It Could Happen Here Weekly 240

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

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

Speaker 3 (00:28):
Hello, go on and welcome to it could happen here.
My name is Dan al Kurd, and I'm a researcher
and analyst of Arab and pasting in politics. Today I
want to talk about football, soccer, whatever, and I'll just
start by saying, obviously FIFA is a terrible, terrible organization.
And while there are many heartwarming events in this World Cup,

(00:49):
the World Cup gets me, gets a lot of us.
Despite everything, there have also been egregious incidents against players
and referees and fans from the global South. Take for example,
what happened to the Somali referee who wasn't allowed to
come into the US to do his job. He was
kept hours and hours in the airport before being unceremoniously
returned to Somalia. Similarly, the head of the Palestine Football

(01:11):
Association was denied a visa in to the United States,
not allowed to come to the World Cup on US soil.
This is in spite of the fact that FIFA invited
association heads from around the world to attend and he
did attend the opening game in Mexico City. Or one
of the worst incidents, if you can call it that,
the way that the Iranian team has been treated. They

(01:31):
weren't allowed to stay in the US despite the games
they were playing in this country, were constantly made to
fly back to Mexico after every game. Clearly they were
put at a severe disadvantage because they weren't allowed to
rest and recuperate like the other teams. And listen, I'm
not going to say it is a conspiracy, but having
not won but three goals discounted by var eventually leading
to their elimination from the tournament just adds insult to injury.

(01:54):
But like I said, of course, there are many heartwarming stories.
For me as a Palestine unit's been great to see
how much Palestine keeps popping up despite the fact that
the environment in the United States is much more hostile
on this issue than the last World Cup. People are
still talking about Palestine and advocating for Palestine. Thousands of
Bosnian supporters, for example, turned Toronto into a sea of

(02:16):
blue as they marched toward the stadium for the Canada match,
chanting Free Palestine, and they did that in a number
of places, Englewood, Seattle. They also chanted Palestine within the
stadiums in multiple games. At that Canada game, activists also
a deferrald a kick Israel out of FIFA banner and
it makes sense really when you understand the experience of
Bosnians with jedtocide themselves not too long ago. Similarly, Moroccan

(02:39):
fans held Palestinian flags or wore Morocco jerseys with the
word Palestine on it, and this showed up on TV.
At the very opening match in Mexico City, pro Palestine
demonstrators gathered to form a giant human Palestinian flag, and
South Korean fans brought Palestinian flags to the tournament, honoring
a promise they made during their qualifying when They're fans

(03:00):
had chanted will take Palestine to the World Cup with us.
In Gaza, Palestinians are watching the games too. Spain is
the favorite team these days because of the government's position
on the Israel Palestinian conflict and because of superstar player
leamg Yamal, who has been unapologetically pro Palestine. Obviously, the
genocide that has unfolded in Gaza and the war in

(03:21):
killing that continues in the Middle East in both occupy
territories and in Lebanon are part of the reason why
this issue seems to be ever present. But it didn't
start with the genocide. The story of Palestine at the
World Cup is more layer than that, and the twenty
twenty two World Cup in Qatar was a good demonstration
of why Palestine keeps popping up and what Palestine represents

(03:41):
to fans, especially air ones then and everyone now. I
know it might seem strange to be talking about this
now a few years after the fact, but I've been
thinking about it a lot, especially given everything that has
unfolded since, and I think the World Cup moment is
one of those events that gets more interesting, not less,
as time passes back then as it does now. It's
showing us something important, not just about Palestine, but about

(04:04):
the limits of what governments can actually control when it
comes to what their own people believe.

Speaker 4 (04:09):
So let's get into it.

Speaker 3 (04:11):
Palestine did not qualify for the twenty twenty two World Cup.
The Palasadian national football team was nowhere near Doha in
an official capacity, and yet Arabs from across the region
and across the world began referring to Palestine then as
the thirty third team. Because Palestine was everywhere at the
twenty twenty two World Cup. There were Palestinian flags draped

(04:31):
over shoulders and stadiums. Crowds erupted into the chance of Multani,
the Palestinian anthem. After Arab teams won, one Tunisian fan
ran onto the pitch mid match for the Palestinian flag.
And when Morocco pulled off their historic upset against Spain
so it's the first African and Arab team to ever
reach the semi finals of a World Cup, Moroccan players
ran to the crowd and held up the Palestinian flag.

(04:52):
This was significant. Morocco had just signed the Abraham Accords
with Israel only two years prior to this game, and
their players didn't seemed to care. Israeli journalists who traveled
to Kata to cover the tournament reported being coldly received, followed,
and in some cases physically shut out of interviews by
crowds of Arab fans. Some of these reporters were caught
on camera claiming to be from other countries like France

(05:15):
or Switzerland in order to get people to talk to them.
Some of them masked their logos from their stations. Israeli
media at the time expressed something between confusion and outrage.
One reporter remarked, and I'm paraphrasing here, but he basically
said that the hostility wasn't just coming from governments as
they had assumed, it was coming from ordinary people, and

(05:35):
this surprised them, but it shouldn't have. Now. None of
this was purely spontaneous. That's the part of the story
I find most interesting and the part that gets maybe
the least attention. Months before the World Cup began, a
Qatari activist group called Katari Youth a post a normalization QAYN,
started planning. They were founded in twenty eleven and by
twenty twenty two, led predominantly by Qatari women, they had

(05:58):
been working for over a decade to push back against
Glatar's slow dift towards normalizing ties with Israel. Which is
something the Clitari government had been entertaining, largely under pressure
from the United States and from its golf neighbors, and
in a country where over eighty percent of people opposed
normalization with Israel. This organization, Qultari Youth, had a base,
but they had to work carefully because you can't have

(06:19):
unsanctioned civil society organizations. There's all sorts of restrictions on
independent activism, extremely severe and cleveland. But they saw the
World Cup as a window, an opportunity to turn what
already existed, which was deep, widespread popular solidarity with Palestine,
into something visible, coordinated and impossible to ignore. So they
got to work. They persuaded Katura's national team captain to

(06:42):
wear a Kafia patterned armband before the opening match, and
then there was this hashtag the captain's armband is Palestinian,
which started trending on Arabic Twitter.

Speaker 4 (06:51):
They reached out to Quatari.

Speaker 3 (06:53):
Influencers from prominent journalists who amplified the campaign across social media,
and they called on local businesses to display signs that
they were compliant with the boycott, divestment, sanctions movement. They
also ran a kind of counterintelligence operation against Israeli media,
because they were the ones that began identifying Israeli journalists
and their logos on social media, flagging them so that

(07:13):
Arab fans at the tournament knew who to avoid, and
this is how those videos of Israeli broadcasters being turned
away kept appearing online. They also organized fans to chant
for Palisian at the forty eighth minute of every match.
That's not random. That's a reference to nineteen forty eight
and to the Nekba where close to William Past Indians
were expelled from their homes with the founding of Israeli State.
Key members of Katarith said the goal was to turn

(07:35):
Arab fans from sympathizers into participants, and they were honest
about something else too. This only worked because the ground
was already ready. As they put it, the campaign would
not have succeeded had it not been for people's own
proactive support of the Palaestini cause, and that's worth sitting
with for a moment. The organizing mattered, the strategy mattered,
but the reason it spread so quickly so far is

(07:56):
that there was already a fire there. Katariuth just let
them now to understand why people were so upset. You
have to understand the Abraham Accords. I've talked about it
on this podcast before the normalization agreements broken by the

(08:18):
Trump administration in twenty twenty between Israel and the UAE,
the United Air Emirates and Bahrain, and later Sudan and Morocco.
These deals were sold as historic breakthroughs, as a new
era of peace, and in terms of official diplomatic relations,
they were breakthroughs. They were historic, but there was a problem.
Nobody asked the people, and these accords didn't solve anything.

Speaker 5 (08:40):
Now.

Speaker 3 (08:40):
Air public opinion surveys have consistently shown that the vast
majority of Arabs opposed normalization with Israel absent a resolution
to the question of Palestinian statehood and the ongoing occupation,
and in the most recent polling before the accords, it
was something like eighty eight percent of Arabs across thirteen
countries that rejected normalization with Israel, and nearly two thirds
of those cited the occupation of Pastinian land as their reason.

(09:03):
Only seven percent cited something like religious objections. The fear
had always been that if you normalize relations with Israel
without a resolution to the Israeli Palsaiinian conflict. Israel would
not have any reason to try and resolve the conflict
or address the grievances of Palestinians that Israel perhaps would
become more aggressive if the guardrails were off. So what

(09:25):
the Abraham Cords actually did from the perspective of ordinary
Arabs was deep in the sense that their governments wouldn't
listen to them, were willing to sell them out, sell
out the Palestinians for economic and security arrangements that disproportionately
benefited ruling classes anyway, and the US Israeli security architecture.
I've written about this academically, and what I found is

(09:45):
a kind of paradox at the heart of these so
called peace deals. Peace initiatives that don't address the root
causes of conflict don't actually create peace. They create a
different kind of violence, a structural violence, because they maintained
the root causes of conflict, and and they enable authoritarian
practices by governments. So Israel shares a lot of tools surveillance, technology,

(10:05):
propaganda framework, security cooperation, both material and discursive tools, and
these have a way of turning up in the hands
of governments for pressing their own citizens. Now I'm not
saying the United Arab Emirates or Bahrain needed encouragement to
repress their own citizens, but it's just another added layer,
another way that the red lines shift, and new ways
that these governments can attack their own citizens and their

(10:28):
own activists. For example, Amadouti activists involved in anti normalization
activities after the accords became targets of surveillance operations, and
people who spoke out about the deals faced travel bands
in Bahrain, civil society organizations were newly restricted. The quote
unquote peace came with the repressive apparatus baked in, which
is exactly why when thousands of Arabs gathered and has

(10:49):
public squares to watch the World Cup, the energy around
Palestine wasn't some just like emotional sentiment, and it wasn't
a relic.

Speaker 4 (10:57):
It was fresh.

Speaker 3 (10:58):
It was the anger of people who had just watched
their governments make deals they never asked for, and deals
that were used to oppress them and not solve the
postating issue. There is a concept that academics and activists
have used called sports normalization. The idea is that sports,
because they're presented as a political or maybe as entertainment
as a space above politics. They can be used as

(11:19):
a soft avenue for normalizing relationships that would be otherwise
politically controversial. Israel has long pursued the strategy. The logic is,
if Israel and Arab athletes compete together, then this image
of coexistence replaces the political reality of occupation. You don't
need any kind of solution or diplomatic agreement. You just
need enough footage of an Israelian Oracan shaking hands on

(11:41):
the pitch to make people feel like things are moving
in a good direction. Kutan Youth were very explicit about
targeting this. They hosted panels on sports normalization. They released
a statement pointing out that Western political boycotts of Russia
extended the sporting events after the invasion of Ukraine, and
nobody then complained that sports were being mixed up with politics,
and to them, the inconsistency was glaring that mixing sports

(12:03):
with politics was apparently fine when it was about sanctioning Russia,
you know, admittedly very appropriately, but somehow inappropriate when it
came to Palestinian rights, and this double standard I've encountered
it constantly in my work. The insistence that the Pastadian
cause is uniquely problematic, uniquely in need of being kept
out of polite conversation or unreasonable. This insistence falls apart

(12:26):
the moment you compare it to any other conflict where
the West has chosen a side. Now, the World Cup
made that visible in real time. When the Palestidian flag
showed up in a stadium in Doha, it wasn't just
a symbol of solidarity. It was an argument. It said,
this issue is not resolved. We have not moved on.
It doesn't matter what the Abraham records said or how
many photo ops it's going to make any of this

(12:46):
go away.

Speaker 5 (12:48):
Now.

Speaker 3 (12:48):
I want to dwell for a minute on Morocco full disclosure.
That's the team I support. I hope they go as
far as possible. But Morocco is an interesting case, and
I think it illuminates something about the limits of top
down normalization. Like I said, in governments signed the apraamic courts,
and the deal actually included US recognition of Moroccan sovereignty
over Western Sahara, which Morocco has long occupied. Itself a

(13:10):
case of a people's right to self determination being traded
away in this diplomatic agreement situation. So it was a
completely cynical arrangement all around. And yet when Morocco beat
Spain and reached the semi finals, their players held up
the Palestinian flag. When Morocco beat Portugal and the streets
of robot and Casablanca erupted, the Palstinian flag was there too,
and fans in Doha who had traveled from across North

(13:32):
Africa and the Middle East were wearing Palstinian Kafia's chanting
for Palestine. Now, the Moroccan government's deal with Israel did
not transfer to the Moroccan people. And this is the
key insight from the World Cup, the one that I
keep coming back to that governments can sign papers, but
they can't really sign on behalf.

Speaker 4 (13:46):
Of public sentiment.

Speaker 3 (13:47):
And these countries are not democratic, so any kind of
push to do something like this seems like a betrayal
to their own citizens. And they can't normalize what has
not been normalized in the hearts and minds of their
own There is a kind of arrogance in the Abraham
Recurts framework. The assumption is that if you get the
right signatures, if you get the right photo op on
the White House lawn, that the conflict can be ignored

(14:09):
that the Pastadian cause can recede, but the World Cup
was a direct refutation of that assumption. Now I've been
thinking about all of this in the context of everything
that has happened since the genocide in Gaza, the daily images,
the death tolls, the wholesale destruction of Gazan society, and
the ongoing question of what normalization means now and whether
any of those Abraham courts frameworks can survive what the

(14:31):
world has watched happen.

Speaker 4 (14:33):
Now.

Speaker 3 (14:33):
I do think it will survive. These governments do not
care about what happened in Gaza. But what it shows
is that the fears around the Abraham recurts were completely founded.
Ignoring the Israeli Pastadian conflict would lead to an escalation
in the violence. I think the World's Cup moment was
a preview back in twenty twenty two. It told us
something about where popular Arab opinion actually was, not where

(14:55):
governments claimed it was and not where Western media assumed
it was, but where it actually was. And it showed
us that organized strategic activism can channel that sentiment at
something visible and politically costly for the forces of normalization.

Speaker 1 (15:07):
Now.

Speaker 3 (15:07):
Katar Youth, a post a normalization. Was a small group,
and they were operating under real restrictions in a country
that doesn't allow independent civil society, and they still managed
to turn a global sporting event into one of the
most visible expressions of Palestinian solidarity in years. And that
matters not because a football tournament, a soccer tournament, is
going to solve anything.

Speaker 4 (15:26):
It doesn't.

Speaker 3 (15:27):
Palestinian families don't get their homes back because people flew
a flag in a stadium. But movements build over time
and through moments of visibility, through the accumulation of pressure,
and through the refusal to let the issue disappear into
a manufactured consensus that was never real to begin with.
And today in twenty twenty six, this is not specific
to air of publics. Even Western publics have seen their

(15:49):
governments ignore genocide, have seen their rights recede as their
government's ally to protect genocide in a variety of ways.
Now I'll end with something a little more personal. When
I watched those World Croup crowds back in twenty twenty two,
when I saw all these different Arabs, Moroccans and Tunisians
and Saudis, people from countries that have varying and complicated
relationships with this issue. All waiving the Palestinian flag, I

(16:12):
felt a kind of hope, and it's not naive. It's
not the hope that this will be resolved soon or easily,
but the hope that says Palestinians are not alone and
the cause is not forgotten. And the silence that has
been imposed on this question, attempted silence top down for
so long, is not the consent it pretends to be.
Governments can sign a chords, but they can erase what

(16:33):
people know, and they cannot sign away what people feel.
When they watch a team lose and a flag goes
up in a stadium and thousands of people start chanting.
Palestine keeps showing up uninvited at every table that tries
to exclude it, and I think it will keep doing that.
Thank you so much for listening to it could happen here.
I'm don algirt.

Speaker 6 (17:05):
Before we start. I want to make something inescapably clear.
I am not against human rights or the ideals they
embody and aspire to. Human rights are in fact a
flawed attempts at making the world a better place for
all human beings. And it is exactly those flaws that
I want to address here. Just having universal human rights
does not mean any progress or any improvements in that

(17:27):
regard are no longer necessary. To reach those there needs
to be in depth conversations and critiques. I've deliberately chosen
a provocative title to start this episode. If sad title
makes it through post production, because I think the best
way to have this conversation is if we temporarily strip
any blind assumptions. There should not, for the time being,

(17:48):
be a's standard answer to just defouled back to So
let me say it again. The concepts and ideals of
universal human rights are good and well intended. This is
not a plea against either of those. This is just
to ensure that we can all engage with the flaws
and the criticisms that are currently late at the feat
above those human rights. Please don't hate me further. There

(18:09):
will be some abstract concept and theories here. I'll do
my best to explain them in Layman's terms. Unfortunately, the
Ivory Tower of the university is still a thing, and
I think this bit should be accessible to everyone, not
just university educated people. So if I'm being a bit
reductive or unnnuanced, it is to make it widely available.

(18:30):
And with that, Hello everyone, welcome to this could happen here.
I am Mick. I'm joined by the lovely James Stout.
Hi James, how are you doing? Hey good, I'm good.
I'm excited about this. Yeah, we're going to go through
a lot today. When I pitched this, I thought it
would be just a fun thirty minute episode and now

(18:50):
we're at like five thousand words and ten pages of script.
So yeah, these things can get away from me. Yes, exactly.
And there's always the content, it's always context. You can
just throw things out there. But I had to kill
some darlings unfortunately. But there we go. So to start off,
we first have to explore a little bit about the

(19:12):
history of human rights and how they came to be.
When we are talking about right, we are speaking of
either a legal, a social, or an ethical rule that
is connected to legal systems, social conventions, or neu ethical
standpoints that are seen as normal for a certain group
at a certain time. Because they evolved, they change. These

(19:34):
rights are often inscribed, codified, or written down in either
legal documents or in the public consciousness. And what I
mean by the latter is like or make a queue
for the bus or the train. It's not something that's
often written down in illegal code or something. It's just
an unwritten rule that exists between the people the convention.

(19:56):
Most likely, if you're going to skip cues, you'll never
be prosecuted or find for that. People will probably think
you're a bit of an asshole. So the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights was signed in nineteen forty eight by
the UN. Prior to this, the concept of human rights
was largely found in the idea of natural rights. The
very first historical notion of this that we know of

(20:19):
was in the Zoroastrian religion in the Iran region, which
thought that citizens have a fundamental right to enlightened leadership
and that people had the right to rise up against
those who are wicked. Similar ideas surrounding rights are also
found in ancient Greek philosophy, like the Epicurean school of
thought and the Stoics. Later, it was also explicitly named

(20:42):
by Roman philosophers, which they probably stole from the Greeks,
like Cicero and Seneca, that that Cicero once said that
we are born for justice, and that right is based
not upon opinions, but upon nature. And I think This
is important into the Zubin not a bit. Romans were
very not a very religious, but it was a religious society.

(21:06):
They had tons of deities. But despite that, it's to
nature that Cicero make makes that claim. Yeah, as opposed
to God or God's right exactly. There's something innate or
something by virtue of being human that it gives you
those rights. Yeah, there was. In the seventeenth century was

(21:26):
the English philosopher John Locke, who discussed similar things, particularly
that fundamental rights as he called them, such as life, liberty,
and a state. A state meaning property in this case
are things that could not be handed over or transferred
under the social contract. With social contract, it is often
meant that you, as an individual have surrendered some of

(21:49):
your rights and handed them over to the authority under
which you fall or to which you are subject. Often
this exchange translates to that the authority to which you
hand it over will then protect your remaining rights. Yeah.
Usually this is strained as consensual, as a voluntary deal
you make or have made with again, whichever authority happens

(22:12):
to hold control over you. I also think it's worth
noting that consent implies an active decision with like knowledge
and circumstances and the ability to consent. And this is
just my own personal gripe. Whenever people refer back to
the social contract, it's like I didn't agree to anything.
I must have missed that meeting.

Speaker 7 (22:32):
But yet it relies on this like thought experiment, right,
like this idea of like would someone in ex circumstance do?

Speaker 5 (22:39):
Why?

Speaker 6 (22:39):
I think this is.

Speaker 7 (22:40):
What Hobbes does, right, Yes, Like I guess Hobb's lock
and Rousseau would be the people you'd want to read
if you wanted to learn more about this. In Rejava,
they have an explicit social contract, right, which is like
a document, and people do get too consent on it.
I guess I should say consult rather than consent, right,
There was a long consultative process was part of the

(23:01):
formation of the metric and social contracting Java as opposed
to like requiring like universal consensus to be to be established.

Speaker 6 (23:08):
Once again, ros Javaz leading away, Yeah, showing us all
the way. That's that's right to be unusual. Yeah, we
will be touching a little bit on Hobs and Rousseau. Okay, fine,
but this some of the latter bid up like the
virtue of being born hardly checks my boxes for active consent.
But yeah, you know, I think there's some bureaucrat out

(23:30):
there who will disagree with me on that. As you said, James,
the idea of the social contract came from philosophers like
Rousseau and Hobbes and our Court, who are contemporary understanding
of like social and political theory, and are also foundational
to like most liberal democracies, the ideas is following. At first,

(23:51):
there was like no state and no authority, and everyone
was in a state of nature where human existence was
harsh and brute and short. Yeah, nasty, brutish in short
is the like here's the exact words the Hobbs quite
that gets deployed a lot about people and things, yes,
ignoring the fact that Hobbes was an idiot.

Speaker 7 (24:11):
Yeah, and that life without the state is not nasty,
brutish and short.

Speaker 6 (24:14):
And we have a lot of examples of this. But no,
but it's this retroactive justification because this is how things
are now. So I am inventing a story to justify
how we end up here.

Speaker 7 (24:25):
Yeah, Like Jim Scott, I guess kind of deals with
this a little bit right in the art of not
being governed when he's talking about the idea that those
who exist without the state are behind those who exist
within the state, as opposed to just on a different
pathway they've chosen to follow.

Speaker 6 (24:40):
Yeah, because like we need we need the authority, and
you need a social contract because otherwise humanity is just
subject to its own worst impulses, like our hunger games
without the dystopian stuff inside it. Therefore, there is we
need authority, which was created to keep this state of
nature at bay and make or keep us civilized. And

(25:02):
this also then ties in with like the monopoly on violence,
because that is one of the rights that you surrender
under this social contract and is given to specialized government
forces in order to use the violence that is necessary
to maintain order. As a small side note, the whole
state of nature thing is pretty much bullshit. On why

(25:23):
that is is discussed at length in the Dawn of
Everything by David Graber and David Wengro, But it would
be way to watch the also include here you'd have
to listen to me all week.

Speaker 7 (25:34):
I do have an audiobook at the Door of Everything,
and it is it's a lot of audiobook, Like.

Speaker 6 (25:39):
Yeah, it's such a massive book, just massive. Just as
a small clarification before we move on, there are many
more notable figures who've written about like natural rights, Francis
Hudgeon Hegel, and Thomas Pain. Clearly, there are also many
more who did that in the American context, like Thomas Jefferson.

(25:59):
But everyone listening to this nose the American stuff way
better than I do, so I'll just skip that, including
the parts where Jefferson was pretty selective on who counted
as a human being and who didn't. Many such cases here,
many such cases. Unfortunately it has not gone away as
much as it should have. Yeah, So the biggest criticism

(26:21):
that we have here to address against natural rights is
that you can draw from facts. It's something that you
say is out there, but you can prove it through
science or through empirical research, through data collection. It's something
that comes from tradition, authority, or morality. There is no
argument to be made that it exists in the same

(26:43):
way as the coffee on my desk as I'm writing this.
To put it very bluntly, natural rights being inherent or
unalienable is just saying they exist because I say so.
It has just as much weight as me claiming that
I now own James's chickens, which I now do. It
is a fact you have.

Speaker 7 (27:02):
To fight me for them and surrendering them monopoly on shakins. Yes,
you know, you know where I live. You can you
can fat at them to me.

Speaker 6 (27:10):
Yeah. So what has happened is by putting these natural
rights into law, we can make them like real or
tangible in the sense that there is something you can
point to, like that thing says it, or this law
says it. It transforms natural rights from something that is
scientifically baseless into like a part of the social contract

(27:33):
and thus should be upheld by whatever authority, state, or
government you happen to be subject to. The creation of
constitutions in democracies is like a very explicit attempt to
make rights real. But as we all know, they're also
not infallible. In the wake of the horrors of the
Second World War, the international community drafted and voted on

(27:54):
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was a massive
step at the time. Of the fifty eight member states
at the time, forty eight voted in favor, two did
not participate, an AID abstained from voting. For those who
are paying attention, there are so little countries that voted
on it, because judges were less countries back then, and

(28:16):
an exact number is very hard to find because all
data sets and all definitions just differ. To this day,
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is still one of
the most significant milestones of the twentieth twentieth century. It
has pretty neutral language in terms of culture, religion, or
any particular political system. It also became a stepping stone

(28:37):
for the International Bill of Human Rights and several different treaties,
with all one hundred and ninety three UN member states
as of now as signing at least one or more
of those treaties. Yeah, I can't understate how massive that
achievement is, and before we were actually criticizing it, I
do think it's right to recognize it. And that isn't perfect,

(29:01):
which is why we're also going to kick against its
shinbone for a while. So to the surprise of no one,
human rights are flawed but good. They've also been used
pretty disingenuously, and that is where, like this start, they
have often been used as a justification for war to
obscure or hide other motivations, like I think of the

(29:23):
Iraq war. No, not that one. The Iraq in the
invasion of Kuwait in the in nineteen ninety, the Saddam
government publicly stated that they wanted to support the revolutionary
government in Kuwait, that it was for our solidarity. They
also cited that the current administration over there was incredibly
unpopular and thus they had to invade for greater political

(29:45):
and economic freedom for the Kuwaiti people. What was widely
seen as like, the actual motivations were oil resources and
more regional control because of course, yeah, Russia has also
used human rights as a reason for invading.

Speaker 7 (30:00):
Yeah, you look very surprised at that, shapes I was
about to say the same thing, like Russia left to.

Speaker 6 (30:05):
Do this, Yes, they did it in two thousand and eight,
with like when they invaded Georgia because they had to
protect Russian citizens and peacekeepers, while it was mainly about
like preventing native expansion in the newly independent Georgia. The
same thing happened in twenty fourteen when they first invaded
Ukraine because Russian speakers had to be protected from Ukrainian fascists.

(30:28):
There was also the Serbian forces in Bosnia and Kosovo,
where the Serbs were under threats and Indias campaign into
East Pakistan now known as Bangladesh, although in that latter
one the motivations seem a bit more muddled because it
appears there's some genuine concern there for human rights or
humanitarian aid, but again modeled limited time.

Speaker 7 (30:52):
And I think like it's always telling like where states
decide it's important to go to war for human rights
and the right.

Speaker 6 (31:00):
Yeah, we're very selective when these rights need to be
enforced or when there's violence needed for it to be enforced.

Speaker 2 (31:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (31:09):
No one's rolling out to defend the human rights of
hina people in Memma, for example.

Speaker 6 (31:14):
No exactly, And like I think you said this at
some point, but like when in Me and mar the
revolution started, there was like an explicit appeal to like human.

Speaker 7 (31:24):
Rights, Yeah, and like a very well lucidated appeal to
like R two P right, the right to protect. I
think I have to check responsibility to protect. It's what
R two P stands for, not right, but responsibility. So
it's a responsibility of a state to intervene in the
internal affairs of another state if human rights are being

(31:47):
abused in that state. It's best of my understanding of
it anyway, And this is as it spake strange to
me by many many young people in Mema. I actually
spoke to a young person in Memma who would orchestrated,
at great risk of their life, a massive R two
P like floating sort of symbol that could be seen
from the air. I guess, like explicitly to alert the

(32:10):
world that our human rights are being violated, and we
have human rights, so surely the people who guarantee those
rights question mark will intervene to protect those rights. So
like you saw signs explicitly calling on a SCN, on
the UN, on the European Union, on the United States,

(32:30):
and like also people trying to make signs that are
very funny so that they would go viral in English
because they wanted the world to see them. When they
figured if the world's all they'd be like, huh, human
rights are being violated. And it took a lot of
dead people for I think, because that's a very entrenched
view that many of us have, right, that we have
these rights, we do it writes any matter insofar as

(32:51):
they are someone's prepared to use force to protect them
in this instance, and nobody was apart from the people
of Memma themselves, right, So they like right, space discourse
still very very common there. Now those rights are backed
up by people who you know, initially used home made
and three D printed firearms and now have better firearms.

(33:14):
But like, the reason those people have those rights could
stay for for them, not because the rights enforced themselves
or any other state decided to enforce them.

Speaker 6 (33:21):
No, exactly. It is pretty revealing that when a people
desperately in need for their rights to be upheld by
some force or by some army or whatever, and they're
making explicit appeals towards and the international community as a
wholes like, nah, they get a closer right than there is,

(33:42):
but they were unalienable, so yeah, great, they still technically
had them sort of maybe right, Yeah, they should have
bought a premium package. And also yes, the US invasion
of Iraq in two thousand and three, yeah, I did
not forget. It was very much justified. There's a mission
of liberation and freeing people from a dictator. Well it

(34:04):
was much again oil and influence, as it always says,
which is why you will now have to listen to
ads so cools and media can get some much needed
oil and influence. Nice, and we're back now loaded with

(34:29):
petro dollars. It is time to dive deeper into the critiques.
So someone whose work was incredibly influential in the realm
of philosophy and ethics was Simon Veil James. I think
you may have heard of her.

Speaker 7 (34:44):
Yeah, she was with the De Ruti column in the
International Group. She burned herself frying eggs in a house
they liberated and had to go home.

Speaker 6 (34:53):
Yeah, she is a fascinating figure.

Speaker 7 (34:56):
Yeah, that someone who just like forest gumps through through
like the history of amazing things in that time period.

Speaker 6 (35:04):
Yes, it was like I have written this down in
the script, but when she was eight or nine she
refused to eat chocolate or something. It's solidarity with the
soldiers overseas or the soldiers who were fighting in World
War One. There's tons of like incredible stuff in there. Amazing.
I didn't know that. Like, she taught at the university,
but then in nineteen thirty four she took a leave

(35:26):
of absence from teaching to work anonymously in two different
labor factories because she better wanted to understand the working class.
A few years later she would join the anarchist do
Ruti column as you said, and fight in the Spanish
Civil War, where she very badly wanted to fight despite
her outspoken pacifism, but her comrades held her back because

(35:48):
she was incredibly near sighted that they were like, yeah,
we don't trust you with this machine gun, which fair. Yeah.
And she died eventually at a very young age in
nineteen forty three due to her poorer health. That is,
while she was sick, she would only eat whatever she
thought the residents of Nazi occupied France would be able

(36:09):
to eat, and refuse to eat more. As her biographer
Richard Reese summed up as for her death, whatever explanation
one may give of it, it will amount in the
end to saying that she died of love. Well, that's bad.

Speaker 7 (36:22):
As in my book, Yeah, yeah, that's a cool way
of phrasing two it is BEAUTI presented.

Speaker 2 (36:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (36:27):
Simon was very critical of the concept of rights, and
she much preferred to speak of obligations. The latter, she argued,
are much more fundamental than rights, because rights are only
meaningful to the extent that others respect those rights. To her,
rights are relative and related to certain conditions, while obligations

(36:48):
exist outside those conditions. On the surface, this may seem
like the same criticism we had earlier that they only
exist out there and only because I say so. But
I think she moves further than that, because she sees
a system that has its foundation on these obligations, specifically
what she calls the need for a soul to hear.

(37:09):
These needs are the things that we as human beings
require to thrive, food, shelter, medicine, but also like equality,
freedom of opinion, and security in the form of not
having any persistent fears. There are many more in her book.
I'm not going to delve a buch deeper in it
because I think, like the just this out there, this

(37:30):
may seem like a very theoretical difference, but let me
illustrate what I think is a very strong example of
like rights versus obligations. I have stolen this metaphor from
the philosophized this podcast, Okay, from the episode in which
the host discusses the modern day concentration camp and Georgio Agambin.
So all the credit to that host for this metaphor.

(37:53):
So let's get back to those chickens that used to
belong to James, but that I now own, like it
is my right in a legal and economic sense to
sell these at the market, and it is my right
to sell them for any price that I think they
are worth, just as it is my right to very
quickly go out of business because nobody wants to buy
my five thousand dollars chickens. And now I'm going to

(38:14):
be a bit provocative. I just feel free to respond.
What if someone were to be forced into prostitution, either
by coercion or violence? Okay, why is that wrong? Why
is that disgusting and abhorrent? Yeah, for many reasons. Is
the reason for that because this person has a legal

(38:34):
right to not be forced into prostitution? Or is there
something else going on there?

Speaker 7 (38:40):
But there's a lot there's a lot more going on there, right,
Like it's apart because it's like disgusting to us as
people that someone's supposed to do this without that consent
and without consenting like actively to doing a thing that
they are being forced to do against their will exactly.

Speaker 6 (38:57):
But it speaks to the nature of right that your
first instinct is not to say, oh, but that's against
the law. Yeah, your first instinct is to say, like,
oh jeez, that's fucked up. Yeah, that's wrong, and it
is wrong because what you're doing is like violating the agency,
the autonomy, the dignity, the sense of belonging to themselves

(39:18):
and their bodies. It is something that it is much
more a gut feeling, something that is that exists out there,
rather than like pointing to a law twenty three, subsection two,
paragraph three, whatever, three. And we can put it in
a more concrete example like The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.

(39:39):
In short, for those who are not familiar with either
the book or the show, it's about a patriarchal, totalitarian republic,
very religious, where some women are forcibly assigned to powerful
and high status men to bear children for them. Now,
in this society, the sexual violence, the forced pregnancies, the births,
they're entirely legal, like the people doing it, and that's

(40:01):
not just the men in those books. They are doing
it within their rights. It is legal what they're doing.
But also going to ask you as like the listener,
does that make it any less fucked up?

Speaker 7 (40:12):
Yeah, Like, I guess we can argue the same thing
in any Islamic state, right, there were people who were
forced into slavery, sexually assaulted.

Speaker 6 (40:21):
Sexual violence was commonplace. It was at least accepted.

Speaker 7 (40:26):
I'm not familiar with the exactly legal structures of the
Islamic state with regard to epicentainly that it was widespread
and not condemned, and like that doesn't matter. It was
still wrong. It was still disgusting, right, which is why people,
including people in Kurdistan, decided to take up arms against it,
and very rightfully. So, yeah, I guess they're like universal

(40:48):
human rights were violated. That their rights, and that is
the Islamic States so much as that was a state, which.

Speaker 6 (40:53):
It was, we're not, yeah, and we'll get there, because
there's like a difference between the a so having universal
right and having a sovereign that is going to respect them.
So yeah, sorry for that painful metaphor. I think that
that both of these make it clear, although maybe painfully clear,
like legality has nothing to do with it, like the

(41:14):
rights have nothing to do with it. It's your human
response and lack or the fact that you have a
sense of decency that makes something like wrong or right. Heah,
So the right to not be preyed upon can be
taken away as all right, but the sense of injustice
of wrongness will not. There exists an obligation to the

(41:35):
people in your community, regardless of which community or the
size of it, to not do horrific shit like that
and in the process destroy part of someone's solemn being.
The lack of any empirical data does not mean that
there isn't something there, even if it's just like a
gut feeling or a sense of justice. Will and myself

(41:57):
would say it's wrong because we have an obligation to
to respect them that by like just being born human,
you have to have your agency and your autonomy and
your dignity respected. But do you know what will destroy
your soul and being products service is support this podcast?
It definitely is. They already have And we're back after

(42:30):
the identity crushing stream of surducts and products or whatever.
So quickly recap what we said before the break, which
is that you can say that there is something beyond right,
as rights can conveniently be taken away when those empower
think that is what they need to do. It is
what Simon Ville would call the difference between being a

(42:51):
subject and being an object, being a subject to something
in the sense that you can be subject to a
queen through that lens. Being a subject means that you're
only seen as something that is value rights in relation
to the queen. Okay, there is a relational aspect here
that defines what over who you are. Being seen as

(43:15):
an object here means that you exist like in and
of yourself, and that you're not defined because of the
definition of something else. I think a good way to
view this is the think of someone's child, son or
daughter and thinking of that same person as just themselves.
Like in the first one, it's the relation that you emphasize.
In the latter, you just see them as a person,

(43:38):
regardless of like linear image or relation. Yeah, I fear
this next part could be rather complex, but I'll do
my best to go into like Layman's terms. It evolves
some pretty complex philosophy about authors whom many people have read.
But do you understand Yeah, myself included, I'm an idiot.
I'm just trying to make it make sense and make
it like clear and legible for everyone who hasn't read

(44:02):
these offers, and I probably wouldn't recommend reading them. So
we're speaking of Hannah Arrant and Georgio Aghamben both made
some major critiques of human rights, and these are in
relation to each other. To an extent. So the start off,
they make distinctions and definitions on what it is to
be human and what it is to be recognized as

(44:25):
a human being. Ran uses the terms zoe and bios
for this, like the Greek terms Okay, zoe is the
idea and the concept of life in a purely biological
sense as just a biological unit that breathes, that consumes,
that defecates. Okay. Think of someone living alone in the

(44:47):
mountains without anyone else nearby or any contact with other
human beings. Like, biologically, yes, they are human, They're just
no denying that. But in terms of bios meaning a
life that has meaning and it is political, it becomes
less obvious that that personal learning the mountains like can
be recognized as human.

Speaker 7 (45:08):
Sure, yeah, Like part of being human is being part
of a community, right, Like we only are able to
fully realize ourselves in the context of other people.

Speaker 6 (45:16):
Exactly, And that is what what I'm getting at without
saying that this person of the balance is not a
human being, but they're isolated and not part of a community.
Think of like making meaningful moments together with like those
dear to you. That that is in a sense the
meaning that the term bios kind of points to Yeah,

(45:36):
living alone in the woods also means like there's no
community or no sovereign power to hold someone accountable or
to uphold they're supposedly unalienable rights. As a little pointer between,
I'm going to use like state power, sovereign or government
pretty much interchangeably, because I don't want to repeat the

(45:58):
same words but or say power every two sentences. I
think that would make for a boring listening. But just
so you use the listener, not that that is somewhat intentional.
So it is in the context of the man in
the mountains that we should interpret Zoe and bios, not
like as in literal black and white checkboxes, but like

(46:19):
as a nuanced lens to look through. And if we
look through this lens, then the following pops up. For
someone to have BIOS, there needs to be a community.
There needs to be a sovereign or, as a Hanna
Arrent would say, a political community. That can be any
group of people, any country, political identity, or ideology. That

(46:41):
doesn't really matter for you to belong to a political community,
whichever one of those categories it is. But that is
the most fundamental right. According to Hannah Rent, and we'll
get into why. She also calls it like the right
to have rights, the right to belong to political community
that in turn cherishes you and upholds those rights for you.

(47:05):
The man in the woods has no one to do
that for him. He lacks a certain political and legal
recognition of his humanity that comes with like being part
of community. Yeah, if we think of people on the move,
of migrants, or of stateless people, then we can look
at them as not having a political community. And in

(47:27):
the context of bios is, aren't puts it there is
also of political community to emphasize their humanity or uphold
their human rights. Yeah, because there is no system or
sovereign that can like uphold them or enforce those ideas.

Speaker 7 (47:43):
Sometimes like they're able to act collectively to protect each other.

Speaker 6 (47:49):
Right like within that, but that is a different thing. Right.

Speaker 7 (47:52):
That's that I guess you could call the obligation right,
that is their obligation to each.

Speaker 6 (47:57):
Other that they are fulfilled when they do that.

Speaker 7 (48:01):
Right like that, As you say that no powerful entity
is obliged to protect their rights, you could look at
the example of outdoor attention in the US.

Speaker 5 (48:09):
Right.

Speaker 6 (48:10):
I remember once I was out.

Speaker 7 (48:12):
Feeding people in outdoor attention with prop Actually he also
has a podcast on this network. And we ran into
this guy had like a he had like a polo
on and I said, the fuck you didn't Who the
fuck is this? They had like nice shoes, and I
was like, what's happening here? The guy was from the
Office of the Immigration Detention on but to it because
you have a bunch of rights in the US, right,

(48:32):
Like that person came along and had a clipboard and
they did a bunch of stuff and it didn't matter. Right,
there's people, a bunch of those people's rights were being violated.
I'm sure the person ticked a bunch of boxes on there,
like which rights are being violated for him? It didn't
feed those people. We did, didn't keep them warm that night.
We did, didn't build them a shelter. We did right
like it was us for filling our obligations to each other,

(48:53):
not their theoretical rights under the state, which mattered exactly.

Speaker 6 (48:57):
And just to point out, like the prior to that
not necessary saily part of your political community, but you
just feel that it does your obligation as a human
being to like I can help these people, I can
feed them, I can keep.

Speaker 7 (49:09):
Them warm, Yeah, exactly, like and is it Locke who
does ask? Not for whom the bell tolls? It tolls
for thee maybe not Hemingway. Hemingway wrote the book, but
it's based on No, it's a man shit. We got
to google this because otherwise that's not for whom the
bell tolls. John Dunn, So other John, I think about

(49:30):
that a lot. It's something I would hear like, occasionally
referenced him in reference to the international brigades in the
Spanish Civil War, included by John McCain, who wrote in
a bitterery for the last American International Brigadier to die,
which is like one of the less shitty things John
McCain did, which he did many shitty things, terrible things,
but like inherenting, that is the idea that like the

(49:51):
bell here being the funery bell, right, that like I
guess when humanity is devalued, my humanity is devalued, and
like I am not fully realizes a person if people
are being stripped of their dignity in my presence, in
my community, so like those people are not part of
my community, but like my community is being devalued because

(50:11):
humanity is being devalued in my community. And the way
I'm going to make sure that doesn't happen is by
stepping in in order to protect those people, to keep
those people safe, to show those people that fundamentally, human
dignity is guaranteed by the humans and not by other states.

Speaker 6 (50:27):
Yeah, very well said. So I have one last example here.
If there's too many examples for the listener, I apologize,
but i just want to make it clear. So I've
done my best to find examples and explain them. The
Sentinel Least people in the Bay of Bengal. I think
most of you have heard of them. They are like

(50:48):
an indigenous people on that are isolated on a single
island and they've had little to no contact with the
mainland or air quotes modern world. Yeah, I think in
twenty eighteen or something, there was a missionary.

Speaker 5 (51:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (51:00):
Every few years, some ball end will try and go
and give them the Bible and they'll kill them or
fire arrows at them or yeah. Yeah those people. Yeah. Now,
like I can't guarantee that this is how what is
going on because I haven't spoken to them, obviously, but
I'm guessing that they don't speak of human rights and
we the nonsentinelice people don't really speak of their right

(51:23):
to healthcare, their rights to freedom of opinion. My point
is more that like, unless there is contact with them
and they become like a political community, there are no
really not any human rights for them to speak of
a bold like in a sense, they don't have human
rights because there is no contact and nothing to appold
or enforce at this point, James, this is where we

(51:46):
are going to isolate ourselves on an island until it
is time for part two.

Speaker 2 (51:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (51:51):
Perfect, Looking forward to seeing you very soon again for
our next shin kicking badass mm hmm.

Speaker 7 (51:58):
And I am fashioning about to defend us from Christian
missionaries in boats.

Speaker 6 (52:02):
Yes, let us also throw like spears and arrows at
missionaries coming to our isolated island. Yep, hey everyone, welcome

(52:23):
back to it could happen here. I am still Mick,
and I'm still with James. If for some reason you
haven't listened to the first parts, I would strongly urge
you to do that first, because we're going to dive
straight in here, and I'm afraid you're going to miss
a lot of context and a lot of explanation as
to what's going on. So yes, our next shin kicking

(52:46):
bad ass is Georgio Khamben. I mentioned him before. Some
of you may have heard from him because around the
COVID pandemic his work became incredibly popular all of a sudden.
He follows is a similar philosophical path that Theatana Arentz
already laid out, but he goes like a few steps further.

(53:06):
I'm sorry to say that we have once again some
concepts to explore before we get the go deeper. Argumbh
strongly uses the concept of a homo seser. It's a
Latin term used during some time in the Roman Republic.
It means sacred man or a cursed man. It is

(53:28):
a person who is banned from society, might be killed
by anybody, but must not be sacrificed in a religious ritual.
So Argamben sees this as someone who is exiled from
society and also not recognized as someone fits or worthy
of being used in religious rituals like In fact, the

(53:51):
Roman state has declared that this person is just a
biological life form. Okay, that's in essence what this boils
down to holds like the sovereign power over this person.
Because it is like the Roman state that could enforce
this or retract it, but for all intents and purposes,
like the homosaeser is like stripped of humanity from political community,

(54:15):
essentially rightless. And this also like a really weird position
because you're still sort of subject to the state without
the state wanting anything to do with you. Yeah, almost
like a very one directional relationship. And agambh in turn
adapts this concept of the homo siser into his state

(54:36):
of exception. In his work of the same name, he
lays out how in times of emergency usually this is
what like the German philosopher Carl Schmidt often referred to,
but agambenn is taking it in a much cooler direction
than Carl Schmidt ever did. In times of emergency where
on a political level, the decision is made to increase

(54:58):
the legal power of the sol system. This increase can
be an addition of new laws or the adulment of others,
but the question of how legal this is this increase
in power is often a very very gray area, like
martial laws is a good example. Like there is a real,
perceived or imaginary threats to the country or society and

(55:21):
thus whoever is in power invokes martial law and suddenly
all bets are off because they can't be restricted by
law in order to deal with that situation. Yeah, Like
many a dictator has like invoked martial law just so
they could like crush down on everything.

Speaker 7 (55:37):
Yeah, I think there were so many places where I
could think of where there's been like a state of
exception or a state of emergency for decades, right, I
mean to an extent, since the United States passed a
Patriot Act, or like you know, in the United States,
we famously have the First ten Amendment to the Constitution,
which are referred to as a Bill of Rights, right,
which enshrine many things in states are supposed to do

(55:59):
to us unless you happen to be in the border
enforcement zone or subject to some of these like sneak
and peak warrants that the Patriot Act allows, right, or
other piece of legislation as well. Right, Like, there are many, many,
many examples of this.

Speaker 6 (56:15):
Yeah, where Hannah Arnd has like very distinct like this
a way and the bios and argambenz sort of sees
like an in between area where yeah, you become this
homosaser where like you're not really the one, you're not
really the other, and in that gray area, just anything
can happen.

Speaker 7 (56:31):
Yeah, I think that like humans without rights concept is yeah, useful.

Speaker 6 (56:37):
Yeah, and they become so fluid in a bad way.
Like if I were to arrive at like LAX, if
I make the wrong joke while I'm in the gray zone,
then probably every one of my ob will be searched
for like drugs or other things. But once I step
out of LAX, then like the LAPD can't do that
to me, right without a whole different bureaucratic legal animal

(57:01):
that they'll have to deal with. Yeah, but like physically
I just took three steps yeah right, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 7 (57:09):
Or like if you think of the rights the migrants
and refugees have, right, like they can be in the
same space as someone but have completely different rights. Think
about how there were hindred people are in the camps
in Bangladesh, for example, like a Bangladeshi person could come
there that they would have very different experiences of the
state in their rights, especially if they tried to walk.

Speaker 6 (57:29):
Out of there. Yeah together, Or like Palestinians living in
certain areas and the Palestinians will need to be able
to identify themselves at each checkpoint where they have to
wait two hours and Israeli personal just walk through it
and wave through the guards. Yeah, they're the exception, so
they can be treated differently.

Speaker 7 (57:50):
Yeah, you literally have roads that they can't go on, right, Like, Yeah,
a Palestinian and Israeli person is a good example. Right,
they could be holding hands walking together an entry checkpoint.
From the moment they entered to the moment they left.
They would have completely diverting experiences and the whole different
set of like legal rights and legal protections.

Speaker 6 (58:12):
Yeah. Another example that I wrote down here was like
the pandemics and the lockdowns, because I know, at least
in the Netherlands one we had lockdowns. It was very
unclear as to if it was constitutionally even allowed to
do that and if the crisis was severe enough to
justify those measures on a legal level. Right, Yeah, that's

(58:33):
also a discussion here. Yes, Well, I'm not an expert
on the US, so I can only use my own example.
Year At this point, this is where all the critiques
sort of start to blend together, and this is where
I hope like it's going to make the most sense.
As Simon Vale already said, like rights are conditional and
require power to uphold them for you as a subject.

(58:57):
What we run into now is this distinction between being
human as a biological unit or as a political one,
because the latter has access to rights the former doesn't,
and as a consequence, that person becomes this homosaser in
a sense, outside of society and the protections that that offers.

(59:17):
You get all the downsides of being a subject, but
none of the benefits, like the social contract sort of
becomes revoked. The tricky part is that our can also
treat you differently based on like biological categories or political categories,
like prison labor is a very good example of this.

(59:37):
Under the thirteenth Amendment, slave labor was made illegal except
as a punishment. So as soon as power can give
you a punishment, some of your rights just dissipate. Yeah,
Like another one is healthcare. Like if you're a this
woman experiencing like a menopausal issues, it's relatively easy to

(59:57):
get like hormone treatments, but if you're at and ruin,
it suddenly becomes incredibly difficult or downright illegal to get
those very same hormones. And that's also like this categorization
in order to treat someone differently. So what I think
I'm trying to say is that our can also navigate

(01:00:19):
in such a way that even if you are part
of a political community, it can negate the rights and
the human rights that should come with it by categorizing
you differently. Like this is a gumbance, like massive critique,
because rather than you getting human rights and getting them
respected by power, it makes you dependent on power to

(01:00:41):
recognize and honor it. Yeah, in a way, human rights
become a liability instead of a protection because power, the sovereign,
the state can still decide whether or not to recognize
you as like biological or political. So one of the

(01:01:09):
most tangible and powerful examples of this not being recognized
comes from our good friend James President Gregory Woogie Bush
and his seaside resort in Guntanamo Bay. I think I
had that too correct. Under international law, you're still entitled
to have certain human rights when you are detained as

(01:01:30):
a prisoner of war. Yeah, I'll be citing a little
bit from the third Geneva Convention in which this was
like ratified. The status of POW's only applies in international
armed conflict. POWs are usually members of armed forces or
of one of the parties to a conflict who fall
into the hands of the opposing party. The Third Geneva

(01:01:50):
Convention also classifies other categories of people who have the
right to POW status or maybe treated as such. POW's
must be treated humanly in all circumstances. They are protected
against any act of violence, as well as against intimidation, insults,
and public curiosity. The International Humanitarian Law also defines the

(01:02:13):
minimum acceptable conditions of the tension, covering such issues as accommodation, food, clothing, hygiene,
and medical care. So you know where this is going. Yeah,
because Greg water Walker Bush circumvented this all by proclaiming
that certain people were not prisoners of war but rather
enemy combatants and as such not subject to the protections

(01:02:36):
of the Geneva Convention. It's a beaten switch that is
as smart as it is like diabolical, because the power
simply switches around the political community that applies to you,
and suddenly they can do whatever they want to you
because you're just the biological unit.

Speaker 2 (01:02:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:02:55):
Like it's a linguistic switcheru. Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:02:57):
And it shows how our rights are perceived in us.
Lord come from the state as a guarantor of them. Right, Like,
because these people were quote unquote terrorists and they weren't
fighting on behalf of a state. Therefore obligations to them
and to the state that we're at war with don't exist,

(01:03:18):
and like so they therefore they don't have rights because
there is not a state to say, hey, you're violating them,
even though many many Americans, including in many many court cases,
said hey, you're violating their rights, and even when they
were citizens of other countries like British people were in
Guantanamo Bay.

Speaker 6 (01:03:35):
Yeah, from all over the world. Yeah. Also, I think
that there never has been a single conviction because of
whatever the fuck happened in Guantanamo Bay. Yeah, they have
their own special court.

Speaker 7 (01:03:45):
I don't know if they've convicted people there, but they
definitely have a court there.

Speaker 6 (01:03:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:03:50):
I didn't know about the convictions, but I remember teaching
a sociology course and getting into Guantanamo Bay quite a lot,
but that was some time ago. I've had students who
were who served at Guantanamo O Mai fuck, And I
think it's fair to say that like that, the psychological
damage that does to everybody involved should not be underestimated.
Like it's It goes back to your idea of like

(01:04:11):
we have an inherent gut feeling of right and wrong,
and participating in something that you know to be wrong
isn't good for you.

Speaker 6 (01:04:22):
It's not.

Speaker 7 (01:04:23):
It's not the same as being tortured and waterboarded, but
knowing that you are in a place. To be clear,
I don't know anyone who has participated in any of
that like enhanced interrogation bullshit, But just being a fucking
cook in a place where that happens is still damaging,
I'm sure to you and your sense of being a
person who believes in their obligation to others.

Speaker 6 (01:04:44):
Yeah, like I would not. I would not trust anyone
who wouldn't be affected by that. Yeah, yeah, exactly like that.
That person that the Burston was not affected by that
is like either a psychopath or like that inside. Yeah,
I'm not going to be nuanced about that. But this
is like the core of like the entire critique against
human rights, because it is simply the state decides that

(01:05:07):
you look part of a political community or just cuts
you off from it, and suddenly we can play like
Hotel California at twenty four to seven and drive you insane. Yeah,
or a lack of sleep, too old or too cold.
It's so weird to have something that we are taught
is like unalienable. It's actually just like the premium option,

(01:05:29):
but you can't buy it, Like there is a power
that has to say, oh no, this person has the
premium package and you get to have human rights, like
it is this right to have rights. As Aaron said,
that makes it really weird because you're still dependent and
unless recognized, you're still just just an animal existing out there.
It's yeah, so, and this is why I thought it

(01:05:51):
would be a good idea to have this discussion, because
I think we can look at every pretty much any
continent at the moment and see things they're like, oh,
you can see this pattern everywhere.

Speaker 7 (01:06:02):
Yeah, it's very relevant to the United States right now,
right because like we've got you know, Lakey Department of
Home Land Security going out there and doing stuff which
is violative of people's rights, both in US and international
law terms, and like there's been a response right by
certain groups people, And I understand, right, if you have
spent your whole life seeing like rights as guaranteed by
the state, and the state is of anevolent actor, then

(01:06:24):
it's hard to make that mind switch. I do understand that,
but like it actually doesn't matter, and this is very
hard for some people to gra judging by my replies
on bskuy dot app, Yeah that's actually illegal. It doesn't matter, right,
Like people just being like, oh, they can't do that
while they're doing it. It doesn't matter that they're violating
like half the Bill of Rights in a two minute period.

(01:06:44):
They're still doing it. There is no accountability because the
state doesn't hold itself accountable. So like when we need
to think of a framework where like our assumptions can
line up with reality, you come back to obligations because
look at what Yeah, what do you think is right
and wrong to happen to people. Yeah, we'd meet that

(01:07:06):
a lot with outdoor attention actually, like when we were
feeding people, Like you'd be like, hey, just trying to
get help from folks, you know, they trying to be like, hey,
you know, we're trying to feed these folks and help
us out, give us whatever. Like people will be asking
friends and their community and then folks will be like,
well they can't do that, they have the right.

Speaker 6 (01:07:24):
To blah blah blah blah blah.

Speaker 7 (01:07:25):
You'd be like, oh, do you want to come tell them? Like,
we'll see how it goes, I guess, but like they
are doing it, and we have an obligation to take
care of them. And like, I think people have become
very comfortable outsourcing their obligation to the state without realizing
that they therefore they no longer get to decide who
gets right to when when you do that.

Speaker 6 (01:07:48):
Yeah, I think it's important to highlight like this, this
little switcher room. If you think of like the Palestine protests,
like they can't outright band protests because then you're you're
very much violating the constitution, right, Yeah, but if you say, like, oh, no,
but this is not because they're protesting, this is because
it's anti Semitic and we need to protect these other people. Yeah,

(01:08:10):
Like the acts that are happening on the ground have
not really changed, but the way you can approach this
from a legal and a political level become a whole
different ballgame. And I think that that doesn't pertain to
human rights as much as like the example you mentioned,
but it is again this dait and switch that keeps happening. Yeah,
And I'm sure everyone listening can think of times or

(01:08:33):
examples of that, and it is not great. Yeah, it's
not great. Yeah, that is all I have. Unfortunately, I

(01:08:53):
don't have any advice or anything or how to deal
with this for you as the listener. Yeah, it doesn't
help to tell if the cop they're violating your human rights,
they won't listen. Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:09:05):
I think it could be easy for people to assume
that this is a hopeless thing, right like that, like
because the rights only matter when the state decides they
matter that therefore they didn't matter. But it can also
be a hopeful thing because like maybe if we look
at the example I wrote back to my book, right
of the CBS when they were in Shengal and they

(01:09:25):
were on their mountain right and the Islamic state I
think it was Isis at that time, not sure if
it had declared itself the Islamic State, yet was surrounding
them and like very much coming to violate every single
concept of rights and decency that one can imagine for
a human being. Right and our Remember I'm interviewing a
Yepe Gay commander about this in Rajaba and him saying,

(01:09:47):
obviously I'm translating care An a direct quotation, but we
were very disappointed in the states of the world at
that moment, and so we decided to go ourselves. And
like it was a very small number, right, different accounts
have had different numbers. I think entirely Kurdish. We can
we can debate of if a Zd people are Kurdish
or not, but like, it's not the place for that
isn't no people from the YPG who went to the

(01:10:12):
mountain and eventually built corridor with their blood, with their bodies,
right to allow those people to come to Java. Now
I'm fortunately those people. It's a very good example. Now
I think about actually, right, so those people acted as
guarantors of someone else it's rights by fulfilling their obligation. Now,
if we look at where the Azd people are in

(01:10:34):
some part not everything called a Zed person, but many
Zed people are still in refugee camps in Iraq.

Speaker 6 (01:10:38):
Right, the conditions that they are in.

Speaker 7 (01:10:41):
We hear a lot about how bad conditions are for
people in the Islamic state prisons or were. We do
not hear as much about how bad conditions are for
the Azdi people. But they are bad, right, they have
a right to a much better life. The states of
the world are not fulfilling that right, they are not
fulfilling their obligation to these people who did nothing other
than live the way they've lived for thousands of years.

(01:11:01):
And because that way was considered to be heretical by
the Islamic state, they were targeted for genocide right, and
would have been killed in much greater numbers were it
not for those people who were willing to fulfill their
obligation to go and defend them. And then the states
of the world have let them down again, and so
you know, tried to try to find a future for themselves.

Speaker 6 (01:11:20):
So like it's, uh, we're very good at that. Yeah, yeah,
this is the thing that we do. I may have
a hopeful example. Us I told you, James, that I
had a random person living in my house. Yeah, and well,
for you the listeners, like through the community, it became
nonlust that there was someone who had fled an unsafe
home situation legal adults. But I'm not entirely sure how

(01:11:44):
much it should say, but it sounded very serious and
we took it very seriously. And I had a spare
room at that time. I did not know this person.
I only have a first name. I never learned a
second name. Or anything, never asked for idea. I thought
to myself, Like, the world I want to live in
is one where someone can feel safe in situations like that. Yeah,

(01:12:11):
So despite me being a pretty introverted person, like I
was like, Okay, come live here, because you need someplace
to get back on your feet. You need somewhere to
be safe. And that is a way which you can
like uphold your obligations to other people also with like
the safety security without persistent fear, a roof over their heads,

(01:12:32):
even just a place to cool down a bit and
figure things out. And it would wreck my own political
convictions to be able to help in such a situation
and not do it because I find it a little
uncomfortable to have a stranger living in my house. Also,
for the record, nothing was stolen, nothing weird or bad happened.

(01:12:53):
This person just lived here for a week and moved on. Yeah,
but that is a way in which like you can
also in an a small way, like fulfill your your
obligation to other people and to live in accordance with
like your own convictions and your own moral an ideological compus. Yeah,
I think that's a great example of how you can

(01:13:14):
act according to your obligation, right, get it, And we
can all do that in different ways, right, different senses,
And like that's one thing. Like I liked what you
said a lot that if the world you want to
live in is one where that person can feel safe,
and like we only do that by building it ourselves.
My perception of politics is that, like we are wasting

(01:13:37):
our time asking the state to build that world for us,
and instead we can build it like peace by piece
along the way. And I know people like perceive anarchism
to be like a chaotic and violent, but like most
of the time when you're doing anarchism, you're making someone
food or giving someone a blanket, like very really nice,
pleasant things to be doing. And like it makes me

(01:13:58):
feel better that we can make a world where that
happened through our individual actions. Yeah, very nice. David Graeber
a metaphor the air for the digging a well. So
like Mia likes to say, like put a transgirl on
your couch, Yeah, that's also protecting you in rights. Yes, yeah, yeah,

(01:14:18):
I'm sorry, I just thought of it, but yeah, put
someone on your couch who is in dire need of
a safe place. Yeah, but be also safe yourself. Clearly.
I think that's all we have. James. This was depressing
and then uplifting enough. Yeah, that's what we do here.
I don't care. Yeah, well, take care of everyone, and
until next time.

Speaker 2 (01:14:51):
Welcome back to it could happen here, a podcast about
it continuing to happen here. I'm Robert Evans, and today
I've I got a friend of the pod, Laura Jadid
in the studio, well not literally in the studio, you
know how things work with the internet, folks. And last
weekend Laura traveled to the Great American State Fair in

(01:15:12):
our nation's beautiful capital of Washington, DC, where she witnessed
a lovely celebration of America's two hundred and fiftieth anniversary
with no inclement weather whatsoever? Is that right, Laura?

Speaker 4 (01:15:23):
No, it was charming and beautiful and very professionally done
and everyone had a lovely time.

Speaker 2 (01:15:27):
Awesome stuff, Laura, Yeah, let's start. Was this just kind
of as soon as he said he was doing this,
you were like, well, I have to be there. This
is just simply not an option for me to miss.

Speaker 4 (01:15:37):
I mean, I definitely wanted to go. I actually was
in town for a different I was there for a
religious extremist conference, which is a whole different. We we ended early,
and I was like, you know, I've got several hours
before I need to return home. Why didn't I go
have a nice time an affair. I've been to a
fair in a while.

Speaker 2 (01:15:52):
To go to a fair, Yeah, So, how was it?
Walk us through, like step by step kind of your
experiences at this wonderful event celebrating two hundred fifty years
as technically a country.

Speaker 4 (01:16:02):
Yes, well, I would say the highlight, other than the weather,
which we'll get into, was going into there. There's these
little rooms where they've got booths for states and territories
and departments of the government and random sponsors. And my
favorite booth I think was probably the Department of Justice
because it was completely empty. And by empty, I don't
mean there wasn't anybody there. I mean that there was

(01:16:24):
a card table, three folding chairs, a battered backdrop, and
nothing else.

Speaker 5 (01:16:30):
Sure.

Speaker 4 (01:16:31):
Yeah, yeah, it was incredible. I'm perfect. It was so
heavy handed.

Speaker 2 (01:16:35):
That's great.

Speaker 4 (01:16:36):
You know, I know people who use subtext and they're
all cowards, and there are no cowards in this administration.

Speaker 2 (01:16:41):
Yeah, your photos of that were really funny. So I
guess the layout is like it almost sounds like a
trade show or something. We've got like these booths for
each of the states and bunch of government agencies and
then like what all was going on?

Speaker 4 (01:16:52):
Yeah, it's like if a ren fare and a trade
show had a baby, and the baby had the worst
aspects of both. It was incredible, Like you enter it,
and I will say this, so you know, people, you've
probably seen pictures. Everyone's i think seen pictures of what
this thing looks like. Yeah, and the fourth of July
was different, and that there were a lot of people
there because that's the day. People came from all over
the country to celebrate the fourth July and d s

(01:17:13):
so it was crowded, but everything else was somehow worse
than it looked in the pictures, because like you know,
you can see the pictures of like the timou Arch
and you see how bad it looks, but there's nothing
like walking towards it, and from a distance it's like, oh,
that's an odd thing in the middle of a field,
but it looks fine. And then the closer you get,
the worse it looks. And it's just this this kind
of slow dawning horror of this like uncanny Valley object.

(01:17:37):
There are the two long buildings that were just going
by either side basically for like the length of the
Washington Mall, just little like tent slash trailer buildings with
canvas staple to them. And the canvas had this illusion
of columns and baba leafs and stuff like that. And
we've seen, you know, that's in pictures. But yeah, walking
down the mall and seeing that optical illusion not shift

(01:17:58):
with your perspective is just it's like being in a
really badly rendered video game but it's real and you're
touching grass at the same time, and it's just the
whole thing is so eerie and strange. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:18:10):
Yeah, So what can you tell me about like the audience, Like,
what's the vibe like on the ground when you when
you show up at least for the first portion of
this before the weather starts to change.

Speaker 4 (01:18:19):
Yeah. So I've been to a lot of right wing
events kind of what I do. I've been, you know,
I go to a lot of these, and this was
less Maga forward. I'm not saying there were no Trump
hats or Trump shirts, but they were. It was mostly
just like America Hell yeah, but everybody there was was
very clearly Republican. Everyone assumed everyone else was a Republican.
The booth operators assumed everybody was a Republican, a pretty

(01:18:40):
pretty fa safe assumption. It was maga light, I'd say,
I mean, it was almost more horrifying in that way,
because it felt like it was kind of realizing their
fantasy of like all real Americans supporting Trump. You know,
these were all the real Americans out here celebrating America.
It was regular folks who think Trump's doing a great
job and aren't at all disgusted by this fair So
the vibes were kind of cheerfully brand I'd.

Speaker 2 (01:19:00):
Say, cheerfully rancid. Yeah, what a great term to describe
the country as a whole. Right now, do you have
any kind of like top fhaves, Like of the of
the things you saw, like on the ground, they're like,
what stuff really stuck out to you?

Speaker 5 (01:19:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:19:14):
So, initially, before the weather went to hell and by
focus changed, I decided, because you know, there's been a
lot of articles about how absolutely got awful and dumb
and silly the sarahs, I decided to do something a
little different. I was going to go to every single
state and territory booth and rank them, and the variety
in the state and territory booths I found interesting. You know,
you had Oregon. Actually I gave out some like fake

(01:19:36):
awards when I wrote about this on my sub stack,
and Oregon won the most fuck You award. It's close,
but it was just this very small booth. Two of
the walls blank white canvas, kind of plastic y, and
then there was just like a thing that said Oregon
the beever state, and there was kind of a little
banner of some of the things that are in Oregon,
and a Columbia sports like bag just kind of clipped
to it with like like just a you know, a

(01:19:58):
kitchen clip. I was like, yeah, that that wins this.

Speaker 2 (01:20:01):
Yeah that Oregon.

Speaker 4 (01:20:02):
Baby. It was great. It was great. And then you
had like Puerto Rico, which was clearly sponsored by the
businesses that want people to go to Puerto Rico for
the tax breaks. And it was very lush and there
were big screens and it was populated entirely by hot
Puerto Rican guys. You were teaching Middle America how to
salsa and everyone enjoyed that very much.

Speaker 2 (01:20:19):
So, oh yeah, that sounds good.

Speaker 4 (01:20:21):
Yeah, Georgia's was completely about poultry. AI generated entirely pictures
of poultry sponsored by Purdue Chicken.

Speaker 2 (01:20:29):
Uh huh. That's what I think of when I think
of Georgia.

Speaker 4 (01:20:32):
Of course, poultry obviously, Yeah, the infamous Georgia poultries. Yes.
And so it was like some states went all out.
Some states kind of were like, you should visit our states.
Some states were like, we sold this booth to a company,
and then some states were like, this is a booth,
we are here.

Speaker 2 (01:20:47):
Yeah, we're legally required, Yes, we have we.

Speaker 4 (01:20:51):
Have fulfilled our required to have an object at this fair.

Speaker 5 (01:20:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:20:54):
And then there were these like little flashes of normalcy
and this otherwise very abnormal event were almost more disconcerting
because it was like a glimpse of what might have been.
Like the DC Metro had a full scale subway car,
like three subway cars linked up mock up railroad and
you go inside it. It was like a museum of
the history of the Metro and how it's helped DC

(01:21:16):
and how it was built and fun facts about the Metro,
and it's like kind of a boring exhibit, but it
was an apolitical celebration of a real achievement. Oh yeah,
yeah right, and so you know, naturally freedom two fifty
hits that behind one of the long Low buildings, and
also a twenty four to seven Christian Revival tent, just
to be sure nobody accidentally stumbled on anything that wasn't
just weird.

Speaker 2 (01:21:36):
As hell, just to make sure there wasn't anything that
like Americans broadly could enjoy exactly.

Speaker 4 (01:21:41):
We can't have that, like, yeah, it has to be here,
but you don't have to put it out of the
way to worry about it.

Speaker 2 (01:21:46):
Everything's gotta be culture war oriented.

Speaker 6 (01:21:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:21:48):
Yeah, so that was kind of the most normal if
I had to pick a most abnormal, and it's it's tough,
it's it's a that's a that's a crowded field.

Speaker 5 (01:21:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:21:56):
The Department of Education booth was completely yes, banners by
far right organizations.

Speaker 2 (01:22:04):
Awesome, Great, I love see that.

Speaker 6 (01:22:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:22:06):
So yeah, just purely the most like racist homeschooling, forward
cut school funds, vouchers, yay, like, oh, teach kids, Vietnam
didn't happen, gay people don't exist kind of bullshit. Great,
what a turning point.

Speaker 4 (01:22:20):
Yeah, oh yeah, yeah very much. America is a Christian nation.
Yeah yeah, So weirdly, I was. I was surprised TSA
wasn't in there, one of the ones trigger You obviously,
you know, the Premier University of America, Prager You was
in there. Also a thing called Patriot Academy, which I
wrote an article about them in twenty twenty two, not
realizing they would be part of our education system at
the time. But I went to their constitutional self defense

(01:22:40):
course at the Whitnington Center in New Mexico, where we
learned how to shoot handguns and also about the biblical
origins of our constitution.

Speaker 2 (01:22:47):
So that's good.

Speaker 4 (01:22:48):
Yeah, it seems like a good thing to teach kids.
It seems like a really good program to implement, maybe,
you know, in our school systems.

Speaker 2 (01:22:55):
Yeah, I'm not optimistic about the fact that that's the
depart of Educations booth.

Speaker 4 (01:23:02):
Yeah, but it's not Baltimore.

Speaker 2 (01:23:04):
Not great. Yeah, any other like weird kind of culture
war signifiers at the booths that are particularly noteworthy.

Speaker 4 (01:23:11):
I mean, so this has been discussed elsewhere, but it
curely can't be mentioned enough. It feels like very emblematic.
If the time we're in there was like a I
think it was the American I don't think it was
the Innovator's Hall. It was America Made in America Hall.
It was like a much larger building with a lot
more exhibits, and right in the center of it, taking
up the majority of the real estate, like the largest
by far, just portraits after portrait, large oil paint portraits

(01:23:35):
of the American flag, including a cross draped in the
American flag, because because why not. And the artist whose
name I guess is Scott Lebido. There's a quote by
him above his beautiful works of exactly one subject which says,
and I quote, I have flirted eye to eye with Mona,
Lisa and Paris. I have touched the thick, painful brushstrokes

(01:23:57):
of van Go and I gasped in awe at nickel
angelo Sistine Chapel. Yes, still to this day, my favorite
work of art is Dot Dot Dot, the star spangled banner.

Speaker 2 (01:24:08):
Oh my god. I'm on this guy's website right now.
And the first thing on the Scott Lobido website to
sign my petition to install a giant permanent flag at
ground zero, New York City got one hundred and sixteen
thousand signatures. Yeah that that really matters.

Speaker 4 (01:24:25):
Yeah, yeah, No, And if there's one thing the ground
zero needs. It's more American flag in the nine to
eleven Museum. It's not very American. You would never know
going down there about patriotism at all.

Speaker 2 (01:24:34):
He also has a documentary about him that I think
is just an ad streaming on Amazon Prime and Aple TV,
called The Relentless Patriot.

Speaker 4 (01:24:44):
Oh god, relentless is a fair adjective.

Speaker 5 (01:24:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:24:47):
I found the paintings very relentless personally.

Speaker 2 (01:24:49):
Yeah, his art is incredible stuff here, there's some very
for over thirty years, America's artist Scott Lobido in America's
artist Scot Lobido, every first letter in that is capitalized,
has respectfully painted thousands of renditions of old glory on schools, homes, firehouses,
police stations, cars, and canvases. Scott's past is rather colorful. Okay,
so he's some sort of criminals. Yeah, amazing shit. I

(01:25:12):
really want to know that is colorful life prior to
this point.

Speaker 5 (01:25:15):
Oh my god.

Speaker 4 (01:25:16):
I like to imagine it with some kind of like
petty staff and he's like, you know what would make
me way more money? Yeah, it's just aging.

Speaker 2 (01:25:22):
Fucking crude American flag drawings with Donald Trump in them,
or a fist in one of his works of home.

Speaker 4 (01:25:29):
Wow, like like a BLM fist or just a fist.

Speaker 2 (01:25:31):
No, it's like a fist in a flag and the
fist is covered in like paint that's like flag colored.

Speaker 4 (01:25:37):
That makes sense.

Speaker 2 (01:25:38):
I'm on Facebook here, he's got a video of it.
Let's wait for this fucking thing to start. But it
looks like, yeah, he's unveiling a piece of art. I'm
trying to click through the unveiling because I don't care
what this fucker has to say. But it looks like
it's just a middle finger. Yeah, it's just a middle finger. Wow.
And I think that's a four fingered hand. I know
there's a fifth. There's a fifth. It's just not a
very well, it's not like a good like the proportions

(01:25:59):
are really bad on this anyway. I'm sorry we're taking
pitting way too much time on Scott Lebda.

Speaker 4 (01:26:05):
I mean, I will say, if America had to have
an artist right now, a poorly drawn middle finger, you
can do worst you can.

Speaker 2 (01:26:11):
Art's represent porcult middle finger. Yes, oh my god, speaking
of poorly sculpted middle fingers, Maybe our advertisers sell that.
I don't know, that's not my job and I'm bad

(01:26:32):
with Laura. Let's continue. What next do you want to
tell us about the Great American State? Also, it's not
a state fair. It's like the Federal it's like the
National Fair.

Speaker 4 (01:26:41):
So yeah, like the states were there, but kind of
as stars.

Speaker 2 (01:26:45):
Yeah, so I don't know.

Speaker 4 (01:26:47):
I mean, the fair was just it was. It was
pretty boring. There was the fairest wheel of the merry
ground from the World Fair was probably the funnest thing there.
That was from you know, a time when America did
things well. But you know, it was just kind of
a lot of what I've just said. That is, until
the rain started, and I think that might be a
decent place to go, because it seemed that despite this

(01:27:09):
having been forecast for about a week, they had made
no plans whatsoever. What would happen if it actually did
rain at all?

Speaker 2 (01:27:16):
Sure if that sounds like the Trump administration, Yeah, yeah,
God wouldn't let that happen.

Speaker 4 (01:27:20):
Oh God loves America. Why would he let it rain?
Absolutely not. So at a certain point in the fair,
my phone was dying. I had forgotten my charging brick
at home, and I decided to charge it at the
Department of Justice. Booths since no one was using it.

Speaker 2 (01:27:33):
So I stuck in there and I, you know, plugged
in my pay for the Department of Justice. You know,
our tax dollars, say for that, damn.

Speaker 4 (01:27:38):
My tax dollars. Yes, and no one you know, So
I occupied the Department of Justice, plugged in my phone,
and about five minutes after that, this announcement starts going
out over the speakers on Loop for like, you know,
at least an hour and a half, just you know,
due to inclement weather, the fair has been quote temporarily postponed.
Please make your way to the exits and then we'll
let you back in when the storm blows over. And
you know, I've waited an hour to get in light

(01:27:59):
most people, and it was very hot, and they'd taken
my nice pen away, and I was kind of salty
about that. I didn't want to wait in line again,
and I'm like, I have electricity here, I have my
backup pen. They didn't find I have sour patch kids,
and I'm just gonna hang out. So I did that
for a while until the fair people found me and
kicked me out. And then when I went outside, I
found that I was not alone in this logic that
a lot of fairgoers were like, well, just get wet

(01:28:20):
here instead of getting wet out there, right because they
were telling us, you know, we'll go shelter in your
cars or in the surrounding buildings. And you know, we
were encouraged not to bring cars because it's Washington, d C.
And there were a lot of people and there's only
so much parking, so people didn't have cars. And this
is you know, seven pm on a Nationville holiday in
the middle of DC, so that the buildings mostly weren't

(01:28:41):
open either, so you know, rather than go be wet outside,
people decided to be wet inside. And this went on
for about an hour until the cops showed up and
in a scene that I think would be recognizable to
you as well, a line of cops just kind of
trundling down the fare and motorcycles. The big difference between
this and any other protest was at the cops were
nice and not screaming or deploying tear gas and just

(01:29:03):
kind of herded everyone out, you know, past the throngs
of thousands already trying to get back in because there
was nowhere else for people to go except for the
block traffic for blocks and blocks and blocks, which is
what they did in the rain. It was yeah, And
so you've got a crowd of people who are both

(01:29:24):
soaking wet and dehydrated, which is a great combination, and
people start dropping as people are wont to do, and
so ambulances are coming through the crowd constantly. And you
know this line that we always hear about protests, how
they're you know, they're blocking traffic and what if an
emergency vehicle needed to come in. Well, that was very
much in play, but for some reason that was okay
in this case. They just put on their sirens and

(01:29:45):
went two miles per hour and got through. For what
I want to say, about an hour. This was just
everyone standing around waiting to get back in, getting out
of the way for ambulances, everyone getting more and more
tightly packed until the crowd shreunded into little like freaky
lurches and shoves. Was that, you know, it's like we're
on the verge of stampede here because they've planned this
so well that what else was going to happen. They

(01:30:06):
weren't going to go home. It was temporarily postponed, so.

Speaker 2 (01:30:09):
Right, you want to come back, Yeah, they said, temporary. Yeah,
terrible idea, right, yes, like.

Speaker 4 (01:30:15):
Don't go home, hang out here, wait outside the gates
and get soaking wet, because this is safer than being
inside the fare where you could like do things instead
of just standing around and being angry.

Speaker 2 (01:30:24):
Yeah. It's both saying like, we want you to stay
out where you will be in danger, but also we
want to put you into a situation where a lot
of you have to move at once.

Speaker 4 (01:30:33):
Yes, yes, and it'll be upset and the security will
be overwhelmed.

Speaker 2 (01:30:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:30:39):
Yeah, it was. It was brilliant, really really brilliant stuff.
And you know, the storm continued to get worse. It
did not improve. It just got more and more rainy,
and people were more and more determined to stay. I
mean there was a little bit of attrition, but mostly
you know, and I fell into a group that was
more determined than most. They were, you know, following the
ambulances in because the ambulances were making space. It was
a good way to move up to completely antisocial in

(01:31:01):
this way. Eventually, this group got far enough down the
street that it seemed like we were going to make
it in, and we kept moving a little bit and
there was the chants of USA. I believe God Bless
America was sung at one point, but the progress slowed
and then it stopped, and then music began to play
just beyond us inside the fence, and the crowd became
a bit more agitated, and God Blessed the USA started playing,

(01:31:24):
and that was a huge catastrophe because you know, that
means the speech is about to start, and we were
going to miss Trump speaking, which was a problem. And
then Trump started speaking, and this was the moment that
I think that the crowd just completely broke their will
and spirits broke because the reverberation from the poorly placed
speakers were such that you could not understand him. It
was kind of a nightmare world for me in a

(01:31:45):
different way because you could hear Trump's cadence and voice,
but not his words. It was just this like psychotic
babble of nothing just watching over us.

Speaker 2 (01:31:54):
Yeah, reading transcripts of it, even, it was just like, honestly,
it's like it's like asmrs yeah, right, Like it's just
he's He's creating at this point, like a soundscape for
them to kind of exist inside for a little while.

Speaker 4 (01:32:07):
Yeah. Yeah. And then amplified by the fact that it
was coming at us, you know, from several directions out
of sync, so truly incomprehensible. Just this weird, trumpy and
gibberish watching over this crowd, and the boo that erupted
when they realized they couldn't hear their leaders speak.

Speaker 2 (01:32:20):
It was just primal, like that's funny, it's great.

Speaker 4 (01:32:24):
I was having the I mean, I was soaking wet,
having the best time.

Speaker 2 (01:32:27):
Yeah, they're all in withdrawal. Yeah, yeah, it's like no,
and so you know, he.

Speaker 4 (01:32:33):
Speaks for a while and midnight passes and there have
been no fireworks. So the fourth of July, the two
hundred fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, has now
passed in DC with zero fireworks whatsoever. But you know,
everyone was excited for eight hundred and fifty thousand fireworks
to go off, which they eventually started to do at
around you know, twelve fifteen, completely obscured by the trees,

(01:32:55):
completely obscured. Yeah, could not see them at all after
all that waiting.

Speaker 2 (01:33:00):
Yeah, I saw your pictures and stuff from it. It's
like you can in like the top corner above a tree,
you can see little bits of an explosion peeking out
just the worst fireworks show, so frustrating.

Speaker 4 (01:33:12):
Oh bad, Oh my god. So I'm walking out and
they're playing Journey. You know, first stop believing, like I
have stopped believing, and yeah, then bon Jovi's living on
a prayer. I'm not really living on anything at this point.
The smoke is so thick. Even if we could have
seen it was just an orange glow on the horizon,
it's just brackling of bombs.

Speaker 2 (01:33:30):
It's just awesome. Well, we will conclude this story and
your experience at the Great American State Fair, but first,
here's one last at break. Okay, so how many times

(01:33:53):
I'm curious would you estimate you heard Lee Greenwood's God
Bless the USA during your time there?

Speaker 4 (01:34:00):
Leave it or not? Just before Trump came out?

Speaker 6 (01:34:02):
Just the one, which was good.

Speaker 2 (01:34:03):
That's not surprised as well.

Speaker 4 (01:34:05):
I assumed it would be playing NonStop, but I guess
that's like Trump's theme saw.

Speaker 2 (01:34:09):
Yeah, yeah, they wanted to keep it like for him.
It's like a WWF thing, that's like what plays him
on stage.

Speaker 4 (01:34:14):
Or whatever exactly. Yeah, you know, I feel like this
was a small rebellion because there was music playing inside
of the State Fair. But what you had was like
Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville is I'm like staring at the arch
just I mean, they played Fortunate Son, which I guess
isn't surprising.

Speaker 2 (01:34:31):
Not surprising, not really proper, but it's not really proper.

Speaker 4 (01:34:34):
Katie Perry's Firework played several times because I mean, you know,
of course firework fourth of July. So it wasn't really
like a big patriotic music fest. It was just kind
of like pop music that was barely related and or
a little sad.

Speaker 2 (01:34:47):
It was yeah, yeah, odd, odd, Well anything else about
the event at all that you feel like is really
worth getting into here at the at the end of
our tale, I mean, the the fact.

Speaker 4 (01:35:00):
That there isn't I feel like, isn't itself something like there?
It was so empty, It was such an empty thing. Yeah,
everything was so sad, lazy, small and lazy and trashy
and cheap.

Speaker 2 (01:35:12):
The feeling I kept having was that it all felt
AI generated. Yes, even the stuff that like couldn't have been,
Like the arch looked like an AI generated image just
stuck in the real world and like a lot of
the booths. I mean, there was a lot of AI
art there, but it just yea, all of your pictures.
I kept thinking of It's like my friend is trapped
in like an AI generated version of reality. That's really lazy.

Speaker 4 (01:35:36):
It's exactly like it. That is such a good way
to put it. It really did. It was just like
the ethos of AI infused this place. Like yeah, it's
kind of like if you described I mean, I feel
like I'm very everything to the back rooms right now
because I just watched it, not a little obsessed, but like.

Speaker 2 (01:35:51):
A lot of back rooms vibes this person watching the
back rooms.

Speaker 4 (01:35:54):
Yea, and yet I mean it really was like if
something described what a building was and then someone who
never seen one before was like, oh like this right,
like yeah, sure like that. Yeah, yeah, just no, it
was so soulless. I mean, you know, whether or not
you care for America, I personally, you know, like my
country's got a lot of problems. I would like a
lot of them to be better, but you know, I
live here, I'd like it to be nice. And it

(01:36:17):
was just kind of embarrassing. It was sad that this
is really what we are right now. We are just yeah,
this like soulless AI esque phoned in sad part is
like that even part is not even the right word,
like radically far right bullshit.

Speaker 2 (01:36:34):
Yeah it's gross, yeah yeah gross. Yeah, it's like funny
in a cosmic sense, but mostly depressing to be honest.

Speaker 4 (01:36:44):
Yeah, yeah, I enjoyed my time there because I enjoyed
depressing horrible things. But I can't I can't say that,
like if I was giving a Yelp preview.

Speaker 2 (01:36:51):
It feels right in this era of America to be
like depressed and disappointed.

Speaker 4 (01:36:56):
Yeah, yeah, like the people. And I caught myself doing
this too, like this, this is a a representation of
who we are?

Speaker 6 (01:37:01):
Like, yes it is.

Speaker 2 (01:37:02):
No, this is a pretty good Yeah, this is exactly
who we are the more or less.

Speaker 4 (01:37:10):
Yeah, four point five stars nailed it.

Speaker 2 (01:37:12):
Yeah. I say that a lot like whenever someone's like,
this isn't who we are? Isn't it.

Speaker 6 (01:37:18):
Us?

Speaker 4 (01:37:19):
I am, and this feels like us to me.

Speaker 5 (01:37:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:37:26):
Periodically, during like the riots in twenty twenty, I'd post
some footage and one of the comments would be like,
this isn't the America I grew up And it's like,
I'm know when I grew up in.

Speaker 4 (01:37:38):
I mean, it wasn't the one I grew up in,
but that's because I lived in areas where the police works.
So yeah, it was always there. I just wasn't visiting it,
you know.

Speaker 2 (01:37:46):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well Laura, anything else pluggables to plug
at the end here.

Speaker 4 (01:37:51):
Oh yeah, well you can. You can check out. I've
got a newsletter at firewalledmedia dot com. I am Laura
Jdeed on basically every social media platform, mostly active on
Blue Sky now, but theoretically on all of the other
ones as well. And yeah, come come check me out.
I am the only Orige Deed in the world, so
I'm very easy to find.

Speaker 2 (01:38:06):
Excellent. All right, Well, thank you Laura, and thank you
all for listening. We'll be back at some point in
the future. Well, actually, dumon, you know how this works.

Speaker 8 (01:38:30):
This is happening, This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder.
That's right, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the
White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you.
I'm Garrison Davis Dame, joined by Mia Wong and Robert Evans.
This episode, we're covering the week of July first to
July eighth, or some small things. Last week, Ben Gavier,

(01:38:54):
the Israeli National Security minister canceled an upcoming trip to
New York City for the UN Police Summit amidst calls
for him to be arrested for war crimes.

Speaker 2 (01:39:07):
That's good, that's good to see. It's nice to see
that he's feel scared even a little, you know.

Speaker 8 (01:39:12):
Yes, yeah, the planned protest outside of the UN took place,
even though Ben Gavier did not travel to the city.
No one really knows if Mitch McConnell is actually still alive,
as he remains hospitalized after being omitted in mid June
for suffering cardiac arrest. On Tuesday, a bunch of Republicans

(01:39:33):
senators said that they for sure talked to him multiple
mites about all his favorite topics.

Speaker 2 (01:39:39):
Definitely not AI generated images and shit.

Speaker 5 (01:39:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:39:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:39:44):
There's really no clear indication on what his current mental
state is. Laura Lumer has said that he's effectively braindead.
Not a reliable source either at all, but the audio
from the nine to one to one call yeah, indicates
there was CPR being performed.

Speaker 2 (01:40:03):
So based purely on that, what Lumour says is very
likely because when people at McConnell's age need CPR and
are like at the time at which EMS arrives. This
is not an uncommon result, like what Lumur suggested.

Speaker 8 (01:40:17):
Yeah, we could see a historic weekend at Bernie's even
in American politics. Yeah, if Republicans want to hold on
to this Senate seat without doing a special election.

Speaker 2 (01:40:28):
Honestly, it'd be the best way to honor his memory. Like,
that's the appropriate way to honor Mitch McConnell's memory. One
last filibuster, kind of breaking the law one last time
to stack things in the gfp's deck.

Speaker 9 (01:40:42):
I also want to note the friend of the show,
Myra Lazine from trans News Network, did request comment about
the status of McConnell from his office and has not
received a reply.

Speaker 6 (01:40:54):
We will let you know if if we.

Speaker 9 (01:40:56):
Get any kind of confirmation from their press steal he
is in fact alive.

Speaker 8 (01:41:02):
And our colleague James Stout, who will have a special
segment later on this episode, also wanted us to note
that San Diego has begun defunding and closing more than
thirty public toilets today.

Speaker 6 (01:41:14):
Cool to that.

Speaker 8 (01:41:16):
I will add, in a not humble brag fashion, that Mom,
Donnie and the MTA announced a new plan to expand
bus routes great the same day anyway, you can have
either world people, but not if you live in California. Actually,
no toilets or slightly faster buses. The two choices of

(01:41:37):
American politics, Yeah, the two choices that are presented to voters.

Speaker 9 (01:41:42):
Well, okay, I'm going to present a third choice, which
is I do want to talk briefly about something that's
happening in France right now. There is an attempt that
has passed the Lower House and is pending a vote
from the Upper House as we speak, to pass a
police immunity law. I don't know what exactly the the
term to describe it is, but it is a law
that would automatically treat any police killing as justified until

(01:42:07):
proven otherwise. This is obviously an extremely dangerous bill. It
effectively allows the police to, as long as there are
no witnesses, kill someone and not be investigated or removed
for it. So that is still technically making its way
through the French Parliament, but very much looks like it

(01:42:27):
could pass. It is extremely bleak cool. Yeah, just obviously
this is a bill backed by the French far right
that's also being backed by a bunch of the French
quote unquote center right, and yeah, quite bad.

Speaker 8 (01:42:42):
Speaking of bad, let's get on to our first main
story this week. As many of you know, there's been
a major update in the main Senate race. On Monday,
a woman named Jenny Rassico came forward with an allegation
that Graham Platner raped her into one. Rascoe told Politico

(01:43:02):
and CNN that she and Plattner had been seeing each
other on and off for about two years, and then
one night in twenty twenty one, Platner entered her home
quote unquote heavily intoxicated, despite Rassico explicitly telling him not
to come over. Once inside, Platner forced himself on her
while she resisted and repeatedly told him to stop, and
then he raped her. Rascoe told Politico that Platta did

(01:43:25):
not remember what he did the next morning, but shortly
thereafter she caught off contact with him after telling him
what happened that night was not consensual.

Speaker 2 (01:43:34):
Yep, I guess this is what it took. Unfortunately, and like,
I'm sorry this lady had to come forward and say this. Yeah,
but you know, it does look like this has done
the job finally of ending this guy's career. I mean,
I guess we'll see anything could happen still, but I
don't know what else to say.

Speaker 8 (01:43:56):
Her specific allegation is heavily corroborated in the reporting. Politico
interviewed the woman's next boyfriend, who in twenty twenty three
she told him about what happened with Platner, and also
reviewed emails to a therapist discussing the sexual assault. Politico
published some private Facebook messages between Rascoe and a friend

(01:44:17):
of hers, whom she warned against getting involved with Platner.
And that was years before he ran for office. I'll
read some of those texts here.

Speaker 6 (01:44:27):
Quote.

Speaker 8 (01:44:27):
He can be charming and funny, and he's a decently
intelligent person. He's not all bad, but I ended up
in a bad situation with him, and I will just
very politely call him consensually careless at times. She followed
up by writing, when drunk plus PTSD, he lies also
doesn't listen to you when drunk, unquote.

Speaker 2 (01:44:49):
And it's still remarkable, honestly, how much slack she was
trying to cut him in that message, like unnecessarily empathetic
way of expressing that to someone else about a person
who had done that to you. Yeah, I don't know,
that's what struck me about that.

Speaker 8 (01:45:05):
One of the most devastating parts of this is that
Rasico told Politico that she previously withheld this accusation because
she agrees with Plattner's political platform.

Speaker 9 (01:45:17):
Quote.

Speaker 8 (01:45:18):
One of the reasons I didn't come forward sooner was
the huge moral conflict that I had between supporting his
politics but not supporting him as a person. I just
want the truth out there. I just want people to
have a whole scope of who he is as a person.

Speaker 6 (01:45:32):
Unquote.

Speaker 2 (01:45:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:45:34):
After Resco made this allegation, which is Platner's first public
allegation of rape or sexual assault, Lindsay Feifeld, the Republican
operative who was at the center of the New York
Times report on Platner last month, told The Washington Post
that Platinner sneakily removed condoms during sex Jesus, which is

(01:45:57):
also a form of sexual assault.

Speaker 6 (01:45:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:46:00):
In a video released on Monday, Platner denied the allegations
and said quote, we are taking time to reflect on
the best path forward. Following the allegation, Platner lost high
profile endorsements many of his volunteers, and support from community organizations.
The thirty thousand member actives organization Made People's Alliance, whom

(01:46:23):
Platner was a member of, withdrew their endorsement and told
him to step down. The Democrat nominee for governor had
a Pinigree, who Platners supported as a rank choice candidate,
released a statement calling for him to drop out of
the race. Quote for Maine, for the future of control
of the US Senate, and because no party should stand
behind a candidate facing allegations of assault, grand Platner should

(01:46:45):
exit the race immediately. Democrats need a nominee who can
beat Susan Collins in November. Grand Platner is no longer
that candidate. Grand Platner tapped into something real voters hungry
for change, showed up with real passion and energy. That
energy doesn't have to go away. It needs a new
candidate to carry it forward. That last little section by

(01:47:08):
Hannah is part of what I was trying to express
in my recent peace outlining the campaign's platform and on
the ground strategy, and I think looking back at his campaign,
it really is worth trying to understand why it worked
as well as it did up to this point. Up
to this allegation, this election has highlighted that there can

(01:47:29):
be a considerable gap in the way certain candidates are
talked about online and how they are viewed by the
local organizations or the local electorate. Now, at least the
organizations are breaking with Platner. We don't have a great
idea yet of how voters see him post these allegations,
but there was a series of focus groups that The

(01:47:52):
Bulwark ran in June with a group of main women
who supported Platner but said that they would draw the
line at an allegation of sexual assault. So my last
episode was focusing on trying to explain how he won
the primary and how his relationships with unions and local

(01:48:12):
activistcripts contributed to that campaign success. And there is a
reason that I waited until after the primary to discuss
that platform in detail. And we had done some piecemeal
reporting on some of his other scandals, but the information
circulated on Blue Sky right Now about Daniel Morov, who
was mentioned in the piece was not as publicly accessible
when that episode was written, and I think a piece

(01:48:35):
fully evaluating or relitigating all the personal issues with Platner
or some of his staff would have needed to be
a separate episode which is why that piece starts off
with mentioning all of the main scandals before narrowing its
focus on why he won the nomination and focusing on
why he won the nomination so handily, like over fifty
points against a Democrat establishing candidate. I think it's really

(01:48:58):
important to understand what's happening in American politics right now.
Right Yeah, Platner got the most votes in state primary history.
He did eighty three town halls, a master over fifteen
thousand volunteers, and a semiotic analysis of Platner as a
person doesn't tell us how his campaign attracted such historic

(01:49:21):
support in Maine. Right, politics isn't just about vibes and
symbols or even individual character, but rather structural forces, And
there is a distinctness at the root of politics between
symbols and like the real forces of society. Those forces
can be esthetically flexible and adapt a lot of different symbols.

(01:49:43):
For every grand Platner right a bad guy who represented
good politics in Maine, there are many more people who
represent very bad politics who dress themselves up in a
spotless like moral symbology.

Speaker 6 (01:49:57):
Look at right now.

Speaker 8 (01:49:58):
There's a lot of Democratic like party figures who are
taking a lap people who have supported Andrew Cuomo and
the Clintons who are saying, like, aha, I told you so,
who couldn't have seen this coming? And like that that's
grossed on its face because of the types of behavior
they are very clearly okay with excusing to put forward

(01:50:19):
their candidates. But also I think this this this reaction
of like, who couldn't see this coming? Right, there's all
these red flags. This also like fails to like understand
how we got to this point, Like Platter wasn't chosen
to be the nominee by online leftists, but rather the
people have made But there are contributing factors that led
us to a very very precarious situation, including the lack

(01:50:43):
of serious vetting by some of the consultants working on
this campaign, oh as well as Chuck Schumer is clearing
the field of other Democratic candidates, which helped create this
effectively one on one Mills v. Platinir matchup, while other
qualified candidates were pushed into the governor's race. And now
some of those people might be going after the Senate

(01:51:04):
nomination following the assumed dropout of Platner.

Speaker 6 (01:51:08):
In these next few days.

Speaker 2 (01:51:10):
We do have to wonder and by the time people
listen to this, there's a good chance. I guess this
won't matter. But like, what if he decides to just
fuck the party right? Like what if they don't sort
all this out? It's not an impossible situation from where
we're sitting right now. I don't think it's the likeliest,
but it's not impossible. From where we are right now.

Speaker 8 (01:51:28):
It's not impossible, and that it is an interesting kind
of thing to think about. Yeah, consultants like Morse Cats
are urging him to drop out, and there is a
lot of reports coming out that are suggesting that he will.
And to this point, a Platner has been a very
effective conveyor of a working class centric platform, and his
resilience as a candidate through his other well publicized personal issues,

(01:51:54):
have proven a real hunger for a new kind of politics.
But by making himself the avatar of that movement in Maine,
he has also severely compromised the movement. There's a lot
of people who supported his campaign despite his past, based
on this idea that those past experiences led him to

(01:52:15):
this working class politics. His campaign was predicated on that
he was not the same person who made those awful
Reddit posts a decade ago, but the details in the
recency of this right allegation suggests that is not really
the case. This allegation affirms a larger pattern of behavior
which is itself disqualifying and illuminates false and misleading statements

(01:52:36):
Platner has made to supporters, which further undermined his integrity, reliability,
and the trust necessary for an electorate, for unions and
community organizations to put forward a candidate with faith that
he will follow through on the working class platform that
he adopted. This redemption story that the campaign ran with
attracted a lot of supporters, supporters who Platum are assured

(01:53:00):
that no new damaging allegations would be coming out against him.
Then this not only betrays the trust of those supporters
and its volunteers, but it also puts the viability of
their shared working class politics at risk based on their
association with him and especially this new accusation of rape.

Speaker 9 (01:53:20):
I think there's two things that are sort of important
to keep in mind when thinking about this. One is
that it's quite common for someone who is a rapist
to also be extremely charismatic, to be a good communicator,
to be very skilled at manipulating social situations, and that
none of the things that they can be good at

(01:53:43):
like make it okay for them to be a rapist.
But also that's how a lot of the people who
are able to do these kinds of things are able
to maintain themselves and are able to survive. That's how
a lot of politicians you get into this place are
able to just you know, survived by the fact that
they have credible rate allegations, Like we should mention, you know,

(01:54:03):
for example, that there are significant credible rate allegations against
the President of the United States, a thing that has
not stopped him from being elected twice.

Speaker 2 (01:54:10):
A conviction not just deleegation, it's a conviction found.

Speaker 8 (01:54:14):
Liable in civil court.

Speaker 9 (01:54:15):
Yeah, multiple allegations, right, like you know, and then I
think the second issue here, right, and this is something
you were mentioning when you're talking about like the problem
with him making himself the avatar of this sort of
like movement of structural forces is that this is just
to some extent, one of the risks and one of
the challenges you face when you're attempting to run a
working class movement that is centered around a charismatic figure.

(01:54:37):
Because there is always just a decent chance that like
they've done something horrible like this is a problem with
just like the structure of electoral democracy, right, Yeah, this
is a structural problem with the way that electoral democracy
is about selecting your rulers and the fact that people
who want to become rulers also just have a higher
chance of being able to get away with shit like this,
and that's something that you have to manage to make

(01:54:59):
sure that, like your movements are not just one guy
who can fuck the entire thing over by being a
piece of shit.

Speaker 8 (01:55:07):
Yeah, and yeah, Rasco specifically talking about how she hesitated
to come forward because she agrees with this, with this politics,
with this movement, I mean, is completely devastating, and that
this reminds me of you know, the allegations, right, Like
sexual assault is a problem across everything from you know,
like non hierarchical anarchist organizing to the labor movement to

(01:55:30):
electoral campaigns. Not every rapist is going to have a
Nazi tattoo. Bad politics now is going to have is
going to have bad politics, right, and like re looking
at the sort of many red flags this has I
think a lot of people saw that like something like
this is a possibility, but a possibility is not an inevitability. Yeah,

(01:55:50):
And for a lot of people, especially in Maine, right,
the political platform and the community ties that Platner established
outweighed the many red flags of Platner as a person.
He kind of pushed that to of a very a
very far limit, like farther than I've seen in a
lot of electoral campaigns of how far he was able
to maintain support. Yeah, rather than that illustrating something uniquely

(01:56:14):
special about Platner as a person, that shows the depth
of the desire to unseat who's in Collins and the
lack of trust in the democratic establishment. Now, this rape
allegation is obviously completely discrediting by itself, and also because
of how it clearly illuminates this pattern of lying and dishonesty.

(01:56:35):
I think that that compounds a lot of the issues
that people have been talking about with Platner for a
long time. And you know, like even something like the tattoo, right,
even if he did not know what the tattoo was
when he got it.

Speaker 2 (01:56:47):
Which I never believed, like, and we said that when
at the time that that's that was never a credible story, right.

Speaker 8 (01:56:52):
Fellow Marines in his group who also got the tattoo,
Where any of you by Zeto, They said they didn't
know what it was.

Speaker 2 (01:56:58):
That's not what I'm talking about. He stated that he
had not realized prior to it coming out that it
is Nazi, after he had said that he loved the
movie Come and See, which that image is repeatedly. That
was when I was like, well, he's a liar, right, yes,
we said, we talked about this on air, by the way, Yeah,
just to be clear.

Speaker 8 (01:57:15):
Yes, and debating whether or not he is a Nazi
overlooks the other very clear issues exemplified by the tattoo,
you know, recklessness, poor judgment. And then considering these new allegations,
you know, Platner's dishonesty right, based on the conflicting reports
of when he learned of the tattoos Nazi associations, and

(01:57:37):
I think that bolster's the fact that he has a
pattern of lying and especially like lying to get into
power multiple times these past few months, Platner has reassured senators, supporters,
and volunteers that no new allegations would be coming out
against him, even while he was aware that Jenny Rascoe
was speaking without lets like The New York Times, Platner

(01:57:59):
had until July thirteenth to drop out of the race
to be removed from the ballot, and the party has
until July twenty seventh to select a new candidate to
appear on the November ballot. There's a lot of conflicting
reporting on when exactly Plattner is going to drop out
and why he has not yet, And I might do
an update on this based on what will change in

(01:58:22):
the next few hours the next day, but as of
right now, there is seemingly a conflict or kind of
like a power struggle between his campaign and the Democratic
Party on deciding the transparency of the process to select
the next candidate. There's been a few people from the
governor's race, as I mentioned, who's thrown their hat in
the ring. Troy Jackson has file paperwork. He was the

(01:58:43):
only DSA endorsed candidate in the main governor's race, alsodorsed
by Sanders. Doctor Nurov shaw a kind of more like
moderate progressive, announced his intention and as part of his
announcement he mentioned opposition to Israel. He's kind of trying
to move in the direction of Platinir's politics. Even though
traditionally he has been more of a moderate liberal. We'll

(01:59:07):
find out in the next few days if the platform
and campaign style that was so successful can transfer to
someone else, because I think this campaign has provided a
very effective blueprint of in person engagement, town halls, leaning
on local organizing connections, and having those connections in organized
labor helped determine a platform. A platform that has stuff

(01:59:28):
like Medicare for all, tax rich, no money for Israel,
Supreme Court reform, destroying citizens United, but also stuff like
investing in manufacturing public utilities, building clean energy, and strengthening
labor organizing laws. Yeah, quick update here. A few hours
after recording, Platna released a lengthy eleven minute video maintaining

(01:59:51):
these allegations are false and attacking the corporate media system
and the quote unquote political establishment. Towards the end of
the video, he announced the campaign is suspending operations and
said he will withdraw from the race, though he has
not yet officially dropped out of the race, and reports

(02:00:11):
indicate he will not do so until Monday, which is
the deadline. Also on Wednesday night, we got a better
look at what the replacement process is going to be
and instead of an open caucus, basically a mini primary.
The main state Democrats have decided to go forward with

(02:00:31):
a six hundred person nominating convention, with five hundred delegates
elected proportionally by county committees and one hundred delegates from
the state committee. This is not the most open or
democratic option the state party could have gone forward with,
and could cause some real blowback from voters who will

(02:00:53):
be unable to participate in choosing the nominee.

Speaker 2 (02:00:57):
Well, we should talk about I guess the right and
Grim of it all. Yeah, sure so, Ryan Grim with
drop Side News published earlier and breaking points as well. Yeah,
and breaking points earlier today this Wednesday the eighth, when
we recorded that essentially the initial reports had not mentioned
a couple of what they felt were relevant facts, one

(02:01:17):
of which was that before texting him not to come over,
she had texted about needing a massage on her glutes,
which I don't see as super relevant.

Speaker 8 (02:01:27):
No.

Speaker 2 (02:01:27):
I think the argument being made, particularly by dropside, is that, like, well,
this was still a relevant detail that was not included.
The other thing that wasn't that report that is more
relevant is the fact that Politico had details about this
assault way before they released them right like, way before
it actually came out that may have been relevant to voters.
They do think that's a fair critique. I don't agree

(02:01:48):
with the relevance at all of her mentioning that she
needed a massage. That's not an invitation to sex that
doesn't like. I see that as entirely unrelevant, And I
think that this is within a tradition of that particular
journalist defending people that he likes from allegations that are credible.
I don't particularly respect this decision, but it's relevant.

Speaker 8 (02:02:11):
It's a pretty gross move to take this moment and
then try to inject any amount of doubt into what's
happened and peddling this politely i'll say soft rape apologia.
That's it's disgusting. There's this a very similar thing coming
from the Young Turks, from an Kasparian and Chenk. I'm

(02:02:31):
happy that the majority report people turned on Graham like
immediately apologized for defending him throughout these these past these
past few months and said that they were wrong about
him as a person. Yeah, I'm glad they did that.
But what Grimm did hear and what the Young Turks
are doing is just completely despicable. Yeah, I think it's

(02:02:54):
I think it's gross repulsive.

Speaker 6 (02:02:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:02:56):
I don't think there's any reason to bring that specific
detail up other than to try to inject out like you.

Speaker 9 (02:03:04):
Said, Yeah, I want to say just one thing about
the way that consent works, which is that if you
withdraw consent at any time, no matter what happened before,
it is withdrawn. That's that's how it works. And if
anyone like, regardless of what happened until that moment, you
have to continue consenting. And if you stop consenting, the

(02:03:24):
moment you stop consenting like you have stopped consenting, it
becomes assault. I just I want to be extremely clear
about that because people are trying to muddy the waters
about this, and this is just an important thing for
people to understand about the way that consent works.

Speaker 2 (02:03:37):
I think that would be even more relevant if she'd
said come over and then said don't later. But like
what she said was not even starting the Yeah, no,
it's not even that, but but I I just want
to be clear about it. According to Grim's report, she
did not even ask him for a massage.

Speaker 4 (02:03:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:03:54):
His entire motivation to do this is so is so
suspib Like, hey, he's trying to say this is about
like journalistic in tegrity and how Politico and CNN we're
dishonest with yeah, Rasaco's you know claims, and like that's
that's it's completely absurd. I think anyone with half a
brainon cell can see what he's trying to do here,
and it's and it's gross.

Speaker 2 (02:04:11):
I simply don't agree with that.

Speaker 6 (02:04:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:04:13):
Yeah, And I think I think the other thing that's
kind of very bleak about this is that like there
is more proof here than yeah, most people who are
sexually assaulted are going to have right, and this is
still the reaction that that it's getting from like fortunately
not a very large number of people, but still people

(02:04:35):
who have large.

Speaker 8 (02:04:35):
But still pretty influential yeah people.

Speaker 9 (02:04:37):
Yeah, yeah, And and that's you know, like this is
part of the reason why, you know, when this shit
happens everywhere from like five person anarchist collectives up to
like the DSA, up to like the Democratic Party up
to the like the president of the fucking United States,
why this ship plays out like this because this is
just a structural factor of politics writ large, is that

(02:05:00):
you are going to have to deal with people who
fucking do this and their fight to get away with
it and people who try to run cover for them.

Speaker 5 (02:05:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:05:06):
I think this is part of why I have an
issue sometimes with folks when there's like a new allegation
against like a conservative politician or like a right wing
church figure or something, and they're like, it's always these guys,
and it's like, no, it's every Like pedophilia is all
over the place. It exists in left wing organizations and
right wing organizations. And when you start being like, well,
this is a thing the bad people do, not a

(02:05:27):
thing the good people do, then you've created a place
in which the people who do that have cover, Like
that's that's what you're doing when you're like, now, bad
people do that, so no one that I agree with
would Yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:05:38):
Yeah, Like sexual violence and getting away with it, that's
a structural force, right, Like that, that's something that is
brought about by like large scale structural forces that, regardless
of what people stated, politics are transcendose divides and people
do it. Anyways, Well, let's go on a break and
then we will return with more news because more things
happened this past week.

Speaker 2 (02:06:11):
All Right, we're back, and you know, there's simply nothing
to say, but it's time for a little musical interlude.
Locky jazz rocky jazz bo.

Speaker 8 (02:06:26):
Sorry, lock.

Speaker 2 (02:06:30):
Locky jazz bo rocky jazz bo. Ah, Oh god, that
just hits every single time. It's been too long. Yeah,
it really has, it really has, it really has. The
time makes fools of us all mia. What's happening in
tariffs today?

Speaker 9 (02:06:47):
The tariffs have been in committee, which is why the
tariff song has been It has been in the box.
But they are no longer in committee. So long long ago,
in a galaxy far far away, which is to say, February,
in a slightly different department, we talked about the possibility
of Trump replacing the tariffs that the Supreme Court struck
down by using a series of different sets of tariffs.

(02:07:10):
One of the sets that we mentioned are tariffs imposed
by using Section three ZHO one of the US Trade
Act of nineteen seventy four. This allows the administration to
carry out an investigation into unfair trade practices and that
imposed teriffs after the investigation is concluded. Now, the administration
basically set one of these investigations in motion, effectively the

(02:07:33):
moments the ruling was decided in February and on July second,
they returned with their conclusions, which Lo and Behold found
that fifty four countries were failing to take appropriate measures
to quote impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the
importation of goods produced with forced labor. Now these countries,

(02:07:54):
on top of Russia and China, include traditional US allies
like Israel, Japan, South Korea, and India.

Speaker 8 (02:08:01):
I think you mean the Islamic Republic of Japan. I'm sorry,
I had to. I just I could not let that
one escape me. I missed that reference. Did someone trum
Trump today said the words the Islamic Republic of Japan?
Whether I think he did not mean to say the
Islamic Republic of Japan.

Speaker 2 (02:08:21):
What country has taken fewer Islamic refugees than Japan? Like,
I don't even understand down that could be like a
conservative bugbear?

Speaker 8 (02:08:30):
He says, the Islamic Republic of Japan fired missiles at
US shifts.

Speaker 2 (02:08:36):
Okay, Okay, he just misspoke. He misspoke. He's trying to
say Ron It's just a normal senior moment from our
president as he launches or continues a series of illegal
attacks on foreign countries. Just a normal senior moment from
our president. We're good, We're good, everything's fine us. Incredible

(02:08:57):
stuff happening here that yeah, or that it cannot produce. Actually, admittedly,
this is not the first time in our lifetimes that
our president has not been able to correctly name the
country which he is bombing. There isn't sure, isn't. It's
not even the second president that this has happened to
in our lifetime. No, I'm not certain.

Speaker 6 (02:09:18):
It's the third.

Speaker 9 (02:09:19):
Like three out of four. I'm pretty sure Bill Clinton.

Speaker 4 (02:09:22):
Could do it, So that's like three out of five.

Speaker 2 (02:09:25):
But I'm not one hundred percent. He's a country boy.
He probably fucked it up once. Now, we didn't bomb
as many people when he was president, but we didn't
bomb no people.

Speaker 9 (02:09:33):
That's probably true. Good God, good god.

Speaker 8 (02:09:37):
Okay, So sorry, sorry, my apologies, it's okay, it's okay,
returning for this this bleak interlude.

Speaker 9 (02:09:44):
So again, countries that the US are saying like are
not enforcing this prohibition on the importation of goods abuses
for slabor. So these again include a bunch of traditional
US allies like Japan, South Korea, India, and Israel, which
is sort of interesting. It also says quote the following
six economies have failed to effectively enforce a prohibition on

(02:10:04):
the importation of goods produced with forced labor. Canada, Ecuador,
the European Union, Indonesia, Mexico, and Pakistan. So on this
list that is the entire EU, Canada, Mexico, China, India, Japan,
South Korea, Brazil, and Turkey, which is a list of
the world's largest economies. And then also there's a few
kind of oddball ones like poor Sri Lanka, which they

(02:10:29):
really have something out for Sri Lanka. I don't know
exactly why it keeps showing up on these terif lists,
despite the fact that these poor people have been just
suffering unbelievably devastating economic consequences for a very long time.
Now I am in the unfortunate position of having to
agree with California's Attorney General, a thing I am not
typically doing. But he did in fact say something which

(02:10:52):
is true that this list of countries is in fact
ninety nine percent of all US imports.

Speaker 6 (02:10:57):
So okay. Now we can.

Speaker 9 (02:11:01):
Obviously note here the hypocrisy of imposing teriffs for forced
labor in a country whose constitution specifically allows forced labor
for prisoners, and note that you know, forced labor of
various kinds from a dentuer service you to debt, p
andage to various kinds of slavery have been key elements
to the development of capitalism from the beginning. But this
is not about forced labor at all, as I think
anyone who is even remotely paying attention will understand. So

(02:11:25):
the tariff rates are nominally tied to setting up systems
that ensure that goods produced with forced labor aren't being
sent to the US. With countries who are like out
of compliance with the US system would do that getting
a twelve percent twelve point five percent tariff rate, and
countries who are complying facing ten percent teriff rates. That's
at least the theory. The practice is not that, as

(02:11:46):
the diplomat notes quote. The proposed teriff rates, however, cannot
be explained by human rights concerns alone. Thailand and Vietnam
at the Philippines have not established import prohibition systems meeting
US standards and face a twelve point five percent tariff.
Malaysia and Cambodia likewise lacks US systems, but phase a
tariff for fully ten percent. So this is just a

(02:12:07):
fairly naked attempt to reimpose the set of tariffs that
Trump initially imposed in February in the wake of that
Supreme Court decision. We talked about those in a different episode.
They are up for a July twenty fourth deadline, so
it's pretty clear that this report is time to come
out in a way to allows these tariffs, which are
very very similar to the ones that were already in place,

(02:12:29):
to go into effect. Now, it's worth noting that those
tariffs had some bad court rulings. They're probably not going
to last long enough to get like a good Supreme
Court ruling on it before they come out of effect.
So those ones probably won't be lifted by a court
order just because there's not enough time. But there's a
good chance that these terroriffs are also not going to survive.

(02:12:51):
But the California Attorney General is part of a very
large group of state attorney generals which features the attorney
general of almost every state with a Democratic governor, which
I'm not going to read the list out because it's
a bunch of them, but they are once again suing
the administration over these tariffs. So here here we are
again riding the tariff roller coaster, and yeah, we're back

(02:13:17):
with the Trump administration trying to impose ten to twelve
percent tariffs on most of the economies in the.

Speaker 8 (02:13:21):
World, speaking of the Islamic Republic of not Japan. No boy,
here is James Stout with a special segment.

Speaker 7 (02:13:32):
So what I want to talk about today is this
lawsuit recently filed by the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund,
represented by Public Citizen, which has some incredible accusations about
what the United States government has done to people who
are Iranian nationals seeking asylum in the United States. Specifically,

(02:13:53):
they're alleging that the US government has just closed confidential
information on Iranian national seeking asylum in the USA to
the Iranian government. I am going to reference a complaint
and quote from a length quite a bit here, because
these accusations are crazy. Not crazy in that I think
they're false. I don't think they're false, crazy in that
they are abhorrent and disgusting, especially when you consider that

(02:14:15):
the United States government has consistently talked about the rights
of people in Iran while all the time violating those
same rights. So let's quote from that complaint.

Speaker 6 (02:14:25):
Quote.

Speaker 7 (02:14:26):
Many of the asylum seekers are pro democracy protesters, members
of religious minorities such as evangelical Christians or members of
the LGBTQ community, who seek refuge in the United States
because of grave dangers they face in Iran. It's closing
their confidential information to the Iranian government, violates the asylum seekers'
confidentiality rights, endangers their family members and acquaintances who may

(02:14:47):
still be residing in Iran, and puts those who are
subject to removal to Iran directly or through chain refilement
via third countries at risk persecution, torture, and death following
their ribal in it run. If you're not familiar with
Jane Refileman, it's sending someone to a third country that
will then send them to the place that the USA
can't or won't send them due to concerns of persecution

(02:15:09):
or torture. So it's an end ran around international law.
It's barred by the ninety fifty one Refugee Convention and
the UN Convention against Torture, but the US has been
doing it a lot under the Trump two point zero regime.
In the course of my work, I have met Iranians
from all of the groups described in this complaint, as
well as those who are ethnic minority is in country

(02:15:30):
in addition to being parts of the groups described in
this complaint. Can think of a group of young Iranian women,
I men the Dadian Gap who I spent a good
deal of time talking to you really lovely folks of
man with them as well.

Speaker 6 (02:15:42):
Actually I think about it.

Speaker 7 (02:15:43):
You can hear them in my Darien series. I met
some Iranian Christians in outdoor attention, a number of them. Remember,
one of them was having a heart problem, so it's
been a deal of time trying to help her and
get her medical attention. As I've covered before in this show,
throughout the USA, when Israel's bombing campaign on Iran, Iran
has kept killing its own citizens. In the last couple

(02:16:05):
of weeks, it has engaged some of the armed Kurdish
groups and there have been casualties on both sides. The
process of the US government sharing these records with Iran.
The suit alleges began in March of twenty twenty five.
It seems to have continued when the US was bombing
Iran that year. It seems to have continued while Iran

(02:16:27):
massacred thousands of its own citizens in January of this year,
and it continued throughout the United States and Israel's current
war on Iran. Indeed, a flight left for Iran on
January the twenty fifth of this year, as the dead
from the pro democracy protests were only recently in their graves.

(02:16:47):
Iran doesn't have an embassy in the US, and these
affairs go through the Iranian Interest Section of the Pakistani embassy.
It was to that Iranian Interest section that the State
Department reached out in March of twenty twenty five. According
to the lawsuit quote, the March twenty twenty five meeting
produced an agreement between the United States government and the
Iranian government, under which ICE and Iranian government officials have

(02:17:11):
begun holding monthly meetings to share the immigration files and
information of Iranians in ICE custody. In addition, since the
March twenty twenty five meeting, US government officials have periodically
mailed or hand delivered immigration files of Iranians in ICE custody,
who the Iranian government then goes onto. Alleged that ICE

(02:17:31):
has provided officials from the Iranian Interest Section with access
to people that it has detained and worked with the
Iranian government to pressure these people to waive their rights.
This is going to be them signing quote unquote voluntary
deportation paperwork where very clear is not voluntary when they're
held against their will and pressure to do it. But
that's what you'll hear it called quote. Many of the

(02:17:53):
Iranian detainees did not consent to meet with the Iranian
Intersection officials, but were required to do so by ice.
According to Iranian detainees who met with an Iranian Intersection official,
the official had knowledge of their immigration cases, including the
details of their asylum applications. These nonconsensual meetings with the
Interestsection officials solidify the detainee's belief that they have been

(02:18:15):
identified to the very same repressive government that they had fled.
The United States government allowed the Iranian government to select
the Iranians deported to Iran. According to this complaint, some
of those people were then interrogated by an intelligent section
of the IRGC on their rival in Iran. Some of

(02:18:36):
these people had detailed on their application as they must
to make a good asylum application right, that they had
participated in the twenty twenty two jan Azadi movement Woman
Life Freedom. There's a Kurdish slogan of the Kurdish Freedom
movement that was used by pro democracy protesters in Iran

(02:18:56):
after the murder of Jinamini by Iraan police. This sparked
a whole movement. I'm sure you could find a great
deal of good writing on that movement. It was very
well covered. I have met women who took part in
that movement. As I said before, you can hear some
of them in some of my podcasts. They tried with
every fiber of their being to make it round better.

(02:19:20):
They saw their friends die to try and make it
round better, and then they fled because it was made
very clear to them that the state was willing to
fill the streets with blood before it changed. Now those
people are obviously afraid of telling the truth on their
asylum applications or even to their lawyers, especially while they're
in detention, because they now know that that information could

(02:19:43):
be delivered directly into the hands of the Iranian government.
They may have sat in their applications. I was part
of this movement because I'm opposed to the government, and
now that information is being delivered to the government. They
came here to experience some of the freedoms that their
friends died for dead. They were hand delivered to the
regime that they had fled from the US did not

(02:20:04):
ask for any protections or guarantees for their safety. At
the very same time, the USA was using the rights
Iranian people as a pretext for its war in era.
It did this as it was depriving people of those
very same rights back here. This is disgusting. I will
link to the complaint in the sourceage you'd like to

(02:20:26):
read it yourself. I'm going to keep an eye on
this one. Even amongst the horrors of the second Trump administration,
this is just particularly apparent.

Speaker 8 (02:20:36):
We'll go on a break and then return for one
more batch of news.

Speaker 2 (02:20:49):
We are back.

Speaker 8 (02:20:51):
Next up two shootings by ice, which have both occurred
just this last week, exactly half a year after the
shooting of Renee Good Robert.

Speaker 2 (02:21:03):
Video captured Wednesday morning in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania showed Ice attempting
to arrest an undocumented immigrant from Mexico named Clemente Laura Hernandez.
There's video of this incident. You can see like a
black car with flashing lights, like an unmarked police car
blocking like a white suv. Agents get out of the

(02:21:26):
car and rush the suv and again they just kind
of look like guys with guns in a moment, and
one of them starts screaming that he's going to shatter
the window and yelling at the driver. At that point,
the driver pulls away in a panic. They hit the black,
unmarked car that had been blocking them. They speed off,
the fucking Ice points out there, going wrong way down

(02:21:47):
a one way street, and they hit another uninvolved civilian
vehicle and it was like, yeah, they were panicked because
an unmarked car drove up and gunman ran out and
started surrounding and screaming at them.

Speaker 6 (02:21:58):
It scared them.

Speaker 2 (02:21:59):
That's the kind of shit that happens in countries where
the cartels are in charge of everything, if you pretend
that like Ice is in any meaningful way different from
a cartellary gang. As of us recording this, this person
has not been taken into custody. I hope they stay
that way. Also earlier this week in Houston, Texas, Lorenzo
Salgado Arajo, who is fifty two years old, was driving

(02:22:23):
in the East End when the same basic thing happened.
Unmarked cars surround him, guys with guns get out. He
gets really scared and he drives off and he gets shot.
As he's driving away. ICE accused him of having weaponized
the vehicle. He was taken to the hospital where he died.
Salgado a Rajo had no criminal record, he had been

(02:22:45):
in the country for more than thirty years. He was
in a car with several people, including his brother. There's
no evidence whatsoever of any kind of violence in his past.
There's no evidence that he wanted to hurt anyone. There's
no evidence that he was doing anything but being terrified
by unmarked, armed men surrounding him. His son has come
out and said that if he knew they were ICE,

(02:23:07):
he certainly would have stopped and complied. He had no
idea what was happening, which again seems very credible to me.
There's already been a cavalcade of people coming out to
demand an independent and impartial investigation into what happened, including
US Representative Sylvia Garcia, who's a Democrat from Texas, and
obviously his son and Alejandra Salinas, a Houston City council manager,

(02:23:31):
also called for an immediate and partial investigation. I don't
know what good I think that's going to do. Like, realistically,
for one thing, no law enforcement entity could be trusted
to conduct an independent and partial investigation of ice period,
especially right now. For another, there's literally no way to
guarantee that they will be held to account even if
the evidence, and I think it suggests that they were

(02:23:53):
acting entirely wrongly and murdered a man like I don't
believe anything's going to happen to this guy at this point.
So I guess I support the idea of an independent
and impartial investigation. I just don't think that's going to
get us anywhere yet.

Speaker 9 (02:24:06):
Yeah, I mean, I think I think if we want
an actual independence, like impartial investigation, it's going to have
to happen after this. This administration regime is out of power,
and that's the thing that can be done, right, But
it's going to just take a bunch of time until
these people don't have control of all of the state
security services. And in the meantime, they're just going to
keep doing the same shooting over and over again. There's

(02:24:29):
been growing protests in Houston these past few days. This
is some audio recorded Tuesday published by Reuters.

Speaker 10 (02:24:36):
People are here to work, Families are dying, people are dying,
but are doing murdering innocent Mexican people.

Speaker 9 (02:24:42):
They come to work.

Speaker 4 (02:24:44):
They come here to work, So what if they don't
got papers? So what they're welcome?

Speaker 10 (02:24:53):
Yeah, Trump did this to us. What happened to taking
the murderers out? What happened to take in the rapist own?
What happened to taking the drug dealers down? Not innocent people?
That's not what you said, President Trump. You didn't say that.

Speaker 8 (02:25:07):
Since then, the protests have only grown. On Wednesday evening,
hundreds of people marched in Magnolia Park on the street
where Lorenzo Salgado O Rajo was shot by ice four
our last segment, Let's talk about America two fifty. So

(02:25:29):
this past weekend marked the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary
of the United States, and things went off without a hitch.
I heard the Great American State Fair was lots of fun,
that it was totally packed, that no parts of any
stages on nearly killed dancers as they were setting up

(02:25:49):
the event, That there was no severe weather events that
disrupted it.

Speaker 2 (02:25:54):
I heard it was fun.

Speaker 8 (02:25:56):
And adding to the fun was President Trump, who spent
much of the fourth of July weekend talking about the
growing threat of communism and the need to pass the
Save America Act. Following the Supreme Court's ruling in support
of counting mail in ballots. In Trump's July fourth speech

(02:26:16):
commemorating the historic occasion of America's two hundred and fiftieth birthday,
the President said that to keep America great, we must
pass the Save America Act, the troubled voter restriction bill
that has failed to pass Congress. Quote, all voters must
provide a little thing called proof of citizenship. There will

(02:26:37):
be no mail in ballots except for illness, disability, military deployment,
or travel. And you won't have cheating on the elections anymore.

Speaker 6 (02:26:46):
It's very simple.

Speaker 8 (02:26:47):
Unquote. Speaker Johnson has indicated his plan to pass another
version of the Save Act through reconciliation. The bill's repeatedly
installed in the Senate, and that has bolstered a lot
of Trump's frustrations these past few months. Now, following the
Supreme Court ruling, it appears that Republicans will take another

(02:27:10):
crack at it. But Trump also spent much of the
America two fifty address railing against communism. Quote, America will
never be a communist country. It's like a cancer. You
got to cut it out, and you got to cut
it out fast. The communist system is the opposite of
the American system, and the communist system has never worked.

(02:27:34):
Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world,
only to have that menace rear its ugly head right
back here in America. Unquote real, real nineteen fifties style
reactions to seven social Democrats getting elected. But I think

(02:27:56):
that the fact that how scared he is and people,
including on the Democratic Party side, and you know, there's
been a wave of articles from the Atlantic really scared
of the more kind of social democratic, democratic socialist direction
that the party's been going, really frightened. In fact, I think,
like a few days ago, Trump even said the words
as social democrat and said they're just communists. But the

(02:28:18):
fact that Trump had to learn what social democrat is
is a really interesting indicator of where we are at
as a country.

Speaker 4 (02:28:26):
M H.

Speaker 8 (02:28:27):
On the eve of July fourth, Trump gave another speech
at Mount Rushmore after speaking to the AI ghost of
Roseveldt God. And during this Mount Rushmore speech, he spoke
at length about how communism is a quote moral threat
to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country,
including World War One, World War two, Pearl Harbor or

(02:28:51):
even nine to eleven.

Speaker 2 (02:28:53):
World War One is simply not a threat to our country.
Not in any way, shape or form was our country
threatened at any point in World War Onebviously, some Americans
were killed as a result of Germany attacking shipping, but
in no way were we in danger.

Speaker 9 (02:29:06):
Yeah, Like, does she understand that Pearl Harvard was part
of World War two?

Speaker 7 (02:29:10):
Like?

Speaker 2 (02:29:10):
Does he like get that he was just shooting buzzwords off?
I think that's all that was.

Speaker 9 (02:29:15):
Yeah, incredible guide to control the largest nuclear weapons arsenal
in human history.

Speaker 8 (02:29:22):
Trump also called communism the enemy of the Constitution, the
enemy of July fourth, seventeen seventy six. Quote, on the
eve of this two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of American heritage,
we resolve and swear for all to hear that the
citizens of the United States of America will vanquish communism quickly.

(02:29:43):
President Trump also had this banger line, which is the
only clip I actually want to play of this speech.

Speaker 5 (02:29:50):
Boy, you can be loyal to Carl Box, or you
can be loyal to America. You can be a communist,
or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.

Speaker 11 (02:30:01):
As for those who pedal Marxist lies about our heritage,
tell our children that we live on stolen land, or
that our heroes were oppressors.

Speaker 5 (02:30:13):
They're doing something much worse than slandering our past. They
are slandering and attacking our future. Not going to let
that happen.

Speaker 8 (02:30:22):
You can be loyal to Karl Marx, You can be
loyal to America. So true, So true, President Donald Trump.
It's just really stunning thinking about this is how the
President of the United States is spending the two hundred
and fiftieth anniversary of the country that he thinks it

(02:30:42):
is important to start bringing this stuff up. I just
thought that was a little interesting tidbit that happened this weekend. Anyway,
I think that is all we have for news this week.

Speaker 2 (02:30:55):
Okay, well, I guess it's been. It hasn't been a
short news week, but you know, we don't always have
to talk for an hour and twenty minutes about the
shit that's happening. You now kind of know what's happening.

Speaker 8 (02:31:04):
No, this is just a fifty five to one hour
and three minutes with James Segment said, yeah, a short
news week.

Speaker 2 (02:31:11):
Yeah, a short news week. All right, go go with
christ my friends, we.

Speaker 8 (02:31:15):
Reported the news.

Speaker 6 (02:31:16):
We reported the news.

Speaker 2 (02:31:25):
Hey, We'll be back Monday, with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 1 (02:31:31):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia 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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