It Could Happen Here Weekly 85

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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. What are we recording?

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah?

Speaker 1 (00:31):
What the episode started?

Speaker 3 (00:33):
Now?

Speaker 1 (00:34):
I was, I was, I was going to say something,
something to do with Texas. But to be honest, you know, why,
why why do we do this? Why do we let ourselves,
you know, get famous for for for saying a particular
bit and then just keep repeating it over and over again.
Are we so creatively bankrupt that there's there's nothing else
we can do but repeat our greatest hits in order

(00:55):
to recapture some of the some of the the excitement
that we felt as younger men. Anyway, my co hosts
on this episode, James Stout and me A Wong, welcome,
there could happen here.

Speaker 4 (01:12):
Hi, Robert, I'm glad you're doing so well.

Speaker 1 (01:15):
We're all doing great, James. You've just been having a
searing emotional experience at the border. Yeah, and everyone else
is busy living in the United States, which is its
own seering emotional experience.

Speaker 5 (01:28):
Man.

Speaker 1 (01:28):
Today, today we're going to be talking about the both
the most and least American state, Texas. Huzzah, Yeah, love you. Yeah.
Who here has spent a lot of time in Texas. Garrison,
You lived in the Dallas area, right.

Speaker 6 (01:47):
A lot that I've made my visits to Texas over
the years with you, even in the murder house.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
You and I have quaffed many a shiner bock together,
James Many. Okay, I guess we'll move into the fucking episode.
So there was a there was an email sent out
by Texasdemocrats dot org recently with the title Texas moves
from solid red to battleground. Sure, you know, like clockwork.

(02:16):
A lot of Democrats got very excited, and I made
a couple of people made posts being like, hey, this
is the same thing that happens every single election. They
are never right. Texas is never a battleground and it
always costs an insane amount of money. It is a
con by DC political consultants to get your money and

(02:38):
pump it into something that will fill up their coffers
and not achieve anything of value for the state of
Texas or for the Democrats nationwide. And this makes people
very angry for two reasons. One, they tend to interpret
it as saying abandon Texas and the people there, which
is not the statement I was making or anyone else
was making. And number two, everyone and it kind of

(03:00):
obsessively starts pointing out like, look, look at how over
the last thirty years, you know, the things have narrowed
in Texas, and the proportion of like Democratic votes is
you know raised, This is a this is winnable. We
can do it. We can do it. We're gonna talk
today about why the anyone who talks to you about

(03:21):
flipping Texas as a political goal that you should give
money to is conning you, and not only conning you,
but making it actually more difficult for Democrats to win,
both in Texas and nationwide. That's that's that's the premise
of the episode.

Speaker 7 (03:35):
Everybody, Here's here's how Bernie can still win. Though at
the very end, we will give you.

Speaker 1 (03:41):
Yeah, We're gonna let you know he's got a shot. Look,
look if he if he is capable of putting another
three rounds of six point five into a dinner plate
sized target at one hundred and fifty yards. Now that
that was anyway, he'd have to shoot a lot of

(04:03):
people to make.

Speaker 3 (04:04):
He's got a deploy bought a joy into an.

Speaker 4 (04:12):
Absolutely not.

Speaker 1 (04:16):
Person. So I want to talk about this because I
find it, like I think people tend to interpret this.
I've certainly gotten accused of like, oh, you're just kind
of being like a nihilist. Uh, this is you're being
you know, just an anti electoralist. You're not being practical.
There was a there was one particular guy who's like
a local Democratic candidate who responded seven times to my

(04:38):
tweet being like with variations, and his obsession was like,
if we win Texas, it's impossible for the GOP to
win national elections, which is true. If theoretically the Democrats
flipped Texas, the GOP would have no chance at winning
a federal election ever.

Speaker 3 (04:53):
Again, Yeah, and so simultaneous to this, right, if the
Republican there are more Republicans in California than there are
any other state in the Union, and if the Republicans
won California, they would they would win every election forever.

Speaker 1 (05:04):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, happen, not going to happen. I mean,
it's it's one of those things. I am not saying
Texas will never be a blue state. You know, that
is something that is possible, even likely, given enough time.
What I am saying, the argument that I'm making here,
and I'll provide you with evidence, is that number one,

(05:24):
focusing on these elections from the top down. And when
you're saying we want to flip Texas, that's a top
down approach, right. You are not focusing on we want
to fill up and win a bunch of different local elections.
We want to flip, you know, the state houses. We
want to flip a bunch of mayoralties and stuff. You
are saying what matters is how Texas votes in the

(05:46):
national election. And if you were to get if you
were to kind of eke out a bear like in Georgia,
right where you get a narrow victory in the federal election,
that would be great for the Democratic Party. One of
my issues with it is that kind of focusing obsessively
on flipping Texas isn't focusing on the stuff that actually
will help Texans, like Texans currently being targeted by the

(06:08):
state government, because flipping the state in a federal election,
but not taking the governor's seat, not taking the lieutenant
governor's seat, not like actually taking the state House, doesn't
improve life for people in Texas. I think the kind
of the degree to which the federal government, Biden's administration,
has been unable to push back very effectively against kind

(06:32):
of a lot of the shit that DeSantis has been
doing in Florida. You know, they have started to make
some attempts, is evidence of this, and kind of more
to the point, even if you don't agree with that, fundamentally,
these strategies that the Democratic Party has embraced in Texas
do not work. The Texas Democratic Party is incompetent. They
are bad at their job. They are worse. People bring

(06:55):
up Georgia a lot when I talk about flipping Texas,
and folks are like, well, we flipped Georgia, And it's like, yeah,
because the state elected officials and candidates in George number one,
the state party did a much better job of kind
of harvesting is a weird way to phrase it, but
of incubating talent to run for election in a number

(07:15):
of local offices. Then the Texas Democratic Party has ever done,
and that was a big part of what allowed them
to be competitive and eventually to flip the state. There's
a lot of like kind of dollar sign information on
how bad the state party in Texas is at this shit,
and I guess I should go ahead and provide some

(07:36):
of that now. So in the twenty twenty two election,
the midterms famously an unusually good showing for the Democratic
Party nationwide for a midterm election everywhere but Texas. O'Rourke
ran against Greg Abbott. He lost by eleven percent. This

(07:57):
is kind of to contrast the election that got everyone
excited when he was running against Cruse. I think they
were like three percent apart. And again, the only reason
there was this kind of mistaken belief and excitement among
dims that O'Rourke, because he was so close to Cruz,
had a real shot of winning Texas. No, he got
kind of close to beating Cruz because Ted, even Republicans

(08:19):
hate Ted Cruz. No one has ever liked that man.
His own wife can barely stand to be in a
room with him. His political allies would turn the other
cheek if fucking somebody anyway, we shouldn't talk about political
assassinations on this podcast. It wouldn't anger anybody though, right.
Lindsay Graham has said that, like Lindsay Graham's like, what
maybe the only good joke a Republican elected officials ever

(08:41):
told is that if you were to shoot Ted Cruz
on the floor of Congress and the trial was held
in Congress, like nobody would vote to convict the murderer. Anyway.
So Beto lost quite badly to Greg Abbott, and beyond that,
basically every statewide candidate that the Democrats ran lost in

(09:03):
that election. It was a bad election for the Democratic
Party and people who pay attention to Texas politics and actually, like,
aren't just trying to like grift your donation money? Know this.
Joe Montfort, a Democratic consultant in North Texas, said, quote,
it's been one election after another where we ramp everybody
up and set these expectations that we're going to finish
in first and then we finish in second. I don't

(09:25):
see any indication that we can win at state wide
levels or won't continue to bleed house seats to the
other party.

Speaker 4 (09:31):
I love to need to finish in second.

Speaker 8 (09:33):
There is if there's like a podium on election libertarians. Yeah,
the text Democratic Party to take the l to like Gildstein.

Speaker 1 (09:45):
Yeah, there were some kind of site. There were some
wins by Democrats in Texas. They managed to hold on
to two out of three seats congressional seats in the
battleground regions in South Texas, but they still lost one.
They did they you would still lose one and you know,
the GOP had to spend a lot of money to
do that. But like one of the one of the

(10:07):
points is that so they they held onto two of
those seats, and they won a contestant seat in the
suburbs of Dallas, and you know, like but basically in
all of these areas, these were like super narrow winds,
like these the big successes, and they were narrow wins
in areas that Joe Biden had carried by double digits
two years ago. And Joe Biden is a historically like

(10:29):
that is part of some of the some of it
will show you how bad the Texas Democratic Party is.
Joe Biden is not a popular president. And the fact
that he carried a lot of these areas by more
than the candidates who narrowly won in twenty twenty two
could is not a great sign for the way things
are trending.

Speaker 6 (10:45):
Yeah, It's probably also worth pointing out that like those
Southern Texas seats, like in the Rio Grande Valley, right, Like, yeah,
those people are normally Democrats, Yeah, but you have guys
like hen is it Quella Quala Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah's
opposed to abortion rights yeah yeah, and extremely hawkish on
the border, and like, yeah, what do we gain by

(11:05):
having like yeah, blue team good? Like not really if
this person is going to take away your bodily autonomy
and brutalize people for coming to this country for one day.

Speaker 4 (11:13):
About a life.

Speaker 1 (11:14):
Yeah, it's it's like a lot of the some of
these wins are kind of like marginal at best, given
the compromises or just given the kind of Democrats who
can win it. It's like a Joe Manchin kind of situation.

Speaker 3 (11:25):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (11:27):
And more to the point, like it's not not only
is this like evidence kind of that the Democrats' strategy
isn't isn't working. It's not simply that they tried something
and it failed. They tried something and it was so
expensive that it stopped them from trying things in other
areas where the money could have gone better. For example
of how fucking wasteful, particularly the bed O Wort campaign was, right,

(11:49):
he loses by eleven points to Greg Abbot. He raised
seventy seven million dollars to lose by that much. A
few years earlier, Lupe Valdez ran against Greg Abbot. She
spent raised like two million dollars and lost by thirteen points.
So seventy five million dollars may have bought Beto two percent.

(12:09):
Uh you know, like if you assume that national trends
had nothing to do with that gap closing, buy a
tiny amount, like what.

Speaker 3 (12:16):
With seventy five million dollars, I could take control of
a moderate at least is Texas city?

Speaker 6 (12:21):
Like yeah that is like, yeah, I could buy had
my chunk of Texas specific like you could purchase a
large chunk of fort Worth with that much money. No, yeah,
that's how I'll go here at cools the own media.

Speaker 1 (12:33):
Yeah, yeah, to own fort Worth. Finally my dream completed.
I'll be able to be I'm gonna buy those horse
statues at Los Kalitas, finally be happy.

Speaker 6 (12:44):
Let's get blucifer as well. It's probably a good time
to pivot to ads that help us pay for a
piece of fool.

Speaker 1 (12:50):
Sure, yeah, you know, who isn't a waste of money
these fucking ads. So overall we just talked about you know,
Beto raised seventy seven million. The gubernatorial race cost in
total something like one hundred and forty million dollars, which
is a huge amount of money for something that fails
that badly and doesn't there's no evidence that Beto's campaign

(13:12):
like he was. He's obviously good at fundraising, right, And
there was kind of this belief among a lot of dims,
an errant belief that this meant that he would be
good for down ballot races. Right, He's going to bring
the entire because of how much attention he gets, He's
going to raise the entire Democratic Party up. The poor
showing of the Democratic Party in Texas in twenty twenty
two suggests that that's not the case. And the money,
like there are there are fights that could have been

(13:35):
won and probably weren't because the money wasn't being invested
in those fights. It was going to battle. And I'm going
to quote from an article by the Texas Tribune here.
This year the party ran Rochelle Garza, a civil rights
lawyer with little political experience against Attorney General Ken Paxton,
who was widely seen as the most vulnerable Republican incumbent.
But Garza struggled to raise money or gain traction in

(13:56):
auric shadow and lost by ten percentage points against Paxton,
who's been indicted on felony security fraud charges and is
being investigated by the FBI for abuse of office accusations.
And it's what, Maybe she couldn't have won no matter
what you did. But one of the rules of politics
in this country is that the money you spend at
a big race, like a gubernatorial race, like a like

(14:18):
a like a Senate or a congressional campaign at the
federal level, like a presidential campaign, goes less far per
dollar than the money you spend in smaller local elections. Right,
ten million bucks going into that election might have done something,
you know, as opposed to seventy five million going into
Bedo O'Rourke and accomplishing very little. This has been not

(14:42):
just a problem in Texas in previous elections, throughout the
Trump area and a little before in particular, this was
a problem the DIMS had kind of from the middle
of the Obama years until the last couple of like,
really the last midterm at twenty eighteen is when it
started to turn around nationally, and the dims have I've
learned a lot in other regions about like not spending

(15:04):
stupid amounts of money on hopeless contests, but not like comprehensively.
So for example, in twenty twenty two, the second most
expensive house race was the fourteenth congressional district of Georgia,
where Marcus Flowers raised sixteen million dollars and lost by
thirty two points, not a great return on the investment.

(15:27):
And it was like the reason why he raised so
much money is because he was running against Marjorie Taylor Green,
and nationally, dims outside of Georgia wanted to put in
money because they hate her. And it's a trend that
relies a lot on social media on kind of the
way in which like hardcore dims, the dims that do
a lot of the small dollar donations think about politics
where it's like Marjorie Taylor Green bad donate money to opponent, Well,

(15:50):
her opponent had no chance of winning in that district,
Like no amount of money would have flipped that, and
you just wasted sixteen million dollars that could have helped
somewhere else. Maybe that's an insane thing, and it's not
as bad as it used if you want to look
at like the like the kind of the dumbest it
ever was. In twenty twenty, so Lindsay Graham's seat was

(16:12):
up in South Carolina and Jamie Harrison ran against Lindsay
Grant and dims again because Lindsay Graham evil, you know,
raised one hundred and thirty million dollars and he lost
fight ten points. Amy McGrath lost to Mitch McConnell, who
is another like you can always get a shitload of
money to fight Mitch McConnell ninety four million dollars lost
by twenty points, either of the like one hundred and

(16:35):
thirty million, ninety four million, that's two state legislators you
could have flipped, or at least made progress on flipping, right,
Like that amount of money could potentially do that or
at least help set up, you know, get a couple
of people elected who have a chance at kind of
broadening a base of support and becoming you know, leaders
in states that are currently like dominated by red legislators.

(16:56):
Like there's a chance at least here and that.

Speaker 3 (17:00):
Like specifically the state legislature. Thing is this has been
a problem with the Democrats for fucking ages, which is
that they just like it is only genuinely in the
last two years the Democrats are started giving a ship
about state legislatures, like and this is this is one
of the things from the Obama era, Like one of
the reasons everything sucks so much is that the Democrats
managed to lose like, oh god, I forget it was

(17:23):
like they I think I think the total they lost
like a thousand seats. It was like yeah, and and
and you know, on the we were seeing the product
of this, right like this like like Wisconsin was sort
of just a hell hole for the last decade. Uh
and you know, I mean like and these are like
Minnesota to like the like, there are lots of these
states that like that thought, not Minnesota, wor am I

(17:45):
talking about Michigan?

Speaker 1 (17:46):
Yeah, Michigan.

Speaker 3 (17:47):
Yeah, Like there's a lot of these states, and you know,
like and both of these places were winnable, right like
like they're like the Democrats are winning there now, right,
but they just like fucking left, like you know, they
they they fucking left Lint to get poisoned by lead
because they just not like the only the only things
that the problem is there's there's no money for consultants
in in sort of like downbout like state, and like

(18:08):
local races just just jack shit, right, And the Democrat
the Democrat party like is not run by sort of
like it's it's not a party in like an actual
real sense. It is a it is a collection of consultants.
And those consultants only care about senates, about Senate races.
Sometimes they care about house races, and they care specifically
they spend all of their fucking money and presidential races.
And you know, it's like again, and the Republicans don't

(18:29):
do that because they have a bunch of like people
they you know, because they have a bunch of like
part of their base, right is these like small and
mid scale capitalists in you know, in cities, in rural
areas who have like immediate concerns about like you know,
there's like there there are specific workers who they want
like lives to be worse. And so because of that,
the Republican machine is like seize the entire fucking country.

(18:51):
And the Democrats have been sitting around like spending like
a trillion dollars on Wendy Davis losing by twenty points.

Speaker 1 (19:00):
Yeah, yeah, And it's like you get these you get
these like cases where you know, you're looking at thirty
million being spent, you know, failing to unseat Marjorie Taylor
Green or somebody thirty three million something like that. But
what you don't like at the same time as like

(19:20):
that's happening, is all of these massive amounts of money
are being devoted to these like to the races that
get attention because there's famous names involved. You have, like
in twenty twenty I think it was you have or no,
it is twenty twenty two. You have the election between
Ted Budd, a Republican against the Democrat Sherry Beasley in
North Carolina where the Democratic Party decided not to prioritize

(19:45):
this election because it wasn't winnable, and then Bud won
up wound up winning by just four points. That's a
seat you could flip with money. That's that's not that's
not an unreasonable thing, as opposed to again, the races
where it went to and people are losing by like
thirty something fucking percent. And if you want to know
who a serious candidate is who is not just trying

(20:05):
to do the sexy thing or not just trying to
like again flip the state so that we can win
the federal election, but actually wants to help their state.
And this is again there's very nice things about Beto O'Rourke.
I was in Texas during the ice storm. He did
good work during the ice storm, like actual community defense
kind of stuff that I do have some respect for.

(20:26):
He is not and has never been a serious politician.
And I will tell you why he went from winning
an election to losing a state election against Ted Cruz,
to losing a presidential race to losing the governor seat.
That is so fucking scattershot. That is not building a
base of power, That is not building from the ground up,

(20:47):
and like encouraging the growth of other personalities. You're just
darting from whatever the sexiest and most like pr driven
race is. That's not serious. I want to talk about
what Number one one, the Democratic Party, the ship that like,
as we've said, they're getting better. The National Party got
a lot better at this particularly in twenty twenty two.

(21:08):
It was less stupid than the previous couple of elections
had been.

Speaker 3 (21:12):
Really difficult, to be more dumb than that, but you
know it is British British labor et cetera, et cetera.
Y labor actually is the big one. Oh my fuck.

Speaker 1 (21:24):
I want to talk what has what has worked, and
what I think could work again. And to do that,
I'm going to talk about a guy named Howard Dean,
who here knows who Howard Dean was. Garrison simply, yeah,
a little bit.

Speaker 5 (21:38):
Have you?

Speaker 1 (21:39):
Have you all heard the video of him screaming that
got like his career is before? Okay, well, James, would
you load that up for us so we could play
that in a second to the Deanswward, Jamie, pull it up.
Howard Howard Dean ran for president and was He was

(21:59):
the first national political candidate to use the internet effectively
to raise money in the in the history of US politics.
He's kind of pre Obama, worked out a lot of
the strategies that Obama's people wound up using to very
successfully raise money for him. He was really good at it.
He was a reasonably intelligent candidate, and then he gave

(22:20):
the speech that we're about to play for you, and
it completely created his ended him as a as a candidate.

Speaker 3 (22:26):
You know, I always say, the thing about Dean. Dean
is stunningly unlucky that he ran in the time that
he did, because the clip you're about to hear is
one thousand times less weird than anything DeSantis has ever done.
Like he he ran in it. I mean there was
there was dan Quail, right, but like he ran in
an era where like the seriousness and like non weirdness

(22:49):
of politicians was so much higher.

Speaker 4 (22:51):
I mean it's in the chat, so you can this
is a good shit.

Speaker 1 (22:56):
Straight to that beautiful scream.

Speaker 9 (22:58):
We're going to South Carolina in Oklahoma and Arizona and
North Dakota and New Mexico. We're going to California and
Texas and New York. We're going to South Dakota and
Oregon and Washington and Michigan, and then we're going to Washington,
d C.

Speaker 2 (23:14):
To take back the White House.

Speaker 1 (23:19):
That's it. That ended his career as a candidate. And
it's a little silly, but that doesn't that doesn't that
wouldn't be a twelve second news cycle today. But after
kind of failing out as a presidential candidate, he became
chairman of the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, and he

(23:40):
was a pretty good one. His kind of primary strategic
vision was what he called the fifty state strategy, which is,
don't focus just on swing states, never write a state
off at unwinnable. Instead, spread the money that the DNC
has around two campaign throughout the country everywhere, particularly to
fund local dncs so that they can start building a

(24:02):
stable of candidates that can attract voters and eventually win
local elections. It's not like an easy, it's not a
sexy strategy because a lot of it is focused on
like the slow kind of grueling fight to build up
a base of support and unfriendly terrain. But it worked
like really well. Actually in twenty or so states, those

(24:25):
that had voted solidly Republican in private previous recent presidential races,
Democratic candidates like won elections that had previously like in
the like gone against them like it had. Like there
were about like twenty states where it the kind of
slide to red was arrested and pushed back to blue.

(24:45):
These are Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska,
North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah,
West Virginia, and Wyoming. When you do the yeah, there
we go. So basically, Dean's strategy led to a net

(25:07):
gain of thirty nine state House seats and a two
percent increase of all seats in the states analyzed. They
lost two, you know, state Senate seats net, but it
worked great in the House and like gained an attorney generalship,
gained three House seats, gained a Senate seat, and in
fifteen of the twenty seats the Democratic nominees on increase

(25:29):
in vote share between two thousand and four and two
thousand and eight, which was the years that so again,
not super sexy. These aren't like we flipped Texas suddenly,
but it's like, oh, we started to see real gains
and like a lot of pretty red states.

Speaker 3 (25:44):
Now.

Speaker 1 (25:45):
It didn't work everywhere. It was not particularly successful in
a large chunk of the South, like it did not
arrest the slide into the red everywhere. But in a
lot of the Midwest, particularly the states that were like
the Hillary Clinton so called firewall that went for Trump
in twenty twenty, it was extremely effective. And of course
it got mixed immediately after Obama won election. And this

(26:06):
is a big part of why in twenty ten the
DIMS lost disastrously. But like the basic idea of we
should be putting money into local democratic parties in order
to like number one, have like a big part of
winning any conflict, whether it's a war or a political election,
is having the resources available reserves to take advantage of

(26:30):
opportunities that present themselves in the moment. So you have
a solidly read state house seat or judge ship or
something like that, or governorship or mayor mayoralty, and a
candidate has a health scare or has a scandal, you know,
they get caught fucking a thirteen year old or something,
and suddenly this seat that was solidly read is in play.

(26:53):
And if you have no one who can get votes,
who can get voters excited, who can run for that, well,
then your probably not gonna win it. It's just going
to like go to whoever the RNC you know, picks
to pick up the seat next. But if you've got
someone waiting in the wings, they have a chance at
winning it. And a good example of this is what
just happened in Jacksonville, Florida. Right you have DeSantis make

(27:14):
go like lunge to the fucking most fascist end of
the right and pass this abortion bill that's something like
seventy five percent of the state doesn't like. And the
Dims had a decent candidate there that was able to
run against the Republican mayor of Jacksonville and win. And
in that election, the dim spent two million and the
Republicans spent nine million. You were not talking about the

(27:36):
kind of resources expended that you're seeing in some of
these dumb races we're talking about. So anyway, like this
is most of what I wanted to get into is
just like you can win and you can improve things
in Texas and you can build a base from which
to actually change things electorally in that state. But you
can't do it by just like focusing on whoever is
at the top. Like it has to be smarter. It's

(27:57):
not just about shoveling money into a pit.

Speaker 3 (28:00):
Yeah, And like I think there's there's a couple of
things I want to add. One was that like, oh god, okay,
like so Tim Kane, Yeah, tim Kaine got put in
after they ran out Dean and Jesus like Tim Kane
might be is a is like a once in a
generation terrible politician, like one of the worst, you know,

(28:23):
but like like you would see ship like.

Speaker 1 (28:25):
He is the Winston Churchill of making me bored.

Speaker 3 (28:28):
Like yeah, like he like like you would see I mean,
and this still happens, right, but like there are there
are seats that are winnable that the Dems like just
literally won't even bother finding people to run for because
they're just fucking too lazy and they don't give a shit.
And you know this this happens if this happens in
a fucking lot of races, and you know, and part
part of the other thing that that happens in this

(28:49):
sort of period that like you know, is the reason
why the top down is okay. So this is like
if if we're gonna actually do this sort of like
complicated electoralism, like this is why Bernie Sanders lost two
elections in a row. Is that you can't actually like
like actual sort of like substantive political change like doesn't
happen from the top down. It's it's like it happens

(29:10):
on bottom up organizing. And you know, the the democratic
waves in like the last two years, we're basically like
them eating actual social movements. It's you know, like they
it's it's them basically, like they're there. There's a sort
of rejuvenated anti abortion movement that they just sort of consume. Right,
They've been doing a very very good job of sort
of like eating like whatever sort of queer rights like

(29:31):
movements exist alive, and they had kind of stopped doing
that for a while because they chose to just like
destroy Occupy Whether rather than like try to co opt it.
And you know, I mean there were reasons for that, right,
but like part of part of the thing like if
if you if if you're a Democrat and you want
to actually like win Texas, you need to have like

(29:52):
actual you to have actual sort of social movements that
you know, the Democrats can eventually take over and destroy.
But in the time between they destroy them, destroying them
and them, and you know, like like in the brief
time while they both exist and are controled by Democratic Party,
that's how you actually sort of like build the kinds
of the build the kinds of coalitions to build the
kinds of organization that win these races. And the Democratic

(30:14):
Party has just no interest in doing that like almost
anywhere basically outside of Minnesota, where I don't know.

Speaker 4 (30:22):
Those.

Speaker 3 (30:23):
The Minnesota Dems are fucking built different. I don't, I don't,
I don't know.

Speaker 10 (30:27):
I don't.

Speaker 3 (30:27):
I don't have another explanation for that, but like, yeah,
it's I don't know, it's it's.

Speaker 1 (30:34):
It's like one of the things that you have the
opportunity to do at the local level is and this
is you know, this is a big factor in like,
uh politics in Georgia. You've got people who are motivated
because of a specific political issue that Dems are strong on,
like abortion, and you can you can get people registered,
you can get people out organizing, you can get people

(30:56):
donating money, and more most important that you can get
people votevoting and voting in numbers that they haven't before
and make if you're able to kind of harness that
sort of thing. But being able to harness that again,
part of it is this is not sexy. This is
not something we can say this is going to flip
a state in twenty twenty four. But putting in the
money and the resources to have people who are being

(31:20):
supported to go out and make attempts and to build
like a reputation and a base of support and networks
in the state, Like that's the non sexy thing that
the number one the Republicans are really good at. If
you're asking yourself, looking at all these horrible anti trans bills,
anti gay bills, anti abortion bills, how do they do

(31:41):
this well? Because church is organized at the local level
to build up the kind of support and the kind
of human infrastructure that allowed them to take advantage of
the kind of broader social trends that drove some of
those states more deeply read and that kind of like
made may did it possible for them to do things
that ten years before people had said, like there's no

(32:03):
way to make this happen. That can work on the
left side of things, but you have to have the
groundwork in They started.

Speaker 7 (32:10):
With like school boards, Yeah, they started. They started with
going for school boards, going after books. Then you get
up basic people riled up that you can go after
healthcare for minors and you can go after health care
for adults. It was a very easy path and it
started by like going to the most accessible places to
have public comment on issues, which was complaining about books
inside of school.

Speaker 1 (32:30):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (32:31):
And another thing I'd say about the church thing is
like the thing that you used to do that for
the Democrats was unions, but then they destroyed them all.
And but you know, but like you can actually you
can actually see what this looks like like in the
places where something like this. This is why the state
level Midwest Dems are so much further to the left
than the Dems everywhere else, because like the people in Minnesota,
the people in Wisconsin are likely the only reason they're

(32:53):
even so remotely in power is because and you know,
you're seeing this, like it's at like in Chicago too,
with Brandon Johnson. Is that like those those people are
like functionally dependent on like that they're on their teachers
unions to exist as like a political coalision. Yeah, and
so you know, like like union organizing is a is
a like we're just like fucking just giving money to

(33:14):
a strike fund is even even if the thing that
you want to do is win elections, that is a
more effective way of winning of winning elections than fucking
giving money to Beto Auroric like a seventh time.

Speaker 1 (33:24):
Yeah, and again when we the thing I want to
get across here is the right thing to do is
not say and no one is suggesting this here, fuck Texas,
it can never be fixed. The right thing is saying
if you're focused on one famous guy running in Texas

(33:44):
or this like top level thing of flipping Texas, you
don't actually care all that much about the problems being
faced by people in Texas because that's not really going
to fix them. Right, Beto's not going to win. And
even if Texas flips for an election action, that doesn't
mean the state legislature flips. It doesn't mean the governor flips.
It doesn't mean that things get better for people doing

(34:07):
these kind of bottom up approaches. Number one will eventually
flip the fucking state. Right, there is a demographic trend happening.
Part of how you flip the state, By the way,
if you're actually responsible, is like proving that you can
make people's lives better. If you want to flip the state,
that's maybe more ethical than just being like, what if
we dump one hundred and seventy million dollars to try

(34:31):
to make this guy who goes viral on YouTube or
Twitter sometimes look better? Right, maybe one of those is
more ethical than the other. Anyway, I don't want to
rant about electoralism anymore, but as a transplant in Texan,
I get frustrated by this. So I felt like we
had to say something.

Speaker 6 (34:48):
Yeah, I also get frustrated by Better claiming to be punk,
which is the least punk thing in the fucking whether
that's a no repisode.

Speaker 1 (34:56):
No, we have one. We have one elected who's gotten
anywhere close to being punk, and it was Bernie Sanders
when he when he got into that cold book depository
that November morning with the man liquor carcano rifle. Extremely
punk anyway, cutting the feed here.

Speaker 11 (35:32):
Ah, oh yeah, it could happen here a podcast where
I just made my colleagues I can see them through
the zoom, deeply uncomfortable by opening this podcast with with.

Speaker 1 (35:47):
With a sound that you shouldn't make in the workplace.
I'm Robert Evans. Joining me today is Mia Wong and
Garrison Davis me. I take it from here.

Speaker 3 (35:57):
Oh boy, So it's been a you know, this is okay,
So this, I guess is now like last week's Twitter thing.
But okay, so also not this is this is? This
is not a Twitter thing? No, well it kind of is.

Speaker 1 (36:11):
It kind of is, but like let's not let's not
friend this as a Twitter thing?

Speaker 3 (36:15):
Yeah, okay, okay, so what this is? We we are okay,
we have been experiencing in the last you know, like
half decade actually belonging from that cause like this seven
eight years now, like the the sort of incredible rise
in casual American anti semitism and the level of anti
semitism that you could just do in in sort of
public discourse and it's quote unquote fine. And one of

(36:38):
the sort of biggest indicators of this is the like
the the extent to which it's now socially acceptable to
just do the most like absolutely like unhinged like antisemitic
conspiracy theories about George Soros. And specifically the thing that

(36:58):
specifically was like, okay, need to do this episode was
last week Elon Musk like compared George Soros to Magneto
and then said, quote you assume they are good intentions.
They are not. He wants to erode the fabric, the
very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity. And this is
just like the mainstreamline of the Republican Party now like

(37:21):
they just all do this. You can just sort of,
I mean, and this is honestly like as bad, like
you know, this is like the stuff that Elon Musk
is saying is unbelievably unacceptable. That's not even anywhere near
as bad as it goes, Like it's pretty common to
just sho these people like talking about the Satan sorrows

(37:41):
agenda and shit. Now like it's it has gotten unbelievably,
unfathomably out of control. And so today I wanted to
take a look at, okay, who George Soros actually is,
like the real human being and not the sort of
like caricature projection that has been created of him on

(38:02):
the right. And I wanted to also sort of look
at why the right hates him so much. And you know,
Soros is kind an interesting figure because he falls like
right in the middle of like our two shows about people,
because he's not he's not really like a cool person.
He does cool stuff, but though he does stuff that's
cool sometimes, but he's not also like a bastard properly.

Speaker 1 (38:22):
So though he's done some bastardy stuff too, he has.

Speaker 3 (38:25):
We are going to talk about that.

Speaker 1 (38:27):
He said, he's a Yeah, I mean.

Speaker 3 (38:28):
Most of what this episode is about, he's.

Speaker 1 (38:30):
I would say he's like twenty percent more complicated than
the average billionaire on a on.

Speaker 3 (38:36):
A morel yeah, I think I think like twenty or
thirty percent.

Speaker 1 (38:40):
Yeah, there's there's somewhere in that neighborhood.

Speaker 3 (38:42):
Yeah, you know, and I think there's three George Soros's.
Two of them are real and one of them is fake.
There is you know. So George Soros is a billionaire philanthropist, right,
and you know, so that means that he has a
sort of billionaire side and a philanthropist's side, and they
are very often working across purposes. Sometimes they're not working.
Sometimes there he aligns them together, sometimes he doesn't. And

(39:07):
so the way I've sort of structured this is like
the first episode we're gonna be talking about the sort
of billionaire side and how he did that, and the
second episode is going to be more about the philanthropist's
side and how both of these basically have been kind
of accidentally structured in such a way that the right
was like, oh my god, this is the perfect guy

(39:27):
to do atise medic conspiracy theories about. And then there's
also the third George Soros is like the one who's
just literally the devil who the Republicans have made up
and yeah, so George Soros was born to a Jewish
family in Hungary in nineteen thirty, which is not a
good time to be born into a Jewish family in Hungary.

Speaker 1 (39:47):
No, really, there's not a good time to be born
to a Jewish and family in Hungary until like I'm
gonna get I'm gonna say, sometime in the fifties.

Speaker 3 (39:57):
Yeah, you know, I will say that it gets way
like it. It is way worse when he is born
than it was in like even like the eighteen nineties,
which is like not a great time, but it's gotten
significantly worse. He is fourteen when the Nazis invade Hungary
nineteen forty four, and this is the point at which

(40:20):
we get to our first Soros conspiracy, which is that
there's this, there's this.

Speaker 1 (40:23):
It's a little more complicated than that. It's not really
the Nazis. Well, it's a little more complex than yea,
when the extermination of the Hungarian Jewish community begins, really
in nineteen forty four, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (40:37):
And so there's a thing that happens. I don't know.
He and his dad have a kind of complicated like
set of things they survive, and there's a part of
the story that gets picked up by the right that
gets If you've ever heard Alex Jones talk about Sorows,

(40:57):
like the second or third thing he will say is
that like Soros Nazi collaborator, was like a willing collaborator
with the.

Speaker 1 (41:02):
Nazis, which is not true.

Speaker 3 (41:05):
And also like he's fourteen, like you know, but like
I don't really call even like fourteen year olds and
the Hitler youth willing collaborators because they're children. Yeah, you
have to have a lion at some point, even with
Nazis where if their kids, they're not really morally responsible
either way. Yeah, and like you know, so the specific

(41:26):
thing that he does is there's these notices that are
sent up by the government that's like telling Jewish people
to like go like to a place and if you
go to the place, you're gonna get routed up and killed.
And basically, so the thing that actually happened is that
so George Ros's dad is told to do this and
he gives it to George Rosen is like go tell

(41:46):
these people that they've been called for this and that
if they go, they're like they're gonna get taken away.
And this has been transformed by you know this that is,
this is a nightmarish thing these people are spiving. This
has been transformed by a bunch of the worst people
ever lived into Nazi collaboration, which is also you know,
the part of the story that never gets told, even
even when people sort of like do the like dive

(42:08):
into like oh this is fake. Is that the thing
that like Soros's family spends the rest of the war
doing is basically getting like counterfeit papers to Jewish families
that like says that they're Christian, and you know they
like they they legitimately save a bunch of families from
dying in the Holocaust, and yeh.

Speaker 1 (42:25):
Know, the shit that Jones pulls on them is like
part of this because of like the job this guy
who's like saving young George Soros has involves like basically
like itemizing stuff left behind by Jewish families forced out
of their homes. He's like they were profiting off of
the holl No, they were like doing whatever job kept
them under the radar while they attempted to help. Like

(42:47):
it was the Holocaust. It was messy. Yeah, but like
it's almost like saying like Oscar Schindler took advantage of
slave labors. Well, no, it's actually what Schindler was doing.
It was not that, Yeah, like he was you the
trappings of this slave labor system in order to rescue people.
It's quite different from just enslaving people.

Speaker 3 (43:07):
Yeah. I think the thing that's really disturbing about this though,
right is like, Okay, like this is like Alex Jones
is Alex Jones, Right, He's just gonna say the worst
shit you've ever heard. But like this is like a
thing that mainstream right wingers just say now, yeah, and
it's just unbelievably horrible and it sucks and it's just
like not true. But fortunately for George Soros, his family

(43:29):
makes it through the Holocaust, well his immediate family does,
and they like get out and they end up in
the US. And this is where, Okay, this is something
that I think is very important to the story that
isn't told very much. So Soros is like a finance whiz, right,

(43:50):
he is very, very very good at finance. And we're
gonna be talking a bit about like how like the
things that he figured out to let him do this,
because it's interesting. But he's also not from the sort
of like American or the British financial elite, Like if
I don't there's like a certain kind of person, right
who like goes into finance and you know, it's like
like like wasp frat Brose or like in bred British aristocrats, right,

(44:14):
and door Soros is like a hung is a Hungarian immigrant, right.
He is not sort of from these people. He is
like and and you know this is this is gonna
be a really big deal when he like goes up
against the British financial elite later on. But you know,
he he he threw sort of like he's able to
turn like a job doing door to door salesman into

(44:37):
like a way into a firm, and he's able to
sort of work his way up to a point where
like he has suddenly like has his own hedge fund
and he is really really good at this. He's he's
one of the sort of early people who does hedge funds.
There's a great book called The Influence of Soros, Politics, Power,
and the Struggle for an Open Society by Emily Tempkin,

(44:59):
who did a lot of really great work like interviewed Soros,
interviewed an enormous number of the people who were around him.
And I want to read a passage of this about
like how he figured out how to sort of beat
the market. He's talking about this guy named Carl Popper,
who's like a philosopher of science who also wrote this
book called The Open Society that we'll talk about next episode.

Speaker 1 (45:21):
More.

Speaker 3 (45:22):
Popper's philosophy made me more sensitive to the role of
misconceptions in financial markets, Soros said decades later. People believe
that markets don't lie and shouldn't be and should be trusted.
But that isn't true. Sorrow's knew markets react to humans,
and humans are fallible. Instead of looking at the money
being made, or as Sebastian Mallaby put it, in more
Money than God, his book on the history of hedge funds,

(45:44):
the Psychology that drove investors appetites, Soros looked at how
one impacted the other, predicting that each would drive the
other forward until the trust were so completely overvalued that
a crash was inevitable. And this is really like if
you even today, right, you know, if you're able to

(46:05):
understand that, you know, like the way a lot of
hedgephoon people tend to think about the market is as
like the market, you know, especially in this period, is
this is this sort of dogmatic, neo lible thing of
like the market is like a perfect codvance of price signals,
and so I was just like no, it's made out
of people. And those people like get greedy. They have
emotional stuff they like they get into these like fomo

(46:28):
like fear of missing out stuff. You know, they like
intensely overvalue assets because everyone else sees the assets like expensive,
so everyone like you know, rushes to buy it, and
like this is something like like even now right, this
is this is like a very smart way to understand finance.
She's figured this out in like the seventies. And if you,
if you, if you're able to do this kind of

(46:48):
stuff and like use this to understand how the market
works in the seventies, you are going to look like
a god among men. And he starts a hedgephone in
nineteen seventy three, but by nineteen eighty one he has
a fun that is worth three hundred and eighty one
million dollars in like nineteen eighty one money. I don't
know what that is in modern money, but I assume
it's a lot. I'm a hack of a fraud. I

(47:09):
should have actually figured this out.

Speaker 1 (47:10):
Yeah, that's like a billion dollars.

Speaker 3 (47:12):
Yeah, And like he personally is like has like for
himself like one hundred million dollars right, and he you know,
at this point, he starts to become sort of very
famous in finance circles because you know, I mean he's
just like absolutely destroying the market. Now, okay, this is
where things get. You know, up until this point, he's
kind of like he's been doing a lot of sort

(47:35):
of finance stuff that's kind of shady, but it's mostly
just been him like ripping off other finance people, which
I'm entirely okay with, like that's just very funny. But
he starts to get into currency speculation, and in nineteen
eighty five he has one of his big breaks, which
is he predicts the plaza cords. Now, okay, the Plaza

(47:56):
cord is something we've talked about on the show before,
but I need to talk about it a bit more
because unfortunately it's we have to talk about the Asian
financial collaps this episode. And this is a like one
of the key moments of the Asian financial collabs, even
though it was like a decade earlier. So in nineteen
eighty five, Ronald Reagan is trying to like revive the
US as a domestic manufacturing industry because it's like dying,

(48:21):
and you know the reason part of the like a
big part of the reason is dying is that they're
getting absolutely destroyed by sort of German and like West
German and Japanese manufacturers. And part of what's happening here
is that particularly Japan's currencies are worth way currency is
worth way less than the dollar. This is called having
a weak currency, and having a weak currency is really

(48:41):
good for if you have like an export based manufacturing economy.
And so Reagan basically like walks into a meeting with
like the Germans, Japanese government, the British, like few other
people and just basically just like not quite in so
many words, but basically just says like you are all
American military protectorates, and because you're all American military protecs,
like I can I can force you to increase the

(49:02):
value of your currency like or else capital O, capital e.
And they do. They comply, and this is this, this
becomes this is a thing called the Plaza Cords. And
this this, you know, weakens the value of the dollar
versus a bunch of other currencies. And this like literally
single handedly like restores the profitability of American manufacturing like
through the nineties, which is really wild, but the the

(49:27):
other the important thing for this story is that I
I don't know how he did this, but like George
Soros predicts that this is gonna happen, and she makes
an unbelievable amount of money basically like no, no, like
basically do in currency speculation because he knows what, like
currencies are going to increase in value, which you know,
he knows that, like uh, for example, he knows that,

(49:48):
like the Japanese yen is going to increase in value.
So he makes an enormous amount of money doing this stuff,
and he gets very famous for like he'll like make
it much of money, and then it'll lose it again
and and then he'll make it again. And this all
culminates in okay, so they're they're okay. He starts taking

(50:11):
a truly enormous bets, like against national currencies, and there's
one of these that's just funny, and there's one of
these that's really bad. So we're gonna do the funny
one first, which is so in nineteen ninety two Soros
And this is the other part that they ever got
talked about. It's like it's not just Soros doing this stuff.
He has like allies because like as big as Soros

(50:33):
for NBA is right, he can't him and his ally
is gonna take a fifteen billion dollars short position on
the pound. And even he doesn't have like nobody like
this is like fifteen billion of nineteen nineties money, right,
Like you need a bunch of firms working together in
order to do this. But he basically takes this massive
bet the pound is gonna go down, and because of
the way that these these bets work, like the actual

(50:55):
value of the pounds like collapses and the British Central
Bank like like doesn't have enough thing. The reason we're
able to do is they figure out that the Birtis
Central Bank doesn't have enough money to stop them, like
they don't have enough money to like maintain like they
don't have enough reserves to like maintain the value of
the pound. And so he gets like completely blamed for this,
even though again there's like other people involved in this, right,

(51:18):
Like the front page of the Daily Mail is literally
his face in the title I made a billion crashing
the pound baste, which is I okay, so like an
anti British level, this is very funny. It's no, there's
a bunch of arguments about like what does this mean

(51:38):
for like the world economy and for national sovereignty. Soros
thinks that like currency speculation is necessary evil and he he.

Speaker 1 (51:47):
Has this sort of seem to think that when you're
making that much money, yeah right.

Speaker 12 (51:51):
You know it's now okay, this this like specific thing
which is like a a a bank a banker comes
in and is able to manipulate the value of a currency.

Speaker 3 (52:06):
This is like this is like absolutely like this is
the fodder for like the absolute most paranoid fantasies of
the anti Semitic right. Like it's this sort of like
rootless cosmopolitan banker like attacks the good and righteous like
noble people of Britain thing, And this is how it
gets framed in the press, who are like the press

(52:26):
is I mean it's the British press, right, Like the
British are not known for, you know, not being anti Semitic,
and so they just like go wild with this. But
you know, like this particular thing he's doing against the British.
Part of what's happening here, right is there's this sort
of there's this kind of like national populist equation thing

(52:46):
going on here where there's this assumption that like the
Bank of Britain, like the bank, like the British Central
Bank is like an entity that is identifiable with like
an ordinary person in Britain, and like no, like the
the Retis Central Brank is run by just unbelievably and
bred aristocrats, right.

Speaker 1 (53:06):
And you know, I think they're pretty believably in bread.

Speaker 3 (53:11):
That's fair.

Speaker 1 (53:12):
Yeah, we're just talking about like like zero point five
six of a Habsburg unit. You know, I have the
Habsburg is the international unit for measuring how inbred someone is.
If you're if you're unaware.

Speaker 3 (53:26):
I yeah, yeah, that seems that seems like a reasonable
amount of inbread for these specific people. But you know,
like but this is what I was talking about, Like
at the very beginning, I was talking about sort of
like sorrow's not being from this sort of like normal
class of finance people. And the thing is, like the
normal class of finance people are fucking terrible at their jobs, right,
like these amber British aristocrats and like the fucking American

(53:47):
like cocaine frat boys, like like just like doing lines
of cocane off each other's as cracks. Like these people
all suck at their jobs. And George Soros is like
smart and is good at his job, and so she
just like absolutely goes through these people like a fucking
flaming chainsaw, and she just like, you know, and the
maneuvers that he's doing here, she just like absolutely humiliates

(54:10):
all of the people at the at the at the
British Central Bank. He's humiliating, like and not just those
guys too, it's humiliating the Tories, it's humiliating like all
of the people who are seriously important in the real economy,
in the sort of real British economy. And he can
do this right because like his opponents are you know,
people who are like they're they're they're promoting they're like

(54:32):
they're they're they're okay, they take in like their people
from college, right, and they're promoting the base off how
good they are at golf. And so when she just
sort of like cut like walks in and just makes
it like makes like billions of dollars just like destroying
these people, he makes just a permanent enemy of a
very very powerful like faction of the British ruling class,

(54:55):
and the British ruling class, like I don't know, they
they It is hard to fight people who will beat
the British ruling class and an anti semitism off. And
this is this is one of the things that sort
of you know, if you're looking at like why Sorrow
specifically is the guy who all of these sort of
right wing conspiracies wind up being about, Like part of
it is because he pisses off these specific people.

Speaker 1 (55:19):
Yeah, these guys who's like dads were all friends with
the King of England, who was like a close personal
buddy with Hitler. Like there it's a bunch of like
it's a bunch of guys who are already pretty bigoted
and then they get beaten at their own stupid financial game.
And so like the fact that it's a Jewish dude
who does it means that they're going to be even

(55:39):
more racist than they already were. And the fact that
there's plenty of international anti semitism and that George Soros
after this starts funding liberal and you know, vaguely progressive causes,
Like yeah, it's not this is not a it's not
surprising that this is the way things went.

Speaker 3 (55:57):
Yeah, and you know, and again, like I can't under
emphasize the extent to which this is also very specifically
the reaction to the British media class. Who I mean,
we know now that those people are psychos, Like we
have seen them see a transperson at a boat race
and like like ten years ago and like like draw
a giant things circling them in a boat and making

(56:19):
it a front page news story. Those people in the nineties.

Speaker 7 (56:22):
Were like, sure, they are biological biologically better at navigation,
that is that has actually been been proven.

Speaker 3 (56:29):
Yeah, but then they're like justice, they're they're they're just
a sort of feral and like terrifying lead bigoted then
as they are now. And this means that like like
just if you're a regular British person and you are
like walking down the street and there's a newspaper sand
you are seeing like like they truly unbelievably terrifying anti

(56:53):
Semitic shit, like just literally everywhere. And this this will
have no consequence, which is whatsoever? Yeah, it's all good,
nothing bad ever happens. And speaking of no consequences, do
you know what we can promise about about training services?
Twenty three minutes.

Speaker 1 (57:14):
In you know, look, you're welcome, Daniel.

Speaker 3 (57:19):
Okay, we're back. We have to talk about Okay, so
the doing it to the British economy was mostly just
really funny because the British economy is going to be fine.
And it's the funny part about shed H doing it
of the British economy is that this actually unfortunately helps
the British economy because it forces the British to like
abandon some truly spectacularly not very good financial policy they

(57:43):
were doing. But then he does it to Thailand and
that is a lot less justifiable. So it in this
is five years later, is nineteen ninety seven. Sous brings
in some economists, Arminio Fraga, like Roddy Joe's David Kowitz,

(58:09):
he brings He's bringing in people who are sort of
experts in like developing market economics, and that's never no
one has ever brought in a developing market economist for
like a good reason. And what they what they realize
is that they start doing analysis of Southeast Asia, like

(58:31):
the Southeast Asian markets, and they realize very quickly that
Thailand is fucked. They they figure out that Thailand has
Thailand has his currency pegged to the dollar and this,
but you know, they don't have the reserves support this,
and the tie like actual Tai currency isn't strong enough
to maintain like stay being pegged to the dollars. It's

(58:54):
not a strong enough currency, and so they do a
two billion dollars short of of like Thailand's currency. And
I mean, I'm gonna read from the Influence of Sorrows
again about like the process of this. It was a
debate we had. Jones told me we'd gone to work
in Asia, and here you are taking large scale short

(59:14):
positions in countries with institutional fragility. Going for the juggular
in the United Kingdom was one thing doing the same,
and Thailand was another. The Bank of England would surely recover.
Thailand was a developing economy and it was unclear what
impact outside investors could have. Soros has justified speculation with
the idea that it could serve as a kind of
warning to governments. Look, Thai government, the bot needs to devalue.

(59:39):
Change your policy now before a currency collapses, devastating for
your people. The trouble is the Thai government didn't do this. Instead,
it spent months using Bank of Thailand reserves to buy
tai bot. When it finally ran out in early summer
nineteen ninety seven, the value of the bot plunged thirty
two percent against the dollars, and millions of people lost
Thai people lost their livelihoods. The Soros fund seven hundred

(01:00:00):
and fifty million dollars.

Speaker 1 (01:00:02):
Yeah, it's a little bit like me being like, look, yes,
I made a lot of money selling Heroin to those
middle schoolers, but really, when you think about it, it
was a warning to those schools that it was too
easy for me to bribe the janitor to sell Heroin
to kids.

Speaker 3 (01:00:18):
There.

Speaker 1 (01:00:19):
You know, I was actually performing a public service.

Speaker 3 (01:00:23):
So true, Robert, it is just like that, you know,
to be fair, you know, I'm not going to every money.
I'm not going to finish that thought.

Speaker 1 (01:00:31):
That's probably for the best. Yeah, we need we need
one person to remain uncanceled here to keep the lights on.

Speaker 3 (01:00:39):
Oh god, doesn't have to be me.

Speaker 1 (01:00:41):
Oh no, yeah, no, legally it does.

Speaker 3 (01:00:43):
It's really bad. Yeah, no more joking, but yeah, we can't.
We can't suffer any other jokes.

Speaker 1 (01:00:48):
Yes, somebody's got to upload this episode.

Speaker 3 (01:00:52):
All right here here, here, here's the next joke. Soros
actually doesn't make money off of the speculation. If off
of a speculating in Southeast Asia because he loses basically
the same amount of money taking like a long position
in Indonesia.

Speaker 1 (01:01:06):
Yeah, the same thing happened to me when I took
a long position on doing cocaine in my bathroom with
the money that I made selling drugs to all those kids.
You know, we're a lot alike him and me, we're
a lot of like, well.

Speaker 3 (01:01:21):
Okay, to be fair, to be fair, and this is okay,
this is the thing I I The reason I wanted
to talk about this specifically is that, like, okay, like
to this day, if you look under sort of if
you if you every once in a while, someone someone,
there'll be a tweet that's like, like, what did George
Sorrows do? And immediately there will be a bunch of

(01:01:41):
people talking about how he like deliberately destroyed all of
the economies in Southeast Asia. Yeah, and that's not really
what happened.

Speaker 1 (01:01:50):
And that would be for one thing, too much to
put on one guy fucking around with a cup.

Speaker 3 (01:01:54):
Yeah. Yeah, And I wanted to actually kind of walk
through this a little bit in depth, just because Okay,
there's a really really easy way to think about the
economy that is bad. It leads you into anti Semitic traps,
which is like, hey, here is like one banker who
wanted to make money, and because he wanted to make money,
he like destroyed all these economies. And like, on the

(01:02:16):
one hand, yeah, like like sorrow is vetting against like
the tai currency is bad, right, like this is this
is not a thing you should have been doing. On
the other hand, you know, Okay, so that's like the
sort of level one thing. But the thing about you know,
this is the sort of this is the sort of
like great Man anti anti Semitism theory of collapse. And
this is the theory that a lot of the sort
of regional leaders take, you know, because and this and

(01:02:39):
this is sort of a crucial thing, right, this position
very conveniently allows them to just like not think about
capitalism in general or like their role in this in
this crisis, which is not insignificance. And so in order
to figure out what what actually happened here, we need
to look at so so Sorow sort of like tip

(01:02:59):
like tip some don dominos, right, but the dominoes were
already there and they were going like regardless even if
Soros had never existed, right, like they were going to
fall and they were going to fall because ironically of
the Plaza coords. So you know when we talked about
the plaza courts earlier. The US forces Japan to increase
the value of its currency relative for the dollar. Okay,

(01:03:20):
so this is great for the American economy. This nukes
the Japanese economy, I mean the Japanese economy, you know.
And we'll talk about this in a bit too. It
was already kind of doing bad when the US does
this and its manufactured economy just like implodes it. It
gots the Japanese economy. It has. The Japanese economy has
never recovered from this. It probably will never recover really

(01:03:42):
into what it was. And you know, the effect this
has is that now the governments of Japan has to
figure out how to grow their economy without having any
like way to make money that grows your economy. But
and now they have a stronger currency. And so their
solution is, okay, what what did they all all the

(01:04:03):
central bank people look around each other and they go,
what is a strong currency good for housing speculation? And
so they they start like they start they start slashing
interest race and they start basically building an entire economy,
uh based on the assumption that housing prices will always
go up, and so you should just take out loans
so you could buy houses because the value of the

(01:04:23):
housing will because housing prices will always go up, so
you can you can have all of these assets based
on mortgages. This is this may may or may not
be sounding familiar to everyone who lid you thousand.

Speaker 4 (01:04:35):
And eight.

Speaker 3 (01:04:37):
And so you know, in in like in like nineteen
eighty two, the entire Japanese economy implodes sort of again
because they they literally built the two thousand and eight machine.
And so this this forces the US to do something
called the reverse Plaza cords where they take the original
Plaza records and they reverse it and they increase the

(01:04:58):
value of the American dollar. American manufactory dies like it's
never recovered, it's never coming back. And this for a
this kind of the stabilizes the Japanese economy a little bit,
but it means that the US now no longer has
a functional economy. And so we do our solution to
this is we need two thousand and eight, right, we
build an entire economy also on the Japanese model of

(01:05:20):
currency speculat of you know, of like housing price speculation,
craculation of like or like the rising prices of like stocks. Right,
we we build an economy completely made a bullshit. But
you know, okay, but what does this have to do
with the Asian market collaps? Okay? The problem is that
like all of the countries in East Asia and like
Southeast Asia also do this. They also do the thing
where they're like, oh, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna

(01:05:42):
ba We're okay, so our manufacturing economies are declining, right,
so we're gonna we're gonna base our entire economy on
housing prices going up. And you know that's and it's
not George Soros. That's the thing that actually destroys like
the sort of that that's something that like that like
actually destroy all of these economies. And you know, and

(01:06:03):
I wanted to sort of run through this, and you know,
this is like a lot of like sort of econ shit, right,
But the reason I wanted to run through this is
that I think I think he gets at the sort
of truly the truly horrifying thing about how our economy
works that is really difficult to face, and is I

(01:06:23):
think it's at least a part of why people really
really want there to just be one guy who is
running anything everything, whether that's the CIA, whether that's Soros,
whether that's like the New World Order. Yeah, right, because
if there's if there's like a guy who's doing this, right,
you can stop him. But the great horror of this

(01:06:44):
world is that there is no deep state, right, there
is no Satanis cabal, There's no one pulling the strings
at all. The only thing that is there is just
sort of the cold, lifeless and inexorable death logic of capital.
And that logic is moving all of us, right all
you know, the people who are doing that can conspiracies
insofar as they exist, are being moved by this. All
of the rulers are being moved by capital. All of us,

(01:07:06):
the subjects, are being moved by capital. But that like sucks, right,
Like the fact that all of these economies are destroyed
not by like the individual actions of people, but by
the fact that, like returns are less good in Thailand
than they are in China. And this is just sort
of the inectable logic of the entire economic system we have.

(01:07:26):
This is, you know, this is absolutely terrifying and faced
with this sort of reality, right, like people who want
to protect capitalism because you know, they have a bunch
of assets in it, right, retreat into this sort of
like they you know, they they they use Soros as
a smoke screen for like why everything is suddenly going wrong.

(01:07:47):
But sort of simultaneous to this, right, this is also
a real problem for George Soros because he's like, you know,
when he's not sort of in his role as like
capital he's like not a piece of shit. He's like
a person who wants the world to be better. And this,

(01:08:08):
you know, this causes a sort of there was a
contradiction in his ideology, right, which is that he wants
the world to be a better place, and simultaneously he's
also a capitalist, and these two things are sort of
warring with each other. Even as early as even as
early sort of the nineties, he's giving speeches about how
like his open society that he wants. It's a sort

(01:08:29):
of like this liberal democratic society of like laws and
norms and human rights. The greatest danger twitter ceased to
be communism, it's now capitalism. But he can't do anything
about it because he is also a capitalist. And next
episode we are going to watch Soros like through his
philanthropic endeavors, attempt to solve the problems that his economic

(01:08:50):
system has caused, and fail catastrophically and become the sort
of boogeyman and the the anti Sivdic spector of every
conspiracy theory the world.

Speaker 1 (01:09:01):
Yeah, so check out that next time. And you know,
if you're hanging out around Clark Middle School and you
have forty dollars, I can hook you up with some
some of that sweet black tar, so you know, give
me a ring. My phone numbers posted in the show
notes of every episode.

Speaker 3 (01:09:36):
It's it could happen here the podcast where I attempt
to wrangle jokes that are enough okay that we keep podcasting. Yeah,
with me here to wrangle Robert Evans and also Karrison Davis. Welcome,

(01:09:57):
Welcome by Eck.

Speaker 1 (01:09:58):
My two uses in this series are to make corrections
on Hungarian history of the Holocaust and talk about selling
Heroin to children. So proud to be here.

Speaker 3 (01:10:13):
I'm very excited. You're gonna hear me complain. You're gonna
get to listen to me very briefly complain about Plato,
a thing I did not think I was gonna do
when I started.

Speaker 1 (01:10:20):
This like the like the philosophy guy.

Speaker 3 (01:10:23):
Yeah, yeah, okay, okay, all right, okay, so all right,
why why are we eventually going to talk about Plato?
So George Soros is probably best known for a foundation
that he eventually funds called Open Society that was visually
the Soros Foundation. Then he was like, why am I
naming this after myself? And it changed to Open Society.

(01:10:47):
I'm going to read, so the Open Society is a
very sort.

Speaker 1 (01:10:51):
Of again, I gotta say, exactly twenty percent more self
awareness than you get from the average billionaire. Like Bill
Gates is like, well call it the Gatespell Foundation. Sourus
is like, well call it the Soros you know wait,
wait you know, no, you know what?

Speaker 3 (01:11:06):
Well, And to be fair, like Soros has Sorros has
a real ideology and it it can't work, but if
it did, the world wouldn't be that bad, Unlike unlike
what would happen if you let Bill Gates run rampant
over the earth, which is the world we live in
right now. So I'm going to read a little bit

(01:11:30):
from the influence Soros again about like what the Open
Society is. I have lived through Nazi persecution and Soviet occupations.
Soros later said, Popper's book is Carl Popper Open Society
and His Enemies struck me with the force of revelation.
It showed that fascism and communism have a lot in common,
that they both stand in opposition to a different principle

(01:11:52):
of social organization, the principle of open society. So okay,
I I read this, and I was like, okay, so
let's go, let's go. Let's go read Carl Poppers's book,
which is called The Open Society Enemies. And so I assumed, right,
that's interesting me.

Speaker 1 (01:12:11):
I was also doing poppers last night.

Speaker 3 (01:12:14):
You had to suppear your experience with your poppers. I'm
assuming I had a bad fucking time. I read this
like last week.

Speaker 1 (01:12:21):
She got mears from a gas station too, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:12:24):
No, instead I got it from the internet for free,
which questionable results. So okay, so I read this book, right,
So this is Karl Popper is like normally a philosopher. Well,
he's like a scientist, right, He's most famous for philosophy
of science stuff. But he also wrote this book, and
this is his critique of totalitarianism. So okay, I'm expecting, right,

(01:12:47):
it's going to be half of it's gonna be about
the Nazis and half of it's going to be about
the communist right. No, the first half of this book
is about Plato and the second half of this book
is about Borks. But he spends like two hundred ages
yelling at Plato. And to be fair, everything he says
about Plato and about why Plato is totalitarian is completely true.

(01:13:08):
But like his conclusion about what totalitarianism is is that
totalitarianism is descendant. It's like the product of this thing
he calls historicism, which is when like you have one
thing that's the agent of history. And so he sees
like like I don't know, like a great man or

(01:13:29):
like the guy like whatever hegel's geist, or like one
great nation or like a great class as like those
are all examples of historicism. And if you think about
history like this, you will this is how totalitarianism is born.
And I am incredibly skeptical of that, of the view
of the way you look think about history being the

(01:13:51):
origin of totalitarianism. I I don't know. It's it's a
very very weird book. In a lot of ways. Poper
is trying to do this thing that like a lot
of kind of liberal philosophers of that period is doing,
which is that she's trying to reconcile sort of like
individual freedom but then also sort of economic calitarianism. And

(01:14:15):
you know, okay, so if you were actually serious about
doing both of these things right, like the two things
you care about on earth are protecting individual freedom and
achieving economic calitarianism, you have two options. You either become
an anarchist and you sacrifice neither of your values, or
you become a neoliberal and you sacrifice both. And Popper
unfortunately takes a second route.

Speaker 1 (01:14:37):
And I feel like a lot of a lot of
the conflict between kind of like reconciling you know, the
Great Man theory of history with some of these other
like it comes out of an unwillingness to look at
systems of power, because the extent to which like individual
weirdos and their obsessions influence history is largely due to

(01:15:01):
or is largely like related to the degree of power
that like different systems allow to be invested into like
individual weirdos. Like it's it's less a matter of like
you've got these sort of you know, in that kind
of fascist idea, you've got these sort of individuals who
embody the spirit of a people. And more, if your
system allows huge amounts of power to be invested in

(01:15:22):
individual people with their weird hang ups, than those weird
hang ups of this one guy may wind up defining history.
I don't know, this is this this is an unrelated ram.

Speaker 3 (01:15:30):
Well, no, I think it is related because this this
is sort of the core flaw of this ideology, which
is that these people conclude okay, so like they don't
okay the thing that they have to do, like pop
rass to do right, because he like acknowledges that a
lot of the Marxist critique is really powerful and that
like it is in fact not very good that you
have an entire class of people to like survive off

(01:15:53):
of extracting like labor from another class of people. But
you know, if you accept that, right, you can't actually
like defend capitalism on the merits of it being an
economic system. You have to like do this like circle
run around dance of like defending ideas. And this all
gets like gets to this point where the problem that

(01:16:13):
you're talking about happens, which is that like, well, okay,
capitalism is also a system where one really weird guy,
and he's like, terrible ideas can have an enormous impact
on how society operates. Like this is this is this
is this is the thing we're all suffering from from
like Elon Musk, right, or like what what's that guy's name,
like Robert Moses, right, Like yeah, like the you know,

(01:16:35):
like capitalism is absolutely a system that generates just one
guy who can just fuck everyone's.

Speaker 1 (01:16:40):
And that's a perfect example of it, because like the
fact that Moses has these weird personal hang ups around
public transportation and this love of being driven around influences
how tens of millions of people live to this day,
and influences like the global climate crisis. And so it's
not like this great man didn't like grab the lathe

(01:17:01):
of heaven. It was more like, no, our we we
are society kind of like the system we set up
allowed an enormous amount of power for this specific thing.
How our cities are set up to be invested in
an unelected weirdo because he was the only one interested
enough to focus on it, and that led to this
very bad situation.

Speaker 3 (01:17:18):
Yeah, and like I think I think Popper's think of that.
I was like, well, okay, you do you do you
deal with this by like just having elections for everyone,
And it's like, well, okay, like so sometimes you have election.
We never vote for crazy assholes, thank god. Sometimes sometimes
sometimes you get Donald Trump, right, like, you know, the
these these are these are these are things that are

(01:17:39):
going to haunt both Popper. Popper doesn't live long enough
to see like the absolute worst this can possibly go.
But George Soros unfortunately has lived to see exactly how
value this this con possibly go.

Speaker 1 (01:17:54):
But let's call him, let's let's call him by his
nickname from from now on. Uh uh g Sizzle? Is
that good that we're not doing that. We're not doing that.
Thank you, Thank you, Garrison. This is this is this
is why you're This is why you're here. You have
power of attorney over what nicknames we call the subjects

(01:18:17):
of the episodes.

Speaker 3 (01:18:20):
I will I will keep it and reserve this power.

Speaker 1 (01:18:28):
See, this is we're We've built a system to try
and uh and stop you know, individuals with with weird
hang ups from from influencing history so much. It's that simple, folks,
you know, devolve powers. Yeah, works great for un precedency.

Speaker 3 (01:18:46):
Unfortunately, we're you have to talk about Ugoslavia this episode.
So it doesn't always work. But all right, so back
back back in, back in sort of the heady days
of of the seventies and eighties George, where like, okay,
he has a dual thing where he at once has
his kind of crisis a conscience thing where he's like,

(01:19:08):
I want to actually do something with my life that's
not just you know how, I want to have an
impact on the world that is positive and not like
I made so much money that like gods look at
it and vomit and so and so. Okay, So his
solicial is he sets up a tax dodge. And he's
actually very explicit about those interviews that his first foundation

(01:19:29):
to do charity work was set up as a tax dodge.
But but this is where Soros is very interesting, right
because he has, you know, for for like a billionaire, right,
he has some positions that are started only very good.
So he is anti apartheid and that is like not
a thing you can guarantee from people in that era,

(01:19:50):
like oh boy. He also and this is only I
guess gets him in trouble like to this day, is
he is pro Palestine. And this is part of why
like Netanyahu absolutely hates him. He's he's not like like okay,
he's he's.

Speaker 1 (01:20:03):
Not like a radical pro Palaestine by the standards of
net and Yahoo a radical.

Speaker 3 (01:20:08):
Yeah yeah, yeah. It was like his you know, his
sort of like like his sort of like liberal humanism,
like hey, we should not like shoot children with guns.

Speaker 1 (01:20:19):
Thing is Broadley anti shooting children throwing rocks?

Speaker 3 (01:20:24):
Yeah, and like like that that that makes you a
like like like enemy number one of the Israeli Still
well yeah, no, I okay put them like.

Speaker 1 (01:20:33):
The enemy number one is those kids, but yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:20:36):
Or four. They haven't rapped him yet. So oh god,
speaking of things that the Israeli government didn't do. So
he gets his start.

Speaker 1 (01:20:45):
I thought you were going to do an ad.

Speaker 3 (01:20:50):
I don't worry. I have a better one. It's kind
of good. So in that today, his first experience, like
doing charity work is he decides that he's going to
go up against like apartheid in South Africa, and yeah,
this is good. So he he what he starts doing.
He starts giving scholarships to black students to go to
the University of Cape Town, and then he learns a

(01:21:10):
very very important lesson about neoliberalism that he's about he's
going to like promptly forget after this, which is that, okay,
So what actually happened what he thinks is going to happen, right,
is what he's trying to do, is he's trying to make,
you know, he's trying to make sure there's more money
for black kids to go to go to university. What
actually happens is that the state uses his money to
pay for the existing scholarships and stops paying for any

(01:21:31):
more scholarships. And so there's two things going on here, right,
One is the obvious. This is the this is the
apartheid racism, right like they don't want more like they
don't want more non white kids going to school. But
then two also this is also sort of a classic
nearliberal failure, which is like if you were, if you were,
when you replace the state with like billionaire philanthropists, the
state simply instead of like you know, having more of

(01:21:53):
the of like the resources of the services provided, the
state just stops doing it and spends more money on cops.
And so he sours very quickly realizes that like he
figures this out, it is like I fuck this, Like no,
I'm not going to help you, like I'm not going
to help the apartek government do racism. And so this
makes him kind of weary of this stuff because he

(01:22:14):
has sort of he has sort of seen how you
see what happens when you when you very explicitly try
to work within a system that is unbelievably fucked up,
which is that the apartheid government uses your money to
as a way to like funnel more of their own
money into their own pockets. And do you know who
else use the system of apartheid to funnel more money

(01:22:35):
into their own pockets?

Speaker 7 (01:22:38):
Oh okay, I see, I now see what you were doing.
I think the last I think the previous attempt to
not break was actually better.

Speaker 3 (01:22:46):
I was kind of like, you know, you.

Speaker 1 (01:22:47):
Know, I mean criticism correct that our podcasts are entirely
sponsored via a time machine. We used to go back
to apartheid South Africa. Uh get their advertising dollars. So
please keep the krue grands flowing and purchase these products
and services. I learned that krue grands was the South

(01:23:11):
African currency from the movie Lethal Weapon two. We're back
and I'm sitting uncomfortable in the knowledge that I am
the only person on this zoom call who has watched
lethal Weapon? Two? Have either of you seen any of
the Lethal's weapon? No, unbelievable. You're missing maybe the best
Mel Gibson performance outside of that time he got pulled

(01:23:32):
over in Malibu and gave a racist rant to those
California State Highway Patrol officers.

Speaker 3 (01:23:39):
H okaygre thinking of people who are about to give
racist rants. Okay. So the other thing about Soros, and
the thing that is sort of blisteringly ironic about how
the sort of course of Andy Soro's attacks go, is
that Soros is like a vehement, like pretty hardline anti

(01:24:01):
communist and this is what he spends most of his time,
like in the eighties doing, is is you know, like
give giving money to anti communist groups and communist countries.
So he funds Solidarity in Poland, which is this like
I very mixed record.

Speaker 1 (01:24:20):
Well, we'll get the like he's funding anti communist causes.

Speaker 3 (01:24:23):
Yeah, yeah, he's funny, but you know he's he's funny.
He's trying to fund like a very specific kind of
like liberal anti communist cause, right, and you know this
this goes badly for him in a number of ways.
One is that the moment, like the moment the Berlin wallfalls,
everyone just like suddenly forgets about all of the anti
communism that he did because you know, and this is

(01:24:45):
something about this, we have a kind of anti communist
that he is, right, Like, there's a lot of anti
communists who are, like you were, just like desk squad guys,
right like, this is your like your guy trained by
Shan Kai Shek who's like shooting peasants in like El Salvador. Right,
there's also like another kind of anti communists in this
era who are sort of liberal anti communists who like

(01:25:07):
are anti communists but like also anti Pinochet. For example,
like Soros give somebody to the people, you know, when
when Pinochet has this big referendum of his like should
I stay in power? He gives money to the people
who are like no, and those are people who, ah,
their intentions are better than the just like absolutely horrifying

(01:25:31):
right wingers. But you know, it doesn't it doesn't go
great for him. So Soros his initial plan, right is
he's gonna, you know, okay, when he's trying to like
start funding ant communist groups, He's gonna use his things
like he was gonna go into Hungary and he was
gonna like give Hungarian students scholarships, and the Hungarian students
were like, don't do this, Like if you if you

(01:25:53):
just show up and give us money, the state is
immediately going to be able to go like, hey, you
were like outside funded opposition people doing like regime change stuff,
and it's going to like immediately discredit us. And so
this is the point where he sets up the SOUS Foundation,
which becomes opens There's a whole thing with this. This

(01:26:15):
stuff changes names like many times the Open Society Foundation stuff. Yeah, yeah,
and you know, and so you know what we were like,
we just talk about what they actually do because in
sort of like.

Speaker 1 (01:26:29):
That, I can tell you one thing that they do
because I used to work with when I was teaching
classes at Belling cat my my partner, my partner, John Carlo,
he would go and teach because he's he was born
and for at least a period of time raised in Venezuela.
He would teach classes in Latin America to local journalists

(01:26:49):
who wanted to know open source investigative techniques and who
didn't have the kind of money to pay what it
usually costs to do a belling cat thing, and that
program whereby a bunch of journalists in Latin America, particularly Columbia,
got training, was funded by the Open Society Foundation. And
so a couple of years ago when there was that
massive swellowing of like the police murdering people and protest

(01:27:12):
crowds and stuff in Colombia, the journalists who were like
doing open source investigation to track down which police officers
were you know, killing folks and how this was going
were a lot of the folks that John Carlo had trained.
Like that's the kind of stuff that one of the
kind of things that the Open Society Foundation does.

Speaker 3 (01:27:29):
Yeah, they also do a lot of They do a
lot of like giving student scholarships. The other thing they're
really big on that doesn't get talked about much is
that there were huge on like cultural events basically like
paying people money to like put on plays and like
theater stuff and music and like writing poems and books,
which is like I don't know, like I actually think

(01:27:52):
that's cool, Like like we as a society used to
do this, Like we used to like pay people, like
the government used to pay people to like write things
and like create art. And then we decided that that
was bad, and I've never done it again.

Speaker 1 (01:28:04):
And yeah, I'm anti creating art for the record, That's
why I'm really happy about all this.

Speaker 3 (01:28:10):
Ai bait bait ye bait post do not engage. So
unfortunately for the Soros Foundation, one of the people they
give these these scholarships to is victor Or Broun, which
is I.

Speaker 1 (01:28:31):
Victory the Hungarian Yeah, press, yes, we.

Speaker 3 (01:28:38):
Shall, we shall return to that. This is I think
maybe the single greatest example of like creating young grave
Digger I've ever seen in my entire life. I I
I don't know, like one of the things that that
comes up about this and this is this is one
of the things that another one of the guys who
sorows BACKX, who like betrays him later on, says that
Soros is bad at politics, like you just he's like

(01:29:00):
not very good at it, Like he's not you know
people like the sort of like thing about him is
that he's this sort of like criminal mastermind who can
like like bankow revolutions and stuff, and he just like
gets out maneuvered by people constantly in ways that are
like kind of depressing. Yeah, but you Okay, So he's

(01:29:21):
spending in the eighties like doing all this, you know,
like doing this sort of cultural work. And you know
in Hungary, right, there's a sort of interesting thing that
happens where like he's wealthy enough that like even the
Communist Party is sort of like has to work with
him because he has money and they sort of don't.
But you know, the other thing that that's I think

(01:29:42):
important to understand is that he's not like there's a
bunch of foundations who do like exactly the same stuff, right,
like maybe slightly worse. Like you know, there's like the
Ford Foundation, There's like the Rockefellers, right, or the Rockefeller Foundation,
like they all they all like at any place where
open society is like doing stuff, there's like a worse
version of it at the Ford Foundation, and like the

(01:30:03):
Rockefellers are doing. But you know, somehow, stunningly only one
of these groups is singled out for being yelled at
all the time. And I will I will leave as
an exercise to the reader why specifically picked Soros and
not Ford? Huh huh?

Speaker 7 (01:30:19):
I wonder, I wonder what big mystery. I wonder what
differences and uh and cultural views might be.

Speaker 3 (01:30:26):
It might be Yeah, so okay, the other real problem
that he runs into, which is a cultural problem, is that, okay,
this is the problem that all the liberal anti communists
run into, which is that, Okay, so the walls come down, right,
and the communist governments fall, and it turns out that, uh,

(01:30:46):
the anti communists and and Europe are almost all right
wingers and their base are all like right wing nationalists fanatics.
Here's another Stories quote about this. I thought I would
blaze the trail, I would lead and others would follow.
But now that I look, I find that there was
practically nobody behind me. I asked myself what went wrong?
And part of what went wrong is like what Soros

(01:31:09):
is doing in these places. So for example, you know,
he's involved in funding solidarity, he's involved in some solidarities
negotiations with the government. And then the other thing that
he does is he's one of the people who helps
like do structural adjustment in Poland. And this goes really
badly because so what we were talking about, we just

(01:31:30):
talk a little bit about what solidarity is because he
helps destroy it by accident. Solidarity is this giant sort
of like social democratic e union that forms in you know,
in like the early eighties in Poland, that's like the
first sort of independent union in one of these communist countries.
And they eventually are able to sort of like knock

(01:31:51):
off the government. But they come into power, and you know,
so they do on sort of Soros's advice and on
the advice of a lot of the sort of financial people.
They're getting, right, all of the people are telling them
to do privatization. So they do it, right, They privatize
all of these giant state owned like facilities, they privatize
their docks like stuff like that. And this, it turns out,

(01:32:12):
it just causes massive de industrialization. It destroys Solidarity's base
because there's there's suddenly no longer all of these union
jobs at all these state owned factories. And so you know,
they lose an ex election and the solidarity like vanishes
forever into the midst of time. There's like six of
those guys left. Yeah, and this and this is a
real sort of source problem. This that like keeps running

(01:32:33):
over and over again, right is you know, he spent
all this time being an anti communists, but then the
actual anti communists who have bases and who aren't just
like destroying their own bases by like doing privatization, which
is something he stuff he's also pushing, right are these
right wringers? And this is this is just sort of
a fiasco, and you know, it's so like he he does,

(01:32:57):
like he tries to do like a very similar thing
to what he'd been doing in in Eastern Europe and China,
and this goes like even worse because he winds up
like backing, he winds up backing one of the CCP
factions who gets purged after Tienemann, and so you know,
surus like as the sort of nineties go on, right,
like he's sort of slowly starting to realize that, like

(01:33:21):
the stuff that he's doing is not working very well.
And one of the sort of I don't know if
consequence is the right word, but okay, one of soros
are sort of like principles that makes them different from
a lot of other of these billionaires rights. He doesn't
do humanitarian aid. His thing is that like he wants
to produce a society that doesn't need humanitarian aid, which
is sort of noble.

Speaker 13 (01:33:41):
But like.

Speaker 3 (01:33:45):
Then then Yugoslavia falls apart, and he winds up doing
a bunch of stuff in Yugoslavia, Like he winds up
building like a water purification plant Sarajevo. While aside resiege
and the other thing that I didn't know he was
like really involved with is like he's basically the reason
why the UN war crimes tribunal that like tries Moloshovic

(01:34:08):
and stuff like happens, Like he funds it. It wasn't
really like a UN thing he was. He was like, Hey,
we're gonna have this tribunal. And then the German government
like arrested one of the war criminals just sort of
randomly at like an airport or something. And he's able
to convince sort of like Clinton and a bunch of
other people to like actually turn and the UN to
like turn this into a real court. And this pisses

(01:34:30):
off a lot of people and like bye by a
lot of people. I mean, like very specifically pisses Belosovik
cough because I somewhat obvious reasons that he tried to
try him for war crimes. Okay, so I think, gar
you're too young for this. Robert, do you remember Rock
the Vote? God?

Speaker 1 (01:34:48):
Oh yes, I remember Rock the Vote.

Speaker 3 (01:34:52):
Okay. So one of the things Soros does is he
does like a he brings like a rock to vote.
He's like one of the people who brings the rock
devote to like Slovakia great, and you know, and this
is the first.

Speaker 1 (01:35:05):
Time that this is how we introduce people to democracy
by showing how cringe it can be perfect well.

Speaker 3 (01:35:12):
And the government is immediately immediately this is sort of
the first time that like a government is seriously like, well,
I mean, okay, this is the first time that you've
had like a protest movement that starts and the head
of the country goes like, it's George Soros. He's the
one doing this, even though like the Ford Foundation again
and the Rockefellers and just like a bunch of random

(01:35:34):
people in Slovakia are also doing this. But this is,
this is this is sort of going to become like
a pattern in in in these things, because you know,
he he's sort of like like I think she's kind
of like poking a lot of sort of very powerful,
like increasingly powerful sort of regional right wing leaders because

(01:35:56):
he looks at the societies and are like, actually, it
sucks to have like just dog shit right wingers who
are like racist and hate everyone running a country.

Speaker 1 (01:36:09):
Yeah, that sounds like it would be bad.

Speaker 3 (01:36:11):
Yeah, and this is this is the thing about words, right,
Like he every once in a while, right, he sees
something really bad going on and goes, I'm gonna throw
a bunch of money at it try to fix it.
And so one of the things that he does this
for is the war on drugs, like in the in
sort of the eighties and nineties, Like Saras looks at

(01:36:31):
this and it is like this fucking sucks, Like this
is really bad. And so he starts working in Baltimore,
where the government is trying to do like something's like
pretty like something like even now is to consider sort
of like pretty radical I like harm reduction stuff. So
I mean they like it. Like Baltimore in the nineties
has needle exchanges. Uh, he's doing like narcan trainings for people.

(01:36:56):
He's you know, he's doing things like funny instead of
like like giving money to like he's doing he's has
these programs to like get people out of like prison faster,
and he's doing like after school programs for kids and
this stuff like this is like genuinely good. Like there's
no like I don't know it sucks that like it's
it's billionaire money that's like doing it. But like I

(01:37:18):
don't know, like probably there's a lot of people who
are alive because I didn't get HIV from needles that
they were able to do exchanges for. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:37:26):
Sure, that's all. That's all good stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:37:28):
Yeah, And but you know the interesting thing about Storts, right,
he's he's like not like you know, he's doing stuff
that's like pretty lefty, right, but he's like not a
partisan guy until he sees George Bush and he sees
he's he like the day after nine to eleven, he's like,
holy shit, this guy is a maniac. And like it's
just instantly has like the switch flips of like this man,

(01:37:49):
this man is an enemy to open society, which is true.
And he's like he's he like, guess this braid of
like I need to bring this man down. So he
starts getting really for the first time, he starts getting
really really involved in the two thousand and four election.
He's doing like like these like micro targeting ad stuff.
He's like throwing money around everywhere, and you know, I
mean he explicitly like the like the way he looks

(01:38:11):
at it, like if he's very explicit about this is
like he wants to level the like the playing field
between the Republicans, who are funded by just a trillion
routing billionaires and the Democrats, who are funded by not
that many billionaires. The problem with this is that he
has like a very weird view of what's wrong with Bush.
I'm gonna read from the People up the Stars again

(01:38:32):
in imposing its view of freedom on both the American
people in a foreign country. Quote the supremacist ideology of
the Bush administration, and it is in contradiction with the
principles of open society because it claims possession of an
ultimate truth, which I don't know, I don't actually think
like claiming possession of an ultimate truth is like specifically

(01:38:53):
the thing that like is the reason why the Bush
administration is bad. But simultaneously, I don't know, Like I
it's hard for me to be like too mad about
a billionaire seeing George Bush and just like going, oh
my god.

Speaker 1 (01:39:14):
Yeah it didn't it didn't work, but it yeah, good
that he gave it, gave it the old college try.

Speaker 3 (01:39:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (01:39:21):
Well.

Speaker 3 (01:39:21):
Unfortunately, this this has a backlash effect, which the Republicans
see him start doing this and they're like, oh shit,
this is incredible campaign material for us, and we start
seeing like the sort of the less openly anti Semitic
like precursors. So like all the stuff we see today,
like Bill O'Reilly goes after him.

Speaker 1 (01:39:41):
Oh god, Robert, do you remember denn Dennis Hastard. Oh yeah,
Look if my favorite pedophiles who were long standing speakers
of the House of Representatives, Dennis Hastard is easily in
the top three.

Speaker 3 (01:39:58):
She i, this is the thing that's been like collectively
wiped from like America's conscience. Is that like the Republican
speaker of the House for like twenty years was like
one of one of one of history's most prolific pedophiles.

Speaker 1 (01:40:10):
He sure was.

Speaker 3 (01:40:12):
And she she also turns out one of the people
who mainstream the anti Soros stuff. She starts citing a
fucking Lyndon LaRouche quote unquote report claiming that Soros got
his money from drugs. So Lyndon LaRouche is this like
fascist weirdo who cut his teeth and running this like
anti communist cult that would like physically fight leftist groups

(01:40:33):
on campuses and would like give information on like student
leftist groups and like other leftistcroops or the government like
they are they are so feded up that like if
you start reading about de LaRouche sites, like they were
narking to federal orgs like you've never heard of before,
it's stunningly, stunningly bizarre like conspiracy cult thing. And Dennis

(01:40:56):
Hastert was just straight up like reading their antisemitic conspiracy
theories like on TV. But you know, and I think
I think it's something that that one of the things
I wanted to emphasize like in this episode, right is
like the anti Soro stuff isn't really like I don't
know what you call it, like or sort of organic
anti Semitism, Like it's not something that like comes from

(01:41:19):
the Republican base, right, This is something that this is
a deliberate choice by Republican political strategists who are very
deliberately like this this is this is a Jewish billionaire
who's helping the who's helping a Democratic party, Like we
can use this to do to try to do like
culture warship to win this election. And you know, like

(01:41:39):
we know we can see the results of this, and
this isn't even you know, we're gonna get this in
a little bit, but like this this isn't even the
only time this is gonna happen where like the specific
like sorrows, like anti Semitism stuff for dreaming agust is
like it's cooked up by like like very specifically cooked
up as a targeted thing by political strategists. I love it.

Speaker 1 (01:42:00):
Which it's it's good.

Speaker 3 (01:42:05):
Anyways, we should we should do ads.

Speaker 1 (01:42:08):
Yeah, speaking of anti Semitism, you know, just just speaking
about it. That's what we're doing here. Anyway, here's the mads. Ah,
we're back, got another email from the A d L.
I'm gonna deal with this. Y'all continue talking about George Soros.

Speaker 3 (01:42:27):
Oh boy, So all right, Well the other thing Soros
keeps doing, like you know, so in going after Bush, right,
he has now made himself like he's not enemy number
one yet, but he's going he's made himself like a
pretty high profile enemy of the Republican like.

Speaker 1 (01:42:43):
Through the shoe.

Speaker 3 (01:42:44):
Yeah yeah, yeah, so that guy actually sucks.

Speaker 1 (01:42:47):
Ida Yeah yeah, we're not praising him.

Speaker 3 (01:42:51):
Yeah. He starts this sort of like arc of pissing
off a bunch of really really powerful and important people
who are anti Semitic great wingers. So remember how I
a while back, I said I was talking about there
was a guy who double crossed Soros, who was like,
this guy's bad at politics. So that guy was like

(01:43:12):
a h that that that that guy. That guy was
a Georgian protest leader who Soros like helped like his
protest movements overthrow a sort of like kind of pretty
shitty like pro Russian government in Georgia. But like that guy,
that guy has like a wild arc that you could
do his own fucking movie series on. He's now a victor,

(01:43:35):
a close ally of Victoria Bond. So it's going great,
But how do you actually pronounce his name? For some reason,
it always just like pings off my brain.

Speaker 1 (01:43:44):
Oh yeah, I mean Victoria Garren. I hear, are the
real brain trust to ask about pronunciation? You've brought together,
you know, just the goat.

Speaker 7 (01:43:55):
Latest gnunciator just said to me a list of like
European cities. That's a free episode idea.

Speaker 2 (01:44:09):
There you go.

Speaker 1 (01:44:10):
Yeah, I'm just gonna say the word Binghamton like forty
seven times. It's gonna be great.

Speaker 3 (01:44:19):
Okay, So sorrows back to this GE's called the Rose Revolution,
and you know this turns out badly for Soros in
every possible way, which is that like one his guy
like sucks and turns on him. And then two he
really like this like really pisses off Latimer putin a
man who is going to hold this grudge like like
on his deathbed, he will be holding this grudge. Now, okay.

(01:44:43):
So one of the things that that sort of like happens.
So he's backing these sort of like protest movements in
Eastern Europe. I refuse the sort of two thousands. And
you know, as the two thousands go on and turn
two thousand and eight, thing the world economy goes to shit.

(01:45:03):
A bunch of right wingers started taking power. And one
of victor Or Bond's like political consultants, who's this guy
who he met through net and Yahoo? Like specifically like
this is this is another consultant guy very specifically cooks
up the idea for how you know, he's trying to
fend off like a right like a sort of another

(01:45:25):
sort of right wing challenge. He's trying to fend off
like the rest of our political establishment. And or Bond's
consultant like very specifically is like what if we go
after Soros again? And you know, and so he does,
and this is this is another one of those things
like this is literally the anti Semitism is fucking cooked
up in a pr lab in order for these people

(01:45:46):
to win elections. And I don't know that that that
just sort of just sort of like cynical cold bloodedness
of it, like of these people, like this politic cool
consultant by the way, like is also Jewish, right like,
and he just doesn't give a shit. He's like a
fuck it. Like well, you know, like I'm like one

(01:46:07):
of Netanyahu's guys. NETANYAHUO fucking hates this guy too, Like
why don't we just use him as a punching bag,
And so they do, and you know, this is this
is part of a big part of the reason like
why Soros turns into this sort of enemy Number one
is that in twenty fifteen, they start blaming him for
the influx of refugees from Syria and this spreads like
fucking wildfire. Suddenly, like every single right wing leader on

(01:46:29):
earth is like, oh shit, I can blame all of
my refugee stuff on this guy, and they start doing it.
And you know, so suddenly, like like air Dowan is
blaming him for like the Gtzy part protests and he
does at thirteen, like Trump gets on this and you know,
this stuff sort of like it's it spreads really quickly,
and once it's sort of out of the bottle, right

(01:46:51):
like you know, like people like like there are the
people who sort of first start this right are doing
this sort of like you know, like incredibly cold, cynical
political calculus. But once once that, once this like incredibly
high level that he sent and he sententism gets out
of the open, it starts turning into just like Soros
a Satan ship and you know, and and part part

(01:47:12):
of what happens here is is that like this is
this is one of the things, like the sort of
campaigns against Soros is one of the things that he's
responsible for, like our current like migrant policy, like why
it's so bad, Like why like half our episodes next
week and are going to be about like just horrible
shit happening at the border, which is that like Soros

(01:47:34):
in the in the like the late the nineties and
two thousands found out that like Clinton was funding his
welfare reform by cutting legal immigrants off from food stamps
and like SSI benefits, and he's like, wait, this is fucking.

Speaker 14 (01:47:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:47:50):
It's just like like he caught one point five million
people off of his off of fucking benefits for just
no reason, like on believably demonic act. And Soro finds
out about this is like wait, what the fuck, what
do you mean he's doing this? So he like puts
a coalition together that like funds a bunch of immigrant
advocacy groups, and he's able to overturn this. But there's

(01:48:12):
a sort of right the right wing reaction to this,
right like is partially also part of the right wing
reaction to Soorros two thousand and four. There's this very
very effective and like unbelievably brutal sort of right wing
backlash about immigration politics. That is, you know, it's one
of the things that drives the Obama administration.

Speaker 5 (01:48:29):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:48:29):
The Obama administration is like worse than the Bush administration
on like deportation shit. It's you know, just utter horror,
and all of that stuff continues, and all of these
right wing people figure out that if you can just
pin like like Trump starts with Trump pins the migrant
caravent on Soros, and they figure out, like, this is
the this is like the specific combination, right, It's like

(01:48:52):
the the the anti semitism of like the Jewish banker
bringing immigrants into your country is just like the sort
of one way shop driving your entire country into like
a like fascist right wing frenzy. And it works. And now,
you know, like the cycle that we're in now is
like anytime something happens, like the right blames info like this.

(01:49:15):
So the the the current right wing panic is that
Trot Soros was funding some like pretty moderate like reform
DA people because he's a criminal justice reform guy. And
the Republicans are now all talking about how this is
like a scheme by Soros to like cause crime and
like destroy the entire country. And unfortunately, like this is

(01:49:38):
just like this is this is just this is just
reality now all of these like really bleakly cynical political
leaders and they're like polsters and pr consultants, where like
we could use anti semitism to win elections and they
did and now we live in hell.

Speaker 4 (01:50:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:50:03):
But on the upside, you know, uh, the you know,
have you guys had the new uh the new Mountain
Dew zero major melon. It's not tasty, but uh it's
in grocery stores. So if you're looking for a diet
mountain dew flavor, you know, that makes it all kind

(01:50:23):
of worthwhile.

Speaker 3 (01:50:26):
I no longer even delivering flavor.

Speaker 1 (01:50:29):
That's that's what I had for you. It was that
or another heroine.

Speaker 7 (01:50:32):
Why why would they need to deliver flavor when instead
they can just continue to mainstream anti semitism to get
right wing politicians elected so they can make say.

Speaker 1 (01:50:42):
But you know what I've been I've been studying this
can for a while now, and none of the anthropomorphized
watermelons look like they could be racial caricatures. So that's
a win.

Speaker 7 (01:50:54):
You know, Look, if that is, if that is actually
that actually is a racism wind to.

Speaker 1 (01:51:01):
If Mountain Dew had made a melon version in nineteen thirty,
it would have been pretty bad. Like we would be
sharing pictures of those cans on Twitter today and going,
oh my god. They would have to make a statement.
They'd have to donate some money to like, I don't know,
fun to probably scholarships or something. It'd be a real
problem for Mountain Dew, is what I'm saying. But today,

(01:51:23):
nothing problematic about the melons on their can.

Speaker 7 (01:51:26):
Yeah, I'm sure there's nothing problematic about the soda industry.

Speaker 1 (01:51:30):
Aspertaine, the health chemical.

Speaker 3 (01:51:35):
Well, is that is that all we had?

Speaker 5 (01:51:37):
Yah?

Speaker 3 (01:51:38):
Yeah, that's yeah, this is this is endicular app here.

Speaker 7 (01:51:41):
Well, it's now we finally know why George Soros is
as bad as Magneto, and why comparing George Soros to
Magneto as the one of the richest men in the
world who owns probably the most influential communication app is
probably not a good thing, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:52:00):
Okay, one more thing I want to get out, like
for one second that I forgot I realized I forgot
to say earlier, is that like Soros is not like
in the scale of billionaire, Soros is not very rich,
Like he's like the three hundred and seventieth richest billionaire.
Like he's not even in the top one hundred. Right,
Elon Musk he has like six billion dollars. Elon Musk
has like one hundred and eighty four billion dollars or something.

(01:52:23):
So like, you know what the the relative levels of
influence that these people have.

Speaker 7 (01:52:31):
No, I was talking about Elon Musk, Yeah, right, the
one of the chest most influential people.

Speaker 3 (01:52:38):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I just I just I need
everyone to understand exactly how much more fucking riches. It's
it's it's like fucking it's like when fucking Henry Ford
was like doing anti Semitic conspiracy series. It's like you
literally like like you personally literally control like more wealth
than like all the people you're ranting about combined. Like
shut the fuck up. Oh my god, h anti semitism, folks,

(01:53:02):
it sucks. And also rich people do it even though
they're they are the actual like the actuals. Yeah, in
so far as anything even remotely like what they're what
they're hypothesizing, could even potentially exist, it's fucking these people.
So yeah, they're bad. Uh yeah, it's it could happen here.

(01:53:40):
Uh look, I didn't I didn't think of an intro
for this one. I really should have. I apologize to
the readers. I was reading about Chinese aloze instead.

Speaker 10 (01:53:48):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:53:48):
Yeah, this is a podcast that's I don't know. It's
about things. I'm here unlike all those other podcasts about things,
and ours is actually about things. And today it's about
hot dogs, and in order to talk about hot dogs,
were joined by Jamie Loftus, whose new book Raw Dog,

(01:54:11):
The Naked Truth about hot Dogs boldly asked the question
what if a book was good? Welcome to the show, JB.

Speaker 5 (01:54:16):
Hello, Hello, So it's so good to be here to
talk about things. This is like the thingiest thing available,
I think.

Speaker 3 (01:54:26):
Yeah, so I I read this book in Okay, I
don't know how you're actually supposed to divide up, Like
if you stand up to go to the bathroom in
the middle of a sitting, is that still one sitting?

Speaker 5 (01:54:37):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:54:37):
So I read this book in one sitting and it
was great.

Speaker 5 (01:54:40):
One sitting with a bathroom break.

Speaker 3 (01:54:43):
I think there was two technically, but yeah, it was
a good time. Yeah. And so okay, so this is
this is a book that's about hot dogs and also
about it's a tale of human human and animal misery
and suffering. And so as I was reading book, my
playlist pops up Daniel Connan The Painted Birds song The
Butchers Share, and so I'm like reading about this and

(01:55:05):
the song starts going, Let's take a walk around the
Old Bizarre, where every little thing has traveled far, every
pair of pants and grain of rice contains a horror
story and its price.

Speaker 5 (01:55:20):
Wow. Really really theming right at you?

Speaker 3 (01:55:24):
Yeah, I was like wow, Wow, Okay, I guess reality
is just sort of telling me what the what what
the plot is right now?

Speaker 1 (01:55:29):
Yeah?

Speaker 7 (01:55:29):
I mean that In another another case, I think it's
really important that we're talking about this right now.

Speaker 3 (01:55:33):
Is that I.

Speaker 7 (01:55:34):
Believe your book was officially published on May twenty third, Yeah,
which is which is the twenty third day in the
fifth month, which is obviously of the year twenty twenty three,
which is very important in the in the Discordian glendar,
and your books about hot dogs, which is a specifically
it is the one sacred food in the religion of Discordianism.

(01:55:55):
So we for these.

Speaker 3 (01:55:58):
Reasons, it's really it's really important we talked with this
because you us be a very powerful wizard to have
to have figured this out.

Speaker 5 (01:56:06):
Yes, yes, I had to reserve this date years in advance.
I saw it coming and uh, you know, and and
then by the time people caught on it was too late.
I had already I had already wizarded my way into
the most potent release date. And now I mean, it's
we all may be fucked because I didn't.

Speaker 3 (01:56:31):
Someone's gonnassassinate JFK again.

Speaker 5 (01:56:33):
It's gonna be great, and this time his head is
going to explode like there's twice as much blood in
it as the original. It's gonna be really shocked.

Speaker 15 (01:56:41):
The original.

Speaker 3 (01:56:42):
I love it.

Speaker 15 (01:56:42):
It's like as the original series or movies.

Speaker 3 (01:56:45):
It's gonna be a second there's gonna be a second
grassy knoll stack on top of the book depository. It's
gonna be amazing.

Speaker 5 (01:56:51):
Has reboot Culture gone too far? You know? It's good,
it's a good question.

Speaker 3 (01:56:59):
I was gonna I was trying to do a reboot
culture plug cycle back here thing, and I can't do it.
I'm a hack and a fraud. But I wanted to. Yeah,
So I wanted to talk to you a bit about
one of the things you mentioned in the book is
that you were trying to get into like like try
trying to be able to get tours of these of
these meat like packing plants, and just they just like

(01:57:19):
didn't let you. So I wanted to ask a bit
about like that process, because that seemed like it was
incredibly chaotic.

Speaker 5 (01:57:26):
Yeah, it was really frustrating and humiliating kind of every
step of the way. Where I mean, as we were traveling,
I had, you know, the map of places that I
wanted to go, and then I also had a map
of like meat packing plants that we could possibly go
to on the way, And so I reached out a
little bit in advance and either got I mean got

(01:57:46):
a ton of just no answers, and I would try
to call, but generally the excuse I was given was was, well,
we don't let people tour anymore since COVID, because there
were a few places. I know that the Vienna Beef
factory in Chicago used to do tours of very specific
areas of the factory, kind of the least gnarly parts,

(01:58:10):
which is saying nothing, but you know, there were places
that you used to let civilians tour, and now it's
just unless things have changed in the last you know,
year or so, no one can. And on top of that,
in certain states, and this is also shifting. But the

(01:58:30):
AGGAG laws I think make it way less possible and
appealing for any meat packing plant to allow other people in,
which is true. I mean the AGAG law rabbit hole
is so sinister of just like, instead of any meaningful
improvement in meat packing plants, they're inventing new laws to

(01:58:52):
combat technology, which is just like terrifying.

Speaker 3 (01:58:58):
Yeah, I mean that was all was that? Was that
technically pregreen.

Speaker 5 (01:59:01):
Scare That's a good question, Honestly, I think I think
it was.

Speaker 3 (01:59:06):
I think that was mostly like a mid like a
mid nineties thing.

Speaker 5 (01:59:10):
Yeah, but they've definitely kicked up. I mean, I think
awareness of them in general has kicked up in the
last couple of years because like in uh, sort of
in step with how horrible conditions were for workers during
lockdown after the executive order, I think there was like
all of a sudden, a heightened interest in wanting to

(01:59:32):
investigate it, and they were just blocked at every single turn.
And there are some I know that some have been
overturned or in the in the process of being overturned,
but I don't know. It seems pretty bleak to me.

Speaker 3 (01:59:47):
Yeah, yeah, like you do know, I think i'd help
with that, right, Like we found out like one like
a look was like a month ago, like pretty recently.
Also that there were a bunch of companies, of these
meatpacking companies that were just like using child labor. The
children were getting horribly named.

Speaker 5 (02:00:04):
Yep. That yeah, that was in didn't make the book,
but I could have taken an educated guess, you know,
like truly it is like often so comically bad it
feels wrong, but it's just like so over the top horrible,
and it sounds like describing current meatpacking conditions in the us.

(02:00:27):
Sounds like you're describing meatpacking conditions one hundred years ago,
and they were actually slightly better one hundred years ago.
So it is it is very bleak in the unions
that still exist, but they are somewhat weakened and making
it possible for laws like this to sneak through at

(02:00:47):
active child labor. And uh, there's I know. I put
this in the book because it's something I think about
all the time. Where you know, down the line, it
was reported that not only was working to meet packing
plant one of the least safe jobs in the country
during lockdown, but but on top of that, a year later,

(02:01:08):
it was revealed that the top brass at Tyson and
Smithfield were directly colluding with the government and essentially drafted
the drafted the executive order that was given in April
twenty twenty to keep the meatpacking plants open. There were
you know, foreman and sort of middle managers at these
companies that would take bets on how many of their

(02:01:30):
employees would get sick. It was just like it was
cartoon evil.

Speaker 3 (02:01:34):
It was yeh, I'm like constantly haunted by the taking
bets thing like that's you think about that, like once
a week and of like, I think I think your
line was I think your line was like a continued
thing of how okay with you are?

Speaker 10 (02:01:48):
You?

Speaker 3 (02:01:48):
Are you with bringing the guillotine back? And I was like,
you know, like this.

Speaker 5 (02:01:54):
And it's the worst when it's like middle managers. I'm like,
what is what is your endgame here? Like it's I mean,
I know what the endgame is, but it's so bleak
to you know, be making you know, just getting by
and still betting against your like like vulnerable people that
work for you, who you see every day. It's just like,
I mean whatever, not surprising, but yeah, I was like, Wow,

(02:02:17):
there's no there's no justice in hot dog Land. There
really is.

Speaker 15 (02:02:21):
I'm so curious about how curated what they what information
is allowed to be shared, Like I'm curious if I
don't know if they know how bad it is even
or if they're just like conditioned not to not to
think about it.

Speaker 5 (02:02:34):
Yeah, from what I can tell, there are. And I
write about one at length in the book because it's
one of my favorite YouTube clips of all time. This
like Canadian TV show that's like a I think it's
just called how It's Made, But.

Speaker 3 (02:02:49):
It's like this is a very popular Canadian television show.
It's I watched this as a kid, really, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:02:55):
Yeah, I love I mean, I love shows like that,
and I love specifically when they show you how something
gross is made because they're really trying to like keep
the mood light in a way that is like so
funny with hot Dogs where it's like just these big
machines farting out goo and then there's like this bassline

(02:03:17):
playing that's like boom boom, boom boom. The next step
in the hot dog's journey is going to the shit
that and you're like, what, it's so good, but it's
really I mean, those those clips are ridiculously curated and
to the point where it's like I can't even really
tell you what's missing, but I you know, you could
tell weird pr when you see it, and yeah, like

(02:03:40):
they're sort of showing the easiest I don't know, it
reminds me. I don't know why. I'm like in I'm
like Farah Nose pilled today, but like it reminds me
of the anecdote about Elizabeth Holmes where she was like
taking Joe Biden around Pharah Nose and then there were
like people in each room, setting up the next room
to look like it was a functioning business, as like

(02:04:02):
they were taking him through the through the rooms and
successfully deceived him. That's very much what hot dog production
clips feel like to me, which is wild because they're
still disgusting, like you cannot make it look good. But yeah,
I don't know. I mean, going back through years of reports,

(02:04:22):
it's it's really difficult, understandably so to speak with people
who work at meat packing plants as well, because there's
like not a lot of that they stand to gain
from talking to reporters. But there was a good Washington
Post report about it in the early two thousands that
detailed not just labor abuses within the workforce, but how

(02:04:46):
you know when you're not paying your employees enough and
not keeping the equipment updated, and are you know, factory
farming focused on just production production production. The animals are
far worse off too, and there were some pretty horrifying
descriptions of what would happen to animals when people didn't
have the workforce or the or the tools to be

(02:05:07):
able to, you know, slaughter an animal in not the
most horrible way possible.

Speaker 3 (02:05:14):
I like thought I had to, like i'd like watch
stuff before on factory farming and like, I don't I
might have a real fun time sleeping tonight thinking about
the fucking like I don't know. I mean, the LA
should probably content wording this because this is like the
animal stuff and this is genuinely horrible, Like this thing

(02:05:34):
I was like, I was like, I'm talking about like
they're like stunning an animal to kill it, but the animal
comes back and they're like literally chopping the animal apart
while it's alive. The animals like blinking out that're like
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 5 (02:05:46):
It's like it's hot. And then and on the workers end,
it's like and don't stop or you're fired, and like
and you have no protection. It's just like it's a
it's a nightmare in a lot of places. And there
it came around in an interesting way with at the
Nathan Totalk eating contest last year because they use I

(02:06:08):
don't know if they used Smithfield plants for all of
their food, but they did certainly some of them. And
there was a protester who came on stage while Joey
Chestnutt was gobbling seventy five guzsies or something like that,
and like the protester was like wearing a Darth Vader
mask and he had this sign that said like take
down the Smithfield death Star. And it was a good,

(02:06:29):
like a pretty solid protest. It made it on TV.
But then Joey Chestnut tackled him to the ground and
then just stood up and kept eating hot dogs. It
was like, I mean, the protester was so in the right,
but also watching Joey really just take someone just in
the middle of eating. He was like forty hot dogs

(02:06:51):
deep tackled this guy to the ground and on like
the low res feed I was watching, it looked like
he killed him, and I was like, what did Joey
just do on ESPN? Did he just kill a man?
He didn't, but he injured someone and he also had
a broken leg at the time. Joey not the protester,
so it was just like then he went back to

(02:07:12):
very very bizarre and then he yeah, and then he
finished the contest and he was like, well, I would
have beat my own record, but unfortunately I had a
pause for five seconds to kill someone. But anyways, Yeah,
the especially Smithfield, I think is uniquely bad. That Smithfield Entyson.
It's just like her, like horrendous with labor practices.

Speaker 3 (02:07:35):
Yeah, I mean I think that was like I had
a thing I was gonna say and then it simply
evaporated from my mind. Uh you know what fucking ed
breaker to cover up my failures.

Speaker 7 (02:07:49):
I keep having this like false memory. I feel like
it's like it's like Mendela effect thing where when everyone says,
whenever someone says Joey Chestnut, I keep I keep thinking
it's a character.

Speaker 3 (02:08:00):
I think you should leave, But whenever I look at it,
very single time, I mean, it does sound.

Speaker 5 (02:08:10):
Like that, and I think you should leave. Has such
god tear hot dog jokes that Joey should be on
that show, but unfortunately he lacks charisma and so he's
He's definitely complicit in a number of things. Very hard

(02:08:33):
to know what Joey's politics are, which I know is intentional,
but I'm like, what's going on with him? He's from
San Diego, but now he lives in Indiana. I just
don't feel like it bodes well, but I can't say
for sure.

Speaker 3 (02:08:46):
Yeah, yeah, you know that was another part of this
that I was like, I was reading this and especially
like given the ship that's been happening the last few
weeks reading about to Kyu Kobyashi, the former champion competitive
eating guy coming to the US and then like having

(02:09:06):
the very combination American experience of like coming to the
US and then slowly realizing, holy shit, this place sucks ass,
Like there's just a bunch of racist here and they
hate us, and my boss is going to like run
a racist pr campaign against me for money.

Speaker 5 (02:09:20):
Like like mask off like every day all the time,
And here's the guy I'm going to be replacing you with,
and you will be only abused until this guy can
beat you and then goodbye forever. And that's what happened.
It's so I mean, I don't know. I think it's

(02:09:40):
fascinating in a very sick way because it's like he
is just hot dog Vince McMahon, like absolutely who this
guy is and clearly idolized as Vince McMahon, the guy
George Shay like his wife wrote for the WWE and
soap operas, and so he he's just like very well

(02:10:01):
versed in a very racist, anti woman high drama. Like
it's just like what he it's his favorite and I
hate him and he's so uniquely in control of that world.
It feels very Vince mcmonish, where you're like, surely someone

(02:10:22):
else could do this job, but it's just not not allowed.

Speaker 7 (02:10:27):
If he's the Vince McMahon of the hot dog world,
are what are you now in the hot talk world?
Good question, the study of hot talks.

Speaker 5 (02:10:38):
I'm one of the people who Vince McMahon covers up
the murder of I think probably that's eventually me. I'll
be involved in a very small, suspicious incident in this
man's life. I don't know. I mean, yeah, Unfortunately, I

(02:10:58):
feel like that's the best shot I have. Uh. It
was interesting though, when I released an excerpt of my
book that was about Joey Chessman and there they did
not run this by me, but they just named the
excerpt I'm in Love with Joey Chestnut, and I was like, Okay,
I guess I do say that, but I wouldn't lead
with it anyways. Uh, the Major League Eating PR team

(02:11:23):
reached out to me, and I thought it was going
to be I was just going to get like reamed,
but they it was just a light fact correct. It
was very weird, a little menacing, But I guess that
they're fine with me calling them evil. They're like, hey,
when you said we were evil, your number was a
little bit off, just so you know. And thanks.

Speaker 3 (02:11:46):
I guess Russ is good for us.

Speaker 5 (02:11:47):
Yeah, knowledge is power, and I changed my mind. I
think they're great now due to this small fact.

Speaker 3 (02:11:54):
Correction ringing ringing endorsements where we're attempting to confirm live
there is not, in fact a gun behind Jamie's head
right now.

Speaker 5 (02:12:10):
Look, I can't say. I can't say I think the
two things. Yeah, with the book being out now, it
feels nice in most ways, and then two ways where
I'm like stressed out about it, where I'm like, I'm
afraid that George sha is going to come for me,
and I'm also afraid the entire city of Chicago is
going to come.

Speaker 3 (02:12:29):
Oh okay, I want to talk about this because okay,
all right, So I'm gonna have to go into witness
protection after this. But I agree with you that the
Chagosolt hot Dog is not that good. Yeah, like I
think on hot Dog is really good. But yeah, there's
like it doesn't it just it's it gets to soggy
pretty quickly. It like the flavors don't necessarily go together.
Like it's only okay, it's it's it's.

Speaker 5 (02:12:53):
Wet and there's too much going on, and it's just like, yeah,
it's a catastrophe. I I well, okay, I'm was promising
myself I would dial back on Iago hotdogs lander, but
it's like not, it's not it's not very good. And
I think the main thing, it wouldn't bother me as
much if they I'm like those people in Chicago who

(02:13:19):
But if the Chicago hot dog loving community was just like, hey,
we have this gross hot dog and we love it,
that's fine, unbridled enthusiasm for something gross, love it. But
then they top that up by being like, and if
you like Ketchup, you should walk into traffic and get
hit by a car. Like so aggressively hate Ketchup in

(02:13:42):
a way that I don't know. I love something disgusting,
but hating something innocuous is such a weird thing to do.
It's very bizarre.

Speaker 3 (02:13:52):
I also got like just absolute whiplash reading this because
one of these places you go to is the incomprehend
simply named Fatso's Last Stand, and I was literally there
last week by accident, because I know, yeah, so I
was like an absolute fool. I was trying to travel
at seven am on two hours of sleep because I
was writing an episode and I took a bus the

(02:14:13):
wrong way and I ended up there and I was like,
what the fuck have I just walked into? Opened this
book and I was like, Oh my god, what is
happening to me?

Speaker 5 (02:14:22):
Empty Fatso's Last Stand sounds like a very scary, wominal space.

Speaker 3 (02:14:28):
It was so a cursive like I was like getting
off the bus and the bus driver was like, are
you sure you want to get off here? And I
was like, yeah, well like a like a I don't
know episode, it was a thing.

Speaker 5 (02:14:42):
Yeah, and then you find out that Fatso's Last Stand
burned down twenty years ago. Did you get anything?

Speaker 3 (02:14:50):
They weren't open?

Speaker 1 (02:14:51):
Oh?

Speaker 5 (02:14:53):
Pretty good?

Speaker 3 (02:14:53):
It was.

Speaker 5 (02:14:53):
It was pretty good there. And then I've since gone
back to Chicago because I didn't have time to go
everywhere I wanted to, And I since on back and
I do genuinely like the Chicago style hot dog at
Red Hot Ranch. I'm a big Red Hot Ranch head.
I've converted, but a lot of it is, Yeah, it's
just bizarre, and the hating the ketchup thing is confusing.

(02:15:14):
And then I went to Pittsburgh recently and their Ketchup City, USA,
and so I was having some interesting conversation and yeah,
this is what my life is like now I did everything.

Speaker 3 (02:15:25):
Okay. So there's there's two more various like hot dog
questions you need to ask. One is do you have
portillo takes?

Speaker 5 (02:15:32):
Ooh not really? I like I like Portillo's and I've
been in Illinois and I've been in California too. It's
a classic. It's good it didn't it didn't make it
into the book because there was like so many hot
dogs that didn't make it into the book because they're like,
all right, that's just you saying, like there were so

(02:15:52):
many paragraphs in the road, like and then I had
this one and I liked it. And then I had
this one and I liked it. So my editor was like,
all right, we can, we can cut it.

Speaker 4 (02:16:02):
Yeah we can.

Speaker 5 (02:16:05):
I had to cut whole chapters. It's so wild how
long this book could have been where I not reigned
in but there was well this is Chicago relevant too.
I took a two day course called hot Dog University
through Vienna Beef from this Guy's a thing.

Speaker 4 (02:16:23):
I'm going to beat that for me.

Speaker 5 (02:16:25):
Sorry, oh yeah, I'm a graduate of hot Dog University.
It's a course where you it was on zoom. Unfortunately
it used to be in person. This is Guy Mark, PhD,
Professor hot Dogs, and you take the course and he
teaches you how to open your own hot dog stand

(02:16:49):
and over the course of two days. And it was
actually I learned a lot.

Speaker 15 (02:16:51):
How many people were on the zoom.

Speaker 5 (02:16:54):
There are three people. It was me and two guys
from Chicago. And I was trying to like be I
didn't want to say why I was there, so I
was trying to like, oh, my name's Jamie, and I'm
interested in opening a California hot dog stand. And Mark
was really interested in an idea. And it was a
couple months of me kind of like dodging some emails

(02:17:15):
of like I'm not going to do it. I never
told them, but I'm not going to do it.

Speaker 3 (02:17:24):
Okay, So all right, I need to I got. I'm
now conflicted because I have a great hot dog stand pivot.
But also I want to ask you the second hot
dog question, which is have you had Japa Dogs?

Speaker 5 (02:17:33):
No, I haven't had Japa dogs yet. I wanted to
go because I know that there's like a bunch of
there's some Vancouver.

Speaker 3 (02:17:38):
Is that right, Like I know, yeah, yeah, Canadian Canada codd.
My my friend in Vancouver keeps insisting I eat it,
and I refuse.

Speaker 5 (02:17:48):
I wanted to go to Vancouver and try it because
like Northwestern hot dogs, there's like there's a lot going
on there in a good way, Like Portland, Seattle, big
fan of their hot dogs. Yeah, I didn't get to
jack a dog. There are a few places. There was
a place in Maine I really wanted to go to,
but it was so on the side of the highway
and open two hours a day that it was like

(02:18:09):
it would be so logistically hard to be there. But
working on it. Yeah, I want to go to jap
a dog someday. I went to U. I got hot
dog poutine in Montreal recently, which I guess is common
a common poutine make.

Speaker 3 (02:18:24):
It was great.

Speaker 7 (02:18:26):
So now that you've dedicated I'm guessing multiple years of
your life.

Speaker 5 (02:18:30):
Two years Yeah, ye, not getting those back.

Speaker 7 (02:18:34):
So I guess it's studying both hot dogs and like
the cultural conditions that are created around them.

Speaker 3 (02:18:41):
Do you feel like a better person.

Speaker 16 (02:18:45):
Ooh?

Speaker 3 (02:18:48):
Or have you learned something extremely useful about American culture
that will improve your life going forward.

Speaker 5 (02:18:55):
Thank you for two alternatives to the question. I said
that knowing more about hot dogs didn't make me a
better person. I think, I hope, And I also I
think that like I don't know, it's like it feels
better to or I don't know, like I enjoy my stuff.
That it's like you can get to a really dark

(02:19:16):
and serious place, but they seem so innocuous. It's like whatever,
and getting Hansel and Gretel to come into your candy
house and then being like, actually, it's sucking a murder city.
Everyone's fucked in here. Like you're gonna have fun for
a little while, the food is delicious, but then you're
gonna die. Like I just I like, I like subjects

(02:19:37):
like that and getting to I don't know, I've met
genuinely when we had the book release show the other night.
I've met so many nice people through the hot dog community,
my my dog community. It's true. I had this guy
I met in a parking lot in Culver City. He
was a Wiener mobile driver at the time, and he

(02:19:59):
like his yance. We talked on stage and he was
reflecting on his Wienermobile heyday and he told me this,
Oh I'm excited because at the time he was still
working for Oscar Meyer and I was like, do people
have sex in here? And he was like, I don't know, probably,
but now he doesn't work for Oscar Myers. I was like,
do people have sex in there? You have no loyalty

(02:20:22):
at this point, and he was like, okay, well I
never did. But there is like, there's like six seats
in the waitermobile, and I guess on the back left
it's called the meat seat. And that's where the fuck
the meat seats. I know. It was really it was
really shocking, and he's so sweet that it was really

(02:20:44):
scary to hear it coming out of his mouth. So
there is the meat seat. Anyways, I've made a lot
of nice I've met a lot of nice people through
hot dogs, and I've learned stuff I did not know.

Speaker 3 (02:21:00):
So fun.

Speaker 7 (02:21:02):
Well, you, you too can become a better person by
purchasing the book Rock Talk wherever books are sold. One
actual serious question, have they ever watched the movie Food Fight?

Speaker 10 (02:21:14):
No?

Speaker 5 (02:21:15):
Wait? When? When?

Speaker 16 (02:21:16):
Is it?

Speaker 7 (02:21:16):
From the twenty twelve computer animated movie starring starring supermarket
food mascots that they and they unite to fight the
generic brand food products in their grocery store. And there's
a lot of really weird na see imagery, really uncomfortable

(02:21:36):
like over sexualization and some of the most some of
the most garish animation you've ever seen. It's a pretty
wild movie.

Speaker 5 (02:21:45):
It was.

Speaker 3 (02:21:45):
It was a development for like it was like almost
like a decade and a half.

Speaker 5 (02:21:50):
Evil Longoria, Hillary Duff, Oh.

Speaker 3 (02:21:55):
Yeah, Christer Lloyd plays Plays plays one of the villas.

Speaker 5 (02:22:01):
It is.

Speaker 3 (02:22:02):
It is one of the worst like acid trips of
a movie, just just because of like it is just
really bad.

Speaker 15 (02:22:09):
That is, I have zero records predominantly features hot dogs,
so I can.

Speaker 5 (02:22:15):
I mean, hot dogs are certainly prominent on this post there.
I'm just like shocked at them billing the starkest tuna
above the twinkie. It doesn't make sense to me.

Speaker 7 (02:22:27):
Also, there is there is there is a dog character
who's just like Indiana Jones, but a dog that is
also but also in a romantic relationship with a human woman.

Speaker 5 (02:22:43):
I don't want to know where the Nazi stuff comes in,
but I am this is so wild because it's like
I thought that sausage party was the worst thing to
happen to this very scary genre, and it like, this
is like.

Speaker 3 (02:22:54):
The dark side of Sausage Party.

Speaker 5 (02:22:57):
No, oh my hot. Oh, and there's a maybe there's
a sequel Food Fight. It's about time.

Speaker 3 (02:23:05):
I've not heard of this.

Speaker 5 (02:23:07):
Oh oh, maybe this is fake. No, maybe this is fake.
I hope it's fake.

Speaker 13 (02:23:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:23:12):
This is so ugly Holy no, it is.

Speaker 7 (02:23:14):
It is one of the worst movies ever ever made.
It's it's it's it's garish, it's upsetting, it is weirdly fascistic,
and it's also like primarily based around like brand promotion. Also,
a lot of these big food companies like signed these
contracts in the late nineties, and of course the film
didn't come out until twenty twelve.

Speaker 3 (02:23:34):
Oh my god. There's a whole bunch of really weird,
like Food Fight merchandise that was made with all of
these brand mascots and it's all extremely questionable.

Speaker 5 (02:23:46):
That does explain the cast, yeah, because it was like,
it's a late nineties cast to have Wayne Brady playing Daredevil,
band Christopher Lloyd playing mister Clipboard, Chris Catan is in it. Yeah,
this movie has been in the me for a long time.

Speaker 1 (02:24:02):
Wow, holy ship.

Speaker 3 (02:24:03):
Anyway, I was just wondering since it is.

Speaker 7 (02:24:06):
It is supermarket food hot dog adjacent, and it does
does often draw draw draw parallels to Sausage Party, which
is also obviously one of the most famous hot dog films.

Speaker 4 (02:24:19):
One of the most famous films.

Speaker 1 (02:24:26):
I have.

Speaker 5 (02:24:27):
I've been wearing them at the shows I have. They
did make Halloween costumes for Sausage Party, and they have
the bun that looks so visceral like the like it
has like vagina mouse, and then they gave the bun
huge boobs and a huge butt. Anyways, she's voiced by
Kristin Wig and I have the costume and I've been

(02:24:53):
wearing it.

Speaker 3 (02:24:54):
You have the actual costume, Yeah, I have.

Speaker 5 (02:24:57):
It's it's tonight.

Speaker 3 (02:25:01):
Oh god, you're.

Speaker 15 (02:25:02):
Wearing it for your book stuff?

Speaker 3 (02:25:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:25:04):
I love a costume change, especially when it is also
a jump scare.

Speaker 3 (02:25:11):
Yeah yeah wow. Yeah, Well that's incredibly upsetting. That's about
all the time we have today, though, Jamie. Where can
people find the hot Dog book?

Speaker 10 (02:25:27):
Oh?

Speaker 5 (02:25:27):
You can find it all over the place, but I
would recommend getting it from bookshop dot org if you're
ordering online. It's a really cool website that will automatically
purchase from your nearest independent bookstore and send it to you.
So yeah, it's a pro labor book, so don't buy
it from somewhere shitty, use your head, but yeah, get it.

(02:25:48):
And there's also I also the audience book if you
like many people have been telling me for the past
couple of days, or like a book kind of a
long podcast in a way, and it's like, sure, it
feels great. It feels great to hear.

Speaker 3 (02:26:05):
And where can people find you on the internet and
the stuff that you also do that's not the hot
time book.

Speaker 5 (02:26:10):
Uh, bravely still on on Twitter at Jamie loftus help
and Instagram at Jamie christ Superstar. And then you can
listen to me on the Bechdel Cast every week on
this very network.

Speaker 3 (02:26:23):
Well, I sure hope you cover food Fight in an
upcoming episode.

Speaker 5 (02:26:27):
We just covered Sausage Party, and I think we both
have PTSD, So.

Speaker 3 (02:26:33):
You have like a de talks period first.

Speaker 5 (02:26:37):
And then come back with food Fight and by the
end be like, you know, Sausage Party.

Speaker 3 (02:26:44):
This is the one you do when the paperback comes out.

Speaker 5 (02:26:48):
Honestly nice, not the worst idea. I I do want
to watch this movie now, but I like looking at
the poster, I'm like, I don't know if I can
watch it alone, but I will watch it.

Speaker 3 (02:26:59):
We can, we can surely plan something.

Speaker 5 (02:27:02):
Let's do it all right.

Speaker 7 (02:27:06):
Thank you, Thank you for coming on and talking about
hot dogs and labor and all of all of your
hard work. You can find us on cool Zone Media,
on most of the Instagrams and twitters and other places.

Speaker 3 (02:27:19):
And happen here pod keep on dog dog doggin yep.

Speaker 7 (02:27:25):
Okay, as they say, as they say, yes, hello, welcome

(02:27:49):
to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. Recently, I
just wrapped up a whole five episodes about the previous
week of action to stop cop City in Atlanta, Georgia.
In a somewhat unsuccessful attempt to shorten the running time
of those episodes, I had to cut out many of

(02:28:09):
the funny bits, jokes, gaffs, goofs, bloopers, and related tomfoolery.
But as demonstrated by the police's massive mobilization to shut
down a canceled comedy event in the woods on March seventh,
the Wallani Forest and surrounding area of Atlanta are often
home to manifestations of absurdist humor. There's been a lot

(02:28:31):
of not great news recently, well there's kind of always
a lot of not great news now that we live
in an ever expanding hyperreality oversaturated with information. But I digress.
I think it's just as important to not overlook the comedic,
lighthearted side of things as it is to keep up
with all of the doom and gloom that we usually.

Speaker 3 (02:28:52):
Platform on our show. So, without further ado, I present
to you jokes from the Atlantist side.

Speaker 7 (02:29:03):
Note, I am now invoking Jester's privilege legally, everything we
say in this episode is a joke as a as
a little heads up. Okay, this episode will probably make
more sense if you listened to the four part Week
of Action series or the retrospective episode. But also I
will do my best to pop in via this narration

(02:29:24):
to help fill in any gaps so that listeners will
not be completely lost if you've not listened to those
other episodes. Anyway, we shall start by tuning back into
my conversation with Matt from the Atlanta Community Press Collective
as we discuss the March fifth police raid of the
South River Music Festival. Welcome to it could happen here cast.

(02:29:49):
I'm Garrison Davis.

Speaker 2 (02:29:51):
In World of Warcraft, you can shield bash.

Speaker 5 (02:29:54):
So.

Speaker 3 (02:29:57):
There's been this effort from police and media to frame
these arrests as like these were arrests that happened at
a crime scene, like these these arrests were people who
were torching equipment, who were involved in all these actions,
who were doing domestic terrorism. But all the rest that
happened were at a music festival, Like they were in
a completely different section of the forest.

Speaker 2 (02:30:16):
At a music festival, at the parking lot, even away
from the music festival. And you know, police surveillance may
be good, and they may have been able to pick
out an individual or two, but for the most part,
like you had something like two hundred people partake in
this direct action and then disappear into the woods, there's

(02:30:37):
really no way too And of course most of them
were wearing block of some form.

Speaker 3 (02:30:43):
There's really no way much of that block, which has
now been burnt and it's no longer existing in the
physical material realm, so there's no way to like really
tell who was there, and other than allegedly having mud
on your clothes.

Speaker 7 (02:30:58):
Don't want to talk about what the war and were
in the oddity of how the warrants were formatted.

Speaker 2 (02:31:05):
Once you started to listen to them, you noticed this
very repetitive nature of them. And so about halfway through
we get to a lawyer who straight up calls out
the fact that these warrants seem like they were just
copy pasted.

Speaker 3 (02:31:20):
Like every single person all the way downline. And one
of the such claims the mud mud.

Speaker 2 (02:31:30):
So I don't know, I don't know how many festivals
you've attended in your life, but I've been to a few,
and they are never clean affairs.

Speaker 7 (02:31:40):
So it rained like one day before the night before
the festival started, there was a tornado warning in Atlanta.
I forgot about that, and there was rain, which makes
I don't know if the prosecutors know this, but when
rain mixes with dirt, it creates something called that we

(02:32:01):
that we refer to as mud. My dock martins are
still caked in mud. Future me cutting back in here
for a sec. So for the record, I have since
cleaned my dock Martins, but the mud was still on
there for well over a month until I was forced
to wash my shoes after I stepped in much much

(02:32:21):
more mud while in the Tillamook Forest as I was
failing to shoot Akeeltech, which yeah, that was that was
probably my bad. These charges don't make any sense. There's
no evidence these people committed any actual crimes, so they're
just being charged with terrorism. This like nebulous concept. The
judge said that the legal basis of these claims will

(02:32:42):
have to be decided on another day. Similarly, they said
that in regards to like actual evidence that these people
charged did any crimes, she said that she had none
of this, none of the She said that she had
none of this evidence in front of her, and that
evidence is for another day.

Speaker 3 (02:32:59):
So it's absolutely I think bonkers is an appropriate word.
One of those one of those kangaroo court moments.

Speaker 2 (02:33:07):
It really my faith in the legal system was really
solidified this day. There was also the threat of arrest
for the New York Times reporter that happened forgot to
mention that, So yeah, I'll leave that commentary by itself.

Speaker 7 (02:33:25):
They should have they should have charged Sean Keenan with
domestic terrorism. Sorry for making fun of noted trans ally
the New York Times. I promise it won't happen again.
Wait wait, no, that's that's a lie. That there's at
least two more New York Times jokes.

Speaker 3 (02:33:41):
In this script.

Speaker 7 (02:33:41):
Fuck, I guess let's talk about Monday, Monday, Monday, So, uh, don't.

Speaker 10 (02:33:53):
It is the editor?

Speaker 2 (02:33:54):
No, Daniel, Daniel, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.

Speaker 3 (02:33:57):
He's not going to hear any of this ship. I'm
because the way these work as I transcribe them and
then I copy and paste sections, so they only move
the section over.

Speaker 2 (02:34:05):
So when I when I say, ask Garrison about okay.

Speaker 3 (02:34:10):
So it turns out that was a lie. Daniel did
need to hear that. So sorry, danel full full transparency.
Most of those bleeps were me making horrible, horrible slurping
noises into the microphone, as Daniel can probably attest. So
really all of you should be thanking Daniel for suffering
through those to bleep them out. Daniel died for your sins,

(02:34:32):
I mean content truly, truly, braver than the troops.

Speaker 7 (02:34:35):
Insert joke. Anyway, back to me from the past. So
let's talk about let's talk about Monday. I want to
talk about the clergy event that happened in from a
city hall, so city council meeting. You work for the
Atlantic Community Press Collective. You've you've covered a lot of
city council meetings in Atlanta before. This was my first
time covering an Atlanta City Council meeting. Due to your

(02:35:00):
know wisdom in this in this field, I would like
for you to to discuss what happened at the city
Council meeting and in relation to your to your to
your years of experience in covering these these uh these meetings.

Speaker 2 (02:35:13):
So I city council meets every other week on Mondays.
I cover several other committees, but uh, you know, the
big one is always the city Council meeting. And over
over the course of time, there there's like a cast
of characters that that you just begin to understand are
going to appear either every week or or from time

(02:35:35):
to time. And you you had the pleasure of actually
getting to see a few of these and I was like,
there were we were there were a few of us
media folks there, and I was actually really happy that
like people got to experience this with me because I
usually have to do it by myself. So you got
to meet three of the characters. You got to meet
Brother Hakim, you got to meet Rachel, and you got

(02:35:56):
to be your favorite chef doctor.

Speaker 7 (02:35:59):
So this is just somebody who everyone refers to as
chef Doctor. He is dressed up as what you can
only describe as a chef doctor some wondering half of
a chef's outfit, half of a doctor's outfit. He had
a Freemason pin on his shirt, because of course he did.
And I just like watched him for a while, because

(02:36:19):
like initially in the city council meeting, they were just
like handing out awards to, like the proclamation, the proclamations
and awards to like various people, including like former city
council members, like whatever. And then eventually public comments started,
and I guess, let's let's talk about chef doctor so well, no,

(02:36:41):
so for the entirety of the city council meeting. During
the proclamations, in the back, in the back of the
back of city Council, there was this large red like
like heart just sitting sitting in the back.

Speaker 2 (02:36:57):
But it looked like Bob the Tomato from the it looked.

Speaker 3 (02:37:01):
That was exactly what I thought.

Speaker 7 (02:37:03):
I like, this heart, Like, why is there this Bob
the Tomato ass heart mascot just sitting in the back
of city council. No one was inside the costume. It
was just like the heart sitting there next to like
another massive heart made up of like flowers.

Speaker 3 (02:37:18):
I saw.

Speaker 7 (02:37:18):
I was kind of confused for why that was there.
There was like a pediatric surgeon that got like one
of the awards, and like, oh, maybe the heart's there
because of like because of like heart surgery or something.

Speaker 3 (02:37:27):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (02:37:28):
No, No, that would make sense. And you have to
you have to get out of that mindset for public
comment for the most part.

Speaker 3 (02:37:35):
So then chef doctor gets ten minutes of public comment.

Speaker 2 (02:37:40):
So we should explain that mechanism. Everyone who signs up
for public comment gets two minutes. You can award your
time or give over your time to somebody else. So
there were four other people who gave their time over
to chef doctor to give him ten minutes, and he
used all ten minutes.

Speaker 7 (02:37:56):
And so what was chef doctor trying to get out
of the city? Why was he giving public.

Speaker 2 (02:38:04):
Heart So a shout out to chef doctor. Okay, like
his Chef doctor wants to create a soul food museum
in the West side of Atlanta, and and he's she's
shown up a few times to kind of ask city
council for money, and as far as I know, that
has gone nowhere. But that was what he is ostensibly
there for today. However, beyond just the heart, the dancing,

(02:38:30):
we haven't got there yet. However, beyond just the big
red heart, and like the paper mache flower heart, he
brought a.

Speaker 7 (02:38:39):
Floutist, a floutest. So a floutist is someone who plays
the flute. If you are like an uncultured person, who's
who's who's listening to this? And he walked up to
the microphone and then for five minutes he got a
floutist to play a flute cover of amazing Grace.

Speaker 2 (02:38:57):
Yes, but but he had back muse from a laptop
that just kind of appeared up nowhere, and so he
played into the microphone.

Speaker 7 (02:39:05):
They played this funeral song as as this now heart
that's been brought to life, it starts dancing.

Speaker 3 (02:39:15):
Starts dancing. So this person wearing like heart pajama pants
changed into this hard question at some point. I didn't
see them change into this. I don't know how this happened.
I must have missed it.

Speaker 2 (02:39:27):
With City Council Magic.

Speaker 13 (02:39:28):
Next will be.

Speaker 2 (02:39:30):
Chef doctor Kenneth Wilhoyt.

Speaker 13 (02:39:32):
You'll have ten minutes due to yield in time.

Speaker 2 (02:39:35):
Chef, let's go ahead and get started.

Speaker 3 (02:39:38):
My name is.

Speaker 14 (02:39:40):
A chef doctor Kenneth Wilhoyd. I'm the president of the
Soul Food Museum and the Soul Food University.

Speaker 17 (02:39:53):
We are celebrating a twentieth anniversary and we are asking
for the City Council and an honorable mayor to get
behind us and support us with donating a museum space,
building and land with parking in the city of Atlanta.

Speaker 14 (02:40:16):
For our tourists that come here to have a place
to come and experience our hospitality agriculture Service of Atlanta.
I'm gonna sell quick prayer because I'm spirit lid. I
do things by spirit. I'm at that age you know
it's not about me, it's about the spirit. Now we'll

(02:40:40):
have a song that was selected by the spirit of
the ancestors, not by me, but by the spirit of
the ancestors. I asked God to say, Hey, God, what
songs should we introduce today? This is the one that was.

Speaker 3 (02:41:09):
But this, this guy in the heart costume walks up
and he starts like kind of dancing to this float
music for five minutes. Talk about the dancing.

Speaker 2 (02:41:20):
I don't think it was so much dancing as a
swaying with a little bit of hand motion along with
the swang.

Speaker 10 (02:41:27):
But like I.

Speaker 2 (02:41:29):
I wasn't expecting it.

Speaker 3 (02:41:30):
I thought some would like dosed me with hallucinogens.

Speaker 2 (02:41:33):
I did, actually I had. There were some streps of LSD.
I put them in your water bottle when you went looking.

Speaker 3 (02:41:41):
This explained so much about what happened on Monday.

Speaker 2 (02:41:44):
No, it would make much more sense if that's what happened. Unfortunately,
Atlanta is a cartoon town and that's not what happened.
This was real life.

Speaker 7 (02:41:54):
So this, this this float cover of Amazing Grace played
for five minutes with along with the dancing Heart, and
then we finally got to public comment for the reason
for the reason for the reason for why we were there.
Not only were we blessed with that stunning rendition of
amazing Grace, the floutist himself was was briefly able to

(02:42:15):
address the city Council before President Dave Shipman rudely, very
very rudely called time amazing.

Speaker 3 (02:42:24):
It's such a sort that made the world.

Speaker 5 (02:42:28):
So that's.

Speaker 7 (02:42:42):
Okay, and we are back. And just as a note,
I forgot to put this in the script, so I'm
going to say it now. It turns out that that
heart costume that was quote unquote dancing to the music
that's actually rentable. You can rent that in Atlanta. So
I I have some really good ideas for the next
for the next week of action, since we could rent

(02:43:04):
more more bouncy castles and also that hard costume. I
think there's a lot of potential, extremely funny things that
that could happen. Anyway, back to my conversation with Matt
from the Atlantic Community Press Collective.

Speaker 2 (02:43:16):
There are a couple like things to note about how
city council public comment works. City council doesn't tend to
pay attention to them Oessensibly the only one who pays
attention is City Council President Doug Shipman, because it is
his job to call time and to call up the
next person. But you know, city councilors will like step
in and out of the room, get something to eat

(02:43:38):
during the seventeen hours of public comment for cop city,
like one of them held a press conference like it is.

Speaker 3 (02:43:43):
It is weird. How they're like legally allowed to not
pay attention like that is that is bizarre.

Speaker 2 (02:43:48):
You would you would you would think that if you
allegedly work for the people, like.

Speaker 3 (02:43:53):
You would you have to actually listen to them.

Speaker 2 (02:43:56):
So amongst the city Council. There are two in particular,
I'm glad you got to see there. There's Mary Norwood,
who represents Buckhead, and then there's Dustin Hillis, who is
the the committee chair for the Public Safety Legal Administration Committee.
So he's basically in charge of police here.

Speaker 1 (02:44:14):
Throwing molotov cocktails at officers and damaging millions of dollars of.

Speaker 3 (02:44:21):
Equipment, and he gives off that vibe and neither one
of them will pay attention.

Speaker 7 (02:44:26):
They were, they were on their phone from almost the
entire time I was there. The the the Buckhead woman
gave off ontologically evil vibe. Like I I did not
know like who she was when I went to the
City Council, but once I saw her, I was like, oh, okay,
this person is like obviously evil, right, And I asked

(02:44:47):
people about it afterwards, like oh, yes, that is a
person that represents Bucket. I'm like, okay, yes, of course,
of course, Bucket of course.

Speaker 2 (02:44:54):
Being the like primarily white neighborhood in North Atlanta, that
part of it wan to secede from the city, and
that's a whole, Yes, that is a whole another issue.
But to kind of give context of what Buckhead is redlining.

Speaker 10 (02:45:11):
That's not a question, that's just a observation.

Speaker 2 (02:45:15):
And so sitting directly next to her is Dustin Hillis,
who is known for not paying attention.

Speaker 3 (02:45:21):
Ever, except except they did both pay attention after public
comment when police gave their testimony on what happened to
the night previous, and then these two people were very engaged.
We will hear more from Mary Norwood ontologically evil in
a in a bit, but first I have to saw

(02:45:42):
Jesus Christ fucking fuck Jesus. My cats are just running
a muck all right.

Speaker 7 (02:45:53):
We will hear more from Mary Norwood ontologically evil in
a bit, but first I have to I have to
some of Councilman Antonio Lewis's response after Police Chief Darren
Cherbaum gave his little presentation at City Council. Because I
don't think I've ever heard January sixth, the Atlanta Way,
and six Flags all get mentioned in the same sentence

(02:46:14):
before they.

Speaker 16 (02:46:15):
Looked like January sixth. I ain't never seen police run
from a group of people, and so the only thing
I could think about when I saw that video. I
saw it on atl scoop, the videos all out there.
I've been seeing it all over and when I saw
the police officers run, I mean I was a little nervous.
When I saw the heat map, I saw one hundred

(02:46:35):
people I saw, I saw it. I mean like that
ain't the Atlanta wait, I mean, I ain't never seen.
I'm just thinking about the At the same time, at
six Flags, we had some young men that were fighting,
some of our teenagers fighting at six Flags.

Speaker 3 (02:46:50):
They didn't run up on the police.

Speaker 16 (02:46:52):
They didn't run up on the police with molotail malor
tail cocktails throwing to burn up stuff. What I will say,
I thank you so much for last night for working.
I want to really commend officers because y'all were under
some immense pressure. And to not see a gun fire
back because when I see the firecrackers, I'm from Cleveland Avenue.

(02:47:13):
If they throw firecrackers at me, I don't know those firecrackers.
I've never seen that. So I appreciate APD for doing that.

Speaker 7 (02:47:21):
Truly, truly a stunning admission, just just perfect. So I
had to listen to Atlanta Police Chief Darren Sheerbaum's testimony
a few times for the five episodes that were released
earlier this month, so I didn't really feel like fully
listening through again to find any funny bits to put
in this episode. So I just kind of like skimmed

(02:47:43):
through while multitasking, and weirdly enough, I noticed that the
chief said some pretty shocking things that I somehow just
must have missed in my previous viewings. So I will
play those for you now, and I will warn you
it is. It is pretty disturbing. Like all the subjects
we put on air, their statements do not reflect our
opinions or the official position held by whatever current company

(02:48:07):
owns this podcast. So yeah, like I said, well warning,
these are shocking, but I will let the chief speak
for himself.

Speaker 18 (02:48:14):
Take aggressive action against these officers, move to the front gate,
more accelerant, inflict vitally harm upon them, launch illegal and
criminal attacks to attack members of law enforcement, bring harm
to our officers. These attacks are going to continue.

Speaker 7 (02:48:31):
Pretty pretty shocking stuff coming from a police chief to Jesus,
But that is only the tip of the iceberg. Because
to my surprise, after public COVID was over and all
the news cameras left after I left, and you know,
everyone left the building, it turns out Darren Sheerbaum gave
a second testimony at the very end of the City

(02:48:53):
Council meeting that I just completely missed until now, so
I will warn you it is kind of leud in nature.
So if you want to skip past lewd police conduct,
just fast forward like a minute or two. But anyway,
without further ado, here is the secret recently unearthed second
testimony presented by Atlanta Police Chief Darren Sheerbaum.

Speaker 18 (02:49:17):
Presidentship and members of the Council would like to brief
you on events that transpired yesterday. I'm going to let
the video play here. Why I walk through each of
the situations. What you see here is of our partners
at the Decab County Police Department, the Sheriff of Fulton County,
as well as the Georgia State Patrol. We're seeing changing
out of the clothes that they were wearing. They're going
to position themselves when it appears to be an attempt

(02:49:38):
to keep pursuing the officers. This is the officers see these.
We had a rapid response from our partners as well
as to change their clothing. Different groups were performing acts
within the manner of their training and their discipline at
this time. Our officers repositioning themselves inside of our partners.
These officers had been stationary to ensure that they are

(02:49:59):
being restrained. The officers are on city property and are
positioning themselves and repositioned themselves to be prepared to go
back in. Our officers are showing great restraint. They remained
in a position. It's what you see here is a
lieutenant that is discharging. We're very fortunate that that was
the outcome, and I want to commend every man and

(02:50:22):
woman on duty yesterday as they stood in the gap
to do their job, those officers entered our partners, and
what you see here, ladies and gentlemen, is as some
of the individuals that had just previously had entered into
those officers, they start changing back into the clothes that
they were just wearing moments before. Just last night, officers

(02:50:43):
of this department, as well as the Cab County to
the Georgia State Patrol and the Sheriff's Department moved in.
And I want to think of the men and women
again of the Atlanta Police Department, the Georgia State Patrol,
the Sheriff's Department, as well as the the Cap County
Police Department for the professionalism that they demonstrated through the
night and to the early hours of this morning while
many of us were asleep, they continue to work through

(02:51:04):
the night.

Speaker 16 (02:51:06):
I've never seen that, so I appreciate APD for doing that.

Speaker 10 (02:51:09):
I would have loved for every one of those very
hysterical people that we've been sitting listening to for two
or three hours to have seen an actual video of
what really did happen. And there may be great reasons
if the administration chose to do it this way, but
our media is gone and all the people that needed
to see this are gone.

Speaker 5 (02:51:30):
I'm glad that nobody was hurt and none of our
employees were hurt yesterday.

Speaker 7 (02:51:35):
Oh boy, whoa uh well that was That was certainly
something I did not did not want to know that
much about what the the APD and their partners get
up to after hours. Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled comedic,
James I know A. Sheerbaum was addressed with some questions

(02:51:56):
by Unicorn Riot when he was trying to exit, which
he then denied. He hea have a very frustrated face
and then denied answering and promptly left the building.

Speaker 2 (02:52:06):
Well in the company of the New York Times journalist
Oh with With with.

Speaker 7 (02:52:11):
A friend of the show Sean Keenan. So that was
that was a That was most of Monday. Yeah, that
is everything that happened on Monday.

Speaker 2 (02:52:19):
So what Monday evening I went home to start working
on article. What did you do, Guaryson?

Speaker 7 (02:52:24):
I went to the Perham in the Woods. I got
to share my memory of the veggie tails esther story
starring the tickle monsters. I got to bond with a
few expangelicals about that, so that was fine. Then there
was an experimental noise show in the forest.

Speaker 2 (02:52:41):
And then you had a tragic neck injury on Monday night.

Speaker 3 (02:52:45):
So Tuesday, the.

Speaker 2 (02:52:47):
Group that we followed left out of the church and
went to Norfolk Southern, which is one of the funders
of APF and UH Friend of the Environment in Ohio.
When they finished reading the letter, like all they asked
was that the letter go to the CEO. Yep, And
they denied that and all they had to do was

(02:53:08):
accept it and and move on.

Speaker 3 (02:53:10):
But they while people were inside the security called ns Police.
And if you're wondering, you're like, you know, NS Police.
That isn't the city in Atlanta, what could that be?
That is the Norfolk Southern Police, who are legally allowed
to arrest people.

Speaker 2 (02:53:27):
And we we thankfully we avoided going to Norfolk Southern
Police Jail, going to Norfolk Southern Court, which certainly would
have been a very legitimate court, so.

Speaker 7 (02:53:39):
It would have been almost as legitimate as the real
court that that the bail hearings happened at. That same day,
after successfully evading Norfolk Southern Jail, Matt and I headed
downtown for a march that was accompanied by a cadre
of over one hundred officers. Pinning this crowd onto the sidewalk.

Speaker 3 (02:54:00):
Got a blocking the sidewalk like a Doorida State University
canine unit. This blocking off the entire sidewalk next to
a Fulton County Sheriff's vehicle. I like the cops are
just also commanding the corporate media on where they can
stand and the whatever like boomer journalist is with whatever
like mainstream news. Helle and was very peeed off at

(02:54:22):
this cop for telling you to get on the sidewalk.
The next day, a smaller crowd met up at the
same spot and broke off into little subgroups to walk
around downtown Atlanta and hand out defend the forest leaflets.
So all the little subgroups kind of meet up on
on Andrew Jung and Peach Tree, right next to the

(02:54:45):
Hooters and the hard Rock Cafe.

Speaker 7 (02:54:50):
To classic examples of atlanted food. There was an Atlanta
swat vehicle parked outside of the Hooters. Fucking the fucking
outside a fucking hard rock cast.

Speaker 3 (02:55:00):
So I can't keep picking up this copyrighted music.

Speaker 2 (02:55:03):
But there's a big.

Speaker 3 (02:55:04):
Atlanta Police swat vehicle parts on the block by the
Atlanta Police Foundation head quarters. All right, there's actually a
pretty decent number of people gathered here for the flywering
event today. They're at the Peachtree and Young International Boulevard intersection,
right across from the Hooters and the Hard Rock Cafe.

(02:55:24):
There's a swat vehicle parks right behind us. There is about,
I don't know, twenty to thirty officers stationed a little
bit to our north. You know, normal police responds to
people handing out flyers, just fifty officers and a swat team.
Lieutenant Neil Welch approaches the crowd and gives them a
dispersal order. They cross the street walk like a block

(02:55:44):
north past some of the cops that are guarding the
Wells Fargo building. At this point, people chatted the cops
to quit your jobs. Quit your job, and one of
the cops guarding the wells Fargo, says, that's actually good idea.

Speaker 5 (02:56:01):
You can always quit your job.

Speaker 15 (02:56:03):
That's actually sounded.

Speaker 3 (02:56:09):
Already tried.

Speaker 2 (02:56:10):
And he's like, I tried to and they wouldn't let me.
But like, I don't like laughing, but that one got me.
That one got me.

Speaker 7 (02:56:18):
The cop responded like, not in like a glib tone
like he was, it was actually actually like yeah, that's
actually yeah, that's actually a good idea.

Speaker 3 (02:56:28):
Extremely funny moment.

Speaker 2 (02:56:30):
While this is happening, Uh, there's another group who comes
in to the side of Petree Center Mall and enters
the mall to find Mayor Andre Dickens.

Speaker 3 (02:56:40):
Andre Dickens is like the head of some kind of
like board or something.

Speaker 2 (02:56:44):
Yeah. There there are a couple of boards in Atlanta
that stipulate the mayor is like the head of the board,
and this is one of them. And it meets in
Peatree Center Mall as one does. So the mayor is
having a meeting in the mall office spaces, you know,
sort of above the mall, and so so three Indigenous
An activists along with Kamal Franklin arrive and they find

(02:57:09):
the mayor. They enter the board meeting and they begin
to read this letter from the Muscogie Nation aloud. Mayor Dickens,
in true mayor fashion, bolts away from this, running through
an exit door which is then like blocked by a
guard which I think that has its own like set
of legal issues, essentially just ignoring them over his shoulder.

(02:57:32):
He calls out, I've got a copy of the letter
and hides just completely trying to escape what is not
a good look for him.

Speaker 7 (02:57:41):
This this is what we call a ted Wheeler moments.
So as this happens, I think like like Apex Swat
is deployed.

Speaker 2 (02:57:51):
They so Apex and Swat had had been elsewhere and
they were called back to their vehicles like right before this,
and then the activist exit and almost like in this
very comical moment, after they get out in a way,
squads of these special units start rushing into the building,

(02:58:11):
of course, finding no one.

Speaker 7 (02:58:13):
Charlie Chapman asked, shit, truly, okay, even a more future
version of Garrison here. Apparently I've been told by Daniel
that his name is Charlie Chaplin. I don't know he's
a pedophile. So whatever, Charlie not Daniel, oh boy, And

(02:58:35):
I do want to say I did try multiple times
to take Matt to the Hard Rock Cafe or the Hooters,
either one, and he refused my offer multiple times, very
very rudely. So at some point when I'm back in Atlanta,
I will have to gather a troop of fanboys and
head over to the Hooters anyway. Next was the Community

(02:58:58):
Movement Builder's rally on the evening of Thursday, March ninth,
which had fewer jokes that night, but there are a
few embarrassing recording bloopers at the expense of my own ego,
So I will play those for your amusement. You absolute
seck Fox.

Speaker 5 (02:59:18):
Yeah, we'll start.

Speaker 3 (02:59:20):
It is a kind of raining.

Speaker 7 (02:59:23):
We'll see how many people show up and how how
large the police response will be. In comparison, what could
happen here?

Speaker 2 (02:59:35):
Well, it could happen here. A podcast by Robert Evans.
We are at the site of the Martin Luther King Memorial.

Speaker 3 (02:59:45):
Did you see the two Sandy Springs police buses?

Speaker 2 (02:59:48):
I did see that, Sandy. I lived in Sandy Springs
for a year and that brought back some memories. But
yes to Sandy Springs police buses, Sandy Springs, of course,
being mostly outside of the perimeter. A good A good
drive from here. That's good, that was good. All right, hoggers,
absolutely hoggers.

Speaker 3 (03:00:10):
The police police has has been stating, well, I'll never mind,
I cut that. What am I saying? Big puddle on
the street, demonstrating the city's commitments to infrastructure. That was
that was a joke because the drawing was plumped. I
accidentally turned off my my my recording by tripping on

(03:00:33):
some stairs. They're so they're so close together, we're just
they're just sandwiched in. Got a New York Times reporter
standing in the middle of the street, of course, the
only person allowed to stand in the streets the one,
the one New York Times reporter. I would estimate almost
about a kilometer, But I'm Canadian, so that's not very

(03:00:53):
helpful to you, to you us listeners.

Speaker 2 (03:00:56):
The real outside agitators is Sandy Springs. Please. Yeah. The
police were ready to mass rest the entire time. I
don't know if you mentioned this. So in between the
police line in front of the APF building and the
protesters was essentially like a mixture of Copwatch and National

(03:01:17):
Lawyers Guild and a CLU, because of course you had
to have like both both legal observer factions just to
make sure everybody's watching each other.

Speaker 7 (03:01:26):
Get you can watch energy, Get a westrested, who can
watch acil you get arrested.

Speaker 2 (03:01:31):
It's turtles all the way down, legal observers.

Speaker 3 (03:01:33):
All the way down. Oh and we are back. That's
that's great, all right.

Speaker 7 (03:01:42):
One of the stops on the tour of the Blondie
Forest that Joe Perry was doing throughout the week was
the area of the land swap between the former owner
of Black Hall Studios, Ryan Millsap, and the Cabot County's
Entrenchment Creek Park. So on one side there's this beautiful
forested park that Ryan Millsap wants to trade for. Then
on the other side is this massive amount of dirt

(03:02:04):
that he currently owns, which is right next to Bouldercrest Road.

Speaker 13 (03:02:08):
That's a huge, huge dirt field that you see. And
what happened is while that swap was being orchestrated, Blackhall
was bringing thousands and thousands and thousands of dump truck
loads of dirt and just filling it up, filling it up,
filling it up, and somebody else is gonna have.

Speaker 2 (03:02:28):
To do the math.

Speaker 13 (03:02:28):
But I don't know if you say, like fifteen acres
of dirt that is twenty feet plus high, how much
dirt that is.

Speaker 2 (03:02:36):
It's a lot.

Speaker 13 (03:02:37):
It's not natural. It's not something that's helping this flood
prone area. All that's gonna run into here, no matter
how many silk fences you put up. So that's what
they're calling Michelle Obama Park. That's exactly exactly right. If
somebody needs to talk to Michelle and say, Nahu, you

(03:02:58):
need to take your name off of that. And I
don't know who who got away with that, but that's
not it.

Speaker 2 (03:03:04):
You're seeing the most picturesque side of that piece of land.

Speaker 3 (03:03:08):
Yeah, you get gets the top worse.

Speaker 1 (03:03:10):
It's just it's just it's garbage.

Speaker 13 (03:03:13):
Well the thing, and it is literally garbage because a
lot of this stuff, this dirt cave. You know, Ryan
millsp has he is. He's not a movie mogul, He's
he's a land baron. He's he's in real estate and
he's made billions of dollars in real estate, and so
that dirt comes from other properties. He's he's digging up

(03:03:34):
a place on you know, a boulevard to put some
apartments in. He's pulling dirt out of there. That's what's
coming in here. That's dirt coming from all these other
construction sites.

Speaker 3 (03:03:43):
Yeah, that is not top soil.

Speaker 13 (03:03:46):
You can, and I believe me, I'm not saying I'm
not making that up. I've been over there and I've
walked and I've seen what's in there. I've seen water
heaters in there. I've seen gutters in there, I've seen pipes,
I've seen all kinds of crap.

Speaker 3 (03:03:55):
It's trash.

Speaker 13 (03:03:56):
It's a big trash mountain. That's what they want to
have be Michelle Obama Park and hanging a hath So. Yeah,
that's I just wanted you to kind of lay your
eyes on what the county thought was a good idea,
in what Black Hall thought. Of course, you know, Ryan
Miller is a great idea for Ryan millsatt because the

(03:04:17):
land that he acquired is worth way more millions more.
It's now worth millions more than than when he made
the swap. So he has made a lot of money
on this swap, and that's why he's angry that he
can't get his hands on it. Yet nobody knows what
he's gonna do with it, because the original agreement between
him and the county was that he was gonna build
movie studios on that land. Well he can't now because

(03:04:40):
he sold his rights to the movie studios to a
company that's now called Shadow Box. They're the ones that
owns his previous studios, so he can't have a rival
company right across the street from them. So he hasn't
said and nobody knows exactly what he's gonna do with
the property if he wins this court case, and it's
those forty acres, who knows. It's a mystery. So that's

(03:05:05):
that's where that stands right now. Hopefully we win the lawsuit.
If we do, he will be he will have to
put the bill for repaving the path and redoing the
parking lot and putting a new gazebo in. That's what
the judge decreed. That's why they said we don't need
a restraining order. All that is replaceable. So except for
the trees that he tore down, you know those are

(03:05:27):
going to take another seventy five years, but who's counting.

Speaker 7 (03:05:31):
The fate of Michelle Obama Park is still up in
the air as of time of recording. So yeah, I'm
excited to visit that if the landswap gets passed, almost done,
we're gonna we're gonna briefly, briefly tap back into my
conversation with Matt from the Atlantic Community Press Collective and
then unfortunately, our jokes must come to an end.

Speaker 2 (03:05:54):
I think one thing that's been lost in all of
this too is all of the lighthearted events that have
continued to gone through the week. And you know, we
have this this, this youth rally or there's the youth
rally that's happening on Saturday. Of course recording this beforehand,
and like the joy of the movement that was represented
in the Bouncy Castle rip which was first pointed at

(03:06:18):
a rifle was pointing at and.

Speaker 3 (03:06:20):
We haven't talked about the gun, talk about the guns
in the bouncy castle.

Speaker 2 (03:06:26):
So so one thing I think that that.

Speaker 3 (03:06:30):
We didn't mention.

Speaker 2 (03:06:31):
How can you forget about the guns and the bouncy castle.
So when when the police came running up onto the
tarmac at RCA Field where the bouncy Castle was, of
course they had to point a rifle at the bouncy Castle.
And if that doesn't show that police are not here
to have fun and have joy. I don't know what
what is I I don't know if anyone was in

(03:06:54):
it at the time. I don't think so. I think
they were literally just pointing a gun at an empty
bouncy castle which they have they destroyed, and and I
think we have to take a moment to mourn that.

Speaker 3 (03:07:08):
Did they destroyed or like deflate it? I think they destroyed.
It wasn't like a rental or something.

Speaker 2 (03:07:12):
Yes, So rip bouncy house, you will be missed and
all the joy that you represented. Uh, my girlfriend's texting
me cringe.

Speaker 3 (03:07:27):
Let me let me check my my note my notes.

Speaker 2 (03:07:34):
In case Garrison doesn't cut this. Ask about Garrison's neck?

Speaker 1 (03:07:39):
What hmm?

Speaker 3 (03:07:41):
What what did you say?

Speaker 2 (03:07:43):
Ask about what Garrison did?

Speaker 3 (03:07:44):
Friday fire, burn Tower Saturday, Gresham Park Sunday, Monday noon Tuesday.
All right, all right, okay, I'm gonna just gonna look
through my other notes app because I keep my notes
in three different notes apps because I'm normal.

Speaker 2 (03:08:04):
So one thing that's been notable, especially in how the
police talk about the forest, is they've begun using like
these these militarized terms, like the denial of operating area
that we saw when Ryan millsap was important to Cap County.
He said, the GBI told him to clear the area

(03:08:26):
to deny operating space. And you know the use of terrorism,
like there's there's some eerie parallels between the language that
was used to describe insurgencies in countries that America is
invading or the United States is invading, and a lot
of that language, like the military equipment that was used

(03:08:48):
there is has come home and it is now being
used against Americans engaged in like these liberation struggles.

Speaker 3 (03:08:56):
I wonder where we've talked about that before.

Speaker 7 (03:08:58):
I don't know it happen where speaking of it is
still happening. The last week, approximately five hundred people came
out to City Hall as the city Council is now
in the process of voting to approve public funds for
the Cop City project. Nearly three hundred people signed up
for public comment, with one hundreds more waiting in line.

(03:09:20):
A public comment lasted seven hours, and during so not
a single person voiced support of using taxpayer money to
fund the police training facility. The Atlanta Community Press Collective
have recently reported that the proposed city funds toward the
Cop City project have ballooned to a minimum of fifty

(03:09:42):
one million dollars, with the thirty million dollar package awaiting
final vote in City Council, plus another at least twenty
million dollar chunk to be given to the Atlanta Police
Foundation via a quote unquote loan, which indicates that the
Atlanta Police Foundation's private fundraising has not gone as well
as they initially had hoped. For more on that, I'd

(03:10:03):
recommend checking out The Press Collective's recent article from May
twenty fourth, and you can also donate to them to
support their continued reporting of the happenings in Atlanta.

Speaker 2 (03:10:14):
You can find us on Twitter at Atlanta Underscore Press.
Our website is Atlpress Collective dot com, and you can
find our Instagram at atl Press Collective. We have partnered
with Open Collective. We are fiscally sponsored now by the
Open Collective Foundation in a way to transparently fundraise in

(03:10:36):
order to sustain our reporting. Everything up until actually the
Week of Action, everything that we have done up until
the Week of Action was all unpaid, and it is
our desire to continue to grow with the movement, and
so we were excited to find a partner in the
Open Collective Foundation that can continue that sort of horizontal

(03:10:59):
open in organizing that that we have done internally.

Speaker 3 (03:11:04):
Okay, yeah, I think I think.

Speaker 1 (03:11:06):
I think we're good.

Speaker 3 (03:11:07):
I think we have it.

Speaker 2 (03:11:08):
Good job team.

Speaker 3 (03:11:08):
Oh shit, I wasn't required.

Speaker 1 (03:11:24):
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the Universe.

Speaker 5 (03:11:30):
It Could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 3 (03:11:32):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources.

Speaker 5 (03:11:47):
Thanks for listening.