It Could Happen Here Weekly 230

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
A 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. Hey, everybody, this is
it could happen here and I am Robert Evans, and
initially this is supposed to be a slightly different episode.
I have been pondering over the fact recently that I
feel weirdly optimistic, particularly in the last couple of weeks,
especially compared to a lot of the people that I

(00:45):
know and spend time around. And I think it's because
I've been interpreting some of the same pieces of news
differently than they have, and because I've been coming across
some different pieces of information than they have. And I
wanted to kind of walk people through why I've been
feeling so optimistic, and so I wrote something and I
recorded it around Thursday of last week, and then over

(01:07):
the weekend a gunman attack the White House Correspondence dinner,
and actually, this hasn't really changed any of my overall feelings.
We'll talk about that this week, probably on ED, but
I did make some alterations to the episode as a
result of that, although I do think it reinforces my
primary point, which is that the political era that we

(01:27):
now find ourselves in is one dominated by extremophiles. Extremophiles
are organisms with unique cellular and molecular mechanisms that allow
them to survive and thrive in extreme habitats. I'm talking
about places like volcanic events at the very bottom of
the ocean, or the Dead Sea. If you've ever wondered
why it's called the dead sea, it's because for a

(01:48):
very long time, people thought it was too salty to
host any life. Modern research has disabused us of this notion.
The dead sea hosts life. It's just weird life, because
the dead Sea is a weird place. The term extremophile
was coined in nineteen seventy four by R. D. McElroy
to describe microorganisms scientists were increasingly finding in places that

(02:09):
should have been devoid of life. The word is a
hybrid term that literally means love of extremes, and while
it is usually used in a scientific context to describe
small organisms and very odd locations, some experts have over
the years pointed out that the label might well apply
to humans too. In the journal article all about Extremophiles JOHNS.

(02:30):
Hopkins Universities, James A. Koker wrote that quote, despite common perception,
most of Earth is what is often referred to as
an extreme environment. Yet to the organisms that call these
places home, it is simply that home. They have adapted
to thrive in these environments, and in the process have
evolved many unique adaptations at the molecular and atomic level.

(02:50):
In our human centric view of the planet Earth, we
tend to think of ourselves as being in the Goldilock zone,
not too hot or too cold, protected from radiation, and
filled with all the things next necessary for life to exist.
To some extent, this is true. However, this view keeps
us from acknowledging several basic facts, including that the Earth
is mostly a cold place. Over ninety percent of its
oceans are at or below five degrees celsius, and it

(03:13):
has an average temperature of around fifteen degrees celsius, and
several conditions we humans consider normal i e. Twenty percent
oxygen in the air actually make us extremophiles from the
point of view of other species.

Speaker 2 (03:25):
End quote.

Speaker 1 (03:26):
Now, I have a bad tendency to want to apply
literal knowledge like this metaphorically to my understanding of politics.
It's a bit of a sickness, but it also makes
more sense sometimes than you'd expect. There's a tendency among
many millennials and even Gen Z and Alpha kids too
young to have known the nineties to look back on
that decade as a sort of cultural goldilock zone, as

(03:47):
if the brief period post Cold War and pre nine
eleven was some sort of cultural peak for our species,
and everything since has been a slow downhill slide. People
have different reasons for this. Some of them blame nine
to eleven. Some people will argue that we were in
that sweet spot where the Internet existed and could tap
you into cool and interesting things, but social media hadn't
come along yet and ruined it all. You know, different

(04:09):
people come up with different justifications for this, but this
view keeps people from acknowledging some very basic facts about
the nineteen nineties, which is that they were full of
genocides and Rwanda and Bosnia just named two, and repeated
US military adventures and misadventures in other parts of the globe,
some of which ended disastrously, as in Mogadishu. Our president

(04:30):
for most of the nineties was a sex pest, and
members of the far right staged a series of bloody
terrorist attacks, including the Oklahoma City bombing and Olympic Park bombing.
And while all this was happening, a new and more
openly extremist Republican Party captured Congress, while hapless outmaneuver Democrats
gawked in awe. The reality is that the nineties were

(04:50):
a time of extremity, of extreme weirdness and darkness, just
like every other period of human existence, and the extremity
of the era helped birth a new conservative movement, one
radical enough to wrench power from the liberals and bring
us ultimately into the slavering jaws of the Bush era. Today,
those same neo conservatives seemed tame next to their modern descendants,

(05:12):
the Maga movement, But in their own time, they were
the craziest bastards out there. And this hits at a
fundamental reality in American politics. If survival in extreme times
requires extreme adaptations, then It's no wonder that for much
of our lives, the extremists are the ones who have
primarily thrived electorally. Democrats like to forget this, but Bill

(05:33):
Clinton felt like a pretty big swing to folks exiting
the era of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush,
just as Barack Obama was seen as the most extreme
choice imaginable by roughly half of this country. In fact,
he was such an extreme choice that the Conservative movement
had to birth the Tea Party and eventually the Maga
Movement in order to unseat the Democratic Party and repeal

(05:54):
the changes from the Obama years in power. I like
thinking about this stuff because I find it interesting that
one common theme from evolutionary biology to modern politics is
this in extreme environments, extreme adaptations are necessary to survive.
We Homo sapiens, have been in the business of extreme
adaptations for as long as we've existed.

Speaker 2 (06:13):
That's all.

Speaker 1 (06:14):
Central heating and air, vaccines, antibiotics, and the AR fifteen
are adaptations to extreme environments and situations, many of them
extreme environments and situations that we created for ourselves. The
problem is our adaptations have a nasty tendency to drive
even more extreme circumstances, which in turn foster further adaptations,
and so on and so forth until we invent the

(06:35):
Internet and satellite guided thermonuclear bombs. Extreme adaptations are not
always good, but once you've found yourself thrown into an
extreme environment, you can't just wish the weather was different.
You've got to adapt. That's the bad news about our
current political situation. The good news is that the pendulum
has started to swing back our way. The extremism of

(06:57):
the Trump era is provoking its own equal but opposite reaction,
and you can see the first stirrings of that and
the popularity of Zoron Mandani, or the fact that a
former pillow of neo conservatism like Bill Crystal is currently
advocating for the abolition of ice. We are in the
process of deciding the next extreme that will dominate American politics,
which means we have the opportunity to adapt with policies

(07:20):
and changes that are every bit as good as the
ones that Trump administration has forced through our bad To
do that, we're going to have to be brave and
we're going to have to start getting our shit together now,
because this window of opportunity won't last long. The way
I see it. The GOP entered office this time around,
intent on waging the political equivalent of a shock and
awe campaign. They burnt up any goodwill or benefit of

(07:43):
the doubt they might have had in an orgy of
careless and brutal cuts to basic government functions carried out
by the least sympathetic group of Groper's imaginable, one of
whom was nicknamed big Balls. A fleury of state and
local legislative pushes and criminal investigations aimed at hurting left
wing activists and queer, particularly trans people have done tremendous damage,

(08:04):
as have relentless ice raids on mostly non white Americans.
It's been bad, and yet we're still here. I won't
pretend we're in a good situation today, not at least
in terms of what we'd like good to mean in
the everyday sense of the word. Many of us haven't
survived the first sixteen months or so of the Second
Trunk presidency. Fewer of us are going to make it

(08:24):
to the end. But this regime came to power with
the knowledge that their success or failure hinged on speed
and violence of action. They had a limited window to
make resistance impossible, and they missed it. You can see
some evidence of this in our War of Choice against Iran.
President Trump wanted a quick, brutal triumph that would look
good on the evening news, so he told his military

(08:44):
to bear down on Iran with all the speed and
violence of action they could muster. That plan failed, and
the reasons why are weirdly similar to how the Republican
Party has overplayed their hand in our ongoing culture war.
Back in Trump's first term, the DoD established the Algorithmic
Warfare cross functional team nicknamed Project Maven. The goal of
the project, as per Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan, was to

(09:06):
automate the analysis of drone footage and other data humans
previously would have gone over by hand, in order to
speed up the rate at which targets were identified and
struck in wartime. Project Maban from the Jump was a
product of the worst kind of military thinking, How can
we automate as much of our planning of warfare as possible.

(09:27):
This is the kind of project you pursue when your
finest military minds still believe that victory is as simple
as killing or destroying a preset number of bad guys,
causing them to give up. The goal was to create
a system that could collate and synthesize huge quantities of
data in order to allow one thousand targeting decisions per hour.
Kevin Baker, writing for The Guardian, notes that this means

(09:48):
quote three point six seconds per decision, or from the
individual targeteer's perspective, one decision every seventy two seconds. Now,
we're going to talk about where this kind of thinking
has led us in our conflict with Iran. But first,
here's some ads we're back. Now. If you listen to

(10:16):
the advocates of this kind of military build up that
people who are really bullish on AI for military purposes
talk and their podcasts and on their blogs, the reasoning
behind why you need to be able to make a
thousand targeting decisions per hour is pretty obvious. They're obsessed
with the idea that a future war between the US
and a peer or near peer adversary, most prominently China, right,

(10:39):
that's what they're planning on now. The Chinese military is
also heavily invested in AI. There was a major New
York Times article earlier this month, in April of twenty
twenty six, titled Mutually Automated destruction the escalating global AI
arms race.

Speaker 2 (10:52):
I'm going to quote from that.

Speaker 1 (10:53):
Now. China and Russia are experimenting with letting AI make
battlefield decisions on its own. Two US officials said China
is developing systems for dozens of autonomous drones to coordinate
attacks without human thought will Russia is building Lancet drones
that can circle the sky and autonomously pick targets, they said.
Even as the specifics of the technologies remain veiled, the
intentions are clear. In twenty seventeen, mister Putin declared that

(11:14):
whoever leads a AI will become the ruler of the world.
Mister z said in twenty twenty four that the technology
would be the main battleground of geopolitical competition. In January,
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed all branches of the US
military to adopt AI, saying they needed to accelerate like hell.

Speaker 2 (11:33):
Now.

Speaker 1 (11:33):
My interpretation of what I've read from most of these
guys is that they see future conflict as a massive
but almost instantaneous chess game. Right, Whoever has the AI
that can most quickly and effectively sort through their intelligence,
come up with target packages, and then strike those targets first, wins.

Speaker 3 (11:50):
Right.

Speaker 1 (11:50):
If we can make a thousand decisions and a thousand
strikes in an hour and they can only make eight hundred,
then we'll destroy more of them and will win the war. Right,
It all be decided right at the start. And this
may well be how a shooting war between China and
the US would proceed. But given that very few people
in either country want that war to happen because it
would kill us all, I think we might do best
focusing on the war our country is currently fighting, where

(12:13):
this logic has resulted in a catastrophic failure for at
least the second time in my life. In two thousand
and three, the United States invaded Iraq. After more than
a year of build up, in years of intelligence gathering,
our military planners put together a list of fifty high
value targets. The idea was, if we could use our
incredible super advanced spying equipment and our precision guided weapons

(12:34):
to wipe out the most important figures of resistance in Iraq,
we could hobble any response to the invasion. All fifty
targets were struck, none of the people targeted were killed.
Now that doesn't mean no one was killed. It just
means we missed all the people we thought we were
going to hit. To quote from Kevin Baker's great article, again,
the targeting cycle had been fast enough to hit fifty
buildings and too fast to discover it was hitting the

(12:55):
wrong ones. Fast forward earlier this year, Administration orders the
launch of Operation Epic Fury and unleashed a nightmare arsenal
of hyper advanced weaponry on the people and leaders of
Iran alongside the Israeli Air Force. In the first two weeks,
US forces hit six thousand targets picked with the help
of Project Mavin. One of them was the Monob Girls

(13:17):
Elementary School, which was destroyed by a missile, killing one
hundred and fifty six and wounding ninety five. Now, Alex Karp,
the CEO of pallanteers hyper advanced AI and a multi
billion dollar network of satellites backed up by decades of
intelligence gathering by the CIA, and the massade wasn't enough
to drop us from striking a school that we knew

(13:37):
contained none of our targets. We had data that the
people we thought were there at one point were no
longer there, and it was a school now. But some
of the data Maven relied on was old and outdated.
And these machines aren't capable of real judgment and the
way we think of it. And because people trusted them
so much, no one thought to check before ordering the strikes.
This is a human error. This is not an AI error,

(14:00):
but it illustrates a massive law in the fantasy that
winning a war could be as easy as building a
smarter machine. Got to be accurate, and it is important
to note a lot of those six thousand targets were
what we thought, and they were accurately struck and killed.
In the opening salvel of the war, President Trump and
his mouthpieces celebrated their successful assassination of Iron Supreme Leader,
alongside many other prominent military and governmental officials. This seemed

(14:23):
at first to be way more successful than the opening
strikes against a Rock. They didn't get any of those
fifty guys. We got a bunch of our initial targets
in this first wave of strikes. Maybe we just didn't
have the right technology when we invaded Rock. Maybe now
we're doing it right, you know, finally we'll be able
to win a war this way. However, that quickly proved untrue.
All of those strikes put together were not enough to

(14:45):
break Iran's will or its capacity to fight and fight
back effectively. Now Donald Trump finds himself trapped in an
expensive quagmire, one that is already bleeding him advanced munitions
and equipment while it crashes the global economy. The most
recent ap the NARC poll, puts Trump's overall approval at
thirty three percent, which is down five percent since just

(15:05):
back in March. Only thirty two percent of Americans approve
of his leadership on Iran. Because most of this country
can still see a man shooting himself in the dick
for what it is. Pete Hegsath is our most lethality
obsessed Secretary of Defense and History, and in him we
see the result of a long sickness first incubated during
the Vietnam War, when embarrassed generals needed to spin their

(15:27):
failure to make progress as a kind of victory, so
they turned to bragging about how many fighters they had killed,
inevitably defining many civilian dead as enemy combatants, and bragging
about the tonnage of trucking that they destroyed based on
wildly incomplete and inaccurate intelligence. Ever since this calamitous era.
Informed students of military theory have seen doing body counts

(15:48):
as the death knell of a military entity's ability to
make intelligent decisions that move their forces closer to victory.
But because the entire conservative project in this country is
built on the thoughtless worship of military pat prowess in power,
we've seen this kind of thinking trickle down to the
sarey cadra of influencers who call themselves right wing intellectuals. Today,
I'm talking about dudes like Matt Walsh and Chris Ruffo

(16:10):
who've built their reputations on picking targets to drum up
mobs against and uses the basis of attack ads. These
people have proven legitimately good at stirring up haate and
forcing laws all over the country restricting things like drag
shows or the use of chosen pronouns and government documents.
All these people are by definition huge assholes, and so
are their followers, and thus when those people get radicalized

(16:33):
to take action in their communities, they make those communities worse.
This pisses off their neighbors, which has resulted in significant
backlash across the country. As an example, Moms for Liberty
was formed in Florida on January first, twenty twenty one,
by Republican activists and former school board members who were
outraged about pandemic safety protocols and schools. They became a

(16:55):
vehicle for the parental rights movement, a nebulous and deeply
toxic force in American political life. It sees the parent
as a kind of absolute sovereign over the life and
mind of their child. Any influence that might lead that
child to become a different kind of person than the
parent envisions must be pruned away. The group used the
then fresh moral panic over critical race theory as a
lever from which to force themselves into American life. In

(17:17):
June of twenty twenty one, they started filing what would
become a long series of criminal complaints against books available
in specific school libraries across the nation. Schools started removing books,
and Moms for liberty inspired candidates began winning school board
elections around the country. It looked, for a little while
like a popular wave of hysterical fear might yank America
into a Fahrenheit four to fifty one style future, slightly

(17:39):
ahead of schedule, but just a couple of years later,
a funny thing happened, Moms for Liberty backed candidates started
losing major elections, first a series of school board races
in twenty twenty three in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Iowa. But
even as the Biden administration kareemed towards a disastrous new
election in twenty twenty four, one in which the far
right seemed to have all the momentum, regular people kept

(18:02):
rising up and organizing to protect their schools. One of
the first was karen's Foboda, a mother of seven in
Duchess County, New York. In twenty twenty three, she told
NPR reporter Jim Zaroli, I looked into the local Facebook
page of Moms for Liberty and just browsed through some
of the social media of some of these individuals, and
what I saw was very upsetting. As a mom of
kids who were members of that community, it was very

(18:22):
concerning to think that these people would be trying to
get onto the school board, because what does that mean
for my kids? So she started a group of her own,
Defensive Democracy, which organized like minded parents in her community
to warn each other about Moms for Liberty. It defeated
an entire slate of Moms for Liberty backed candidates in
twenty twenty three, all with the infrastructure of a Facebook

(18:42):
page and weekly zoom calls. And the really remarkable thing
is that even while the twenty twenty four election took
over the national discourse and the Democratic Party completely shat
the bed, people kept connecting and organizing in school districts
across the country to fight for their children's educations. In
November of twenty twi, the Houston suburb of Cyprus, Texas,
saw Democratic candidates sweep three school board seats and take

(19:05):
the majority, ending two years of Republican dominance. This trend
was repeated elsewhere that same month, per a political article
by Liz Crampton and Madison Fernandez quote in Pennsylvania, Democrats
slipped at least two dozen school board seats, per an
ongoing tally from progressive recruitment group Pipeline Fund. The under
the radar trend was enabled by voters increasing weariness with
the culture wars that helped the MAGA movement engineer school

(19:27):
board takeovers and generate hyper local interest in politics as
the COVID nineteen pandemic raged. In addition to Texas, Republicans
lost seats in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio and the
national battleground of Pennsylvania the result of well funded campaigns
orchestrated by local leaders. Now, one of my favorite details
from that piece is a quote from one of the
new school board members, Leslie Gilmart, who stated, folks just

(19:49):
wanted their school boards to be boring again. They wanted normalcy.
Once the board was taken over by a superpartisan, extremist majority,
folks across the political spectrum were dismayed. Now, I continue
to be an advocate of the thought that Tim Walls
might have made a more effective vice presidential candidate if
he'd kept calling the Republicans out for being freaks because
they are. Their obsession with the lives and behavior of

(20:10):
their fellow citizens and their naked slavering need to control
their neighbors is upsetting, an unnatural.

Speaker 2 (20:16):
The way I see.

Speaker 1 (20:17):
It, we're in a time of incredible opportunity right now.
The devil has played his hand and wound up slipping
on a puddle of his own flop sweat along the way.
The momentum is with anyone but these fucks, at least
right now, which is why a bunch of tertiary Trump
supporters like Tucker Carlson have been cutting bait. Donald did
the thing fascists off and do. He kept reaching until
he reached for something that exceeded his grasp.

Speaker 3 (20:39):
Now.

Speaker 1 (20:39):
I don't know what's going to happen next in our
absolutely unnecessary struggle with Iran. I think there's a non
zero chance Trump tries to extricate our forces save for
some token s is rule, won't say we abandon them,
and tries to take out the Cuban government next. Falso possible,
Wh'll escalate the violence against Iran in some massive, apocalyptic,
hideous way. In either case, the human cost will be nightmare,

(21:00):
But either action would just be the flailing of a
busted gambler putting everything he has on a fantasy that
Americans want to see foreign enemies broken while they can't
afford to fill their car at home. Every poll of
the American people seems to suggest that most of us
as a pretty low appetite for unnecessary wars. Outside of Florida,
it's hard to find regular people who are scared of

(21:20):
the Cuban government. The idea that they represent any kind
of threat to folks in Michigan or Kansas is absurd
on its face. The further Trump reaches, the angrier people get.
Fascist governments rely on the complicity of the masses even
more than their enthusiastic support. And many Americans have proven
themselves unwilling to be complicit in most of what the
Heritage Foundation and their friends want for this country. And

(21:44):
that's a nice note to roll to ads on.

Speaker 2 (21:56):
We're back.

Speaker 1 (21:57):
If you want a direct example of how weak the
cultural conservatives are right now, think back to the stunt
President Trump pulled with door dasherler in April. He ordered
several bags and had them delivered by a dasher who
was there to get photographed praising the president's no tax
on tips policy. While they were standing outside the Oval office,
Trump asked the dasher if they thought trans women should
be allowed to compete in women's sports. And the dasher

(22:19):
in question was fifty eight year old Sharon Simmons, who
was a I Mean, it's been widely reported, is a
Republican activist. She'd previously spoken out in favor of the
no tax on tips policy at the House Ways and
Means Committee field hearing, and even when she was under
the gun next to the President, Simmons wasn't willing to
agree with him on the weird anti trans stuff. She replied,
I don't really have an opinion on that, and I'm

(22:40):
not here to call her a hero for that.

Speaker 2 (22:42):
She's not.

Speaker 1 (22:43):
But it shows a crack in the rhetorical wall these
people have built for themselves. A Republican can't just support
low taxes. Now they have to endorse a whole raft
of psychotic vengeance politics and anti scientific views that are
deeply alienating to anyone who has a chance of being
called normalcushion of life after Trump nowadays has to include
an acknowledgment of the big, lurking question of our age

(23:05):
what if he won't give up power? And that's a
bigger question than the just Trump. A large number of
government officials, of elected leaders, military officers, and law enforcement
officers have implicated themselves in the crimes and what we
might call the oughta be crimes of this administration. It's
not unreasonable to ask what if they won't leave power
without a fight? And I don't have a comprehensive answer

(23:25):
for you that I feel comfortable putting in the last
couple of pages of a podcast script, but I will
point out that just In the last month. As I
write this, Victor Orbon and his entire political movement faced
sweeping defeat at the polls. Orbon had been previously referred
to as a quasi dictatorial figure. He was the leader
of the Hungarian government, and he had led a massive

(23:45):
right wing crack down the detacked schools that attacked the
LGBT movement, and that became a major funder for much
of our own right wing movement. It's come out that
the Orbon government was sending money helping to fund Sea Pack.
They were sending money to specific right wing influencers like
Rod Dreyer. And despite the fact that Orbon was the
guy that people like Tucker Carlson a couple years ago
was saying, this is the future of American politics, Orbanism

(24:07):
is what we want. Despite that fact, when they lost
an election, he and his cronies back down without a fight. Now,
ultimately they did this because they still think they're bulletproof.

Speaker 2 (24:17):
Right, We've got enough people in.

Speaker 1 (24:19):
The government that we can stop Peter Magyar, the new guy,
from doing any damage to us right and thus temporarily
leaving power is an acceptable sacrifice because that lets us
avoid a civil war and the rest of the EU
who won't look kindly on that. I'm sure that's a
lot of their thinking. And obviously the US is in
a very different position geopolitically. But the rapidity with which
some former Trump stalwarts like Marjorie Taylor Green and Alex

(24:41):
Jones and Tucker Carlson have abandoned MAGA suggests one thing.
They think it's more personally profitable for them to not
be seen standing next to the president or the MAGA
movement right now. And here's more good news. Remember how
basically every social network is now owned by an openly evil,
right wing billionaire.

Speaker 2 (25:00):
Well.

Speaker 1 (25:00):
Americans have responded to this by discarding social media and
ever growing numbers. This has been about one of the
most consequential shifts of the last few years, and just
this week, University of Amsterdam professor Peter Tornberg published a
study on shifts in US social media use from twenty
twenty to twenty twenty four. Quote online platform reached aclinent,
driven by growth in the share of Americans, especially the

(25:22):
youngest and oldest cohorts who report using no social media.
Visiting and posting activity on Twitter, slash x, and Facebook
have fallen by nearly fifty percent since twenty twenty, with
the decline on Twitter x driven primarily by reduced participation
among democratic users. Now, this is broadly speaking a good
thing for the mental health of Americans overall and for
the future of our body politic but the Americans who

(25:44):
remain in social media aren't all doing so hot. Over
the same time period, traffic on Twitter and Facebook grew
markedly more right wing as both sites shrank. In his paper,
Tornberg warns as casual users disengaged while polarized partisans remained vocal,
online discourse comes narrower and more ideologically extreme, or in
other words, as the algorithms that govern what gets seen

(26:07):
on these shrinking social media sites reward more extreme content.
Less extreme users leave, and the ones who succeed and
become more widely shared are the most extreme. It's, you know,
another extremeophile kind of situation. Part of why the people
near Trump all believe they're winning is they live in
these same Internet fever swamps, and they've gotten used to
the Internet mattering a lot more than.

Speaker 2 (26:28):
It does right now.

Speaker 1 (26:30):
I don't mean to suggest that what happens online is
an important but that importance has been softened by the
sheer deluge of AI, slop, spam, and weird right wing
propaganda that we've been forcibly drowned in for years. Less
people are using these things than they used to, which
means their reach has declined because people find them off
putting and gross. The data shows that folks, particularly over

(26:51):
sixty five and under twenty four, are increasingly fed up
with not just social media, but the whole state of
affairs we've been locked in politically. In the recent Virginia
governor's Racemocrat Abigail Spanberger won by a comfortable margin. Republicans
devoted a huge amount of their budget against her to
anti trans attack ads, writing high off their inaccurate belief
that anti trans propaganda had one trump the reelection in

(27:12):
twenty twenty four, but only four percent of voters in
that election listed transgender policies as a top issue. Now,
that alone might just point to the overwhelming impulse towards
centrism shared by much of the American middle class. People
don't like to stand out, particularly as a political radical.
But a year after Spanberger's election, a majority of Virginia
voters approved a radical redistricting measure. This was entirely framed

(27:36):
as a response to the Republican party fighting for their
right to redistrict several states in their favor. The usual
chorus of voices piped up to say, Oh, I don't know, guys,
we shouldn't do the same thing they keep doing in
order to defend ourselves. That doesn't seem fair. And this time,
thank goodness, most people ignored them. The controversial measure outperformed
Kamala Harris by eight points. And yes, the federal judge

(27:59):
did immediately rule the measure unconstitutional, but you know how
these things go. We're off to a series of court
battles now, and however those end up. Two useful things
have been accomplished. The liberal majority of a state has
banded together to fight the Republicans on their own terms,
and a clear message has been sent to those same
people that Republicans benefit from a different set of laws
than democrats. Now, any anarchist or left as political organizer

(28:22):
you've ever known would have told you the right wing
always benefits from an interpretation of the law that she
shucks seems to deny their opponents the right to do
the same things in self defense. It's bad that things
work this way, But good for rank and file liberals
to be reminded of that reality. If it weren't, the
current gatekeepers of our news media wouldn't be rallying so
hard against this measure. The same day I wrote all

(28:44):
of this, the Washington Post published an opinion column by
Theodore Johnson titled Why Virginia went back on its word.
It opens with a particularly idiotic paragraph. Partisanship died its
best impression of democracy in Virginia. On Tuesday, voters approved
a referendum permitting the state's congressional districts to be redrawn
to help Democrats win four additional seats. It's retaliation to

(29:05):
recent redistricting by Texas to hand Republicans five more seats.
At the best of President Donald Trump. It's a red
versus Blue tit for tat over who can jerrymander more efficiently?
A necessary evil, the parties say, to protect democracy. It's
actually not necessarily I mean, not that it's a necessary evil.
The parties say. It's that one party was already doing
this for years. The Republicans and you didn't speak up

(29:28):
the Washington Posts. You know, this guy didn't write the
same column when this shit's been happening in other states.
He only does it when Democrats do it in Virginia, right,
And I also might point out to a majority of
voters approving a measure is democracy. You know, if your
only concern is the overall health of democracy, Redistricting that
favors democrats really corrects a structural imbalance in our political

(29:48):
system that favors loosely populated rural areas with an unfair
proportion of political power and marginalizes the greater number of
citizens who live in urban areas and tend to vote Democrat. Anyway,
there are other good reasons to see hope for a
fierce swing in American politics, not merely back to the middle,
but far to the left. Simply as a matter of
practical necessity, the Republicans have spent their time and power

(30:10):
gutting the Parks Department, the Post Office, the VA, the FAA,
and every other useful part of our state structure. And
this is a big part of what's radicalized people, because
they've very quickly come to notice that things are missing
and shit is not working right. For decades, the government
has been the enemy to millions of Americans who went
out in the world and relied on government services every
day of their lives, and yes, that's irritating and unfair,

(30:32):
and no, we don't have time to fix that up
right now. What we can do is use the fact
that the Republicans broke all these systems to point out
to people, actually, you don't hate it when the government
does stuff, You just hate the way Republicans run the government.
And the fact that the Democrats have usually been too
scared to push for policies as extreme as they need to.

(30:53):
Right this is an opportunity to convince a lot of people,
oh shit, paying taxes to support a vibrant civil society
with the extensive and functional infrastructure is a lot better
than letting big balls de leete half of civil service,
right like. That's I think the opportunity we have right now,
and pushing that basic line on as many Americans as
possible in the next two years is I think one

(31:13):
of the most important things we can do at the moment.
Along with that, we need to keep building support for
enforcement of consequences against the cadra of billionaires and their
lackeys who have been robbing our shared heritage blind this
whole while. If I had my way about it, I'd
point out to people that there are an awful lot
of billionaires who we knew colluded to take over the
federal government put something like Elon Musk's doge in place.

(31:35):
You can just see that in some of the texts
between Mark Zuckerbergeting and Elon Musk. These people are enemies
of the state with an awful lot of money that
we could confiscate to do things like replace the books
Moms for Liberty tore out of public libraries. Now, we
also need to see consequences for the criminals who have
weaponized the organs of the state to fight their war
against transgender Americans. This is an issue you can, in fact,

(31:57):
get centrist voters to support. The average swing voter may
not be particularly woke on gender theory, but they don't
like seeing the government bully people who are just trying
to get by. The widespread suffering created by the MAGA
movement also creates potential for widespread solidarity between its victims.
If the midterms go badly for the GOP and the

(32:17):
twenty twenty eight elections go even worse, the USA's new
elected officials and surviving citizens will find themselves in the
same situations. The man who just unseated Victor Orbon and
his supporters, we all learned how temporary a victory can be.
After twenty twenty four, I've seen more than a few
comments online by liberals who decided Orbon's defeat was a
good time to attack a straw man caricature of a leftist,

(32:39):
and these posts were generally laughing at this idea that
a lot of people on the left express that electoralism
can't defeat fascism. Now, I do share a frustration with
the blanket rejection of electoral politics that some people on
the left champion, but every online and real life lefty
that I know was thrilled to see Orbonde get the boot. However,
they all did share a fear us. This one fear

(33:00):
that I've seen in common with every analyst and expert
on Hungarian politics that I've read, which is winning the
election isn't going to be enough for Magyar Orbon is
an extremist, someone who took power because things were extremely
shitty in Hungary and voters got angry enough to vote
for a guy who promised to burn things down. They
did come to regret that, but things are still extremely

(33:21):
bad in Hungary. Joe Biden was a moderate who tried
to govern in an environment of raging extremes. His promise
was that he would bring things back to the normal
of the Obama era. He failed to do that because
it's impossible, and his failure opened up the way for
Trump two point zero. If we don't want to repeat
that cycle, the failures and ultimate collapse of the MAGA

(33:42):
movement have to be met with new strategies, new tactics,
and new politics as we seek to fill the void
that they're going to leave behind. I wrote and recorded
the first draft of this piece, as I said earlier,
just a few days before, a gunman stormed into the
Correspondence dinner. His manifesto has made it clear that he
wanted to arm the President and members of his cabinet.

(34:02):
Within hours, his social media accounts were archived and his
life was put under a microscope, as it always happens
with gunmen these days. All of this revealed a liberal man,
one who had previously expressed very common centrist opinions, including
a dislike of firearms. I've seen this used by people
to justify a conspiratorial narrative that immediately followed the attack.

(34:23):
This guy is a perfect patsy. Obviously they cooked this
up in a lab as an excuse to crack down
on Democrats. I don't believe that, and here is not
a place for an argument as to why.

Speaker 2 (34:32):
Again.

Speaker 1 (34:32):
We'll talk about that, I'm sure later this week. What
is interesting to me is that before any of this happened,
I had been planning to revise the ending of this
episode by commenting on an article that came out in
April of twenty twenty five. It's published by Oxios and
the title was Democrats told to get shot for the
anti Trump resistance. Here's a quote from that article. At
town halls in their districts and in one on one

(34:53):
meetings with constituents and activists, Democratic members of Congress are
facing and growing thrum of demands to break the rules,
fight dirty, and not be afraid to get hurt. One
of the lawmakers that they talked to for that article
related a conversation that he'd had in a meeting with
a constituent.

Speaker 2 (35:08):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (35:08):
I actually said in a meeting, when they light a fire,
my thought is grab an extinguisher. And someone at the
table said, have you tried gasoline? So many regular Liberals
are embracing extreme rhetoric and measures today because they know
on some level that that's the only way you survive
in an extreme environment. We see this in the thousands

(35:28):
of normies in Minneapolis who have been willing and eager
to confront armed federal agents in bathrobes and risk their
own life and limb to protect their neighbors from ice.
And we've also seen a very dark reflection of that
in the actions of that gunman last weekend. Now, the
fact that an educated and informed thirty one year old
man decided to buy a firearm that he hated and

(35:49):
attack the president represents many failures. One of them is
a failure of the Democratic Party and the Liberal project
to provide him with anything that felt like a useful
outlet for his rage and hopelessness. People start talking and
acting like this guy was acting, you can either throw
your hands up and back away, or you can try
like hell to present them with a counter offer. In
this case, I mean a set of policies, activist campaigns,

(36:12):
and organized actions to make this country a less horrific place.
The victory and wild popularity of Zoran Mamdani is proof
that you can, in fact do this even in twenty
twenty six. The widespread support for formerly extreme positions like
abolishing ice, taxing billionaires, radically redistricting states, halting the construction
of data centers, and expanding and packing the Supreme Court

(36:34):
are more than enough evidence to show that people will
get in line to back a candidate and a party
who promises radical change. Moreover, everything I've seen lately suggests
that people are starving for a movement like this, Hungry
for their own candidate who feels like Mamdanni, hungry more
than anything to feel hopeful again. When Oregon Senator Ron

(36:55):
Whiten posted see you at Nuremberg two point zero after
Christy Nome got fired, I watched a coalition of left
wing radicals and centrist dims who never came together over
anything else, express wild glee at the very thought we
can do this. We have the tools, and we have
the opportunity. It's going to take a big old step
into the unknown, but that's our only option besides waiting

(37:19):
until we get another chance to look through the social
media ar types of a gunman.

Speaker 4 (37:34):
So by the time you hear this, the situation may
have evolved in any number of directions. I'm speaking in
the immediate week of the United States and Israel's brutal
invasion of Iran. Thus far, over a thousand have been killed,
including over one hundred school children and the Supreme leader
of Iran, Ayatolda Ali Kameni. In response to this American

(37:59):
is really aggression, Iran has retaliated by targeting both American
bases and civilian and energy infrastructure in the neighboring countries
that have facilitated American presence in the region. With the
strategically and economically critical straight off home moods in jeopardy,
with France, the UK, and Germany aka the usual suspects
indicating potential involvement, and with the potential Russian and Chinese

(38:23):
involvement also being floated in some circles, it seems to
me that without any formal announcement, the war on the
world has escalated potentially to a point of no return. Hello,
and welcome to it grappen Here. I'm andrews Age andrewism
on YouTube, and I'm joined again by It's James Hi,

(38:43):
and how are you doing as well as I can be?

Speaker 2 (38:47):
Yeah, that's about the best we can hope for these days.
Isn't it.

Speaker 4 (38:50):
Yeah, And in a time like this, I want to
take a look back at history, particularly how past US
interventions have left devastation in their week. Today I wanted
to look at the fate of Libya, a country still
dealing with his similar intentions following the end of the
post intervention civil War. So I suppose we should begin

(39:12):
in mid February in twenty eleven, and the Arab of
Spring was sweeping the Middle East and North Africa. Among
the countries caught up in the fuva against the prevailing
states was Libya, a North African state ruled for the
previous forty two years by the Colonel Mumar al Gaddafi's government.
Masses had taken to the streets across the country, starting

(39:32):
in Benghazi. The government had some successes in putting down
the revolt, killing hundreds of rebels and demonstrators alike, and
some failures as the masses managed to hold position. The
people had many motivations Spanish Islamist democratic SI militant to tribal,
to just disaffected against a government intent on its continued survival. Revolutions, uprisings, protests, revolts.

(39:59):
They tend to messy your fears. I'm sure James, you're
well away of that.

Speaker 3 (40:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:04):
Yeah, I think it's really easy of like outside observers
or when we're looking back at history to be like, oh,
this revolution was an Islamist revolution, this was a Marxist
learning this revolution, this one was an anarchist revolution. But
every revolution that I have been at that I have
witnessed happening, it's an everything revolution when it starts and

(40:29):
it later becomes a something revolution. But especially in the
Arab Spring, right like in that time, it was just
like we've had enough of being under the boot of
these regimes and it was extraordinarily heterodox, and that was
quite beautiful in the early days.

Speaker 4 (40:47):
Exactly exactly. The heterodox nature of revolutions is really what
I want to drill here, because I think it's it's
very easy for people to caricaturize and sleep a broad
brush and it's the t or this is and it
gets to be around people are saying, oh, it's only monarchists,
it's monarchists and Zionists going out in the streets when

(41:08):
they will protesting when the situation on the ground is
always more complex than that.

Speaker 2 (41:13):
Yeah, maybe I'll just take a second to address the
annoying campus tendency. I understand that every time the United
States ranged down death on some part of the world,
it's terrible, right, it's sad, as you just said, Andrew.
In Iran, we've seen a girls' school bombed, not once
but twice, it seems, right, like what they call a

(41:34):
double tack attack. That doesn't mean that your response has
to be to support the other people who are killing
those same civilians in that same place. It is possible
for two things to be bad, and like in Iran, Yeah,
there is a monarchist opposition. It sucks. I spoke just
this morning to a Kurdish group which is opposing the

(41:58):
regime in Iran, and they had nothing but bad things
to say about the monarchists. Right, they said, this is
the PAK write the coast down Freedom Party I'm quoting here.
They do not have a foothold in society to actually
achieve anything. The lies and delusions of a group of
people sitting in nightclubs cannot make any real impact. That
You're free to use that one next time someone tells

(42:19):
you all the opposition in around its monarchist, it's nonsense.

Speaker 4 (42:23):
Exactly, I mean, just on its face, it's obviously nonsense.
This notion that these people are high minds. It's hilarious
as notion that you see popping up again and again.

Speaker 2 (42:34):
Yeah, very orientalist.

Speaker 4 (42:36):
Yeah, anytime people step outside and they have something that
they're upset about, they just get labeled with this one
broad sweeping ideological monarcha, whether they subscribe to it or not. Yeah,
And even within the ideological monikers, there's always a lot
of nuance and how people understand those ideologies. You know,

(42:57):
no to Islamists are necessarily not two monarchists ivan a
necessarily alike, and those are both ideologies that I absolutely abhor,
you know.

Speaker 2 (43:06):
Right, Yeah, I don't understand how you can be a
leftist and spend your life like as such and then
also think that in other parts of the world people
don't want the same things like I believe it is
inherently human, yeah, to want dignity and respect and the
same for others, and to want our communities to govern themselves.

(43:28):
And I don't believe that it's any less human if
you live in North Africa or the Middle East, or
South Africa, or an island in the Caribbean or an
island in a Pacific like I believe it comes from
our human nature, and so it strikes me as therefore
obvious that there cannot be a country where people's human
nature is fundamentally distinct and they're all just like knee
jerk monarchists. I wouldn't see the world the way I

(43:51):
see it if I was able to believe that. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (43:54):
Yeah, these movements, they're always composed by the choices and
actions of sometimes millions of people, each with their own motivations.
And now it's easy, particularly in retrospect, to pick particular
leaders or organizations as representative of them all. That doesn't
make it so. One of the things that defined the

(44:14):
Art of Spring, as you mentioned it, was its leaderless nature.
You had new liberals, you had monarchists, you had socialists,
you had most of all, I would say, people without
any ideological commitments at all. The majority of the human
population is not ideologically committed one way or the other.
Most people are just trying to live their lives and
meet their basic needs, and they're submerged in society that

(44:38):
lends them towards a particular inclination. But that's not set
in stone. Most people in the Arab of Spring likely
sought just the end of whatever it was they were
suffering under before. And of course in these kind of incidents,
geopolitical actors will choose to back particular factions, lend them
creedoms and prominence according to their geopolitical interests, but don't

(45:00):
give them undue credit. You know, during the Cool War,
for example, the US would have backed rebellions they believe
benefit them, and vice booths of the USSR backed rebellions
they thought would benefit them. And even today, the US
is claimant to care about freedom but has continued to
work with the Saudis, who infamously invaded Bahrain to crush
the Arab spring that occurred there. At the time, France's

(45:22):
love for democracy didn't exactly match their offer to aid
Algeria and Tunisia in putting down their own Arab springs. Now,
as I've been saying quite often pointing out hypocrisy, it's
kind of a baby's first geopistical analysis, right, none of
these governments have any consistent values beyond their own interests.

(45:45):
But I think it's important to make this kind of
heterodoxy in movements clear to contextualize what happened next. There's
another notion that the US intervention is entering these countries

(46:10):
during these conflicts ahold humanitarian and aims to liberate the
women or to liberate minorities in that region. The United States,
like all the cover months, is opportunistic right. It is
taking advantage of often genuine struggles by people to serve
its own situation or goals without a care for what
happens those people, either openly intervene in or covidly intervening.

(46:35):
The most obvious recent example is with the goods in Syria.
At the time, they were convenient to the United States
interests until they weren't and they were abandoned. And this
is especially the case when resources like oil come into
the picture, and Libya is extremely oil rich. So tragically,
the West saw this uprising in Libya as an opportunity.

(47:00):
On a timeline and Encyclopedia Britannica. On the nineteenth of
March twenty eleven, Libya was attacked by the combined forces
of the United States, the UK, and France. These countries
now condemned Kadafi as an oppressor of the civilians they
were swooping in to say, though for years before the
UK and France were selling in weapons they, alongside the

(47:22):
Katari and Saudi allies, took advantage of the protests to
assert their military might. This move was authorized by the
UN Resolution nineteen seventy three, and NATO would soon take
command of the operation. While claiming to protect civilians under
a responsibility to protect doctrine, they bombed them. An allegedly
humanitarian intervention led to the deaths of tens of thousands

(47:46):
of a national population of just over six million. Key
infrastructure was devastated by the Natal Woman campaign and by
the struggles between the government and the now armed rebels
of the National Transitional Council or NTC. A quick by
the way, the NTC appointed themselves as the leaders of
the movement, and despite the struggle being kickstarted by mostly

(48:07):
working and middle class militants, often of an Islamic orientation,
the NTC was composed mainly of regime defectors, businessmen and
exiles who had a broadly pro Western, conservative and free
market stance. Some of the elements in Gaddafi's government and
military had defected to the rebels and equipped those previously

(48:28):
unarmed protesters with firepower, and so up to now we
only have estimates regarding the civilian death doll infrastructural devastation,
and arbitrary detentions, disappearances and kidnappings carried out by both
Progadafi and anti Gaddafi forces, not to mention the Liberate
targeting of black Libyans and Sub Saharan African migrants by

(48:49):
rebel forces that took place during and after the twenty
eleven war, with the claim that they were Gaddaffi's hired mercenaries.
Many of those Africans attempts to escape were met with
callous disregard by Europe.

Speaker 2 (49:04):
Yeah, callous disregarded. I mean, there are no words strong
enough to express the way I feel about the way
the European Union has treated migrants in Liberated is absolutely
disgusting and continues to be despicable. Yeah. Have you read
Sally Hayden's book about this?

Speaker 4 (49:20):
No, I haven't.

Speaker 2 (49:21):
It's called My Fourth Time We Drowned. Very good book,
difficult read, I would say, very much. It's some of
the type of reporting that I try and do myself
on migration, and that it talks about people, not numbers,
and its centers migrants as individuals with stories. It's a
great book, but probably not want to read, you know.

(49:42):
Right before bed.

Speaker 4 (49:43):
I could imagine it sounds heavy.

Speaker 2 (49:46):
Yeah, definitely heavy gooing and so.

Speaker 4 (49:49):
Following steelmates between the pro and Goodafi camps, in late
spring of twenty eleven, the rebels, assisted by netile forces,
took Tripoli and toppled Goodaffi's got and the NTC was
recognized internationally almost immediately as the legitimate government of Libya.
As Matt will Gress notes in jackbn quote on the

(50:10):
day Tripoli fell, the New York Times headline the scramble
for access to Libya's oil wealth begins was telen Libya's
vast oil reserves, along prized by the West for being
the largest in Africa and incredibly close to Europe, were
now open to business for foreign investors. As is the
case with all imperial interventions, the attempts to get profits

(50:31):
flowing from multinational corporations comes long before any ideas of
reconstructure such as es central infrastructure projects or insurance services
end quote. And really up to now that infrastructure has
not been established, and even access to Libya's oil is
not yet secured, even though they allegedly managed to loot
some of that oil. In twenty twelve, Nakadafi himself fled

(50:53):
after the fall of Tripoli, but he was found NATO
bombed his convoy and he was captured alive, then executed
by NTC forces in October twenty eleven, after which the
war was declared over and the ANTC declared Libya and
Islamic democracy in their constitutional declaration. The NTC estimated thirty

(51:13):
thousand dead, and a UN report from twenty twelve estimated
that more than nine hundred thousand people had to leave
the country since February of twenty eleven. Many were not
Libya nationals, but more than six hundred and sixty eight
thousand Libyans also fled, and an estimated two hundred thousand
people had been internally displaced, continuing without timeline. In twenty twelve,

(51:35):
the NTC handed power over to the General National Congress,
or GNC, and despite a formal end to the war,
Grafi loyalists, local militias, and tribes shaped against each other
and the GENC. The militias wouldn't disarm. The Graffi loyalists
continued to fight, and the GNC failed to put forward
a new constitution, so in twenty fourteen they were ousted

(51:57):
by the newly elected House of Representatives and in twenty fourteen,
a second civil war would begin in Libya, with the
nation split mainly between the House Representatives or HR, with
its Libya National Army or LNA, based in Tobruk to
the east, and their rival, made up of mostly Islamists
from the former gen C with their Libya Dawn Militia

(52:19):
based in Tripoli to the west. They didn't win the election,
they didn't consider it legitimate because of its low turnout,
and they didn't appreciate the amount of former Gaddafi supporters
in the new government, so they rose up to fight,
claiming to be the National Salvation Government or NSG. So
you have the HR and they have the NSG. Beyond
these two factions, yours had an al Qaeda affiliated militia

(52:42):
and the Islamic State, both engaged in insurgent struggle around
the country, sometimes holding entire cities. Eventually, the two governments
came together to sign the LPA, the Libyan Political Agreement
to form the Interim Presidential Council and Government of National
Accord or GNA in late twenty fifteen. With that attempt

(53:03):
at cohesion didn't really work out, as the U went
back to GNA, now based in Tripoli, couldn't consolidate power.
By the end of twenty sixteen, factions affiliated with the
NSG still resisted the GNA, and the HR, still based
in Tobrook, refused to endorse the GNA's appointments, so they
went from having two competing governments to kind of having three,

(53:26):
though the main opposing forces when all the GNA and
the HR. The JNA was backed by Tihi Qatar and
the EU, especially Italy and the UN, while the HR
was backed by Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Emirates,
and to some extent, France, who technically recognized the GNA

(53:46):
but also provided support to the HR for their struggle
against the Isthmists. The US was also supposed to be
back in the GNA, but Trump jumped out to praise
the HR at one point, so the US's position was
exposed as a lot more ambiguous in practice. Yeah, so,

(54:16):
the GNA and the HR would keep on struggling against
each other for control over the central bank and oil
companies and territory over the years. By the end of
one particularly significant offensive in twenty nineteen, which saw the
country's largest oil field brought under HR control. The situation
was such that the HR's leverage came from their control
over the oil field, and the GNA's leverage was that

(54:38):
it was internationally recognized and could legally sell the oil.
GNA leader Fayez Al Seraje and HR leader Shalifa Afta
seemed to be developing in cooperative relations, and in March
or twenty nineteen they were supposed to have a national
unity conference, but then the HR tried to take Tripoly whoopsie,

(54:59):
so they and I had to put spone in that conference.
The resultant fight and led to the hrt in st
a major city between the Libya's east and west halves.
With Turkish support, the JNA successfully repelled the HR from
the Atropoli and situation was stabilized with a battle line
just east oft.

Speaker 2 (55:18):
In twenty twenty, yeah, not just Turkish support, Turkey deployed
the Syrian National Army aka the TFSA the Turkish Free
Syrian Army. They are widely believed to be rebadged Islamist
from previous iterations of various Islamist groups in Syria that

(55:39):
Turkey has formed into kind of its own proxy force.
I mean, I'm sure if you go to the Wikipedia
page there are like seventeen million different war crimes listed,
like they are there. They are well known for their
affinity for war crimes.

Speaker 4 (55:52):
Yeah, I can imagine the fact that Turkey Turkey's back
and then tells me everything I need to know I.

Speaker 2 (55:58):
Think, yeah, right, yeah, and that they're considered like a
deniable proxy, right, like they could be like you can
be like, oh, well that wasn't us, That was these
Syrian guys who we happen to arm and equip and
run air support for.

Speaker 4 (56:12):
Yeah, what is the situation now? Now that Turkey is
kind of back in the new government in Syria.

Speaker 2 (56:18):
They have largely been folded into the stg's armed forces.
So like Abu Humpsa is I think a general or
brigadier I can't quite remember his rank, but as a
guy who has been widely condemned is now a military
officer within the stg's Ministry of Defense.

Speaker 4 (56:37):
Huh okay, So a more a great description than would
be that Turkey sent their what criminal proxy is to
support the GNA in repellent nat or premiature folie. Yeah,
and the situation stabilized the battle line just east of
thirty in twenty twenty, and after other times to reach

(56:58):
an agreement field they agreed to share oil revenue, establish
a prominencies fire, and get both Turkish forces and Russian
mercenaries out of the country. So the Second Civil War
was officially over in October twenty twenty. According to reporting
by Al Jazeera. The UN initiated a new attempt at

(57:18):
a unifying government in twenty twenty one, which was approved
originally by both rival parliament, leading to the establishment of
the Interim Government of National Unity or GNU in March
twenty twenty one, thus replacing the previously un baked GNA.
So we went from GNA to GNU, but then the

(57:38):
GNU would be opposed by the HR, which withdrew from
the GNU in September twenty twenty one and established the
Government of National Stability or GNS in March twenty two.
So the GNA was replaced by the GNU, and the
GNU was now opposed by the GNS, and thus the

(57:59):
country remained split into up to today between the UN
back to GNU and the HR slash Libya National Army
backed GNS. And in all of this chaos, people on
the ground have been suffering they've been suffering human rights
of uses, disappearances up to recently, the GNU imposed a
morality police, and they even numerous reports about open slave

(58:22):
markets in Libya where migrant Black Africans are auctioned to
the highest bidder. This is a result of human trafficking
and debt bondage, so not exactly the same as chattel slavery,
but the experience and racial undertones are all too familiar.
The suffering in Libya has also spread beyond its borders.

(58:44):
Following Gaddafi's fall, the weapons of his military stockpiles ended
up in the hands of militants across the Sahel region
of Africa and even in Syria. You'll remember in my
episode on the situation in Nigeria, some of those weapons
ended up in the hands of Bokoharam and other Islamic
militant groups in the region, Pulani herdsman as so on. Tragically,

(59:09):
because Libya just cast seem to catch a break at all,
September twenty three also saw catastrophic floods devastating the country.
The hurricane strong Storm Daniel caused two dams to burst
in the coastal city of Durna, which is within Jena's
territory in eastern Libyia. The flooding killed at least four
thousand people, though potentially even more, left on thousands missing

(59:33):
and displaced more than forty thousand others. The nation, still
wrought by civil war and still unrecovered from the devastation
of the NATO Obomban campaign, surely could have mustered a
more adequate response to the tragedy if not for those conditions.
In fact, it is theorized that the tragedy could have
been avoided altogether because, according to reports by the Middle

(59:54):
East Eye, a Turkish company was supposed to reability to
field dams, but the their works were reportedly interrupted by
the twenty eleven uprising and subsequent civil war.

Speaker 2 (01:00:06):
Yeah, it's always the cost of war that we don't count,
right Like, if you look at the twenty twenty three
earthquake that killed people in Syria and Turkey, right Like,
undoubtedly that would have done a lot less damage if
that hadn't been for the fact that war had been
raging in those places for so long, So like everything
else got put on hold. All the normal infrastructure repair

(01:00:27):
and in such that you would expect had to stop
because of that. War that made things like the earthquake worse. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:00:35):
I don't think the people who rose up against Gaddafi
and fought and died back in February or twenty eleven
I'd sought this out come. Unfortunately, in a world dictated
by the whims of imperiali spowers, this was the end
of their actions. I don't want people to get it

(01:00:57):
twisted though, because in the time since, as people have
observed the devastation wrought by the civil wars, there has
been an effort to most whitewash Kaddafi and to limit
our vision of possibilities to a binary of either perpetual
Gaddaffi rule on one end or perpetual civil war on

(01:01:19):
the other end. Those are not the only possibilities. So
we've discussed the legacy of nature intervention, which deserves condemnation
in this episode, and it should be an indication that
to the Western invasions and wars not going to liberate anyone.

Speaker 2 (01:01:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:01:36):
But aside from that accurate analysis of Libya since the
fall of Gaddafi, I want to bring in some conversation
on the man himself in the next episode. Until then,
all power to all the people. This has been it
could happen here, have been Andre Sage peace, Hello and

(01:02:08):
welcome to it happen here. I am andresige andraism on
YouTube and joined again.

Speaker 2 (01:02:14):
By James again.

Speaker 4 (01:02:17):
Yes, I've noticed a phenomenon I'm not sure if you've
noticed it too, where anti imperialists solidarity somehow goes a
step beyond opposing imperialist aggression itself and crosses into lionizing
or whitewashing the targets of that aggression, or rather the

(01:02:38):
asensible leaders of the target to that aggression.

Speaker 2 (01:02:41):
Oh yeah, I have noticed this too. It's one of
the things that makes me most angry in the world.
What's been referred to as the anti imperialism of idiots. Yes,
not so relevant now that I used to like to
apply the sad test to anybody who claimed to be
interested in the politics of liberation. Right if you if
you think Bashar Alasad is a based anti imperialist people's

(01:03:04):
socialist hero, then your politics are shit. I have nothing
good to say about that. Like, you're an idiot.

Speaker 4 (01:03:11):
Yeah, yeah, it should be a fringe phenomenon, right, but
I haven't seen it get an increase intraction.

Speaker 2 (01:03:18):
Yeah, even in like relatively you know, like I won't
kind of start a war with various US leftist publications.
But I went to pitch some people this last week,
thinking like, there is speculation that the United States will
once again ally itself with Kurdish groups. So I'm sure
it had then planned to once again abandon when that

(01:03:40):
became politically more expedient. But I happened to have some
insight into these various Kurtish groups, having spent some time
there and having contacts there, And so I went to
the website of these various you know, big publications which
are left or left leaning or even sort of liberal,
and I saw these borderline campus takes on what's happening
in Iran. And it's just so so frustrating to me, Like,

(01:04:04):
it makes me so angry that people continue to view
the world through this binary Marvel movie lens, which sees
it as impossible that two things could be bad at
the same time. Yeah, it's infuriating to me.

Speaker 4 (01:04:18):
Yeah, And if I was more inclined to conspiracy, I
might say that this binary is intentionally constructed, you know,
that it's it's by design that the most vocal anti
imperiodist voices also just so happened to align themselves with

(01:04:39):
state power. Yeah, and camp is on. But I'm not
inclined to conspiracy, so.

Speaker 2 (01:04:46):
Yeah, yeah, one can make a pretty reasonable argument.

Speaker 4 (01:04:49):
For that, right, One could make that argument. Yeah, I won't,
but one could.

Speaker 2 (01:04:55):
I might.

Speaker 4 (01:04:57):
I think one of the best examples of this is
this sort of odd obsession that some people have with
Colonel Wumar Algadafi. Now, last episode, we spoke about the
long term consequences of Western intervention in Libya, beginning with
the twenty eleven uprising during the Arab Spring against the
forty two year rule of more Markedafi. What began as

(01:05:18):
a broad, largely lead less protest movement was quickly shaped
by foreign intervention. In Marshal twenty eleven, the US, the UK,
and France launched a military campaign through NATO under the
UN mandate to protect civilians. The war toppled Gaddafi, but
killed tens of thousands and devastated infrastructure. In the aftermath,

(01:05:40):
Libya fractured into rival governments, militias, and foreign backed factions,
triggering yet another civil war in twenty fourteen, and despite
a cease fire in twenty twenty, the country remains divided
between competing administrations. While ordinary Libyans face instability, human rights abuses,
and economic hardship. I think it's fair to say that

(01:06:00):
the NATO intervention was a net negative for the country.
But in this same breath, I cannot agree with those
who seem to believe that Gaddafi's rule could have continued
either that he was some force for good in the country.
And in this episode, I really want to get into
the y to identify and dissect the actions of the
man Kaddafi. According to his biography and en Psycopoedia Britannica,

(01:06:24):
Murma al Kaddafi was born in nineteen forty two near Sirte, Libya.
Sixty nine years later, he would be captured and killed
in Sirte, Libya. After spending his early years in at
tent he graduated from the University of Libya in nineteen
sixty three and then graduated from a military academy in
nineteen sixty five. In nineteen sixty nine, at the age

(01:06:48):
of twenty seven, Gaddafi pulled off a blood less coup
to seize power from King Idris, the First of Libya.
For the next four decades plus, he would be the
de facto ruler of Libya. Gidraffi was both a passionate
Arab nationalist and a Muslim in power, he tried to
push both of his ideologies. He expelled Western military forces,

(01:07:12):
expelled remaining Italian settlers and Jewish communities in Libya, nationalized
the country's oil industry, banned alcohol and gambling, tried to
unify with his Arab neighbors occasionally by attempting coups in
their countries, and stood against normalization with Israel. So a
very mixed bag. So far. Until nineteen seventy seven, Gaddafi

(01:07:35):
ruled the Libyan Arab Republic, but the culmination of his
Cultural Revolution period from nineteen seventy three to nineteen seventy
seven would sideline his political and religious opponents, who would
begin in to see him as unstable, huboristic, and authoritarian.
That period would instead cement Gaddaffi as the sole ruler

(01:07:56):
of what he would rename the Socialist People's Libya and
Arab Jamahiria, as recounted in Libya The History of Gaddafi's
Pariah State by John Oakes. Jamahiria was a term he
coined in his Green Book, likely inspired by Mao's Little
Read Book, published during the Libyan Cultural Revolution period. Jamahiria

(01:08:17):
was his idea of a state of the masses governed
by people's congresses and popular assemblies. And if it's one
thing that makes a political movement, it's empowering. It's slapping
the people's and popular label on everything, regardless of any
additional context. So they had these democratic local assemblies called

(01:08:38):
basic People's Congresses that met three times a year, and
those congresses appointed executive people's committees which did most of
the day to day stuff, and above it all was
the General People's Congress. This period was simultaneously an effort
to encourage popular participation through these congresses while suppressing descend

(01:08:59):
through his control over the secret services. It was clear
that Gaddaffi was still in charge even after he stepped
down from his formal position as Secretary General in nineteen
seventy nine and simply and humbly dubbed himself the brotherly
leader and guide of the revolution.

Speaker 2 (01:09:17):
Yeah, he gets some of his like hubristic stuff, Like
his rhetoric is his outfit. His reference to himself is
like you couldn't parody some of it. It is where
like the parodies of dictators in this part of the
world come from. Is Goaddafi's kind of affect.

Speaker 4 (01:09:35):
I guess, yeah, he was a character, Yes, that he
was here, he was a definitely a character. Yeah so,
I mean, anarchist critiques of democracy are easy to find,
and although Gadaffi's Libya is never solely directly democratic, even
in his project, you could see some of the flaws

(01:09:58):
and the issues that anarchist of identify guide in this
approach to popular power as the congresses, the People's Congresses
were poorly attended and easily manipulated. Issues were often raised
and rarely resolved, And of course compounding those flaws was
the fact that these people's Congresses had no actual power
over the things that mattered in Libya, the oil industry,

(01:10:22):
the armed forces, the security services, and foreign policy, where
Kadafi and his compatriots still ruled. Gaddaffi decided where the
oil money went, and he directed some of it to
a great man made of a project that would extract
from the ancient and non renewable aquifer under the Libyan
desert to supply the course for some more stable water supply.

(01:10:43):
Frustratingly for him, I could assume Kaddafi did not get
what he wanted out of the revolutionary people's congresses, so
he created revolutionary committees to mobilize the people and safeguard
their rule through commandos that answered to Gaddafi directly. These
revolutionary committees could arrest counter revolutionaries, establish revolutionary courts, and

(01:11:07):
eliminate enemies of the revolution at home and abroad. The
people he called stray dogs. All of this for the people,
of course, and for the revolution.

Speaker 5 (01:11:29):
So on.

Speaker 4 (01:11:29):
People his system had some degree of people power and
people voice, but in practice he exercised near total control
and suppression of opposition, both within the country and outside
the country. The same went for workplaces.

Speaker 2 (01:11:47):
Of course.

Speaker 4 (01:11:48):
He spoke about worker partnership and power in the Green Book,
but it was a state controlled and state distributed economy
in Libia, run by oil money, with very few worker
run enterprises. There was also no real freedom of organization
or strike in Libya, as independent unions were banned and
Gadaffi explicitly rejected class struggle despite claiming to be a socialist.

(01:12:13):
So in the Return of Mormon Gadaffi by Tunisian academic
hate M. Gussemi, he hadised the cult of personality that
was forged over the years of Gaddafi's rule that has
resurfaced up to today. His opponents often pointed the good
that he did for the country, establishing basic social services,
free health, gain, education, howies in and land distribution, accessible

(01:12:36):
loan programs, women's rights and so on, and with that
welfare state came naturally some base of popular support for
people who had little to nothing before. Other fans of
Gadaffi point to what I like to call hype moments
and aura. So there was a time when he was
in the UN General Assembly and he was supposed to

(01:12:59):
be a short time to speak, and he just went
on and on and on and on and on and on,
and he tore up the UN chatter hyperments and aura, right,
and yeah, that's like something that a lot of people
point to. He was also, at one point in time
the Chairman of the African Union, and he wanted to
keep that position permanently, and he was proposing a whole

(01:13:22):
United States of Africa, like he had a whole period
of African solidarity, which we'll get to.

Speaker 2 (01:13:29):
Yeah, okay, good, Yeah, His Pan Africanist arc is is fascinating.

Speaker 4 (01:13:33):
Yeah. So none of this, however, erases his dark dark side.
For one, for all the women's rights that he put
forward in Libya. He was not that great to women.
The Green Book presents Gaddafi as someone who cared about
women's dignity and rights. But even in that book you

(01:13:54):
see a very complimentarist take on women's place in society.
It's like, yeah, the equals to men, but also their
role is in the household. They're supposed to be mothers
above everything else. Yeah, he was like, they need to
be mothers, but they shouldn't be treated as property or objects.

Speaker 2 (01:14:12):
Yeah. I think he based a lot of this in
like his interpretation of Hadi thought the Kuran, like his
idea that like there was some kind of divine guidance
on gender roles.

Speaker 6 (01:14:22):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:14:22):
I've actually seen this in recent days, Like you can
go and find harmonised tweets, right, like like Ayatollah Hamani
not his son, and like you can see his stuff
where he's like you should not mistreat your wife. You
can literally find in his timeline on Twitter. Right. He
was a big poster and people have somehow attempted to

(01:14:43):
like construe this as like he was a leader of
enlightened feminist regime like in Iran, which I don't know.

Speaker 4 (01:14:49):
It's benevolent patriarchy. Alough again, Yeah, I like you.

Speaker 2 (01:14:53):
You have to be really on a special fucking truth
trajectory to convince yourself that that is the case. Like,
it takes a remarkable capacity for self delusion to rather
than listening to women in Iran, women from Iran, many
of whom I have spoken to, to look at the
evidence of the killing, for example, with you know, Amini

(01:15:17):
right to be like, I know, I found this tweet
from twenty thirteen, so we were good. Here is this
is fine. It's just remarkable people's tendency to do that.

Speaker 4 (01:15:26):
Yeah, it's remarkable and stupid.

Speaker 2 (01:15:29):
Yeah, yeah, stupid It is a good word.

Speaker 4 (01:15:32):
Yeah. And going back to Gaddafi aside from that sort
of benevolent patriarchy take on women's equality.

Speaker 2 (01:15:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:15:41):
Investigative reporting by anaka Jin also gathered testimony since his
fall that alleged his procurement, collusion, and sexual abuse of
women inside his compound, heeded by a network of officials. Unfortunately,
many of these women are far too a free to
come forward even all these years after his death, due

(01:16:03):
to the persistence of prograd Afi sentiment in the country
up to today. So not the best for women. What
about for Africa, right, his whole pan Africanist are He
styled himself as a Pan African who would support the
struggles of people like Mandela and would fund infrastructure projects

(01:16:27):
around the continent. But he had a history of attemptant
over through governments in Africa and support oppressive ones, including
Idi Amin of Uganda and Charles Taylor of Liberia. So
his Pan Africanism was never concerned with the freedom or
well being of African people. It was I think very

(01:16:49):
much according to his own self aggrandizement.

Speaker 2 (01:16:54):
Yeah, didn't He proposed like an African Union, which was
more akin to like a United States, like Federal Africa.

Speaker 4 (01:17:02):
The United States of Africa. That was his proposal.

Speaker 2 (01:17:05):
Fantastic, Yeah, yeah, correct.

Speaker 4 (01:17:08):
And as he is proposing this Pan African vision within
Libya itself, he was pushing for an Arablivia. Yeah, the
Amazek and other non Arab Africans in Libya were mistreated,
you know. His vision of an Arab Libya led to
this suppression of the Toaregs, the tables and the Amazek.

(01:17:31):
He had policies, as reported in the BBC in New
Internationalists aljaz right elsewhere, he had policies that included the
bannon of minority languages, the bannon of minority names, the
discourageon of cultural expression, and sometimes denying citizenship to groups
outside the Arab identity. So naturally, many of these minorities
took part in the twenty eleven movement, and after Gaddafi's

(01:17:53):
fall there was a revival of language, cultural institutions and publications. However,
the NTC and these that followed have continued to ignore
the minority plight. Minority groups are still struggling for constitutional recognition, representation,
and equal rights in a country that is, of course
still divided, and some minorities have chosen to boycott the

(01:18:15):
national political process entirely in favor of pursuing local self governance. Also,
minorities were not the only people being persecuted in Gaddaffi's Libya.
On the political front, Despite coal and himself a socialist,
Gaddaffi was really all over the place ideologically now internationally,
he may have backed the Palestinian struggle, the Irish struggle,

(01:18:38):
the African American struggle, but he was consistent in suppressing
actual leftists in Libya. Marxis dot Com identified some of
these repressive efforts in their article on Gaddafi quote. Gaddaffi
was very clear in expressing his anti communism. In nineteen
seventy one, he sent a plane full of Sudanese communists
back to Sudan, where they were execut by Nimri. In

(01:19:01):
nineteen seventy three, the regime publish an official document to
commemorate the fourth anniversary of Gadaffi's rise to power under
the title Holy War against Communism end quote quite the center.
Later on, however, he would get more chummy with the ussry.
But Gadaffi was no marxisilatist, and communists and leftists and

(01:19:22):
workers were not legally capable of organizing independently in Libya.
Aside from them, you also had the murder and torture
of civilians and journalists, the assassinations of rivals and Libya
and around the world. It was not the free speech
utopia that Kadafi tried to paint that as instead of
emboldening the left to sermons, he emboldened these tribal groups

(01:19:46):
and set the foundation for the Libya that we see today.

Speaker 2 (01:19:52):
His consistent through line is that he liked strong men
and sees himself among them and wants to associate himself
with them. At some point in the early two thousands,
he was supporting Yorg Hyder, a neo fascist in Austria,
and telling Europeans they needed to get past their obsession
with the Second World War. He had no like consistent politics.

Speaker 4 (01:20:14):
Well, I mean that tracks with his expulsion of Jewish
communities in Libya. Yeah, he didn't only expel Jewish settlers,
He expelled Jewish communities that had arrived prior to Italian colonization,
that had existed in Libya for centuries.

Speaker 2 (01:20:29):
Yeah that maybe, I guess Anti Semitism can often be
the link that brings terrible people together.

Speaker 4 (01:20:36):
He had a lot of other notorious incidents of suppression,
but one of the most significant was the Abu Salem massacre.
In short, as recounted by John Ooks, Abu Salem was
the site of a prisoner's protest on the twenty eighth
of June nineteen ninety six. The prisoners escaped their cells
and were protesting them as treatment as gods shot at

(01:20:58):
them from the roof. Two tops of officials came and
took command, ordering the shooting to stop and promising to
address the prisoner's complaints if they returned to their cells
and gave up the guards they had hostage, and the
following day shots fired from eleven am to one thirty
five pm, a mass slaughter of approximately one thy two

(01:21:20):
hundred of the sixteen to seventeen hundred prisoners in Abu Salins.
The families who suffered a blow were among the first
on the streets of Benghazi twenty eleven, but those families
were not originally told that they loved ones had been killed.
Some of them continued to visit the prison for weeks, months,
years after, bringing gifts for their relatives who were already

(01:21:44):
long dead. In the twists and turns of Gaddafi's ideological
development or lack their of. Following the fall of the USSR,
Gaddafi would also pursue economic liberalization. He started opening up
to the West slightly. There was slow progress and a
brief hiccup, but by two thousand and three, free market

(01:22:05):
advocate Chukri Ganim was appointed Prime Minister. Before long, three
hundred and sixty state enterprises were privatized. By two thousand
and seven, Libya was laying off as many as a
third of the government workforce four hundred thousand public sector workers.
According to a New York Times article from twenty eleven.

(01:22:26):
The IMF had actually praised Libya's economic reforms, So why
twenty eleven conditions were so unbearable for so many workers,
especially young people. There's no wonder that some of them
fought with nothing to lose. The last aspects of Goodaffi's

(01:22:51):
rule that I want to touch on was his complex
relationship with Western powers Billionais rule in the seventies and eighties.
He did style himself an anti imperist revolutionary, and that
is the image that our people uphold of him to
this day. Libya funded an armed revolutionary and Milson movements worldwide,
from the African National Congress or the ANC, to the

(01:23:13):
Palestine Liberation Organization or PILO, to the Irish Republican Army
or IRI. He aligned himself with the so called radical
camp in the Middle East, including Bathist Syria and Iran,
and Western governments accused Libya of supporting international terrorism. Libya
was considered a rogue state, but as noted by Syrian

(01:23:35):
anarchist Mazen Kamalmas in an interview with Jose Antonio Guitairez quote,
even when Gaddafi was declaring himself an anti imperialist long ago.
It was just a lip service while he engaged as
an authoritarian in trivial terrorist acts that never meant to
support the libertarian objectives of the victims of imperialism end quote. Still,

(01:23:57):
Reagan called him a mad dog, and the US bombed
Libya in nineteen eighty six after attacks in a West
Berlin nightclub were attributed to Libyan agents. Those bombans narrowly
missed Gaddafi himself, but they killed his adopted baby daughter.
Libya was also blamed for the nineteen eighty eight bombing
of PanAm Flight one O three over Lockerby, which led

(01:24:19):
to sanctions both the United Nations and the US, which
isolated Libya economically and diplomatically. In the nineties, however, with
four of the USSR, Libya began solely shifting toward cooperation.
They handed over the suspects in the Lockerby bombing, and
sanctions began to loosen as they attempted to normalize relations.

(01:24:40):
Western intelligence services soon started cooperating with Libyan intelligence against
Islamist militon groups, including the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which
is a thorn in Gaddafi's side. The early two thousands
had Libya renounce its weapons of mass destruction program following
the invasion of Iraq. The US and the unsuresequently lifted
sanction and diplomatic relations were restored fully with Western countries.

(01:25:04):
Gadaffi hosted Tony Blair of the UK, Nicholas Sarkozia France,
and met with Obama as well, and many of these
meetings with Western leaders produced multi billion dollar energy in
business deals BP Royal, Dot Shell, Excellent, Mobile, Chevron, Total Energies.
They were all get in pieces of Libya's wealth. As

(01:25:25):
Libya began adopting more neoliberal economic reforms like currency devaluation,
trade liberalization, and more openness to foreign investment. Libya was
also able to cooperate closely with Western intelligence during the
war and terror, including assist in the CIE and MI
six in rendition and torture, as uncovered by Human Rights Watch.

(01:25:46):
So by the mid two thousands, Libya had mostly reintegrated
into the Western their global system, and the West, for
their part, simply ignored Gdaffi's continues. Human rights abuses. The
counter terrorism cooperation, the oil and gascon tracks, and don't
forget the brutal African migrant control were all too valuable
for America and Europe.

Speaker 2 (01:26:07):
I remember this this period quite well. It was when
I was in my undergraduate university and Gaddafi was invited
to speak the Oxford Union. I did my undergraduate there
and myself and a number of friends.

Speaker 4 (01:26:19):
So you met Gadafi.

Speaker 2 (01:26:21):
No, he spoke. He spoke via video conference, okay, which
they paused while they removed us for protesting Gaddafi's Like,
it just seemed like this decade of abuse of his
own people have been completely forgotten, right, because he was
now prepared to do abuse of other people that was
beneficial to the United Kingdom of the United States. And

(01:26:44):
we felt like that was apparent and wrong, so we
went to make our feelings known. And the Oxford Union's
very silly institution, right, which prizes itself on free speech,
and really it just does kind of class reproduction for
the most part, right, And of course there was not
freedom of speech for people who are going to be
rude to someone who was in charge of a state,

(01:27:05):
even if they were being rude on behalf of the
thousands of people he's had murdered and tortured. And yeah,
that was my little personal running with Goodafi when I
was what like eighteen. But yeah, I can't remember if
we were like not allowed in or we were booted out,
because I am like two decades and half a dozen
traumatic brain injuries since my teenage years. But yeah, I

(01:27:29):
do remember just being like, people are triating with I
guess some kind of fucking novelty, and this person has
real blood on his hands, like real people have suffered
tremendously and died because of actions he's taken, like it's
not funny or cute.

Speaker 4 (01:27:42):
Wow, what year was that?

Speaker 2 (01:27:44):
It would have been in the early two thousands, the
Bush era, because that's when I was in my undergraduate
second Bush term, so like it would have been brought
in two thousand and six some of somewhere there.

Speaker 4 (01:27:57):
Yeah, thankfully I never had any run ins with good Yea.

Speaker 2 (01:28:01):
Even at that time, I can remember just being sort
of somewhat pulled by the Marxist learning this tendency to
excuse crimes against humanity if as long as they were
done by people who who said the right things, who
had the right vibes, who condemned the right people, and
the liberal tendency to excuse crimes against humanity so long

(01:28:23):
as they were done in service of capitalism and the state.

Speaker 4 (01:28:26):
Yeah, yeah, shockingly similar tendencies in some ways.

Speaker 2 (01:28:30):
Yeah, right, like this fundamentally not rooted in the idea
that people have a right to dignity. Both of them
hold people as less valuable than other things, right, be
it capital or I mean the Marxis learnings tendency, honestly, Like,
it's not even the revolution that they believe it's more
valuable than people. It's the revolutionary rhetoric. Yeah, like with

(01:28:55):
a sad right, Like you can murder your own people
with chemical weapons so long as you pretend to give
a single shit about Palestinians, even though you've spent decades
using your weapons to kill your own people and never
once use him to actually help the people of Palestine,
to actually protect.

Speaker 4 (01:29:13):
People, exactly exactly, So at this point, now you know, good,
after he's trying to be your chummy with dus after
he spent some time being chummy with Africa, and spend
some time being chummy with USSR and with rebel groups
around the world. But that was just the thing, right,
he had this track record of flip flopping, you know,

(01:29:38):
and even though relations had normalize, these Western powers could
not trust him. They still saw him as that mad dog.
They still saw him as unpredictable and unreliable. In fact,
even while he was cutting deals with these multi billion
dollar corporations for the oil contracts and so on, when
he wasn't getting what he wanted, he would threaten to
nationalize to get what he wanted. And so to West,

(01:30:03):
being opportunistic, we're just waiting for an opportunity. They were
done with playing his game, and that opportunity came when
the people organically rose up against Kadafi in twenty eleven,
not long after NATO intervened, and the years since Libyans
have suffered and died with no end in sight. It

(01:30:24):
shouldn't be uncontroversial to say this Gadafi was not a
true antime perialist. I don't think it's possible for a
statesman or a government to be truly anti perialist. Government
is foundationally exploitative internally and when turned externally, that drive
exploitation is what we understand as imperialism. All the markers

(01:30:48):
of imperialism worthy of condemnation, be it economic exploitation, cultural dominance,
military violence, et cetera, is carried out under the label
of governance when done within its own borders when done against,
for example, the non Arab minorities in Libya. I think
what's missing from now popular anti imperialist narratives is that connection,

(01:31:11):
that analysis and a gap in the analysis is what's
creating this false consciousness that leads people to combs to
conclusion that anti imperialism means that XYZ government is anti
imperialists and good, and ABC government is imperialists and bad.
That's not how the world works. States are never going
to be liberatory. They're not able to produce a liberatory framework.

(01:31:34):
At their best, they function as a welfare state. At
their worst, you get mass suppression and culture personality. Sometimes
you get a combination of both, as with Libya and
a Giraffi. And that's my message for today. Please stop
Lionis and leaders stay woke. Yeah, and all power for

(01:31:58):
all the people. I've been and youre siege. This is
a Kapania peace.

Speaker 6 (01:32:17):
On Sunday, April twelfth, I went to the Basement nightclub
in Queens. Like usual, someone scanned my ticket at the
Big gate off Flushing Avenue. I had to wait in
a winding line outside the door, went through security, and
finally reached the DJ and bar, but instead of the
regular collection of twinks, dolls, and bisexuals, the room was

(01:32:39):
full of city workers, politicians, journalists, and DSA members, a
decent number of which probably were bisexual. I suppose technically
we were directly above the Basement nightclub in the Knockdown
Center event venue. Gathered this Sunday afternoon to attend Mayor
Zoron Mamdani's one hundred day address. I'm Garrison Davis. This

(01:33:03):
is it could happen here. I show about things falling
apart and sometimes putting stuff back together. This one is
one of those rare episodes focused on the latter. Earlier
this April marked Mayor Mamdani's first one hundred days in office.
This episode, I'll discuss what Zoron has done these first
one hundred days, some of the challenges he's faced, if

(01:33:25):
he's been able to deliver on the promises of his campaign,
and how he's adapted to the power and constraints of
running the biggest city in the country, and finally, what
all this could mean for the future of working class
and left wing politics in the United States. Let's first
return to the one hundred day Address above the Basement nightclub,

(01:33:46):
upon entering the venue, you found yourself in a museum
of the administration's first one hundred days. This little installation
displayed the Mayor's snowshovel from the historic blizzard during Zoron's
first few weeks in office, a tenant organizing suggestion board
from the rental ripoff hearings, and a child sized mayoral
podium used to announce a new free childcare program for

(01:34:08):
two year olds. Museum plaques detailed victories for labor and
tenants rights, as well as infrastructure accomplishments like scaffolding reform
and a pothole blitz that filled over twenty thousand potholes
in just three days. Before the mayor's speech, a Bronx parent,
two tenant organizers, and a city worker from the Department
of Transportation spoke to the crowd about how life is

(01:34:31):
different under the new administration. Mamdani's speech was effectively a
state of the Union for New York City. The mayor
outlined the campaign promises the administration has fulfilled so far
in their short time in office, and connected his style
of governing to the Sewer Socialists of Milwaukee from the
first half of the twentieth century. Who focused on strengthening

(01:34:52):
public services.

Speaker 5 (01:34:54):
Because for too long, City Hall had not just failed
to meet expectations, it had low them. After years of
broken promises, no one in this city could be blamed
for doubting that government held either the ability or the
ambition to upend the status quo.

Speaker 7 (01:35:12):
It.

Speaker 5 (01:35:12):
As I said on that freezing January afternoon to more
than eight and a half million New Yorkers, we will
make no apology for what we believe. I was elected
as a democratic socialist, and I will govern as a
democratic socialist.

Speaker 6 (01:35:32):
This speech was really the first time since the inauguration
that the Mayor has talked at length about what it
means to govern as a democratic socialist and the example
that New York City can set for the rest of
the country. The address was mostly attended by city workers,
who the Mayor invited to enter into a ticket lottery.

(01:35:53):
For most of the speech, I was pinned between a
group of uniformed Department of Sanitation employees and workers from
the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. The event in
general was focused on uplifting civil servants and celebrating public service,
whether that be bus drivers, school teachers, or the sanitation
workers that kept the city running during the worst snowstorm

(01:36:16):
in years. It feels like for the past few decades,
the only public sector job that gets regularly celebrated as
noble by those in government or in the media and
promoted by pop culture is being a police officer. Being
a cop is the only public sector job that gets
uplifted with propaganda. Zoron's little videos promoting three point one

(01:36:38):
city call center workers is to quote front of the
pod Ben Lorber, rolling back decades of neoliberal propaganda reasserting
the dignity of public sector work and workers. A common
turn of phrase uttered by Mayor Mumdani is if you
can't solve the smallest task in someone's life, why would
they ever trust you to solve the biggest one. So

(01:37:00):
let's go over some things big and small that Mamdani
has been able to do in his first one hundred days.
One of Mamdani's core campaign promises was to freeze the rent.
On February eighteenth, Mayor Mamdani appointed six new members to
the nine member Rent Guidelines Board, which each year is
tasked with determining the rent increase percentages for the more

(01:37:23):
than one million rent stabilized apartments. In the city under
airic Adams, the board approved a three percent rent increase
for one year leases and a four point five percent
increase for two year leases in just a few weeks.
The new board will hold a preliminary vote to freeze
or raise rents before their final vote in June. Public

(01:37:44):
testimony on rent adjustments is currently underway. Housing in general
is one of the top issues affecting affordability in the city,
and the Mayor's approach has not been limited to filling
vacancies on the Rent Guidelines Board. After Zora's and aaugurations
beach on January first, he went to a neglected apartment
building just east of Prospect Park to sign an executive

(01:38:06):
order revitalizing the Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants and appointed
a tenant organizer to lead the office. This apartment building
was owned by a literally bankrupt landlord called the Pinnacle Group,
who was responsible for more than five thousand housing violations
and fourteen thousand complaints. The revamped Office to Protect Tenants

(01:38:28):
and the Mayor intervened in the bankruptcy proceedings and successfully
secured thirty million dollars in repairs and upgrades for tenants
as well as protection from future displacement. Through this office,
the administration has continued to crack down on bad landlords
who violate New York City law and mistrey tenants. Just

(01:38:48):
a few weeks after the inauguration, Momdanni announced a two
point one million dollar settlement from A and E real
Estate Properties for tenant harassment and hazardous conditions across fourteen
buildings in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queen's As a part of
the settlement, A and E was also required to correct
more than four thousand building condition violations. In February, the
Department of Housing, Preservation and Development released a public list

(01:39:12):
of the two hundred and fifty buildings with the most
severe housing code violations a city wide and put them
under heightened oversight via the Alternative Enforcement Program, with the
city stepping in to make repairs, then billing the landlords
if they failed to address violations.

Speaker 5 (01:39:29):
Since January first, we have won more than thirty four
million dollars in settlements, judgments and repairs for tenants, delivered
improvements to six thousand and seventy apartments so far, and
issued one hundred and ninety five thousand, eight hundred and
twenty nine violations New York City will no longer tolerate

(01:39:52):
exploitation as a business model.

Speaker 6 (01:39:57):
In March, Mayor Mumdani announced a quote unquote landmark victory
against famously bad landlord Seth Miller of Egis Realty. You
can say the landlord was egregious at Realty. The city
brought a case against Miller for dangerously direct conditions at
nine to one to nine Prospect Avenue in the South Bronx,

(01:40:18):
and for the first time ever, courts imposed the maximum
penalties under the city's nuisance abatement law, a one thousand
dollars fine per day until housing violations are addressed and
two point one seven four million dollars in retroactive penalties.
During the first one hundred days, the city held five

(01:40:39):
rental ripoff hearings, one in each borough, providing New Yorkers
a platform to discuss various problems with their landlord, from
poor conditions to repair delays or junk fees. This was
a dedicated public forum for tenants to speak directly to
city officials and collectively shape housing policy going forward. A
month into office, the mayor announced a thirty eight million

(01:41:01):
dollar investment to install modern heating and cooling in seven
hundred and twelve of New York City's public housing units
at the Beach forty first Street houses in Queens And
technically this is after the first one hundred days, but
I think it's worth mentioning that just a few days ago,
zorunannounced a two point five billion dollar investment in public

(01:41:22):
housing to deliver new energy efficient lighting and faucets to
forty five thousand homes, heat pumps in twenty thousand, and
ten thousand new induction stoves, all affecting the Nische public
housing in New York City. On Zoron's very first day
in office, he also signed two executive orders to accelerate
housing construction by building on city owned properties to increase

(01:41:43):
the supply of affordable housing and cutting red tape to
make it faster and more affordable to build. The development
approval process for building affordable housing has been reduced by
more than two years by the administration's implementation of the
new voter approved Expediated Land Use Review recedure, combined with
a new program called the Neighborhood Builder's Fast Track, which

(01:42:04):
will pre select qualified developers to shorten the pre development
timeline by eight months for certain projects. On city owned land.
Another of Zorn's core campaign promises was universal childcare. On
his eighth day in office, Mayramdani announced a partnership with
Governor Kathy Hockel to provide free childcare for thousands of
two year olds in New York City with a one

(01:42:26):
point two billion dollar increase in state funding. Since then,
the mayor has expanded the free three K program for
three year olds to more than half of all school
districts in the city, and announced two K fall enrollment
for school districts eighteen, twenty three, ten six, and twenty seven,
which serve lower income neighborhoods. Two K applications open for

(01:42:49):
the first time on June second, with the program operating
on a full day schedule from eight am to six
pm all year round. As a part of the three
K expansion, seven new early childcare education centers are opening
in Western Queens, Staten Island, South Brooklyn, and the South
Bronx and On March thirtieth, the mayor announced the city's

(01:43:10):
first pilot program for free on site childcare for city workers,
based at the David Dinkins Municipal Building, with applications opening
on April thirtieth. The city also created a new accessible
childcare provider map with interactive features to filter by location,
age group, and cost. The mayor says that all these
steps will lead to free childcare for every three year

(01:43:32):
old and two year old in the city by the
end of his first term. Another key promise was fast
and free buses. The administration is making headway on the
fast part by building more bus lanes, redesigning streets, as
well as adding protected by clanes on mcguinnis Boulevard, thirty
first Street in Astoria, Ashland Place across Flatbush, East, Flatbush, Midwood,

(01:43:54):
and Brooklyn and Kingston Avenues in central Brooklyn. Amdani restarted
the Stall Madison Ave bus lane redesign to make buses
faster and more reliable for ninety two thousand daily riders.
The city announced a new bus lane for the Bronx
crosstown bus service to Yankee Stadium and restarted the Fordham
Road bus Lane project to improve the busiest bus corridor

(01:44:17):
in the Bronx, servicing an average of one hundred and
thirty thousand daily riders across four routes. Just this week,
construction began in Brooklyn for the redesign of Flatbush Avenue
with the goal of improving bus speeds by over forty
percent for one hundred and thirty two thousand daily riders,
and before the World Cup this summer, Zoron has promised

(01:44:38):
to complete new bike lanes and pedestrian upgrades in Lower Manhattan.
As for the free part, that will be a bit harder.
Mamdani maintains that his administration is working with the state
government in Albany and the MTA to eventually make New
York City buses free, and proposed a five week free
bus pilot program during the World Cup. Nope, it's unclear

(01:45:00):
if that will happen. It's not all sunshine and rainbows
in New York City. Upon taking office, Mayor Mumdani discovered
the city was facing an unexpected financial crisis in the

(01:45:21):
form of a hidden twelve billion dollar deficit left by
former Mayor Eric Adams, stemming from years of fiscal mismanagement
and the under budgeting of essential services like rental and
cash assistance, shelters, health insurance, and special ad as. Mayor
Eric Adams covered up this massive budget deficit by leaving
the gaps grossly understated, gaps that were made worse by

(01:45:44):
divestment in New York City by the state under former
Governor Andrew Cuomo. The mayor is actually required by law
to have a balanced budget, so rather than sweeping this
under the rug by continuing to cook the city's books
like his predecessor, Zoron chose transparency about the financial crisis
he's inherited and signed an executive order to designate chief

(01:46:05):
savings officers in every city agency to streamline processes and
eliminate waste. Some of these savings so far include canceling
twenty thousand dollars of Slack subscriptions to saving one hundreds
of thousands of dollars by foregoing vacant office space. Through
his relationship with Governor Kathy Hochel, the mayor secured one

(01:46:26):
point five billion dollars in state aid in February that,
combined with higher than expected Wall Street revenues and savings measures,
shrunk the deficit to five point four billion. Zoron's preliminary budget,
released last February, sparked criticism for failing short of promises
to increase funding to parks and libraries. While campaigning, Zoron

(01:46:49):
advocated for city libraries to receive zero point five percent
of the city budget, but the preliminary budget only allocated
point three nine percent, which is actually a twenty nine
nine million dollar cut from the last Adams budget down
to four hundred and fifty six million dollars. Meanwhile, the
park budget remained effectively flat at about zero point five percent,

(01:47:11):
rather than boosting it to one percent of the total
budget as Mamdani previously hoped. Though in March, Mayor Mamdani
announced new capital investment of fifty million dollars to reconstruct
ten parks in underserved neighborhoods. This February budget is preliminary
and subject to change as Zoron's negotiations with the city
council and the state continue. In February, Mamdani reversed a

(01:47:36):
previous policy against the force removal of homeless encampments after
twenty people died in the street during a horrific blizzard
and sudden cold snap in late January. Despite the efforts
of outreach workers visiting known homeless people every two hours
to offer warm shelter and check if they needed help,
fourteen hundred people were placed into shelters and warming centers

(01:47:59):
during that first time freeze, with eighty five people involuntarily
moved or hospitalized. The new encampment SPEEP policy will be
led by the Department of Homeless Services rather than the
NYPD as they were under Eric Adams, which mcdonnie said
put homeless New Yorkers in danger and was ineffective in
moving people into shelter or housing. Under the new plan,

(01:48:21):
after posting a removal notice, outreach workers will visit encampments
every day for a week with the goal of connecting
people to shelter and establishing a pipeline to stable housing,
while opening new shelters across the city, including New York
City's first ever pet inclusive transitional housing facility for families.
Much of the criticism levied at Zoran revolves around his

(01:48:43):
choice to retain NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tish, something he announced
before of the election. Zoron did cancel and Eric adams
plan to add five thousand more NYPD officers, but as promised,
their budget remained effectively the same despite the financial deficit.
But Tish specifically has been seen as a rare moderating

(01:49:04):
force in the administration, an outlier that may be preventing
police reforms that Zoron campaigned on like disbanding the SRG,
the Strategic Response Group tasked with responding to both protests
and terrorism, as well as getting rid of the NYPD
gang database. Critics have noted that Zoron seems to be
moving towards quote unquote reforms of the gang database rather

(01:49:28):
than his previous call to get rid of it, saying
in early April, quote I've made my critiques of the
database clear, and the NYPD has also implemented a number
of reforms as per the recommendation that came through, and
the implementation of those reforms and the results of that
are part of the active discussion that we are having unquote.

(01:49:48):
The gang database in New York has shrunk by forty
percent in the last two years. As for the SRG,
Mayor Mamdani still maintains that he remains quote steadfast in
my commitment to disband the SRG, to do so in
a manner that upholds both First Amendment rights of New
Yorkers and keeps New Yorkers safe, and that is the
subject of an active conversation that we are having unquote.

(01:50:12):
Commissioner Tish has been particularly resistant to the idea of
disbanding the SRG, though earlier this month, Mayor Mumdani's chief
of staff, Elbasgard Church, said on the News that the
administration remains committed to fulfilling the campaign promise of disbanding
the SRG, and that a delegation of City Hall and
NYPD officials traveled to Columbus, Ohio to learn about their

(01:50:34):
protest policing model focused on quote communication and quote de
escalation over mass arrests and aggressive force.

Speaker 3 (01:50:42):
The commitment is to disband the SRG, and I think
that the Columbus visit showcases that we are committed to
a really disciplined approach here. We want it to work,
and we want to do it in collaboration with the NYPD.
So the Mayor is in regular conversation with his police Commissioner,
and our teams also meet regularly so that we can

(01:51:04):
design something that is best suited to that commitment being
fulfilled and not compromising any of the safety and the
protection that New Yorkers deserve.

Speaker 6 (01:51:12):
In an April interview, may Or mam Donni did express
to The New York Times that when unable to reach
an agreement with TISH, he does have the power to
overrule her on police policy if needed. Quote. Ultimately, I
hold the final decision, no matter which department or agency
we're speaking about. On quote, Mam Donnie has not exercised
this power with the NYPD as of yet. In March,

(01:51:36):
Zoron took the first step in establishing the Department of
Community Safety by opening the Office of Community Safety, led
by Deputy Mayor Ronita Francois, who directed de Blasio's Action
Plan for Neighborhood Safety and advised Campaign Zero, which opposes
the Gang Database. The new Office of Community Safety will
develop strategies and coordinate efforts to combat gun violence, mental health,

(01:52:00):
crisis response, hate crimes, and substance abuse issues. At the announcement,
Francois said, quote, the evidence is clear. Addressing what ails
our communities, whether that be crumbling physical infrastructure, social disconnection,
or a lack of access to economic opportunity, is how
we best ensure that our communities are safe.

Speaker 2 (01:52:20):
Unquote.

Speaker 6 (01:52:21):
It's too early to judge the impact of the office,
but such an office or city department has the potential
to challenge the police's monopoly on public safety. The other
common critique of Mumdani is based on his endorsement of
liberal Governor Kathy Hochel and his decision to focus on
governing rather than dedicating resources and political capital towards further

(01:52:43):
uphill primary challenges. Zoran has said, quote, the success of
our movement will be defined by the success of our government.
Through his working partnership with Governor Hokeel, the mayor has
been able to extract wins from the state, particularly for
universal childcare and the one point five billion dollars in
state aid. In the realm of discourse, some leftists, anarchists

(01:53:07):
or ultras have jumped on any fault or policy shift
as a sign that Zoron has wholly moved to the
right or betrayed the movement. Such opinions are rewarded by
the social media economy, which tends to encourage whatever is
seen as the most radical, extreme, or divisive opinion. This
tendency has been present even among some of Zoron's earliest

(01:53:29):
online supporters. Behind this tendency is a willingness and frankly
hunger to turn on Zoron, not necessarily for anything he
has or has not done, but because of the position
he now occupies. Zoron used to be an outsider challenging
the democratic establishment embodied by Andrew Cuomo, but now he's

(01:53:51):
one of the most popular Democrats in the country. DNC
social media accounts are hosting Zoron memes and hype videos.
This could be viewed as a massive accomplishment evidence that
the Democratic Party can be forced to bend toward left
wing populism because of the working class voters and mass
organizing that put Zoron in the position he's currently in.

(01:54:13):
But others view Zoron's acceptance and select promotion within the
party as a sign he's been corrupted, co opted, recuperated,
or made palatable. Both of these things can be partially true.
The Democratic elite certainly have their own motives for dipping
their toes into the Mamdani hottub, just as Zoron and

(01:54:36):
the New York City DSA have their own aspirations for
influencing the direction of the party towards social democracy and
democratic socialism. In general, there's a lot of confusion or
disagreement on what it means to be a democratic socialist
in a position of power. As an executive, Zoron is
in a unique position that not many other DSA members

(01:54:57):
have ever had, being in such a position of power
informs and shapes the way someone interacts with the systems
of party and state in a way that those outside
of power cannot fully understand. It filters ideology into material actions.
This idea frightens many, but differences in political horizons also

(01:55:20):
affect the way people interact and move with these systems.
The question is not what should Zoron do if there
were no constraints on his power, because then obviously he
should just implement utopian communism. But his power obviously does
have constraints if the goal for the left is to
build a working class movement to that end, as a

(01:55:41):
function of Zoron's constraints, it may actually be more effective
for him to operate down certain state pathways that allow
him to facilitate the building of a working class movement
and avoid other more extreme pathways that, because of the
current constraints on executive power, would either be in af
fect at best or self destructive at worst. As the mayor,

(01:56:04):
Zoron's job is to run the biggest city in the country,
and as a democratic socialist that means using government to
make life better for the working class. His task is
to govern in a way that alleviates economic conditions to
make it easier to organize and build a working class movement.
But building that movement is not his job. It's yours.

(01:56:28):
It's the job of the people, and such a movement
is the only way of holding elected leaders like Zoron accountable.
Zoron is not a revolutionary nor is he an organizer.
He's the mayor of New York City, and as mayor,
he has to serve more than eight million New Yorkers,
not just the fourteen thousand members of New York City DSA.

(01:56:49):
The mayor may join the picket line with striking nurses
and fight for working class New Yorkers in city Hall,
or even open an office of mass Engagement, like Zoron
has done, but it is up to those outside city
Hall to move in tandem by working to rebuild a
labor movement. Assuming that Zoron or some random public official

(01:57:10):
can just do whatever is the most extreme radical thing
mistakingly sees the state as having more power than it
actually does. People often see the state as an ahistorical,
abstracted seat of power, but no, the state is just
the mediator between capital and labor. The power of the
state to support labor is exercised by doing things that

(01:57:32):
are in the interest of labor and society as a whole,
rather than just capital. But this ability is directly linked
to the extent that labor is organized. So if labor
is largely unorganized, then Zoron is more restrained in what
he can do. What he can do then is use
his position to help build working class power, which will

(01:57:54):
then enable him further so on and so on. The
state has no power against capital outside of the power
that labor gives it. Our situation is one where capital
is very strong, which means when the state serves capital
it's quite strong, but in its function of serving labor
it's rather weak. Because the left is failed to reckon

(01:58:16):
with the fact that right now labor is actually quite weak,
which means that state actors, even those on the pro
labor left, are very constrained. So the main thing they
can do to strengthen labor is providing better conditions for
which labor power may be built, and importantly, organizers must

(01:58:37):
utilize those conditions to build the labor movement. Zorn's other
task is to demonstrate that left wing working class politics
can actually govern, not just critique whether or not he
succeeds at governing and delivering for working class New Yorkers,
determines the perceived viability of democratic socialist politics nationally going forward.

(01:58:59):
As Mamdani has said, the worth of an ideology can
only be judged by its delivery. Mamdani is not the
first democratic socialist to be put in such a position.

(01:59:19):
In his one hundred day address, Mayor Mumdanni spoke about
the so called sewer socialists of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who one
hundred years ago quote built the greatest public park system
in the nation, and whether the Great Depression better than
almost any other American city, Milwaukee purged corruption, built the
first municipally sponsored public housing development in the nation, and

(01:59:41):
transformed the city's sewage disposal system unquote. Mayor Mamdani is
trying to revive this legacy of municipal socialism by acting
on his mantra there is no problem too big, no
task too small. On day six of office, Mamdani fixed
the infamous Williamsburg break bump that has long plague cyclists,

(02:00:03):
and in response to the historic winter damage affecting city streets,
the administration launched a five borough pothole blitz filling one
hundred thousand potholes in less than one hundred days.

Speaker 5 (02:00:16):
This is pothole politics, our twenty twenty six answer to
sewer socialism, where government is not too busy, not too
self important, not too mired in paperwork, to fix the
problems of the city, no matter their size.

Speaker 6 (02:00:31):
This quote unquote pothole politics has extended to scaffolding reforms,
reducing the time that sheds clutter our sidewalks. In January,
the mayor announced a new program to expand modular public restrooms,
and starting this summer, the roof of the historic David
Dinkin's Municipal Building will be open to the public for
free viewing and tours. Fighting for workers from within city

(02:00:54):
Hall isn't just an abstract ideal. In the first one
hundred days, the administration secured nine point three million dollars
in restitution.

Speaker 5 (02:01:03):
No longer will city government be afraid of its own shadow.
If anyone should be afraid, it is those who take
advantage of working people.

Speaker 6 (02:01:13):
On January fifteenth, the city filed a lawsuit against a
predatory delivery app called Moto Click for violating worker laws
like minimal pay rate. At the end of January, Zoron
announced more than five million dollars in worker restitution and
penalties due to minimum pay rate violations from three major
restaurant delivery apps, Uber Eats, Phanton and Hungry Panda. This

(02:01:35):
money will be paid to almost fifty thousand workers, and
as a part of the settlement, Uber also agreed to
reinstate ten thousand wrongfully deactivated delivery workers. In March, the
administration won almost two million dollars for over eight hundred
fast food workers at Taco Bell and retail workers for
violations of worker protection laws against unpredictable scheduling. The mayor

(02:01:58):
signed executive orders strengthening consumer protections by targeting hidden junk
fees and impossible to cancel subscriptions, and expanded the protected
time off law to four point three million previously unprotected
workers and issued compliance warnings to nearly sixty thousand employers.
Speaking of sewer socialism, at the end of March, Mayrormamdani

(02:02:20):
announced a one hundred and eight million dollar investment to
upgrade and replace more than six thousand and seven hundred
water catch basins to combat flooding. This quote unquote pothole politics,
least the groundwork of public trust needed for larger systematic transformations.

Speaker 5 (02:02:37):
If government can't do the small things, how could you
ever trust it to do the big ones? How can
we promise to transform our city if we can't pave
your street.

Speaker 6 (02:02:48):
At the end of the one hundred day Address, Mayor
Mamdani made a series of announcements. The administration is restarting
trash containerization and will make buses faster for one million
New Yorkers by speeding up buses by twenty percent along
forty five priority corridors and constructing new rapid bus routes
for one hundred thousand New Yorkers who live more than

(02:03:09):
half a mile away from a subway or rail stop.
But the big announcement was an update to another of
Zoron's core campaign promises. The first of five city owned
grocery stores will open next year, with one store being
opened in each borough by the end of Mamdani's first term.
The location of the Manhattan Municipal grocery store has already

(02:03:31):
been selected. Le Marquetta in East Harlem, a public market
opened by the New Deal era Mayor Pharaoh LaGuardia. The
city will build a nine thousand square foot store at
the site to offer cheaper groceries than the capitalist competitors.

Speaker 5 (02:03:48):
I know there are many who use socialists as a
dirty word, something to be ashamed of. They can try
all they want, but we will not be ashamed of
using government to fight for the many, not simply the few.
We will not be ashamed of adding more heat pumps

(02:04:09):
to knights of buildings in the Rockaways, or building more
supportive housing in Harlem, or standing steadfast alongside our trans neighbors.
We will not be ashamed of investing in youth mental
health clinics, or working to close rikers, or fighting for

(02:04:29):
immigrants targeted by ice. To any New Yorker, whether you're
under attack from the federal government's cruelty or suffocating under
the affordability crisis, we will stand beside you because government

(02:04:51):
is a series of choices, and socialism is the choice
to fight for every New Yorker to extend democracy from
the ballot box to the rest of our lives.

Speaker 6 (02:05:04):
Three days after Mamdanie's one hundred day address, on Tax Day,
April fifteenth, the mayor announced that he and Governor hokel
had agreed to a new tax the Rich proposal. New
York State will have its first ever heated tear tax,
a wealth tax on second homes in New York City
valued above five million dollars owned by out of state elites.

(02:05:29):
This tax on the ultra wealthy is projected to generate
five hundred million dollars in annual revenue. And if owners
want to avoid the tax by moving into the residence,
that's fine too, because then they'll have to pay New
York resident taxes, So you get taxed either way. Part
of pushing back against the libertarian ethos in America by

(02:05:52):
showing that government can actually make your life better is
actually showing people what local government is doing. Since taking office,
Zoron has employed the same widely successful messaging style that
helped get him elected to make psays and inform New
Yorkers about what the administration has been able to accomplish.
This is something Democrats have largely failed to do by

(02:06:14):
either just not doing this sort of outreach while governing,
making any outreach inaccessible or hard to understand, or having
your outreach come off as cringe or out of touch.
Regardless of how much effort is put into outreach, the
people have to also see the improvements being talked about
in their own lives or in their own neighborhoods. A

(02:06:35):
dense population and having a cohesive city culture like New
York helps with that. Millions of cyclists cross the Williamsburg
Bridge every year, so when the mayor fixes the bump
during his first week in office, that's an easy reference
point for people. The success of the administration's comm strategy
has been by using Zoron's popularity to promote the public

(02:06:58):
sector and public sector workers while actually showing people how
social services help city residents. As the mayor says, New
York belongs to all who live in it. While in office,
Zoron has largely declined to explicitly talk about how his
administration may impact the future of democratic socialism across the country,

(02:07:21):
instead keeping his vision laser focused on improving the lives
of working New Yorkers and making this city more affordable.
To quote the mayor, we cannot burden ourselves with the
question of what this means beyond this city. But before
the mayor went on stage at the one hundred day address,
they played a clip of the Progressive New Deal Mayor

(02:07:43):
Fiorello LaGuardia saying that the greatness of New York City
is in the services to its people, where public problems
are really the problems of all the people, quote. And
if we succeed here, surely it can be done elsewhere.
When former Socialist Mayor Bernie Sanders made a surprise appearance

(02:08:03):
during Zoron's speech, the Senator spoke about how what's happening
in New York is influencing those outside the city.

Speaker 7 (02:08:11):
And I want to tell all of you and the mayor,
but what you guys are doing here in New York City,
it's important not only to the people here.

Speaker 2 (02:08:21):
What you are doing, what the mayor is.

Speaker 7 (02:08:24):
Doing, is providing hope and inspiration not only to people
all across our country, but honestly all across the world.

Speaker 6 (02:08:37):
As a part of Mamdani's first one hundred days press circuit,
he was asked on CBS News about the future of
the Democratic Party and if his socialist politics are really viable.

Speaker 5 (02:08:49):
You know, what I find is that New Yorkers asked
me less about how I describe my politics and more
about whether my politics includes them. And I think what
we can see is that a democratic socialist politics is
one that should be judged on its delivery, like any ideology,
and what we're showing in this city is we can
pursue the big things like universal childcare and do the
pothole politics at the same time that we're showing and

(02:09:11):
not just filling in the potholes, changing the catch basins,
but also repaving over a thousand miles of roadway.

Speaker 4 (02:09:17):
But mister Mayor, presidential and statewide elections are often decided
in battleground regions that do not look like New York City.

Speaker 5 (02:09:23):
Yeah, I'll be honest with you. Before I was the mayor,
I was an assembly member of a story in Long
Island City. At that time, I was told that you
could only be a Democratic socialist in Northwest Queens. Then
I became the mayor. Now the next question is the state.
Then it'll be the next question will be the country.
I think that this is a politics that can flourish
anywhere because, frankly, there is only one majority in this
country that's the working class, and it's time we have

(02:09:44):
a politics that puts them at the heart of what
it is that we're pursuing and not.

Speaker 6 (02:09:47):
As part of the appendix, Mamdanie still has over thirteen
hundred days left in his first term, and there will
be more challenges along the way, Challenges with the NYPD,
the MTA, state government, federal government, the billionaires, and the
bloodsucking monsters among the Democratic Party elite. Attempts to hold

(02:10:08):
politicians like Zoron truly accountable to their politics will require
more than Twitter, maoists and your small DSA caucus. Navigating
all these problems will require not just principal leadership with
a commitment to working class politics, but also growing the
mass organizing apparatus that helped get Zora elected, and continuing

(02:10:30):
to build power in city hall, state government, and in.

Speaker 2 (02:10:33):
The workplace.

Speaker 6 (02:10:35):
That does it today.

Speaker 2 (02:10:36):
For it could happen here, see you on the other side.

Speaker 6 (02:10:55):
This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly
newscast covering what's happening in the White House, They're crumbling world,
and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis today
I'm joined by James Stout and Robert Evans. This episode
recovering the week of April twenty second April thirtieth. Anything
anything interesting happened this week?

Speaker 2 (02:11:13):
Very little? Not much news? Oh not much?

Speaker 1 (02:11:16):
I mean, Garrison, you've joined the ranks of the vaccine injured, right.

Speaker 2 (02:11:21):
Right, Yeah, yeah, got full, so joining us of four
live vaccines inside Garrison's podies.

Speaker 6 (02:11:27):
Thank you, thank you for having me and my four
live vaccines, which have obliterated my body and mind this
week as I scrambled to finish them.

Speaker 2 (02:11:35):
I'm Donnie piece.

Speaker 6 (02:11:37):
But news happens whether or not I feel bad, So
let's get to it.

Speaker 2 (02:11:42):
In fact, I seem to happen a lot when we've
they need you sometimes conspire us that way.

Speaker 6 (02:11:47):
Now we will talk about the thing. Obviously, we'll talk
about the thing, but first some smaller news items to start.
Congress has voted to end the seventy six day DHS
shut down without funding for ice or border patrol. The
bill now goes to Trump today and if he signs it,
the shutdown will be over. The House voted to reauthorize

(02:12:10):
FAIZA section seven oh two, the warrant list of surveillance authority.
Forty two House Democrats voted to reauthorize twenty two Republicans
voted against the bills, expected to be stalled in the
Senate at least this version of the bill, as it
included an amendment about digital currency, which the Senate will
fight over. The ATF released a new list of proposed

(02:12:33):
reforms and regulations repealing the Biden pistol brace rule, as
well as requiring quote unquote biological sex be used on
ATF forms. The State Department is releasing a limited edition
passport for the United States two hundred and fiftieth anniversary,
featuring a portrait of President Trump superimposed on the Declaration
of Independence and an American flag with his golden signature below.

(02:12:57):
Google Trump Golden Signature for more.

Speaker 1 (02:13:00):
Look, I'm just gonna say, if we have any foreign
border Control agents listening, you have to detain anybody you
can see that pass forward.

Speaker 2 (02:13:10):
It is now possible for Nicki Minaj, and only Nicki Minaj,
to assemble the most unique collection of United States government
documents in history if she becomes a citizen, because she
is apparently the only recipient of the Gold Card that's
the Golden Visa. Yeah, yeah, she could, really, she could
really get a unique but you know, Pokemon combination here

(02:13:31):
of I guess she'd have to advance pretty quickly for
a moment you would. I'm not clear how one goes
from Gold Card citizenship, and the only way we'll find
out is by closely following Nicki Minaj.

Speaker 6 (02:13:41):
The DOJ indicted former FBI doctor James Colemy for the
second time, this time for posting an Instagram image with
the numbers eighty six forty seven.

Speaker 2 (02:13:52):
Once again.

Speaker 6 (02:13:53):
Trump's FCC is going after Disney's ABC licenses by directing
Disney to file an early renewal order after Jimmy Kimmel
made a joke a few days before the White House
Correspondents Dinner about First Lady Milania Trump having the quote
glow of an expectant widow. It pains me to say
critical support to Jimmy Kimmel. President Trump, David Allison, Todd

(02:14:15):
Blanche Stephen Miller, Barry Weiss, Paramount's chief legal officer, and
several CBS journalists met in a closed door dinner in Washington,
d C. Last week, as the Paramount buyout of Warner
Brothers and CNN progresses nightmare blunt rotation. Main Governor Janet
Mills vetoed the state's eighteen month data center moratorium, the

(02:14:36):
first of its kind in the country. Days later, Mills
dropped out of the Senate race, paving the way for
populist candidate Graham Plattner to receive the Democratic nomination and
go up against Susan Collins in the midterms.

Speaker 2 (02:14:48):
Mister dem seemed to already be behind Amosaur post from
the Democrats account Patrick Graham.

Speaker 1 (02:14:54):
Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how the
Democratic Party kind of falls in line behind this guy,
given the fairly unique degree of controversy over the Nazi
tattoo and a couple of other things that have come up.
But this has been in general, the gap between kind
of how random progressives and Democrats online talk about Platner
and how people in Maine feel about him has been

(02:15:16):
massive from the jump, and I think a lot of
it has to do just with the fact that this
guy went about campaigning in a very dedicated way. He
visited basically every county that like he could, and it
goes to show that the consensus that builds online around
candidates will never matter as much as like what they're
out there actually doing in the world. And it's useful

(02:15:38):
to get a reminder of that, whether or not you
think this is a tremendous disaster, just the degree to
which all of the talk about this guy online had
no impact on his ability to actually like win. Now,
this is a unique case. There aren't a whole lot
of seats that are like the seat that he's going
to be taking, right in terms of like both the
weakness of your primary right and the weakness of the

(02:16:01):
other party if you should happen to win the primary. Like,
this is not every congressional district, but it's still kind
of an interesting case study.

Speaker 2 (02:16:09):
Maine is also like it's not California, you know, like Californian,
so discourse happens on LANs We're of vast state and
you know these big cities Inserche and Maine is different.
Like he has good ground game and that matters more there,
it seems.

Speaker 6 (02:16:22):
And this signifies like a rejection of democratic establishment, yes,
sessions like a hunger for change yep. And the fact
that someone with all the controversies that come with Platner
was able to beat the Democratic establishment I think shows
how hungry, how hungry people are to upseat these these
bloodsucking monsters.

Speaker 2 (02:16:41):
Yeah, we'll keep reporting on that. I'm kind of interested
in this race.

Speaker 6 (02:16:45):
Yes, no, absolutely, I mean Susan Collins plays a unique
role in the Senate right now. M Finally for me,
On Saturday, a car bomb exploded at a police station
in Dunmurrae, Northern Ireland outside Belfast. A group calling itself
the quote unquote New IRA claimed responsibility and a sixty
six year old man has been arrested.

Speaker 2 (02:17:06):
Yeah, new IRA, sixty six year old man. Well, the
new IRAS's it grows out of the real IRA. Right.
Was it the new IRA who killed the journalist a
few years back in Belfast? You know what, I don't know?

Speaker 1 (02:17:23):
The new Ira yep admitted responsibility. Yeah, yeah, that's the
new IRA as well. Lara McKee is the name of
the journalist who was killed. Okay, I think just out
of negligence and incompetence during an action these people were
a part of.

Speaker 2 (02:17:36):
Yeah, this is like just before COVID at times. Yeah,
I do remember.

Speaker 7 (02:17:41):
So.

Speaker 2 (02:17:42):
Two large vessels, including a tanker, have been seized by
pirates off Somalia. Another attempted hijacking by pirates was prevented.
I'm just going to quote the ukmto here quote the
master of a cargo vessel was approached by two small
fishing vessels with armed persons support. One vessel approached within
six hundred meters, warning shots were fired and the suspicious

(02:18:04):
craft returned fire. The suspicious boat moved away and made
clear of the vessel. All crew are safe and accounted for.
Vessels are advised to transit with caution and report and
the suspicious activities to UK MDO authorities are investigating. I
saw another incident where a ship had fired a flare
people who were allegedly attempting to board it right that,

(02:18:25):
it seems like there has been an uptick an incidant,
especially as ships generally are having a hard time right now.
The United States has also been boarding a number of
vessels to inspect them as part of its blockade on
Iran and Iranian goods. Secondly, j NIM that Ali Islam
while Muslimin and the Asquad Liberation Front in Mali launched

(02:18:48):
a shock offensive this week that saw them sweep into
Mali's capital, assassinate the defense minister, and force the military
Hunter and its allied Russian forces to abandon whole cities.
They also abandoned a number of bases right there. J
and I AM have captured like massive amounts of Russian
Africa core material. But this is a pretty ground shaking offensive,

(02:19:10):
a big change for Mali. The Hunter in the Ammar
I still keep calling them that they've rebranded themselves as
a civilian government. They're not now min A Lang gets
retired as a general and just become president and change
closed and done the same shit like the Hunter reclaimed
Falam this week, which using Chin State. It's capital of

(02:19:31):
Chinn State. Fighting has been happening there for months. I've
been talking to people pretty regularly who are taking part
in the in the battle there. They're obviously, you know,
they lost friends in the battle. They are not happy
about this, but I think it's fair to say that
spirits among the resistance generally remain pretty high, and they
hope that they will return to Palam soon enough. Doug

(02:19:54):
Bergham has announced a United States Geographic is it geographical
or geological USGS geological server?

Speaker 1 (02:20:02):
Yeah, I know that because of the film Evolution starring
David Dukovn not familiar. This is an important piece of
news for the listeners. There was a brief period of
time in between X Files and Californication where we thought
that David Duchovny might have a career as a comedic actor.

Speaker 2 (02:20:16):
And no, he did not that he might have a career.

Speaker 6 (02:20:22):
I loved he said a great.

Speaker 2 (02:20:25):
Just not as a comedic actor. Yeah, Okay, So, Doug
Bergen has announced that the United States Geological Survey found
enough lithium to replace three centuries of imports in Appalachia.

Speaker 1 (02:20:39):
Enough left the end to do that or make one
American small town normal for a weekend.

Speaker 2 (02:20:46):
Yeah, I want to read from this because it's kind
of interesting. Quite the southern Appalachians hold an estimated one
point four to three million metric tons of lithium oxide
concentrated in the Carolinas, and the Northern Appalachians estimated nine
hundred thousand metric tons concentrated in Maine and New Hampshire,
according to estimates in a new USGS scientific paper. That

(02:21:08):
is like, I guess Big Appalachia like going up into
Maine there Leaving that aside. Lithium mining is incredibly disruptive
to the environment. Right Generally, there's two ways you could
do it. You can extract it from brine like they
do in Chile, and I think other places think they're
trying to do that in California. Otherwise it's open pit mining.

(02:21:30):
The water use, energy use, ecological damage will be huge.
Potential for disasters is not zero, and the people of
apple Lecture should be more than familiar with how this
tends to go right. This is the long history of
mining and mining disasters. Moving on, Donald Trump has reposted
a tweet about changing the name of Ice to nice

(02:21:54):
nice Agents. They should do this. I want them to
do this. It would be absolutely disastrous for audio journalism.

Speaker 1 (02:22:03):
It's it's it'd be like, look, we understand, you know,
it's nineteen forty three. People have a lot of issues
with the Gestapo. We're gonna call them the funestoppo now.

Speaker 2 (02:22:11):
Yeah, the nice stoppo. Yeah, the great style process now
stands for super sweet.

Speaker 6 (02:22:17):
Actually, the White House account and the DHS account have
posted nice images or hype videos since this as well.

Speaker 1 (02:22:28):
Yeah, you have to consider there's like a forty chance
this happens at least.

Speaker 2 (02:22:32):
Yeah, no, this might happen.

Speaker 1 (02:22:34):
If this could very much happen, Like we're laughing, but
this could be the future.

Speaker 2 (02:22:38):
Yeah. What does the END stand for national? National? It's
just it's what they call a backronym. I know, Garrison
with these guys, the N could have stood for a
couple of things, you thinks. Yeah, so, uh Trump truth,
great idea do it? That is how policy is made
these days.

Speaker 6 (02:22:58):
This is hugover and policy works now via via truth.

Speaker 4 (02:23:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:23:01):
Yeah, this has made something clear to me that I
was kind of dancing around for all, which is that
I am in support in general of any policy that
just pulls the wool off of people's eyes like this.
This is one of those things where it's now should
be clearer to even the really stupid people, where we
are as a country when we do so, when something
like this happens, and so I'm supportive of it, Like
we can't have any artifice. The more you dress things up,

(02:23:23):
the more people get deranged. So at least this everyone
knows what's happening.

Speaker 2 (02:23:27):
Yeah, really clear. I'm also Germany in favor of like
they have a budget, it is vast, but it is
fixed and if they want to spend it all rewrapping
their vehicles to say nice, yeah fine. Also it's gonna
make them feel lame.

Speaker 6 (02:23:39):
Are they gonna do that by buying end stickers or
do they have to get the whole new sticker? Do
you think right? Are they slap the end?

Speaker 2 (02:23:45):
I hope they just slap it in. I know, if
we want to open the open door and I'm having
stickers with in on that, yeah, who knows? Garrison they
had previously spent quite a lot of money wrapping vehicles,
so it's not beyond them to get Maybe they'll get
a whole rebrand. Maybe it'll be nice and a picture
of someone like holding cake. Or they got to find

(02:24:05):
some way to spend the seven bajillion dollars. Yeah they have, so.

Speaker 1 (02:24:09):
Either that or you know, when we get someone better
in We could keep the name, but just create like
a brand partnership with the city of Nice. And I'm
going to say that like it's like and turn them
into advertising instead of pulling people away from their families.
They can tell people about all of the new deals
on airfare to France that are available right now.

Speaker 6 (02:24:27):
We don't even need to abolish Nice.

Speaker 2 (02:24:28):
We can just perform it.

Speaker 1 (02:24:29):
Yeah, we could just we could just perform it to
a totism agency for one city in France.

Speaker 2 (02:24:35):
There is a type of biscuit in Britain which I
suspect maybe comes from Nice Finish Germany referred to as
a Nice biscuit because it has Nice stamped on the biscuit. Sure,
so perhaps we could instead of guns, give them biscuits
and they can hand those out.

Speaker 1 (02:24:48):
Think of how much better it'll be Some guy shows
up for his like, you know, immigration court meeting, and
he finishes that. On his way out, there's a delegation
of guys from from Nice just being like, you want
to go on vacation from one of France's top five
or six cities.

Speaker 2 (02:25:03):
I assume the niceise cops. Yeah, they give you like
one of their special salents they make there with. Yeah,
so many. Yeah, it could be great. Hit us up,
it could be this could work. Yeah, if you're the
mayor of Nice, we can we can introduce you. Yeah. Finally,
the United States has indicted the governor of Sino Law
on drug grafficking charges, which is a pretty significant thing.

Speaker 6 (02:25:27):
Well that's not as funny.

Speaker 2 (02:25:28):
Yeah, no, no, no, Well I'm not going to be
brand rebranding it as clearly are they.

Speaker 6 (02:25:33):
Speaking of not being funny? Let's actually talk about the
bad news this week.

Speaker 2 (02:25:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:25:40):
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana voting
map as a quote unconstitutional racial gerrymander unquote that effectively
created a black voting district. The ruling was split six
three on ideological lines. Alito, who wrote the majority opinion,
saying that the district violated the equal Protection Clause of

(02:26:04):
the Constitution. The new ruling substantially undermines the nineteen sixty
five Voting Rights Act, reinterpreting Section two provisions against racial
discrimination to require evidence of intentional racial discrimination, not just
discrimination as the effect, so in the future, proving discriminatory

(02:26:26):
motives may be needed in order to win legal challenges
against gerrymandering. By citing the Voting Rights Act. This ruling
specifically depowers black voters while enabling Republican jerrymandering to continue.
Republicans in the South will now be able to redraw
house district maps that lean Democrat that have a high
number of Black voters, and pr strates. At least fifteen

(02:26:49):
house districts are now at risk of elimination. In the dissent,
Justice Alanna Kagan wrote that court's decision will set back
the foundational right to Congress rented of racial equality in
electoral opportunity unquote. Yeah, this is that this is possibly
the worst escalation of the continued undermining of the Voting

(02:27:11):
Rights Act.

Speaker 1 (02:27:12):
Yeah, yeah, right, yeah, I mean, this is inarguably the
most important thing going on this week, even with the
shooting that we haven't talked about, like the gutting of
laymore people died for like the Voting Rights Act has
a body count attached to it. Yeah, the court has
to be packed the next Like, if there's ever another
democratic or left of center administration and they don't pack

(02:27:34):
the court, there's simply no chance of improving or fixing
any of the problems this country has.

Speaker 2 (02:27:39):
Like it's a necessary prerequisite. It's no coming back from this.

Speaker 6 (02:27:43):
DC and Porto ricurls need to become states to have
their own congressional representation. Any future opposition administration has to
go completely glove sauce like.

Speaker 1 (02:27:52):
Yeah, and we have to imprison a bunch of the
people currently running things. Yeah, Like, there's a lot of
stuff that has to happen, but one of those is
the Supreme Court needs to get packed, because by god,
these people are not going to approve of anything that
isn't insane.

Speaker 6 (02:28:05):
It's unclear if this rulely will have immediate impacts on
the upcoming midterms, but by twenty twenty eight they will
certainly have impacts.

Speaker 2 (02:28:13):
Yeah. Yeah, they had filed for an emergency decision on
redistruting or I guess not redistruting like predistricting. I don't know.
What you would call that, but to get this in
effect before the midterms.

Speaker 6 (02:28:27):
Basically, Yeah, the Supreme Court also sent us to a
lower court to work out more details. It's going to
obviously be ongoing little litigation about it, just as there
will be about Florida's redistricting measure that they are trying
to finalize before the midterms as well.

Speaker 2 (02:28:43):
Yeah, and indeed, Californias, I think there have been some arguments,
may like, now that this decision has been made by
the Supreme Court, right, like, other states will have to
consider this in their redistricting.

Speaker 6 (02:28:53):
Should we take a break, we shall, and then we
can talk about the dinner. Yeah, okay, we are back.
Let's talk about the dinner. Let's talk about the shooting

(02:29:14):
that happened at the dinner, the thing that everyone else
has been talking about for the past five six days.
So yeah, on April twenty fifth, during the White House
Correspondence dinner, Everyone's favorite event.

Speaker 2 (02:29:26):
It's a shame we weren't there.

Speaker 6 (02:29:27):
It is unfortunate that we were not there to point
our vertical video at our face as the news happens
in front of us.

Speaker 2 (02:29:34):
Oh, I would have been filming just your face.

Speaker 1 (02:29:36):
Garrison and just like really tight in like to the
point where it's it's difficult for you to get up
and move. I keep wedging, no garrison, face the camera.
Come on, people need to see this.

Speaker 2 (02:29:47):
I'd be assuming the war fight aposture.

Speaker 6 (02:29:51):
You're gonna get up like Haanksteth and the storm around. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:29:55):
I would also be shielding myself behind Stephen Miller's wife.

Speaker 6 (02:30:00):
Hed have been protecting the white I know either way.

Speaker 2 (02:30:05):
Ye, yeah, yeah, it's funny.

Speaker 6 (02:30:06):
Yeah, at least at least Miller wasn't wasn't getting cooked,
unlike the FBI director.

Speaker 1 (02:30:12):
Yeah, that is funny that he abandoned his wife. Yeah yeah, girlfriend, girlfriend, girlfriend. Sorry,
I guess we should just go. Let's recap the events
for people who live under a rock.

Speaker 6 (02:30:24):
So shortly before eight thirty pm, the alleged shooter approached
the Secret Service security screening checkpoint located on the terrace
level of the hotel. This was the level above the
ballroom level where the actual dinner was taking place. James,
we should probably just read from the court document.

Speaker 2 (02:30:46):
Yeah, I think I'm just yet, I'm going to read
this straight from the government's DFJ statement in the court
right before the dependent approach to checkpoint, he discarded a
long black coat that concealed a twelve gage pump action shook.
That defendant then sprinted through one of the magnetometers at
the checkpoint and ran in the direction of the stairs
leading to the ballroom, where the President and members of

(02:31:07):
his family and cabinet were located. As the defendant did so,
he held a shotgun in both hands in a raised
position parallel to the ground. A United States Secret Service
officer observed the defendant fire the shotgun in the direction
of the stairs leading down to the ballroom. The Secret
Service officer and others at the checkpoint heard the gun shot.
The Secret Service officer drew his service weapon and fired

(02:31:29):
five times the defendant. The defendant fell to the ground
and was restrained by law enforcement and was placed under arrests.
The defendant suffered a minor injury to his knee, but
was not shot. We can in a second talk about
whether he shot the Secret Service officer.

Speaker 1 (02:31:47):
Yeah, because there's an interesting Washington Post review that's out
too now.

Speaker 2 (02:31:52):
Yeah, and a couple of court documents just filed today. Yeah,
let's talk a little bit about the just circumstances this right,
this person had purchased. According to court documents, he purchased
two weapons from separate firearm stealers in California, buying the
shotgun on or about August seventeenth, twenty twenty five, and
the pistol on or about October sixth, twenty twenty three.

Speaker 6 (02:32:13):
Yeah, the pistol for a while. The shotgun was a
more of a recent purchase.

Speaker 2 (02:32:17):
Yeah. Yeah. The pistol is a fascinating choice, amazing choice.
Thirty eight super Yeah, I have never seen a thirty
eight super hanggun outside of the They're they're common in
Mexico because they have a certain cachet and cultural value.
Every thirty eight superhandgun than I have personally held was

(02:32:39):
embossed in gold and silver. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:32:41):
Yeah, and usually a Mexican flag, but not exclusively.

Speaker 2 (02:32:45):
Yeah, or like some sort of heraldry that denotes but
it's associated sometimes with organized crime, Like I'm not when
I say associated with organized crime. A few weeks ago, right,
I talked about a material support for terrorism case which
centered on on a firearms dealer who was selling grips
for thirty thirty eight super pistols with images that are

(02:33:06):
associated with cartels, Like when you buy a thirty eight super.
Someone at the ATF gets an email. I bet like
these things that are very rare and they have a
certain consumer base.

Speaker 1 (02:33:19):
Now, obviously there are normal thirty eight super pistols that exist.
They're just like today, most people buy because it's a
weird moon round too. There's not a it's not a
normal like. It's not there's nothing wrong with it, but
it's not a round that's commonly carried. It's expensive. It's
primarily something that has like cachet for drug dealers. But
I guess also my interpretation and I guess we're I know,

(02:33:42):
maybe this is getting too much into my SA side
of things, But I do have a theory as to
why he would have picked this gun and the shotgun
that he picked.

Speaker 2 (02:33:48):
But we can talk about that later if you want.

Speaker 6 (02:33:50):
We'll get that in the sac.

Speaker 2 (02:33:51):
Yeah, he also had a I believe, two knives and
four daggers. Yeah, six bladed weapons. Really want to see
pictures of those bladed weapons? They are in the court documents, buddy,
let me have you. Let me let me just find
those for you.

Speaker 6 (02:34:06):
We have an enhanced image of some of them too.

Speaker 2 (02:34:09):
Yeah, so we should talk about this. The government submitted
a quote unquote enhanced image. In the court case, mister
Allen took a picture of himself at about eighth three pm,
so about half an hour before he rushed past the magnetometer. There.
In the picture we can see he is wearing black
suit pants. He is wearing a black shirt. He has

(02:34:33):
a red tie which inexplicably is tucked into his pants.
He has a shoulder holster and a large k by
knife in a in a downwards draw configuration. He is
carrying a pair of pliers and a pair of wirecutters
in a holster on his left side. On his right side,

(02:34:53):
he is carrying a small leather bag which allegedly contained
more shotgun rounds, and the nineteen leve is in a
crusteral showd to holster right. None of this screams highly trained.

Speaker 6 (02:35:06):
The quote unquote enhanced image was basically a zoomed in
the oh yeah copy of this photo that, if I
were to guess, the word enhanced means that they use
some kind of sharpening or AI image sharpening tool.

Speaker 1 (02:35:20):
Yes, yes, none of which are real In terms of like,
none of which are actually enhancing or sharpening.

Speaker 6 (02:35:27):
The details that you are seeing should not be allowed
in to be like viewed in court, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:35:33):
The AI is guessing there's not extra data in the photo.
The AI is uncovering, Like, the AI is basically attempting
to clean up an image. Which is fine if you
have like a blurry photo of you and like your
wife when you got in your first apartment together that
you want cleaned up.

Speaker 2 (02:35:49):
Yeah, but that's not it's not should not be, should
not be. Yeah, I'm sure we'll see the defense challenge
and I'll be interested to note, like what AI they
used and did they did they also very iterations of
the enhancement or did they you know, like this will
be interesting. I don't think it materially inserty anything. We
can see the same Samsung phone. I can see the

(02:36:10):
handle of the knife in both imagies. I can see
the handle of their hangguns.

Speaker 6 (02:36:13):
This is more of like a principal thing. Yeah, then, like,
did this specifically affect the photo in this case in
any way that would lead to the evidence being more useful?

Speaker 2 (02:36:23):
Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah, this is a bad slippery slope.
So talking of his phone, he kept it with him
as he traveled across the country on a train, taking
notes about the landscape as he went Amtrak. Yeah, yeah,
he took Amtrak and like he was enchanted by like
the deserts and the he liked Chicago. He thought the
woods on the East coast were greatly.

Speaker 6 (02:36:44):
He kept like a like a journal where he wrote
about the trap.

Speaker 2 (02:36:47):
Yeah, in the notesap of his phone. Yeah, and then
the day of his attempted shooting, he used open sources
to track the present movements. Should we move on to
did he fire his gun?

Speaker 7 (02:36:58):
Yeah?

Speaker 6 (02:36:58):
That's a big because because that is that's a big
question right now. Yeah, that's one half the question. The
other half is did he shoot a Secret Service agent?

Speaker 4 (02:37:05):
Which?

Speaker 5 (02:37:06):
Right?

Speaker 2 (02:37:07):
Did he shoot anybody?

Speaker 6 (02:37:08):
H The DOJ is saying he fired a gun.

Speaker 2 (02:37:12):
The DOJ claims that, but is not really affirmatively saying that.

Speaker 6 (02:37:17):
He shot an agent.

Speaker 2 (02:37:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:37:19):
No, they they've said a couple of different things. They've
said that an agent was struck by gunfire. They've said
that it was not friendly fire. But they have not
said that he was struck by the assailant shotgun, by
the gunman's actual weapon. And that's partly because there's not
hard evidence yet that the gunmen actually fired his shotgun.

Speaker 2 (02:37:42):
Let me read you what they fired in court today. Yeah,
the evidence gathered analyzed to date establishes your client fired
his Mossburg twelve gage pumpatch and shotgun at least one
time as he rampast some magnetometis on the terrace level
of the Washington Hilton on April twenty fifth, twenty twenty six,
when the weapon was recovered, had once been ard case
in the chamber, which has been identified as having been

(02:38:03):
fired in the mos Bog shotgun. The government's preliminary ballistics
video analysis show that your client fired his shotgun in
the direction of Secret Service Officer VG, which Officer VEG observed. Additionally,
at least one fragment was recovered from the crime scene
that was physically consistent with a single buckshot pellet. That
fragment was recovered from a location at the scene consistent
with your client firing his shotgun in the direction of

(02:38:26):
Oppicer VEG. The government is aware of no physical evidence,
digital video evidence, or witness statements that are inconsistent with
the theory that your client fired his shotgun in the
direction of Officer VG or the officer of VEG was
indeed shot once in the chest while wearing a ballistic vest,
they go on them further to say, the government also
recovered five spent nine millimeters LUGA cartridge cases, each of

(02:38:49):
which was determined to have been fired from Officer Veg's
service weapon. The government also identified five separate bullet holes
in the walls opposite from Officer VG, consistent with the
direction of Sevigi fired his service weapon. That's like the
most Yeah, that's the most detail that we've seen from
them of their case.

Speaker 1 (02:39:09):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:39:10):
His defense had previously suggested that the because of some
of the public statements Attorney General Blanche have made, the
government may have exculpatory evidence either that he didn't fire
his gun or that he didn't shoot the Secret Service
agent in question.

Speaker 6 (02:39:24):
Which administration officials have gone on in the news to
say that the Secret Service agent did not shoot himself,
which yes, is not saying that another Secret Service agent
did not shoot him though.

Speaker 2 (02:39:36):
Yeah, yeah, And it doesn't seem like he shot into
a plaster board wall, it seems right, so he didn't
maybe get splashed back, which.

Speaker 1 (02:39:45):
Is you know, the only holes we've seen look like
they came from pistols, and that's something the Washington Posts
actually did like look into, because there's at least one.
There's a couple I think of livestream videos that showed
like holes from a bullet in the wall. But the
Post talked to Rick Vasquez, the firearms consultant and former
chief of the firearms Technology branch at the ATF or

(02:40:08):
what was then the ATF, who said that the holes
were consistent with handgun rounds. Now, that's not like a
firearms technology. There's a lot of WU there, but it's
also pretty easy to look. I mean, sometimes it could
be kind of messy because like the balls and like
a double lot buck shotshell are kind of similar in
size to nine.

Speaker 2 (02:40:25):
Millimeter right somewhere in the thirty caliber range, right, but
they don't tend.

Speaker 1 (02:40:29):
To hit with the same kinds of patterns, right, Like,
there does tend to be a significant difference, especially that
kind of range. The night of the shooting or within
a few hours of a Trump posted security camera footage
and the Post got a hold of a higher resolution
copy of that footage and they went through like a
frame by frame analysis of it because, as you noted, James,

(02:40:51):
they claimed that cold has charged his shotgun while he
was passing through the magnometers. The magnetometers, right, they didn't
say it happened to elsewhere. They said it like as
he was going to that checkpoint that you can watch
him sprint through like he's fucking rudo running his way
into the correspondence dinner. And in their frame by frame analysis,
the Post only found evidence of four muzzle flashes, all

(02:41:12):
of them from the agent who was allegedly struck by
something's weapon.

Speaker 2 (02:41:17):
Right, So, first off, I.

Speaker 1 (02:41:18):
Mean, and you can hear in other footage, you can
clearly hear more shots than that, Like I don't doubt
that there were that he discharged five shots, but the
video only shows four, and crucially, it does not show
Cole's shotgun firing, and the video follows him until he
goes off screen. So maybe whoever wrote that out should
have written after passing through the magnanometers.

Speaker 2 (02:41:40):
But they seem to pretty clearly be saying.

Speaker 1 (02:41:42):
It was while he was in that little security area,
and there's not evidence in the footage of him firing.
We don't see anything that looks like firing, Like nobody
reacts as if he has fired, Like there's just no
evidence that he shot. And you know, they're hinging a
lot on the fact that there's this spent cartridge in
the chamber of his twelve gauge. But number one, that's

(02:42:04):
actually not an uncommon way to store that kind of
twelve gage shotgun with a spent shell in the in
the breach, because it makes it easy if something were
to happen. It makes it easier to basically get a
fresh round in without needing to have a chambered round
at all times, which a lot of people, most people don't.

Speaker 2 (02:42:21):
Like to do. Yeah, and that'll drop say five that like,
it's a bad idea to do that.

Speaker 1 (02:42:26):
You don't want to do that with a shotgun, you know.
Is it possible that he was storing it that way?
Is it possible that he loaded one an empty round
in there intentionally because he didn't actually he was hoping
to do a suicide by cop and he didn't intend
to actually shoot anybody. Is it possible he just fucked up.
It's also perfectly possible he fired later. But it's really

(02:42:47):
weird that they wrote it out that way if that's
what they're alleging, because we see him when he's at
the security checkpoint at the magnanometer and he doesn't fire
in the footage.

Speaker 3 (02:42:58):
That we have.

Speaker 2 (02:42:59):
Yeah, there's been a lot of press statements that are
sort of talking around exactly not making the explicit statement
he fired his shotgun and he shot the officer in
the chest, right, and certainly, like I'm not sure about
the distance we're talking about, Like, and then then thus
the spread that would happen with that, it.

Speaker 1 (02:43:20):
Would be minimal spread even with a sod off in
a narrow corridor like that.

Speaker 2 (02:43:26):
Yeah, I mean you go by an inch per yard, right, Like,
that's the amount that yeah, really spreads. And then it's
so if you hit this person once, assuming this person
has a chest at twenty inches wide, Yeah, that doesn't
line up, right, Yeah, it might be different with bugshot.

Speaker 6 (02:43:40):
I mean, obviously, if they had evidence that the secret
cerviationent was shot by mister Allen, we'd have seen it.
They would be running with that. The fact that they
do not have evidence that the agent was shot by
Allan is shown in the way that they're like talking
about this, like.

Speaker 1 (02:43:56):
He was shot, yeah, and the guy discharged to separate
statements exactly two separate statements. Yeah, they're still affirming that
the agent did not shoot himself, which does not mean
that he was not shot by another agent. Yeah, yeah,
And there's a in that Washington Post article. They talked
to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and asked him to explain,

(02:44:19):
like why why are you guys never willing to say,
like where the round.

Speaker 2 (02:44:22):
That hit the officer came from? Right?

Speaker 1 (02:44:24):
They asked him the question that we've been asking, and
Blanche answered, we want to get that right.

Speaker 2 (02:44:28):
We're still looking at that. There you go, right, And
that is a big change.

Speaker 1 (02:44:32):
As the Post notes of a day earlier, he told
ABC that officials believe the gunman had shot the officer,
so he has pulled back, which leads me to think
maybe this guy didn't shoot at all, or maybe he
fired later, maybe even totally by accident, maybe when he
was falling down he like discharged. But so also you
would think there'd be a photo somewhere of where he

(02:44:52):
discharged the shotgun. It's surprisingly easy for bullets to get lost, right,
and by that, I mean just get so destroyed and
what not by impact that there's not really much of
anything to find. That happens all the time. It's really rare,
and I would argue impossible to discharge a twelve gage
shotgun with any kind of shot shell in a fucking

(02:45:12):
hotel like this and not have there be some sign
of what you They make holes in things, that's what
they're full. They make multiple holes. Yeah, unless it's a slug,
but then they make a really big hole. And cold
had specifically written that he was not intending to use
slugs in his manifesto suicide know, whatever you want to
call it. He specifically stated that he was using a
twelve gage loaded with buckshot because he wanted to reduce

(02:45:35):
the chances of overpenetration and of injuring or killing someone
he did not intend to hit.

Speaker 6 (02:45:40):
Yeah, let's talk a little bit about his background, maybe
a few other things from that manifesto. I know, Robert,
you've done some digging into that. I did the.

Speaker 1 (02:45:50):
Normal thing that at least one of us does, generally
all of us do in some form. Ever, after every
kind of mass shooting or like publicly notable terror attack
or whatever.

Speaker 2 (02:46:00):
And just found myself looking through a stranger social media.

Speaker 1 (02:46:03):
Yeah, there's been a bunch a couple of good articles
out about him now most of like the first things
that we knew about this guy, Like the very first
fact is when his name came out, there were two
different guys who kind of lived in the Torrents.

Speaker 2 (02:46:16):
Area who were immediately like there were.

Speaker 1 (02:46:18):
Responses under Cole Thomas Allen or Cole Allen, and one
of them was like some fucking white dude who worked
at it was a consulting firm or something.

Speaker 6 (02:46:27):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (02:46:27):
It wasn't very but he just looked like he might
have been thirty. And the other was Cole Thomas Allen
and it was him winning a Teacher of the Year
award at the He worked at a company that was
basically doing like top college test prep tutoring.

Speaker 2 (02:46:40):
Right, Yeah, so he was a teacher.

Speaker 1 (02:46:42):
Some people that are really angry at the description of
him as a teacher because they're being like, he's trying
to like bad mouth public school teachers. He's not a
public school teacher, but there are other kinds of teachers.
He was a teacher of the months at the tutoring
academy that he worked at. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I had
found by the time I got there, which is like
twenty minutes after the name started spreading the Facebook page

(02:47:03):
of the school that he worked or of the tutoring
academy whatever that he worked at, which I'm not going
to name, but it was hundreds of posts already being
like good to see this is who's teaching your kids,
you know, like you hired a terrorist all this kind
of like yeah, yeah, it's it's it's bleak. It's the
normal thing that happens, you know, with anything related to
this in this case. Right after that, Trump posted a

(02:47:27):
picture of the detained and stripped, mostly naked gunman that
was obviously the Cole Allen who had won the Teacher
of the Month, like immediately visible, like you could do.
It was a positive idea was very quick from that
point on. So at that point a couple other things
started coming out because you know, I had looked through
from that Facebook page, I had found a couple other

(02:47:48):
posts about Cole Thomas Allen or different places where he
had accounts, which made a couple other details of his
background obvious. He was a mechanical engineering student in Caltech
kind of during the first Trump administration. Yep, you know
that was honestly, like most of what was like immediately
obvious is that like he'd been an engineering student at Caltech,

(02:48:09):
he'd worked as a teacher, and he'd been a part
of In his LinkedIn, you can see that he'd been
a part of Caltech's Christian Fellowship and the NERF Club.
Right yeah, now, Ken Klippenstein talked to one of his
co fellow peers during this period of time. He knew
that while he was at NERF Club, cal had like
kind of led there was like a conflict within the

(02:48:29):
club over people modifying and otherwise altering their NERF guns
to make them more resemble real weapons, as NERF has
also come out with more guns that look like real
guns over the years, and he was really against this, Like,
he was very against the idea of like NERF guns
that were modified to look like real guns, or just
like people playing with things that looked like real guns.

Speaker 2 (02:48:50):
Now, fast forward to the actual day of the shooting.

Speaker 1 (02:48:54):
His blue sky account got found fairly quickly alongside the LinkedIn.
Obviously that got deleted in very short order, but it
was archived, thankfully by a very nice person who realized
that it would probably be useful to have actual documentation
about what this guy was doing online rather than rely
on a bunch of different articles making claims. So I
went through all of that, you know, as soon as

(02:49:15):
it came out. He had about five hundred followers who
was following about one hundred and fourteen people. He did
not post often on his own, but when he did,
in like the two different occasions I could find of
him like posting on his own in this incomplete archive
of his Blue Sky. One of them was him posting
in like sympathy and solidarity with Ukraine, which is something

(02:49:37):
that was very consistent. He reposted a ton of different
fundraisers from different Ukrainian military units that was.

Speaker 6 (02:49:43):
At his user bio as well's support for Ukraine.

Speaker 1 (02:49:46):
Yeah, he was massively supportive of Ukraine and very angry
at the Trump administration's failure to follow through with US
obligations in that regard. And the only other post of
his that was like him writing something that I I
saw was him basically critiquing an article about using AI
in the classroom, and like people who were advocated use

(02:50:07):
of AI in the classroom, he's very much against that.
He was a reposter, though he was a reposter, and
we'll talk about like some of the things he reposted.
His bio read hi, I'm a random Californian guy, with
posts about American politics, support for Ukraine, and observations of
small creatures. And then he includes a quote, I choose
my own battlefields, not through my blood, but with my heart.
I stand on the battlefield to protect what I want.

(02:50:28):
So that is I like type that quote in and
that is a quote from an anime, the same anime
that his his profile picture was also from this specific anime,
which is Kagura. I don't know how that's pronounced. I
think the character that he had is PfP of was Kagura.
It's this like red haired lady with these weird like

(02:50:49):
ball things on either side of her hair. Like I
don't fully know how to describe this lady's hairstyle. It's
kind of like vaguely Princess Leiah esque. And that appears
to be whos his PfP photo is. Okay, the series
is called Gintama. I don't know much about this. I've
heard people online being like, oh, he was a fan

(02:51:09):
of like this anime that means something or other, but like,
I don't actually understand enough about the anime to give
much of an analysis of that. I think it's just
people being like, because of the character he likes, it
makes sense that he's a guy who would do something
very extreme. I don't know enough about the anime to
say how relevant that is, But the quote kind of

(02:51:30):
does sound relevant to what he actually did, Like I
stand on the battlefield to protect what I want.

Speaker 2 (02:51:36):
And you can read stuff like that in his manifesto.

Speaker 1 (02:51:38):
Yeah, you can read stuff like that as manifesto, which
we'll talk about. His actual reposts are very normal lib coded. Yeah,
he's a liberal hugueally supportive of Ukraine. Nothing about Palestine
in there, nothing about Israel in there. Photo has since
come out that appears to be a legitimate of him
wearing like an IDF shirt some time ago.

Speaker 2 (02:51:56):
He doesn't say anything. Again in the.

Speaker 1 (02:51:58):
Limited we don't also have we don't have his whole
bluesky in here. In the limited archive we have, I
don't see anything of him like him talking at all
about Israel. So I don't have enough to say that,
like he was strongly supportive, but he certainly there's a
real discrepancy between how he talks about Ukraine and and
him mentioning anything at all about what's happening in Gaza.

Speaker 2 (02:52:17):
Right.

Speaker 6 (02:52:18):
Yeah, what is believed to be his Twitter accountter has
also been scraped and not as well archives, but there's
there's screenshots of reposts on Twitter reposting Brianna Wu with
some criticism of pro Palestine protesters or things that are
critical of Palestine and in a nominal way supportive of Israel.

Speaker 2 (02:52:39):
Yeah, And it's kind of hard to tell.

Speaker 1 (02:52:41):
Was he just more quiet about this online because he
wanted to avoid, you know, getting dogpiled, or is this
just something that as the genocide gout worse and worse,
he became less willing to talk about. I don't know,
but it's it's kind of it's just noteworthy how much
like how absent that kind of discussion is next to
how often he talks about grain.

Speaker 6 (02:53:00):
Next to the Ukraine stuff.

Speaker 3 (02:53:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:53:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:53:01):
He also posted a bunch of very normal posts. There
was one from a user you know, if you guys remember,
like a week or so ago, the New York Times
published an interview with Hassan Piker, the streamer, and the
article was titled the rich don't play by the rules,
So why should I? Why petty theft might be the
new political protest. It's where Hassan tried to introduce the
term micro alluding to the discourse, which I don't support

(02:53:23):
at all, but it was like a pro shoplifting kind
of like are you kind of getting a casual and
jokey pro shoplifting argument, right, I don't want to People
have blown this out of proportion, but it's interesting that
he came down against Hassan's side on that. He was
basically reposting someone who was like, Hey, I've spent a
lot of time in countries where graft and grifting are
like normal, and it's really bad for that to happen.

(02:53:45):
You don't want that to happen to your country. So
he's certainly not like the on the far left, like
direct action is good. I love committing crimes anarchist side
of things. He is not at all that kind of guy.
He's a Will Stancilite. He is a lot of Will
Stancel reposts, a lot of Will stancil posts. Yeah, yeah,

(02:54:05):
he reposted me a couple of times. He posted me
like talking about like the Pope, right, like because making
fun of Trump for calling the Pope soft on crime,
like not any of my like spicy.

Speaker 6 (02:54:17):
Takes, right, just like viral posts on Blue Sky.

Speaker 1 (02:54:20):
He didn't do a lot of spicy tapes. He reposted
a lot of normal viral stuff you'd expect. He was
really angry about COVID nineteen. He hates Elon Musk. He
reposted a lot of like, you know, Elon Musk wants
poor African children to die, like kind of content talking
about that after some of the more recent articles about
how many people died as a result of like the

(02:54:41):
American like aid cuts, that Musk was a major pardon.
He was very angry about that. He reposted Bill Crystal
saying abolish ice, okay. And there's a couple of different
posts that he shared about or from people who were
criticizing the White House Correspondence dinner, and particularly like when
Jake Tapper fucking made a post about, like here's the

(02:55:03):
napkins that we've got that have like freedom of the press,
you know, the First Amendment stuff on it that like
is supposed to be like this is our protest against
the president, right, Like we've got these these monogram napkins,
And he made fun of that, like a lot of
people did. He was generally critical of anyone who would
be at the correspondence dinner, which was reflected in his
manifesto where he said that like the journalists and the

(02:55:26):
other people at the event who are not in the
administration aren't my targets. And you know, he said he
didn't want to hit them, but also he was quote
I would still go through most everyone here to get
to the targets if it were absolutely necessary, on the
basis that most people chose to attend a speech by
a pedophile, rapist and trader and are thus complicit.

Speaker 2 (02:55:45):
But I really hope it doesn't come.

Speaker 3 (02:55:46):
To that, right.

Speaker 6 (02:55:47):
Yeah, Another interesting bit from his manifesto's quote administration officials,
not including mister Fatel, they are targets prioritized from highest
ranking to lowest.

Speaker 5 (02:55:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:55:59):
Interesting, interesting parenthetical.

Speaker 1 (02:56:02):
I wonder if that's just because some people were joking
after that article came out about how Cash betel they
had to like break down his door because he was
too drunk to reach. People were joking like, maybe it's
best if Cash stays in office because he's so I
wonder if that was.

Speaker 2 (02:56:15):
The joke he was making.

Speaker 1 (02:56:16):
Unclear what he meant by that, But he doesn't give
us any reason to believe aso, and he doesn't share
any jokes like that, right, So that is kind of
legitimately baffling.

Speaker 6 (02:56:25):
Now, most of the manifesto is like apologizing to people
he knows yep, for how this will be like disruptive, yeah,
and then talking about his own rules of engagement, yes,
which he says, quote probably in a terrible format, but
I'm not military, so too bad un quote Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:56:41):
And it's it's interesting because he had also shared at
least one post on Blue Sky that was like kind
of pro gun control, that was like talking about how
it's bad to have a gun, basically like it increases
the danger that you're in, which it did for this guy.
But it is interesting in terms of the firearms he chose,
because this is clearly a guy who supports more gun control.
He seems to find it distasteful certainly to like celebrate

(02:57:05):
guns right and celebrate like military style weapons. I kind
of wonder if he picked the firearms he picked because
they did not look like the pistol didn't look like
a glock or like the standard police guns that he
sees people owning, and a shotgun doesn't look like an
AR fifteen AAR fifteen. Yeah, I kind of wonder, although
he says it was to minimize penetration, so maybe that's

(02:57:26):
more likely.

Speaker 6 (02:57:26):
The other thing I want to mention is because the
shotgun was purchased in August, and he does make a
few references in the manifesto too, Yes, like thinking of
having done something like this for quite a while, but
this was his first opportunity that he saw that seemed
semi possible.

Speaker 3 (02:57:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:57:43):
And I also had the thought that, well, when he
bought the shotgun, because he specifically states that he wants
to use a shotgun to minimize like casualties, then the
date at which he bought the shotgun might be the
date at which he decided he was going to do this, right,
or it might be the point which he started taking actions.
It would make some that maybe that would be around
when he had started planning to do this. And you know,

(02:58:05):
there's so much different shit happened around August of twenty
twenty five, it's kind of impossible to say this is
definitely it. I did notice that August twenty fifth, twenty
twenty five, is when Trump issued his additional measures to
address the crime Emergency in the District of Columbia Executive Order.

Speaker 6 (02:58:22):
Yeah, the military occupation of DC.

Speaker 3 (02:58:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:58:26):
So, and this is when Trump is really and a
bunch of there's a bunch of different news stories around
Trump trying to deploy the National Guard in US cities,
And I kind of wonder if maybe that's when he
but that's purely theoretical. There was a lot of other
bad stuff happening that, you know, so who's to say.
He also seems to be angry about our war against Iran,
like the fact, like the war of choice that Trump

(02:58:47):
launched against Iran. He didn't get a post a lot
about it. But there are some references in the manifesto
that kind of make me feel like that that may
have also been like a major thing that helped push
him to make this decision, because he specifically stated that
I'm a citizen of the United States of America. What
my representatives do reflects me, and I am no longer

(02:59:07):
one to permit a pedophile, rapist, and trader to coat
my hands with his crimes, right, Like, there's some reasons
to believe that that probably played into it as well.

Speaker 6 (02:59:15):
Interestingly, he does sign the manifesto with his blue sky username.
Sure does Cold Force.

Speaker 2 (02:59:22):
Yeah he thought that was cool. Yeah, perhaps that was
her name he used. I don't know, and there's nothing
activities or like it was. Maybe that's something to him.

Speaker 1 (02:59:31):
Another thing that's probably worth talking about because Trump has
made the claim several times. This guy was anti Christian.
That hatred of Christianity is what drove him. As I
said before, in Caltech he was a member of the
Christian group. I'll talk about that in a second. But
in his manifesto he specifically justifies what he's doing as
a Christian. There is a segment in there where he's
going through like some objections he knows people in his

(02:59:52):
life will have, and kind of rebutting them. An objection
one is as a Christian, you should turn the other cheek.
Rebuttal turning the other cheek is for when you yourself
are oppressed. I'm not the person raped in a detention camp.
I'm not the fisherman executed without trial. I'm not a
school kid blown up, or a child starved, or a
teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration. Right,
So he specifically is justifying this as a Christians on

(03:00:15):
Christian grounds. He thanks his church, which seems to have
been a major part of his life. So there's a
quote from Ken Klippenstein's article about his time at Caltech.
He was pretty prominent at the Caltech Christian Fellowship, pretty
Christian and mellow. If I didn't see his face eating carpet.
I would have never believed it. And then I found
a Christianity Today piece that just came up a few

(03:00:36):
hours ago, and a line from that is Alan's father,
Thomas Allen, was listed as an elder at Grace United
Reformed Church and Torrance and an evangelical congregation that describes
itself as preaching a gospel that is Christ centered, covenental,
and confessional. The church's leadership page and social media pages
have been pulled down, and yeah, it's fucked up. They
had to have like security guards, armed guards, like escort

(03:00:57):
worshippers inside and out this weekend just because of like
all of the press around this. Elizabeth ter Linden, who
also knew him at the time, told The New York
Times he was definitely a strong believer in evangelical Christianity.
At the time that I knew him, she was in
the Caltech Christian Fellowship with him. So this guy appears
to have been like a very strong evangelical Christian, like

(03:01:17):
a liberal Christian.

Speaker 2 (03:01:19):
We don't exactly know.

Speaker 1 (03:01:21):
Was he always was his Christianity always like progressive and
liberal tinted, or was he kind of more conservative at
a different point in his life we do know that
within the last couple of years he got involved in
left wing activism in Los Angeles. His sister told law
enforcement that after he got more involved in left wing activism,
particularly a group who called themselves the White Awakes, which

(03:01:42):
was referencing an anti slavery protest in the eighteen sixties.
Oh yeah, okay, right, Like these were some of the
people who like back Lincoln. So he joined some group
and Alick has called the White Awakes for some period
of time, he starts talking more radically, starts showing up
to more protests, and I think he's helping with a
couple of different kinds of things with the cup different groups.
But that's when his sister says, he starts making like

(03:02:03):
a lot more radical statements and maybe sometimes aggressive statements.
And that lines up with when he buys a gun
and he starts training after twenty twenty three. So this
may have just been a thing where he he didn't
have a full plan at that point, but he accepted
the possibility that he might need to do violence in
order to support, you know, his his ideals. We don't
really know, but that's that's all we've gotten in terms

(03:02:26):
of a journey.

Speaker 6 (03:02:27):
Yeah, in October of twenty twenty four, he did make
one donation to the themircial campaign via.

Speaker 2 (03:02:33):
Act twenty five dollars.

Speaker 1 (03:02:36):
Yeah, but not a lot of not a long history
of donations to the party, not a long history of
like volunteering for the Democratic Party specifically. Seems to have
been a pretty loyal voter. Yeah, but this is a
guy who I think really, during like the it would
be during the Biden years, gets more involved in like
left wing protests and organizing. He becomes angrier, and then
after twenty twenty four, he gets really really angry at

(03:02:58):
Trump and Evince, probably some time late last year, decides
to take action, and for whatever reason, picks the Correspondent's
dinner to do it. It's probably also worth noting that
he sends this manifesto thing out right before he carries
out the attack, Like he's staying in the hotel for
a couple of.

Speaker 2 (03:03:15):
Days before all this happens. He booked two nights.

Speaker 1 (03:03:19):
We actually get him to reflect a little on the
security that he's experienced while he's been there, and that's
a really interesting part of this. He says, I expected
security cameras at every bend bugged hotel rooms, armed agents
every ten feet, metal detectors out the wazoo. What I got,
who knows, maybe they're pranking me, is nothing. No damn security,
not in transport, not in the hotel, and not in
the event.

Speaker 7 (03:03:38):
Like.

Speaker 1 (03:03:39):
The one thing that I immediately noticed walking to the
hotel is the sense of arrogance. I walk in with
multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the
possibility that I could be a threat.

Speaker 2 (03:03:47):
Crazy stuff.

Speaker 6 (03:03:48):
Most of the security seemed to be isolated around the
actual ballroom and the levels immediately above and below.

Speaker 1 (03:03:54):
And again, he doesn't get anywhere close to the president
or any other important person, right, So you could argue
the security did its job. He was just in the
same hotel. But yeah, crazy stuff.

Speaker 2 (03:04:07):
I don't know. I don't have anything else.

Speaker 6 (03:04:09):
Yeah, let's go on ad break and then return to
briefly discuss some of the conspiracy theories that have spawned
after this alleged shooting. Love it, okay, we are back.

(03:04:33):
Immediately after the event took place, tons of conspiracy theories
started cropping up, obviously piggybacking off of the Butler Pennsylvania ones.
This was not helped by the confusion in early reports,
because once you get every journalist in DC in one
room and then an event happens, that means every journalist
has a kind of different version of the event that

(03:04:55):
gets immediately blasted out online and on the news. So
there was no not a clear sequence of events. In
the immediate aftermath of the shooting, there was reports that
maybe was just dishes being dropped. Eventually it was clear
that no, there was an actual shooting, and Wolf Flitzer
did lose a shoe in the course of the events.

Speaker 2 (03:05:14):
He sure did.

Speaker 1 (03:05:16):
Poor Wolf.

Speaker 6 (03:05:16):
Now also not helping things. Trump was basically live truthing
this investigation on the night of the shooting, uh huh,
And it was not clear to many people that the
shooting did not happen on the ballroom level, yeah, and
that the shoot did not get close to the targets.

Speaker 7 (03:05:32):
Well.

Speaker 1 (03:05:32):
Also, the people in the main room were still very
scared because like, oh, they had no real context on
what was happening, and everyone around them just started freaking out.

Speaker 6 (03:05:42):
Yeah, because there's the military running around, secret Service running around.
They heard gunshots. Yeah, it is a frightening thing. You're
seeing jd. Vance get pulled off stage. Trump's stucking down.

Speaker 1 (03:05:51):
What I do feel is kind of interesting about this
is you've got this whole DC class of like press
and other important people who are not empower themselves but
are close to it, and they do a lot of
the things that they do because they like being close
to power, and there's this illusion that comes with that.
I think for a lot of these people of importance
that gets ripped away when the Secret Service pulls all

(03:06:13):
of the people who are important out of the room
and you're just left wondering if you're in danger, Like
that's what it'll be like if there's a nuclear war.
All of these people will suddenly have the few folks
who have a detail get ripped out of the room,
and then you'll just hear the sirens start and have nothing,
no idea what's happening, and realize that your whole life
in pursuit of being close to power has brought you

(03:06:34):
no security. Crazy stuff, wild times anyway, Garrison.

Speaker 6 (03:06:38):
What are the core pieces of quote unquote evidence that
was used to assert that the shooting was some kind
of false flag or syop? Was a comment made by
Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt shortly before the dinner. This speech
tonight will be classic Donald J.

Speaker 8 (03:06:54):
Trump.

Speaker 1 (03:06:55):
It'll be funny, it'll be entertaining, there will be some
shots fired tonight.

Speaker 2 (03:07:00):
Great stuff.

Speaker 6 (03:07:01):
Poor choice of words. There on behalf of the press secretary.

Speaker 2 (03:07:05):
Excellent choice of words.

Speaker 6 (03:07:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:07:08):
Also, though, like it's not a Dann Brown level when
people are actually plotting conspiracy, they did go around leaving
the little easter eggs for you to find, of course.

Speaker 6 (03:07:17):
Yeah, why why else would there why else would the
deep state orchestrate like a top a top level secret
secret syop and not not decide to leave little clues beforehand?

Speaker 1 (03:07:28):
Yeah, they got they have to leave little clues, Garrison.
Have you listened to Alex Jones. That's part of the
deal they make with the demons is that they have
to They have to leave little clues for the evil.

Speaker 2 (03:07:39):
That they're doing while they're doing it.

Speaker 6 (03:07:40):
They call that the Riddler's law.

Speaker 2 (03:07:43):
Uh huh, that's right now.

Speaker 6 (03:07:45):
Another thing that got amplified in the conspiratorial miliu was
a Twitter account with a Pepe profile picture wearing the
same outfit as President Trump for the night of the Dinner,
who tweeted the alleged shooter's name about two and a
half years ago. This post is the account's only visible post.

(03:08:07):
The banner image of the account is a bunch of
streaks of color. But if you overlay the image of
Trump holding its fist up in the air at Butler,
the color streaks and the darkened areas line up with
the Trump Butler photo. Now, the alleged shooter also had
an undergraduate research fellowship at NASA for the summer of
twenty to fourteen, and the name of this Twitter account

(03:08:28):
matches the name of someone at lockeed Martin who published
a NASA paper at the same time that the shooter
was at NASA, and the shooter worked for the Jet
Propulsion Lab, the same labs that those scientists who have
gone missing also have been working out of. When I
saw this, I started feeling a little bit scared because

(03:08:49):
I thought I was getting too I don't know, I
was afraid, needing help. But this is But that's not
all because the Pepe the Pepe Twitter account was also
connected to a time travel study, because the color streak
banner photo was traced to a website on how to

(03:09:11):
build a time machine, and this photo was used on
the web page for the time machine study. So what's
what's really going on here? First of all, this quote
unquote time Machine website is actually a europe based project
for quote three D digitalization of cultural heritage, scanning like

(03:09:32):
artifacts and uploading them online as like three D models.
That's their quote unquote time Machine is preserving cultural heritage. Yes,
an archive, and actually this color streak image has actually
been floating around the Internet for a long time. I
found versions of it since at least twenty eighteen. There
are hundreds of people named Cole Allen in the US

(03:09:52):
on data broker sites. Right now, the first archive of
this pepe Twitter account whose profile picture only mat Trump's
because it's a tuxedo, one of the most common outfits
from men at events like this.

Speaker 1 (03:10:05):
Yeah, yes, it is the same outfit that Trump was
wearing at the dinner. It's also the same outfit Trump
is worn at every dinner, because it's what you wear
at dinners if you're the president at TEXIEDA.

Speaker 6 (03:10:16):
But the first archive of this post is from after
the shooting, so we don't know what this account looked
like prior to the shooting. Now, this account could have
tweeted tons of random names and then deleted all the
other posts to pull a stunt like this or people
at Twitter, like you know, x everything up. The people
who work there could have backdated the account and the

(03:10:37):
post to boost engagement on the platform. Now, those aren't
any more likely than just a simple coincidence, But there
are other explanations other than gesturing vaguely towards a pre
planned psyop spreading images of this. A Twitter account isn't
necessarily putting forward a specific conspiracy theory. He just gets

(03:10:58):
used as a data point other unconnected data points to
sew public mistrust and undermine reality inferring meaning from odd coincidences.

Speaker 2 (03:11:07):
Right this is?

Speaker 6 (03:11:07):
This is seeing patterns that aren't there and literally in
the case of seeing the Butler photo in a splash
of colors, and again like why would quote unquote they
drop hints beforehand?

Speaker 2 (03:11:19):
Right is?

Speaker 6 (03:11:20):
This is this predictive programming. But predictive programming isn't really
necessary to get the public to accept an event like
an attempted assassination. In fact, that would only sew suspicion.
Dropping these little hints just so suspicion for an event
like this, It doesn't actually make it more acceptable. Right
The whole idea of predictive programming is sowing seeds to

(03:11:41):
get the public to accept an otherwise unacceptable thing, and
that's not necessary for a presidential assassination. Yeah, Now there
are some other things that propped up in this conspiratorial
uh shenanigans. In the wake of the shooting, a Fox
News reporter was calling in to report herk's varience at
the dinner and suddenly cut out when she started talking

(03:12:04):
about something that Carolyn Levitt's husband said to her.

Speaker 5 (03:12:08):
He kind of leaned over and said, you know, I
watched your on TV.

Speaker 4 (03:12:11):
DoD a great job. You need to be very safe.
And he was just very serious when he said that
to me, and he kind of looked around the room
and he said, you know, there are.

Speaker 8 (03:12:19):
Some sounds like we lost Ayisha's phone there.

Speaker 6 (03:12:30):
Well, well, well what so her audio actually cuts out
at different points during this televised call. The anchor said
that she was having sell service issues, and later on
x this reporter posted that she was about to say
that Carolyn Levitt's husband was quote telling me to be
careful with my own safety because the world is crazy unquote.

(03:12:54):
But it does make for a funny moment, a funny
of television.

Speaker 2 (03:12:58):
That's a good moment.

Speaker 1 (03:12:59):
That's an incredible time for your call to cut out,
Like just awesome stuff.

Speaker 3 (03:13:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (03:13:04):
There's other other viral posts spreading video of the military
storming past the red carpet or people in military fatigue
storming past the red carpet after the shooting, with one
person writing quote, law enforcement doesn't act like this. Neither
does the military. This is a staged event with a
shitty script and pre positioned cameras. Unquote. The cameras are

(03:13:27):
there because they're they're to film the red carpet, the physition.

Speaker 2 (03:13:32):
Yes, because this is an organization where all the press gathered.

Speaker 6 (03:13:35):
This is a press event. That's why there's pre positioned cameras.

Speaker 1 (03:13:38):
Yeah, it's it's how you do you know the White
House correspondence dinner.

Speaker 2 (03:13:43):
Yeah. Oh so you're going to see some types of
cops you have never previously seen when someone tries to
assassinate the president. Oh yeah, there are a whole lot
of people whose job it is to stop that happening,
Lots of them on necessarily uniformed offices who you see
every day in the Secret Service. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (03:13:59):
Other people also thought it was odd that Trump has
skipped every correspondent to dinner across his two terms. Except
for this one, and then all of a sudden there's
a shooter in the lobby. How did the shooter know
that Trump would go to this one? Because the shooter
planned planned this since early April. How would the shooter
know this? Well, it's actually quite simple, because Trump announced

(03:14:21):
he was attending this dinner in early March, and according
to Core documents, Cole Allen started searching for information about
this dinner in early April. A month later, before then
booking two nights at the Washington Hilton, Trump already announced
that he was going to be attending the dinner. The
oddest aspect of the conspiracism post this event is that

(03:14:45):
Trump needed to stage this not for any national security
reasons or to seize more power, but to construct the
White House ballroom, which has been the main thing that
people on the right have been talking about after the shooting.
The people on the right have not been using this
shooting to go after liberal terrorists, but have been talking
NonStop about how this security breach demonstrates the need to

(03:15:09):
construct Trump's massive ballroom, and that's the main thing they're
talking about. It's so funny the idea that they would
stage that the deep state it's going to stage a
false flag just to push for the ballroom.

Speaker 2 (03:15:21):
Yeah, is to me, frankly very funny. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:15:25):
We don't get an enabling Act in our new fascists.
We just get a fucking ballroom. Yeah yeah, right, Like okay,
I mean I guess I prefer this, Yeah.

Speaker 6 (03:15:35):
The reichstick fire to construct a nice dance floor.

Speaker 2 (03:15:40):
Yeah yeah, just yeah, I mean a lot of this
was like centered on the safety and security exemption which
was provided in the injunction against the building of the
new ballroom.

Speaker 5 (03:15:53):
Right.

Speaker 2 (03:15:53):
The issue here is that the Trump administration already filed
on the third of April a claim that the entire
building was a contiguous hole. They couldn't do the security
part without doing the fantasy dance floor part, right, Like, yes,
Trump has also truced about this. Previous to this event,
this wouldn't have really added anything. Yeah, they did try

(03:16:14):
and get the National Trust for Historical Preservation to withdraw
their court case, which they didn't against. Subsequently to this,
the events of the White House correspond.

Speaker 6 (03:16:25):
So yeah, that's most of what I have on the
conspiracy stuff. There's certainly more, but that's.

Speaker 2 (03:16:30):
Oh dose more.

Speaker 6 (03:16:31):
Yeah, We're going to leave it there's always going to
be more right, Like, that's that's the way how it is.
We don't have good data on like the widespread belief
of this theory. There was there was a poll that
circulated that said like something like forty seven percent of
Democrats thought the attempted assassination was staged. But this poll,
which is from the Manhattan Institute, so take that with

(03:16:53):
a grain of fascism. This poll is actually pulling the
Butler shooting, not this recent one, and people did not
acknowledge that when they were spreading this poll around. So
we don't know how many people actually believe that this
shooting was staged, but you can certainly see a lot
of people asserting as such on the internet.

Speaker 4 (03:17:16):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 2 (03:17:18):
Shall we move on to a couple of other topics
we need to cover.

Speaker 6 (03:17:22):
Yes, this will be a super super sized episode, but
it is what it is.

Speaker 2 (03:17:27):
Yeah, let's go talking to people talking about thinks of
the internet. I think some people got this one get
a little carried away. As three zero decision of a
panel of Second Circuit Court judges has rejected ICE's mandatory
detention of people seeking to deport with a few exceptions.
The opinion was written by Judge Bianco, who is a

(03:17:50):
Trump appointee, stated that quote petitioner entered the United States
and lawfully in two thousand and four or two thousand
and five and has resided here ever since. He's there
for deemed to be an applicant for admission by section
one two to five A, that he is not quote
seeking admission because he is not requesting law ful entry
into the United States after inspection authorization. The government's attempt

(03:18:11):
to muddy these textually clear waters defies the statute's context, structure, history,
and purpose, contradicts of Supreme Court dicta in Jennings and
long standing executive branch practice, and its interpretation of statute
raisive serious constitutional questions that should be avoided even if
the statutory language were ambiguous. The statute in question here

(03:18:33):
is the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of
nineteen ninety six, and specifically the fact that it has
a mandatory detainer for people quote unquote seeking admission to
the USA. Now, this ruling puts the Second Circuit in
agreement with over three hundred and seventy judges across the nation,

(03:18:55):
but notably odds with the Fifth and Eighth circuit.

Speaker 5 (03:18:57):
Right.

Speaker 2 (03:18:58):
Judge Bianco, in a a really incredibly New York and
analogy here for seeking admission wrote, if someone sneaks into
Yankee Stadium at the start of the game with no
ticket for admission and no intention of ever paying, and
he is later found by security in a seat in
the seventh inning, no one would consider that to be
seeking admission to the game. So hopefully that's that they

(03:19:20):
explained to people that the argument that the government is
making here is that someone who has been in the
country for a long period of time is still seeking admission.

Speaker 5 (03:19:29):
Right.

Speaker 2 (03:19:30):
The Trump administrations place itself odds with other administrations. Right,
this has been lost into nineteen ninety six, as Bianco wrote,
quote for five presidential administrations have nearly three decades. It
did consistently release detainees on bond, whom the government now
argues are covered by Section one two two five B
two A. Even in President Trump's first term and the

(03:19:51):
first few months of his second, the agency adhered to
the decades old understanding and the relative scopes of sections
one two two five and one two two six. The
these circumstances, the fact that no president has ever found
such power in the statute is strong evidence that it
does not exist. That pretty much explains itself, right. What
I have not been able to work out is whether

(03:20:12):
this pertains to people who are detained as in who
are arrested in the second circuit, or people who are
held in the second circuit or both. My guess would
be both, because it is the law in the second circuit, right,
so it applies in the second circuit. Certainly, most attention
facilities are not in the second circuit. A lot of
them are in the Fifth, which has come down the
opposite way on this. This is why the Supreme Court exists, right,

(03:20:35):
big disagreement between these several circuit courts here. Moving on
to talk about the border wall. Before leaving office, Secretary
no massigned several waivers for border war construction. This was
not in the week before she left office, but this year.
One of them waived twenty eight laws in the Big

(03:20:55):
Bend area of Texas. The waiver included a hundred and
empty five miles of the riverfront of the Rio Grande,
including parts of the State Park, National Park, and federally
protected river. These some of these areas are very popular
for outdoor recreation. These waivers are now being challenged in
court by the Center for Biological Diversity. They're atteditus on.

(03:21:16):
You'll see them in a lot of border legal cases.
The Friends of Roridosa Church and a telling were river
guide named Billy Miller. It's an interesting coalition, right that
we don't often see, like a church group has the
sort of approach to this that it would destroy historical
and cultural heritage to build the wall there. Obviously, the

(03:21:38):
river guy, Billy Miller, Mister Miller has the claim that
it would be disruptive to have business and to people's
enjoyment of nature on the river. Currently, what they are
doing is focusing on Chispa Road. That's it's Neil like Valentine,
Texas northwestern MafA where are carrying out road improvements that
they did not notify county officials about, which is obvious

(03:22:00):
the course of disruption. I've actually ridden my bike out
there a fair bit, did some work making a film
out there a few years ago. It's a really beautiful
part of the country. I'm sure a lot of people
will be familiar with Marfa, which is nearby. Oh, it's
a great city, great Muffa's great. I love that area Texas.

Speaker 1 (03:22:15):
Yeah, I watched it all burned down one beautiful, beautiful
afternoon when the horrible fire started. Yeah, it was wild, Yeah,
I bet geez.

Speaker 2 (03:22:24):
Luckily, Marfa has recovered a great place to visit. You
can go and see the Prata Store, which people now
think is AI generated, which is great. Our reality is cool.

Speaker 1 (03:22:37):
You can go see the Jud Foundations or the Chinnati Foundation,
the Donald jud Museum. You know, a lot of other
good stuff out in Marfa. Pretty good geez sandwich restaurant.

Speaker 2 (03:22:47):
Pretty fancy glamping set up there as well. Ye. So
I checked out the CBP smart All Interactive map, which
sometimes like they don't always have to give notice when
they're changing their plans, or sometimes find out via the
smart Wall interactive map. And right now it shows vehicle
barriers and patrol road planned inside the National Park. Right

(03:23:10):
so this will cause damage far far beyond the riverfront.
Evidently to build barriers at the riverfront, they have to
build roads to get to riverfront, which will also spread
this damage over an area that like, especially in Texas.
Texas is not a state which is abundant with public
land now. It is not like those states further west
in that regard. And I know this is an area

(03:23:32):
which is very special to a great deal of people.
I'm really interested in rating more about this, so like
especially people in the outdoor industry or folks in that region,
I'd love to hear from you. You can do cal
Zone tips at proton dot me if you want to
talk about that. Do you want to do that?

Speaker 6 (03:23:48):
We reported, We reported the news.

Speaker 2 (03:23:51):
All of it. Yeah again. Call Zone Tips at proton
dot me for story tips. For your marketing emails, you
can just go ahead and flush those we reported the news.

Speaker 1 (03:24:07):
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 9 (03:24:13):
It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com for check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources where it could Happen here listed directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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