It Could Happen Here Weekly 248

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Call 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 everyone and welcome to It Could Happen Here. My
name is Anna Elkurd and I'm a researcher and analyst
of Arab and Palestinian politics. Today I want to talk
about the recent announcement that Hamas agreed to a second
phase of the Gaza ceasefire. So the Board of Peace
and mediator countries announced July 30th, last Thursday, I'm recording
on August 4th, that Hamas had agreed to a sort

(00:51):
of roadmap in which they would relinquish some of their weapons.
So this whole scenario has hinged on Hamas disarming, even
though in other conflicts, when there have been two parties,
disarmament comes at later stages. But in this scenario, the
Board of Peace and the Director General, Nikolai Mladenov, has

(01:12):
basically hinged the entire process on Hamas disarming first. And
so in the recent announcement, which President Donald Trump basically
celebrated on his social media, calling it a historic agreement
for the complete disarmament of Hamas. Hamas basically said that
they had been in conversation with not only the mediators

(01:33):
and their proposals, but with other Palestinian factions and had
agreed to relinquish their weapons in a particular way. So
they said it was contingent and conditional on a permanent
end to Israeli attacks and a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza,
as well as recovery and reconstruction. And importantly, they basically

(01:54):
said that no weapons would be handed over to Israel
or to any non-Palestinian party. So what Hamas is saying
is we're going to give up our weapons eventually if
Israel also adheres to the guidelines of the ceasefire. And
we will relinquish our weapons to the National Committee, which
is a governance structure made up of Palestinian technocrats. So

(02:18):
since the National Committee is supposed to govern Gaza eventually,
or at least that's the intention of this committee, even
though they haven't actually been allowed to do that, the
idea here is Hamas is saying, you want to claim
that disarmament is the reason that the ceasefire and recovery
and reconstruction can't proceed? Okay, so we'll disarm, but we'll

(02:39):
only disarm to other Palestinians. And like I said, it's
contingent on Israel also agreeing. withdrawing from Gaza, ceasing the
continued attacks. Israeli officials have basically said that they have
like severe worries about it and they're not interested. The
national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gavir, basically said that it's not

(03:01):
acceptable to Israel. So, you know, it's very much up
in the air, but Hamas basically threw the ball in
Israel's court with this announcement. It's also important to point
out that throughout these past couple of months since the
ceasefire was announced, Over a thousand Palestinians have been killed.
In the week that this announcement was made, Israel killed

(03:23):
at least six in Gaza and wounded many others.

Speaker 4 (03:26):
And so all of that is going on.

Speaker 3 (03:28):
And that's not even mentioning what's happening in the West Bank,
where things have really escalated in terms of both Israeli
army and Israeli settler violence, which often, of course, goes
hand in hand. This announcement might really amount to nothing here,
especially if Israel doesn't comply. But I think it poses
a bigger question around the Board of Peace and its

(03:49):
design and its objectives. So that's basically what this episode
is going to be about, answering the question of whether
the board's design, who sits on it, who pays for
a seat, who answers to who, actually makes a fair
outcome for Palestinians structurally impossible, regardless of this announcement or
any other announcements or decisions that Palestinians may make. So

(04:11):
just as a reminder to listeners, the Board of Peace
was announced as part of President Trump's 20-point Gaza plan
back in September 2025. 20 points to get Gaza back
on track. I shouldn't make jokes here, but that's what
it was called, and it was launched in January 2026.
Its stated purpose is to promote stability, restore dependable and

(04:34):
lawful governance, and secure enduring peace. in conflict-affected areas. So
not only in Gaza. At the start, the Board of
Peace was announced around what was happening in Gaza, but
eventually it grew into a bigger idea, and Gaza was
framed as a template. So this Board of Peace is
supposed to be a model for managing future conflicts globally.

(04:56):
But as I've argued in the past, this really is
not about conflict resolution. It's about conflict management and a
very particular type of conflict management where you subdue conflict
through repressive means rather than reconciliation or recovery or reparations
or anything kind of long-term. So I think it's important
to maybe discuss at this point how the Board of

(05:20):
Peace is structured. It's basically a three-tier hierarchy with Gaza
at the bottom. At the top, there's the founding executive board.
This is chaired by President Trump In fact, in the
founding documents of the Board of Peace, he is named explicitly.
It's not that the president of the United States, you know,
will continue to chair the Board of Peace. No, it's

(05:40):
specifically Donald Trump. So apparently he's going to be president
for life here. That's the top decision-making body. And then
underneath that is the Gaza Executive Board. Includes a lot
of different interesting characters. I'll talk about them in a second.
The Gaza Executive Board oversees implementation of what happens in Gaza. Farther, farther,
farther underneath that is the National Committee for the Administration

(06:02):
of Gaza, who are 15 unelected Palestinian technocrats approved by
Palestinian factions. But, you know, they are not of any
particular party. They are civil servants and they're supposed to
actually administer Gaza day to day. Now, the National Committee
reports to the director general of the Gaza Executive Board,
who is Nikolai Mladenov, not to any Palestinian constituency at

(06:27):
or to the Palestinian Authority, for example, or any Palestinian body. Now,
the six-page charter of the Board of Peace never actually
mentions Gaza or human rights. And I don't think this
is an oversight. You know, the board is designed as
a template for managing future conflicts. It's not designed to
uphold human rights. And I think even though, of course,
these are problematic positions to take, I think the European

(06:50):
reaction serves as a sort of legitimacy check here. When
the Board of Peace and its mechanisms were supposed to
be applied to Gaza, the EU attended the board's first
meeting as an observer, for example, and a number of
countries kind of floated the idea of joining. But then
when the Board of Peace was expanded as an idea

(07:12):
to become a template for future conflicts, for example, Ukraine, then,
you know, the European Union and other European actors basically
cited serious doubts about compatibility with the UN Charter. And
then France and the UK voiced reservations when Putin, for example,
was invited to be on the board. So yeah, who

(07:33):
is on the top tier board here? It's got people
like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who holds a
seat on the Board of Peace, despite being a party
to a conflict that's literally ongoing and is the reason
why the Board of Peace supposedly came into existence. And
despite having an ICC arrest warrant for war crimes. So clearly,

(07:54):
you know, one party to the conflict in this scenario,
in the Gaza case, is elevated while the other is administered.
Then there are a bunch of business figures. So CEOs,
venture capitalists, they sit alongside heads of state. So reconstruction
is really framed as a business opportunity as much as
it's framed as an issue of governance. There's not a

(08:16):
single Palestinian, nor does the PA actually hold a seat
anywhere in this hierarchy. Even though the Palestinian Authority did
actually want to join the Board of Peace and it
sought full membership on it, all they got was basically
a consolation prize, which was this coordination committee between the
Palestinian Authority and the board, with the Palestinian Authority Prime
Minister Mohammad Mustafa basically representing the Palestinian Authority one-on-one to Mladenov,

(08:40):
which has been described as a type of compromise because
the PA doesn't actually have a seat by itself. There
was much made about a $ 1 billion price tag for
a permanent seat on the board. So people like Viktor
Orban and Vladimir Putin and Lukashenko basically were invited to

(09:00):
participate in this way. And it's, you know, kind of
obviously a sham, turning participation and, you know, quote-unquote peace
governance into a commodity for heads of state. Now, Jared Kushner,
the president's son-in-law, who is inexplicably also involved in this,
at Davos in January, basically presented a master plan that

(09:20):
projected $ 10 billion for Gaza's GDP by 2035. And he
talked about new towers and industrial parks and all of this,
of course, drawn up without consulting Palestinians living in Gaza.
And Trump himself has described Gaza as a, quote, beautiful
piece of property over and over. So to me, this
is a shorthand for how the plan frames the conflict.

(09:42):
or wants to, wants to convince people that this conflict
is fundamentally about underdevelopment. Palestinians have grievances because they're poor,
rather than the occupation, rather than the genocide. So, you know,
it poses the question, what does it mean for this
peace architecture when the same people who oversee reconstruction also protest?

Speaker 4 (10:00):
Profit from it?

Speaker 3 (10:11):
Now, who is on the Gaza executive board, that second tier?
You can find the full roster online It is important
to note that they actually haven't met ever as a board.
You know, some of these people have their names and
their pictures on the website. And this Gaza executive board
has really not functioned except as kind of a legitimacy
stamp on the Board of Peace's activities. But it really

(10:33):
is very indicative of what the Board of Peace is
supposed to be and how they want to deal with
Gaza here. When you look at who has been invited,
even if they've never met. So it's got Gulf diplomats,
Turkish diplomats. It has an Egyptian intelligence chief. It has
a bunch of Trump administration people, Kushner, Susan Wiles, Steve Witkoff.
And then finance and business interests, like I said, are

(10:54):
very heavily represented here. So you have the CEO of Apollo,
Mark Rowan. You have venture capitalist Michael Eisenberg and a
number of other businessmen, many of them with ties to Israel.
There's only really two companies.

Speaker 4 (11:10):
Let's say, peace process veterans on this board.

Speaker 3 (11:14):
There's the director general, Mladenov, who I've discussed in a
previous episode, who's very problematic. I'll talk about him in
just a second. And then Tony Blair. Tony Blair, also
extremely problematic. He has a history of basically delivering the
Good Friday Agreement in the Northern Ireland conflict, but he
doesn't seem to be applying any of the lessons of
those previous conflicts to the Middle East in any way.

(11:36):
But the point here is that security, finance, and U.S.
political operatives clearly outweigh conflict resolution expertise on this executive board.
So who's actually running this? Like I said, they've never
actually met. Maybe some of them have been promised a
bigger role in the future. I'm thinking particularly the business
people here. But let's linger on Nikolai, I don't know

(11:59):
how to pronounce his name, Ladinov, who is the director
general here. I've talked about him before in a previous episode,
but he's the former Bulgarian foreign minister under a government
that was toppled by anti-corruption protests. Since 2022, he was
the head of an Emirati diplomatic academy which championed the
Abraham Accords, the so-called peace agreements between Israel and the

(12:20):
UAE and Bahrain and a few others. And this is
a framework that was disastrous. It's seen, especially by Palestinians,
as essentially cementing their exclusion from statehood. So this is
the guy who's supposed to run the Gaza executive board
and who has turned the peace process on its head
by basically, again, like I said at the beginning of

(12:40):
the episode, conditioning the entire process on disarmament first. We
have the rest of the Gaza executive board, and then
we have the Center for Civilian Military Control. So- This
is a center. It's based in the south of Israel.
It's supposed to oversee the ceasefire. But every ceasefire enforcement

(13:00):
decision basically has no sway on Israel itself. Like there's
no mechanism to actually hold Israel accountable. It has no
independent authority. It coordinates with the White House. And in particular,
the liaison to the White House is this man, Aryeh Lightstone.
who was a senior advisor to a former U.S. ambassador
to Israel who was extremely right-wing. And there's been recent reporting,

(13:23):
which I'll link in the show notes, about how intensely
hostile he is to Palestinians. So this is the guy
who's supposed to oversee the ceasefire and report to the
White House.

Speaker 4 (13:34):
So what are the consequences on the ground?

Speaker 3 (13:36):
As I said, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed
in Gaza since the ceasefire was announced. Over half of
Gaza is now behind this quote-unquote yellow line, which is
Israeli-controlled territory. Humanitarian and agricultural access is restricted or prohibited
in that area. So Gaza is more and more squeezed.
The aid that was supposed to reach 600 trucks a
day has never reached that promised 600 trucks. And much

(14:00):
of what enters is basically private sector goods that's sold
for profit, with the Israelis also getting like a coordination
fee on each truck. Now, Hamas dissolved its emergency committee
in July 2026. before they announced that they had accepted
the mediator's proposals about disarmament. They dissolved this emergency committee
and said they were handing authority over to the national committee.

(14:22):
But the board basically was uninterested in this move. They
said that they were guided by actions, not promises. And
it really points to the fact that these kind of
procedural concessions that Hamas is attempting to make don't really
fix the structural design flaws. I think it's also important
to point out here that even though on paper Hamas
has given up its civilian government, On the ground, like

(14:44):
that doesn't actually change much. It's still involved in security
and policing and bureaucracy. And what they dissolved is this
like civilian cabinet body that had run Gaza since October 2023.
And it's a very like specific administrative organ. And it's
not all of Hamas's governing capacity. So it was kind of, again,
a way of like throwing the ball in Israel's court

(15:06):
and claiming that we are dissolving the committee.

Speaker 4 (15:08):
We are making these concessions. But they're being very, you know,
strategic about this.

Speaker 3 (15:13):
And in the same announcement, when they dissolved the emergency committee,
they basically said that their technical and professional staff would
remain in their posts. And it hasn't, you know, relinquished
control over the civil service and security bureaucracy. So a
few months ago, much was made about Hamas's strategy and
whether there were going to be shifts in that strategy.
Because there was an internal election in Hamas that basically

(15:37):
cemented the divide between a kind of more hardline camp
and a more pragmatist camp. And the more hardline camp won.
So between Khaled Mishal, who was supposedly, you know, more
pragmatist and arguing for political accommodation, and Khalil Hayya, who
demanded kind of more confrontation, the second guy won. And

(16:00):
so there was a lot of speculation back in February
that that meant if the hardliners won, that this is
going to impact disarmament. And that that means Hamas will
never disarm and would never actually acquiesce to what was
being demanded of them. But in the last couple of weeks, months,

(16:20):
you can see that Hamas' strategy is much more, let's say,
nuanced and attempting to kind of buy time with the
United States and with the international community while.

Speaker 4 (16:34):
Still saying, okay, we're going to make concessions.

Speaker 3 (16:37):
This is not to imply that the victory of the
kind of more hardline camp isn't going to impact Hamas'
strategy in the future. They are much more Gaza-rooted and
a more pro-Iran faction. Obviously, these are internal shifts between them,
but we'll see how that plays out in the near future.
But again, I think we go back to the idea

(16:59):
of how the Board of Peace is designed and whether
the flaws in its design and the dangerous precedent it
sets for not only quote unquote, you know, conflict resolution
in Gaza, but conflict resolution in every other arena of
conflict here, where in this scenario, there isn't neutral mediation.
There isn't buy-in from all parties. One side is completely

(17:21):
missing from the board. One side is administered. It really
poses the question of whether any kind of political movement,
any concessions, anything that can be mediated and agreed upon
actually impacts how the board is going to function. Hamish Hedda,
who was speaking at a Carnegie Endowment roundtable back in April,

(17:42):
he is a Gazan journalist, I think put it really
well when he said that, quote, Gaza is no longer
just a unique, extraordinary case of human savagery. It is
a canary in a coal mine. What starts there does
not end there. And I think I want to end
on that note of framing Gaza as a canary in
the coal mine, because the Board of Peace is this
model that combines billionaires, profiteering, and kind of the worst

(18:09):
actors in the world in terms of dictators and those
who are invested in a more authoritarian world, that is
going to be the model that's going to be exported
to other weak states or contested territories.

Speaker 4 (18:22):
That's all for me today. Hope that this was at
least eye-opening. And thanks for listening.

Speaker 5 (18:40):
The drums of war are beaten. Everywhere you look, people
are picking sides. Governments are demanding unity. Critics are being
denounced as naive, irresponsible, even treacherous. And a movement built
on international solidarity has been split in the kiosk. The

(19:00):
year is 1914, at the beginning of the First World War,
though you'll be excused if you thought I was describing today.
Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Andrew Sage,
also Andrewism on YouTube, joined again by Neil Wogg to
discuss the infamous split among the anarchists over World War I,

(19:23):
of all things. So just to be clear, the common
anarchist stance prior to the war was fairly straightforward. It
was a stance of internationalist worker solidarity against imperialist wars,
a solidarity that transcended borders and nationalities. recognizing that ordinary
people had more in common with one another than with
the ruling classes of their own countries. Such wars were

(19:45):
never fought in the interests of workers, but in the
interests of states, empires, dynasties, and capitalists. If war came,
the task of revolutionaries was not to rally behind their
own governments, but to oppose the conflict and preserve international
working-class solidarity. However, the Great War would strain the internationalist cause.

(20:08):
forcing splits and theoretical developments owing to the ensuing debates
personified in the disagreement between Errico Malatesta and Peter Kropotkin,
as well as many others, who clashed intellectually over the
nature of war, history, national struggle, and revolutionary change. The
First World War emerged from decades of imperial rivalry, colonial competition,

(20:32):
military expansion, and competing alliance systems among Europe's great powers.
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on the
28th of June 1914 served as the immediate catalyst, but
it merely ignited tensions that had been building for years.
Within weeks, a regional dispute between Austria-Hungary and Serbia escalated

(20:54):
into a continental and eventually global conflict. On one side
stood the Central Powers, led by Germany and Austria-Hungary, later
joined by the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria. and opposing them
were the Allied powers, initially consisting of France, Russia, and Britain,
with countries such as Italy, Romania, Japan, and eventually the

(21:16):
United States entering the war on the Allied side as
the conflict expanded. Attitudes toward the First World War across
Europe were deeply divided and often changed dramatically in the
opening weeks of the conflict. A powerful wave of patriotic
enthusiasm swept through many cities, with countless people volunteering for
military service, under the belief that the war would be short, necessary,

(21:39):
or even glorious. Governments, newspapers, churches, and much of the
political establishment promoted national unity and portrayed the conflict as
a defensive struggle against foreign aggression. For socialists, trade unionists,
religious pacifists, and most relevantly anarchists, the stance was deeply

(21:59):
sceptical or openly oppositional to the war. as it appeared
to be a catastrophic clash between rival empires in which
ordinary people would bear the costs while elites pursued their
geopolitical ambitions. However, one of the attitudes that flared up
as a result of the war, even amongst some anarchists
and socialists, was anti-German sentiment, manifest in Kropotkin's open letter

(22:23):
in the anarchist newspaper Freedom. This open letter would spark
the ensuing debate between Kropotkin and Malatesta. As documented by
historian Matthew S. Adam in Anarchism and the First World War,
Kapotkin wrote, quote, I consider that the duty of everyone
who cherishes the idea of human progress is to crush
the invasion of the Germans into Western Europe. Since 1871,

(22:46):
Germany has become a standing menace to European progress. All
were living under the menace of sudden invasion. More than that,
Germany was the chief support and protection of reaction, end quote.
For many anarchists, and even Leon Trotsky, this seemed a
clear break from Kropotkin's anarchism, which would be in opposition

(23:06):
to alignment with nation-state-based struggles. However, as noted by historian
George Woodcock in Peter Kropotkin, From Prince to Rebel, quote,
anti-German sentiment was probably an influence on Kropotkin long before
this point, as it was a current in Russian revolutionary
movements due to the German rule by the Romanov dynasty.

(23:27):
and perhaps also because his fellow Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin
had an infamous rivalry with the German Karl Marx. End quote.
Though of course, you know, this is speculation. Kropotkin and
Malatesta were both in Britain when their exchange of letters
took place. Malatesta wrote in his article, Anarchists Have Forgotten

(23:47):
Their Principles, that the only war worth fighting was one
of liberation, and there was no siding with national agglomerations.
He said, quote, End quote. Now, Kropotkin had previously argued

(24:28):
that modern wars were fundamentally driven by capitalist competition for markets, resources,
and opportunities to exploit less industrialized nations. He pointed to
the imperial conquests and colonial conflicts of his time as
evidence that financiers and economic interests, rather than ordinary people,
were the true beneficiaries of war. And while he saw

(24:49):
capitalism as the primary engine of modern militarism, he also
condemned the state as the political institution that organized and
carried out these conflicts. So it was odd for Kropotkin
to seemingly come out the contrary of his previous positions,
and take one state's side over another when he had

(25:11):
seen through such sides before. But, of course, people and
their motivations are more complex. Kropotkin had sympathy for France
and hostility toward Germany. He saw France as the heir
to the revolutionary tradition of 1789 and the Paris Commune,
and he saw Germany as the embodiment of militarism and authoritarianism.

(25:35):
He believed the war was a poor moment for social
revolution and feared that a German victory would usher in
decades of political reaction, wiping out the hard-won freedoms that
had been achieved in countries like Britain and France. His
support for the Allies was rooted in his broader view
of history, that social progress was never guaranteed and could

(25:57):
always be reversed, that periods of freedom and cooperation could
collapse into authoritarianism. He also believed that national liberation struggles
were a space ripe for anarchist social insertion and radicalization,
and that in times of war, an anti-militarist general strike
within the targeted nation would simply gift the country to

(26:19):
its invaders, and that anti-militarists advocating such actions were thus
siding with the invaders and making social revolution more difficult
to carry out in the future. This is, for me,
a somewhat compelling argument. I feel this way about current struggle.
While the worker has no friend in the states of

(26:40):
the world, and I don't think it should be framed
as a matter of campism the way we see running
rampant today, It is undeniable that there are some victories
and defeats that will be more or less preferable to
the viability of the struggle long term. I am rooting
against an Israeli victory anywhere. And while I reserve my

(27:01):
right to criticize the politics, ideologies, and other actions of
the groups carrying out that resistance, it remains true that
the defeat of the oppressors can open up the space
for further struggles. If it was that anarchists were arguing
and acting solely for anti-militarism in the targeted countries, then
I would be fully with Kropotkin, you know, I would

(27:23):
get where he's coming from, we would indeed have a problem.
But I think he mischaracterized the anarchist position, or perhaps
did not give them enough credit. As for the anarchists,
primary responsibility for anti-militarist ends is in agitating within the
invader countries themselves. to disrupt the militarism within the threatening
nations to the bitter end. Anything less would be an

(27:47):
incomplete and flaccid anti-militarist struggle. Kropotkin addresses this in the
Manifesto of the Sixteen, which we'll get to shortly. And yet,
with the context of hindsight, I share Malatesta's criticism of
the pitfalls of lesser evilism as he kinda predicted World
War II. Adam wrote of Malatesta's position, quote, German victory

(28:11):
would certainly mean the triumph of militarism, but the triumph
of the Allies would result in much the same. Both
guaranteed the victory of the state principle. With statism delivered
in both cases, and the tensions that caused the war
remaining unresolved, Malatesta perspicaciously warned that with both sides exhausted,
some kind of peace would be patched up, leaving all

(28:32):
questions open, thus preparing for a new war more murderous
than the present. End quote. In 1915, Malatesta, along with
Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and 32 other signatories, co-signed a

(28:57):
manifesto titled The Anarchist International and the War, otherwise known
as the International Anarchist Manifesto on the War, Manifesto of
the 35, and Anti-War Manifesto. In this text, Malatesta, along
with Emma Goldman, and 32 other signatories, the anarchists call
out the ridiculous notion that any side of this clash
of civilizations had claim to righteousness, freedom, or civilization. Quote,

(29:19):
In the current conflict, the governments in Berlin and Vienna
have justified themselves by producing documents every bit as authentic
as those produced by the governments in Paris, London, and Petrograd.
It is for whoever on each side who will produce
the most unchallengeable, most telling documentation to prove their bona fides.
and portray themselves as the unblemished defender of the right

(29:42):
and of freedom, the champion of civilization. Civilization? Who stands
for that at the moment? Is it the German state
with its redoubtable militarism, so powerful that it has stifled
every vestige of rebellion? Or the Russian state, whose only
methods of persuasion are the nowt, the Gibbet, and Siberia.
Or the French state, with Espiribi, its bloody conquests in Tonkin, Madagascar, Morocco,

(30:07):
and forcible conscription of black troops. The France whose prisons
have housed, for years past, comrades whose only crime was
to have written and spoken out against the war. Or England,
as she exploits, divides, starves, and oppresses the peoples of
her huge colonial empire. No, none of the belligerents has
any right to lay claim to civilisation. just as none

(30:29):
of them is entitled to claim legitimate self-defense. The truth
is that the root of wars, of the war currently
bloody in the plains of Europe, just like all the
ones that went before it, is located exclusively in the
existence of the state, which is the political form of privilege.
The state is born of military might, it has grown
through recourse to military might, and logically, it is upon

(30:53):
military might that it must rely if it is to
retain its omnipotence. Whatever the form it may assume, the
state is merely oppression organized for the benefit of a
privileged minority. The present conflict offers a striking illustration of this.
All forms of the state are embroiled in the present war.
Absolutism is represented by Russia, absolutism mitigated by parliamentarism and

(31:17):
by Germany, a state ruling over very different peoples by Austria,
constitutional democracy by England, and the democratic republican system by France.
End quote. Malatesta rejected the idea that anarchists should support
one state over another because it was supposedly the lesser evil.
Doing so, he argued, placed the struggles of some workers

(31:41):
above those of others and abandoned international working class solidarity.
While he accepted that anti-colonial wars and social revolutions could
be justified, he maintained that anarchists should oppose wars between
rival capitalist and imperialist states. refusing to become complicit in
their violence and exploitation. Later, in the brief manifesto, No

(32:03):
matter where they may find themselves, the anarchists' role in
the current tragedy is to carry on proclaiming that there
is but one war of liberation, the one waged in
every country by the oppressed against the oppressor, by the
exploited against the exploiter. Our task is to summon the
slaves to revolt against their masters. Anarchist propaganda and anarchist

(32:25):
action should set about doggedly undermining and breaking up the
various states, cultivating the spirit of rebellion, and acting as
midwife to the discontent in the peoples and in the armies.
End quote. Going on to describe how anarchists might convince
the soldiers, the factory workers, the peasants, the outcasts, the women,
and to quote, capitalize upon every stirring of rebellion, every discontent,

(32:51):
in order to foment insurrection. to organize the revolution to
which we look for the ending of all of society's iniquities.
End quote. Powerful words. Yeah. And indeed in line with
what anarchists had long proclaimed. But Kropotkin, and Kropotkin was
not alone, mind you, he took a different position on
the war. He and 14 allies published in 1916 the

(33:15):
Manifesto of the Sixteen as a reply. It was not
16 of them who signed that manifesto, it was 15.
He just got called the Manifesto of the Sixteen because
the home address of one of the contributors was mistaken
for another contributor.

Speaker 4 (33:32):
Incredible stuff.

Speaker 5 (33:36):
Yeah, and so that's what I was knowing today. But
it's like he was living in some town in Algeria,
I believe, and they thought the name of the town
was a person's name. Oh my God. Publishing mistakes are
tailors all this time. In the Manifesto of the Sixteen,
Kropotkin and the other signatories reaffirmed their opposition to militarism

(33:56):
and wars of conquest, but argued that peace could not
simply be declared while Germany continued its invasion and expansion.
They contended that German workers had failed to resist their
own government's imperial ambitions, leaving no meaningful internal opposition to militarism.
Although they maintained their commitment to internationalism and the eventual

(34:18):
abolition of borders... they concluded that the defeat of German
militarism was a necessary precondition for a just and lasting peace,
believing it would ultimately benefit both the German people and
the cause of human liberation. So, I get where Kropotkin
is coming from too, as I see parallels to the

(34:38):
situation today vis-a-vis American imperialism and the flawed actors that
resist it. Even though I generally share Malatesta's sentiments, and
Malatesta was ultimately correct in his assessment that maintaining a
consistent stance is necessary for the clarity of the movement,
and also that this war's outcome would be nothing but

(34:58):
a precursor to a further war and would not advance
the class struggle and in fact worsen its conditions. All
that being said, I think there's room for a more
sympathetic appraisal of Kropotkin's position. As for responses and just
the overall outcome of this rift, For one, the Bolshevik
party had something to say. Lenin condemned the supporters of

(35:21):
World War I as anarcho-chauvinists. Stalin and Trotsky dismissed Kropotkin's
pro-war stance as evidence of anarchism's failure, despite the fact
that the majority of the anarchist movement remained opposed to
the Great War. Malatesta, responding to the Manifesto of the
Sixteen with his article Pro-Government Anarchists, accused its signatories of

(35:43):
abandoning anarchist principles and by siding with states in wartime.
He also pointed out that in the name of defeating
German militarism, they had instead strengthened militarism, authoritarianism, and nationalism
across Europe, including in the countries they were siding with
the governments of. Alexander Bultmann, echoing this criticism, argued that

(36:05):
Kropotkin had wrongly treated nations as if they were their governments,
when in reality the war was being driven by ruling elites,
not ordinary people. Malatesta maintained the position that anarchists should
capitalize on the imperialist war for class war by encouraging
workers to resist their own governments and revive genuine international solidarity.

(36:27):
Although wartime repression made revolutionary activity extremely difficult, he believed
the crisis created new opportunities for insurrection rather than justification
for supporting any state. The anarchist movement emerged from the
other side of the Great War Fragmented. some of its
adherents forever stained by their inconsistency of principle. The war

(37:01):
forced anarchists to reconsider strategy and revolutionary tactics, and, alongside
the economic devastation and political instability it unleashed, helped create
conditions that fueled revolutionary upheavals across Europe, most notably the
Russian Revolution and the wave of labor unrest that followed
the war. Though the revolution was initially carried out by

(37:23):
a diversity of forces, the Bolsheviks claimed it, and with
the seeming success of the Marxist model in Russia, it
appeared anarchism would be on the downturn. Though disillusionment with
that model would follow, and as many anarchists have highlighted,
the metrics of success between the respective movements were in
many ways different, it wasn't all bad news coming after

(37:45):
the war. The collapse of old regimes inspired experiments in workers' self-governance,
such as the German Revolution of 1918 and the Bavarian
Council Republic, where anarchists like Gustav Landauer and Eric Moussam
sought to build a federation of workers' councils rather than
a new state. Similar anti-authoritarian currents appeared in the Kronstadt

(38:06):
Rebellion of 1921, where rebels called for free Soviets independent
of Bolshevik control. Despite the growing dominance of state socialism,
anarchist ideas continue to shape revolutionary struggles in the aftermath
of the Great War. Though the war marked a shift
in the movement that some would argue anarchism has never

(38:26):
fully recovered from, anarchism has persisted, continues to reach people worldwide,
and has the potential still to intercede in the diversity
of struggles and places today. What is needed is a
clarity and consistency of principles and analyses across contexts that
can encourage initiative and responsibility and solidarity and revolutionary achievement.

(38:50):
It's easy, I think, to reduce this story to Kropotkin
standing alone, betraying anarchism. While ultimately I end up aligning
more with Malatesta's position than Kropotkin's, I do think that
Kropotkin deserves a bit more credit and he has sometimes
been afforded in retrospect. While his prejudices played a role,

(39:12):
he did seem to genuinely believe that German militarism posed
a unique threat to freedom that British, French, and Russian
powers did not. Whether he was right is another question,
but I think he was still coming from an anarchist place.
Coloured as he may have been by his anti-German prejudices.

(39:33):
I think the whole incident revealed the liveliness of the
anarchist movement as one that was constantly questioning and adapting
and conflicting and refining its ideas. Something that I hope
that we will be willing to carry on today. But
what were your thoughts? on this bit of early 20th
century drama alert.

Speaker 6 (39:55):
Yeah, I mean, I think in a lot of ways,
this is the anarchist version of a debate that played
out throughout the entire socialist movement and effectively ended up
destroying it in the sense that, you know, the logic
that Kropotkin is operating from to some extent makes sense,
but it's also the logic that was taken by every

(40:16):
single individual side in the conflict where like the German
social democratic party, you know, ends up supporting the war
because they think that if they don't, they're going to
be sort of like annihilated by the reactionary forces.

Speaker 4 (40:28):
Of the czar.

Speaker 6 (40:29):
And, but then like the French think they're going to
be destroyed by the reactionary forces of the Germans and
so on and so forth. And so everyone ends up
operating from this logic of like, It's going to be
really bad for us if the other side of this
wins this war. And it ends up squandering this moment

(40:51):
of possibility. And instead, everyone just gets sort of fed
into the meat grinder. And I think the struggle playing
out this way was effectively the worst possible thing that
could have happened. Because it meant that some of the
only people who were left resisting it were people who
shouldn't be running a dog kennel, much less, you know, like,

(41:13):
controlling the fate of the socialist movement. And also it
meant that the war was allowed to continue. And so
I think from a theoretical perspective, it's like, it makes
sense why people took the positions that they did, and also, like,
supporting this war was so catastrophically wrong that basically every
subsequent war of the 20th century can be laid upon it.

Speaker 5 (41:37):
But, I don't know.

Speaker 6 (41:39):
The other thing I'll say about it is it's not
clear to me if Kropotkin acting differently would have changed anything.
But the sort of general failure of the socialist movement
to actually grapple with this moment was a sort of
apocalyptic moment in the history of class struggle that we
have never recovered from.

Speaker 5 (41:59):
Yeah, I definitely don't think that the blame for World
War II and all subsequent wars in the 20th century, which...
can in some way be connected to that World War I.
I don't think we should lay the blame on the
feet of Kropotkin or on the anarchist movement or the
socialist movement.

Speaker 4 (42:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (42:18):
All we can really do is speculate the what if,
you know? Yeah. And what if there was a unified front,
a unified stand across all these countries, a commitment, a
solid commitment to we will not cooperate with our respective states.
How might the course of the war turned out differently
how might history have played out differently i guess we'll

(42:40):
never know yeah but we are in a position to
shape the course of history here and now yeah as
the title of the podcast goes you know it could
happen here it kind of is happening here by here
i mean on this planet across the world we are
dealing with wars we are dealing with interstate conflicts diplomatic economic,

(43:06):
and military. And despite how interconnected we are through the internet,
it certainly doesn't feel like we've come any closer to
the kind of international solidarity that the Great War demanded,
let alone the many wars being raged across the world today.

Speaker 6 (43:25):
Yeah, but even, you know, the bleakness of the past
and the bleakness of the present does not mean that
the future As I've said before, the definitional quality of
modernity is that today is not like yesterday. And so
we don't actually have to live through yet another round

(43:46):
of imperialist butchery where different parts of the working class
slaughter each other. We don't have to live in a
world that's defined by endless status and capitalist war. We
can build something else. But that's something that is the
responsibility of not the state, because the state will never

(44:07):
choose to abandon its privilege and abandon its wars. And
it's not up to, you know, capital, because capital will
also continue fighting its wars. The only people who can do.

Speaker 7 (44:16):
It is us.

Speaker 5 (44:18):
As usual, all power to all the people. Peace.

Speaker 2 (44:35):
Robert Evans here, and this is It Could Happen Here,
a podcast about our crumbling world and the people making
it crumble. And a good chunk of those people happen
to be race scientists, which is why today I'm going
to be talking about the gang of race scientists who
went after Jason Arday, the former Cambridge professor who recently
died by suicide just earlier this year in August of 2026.

(44:57):
And I came across a very good article about what
happened to Jason and the people kind of responsible to that.
by Stephanie Lamy. Stephanie is a researcher, a feminist, and
an expert in influence operations. She's the former Secretary General
of Internet Without Borders and the co-founder of DANAIDES.org, which

(45:17):
develops and deploys technology for civil society organizations operating in
conflict and crisis environments. She's a PhD candidate in political
sociology and And she wrote this really, really good article
that was published initially on the Club de Media part,
which is a French journalism blog, effectively. And she published
also a really good translation of it. And I enjoyed

(45:38):
it very much. I thought it was really valuable. So
I reached out to Stephanie and asked if we could
pay to host the audio version of her investigation. And
she agreed. So I'm going to be reading it. She
wanted me to do that. But I want to make
it clear, none of this is my work. And I
don't say that to, you know, defray any sort of
responsibility or whatever. This is much better work than I

(45:58):
could have done on the same subject, and I'm really
proud to be able to host Stephanie's article. Before I
get into her article, I do want to note that
she is the author of two books, Ogura Toxica, Uncivil
Society in the Internet Age, which is about how anti-democratic
actors use influence operations and digital platforms to mobilize and
undermine democratic societies. and La Terreur Masculiniste in 2024, an

(46:19):
investigation into masculinist radical milieus, their ideologies, networks, and the
use of violence as a political strategy. Both are published
by Editions du Deux Tours. I think, unfortunately, they're, I mean,
unless you speak French, then it's very fortunate, but they
are in French. Obviously, I'm going to be reading Stephanie's
article in English. And here it goes. The Hunt for
Jason Arday. Race science is a pseudoscience that feeds far-right propaganda.

(46:44):
Long relegated to the margins, it is gaining traction in
universities and seeks to establish its proponents as arbiters of knowledge.
The hunt that led to Jason Arday's death reveals how
this machinery of epistemic domination operates and who helps normalize it.
From day one, everything pointed to the fact that Jason Arday,
the black neurodivergent Cambridge professor who died in August of 2026,

(47:04):
was being subjected to racist and ableist harassment. exactly the
kind of targeting he himself had described. Arte had been
marked as quarry long before the fatal media pile-on. An
open and immensely well-funded race science international network enabled its
hunters to unleash the pack, to give the pursuit scale, reach,
and political unity. But to break out of the margins

(47:25):
of race science, the chase had to become something else.
Its extremist ideology needed to be laundered into a story
about scientific and journalistic integrity. The media had ample evidence
to challenge the frame imposed on them by the eugenicists. Instead,
they adopted it, running with the hounds, and in doing so,
legitimized both the aims and the epistemic authority of race scientists.

(47:46):
Marking the Quarry The hunt for Professor Jason Arday began quietly,
three years earlier, couched in the civilized nodes of a
scholarly society, a professor who was merely asking questions. In
May of 2023, Dave Harris, a retired white academic and
professor emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University, began examining Arday's publications.

(48:07):
Arday's appointment as professor of sociology and education at Cambridge
had made national news. At 37, he was the youngest
black professor in the university's history. From the moment he
arrived at Cambridge, our day was targeted by freedom of
information requests. In the United States, Christian nationalist organizations opposed
to teaching and researching drawing on critical race theory, CRT,

(48:27):
which examines, among other things, how racism is reproduced through
law and institutions, were already explicitly encouraging their supporters to
use public records procedures to target academics and then identify
or manufacture misconduct. Such smear campaigns are now part of
the academic far-right's repertoire. aimed particularly at researchers who examine
power relations, but also at those whose very presence, whose

(48:49):
perceived identity, appears to embody the gains of diversity, equity,
and inclusion policies. The largely covert campaign against Black scholars
also surfaced in 2023, when the work of Claudine Gay,
Harvard's first Black president, came under heightened scrutiny against a
backdrop of misogynoir. Christopher Ruffo, a senior fellow at the
Manhattan Institute and former visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation,

(49:11):
both Christian nationalist organizations, is one of the principal architects
of the American campaigns against CRT and DEI. He helped
turn the plagiarism allegations against gay into a broader political
offensive against minority representation in American institutions. What connects Rufo
to what would later come for ARDE is not only
the method, but also the network. Rufo has repeatedly promoted

(49:34):
race-science-focused online magazine, Aporia, and appeared on its podcast in 2023.
Research by the anti-fascist organization Hope Not Hate identifies Emporia
as the public-facing arm of the Human Diversity Foundation, or HDF,
a Wyoming-registered company created as the successor to the Pioneer Fund,
the American eugenics organization established in 1937. Byline Times reports

(49:56):
that Rufo and HDF also shared a funder. Tech entrepreneur
Andrew Conru invested $ 1. 3 million in HDF, while his foundation
gave $ 25, 000 to Rufo's documentary foundation in 2021. Aporia repeatedly
provided a platform for Nathan Kofnes, the race science researcher
who would later propel the allegations against R & A
to a mass audience. HDF co-founder Emile Kierkegaard had met

(50:20):
Peter Thiel in 2019. According to Kierkegaard's own account, Thiel
subsequently asked him to recommend other researchers. Kierkegaard named Kofnes
and Noah Carl, Aporia's editor. Both have been run out
of Cambridge for their mediocre work and overt racism. This
network also overlaps directly with Britain's Free Speech Union, FSU,

(50:40):
founded by Spectator magazine associate Toby Young, who has himself
advocated what he called progressive eugenics. Aporia's Noah Karl is
the co-director of Skeptics LTD, the publishing company controlled by Young,
while Aporia contributor Eric Kaufman sits on the FSU's advisory council.
The funding of race science by Christian nationalist and extractive

(51:02):
industry billionaires, including surveillance capitalism, serves a political function. As
historian of neoliberalism Quinn Slobodian shows in Hayek's Bastards, racialist
theories and the obsession with IQ make it possible to
naturalize inequality. Social hierarchies are no longer presented as the
product of power relations, but as the expression of supposedly
objective biological differences that are hereditary. In largely secular societies,

(51:27):
race science therefore provides Christian nationalists with a substitute for
the authority religion no longer commands. It also provides intelligence-obsessed
techno-masculinists with a scientific veneer for the hierarchies they seek
to uphold or even reinforce. The day Claudine Gay resigned
as Harvard president, Rufo announced an initial $ 10, 000 fund for
plagiarism hunting at elite universities, explicitly tying the bounty hunt

(51:51):
to his campaign to defeat what he called racialist ideology.
Plagiarism hunting reconfigures legitimacy. Promoters of the junk science, that
is race science, reposition themselves as arbiters of scientific integrity,
from which position they can disqualify those who expose the
cultural foundations of systems of power. By June 2024, Black
academics were describing the climate in their universities as... open season.

(52:16):
The pursuit. So, against this backdrop of racist attacks on
scholars at elite universities, on the 4th of May, 2023,
Arday received his first email from Dave Harris. Harris challenged
his public work. When Arday did not reply, Harris wrote again.
On the 11th of May, Arday eventually responded, accusing Harris
of spending hours combing through his work looking for mistakes

(52:39):
and He told him not to contact him again. Anything
further from you will be considered bullying and harassment, citing
a past incident of bullying in which Harris had been involved.
Harris replied anyway. Arday had explicitly asked him to stop,
but Harris, willfully oblivious of his own oppressive behavior, treated
the pursuit of academic standards as an entitlement to continue. Meanwhile,

(52:59):
across the Atlantic, this very posture was growing. The self-appointed
investigator of black academics could recast himself as a guardian
of merit, simply a man of learning, asking questions. With
no reply to his last email, Harris took his claims
elsewhere and enlisted another retired academic, Martin Hammersley, professor emeritus
of education and social research at The Open University, who

(53:20):
has a history of wild claims about feminist standpoint theory.
His grievance is what he regards as the influence of
activist research on the social sciences and the diversity of viewpoints.
On the 19th of May, 2023, Hammersley wrote to Hillary Crimin,
head of Cambridge's Faculty of Education, and Rhys Morgan, the
university's head of research policy, governance, and integrity, setting out

(53:41):
allegations concerning Arday's 2018 paper in social sciences. Kremen then
met with Arday and the faculty's director of research. Arday
agreed that the article could be temporarily removed from the
journal's platform while the issues raised were examined. On the
21st of June, 2023, Kremen told Hammersley that Arday retained
the faculty's full support. Morgan separately informed him that, because

(54:03):
the work predated Arday's employment at Cambridge, the university did
not consider an investigation to fall within its remit. Hammersley
escalated the pursuit, rejecting the resolution and demanding a systematic
investigation of Arday's other publications. Kremen did not respond. The
chase then spread beyond Cambridge. Harris and Hammersley contacted academic
journals and Liverpool John Moores University, which had awarded Arday

(54:25):
his Ph.D., Harris and Hammersley also harried Arday outside university channels.
As early as 2023, he contacted Jack Grove, a journalist
at Times Higher Education, drawing his attention to the correction
to Arday's 2018 paper. Times Higher Education, THE, did not
investigate the allegations in earnest until June 2025, when another

(54:46):
professor contacted the publication about Arday's work. Harris then supplied
material to Grove, whose scrutiny extended far beyond Arday's publications
to his CV, sporting achievements, charitable activities, and personal biography.
By September, Grove had compiled a 63-page dossier and approached
Arday for comment not only on his work, but on
his private life. By all accounts, Arday experienced this as

(55:09):
a continuation of the harassment he had already identified. The
man he had asked to stop pursuing him had now
enlisted journalists for the hunt. It's important at this stage
to understand what the hunt had failed to achieve. After
years of relentless scrutiny, only two of Jason Narde's 33
peer-reviewed papers had been challenged. The article in Social Sciences
was amended in December of 2023, with additional references and

(55:31):
clarification of its relationship to earlier work. The paper in
Educational Philosophy and Theory was corrected in May of 2024.
Neither was retracted. By the time THE began its investigation
in 2025, both matters had been closed. When the allegations
eventually reached Arday's PhD, Liverpool John Moores University found citation
defects but cleared him from plagiarism, including that they resulted

(55:54):
from honest and reasonable error compounded by inadequate supervision related
to his learning disabilities. It's also important to center the
story here. From Arday's standpoint, and from LJMU's own standards,
there was no intent to commit academic fraud. Arday, for
his part, consistently described what was happening to him as
racist and ableist harassment, not legitimate academic debate. In April

(56:17):
of 2026, in his British Sociological Association keynote, Wanted Dead
or Alive, the playbook, he described how black academics were
being targeted through an identifiable repertoire already deployed against prominent
scholars in the United States. He explicitly warned that the
very instruments designed to protect academic integrity were being weaponized
against them. By then, Arday had already made public the

(56:39):
very tangible effects of the campaign, racist abuse, threats, and intimidation.
In a July 2025 letter to Jackie Smith, then Minister
for Skills at the UK Department of Education, he reported
a physical assault, death, and rape threats against himself and
his family, and racist objects and threats sent both through
Cambridge and to his family home. In his memoir, he

(56:59):
likewise described targeted campaigns driven by racial animus. In fact,
the entire media coverage of the plagiarism affair cast Dave
Harris in the familiar role of the reasonable, concerned academic,
a variation on the concerned parent or concerned citizen routinely
mobilized to lend the appearance of spontaneous, reasonable concern to
far-right campaigns against sex education, trans rights, racial equality, and

(57:23):
public health measures, while Arday became the eccentric young black
professor resisting legitimate scrutiny. His attempts to protect himself were
recoded as aggression through the classic mechanism of DARVO, deny, attack,
and reverse victim and offender, first identified by psychologist Jennifer Freed.
The reversal drew on the myth of the perfect victim.
Inaccuracy in Arday's autobiographical narrative, as well as unprovable facts,

(57:47):
were used to discredit his testimony. If he was not
beyond reproach, perhaps he was not a victim at all,
and perhaps his place at Cambridge was itself suspect, and
maybe he even deserved to be harassed. In a historically
white and male elite institution, credibility, merit, and belonging became entangled.
The racist trope of the threatening black man did the rest.

(58:07):
Arday could be cast simultaneously as aggressor and fraud, while
those pursuing him became the hapless victims of an interloper
with something to hide. But for the reversal to take hold,
it had to be made public. Darvo works by manipulating
how third parties perceive victim and offender. On the 5th
of August, as Arday resigned from Cambridge and lost the
institutional protections that came with his position, the Committee for

(58:29):
Academic Freedom, CAF, an anti-DEI organization, revealed that Arday had
reported Dave Harris to the police and that the case
had been closed without further action. CAF's Frederick Attenborough, who
had previously headed research at the Free Speech Union, FSU,
framed Arday's report to the police as a threat to
academic freedom. Also on the 5th of August, Times Higher

(58:49):
Education helped publicize the same reversal. Jack Grove published his
account under the headline, I was reported to police over
the Arday case. I was just doing my job. Arday's
complaint to the police and his instruction of Carter Rook,
the London firm specializing in media and defamation, were framed
as attempts to obstruct legitimate journalism, while Arday's attempts to
protect himself from harassment became threats to press freedom. On

(59:12):
the 10th of August, the FSU fused the supposed attacks
on academic and press freedom into a single conspiratorial narrative,
casting Arday as a powerful censor determined to intimidate his critics. Quote,
in a desperate bid to avoid scrutiny, Professor Arday tried
to use the police to silence a journalist and an academic.
This threat frame survived Arday's death on the 14th of August.

(59:34):
That same day, THE published an opinion piece by Ian Pace,
an advisory board member of Academics for Academic Freedom, AFAF,
who campaigns on institutional neutrality and academic free speech alongside
Cambridge professor and Reform UK head of policy, James Orr.
As Byline Times has documented, Orr himself is a keynote
in the same network. Peter Thiel made a secret five-figure

(59:57):
donation to Cambridge through Orr around the time of his appointment.
while Orr later helped bring the race science publication Aporia
into organized national conservative politics. Pace argued that the Arday
affair demonstrated, quote, the danger of treating criticism as injury.
Three days after Arday's death, THE news editor Tom Williams
maintained that the journalistic inquiry into the person of Arday

(01:00:18):
by Grove was justified. And we'll continue, but first, here's
some ads. And we're back. The Code of Gentlemanly Conduct.

(01:00:39):
The chase had remained largely confined to allegations and rumors
circulated by Harris and others through academic and journalistic channels.
The public frenzy began in earnest on the far-right French
on the 21st of July, 2026, when Nathan Kofnas, the
race scientist, published allegations based on a dossier he said
he had recently received from an unidentified source inside Cambridge.

(01:01:00):
That claim is unverifiable. Three days later, the Telegraph, to
which Free Speech Union founder and General Secretary Toby Young
regularly contributes, published an article with the title, Cambridge Diversity
Poster Boy in Plagiarism Row. The Times and the Daily
Mail followed that same day with similar articles. By the
1st of August, The Guardian published its investigation under the
sensational headline, Plagiarism, Playbooks, and a Pig's Head, the new

(01:01:23):
claim surrounding Cambridge professor Jason Arday. The story had become
a national media affair, still oriented by the race science
network's framing. Four days after the Guardian piece, Cambridge announced
a new investigation into Arday's qualifications and career, citing new information.
Arday resigned later that day, saying that the relentless accusations, speculation,

(01:01:43):
and public commentary had taken a profound toll on him
and those he loved. The scrutiny had to be of Arday,
not the PAC. The Guardian article subjected Arday's accounts of
racist harassment to minute scrutiny, going so far as to
check some of them with police and witnesses, and finding
discrepancies in but the three-year pursuit initiated by Harris, the quarry,
the chase, and the context was entirely absent from the story.

(01:02:06):
Harris briefly appears in the article as a concerned academic.
But Dave Harris's own history should have complicated his portrayal
as a neutral source. For example, it's publicly available information that,
in May of 1998, Times Higher Education reported that Harris
had been dismissed from what is now Plymouth Marion following
a complaint alleging harassment and bullying. Harris maintained that the

(01:02:27):
dispute had begun after he and a colleague raised concerns
about academic standards, and his union supported his appeal. He
was reinstated the following month, although the re-hearing upheld a
finding of misconduct and issued him with a formal warning.
This history should have at least alerted the Guardian to
a possible recurring pattern of behavior. Although Arday had pitched
specifically to him, maybe sending the arts and culture editor

(01:02:49):
to cover the story was not the appropriate choice to
cover a far-right propaganda campaign. In a video published after
Arday's death, Harris lied, saying he had been cleared. Furthermore,
Times higher education accounts repeatedly confirmed Harris's correspondence was described
as notably, even excessively, polite, as though civility of tone

(01:03:10):
guaranteed disinterestedness of purpose. Times Higher Education's Jack Grove recalled
his first email in his August 5th account as softly phrased.
By then, Arda had already asked Harris to stop contacting
him and reported him to the police. When Times Higher
Education had resumed its investigation in 2025, Tom Williams similarly
described the anonymous professor who contacted him as almost apologetic

(01:03:33):
about raising his concerns. Politeness became a proxy for trustworthiness,
while the repetition and escalation of approaching THE, the very
conduct Arday had identified as harassment, disappeared from view. Two
things can be true at once. A harasser can also
be perfectly gentlemanly. As race and performance scholars Kyla Wazana-Tomkins
and Tavia Nyong'o have argued, Civility operates as a covert

(01:03:55):
political aesthetic and a rhetorical mode which guards the boundaries
of access to politicity. It helps determine whose speech and
conduct are recognized in the first place as legitimate political participation.
Harris's softly phrased manner helped make him legible as reasonable, measured, rational,
and therefore credible, irrespective of the cumulative effect of his conduct.

(01:04:17):
The veneer of politeness, combined with other markers of legitimacy,
a white man, a professor emeritus, a selfless defender of
academic standards, positioned Harris as an arbiter of scientific integrity
rather than an object of scrutiny himself. Retraction Watch, a
specialist publication dedicated to research integrity and misconduct, glaringly failed
to scrutinize Harris' own track record. In its lengthy investigation

(01:04:39):
published on the 27th of July, it detailed Harris' pursuit
and quoted Arday explicitly asking him to stop, yet did
not frame that conduct as harassment, nor did it mention
that Harris had himself previously been dismissed following allegations of
harassment and bullying in a dispute he said arose from
concerns about academic standards. Instead, Harris was given space to
complain that bloody awful work could get through when standards

(01:05:02):
were relaxed for special issues devoted to activist issues, like
racial inequality. Harris's own record received no comparable scrutiny, nor
was his sustained campaign against critical race theory treated as activism.
The very man denouncing other people's work as bloody awful
had himself faced questions about the quality of his research.

(01:05:22):
In April of 2025, internal Plymouth Marjan correspondents described publications
produced in the Marjan name as poor quality and often controversial,
a criticism Harris himself understood to refer to his methodological
assessments of critical race theory. His resulting critique of CRT
was self-published in March 2024, rather than published by an
academic press. The pamphlet attracted just five reviews, including a

(01:05:46):
generic endorsement from Martin Hammersley. Concerns about the poor standard
of Harris' research had already been public knowledge since January
of 2026, when The Telegraph reported Plymouth Marjon's decision to
suspend his emeritus status. In that article, The Telegraph explained
the university's assessment of the publications produced in the Marjon
name were poor quality and often controversial. Although the Telegraph

(01:06:07):
framed Harris as the injured party, an academic stripped of
title after critiquing critical race theory, the information was now
in the public domain, readily available to any journalist assessing
his credibility when the Arday allegations resurfaced in July. Between
the 24th of July and Arday's death on the 14th
of August, the Telegraph published 43 articles about Jason Arday.

(01:06:29):
It even ran a box headed, How the Telegraph's Reporting
Led to Jason Arday's Resignation. After his death, the newspaper
quietly altered the headline, Jason Arday is living proof that
you reap what you sow, removing the word living. Meanwhile,
the January article about Harris briefly disappeared from the Telegraph's website,
the very article containing information that should have disqualified Harris

(01:06:50):
from being treated as an unimpeachably credible source. What felled
Arday was not the action of isolated actors, but that
of a single well-connected and well-financed PAC with a not-so-secret plan.
In 2023, Nathan Kofnes laid out a roadmap to power
on his substack, How to Take Back Academia. He was
not alone in articulating such a strategy, and the prescriptions

(01:07:11):
tend to look very similar. Quote, There are two ways
to reduce the power of the wokesters on campus. Remove
them by showing that they don't satisfy minimal criteria for
contract renewal or academic promotion, or dilute their influence by
bringing in some of the non-woke scholars who have been
pushed out of academia for political reasons. The two-pronged approach— eliminate
the black scholars, platform the mediocre white males— is apparent with

(01:07:32):
the support system they enjoy. When Dave Harris had his
emeritus status suspended in January of 2026, he became a
cause célèbre in Britain's anti-woke ecosystem, with the Committee for
Academic Freedom, CAF, rallying to his defense. CAF's Frederick Attenborough,
during his time at the Free Speech Union, had also
defended Nathan Kofness. When Emanuel College, Cambridge, terminated Kofnes' affiliation

(01:07:54):
on the 5th of April, 2024, following his writings on race, heredity,
and intelligence, the FSU assisted him in the proceedings, with
Attenborough personally promoting his case. Kofnes later stated that FSU
Chief Legal Counsel Bryn Harris assisted his appeal. The FSU
subsequently backed his legal challenge and urged supporters to contribute
to his legal fund. The FSU itself says it has

(01:08:15):
supported Kofnes throughout and helped him bring legal action against
Emanuel College. In March of 2026, Attenborough, now at CAF,
intervened on Kofnes' behalf again, urging Ghent University to resist
demands that his appointment be rescinded. Kofnes had been recruited
to Ghent by Bouc Devry, whose own work on intelligence
and dysgenic fertility draws extensively on hereditarian researchers. In 2024,

(01:08:39):
Devry also attended the London Conference on Intelligence alongside Human
Diversity Foundation co-founder Emile Kierkegaard. De Vries had already sought
university funding to bring Kofnis to Ghent for a lecture
in February of 2024, just days after Kofnis published A
Guide for Hereditarian Revolution, before later hiring him as a
postdoctoral researcher on his Liberalism's Fertility Problem project. So when,

(01:09:03):
on the 21st of July, Nathan Kofnes published DEI Fraud
and Cover-Up at Cambridge on his substack, the architecture of
uncivil society actors to immediately scale the harassment initiated by Harris,
as well as give cover to the attackers, was already
in place. So was the framing. Kofnes heavily promoted his
blog entry on X, where the post exceeded one million views.

(01:09:25):
It was amplified by figures such as Richard Hanania, the
American race and IQ writer from the same reactionary intellectual
milieu as Curtis Yarvin. A foundational figure of the anti-democratic
Dark Enlightenment, Yarvin coined the concept of the cathedral to
describe what, in secular societies, he presented as a new church,
a decentralized system made up, in particular, of universities and

(01:09:46):
mainstream media— responsible for producing and disseminating progressive orthodoxy and
policing the boundaries between truth and heresy. The concept made
refutation almost impossible. If academic institutions rejected race science, that
rejection itself could be presented as proof of their membership
in the cathedral, discrediting academic knowledge production on race while
recasting hereditary and race science as censored truth fitted directly

(01:10:09):
into this logic. By the time the first national newspaper
articles appeared three days later in the Telegraph, the Times
and the Daily Mail reported Kofnes and those amplifying his
narrative had already transformed Arday into a symbol of the
supposed corruption of universities by DEI. A DEI star whose
alleged failings were presented as proof that Cambridge had sacrificed
academic standards to racial hiring and then sought to conceal

(01:10:32):
the consequences. Brought to bay on the 31st of July,
Arday submitted to an interview with the Times to defend
himself against the allegations. But by then, the media pack
was closing in and the kill seemed inevitable. According to
News Corp's verified corpus, 52 articles about Arday had appeared
by the time his resignation statement was published on the
5th of August. Arday's resignation did not stop the hunt,

(01:10:54):
because the actions of the victim have no bearing on
the level of harassment they receive. It stops when the
harassers stop, whether because they move on to another target
or because institutions and bystanders intervene. If the prey is isolated,
the hunt can intensify. Another 222 articles appeared between his
resignation and the moment he was found dead on the
14th of August. 214 through the 13th, and eight more

(01:11:16):
that day before his death became known. In all, News
Cord records 274 articles across 26 outlets in the 22
days between the first national coverage on the 24th of
July and his death. Of those articles, my own, Stephanie's,
mapping identifies at least 23 produced by outlets or authors
with links to the FSU, 19 of them after Arday resigned.

(01:11:38):
21 appeared in The Spectator alone, where FSU founder Toby
Young is associate editor and columnist. Another was written in
The Telegraph by FSU-linked Alison Pearson, and another in The
Times by FSU chair Nigel Bigger. And we'll continue, but first,
we've got one last ad break. And we're back. the trophy.

(01:12:10):
Rather than a media pile-on, this was predatory propaganda. Fighting
propaganda is not simply a matter of determining whether each
individual claim is true or false. It is first and
foremost a struggle over who has the power to define reality.
That is what framing does. It places certain perspectives at
the center, relegates others to the margins, and determines what
becomes visible, sayable, and relevant. That authority, that power, is

(01:12:33):
precisely what is at stake. Race science, a belief system
fundamentally untethered from reality. needs to be received as science.
Its proponents crave legitimacy because their very existence depends on it.
Without recognition from journalists, universities, and the public, they remain
what they are, marginal and extremist. With it, they acquire
the authority to police the boundaries of knowledge, to decide

(01:12:54):
what counts as evidence, what constitutes merit, whose scholarship warrants investigation,
and whose testimony can be dismissed as mere grievance. And
Arde was an extraordinarily useful object around which to manufacture
that authority. A young black professor at Cambridge with a
remarkable life story, working on racism, sanism, and inequality. Make
him doubtful enough, and he can be made to carry

(01:13:16):
the weight of a much larger proposition. Perhaps inclusion policies
put him there. Perhaps standards were lowered. Perhaps research on
racism itself is suspect. Perhaps the people telling us racism
structures the academy are precisely the people who do not
belong in it. You do not have to prove the
whole proposition. You only have to keep the doubt moving.
As defense researcher Olivier Schmitt, now research director at the

(01:13:38):
Institute for Military Operations at the Royal Danish Defense College,
has shown, methodological doubt can be turned into systematic doubt.
I'm just asking questions, then becomes a posture through which
suspicion can be kept moving, alive and definitely, even in
the absence of sufficient evidence, while claiming the credibility of
critical thinking. Arde did not have to be proved a fraud.

(01:13:59):
He only had to be made permanently suspect. and with him,
everyone who looked like him. But the hunt could continue
only as long as the pact kept running and the
hounds baying. Arday's mass harassment on social media was participatory.
For some, the serialization of revelations discrediting him became collective fun, harass-tainment.
Adam Serwer, the American journalist at The Atlantic whose work

(01:14:22):
examines race in American politics, captured this political pleasure in
collective humiliation in one phrase, the cruelty is the point.
For others, the reward was informational ascendancy and a misguided
impression that their contribution would protect science somehow. Kate Starbert,
a University of Washington professor who studies collective sense-making, has
shown that online crowds do not merely consume a narrative.

(01:14:45):
They participate in investigating, producing, and circulating the material that
sustains it. The invitation to go and look for yourself,
to check another supposedly outlandish claim, to uncover another discrepancy,
was particularly enticing to those who define themselves as rationalists
or skeptics. Participation could be experienced as independent inquiry, affording
a sense of intellectual superiority over those who brought the

(01:15:07):
issue back to the reality of harassment, and thereby establish
ascendancy over them. Participation in the harassment offered epistemic domination.
That reward helps explain why, even after Arde's death, so
many of those who engaged with the ready stream of
revelations remain invested in fact-checking him to this day, unable
to let him go. Even the reasonable minds. Kate Starbert

(01:15:29):
has also argued that the answer to information disorder lies, quote,
not in better facts, but better frames. Arday was hounded
to death. But the frame that made the hunt possible survives,
a frame centered on the feelings of cisgender white men
who believe themselves to be being greatly replaced from the
institutions that produce knowledge, while pushing Arday's own perspective out
of view. On the 20th of August, six days after

(01:15:52):
the kill, Ghent University suspended Kofnes as a precautionary measure
pending a disciplinary investigation into conduct that, in part, predated
his post about Arday. The disciplinary letter describes months of complaints, reports,
and concerns about his conduct and public statements and their
impact on staff and students. It accuses him, among other things,
of using his position and Ghent affiliation to pursue and

(01:16:13):
promote his race realism and hereditarian revolution, despite having been
hired to work on the future of liberalism. The university
regarded this as a breach of his professional obligations, a
misuse of his institutional reputation, and a conflict with its
code of ethics, which prohibits, among other things, the dissemination
of ideas of racial superiority and incitement to racial segregation.

(01:16:34):
This time, fraud really was at the heart of the case.
Kofnes immediately recast his suspension of censorship, an attack on
his freedom of speech. The experiences of his racialized colleagues
disappeared from the story. His claim amplified by the very
architecture of actors implicated in the hunt but now with
an American dimension. Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal handed him

(01:16:54):
its opinion pages to consolidate the frame. How I became
the scapegoat in the Jason Arday affair. My university suspended me,
the article declared. All I did was tell the truth.

Speaker 4 (01:17:06):
U.S.

Speaker 2 (01:17:06):
Ambassador to Belgium Bill White then reproduced the free speech frame,
pressuring Ghent to reinstate Kofnis and warning that all options
were on the table as the United States reviewed its
relationship with the university. Its rector, Petra de Sutter, a
trans woman and former Green Party deputy prime minister of Belgium,
then became the new target onto which the frame could
be transferred. Within days, an open letter opposing the punishment

(01:17:29):
of a whistleblower in the person of Cofnes attracted more
than 800 academics. Among them, actors embedded in a billionaire-funded
Christian nationalist and transphobic networks across Europe. In France and Belgium,
for example, signatories Florence Beauregard Blackner and Xavier Laurence Salvador
led back to Christian nationalist billionaire Pierre-Edward Sterin, who funds

(01:17:49):
Salvador's Observatoire du Decolonialisme, while his Pericles project funds Justitia,
created with the Institut Thomas More in Belgium. The latter
collaborates with Beauregard Blackner and is linked to a French
transphobic organization that fuels campaigns against trans right. Pierre-Edward Sterin's
Observatory has since expanded its remit, The organization intervenes in

(01:18:12):
academic controversies in the name of academic freedom, opposition to censorship,
and scientific integrity, a function comparable to that of the
Free Speech Union in the United Kingdom. And like the FSU,
it has relays across several media spaces. Its actors circulate
in particular through the neo-secularist cluster around Lapointe, Marianne, Franck Thirure,
and Charlie Hebdo, but also through far-right media organs such

(01:18:35):
as Le Figaro, Cossure, Belur's Actuals, and Atlantico. Added to
this is Christian nationalist Vincent Ballor's media apparatus, CNews, Europe 1, JDD,
and others. But Beauregard, Blackner, and Salvador are not the
only French signatories. Martine Benoit, Jean Fichaud, Andreas Bekfalvy, and
Charles Ramond have, like Beauregard, Blackner, and Salvador, signed initiatives

(01:18:58):
organized by Vigilance Universities, a collective founded in 2016 to
combat what it describes as racialism, communitarianism, and attacks on
universalism in higher education. The neo-secularist milieu thus performs both
a function of monitoring and that of ideological laundering. The
dominant group's identity anxieties and the objectives advanced by Christofascist

(01:19:19):
networks are stripped of their religious matrix and translated into
the language of universalism, secularism, science, and academic freedom. Nathan
Kofnes has since been permitted to return to his mediocre work,
albeit remotely in pending investigations. But he's only a cog
in a well-oiled machine, the one who looks the part.
Behind him, billionaire money flows through think tanks, media, and

(01:19:40):
strategic litigation and concerned academics, allowing the same politics of
white cis male supremacy to circulate under the cover of neutrality,
a very long way from the besieged dissidents they claim
to be. The hood is not what makes the racist.
Sometimes it simply makes the racist easier to recognize. And
race science is a lab coat with an equally white hood.

(01:20:00):
The onslaught against Jason Arday was not inevitable. It became
possible because at every stage of the pursuit, people and institutions,
the police, universities, the media, the commentariat, chose to ignore
his warnings, legitimize the frame and amplify the reality imposed
by the proponents of race science. Collectively, we did not
simply follow the hunt. We handed them the trophy, the

(01:20:20):
power to define what is real. To overturn that frame,
to take back the power, we first have to lift
the hood, collectively name what is wearing it, That starts
with bringing the voices of those producing knowledge from the
front lines back to the center and listening when they
sound the alarm. Jason Arday was afforded no such attention.
The stakes are huge. As Jafari Sinclair Allen, professor of

(01:20:41):
black studies at Columbia University, writes in The Nation, this
is a transatlantic movement to end the independent production of
knowledge about race and power and to decide on both
shores who is permitted to produce it at all. The
question now is whether we can recognize the hunt for
power when it disguises itself as free speech, academic freedom,
or scientific concern, and refuse our assigned role in the

(01:21:02):
killing of our democracies. And that's it. Again, this was
written by Stephanie Lamy. You can find more of her
work on the Club de Media part, and we'll have
that linked in the show notes. Thank you again, Stephanie.
We'll be back tomorrow.

Speaker 5 (01:21:29):
Did you have a favorite ancient civilization that you were
learning about growing up? Oh man, so many.

Speaker 8 (01:21:37):
I guess I enjoyed like Celtic things because that's like
part of the world I'm from.

Speaker 5 (01:21:43):
I wasn't even that Celtic. I think she was Celtic,
like a Celtic warrior, queen, Bodicia.

Speaker 8 (01:21:49):
Bodicia is how people used to say it, but Boudica
I think is more accurate.

Speaker 5 (01:21:53):
That speed. Like she was someone who had resisted the
Roman invasions, right?

Speaker 4 (01:21:59):
Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 8 (01:22:00):
Where my dad lives is like where the Romans built
their border wall called Hadrian's Wall. And it's just kind
of cool to be like, you know, the Romans brought
their colonialism to all of Europe and they got here
and I can't fucking do it. It might have been
they got to that part of the world and they
were like, it's raining so fucking much I want to
go back to Italy. But yeah, it was always interesting

(01:22:24):
to me to think of like, You know, the amount
of our modern world that's still impacted by Roman colonization
and then these people who were able to resist it.

Speaker 5 (01:22:33):
Yeah. I remember as a child, I was a really
big fan of Egypt, of course, I guess, classic.

Speaker 9 (01:22:40):
Of course.

Speaker 5 (01:22:41):
Greece, you can't go wrong. Yeah. Babylon, big fan. I
liked the beards. Yeah. You know, very cool.

Speaker 7 (01:22:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:22:50):
As someone who, you know, I grew up like with
a voracious appetite for those things. living long ago, how
people lived in the past, like historical books, how people dressed,
what they ate, how they lived day to day. And
a lot of those ancient civilizations were presented to me
as humanity's great achievements. You know, the magnificent architecture, the

(01:23:17):
advances in agriculture, the remarkable works of art, and so on.
But as I got older and I started reading more
history from below rather than history through the lens of
kings and empires, I learned more about life before civilization
and outside of empire. And I really became less interested

(01:23:42):
in civilization as something to be held up as the
pinnacle of what he wants to keep full of. although
I am still very much interested in it as an
idea and how we think about and talk about it
as an idea. And so this is It Could Happen Here.
I am Andrew Sage, or Andrewism on YouTube, joined again by... James.

Speaker 8 (01:24:06):
People have already heard me sounding off, but yeah, it's
nice to be here again.

Speaker 5 (01:24:09):
Yes, in case you didn't recognize the voice. And I
want to talk about the meaning of civilization. If I
were to ask you if you... were civilized, how would
you respond?

Speaker 8 (01:24:23):
I think I aspire not to be, but like I
have been raised in a society which very much proposed
this binary between like the civilized and the uncivilized, right?
I guess savage is a word you could use if
you were looking at how that society portrayed it, right?
And like, even though I think British education and stuff

(01:24:44):
wouldn't use that word anymore, it says a lot about
like the state and its desire to shape narratives in
its favor. So I think I would aspire to de-civilize myself,
I guess. I'm not like anti-civ in the big scheme
of things, but I think in the way that it's
often used to describe indigenous peoples or peoples who are

(01:25:04):
not under control of the.

Speaker 4 (01:25:05):
State, I don't like that very much.

Speaker 5 (01:25:07):
Yeah, it's interesting to me because if you ask most people,
they'll probably just be like, yes. They would say yes
without hesitation.

Speaker 8 (01:25:15):
Sure.

Speaker 5 (01:25:16):
You know, obviously we're not... Most people.

Speaker 4 (01:25:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:25:22):
But, you know, as you mentioned, like the alternative being,
you know, the savage, that is something that has kind
of fallen out of fashion. You know, that exact binary
of civilized and savage is not in vogue. You know,
it's not treated as something that you see. And yet
we maintain one half of the binary as something to uphold.

(01:25:43):
So we still say, you know, we are civilized and
this is civilization, but you wouldn't as much see descriptions
of the alternative, of the barbarian, the uncivilized, the savage,
the primitive. I think you can ask people, like, what
is civilization? What do you mean by being civilized? And

(01:26:05):
it's a bit shaky. You know, it's one of those
concepts that is so familiar, so used to being referenced,
that not many people stop to interrogate it. You know,
we throw the word around all the time and it
can mean cities or technology or modernity or law or
culture or the state or simply not being barbaric. Historically,

(01:26:28):
it's also been a way of dividing humanity. The Greeks,
I believe, were the ones who referred to basically anyone
who didn't speak Greek as a barbarian. You know, China
infamously treated... everything outside of china as the barbarian.

Speaker 8 (01:26:45):
Yeah isn't it like a literally an onomatopoeia like people
are saying like.

Speaker 4 (01:26:50):
Bar bar bar bar bar bar bar.

Speaker 5 (01:26:53):
I think i've heard that story as well yeah i'm
not sure how true it.

Speaker 8 (01:26:56):
Is yeah i'm not super familiar with like the little
exhausting on that one i.

Speaker 5 (01:27:02):
Guess yeah but you know the distinction of the civilized
and barbarian is something that has been weaponized across history
to justify conquest and colonization and hierarchical taxonomies of the
human race. White man's burden, quote unquote, was to bring

(01:27:22):
civilization to the less advanced people. Yeah. Civilization being, of course,
the most advanced stage of human social and cultural development,
which to me is itself a hubris because I think
that presumption that we made it, you know, we reach
where we go and, you know, what we figured out here,
this is it.

Speaker 7 (01:27:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:27:43):
You know, I think that is a very damaging way
of thinking.

Speaker 9 (01:27:47):
Definitely.

Speaker 5 (01:27:48):
And it's something that I think is embedded into a
very popular perception of what civilization is. You know, usually, historically,
civilization has also been tied to cities, writing, large populations, agriculture,
social stratification of some kind, specialized labor, monumental architecture, and

(01:28:11):
of course, the state.

Speaker 8 (01:28:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:28:13):
Buried in many of these associations is the assumption that
hierarchy is advanced, that this way of structuring human society
is the destination we were always headed to. You know,
we have this term in anthropology, stateless. The presumption being
that lacking a state is itself, you know, something that

(01:28:36):
perhaps needs to be rectified. I'm not saying that every
anthropologist takes this perspective. but the words that we use
carry certain connotations. And I think that for some people,
particularly people raised in a civilization context, It's like, oh yeah,
they haven't reached where we have reached yet. They haven't
gotten there yet. They haven't evolved to a point where

(01:28:56):
they've developed a state yet. But that is the trajectory
that they are on or are supposed to be on.
The more bureaucracy and rule and classes and institutions your
society has, the more advanced it is presumed to be.
And then, of course, you have people like Samuel Huntington,
who used civilization in this very broad sense as cultural identities.

Speaker 8 (01:29:19):
Yeah, I have a pretty negative impression of Samuel Huntington
as a human being and as a theorist, but.

Speaker 5 (01:29:26):
As do I, I mean.

Speaker 4 (01:29:27):
I think we all do.

Speaker 5 (01:29:30):
To give you the listener an indication, he treats Islam
as a civilization, Hinduism as a civilization, Orthodoxy as a civilization,
and then everything south of the Sahara in Africa is
just one civilization, Tim.

Speaker 8 (01:29:45):
Yeah, I love that, like, Islam is a civilization and also, like,
south of the Sahara is a civilization as if never
the two shall meet, right? Like, famously, there were no
Muslims in Africa. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:30:01):
The maps that I've seen, he does have, like, Islam
in Africa as well. If you ever look at the map,
the map is awful. The map is just awful.

Speaker 8 (01:30:11):
Yeah, the map, like, gives me fucking... Yeah, like, admittedly,
it's been a long time since I've engaged. Yeah, Muslim
and African. I guess, yeah, he includes a horn of
Africa in Muslim.

Speaker 4 (01:30:23):
Fucking unbelievable. Yeah, Confucian.

Speaker 8 (01:30:27):
Japan just exists as, like, a, like, every other culture is, like,
massively homogenized, and then Japanese is, like, completely unique in
this little bubble.

Speaker 5 (01:30:37):
Yeah, yeah. That's such, like, I'm sorry, like, that's so
weeb-coded to me.

Speaker 8 (01:30:45):
Yeah it's incredibly white dude who hasn't fucking really engaged
with the world coded you know.

Speaker 5 (01:30:51):
Yeah yeah it's like oh yeah the entire continent of
africa sure fine whatever that's that's africa japan though like
this japan is distinct from korea from china from the
philippines from all of asia japan has its own thing yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:31:07):
From these places it's had exchange with for centuries yeah
and then like The entirety of North America, Greenland, Western Europe,
and Australasia is just Western. The indigenous peoples there don't exist, right? Like,
the differences in those cultures.

Speaker 5 (01:31:23):
Yeah, well, Western is code for white, so... Yeah. It's
not surprising.

Speaker 4 (01:31:28):
Yeah, that's definitely what he's doing there.

Speaker 5 (01:31:31):
His famous argument was that future conflicts would be predicated
on clashes between these civilizations. Hence, clashes of civilizations being...
The title of his book. Yeah. I don't find it
very convincing. I don't think you do either. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:31:48):
No, I'm not buying it, to be honest.

Speaker 7 (01:31:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:31:50):
It treats these big cultural blobs as if they're unified
entities and discrete entities when, you know, history has been
a long story of exchange, borrowing, overlap, divergence, migration, and transformation.

Speaker 8 (01:32:06):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:32:18):
Finally, for another perspective, I want to share on the
subject of civilization. We have David Wengru, who many of
you may know as the co-author of The Dawn of Everything.
And for him, he argued that if we're going to
keep using the word civilization, we should think of it
as a product of interaction between societies. So through trade

(01:32:42):
and conflict and migration and imitation collaboration, Civilization is like
an emergent phenomenon of that interconnectedness. I think that is
a somewhat idiosyncratic, but still compelling and somewhat familiar approach
to the idea. Typically, people do think of civilizations as

(01:33:05):
discrete entities, though. Yeah. At least in Lehman's perspective. But
the field of anthropology and historical research I know is
rife with comparative studies. and investigations of those very exchanges
between societies. So as he is speaking from an anthropological perspective,

(01:33:25):
I see why he would want to put forward that reframing.
And the thing about definitions of words and connotations and
stuff is none of it is really objectively correct. They're
all just pointing to different things. And the way that
we use language is always going to be subject to debate.
I think the fact that we can't even agree on
what civilization exactly is should probably make us a bit

(01:33:49):
more cautious in how we make sweeping claims about it.
And really, I feel I've heard about many of the
words that we throw around so casually. But one consistency
I've seen across most definitions of civilization is this packaging with,
of course, the city, but also with ideas of advancement
and development, which of course begs the question, advanced according

(01:34:11):
to whom? measured by what standard? How do you actually
quantify how much more advanced one society is compared to another?
If the benchmark is skyscrapers and bureaucracies and standing armies
or industrial output, then yeah, sure, modern states score very
highly in terms of advancement. But then we can ask,

(01:34:33):
why should those be the specific metrics we use? Why
not measure the advancement of a society according to how
much leisure its members enjoy? or by how equal they are,
or by how sustainable they engage with the ecosystem they're
embedded in, or by how much freedom regular people have
over their own lives. You know, we can pick different

(01:34:55):
measuring sticks and get different winners and losers in this
competition of advancement. But the measuring stick we're working with
when we speak of civilization clearly isn't very helpful for
many of us. All societies are not working with the
same measuring stick. despite the efforts to impose this capitalist
neoliberal measuring stick on everybody. You know, we have countless

(01:35:17):
experiments and examples of different ways of organizing life across history,
some lasting for centuries, others millennia, some expanding into empires,
others staying small, some prioritizing equality, others prioritizing hierarchy, accumulation
versus mobility. You know, we can't assume that All of
humanity is trying to reach the same predetermined destination. So

(01:35:40):
the whole language of more and less civilized doesn't really
cut it for me. But the language of civilization does
work for the people that it serves. The people who
see their society as the highest stage of human development,
which must be imposed on others by evangelism and conquest
and so on to bring development. And same attitude which

(01:36:04):
is extended to people by European colonial powers to invade
these lands for wealth and territory, to conquer them, to
treat them as a lesser on the ladder of human development.
That very same attitude extends beyond people to nature itself
as something vile and unproductive and waiting to be mastered

(01:36:29):
by civilizations. But one thing that's really stuck with me
in reading, for instance, James E. Scott, which he talks
about this in Against the Green, is just how fragile
and not inevitable this civilizational development was. These early states
very often collapsed, very often fragmented. And for many people

(01:36:54):
in those contexts, the collapse, quote unquote, was an escape
to freedom. You know, it was something that gave them
an opportunity to disperse and to create smaller communities and
to have greater autonomy and fewer obligations to rulers. And
so with all that history in mind, I find the

(01:37:16):
concept of civilization, you know, something to think about, but
certainly not something to idealize.

Speaker 9 (01:37:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:37:22):
Something that just came to my mind is a speech
that Daruti gave to the cop's.

Speaker 4 (01:37:28):
On the eve of the Catalan revolution, right? So 19th
of July.

Speaker 8 (01:37:33):
So the cops have been sent, right? They know that
the military is going to rise up against them, right?
They know that in the coming days that they will
either have to fight their own military or accept the
end of this like liberal democracy in Spain, right? This
republic in Spain. The Catalan government has still sent the

(01:37:54):
police to seize weapons from the anarchists, right, who are
the most capable people of fighting this coup. They would
rather state than no state, I guess, right? The state's
always going to have more solidarity with the state than
its constituents. And he says to the cobs, sometimes when
we're given an order.

Speaker 4 (01:38:11):
We have to disobey it.

Speaker 8 (01:38:12):
And even if the order comes from a very big
and important person, to translate, obviously, and paraphrase to, we
civilize ourselves with disobedience.

Speaker 4 (01:38:22):
It's a really interesting phrase, right?

Speaker 8 (01:38:24):
Like to him, I guess the concept of civilization is
dignity and like, autonomy the person who is given up
their autonomy to the state is not civilized because they
have given up that autonomy and allowed the state to
be the one that makes their decisions for them right
like it's an alternative use it's like.

Speaker 5 (01:38:46):
An inversion basically.

Speaker 8 (01:38:48):
Exactly yeah yeah like he's taken that term and said
like it's it's fundamentally uncivilized of you to uh to
allow the state to be the one that makes the
choices for you it's just a really interesting yeah inversion
of the terminology.

Speaker 5 (01:39:03):
Yeah yeah i think it's it's curious because when i
look at for instance there's this book civilized death by
Christopher Ryan, and he uses this concept of human domestication. Okay.
And he argues that, you know, just as humans selectively
bred and conditioned animals to fit into environments that we

(01:39:26):
designed for our own purposes, civilization shaped us to fit
the needs of these large hierarchical systems. Okay. You know,
with sort of routines and obedience and punctuality for activity,
dependence on these institutions. And so it's kind of interesting
to me that, you know, by Dorotes Freeman, the domestication

(01:39:49):
of civilisation is precisely what makes us uncivilised.

Speaker 8 (01:39:53):
Yeah, like the forced pacifism, I don't know how to
say it, is what makes us uncivilised, it makes us undignified.

Speaker 5 (01:40:00):
Yeah, and I guess that is another use or connotation
associated with civilisation that he's utilising there, which is, Civilization
as dignity.

Speaker 2 (01:40:10):
Right.

Speaker 5 (01:40:11):
As being upright or dignified as a person. To be
civilized is to be, you know, a certain standard or
caliber of person.

Speaker 4 (01:40:21):
Yeah, exactly that.

Speaker 8 (01:40:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:40:23):
And so he's kind of pointing to civilization as corrupting
that caliber by making us slavishly dependent on the institutions
over which we have very little control over.

Speaker 8 (01:40:37):
Yeah, it's like an interesting inversion. I'm not sure how
useful it is. I'm not sure if it's a term
anyone needs to recapture, but it's interesting.

Speaker 5 (01:40:45):
First thing, even if I find that an invasion is
not necessarily practical in terms of day-to-day communication, I think
playing with concepts, tinkering with concepts, invoking them, I think
it's still useful in better grasping them. Yes. In better
formulating our sense of what they are And what they

(01:41:07):
are not.

Speaker 4 (01:41:08):
Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 8 (01:41:10):
The meaning of a word is something we co-create over time, right?
It's not like a fixed thing. And obviously we have
these dictionaries and they have the meanings of words, but
language is just a way of communicating concepts. And so
we co-create that meaning as we redefine those concepts.

Speaker 5 (01:41:28):
Exactly. Exactly. So much of modern civilized life clearly isn't
good for us. I say that after stretching my back with,

(01:41:50):
you know, great futility as I spent most of my
day sitting.

Speaker 8 (01:41:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:41:57):
Working at a desk. You know, a lot of people
are working jobs they find meaningless simply because they need
the income to survive. You know, they are spending most
of their waking hours indoors, unexposed to fresh air. If
they even have fresh air outdoors because many of us
live in urban environments where the standards of air quality

(01:42:20):
are not the best. You could also speak of the
rates of stress and loneliness and anxiety and depression and
burnout that have continued to rise even as our material
wealth as societies, not necessarily as individuals, but as societies
and our technological capabilities have both increased. I don't think

(01:42:40):
you have to be a primitivist and advocate for some
return to prehistory to recognize the negatives, the real same.
And while I think many technological developments associated with civilization
have genuinely improved people's lives, you know, antibiotics, dentistry, planes,
the internet, especially for disabled people and those medical conditions

(01:43:03):
that would otherwise be untreatable. You know, these are very
beneficial innovations. Yeah. I just don't think that civilization as
we have structured it and conceived of it has a
monopoly on innovation. In his book, Wild Thoughts, Claude Lévi-Strauss
had made the point that many of humanity's greatest technological

(01:43:24):
breakthroughs in agriculture, weaving, pottery, animal domestication, they were developed
long before we conventionally think of as civilization. Human beings
have always been creative. We've always experimented. We've always invented
and we always will. I don't think we can or
should go back because, I mean, there are billions of

(01:43:46):
us now, mostly in cities that are far from ecologically sustainable.
But I think if we keep the history of our
diverse social forms in mind, then as we go forward,
we can try to preserve what genuinely enriches human life
while leaving behind the institutions and assumptions that no longer do.

(01:44:08):
By the way, do you by chance have a blueprint
for the future of our species?

Speaker 4 (01:44:17):
No, I don't think I do other than working it
out together.

Speaker 5 (01:44:22):
Yeah, me neither. Hoping someone might. I guess we'd have
to figure that out together. Exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:44:28):
Maybe that is a blueprint.

Speaker 5 (01:44:30):
Exactly. I'm really not interested in seeing that there's like
one correct society that everybody has to adopt.

Speaker 4 (01:44:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:44:37):
I think we can learn something from the incredible diversity
of human societies that have existed. And we can use
that not for mimicry, but for inspiration, you know, to
realize that we too can pursue these uncharted territories and
develop something new or to take old concepts and stretch

(01:44:58):
them into new forms.

Speaker 4 (01:45:00):
Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 5 (01:45:01):
The author Daniel Quinn in his book Ishmael had made
a point that Tribes can be defined not by hunting
and gathering or ethnicity, but as a social organization that
allows people to make a living together. And so by
this definition, people still today create tribal forms of organization

(01:45:22):
all the time, whether it be mutual aid networks, affinity groups,
intentional communities, wherever people freely organize themselves around shared needs
and shared purposes. One thing Quinn emphasizes is that these
kinds of societies can be very flexible. You know, when
these arrangements are no longer working for us, we can
change them. We can walk away from them. We're not

(01:45:44):
tied to them in the way that we are basically
bound by an enormous bureaucracy that we're supposedly in social
contract with today. And so really, for me, that's what
I want to focus on, a world where people have
greater control over their lives, more decentralized, more cooperation, a
world where organizations are things that people can freely join

(01:46:06):
and reshape and split and leave, and they're no longer
serving their needs. I really care about GDP metrics and,
you know, megacity concentrations. I just want to know, you know,
how we get from here to there together. And to me,

(01:46:27):
that is something that requires... as I've said many times
before on this podcast and on my YouTube channel, it
requires opposition to systems of domination, you know, through confrontation
and non-cooperation, through things like strikes and boycotts and other
forms of resistance. And it also requires, on the other

(01:46:48):
end of that equation, that we prefigure the world we
want to live in by promoting certain ideas and philosophies.
But more so by building the actual relationships and institutions
we want to live in and be a part of.
And I think that these are two processes that will
reinforce each other. You know, people will see and experience

(01:47:09):
different ways of organizing their lives and that informs their ideology.
They become more confident that these alternatives are possible and
it drives them to push them in new directions. So
I say all that to say that The idea of
civilization had its place and has had its time. But

(01:47:30):
I think that we can let go of that old idea.
You know, that we don't have to assume that there
is no other alternative. And I think that requires not
just a rejection, but an act of replacement. To make
the cracks of the old order apparent... And to make

(01:47:56):
the idea, the omni idea of liberalism, capitalism, and civilization
unconvincing by the presentation of this other alternative. I know
some people might call that next thing a better civilization,
but I would prefer to be, you know, didn't bind

(01:48:16):
ourselves to that old terminology. I least that's how i
try to approach it and what about.

Speaker 8 (01:48:23):
You yeah i don't think we should be beholden to
these things that they can hold us back right and
as you say we should be more focused in like
building the world that we want to live in and
not so much building the world we've been told we
should want to live in language can turn into a
way of seeing the world and i think we need
to be careful of letting language determine how we see

(01:48:45):
the world in a way that inherently like limits our
ability to create a better one and i think this
is a concept that we need to be very careful
of like when it comes to that and just like
the inherent bigotry that came came with a lot of
civilization narratives right Sometimes I do like the idea, and
Scott talks about this a little bit, right? But like,

(01:49:05):
in fact, it is people in states who are domesticated
and they were domesticated by grain crops. Grain crops brought
those people in, forced them to live in a certain place,
forced them to live in a certain way, all this
so they could tend and care for grain crops, right?

Speaker 5 (01:49:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:49:20):
Like, I think maybe flipping that around might help people
understand a little bit.

Speaker 5 (01:49:25):
Yeah, I think there's a, I forget the name of
the book. Is it Botany of Desire?

Speaker 8 (01:49:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:49:32):
Yeah, I haven't read that. I've been recommended that book before.

Speaker 5 (01:49:35):
Yeah, I read that a couple years ago. And I
think it was on that very subject. The idea that
the plans that we've raised have in some ways domesticated us.

Speaker 9 (01:49:47):
Right.

Speaker 5 (01:49:48):
Just as we have domesticated them. It's been a reciprocal process.

Speaker 4 (01:49:52):
Yeah, I like that idea.

Speaker 5 (01:49:54):
That, I think, was like a theme or an element
of that book, if I remember correctly.

Speaker 4 (01:49:57):
Okay, nice.

Speaker 5 (01:49:58):
Yeah. Or maybe it's a theme that I read into it.

Speaker 4 (01:50:02):
Right, either way, I think it's sometimes a useful way
of seeing the world.

Speaker 5 (01:50:06):
And yeah, I guess that's one of my takeaways as well.
Play around with concepts, think with them, flip them upside down.
And I think that is also how we innovate, how
we create new things, new meaning. You know, there is this,
I think it's a proverb, or it might be an Ecclesiastes,

(01:50:26):
but it's like, there's nothing new under the sun.

Speaker 8 (01:50:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:50:29):
So it's like creativity is just the ways that we
repurpose what already exists. We build upon everything that came before.
And we have to be willing to play around with
it if we want to get to that point of innovator.

Speaker 8 (01:50:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:50:45):
That's pretty much all I have for today. All power
to all the people. Peace.

Speaker 4 (01:51:08):
This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly
newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world,
and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. This episode,
we are covering the week of August 26th to September 2nd. Today,
I'm joined by James Stout, Robert Evans, and special correspondent
Prop from our show Hood Politics. Welcome.

Speaker 9 (01:51:30):
Hey, long-time listener, first-time caller, you know.

Speaker 5 (01:51:33):
Glad to be here.

Speaker 4 (01:51:34):
First time on ED. You've been on It Could Happen
Here a few times.

Speaker 9 (01:51:37):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

Speaker 4 (01:51:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:51:39):
Your favorite cousin, you know.

Speaker 4 (01:51:41):
James, do you want to start with your little short
news items?

Speaker 8 (01:51:44):
This is a barrage of bad news. Prop if you're
not familiar with this. Last week, I guess, barrage was
an unfortunate choice of words. Right when we were releasing this,
a flood in Nepal caused catastrophic damage.

Speaker 5 (01:51:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:51:59):
If you're on the internet, you've seen the videos, right? Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:52:02):
1,000... People have been reported dead so far with nearly
4,000 missing. The current hypothesis is that a glacial collapse
so large and fast that it caused a seismic event,
caused a detached portion of the glacier to melt due
to friction as it fell. So there was like a
seismic event.

Speaker 5 (01:52:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:52:22):
And there was some question of the timeline, right? Did
the seismic event precipitate the collapse or did the collapse?

Speaker 6 (01:52:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:52:29):
From what I've seen, the current hypothesis is that so
much of the glacier fell that it created the seismic event.

Speaker 2 (01:52:36):
Yeah, yeah, that's what I remember hearing.

Speaker 9 (01:52:38):
Me too. And the most logical.

Speaker 8 (01:52:41):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does seem like it wasn't a
tectonic situation here.

Speaker 2 (01:52:45):
No, it was purely as a result of the glacier degrading.

Speaker 4 (01:52:49):
Yeah, I've seen a glacier carve before.

Speaker 8 (01:52:53):
It's an incredible thing. But this is on a scale
that is almost unfathomable. There are early warning systems for
flooding on that river, but the flooding moved so fast
that it swamped and destroyed those facilities before they could trigger.

Speaker 2 (01:53:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:53:08):
We're talking seconds here.

Speaker 5 (01:53:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:53:10):
Secondly, I'm going to talk about the SDF, the Syrian
Democratic Forces, which was officially dissolved on August 25th. had
its forces absorbed into the new Syrian army, Masloum Ebdi.

Speaker 2 (01:53:24):
The SDF being, of course, the armed forces of Rojava,
the self-administration, the ANAS, you know, in northeast Syria. James
and I both reported from there.

Speaker 8 (01:53:34):
Yeah, and I know it's been really an important place,
an important thing for both of us. We will, like,
break this down in more detail in another episode, but
I wanted to say really briefly, Mazlou Mebdi made the
announcement and he said that approximately 10,000 SDF fighters have
been integrated into a new Syrian army. The integration that

(01:53:56):
matters is the Women's Protection Forces, the YPJ.

Speaker 2 (01:53:59):
And some of the ethnic minority militias.

Speaker 4 (01:54:02):
Sure, yeah, yeah. The non-Kurdish ethnic minorities.

Speaker 2 (01:54:05):
Yeah, the Armenians and the Assyrians and the like.

Speaker 4 (01:54:08):
The Assyrians, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:54:12):
As it seems right now, the offer is for the
YPGA to integrate as individuals into the Ministry of the Interior.
So doing stuff like tourism police, border police. And it
does not seem that the new Syrian government is interested
in having women in its armed forces, right? Despite these
particular women being some of the most capable fighters in

(01:54:32):
the world who have been trained by the US and
by other militaries and have been fighting for more than
a decade in some cases. Yeah. Right now, what they
want is to remain as a distinct entity with their
own structures and not to be broken up as a
group of disparate individuals. In related news, I guess, there
have been protests in Kamishlo this week after the government

(01:54:54):
failed to follow through on its promise in the constitution
to have Kurdish be a language of instruction. Instead, lessons
are optional and three hours a week.

Speaker 4 (01:55:04):
This would be a disaster for people.

Speaker 8 (01:55:06):
There are generations who have grown up in Rojava Where
Kurdish was the language they spoke at home, Kurdish was
the language they spoke at school. Of course, Comanji Kurdish
has a different alphabet to Arabic. There are older generations
who were educated in Arabic, right? And they're very aware
of this difference. But the right to education in your
mother tongue, when we look at autonomous movements across the world,

(01:55:28):
I wrote about this in my PhD dissertation actually, this
is one of the things that is considered sufficient autonomy
for these sub-state national groups and taking it away. It's
a very serious thing.

Speaker 2 (01:55:40):
No, especially since, I mean, a lot of these people,
like in Turkey, it's been criminalized and there have been
degrees of this in Syria under different regimes. But in Turkey,
it's been criminalized for a long time to speak the
Kurdish language.

Speaker 5 (01:55:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:55:52):
And the school textbooks have explicitly in Turkey, like, I mean,
they've written Kurds out of history, right? Let's move to Myanmar,
where a Burmese junta resupply convoy to Bamu has been
targeted by numerous FPV drones and attacks on its way
up the Urawadi River to resupply the town. The KIA,
Kachin Independence Army, is attacking government forces there. It seems

(01:56:14):
like this morning, two boats seem.

Speaker 4 (01:56:18):
To have surrendered.

Speaker 8 (01:56:19):
And there are videos of what look like hundreds of
what are probably conscript soldiers being captured by the KIA.

Speaker 4 (01:56:26):
And associated PDFs.

Speaker 2 (01:56:28):
They're relying.

Speaker 8 (01:56:29):
incredibly heavily on conscripts right now. Someone sent me some
documents from a junta officer who they captured showing that
something like a single digit percentage of the troops under
his command had been in the military before the conscription began.
So they're like taking people with very little training and
sent into the front line very quickly, which relates to

(01:56:50):
my next point, which is that Malaysia is planning to
forcibly return Myanmar nationals on Myanmar Navy ships at the
end of this month. We can pretty safely assume that
these will be Rohingya or other Muslim peoples from Myanmar, right?
Malaysia has been one of the places where people have
tended to go, especially with conditions being what they are
in Cox's Bazaar. This would lead to those people most

(01:57:11):
likely immediately being conscripted if they were sent back.

Speaker 4 (01:57:15):
That's all I've got. Gary, I know you have some
stuff too. Yes, I do have some stuff because it
was a big news week for White House extended universe
related news.

Speaker 5 (01:57:26):
Okay. On.

Speaker 4 (01:57:27):
August 28th, Trump signed an executive order to create the
country's first US Space Academy. The order starts by saying, quote,
space is a critical domain for American national security, economic growth,
scientific discovery, and technological innovation. More details on this will
come out in the next 120 days.

Speaker 8 (01:57:45):
I'm really excited to see how they're going to work
in the Confederate flag into that, because you know they're
going to.

Speaker 4 (01:57:51):
Military academies love that shit. Yeah. Trump starts evil Star Trek.
Amid trade disputes with Canada, on August 27th, President Trump
signed an executive order to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America.
And as of recording, both Google and Apple Maps have

(01:58:11):
complied with Trump's order. This move has not received universal praise,
even among Trump's followers on the right. Matt Walsh came
out against this, saying, quote, This will be an unpopular
opinion on the right, but I think this is kind
of dumb, even as a troll. Lake Ontario was given
that name on maps by European explorers long before the

(01:58:35):
Canadian province of Ontario was named. There are several cities
in America called Ontario, at least one of them, predating
the Canadian province by like a hundred years, because the
word originates with native tribes in North America. Yeah. It
is not a Canadian invention. Canadians never uniquely owned the
lake or the name, so in effect... All you're doing
here is actually giving them credit for a thing that

(01:58:56):
wasn't theirs to begin with. Yeah, it's funny when Canadians
are upset, I guess, or whatever, but Lake Ontario name
itself is American history dating back many centuries. Not sure
how you own Canada by deleting your own history, unquote.
So that's Matt Walsh's long, long take on this, if

(01:59:18):
you are interested in.

Speaker 2 (01:59:20):
Man, of all the things I would think he'd break
with the administration on.

Speaker 4 (01:59:24):
Right. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:59:25):
Okay.

Speaker 5 (01:59:26):
All right, Matt.

Speaker 2 (01:59:27):
All right.

Speaker 4 (01:59:27):
Well, because European explorers did that.

Speaker 7 (01:59:30):
I know.

Speaker 9 (01:59:31):
I know.

Speaker 2 (01:59:32):
It's just also stupid.

Speaker 7 (01:59:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:59:34):
And also, okay, it's stupid. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.

Speaker 7 (01:59:39):
But America's the name of the continent. It shouldn't bother
me as much as it does. But like- Canada's a
part of America. Like, you understand it.

Speaker 9 (01:59:50):
The Americas.

Speaker 2 (01:59:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:59:52):
Even if it is a troll. It's not even a...
I shouldn't care that your troll sucks.

Speaker 4 (01:59:57):
It's deeply frustrating.

Speaker 9 (01:59:59):
Yes.

Speaker 4 (02:00:00):
It's so stupid.

Speaker 7 (02:00:02):
And even calling the Gulf of Mexico, calling the Gulf
of America.

Speaker 9 (02:00:07):
You know Mexico's a part of America.

Speaker 4 (02:00:09):
It's still.

Speaker 9 (02:00:10):
It's not a... It's just not a... This doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.

Speaker 4 (02:00:14):
It's one of the most annoying things that he has
done and continues to do as president. Yeah. And the
fact that Apple and Google Maps is like the key
towing to this is just completely embarrassing. A pundit on
Fox News' The Five also did not like this, but
because he was concerned that the new acronym that would
be given to kids to memorize the Great Lakes, right?

(02:00:35):
Because the acronym used to be HOMES. To go over
all of the Great Lakes. That's the first letter of
each said lake. Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior. Work
well for you. This Fox News prudent is concerned that
now the acronym will be too close to Hamas. Because

(02:00:57):
you have to trade the O for the A.

Speaker 2 (02:00:59):
Yep, yep, yep, yep.

Speaker 9 (02:01:01):
All right.

Speaker 8 (02:01:03):
If we could get a merry-go-vespoochie in there, if.

Speaker 4 (02:01:06):
Lake Erie, we'd be there.

Speaker 2 (02:01:08):
Right. I think we could make it to Homo. We
could probably get to Homo pretty easily. We could get
to Homo. If we're close to Hamas, we've got to
be close to Homo.

Speaker 4 (02:01:15):
The next liberal president has to replace the name of
Lake Erie with another O word and have homos.

Speaker 9 (02:01:22):
Lake Obama. There we go. Lake Obama.

Speaker 4 (02:01:26):
Lake Obama. Yeah, that's good. Trump has also, since renaming,
quote unquote, renaming the lake, he has also suggested changing
the name of either the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean to
the American Ocean.

Speaker 2 (02:01:39):
The American Ocean, absolutely.

Speaker 4 (02:01:40):
And has also talked repeatedly about changing the name of
the Strait of Hormuz to the Strait of America.

Speaker 5 (02:01:46):
Oh my gosh.

Speaker 4 (02:01:46):
So we'll see how that works out for him. How's
that going for him? We'll check in later. how's that
going yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:01:55):
About to go to your backyard and change the name
of it.

Speaker 2 (02:01:59):
This is just for clout right like this is just
a fucking like he's found out that he gets a
lot of attention and owns the libs and yeah yeah
yeah creates like a news cycle whenever he does this
bullshit that's the reason this is happening right.

Speaker 4 (02:02:11):
Yeah that's why i don't want to speak any more
about it but right it's it's it's it's worth a
little mention there and for sure Homes to Hamas is
undeniably funny.

Speaker 8 (02:02:22):
Homes for Hamas is an amazing, like a fictional NGO
that would come out of like a Matt Walsh tweet.

Speaker 4 (02:02:29):
That is true. And then maybe the new Daily Wire
Plus film.

Speaker 8 (02:02:34):
The next film, yeah. It's Habitat for Humanity, but it's
Habitat for Hamas instead.

Speaker 4 (02:02:40):
Speaking of something that could come out of a Daily
Wire exclusive film, A former staffer for Mike Collins, a
Republican congressman from Georgia who's currently running for Senate against
John Ossoff, has been linked to a Nazi account on
X the Everything app. This ex-staffer is a 24-year-old who
interned for Collins in 2024 and then the next year

(02:03:01):
worked as a contractor at a pro-Collins PAC. On X,
this staffer described himself as a quote-unquote twink fascist.

Speaker 5 (02:03:10):
Okay, yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:03:12):
And in one post from July of this year, he
used the word twink to type out the shape of
a swastika.

Speaker 2 (02:03:21):
Okay. All right.

Speaker 4 (02:03:23):
I have it in the doc here if you guys
want to see.

Speaker 9 (02:03:27):
What is happening?

Speaker 4 (02:03:28):
How does he think that's going to end for him?
I don't think he cares.

Speaker 3 (02:03:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:03:34):
I think there's a chunk of people for whom all
that matters is the lulz, right?

Speaker 4 (02:03:38):
So it would seem, yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:03:40):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (02:03:40):
He also posted thirst traps of himself.

Speaker 5 (02:03:43):
Sure.

Speaker 4 (02:03:43):
Captioned racist.

Speaker 2 (02:03:44):
That's not desperate.

Speaker 4 (02:03:45):
And also shared a grok generated photo of himself in
a Klan robe. Fascinating.

Speaker 7 (02:03:50):
I never thought I'd see the day of like bored Nazis.

Speaker 4 (02:03:55):
With too much time on their hands online.

Speaker 6 (02:03:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:03:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:03:58):
I was like, y'all just bored now.

Speaker 2 (02:04:00):
I mean, that's where these Nazis started.

Speaker 9 (02:04:02):
Okay.

Speaker 4 (02:04:03):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:04:03):
It began in boredom. And I guess to some extent,
you know, it should end there.

Speaker 4 (02:04:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:04:10):
Touche.

Speaker 4 (02:04:11):
Yeah, it's downstream of being on the internet too much.

Speaker 5 (02:04:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:04:16):
On Monday, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy announced an emergency
shutdown of 110 commercial driver's license schools, which, according to
the White House, accounted for, quote, more than 5,000 of
the drivers who have failed English proficiency tests, unquote. So
this will make it harder for people to work as

(02:04:37):
commercial drivers.

Speaker 6 (02:04:38):
Hmm.

Speaker 2 (02:04:39):
Yeah, we've got too many of those as it is,
so that's good.

Speaker 9 (02:04:42):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:04:43):
Things are going great. A federal appeals court ruled three
to one, and that's Trump appointees on that court, that
states can regulate prediction market platforms like Cauchy as gambling.
This case originated from regulators in Nevada with support from
their Republican governor. Obviously, the state of Nevada has an
interest in keeping these platforms regulated as gambling or kicking

(02:05:07):
the platforms out of their state entirely. because it's Nevada.
It's Las Vegas. The judges in this case wrote, quote,
The substance of the sports event contracts offered on Kalshi's
exchange is sports gambling, regardless of whether Kalshi calls them swaps.
Kalshi's attempts to distinguish its sports event contracts from sportsbooks

(02:05:30):
betting are unpersuasive, unquote. The judges also highlighted how in court,
Kalshi argued that Its platform wasn't actually sports betting, but
Kalshi had previously used that term to market its platform
to users.

Speaker 7 (02:05:47):
I didn't go too deep into this, but yesterday, the
first person to get a lifetime ban from Kalshi, did
y'all see this? No.

Speaker 5 (02:05:56):
No.

Speaker 4 (02:05:57):
Is it Trump's teleprompter guy?

Speaker 5 (02:05:59):
No.

Speaker 7 (02:06:00):
No.

Speaker 9 (02:06:01):
It's even funnier. It's George Santos. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
He's back.

Speaker 5 (02:06:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:06:09):
No way. 4-1 out for Santos.

Speaker 9 (02:06:13):
For insider trading.

Speaker 4 (02:06:15):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did he bet on himself getting booed
out of Congress?

Speaker 9 (02:06:19):
I can only imagine him being like, oh, me, right? Oh,
fuck me, right? Fuck me.

Speaker 4 (02:06:26):
That's good.

Speaker 5 (02:06:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:06:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:06:29):
This case here will most likely escalate to the Supreme Court.
Another case which might end up going to the Supreme
Court relates to this next short story. A district court
judge in California ruled that Rubio's use of the NIA
to deport non-citizens based on their political speech violates the
First and Fifth Amendments. Stephen Miller reacted to this ruling

(02:06:50):
by writing, quote, a district court judge says America must
admit and keep foreigners who hate America and hate Americans out.
Court-ordered civilizational suicide. It will not stand, unquote. Yeah. Very
much in line with Stephen Miller's stance on restricting free

(02:07:10):
speech in order to save our civilization.

Speaker 5 (02:07:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:07:14):
Second to last here, I'm going to talk about a
story in The Guardian, which everyone should just read the
full story. It'll be at the top of our show notes,
so you can check it out. Usually I keep the
small things show notes at the top. And this one
will be at the top of the top because you
should just read the story. Last Saturday, The Guardian reported
that the Trump admin has been using a, quote, obscure
legal maneuver to try to obtain private information on journalists,

(02:07:37):
nonprofits and unions, unquote, all without judicial oversight. How The
Guardian learned about this is that feds tried to get
a search warrant for digital information from a Minneapolis journalist
named Georgia Fort and Don Lennon. The judge denied this request,
citing a lack of probable cause, and the government then

(02:07:57):
withdrew its request. But weeks later... DHS requested the information
from Google anyway. They went straight to Google. And per
The Guardian, they used a, quote, administrative summons citing an
arcane provision of federal law, 19 U.S.C. 1509, dealing with
customs imports, unquote. All that was needed to send the

(02:08:20):
summons was a sign-off from a DHS official. There was
no judge involved. Google denied the requests for information on Fort,
but DHS did secretly obtain her phone records from T-Mobile,
with no opportunity for her to challenge the summons.

Speaker 2 (02:08:37):
Hmm.

Speaker 4 (02:08:38):
For more information, people should read this full article on
The Guardian. It has other instances of DHS using this
little piece of customs law. Basically, DHS is arguing that
because this involves people interfering with ICE agents, it is
subject to this customs, duties, and taxes import law, which is,

(02:08:59):
in cases where this has been actually argued in court,
has not succeeded. But they have been able to successfully
get information on a number of people and have also
requested information on outlets like Democracy Now!, independent journalists, and nonprofits.
And this follows, you know, a few weeks ago, we
reported DHS obtaining financial information on unions in Minneapolis as well.

(02:09:22):
This is all kind of part of this same time
zone in terms of the response to Operation Metro Surge. Lastly,
for small things, and this will be a future episode
probably next week, Far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was deported last week.

Speaker 2 (02:09:39):
Yeah, he sure was.

Speaker 5 (02:09:41):
Yeah, buddy.

Speaker 4 (02:09:42):
After promoting ICE and deportations pretty gloriously for years and years.

Speaker 2 (02:09:47):
Yeah, talking about wanting to masturbate while ICE tore people
away from their families. Like, he specifically and directly stated, like, that, yeah, yeah,
I don't know. I got no sympathy for the man.

Speaker 4 (02:10:00):
Certainly not.

Speaker 2 (02:10:00):
Like, fuck ICE, but, yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:10:03):
Yeah, I mean, this is Milo suffering the consequences of
the world that he helped bring into existence and has
cheered on for years and years and years. This, you know,
this should not be a thing that we have in
our country. This process should not be something that exists,
but it's one that Milo wants to exist and he
still wants it to exist. In his interview with Piers
Morgan after his deportation, he said that the problem is

(02:10:23):
not deportations, but that they're just deporting the wrong people.

Speaker 2 (02:10:26):
Yeah, after saying no one deserves this kind of treatment,
he then went on to say like, but obviously some
people do.

Speaker 5 (02:10:32):
Yes.

Speaker 7 (02:10:33):
But even that, like, this man's treatment, he still got the, like,
white glove treatment.

Speaker 9 (02:10:39):
He's fine.

Speaker 2 (02:10:39):
He's fine.

Speaker 9 (02:10:40):
Yeah. Did you miss a meal, bro? Like, was they
handing you stuff?

Speaker 4 (02:10:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:10:45):
Maggots in it?

Speaker 4 (02:10:46):
No. He spent less than a day in detention.

Speaker 8 (02:10:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:10:49):
And now he is free to go back in Britain
with all of the money and resources that he has.
He is not suffering the way thousands and thousands of
other people have suffered.

Speaker 5 (02:10:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:10:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:11:00):
Now, DHS claims that he overstayed a visa.

Speaker 5 (02:11:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:11:03):
Meanwhile, Milo himself claims that his green card was quote-unquote
canceled without him knowing and that summons to immigration court
were sent to an address that he no longer lives
at and he never learned about the summons. That's what
he's claiming. We will go over all of these in
much more detail next week. Unless anyone has anything to

(02:11:24):
add on that.

Speaker 9 (02:11:25):
Nope.

Speaker 4 (02:11:25):
I think we can... Yeah, whatever.

Speaker 5 (02:11:28):
Yeah, whatever.

Speaker 4 (02:11:29):
It's funny, I think last time me and Prop talked
at length, it was about Kanye West, who Milo was
working for at the time.

Speaker 9 (02:11:37):
He was working for him, yep.

Speaker 4 (02:11:39):
And is actually working for Kanye again.

Speaker 5 (02:11:42):
Yes.

Speaker 4 (02:11:42):
He started working with him again earlier this year.

Speaker 9 (02:11:44):
Oh, good.

Speaker 2 (02:11:45):
That's what he was in Louisiana for, it looked like.

Speaker 4 (02:11:49):
Quite possibly.

Speaker 9 (02:11:49):
Yeah. Okay, obviously there's exceptions to everything, right?

Speaker 7 (02:11:55):
But within sort of like black American culture. It's, we're
done talking about you. We're done dragging. We won't even
check for you. I'm like, Kanye dropped an album. And
I'm like, wait, what? Like, I don't know anyone who
heard this record.

Speaker 4 (02:12:15):
Just like dropped it into a void.

Speaker 7 (02:12:18):
I was just like, this is how you know how
thoroughly you burnt your brand. Like, honestly, as a person
who bleeds hip hop, is arguably a generational talent when
it comes to production, soundscaping, like creating music, but is

(02:12:38):
so completely insufferable.

Speaker 9 (02:12:42):
And just so, we're just.

Speaker 7 (02:12:44):
So done with you. And your boy Milo gone, as
he should be.

Speaker 5 (02:12:52):
Yes.

Speaker 4 (02:12:53):
Yeah, that's what happens when you hire the man who
perfected the art of the fall off.

Speaker 2 (02:12:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:13:00):
To work for your company.

Speaker 9 (02:13:01):
To help you in your fall off, sir. And you
can argue.

Speaker 7 (02:13:07):
He's like he sold out five days at crypto. Okay,
but that's not five days in every city in America,
which is what he was doing.

Speaker 5 (02:13:18):
Yeah. Anyway.

Speaker 4 (02:13:21):
Yeah, I'll talk a little bit more about what Milo's
been up to and other issues regarding his ongoing separation
from his husband and questions about his legal status next
week in a special episode. But for now, let's go
to a quick ad break and then return for some
more news.

Speaker 9 (02:13:48):
Okay, so.

Speaker 7 (02:13:50):
27 years ago, one of the greatest rappers of all
time was murdered in front of everybody.

Speaker 9 (02:13:56):
This is Tupac. And the killer just now got sentenced.

Speaker 7 (02:14:02):
One would wonder, first of all, why this is so
important to put it on executive order. And I have
a theory as to why. But also, why did it
take 27 years to solve this? And everybody involved except
for one dude has been dead. So what is we
talking about? So to understand his importance to this, I
think we have to understand really just how singular Tupac

(02:14:24):
was as a person. And I think anybody born post
his birth, it's like you weren't a part of the
monoculture that we had all existed in, in the sense
that at some point in our lives, we used to
all sit down at eight o'clock Thursday night to watch
the same television show like across the world. You know, like, yeah,

(02:14:44):
that just doesn't exist. So to be a star in
that era means the planet is watching you. And I
think that Pac was such an enigma. We're talking about
a guy's life who's like his life would be a
bad script. Like if this was somebody was writing like
what he actually lived in a script, you'd be like,
come on, guys.

Speaker 2 (02:15:03):
Yeah. His last words as he was bleeding out and
the police asked him who did it were something along
the lines of fuck you, pig.

Speaker 9 (02:15:09):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:15:09):
Like it was something like that.

Speaker 9 (02:15:10):
Fuck you, pig.

Speaker 7 (02:15:12):
Like you're talking about a guy whose godfather was Geronimo Pratt,
the legendary Black Panther. His mama and auntie, Fanny and
Assata Shakur, defended themselves in federal court while she was
pregnant with him. The man was clearly Jada Pinkett's first love,
which means that Will Smith is the consolation prize to Tupac. Like,

(02:15:36):
that's what I'm trying to say. Like, the man dated Madonna.
He dated Quincy Jones's daughter. Like, there was just genre-defining films.
The guy lived four lives. Like, he literally lived four
lives inside of the five years that he was a
public figure. Rapper, gangster, sex symbol, revolutionary. All before he

(02:15:58):
was 26. So backstory before we get this court case.
So 1996, honestly, the biggest star in the world, him
and Notorious B.I.G., two biggest rappers that rap has ever seen, right?
Pac and his friends, part of Defro Records, Suge Knight,
who was the leader of Defro, went to Vegas to

(02:16:19):
a Mike Tyson fight.

Speaker 9 (02:16:20):
At the Mike Tyson fight, they see a man named Orlando.

Speaker 7 (02:16:24):
Now, Orlando was a crip important to the story, Shug
being a notorious Compton Piru blood in charge of death
row records at this fight for Mike Tyson, which only
lasted 15 seconds, which was why they were.

Speaker 9 (02:16:39):
So bored because the fight was done immediately.

Speaker 7 (02:16:42):
So while they were out trying to party, still kind
of bored because the fight they came to see didn't happen,
they run into this guy named Orlando. Now, Orlando's important because, again,
he's a crip. And a few months earlier, he snatched
a chain, a Death Row Records gold chain from another
person at the Lakewood Mall, no less, which is very

(02:17:03):
funny because Lakewood is a suburb of Long Beach. It's
not even like a city. It's literally just a mall.
So these murderous Crips steal this chain from this guy.
They see him and they're like, hey, that's the dude
that snatched the homie's chain. So him and Suge go

(02:17:23):
stomp the guy out. It's all, you could see it all.
It's all on, you know, surveillance footage, camera footage. They
see him stomp him out. They're still on a high.
They're about to go party. They want to go do
their thing. The problem is the guy that they stomped out,
his uncle is this man named Keefie D. Keep Keefie
D's name in mind because Keefie D had a friend
named Zip, I know.

Speaker 9 (02:17:43):
But Zip worked for P.

Speaker 7 (02:17:45):
Diddy, as in Sean Puffy Combs, as in the worst
human we've ever met you know what I'm saying so
he works for him Puffy is the leader of Bad
Boy Records who's got Biggie they're in this amazing like
struggle for power to be the king of hip hop
it was pretty well known worst kept secret Puffy wanted

(02:18:06):
Suge and Pac dead right So Zip works for Diddy.
Keefy D gets a gun from Zip and says, you
finna let that man, you know, stomp you out like
that in front of the homies. We got to go
get your gift back. They get in the car, find
out where he's going to be at the club. He's
not there. They were going to give up. And then
some girls on the side of the road at the

(02:18:27):
gas station realized that that's Tupac in the car because, again,
he's the biggest star on the planet at the time.

Speaker 9 (02:18:32):
They're screaming, oh, my God, oh, my God, it's Pac.
They go, oh, dude, it's him. He's there.

Speaker 7 (02:18:36):
Flip a U-turn. roll the window down, shoot through the car,
kill Tupac, right? Now, all kinds of conspiracy theories as
to how this happened because the case went unsolved, but
of course it was solved. He's the biggest artist on
the planet. They absolutely knew who killed this guy. It's just,
you didn't have enough to convict him, right? Because it's

(02:18:57):
still all hearsay. It's still all this, the word of
a bunch of crips who all tell war stories all
the time. You can't prove it, right? Anyway, They're waiting
for a chance to actually solve this. Six months later,
Biggie gets killed, right? So now you got two of
the biggest stars in the world in hip hop murdered.
Biggie's mom sues NYPD for not solving the case, right?

(02:19:20):
Which means that, damn, we better solve this shit. Well,
we kind of know who did it, but we can't
prove it yet. 2008, Keefie D gets picked up on
a drug charge, right? It's a federal case because he's
doing a whole lot of drugs. Right. So now the
man's going to get put up under the jail. The
cops say to him, hey, listen, we know you got
all them drugs, but can you tell us about what
happened in 96? He was like, what you talking about?

(02:19:42):
They was like, we don't play dumb. You know that
we know it was you.

Speaker 5 (02:19:46):
Right.

Speaker 7 (02:19:47):
And let me tell you something about this code that
the gangsters have. You throw enough time at somebody, they're
going to start singing, boy. And Keefie sang, right? He
told him the whole story, exactly what happened, all the names.
Let me tell you, look, this is where we were
sitting in the car. This the homie, this the one
who actually shot. I got the gun from this person

(02:20:07):
and the gun I got from Diddy's homie told the
whole thing in exchange for immunity.

Speaker 9 (02:20:13):
It was like, all right, we got you.

Speaker 7 (02:20:15):
Good.

Speaker 9 (02:20:16):
Shut your mouth. Everything's fine.

Speaker 7 (02:20:19):
They would go to trial, except they can't go to
trial because, again, it's the word of just Keefie by
himself because everybody else that was in the car is dead.
And are you going to press charges against Puffy, against Diddy?
It's absolutely, you can't do it. Anyway, it had been
fine right off to the sunset. We wouldn't have known
until this fool got on YouTube. And then, guys, listen,

(02:20:44):
it can happen here, podcast team.

Speaker 9 (02:20:47):
My friends. My friends, he wrote a book. He wrote
a book confessing all of this, right? He wrote a book.

Speaker 4 (02:21:01):
Perfect.

Speaker 7 (02:21:01):
He got on every podcast he could get on telling
this story. Two years ago, Las Vegas PD say, hey, homie, uh,
we got to charge you for murder.

Speaker 9 (02:21:13):
He was like, what are you talking about? I got
a deal.

Speaker 7 (02:21:14):
They was like, first of all, your deal was with
the feds, not with the Las Vegas PD, number one.
And number two, the deal was for your testimony to us.

Speaker 9 (02:21:25):
You just told the planet what you did. You got
on the internet and you told.

Speaker 7 (02:21:32):
The planet, sir, you confessed to a murder. So he like, okay, well,
I guess we got to do. The trial started last month.
The man's defense was, I need you to look me
in my eyes. The man's defense was, I was making
that up for clout.

Speaker 9 (02:21:49):
I was lying the whole time.

Speaker 2 (02:21:51):
We're seeing a lot of that in court these days.

Speaker 9 (02:21:54):
Yeah, I made it up. This is not real. I
made it up.

Speaker 7 (02:21:59):
They was like, sir, we finna put you up under
the jail. So he just got convicted for murder. He
was not the one that pulled the trigger. The one
that pulled the trigger is dead. But he was the
one that attained the gun to make sure this happened.
He's the last one left.

Speaker 9 (02:22:14):
63 years old, about to go to jail for the
rest of his life.

Speaker 7 (02:22:17):
Now, the reason why I bring this up for executive
disorder is I really think this is the destiny of
the Epstein case.

Speaker 9 (02:22:28):
They're going to wait until everybody's dead.

Speaker 7 (02:22:31):
Except for one dude, and then put him in jail.

Speaker 9 (02:22:35):
That's my theory.

Speaker 8 (02:22:36):
Thomas Massey was on One in Congress again today reading
off a bunch of the Epstein co-conspirators. I'm not sure
if you saw that bit.

Speaker 9 (02:22:44):
Yes, I did. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:22:46):
And so what I'm trying to say is the case
was solved within a week.

Speaker 9 (02:22:53):
Yeah. Everyone knows who's guilty. Now, I'm not a gangster.

Speaker 7 (02:22:59):
Okay, I'm from here, but I do not at all
report to be a member of an active gang. I
don't think there's a single gang member in Los Angeles
who did not know who killed Tupac.

Speaker 5 (02:23:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:23:13):
Everyone knew who did it. But you don't talk to
the cops. It's their job to figure it out. All right,
that's your job. That's not my job. That's your job.
That's their job to.

Speaker 9 (02:23:24):
Figure it out. But either way, now.

Speaker 7 (02:23:28):
Officially, case closed. Tupac was murdered by Keefy D's friend.

Speaker 9 (02:23:34):
Who shot through the thing.

Speaker 7 (02:23:35):
And now he's going to jail for a murder that
happened 27 years ago.

Speaker 9 (02:23:39):
But yeah, you know, keep fun in the police, right?

Speaker 8 (02:23:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:23:42):
They're good at their job.

Speaker 5 (02:23:44):
They'll solve murders.

Speaker 2 (02:23:45):
I mean, not like they can't solve like a kidnapping
of an incredibly famous person's mom.

Speaker 5 (02:23:49):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:23:50):
But, you know, eventually they solve the really obvious crimes
if they're forced to.

Speaker 9 (02:23:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:23:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:23:58):
I think that's why we should be funding millions of
dollars to big podcasts so we can continue to have
people confess to murders on podcasts.

Speaker 2 (02:24:05):
Honestly, that's what we replace the police with. It's just
podcasts where people confess to crimes.

Speaker 4 (02:24:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:24:10):
Just promise them $ 500 and a Vlad TV interview.

Speaker 9 (02:24:15):
They will tell you every crime they did.

Speaker 8 (02:24:17):
That's our new take on true crime. Someone just comes
on and talks about their crimes.

Speaker 5 (02:24:22):
Right.

Speaker 8 (02:24:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:24:24):
I think being forced to talk on the Joe Rogan
experience would qualify as cruel and unusual punishment. So I
don't know about that. Constitutionally prohibited. Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (02:24:36):
It's one of the amendments.

Speaker 9 (02:24:38):
Like, okay, guys, just give me the time. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:24:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:24:43):
So moral of the story, guys, yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:24:45):
Like, hey, listen, if you were about to get away
with murder, just, like, shut the fuck up.

Speaker 9 (02:24:50):
Like, I can't stress this enough.

Speaker 4 (02:24:55):
If you're going to write a book, at least title
it something like If I Did It. Don't say I
did it.

Speaker 9 (02:25:00):
Right. If I did it.

Speaker 2 (02:25:01):
That worked great for OJ.

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

Speaker 4 (02:25:03):
You got to put the if in front first.

Speaker 9 (02:25:06):
OJ got away with murder. Like, can we just? Yes.
Because he was like, well, if I was going to
do it.

Speaker 5 (02:25:13):
All right.

Speaker 9 (02:25:14):
Back to actual death.

Speaker 4 (02:25:15):
Okay.

Speaker 8 (02:25:16):
So talking of two groups of people who keep shooting
each other, let's go to Venice Wayler first. Hmm. The
United States yesterday, when we're recording this on Wednesday, September 2nd,
so that would be Tuesday, September 1st, announced an oil
deal with Venezuela. And when I say Venezuela, I mean
specifically with Delce Rodriguez. The way we found out was

(02:25:37):
that the president truthed, quote, breaking news that parts in
block capitals. The United States of America has just entered
into an agreement with the country of Venezuela, countries capitalized.
I'll just do the block caps. on the biggest oil
deal in world history. That one's in block caps. At
my direction, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of

(02:25:57):
War Pete Hegsess working closely with highly respected interim president
of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez, and through a partnership with private business,
have secured majority US control of more than 65 billion
barrels of proven oil reserves in Venezuela. At no cost
to the American taxpayer, this historic transaction more than doubles,
that's in block caps, American oil reserves greatly increases our

(02:26:18):
oil supply and will substantially lower gas prices for all
Americans long into the future while helping, that's not a
full stop, I'm struggling, while helping to continue to set
Venezuela on a course toward tremendous success and great prosperity.
This transaction will greatly strengthen the already growing relationship between
Venezuela and the United States. Thank you for your attention
to this groundbreaking matter. Make America great again, President Donald J.

Speaker 9 (02:26:40):
Trump.

Speaker 8 (02:26:41):
I wouldn't pay too much attention to the claims he's
making here. We know that the United States is planning
to partner with some kind of private business entity to
develop oil fields. It seems like from reporting, they will
take 55% of the effective output and have a right
to buy oil at cost. If you remember when they

(02:27:01):
first kidnapped Maduro, Trump summoned oil executives to the White
House and none of them were exactly chomping at the
bit to go drill baby drill in Venezuela, right? That's
because the infrastructure is damaged and the crude oil is
among the heaviest and dirtiest on the planet. They would
just rather go berserk. almost anywhere else, right? They have

(02:27:24):
to do more work to get this oil in worse conditions.
I want to recap a little bit where we're at.
The United States is effectively running Venezuela as a vassal
state now. It literally receives revenue from Venezuelan exports and
then sends it back via private banks. There was a
really good NYT article on Delcy and Rubio's relationship that
made the analogy that this is like a parent giving

(02:27:44):
a child, what do you call it, an allowance, right?

Speaker 4 (02:27:48):
We call it pocket money.

Speaker 8 (02:27:50):
The United States deployed hundreds of troops to Venezuela after
a devastating earthquake. Allegedly, according to this NYT report, Rubio
has an effective veto on government appointments. He decides who
gets sanctions waivers to work there. He and Delci send
each other birthday messages and selfies. Venezuela, in the meantime,

(02:28:10):
has quietly wound down its cooperation with Russia. And it coordinated,
Venezuelan intelligence coordinated with the US military when they struck
Tren de Aragua personnel. They have forced Venezuelan ministers to
delete tweets condemning the US attack on Iran. Just for reference, people,
Iran has been a longtime ally of the regime in
Venezuela in so much as we can see. There is continuity, obviously,

(02:28:33):
from Delcy, from Maduro to Delcy, but things are very
much changing. Delcy has run drafts of tweets past Marco
Rubio before posting them.

Speaker 5 (02:28:42):
Okay.

Speaker 9 (02:28:42):
Oh, boy.

Speaker 8 (02:28:43):
Sheesh.

Speaker 5 (02:28:45):
All right.

Speaker 8 (02:28:46):
When there were reports that DOJ was building a case
against her, she approached him for assurance. And it seems
like that directly resulted in Trump truthing. Do you remember
a few months ago now, Trump truthed how great she
was and how high?

Speaker 4 (02:29:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:29:00):
It seems like that was the assurance that she was
asking for. So it came in the form of the
president posting, as he did again yesterday, about how great
she is.

Speaker 4 (02:29:10):
The poster's republic.

Speaker 5 (02:29:12):
Yes.

Speaker 8 (02:29:13):
What incentive does the United States have to move towards
democracy in Venezuela, when it is getting everything it wants,
and it doesn't have to deal with the possibility of
the president changing, of the legislature changing. The US is
effectively running Venezuela as an informal colony, as it has
done in all of its colonies.

Speaker 4 (02:29:34):
It is not inclined to give those people more rights.

Speaker 8 (02:29:37):
I would focus less on this deal and more on
the fact that Trump is very clearly trying to lean
on gas prices. And the reason he's doing that is
what we're going to talk about next, his ongoing disastrous
war with Iran. So the US this week is once
again on a path to escalation in Iran. On the

(02:29:58):
30th of August, a new round of strikes inside Iran began.
This followed the kind of reduced bombing activity that we
spoke about last week, right? The United States says it
struck launches for rockets which were preparing to deploy mines
into the Strait of Hormuz, which Trump has claimed is
not mined. In response, Iran launched ballistic missiles at US

(02:30:20):
bases and allies in the region. And a US source
told Fox News that, quote, nearly all of them were intercepted.

Speaker 9 (02:30:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:30:29):
All right.

Speaker 9 (02:30:29):
Great.

Speaker 4 (02:30:30):
Well, that's good. You want to know that most of
the missiles didn't make it?

Speaker 2 (02:30:33):
Nearly all is all the missiles you need to stop.

Speaker 4 (02:30:35):
That's what I want out of a missile defense system.

Speaker 9 (02:30:37):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:30:38):
What it means, of course, is that United States has
used more of its interceptors, right, which are It is
already dwindling its supply. The Iranians, meanwhile, struck four vessels
in the Strait of Hormuz this week, perhaps soon to
be renamed the Strait of America. It does not seem
that America has much to say on what goes on there.

(02:30:59):
In one incident on Monday, which I saw a UK MTO,
so it's American Trade Office, right? That's kind of the
entity which puts out these safety briefings to mariners. A
tanker was hit with three projectiles. Which is the first
time I can recall in this conflict that happening, right?
Like there's a difference between like, we will strike your

(02:31:20):
vessel to show you that we can strike your vessel
and hopefully cause people to stop coming through here out
of fear and hitting it three times, which seems to
me like maybe an attempt to sink a vessel, right?

Speaker 4 (02:31:30):
Like that's an escalation.

Speaker 8 (02:31:33):
In response, on Tuesday, 1st September, the US began another
series of bombings with the president truthing. The United States is,
as we speak, striking Iranian targets near the Strait of Hormuz.
The strikes are large and powerful, and then retaliation for
the Iranians' failed attempt to adding sea mines to the Strait,
which currently has no mines. They have been completely removed
or detonated. And the Iranians shooting eight missiles all successfully

(02:31:55):
knocked down an armed military base in Jordan. If the
failed nation of Iran retaliates for this very justified attack,
they'll be hit again at a much harder and higher level.
but it will not be the biggest attack of them
all that.

Speaker 4 (02:32:06):
Is waiting in the wings.

Speaker 8 (02:32:08):
And when it is over, there will be very little
left of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And then he
signs it. He also did another one where he said,
it's a failed nation. They have no eight Navy. They
have an air force for inflation to 300%. Their leadership
is disarray. And then he's blaming fake news for giving
you other impressions. He also tweeted a shit tier AI

(02:32:29):
slop video of missiles hitting Karg Island. where the observer
was in a helicopter with the missiles flying over their head.

Speaker 4 (02:32:39):
It was very bad.

Speaker 5 (02:32:39):
What?

Speaker 9 (02:32:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:32:42):
Prop, have you not seen this? I will drop this
in the chat for you to watch. Yeah, let's get
a live react.

Speaker 5 (02:32:48):
Okay.

Speaker 4 (02:32:49):
The video is its own thing. The caption he used
for this, or whoever's running his account used for this,
is also, I think it's kind of incredible.

Speaker 9 (02:32:57):
Smithereens?

Speaker 5 (02:32:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:32:59):
Garg Island being blown to smithereens.

Speaker 9 (02:33:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:33:03):
President DJT.

Speaker 5 (02:33:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:33:05):
It is interesting that that one was not signed. Thank
you for your attention on this, Matt. That's a good point.

Speaker 2 (02:33:11):
It looks like a cut scene from like a Command
and Conquer game.

Speaker 4 (02:33:15):
Yes, that is exactly what I thought of.

Speaker 7 (02:33:17):
Why is this person lowering themselves into the explosion?

Speaker 2 (02:33:21):
Yeah, that doesn't make a lot of sense.

Speaker 9 (02:33:23):
I don't understand why you would do this.

Speaker 5 (02:33:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:33:26):
Yeah, I wouldn't want to be there.

Speaker 9 (02:33:28):
Who is shooting these missiles? What is happening?

Speaker 4 (02:33:32):
Yeah, there's like infinite secondaries. Every like.

Speaker 8 (02:33:35):
Everything that explodes lands and then explodes again. The way
the AI understands explosions, it's fascinating shit.

Speaker 4 (02:33:43):
Just on a very basic level, this is an interesting
thing for a president to do. I know this is Trump.
He posts shit from his account all the time. But
the idea of a president posting a semi-photorealistic, obviously we
can tell, but a semi-photorealistic video Another location being hit
by ostensibly our own military is interesting. I just like

(02:34:08):
a more advanced version of this could be an actual
video that's indistinguishable from real footage, at least on a
service level glance. That's like, you know, the president saying that,
you know, X location has been hit.

Speaker 5 (02:34:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:34:21):
And like, no, it hasn't. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:34:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:34:23):
This is the kind of sloppy and bad. It's not clear.
He's actually trying to convince people that this actually happened.

Speaker 5 (02:34:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:34:29):
But just the very basic components of this are interesting
and troubling.

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

Speaker 4 (02:34:35):
With the, from the commander in chief, it's not great stuff.

Speaker 5 (02:34:37):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:34:38):
Clearly, like, he's enjoying watching little AI videos. He posted
another one.

Speaker 8 (02:34:42):
Today of Lake America. Well, yeah, he's kicking the sign
for Lake Ontario. He walks up. He's carrying, you know,
it's a wooden sign on a couple of 4x4s. He
kicks the sign over. At that point, one of the
legs on the sign suddenly becomes shorter when it's on
the ground.

Speaker 9 (02:34:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:34:58):
And then YMCA starts playing, and he dances in his
characteristic fashion.

Speaker 4 (02:35:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:35:06):
It's just so embarrassing, man.

Speaker 8 (02:35:08):
He's having a great time with the AI machine that
someone gave him.

Speaker 6 (02:35:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:35:13):
So let's talk about what these mean, right?

Speaker 8 (02:35:16):
He's clearly losing patience with this war and he's worrying
about how it's going to impact the midterms. So much
of what we're seeing now is like, we're going to
talk about other stuff with voting rights later, right? DHS
is clearly winding up. for the midterms in blue states.

Speaker 2 (02:35:31):
Yeah i'll be commenting on that a bit yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:35:34):
We can see the work requirements for federal benefits not
hitting until january 27 like they are still worried about
these midterms right yeah meanwhile they are still fucking up
in iran i saw a video last night of an
iranian missile hitting something in jordan like this is one
of the ones that wasn't most of them i guess
uh because it clearly impacted the ground Iran claims to
have shot down a Reaper. Last night, United States missiles,

(02:35:58):
not for the first time in American history.

Speaker 4 (02:36:00):
Hit a wedding.

Speaker 2 (02:36:01):
Yeah, we've done a bit of that.

Speaker 5 (02:36:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:36:04):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:36:05):
This was like a defining moment for Obama's air war, right?
For his drone campaign.

Speaker 5 (02:36:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:36:12):
When people talk about Obama and how he was a
disappointment in foreign policy terms, this is what they talk about, right?

Speaker 4 (02:36:19):
Like, this is the moment.

Speaker 5 (02:36:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:36:21):
And he bombed a wedding, yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:36:23):
Yeah, we did that again.

Speaker 8 (02:36:25):
This time, Weapon Fragments at the scene show, I think
it's what a slam ER or slammer. Please email me,
Navy people, tell me how you refer to the missile.
Boeing has touted it as the, quote, most accurate missile
in the Navy's arsenal. It punched straight through the roof
of this building. Balooch weddings are really big. There were

(02:36:45):
hundreds of people there. There were at least 50 people injured,
at least five of them dead, including a child missing.
I've seen videos where you can see children's shoes, little
tiny toddlers' wedding shoes among the rubble, right?

Speaker 7 (02:36:57):
Damn.

Speaker 8 (02:36:58):
Yeah, it's pretty fucked up, and the images that will
come out of it will not look good.

Speaker 5 (02:37:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:37:04):
Finally, talking of Iranian missile strikes, I want to speak
about this. Discourse about this missile. This missile is generally
referred to as a castle breaker. The Persian name is
Kaibasha Khan, I believe. Castle is referring... to a specific
castle from like Quranic history. And that's relevant only because
this missile is designed to hit Israel, right? Like that

(02:37:25):
is what this is for. It's a medium range ballistic missile,
something like a 900 mile range. Recently, though, there's been
a lot of reporting that this is some kind of
new and groundbreaking thing that Iran's been dropping in the
last few weeks. And they have had them for years.
We know this because they unveiled it on live TV.
They literally whipped a tablecloth off it and were like,

(02:37:46):
there it is.

Speaker 4 (02:37:47):
Iran does this a lot with its weapons systems, right?

Speaker 5 (02:37:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:37:50):
But I'll include a link to a Russia Today post
about it. They do seem to be likely the missiles
that killed several US service people in Jordan in July.
But in part, the reason that they were the missiles
that snuck through because they're the missiles that Iran uses
a lot. Iranian state propaganda is making a big deal
of talking about these missiles. They do this occasionally with

(02:38:11):
their weapon systems, right? They portray it as like, oh,
the American patriot has nothing on this missile system that
we have.

Speaker 4 (02:38:19):
But they are effective, right? They're smallish. They're maneuverable.

Speaker 8 (02:38:22):
And in the terminal phase of their trajectory, they maneuver,
which makes them harder to intercept. If it's just doing
a ballistic arc, then it's a math problem to intercept it.
But if it's maneuvering, from what I understand, that makes
the intercept more complicated. They use these in Syria soon

(02:38:43):
after I left, actually. This isn't some secret brand new technology,
but it is a technology that is effective. And the
reason it's continuing to be effective is that despite more
than six months of war, the United States has failed
to destroy their launchers and failed to destroy their missile supplies, right?
And that is why they're still able to strike United

(02:39:04):
States bases all around the region, which they have been
doing last night and they will do again.

Speaker 4 (02:39:10):
Tonight, I imagine.

Speaker 8 (02:39:11):
And as the US supply of munitions continues to dwindle,
this is going to become a bigger and bigger problem
for the United States.

Speaker 9 (02:39:18):
What an L.

Speaker 4 (02:39:19):
Talking of big problems, we haven't done an ad break
in a while.

Speaker 2 (02:39:34):
And we're back. So at the end of March, 2026,
which is, I think, At least it feels like that.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order to create a
national list of verified eligible voters. Mail-in voting would be
restricted to the people on this list, which would be
essentially an arbitrary list of whoever the administration thought should

(02:39:58):
be on it, right? It was going to be compiled
with help from DHS based on like citizenship roles. Voting
law experts immediately complained that this violated the Constitution for
a variety of reasons. And some people have said essentially
this is an attempt at a coup. Under the order,
DHS was supposed to work with the Social Security Administration
to create lists for each state. Ballots would be given

(02:40:18):
new envelopes with special barcodes for tracking, and federal funds
would be withheld from states that refused to comply with
this illegal order. As with many Trump executive orders, this
one was immediately met by a federal judge who issued
a temporary restraining order that blocked it from going into effect.
Trump appealed, and the whole situation remains legally unsettled to
this day. Despite the fact that the order has been halted,

(02:40:40):
earlier this week, Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, announced that
a USPS whistleblower had come forth to assert that the
Postal Service was still moving forward to comply with the
halted order anyway. According to an article by the AP, quote,
The disclosure from the unidentified whistleblower contends that the Postal
Service has been scrambling to try and build a complex
system that would normally take a year or more and

(02:41:01):
only three months, sometimes in defiance of the judge's orders
halting work. The goal is to have it ready for
use in the midterm elections. The disclosure contends that, due
to the new procedures, a single scanning error in a
batch of tens of thousands of ballot envelopes could prevent
any from reaching voters. It details a system that election
officials have already warned could not be implemented before the
first mail ballots begin going out Friday in North Carolina.

(02:41:24):
The Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions
of Americans, Blumenthal told reporters in advance of releasing the
whistleblower information. this administration seems hell-bent on changing the framework
on casting ballots in this country, clearly for political reasons. Now,
For its part, the U.S. Postal Service contends that the
judge's restraining order still gave them explicitly the right to

(02:41:45):
develop online tools for states who wanted to voluntarily abide
by the order. Even if this is true, it's a
massive issue because the changes mandated by the EO are
hideously unconstitutional and no state should be allowed to carry
them out. And to make that point, here's a quote
from the actual whistleblower complaint to Blumenthal. When ballots are
submitted to USPS in large volume batches, if any one

(02:42:07):
ballot in the batch cannot be verified against the portal,
all ballots in that batch will be rejected. For example,
if a state election official brings a batch of 10,000
ballots to USPS and USPS is unable to match just
one of those ballots against the portal because, for example,
someone had recently changed their name after marriage or they've moved,
then USPS would refuse to mail the remaining 9,999 ballots

(02:42:29):
as well.

Speaker 4 (02:42:31):
That's what the whistleblower is contending about the new USPS
rules regarding, yes, the barcodes and the portal system.

Speaker 5 (02:42:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:42:40):
Like this is how he's describing the system as working, right?

Speaker 5 (02:42:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:42:45):
He continues, USPS expects the state to take back the
entire batch to cure the issue with a single ballot.
Should the slapdash portal mistakenly mark a ballot as unverified,
there is no clear process by which state election officials
or voters themselves can challenge the rejection. The rule simply
vaguely states that they will be informed of the escalation
procedures should they decide to challenge a rejection. Voters intending

(02:43:08):
to cast ballots by mail may not even be aware
that their ballots have been rejected or were part of
a rejected batch until it is too late to secure
an alternative ballot or vote in person. Now, I would
call this a clear attempt to steal an election or
not necessarily to steal, but at least to create doubt
around the midterm elections, right? This is something of a
desperate Hail Mary by Trump and his cronies as the

(02:43:29):
numbers of them have gotten much, much worse nationwide. And
if individual states are allowed to do this, even if
the TROs remain in place and this is halted from
going forward nationwide before the election, if individual states are
allowed to use this system, then we could see countless
Democrat votes tossed out in red states where many Dems
are doing well for the first time in several election cycles.

(02:43:51):
And I think a large part of the goal here,
beyond just blunt disenfranchisement, is creating chaos, right? Because chaos
is almost as good as outright tossing out votes. It
creates doubt and it provides opportunity, a period of time
in which the administration can set narratives about how the
election went in an uncertain election night, right? That's a
big part of, I think, why they're doing this is

(02:44:11):
to provide opportunities to where they can throw doubt on
the system. Here's another relevant quote from the complaint. According
to the whistleblower, USPS's effort to develop and deploy the
portal has been rushed, risky, and haphazard because leadership has
demanded an impossible timeframe. In an effort to meet impossible deadlines,
USPS has eliminated standard and needed testing, thereby creating a

(02:44:31):
substantial risk of a catastrophic failure of the system that
could derail the midterm elections.

Speaker 9 (02:44:37):
Quote, Now, It's good that.

Speaker 2 (02:45:05):
This whistleblower came forward and courage like this is one of,
if not the only ways that we're going to have
a chance to catch and stop schemes like this from
coming to fruition. It is too early to know what
the fallout from this revelation is going to be. That
is still very much ongoing. This all just came out
in the last couple of days. So we'll update you
on this in the future as this evolves. But I
wanted to talk a little bit more about some other

(02:45:28):
midterm fuckery related news, some stuff that's a little bit
less dark, right? General Dan Cain, chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, wrote in a letter to Senator Alyssa Slotkin,
a Democrat, early this week, promising her, quote, the joint
force has no plans to send federal military personnel or
federalized members of the National Guard to polling places during
the 2020 elections. Likewise, the joint force has no plans

(02:45:50):
to use such personnel to seize ballots, voting machines or
other election related material. Now, this was in response to
a request Slotkin's office sent Cain and Pete Hegseth, asking
for confirmation the Pentagon would not interfere with the election
by having soldiers at polling places or seizing ballots. I'd
call this a partial positive story, right? It's good that
he's saying that. It's not great that elected Democrats are

(02:46:13):
so worried about this that they felt the need to ask.
It's not just the military we have to contend with here,
because back in February, DHS Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity
Heather Honey said, And that sounded great, but on September
1st of 2026, just a couple of days ago, Homeland
Security Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen made some concerning statements to

(02:46:36):
reporters in New York City. Per Politico, quote, Yep. He added, however,
that reports of specific undocumented immigrants at a location could
be a reason for ICE to deploy. The only reason
why we would be at polling places is that there
is a threat to that polling place or we're serving
a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down,

(02:46:58):
he said. ICE's job is immigration, customs enforcement. That's their job.
If we're serving a warrant, we will be where we
need to be. And that does leave the door open
to some degree of intimidation and fuckery at polls, because
we've all seen over the last two years that ICE
regularly take being brown as a sign that someone might
be an illegal alien in need of tasing and arrest.
And when the agency was asked for more clarification, on

(02:47:20):
Mullen's statement, ICE responded, ICE is not planning operations targeting
polling locations. ICE conducts intelligence-driven targeted enforcement. And if an
active public safety threat endangered a public location, they may
be arrested as a result of that targeted enforcement action.
So again, what's going to happen?

Speaker 9 (02:47:36):
It's hard to say.

Speaker 2 (02:47:39):
So far, DHS and the military are saying the right things.
But certainly with ICE, there remains open the possibility of
some targeted ICE fuckery at polling locations around the country.
So something to keep an eye on as well.

Speaker 4 (02:47:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:47:50):
Yeah, no parts of me trust them in any way
that their word means anything. And it sounds like exactly
what you said. This is some sort of word judo.
We're not planning to be there for the purpose of.

Speaker 2 (02:48:10):
Keeping the door open.

Speaker 9 (02:48:12):
Yeah, you know what I'm saying? Well, we told you
we wasn't coming for the purpose of this. We here
for that.

Speaker 2 (02:48:18):
And again, you know, I don't expect some national rollout
of ICE, but there's some really close state elections and maybe,
you know.

Speaker 5 (02:48:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:48:26):
There were people who were attempting to do this six
years ago in 2020 in swing states, right?

Speaker 4 (02:48:33):
Yeah. And like that.

Speaker 8 (02:48:35):
Very narrowly avoided happening through the intervention. I think of
a couple of members of Congress, but like this is
something that has clearly been like a.

Speaker 4 (02:48:48):
I guess a strategy, right?

Speaker 8 (02:48:49):
It's not a hard one to come up with, but
it's a thing that we should be really fucking worried about.

Speaker 4 (02:48:53):
Yeah. Yep. To clarify one thing regarding my reporting last
week on the plans for this UPS implementation of the
executive order, there was two injunctions that were dropped last week.
And then after the USPS published the rule change, a
new lawsuit was initiated by over half a dozen states.

(02:49:17):
And then a judge granted a TRO in regards to
that new lawsuit. And there will be a hearing tomorrow,
which for us is September 3rd, that will determine if
there's going to be a permanent injunction.

Speaker 5 (02:49:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:49:30):
And then based on whatever happens at that hearing, the
Trump administration will also likely appeal to the Supreme Court.
And it's really just a matter of days in terms
of ballots being sent out.

Speaker 5 (02:49:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:49:40):
It's cutting it super close. And they're trying to make
this be very close.

Speaker 7 (02:49:44):
Right.

Speaker 4 (02:49:45):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:49:46):
Usually I can at least follow the logic of the
Supreme Court. But this one, I just kind.

Speaker 9 (02:49:51):
Of, whether I agree with them or not, I was like,
at least I understand how you got there. But they're
just like, I don't know. This ain't illegal yet, but
let them cook.

Speaker 4 (02:50:00):
No, this seems like some of the one of the
more partisan or like subservient to Trump kind of type
orders that they've had.

Speaker 7 (02:50:07):
Yeah yeah like okay a little bit of our like
personal information but basically we've been waiting for the insurance
to it happened already but my wife needed a particular
medical procedure this is to like prevent a stroke you
know i'm saying and so essentially they was like well
we can't approve this this preventative procedure unless you already

(02:50:30):
have a stroke let me get this straight fam perfect
okay just say it to yourself again yeah like so
you so they gotta so they gotta break a law
before you could say what they doing is illegal I
just yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:50:50):
That is a fair interpretation of the Supreme Court's logic
yeah that's what the.

Speaker 7 (02:50:54):
Supreme Court just said they gotta break a law before
we could tell you what they did is illegal okay okay.

Speaker 8 (02:51:01):
Yeah that does seem to be where we're at it's
great yeah For our final story, let's talk about Data Republican.

Speaker 4 (02:51:09):
Data Republican is a relatively popular conservative influencer or propagandist
on X the Everything app. But this isn't just a
story about Twitter drama, trust me. Data Republican has almost
a million followers on X. Her account started to gain
traction in the early days of Musk's doge by her
posts that are kind of like data journalism. I use

(02:51:32):
that term very loosely. Yeah. using manipulated data to justify
Doge in a very questionable way. And now she produces
content which is essentially like open source, like OSINT style
data journalism for MAGA or a far right audience. Her
bio reads, I'm just a tool builder and has a

(02:51:53):
quote from Musk saying that she's worth following as well
as a quote from Charlie Kirk saying, you're a must follow.
Last week, Data Republican published a web tool mapping out
thousands of Antifa, anarchist, and left-wing websites from across the
globe hosted through NoBlogs. And as we discussed last week,

(02:52:15):
the collective that runs the infrastructure behind NoBlogs was designated
as a specially designated global terrorist. Data Republican basically scraped
every NoBlogs site that was online as of last week
and created an index of posts, if they host doxing information,
calls to violence, and if they have any financial information

(02:52:37):
or donation links, as well as quote-unquote institutional affiliations to
other organizations such as the SPLC and any connections to
other no-blogs sites. She described the tool like this, quote,
introducing an interactive map of 7,000 plus blogs across many
countries and languages, anti-fascist, anarchist, ecological, prisoner solidarity, migrant border, revolutionary,

(02:53:02):
Every one classified, geolocated, and searchable down to the verbatim quote.
Verified quotes. Every claim is a receipt. Their words, not mine.
4,000 plus blogs pinned to a live world map. Zoom
into your own city. Many blogs classified, quote-unquote, operational. Click
any blog, author, or cell, and walk the network one
tie at a time. No grant funded this. No client

(02:53:25):
asked for it. I do this for free on my
own time because someone should, unquote. I have a little
picture of the tool here below, which was titled Trump Blogs.
That's what she calls her tool to search all these
different sites. She has little nodes on this map that
are labeled mainstream authority for groups like the SPLC or

(02:53:46):
the ADL. She has another node for Antifa slash Watchdog Research,
which she calls naming shops, basically like, you know, info
sites where anti-fascist researchers will name fascists.

Speaker 2 (02:53:58):
In their area.

Speaker 5 (02:53:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:54:00):
She's in other nodes for movement legal defense, for official
political parties, mostly international-based parties, and for movement infrastructures. Now,
a few days prior, she posted a similar network map
for the DSA, inspired largely by Marco Rubio's Cuba conspiracy document.
This quote-unquote DSA explorer allows you to navigate an alleged

(02:54:22):
web of connections between DSA members, journalists, politicians, and other
left-wing organizations. other quote-unquote anti-imperialist organizations, foreign political parties, and
Islamic terror groups. Data Republican has a few projects like
this on her website. Other projects include the National Endowment
for Democracy Explorer, quote, AI-generated summaries of NED's Journal of

(02:54:47):
Democracy articles, authors, and NGOs, unquote.

Speaker 5 (02:54:50):
Perfect.

Speaker 4 (02:54:51):
She also has another database of nonprofit NGOs, their employees,
and their volunteers, and whether they receive government funding. For instance,
she has pages on 92 nonprofits focused on combating hunger.
Truly the worst of the worst being documented here. Yeah.
She also has a database of grant funding, a 2024

(02:55:13):
voter turnout analysis, and a link to her book on
NGOs and USAID published under her real name, Jennica Pounds,
with a foreword by Doge's own Big Balls.

Speaker 5 (02:55:25):
Oh my god.

Speaker 8 (02:55:25):
Is he credited using his legal name there or Big Balls? No,
he is credited as Big Falls. Like I read it,
he is credited as Big Falls.

Speaker 4 (02:55:36):
At the bottom of the Data Republican website is a
link to a nearly 5,000-word essay from her pastor titled
The Historical Case for Christianity. Last April, Jenica Pounce, Data Republican,
became a credentialed member of Hegseth's revamped Pentagon Press Corps.
Remember when he kicked out all those news outlets out

(02:55:58):
of the Pentagon last March and replaced them with right-wing cheerleaders?
Pound's admission into the press corps was part of this effort.
And then last month, something odd happened in the Pentagon
press corps. Jenica Pound, data Republican, accused someone from the
State Department of trying to entrap her into leaking old

(02:56:19):
Biden-era documents about Cuba by presenting the documents as an
exclusive scoop. I'm going to read a quick text exchange
that Data Republican posted on Twitter. This is her, quote,
Just to be clear, you want me to leak the
material you gave to me?

Speaker 9 (02:56:35):
Unredacted?

Speaker 4 (02:56:37):
Happy to help your efforts. The person that she was
texting to responded, quote, It already contains all necessary redactions.
If you'd rather report on already open source stuff, that's
fine too. But I wanted to give you the option of,
quote unquote, breaking the story as a sort of gift. Unquote. OK,
so as data Republican, Jenica Pounds posted a now deleted

(02:57:01):
tweet reading. It's not OK when the deep state sets
you up to commit a crime. I have never been
more angry in my life. Meanwhile, the Undersecretary of State,
Sarah Rogers, who oversees Voice of America, basically government-funded media,
replied to Pounds' thread about this alleged entrapment and tried

(02:57:21):
to explain that this wasn't a deep state plot trying
to trick Pounds into committing treason, but rather, a sincere
offer from her, Sarah Rogers, to just publish some exclusive documents.
And then Sarah Rogers posted a thread of those documents. Also,

(02:57:54):
it's funny that she calls just redactions FOIA redactions because
these were not FOIA documents, but she just refers to
those as FOIA redactions. Just an interesting note here. Yeah.
So essentially, Data Republican just botched a scoop because of
her weird paranoia and because she doesn't really know how
to do journalism, even like administration propaganda journalism. And in

(02:58:18):
the midst of this shit show, like this, this caused
a lot of drama, like on like, you know, MAGA Twitter.
But in the midst of this shit show, the far-right
news aggregator account America First News claimed that Pounds wasn't
just a Pentagon press corps journalist, but was actually a, quote,
Department of War employee, unquote. A big claim. And then

(02:58:41):
a few days later, the Pentagon confirmed that Pounds was
indeed an employee of the Department of War, the so-called
This is a statement from the DOD or the DOW, quote,
Miss Jenica Pounds serves at the Department of War as
a special government employee and is no longer a credentialed
journalist at the Pentagon. Her press credentials expired in June

(02:59:04):
2026 and she did not seek a renewal. She began
working for the department in July, 2026 unquote. So that's
pretty wild. And I will invite you to return back
to this map of like Antifa anarchist, no blogs, websites
that pounds created while she was a special government employee
of the department of war. You know, same thing with

(02:59:26):
this DHS list, same thing with this, you know, voter analysis,
although the voter analysis, what I think was an older piece,
but it's still on her website, but both this no
blogs list and, and this network map of DSA were
created and published as public tools while she worked and
is still working for the Department of War. And then

(02:59:47):
a few days after this was revealed, the Washington Post
published an article revealing that Pounce was not the only
right-wing influencer secretly working for Pete Haig's death. This is
a quote from the Post. Quote, The Pentagon has secretly
installed several conservative military veterans with large eyeline followings in
government roles, declining to disclose their assignments as they amplify

(03:00:07):
Defense Secretary Pete Higgs's viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize
the Trump administration, unquote. So according to the Washington Post,
at least three retired colonels, who now boast hundreds of
thousands of followers each on XTheEverything app, have been assigned
to civilian roles in the office of Anthony Tada, the
Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. And this office

(03:00:31):
has been focusing on how to make the military less woke, specifically.

Speaker 5 (03:00:34):
Man.

Speaker 4 (03:00:35):
These influencers are listed as either special government employees or, quote,
highly qualified experts, which can work on a longer-term basis
than special government employees who can only work for a
few months.

Speaker 5 (03:00:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (03:00:47):
And, like, these are influencers who are actively working on policy,
on military policy, on how to make the military less woke,
while also posting on their big accounts and in major
news publications, like the Daily Caller, as well as the
Washington Post itself. One of these influencers had a letter
to the editor published in the Post recently. And so

(03:01:08):
they're doing all this and posting about how awesome Pete
Hegseth is, while never disclosing that they also work for
Pete Hegseth.

Speaker 9 (03:01:16):
They work for Pete Hegseth, right.

Speaker 4 (03:01:18):
And like, again, Twitter sucks. But unfortunately, Twitter is still
very consequential to national politics.

Speaker 8 (03:01:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (03:01:25):
It's one of the primary ways the administration communicates with
people and the public digitally. And as a platform, it's important,
not just to this administration, but especially for the so-called
Department of War. We've seen pictures from live military operations
that show that Hengsteth has Twitter feeds pulled up on
screen of While special operations are underway.

Speaker 9 (03:01:48):
The man is watching Twitter.

Speaker 4 (03:01:49):
Yeah, like in the situation room. Yeah, they're checking hashtags.
And now they're recruiting staff from Twitter, including staff who
are building publicly accessible tools mapping out the left. From
the DSA and Palestinian solidarity organizations to Antifa info blogs
and anarchist report backs. She's building those databases while covertly

(03:02:12):
working for the Pentagon. And I want to close with
this one reply she made to her posts regarding the
NoBlogs tool. Quote, in the course of building this website,
a number of anti-fascists were identified. I disclosed them, but
not on the website directly to the USA government. Unquote.
The government that she works for, that she is working for.

Speaker 9 (03:02:35):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 (03:02:36):
How would you have that direct channel?

Speaker 7 (03:02:37):
Like, When I let myself think too long about like,
follow me, what frustrates me about climate change is the
fact that we saw it coming a hundred years ago
and just watch this slow, slow moving death. And we're like, guys,
it's on its way. This is where here's evidence. Here's
what's happening.

Speaker 9 (03:02:57):
It's coming.

Speaker 7 (03:02:58):
If we get above two degrees Celsius, we're above two
degrees Celsius.

Speaker 9 (03:03:03):
It's right there.

Speaker 7 (03:03:04):
I feel like that when Pete Hexeth said, I'm finna
fire everybody from the press corps, you not allowed to come.
And you're going, he's going to hire his own press people. Guys,
they're going to put him on the... She works for him.

Speaker 9 (03:03:18):
It's just so.
This is the slowest moving coup.

Speaker 7 (03:03:29):
Like, it's just, it's the slowest moving coup that you
all see.

Speaker 9 (03:03:33):
Hey, hey, hey, excuse me, excuse me.

Speaker 7 (03:03:37):
They're going to hire their own press and put, they're
going to send all of our names to the government.

Speaker 2 (03:03:43):
Oh, there it is.

Speaker 9 (03:03:44):
I just, yeah.

Speaker 4 (03:03:47):
One of the things that gets me the most about
this is how literally days ago, she was, you know,
ranting about the deep state.

Speaker 9 (03:03:53):
You know?

Speaker 4 (03:03:54):
Of which she is part. While she is a secret, like, covert, undisclosed,
special government employee. That's you!

Speaker 9 (03:04:02):
She is you and you are it.

Speaker 8 (03:04:05):
People will often talk about, like, psyops or psywar, right?
And be like, an individual person is a psyop. And
generally that's not how psychological warfare works, right? But, like,
now they're doing it. That is what.

Speaker 4 (03:04:16):
They're doing now.

Speaker 9 (03:04:18):
You're the thing. You're the thing.

Speaker 4 (03:04:21):
It's great stuff. Oh, and one other thing that I
do want to briefly mention, and this could just be
a curious coincidence, but late last week, NoBlogs suffered a
hack a few days after the group that runs NoBlogs,
the IA Collective, was declared a specially designated global terrorist.
The collective published a statement saying that the hack lasted

(03:04:44):
about two hours, during which the title of NoBlogs was
changed to Trump Blogs, and the attacker, quote, may have
had access to the user's database. Now, Trump Blogs is
also what Data Republican calls her no-blogs tracking tool. Now,

(03:05:05):
I'm not saying that Data Republican scraped no-blogs data by
hacking the website, but these two events did happen around
the same time, which means could just be a curious coincidence.
There is no direct evidence that Data Republican is the
one who hacked noblogs, and the use of Trumpblogs as

(03:05:26):
a term isn't very original, for one, and could just
be a sort of inside joke, troll, or reference. But
considering the fact that Data Republican secretly works for the Pentagon,
I thought this is something worth mentioning, coincidence or not.
You can draw your own conclusions. That should do it

(03:05:47):
for us here at It Could Happen Here.

Speaker 8 (03:05:50):
If you want to email us, you can do it.
It's coolzontipsatproton.me. Prop, do you have any other podcasts that
you'd like us to listen to?

Speaker 9 (03:05:58):
Hey, it'd be great, actually.

Speaker 7 (03:06:00):
We have a cousin podcast called Politics with Prop where
we dive into not the breadth of topics that were
covered here, but... A couple of topics that may make
you scratch your head a little bit. Like, I feel
like what they're saying is A, B, and C, and
I get to go, yes, you're right. That's exactly what
they're saying.

Speaker 9 (03:06:18):
So, yeah, tap in with me.

Speaker 7 (03:06:20):
Hub Politics with Prop every Wednesday and Friday.

Speaker 5 (03:06:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (03:06:24):
We reported the news.

Speaker 9 (03:06:26):
We reported the news.

Speaker 2 (03:06:32):
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 1 (03:06:37):
It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website,
coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find
sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions.

Speaker 4 (03:06:54):
Thanks for listening.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Behind the Bastards News

Follow Us On

Host

Robert Evans

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

The Bobby Bones Show

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}It Could Happen Here Weekly 248