he was doing stuff with Pasei. Yeah,
but it was really in the past few months where
where he started to like spiral in this in this
very like like doomer direction. Like you know, he was
already a very critical and very doomor about what AI
could do, but the sort of intense existential like like

(01:26:11):
immediate existential threat that that opposed is something that he
was really developing at the end of last year in
the start of this year. And you know this is
in part because of the sort of environment that he
was immersed in. Yeah, and we'll talk more about that
environment after this ad break. Okay, we are back. Morono

(01:26:40):
Gama had a bunch of other writing on his substack,
which gives us a bit of a closer look at
his political philosophy and the sort of information ecosystem that
he exists in beyond just the AI question. In this
AI article that he wrote or published in January, he
recommended that people reader Yudkowski's book. If anyone builds it,

(01:27:02):
everyone dies.

Speaker 9 (01:27:04):
Mm hmm. Thanks the Leezer.

Speaker 4 (01:27:06):
Do you want to, like, I guess briefly give some
background on like who this guy is.

Speaker 1 (01:27:11):
Well, he wrote a rationalist Harry Potter, Like, he's the
guy who started a website called less Wrong. Yeah, which
was about basically like logic puzzles and trying to like
optimize your thinking and your responses to behavior with like
Bayesian analysis. Yes, and he's kind of branded himself as
an AI expert. He's not like a coder or anything.
And he's not like an expert on machine learning. He
doesn't have any qualifications, but he's like an expert on

(01:27:33):
like again, game theorying how an AI would have super
intelligent AI would have to act, and he generally makes
very dire conclusions that are all pretty much based in
like Terminator or Horizon Zero. Don If you want my
honest opinion of Elisa Yodkowski, Yeah, yeah, And his irresponsibility

(01:27:55):
is largely down to him being a dummy, and he's
definitely part of what radicalized this guy. But the fact
that you have open AI and anthropic and a number
of other people, like a lot of like folks like
fucking Elon Musk, but also just a lot of like
popular public intellectuals quote unquote and their podcasts and shit
talking about all this, like, Yep, we're moments away from

(01:28:17):
super intelligent AI that's going to be able to do everything.
Everyone's losing their jobs, none of it. It's like, we won't
need people doing anything. If that weren't all over the
fucking place, a leisure would sound a lot less convincing, sure, no, I.

Speaker 4 (01:28:31):
Mean, and like the media environment around or like the
you know, the sort of online communities around the ratchlists
are are interesting because you have a lot of them
who are AI domers, like like Dudkowski, but a lot
of them are also AI accelerationists, right. A lot of
the sort of West Coast you know, parts of iziens
are kind of like this.

Speaker 9 (01:28:49):
Yeah it was a splinter Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:28:50):
Yeah, there's there's this kind of splintering around people who
who maybe even believe some of the you know, existential
claims arend AI, but believe that developing it is then
the best way to kind of get out of that crisis.
And this creates an interesting dynamic among you know rooms
full of these rationalists or post rationalists, and in that

(01:29:13):
podcast interview, Moronogama says that it was videos of Yudkowski
debate videos on YouTube that originally exposed him to his work,
and on other posts on his substack, Nagama also mentions
Yudkowski's work as a part of Mononagama is like other
interests which contain writing on pseudo spiritual philosophy. He writes

(01:29:35):
about quote the ultimate Tree of Reality or the Tree
of ultimate Reality, the aberration of Man, genealogy of being,
and the Warrior and the Martyr, And on February twenty eighth,
twenty twenty six, he posted quote an analysis of political
Extremes which goes over some of his political philosophy, which

(01:29:57):
which relates to like rational arguments or you know, some
some rationalist arguments around like IQ. In this essay, moroon
Gama primarily described himself as a consequentialist and critiqued leftism
for being trapped in an idealized world like a quote
schizophrenic patient who attempts the same zealous plots over and

(01:30:18):
over again without hesitation. This essay defends discrimination as a
justified means of reacting to inequalities, and claims that such
statements are only controversial because of a quote natural emotional
resistance to intrinsic judgment unquote, which he says has nothing
to do with the factual truth of certain claims like

(01:30:40):
quote East Asian people are on average more intelligent than
Black people unquote.

Speaker 9 (01:30:45):
Okay, m hm.

Speaker 4 (01:30:47):
Now, Moron Agama argues that the problem with right wingism,
as he puts it, is that it has no boundary.
Its constant scaling. An outward expansion inevitably leads to self
consuming defeat. Quote. It goes from being about preserving the
best of human qualities to being deeply anti human and

(01:31:07):
producing zero winners.

Speaker 6 (01:31:09):
Quote.

Speaker 4 (01:31:10):
This sort of refers to Karl Schmidt's fascist writing on
internal conflict being externalized by the establishment of a border
which expands to push out an increasing number of enemy groups. Instead,
Monogamba proposes what he calls a sustainable form of rightist

(01:31:30):
discrimination by establishing a sedentary floor for movements slash radical
policy suggestions instead of an always rising idealistic ceiling. So,
for example, instead of deciding that a certain IQ score
should be required to vote, he advocates setting a concrete,

(01:31:51):
unchangeable floor by quote limiting voting to certain people who
pass critical thinking and Civics tests unquote ah mm hmm. Yeah, yes,
so some somehow determining a critical thinking and Civics tests
is less arbitrary and less prone to arbitrary changes than
deciding a certain IQ score.

Speaker 1 (01:32:13):
I wonder what kind of critical thinking he's going to
be interested in. I wonder what kind of IQ you know? Like, yeah,
well it's yeah, these these these people always break down
the same things.

Speaker 4 (01:32:25):
I mean, yeah, I mean this essay in particular gets
gets really contradictory, ill cert certain things and then later
on basically argue the opposite. It's it's very it's very
disordered thinking. I mean, this is this is the work
of like a nineteen year old who was in like
a mental spiral leading leading to him traveling across the
country to fire bomb Sam Maltman's house. Yeah, like this

(01:32:47):
this is not is not the product of, like, you know,
a logically ordered mind, despite how you know, a rationalist
might you know perceive themselves as such?

Speaker 6 (01:32:56):
Yep.

Speaker 4 (01:32:56):
Now, at the end of this essay, he advocates for
quote ending mass migration and initiating mass deportations. He says
that This is necessary because quote nations have a right
to preserve their ethnic identity, and low skill immigration statuates
the job markets of these countries, making jobs which could
once earn a living wage become unlivable, increasing the amount

(01:33:17):
of value draining people in society by both importing them
and undercutting low skilled natives. Generally, whiteness in these countries
is a decent correlative to some of the things I
value unquote.

Speaker 9 (01:33:31):
Mm hmmm, some am okay.

Speaker 4 (01:33:33):
Now, Ronagama isn't white, and he and he says that
he opposes white supremacy, but he does those by saying, like,
you know, it's not actually about whiteness. It's that whiteness
correlates to certain things I value, like high IQ. And
that's how he tries to justify it in his head.
And rather than establish an explicitly white supremacist state, something

(01:33:54):
he claims to oppose as race is an imperfect metric
to discriminate effectively based on traits to him, rather, he
advocates for quote the most effective type of discrimination, evaluating
the possibility of IQ slash merit based nationalism unquote. Basically,
that's having a country where citizenship is determined by IQ

(01:34:17):
and again this contradicts his previous claim where he advocates
against requiring IQ to vote instead having a critical thinking
and civics test, but then advocates for a country which
citizenship is determined by IQ, and usually citizenship is the
fact that determines if someone can vote. So this is
where you know, this is just one example of this
sort of contradictory writing in this In this essay, now,

(01:34:41):
Monnagama writes that the only problem with this IQ nationalism
is that it would create a quote brain train across
the Third World, leading to worsening conditions in third world
countries and thus even more illegal immigration because people with
high IQ is and then be able to immigrate and

(01:35:01):
gain citizenship to first world countries. Right in a in
a United States where citizenship is determined by high IQ,
then people who with people with hiaqsrom around the world
will then all just move to the United States. Of course,
So to solve this problem, he says that he rejects
quote unquote classical eugenics and extermination in favor of what
he calls ethical eugenics in the third world.

Speaker 1 (01:35:24):
Oh oh, ethical eugenics. Ah good, I'm glad someone figured
it out.

Speaker 4 (01:35:27):
And this ethical eugenics is to promote quote IQ growth
genetically unquote, so that the whole basis of this article
is his belief that IQ is genetically determined, not determined
by class, and he never interrogates this idea. All of
the all of the the statements that he makes in
this article is based on the idea that IQ is

(01:35:49):
genetically determined, that it's not determined by education and class.
It is primarily or almost solely genetically based. Thus ethical
eugenics to create high IQ babies, which he thinks will
solve solve the problems of the world.

Speaker 6 (01:36:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:36:08):
Yeah, we never tried that before for sure, Like there
haven't been generations of times in which that was attempted
that all ended in disaster and mass death. Nah, they
just didn't They didn't get it right because they didn't
put ethical.

Speaker 4 (01:36:19):
In No, those are classical eugenics, Robert.

Speaker 1 (01:36:21):
They forgot to put ethical in front of it. That
was the big Ah, what a tragedy. They were one
word away from greatness.

Speaker 4 (01:36:28):
So yeah, that is That is the other piece of
writing that I think is worth expounding on to get
a more full sense of kind of where this guy's
head is at. Right, This is not sure. This is
not a leftist ANTIFA super soldier firebombing Sam Altman's home. Nope,
that isn't to say what happened isn't isn't interesting. But
I think you know, if, like you said, you know,

(01:36:50):
this is the first quasi terrorist attack inspired by the
sort of rhetoric that these companies are producing themselves to
boost their own stock price.

Speaker 6 (01:36:58):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (01:36:58):
I mean I literally saw on Reddit earlier today. The
title from the actual like post was CEOs make shocking
predictions about AI. Huge job losses are coming soon twenty
thirty fifty percent unemployment within the next two to five years.
And when you trace it back to its source, it's
Dario Amadey of Anthropic just basically quoting some statistics he

(01:37:20):
found from estimations by like Axios and Fox News yea,
and talking on some fucking podcast, scaring the shit out
of people like it's it's every day, like of course
some people are going to react like this.

Speaker 4 (01:37:33):
The other reason I wanted to talk about this the
second half of this, this sort of IQ and like
you know, rationalist stuff, because this is just another instance
of you know, public acts of political violence I think
done by people downstream from the rationalists. You know, Luigi
is is a part of this. The Zizians is also
a part of this. It's like an extended network. This

(01:37:55):
type of thought does keep producing acts of public violence
like this, and that is it is an interesting thing
to chart. On April fourteenth, Ronagama's public defender set in
court that he has a quote history of autism and
mental health illness, and that his actions quote appeared to
have been driven by an acute mental health crisis. His
parents released a statement that same Tuesday, saying, quote, our

(01:38:19):
son Daniel is a loving person who has been suffering
recently from mental illness crisis. We have been trying our
best to address these issues and get him effective treatment,
and we are very concerned for his well being. Unquote
m hm. He currently is facing federal and state charges,
including attempted murder. That is all I have on this

(01:38:42):
for now.

Speaker 1 (01:38:43):
Well, I mean, this isn't gonna stop happening, Like these
won't be the last attacks like this. I haven't seen
a big push in the media or from like elected
leaders to talk about like anti AI sentiment as like
a terrorist threat. Yet that hasn't really seemed to pick
up yet, And I haven't seen this yet be blamed

(01:39:05):
on like leftist stuff. I've seen it been blamed on
like the anti AI thing, which I you know, it
is part of.

Speaker 9 (01:39:12):
Like some of the anti AI movement.

Speaker 1 (01:39:14):
Are people who literally believe it's like a demon god
that's going to destroy things. But I'm interested as there
are more of these as you know, this kind of
stuff continues to happen, what form that takes, and like
how it actually looks when this was this starts to
hit politics in a big way.

Speaker 4 (01:39:33):
Yeah, US attorney Craig Misakian said, referring to this case
that they are going to treat it as an act
of domestic terrorism.

Speaker 1 (01:39:40):
Yeah, I mean it is like it is he was
trying to do terrorism, like his goal specifically was to
cause changes in policy.

Speaker 4 (01:39:50):
Yeah, but you're right, Like I haven't seen them refer
to this from the sort of political lens. Like there's
been statements from you know, other US government officials referring
to that where house fire as you know, being motivated
by anti capitalism and like and like threatened like threatening
our way of life, threatening the capitalist way of life,
which is that they refer to that warehouse fire in Ontario, California.

(01:40:11):
I've not seen them specifically kind of layout like anti
AI sentiments as a motivating factor of terrorism. Yeah, though
I'm sure they will quite soon, right, Yeah, between the
shots fired at the home of that city councilman in
the Midwest over his vote in support of a data

(01:40:31):
center over data centers. As we see more instance kind
of like that, as we see stuff like this, I
think it's it's very likely that they will add anti
AA sentiment to the list of common recurring motivating factors
of this sort of domestic violent extremism.

Speaker 11 (01:40:47):
Yep, all right, bye everybody, Hi, and welcome to the show.

Speaker 10 (01:41:05):
It's me James today, and I'm very fortunate to be
joined by a member of the UCSD faculty, someone who
is a professor of environmental physics at Script's Institution of
u Scenography, also teaching the Critical Gender Studies department, and
we're talking today about the disciplinary action that they are
facing for participation in the Guards of Solidarity encampment. So

(01:41:27):
welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.

Speaker 6 (01:41:30):
Thank you, James. I'm really happy to be here.

Speaker 10 (01:41:32):
Yeah, it's great too. Great to have young Dad. We
can share our platform and talk about this, So I
think to begin with, you know, it's been a little
while perhaps, I know a lot of people have sort
of been investigating and changing their politics in the last
year or so, So perhaps you could explain a little
bit about the Guards of Solidarity encampment, the moment that
came in, and the role that it played in the

(01:41:56):
anti genocide of Palestinian liberation movement at uc San Diego.

Speaker 6 (01:41:59):
Mob yes once again for this opportunity. So the encampment
at UCSD was set up on May first, twenty twenty four,
and that was happening in the context of encampments that
were being set up at universities across the US. I

(01:42:22):
believe that the UCSD encampment was approximately the hundredth encampment
set up in the US at that time. There's quite
a number of interesting things about kind of the whole
encampment movement. First of all, the fact that they met
with such severe repression is very suggestive that how effective

(01:42:47):
they were in bringing the issues related to the genocide
and the occupation of Palestine to the forefront in ways
that certainly weren't happening in the US at the time.
Another thing about the encampments that I found really interesting.
But also, I mean, I think brilliant from a organizing perspective,

(01:43:11):
is that they were very visually and viscerally recreating the
conditions under which Palestinians in Gaza were living at the
time and still are, having been displaced from their residences
and being forced to live in these very makeshift tent encampments.

(01:43:35):
And so there was a recreation len of those conditions
in a very visual way. And I think that that
also was in some sense reminiscent of the shanty towns
that were constructed on college campuses in the US in
the mid eighties in the anti aparthe type movement. So

(01:43:58):
I think paying attention to some of those details which
off and you have lost we started talking about, you know,
rise police and so forth. These encampments were They weren't
just you know, a bunch of students hanging out. These
were constructed and developed in a very thoughtful manner, and

(01:44:20):
that was definitely the case at UCSD, as I was
told by students who were participating in it, as a
space you engage in education and research about the genocide
and about the occupation of Palestine, as well as the

(01:44:42):
ties that UCSD had to the occupation and the genital
side in Palestine. So you had, and I talked to
many students who were actively engaged in this. You had
students sitting on their laptops doing research about the UCSD's
ties to weapons and manufacturers, the ways that UCSD supported

(01:45:10):
the discourses that were enabling the genocide and the occupation,
including archaeological research. And also you know, there was a
program associated with every day and the students would plan teachings.
Sometimes professors would do the teachings, sometimes students, sometimes community members.

(01:45:33):
There were teachings on a whole range of really interesting topics,
including of course about Palestine, about the genocide, but also
about other issues like the role of surveillance and surveillance
technology in the genocide, the ecoside that was happening continues
to happen in Gaza and Palestine. And so it was

(01:45:57):
a place of an amazing place of learning and research
and also community engagement. So as I said, you know,
outside speakers are being brought in, community members were coming
in and participating and learning, and so you know, those

(01:46:17):
three things research, teaching and community engagement, those are precisely
the things that the university tells us as faculty and
students that we should be doing so. To me, the
encampment was functioning even though it wasn't getting any support

(01:46:39):
from the university, and it was actually Universities throughout its
five days of existence, was trying to shut it down.
Despite all that, it was functioning essentially like any other
research institute on campus, and I would say probably better
than many of the research institutes campus.

Speaker 10 (01:47:01):
Yeah, you know, I attended a few times to talk
to people, to observe, to do my journalism and give
As you said, the university immediately was very obviously very hostile.
You had people from like university administration giving out little
flyers or something about like university rules, and there was

(01:47:22):
constant presence of UCPD, constant presence of administration, constant concerns
for people about their safety in the encampment. As you say,
the university was very hostile to it, despite it doing
things at the university purports to believe in. Let's discuss
briefly the history. UCSD hasn't always come down so hard

(01:47:45):
on protest movements, but it also has something of a
history of handling these moments very poorly, I would say,
So perhaps we could begin Yeah, if you could talk
about the anti apartheid movement, and then we can move
through what people have called the Black Winter at UCSD
and some of the other things that we both have
some experience of.

Speaker 6 (01:48:05):
Yeah, so it's very interesting to me. I mean, of course,
you know, many people are aware of the history of
a student activism at UCSD, and many times when you
just mentioned that, people immediately think of Angela Davis, who

(01:48:26):
of course was fired by UCSD but then went on
to become a distinguished professor at uc Santa Cruz and
you know, just prolific and amazing scholar academic but not

(01:48:46):
talking about obscure academic topics, but you know, topics that
are directly relevant to people's lives. So many of those topics.
And so now, of course UCSDS celebrates Angela Davis without
mentioning that they fired her. Yeah, so there's kind there

(01:49:08):
is a little bit of this this Okay, we're going
to try to suppress stud's movements, but then later on
celebrate them. So there, of course, were quite a number
of other stuple led movements. One of them, as you mentioned,
was the anti apartheid movement, and of course that was

(01:49:30):
also part of a national movement. Especially Berkeley was very
strong campus in that respect, but you know, numerous campuses
across the US were involved in that movement, as was UCSD,
and we had the UCSD the students, and this was

(01:49:51):
in nineteen eighty five. It took place over a period
of about four or five months, as I call. The
students had numerous protests and at the time for people
who were familiar with the u SSD campus, UCSD has
grown significantly since the eighties, but at that time the

(01:50:16):
central meeting place for campus was what's called Ravel College
in Revel Plaza, so there were numerous protests there anti
apartheype protests. The students on several occasions set replica shanty
towns on the Revel Plaza, as happened at many other

(01:50:38):
universities in the US. Those were basically replicas of impoverished
conditions that South African black folks had to live in
under apartheid in South Africa, so they were setting up
to the shantydown student kind of reproduced those conditions visually.

(01:50:59):
In additionally, during that four or five month period, the
students occupied the Humanities Library, which was called Galbray Hall.
It's just adjacent to rod All Plaza, they took over
the library and they occupied it for a month, more
than a month, okay, Yeah, And like all of these
things happened and there were no invasions of the riot

(01:51:24):
police or anything. And what came out of that movement
that the U sees was that the regents decided to
divest from all corporations associated with South Africa. So that
was like a major win. But it was not just

(01:51:46):
a win for the student movements, but it was also
a win for the university because the students who were
basically able to show the university that participating in this
very unjust system was something that shouldn't be doing. And
so the students basically helped the university to see that. Yeah.

(01:52:07):
And so by kind of allowing these protests to happen,
in a sense, it allowed the university administration and I'm
not singing their praises, because you know, they were quite
retrograde in many ways as they are now, but by
kind of stepping back and allowing these things to happen,

(01:52:27):
the university was able to learn from what the students
were saying and had to act on it. So I
feel that that moment in history was something that I mean,
I know the current administration hasn't forgotten because they celebrated
now they say, you know, how wonderful we were for

(01:52:49):
divesting from South Africa and look at our great students,
you know. But okay, so that happened in the eighties.
Before we get to Black Winter, I'm just going to
mention one other event, which I think is significant, especially
when we're thinking about encampments. So, in nineteen ninety two,

(01:53:11):
UCSD was the only uc campus that did not have
a women's resource center, and women and their allies on
campus had been organizing to get a women's center since
the seventies on the UCSD campus, but they have mostly
been ignored by the administration or where are we going

(01:53:35):
to find the money, blah blah blah. So student led,
but they were also like staff and faculty involved as well,
because the prob of misogyny was very real on the
UCSD campus. Then I arrived UCSD in nineteen ninety and
I immediately saw that problem, so I was very aware

(01:53:59):
of it. So the organizers then of this movement decided
to set up an encampment on what is called sun
God Lawn, which is kind of a major open space
on campus. So they set up this encampment and basically

(01:54:19):
they reproduced what they envisioned a women's center would look like,
and so they essentially opened a women's center in this
open space. It set up this encampment, they staffed at
twenty four to seven and it was up for a week.
No arrests room made, no disciplinary charges resulted. But the

(01:54:42):
university then started paying attention to the demand for a
resource center, and it took them several years, but they
eventually set up the Women's Resource Center that exists now
in nineteen ninety five. So again that was an encampment
where the administration was basically able to learn from the

(01:55:07):
actings on campus about you know how they basically kind
of behave reasonably.

Speaker 10 (01:55:15):
Yeah, let's take a little break, and when we come back,
when I talk about the Black Winter, which coincides with
the start of my own time at uc San Diego.

Speaker 12 (01:55:32):
And then the third example of this is something that's
called Black Winter, and it's a essentially a three week
intense period of organizing on campus that happened. I mean
it was in response and direct response to a racist

(01:55:55):
party that was held by one of the UCSD fraternities
that they called the Compton Cookout. They put out an
announcement on Facebook, which was probably the Golantos today's Instagram,
and I don't even know, probably many of your listeners
haven't even heard of Facebook, but back then it was

(01:56:20):
was very big, and it was a you know, just
despicable racist description of a party where people were supposed
to dress up as what they imagine people, you know,
characters from from Compton would look like. And of course,

(01:56:45):
you know, students who.

Speaker 6 (01:56:47):
Found out about this, you're very upset. At the time.
The students in the Black Student Union and in METCHA,
who were working very closely together, had been organizing for
quite a number of years prior to this around you
know what at the time, this is twenty ten, was

(01:57:10):
called campus climate. And that's basically just the fact that
there was a lot of racism, sometimes overt racism, sometimes
less overt microaggressions that were very common. Yeah, and for
many especially black students, but really all students of color

(01:57:35):
and also queer and trans students as were basically had
to navigate this like every day, I mean as part
of their everyday life. So it was this extra burden
on our students and they had been organizing around this
for quite some time. They had written a report that

(01:57:56):
was called do you see Us? So you see do
you see us? In many ways, they were ready for
an event like this. They were prepared.

Speaker 13 (01:58:07):
They had been doing a lot of organizing and already,
and so when this hit they they basically immediately went
to the administration and said, you know, can you do
something about this? The administration said, you know, it's free speech.
They deployed that phrase when it's.

Speaker 6 (01:58:25):
Stillbot but yeah, tactically, so that was the message they
were putting out and it became it very quickly became
a news item. So local outlets were reporting on it,
and the response of the university was free speech, and
it basically started escalating. There were a number of students

(01:58:48):
on campus at the time, probably still today but maybe
a little bit quieter. We were fairly openly racist, and there
was one group. They published a news paper newsletter which
was particularly so. And they also had a television show
on It doesn't exist anymore. It's called UCSD TV. It

(01:59:09):
was kind of a local TV station. The Compton Cookout
Hardy happened on Monday, and that was like a holiday
in February. And then on Thursday of that week, the
student group that I was talking about how a TV
show and they started using the N word explicitly on

(01:59:31):
that show, and a number of students saw that, and
of course, we're completely outraged. And so the students in
the Black Student Union and kind of their friends were
basically trying to figure out what to do, and so
they decided to call for a rally on the Library Walk,
which is the main one of the main walkways at UCSD,

(01:59:56):
and they called for a rally right in front of
the where Chancellor's office was located at the time. And
so they had this rally quite a number of people.
They called the rally real Pain, Real Action, you know,
they were saying, we were feeling real pain at these

(02:00:17):
kind of racist incidents, and we want to see real
action by the administration. So they had this rally and
the chancellor at the time, who was Mary Ann Fox,
came out to the rally, and there's video of this
somewhat pathetic video, and basically the organizers of the rally

(02:00:40):
were like chanting leading the chance and then the chancellor
was basically following the organizers and trying to put her
arm around them as if somehow that would solve everything.
You just need a hug, And of course the organizers
were like, no getting hear me. I don't want to hug,

(02:01:03):
I want some action. Yeah, this kind of snowballed. The
chancellor basically then met with a bunch of these students
who had been at a rally and kind of they
had they had a list of like thirty demands and
she went through the list and it was just like
there's video of this too, and it's it's almost I mean,

(02:01:24):
I just feel because I knew like a bunch of
these students that I was like, oh my god, you
know how awful this must have felt to them.

Speaker 14 (02:01:33):
But she was going through this list very rationally and
dispassionately and saying, oh, you know we can't do that, sorry,
but this one, yes, this one's done, This one's done.

Speaker 6 (02:01:46):
And the students were sitting there like, well, if it
was done, you know, why haven't you done it? You know,
if it's so easy to do? Yeah, And so nothing
very definitely came out of that meeting, but the university
decided to make a teaching the following Wednesday. And I mean,

(02:02:06):
of course teachings are not the things that people in
power do, so they're obviously kind of co opting and
appropriating that term.

Speaker 10 (02:02:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:02:17):
So what the students decided to do because they were
they knew that this was just going to be okay,
we're going to try to bury this basically, yeah, yeah,
And so what the students did They organized a press
conference that morning, which a lot of press did come
out to, and they had really powerful speakers, and this

(02:02:38):
was before the teaching, and then they just went out
of march. They marched around the Chancellor's complex, you know,
continuously chanting up to the point of the teaching. And
so then they all went into the teaching. They had
like five hundred people by that time, and the room
was just completely act and so they allowed the teaching

(02:03:02):
to start. But then at some point one of the
Black student Union members went up and said, we've had
enough of this. We're now going to do our own
teach out. So they marched out of the teaching and
went around to this area that has these steps and

(02:03:25):
just you know, five hundred folks, incredible concentration of black
folks and people of color, students and faculty and all
of their allies all gathered together and they had to
teach out, which was incredibly powerful. And that day I

(02:03:45):
said it myself and for many other people that I
knew at the university. We basically all said, this is
the best day we've ever had at UCFD, so amazing.
The next day, in the library, in the main library,
one of the students wits who there found a newsing

(02:04:07):
in the library and of course, I'm sure your listeners
know that the news is a very powerful symbol of
violence against black votes in the US, and so that
was that was traumatizing for so many students. I remember
getting text messages from students, you know, saying, you know,

(02:04:31):
I can't come on campus because I don't feel safe
here anymore.

Speaker 10 (02:04:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:04:35):
So the next morning, the students held a rally again
in front of the Chancellor's office where they were probably
I'm guessing close to one thousand people, and people just
got up and were talking about what they were feeling
in their analysis. The university came in. They sent like

(02:04:56):
a spoth person to say, oh, you know, we have
the police out like looking for whoever hangs on the
noose or whatever. And I mean, you know, police are
not a comfort.

Speaker 10 (02:05:11):
No one wanted to hear like, we're sending the cops.

Speaker 6 (02:05:13):
At that moment. Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly. So the students
then went in and they occupied the chancellor's office for
the full day, and that really made people set up
a nose. And by this time there was international coverage
of what was going on. There was an opening of

(02:05:34):
the Civil Rights Investigation on UCSD. I was getting emails
from colleagues like in other countries saying, what's going on
at is this Like, you know, it sounds like a
KKK rally or something, not exactly that, but it's close.
So then this all culminated about a week later in

(02:05:57):
a huge rally where much of his library walk was
completely packed filled with people. It was definitely blocked. And
during that rally, the university said we will commit to
implementing these demands, the demands of the students. Of course,
in the end they backed off much of that, and

(02:06:19):
so that was like a huge victory and it did
result in some pretty substantial changes to use. I'll just
mention a couple of them. So UCSD create a Black
Resource Center which didn't exist before, a Roser Resource Center,
and an intertribal Resource center. So those were significant victories.

(02:06:45):
They also created a undergraduate requirement or requirement that undergraduates
take a diversity, Equity and Inclusion course, and that was
an attempt to try to change the client it and yea,
do some educating. You know, students in California universities come

(02:07:06):
from also to different backgrounds, and some of them are
very aware of racism and it's its impacts and anti
blackness ins and back, so that some come without that knowledge.
So that was significant help, but also at the time
was boosted a little bit. It didn't end up maybe

(02:07:29):
being such a great boost, but it didn't boost the
departments that teach those kind of courses because now they had,
you know, a significantly greater number of students and we're
getting more resources as a result. So all those things
were were good again, no arrests, no disciplinary actions, and

(02:07:52):
the university learned some valuable lessons.

Speaker 10 (02:07:56):
Yeah, definitely, let's take a little break and when come back,
I want to talk about this. This like Palestine exception
to free speed. All right, we are back. Yeah, I

(02:08:17):
remember that that black Winter moment very well. I recently
arrived at UCSD and I was like immediately taken aback
by the brazenness of the racism, and it kind of
come from Britain, not not a non racist country. But yeah,
the openness and the cruelty and the delight that certain
people took in that was pretty appalling. Now, if we

(02:08:40):
skip forward thirteen years right to the beginning of the
genocide in Gaza, a lot has changed on campus, but
also a lot has not. Right, It's still not a
massively diverse institution UCSD, even compared to other institutions in
the city. But from twenty twenty three through twenty twenty four, right,
we have this movement on campus to end the genocide,

(02:09:02):
and Gaza comes a movement it's about more than that, right,
about liberation for Palestinian people, and then broadly about like
I guess, liberation in the region and what that means.
And the university did not respond in the same way.
This has led to people theorizing a Palestine exception for
free speech. So could you explain that to people? And

(02:09:24):
I thought you had a really interesting approach to it
as a scientist that practice could share with people as well.

Speaker 6 (02:09:30):
Yeah, as you said, kind of in the wake of
October seventh, marked the beginning of Israel's genocide on Gaza. Obviously,
it took many people quite a while to conclude it
was genocide, but I remember it was almost maybe it

(02:09:51):
was within a week or perhaps ten days of October seventh,
the Coalition of Palestinian Unions put out a call for
labor solidarity in which they turned to what was happening
in jazz sign And there are also others who were
doing that as well.

Speaker 10 (02:10:10):
Just personally, Like I was in Syria on seventh October,
I think I entered that day. I spent some time
in Kurdistan, and I remember by the time I was
conducting interviews in southern Kurdistan, maybe a week later, maybe
ten days later, Kurdish groups were using that phrase right,
like there was a sense of like impending disaster that

(02:10:33):
came very quickly. This is what will happen next will
be horrific. But yeah, those calls came very quickly, as
you said.

Speaker 6 (02:10:39):
Yeah, And of course, like students and USSD, we were
kind of also coming to those conclusions. The administration was
putting out language that was, you know, sympathetic to those
who were killed or you know, injured on October seventh,

(02:11:05):
but they were ignoring everything else that was happening. And
so of course This wasn't a surprise, but it was
part of what was happening. And it was also the
kind of language that the university was using, and this
is something that continued. It was essentially recalling, even though

(02:11:27):
it kind of had this neutral sense to it, it
was recalling the you know, the decades of Islamophobia, anti
Arab racism that happened in the wake of of nine
to eleven. So in a sense, they were communicating by

(02:11:48):
using that kind of language language around, you know, using
words like violence and safety and civility. They were communicating
very clearly that people could talk about what happened on
the morning of October seventh, but not about anything else.

(02:12:10):
And that was entirely clear. I mean, it's not like
we had to do any deep analysis to figure out
that's what the administration was saying. And you know, as
students organized over the following months, students who were engaged

(02:12:31):
in that organizing or being subject to disciplinary investigations. There
were some faculty who were investigating for mentioning the genocide
and the occupation of Palestine in their classes, and all
of these things were creating a climate of fear but

(02:12:56):
also uncertainty like you could never be sure if what
you would say could get you in trouble, and so
the easiest thing to do would be to say nothing
at all.

Speaker 10 (02:13:07):
Yeah, it's like a chilling effect on speech.

Speaker 6 (02:13:10):
Absolutely, so that was happening. This phenomenon, of course, wasn't
invented by you say, the administration. It's something that's been
going on for quite a while, many many decades. As
you mentioned, James, is called the Palestine Exception to free speech.

(02:13:30):
There if anyone wants to find out more about it.
I mean, there's a huge amount of scholarly work on it.
There's an excellent report that's available freely online which is
called exactly that, the Palestine Exception to Free Speech, written
by Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights. It's

(02:13:51):
very easy to find online. And one of the things
as a physicist, I'm very critical of the role of
phys in society. You have to think very deeply to
be critical of physics, thinking about nuclear physics and so forth.
But as a person who does physics professionally, I often

(02:14:16):
think about problems from a physics perspective, and so when
I think about the Palestine Exception, I kind of bring
a bit of a physics lens to it. So in physics,
when we're looking at a phenomenon, we often can't observe
that phenomenon directly. And so, for example, people who study

(02:14:40):
the physics of subatomic particles, they will to study how
to sub atomic particles interact, or many sub atomic particles interact,
they will collide them together. They don't have the precision
and the resolution to observe exactly interaction, but they can

(02:15:01):
look before the interaction and then what comes out afterwards.
And by looking at those patterns of what goes in
and what comes out, they can get an idea of
what's happening within that black box. And so this is
the way I view the Palestine exception, because the Palestine

(02:15:23):
exception to free speech is just the idea that there
are these structures in society that have been formulated such
that it makes it very difficult to engage in speech
about Palestine. And the impact of that, of course, is
that if you can't talk about Palestine, then violence that's

(02:15:47):
committed against Palestinians is something that's enabled facilitated by that
lack of discussion. Like I don't have access to the
conversations amongst you see the administrators or between u SEE
administrators and the main office of the President of U SEE, Like,

(02:16:09):
I don't have access to any of that information. In
some sense, that's the black box part of it. But
what we can see is kind of what's going in
and what's coming out of that box, and so we
can see the behaviors, the patterns of behaviors. And so
as a physicist, I'm like, Okay, if we're going to
look at the uc and say, the University of California

(02:16:32):
and say, is this a place where the Palestine Exception
of free speech is operating, then we were not going
to be able to have access to the rooms in
which that's planned, if it is being planned, But rather
we can look at the pattern. And the really interesting
thing about this report I cited all right, Signed Legal

(02:16:54):
and the Center Constitutional Rights, is they lay that out
very clearly. They lay out, Okay, the Palestine Exception of
free speech is basically a combination of these kinds of behaviors.
So they talk about things like accusations of anti Semitism,
for example, and accusations of support for terrorism. So if

(02:17:14):
you come to any rally pro palestinean rally at UCSD,
there's always at least one or many counter protesters who
are shared shouting exactly that this is anti semitic, that
everyone here is supporting Hamas, you know, and when we

(02:17:35):
say Hamas, you know, that just immediately goes to everybody's
mind to terrorism. Yeah, all these kinds of behaviors on
it their way out are things that can be seen
you see wide campuses, but definitely a UCSD. Yeah.

Speaker 10 (02:17:49):
Yeah, it's important to consider, like as we enter a
time where like repression of campus speech is at a height, right,
like the combination of this Palestine exception and the seeming
desire to expel as many international students as possible, that
this is contrary to the reason the university exists, as
well as as you say, it suppresses opposition to genocide.

(02:18:14):
To finish up, I guess we're not just doing this
at the university because it's a place where we like
to argue, or because students are particularly predisposed to radical politics,
or for any other number of reasons. Right, the university
is also part of the apparatus. Can you explain that
a little bit like the university is not neutral in
this to begin with?

Speaker 6 (02:18:36):
Yes, that is certainly true, and I mean that happens
in many different ways. Some of the ways we don't
even know about, but there are many of those ways
that primarily through student research, some faculty research. We have
some ideas. Basically a UCSD and other uc campuses, there's

(02:18:58):
quite a lot of military related research, you know, some
of them research is not directly related to the genocide,
but as we all know, the US is supplying many
of the weapons that are being used in the genocide
and now in Iran as well, and some of those weapons,

(02:19:23):
like drones, the aspects of them have been designed and
worked on at UCSD. Kind of the hardware then of
genocide is very much a product of university research, part
of which has been time in UCSD at other uc
campuses and part at other universities in the US and

(02:19:49):
Israel as well. Another aspect of it which I think
we don't know as much about this software. So you know,
there's a huge amount of research on artificial intelligence that's
happening in UCSD, other uc campuses of other university campuses.

(02:20:09):
I mean, all that research came out of universities. You know,
as we now know through credible journalistic investigations that Israel
is using artificial intelligence and it's targeting. Yeah, and apparently
that's also happening in the US military as well. You know.

(02:20:32):
So there's like another very direct connection. A third connection
which is very strong at UCSD or so many other campuses,
is that part of the creation of a discourse that
legitimizes and justifies Israel's occupation of Colstein is archaeology. And

(02:20:57):
I'm not an expert in this field, but I could
just kind of cite what other people I've talked about,
but there are many archaeological investigations that UCSD academics have
participated in Israel that contribute to creating this story that

(02:21:18):
the people running Israel and Israeli citizens are the rightful
owners of that land and that the Palestinians came in
at some late point, maybe a couple of decades before
the founding of Israel, which of course is completely false,

(02:21:40):
and there's so much scholarship about that. But that's the
that's the purpose of those investigations, and so again that's
connected to universities and the UCSD in particular. One can't
really argue that the having a discussion about simplicity and

(02:22:01):
jazz side is something that is not of interest to UCSD.

Speaker 10 (02:22:07):
The definitelys Yeah, Okay, it have to happen at the
university because it is about the university. Yes, I think
they finish up. We've outlined why it's important, we have
outlined how anti genocidal speech when it is about Palestinian
people is treated differently, and we've outlined why there is
a chilling effect. I understand some people, especially international students

(02:22:29):
and non citizen faculty, et cetera, have real concerns, and
I want to respect those. But for people who would
like to they should continue to speak out right, like,
we all lose even if we have if you somehow
are unconcerned by genocide of fellows, human beings, if the
university becomes a space where certain things are oppressed, and
what we can't stand up for each other. So, like,

(02:22:49):
what resources would you suggest for those people? As new
students are coming into university this year, they've lived half
their high school years through this genocide. I'm sure many
of them will want continue advocating. What would you suggest
for them?

Speaker 6 (02:23:03):
Yeah, especially for students, I would suggest to connect with
organizations that are already kind of doing this work. So
you know, at UCSD there's Students for Justice in Palestine
but there's also quite a number of other student organizations.
Like tomorrow we're having a major Earth Day rally where

(02:23:26):
organizations Students for Justice Palestine, but also anti imperialist organization
like SPARK, and then other organizations like Green New Deal, Students,
sustainability collectives. They're all coming together to talk about Palestine
and the ego side Palestine and the jedocide in Palestine.

(02:23:50):
So I think that there are ways for students from
a broad range of interests and backgrounds to get involved
in organizing. You know, it's not like you have to
start that from scratch. People are already doing that. It
might be a little bit hard at your university to
find those because of the suppression, but if you if

(02:24:13):
you ask around, you will, or if you look on
social media you will, you will find those folks. That's
why I would start as a student. For faculty and
staff especially, it's a little bit more difficult because we're,
you know, as employees, we're very vulnerable. Faculty with tenure

(02:24:37):
are less vulnerable. But you know, my case and other
faculties cases are our examples of how tenure doesn't really
protect you from this if they're determined. So I feel
that there's again here. What we need to do is
to kind of work collectively, so you don't want to

(02:24:58):
fight the system on your own, but find other faculty
who are doing this work and basically who can can
work as a support network and kind of collectively find
ways to speak out to support our students, which I
think is in many ways our primary responsibility with regard

(02:25:23):
to the genocide, and basically create spaces where where it's
possible to talk about the genocide.

Speaker 10 (02:25:33):
Yeah, I think it's really important. I guess I'll just say, like,
if you're a student or faculty and you see someone
involved in its advocacy, like, don't feel afraid to go
talk to them and ask either. Like university can be intimidating,
especially when you're a new faculty member also undergraduate for
that matter, Like it can be hard to meet people
and talk to people, but I think most people would

(02:25:53):
be happy if you did. Is there anything else you'd
like to share with people? Before we'd wrap up?

Speaker 6 (02:25:58):
There was so much? Yeah, so I do hope we
can talk again sometime.

Speaker 15 (02:26:03):
Yes we will, But also just maybe I just want
to say, you know, thanks to you, there aren't you know,
a huge number of spaces where we can have these.

Speaker 6 (02:26:13):
Kinds of discussions.

Speaker 16 (02:26:14):
So so I'm really grateful, you know, I know that
you do doing not just this kind of work, but
also you know, really going out and reporting on stories that.

Speaker 6 (02:26:26):
Aren't being told. And so I'm grateful to you basically
for doing that work.

Speaker 10 (02:26:31):
It's very kind. Thank you.

Speaker 4 (02:26:45):
This is it could happen here Executive Disorder, our weekly
newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world,
and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis to Dame,
joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans. This
episode recovering the week of April sixteenth to April twenty second. James,
some small news items at the start.

Speaker 10 (02:27:07):
Yeah, a few things I want to discuss up top.
The United States government appears to be running multiple propaganda
sites with associated X accounts that are posing as Iranian media.
One of the accounts is located in Florida. This is not,
like massively uncommon in a conflict out of this right now,
the information war is part of the war.

Speaker 4 (02:27:29):
This is what like US actual psyop is like, this
is what the United States syop operations are.

Speaker 10 (02:27:35):
Yeah, the syop is not like the woman sold you
that you follow on Instagram.

Speaker 1 (02:27:38):
This isn't new for the US to be doing. It
is new for it to be like this sloppy. I
think that's probably fair to say this is like a
sloppier than normal.

Speaker 10 (02:27:47):
Yes, that's what's remarkable here. It said it's shoddy. Yeah,
and that is not a good sign for their for
like the whole US sort of capacity in this regard.

Speaker 9 (02:27:56):
But it depends on how you think about it.

Speaker 10 (02:27:57):
But yeah, yeah, yeah, sure's Actually a number of former
DHS Department pronoun Security and IODS, Immigration and Naturalization Services
officials have filed an amicus brief with a Supreme Court
explaining why the cancelation of the Haiti TPS Temporary Protected
Status is illegal. They do include Janet Napolitano, which is nice,

(02:28:18):
but a ton of people from Obama Bush, even Clinton
admin pre DHS I ins were pilots amakus brief. An
IDF soldier has been photographed destroying a statue of the
Crucifixion of Jesus Christ in Lebanon, showing it with a
splitting more. A lot of reporting called it a sledge hammer.

(02:28:39):
That's not what a sledgehammer looks like I know, I
get really picky about this, but like, maybe if you
haven't worked with your hands, you should write things that
can be read by someone who has scan and not
be completely ridiculous. The IDF has launched an investigation and
so far subjected two soldiers to thirty days in military detention,
which is more than they would get if they had
killed actual Christian children in Palestine. Says a Lot, I

(02:29:02):
think that this image is like, we spoke about this
in our group chat, but this is the it's one image,
It's comic book evil. There are many reasons why this
is the thing that's blowing up for them. Ken Paxton
is investigating Act Blue. Act Blue is a major donation
website for Democratic candidates, is claiming that they have continued
to accept gift card donations, which could hide donations from

(02:29:27):
foreign individuals or corporations or even states. I suppose the
United States government's plans to send Afghans who are stuck
in limbo in Kata to the Democratic Republic of Congo
being reported on by the New York Times. Just for
some context here, I saw people sharing this and thinking
that they that this referred to Afghan SIV recipient who

(02:29:49):
a resident in the United States. That is not what
it's referring to. It's referring to people who the Biden
administration removed from Afghanistan or wherever they worked in Pakistan
and then took them to kata As like a temporary
stopping off point where they would continue to do their
vetting and background checks. This is normal for refugee admissions
as opposed to asylum admissions. And then the twenty twenty

(02:30:12):
four election have been Democrats lost, and that people have
been in limbo ever since, and it appears to Trump
administration has been trying to get them various states in
Africa to accept them, and it's now proposing the Democratic
Republic of Congo, a country which already has a significant
refugee crisis.

Speaker 4 (02:30:28):
Ron Decentis, who is term limited as governor, has been
jockeying for a position inside the Trump administration. Axios reports
Dessentis has expressed interest in being a Secretary of War,
attorney general, or even a Supreme Court justice. Trump is
expected to reclassify marijuana as soon as maybe today. We're

(02:30:50):
recording this on Wednesday, April twenty second.

Speaker 9 (02:30:52):
Fingers crossed earlier this.

Speaker 4 (02:30:54):
Week Trump signed an executive order to advance its psychedelic
treatment for mental illness and possibly reschedule certainly substances which
have completed phase three clinical trials.

Speaker 6 (02:31:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:31:03):
This, this is the real sign that their internal polling
is showing Trump really closing on getting blow thirty percent approval.

Speaker 1 (02:31:09):
That's that's the most whatever gets. It's actual legal marijuana.

Speaker 9 (02:31:15):
Fuck it. Yeah, Like at this point.

Speaker 10 (02:31:18):
It's such an easy win, and it's been an easy
win for the last three presidents, and anyone could have
done it.

Speaker 1 (02:31:24):
It's a gun that's been left on the ground and
fucking Trump finally just picked the damn thing up after
it got covered in an inch and a half at dust.

Speaker 9 (02:31:33):
Like unbelievable.

Speaker 2 (02:31:35):
They're desperate, keep pushing. We can get like completely legal
ELOSD I believe in us m hmm.

Speaker 4 (02:31:40):
On Fox News' Sunday Morning Show, Cash Burttel announced that
the FBI will soon make arrests related to Trump's claims
that the twenty twenty election was stolen, with Patel saying, quote,
they tried to thwart our elections and rig the entire system.

Speaker 17 (02:31:56):
I can announce on your show that we've got all
the information we need We're working with our prosecutors, a
Department of Justice and their Attorney General, Todd Blanche and
we are going to be making arrest and it's coming,
and I promise you it's coming soon.

Speaker 4 (02:32:10):
Bettel later said it's a conspiracy case and that quote,
we have the information to back President Trump's claims. On Tuesday,
voters in Virginia approved a redistracting measure which would likely
move four Republican seats to Democrat seats in the midterms.
This measure passed was fifty one point five percent of

(02:32:31):
the vote, totaling over three million votes. Virginia joins California
in approving new congressional maps to combat the recent gerrymandering
in red states like Texas. At the behest of Trump,
but now with Virginia, Dems are actually up one seat nationally.
Ronda Santis has called for Florida lawmakers to meet next
week to consider redistricting in their state. Trump has called

(02:32:54):
the Virginia election quote unquote rigged, saying that Republicans were
winning until a quote massive mail in ballot drop quote,
which is just how elections work. That's just how voting works.

Speaker 1 (02:33:08):
Yeah, we were winning until more people voted for the other.

Speaker 4 (02:33:12):
Until we counted more votes that showed that we did
not win.

Speaker 2 (02:33:15):
We just live in the twenty sixteen election forever. Now, Yeah,
it's great.

Speaker 1 (02:33:20):
I was doing pretty well in that boxing match until
it started.

Speaker 10 (02:33:24):
Until the other guy punched me in the face.

Speaker 4 (02:33:27):
The margin of victory closely matches the result of the
twenty twenty four presidential election in Virginia. Republicans have challenged
the Virginia redistricting in court since before today's election, and
the Supreme Court of Virginia ruled that the measure could
go to a vote while legal challenges continue. This is
the second most important election this week, the most important

(02:33:48):
one obviously being the Webbys, in which I think we
can announce we have won Woo in unrigged election matters,
the only fair election that this country is seen, possibly
in like over twenty five years.

Speaker 10 (02:34:01):
That's why they selected Claude as Person of the year.

Speaker 1 (02:34:05):
Clearly, the Webbees in twenty twenty six are the only
election that's going to affect anybody's lives.

Speaker 9 (02:34:10):
I think we can all agree on that anyway.

Speaker 1 (02:34:14):
So as you probably are aware, because the President shouts
about it every ten minutes, there's a ceasefire currently in
effect in the conflict with Iran, the war of choice
that we started with Iran. James is going to talk
a little bit more about that in a second. But
because of the stand down, there's been kind of time
for both forces to you know, reassess things, and time

(02:34:37):
for outside people to reassess like kind of what we
can tell about what's going on. Obviously, in the immediate
wake of Operation Epic Fury, and is recently as last Tuesday,
President Trump said, quote, we've taken out their navy, We've
taken out their air force, We've taken out their leaders.
On April eighth, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called Operation Epic

(02:34:58):
Fury a historic and overwhel victory on the battlefield. By
any measure, Epic Fury decimated Iran's military and rendered it
combat and effective for years to come. Now, that last sentence,
the first part is technically accurate.

Speaker 9 (02:35:12):
But not in the way that hegseeth means.

Speaker 10 (02:35:15):
No one knows what decimate means anymore.

Speaker 1 (02:35:16):
Decimate literally means to destroy like a tenth of a group. Yeah, right, yea,
And yeah, that's pretty accurate, right, But the second part
of that sentence rendered it combat and effective for years
to come is not accurate. Neither is Trump's statement that
we've taken out their navy and their air force. CBS
published an article today reporting that roughly sixty percent of

(02:35:39):
the naval arm of the Islamic Revolutionary guardcore is still
in existence, including fast tag speedboats and Iranian air power,
while it's been degraded, is still significantly more functional than
actually I had assumed. About two thirds of the Iranian
Air Force is still believed to be operational, despite the
massive US in his Israeli air strikes largely targeting air

(02:36:02):
production and storage facilities. The fact that you're looking at
two thirds of Iran's navy and air force still functional
and at least about half their ballistic missile stockpile and
their launch system stockpile intact. That's a significant difference from
what the administration has claimed and evidence that where we

(02:36:25):
to continue to press with the open fighting part of
this conflict, it would be years probably before you're talking
about like a complete degradation of Iranian fighting capability if
that was ever achieved, Like when you factor in the
United States would continue to suffer casualties, and we've already
been losing more of, you know, particularly our interceptor missile

(02:36:48):
capability and a number of advanced systems like a wax,
then we can afford to replace James.

Speaker 10 (02:36:53):
Yeah, so I want to talk a little bit about
the cease fire itself, right, and then like what's been
happening there. Let's start with, like I guess straight off,
horn moves updates and then get into the CISFAR. The
Navy intercepted an Iranian vessel in the Arabian Sea this week,
close to the Iran Pakistan border. The Tuska was warned.

(02:37:17):
Imagine they use an l rad to warn it. People
see l rads on ships sometimes I think they're coming
to like make you deaf. That's one of the reasons
of ships have lrads. They could have also used the
radio that if they can talk to them on the
radio of their receiving communications with the radio. They then
ordered it to evacuate its engine room. They then shot
out its engine with the five inch gun.

Speaker 9 (02:37:38):
First time they've gotten to do that in forty years.

Speaker 10 (02:37:40):
Yeah, I was looking at it. I guess it was
it was since what nineteen eighty eight, the last time
that I was thinking it's It's been a lot. It's
been a minute since the ship engaged inner the ship
with its main gun. It was a USS Spruance, it
guided missile destroyer that did that. Subsequently, US marines on
the Tripoli we were posted on when the Tripoli first

(02:38:01):
move towards that region.

Speaker 6 (02:38:02):
Right.

Speaker 10 (02:38:03):
We specifically said that this is one of the capacities
that it had they boarded the ship, so they transferred
a helicopter and then boarded the ship. The US has
since inspected other ships, including outside of the Saint Comeo.
So the US perceives its blockade to be global right
of Iranian assets, of Iranian vessels and the quote unquote

(02:38:27):
shadow fleet, which you've already explained on ED, so I'm
not going to go into depth on what that means.
The IOGC also fired at several vessels in the street.
There is some reporting that one of them, an Indian tanker,
had paid a fee in cryptocurrency to what turned out
to be a scammer. I am certain that these scams
exist because there have been multiple warnings of them. I

(02:38:50):
haven't seen any evidence that is satisfactory enough for me
to be confident that that particular ship had been scammed.
The most compelling piece of evidence. A ship is called
the San Mar Herald. Is this audio that we're going
to play right here?

Speaker 4 (02:39:07):
If my navy sefi naby, is this modeling a san Mada?

Speaker 6 (02:39:11):
You give me Clarence to go?

Speaker 4 (02:39:13):
My name second on your list.

Speaker 3 (02:39:16):
You get me Clarence to go.

Speaker 10 (02:39:17):
You are fighting now, let me turn back, just to
guess I wasn't clear. You gave me clearance to go.
You're firing now, let me turn back. So it does
seem that that vessel believe that it had clearance to
go and was sent fire upon this morning. There was
some ocynth pictures of IIGC and they looked like kind
of fast attack boats kind of things. Throughout what was

(02:39:39):
talking about in the straight up horn mus Yeah, something
of a flex Yay, we still have a navy like yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think that's important in the context of the ceasefire.
I want to explain very briefly, there's been a lot
of contradictory reporting on when, where, and how negotiations are
going to happen. It cease fire was set to expire
the day we're recording Wednesday. On Tuesday, we saw Donald

(02:40:01):
Trump laterally extend the ceasefire by truthing quote based on
the fact that the government of Iran is seriously fractured,
not unexpectedly so, and upon the request of Field Marshal
Simonia and Prime Minister Shabaz Sharif of Pakistan, we have
been asked to hold our attack on the country of
Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can
come up with a unified proposal. I have therefore directed

(02:40:24):
our military to continue the blockade and in all other
respects remain ready and able, and will therefore extend the
cease fire until such time as their proposal hast submitted
and discussions are concluded one way or the other. President
Donald J. Trump, the consensus seems to me that this
is not like an infinite extension. This is like maybe
less than a week for Iran to either comply with

(02:40:47):
US terms or submit proposals in the US considers acceptable.
A lot of that reporting does seem to come from
Barack Revied, who's not really good at journalism, so take
it with the pinch of salt. Trump, though, is correct
that the state of Iran is on a unified entity,
and I covered this in the piece I did last
week on an update on the Iran war, Right, Like,

(02:41:09):
I think there's a tendency from people in the global
North to look at a state and see it as
like a pyramid. Right, you have the head of state,
and then you have government, and then you have legislature,
and then you have the people they commanded, right, military
and all the civil bureaucracy. That's not quite how Iran works.
And I went into more detail in that episode that

(02:41:30):
I made, so I'm not going to go into it here,
but there are a series of overlapping but not entirely
aligned power centers within Iran and within its military capacity,
both within its military and the traditional sense, and within
the IIGC. Why this is relevant to the negotiations is
it it's not possible for politicians to negotiate if they

(02:41:50):
do not believe that they can agree to terms and
that their military will then comply with those terms.

Speaker 6 (02:41:58):
Right.

Speaker 10 (02:41:58):
If the Iranian Foreign Ministry agrees with the US to
do something, the IGC doesn't do it, that then immediately
undermines any further negotiations.

Speaker 6 (02:42:06):
Right.

Speaker 10 (02:42:07):
So when we see, for instance, this morning, a large
number of boats going into straight upform news that looks
a little bit like a flex right, in the context
of this power struggle, in the context of Trump acknowledging
that Trump has once again been truthing this week about
Iranian nuclear weapons. I'm just going to read one of

(02:42:27):
his truths because I think it contained. It shows that
the administration feels that it is weak on this particular accusation.
Israel never took me into the war with Iran. The
results of October seventh added to my lifelong opinion that
Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. Did Yeah, I
don't know what's going on with that sentence.

Speaker 4 (02:42:48):
That's just that's that's Iran can never have a nuclear
weapon in karmadd did the word did?

Speaker 6 (02:42:55):
Yeah?

Speaker 10 (02:42:56):
Yeah, I'm not reading that wrong. Yes, just it's to
hang out just what it said.

Speaker 2 (02:43:00):
Yeah, he's simply senile.

Speaker 10 (02:43:02):
I can't help you. I'm just saying the words. I
watch it and read the fake news pundits and polls
in total disbelief. Ninety percent of what they say are
lies and made up stories, and the polls are rigged,
much as a twenty to twenty presidential election was rigged,
just like the results in Venezuela, which the media doesn't
like talking about the results in Iran. Will be amazing

(02:43:22):
and if arounds new leaders, regime chains, exclamation mark clothes,
parentheses are smart, Iran can have a great and prosperous future.
President DJT. That's one of the more challenging passages of
English language texts that I've ever approached. I speak four
or five languages, and that's that's speak set me back,

(02:43:43):
But I've tried to give you a good faith reading
of it. He's clearly sensitive to the allegation that Israel
pushed the US into this conflict.

Speaker 4 (02:43:53):
Rant He's clearly sensitive.

Speaker 10 (02:43:57):
The last thing that I want to add is that
strikes on Kurdish groups have continued despite the ceasefire, right
despite the renewed ceasefire the PAK. Just two hours after
Trump announced the extension of the ceasefire, Tehran sent four
drones to attack a PAK base. There have been more

(02:44:19):
injuries in Kurdistan. It doesn't seem that Iran considers any
ceasefire to apply to its ongoing attack against the Deutroy
Dulati groups who are currently in southern Kurdistan inside the
borders of Iraq.

Speaker 4 (02:44:32):
Next up, we will discuss the charges against the SPLC,
But first listen to these acts. Okay, we are back.

(02:44:52):
On Tuesday, April twenty, first Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche
and FBI Director Cash Battel announced that a grand jury
indited the Southern Poverty Law Center on eleven counts, including
wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and
conspiracy to commit to concealment money laundering. The indictment argues
that the SPLC defrauded their donors by using donation money

(02:45:15):
to pay confidential informants within white supremacist or neo Nazi organizations.
Here is a short clip of the press conference of
a reporter asking Todd Blanche a question, I just want
to make sure.

Speaker 16 (02:45:28):
I understand you're alleging that the Southern Poverty Law Center
was paying the leaders of KKK and other groups to continue.

Speaker 6 (02:45:38):
Their operations.

Speaker 18 (02:45:39):
Is that I'm not alleging it. The grandeury return and
indictment that says that. And so what the investigation found,
according to the indictment that was returned today, is that
they were paying. So the Southern Poverty Law Center is
raising money, asking folks to give them money to dismount racism,
and over a very long period of time, they were

(02:46:00):
using some of the money they raised from donors to
pay to they call them feel you know, basically to
informants for information, for access, to just pay them for
certain to do certain things. And so yes, that's exactly
what the indictment charges.

Speaker 4 (02:46:18):
The SPLC is a nonprofit advocacy organization aimed at quote
unquote dismantling white supremacy and exposing hate. They operate a
blog called hate Watch and run a public database of
hate groups and far right extremists. This indictment claims that
the SPLC has utilized informants to gained information on far
right activity since the eighties, but between twenty fourteen and

(02:46:42):
twenty twenty three, the SPLC secretly paid over three million
dollars to individuals associated with various violent extriist groups quote
unquote in a clandestine manner.

Speaker 6 (02:46:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:46:55):
No, one, if you kind of have been in the
world of CVE counting violent extremism like research or like
involved in NGOs in that sphere at all, or a
been a researcher there, you're probably aware of the fact
that the SPLC, like has been paying informants. A lot
of their scoops are because some Nazi tells on another

(02:47:17):
Nazi essentially right yeah, so that part isn't surprising. The
weirdness is how the SPLC was going about it and
how much fucking money they were giving some of these
The amounts of some of these is yeah, it was
legitimately shocking, and I do want to get into some
more details about those amounts in the groups and the
sort of nest of fake businesses the SPLC used to distribute.

Speaker 4 (02:47:41):
This money, according to the indictment. The indictment reads that
this was donation money quote received under the auspice that
the funds would be used to quote unquote dismantle violent
ex rivist groups. This money was instead being used in
part by the SPLC to pay leaders and others within
these same violenctricy humis groups. That money was then used

(02:48:01):
for the benefit of the individuals as well as the
violent extremist groups unquote. Money was funneled to individuals associated
with violent extreamist groups, including the klu Klux Klan, the
United Clans of America, Unite the Right National Alliance, National
Socialist Movement, Aryan Nations, and the affiliated Sadistic Soul's Motorcycle Club,

(02:48:22):
National Socialist Party of America, American Nazi Party, and American Front.
One informant, according to the indictment, was quote a member
of the online leadership chat group that planned the twenty
seventeen Unite the Right event in Charlottesville, Virginia, and attended
the event at the direction of the SPLC. This informant

(02:48:44):
made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and
helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees. Between
twenty fifteen and twenty twenty three, the SPLC secretly paid
this informant more than two hundred and seventy thousand dollars
from twenty fourteen to twenty twenty three. More than one
million dollars was allegedly paid to someone affiliated with the

(02:49:05):
National Alliance who served as an informant for over twenty
years while fundraising for this Nazi group. The Imperial Wizard
of the Rebooted Imperial Clans of America was a paid
informant according to the indictment. This is likely a guy
named Bradley Jenkins, an officer in the National Socialist Movement
and the Aryan Nations affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, secretly

(02:49:30):
received more than three hundred thousand dollars between twenty fourteen
and twenty twenty, the former chairman of the National Alliance
was secretly paid more than one hundred and forty thousand dollars,
while the SPLC website featured an extremist profile page for
this individual, likely Eric Glebe. The SPLC also paid the
leader of the National Socialist Party of America seventy thousand

(02:49:51):
dollars between twenty fourteen to twenty sixteen. This individual was
a former director of an Aryan Nations faction and a
former member of the CAKE. This is likely a guy
named Paul Mullett, who the SBLC hosts an extremist file
web page on their website. A few other unidentified informants
are listed in the indictment, as well as a claim

(02:50:13):
that the SBLC funneled more than one hundred and sixty
thousand dollars from a fictitious entity to an informant quote,
who then sent funds to various violent extremist group leaders,
including the former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the
klu Klux Klan unquote. That's a lot of money.

Speaker 6 (02:50:30):
Now.

Speaker 4 (02:50:30):
To obscure the nature of these payments, the SBLC opened
a series of bank accounts at multiple banks for various
fictitious businesses. These weren't actually incorporated, but they claimed to
be businesses with names like The Center Investigative Agency or
the CIA, Why Yeah, Fox Photography, Northwest Technologies, Tech Writers Group,

(02:50:56):
Rare Books, Warehouse Imagery, Inc. Ja JA Electronics, Kelly's Marine,
and Turner Personnel.

Speaker 9 (02:51:04):
Great Good Work Guys.

Speaker 4 (02:51:07):
Essentially, the DOJ is arguing that the SBLC solicited donations
under false pretenses and then transferred that money to extremist
groups using a network of fake businesses. To get a conviction,
the dog will have to argue that this activity constitutes wirefraud,
false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to
commit concealment money laundering. A conviction will result in the

(02:51:30):
forfeiture of financial gains from the alleged illegal activities. The
right has reacted to this news by calling the Unite
the Right rally and kind of the alt right movement
as it existed from this time period a syop or
a false flag. Senator Mike Lee, right wing political influencer

(02:51:50):
Nick Sorter, and Elon Musk have boosted these claims, getting
tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands alikes on x
Everything app This seems to be a narrative. It's not
really new, I guess, but an enhanced narrative that is
emerging among the online right as a way to dissuade
some of the uglier parts of that era, while still

(02:52:11):
carrying along a lot of the same politics, especially on
like the Great Replacement, which is more of a mainstream
idea among the conservative movement at this point in time,
so they're able to walk away from the uglier kind
of imagery and explicitly notz the elements of this like
the KKK, which is very boomer very very very Boomer
coded k the KKK, so they're able to call stuff

(02:52:33):
like that and the Unite the Right rally of syop
or a false flag while still reaping the benefits that
the alt right movement achieved by kind of trailblazing certain
rhetoric into the conservative mainstream. Right wing commentators have also
used this news to reassert one of their favorite claims
that Patriot Front is a psyop or a false flag operation,

(02:52:55):
that whenever a group of young Nazis show up in
a u all all wearing matching outfits and masks, that
this is a staged event by either the deep State,
the FEDS, or a group like the SPLC. Patriot Front
is not actually named in this indictment. There's no evidence
that the SPLC was paying anyone at Patriot Front to

(02:53:16):
inform on the operations of that group, and obviously paying
an individual to inform on the details of an upcoming
event like Unite the Right does not mean that the
Unite the Right event in Charlottesville was planned or staged
by the SPLC. Dozens of people were involved in the

(02:53:37):
planning of this event, and hundreds participated of their own volition.
One person in a planning group chat sending info to
the SPLC does not mean that this action was staged
or fake.

Speaker 1 (02:53:52):
Anyone who's in the field has that a lot of
issues with the SPLC over the last few years, especially
people who work for them. I have a lot of
I know a lot of people have worked for them
and gotten fucked over by them. They did a lot
of union busting too. The people who run the SPLC,
and some of whom are the people who are specifically
accused of having committed these crimes. I don't know if

(02:54:12):
I feel like that like the specific things they have
to prove in order to date a conviction are accurate
because fundamentally, anyone who donated to the SPLC knew that
they were like getting shipped from informants. You know, like,
I don't think that was like the amount of money though,
is shocking.

Speaker 4 (02:54:30):
That's what the That's what they're gonna have to defend
in court. Yeah, they're gonna have to hard and have
to argue that the money that was donated was used
for its intended purpose, which was dismantling whit's premisies. You'll
have to say that the information that they obtained through
these through through paying these informants, was still in furtherance
of that mission. Right, That's going to be what they're
going to defend in court.

Speaker 15 (02:54:50):
Now.

Speaker 4 (02:54:50):
You know, obviously the FBI also uses information, sure, right,
the FBI does this same thing. Famously, the FBI paid
the OH nine A affiliated Joshua Caleb Sutter over one
hundred and forty thousand dollars from twenty three to twenty
twenty one. The FBI funded a publishing house, a neo
Nazi publishing house essentially yeah yeah, yeah, which is responsible for,

(02:55:14):
in part, the political direction of the Adam Off Indivision
now at Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has said that
quote the SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence
end quote. Using donor money to allegedly profit off klansmen
cannot go unchecked. Unquote. Patel has said that quote this
is illegal, and this is an ongoing investigation against all

(02:55:37):
individuals involved. The SBLC released a video statement saying that
the use of informants was quote unquote necessary and claimed
quote these individuals risked their lives to infiltrate and inform
on the activities of our nation's most radical and violent
extremist groups unquote. The indictment does not characterize many of

(02:55:57):
these informants as quote unquote infiltrators, but rather individuals who
were already members of these groups and were paid by
the SBLC to share information and gossip on fellow members.
The SBLC statement also said that they quote frequently shared
what we learned from informants with local and federal law enforcement,

(02:56:17):
including the FBI. We did not, however, share our use
of informants broadly with anyone to protect the identity and
safety of the informants and their families unquote, like a
lot of the people in this field. The FBI knew
the SBLC was doing this.

Speaker 9 (02:56:31):
Yeah, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:56:32):
After the assassination of Charlie kirk Cash, Betel announced that
the FBI was severing ties with the SBLC, saying the
organization had been turned into a quote unquote partisan smear
machine that defamed quote unquote mainstream Americans with its hate map.

Speaker 6 (02:56:48):
Okay.

Speaker 4 (02:56:49):
Attorney Ed Martin, former head of the DOJ's Weaponization Working
Group as in weaponizing the dj against political enemies, shared
news of the indictment on x everything app and wrote, quote,
they killed Charlie and they will pay unquote. So clearly
this prosecution is politically motivated. Right There is political motivations

(02:57:11):
behind deciding to do this right now. The FBI already
knew that this was happening to a certain extent, but
now they are going after the SBLC as a part
of a targeted political prosecution, and this indictment could be
seen as part of the anti Antifa nonprofit crackdown. Last March,

(02:57:33):
CBS News reported that the FBI and the IRS formed
a new initiative to investigate fraud at nonprofit organizations with
suspected links to domestic terrorism following federal directives to pursue
Antifa aligned groups. A spokesperson from the IRS told CBS
News quote, IRS Criminal Investigation is collaborating with federal law

(02:57:54):
enforcement agencies, including the FBI, to investigate individuals and entities
that may be funding the domestic terrorism or political violence.

Speaker 1 (02:58:04):
Yeah, it's it's unfortunate that the SPLC was so reckless
and sloppy, and the fucking amounts are shocking and indefensible
and again not necessarily in a legal sense. Like I'm
very doubtful of the government's case, but I am very
angry at the Southern Poverty Law Center, And I don't

(02:58:26):
think it should contend you to exist as an organization,
like if it's going to do this.

Speaker 10 (02:58:32):
Yeah, and like when you combine this as you say,
like anyone who works in this world knows people working
there had a mitiable time for a long time, for
a great variety of recent time.

Speaker 9 (02:58:41):
Yeah, I'm livid at them.

Speaker 1 (02:58:43):
Yeah, this is obviously evidence that the Trump administration is
doing what they've said they're doing that, Like the DOJ
is going to be looking into these like big you know,
liberal and left aligned in goos particularly that like are
focused on combating the far right, but in terms of
this showing any reason to be scared that they're going
to disappear people like, no, the SPOC did something crazy,

(02:59:07):
and I don't think that the charges specifically are valid,
but like they open themselves up to get fucked with
by doing something so not like give one of these
people a million dollars a million dollars, Yeah, that's wild.

Speaker 4 (02:59:23):
Yeah, why do they have a fake company named after
the CIA?

Speaker 9 (02:59:26):
What are you guys doing?

Speaker 10 (02:59:28):
Yeah, someone thought they were being a really cool secret spy.

Speaker 4 (02:59:32):
And I mean those are some of the charges that
may be able to stick. Is the sort of stuff
about misrepresenting yeah to a federally insured bank that that
type of stuff could be easier to argue based on
what I've read in the indictment, but of course that'll
get settled in court.

Speaker 2 (02:59:46):
Yeah yeah, yeah. And as a way to sort of
close this out, I think one of the things that
we're running into here is one of the thing that
the right is being able to use here is the
fact that a lot of these sort of liberal in
central left NGOs absolutely sucked and like we have covered
on this show, you know, a whole bunch of these
organizations do in union busting, and they're like, their priorities

(03:00:08):
don't necessarily match what you know, I would say ours
should be. And I think this is something that this
administration is going to continue to sort of in some
ways use as a rift point, like the fact that
these groups are doing all of this in unhinged shit, right,
this is this is the political consequence of the structure

(03:00:29):
that these NGOs use in the way that they've operated,
and now there's sort of chickens are coming home to roost.

Speaker 10 (03:00:36):
I want to talk this week in our immigration segment
about the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service. This is
the agency task with vetting and adjudicating immigration benefits. It's
the only immigration agency at DHS. It traditionally hasn't done
enforcement sweeps right, So for a while, particularly recently, people

(03:00:56):
there have felt a little out of place at the
Department Home Security.

Speaker 6 (03:01:00):
Right.

Speaker 10 (03:01:01):
The idea has been keep enforcement and processing separate so
that people don't have very reasonable reasons to fear doing
the legal process, right, so that people continue to show
up to their interviews, to submit their documents, et cetera. Generally,
they are funded in a large part by immigration fees
and perceived as the friendly and more welcoming side of

(03:01:22):
the process. Their job isn't historically has not been to
kind of root out bad migration as so much as
to help people, or at least to process people to
do the bureaucratic part of migration. Under the second Trump administration, however,
this has changed. There have been detentions at interviews, there

(03:01:44):
have been cancelations of citizenships ceremonies. The USAS has begun
hiring for a new position, and this new position is
eligible for remote work, for more remote work than existing hires,
and it's called the Homeland Defender. So like we probably
many people have seen these Homeland Defender advertisements on x
dot com, the everything website right, Homeland Defenders have been

(03:02:06):
offered up to fifty thousand dollars in signing bonuses, and
at the same time as offering remote work benefits for
the Homeland Defenders, the agency has been forcing other people
to return to offices that could no longer fit the
number of staff it had under years of work from home.
The agency grew and changed right like almost every organization did,
and there were reports that you literally had like lawyers

(03:02:28):
sitting in corridors working on their laptops or like trying
to perch on a radiator or a window sill because
their offices could fit people. Right, and at the same time,
the branding around Homeland Defender is not the way that
USCIS staff traditionally saw themselves. In Minnesota, USCAS has begun
reinvestigating people admitted with the incredibly highly vetted refugee status.

(03:02:52):
So we already spoke about it once today. Right, the
refugees are vetted before they even enter the United States.
Across the country, executive orders will followed with memos pausing
or entirely stopping the process of legal and veted immigration
for people from an increasing number of countries. The legally
mandated green cards for adult children and siblings or current sistants,

(03:03:12):
as well as spouses and minor children of existing permanent
residents has gone unfulfilled. This is quote unquote family based migration.
They used to call it chain migration. Right. That used
to be the language on the right. It's something that
Trump administration has hated since its first term. Right, this
has been a thing that they spoke about and that

(03:03:33):
has been spoken about at the right for some time.
These green cards could be reused for employment based claims,
which is going to have a much larger number of
people who are already in the country. It's not bringing
new people in or they might go Unused. Refugees are
being detained without any clear legal authority and requizzed about
their applications. According to reporting in The New Yorker, this

(03:03:56):
means that people are being taken in meaned at an
ice facility right and then quiz about stuff that they'd
already been asked about before they came to the United
States when they were doing that vetting. People who are
married to United States citizens are being arrested at interviews,
even though generally there was an amnesty of people who,

(03:04:16):
for instance, had overstate a visa and then got married before.
USCIS has also committed significant resources of the agency that
may well have been taken away from processing claims and
devoted them entirely to investigating naturalizations with the goal of
denaturalizing naturalized United States citizens. This is a very difficult

(03:04:38):
process right. The Afreem case is the Supreme Court case
which governs this right. It refers to someone who was
a Jewish communist or had been in Israel. What it
says is the government cannot de citizenize someone because it
doesn't agree with their politics, even in the time of
anti communism. Right, Once somebody becomes a citizen in their

(03:04:59):
files or remove from USCIS and they go to the
National Record Center and so calling the presumably tens of
thousands of files of naturalized United States citizens and hundreds
of thousands over time millions right would require some kind
of filter. The most likely way this is being filtered

(03:05:22):
is through their nationality.

Speaker 6 (03:05:24):
Right.

Speaker 10 (03:05:25):
One can imagine, for instance, that the seventy five countries
Trump has paused green card processes for might be a start,
or their specific focus on Somali people might even prove
a more focused way of doing it right. They have
had some success this week. A Belizean woman was found
guilty of naturalization fraud for submitting a fake divorce degree

(03:05:46):
She married an American citizen without being divorced from a
previous spouse. Belize They found that she had falsified those documents.

Speaker 6 (03:05:55):
Right.

Speaker 10 (03:05:56):
They are also pursuing a case against a Nigerian man
who has already been convicted of fraud and it has
already been put in prison for that, but they are
now pursuing a denaturalization case as well. Virtually every interaction
with USCIS now seems to require interviews in person and
biometric connection. This means that applicants now have to come

(03:06:19):
into an office where they know that people have been detained.
This leads to people being afraid to do that right.
Petitions are slowing down as they're moved around to a
dwindling workforce which is still focused on processing those as
opposed to the growing amount of the USCIS workforce which
is looking for quote unquote fraud in applications or attempting

(03:06:40):
to denaturalize people. As we just covered, among the people
waiting without visas are some people who are waiting for
special visas, which are given to people who are survivors
of human trafficking, gender based violence, or other crimes. This
includes children. There's especially Immigrant Juvenile visa, which every single

(03:07:00):
person I've heard of coming on an SIJ visa has
had things happen to them which I didn't struggle to
think about that would keep you up at night. And
the thought that those people are waiting in limbo because
they're trying to denaturalize people is particularly upsetting. I'm sure
it's also upsetting to some people who've worked at uscis
their whole life, and I know that morale among those

(03:07:23):
people is pretty low. While the agency sort of has
changed beyond all recognition in the last couple of years.
Talking of changing beyond all recognition, we're going to now
pivot from journalism to probably some adverts for online gambling. Yeah,
it would be shocking and jarring.

Speaker 9 (03:07:41):
I love it.

Speaker 10 (03:07:41):
You could change your life beyond all recognition if you
have a big win that.

Speaker 4 (03:07:46):
Or a big loss.

Speaker 10 (03:07:47):
Yeah, yeah, your life that way, Derrison. We're not supposed
to mention.

Speaker 4 (03:07:51):
That we're back.

Speaker 1 (03:08:01):
And we all just voted on Forbes dot COM's newest
prediction contest, how many people will be wounded in the
next three American mass shootings. I'm excited. There's a big
prize for this one.

Speaker 6 (03:08:14):
Sick.

Speaker 1 (03:08:15):
Yeah, that's only slightly an exaggeration of what Forbes is
actually doing.

Speaker 6 (03:08:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (03:08:20):
Yeah, it's pretty gross.

Speaker 4 (03:08:23):
It's pretty really hideous. It's okay, guys, it's not a market,
it's just our prediction platform. It's a prediction platform. There's
no real money, only social capital.

Speaker 10 (03:08:35):
That could be the slogan of most journalistic enterprises in
twenty twenty six. To be honest, Forbes has kind of
been a blog rather than a news website, but this
is still pretty disgusting.

Speaker 4 (03:08:48):
Speaking of there being no real money.

Speaker 2 (03:08:50):
Yeah, let's talk about the Federal Reserve. So when we
last left our I hesitate to call them heroes, yes,
But when we last left the Federal Reserve Board, there
was a very obviously cooked up investigation by the Justice
Department into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. This investigation doesn't

(03:09:13):
really seem to have advanced at all, but the conflict
over Powell and over Powell's replacement has been intensifying in
recent weeks. Last week, on the fifteenth of April, Trump
threatened to fire Powell if Powell stayed on as basically
the temporary Federal Reserve Chair after his term expired. Now,

(03:09:37):
the reason this is happening is because Trump's attempt to
get someone confirmed to replace Powell has not been going well,
and if no one is confirmed by May fifteenth, then
the office is just empty, and Powell has said that
he wants to stay on and become the temporary chair.

(03:09:59):
This is sort of unprecedented, but then again, we've also
not ever had the president's open an investigation into the
sitting chair of the Federal Reserve, causing him to give
a reverse hostage video. So where things are right now
is that we are getting hearings on Trump's preferred nominee,
a man named Kevin Walsh. However, there is a real

(03:10:23):
problem with worsh as as a candidate that's not doesn't
have anything to do with who he is. We'll get
to that in a second. The biggest issue that Trump
is facing here is that Tom Tillis, who's an outgoing
Republican Senator, is refusing to let any Trump appointee pass
through the Finance Committee unless Trump ends the investigation into

(03:10:45):
Jerom Powell. So this has had everything at a complete standstill.
It was sort of unclear though a lot of different
Republican senators had threatened to do something like this, But
because Tillis is just leaving, he's just he's retiring at
the end of this at the end of the session.
He's the one who's you know, up there doing it.

(03:11:06):
And this has ground the nomination to a halt. We're
still getting hearings, but there's no way for him to
actually get a vote to get get this process out
of committee. So into this morass steps Kevin Walsh, who
He's not the most unhinged guy Trump could have hicked
high bar. This is, at least nominally, on the surface,

(03:11:28):
sort of a FED guy like he has worked for
the Federal Reserve, like Federal Reserve banks before.

Speaker 4 (03:11:33):
He's not a podcast right, Yes, actually, actually.

Speaker 6 (03:11:41):
He might have one.

Speaker 9 (03:11:43):
There's a non zero chance.

Speaker 10 (03:11:44):
He might be.

Speaker 4 (03:11:44):
He might be.

Speaker 2 (03:11:45):
I I don't know, but I am not willing to
say that he is not one. So now this, this,
this whole nomination has also become a mess because again,
as as we've been talking about, the reason why Trump
wants to basically take direct control of the Federal Reserve
and and FED independence by installing his guys as a

(03:12:08):
chairman of the Federal Reserve Board is that he wants
to FED well, he wants to be able to control
the FED so he can control interest rates. He wants
interest rates cut. Now, this is coming up a lot
in the hearings and so far Walsh is giving answers

(03:12:28):
that if you've ever watched the testimony of someone who's
who's trying to get onto the Supreme Court, it's a
lot like that, where he is saying the things that
he is supposed to say. He's saying that he opposes
an interest rate cut. He's saying that the primary job
of the FED is a combat inflation. He's saying that
he believes it fed independents. But he also has said
that Trump has not asked him to cut interest rates.

(03:12:53):
And Elizabeth Warren, who's been sort of leading the Democratic
charge against this, has pointed out a number of things,
one of which is in workboard. He gets some more
of the weird shit with him in a second. But
one of the major things here is that the President
has said that he's asked Worsh to do just ray cuts.
So somebody's lying here. Worsh isn't giving non answers about that.

(03:13:17):
I'm also just going to read this quote from the
Associated Press quote. Warren also noted that Worsh has not
disclosed all of his financial holdings, which include investments in
startups and private companies, or the size of those financial stakes.
For example, Worsh has said he has holdings in SpaceX
and polymarkets, but it's not said how large those investments are.

Speaker 4 (03:13:37):
Great, well, you can't win them off.

Speaker 2 (03:13:40):
Yeah, So later on Warsh said he would divest from
one hundred million dollars in investments but you know this
is great. Warren also points out that he's in the
Epstein files because Epstein apparently invited him and his wife
to Wade party. It is unclear at this point what
what a connection he had, or if there was more.

(03:14:02):
But that's not a great sign. Where we are right
now is that worsh is normal enough of a guy
that Tom Tillis is willing to vote for him if
the investigation is dropped. Tillis and some other members of
the committee have been Republican members of the committee have
been talking about this scheme to get the investigation transferred

(03:14:23):
from the Department of Justice to the Senate Committee. I
think at which point they could basically just kill it
or just have it be a thing at a budget overruns.
That's not like an attempt to depose Jeroon Powell. It's
not clear what's going to happen with that, and it
hasn't started yet. This is the point that we're at
right now. This conflict is going to keep heating up
as the May fifteenth deadline for getting a new nominion

(03:14:46):
before the board vacancy happens, and Jerome Powell basically stays
in power longer than his terminally last happens. So we're
going to keep following this story. And there's one other
story that we are going to keep following, which is
there was an exclusive by the Wall Street Journal, which
is a report this is from unimed US officials, but

(03:15:07):
it claims that the UAE's central bank governor is reportedly
trying to get what's called a currency swap with the US.
So what a currency swap is basically is, it's like
it's a way to try to fix an exchange rate
and get a country a certain amount of US dollars
by just like just at the fixed exchange rate, just

(03:15:28):
like swapping X amount of dollars for x amounts of
another country's currency. This report was immediately denied, very very
quickly denied by a series of posts on x the
everything app by the UAE's embassy to the US where
they gave a thing of Trump also had like started

(03:15:48):
talking about this too. I'm just going to read a
little bit of this quote. We very much appreciate President
Trump's recognition of the UAE is one of America's most
important economic and trade partners. That recognition reflex at depth
of mutual trust based on mutual investment, et cetera, et cetera,
et cetera. Any suggestion that the UAE requires external financial
backing misreads the facts. The UAE is one of the

(03:16:11):
most financially resilient economies, underpinned by more than two trillion
dollars in the sovereign and assets more than three hundred
billion dollars in foreign currency reserves held by the UAE
Central Bank and banking sectors, with approximately one point five
trillion in deposits. So when they start listening out the deposits,
that's when things are not going great.

Speaker 6 (03:16:29):
And yeah, the the.

Speaker 2 (03:16:31):
Issue here, and this is something this is what the
Waalsher journal is talking about, is that this is not
an immediate proposal. This is a proposal for what's becoming
increasingly clear, which is that there's no there's not actually
an end to the war and Iran in sight. And
if the trader for moves remains closed, this is an
existential crisis for the UAE because not only are all

(03:16:54):
of their exports stopped, you know, like the ue itself
is just physically under threat, to the infrastructures under threat,
and it's very difficult for them to get more investments.
And this could in the future start a dollar crisis
of the kind that we've talked about on the show
before Go if you want to, Yeah, I've talked about
basically dollar crises and how you can have balance of

(03:17:16):
payments crises for running out of US dollars. What's interesting
about this reports, and the reason that we're sort of
talking about it right now, is that one of the
things that the UAE reportedly was mentioning was that they
might be forced to turn the Chinese currency. It's basically
they might be forced to like sell oil in Chinese
currency in order to get it through the straight, which

(03:17:38):
would be a apackle shift to the entire global political economy, right,
which is the America's status in the world is in part,
but in no small part, based on the fact that
you can really only buy oil in dollars. And it
seems like what's happening is that the UAE is looking

(03:17:58):
at their long term prospects going we're completely screwed. They're going, oh, well,
if we don't, if you don't just hand us a
bunch of money, we're going to have to start looking
at the underpinnings of you know, American imperial power. So
we're going to continue to see where this goes. As
just war continues, and as the stray continues to be blocked,
countries around the world are going to become more and
more desperate. As the economic consequences of this ripples out

(03:18:22):
across the world, We're probably going to start seeing more
things like this. And at some point, if it becomes
clear that the war is not going to end. In
Trump's early week announcement that the ceasefires are going to
keep going, stops being able to keep the stock markets
from being propped up, We're going to start seeing an
even wider spread impact of this. But this is a

(03:18:45):
bleak sign from a staunch US ally. Yeah, we have
one final story before closing, which is a little funny,
also worrying, but more more funny.

Speaker 10 (03:18:56):
I think that's pretty good.

Speaker 4 (03:18:58):
Shawnie Kirkhoff, the woman that Glenn Beck's right wing outlet
The Blaze falsely accused of being the January sixth pipe bomber,
has launched a lawsuit against The Blaze and the two
quote unquote journalists who wrote the story for context. Last November,
the Blaze published a story claiming to have identified the

(03:19:19):
bomber as a Capitol police officer who responded to the
January sixth insurrection based on quote forensic gate analysis which
determined the officer was a quote up to ninety eight
percent match to surveillance video of the bomber.

Speaker 6 (03:19:37):
Oh God.

Speaker 4 (03:19:38):
This lawsuit claims five counts of defamation and one count
of defamation by implication, and Kerkhoff is requesting a jury trial.
The documents claim that the Blaze report targeted her because
of her actions on January sixth as a police officer
and testimony she gave against insurrectionists in court, and part

(03:20:01):
of the intention of targeting her was to build on
this larger idea that the defendants had that January sixth
was a quote unquote inside job. As these reports were
getting published by The Blaze, Glenn Beck said on his show,
quote this is one of the biggest stories. I think
it is the biggest scandal of my lifetime, maybe in

(03:20:22):
the last one hundred years.

Speaker 1 (03:20:24):
Paper monstrous, bigger than Watergate.

Speaker 4 (03:20:28):
Pullit surprise winning stuff.

Speaker 10 (03:20:31):
You have the capacity for self delusion, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (03:20:34):
Pullet sinning stuff.

Speaker 9 (03:20:35):
I'm waiting for the politics are committed to finish reviewing
this one.

Speaker 10 (03:20:38):
They're gonna have to get in a nine after the
pulic serprise are surely going to get for interviewing the
dude who murdered Minneapolis Democratic politicians? Well, yeah, which I'm
sure was an action that his lawyer was super stoked about.

Speaker 6 (03:20:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (03:20:51):
Court documents to say that because of this false claim,
the CIA placed the plaintiff on administrative leave and she
was forced into hiding amidst online threats from conspiracy theorists
quote for her role in supporting the deep state, including
in posts on her mother's obituary web page unquote, she
was getting death threats on the obituary page for her mother.

Speaker 10 (03:21:15):
Yeah, in constant frustration in my life, his journalists posting
screenshots from court cases and then not listening to the
court listener page. So I decided to find the page
so I could not be that guy. But yes, some
of the threats this woman got genuinely probably made her
life very difficult to live for a period of time.

Speaker 4 (03:21:34):
Absolutely. The stud alleges that even after she was cleared
as a suspect and weeks later another suspect was arrested
who seems to be the likely bomber, these blaze ute
unquote journalists continue to harass her and that their quote,
false and defamatory accusations have irreparably changed her life unquote.

(03:21:59):
The documents that this ruined her lifetime career in public
service by forever linking her to the bombing and records
of an FBI investigation, making any potential security clearance is
needed in the future difficult or impossible to pass. One
of the journalists was fired by the Blaze on April first,
just earlier this month, and the other resigned two days later.

(03:22:23):
They have since raised over twenty thousand dollars since leaving
the Blaze to continue their claims on a new independent
website that they're launching. Given the name of the website,
the website is called Yeah, They're a toss regnant LLC.

Speaker 9 (03:22:39):
Yes, yes, Veritas.

Speaker 4 (03:22:41):
I think that just means the truth is king basically trains.

Speaker 10 (03:22:44):
Yeah, yeah, I think that's what they were going for
at least.

Speaker 15 (03:22:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (03:22:47):
I love it.

Speaker 4 (03:22:48):
I love it.

Speaker 1 (03:22:48):
When I read that detail, I was you guys are
going to be the most sued any people have ever been.

Speaker 9 (03:22:55):
It's beautiful.

Speaker 10 (03:22:57):
Something about PITOD seems relevant here.

Speaker 4 (03:23:00):
The document says that the plaintiff was called in to
work on November sixth, where two FBI agents then asked
her about quote unquote online chatter that she was the bomber.
She consented to a phone and car search and was
placed on administrative leave. Later that day, a quote unquote
caravan of FBI vehicles arrived outside her home, including a
bomb disposal truck and a helicopter. I'm just going to

(03:23:24):
read from the document quote. The agents claimed that they
were primarily looking for shoes. Agents edited their vehicles with
their guns drawn in full tactical gear. An agent called
mister Dickert, who is the plaintiff's boyfriend, and commanded him
to quote come out of the house unarmed with your dogs.
Mister Dickart and missus Kirkhoff complied and stepped outside. Agents

(03:23:47):
swept through the house, then re entered with bomb sniffing dogs.
They opened cabinets, rifled through drawers, and scattered Missus Kerkhoff's
and mister Dickard's belongings, all without obtaining Miss Kerr's or
mister Dickert's consent. It suddenly occurred to miss Kirkoff that
they were not simply looking for a pair of shoes.

Speaker 6 (03:24:08):
Unquote.

Speaker 10 (03:24:09):
Never heard the masking for the dogs to come out
before that was a new one for me.

Speaker 4 (03:24:13):
That is an interesting detail. That is an interesting Yeah.
So the plaintiff asked the agents there why they would
do all this to investigate quote unquote online chatter, and
as senior official responded that these orders came from quote
unquote higher up and that Miss Kirkhoff could quote clear
everything up just that night if she would accompany agents

(03:24:36):
to the FBI office for a polygraph interview. Miss Kerkoff agreed,
and agents assured her that the drive out to the
office would take longer than the interview itself. This was
not true. The interview lasted almost three hours. Agents repeatedly
accused the plaintiff of placing the bombs and continually asserted
her guilt. Part Way through the interview, the interrogator changed

(03:24:59):
out the tube on the polygraph because they quote did
not like how they were reading unquote.

Speaker 10 (03:25:04):
That was a remarkable detail.

Speaker 4 (03:25:07):
Jesus yeah, oh, Jesus Christ, and at one point told
the plaintiff that she quote unquote fail Wow. Oh, the
plaintiff assumed was just an interrogation technique.

Speaker 10 (03:25:18):
Yeah, you can't fail a polygraph test, right, It just
gives information, yes, often not actually information, which she's very
useful in any way relevant to whether you're telling the
truth or not. Polygraphs not not really something that should
be used in this capacity. But here we go anyway.
But yet there's not like a past fail. It doesn't
like a bleep bleep bleep liar detective.

Speaker 4 (03:25:38):
Now, after midnight, she asked if she was free to leave,
and the agents said yes, so she went home. In
the next day, the FBI returned her phone, and then
once she got back her phone, she saw this quote
unquote online chatter exploding all over, alleging that she was
the bomber. A day later, the Blaze published a report

(03:26:00):
explicitly naming her as the bombing suspect, something they already
alluded to in previous reporting, which sparked the online chatter,
which caused the FBI to search her home and interrogate her.
This was all intentional on the part of the Blaze.
According to this court document, the defendants, these quote unquote
journalists purposely forwarded a tip to the Office of the

(03:26:23):
Director of National Intelligence in an attempt to get quote
unquote coroboration of their reporting from sources inside the government
by getting the plaintiff placed under investigation. Prior to their
publishing of the articles identifying her as the bomber. This
was basically all part of the ski.

Speaker 9 (03:26:42):
Their goal was to set the narrative Jesus Christ.

Speaker 4 (03:26:47):
Months later, the defendants have refused to remove headlines or
social media posts claiming to identify the bomber, even after
the actual text of these articles was removed after the
FBI arrested the real suspect in December. Well, just last month,
the quote unquote journalists published another article on The Blaze titled,

(03:27:08):
quote Brian Cole Junior's physical presence, posture, mannerisms are no
match to FBI's hooey clad pipe bomb suspect unquote god.
This was another article on The Blaze saying that Gate
analysis showed that Brian Cole Junior, the actual suspect who
has been arrested, does not match the Gate does not

(03:27:30):
have a positive Gate analysis match to the surveillance footage
from that night.

Speaker 1 (03:27:38):
Oh god, because it's not real, because because Gate analysis
is bullshit.

Speaker 10 (03:27:43):
Well they break that down in the quote documents, right.
The footage of her that they had was when she's
carrying like fifty pounds of tactical gear and a heavy.

Speaker 1 (03:27:50):
Bag tactical gear yes, yes, and she suffered a serious
laying injury in college.

Speaker 10 (03:27:56):
Yeh, it's comical that like they that this is what
they went with, but then the fact that they're doubling
down on it's very.

Speaker 4 (03:28:03):
Funny and legally baffling.

Speaker 10 (03:28:07):
Yeah, they really are not ready for the consequences to
hit them on this one.

Speaker 4 (03:28:11):
No. So, like I said, these two quote unquot journalists
were fired and Slash left The Blaze earlier this month,
but in posts and podcast appearances, they assert that Brian
Cole Junior is a quote unquote patsy, and that quote
the truth about the pipe bomber has been quote unquote
floored it, and that quote unquote legal considerations are preventing

(03:28:34):
them from further disclosing the quote unquote darker details about
their yeah, pipe bomber theory is christ Now, Brian Colet
Junior's defense lawyers have filed a subpoena for miss Kirkoff,
which misleadingly states she quote unquote failed a polygraph. This

(03:28:55):
subpoena also contains her home address, and the subpoena has
been spread online by these quote quote journalists as evidence
that they were right all along. The plaintiff continues to
deal with doxing and death threats as a result from
the subpoena, and the quote unquote journalists continued reporting, spreading
claims that she is in fact the real bomber. So

(03:29:16):
Kirkoff is requesting a jury trial with these six counts
of defamation. And I hope she gets a lot of
money from everyone involved in this.

Speaker 9 (03:29:25):
Yeah, I hope she gets every dollar.

Speaker 10 (03:29:27):
Glenn beck Hans, Yeah, I mean I hope the outlets
existing that is that would be ideal.

Speaker 1 (03:29:33):
Yeah, I hope the outlet becomes yet another subsidiary of
the Onion.

Speaker 10 (03:29:40):
That would be a magnificent way for this to end.
But yeah, like yeah, and then another element of the
documents are noticed with that they talked about how the
the quote unquote journalists had benefited from their Blue check
X posts.

Speaker 4 (03:29:54):
Right, yeah, monetized accounts on X.

Speaker 6 (03:29:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (03:29:57):
I would be interested to see as we get more
in discovery element of this case, how much were they
making how much would it making from X versus the Blaze? Like,
I'm going to follow this one just because so many
of the bits of misleading reporting we see are because
of this financial incentive structure. So it'll be very revealing

(03:30:17):
for us well.

Speaker 4 (03:30:18):
And this financial structure is something that X Everything app
is somewhat attempting to take on, at least for news
aggregator accounts.

Speaker 10 (03:30:25):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, they specifically went off to dom Lucret apparently.

Speaker 4 (03:30:29):
Yes, one of X's guys announced like a week or
so ago that they're going to be reforming reforming the
payout system for news aggregators. This is uh Nikolie de Beer.

Speaker 6 (03:30:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:30:41):
Part of the way they're doing that is that Ex's
traffic is in free fall, and this is something that
we're seeing, like across social media. There was a really
good report that Peter Tornberg, who's an assistant professor in
computational social science at the University of Amsterdam, published earlier
this year.

Speaker 9 (03:31:00):
I mean, like just today came up with an update
on it.

Speaker 1 (03:31:03):
On like the most recent numbers we have on like
what's happening to the different social media networks. Visiting and
posting on X the Everything app and Facebook have seen
like a nearly fifty percent drops, a significant decline among
like the youngest and the oldest users on social media,
particularly like people over sixty five and people from eighteen

(03:31:25):
to twenty four have seen like the biggest decline and
like the time that they've actually spent on site. I'm
going to be doing something.

Speaker 4 (03:31:32):
More detailed about this in the future, But a lot
of what you're.

Speaker 1 (03:31:35):
Seeing from these big social media companies and these like
big pivots, right are moves in desperation. This is not
working as well as it used to. The economics that
once underpin this system are falling apart. None of these
companies are as profitable as they used to be, and
people are pulling away from social media, particularly from like

(03:31:57):
a lot of the text based social media sites which
were never as profitable as like short form video was.
So I don't know, that's something that made me less bummed.

Speaker 4 (03:32:10):
Well, I hope, I hope she gets certainly all the
money they got from X and learning how much money
that was will be super interesting in discovery and hopefully
much much much more money as well.

Speaker 6 (03:32:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (03:32:23):
Yeah, speaking of money, James, you wanted to plug a donation.

Speaker 9 (03:32:29):
That's right.

Speaker 10 (03:32:30):
Yeah, I want to talk retty briefly about the guys
from Cobra column. So Cobra Column if people aren't familiar,
it's a special Forces or it's a PDF that is
aligned with the Korn National Union Crerand National Liberation Army
and the struggle for liberation in the m R against
the Hunter Right. They have been fighting intensely in an

(03:32:53):
area near reality, place that Robert and I spend some time,
actually just across the river from place Robin I spend
some time. Albeit the Hunter has successfully launched munitions into
Thailand several times now, and they are really like if
you want to look at the front line of people's
autonomy against autocracy, against dictatorship, against tyranny, like they are

(03:33:14):
at it, and they need money to sustain their efforts,
to feed themselves, to equip themselves, to buy medical equipment,
and I think they're also trying to buy like a
replacement helmets and body armor because they're keep getting hit
by drones, right, and people have survivable injuries, but their
armor is destroyed. If you'd like to help, you can
send fifteen euros for ten stickers. Stickers have the Milk

(03:33:36):
Tea Alliance salute, which is the same as the salute
that the cub Scouts use and the one from Hunger Games.
I'm not going to describe it because you can work
it out. It is stickers for Meanmar at ProtonMail dot com.
You can send fifteen euros for two stickers. That's s
T I C K E R S f O R

(03:33:57):
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If you want to email us cool Zone Tips at
proton don't me If it's a marketing email, I'll block you.

Speaker 2 (03:34:07):
Put a trans girl on your couch.

Speaker 4 (03:34:10):
We reported the.

Speaker 9 (03:34:11):
News hy, Bye, We reported the news.

Speaker 6 (03:34:22):
Hey.

Speaker 1 (03:34:22):
We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from
now until the heat death of the Universe.

Speaker 4 (03:34:27):
It could Happen Here is a production of pool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Foolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 1 (03:34:40):
You can now find sources where it Could Happen here
listed directly in episode descriptions.

Speaker 4 (03:34:44):
Thanks for listening.

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Episode Transcript

Behind the Bastards News

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Host

Robert Evans

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Stuff You Should Know

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