It Could Happen Here Weekly 147

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

1. How to Stop the Far Right in Three Easy Steps
2. What’s The Matter With Texas? feat. Steven Monacelli & Dr. Michael Phillips
3. Inside the Russian Government's Big YouTube Scam
4. Harris V. Trump: The Thriller in Wherever They Filmed This Debate
5. What Happens When Temperatures Soar at the Border?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Al Zone Media.

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

Speaker 3 (00:26):
Welcome to it could happen here a podcast about things
falling apart and how to put them back together again.
I'm your host, b A walg with me is Robert Evans.
Woo woo. So we have spent a lot of time
on this show talking about the rise of the far
right and what that's looked like electorally, what that's looked
like in the streets, and the sort of you know,

(00:47):
deleterious effects that it has had on effectively everyone in
the US. This is going to be a little bit
of a different episode. We've talked about a lot of
the responses to the far right, sort of you know,
inter sort of direct actions and sort of confrontations. What
we haven't really done is talked about what can be
done electorally, and I do think that a significant portion

(01:09):
of the far right can be defanged and eventually defeated
through a series of things that are not particularly complicated.
But the problem is that defeating the far right means
going beyond simply trying to win every single election, which
is the current sort of democratic strategy. Right If you

(01:29):
want to actually defeat the far right, winning every election
is not a viable strategy. We've seen this fail already
with Hillary Clinton. We cannot rely on simply winning every
election into the future. You have to go beyond mere
electoral victory towards using your electoral victory to actually defeat
the base of the far right. When the Republican Party

(01:49):
held power for twelve years following the ascension of Ronald Reagan,
they did it by destroying the political base the Democratic Party.
They shattered America's trade unions and rebuilt the economy to
ens unions would no longer be able to provide the
ideological and financial support the Democrats had relied on. If
we are going to defeat the far right, we need
to wage the same kind of campaign against them now.

(02:12):
Luckily for us, unlike Ronald Reagan, We do not need
to completely rebuild the American economy to knock the legs
of the far right out from under them. There is,
in fact, a pretty minimal program that we can implement
to defeat the far right that is very simple. It
has three components. First, a crack down on MLMs that
drives them effectively completely underground.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yeah, by which we mean multi level marketing. For these
are period schemes, right, which are a major source of
funding for the fire right. I mean this is where
Trump comes out of, right, this is why he did
that fake university like, this is a big part of
his base. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:50):
Yeah, we're going to get more into that in a seconds.
The second, very important one is a regulatory overhaul of
how the FDA regulates supplements. Oh boy, which sounds like
it yeah, extremely technical and nerdy thing, but supplements are
another enormous cash spigot for the far right.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
Yeah, this is where Alex Jones and Joe Rogan get
their shit. Yeah, yep, yep.

Speaker 3 (03:10):
And the third is another kind of wonky change that
will be extremely important, which is making sure to allow
car companies to make direct sales to customers, thus undercutting
the enormous and extremely politically powerful base of right wing
American car dealership owners.

Speaker 2 (03:28):
Yeah, who donate more money to political causes than any
other career field in this country.

Speaker 3 (03:34):
Yeah. And you may not believe us yet just from
this sort of basic introduction, but these three simple reforms
EML and regulation, regulation of dietary supplements, and the direct
sales of cars will destroy so much of the financial
and political base of the far right that they will
at least temporarily and in the sort of mid range term,
becomes significantly less of a threat than they are now.

(03:56):
So we are going to start with MLMs. Yeah, as
Robert has sort of alluded to, MLMs are a very
very important political base for the far rights. I'm probably
the most famous and the one that Robert has done
an entire show on. So go listen to that if
you want to really actually in detailed thing on the
history of Amway. Amway and the sort of political family

(04:18):
the devices that they've generated are an incredibly important part
of the emerging far right. I mean, obviously, most famously
Betsy de Vos, who married into the Klan, was our
Secretary of Education under Trump. You know, the sort of
prince family is embedded into this and Amway famously used
its own internal communications to stump for Republican Party candidates

(04:42):
and also uses its base and also directly its own
funds to fund the Republican Party and a bunch of
Republican congressional candidates. Now, obviously, and this is something that
is true of all of these reforms, is that everything
we're doing here, they're morally and politically good in their
own right. Right, MLMs are scams, They're extremely exploitative, and

(05:03):
their role, I think in the far right is a
lot more important than people understand. Even if you just
look at the money, you're sort of missing part of
what's going on with MLMs. MLMs aren't just a cash spigot.
They're part of how the far right builds is ideological base.
MLMs teach you to convert all of your personal relations

(05:24):
into potential assets for sales. This is obviously evil on
a moral level, but it's also insidious on an ideological level.
The MLM logic of turning all of your most precious
relationships into sales vectors changes how you see the world.
And this is why Republican recruiting inside Amway works so well.
Once you've been trained that literally everything, even your sort

(05:46):
of closest friends and your dearest relationships with your family
are just business opportunities. It's extremely easy to convince you
of the rest of the Republican Party platform in the
same way the experience of being in a union and
organizing with your coworkers once reliably turned out the ideological
base of the left. MLMs have generated enormous political basis
for the right. And unfortunately, this sort of ideological threat

(06:09):
doesn't just go away if people are able to get
out of MLMs, or especially if you know they're sort
of cast out of the mlems because they've simply are
broken brand of money and are in debt. The isolation
and alienation that comes from pushing away, you know, every
single relation that's close to you, from attempting to sell
them soap or whatever, makes people isolated and alienated and

(06:30):
makes them more vulnerable to far right radicalization. And this
is why driving these MLMs under isn't just a way
to sort of cost Republican Party money, because that's not
enough to defeat the Republicans. They can find other sources
of money. What you need to do is systematically remove
parts of their political base. And when I say your

(06:53):
roofports to their political base. What I mean is you
have to go after the systems that are creating more
members of the or right. Going after MLMs is a
way to do that. Now. The FTC has gone after
m lms before. They sort of famously, as you talked
about in that episode and an m way, they went after
a bunch of MLMs in the eighties. But this sort

(07:14):
of caused MLMs to get smarter and has you know,
has been pretty effective in in sort of warding the
FTC off from really going after MLMs since then.

Speaker 2 (07:25):
Yeah, which is by the way, like another you were
just talking about how the way MLMs impact like the
minds of the people participating in them, like prepares them,
you know, for the far right. Yeah, the way in
which this this sense of impunity has developed among the
people who run and participate in these things due to
their capture of the legal system is also a part

(07:49):
of like why the far right works the way it does,
that sense of impunity.

Speaker 3 (07:53):
Yeah, And part of the reason why they have that
impunity is is just the way the FDC goes after
these companies, right, I mean, there was in the in
the mid twenty tens, the FTC went after neutral Light,
which is one of the biggest and oldest MLMs. But
the way they went after them was they issued them
a two hundred million dollar fine, and that's a lot
of money, but it didn't drive neutral Light out of business.
And as the anthropologist David Graeber pointed out, if government

(08:17):
regulation just means setting fines, and if the fines still
allow the business to make more money than they lost
from the fines, then that's just the government taking a cut.
It's not actual regulation. And if you're one of these
businesses and the worst that could happen to you is
the government takes a cut, you end up with, you know,
two thousand and eight right where all these banks know

(08:38):
they're going to get bailed out, and they know the
worst punishment that's going to happen to them is just
the government taking a small cut and they can go
back to just making all their money. So in order
to actually go after MLMs, we can't simply rely on
the FTC. You know, even if if you were to
sort of put in charge a more militant FTC that
was were willing to go after stuff, there needs to

(08:59):
be actual literary change here, and that is possible but difficult.
But if we actually want, if we're actually deeply serious
about wielding political power to defeat the far right and
to keep them from re emerging and to keep them
out of power generationally, then this is the start of
what we have to do. So we mentioned Neutralite, which is,

(09:20):
you know, a very very powerful MLM. Neutralite is important
because it is actually two kinds of business that are
extremely important to the far right. At the same time.
It is part MLM, but it is an MLM that
also sells dietary supplements. And when we come back from
these ads, we will be considering the role of the

(09:41):
virtually unregulated dietary supplement markets in the rise of the
far right more broadly, and we are back, oh boy, yeah,
the supplement market. There is a lot less that has

(10:02):
been written about this, then there should be. So dietary
supplements are barely regulated by the FDA. People are getting
scammed all over the place enormous numbers. I mean, I've
seen numbers that we're suggesting. I mean two hundred million
people take some kind of dietary supplement if you include
things like sort of vitamin gummyes et cetera, et cetera.
This is an enormous this is an enormous business. I'm

(10:25):
going to read from Johnny R. Starr, who wrote an
article about supplement regulation in the American Journal of Public Health.
If you're going to read this, By the way, this
is slightly out of date, because the next year, I
don't know if this is part of this. The next
year at FDC a little bit overhauled their supplement regulations.
But here is star quote the Dietary Supplement Health and

(10:46):
Education Act, which is the big thing that sort of
deregulated supplements, prohibit supplements that pose a substantial risk of injury,
allows the Secretary of Health and Human Services to issue
immediate bands on substances that are imminent hazards, and authorizes
the FDA to implement current good manufacturing practice guidelines. The
law also requires pre market notification for new dietary supplements

(11:09):
defined supplements that were not marketed in the US before
October fifteenth, nineteen forty four, which is when the Dietary
Supplement Health Education Act went into effect. Products violating these
regulations are deemed dangerous, adulterated, and misbranded, are otherwise unlawful.
And that all sounds well and good until you get
to the next sentence, which is quote, However, supplements need
not be evaluated for efficiency, and only limited data on

(11:32):
safety are required for new supplement ingredients.

Speaker 4 (11:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (11:36):
So, like you're not supposed to let people sell dangerous supplements,
but we're all also not supposed to check to make
sure the supplements are safe or work.

Speaker 3 (11:44):
Yeah. Yeah, it as the FDA itself admits that even
the little tiny notifications for things like new ingredients that
the fa in posts of twenty sixteen, you're supposed to
notify the FADA if you put new ingredients. But like,
even that just isn't happening. These companies just don't care.
They're just not either not even like doing the little
tidy legal mandate stuff they're required to.

Speaker 2 (12:05):
I should also note a large part of the blame
for particularly the supplements, but also I mean MLMs, actually
they play a role in it too. It's the state
of Utah.

Speaker 3 (12:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:14):
By the way, a political power of the state of
Utah is a huge part of why, because supplements are
a massive fucking industry in Utah. So are MLMs. So,
by the way, our team treatment facilities, the ones where
they like kidnap your children and torture them. These are
all things that the state of Utah in specific will
fight like hell to stop from being fixed in any way,

(12:37):
shape or for.

Speaker 3 (12:38):
Yeah, and that bill I keep talking about the Dietary
Supplement Health Education Act, That is the baby of Utah
Senator or In Hatch, who is a terrible right wing
force in American politics. And the fact that orin Hatch
has been this effective and the fact that Utah serves
as such a powerful base here demonstrate something that's important
about this political strategy, which is that it has to

(12:59):
be a federal level political strategy because there are a
lot of states Republicans effectively have strangleholds. You need to
use the federal government to bypass the unbelievable block of
sort of political power in these states. I want to
read a little bit more from that article by Star
about what kind of regulations are required for supplements, because
I think it's extremely dire in and of itself. Quote,

(13:23):
manufacturers are not required to confirm the identity of all
ingredients supply to them.

Speaker 2 (13:28):
Sure why they need to do that?

Speaker 3 (13:32):
Unbelievable, And they're not required to follow up river how
I talked about there's current good manufacturing Practices guidelines. Following
those guidelines does not guarantee the absence of all contabinants. Moreover,
unlike drugs which are considered unadulterated or misbranded, if they
do not achieve compliance with national standards set by US

(13:52):
Pharmacopeia and National formulary, dietary supplements may choose to be compliant.
Only six brands of dietary supplements are currently verified by
US Pharmacopeia, so they don't have to work. They can
choose whether or not they want to be submitted to
see if any of this stuff works. Now in theory, also,

(14:14):
the marketing of dietary settlements is supposed to be regulated
by the FDC, But like is the FDC regulating you
know all of these false claims people are making with
the dietary slelements. No, of course they're not doing that.
So why do we care about supplement market Robert has
kind of has talked about this at the very beginning
of the episode. The easiest answer for why we should
care about supplement markets is simply the figure of Alex Jones,

(14:37):
who you know, we have talked about extensively on this show.
It's been behind the masters. If you want to really,
really in depth look at who Alex Jones is. The
podcast Knowledge Fight is the single best resource I think
anyone has ever created.

Speaker 2 (14:50):
Yeah, it would be hard to beat.

Speaker 3 (14:53):
Yeah, it's it's unbelievably detailed. But Alex Jones has, you know,
as an individual figure, has done more or to sort
of spread the ideology the far right and turn this
country into what it is now then maybe almost any
other single person other than someone like Trump. Right, he
is probably most well known now as quote the Sandy

(15:13):
Hook guy, which he's extremely mad at people calling him,
but he's why everyone thinks that not everyone, but a
bunch of people think that Sandy Hook was a false flag.
And importantly, here's from NPR quote most of Free Speech Systems,
which is Alex Jones, the corporate name for Alex Jones' company.
Most of Free Speech System's revenue to this day, about

(15:34):
eighty percent comes from dietary supplements, according to court records. Now,
these court records come from one of a number of
lawsuits against Alex Jones for defaming the families of the
victims of the Alex Jones shooting. Are we certain for
defaming the victims of Sandy Hook shooting. Sorry, yeah, yeah.

(15:56):
And you know, in the process of discovery, we got
a bunch of information about how how Alex Jones's internal
media empire actually works. Now, if you followed Alex Jones
over the years, you know that he's hawked everything from
silver to satellite phones. But it is the dietary supplements
that actually sell right As an MPR article said, about

(16:17):
eighty percent of his revenue comes from dietary supplements. And
this is not a sort of small independent media outlet,
right free speech systems. Again, as Alex Jones' company was
worth hundreds of millions of dollars, this is an enormous
for right media empire, and supplement sales allow right wing
figures like Alex Jones to bypass the reliance on ads,

(16:39):
which removes a lot of potential leverage from activist groups
who wage pressure campaigns against you know, dated this against
Tucker Carlson for example, where people went after their advertisers
and showed them the stuff Tucker Carlson was saying on
Fox before he got kicked off and what do you
want to fund this? And you know that was actually
a sort of effective strategy. But you know, the any

(17:00):
part about this is if you look at the end
of Tucker Carlson's show, right, the ads on that show
were ads from the MyPillow guy, who is a far
right extremist in his own right and a very important
election denier, and a bunch of supplement companies. Supplement sales
are a durable and renewable grift because there's already an

(17:22):
extensive network of suppliers and distributors. Right wing brands who
want to make a bunch of money can just sort
of slap their name onto existing supplements that they buy wholesale,
and then they can market them to their viewers, and
this gives them an extremely profitable and lucrative source of funding.
And this is used all over the place right.

Speaker 2 (17:41):
Again, it impacts what they say and like how they
like the obsession they have with like seed oils and
what's destroying your ability, like your testosterone and all of
these like different far right conspiracy theories about you know,
what kind of stuff you shouldn't be eating, Like all
of this stuff is related to the supplement business, right,

(18:02):
Like they are trying to drum up and destroy trust
and public health and drum up conspiracy theories for their
own profit and so it's not just a matter of
like this is how they get money, but this also
is why they do some of the things that are
so harmful.

Speaker 3 (18:16):
Yeah, and as you're saying, this is cyclical, right, the
incentive structure for going further and further into these conspiracies
and selling more and more of the supplement things, it's
a spiral. It it keeps on just increasing in size
and increasing in size due to the feedback loop from
the incentive structure that's selling these supplements creates. Now, this

(18:37):
is actually not an enormously difficult sort of feel to
just completely shut down the next branch we're going to
talk about, I think is actually a much harder political fight,
But a lot of the market for this can be
defeated by just having the FTC actually regulate supplements the
way they do drugs because and this is really important,

(18:57):
these supplements are being marketed as a drugs, right. The
advertisements that these people are already doing are already illegal.
The FTC is not supposed to allow people to sell
supplements like this. They shouldn't be able to be manufactured
like this. And this is again as with banning MLMs,
this is something that helps the consumer because it'll mean
that whatever supplement market exists after sort of a massive

(19:20):
regulatory sweep and crackdown will be much safer, it will
be much more effective, and it will also destroy the
base of far right media. If you can cut the
knees out of this sort of far right media ecosystem,
you can go an enormous way towards solving the crisis
of the far right that has been brought upon this country.

Speaker 2 (19:40):
Speaking of crisis.

Speaker 3 (19:42):
Yeah, we're gonna let the ads talk about the ads,
and then we're gonna come back and close by talking
about car manufacturers in the American gentry.

Speaker 2 (19:49):
Yeah, you're back. And this is a fun one. This
is also like one of my particular favorite things to
hit because I don't think a lot of people know
how much the Republican Party is just a party of

(20:11):
used car dealers YEP.

Speaker 3 (20:13):
Probably the most famous piece that talks it's not really
fully about car dealerships, but it mentions their sort of
political effect and the kind of class that they belong to.
Is maybe the best thing The Atlantic has published in
the last decade, at least one of the best things
they've published, and it's an article on the American gentry
by the by the journalist Patrick Wyman. Wyman argues that

(20:36):
huge swaths of America are ruled by what he calls
the local gentry. These are millionaires, and notably, these are
not billionaires. These are multi multimillionaires whose wealth derives from
immediate wealth extraction from the surrounding communities. In places like
wyman childhood home of Yakima, Washington, these elites have enormous
local power over the territory. They rule like the landed

(20:58):
gentry of old Wyman quote the conspicuously consuming celebrities and
jet setting cause of politans, if popular imagination exists, But
they are far outnumbered by a less exalted and less
discussed elite group, one that sits at the pinnacle of
the local hierarchies that govern life for tens of millions
of people. Donald Trump grasped this group's existence and its importance,

(21:21):
acting as he often does, on unthinking but effective instinct,
when he crowed about his quote beautiful boters, lauding the
flotilla of his supporters trailing MAGA flags from their watercraft
in his honor, or addressed his devoted followers among a
rioting January sixth crowd that included people who had flown
to the event on private jets. He knew what he

(21:43):
was doing. Trump was courting the support of the American gentry,
the salts of the earth, multimillionaires. You see them as
local leaders in business and politics, the underappreciated backbone of
a once great nation. Now Wyman is largely focused on
the agricultural gentry, because that's you know, the sort the
sort of agrobarons who are very important to this story,

(22:05):
but are are kind of are are kind of auxiliary
to this and that you know, that's largely because he's
talking a lot about the places where he grew up,
which are which are agricultural hubs. But a very critical
component of this American gentry, of this local elite class
are car dealership owners, and their wealth and influence literally
cannot be overstated. The journalist Alexander Salmon wrote this in

(22:28):
an article in Slate in twenty twenty three. Quote auto
dealers are one of the five most common professions among
the top point one percent of American earners. Car dealers,
gas station owners, and building contractors. It turns out, make
up the majority of the countries one hundred and forty
thousand Americans who earn more than one point five million
dollars a year. Crunching numbers from the US Census Bureau, data,

(22:51):
scientists and author Stephens Devotowitz found that over twenty percent
of car dealerships in the US have an owner in
banking more than one point five million a year, which
is absolutely absurd. That is, that is an unbelievable amount
of money for people who really, when you think about it,
don't do anything, like what is the actual service that
a car dealer is do?

Speaker 2 (23:13):
I mean the primary thing that they do is rip
people off, because there the entire way that car sales
work is based on fraud yep, right, Like it's based
on getting you to buy things that do not actually work,
like service packages and whatnot that you often will not
get any benefit from. And it's a lot of it

(23:33):
is based around also just outright scams, you know, altering
the information buyers have access to so they don't realize
like problems with a used car or whatever. Like it's
it's all fraud, right.

Speaker 3 (23:45):
Yeah, And as as is becoming ever true of American life, fraudsters,
scammers and people who are just their entire existence is
dedicated to ripping you off have more and more political
power in this country. Here's a salmon from that same
article quote. As of twenty twenty one, the top one
hundred dealership groups in the US had annual revenues of

(24:06):
around one hundred billion dollars, more than any company that
actually makes cars. The National Automotive Dealer Association NADA became
one of the most influential lobbying entities in Washington, with
sixteen thousand dues paying members spanning thirty two thousand, five
hundred franchises. Soon enough, a stop at the annual NADA

(24:27):
convention became routine for presidential hall fulls, and even Presidents
Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Hillary Clinton all attended
ahead of presidential runs. Bill Clinton and both Bushes came
after they left the White House. And the fact that
Democrats are showing up to this is appalling on a
moral level. Right, this is an entire organization of fraudsters,

(24:48):
and it doesn't even work.

Speaker 2 (24:50):
Right.

Speaker 3 (24:50):
Car dealers donate six to one for Republican causes, but.

Speaker 2 (24:53):
They really want that one. Yeah, it's the same thing
with like you've got Schumer going out for the crypto
Caucus now where Yeah, well, only a fraction of those
guys are going to donate to DIMS, but it's all scam.
He doesn't really care as long as some of it
goes to him. Yeah yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:09):
Now. The thing that's that's dangerous about these people, and
I think it's even more dangerous than something like crypto money,
is that these are local elites, right, and they are
dispersed enormously across the country. This is something that Salmon
is very sort of specific about, and something that comes
up in Wyman's piece, and somebody comes up if you
do any research about this at all. A huge part

(25:29):
of the power is because these people are spread geographically
across the country, and because they are the richest people
or among the richest people in the sort of small
areas that they dominate, they have unbelievable amounts of political power.
And because they are again unbelievably wealthy, they can funnel
this money directly into local politics on a scale that

(25:50):
cannot be matched by your sort of grassroots organizations. This
allows them to buy everything from city council's to seats
in Congress, and.

Speaker 2 (25:57):
They effectively unionize like and they've got the Portland Business
Association right, which is to a significant extent, allied with
the police and like dominates local politics. They're the ones
who buy the mayor's election, like they're the ones who
you know, make deals with the Portland Police Officers union.
Like this is this is the way in which a

(26:19):
lot of power gets exercise that actually impacts your daily life.

Speaker 3 (26:25):
Yeah, and they've also been doing things like like coordinating
and doing strategy sharing about defeating unions. But I mean,
this is why most of these big associations were formed,
was specifically to destroy unions in the early twentieth century.
And you know, I mean the Autolobbying Group was formed
to do autolobbying because these car dealerships don't have unions.
That's another thing that we'll come back to it a

(26:45):
little bit. But yeah, these car dealerships are a durable
and extremely powerful force in electoral politics, and they deliver
seats and this is the most important thing if you're
an electoralist. Right, these people consistently deliver cease to Republicans
by flooding an amount of money into local races that
people can't compete with. And because of this, they miserate
the lives of hundreds of millions of people, and they

(27:07):
can also largely be destroyed in a single stroke. That's
maybe oversalling it a little bit, but their power largely
rests on an enormous array of state level monopolies that
ban the direct sales of cars to consumers or prevent
car companies from competing with local retailers. And this is
something that the autolobby has been you know, the auto

(27:28):
association lobby not has been fighting for for ages. They've
gotten it in an enormous number of states.

Speaker 2 (27:34):
Yeah, and this, by the way, you know, in terms
of abilities to like disrupt things, this is a big
part of like how Tesla is different from other auto
manufacturers is in most states. There are some states where
they're not allowed to do this, but in most states
they sell directly to the customer, which is like back
before Musk became as political a figure, was actually a
major reason why these people didn't like him.

Speaker 3 (27:55):
Well, they still don't. This is actually a really interesting thing,
is what the thing I want to close on here? Yes, yes, yes,
these people still hate Musk and they hate electric cars
because electric cars, to a large extent, are both a
being directly sold by companies and B it's harder to
you actually have to do service on them in a
way that makes it more expensive for these these companies

(28:16):
to write about this. This is something that Salmon has
written about extensively, so they absolutely despise electric cars. And
this is actually a political opportunity for us, right because
Elon Musk now is again one of there is I
think he's still the richest person in the world technically
until sort of all his stocks implode. But this is
an opportunity also to split parts of the Republican base

(28:37):
right because the local government monopolies that these car dealers
have are actually enormously unpopular among a lot of the
other parts of the Republican base right. Elon hates them.
Actual car manufacturers hate it. No one likes car dealers, like,
oh yeah, and this is everything you know. This is
also something that libertarians hate because libertarians look at this,

(28:59):
and this is one of the few times libertarians are right.
They look at this and go, oh yeah, well, these
people have been literally granted market monopolies. There are a
lot of places where if there's already a car dealer there,
if you're a car company, you can't compete with these things.
So these are state sanction monopolies. So there's large portions
of the Republican base who oppose these companies, and if
you can use this as a wedge issue to split

(29:22):
the Republican base, and that's sort of where I want
to close on. As much as I've been talking about
these three very specific things, right banning MLMs or at
least having extremely large regulatory crackdowns, regulatory crackdowns on supplements,
and legislation to allow direct car sales. What we're trying
to do here isn't just getting rid of the money

(29:43):
that supports the far right. We're trying to destroy their
institutions and we're trying to fracture their base, right. Going
after MLMs destroys their ability to sort of produce more
produce more Republicans from these MLMs and produce more people
in the far right from these MLMs. Going after supplements
is a way to destroy the right wing media ecosystem,
which has been crucial to the rise of the far right.

(30:03):
And going after cars can help split the emerging Republican
coalition by you know, pitting two parts of the Republican
base against each other, pitting these car dealers versus Elon
and versus the auto manufacturers.

Speaker 2 (30:14):
Well, Mia, great episode, This is a nice starter. This
is again something we're going to continue to talk about
because I really think we can't hit enough on this. Obviously,
these three things don't solve every problem with the far right,
but this is like, if you get actually like packaged
these together into a legislative agenda, it could be the

(30:35):
equivalent of like the nuclear option for these people. So yeah, yeah,
I think this is a smart thing to be hitting.
We will continue to talk about this in more detail,
but you know what, we're done for the day, Go
do something else.

Speaker 5 (31:10):
I'm Stephen Monticelli, a journalist in Dallas who covers political
extremism in Texas.

Speaker 6 (31:16):
I'm Michael Phillips, an historian who wrote a history of
racism in Dallas called White Metropolis. Both of us grew
up in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas, and for both
of us our home state has been a matter of
both wonder and horrified fascination. In this episode of It
Could Happen Here, we're going to try to explain Texas

(31:37):
culture and politics and why the country and the world
should care. Spoiler alert, what happens in Texas doesn't stay
in Texas, the state has always had a disproportionate impact
on national politics. The annexation of Texas in eighteen forty
five provoked the Mexican American War. From eighteen forty six
to eighteen forty eight, the United States I have two

(32:00):
thirds of Mexico's territory, and there was an ugly and
bitter fight over the status of slavery in all that
new land the United States acquired. That's going to turn
out to be one of the major causes of the
Civil War, a conflict that resulted in the liberation of
four million African Americans from slavery, but also the death

(32:21):
of three quarters of a million Americans. Texas also was
the epicenter of the Populist Movement, a leftist movement largely
based in Texas that actually challenged the power of the
Democratic Party in the South. And if the Populist Party
had succeeded everything else happened in America in the twentieth

(32:41):
century in terms of Jim Crow, lynching, the Clan, etc.
May have had a very different outcome.

Speaker 5 (32:48):
Slavery didn't end in Texas until June nineteenth, eighteen sixty five,
months after it had ended in the rest of the country.
It's a state that today is the second most pot
peoalists say in the nation, and it's the eighth largest
economy in the world. Two of the most consequential presidents
over the last sixty years hailed from the Lone Star State.

(33:10):
There was Democrat Lyndon Johnson, who brought the country not
only Medicare and Medicaid, but the nineteen sixty four Civil
Rights Act and the nineteen sixty five Voting Rights Act,
two issues that the right wing continue to fight against
to this day. Those laws made African Americans perhaps the
most important constituency in the Democratic Party. Racist backlash to

(33:32):
johnson civil rights legislation, urban uprisings in places like the
Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles, and white flight generally led
segregationists and their children in the South, who had been
loyal Democratic voters to switch allegiance to the Republican Party.
Over the next three decades, another Texas president, Republican George W.

Speaker 3 (33:51):
Bush.

Speaker 5 (33:52):
He aggressively embraced homophobia, tightened the ties between the Republican
Party and the most right wing Christians in the country,
and made denial of climate change strict.

Speaker 7 (34:00):
Gope orthodoxy.

Speaker 5 (34:02):
Of course, the Bush family's oil wealth was central to
their rise to power, and broadly speaking, the wealth of
right wing oil barons in Texas has helped push the
Republican Party further and further to the right, in no
small part due to a particular belief in a particular
strain of Christianity, which we'll get to later in this episode.

Speaker 6 (34:22):
Bush's response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon on September eleventh led to the
rise of the modern surveillance state and the two longest
wars in American history, both of them disastrous failures. The
combination of white backlash to the LBJ era civil rights initiatives,

(34:43):
the intense religiosity of the Bush era and the Republican
Party in that time period, and the sense of the
United States was a declining power unable to impose its
will on Afghanistan and Iraq opened the door of the
Donald Trump's ascendancy. In short, two Texas presidents played a
major role in making the Democratic Party vastly more diverse,

(35:06):
more urban based, and more mainstream liberal, and the Republican
Party more white, more right wing, more isolationists, and far
more fundamentalists and skeptical science.

Speaker 5 (35:19):
Texas has been in the national news frequently in recent years,
and often for the worst reasons. It's become famous and
infamous for its wide open gun laws and several of
the worst mass shootings in American history, including at an
army base in Killeen, a Walmart and al Paso, and
an outlet mall in Allen. Draconian abortion laws allow complete

(35:42):
strangers to sue women who go out of state and
their pregnancy, and new laws are being considered to prevent
women from traveling through particular counties on highways who if
they are seeking abortion, you know they could be arrested
for basically trying to leave the state to seek an abortion.

Speaker 6 (35:59):
In the last three year years in the state, a
group of teachers in the Southflex School District in the
Dallas Fort Worth area were instructed to tell quote both
sides of the Holocaust in order to not run a
foul of the legislature's ban on critical race theory. A
beloved teacher, Nerving, was fire for displaying a rainbow sticker
in our classroom as a sign of support for LGBTQ students.

(36:22):
The first ever African American high school principal at Heritage
High and yet another Dallas suburb, Colleyville, was forced from
his job when he sent an email to his high
school community after the murder of George Floyd that acknowledged
existence of systemic racism in the United States.

Speaker 5 (36:39):
So I think you could maybe pick up on a
trend here in Texas that our fundamental rights like free
speech are under threat, particularly if you run a foul
of the orthodoxy that comes out of the Republican Party.
And one target of that orthodoxy has been books. All

(37:00):
across this nation, we've seen dust ups over books in schools,
books and libraries, and Texas has.

Speaker 7 (37:08):
Been one of the.

Speaker 5 (37:10):
Main flashpoints of this fight. So the literary organization pen
America reports that Texas and Florida lead the nation in
book bands at public schools, with more than fifteen hundred
books banned in the state of Texas. Most of those
books deal with issues like racism or LGBTQ experience, and

(37:32):
one deputy constable in Granbury, a suburb near Dallas Fort Worth,
even spent two years investigating three librarians on alleged felony
charges of providing so called harmful materials to miners. Simply
because they allowed miners to access acclaimed books like The

(37:52):
Bluest Eye by Tony Morrison. According to an investigation by
NBC News, the law enforcement officer Scott London was a
member of the extremist Oathkeepers organization. He subpoened names of
young readers who checked out supposedly objectable material, and he
even secretly recorded his conversations with the librarians who drew

(38:14):
his unwonted attention. The investigative report that came out of
this investigation into so called harmful materials was eight hundred
and twenty four pages long, and no charges were ever filed.
But nonetheless a lot of people's lives were made difficult
and a bunch of books have been taken off the shelves.

Speaker 6 (38:37):
So, as we mentioned, Texas has been on the cutting
edge of right wing politics and America on issues like abortion,
the treatment of trans children, and on immigration particular. Texas
has modeled the Republican attitude on newcomers and migrants and

(38:58):
policies towards them. The state k Governor Greg Abbott essentially
tried to establish his own independent border policy, even though
the constitution makes that the responsibility of the federal government.
Texas so far has built thirty four miles of a
wall Abbot valves will eventually extend along the entirety of
texas twelve hundred and fifty four mile international border with Mexico.

(39:23):
One estimate says that project, if it were completed, would
take thirty years and cost twenty billion dollars. The State
of Texas has placed Buoy's entangled with razor wire in
the Rio Grande River near Eagle Pass, a border town
that's a major crossing point for migrants fleeing the violence

(39:43):
and economic hardship in Central America, Venezuela and the rest
of Latin America.

Speaker 5 (39:49):
One of Governor Abbot's border initiatives, Operation Loan Star, has
flooded the border with hundreds of law enforcement agents and
has touted thousands of arrests. But it's also eleven billion
dollars and it's unclear what it's really done in terms
of making the state safer. Texas insists, through statements from

(40:11):
people like Greg Abbott, that immigrants are dangerous and that
they are flooding our streets with crime, never mind the
fact that studies indicate that immigrants are far less likely
to commit crimes. On average, these initiatives have been deadly.
In August twenty twenty three, a buoy trapped a twenty
year old in Durham and a small child, causing them

(40:33):
both to drown. The Texas border patrols El Paso sector
has become one of the deadliest areas of the border here,
with one hundred and forty nine immigrants dying over a
twelve month period between twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three. Recently,
on a podcast, Abbot expressed regret that Texas has been
unable to shoot immigrants who are attempting to enter Texas

(40:54):
by crossing the Rio Grant and has complained that the
Biden administration might file murder charges against border regions if
such lethal force was used.

Speaker 3 (41:02):
And the only thing that we're not doing is we're
not shooting people who come across the border.

Speaker 8 (41:08):
Because of course the Biden administration with charges with murder.

Speaker 6 (41:12):
One of the issues about immigration is a panic amongst
the Anglos living in the state that white people will
become a shrinking and less politically powerful minority, and this
connects to the issue of abortion. Throughout the history of
abortion laws in Texas, there's been a discussion of whether

(41:33):
or not white Texans were committing what they said in
the early twentieth century was so called Reese suicide, a
real panic that black and brown people would eventually out
number whites and would seize political control of the state.
And this is tied to the abortion issue because throughout
the history of abortion laws in America and in Texas,

(41:54):
there's been a concern that white women are having abortions
and that really fuel some of the extremism in how
Texas has approached this issue. Twenty twenty two, this state
legislature passed the law that would allow a third party
to sue anyone who helped a woman getting an abortion,
although the courts have so far blocked enforcement of that law,

(42:18):
called Senate Bill eight. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton meanwhile
has addressed another issue dealing with trans children, and again,
trans children, if they're white, would be out of the
reproductive demographic race that panics white racist in the state.
He has tried to force doctors and other states to

(42:39):
provide medical information on young people receiving gender affirming care
outside of Texas and the parents are trans children in
Texas have been investigated for child abuse in each case,
these extreme laws have been discussed, in some cases imitated
in other Red states.

Speaker 5 (42:59):
On the one hand, we've got anxieties about immigrants allegedly
replacing the white race rhetoric that has been repeated by
people as high up as Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who
has said that immigrants are trying to take over our
country without firing a shot. This is something that people

(43:20):
like the Hitler admirer Nick Fuentes, who has met with
a high ranking and influential Republican consultant who works for
one of the largest political donors in the country, he
believes that sort of rhetoric and pushes it. On the
other hand, we've got the issue with LGBTQ issues in general.

(43:41):
We've seen books being taken off the shelves as we've
previously mentioned. We've seen rights taken away from students with
regard to their access to bathrooms. We have seen, as
doctor Phillips mentioned, the targeting of parents, and a lot
of this comes from this anxiety that students are being
groomed into becoming LGBTQ in public schools, in public libraries,

(44:06):
and other settings. The idea being that yes, they're trying
to turn your kids gay. That's what they're saying, and
so of course they're going to be extremely upset about
any shrinking demographic numbers among the white population, or a
growing acceptance of queerness or people being transgender, and so

(44:29):
much of that is rooted in religious belief. But all
of this it matters in a bigger perspective, and I
think we can understand why some of this is so
prevalent in Texas through the lens of Texas's importance to
national politics.

Speaker 6 (44:46):
Texas counts for forty of two hundred and seventy votes
needed to win the electoral College. Only California has more
electoral College votes, and the Republican Party has been able
to rel lie on winning every single presidential election in
the state since nineteen eighty. If Texas should ever flip politically,

(45:09):
it'd be hard to see how the Republicans could ever
win the White House again. And it always seems like
Texas is just on the verge of flipping blue.

Speaker 7 (45:19):
Right.

Speaker 5 (45:20):
There's there's been a lot of talk for a long
time about this pending demographic revolution, the idea that eventually,
you know, the numbers are just baked in and that
Republicans will no longer control the state. So let's look
at some of those numbers. So Tejanos or people of
Latino Hispanic descent, make up more than forty percent of

(45:40):
the state's population, so they're the largest single population group.
Non Whites account for sixty percent of all Texans, and
as a group, they vote mostly for Democrats, and they
control most of the state's largest cities in terms of
political dominance. But because of low voter turnout among people
of color, laws that intentionally make registering to vote harder,

(46:01):
making voting itself even more difficult, gerrymandering, and the general
feebleness of the Democratic Party in the state, the state
has remained in control of a very conservative, very white
Republican minority for three decades. In Texas, every major city
is blue except for one, and that's Fort Worth, which

(46:23):
is in a place called Tarrant County. And I think
it is not a coincidence that the largest, flashiest conflicts
have often been in Tarrant County when it comes to
things like schools, when it comes to things like books. Colleyville,
as we previously mentioned, is in Tarrn County. If you've
ever heard of the name South Lake, that's a town

(46:45):
in Tarrant County. There are numerous national articles about issues
that have emerged from this one single stronghold of Republican
power in the state, which if it were to fall,
would pretend great changes not just for the politics in
the state of Texas, but perhaps even the nation.

Speaker 6 (47:07):
It's been remarkable because school board meetings used to be
really dull and talking. You used to talk about boundaries
for particular campuses, you know which students are going to
tend which class. But now over the last few years,
very often they've been scenes of screaming, matches, threats, and
so on. Texas in many ways has become a laboratory

(47:30):
of autocracy, and again it's a model for other states
that have a right wing political leadership. For instance, the
Texas Republican Party platform adopted this year called for changes
in the way statewide officials like governor would be elected,

(47:51):
and essentially, the Republican Party called for creating a local
version of the electoral college. Under these proposed changes, a
candidate for governor, lieutenant governor, all the down ballot statewide
offices could win the popular vote and still lose the
election unless they carry a majority of the two hundred

(48:13):
and fifty four counties in the state, most of which
are very white, very conservative, very fundamentalist. If this became law,
the proposal would guarantee permanent Republican rule in the state,
and as I said, other Republican states are looking at
this proposal. It hasn't been proposed as legislation, but that

(48:35):
would really end any pretense of democracy because most people
in Texas live in cities like the rest of the
United States. Another way that Republicans have maintained their grip
on the state is by waging a never ending culture
war centered on matters of faith. So if you really

(48:56):
want to understand Texas, its culture, and its politics, you
can't avoid a discussion of religion. You have to dive
into a one particular type of Christianity. We've already referred to.
This interpretation of the Bible motivates right wing voters and
the vast rural sections of the state and the outer
suburbs and the major cities. It's disproportionately molded the state's

(49:21):
laws and attitudes where its African Americans, immigrants, and the
people we've talked about women, gay and trans people, and
also non Christians like Jews and Muslims.

Speaker 5 (49:32):
If you trap the sort of issues that are being
discussed by the Republican Party of Texas and you look back,
say to the time of George H. W. Bush, and
you look to now, it will be very clear to
you that the topics have changed. The sort of things
that they talk about. It's less about low taxes, it's
less about being business friendly, it's less about letting you

(49:55):
do what you want in your personal life, and it's
much more about imposing a particular religious viewpoint on others
through policy. And the most vocal, perhaps one of the
most highly organized and certainly flush with funds, sect of

(50:17):
Christianity that is, you know, driving this is this group
of Christian fundamentalists that religious scholars broadly describe as dispensationalists.
So what's a dispensationalist. It's a fancy word for someone
who believes that we are living in the end times.
The end times being this idea that at any moment
now all true Christians will be wisked up into the

(50:41):
clouds in an event called the Rapture, that an embodiment
of Satan called the Antichrist will take over the world
and try to destroy Israel. And you know, all of
this is, you know, presaging the final judgment, you know,
the day when the Lord Jesus comes down and he
basically decides who's done well, who's done bad, and that

(51:01):
settles it for all eternity.

Speaker 6 (51:04):
This particular strain of fundamentalism in Texas culture and politics
has a profound impact on global politics. The dispensationalists are
certain World War three is going to consume the planet.
They believe there's going to be a final battle between

(51:25):
good and evil called the Battle of Armageddon. And they
believe this, and this is significant. They believe that Jesus
Christ will come back specifically to stop World War three
for a particular purpose. He's going to come to prevent
the destruction of all remaining Jewish people on the planet.

(51:47):
And they believe that millions of Jewish people are going
to die, those who survive are going to convert to Christianity,
and when Jesus returns, he will establish what's essentially a
divine dictatorship that will be a time of perfect peace
and harmony, called the Millennium.

Speaker 5 (52:05):
Texans have played a major role in popularizing dispensationalism and
its doom day theology both in modern times but also historically,
one Texas writer named Michael Ennis once called the city
of Dallas the Athens of the Apocalypse, and in the
late twentieth century, predicting the end of the world was

(52:26):
a lucrative business. So there was a theological center here
in Dallas that was one of the most influential groups
when it came to originating and promoting.

Speaker 7 (52:42):
This idea of the end times.

Speaker 5 (52:44):
And it also has to do with one gentleman named
Cyrus Scofield. But before we talk about Cyrus Schofield, a
quick ad break.

Speaker 6 (53:05):
What happened was there's this member, a convert to the
Congregationalist church who came from Kansas. He had been a
politician in Kansas who had to leave office because he
was accused of accepting bribes. He later said he was
struggling with alcoholism at the time. His name is Cyrus Schofield,

(53:28):
and he converts to Christianity and he's invited to head
this Congregationalist church that has a tiny congregation in Dallas, Texas.
And when he gets here, he brings this dispensationalism he's
learned from other evangelists and he's a modernizer. He has

(53:51):
adult education classes correspondents courses on the Bible, and eventually
he produces something published in nineteen oh nine called the
Schofield Reference Bible that basically is the King James Bible

(54:12):
with footnotes that he and his co editors have put
together where they say, these strange verses in the Book
of Daniel, in the Book of Revelation that refer to
beast with seven heads and ten horns, and you know,
these other strange creatures, and this highly symbolic language has

(54:33):
a very literal, obvious meaning, and that is the return
of Jewish people to the state of Israel, and how
that marks the beginning of the end.

Speaker 5 (54:45):
So the Schofield Reference Bible extremely popular when it comes out.
It was so popular it didn't save effectively the Oxford
University Press from going.

Speaker 6 (54:57):
Yeah under during the Great Depression. That was very much
a possibility that Oxford University Press would go under. And
Schofield was lucky in some ways that you could put
it that way because the Reference Bible comes out in
nineteen oh nine, and four years later, what was at

(55:19):
that point the most catastrophic war in human history, World
War One, breaks out with a level of death and
technology that was unprecedented in its destructiveness. Then the depression happens.
You have the rise of these fascist dictators, and there's
a sense that the world as we knew it was collapsing.

(55:42):
Capitalism might collapse, you know, you might have communists takeover,
you might have fascist takeover. And then of course World
War Two, and then finally the thing that really makes
Schofield seem like he was onto something in terms of
his Biblical interpretation. And this particular interpretation had been around

(56:05):
in certain variants for centuries and centuries, but it had
always been a minority view. But what really made it
seem like Schofield was onto something was nineteen forty eight
when the State of Israel is established, the modern state
of Israel. Because he had been saying this would happen,

(56:26):
this would be the sign of the end. It becomes
the point where a lot of churches ministers are measured
by the degree to which they promote Scofieldism, and Protestant
churches ministers get fired if they don't begin to talk
about the end times.

Speaker 5 (56:43):
Schofield kind of won the lottery with timing, and you
can imagine a world maybe where the Schofield Bible didn't
take off.

Speaker 6 (56:50):
Because it hadn't come out at that time that it
did now one of Schofield's acolytes separated by several decades.
Schofield had been dead for a long time. When you
have a student at the Dallas Theological Seminary, name how Lindsay,
who had been a tugboat captain, he is attending this

(57:14):
particular school, Dallas Theological Seminary had actually been established in
the nineteen twenties by allies associates of Cyrus Schofield. It
had been a center of the study of Biblical prophecy.
And basically Lindsay's a student, and a lot of his
peers said, basically he took his class notes and turned

(57:37):
into a book and his real effort. He had been
a leader in the campus Crusade for Christ, which was
an evangelical group that was trying to fight the counterculture hippies,
LSD and so on, and so he had that experience
and he brought it into the writing of a best
selling book called The Late Great Planet Earth. And The

(58:00):
Late Great Planet Earth is written in the language of
the time. He tries to use hippie type of lingo
in to catch on with the youth culture and it's
his timing, just like Schofields is great. This is a
time where there's an obsession with hidden knowledge. You have
really popular books selling about the lost continent of Atlantis UFOs,

(58:26):
the phenomena supposedly a spontaneous human combustion. Did ancient aliens
build the Pyramids? And if you went to a convenience
store or a store department store, you might find racks
of paper books with all this hidden knowledge. And people
believed that there was something hidden because of Watergate and

(58:47):
because of Vietnam, and so this became a phenomenal seller.
It was the best selling quote unquote nonfiction book of
the nineteen seventies. It later got made into a pseudo
documentary that was narrated by the movie star Orson Wells.

Speaker 5 (59:03):
Yeah, I mean it was so successful that it was
like twenty eight million copies by nineteen ninety had been sold.
And if you've got Orson Wells buttery voice narrating it
as if it has some real import, certainly, many, many,
many people were exposed to the ideas of how Lindsay Man.

Speaker 4 (59:23):
Is faced by unprecedented perils threatened to send him crashing.

Speaker 7 (59:27):
And the extention.

Speaker 9 (59:29):
Now from how Lindsay's incredible best selling book comes the film,
which explores the terrifying.

Speaker 1 (59:35):
Policies of the revelations.

Speaker 4 (59:36):
Here's Our Planet Truly and Mortal Peril.

Speaker 9 (59:40):
The Late Great Planet Earth, featuring Orson Wells.

Speaker 5 (59:44):
But it didn't stop there. Lindsay's book inspired some other
guys who you may have heard of, these two right
wing political activists and Christian evangelicals named Tim Lahay and
Jerry B.

Speaker 7 (59:58):
Jenkins.

Speaker 5 (59:59):
And and they're the creators of the Left Behind series. Now,
if you don't know the Left Behind series, you may
have been living under a rock, or maybe you weren't
born yet. And that's not your fault, but it is
this publishing empire. At this point, retail giants like Walmart
stocked the books. They sold eighty million copies, warehouses full

(01:00:22):
of merch sequels, prequels, graphic novels, audio books, calendars, greeting cards,
a shoot them up computer game based on the books.
All of this stuff was centrally talking about the rapture
the end times. That's what the Left Behind series was about.
And those who are left behind are those who were

(01:00:42):
not raptured. And these films center on the chaos that
breaks out right after the rapture, really really popular stuff.
Will play a quick clip so you can get a
sense of what that's like.

Speaker 3 (01:00:55):
He took them to protect them, what from the darkest
time in the history of this world, persecution.

Speaker 7 (01:01:03):
And seven years of darkness.

Speaker 10 (01:01:05):
He took them there.

Speaker 5 (01:01:07):
The left Behind books, they basically depict Jesus not as
a source of love and forgiveness, but as this like
source of vengeance and bloodshed. One person who spoke to
in the preparation of this episode described him as a
sort of rambo Jesus, to be compared to mister Rogers Jesus,

(01:01:27):
you could say.

Speaker 6 (01:01:29):
And what's particularly dangerous is sometimes believers in this interpretation
of the Bible try to make the end times happen
sooner rather than later. Yeah, I can mention two cases,
one better known than the other. You had a father's
son evangelical team called Gardner Ted Armstrong. His father was

(01:01:53):
named Herbert W. Armstrong. That a radio broadcasting empire. The
problem is called the World Tomorrow. And they had college
campuses in California and in Big Sandy, Texas, unaccredited college,
unaccredited college absolutely And one person who had listened to

(01:02:15):
the armstrongs on the radio, and there's an Australian named
Michael Dennis Rohan on August twenty first, nineteen sixty nine,
actually travels to the Aloxa Mosque in Jerusalem because he
believes that's a key focal point of where armageddon is
going to take place, and he actually starts a fire

(01:02:37):
in that mosque, and that's a revered one of those
holy sites in Islam. And there was a time where
there was a diplomatic crisis caused by this believer in dispensationalism. Then,
of course we have what had happened to Waco, where
you had a sect very much obsessed with en times

(01:02:59):
and with this spensationalism led by a man named David
Koresh nineteen ninety three, he led his followers on this
fifty one day standoff with federal and state officials over
the illegal weapons that this group, the Branch Davidians held.
Eventually you have an exchange of gunfire between the agents

(01:03:24):
and the Branch Davidians, and then on April nineteenth, the
Feds decide to charge in and there's a fire and
seventy six people die, including twenty five children.

Speaker 5 (01:03:38):
In the modern day, you know, we've got two hugely
influential people who promote End Times theology. Now, one of
them is the biggest political donor in the entire state
of Texas, more money donated than anyone else. And his
name is Tim Dunn, and we'll talk about him in

(01:04:00):
a second, But first I want to talk about someone
who is also pretty influential, maybe not as wealthy as
Tim Dunn, who I should mention got his money through oil.
But this is a man named John Hagy. He is
the pastor of a twenty two thousand member church in
Texas called Cornerstone Church, and I think he has a

(01:04:23):
global audience as large as one hundred million people. So
back in the day, as a twenty eight year old
young man, he took part in the Wallace Youth, which
is an organization devoted to supporting the presidential candidacy of
white supremacist Alabama Governor George Wallace in nineteen sixty eight. Yeah,

(01:04:43):
let's just hear from Wallace real quick.

Speaker 11 (01:04:45):
In the name of the greatest people that I've ever
taught differ. I've brought a line in the dusk and
passed the government before the THEATA Turner, and I face segregation. Now,
Tom and Sarah Gosan forever.

Speaker 5 (01:05:05):
So since then, in his fifty eight years as a
non denominational pastor, hage has proven to be as much
of a lightning rod as Wallace. When Hurricane Katrina killed
nearly fourteen hundred people in New Orleans in two thousand
and five, hage insisted the superstorm represented God's wrath at
a planned gay pripride. I can't even believe that that's real. Yeah,

(01:05:28):
so he really said, Oh, you celebrated the gays, and
so God killed a bunch.

Speaker 7 (01:05:33):
Of you with a hurricane. He really said that.

Speaker 5 (01:05:36):
He's also called the Catholic Church a false cult and
has falsely claimed that Muslims are commanded by the Qur'an
to kill Christians in Jews. So he's a you know,
really moderate guy when he comes to his word choice
in his rhetoric.

Speaker 6 (01:05:53):
Hagey, for instance, believes that Jewish people are still God's chosen,
and he often quotes a line from Genesis twelve three,
twelfth chapter third verse in which God says to Abraham,
I will bless those who bless you, and curse those
who curse you, and he interprets that the mean that

(01:06:14):
if the United States ever fails to support the State
of Israel in any of its policies, or if it
attempts to encourage Israel to trade land for peace, to
set aside land for the Palestinians to establish their own nation,
that that leader is violating a divine commandment to quote,

(01:06:35):
not divide my land, and there will be terrible consequences.
So I one dispensationalists pastor basically said that the United
States has economic problems whenever it fails to support Israel.
Hagey in twenty fourteen said that a small outbreak of
the Ebola virus in the United States was God's vengeance

(01:06:58):
against President Barack Obama for supporting the establishment of Palestinian state.
And of course, when that is a big attitude amongst
a really significant block of voters, that makes the United
States really have problems when it tries to mediate in
that conflict.

Speaker 5 (01:07:19):
We'll talk a little bit more about John Hagey. Right
after this ad break, you might be asking, who cares
about this guy John hagy Like, why does his interpretation

(01:07:39):
of the Bible matter at all? Why does what he
say have anything to do with my life? And there's
a number of reasons why it matters. So, I mean,
he could be considered the most important leader of the
Christian Zionist movement for starters. He formed an organization in
two thousand and six called Christians United for Israel, which

(01:08:01):
has like a reported ten million members in the United States.
Not sure how accurate or real that is, but you know,
he has donated through his organizations more than fifty eight
million dollars to right wing extremists in Israel's specifically ones
that have you know, sponsored settlers to move to the
occupied West Bank.

Speaker 7 (01:08:20):
In you know, violation of international law.

Speaker 5 (01:08:24):
And he's, you know, he's pushed Congress to take a
hard line on the Palestinian issue of Palestinian statehood. He
has the ear of elected officials in Texas state level
politicians like Greg Gabbott and Dan Patrick have been seen
with him at campaign events, have featured him at campaign events.
Hagey has tried to you know, influence a number of

(01:08:46):
issues and has had success. He was sought as someone
whose endorsement mattered in the presidential elections of George H. W.

Speaker 7 (01:08:55):
Bush and George W. Bush.

Speaker 5 (01:08:56):
He was an early supporter of Donald Trump, and he
influences the other major pastors as well, And so it's
hard to say that people like this don't matter, particularly
whenever you know they have been invited to speak during
big events like the March for Israel in twenty twenty three,

(01:09:19):
which drew tens of thousands of people to Washington, DC.

Speaker 7 (01:09:22):
And who was there, John Hage.

Speaker 6 (01:09:25):
And here's one of the paradoxes of this movement. When
Hage was invited to speak at this pro Israel event
after the October seventh Hamas attacks in Neurope, Israeli Kibbutz
Hage was invited and a lot of Jewish people were
horrified because he really does capture one the central paradoxes

(01:09:50):
of dispensationalism, and that is someone can be inflexibly pro
Israel in anti Semitic at the same time. And so
John Hagen is promoted a very old anti Semitic myth
that rich Jewish people control the world's finances. He talks

(01:10:11):
about the Rothschild family, which has always been an obsession
of anti Semites. You know, the secret puppet masters of
the world, you know who rob the typical, the average
person of money to gain wealth. They cause wars to
enrich themselves. He actually described Hitler based on nothing as

(01:10:35):
a half breed Jew, and he said that Hitler was
sent by God himself. So he's Hitler was an emissary
of God as a hunter to persecute Jews in Europe
in the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties, specifically for the
purpose of forcing them to leave Europe and settle in Palestine.

(01:10:58):
And you know, he said that this was all part
of the Divine plan. Nazism was part of the Divine plan.

Speaker 5 (01:11:05):
Yeah, but don't just take our word for it. You
can listen to him say something along these lines right now, How.

Speaker 9 (01:11:12):
Did it happen because God allowed it to happen. Why
did it happen because God said, my top priority for
the Jewish people is to get them.

Speaker 10 (01:11:20):
To come back to the land of Israel.

Speaker 9 (01:11:23):
Today Israel is back in the land, and they are
at Hisequel thirty seven and eight. They're physically alive, but
they're not spiritually alive. Now, how is God going to
cause the Jewish people to come spiritually alive? And say,
the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, he is God.

Speaker 5 (01:11:38):
So yeah, you know, hege has predicted that the Antichrist
will be a half breed gay Jew and will rule
the planet on behalf of Satan. Those are the kinds
of things that he believes and he spreads. And in
spite of statements like these, several Israeli governments have welcome
to the support of right wing and times past like Hagy.

(01:12:01):
I mean, they don't have any issue with working with
someone like Hagy. And obviously that relationship is cynical because
you know, people like Hagy are able to help bring
material resources to Israel and further solidify the relationship that
Israel has with the state of Texas.

Speaker 6 (01:12:20):
And there's a real interesting synthusis between the far right
in Texas and the very right wing government that rules Israel.
Now Israel depends on Texas oil. Many of the weapons
Israel is using in its warren Gonza are manufactured in Texas,

(01:12:43):
including in the Dallas Fort Worth area where Steve and
I are having this conversation. You have some of the
wealthiest American supporters of Israel, like hyper conservatives such as
the widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Addison, who have
spent quite a bit of money flying Texas politicians like

(01:13:07):
Governor Greg Abbott, the agricultural Commissioner, said Miller, members of
the state legislature to Israel to promote close business ties
and to ensure that weapons manufactured in Texas and that
Texas oil flows to that state.

Speaker 5 (01:13:25):
In the background of all of this is the money,
the money backing these politicians, and the largest and most
powerful political donor in Texas is someone who we have
mentioned already, billionaire oil man Tim Dunn. So Tim Dunn,
who is he? What's his deal? He's a pastor, He's

(01:13:46):
based in Midland, which is in West Texas, and over
the last decade, Dunn has dumped tens of millions of
dollars into the campaign coffers of far right politicians and
political action committees that promote sendiary messages, including the one
group that I previously mentioned was caught meeting with a

(01:14:06):
self admitted Hitler fan, Nick went Is. Nevertheless, Dunn is
named alongside Hagey on the annual list of Israel's top
fifty Christian Allies published by the Israel Allies Foundation, of
which Done incidentally is the chairman of the It's like
the Christian Advisory Board.

Speaker 3 (01:14:27):
So yeah, this really really.

Speaker 5 (01:14:31):
Powerful donor who has his thumb on the scales all
across the state. He too is an End Times prophecy believer.
And he's not just a believer. He preaches it at
his own church in Midland, where he's a pastor.

Speaker 8 (01:14:47):
God is a consuming fire taking vengeance on those who
do not know God and on those who do not
obey the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. The word
obey means listen to, So we're talking here about unbelievers.
These shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence
of the Lord and from the glory of His power.

Speaker 5 (01:15:09):
And you know, it's completely changed the nature of the
Republican Party his influence. They were already conservative and already
religious to begin with, but the sort of wave of
politicians that have been supported by Dunn has taken that
to a new level.

Speaker 6 (01:15:26):
And you know, I mean it's resulted in, I think,
a real assault on free speech in the state of Texas.
We have religious groups like Christians United for Israel in
the Texas Eagle Forum lobbing the state legislature and persuading

(01:15:48):
politicians like Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick were sympathetic to
their agenda to pass laws that limit the way people
who oppose Israeli policies can protests. So, for instance, twenty seventeen,
Texas passed Hospill eighty nine, a law that banned the
stay from doing any business with any company or individual

(01:16:10):
contractors who participate in the boycott of Israel that many
activists have participated in. And on March twenty seventh of
this year, when you began to have a wave of
protests across the nation and in Texas, and there were
major protests at the UT Austin campus at the University

(01:16:31):
of Texas at Dallas, which is in a suburb called Richardson,
another one at the University of North Texas UT Arlington,
University of Texas at San Antonio. Abbott responded to these
protests by issuing an executive order that defined a common
slogan chanted by supporters of Palestinian statehood from the River

(01:16:55):
to the Sea Palace Steine will be Free, as anti
SeMet and it required public colleges and universities to review
their free speech policies and to punish what the state
regards as anti Semitic speech by faculty and students. And
it targeted two specific groups, two student groups, the Palestine

(01:17:19):
Solidarity Committee and students for Justice and Palestine to be
disciplined for violating these policies the State of Texas saying
these words are forbidden.

Speaker 5 (01:17:32):
Indeed, and despite the fact that the University of Texas
at Austin had issued a video celebrating their so called
free speech Week, I think it was just a matter
of months before they arrested one hundred and thirty six
pro Palestinian.

Speaker 7 (01:17:48):
Demonstrators at the University of Texas at Austin.

Speaker 5 (01:17:51):
All across the state, we've seen pro Palestinian protests or
what you could call anti genocide protests or calls for
divestment at these various universities, and arrests have happened at
least three different universities.

Speaker 6 (01:18:05):
I mentioned earlier a paradox in dispensationalism, and that is
that some of the people who have absolute devotion to
promoting the state of Israel are at the same time antisemitic.
And another paradox is that Schofield himself, Cyrus Schofield himself

(01:18:26):
said that Jesus wasn't into politics. He said that when
Jesus was alive, slavery, inequality of wealth, all of these
political pressure were all at their worse and Jesus and
his apostles didn't address any of that. They focus on salvation.
That Christianity is not about changing this world, because this

(01:18:49):
world is doomed and the only person who's going to
fix anything is Jesus himself. But nevertheless, these dispensationalists at
the same time are very happy to be involved in
politics that's not involved in social or form. They don't
want you to. You know, Schofield was living at a
time of progressive movement when they were trying to end

(01:19:11):
child labor, trying to make workplaces safer, and so on.
Today we're dealing with issues of wealth, inequality and so on.
The dispensationalists will say, believing that humans can fix those
problems with satanic But nevertheless, you should be involved in
politics if it involves denying women sovereignty over their bodies,

(01:19:32):
if it involves banning people from gender affirming care and
so on, but that politics is okay and so and
we see this with this activism and trying to suppress
a particular side of the Israel Palestine.

Speaker 5 (01:19:51):
Debate, right, And I think that if that strain of
dispensationalism that's Schofield represented, that sort of a political dispensationalism.
If it still exists, it is certainly no longer dominant
because today, you know, we're seeing this end times theology,
this belief in this theory around the end times, it's
increasingly overlapping with other sort of distinct trends in Christianity.

(01:20:18):
So on the one hand, there's things like the prosperity Gospel,
which is, you know, best represented by Kenneth Copeland. He's
the richest pastor in all of the United States, and
his whole thing is, yeah, if you know you give,
you get and so you give me your money and
you prove that you're you know, holy person, you will
be rewarded. In turn, you will be healed, all of

(01:20:39):
your things will be solved. And then the other thing
that it's overlapping with this end times theology belief is
what you know, we might just call the Seven Mountains
dominionist trend or dominionism broadly speaking, which you may or
may not be familiar with, but it really just breaks
down to this idea that Christians should be at the

(01:21:04):
top of all of the mountains of society, and these
are just you know, basically stand ins for the segments
of society they think are important, so education, media, politics,
what have you. This is a really growing idea as
a sort of meme in right wing Christianity in these

(01:21:26):
sort of non denominational churches, which are the fastest growing
and largest segment of churches I think we're talking about.

Speaker 6 (01:21:35):
And those dominionists are the ones who are taking over
these school boards that are adopting the anti trans policies
and also banning the books.

Speaker 5 (01:21:45):
That's right, and it is a very active form of Christianity,
very politically active, and so through people like Hagey and
you know, people like Tim Dunn, we see that embodied
in what they do. The sort of advocate can see
that John Hagy takes part in in the millions and
millions of dollars that Tim Dunn dumps into the state

(01:22:07):
of Texas.

Speaker 6 (01:22:08):
And you could almost characterize the Republican Party in Texas,
which is one of the most important state wings of
the Republican Party in the United States, as a wholly
owned done subsidiary. You know. He really many of the
most infamous Texas politicians in this era, such as Ken Paxton,

(01:22:29):
are generously supported by Dounn. And so I think that
if we kind of wrap this up, I think that
we could say that the disdain from activism that dispensationalists
claim is a ruse that activism is bad if it
advances any attempt to create equal opportunity, reduce income inequality.

(01:22:56):
And dispensationalists vote and they with Texas as one of
the major bases for dispensationalism, they are a hugely influential
budding block. Thirty nine percent of Americans have told polsters
that they believe we're living in the end times. And

(01:23:17):
the simple fact is, if you think the world's going
to end, you're not going to invest much time in
making the world better, making it a more just place.
You're not going to try to clean the water, clean
the air. Half of Evangelical Protestants in the United States
believe that supporting Israel is absolutely essential to fulfilling Bible prophecy,

(01:23:39):
and that group constitutes a third of all adult Texans.
And they want to love Israel to death because they
believe that if they push Israel to annex the West Bank,
to take the most aggressive standards Palestinians, that will provoke
the of the Antichrist, which will lead to arm again.

(01:24:02):
And they're willing to make that sacrifice. They're willing to
fight for the Second Coming to happen down to the
last Jewish person. And this is creating instability for the
world and putting the United States in a very difficult
place in the world stage, and the chain of events
leading to our position currently visa the Middle East can

(01:24:27):
be drawn back to this state.

Speaker 2 (01:24:29):
That's right.

Speaker 5 (01:24:30):
And I think one thing that I really want to
emphasize that we haven't dived into as much as we
could have, is that this sort of belief system tends
towards dehumanization. So if you believe that your opponents are
in league with the devil, or are Satanic, or are

(01:24:50):
doing the bidding of evil, and that you are on
the side of good unequivocally and you are doing the
Lord's work, it is e easy to treat your opponents
as inhuman, less than human, to see them as other
than someone who has equal rights and equal standing.

Speaker 6 (01:25:12):
And if you're wondering if it could happen here, it
meaning fascism in many ways. It's happened in Texas already,
and we have a large population here. As they wait
for the end, they're building walls around the lives of
more than thirty million people who live in this state.

Speaker 12 (01:25:30):
I'm Stephen MANCHELLI, I'm Michael Phillips. Thank you for listening.

Speaker 2 (01:25:56):
Oh what indicted by the FBI, my several people I
don't like it could happen here a podcast about things
falling apart, and today this week, well for the last
couple of weeks, the thing that's fallen apart is Tenet Media.
This is not related to Christopher Nolan, that we can

(01:26:18):
prove at this exact moment. It is instead a media
adventure starring a bunch of assholes that turned out to
all be an op by the Russian government, and none
of said assholes claim they knew anything, even though they
got paid one hundred thousand dollars a video. Anyway, We're
going to talk about all that and more today, but
I'm going to bring onto the program now my co hosts,

(01:26:38):
Garrison Davis and James Stout.

Speaker 3 (01:26:41):
Thank you.

Speaker 13 (01:26:42):
I'm not getting one hundred k per episode here, but
if I was, I certainly wouldn't tell the government now
that it was actually a foreign government that's saying me.

Speaker 10 (01:26:51):
I would keep tweeting about it.

Speaker 2 (01:26:53):
Fun fact about both of you guys, Before we get
into this. If you reverse your last names, you sound
like Confederate era generals.

Speaker 10 (01:27:00):
Garrison Stout, James Davis like.

Speaker 2 (01:27:02):
Names Davis s Garrison Stout.

Speaker 10 (01:27:04):
Yeah, oh yeah, all right, yeah, yeah, that's sod. That
is our secret backstory. We had to actually switch them
when we joined cool Zone Media due to a Confederate tie.

Speaker 2 (01:27:12):
Yeah, and the fact that you're one hundred and ninety
years old. So Garrison, you want to take us off here?

Speaker 3 (01:27:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (01:27:20):
So Tene Media was this kind of small right wings
startup that hired a whole bunch of more well known
content creators on the right wing sphere, from like Tim Poole,
Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Lauren Southern. Yeah, people who are
either just like conservative commentators or you know, in someone
like Lauren Southern's case has been like an alt right
kind of white supremacist media figure for quite a while.

(01:27:42):
And they put together this little collection of people to
make like content for Tenants on YouTube channel as well
as licensing some of their regular content. And this company
was ostensibly started by another right wing YouTuber named Lauren
Chen and her husband Liam Donovan. Chen's been like on
Fox News News Max Daily Wire and was employed at

(01:28:05):
the Blaze, where she's no longer employed based on the
allocations inside this DOJ indictment. So yeah, it was a
small collection, not super kind of noteworthy. Honestly, in a
lot of cases, lots of people weren't super familiar with
tenet media. I know they also hired like Taylor Hanson,
who was kind of one of the first guys to
report on grooming LGBTQ stuff like a few years ago.

Speaker 2 (01:28:29):
That's kind of what was immediately weird about them to
everyone who pays attention to this stuff is that their
videos did not get a crazy amount of engagement. They
were clearly not an established like they came out of nowhere,
but they had money, the money to pay for people
who weren't cheap. Timpool, if you don't know, Tim is
one of the most profitable influencers on the right wing

(01:28:50):
chunks of the Internet. He's a guy who kind of
got his start as a citizen journalist during occupy. Really,
he's one of these guys. All he does is he
gets on he reads news articles, he reads the headlines
of news articles. He talks about how we're all doomed
to left wing terrorism or whatever, and then he makes
millions of dollars. He's a frustrating individual to say the least,

(01:29:10):
but he doesn't come cheap, and Hansen also doesn't come cheap.
Dave Rubin is not an inexpensive person to bring onto
your team. So it was kind of clear from the
beginning there's a lot of money behind this thing that
seems to have come out of nowhere. Whose money is it?

Speaker 13 (01:29:25):
And that is what the federal government's been trying to
figure out. And we have now a better indication on
where all of these kind of right wing content firms,
or at least this one who's employing some very unforunch
of people, where they are getting some of their money from.
Because there's a lot of money flying around this space.
Lots of these guys are obviously filled by like fossil
fuel billionaires.

Speaker 6 (01:29:46):
Right.

Speaker 13 (01:29:46):
You can look at like the early funding for The
Daily Wired that has a lot of money, but for this,
for this smaller, kind of lesser known company, how are
they paying one hundred thousand dollars per episode to these guys?

Speaker 2 (01:29:59):
And it's also the Daily Wire definitely started inorganically by
getting a lot of fossil fuel money pumped into it.
But one thing you have to hand it to them,
is they built a business that is a functional business, right,
they are now profitable in their own regard, or at
least were. There's some evidence their traffic collapsed recently, but
you saw you saw them have a growth curve that

(01:30:19):
looked pretty organic for a media organization, which you didn't
see with Tenant.

Speaker 3 (01:30:24):
No no.

Speaker 13 (01:30:25):
And it seems the only way to actually pay these
millions and millions of dollars to all these people is
if you are actually the government of Russia who is
starting covert operations that's their words, not mine, to influence
the US election by like both talking about like Ukraine,
using these mouthpieces, but also just kind of so general division,

(01:30:48):
which seems to be kind of the main tactic. And
Robert elected to actually go through some of this g's
twenty three page indictment and kind of hopefully we can
find some of some of the some of the better
funnier little tidbits here, because there's a lot of interesting
information about kind of the inter workings of some of
these media groups and how exactly Timpoole was convinced by

(01:31:13):
a Russian agent.

Speaker 10 (01:31:15):
Yeah, a Russian agent pretending to be three different people.

Speaker 13 (01:31:19):
Pretending to be some mysterious European billionaire.

Speaker 2 (01:31:23):
Yeah. So the document starts with some stuff that I
had been unaware, which is that you know, because Russia
Today is kind of the first large Russian government affiliated
media organization that has been like putting up propaganda in
the United States, and the FBI has been watching them
like a hawk. And so they quote here from the
editor in chief of RT after the expanded Russian invasion

(01:31:46):
in February twenty twenty two, when he describes Russia Today,
which has always argued that it's a legitimate news organization,
as an entire empire of covert projects designed to shape
public opinion in Western audiences. And one of these covert
projects it described as the funding of what we now
know is Tenant Media. Right, it's described in these documents

(01:32:07):
because their indictments as a Tennessee based online creation company,
but it's it can only be referring to Tenant Media.

Speaker 13 (01:32:14):
As employees have since admitted that, yes, it is for
sure to Tenant Media.

Speaker 2 (01:32:18):
Yes, yes, there's no doubt about this. We're not like
reading into the what the FED said here at all.

Speaker 3 (01:32:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:32:23):
So they spent over the course of about a year
ten million dollars. I think it's actually was more like
nine point six, but ten million dollars basically just buying
these influencers.

Speaker 3 (01:32:32):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (01:32:34):
First off, things we could do with ten million dollars yeah,
oh oh, James, we'd be sailing to me and Maar
and on a pallet kill rocket launchers.

Speaker 10 (01:32:46):
The things that their military could do with ten billion dollars.

Speaker 2 (01:32:50):
That's sending dude to the front with as off plates. Yeah,
it's anyway. Whatever. So the kind of key detail there
is how much they were making per one of these
dog shit videos, which is about one hundred thousand dollars
per YouTube video. That's what Tim was getting. I think
Dave Rubin was getting close to just half a million
a month to do like a weekly video. So when

(01:33:12):
that is the kind of money we're.

Speaker 13 (01:33:14):
Talking about, and Tim was also being paid one hundred
thousand dollars per weekly video as well. He was making
one video a week. That was what he decided on
his contract. So he's breaking in at least four hundred thousand,
if not five hundred thousand dollars a month.

Speaker 10 (01:33:27):
Yeah, and then they had signing and download bonuses on
top of that.

Speaker 2 (01:33:31):
Which is like even for them is more than you
could get on YouTube for the kind of traffic that
they get. That is that is like the top one
percent of the top one percent of YouTube creators are
making money like that, and certainly no one with the
kind of views these tenivities we're getting. So anyway, Garrison,
you've got a clip to play.

Speaker 13 (01:33:50):
Yeah, here's here's a here's a clip that's definitely a
totally genuine opinion. Not impacted by those one hundred thousand
dollars of Tim Poole talking about Ukraine.

Speaker 10 (01:33:59):
Trigger war, most annoying man on earth.

Speaker 14 (01:34:02):
This is psychotic. Ukraine is the enemy of this country.
Ukraine is our enemy being funded by the Democrats. I
will stress again one of the greatest enemies of our
nation right now is Ukraine. They are expanding this war now,
don't get me wrong. I know you've got criminal elements
of the US government pushing them and guiding them and

(01:34:22):
telling them what to do. Ukraine is now accused a
German warrant issued for blowing up the nord Stream pipeline
in triggering this conflict. Ukraine is the greatest threat to
this nation and to the world. We should rescind all
funding and financing, pull out all military support, and we

(01:34:44):
should apologize to Russia.

Speaker 13 (01:34:45):
Interesting, I wonder what would compel a man to say that, huh, curious,
very curious.

Speaker 2 (01:34:51):
There's no way to know garrison. So, since they publicly
launched in November of last year, Tenant Media posted almost
two thousand videos. I got about sixteen million views. And
sixteen million views is a lot for a YouTube channel,
but not if you've put out two thousand videos. So again,
that's what I mean when I say, like, this is
not the kind of audience that you would get this

(01:35:11):
kind of money organically for, right, Like this was obviously
and I mentioned this because this is obviously suspicious to
the creators. You cannot be Timpoole is not a smart man,
but you cannot work for YouTube the way that he
has and not know that something is fucked up with
the money.

Speaker 10 (01:35:29):
Just if you're not a mental arithmetician like myself. That
is eight thousand views video. Yeah, I made a video
once about how to use hiking polls, which has around
that many views.

Speaker 2 (01:35:38):
I have a video that I fucked up when filming
another video while I was reviewing products fifteen years ago,
before anyone knew who I was that has more than.

Speaker 10 (01:35:46):
Eight years, Like where's all money, Vladimir.

Speaker 2 (01:35:50):
Yeah, yeah, come on, Vladimir, Like I'll there's a lot
I'll do for half a million dollars.

Speaker 13 (01:35:55):
Well, And I think part of this as well is
not just trying to prop up ten and own news itself.
It's making these specific content creators lives more comfortable, because
the better that these guys do, that's all that Russia
is like interested in, as alleged in this document, right,
It's that they just want to make sure that these
guys can still talk about Ukraine as certainly as like

(01:36:17):
this like evil and how Russia is like the traditionalist
Christian empire and right wing resistance to globalist domination. But
in terms of like just wanting to amplify US domestic
divisions in order to weaken US opposition to core government
of Russia's interests in the ongoing war in Ukraine. As
said in the document, all they need to do is
just make sure these guys are having a lot of money,

(01:36:38):
so like their comfortable tenant doesn't need to be like
a successful media operation where like they're making more money
on YouTube than they're paying their influences. And that's not
the point. The point is just to give these guys
a lot of money to keep talking the way they're talking.

Speaker 3 (01:36:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:36:51):
What was also interesting to me, and this comes from
a Wired article. Wired downloaded as many of these videos
as they could and then ran them through. This is
actually one of the un journalistic uses for these large
language models. They ran them through like one of those
machine learning algorithms to just kind of look at how
often different subjects are mentioned, because no human being could

(01:37:11):
analyze that many videos with any kind of like speed, right,
And one thing they found is that Ukraine, which you
would imagine being the focus of a horrific war that
is bleeding. Russia's military was mentioned about like a third
as often as transgender people. The vast majority of the
content was US culture war stuff right like woke is

(01:37:35):
much more of a focus than anything to do directly
with Russian military operations or Russian like government like what
you would imagine, right, And the reason for that is
that they see it as number one, building a sense
of solidarity between American conservatives and Russia, which is largely imaginary.
I'll be talking about this in an episode later, but
like Russia is not the country a lot of conservatives

(01:37:57):
in the US think it is. But more to the point,
it's just sort of stoking division, right, rather than actually
needing to change American minds on Ukraine in much of
a concerted way. Like if you kind of keep them
ginned up and angry about everything the quote unquote left
is doing, they will be against supporting Ukrainian resistance anyway, right,

(01:38:17):
And that's the bet the Russians made, very very astutely,
and it seems to be paying off for them. One
of the more interesting facts here is that one of
the primary contacts, this is one of the people who
has been indicted, who was working with you know, Pool
and these other creators, is an employee of Russia today
with the perfect spy name, Constantine Kalashnikov. Just amazing stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:38:42):
How is that literally their day? Yeah? How do they
not just change it?

Speaker 2 (01:38:46):
We call it a Kalashnikov because the guy's name was Kalashnikov.

Speaker 13 (01:38:51):
It's just lovely, it's just beautiful.

Speaker 2 (01:38:54):
It's breathtaking because if you put a character with that
name in a Bond film, everyone would be like, come on, man,
it's not nineteen sixty five anymore. What are we doing here?
But that that's just the person's actual name. It beautiful.
So they had a couple of fake personas within the company,
but this was a person who like directly talked to
the employees of people like Pool, the editors and whatnot

(01:39:17):
without disclosing that he worked at Russia. Today now there's
evidence that people who worked for some of these creators
in their discords, like editors and whatnot, saw this as
deeply suspicious. Probably the most interesting came from when we
now know it was Tucker Carlson posted a video during
his trip in Moscow like where he was going to
a Russian grocery store to be like, look, Russia has

(01:39:38):
grocery stores. Everything's fine here. His editor in the discord
was like, this seems like a little much what are
we doing here basically, and the statement made was along
the lines of like, you know, this is what the
people paying us want us to get out right, which
is clear evidence that people were aware of what they
were doing to some extent.

Speaker 13 (01:39:59):
At least among like the tenant media producers, there was
a growing awareness of what was actually going on. Obviously,
all of the on air talent still maintains that they
are the victims of an international conspiracy.

Speaker 2 (01:40:12):
In a victim pays, I guess, oh.

Speaker 13 (01:40:15):
My god, and no, I think one of one of
the funniest parts is definitely this fake European businessman. I
believe he's referred to as Edward Grengorian.

Speaker 3 (01:40:27):
Yes, this was very funny, but.

Speaker 2 (01:40:28):
We'll talk about Edward. Let's let's throw to ads first
and then we'll get back to this and we're back, Garrison,
Let's talk about Edward.

Speaker 3 (01:40:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (01:40:46):
So in the document they talked about how Kalashnikov, this
other RT person, as well as Tenants founders worked together
to deceive commentators one and two, who we believe are
our Timpool and Dave Rubin. The point was to let
leverage their existing audiences and license their videos they were
already making. So together the RT people and the Tenant

(01:41:08):
founders tried to trick Pool and who we believe is
Ruben into thinking that the person providing these one hundred
thousand dollars per episodes was a European businessman and private
investor named Edward Gregorian, which is a wonderful a wonderful
fake name. And this was not real person. This was

(01:41:30):
a completely faked person. At some point, I believe Dave
Ruben or Commentator number one requested that the founder provide
like a profile or an article.

Speaker 6 (01:41:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:41:39):
Yeah, it was commentator too that wanted to know more
about the quote. Would like to know more about the
company and who he will be working with.

Speaker 13 (01:41:46):
Yeah, so they asked for like this, like one page
profile on like who this guy was, And this was
provided and he was described as an accomplished finance professional
who had various positions in Brussels and France multi National Bank,
including the director of private Banking division and wealth management.

Speaker 2 (01:42:05):
The one page on this guy who is supposedly their investor,
shows an obvious stock photo of a man on a
private jet with his face blurred out face blood. Yeah
that's what's that? Looks real? Yeah, not sketchy at all.
This is this is an actual guy quote. Founder one
transmitted the Edward Gregorian profile to Commentator one, who is

(01:42:27):
either Pool or Ruben.

Speaker 3 (01:42:28):
We believe it's Reuben.

Speaker 2 (01:42:29):
Yeah, I think that one's Ruben because Tim wouldn't have
asked for more details, Honor. About May twelfth, twenty twenty three,
Founder one reported to Persona one that Commentator one had
a problem with the profile we sent over, specifically the
reference to social justice. I think it may be because
that's usually a term used by liberals, but we're trying
to create a conservative network. Founder one suggested that Commentator

(01:42:49):
one and Edward could simply speak together to clarify the profile.

Speaker 13 (01:42:53):
Yes, and I know there was a secure call between
a Russian ation pretending to be miss Gregorian to Tempoole,
and allegedly this this other call with Commentator one, who
we think is Ruben. So there was like conversations between
like Rubin and Pool with people like further involved in

(01:43:14):
the actual like espionage parts of this and the actual
like you're talking to people affiliated was like Russian spies
in order to like sell this lie.

Speaker 10 (01:43:23):
I did find it very funny. Where did you read
the section where they sort of did a forensic analysis
of the three persona's email accounts.

Speaker 3 (01:43:30):
No, I'm not fun up in doing it yet.

Speaker 10 (01:43:32):
So they had three different personas, so all access from
the same IP address and had different were presenting a
three different individuals, right with three different email accounts. Obviously,
the DOJ has been able to get access to those
email accounts, and they found that the people using those
email accounts made mistakes in signing them. So one was
supposed to come from PERSONA three, but they mistakenly signed

(01:43:54):
it Edward Gregorian. And another time PERSONA one sent a
draft of email to person to two, which percent to
two then coll beet and pasted into an email like
the object was extremely poor. Yeah, it would seem, and
it didn't set anyone off to kind.

Speaker 2 (01:44:09):
Of make that point in terms of like what's happening
to these guys right now. What they've been indicted for
is violations of the Foreign Agent Registration Act. Like, if
you are acting as the agent of a foreign government,
you have to register in the United States. You have
a freedom of speech, but you don't have freedom to
create propaganda for another government and pretend that you're not right. Yeah,

(01:44:31):
and so you know, obviously one of the things the
Feds needed to indict them is evidence that they knew,
specifically they were being employed by the Russian government, Right
that like the Russians hadn't somehow snuck money to the
people who founded Tenant Media, Right. And so at one
point Founder two gets on the Investor Discord channel to
submit one of the influencers, I think it's Ruben's invoices

(01:44:53):
to PERSONA one and press for payment of those invoices
on September eleventh, twenty twenty three, never forget at a
post roximately eight oh seven pm Central time, Founder two
wrote in that Discord channel. Today marks two weeks since
I submitted the invoice for August. Any idea for the
delay We are signing the large contracts. We need to
be certain we will get the funding to pay these
people while waiting for a response, they searched for the

(01:45:15):
current time in Moscow. So yes, unbelievable OPSEC like giving
the government absolute knowledge of intent.

Speaker 13 (01:45:27):
I mean similarly earlier on in the document quote in
their private respondence. While working directly for RT pursue want
to founder one's written contract, Founder one and Founder two
regularly referred to their sponsor as the Russians, and for example,
Honor about May twelfth, twenty twenty one, Founder two message
Founder one on Discord, quote, so we're billing the Russians
from the corporation, right, Honor about May twenty second, Founder

(01:45:51):
one message Founder two on Discord. Also the Russians paid,
so we're good to build them for the second month.
I guess nailed it, Honor about Founder one, message Founder
two on Discord. Also, I say we build the Russians
for the last month. Once we're done the extrafens.

Speaker 2 (01:46:08):
I wonder if they knew they were working for the
Russian government.

Speaker 3 (01:46:11):
There's a lot more that's just like this.

Speaker 13 (01:46:14):
They constantly referred to the source of their income, at
least to each other as quote unquote the Russians, and
then in like outreach to like talent, which is, you know,
a generous word to refer to Timpoole and others, they
were a little bit more vague, but they certainly made
kind of coy references to it in their producer discord beautiful.

Speaker 2 (01:46:32):
Well, yeah, so, I mean the big question here with
all of this is, like, did any of these major
right wing media figures who have like they got hired
in part because they were already doing the job the
Russians wanted them doing, you know, building up this kind
of hatred that exists on the right over the idea
of funding Ukraine and Ukrainian resistance to the Russian war machine.

(01:46:56):
Like all of that kind of stuff is like why
these people got brought on anyway. Tim Poole has just
kind of been one of the most reflexively anti Ukraine
voices and conservative media, and Ruben is very effective at
getting Americans to hate other Americans, like he's one of
the big kind of anti trans culture warriors out there.
Did O Hanson Like that's why they wanted these guys

(01:47:18):
like they wanted to encourage them basically to keep it up.
And you know, the question then is what did these
guys know and when did they know it? And the
bigger question because I have my suspicions, and my suspicions
are a lot and immediately, but none of that is
in this indictment obviously. And the big question then is

(01:47:38):
is the federal government going to attempt to prove anything
like do they want to actually go after these guys?
And I don't know. My guess is not because there
very rarely are consequences for these people. But I'm curious
as to what y'all think.

Speaker 3 (01:47:51):
No, it seems not.

Speaker 13 (01:47:53):
I'm both both Pool and I think three others have
made statements saying that they've been contacted by the FBI
as a potential victim of a crime vibe and that
they will be happy to assist the FBI investigating this matter.

Speaker 2 (01:48:04):
Now, that doesn't mean the FBI isn't necessarily looking into them,
because that is all which the FBI would use if
they suspected them. But yeah, my guess is that they
lawyered up.

Speaker 13 (01:48:15):
Absolutely. It was funny both in there. In Betty Johnson's
and Timpole's immediate statements, they call this elk DOJ indictment,
which is not true. It was not leaked, it was
just unsealed.

Speaker 2 (01:48:26):
Yeah, they just arrested people.

Speaker 10 (01:48:28):
Yeah, I'm very sure there's a press release.

Speaker 13 (01:48:30):
Like Also, one of the final posts from Tenant Media,
I was talking about how this woman named Lauren's son
was charged with acting as an agent of the Chinese
Communist Party. Quote he or she is talking about DEI?
Why would the Chinese government want to push a DEI
in America?

Speaker 3 (01:48:45):
Oh? Yeah, remember this?

Speaker 13 (01:48:47):
This is This is I think one of one of
their final Twitter posts before their I can't got taken down.

Speaker 2 (01:48:53):
Yeah beautiful.

Speaker 10 (01:48:54):
Their Rumba account is still live and kicking.

Speaker 3 (01:48:56):
Yeah. Oh thank goodness that out.

Speaker 10 (01:48:58):
Also, could we talk about their graphic design just for
a moment, because it is dog shit? Yeah, Tenant mediums
Tenant Yeah, like, have you I don't know, have you
have you been on their rumble account? Garrison?

Speaker 13 (01:49:10):
You know, I can't I can't say I have been
on their Rumble account as of as of recent.

Speaker 2 (01:49:14):
The last time I looked at Rumble it was their
booth at the rnc OW.

Speaker 10 (01:49:20):
Let me tell you they're back, and genuinely some of
the most like deranged. It's just it's extremely busy, it's
very nineties like. It's a lot of bright colors.

Speaker 3 (01:49:31):
I mean.

Speaker 13 (01:49:31):
The clearest indication to me that this was absolutely a
Russian op is that the company described itself as quote
a network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political
and cultural issues.

Speaker 2 (01:49:44):
Definitely Russians. Definitely Russians.

Speaker 3 (01:49:47):
You're like, oh, I wonder who wrote that? Who would
ever described themselves?

Speaker 2 (01:49:51):
Tim Poole had never even seen the word head of
redox before.

Speaker 3 (01:49:54):
Yeah, it's crazy, It's it's wild.

Speaker 10 (01:49:58):
Yeah, they put multipolar into a theosauric and that's what
they came up with.

Speaker 3 (01:50:01):
It's crazy.

Speaker 2 (01:50:02):
It is interesting. One of the things in this indictment
that I did find kind of worth talking about is
that it specifically notes that folks at Russia today when
they were because they were largely deplatformed after the expanded
Russian invasion in twenty twenty two early twenty twenty two
and the indictment quotes the editor in chief of Russia
Today being like, but it's fine because we were able

(01:50:22):
to rebuild our following on Twitter. So I don't know
if you, just in case you had any questions about
like what Elon Musk's reforms at Twitter have accomplished, one
of them is that we should probably roll to ads again.
And then, Garrison, you had a very fun document you
wanted to take us.

Speaker 13 (01:50:38):
Through, yes to kind of talk about why they might
be doing some of this. There was one other document
that was unsealed that kind of sheds a light on
Russia's exact focus on influencing US politics.

Speaker 2 (01:50:49):
Well, that's great, speaking of influencing US politics. Our advertisers
probably don't. And we're back.

Speaker 13 (01:51:07):
There's another document called Exhibit nine to A, which is
originally in Russian and this translated Coffee is provided in
this PDF. And this appears to be some kind of
instructional manual for why exactly people are going about this,
why exactly is Tim Poole and all these others getting

(01:51:30):
paid to talk about what they talk about. And then
it also kind of explains like tactics and like how
to actually go about it. So the first bit of
this of this document, they just are talking about like
the US two party system, which is really funny, and
they primarily explain the two party system's differences as being
like the way that they affect race, that the US

(01:51:51):
Political Party B or Democratic Party includes people of color
and quote unquote supporters of affirmative action and reverse discrimination,
i e. Infringement on the rights of the white population
of the United States. And then meanwhile, the Republican Party
are victims of discrimination by people of color unquote. So
that's how they kind of frame the US two party

(01:52:12):
system is that there's these poor white people being oppressed
by wokeism. They end this little introduction on the two
party system by saying, quote, a key characteristic of the
American media is it skew towards the Democratic Party's influence.
While society is split between supporters of the new globalist
socialism and traditional values, the media is democrat by over

(01:52:32):
seventy five percent. Situation for the Republicans is made complicated
by the censorship on social media and Democrats oriented new media.
So some kind of weird phrasing there because it is
being translated from Russian. But they're talking about how liberalism
is inherently biased in media, and that's something that's promoted
while being racist and being a Republican is something that

(01:52:55):
is harder to get paid for by big media.

Speaker 7 (01:52:57):
To talk about.

Speaker 13 (01:52:58):
And that's why they have this campaign, which they title
gorilla media campaign in the United States. They justify this
by saying that there is no pro Russian and or
putin mainstream politicians or succinctly large numbers of influencers and voters,
and this is one of the things they're trying to do.

(01:53:18):
Another quote is that Americans are quote dissatisfied by the
dramatic decline and center of living and large expenditures of
offensive policy in the United States, in Europe and Ukraine.
They are afraid of losing the American way of life
in the American dream. It is these sentiments that should
be exploited in the course of an information campaign in
the United States. Smart The campaign topics used in their

(01:53:41):
Gorilla Media campaign are included here. First ones encroaching universal poverty.
Number two is the risk of job loss for white Americans,
privileges for people of color, perverts and disabled, constant lies
of the Democratic Party administration. They threat of crime coming
from people of color, and immigrants, including new immigrants from Ukraine.

(01:54:02):
Overspending on foreign policy at the expense of interests of
white US citizens, constant lies to the voters by the
Democrats in power. Last, but not least, America is suffering
a defeat despite Liberals' efforts. We are being drawn into
the water. Our guys will die in Ukraine. The target
audience of their campaign is listed as Republican voters, Donald

(01:54:26):
Trump supporters, supporters of quote traditional family values, white Americans
representing the lower and middle class.

Speaker 2 (01:54:33):
Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things. It's frustrating
that it is working. Yeah, to be quite frank, it's
exactly what the Russiagate conspiracy theorists have been saying for years. Unfortunately, Yeah, unfortunately,
and like a shitload of people on the left have
just been mocking them endlessly, in part because they've bought
a lot of this propaganda.

Speaker 13 (01:54:54):
And this is certainly different from the way they were
going about it in twenty sixteen, right, And this isn't
absolutely Yeah, this is the same like Facebook stuff they're doing,
although Tenant did did have Facebook accounts. These are like
weaponizing these people that have gotten big on YouTube and
other platforms for talking, but the same type of things
that Russia kind of wants them to talk about, and
it's just making sure that they have the ability to
do so. Kind of Lastly, in this information doc they

(01:55:17):
talk about kind of like where you can spread this disinformation.
It says here quote on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. We
need to create multiple perishable accounts, primarily for the work
with comments. Websites should serve as the sources of information
for dissemination and for video content YouTube accounts with a
relatively small number of subscribers and commentators unquote. The list

(01:55:37):
of information products can be disseminated includes texts of posts,
comments on social media, memes including charactures and collages, and
video content including news stories in the Fox News style.
They then propose creating a quote unquote project office to
run us this style of like media campaign. This consists

(01:55:59):
of three segments monitoring US media and social media accounts
of Republican politicians. A text factor with a minimum of
five to four main topic based recommendations, including about ten
basic posts on social media and forty to sixty comments,
and then managing an editorial office with a daily output

(01:56:19):
of three to four pictures and memes and a video
editorial office with a daily output of three to four
videos per day.

Speaker 2 (01:56:27):
Quote.

Speaker 13 (01:56:28):
In order for this work to be effective, you need
to use a minimum of fake news and a maximum
of realistic information.

Speaker 3 (01:56:35):
At the same time.

Speaker 13 (01:56:36):
You should continuously repeat that this is what's really happening,
but the official media will never tell you about it
or show it to you unquote.

Speaker 2 (01:56:43):
So I mean, like, part of what's frustrating about this
number one is just like they clearly have watched Alex Jones,
and like, I've learned a great deal from how he's
done this, which, unfortunately something Alex used to claim about
putin that fuck maybe he was right. But the bigger,
more frustrating point to me is that like, oh, they
didn't need to do any of this at all, Like

(01:57:04):
this was all working just fine without them directly getting
involved this way, I kind of am intro. I think
it's probably just a reaction to the fact that they
had a lot of their more traditional stuff get deplatformed
after February twenty twenty two. Yeah, but like this was
all stuff the Right was doing organically in their media
without Russian money. They didn't need this.

Speaker 13 (01:57:26):
They certainly are trying to kind of rebuild some of
their like directability to influence after like RT got deplatformed.
The other part that's interesting to me is because like
this indictment focuses on like Tenet Media as being kind
of one of these video editorial offices with a daily
output of three to four videos a day.

Speaker 3 (01:57:42):
Like that.

Speaker 13 (01:57:42):
That's what this That's what this kind of guide it describes,
that's what Tenant is. This evidence Stock also talks about
how like they're also just like faking engagement, getting like
sixty comments per day on various social media posts on
political topics. So that also like points towards like a
lot of people like driving like discussions and trying to
like increase the actual visibility and engagement is being boosted

(01:58:05):
by this like non authentic interference. A lot of videos
will go viral not just because they had a lot
of people watch them initially. It's because they have a
lot of engagement in like the comments, and that's what's
going to push something to actually show up more people's feets.
Like that is how Twitter currently works. There's a degree
to which that's how things work on YouTube. So it's
also just trying to try to like engineer virality by

(01:58:27):
faking a certain amount of engagement. Yeah, there's also like
that that degree of like interference beyond just actually, you know,
paying for Tim Poole to talk about Ukraine and talk
about how gay people are evil once a week.

Speaker 3 (01:58:40):
Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:58:41):
I think that's probably all we've got to say about
this for right now. This is not the most surprising
news in the world. It is good that it's embarrassing
to some of these guys. I don't know that. I
think it's actually going to hurt their listenership at all.
The people who listen to them don't really care.

Speaker 3 (01:58:56):
Yeah, they'll lie out of it.

Speaker 13 (01:58:58):
Yeah, they'll find some way to and to make themselves
the victim out of it. They will not have any
reflection that there was a whole Russian operation to identify
like influencers, to scout for that would serve Russia's purposes.
That they will never reflect on why they specifically were
scouted for. No, Yeah, they will never reflect that. The
only bit of like, the only bit of hesitation that

(01:59:21):
they had to take this money was that the profile
for the think businessman mentioned to Social Justice that was
the only thing that they like protested that's the only
thing that they actually wanted to look further into was
the fact that he listed social justice is something he
cares about, and not the fact that he just doesn't
exist at all.

Speaker 3 (01:59:37):
This is a completely fake person.

Speaker 13 (01:59:39):
They were able to flag social justice but not flag
that he just did not existed. None of this will
cause any kind of recollection because these guys don't care.
Like the reason why they say what they say is
because they can make five hundred thousand dollars a month
extra saying it, So imagine how much money they're already making.
Like that explains why they're doing what they're doing. Like
they don't care what they say anymore. They make such

(02:00:00):
a ridiculous amount of money that it doesn't matter.

Speaker 2 (02:00:03):
Yeah, and that's what it's always been about. Like they
have never believed in anything.

Speaker 13 (02:00:07):
Yeah, they don't need to like reflect on any of
this because they're still making tons of money. They're making
slightly less than they used to now that Russia's not
paying them, but they are still making tons Especially like
if this is what they thought like the going price was,
like they suggested these amounts, like they this is like
the regular price for them, and that kind of points
towards how much money is flying around this right wing
medio ecosystem.

Speaker 2 (02:00:28):
Yep, great, good to stuff.

Speaker 10 (02:00:31):
Yeah, the last couple of videos were focusing on this
ridiculous lie that migrant's taken over an apartment complex in Colorado,
Like all this shit that just isn't true that they've
been able to make true. I don't know, it's so frustrating.
I find it's so frustrating. Also, how like Pool has
been able to run this line of like the media
won't tell you this because there are things that legitimately

(02:00:54):
our neoliberal establishment media completely ignores and like that leave
the door open for this kind of shit, and as
a result, people can fill that space with lies, as
we're seeing here.

Speaker 3 (02:01:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (02:01:07):
Well, so the next time you get contacted by a
shady man on WhatsApp to pay you five hundred thousand
dollars about talking about how gay people are evil, you
might want to check to see if he's actually a
Russian agent first. You just you might want to do
a little a little bit of work. Yeah, they have
to tell you. It's like cops. You just ask him that.

Speaker 2 (02:01:26):
They have to tell you, you know what, Just send
him my way. That's exciting. New content news for you guys.

Speaker 13 (02:01:31):
I would not get paid by Russia to lie. I
might get paid by like Sweden, you know, to like
advance Swedish interests.

Speaker 2 (02:01:38):
Maybe there's a number of most countries I would lie
for besides that aren't rush. Yeah, would I would lie
for like Japan?

Speaker 3 (02:01:47):
Probably No, that could get dark actually never won. Yeah, yeah,
I leave that one out. Brother.

Speaker 2 (02:01:52):
Sweden, Sweden's perfect, No, it's just scarce. So I just
think you're underestimating the kind of shit Sweden gets up to.

Speaker 3 (02:01:57):
Oh no, they're certainly evil. They're certainly evil.

Speaker 13 (02:02:00):
But in terms of like a very like milk toast
country to get paid to increase their foreign interest, then
I think Sweden's about as good as you're gonna get. Like,
come on, like hungry, come on, come on Switzerland.

Speaker 2 (02:02:11):
You know all the Switzerland you would you would quickly
get implicated. But they could pay.

Speaker 3 (02:02:16):
All the financial all the financial price.

Speaker 10 (02:02:19):
Yeah, Robert and I received material benefits from the Burmese PDF.
We both had a nice lunch from them, and that
has been what we've done all our coverage. It's time
for us to come clean now.

Speaker 2 (02:02:28):
We did, although you did get very sick afterwards.

Speaker 10 (02:02:31):
So deceivably sick and you lucked me out of the toilet.

Speaker 2 (02:02:34):
So yeah, that was pretty funny.

Speaker 13 (02:02:42):
Oh what a time anyway, Rip Tenant Media, you were
a bake one.

Speaker 2 (02:02:48):
We'll be back tomorrow. Ah, what's not doing great? My democracy?

(02:03:15):
Although better than a couple of months ago. Maybe if
we're comparing this debate to the last debate, I think
the short answer everyone we'll agree with is better debate.

Speaker 3 (02:03:26):
My god.

Speaker 2 (02:03:28):
I'm Robert Evans with me tonight for you know. A
quick reaction to everything that went on in case you
don't want to sit through it yourself is Garrison Davis
and Sophie Lichdermann.

Speaker 13 (02:03:40):
Yeah, this was like a real debate. We haven't had
one of these in a long time.

Speaker 2 (02:03:43):
No, no, maybe never. I can't actually think of a
time in my life. It's certainly not in my adult
life where we have had one. I don't know, you
know what, Maybe I'm not remembering the Romney one well enough,
but certainly it's been a long time since we've got
This was really was about the issues to a significant extent,
not all of the issues I would have picked to
talk about, but there was a lot of discussion of

(02:04:05):
issues and policy.

Speaker 3 (02:04:07):
And like actual moderating.

Speaker 2 (02:04:09):
And actual moderating, yes, live.

Speaker 13 (02:04:11):
Fact checks, which I've never seen to this extent at
any Yeah, at any presidential debate. Ever, it was almost
shocking to see the moderators actually do their job.

Speaker 2 (02:04:19):
That was the highlight of the night for me.

Speaker 15 (02:04:21):
Yeah, And if you didn't catch the debate, it was
hosted by Disney's ABC and the moderators were Lindsay Davis
and David Muir, and yeah, both of them each did
a very decent job, I believe, with live fact checking.
When Trump said some of yes, very out of pocket,

(02:04:41):
unhinged comments.

Speaker 2 (02:04:43):
They deferred to him a couple of times when he
would demand to be allowed to speak. That I wasn't
thrilled with, but yeah, it was kind of it was
made up for you know. One of the things going
on on the right wing media the last couple of
days has been this claim that Haitian immigrants to the
United States are eating people's pets. Probably do an episode
on this, it's worth covering. Like it's all lies, it's

(02:05:03):
like evil, racist lies. But Trump brought it up in
detail during the debate and got pressed pretty effectively by
David who essentially what I'm saying like, well, that's just
not true. Like we've talked to the city manager. There's
no reports of anyone's pet speed. Yeah, you've just made
this up. And Trump said it was true because he
saw it on TV.

Speaker 3 (02:05:24):
He said it twice.

Speaker 15 (02:05:25):
But like, you know, I just want to like for
like a Reuter's fact check, like this started from a
Facebook post and then determined that it was there was
no evidence to this claim, and that didn't stop the
likes of jd Vance and other horrible individuals spreading it
on the internet and Donald Trump announcing it to be

(02:05:47):
true multiple times during the biggest presidential debate of our lifetime.

Speaker 13 (02:05:53):
As they kept saying, it seems every debate is the
most historic debate that's ever happened.

Speaker 2 (02:05:59):
Yeah, I'm going to say this one wasn't. Sorry, the
last one definitely was because one of the guys who
was in it is no longer running for presidents.

Speaker 3 (02:06:07):
That's fair. That one was a little historic.

Speaker 15 (02:06:09):
Yeah, do we want to get into a little bit
of the pre show at all?

Speaker 13 (02:06:12):
Or sure we could talk about the pre show first?

Speaker 6 (02:06:15):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (02:06:15):
Why not? Why don't you start there?

Speaker 4 (02:06:17):
Sophie.

Speaker 15 (02:06:18):
During the pre show, Fox News was talking about how
the Trump campaign says that he will only go low
on the issues, and he did not. They also had
a guy who is on TV way too much Byron Donald,
where he said that Kamala, we know Biden is not

(02:06:38):
running the country your VP.

Speaker 3 (02:06:41):
Now basically what.

Speaker 15 (02:06:43):
They they kind of just did the same sad talking
points and then CNN did, I mean, this is not
that interesting, to be honest, like CNN talked about how
important this was, and Chris Wallace specifically said that Trump's
biggest strength is he doesn't talk like a Paulian. I
don't think that helped him tonight, to be honest, not tonight.

Speaker 2 (02:07:03):
Well, you know, to be honest, here's what I would
say that was true of why he won. That played
a major role in winning. But he talks like a
politician now because politics has reordered itself around trump Ism,
particularly on the right. But even Harris and Walls are
a little trumpier than certainly any Democratic politician was before

(02:07:26):
the selection.

Speaker 15 (02:07:26):
Right, and the most interesting thing that was said in
both of these things to be which will bring us
to the start of the debate. CNN was heavily focused
on the fact that President Trump is almost a foot
taller than Vice President Harris and asking if he will
take advantage of that. He wouldn't even meet her across
the stage to shake her hand. She walked all the
way over to him. I genuinely think he did not

(02:07:48):
want to shake her hand.

Speaker 2 (02:07:50):
No, he didn't, And I thought that was again, this
all seems like very petty stuff to talk about, but
this is the pettiest man alive, and like this stuff
actually does matter. And I think it was a pretty
intelligent strategic move. I think it started off the night
with him off ballance. She immediately put him off balance
and pissed him off, and he didn't really recover. He

(02:08:12):
had some moments. He certainly was not weak everywhere I
think he was. He was lie like his economy. Everything
he says about like tariffs is like it's a nonsense
policy that would devastate like large chunks of this country.
But I think his messaging was pretty effective there. It
probably is going to work for a lot of moderates.
I thought his messaging on Afghanistan was really effective. I

(02:08:34):
think he probably won that segment of the debate just
in terms of what's going to play better.

Speaker 3 (02:08:39):
Those are the two definitely right.

Speaker 2 (02:08:41):
But you know, he didn't lose every clash they had.
He never got momentum, and he was never able to
build momentum. Even when he had a win, he was
never able to tie that into a greater pattern like
he was with Biden. He was never able to get
any kind of weight behind him. He just kind of
was wabbed the whole.

Speaker 15 (02:09:00):
Night, which I think at this scale is the first
we've seen from him.

Speaker 13 (02:09:05):
No, it was definitely Kamala going in hard for the
handshake at the very very start of the debate was
her equivalent of Trump following around Hillary Clinton on that
debate stage. Yep, it threw him off balance. He wasn't
expecting it. It immediately kind of gave her the upper
hand literally wow and controlling where the conversation was going

(02:09:26):
to go. Like Trump refused to look at Kamala through
the entire debate. He only looked straight ahead. Kamala was
often addressing Trump directly looking at him and then also
turning towards the cameras. Trump was just straight faced the
entire time. He never he never looked at her or
acknowledged her like visually. It was kind of odd to see,
and throughout the debate he just kept getting really angry

(02:09:48):
and almost like childish. Harris maintained her ability to present
herself as like the more hopeful candidate and by and
large led the debate.

Speaker 2 (02:09:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (02:09:57):
Yeah, he kept having to like follow her. You just
came off as like an angry child.

Speaker 9 (02:10:02):
Now.

Speaker 13 (02:10:02):
She did not answer some of the questions about like
her policy shifts, but she was able to deflect those
questions and Trump to go off topic to talking about
like crowd sizes and rumors about eating dogs. Trump wasn't
able to actually talk about what his plans for the
country were. Harris just kept him like complaining about weird nonsense,
going off on tagents, and always going back to talking

(02:10:23):
about immigrants. He just couldn't control the conversation at all.

Speaker 2 (02:10:28):
No, and the crowd size stuff. Like he was very
clearly like on the verge of kind of losing it there,
which was interesting to see.

Speaker 15 (02:10:36):
CNN claimed during their post show that that moment was
when he never recovered after the crowd size stuff.

Speaker 2 (02:10:43):
Yeah, I think that's probably accurate.

Speaker 15 (02:10:44):
Fair, Yeah, that's a fair analysis from CNN.

Speaker 2 (02:10:48):
I would say that he didn't he never recovered from
the opening handshake, Like, but that's when it was kind
of undeniable, the crowd sized thing like, because he kept
trying to get back on the rails, and I think
he gave up. And the clearest example of that was
his closing statements, which I know we're kind of jumping
around here, but Kamala's closing statements were the kind of

(02:11:08):
closing statements you give if you are trying to become
the president, and Trump's you can contrast it to the
way he was talking during his big RNC speech, which
was certainly much too long, but was clearly intentional for
the most part, was a better speech. Yeah, it's like
there was some ad libbing there. He did some, but

(02:11:30):
this was clearly not written down ahead of time. It
did not sound like that. It made no sense. Yeah,
it was nonsense.

Speaker 13 (02:11:36):
Kamala's ending statement was talking about how this is a
fight for two different versions of what this country will
look like, you know, very politician e speech. Trump didn't
talk about himself at all. He just was complaining that
if Kamala Harris has so many great ideas for the country,
why hasn't she enacted them? And the answer is because
she's not the president. Yes, but he did not talk

(02:11:56):
about his own version of the country. He was just
complaining about how much he didn't like Kamala Harris and
that Kamala Harris is promising to do great things even
though that she's not like doing them right now as
vice president. And that was his messaging, at.

Speaker 2 (02:12:09):
Least in the pre show that I watched, and in
a lot of like the punditry I read before this,
the thing that kept getting reinforced was that this has
to be a debate about the issues. The Americans that
are still undecided want to hear what people's plans are
for the country. Now. Do I believe that's the case.
I'm not necessarily the most optimistic about how seriously Americans

(02:12:33):
take political policy. But if that is the case, Trump
blew his chance to talk about what he wants to
do as president because he number one, was extremely defensive.
He spent more time denying things that he wasn't going
to do. Like it she got him very good on
twenty twenty five. That has proven to be an extremely
effective line of attack, and he was really he had

(02:12:56):
to not just deny that he planned to like in
State Project T twenty five as present, but like he
had to repeatedly claim I've never read it like, I
don't know what's in it.

Speaker 3 (02:13:05):
I don't want to read it.

Speaker 15 (02:13:07):
I have nothing to do with Project twenty twenty five.

Speaker 2 (02:13:11):
In a way that sounded almost panicked. Yeah, right, like
where he really I'm kind of surprised they didn't give
him a better response on that, that they didn't really
drill that down, and I wonder if they did. And
he just was so flustered and pissed that he didn't
do it. But he certainly did not have an effective
response to that one. And when he kept repeatedly being

(02:13:33):
asked to give his policy on how he would like
fix the Affordable Care Act or replace it, he just punted.

Speaker 15 (02:13:40):
He just kept saying it's terrible.

Speaker 2 (02:13:42):
It's like, okay, yeah, it's terrible, but i can't do
anything about it, so I'm not going to repeal it,
but like We've got to do better. It was. It
was a really weak answer.

Speaker 3 (02:13:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (02:13:53):
One thing I found interesting is that the last debate
was full of so many AD breaks and we went
full like a one hour, yeah, full hour before before ads,
and speaking of ads, oh wow, we have gone a
full thirteen minutes, and that means it's time for us
to take an ad break.

Speaker 3 (02:14:19):
All right, we are back.

Speaker 2 (02:14:21):
Yeah. Can I get to one thing first because I
just came across this. It's about the Haitian immigrants. PBS
put up a documentary like literally a day or two
ago talking, yeah, one day ago, talking about this, and
they interview a factory owner in Springfield, Ohio about what
he thinks of Haitian migration, and he's like, I wish
a lot more of them would come. They're the only

(02:14:42):
people in town who don't do drugs and come to
work on time. I just thought that was a great,
great Springfield, Ohio representation. I hope that guy's happened a
good night.

Speaker 15 (02:14:54):
Great quote there, Robert, Yeah, Gerre, what do you want
to talk about next?

Speaker 4 (02:14:58):
Now?

Speaker 13 (02:14:59):
In this middle section, it is kind of I want
to go over some of what they actually talked about
during the debate, a few of kind of the main topics.
They started with the economy. Kamla was talking about how
there's a shortage of homes, they're the cost of housing
is just too high, and she's going to have tax
cuts for families and warned about Trump's quote unquote sales
tax that would rise costs for households by nearly four

(02:15:22):
thousand dollars a year now. This is in reference to
Trump's tariffs, which he then talked about next. They know
they're not sales tax, they're tariffs, and that countries will
pay us back for all that we've done in the
world's insane, which will bainly mean that our economy will
do worse and things will be more expensive for us.

Speaker 15 (02:15:39):
I thought Kama was pretty strong during that section in
terms of like her response. She directly mentioned Goldman Sachs,
which is something that's come out in the last couple
days from Reuters. It's that the Goldman Sacks's biggest boost
you as economy from Maharis when talking about US economic
growth would likely get the biggest boost in the coming

(02:16:00):
two years from Democrats headed by Kamala Harris winning the
White House in Congress in Novembers election. And she specifically
called out to that, And her being actually able to
call out to something like that in a debate was
something we I haven't seen in a while on a debate,
and so that was something that I particularly took note of.

Speaker 13 (02:16:21):
Yeah, actually slight relevant authorities on issues.

Speaker 2 (02:16:24):
Yeah, Yeah, she did a lot of that. She definitely
had her moments where she would avoid responses. I noted
she consistently refused to answer, are there limitations you think
should be in place on when people can get abortions? Right? Yeah,
she just kind of did not answer that one. Now,
to be frank, I think that's a bullshit question, and
I think a redirection was pretty effective. Yeah, But as

(02:16:47):
a general rule, when she answered questions, she cited statistics
and like studies and did a pretty a pretty good job. Now, again,
how well is that going to matter? We're still very
early in the pundit cycle here. It seems pretty clear
that most of the mainstream media, including Fox Like, agrees

(02:17:08):
Harris won the night. Polymarket predicts a ninety seven percent
chance that Harris is judged the winner in the debate snappoles,
which I found out from Nate Silver's quick reaction, where
he also notes, quote bitcoin prices are down, which also
implies a loss for Trump.

Speaker 15 (02:17:24):
That's very funny.

Speaker 13 (02:17:27):
I love that Bitcoin's a good political needle to see
where the country's going.

Speaker 2 (02:17:32):
I'll tell you the happiest assuming that we don't usher
in a new fascist or you know, a significantly worse
state in November. The best thing about it is going
to be not needing to pay attention to Nate Silver
for another four years.

Speaker 3 (02:17:45):
Yeah, but yeah, you know.

Speaker 2 (02:17:47):
He did make one other point that I found kind
of funny, which was his argument that, like well, Trump
is a lot taller. The stature gap in terms of
physical size was also notable, especially with Harris having a
shorter podium. And you'll hear people say that you should
watch the debate with the sound off, and by that
measure it was much closer than with the sound on.

Speaker 3 (02:18:06):
Who says that name? Has ever said that, who's gonna
watch the debate with the sound off?

Speaker 2 (02:18:12):
Stick to Poles man, what the fuck is wrong with you?

Speaker 13 (02:18:16):
These debates used to be audio only. They were a
radio broadcasts. That is, that's how the TA started.

Speaker 15 (02:18:22):
That is so unwell of him to say what are you?
What are you doing? Why think that over head? And
don't put that on the internet.

Speaker 3 (02:18:30):
He is a good one.

Speaker 2 (02:18:32):
Yes, every second Nate Silver isn't writing a blog post
or looking at Poles he is he is sitting in
a shitty bar in like Fremont Street, Vegas, playing like
mid Steaks poker. So he probably does consume a lot
of television with the sound off.

Speaker 3 (02:18:49):
But to go back to the economy.

Speaker 13 (02:18:51):
So as Kamla was talking about her plans for like
tax credits and tax cuts helping people buy homes, Trump
was just talking about and immediately brought up that one
of the things that's affecting the economy is that there's
there's millions of people pouring in from prisons and a
sane asylums, taking jobs from black and Hispanic and union workers.

(02:19:12):
That these immigrants are taking over towns and buildings violently,
And it's just immediately that's that, that's what that's what
he goes to because he has really just nothing else.

Speaker 15 (02:19:22):
He also said people can't buy bacon, cereal and eggs
cereal cereal.

Speaker 3 (02:19:28):
Of all the foods to choose cereal.

Speaker 13 (02:19:31):
So yeah, tried to talk about like inflation and stuff.
It just it just didn't go very well, especially because
inflations rose so much during the pandemic when he was president.
It just didn't play very well at all. Immediately it
was clear that Kamala was kind of the front runner.
The next topic was abortion, which Kamala also did very well,
and Trump just really lost it because he couldn't stop

(02:19:52):
talking about how Tim Walls wants to execute babies after birth,
and this just this was the main thing he talked about.
He was very defensive about his stance on a national
abortion ban. Moderators asked him about his contradictory abortion statements,
about how he's voting for an abortion ban in Florida
but is claiming to not want one nationally, and Trump

(02:20:12):
just didn't know how to talk about this topic very
well and just kept saying that Democrats are evil because
they want to do nine month abortions, seven month, eight
month abortions, post birth executions, they will execute the baby,
which was I believe this was like the first fact
check for the night, and this is what kind of
really scared Trump is. He was like, Oh, they're actually

(02:20:33):
gonna call me on this stuff. Moderator said that there's
no states where you can kill babies after birth, and
Trump just didn't know what to do. Kamala brought up
Project to twenty twenty five and their plans for a
national abortion ban. Trump made a little funny comment kind
of throwing JD Vans under the buss about Trump vetoing
a national abortion ban if it was passed by Congress.

(02:20:56):
Trump said that he actually hadn't talked to Vance about that.

Speaker 3 (02:21:00):
I didn't discuss it with Jamie.

Speaker 2 (02:21:01):
By the way, I've been taken a break from Twitter,
but I did catch a good post recently. JD. Vance,
before the debate, made a claim that a bunch of
people from Springfield who he won't name, have reached out
to him talking about Haitians eating their pets, and then
ended it by saying like, it's possible this will prove
to be untrue. And someone just quote tweeted that and said,
every day I see something that makes me understand why

(02:21:24):
Vance's mom traded him for a couple of perk thirties.

Speaker 3 (02:21:28):
Incredible.

Speaker 13 (02:21:33):
Kamala basically said most of her regular talking points and abortion.
She would like for the House in the Senate to
put abortion protections into law and she would sign that
bill and wants to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade,
and also talked about how it's absurd to be talking
about post birth executions and how this is like consulting.

Speaker 15 (02:21:52):
Yep, she's correct, Thank you so much.

Speaker 3 (02:21:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (02:21:56):
Next thing was the border, very similar to both their
RNC and their DNC speeches. Kamala talking about this kind
of very conservative border bill that Trump shot down for
political gain and then invited us to attend a Trump
rally where he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter
and how windmills caused cancer, and that people leave early,
and he never talks about you, the American people. So

(02:22:18):
this was obviously giant bait for Trump, which he he
took immediately. He just couldn't stop talking about people actually
come to my rallies way more than they go to
your rallies. They don't leave early. You have to bust
in people to your rallies.

Speaker 15 (02:22:32):
And he claims she pays people to attend her rallies
as well.

Speaker 3 (02:22:36):
He got so flustered.

Speaker 13 (02:22:37):
Is that this is what he started talking about the
eating dogs thing. It's because he got so flustered on
this line of argument about his crowd size that he
just he just had to immediately talk about how there's
immigrants eating dogs. Yeah, because he just didn't know what
to do.

Speaker 2 (02:22:51):
I mean, it's actually kind of just a very like
on the nose, but perfect representation of how racism works
culturally a lot of the time, which is like white
man feels aggrieved and threatened and immediately turns to attacking
an entire group of people based on their race, like
it really was the most direct example of that that

(02:23:13):
you could possibly get, Like, he felt vulnerable and so
he attacked a group of people for eating cats. He
did a blood libel.

Speaker 13 (02:23:21):
I think a big part of Kamalist strategy here was
to paint Trump as like an illegitimate figure in politics,
like someone who's not like responsible to like lead the.

Speaker 3 (02:23:30):
Military and it's dangerous. Yeah, she bragged.

Speaker 13 (02:23:33):
About the endorsement of two hundred Republicans, including Dick Cheney
hated that moment, like, no, but you know, is not great,
but we'll see if it plays politically well.

Speaker 2 (02:23:43):
It might work.

Speaker 15 (02:23:44):
Yeah, it doesn't play well for us, but yes, doesn't
mean it doesn't overall play well.

Speaker 13 (02:23:50):
Unfortunately, a lot of her statements seemed like she was
trying to court both the NATSEC people and the courts
if there's ever like a contested election, Like she wants
those people to be on her side. And there was
a lot of Commons throughout the debate that was kind
of pointing to that and like showing how Trump's just
like an unreliable and like dangerous figure to be in
control of national security. Trump went on this interesting tangent

(02:24:13):
about how he was actually good because he fired a
whole bunch of those Republicans because they were because they
were bad at their jobs.

Speaker 2 (02:24:20):
I thought it was one of his more effective moments.

Speaker 13 (02:24:23):
That was something we've never really seen done before, openly
attacking military leaders in that fashion.

Speaker 15 (02:24:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:24:29):
I didn't read it as attacking military leaders. I read
it as him specifically stating because she was Harris had
been talking about the Republicans from the Bush White House
who had endorsed her, And I read it as Trump
saying I brought in a lot of like rhinos, what
he would call rhinos, but I brought in a lot
of like old Republican veterans and fired them because they
were bad at their job. And I thought that was

(02:24:51):
one where I was like, well, yeah, they were, you know, like,
you're not wrong. You didn't replace them with anyone better,
but like they were. In fact, you did hire a
bunch of Republican officials who had a long history working
in other administrations, who sucked at what they did, you know, like,
not wrong. Now it's interesting to have him say I

(02:25:11):
brought in a lot of people, some of them were
good and some of them were bad.

Speaker 3 (02:25:14):
Yes, Yeah, I don't.

Speaker 2 (02:25:15):
Think I've ever heard a former president admit that during
a debate.

Speaker 15 (02:25:19):
He was like, we don't talk about the good people.
And it's like, well, why why don't you do that
now during your debate. Yeah, here's your chance.

Speaker 6 (02:25:27):
JD.

Speaker 3 (02:25:28):
Vance great guy, great guy, great, great guy. Trump, So JD.

Speaker 15 (02:25:31):
Van's great guy. Never met him, don't know who he is.
Who are you talking about, never talked to him.

Speaker 13 (02:25:36):
One of the more interesting questions the moderator asked was
just directly asking Trump, how would you go about your
massive deportation program? How would you actually go about deporting
eleven million or more undocumented immigrants? And Trump did not
have a real answer to this question. Trump said that,
you know, there's actually way more of them here than

(02:25:56):
what you would think. South America is sending all their
criminals here.

Speaker 2 (02:26:00):
It's really interesting because he said, they say fifteen million,
it's really twenty one million. And then he said, and
it's a lot more than twenty one million.

Speaker 3 (02:26:07):
Okay, how many is it? Donald?

Speaker 13 (02:26:11):
The moderators challenged him on like rising crime rates, saying
that the FBI is actually, you know, showing that crime
is going down, and Trump then claimed that the FBI
crime rates are fraudular, are fraudulent, which is the first
time that you've seen, at least that I've seen him
talk about it that way. Like usually on Fox News
they will like mention that, but they'll be like, but

(02:26:33):
people feel crime is going up, So that's what really matters.
Even if even if the FBI claims it's going down,
people still feel less safe. But he just openly said
that those numbers are just like fake, like the FBI
is just like lying saying that they aren't counting crimes
in like the biggest major cities. Kanma's response to this
was saying that that's rich coming from a convicted criminal.

(02:26:53):
So we got that first, like prosecutor girl boss moment.

Speaker 3 (02:26:57):
Okay, hi've rise up.

Speaker 13 (02:26:59):
Trump complained about all of like the legal witch hunts
he's been facing and said that, quote, I probably took
a bullet to the head because of the things they
say about me, unquote, which is just a fascinating way
to frame that unhinged thing to say.

Speaker 2 (02:27:12):
It is, especially given how many Americans don't think he
was shot in the head.

Speaker 15 (02:27:21):
You just know his advisors were like, what the fuck, Like,
what are you saying right now?

Speaker 2 (02:27:29):
Ah?

Speaker 5 (02:27:29):
Fuck?

Speaker 2 (02:27:30):
Oh they are drinking tonight.

Speaker 3 (02:27:32):
Oh, they they.

Speaker 15 (02:27:33):
Are drinking tonight.

Speaker 3 (02:27:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 15 (02:27:36):
Yeah, And that's not even like the most unhinged thing
he said, because the most unhinged thing he said the
entire night came shortly after that, which was, she wants
to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison. Based
she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison.

(02:28:00):
She wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in.

Speaker 3 (02:28:07):
Prison, and the leader says she's a radical liberal.

Speaker 2 (02:28:10):
I believe that a president can perform surgery if that
president wants to. Sophie and I support Kamala Harris's policy.

Speaker 15 (02:28:17):
You should have voted for Ben Carson, then.

Speaker 3 (02:28:20):
I did I write him in every year? Okay Jesus Christ,
no you don't.

Speaker 13 (02:28:27):
There was a good tweet that remarked that it just
sounds like he's talking like he's playing cards against humanity.
He's just like change, He's just like changing out different
words like transgender aliens, prison, surgery. I believe what he's
referencing here is that both Fox News and Trump's campaign
team the past few days have been talking about how
in twenty twenty, Kamala made a statement basically saying that, yeah,

(02:28:50):
we should like offer gender affirming health care to people
in prison. Like, if you're in prison, we should not
like deny health care to you just because you're locked up.
That's like what he's talking about. That is specifically what
he's referring to. But it just it's sounds just absolutely bad.

Speaker 7 (02:29:05):
Shit.

Speaker 13 (02:29:06):
Let's have another quick ad break. We will come back.
I want to talk a little bit about January sixth,
foreign policy, Israel, Palestine, and then some of Trump's and
Kamala's post debate statements made to the press.

Speaker 3 (02:29:29):
All Right, we are so bad, so bad.

Speaker 2 (02:29:32):
It's so bad, like the Harris campaign kind of kind
of She's been slowly kind of like flatlining in some
of these polls. I do want to talk about that
a little before we get into this, because it has
been interesting. She's been losing kind of national popular vote momentum,
and that has been narrowing. The swing states have not

(02:29:55):
really narrowed in the same way. Yeah, which is not
to say that she is a clear favorite. Everything basically
is within the margin of error.

Speaker 13 (02:30:01):
She's barely ahead, but she's still ahead. It has been
a really interesting change. It has not been the same.

Speaker 2 (02:30:08):
There's a newsletter I check on occasionally for stuff like
this at GERMNTUM. That made what I thought was an
interesting point, which was that it's possible that a lot
of that has to do with the fact that the
national popular vote has been narrowing as a result of
the ads the Republicans have been pumping out because there
wasn't a real strong consensus about who Harris was and
now that's growing. But in a lot of these swing states,

(02:30:31):
which are red states, people have been living under Republicans
and are just a lot less kind of vulnerable to
being drawn away by that kind of propaganda because they
know what it's like.

Speaker 13 (02:30:42):
No, I mean, especially if you're looking at North Carolina,
you're looking at Georgia. Those are two battlegrounds that the
Harris campaign is targeting. I can definitely see that being
being an aspect. So the mods turned the questions towards
January sixth. Trump immediately claimed that nobody on the other
side was killed, only Ash the bad that was killed

(02:31:03):
by a bad police officer.

Speaker 15 (02:31:06):
Very ironic, but.

Speaker 2 (02:31:07):
Easily the only Coppall go to bat for the best
shoot in twenty twenty one by a mile.

Speaker 13 (02:31:15):
And he then complained that why haven't BLM rioters been
prosecuted in Seattle and Minneapolis, which of course they have.
They are still they're still arresting people.

Speaker 2 (02:31:25):
Man, I've spent time in courtrooms with people, Like.

Speaker 15 (02:31:28):
Yes, I was shocked he did not call out Portland.

Speaker 2 (02:31:31):
It is interesting that he went for Seattle and not Portland.
I guess maybe just says a lot about his media
diet that he just maybe got a lot more Chaz
stuff than he did Portland stuff.

Speaker 10 (02:31:42):
I don't know.

Speaker 13 (02:31:43):
He certainly did go after a commonal a few times
for being pro defund the police back in twenty twenty.

Speaker 2 (02:31:48):
He really, he tried several times. He clearly she never
took the bait. Yeah, she never took the bait. And
that must have been one that his advisors really pushed
him on. Yeah, like they must have said, you'll get her.

Speaker 13 (02:32:01):
It was both that and her previous like fracking policies,
which which she has like backtracked on. And ye, you
have to if you want to win Pennsylvania. So like,
I understand why they're doing it. It sucks because the
planet's burning, but right now they're trying to win Pennsylvania.
The debate was in Pennsylvania, Like that's why she has
backtracked on those policies. I think it's smart to deflect

(02:32:22):
from that at least right now. But yeah, I mean,
that's that's not surprising to me.

Speaker 3 (02:32:26):
Now.

Speaker 13 (02:32:27):
I think Kamala did a pretty good statement about January sixth.
She said, I was at the Capitol on j sixth.
He incited a violent mob. And now she got kind
of emotional. She said one hundred and forty officers were
injured and some died. Trump was impeached, which is something
that just hasn't been talked about very much. Is like, yeah,
Trump has been impeached. Why isn't that talked about very much?

Speaker 15 (02:32:46):
Because so many other things have happened, then everyone has forgotten.

Speaker 13 (02:32:49):
Yeah, that he was liter really impeached. Yeah, multiple times.
And then she pointed to January sixth as like not
the only incident. No, she pointed back to Charlottesville, talked
about Trump's statements about Proud Boys and how the Proud
Boy militia was told to stand back and stand by,
and she kind of closed this this little January sixth
monologue by saying, like, we don't have to go back

(02:33:10):
to this. He says that if the election doesn't go
to his liking there will be a blood bath.

Speaker 3 (02:33:15):
We don't have to go back.

Speaker 13 (02:33:16):
And she's positioning herself as like as an alternative towards
like that type of chaos. Trump got very mad at this,
very mad Trump talking about how Fox News debugged the
Charlottesville quote.

Speaker 3 (02:33:28):
Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure. Yeah, I'm sure.

Speaker 13 (02:33:32):
I know one other like fact checker I think with
Snopes is like, actually, the Charlottesville quote is different in context,
and at least a whole bunch of fact checkers that
like I know and extremism reporters have kind of gotten
on snopesas for this, because it's very clear it's a
very disingenuous way of framing what he was trying to say. Yeah,
we all know what happened on Charlottesville. We all know
what he was talking about.

Speaker 15 (02:33:52):
Yeah, Cataboo is a really good video on it if
you want to watch more.

Speaker 2 (02:33:55):
Yeah, yes she does.

Speaker 13 (02:33:56):
And then the moderators talked about how Trump has been
falsely claiming for three and a half years that he
won the twenty twenty election, but now says that he
lost by a whisker, and Trump was startled by this.

Speaker 3 (02:34:08):
He's like, did I actually say that? I said that
I said that. No, no, no, no, no, that was sarcastic,
and it was.

Speaker 2 (02:34:14):
Like the only time I've ever heard him he sounded
genuinely like confused, like maybe there was a little old man.
But we were like, oh shit, what have I been saying.

Speaker 13 (02:34:23):
He's like, no, no, no, that was a sarcastic statement.
I still think I won the twenty twenty election.

Speaker 2 (02:34:30):
Yeah, and he really And that was one of the
more effective moderator moments because you could see the moderator
was like, Oh, what a gift I've been given. I
just want to make very clear. Let's have him say,
Let's have him confirm what he means, like three times,
and then we could move on.

Speaker 13 (02:34:44):
Kabla had a good reply talking about how like we
can't have a candidate who's confused about how the elections work.

Speaker 3 (02:34:51):
And being like like she is correct, Yeah.

Speaker 13 (02:34:53):
Come on, great respond and then Trump immediately went on
to defend Victor Horbon, Yes, the president of Hungary, seg
some people call him the strong man because he's a
really tough guy.

Speaker 15 (02:35:05):
He loves the strong man thing.

Speaker 2 (02:35:07):
That was my favorite part because he clearly misunderstood, no,
strong man is a term for dictation.

Speaker 3 (02:35:12):
Yes, Yeah, he just that was quite a moment for
this country.

Speaker 15 (02:35:19):
It was just the fumbling and bumbling.

Speaker 2 (02:35:22):
I love it, you know what. Overall, good time, except
for one thing that really sucked, which is several things
that really sucked, which is whenever it came to something
where a huge number of human lives were involved. Yeah,
almost always it got kind of brushed over.

Speaker 3 (02:35:39):
Ukraine.

Speaker 2 (02:35:39):
I will say, I don't think it got a very
good set of questions. It was the same shit that
they've been asking both sides. Right, The Dims get asked,
how are you going to actually conclude this conflict in
a favorable way? And the Republicans get asked, are you
just going to abandon Ukraine? Right? Like, that's the gist

(02:35:59):
of what both candidates are being pushed on, and the
gist of their responses is unchanged from everything we've heard
earlier this year.

Speaker 15 (02:36:07):
Right, And despite being asked multiple times, Trump refused to
answer if it was in the world's best interest of
Ukraine wins the war. He was asked that several times,
and he just he just said, I want the war
to end, not an answer.

Speaker 2 (02:36:19):
And there wouldn't have been a war if I'd been president.

Speaker 15 (02:36:22):
This wouldn't have happened. Yeah, this wouldn't have happened. That's
his claim.

Speaker 2 (02:36:25):
But you know, Harris did not have an answer, because
there isn't one, no, no, this is an incredibly difficult war.
Right now, I will say, I think like the actual
things she should have done, and the thing that Biden
should have done, is say, like we are removing all
extant limitations on the weapons that we ship Ukraine and
how they can use them. You know, at this point

(02:36:45):
they have now invaded Russian territory and occupied hundreds of
miles of it. Like, you know, that was something I
was interested in that she should have hit on and
did not, which Trump brought up the fact that Russia
has nuclear weapons in a matter of like, we can't
push him too much. Who knows what they'll do, right
That was clearly what he wanted people to take from
him bringing up the fact that Russia has a nuclear arsenal,
and Harris didn't bring up like, yeah, you know, they

(02:37:08):
invaded Russia a couple of weeks back, no nukes, Like
this kind of threat is clearly something that the Putin
regime wants the international community to have. But when push
comes to shove, he's not suicidal. And the idea that
like Putin is going to start nuking people if Ukraine
is able to fire missiles at Russian fuel depots or whatever,

(02:37:32):
I just don't think is supported by how he's actually
performed so far. But at any rate, at least Ukraine
got a decent amount of time. It was one of
the things that they talked about more in this debate.
Gaza got one very quick question. You could tell the
moderators wanted to move the fuck past it as fast
as possible, and both Trump and Harris wanted to get

(02:37:53):
past it, Harris more so than Trump.

Speaker 15 (02:37:55):
Harris stayed about the same statement she made at the
DNC YEP she first mentioned October seventh, talked about how
far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.

Speaker 13 (02:38:04):
The war must dan. We need a cease fire deal,
the hostages out. We need to chart a course for
a two state solution and rebuild Gaza. We will always
give Israel the ability to defend itself, especially in relation
to Iran. That was most of her statement, which is
nothing new from her now. Trump first tried to skip
the question and just immediately talking about Russia. He then
said that Kamala hates Israel and she also hates the

(02:38:25):
Arab people.

Speaker 3 (02:38:26):
The whole area will be bombed.

Speaker 13 (02:38:28):
Under her presidency, saying that if he gets elected as
president elect, he will solve the war. And then he
just talked about like how oil pipelines are important.

Speaker 2 (02:38:37):
It was so weird interesting to me that he tried
to skip this when this is one of the things
she's weakest on the things. But I think it may
just be that, like Americans overwhelmingly at this point do
not think Israel is categorically in the wrong. They think
that Israel is often in the wrong in this war

(02:38:59):
and been killing a lot of innocent people. And so
it may just be that he knows that, Like this
isn't really a great issue for me either, Let's move
back to something. But it was it was interesting to
me that he didn't have any kind of concerted attack,
like saying she hates Israel and Arabs is such a
strange tactic to take here, and I don't see how

(02:39:22):
he thought it could help him.

Speaker 3 (02:39:24):
Who are you trying to appeal to.

Speaker 2 (02:39:25):
Right, How is this supposed to get you a vote?
What vote does this get you that you don't have?

Speaker 15 (02:39:31):
There's just no way. That was like what was in
his campaign prep. Yeah, that was not advice, There's no way.

Speaker 13 (02:39:36):
Yeah, Kamla did have a good line here to think
points towards her like recording that sec people. She said,
it's well known that Trump is a weak on foreign
policy and national security. He's pro dictator. Yeah, yeah, Trump
just doesn't have any way to answer that, because yeah,
he does want to be a dictatory. He just he
just offended the president of Hungary like a few minutes ago.

Speaker 2 (02:39:58):
Yeah, like called him as strong man and said that
that means he's tough.

Speaker 3 (02:40:02):
Well.

Speaker 2 (02:40:02):
He also she had a good line about how like
he's not going to be tough with these people, They're
just going to like say something nice to him and
then he'll immediately want to be their friends. Like, yeah,
that was a decent little jab. She got a few
of those in more than a few. I want to
talk about since we're kind of running along just a
little bit. At the endier after the debate ended, I
caught this. I don't think you guys did, but Trump

(02:40:25):
went down to what's called the no spin zone, which
is just a thing Fox did. I I think it
started on the Handity Show.

Speaker 3 (02:40:32):
I caught the.

Speaker 15 (02:40:33):
Fox immediate after the debate response, do you want me
to get into that, it's just one quick thing?

Speaker 2 (02:40:40):
Sure?

Speaker 15 (02:40:41):
Yeah, So immediate response from Fox was Vice President Harris
was clearly well prepared, but she was never held to
the fire and felt like ABC was helping her out.
He went down a few cat and cat and dog
holes instead of rabbit holes and not rabbit holes. That
a direct thing to the eating pets thing. Make no

(02:41:03):
but snake about it. Trump had a bad night.

Speaker 2 (02:41:06):
Yeah, that's interesting.

Speaker 15 (02:41:07):
Then just talked about how she was calm and prepared
and whatnot. But then you know, Hannity came on and
did his Hannity thing and then I'm.

Speaker 3 (02:41:16):
No spin zone.

Speaker 2 (02:41:17):
That must have been why Trump was heading down to
the no spin zone. So what happened? You've got this.
It's the floor of where they did the debate, so
everyone is everywhere, tons of media and Trump. There's like
this huge scrum around him and I'm watching on ABC
and the ABC anchors just start screaming at him from
like Donald Donald, mister President, trying to get him to

(02:41:38):
answer their questions and like everyone is doing this, and
he eventually like gives a statement where he says, well,
this was my favorite debate. This was like the best
debate I've ever had. I clearly won. Someone was like,
so are you going to do a second debate? Harris says,
she wants another debate, and he's like, well, she just
wants another debate because she lost, So I don't know
if I'm going to do another debate. I found that

(02:41:58):
very funny. I found it kind of shameful how the
ABC guys just kept howling at him to give them
some attention in the middle of this very crowded room.
There was no way he could hear you. He's an
old man. Guys have some self fucking respect. You're supposed
to be journalists, and you had a colleague down there
who was actually asking him questions. But anyway, yeah, so yeah,
I mean, there wasn't a ton there other than him

(02:42:21):
kind of desperately trying. And one of them did make
the good point that, like he is claiming, I obviously
won the debate, as he heads down to the spin
zone spin his loss, which is like, yeah, it's not
a position of strength. No, I don't know that you
would have been doing this if this had been a
clean win, but it certainly wasn't and yeah, like I

(02:42:41):
think tonight went pretty badly for him.

Speaker 15 (02:42:44):
Yeah, yeah, CNN was like foaming at the mouth happy
or sad a CNN was thrill, They're foaming at the
mouth for Kamala Harris that nobody else has done what
she's been able to do. And then something else happened
that made CNN and MSNBC thrilled and ruined one Trump

(02:43:05):
advisor's day. I'm sure Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris for
president right after the debate, And if only we could
have seen that Trump advisor whispered in his ear that
he did not, in fact, despite that AI fake endorsement,
get endorsed by childless cat lady Taylor Swift.

Speaker 2 (02:43:26):
That's so interesting to me that she couched her endorsement
in I am doing this because of the AI that
Trump kept retweeting.

Speaker 13 (02:43:37):
Yeah, retruthing, sorry, retruthing.

Speaker 2 (02:43:40):
Retruthing, Yes, you're right, I apologize. I didn't mean to.
I'm not going to make that joke anyway, Garrison, what
were you going to say?

Speaker 13 (02:43:47):
Just that that's all just retruth thing.

Speaker 2 (02:43:51):
It's interesting to me that she she did specifically like
couch it and like is it's because of what he
did with this AI video like that, I felt like
I had a need to come out and say who
I'm voting for.

Speaker 10 (02:44:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:44:02):
Also, she has a cute cat. I hadn't seen her
cat before.

Speaker 3 (02:44:05):
It's also that.

Speaker 15 (02:44:06):
But because I pay attention to Taylor Swift News, she
was getting hammered a little bit in the last week
because one of her good friends, Brittany Mahomes, who's the
wife of Patrick Mahomes, who is Taylor Shift's boyfriends Travis
Kelsey's teammate Jesus Christ You're welcome, has liked several of
Trump's posts and uh truth truths. No, I don't know where.

Speaker 3 (02:44:28):
It was to be.

Speaker 15 (02:44:29):
I think it was actually think I don't I actually
don't think.

Speaker 3 (02:44:31):
It was his posts.

Speaker 15 (02:44:32):
I think it was your post about him pro Trump
post on Instagram very important to this election. Yes, and
then and then they were seen together at the US
Open and and the Girl Bosses were very unhappy with
Taylor about this, and so so I think that also
played into the timing. Robert, just so you know know,
you're Taylor Swift. Facts by Sophie Lickterman.

Speaker 2 (02:44:51):
Sorry Sophie, well you were talking about washed up musician
Taylor Swift Live.

Speaker 13 (02:45:00):
You are going to get ones are going to get
on our ass.

Speaker 3 (02:45:02):
They will get our show canceled.

Speaker 15 (02:45:04):
Robert Evans, we are not in that era. I was
getting in that.

Speaker 2 (02:45:08):
I was getting crucial debate take from America's most influential celebrity,
Gilbert artist, Scott Adams.

Speaker 3 (02:45:17):
What do you think?

Speaker 2 (02:45:18):
No, the debate is a tie so far with lots
of folks is flying a tie? Is a win for Harris?

Speaker 3 (02:45:25):
Well, that's true. I think that is true.

Speaker 2 (02:45:28):
There you go, Scott, good work.

Speaker 13 (02:45:30):
Scott comes out saying that Harris won the debate.

Speaker 3 (02:45:33):
There you go. That's great.

Speaker 13 (02:45:36):
Finally, I do I do think it's funny that Trump
claimed that he didn't know about his previous comments questioning
if Kamala Harris was black.

Speaker 3 (02:45:43):
That was a very.

Speaker 2 (02:45:45):
Talk about that moment. Oh, were you accused her of
putting out too?

Speaker 3 (02:45:50):
What was that to talk?

Speaker 13 (02:45:52):
He was also like saying, well, the Central Park five
pled guilty, So actually I think it was okay. I
wanted them executed a wild, a wild.

Speaker 3 (02:46:02):
Unforced error there.

Speaker 2 (02:46:03):
Man.

Speaker 13 (02:46:04):
That whole little racism section was just crazy.

Speaker 2 (02:46:08):
Look, I will take one quick victory lap because I
said after the last debate, which was a disaster in
every possible way for Biden. Trump's not his soul self either.
He is definitely an older man. Yeah, he was in
twenty sixteen and even twenty twenty, and like, yeah, this
was that.

Speaker 13 (02:46:26):
Well, hopefully this was the only presidential debate that we'll
have to talk about with Kamala v.

Speaker 3 (02:46:31):
Trump. What an exciting time.

Speaker 13 (02:46:33):
I'm excited for that, for that Vance Walls debate, if
that ever happens.

Speaker 2 (02:46:37):
So am I.

Speaker 15 (02:46:38):
Oh interesting that Like our reaction after this debate was like, Okay,
she shouldn't do any other debates and he's going to
want to do more debates. Yeah, And it was the
exact opposite in their in their reactions.

Speaker 2 (02:46:51):
Yeah, I was interested by that, which.

Speaker 15 (02:46:53):
Like on MSNBC Tim Walls was like she should do
one every day. I mean, she did good, she did well,
But like my reaction was like, Okay, you did the job.

Speaker 3 (02:47:03):
You did the job.

Speaker 2 (02:47:05):
I do think like I have like, oh boys, I
think this might be Hubris coming in here and a
bad idea, but she could be right. I don't know.

Speaker 10 (02:47:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:47:13):
Yeah, Like one of the problems is that if the
election doesn't turn around as much or if something else
happens that pushes momentum back towards Trump, she might need
a third debate and you kind of have to You
kind of can't know, like you are rolling the dice
on this one way or the other.

Speaker 13 (02:47:31):
Yeah, well that was the best debate I've ever watched. Yeah,
just in terms of it actually being a debate. Yeah,
there was not a half dead man on screen, or
yeah maybe there was that, there just wasn't two half
dead men on screen, so you just.

Speaker 2 (02:47:45):
Get a good look at like, Okay, yeah, these are
these are pretty decent pictures of the kinds of president
that these people want to be.

Speaker 15 (02:47:54):
And like it literally comes down to he was not
willing to shake her hand, and she walked across the
stage to shake his hand, and that's basically what the
debate was.

Speaker 2 (02:48:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 15 (02:48:05):
Anyway, anyways, this has been it could happen here. We're
gonna post our source links from this episode in the
episode description, so look out for that.

Speaker 2 (02:48:15):
Yeah, that's right, and you know, until next time. I
don't really have any advice.

Speaker 10 (02:48:21):
Bye, Hi everyone, it's me James. This is a pick up.

(02:48:43):
It's Thursday Morning. I recorded with Joseph on Wednesday night,
someone destroyed or removed one of our coolers. Since then,
I've received photos this morning of a place where we
put it and it's gone. You can probably joy your
own conclusions to how I feel about that probably tell
from how I'm talking to it. I'm pretty pissed off. Also,
our friend Rafael, Rafael from Los Angeles de la Desierto

(02:49:07):
is without a vehicle at the moment. His truck broke.
This is a person who gives every ounce of his
being to rescuing migrants. He is there with them in
their hardest times. When they pass away, he's there to
recover their remains with dignity, to connect their families with
the passing moments of their loved ones. He's there to

(02:49:27):
rescue people. He rescued a woman and child on Monday.
His truck's broken, and if you're able to give, I'm
going to include a link in the show notes. I
talk to Borderlands Relief Collective and we all agree that
the most important thing right now is to get money
to Raphael so he can continue doing that life saving
search and rescue work as we hit record temperatures here
and before it gets freezing cold in the winters. So

(02:49:49):
if you can, please, please just a few bucks, like
we'll buy them an old track. I'll fix it. I
just don't want more people to die out there, and
I think having a truck for Rafael would meaningfully make
it safer for people. So if you're able to give,
please give. Otherwise, please enjoy this podcast. And yeah, I

(02:50:09):
understand if you can't. It's a hard time for everyone.
But yeah, either way, hope if you can enjoy this podcast. Bye,
Hi everyone, and welcome to the podcast today. It's me
James and I'm joined by Joseph Hauser, who's a volunteer
from Bordlands Relief Collective who was out with me on Sunday.

(02:50:30):
We're recording this on Wednesday night and we were dropping
water at the border. We wanted to describe for you
a little bit of our what we saw at there.
It was very hot, things were in a bad way.
I think it's fair to say like despite all of
our best efforts, things were really difficult there. There's only
so much we can do when it's one hundred and
five degrees and there are dozens of people and we're
trying to get water to all of them. So welcome

(02:50:52):
to the show.

Speaker 1 (02:50:52):
Yeah, thank you, James, thanks for having me on.

Speaker 10 (02:50:55):
No, I appreciate you being gay. So I think if
we begin by like describing preps for people, and we
first started messaging by going out on Sunday, like Saturday afternoon, right,
I think.

Speaker 4 (02:51:08):
Yeah, Yeah, it was yeah, early Saturday afternoon. I had
just finished getting my haircut, I'd gone and grabbed an
early lunch, and I saw a message from you and
one of our group chats that some of the local
grocery stores were selling those big orange five gallon water
jugs for like thirteen dollars, Like apparently they're trying to

(02:51:30):
like get rid of their stock or something. So yeah,
you and me a couple of other people were scrambling
around the county trying to buy up as many of
them as we could.

Speaker 10 (02:51:38):
Yeah, like I think I was a normally one hundred
bucks for reference. They're like an insulated water vessel with
a spout on the bottom. And given that we knew
it was going to be a record temperature and it
was already really hot on Saturday, we wanted to try
and get folks water that was as cold as possible.
So yeah, we went all around, bought all the all
the ones from that chain of grocery stores that we could,

(02:51:59):
and that sort of corralled them, and then we put
ice in them. Right, this is the next day on Sunday,
and then you and I met up and we went out.
Do you want to just give people a sense of
the people we met right from all over the world,
the different places we met them, and then then the
sort of condition that we found them in.

Speaker 1 (02:52:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:52:17):
So the first group of people we met, we ran
into four Mauritanian men. Yeah, they seemed to be in
pretty good spirits. They were all traveling together. Gave them
some food, gatorade, water, kind of our typical stuff that.

Speaker 1 (02:52:33):
We hand out.

Speaker 4 (02:52:34):
Yeah, and I don't know, maybe three minutes down the
road from there. I don't know where the man was from,
but is Asian man that did not look to be
in great shape.

Speaker 1 (02:52:46):
His clothes was torn up, his face was really dirty.

Speaker 4 (02:52:50):
From what we could understand, he was saying he had
been mugged, his cell phone had been stolen from him.

Speaker 1 (02:52:57):
Yeah, and he just looked in a bad ways.

Speaker 4 (02:53:00):
So we, yeah, you know, gave him water, gave him
again some gatorade, and when we tried to give him
some food, he was just like I can't like, I'm
so like, he's just so dehydrated.

Speaker 1 (02:53:14):
He he couldn't stomach anything other than liquid.

Speaker 10 (02:53:17):
Yeah, it was like we see people all the time
who were in a bad state, but it's pretty rare
for people to be like I can't eat, I'm too dehydrated.
I can't face food right now. Because he'd been walking
for at least seven eight hours, I'm guessing, if not days, Yeah,
depends how he came man, because we were just driving
along and he came out of the verge like with

(02:53:39):
his hands in the air, like looking just so afraid,
like they'll stay with me for a while, like absolute
like fear.

Speaker 1 (02:53:46):
But he had yeah, like he just looked stricken.

Speaker 10 (02:53:49):
Yeah, yeah, like just really it's just so sad to
see someone like reduced to that. I'm glad we were
able to help him and get him the stuff that
he needed. And then from there we moved on to
I'm trying to think where we went next. We went
up to the top, right, we grave up to the

(02:54:09):
top of them out too.

Speaker 4 (02:54:10):
Yeah, we went up to an area where Borderlands Relief
Collective has set up what we call a welcome station.
It's up on top of one of the smaller peaks
in the area. It gives us a good view, like
you can see all the way down to the actual
border and stuff and kind of take note of like, okay,
like we've got a group coming up here.

Speaker 1 (02:54:30):
There's some people crossing over there.

Speaker 4 (02:54:32):
And then we've primarily done that in the winter time,
just to greet people with some like some hot teas,
some water food, just basically things to say like hey,
like you know you're here, yeah, and at least give
them a friendly face, because who knows what they've you know,
what everyone's been through just to get to that point.
But yeah, so we dropped one of our water jugs

(02:54:54):
there and then went a little bit further down the
road to a gate that I think Border Patrol maintains
that gate maybe cal Fire yeah as well, they keep
that locked pretty much always. But we know people take
that road up obviously, So we left one of the
smaller water jugs we were able to pick up. I

(02:55:15):
think that one was like a two or three gallon
that we left there.

Speaker 10 (02:55:18):
Right, Yeah, because people people walk up for the border.
I always like that spot. It's weird because sometimes you
see people in your they've got a long walk and
it's hot and I'm up here and there down there
and that that sucks. Yeah, sometimes it's a really if
it was anywhere else, it would be a beautiful view.
There's a valley below with little oak grove and like
sometimes you'll see like a red tailed hawk or something

(02:55:39):
and it'll be like level with your eye line because
you're at the top there and it's but unfortunately, yeah,
it's at the border, so people have to suffer miserably there.

Speaker 4 (02:55:47):
Yeah, it's absolutely gorgeous like natural landscape, but it is
like just so unbelievably deadly and unforgiving.

Speaker 10 (02:55:54):
Yeah, Like you and I have both hiked lick alongside
hiking up and down the roads. We've hiked on the
trails and migrants often take. And I've hiked a lot,
You've hiked a lot. It's incredibly difficult going. It's difficult
for us as like fit people with technical apparel and
good shoes, like we often see people in flip flops
or like crappy sneakers if.

Speaker 1 (02:56:17):
They have footwear at all at that point.

Speaker 10 (02:56:19):
Yeah, I remember a number of the people we ran
into didn't have shoes like later in the day. Yeah,
and I've definitely given away shoes before and then we
have some of my drug. But I'm a giant person.
Everyone it's like penguin flip of feet, so I wasn't
able to help everyone. And so yeah, we went from there,
we dropped another We hiked to water in a little

(02:56:41):
bit because the road was too narrow to turn the
truck around, and we dropped that in another gate. And
then I think at that point things were pretty normal,
and that was like a normal water drop day, or
a driving water drop day, I should say, not a
hiking one. Do you want to describe what we saw
at the next place you went to, because I think

(02:57:02):
that was when both of us realized that like things
were going to be worse in normal and people needed
as much help as we could possibly get in.

Speaker 1 (02:57:09):
Yeah. So basically, once we finished up in that.

Speaker 4 (02:57:12):
Area, we went from where we were, we went a
little bit further south. I don't know, I was like
maybe a ten minute drive, you think.

Speaker 1 (02:57:20):
Once we got back to the main road, yeah, we
ran into a group of three men.

Speaker 4 (02:57:27):
Believe they were more Aitanian again, a different group of men. Yeah,
when we came across them, they were kind of walking
almost like just middle of the lane on the road. Yeah, yeah,
which was kind of like keyed us in that, like, oh,
like we should stop and check on these guys.

Speaker 1 (02:57:43):
They overall seemed to be doing pretty well, Like.

Speaker 4 (02:57:47):
They were obviously very tired exhausted from their journey, but
they were telling us that, you know, like oh we've
got another two, We've got two more they fell behind.
So we gave these guys you know again the normal
like food, gatorade, water, checked in with them to see
if they had like any wounds or anything we could treat,
and they seemed pretty good. So we hung out in

(02:58:10):
that area for I don't know, it was maybe five
ten minutes max. Before we saw the people that they
had mentioned were further down the road. So another two
guys came up. We again gave them what supplies they
seemed like they needed. The The fifth guy in that
group seemed to be in the worst shape of all

(02:58:32):
of them. Yeah, he was upright and you know, like
moving under his own power, but like you just kind
of see that little wobble in his step.

Speaker 1 (02:58:42):
So we kind of took some extra time with him.

Speaker 4 (02:58:45):
I believe we got him like a little ice pack
to put on the back of his neck, just to
try and bring his body temperature down, and then kind
of just got that. All five of them regrouped together
under a tree some shade, and then from there we
went I don't know, maybe we got maybe three hundred

(02:59:06):
feet down the road and we came across a group
of five I believe they were all Spanish speakers.

Speaker 1 (02:59:15):
I didn't catch where they were from.

Speaker 10 (02:59:17):
Yeah, I think once it from Colombia. I can't remember
where the whole group were from, though.

Speaker 1 (02:59:24):
But that was so far.

Speaker 4 (02:59:25):
Everyone we had run into was by a parent's middle
aged men I shouldn't say middle age, like young adult. Yeah, yeah,
like thirty thirty five maybe, like you know, somewhere in
that range.

Speaker 3 (02:59:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (02:59:38):
Yeah, they could be anywhere from like twenties to thirties. Yeah.
Like I think some of that is because it was
such a difficult day that like some folks who have
children or older people maybe decided not to make the
journey that day. Yeah, they had that choice. But this, yeah,
this group was yeah, this.

Speaker 4 (02:59:53):
Group of five we I want to say it was
three men in that age range.

Speaker 13 (03:00:00):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (03:00:01):
There was a woman with them, and then a kid that,
if I had to guess, probably fifteen at the oldest.

Speaker 4 (03:00:07):
Like I seemed to remember, like clocking that he had
braces on, like he just he seemed young.

Speaker 10 (03:00:13):
Yeah, he seemed like a child. Yeah, it wasn't like
a young man.

Speaker 4 (03:00:16):
And so you know, we got off to the side
of the road again, we're giving them food, water, all
that again, like this is all off.

Speaker 1 (03:00:25):
The main road for that area.

Speaker 4 (03:00:27):
And like as we're interacting with these groups, you know,
like several border patrol cars are just zooming passed like yeah,
just crazy.

Speaker 1 (03:00:37):
But nobody.

Speaker 4 (03:00:38):
Nobody's stopping the check in and nobody's you know, like
you know, stopping them from big finger quotes here, invading right.

Speaker 10 (03:00:47):
Getting getting on a bus as like people are going
so mad about us. We oh before they got mad
about Haitian people.

Speaker 4 (03:00:54):
But yeah, so we we worked with that group. Nobody
really seemed to be in dire straits there. So we're
working towards a trailhead which we could actually see from
where we were working with this group of five and
there's like a little bridge there and we just kind

(03:01:16):
of see some heads popping up.

Speaker 10 (03:01:18):
Yeah, and we're like, oh, I think you have my binoculars.

Speaker 3 (03:01:21):
We were like checking to see.

Speaker 1 (03:01:23):
Yeah, and we're like oh, like we like we need
to get over there.

Speaker 4 (03:01:26):
So we get back in the truck after we get
them kind of you know, as settled as we can,
and we get over to this trailhead, which.

Speaker 1 (03:01:35):
Is like, really I think where the day because.

Speaker 4 (03:01:39):
Like you said, like it was kind of a normal
day up until we got to this trailhead and then
things kind of seemed to take a turn.

Speaker 10 (03:01:45):
Yeah, talking of taking a turn, why don't we take
a turn to advertisements and then come back.

Speaker 1 (03:01:51):
That's why they pay you the big bucks.

Speaker 3 (03:01:53):
That I see.

Speaker 10 (03:01:54):
You see that no one saw that comes. All right,
we are back. I hope that you haven't bought anything.
You could give money to board Lands Relief Collective of
Google lip.

Speaker 1