It Could Happen Here Weekly 238

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

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

Speaker 3 (00:28):
Welcome to it could happen here on Garrison Davis. This
show originally focused on the potentiality of a second American
Civil War and the conditions or events that might set
one into motion, and we will return to that topic
later this episode, but first let me introduce my guest
friend of the pod, artist and noted live streamer, Bailey

(00:51):
new Poster.

Speaker 4 (00:52):
I don't like that that's what we're attributing to me nowadays,
but that's you know, that's fine, that's fair.

Speaker 3 (01:00):
Hello, everybody, Thank you for coming back on the show.
Let's start our main topic. Last summer, President Trump announced
a UFC championship fight at the White House in twenty
twenty six as a part of the festivities for America's
two hundred and fiftieth birthday. The event was initially planned

(01:21):
to take place on July fourth, but last October Trump
announced it was rescheduled to take place on Flag Day,
June fourteenth, which coincides with his eightieth birthday. Come Memorial Day,
a giant claw like canopy was being erected on the
South lawn right in front of the White House. The event,
officially titled UFC Freedom two point fifty, had a lower

(01:44):
capacity than originally envisioned, just four thousand attendees, far from
the twenty five thousand spectators on the White House grounds
that Trump pitched last summer. The four thousand seats in
the miniature stadium arena were invite only. Most tickets went
to members of the military, while Trump had one thousand
tickets to give out at his discretion, though there were

(02:07):
eighty five thousand free tickets to watch the fights on
big screens from the Ellipse Park near the Washington Monument.
UC freem To fifty was streamed on Paramount Plus and
began with Trump and UFC CEO Dana White walking together
from the Oval office to the octagon. Zach Brown sung
the national anthem, featuring a military flyover. This was a

(02:31):
sixty million dollar production with fireworks, dirt bike tricks, and
music by the US Marine Band, which played Trump's favorite
song YMCA. Billionaires like David Allison and Mark Zuckerberg were
in attendance, along with members of Trump's cabinet and politicians.
Before the first fight, UFC announcer Bruce Boffer kick things

(02:53):
off in a way that really encapsulated the entire event.
And I'll show you this clip here and I'll have
the audience listen to the audio from.

Speaker 5 (03:03):
The shot form Love the Wide, Posh and Washrington for
you say Freedom, two crypt for such Abye rab Trucks,
Nothing Stop ram and by Crypto dot com, the world's
leading cryptocurrency platform.

Speaker 4 (03:23):
Yes, sponsorships on the White House lawn.

Speaker 3 (03:26):
Let's go dude, Crypto shoutouts literally within thirty seconds of
like the actual event, like starting after the anthem, like
when once the fight starts, within thirty seconds we get
cryptocurrency ads. And I mean the stage was covered in
logos for Red, White and Blue, Monster Energy, Meta Rumble,

(03:46):
the far right video streaming platform Crypto dot Com, as mentioned,
Steak Gambling, and of course polymarket. UFC fighters were actually
paid in the form of a crypto coin called USD
one issued by the Trump family's own crypto company, World

(04:08):
Liberty Financial. Awesome crypto all the way in this event,
but UFC Freedom to Fifty went off largely without a hitch,
save for a stunt pulled by UFC heel Josh Hokit
after winning his heavyweight match where he called Michelle Obama
a man while being interviewed by Joe Rogan.

Speaker 4 (04:30):
Oh, that's that's probably one of my favorite conspiracy theories.
The Michelle Obama is a man.

Speaker 3 (04:36):
See, it's pretty old. People have been people have been
writing that for like over a decade.

Speaker 4 (04:42):
That's a that's a classic. I like the ones that
mix it with Michelle Obama as a man and Obama
used to be a woman. Those are the ones that
I really respect.

Speaker 3 (04:51):
A solid, straight tea for tea relationship there.

Speaker 2 (04:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (04:55):
Joe Rogan never addressed this comment for the rest of
the night in the UFC cut out this comment from
Hokit from the YouTube upload and has been issuing takedown
requests across social media. UFC CEO DN and White full
Time Magazine that he's quote completely against saying nasty and
false things about people's families. Everyone knows my position on
free speech, but I hate that kind of nonsense unquote.

(05:18):
But according to the FBI, this event could have gone
very differently. On the morning of Tuesday, June sixteenth, the
DOJ announced that the FBI and law enforcement had prevented
a mass casualty attack attempting to kill government officials, with
five arrests in multiple states over that weekend. Early reports

(05:40):
framed the alleged plot as a sophisticated, multi step plan
involving explosives, drones, and snipers. Vice President Jade Vance addressed
the alleged terror plot on Fox and Friends Tuesday morning, saying, quote,
so much of the far left rhetoric is driving itself
towards violence. Let's take a list. This is very, very

(06:02):
dark stuff.

Speaker 6 (06:03):
This is what happens when people turn the rhetoric up
so loud that disagree with somebody is a cause for violence.
That's the place that we've come to. Unfortunately, I think
a lot of my Democratic colleagues in Washington have got
to look themselves in the mirror and say, why is
so much of this political violence coming from our side
of the spectrum.

Speaker 7 (06:20):
Maybe they can do something different.

Speaker 4 (06:22):
His eyes are getting like deeper set, Like he looks
waxier and waxier as the days go on.

Speaker 3 (06:28):
Maybe it's just he doesn't get thicker eyelighter, or maybe
he's moved to eyeshadow.

Speaker 4 (06:33):
That's possible, that is.

Speaker 3 (06:35):
Which is the sensible move. And yeah, you start off
with eyeliner, doesn't look good. Then you realize what I
should really be doing is eyeshadow.

Speaker 4 (06:42):
Imagine tears streaking down his face and his eye.

Speaker 3 (06:45):
Oh Midwest evo, Oh Midwest Evo.

Speaker 4 (06:49):
Shiver ran up my spine.

Speaker 3 (06:51):
So, according to the Vice President, this alleged are plot
was coming from the Democrat side of politics and simply
the result of them turning up political rhetoric. Fox News
reported that upwards of twenty three people were involved in
this plot, five of whom are currently in custody, with
the details of the plan being uncovered on the encrypted

(07:12):
messaging app Signal. Fox News claimed the thwarted attack was
targeting capitalism, billionaires, and apac. Jd Vance also mentioned how
the administration is going after the terrorist funding networks facilitating
this kind of violence.

Speaker 6 (07:28):
We're trying to look at the underground networks that drive
towards this violence. Twenty three people do not get to
the point where they're going to commit a mass terror
incident in Washington, DC without some serious funding, without some
serious coordination. And we've actually been trying to go with
those networks of coordination because this is this is a
terrorist plot. That's not a few guys doing crazy stuff.

Speaker 7 (07:50):
That is a.

Speaker 3 (07:51):
Coordinated plan terrorist plot.

Speaker 6 (07:53):
Thank god we thwarded it, but we've got to do
more of that stuff.

Speaker 3 (07:56):
According to the charges announced by the DOJ, Tyson Proper
nineteen years old of Ohio, Brian Row twenty four of California,
Michael Thomas thirty two of California, Daniel Eskridge thirty two
of Missouri, and Abraham Alverrez thirty one of Nebraska all

(08:16):
conspired to plan and execute a mass casualty events targeting
politicians and other quote unquote high value targets at the
UFC Freedom to Fifty event. The co conspirators allegedly planned
to use drones to drop unspecified explosives on the north
side of the UFC arena, forcing event attendees to evacuate south,

(08:37):
where other co conspirators would be set up with sniper
rifles to fire on the fleeing crowd.

Speaker 4 (08:44):
It's sort of a real shame that the io interactive
guys aren't making another hit Man game.

Speaker 3 (08:50):
For a minute, A lot of this is like very Hitman,
very yeah, very Agent forty seven's type stuff. And as
we get more or into the plan, it's gonna get
an increasingly video gamey yeah yeah. Acting Atorney General Todd
Blanche said, quote the FBI, our law enforcement partners, and
our use attorneys that did what they do every day

(09:12):
to make America safe through quick response and vigilance in investigating, disrupting,
and dismantling this alleged plan before it could be carried out.
FBI Director Caspitel said, quote, Thanks to the rapid action
of this FBI, our partners, and the DOJ in a
multi state operation, multiple individuals are now in custody and
allegedly planned attacks were stopped cold. While the result represented

(09:34):
the best of investigative work, it was also nothing under
the ordinary for this law enforcement team. We are built
to detect, respond to, and bring to justice those who
threatened the lives of American citizens unquote.

Speaker 4 (09:46):
And he said all that without blinking those big wet
eyes of his.

Speaker 3 (09:50):
I think this was mostly in the form of a tweet.
So it sounds like the FBI did a darn fine
job preventing this terrorist attack. Except what what happened here
was not the result of the FBI's excellent investigative prowess.
They did not just stumble across this attack because of their,
you know, diligent, diligent efforts to disrupt terrorist planning. Law

(10:14):
enforcement only learned about this potential attack because on June tenth,
the mother of one of the co conspirators called local
law enforcement in Ohio, concerned about her son's recent firearm
purchases and contact with individuals online. Officers went to their
family home and spoke with nineteen year old Tyson Proper

(10:35):
and his family. According to the criminal complaint, a family
member told officers that Proper had quote recently met random
people online and quit his job in preparation to conduct
quote unquote missions and quote unquote recons with these individuals
as soon as that upcoming weekend. Proper allegedly spent about

(10:57):
three thousand dollars of his graduation money to buy quote,
camping gear, food, ballistic plates, a new shotgun, a rifle,
lots of ammunition, extra magazines, and plate carriers. Unquote, the
family turned all this equipment over to the police voluntarily.
After local law enforcement interviewed Proper and his family. Tyson

(11:17):
Proper was transported to Dublin Springs Mental Health Center. And
I think this is quite notable is that they did
not take him into custody, but was transferred to a
mental hospital. In the DOJ announcement, they refer to this
as a medical facility, but in court documents they specify
its mental health facility, and the criminal complaint says, quote

(11:39):
law enforcement submitted an application for an emergency admission based
on his homicidal ideations, detailing that Proper had been thinking
about joining the military or police force with the goal
of being able to kill people unquote.

Speaker 4 (11:53):
I like that. It's always like these guys, no matter
what political ideology they have, at at one point they're like,
maybe I should just fucking join the military, Maybe I
should just join the police. I just really want to
fucking shoot people. It's like I want to cause, I
want like a duty.

Speaker 3 (12:10):
Yeah, that that's sort of kind of more like floaty mindset.
I think there's more of a factor here than like
any specific political ideology in a sense. And we'll get
into that once we once we talk about the way
that this group envisioned itself, like the role that it
had on starting a second American Revolution. But there's very
little like defined ideology happening with these individuals, and for

(12:33):
someone like Proper, there's a large degree of delusional thinking
at play here.

Speaker 4 (12:38):
Yeah, it's it's guys who want to do missions. Yeah, exactly,
it's it like missions and recon.

Speaker 3 (12:45):
It's very it's it's it's very it's like aesthetically based
on like the military and this idea of like tactics
and what. We'll get into this sort of like you know,
military fetishism later on as well, but but yeah, it's
it's it's it's very much like very very video gaming,
very much like I want I want to plan like
a mission to do in real life, like what we
play in video games. That is that that that's the

(13:05):
sort of feeling across reading about their plan because their
plan is relatively complicated, and there's no way that they
could have pulled a plan like this off like this,
This type of plan would be hard for a nation
state to be able to do successfully. There's there's no
way that like five guys from like across the United

(13:25):
States with like a you know, nerdy focus and like
tactical kit would be able to like do.

Speaker 4 (13:30):
This about like halfway through planning, they would have given
up and all gone.

Speaker 3 (13:34):
Gay probably what do you mean gone gay?

Speaker 4 (13:39):
When it turned it, I was just thinking, like, you know,
really quitting your job. This guy quits his job to
meet his online friends, you know, go hang out with
them in the woods.

Speaker 3 (13:48):
That's more positive out the fifty to.

Speaker 4 (13:51):
Fifty, Like they either try to play in a mass
terror attack or they like all end up like kissing
and stuff.

Speaker 8 (13:57):
You know.

Speaker 3 (13:57):
I mean, yeah, camp having a gay camp out in
the wood is the more positive path for people like
this because that's really all they need. It's just a
group of friends to go camping with. Well I do.

Speaker 4 (14:06):
I do like how Vance and them are talking about it.
They're like, fuck, we got these guys who were definitely
gonna try and shoot up our UFC event and they
were going to successfully do it if we didn't stop them.
And it's like if you look at the kid as
like a mentally ill teenager.

Speaker 3 (14:25):
Yes, and as we will also get into you know,
far from this like left wing anti capitalist motivation which
JD Van's and Fox News are promoting that is not
at all what was going on here. So, the day
after Tyson Propper was admitted to the mental health facility,
the Sheriff's office contact at the FBI. After searching Proper's phone,

(14:48):
investigators found signal chats detailing a planned attack with maps
highlighting potential sniper locations and drone launch points. According to
the criminal complaint, Tyson Propper's family saw him researching and
mapping locations around Washington, d C, and when asked what
he was doing, he said that he intended to conduct
quote unquote recon and quote unquote hit and run missions.

Speaker 4 (15:12):
Run missions. Awesome, dude, that's fantastic. I gonna do GTA
five online like heist, like prerequisite missions before we go
blow up this this UFC event.

Speaker 3 (15:28):
So on June eleventh, the FBI searched Proper's home and
found a journal that the criminal complaints has contained a
list of approximately forty six names, including celebrities and politicians,
as well as pages quote in which Proper wrote that
the government sought to control people and to sacrifice children
and others to a demonic figure unquote awsome.

Speaker 4 (15:51):
We're going it's getting better. It's it's getting better.

Speaker 3 (15:55):
So yes, this is obviously evidence of like delusional thinking.
This is not this is not someone who's doing well.
And this is also not your typical rhetoric from a
democratic politician. Considering the claims made by J. D. Vance,
this is not This is not regular democratic politician rhetoric.
The Proper's family told the FBI that he recently began

(16:18):
interacting with a group of people online who quote represented
themselves as ex military and that may share some Christian
based ideology unquote. The family believed that these people online
were using religion to manipulate Proper, and that they quote
expressed ultra religious and anti government sentiments, specifically cite a

(16:39):
grievances about government corruption, the handling of the Epstein files,
data centers, taking up all the watering communities, and other
government actions unquote. So rather than a sort of general
like left wing anti capitalist or rhetoric from democratic politicians
motivating this attack, this is very general kind of liberty

(17:00):
esque anti government sentiments. And this, as we will discuss,
the script do not consider itself on the right or
the left, but saw themselves as American patriots more than
anything else, and they were upset about government corruption and
had this anti establishment kind of leaning that was pushing
them to plan very complicated and far fetched attacks against

(17:23):
the establishment and corrupt politicians.

Speaker 4 (17:25):
This is very average guy who sells cars ideology.

Speaker 3 (17:29):
Yes, oftentimes when people like read through these sorts of
core documents, they'll be like they had an incoherent ideology,
and it's not not really incoherent, right, They're responding to
real things in the world, Like everyone knows we're all
being fucked over government did mishandle the Epstein files. There
is a lot of corruption, right, and it does exist
on both sides of the political spectrum. So, like they

(17:50):
are responding to real things, but there's not an avenue
that it's being channeled in a helpful or useful direction.
So it gets dispersed through these very larpy like idealistic
violent avenues where you get a group of people who
don't really know what to do but are seeing these
problems in the world, and then what they end up
doing is LARPing themselves into federal custody by typing on

(18:12):
signal about their dreams to shoot politicians.

Speaker 4 (18:15):
Spending their college money on guns.

Speaker 3 (18:18):
Yeah, Now, the criminal complaint in Ohio for Tyson. Proper
also specifies that family members highlighted concerning statements he'd made
in recent months on social media, quote, such as making
sympathetic comments about Adolf Hitler and posting anti Semitic comments
on Facebook unquote.

Speaker 4 (18:37):
Wow left wing.

Speaker 3 (18:41):
Well there they are national socialists after all.

Speaker 4 (18:44):
True. True.

Speaker 3 (18:46):
We will return to discuss Tyson Proper and the alleged
attack on UFC two hundred after this at brick. Okay,
we are back. On June eleventh, the FBI interviewed Proper

(19:08):
at the mental hospital, where he admitted to planning an
attack on the Freedom to fifty event at the White House.
The FBI ran their own search of Proper's phone, and
on the encrypted messaging app simple x, found messages identifying
possible targets. The criminal complaint alleges that in mid May,
Proper identified a senator from Tennessee and wrote quote, she's

(19:30):
taken money from the pro Israel lobby and supports them unquote.
A few weeks later, Proper sent pictures of four members
of Congress, apparently taken from the track APAC website, writing quote,
these are the people we're going to focus on. Proper
allegedly told police that members of this group that were
planning the attack were primarily recruited through TikTok, where members

(19:56):
shared photos and videos of tactical kits and physical training
via TikTok direct messages. Once the recruit had proven himself
on TikTok, they were then let into a quote unquote
vetted signal chat.

Speaker 4 (20:09):
I'm so glad this isn't happening on my video app
of choice Instagram reels. I really don't want to start
restricting that.

Speaker 3 (20:18):
The TikTok aspect is super interesting because there's elements of
this that's similar to the accelerationists, like Nazi terrorism of
you know, twenty sixteen to twenty twenty. These people are
not explicitly Nazis, even if there's an aspect of anti
Semitism kind of directing this violence, but this is anti
Semitism is largely focused on the role that Israel has

(20:41):
in influencing the US government and the Israel lobby and
politicians taking money from Israel. That's where most of the
anti Semitic aspect comes from. And then in Proper's case,
he is posting about Hitler on Facebook. But this is
not driven by like neo Nazi style anti Semitic ideology.
These these guys aren't posting about son and Rads or

(21:02):
Germany or race science, at least that's not what's outlined
in the court documents. So some of this does feel
downstream from the accelerationius Nazis like the Base and Adam
Waffen and their target selection that we'll get into in
a sect kind of also is similar to this, but
they're not primarily organizing this on like telegram, right. This
is this is guys posting like shooting videos and tactical

(21:25):
kit on TikTok, and that's how they meet each other
is through TikTok sharing videos of their you know, plate
carrier and doing shooting drills. And then they start you
know talking, and they start planning these sorts of operations
as they call them, and then they move to signal
to plan these things more in depth. Proper's phone contained

(21:46):
a large signal chat with approximately nineteen individuals, along with
smaller chats consisting of four to five people that were
divided based on role assignments and locations. In these chats,
the group discussed to exit a scape and evasion resources
for the Freedom to fifty attack, including the location of
potential safehouses. One of the signal chats was titled Hunters,

(22:10):
which the complaint says, quote contained detailed instructions for carrying
with the attack and plans to safely escape. Proper showed
the FBI the TikTok profiles of other co conspirators, and
based on this, investigators were able to identify someone in
California and someone in Missouri. The guy in Missouri, Daniel Eskridge,

(22:31):
had the username fulcrum Resist on TikTok, and they were
able to identify him because he followed himself from another
account with his legal name, and the account with his
legal name largely just reposted the tactical videos from at
fulcrum Resist.

Speaker 4 (22:52):
Like reposting your own videos would be like, I don't know.
This guy looks pretty sick, pretty in dope. Have you
guys seen this guy shooting? Oh my god, I bet
he's gonna do something crazy one day.

Speaker 3 (23:04):
This guy has a wife and five kids.

Speaker 4 (23:06):
Oh my god.

Speaker 3 (23:07):
He's like, I think it's like thirty two years old.
He lives in a rural property about an hour north
of Kansas City, and he's he's kind of the most
interesting guy in this whole deal for me. The FBI
was also able to identify co conspirators based on information
in the simple X messages given to them by proper Now.

(23:27):
One of these simple X group chats was called Vanguard
of the Old Republic. Gods. Yes, this was the main
name that this group used to refer to themselves, was
Vanguard of the Old Republic. And there was another simple
X chat that was called Vanguard of the Old Republic
Parenthesis OPS Stage one, which was like a which was

(23:52):
like an you know, an OP planning chat.

Speaker 4 (23:54):
Awesome, that's so dope.

Speaker 3 (23:57):
I'm gonna read some messages from Fulkrum, that is Daniel
Eskridge of Missouri. He wrote that the Vanguard of the
Old Republic should intend to quote, recruit operators into this
group and start making teams to complete tasks and objectives
to push our lines forward. So good quote. The definition

(24:21):
of a vanguard is the leading group in an advancing
army or the foremost pioneers in any field, movement, or industry.
That is what we strive to be. This chat here
will be insulated for the most part from each team's
detailed plan, so we won't post exact details in this chat.
This will be the main chat for everyone as we grow,

(24:42):
and we will have specific ops chats. Our goal is
in a general sense to quote, restore the old republic.
Our constitutional republic has been stolen by corporations, politicians, and
foreign actors. They have usurved power from the people and
concentrated it at the top to the point that we
now live in late stage quote unquote democracy. When I

(25:05):
say restore the old Republic, I'm not talking about all
the flaws that we had in the past times, but
merely talking about the fact that in a constitutional republic,
the people truly hold the power, and that's what we
intend to restore. To get there, this country needs more
fuel on the fire to show our fellow Americans at
the time has come to stand up and reclaim that power.

(25:26):
Twenty six Oh my god.

Speaker 4 (25:28):
People who are on like the the Star Wars wiki forum,
like way too much, like I'm on the what is
it wookie pdia woki wookie pedia mod.

Speaker 3 (25:43):
Another co conspirator named Michael Thomas of California wrote, quote,
to be clear, I intend to escalate this group, and
I don't want to take six business years to do
it unquote six business years.

Speaker 4 (25:56):
He's making it sound more professional.

Speaker 3 (25:58):
That's this is like larpie, right. They're using all these
like you know, the sort of like tier one operator
terms which we'll get into in a sack, and like
you know, missions. They wanted to have professional six business years.
This is serious, the same as a regular year. It's
not it. But Thomas also wrote that everyone in the
group should quote consider yourselves an enemy of the state,

(26:20):
and discussed imagining executions. Another Coken spirit named Brian Row
of California wrote about the need for quote unquote gorilla
style warfare and quote unquote raid attacks with quote skilled
operators to work like ghosts to conduct infiltration missions unquote Yes,
very hit man, very agent for seven right.

Speaker 9 (26:41):
Right.

Speaker 3 (26:42):
These are frankly just like the totally totally delusional. The
criminal complaint says that Thomas and Raw met at least
once in the last month in southern California to quote
practice marksmanship and tactics. Michael Thomas of California described different
tiers of operators within the Vanguard of the Old Republic,
and this is largely taking from military terms.

Speaker 2 (27:05):
Quote.

Speaker 3 (27:06):
Tier one operators may be asked to put themselves in
harm's way, break the law, and potentially go into hiding.
Tier two would consist of getaway drivers, drone operators, and
direct support. May still be asked to seriously break the law.
Tier three may be a runner or part of the
underground railroad indirect support, recruitment, supply, logistics tech still actually contributing,

(27:28):
but most likely safe from legal issues. Tier four social
media influencers, protesters, funders, press followers. Nobody is being asked
too much or taking any risks. Tier one status is
not something to take lightly. You will be sacrificing for
your country and carrying a brunt of the weight. We

(27:50):
will try to break them out of jail if we
need to.

Speaker 4 (27:53):
Unquote, oh my god, dude, Oh.

Speaker 3 (27:58):
This is kind of them at their larpist is like
when they're talking about like four different tiers of operators,
and it's like you and like at you know, at
the most, like nineteen of your Internet buddies. Yeah, and
kind of at the least kind of you and your
five closest friends talking about how you want to like
wage insurgent warfare against the government.

Speaker 4 (28:16):
They're structuring their discord server.

Speaker 3 (28:18):
Yes, you know, yes, that is that's what's happening, just
not on discord but on simple X and signal. But
like a lot of people like know guys like this, right,
These are guys in their twenties to thirties who played
a lot of like tactical military video games, who have
this sort of like military tactical fetishism, and they're looking
for like an outlet for this, combined with this anti

(28:39):
establishment sentiment that is based on very real things happening
out in the world, but it has nowhere to be directed.
So they just do this larp and eventually wind up
in federal custody and get charged with conspiracy to commit
murder on the White House grounds. Fulcrum Daniel Skritche of
Missouri wrote, quote so right now in the historical timeline,

(29:00):
I believe we are at the trigger event point, meaning
to set this off, we need an event or events
that cause people to realize the revolution has officially begun. Quote,
So this is what the group intended to do. They
intended to execute attacks that served as trigger events to
cause this sort of mass like upswell of support for

(29:23):
a second American Revolution. They didn't call it a civil war.
They called it a Second American Revolution. And that is
how they envisioned themselves as being the operators that will
do trigger events to put this all into motion. It's
kind of similar to like the Boogloo boy type stuff
from you know, five six years ago. This group allegedly

(29:45):
talked about attacking power grids with a fleet of drones
to hit specific transformers, and discussed assassinating several US senators,
House representatives, and prominent business executives. So this sort of
target selection very similar to the Base and Adamoffen and like,
you know, neo Nazi accelerationist terrorism from around like the
you know, twenty sixteen to twenty twenty two type era.

(30:07):
The group did debate how they should choose assassination targets,
with Fulcrum writing quote, we need to make sure it's
someone that can't be easily turned into a right versus
left thing. We want someone both sides would celebrate, would
cheer and support us for taking out.

Speaker 4 (30:25):
Both sides would celebrate us shooting up this one guy,
like this one guy's weird America birthday events, like what do?

Speaker 2 (30:33):
What did I mean?

Speaker 3 (30:34):
I think what they're pulling on from here is stuff
like the Luigi Mangioni incidents, right, and they're trying to
identify like and I find this prepared to be very
interesting because a lot of these guys do have this
sort of like like Christian nationalists or like Christian like libertarians.
It's kind of unclear, but they did definitely have this
like Christian element to their motivation. They see them themselves

(30:54):
as patriots, but they do not explicitly associate themselves with
like the right or the left. Right they see themselves
is kind of like outside politics. But I find this
aspect to be rather interesting. When they're trying to specifically
find targets that will allow for both people on the
right and left to like cheer them on or like
join in on like a second American revolution. This does

(31:15):
push them towards a talking a lot about like APAC
backed politicians and unnamed prominent business executives. Their names are
redacted in their criminal complaint, but I'm sure it's you know.

Speaker 4 (31:28):
It's it's black rockets.

Speaker 3 (31:30):
Well, it could be people like Jeff Bezos, like Elonnasket.
It doesn't It's not totally clear, but I'm assuming that's
the sort of range in which they're discussing folkrum texted quote.
So the goal here is to get at least three
trigger event ops fully planned and manned, and to the
best of our ability, to have them executed on the

(31:50):
same day or in rapid succession, so that our message
is undeniably clear to our illegitimate government and our fellow
Americans that we are waging war. We don't need to
wait for resistance, infrastructure, supply lines and all these other things.
That's what every other group in this movement is working on,
and I'm sure one of them will be able to
get it right, but they can't do that without mass support,

(32:13):
and they won't get mass support as long as people
think all anyone is doing is holding signs and chanting.
All we need is three small groups of fully committed
operators with a fully fleshed out and perfectly formulated plaid
and all real world on the ground intel they will
need for each op to be successful. Once we've decided
on what three events would provide the most impact and

(32:34):
bring in the most support, we will create special chats
for those ops specifically so that only the people on
those ops know the details unquote, all of.

Speaker 4 (32:43):
This planning just for one nineteen year old. I gotta
invite my mentally ill nineteen year old buddy into this
group chat so his mom can get really worried.

Speaker 3 (32:58):
That's how a lot of this stuff goes. And like,
I don't want to I don't want to diminish the
possible harm that a group like this could cause. I
think something that Robert pointed out last week when discussing
this on executive disorders, Like this group could have easily
spawned like one or two like mass shooters.

Speaker 9 (33:13):
Right.

Speaker 3 (33:13):
Or they could have acted on a plan that was
way too difficult to pull off that caused a lot
of clateral damage. Right, this group could have done something
very bad. This group could have set a plan into
motion that ended up killing or wounding a bunch of people,
or driven people towards other sorts of violent acts. Right
because they're encouraging each other to buy weapons by kit,

(33:34):
you know, do all these things. Right, So there was
a potential for real harm. Here was the UFC freem
two fifty event ever in serious harm from these people.
Absolutely not. There was no way they were able to
pull off their plan, as we will soon discuss. But
first let's go on another ad break. Okay, we are back.

(34:05):
I have one more encrypted message from from fulcrum or
Daniel Escritch of Missouri. Quote I can't speak for everyone
in saying we're tired of not making shit happen and
tired of being ruled over by treasonous, pedophilic, criminal politicians
and foreign agents unquote. The fulcrum wrote that what they're

(34:26):
doing is not only our birthright, but also our duty
as Americans. It's about time the elites and the government
are reminded of why they should fear the people, especially
the American people. So Eskridge wrote that the American people
is the largest standing army in the world, with one

(34:48):
hundred and seven million gun owners. He also believed that
half of the military would join their cause and not
follow quote unquote unlawful orders after the Second American Revolution
kicks off, and that following a successful trigger event operation,
potentially three percent of the US population would stand with

(35:10):
their group, writing that just like America's forefathers, quote, what
we do here will reverberate around the world and echo
throughout history. Long Live the Republic unquote. Oh god, So
that's the most we know about the group formation and
the sort of drivers that they themselves are discussing. Let's
close by getting back into the UFC Freedom to fifty

(35:33):
attack plan, because the more that I learned about this plan,
the more it became clear that this would just simply
never happen. This is not a feasible operation. It would
be hard for a special ops military team to pull
us off at this location, let alone five of your
TikTok friends to pull this off. And like the plan

(35:55):
to target Freedom to fifty really only kicked off a
week before the event would schedule.

Speaker 4 (36:00):
To take place, Well there's your issue, guys. If you
add a little maybe a month's heads up, you know,
maybe you could have gotten something going on.

Speaker 3 (36:10):
June seventh, Fulkrum messaged the Vanguard of the Old Republic
about using the White House UFC event to take out
quote unquote high value targets. In his message, he mentioned
communication with quote unquote other groups and said that the
UFC attack would require cooperation from everyone and that they

(36:30):
would need to quote put a hold on the other
ops that we're currently being planned quote. We need five
teams of three, each team consisting of one sniper, one
Tier one operator as support slash lookout, and one drone
operator unquote. As a part of the planning, they needed
to pick five locations ideal for quote precise sniper shots

(36:53):
and for the drone pilot to operate from. Fulkrum wrote, quote,
once each team is mission ready, the green light will
be given and the drone rigged with explosives will fly
and they will initiate the attack unquote. So after the
explosives detonate, the attention will be quote on the skies

(37:15):
and not the rooftop snipers, who will then eliminate quote
unquote high value targets.

Speaker 4 (37:23):
Also, I feel like the skies and rooftop targets are
remarkably blacket. I'm feel like, if you're looking up, you
might see on the roof.

Speaker 3 (37:36):
I don't know. No, even the idea that you can
get a sniper on a rooftop anywhere close to the
White House without getting your head blown off is like insane, right,
There's there's just no way that's gonna happen. You're not
gonna be able to get a sniper on a roof
within a sightline of the White House.

Speaker 10 (37:52):
I mean.

Speaker 3 (37:52):
Following the attempted assassination on Donald Trump in Butler, I
can see why people might think it's easier to set
up a sniper than one might expect. The White House
is like the most defended place in the country like,
especially at an event like this where there's even more security.
I just don't see how this is in any way
feasible now. The group believed that there would be a

(38:13):
protest outside of the event and that this would help
allow quote unquote extraction teams to evacuate the quote unquote
operators to a location out of state after successful completion
of mission objectives. H Fulkram wrote, quote, if we're successful,
this could be the first battle of the Second American Revolution.

(38:35):
Who is willing to be able to drop everything and
be one of these ten operators? And who is confident
and capable of flying drones? June seventh, ten, twenty eight pm.

Speaker 4 (38:44):
Nineteen year old, raise your aunt.

Speaker 3 (38:46):
They please come to bed.

Speaker 4 (38:47):
No, no, honey, I've been activated. I gotta go. I
got you know those friends have been hanging out in
the Woodsworth. I gotta go. They need me.

Speaker 3 (38:57):
So even if this group god enough quote unquote operators
to pull out this mission, which is highly questionable, if
not impossible, they simply did not have the funds, the materials,
or the resources to carry out an attack like this,
let alone the skill or logistical capacity. Folkrum text of
the group quote, we also need to come up with
one thousand and three hundred dollars as ap.

Speaker 2 (39:20):
We need to.

Speaker 4 (39:20):
Come up with one thousand, three hundred dollars. You can't
just pull it. What this guy has three kids and
a wife and he can't pull five kids and he
can't pull like.

Speaker 9 (39:32):
We have.

Speaker 4 (39:33):
Oh, true, true, Yeah, but you're gonna you're gonna die,
Like he's gonna he knows he's going to die. He's
LARPing like he's gonna get out, but he knows he's
gonna die, and he can't be like I will go
and I'll sell some bullshit and I'll get like one thousand,
three hundred dollars.

Speaker 3 (39:48):
We got a fund, a credit card, Yeah, anyone have
a credit card? Quote, thirteen hundred dollars gets us the
drones and the charges. We should all pitch in and
we need it to a sap.

Speaker 4 (40:01):
What kind of drones are they getting? Like is this Amazon?
Like you look up drone on there. What I'm just
picturing like the drones that you see getting flown around
like at the park by a family that just want it,
just carrying a grenade exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (40:20):
Thomas of California replied, quote, I'm flat broke I can
pay in manpower, though, I bet you could come up
with one hundred dollars in a week somehow. Maybe just
hold a sign by the freeway saying, quote fund the
freedom fighters.

Speaker 4 (40:36):
Oh my god, that's awesome.

Speaker 3 (40:40):
Dude, so unable to pay for bombs. The group talked
about trying to build drones and discussed breaking into military
facilities to steal the explosives needed for their attack plan.

Speaker 4 (40:58):
Does an'ty of us know how to build this? Oh shit,
we might have to redo the whole up. Oh or
or we can break into some of the most protected
facilities in America. I think that might be the that
might be the better choice.

Speaker 3 (41:13):
To be fair, some of those military facilities are not
as protected than what you might think.

Speaker 4 (41:16):
That's fair.

Speaker 3 (41:17):
The criminal complaints reads quote. A number of the group
stated he knew how to build drones connected via fiber
optic cable and capable of carrying explosive charges, but did
not have access to the materials needed for explosive charges.
That number suggested that they quote may need to hit
a military industrial complex facility for the things we need unquote.

(41:41):
Fulcrum or s Gridge responded ten four. I'm lucky to
sound to this.

Speaker 4 (41:46):
Awesome. What you're texting people ten to four? What are
you doing? What are we doing?

Speaker 3 (41:53):
The complaint alleges that the group continue to discuss the
quote benefits and the detriments of obtaining a quote unquote
cook for explosive charges versus stealing military ordinance from a
manufacturing plant unquote. They were looking at a few locations
in Kansas and zeroed in on the Kansas Army Ammunition plant,

(42:15):
though they never actually stole exclusives from this plant, but
they sure to talk about it and their conversations are
in the charging documents.

Speaker 11 (42:24):
Awesome.

Speaker 3 (42:25):
So again, this is all happening days before this attack
is supposed to kick off, and a part of the
plan is for a day or two before UFC freedom
to fifty, the group was to meet up in Fredericksburg,
Virginia to like go over plans again in person and
like practice and prepare. So they needed to get guys
in Fredericksburg around the twelfth or the thirteenth. One of

(42:48):
the members who was interviewed by the FBI confirmed that
the group was communicating online but attacking the event, but
claimed that the attack plan was canceled on June twelfth,
and of course Tyson Proper was placed in the mental
health facility on June tenth, so somewhere between June tenth
and June twelfth the group called off their plans. It

(43:11):
is notable, however, that at least one of the co
conspirators did attempt to drive to Washington, d C. When
Brian Raw was interviewed by the FBI, he admitted that
he'd tried to drive to Washington, d C. To protest
UFC Freedom two fifty, but denied any involvement in this conspiracy,

(43:33):
and he told the FBI that his vehicle malfunctioned and
had to return home. One of the most interesting parts
in the criminal complaint is this FBI agent writing about
how when he was interviewing Raw, Rao discussed how someone
could hypothetically use drone's arm with explosives to bomb buildings

(43:53):
near the White House, which would cause them ass panic
with limited debts at UFC Freedom tow fifty, and mentioned
this as an example of how to use drones to
enact political change in a more targeted way rather than
indiscriminate killing. The FBI agent wrote quote, based on this exchange,
I believe Rao was privy to the operational details of

(44:13):
the plan. Unquote, So Brian Rawb just like talked about
the plan just like as a hypothetical to an FBI
agent while the FBI was searching his vehicle after admitting
he tried to drive to DC to protest the event
but was not involved in any criminal conspiracy.

Speaker 4 (44:29):
It's like being you know, you just got caught. Your
spouse has found all of your your secret messages or
whatever to your your grinder lover, and while they're going
through your phone, you're like, I mean, what if somebody
was hypothetically gonna do that, Like if I you know,
it wouldn't be that bad because with a it's with
a man and not a woman. So it's like we
love each other completely different ways. But that's just like me,

(44:53):
you know, that's not real. That's not like, it's not
it wouldn't be anything real. Just like hypothetically, you'd be
cool with that, right, you'd.

Speaker 11 (45:00):
Be cool with that.

Speaker 3 (45:01):
The FBI was not cool with that, especially considering that
when executing a federal search warrant of Row's vehicle and home,
they seized an Air fifteen style rifle, a Glock nineteen handgun,
a tactical belt, an ammocan full of bullets, a two
way radio, an infrared laser target pointer, and a rifle magazine.
Brian Row's family members told law enforcement that Rau had

(45:24):
alluded to traveling to d C, and, according to the
California Criminal Complaint, Rao told his family that quote, one
day they would wake up and he would be gone,
and that he intended to travel to Washington, d C.
Where quote unquote something big would happen. Similar to Proper's family,
Brian Row's family suspected that he may be intending to

(45:47):
commit an act of violence based on a quote increased
time spent shooting weapons, and a noticeable change in behavior,
including increased anxiety, irritation, and seclusion unquote dad.

Speaker 4 (45:59):
Spreading a lot of time in the shed with a
gun in his mouth.

Speaker 3 (46:06):
Family also told law enforcement that Rao had been spending
a lot of time online with a new group of friends,
with his family also telling law enforcement that they considered
reporting him to the police after he left on his
way to DC, but did not because he returned home
so quickly. Rao told the FBI he had vehicle trouble.

(46:27):
On June thirteenth, law enforcement officials executed a federal search
warrant of Daniel Eskridge or Fulkrum's residents, and agents seized rifles,
a shotgun, pistol, and other tactical gear that matched Photoseskridge
posted online. That same day, FBI searched the home of
Michael Thomas in California, where they seized a hunting rifle

(46:49):
and air fifteen style rifle, thirty round extended magazines with
approximately one hundred and eighty rounds of ammunition, as well
as a pistol. While Michael Thomas was being interviewed to
quote the criminal complaint quote, he stated that he saw
himself as the planner and adviser for the group, and
while he was not willing to take action himself, wanted
to guide and instruct to others on how to carry

(47:10):
out attacks. Thomas expressed frustration that some members of the
group seemed noncommittal and these excuses as to why they
could not take action. Thomas said that the aim of
this and subsequent attacks was to create enough chaos to
bring about the overthrow of the US government, which he
believed was being quote run by an elite group of
individuals who sacrifice and consume infants who are also deeply

(47:33):
involved with Jeffrey Epstein and are now protected by President
Donald Trump. Thomas places some of the responsibility of his
corruption of the US government with Jewish people and blames
them and Israel for the current war with Iran unquote. So, yeah,
that is what did not happen at UFC Freedom two fifty.

Speaker 4 (47:52):
Nothing will ever happen now.

Speaker 3 (47:55):
Jd Vance did go back on Fox News Tuesday night
on Fox News as the five and said, quote, it
turns out the plot was like not that advanced. They
weren't in town, They had not really done that much
planning unquote, So slightly backtracking his previous assertions.

Speaker 4 (48:15):
We've gotta find who's funding these guys, these guys who
can't pull out one thousand, three hundred bucks from like
between the between five people. Yeah, like what is going on? Like, No,
I didn't. Wasn't it like nineteen or something? In this
signal nineteen.

Speaker 3 (48:30):
In the biggest signal chat related to the group, there's
there was nineteen people. So far only high have been arrested.
More have been interviewed, right, because the FBI mentioned interviewing
someone in West Virginia who said who said that the
attack plan was canceled as of recording. This guy's not
been arrested in charge. We don't know his name, so
that they definitely, they definitely are talking with other people
related to this, like network.

Speaker 4 (48:51):
Well they know he was a Tier four operator. He
wasn't the wall can't touch him, you know.

Speaker 3 (48:56):
Yeah, famously how conspiracy charges were Yeah. Yeah. The last
thing I want to mention is the fifth guy that
was arrested, right, because there was five people arrested initially,
and that is Abraham Alverrez. He was known as quote
unquote Shepherd.

Speaker 4 (49:10):
Online Call of Duty of Course Classic.

Speaker 3 (49:13):
And the DOJ claims that he was responsible for planning, organizing,
and directing the planned attack. Alveraz allegedly picked out the
drone launch points and sniper locations and claimed to have
one drone and was trying to get others. He also
selected a safe zone meet up location in Nebraska for
after the attack. Alverraz also claimed to be quote unquote

(49:36):
cooking explosives, but court documents never specify that drones or
explosives were seized during any of the searches, so we
don't know if he actually had a drone or actually
had explosives. It seems unlikely because of the whole plan
if needing to steal explosives from this military facility in Kansas,
But he may have been trying to make explosives, but

(49:58):
at this point it's kind of unclear.

Speaker 1 (50:01):
Now.

Speaker 3 (50:01):
Before any of the details of any of the alleged
attackers was released, a Fox News contributor said that considering
President Biden let in quote unquote millions of unvetted people
into the country, quote, it would be a very dangerous
delusion to believe that these terrorist organizations and countries did
not use that open border to bring people inside unquote.

(50:23):
And as we've already discussed, this was not the operation
of a foreign terrorist organization or people that were brought
into the country. These are Americans. These are American patriots
self ascribed. But on Thursday, June eighteenth, the DHS announced
quote alleged ringleader of UFC terrorist plot is a Mexican

(50:43):
illegal alien unquote, with Acting Assistant Secretary of Lauren Biss writing,
this illegal alien from Mexico should have never been allowed
in our country. He was the ringleader of a failed
terror attack targeting UFC Freedom to fifty at the White House.
The current league status of Abraham Alverez is kind of unclear,

(51:04):
but he was not brought into the country under Biden's
open borders. He entered the country as a child on
a B two visitor visa that expired in December of
twenty twenty one. He's been in this country nearly his
whole life, and under Obama, he was granted Deferred Action
for Childhood Arrivals or DACA in twenty fourteen, suspending possible deportation.

(51:28):
So while it looks like he currently may not have
legal status, this was not an illegal alien who snuck
across the border from Mexico. This guy was brought to
the United States as a child and has lived here
for over twenty five years, over twenty seven years, so
I do think that is worth noting. But I'm sure
going forward the Trump administration will be running with this

(51:50):
idea that this illegal alien from Mexico planned the UFC
Freedom to fifty terrorist attack, and the actual context of
how Alvarez entered the country is important, not that it
will matter to Fox News or the Trump administration, but
I do think it is worth specifying. And of course,
there was upwards of nineteen other people involved in this

(52:10):
and the four others that I've spent most of the
episode talking about. Are all US born citizens anyway? Yeah,
that's what That's what did not happen at USC Freedom
to fifty.

Speaker 4 (52:21):
And let things I suppose continue to.

Speaker 3 (52:24):
Continue open it could. It could not happen here.

Speaker 4 (52:29):
It will continue not happening.

Speaker 3 (52:31):
So Bailey, new poster. Where can people find you online?

Speaker 4 (52:34):
Oh god, I'm on a Blue Sky as new poster two.

Speaker 3 (52:39):
Very smart pick.

Speaker 4 (52:40):
Yes, I'm also on the other app x as new
poster two, but I'm.

Speaker 3 (52:46):
Not very much very woke of you.

Speaker 4 (52:49):
I'm also on Instagram as postolytical blaying because that account
has not been a suspended three different times. And then
on Twitch as I think on Twitch's new poster two
as well.

Speaker 3 (53:02):
So excellent.

Speaker 4 (53:02):
There's four little options for you.

Speaker 3 (53:05):
Yes, good luck in your streaming endeavors. Oh god, all right,
that doesn't cross here. What could happen here? See you
on the other side?

Speaker 2 (53:12):
All right, hey, everybody, Robert Evans here and this is
it could happen here. I wanted to talk today a
little bit about Belfast and about what happened there earlier

(53:33):
this month, the racist riots, in which mobs of bigots
ran through the city, forcing people out of their homes
for not being white, destroying businesses, terrorizing people. It was
horrific and if you spent any time watching live streams
or videos or just the coverage, I'm sure you felt
as frightened, both for those people directly and just for

(53:54):
the future. As many of us, and in the week
of something like that, it can often be hard to
know what to do and what would I do if
this was happening in my community, right, like, what is
the proper response, especially if there isn't you know, an
immediate response in the moment that meets, you know, the
rage of one of these nights and actually is able
to stop it. You know, if these bigots are able

(54:16):
to go through and attack and harm people, how do
you both respond to that and help the people who
have been hurt? And how do you deal with the
fact that that could be a very dangerous situation, you know,
especially if you've still got these mobs of people out
there who are willing to hurt the folks that you're
trying to protect and anyone potentially trying to protect them. Well,

(54:37):
obviously the people who live in Belfast are dealing with
that problem immediately, and so The best place to go
if I've wanted to know what that was like was
to someone who's been living through it, And fortunately I
found the posts on Blue Sky of Lee Hurley. He's
a Belfast based writer. He's the owner of Daily Canon
dot com. Lee also runs the Transagenda, which records and
documents anti trans media coverage in UK papers. You can

(55:00):
subscribe at Transagenda dot info. I reached out to Lee
after seeing some posts that Lee had made about what
he had witnessed in terms of the local response to
people trying to organize to help folks who had been
attacked and brutalized. And Lee wrote an essay for us
and read it and thankful it was good enough to
do both of those things. So this is some direct,

(55:21):
firsthand reporting both on what it was like to live
in Belfast while that was going on and what it's
been like to watch the community spring into action to
try and make right some of the wrongs that were done. So,
without further ado, here's Lee.

Speaker 1 (55:39):
Last week Belfast hit the headlines worldwide and usual Belfast fashion,
it wasn't for anything good On Monday. It's a June
twenty twenty six. A man was attacked and styled in
North Belfast by a refugee. It was a vicious attack
caught on camera that resulted in the victim losing an
eye and being placed in gematically induced coma. At the
time of recording, the victim remains in hospital. The next

(56:02):
day the city exploded, rats took place across Belfast, fires
raged and people were forced to flee from their homes. Today,
I want to talk to you about what happened, what
really happened, Not the attack and not the rats themselves,
but what went on in the ours and the days
after that, beyond the brick throwing and the burning and
the fear. Because something good did happen, and I think

(56:24):
it's important that the word knows about that. You need
to know that Belfast isn't all bad. It isn't what
you saw on the TV. But while the horror happened
on the streets, the rest of the city said enough,
we mobilized. This is the story of the real community
of Belfast. Belfast is a beautiful city, rich in culture, history,
world renowned for its food and if you would believe it,

(56:47):
it's welcome in nature. Ask anyone who's visited for recommendations
about what to do in the city, and you'd like
to hear them real about the Titanic Museum, a Game
of Thrones tour, or the stunning architecture. They'll tell you
hang nice, everybody they met was. You'll be told about
some wonderful restaurant they visited in the amazing trad music
session they stumbled upon its quin Backstreet pub. They'll tell

(57:09):
you they want to go back. One of our most
popular tourist activities is a tour of the key sites
that plad Key rules in our Civil war. Taxi drivers
will take you to the places where blood was shed,
bombs exploded, and those left behind still visit the morning.
The tours aren't even that expensive. Here in Belfast. We've
made a small industry out of the darkest parts of
our country's history, the Troubles. Although the days of bombs

(57:33):
and murders and army controlled streets are spoken off in
past tense by those tour guides, the beliefs, culture, and
division that fueled the fighting are still just as strongly
held in many communities throughout the city as they were
on the day that peace agreement was signed nearly thirty
years ago. Bilfast is a beautiful city, but it's a
city that requires context to be fully understood and somewhere

(57:55):
argued fully appreciated. Like almost all wars, the troubles centered
our identity and access to resources on one side, the
niceness or Catholics who identify with in which the country
to be united Ireland on the other Royalists or Protestants
who want no n Iron to remain part of the UK.
Division goes deeper than that, and it is much more complicated,

(58:16):
but it's a bit like the left right divide of
Democrats and Republicans in the US. Knowing what side someone
falls on can usually tell you a lot about their
other beliefs and morals. Even international politics gets devavid up
here to one side of the other loyal support Israel
nicely support Palestine. Of course, it's not that simple. Not

(58:36):
all Protestants and Catholics hold the same viewpoints. But for
the safe of brevity, I'm generalizing, and this is of
course a very short and brief explanation of what is
actually a very complex history that spans hundreds of years.
We simply don't have the time to when they are
all with any more depth than that. It's not the
focus of this podcast anyway, but even that oversimplified summary
should help you see the contextual ends through its Belfast

(58:59):
and what happened must be viewed. And it is within
this context where tribalism and nationality and identity are so
important that whole houseness states advertised theirs by painting their
curbstones in the colors of the British or Irish flag
John mural celebrating both murderers and the murder that alike
are painted on the sides of houses or hered for
the other continues and were resources are fiercely protected and

(59:22):
fought over that this story takes place. Tension has been
bubbling up about migration for the last several years in
Northern Ireland and elsewhere. Just last summer we saw rats
in nearby Ballomina and in Belfast after an a led
sexual assault took place, with the accused perpetrators being two
teenage boys from Romania. Houses and businesses were smashed up
and burnt. If the riters believed with any connection whatsoever

(59:45):
to an immigrant, no matter where in the world they
hails from. I remember driving through Botanic, a vibrant multicultural
area of Belfast. We give a few minutes away from
and seeing business after business destroyed the Hooker bar the
International supermarket cafes. Several months later, the charges against those
two teenage bones were quietly dropped due to significant evidential developments.

(01:00:07):
Like everything else here, attitudes to immigration and race in
general has a pretty clear split between our two main communities.
Throughout loyalist areas, you will find graffiti and science stable.
Don't the lamp posts. Foreigners not welcome here, no Muslims allowed,
Stop the boats. A lot of the time these vitriolic
messages aren't even spelled correctly. Education is just one of

(01:00:28):
the many areas neglected here that nobody have our riots over.
That's not to say there's no such thing as a
racist nationalist. There are assholes everywhere. Belfout is of course
no different on that front. When this most recent horrific
attactic place in a city where immigrants legal refugee asylum
doesn't actually matter in fact, because you don't have to
be a migrant to be targeted. You just have to

(01:00:50):
be non white, whether already treated escape boats for every
problem where racist riots have become something of a summer tradition.
Everyone knew what was coming with their and Our social
media was full of AI generated the posters telling people
to take to the streets to protest immigrants. When they
said protest, we all knew they meant riot, and so

(01:01:10):
the city shut dying for three days. Shops, schools, community centers,
swimming pools, public transport and businesses were held hostage duraicism.
Some places opened for a few hours in the mornings
before having to close again. The buses were running, the
buses were off. Half the city worked from home. Fake
protest posters popped up on social media. Everyday life and
routine was thrown into disarranged chaos. But it was when

(01:01:33):
the sun went dying that the actual horror happened. From
the comfort of our homes. With the blinds dying, many
of us sat scarred, scrolling social media trying to find
out what was happening via helicopter footed streamed live on YouTube.
We watched our city get destroyed. We texted each other
and made phone calls, and even shit posted online trying
to find some revity or light in the situation. For others,

(01:01:56):
those days changed their lives forever. They watched the cars
get burnt out along with the metal and the tarres tomorrow,
school on and transport went up in smoke, sam from
the last time they tripped to the beach, still in
the foot wells, a favorite cardigan left in the passenger seat, gone,
all of it gone. Whole homes gone, whether physically said
on fire or threatened through the letter boxes, or driven

(01:02:18):
out by a fear. Many of us will never have
to know the true number of people who fled their
homes since the Eighth of Durne. It is hard to gauge.
Some have gone to stay with relatives or friends across
the city. Some have moved to completely new places, wearing
the thing safe enough to try again. Many have left
the country altogether. And who can blame them? That is
our loss? They say. In times of trouble, look for

(01:02:40):
the helpers. But here in Belfast you wouldn't have seen
too many at first glance. That's for the same reason
you didn't see people rise up and take on the
raiders face to face. Fear, fear of personal reprisal from
the loyalist para military organizations, fear of alerting the riders
and making the situation even worse for those you're trying
to help. Fear is endemic here, but there were helpers,

(01:03:02):
hundreds in fact, but our helpers moved quietly and in
the shadows, without fuss. File fire people across spellfasts began
taking action almost immediately, as everyday life began. They return
to normal, and schools and shops cautiously reopened. Strangers became
small heroes, Families removed from their homes and their darkness,
and children taken to and from school. The elderly and

(01:03:23):
second pregnant accompanied the hospital and doctor appointments in church
halls and community centers. Supermarket sized foodbanks sprung up from nothing.
Money was raised from all over the world. Where there
was need, somebody met it. Then they returned and asked
who they could help next. In those moments, the real
Belfast was seen. On Thursday afternoon, forty eight hours after

(01:03:54):
they all started. My fiance arrived home from work. Let's
call her l I couldn't sit and do a thing anymore.
So here's what this happening. And she said she'd already
contacted the church and arranged use of their hall. She
contacted people she knew through her community work to get
word out. I posted about it on Blue Sky, not
mentioning anything about where it would be located out affairs
would be targeted, and someone asked if there was a fundraiser.

(01:04:17):
There wasn't. There hadn't been anything just a few hours ago.
Not thinking it would get much attention, I threw up
a link to my PayPal and said I'd passed the
money on if anyone wanted to do it. Thousands came
flooding in from all over the world, particularly from Minnesota.
Salary came when we were up at six am. They
hit the wholesalers. Havn't wrokeed in another friend to help
with her car. By nine am we were at the

(01:04:38):
church with two car, rules of food and essentials, not
knowing if it would just been the three of us
standing there all day with a lot of food. None
of us had ever done this before, although well has
experienced working with immigrants and asylum seekers in other areas.
We couldn't have been more wrong. Through the networks l
had formed over the previous forty eight hours, an organization
started sending as addresses of people who needed food. Volunteers

(01:05:00):
kept arriving, people flewed in with donations of food and
money and essentials. By the afternoon, people were dropping stuff in,
taking photos of our board that showed items we were
lowing and then going shopping to get those items. Specifically,
hundreds of food parcels were packed up. Need one for
a family of five went to call across the hall
as he Elk coordinated everything that needed to go out.

(01:05:21):
What ages of the children do they need nappies? Came
or reply? Without fail, everybody just pitched in with whatever
was needed to be done. Others dealt with people who
came in themselves and needed help. Drivers sent from other
small charities arrived to collect parcels for people they were helping.
I found myself managing the stock run into the shop
and the wholesaler's time and time again to fill up
the items we couldn't keep up with basics like all

(01:05:43):
the sugar floor or rice, pasta, soap, sanitary products, nappies.
The list was endless, as was the number of people
we were trying to help. For three days, people who
had never met before stood side by side sorting food parcels.
Strangers took strangers into their car into their homes. Is
this definitely lal was definitely googled by a lot of

(01:06:03):
white people. I've lost kind of the amount of people
I've met over the last week, but I know it's
more than I would usually meet in the year. To
be fur I'm not actually that social, but it was
still a lot of people. I don't think I got
the names of half of the ones I worked alongside
in that pop up food bank that my partner seemed
a magic goredath thin r using the relationships she'd built
up through her job. But it didn't matter. There wasn't

(01:06:25):
time for small talk. It was more hello, thank you
for helping past me some kicking OI plays or we
added the odor one Again. That's not to say there
was new bonding. When you sure an intense experience like that,
under the way of emotions we were working with, there's
a connection built. There was a sense of community that
I've never experienced before, and given the circumstances, I sincerely
hoped to never experience again. But that seems unlikely. In

(01:06:49):
that church hall where we ran the food bank, nobody
needed to be told what to do. There was no
induction or even delegation of rules. For three days. People
turned up when they found themselves something to do. And
I don't know if it will surprise you, because it shouldn't,
but There were many migrants and refugees who turned up
to help themselves. One woman came because she was in
need of food for herself, but she asked if she

(01:07:11):
could take some extra to make meals for others. Within
two hours we had thirty contents of home. Halal crey
to deliver the homes thanks to her work. I'm not
sure I've ever been able to truly define what love
or selflessness or solidarity mean, but I'm pretty sure that's
what it looks like. This was not work being done
by professional charities or organizations. That's not to say they

(01:07:32):
weren't doing anything, far from it, But I want to
take a moment to press upon music. This was everyday
people figuring it out together, many of whom we had
never done anything like this before. What'sapp group were created,
phone numbers, sure and Google doc data bases thrown together
across the city. Volunteers together and a part Does anyone
held close for a baby? Did someone drive a lady

(01:07:53):
to an appointment tomorrow? At ten am? Resources were sued
across mesif donation centers if one centered one might have
don another were sharing their supply. Volunteers drove from centers
to shops to homes, trying to find what was required.
It was beautiful chaos and it worked. Nobody had to
be there. Almost all the volunteers had arrived through word

(01:08:14):
of mouthe. I don't think I saw one single social
media poster advert calling out for help a person. The
one I posted on our last day helped just cam.
Like me, many of the volunteers still compelled to do something.
Sitting at home beyond the locked door and watching he
had filled the city Vihile livestream just wasn't cutting it anymore.
One volunteer told me that when the violence erupted, they

(01:08:35):
simply couldn't get the affected people out of her head.
They took Friday afternoon off work to deliver food and
essential supplies the families who were too fraid to leave
their homes. More than anything, she said, she wanted to
show that people of Belfast Ker and the newcomers to
our city are welcome. At a time when fear and
uncertainly was affecting so many families, it felt important to

(01:08:55):
her to offer practical support and remind people that they
were not alone. The work people have been doing and
are still doing is not without risk. I smoke earlier
of fear. There's a dark rumor that Northern Land has
the best knee surgeons in the world due to the
Power military's favorite publishment style of knee cabin or the
place of gone to the back of your knee and
pull the trigger blown out the front. If you live

(01:09:16):
in the community run by the parers and you piss
them off, you're going to know about it. It might
be a brick through your window, graffiti on your door,
or a visit from the local police to tell you
they would strongly advise you leave the premises and find
somewhere else to live. For many community volunteers, this was
a case of heart over mind. They were driving in
the loyal of strongholds that had been ratting just hours
before to deliver food to the very people that had

(01:09:39):
been targeted. But their compassion for those sitting hungry, tired,
and scared outwigged the fear they felt for their own safety.
Many of the volunteers who helped will never tell their
neighbors what they did. They may never tell anyone about it.
Drivers arrived back to the hall, stories of families sitting
in the dark with no electric in the mirror of
mothers hiding in the back room by the door with

(01:09:59):
their babies in their own I'm ready to run should
a framing bottle come through the window. If you've wondered
for a moment, what kept us motivated? No, you know,
some volunteers sprung into action from the first moment, and
some are still going. There are still people from ethnic
minority community in great need. I cannot imagine the fear
they're still living in. But why was it left of

(01:10:19):
the people to take action? I've heard that question asked
several times during the last week. It's hard to know.
Many people are rightly wondering where the government Wasn't all
this were our politicians, Yes, some that are on their
podiums from time to time to condemned the valance. But
if it wasn't for the community on the ground and
the wonderful, generous people who do needed money, all of
those people that we helped would still be sitting there, hungry, tired,

(01:10:42):
and scoured even more than they are. And I I
know that here on the ground, we're putting together a
contingency plan so that we're ready to spring in the
action should this happen once more. And we've done that
without any of the resources at the disposal of the government,
albeit in our own small way. So after so many
summers of this happening, do we know nothing of any
government plan. If there was any sort of plan, surely

(01:11:06):
we would be seeing it in action by nine. The
sad reality is this is likely going to happen again,
probably this very summer. We have a lot of problems
with very little solution. How do we guarantee housing that's
safe in a city that's litered with you? How do
we say to people, we've given you a food parcel
with the week's worth of food, but next week you're
going to have to sort of out yourself and go

(01:11:26):
to the shop. Next week you're going to have to
walk past your neighbors smashed windows and the graffiti saying
Muslims out. Next week you're going to have to walk
past the house of that loyalist the insists on calling
you slurs every time he sees you. Even as I'm
recording this, there are new calls for so called protests
over the next few days. There's a rumor a norm
white man who was arrested for trying to break into

(01:11:47):
someone's house. I'm not being called by saying Nor'm white.
That's the bagst level of racism we're currently operating with here,
and an incident like that is enough to set this
all off again for the rest of the summer. Eyes
on both sides of the immigran argument will skim over
these artic goals, searching for a race or nationality to
be mentioned. I cannot imagine how it feels to be
a member of an ethnic minority. And beyond tender hooks

(01:12:10):
hoping and praying someone of color does not commit a crime,
you may be forgiven for thinking that we have absolutely
no other crimes occurring on a daily basis, especially non
committed by white people. Of course we do, They're the majority.
We have one of the highest rates of violence against
women and girls in the whole of Europe. Since twenty
twenty thirty women have been violently killed by a man,

(01:12:32):
a local man. Did they right? Then, I'll give you
two guesses. Our community action was not enough. That's the
sad reality. What does some toilet rule and a few
vegetables matter when someone's car has been burned out? How
does a bag of rice compensated for having to leave
your home? It just doesn't. But maybe it will bring
a small bit of hope. When we decided we were

(01:12:53):
going to do something to help, that's all we started with, hope.
And now a week later, after thousands of pounds worth
of food, electric vergers, phones, sim cards, blankets and pajamas
have passed in and out of our doors into the
homes and emergency accommodation across Belfast, it's all we're left
with hope that we helped, Hope that we won't ever
have to do it again. As one recipient the financial

(01:13:15):
help put it, the real value is not in the amount,
it's the kindness, humanity and compassion behind it. At the
very start of this podcast, I told you Belfast is
a beautiful city, rich in culture and history. But to
borrow of the wonderful words of that recipient, I think
it's also a city rich in kindness, humanity and compassion.
It is a city that has shown it can I

(01:13:36):
will come together when it really matters, even if you
can't always see it. That's the real face of Belfast.
I want to say thank you, thank you to everyone
who I met but never got the names off the
people I'd never have met, and I hope I don't
have to meet again. Thank you to everyone who donated
from across the world. That support meant everything to us

(01:13:56):
and allowed us to help those who needed the most.
And I also want to say thank you to the
people here on Belfast and the norther line. They have been
the most affected by these rats. So the immigrants, the
refugees and the asylum seekers, thank you for coming here,
for having to our community, and for becoming our community.

(01:14:16):
We are the real community of Belfast only are nothing
with aya.

Speaker 11 (01:14:33):
Welcome to it could happen here. A podcast that is
often about being trans in America and living under a
regime that is actively hostile to our mere existence. I'm
your host, Mia Wong, and today we're going to take
a somewhat broad view and look at what it means

(01:14:57):
to be trans in America from a class standpoint. Now,
I think if you are trans, you are, at least
broadly speaking, not a capitalist in the sense of you
do not own the means of production. You are not
the bourgeoisie. There are so few of us at all

(01:15:17):
who can be said to own the means of production.
We are all almost entirely as a class, like some
kind of worker or another. But there is a lot
of specificity to the specific trans experience of class and
where we fit into the broader American class structure that

(01:15:38):
I want to talk about today, and I want to
simultaneously get people an actual understanding in one place of
just kind of the outskirts of how bad it is,
but then also talk about how.

Speaker 3 (01:15:55):
Good it is.

Speaker 11 (01:15:56):
Isn't maybe the right term, but want to give people
a sense of what this class position means for our
place and ability to fight back, because that is also
a critically important part of not just being trans, but
a critically important part of every leftist and liberation movements

(01:16:18):
in the US for the past decade has been longer
than a decade, like two decades has been US, And
obviously there have been a lot of trans people who
are involved in a bunch of shit before then. But
the extent to which trans people have been involved and
have been central to every social movement you've ever heard

(01:16:39):
of in the modern era is exceptional, and I want
to talk about why that is. I want to start
talking about why that is by looking at some of
the data that we have on what it's like to
be trans in the US. And this is one of

(01:16:59):
the things is very difficult when you're writing about trans people,
because you know, we all have our experience of transness.
And when he's trying to get trans healthcare, I think
is aware that there is so much research that has
just not been done about us. This is medical research

(01:17:20):
on the effects of specific like hormone regimens, and like
what kinds of medicines do and don't help, and what
the effects are. A lot of the information that you
do get from doctors is based on really really old
studies that aren't applicable to what actually exists. And this
is also true when you're trying to look at economic data,
where there just aren't that many studies of what it's

(01:17:43):
like for trans people in the US, and the ones
that do exist, and there are people who have done some,
they're very reliant on data sets that are not specifically
designed to be of trans people. And that's a problem
because a lot of what you end up with and

(01:18:03):
the reason why, like there are some things that I've
read that are just not going to be in this episode,
is that they are very reliant on things like, Okay,
we know this person as gender markers have changed or
their names have changed, and that's fine, kind of if
you want to sort of get a sense of what's
going on. But like the percentage of transpeople, the sort
of demographics of trans people who have officially changed their

(01:18:27):
gender markers is not reflective of trans people in general.
So we're going to be using a lot of data
in this from what's called the US Trans Survey USTs.
Its run by advocates for trans equality, and God fucking
blessed them. These people are doing the transgender's work. It's

(01:18:49):
an invaluable resource. I don't know of a better sort
of repository of information about trans people that has been collected.
So these surveys are runfairly and frequently. There was one
in twenty fifteen and one in twenty twenty two. But
in the twenty twenty two one they got ninety two
thousand trans and non bineary respondents, which is unbelievable. That

(01:19:11):
is a staggering sample size. But the information they got
from it is in a lot of ways extremely bleak.
I mean, you know, you can look at the positive stuff,
which is that yeah, people who transition to say that, yeah,
their lives are happier now. They transitions like they like transitioning.
It's it's good it's I don't know, do the thing.
It will make you happier. However, comma the economic numbers.

(01:19:35):
Jesus Christ, Oh boy, oh boy. Now, as I've said, right,
the people who work on the US Transerve A they
do astonishing work. But as with all trans people, they're
doing astonishing work with not that many resources, and it
takes them a long time to put their studies together.
So again, the information that we're using is from twenty
twenty two. So this means a.

Speaker 3 (01:19:56):
Couple of things.

Speaker 11 (01:19:57):
One, this is dreen the Biden administry, right, a regime
that is significantly less hostile to trans people than this
current one, even though there was a bunch of bad
shit going on then, some of it done by the
Biden administration. Dear God, is Tromp administration significantly significantly more
hostile trans people. So the conditions that we're seeing now
are going to be worse than the ones that we

(01:20:20):
have data for. So all of the numbers I'm about
to tell you about poverty rates and unemployment and homelessness,
it's gotten worse. The second thing is when the US
transerveyor writes reports, I mean they released recently, Yeah, they're
released in June Health and Wellbeing a report of the
twenty twenty two US Transgender Survey. It is one hundred
and ten pages long, so they do very very good

(01:20:43):
and detailed work. However, what that means is that we still,
for example, don't have like a granular economic report, and
we don't have just the full report that they write.

Speaker 3 (01:20:51):
On this stuff.

Speaker 11 (01:20:52):
And we also don't have really the sort of granular
reports that they had from the twenty fifteen numbers on
the XPUS to trans people of different races. So those
are sort of what I would say are the limits
going into this that we have. However, what we do
have from the early inside report is just horrifying. So

(01:21:13):
one of the sort of defining conditions of being trans
is dispossession, and you can look at dispossession in a
whole bunch of different ways. You can look at, for example,
the poverty rate. The poverty rate from the US trans
Survey among trans people is thirty four percent. The American
poverty rate is twelve percent, so that's almost three times

(01:21:36):
higher than the general population's poverty rate, and thirty four
percent is really bad, right, even looking at other demographics
and other poverty rates, that's really really really bad. The
trans unemployment rate is I think, in some ways even worse.
The US trans unemployment rate is eighteen percent. The US

(01:21:58):
unemployment rate in general and twenty twenty two is three
point six percent. So let's try to get an understanding
of what it means. Unemployment rate is a weird number.
There are so there's people. It doesn't count in terms
of people who have stopped looking for work, right, But
to put this into perspective, during the peak of the
lockdowns in twenty twenty the unemployment rate in the US

(01:22:20):
was fourteen percent, and that was the highest it's been
in ages. For trans people it's eighteen percent. So if
your trans in America right trying to find a job,
it is worse than it was for everyone during the lockdowns.
Eighteen percent unemployment is like nineteen thirty seven, early nineteen

(01:22:41):
thirty eight, great depression levels of unemployment.

Speaker 3 (01:22:45):
It's almost one in five people. And again these.

Speaker 11 (01:22:49):
Are the numbers from twenty twenty two, between the Biden
administration when the situation was better for trans people. We
don't have more recent numbers for the US of any
kind of scale. And even back then four years ago,
when things were better for US and the economy in
general was running a little bit better. It was again

(01:23:12):
nineteen thirty eight Great Depression levels for just a regular transperson. Right,
this has a breathly really broad array of effects, right
in terms of, you know, just the experience of the
world that you have if you are trans because you
are fundamentally living in a different world than an economic

(01:23:32):
world than SIS people do. Like again, the CIS people's
unemployment rate twenty twenty two was like three point six
percent and yours is eighteen. You are living through the
Great Depression and they are living through a normal economy.
And that means that just fundamentally, from a class position,
you have a different experience of reality than they do.
You are living in something that is not the same

(01:23:55):
as theirs. I also want to talk about home homelessless numbers,
because you know, queer homelessness has always been really really
bad for reasons that kind of obvious reasons that we'll
get into here, but it's also related to, for example,
the unemployment rate and the poverty rate, because you know,
having an apartment or just any place to stay is expensive.

(01:24:18):
We got to report recently that was a joint effort
between advocates for trans Equality and the National Alliance to
End Homelessness who did a report using the USTs data,
and they talked about how thirty percent of trans people
have experienced homelessness in their lifetime. For Americans, it's about
four percent for Americans at large, right this, you know,

(01:24:41):
just like SIS Americans in general, it's about four percent.
So that is a homelessness rate of eight times the
rate of the general population. And again that is the
twenty twenty two numbers, which are now worse. And this
is something that I think is borne out by if
you're around any like I mean, not even working class

(01:25:03):
trans people, if you're just around trans people in general,
you have met people who have been homeless, right Like,
you're just constantly around people who have been homeless. And
this is one of I think the defining elements of
what being a trans worker is is that the level

(01:25:24):
of pricarity is so great and the odds that through
some kind of employment discrimination or just some bullshit happening
with your employer or just like I don't know, the
employers doing layoffs. It is so so easy to move
back and forth between having an apartment and being on
the street in a way that to some extent the

(01:25:45):
general American population has. But again, the rate for the
general population if they've been homeless in their lifetime is
four percent, and for trans people it's thirty percent. And
this rate, this thirty percent rate of trans people who've
experienced homelessness. And also, by the way, a lot of
the people who've experienced this have experienced in more than once.

(01:26:07):
And you know, there's a lot of just people who
are transfer homeless. Write the fuck now. This is why
I say, like, put a transgirl on your couch at
the end of every executive disorder, because there aren't like
widespread solutions to this right now. It's something that we
have to figure out for ourselves, and we just don't
have the resources to do it now. This discrimination is

(01:26:28):
intensified both in the housing market right by just general
anti transcrimination, by poverty, and this is this is also
sort of a cyclical process, right Like part of what's
difficult about me writing this is that I haven't been
homeless and I haven't been a sex worker, which means
that I'm missing experiences that a lot of trans workers have.
What I can say about it is like, obviously, being

(01:26:49):
homeless makes it harder to get even just an apartment afterwards,
because it has a whole bunch of negative effects on
a whole bunch of shit, including, for example, like it
like you know, obviously it's like fucks with your credit score,
it fucks with just like oh, do you have like
previous landlord references that you can use the There's a

(01:27:10):
whole bunch of different sort of spiraling effects of this.
There's obviously there's health effects, there's safety effects. So what
you're facing is on the one hand, you are squeezed
out through discrimination of the workplace, through the fact that also,
and this is another fairly common thing, trans people make
significantly less money than SIS people do. Just on the dollar,

(01:27:30):
it's way way worse. So you have lower income when
you get a job, you have less access to jobs,
and you also just have housing market discrimination. And also
trans people have weaker access to family support networks that
function in a way to subsidize social reproduction for SIST people.
A lot of trans people's families and parents don't accept them,

(01:27:53):
and they just get kicked out or if they are
able to access resources from them, it's under conditions of
extreme violence, and that has a massive effect on homelessness. Right, like,
a whole bunch of homelessness is caused by queer youth
getting kicked out of their houses. And because you also
don't have places you can go back to, right, you

(01:28:14):
don't have the kind of like family like familial safety
net that a lot of SIS people have access to,
and you're less likely to have access to it. This
intensifies the rate of homelessness, and it intensifies the consequences
of it and how difficult it is to get out.
All right, we are going to go to ads and
then we are going to come back and talk about

(01:28:34):
some more bleak shit. But also this is not just
the Things Fall Apart podcast. This is also the put
It Back Together but in a better way podcast.

Speaker 3 (01:28:55):
We are back Now.

Speaker 11 (01:28:59):
There's another factor, something that's becoming increasingly a factor of
trans life that has existed obviously for a long time,
but has been enormously exacerbated by the current regime, and
that is the trans refugee population. There is in the
US a massive trans refugee population. These are you know,

(01:29:20):
what you would call, I guess, internally displaced people. The
Movement Advancement Project or MAP, did a study in twenty
twenty four to twenty twenty five looking at trans people
who moved from one state to another because of anti
trans legislation, right, and they found and this is just
between November and June of twenty twenty five, they found

(01:29:43):
that nine percent of all trans people had moved in
just an eight month span. Right, that's nine percent of
trans people had just just in this span between November
twenty twenty four and June twenty twenty five. Right, just
in that span, nine percent of the transpopulation moved. That's

(01:30:06):
over one percent of the total transpopulation moving per month
to a different state, specifically because of anti trans legislation. Right,
that's really bad. If you look at sort of the
general population of transit in the US, that's four hundred
thousand people in just that eight month span. That's the

(01:30:27):
entire population of Cleveland, Ohio, and then thirty five thousand
more people, Right, I mean that's like obviously it's not
like the complete metropolitan it's like the ashual just like
city of Cleveland. Right, But like, again, that's in the
span of eight months, we moved the entire city of Cleveland.
And it's definitely gotten almost certainly has like there have

(01:30:48):
been more people who have moved, you know, since June
twenty twenty five, because the anti transiscrimination, anti transcrackdowns from
the state have only gotten worse. This is a refugee crisis, right,
and the things that they're fleeing from are also things
that are just you know, conditions of what of what
being trands is in the US, right, which they're fleeing,

(01:31:08):
restrictions on healthcare access from the national level, from the
state level, also as we talked about, like from religious
hospitals who can also just like even if even if
you're in a so called bluestate can just be like
fuck you eat shit, We're not going to give you
health care. They're fleeing, bathroom bills, they're fleeing, don't say
gay bands, they're fleeing. Also just an increase in social violence,

(01:31:31):
right because the thing that this that this all legitimizes, right,
that anti trans rhetoric legitimizes, the anti trans state action legitimizes,
is just getting assaulted for being trans, a thing that
has always happened, but it's now happening more than it
did before. And yeah, that not being you know, assaulted,

(01:31:51):
and this happens at work, This happens like coming back
from work. This happens in other places too. Is also
you know, a part of the condition of your labor
when you combine the fact that trans people were already
and I want to point this out right, the homelessness rates,
you know, the eighteen percent rate of unemployment, the thirty
percent rate of experiencing homelessness in their lifetime, right, that

(01:32:14):
was before the refugee crisis, like really really intensified into
what we're seeing now. Right, It was not as bad
in twenty twenty two as it is right now, when again,
like we were seeing for for a period of eight months,
we were seeing over a percent of the population per month,
the transpopulation per month, moving all all of the the

(01:32:36):
unemployment numbers and the poverty numbers and the homeless numbers
were those were all pre the sort of real intensification
after the election of the mass migration and refugee sort
of status or trans people, and this has had an
effect on trans people's class position. Right, what this has

(01:32:57):
created in the places that trans people are flat to,
and this is places like Portland, this is places like
New York, like LA There's a lot of sort of
like regional centers too. Obviously, Chicago's at the other sort
of big one, but you know, they're like places like Missoula,
right for people who don't know what Missoum was, a
city with you know, like a pretty large university of
population in Montana that has a fairly large transpopulation because

(01:33:21):
it collects trans people from a whole bunch of the
region around it. And there's also a bunch of people
who go to there for college and realize that they're trans.
But what this has done, right is it's forced a
bunch of people to move leave their homes, which is expensive, right,
And then you have to find jobs in these new places,

(01:33:42):
and it's already really difficult to find jobs in the
places that you were. And so you know what you're
facing just in general, right, is you're facing this trade
off between can you survive in the place that you
are with the life that you have, or you need
to pick up and go to another place where it's

(01:34:06):
less illegal for you to be yourself. And what this
has created is this sort of mass underclass of trans
workers that is especially large in places with large refugee populations.
These workers are of any subgroup that, like trans people
are in the trans people in that group are the
most marginalized and the most just absolutely fucked of everyone

(01:34:29):
in that group.

Speaker 9 (01:34:29):
Right.

Speaker 11 (01:34:30):
You know, you can look at like the violence rates
for black trans women particularly is appalling. Right, there's a
lot of disabled trans people, and among disabled people who
already have it really really bad in the US, right, Like,
you look at disabled trans people and it's even fucking harder.
That's especially an issue with you know, something that's been
affecting a whole bunch of people, which is the Medicaid

(01:34:52):
work requirements, which have been just unbelievably harmful to a
whole bunch of disabled trans people who suddenly are being
like worse to work, who just can't. Right, And what
this has created is this incredibly incredibly precarious class of workers.
All over the spectrum of the working class, right, there

(01:35:13):
are a lot of trans people, an unbelievable number of
trans people working service jobs. And like the lower end
and shittier the service job, the more likely you are
to find trans people there. There's always been a lot
of trans sex work because a lot of times that's
the thing you can do, right, And this is sex
work across the entire spectrum of what sex work is

(01:35:33):
of sort of like greater and lesser degrees of risk.
This also is the thing that contributes to the criminalization
of trans people, because there's a bunch of criminalization of
sex workers in ways that gets trans people targeted by
the police and subject even more police violence than they
are already which they are also subject to extraordinary amounts
of police violence. I don't know, every trans person has

(01:35:54):
seen some shit, but I'm not just saying this to
be like the trans class position is bad. But what
this has done is create this class of trans workers

(01:36:16):
that moves between parts of the class that don't have
contact with each other very much. There's a whole bunch
of movement between being housed and being unhoused in a
way that is at a significantly broader scale than it
is for the rest of like the rest of the population,
there are a whole bunch of different kinds of trans
workers who are able to unify around being trans and

(01:36:39):
have contact with each other and do organize with each other,
and who fight, you know, alongside each other, right from
different parts of the working class that don't often particularly
get along, and in particular in terms of like you know,
service workers and on house people, there is a really
systemic effort by the States and by the rights and
even need to buy that by the Democratic Party too,

(01:36:59):
to pit these against each other. But also with trans people,
it's like, well, I don't know, like there's also an
extent to which yeah, like if you're a transparson, you
are you know, X number of days away from being
that person on the street. And so this has created
a fairly unique class position right of unbelievable precarity, you know,

(01:37:21):
state and forced pricarity. It's it's it's obviously not the
only right class position in the US of like legally
mandated percarity. You can look at undocumented workers who have
even more genocidal shit happening against them right now in
terms of just like yeah, no, yeah, there's just ice
rounding people up. But what has been produced here is

(01:37:42):
this incredibly precarious class like down the remobile workers. And
it's also worth noting that like to some extent, this
is a deliberate strategy of the right, Like this is this.

Speaker 3 (01:37:53):
Is what the right wants.

Speaker 11 (01:37:56):
You know, if you look at like the rise of neoliberalists,
and you look at Reagan, you look at Thatcher, right,
one of the big things that they are about in
this era is control over gender and control over social reproduction.
This is one of the things, you know, if you
look at how these people come to power, they come
to power on the back of very very right wing

(01:38:18):
social movements, right that are you know, in the US,
it's like the you know, the sort of like the
rise of the evangelicals, who one of their big things, right,
one of the things that they're interested in is suppressing
queer people specifically, right.

Speaker 3 (01:38:33):
But you can you can look at this in other.

Speaker 11 (01:38:35):
Context too, where you know, you can look at China
in the nineteen eighties as the beginning of sort of
the reform period of starting when you start to see
the return of capitalists in the China in nineteen eighty
you get the one child policy occurring on a little
bit of a tangent here. But something I don't think
is really acknowledged in the way that people think and
talk about China, which is that the one child policy

(01:38:57):
was not a thing from the Maoist period. This was
the reform, right, Dan Jhahping is in power when this
goes into effect, right, and when it's like written into
the constitution, like this is dang Zhahping, This is this is,
you know, the sort of pro capitalist reform movements that
is imposing the one child policy on people in the US.
You also have like restrictions on abortion that are sort

(01:39:18):
of part and parcel of the rights attempt to expand
capitalism because control over the family, control over you know,
social reproduction, the production of new workers and the ability
for people to continue to be workers for the capitalist system,
that's something that is important to them, right, And the
maintenance of right wing gender roles is something that is

(01:39:39):
important for them to be able to reproduce their ideology
and also reproduce capital in general. And so they came
after us. But on the other hand, right, you know,
as much as we have been targeted by the right,
trans people have also, as I sort of talked about
a bit at the beginning of this episode, been overrepresented
in just every left of social movement for the past

(01:40:03):
like two decades, right, everything from like union organizing to
mutual aid to like who shows up in the street
to protest to like blocks, from like occupy to the Uprising. Right,
there are trans people in all of these social movements
in extremely key roles. And the only real way for
this not to happen is to when trans people are

(01:40:25):
specifically driven out of these movements, and that happens a lot, right,
Like That's that's also like one of the things that
you experience being being a trends like worker is that,
you know, people who are transphobic in the left will
run you out of the shit that you're doing. Usually,
I say usually because some ofttimes.

Speaker 3 (01:40:42):
They are x.

Speaker 11 (01:40:43):
You are explicitly pushed after being trans. Usually there's like
some other excuse that's that's found to do this. But
you know, even with how much you know, like persecution
to trans people there have been in the social movements,
trans people still show up for right, you know, they
take just sort of a random example, right, friend of
the show, Vicky Ostroweil was the facilitator of the first

(01:41:04):
occupy meeting in New York.

Speaker 3 (01:41:06):
Right, We're just always there.

Speaker 11 (01:41:08):
We have always been there, We've been there everywhere, and
we will continue to be there in all of these movements,
in the anti ice movements. In I say movements because
like this is true in like the twenty eighteen anti
Ice movement is true in the current anti ice movement.
It is true in the student encampments of twenty twenty
four and there's a reason for this, and the reason

(01:41:29):
for this, to a large extent is that very precarity, right,
if you were going to be trans, especially now, you
have no choice but to fight, if you want to exist,
if you want to have access to your healthcare, if
you want to be upgraded to the status of mere proletarians,
if you want your life to just merely merely be

(01:41:54):
the life of a CIS worker, which is significantly less
fucked than your life is, you have to fight. And
this is something that is also spread to some extent
by sort of transculture, I would say broadly, but also
just like the kind of social groups that form, and
also it's spread and this is particularly something you see
in unions a lot, right. We've talked a lot in

(01:42:15):
the show about trans people being overrepresented in unions. It's like, well,
we're overrepresented in unions because we're workers, right, And this
is in some sense the potential of what the Right
has wrought, right, which is that they have created this
extremely large population of trans service workers and trans refugees

(01:42:36):
who have nothing to lose but their chains and a
world to win. Slightly elsewhere in the manifesto, like Marx Rights,
what the bourgeoisie produce above all are its own grave diggers.
And if you look out at the world in twenty
twenty six, right, you can see the graves being dug

(01:42:58):
The question is who is going to be buried there?
The capitalist class would very much like it to be us. I,
for one thing, don't want to fucking be buried in
a mass grave. And if we're going to put something
in that grave, better it be the class system itself.
And that's a world worth fighting for. The world where

(01:43:19):
there are no grave diggers, where there are no mass graves,
where the state and the landlord don't throw you on
the street in the night, where you can live in
your community and not be run out, where you have
your healthcare, and you are able to be the person
that you want to be. And that world is winnable.
All that is left is to fight for it.

Speaker 3 (01:43:54):
Welcome to it. Could happen here. I show about things
falling apart and putting them back together. I'm Garrison Davis.
This episode is on probably the most controversial mid term
election happening this year, the US Senate race in Maine,
where the new Democratic nominee Graham Platner is running to
end the thirty year reign of Republican Senator Susan Collins,

(01:44:19):
who brands herself as a moderate, independent leaning Republican but
is consistently backed Trump's on popular policies while holding on
to power. Beating Susan Collins would be a key part
of taking the Senate away from the Republicans. Much of
the media coverage and discussion of this election has focused

(01:44:39):
on the scandals relating to Graham Platner's personal life, with
very little on the real relations of his campaign, the
political platform he's running, on the relations between him and
organized labor unions and working class maners. Platter's campaign has
attracted overwhelming support from voters in Maine despite the series

(01:45:01):
of well reported personal controversies the Nazi links tattoo he
got his a marine, old offensive reddit posts, marital issues,
relationship issues, and an ext girlfriend who worked at the
Heritage Foundation accusing him of quote unquote disturbing behavior after
he got out of the military. Mainstream outlets have covered
those at length. This episode, I'm going to narrowly focus

(01:45:24):
on the relations of Grand Platner's campaign. I'll start by
going over his campaign platform, then his ties to labor
unions and community organizing, and finally, how those ties set
up his campaign for massive success in the Democratic primary.
Platner calls himself a new deal Democrat, and, like Bernie Sanders,

(01:45:45):
believes we need a quote unquote political revolution in this country.
He wants to shake up the Supreme Court, increase the
federal minimum wage, and ban billionaires from buying elections. His
platform is also designed to address the concerns of working
class Mayer like declining manufacturing, decaying infrastructure, closing hospitals, and
spiking energy costs. Platinir supports universal health care and ultimately

(01:46:09):
wants to pass a Medicare for all type system, while
pointing to how the country could build on the VA model, saying, quote,
the level of healthcare I've received with Maine's excellent VA
system should be available to all on quote we all
know that going up against for profit healthcare will be
a hard battle to win. His platform contains a list

(01:46:32):
of policies that will start to break up healthcare monopolies
and crack down on pharma corruption, like banning insurance companies
and private equity from buying medical practices and hospitals, and
banning prescription drug advertising Platina says he wants to expand
Medicare and MEDICAIDS power to negotiate drug prices, allow the
import of low cost prescription drugs from other markets, and

(01:46:54):
ban stock buybacks, and impose a cap on executive compensation
for pharmaceutical companies that receive public funds. His platform calls
to direct federal funds to reopen recently closed hospitals, birthing units,
and clinics, establish a national public drug manufacturing sector, make
Medicare telehealth coverage permanent reverse doge cuts to the via

(01:47:16):
national legislation, mandating a safe level of nurse to patient ratios,
to counter chronic hospital understaffing, and to open a new
medical school at University Maine. A large part of Grand
Platner's policy platform is focused on protecting democracy by keeping
money out of elections. Quote. Democracy cannot function when wealth

(01:47:37):
buys power. Since Citizens United unlimited, dark money has flooded
American politics, giving billionaires and special interests enormous influence unquote,
Platnair wants to overturn Citizens United, either through a constitutional
amendment or a different Supreme Court. More on that later.
He also campaigns on banning congressional stock trading, and advocates

(01:47:58):
that former members of Congress should be banned from congressional lobbying. Quote.
Public service should never become a pathway to private affluence unquote.
Platner supports mandating congressional term limits two for the Senate
and six for the House, and at a minimum, returning
to the talking filibuster. His platform also includes congressional representation

(01:48:19):
for everyone in the country quote unquote, including in places
like Washington, d c. As for the Supreme Court, Platner
wants to pack the court and end lifetime appointments with
staggered time limited terms. He's also in favor of impeaching
justices on the Supreme Court by quote holding the Court
to the same ethic standards we hold all other federal

(01:48:42):
judges unquote. Platine supports passing a constitutional amendment to quote
prohibit partisan jerrymandering and require independent redistricting commissions to draw
their maps, which he says would keep elected officials more
accountable and make voters voices stronger. To combat anti labor

(01:49:02):
legislation like the Taft Hartley Act, Plantner wants to strengthen
our quote unquote right to organize by passing the Protecting
the Right to Organize Act, which would crack down on
union busting by issuing significant penalties and override right to
work laws. Planner also supports creating a union job requirement
for all jobs funded by federal dollars. In interviews, Plantner

(01:49:24):
is advocated for something akin to FDR's proposed Economic Bill
of Rights. Quote. In order to democratize our economy, we
need to provide as rights things like housing, healthcare, education,
and collective bargaining unquote. He also wants to pass the
Equal Rights Amendment to protect against sex discrimination, while addressing
how communities of color, LGBTQ, Americans, and immigrants have had

(01:49:46):
the legal protections that were meant to guarantee them equal
rights quote turned against them instead of working in their defense.
We need a twenty first century constitution that restores the
original purpose of these guarantees equal rights under the law
protected for every person in this country unquote. His policy
platform includes passing federal LGBTQ anti discrimination legislation and calls

(01:50:11):
out Democrats for quote unquote peddling soft bigotry to pander
to Trump voters. One of Platner's most in depth policy
pages is for his billionaire tax plan, which he says
represents quote the bare minimum of what I believe we
should expect a democratic Congress under our next president to pass.

(01:50:33):
Plantner believes that income taxes alone quote cannot address the
massive concentration of wealth in the hands of a few.
Only a tax on wealth can do so. He promotes
a five to six percent annual tax on wealth over
one billion dollars, as well as taxing capital gains the
same as wages, quadrupling taxes on stock buybacks, and taxing

(01:50:55):
excessive CEO pay to pressure corporations to reinvest profits back
into the workers through higher wages, better benefits, and long
term security. On the campaign trail, he's talked with voters
about removing the one hundred and sixty seven thousand dollars
a year income tax cap on Social Security payments so
that the ultra rich contribute to the same payroll tax

(01:51:17):
rate as the rest of us. He also wants to
restore the enhanced child tax credit. Platner's tax plan doesn't
just include raising taxes on the rich, but closing loopholes
make a corporation's use to avoid paying taxes altogether. Quote
By closing corporate loopholes. We ensure that the giants who
profit off our shared infrastructure, courts, and educated workforce finally

(01:51:41):
pay their way, and that we can sustain investments into schools, safety,
and services every community depends on. One way to stop
corporate tax dodging is by ending worker misclassification, that is,
hiring workers as quote unquote contractors to deprive workers of
labor protections and healthcare, while using this misclassification to dodge

(01:52:01):
payroll taxes. Instead of foreign policy dominated by trade agreements
that exploits workers and promotes endless war, Platner's platform calls
for a new era of American quote unquote economic diplomacy
that takes on billionaires who quote defund the societies that
made their fortunes possible simply by shuffling money into an

(01:52:21):
offshore account unquote. He advocates a global billionaire minimum tax
to quote ensure that extreme wealth is finally reinvested in
the public good, regardless of where it is parked unquote.
This is based on a proposal by the EU's Internal
Tax Observatory. To accomplish this, Platner says, we would need

(01:52:43):
to overhaul global economic institutions, use our leverage as a
trading partner, and use international economic diplomacy to target concentrated
wealth and coordinate taxes and sanctions on ultra wealthy individuals quote,
rather than relying on broad trades actions that harm ordinary people.

(01:53:03):
He also wants to close an inheritance tax loophole by
stopping billionaires from passing down their wealth to their errors
tax free through buying appreciating assets, borrowing against those assets,
and then passing down the assets after they die while
avoiding any taxes on the increased asset value. Platner says
time for those gains to be taxed too. The tax

(01:53:25):
plan also includes ways to lower taxes for working and
middle class Americans. Quote. If we tax millionaires and billionaires
at fair levels, we can provide a quote unquote cost
of living exemption from federal income tax up to a
reasonable threshold for working and middle class Americans. If we
stop multinational monopolies from dodging their taxes, we can cut

(01:53:46):
taxes on the small businesses and self employed individuals who
are struggling to survive. The federal government could adopt a
property tax fairness credit similar to MAINZ that ensures low
and middle income families do not pay more than for
percent of their income in property taxes by providing a
refundable credit, including a fair calculation of rent attributable to

(01:54:08):
property taxes, so that renters are treated equitably un quote.
Something we've previously reported on is Platner's opposition to what
he calls regressive gas and diesel taxes. Quote. Relying on
fossil fuels to fund basic infrastructure does not make sense
if we want to reduce fossil fuels used in transportation. Instead,

(01:54:29):
public goods should be financed by progressive general revenues, as
outlined in my end billionaire welfare tax plan unquote. Platner
notes that an extra two hundred and seventy five billion
dollars has supplemented the tax based Highway Trust Fund since
two thousand and eight. Platner also supports Rocana's Big Oil

(01:54:51):
Windfall Profits bill that would implement a per barrel tax
equal to fifty percent of the difference between the current
oil price and the price per barrel last year, and
he promotes a national electricity rate freeze by quote, providing
direct low cost energy infrastructure financing to any state that
freezes or lowers electricity rates for four years, funded by

(01:55:12):
the windfall profits tax and repurposed federal fossil fuel subsidies. Quote.
His platform states that the most effective national security project
would be a huge buildout of domestic clean energy production,
rather than relying on private equity to invest in new
clean energy. Plantner supports a National Energy Infrastructure Fund that

(01:55:35):
would issue debt backed by the federal government and quote
partner with state lending authorities to provide cheap capital directly
to utilities, rural electric cooperatives, public energy authorities, and other
developers of low risk clean energy projects unquote. Plantner believes
this fund could cut Wall Street speculators out of the equation,

(01:55:57):
help build at scale with union jobs, low lower costs,
and pass savings onto rate payers. He also wants the
Department Energy to use the Defense Production Act to revive
dimestic manufacturing to procure and stockpile critical clean energy technologies.
His platform also includes creating a strategic fuel reserve for
farmers and fisheries, a national whole home repair program to

(01:56:21):
assist in weatherization, electrification, and heat pumps to lower household
bills by partnering with public housing authorities, county programs, and
local trade unions. As well as reinvesting the money funnel
to big defense contractors back into shipbuilding. On the campaign trail,
Platner talks a lot about being a veteran and the
various ways that's informed his politics. He's promised to quote,

(01:56:45):
never send Americans into a pointless war, and to solve
the issue of a president effectively being able to declare
wars but it's not call them wars. Platner is called
on Congress to reclaim its war powers and other authorities
over the executive. We must pass a new War Powers Act.
This say must go for ending the executive's intrusion on

(01:57:07):
congressional powers of the purse, taxation, and other legislative prerogatives. Unquote.
We'll talk more about grand Platner's campaign platform and ties
to organized labor after this ad break. Welcome back to

(01:57:31):
it could happen here. Democratic nominee for US Senate, grand
Platner was interviewed by The New York Times and said
that since the end of the Second World War, American
foreign policy, our wars and interventions haven't been good for
workers or American families. Quote, they often are very good

(01:57:51):
for corporate interests, defense contractors, and people in places of
political power who want to use war as a mechanism
of protecting their political power unquote. Platter told The Times
that he has a complicated relationship with the military, where
he's still proud of being a marine, but is ashamed
of what's happened in the Middle East and says that

(01:58:14):
the policies and systems orchestrating those wars are quote unquote
flawed from the top down, and that he considers himself
anti war.

Speaker 9 (01:58:22):
But it doesn't matter if you try your best inside
of a flawed policy, in a flawed system, it's flawed
from the top down. It's bound to fail. It's bound
to bring an immense amount of violence upon people who
in no way, shape or form are deserving it of it,
because I mean, we destroyed a Raq, and we destroyed Afghanistan,
and all the suffering, all the killing, all the dying,

(01:58:43):
all the displacement, all of it was we brought that
We the United States, did that, and then that I'm
ashamed of. The anger that I feel is for the
people that sent me, who are frankly still the same
people who are sending people off right now to go

(01:59:07):
but be in harms way. So we can start and
have the stupid war with Iran.

Speaker 3 (01:59:11):
Platner has been clear that Israel is committing a genocide
in Gaza and that the US has aided in the
genocide of Palestinians. Quote. It is the moral question of
our time, and we failed as a nation. Platner believes
that Israel should not receive any US tax dollars and
has proudly opposed a pack, though he has voice support

(01:59:33):
for sending aid to Ukraine. Platner calls abolishing Ice the
quote unquote moderate position, and that he supports a path
to citizenship, strong border security, and a quote unquote end
to the mass deportation machine. His policy platform says that
quote unquote, many multinational corporations have no interest in immigration

(01:59:56):
reform because quote they want illegal workers with no rights
who they can pay slave wages and abuse at will.
In response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which
Susan Collins assisted in by voting for Brett Kavanaugh, Platner
wants to codify abortion rights and protect privacy rights. His

(02:00:18):
platform states, quote, the Constitution should make clear that Americans
have a fundamental right to privacy, including personal medical decisions,
control over one's own body and freedom from unjust surveillance.
In an age of mass data collection and artificial intelligence,
this protection is more important than ever. Platner certainly leans

(02:00:38):
pro gun. He's taught leftist armed self defense classes and
owns air fifteens. He doesn't support an assault weapons span,
but did back a referendum to create a red flag
law in the state of Maine. Other miscellaneous campaign planks
include more funding for the Post Office, passing the Postal
Banking Act, developing a federal childcare policy for kids under six,

(02:01:00):
defending Medicare access for people with disabilities, strengthening the Clean
Air and Clean Water Act, opposing any federal support for
private school vouchers, reviving federal support for housing something like
the VA Home Loan program for more Americans, banning hedge
funds from buying homes through legislation like the End Hedge
Fund Control of American Homes Act, and legalizing cannabis and

(02:01:24):
clemency for people caught up in the War on Drugs.
That is a long list of policies, goals, and prospective
legislation that would be no easy task to enact. Some
would mean a fundamental transformation in American politics and the
world economy. Platner knows that not everything in his platform

(02:01:45):
can be passed overnight, but says that Democrats need a
strategic vision to fight for, telling the Main Monitor quote,
I'll be the first one to say that me being
in the Senate as the junior senator from Maine is
not going to get us medicare for There is this
sort of establishment pushback where people are often like, well,
you're not gonna be able to do that immediately, Like, well, no, shit,

(02:02:08):
that's what power building is, That's what a long term
plan is unquote. In interviews, Platner often talks about his
quote unquote theory of power and how the Democratic Party
has quote never been able to articulate what it's trying
to do, like what's the end goal. It never really
articulates a clear set of policies to get us there,

(02:02:30):
and then never seems to want to wield power to
make those policies a reality unquote. Plattner told The New
York Times that Democratic Party leadership has failed the moment,
that the party needs new leadership and that Chuck Schumer
should be replaced. Of course, candidates can say anything to

(02:02:50):
get elected. We've all seen politicians run on populist platforms,
only to then serve lobbyists, corporate interests, and themselves once
in office. Trump himself first ran as a populist outsider
despite being a billionaire. Senator John Fetterman also comes to mind, though.
The only thing that really made Harvard graduate John Fetterman

(02:03:13):
and quote unquote outsider was that he wore a hoodie
and head stupid facial hair. Prior to his Senate campaign,
he served as mayor of Braddock for thirteen years and
lieutenant governor for four. Fetterman also claims that suffering a
stroke quote unquote liberated him from quote unquote progressivism. All

(02:03:33):
is to say, John Fetterman and Graham Plattner's respective backgrounds
are quite different. But obviously words and promises aren't enough
to measure a candidate's worth. One must look deeper at
the ties to local communities and organizations that might inform
a candidate's political platform and facilitate their ability to run

(02:03:55):
for office. To quote Graham Platner, we need to build
play power through getting people like me into the US Senate,
into Congress, and we also need to do it while
building organizational power outside of this system. There's never been
a moment in American history where we've gotten good things
just because the institutions or people in power decided to

(02:04:17):
do it. They need to be pressed. I mean, this
is honestly why the country has killed the labor movement.
We did it on purpose. We did it because the
labor movement is the foundation of power that can actually
like push back against this system. Unquote. Grand Platner is
only running for Senate because last summer the afl CIO,

(02:04:39):
along with other local labor unions, we're looking to put
up a candidate to run against Susan Collins on a
working class platform. In July twenty twenty five, candidate scouts
showed up outside Platner's door asking him to run for Senate.
Platner says he and his wife told them to quote
unquote fuck off. The scouts, including progressive strategists Daniel Moroff,

(02:05:01):
had learned about Platner from a video he was in
a few years ago about community organizing against a corporate
Norwegian salmon farm that was trying to move in to
their bay.

Speaker 9 (02:05:11):
My daily grind is coming out in the morning, cleaning
equipment and tying knots and fixing rope and fixing line
and fixing boats, and cleaning oysters and listening to podcasts.
My name is Graham Plattner and I live in Sullivan, Maine,
the owner of Frenchman Bay Oyster Company. Born and raised
here in Sullivan. I grew up three houses down from

(02:05:33):
the house I currently live in.

Speaker 3 (02:05:35):
Bank Or Daily News reported that in July, Platner spoke
with Jason Shedlock, the president of the main State Building
and Construction Trades Council, via zoom to quote talk about
the potential run while working on his oyster boat. About
a week after first knocking on his door, the campaign
scouts showed up again, but this time with a detailed

(02:05:57):
plan and the connections to get a camp pagn up
and running. Union support helped provide resources to shoot a
launch video, facilitate small dollar fundraising, and get Platner's name
in local papers. He had never run for office before,
but did serve as the harbor master and chair of
the Planning Board for the town of Sullivan. In terms

(02:06:20):
of Platner's own working class or middle class background, Platner's
father was a lawyer in rural Maine, and his mom
was a small business owner who currently owns a local
restaurant as a kid. His family got a financial aid
package for a fancy private school in Connecticut, but Plattner
got himself kicked out after three months and then went

(02:06:42):
back to Maine. After xiting the military, he worked as
a bartender while going to university in DC, dropped out,
then worked as a private military contractor for six months
at the embassy in Afghanistan. While there, Platner says he
got deeply disillusioned with government corruption and the military industrial complex.

(02:07:02):
Quit moved back to Maine, started working at a friend's
oyster farm, and got into local organizing. In a less
reported on a Reddit post made by Graham Plattner, he
credited late political commentator Michael Brooks with moving him towards
left wing, working class politics around twenty nineteen to twenty twenty.

(02:07:25):
Platner also made Reddit posts about being an anti fascist.
The Senate campaign launched in mid August, and in just
nine days it raised one million dollars, with an average
donation of thirty three dollars. Ninety eight percent of the
donations were under one hundred dollars. During its first week,
the campaign was attracting three hundred volunteers per day. Pretty soon,

(02:07:47):
the campaign attracted the attention of Bernie Sanders, who comes
September invited Platner to speak on his upcoming Fight Oligarchy
tour and has continued to campaign with and back Platner
while Governor Janet Mills was recruited by Chuck Schumer to
beat Platner in the Democratic primary. From early on in

(02:08:07):
the race, Plattner had received backing from local labor unions.
Beyond the main AFL CIO, Platner has received endorsements from
Iron Workers Local seven, National Nurses United Maine State Nurses Association,
American Postal Workers Local four five eight, the National Postal
Mail Handlers Local three oh one, the Electrical Workers Union

(02:08:29):
Local two three two seven, the International Federation of Professional
and Technical Engineers, Main State Council of Building and Construction Trades,
North Atlantic States, Regional Council of Carpenters, Carpenter's Local three
four nine and three five two, Painters and Allied Trades
DC thirty five Massachusetts and Northern New England Labours and

(02:08:51):
District Council Mill Rights Local one one two one, Labourer's
International Union of North America Local three two seven six
six eight, and nine seven six, Teamster's Local three forty,
and the United Auto Workers, who represents nearly two thousand
workers in Maine, including marine draftsman at the Bath Iron Works,

(02:09:12):
nonprofit employees, workers at the Portland Museum of Art, and
graduate employees across the University of Maine system. In their endorsement,
UAW Region nine A director Brandon Mansilla said, quote, Graham
Platner has emerged as a voice for the people of Maine,
fed up with the corrupting influence of the oligarchy and
money in our politics. More importantly, he's building a mass

(02:09:36):
movement that will not only power his campaign, but will
be ready to take on the challenges facing working families
in Maine and across the country once in office. Our
members are ready to hit the ground running with Graham's
campaign and take back the power for Maine's working class. Unquote.
Platner has said he wanted this campaign to be an

(02:09:58):
extension of the local community organizing that he and his
wife were already engaged in. Telling the main monitor the
campaign is a quote organizing strategy first and an electoral
strategy second. For the past few years, Platner is organized
with a mutual aid and community activist group called Arcadia
Action and was named in local news coverage for organizing

(02:10:21):
a protest after Trump was reelected. The protest focused on
quote the preservation of constitutional rights, support for Ukraine, and
protecting transgender maners. Platner was also an active member of
the Panopsicate County chapter of the Mainz People's Alliance, the
largest quote unquote progressive community action organization in the state,

(02:10:42):
which claims to have more than thirty two thousand members.
As a member of the main People's Alliance, Platner traveled
to Washington, DC a couple of years ago for a
march to protest access to healthcare, and since then has
been doing grassroots community organizing in Hannock County. According to
the organization, the member led board of directors of Maine

(02:11:04):
People's Alliance voted unanimously to endorse Graham Platner to quote
the announcement Maine People's Alliance board co chair Gina Morin.
They them said, quote, listening to Platner during interviews in
town halls, it is clear that he addresses the critical
issues affecting our country and specifically Maine. He speaks directly

(02:11:24):
to the reality that the top one percent are hoarding
wealth while the middle class and the poor are left
to go without. He's also addressed the need to fix
the same issues that we have been working on for years,
such as health care, affordability, the housing crisis, and immigrant rights.
His activism drove him to seek this office out of frustration.

(02:11:46):
His values and dedication are what align him with the
Main People's Alliance. Unquote. The organization said back in February
that Platner has been quote active and vocal in resisting
IS's presence here in May and has been calling on
our members of Congress to do more to protect everyone
in Maine and across the country from ICE's violent, racist tactics.

(02:12:09):
Main People's Alliance board member Sean Donnelly said, quote. Graham
names the oligarchy and corporate greed as the true enemies
of progress in Washington, and he understands that the only
way to defeat them is through grassroots organizing. His personal
story of finding purpose through his community and activism has
the power to inspire many who may feel angry, disconnected,

(02:12:30):
or hopeless about politics. Graham is a talented leader whose values, vision,
and strategy are aligned with the mission of the Main
People's Alliance quote. Following the primary, the Planned Parenthood Action
Fund endorsed Platner over Susan Collins, who was one of
the deciding votes and sending Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
And last week, the Main Service Employees Association, which represents

(02:12:53):
more than thirteen thousand active and retired public service workers
in the state, formally endorsed Graham Platner. So why are
these endorsements and community ties important? These relations are what
a working class campaign's political platform emerges from, and this
community voting block is a mechanism to hold working class

(02:13:16):
candidates accountable to their constituents. Platner has told The New
York Times that he's a quote firm believer that organized
people is the only actual place of power to conflict
with organized money, and in our society, money is very
organized unquote. He echoed this sentiment at a campaign rally

(02:13:36):
covered by more Perfect Union.

Speaker 9 (02:13:38):
Politics is about power, and in this society, power is
either organized money or its organized people. And the money
is organized. It always has been and it always will
be until we organize enough people to pull it back.

Speaker 3 (02:13:53):
In May, Platner told John Stewart that getting someone like
him elected quote needs to be in tandem with a
fully organized, broad based coalition here in the state of
Maine that can put pressure on members of our delegation
if need be, because it's not going to be enough
to just rely on the systems. Quote. Two days before

(02:14:16):
the primary election, Platner spoke at a town hall about
building a Senate office that prioritizes a relationship with labor
unions rather than the owners of the industries that labor
works in a Senate office where a worker, labor organizer,
or civil rights representative should get more face to face
time with a Senator than any lobbyist.

Speaker 9 (02:14:36):
I very much believe that we need to connect that
kind of local organizing work directly to a Senate office
in DC. So something like I used to have been
an organizer with Main People's Alliance before, and I firmly
believe that we need closer coordination between community organizations and

(02:14:59):
vil mental organizations frankly, all of the organizing groups around
Maine with institutional power, because I do think that that's
history tends to show that you're most successful when outside
organizing is working in tandem with institutional power. That tends
to be when we get the most significant wins.

Speaker 3 (02:15:22):
I'll come back to discuss how the Platner campaign was
actually run after this ad break. Welcome back to what
could happen here. This past April, one of Platner's former

(02:15:45):
high school classmates turned journalist named Josh Keef wrote an
article for The Main Monitor about why Platner's campaign has
been so successful in Maine. The Platner told his former
classmate that the campaign is being run like a community
organizing project. Quote. This kind of campaign and kind of

(02:16:06):
politics with an organizing focus. This doesn't work if you
just run TV ads. My background is in organizing and
I want to take that on the road as a candidate.
And the only way it ever works is by going
out and engaging with people directly. You got to like
not sleep unquote. Direct person to person engagement has been

(02:16:29):
the hallmark of Platner's campaign strategy here. Age is certainly
playing a factor in the race. Platner is forty one,
Janet Mills is seventy eight, and Susan Collins is seventy three.
Platner's younger age is not just compelling to voters who
want a younger generation of candidates, but it also impacts

(02:16:50):
how he can campaign. Platter is effectively campaigning full time,
making three to six campaign appearances a day, while his
business partner handles the oyster farm. From late September to
the early June primary, his campaign held eighty three town
hall events across the state, pulling in hundreds of people

(02:17:11):
per event and filling out community venues. In comparison, Susan
Collins has not held a single public town hall meeting
in over twenty five years. Janet Mills didn't even release
a policy platform until April. Platner told more Perfect Union quote,
people want to hear about the future, People want to

(02:17:32):
hear about your policies, and people also want access to
you so they can figure out if you're full of
shit or not. Unquote. Considering the smaller size of Maine,
come the November election, there's a good chance Platner will
have spoken face to face with nearly every voter in
the state. At these town halls, he often talks about power,

(02:17:55):
how working class power won the New Deal, and how
since the seventies, cooport interests have been undermining that power
using money to influence policy. At an event in Freiburg, Maine,
Platner said, quote, we are the richest society in the
history of humanity. We can have universal health care. We
can have universal childcare. We can have universal education going

(02:18:18):
from kindergarten all the way through higher education. We can
have a tax code that pulls back the wealth that
was stolen from the working class of this country for
the past fifty years. What we need to do is
from the ground up, build power the old fashioned way.
This comes from organizing unquote. Platner's campaign has helped with

(02:18:39):
other local electoral and legislative efforts, and The Main Monitor
reported that Platner's events often serve as locations for quote
food donation drop offs. He is frequently introduced by a
local activist who gets to talk about their work unquote.
Platner told the Main Monitor, quote, we really have to
fundamentally understand and that no one is coming to save us.

(02:19:03):
And the only way to build that power on your
own is here in the real world, face to face
with your neighbors, building trust in relationships again unquote. Platner
has also said that building that kind of outside power
is also how to find more people to run for
office and gather the resources needed to get them elected

(02:19:24):
to take power in an interview with John Stewart, Platner
said that because the US Senate is in many ways
a uniquely undemocratic institution quote set up to be a
specific bulwark against working class people to protect the elites,
that actually makes it a quote unquote unique place of
power if candidates with strong ties to working class communities

(02:19:46):
can occupy those seats. Following their historic loss in twenty
twenty four, the Democratic Party establishment has been in a
uniquely weak position, opening up the opportunity to address the
shoes that have led the party into national irrelevancy. Graham
Plattner lays blame on the Democrats abandoning the working class,

(02:20:08):
and that doesn't just mean white construction workers, but the
actual multicultural, multi racial working class wage workers and those
who cannot live off their investments. For the past forty years,
the party has abandoned organized labor and begun catering to
upper middle class professionals and has become a party of
the elites and ivy leagues. In the United States, there

(02:20:31):
are a lot of people who don't vote based on
an ideology they hold, but in response to what's happening
in their communities. Hospitals closing jobs, disappearing groceries and utility
is getting more expensive. Why would they vote for a
party that says everything is fine, The economy is technically
doing great. The Democratic establishment has wagered that voters would

(02:20:55):
rather protect the system rather than change it, and in
twenty twenty four that wager was proven wrong. People want change,
even if that change is being promised by a billionaire
charlatan whose real interest is in serving the upper class
and tech companies. But for as many people who decided
to vote for Trump, there were many others who saw

(02:21:18):
through the charade but were so disillusioned by party politics
that they chose not to vote at all. Plattner's campaign
has made itself not just about taking on Trump or
even Susan Collins, but a part of a larger seismic
shift the working class reasserting its power and taking back

(02:21:39):
the Democratic Party. To quote the main Monitor, quote, Unlike
a Janet Mills, He's not trying to convince voters he
will stand up to Trump. He's trying to start a
movement to build a world without the despair and resentment
that he believes allows Trump's brand of politics to flourish. Unquote.
Later at that event in the town of Freiburg, Platner

(02:22:02):
told the crowd, quote, people when their lives begin to deteriorate,
are going to look for folks to blame. And if
we don't have an actual answer, then hatred and xenophobia,
and racism and homophobia and transphobia, all of them will
fill the vacuum. This means we have to go out
in our community and we have to wear our hearts

(02:22:23):
on our sleeves unquote. Maine has semi open primaries, meaning
that unenrolled voters can vote in a party primary in
the leader to the primary. Platner's campaign at a series
of videos where he gets coffee with Republican leaning voters
and they talk about how their interests are more aligned

(02:22:44):
compared to the interests of Trump, the billionaire class, and
Susan Collins. Platner himself has said that his rise in
Maine says more about the appetite for a new kind
of politics rather than him specifically as a candidate. But
from the perspective of some voters, the slow drip of

(02:23:05):
scandals and controversies might actually bolster Platner's image as an
anti establishment candidate. For example, these people interviewed by CNN
and MS. Now, are you.

Speaker 8 (02:23:17):
Considering holding your breath and voting for him?

Speaker 11 (02:23:21):
I got until Tuesday to decide, but I'm pretty sure
i'll vote for him. I don't take a lot of
this crap is anybody else's business.

Speaker 9 (02:23:29):
For some Democrats, they're willing to look past the interpersonal stories.

Speaker 8 (02:23:33):
I'm not really interested in the guy's Floyd Bules, you know.
I'm interested in his vision and what he has to say,
and I love what he has to say. So, yeah,
it's been definitely difficult because everybody is piling on this guy.

Speaker 12 (02:23:49):
Does he have a problem at past, Yes, but I
would rather have a redemption story than somebody telling you
how wonderful they are, how much research they do.

Speaker 3 (02:24:00):
And yet they still make the wrong decision for the
people of me. On election day, June ninth, Platner won
seventy one point nine percent of the vote, with one
hundred fifty four thousand and fifty eight votes. Governor Janet Mills,
who stopped campaigning a month and a half prior but
remained on the ballot, one forty one thousand votes, or

(02:24:23):
nineteen point three percent. Grand Platner won more primary votes
than any other Democratic Senate candidate in the history of Maine.
As he walked onto the stage for his victory speech,
Dropkick Murphy's cover of Which Side Are You On blaired
in the background. Platner promised, quote, I will be a

(02:24:45):
senator for the people who cannot afford to buy a senator.

Speaker 2 (02:24:49):
Now.

Speaker 9 (02:24:51):
Now, the national pundits, the political establishment, they keep looking
for that one story, that one headline, that one moment
in my life that they can define the campaign by.
But in trying so hard to understand me, they failed
to understand that this is not about me at all.

Speaker 3 (02:25:18):
This is a.

Speaker 9 (02:25:19):
Movement about us, about the far too many, working far
too hard and struggling far too much at the hands
of the ruling class.

Speaker 3 (02:25:34):
At a town hall just a few days before the primary,
Platner spoke about the need to rebuild our old alliances
with labor union's, community organizations, and civil rights groups. Quote,
the only thing that's ever beat fascism is a broad
based working class coalition. Fascism is what we are up against.
I think a lot of the folks at the national

(02:25:56):
level misunderstand the reason they keep getting everything wrong. They
think this is a race about me, but it isn't.
This is a race about us. This is a race
about the future of politics in Maine. This is a
race about building power, the old fashioned away from the
ground up, going out into our communities and having hard conversations,
putting in time and energy that many of us do

(02:26:17):
not have. We've got to do it anyway. So what
I'm asking to do. If you don't want to volunteer
on this campaign, that's fine. Join a labor union, Go
help out at the local food pountry, go help out
at a food bank. It doesn't matter what you do.
What you gotta do something because the moment we're in

(02:26:38):
right now, it's going to require all of us. Unquote,
there were two hundred and fifteen thousand votes in the
Democratic primary. Plattner's campaign had fifteen thousand volunteers. These volunteers
went up against and beat the Democratic establishment, and now
they face the GOP establishment. This shift in the politics

(02:27:01):
of the Democratic Party is not isolated to Maine. Democratic
Socialists just won in Washington, DC, and following the election
of Zorammdani, nine more DSA candidates just won the Democratic
primary in New York, including three seats in the US
House of Representatives. But Maine occupies a unique place in
American politics, the stereotypical purple state. Unseating Susan Collins would

(02:27:25):
prove that real working class politics don't just win liberal cities,
but can take down what Bernie Sanders would call the oligarchy.

Speaker 9 (02:27:36):
There's an old saying, as Maine goes, so goes the nation.
If you want to stop if you want to stop
war with Iran in n the Forever Wars, If you
want to give workers the rays they deserve, seniors the
security they worked for. You want to bring back Roe

(02:27:56):
v Wade. As Maine goes, so goes the nation. If
you want to stop a Trump family slush fund, their ballroom,
their deals with Saudi princes and tech oligarchs. If you
want to stop the corruption, as Maine goes, so goes
the nation. If we want to dismantle Ice, win back

(02:28:19):
the Senate, check Donald Trump's power, and take back hours.
As Maine goes, so goes the nation. Together we will
defeat Susan Collins.

Speaker 3 (02:28:32):
Grand Platner is slightly ahead in the polls above Susan Collins,
but the race is still quite close. In twenty twenty,
when Collins was facing a challenger, she too was behind
in the polls but still pulled off a victory. That
doesn't for me. Ed, it could happen here.

Speaker 10 (02:28:50):
See you on the other side.

Speaker 3 (02:29:07):
This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly
newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world,
and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis today,
joined by James Stout, Mia Wong, and Robert Evans.

Speaker 9 (02:29:19):
Hey.

Speaker 3 (02:29:20):
This episode, we are covering the week of June seventeenth
to June twenty fourth.

Speaker 7 (02:29:25):
Yeah, sho, we start off with some little things.

Speaker 2 (02:29:27):
Yeah, let's start out with some small things.

Speaker 13 (02:29:31):
Mm hmmm, So I guess to begin with the federal
judge Sparkles suit Nananaccheley, who we've heard about before in
the show, has spoked the Trump administration from quote haphazardly
assembling a list of citizens it will be used to
purge voter rolls.

Speaker 2 (02:29:46):
Great. Yeah, I'm glad they can't do that haphazardly.

Speaker 13 (02:29:50):
Yeah, given the timing right link before the midterms, hopefully
that means that this isn't going to happen in a
way that will impact the midterms. The State Department has
announced it's going to begin provoking passports people with outstanding
child support of more than two thousand, five.

Speaker 7 (02:30:05):
Hundred United States dollars.

Speaker 13 (02:30:07):
They can contact an embassy to get a temporary passport
to come back to the US, but they'll only have
a full passport resort. I guess if they pay their
standing child support debt.

Speaker 2 (02:30:16):
Okay, Yeah, I'm wondering what got this to their ears?
How big a problem is this? Again, I'm not against this.
I'm just wondering, like, why they moved to do this.

Speaker 13 (02:30:28):
I saw it on the Twitter feed of the US
Embassy in Nigeria, and I would be interested. And I
don't know how possible this would be to go after
with public records to know which particular embassies are revoking
passports of which particular people, if you.

Speaker 7 (02:30:46):
See what I mean.

Speaker 3 (02:30:46):
Yeah, I think in general, revoking passports is a bad
thing to do.

Speaker 13 (02:30:52):
Yeah, I think this isn't the way to go after
the childs. But you are a piece of shit if
you're not playing paying your child support. But I think
generally that the possibility of someone being left like stateless,
you know, that's not how we get to a better
world here.

Speaker 2 (02:31:05):
I'm just wondering why they're doing this, Like that's that's
about Like this has to be they have to be
targeting somebody with this, Like I don't believe this is
about the problem of like there being a lot of
people who are getting out of child support by fleeing
the country. Like I don't believe that's the motivation here.
And I'm kind of curious what it is.

Speaker 13 (02:31:22):
I can tell you for sure, but the fact that
I saw it is on the Nigeria embassy website. I
mean I can look right now and see what if
other embassies posted it. I guess here we go US
embassy in Spain. I don't see it on their page
for example.

Speaker 2 (02:31:38):
Interesting, Okay, it'd be interesting to follow sub Jackson.

Speaker 13 (02:31:41):
But yeah, sure, somethink I came across, like you know,
about half an hour before we recorded this.

Speaker 2 (02:31:46):
No, it's not worthy.

Speaker 13 (02:31:47):
A judge has quashed a subpoena aimed at Governor Waltz
and their Frey and with other state politicians in Minneapolis,
writing quote, this course of events in and of itself
establishes beyond a reasonable dispute that the subpoenas were part
of a broader campaign to coerce state and local officials
in Minnesota to assist their Trump administration in its enforcement

(02:32:08):
of immigration laws. And of course, this campaign played out
against a backdrop of the Trump administration's well established history
of using criminal investigations to retaliate against and pressure the
president's political and personal adversaries. Very clear, everything that Trump
adminstras she has done with the DOJ, right, but it's
good to see it called out.

Speaker 7 (02:32:27):
I guess sure USCAS is.

Speaker 13 (02:32:30):
Looking to increase fees for existing permanent residents to naturalize
I become US citizens, as well as removing fee waivers
for lower income migrants. This will be a barrier to people, right,
and that is why it's happening.

Speaker 2 (02:32:43):
Yep, A Rep and.

Speaker 13 (02:32:44):
A Paulina Luna used clawed aimend legislation. She's deleted her tweet,
but I actually posted a link to her tweet on
Blue Sky and it still contains like the cached text
of the tweet if you want to go read it.
She immediately responded by throwing her stuff under a bus.

Speaker 2 (02:33:01):
Sure noble, claiming that it.

Speaker 13 (02:33:03):
Was not uncommon for stuff to use claude fucking amend
national legislation and people.

Speaker 2 (02:33:07):
Just don't like to do their job, do you my god?

Speaker 13 (02:33:10):
Yeah, it's yeah, I don't know how for hundreds of
years people wrote legislation without asking fucking Claude. She left
the like it's it had. Claude responded in the text
of the bill that that's.

Speaker 2 (02:33:21):
Had great stuff.

Speaker 3 (02:33:23):
Yeah. Claude is very popular in Washington, DC, like specifically, yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:33:27):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's it's widely agreed to be
the best of the of the.

Speaker 7 (02:33:30):
Chat, the thinking person's chat.

Speaker 2 (02:33:32):
But yeah, yeah, the thinking man's chat.

Speaker 9 (02:33:34):
Butt.

Speaker 3 (02:33:34):
There is like a weird bizarro universe where you get
like the Mark Fisher Claude outputs that writes tons of
legislation that gets suddenly passed, where the US Center is
a very odd odd time because they kept using this
chatbot that really liked like a certain certain writing from

(02:33:55):
certain shit.

Speaker 2 (02:33:55):
That people were reading online in two thousand and one.

Speaker 7 (02:33:59):
Yeah, have certain see he's baked in.

Speaker 11 (02:34:01):
Yeah yeah, I'm having this night mirror image. I'm having
this nightmare image of people doing like prompt injection attacks,
specifically to like get Claude to like auto spit out
certain lines of regulation.

Speaker 3 (02:34:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (02:34:13):
Yeah, just inserting trans rights into use appropriations.

Speaker 2 (02:34:17):
Built Claude amending prescription drug laws to allow me specifically
to purchase a lotted over the counter. I can see
a lot of good, good places to go here. Yeah,
the Evans Amendment, the Evan's Amendment, I just get to call.

Speaker 7 (02:34:32):
It can actually be delivered. You don't even have to
purchase it.

Speaker 2 (02:34:34):
Yeah, they put it in a trash bag for me.

Speaker 7 (02:34:36):
Yeah, drop it with the drone.

Speaker 13 (02:34:38):
Talking of inserting shit into bills, let's talk about Mike Lee.
The only person wors for planet than the sport of golf, Michael.

Speaker 3 (02:34:45):
He mentioned two weeks in a row. I'm run three.

Speaker 13 (02:34:48):
I'm mentioned in Mike Lee until he stops with this shit.
Let me tell you, a bipartisan group of legislators has
introduced legislation to block the back door set of public
lands through the reconciliation process.

Speaker 2 (02:34:58):
Huzzah.

Speaker 13 (02:35:00):
They might as well have called this fuck you, Mike Lee.
Stopped doing this bill, Mike Like, it is exclusively one
the person, Yeah, who is doing this, and it is
Mike Lee.

Speaker 2 (02:35:10):
The bill equivalent of spritzing a single guy on the
nose with a bottle of water.

Speaker 7 (02:35:17):
Yeah, he's been slapped down.

Speaker 13 (02:35:19):
It's it's interesting to see, like you see less bipartisanship
than he used to but no one likes Mike Lee
in this ship. Yeah, apart from people in Utah who
inexplicably elected him.

Speaker 2 (02:35:29):
There's nothing people in Utah hate more than the beautiful
land in which they inhabit.

Speaker 7 (02:35:34):
Yeah, not being able to mine and graze it as much.

Speaker 13 (02:35:37):
So like, Yeah, the Atlantic is reporting that Xcess has
pressured General Donahue into stepping down Seince. Donahue will leave
his job next week. Yeah, I guess, I mean, Robert
you I'm sure if for minut as well.

Speaker 2 (02:35:50):
Donahue is a massive figure. He's very famously like the
last US military official to leave Afghanistan during the withdrawal.
He's a pretty major guy and was widely considered to
be kind of one of the folks you'd think would
be sort of bulletproof outside of the fact that he
was involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan famously, like and

(02:36:11):
I think most people assumed that because it was in
a very like stereotypically heroic way, and because this guy
had such a reputation within like special operations, that he
would be protected. But this is kind of further example
of the brain drain that's been hitting all of the
guys who know how to do stuff. Yeah, in the
Department of Defense.

Speaker 13 (02:36:30):
Yeah, it is quite remarkable when you look at a
list of the people who have been purged, like you know,
quote unquite retired, right, Like, in terms of US military
leadership capacity, it has been significantly diminished.

Speaker 7 (02:36:42):
Yeah, by p hexeth.

Speaker 11 (02:36:44):
I just I just want to put a note in
here for later on hopefully hopefully this never becomes relevant.
But I really really do not like that in a
two year span there's been a significant purge of both
the senior leadership of the American and Chinese militaries.

Speaker 3 (02:36:57):
Really do not like that.

Speaker 11 (02:36:58):
Just just just putting this note in the record that like, yeah,
very very similar.

Speaker 2 (02:37:03):
I mean all the guys who like know each other. Yeah,
you can say, no, I don't think that means that
I know this guy he would do wouldn't do that
for this reason, Like everyone like that on both sides
is gone, and that maybe is how traditionally disasters happen.

Speaker 11 (02:37:16):
Yeah, yeah, so I don't like this, just putting good note.

Speaker 2 (02:37:20):
It's actually like say what you want about I mean,
say many different things about like the fucking militaries of
both China and the United States. But it's really good.
Actually when you have like a professional officer CADRA that's
insulated from politics and also like kind of socially know
the guys in the other countries at the higher levels
because they've like spoken like that's actually really useful in

(02:37:41):
de escalation.

Speaker 13 (02:37:41):
Of conflicts exactly. Yeah, it gives an informal de escalation mechanism, and.

Speaker 2 (02:37:46):
When that disappears, it can lead the problems.

Speaker 13 (02:37:48):
Yeah, when you're promoting like people of the heg seth. Yeah,
fucking tendency especially right.

Speaker 2 (02:37:55):
A surprising number of disasters have been averted, and not
just because military official because like people in two countries
who were like high up in the government like just
kind of had hung out with each other in events
and one was able to call the other and be like,
hey Joe, like you guys aren't doing this, are you?
Because my people are fucking flipping out. Yeah, those relationships

(02:38:15):
are really load bearing. In the US, all not dying
an atomic fire thing. So yeah, you know, there seems
to be some kind of counterfactory. There's just a lie
going around x dot com that like, Donahue, don't whe's
the last song to leave Afghanistan is road it said,
and like that like they were being shot at and
there were like junior enlisted folks being shot at.

Speaker 7 (02:38:36):
That wasn't happening.

Speaker 13 (02:38:37):
The last thirteen US troops who died in Afghanistan were
not shot by the Taliban. They were killed in Islamic
State suicide bombing.

Speaker 2 (02:38:45):
Again because the Taliban was cooperating with our withdrawal. They
were not like the Talban was not fighting shooting at
the US as we were leaving because they wanted us
to do what we were doing.

Speaker 13 (02:38:57):
Yeah, yeah, they got the outcome with having to do that.

Speaker 2 (02:39:01):
If you're the Taliban and the war is almost over,
and you know, if you know what you know one
thing about the US is the Taliban, which is like
if we just suddenly kill up onto their guys, maybe
they don't leave.

Speaker 13 (02:39:11):
Yeah, I know they will return and do a fucking
murdering people spree. Like I know people once again, right,
Like things that have happened in the last five years
seem to not exist in the mind of people who
use x dot com to get.

Speaker 2 (02:39:22):
Their news ever existed for them.

Speaker 7 (02:39:23):
I guess.

Speaker 13 (02:39:24):
Finally some good news from Maugway PDF who destroyed a
top my door I seventeen helicopter using FPV drones yesterday.
Oh wow, Yeah, not the first time it has happened
in Meenma. I constantly see when a drone is used
in Ukraine in a sort of relatively novel way, people
saying this is the first time that has happened, and
almost always it has already happened in Meanma. Not always,

(02:39:47):
like there were some autonomous drones that kill people in
Ukraine a couple of years ago that I'm not aware
of existing in me Mma. But like, Orientalism definitely plays
a role in people's ignorance when it comes to like
military firsts happening in the Spring Revolution. But yeah, in
this instance, they seemed to hit it with multiple FPV
drones taking out it's it's landing gear than its engines.

Speaker 3 (02:40:09):
I do have one short story here that I've tried
to avoid covering because they really don't think it's that important. Yeah,
but much like the algae just keeps creeping back into
the headlines. So last month, President Trump got super obsessed
with the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool spent fourteen million dollars
in a no contract bid to get rid of the algae.
Trump used his own pool guys and they drained the

(02:40:31):
reflection pool. They painted the bottom quote unquote American flag
blue and then filled that thing up again.

Speaker 2 (02:40:40):
Brilliant marketing decision by whoever named that paint, by the way.

Speaker 3 (02:40:45):
Yeah, somehow the algae returned and in an even worse state,
turning the entirety of the blue reflecting water green. So
in response, they sort of dumping gallons of hydrogen peroxide
into the pool to kill the algae. Now, hydrogen beroxide
also a paint thinner, and stripped of the American flag

(02:41:08):
blue paint started peeling off the bottom of the pool,
making the situation worse. Now here's where things get really interesting.
This is the only reason why we're covering this because
last weekend, Trump began making the completely unsubstantiated claims that
the algae filled blue paint fiasco was the result of
quote unquote radical left lunatics who vandalized the pool. Yeah,

(02:41:33):
the National Garden the park police have since then been
arresting people for standing near the reflecting pool. On Tuesday night,
President Trump truth to quote, six people have been arrested
and seven people had been sighted for the damage they
did to our country's now beautiful reflecting pool. The three

(02:41:53):
hundred and fifty foot gash made by a very sharp
knife or razors is actually numerous slashes over a very
long three hundred and fifty foot length. It was purposely,
incriminally done, and someone had to work very hard, probably
in the dark of the night, to create such a situation. Unquote,

(02:42:15):
no evidence this has happened. Obviously, people have been watching
the pool NonStop. No one's been seeing God waiting in
there with a knife cutting the floor.

Speaker 2 (02:42:26):
And garrison, garrison. You're not understanding what the president's saying.
One man didn't wait in there with a knife. A
team of hundreds each made a single slash. That's the
kind of discipline and dief is capable of, you know,
night and of course in the dark of the.

Speaker 3 (02:42:40):
Night, they were black. There's out out looks like the
Washington cous just reported on Trump's claims without noting that
this is just a lie, just nonsense. Yeah, but as
as the President has said, six people have been arrested,
one of whom for sticking his hand in the pool
and touching one of the floating pieces of blue hain't.

Speaker 2 (02:43:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:43:01):
Trump has said they will need to join the pool
again to make further repairs. Ahead of the fourth of
July two hundred and fiftieth celebration.

Speaker 2 (02:43:08):
If you read the actual report that was made by
UH I think it was the Parts Department or whatever,
like analyzing what had happened in the reflecting pool. They
did notice some like things that were described as cuts,
but concluded they had nothing to do with the paint itself.
Like if you actually read the report, like what he's
talking about is not like what his own people said.

(02:43:29):
He just saw cuts in the report and ignore that.
It was like, but these were somewhere else and not
relevant to the paint peeling and just went with it
like that's the root of all this.

Speaker 11 (02:43:39):
The thing with the story is like, yeah, on the
one hand, it is very funny that the pool the
pool green, but also the fact that Trump can just
lie about this stuff and then also a bunch of
people get arrested, Yeah, is really bad. It is in
fact really bad. But you can be arrested for putting
your hand in a pool. That's very bad. I just

(02:44:02):
just on just on a fundamental level, not not a
sign of a society that is functioning.

Speaker 3 (02:44:07):
Or healthy or at all not doing well.

Speaker 13 (02:44:10):
Yeah yeah no great, no not a good Yeah, not
a good look for us on the USA.

Speaker 7 (02:44:17):
It's two hundred and fifty is birthday.

Speaker 3 (02:44:18):
Yeah, deeply authoritarian society. Speaking of let's discuss probably the
worst piece of news this week, which is the sentencing
in the Prairie Land case, where the Trump administration brought
terrorism charges against what they alleged as an ANTIFA cell
who attended a protest outside of an iced attention facility

(02:44:42):
last fourth of July. Benjamin Song was sentenced to one
hundred years in prison. Song was convicted of attempted murder
for shooting toward a police officer who was pointing a
handgun at fleeing protesters. Marcilla Reda was sentenced to seventy
year in prison. Zachary Evitt's Autumn Hill, Savannah Batten, Elizabeth Soto,

(02:45:04):
and Megan Morris were sentenced to fifty years in prison
after being convicted of providing quote unquote material support to terrorists. Now,
some of these people weren't even involved in planning the protest,
but just knew others who were. One of the people
in this case wasn't even at the protest. Daniel Sanchez

(02:45:26):
des Strata, who was sentenced to thirty years in prison,
did not attend the protest, but was convicted of concealing
documents for moving a box of personal items and anarchisines
from one house to another that got him sentenced to
thirty years in prison. One of the judges, Judge O'Connor,
who was not the judge for the trial, said that
the maximum sentences are to quote, send a message to

(02:45:48):
anyone who shares similar ideologies.

Speaker 13 (02:45:51):
Yeah, these are brutal sentences, right, Like, Yeah, these are
the sort of things that you see in the potential
life a bitity, but it's in my experience, I haven't
seen many people get like maximum sentences, Like I'm familiar
with guys who are convicted of providing material support to
the Islamic State, for instance, who did not get sentences

(02:46:13):
anywhere near this duration.

Speaker 3 (02:46:15):
No, this is absolutely insane. Least, it is not unprecedented,
very clearly politically motivated, as the judge openly said during sentencing.

Speaker 2 (02:46:24):
Yeah, deliberately admitted it was.

Speaker 3 (02:46:26):
Yeah, like the Adam Laffin guy who planned to attack
power grids a few years ago was just sentenced to
twenty This is absurd, Like a song, sentence of one
hundred years is pretty insane itself, for even for being
convicted of attempted murder, but all of these material support
charges and concealing documents at thirty to seventy years is like.

Speaker 2 (02:46:48):
Yeah, it's outrageous. Yeah, it's a very clear attempt to
having a chilling it. Yeah, right, Like a's the goal here,
the goal with the with the prosecutions in Minneapolis as well,
Like yeah, you know, it's all this same part of
the stage strategy.

Speaker 3 (02:47:02):
Yeah, now, using conspiracy charges to rope in people to
this larger case, arguing that this conspiracy is evidenced through
reading zines, through wearing certain clothes at a protest, not
being ut out quote unquote Antifa, and then they don't
need to actually argue that every single person did a
specific violent crime, but justice association with each other can

(02:47:24):
lead to a conviction. And we are seeing this, you know,
copied in Minnesota where just like one or two people
are charged with doing violence like you know, kicking a vehicle.
But what links the fifteen defendants together in Minnesota are
these conspiracy charges? Yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:47:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 11 (02:47:39):
The thing that it reminds me the most of is
just is Haymarket, where you know, in a very similar way,
you have an attempt to not even necessarily go after
the people who did the thing. You have an attempt
to put the ideology on trial. I mean, the judge
explicitly says this, right, this is not a trial. This

(02:47:59):
is because something happened. This is specifically an attempt to
send the message. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, to send a message
into like stop resistance to everything the Troil adminstration has
been doing, and particularly to try to try to like
bring down a level of resistance to ice and border
patrols like raids and actions going forward.

Speaker 3 (02:48:20):
The defendants will absolutely need support for what it's going
to be a lengthy appeals process. Yeah. The worst case
scenario is going to require building a mass movement to
push for pardoning anti ice protesters, including the Prairie Line defendants,
in a post Trump government. Of A complicating factor in
this case is that some of these defendants are also

(02:48:41):
facing state charges, which a federal pardon would not cover
in Texas. Yeah, but rallying behind these people is of
the utmost urgency, same as all the anti ice protesters
around the country who are facing repression. I do want
to know that, like our previous coverage of Prairie Life,

(02:49:01):
my previous coverage focused on how the government used these
specific charges, how they use specific testimony and flimsy evidence
to successfully argue a conviction, while also mentioning that some
of the mistakes that the public defenders made during that case,
missing deadline stile motions, not calling witnesses. There is unique
aspects of this case, and I think knowing what those

(02:49:22):
are is important. When I was putting together that episode,
a lot of the coverage I saw talked about how
fucked up this situation is, and it really is right,
but I think it's also important to actually know how
the state is able to do this, like how they're
able to argue this in very specific ways, to understand
some of the unique aspects of this case, and to
know what this state and jurors considered relevant evidence saying

(02:49:46):
certain things in group chats, but also just being at
a protest with someone else wearing possibly matching clothing.

Speaker 9 (02:49:53):
Right.

Speaker 3 (02:49:53):
Understanding those specifics I think is also important. But going forward,
supporting these defendants, regardless of the can addiction is of
the utmost urgency. We will link to the Support Committee
for the Prairie Line Defendants and the donation link to
help with legal costs and other expenses resulting from the
state repression.

Speaker 13 (02:50:11):
Yeah, I'm curious people will have a lengthly challenging appeal
process ahead of them, like they will need significant legal support.

Speaker 7 (02:50:20):
Yeah, if they're going to get out of prison.

Speaker 13 (02:50:22):
And you know, like if we look at like previous
movements in the US, think like Biden pardon Leonard Peltier
after decades right yep of him being in prison, like
most of the rest of his life was spent in jail,
and we can come to contrast set to have Trump
pardon the J six is very rapidly.

Speaker 3 (02:50:40):
No, specifically in a in a post J six pardon world,
and considering the popular resistance to ICE, Yeah, I think
it's it's it's it's it's imperative that we go forward
with this specific intention of even if the appeals fail,
an anti as movement needs to include these people in
their advocacy and getting them pardons in the future.

Speaker 9 (02:51:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:51:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 11 (02:51:04):
And I think it is also just worth saying that,
you know, I think there's there's an extent to which
this repression would have happened regardless, but part of the
reason why this is happening, and part of the reason
why the judge is saying the stuff, part of the
reason why they find the need to try to do
a chilling effect and you know, use fear and terror
to stop anything else, you know, to stop any of

(02:51:24):
the resistance, is that the resistance is working.

Speaker 9 (02:51:26):
Right.

Speaker 11 (02:51:27):
That doesn't mean that people aren't getting hurt in unbelievably
sort of hideous ways. It doesn't mean that deportations are continuing,
but they have not been able to do the things
that they wanted to do.

Speaker 2 (02:51:38):
Now, this is defensive lashing out.

Speaker 11 (02:51:40):
Yeah, yeah, you know, there is an extent to which
they're doing this because they're losing and they know it,
and they have something has to happen in order to
change the balance of how this whole sort of conflict
between ice and people's communities has been unfolding. And this
is one of the things they're trying to do to
do that.

Speaker 2 (02:51:56):
Yeah, and more broadly, they're just trying to chill anything
that could become part of successful resistance. Like they understand
that anything that's public to the administration that looks bad
can make them look bad. Like that's why they're lashing
out at the fucking reflecting pool tool. Like the goal
is to just like to instill a sort of instinctive
fear of doing anything that could make the administration look bad.

(02:52:19):
They're trying to like force their own sort of like
less majest situation out through just like arresting people whenever
they embarrass the regime.

Speaker 3 (02:52:27):
Yeah, and specifically trying to criminalize common protest tactics and
picking specific cases like you know, Prairie Land and like
the fifteen defendants in Minneapolis, and rather than actually focusing
the majority of the case on alleged crimes, instead focusing
on Antifa as this scary specter, right is anarchism, violent militancy,

(02:52:49):
where just discussions or aesthetics of militancy is really what
is is really what the case is like resting on
and convincing a jury that these people are a scary
group of outside ATGE dictators, but by solidifying a conviction
that actually criminalizes what are legal protest tactics Like this
is the scariest part about the case in Minneapolis in
the Twin Cities is that most of that document is

(02:53:13):
covering legal like ICE like ICE Watch, rapid Response Networks,
right legal actions, but they're trying to criminalize people's coordination
to do that legal action by focusing on a group
that the government thinks is specifically, you know, militant or
has certain political beliefs.

Speaker 13 (02:53:31):
Yeah, I would say that the Minneapolis indictment is not
the Peri Land indictment like that, It's a very different thing,
totally and totally. Yeah, we made an episode and that
people go back and listen to it. But like I
think people, I understand the fear that people are feeling.
But like I want you to know that this isn't
every case going forward, right for this is a case,

(02:53:53):
yeah that they have had success and they extracted like
a really horrific burden. Most of the cases they bought
in Minnesota have been thrown out.

Speaker 3 (02:54:02):
The details and evidence of these cases are very, very different.
I'm only invoking the comparison because the strategy from the
DOJ is similar. Even if the specific details and evidence
in these cases do wide, they differ. And regardless of
those differences, I think both both the defendants in both
cases should receive the same amount of support.

Speaker 9 (02:54:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:54:22):
Like I mentioned, links for the support committee and the
donation link will be at the very top of the
description below. Let's go on a break and return for
more news.

Speaker 7 (02:54:46):
We are back when we're talking about Iran.

Speaker 13 (02:54:49):
We saw like a lot of back and forth over
the weekend about the MoU, about Trump threatening the Iranian delegation,
about them not signing it.

Speaker 3 (02:54:56):
The mu of Versai didn't didn't work out, So we
have an an MoU in place.

Speaker 13 (02:55:04):
Right at the time of writing, this rest on a
very fragile piece in Lebanon, and I want to read
something from Bengavia about Lebanon. He's a national security minister
in Israel. The last time we spoke about him, he
was physically assaulting people from the flotilla. I think I'm

(02:55:25):
just going to read this out. For every tier of
an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All
of Lebanon must burn, with all due respect to the Americans.
Israel must make it clear to the entire world that
the blood of our sons and the security of our
citizens are not forfeit.

Speaker 7 (02:55:40):
All of Lebanon must burn.

Speaker 13 (02:55:42):
Our supreme duty is to protect the citizens Visrael and
the soldiers the IDF, and this commitment takes presence over
every other consideration. I told the Prime Minister even in
a private meeting. So every tier of an Israeli mother,
a thousand Lebanese mothers, must weep enough with a ping
pong in the Middle East. You don't win with measured
responses and restraint. You need to go berserk, to obliterate,
to crush the terror. That's just a genocide post like

(02:56:04):
there's there's.

Speaker 2 (02:56:05):
Insane genocidal, yes, super genocide, Like.

Speaker 7 (02:56:08):
He might as well just say, like, what I want
is a genocide. The genocide is what I want.

Speaker 13 (02:56:12):
Like in other historically documented genocides, it is relatively rare
to have the person just being like, we're doing a
genocide over here.

Speaker 2 (02:56:21):
This is a genocide, seems like a good dame, like.

Speaker 13 (02:56:26):
It is historically somewhat remarkable to just being I guess
we want to wipe them all out. Actually, if anyone
wonders if this is a genocide or not, absolutely like
you will not find it clearer statement of genocidal intent
than this. And so the Iran peace deal being contingent
on Israel at least finding peace in Lebanon right now

(02:56:46):
they're occupying something Lebanon, it doesn't look like they're leaving,
is contingent on this government, which includes someone who is
openly genocidal. That finding a peace deal with Lebanon, which
I mean, what kind of piece. What kind of compromise
can you come to with that person? Israel continues to
be the force that continues to destabilize the region and

(02:57:08):
cause more death and suffering. Let's move back to America.
The Senate did pass a war powers resolution this week,
came through from the House. A resolution here it expresses
a will of Congress. It's slightly different for a piece
of legislation. It is a setback for Trump, right, like
it's not nothing, especially because some Republicans supported it, ran

(02:57:29):
Paul Lisa Makowski, Susan Collins, and Bill Cassidy. Of course
John Fetterman cross the other way because he is the
marga Republican. He just has a blue badge next to him.
So in twenty nineteen, probably the most analogous kind of
recent example, Trump vetoed resolution concerning US support for the
Saudi led coalition in Yemen. Right, he will likely ignore

(02:57:50):
this history. Understanders will know that we didn't stop supporting
to Saudi's right, and he is very unlikely to change
his policy about this, but he is clearly very upset
about it. And this is important because Trump has a
record As we go into the mid terms of attempting
to destroy the careers of any Republican who he considers

(02:58:13):
to have spoken out against him. Right, So, in a
general sense, with the war, Congress would have to approve
it within sixty days, sometimes for national security reasons. It
could be extended by the eggective branch in ninety days. Well,
the White House is arguing here is that the April
ceasefire means that that clock has stopped, and that the
War Powers resolution therefore became to a war that no
longer exists. And if they start again, it will be

(02:58:35):
a completely different, separate and unrelated thing, and that club
would start again from zero. Yeah, Jesus crazy, but that's
kind of magical thinking. But that's what they're going with. Right.
Just before we recorded, it was reported that Trump had
a lunch, like a closed door lunch with GP centers,
which resulted in him getting into a screaming match with
some of those senators, including Cassidy. Clearly, the peace deal,

(02:58:59):
the forty points that we that we spoke about last
time have been extremely unpopular with the Republicans, right because
Trump poventually caved on like Grans coming out of this
perhaps strategically in a better position than it went into this.
And now, obviously the US has done massive damage to
Iranian infrastructure to kill people, right, but in terms of

(02:59:21):
actually their military capacity, it seems to be a much
less degrade than we initially thought. It looks like this
continues to be one of the areas where Trump is
bleeding GOP support, and so it is interesting to keep
track of this. Let's move on to talk about immigration now.
So the DC District Court had a ruling this week

(02:59:43):
in order the government to facilitate the return of a
man mister Martinez and Dino, that they had deported to
ondore US. The quote from the opinion I'm going to
quote kind of extendedly, hear, I have removed like when
you get these opinions right, they will have intex citations
for other cour cases. Never removed those from reading clarity.
After being arrested and detained in Montana by immigration authorities

(03:00:06):
and moved between at least six detention centers in different
states across the country, he seemingly disappeared. He was not
permitted to contact his attorneys for more than ten days,
and neither Immigration and Customs Enforcement nor Customs and Border
Protection would tell his attorneys where he was or in
which agency's custody, despite repeated requests, Not until his attorneys

(03:00:28):
filed this lawsuit, initially seeking only a temporary restraining order
directing defendants to tell them where and in whose custody
plaintiff was located, did the government disclose that he had
been removed to Honduras the same day, purportedly because he
had voluntarily agreed to that departure. So this guy was
kept without contact to his lawyer, who was trying to

(03:00:50):
contact him and who he was asking to talk to,
for ten days. He disputes in this case that he
voluntarily agreed to depart because he was deprived of access
to his legal team because he wasn't able to understand
the documents he was asked to sign. I can say
from numerous interviews I've conducted with people who have been
in detention that there is a great deal of pressure

(03:01:11):
to sign those documents, and they're there all the time,
right like in the middle of the night, when you
can't sleep and it's freezing fucking cold, that document is
right there in the wall for you to sign. The
court ordered the government to quote ensure that his case
is handled as it would have been had he not
been improperly sent to Honduras. And they cited out at
aggasi of US is gnome right, so they're using that

(03:01:33):
like a precedent here. That doesn't mean that he gets
to come home and he's not going to be pursued
by immigration, right. That means that they have to process
him and not hide him away from his lawyer for
ten days, because effectively what they did was hit this
man from his lawyers for more than a week and
then forced him to sign a document he couldn't meaningfully
consent to. Some background here, he entered his fourteen year

(03:01:57):
old without family members. I don't like the term and
a minor because I've spent time with Margaret's traveling to
the US, and there are often children who are traveling
without their family, but they're still accompanied by somebody or
somebody who's just decided to take care of them.

Speaker 7 (03:02:10):
But that would be the legal term here, right.

Speaker 13 (03:02:12):
He was granted SIJ Special Immigrant Juvenile status, and then
when he got back to Honduras, he contacted his lawyer
filed enough for David, stating that the paperwork he signed
when he was detained was not explained to him and
he was quote told the only option he had attention
was to sign for the paperwork. He quote asked to
speak with his attorneys for days between nine days between

(03:02:35):
March thirty first and April ninth, and his quote requests
were ignored or denied, and he quote told immigration officials
that he was afraid to return to Honduras and wanted
an interview or a hearing with the judge.

Speaker 7 (03:02:47):
These requests were also quote ignored or denied.

Speaker 13 (03:02:50):
He also says he felt terribly mistreated due to poor
food and no access to showers. He also gave a
different himeline of deportation than that which government is entered
in his case. Just think that he may not have
entered the country at the time the government said he
was out of their custody, which is important, right because
the government saying we don't have him anymore. His timeline

(03:03:13):
when they landed, how long they sat on the tarmac,
when they transited the border there is different from the
one that the government provided. It's good to see this
case right, but he will still face an uphill battle.
I also want to talk very briefly about Blanche versus Lao.
This is a ruling that returning Green card holders are
now considered or can be considered, applicants for admission, which

(03:03:34):
means they can be placed on immigration parole when entering
the country. A case he potentially mister Lao, who returned
to twenty twelve and was placed on parole while facing charge,
is related to trademark counterfeiting. I do want to go
back and reference their date again, twenty twelve. This is
something that happened when Barack Obama was president. Barack Obama
loved to deport people. Anybody who's telling you that it

(03:03:57):
isn't the case is lying to you.

Speaker 7 (03:03:59):
Missed a.

Speaker 13 (03:04:00):
Lao later pled guilty and therefore was swiftly praised in
removal proceedings because the government argued he was inadmissible. So
when you are parolled, you're not technically admitted. You are
parolled pending admission. Therefore, if you're found to be inadmissible,
it is quicker to begin that removal. So this is

(03:04:21):
where the Supreme Court had to decide. Right, Generally, Green
card holders are considered to have already been admitted when
they are returning.

Speaker 9 (03:04:30):
Right.

Speaker 13 (03:04:31):
This ruling, though, will have serious consequences for lpr's legal
permanent residents. Green card holders. Right, this pertains to crimes
involving moral turpitude. I spoke about these a great deal,
and I don't think we already have the space or
time to go into them here. But it's going to
say that it is a broad and nebulous category because
quote from the Supreme Court opinion here, nothing in the

(03:04:52):
Ina required the border officer to have a clear and
convincing evidence that Lao had committed a crime involving moral
turpitude before deeming him an appetit for admission. So mister
Lao had not been convicted of that crime, right he
had been charged with that crime. Mister Law is still
contesting whether this particular crime does involve moral turpitude, it seems.
But nonetheless, this is a significant thing that green card

(03:05:14):
holds legal public residents need to.

Speaker 3 (03:05:15):
Be aware of.

Speaker 13 (03:05:17):
That's it for James reads a bunch of court documents
this week. I'll link to all the court docks in
the thing you guys want to get deep in there.

Speaker 11 (03:05:26):
So another extremely bleak news. We're moving to the climate
front where we are seeing a whole bunch of heat
waves across the world. I want to start in India
and Pakistan, so India has been dealing with very very
serious heat wave for a lot of parts of May
and June. Temperatures just in parts of New Delhi have
hit one hundred and twenty three degrees fahrenheit, which is

(03:05:49):
a nightmare.

Speaker 2 (03:05:49):
Yeah, that's really bad.

Speaker 3 (03:05:51):
Yeah, Yeah, in New Delhi has consistently been over one
hundred degrees.

Speaker 2 (03:05:55):
We're also talking about over one hundred degrees in one
of the most human and worst AQ Yeah. Places. That's
just hell, yeah, that's hell.

Speaker 3 (03:06:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (03:06:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 11 (03:06:03):
And as we're going to get you in a second,
in places where people don't have access to air conditioning,
and especially the you know, the the more rural and
the more like the further out you get, you're dealing
with people where you don't have good access to electricity,
and electricity grids tend to fail on the heat, especially
when it is is hot and also this humid just

(03:06:27):
that we know of the direct reporting from the Indian
Health Ministry is reporting one hundred dead from the heat.

Speaker 3 (03:06:33):
It's probably much larger than that.

Speaker 11 (03:06:36):
One of the very consistent things when you when you're
reporting on this, and you know the PPC, for example,
we'll talk to researchers, is that, yeah, the deaths are
probably way higher, but there's real problems with how heat
related deaths are categorized, because the thing that kills you
is the heat, but you're dying from like another sort
of like health factor you had going on, So we're

(03:06:57):
probably not going to know what the mat attitude of
this was. For a pretty long time, things have been
bad enough that almost half of the states in India
have either and it depends a lot on the region,
but a lot of these places have just straight up
shut down their schools or have revised the schedules for
their schools and effectively just started the summer break early

(03:07:18):
because it is too hot to send kids to classrooms.
Sometimes there's been like zoom school all all sort of
stuff people probably are familiar from from like the lockdowns.
But yeah, the BBC did a report from Bando, which
is a district in Utu Pradesh, where there was a
full week in May where it was between one hundred

(03:07:38):
and sixteen and one hundred and eighteen degrees, which is
just a nightmare and the other extremely dangerous part. And
this is also true with the other places we want
to be talking about, but is particularly has been true
in a lot of places in India is that it's
not really cooling at night, and that as we've discussed
on this show before in a whole bunch of different segments,
but it's worth repeating every single time it is hot.

(03:08:02):
That's one of the ways that things get very, very
dangerous because when there art periods you can cool off
at night. That is like, that is part of the
way that that heat stroken, deaths from heat injury are
exacerbated intensified.

Speaker 3 (03:08:15):
Now there's also a heat wave going on across Europe.

Speaker 2 (03:08:20):
Yeah, a lot of heat waves to go around here.

Speaker 11 (03:08:22):
Yeah, fortunately, yeah, yeah, oh yeah, yeah. So both the
UK and France are seeing their hottest weather on record.
France saw their hottest day on record and their hottest
night on record, which is extremely bad. Forty people have
died in France. I think it's the beginning of June,
just from drownings from people trying to escape the heat.

(03:08:44):
Got that's really yeah, that's brutal. Yeah, and there's also
been a record temperatures places in Spain. You're seeing temperatures
that should not be happening, not just at sea level,
but up in the mountains. You're seeing temperatures that are
astounding and temperatures that you know, the architecture of these

(03:09:08):
places and they're electrical grids, and just like do you
have air conditioning? Right, Like a lot of the places
with these ways are striking, are not places that they've
necessarily hit before, and they're not designed to handle this
kind of heat.

Speaker 7 (03:09:22):
Yeah, I mean people haven't familiar.

Speaker 13 (03:09:24):
Most of our houses in Europe built differently from houses
in the US, and they're not particularly designed, like especially
as you get into Spain, like some of the designed
with shade in mind, but not with like a temperature
conservation insulation, and so it's specifically a conditioning, right.

Speaker 7 (03:09:39):
Air conditioning is much much less common than it is
in the United States.

Speaker 2 (03:09:42):
Yep.

Speaker 11 (03:09:43):
Yeah, It's also worth noting that, like one of the
things is intensifying this in a lot of places in India.

Speaker 2 (03:09:48):
But this is true.

Speaker 11 (03:09:49):
The more into the developing world you are, like the
more fucked you are in a lot of ways about this.
But like you're also dealing with a lot of places
where just the trees have been cut down for industrial
and sort of mining purposes, and that also is increasing temperatures.
And I want to close by just saying that, right,
we're seeing the hottest temperatures on record. And this is

(03:10:13):
what's happening under one point four degrees of global warming. Right,
Like the versions of this where we're supposed to be
stabilizing are you know, the sort of was supposed to
be the sort of habitable zone. Right, The ca scenarios
where we like quote unquote deal with climate change are
like two degrees of warming, two point five degrees of warming.

Speaker 3 (03:10:35):
It's already this bad. It is just going to get worse.

Speaker 11 (03:10:40):
And this is one of the just persistent kind of
quiet crises that is happening in the back top of
everything else, which is that, Yeah, the way that we're
powering all of our industries is causing the world to burn.

Speaker 13 (03:10:54):
Yeah, complicated further by like austerity measures and make it
harder for people to fund cooling their homes in Europe, right,
and the things you might need to buy or do
to keep your house cool. Margaret and I mad an
episode a while ago about heat wave. So you're looking
for some resources, you might be able to find some there.

Speaker 3 (03:11:11):
Yeah, let's go and break and then we will return
for a few more news stories, hopefully not all of
them depressing.

Speaker 2 (03:11:18):
Don't worry, I've got a happy one. Yay, we're back,
and as promised, I have some less depressing stuff to
talk to you all about. Oh sorry, no, I messed up.

(03:11:40):
We're going to talk about the deaths of millions. So
if you can recall back to the first months of
the Trump administration, in like February third, twenty twenty five,
this is a little bit after Musk started his you know,
the early stages of his work with DOGE. He tweeted, quote,
we spent the weekend feeding USAID at the wood Shipper.
I think we all remember that that great moment. And

(03:12:01):
this been widely criticized, and there are numerous articles, studies,
and reports that have come out and made the case
that the cuts to USAID that Doge made have resulted
in a tremendous amount of human death and suffering. Musk
has consistently denied this. Earlier this week, he quote tweeted
a fan who had written, if cutting USAID killed a child,
a single child, it would be covered by the media

(03:12:22):
like the biggest story in history. Musk added exactly in
his quote tweet. Now, there actually have been several stories
that specify individual children that have died because of cuts
to USAID and we'll be talking about some of them.
Oh yeah, But I want to quote from a recent
article by Matt Novak and Gizmoto, the Trillionaire Oligarchy, if
it insisted that USAID is the one that's killed people,

(03:12:43):
retweeting a conspiracy theory from Rand Paul that Anthony Fauci
was to blame for the COVID nineteen pandemic because federal
funds were being used to conduct gain a function research.
Usa'd money killed millions, must wrote Tuesday. Admittedly, US intelligence
agencies now endorsed the idea that COVID nineteen escaped from
a lab, but that only happened after President Trump took
office for a second time. Before Trump took control, intel

(03:13:04):
agencies were largely skeptical of the idea. So you're already
seeing like the dimensions of sort of the spin here
to the all of the many deaths as a result
of and this, this, this will come down to not
just you know, the USA cut cuts. But anytime this
is pointed out is the counterfact will be well, but
you know, actually, these these these groups were killing way
more people because of and then insert this insane conspiracy theory. Right,

(03:13:26):
we've reached the point where they're now load bearing. Ye,
both for like the personal like mental health of the
richest man in the world, and for the federal government itself.
Like the conspiracy theories aren't just a thing that are
being sign posted to get votes. They're a load bearing
part of the ideology, because otherwise everything's a failure. Right,

(03:13:47):
good stuff, Glad we're here. So Novak's article noted, and
as I opened the episode by mentioning, a ton of
people have done the important work of documenting just how
many human beings have been killed as a result of
the cuts that Elon muh was integral in pushing. We'll
talk more about that later, but I want to give
one example from a Washington Post article published in September
of twenty twenty five that does specify a single child

(03:14:09):
that was killed as a result of these cuts. Quote.
Fever ravaged the body of five year old Suzic Kenyabi
as she sweated and shivered on a thin mattress and
a two room clinic in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The pig tailed girl who had liked pretty dresses, was
battling malaria and desperately needed medication that could save her life.
That medication already purchased by a US taxpayer funded program,

(03:14:30):
was tantalizingly close a little more than seven miles away,
but it hadn't reached the clinic where Susa was being
treated because President Donald Trump's suspension of four and eight
had thrown supply chains into chaos. The injection Susan needed
had traveled thousands of miles to the Central African nation
Usaight and other records show, only to be stranded in
a regional distribution warehouse in the same city where she
was gasping for air. Less than a week after her

(03:14:51):
symptoms began, Susa was dead. Congolese government data shows that
in Susa's province, deaths caused by malaria nearly tripled in
the first half of this year, So keep that in
mind during this next bet. That's just one of many
stories we may I think I will cover this at
some point on bTB in more detail. But a couple
of days ago, you know, the same week that we're
recording this episode, Roekana, a Democrat from California, went on

(03:15:15):
the Ihip News podcast, which I am not familiar with,
but is apparently a sister podcast to what the Hill
calls the notable. I've had it podcast. I don't know
who any of these people are, but whatever. Kinda was asked, like,
what will your party do if the Democrats win the midterms?
Here's what the Hill says happen next. I do believe

(03:15:35):
that once we take power, there has to be accountability.
There needs to be accountability for Elon Musk Kinda told Welch,
you know, they're celebrating that he created forty four hundred millionaires,
but they don't talk about the four and a half
million children around the world who he possibly sentenced to
death by dismantling the US Agency for International Development USA.
Kinda added, he needs to answer for that. He needs
to be subpoened, he needs to face investigation. He needs

(03:15:56):
to answer for what he did with the Department of
Government Efficiency. Kanna's comments were quickly exerted from the podcast
itself and shared all around the Internet until they reached Musk,
and he made a comment of his own on the
website that he owns. The standard applied by DOGE was
very simple and easy. Provide contact information for the recipients
of AIDS that we can confirm it's not fraudulent. The
tech Trillionaire set in one of the posts. The reality

(03:16:19):
is that money was being sent to corrupt politicians under
the guise of AID liars and stock inside traders like Row.
The robbers should be in prison. Musk went on to
claim that it's time to sue this liar.

Speaker 7 (03:16:28):
It would be great if he sued them. That would
be a fantastic out.

Speaker 3 (03:16:32):
Great.

Speaker 2 (03:16:32):
I'd be fine with that. It looks like the direction
Roe wants to go as much dumber because everything, if
every one of us politics is annoying. Kanna responded to
this by challenging Elon Musk to a televised debate, and
I'm the fuck all, I'm not gonna say what I think.
I'm frustrated anyway. Instead of going into that, I want
to talk about where the number rows sided came from,

(03:16:53):
because that is worth discussing. It has claimed four and
a half million children who might die as a result
of the USAID cuts. On January first of twenty twenty five,
the UCA Fielding School of Public Health carried out research
that found that over the prior twenty years USAID funding
it helped save ninety one million lives. Obviously, that same
study also concluded that the massive cuts to usaid under

(03:17:15):
Trump would imperil that work, and they calculated that the
cuts would cause fourteen million additional deaths around the world
by twenty thirty, including the deaths of more than four
and a half million children under five. So, if you
look back to rose phrasing, I think he actually did
a reasonably good job of like citing this information, because
what Rose said was they don't talk about the four
and a half million children around the world who he

(03:17:35):
possibly sends to death by dismantling USA. Right, That's a
reasonably accurate way to sum that up. So I'll give
Rose some points there, although I'll take a couple of
points away because this phrasing does somewhat emit that these
are predicted future deaths. He's not like not saying that,
but he could have been a little clearer here. Yeah,
And I might also say because I think you could
argue that he undercounted the severity of what that study says,

(03:17:57):
because the study just notes that four and a half
million children under five could die as a result of
these cuts, which suggests way more than four and a
half million total children deaths. Right, there are a lot
of children who are over five.

Speaker 7 (03:18:11):
Yeah, Yeah, most of the children are of a fund.

Speaker 2 (03:18:13):
Most children are probably over five years old. I do
want to quote from UCLA Studies again here, just to
clarify where their data came from. Quote the London based
journal The Lance. It analyzed data from one hundred and
thirty three countries. The work combined to approaches a retrospective
evaluation covering the years twenty one to twenty twenty one,
and forecasting models projecting impacts through twenty thirty. Based on
reductions to the budget of USAIGHT, US citizens contribute about

(03:18:37):
seventeen cents per day to US eight about sixty four
dollars per year. I think most people would support continued
USAID funding if they knew just how effective such a
small contribution can be to saving millions of lives, said
doctor James Machenko. And I agree with that. I think
those are the kind of numbers that we should be
putting out, which is like, this is how little money
it costs per US tax repair to save this huge

(03:18:58):
number of lives around the world. It's worth digging into
some of the more specific reporting we've seen on the
consequences of these USAID cuts, because the reporting that Roe
was citing is just predicting future possible deaths. Yeah, but
there's documentation, as I cited earlier, about the people that
Elon Musk and Doge have already helped to kill or
write or who have the cuts that they have championed

(03:19:20):
have led to these people's deaths, would be the most
accurate way of saying that and celebrated like yeah, and
celebrated it right they have. So again, I'll probably do
a whole bTB and all this stuff later, but I
want to discuss one more story which was published earlier
this year in the New York Times. The title that
article was in Afghanistan, a Trail of hunger and death
behind usaid cuts. Trump last year very suddenly cut usaid

(03:19:45):
to Afghanistan. You know, even after our twenty twenty one
pull out from the country, we had continued to send
a significant amount about a billion dollars worth of aid
a year, which was more than a third of all
of the aid flowing into Afghanistan. So given the status
of that country, you can see how load bearing that
is to their life infrastructure of health. Cutting that has
caused the worst child starvation crisis in twenty five years

(03:20:06):
in Afghanistan. And this catastrophe has been exacerbated by the
closing of four hundred and fifty health centers as a
result of these cuts. Here's a selection from that Times article.
The isolated province of Daikundi has lost many of its
health clinics to the US eight cuts. The clinic in Naleje,
surrounded by parched fields of almond and mulberry trees, was
a lifeline for eight hundred and fifty families. The villager
say it's closure has hurt children the most. Sakiya, three

(03:20:28):
months old, has been vomiting since birth and her condition
is deteriorating, said her mother, Sharifa Kowari. For weeks, she
hoped her husband would bring back enough money from the
coal mine where he worked to finance a taxi ride
to the nearest clinic, but he said his pay was
barely enough to put food on the table. The loss
of the clinic erased years of monitoring that had saved
children's lives. When I was giving birth, we were losing babies,
said Nick Bocht, miss Kowari's mother in law. One would

(03:20:50):
hope that younger mothers these days wouldn't face that. And
another tragedy contained that article quote In twenty twenty four,
the United States funded over half of Afghanistan's nutrient and
agricultural programs. Food and security has skyrocketed since last year's cuts.
More than seventeen million Afghans, forty percent of the population
now face acute levels of hunger, two million more than
last year. Seven province has faced critical food and security,

(03:21:13):
the final stage before famine, according to the Integrated Food
Security Phase Classification, a group of international organizations that the
United Nations and aid agencies rely on to monitor global hunger.
None were at this level a year ago. Mount nutrition
is also hitting cities, affecting the most vulnerable, the very young, sick,
and elderly first, as it does elsewhere. Muhammad Ali, nine
months old, was one of a dozen toddlers way lating

(03:21:34):
their dozing in a Kabul nutrition ward on a recent morning.
He was too weak to ingest milks at his mother,
her husband's meager and commis a housekeeper, means they often
eat only once a day. And there's millions of stories
like this already, and just to hit I mean, the
number of deaths already as a result of these cuts
is hideous and undeniable, and one of the counters. You'll
see when this get brought up to Musk and his

(03:21:54):
fawning fans, is that like, oh, the money was just
going to corrupt dictators and local rulers and like no
damage that were already seeing shows that it wasn't. There
was aiden place that was catching some people and it's
not catching them now and the human consequences of this
have been atrocious, and that's that's just inarguable. Yeah, anyway,
that's all I got for today.

Speaker 13 (03:22:14):
I remember that time receiving calls and messages from people
in the in the Burmese tiaspar and on the Thai
Burmese border about one of the only clinics where people
could deliver their babies closing down and people literally going
to the clinic finally it locked like inaccessible to them
and delivering their babies on the street outside. Like this

(03:22:35):
is within maybe days hours after the USA, after after
la Must tweeted about how he didn't go to a
party because he was too busy acting this shit like yeah,
I've seen usad all over the world, and yeah, undoubtedly
not every penny that goes into that goes directly to
buying food, because that's not how that shit works, right,

(03:22:55):
People have to administer this, People have to get things done.
Sometimes the way you get things done is through things
that we would consider corruption. I don't particularly care as
long as it results in the person who needs food
getting food, or who needs medicine getting medicine. And like,
there are of course other ways to achieve that end,
and I think we should pursue them. But like, this

(03:23:17):
is one of the worst things that the Trump administration
has done, one of the cruelest and most evil things
that the United States has done in a very long time.
And like the USAID often crowded out other agencies, right,
so that like local networks, local NGOs, other NGOs couldn't
exist in that space, And then bait and switching like

(03:23:37):
this is particularly evil for.

Speaker 3 (03:23:40):
Our last main story, something that is I arguably arguably
less depressing. On Tuesday night, we saw the first real
test of Zoramumdani and New York City DSA's political power.
All three of the Mamdani endorsed candidates, one the Congressional
Democratic Crime I'm Mary, and nine out of ten insurgent

(03:24:03):
candidates on the DSA slate won their races for Congress,
State Assembly, and state Senate. These insurgent candidates are non
income people challenging seats. Now, as for the Mamdani slate,
former City comptrol Or Bradlander beat incumbent Congressman Dan Goldman
with sixty five point eight percent of the vote in

(03:24:23):
District ten, which is Park Slope to Lower Manhattan. Dan
Goldman is an establishment Democrat who's supported by Apak. He
got famous for Trump's first impeachment hearings. Oh how well
that went. Bradlander opposes a pack has long called Israel's
actions in Gaza genocide, but also describes himself as a

(03:24:44):
quote unquote liberal Zionist, the one that would vote against
offensive weapons sales to Israel. When campaigning with Mamdani and
Palestinian activists Mohsen Madui, who's been targeted by the Trump administration,
Bradlander said, quote as a proud Jewish New Yorker, I
will join you in that fight to end occupation and
apartheid and genocide. Lander's victory here is a pretty significant

(03:25:09):
upset he was projected to when he was doing good
in the polls, but unseating Goldman is not a small feat.
The second congression race, I want to talk about is
in Bushwick, Greenpoint and Williamsburg, and this was technically an
empty seat, but the outgoing congresswoman threw her backing behind
progressive Antonio Renoso. The Brooklyn Bureau President Mom Donnie, and

(03:25:32):
the DSA backed Claire Valdez, a state assembly member and
a union organizer. There was a huge organizing push for
Claire in the weeks leading up to the election. There's
a massive ground game from DSA, three hundred thousand doors knocked. Meanwhile,
a dark money superpack dropped up to a million dollars
in the last week of the election to blast pro

(03:25:55):
Renosso ads and Renosso had backing up a bunch of
unions and the Working Families Party. More kind of like
typical progressive democratic establishment organizations in New York. This is
the quote unquote like a comedy corridor. This is like
the kind of one of the further left districts in
the country. And Ronoso is a progressive figure, but Claire

(03:26:17):
was absolutely running to his left and had support from
the UAW as well as the DSA, and come election day,
Claire won with fifty six point one percent of the vote,
while Renoso earned thirty five point eight percent. But the
biggest upset of the night was in the thirteenth District,

(03:26:39):
Upper Manhattan and parts of the West Bronx community. Organizer
Deriliza of the La Chavier beat the chair of the
Congressional Hispanic Concus, Adriano Espayat. Espayot has been a powerhouse
in New York City politics for thirty years. He's deeply
tied to the New York City Democratic political establishment, and

(03:26:59):
this was the closest race. Avila Chavier won with forty
nine point four percent of the vote to Espayot's forty
five point nine percent. Avila Chavier has been very active
in pro Palestinian organizing in New York City, including the
Columbia Encampments. Pro Espayot attack ads against her highlighted a

(03:27:19):
tweet she wrote a few years ago reading quote unquote
fuck Kamala. Harris Apak pumped six hundred and fifty thousand
dollars into a pro Espayot superpack, which spent almost three
million dollars to help re elect him, and in total,
Espiot received over seven million from the Real Estate Wall
Street Pro Israel lobby and from GOP donors, as well

(03:27:41):
as a collection of superpacks in the lead up to
this primary, things were getting pretty ugly. In response to
a campaign speech where Mamdani quoted jes K's translation of
Gramscy quote the old world is dying and the new
world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters,
before discussing how A and super PACs are using dark
money to hide the identity of donors while blanketing the

(03:28:04):
airways in bad pay attacks. In response to this speech,
New Jersey Democratic House Rep. Josh Gottheimer responded, monsters, dark
money a hidden hand turning us against each other. Swap
a pack for Jews, and it's the oldest anti Semitic
conspiracy theory in the books. Unquote it.

Speaker 7 (03:28:27):
You'll make up a bunch of shit and it means
a different thing.

Speaker 3 (03:28:29):
Yeah, if you swap this word for this word you
changed for this.

Speaker 13 (03:28:33):
Yeah, if you said something completely different, it would have
a different meaning.

Speaker 3 (03:28:37):
But Mamdani has faced multiple questions about this in the
past few days, and I think he has answered them
fairly well. But yeah, people trying to insinuate that dark
money is like an antisemitic term when it just refers
to like an actual process of hiding the identity of
donors to a super pack.

Speaker 2 (03:28:56):
Yeah, and a term people who have been using for
twenty years.

Speaker 3 (03:28:59):
It's a real it's a real term.

Speaker 2 (03:29:02):
There's a book called Dark Funny. It's a term people
have been using for forever.

Speaker 3 (03:29:06):
It's completely absurd. But things got way worse than this.
While campaigning, Daria Lezo was harassed by people yelling quote
unquote Jew hater, I'm gonna win, and someone following her
around screaming she's Haitian.

Speaker 2 (03:29:26):
Jesus, Jesus CHRISTI here.

Speaker 3 (03:29:30):
Racial animis continue to be weaponized in the District thirteen election.
A senior advisor to Representative Espayot, who is then on leave,
went on a Spanish language podcast to say that Mamdani
wanted to change the racial demographics of Washington Heights Northern
Manhattan by making it quote no longer a bastion of

(03:29:51):
the Dominican community unquote, but instead a quote unquote bastion
of the Haitian Muslim community allied to him.

Speaker 13 (03:30:00):
Oh boy, Anti Haitian bigotry specifically among the Americans is
a real and vicious thing. Where We've made a whole
podcast about this a couple of weeks ago. But I
did wonder when they swear someone was shouting she's Haitian.

Speaker 3 (03:30:13):
If that was what was happening there, Yes, and that
was definitely weaponized by campaign advisors and volunteers going into
this race. Darielzer herself is a child of Dominican immigrants,
She's Afro Latina. But this advisor's invocation of this great
replacement theory style attack is an extremely disgusting play.

Speaker 13 (03:30:33):
Yeah, this exists in the discourse in the Dominican Republic,
to be clear, and like it's no, they didn't, they
didn't whip that one out in air.

Speaker 3 (03:30:40):
But politicians from the Dominican Republic echoed this rhetoric on
X the everything app in specific reference to this District
thirteen election. Come election day, Spaiyot's canvassers screamed at Dai
lees of voters and volunteers, quote, Dominicans only go to
Cuba if you want communist shut up, get educated. We

(03:31:02):
don't want Islam here either. Were Christians here unquote Jesus Christ.
Very ugly weaponization of racial nationalism. Yeah, now this did
not work. Terry Halisa one in what is a massive
upset and her Palestinian activism was a big part of
her campaign and prove that anti Israel politics do have

(03:31:25):
a strong place in the Democratic Party moving forward, and
to do that you have to unseat these A pack
backed candidates. This was a really big night for New
York City DSAY, and this election has cemented that New
York City, ESSAY is possibly the strongest political machine in
the city, at least in terms of elections right and
if you want to look at political power more broadly,

(03:31:48):
it's like the New York City DSA and like the
NYPD right now there are like strong dueling factions and
part of Zornmandani's mayorship is a manifestation of those contradictions.
But also based on this sweep of DSA candidates going
against establishment Democrat incumbents, people are also reconsidering Zoron and
the DSA's decision to curb Councilman Chaose's primary challenge against

(03:32:11):
Hakeem Jeffries. Yeah, who knows how that would have gone.
Possibly she could have tapped into this incredible momentum and
beaten House Minority Leader Hakim Jeffries. That could have certainly
been possible. DSA was also pretty thinly stretched this election.
They had a lot of stuff going on, and it's
possible that a primary of this scale would have prohibited

(03:32:32):
their ability to win some of these other elections. We
don't know. I don't think it's super useful to retroactively
speculate so much, but this sweep is useful information going
forward that supports the idea that there is a real
hunger to unseat these establishment democratic figures, and that has
been proven Tuesday night in New York City.

Speaker 13 (03:32:53):
It's the supporter opposite of what we've seen in California, right,
which is like the Democrat Party doubling down without as
many successful left primary challenges.

Speaker 3 (03:33:05):
Yeah, and I mean New York City, DA say, is
like a uniquely highly organized like faction in this city
like that. The fact that it was able to outorganize
the Working Families Party is significant.

Speaker 8 (03:33:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:33:16):
Yeah, and to a pretty to a pretty extensive degree.
In Bushwick, the Comedy Cord or Green Point Williamsburg.

Speaker 13 (03:33:24):
There's still space for Pinos attempts to run into the
Working Families Party and we run a spoiler, but we'll
see how it goes.

Speaker 3 (03:33:32):
Yeah, and I mean if specifically, if Darie Olasa gets
into Congress, which it is almost certain that she will
based on how this night went she could very likely
be the farthest left congress member in the history of
the country, or at least in the past like fifty years,
like significantly to the left of of AOC, and like
the campaign itself was significantly to the left of AOC's campaign. Yeah, anyway,

(03:33:54):
that is that is what happened in New York Tuesday night.

Speaker 7 (03:33:58):
Cool.

Speaker 2 (03:33:59):
I guess last we should talk about a couple of
mass shootings. Yeah, that have unfortunately occurred in the last week.
Two mass shootings that I wanted to talk about. One
happened just the day before we are recording this. So
on June twenty third of twenty twenty six in Montreal.

Speaker 3 (03:34:18):
Twenty five year old Seth Hatfield of Lethbridge, Virginia allegedly
started shooting from a hotel window in the Codine borough
of Montreal. Footage posted to social media shows the shooter
firing at police on street level before being shot and
killed himself. Two other people were killed during this incident,

(03:34:38):
a police officer and a civilian.

Speaker 2 (03:34:40):
There's a manifesto. It's about one hundred and four pages
that is out. I have not gotten to read the
whole thing yet, but early reporting on it suggests It's
a lot of in cell type rhetoric, a lot of
discussion about like how it's unfair that women are you know,
hypergamus and going for all of this like tiny member
of attractive guys and so this huge now it's very

(03:35:03):
normal like in cell stuff. He like lists out the
different like classes of targets that he thinks are okay.
One thing that does kind of make this interesting is
he's grafting this like weird kind of like reactionary anti
capitalism to the in seldom which has been done before.
This is not like the first time I've seen this.

Speaker 3 (03:35:21):
We also mixing in the West is preventing me from
getting my girlfriends right, Yeah, mixing in some anti semitism
and anti Zionism, and also mixing in like at least
some like kind of left wing and right wing signifying.
Really like there's some calls to you know, ending capitalism
that can seem kind of socialist, but then a lot

(03:35:43):
of really reactionary anti immigrant stuff in there too. He's
also really angry at pickup artists. The shooting took place
outside of the head office of a Low, which is
the parent company of porn Hub, and he was also
really angry about porn hub. A big, a big chunk
of the manifest was apparently him justifying attacking executives of
specific companies, including like the people who put out pornography.

(03:36:05):
This is not like super weird stuff, unfortunately, but yeah,
it is very sad. It's not the first time this
has epen in Canada. There've been in twenty eighteen. There's
a van attack in Toronto that killed ten that was
kind of an in cell linked attack. There was a
twenty twenty machete attack, and then of course there was
the a Coole Polytechnic attack, which was a couple of

(03:36:25):
decades ago at this point, which is considered to be
in some cases some people would argue like the first
of the in cell kind of like public like mass attacks.
And then also this week there was a mass shooting
in Chico, California. We don't know a whole lot about
this one yet, but I did want to note that
it's happened. Law enforcement officials have said that the shooter
was wearing clothing like that of the Columbine killer Eric Harris,

(03:36:49):
and seems to have been like a columnbiner, someone who
was interested in mass shootings as a fan and was
carrying out this almost as an active fandom. Again, this
is the kind of scene think we've seen ye unfortunately
well over a hundred times in the past, so it's
very sad. We'll probably talk a little more about Chico
in the future. There's just not a ton of information out,

(03:37:09):
but I didn't want people to not be aware of it.
Those countries sucks.

Speaker 2 (03:37:13):
Yeah, well the news.

Speaker 7 (03:37:15):
Yeah, I've done a great time in America.

Speaker 3 (03:37:17):
Well, to quote Zoran's quote of Jijak mistranslating gramscy Yeah,
the world is dying and the new one struggles to
be bored. Now is the time of Monsters.

Speaker 2 (03:37:31):
No, no, no, no, I disagree. I think now is
the time of the Mons stars, the antagonists from the
classic film Space Jam. This is their year. Go nixt yep.

Speaker 3 (03:37:43):
Put a trounscroll in your couch. We reported the news.

Speaker 2 (03:37:48):
We reported the news. Hey, We'll be back Monday with
more episodes every week from now until the heat Death
of the Verse.

Speaker 13 (03:38:01):
It could happen.

Speaker 14 (03:38:01):
Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonmedia dot com,
or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts
or Wherever you listen to podcasts, you can now find
sources for it could happen here, listed directly in episode descriptions.
Thanks for listening.

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